The Tower at the Edge of the World Read online

  He could hardly abandon his sacred mission simply because he was curious about what a bird had found somewhere to place in its nest.

  He put aside the book on flower symbolism and picked up a different book to take with him to sit by the fire.

  It was one he had found slipped behind the Old Shaian epics, a small book bound in plain leather. It bore none of the gold or gems or even decorative tooling of the other books that had drawn his interest. He opened it now, to see that it was written in very old Shaian ideographs, with delicate calligraphy of exquisite mastery.

  On the flyleaf was written, The Commonplace Book of Harbut Zalarin.

  2

  He grew absorbed in the account of an ancient wizard’s day. Harbut Zalarin was from before the Empire; his grandson was Yr the Conqueror who had founded it. The thousands of years that various wizards had spent developing and elaborating the rituals of Schooled magic had not even begun in this book, and the way Harbut Zalarin spoke of magic was more like poetry than anything. The young man was entranced.

  Harbut Zalarin noted things utterly foreign to his experience, and things of astonishing immediacy. The sensation of magic; the young man had never read anyone describe it so perfectly, or indeed at all. He felt he was reading his own thoughts at times, when Harbut Zalarin wrote of the magic he was doing or had done or had observed.

  And then other times, he was thrown out of himself into wonder and confusion. Harbut Zalarin wrote about the weather at the time he awoke each day, with no explanation given; after a time the young man decided it must have been a component of his personal daily rituals, and therefore (as he had been taught to do) ceased his speculation. But he did wonder at the changing weather, and whether the ancient wizard was writing of this tower, which other books called the tower of Harbut Zalarin, and how much its circumstances had changed if he was.

  In the months and years of his experience, it was always partly misty and partly sunny around the tower at the edge of the world. He always awoke at dawn for the first prayers, as he had done as far back as he could remember, and there was always the ebbing and flowing mist and the sun running his courses.

  His old life, in the big red house all by itself in the mountains, had incorporated some excursions out-of-doors, for his tutor studied wildflowers, and took him occasionally for walks. However, the red house was in the heartland of the Empire, and the weather there was perfect. Warm sunny days and mildly cool nights, rain falling only after dark; never snow, never storms, never hail. There had been one daytime windstorm, when he was twelve, and the wind had blown hard enough to bend the trees over.

  That had been, he was told, because of the Emperor’s displeasure with his request to learn swordsmanship and riding after reading too many old epics. Apart from the refusal to teach him (for there was no need for him to learn such barbaric arts), the library had been forbidden him and instead of epics he was forced to memorize the seven-volume Manual of Etiquette. He was destined for a life of seclusion and study; but he knew how to address every rank in the Empire, from Tanteyr slave to the Emperor himself.

  He had met, in his life, his parents, his tutor, the four priest-magi who performed the great ceremonies, and the seven servants of the red house.

  He knew only the names of hail, snow, lightning, thunder.

  He kept reading.

  Sometimes Harbut Zalarin made little sketches or doodles on the page, in ink of several colours. Some framed pithy little aphorisms or things he wanted to remember, and the young man puzzled over these, perturbed at the nonchalance with which the ancient wizard wrote down his thoughts.

  One stopped him:

  What you name yourself you are.

  He read this over several times before it occurred to him he didn’t know what his own given name was.

  He’d never been called by it. His tutor called him savelin or chantling, depending on whether what he’d been doing resulted in censure or endearment. Savelin, lordling; chantling, for the boy under enchantments.

  The seven servants in the red house were very correct and proper about never addressing him directly, and probably did not know his name, either. His parents and the priest-magi presumably knew it, but as they only came to the red house once a year, for the annual seizin ceremonies, they had never needed to call him anything but boy.

  Chantling, savelin, boy.

  Harbut Zalarin was very concerned with names. There were lists of them elsewhere in the book, and a short passage discussing the nature of magic as akin to poetry, in that both were fundamentally the art of naming.

  The young man put down the commonplace book and performed the mid-afternoon ritual perfunctorily, mind working in unaccustomed ways.

  What you name yourself you are.

  He kept going back to the page. Traced out the leaves of the plants in the frame around the words: ivy, columbine, strawberry. He’d seen them in his tutor’s books of wildflowers, for they were not the plants of the red house or the tower.

  What you name yourself you are.

  It had never once occurred to him that he could name himself.

  He got up to pace the tower room, back and forth from window to window, tracing out the seven-pointed star inscribed on the wooden floor in lines of silver and gold. He paused at one window, looking at the pale Moon sailing high above the mist in a deep blue sky. Turned after a blank stare at the silver line of the distant sea and the brilliant white spot of the Sun.

  Stopped again at the eastern window to stare into the clouds of the Abyss. Two floors below him was the gargoyle sticking out, wreathed by swallows, with the stick nest visible like a hat between its ears.

  He went back to the commonplace book, heart racing with feelings he could not name. Flipped through its pages, looking for he knew not what, some suggestion of action, some piece of advice, some rule to live by. Choosing which tea ceremony to perform or which book to read were the only decisions he had ever learned to make. He had not even ever tried to write his own poetry or invent his own spells.

  He found no instructions. Many sentences and phrases and words that spoke to him in muffled voices, as incomprehensible as the winds calling around the tower, the sprites speaking to each other in voices like shadows, the birds singing or crying as they flew. Many intimations of doors he had not suspected existed. Many possibilities he could not even begin to imagine taking. Many blank pages that might have held secrets if only he’d had the key to opening them.

  Naming himself was too enormous a step for him to take first. A lifetime of careful avoidance of names in favour of titles—Master Tutor, Sir and Madam, Magister and Magistra, Maid, Butler, Cook—could not be easily abandoned. Savelin, Chantling, boy; those were his names. His parents and the priest-magi had names and titles he had read in his Manual of Etiquette, but they remained as unreal to him as the Emperor to whom he prayed.

  He went back to the bathing room. The swallows were spiralling around the gargoyle.

  He put his hand on the windowsill, and then something he had read some time ago emerged into his mind, and he nearly ran upstairs to find the Gesta Oloris.

  Olor was a hero of the early Empire. The young man had read the Gesta five or six times, never failing to be moved by the great arc of action, adventure, heroism, and final tragedy when Olor perished in a battle against the Tsorians. He found the scroll and unwound it quickly until he found the passage near the middle where Olor escaped from imprisonment in, yes, a tower.

  * * *

  And Olor of might and renown

  Took the clothes from his back and ripped them long

  And with the craft the Lady of Mists had taught him

  Wove them into one braid as long as the tower was high

  Tied them to the bar in the window

  And in the dark of the night made his escape.

  * * *

  The young man did not rip his clothing; he had been firmly punished for that as a boy, the first time he read the Gesta. He went to the storage room and picked through the strange items of clothing until he found a long strip of fabric, a foot wide and a dozen long, neatly folded in a basket. It was scarlet as blood, and looked startling against the dark skin of his arms and the white of his simple tunic. Since he did not intend to escape the tower—where could he go?—he felt it long enough. He thought it most convenient it was already long and narrow, and since he had no idea how to make a plait (or indeed, quite what a plait was), he took it as it was into the bathing room.

  There were no bars on the window; it wasn’t a prison. After some consideration he discovered he could wrap one end of the fabric around the foot of the bath tub. It took him several attempts before it seemed at all secure when he tugged on it experimentally. But at last it seemed tightly enough wound—he knew nothing of knots—and then he was left with climbing out the window.

  He draped the free end down first. The wind caught it immediately, sending it flaming out over the abyss, a banner declaring allegiance to the little gods of fire or the Wind Lords of Kaphyrn or the first Lord of Ysthar or (if only it had had a yellow border) the third-ranked baron of Pfaschen on Alinor. He smiled to see it shining out so bravely against the clouds, even though clearly it would not hang quietly down as had the plait down which Olor had climbed.

  He assumed this was because he had not plaited it, whatever that meant, but when he looked back at the scroll for assistance he saw that the next stanza described Olor undoing the end from around his waist.

  He pulled the fabric back within and tied it around his waist, but when it was tight enough to stay up it was too short to reach the window, and when it was longer it was too loose and kept falling off. The young man sat on the edge of the tub and frowned out at the swallows swooping, the wild sprites laughing maniacally at only they knew
what, and finally bethought himself to try tying it around his shoulder, like the formal mantle he had worn for one of the great ceremonies.

  The window was waist high, too high for him to climb out of. He fetched a low stool out of the storage room, and, pleased with his ingenuity, clambered up.

  Below him the swallows darted and swooped, the gulls soared with unmoving wings, the half-invisible sprites rode their sky-horses, and the clouds moved incessantly. He thought of what might happen to the Empire if he fell and ceased performing his rituals.

  He was not much given to imagining the future or the consequences of his actions; they had always been so circumscribed and carefully chosen, the answers had always been do it right or else. Neither had he anything beyond the vaguest sense of what the Empire actually was in terms of anything but magic and the lists of titles and addresses in the Manual of Etiquette.

  He could name all the countries and provinces and domains of the Empire, who ruled them from which capitals, what their specialties were and when they had become part of Astandalas, what were their banners and their languages and their strict rank in the hierarchy of things.

  He had seen the red house, its grounds, the encircling mountains, and the tower at the edge of the world.

  Also, he did not think he would fall.

  He was not nimble. He put one knee up on the ledge, and bounced awkwardly until he could get the other leg up beside it, and then he nearly pitched forward.

  The fabric caught him before he could quite fall, and he nodded with satisfaction that Olor had guided him so well, and dismissed as a result any further concern for his safety. Olor had reached the ground safely; he was following Olor’s example; surely there was nothing more to it.

  He eventually managed to get one leg around, and then the other, and finally he was sitting on the windowsill with his legs dangling over. He swung them experimentally. There was a narrow ledge below him, out of which sprang the gargoyle’s stone neck, and below that perhaps a small spit of land, and more certainly the Abyss.

  He had a vague memory of Olor—or no, was it Daphnis of Tikla Dor?—wriggling out of another tower window to a tree—yes—that was Daphnis. She turned and slid out on her belly, dropping down with her hands until her feet touched the branch.

  Using the fabric to counterbalance him as best he could, he twisted around until he was resting on his armpits.

  Unlike Daphnis, his feet did not touch.

  It crossed his mind that had his tutor seen him, memorizing the Manual of Etiquette would have seemed a mild punishment. He could also feel the increasing constriction that indicated he was late for the next ritual. He almost tried to raise himself back up through the window, but for the fact he was nowhere strong enough to do so. And so, without a prayer to any deity, he dropped.

  He landed on the ledge with a wobble; the fabric kept him from tipping sideways. He leaned his forehead against the mossy stone of the tower and was amazed more at the feeling on his skin than at the fact that he was out-of-doors. He turned around.

  The fabric was twisted around him such that he couldn’t go more than a step away from the tower wall. When he tested its reach he stepped into a wind as buffeting and strong as that which had slammed the tower door in his face. He staggered back against the wall. The prickling in his head was growing. Upstairs he should have been lighting candles and chanting the forty-seventh of the psalms to the Emperor as Sun-in-Glory.

  He shook his head and carefully extricated himself from the fabric. Daphnis had climbed down through the oak tree; he remembered the passage now. She’d come to a long narrow branch reaching out over the wall that enclosed her garden, and been unable to walk along its length. He’d never understood that difficulty, until he stood with his back pressed against the tower wall and looked at the eight feet he wanted to traverse. A troupe of sprites galloped their sky-horses past him with wild yells and hooting laughter, and then it was just the swallows and the gulls and the clouds that went all the way down past the bottom of the world.

  Daphnis had lain down on her stomach, legs on each side of the branch for balance, and used her feet to push herself along until she reached her destination.

  He chanted the forty-seventh psalm as he followed suit. Without the candles the ritual was incomplete, but speaking the words helped. He felt the magic move about him, the enchantments grow quiescent by his words. He repeated the psalm three times, once for each of the candles upstairs, and with his face turned away from the wind, eyes watering from its pressure, he pushed himself forward until his hands reached the swelling stone carved with scales to represent the gargoyle’s head.

  He blinked away the tears and turned his head. There was a bird sitting in the nest.

  A large black-blacked gull, it had a huge yellow beak and eyes that seemed to glitter malevolently at him. It was hunched down into the hollow of the nest, completely obscuring the golden thing.

  With vague memories of the Cook batting her apron at him, he said, “Shoo.”

  The gull opened its beak, revealing a black tongue, and clacked it shut again.

  “I need to reach under you,” he said. The gull didn’t do anything. He thought for a while, the wind whipping his clothes over his back. “If you would, I should be much obliged.”

  The gull sank its head into its shoulders and ignored him.

  “I know you found it, but I can’t think you need it, and I am very curious what it is.”

  The gull closed its eyes.

  He reached forward with one cautious arm to slip his hand under the bird’s body. For one astonishing moment he touched the soft warmth of its feathers and felt the fast beating heart.

  He endured what felt an endless buffeting and many sharp pecks to his head, face buried in his arms to protect his eyes. When at last the affronted bird flew off he lay there for a while, gulping, shaking uncontrollably.

  Finally the physical reaction passed, and he was able to move again. With one hand gripping the metal thing as tightly as he could, he pushed his way ever so slowly back to the wall of the tower. He hit stone with his rear and cried aloud with surprise at the touch before realizing what it was.

  The scarlet cloth was flapping out in the wind again. He very slowly brought one leg up to the ledge, and then levered himself up against the tower wall until at last he was standing.

  Something wet was trickling down his head and face. He thought it blood from the gull’s attack, but when he wiped his face with the bottom of his tunic the streaks were greenish, not red. He frowned at it. He was used to blood and small cuts, integral components as they were of many of his rituals, but he had never sweated before except in illness. The green he thought a curious colour for a bodily fluid, but the poems never compared sweat to anything but the salt sea, and they often described the sea as green or blue. (He’d never smeared moss across himself, either.) He was pleased to discover the connection.

  Even standing he could not reach the cloth. He transferred the golden thing to his left hand so he could reach up with his right, pressing his belly up against the stones of the tower. The wind snapped the red fabric to and fro, even more like a banner or a flag.

  There were no sprites to ask or command assistance of, if they’d even listened to him—he wasn’t sure they were even able to hear him. Instead he waited patiently until a gust or an unseen wild sprite snapped it down, whereupon he caught it, and very pleased indeed was he with this success. And then he stood there, mysterious golden object in one hand and loose end of the scarlet banner in the other, standing on a ledge with his back to the Abyss and his face to the tower at the edge of the world, and if perhaps he looked like Olor the Hero, he was rather less experienced in adventure.

  The window was just at the level of his head. He could see the familiar room with sudden new perspective. The footed bathtub, enamelled in green and blue, with golden fixtures; the intricate mosaic tiles showing mythological sea scenes, the racks for towels and robes, the slatted floor under the dowser, and the various bathing utensils and ritual objects neatly in their places. The scarlet cloth wrapped around the tub was magnificently out of place, so magnificent he thought briefly of calling himself by its name.