All the Paths of Shadow (3 page)

Meralda half-turned as she climbed and lifted an eyebrow at the captain. “I detest surprises,” she said.

“Quite right,” said the captain. “My mistake.”

Meralda reached the second floor landing. The copper-bound double doors to the Royal Thaumaturgical Laboratory were just ten paces away, but in place of the mismatched suits of armor that had flanked the laboratory doors since the days of King Esperus, a pair of gangly, red-shirted palace soldiers stood at attention, right hands on sword hilts, eyes straight ahead.

Meralda stared.

The soldiers were twins. Both were blond, fair skinned, blue-eyed, and freckled. Both avoided Meralda’s gaze with a terrified determination, further evidenced by the sheen of sweat on their faces and their futile attempts to remain absolutely still to the point of excluding breathing and swallowing.

“Thaumaturge,” said the captain, “I present to you Tervis and Kervis Bellringer, Guardsmen of the Realm. They are to serve as your bodyguards for the duration of the Accords.” The captain shook his head. “By order of the king,” he said, before Meralda could protest. “All members of the court are to be assigned bodyguards. No fewer than two, no exceptions, no discussion.” The captain turned away from the young soldiers and lowered his voice to a whisper. “They’re good lads, Sorceress,” he said. “Twins, fresh in from a horse ranch halfway to Vonath. I won’t waste them on toads like Sir Ricard and I don’t trust them to hooligans like Ordo or Thaft. Give them a chance. This isn’t their fault.”

The captain’s half-smile vanished, suddenly replaced by a grimace of barely contained fury. He turned and stamped up the last few stairs. “You there!” he bellowed at the right-most lad, not halting until he was a hand’s breadth from the boy’s face. “Guardsman Kervis!”

“Sir,” said the left-most boy. “Pardon, but I’m Kervis. He’s Tervis.”

“You’re Kervis if I say you are!” shouted the captain. “You’re Kervis, your boots are Kervis, your hat is bloody well Kervis if I say it is! Now then.” The captain stalked over to the face of the boy on the left. “Do you see this woman, soldier?”

The boy glanced at Meralda, looked away, and nodded frantically.

“Do you think your brother Kervis sees her, soldier?”

The nods came faster. The captain leaned down and stepped close to Kervis. “You and your brother are the lady’s bodyguards, soldier,” said the captain, his voice fallen to a whisper. “What does that mean, bodyguard?”

“Sir,” said the boy, his eyes wide, “We are to protect her, um, body, from, er—”

“Enemies, sir!” croaked the other Bellringer. “Enemies, foreign or, um, domestic. Sir.”

The captain glared. Kervis shook. “That’s correct, soldier,” he said. “So if you’ve got to take on the whole of Vonath single-handed with a dull butter knife then that’s what you do. Because if anything happens to the sorceress it won’t be the army or the crown you’ll answer to. It’ll be me.” The captain’s voice rose to a bellow. “Me!”

The captain whirled, winked at Meralda, and stamped off down the stairs.

The Bellringers, sweating and wide-eyed, watched him go.

Meralda shook her head. “Guardsman Kervis,” she said, when the captain’s footfalls died. “How old are you?”

The boy cleared his throat. “Eight and ten, ma’am,” he said. “Soon be nine and ten.”

“Me, too,” said Tervis. “Ma’am.”

“I surmised as much,” said Meralda. “Well, gentlemen, let me make one thing clear, here and now. The king has decreed that you shall dog my steps. But it would not do for you to be too much underfoot.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Meralda sighed. Somewhere in the palace, a clock began striking the ninth hour, and with every bell toll Meralda felt the weight of the day settle heavy in her bones.

“Guardsman Kervis,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Are you familiar with the palace?”

Guardsman Kervis leapt to attention. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Then you know where the basement kitchen is.”

“Down the west stair, left at the Burnt Door, right and two doors down from the Anvion Room. Yes, ma’am,” said Kervis.

Meralda stepped off the last stair. “Very well. Go there, at once. Tell them the sorceress wants a pot of coffee.”

Kervis beamed. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Right away.”

“And get three mugs, too,” said Meralda. “You gentlemen do drink coffee, I assume?”

The Bellringers nodded. Tervis’ helmet threatened to fall off, despite the strap cutting into his chin.

“Good,” said Meralda. “We’ll all need a cup, tonight.” Then she stepped to the door, fumbled in her pocket for the big black iron key, and put it in the lock.

The door crackled faintly, and the short-cropped hair on Tervis’ head tried to stand up below his helmet.

Meralda whispered a word, and pushed the door gently open. “Knock, when you return,” she said to Kervis. “And, gentlemen, I don’t need to warn you against ever opening this door yourself, do I?”

“No, ma’am,” said the Bellringers. “Not ever.”

“Good,” said Meralda. “Good.” Then she removed the key, dropped it back in her pocket, and closed the door gently behind her.

“Nineteen days,” she said, to the shadows. “Nineteen days to shrink the Tower or move the Sun.”

“Ma’am?” spoke a muffled voice from beyond the door. “Were you speaking to me?”

“No, Guardsman,” said Meralda. “I wasn’t.”

“Just checking,” said Tervis. Meralda couldn’t see the young man, but she was absolutely certain that he had snapped to full attention before speaking. “Ma’am.”

Meralda shook her head, shrugged out of her coat, rolled up her sleeves, and went about switching on her spark lamps.

Chapter Two

Bright morning sunlight streamed through the kitchen window. “Good morning, Mistress,” said Mug, as Meralda shuffled out of her bedroom, barked her shin on a chair leg, and made slowly for the cupboards. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mmmph,” said Meralda, squinting in the daylight. Her bathrobe, belt trailing loose like a train, hung lopsided from her shoulders. Her slippers were mismatched, right foot blue, left foot yellow with tassels.

Mug regarded the Thaumaturge with a dozen shiny eyes. “Perhaps I should be asking if you slept at all,” said Mug. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Meralda shrugged and rubbed her eyes. “It was late,” she said. “You were asleep.” Meralda filled her coffee pot with water from the sink, rummaged in the cupboard for grounds, and sank into her chair with a sigh and a frown when the coffee urn turned up empty.

“Forgive me, mistress,” said Mug. “I meant to remind you yesterday.”

Meralda yawned. “I’ll get a cup at Flayne’s,” she said. “But first, a piece of toast.”

“Out of bread, too,” said Mug. He tilted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I imagine the mages of legend had someone handy to do the shopping,” he said. “‘Fetch me a bag of flour and an onion,’ they’d say, before charging off to topple the Acatean Empire or clash with the Hang.” Mug shook his leaves. “Yes, that’s the life. Power, magic, and all the shopping done. You really should look into conquering the world and making Yvin run all your errands.”

Meralda peeped out from between her fingers. “Do you sit around at night and think of these things, Mug?”

Mug tossed his fronds in a shrug. “Last night I thought a lot about towers and thaumaturges,” he said. “Specifically, I wondered what mine was doing about a certain long shadow.”

Meralda groaned.

Mug’s eyes clustered together. “Bad news, is it? Going to tell Yvin it can’t be done?”

“Worse,” said Meralda. “I’m going to tell him it can.”

Mug wilted. “Oh,” he said.

“Oh, indeed,” said Meralda. “I think I can change the air around the Tower. Make it bend light differently.”

Mug’s frown deepened. “Sounds interesting, in a hopelessly implausible way.”

“Water does the same thing,” said Meralda.

Mug’s red eyes gathered in a cluster. “Water hides shadows?” he asked, with a furtive red-eyed glance toward the half-full kitchen sink below him.

Meralda shook her head. “No, Mug,” she said. “Water bends light. It’s called refraction, and different materials refract light to different degrees.”

“If you say so, mistress,” said Mug. “Will it be difficult?”

“Extremely,” said Meralda, after another yawn. “I’ll have to divide the air around the Tower into hundreds of different volumes, and assign a unique refractive value to each volume.” She yawned again.

“Is that before or after you buy coffee and bread?”

“After,” said Meralda. She rose, rummaged in her icebox, and produced a chunk of cheese and a wax bag of Flayne’s salt crackers.

A knock sounded softly at the door. Meralda grimaced. “Right on time,” she said. “They’ve probably been standing there listening for the palace bells to sound before they knocked.”

Indeed, the Brass Bell, five hundred years old and as big as a house, was sounding from the palace.

Mug divided his eyes between Meralda and the door. “They? They who?”

“My bodyguards,” said Meralda, rising. “And no, it wasn’t my idea, and no, I can’t get rid of them.”

The knock sounded again. Mug twisted all of his eyes towards Meralda, and shook his leaves in what the Thaumaturge recognized as Mug’s equivalent of taking a deep breath.

“Not a word,” said Meralda, her eyes flashing beneath a tangled shock of hair. “Not one.”

Mug tossed his leaves and sighed.

“Thaumaturge?” spoke a voice at the door. “You asked us to report for duty at first ring.”

“Thank you, Kervis,” said Meralda. “I’ll be out in a few moments. There’s a settee just down the hall.”

They won’t do it,
thought Meralda.
They won’t sit. They’ll flank my door and lock their knees and stare at my neighbors and if it takes me more than twenty minutes to bathe and dress one or both of them will fall over in a dead faint.

“We brought you coffee,” said a fainter voice. “Ma’am.”

“They brought you coffee,” echoed Mug. “Ma’am.”

Meralda glared. “Thank you,” she said.

“It’s from Flayne’s,” said a Bellringer.
Tervis
, Meralda decided.
He’s the timid twin.
What a difference a few minutes made.

Meralda smiled. A cup of Flayne’s coffee was sixpence. A lavish sum, on a guardsman’s pay, even split in two.

Meralda padded to her front door and opened it a hand’s width. “Thank you,” she said again, as a grinning Kervis thrust a steaming paper cup within. “Now, if you gentlemen will take a seat, I’ll be out in a moment.”

“Yes, ma’am,” chorused the guards.

Meralda eased the door shut.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mug, his voice a perfect rendition of the Bellringers. “They’ll both be in love with you before the Accords, you know. Ah, love,” added Mug, with a tossing of leaves. “Flowers and music and moonlight and guardsmen! You’ll have to get a bigger place, the three of you. What will old Missus Whitlonk think, what with the lads coming and going at all hours?”

Meralda raised the cup to her lips, kicked off her mismatched slippers, and marched wordlessly back to her bedroom.

Angis and his cab were waiting at the curb when Meralda and the Bellringers clattered down the steps and out into the hustle and bustle of Fairlane Street.

“Morning, Thaumaturge,” said Angis, doffing his hat. “Who ’er these lads? Book-ends?”

Meralda laughed. “Goodman Angis Kert, meet Tervis and Kervis Bellringer. They are my guards until the Accords.”

Angis guffawed. “Where you lads from?”

“Allaskar, sir,” said Kervis. “Just outside Moren.”

Angis took Meralda’s battered black leather instrument bag and placed it carefully in the cab. “Knew a man from Allaskar, once,” he said. “When I was in the army. What was his name, now?”

Meralda caught hold of the cab’s side rail and climbed inside. A double-decked Steam Guild trolley chugged past, smokestacks billowing, sending pedestrians and cabs scurrying off the track lane and momentarily drowning out the clatter of the road and the conversation between the Bellringers and Angis.

Meralda settled back into the cushioned seat and closed her eyes.

“Pardon, Thaumaturge,” said Tervis at the door. “Goodman Kert wants to know our destination. And Kervis wants to know if he can ride up top, to keep an eye out.”

Meralda smiled. She, too, recalled a time when Tirlin was best seen from the cabman’s seat.

“We go to the Tower, guardsman,” she said. “And tell guardsman Kervis I shall feel most secure knowing he and Angis are scouring the sidewalks for wandering Vonat river bandits.”

Meralda sensed Tervis grin, but did not open her eyes to see it. The door shut. Words were spoken. An instant later the cab door opened and Tervis climbed inside.

“We’re off, ma’am,” he said, his sword clattering against the cab door’s frame. “We’re off!”

The cab rolled smoothly into traffic. Above, Angis and Kervis were chatting away like long lost brothers. From the sound of it, Angis may well have served in the army with the Bellringers’ uncle. Meralda noted with mild shock that the cabman’s language never veered from strict propriety, even when a ten-horse road barge nearly forced Angis onto the sidewalk.

Wakened, Meralda kept her eyes open after that. Across from her Tervis stared through his window, occasionally biting back habitual exclamations to his twin at the sight of passing trolleys, a Builder’s Guild steam shovel at work, and the distant, bobbing hulks of dirigibles moored in a field east of the docks. The guardsman went slack-jawed with awe when he spied a walking barge hauling a load of lumber up a steep hill, and again when the automaton at the fruit market singled him out for a wave and a doff of its red hat.

“Mum said we’d see wonders, ma’am,” said Tervis, as the shadow of a rising airship blotted out the sun. “She was right.”

“My mother said the same thing,” said Meralda.

“Your mum?” said Tervis, craning his neck to follow the airship. “Weren’t you born in the palace?”

Meralda laughed. Tervis stared out, lost in wonders a thousand other cab riders ignored twice a day, every day.

I wonder,
mused Meralda.
Should I tell him I was born on a pig farm? Should I tell him the king is a bumbler, the court a refuge for overbred dunderheads, and the Accords are largely an opportunity for the nobles of five nations to come together and drink to excess at their peoples’ expense?