All the Paths of Shadow

by Frank Tuttle

  “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?

  Another airship, her fans swiveling and whirling, swooped ponderously down and blotted out the sun.

  “Wondrous,” said Tervis.

  Meralda smiled, and said nothing.

  “Here we are, ladies and thaumaturges,” shouted Angis. “The Tower.”

  Angis pulled his cab to the curb in the circle ’round that looped between Hent Street and the park’s east entrance. The Bellringers stared. No wonder so many painters set up their easels here, thought Meralda.

  The park wall, ten miles of Old Kingdom rough hewn stone ravaged and worn by the passing of centuries, rose a full thirty feet above the well-tended grass of the park. The gargoyles mad king Foon had added in the second century still danced and capered and brooded atop the wall. The age-old tradition of tying ridiculous hats to the most fearsome of the gargoyles was, Meralda saw, still observed by Tirlin’s more daring youngsters. The pair of gargoyles flanking the gate-posts were sporting last year’s fruit-and-feather day hats, and the right-most fellow was wearing a jaunty pink Oaftree scarf.

  Well above and just inside the wall and its gargoyles, the park’s ring of Old Kingdom iron oaks rustled and swayed, like thick green mountain peaks shuffling to and fro against a pale blue sky. Meralda loved the oaks, and though she knew the stories claiming Otrinvion himself planted the seedlings were utter nonsense, she couldn’t help but think those mighty old trees had watched Tirlin for a good portion of its clamorous history.

  “Oh,” said Kervis, and Meralda knew from his face that he wasn’t seeing the wall or the Old Oaks or the line of dancing gargoyles.

  “The captain says it’s haunted,” said Tervis, his eyes upon the Tower. Meralda put her bag in her lap and waited for the guardsman to notice that the cab had stopped.

  “The thaumaturge says it isn’t,” said Meralda. “And she should know better, shouldn’t she?”

  Tervis whirled, groping for the door latch. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Angis flung open the door from o
utside. Tervis yelped and would have fallen, had Angis not caught hold of his red uniform collar. “Here, lad,” said Angis. “First thing you’ve got to learn about is doors. See this here? It’s what we city folks call a latch.”

  “Leave him be, Angis,” said Meralda.

  “Aye, Lady,” said Angis, grinning. He reached up, caught Meralda’s black bag, and held her door. “Will you be long, this morning?”

  “Two hours,” she said, stepping out onto the curb. “Then it’s off to the palace.”

  “Got to greet our Eryan guests, aye?”

  “Aye,” said Meralda, wincing at the thought of a long afternoon at court. “But first, I’ve got work to do. Gentlemen?”

  The Bellringers looked down, away from the Tower.

  “That is the Tower,” she said, as Angis tended his ponies. “It’s seven hundred years old. It was built by Otrinvion the Black, himself. You’ve heard the name?”

  The Bellringers nodded in unison.

  “The Tower is central to our history,” she said. “And the Tower has a long and bloody past. War and murder and madness. You’ve heard the stories of King Tornben the Mad? Queen Annabet the Torturer?”

  The Bellringers exchanged glances, and Kervis nodded.

  “The stories are true,” said Meralda. “Documented fact. But I tell you this, gentlemen, and I want you to remember it.” Meralda paused, shifted her bag from her left hand to her right, and waved back Kervis when he motioned to take the bag himself.

  “The Tower is not haunted,” she said. “It was not, is not, and shall never be. Is that clear?”

  The Bellringers nodded, slowly this time.

  Angis grinned at his ponies, but didn’t say a word.

  “Then let’s go,” said Meralda. “Follow me.”

  She turned and set foot on the cracked flagstones of Wizard’s Walk, which led through the park’s east gate and then wound toward the Tower. The walk was, according to local lore, another of Otrinvion’s legacies.

  The Bellringers, right hands on sword hilts, faces stern (except for Tervis, who kept wrinkling his forehead to push his helmet up), fell into step behind her.

  “Keep a sharp eye out, lads,” said Angis, after Meralda passed into the park. “Especially after dark. That’s when the haunts get mean.” Angis lifted his voice. “Not that I believe such, mind you.”

  Meralda listened to the steady tromp-tromp of newly soled guard boots and frowned. The Bellringers were marching, not walking. Fresh out of boot camp, she thought. I’m sure they’re not even aware they’re doing it. I’ll be hearing the sound of marching boots from now until the Accords. That’s eighteen more days, and every one of them my own small army dress parade.

  The walk turned suddenly, leaving the shade of the old oaks for the close-cropped green grass of the park proper.

  The Tower split the sky, no longer obscured by walls or oaks.

  “Here it is, gentlemen,” said Meralda, halting. “The Tower.”

  “It’s taller than the palace,” said Kervis.

  Meralda shook her head. She knew the highest spire of the palace to be ten feet taller than the blunt tip of the Tower. Old King Horoled, a century past, had nearly bankrupted Tirlin seeing to that. But the palace was more than twenty city blocks away. One had to squint just to make out the lofty spire, which peeked above the trees. The palace might be taller, thought Meralda, but here in the park, the Tower reigns.

  Reigns? No, Meralda decided. The Tower doesn’t reign. It looms. Looms above the Old Oaks. Looms above the park wall. Looms above Tirlin. Thick and tall and blunt, chipped and nicked by seven hundred years of determined attempts to pull it down, the Tower endures.

  “If a mountain had bones,” said Tervis, “that’s what they’d look like.”

  “Hush,” replied Kervis. “It’s just a pile of rocks.”

  A lumber wain rumbled up the Walk behind them. “Passing by,” shouted the driver. “Make way.”

  Meralda stepped onto the grass and motioned the Bellringers to follow.

  The lumber wain rattled past.

  Tervis pointed toward the hurried band of carpenters stacking lumber and erecting scaffolds at the base of the Tower.

  “What are they building?”

  Meralda frowned. “Seating,” she said. “For the Accords.”

  Meralda resumed her trek toward the Tower, which lay a goodly march ahead. “The king will give the commencement speech from there,” she said, pointing toward the tall, narrow framework jutting out from the base of the Tower. “The Eryans will be there, the Alons there, the Phendelits there, and the Vonats just in front of us,” she said, her hand indicating the skeletal frames arranged around and dwarfed by the Tower. “All this, for a ten minute speech no one will remember the next day.”

  “Kings will do what kings will do,” said Kervis, with the air of one repeating a time-honored truth. “At least that’s what Pop always says.”

  “Ma’am,” he added, after a jab in the ribs from Tervis.

  The Tower beckoned. Meralda fell into step with her soldiers and marched, humming, ahead.

  The Tower doors, each twenty feet high and nearly as wide, were open, but blocked by a drooping length of bright yellow ribbon and a faded Danger Public Works sign bolted to a rusty iron stand.

  Meralda waved to the Builder’s Guild foreman, lifted the yellow ribbon, and passed over the threshold.

  Three steps on stone, and the last slanting rays of the sun gave way to darkness. Meralda squinted ahead, slowing until she could make out shapes in the shadows. “Be careful,” she said, as Tervis and Kervis entered. “The carpenters are stacking lumber in here.”

  Meralda reached out and touched the wall to her right. The stone was cold. Like the outside of the Tower, the interior hall was stone. Solid black Eryan granite, shaped and fused into a single mass by a spell or spells known only to the Tower’s long-dead master. Cold and dry and as smooth as glass. Meralda knew just beyond the wall, the sun was shining, the park was green and lush, and Tirlin was bustling and busy. But here, in the windowless belly of the Tower, she felt as if it were the smallest hour of the longest, darkest night.

  “It’s quiet, all of a sudden,” said Tervis, in a whisper. “Isn’t it?”

  Meralda shrugged. Oh, the hammering and pounding and shouting continued, but the Tower doors might as well have been flung shut, so faint was the noise after only a few paces. And had the daylight fled so quickly, on her other visits?

  “This way,” she said, when the Bellringer’s footfalls fell behind. “The hall is very short, and there are no turns.”

  “No windows, either,” muttered Tervis. “Ma’am.”

  “We won’t need windows,” said Meralda, groping in her bag. “We’ll have plenty of our own light.”

  “Oh,” said Kervis. “Should I go back and fetch a lantern?”

  Meralda pulled a short brass pipe from her bag. “Light,” she said, unlatching the simple magelamp spell coiled invisibly around the cylinder with the word.

  The Bellringers whistled as wide beams of soft white light flared from each end of the brass tube.

  “Wizard lamp,” said Tervis, lifting his hand to run his fingers through the light. “Uncle Rammis saw one, once. Nobody believed him.”

  Meralda played the lamp around the hall. Shadows flew. Some, she thought, more slowly than others.

  A shiver ran the length of Meralda’s spine.

  “Nonsense,” she said, amazed and a bit embarrassed. “Utter nonsense.”

  “Pardon, ma’am?” asked Kervis.

  Meralda shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. We have a long flight of stairs to climb, gentlemen,” she said, striding toward the heart of the darkness at the end of the hall. “Shall we go?”

  The Bellringers followed. Ten paces further Meralda’s lamplight fell across a crude table bearing half a dozen battered oil lanterns, an open box of Red Cat matches, and a half-eaten Lamp River apple.

  Further down the hall, smo
oth-planed cedar planks were stacked neatly along each wall. Meralda thought she heard the sound of gentle snoring behind the third stack as she passed it, and her face reddened even more. I can at least be thankful Mug isn’t here, she thought. I’d never hear the last of this. Carpenters sleep while the sorceress trembles.

  Meralda’s footfalls came faster and harder until the hall simply ended, and the shaft of light from her magelamp soared up and out, only to lose itself in the vast, cavernous maw of the Tower.

  Kervis whistled softly.

  “Bats,” said Tervis, his face turned upward. “You’d think there would be bats.”

  “Not a one,” said Meralda. “There isn’t a crack or a gap anywhere in the Tower. It’s an amazing structure.” She played the lamplight out into the darkness, resting the beam finally on the far side of the Tower and the faint outline of the winding, rail-less stair that wound lazily up and away into the dark.

  “We climb that?” asked Kervis.

  Meralda nodded. “It’s wider than it looks,” she said, though she understood the badly-hidden wash of fear in the boy’s voice. She recalled the first time she had ascended the stair. Darkness above, and darkness below, a magelit patch of old black stone to her left, a hungry void a step to her right.

  From the idling carpenters just beyond the doors, Meralda heard the barest snatch of soft, low laughter.

  There will be no more bloody shivering, she said, to herself. I won’t have it.

  “Do either of you have a fear of high places?”

  In perfect unison, both Bellringers, their faces pale in the magelamp, wiped sweat from their foreheads with their right hands, set their jaws, and shook their heads.

  “We’re not afraid,” said Kervis. “Shall I go first?”

  Meralda waved him ahead. “Stay in the lamplight,” she said. “Tervis, if you would be so good as to follow?”

  “Right behind you, ma’am.”

  Meralda switched her bag to her right shoulder and set out for the foot of the stair. She knew it was her imagination, but laughter seemed to follow all the way up to the Wizard’s Flat.