by Jean Johnson
“We’re having some problems with the main power fluctuating. Are you doing anything special up there?” Brennan asked.
She carefully looked over the array of enchanted Artifacts and gizmos framing each mirror along her broad, curved desk, then at the other stations around the control room. Shaking her head, she said, “No, everything’s the same as it was. Status normal.”
“Well, we’re losing power to the nonessentials,” Brennan told her. “I’m getting reports from repair teams that the rooms and corridors not currently in use have been shutting down in Standby mode. It’s starting to make getting from point to point difficult behind the scenes. We’ve had three teams temporarily stranded so far, though we did get them out again with a local override.”
“That’s . . . not good. I’ll try to see if I can track the reason from up here. You look for a reason down there,” she directed, and turned in her chair so that she faced a different mirror. Sliding her fingers down the edge of that mirror and the one next to it, she activated both. “Middle Maintenance, Top Maintenance, this is Topside Control. Base Maintenance is registering a slowdown in responsiveness from the unused sectors. Double-check and report. What’s your status?”
Middle Maintenance was overseen by Heral. The man was as dark-skinned as Jessina, and could have passed for a cousin in a pinch, though they each originally came from two separate kingdoms along the southern coast of Aiar. He grinned at her, his teeth flashing white. “Eh, it’s probably just repairer’s syndrome; with the Master away, the Tower will play, and all that.”
The woman on the screen to his left scowled. “I heard that, Heral. Don’t even joke about it! If the Tower is actually acting up, and the Guardian’s not here to handle it quickly, we could all be in serious trouble. Jessina, should we send for him?”
Jessina wrinkled her nose. “He gets out so infrequently, and he was so happy to have the chance to go shopping in a big city. He was going to meet with his printers, too. I’d really hate to cut his trip short if it’s just a false alarm—if anything sudden happens, yes, absolutely, I will contact him, Wenda,” she promised the leader of Top Maintenance. “But let’s see first if this is more than just a bobble on the charts.”
“It could be something one of the player teams has done,” Brennan offered from the still-open mirror to her left. “Like that explosion last year that broke through three levels and damaged the water and sewer lines? That locked more than a few rooms in place for a bit, and not all of them logically connected to each other.”
“I don’t have any such explosions registering on my Artifacts,” Wenda said, “but then it could be a non-blatant piece of wild magic. I’m going to order my teams to double-check they have their emergency packs with them, just in case they get locked up, until we can get the Master back.”
“They should anyway; it’s standard operating procedure,” Jessina stated. “I will not have a preventable accident on the day when I’ve been left in charge. The Tower will play nice while the Master’s away, or it’ll learn not to mess with me a second time!”
Brennan chuckled at that absurd statement. Heral laughed outright. Even Wenda smiled a little; Jessina was a good mage, a strong mage, but she was not the Mistress of the Tower. She wasn’t the Guardian of the magical source powering all the many rooms, corridors, halls, traps, tricks, and the very important safety features that made the Tower so compelling to watch even while it was so dangerous to play.
For all that the locals took pride in the Tower, mages from halfway around the world paid dearly to see adventurous and hardy souls brave its many dangers . . . the pay-per-show scrycasts of those adventures were not the purpose of the Tower’s existence. The Tower’s traps were meant to be very lethal. They could be modified so they weren’t quite so deadly, but only by the Guardian, the Master himself.
Their employer had done so, making a few adjustments so that the Tower would run smoothly in his absence. Only then had he stepped through a mirror-Gate to the nearest main city for a day of shopping and negotiating for his latest book on the nature and ways of certain aspects of Gating-based magic. Even when he was here, the Tower was usually quite stable under normal operating conditions. There shouldn’t be any reason for some of its sectors to have problems. At least, not serious ones.
Still, it was Jessina’s job to make sure those problems were found, identified, and handled, one way or another. Disturbing though the implications were, she went about the task of contacting various subdepartments, asking for signs of any anomalies, slowdowns, changes, and so forth. She did so calmly, though she did hurry. If there was a problem, she wanted to know exactly what it was before contacting the Master on his one day away from the Tower in nearly a full year.
* * *
Kerric Vo Mos stood with his feet braced, his shoulders squared, his hands on his hips, and just breathed. Inhaling lungful after lungful, he dragged in the wonderful scents of the farmer’s market here in Sendale. The stalls were teeming with piles of ripe vegetables, pungent herbs, brightly colored berries, butchered meats, mounds of fruit, and fresh-caught fish . . . He could have gotten similar fare in the town located a short distance from the base of the Tower—and had, in the past—but there, he was treated with deference. There, he never had to pay for a thing.
Sometimes a man just wanted to pay for a damn apple, and take pride in being able to do so, and not have his perfectly good coin refused.
Here . . . well, here, almost nobody knew who the short, curly-haired man in the plain brown tunic and dark brown trews was. He wasn’t Kerric Vo Mos, Guardian of the Tower, Master Mage and Author of Dozens of Tomes. He had been that august personage earlier this morning, but that was when he had been handling his publishing affairs. Right now, he was just plain—
“Outta the way, youngling!” an elderly woman snapped, whacking him on the boot with her cane hard enough to make him hop a little. It stung, since the wood had connected with the anklebone under the leather, but he didn’t scowl or curse. Instead, he grinned and gave her an exaggerated bow as he stepped aside.
“Of course, Mistress! My apologies for delaying your day’s tasks,” he offered as suavely as he could.
She eyed him, snorted, and hobbled on, cane thumping the cobblestones lining the market square.
The day was a beautiful one, warm but not overly hot, with puffy white clouds drifting by in a beautiful blue sky. The edges of that sky were crowded by timber-and-plaster buildings with tiled roofs, but no matter which way he turned, he could not see the mottled, cream-and-white walls of the Tower looming over his head.
Grinning, he turned in a circle, enjoying the view yet again, then wondered what sort of delights he should look for first in the farmer’s market. Fattened liver mousse, or beautifully marbled cheeses; perhaps there was even a fruit-ice vendor somewhere nearby. Such things were usually sold by some enterprising, low-powered mage who could freeze and shave water with a simple pair of spells for vast profits in the summer.
Such as today, a glorious, warm, early summer day. A fruit-ice was definitely not out of the question. Rubbing his hands together, Kerric eyed the stalls and booths and tents and wagons, trying to spot what he wanted. Something out of place caught his eye: a man walking with two books in his hand, gesturing at them as he talked to the lady at his side. The tomes looked a little old and worn. Curious, Kerric moved closer.
“. . . I think I should’ve bought the Elgin Ves Troth edition, too, but it was in such terrible shape,” the dark-haired man was saying.
Kerric perked up at that, and stepped into their path. “Excuse me, milord, milady,” he apologized by way of introduction, “but by any chance are you talking about a bookseller?”
“Why, yes,” the middle-aged man stated. He nodded back the way they had come. “Go that way about eight or nine farmers, to the first big left-turning, and cut over to the next aisle in the market and head right, further down the way. You can’t miss it.”
“Many thanks!” Lifting his h
and in farewell, Kerric hurried that way.
He was shorter than the average man in Sendale, and barely as tall as the average woman, which made it hard for him see where to go through the crowds attending the market. Still, the square set of his broad shoulders, his confident, erect posture, and the deft way he dodged between passersby allowed him to double back and take the left-turning when he passed it, then allowed a dash to the right to get ahead of a mother and her gaggle of four or five children.
Their shrill whining for treats as the woman and her herd passed a pastry stall made him wince. He didn’t dislike children; they were important to the world, and could be pleasant if their parents taught them the hows and whys of good manners. Some were even quick-witted and charming. But they were not allowed in the Tower for very, very good reason. The end result of that sensible prohibition meant Kerric wasn’t used to dealing with them.
Ah, they stopped at a fruit stall, something about cherries. Gods bless you, woman; you have the patience I lack. Hurrying onward, Kerric spotted the bookseller. The old man had a large cart of them, most in bad condition, but Kerric didn’t care. He didn’t have a lot of free time for reading, between his duties as Master of the Tower and his interest in experimenting with magic and writing down his observations in tomes meant to help others . . . but he did love to read.
There was indeed an Elgin Ves Troth in among the baskets of books, and it was in deplorable condition. The pages were wrinkled and the ink smeared from having been soaked; hints of mildew bloom stained the cover, which was falling apart; and three of the quires would have to be re-stitched together to hold all the pages in place . . . but much of it was still readable, if one went slowly and carefully. However, what might make it worthwhile was that it was a treatise on the Gods he hadn’t read before, always a plus.
Kerric fancied himself a modern-day Ves Troth in his own field of expertise, since the man had wielded his pen with a deft touch of humor as well as a liberal splashing of truth. The book was in bad shape, yes, but he did have the tools to repair it. The trick was finding the spare time to tend to the tome, if he bought it.
“. . . Master Kerric? Master Kerric!”
Kerric turned. He couldn’t see who had shouted, but the voice was familiar. At the third calling of his name, the owner of the voice dodged a set of market visitors and came into view. The sight of the beanpole-tall, beanpole-skinny, dark-haired Seanus made Kerric wince. The pendant straining in the young man’s fist made him curse. And the frantic look on the apprentice mage’s teenaged face made him want to hit his forehead with the tome still in his hand.
“Master Kerric! Thank the Gods I’ve found you!” Seanus gasped out, stumbling to a halt. He braced his palms on his knees, careful not to drop the locator-pendant, which swung toward Kerric in defiance of gravity, as it was enspelled to do. “Trouble at the Tower . . . !”
“I know that, Seanus,” Kerric muttered, regretfully setting the book back in one of the baskets. “Fire, flood, rioting, or did something collapse?”
Oddly, Seanus glanced around the mostly mindless crowd. His brown eyes were so wide, the older man could see the whites surrounding the youth’s irises. Seanus held his breath for a moment, then leaned down and in, close enough that his breath hit Kerric’s ear in an anxious gust of warmth.
“Someone’sstealingtheFountain’spowers!”
The jumble of consonants and syllables didn’t make sense for a long moment. When it did, the oath that burst from Kerric’s lips silenced most everyone within a good fifty feet. It was loud, it was vehement, and it accompanied a dark scowl of anger. On his one day off of the year—!
The mother back by the fruit seller quickly clapped her hands over the nearest boy’s ears, her expression even more affronted than most of the other adults’, while her other little ones stared, bewildered by the fuss. An elderly couple blinked in shock, the old man pressing his hand to his chest. Assorted middle-aged and younger adults gave him wary, offended looks. Kerric ignored them all, mind racing. There was too much between him and the local Mage Guild. Too many bodies, too many buildings, too many streets . . .
“Tessoloc!” Snapping his hand down, Kerric cast a flight spell on himself. One moment he was on the ground next to Seanus, who was still trying to recover his breath. The next, he jerked up into the air and soared toward the east, heading for the green-tiled roofs of the Guild. From there, he could catch a mirror-Gate into the Tower itself. Hopefully. If things had gotten to the critical stage . . .
If the situation had deteriorated that far, he would have to pick a mirror in the village, one of the ones at the Adventurer’s Hall, or maybe the mayor’s office.
Landing in the small courtyard, Kerric hurried inside without bothering to close the front door. Most of the Guild’s business was conducted upstairs, but the main floor was devoted to the most profitable of the services provided by the local Mage Guild: the ability to open Gates between distant locations via large mirrors.
The receptionist, an apprentice mage with pale blond hair cropped so short, he almost looked bald, gave him a startled look. “Master Kerric? I heard that someone came tearing through here earlier, but—”
“I need a mirror, right now,” he ordered, digging into his pouch. Tossing a handful of gold crownai on the younger man’s desk, he didn’t bother to count them. “Which one’s free?”
“They’re, uh, they’re all busy. It’s summer, the traveling season. I can schedule you in half an hour, I think,” the apprentice said, looking down at his appointments ledger.
“Your schedule can hang itself. I’m taking the very next mirror—and if the Guildmaster has a problem with it, tell him he won’t get any scrying feed from the Tower for a week!” Kerric stated bluntly, already striding toward the Departures corridor.
The rooms on the far side of the reception hall had mirrors reserved for Arrivals, to make sure those traveling from mirror-Gates in neighboring regions to the mirrors of Sendale’s Guildhall would not be trying to cross into a mirror opened into a third location. Picking the first room for departing travelers, Kerric stepped inside just as a quintet of well-dressed bodies started carefully hopping over the cheval-style frame of the open mirror. Father, mother, and three roughly teenaged children passed through.
The mage in charge of opening that room’s mirror frowned at Kerric. His lack of recognition told Kerric that he wasn’t one of the mages here at the Guildhouse who watched the scryings from the Tower. “Excuse me, but you don’t look like a clutch of nuns from the Starranos Temple, and they’re next on the list. Not you.”
“That’s because I’m not. I need to get back to the Tower immediately, and I’m commandeering your mirror for it.” The pot of powder he wanted was on the table next to the frame of the large cheval-style mirror. Grabbing a handful, Kerric cast it at the permeable surface, chanting the Gating syllables in a strong voice that echoed off the walls of the modest room. The words shifted the focus of the mirror from whatever Guildhall the previous group had paid for as their destination to a mirror in the castlelike command structure at the top of the Tower—
The mirror shattered in a flare of greenish-gold light. Both men flinched, personal shields snapping up instantly, Kerric’s in transparent gold, the other mage’s in green. Thankfully, they weren’t needed; the cheval stand had subtle warding runes carved into its wooden frame. Fragments of silvered glass hit an elongated, egglike shield and bounced back, falling and sliding down the curved, blue-glowing surface into a pile an inch from the floor.
“Bastard!” the other mage cursed. “You cast the spell wrong! What sort of incompetent—”
“Silence.” Kerric glared the taller man into obedience. He wasn’t tall, but his will was strong, his sense of command imposing. “That was not a mis-cast mirror-Gate.”
“I don’t care who you think you are—” the mage began again with disparaging heat in his tone, only to be cut off again.
“You should care. I am Master Kerric Vo Mos, foremos
t living authority on mirror magics, and Guardian of the Tower,” he stated slowly, crisply. The other man lost some of his belligerence, choosing to gape at Kerric instead. Most people didn’t expect the Master of the Tower to be . . . well, short. Kerric was used to it by now. He pointed at the shield-wrapped stand. “That mirror was destroyed by the Tower’s defenses. I can tell because of the greenish cast to the explosion’s energies.
“Someone is attacking the Tower, and with myself here,” he added, jabbing his finger at the ground, then at the mirrorless frame, “instead of there, I am now unable to stop it from killing anyone who tries to Gate in . . . or out. There were eight teams of adventurers crawling through the Tower when I came here this morning, and over two hundred personnel who are now trapped inside. Lives always take precedence over objects, because objects can be rebuilt or replaced.
“I’ll send payment for the mirror when I can, or send a better replacement, but I’ll have to commandeer another mirror immediately to deal with this,” he finished grimly. The other mage opened his mouth to protest. Kerric cut him off, lifting a hand in dismissal as he turned back toward the corridor. “To the village. I’m not an idiot.”
“Are you sure?” the mage called out as he left. “Because it sounds like your village is short one!”
Ten or so years ago, Kerric might have taken that as a personal insult on his height as well as his intellect. Fifteen years ago, he would have been insulted outright. But over ten years ago, he had traveled to the Tower to study its translocational arrangements, the ways the myriad passages, corridors, chambers, halls, caverns, stairwells, and rooms not just connected to each other, but interconnected. The life he had been given, the opportunities, made such things unimportant by comparison.
The next room had a merchant with five porters bearing huge bundles strapped to their backs. Upon seeing Kerric enter, the female mage in charge stopped herself from casting the Gating powder, choosing to frown at the new arrival instead. “Can I help you . . . wait, Master Kerric? Is that you?”
