There had been something that niggled at the back of Jim's mind ever since Carolinus had mentioned Malvinne's lavish way of life in comparison to the humble one that Carolinus himself followed.
Carolinus had impressed upon him from almost the very first moment of meeting Jim, when Jim was in the body of the dragon Gorbash, that the First Law of Magic was the Law of Payment.
Any kind of magic required payment in equal amount. Moreover, the Accounting Office was there to keep the accounts and make sure that payments balanced income. Income came by doing approved work that produced a credit to a magician's magical balance, in addition to whatever ordinary way it might pay him. Ordinary payment and magical payment had no connection with each other.
For example, Carolinus, on Jim's first meeting with him, had ended up dickering like a tinker at a country fair with Gorbash's granduncle Smrgol. It was only, finally, for what seemed to Jim a rather tremendous price in gold and gems that he agreed to help Jim recover Angie.
Later he had said that if he had realized that the rescue was in a good cause they could have had his help for nothing. Not that he had ever given back the gold and gems, come to think of it. But what that episode had pointed up was the fact that a magician needed ordinary income in order to live in the ordinary world. At the same time he needed a healthy magical balance with the Accounting Office in order to do his magic.
Apparently the magic that was done at Carolinus's level of AAA+ competence, just as at Malvinne's level of AAA, was an expensive process—in terms of that magical balance, if nothing else.
What all this boiled down to was that Malvinne might have a good source of ordinary human income; but he might at the same time be living close to the wire as far as his magical balance went. The Accounting Office would undoubtedly know what his balance was; but Jim was quite sure without asking that they would not tell a class D magician like himself what the balance of a class AAA magician was. But, just assume that Malvinne was in a position where, in order to keep up the way he wanted to live, he had to expend his magical balance close to its available limits.
In that case, he might occasionally, or even routinely, look for ways to do things by ordinary means, so as to avoid doing them by magic and depleting his magical balance any more than necessary.
In that case, if he had a secret way up here, it might well nor be a magical route. It might be a perfectly ordinary one, but very cleverly hidden from ordinary eyes, to conserve Malvinne's magic balance.
The question was, as Giles had mentioned, where could any other route—from the levels far below up to here—be hidden in this open shell of a tower?
Jim came to a sudden decision.
"How such a way could be is beside the point," he said. "Let's first find the entrance to it, if there is one. Once we've found it we'll automatically find out how it could be hidden."
The faces of the others lit up, but Jim had already turned and headed out, completely forgetting the business about needing the permission of royalty before leaving a room where a royal personage happened to be.
He did remember it, the minute he was outside the door. But then, on second thought, decided that it was a good idea that he had ignored it this time; because with the difficulties they were undoubtedly going to have getting the Prince back to his army of Englishmen, there would be no time for such protocol. Just as well they should start now.
The others had followed him out, by the time he stood facing the three remaining doors. He intended to use the same warning signal transference on each door to let him into the other rooms safely, so that these could be searched. For a moment he played with the idea of some kind of all-purpose command that would open all the doors up to him at once. But he decided to play it safe. He approached the first door on his left, and wrote on his forehead the magical command to switch the warning from Malvinne to him if the door was open.
He went in this time without hesitation. The room within was completely bare. The others had followed him in; and he left them to search it while he went to try the next room. This also was completely bare. There was a stone outer wall with its window slits—the curving wall of the tower itself—and the three flanking walls, also of stone. Nowhere was there any red coloring to suggest magic had been used to guard anything like a secret entrance.
He left it and went on to try the fourth room and found that to be about triple the size of the other three rooms, including the one in which the Prince had been held.
This room was clearly the fourteenth-century equivalent of a laboratory. A number of odd-looking instruments and vessels, almost entirely of glass, were scattered around on tables and on shelves against the wall. Most of these containers had cryptic marks on them. It occurred to Jim that there was probably some magical way to make those marks readable; but there was really no time for that sort of thing now. Whatever was in them would probably not help them escape in any case.
Beyond this equipment and the tables on which it was set out, the jumble in the room held nothing living, except for something that looked rather like a large yellow birdcage, which contained six rather ordinary looking house mice.
Jim opened the cage door, on the principle that it would at least give the mice a chance at freedom away from Malvinne. But the mice cowered in a corner and made no attempt to go out through the doorway. Jim simply left them in the cage with the door ajar. Soon or later, he guessed, they would summon up the courage to stick their heads outside and shortly after that they would find themselves free. After that it would be up to them.
He went back to the open lobby space of the second floor outside the entrance to the four rooms. The others gathered around him, waiting for further commands.
It surprised Jim that the Prince had not been full of questions or demands. Part of him had been braced for that. However, in this society, whoever led at any time was the leader. His leadership could be challenged, of course; and probably often was. But until that happened, everybody else seemed to fall into line and follow automatically, ready to obey.
"Sir James is a Mage, Your Highness," he heard Brian explaining to the Prince. "That's how he was able to open the doors safely. Otherwise Magic probably would have destroyed us and warned Malvinne."
"Indeed!" said the Prince, looking at Jim with a freshened respect.
"A magician of a much lower class and ability than that of Malvinne, I'm afraid, Your Highness," said Jim. It would not do to let the Prince get any false ideas about what Jim could accomplish. "Look, there's obviously no entrance up here. We'll examine things down below, in what seem to be Malvinne's private quarters."
He hurried down the stairs with the others after him, telling himself that he should have looked downstairs in the first place. It would be much more likely that any private entrance would be in Malvinne's own rooms, rather than in his laboratory, or in the other rooms he kept—either as cells or for whatever purpose might be needed.
On the floor below, he was struck again by the richness of the furnishings. What furniture there was, was carefully built, carved, and finished. Moreover, outside of a few low tables and some piles of cushions that gave the place almost an oriental look, there were none of the ordinary stools or tables that had been constructed for service only.
The layers of rugs were thick on the floor and the heavy tapestries hung still on the walls, not even stirred by the occasional drafts that came up the hollow tower from below.
"I think all of us should search, so as to cover as much ground as quickly as possible," said Jim, "including yourself, Your Highness, if you'll be so good? You, more than any of us, might have heard something from him that you don't recall right away, but which could suggest something to you when you look at it down here. For the rest of you, look for anything that resembles a door, or could be a door in disguise—a panel, a chest, anything of that sort."
They scattered to do as he said. Meanwhile, Jim himself went hunting, not for any particular signs of a doorway, but for anything that showed the
color red about it. If there was a secret entrance to the way they had imagined, it would almost certainly be guarded by magic. While the others went over each room closely and Aragh used his nose in various places, Jim searched the walls and even the floor for any glimpse of red.
The total space covered by the rooms down here was only slightly larger than that of the rooms they had looked at upstairs, because of the way the tower narrowed from its base upward to its top. There would be a roof above the floor above, or else an open space protected with breast-high walls, so that the tower could be defended in normal medieval fashion from any who might try to storm it.
Jim did not think there was any point in looking up there. Any entrance that they might find there would have to pass through both floors below to provide passage downward; and while a passage might be hidden somewhere on this level, certainly there had been none hidden on the one above. Putting all the rooms together, it had been possible to see the bare wall of the tower all around.
It took them only about half an hour to make their search. It would not have taken that long if it had not been for the extra furniture and some cabinets or cupboards that needed to be investigated. None of these were warded by magic; so Jim let the others look into them. Aragh in particular stuck his head into each one to see what his nose could tell him. In each case the result was negative. In fact, the result was negative as far as the whole floor was concerned. They met together once more, outside the rooms of the floors, clustered next to the stairway and baffled.
"I fear me, Sir James," said the Prince, "that whatever road Malvinne traveled other than the stairway must have been a magic one. Certainly, we have searched this area high and low and found nothing."
Curiously, their very lack of success was making Jim stubborn. The more he thought of it the more he became convinced that there had to be a secret and purely physical route from here down to the floors below. Suddenly, an idea exploded in his bead.
"Look again!" he said, suddenly. "Look behind the tapestries. Look for anything red—but if you do see red, whatever you do, don't touch it."
"Red, James?" asked Brian.
Jim swore at himself internally. Of course, he was the only one who was able to see the warning color he had picked. Hastily, he wrote a new magic command on the inside of his forehead:
ALL SEE→MAGICWARNING RED, HERE
"Yes," Jim said. "I've just now done a bit of small magic that should make any such doorway shine with the color red. If you see anything like that, call me at once. Again, don't touch it. Don't even get close to it if you can avoid it. Anything that is red-colored may be deadly."
They scattered once more to their searching and Jim himself began feverishly working down one of the walls, lifting the edge of the tapestries away from the stone.
This time their search took a little longer, perhaps something over an hour; but it also turned up nothing in the way of what they sought.
When they were all back together Jim noticed that Aragh, instead of standing with the rest, was apparently asleep against a pile of cushions on the floor. He looked as if he had been there for some time.
"Aragh!" called Jim. "Didn't you search like the rest?"
Aragh opened one eye and then the other, then got to his feet and shook himself.
"No," he answered.
They all stared at him.
"Why not?" demanded Jim.
"I should have thought one like yourself would know, James," said Aragh. "We wolves are unable to see what you on two legs call colors. To us, such differences are merely part of a straightforward world of black and white and gray. Indeed I have only the word of humans for it that there's anything beyond those shades I see.
"Nor, probably, would I have been that useful if I had been able to see this red coloring," went on Aragh, with a yawn. "My eyes are not good for that kind of seeing; though in other ways I often notice things that you others will not. Of course if this 'red' had a scent, the rest of you would probably be far behind me in discovering any of it."
"Of course! I've been a fool!" said Jim. "Aragh, prepare to use that nose of yours!"
"You are not going to magic me?" demanded Aragh swiftly.
"No, no!" said Jim. "I'm going to magic what we hunt for. So that in addition to having color it'll have scent. How about the scent of garlic?"
"That," said Aragh, and his jaws opened as if he was laughing, "is one that I think even you humans might find in time. By all means let it be garlic."
Jim wrote a new magical command on the inside of his forehead:
MAGIC →RED TO SMELL LIKE GARLIC
The words were barely written before Aragh's ears pricked up and he trotted over to the landing just above the magic stair which they had gone to such difficulty to surmount. He sniffed at some rugs mere. Then he shoved the end of his muzzle down under the edge of one of the top rugs, and took what seemed to be a deep and highly enjoyable sniff. He took the edge of the rug between his teeth and pulled it aside.
"Well, James," he said, dropping the rug he had pulled aside and going back to attack the one underneath it, "what are you waiting for? I've found it."
There was a concerted rush to the spot and they all began hauling aside the many layers of rug.
As they drew them clear, a glint of color began to be visible. A glint of red.
"Stand back, stand back all of you!" said Jim. "I'll do the last of the uncovering, here."
He waited until the others had backed off, then he bent down and began pulling the last few rugs clear. They came back to reveal a trapdoor in the floor, and it was glowing solidly red. Once more the magical warning ran in Jim's head.
He waited until it had cleared, and then turned to the others.
"I'm going to try opening this trapdoor," he told them. "I ought to be able to do it as safely as I opened the doors upstairs; but in case I don't, and anything happens to me, try making some kind of a rope, attaching a weight to it, and letting the weight fall off this landing into the open air in such a way that the weight of it pulls back and up on the trapdoor to open it. Then one of you try it and see if it's safe. If it is, the rest can follow after."
"You fear for your life if you lift that trapdoor, James?" said Brian.
"There's some risk," admitted Jim.
"In that case," said Brian, "let me do it. You are more useful to His Highness in helping him clear of this damnable place than any of the rest of us. So if there be risk, let me take it first."
"Thanks, Brian," said Jim. He was touched; for he read more in Brian's words than just a concern for the safety of the Prince. He knew Brian too well. The other was also concerned about him, James; and as usual was offering to put himself between danger and his friend. "But I'm afraid the magic that should protect me won't protect the rest of you. So there's no choice about it. I have to be the one who tries to lift the door first. Stand back."
He turned to the trapdoor again without looking to see whether they did as he had said. Reaching out, he took a firm hold of the handle of the trapdoor, which was not really different from the handles of the doors upstairs; except that it was set into the surface of the trapdoor, which must be some considerable thickness.
He took hold of it, therefore, expecting to lift a heavy weight. But the trapdoor must have been counterweighted in some way, because it tilted up easily at the first effort he put into lifting it, revealing an open hole and steps leading down. The red did not touch the underpart of the trapdoor, or anything below the floor in which it was inset. Looking more closely, he saw the red coloring around the trapdoor had disappeared, as it probably did whenever that which it identified as Malvinne's hand lifted it.
"So," said Jim, "there's our solution. See where it leads?"
He pointed. The steps led down into the buttressing below the regular staircase. The space was so narrow they would have to go single file, and both Dafydd and Jim would have to duck their heads as well because there was not much space between the steps they trod on and th
e underside of the steps above their heads. But it was clearly and plainly their passage out and away from here.
"Follow me," Jim said to the others. "Your Highness had better be the one directly behind me. All of you be careful so that you step from a rug directly onto the first step below the surface of this floor. I don't think the edge of the hole is still dangerous to you, but it might be."
"You've done well, Sir James," said the Prince, looking at him with a touch of awe, "as did Sir Wolf. I will remember this in both your cases."
He looked around himself generally.
"As I will remember all of you, my rescuers," he said.
"We aren't out of it yet," said Jim, "but at least we have a chance."
In spite of his words, his heart had lightened. He had the feeling that if Malvinne had gone to the trouble to make a secret passage like this, it could well lead by secret ways clear outside the castle. At least, it might be a good bet. But he hesitated to mention this to the others yet, for fear that this guess of his should turn sour.
He headed down the steps and the others followed. Jim carefully closed the trapdoor, with rugs atop it, behind them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The steps and walls about them glowed with what was unmistakably a magic form of lighting. As they got about ten or fifteen feet below the level of the landing, the headroom increased so that Jim and Dafydd could walk upright. Jim had feared that they would have to make their trip in darkness, feeling their way down the stairs. That Malvinne had set up lighting was only to be expected, and Jim was inwardly embarrassed he had not expected it.
Still, there was reason for self-congratulation. It was still a long, slow climb down the secret stairway to the inhabited regions where the other stairway above them had begun to wind upward. Jim discovered a bonus in their descent, however. Little cracks had been allowed between the steps and the risers, in places.
These were apparently accidental cracks. But they occurred at fairly regular intervals; and by looking out through them he was able to get a limited, but very useful, view of how close they were getting to the level from which they had originally begun their upward climb.