All the Paths of Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed over the threshold.
    Three steps on stone, and the last slanting rays of the sun gave way to darkness. Meralda squinted ahead, slowing until she could make out shapes in the shadows. “Be careful,” she said, as Tervis and Kervis entered. “The carpenters are stacking lumber in here.”
    Meralda reached out and touched the wall to her right. The stone was cold. Like the outside of the Tower, the interior hall was stone. Solid black Eryan granite, shaped and fused into a single mass by a spell or spells known only to the Tower’s long-dead master. Cold and dry and as smooth as glass. Meralda knew just beyond the wall, the sun was shining, the park was green and lush, and Tirlin was bustling and busy. But here, in the windowless belly of the Tower, she felt as if it were the smallest hour of the longest, darkest night.
    “It’s quiet, all of a sudden,” said Tervis, in a whisper. “Isn’t it?”
    Meralda shrugged. Oh, the hammering and pounding and shouting continued, but the Tower doors might as well have been flung shut, so faint was the noise after only a few paces. And had the daylight fled so quickly, on her other visits?
    “This way,” she said, when the Bellringer’s footfalls fell behind. “The hall is very short, and there are no turns.”
    “No windows, either,” muttered Tervis. “Ma’am.”
    “We won’t need windows,” said Meralda, groping in her bag. “We’ll have plenty of our own light.”
    “Oh,” said Kervis. “Should I go back and fetch a lantern?”
    Meralda pulled a short brass pipe from her bag. “Light,” she said, unlatching the simple magelamp spell coiled invisibly around the cylinder with the word.
    The Bellringers whistled as wide beams of soft white light flared from each end of the brass tube.
    “Wizard lamp,” said Tervis, lifting his hand to run his fingers through the light. “Uncle Rammis saw one, once. Nobody believed him.”
    Meralda played the lamp around the hall. Shadows flew. Some, she thought, more slowly than others.
    A shiver ran the length of Meralda’s spine.
    “Nonsense,” she said, amazed and a bit embarrassed. “Utter nonsense.”
    “Pardon, ma’am?” asked Kervis.
    Meralda shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. We have a long flight of stairs to climb, gentlemen,” she said, striding toward the heart of the darkness at the end of the hall. “Shall we go?”
    The Bellringers followed. Ten paces further Meralda’s lamplight fell across a crude table bearing half a dozen battered oil lanterns, an open box of Red Cat matches, and a half-eaten Lamp River apple.
    Further down the hall, smooth-planed cedar planks were stacked neatly along each wall. Meralda thought she heard the sound of gentle snoring behind the third stack as she passed it, and her face reddened even more. I can at least be thankful Mug isn’t here, she thought. I’d never hear the last of this. Carpenters sleep while the sorceress trembles.
    Meralda’s footfalls came faster and harder until the hall simply ended, and the shaft of light from her magelamp soared up and out, only to lose itself in the vast, cavernous maw of the Tower.
    Kervis whistled softly.
    “Bats,” said Tervis, his face turned upward. “You’d think there would be bats.”
    “Not a one,” said Meralda. “There isn’t a crack or a gap anywhere in the Tower. It’s an amazing structure.” She played the lamplight out into the darkness, resting the beam finally on the far side of the Tower and the faint outline of the winding, rail-less stair that wound lazily up and away into the dark.
    “We climb that?” asked Kervis.
    Meralda nodded. “It’s wider than it looks,” she said, though she understood the badly-hidden wash of fear in the boy’s voice. She recalled the first time she had ascended the stair. Darkness above, and darkness below, a magelit patch of old black stone to her left, a hungry void a step to her right.
    From the idling carpenters just beyond the doors,