Frank Tuttle - All the Paths of Shadow

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 Tower, should there?”

Meralda marched down the stairs. The Bellringers looked up at her, confusion mirrored in their features.

“You,” said Meralda, to one of the half-dozen strange guards gathered behind the Bellringers. “Stay here. No one but me goes back up those stairs. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the guard. Meralda reached the last tread, and the grass of the park and the press of the crowd.

“We’re in a hurry,” she said. “Make way, will you?”

Guards bellowed, and the crowd melted away. The Bellringers fell into place on either side of Meralda.

She set a quick pace. The Tower loomed up ahead, doors ringed by guards, guards ringed by penswifts. Meralda saw them, and felt her chest tighten.

“Thaumaturge!” came shouts all about her as she reached the Tower. “Thaumaturge!”

Meralda steeled herself. I do not hear, I do not see.

“Sergeant,” she said, over the din. Kervis and Tervis kept the most insistent of the penswifts at arm’s length.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Has anyone been in or out of the Tower?”

“No, ma’am,” said the sergeant. “They hauled the last of the lumber out yesterday. Sealed ever since.”

Meralda nodded. “Open the doors, please.”

As the penswifts shouted, a pair of guards swung the Tower doors open and the Bellringers darted ahead. The penswifts leaped aside, still shouting questions, but before they could follow the Tower guards converged and the doors swung shut.

Darkness fell. Meralda and the Bellringers came to a sudden halt. Meralda found her magelamp, took a breath, and spoke the word.

Light flared.

“Pardon, ma’am,” said Kervis, his eyes on the darkness. “What are we looking for?”

“Evidence,” she said. She put her bag on the floor, bent, and opened the catch.

Tervis cleared his throat. “Will we be climbing to the flat?”

Meralda bit her lip. The spellwork I saw radiated from the flat, she thought. The only way to see it again is to climb those stairs, up into the dark.

But she’d be foolish to do so with nothing but a pair of magelamps and a single charged ward wand. “No, we won’t be seeing the flat just now,” she said aloud. The Bellringers, as one, let out their breath in a rush. “This is as far as we go.”

Meralda pointed the lamp into her bag, and withdrew the cloth-wrapped retaining wand.

It buzzed at her touch.

“I’m going to release another ward spell,” she said. “It’s far more powerful than the one I loosed in the flat.”

She heard the Bellringers each take a short step backwards.

“Don’t worry,” said Meralda. “This is a new spell. It won’t trigger until we’re all gone.” She raised her voice so that it echoed throughout the Tower. “Of course, it will target anyone hiding in the Tower the instant we leave. That would be a pity, since this new spell is easily capable of melting rock. At a distance. Still, if no one comes forward now…”

Silence. Meralda counted to ten, removed the cloth, and spoke a word.

The wand howled like a thousand angry hornets. The ward spell, when it leaped from the copper wand, burned bright as a gas lamp, and big as a fat pumpkin.

It expanded until it was a whirling, ragged ball of fire, and then it shot up into the heart of the Tower, touching the walls in every direction with an angry ring-shaped crimson glow that flashed wide and round against the first story ceiling before vanishing abruptly. The howling continued, muted, but furious.

“Can it really melt rock?” asked Tervis.

“Oh, yes,” said Meralda. “Rock, metal, hidden intruders. I suspect they’ll all leave behind the same mass of ashes.”

Kervis whistled. “That ought to give Old Ugly something to chew on.”

Meralda grinned. Then she sought her bag again, and withdrew a small cloth bag of Old Maid flour.

Tervis cocked his head. “Aha!” he said. “Going to sprinkle that on the stair, are you?”

Meralda untied the bag. “We’ll go up high enough that no one could jump down to avoid it,” she said. “And we’ll cover twenty treads or so, to keep clever persons from leaping across it.”

Kervis frowned. “Is that magic powder?”

Meralda smiled. “I doubt it,” she said. “But it does make good biscuits.” She played the light on the stair, on the far side of the Tower. “If you gentlemen will accompany me?”

The Bellringers tramped with her toward the stair.

Meralda was still squinting in the sun, halfway down Wizard’s Walk and halfway to her carriage, when Kervis looked up, frowned, and fell out of step with Tervis.

“Uh oh,” he said.

Meralda followed his gaze to the head of the walk. She still couldn’t make out faces, but the uniforms were plain enough. Palace guards, with the captain himself at the fore.

Meralda groaned. “Tell me that isn’t the captain, looking for me.”

“It isn’t, ma’am,” said Kervis. “But it is. Must be half a dozen with him, too.” Kervis shifted his crossbow and sighed. “Whatever it is, it isn’t good.”

Meralda quickened her pace. Traffic on the walk cleared as the captain and his men bore down it. Two hundred paces, one hundred, fifty. As the distance between them closed, Meralda tried and failed to read the captain’s face, and guess what calamity had brought him all the way to the park.

Meralda heard a rush of booted feet behind her, and though she didn’t turn to look she could imagine a mob of penswifts racing to catch up with her.

The captain saw, and his face went crimson, and Meralda could see the muscles of his neck tighten and bunch.

“How nice of you to drop by, Captain,” said Meralda, through a forced smile. “My days are full of surprises.”

The captain muttered to his men, and they flanked him and hurried past. Meralda grinned at the thought of the penswifts arguing with the captain’s grim-faced lieutenants.

The captain came puffing to a halt. Meralda stopped as well, noting with satisfaction that the penswifts had been shouted to a dead halt some distance behind.