The Tower at the Edge of the World Read online

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  The Tower at the Edge of the World

  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  The Tower at the Edge of the World

  Victoria Goddard

  The Tower at the Edge of the World

  Victoria Goddard

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  Copyright © 2014 by Victoria Goddard

  Published November 2014 by Underhill Books.

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Cover Design: Victoria Goddard

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  * * *

  www.victoriagoddard.ca

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Author’s Note

  1

  In a tower at the edge of the world a young man found, one day, three items of interest: a golden key, an aphorism, and a spell.

  He wasn’t looking for them. He’d been living in the tower for a while by that point, and had settled into the rituals and routines of what he assumed would be the rest of a long and very quiet life. The intervals between rituals were taken up with playing the harp, reading poetry, or studying the most abstruse realms of theoretical magic.

  The situation of the tower was at the easternmost edge of a long narrow island that broke the water’s plummet into the Abyss on the eastern side of the world.

  (He was not certain which world it was, but guessed from the island and the sea that it was Colhélhé, though it might also have been some far reach of Voonra or Ysthar or even Alinor; he knew from the books in the tower and the magic that he was still within the bounds of the Empire, but only barely.)

  From the upper windows he could see long low grassy dunes, extending north and south until they dissolved into the blue distance.

  Westward lay the rest of the world, and the Empire of Astandalas of which he was perhaps both loneliest outpost and most loyal son, and what he thought of as the peopled lands. All he could see of them was the short sides of the long dunes and, in the middle distance, the long silver line of the sea.

  East of the tower was the Abyss.

  During the day grey and white clouds boiled ceaselessly there, broken only by the bravest and most audacious kingfishers and gulls seeking only they knew what treasures under the mist and the spray and the spume.

  During the night the stars went all the way down, and nothing stirred but their slow wheeling progress across three-quarters of the celestial globe.

  It was after his morning bath and before breakfast that the young man had paused to look out the window. From the bathing room he could see the swallows who nested on the eaves of the tower’s windows and in a row along the waterspout gargoyles. While he was looking out at the swallows, he happened to follow one’s flight down with his gaze, and saw a glint of gold on the gargoyle’s neck.

  Despite a lifetime of discouragement, he was a curious young man. He was entirely unaccustomed to physical exertion, however, and at first he couldn’t think how he might possibly get at the gold thing to see what it was.

  The gold thing glinted, though that side of the tower was in shadow, for it was located to the east of the Sun.

  (One morning he had awoken to see that the mists had not risen, and the Sun come running in the shape of a giant tossing a fiery sphere before he let out a wild holler and leaped into the sky to run his course. The young man was very surprised but not quite shocked to see this, for he had very little experience of the peopled lands and had spent much time reading ancient epics about the Sun and the Moon and the youth of the nine worlds, and for all he knew that sort of thing happened all the time. He was somewhat disappointed that it had, however, only happened to him the once.)

  The gold thing was peeking out of a pile of sticks placed between the ears of the gargoyle. The swallows made clay nests, so it had to be something else, a gull or a kingfisher or an albatross or some other bird for which he had no name.

  The tower had several layers of crenellations. The gargoyle stuck some eight feet out over the Abyss from a cornice located perhaps five feet below the window. The young man looked, considered the endless boiling cloud directly below the gargoyle, considered also the fact that he was not supposed to leave the tower, and somewhat wistfully went on with his day.

  Life in the Empire, or at least life as he knew it, was entirely governed by an elaborate series of deliberately incomprehensible actions, prayers, sacrifices, songs, and commandments intended to bind its citizens and the several worlds they inhabited into a complex web of magic, custom, habit, and obedience.

  The Schooled magic of the Empire was the most complete and successful system of governance there had ever been; on Ysthar and parts of Zunidh the Schooled wizards managed even the weather according to their principles.

  The young man had been very carefully brought up. He believed that if he did not fulfil his ritual duties, the Empire would fall.

  And so he anointed himself with the unguent provided in the day’s flask, and prayed for the long life and reign of the Emperor Eritanyr, Sun of his people, god of the friendless, prosperity of the faithful, prince of a hundred lands.

  He felt guilty that his thoughts wandered often to that little golden glint in the bird’s nest.

  The enchanted pantry that provided his meals did not require any choice or preparation from him with respect to the symbolism of tableware or foodstuffs. He accepted the goblets of one or other colour of glass or metal, the plates or bowls or platters of wood or lacquer, white porcelain or celadon, the utensils of gold or silver or iron or bamboo or glass. He performed his prayers and he ate the food presented at the prescribed hours, and if he was curious on occasion about what he was eating and where it might have come from, well, he knew better than to dwell on those questions, when he so thoroughly knew the answer to the question of why.

  Using delicate silver chopsticks to eat some sort of cold dumplings stuffed with some sort of meat and vegetables, with some sort of sauce that tasted salty and sour and spicy at the same time, he tried to keep his mind on the appropriate litany of gratitude.

  But he kept wondering if the gargoyle was really so far down from the windowsill as it seemed; and by natural extension, what would happen if he fell into the Abyss.

  Perhaps he would fall for ever.

  He thought about that long after the sprites bound to the tower had cleared away his tray. He did not bother to ask them their views. The sprites were, theoretically, rational creatures, but apart from their bounden duties they ignored him utterly.

  If he did not fall for ever, he would either die, or survive and be expected to claim wherever he landed for the fiefdom of the Empire. His role, there in the tower, was to be an anchor for the Schooled magic; he had never learned any of the spel
ls and ceremonies involved with conquering new lands.

  He got up and looked out the the eastern window of this room, which was high above the bathing room floor. The Abyssal cloud roiled below him as mute and opaque as ever. It did not seem that there would be any land down there to claim. Merely the depths of the Shadow that had no name that he had heard of in any of the Nine Worlds.

  The tower had one large room at the top that he used as his main living space, with a small alcove off to one side with a sleeping couch. The shrine to the Emperor was located in the middle of the western wall, oriented to the far distance where the thin lines of magic converged at last in the Palace of Stars and the great golden throne of Astandalas. There were windows to each of the eight directions, and shelves between them holding scrolls and books and miscellaneous tools of the wizard’s trade. Apart from the eating couch and accompanying tables, there were some chests and numerous cushions, a few rugs, a standing harp, a wooden floor inscribed with a seven-pointed star, and a fireplace that had been burning a single log with a cheerful red-and-gold flame since he had arrived. There was a trapdoor in the centre of the ceiling, with a handle he had not worked out how to open, and on the northern edge of the room there was the stair leading down.

  He was working his way through the books in the room. Most belonged to the tower’s later inhabitants, wizards of one sort or another who had undertaken their studies in the peaceful solitude of the edge of the world, scholars devoted to their work and those devoted to the Empire.

  Some of the books belonged to the tower’s original builder, Harbut Zalarin whose mother had married the Sun, but the young man had not realized that a certain old book he had found was one of them, and did not know that the old commonplace book was more dangerous than any of the grimoires or books of spells and cantrips.

  He had found spells for levitation, but they were all of later vintage, and presupposed the full existence of Schooled magic. The tower was an anchor point for that intricate creation, but was not enmeshed in it, and the spells did not work. The young man did not know the reason for his continuing failures at Schooled magic, but had started nevertheless to follow the tracks of the older and more secret wild magic that were hidden in the references of the more acceptable books in the tower without quite knowing how far astray from prescribed paths he was going.

  After ten minutes spent fruitlessly trying to work one of the levitation spells for the hundredth time, he went back to the bathing room and stared down at the gargoyle. The tower was made of alternating bands of rough dark and shimmering pale grey stone, much encrusted with moss and tiny ferns. The swallows built their nests below the window ledges and in a row under the gargoyles’ necks. He watched for a while, but no other kind of bird landed on the stick nest.

  He made himself go back up to his study to read the next chapter in his book on Voonran floral symbolism, which apparently was rather important if one wished to perform weather spells.

  He couldn’t concentrate on the niceties of distinction between types of carnations.

  “I’m not supposed to go outside,” he said aloud, rather startling himself. He went through periods of speaking out loud, but this had not been one of them. Yet today the network of ritual magic seemed almost to be listening, it was so strongly present in the room with him.

  There was something gold and strange in the bird nest, and he had never been so curious in his life.

  He walked restlessly around the tower. The sleeping chamber with the long divan and piles of soft cushions and silken blankets provided no rest. The windows faced west, to the setting—and here, alone he suspected of all places, the rising—Sun, so that first in the morning and last in the evening he could burn incense to the Emperor, descendant of the Sun through the line of Harbut Zalarin, glory of his people, fount of blessings, king of kings and mortal better worshipped than most gods.

  The young man had been taught to pray, of course, with a hundred different invocations to the Emperor. He had not, however, come across the idea that one might pray outside of the set times and ceremonies. It did not occur to him to ask assistance of the Emperor.

  He went to the bathing room again. He peered cautiously out the window. The gold thing was still in the nest. The swallows were still flitting about, twittering gaily as they hunted insects.

  He bent as far out the window as he dared. Down below—not in the Abyss but at the foot of the tower—possibly there was a tiny bit of land. He frowned near-sightedly at it, unable to judge the distance.

  “There’s no harm in seeing, is there?” he said to the swallows. They ignored him as utterly as did the sprites.

  The bathing room shared a floor with a privy and some sort of storage closet he had not examined closely. The fourth door was the one leading down. He opened it and peered down the narrow staircase as doubtfully as he had leaned out the window. His small motions echoed mournfully in the space down there, in a dank black hollow. He shuddered a little; and then he started down.

  He kept his left hand on the wall. He had never been down the stairs before.

  A few days before his sixteenth birthday his tutor had told him that his education was finished and that they would be parting ways, the tutor to retire to his family lands and himself to start his new life as a man grown to his estate and purpose in the Empire. Neither of them had been entirely sure what form his duty would take, but the young man had been curious about his new life and eager to experience the elaborate series of ceremonies that enacted his coming of age.

  The ceremonies had surpassed his imagination, except that they had involved no great crowds or grand holocausts. The same four priest-magi who had performed all the previous great ceremonies had come and led him through the dances, the sacrifices, the bloodlettings and the bindings, the vesting and divesting and the hugely complex spells.

  The young man had been delighted with the ceremonies, with the chance to observe such skilled wizards at work, and with the satisfying thought that at some fundamental level what he was and what he did mattered to the Empire of which he was so small a part.

  Exhausted by the ceremonies, he had slept very deeply.

  He had dreamed that he was being passed from hand to hand by a great chain of faceless and nameless people.

  He had awoken to discover he was no longer in the house he had known all his life but rather in this stone tower at the farthest edge of the Empire, anchor for all its magic.

  The wall was damp under his hand. He frowned nervously at the darkness and counted the steps as he went down. There were seventy-seven.

  The room at the base of the tower was musty and strange smelling, as if the lair of long-gone beasts. (He had been reading, when the dry tomes of magic overwhelmed him, old poetry of adventures and heroism and bright deeds, which comprised a fair portion of the library upstairs.) Making light was one of the first things he had learned, and so he warily illuminated the space around him. He let out a breath of mingled relief and disappointment that the cavernous space was utterly empty, without even a dragon scale or a coin to catch the light and feed his imagination.

  The door to the tower was made of silvery grey logs bound with straps of woven copper gone green with time. The handle was a great iron ring set in the middle of the door, and it took him a goodly while to figure out that he had to turn it and then push the door open.

  It was only after he stood blinking at the world outside that he realized it was the first door he had ever opened himself.

  At ground level the dunes looked much bigger than they did from the windows above. White rocks led in a slanting line away from the door, between two steep slopes covered with the dull green grass, with little wild sea-clover blooming pink and white near the ground. It was the usual hazy weather, mist boiling up from the Abyss, the Sun a pale disc in a white sky rived with startling blue. (Rived was his favourite new word; he had discovered it recently in a book of poems; he was pleased to find some use for it.)

  The door was very heavy, or seem
ed so, and hard to open, and even harder to keep open. He put his foot over the threshold to push it back all the way, and the wind caught it—or perhaps it was the action of one of the sprites—and slammed it back closed again with an enormous crash.

  He fell over in surprise. Picked himself up, frowned, and turned the handle again. This time he could not push it open against the pressure, though he tried until his arms shook and his heart raced. At last he gave up, and slumped down against the door in some dejection, until a prickling uneasiness reminded him that it was time for the noon rituals and his lunch.

  He was much slower about climbing up the stairs, and late to commence the small burnt offering. One pinch of snuff, one small white feather, three drops of blood, and a tiny waxy bead of fragrant ambergris. He rolled the ambergris around his fingers before dropping it into the miniature crucible. The magic of the Empire pulsed about him, tactile as a hand on his shoulder.

  He felt very guilty for opening the door, and resolved to put the golden thing out of his mind.

  He still couldn’t concentrate on Voonran flower symbolism. He performed the first major tea ceremony, which was discretionary; choosing which of the four major or seven minor ceremonies for the day had always been one of his favourite things—but though he chose his favourite, dedicated to the spirits of fire, he did not feel either calmed or invigorated as he usually did; he felt anxious and unsettled.

  He knew the names of the emotions from books. The feelings seemed to well up from somewhere usually inaccessible, through some door usually as firmly blocked as the tower’s. The rituals, the ceremonies, the conventions and the routines, all were intended to prevent anxiety, worry, distress, fear. He was, he knew, granted a very great gift in that he knew with the uttermost certainty that his role in the Empire was to stay in his tower and perform his assigned rituals and keep the Empire safe from harm.