All the Paths of Shadow (31 page)

Now is not the time,
she chided herself,
to start filling the dark with penny-novel villains.
Especially when a large, ferocious ward spell is waiting to pounce on anyone but the Bellringers or myself.

“I’d best make sure it’s still waiting,” she said. And then she sang out a single word of the ward’s unlatching spell, heard an answering buzz from high above, and smiled, satisfied that the ward still roamed the dark, invisible, but vigilant.

“Well,” said Meralda. “Time to go.” Her echo died quickly, and she hefted her instrument bag with a groan.
I’ll miss having Tervis carry this,
she thought.
But I can hardly trot back down the stair if I decide I need a fresh holdstone or a piece of one-way glass. And I certainly can’t have the Bellringers underfoot if yonder ward spell goes bad.

She slipped the bag strap over her shoulder and regarded the damp, cloth-wrapped bundle still dripping rainwater several feet away. Inside the cloth, the new weak spell detector sizzled faintly, sending tiny blue flashes of light twirling about like gnats.

Meralda groaned. “You should not be doing that,” she said. Her words echoed through the empty Tower. What could it possibly be detecting, this far from the flat? Or am I only now seeing the flashes because the Tower is so dark?

It occurred to her that the blanket she’d used to shield the detector from the rain was the same blanket that usually covered Goboy’s scrying mirror. The detector might be reacting to traces of spell energies latched to the blanket, faint though they must be. And if that were so, the tiny bursts of fire would cease when the blanket was removed.

Meralda grasped the damp blanket with her left hand and unwound it until the detector was freed.

The darting flashes stopped.

Meralda sighed in relief. “Marvelous,” she said, taking the detector up by its handle. “Ten to the minus twelfth, or I’m a cabaret dancer.”

Meralda spoke a word, and the dark half-globe of the detector began to glow, spilling a candle’s worth of soft blue light at her feet.

Meralda spoke the second word, and the light began to brighten. By the time she reached the flat, Meralda fully expected to be engulfed in a globe of light fully twenty feet in radius. But for now, she played the magelamp on the treads, shifted her bag on her shoulder, and set foot on the stair.

Her wet boots squeaked until the soles touched the flour, and then they went slick. Meralda climbed the first dozen steps carefully, then turned, scraped her toes and heels off on the edge of a tread, and listened to the thunder boom and crackle far above.

If Mug were there, he’d be saying things like “Nice day to meet ghosts,” or “good weather for spook hunting,”.
And I’d sigh and tell him to shut up,
thought Meralda.
But in truth, isn’t that what I’m doing?

Meralda took a few careful steps upward. Satisfied that her boots were clean—
it would be a shame to face the shade of Otrinvion, but then slip off the stair because of flour on my boots,
she thought—she continued her trek toward the flat.

The detector’s globe of radiance slowly expanded, spitting tell-tale sparks and flashes as the sharply defined sphere of light brushed the treads of the stair, or the wall, or the corner of Meralda’s instrument bag. Meralda watched and smiled, heartened by the detector’s seeming eagerness to reach the flat. She knew until the spells were latched to the Tower the glows and sparks were nothing more than random trace events. Still, though, she was glad for any sign the spells were still active.

Scritch, scrape, scritch, scrape. Even the thunder wasn’t enough to mask the lonely sounds of Meralda’s slow progress up the winding stair. Determined to reach the halfway point to the first floor landing before changing her bag strap to the other shoulder, Meralda set her jaw and kept a steady pace.

The darkness grew about her, made even darker and much larger when the Tower floor vanished, and Meralda once again had the sensation of walking up the walls of the night. Shadows danced on the wall beside her, causing Meralda to force her eyes strictly upon the stairs ahead. “I will not be spooked,” she said aloud, her voice quickly lost to the grumbling thunder.

Still, shadows flew, and the whirls and flashes from the detector’s slowly expanding sphere of influence only added to their brief dances.
Just like in the stories,
thought Meralda. No wonder the mages of old preferred to leave the Tower alone.

A few had dared the dark, though. Meralda pulled down every musty old tome in the laboratory the night before, while her new illuminator spells were building, and for the first time she’d read through the books with an eye for tales of the darker shadow said to lurk in the heart of the Tower.

“We saw a Flitting shape,”
wrote one mage, the ink of his scribbled words faded and flaking.
“And Heard sudden cruel Laughter, and then our Spelles of Warding were broken, and Fire rolled Down the staire, and we fled, and None of the Guard will go back, not even for their Swords.”

Meralda guessed she was halfway to the first floor landing, and she halted long enough to shift the bag strap to her right shoulder. This put the bag on her right, and forced her to walk a step closer to the dark than before.

“We saw a Flitting shape,” she’d read, and the words now danced in her mind. “
Flitting Shape, wrathful Spectre, gruesome hollow Man.
” Tale after tale, mage after mage. They’d all used different words to describe the Tower shade, but their stories were always the same.

The shade appears, ward spells go awry, guards and mages take to their heels. Meralda had found eight such encounters, spread out over four centuries, in less than an hour of reading. Immediately, she had seen a pattern of ghostly encounters emerge.

Mages with spells enter the Tower. What mages, with what spells, for what purpose—none of these things seemed to matter. Meralda suspected the mere act of hauling major unlatched spellworks into the Tower was enough to stir the shade.

And the shade, once stirred, soon appears. It allows itself to be seen, or be heard, or both. And then it attacks ward spells or spellworks, and in doing so it frightens the intruders away, generally for decades to come.

Meralda had wondered why Fromarch and Shingvere never saw the shade, until she realized that Fromarch had insisted they convey no unlatched spells within the Tower. The scrying mirrors, the lookabout staves, the sixteen pieces of Ovaro’s Image Capture Box, all were passive spellworks, firmly latched to mechanisms carried in from the laboratory. True, Fromarch had latched a few see-you spells to the Tower proper, which would have alerted them to any sneaky mortal intruders. But they had been tiny spells, hand cast, on the last days of their search.
Perhaps,
thought Meralda,
hand cast spells simply aren’t worthy of the shade’s horrific attention.

The detector weighed heavy in Meralda’s hand.
And here I go alone,
she thought,
to latch a major spellwork to the heart of the Tower itself.

“Vonashon, empalos, endera.” Meralda recalled the words, and that awful face.
Walk away.
Good advice, it seems,
she thought.
I only wish I could.
“Perhaps the guilds are hiring,” she muttered to the dark.

The detector flashed suddenly, and Meralda started and gasped. But the light settled back to its normal steady cast, and Meralda took a deep breath and continued her climb.

The sphere of light cast by the detector had expanded to engulf all of the handle and Meralda’s hand and half her forearm. Grateful for the extra light, Meralda held the half-globe close to the stair, and wondered if the shade was curious about what she carried.

The shade,
thought Meralda.
Well, there, I’ve said it, even if only to myself. But I can hardly deny it any longer. Something here, in the dark, is watching me. Has been watching me since the day I first set foot in the hall.

The light from her magelamp caught the seamless black ceiling of the first floor, not fifty hands above. Meralda quickened her pace, well aware that she was no closer to daylight, but eager to quit the darkness below and see a floor under her feet, if only for a moment.

First floor, second floor, third floor at last. Meralda stopped, mopped sweat from her forehead, and let her bag drop to the stair.

Both shoulders ached, bruised by the bag strap. Her arms were weary from the weight of the detector, which now glowed bright as a magelamp and sent worms of cold blue fire wriggling and crawling across those parts of the Tower it touched.

“Not much farther,” she said aloud, swapping the bag strap from left to right and wincing as she hefted the bag again. “Good thing, too.”

She resumed her climb. Shadows still darted about her, but not so near, now that the detector’s glow had engulfed her. She could sense the ward spell passing occasionally, but it never ventured close or lingered too long.

Still, Meralda was wary.
It’s just about this point,
she thought,
that most of the mages of old ran into the shade.
High on the stair, nowhere to hide, nothing to do but make a mad dash downward for the hall and the park. She shuddered at the thought of running any distance down the narrow winding stair.

Soon, though, the magelamp’s light washed over the final ceiling, and then caught the tarnished brass door knob of the plain wooden door set in the upright notch at the top of the stair. Meralda found herself, if not exactly dashing, at least walking briskly the last hundred treads to the flat. As if by hurrying she could somehow miss the sudden awful appearance of the shade of dread Otrinvion.

At the door, she dropped her bag and the detector on the tread behind her and fumbled in her pockets for the key.

It wasn’t there.

At her back, she felt the darkness gather.

She put the magelamp under her chin, bent her head forward, and held the cold lamp tight against her neck while she used both hands to search her pockets.
I put it in my right skirt pocket before I left for the park,
she thought.
I know I did.

Thunder broke, and rolled in echoes through the dark, and Meralda was overwhelmed by the sensation that if she were to turn, if she were to face the stair, something would be standing there, just past the glow of the detector.
Wrathful Spectre,
she thought, and shivered. A gruesome hollow man, waiting for her to turn so it could open its awful mad eyes and split its rotted face with a wide and hungry smile.

Handkerchiefs, ward wands, an old pair of theatre tickets, fused into a smooth mass of paper pulp by the wash. Then her right hand closed on cold, smooth iron, and she pulled the flat key from her blouse pocket, thrust it hard in the door, gave the key a savage twist, and shoved.

The door flew open, and daylight spilled out of the flat and onto the stair.

Meralda took her magelamp in her hand, drew in a ragged breath, and turned around to face the dark.

The stair was empty. But empty in a manner that suggested to Meralda it was only very recently emptied. Vacated, perhaps, in the brief moment immediately before she worked up the nerve to turn and look.

“No more of this,” she said. “Sight!”

Meralda closed her eyes, and for the first time since entering the Tower she willed forth her Sight.

The detector’s sphere of influence blazed like a tame globe of fire. Her bag, within the detector’s sphere, cast whirling loops and probing red and blue and green-hued tangles writhing about the stair. Meralda pushed her Sight out, into the dark, past the light that shone weakly through the open door.

Nothing. Darkness and darkness and no hint of anything else.

Meralda opened her eyes and let her Sight abate, though she did not let it fall. Normal vision and glittering Sight left the flat glowing and indistinct, but revealed only smooth stone and those things Meralda had brought. She picked up her bag, took the detector in her hand, closed the door with her heel, and walked to the center of the flat.

She dropped her bag to the floor beside her.

This is it,
she thought.
If the Tower is haunted, I am about to come face-to-face with the shade of Otrinvion the Black.

Or, more likely, make a complete fool of myself.

Meralda cleared her throat.

“Greetings,” she said, aloud. “I am Mage Ovis, Thaumaturge to the Kingdom of Tirlin.” She licked her lips, which had gone dry as she spoke.

“It was I who latched the shadow moving spell to this place,” she said, her voice loud and ringing in the round, empty flat. “I meant no harm, but harm I may have done, to a spellwork I did not know existed until my own spells broke apart. For this,” she said, “I am sorry.”

Shingvere,
she thought silently,
must never ever hear of this.

“Furthermore,” she added, “I plan to loose another spell here today. It is a passive spell, one I shall latch to the space in this room, rather than to the Tower itself. This spell is meant to reveal any older spellworks active here, so I might determine their function and assess any damage I might have unknowingly done.” She paused, considering her next words. “It is not my intent to usurp, remove, or modify any part or portion of the Tower, or its works,” she said. “Nor do I intend upon proving or disproving the existence of any, um, unseen residents to this place. I only want to know what, if any, harm I may have done. I also need to know if there is a safe way to latch a shadow moving spell to the lower half of the Tower.”

The only sound was thunder, the only shadow Meralda’s, cast briefly by distant lightning.

“That is who I am,” she said. “And that is why I am here. I ask for your forbearance, that I might do my work, and then leave you in peace. May I do so?”

Meralda kept her eyes open, and let her Sight move out into the flat.

Nothing stirred. Aside from the sounds of muted thunder and her own rapid breaths, the Tower was utterly silent, utterly still.