CHAPTER 5 — THE TOWER
In her third year of tower life, Rona had learned two things: the stairs never ended, and whoever ranked lowest carried everything.
What she carried this morning was a chest of chalk half her own height. From the ritual archive on the seventh floor to the Seventeenth Great Circle Hall, exactly four hundred and eighty-five steps. Rona counted them, because counting was better than thinking about the burn in her arms. On the three hundred and ninety-sixth step she met old Master Corvin; he looked at the chest, looked at Rona, then stepped aside and went on his way. Rona cursed him inwardly for making him wait with this heavy load, even if only for a few seconds, but not daring to say it out loud, he continued climbing the stairs.
By the time she reached the Great Circle Hall her breath had knotted in her chest, and the hall was fuller than she had ever seen it. Masters had come down from every floor of the tower. The senior mages lined the walls, and on the marble floor six scribes crawled on their knees around a giant compass, drawing a circle. A circle within the circle, and another within that. Rona set the chest down and for a moment, only a moment, stood still.
The pattern on the floor resembled nothing in any of her textbooks.
"Don't stand there gawking!" The head scribe jabbed a finger at the chalk chest. "Open it. Sort out the blue ones. And no one steps inside the inner circle, do you hear? Whoever does, the Master will draw his next circle with their hide."
Rona opened the chest and set to sorting. Her hands worked while her ears stayed on the hall. Everyone who survived three years in the tower acquired that skill; hands on the task, ears at the door.
"...I am telling you, the text in the archive is half a copy. The true rite was lost when Helios burned, seven centuries ago." That was Velmar, one of the fourth-floor masters; his voice, as always, was the voice of a man weary of the world's wrongness. "Casting a summoning from an incomplete text is setting sail with half a map."
"Better the Master tried and failed than never tried." That was one of the young masters, whose name Rona could not recall. "The council has ruled. The emperor has set his seal. There is no point arguing now."
"There is every point, because when we fail, the council will not blame the throne, nor even the Master. It will blame the tower." Velmar's voice dropped, but Rona's ear caught it. "No one has attempted this in a thousand years. Do you know why, boy? Not for lack of skill. Thirteen towers tried it across a millennium, and thirteen times the circle stayed empty. An empty circle, dead acolytes, and a fortune burned. The legend does not answer. Perhaps the legend never existed."
Rona's fingers slowed for a moment over the blue chalk. Thirteen attempts. Empty circles. In Kisabra, in the fishing town where she grew up, everyone knew the tale of the hero. It was told by the hearth on winter nights; the man called from another world, the man who raised the city of the sun. Three years ago she had learned that the tale had an actual rite in the tower archives, and that day she had felt as if she were living inside a story. Now she was learning that the story had been tested thirteen times and come back empty thirteen times, and that knowledge was very far from the warmth of that hearth.
The doors of the hall opened, and silence spread like rings from a stone dropped in water.
Ogmios walked in.
In three years, Rona had seen the Tower Master this close perhaps ten times. He was not an imposing man; middle height, thin, greying, plainly dressed. But when he entered a room, the room's center of gravity shifted. Everyone leaned a finger's breadth toward him without knowing it, and Rona had never worked out whether that came from power or from habit.
Ogmios walked to the circle on the floor, stopped at its edge, and looked for a long time. Then he crouched, took the chalk from the head scribe's hand, wiped three symbols from the eastern arc of the inner circle with his sleeve, and redrew them. No one said a word. The head scribe looked down at his papers, compared them with his own copy, and Rona watched the man's face drain slowly of color.
"The archive copy is flawed," Ogmios said. He spoke not to the hall but, it seemed, to the circle itself. "Three symbols, deliberately inverted. The old masters left traps in their copies. So that whoever stole the rite from the book would die in the circle." He straightened and handed back the chalk. "Continue."
Velmar stepped forward. The old master's jaw was tight. "Master. I say it one last time, and I say it for the record. This rite has been attempted thirteen times, and..."
"Fourteen," said Ogmios. "There is one more attempt that never reached the records, at the tower of Seria. Count that one too." He turned to Velmar, and Rona saw something strange on the Tower Master's face; not anger, not weariness, something very near courtesy. "Your objection is recorded, Velmar. You may even be right. But I will ask you a question, and you will answer it after the circle is finished. Thirteen towers tried, and the circle stayed empty, true. But what if it is not that the legend does not answer..." He paused a moment. "...what if the question was asked wrongly?"
Velmar did not reply. Ogmios surveyed the hall one last time, and his eyes passed, for an instant, over Rona where she knelt beside the chalk chest. They did not stop; they recorded her and moved on, like an entry in a man's inventory. Then he walked to the doors.
"The rite is in three days, at dawn. I want the list of participants by evening. And Velmar..." He stopped at the threshold. "If I am wrong, the tower will bear the shame under my name. If I am right, it will be remembered under yours. A profitable bargain for us both."
The doors closed, and the hall began to hum again.
Rona ate her supper alone in the cold refectory of the dormitory. The soup was the usual soup; barley, some root, a finger of fat on a good day. Spoon in hand, watching the steam thin over the bowl, her mind was still on the circle. Her shift in the healing ward began in two hours, and tomorrow she would carry chalk again, and none of it smothered the small, shameful flutter in her chest.
What if it works?
The child who had listened to that tale by the hearth in Kisabra still lived somewhere inside her. Mages did not believe in the hero; Rona had learned that early, disbelief was worn here like a uniform. But Rona had been a healer before she was ever a mage, and healers knew a strange thing: sometimes a patient begins to recover not at the medicine, but at the news that medicine is coming.
Perhaps Velmar was right, and the circle would stay empty.
But in three days, at dawn, the whole tower would stand around that circle, and Rona, spooning the barley from the bottom of her bowl, admitted it to herself: she wanted it not to stay empty. She wanted to live in a world where a tale could be true.
She set down the spoon, cleared her tray, and went down to the healing ward. At its door, the old healer woman handing over the night watch looked at her and said her single sentence, the same as every evening.
"Hands washed?"
"Washed, auntie."
"Good." The woman took her cloak, and going out, paused a moment at the door. "What is it they're drawing up there, have you heard? The whole tower speaks of nothing else."
Rona thought for a moment, and smiled. "They are drawing a fairy tale, auntie."
The woman grumbled and left. Rona refreshed the ward's lamps, sat down at the head of the first bed, and as she laid the damp cloth on the burning forehead of the mason's apprentice, she looked out the window toward the tower's crown. The windows of the seventeenth floor would remain lit until morning.
For three whole days.