“I would have magicked up a bell, or something, and I’d just turn up out of nowhere when it was rung,” Esha pointed out. “That way nobody would have to do all this uphill nonsense.”
Esha was of the Coast-people, who fell outside Lannesite’s strict reach, and maintained a tenuous independence along the sea’s edge and the banks of rivers and lakes. An independence bought with cartloads of fish and defended by the general difficulty of the terrain; hard to subjugate a people who could just go into the water at a moment’s notice, and then come out of it with spears and poison darts when you least wanted them to. Her skin was pale like most of her people, greenish white and heavily freckled with blue about the bridge of her nose and cheekbones. She had a hard, square chin and her straw-coloured hair had obviously been trimmed with the aid of a bowl. She was shorter than Lyn, compact of frame, wearing a wayfarer’s layers of wax-cloth and weft, with a cuirass of hard scales over it all in case of trouble.
Esha was a traveller, for all her complaints about the “uphill nonsense.” She was two full Storm-seasons Lyn’s senior without actually seeming much older. Lyn remembered her turning up at court at random intervals with her travellers’ tales and outlandish souvenirs, and only later worked out that much of Esha Free Mark’s journeying had been clandestine errands for the throne. That hard-won suffix attached to her name was the Crown’s guarantee of her right to go where she wanted without exception, and there were precious few foreigners who’d earned it.
Except, as Lyn grew up, the political landscape of Lannesite had grown more intricate, locked into a series of treaties with neighbouring states and non-states, so that Esha Free Mark’s anarchistic style of impromptu diplomacy had become a little embarrassing for the throne, and she had been called on less and less. One day, so said Lyn’s sisters, Esha would go pick a fight with someone, cross a border somewhere, and the writ of Lannesite would not bail her out.
When Lynesse Fourth Daughter had come asking for her help with a journey where nobody went and, after, to where nobody was currently returning from, Esha had jumped at the chance.
“I think,” she told Esha now, “that it is a good thing Nyrgoth Elder did not give my family a bell to ring, to summon him.”
“That so?”
“I think,” Lyn went on, “that if such a bell existed, I’d have rung it with all my might before my third season just to see what happened.”
*
The next morning they decamped with the dawn, ascending a mountain pass that seemed devoid of life, no song of beast, no chirr of creeping thing. The clear sky above shifted imperceptibly from beautiful to ominous, and Lynesse felt that there was some sound, too low or high for her to hear, that was nonetheless plucking at her innards, creating brief blooms of anxiety and fret that made her want to turn around and go back down. Glancing at Esha, she saw the same worry on her companion’s face.
“The Elder doesn’t much want visitors, does he?” the Free Mark said. “Doubtless he is considering some matters of philosophy and does not wish to be disturbed, by man or beast. What makes you think he’ll even open his door, let alone help?”
“The ancient compact still stands,” was Lyn’s only answer to that. She was aware that Esha probably thought it was more myth than matter, but she had grown up on the stories; they were a part of her as much as her bones and sinew. And if not now, then when?
And soon enough, through the silent, vacant land, they had come to the tower’s door, which was round and had no furnishing, not handle nor bell. The utter quiet seemed greater there, in the tower’s shadow, as though there was some sound the building itself was making, inaudible to the ear and yet loud enough to resound insensibly from every rock. Looking up the tower’s height towards its apex, Lyn decided that those old artists had the right of it after all. The tower was greater than its mere physical dimensions. It reached all the way past the sky to the stars.
When she’d seen the tower before, all those years and Storm-seasons ago, she’d felt nothing but excitement. The thrill of the forbidden, something made physically appreciable that had previously only existed in stories and ill-proportioned illustrations. Child Lynesse had just been thrilled that she’d made it so high, seen so far. The Tower of the Elder Sorcerer!
Child Lynesse had also known that her mother’s servants were right on her heels at that point. Obviously, she’d been ready to press onwards to the wizard’s very door. Obviously. An easy thing to swear to when you were thirteen heartbeats away from some harassed functionary’s hand landing on your shoulder to haul you back.
And here she was, and there were no court menials at her heels to restrain her. She was at the very portal to the sorcerer’s domain, where no other had ever stood since her ancestor had come, to beg the help of magic to fight magic. Just as she now needed to fight magic. She, the princess of the blood. The one whose duty it was to do such impossible things. Go to the forbidden places. Strike bargains with the unknowable.
I don’t think this was a good idea. And this was a poor time to have such a thought. In Lyn’s experience, that particular regret only slunk into sight after she’d done something her mother wouldn’t approve of. To find it turn up ahead of schedule was profoundly inconvenient because it meant she couldn’t just do and then lament in hindsight.
“Esh’,” she breathed, teetering perilously at the brink of a common sense decision. Let’s just go back. Except her friend looked at her, and there was just enough of We came all this way in Esha’s expression that Lyn reached out with the iron pommel of her knife and rapped hard on the metal of the circular door.
She had wondered if the sorcerer had servants, and what form they might take. No form at all, apparently, for a voice spoke from the air, or perhaps from the door itself. It used sounds she did not know, although the rhythm of them, and the questioning lilt at the end, told her they were words.
“A spirit,” Esha said, wide-eyed. “A spirit as his doorman.”
“Howe comyst vysitingen thys owetpost?” demanded the door, its tone the same but its words now halfway familiar, sounding like Lyn’s tutor when she read the old, old books.
“Did it ask who we were?” Lyn was hanging on to her nerve by a thread.
Esha shrugged, her hand on her sword hilt. “Just barble-garble to me.”
“Who has come to visit this outpost?” And now the words were strangely accented but fully comprehensible, as though the voice had been listening to their conversation and reminding itself how people spoke.