Shade and Sorceress

by Catherine Egan

  Truly his mother’s son, Charlie kept up a steady stream of talk about which kings and queens and presidents he had seen here, where the dragons were kept (in caverns beneath the Inner Sanctum, he claimed), how he knew where the dungeons were, and so on. Eliza listened politely until they reached the end of the south wing. A thin corridor wound its way around the tower, leading them into the east wing.

  “What’s in the towers?” Eliza asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “Not allowed in. I’ll find out eventually, though.”

  “We could probably sneak in,” said Eliza. “Somehow.”

  “Aye,” said Charlie, giving her an appreciative look. “I bet we could.”

  They entered the Portrait Gallery through an arched opening that led into a high-ceilinged six-sided room. The room was dark and the white tile floor was inlaid with black tile crabs. The walls were lined with framed portraits of Mancers, white-robed and fiery-eyed, all with a black crab on their robes, over the heart.

  “Manipulators of water from a long time ago,” said Charlie, leading her through another arched doorway into a nearly identical room. This room opened onto two others, also the same. “See, the ones in the gold frames were Emissariae.”

  “What?”

  “Emissariae. You know, the ones who can leave the Citadel.”

  Eliza had been to a museum before, when she was six years old and visiting Kalla with her father. She remembered endless halls full of paintings and sculptures, the muted lighting and the eerie hush. This was like sneaking into a museum at night, deserted and unlit, the figures in the paintings glaring down from within their frames, as if they wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong.

  “Simathien,” said Charlie, pointing to one portrait set in an ornate alcove above the others, as if it were of particular importance. Eliza nodded, though it meant nothing to her. He looked like every other Mancer.

  They passed through seven-sided rooms with ruby birds tiled on the floors, turquoise serpents in eight-sided rooms, ivory bears set amid darker tiles in large nine-sided rooms, and golden human figures in five-sided rooms. She wanted to have a closer look at the portraits, but Charlie was getting impatient, leading her at a near-run up narrow marble staircases and through further mazes of portrait rooms to some particular destination. He stopped when they came out into a rectangular hall. Bright mosaics on the floor created a sea of colour but no discernible picture, and the portraits on the wall here were larger than what they had seen before.

  “There’s twenty-eight of them,” said Charlie proudly, as if he’d painted them all himself. “From the first Supreme Mancer to the one now. Mancers only live about five hundred years, aye.”

  “How old are you?” Eliza asked, amused.

  “Thirteen,” he said, a bit defensively.

  Eliza looked around at the portraits. Here by the door was Kyreth, she thought, though it was difficult to be sure. It was a hard, oblong face. The high brow gave him a thoughtful appearance, but his sharp cheekbones and jawline and his aquiline nose looked as if they had been carved out of rock. His mouth was a thin, stern line. With their strong, unlined faces and fair hair, the Mancers all looked rather similar, but up close one could detect differences in their features.

  “Is Karbek here?” Eliza asked, for even she had heard of the Mancer who first separated the worlds, and for whom the great Di Shang mountain range was named. They crossed the hall so Charlie could point him out to her. He looked rather savage, she thought.

  “Who painted them all?” she asked. “It couldnay have been painted while he was alive. It doesnay look old at all.”

  “They dinnay get painted, exactly,” said Charlie. “Least, there’s no painter. Come on, I have a surprise for you.”

  And again they were running through room after room of portraits. Eliza was vividly aware of how terrible it would be to get lost here. One could spend days, surely, wandering these rooms without finding one’s way out. They came to another big hall, but this one was different. It was lined not with portraits of Mancers but of women. Each one wore a black tunic over black leggings and each one bore the same slender white rod about the length of her arm.

  “Is this...?” She let the question hang there, unable to finish it.

  “These are the Shang Sorceresses,” said Charlie, grinning widely. “There are a lot more rooms like this one, but this is the most recent one. Come over here.”

  Eliza found herself looking straight up at a life-sized portrait of her mother. She recognized her from her photograph, but her expression here was entirely different. She was wearing the same outfit as all the others and looking defiantly at something in the distance. She too was holding the white rod.

  “Not that one,” said Charlie, nudging her and pointing. Eliza followed his finger to the portrait next to her mother’s. A bolt of alarm rocketed through her.

  “That’s me!” she cried indignantly. “Why have they got one of me? Who painted it?”

  “I told you, no one painted it,” said Charlie, watching her carefully. “Why dinnay you know about any of this mess? I thought you were...you know.”

  Eliza couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t like looking at the portrait of herself, didn’t like the sullen expression that had been captured on her face. She noticed that all the portraits but hers had a date inscribed on the bottom of the frame, with a line in an unfamiliar script.

  “Can you read this?” she asked Charlie, pointing to the inscription under her mother’s portrait.

  To her surprise, he nodded. “We learn in school, aye. For reading Tian Xia literature or something. It’s the Language of First Days.”

  “Lah, what does it say?”

  “Killed in battle,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

  Her heart plummeted. Her father had lied about this, too, then. About everything.

  “What about this one?” she asked quickly, going on to her grandmother’s portrait.

  “They all say the same thing, aye,” he said in a soft voice.

  Eliza felt sick. She walked right around the hall, looking at all these women, supposedly her grandmother, her great-grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, and so on, every single one of them killed in battle. Clearly, being a Sorceress was a dangerous business. Kyreth’s talk about the line of the Sorceress had been abstract and confusing, but here in the Portrait Gallery it began to sink in. But even if her mother had been a Sorceress, Eliza thought to herself, she was not anything of the kind. It was a mistake, a horrible mistake. Her portrait did not belong here. She did not belong here.

  Charlie left her alone for a while but he came back shortly and pulled her out of her reverie.

  “The Mancers are done for the day,” he said. “They’re meeting in the grand dining hall. It’s the only place where they can all sit around a table.”

  “Is there a door there?” Eliza asked immediately. “I mean, one we can find?”

  “I know a better way if you want to eavesdrop,” he said. “That is what you want to do, nay?”

  “Of course,” said Eliza, thinking that Nell and Charlie would get along famously.

  ~

  In the kitchen back in the south wing, Charlie explained that the chimneys to the fireplaces were all connected and he made sure the flues were always open so that sound could flow freely. The two of them crouched right inside the wide fireplace. They could make out a good deal, if not all, of what the Mancers were saying.

  “...The only possible culprit. None other would be powerful enough to work Magic that resists our detection,” Kyreth was saying.

  “Your Eminence, may I speak?”

  “Speak, Obrad,” said Kyreth.

  Obrad. The one they had intended for her mother. If her mother had obeyed them, Eliza would not exist.

  “If we are certain the intruder came with the girl, as a hitchhiker of sorts, then it did not need to break any barrier. Unwitting, we brought it with us. The spell itself...” Eliza did not hear th
e end of his sentence, but Kyreth responded angrily.

  “How it came is irrelevant. The spell it worked once here was undoubtedly Great Magic.”

  “But we have confirmed that the...other one is still safely imprisoned,” came another voice. “The intruder cannot possess much power of its own or we would have felt its presence today from the Inner Sanctum. Whatever spell it worked must have been prepared ahead of time. By her.”

  Now Kyreth was speaking softly and rapidly and Eliza heard only fragments: “...until we know more...vigilance...best she does not know too much.”

  “And if the girl cannot...?” somebody asked. Eliza strained for the end of the sentence but could not catch it.

  Kyreth murmured some reply, the only part of which she understood being, “Tomorrow she will begin.” Then he raised his voice and said, “The sun is setting. Go. Rest.”

  Eliza and Charlie sat in the ashy fireplace and looked at each other. Eliza’s heart was thumping painfully.

  “I’ve got homework, aye,” said Charlie, abruptly getting up and brushing his pants off. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Homework?” exclaimed Eliza. “Is it nay your summer holiday?”

  “We get piles of homework for the summer,” he said with a roll of his eyes that she hoped was intended for his teachers and not for her. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and sauntered off, whistling. Eliza sat in the fireplace, alone with her turbulent thoughts, until Missus Ash happened upon her.

  “That’s no place to sit about. Lah, you’re filthy! You’ll have to wash up before supper.”

  Missus Ash was terribly excited by the day’s events. She put Eliza’s chicken stew in front of her, saying, “I will say, lass, you’ve brought a good deal of excitement with you. Almost all day they spent in the Inner Sanctum! An intruder, we’ve got! We’ll have to keep an eye out. But no need for you to fret. The Mancers will protect you. Powerful, powerful beings they are, aye. What I can nay fathom is how an intruder got in here, with all the mystical barriers they’ve got. They must be puzzling that out themselves.”

  “They said it came with me.”

  “Oh, did it, aye? Little invisible something hanging on to you? Is that what they think?”

  “I dinnay know what they think.”

  “Lah, dinnay worry, little mite, they’ll sort it all out in no time. No one can get at you with that trinket you’re wearing, aye.”

  Eliza found this small comfort. Missus Ash took her back to her room after supper, where she changed into the nightgown she’d left on the floor and lay down on the huge bed. A profound loneliness gripped her and she curled into a ball.

  Eliza was no stranger to change and upheaval. She had been only seven years old when she’d had to walk an hour down the mountainside in the snow and the freezing wind to the little school in the Karbek mountains. The mentor there, a man with chapped red hands and watery eyes, had introduced her to the six other students, whom she saw only as a group of pinched, unwashed faces staring at her with undisguised hostility. She remembered how she had felt sitting down at her desk that first day, shivering and miserable in her boots and coat. It had seemed impossible, intolerable that this would be her life from now on. And yet within a few weeks that long walk to and from school was simply habit, and if she was lonely at school, that too was nothing out of the ordinary. She got used to everything in the end, simply waiting out the worst until she and her father moved on.

  But this was stranger and more frightening than the Karbek mountains, the scowling men with guns at their hips in Huir-Kosta, or the bandit raids in Quan, and she was entirely alone, without her father to comfort and take care of her. She longed for his broad, cool hand on her forehead, his wry grin and laughing eyes. She wanted to be in Holburg, in her own bed, listening to the wind in the trees, straining for the sound of the surf. A sob swelled in her chest. Before she released it she heard a little scuffling sound and a soft mew. She looked up to see a lanky grey cat at the foot of the bed looking at her with bright, inquisitive eyes.

  “Hi, you,” said Eliza, reaching out a hand. The cat approached, sniffed her fingers once or twice, then rubbed its face up against her hand. A purr rose from its throat. Eliza lifted the cat onto her stomach and lay back against the pillows, her tears unshed. In fact, she was terribly tired. With the warm body of the cat against hers, its deep purr soothing her, she fell quickly and soundly asleep.

  ~ Chapter 4 ~

  When Eliza woke to her second day in the Mancer Citadel Missus Ash was already in her room drawing the curtains.

  “Good morning, chicken,” she chimed. “I’ve got a hot breakfast ready for you in the kitchen.”

  Eliza sat up. She could feel the warm spot next to her where the cat must have been just moments before and looked around the room for it. Missus Ash chuckled.

  “Looking for Smoky? He ran out just as I came in.”

  “Is he your cat?”

  “He is, aye,” said Missus Ash. “You dinnay mind him, do ye?”

  Eliza shook her head. “I like cats.”

  “Lah, that’s fine then. He took to you quick enough, to spend the night in your bed. I’ve never seen the like with that cat.”

  “My father’s Sorma,” said Eliza. “Animals always like me.”

  “That explains it!” said Missus Ash with a smile. “Lah, do you wear that thing to bed, too?”

  Eliza remembered the heavy pendant around her neck. “They said to nary take it off,” she said.

  “Very wise, no doubt,” agreed Missus Ash. “Come on. Let’s get some breakfast in ye.”

  In the kitchen, Eliza devoured a hot bowl of porridge with brown sugar and golden syrup and then asked Missus Ash for the second time, “How did you end up working here?”

  “That’s a story too long for this morning,” said Missus Ash with an odd smile. Eliza was disappointed but couldn’t think of any way to press her for more without being rude.

  “So Charlie has been coming here during the holidays since he was a little boy?” she asked.

  “Aye, that’s right, chicken.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Up to no good, I spec. But you’ll nay be joining him in that this morning, Miss Eliza Tok. You are to report to the Spellmaster in the Library.”

  “What for?” asked Eliza, alarmed.

  Missus Ash gave her a twinkling little smile. “Your lessons, o’ course.”

  ~

  Missus Ash took Eliza to the top floor of the north wing. They had to take a great many breaks on the way up and Missus Ash was panting for breath by the end.

  “No reason they cannay install an elevator,” she muttered, walking Eliza down the length of an empty hallway. “Now, where is it, where is it?” She paused and knocked on the wall. A door appeared a bit further down and opened. A Mancer with a silvery hue to his skin stepped out and greeted them. His eyes had a softer light than the other Mancers she had met, like the sun just beginning to set, and so it was easier to look at his face. His voice, however, had the same powerful resonance as Supreme Mancer Kyreth’s.

  “Welcome, Eliza Tok! I am the Spellmaster, Foss.”

  He bowed respectfully to her. She had no idea how to respond, if she was supposed to bow in return, or maybe curtsy. Paralyzed by her uncertainty, she just stood and gaped at him awkwardly.

  “Lah, I’ll leave ye to it,” said Missus Ash abruptly, and she turned and walked away. Eliza looked after her desperately.

  “This way, Eliza Tok, this way.”

  Foss gestured her through the door. Eliza stopped just inside the doorway and stared up, lips parting in amazement. The whole Citadel was on a larger-than-human scale, but the Library went beyond that. This was like entering a vast cavern, marble bookcases towering up, cliff-like, towards the ceiling. Bamboo ladders tall as trees, taller, stood against the bookcases, and woven bridges were slung between them. She tried to imagine Mancers climbing up to those dizzying heights to fetch their books. Some light filtered in through long wi
ndows far at the back of the hall, but mostly the library was lit by amber orbs hanging haphazardly from the shelves. Staring straight up, she thought she saw little dark shapes flitting about near the ceiling – bats, she guessed.

  “This is the Old Library, as we call it,” Foss told her conversationally, guiding her in among the soaring bookshelves. “The New Library consists of the Commentaries and extends seven stories below us, though the rooms are rather smaller than this one of course. But these books,” he swept his hand in an arc, “are the Early Texts. Look.”

  He said something that Eliza couldn’t understand, and as he spoke the light slipped out of one of the amber orbs, leaving it dull, and went twirling upwards. Foss climbed after it, up one of the ladders, and then with startling agility he stepped off the ladder onto the edge of one of the shelves, holding on to a shelf above with one hand, and edged along it as if along a rock face to where the amber light danced. He pulled a book off the shelf there, tucked it under his free arm, and made his way swiftly back to the ladder and down. The amber light hung in the air a moment then went diving back to the orb and crawled back in, illuminating it once more. Foss returned to Eliza and opened the book to show her. The paper was brown with age, and neat ink characters ran across the pages like little insects. The Language of First Days, as Charlie had called it.

  “It looks old,” said Eliza shyly. She reached to touch it but Foss cried, “Ah ah ah!” and closed the book. Back up the ladder he went to return it. There was something so odd about this tall and terrible being climbing around like a monkey that Eliza wanted to laugh and had to bite her lip.

  “That was Volume Ten of the Book of the Ancients, Eliza Tok!” he said, back at her side. “Written by the Great Mancer Simathien! You have studied him, of course.”

  Eliza nodded vaguely. She had no idea what he was talking about.

  “You will have your lessons here, Eliza, among the oldest and finest books in the worlds. I hope the presence of these great texts will serve as an inspiration for you.”