“Those light the warning beacons,” I explained quickly. Each of the towers, both those of Castle Cameron and those of the town walls, had a large glass sphere mounted atop their tower roofs. “This one turns the signal on and makes the color a bright blue,” I said pointing to the left most of the bottom three symbols. “The middle one sets it to yellow and the one on the right is for barrier around the entire town and the castle. The next one down just sets it around the castle proper and it’s more powerful in that configuration… less area to cover.”
“What are those two?” she asked, pointing to the two I hadn’t mentioned yet.
“Those open the barrier in one of two places, either the city gate or the castle courtyard gate, without removing the main portion of the barrier,” I answered. “That way you can…”
“…let in refugees without dropping the defenses entirely,” Elaine finished for me. Although she was bright, and a quick learner; her tendency to jump ahead was occasionally annoying. “How will you know if something tries to slip in with them?” she added.
“Here,” I told her, pointing to another rune. “This one activates the window near the city gate, and this other one does the same near the castle gate.” I turned them on to illustrate the point.
“But they are so small, how would you… oh!” she remarked, cutting off her statement abruptly.
“Were you about to ask how we would see well through such a small window?” I said with a faint smile.
She nodded. “Yes but I can see now, when the portal windows are open, more than just light passes. I can sense everything beyond the glass, just as though I were standing behind a regular window.”
Walter spoke then, “That’s right, and so long as the glass remains intact, it will function that way, but remember that magic will pass both ways. If you open it and you sense something powerful, such as one of the gods, you must close it immediately, as well as the barrier; otherwise you risk yourself along with our defenses.”
“Yes, of course Father,” Elaine replied demurely, though I could tell the advice annoyed her. If she had been a teenager, she might have rolled her eyes… fortunately she was older than that.
“Needless to say,” I said, breaking the tension, “you are only to use this room if I am away and your father isn’t present. You already know the rules for determining whether we will use the red, yellow, or blue signal, but in my absence it is quite simple. If any of the gods show up while I am away, it should be red… immediate evacuation. If it is only one and you think the barrier will hold for a while you might use yellow to allow more time for an orderly evacuation but if there is any doubt don’t risk it.”
“I understand,” she replied smoothly, her attitude with me was much more deferential. I wondered if I would have similar problems someday with my own daughters. Imagining Moira’s sweet smile and eager to please demeanor, I couldn’t believe it. Surely not, I told myself.
“From here I think the only things we need to worry about are the preparations for the festival. We’ve done as much as we can to prepare for the worst, and we should have almost a week after the festival before they arrive,” I told them both.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to enjoy myself with a sword hanging over our necks,” commented Walter.
“You can manage! I for one intend to enjoy the dancing,” Elaine said with enthusiasm. “No sense in worrying over things we can’t change.”
Inwardly I agreed with her, but I had a feeling I would still have the same problem as Walter.
The next few days went by uneventfully, and despite my fears I could find little else to do to prepare. I had been preparing for years already. Instead, I used some of the time to work on the glass mirror that Gram and Matthew had inadvertently broken.
It was still two days from the festival as I stared at the glass fragments I had spread out upon the worktable in front of me. I was a bit frustrated already, for I had been staring at them for some time. My first effort had been to organize the pieces by shape and size, and somehow begin fusing them back together. That hadn’t worked at all.
While I could easily fuse any two pieces together, they weren’t necessarily the ‘right’ two pieces. They were so small and so many that I had little hope of fitting them back together as they had been originally. “I might as well just melt all the glass down and create an entirely new mirror from it then,” I said aloud to myself. I didn’t really want to do that though; my intention was to restore the mirror to its former state, complete with any flaws or imperfections that had made it a keepsake.
I took a deep breath and tried to relax. No good would come from beating my head against the wall. After a time I let my mind wander a bit, and I realized that I could hear the tiny voices of the pieces of glass. Now that it was shattered, each shard had its own unique voice. Focusing on them was merely a matter of patience and practice. Compared to their tiny songs, the beat of the earth was like a massive drum and the sky outside sounded like a rushing river.
Of course none of these were true ‘sounds’, but that is the only way I can describe them. Along with those, I could also hear the faintly disturbing melody of what I had come to think of as ‘death’ underlying the others, much like a counterpoint to the song of the rest of the world. Why couldn’t I hear it before? I wondered. It was only since rescuing Walter’s spirit from the void that I had begun to hear it running alongside all the other voices of the world.
Turning away from that topic, I focused again on the tiny shards of glass that lay before me, concentrating on their small harmonies. At first they were all separate, but as I let my attention drift, they began to come into focus as pieces of a more elaborate harmony. Perhaps I could ‘convince’ them to resume their former condition…
That was a dangerous thought, especially since I had once again given Elaine the day off. I wasn’t supposed to exercise my abilities as an archmage without someone keeping an eye on me. Still, this couldn’t hurt much. I won’t go far, I assured myself.
With that, I opened myself to the wider influence of the crystalline melodies that lay across the surface of my work table. Keeping myself tightly anchored, I joined the tiny glass songs to my own and slowly began coaxing them into returning to their former state. The effort, though small, took intense concentration, and my sense of time rapidly faded while my consciousness grew ever more ordered.
An observer watching me would have seen the fragments slowly rearranging themselves, moving and locking into place with each other. That same observer would probably have become bored, for while I had lost my perception of time, hours slipped by unnoticed as Penny’s mirror gradually reformed.
Eventually, I was almost done, but I was having trouble remembering what the word meant precisely. For that matter, I was no longer sure exactly why I was doing what I was… I frowned and a memory appeared; that of a woman’s face. I forced myself to focus upon the memory, for I felt instinctively that it held the clue to my reason for being there.
The woman’s eyes were dark brown, and her hair fell around her in heavy brown curls. In appearance she was much like Penny. Penny? For a moment I struggled to remember the significance of that name. Penny! That’s her mother… I must have dredged up a memory of her from our childhood. With the memories I found it easier to withdraw from the work at hand, but not before finishing; and as I coaxed the last few pieces into place a stroke of inspiration hit me.