Shade and Sorceress

by Catherine Egan

  She ate her meals alone. Missus Ash and Charlie ate separately, in their own quarters, and Eliza was never invited to join them. After supper, she went to her room and practiced writing the Language of First Days with a brush and ink. She sounded out the words as she wrote and tried to make the sweeping characters as perfect and beautiful as the ones in the book she was copying from.

  At night she had difficulty sleeping. She lay in the large bed fingering the barrier star around her neck and talking to Smoky, her only companion through the lonely evenings.

  “What I cannay understand,” she told the cat, “is why they still want me here at all, aye. It’s obvious now that I’m nay a Sorceress. I cannay do any of the things they want me to! So why do they nay just send me home?”

  Smoky tilted his head on one side and regarded her most intelligently, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

  Though Eliza did not know it, the Mancers were asking similar questions. Why try to teach a girl with no ability? Some of them had begun to openly question whether she was, in fact, Rea’s daughter, implying that she might be a trick or decoy. Finding her after a decade of searching had been a great triumph, a cause for celebration. But as the weeks passed with no evidence of her power the Mancers were plunged in doubt and morale was low. Kyreth tried to assuage their doubts, but he too was concerned. They needed incontrovertible proof of her heritage. They had to know if she had power, whatever the cost.

  ~

  She was in the Library with Foss, who had just finished demonstrating how to mix a potion that turned the drinker invisible for a few minutes.

  “A little spinal juice from a Tian Xia invisible eel makes it very potent indeed,” said Foss, “but I don’t fancy being invisible all day.”

  He drank back the murky liquid, and to Eliza’s amazed delight he slowly faded away. She was trying to hit him by tossing pencils, giggling uncontrollably, when Kyreth appeared behind them.

  “We’re working on her Deep Knowing,” came Foss’s voice from an entirely unexpected direction, sounding rather sheepish.

  “You’re over there?” exclaimed Eliza. “I thought you were by the potion books, aye!”

  But when she looked up at Kyreth she was chastened.

  “Today I will teach you what you are,” he rumbled. “This lesson, you cannot fail to understand.”

  He did not touch her but as if he had caught her by the scruff of the neck Eliza found herself trotting breathlessly at his side down the hallway, with Foss just behind them gradually becoming visible again. He took them to the west wing and down so many sets of stairs, first marble and then grey stone, that Eliza thought they must surely be headed underground. The corridors here were cold flagstone, narrow and dark. They came to a large iron door without any handle. Kyreth struck it with the palm of his hand and shouted a string of words in the Language of First Days. Eliza, insensitive though she was to Magic generally, could feel the potency of the words as they poured out of him, and she was reminded of the strange things she had seen in his study on her second day in the Citadel. The door swung open. Rather frightened now, she followed Kyreth down a narrow torch-lit stairway into a stone room so low the Mancers had to bend to enter it.

  “This is the Treasury of the Sorceress,” said Kyreth. Eliza looked around her, puzzled, for the room was small and dark and empty.

  “But there’s nothing here,” she said.

  “Wrong, Eliza Tok,” murmured Foss just behind her. Kyreth struck the wall with his palm and uttered a single word. The stone flamed for a moment and then opened into a small alcove. Inside it hung a black tunic, a pair of leggings and boots, and a white staff the length of her arm.

  “Put it on,” said Kyreth. “Take the staff. We will wait upstairs.”

  He and Foss turned and disappeared up the stairs. Eliza changed hurriedly out of her clothes and into the outfit hanging on the wall. It fit her perfectly, even the boots. She took the staff in her hand, heart pounding. She wasn’t sure what to do with her own clothes but decided finally to leave them there and mounted the stairs to where Kyreth and Foss were waiting. They were speaking intensely in low voices. She felt self-conscious and rather silly standing before them in this peculiar get-up.

  “The Shang Sorceress has been the most powerful tool of the Mancers for millenia,” said Kyreth, turning his flaming eyes towards her so that she was bathed in light. “Since the separation of the worlds she has defended Di Shang from its enemies unto her death. Your mother and your grandmother and those who came before them gave their lives to this cause. It is who you are. Do you hear me, Eliza?”

  “Aye,” she said, growing more and more surly as he spoke. She had to bite her tongue to keep from adding, How could I nay hear you when you’re shouting right in my face? She didn’t much like being called a tool, either.

  “Then come with me.”

  “If I may, Your Eminence...” Foss faltered and then continued in a stronger voice. “We have had no luck with the simplest of spells. I think such a test may prove...I think she is unready.”

  “She will never be ready,” said Kyreth, “until she has to be.”

  “But we cannot risk...”

  “If she cannot work Magic she is no use, there is no Shang Sorceress, the line is finished. We risk nothing. But we must know.”

  “Your Eminence, she is not only a Sorceress, if she is that at all. She is also a human child.”

  “Go, Foss!” Kyreth thundered.

  Foss looked stricken, but he bowed and turned away. Unable to break away from Kyreth’s side, Eliza followed him up the stairs, back into the Citadel she was familiar with and out into the bright sunshine of the grounds. He made straight for the dark wood in the northwest corner that she had avoided instinctively until now.

  “This place leads to the Crossing,” he said, sensing her resistance. “We will not go far. As well you know, certain beings bent on destruction still cross over from time to time. The first duty of the Shang Sorceress is to guard the Crossing and banish these creatures that threaten humanity to the place from whence they came, barring their return with magic. While there is only one Crossing, there are many points of entry. This one belongs to the Mancers. The staff you bear will channel your power, give it focus. It was fashioned by the manipulators of wood thousands of years ago from a Tian Xia tree and it cannot be broken. Take off the barrier star and give it to me.”

  Eliza was too afraid to speak now. She removed the pendant and handed it to Kyreth. They stepped into the darkness of the wood. The trees drank up the light the way earth absorbs water. Even Kyreth’s eyes grew dim and pale. The heavy dark was full of little murmurs and the ground was soft and strange under her feet. Leaves and cobwebs and what felt like wings brushed against her face as she followed the back of the Supreme Mancer. Within moments they were on a foggy beach, the line of trees dark behind them. The grey water, mirror-like, gave off a strange, pale light that did not penetrate deep into the mist.

  “What is this place?” Eliza asked, and was ashamed to hear the tremor in her voice.

  Kyreth faced the water with his arms spread wide. He shouted out a word in the Language of First Days, repeating it over and over again. He was calling something, or so it seemed to Eliza. And then all at once he was gone, and she was alone on the silvery shore.

  “Where are you?” shouted Eliza, looking around her in a panic. “Kyreth! Dinnay leave me here!”

  She turned and ran back among the trees, stumbling through the dark. Creatures she couldn’t identify hissed in her ears and flapped about her face. Moments later she was back on the beach, and this time she saw a dark mass half-obscured by mist, emerging from the water. It was moving towards her, over the water now, and as it came closer it began to take shape. She could see six legs and a blunt head flashing with teeth. A throttled sound, almost a scream, leaped from her throat and she turned and ran back in among the trees again, back into the awful clutching, hissing darkness. But there was no going back. Whichever way
she ran led her straight back onto the silver beach where the beast came bounding across the water towards her. It had a mouth like a giant trap, a face crisscrossed with teeth, and yellow eyes on either side of its scarred head. Shaking, she pointed the staff at it.

  “Go away!” she shouted, and waved the staff at it ineffectually.

  With one great leap it was upon her. She landed hard on her back in the sand and the staff rolled out of her reach. Saliva from the six-legged hound’s fangs dripped onto her face and the weight of it nearly crushed her.

  “Go away,” she gasped. She managed to jerk to the side just far enough to reach her staff and swung it around to jab the creature in one of its yellow eyes. It threw back its head with a howl. The terrible sound echoed right through her. She struggled to get out from under it but the hound was too heavy and she couldn’t budge. It lowered its hideous head again with a growl and caught the arm that held the staff in its gaping mouth. She could feel her flesh tearing; she could hear the crunch of bone splintering. The pain was searing, blinding. And at the same moment something deep inside her, deeper than a physical place, something like a tight little seed buried in warmth and darkness, suddenly burst, light pouring from it and through her, and she plunged her free arm into the creature’s chest. It seemed to go right through without resistance, through the dark matted fur and the taut flesh and the mighty ribs. Her hand knew what it was looking for, closed around the hot, beating muscle and pulled it out as easily as if she were pulling a book off a shelf. The air was full of a grinding roar and then the full weight of the creature was on her and she spun into unconsciousness.

  ~

  Eliza woke and gasped for breath. Kyreth was there, rolling the stinking beast off her. She sat up. In her hand she still held the creature’s black, smoking heart. She dropped it in the sand, and the sand hissed.

  “The staff is for Magic,” he told her, “not poking.” But he seemed pleased.

  “I think my arm is broken,” she said. In spite of her dizziness and nausea, her overriding feeling was one of relief, relief that her arm was still attached to the rest of her and that the rest of her was still there at all. The sand around her was dark with blood.

  “Yes,” said Kyreth. “We will see to it.”

  ~

  In a small room in the south wing Foss cleaned and bound Eliza’s arm. He handed her a mug full of a fizzing dark liquid.

  “I often think we Mancers have rather neglected the healing arts,” he said gently. “A mystical wound such as this one is beyond my skill, I’m afraid. But this potion will ease the pain and perhaps help speed the healing on a little.”

  Eliza drank, while Kyreth paced before her. He had put the barrier star back around her neck as soon as he brought her out of the wood and back onto the grounds of the Citadel.

  “Now do you understand?” he asked her eagerly. “Do you see what you are capable of?”

  “I killed it,” said Eliza, still rather dazed.

  “So!” Kyreth placed a pencil on the table before her. Eliza groaned.

  “You have done something far more difficult than this, Eliza Tok,” said Foss with a rather pained smile. “I think you may rely on the fact that you are...unblocked, shall we say?”

  Eliza stared at the pencil. Float, you stupid pencil, she thought, or I’ll rip your heart out.

  The pencil did not move. Whatever had burst out of her on the shore had retreated again to some place she could not reach or feel.

  “You don’t mean to tell me you can defeat a hound of the Crossing but you cannot make a pencil float?” said Foss incredulously.

  “Lah, praps if the pencil was trying to kill me...” Eliza ventured, half-joking.

  Kyreth frowned. “Indeed,” he said, more to himself than to them.

  “What if I’d nay killed it?” Eliza asked, turning to him. “Would you have saved me?”

  But he seemed not to hear her.

  ~ Chapter 6 ~

  Rom Tok woke with a start to the sound of his front door splintering. He was out of bed in a flash, crouching in a dark corner of his room, ready to pounce. The house was small and it took no time for the intruders to find him. His bedroom door swung open. Instantly, Rom leaped into the door so that it struck the being that had opened it hard. It fell against the wall with a startled shriek. Rom knew immediately that these weren’t human. The one he had knocked down was naked and hairless, with pale, oily flesh, ropey muscles and great black wings. Its face opened into a terrible dark maw, black-tongued and yellow-toothed. Without its wingspan, however, it was not much bigger than a child. Rom raised a chair over his head and brought it down hard on the fallen body. Two more of the things came bounding into the room and Rom dove for the window, pushing it open and rolling out of it before they could reach him with their long pale hands and curved yellow claws. He landed on his feet, adrenaline coursing through him, and made for the tree line at a powerful sprint. They were descending from the sky now, leaping off the roof of his house in pursuit – how many of them were there? He had to reach the trees first, he just had to reach the trees. One of them landed on his back and he dropped to the ground fast, rolling over so it was beneath him and driving his elbow hard into its soft gut. The thing let out a piteous yowl like a wounded cat. Before he could get to his feet again, three more of them were upon him and more were landing all around. He didn’t call out. Who would be able to help him? They wrestled him to the ground and bound him fast. They forced him into a foul-smelling net. Eight of them carried it, pumping their dark wings and lifting him up into the air. There must be twenty of them at least, he thought, trying to work himself into a position where he could see better. The sky was overcast and the island very dark without the light of moon or stars. Rom Tok, arms and legs firmly bound, hung over the archipelago in a net while his captors veered north.

  ~

  “Are you satisfied with what you have learned?” Foss asked tightly. He did not want to have this discussion, but Kyreth had summoned him to his study and he could not refuse.

  Kyreth was grim. “What have we learned?” he asked.

  “She has power,” said Foss. “We know that now.”

  Kyreth looked up at the Spellmaster, who had declined to sit.

  “You think I was wrong to put her in danger.”

  “You know my thoughts,” said Foss. “Surely it is irrelevant what I think.”

  “Yes,” said Kyreth with a sigh. “But tell me, Foss, why she cannot do Magic under instruction? Why she cannot perform the simplest spell when asked?”

  “She does not control her Magic,” said Foss. “Perhaps it is because she did not learn about it at a younger age. She may even have been encouraged to repress it.”

  Kyreth was not listening. He stood and walked around his desk in a slow circle, then said, “I do not see how it is possible.”

  “What, Your Eminence?”

  “Do you not see what Rea has done?”

  “Rea...?” For an awful moment, Foss wondered if the Supreme Mancer had lost his mind. What could he be talking about? Rea was long dead.

  “To hide the girl,” said Kyreth, with a short, bitter laugh. “From us and from our enemy. Her power should have been like a beacon, but Rea locked it within her so that it would not lead us to her. We imagined the spell was merely to hide the girl’s power, but it is stronger than that. Her power is paralyzed. She was able to access it only to save her own life. She cannot use it consciously or deliberately. It is as good as having no power at all.”

  “But that is impossible,” said Foss firmly. “How could Rea have done such a thing? No such Magic exists.”

  “Yet that is what she has done,” said Kyreth. “Do not doubt it, Spellmaster.”

  “We cannot break Rea’s spell if we do not know what manner of spell it is,” said Foss.

  “No,” Kyreth agreed. “Until we can discover more, you will continue your lessons with her as usual.”

  There was a knock. With a gesture from Kyreth the wa
ll rippled and became a door. Ka entered and bowed.

  “Pardon the interruption, Your Eminence,” he said, and gave Foss a nod of acknowledgement. “The Emissariae have returned from Holburg.”

  “You have brought her father again?” asked Kyreth wearily, for Eliza had not stopped asking for him.

  “No, Your Eminence. The man is gone. There was a struggle at his home, and we found these.”

  He placed a few long, black feathers on Kyreth’s desk.

  “The Cra,” said Kyreth, examining the feathers.

  “We have returned for your instructions. Shall we consult the Vindensphere?”

  “No need. We know where they have taken him,” said Kyreth.

  “They will not be fast and they will need to rest often. If they have not reached the Arctic already we can intercept them.”

  Ka stood waiting until Kyreth said, “It may be a trap. I will think on it. You may go.”

  The manipulator of fire bowed and left the room.

  “The Cra do the bidding of the...the Sorceress in the Arctic,” said Foss, deeply shaken. “Why has she taken the girl’s father? What can she want with him?”

  Kyreth glanced at the Scrolls on the wall behind them.

  “Her intent is hidden from us,” he said, the slightest quiver of anger in his voice.

  “What will we do?” asked Foss. “We must act quickly.”

  “The man is of no use to her or to us. If she has taken him it can only be because she wishes to be pursued,” said Kyreth. “I do not know her ultimate purpose, but I am sure that if we follow we are playing into her hands. We cannot help him.”

  “What will we tell Eliza?”

  “Tell her nothing.”

  “She is expecting him soon. We promised her...after the encounter with the hound of the Crossing.”

  “I know.”

  “She is very much alone here. She is frightened and unhappy.”

  Kyreth heard the tone in his voice and said sharply, “What do you suggest?”