The Rings of Salammis

Mala - Part 5

     Ten minutes later, they gasped with relief to see the Tower of Sorcery ahead of them. It was ringed by a circular road that should have been one of the city's most important hubs, but only a few small carriages drove around it, their drivers urging their horses to a swift canter. There was a pavement around the circular road, connecting the half dozen or so streets running away from it, and that pavement should have been packed with pedestrians as the shortest and most convenient route between those streets and the buildings that stood along them, but instead it was almost deserted. People in this part of the city looked for other routes to wherever they were going. Routes that went way out of their way but had the virtue of not going so close to the dreadful tower.

     Those people who had no choice but to pass by the tower kept their gaze firmly away from it, Thomas noticed, as if afraid of seeing a wizard looking back at them. Looking at the tower himself, Thomas saw that there were indeed wizards standing on the circular pavement, some of them puffing on pipes as they watched the world go by. They were dressed in the ankle length silver and black robes that had become almost the unofficial uniform of University wizards in Agglemonian times. It was one of the very few traditions that had been dropped over the centuries, mainly due to the surviving wizards wanting to avoid notice during the bad days of the Massacre.

     There was a wizard striding purposefully away from the tower on some business or other. He was surrounded by a shimmering globe of luminescence that proudly proclaimed his power to all who saw him, while at the same time protecting him from thrown bricks and bottles. The pride and arrogance of his posture filled Thomas with disgust. It was all too easy to imagine him sneering down his nose at the mundanes, perhaps shoving them out of his path with spellforce. No wonder they rose up against us, he thought. He made him want to lob a few bricks himself.

     Looking back at the tower, he again saw it as the mundanes would see it. Saw it as the embodiment of that same pride and arrogance, the same sneering superiority. It shone through in every block of stone, every window and balcony, and it could be seen from every part of the city. The wizards living in it were literally looking down on the mundanes. Mocking them, laughing at them, or so the citizens of Mala must think, seeing it there every second of every day, looking into their lives like a nosy neighbour.

     Do the wizards know how much they're hated? he wondered. Maybe most of them lived such blinkered, sheltered lives that they truly didn't. He knew of several wizards in his own age who shunned the company of others, keeping only a small staff of servants and spending every waking moment either locked up in their laboratories or out in the desolate places of the world searching for rare spell components. There was no reason to believe that Agglemonian wizards behaved any differently, but there had to be a great many who knew exactly how the mundanes thought of them. Don't they care? thought Thomas in disbelief. Maybe they revel in it. Exult in their ability to strike terror into others. If that was the case, then they had no-one to blame for the Massacre but themselves.

     The soldiers were faltering in their stride, reluctant to approach such an intimidating building. Fearful of attracting the wrath of its terrible occupants. Thomas could see the picture forming in Matthew's mind. They would knock timidly on the huge brass doors, inadvertently sounding a great booming echo that would reverberate throughout the dark, empty corridors of the tower, causing stern, grey bearded heads to look up from their incomprehensible work, angry at the interruption. A small flap would open in the door and furious eyes would glare out. "What do you want?" the doorkeeper would ask. "You're not a wizard. Go away." The door would open a crack to let Thomas in, and then the soldiers would be turned away to wander the streets, lost and bewildered...

     "Stay brave," Thomas said, hanging back to let them catch up with him. "We've all faced terrors beyond the imagination of most of the people in that tower, I shouldn't wonder. Some of the senior wizards may have travelled to strange and terrible dimensions, but most of them have never known any life beyond a rich and comfortable city. It’s they who should fear us, not the other way round."