CHAPTER 11: LESSONS FROM THE DEAD

  Dust spun lazily in the thin shafts of light from the narrow windows above, catching on the rise and fall of their breaths. Irena’s head still swam; her muscles ached from holding the spell for so long. Lira knelt beside her, hands braced on the floor, staring at the new chamber in awe.

  It waited for them.

  Irena pushed herself up, slowly. Her legs trembled, but they held. She offered Lira a hand. Lira took it, let Irena haul her upright, then lingered close at her side.

  Bookcases hugged the curved outer wall. Leather spines and bundled folios sagged the shelves. Scroll-cases sat in neat rows inside built niches, each one capped with a stamped sigil. Long tables stood scattered across the space, crowded with apparatus: glass coils and retorts, brass frames fitted with lenses, metal arms ending in delicate claws. Heavy chests squatted between them, iron bands dark with age but unbroken.

  Pale discs sat embedded in the stone like little moons, set into the floor, sunk at the bases of pillars, and ringed around the room at shoulder height. Crisp geometric sigils covered each disc, far more intricate than the rough ward-marks downstairs. When Irena stared too long, the patterns tugged at the corner of her mind, as if they wanted to turn over and show her another face.

  Her heart hammered as she turned on the spot and drank it in.

  There were no dust-sheets thrown over abandoned furniture. No broken locks. No crowbar marks. No careless boot prints and haphazard looting. Baron Caldar Brennec’s men had never reached this floor. It was untouched.

  “This is…” Irena’s voice trembled. She cleared her throat and forced herself to speak up. “This is it. This is what we came for.”

  Lira’s gaze skittered over shelves, chests, and strange tools. Her hands worked together nervously, as if half-expecting something to jump out at her. Then she fixed her attention on the device at the centre of the room.

  It stood on a waist-high plinth, round and robust, where the rest of the tower wore the softened curves of age. Rings of engraved metal wrapped its circumference. Crystals were mounted upon it as a crown, clear and coloured, each seated in a track or socket. It resembled something between an armillary sphere and a chandelier, and its construction was utterly alien to Irena, except for where she could recognise the careful smith-marks cut into its steely frame.

  Irena took one step toward it and stopped. The hairs on her arms prickled.

  That force again. The air felt… charged. Like the still tension between plucking a string and releasing it. Not the simple, elemental chill of the perimeter ward or the sealed lower passageway. This felt more refined. She was almost sure of it. A different kind of magic.

  “Your Highness?” Lira whispered.

  “I do not know,” Irena said. “Some sort of… magical mechanism. A machine. Like the Nesstriean relics.” She realised Lira might not understand and turned towards her. “It is—”

  Lira was not there.

  Lira should have stayed back. Stayed beside Irena. She had spent her life cleaning around fragile things that shattered if touched the wrong way.

  Instead, wonder buoyed her, and their shared success pushed her forward.

  “I can feel it,” Lira murmured, half to herself. “Like at the door…”

  She hovered her fingers above one of the crystals, hesitated, then brushed it with the lightest touch. Something deep inside the mechanism clicked, soft and metallic, and irrevocable now that it had begun. A crystal slid along its track with a smooth motion and locked into place, as if it had waited years for that exact nudge.

  “Lira—” Irena began, shocked and, annoyingly, impressed by the boldness of the halfling.

  The room hummed.

  The vibration started in the stone under their feet and climbed into the air, making the dust motes tremble. The pale discs in the walls brightened a shade, not flaring but waking, like eyes opening. Light gathered above the plinth and pooled in mid-air: first a vague glow, then a blur, then lines.

  A head took shape in the glow.

  Oh, Irena thought dazedly, he looks exactly like a child’s storybook wizard.

  A floating bust resolved above the plinth, rendered in soft, wavering light, from chest to crown. Age carved him. He did not have the airs of an elderly courtier, preserved by powders and lotions. He was instead old in the honest way, with skin seamed with deep lines, nose hooked, cheeks hollowed by time. His beard poured from his chin in a wild cataract of white, forked at the ends like it could not decide which direction to grow. A tremendous moustache flared over his mouth, its ends curling up as if they moved by their own design. His eyebrows formed beasts of their own, prancing and leaping over eyes that shone with a sharp, restless intelligence. His robes were heavy with stitched sigils, high-collared and layered, the translucent projection possessing resolution enough to read as an impression of cloth. As the image solidified, pomp settled into his demeanour, and self-delight oozed from him.

  Lira gave a strangled yelp and darted behind Irena, clutching at her sleeve with both hands. “It’s him,” she blurted, terrified. “It’s him, it’s his ghost, we woke him—”

  The apparition’s eyes did not swing toward them. Instead, the head tipped back a fraction on a neck made of light, and the voice boomed through the chamber with practised projection:

  “At last,” he declaimed, “one who is not entirely witless has found their way here.”

  His moustache flared dramatically. His eyebrows surged and dipped in emphatic waves. Half-formed hands lifted at the edges of the projection and pinched and chopped the air in broad, theatrical strokes.

  “Seeker of the Art,” he continued, sounding as though he loved his own voice above all else, “you stand in the last bastion of my work. If you hear this, then you have already crossed the first threshold and proven yourself something more than a dabbler or a fool.”

  Irena reeled. The first word had raised every hair on her neck, but the speech soothed something in her as it went on. Not because the voice carried kindness. It did not. It dripped with assumptions and self-satisfaction. But it also carried that shallow, impersonal quality of a proclamation not aimed at her specifically.

  She recognised that quality immediately. All her life, upjumped old men had overlooked her, talked over her, as if she wasn’t even there.

  “Your Highness,” Lira panicked, squeezing her arm hard enough to sting, “we should go—”

  “It is all right, Lira,” Irena said quietly. “He cannot see us.”

  The projection continued its speech, unbothered. “You have traversed the outerlands,” it intoned, “deciphered my lesser puzzles, and overcome the preliminary trials set across this domain. You have found this tower and pierced its first ward. Good. There may be hope for you yet.”

  “Listen,” Irena murmured to Lira, eyes narrowing. “He is not even addressing us.”

  The wizard’s image continued, moustache bristling at every syllable. He did not look at them. His gaze passed through them; his pauses landed at perfectly rehearsed places, heedless of their whispering.

  “It is some manner of recording,” Irena realised aloud. “A speech caught in crystal. He built it for whoever reached this floor. Years ago. Decades ago.”

  Lira’s grip loosened a fraction. “So he’s… not a ghost?” she ventured.

  “Not unless I am very mistaken.” Irena’s heart still raced, but it settled into intrigue now instead of terror. “He thinks he addresses one person who did… all sorts of things we did not do.”

  She turned her attention back to the recording again and listened properly.

  “The witless, the impatient, the merely curious fell away long before reaching this place. You, however, have endured. And now you have started your tentative steps upon this climb towards the sun itself!”

  He leaned forward a fraction, beard and brows jutting to punctuate his own importance.

  “For such tenacity,” he said, “I, Archmage Thalen, Founder of the Material School of Higher Mysteries, acknowledge you.”

  The name struck Irena. She had known it in the abstract since the priest had intoned it outside the tower. Archmage Thalen. Thalen the Mad. Thalen-who-built-the-tower. Legends had been told of him. Yet hearing the name coming from his own mouth was very different.

  Behind her, Lira swallowed audibly.

  The wizard lifted one ghostly hand and ticked off his fingers, moustache bristling with smug delight.

  “You come here, no doubt,” he said, “from some place that calls itself an abbey or a college or a coven, filled with would-be Fundamentalists who think that wielding the raw and untapped forces of reality is a sign of cleverness. Mesmerists from the Pale who never met a mind they didn’t wish to paw about in. Or Cosmologists who would rather hide away on their Celestial Terrace and gibber at stars than attend to the world below.”

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  His wild eyebrows knotted into a theatrical scowl.

  “Let them,” he sniffed. “They play with their flawed systems,” and here his hand thumped an invisible lectern, “We work with what is. Stone. Metal. Glass. Weight. Heat. The stuff of the world. We do not scrape at the mind until it squeals or wobble reality like a child tugging on a tablecloth. We structure. We construct. We build. Techniques without peer, reliable and potent.”

  Wizardry, then, Irena thought. She remembered a court tutor spitting the word materialist with the same tone he reserved for tax revolt and poetry.

  “To that end,” the projection continued, “this tower is not some gaudy monument or a retreat for hermits who wish only to rot in their own cleverness. It is a machine. A system of trials to refine those few who might be worth the tedium of teaching.” He smiled, teeth flashing through the moustache, charming and vaguely alarming in the same instant. “You stand now at the entrance to that crucible.”

  Irena was suddenly struck by a dreadful chill. A crucible. Meaning she had stumbled into some mad wizard’s automated academy by accident. The wards, both inside and out, the subtle sigils she had only half understood upon arrival; they all belonged to the machine, to the system, mired and operated by rules and logic she had not yet learned to read.

  “The days ahead will be demanding,” Thalen said, “You will now demonstrate that you can endure discomforts, face rigours, decipher the obscure, and, most importantly, that you are yet capable of learning.”

  Lira made a tiny, affronted sound, then looked mortified at herself. The archmage barrelled on.

  “Know this, seeker: beneath this tower lie seven chambers. Seven trials. They shall become your seven proofs. Each teaches and tests a different branch of the Material School as I have created it. Each will demand the full extent of your mind, your body, and your craft. No student of mine shall be anything less than exceptional.”

  He sniffed again.

  “You will descend,” he said. “You will learn from these trials. You will solve them. Those who master all seven works will ascend again, not as dabblers but as proven adepts, and will be granted access to my upper laboratories, observatories, and the true engine of what I have built here. Only then will you stand in my presence as a student proper.”

  Irena’s gaze flicked upward, reflexively, to the ceiling. Upper laboratories. Observatories. That suggested there were many more levels above them, filled with saints-knows-what. She had treated this floor as the summit, as an achievement unto itself. Now she knew this was only the beginning, and the tower grew taller in her mind, as if she suddenly stood on a middle rung of a ladder she had never seen whole.

  “But what exactly is below us?” Lira whispered and shivered as she followed Irena’s gaze.

  “Below,” the archmage echoed, as if he had heard, though he had not, “is where you shall first earn that opportunity to prove yourself.”

  The room shifted. The pale discs in the walls kindled brighter for a breath, then dimmed in a rippling sequence as light raced around the chamber. The floor vibrated under Irena’s boots. A seam flared into visibility in the far wall and split with a grinding, dust-shedding groan. Both women flinched.

  A small stone compartment slid forward from within the wall. In its recess, nestled in shaped grooves, lay slender rods, each as long as Irena’s forearm. Matte-black metal made their bodies; pale, faceted crystal capped their tips and threw star-pricks of light into the air.

  “Since you have reached this point,” Thalen’s projection said, moustache twitching with smug generosity, “I will not have you wasting time grinding materials and crying over broken chisels like the last generation of half-wits.”

  He gestured vaguely toward the open compartment.

  “Take up my chalk,” he commanded.

  “Chalk?” Lira echoed under her breath, baffled.

  Irena was similarly confused. These rods looked like they could punch through a steel plate.

  “They are my own invention,” Thalen said, clearly delighted to say it. “Capacitive inscriptive vectors. With them, you will incise your workings directly into stone with ease. The lines you trace will carry a steady, low charge. Properly patterned, they shall stand in place of half the reagents in the old Fundamentalist treatise and all of the superstition.”

  He sniffed again, eyebrows performing an offended little dance.

  “This is the correct medium for my tower’s magic,” he added. “The wards, the channels, the gates below: all are tuned to this method. Attempting to smear blood or burnt offerings over my calculus will accomplish nothing but mess. You will find that such base techniques are suppressed here. In time, you will master your craft. Should you succeed in the trials, of course…”

  Irena stepped toward the compartment with care. Up close, the rods looked weightier than she expected. She lifted one out and cradled it across her palms. Cold metal rested against her skin without unpleasantness. The crystal tip tingled like the air before a thunderstorm.

  “Your first task,” the archmage continued, “is to demonstrate that you can read and repair the fundamental operating systems of this tower.”

  A diagram flared into existence beside his floating head. Irena and Lira turned to look at it, blinking. An arcing semicircle of sigils, some whole and others cracked or broken. It matched the pattern that Irena recognised from around the sealed door in the entrance hall with eerie fidelity.

  “You have, no doubt, already discovered the primary gate below,” Thalen said, beard wagging. “You have also, if you possess eyes, noted damage, erosion, and deliberate vandalism where lesser minds have tried to seize control of what they did not understand.”

  Irena frowned. She remembered the chipped, damaged marks around that door. She remembered how her fingers had itched to fix them without knowing how.

  “You will not strike it with hammers like those imbeciles who came before you,” Thalen told his imagined listener. “You will study it. You will restore it. You will complete the calculus in the correct order, with the correct vectors, using the tools I have provided.”

  The diagram rotated slowly. Certain marks pulsed faintly, drawing the eye. Irena had no idea what they could mean.

  “When you have done so, then the gate will open,” the projection said, “The first trial awaits you below. It will instruct you further in the principles of channelled abjuration and transformation alchimiae, as any Materialist worthy of the name must know.”

  The words carried weight even before Irena understood them. Lira shifted beside her, uneasy.

  “Seven trials,” she murmured. “This doesn’t sound good…”

  “Should you fail,” Thalen added, moustache hitching, “the tower’s systems will ensure that your failure does not slow those who follow in your wake. I did not build this place to nurse cowards and failures.”

  The colour drained from Lira’s face.

  “So descend,” he repeated. “Learn. Prove yourself. You who master the seven trials shall ascend and stand as my student true. Those who do not…” He shrugged, minute and cruel. “The tower will remember them as so much noise.”

  The last word hung in the air. Then, as the light flickered, Archmage Thalen unravelled into drifting motes of light and snapped out of existence. The hum in the air died. Dusty stillness returned to the chamber

  For a moment, only the sound of their restless breathing filled the room.

  “Is he… gone?” Lira whispered.

  “Quite,” Irena said. The mundane quiet of her own voice sounded strange after the projection’s booming quality. “He was never truly here.”

  She looked down at the rod in her hands.

  Wizard chalk, she thought. Capacitive inscriptive vector, if one wished to be as insufferable as Thalen. The lines it carves hold charge. They hold power. They can repair wards. They could also unmake them.

  And far below, under their very feet, the sealed door waited.

  Lira edged toward the compartment. She chewed her lip for a long moment, then reached in and took one of the remaining rods for herself. It sat awkwardly in her smaller hands, too long, too heavy, but she held it as if she had lifted something sacred.

  “So all this was meant for someone else…” she said quietly. “Some prodigy from a proper school who did all his little trials before coming here.”

  “Yes,” Irena said, and her exhilaration began to settle into intent. “And we are going to steal it for ourselves.”

  Lira snapped her head up. Her eyes were wide, frightened, and shining. “Your Highness—”

  “Think about it,” Irena cut in. “They locked us in a prison that just so happened to be a machine for making a wizard. They did not even realise that is what the tower is, or they would never have left it working. They wanted me out of the way. Exiled. Harmless.” She gestured around at the books, the apparatus, the newly opened vault, still holding the chalk. “Thalen built this place to be solved. And to teach his magic. And if repairing this place opens his doors, and reveals more of his secret…” Her smile returned, sharp. “Then I say we use them.”

  Lira swallowed.

  “And what if what’s down there is dangerous?” she asked, voice trembling. “Seven trials. He didn’t sound like a man who worried about… people. What if it’s traps? Beasts? Things that chew up anyone who isn’t his perfect student?”

  Irena hesitated. The sensible answer was: then we stay up here and wait until the baron forgets we exist and the food runs out. The sensible answer was: then we do nothing. We accept our cage.

  “I do not know,” she said instead. The honesty hurt. “It might be dangerous. But no one will come to rescue us. Father…” She swallowed and forced to continue. “The King will not. The church certainly will not. If we do nothing, I grow old here, or the dragon eats me by mistake, or the roof falls in on our heads.”

  Lira’s mouth twitched at that, but her eyes stayed grave.

  “This,” Irena said, hefting the chalk, feeling the faint tingle in the crystal tip, “is the first thing in months that resembles a real way out. Or at least a way to change the shape of the bars that make up our prison.”

  Silence filled the room again. Lira looked down at the rod in her hand. Her thumb rubbed over the smooth metal, leaving no mark.

  “I was sent here to make your bed and sweep your floors,” she finally spoke, “To keep you alive enough that they could feel virtuous about forgetting you.” There was a rare flash of anger in her eyes. “They didn’t say anything about forbidden magic and seven secret trials under our feet.”

  “No,” Irena agreed. “They certainly did not.”

  Lira looked up at her. Fear and resolve warred in her expression, and then, slowly, resolved into a decision.

  “If you go down there,” she said, “you’re going to get into trouble, Your Highness.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “And you will need someone to tell you when the roof is about to fall on your head. Or when you’re about to blow yourself up,” Lira added, with the dry practicality of someone who had spent her life cleaning up rich people’s disasters.

  “That has, on occasion, proven useful,” Irena conceded.

  Lira took a steadying breath.

  “Then I’m not letting you go down there alone,” she said, tightening her fingers around the chalk.

  The words struck somewhere deep and fragile behind Irena’s ribs. For a moment, she did not trust her voice. She nodded once instead, sharp and decisive, and turned to look towards the oculus.

  Stepping towards the rail, she looked down. From this level, the central shaft of the tower fell away in a spiral of stone. She could see, in glimpses between the railings and landings, the familiar floors below: the little kitchen where Lira chopped and stirred; the library where her rescued scroll lay pinned; the vast entrance hall where the instruments had floated and played. All the places where the remainder of her life could have played out, if she had decided to be merely meek and obedient.

  And there.

  Right there.

  The sealed door. The broken arc of sigils. The first gate to whatever Thalen had buried under their feet.

  “We have much work to do, then Lira. Are you ready?”

  Lira joined her, taking a deep breath and nodding once, having found the certainty she would need.

  “I am, Your Highness.”