The Tower (2)
The tower was long and thin. Its height was impressive, yet the ground it occupied was a touch smaller than the annex where Harad was staying.
Still, by his best guess, this tower had once been a Magic Tower.
Harad was convinced that the Magic Towers of the Outlands would prove extraordinary — and no wonder, for they were communities of magicians. Communities more scholarly, more devoted to inquiry, livelier in their exchanges. Nor were they mere crowds gathered under the label of magician. Each tower embodied a different Origin, and magicians whose Origins belonged to the same category banded together beneath that banner.
A Magic Tower, in other words, was specialization given form. A tower standing for such a group was bound to be something special. Granted, this one had been abandoned, so whatever specialness remained could hardly amount to much... and yet surely some trace of what it had once been would survive.
This is it?
Having entered the tower, Harad could not keep the disappointment off his face. There was nothing. The interior was narrow and bare, without so much as one object worth the name.
Because it was abandoned?
No. The bare interior held no dust. Just as the door's seams had suggested, the place was being tended at regular intervals.
Speech drifted down from somewhere above.
"Shall we go up, then?"
Ellen said it to Harad, who, unable to let go just yet, was ransacking the first floor corner to corner.
"Go on ahead."
He rooted around a while longer, then gave up and accepted it. Perhaps that was simply how first floors were. There might be more above — on a floor where magicians actually were, say. Though of course there might not be. Either way, Harad meant to climb to the top. He had never once laid eyes on this tower in his previous life; it was well worth investigating.
"But where do we go up from?"
Ellen asked it while casting exaggerated glances around the room. No stairs were to be seen. The weight of her stare was hardly light, but she seemed to have decided that if anyone would know, it was Harad.
I haven't the faintest idea. Harad feigned composure. Not knowing, he still had to look like he knew — and knowing, he still must not gawk. That was the position he held in Ellen's eyes: the one who taught, the one who spurred her on. The moment there was nothing left to gain from him, her fixation would end.
The interior was slightly smaller in area than the tower had appeared from outside — meaning a hidden space existed. In his head, Harad compared the circumference he had walked outside with the floor beneath his feet.
Here, then. The left wall sat a little farther in than the rest. On closer look, a single hairline seam ran vertically from floor to ceiling, and about four handspans from it stood two buttons. Harad pressed the upper one — the one marked with an upward arrow.
Before long, the seam parted. The wall slid open left and right with a whisper of stone. It had never been a wall at all, but a door — and that seam had been where it joined.
"This looks like the one."
Harad called Ellen over, easy and natural, as though he had known all along.
The space beyond the wall was exceedingly small — five people would have filled it — and it, too, held nothing. Instead, the wall bore a vertical column of buttons like the ones at the entrance. Fifty-two in all; not that he had counted. The buttons were numbered.
"Floor numbers, I see. The tower seems to run to fifty floors."
Two of them were arrows. Judging by the directions they pointed, one opened and one closed.
"...Insane."
Ellen was freshly staggered by the height. And when she realized what this little room was for, she was appalled all over again.
"You're telling me this is an elevator?"
"So it would seem."
"Then I guess we smash through the ceilings and climb."
Astonishment at the very existence of a fifty-floor elevator aside, this was a building abandoned in ages long past. With no man or beast to turn a winch, the only way up would be to punch through each ceiling and haul themselves upward.
Instead of answering, Harad pressed the close button.
The door did not close.
"What are you doing."
Instead of answering, Harad pressed the button again. This time, as before, he let magic bleed out through his fingertip. The door closed.
"Huh?"
"So it was an artifact after all."
"Pardon?"
"This elevator itself is an artifact."
It meant that this structure, capable of rising fifty floors, was in its entirety a single magic tool. Ellen's mouth fell open.
"Let's go up one at a time."
Harad pressed the button marked 2. With a lurch of sudden weightlessness the elevator climbed — and stopped almost at once. The distance between the first floor's ceiling and the second floor's boards seemed a short one. They waited a good while, but the door did not open.
"It seems we open it ourselves. Or someone outside presses the button for us." When Harad pressed the open button, the door slid smoothly apart. The interior much resembled the first floor. They rode down to make certain, and found nothing special there either.
Tap, tap. An odd sound came from behind him. He turned to find Ellen alternately pressing the open button and the close button.
"What are you doing?"
"It's fascinating. ...Why isn't it moving?"
"It needs magic fed into it."
The elevator was nothing so special as Ellen's artifact, which worked without a single drop of magic. Put the other way around, it meant that to the Outlands, elevators were everyday tools.
"Do it for me, then."
Ellen demanded it like a child, looking thoroughly charmed. Truth be told, so was Harad — had she not been there, he would have been doing exactly the same thing.
"Who knows — someday we might even manage one in Serzilla."
"You could make one?"
Ellen's eyes went round and bright. Her prejudice was visibly thinning — no, perhaps she had never felt much aversion to artifacts in the first place. She had been passing as a man with an artifact's help since she was small, after all.
"Unfortunately, I've little talent for making things."
The Sun was an exacting Origin. Unless a thing was extraordinarily sturdy, it fell apart the instant his magic poured into it.
"Then again, I may one day take in a magician with a gift for crafting. Like Kubel, say."
"..."
Ellen did not answer. Neither yes nor no — it read as a deferral. Not a bad reaction.
At Ellen's request, Harad opened and closed the door some thirty times over. Then he pressed 3. He hit the open button and stepped out, but the third floor showed nothing special either. Nor the fourth. Nor the fifth. On and on, the same.
Only, the voices they had heard at the very beginning — speakers presumed to be Outlands magicians — were now unmistakably drawing closer.
"There were two of them."
Not mere voices. A conversation. The higher they climbed, the clearer it grew. When the elevator reached the thirtieth floor, Harad's finger, reaching for the open button, stopped dead.
The voices were not above them. They were just beyond the door.
"Ah. Ah."
Harad breathed it out, low. The conversation beyond the door did not falter. One voice in particular was loud, and it sounded whipped into a fervor — which was why its owners had yet to notice this side of the wall.
No — more likely the location deserves the credit. An abandoned tower in the Boundary: a place no unwelcome guest could reach even if he wished to. If anything came calling here, it would sooner be a magic beast than a person.
"Let's eavesdrop a moment. This promises to be valuable."
Harad whispered it to Ellen.
"Didn't you say you can't hide your presence?"
"This land is hiding me on my behalf."
It was a land ruled by the magic of fire, and Harad's presence lay buried beneath that land's own. Proof enough: the magicians beyond the door still had no inkling of them. Harad pressed his ear to the door, and beside him Ellen matched his posture — using no aura, just in case.
"Can't see a thing — it's maddening. Could you open it just a sliver?"
"Is that remark meant for me?"
"Strength is your trade, isn't it?"
With strength too weak — or merely middling — the door would have groaned. Ellen, who possessed some of the finest raw power in all Serzilla, was neither. Without a sound, slowly, and by sheer force, she parted the doors. The gap was no wider than a little finger, ample for peeping. Harad set one eye against it.
"I'm not particularly interested."
What curious Ellen was their magic, not their conversation.
"Oh — he's got him by the collar."
"...Move aside a moment."
"Please!"
The magician with the collar in his fist roared. He was a mountain of a man — larger than Gulen, a shade smaller than Kubel. The magician he had seized, by contrast, was slight, about Ellen's size, and so his whole body hung dangling from the grip.
"Hervis of the Red Tower. I know this place serves as the Red Tower's relay post. And that you have kept the watch these past six months!"
So the giant magician named the slight one Hervis — a member of the Red Tower, at that.
"I have told you repeatedly, Jeshult of the Ivory Tower. In the past half-year, no comrade has used this place. Nor have I received any message."
The magician called Hervis stayed composed even with his collar wadded in another's fist.
"Ios is dead. Burned by fire, no less!"
"That cannot be."
"Do you doubt Compaso's eyes, then?"
The giant — Jeshult — glared, eyes bulging.
"Compaso, who was watching over Ios's infiltration, passed those very words to me before he died. That Ios died by fire."
"I do not doubt Compaso's eyes. What I doubt is whether a misunderstanding has slipped in somewhere."
The collar shook this way and that. Even amid it, Hervis stood unbowed.
"Why would we ever attack the Ivory Tower?"
"That is exactly why I ask you to prove it. We, too, want to believe in the Red Tower."
"I have said it any number of times. There is no Red Tower comrade infiltrating Serzilla."
Jeshult's hands were trembling now. Choking up, he let go of the collar.
"Two of them are dead. Ios and Compaso! Both my friends — both the Ivory Tower's future!"
"Could it not be another tower disguising its deeds as fire? As you know, our Red Tower can barely manage the search for the prophecy as it is."
"It was fire, unmistakably. Compaso's eyes have never once been wrong."
Jeshult shook his head.
"And I can assert it in turn. The Red Tower has no reason to touch the neutral Ivory Tower. If anything, we hold nothing but gratitude."
"..."
Jeshult dragged a trembling hand down his face.
"Had the Ivory Tower turned away from us as well, the Red Tower could never have held back the tide of Paradise."
"Hervis."
As the hand passed his jaw, the trembling was gone. The eyes that had been brimming with tears had, somewhere along the way, been whetted to a razor's edge.
"If you keep this up, I will have no choice but to kill you."
"Is that the will of the Ivory Tower?"
"I relayed everything I saw and heard, and then I came here."
"The Ivory Tower will not sanction this."
"It makes no matter. The Red Tower is already my enemy."
Jeshult drew deep breath after deep breath, and with each one his bulk swelled. His leather garments split; even his thick robe tore away. By the time the breathing ceased, Jeshult's head nearly brushed the ceiling. The muscle was monstrous as well. Less a man than a magic beast wearing a man's shape.
"Hervis of the Red Tower. I will snap your neck and this watchtower together."
"This watchtower does not break for the likes of a fool."
Hervis's fingertip flicked. Off that friction, fire began to seethe. A flame born the size of a matchstick swelled to the size of Hervis's own body.
"Fire!"
That was the moment — someone burst out shouting. The heads of Jeshult and Hervis, poised a hair's breadth from slaughter, whipped around toward a single point. The elevator.
"So it really is fire!"
From the half-open elevator, a man was gawking in undisguised astonishment. One more stood with him — a woman eyeing the man as though he had lost his senses.
"Ah."
Their eyes met, and the man opened his mouth. Then he smoothed his clothes into order — short-sleeved, they were — and extended a hand, for all the world like a man offering a greeting.
"A pleasure, Jeshult of the Ivory Tower. And it's been a while, Hervis of the Red Tower."
"..."
"...?"
Jeshult's gaze swung back to Hervis. Hervis blinked rapidly. The face was one he had never seen.
"I go by Harad of the Red Tower."
The name, too, was new to their ears.
"As for Ios of the Ivory Tower — I killed him. With this fire."
Harad's flames rose.
Several times larger than Hervis's.