All the Paths of Shadow (22 page)

None,
thought Meralda.
None, and neither shall my name be remembered, unless it is as a footnote on first year midterms.
She could almost see the question written, almost see the frowns it raised. Who was the first woman to wear the robe? And some would know and scribble “Meralda Ovis” and some would shrug and guess and that would be the end of it, the end of her, the end of Mage Meralda.

She thought back to college, remembered how many of those somber young faces were bound for the guilds, and happy to be so. “Forget that court nonsense,” she’d heard one of them snicker at her back during commencement. “Let her have mage. I’ll take a Master’s robe from a guild, any day, and be glad of it, too.”

Meralda looked away from the ranks of cabinets.

“Now just you wait a moment, Miss Ovis,” said Mug. “I see those big moon-eyes getting all misty because you didn’t conjure up the Tears and throw them at the copperheads,” he said. “It’s just like college all over again. You set impossible goals, and then act surprised when you can’t achieve them.”

Meralda sighed. “Mug,” she said.

“Don’t ‘Mug’ me,” replied Mug. “I’m right, and you know it. I’ll tell you something, mistress,” he said. “I studied history right along with you. I’ve heard all the stories. I’ve read all the old books. I believe your hero Tim the Horsehead made things up as he went along, took a lot of wild chances, and had a lot of wild strokes of wholly undeserved, utterly blind, plain dumb luck. I think you are already his equal, if not his superior, in spell shaping and use of Sight, and I know you’re a lot better at mathematics, because Tim’s staff did all his math and his writings are full of errors after the staff was broken at Romare.” Mug paused, rolled a long leaf into a finger-like tube, and shook it gently at Meralda. “So stop berating yourself for not being Tim, Mage Ovis. We don’t need Tim anymore. We need Meralda.”

The faint sound of applause rose up behind Mug, and he made a mocking bow toward the sound.

Meralda realized her fists were clenched at her sides. She took a breath, relaxed her hands and her jaw, and forced a smile. “Thank you,” she said.

Mug blinked at her. “You’re welcome,” he said. His voice softened. “I meant all that, by the way.”

“I know you did,” said Meralda. She walked to her chair, pulled it back, and sat. “So,” she said, licking her lips and pausing a bit when she realized her voice was shaking. “When our history is written, what will it claim we did next?”

Mug considered this. “Well,” he said, slowly. “When confronted by knotty dilemmas, most wizards turn to relics and whatnots,” he said. He turned his eyes upon Goboy’s scrying mirror, through which the last rays of the sun still streamed. “Shall I?”

Meralda sighed in exasperation. “You know full well it’s a waste of time,” she said, patting the mirror frame when the glass flashed at her words. “Not that our friend here isn’t a wondrous and useful work,” she added, hastily, “but the glass can only display images of actions taking place in the present.”
And since all of those tend to be images of bedrooms or bathhouses,
she thought,
the mirror tells us more about Mage Goboy’s favored entertainments than it ever has about anything else.

“Well, then, let’s ask it about the present,” said Mug.

Meralda frowned. The mirror could reflect some things, well enough. Ask it for the sky, or the clouds, or Tirlin from high in the air, and one could expect several hours of reflection before the image broke apart. But ask for anything smaller than the sky, a room, for instance, or a person, and the mirror would flash an instant’s reflection on the glass, and then begin its random perambulation through the more private parts of Tirlin. Meralda’s early investigations of Goboy’s mirror had resulted mainly in a good deal of embarrassment and ultimately the blanket.

“Mirror, mirror,” said Mug, before Meralda could stop him.

The sky and the faint sun vanished, replaced by reflections of Mug and Meralda and a single glowing spark lamp on the ceiling.

Meralda looked at her reflection, and looked away when it winked back at her.

“Show me the Tears,” said Mug, in the king’s own voice. “Show me the Tears, wherever they are.”

The mirror flashed bright white, casting brief shadows on Meralda’s desk. Startled, Meralda looked up at the glass, but it was dark.

Dark, but not black. Indeed, a dim light flickered at the right edge of the glass, halfway up the frame.

“I’ll be trimmed and pruned,” said Mug.

The image grew lighter and clearer. The flickering light became the guttering stub of a candle, burnt down nearly to nothing. Its four fellows were gone, mere lumps that neither smoked nor glowed.

The candle stand sat on a plain wood table. A chair was pushed beneath it. And on the wall adjacent to the table, faint but visible in the failing candlelight, Tim the Horsehead grinned out of a painting.

Meralda rose, eyes wide, biting back an exclamation.

“That’s the safe room, isn’t it?” whispered Mug.

Meralda nodded, brought a finger to her lips. Mug nodded with a tossing of leaves and fell silent.

Meralda sought out Opp’s Rotary Timekeeper and watched the rings whirl round. Ten, twenty, thirty full seconds, and still the image in the mirror held.

The safe room. Meralda let out her breath, afraid to move or speak or even look away.

“Show me the Tears, wherever they are,” Mug had said.

And now we see the safe room?

Meralda rose, banged her right knee on the desk leg, shoved her chair sharply backward, and bit back a shout.

“Mistress?” said Mug, who turned half his eyes upon her, but left the other aimed motionless at the glass.

“The Tears,” said Meralda. “You asked…oh, blast, the nature of your question was such that the object in question would have its whereabouts revealed,” she said, wary of using words the mirror might interpret as a new command. “Think about it, Mug. Imagine you’re a villain. You want to cause trouble. You put a spell on the safe, or the jewel box, and you make it look as if the Tears have been stolen.”

Mug tapped the glass with a leaf. “But you hide the Tears, instead,” he said. “Somehow. Hide them in the safe room.”

“And then you just wait,” said Meralda. She stepped closer to the glass. “You just wait, because sooner or later, the Alons will be gone,” she said. “And sooner or later, Yvin will remove the guards from the safe room. Oh, he might also bar it and lock it, but given time, you can get in. And if not? Well, the damage is done.”

Meralda stared into the glass.
I’m right,
she thought, smiling at the guttering candle, shifting her gaze to the ghostly equine smile of the Horsehead in the portrait.
I’m right.

Mug blinked with fifteen eyes. “It sounds plausible,” he said. He blinked again. “I can’t find anything wrong with it.” He paused. “Except, of course, for the mirror’s sudden spate of competence.”

Meralda felt her smile shrink, just a bit.

“Odd,” she said. “Though not undocumented. Remember the missing princes, back in 1810?”

“I thought you said that Mage Lommis made that story up, to implicate the Vonats,” said Mug.

“I may have been wrong about that,” said Meralda. She reached out and touched the dark oak frame. “I may have been wrong about a lot of things.”

Mug shrugged. “Glasses showing rooms, mages admitting errors. This is a night for rare occurrences,” he said. He thrust an eye toward Meralda. “That aside, what now?”

Meralda turned from the glass to Mug. “It’s time someone else had a very bad day,” she said, and she smiled. At the sight of it Mug pulled his eye hastily back.

“Oh, my,” said Mug.

In the glass, the candle guttered and went out.

Midnight. Meralda yawned and stretched. Mug muttered in his sleep, and Tervis rose from his chair and stood.

The scene in Goboy’s mirror was dark, aside from the faint line of light that crept in from under the safe room door.

“Shut up, you awful hyacinth,” said Mug.

“Ma’am?” said Tervis.

“He’s dreaming,” said Meralda. “Ignore him.” She reached up and stroked the topmost of his leaves.

“Never thought about plants dreaming,” said Tervis. Then he yawned. “But I reckon they get tired; too.”

“Don’t we all,” said Meralda.

Tervis muttered assent, and sat again.

The mirror remained dark. Meralda had sent for the captain, told him of her suspicions, then asked that a contingent of guards be kept ready just beyond the Alon halls. She’d refused the captain’s offer of additional guards to watch the mirror, deciding there was simply too much potential for mischief in the lab.
Or,
Meralda wondered,
is it that I, like Fromarch and all the mages before us, simply don’t want strangers in my lair?

Meralda smiled at the thought.
Next I’ll be slouching around in old robes and muttering to myself in public,
she thought.

“Hedge-bush,” said Mug, and Tervis chuckled.

Meralda bit back another yawn and idly shoved her now-cold cup of coffee around on her desk. She was beginning to question the wisdom of insisting that she keep her own watch on the mirror, instead of assigning Kervis and Tervis to watch it in shifts.

But here I sit,
she thought, half-asleep and bone weary.
I can’t just go home and lie down. Not yet.

She lifted the coffee cup, took a sip, made a face, and put it down.

Sometime during her first hour of watching the mirror, she’d decided that one of the rival Alon wizards was probably the culprit. If so, he’d also be the one to recover the Tears. Meralda’s hope was she could find them first.

And then she’d begun to think about how the Tears were hidden, and she’d decided the Alon mages were, if the captain and Shingvere were correct, simply not up to the task.

Arcane concealment of the Tears, which would mean visual and tactile suppression of form and mass, was not something she’d like to try, she decided. If Red Mawb or Dorn Mukirk cast such a spell, there was more to Alon clan wizards than the college ever taught.

Mug shook his leaves, and Meralda yawned again.

“You’ll have the Tears in hand by tomorrow night, I’ll wager,” said Tervis.

“I wish I shared your confidence,” replied Meralda. “But I hardly know where to begin looking.”

Tervis nodded and smiled. “You’ll know when the time comes.”

“She can’t know of this,” mumbled Mug, in Shingvere’s merry voice. Meralda smiled and patted Mug’s pot. “Poor thing,” she said. “You’ll have to go outside tomorrow, get some real sunlight.”

Tomorrow. She looked to the clock and saw that sunrise was only five hours away.

Night is fled, and with her slumber,
thought Meralda. Phendelit playwrights must lose as much sleep as Tirlish thaumaturges.

“And I still have shadows to move,” she said, aloud. She pushed an image of the face from the park aside and looked down at the drawings and calculations that covered her desk, and the words she’d scribbled earlier on a drawing of the Tower.

“Vonashon, empalos, endera,” she’d written. “Walk warily, walk swiftly, walk away.”

Spoken by a mad-eyed death’s head from within a broken spell. She looked at Mug and shook her head.
I’ll never hear the end of this, if I tell him,
she thought.
Though I suppose I really should.

In casesomething happens to me.

Meralda rubbed her eyes. What did she see?

She picked up her pen, and shuffled her papers until the Tower sketch was before her. She thought back to that instant of Sight, just before the latch tore and fell away, and she began to draw.

“There,” she said. “What, pray tell, are you?”

She’d drawn a ring about the Wizard’s Flat. Riding the ring were a dozen evenly spaced, barrel-sized, round-ended masses, each circling the flat at a hawk’s pace. She noted the direction of flight about the flat, and guesses as to the size and shape of each dark mass, and then she drew a question mark and put down her pen.

I never actually saw the masses,
she realized. She’d only seen their shadows, shadows they cast in the latch, as they flew through it.

A shiver went through Meralda. Not at the thought that she might have actually seen a spellwork cast by the hand of Otrinvion the Black himself, but that her latch might have touched Otrinvion’s spell in the same way his had touched hers.

What if I damaged Otrinvion’s circling masses as badly as they damaged my latch?

“Tervis,” said Meralda, jumping at the loudness of her voice in the silence of the laboratory.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Tervis, leaping to his feet.

“Go to the guards in the hall,” she said. “Send one to the park. I want any news of lights in the flat. Real news, mind you, from the watch or the guard.” Meralda bit her lip, considering. “I’ll want hourly reports, all night tonight, delivered here. Compiled and delivered each morning every day after.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Tervis frowned at the mirror. “Did you see anything, ma’am?” he asked.

“Nothing at all,” she said. “And find me a pillow, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Tervis, and then he turned and darted away.

Mug opened a sleepy red eye. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Locusts?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep,” said Meralda. Mug’s eye closed and drooped on its stalk.

Meralda shifted in her chair, put her chin on her hands, and watched the dark, still glass.

“Thaumaturge,” said a voice.

What,
thought Meralda,
is Tervis doing in my bedroom?

“You might want to wake up, ma’am,” said Tervis, from close beside her. “The captain and the other mages are heading this way.”

Meralda opened her eyes, a drawing of the Tower filling her vision, and realized she was face-down on her laboratory desk.

I’ve a face full of ink smudges,
she thought, and then she rose.

Her back popped and twinged. Her right arm, which was beneath her face, was numb and stiff. Her stocking feet were blocks of ice from resting all night on cold stone. She rubbed her eyes with her left hand and shook her right arm and Mug began to chuckle.