by Jean Johnson
The second thing she did was shove the door wide and prop it firmly open with both Kerric’s and her backpacks. Once it was secured against shutting, she pulled Kerric partway over the threshold, then checked for outsiders again. Only when she was fairly certain nothing would attack either of them immediately did Myal finish sliding the recumbent form of her lover and friend from the anti-magic corridor into the Fountain Hall. Hand on her sword, pulling the packs away to let the door shut, and tired from the long gauntlet run, she waited for him to recover. There was certainly enough time to take in her surroundings in more than just a few fast, wary glances.
The most spectacular feature was the Fountain itself, though it was hard to see through all the other things in the way. The singularity-point, a tiny rip in reality that allowed magic to stream into their world, was a single bright spot of light not much bigger than a large spark cast from the snapping flames in a campfire. It sat just above floor height, in a specially made basin beneath an odd, arching projection, and below a vast glob of dimly lit suncrystal shafts acting as a chandelier.
The Fountain was the brightest thing in the room, though there were plenty of other sources. Multihued light spewed forth in all directions from that spark-point, streaming in pastel veils reminiscent of oil on water, or perhaps the flickering hues found in polished opal stones and sunlit rainbow pearls. All of that poured into a bubblelike sphere twice the length of a man in diameter.
Normally the glow of all that energy would have blended into a shimmering white light, but it was all confined behind curved walls of greenish energies. Jade green, mint green, algae pond with a hint of aqua, she didn’t know quite what to call it, other than that the various intensities cycled through in a soothing ripple of color. Those energy-walls also bulged slightly, like soap bubble films blown upon by an unseen wind. They clung to the columns, to white lines in the floor and to equally arched ribs in the vaulted ceiling, as if sails caught in an unseen, unfelt breeze.
Or rather, they clung to the outermost and middle layers of three concentric rings of columns. The innermost ring had curved but vertically straight walls filled with a gauzelike mesh of silvery, cobweb-thin filaments. On that mesh, images from hundreds upon hundreds of scrying mirrors were flickering, many of them familiar from her years of running Tower gauntlets.
The basin holding the Fountain bubble had been built up out of black marble, forming a sort of stair-step platform about shin-high to her. From one edge, a strange armlike structure jutted up and out, following the curve of the singularity-field. It formed a black stone projection more akin to a faucet pipe than a pedestal, a faucet tipped with a long-stemmed, narrow-cupped goblet. It took her a few moments to realize the “cup” had an uneven rim. It took her a few more to realize that it actually formed a sort of high-mounted chair.
Myal stared at it, frowned, then tilted her head, gauging the size of the thing and its distance from the bubble-sphere. If she wasn’t mistaken, that chair seat was positioned at just the right distance to dangle a mage’s feet into the top of the bubble, when those feet weren’t resting on the stirruplike supports. From the look of it, with the short edge of the rim twisted to face the curved arm, it probably swiveled in a full circle.
This truly was the control-center for the Tower. The Master—or Mistress—would simply climb the somewhat stepped support arm, sit in the chair, and swivel it to face whatever projected scrying image he or she wanted to cast out to the many patrons awaiting their doses of entertainment. Not that she’d ever climb those steps; she wasn’t a mage, and held no pretentions of being able to tap into that much power, never mind actually control it.
The floor was marble, as were the columns, and the ceiling as well, but no type of marble she had seen before. Where the walls and columns were pure white, and the ceiling pure black, the floor was different. Somehow, the normal striations, veins, and veils found in marble had been controlled, corraled, and recrafted into new shapes. The base color for the columns was white, but the polished floor underfoot was not.
It looked like it was intricately inlaid in swirls, curves, and lines, some black, some blue, some green, or cream, or white. There were golden bits and brown bits and pink as well. Every possible hue of marble was represented at some point, in triangles, rectangles, ovals, circles, squares. Spirals and undulations, arrows and loops. But the longer Myal stared at the floor, the more puzzled she grew. Finally, she crouched and fingered the dividing line between two colors, a bit of black and a bit of gold.
Nothing. No seam. It was one continuous piece of solid stone. Myal knew very little about stonework; she knew how to bash through it with her tattoos if needed, but not how to sculpt it, and definitely not how to tint it.
“Mmm . . . I take it we’re safe?” Kerric murmured, capturing her attention. Myal twisted to look over her shoulder, still crouched on the ground. He smiled sleepily up at her, lying on his back and looking too cute—silly helmet notwithstanding—for words.
“Yes. As far as I can tell,” she added, speaking quietly. The energies from the Fountain continued to sizzle, as did the shields.
“Mm. Good. Do me a favor?” Kerric asked, peering up at her. “Back up about three paces . . . and shift about one and a half to your left? That’s the only thing I could think of which would improve my view.”
Back up three paces and shift over . . . Oh. Blushing, Myal pushed to her feet. She did her best to frown down at him, though once again his sense of humor was threatening to make her laugh. “I’m not here to position myself just right for you to look up my armored skirt. This time,” she added tartly, though she was amused by his audacity. “If you want there to be a different sort of time, you’ll have to get up and reclaim your throne.”
Gesturing off at the arch-suspended seat-thing with one hand, she planted the other on her hip in a no-nonsense way. Sighing, Kerric heaved himself over and up onto his knees. The move made him groan a little. He rested there for a few moments, letting all that shifting blood resettle into the new position, breathing deeply to control the impending associated headache. Once he was sure his skull wouldn’t split open from a head-rush effect, he pushed to his feet.
“Well. The Gods are on our side. We’re the first ones in here,” he murmured, glancing around the pleasantly empty Fountain Hall. “Good.”
“So how do you reclaim it?” Myal asked, curious. She kept her eyes roving around the edges of the broad, round chamber, not sure how long they’d stay alone in here. Too many hours spent looking for and dodging dangers, enemies, and lethal threats had her feeling a bit paranoid, and not without undue cause.
“Each Fountain has a unique . . . tone to its magics, for lack of a better explanation,” Kerric told her, still working on recovering from the anti-magic corridor. “To master the Fountain is not to make it change itself to suit you, but rather to shape yourself to match it. Once a mage is accepted into the Fountain’s energies, then he or she can influence its behaviors, subtly altering its tone. But left alone, the Fountain reverts to its true nature. So. I attune myself to each layer of defense, then step in through the screen gate over there,” he stated, nodding at a column that was actually a slender archway with a mesh door in it, giving access to the innermost section. “Climb up, attune myself to the Fountain itself, and there you have it. The Tower has a Master again.”
“Well, get to it,” Myal directed him. “I don’t trust that Torven fellow to stay away at this point. They say that in all the adventure stories in the Great Library, the hero only narrowly saves the day. I don’t want him to show up and attack while you’re only halfway through because you were somehow delayed. So go save it.”
Squinting a little, Kerric eyed the reversed, curved images on one part of the projection mesh. He smirked. “If those scrying spells are right, Torven and company are busy dealing with Pookie the Giant Polka-Dotted Elephant. If they are, then it looks like they wandered off course when we smashed the maintenance tablet and concealed our presence from being
tracked. But you’re right. I’ve been away from my work for long enough.”
Removing his helmet, he dropped it on the floor, gave his scalp one last, semi-satisfying scrub with his fingernails, then shed a few more layers of armor. When he was ready, Kerric walked up to the shields. They crackled with a lethal amount of energy, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to force his way through.
“Guard me, just in case,” he told Myal over his shoulder. “I’ll need all my concentration for this.”
Nodding, she drew her sword and started studying the room in earnest. She moved a little as she did so, both to provide herself with full fields of view around columns and to keep her tired body awake and moving, but didn’t move far from his position. Satisfied he would be well-protected, Kerric returned his gaze to the barrier. The trick to getting through wasn’t brute force; it was cooperation. Harmony.
All he had to do was find the frequency thrumming beneath everything, and match his own inner vibrations to that peculiar not-quite-a-note that was the Fountain’s resonance. A mage could be tone-deaf and still be good at shaping and casting magic, but a Guardian had to be more. Thankfully, the purity of those shields’ green hue told him that any influences imbued into the energies by the interloper had long since faded. He wouldn’t have to try to match any other mage’s powers. His task would have been nigh impossible if another powerful mage had gotten in here and attuned him – or herself first.
For almost ten years, Kerric had worked with these magics. Studied them. Molded his inner energies to vibrate along similar lines. Altering his normally golden-hued aura to something green was easier than a lesser mage might think . . . but then Myal didn’t think about how she drew, swung, or sheathed that sword she wore. Not anymore. Not because she was just that good, but because being that good came with a lot of practice. With the ease of a lot of practice himself, Kerric altered his inner tone and pressed into the barrier, meshing and merging with it
When fully attuned to the Fountain, his aura affected it in turn, changing it from a bright aqua jade to a deeper forest hue. This was something similar, save that he altered himself first, suppressing and squeezing his own energies into the right shape. Like trying to describe a chord played on crystal bells, words couldn’t define what he did; he just did it, played himself like a handful of familiar chimes. It only took him a minute to stretch far enough for the right effect. A single step brought him physically up to the barrier; a second stepped him through unharmed.
Tired, but unharmed. It took effort to match such complex frequencies, particularly without the use of a chime forged in the heart of the Fountain to help attune his mind via his ear. But he got through.
Myal’s soft sigh of relief at his safe passage almost distracted him. Setting aside thoughts of her, ignoring the sight and sound of her, Kerric continued to the next layer. Keeping the purity of his purpose as Master of the Tower uppermost in his thoughts, to guard the singularity, to not abuse its power, to not harm the world itself with the power he was about to command, he passed through that layer as well. Pushed through it, rather; this layer had a physical component as well, one which clung to his unarmored body. More of his inner energy drained away. He staggered on the far side, then recovered, squaring his shoulders.
The third layer of protection was a simple locking mechanism on the mesh door. He might have discarded his armor, leaving him in his scuffed leather boots and sweaty, grimy padded tunic and calf-length trousers, but he hadn’t discarded his lock-picking tools. Pulling them out of the pocket of his pants, he worked on the latch, swung the panel open, and stepped inside. Turning to shut it was merely a habit of tidiness; by this point, between the outer protections and Myal’s fierce abilities, no one would be able to get in here to challenge him fast enough.
He didn’t climb the slanted pedestal, however. Instead, he stepped up to the knee-high wall, sat on the edge, and swung his legs over. Energy washed up over his skin, blinding his inner senses in that first shock wave of power, like how the chill of a swimming pond shocked the outer senses. Part of it revived him, but more of it taxed him, like trying to fight a strong river current with his mind. Pushing off from the black marble edge, he jumped into the sphere.
Energy instantly reached up to grab him, floating him in pure magic. Locks fluttering in the not-wind stirred by the spewing energies, Kerric emptied himself of all thoughts, all notions, all sensations. He embraced the peculiar chiming energies of the singularity, let it all wash through him, absorbed into every pore, every muscle, every bone. The moment he was one with the outer energies, he opened his eyes and drifted toward that spark.
Shifting his hand forward, he touched it. The power at the source-point was a thousand times worse than the outer shield walls and a hundred times stronger than the bubble-sphere. But like those shields, it was a familiar power. He remembered it very well, and in its own limited, unthinking way, it remembered him. So what took him a minute to attune to outside the outermost ring now took him only a few seconds to do here in the heart of pure power. The moment he did attune, the coruscating energies refreshed and revived him as nothing else could, outside of maybe a fine meal and a great night’s sleep.
On the far side of that outermost shield, Myal strove to keep one eye on the rest of the Fountain Hall, doing her duty in the face of her rampant curiosity. Seeing Kerric jump into that bubble-thing worried her; the sheer amount of magic it took to run all the traps, tricks, monsters and illusions of the Tower would surely turn any lesser man to ash, or an unprepared man. But within moments of him swimming into its waterless depths, the mint-green spark at the very center flared against his fingertip, the bubble pulsed into a darker shade of forest, and the aqua green shields vanished as if made of roiling steam from a kettle taken away from a fire.
To her surprise, he didn’t climb back out. Instead, he floated up out of the sphere. The chair-seat swiveled without being touched, and Kerric turned and floated back and down, settling into place. For a moment, his feet continued to dangle inside the bubble, then he lifted them up onto the footrests. Even from several yards away and through a misty screen of shifting images, she could see his chest rise and fall with a deep breath, see the slumping of his shoulders and arms against the side-rests of his odd chair.
“Kerric?” she called out carefully. “Is it safe to approach?”
“. . . Hm? Oh, yes.”
Flicking his hand, he opened the mesh door with a spell. The final two traps were that the gate had to be opened without magic, and the seat claimed without touching the pedestal supporting it. Either would kill the unwary. Not because they were part of the original protection system, but because they were two traps he himself had laid before heading out of the area to go shopping in Sendale. Dismissing those spells with a second flick of his hand, he nodded politely to her.
“I think I’ll just get everyone out of the Tower, then shut it down while I go through the Topside Control staff and truth-spell them for loyalty, then have them truth-spell everyone else in the various layers of Maintenance for loyalty. The Tower will have to remain off the scrycasting channels until I know we haven’t any more adders hidden in our midst like that Torven rat . . . who is managing to survive rather well despite the ferocity of the Pookie scenario spells.” He gestured at the mesh screens, enlarging one of the images with a practiced, wordless bit of power.
Myal glanced that way as she ducked through the arch-pierced column. Not that she would hit her head on its lintel, but it did feel a bit low compared to the high ceiling around them. Sure enough, Torven and company were battered, bloody, and besting the giant, enraged, long-nosed creature. She shook her head. “I don’t know what could kill him, given the luck he’s displayed.”
“True. And until the Fountainways can be reopened for business, I cannot exile him anywhere far, far away.” Rubbing at his chin, he thought a moment on what to do with them, tapped his lips as he sorted and discarded possibilities, then dipped his boots back into the sph
ere and flicked out his finger.
Torven, Barric, and the rest swirled up into the ceiling with startled yells. Not that Kerric or Myal could hear them yelling, since the sound spells weren’t activated, but they watched the quintet hollering with wide mouths and wider eyes, flung this way and that through the suction chutes, until they landed in a completely white, completely blank, brightly lit chamber. Nodding in satisfaction, Kerric swept his hand to the side, shifting the view of the brightly lit, utterly empty room and its captives away from the center of his attention, and called up three new images, enlarging them in a vertical row.
The bottom image was of a middle-aged male with blond hair and shadows under his blue gray eyes. The middle image was a fresher-faced, deeply tanned man with a black moustache and close-cropped black hair, and the top image the very tired-looking Jessina, his lead controller.
“Wake up!” Kerric stated heartily, flashing the startled trio a smile. “Good morning, Tower Maintenance. Kerric Vo Mos is back in the house, and the Tower is once more firmly under my control.
“Oh, thank the Gods!” Jessina breathed, her smile so big, it was almost enough to overlook the tears of weariness in her eyes. Brennan looked like he was so relieved, he was going to faint, while the fresh-faced fellow, a mage named Caros, simply grinned and nodded several times. It should have been Heral at this hour, but undoubtedly he had stayed up extra-late, which meant Caros was now covering for him. Base Maintenance was one of the few locations the employees of the Tower could get to relatively safely. The same could not be said for the other two locations.
Kerric didn’t let them speak. Holding up his hand, he silenced what Jessina was going to say. “First priority, I want to see the senior-most in all three Maintenance sections up here for a mandatory Truth Stoning. Now, I’ve worked with all of you for years, and I trust all of you with the running of the Tower . . . but one of our recent Maintenance mage recruits decided to use a map tablet to try to find his way to the heart of the Tower and take it over by guile, stealth, and force.
