All The Turns of Light (17 page)

“Even dead, I never get tired of this place,” said Tim—Timea, really—the Horsehead, who was seated in Meralda’s chair with her decidedly undainty boots propped on Meralda’s desk. “I see you’ve kept the place in good shape. Well, my portrait is gone, but I can’t blame you much there. I was never overly fond of it myself.”

“It’s on permanent display in the Museum of Arts and History,” Meralda said, surprised at how calm she sounded. “Am I dreaming?” Meralda asked.

“Not at all,” said Tim. “You’re in Tirlin. But only briefly. You are in grave peril, Mage Ovis. As are we all.”

Meralda shivered, remembering the letter blocks in Phillitrep’s Engine spelling out FINAL COSMIC EVENT.

“I was afraid you were going to say something like that,” she said.

“Necessity often makes for awkward conversation. By the way, I’m Tim and male from now on. Even dead, some of my associates are quite pigheaded in their sexist beliefs, so let’s keep my gender a secret for another few centuries, shall we?” said Tim, who gazed off into the shadowed ranks of the shelves and whistled. “You lot! She’s here. We don’t have all day, you know.”

Shadows moved in the dark. Five robed figures quickly emerged from the ranks of shelves.

“Allow me to introduce my companions,” said Tim. “Mage Amorp. Mage Callen. Mages Stripple, Haggart, and Bend.”

The dark figures bowed, but did not uncover their faces.

“I’m honored,” Meralda said. “Your names live on.”

The hoods dipped, and Tim whinnied softly. “A grim shadow, moving quickly, briefly cast its face over the heart of Tirlin,” said Tim. “We sense you are a great distance from home. Over the Great Sea, perhaps?”

“Nearly halfway across it,” Meralda said. “How did you bring me here?”

The robed shades chuckled. “Shelf two hundred,” said one. “Row eighty-six.”

“There’s no such shelf,” Meralda said.

“Oh, but there is,” replied a gruff male voice. “Only a few can find it. If you make it home, seek it out. Lots of surprises stored there. Nearly halfway across the Sea, you say? How did you manage that?”

“An airship,” Meralda replied.

Whispers rose up from the hooded figures, too soft for Meralda to understand.

“It is as we feared,” said Tim. “There is a name for what we all sensed. I will speak it only once, and you must not repeat it here.
Kuhat vulung
. The words are Vonat for black destroyer, or black death.”

“Of course they are,” Meralda said.
I wonder,
she thought.
Do the Vonats even have words for flowers, or smiles?
“You say it just passed over Tirlin? As in flew?”

Tim nodded. “It made haste east, toward the Sea.”

“Then how are you too in peril?” Meralda asked. “Especially considering your, um, postmortem nature.”

“If the black destroyer is loose upon the Realms, everything is in danger,” replied Tim. “That is our reason for emerging from the shadows. We came to give you a gift, Mage Ovis. But know this—there is division of opinion in our ranks. The Mages with me believe the gift is either allied with the danger you face, or even the source of it. My beliefs are contrary to this. You must decide whether to accept our gift or reject it.”

“This gift,” Meralda said. “What is it?”

“We do not know,” said a gruff voice, from behind Tim the Horsehead. “It’s older than Tirlin. Older than the Realms.”

“We tried to determine its age,” said another. “The results were different each attempt.”

“It’s not from this plane of existence,” added a third. “By the time I studied it, it had begun to move from the realm of the living to that of Shadow.” This speaker lowered his hood revealing a bushy white beard, a bald head, and a wide white moustache. “Amorp is the name, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Meralda said. “May I see this thing?”

“You may,” said Tim. “But to do so, you will have to walk with us. Just a short distance, into Shadow.”

“You mean the realm of the dead,” Meralda said.

“Some call it that,” replied Tim. “We can keep you safe, for a time. Sadly, there is no other way, or we would not ask such a thing.”

“I counsel against it,” said the shade of Amorp. “Know this, young woman. No one enters Shadow without peril. Even those few who enter and manage to leave will be marked by the journey. Stained, some would say.”

Meralda smiled. “Are there sea monsters in this place you call Shadow?” she asked.

Tim whinnied. “No. Other things, but no sea monsters.”

“Then let’s go,” Meralda said, smiling at Amorp. “Shadow sounds like a nice change of pace from the places I’ve already been this week.”

Tim nodded and gestured, and a wide column of impenetrable darkness rose slowly up from the Laboratory’s floor and vanished into the ceiling.

“This is the door to Shadow,” said Tim, great equine eyes sad. “Conceal yourself, as we do.”

She rose from the desk and handed Meralda a folded bolt of cloth.

Meralda took it, inspected it, and felt her face flush red.

“This is a bed sheet,” she said.

“We took the liberty of cutting out eyeholes,” said Tim, cheerfully.

“This is
my
bed sheet,” Meralda added. “Taken from
my
hall closet.”

“Well of course it is,” Amorp said, pausing at the edge of the column of darkness and unfolding a white sheet of his own. “None of us have fussed with laundry since we died. Put it on. Or would you rather fight your way through a finite but certainly quite large number of furious vengeful shades?”

The white-haired ghost pulled the sheet over his head and adjusted his eyeholes. “I’ll go on ahead,” he said. Then he met Meralda’s eyes and shook his sheet-covered finger at her. “Remember what I said about entering Shadow, young lady. Stained I said, and stained I meant. Have a care, Mage. This is no game of riddles. Boo.” He stepped into the column of darkness and vanished.

“I know, I know, it’s daft as a bucket of weasels,” said Tim, raising her hands in supplication. “But we didn’t have time for anything more dignified. The lesser shades are more boo than brains, and we all managed to troop over here wearing bed sheets, and we’re running out of time. So put it on and lie about the whole thing later, if there is a later. Claim we clothed ourselves in slightly damp burial shrouds. The eyes go in the front.”

“This is ludicrous,” Meralda said, as one by one the shades of the Mages draped themselves in her good bed linens and disappeared into the shaft of Shadow.

“You’d be amazed by just how much of history is ludicrous,” said Tim, as she pulled her own sheet over her head. “Think about how I feel. I’m a ghost woman pretending to be a ghost man. I have the head of a horse and I’m wearing a bed. Funny old thing, life, even after it’s over it seldom makes much sense. Are you coming or not?”

Meralda yanked the sheet around until she could see through the holes, and then she took Tim’s hand and marched into the dark.

* * *

There was darkness at every hand. No moon, no stars, no streetlamps, not a candle to be seen.

The ground beneath Meralda’s feet was littered with debris. She felt sticks break beneath her soles, heard them crackle like dry kindling, heard faint cries rise with her every step.

“If I discover I am treading on a field of brittle bones,” she said aloud, “I will deem that melodramatic.”

She heard Tim’s neighing laughter. “The denizens of Shadow are often unsubtle,” Tim said. “Ignore them.”

The crackling beneath Meralda’s feet ceased, but before she’d taken another step bony hands beckoned from the darkness, crooking their pale fingers in invitation. “Come to us,” said the voices. “Still warm! Come to us!”

Tim neighed. Lazy lightning played above her head, sending the phantoms reeling and remaining to cast a dim glow from above.

The landscape was barren, but the gentle rise and fall of the land was oddly familiar.

As Meralda’s eyes adjusted, she made out a tall, squat shape looming in the distance, black against the starless dark sky, and she realized she was seeing the Tower in the Park and seeing it as if Tirlin’s lanes and buildings were removed, or had never been built in the first place.

“Welcome to Shadow,” said a voice. “Come and see! Come and see!”

“Walk with us,” said another. “Safe you will be! Safe you will be!”

“Oh, shut up,” Meralda said. “I’ve seen more frightening apparitions on the back covers of two-penny horror novels.”

The Mages chuckled. “It isn’t far,” said Tim.

“Is that really the Tower?” asked Meralda.

“One aspect of it, yes,” said Tim. “The Tower is a complex structure. As we all are, ultimately.”

A translucent female figure floated at Meralda’s side. It turned its hollow eyes on her, and moaned. “He doesn’t love you,” it said, its voice a dry rasp. “He will never love you.”

“Begone,” shouted Tim. For the first time, Meralda heard a faint trace of femininity in Tim’s voice.

Tim whirled and pointed at the shade. “Begone, or feel my wrath!”

The phantom shrieked and rose up into the black sky, still wailing.

“Was that rude creature once a living person?” asked Meralda.

“Probably not,” replied Tim. “We believe such things are merely the doubts and fears the living bring to life by dwelling upon them. They, at least, are easily dismissed.”

More filmy, wavering phantoms gathered at the edges of the light, but Meralda ignored them until she and the Mages reached the foot of the Tower.

The Tower stood open. But whereas the Tower in Tirlin was dark inside, this Tower glowed with a cool dim light that radiated from the walls.

The Mages filed inside, forming a circle with their backs against Tower’s curved walls. Tim took her place in the middle of the open doorway, and motioned for Meralda to stand in the center of the chamber.

“Behold,” said Tim. “Tower, if you please?”

The air before Meralda sparkled. She fought the urge to step back away from the space.

“It takes a moment,” said Amorp. “Ah, here it comes.”

The sparkling became a solid shaft of light, and then a flash.

Meralda stared. Hanging in the air before her was a twisting, writhing, funnel-shaped vortex, wide at the top and vanishing into a point at the bottom. It was so tall Meralda could barely see over the top, and so dark it exuded a dimness into the air a foot on every side.

“What is it?” Some portion of her words seemed to be sucked away by the vortex.

“We could postulate this, or hypothesize that, but the truth is we simply don’t know,” said Tim. “A few Mages, over the centuries, were able to exert brief instances of control over it. There is immeasurable arcane power within its heart. Not surprising, as it was buried beneath Tower by Otrinvion the Black himself.”

Meralda forced her eyes away from the spiraling darkness.

“Why do you believe I need this?” she asked.

“The black death is loose,” said Tim. “Doom lies ahead. That much we agree on. Someone—you, we believe—will face a threat like no other ever imagined. The Vonats have released something so terrible it cast a shadow over the land of the dead, and lass, that’s no easy feat.”

“And you believe this thing, this vortex, can defend us? How?”

“He doesn’t know,” said Amorp. “None of us do. Yes, old Otrinvion created it, and it’s a safe assumption it’s a weapon. But that’s all it is -- an assumption. Hmph.”

Tim the Horsehead shrugged. “True. Still, I can’t think of a better instance in which to have at one’s disposal a limitless volume of arcane energy. And none of us can think of a Mage better suited to wield it.”

Meralda blushed. “You overestimate my skills,” she said.

“We do not. But hear me, Mage Ovis. This could as easily be your doom as your potential salvation. We are but shades. Our view of the living world is blurred and dim at best. Whether you should take this up, or leave it be, that must be your decision.”

“Why have I never heard of this before?” asked Meralda.

“Because you aren’t dead,” replied Tim. “It was a state secret in Amorp’s time, and faded from the world of the living shortly after that. If you are prepared to try and take control of it here, in Shadow, you might retain control of it in the living world as well.”

“If you survive the attempt,” said Amorp. “I certainly didn’t.”

“If I do try to take hold of it,” Meralda said, “how would I carry it back to the world?”

“We’re not sure you can,” said Tim. “But I believe the mere act of absorbing it will suggest a means to retain it. You could perhaps return here, for instance, and wield it from here. Either in a dream-walk, or by the more direct means, although we hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Meralda hesitated.

“Objects have been materializing around me, through no effort on my part,” she said. “Do you know anything about that?”

Something like distant thunder rolled past, filling the empty black sky.