“Hmm.” Jeres tapped his fingers gently on his desk. “No. I quite understand your reasoning, young woman. Your conclusion seems sound to me, if hardly definitive. As it happens, I am also recently in receipt of a letter that makes much the same accusation.” He laid a thoughtful hand gently on a black-bound scroll, which Leilis hadn’t previously noticed among the clutter on his desk.
“Tarre,” the prince’s bodyguard continued after a slight pause. “Please send a man to find Mage Ankennes and deliver my request that he attend me here when he next finds himself at leisure.”
This was a polite way of saying at once, Leilis knew.
“And a similar message to one of the King’s Own mages, please,” Jeres added. “Preferably Mage Periannes, if he can spare a moment. Thank you.” He returned his calm gaze to Leilis, who was still holding the ruined set of pipes. Then he turned to Lord Taudde. “Lord Chontas,” he said after a moment. “May I ask you to examine this set of pipes and identify them as the set you originally gave Prince Tepres? And perhaps you would describe for me the process by which they came into your possession?”
Lord Taudde turned his head, and his eyes met Leilis’s. His expression was remote, thoughtful—not worried in the least. Was it a mask such as keiso learned, Leilis wondered, or was he truly so calm? And if his coolness was a mask, where had he learned to wear it?
The Kalchesene sorcerer reached out his hand to take the ruined ivory pipes from Leilis. Unusually for a man who had once touched her, he made no effort to avoid brushing her fingers, but for a moment held both the pipes and Leilis’s hand.
And at that moment, the shadows in the room all rose up and choked the light. The world tilted and swung, and suddenly all the air in the room seemed to press inward with tremendous pressure. Leilis bit back a cry and clung tightly to Taudde’s hand; indeed, that hold dragged her hard toward him and after him, and she thought, Oh, he’s doing this, he’s taking us both elsewhere. To Kalches, she guessed. But then Leilis saw that his eyes—almost the only things she could still see—had widened, and she realized that he, too, was surprised and alarmed, and that was bad, because if the expanding darkness were not his doing, then—then—
And then they both fell into the darkness, thought and awareness vanishing along with light and air and everything familiar.
CHAPTER 14
Nemienne wondered whether anybody else realized that there had been no real earthquake. Everyone did realize, at least, that nothing had been damaged and no one had been hurt, and so the candlelight district was already settling back to its customary calm pleasure in the coming night. But such calm had never been further from Nemienne’s grasp. She seized Karah’s hands, demanding urgently, “You love Prince Tepres, don’t you?”
Karah stared at her, shocked.
“Don’t you?” repeated Nemienne, with some urgency. “Because the only reason I found you in the dark was because I love you! I don’t think I could find the prince, not if he follows the wrong path into the dark. But you might—if you love him.”
“What in the world do you mean?” Karah asked, bewildered.
Nemienne hardly knew how to explain anything. She said rapidly, “That wasn’t a real earthquake, was it? And Leilis is missing, and those pipes—and the foreign sorcerer came here this morning, but he didn’t find her, or you, or the pipes, did he? And Mage Ankennes gave me the evening off—and the prince is heir to the Dragon, which means he’s a similar thing to the real dragon. Karah, do you love him? Because if you do, I think we haven’t much time left—”
Karah still looked confused, but she didn’t argue, just nodded, scooped up her kitten, and followed her sister. Nemienne caught her hand and dragged her, nearly at a run, up the stairs and down the fourth-floor gallery to the last bedchamber: Leilis’s room.
The room was just as Nemienne had remembered: small, austere, and dominated by the large fireplace with the cracked stones in its hearth. But this time, Nemienne recognized the jagged patterns of the cracks. They were clear kin to the sharp, angular patterns carved on the music room door in Ankennes’s house. She only wondered how she could have failed to recognize that relationship before.
“Leilis isn’t here,” Karah began.
“I know. The foreigner from Kalches went after her because she had his pipes, I expect,” Nemienne explained quickly. “What I don’t know is whether the foreigner is working with Mage Ankennes or against him. I’m sure Mage Ankennes knew about the pipes, but what I don’t know—oh, everything is so confusing! I don’t know who’s on whose side—only if you’re in love with Prince Tepres, it can’t be right to make him a sacrifice—” She was conscious of Karah’s intake of breath, and stopped. But whatever exclamation or question her sister might have thought of asking, Karah closed her mouth again and was silent.
Nemienne was grateful. She needed to find a way into the mountain—she was almost sure she could find a way—the fireplace was a door into and out of the darkness. She crossed the room and knelt down by the fireplace, tracing the crack in one of its hearthstones with the tip of her finger. It was a rune, she knew, or a letter in some strange angular alphabet. Whoever had long ago set these stones in place, these runes brought Cloisonné House under the shadow of Kerre Maraddras. One house of shadows should do as well as the other to find the way… Nemienne closed her eyes and recalled the spell Mage Ankennes had taught her, the one to let you read a language you had never learned. She lifted the spiky cracks from the hearthstones into her mind and let them rest there, illuminated by remembered light.
At first, the letters refused to reveal themselves, but only rested like stones in her mind. Then Nemienne, driven nearly to distraction by the sense of time rushing past them into the vanishing past and inspired perhaps by necessity, called to mind instead the pale greenish light of the caverns under the mountains. This sprang not only to her mind, but, unexpectedly, to her hands. The light gathered like water in her palms and spilled between her fingers to run across the hearth. It pooled in the kitten’s eyes, lambent green, and the little animal crouched down with its ears back flat against its skull. The light poured into the cracks in the hearthstones and filled the fireplace itself with a green light that was nothing like fire. The lines seemed to swim and rearrange themselves. They were runes, Nemienne saw. She knew because her spell told her, that the first was a rune of summoning, the second a rune of traveling, and the third a rune of breaking—summoning what or breaking what, she had only the sketchiest idea. But she had a pretty solid guess about the one connected to traveling.
“Come here, hold my hand,” she said to Karah, holding out her hand for her sister to take.
“What is that light?” Karah asked, hesitating. “What did you do?”
“Do?” Nemienne had hardly done anything, yet. She said instead, still feeling the press of passing time and still carried along by the quick stream of inspiration, “Quickly, quickly, come on, Karah!”
“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Nemienne promised recklessly. She only wished she did know more specifically what it was she was doing, or might do, or ought to do. But she felt strongly that there was no time now to hesitate; that they had to move now if there was to be a chance of saving anything from this night. She caught her sister’s hand in hers and, with the hand she still had free, traced the rune on the middle stone.
The cracks in the stone split wide. Light spilled into the fractures in the stone and darkness spilled out of them. Around Nemienne and Karah, the room seemed to twist, turn itself inside out, and stretch out—and up—and out again. When the world steadied, they found themselves standing close together in the moist chilly air of the caverns. The greenish light showed them the beautiful, strange, stone formations of the caverns. Far away, seeming to echo from every direction, there was the resonant sound of water drops falling from high above into the fathomless black water of the dragon’s pool.
Nemienne had no idea which way to go to reach that so
und.
Then twin lights like miniature green lanterns caught her eye, and she made out the dim shape of Enkea, sitting statue still among the shadows. The cat’s eyes were fixed on the girls—no, on the kitten that clung to Karah’s shoulder.
The kitten leaped to the ground and bounced toward Ankennes’s cat, only Enkea wasn’t really Ankennes’s cat, was she? Nemienne studied the green light of the caverns that folded so smoothly around the slim creature and wondered how she had ever mistaken Enkea for a tame house cat. It was clear enough now that she was a creature of shadows and dim light, and nothing tame.
Karah’s kitten paused to stretch her nose toward Enkea’s face, her whiskers arcing forward—then skittered past and dashed away into the far reaches of the caverns. Enkea rose to her feet and followed sedately, her white foot flashing in the dimness.
Nemienne drew Karah after the cats. She recognized nothing. Without guidance she knew they might have wandered for hours or days… forever, maybe?… through the endless dimness and never found the dragon’s chamber. She hadn’t thought of that when she invoked the rune, and her blood chilled now at the thought. But Enkea never outpaced them, and the kitten dashed forward and back. And very soon she found she could hear, ahead of them, the sound of voices, not quite interpretable. One was light and quick, a voice that Nemienne did not know. The other belonged to Mage Ankennes. Nemienne bit her lip.
“That’s the foreign lord, Lord Chontas Taudde ser Omientes,” Karah whispered in her ear. “And the deep voice is your Mage Ankennes, of course. He sounds very… very confident.”
Nemienne nodded, and swallowed. She wished fervently that she found the mage’s voice reassuring. She would have, mere days ago—she should have, even now—he had to know what he was doing, didn’t he? He was the mage, and she only a girl who’d barely begun to learn from him.
But she was uncomfortably aware that she didn’t trust the mage at all. No matter how horribly presumptuous she was to doubt him, Nemienne couldn’t help herself. She knew that doubting Mage Ankennes was probably going to ruin her whole life. She’d loved being his apprentice—she’d longed to be a mage—if she acted against him now, he’d never forgive her. But she couldn’t be loyal to him and to her sister both. And she was terribly afraid that what her master wanted to do, sacrificing Prince Tepres to destroy the stone dragon, was just wrong. How could it be right?
She bit her lip again, hard enough to hurt. She could still retreat back to Cloisonné House. Take Karah with her—they’d both be so much safer if they slipped away again and nobody ever knew they’d been here. Karah might think she loved Prince Tepres, but how often could she even have met him, yet? Once, twice? Karah couldn’t really know him. He was a prince—not just some court noble’s left-hand son by a keiso wife, but a prince—not just a prince, but the prince, the heir—Nemienne bit her lip till it bled and told herself that her sister would even probably be better off if Prince Tepres was gone. She would meet somebody else, somebody less exalted, somebody safer to love.
But even while Nemienne was telling herself they should simply creep away again and flee back to Cloisonné House, she and Karah were quietly following the cats instead.
The voices became louder as they pressed ahead, but no more comprehensible. The weird echoes of these caverns kept layering words on top of words, until the constant rippling sound blurred to a meaninglessness like the sound of the sea.
The light that illuminated the caverns before them was different here. It was magelight, Nemienne knew. It seemed out of place here beneath Kerre Maraddras—harsh, almost offensive somehow. The stone was meant to shine under a gentler luminosity. Nemienne shuddered. She wanted so much to like Ankennes’s brilliant light, but she couldn’t. She wanted so much to trust her master, to believe that he knew what he was doing, that he was right. But she couldn’t do that, either.
The two girls picked their way toward the hard magelight through a sweeping cluster of fragile needles and spires. At last they emerged to find the voices much louder and more intelligible.
“… needn’t be so delicate,” Mage Ankennes was saying. His deep voice broke through the silence of the caverns like a stone dropped into water, and echoes came back and back again, some with a clear and rounded sound and others hissing and sibilant. “Do you think I’m unaware why Miennes died, or how? You weren’t so reluctant there, I believe.”
“And yet,” replied the lighter voice, “I find I have no wish to lay out a path to sorcerous death a second time to suit the whims of you ruthless Lonne conspirators. You might well consider again what happened to Lord Miennes.” It might have been Nemienne’s imagination that this voice, while sharp, produced echoes that wavered.
“That won’t happen to me,” Mage Ankennes said with assurance.
Nemienne was sure he was right. She might not know exactly what had happened to Lord Miennes, but she was absolutely certain that her master was far more clever. She wondered if the foreign sorcerer realized this, or if he’d been misled by Ankennes’s brawn into thinking the mage dull. She edged around the final curtain of stone, drawing her sister after her, and then at last the girls were able to see into the dragon’s chamber.
The black pool was unchanged. Everything else was different. Mage Ankennes had not carried simple lanterns into the dark, not this time; instead, he had set balls of harsh magelight here and there around the chamber. The white light glared mercilessly off the dragon’s sinuous form, making it look somehow more like stone than ever, flatter and less real.
Mage Ankennes stood nearest to the pool, his back to it and to the dragon. He held a staff in one hand. The staff was heavy and black, nothing Nemienne recognized. The mage looked tensely exultant. It was easy to see him as a man close to achieving his life’s great ambition.
A circle of light blazed on the stone before the mage, and within the circle stood Leilis and the Kalchesene sorcerer. Nemienne knew the man must be the foreign sorcerer because he was with Leilis, but he didn’t at all resemble the image Nemienne had had in her mind’s eye. She had imagined an old man, at least Ankennes’s age, with a scholar’s fine-drawn intensity. This man was young, not much older than Leilis. He possessed an unusual, long, sharp-featured face that instantly proclaimed him foreign, but he didn’t immediately look like a sorcerer. Leilis looked far more stern and proud than he. The Kalchesene only looked frustrated.
Within a separate circle, this one smaller and not so brilliant, stood another young man. Even without Karah’s intake of breath beside her, Nemienne would have known this man for the prince, for royalty was in the haughty set of his shoulders and back. He had pale hair caught back with a clip of jet, dark eyes that at the moment snapped with outrage, and a thin, arrogant mouth. He was standing very straight, his arms crossed over his chest and his jaw set.
“He looks so alone!” whispered Karah.
This, although she supposed it was true, would not have been Nemienne’s first thought. She hissed, “Shush!”
“Fulfill my requirement,” Ankennes said in a reasonable tone, “and there’s no reason you shouldn’t return to Kalches with perfect liberty and health. I may be a ruthless Lonne conspirator, but why should that matter to you? A Kalchesene bardic sorcerer surely hasn’t any deep concern for the well-being of the Seriantes, head or tail.”
The foreigner shrugged. “Perhaps I’ve little concern for the Seriantes, but less interest still in accommodating the murderous whim of a Lonne mage.”
Prince Tepres tilted his head to one side and said in a quick fierce voice, “Yes, Ankennes, do explain your odd whim to us all. I’m certain we are all passionately interested to know your purpose.”
Mage Ankennes completely ignored the prince. He said to the young sorcerer, “I would prefer to harness your peculiar magic to my ends, but, believe me, there are other ways. You’ll play death for the Dragon’s heir and return unharmed to Kalches, or you’ll die first and he’ll still follow. Well?”
“Taudde, you can’t,” Leilis s
aid in a low, passionate voice to the sorcerer. Her tone was odd: She spoke to the foreigner as though she had not only an interest in the outcome of this decision but a right to dictate it. She said, “It doesn’t even matter whether Ankennes can really murder the prince without you or not, and I’m not so sure he can or why would he complicate everything by forcing you to do it? But it matters to you, just you—as well as to, well, everybody else. It would be worse if you murdered the prince than if Mage Ankennes does it.”
The sorcerer tilted his head toward Leilis and listened to her as though he really cared about her opinion.
Mage Ankennes said with exaggerated patience, “The romance of the young! I assure you, Lord Chontas, the prince will be just as dead whoever kills him. So why not live? Play his death for me.”
The young sorcerer gave Ankennes a look of disdain. “You’ve made pipes of your own, then? But even if I would play one set of pipes, do you believe the prince is so foolish as to play the other set? Under any compulsion?”
“Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t,” Mage Ankennes said drily. “Fortunately, his cooperation isn’t required.”
“Aware or unaware, the cooperation of the one to be ensorcelled is always required,” the foreigner began, and then stopped.
Mage Ankennes was holding a thin white flute out to him. Nemienne knew, with a creeping horror even though she didn’t understand why she was so sure, that this flute had been made of bone. She guessed further that it had been made from old, brittle bone—from Seriantes bone, though how the mage would have come to possess such a bone she could not begin to guess.
House of Shadows Page 27
