Wards

They scrub us like heirlooms.

At dawn, tower staff descend on the five of us with brushes, formal robes in tower black, and the grim efficiency of people preparing exhibits for a museum. Even the pink-kitchen lady is in ceremonial apron. I didn't know aprons had a ceremonial tier.

"Stop fidgeting," Helena mutters, fixing my collar clasps for the second time in a week. It's becoming her job. I've stopped fighting it.

"Who visits an unfindable tower?" I mutter back.

"We're about to find out, and you will not embarrass the twins."

"I would never—"

"You would immediately."

⁂

The answer to "who visits an unfindable tower" turns out to be: someone who doesn't have to find it.

We're assembled in the great hall — a room I've never seen before, which by tower standards means it possibly didn't exist yesterday — when one of the freestanding doors at the far end opens from the other side.

Not from the field beyond it. From somewhere else. Through the frame I catch a sliver of a different room in a different light in what my gut says is a different country — and then she steps through, and the door closes, and it's just grass behind it again.

The towers connect.

All that intercontinental institution talk, and I never did the math: one tower in every country, and doors that don't care about geography. The church needed a legendary artifact to move people between worlds. These people commute.

"Master Ilyen," Nemo says. "Of the tower of Trax."

She's maybe sixty, gray hair cropped like she was done arguing with it decades ago, robes a shade of slate that makes the twins' finery look like a costume party. Two aides flank her, carrying ledgers.

Actual ledgers. The most dangerous people carry paperwork.

"Nemo. Nihil." She looks around the hall, unhurried. "You moved the tower."

"The neighborhood declined," Nihil says.

"A kingdom died around you, and the record" — one of the aides opens a book without being asked — "requires answers. But that's the boring half." Her eyes land on us five, in a row in our borrowed black. "I'm also here as courier. The Church of Pyreon has filed a claim."

The word claim does something to the temperature of my blood.

"Read it," Nihil says, flat.

The aide reads. It's long, and it's in the fluent bureaucratic dialect of every world I've ever lived in, and it boils down to this:

The summoned children are products of a sanctified rite. The rite belonged to the Church. The Glooven chapter's fall does not dissolve the Church's rights. Pyreon respectfully requests the return of its wards.

"Wards," Joseph repeats, very quietly. I know that tone. That's the tone from the office, the one that comes right before the lawyer wakes up. "The last warding they did for us was a treasure hunt with a spider in it."

"I don't write them, boy. I deliver them." Ilyen's voice isn't unkind. It isn't kind either. It's a scale, waiting for weights. "The institution recognizes property, contract, and discipleship. The Church asserts the first. What does this tower assert?"

Silence.

Nihil steps forward, and there's nothing of the wet socks in him now.

"They are disciples of this tower," he says. "All five."

Ilyen's eyebrow moves one millimeter. "The record shows two."

"The record is behind," Nemo says. "It happens, at our age."

"Discipleship outranks a property claim — IF it's freely held." Ilyen turns to us, and I understand suddenly that everything until now was preamble; this is the actual visit. "So the record will ask them. One at a time. Under no compulsion."

She looks at Alex first, because she's good at this, and he's visibly the softest target.

"Do you claim this tower, boy?"

Alex's hands are shaking. Alex's hands are always shaking. He answers anyway, which is just what courage looks like on him.

"Yes."

"Why?" A scale, waiting for weights.

"Because the church's warding killed my best friend," Alex says, "and this tower's people wake me up at dawn to teach me how to never let that happen again."

One of the aides writes.

"The reader?"

"Clara. Yes." Her chin is up. "I'm learning to heal. Nobody here has lied to me yet. That's rarer than it should be."

"The swordsman?"

Joseph takes his glasses off, cleans them, puts them back — buying seconds, weighing something. When it comes, it comes precise: "The tower stood by once while a country died, and I hate it. But it told me so to my face. Yes. Conditionally, permanently, yes."

Ilyen almost smiles. Almost. "The record enjoys honesty. The girl with the necklace?"

"Obviously," Helena says.

"That's not a—"

"It's my whole answer." Half a heart catches the light at her collar. "Write 'obviously.'"

The aide looks up at Ilyen. Ilyen sighs. "Write 'obviously.'"

And then it's me.

"The last one. The talented one." She says talented the way an auditor says irregularity. "Do you claim this tower?"

I look at the twins.

Nemo, hands folded, giving me nothing. Nihil, jaw tight, giving me nothing — because it only counts if it's mine, and they know it, and I know it.

These two old monsters who watched a kingdom die on principle. Who caught five falling children anyway. Who kept the worst truths off our plates and put anvils through ceilings to make a grieving girl laugh.

"Yes," I say. "It's the only claim on me that ever asked."

The hall is quiet.

Ilyen studies me for a moment longer than the others got, and I keep my face bored, and somewhere behind my heart a ring and a third spin very fast.

"Recorded," she says at last. "Five disciples, freely held. The Church's claim fails on precedence." She turns to the twins, and the temperature drops a degree. "And the tower of Glooven is recorded as an INTERESTED party. You understand what that costs you. Neutrality was your shield for a very long time, gentlemen."

"We're old," Nihil says. "Shields get heavy."

"Mm." Ilyen gathers her aides with a glance. At the door — her door, the one that goes somewhere else — she pauses.

"Advice, from the record. Pyreon lost a kingdom, a cardinal, and now a claim. Institutions in mourning do arithmetic strangely. Be somewhere far away while they count."

The door closes on a sliver of foreign light.

⁂

"Well," Nihil claps once, and the formal-mode drains out of him like someone pulled a plug. "You heard the paperwork. Pack."

"Where are we going?" Clara asks.

"Away first. Destination is a democracy." He grimaces at the word like it personally wet his socks. "You have until the coast to argue about it."

⁂

That evening, the five of us crowd at the office windows — the real view, wind and cloud — as the tower does something I have no verb for.

The cloud-sea slides. The light leans. There's no lurch, no engine, no sensation at all except the slow, majestic wrongness of a horizon in motion — an entire hidden country of towers and fields and one old tree with two graves, sailing.

Below the clouds, somewhere, the bones of Glooven let go of us.

Nobody talks. Helena's shoulder is against mine. On the glass, five faint reflections, in tower black.

Not wards.

Disciples. Freely held.

It's the first time since the spider that the word forward has meant a direction.