Frank Tuttle - All the Paths of Shadow

Meralda nodded. “I will,” she said. The king looked her in the eye, and his scowl softened, and he held out his hand. “Thank you, Thaumaturge,” he said. “Come what may, we thank you.”

Meralda took his hand, and shook it, and then Yvin stamped off down the Hall, his guardsmen on his heels.

“Well, you certainly told him,” said Mug, when they were gone. “He won’t soon forget that fire and lightning comeuppance.”

Meralda mounted the stair, scowling. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “What was I supposed to do? Call down thunder claps, here on the stair?”

“Oh, no,” said Mug. “Shaking his hand was much more effective.”

Meralda stamped up the stair, reached the landing, and nodded at the Bellringers, who stood bleary eyed and yawning by the laboratory doors. Before either could speak, though, Fromarch flung open the doors and burst into the hall.

“Blow that whistle, lad,” he said. “We’ve got people in the safe room.”

Kervis fumbled with the silver guard’s whistle at his neck, brought it to his lips, and blew a single short blast.

Down the hall and through the palace, the whistle was repeated, fainter and fainter each time until it was gone.

Meralda leaped from the stair. Fromarch saw her, and beckoned her in. “Those Alon bumblers are inside,” he said. “Better have a look.” He turned and hurried away.

Tervis rushed to Meralda’s side and wordlessly took Mug’s sheet-draped bird cage. Meralda let go, and sprinted for the doors.

“Go on, follow her!” said Mug. “I can take a bit of swinging. Run, blast you, run!”

Tervis hurried after, bird cage held high, as eyes poked and thrust their way through folds in the bed sheet.

Meralda ran. The mirror stood by her desk, in what should have been plain sight from the doors. But Shingvere stood before the glass, and his rotund form blocked any view.

“Stand aside!” shouted Fromarch, slowing to a halt. “We can’t see through your thick Eryan bottom!”

Meralda followed. One whistle meant stand alert, Meralda recalled. She wondered if the captain had actually given orders that Tirlish guards were to enter the Alon wing on the traditional three-whistle “fire, foes, fie” signal.

If so, Tirlin was only two whistle blows from war.

Meralda gently moved Shingvere away from the mirror.

There, in the glass, was the safe room, dark no more. In the room, Red Mawb and Dorn Mukirk stood before Tim’s portrait, locked in a silent round of red-faced hand waving and finger pointing.

“Off to a good start,” muttered Mug, as Tervis placed his pot on the edge of Meralda’s desk.

Meralda’s jaw dropped. In one hand, Mawb held a human skull, from which the lower jaw and most of the upper teeth were missing. The skull twitched and spun in Mawb’s hand, as though moving erratically on its own. Indeed, after one particularly violent sideways jerk Mawb slapped the boney face with his free hand.

A ruddy, smoking flame rode the air a hand’s breadth above Mawb’s bald head. Mawb’s robe, like Mukirk’s, was festooned with a variety of symbols, some of which Meralda recognized as numbers and Old Kingdom astrological markings.

“Give ’em a wagon and a tent and we’ll have a bloody circus,” muttered Mug.

Dorn Mukirk, who had appeared at first to be empty-handed, reached within his robe and withdrew a bone. It’s a leg bone, decided Meralda, with a disgusted frown. A yellowed human leg bone.

“Now there’s a use for pockets,” muttered Fromarch.

Dorn Mukirk struck a stiff pose, arms and leg bone uplifted, and mouthed a long word. The leg bone took on a glowing golden aura that left a trail in the air when the wizard swung it down level with his waist.

The Alon mages glared at each other, and began to warily circle the room, each brandishing his respective bone and muttering to it. Red Mawb’s skull twitched and jerked. Dorn Mukirk’s leg bone emitted brief tongues of pale, cold flame. Both wizards circled and chanted and, at one point, bumped into each other and broke into a fresh fit of shouting and fist-waving.

Meralda looked away, and bit back a laugh. “I can hardly believe this,” she said. “Bones?”

“The Alons have always been a bit fond of necromancy,” said Shingvere. “Though I thought they’d grown out of it, of late.” He shook his head. “Seems I was wrong.”

Bones, thought Meralda. Here, in the twentieth century.

“Will you gentlemen keep an eye on our Alons and their body parts? As amusing as this is, I need to prepare the detector.” And test my Sight, Meralda thought, with a tightening of her chest. I hope I don’t have to do this blind.

Shingvere dragged his chair close to the glass. “Aye, we’ll watch the circus, lass. And if they find the Tears I’ll eat my robes.”

Meralda hurried to her workbench, shedding her long coat as she went. The first real bite of autumn had been in the air this morning, reminding her of just how close the Accords were, and just how little she’d done to move the Tower’s shadow.

“First things first,” she muttered, as she draped her coat over a glassware rack and pulled back her chair. “Won’t be any Accords unless you work, my friend.”

She regarded the detector. She’d had no time to do more than assemble a crude framework from cast off bits of this and remainders from that. Finished, the detector was simply a half globe of copper bands, perhaps a foot across, that held a pair of glass discs mounted midway through the half globe’s shell. The glass discs were a finger’s breadth apart, and a faint bluish haze rode the air between the glasses.

Meralda had mounted a plain wooden broom handle to the edge of the half-globe, and had wrapped the gripping end of the handle with thick copper wire. All in all, Meralda decided, it bears an unfortunate resemblance to a plumber’s toilet plunger.

Meralda took a third glass disc from its stand on her bench, slipped it carefully between the two already mounted to the apparatus, and smiled when she heard a tiny click and felt the binding spell lock the disc in place.

“Skulls and leg bones,” she said, softly. “And me without a single bubbling cauldron.”

Mug laughed, and Meralda reached for her notes. First, charge the repeater, and prime the latch, she’d written, just before she’d left for the night. Then set the illuminator and the polarizing bands.

Simple enough. But her nagging worries about her Sight arose again, and Meralda knew she’d have to try now, before she could concentrate on anything else. I can see the colors in the glass change without any Sight, she thought. But who knows what else I might need to see?

“All right,” she said, taking a deep breath, and closing her eyes. “Sight.”

She reached out, willing into being that peculiar sense of things unseen that always preceded the advent of Sight. She felt it blossom, willed it from within to without, and opened her eyes.

“Sight.”

Her workbench was alight with traceries of fire. The five-tined charge dissipater was bathed in a ragged nimbus of shifting blue. The grounding cable was barely visible through its aura of midnight black. The detector, charged and shaped with only the most subtle of spells, sparkled and shone like a jeweler’s display case lit with a noonday sun.

Meralda smiled, and closed her eyes, and willed back a portion of her Sight. I’ll keep what I need to finish the detector, she decided, but save what is left for the safe room.

“Everything all right, Meralda?” asked Fromarch, from his place before the mirror.

“Everything is fine. I’m ready.”