The Tower at the Edge of the World Read online

  “Scarlet,” he said aloud, and knew immediately it was not the name for him.

  Quickly, without thinking twice, he tossed his treasure into the bathing room. It landed in the tub; the enamel, or the metal, rang softly for some time afterwards.

  He looked again at the cloth in his hands. Thought about the unfathomable drop below him, and the riddles to be answered and the name to be given awaiting him within.

  He wrapped the cloth several times about his waist, pulling the end through and tucking it as tightly as he could, and then he grabbed the cloth with one hand and the far side of the sill with the other, and he jumped as high and hard as he could, in an action that in later years he always said was quite possibly the stupidest thing he had ever done; though that verdict was contested, if only by the initial blind drop out of the window.

  Perhaps the gods of his ancestors or the Emperor of his prayers or the Sun and Moon whose near relation had built the tower were looking out for him, for the loose twists did not come undone until after he had wriggled and twitched his ungainly way back into the bathing room. He bumped his chin on the edge of the tub and spent a good quarter of an hour disentangling himself from the scarlet cloth, and there was blood on the floor when he at last he stood, triumphant, to collect his treasure out of the tub.

  He took the scarlet cloth upstairs with him as well as a kind of trophy of his adventure.

  3

  The golden thing was a piece of worked metal, about as long as his hand. The main part of it was a rod, narrower than his finger, like an eating stick or a pen barrel. One end was flattened and worked with wire and metal beads of gold and silver into the shape of the Sun embracing the Moon one on side, and the Moon embracing the Sun on the other. A pattern of tiny stones glittered along the barrel, and at the other end the gold was worked into a strange geometry of grooves and protuberances.

  The young man had never seen a key, and had formed from his books the mental image of a sort of stone that worked sympathetic magic on locks to open doors whenever he read the word. He turned the golden key over and over in his hands and wondered what magic it was intended to perform.

  Since he had no other resources, he turned to his books to give him guidance. What he found, however, further along from the unsettling comments about names in the commonplace book, was a spell to reveal or remove enchantments—the ideograph could have meant either—by translating the enchantment to another receptacle.

  He frowned over this as he performed the sunset rituals, with extra diligence after his disobedience.

  The object probably belonged to Harbut Zalarin, son of the Sun and nephew of the Moon, and very likely it was enchanted.

  He bathed and returned to sit by the fire in his robe, looking at the table on which he had placed the book and the key.

  Harbut Zalarin’s spell did not seem very complicated, or not to someone had spent many months puzzling through the hints of wild magic in the texts left by discreet wizards of Astandalas, reticent to speak of forbidden magic even in books intended to stay in the tower at the farthermost edge of the Empire. Harbut Zalarin’s spell involved none of the tools or materials or rituals of Schooled magic: just the words, the will, and the focused talent.

  Among the items left by the Schooled wizards was a necklace made of black and white crystals set in gold, probably meant for a gift-offering left uncompleted. The young man set the necklace on the table before him, laid the key beside it, and after gathering his thoughts and arranging himself into a meditative posture, he spoke the spell.

  He was not expecting the result to be quite so spectacular as it was.

  While he sat on the mat before the table, mouth agape, the magic in the tower began to coruscate, to pulse, to shimmer, and to move. It gathered itself out of corners, plucked at the folds of his clothing, swirled over his skin like the waters of the bath he had just left. It was visible to his ordinary vision, a gathering explosion of golden sparks, filling the air with power and making it hard to breathe.

  He sat very still, heart pounding with excitement, as the magic poured upwards around him. He had thought the wind outside the tower door strong: this was far stronger, buffeting him from all directions, slamming at his body and his mind. He had grasped the golden key, however, out of determined curiosity, and determined curiosity kept him focused on his goal, the translation of the enchantment to the necklace so he could see what it was and learn.

  His attention narrowed under the pressure of magic until the ring of black and crystal filled his mind. The golden magic belled outwards, trying to tug him away from his intention, but with an effort far surpassing anything he had ever done before he held to that purpose.

  How long he sat there unmoving under the grip of the magic he didn’t know. Finally the magic gathered into a restless unity under him. He shook in awe and trepidation and fear as he spoke the final three words of the spell, the binding of the outer enchantment to its new home.

  With an awful boom the magic coalesced into the necklace; and he fainted.

  He awoke again to himself in the dark.

  There were three sources of light: the eternally burning log in the fireplace, starlight from the eight windows, and a flickering, pulsating glow from the necklace on the table.

  He sat up, feeling dizzy. Put a hand out to steady himself, and was surprised to see how it shook. He sat there assessing his physical sensations with some wonder at their newness and raw strength: he was dizzy, shaking, somehow soft inside himself, his throat tight and his mind feeling bruised. He wiped his face with his hands.

  “Not so simple as it seemed, was it?” he said to himself, something his tutor had often said to him, when he blithely launched into something new. The young man smiled, remembering with abrupt clarity one of those occasions, when he had tried to climb a bookshelf in the library to reach some bright-jacketed book from a high shelf, and pulled all the books down upon him when he fell. How much trouble he’d been in for that mischief—and then the book turned out to be a grammar of Renvoonran, which his tutor had decided he should learn as his punishment.

  That was definitely the most difficult piece of magic he had ever performed. He wiped his face again, sat up straighter, and stared at the table. The stones of the necklace were no longer transparent black and clear crystals, but rather smokey and opaque, magic-haunted, each stone the terminus of one or three or a dozen spells that stretched around the tower and far off into the west.

  He looked at the key, which looked exactly the same as it had earlier, and he looked around the room, which also looked and felt as it had all the time he’d lived there, and then he was abruptly too weary to begin guessing what else he might inadvertently disenchanted, and therefore tottered off to bed.

  It was only when he awoke a second time, far after dawn, that he realized it was himself.

  He knelt before the window to perform the first ritual of the day, and discovered halfway through the invocation that something was deeply amiss.

  He stumbled over his words and nearly dropped the incense (his hands were still shaking in aftereffect of the spell casting), and finally he rocked back on his heels and stared out the window at the Sun well away on his journey.

  Eventually he realized what it was: the ritual was empty. He’d said the right words and performed all the correct actions, and, with his heart racing with panic that he was so late, and guilt for all his errantry and mischief the day before, all that with much more focused intent and diligence than usual, almost as much as he’d used for the disenchantment—and—nothing.

  It was like plucking a harp string and making no sound at all.

  He stumbled through the rest of his rituals, the bath and the anointings and the chanting and the incense and the prayers, and all the while he felt as if his feet were drifting out from under him.

  In the tower room two trays sat waiting beside the necklace. One held the gold goblet of water and gold platter of buns that was the first meal, the other an elaborate pyramid of colour-coordinated fruit that was the second.

  He lay down on the eating couch, reached out automatically for food—and hesitated over which plate to take from.

  He got up in immediate disquiet, paced around a few times. South window, north, southwest, northeast, west, east. His eye was avoiding the necklace and the key; landed on the book.

  What you name yourself you are.

  Savelin, chantling, boy were the names he had been given, and not known better than to accept. Northeast, southwest, north, south. Something was building within him: hunger or fear or some magic, he couldn’t tell.

  At last he went to the necklace. The intricate spells anchored in it had been no dream of the night. They hummed in their places, the most powerfully enchanted object he had ever seen, even more than the things the priest-magi had brought for the great ceremonies of binding.

  When they bound him, he thought slowly.

  He reached out a cautious finger to one slender, small spell, but before he could touch it recoiled so strongly he found himself unwitting on the far side of the room.

  He sat in the window embrasure, sucking at his finger and staring wide-eyed at the necklace. It had shocked him: physically as shuffling feet on a carpet might, psychically as had the spellcasting of the night before—and emotionally as nothing ever had, for he knew the inner nature of the spell he had brushed against from the outside.

  Accept what you are told.

  When he was able to bear looking at it again, he followed that slender, small spell as it moved from the stone nearest the clasp of the necklace and wound its way between all the other spells before finally anchoring itself back in itself. The root of all his life: the undemanding acceptance of everything that happened to him.

  These were his enchantments.

  He regarded the necklace with a mixture of fascination, wariness, and another emotion for which he did not, initially, have a name.

  It began as akin of hollow feeling in his belly, and then as it started to grow it became more like a flame burning there, like a small bright sun of astonishing purity and uncomfortable strength.

  He watched the necklace, or rather the streamers of magical light emanating from it, for a long time. The rectangles of sunlight on the floor stretched and shifted their angle as the Sun ran his course. The magic moved, too, spells crossing from one stone to another, the light changing in a pattern whose timing he knew intimately.

  When it came time for the noon rituals he stirred in the window embrasure, about to begin them, the habitual action nearly as strong as the enchantment—when that unfamiliar fiery emotion rose up in his throat and made him say, “No.”

  He shivered at the sound of his voice. There was an edge to it he’d never heard from himself, a sharpness to the tone that matched some inward sharpness that was slowly being revealed as the uprooted remnants of his enchantments continued to fall away. The enchantments wove an elaborate structure around the necklace, hundreds of them of such complexity he knew he could sit there learning the ways of Schooled magic for the rest of his life, and probably come to be one of the great magi himself.

  He said, “No,” again, uttering the word as firmly as if he were claiming unknown lands for the Emperor. The rejection was immediate and irrevocable, and came from the place of fire within himself.

  The sprites brought the tray containing the ritual’s implements and his lunch, and set it beside the necklace. He was hungry, but he stayed in the window embrasure to see what would happen. No point, he thought, in doing empty rituals. It was a strange thought.

  The magic in the necklace moved: spells lit up in sequence, wove between each other, under over, through, so the air thrummed like a plucked harp string, and the ritual implements pinged lightly as the magic touched them.

  After the magic had resettled he went to the table and took the plate of food before retreating again to his spot at the window. The meal was yellow rice and bright red sauce over chicken and vegetables, with flaked almonds and green herbs decorating the top. Flat bread served as both utensil and antidote to the spiciness of the stew. He ate with gusto, and as he used the bread to mop up the last of the sauce he wondered, not for the first time, both where it had come from and how it had arrived piping-hot and delicious in the tower at the edge of the world.

  For the first time he wondered what it might be like to go find out.

  The mere thought made his hands shake. He dropped a piece of bread and stared at the smear it made across the floor. Go find out?

  He looked at the enchantments. One of them had always prevented that second question from crossing his mind.

  Go find out.

  After lunch there were candles to light and invocations to say. Before thinking he started to say the words for the lighting spell; and then he stopped, and after hesitating a few moments, watching the candles sitting unlit on the table next to the glittering necklace as the magic moved without him. Awkward, unsure, uncomfortable with himself, he picked up the Commonplace Book of Harbut Zalarin and the scarlet cloth and walked all the way down the stairs to the bottom door of the tower without stopping.

  He took a deep breath, turned the handle, and pushed open the door. It opened easily.

  He took another deep breath and stepped outside.

  A bank of fog surrounded the tower. Going down the stairs he’d half-formed the plan to sit outside and read, but after he went two or three feet away from the door he stopped, bewildered and increasingly chilled by the swirling mist. After a few minutes spent staring at the blankness he retreated back inside.

  The climb up the seventy-seven stairs seemed very long. When he reached the bathing-room floor he stopped for breath. He was sweating again, and washed his face. As he dried himself off he looked out the window at the gargoyle and the empty stick nest. The angry gull had not returned.

  After sitting on the stool he’d left under the window for a while, it occurred to him that it might be fun to see what else there was in the storage room. Accordingly he went next door, and proceeded to spend a very happy few hours opening boxes and trunks and wardrobes and trying to figure out what all these intriguing items were.

  Hunger at last drove him up to the tower room for supper. It no longer felt so welcoming a space, not with the magic buzzing around the necklace. He felt too unsettled after eating to read Harbut Zalarin after all, so he pulled down his favourite poems and read about Daphnis and Olor and Tzu-tzên and Aurelius Magnus until it was far too late in the night.

  Every time he came to a new character he tried out their name, speaking it aloud to hear its sound on the air, but none of them seemed quite to answer. He noticed some names trailed meanings after them, and others named the one person and nothing more. He thought perhaps he’d rather have a name all to himself, one he could—like Olor or Hu Liang—make famous by his own doings … but still, nothing came.

  As he read the end of the Gesta Oloris he discovered the name for the hot fire in his breast. When Olor realized his betrayal by his blood brother, the poet said, “his breast lit with fire/ with the white flame of righteous anger/ and burning like the Sons of Thunder” (a gloss explained that these were the gods of war), “Olor lifted up his sword,/ fine-cleaving Ordnamur,/ ready at last to die.”

  The young man read the words over and over again, the thrill the lines had always given him blending with the fire in his own breast as he realized that what he felt—what caused him this fiery pain, this strange sense almost of exaltation—was anger. Righteous indignation—now he connected them other words rushed to mind. Fury. Rage. Wrath.

  He did not sleep well that night. He woke before dawn the next morning, determined that he would not fail the heroes of his beloved poems, neither Daphnis nor Olor nor Tzu-tzên nor any of the others. He would not stay in the tower, enchanted into obedience, nor disenchanted and afraid.

  No. He would go off and find out where the spiced stew came from, go see the countries whose names and rulers and heraldry and imports and exports he had learned by rote, and—this was where the books were particularly clear—he would avenge himself and die in a blaze of glory and justice.

  He decided this at sunrise, and by sunset had despaired of ever leaving, for he was not quite so naive as to set off blindly into the fog with no supplies at all. The poems were fairly clear on the necessity of supplies.

  He went to the storage room and examined all the piles he’d made earlier. There was one old leather bag in the back corner of the storage room, perhaps a foot long and as much around, with a strap to go over his shoulder and handles to carry it by the rest of the time. He put the Commonplace Book of Harbut Zalarin and the scrolls containing the Gesta Oloris, The Seven Classical Poets, and a few texts of magic in it, followed by the red cloth and a piece of blue fabric with yellow swirls on it he found rather appealing. He was going to add some paper and bottles of ink, but the bag was too full.

  He carried the bag upstairs and unpacked it again. Clearly he needed it to carry more than it did on its own merits. He frowned at it, nibbled his lip, paced back and forth, and spent the better part of the next month figuring out how to enchant it to hold whatever he put in it. Every half hour or hour he would emerge out of his scribbles and attempts to concoct the spell with a name on the tip of his tongue: Aurora, Fin-hêlad, Brazenose the Pure.

  These were not his names. Tenebra, Peter, the Kor, Wellamotte, Zurifne. He wrote them down in the margins of an empty notebook he’d found, lists of names for the first beginnings of his own commonplace book. At one point while he was pondering his list, a line jumped into his mind with such force he jumped physically: