Frank Tuttle - All the Paths of Shadow

The glass disks flickered and began to glow. Within a moment a light shone from the glass, bright as a magelamp and a soft, deep blue.

Hushed exclamations rose up from the hall. “Bah,” she heard Dorn Mukirk spit. “Why are we wasting our time with this foreigner’s party lamp?”

Meralda closed her eyes. “Sight,” she intoned, in a whisper. “Sight, Sight, Sight.”

And she opened her eyes, and the room was aglow.

Relief washed through her, and she let out her breath in a sigh. To work, she thought, resisting an impish urge to turn and wave at the corner. Goboy’s mirror seems to look in from there, she decided, and Fromarch, Shingvere and Mug are surely watching this very moment.

Not until I find the Tears, she thought. Not until then.

“I’ll start with this wall,” she said, to Tervis. “I’ll need you to move the table back, if you will.”

The Bellringers nodded, and sprang for the table.

Meralda lifted the detector and followed. Once there, she put the detector’s flat side to the wall, let it latch, and watched the blue light shine as she moved along the stones.

“It’ll be there, ma’am,” said Tervis. “I know it will.”

Meralda nodded and swallowed. Sweat ran down her face, plastered her hair to her temples and the back of her neck. She wondered if Fromarch was pacing now, or if Mug was holding all his eyes in a bunch.

She’d covered three of the room’s four walls, and the floor, without so much as the faintest flicker. Now she was halfway done with the ceiling, and she knew, deep in her heart, that the light wasn’t going to darken no matter how slowly or carefully she moved it across the polished ironwood beams.

“Careful, ma’am,” whispered Tervis, who stood below her and held the chair. Meralda had been forced to use the chair, as the ceiling in the safe room was higher than she recalled, and her handle had proved too short. “You nearly stepped off, that time.”

Meralda nodded, and moved the detector until she could reach no further. “Let’s move the chair,” she said. “One more time ought to do it for the ceiling, and then we’ll check the safe.”

“Good idea,” said Tervis. Meralda put her hand on his shoulder as she stepped down from the chair, and felt that his uniform jacket was wet with sweat. “I was surprised when you didn’t start there,” he said, nodding toward the portrait of Tim and the safe behind it.

“Oh, I know I’ll find traces there,” she said. Or, at least, I bloody well hope so. “But if the spell passed through the walls before latching, I want to know where it came from, and I decided I’d need fresh Sight for that.” And the spell must have passed through a wall, she thought. A wall or the ceiling or the floor, unless our scheming friend hid it months ago.

Tervis nodded, and a fat drop of sweat rolled down his nose.

It’s hotter than a furnace in here, Meralda thought, wiping her own brow with her sleeve. The Alons must have every fireplace and cook stove in the east wing going full blast. Coincidence, or more Alon hospitality?

Meralda took another long breath of hot, still air. She heard a distant clock strike ten, and Red Mawb laughed to his fellows.

Tervis scooted the chair toward the wall. Nothing, Meralda thought, and frowned. I’ve found nothing at all.

She pushed the thought aside. Well, of course you haven’t, she reasoned. Even if the spell passed through the walls, it never latched to them. The safe will likely hold the only traces of the spell. The walls and the floor needed to be checked, of course, but only out of thoroughness. No, if the Tears do remain, they are in the one place we haven’t looked yet.

Meralda bit her lip, stepped into the chair again, and quickly finished checking the ceiling. The steady blue glow never wavered.

“Well,” said Meralda, forcing a smile and climbing down to the floor. “That’s done.”

Tervis frowned. “Nothing?”

“No traces of projected spellworks,” replied Meralda. Her chest tightened. What if I’m wrong? What if the Tears aren’t here at all?

From beyond the doorway, a bevy of close-packed Alons watched, the wizard Red Mawb at the fore. Meralda met his eyes, saw in them a bemused, haughty sort of boredom.

“Is that bad?” asked Tervis.

Meralda looked away from Mawb. “It changes nothing,” she said, to Tervis. “The Tears are here, and we shall have them.”

And then she turned on her heel, walked to the portrait of Tim the Horsehead, and set her Sight upon it.

Nothing. Oh, she saw the usual eddies and swirls of radiance that hung about any surface, if one’s Sight were sensitive enough. But that was all. There was no trace, not the faintest, of the ordered patterns an old spellwork might leave behind. Meralda hadn’t brought her staff, simply because any spell too subtle to be Seen or found out by the Alon wizards wasn’t going to be found by her staff, either. But now she wished she had it, if only to hold something familiar.

“Here we go,” she whispered. Then she placed the detector firmly against the wall, just to the right of the portrait.

Right or wrong, thought Meralda. Now, we see.

After the slightest of hesitations the lighted disks went dark.

Tervis whooped and stamped his foot. “Well done!” cried Kervis.

“And not a head bone in the room,” added Tervis, under his breath but not so faintly that the wizards outside couldn’t hear. “Ma’am.”

Meralda smiled a wide, sweaty smile and propped herself against the wall with her free hand and imagined she could hear, faint but clear, the sound of cheering and clapping from her mages and from Mug, half a palace away.

She stepped back, mopped her brow, and moved the detector, letting the latch take hold once more. The blue light returned, but faint and flickering steadily.

“Good old Tirlish magic,” remarked Tervis, airily, and Meralda grinned.

Move, latch, test, move. In a few moments, Meralda saw that a spellwork had, indeed, been attached to the safe, and the wall about it. The spellwork’s footprint was circular, about four feet in diameter, with a pronounced notch running vertically above the safe.

And utterly invisible to Sight. Strain as she might, without the detector Meralda could see nothing at all, even though she knew what to look for, and where to look. I’d have never found this with my staff, she thought. Not with my staff, not with two dozen staves and every mage in the Realms.

Her elation dimmed at the realization. This is not the work of a guild master or a rogue wizard or a renegade Alon necromancer. No, Meralda decided, this is the work of a mage.A mage with skills I’ve never seen.

Mumbling and jostling sounded from the hall.

Meralda bit her lower lip, reached up, and swung Tim’s portrait away from the safe. When she lifted the detector to the back of the canvas, the light flickered and went out, and Meralda smiled. Yes, she thought, following the faint traceries of light that billowed and swam in the shimmering blue glass. This lot here. One end bound to the back of Tim’s portrait, the other end coiled like a spring. It pushed the portrait out before the safe door opened, and pulled it shut when the work was done.

She waved the detector toward the safe, which was still ajar, and the blue glasses went momentarily dark. Meralda latched to the safe door, and the glow returned, this time as a faint, rotating pattern of tiny criss-crossed lines.

Meralda frowned. Ordered, mobile traces? Of an old spell?

She reached out, opened the safe, and slowly pushed the detector inside.