Thaddeus and I did not speak on our way through the streets of Hermoine. The tower was squat, decrepit, wearing its deceitful face of neglect. But I could feel the truth; as we approached, I began to see the darkness spreading out like a pool from the door. Thaddeus waded into without even noticing. I stopped with the darkness coiling around my ankles and watched, unable either to force myself to follow him or to call his back. The darkness rose to his calves, his thighs, his ribs. He was neck deep in it when he reached the door and turned to look back.
"Well? Are you coming?"
I almost said,
Don't talk! You'll swallow darkness
. But I could hearing my own head how mad that
sounded. I stepped forward.
The darkness was dry and cold and heavy without having any weight I felt it on my skin; my clothing was no protection. Thaddeus said, "The ground isn't going to open up and swallow you, so you can quit walking like a cat on eggshells." He took the key to the tower out of his coat pocket and fitted it in the lock.
Everything became very still, as if the tower were holding its breath. It had been deserted for two hundred years, left to its shadows and cobwebs and dust—and the thing that watched me in my dreams. I realized, as Thaddeus muttered in Midlander and applied magic to the corroded mechanism of the lock, that the tower had been influenced by its inhabitant, as any object was influenced by the magic that moved through it. The stones of the tower partook of that watching spirit and shared of its darkness.
A bright blue spark arced out from the key, and it revolved obediently in the lock.
"Ha!" said Thaddeus and pulled the door open. The hinges howled with rust, and the door juddered to a halt only half-open. Darkness poured out, engulfing us both, and on the instant it disappeared, although I could still feel it whispering against my skin.
"Come on," Thaddeus said, calling witchlight, and stepped through the door. I understood suddenly why he had agreed to bring me here; it meant that he was the first person into the tower. Vicky would be asking his opinion on the repairs needed, the tower's suitability for what they meant to do. I remembered how greatly it had chafed at Thaddeus not to be appointed to the Curia, how bitter he had been in the months before he had gotten the position in Aurelias, that Vida and I had been chosen—and not only was I the youngest member of the Curia by nearly ten years, but everyone in the Mirador knew how much Stephen hated me—and he, Thaddeus de Lalage, had been rejected. I knew how close it had come to poisoning his love for Vida. He needed to feel important, needed to have power. All wizards were like that to some extent, but in few of them was it the parched craving that it was in Thaddeus.
I followed him into the tower and found myself in a narrow staircase between the stones of the outer wall on my right and a wooden interior wall on my left. The wood was in better shape than I had expected—no sign of termites or worms—and, I thought, there won't be any spiders, either. Nothing living. I followed the dim blue glow of Thaddeus's witchlights up and around, past doors in the inner wall that he did not stop to try. The wizard's workroom, the room the Cabalines needed, would be at the top of the tower, where there was the cleanest meeting of the stones raised from the earth and the vast power of the sky.
The staircase ended in a trapdoor. It wasn't bolted, and Thaddeus did not need magic to shove it open. We climbed into the workroom.
There wasn't any dust.
I stayed by the trapdoor as Thaddeus prowled around. The room was circular, bare, strewn with bits of glass from the broken windows. The floor was marked in places, where heavy furniture had once stood, and there was a red circle still visible under the apex of the roof, as if it had been drawn so many times that it could not be erased. My gaze kept returning to it; even if the floor caved in, I thought, that circle would still be there, drawn on nothing but the air.
Thaddeus was examining the windows. I was drawn, step by step, across the floor to the circle. I could not tell, now, if it was my need for knowledge that drove me or the hunger of the thing that infected this tower.
The circle was six feet in diameter; the dim, blurry line that marked it was two inches wide. I could not
tell what it had been drawn with, chalk or paint or something else; there was only redness left, ingrained in the ancient gray boards of the floor, dustless, waiting.
I stepped into the circle.
With the suddenness of a blink, the room changed. The marks on the floor were concealed by the furniture that had made them. There was a long table to the right of the trapdoor and an enormous, looming cabinet, my height or better, fitted with an array of small drawers, its clawed feet tensing into the floor. And there was a long, low chest, under the window where Thaddeus had been standing a moment ago, with cushions on it so that it could be used as a couch. Right now, there was a woman sitting there, dressed like a man. She had a solemn, horsey face and wore her coarse brown hair braided around her head. She seemed to be staring at me, but after a panic-stricken moment, I realized she was looking at some thing behind me, and I turned around.
The man standing there, gems flashing on his fingers as his hands moved, was clearly explaining something to the woman: teaching. Unlike her baggy laborer's clothing, his clothes were silk and velvet. His black hair, streaked with silver, hung in lovelocks to his shoulders; his eyes were dark and very bright. Despite the silver in his hair, he was very young maybe no more than two or three years older than I, very little older than the woman. She was his student, she was a stronger wizard than he, and she would not sleep with him. I could see all these things in the way he looked at her.
I knew that in this one scene I was witnessing months of interactions months of the woman's self-evident excellence, months of her sublime indifference to any aspect of her teacher's personality save his ability to tell her what she wanted to know. Months—or perhaps years—of his knowing that she would be leaving, that she would find a better master who could teach her more, that he himself would be stuck in this squat, ugly tower in this backwater town until his brains rotted and dribbled out his ears. Most wizards would insist, sincerely and desperately, that they were above the feelings that such reflections stirred in the human breast. Probably the black-haired wizard would once have said so himself.
The scene changed. Now it was night in the tower; lit candles stood on every flat surface. The black-haired wizard was alone. There were books open on the table, diagrams scrawled on scraps of paper, chalked on the plaster of the walls. Although his school of magic was largely foreign to me, I could tell that the spell was too big for him, that his resentment and anger and bitterness had driven him to magics better left alone, that his gnawing sense of inferiority was pushing him to attempt a working he knew he could not control.
He spoke a word, which penetrated the circle and the barriers of time; I heard it with an awful clarity, and I knew it was the name of the thing he summoned, the thing that still watched in the tower, the thing that was not alive:
fantôme.
I did not know the word
fantôme
, although it was Marathine. Much of the study of necromancy had been lost when the Cabal declared necromancy a heresy and started burning books. But I did not need to know what a fantôme was to know that the black-haired wizard was making a terrible mistake. No, I said, although I knew he couldn't hear me; I didn't hear myself. Don't do it.
The black-haired wizard stepped into the circle. I edged aside, even though he could not feel me. He was chanting, and I could see the light in his rings.. I felt the thing, the fantôme, coming into being; it was like a miasma in the circle. It stank of rotting lilacs, and I no longer wondered that spiders and rats would flee it. The wizard extended his hands, palms up, and the dim, shining sludge of the fantôme flowed into them. He shut his eyes for a moment, staggering; when he opened them again, I saw the fantôme like a sheen of oil on his irises. Together, wizard and fantôme, they stepped out of the circle. I watched as they crossed the room to the trapdoor, descended out of sight. I knew where they were going, and when they reappeared with the woman slung over their shoulder, I was not surprised. They threw her down in the circle. I tried to move out of the way, but found I could not cross the boundary and was forced to stand with my feet in hers. The wizard was giggling to himself—or perhaps it was the fantôme, since I could hear it, just at the edges of my hearing, a faint, whispering, grating sound. He got a knife and a stick of chalk; I watched as he chalked signs around the woman, and then on her forehead and on her palms. She woke up before he was done and tried to move, but the fantôme's power held her, and she could do no more than twitch. She spoke to him, I thought, but I did not know what she said. All I could hear was that terrible chittering, the fantôme bubbling over with delight.
And when his preparations were made, the wizard butchered his student, and the fantôme fed on her pain and fear, fed on her death and her magic. I watched her blood as it spread across the floor; when it encountered the chalked sigils around the circle, it flowed into their shapes. From them, it flowed into the circle itself, until I was standing inside a ring of blood, and now I knew why that circle could not be eradicated. Even the teachings of the Cabal admitted that workings with blood were powerful beyond the strength of the caster. That was one reason they were forbidden.
I could feel the fantôme's power growing; when the ritual was done, the woman dead, the wizard no longer controlled what he had called, if ever he had. He could not banish it, and the shine in the wizard's eyes was the shine of madness and death and blackest despair.
I watched helplessly as he gathered her body together and left the room, watched helplessly as he returned. I could feel the struggle between them, fantôme and wizard; it made the air thick, viscous. I thought I would choke on the stench of rotted lilacs. The wizard crossed the room, one stiff step at a time; he stopped in front of the chest where I had first seen the woman sitting. He climbed up on it, although the power of the fantôme nearly dragged him off backwards. But there was a difference between magic and will, and the fantôme had no magic of its own with which to compel him; it only had the thunderous, beating force of its will. And I had seen in his eyes when he came back up the stairs that there was nothing it could offer him, no power, no glory, that would mean anything.
He shoved both hands through the window glass. There was a terrible moment when he wobbled on the chest, and the fantôme nearly succeeded in forcing him back down into the room, and then he threw himself through the window, headfirst.
There was an endless howling moment of blackness, and then I was snapped back into the present day, where Thaddeus was turning from the window—the window the black-haired wizard had just thrown himself out of—and I was standing in a faded, innocuous circle.
…
fantôme
… said the breeze through the broken window, and I smelled rotting lilacs.
I screamed, and bolted out of the circle.
"What in the seven names of God?" said Thaddeus, but I could feel the fantôme in the air of the room, could feel its hunger, and the unerring eye of a predator for weak prey. And I could no more shut it out than that broken window could shut out the wind. The fantôme was gathering itself out of the dustless air, marshaling its strength, and then it would walk in and claim whatever there was to be found.
I would have screamed again, but I couldn't catch my breath. I flung myself, scrambling, scrabbling, at the stairs, and did not fall headfirst down them only by luck, an outflung hand that caught the far edge of the opening and steadied me long enough that my feet got under me.
Thaddeus was shouting behind me as I ran down the stairs, but I did not heed him. The fantôme was bounded by the same working that gave it strength. That ring of blood held it in that room, confined it to the tower; it could not follow me out the door and into the deserted square, where I slumped to my knees, panting, almost sobbing for breath, my heart beating in my chest like a terrified bird.
I heard Thaddeus slam the door of the tower. The tide of his contempt and disgust swept ahead of him; I understood that he found my madness revolting, as if I were masturbating in public. The color was a sullen, lurid yellow, the color of bile.
I wanted to cry out,
I'm not doing it on purpose
! but I choked the words back. Instead, I got to my feet again, so that by the time Thaddeus ached me and had come around to stand in front of me, I was at least not on my knees like a penitent slave.
"God, Felix, what is
wrong
with you?" Thaddeus demanded, his words like hammers. He wanted an apology, an admission of weakness and wrongdoing.
"It's a fantôme," I said. "The thing… in the workroom—it was called up by the last wizard who used the tower, and when he couldn't get rid of it he threw himself out the window, and it's still—"
Thaddeus hit me.
It was an open-handed blow, but hard enough to stagger me. When I touched my mouth, my fingers came away bloody; I had bitten my lip.
"Shut up," Thaddeus said.
"But, Thaddeus—"
"I said, shut up!" I flinched, dropping my gaze, and I felt his disgusted satisfaction as clearly as if he'd hit me again. "I've had enough of these pathetic efforts at sabotage—you leave me no choice but to tell Lady Victoria."
"Sabotage? Why would I…"
The look in his eyes was all the answer I needed, but he said, "I have wondered if you were as unwilling to be Malkar's tool as you claim. And this farrago about a monster in the tower… You haven't done much damage to our mission yet, and I intend to see you don't get the chance."
"You think I… you think Malkar… you're crazier than I am!"