by Jean Johnson
FOURTEEN
The grin he gave her was brighter than the White Room. Myal found herself tugged through the mesh door and toward one of the many alcoves lining the edges of the room.
“There aren’t many physical doors into this place, but there are plenty of doorway-Gates, and they’re all functioning. If you’d like to keep visiting me—and I hope you will, as I cannot remember enjoying a woman’s company as much as I have yours,” Kerric added over his shoulder, “then I’ll see that you’re attuned to the exterior ground-level door that leads to Topside Control, and from there, the doorway that leads to my quarters. There’s a physical path, too, but mostly we just use the Gates.”
“Is the physical path trapped?” Myal asked him, curious. They detoured to pick up their discarded bags and armor. She had removed hers while waiting for him to finish the most urgent pieces of business, and now hoped that wherever they were going, it would include a hot bath as well as a hot meal.
“Yes, and for good reason,” Kerric told her. “It wouldn’t do for anyone to have an easy path to assassinate the Tower Guardians in their sleep, after all.” He pointed at specific triangles from among the colored marbles underfoot, one each per alcove, then reclaimed her hand in his. “Black leads to Base Control, that medium gray leads to Middle Control, the white leads to Topside Control . . . and this pale blue triangle here leads to my quarters. Since you’re with me, holding my hand, you’ll be passed through the Gate. If you choose to leave without me, you’ll be automagically deposited in one of the external alcoves at the base of the Tower—all exits from the control centers do that for unauthorized personnel under normal operating conditions.”
“I don’t see a hallway or a door in the alcove,” Myal said, peering at the curved recess in the white marble surface. “Aren’t I supposed to?”
“Nope.” Tugging her into the shallow alcove, he vanished beyond the wall. There was no resistance, no hitting a wall, and no tingling or burning or chilling sensations, since all the Gate-frames were spaced so close together. She also didn’t actually hit the wall. An arm’s length from reaching the back of the alcove, the view changed.
The hallway on the other side of the hidden transfer point was dimly lit, though that didn’t last long, In response to their presence, the suncrystals slowly brightened, so that by the time they emerged in the large sitting room at the end of the passage, their eyes had time to adjust to the bright sunlight streaming in through the huge, crystal-glazed windows covering one wall of the large room. Overstuffed seats, elegantly carved tables, and artwork from a hundred cultures decorated the walls.
Kerric released her hand and gestured at the paintings, scrolls, carvings, masks, weapons, and so forth hung on his walls. “A lot of this is a legacy from past Guardians—go ahead and set your things down anywhere,” he added in invitation. He dumped his overstuffed pack of armor and adventuring gear next to one of the couches. She dropped hers next to it as he continued to speak, introducing her to his home. “Almost all the furniture is provided by the previous owner, though the retiring Guardians do sometimes take a few items when they retire. And I can swap out something if I prefer. Like a really big bed. I like to sprawl when I sleep, just to warn you.”
“As do I,” Myal admitted. “Though I had to get my bed custom-made, just to be long enough for me.”
“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the size of my bed if you choose to stay overnight. Well, technically into the afternoon. It’s about noon now,” he added, squinting at the sunlight. “Four hours from when the scrycasts cut off to when sunset happened—most of it spent researching for a qualified partner—eight or so hours of fighting our way through traps in the night, another six hours tramping around in the daytime until we finally got to the heart . . . yeah, about eighteen.” Sighing, Kerric spread out his arms, stretching his back as well as his limbs. “Gods, it’s good to be home again.”
“I wouldn’t know yet,” Myal quipped dryly. And then flushed as he dropped his arms and turned to look at her. The mood between them soured a little, making her regret she had said it. “I didn’t mean . . .”
Rubbing at the back of his neck, Kerric waved off her awkward apology. “I know what you meant. You’ve been away from your own refuge from the world a bit too long as well. Would you rather head back to your place? I could open a mirror-Gate to your front door if you’d like, so you don’t have to walk all the way home.”
She bit her bottom lip, wondering how to word her reply. Slowly, Myal stated, “What I would like . . . is to eat a fine meal with you, and see the rest of your home, and . . . and see it through your eyes. To then have a chance at some point soon to show you my home, for more than a single conversation, to show you it through my eyes. And . . . to see what each home has in common. To also see what we can learn from each other.”
The mood wasn’t broken anymore. Kerric felt relief that it had been merely slowed. Nodding, he walked back to her side and clasped her hand. “That much, I can do right now. The food, I mean; the rest will take time. This way. I don’t cook, so I don’t actually use the kitchen—one of the privileges of power is being able to order someone else to cook my meals—but I do tend to eat at the breakfasting table in there.”
Myal gave him a bemused look. She had thought she’d learned more than enough about Aian ways in her five years here, but this was a new thing. “An entire table just for breaking one’s fast? Is it illegal to use it for lunch, or supper?”
Kerric laughed. “No, I think it’s just that breakfast is considered casual, merely for family, and supper is when you formally invite guests over for a meal. So the table for breakfast is smaller and often in worse condition, because no one needs to impress their own immediate family. But as it’s usually just me, why dirty a big fancy table?”
“Why haven’t I heard of this Aian custom before?” Myal asked him.
He answered as he led her down a corridor, bypassing a room with a large, fancy table indeed. Myal had an impression of dark wood with an intricately carved edge, matching high-backed chairs with cream cushions, and an ornate suncrystal chandelier before he led her into the bright, homey, clean kitchen. “It’s not an Aian custom, so much as it’s a semi-wealthy family custom. The very wealthy always dine formally with great care for their manners and their surroundings, and the modestly wealthy down through the poor often only have the one table for eating.
“Penambrion hasn’t many of the truly poor; most people are modestly wealthy, since most work for the Tower. Of the adventurers, those that make enough money to be wealthy usually leave to go live rich lives elsewhere, and most of those who stay usually follow the lives they lived before coming to the Tower to make their fortune,” he stated, guiding her to the breakfast table, which sat in a sunlit, window-filled nook. It was old and scratched, and cluttered with dome-covered dishes, but the sanded oak planks were otherwise clean beneath their waiting meal. “The farmers have the least security, since they’re at the mercy of the weather, but most years they do reasonably well.”
“Yes, I’ve helped with their flooding fund,” Myal admitted. The bright smile he gave her at that bit of news warmed her down to her toes. She resolved to keep supporting his farmers. Their farmers, since Penambrion was now her home, and had been for the last few years.
Courteously assisting her into one of the chairs on either side, Kerric seated himself across from her, passed out two plates from a stack and some cutlery, and began removing lids. “Roast beef, peppered squash . . . steamed kaoli greens, buttered onions and green beans, all valley-grown . . . and I’m not sure what this is. Something in a pastry wrapper.”
Myal leaned over the bared plate, sniffed at the little cylinder-shaped wraps, finally broke one open between her fingers to examine the steaming contents, and grinned. “Egg rolls. They’re a bit small, which is why I wasn’t sure. We make them back home with cabbage and other vegetables, sometimes with meat, and the wrapper is brushed inside with scrambled egg before t
hey’re folded and fried—this smells like chicken, and cabbage, and slivers of mushrooms. Most visitors in Mendhi love it . . . unlike hagas.”
“Hagas?” Kerric asked. Most things translated well with the Ultra Tongue potion he had consumed years ago, but certain things did not. All he had was a vague impression of something lumpy in a bed of what looked like multi-hued brown rice. “What’s that?”
“Well, first you take a calf’s stomach—the fourth one, which is the one you squeeze the rennet out of for making cheese,” Myal stated. At the scrunching of his nose in disgust, she grinned. “I know you like cheese, Kerric. But as I was saying, you take the fourth stomach, rinse it and leech it and set aside the liqueur made for cheese making, then you take mushrooms and rice, barley and spices, black beans, peppers, spinach, toasted nuts, and fatah cheese—it has a strong flavor and a crumbly texture—and a little sour cream, and you mix it up and stuff it into the stomach, put it in a baking pan, and pack in more of the stuffing mixture around it with some more peppers. Oh, and you also add . . .”
The look of revulsion twisting his face made her trail off into a chuckle. Kerric couldn’t blame her for laughing at him, but he couldn’t accept that the dish she described was food. “I think I’ll have to agree with your visitors to Mendhi. I’ll take everything but the calf-stomach, if you please.”
“But that’s what gives it its unique flavor,” Myal teased him.
“I like your unique flavor, and that’s the only unique Mendhite flavor for me,” he stated firmly. He did take one of the egg rolls, though. The smells wafting up along with the steam from the one she had broken smelled delicious. Not at all like the hagas thing she described—not that Kerric had smelled one, yet, but he could imagine the weirdness of it.
“Are you comparing me to a calf’s stomach?” Myal asked him dryly, scooping some squash onto her plate and adding a few slices of the beef.
“Certainly not. The entire calf—no, the entire herd,” Kerric corrected himself, “couldn’t compare to you.” He served some vegetables and the steamed greens onto his own plate, then several slices of beef.
She quirked her brows, then chuckled. “I do believe that is the oddest compliment I have ever received. Thank you—for the compliment, not just the uniqueness.”
He grinned and cut into his meat. “Then stick around; I get even odder.”
As he had guessed she would, she laughed at the absurdity of that. Kerric was beginning to get a feel for what pleased Myal, and that pleased him.
Gently teasing and joking with her—for the more time she spent with him, the more she gave back as good as she got, which pleased him even further—the two finished their meal. Replacing the domed lids to stasis-preserve what they hadn’t eaten, he showed her his command of cleaning spells in soaping, scrubbing, rinsing and drying the dishes in just a few minutes, then took Myal on a tour of his home.
Myal enjoyed seeing more than just the kitchen and formal sitting room. The personal library of the Guardians of the Tower, past and present, impressed her beyond words; it was larger than her entire tenement building, and required stairs and ladders to reach all the books and scrolls. Kerric teased her by playfully dragging her out of the room and mock-dabbing at imaginary drool on her chin. She stooped a little and pinched his backside for that, then kissed him. That made them a little late for the tour of the small conservatory, with its broad glazed windows and plethora of flowers. Plucking an orchid no bigger than his thumbnail, he tucked it behind her ear. She gave him a kiss for that, too.
His workshops also impressed her. With the vast energies of the Tower at his disposal, he had clean-burning, spell-fueled forges for metalsmithing, glassmaking, woodworking, even some pottery. The latter puzzled her. Eyeing the clay-stained equipment, Myal glanced at him. “Why pottery? I thought you worked primarily with mirrors.”
“The frame a mirror is set in can be just as important as the mirror itself,” Kerric told her, warming up to one of his favorite subjects. “Same as the mirror’s shape, thickness, clarity, even the components of sand and ash and so forth that go into making it. Pottery frames are heavy and cumbersome, but they provide more stability than wood or metal frames do for Gateway construction. Wood frames dampen some of the shock-waves of the Shattered aether that makes long-distance transportation so difficult these days, but metal is a better stabilizing agent for the actual spell, allowing it to stay open longer with less loss of energy under similar aether conditions. You can’t reach as far, but you can hold the Gate open longer.
“You see, I’m getting closer to re-creating the old Portals in a new way that can reach past the ruptures in the world’s energies,” Kerric added, waxing enthusiastic about his non-Tower work. “The old ones were made out of stone, which is very stable and enduring, but the resonances they work at are along the same span of frequencies as the energies released when the last Convocation of God and Man turned the old capital city of the Aian Empire into a giant crater.”
Myal, leaning back against a stained but otherwise empty workbench, lifted her chin. “You know, I don’t even think the librarians of the Great Mendham Library know why the old capital exploded, and they gather information from all over the world. Do you know?”
He shrugged and spread his arms. “Even after two centuries, we still don’t know what went wrong that day. We do know that whatever energy was released, it was a big enough blast to rupture all the great Portals that were standing open, allowing pilgrims from all over the world to travel to the Convocation. Now, this next room on the tour contains what I like to call my thinkshop, as opposed to my workshop.
“I know you Mendhites love the written word,” he teased as he clasped her hand and led her toward a pair of double doors on the far side of the room, “but this contains numbers and mathemagical symbols as well as letters, so feel free to be bored.”
The angle was very awkward since she had to use her opposite hand, but Myal still managed to swat at that gorgeous rump. Even if it was still clad in stained and sweaty under-armor padding. “Behave. I am capable of understanding a mathemagical formula. I just cannot use the magics . . . involved . . .”
Her voice trailed out. The room he led her into was filled with chalkboards scribbled on in dozens of hues of chalk, huge pads of paper bound along the upper edges and perched on easels, walls of that same fine metal mesh from the Fountain Hall, and mirrors. Over half the formulae scribbled on the boards and projected onto the mesh screens were moving. None of the writing on the paper pads moved. Most of the mirrors were blankly passive, reflecting back the scenery around them, but one very large mirror in the distance had the Mendhite adventurer grabbing for her sword. Which she had left in the front room, along with her pack and her armor.
Kerric, noticing her reflexive twitch-and-grab, tensed instinctively in her wake. He searched his think-room for signs of the many dangers they had faced during their long gauntlet run to the heart, and frowned when he spotted the cause. “It’s okay,” he murmured, reassuring her even as he relaxed a little. Only a little, though. “That’s just a special scrying mirror. It’s not a doorway onto the traps of the Tower or anything. Though why it’s showing scenes of battle . . . I don’t . . .”
Leaving Myal to either stay back or follow, Kerric hurried through the half-maze of boards and screens. The closer he got, the more details he could see in the great cheval mirror standing against the back wall. One segment of his research had led him into exploring ways of scrying into the past. Pools of water, specially crafted glass, even trays of personally spilled blood, though blood-magic was always inherently dangerous. If it wasn’t the mage’s own blood, that weakened the Veil, the barrier between this world and the Netherhells, where demonic creatures roamed, beings of evil made manifest. Only a self-sacrifice countered the negative energies of such a use.
This mirror, however, wasn’t designed to scry into the past. It was his greatest triumph, a mirror that scryed into the future. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to have barg
ained with the priests of various Aian deities for some bones from deceased Seers to grind up and use as a stabilizing agent in the crafting of the glass. But his calculations, however morbid, had suggested that the use of such intrinsically, divinely blessed ingredients would allow for success. That was what Seers did; they peered into the future and related what they saw. Sometimes in verse, sometimes in spontaneous outbursts, sometimes in dreams or waking visions.
Sometimes, in mirror-based scryings. This mirror had been carefully crafted, every step of its construction carefully gauged, to give him a glimpse into the future of the Tower approximately one year ahead. The only problem was, with an actual Seer, one received words which could be interpreted. Sometimes those words could be misinterpreted, or assigned several possibilities, and the details were usually very sketchy . . . but they usually contained explanations of how various things led to the conclusion being discussed.
This mirror simply showed what would happen to whatever land he focused it upon approximately one year from the moment in which he looked, based purely on current events. Anything could change the image, though most of the time it simply showed the most likely events, which rarely changed drastically. It was still being tested for accuracy, and Kerric had left it focused on one of the most stable images he knew, the High Temple of Fate in the Empire of Fortuna. Undoubtedly the image had been paused during the Tower��s lockdown, but with the reopening of the communication channels embedded in the Fountainways connecting various singularity points to each other . . .
Myal stopped next to him, staring at the massive scene of bloodshed and chaos. Great war machines stomped across the landscape, crushing smaller buildings as they fell. They faced off against giant beasts and vaguely humanlike beings covered in dark scales, claws, and battle armor. Tiny by comparison, humans fought against what both realized at the same time were demons, given how they both gasped at the same moment. Denizens of the Netherhells, preached against in both many religious lessons and many mage lessons around the world, the monsters attacked without mercy. Overhead, an ugly stain of clouds, purples and browns and muddy greens, spread across the sky instead of the usual shades of white through gray. The very air itself seemed tainted.
