All the Paths of Shadow (8 page)

“Bah,” said Fromarch again. “So how are you going to go about moving the Tower shadow, Thaumaturge?” he asked.

Meralda wiped her lips. “Directed refraction,” she said. Shingvere slapped his knee.

“Told you!” he crowed. Fromarch scowled.

“He thought you’d hang those spark lights of yours from scaffolds and aim them at the ground,” said Shingvere. “I told him they weren’t bright enough, and if they were they’d be too hot.”

Meralda nodded. “I’m working on cooler, brighter lights,” she said. “But that could take months. Months I won’t get, with Yvin wasting my time at every turn.”

“Spoken like a mage, lass!” said Shingvere. The Eryan donned a wicked smile. “Now you see why I spend so much time away from Erya and that blatherskite queen. She’d have me whiling away the hours as a magic carpet cleaner, you mark my words.”

Fromarch snorted. “So instead you come to Tirlin and chase ghosts,” he said, lifting his bottle. “Another college education, gone sadly to waste.”

Shingvere grinned. “Will you be latching your refraction spell to the Tower itself?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Meralda. “The focal volume will be just below the ceiling of the Wizard’s Flat.” She tilted her head. “If, that is, your ghosts won’t mind.”

Shingvere nodded gravely. “Oh, I don’t think they will,” he said. “But I’d ask them nicely first, all the same. No harm in being polite, is there?”

“No harm in being a soft-headed old fool, either,” muttered Fromarch. He leaned back into the shadows. “But do have a care latching spells to the Tower,” he said. “We had a devil of a time, way back when.”

“Aye,” Shingvere said. “The structural spellworks left a residual charge. New spells tend to unlatch, after a short time. Even old skinny there had trouble working around it.”

Fromarch began to snore. Shingvere yawned and rose from his settee, padding quickly across the dimly lit room toward Meralda. “Well,” he said, smiling. “Just like old times. Seems we young folks need to put the oldsters to bed.”

Shingvere offered his hand, and Meralda took it, and rose. “It’s good to have you two back,” she said, in a whisper. “I’ve been worried about him, since he retired. He used to come around, but lately...”

“He doesn’t want you to feel like you’re still working in his shadow,” replied Shingvere. “He’s really not such a bad old fellow, once you get to know him. And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a bit of company here, now and then.”

Meralda nodded.
I’ll make the time,
she vowed.
Yvin can deal with it in any way he pleases.

Shingvere grinned. “That’s my ’prentice,” he said. Fromarch began to mumble restlessly.

“I’ll see you at court, I’m sure,” said Shingvere. “Tomorrow. But for now, we should all get some sleep. News of the Hang will break tomorrow, and that will make for a very long day of hand-wringing and useless conjecture.”

Meralda groaned softly and rose. Shingvere took her hand, and the pair tip-toed, giggling and stumbling, through Fromarch’s darkened sitting room.

Meralda gathered her light cloak from the rack on the wall and stepped outside. Angis and his coach sat in the dim red glow of a gas lamp. Angis’ cabman’s hat slumped over his eyes, and his chest rose and fell in perfect time with Fromarch’s snores.

Shingvere laughed. “Looks like we’re the only ones left awake,” he said.

“Good night,” said Meralda, struggling to regain her composure. “It’s been a lovely evening.” She shook her head to clear it, letting the cool night air wash over her face.

Shingvere bowed. “Aye, lass, that it has,” he said. “Would that I were thirty years younger.”

Meralda returned his bow. “You’ve been an old bachelor all your life,” she said. “But I love you anyway, you rascal of an Eryan wand-waver.”

Then she turned and darted for the cab. Shingvere laughed and bowed and watched her go. He waved once to Angis as the cabman snapped his reins. Then he turned back to the door and Fromarch’s lightless sitting room.

Inside, Fromarch stirred. “She gone?” he asked.

“Gone,” said Shingvere, settling into a chair and fumbling in the dark for his pipe pouch.

Fromarch muttered a word, and a light blazed, slow and gentle, from a point below the center of the ceiling.

“Thank you,” said Shingvere, filling the bowl of a blackened, ancient Phendelit wood pipe. “May I?”

“Please do,” said Fromarch. A flame appeared at Shingvere’s fingertip, and he lit his pipe with it.

“She’s in for a bad summer,” said Shingvere, after a moment of sucking at the pipe stem. “The Hang. The Tower. The Vonats.”

Fromarch nodded. “Vonats are sending that new wizard of theirs. Humindorus Nam. Mean piece of work.”

“So I hear,” said Shingvere. “Think the stories are true?”

Fromarch snorted. “Every other word, if that,” he said. Then he frowned. “Still. Met him once, years ago, outside Volot. Don’t ask what I was doing there.”

“I won’t,” said Shingvere. “Mainly because I’ve known for years, but go ahead.”

“Met him then,” said Fromarch, squinting back as if across the years. “Called himself just Dorous, then. Mad, he was. Twisted up inside. Didn’t figure he’d last long enough to be a danger to anybody but himself.”

Shingvere pulled his pipe from between his lips. “He’s still a danger to himself, I’ll wager,” he said. “Pity is, he might be a danger to Mage Ovis, too. We can always hope a manure cart runs over him first, but I don’t think that’s likely.”

Fromarch grunted. “She’s smarter than both of us put together,” he said, gruffly. “She can take care of herself. And Nam too, if need be.”

Shingvere nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said. “After all, it’s bad form for one wizard to interfere in the matters of another. She’d be furious, and rightly so.”

“Simply isn’t done,” said Fromarch, shaking his finger. “Breech of professional etiquette. Runs counter to everything we taught her.”

Shingvere wedged his pipe in the corner of his mouth and settled deeper into his chair. “Glad that’s settled, then,” he said. “So, which lot do you want to interfere with? The Vonat or the Hang?”

Fromarch dimmed the foxfire, conjured up a fresh-rolled Alon cigar, and broke into a sudden, awful grin.

Chapter Four

Morning broke for Meralda as it always did, with the sound of the five-twenty trolley gasping and groaning its way past while that devil of a trolley master banged madly away at his brass bell at each and every deserted, windswept corner.

Meralda gritted her teeth and strangled her pillow until the trolley rattled away. Then, within an instant, the paperboys began to sing.

“Hang fleet on the Lamp!” one cried. “Two pence for the
Post
! Two pence for the Hang!”

Mug awoke, demanding news. Meralda drowsily recounted Shingvere’s revelation of the Hang, bade Mug ruminate in silence, and threw back her covers.

The morning sun was bright, and it set her head to pounding. Still, she rose, rummaged for fresh clothes, and bathed. Her coffee urn was still empty, but the Bellringers, when they arrived, bore coffee and a bag of warm donuts, fresh from Flayne’s. At her cab, Angis provided Meralda with a sheaf of just read, but neatly folded, early edition papers.

Meralda settled into her seat and unfolded the morning papers. Tervis, seated across from her, had the rare good sense to be silent while she read.

“
Hang Fleet—Arrival or Invasion?
”
screamed the
Times
. The
Post
was calmer. Meralda noted with approval at no point in the article did the word invasion appear, but the sidebar detailing the dates and summaries of past Hang visits did hint that this latest incursion was the culmination of five centuries of stealthy surveillance.

Angis bellowed at a trolley and lurched to a halt at Weigh. A pair of hotel bellhops ran past, hats in hand, shouting at each other as they darted ahead of Angis and the trolley.

Meralda finished her coffee. The morning air was crisp, and, since the wind was from the north, it lacked the stench of the stockyards south of the college. Tervis caught her eye and grinned, and Meralda found herself smiling back.

“I know there’s Hang afoot, ma’am, but it is a lovely day, isn’t it?” he said.

The cab charged ahead. Meralda nodded, and Tervis turned away, his eyes on Tirlin. Meralda shuffled papers and continued to read.

The back pages of the papers held news only slightly less alarming than the Hang. The Phendelit delegation had sent word to the palace that they would be arriving two days early. Possibly even later that same day, Meralda realized with a shock.

Not to be outdone, the Alons had also sent word ahead. Hang or no Hang, they were determined to make Tirlin on schedule. “We welcome our friends from across the Great Sea,” the Alon queen was quoted as saying. “We only hope to arrive in time to compose ourselves before we meet.”

Meralda frowned at the latest statement by the Vonats. They ignored the arrival of the Hang, stating instead that due to the deplorable condition of the Eryan roadways in southern Fonth they would be delayed, placing their arrival three days hence. The unnamed Vonat spokesman also offered to give the Eryans lessons in modern road building as an expedient to further cultural exchanges.

Meralda folded the
Post
and imagined the turmoil that must be transpiring in the Gold Room. Any one of the calamities could be handled. Indeed, any one disaster was, aside from the Hang arrival, expected. But all taken together?

As the cab rolled to a halt by the palace gates, Meralda almost felt sorry for Yvin.

The palace was abuzz. The wide, carpeted halls were thick with guardsmen and nobles and Eryans and penswifts, all marching determinedly to and fro. Except, Meralda noted, for the penswifts, who tended to lurk in corners before leaping out at distracted court members.

Meralda had to wait for admittance at the doors, and once inside she had to practically shoulder her way through the hall to the foot of the west stair.

A penswift, not one she recognized, charged up the west stair behind her, calling out “Thaumaturge! A moment, please!”

Meralda didn’t slow, nor did she look back, but the Bellringer’s treads halted, and the penswift’s cries came no closer.

Meralda smiled and climbed serenely up the stair. At the top, she found her key, opened the laboratory doors, and stepped quickly inside. She dropped the papers in a heap by the door.

The
Times
fell face-up, displaying the words “Hang Invasion” in tall black letters.

A single flickering gas lamp lit the laboratory. Tiny hints of movement played about the shadows, and though Meralda knew they were merely reflections of the gas lamp on various reflective surfaces she couldn’t help but be reminded of tiny hands waving.

Meralda kicked the paper flat and unlatched the ward spell with a word and a pat on the polished copper globe that sat atop her biggest spark coil apparatus.

The ward spell collapsed. Papers rustled throughout the laboratory, fluttering and waving in the still air as if blown by a sudden gust of wind. The big old scrying mirror bolted to the middle of the east wall flashed, bright and brief, behind the blanket Meralda kept hung over the glass.

“Lights,” said Meralda, when the ward spell static discharge faded.

A pair of head-high spark coils surrounded by a cage of shiny copper bars whined and crackled in the corner. On the high stone ceiling two dozen glass rings flickered, brightened, and filled the windowless laboratory with soft white light.

“Music,” she said, and from the clutter of bisected brass globes and wire-wound glass tubes heaped on a work bench just beside the door came the soft strains of an Alon violin.

“Miracles,” she muttered. The big old scrying mirror pulsed blue behind its blanket, and a few of her more intelligent instruments make querulous chirps, but nothing else occurred.

Meralda sighed, and gazed around. She stood in the midst of what was arguably the best equipped, and certainly the oldest, magical research facility in the Realms. She could take two steps and put her hands on old Phillitrep’s Mathematical Calculating Engine, which was still working, gears and rods awhirl, three hundred years after commencing calculations for Phillitrep’s last “little” problem. She could walk to the rear of the room and, along the way, stand beneath the tall, gleaming bulk of Arkot’s Walking Barge, touch the carefully folded fabric of the very first gas-filled airship, or watch the prototype of Lafrint’s Steam Motor hiss and turn its heavy steel axles.

Eyes, some of steel and glass, others of stone and iron, turned and fixed themselves upon Meralda. Imeck’s Pondering Noggin winked at her, and she waved idly back at it. Tarmore’s Watcher blinked at her, and a moment later Meralda heard the steady scratching of a mechanical pen drawing her likeness on the same scrap of parchment she’d fed the machine months ago. All about the shelves and alcoves of the laboratory, lightning danced, caught in the glass of this or the coils of that. Some of the devices were only half finished, some so old their names and purposes were long forgotten. Still, Meralda could not look upon them without thinking that the least of them held wonders, or the keys to wonders.

Meralda turned her eyes from the ranks of intricate devices. She stalked to her desk, snatched up a fresh sheet of architect’s paper, and began to draw the Tower.

Meralda heard voices beyond the door. One was Tervis. One was not. When she heard her name called Meralda put down her pencil and stretched.
Time for a break anyway,
she thought. She counted rings on the face of Opp’s Rotary Timekeeper. Ten of the clock, and high time for a snack.

Meralda rose as Tervis began to knock. “Pardon, Thaumaturge,” he said. “Urgent summons from the crown. May we have a word?”

Meralda winced.
Urgent summons from the crown,
she thought.
Those have to be my least favorite words.

Meralda threw the door open, stepping back as she did. A trio of grim-faced, black-clad palace guards stood between Kervis and Tervis.