All the Paths of Shadow

Her staff made a cracking noise, like the breaking of dry timber, and the darting shreds of rainbows vanished as they fell into place. The dark sphere about the Tower grew fainter, and fainter, and though the Tower’s shadow was small and fat in the midday sun, the shadow shrank, inching back over the grass toward the foot of the Tower.

“So far so good,” said Mug. Half his eyes were on the Tower. The other half were on the brass-faced stopwatch clicking madly away on Meralda’s workbench. “Fifteen seconds since unlatching.”

Meralda turned her gaze from the flat and watched the shadow shrink. Spectators drew hastily back into the sun, though one child followed the line of darkness, stamping it with his foot as it moved, until he reached a stern- faced guard and was marched away from the Tower.

“Forty seconds,” said Mug.

Meralda wiped her brow with her hand. Elation rose within her. I’ve done it, she thought. It’s going to work.

She turned her Sight back to the latch. Faint as distant smoke against the blue of the sky and the black of the Tower, Meralda struggled to see it.

“Eighty seconds,” said Mug. “Shadow nearly gone.”

Inside the latch, something moved.

Meralda pushed. Sight can be intensified, its resolution limited only by the skill of the seer and the arcane qualities of the objects being seen. Meralda frowned and held her breath and extended her Sight so intently that her normal vision began to fade.

The latch and the refractors were a spherical haze about the flat. Within the haze, though, things moved. Meralda saw barrel-sized masses, dark bulks against the Tower, circling the flat like falcons tethered to a pole. She counted as they flew. Six, eight, ten, a dozen.

Meralda pushed her Sight further, hoping to distinguish details of the masses. Instead, she saw clearly the wakes each dark mass left in the latch as it flew. Wakes that represented wide, encircling rips in the structure of the latch.

Rips that had, over the course of the night, torn the heart of the latch neatly in half.

Meralda gasped and lifted her staff.

“Thaumaturge?” said Mug. “Is there a problem?”

Before Meralda could speak, the weakened latch darkened, swelled like a street minstrel’s balloon, and lost its grip on the Tower.

The refractors within spun and tangled like rags in a whirlwind. The sky about the Tower flashed dark, then light, then dark again, blurring as the broken latch fell. Shouts and a few inebriated cheers rose up from the crowd as the latch and the refractors fell away from the flat and drifted toward the ground.

The latch swelled again.

Every bird in the park took sudden, noisy flight.

Meralda spoke a word, and her staff went ice cold, but the latch still fell, unchecked. Five heartbeats and halfway down the Tower, the refractors began to flail about outside the wobbling orb of the latch. Shadows flew, and shafts of sunlight, and the cheers became shouts and a few onlookers took flight.

Nearly at the Tower’s foot, the latch rolled away from the Tower entirely and proceeded down Wizard’s Walk. The walk cleared as people dashed aside, leaving Meralda and her platform directly in the latch’s wide path.

“It’s a harmless collection of refractors, correct?” asked Mug, half his eyes still on the clock.

Meralda nodded. That’s all it is, she said silently. But as she looked with her Sight within the rapidly approaching spellwork, the refractors came together in a writhing bunch, spun, and then grew still.

Meralda blinked, and when she looked again, the shadows in the latch were gathered in the shape of an angry, open-mouthed face.

Meralda shivered. The eyes in the face opened, and they burned like the eyes in her dream.

“Otrinvion,” she heard, and Meralda knew the voice was not her own. “Vonashon, empalos, endera.”

Meralda’s sight broke. The latch loomed up and engulfed her, and shadows wheeled like birds, and then it was past and gone.

Meralda squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, all she could see were moving bands of dark and light.

“Mistress!” said Mug. “Are you all right?”

Tervis came charging up the stair, heard Mug’s words, and leaped onto the platform.

Meralda rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said. She squinted back toward the park wall, her normal vision still blurred from her long use of Sight. “Is it gone?”

“Earthed itself here, I think,” said Mug. “Probably on your staff.”

Meralda blinked and stepped to the rail.

The spectators, calmed now, were milling about, pointing and talking and laughing at the temerity of their fellows. “Good show!” came a shout from below. “Now that’s good magic!” bellowed another.

Meralda waved and smiled, unable to make out much more than blobs of color and hints of movement.

“Was it supposed to do that?” asked Tervis. “Come down and roll about, I mean.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Meralda. She turned back toward the Tower. “Guardsman. Quickly. Tell the mob of penswifts no doubt gathering at the foot of the stair that the test did what it was meant to do. Nothing more.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then get Kervis to go to the guards at the Tower door. Tell him to tell them that no one goes in or out. No one, for any reason, until I arrive. Is that clear?”

Tervis nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Go.” Tervis sped away.

Mug turned eyes on Meralda. “‘Until you arrive?’” he asked. “Why would you arrive at all? The latch failed. Did you see something I didn’t?”

“I did,” she said, sorting through her instruments until her fingers found the cloth-wrapped wand that held her single ward work.

Meralda felt it, and it was warm. It’s a killing spell, she thought. I never thought I’d cast a killing spell.

Mug imitated the sound of fingers drumming in impatience, and Meralda drew her hand away. “Well?” said Mug. “You can’t go around claiming you saw strange things in the Tower and not provide details. It’s rude.” He pushed eyes toward Meralda. “You saw the face from your dream, didn’t you?”

Meralda lifted her face to meet Mug’s eyes. “How did you know?”

“Because that’s exactly how ghosts do things,” said Mug. “They have rules to follow, you know.”

Meralda frowned. “I’ll have no more of this ghost nonsense.” She glanced back at the stair, wary of penswifts. “What I saw was something else. There are spellworks about the Tower. They ruined the latch.”

Mug frowned. “Spellworks? Whose?”

Meralda closed her bag. She remembered the words the latch had brought, but she did not speak them.

“I don’t know,” she said. Her vision clearing, she dared a look at the Tower, and though the brightness of the sky made her squint she saw nothing unusual in the air.

“What kind of spellworks? Could you tell?”

Meralda looked away, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Aside from knowing something is up there, and part of it, at least, extends beyond the Tower walls around the flat, I don’t know a thing.”

Mug pretended to lift a small leaf and turn it to and fro in deep consideration. “Some might say that such a statement alone would justify sealing the Tower for the next hundred years and then going home,” he said. “Not that you’d ever agree with such a person.”

Too late for that, thought Meralda. What if my spell damaged an old structural spell, just as the old spell tore apart the latch?

And what if persons unknown were preparing the Tower as a place from which to attack Tirlin?

Meralda hefted her bag. “I’ll have a guard stay below to keep the tourists away,” she said. “We shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

Mug sighed. “You shouldn’t,” he agreed. “Of course, there shouldn’t be faces in the sky, or spells on the