by Frank Tuttle
“Open up, police,” cried a gruff voice.
Meralda laughed and rose. She could hear the faint hum of Mug’s flying coils.
The dandyleaf plant sailed inside, circling the cabin once before settling expertly atop Meralda’s desk.
“I take it you are feeling better.” His eyes regarded Meralda intently. “Glad to see you up and not moaning.”
“I needed the rest. Thank you for letting me sleep. Any news?”
“I’m a better poker player than anyone aboard,” Mug reported happily. “Other than that, we are engaged in normal level flight, we are on schedule, and we are not currently engulfed in flames. Talked to Tower yet? He seemed quite smug. I gather he found a way to open the warded case.”
“I have not.” She took her seat and reached for Goboy’s Glass. “Shall we?”
She rapped on the mirror and Mug called out, “Wake up, old stones. The Mage is awake.”
The glass went black.
“Greetings, Mage,” said Tower. “I am prepared to open the Horn’s case, on your command.”
Meralda nodded. “Please do so. I know what we’ll find—an empty box—but there might also be a clue as to how the Horn was removed.”
“You may watch, if you wish,” said Tower. “I can send an image.”
Mug tapped the black glass. “Let’s see it.”
The glass flashed, and the interior of the Royal Laboratory was revealed.
Meralda’s heart nearly broke. “My Laboratory,” she said. Her desk, her rolling chair with its nice soft cushion, her favorite cups. “Oh! I forgot my good pen and there it is, lying beside my magnifying glass.”
Beyond her desk, the rows and rows of shelves extended off into the dark. But before the shelves, the familiar bulks of Phillitrep’s Mathematical Engine and Opp’s Rotary Timekeeper rose up, each whirling and twinkling and glittering as it moved.
The focus of the image shifted, racing away from Meralda’s desk and down Row 17. The view halted again, centered on the plain wooden crate to which a paper label was affixed. Amorp’s Strident Horn, Item AH11286, read the label, penned in Meralda’s precise hand. Below that was the date on which she’d sealed the crate.
“The ward spell appears intact,” said Tower. “I see no evidence whatsoever of tampering.”
Meralda instinctively began to extend her own magical Sight, but stopped when she realized she could hardly use Sight from aboard a moving airship so far from Tirlin.
“Troubling,” she said. “Proceed.”
“I am using a number of artifacts to achieve the opening,” said Tower, as Mingle’s Walking Servitor ambled into view. Its four mechanical legs tiptoed between the tall shelves. For one awful moment, the Servitor appeared to have gotten stuck between the shelves, but it kicked and shook and freed itself before coming to rest just below the Horn’s warded crate.
Como’s Agile Insect, a many-legged thing of delicate brass claws joined to a segmented body composed of silver springs, swarmed easily atop the Servitor and lifted the front half of its worm-like body so that its head was level with the crate.
“That thing gives me nightmares,” muttered Mug. “Why isn’t it locked in a box?”
“Hush,” Meralda said. “Well done, Tower. But how will you defeat the ward spell?”
“I shall not,” Tower replied. “Observe.”
A glowing red circle appeared on the image in the Glass, just to the right of the Horn’s box.
“When the circle turns green, please speak the Word of Unwarding,” said Tower. “I should be able to maintain a spatial congruency long enough for you to pronounce the entire phrase.”
“A spatial congruency?” Mug said. “Between two distant points, one of them moving?”
“It’s possible,” Meralda said. She took a deep breath and prepared to say the word. “Tower, I am ready.”
The red circle turned green.
Meralda spoke the Word. The circle quickly turned red again, but Meralda smelled, just for an instant, the musty, oily scent of the Laboratory.
“Done,” said Tower. “Observe.”
Como’s Agile Insect climbed up the side of the Horn’s case, wedged a pair of many-jointed brass legs into the space between the lid and the sides, and pushed the crate’s lid aside.
“Perplexing,” said Tower.
“Well move the focus, old stones,” Mug said, when the image didn’t shift to reveal the interior of the Horn’s case.
Tower obliged, and the view revealed the Horn, lying intact amid the packing straw.
“I don’t understand,” Meralda said. “Amorp only made one Horn.”
“Well, if he did, and that’s the Horn back in Tirlin, what’s hiding under your bed?”
Meralda rose, knelt by her berth, and retrieved the shoebox in which she’d hidden the Horn.
She opened the box. Inside lay Amorp’s Horn, down to the last minute detail.
“Mistress!” shouted Mug. “Come here! It’s gone!”
Meralda shut the shoebox and hurried back to her desk, box and the Horn in her hands. When she peered into the glass though, the scene was unchanged from before–there was the case, and the Horn safely inside it.
“What?” exclaimed Mug.
“Fascinating,” remarked Tower.
“What are you talking about?” asked Meralda. “What is fascinating?”
“I tell you the Horn vanished,” Mug said. “Just for a moment. But it was gone. You saw, didn’t you, Tower?”
“Indeed,” said Tower. “The Horn here in the Laboratory vanished.”
Meralda opened her shoebox and looked inside. There lay the Horn, unassuming and appearing to be quite solid.
“Mistress,” Mug said, urgently. “Please. Humor me. Don’t look at the glass. Just tell us what you see, in your shoebox.”
“Amorp’s Horn,” she said, keeping her eyes on the Horn in her lap. “Or something very like it. Why? What do you see?”
“We see an empty crate,” replied Tower. “Do you concur, construct?”
“My name is Mug and I concur,” Mug said. “Toolshed,” he added, in a whisper.
“Mage,” said Tower. “Pray look again to the glass, and fix your gaze there. Tell us, what do you see?”
Meralda looked into Goboy’s Glass. “I see the Horn, resting in a bed of straw. As I’ve seen this whole time.”
“Construct named Mug,” said Tower. “Gaze inside this shoebox which your Mistress bears, and tell us what you see.”
Mug sent a dozen eyes through the bars of his cage to peer over the side of the desk.
“An empty shoebox,” he said. His leaves shivered though no air moved. “Mistress, what does this mean?”
“You both seem to be telling me the Horn is wherever I look for it,” Meralda said. “But I see two Horns, separated by a distance of several thousand miles. Neither scenario is one I am comfortable accepting as truth.”
“Mistress, we’re telling you–I’m telling you–that the Horn disappears when you look away from wherever it was, and reappears at the spot you’re looking,” Mug said. “What could do that? I’ve never heard of such a spell!”
“Tower, is that what you observe as well?” asked Meralda.
“It is,” replied Tower. “I daresay such behavior is not among the Horn’s documented uses or abilities.”
“There isn’t a single item in all of Tirlin capable of this,” Meralda said. She held the Horn up before her, turned it this way and that. She closed her eyes, but the Horn remained in her grasp, its surface smooth and slightly cool to her touch.
“A moment of silence, Mug,” Meralda pleaded, keeping her eyes closed as she summoned her magical Sight. “Surely such a fundamental change to the original Horn, or the creation of a replica, will be obvious when I inspect the spell using Sight.”
She took a deep breath and centered herself. Then she opened her eyes and turned her Sight upon the Horn.
The old familiar spellwork revealed itself in a tangle of linke
d attachments and coiled energetic collectors. Meralda smiled at the cleverness of Amorp’s handiwork. Every Mage since the second century has studied the Horn’s workings as a model of parsimony, she thought, but I discover something new each time I inspect it with Sight.
“Well,” Mug demanded. “Is it the real Horn or isn’t it?”
“It appears to be,” Meralda said. “Even though it can’t be.”
She took in another deep breath and focused her Sight anew, willing her perception to go deeper.
For one moment, the Horn’s workings lay in her hands, moving and turning, as they had for centuries.
The next, Meralda saw the cold traceries of even subtler influences, which lay behind and beneath and beside the attachments laid down by Amorp.
She blinked, and her Sight was suddenly awash with perceptions of primal forces underlying even the first layer of new ones she saw just an instant ago.
None of it made any sense. “This isn’t working,” she said aloud, but as she decided to put the Horn down the patterns in her Sight coalesced, changing from a confusing jumble of disjointed images into a simple, elegant shape that both explained and contained the essence of Amorp’s Strident Horn.
“Now I see you!” Meralda felt herself smile. So simple, she thought. As marvelous as the construction was, it could be improved—she couldn’t resist tweaking it now that she understood it. A straightening there, the addition of a linkage there, the removal of this bit here...
For the briefest of instants, Meralda looked upon the improved spellwork with a mixture of pleasure and pride. Then a memory came rushing back, from her first time using Sight under the gruff but watchful guidance of Mage Fromarch.
“Not bad for a first time,” the greying wizard had muttered. “But there’s one thing you’ve got to remember about Sight, apprentice Ovis. You can see things most people cannot. You can observe the hidden, the magical, and the mysterious. But observe only. Never try to change what you see with an act of will.”
“Why not?” Meralda recalled asking. “Wouldn’t that save you time and effort?”
“Sight reveals,” replied Fromarch. “It is the nature of creation that you may observe a thing, or you may change it, but you may not use Sight to do both at once. Which is why we attach spellworks to things, rather than trying to change the fundamental nature of the objects themselves.”
“And if I try?” Meralda had asked.
Fromarch had shrugged. “Then I’ll be training another apprentice,” he said. “And the Palace cleaning staff will probably never get the stains off the floor.”
I’ve done what Fromarch said was impossible, she realized.
I remade the Horn from an act of mere will. No latching of spells, no holdstones, no charged wands, not a single scrap of wire. Yet the Horn is made anew, by no more than a whim, which is directly contrary to the laws of creation.
The new world Meralda perceived burst into blinding sheets of pure white fire. The deck of the Intrepid seemed to drop away, leaving her blind and falling, falling, down through a rushing void.
“Mistress!” shouted Mug, his flying coils buzzing. Meralda’s Sight fell away, and with it the lovely pattern of Amorp’s careful magic.
Meralda found herself on her knees, the wonder she’d felt replaced with a searing, piercing pain that began between her eyes and stretched through her skull and all the way down to the base of her spine.
Mug’s eyes swam into her view, all of them straining to reach through the bars of his cage.
“Bellringers!” he shouted. “Guards! Anybody! Get up, Mistress! Get up!”
Mug’s cries thundered in her ears, driving spikes of agony through flesh and bone alike.
Meralda covered her ears with her fists and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, barely able to feel the deck beneath her knees, her only real sensations those of pain.
She barely heard the Bellringers come charging in. She barely felt them pick her gently up and lay her carefully down on her berth. The least touch of light was like being burned with embers. She moaned in relief when they covered the portholes with blankets, and extinguished every lamp.
The cool damp cloth across her forehead did little to soothe the pain, but at least it was not more agony.
It wasn’t until the ship’s physician gave her an infusion of mertle-bay tea that she was relaxed enough to close her eyes and sink into slumber.
* * *
By the time she awoke, the sun was nearly set. The blanket-covered portholes only let in a gentle ruddy glow, much fainter than the light of a single candle. She could hear the soft breathing of the Bellringers, who were seated near, and could make out the ghostly glow of Mug’s many eyes, all of which were trained upon her.
“She’s awake,” whispered Mug.
One of the Bellringers stood.
“I feel simply awful,” Meralda said. Her voice was more croak than speech.
A cold glass was thrust into her hand.
“It’s water,” said Kervis in a whisper. “The doctor said you’d need it when you woke.”
Meralda drank, not realizing how parched she was until she’d emptied the glass.
“How long was I asleep?” she asked.
“A few hours,” Mug said. “How many eyes do I have?”
“Twenty-nine, of course,” replied Meralda. She managed to sit up, and though the cabin did wobble and swim for a moment she remained upright. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
“No reason,” Mug said, quickly. “More water?”
“In a moment,” Meralda said. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, waited a moment, then stood.
The Bellringers rushed to her side.
Meralda managed a smile.
“You need not accompany me to my next destination,” she said, glancing toward her water closet. “I assure you both I am quite capable.”
She couldn’t see it happen, but she knew both of the guards blushed furiously.
“We’ll be just outside,” said Kervis.
“Glad you’re better,” added Tervis.
Meralda fought back a brief wave of renewed nausea and nodded. “Thank you.”
Mug hovered near the closed door, but she ignored his nonstop stream of questions. She found the switch on the side of the water closet’s single electric lamp, squeezed her eyes shut, and twisted the lamp on.
Even with her eyes shut, the force of the light struck her like a blow.
Slowly, very slowly, she opened her eyes, squinting. At first, she was able to make out nothing but a white glare that enveloped her. Eventually, the mirror and the bright copper fixtures became visible, if not yet perfectly clear.
Relieved, she turned the faucet and splashed water in her face. The icy-cold water felt wonderful. Some of the pain went away. But Meralda couldn’t forget the sight of the Horn’s magical composition changing to her whim, and she couldn’t ignore the single obvious conclusion drawn from her experience.
She pulled back her wet hair and looked into the mirror.
It isn’t Amorp’s Strident Horn behaving in new ways.
It’s me.
She plunged her face into the water again, letting the chill of it numb the pain until her breath ran out.
Her mind raced. Could this be some sort of magical assault?
“No,” she muttered aloud. That makes no sense. If the Vonats could alter reality, we’d all be inmates in their work camps by now.
Hallucination?
No, because Mug and the Bellringers and Tower also saw the Horn move from place to place.
What, then? What?
Meralda groped for a fresh towel, dried her face, and wrapped the towel around her wet hair. Then she leaned on the sink with both hands and glared at her bedraggled reflection and tried to make sense of it all.
Mug shouted through her door. “Sorry to interrupt, Mistress, but the bridge is asking for you. Problem with a desalinizer. Shall I tell them to go pound sand?”
“No,” Meralda sai
d. She splashed more water on her face. “Tell them I’ll be in the maintenance bay shortly. Ask them to remove the covers before I arrive.”
Mug shouted agreement.
“You still have a job to do,” Meralda said to her reflection. “We can try and make sense of this later.”
She used the toilet and drew a hasty bath. “The laws of the universe don’t change merely because one boards an airship and leaves home,” she muttered as she slipped into her tub.
She remembered smelling the Laboratory earlier, when she spoke the Word of Warding. “There is an explanation. There must be.”
The water was warm. Meralda lay back, covered in soap bubbles and feeling the aches fade away.
I wonder...
She raised her Sight, just the tiniest glimpse of it. Then she lifted her hand, and regarded the bubbles she held in her palm.
They sparkled. Meralda blew on them, and they floated through the air, shining like jewels.
Jewels which quickly formed themselves into a perfect spiral reaching all the way to the ceiling.
More bubbles joined the spiral.
“Make a circle,” Meralda said. The bubbles obeyed, forming a perfect ring above the tub.
Her headache came sneaking back, but she ignored it. If I can do this, she wondered, what else can I do?
Could I make myself taller?
The soles of her feet suddenly pressed hard against the end of the tub.
“No, it can’t be,” she said, and suddenly she was no longer crowded in the tub.
I’ve never been very busty, she thought, and she shrieked as she felt her body change.
“Mistress?” shouted Mug.
“Nothing, stubbed my toe, go away,” shouted Meralda.
“Oh, the bridge was on the tube just now,” reported Mug. “Said they made a mistake, the desalinizer wasn’t broken after all. Unless you fixed it from the tub, ha ha.”
Meralda willed her body back to normal. A pang of loneliness shot through her. If anyone could offer insight, she knew, it would be Donchen.
He wouldn’t have the answers either, she realized. But he’d listen, watching her with those soft grey eyes. He’d hold her close while she spoke and when she was done, he’d tell her everything would be all right. Best of all, thought Meralda, just for a moment I’d believe him. Everything would be all right.