All the Paths of Shadow (13 page)

“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?

Meralda thought back to a day when she’d asked Shingvere the very same question.

“You’re making the same mistake Fromarch makes, Apprentice,” Shingvere had said. “You claim you’re open-minded. But here you are, arguing against a haunted Tower without really examining the evidence.”

“What evidence is that?” Fromarch had said. “And what beer bottle did it come out of?”

“Look to your books,” Shingvere had replied. “Book after book, mage after mage, the details differ, but the facts remain unchanged. When you look hard at the Tower, Apprentice, you’ll likely see something looking back.”

Fromarch had snorted and left the room in disdain. Shingvere had shrugged, then grinned and waggled a finger at Meralda’s poorly-concealed expression of polite disbelief.

“One day you’ll see,” he’d said. “Maybe not at the Tower, maybe not tomorrow. But someday, someone is going to come face-to-face with a genuine ghost, and prove it, and then you’ll owe old Shingvere an apology, young lady.”

Meralda closed her eyes and settled back into her seat and wondered, for the first time, if Shingvere might just possibly be right.

Meralda settled into her favorite high-backed, well-cushioned red reading chair and put her bare feet down slowly into a tub of steaming water. “Ahh,” she said. “That feels nice.”

The Bellringers perched uneasily on Meralda’s overstuffed Phendelit couch and watched Mug watch the thaumaturge.

“You look like you’ve put down roots,” said the dandyleaf plant. “Next you’ll be sprouting flowers and asking for a bit of mulch.”

Kervis and Tervis exchanged glances. Mug turned a dozen eyes upon them. “So, lads,” said Mug. “Which one of you is Kervis?”

Kervis looked toward the thaumaturge, but her eyes were closed, and she was silent. “I am, sir,” said Kervis. “I am.”

Mug brought more eyes to bear upon the Bellringer. “Tell me again what you saw.”

“I, um, saw a shape, sir,” said Kervis. “Behind the thaumaturge, after the flash.”

Mug tossed his leaves. “A shape, you say. What kind of shape? A man? A dog? A milk cart? What?”

“A man-shape,” he said, after a moment. “Not a man, exactly. I didn’t see any hair or hands or eyes. Just a man-shape. Tall. Skinny.” Kervis shivered visibly at the memory. “I think he was reaching for her.”

Mug turned a pair of red eyes upon Meralda. “I see,” he said. “How did you explain it, Thaumaturge? A flash-induced visual anomaly, possibly an artifact of the ward spell’s faulty axial orientation?”

Mug turned his eyes back to the Bellringers. “You two see what I’m up against,” he said. “She’s got ward spells exploding, and ghosts reaching out to grab her, and here she sits with her feet in a bath going blithely on about axial faults and visual artifacts.” The dandyleaf plant’s leaves whirled, as if in a wind. “Old Otrinvion could come lurching out of the ground at her feet and she’d swear he was a reflection off the queen’s left ear-ring.”

“Mug.”

Mug rolled his eyes. “You boys know better,” he whispered. “Keep a good watch on her. And for all your sakes, next time shoot the blighter where he stands.”

Meralda opened her eyes. “As Guardsman Kervis knows, discharging a crossbow in the Wizard’s Flat is an excellent way to be remembered as the Tower’s newest ghost. And tell me this, Mug. If indeed dead Otrinvion does come strolling down the stair, what good will it do to shoot him? Do not all of your precious ghost stories stress that spirits cannot be harmed by mundane means?”

Mug glanced sidelong at the Bellringers. “See what I mean?”

Meralda shook her head. “Pay him no attention, gentlemen,” she said. “Logic fails. Reason surrenders. Silence is your only defense.”

“Silence, and a whopping big crossbow,” muttered Mug. Kervis grinned, and Mug winked. “That’s a lad,” he whispered. “There’s hope for you yet.”

Meralda closed her eyes again, and said nothing. Instead, she listened.

Through the four open windows of her sitting room, she could hear Tirlin quite clearly. The last downtown trolley thundered past, right on time, at six-ten. Soon after, traffic halved, and halved again, and the Brass Bell clanged out the seven of the clock. The cries of the paperboys, strident and clear during the closing time bustle, were reduced to a single lad’s weary, hoarse cry of “Hang dock tonight! Two pence for the
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