A Shadow on the Glass Read online

  The specter moved its arms over a fuming crater in the stone. Immediately it was attacked by carmine lightning that sizzled out of the gate. Ghost-fire outlined its cloak. Beneath its feet the stone suddenly flowed like water, dragging the specter down into the crater. The air reeked of brimstone, then it conjured a shimmering protection out of the turmoil, a cone of white radiance that hung the gate with a cobweb of icicles, a Forbidding! The gate boomed shut and vanished.

  The crowd sat up in their seats. This was controversial, for the Histories told that the Forbidding came about by it-self. If it had been made, it raised all sorts of possibilities. Yet Llian knew that it would take more than visions to convince this audience.

  The audience began to stir uneasily. The tale was practically done but no proof had been offered. They felt let down. Llian drew out the moment.

  And the girl? They found her too, when it was safe to go within, later that afternoon. A remarkably pretty young woman, she was crumpled up on the stone with the long skirt covering her sad legs. She was smiling as though she had just had the most wonderful day of her life. Strangely, among all that destruction the girl seemed to have taken no harm, but she was quite dead.

  Anxious to mend Shuthdar’s evil record, she had written down his tale, put it in her bodice, then thrust a long hat-pin right through her heart.

  This caused a sensation! Llian held up his hand and showed two papers, one blotched with a rusty stain.

  I have the proof right here, sealed with her own heart’s blood

  So ends the Tale of the Forbidding—the first tale and the greatest.

  The whole room was on its feet but no one made a sound. They were trying to work out the implications. Then the crowd took a collective breath—the black-robed masters were filing down the hall, two by two, and up the center steps to the stage. Llian’s uncertain smile froze on his face. He had never wanted more than to be a chronicler and a teller. Had he failed so badly as to be publicly stripped of even his student’s rank?

  Wistan, the master of the college, a little man almost as ugly as Shuthdar himself, had always detested Llian. He stood right in front of him, yellow eyes bulging out of a face like a bowl.

  “A remarkable story. But it was not in the proofs you gave me,” he rasped.

  “I kept these back,” Llian replied, clutching his documents like a lifebelt.

  Wistan held out a desiccated hand. Llian dared to hope.”The second paper certifies the girl’s story,” he added softly.

  Wistan scanned the papers. The folds of the first were perforated through and through, the mark of the fatal pin. His face grew grayer and grayer. “So it is true,” he sighed. “Even now such knowledge could be deadly. Say no more!”

  Llian’s knees were shaking so much that he almost fell down. Wistan was a study in indecision. The telling had been a marvelous one, but it threatened everything he had ever worked for. Then the assembled masters forced his hand. They gave a great cry as of one throat, surged forward, bore Llian up and carried him across the stage in triumph. The whole room was laughing and crying, cheering and throwing their hats in the air. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Wistan followed them reluctantly.

  As they swayed across the room toward the exit, Llian caught sight of the red-haired woman again, staring at him. She tried to force her way through the crowd and once more he felt that extraordinary sensation, as though their minds were linked. Who was she? The Graduation Telling was closed to the public but she was not from the college—he had never seen her before.

  She almost reached him, getting so close that he caught a whiff of her lime-blossom perfume, then the crowd forced them apart. Her lips moved and he heard in his head, “Who killed her?” then she disappeared in the mêlêe and he was carried out of the hall to the celebrations.

  But much later, rolling home down the cobbled street surrounded by friends as merry as he was, her words came back to trouble him. The apparent suicide had always puzzled him, but how could anyone else have gotten into the ruins unobserved? Nonetheless the question had been raised and it would not go away. What if someone had found something so important that the girl had to be silenced? That could be the key to an even better story—the first new Great Tale for hundreds of years, and if he were the one to write it, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the greatest chroniclers of all time. Consumed by this thought, Llian forgot all about Wistan’s caution.

  “Look!” cried his friend Thandiwe, a tall handsome student. She and Llian had been friends for years, and occasionally lovers too. She was pointing toward the horizon. “A new star. That’s an omen if ever I saw one. You’re going to be famous, Llian.”

  Llian’s gaze followed her finger. It was not a star at all, but a nebula, for it had a definite shape. A dark-red blotch that he had never seen before, like a tiny spider. Suddenly Llian felt cold though it was a warm summer’s night.

  “An omen. I wonder what kind of an omen? I’m going to bed.”

  “I’m coming too,” said Thandiwe, embracing him and tossing the waterfall of her black hair so that it covered them both.

  Before dawn a dreadful realization woke Llian so abruptly that he fell right out of bed. It was so obvious that he was amazed he hadn’t thought of it himself. If the girl had been murdered, the record he had used for his tale might be false. And if it was, his career would be ruined beyond redemption. There was no more honored profession than chronicler, but no one would be more scorned than he who had debased the greatest of all tales.

  Thandiwe sighed and snuggled down under the covers. Llian picked himself up off the floor and gathered a blanket round him, shivering and staring out the window. The nebula was high, seemingly bigger than before, and now that he saw it clearly Llian realized that it had not the form of a spider at all, but its more deadly relative, the scorpion.

  Fame or oblivion? Either way he had to find the truth. Who had killed the crippled girl? And why? And how could he possibly find out, after all this time?

  2

  * * *

  DECLINE OF

  A CHRONICLER

  While Llian slept, Wistan had been busy in his office. Now he stuck his head out the door. The captain of the college guard, a big merry old fellow with wooly hair and a grin as wide as a doorway, sat outside in an easy chair, whistling. He wore a scarlet kilt from which muscular legs stretched halfway across the hall. He was as opposite to Wistan in appearance, character and temperament as it was possible for any two people to be.

  “Hey, Trusco, come in here. Shut the door behind you.”

  Trusco followed him inside. He had been the captain of the guard for as long as Wistan had been master, more than thirty years. The college was that sort of a place—tradition was everything. It was little changed from the institution of a century ago, or five centuries for that matter.

  Wistan sat down at an ebony desk the size of a double bed, rummaging in its drawers. His hairless dome bobbed up and down as he stacked papers on the desktop. “We’ve got secret work to do tonight. I suppose you know what it is about.”

  “Llian’s tale,” said Trusco, looking down at the ugly little man with affection. “It set my mind wondering, I can tell you.”

  “More than you can know. The girl’s story is true, beyond any doubt.”

  Trusco was not convinced. “Then how come it didn’t come out at the time?”

  “I’ve already checked that There were so many dead that it took days to bury them all, and the girl’s record wasn’t discovered for some time. Then the chronicler who certified it drowned on the way home, crossing a flooded river, and though her bags were recovered, her papers lay forgotten in the archives.”

  “Documents can be faked,” said Trusco sceptically.

  “More often than not but this one isn’t”He produced a stained sheet from behind the desk. “Look! Even after all this time the paper has a story to tell. It’s good thick stock, and there wasn’t much blood. It’s mostly on one side, the side against the gi
rl’s breast. But see how the hat-pin pushed the torn paper out of the other side of the hole. The pin was coming out of her, not going in! She was stabbed in the back! And you know what that means!”

  “Ghosts don’t do murder,” said Trusco.

  “Someone got in secretly. Maybe someone did make the Forbidding.”

  Trusco furrowed his brow. He wasn’t used to such complicated thoughts. “And maybe the golden flute wasn’t destroyed after all.”

  “Don’t even think that aloud! I don’t know what happened. But what we have believed about Shuthdar for three thousand years is proven false; therefore everything else that happened then is open to question. A whole world of deadly possibilities is revealed.”

  “And you want me to take a message to the Council and put all this to Mendark?” Trusco teased, grinning his vast grin. His teeth were as big and square as tombstones. “Well, it’s nice weather for a trip to Thurkad.”

  Thurkad was the largest city in Meldorin, weeks of travel to the east. It was ancient, powerful, wealthy, yet rife with beggars—a teeming, stinking cesspool of a place. Mendark, the cunning and devious Magister of the Council of Santhenar, had dwelt there for an age.

  Wistan knew that he was being teased but he reacted anyway. “Mendark! It will be an icy day in the blackest pit of the void before I do that villain any more favors! It still rankles that I was forced to take Llian.” He took a pinch of snuff from a cloisonné jar, applied it to his nostrils, went red in the face and sneezed mightily. Trusco passed over a green bandanna and Wistan mopped streaming eyes.

  “But Llian has brought the college honor,” said Trusco.

  “So he has, and had he come to me in the proper way I probably would have admitted him, despite that he is an unworthy Zain. But not this way. Why did Mendark want to make a Zain into a chronicler anyway? And what does he want in return? I have a feeling that it won’t do the college any good. Come on, we’re going to the library.”

  “It’s two in the morning,” Trusco protested feebly. “Even Llian will be in bed by now.” Trusco’s protests were just for show; he knew that Wistan hardly slept at all and would not be put off.

  “With one of my students, no doubt,” snorted Wistan. “Here, carry this.” He handed him the bundle of papers, then took a bracelet of woven silver out of a locked drawer and slid it on his wrist.

  “You are serious,” said Trusco. He knew that the bracelet was the key to the master’s safe, but whatever was put inside could not be recovered in that master’s lifetime.

  “The proofs for Llian’s tale. Four years’ work by a genius—never to be seen again while I live.”

  He fell silent and Trusco asked no more questions. Wistan closed the door behind him and followed his captain down a wide hall paved with terracotta tiles. The walls were hung with portraits of famous chroniclers past and present. Trusco jerked his thumb at the last in the row.

  “Has Llian sat for his portrait yet?” he asked cheerfully.

  Wistan winced. “He may not have to.”

  They went out the side door. Trusco held up a lantern to light the winding path, though both could have trodden it blindfolded. They walked down between shoulder-high lavender and rosemary bushes to the Library of the Histories, an architectural extravagance of towers and spires, turrets and cupolas, with every surface so ornate that in places it was impossible to tell what was structure and what merest ornament.

  At the library Wistan used his master key, opened the great carven double doors and signed the book out of habit.

  “What a monstrosity this building is,” he said, looking up at cornices decorated in at least a dozen colors, though the paint was peeling badly.

  “But part of the history of the college, and therefore unassailable,” Trusco said cheekily.

  “A challenge! I would tear it down tomorrow if there was money to build a new one. A nice simple one, like a temple of antiquity.”

  “Then perhaps you should treat Llian better, since his sponsor Mendark has gold by the bucket.”

  “Bah! Come on, we’re going down to the archives.”

  Trusco raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  “We’re going to put the proofs, and every other document about the time of the Forbidding, where no one can get them,” Wistan said. “This secret could be deadly. I have to protect the college.”

  Trusco grunted.

  “You disagree? Well, so be it I don’t want your agreement, just your strong back. In fact I wonder if I should not pile up all his proofs and put a torch to them.”

  That shocked Trusco out of his good-humored acquiescence. “You would burn the Histories? Without the Histories the college has no meaning. What has your life been lived for, master?”

  “Yes, what has my life been lived for?” said Wistan heavily. “Once it was the Histories. Now, to my shame, just the college. I cannot risk it.”

  It took hours to move the shelves of documents down to the locked archives, a basement that contained documents forbidden, dangerous or obscene. In a corner of the basement was a safe large enough to walk into, with shelves piled high with old documents and scrolls. When the job was done, Wistan touched the silver bracelet to a niche on the back wall of the safe and a horizontal slot appeared below it. He reached in, dropped Llian’s proofs through and whipped his hand back out again just as something slammed closed inside.

  “That’ll get you one day,” Trusco said, smiling.

  “Serve me right for putting off my problems to the future, I suppose.” Wistan grimaced. “Well, let whoever succeeds me worry about it.”

  “Ah, but what about Llian? You can’t lock him up, and he knows every word of his proofs.”

  “When he recites them it’s not an original document It’s not proof. But I will deal with him too, just to be sure.”

  “Well, deal gently with him. I like Llian,” said Trusco. “He has brought honor upon the college. And he has a rare mastery of the voice.”

  “Pah! Wretched Zain! He bothers me. He is too bound up in his work, and too curious. He would do anything to advance his art, to get his tale. He is Zain through and through.”

  “Yes he is, the good and the bad. Wistan—”

  “I won’t harm him as long as he cooperates!” snapped Wistan.

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “I will discredit him utterly and strip him of his honor.”

  It was midday when Llian rose. In the daylight his fears of the previous night had receded to a distant worry, one that could be put off. Fifteen years of toil at the college were over! He was a teller and a master chronicler at last, the youngest to have achieved either honor in more than a hundred years. He was just twenty-eight, the whole world was wonderful and it all lay at his feet. Whatever he wanted could be his, though all Llian really wanted was to be a chronicler, to fill in the gaps in the Histories; and a teller, one who searched out forgotten tales or made new ones. His dream was to make a new Great Tale, though a dream was surely all it could be. In four thousand years of keeping the Histories, only twenty-two tales had been judged worthy of being Great Tales.

  Llian scratched himself, inspecting the damage of the previous night in a cracked mirror. His brown eyes were bloodshot and bleary, and his head throbbed. Llian might have been called handsome, save that his mouth was too wide and his chin lopsided, but when he smiled it lit up his whole face. He was of middle height and slimly built, though with strong shoulders. Llian was likeable and charming, though occasionally a little full of himself. Sometimes, because of his heritage, he tried too hard. His voice was soft and rich and mellow, touched with lights and shadows, utterly enchanting. Friends, enemies; all loved his voice. As did he.

  Llian combed untidy brown hair, worn fashionably long, and was halfway through lunch with his friends when the expected summons came. It was Turlew, Wistan’s detestable seneschal, a bitter failed chronicler who hated all students and, most of all, Llian.

  “Wistan requires you in his office immediately,” said
Turlew, licking soft wet lips that looked as though they had been stung by a bee.

  “Tell him I’ll be along presently,” said Llian, and belched. Everyone laughed.

  Turlew’s chubby cheeks grew red. “At once, Wistan said!”

  “I’m not a student anymore,” said Llian. “I’m a master now, you strutting peacock, though since you weren’t invited to the telling last night I’ll excuse you for not knowing that.” Llian was not normally rude but he detested Turlew as much as Turlew resented him.

  “A master, eh? You still have the manners of a student. Have you a position to go to?” Turlew looked as though he could spit venom. “Without Wistan’s references you won’t even get a clerk’s post.”

  “Don’t forget who my sponsor is,” said Llian arrogantly. “Mendark himself! What does Mendark care for Wistan’s references?”

  “You might find that Mendark demands more than you care to repay.”

  That was something Llian had no answer for. Mendark was a mancer—a wielder of the Secret Art—of great power and subtlety, an uncertain friend, a deadly opponent. A perilous master, so the tales went. Mendark had extended his own life many times over, as mancers did, and now his tentacles reached across the known world. Why he had sponsored a Zain at the college no one knew. Suddenly the world outside seemed all too precarious.

  Wistan was pacing the room when Llian entered. He did not smile.

  “Good afternoon, Master Llian,” he said.

  “Good afternoon, Master Wistan,” Llian replied politely.

  He stared at Wistan, apprehension mingled with contempt, his teller’s eye making a caricature of the ugly little man. The skin of Wistan’s long and scrawny neck sagged in festoons like a curtain above a window and quivered with every forced-out word. On top of this column there tottered a head the like of which Llian could not look on without mingled mirth and horror. It was almost fleshless, small and flat at the top, flaring to a jaw so large that he appeared to be nothing but face. The lips were gray and bloodless, the nose a flattened, insignificant thing with large open nostrils of greenish hue. His head bulged at the back and the eyes protruded out of the concavity of his face like two peas resting on a saucer of lard. A few straps of dung-colored hair, hastily combed across the top of a blotchy skull, now hung limp and greasy about his ear.