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.
The detector weighed heavy in Meralda’s hand. And here I go alone, she thought, to latch a major spellwork to the heart of the Tower itself.
“Vonashon, empalos, endera.” Meralda recalled the words, and that awful face. Walk away.Good advice, it seems, she thought. I only wish I could. “Perhaps the guilds are hiring,” she muttered to the dark.
The detector flashed suddenly, and Meralda started and gasped. But the light settled back to its normal steady cast, and Meralda took a deep breath and continued her climb.
The sphere of light cast by the detector had expanded to engulf all of the handle and Meralda’s hand and half her forearm. Grateful for the extra light, Meralda held the half-globe close to the stair, and wondered if the shade was curious about what she carried.
The shade, thought Meralda. Well, there, I’ve said it, even if only to myself. But I can hardly deny it any longer. Something here, in the dark, is watching me. Has been watching me since the day I first set foot in the hall.
The light from her magelamp caught the seamless black ceiling of the first floor, not fifty hands above. Meralda quickened her pace, well aware that she was no closer to daylight, but eager to quit the darkness below and see a floor under her feet, if only for a moment.
First floor, second floor, third floor at last. Meralda stopped, mopped sweat from her forehead, and let her bag drop to the stair.
Both shoulders ached, bruised by the bag strap. Her arms were weary from the weight of the detector, which now glowed bright as a magelamp and sent worms of cold blue fire wriggling and crawling across those parts of the Tower it touched.
“Not much farther,” she said aloud, swapping the bag strap from left to right and wincing as she hefted the bag again. “Good thing, too.”
She resumed her climb. Shadows still darted about her, but not so near, now that the detector’s glow had engulfed her. She could sense the ward spell passing occasionally, but it never ventured close or lingered too long.
Still, Meralda was wary. It’s just about this point, she thought, that most of the mages of old ran into the shade. High on the stair, nowhere to hide, nothing to do but make a mad dash downward for the hall and the park. She shuddered at the thought of running any distance down the narrow winding stair.
Soon, though, the magelamp’s light washed over the final ceiling, and then caught the tarnished brass door knob of the plain wooden door set in the upright notch at the top of the stair. Meralda found herself, if not exactly dashing, at least walking briskly the last hundred treads to the flat. As if by hurrying she could somehow miss the sudden awful appearance of the shade of dread Otrinvion.
At the door, she dropped her bag and the detector on the tread behind her and fumbled in her pockets for the key.
It wasn’t there.
At her back, she felt the darkness gather.
She put the magelamp under her chin, bent her head forward, and held the cold lamp tight against her neck while she used both hands to search her pockets. I put it in my right skirt pocket before I left for the park, she thought. I know I did.
Thunder broke, and rolled in echoes through the dark, and Meralda was overwhelmed by the sensation that if she were to turn, if she were to face the stair, something would be standing there, just past the glow of the detector. Wrathful Spectre, she thought, and shivered. A gruesome hollow man, waiting for her to turn so it could open its awful mad eyes and split its rotted face with a wide and hungry smile.
Handkerchiefs, ward wands, an old pair of theatre tickets, fused into a smooth mass of paper pulp by the wash. Then her right hand closed on cold, smooth iron, and she pulled the flat key from her blouse pocket, thrust it hard in the door, gave the key a savage twist, and shoved.