All the Paths of Shadow

by Frank Tuttle

  “Yes, ma’am!” said Kervis. His grin was bright in the magelamp’s glow.

  Meralda played the lamp upwards. There, not fifty steps away, was the notch in the ceiling that held the door to the Wizard’s Flat.

  “I do believe it gets taller each time,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” said Tervis. “Ma’am,” he added, quickly. “Meaning no disrespect—”

  “I know,” Meralda said. Twenty paces. “You’ve done well, this climb.”

  Tervis sighed. “I practiced,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  Ten paces. “How,” asked Meralda, “did you practice?”

  “Well,” said Tervis. “There’s a big old iron oak, just outside the barracks—”

  Meralda looked over her shoulder. “Guardsman,” she said. “You are not about to tell me you have taken to climbing iron oaks as practice at ascending the Tower, are you?”

  Tervis’ gaze fell to his boots.

  “Don’t do that,” said Meralda, with a glare at Kervis, whose wide-eyed look of innocence was not entirely convincing. “Ever again. That’s an order, from a member in full of the court of Tirlin. Is that clear?”

  Tervis looked up and nodded, relief plain on his face.

  Meralda turned, and was at the door.

  Men, she thought. She shoved the key into the lock and prepared to push against the door, but it opened easily, gentle as a whisper.

  Daylight streamed through. Meralda squinted and stepped into the flat before turning to face the Bellringers.

  Both stood leaning into the sunlight, smiles on their face behind their upheld hands.

  “Bright,” said Tervis.

  “Lovely and bright,” said Kervis. He squinted at Meralda, laid his crossbow carefully down on the floor just inside the flat, and held out his hand. “I can take the lamp now, if you’d like,” he said.

  Meralda smiled and put it into his hand.

  He took it gently, like the dented brass cylinder was made of flower petals and spider webs. “Oooh,” he said, playing the light slowly about. “Magic.”

  Tervis stepped past, Meralda’s bag held forth. “Here you are, Mage,” he said. “What do I do now?”

  “Just open the bag, and hold it off the floor, if you will,” said Meralda. “This will only take a moment, I’ll set the ward, and then we can go.”

  Tervis nodded, and unfastened the bag’s three leather straps. “Here you are,” he said.

  Meralda wiped the sweat from her palms on her skirts and reached inside. She withdrew a fist-sized glass sphere, which rolled on its axis in a burnished copper cage, and a neatly folded bath towel.

  Tervis lifted an eyebrow at the towel.

  Meralda stifled a laugh, and took the globe and towel to the far wall of the flat. She laid the towel at the edge of the floor, took the globe in her right hand, spoke a word, and touched the copper cage gently to the Tower wall.

  The spell enveloping the globe latched to the Tower.

  “Watch,” said Meralda. She took her hand away.

  The globe stuck to the wall, spinning like a top, waist-high above the folded towel.

  Tervis stared. Kervis glanced at the globe, shrugged and went back to playing the magelamp about the darkened stairs.

  Meralda counted. The spell remained latched for a full count of twenty before it lost hold of the Tower and the globe fell onto the towel.

  Meralda scooped up both gently. Faint wisps of fog rose from the glass, and ice coated its surface.

  “Did it, um, work?” asked Tervis.

  “Oh, it worked,” said Meralda. “Now I take the globe back to the laboratory, and say the other half of the word. It will spin again, backwards this time, for the exact amount of time we just saw. I’ll measure the interval precisely and then I’ll know the Tower’s latching coefficient.”

  Meralda folded the towel over the globe as she walked, and Tervis took a single step to meet her. She stowed the latching ball, bade Tervis to seal her bag, and then warned the Bellringers to stand at the door.

  “It’s only a minor ward spell,” she said, as she moved to stand at the center of the flat. “It will allow me to enter the flat and dispel it. Once cast, no one else will be able to pass that door without breaking the ward.”

  “What happens if they try?” asked Kervis.

  Meralda smiled. “Wrack and blast,” she said, though she doubted either Bellringer would know a verse from Ovid. “Fury and flame and fie, fools, fie.”

  Meralda drew the ward wand from her pocket, raised it, and spoke the word.

  The wand went cold. Meralda put it back in her pocket, and walked toward the door, already dreading the long, dark descent. Behind her, the unlatched ward began its lazy orbit of the room.

  Then, with only the faintest and briefest of hissings, the ward spell massed, leaped, and exploded, two short paces from Meralda’s back.

  The flat rang with a thunder-clap that echoed up and down the Tower. Meralda fell, arms outstretched, half-blinded by the reflection of the flash off the rounded walls. She saw Kervis thrown backward toward the stair, saw the magelamp spin out of his grasp. Tervis whirled, one hand on the door frame, the other straining to reach his twin’s pant leg. Meralda could see that Tervis was shouting, but his cry was lost amid the echoing roar.

  And then the doorway was empty. Empty and dark, though the light from Meralda’s magelamp, which spun as it fell, flashed twice across the dark before fading and dying.

  “No!” shouted Meralda, though she could barely hear her voice above the ringing in her ears. She sprang to her feet and raced for the door, blinking past the bright haze that obscured her vision and the spots that danced before her eyes.

  “Tervis!” she shouted. “Kervis!”

  Meralda’s right foot struck her bag, and she stumbled, and in that instant Tervis came diving through the doorway, dragging Kervis by his uniform collar.

  “Behind you, Mage!” cried a Bellringer, and with horror Meralda realized Kervis had snatched up the Oldmark and dropped to one knee. “He’s behind you!”

  Meralda whirled, praying that Kervis had better sense than to actually loose a crossbow bolt in a space as small as the flat.

  Meralda’s eyes watered, and ghostly afterimages of the door and Tervis’ mad lunge wavered and spun across her vision, but the flat before her was empty.

  Except, just for an instant, a bunched, small shadow did seem to dart past the east-facing window, on the far side of the flat. Meralda blinked, and it was gone, leaving her with the vague impression that a bird might have flown past outside.

  The last echoes died.

  “No one is behind me,” said Meralda, quickly. “We’re alone. Put away the crossbow, Kervis. The only thing you’ll shoot here are mages and guardsmen.”

  “There was a man behind you,” said Kervis. Meralda noted with relief that Tervis forced the crossbow down with the palm of his hand. “I saw him!”

  “I saw something too, ma’am,” said Tervis. His voice shook, and his eyes darted about the flat. “Not sure it was a man, but it was there.” His hand went to his sword hilt, and he drew it swiftly, as though he had only just remembered he was armed. “It can’t have gotten out.”

  Meralda lifted her hand. “Listen to me,” she said. The skin on the back of her neck began to tingle and itch, as though sunburnt, and the faint odor of singed hair began to waft through the room. “Something broke the ward, yes. But it could have been an old Tower spellwork, or a fault within the ward itself. What you saw was probably the ward uncoiling.”

  “If a ward spell uncoiling looks like a robe on a wall hook, then that’s what I saw, ma’am.” said Tervis. “Tall black robe with nothing in it.” The boy’s eyes met hers, and after a moment Meralda shook her head.

  “We can talk about it at the bottom,” she said. She motioned for the Bellringers to move toward the door. “It may not be safe here, and I don’t have the tools to deal with a ward gone bad. So we leave, right now.”

 
The Bellringers nodded once, in unison.

  “I lost the magelamp,” said Kervis. “I’m sorry, ma’am. It flew out of my hand.”

  “I have another,” said Meralda. “And you are not to be blamed.” Meralda swallowed, banishing from her mind the image of the two boys falling through the dark. “I thought you’d both fallen.”

  “Nearly did,” said Kervis. The boy shivered. “Tervis caught my boot.” The lad forced a small smile. “Glad it’s a good fit.”

  Meralda bit her lip and motioned for her bag.

  Tervis snatched it up and loosened the straps. “Here you are,” he said, holding it forth.

  Meralda reached inside. She found her spare magelamp, smaller than the one Kervis dropped, but only slightly less bright.

  “Light,” she said, and the magelamp flared to life.

  Meralda urged it brighter. Kervis moved to stand beside the door. “I’ll go last,” he said. “If Ugly wants to follow, he’ll do it with holes in his chest.”

  Meralda gazed round, one last time. The flat was empty, and though her ears still rang Meralda knew it was quiet again. Sunlight streamed through the windows, though it looked cold and thin on the worn stone floor. Nothing passed by beyond, and there was simply no place to hide in the open expanse of the Wizard’s Flat.

  Emptiness. And yet Meralda shivered at the sudden sensation of a watchful gaze turned full upon her.

  Meralda swallowed. “Be quiet a moment, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m going to close my eyes. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t move about.”

  The Bellringers croaked out an affirmative.

  “I’ll put an end to this nonsense here and now,” she muttered. Then she closed her eyes, counted backwards from ten, and extended her second sight into the flat.

  Something, like the lightest caress of a spring thistle’s bloom, stroked the back of Meralda’s flash-burned neck. With it, fainter than a whisper, came words:

  “The old, old wizard goes round and round the stair—”

  Meralda wrenched her sight shut, and the Tower floor spun, and when she opened her eyes Kervis had taken a step toward her.

  “What is it?” asked Kervis. “Ma’am, you’re white as a sheet!”

  “We’re leaving,” said Meralda, aloud. The flat seemed smaller, now. Smaller and darker. The open doorway to the Tower proper gaped. “Stay close. We’re all half blind and a bit deaf. Keep your eyes on your feet and listen for trouble.”

  The muscles in Tervis’ jaw quivered. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Kervis. Don’t linger.” Tervis stepped through the open door, prodding at the dark with his short, plain guardsman’s sword. Meralda followed, careful to keep the light at Tervis’ feet. Kervis backed onto the stair, his crossbow still trained on the empty flat.

  Meralda reached past him and closed the door. The Tower, bereft of the daylight, was plunged into darkness. Meralda’s spare magelamp glittered and shone, and Meralda felt, for an instant, as if she walked alone high up in the night sky, bearing a single tiny star to light her way.

  “I really, really don’t like this place,” muttered Tervis, miserably.

  Meralda waved the pool of light a few treads down. “Then let’s leave it,” she said, pocketing the key. “Can you gentlemen see?”

  “Well enough,” said Kervis. “I can close my eyes and still see you in front of the light,” he added.

  “Me too,” said Tervis, as he began to descend. “Will it go away?”

  “It will,” said Meralda, with what she hoped was total confidence. “Before we reach the park, I imagine.”

  Tervis squinted into the dark. “Look down there,” he said, pointing at an hourglass-shaped splash of light far down in the distance. “Is that your lamp?”

  Meralda peeped over the edge of the stair. “That’s it,” she said. “We shall soon have two to light our way.”

  The light winked out.

  “Sorry, Thaumaturge,” said Kervis. “I dropped it, and now it’s broken.”

  “Think nothing of it, Guardsman,” said Meralda, quickly. “It’s just a brass cylinder. I’ll latch a new spell to it, and it will shine again.”

  They wound down the stair in silence for a time, and Meralda was glad for the darkness, for it hid her worried frown.

  One could cut the magelamp in half, and then crush it, and grind it to a powder. Even after all that, though light would shine from the fragments, until the spell unlatched. A fall, even from the top of the Tower, would not be sufficient to douse the light.

  “I still don’t like this place,” said Tervis, to no one in particular.

  Meralda nodded in silent agreement as Tervis set a brisk pace to the bottom.

  The king put his head in his hands and sighed through his fingers.

  “Thaumaturge,” he said, his face still covered. “Is there or isn’t there a haunt in the Tower?”

  Meralda forced herself to relax her grip on the arms of her stiff old chair. She’d been dreading this moment, ever since reaching the bottom of the Tower and discovering a ring of soldiers holding back a crowd. The flash had been seen as far away as the upper ramparts of the palace, and the roar, according to Angis, rolled like nearby thunder all through the sunlit park.

  “There are no haunts, Majesty,” she said, slowly and evenly. “Not in the Tower, not in the palace, not in the most ancient and blood-stained Phendelit fortress.” Meralda took a breath. “Haunts are things of legend and folklore, not fact or history.”

  Yvin lowered his hands. Meralda was surprised to see how tired he looked, surprised to see the dark bands under the bleary grey eyes, and surprised at all the wrinkles that seemed to have crept across his wide, round face in just the last few days.

  “No haunt in the Tower,” he said, softly.

  “No haunt,” replied Meralda.

  Yvin’s gaze bored into hers. “You don’t sound entirely convinced,” he said.

  Meralda looked away. A sheaf of paper on the desk caught her eye; scrawled at one corner of the top page were the words “Who do we blame?”

  “Something happened, in the flat,” she said, after a moment. “I used second sight to look around a bit.”

  Yvin raised an eyebrow. “Madam, I’ve known five mages, and you are the first to dare second sight in Otrinvion’s stronghold,” he said. He leaned closer. “What did you see?”

  Meralda frowned. “Nothing, Majesty,” she said. “Nothing. I felt what might have been a draft, and a verse from a child’s play poem about the Tower presented itself to me. Nothing else.”

  Yvin drew himself back in his chair. “So. The ward spell failed, the blast left you and your guards justifiably shaken, and you left without further incident,” he said. “Still. What burst your ward?”

  Meralda shrugged. “Residual spell energies, I suspect,” she said. “The Tower’s construction involved structural sorceries, and some certainly linger. The sheer weight of the Tower would cause it to collapse, otherwise.”

  “Seven hundred years is a long time to linger,” said Yvin.

  Meralda nodded. “It is, Majesty,” she replied. “But linger it does. Even Fromarch admits he had trouble latching spells to the Tower. And Shingvere—” Meralda halted, spread her hands. “Well, you know what Mage Shingvere thinks.”

  Yvin grunted. “Residual spell energies. Structural sorceries.”

  “Yes, Majesty.”

  Yvin shrugged. “Then that’s what we’ll tell the papers,” he said. “We’ll tell them, and they’ll run headlines proclaiming the return of dread Otrinvion anyway. A free press.” The king sighed. “What was King Latiron thinking?”

  Meralda shut her mouth just as she realized Yvin was chuckling.

  “Got you,” he said, with a weary grin. Then he rose and sidled around the big, plain oak desk that occupied the center of his book-lined private study. “Go home, Thaumaturge,” he said.

  Meralda rose and went for the door. Yvin opened it for her, and smiled.

  “Go home and stay
home,” he said. “The Hang dock tonight, and the Vonats will be here soon, and then neither you nor I will see a moment’s peace till First Snow.”

  Yvin closed the door. Tervis and Kervis, waiting on the settee in the oak-paneled anteroom, sprang to their feet.

  “Where to, ma’am?” asked Kervis.

  “Home,” said Meralda. From the door to the west hall, Meralda heard the captain tell a penswift that the thaumaturge was in the laboratory, and would be working late.

  He knows quite well where I am, thought Meralda. She smiled at the west door, took a step away from it, and motioned for the Bellringers to follow.

  Meralda took the long route out of the palace, left by the Soldier’s Gate, and found Angis waiting at the curb. “Thought you’d slip out this way,” he said, as Meralda and the Bellringers clambered in his cab. “Penswifts out chasing ghosts, aye?”

  Meralda sighed. She opened her mouth to tell Angis what she’d told Yvin, that there are no haunts, no ghosts, no wraiths.

  This time, though, the words caught in her throat. I know the flat was empty, she thought. Empty and open, no place to hide. But someone was there, watching me.

  Seven hundred years of careful scientific inquiry. Seven centuries of serious, dedicated ghost-hunting, all of it fruitless. Just last year, the famed Night Walker of Dolleth Manor in Phendeli proved to be a child’s enchanted toy soldier, marching sporadically to and fro inside a walled-up corridor. The Piper of Morat’s Elt was just that. A wily piper who spent thirty years tormenting his neighbors because, as he said on his deathbed, “they were a right lot o’ fruit thievin’ rascals.”

  The list of hauntings turned mundane events went on and on. As a student, now and then, of Shingvere’s, Meralda had been exposed to a plethora of grisly tales and paranormal goings-on. Even Shingvere admitted, despite his firm belief in what he called “the realm of the higher natures,” that thaumaturgical inquiries turned up far more flying squirrels and old kitchen magics than potential ghosts. How, then, could the Tower, which had been scrutinized and analyzed by scores of mages since the birth of Tirlin, conceal anything truly out of the ordinary?