by Nix, Garth
The woman, Elinor was shocked to see, was herself. Older, she thought. There was something about her confidence in what they were doing. Her hair was different, how she looked. It was as if Elinor was seeing an older sister, but she knew it was herself, and then she was entirely back in her own time and body staring at the water drop but she still let out a gasp and stepped back and—
Fell backward onto the end of the bed.
“Elinor!”
Elinor sat up like a jack-in-the-box and leapt off the bed, tearing her elbow out of Terciel’s tentative grasp.
“Sorry!” she exclaimed.
“Did you See something?” asked Terciel. “In the water? I forgot you are a Clayr because they’re so bossy and bright-haired, but you had the look then, when they See something . . .”
“No, I don’t think so,” replied Elinor, blushing. “Maybe. I’ve been reading too much, and imagination, you know, and we flew a long time so I’m a bit tired—”
“What did you See?” asked Terciel. “Was it your own future? Or possible future, I know the Clayr always say that, because sometimes they See so many variations.”
“I’m not sure,” replied Elinor. “I probably should go find Mirelle, see if there’s something . . . I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time, Terciel.”
“I’m glad you did,” said Terciel. He was still sitting forward, his arms outstretched, as if he might reach out and draw Elinor back to the bed. She took a step toward the window and turned to look out, hoping this would hide the embarrassment she was sure was evident in her expression. Or maybe it was expectation. Part of her very much wanted Terciel to draw her into his arms, onto the bed, a feeling that both alarmed and excited her, so she didn’t know what to do. All she knew was she couldn’t look at him right now. She needed to practice how to behave.
“I’m very glad you’re here,” said Terciel softly.
As she turned, she saw the flash of movement in the sky. A red-and-gold paperwing, no frosted snow upon it, coming down to land upon the lawn.
“A paperwing!” she cried, pointing.
“More Clayr,” said Terciel. “Filris, with any luck. You know, I had completely forgotten about my foot!”
“That’s good,” replied Elinor. “Oh, look!”
Spiraling down after the paperwing came two message-hawks, brown streaks that came in over the wall, circled the fig tree once, and shot up to the western roof garden two floors above, where there was a mews built against the side of the tower, attended by several Sending falconers.
“More news,” said Terciel. “Doubtless not good.”
Elinor nodded. Terciel had told her about Kerrigor, and Lerantiel’s chain, and Tizanael’s plan to confront the Greater Dead wherever he was gathering his host. It sounded extremely dangerous to Elinor, and she thought Terciel was anxious about it, too, though he disguised it with talk of other Dead he and the Abhorsen had gone up against, and triumphed.
“I’d better go,” she said.
“Stay, please,” said Terciel. “Filris is bound to want to have a bath and change and all that. It is a very long way from the Glacier.”
But Filris came straight from landing to Terciel’s room. She was bright-eyed, white-haired, and slight, and came into the room without knocking, a whirlwind of competence. Sendings stood aside as if for the Abhorsen herself, and Elinor jumped up from the end of the bed and made to slide out the door. Mirelle, coming up close behind, lifted her eyebrows and smiled.
“Elinor?” said Filris. “Yes, Myrien’s granddaughter. Don’t go. I need to look at your wrists, gauge what is best to do there. Terciel, we have met, but you were ten or so, I doubt you recall. I am Filris, Infirmarian of the Clayr. Lie back and let’s get that nightshirt off.
“I really should go,” said Elinor nervously. “I can come back.”
“Naked men disturb you?” asked Filris. “Or just this one?”
“Uh . . .”
“I will come and find you shortly,” said Filris, dismissing her.
Elinor fled. As she passed Mirelle, the Clayr held her elbow for a second, and said, “You should visit the library, ground floor of the tower. I think you’ll like it.”
Elinor, too flustered to answer, left the room.
“You are a wicked old woman,” scolded Mirelle.
Terciel grimaced and lifted off his nightshirt, struggling to clear his arm in the cast out of the sleeve. Filris was already lifting his foot, bending down to inspect it closely.
“By the big toe,” said Mirelle helpfully.
“I see it,” said Filris shortly. “A Kerraste, you say?”
“I think so,” said Terciel. “It looked just like the engraving in Creatures by Nagy. But that didn’t mention a sting in its tail.”
“Hmm,” said Filris. She set his foot down and traced a Charter mark so close to his skin he could almost, but not quite, feel her fingertip. Her nails were carefully cut short, he noticed. She followed that mark with several more, all of them unknown to Terciel. She whispered their use-names under her breath as she spoke, and then fell silent, to sketch a master mark. It merged with the others, and a golden haze formed over the foot, before transforming into a clear pane of crystal. Terciel craned his head and saw that this pane revealed a view inside his foot, showing all the blood vessels and bones as if the skin had not only been peeled away but everything made somewhat translucent.
At the same time he felt a sudden pain halfway up the arch of his foot, and flinched. Filris’s hand snapped down to hold his foot in place with a strength that surprised him.
“Hold still,” she commanded. “I see it. Not much more than a grain of sand, but sufficient to kill you.”
“Kill me?” asked Terciel.
“If it reached your heart,” said Filris. “But it has not got very far. I will summon it forth, back the way it went in. Mirelle, would you lay out my satchel?”
“Will I get the feeling back in my foot?” asked Terciel.
“Rather too much,” said Filris. “I am afraid this will hurt a great deal and I cannot use Charter Magic to relieve the pain, given the nature of this fragment. Nor will a bentwhorl decoction be effective in this case. I am sorry.”
“How long will it take?” asked Terciel. He gulped.
“I will be as swift as I can,” said Filris. “Perhaps two or three minutes.”
She took a long pair of bronze pincers from her satchel and put them by Terciel’s foot, then a small silver bottle with a wired stopper, which she undid and set both pieces down.
“Mirelle, and you Sendings, hold Terciel down, please.”
Mirelle put her hands on Terciel’s leg above and below the knee and began to press down, but the Sendings did not move, until Terciel nodded his head. Then they glided over, one on each side, and he felt the strange pressure of their magical hands upon his arms and shoulders.
“Very good,” said Filris. She handed Terciel a short piece of thick rope, knotted at the ends. “Bite on this. All will be well, Terciel.”
She drew a mark in the air above his toe, and another, and another, in very rapid succession, her fingers leaving glowing trails of light. She brought them together and Terciel bucked rigid under Mirelle and the Sending’s hands, screaming as a pain like a white-hot poker shot up through his foot to his head, a line of fire along the whole side of his body.
Elinor loved the reading room. Like her bedroom, it might have been made to her own design. Bookcases of a rich, lustrous timber stretched from the floor to the very high ceiling above, all the way around, save where the stair rose to the next floor of the tower. There were four huge armchairs in the middle of the room, back to back, each with an iron-framed table that could be wheeled in place for taking notes or stacking up a to-be-read pile, but otherwise were parked besides the chairs. The whole room smelled pleasantly of books. Not a musty, tainted smell, but the clean smell of paper and parchment pages and leather and cloth bindings.
A gilded iron candelabra hung from th
e ceiling, a delicate construction of filigree and slim rods made in the shape of a heraldic sunburst. Charter marks for light were arrayed upon it so that it shone brighter in the center than along the arms.
Librarian Sendings drifted out from the shelves when Elinor came in. One ushered her to a lectern and indicated the massive tome on it, which was chained to the wall behind. The leather-and-gold binding had no title stamped upon it, and Elinor was reluctant to open it, until the librarian Sending stepped up and did it for her, to show the title page.
“A Catalogue of the Library of the Abhorsens Saving Those Too Secret to Mention and Sundry Others Excluded for Important Reasons,” read Elinor aloud.
The Sending bowed and indicated the books all around them, with outstretched arms, back to the catalogue, and then to itself and the two other librarians who had come to stand behind her.
“I look in the catalogue, and you fetch me books?” asked Elinor. “I guess not any secret ones or those excluded for other important reasons?”
The Sendings bowed in unison.
“Right,” said Elinor. She hesitated, then started paging through the catalogue, with no particular intent until she thought of the Breakespear play that had been put in her bedroom and then she was suddenly flipping through to the Bs.
What if there were other lost Breakespear plays?
But when Filris came to the library a scant hour later, she found Elinor fast asleep, curled up in one of the big leather armchairs. The Sendings had put a blue-and-silver blanket upon her, and whatever she had been reading had already been carefully returned to the shelves.
“Elinor.”
Elinor opened one eye, remembered where she was, and sat up, dislodging the blanket. The old Clayr was looking down at her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Elinor. “It has been a very long day. We left Fort Entrance at dawn, Ancelstierran time, and then when we crossed the Wall, it was just before the dawn . . . actually I don’t know how long this day has been. How is Terciel? Could you . . . could you heal his foot?”
“I have not crossed the Wall myself,” said Filris, sitting down in the chair next to her. “But I understand it would be disorienting, and all the more so for someone coming from the south. As for Terciel, he will soon recover, though it is as well I came when I did. Now, let me see your wrists. I hear you were held by a Free Magic sorcerer, but only for a short time?”
“Seconds,” said Elinor. She pushed her sleeves back and held out her arms. “Certainly less than a minute.”
Filris examined first Elinor’s left then her right wrist carefully, and cast a spell on each featuring very tiny marks that Elinor could hardly see, which sank into her skin and vanished.
“What was that spell?” she asked curiously. “And why were the marks so small?”
“It is a spell to clear Free Magic contamination from blood vessels,” said Filris. “The marks begin small, because they must shrink even further to become something too small to be seen by the unaided eye, which travels the blood and eats up any trace of Free Magic.
“However,” she added, carefully replacing Elinor’s right hand on the armchair. “There was almost no contamination in you. A trace, no more. Enough that you would sense the sorcerer again, but nothing truly dangerous. It will be gone in a day or so. Now, I must see to my third patient before supper, which I admit I eagerly await.”
“Your third patient?” asked Elinor. “Who is that?”
“Tizanael,” said Filris. “The Abhorsen. Age wearies even those bolstered by Charter Magic, as I know myself. I will see you at supper, child.”
“Thank you,” said Elinor.
Chapter Twenty-One
Supper” was something of a misnomer, Elinor considered, as she was led into the Great Hall by a Sending and saw the quantity of food on the long table, though it was sometimes difficult for her to tell if a particular highly polished dish was there for display only. The silver-crowded table caught her eye for only a second, because she was immediately distracted by the stained-glass window at the far end, which, despite it already being twilight outside, shone as if the sun was fully behind it. Nor was it glass, she realized, because the images moved, albeit very slowly. It seemed to be a scene from constructing the Wall, but Elinor found whenever she glanced away, she couldn’t remember what she’d seen.
A cough behind her made Elinor turn around. Tizanael loomed above her, all craggy and dominating, made even more so by the deep blue or black dress she wore, which was dotted with the key motif in diamonds, and the diamond bracelets on her wrists, though only a single ring with a small ruby. She wore her sword, the same one Elinor had seen before: a relatively plain weapon, but its rather beaten-up leather scabbard was suspended from a belt of braided gold and silver.
“Welcome to the Abhorsen’s House,” said Tizanael, and inclined her head. “The more so, for you are yourself a distant relative.”
“What?” asked Elinor, before she remembered her manners and bowed back. “I mean, my grandmother was a Clayr, is that what—”
“No, for all we count the Clayr as cousins of a sort, there is a more direct connection,” said Tizanael. “Your great-great-great-grandfather was the Abhorsen Jeremiel. Though that line is no more, save for yourself, we would have had a shared ancestor a century or two ago. I have not looked into the exact genealogy.”
“I have gone from having no relatives at all to quite a number, it seems,” said Elinor, not knowing what else to say. She wondered if it was important in some way, that they had this distant connection. A great-great-great-grandfather did not seem very significant. But then people in the Old Kingdom seemed to care more about this sort of thing.
“Indeed,” replied Tizanael forbiddingly, and indicated a seat, two down on the left from the high-backed, almost throne-like chair at the head of the table. This, she unsurprisingly took herself.
Elinor sat down rather nervously. A Sending immediately poured a pale red wine into one of the six crystal glasses in front of her. Rather disturbingly, there was a gold-mounted drinking horn there as well, which was as long as Elinor’s forearm. She had the feeling it might be for some fermented milk or something of that nature, and hoped she wouldn’t have to drink any. She’d never even had wine before arriving at Wyverley College, where they served it with dinner, and sherry afterward.
The tap of Terciel’s stick announced his arrival. He limped over and sat between Tizanael and Elinor, muttered a greeting to his great-aunt, and smiled at Elinor. She smiled back.
The three Clayr arrived together, talking quietly. Elinor was surprised to see they were all wearing the same clothes the Sendings had made her change into half an hour before. Extraordinarily white, flowing robes that she was very nervous about spilling things on. The other three also had circlets of silver set with moonstones on their heads, whereas she had not been offered this particular adornment. Though a Sending had brushed her hair several hundred times and set a comb of amber and red gold on the left side, which she liked. It was rather nice to be pampered, and to be given so many nice things, even though Elinor presumed they were merely lent to her for the duration of her visit. She still wore the belt of gold plaques and the bone-handled dagger.
Sazene, the Clayr who had flown the paperwing for Filris, was older than Mirelle, but was also blond-haired and brown-skinned, though she had very pale green eyes. She was shorter than Mirelle, and did not have the same hard look about her, so Elinor presumed she was not one of the rangers. Though, like them all, she wore a long dagger at her side.
“Sazene,” said Filris as she sat. “That is Elinor, Myrien’s granddaughter. I don’t think you knew Myrien?”
“Before my time, I’m afraid,” said Sazene. She smiled, nodded to Elinor, and sat down.
Mirelle sat next to her eagerly, rubbing her hands together. “We should kidnap that Sending of yours who seasons and grills the round fish, Tizanael. I have never tasted better.”
“As those fish can only be caught on this stret
ch of the Ratterlin, it would not help you,” replied Tizanael. “You will have to make do with what you can eat while you’re here. But before we do eat, there are important matters to discuss.”
“I saw the message-hawks flying in,” said Filris. She beckoned to a Sending, and indicated the third glass along in the line in front of her, which the Sending filled with a sparkling wine the color of fresh straw.
“Four today,” said Tizanael. “Two from Belisaere, one from Uppside, and another from the Borderer’s post north of Roble’s Town.”
She took a sip from her own glass, a red wine so dark it looked as if it was a black syrup quite different from everyone else’s.
“Uppside is besieged. A summoned fog rolled across this morning, and beneath it, the Dead drag logs and earth to fill the canals. Gore Crows fly above the fog. Other message-hawks were sent, but only one made it here.”
“Uppside!” exclaimed Terciel. He looked stunned. “But there must be five thousand people there, a Trained Band of hundreds, at least two dozen Charter Mages! Surely it is too strong to be attacked?”
“Kerrigor has destroyed all the villages in the Upp river valley, everything from Far Upp to Nether Upp,” said Tizanael. She spoke as calmly as ever, but Elinor noted her left hand upon the table was tightly clenched in anger. “At least two thousand villagers, two thousand spirits reaped, two thousand bodies to be inhabited by stronger spirits drawn from Death. And he has mortal followers, too, sorcerers and bandits. Against all that, I would guess Uppside can hold out only for a short time. Days, I suspect, not weeks, depending on how swiftly the water defenses are breached. The message from the Borderers said the fog extends up the lower slopes of Mount Starn, where the Dead are felling the giant blackwood trees, dragging the logs down.”
