by Jean Johnson
Sparks tingled over her vision. Satisfied, she returned her hand to his back, the other under his buttocks, carrying him on her hip like a basket in the marketplace. “Now we can talk and not be overheard, either by spell-sensitive ears, or by someone scrying the immediate past,” she stated, wending her way carefully through the chests sitting on the floor, on pedestals, and on shelves at the edges of the room. “What comes after Rick’s Favorite Fireball Trap?”
Kerric caught immediately what she meant. Arms around her shoulders, legs around her hips, he considered the ramifications. He hadn’t been carried like this since he was a child, and he was now a full-grown man. Adding packs and various bits of armor didn’t help, but he understood what she was trying to do. “That is a damned powerful spell, milady, if it can seal off conversations from time itself.”
“It’s not a spell. It’s a tattoo, and it simply focuses my life-energy to perform a task. Which means I can only do this for a short period of time before I get a massive headache.” Angling her body by the door, she waited to see if he would pull out the tools he had tucked away. Kerric just waved his hand over the doorplate, murmured something, and the door unlocked and unlatched itself. Even while touching him, she couldn’t sense his magic in use, not unless it affected her directly. She just wasn’t a mage.
“Right, then. After . . . ah, Rick’s Favorite Fireball Trap,” he allowed, chuckling at the new name for it, “we’ll pass through Ring, Mirror, Comb, which isn’t a trap but rather a set of tools we can pick up and use.”
“Like the towels?” Myal asked, meaning the cloths still knotted to their belts. The corridor beyond the room had a good five or six doors in view.
“Yes, except that if we lose one, we don’t get sent back, we just get into a lot of trouble. We want the fourth door on the right. It’s trapped but I can disable it with a spell. After Ring, Mirror, Comb is the one trap that makes this approach impossible for a mage to attempt on their own,” he told her, gray eyes meeting her brown ones with a serious look that bordered on somber. “It’s possible for a single person to get through the Seraglio, if the love of their life is waiting for them outside the Tower, but this one corridor—or rather, the three versions of it we’ll have to cross at different points in the gauntlet—makes this ‘easiest’ path impossible for me to cross on my own.
“Beyond that is a flight of stairs with a ramp trap—you know the kind, the stair treads tip down and it forms a magically greased ramp. We’ll have to float up that one, because it has too many trigger points,” he warned her. “It’s another spot designed to slow down adventurers, should they try to disarm each trigger instead of fly.”
Passing the third door, Myal stopped in front of the fourth on the right. She waited until he opened it, then stepped inside. The bedchamber-sized room was plain and square, with nothing inside it, not even another door. Not that this meant anything. Most doors in the Tower were hidden magically until the correct answer to a riddle had been applied. Remembering what the archer had said, she carried Kerric straight into the middle of the smallish room.
Fire exploded around them. She winced a little reflexively, but breathed slowly and steadily as the flames billowed and roared, washing over them like elemental demons. Finally, the “attack” died down, leaving both of them unharmed. If either of them had screamed and panicked, then the flames would have had real heat to them. Kerric, she was pleased to note, did not panic. Of course, she thought, he knows exactly what to expect, but still . . .
It deserved a reward. Leaning over, she kissed his cheek. At his surprised look, she smiled. “That’s for not fussing about me picking you up.” Another kiss, this time on his lips, and she pulled back. “And that’s for not panicking.”
“Hey, I’ll have you know that the first rule of the Tower Maintenance Staff Handbook is ‘When something goes wrong, don’t panic!’” he quipped. And kissed her back. “That’s for you not panicking. Now, the step after the Fireball, Mirror, Corridor, and Ramp traps is yet another Junk Room, Number One Hundred Seventeen, and beyond that is the lift room with Cabbage, Goat, Wolf. And after that is our first refreshing room break. Now, head back out into the corridor, turn left, go two rooms on the right—the middle room on the left as we came this way—and we’ll pick up the items we need.”
Myal frowned at him. There were now two doors out of this room, she noted. “Back out the way we came? But if that other group is there . . .”
He nodded, understanding her confusion. “We had to trigger this trap to disarm a very real trap many rooms ahead. If they’re out there, I can cast an invisibility illusion on us.”
“But that could be tracked by magic,” she countered. “I can make us invisible for a short period of time in a way that cannot be tracked. But only a short while. Where do we go after picking up the mirror, ring, and comb?”
“Back up the corridor in this direction, take the first left, the first right, and a door at the base of a set of stairs. That’s the trap that I cannot cross,” he warned her. “You’ll have to stop carrying me at that point, because the moment I enter that room, I’ll drop unconscious. Any mage will succumb, and the stronger they are as a mage, the faster they will fall. The corridor is a hundred feet long, and closed by doors at either end.
“Get me into the next hall, and I will recover within minutes, but I will be useless to you . . . and you had better not use any of your tattoos while you’re in there,” Kerric said, giving her an earnest look. “I don’t know if you using them will count as magic or not. If it does, you will fall unconscious the same as me, and nobody will find us until the Tower has a new Guardian and Maintenance can once again scry and roam safely.”
Sober, Myal nodded. “Then I’ll just carry you as far as the door at the bottom of the steps, but we will have to be quick, since this trick comes at a price for me. Hold on to me for a moment.”
Kerric tightened his grip. She freed both hands for a moment, touching the back of her head. A faint grayish light rippled over both of them like a cascade of water, turning the appearance of their limbs as clear as glass.
“Try not to make any sounds,” she whispered, quickly returning her hands to his body, supporting his weight. “You’ll have to unlock the doors.”
“They’re not locked,” he whispered back, freeing one hand from the glasslike woman holding him. Opening the door to the fireball illusion room, he carefully closed it behind them, aided by the way she pivoted when she stepped through. The hallway was empty for the moment. Backtracking, they reached the second door, which was indeed unlocked.
The reason was simple. Any experienced adventurer would be very wary of anything that seemed easy or risk-free. A large number of these rooms were locked, even trapped, but not every door. And some of the unlocked, non-trapped doors hid far worse dangers than the Rushlight Trap and the Scales of Justice.
This room, however, hid nothing more than a large closet-sized room lined with shelves, with about thirty or so items arranged carefully on the shelves. It took him only a few moments to locate the wooden comb, the braided gold ring, and the little silver hand mirror. Myal watched him pick them up and stash them in his pouch—requiring a bit of awkward balancing on her part while he moved—then headed for the hall again. Both froze at the sound of one of the doors opening.
Myal took a risk and stepped into the corridor itself, turning as she did so. Unfortunately, caught off guard, Kerric didn’t quite catch the door lever in time. Forced to leave it open, they found themselves staring at a quintet of slightly bloodied, bruised, grim-looking adventurers. One of them was a man in a black robelike tunic similar to the one Kerric had worn earlier, though its knotwork buttons reached all the way past his knees, and not just to mid-thigh. He was frowning in concentration, holding a glowing, triangular-shaped crystal in front of him. After only two steps, it winked out.
“Damn,” the man muttered to his companions. “I’ve lost the trail.”
Myal took advantage of his speech to ba
ck up a few steps. She froze when he stopped speaking. One of the other two men spoke, giving her a chance to move again, backing up toward the side-corridor which Kerric wanted them to take.
“He must be using some sort of magic to meddle with our tracking,” the tall, muscular, armored adventurer stated. None of them were overly famous, but Myal remembered him. Barric, that was his name. A good fighter type, fairly intelligent, but he played a little rough on the practice field for her taste. One of the two women looked familiar, but she couldn’t place the curly-haired blonde.
“That door is open,” the blonde woman pointed out tartly. Clad in shades of green and beige leathers, with a strung bow slung over one shoulder, she would have looked more at home in a forest than in the granite halls of the Tower.
“Could be a trap,” Barric murmured.
The other woman was short and clad in mottled dark grays that would make her blend into almost any patch of shadow, including a scrap of cloth wound around both her hair and her face, leaving only a strip of golden skin visible. She ghosted toward it. Myal backed up a few more steps, glad she was now fully out of reach. Crouching, the woman examined the entrance to the shelf-lined room without touching anything, then peered at the modestly lit contents of the shelves.
“Dey took a few tings,” she stated, speaking with a non-Aian accent. “Or maybe it’s vun of dose traps vere you are supposed to put something dere. I dunno.”
The man in the robe pulled out another crystal, this time a clear rectangle roughly the size of his face. “Well, we’ll just have to solve this particular puzzle with a little help from this Maintenance pad.”
At the sight of the crystal tablet in his hands, Kerric tensed and bit back a curse. He let Myal carry him all the way to the foot of the stairs, then released her and dropped to his feet, body returning to full visibility. He clenched his hands to contain his rage, while she pressed the back of her head with both hands and panted with relief. She looked at him and frowned.
“What’s wrong?” she breathed as quietly as she could. Her head had started to throb, prelude to the headache that always accompanied the full invisibility of that particular tattoo, but she was concerned about the fury hardening his normally friendly features.
“That bastard of a rat’s son was hired three months ago as a Maintenance mage,” Kerric hissed. “Said his name was Torven. The others are probably taking advantage of the lack of scrying to loot the Tower, but from what he said, he probably wants to follow us all the way t—!”
Quickly pressing her finger to his lips, Myal lifted her head at the door behind him. It had a bronze plaque next to it with the simple, ominous warning, Magic cannot help you, here. “Hush,” she breathed. “Let’s get through this next trap and find a safe place where you can rant.”
Nodding, he grimaced, turned to the door, then looked back at her. “Remember, no tattoos.”
She nodded and relaxed all her muscles, shaking them out slightly. Nodding in approval, Kerric opened the door, took three steps inside—and dropped with a sigh. Myal checked herself even as she tensed her muscles to leap after and rescue him. The whumpf he made didn’t quite echo down the hall, but it did make her nervous, thinking that it might have been overheard. Relaxing herself again, she made sure all her tattoos were quiescent, then moved inside, quietly shut the door, and stepped over his body.
Turning around, she crouched, checking him for damage in the dim light of the corridor. Nothing worse than a bruise on his chin, Myal decided. She turned him over onto his pack-clad back, hooked her fingers under his armpits, and started dragging him down the hall.
He wasn’t kidding about the length of the thing; halfway along, she had to pause to wipe sweat from her brow. Three-quarters of the way, she had to reflexively check herself to keep from using her tattoos; the one time she started to use the left tattoo band for extra strength, she started feeling woozy. Fortunately, the moment she released the use of it with a thought and an arm-twitch, the dizziness faded.
The far door, as promised, was unlocked. Beyond lay another stretch of corridor, this time perpendicular to the hall that had knocked out Kerric. Pulling him into the new passageway, Myal quickly shut the door, then crouched over him again. Hand patting his face, she tried to rouse him gently. It took longer than she liked, minutes instead of seconds, but he finally roused with a deep breath. Eyes snapping open, he gazed up at her for one brief, wary moment . . . then slumped in relief.
“Thank the Gods,” Kerric muttered. “Thank you so very much for hauling me. I hate that trap . . . It’s like falling down a never-ending well of darkness, and it drains a mage, even if we aren’t using any active spells.”
“Any active spells?” Myal asked, her mind catching on that word. She helped him to sit up, and pulled her waterskin free so he could have a drink. So both of them could, which she did after he took a good swallow, taking it back.
Kerric nodded as she drank. “Mages—trained mages—always have passive spells on themselves. Mostly shields, and a way to ground excess energy into the earth in case something happens that causes their power to surge, or in the advent of an attack. I did my best to remove most of them, but some of them are so deeply ingrained, so instinctive, it’s near impossible to undo them and stop using them.
“This is why I’ve been conservative in using magic,” he confessed. “I could fly both of us through these corridors and traps, shield both of us, and be unaffected by the majority of them . . . but having to cross three of those halls from a Netherhell?” Kerric took back the waterskin for another drink. Swallowing, he shook his head. “No . . . I’d be utterly unable to face the final challenge at the end, drained too much to survive. But there’s no choice. There are three of these on our path, which means I desperately need your help to survive this trap.” He paused, then lifted his brows. “Mind you, I’m happy for your company either way.”
“As much as I am beginning to like you very much, the more time I spend in your company,” Myal told him, taking back the skin so she could help him to his feet, “I’d rather you did survive.”
“I already knew I wanted you to survive,” Kerric told her, releasing her hand somewhat reluctantly once he was upright. He liked the way she felt to his inner senses, calm and steady with none of that inner buzzing most mages had.
“You’re not a professional adventurer,” Myal murmured, eyeing him. “But you are proving to be a good partner.”
“I’ll take that as a high compliment from a professional. Give me another moment to regather my energies,” he told her. “Then we’ll fly up the stairs to the next stop, which is Junk Room One Hundred Seventeen—it’ll be my turn to carry you up those steps.”
She snorted a little in mirth at that idea. Kerric lifted a brow at her, both of his hands going to his hips.
“You don’t think I can do it?” he challenged, giving her a wary look.
“No, no, I am certain you can,” she quickly reassured him. “I was laughing at how much my limbs would stick out on either side while you did so. Like trying to carry a really long pole sideways through a doorway.”
Grinning ruefully at the amusing thought, Kerric shook his head. “I’ll try not to whack your head or your feet on anything. Besides, I was going to have you hop on like a backpack. Here, let me put mine in front.”
Suiting actions to words, he shrugged out of the pack, hooked his arms through the other way so that it rested against his chest, then turned and bent over a little, fingers fluttering near her hips.
“Hop on,” he ordered. “I’m stronger than I look. My stamina’s only good for a magical marathon, not for a footrace, but then it’s my magic that’ll be carrying both of us, not my feet.”
Taking him at his word, Myal climbed onto his back, letting his hands hook under her knees for additional support while she looped her arms around his shoulders and grabbed the straps of his pack for support, rather than throttle his neck. To his credit, he didn’t grunt when she climbed on, though she did
hear his breathing deepen a bit, and he did stagger two steps while he was adjusting their balance.
“Zamatu,” he ordered, coaxing his powers into an egglike envelope. To lift himself required but a thought and a flexing of his will. To lift someone else as well required more effort to form the magic into doing what he wanted from it. “Tessoloc!”
They lifted off the floor, floated for a second, then raced up the winding steps. Which, sensitive as they were, still clunked and flattened into a long, slippery ramp even though neither of them had touched a thing. Landing a few feet beyond the top, Kerric cancelled the spell and let Myal climb back down. Magic couldn’t solve everything in the Tower, but the two of them had just climbed eight or more levels in less than one minute.
Of course, they had fallen down the chute at least five levels to the Scales, and would climb and fall several times more as they progressed. There was no path straight up to the Fountain Hall at the heart of the Tower; indeed, they were about to rise again once past the next room, and would lose more levels somewhere after that. Returning his pack to his back, Kerric strode for the first door on the right. A bit of magic unlocked it, permitting him to escort her into a chamber lined with portraits, and a single pedestal in the center of the long, rectangular space.
Myal went straight to it, quickly reading the lines.
I can be long, or I can be short, I can be grown and I can be bought. I can be painted, or I am left bare. I can be round, pointed, and square.
Mindful of the men and women potentially still following them, Kerric ignored the pedestal with its riddle about fingernails, and went straight to the painting in question, a lovely, pale blonde lady in blue velvet and brocaded silk in the layered-robes style of the far-off Draconan Empire. Her hands were crossed in front of her in such a way that they displayed her—
“Fingernails,” Myal stated, satisfaction in her voice. Each nail on the upper hand had been painted in a different style of cut or color. Kerric turned to look at her. She had a pleasant alto voice, not high but not too low, and more used to speaking softly than bellowing commands, though the Mendhite had proven she could give orders quite well when needed.