Meralda closed her eyes. For a moment, the sun was warm and bright.
But then a shadow passed, and the light in the kitchen dimmed, and Meralda imagined she was high and alone on the winding, silent stair.
Thunder smashed and rolled, muted, yet not silenced by the Tower’s thick walls. Meralda took off her high-necked black raincoat at the foot of the stair and wished in vain for a coat rack.
“Oh, bother,” she muttered, putting her magelamp on a chest-high stair tread before shaking her rain soaked coat out on the Tower floor. Half a dozen raincoats in my closet, she thought, and today of all days I grab the Farley and Hent.
As she spread out her coat on the floor, another peal of thunder rang out, so loud and lingering Meralda wondered if it had struck the Tower. Park lore claimed such a thing had never happened, and immediately Meralda wondered if this, too, was another indication that her shadow latch had damaged some ancient Tower spellwork.
“Nonsense,” she said aloud, as the echoes of the thunder clap died. “I can’t be blamed for everything.”
She picked up her magelamp and played it up and around the winding stair. The white flour she’d strewn about the first dozen steps was undisturbed. As if anyone could get past the guards, she thought. Still, it’s good to know I am truly alone, here in the dark. She imagined someone hiding in the shadows, high on the stair, and she pushed the thought quickly away.
Now is not the time, she chided herself, to start filling the dark with penny-novel villains.Especially when a large, ferocious ward spell is waiting to pounce on anyone but the Bellringers or myself.
“I’d best make sure it’s still waiting,” she said. And then she sang out a single word of the ward’s unlatching spell, heard an answering buzz from high above, and smiled, satisfied that the ward still roamed the dark, invisible, but vigilant.
“Well,” said Meralda. “Time to go.” Her echo died quickly, and she hefted her instrument bag with a groan. I’ll miss having Tervis carry this, she thought. But I can hardly trot back down the stair if I decide I need a fresh holdstone or a piece of one-way glass. And I certainly can’t have the Bellringers underfoot if yonder ward spell goes bad.
She slipped the bag strap over her shoulder and regarded the damp, cloth-wrapped bundle still dripping rainwater several feet away. Inside the cloth, the new weak spell detector sizzled faintly, sending tiny blue flashes of light twirling about like gnats.
Meralda groaned. “You should not be doing that,” she said. Her words echoed through the empty Tower. What could it possibly be detecting, this far from the flat? Or am I only now seeing the flashes because the Tower is so dark?
It occurred to her that the blanket she’d used to shield the detector from the rain was the same blanket that usually covered Goboy’s scrying mirror. The detector might be reacting to traces of spell energies latched to the blanket, faint though they must be. And if that were so, the tiny bursts of fire would cease when the blanket was removed.
Meralda grasped the damp blanket with her left hand and unwound it until the detector was freed.
The darting flashes stopped.
Meralda sighed in relief. “Marvelous,” she said, taking the detector up by its handle. “Ten to the minus twelfth, or I’m a cabaret dancer.”
Meralda spoke a word, and the dark half-globe of the detector began to glow, spilling a candle’s worth of soft blue light at her feet.
Meralda spoke the second word, and the light began to brighten. By the time she reached the flat, Meralda fully expected to be engulfed in a globe of light fully twenty feet in radius. But for now, she played the magelamp on the treads, shifted her bag on her shoulder, and set foot on the stair.
Her wet boots squeaked until the soles touched the flour, and then they went slick. Meralda climbed the first dozen steps carefully, then turned, scraped her toes and heels off on the edge of a tread, and listened to the thunder boom and crackle far above.
If Mug were there, he’d be saying things like “Nice day to meet ghosts,” or “good weather for spook hunting,”. And I’d sigh and tell him to shut up, thought Meralda. But in truth, isn’t that what I’m doing?
Meralda took a few careful steps upward. Satisfied that her boots were clean-it would be a shame to face the shade of Otrinvion, but then slip off the stair because of flour on my boots, she thought-she continued her trek toward the flat.
The detector’s globe of radiance slowly expanded, spitting tell-tale sparks and flashes as the sharply defined sphere of light brushed the treads of the stair, or the wall, or the corner of Meralda’s instrument bag. Meralda watched and smiled, heartened by the detector’s seeming eagerness to reach the flat. She knew until the spells were latched to the Tower the glows and sparks were nothing more than random trace events. Still, though, she was glad for any sign the spells were still active.
Scritch, scrape, scritch, scrape. Even the thunder wasn’t enough to mask the lonely sounds of Meralda’s slow progress up the winding stair. Determined to reach the halfway point to the first floor landing before changing her bag strap to the other shoulder, Meralda set her jaw and kept a steady pace.
The darkness grew about her, made even darker and much larger when the Tower floor vanished, and Meralda once again had the sensation of walking up the walls of the night. Shadows danced on the wall beside her, causing Meralda to force her eyes strictly upon the stairs ahead. “I will not be spooked,” she said aloud, her voice quickly lost to the grumbling thunder.
Still, shadows flew, and the whirls and flashes from the detector’s slowly expanding sphere of influence only added to their brief dances. Just like in the stories, thought Meralda. No wonder the mages of old preferred to leave the Tower alone.
A few had dared the dark, though. Meralda pulled down every musty old tome in the laboratory the night before, while her new illuminator spells were building, and for the first time she’d read through the books with an eye for tales of the darker shadow said to lurk in the heart of the Tower.
“We saw a Flitting shape,” wrote one mage, the ink of his scribbled words faded and flaking. “And Heard sudden cruel Laughter, and then our Spelles of Warding were broken, and Fire rolled Down the staire, and we fled, and None of the Guard will go back, not even for their Swords.”
Meralda guessed she was halfway to the first floor landing, and she halted long enough to shift the bag strap to her right shoulder. This put the bag on her right, and forced her to walk a step closer to the dark than before.
“We saw a Flitting shape,” she’d read, and the words now danced in her mind. “Flitting Shape, wrathful Spectre, gruesome hollow Man.” Tale after tale, mage after mage. They’d all used different words to describe the Tower shade, but their stories were always the same.
The shade appears, ward spells go awry, guards and mages take to their heels. Meralda had found eight such encounters, spread out over four centuries, in less than an hour of reading. Immediately, she had seen a pattern of ghostly encounters emerge.
Mages with spells enter the Tower. What mages, with what spells, for what purpose-none of these things seemed to matter. Meralda suspected the mere act of hauling major unlatched spellworks into the Tower was enough to stir the shade.
And the shade, once stirred, soon appears. It allows itself to be seen, or be heard, or both. And then it attacks ward spells or spellworks, and in doing so it frightens the intruders away, generally for decades to come.
Meralda had wondered why Fromarch and Shingvere never saw the shade, until she realized that Fromarch had insisted they convey no unlatched spells within the Tower. The scrying mirrors, the lookabout staves, the sixteen pieces of Ovaro’s Image Capture Box, all were passive spellworks, firmly latched to mechanisms carried in from the laboratory. True, Fromarch had latched a few see-you spells to the Tower proper, which would have alerted them to any sneaky mortal intruders. But they had been tiny spells, hand cast, on the last days of their search. Perhaps, thought Meralda, hand cast spells simply aren’t worthy of the shade’s horrific attention.