The Magician's Tower (25 page)

The architect once again shrugged. “It does not matter now. And you have one final test to complete.” He gestured toward the hanging box overhead. “I submit to you: the box.”

He pulled at what appeared to be some kind of hidden lever along the wall, and the box dropped from the chain. Oona took in a sharp breath, catching it in her open arms. It was very light and extremely smooth. The black color seemed to come from the wood itself, rather than from paint or a stain. Rolling it over in her hands, she could find nowhere to open it. No lock. No seam. No hinge. Nothing but solid box. It was a perfect mystery, and Oona was fascinated.

The architect tapped the box with a short, stubby finger. “In over five hundred years of these contests, the best and the brightest of minds have come to this very place and held that box. None of them have managed to
open it. Perhaps you will be the one.” He looked at his watch. “You have one hour.”

As usual, when Oona had a problem before her, she barely heard the words spoken to her. She moved to the fireplace, where the light was best and the warmth might begin to dry her soaking dress and wet hair. She sat on the floor before the hearth, the box cradled in her lap.

At first she only looked at it, as if her gaze might penetrate the box, discovering its contents by willpower alone, but after a minute of heavy concentration she began to run the tips of her fingers along the sides of the smooth surface.

She found no flaw. No cracks. Nothing to indicate that it could be opened at all. She shook it beside her ear, like a child attempting to discover the contents of a birthday present.

She reached into her pocket for her magnifying glass, only to discover that it was not there. She checked all of her pockets, but they were empty. To her dismay, she all at once remembered changing out of her wet dress the day before. She had placed the contents of her pockets—including the magnifying glass—on her dressing table and then gone straight to bed, evidently failing to place them in the fresh dress she put on when she awoke.

She sighed. It might have been helpful to have had the
glass, even if it had been just the comfort of having a bit of her father with her … to help her see clearly.

Systematically, she applied pressure to the corners of the box with her thumbs.

More than half an hour passed, and the front half of her dress began to dry. Tendrils of steam rose off the fabric, spiraling into the upper reaches of the pyramid in swirling, chaotic patterns that broke apart and rejoined like misty puzzle pieces. Oona placed the box on the floor in front of her and stood on it. She jumped up and down. Nothing. She stepped from the box and watched its immaculate surface flicker in the firelight, as if it were an animal that might at any moment make a sudden dash for the door.

The tower continued to sway in the storm, and the rain seemed to fall even harder. Thunder cracked overhead. The tower trembled, yet Oona remained oblivious to her surroundings.

It was as if nothing else in the world existed, save for the puzzle before her, and it was as she stared fixedly at the box, its shinny black surface flickering in the orange fire glow, that the idea came to her. It seemed so simple.
Too
simple, perhaps, but all the same … she picked the box up, and then, before she could think twice about what she was doing, she tossed it into the fire.

Half expecting the architect to protest, she glanced
over her shoulder, but the tiny man in the tall hat, who was waiting patiently in his place at the center of the room, remained as quiet as snowfall.

By now the fire had burned down to mostly red-hot embers. Surely the box would instantly catch fire, and hopefully, if her hunch was correct, crack open from the heat. The box landed on the embers with a dazzling spray of sparks, several of which sizzled out on Oona's damp dress. She brushed them away with the back of her hand and waited for something to happen.

Nothing. Not only did the box
not
catch fire, it did not so much as begin to smoke. Again, Oona watched the box, waiting. One minute. Three minutes. When five minutes had passed, Oona reached out a tentative hand and felt the top of the box, which remained cool to the touch.

“Remarkable,” she said, and pulled the box from the fire, amazed at how the object managed to maintain a steady temperature, no matter what its environment—yet truthfully, when she thought about it, she was not amazed at all. Was this not the very sort of thing she had been learning about for the past five years? It was indeed. This was no logic puzzle, no comprehensible riddle. It was nothing the mind could grasp at all. This box was undeniably …

“Magic,” she said.

It came out sounding as if she should have known
it all the time; as if it were some inevitable element in her life that she could not get away from. Deny it all she wanted, magic was a part of her world, and perhaps even more so, it was a part of
her
. Indeed, it was so much a part of her that she now realized she had recognized the box to be a magical object from the moment she had first set eyes on it.

“And a magic box,” she said, “requires a magic key.”

She thought of her uncle, and of all the spells and charms she had learned over the years as his apprentice. She thought of the Lights of Wonder spell he had taught her, and how Oona had used it to delight her mother and baby sister. And how the spell had gone so completely wrong, ending in their deaths.

And, of course, she thought of these last few days, when she had retained the hope that perhaps she had not been the cause of their deaths after all. It had been a false hope. Ridiculous, now that she thought of it. Oona had been there … had seen it all happen … and yet some part of her still clung to the thought that perhaps some other action, besides her own incompetence, had in the end caused the spell to go so wrong.

There are times when we humans open like a flower, our petals reaching outward for the answers we seek. But often, the answers that we are looking for are on the inside, and no reaching outward is necessary
.

Oona shook her head, confused. Those had been her uncle's words from the day before. But why were they popping into her head now? She didn't even know what those words had meant.

But then another thought began to materialize in her head, one that was definitely related. It was an image of the Wizard standing in the Pendulum House front garden, the hedge clippers clasped in one hand, just before he had spoken those cryptic words. And then the curious occurrence with the rose. How beautiful it had been. The rose had opened to the Wizard's will. How truly …

Oona's head gave a little jerk. “The rose. The spell. Of course.”

Remembering her empty pockets, it occurred to her how fortunate it was that the simple spell had not required a conductor.

Kneeling down, she placed the box in front of her and raised one finger, playing the memory of what had happened in the garden over in her mind. She closed her eyes, concentrating as thoroughly as she could, and uttered the words her uncle had spoken, hoping beyond hope that she remembered them correctly.

“Abra-ord-ion-all.”

The box clicked.

Oona opened her eyes, her breath suddenly filled with excitement. The box remained on the floor in front of her,
only now there appeared to be a seam running around the top portion—a very defined lid—and an intricate pattern of magical symbols materialized on the box as if they had been carved into the smooth surface. Carefully, delicately, Oona flipped the lid open, her hands shaky from the lingering effects of the spell. Beneath the lid lay what Oona recognized immediately as a magic wand. Beneath the wand was a small piece of metal embossed with the words
Property of Oswald
.

Oona gasped. “Is this what I think it is?”

“It is indeed,” said a voice from behind her. It was not the voice of the architect. It was a voice that caused all the fine hairs along Oona's arms and neck to stand on end, a voice she would never be able to forget her whole life, even if she lived to be a hundred years old. At the sound of it, time seemed almost to stop, and her heart dropped sickeningly into her stomach. Could it be true, or had she simply imagined hearing it?

Oona jumped frantically to her feet, spinning around in a whirl of skirts, only to find Red Martin, the notorious criminal mastermind, standing ominously beside the architect, smiling his broad, malevolent smile at her.

D
ressed in a simple tan suit, Red Martin smiled a winning smile and extended his hand to Oona. Oona stepped back, cringing at the thought of being any closer to this horrible man who was not only responsible for most of the crime on Dark Street, but was also the man behind the murder of her father.

“Thank you, Miss Crate,” he said with an air of false appreciation. “Thank you for opening that box for me. I've been trying to do it for more than five hundred years.”

At first, the statement startled Oona, but then she remembered her own discovery from three months ago: how Red Martin had been using turlock root to keep himself the same age for hundreds of years.

“You?” Oona said, her voice trembling nervously. “How did you get up here?”

Red Martin continued to smile at her, though the smile came nowhere near his eyes.

“Where do you think I've been hiding all these months? Other than in Faerie, of course,” he said. “What better place than here in my tower?” He gestured to a hidden door in the side of the pyramid. It hung open on its hinges, apparently leading to some hidden room beyond.

“
Your
tower?” Oona said dubiously.

Red Martin spread his hands wide. “Yes, mine. Who do you think has been designing and putting on this competition for the last half a millennium?”

Oona looked questioningly at the architect, her confusion growing more and more profound by the moment.

Red Martin began to chuckle. “Surely not this absurdly dressed man. Nor any previous so-called tower architects. They have all been hired men to play the part. Nothing more. The tower has been an instrument of my own, to find someone bright enough, and clever enough, to open that box.”

He arrowed his finger at the box on the floor.

Oona suddenly recalled the achingly boring history lesson from the Museum of Magical History and began to understand. It all made a kind of bizarre sense. She stared at Red Martin in disbelief. “It was you … five hundred
years ago. You were Bernard T. Slyhand, the painter who stole Oswald's wand.”

Red Martin clapped his hands together, applauding. “Very good, Miss Crate. Slyhand was one of my many names. And yes, it was I who stole Oswald's wand all those centuries ago. But when I stole the wand, it was stuck inside the protective case that Oswald himself had made for it: that black box. I had no way of opening it. Nevertheless, I sent a ransom note to Oswald, along with a hurriedly painted portrait of the wand, in the hope that he would think I had managed to somehow open the box. But the painting was done purely from memory. Indeed, I have what is called an eidetic memory, which means that—”

“I know what it means,” Oona said. “It means that you have the ability to remember any thing or event in perfect detail.”

“Very good,” said Red Martin. “I've never met anyone else with a memory to match my own. But I'm special in that way, I suppose.”

“Don't flatter yourself,” Oona said. “Sir Baltimore has an eidetic memory as well.”

Red Martin grinned. “Well, at least he
thinks
he does.”

Oona frowned, glancing nervously toward the outside door. She considered making a run for it. She might be able to get through the door before Red Martin or the
architect could catch up to her, but where would she go from there? Her chest tightened as she fully realized her situation. She was trapped.

Red Martin pointed at the box. “Anyway, I created this contest to find someone smart enough to open that blasted thing. And here you are. I knew it would be you, Miss Crate. After five hundred years of waiting, I just knew it.”

Oona turned to the architect, whom she now knew was not an architect at all, and said: “So you have been in league with Red Martin all along.”

The little man shrugged apologetically. “It's good money. And it's more work than you might expect. Red Martin may have designed it, but I saw to its construction. I arranged the use of the carpets from the museum, and had the monkeys brought in from the World of Man. Not to mention reconstructing an entire riverboat.”

“They are apes, not monkeys,” Oona corrected.

“Whatever,” the false architect said dismissively.

Red Martin rubbed his hands together, grinning like a schoolboy. “The flying snakes I smuggled in myself, from Faerie. I bred them right here in the tower.”

Oona shook her head, realizing how stupid she had been not to have figured it out. Adler Iree had even brought the topic up after their wild ride with the flying serpents, but she had been too determined to win the
challenge to give the matter much thought. And then, of course, it had slipped her mind.