House of Shadows

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Yes,” Moonflower said, earnestly, without either apparent offense or fear, and bowed herself gracefully out of Leilis’s room.

  She would, Leilis thought, make an unforgettable keiso. If only that would be enough… Narienneh might have required prompting to change the girl’s robe straightaway, but she shouldn’t regret her decision. Though Leilis had no authority or official reason even to consider such questions, though nothing about running Cloisonné House could ever legitimately be her business, Leilis couldn’t help but find satisfaction, cold though it might be, in that conclusion.

  And if Narienneh remembered that the initial idea had come from Leilis… well, naturally it wouldn’t matter, because Leilis could never be anything more than she already was: not quite a servant, yet truly nothing more, either. She threw a knot of wood violently into her fire, scattering burning twigs out onto the hearth. She left them there, guttering on the hearthstones, and went to gaze blindly out the room’s small window.

  CHAPTER 5

  Nemienne sat cross-legged on cold stone, her hands resting on her thighs, her back very straight, surrounded by a heavy, ungiving darkness that pressed down upon her. It was not quite silent: A slow drip of water somewhere far away broke through the otherwise impenetrable boundaries of the dark.

  She was trying to call light.

  “It is a simple magic, and a necessary one,” Mage Ankennes had told her. “You learn the theory of magecraft quickly and this is good. You understand some of what you are taught, which is better still. But what I will begin to teach you now is the foundation of true magic. The featureless dark resists any form a mage tries to give it. It crushes the heart and muffles the mind. You will find that darkness may of itself smother light. Magic requires light and clarity. You must learn to strike through the dark and send it back to hide in its shadows so that you will be able to work.”

  So far Nemienne had proved unable to do any such thing. She wondered how stupid she would have to be at summoning light before Ankennes would give up on her and send her home. Well, but it didn’t matter, she told herself firmly. Because she would learn how to do it.

  She knew, though she could not see it, that a fat white candle sat on a saucer at her feet. “You may find it helpful to use fire to remind yourself of light,” the mage had explained. “Light the candle if you wish. Then, when you have reminded yourself of the heft and quality of fire, blow it out and try again to summon a purer light.”

  Nemienne had not yet reached for the candle. She had never been frightened of the dark in her life, yet she thought she could become afraid of this darkness. That didn’t help. It made her angry. That wouldn’t help, either.

  Light. She needed to think of light… There was the pearly light of the early morning before the sun had quite risen above the mountains; there was the light of the morning sun that glittered on the waves of the harbor. Flames leaping in fireplaces drove away the chill. Slender tapers with tall narrow flames created a mysterious flickering light so sisters could huddle close and tell stories in the dark.

  This darkness did not seem to invite companionable stories. Nemienne held her hands in front of her face, opening and closing her fingers. Her hands were completely invisible.

  In summer afternoons, heat poured down into the narrow streets of the city and ran, heavy as gold, along the cobbles. At home on those afternoons, she and her sisters would go out onto their balcony to sleep at night. Miande would let the fire in the oven go out, and Father would send out for cold soups or chilled noodles.

  Nemienne closed her eyes, fiercely homesick. It was the fault, she thought, of this featureless dark. She could almost believe that when she opened her eyes, she would find herself in the familiar gallery, with the voices of her sisters echoing up to her from the house below.

  She opened her eyes to darkness and cold, and the sound of the distant slow dripping of water onto stone. The candle sat before her in its saucer. She reached out to find it, ran a fingertip over the smoothness of its wax and the stiff little wick reassuring at the top. Yes. The mage had shown her how to light a candle: pulling a little fire from the air to light a candle was not difficult. She had done it seven tries out of ten only the previous afternoon. Only now, though she tried and tried, fire refused to bloom along the candle’s wick. Nemienne took her hand away from the candle, grimacing.

  In the distance, water dripped from some unguessable height into an unseen pool.

  Abruptly, the darkness folded back around her, and she found herself sitting on the floor of the mage’s workroom. The room was flooded with light and heat, from wide windows and lanterns and a fire roaring in the great fireplace. The darkness, so heavy and impenetrable a moment before, immediately seemed a distant, weightless thing. Nemienne blinked in the light, feeling half drowned by it, wondering how she could have failed to summon such a powerful substance.

  Mage Ankennes sat at his writing desk, one elbow propped on its surface. Enkea perched on his knee. He leaned his chin on his palm and regarded Nemienne with a thoughtful expression very like the cat’s. “Can you light the candle now?” he asked.

  Nemienne blinked again and lowered her gaze to the candle sitting on the floor by her knee. The heat of the fire beat against her face. Looking into the fire, Nemienne borrowed a little of its fierceness. Reaching out, she brushed the wick of the candle with the tip of her finger and, as he had taught her, let the fire run through her mind and into her hand. The candle burst into flame.

  “Yes,” said the mage thoughtfully.

  “It’s easy,” Nemienne said. “I mean, here it’s easy. I don’t know why it’s different in the dark.”

  “Hmm. Tell me, what disturbed you most, in that dark place?”

  Nemienne thought about this. She said finally, “The dripping water.”

  “Mmm.” The mage studied Nemienne, seeming taken a little by surprise. “The water. Not the dark itself.”

  “The sound of the water seemed too far away. Hearing the drops fall made the dark seem to stretch out too far. As though there was no end to it anywhere. And the sound seemed too loud for its distance.”

  “Ah. A good observation. You are a perceptive child. Ordinarily one would expect insight to lead to practical achievement.” His tone gave her no hint whether he valued insight more than practical achievement or the reverse, but he offered Nemienne a hand up without apparent disapproval, lifting her effortlessly to her feet. His grip was firm and impersonal, his hand almost fever hot, as though fire burned behind his skin. He said, “That is water that falls from one darkness into another without ever being touched by light. It carries power into the depths of the mountain. You felt that. Were you afraid of that darkness?”

  “A little,” Nemienne admitted.

  “That will pass,” said the mage. “You may read, hmm, Kelle Iasodde, I think. The fifth section, where he discusses the eternal darkness and contrasts it with the simple darkness of the ephemeral world. Write me, shall we say, a five-hundred-word essay? About the symbolism of glass and iron and their use in allowing a mage to shift between the worlds of the ephemeral and the eternal.”

  Nemienne nodded, brightening. Iasodde was hard to understand in places, but that sounded interesting.

  The mage smiled a little more widely, missing nothing. He said, “Good. You may try this again tomorrow, then. Or the next day, perhaps. Tonight, the essay. And you may practice calling fire to light candles even in the dark, eh? The ordinary darkness of your room, for now. And practice putting them out again. You’re clever enough with fire. Fire is sympathetic to light. Work with the one and the other should come to you more easily.”

  Nemienne nodded again. “You mean, light and fire are in sympathy with one another because they are similar things? Fire is ephemeral, isn’t that what Iasodde says? And light is eternal. Fire brings light, but it isn’t really the same thing at all.” She had been reading about the principles of sympathetic magic, and finding the theory not quite impenetrably dense.

&nbs
p; “Precisely so,” said the mage. “Very good. Read the fourth passage of the second chapter of Iasodde—yes, I know you have read it. Read it again. Write a second essay for me comparing fire and light, heat and fire, and sympathy and similarity. You will enjoy that, I think, and you may find that understanding the underlying theory will lead to smoother application in practice. You will learn to hold both light and fire in your mind, a defense against any dark, though it stretches out infinitely far.”

  Nemienne tried to imagine this. She would far rather write difficult essays than try to summon light into impenetrable darkness, but she didn’t say so. But she thought she understood why it was important to learn how. She asked, “Why did you build your house in the shadow of the mountain, stretching back into the mountain, if darkness is an enemy of magic?”

  Ankennes smiled. “A good question. Your answer?”

  “So you would remain familiar with the dark, through continually dealing with it? So you would be constantly reminded of light, through having to keep it in mind against the dark?”

  “Both good answers,” said the mage approvingly.

  As Nemienne had already learned was his habit, he did not give any suggestion whether either guess was actually correct. But he seemed happy with her, so she was tentatively pleased with herself despite her inability to summon light into darkness. Anyway, she would learn that. She would learn everything. She already knew—she had known from the first moment in the mage’s house—that she belonged here in this house of magic, in the shadow of the mountain and the shadow of magic. She wasn’t sure Mage Ankennes was perfectly confident of it; she never knew what the mage was thinking. But she meant to prove it to him by midwinter.

  “I am going out this evening,” the mage told her. “You will be well enough here alone?”

  Nemienne blinked, recalled to the moment. This was a question that should have seemed condescending or insulting, the sort of question you would ask a much younger child, not a girl Nemienne’s age. But this house was a little confusing, sometimes. Parts of it were even a little frightening—sometimes. Nemienne said firmly, “Yes, of course. I’ll be perfectly fine.”

  “Of course. Besides, Enkea will be here,” Ankennes assured her, stroking the cat, who half closed her green eyes and sat up straight on his knee. He picked her up and handed her to Nemienne.

  “Of course,” said Nemienne, taking the cat and stroking her throat. She was pleased. The cat could always lead Nemienne wherever she wanted to go in the house, although sometimes she wouldn’t leave a comfortable chair for any coaxing. Mage Ankennes had commented, shortly after Nemienne had become his apprentice, that Enkea had already been in this house when he’d purchased it. This had startled Nemienne, who in the back of her mind had assumed the mage had lived in this house forever. But no. Less than fifteen years, he’d told her when she asked. So Enkea was an old cat—older than she looked—but not as old as Nemienne’s first startled assumption. Though surely it had been a mage who had built this house, mages who had always lived here—she was sure Enkea had always been a mage’s cat.

  She wandered through the house after the mage had gone, Enkea on her shoulder. The house itself seemed in some ways a test of aptitude for magecraft, like lighting a candle with the memory of fire. Navigating it took practice and a certain amount of luck. Nemienne liked the challenge of it. She thought she could feel herself stretching to meet this challenge, as she had somehow never seemed to meet the ordinary challenges of day-to-day life in her father’s house.

  Nemienne shifted uneasily at this thought. Was it disloyal to her family to be glad she was in the mage’s house, to like the strangeness of it? The solitude? She felt the occasional twinge of homesickness, yes; she missed her sisters, yes. The knowledge that her father was gone was a constant ache at the back of her mind. And yet… and yet, it seemed to her that she had fallen into the mage’s house as a fish falls into the sea. Already she could not imagine living anywhere else, and though she read them avidly, letters from her sisters seemed like messages from another country.

  Ankennes’s house always struck Nemienne as oddly outsized, but now, with the mage absent, it seemed even larger than usual. Nemienne had accepted halls that stretched out for surprising distances and turned at odd angles. On the uppermost floor of the house, besides the workroom, she was aware of only two small libraries and a musty scriptorium. Well, usually these were all on the uppermost floor. She had never been down to the lowest level of the house because the door at the bottom of the stair was always closed.

  On the main floor, Nemienne could almost always find her own room, though occasionally she had to hunt back and forth for its door. The room was small, but she had it all to herself. Nemienne liked her room’s small size; it felt very private and enclosed. The quiet of the room, in which she might think or read or study without interruption, had quickly gone from seeming like extraordinary luxury to seeming natural. She found her room now without difficulty and wandered in, glancing around possessively.

  The room had a soft rug, tawny gold and brown, on the floor beside the narrow bed, and walls painted in dusty green and taupe. Above the bed was a shelf on the wall, which held the half-dozen books she was reading. Including the dense Iasodde, from which she was to write her essays. Nemienne opened the volume, thinking she might start that at once, but then, finding herself for some reason restless, closed it again and set it aside.

  Karah’s letter lay on the table. Karah had written with descriptions about lessons and clothing and small details of daily life in a keiso House. Nemienne had read her sister’s letter eagerly, but found it hard to write back; she found her own lessons and the details of her own life difficult to put into words.

  The kitchen, almost as stable as the workroom or the scriptorium, could usually be found along the hall and down a short flight of stairs from her room. It was a large, friendly room with a heavy iron stove capable of producing prodigious heat. Enkea was often to be found stretched out in the chair nearest the stove, luxuriating in heat that seemed as though it should have been too intense for any reasonable creature. She jumped off Nemienne’s shoulder now and leaped up on her chair, purring.

  Exploring the ice pantry, Nemienne found cold roast chicken and noodles dressed with a spicy brown sauce and pink pepperberries. Nemienne, wondering where the mage might have gone—the possibilities seemed endless, and endlessly exotic—ate her supper and fed bits of chicken to Enkea. The cat accepted them with the air of one conveying a favor.

  Nemienne washed her supper dishes, but found herself abruptly consumed, as happened at odd moments, by the memory of doing such homely chores in company with Tana and Miande. Tears prickled suddenly behind her eyes. Nemienne put the dishes to drip by the sink and, lifting Enkea back to her shoulder, hastily left the kitchen. She turned into the long hallway that led to the stairs. She meant to go up to one of the libraries and distract herself by looking at the books there, but when she came to the main landing and began to turn to the right, Enkea leaped from her shoulder and disappeared instead down the stairs to the left. The slim cat blurred at once into shadow, save for her white foot, which flashed in the dim light as she moved. She looked back at Nemienne once. Her eyes caught the light of the landing and cast it back like smoky green lanterns.

  Nemienne hesitated on the landing. When Enkea did not return, she slowly went down the stairs after the cat. They were not quite level; each step was worn a little in the center where traversing feet had fallen for many, many years. Nemienne wondered whose feet those had been, before her master’s. It seemed impossible that ordinary folk had ever dwelled in this house.

  The walls held tall candles in sconces, none lit. The walls, like the stairs, were stone. Cold rolled off them in almost visible waves, so that Nemienne was shivering before she had gone halfway down.

  At the bottom of the stairs, there was a small landing and a great oaken door bound with brass. Nemienne had seen this before. But this time, the door was standing ajar. Be
yond the door was the featureless dark. Enkea was nowhere to be seen.

  For what seemed a long time, Nemienne stood on the lowest step and simply looked into the darkness. She was afraid of it, and yet… if she learned to call light into the darkness tonight, then tomorrow she could impress Mage Ankennes with her confident skill. She liked that idea. And there was the door, right here, so if she couldn’t summon light, she could always back up a few steps and find herself again in the safe—well, familiar—well, sort of familiar—house.

  At last she took a candle from a wall sconce and drew fire from the air to light it. This time the flame came without difficulty. It rose off its wick long and white and nearly smokeless, casting a pool of light that poured across the steps and the landing and accented every unevenness and roughly mortared crack in the stone. But the light somehow seemed reluctant to press beyond the door.

  Slowly, Nemienne stepped down to the landing and put a hand against the door. It was cold. Even the wood was cold, and the brass almost seemed to burn with cold. But the instant she touched it, the door swung wide open to the darkness beyond. Nemienne jumped back. Then she scolded herself—what, did she think the darkness was going to leap out at her?

  But the idea didn’t seem as silly as it should have. Her heart pounded. But the thought of impressing Mage Ankennes kept her on the landing. And besides… it frightened her, that open door, but it drew her as well: She wanted to run away, but she also wanted to accept the door’s invitation. Or challenge. It almost seemed like that. Like a dare.