Nemienne almost expected Enkea to do something to prevent that blow, but of course the cat could do nothing. No more than Nemienne herself. Flinching from the blow as though it was aimed at her, Nemienne fell to her knees at the edge of the pool. The water lapped over her fingers, not like water but like embodied shadow, with green light glimmering at its heart. She gasped and pulled her hands back.
The staff struck—
Above them, everywhere around them, there was a vast, terrible noise as the mountain trembled. Some of the more delicate stalactites and needles shattered with a terrible crystalline chiming like breaking bells, and great cracks ran through the smooth curtains and walls of the cavern. One crack ran with a grinding sound across the smooth stone of the floor from the far side of the cavern nearly to where Nemienne knelt. In the pool before her, ripples disturbed the surface of the water. The pale greenish light natural to the caverns wavered and flickered, like the light of a lantern somebody was shaking. But, though this seemed impossible, the dragon itself remained undisturbed. Not the faintest crack disfigured its neck where the mage had struck it.
Ankennes, looking nonplussed, stepped back and leaned on his staff, studying the stone dragon. Enkea had not moved. Her green eyes rested on the mage, not tame at all. She blinked, once. Above her head, a drop of water made its way down the curve of the dragon’s wing and fell, gleaming faintly green, into the waiting pool: plink. Nemienne stared down into the water after it. The mage also turned his head at the sound, but then he turned slowly back to stare at the gray cat. One of his eyebrows lifted.
Around them, the melody the Kalchesene sorcerer was playing suddenly altered. Everyone, Ankennes included, jerked around to stare at him.
The sorcerer was standing with his legs braced and his flute to his mouth, playing a rippling melody so delicate that it was barely audible—but he had switched the bone flute Ankennes had given him for a plain wooden flute of his own. The bone flute lay discarded at his feet. The sound of the wooden one, if one listened closely, was purer. Cleaner, somehow. Leilis stood with her hands gripping the foreigner’s arm, but she stood like one lending support, not one being supported.
Nemienne looked for and found the thread of music the bardic sorcerer was holding. It led slantwise into the dark, but dimly, far along that path, she could once again see her sister. And beyond Karah, a still dimmer form that had to be the prince. Both of them brightened as she watched.
Mage Ankennes leaned on his staff while he peered along the dark path Taudde’s skill was pulling from his flute. The mage’s eyes widened. He turned sharply toward the Kalchesene. “What is that flute? Stop playing!” he commanded.
The foreigner looked across the pool at Ankennes and nearly smiled behind his wooden flute, which he did not lower. The melody he was playing changed again, it seemed to Nemienne. There was something about it that coaxed, that urged…
Ankennes, face contorted with anger, began to wade back across the pool toward the sorcerer. He still held his staff like a weapon, and Nemienne, thinking of how he’d made the mountain tremble with it, swallowed.
The bardic sorcerer backed away to the far side of the circle—a few steps only—and played on. His eyes, wide and wary, went swiftly from the dragon to Ankennes and finally to Nemienne.
“Oh, where is your sister?” Leilis cried to her. “Nemienne, can’t you bring them back?”
Nemienne was impressed that Leilis had understood so quickly, but she could only answer helplessly, “Yes, I’ll try, I meant to, only now I’m not sure—I’m not sure how far they’ve gone, how far they have to come back. But they are coming. Look, they are—”
Nevertheless, she bit her lips until she tasted blood, and stared after her sister as though she could, by sheer force of will, force her faster back to them along the flute’s path. She reached out, meaning to take her sister’s hand as she had done once before—she would draw Karah out of the dark, and Karah would bring the prince with her—
Mage Ankennes lashed out with his staff, striking right through the brilliant circle of light; his staff came down with frightening force against the sorcerer’s guarding arm. The young man did not cease playing, but his face contorted with pain and he staggered and would have fallen against the burning circle except that Leilis caught him. She flung herself between the mage’s next blow and the young sorcerer.
Ankennes swept her out of the way without using his staff, with just a wave of his hand that sent her staggering. She hit the circle of light and cried out, a high-pitched agonized sound that made Nemienne press her hands to her own mouth to block a scream. But Leilis was not dead. The woman staggered back to her feet, and though she was weeping, Nemienne thought it was as much with rage as with pain.
But the mage punched his staff through the circle a second time, and this time Leilis was not there and the sorcerer could not block the blow. The staff struck at his face, and the wooden flute flew across the circle, struck the barrier of light, and crumbled instantly to dust.
The young sorcerer made a short, hoarse sound and went to one knee, reaching a hand out to the little flurry of dust that was all that remained of his flute. Leilis scrubbed her hands across her face, straightened, and glared with desperate fury at Ankennes.
The pathway the music had laid through the shadows faded, and Nemienne, who had almost thought she could feel her sister’s fingers in hers, suddenly lost her again.
“Let the death of the fledgling Seriantes Dragon summon the true dragon of Lonne down the path of mortality,” Ankennes cried. He turned back toward the black pool and the stone dragon.
Nemienne had never hated anyone before, but as she searched in vain for some fading echo of her sister and found nothing, she found she could hate Ankennes. At least she knew, now, that she was right to fight him. Not that she even could. She had a sudden, vivid hope that the dragon would suddenly lift its head and bite the mage in two. But it remained quiescent. And she could think of nothing at all to do.
Mage Ankennes took a step into the black water, hefting his staff once more.
A gray cat dashed suddenly into the dragon’s chamber. For an instant, Nemienne thought it was Enkea, but this cat was larger and darker: smoky black but with white showing beneath the black as it moved, like smoke veiling white mist. It ran across the cavern and leaped without pause onto a high ledge, spinning around to stare out at them all with a fierce wild gaze. Nemienne saw that one of its eyes was green and the other gold. With a thunderous rush, a crowd of men exploded out of the far reaches of the caverns, following the path the smoke-colored cat had laid down.
Mage Ankennes spun, not only startled but, by all appearances, also alarmed. As he had reason to be, evidently, for the leader of the newcomers flung out an arm and a dozen of his black-clad followers headed toward the mage, faces grim.
The leader was a tall man, with harsh, angular features. He had high cheekbones; a narrow, high-arched nose; and a thin, severe mouth. His hair, caught back with a heavy ring of island jade, was pale as sea-dragon ivory; his eyes were a frosted gray as cold as a high mountain winter. He wore no gold, but, on the first finger of his left hand, a single ring of black iron that glinted with twin rubies. Though all his followers were armed with swords or long-hafted jagged-bladed nikenne, this man carried no weapons. Nemienne could not imagine he would ever need a weapon, because she couldn’t imagine anyone having the nerve to defy him.
And yet, Mage Ankennes did defy him. The mage strode toward the stone dragon, lifting his staff and at the same time laying a bar of fire across the black pool behind him to block pursuit.
The black-clad men hesitated before that fire. But their leader flung out a hand and brought the chill darkness of the caverns falling down upon the fire to smother it. At once the men leaped forward. One of them threw his nikenne. It was not a weapon made for throwing, but it flew as smoothly as an arrow and skidded across the stone so close to Ankennes’s feet that for a moment Nemienne thought it had hit him. Sparks scattered behind the blade wh
ere it scraped across the stone.
Ankennes hesitated, but then lunged forward. For a moment, Nemienne thought he would manage to take the few remaining steps that separated him from the dragon and strike at it again. But Enkea stood up, no longer sleek: Every hair on her body had fluffed up and she seemed three times her ordinary size. The cat hissed, and Ankennes hesitated again, and then the cold-eyed leader of the newcomers set the weight of the mountains dragging at Ankennes’s heel, and at last his men closed on the mage, tearing the staff out of his hand and casting it away.
“Bring him to me,” the cold-eyed man commanded, and demanded of the mage when his followers had done so, “Where is my son?”
So this was the king, Nemienne realized, and was at once amazed she hadn’t known immediately, for he looked exactly as she would have imagined him. This was Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes—the Dragon of Lirionne, who was a “similar thing” to the stone dragon. Nemienne thought he definitely looked similar enough to the dragon.
Ankennes did not answer.
The king turned his head to regard Lord Chontas Taudde ser Omientes, where the Kalchesene sorcerer knelt panting on the stone, still imprisoned by the circle of light. The king’s gaze went for a moment to Leilis, then came back to the sorcerer. One ivory eyebrow rose, profoundly skeptical. He asked again, with stark patience, “Where is my son?”
To Nemienne’s astonishment, the sorcerer caught up the bone flute that had lain discarded near his hand and held it out toward the king. “Give me leave to play this!” he said in an urgent tone. “Give me leave, before the path is irretrievably lost!”
Mage Ankennes said, “No!”
The king did not even look at Ankennes, but gazed steadily at the sorcerer. “Play it,” he said—not so much granting permission as issuing a command.
The sorcerer lifted the bone flute to his mouth. The flute still had that strange off-tone quality; it still sounded like ash and rain. But the melody that spun out from it had a compelling beauty to it now that had previously been lacking. The melody, deceptively simple, drew back out of the dark the glimmering path down which the prince and then Karah had traveled.
Nemienne rose to her feet and peered as hard as she could down that pathway of music and light. She said helplessly, “I don’t see her—” But then she did. Far away, veiled by shadows and by a light that seemed itself a kind of shadow. But she thought her sister was going the wrong way, despite the new melody. She was becoming less clear, fading farther away before her eyes. Of Prince Tepres, Nemienne saw nothing at all. She bit her lip. They would both be lost… In a way the flute made it worse, because they could watch Karah fade from their reach…
Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes strode past her suddenly, straight into the pathway the bone flute had reopened. Like his son and like Karah, he was swept away at once down that shadowed path. But unlike the others, the king remained clearly—almost blindingly—visible. He trailed a greenish brilliance that unraveled behind him to leave a strong, clear trail overlaying the tenuous path the flute had created.
“No!” Mage Ankennes repeated and, in the absence of the crushing power of the king, summoned fire. The men holding him leaped back, cursing. One of them lifted a sword, but a blaze of fire and power sent him sliding across the stone. Ankennes brought both his hands together with a sound like a crack of thunder and lifted them—the fire did not expand, but it intensified—
Nemienne, who had never been able to summon fire into the peculiar heavy darkness of these caverns, found in her heart an understanding of shadows and darkness and black water that had never known the sun. She held in her mind the heavy smothering darkness, knelt on the stone, dipped a finger into the black pool, and drew quickly on the white stone the rune for summoning that she had seen on the hearthstone of Leilis’s fireplace. What she summoned was the patient darkness that lay beyond the reach of any light, the endless heavy shadows that could smother any fire.
Before her, Mage Ankennes’s magefire went out like a snuffed candle. All the light in the caverns vanished—all the light and fire that men had made or brought: not only Ankennes’s powerful fire but also the prisoning circles of light and all the torches the king’s men had carried with them. Through all the caverns, the only light that remained was the light that somehow wasn’t quite light at all: the odd greenish glimmer that seemed a part of the stone, that seemed to rise from the black pool without disturbing its blackness; the pale light that slid along the long elegant head and sinuous neck of the stone dragon and lit the pathway that Taudde had made—or found—with the music he drew from a dead king’s bone.
Mage Ankennes stopped, staring at his own empty hands and then, with an expression of furious amazement, at Nemienne. She couldn’t meet his eyes. The black-clad men caught him roughly by the arms. One of them forced the mage to his knees and another set a blade at his throat. Nemienne didn’t feel triumphant, but rather ill and near tears. She thought the king’s men might kill Ankennes right where he knelt, but they didn’t. She was glad of their restraint, but also wrenched by a guilty wish that they had killed the mage, because she was terrified of him now. But the wish seemed somehow worse than the fear. Nemienne lowered her gaze and stared into the black pool.
The music of the bone flute continued, untouched by any of this struggle. Each note fell into the air like a drop of water into the black pool. The melody slid down a haunting, uncomfortable scale where every note edged toward an unrecognizable minor key, then rose again in repetitive swoops where every phrase seemed to build toward something that could never be reached, that should not ever be reached… The Kalchesene sorcerer had closed his eyes and played by feel or instinct. Leilis stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were open. She stared with calm intensity into the shifting path of light that the sorcerer had lain through the shadows.
Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes was returning along that path, following the melody. The silver kitten rode on his shoulder. Behind him he drew, evidently by sheer force of will, both Karah and his son.
But the king did not walk easily along the path of light. As he became more visible, it became evident that he was forcing his way through the shadows that tried to drown the trail he had left. He leaned hard forward as though he breasted a ferocious wind; he struggled to lift each foot as though he waded through sucking sands. His eyes were open, but his stare was fixed and blank. Nemienne thought he saw nothing of any of them, but only shadows and the desperately faint glimmering of the path.
“Help him!” one of the black-clad men snapped at the foreign sorcerer. He was their senior, a man with a seamed, experienced face, gray streaks through his short-cropped dark hair, and a harsh mouth. His voice cracked across the dragon’s chamber with authority.
“Can’t you see that he’s doing everything he can?” Leilis snapped back. “Are you fool enough to interfere with the only one who can help him?”
The man looked at the sorcerer and said nothing. It was perfectly clear that Leilis had spoken nothing but the truth. The Kalchesene sorcerer looked, indeed, almost as strained as the slowly approaching king. His face was as white as the stone that surrounded them all. The foreign stamp of his face stood out starkly in his drawn exhaustion. He had closed his eyes and now played blind, scattered notes that sometimes seemed random and sometimes resolved into a strange melodic line that never seemed to go in any expected direction. Each phrase he played coaxed the trail of light into brief clarity, and yet it would fade again between one moment and the next.
Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes now seemed in one way close at hand, his features clearly distinguishable; yet though he strove continually along his path, he grew no nearer. His attitude was one of set endurance. Shadows broke like water before the king and eddied behind him; currents of darkness tried to force him first one way and then the other, so that all his effort was bent on keeping to the path of music and light that lay before him, narrow and tenuous as a ribbon. Yet there was an air of solidity about the king as
well. Nemienne could not imagine either his strength or his will failing. If anyone failed here, it would be the sorcerer and not the king. Nemienne thought the king might hold with unchanging force to that uncertain path for uncounted days or years, until everything but that strength and will had been burned away, and he would still in the end win free of the dark. And he would bring his son out with him, too, because he would never let himself fail.
Both Karah and the prince were always partially hidden by the shifting shadows and rippling light that trailed them, but they were there, in the king’s wake. Safe, Nemienne thought. She could see that they were struggling, that they clung to one another, that each of them sometimes hesitated as though to turn back into the shadows. She could see that it was the king’s will that overrode theirs and not only gave them a way forward, but compelled them along it.
“Can he make it through?” asked the senior of the black-clad men. But he didn’t speak as though he addressed anyone in particular, nor as though he expected an answer. He was simply driven to speak by his own desperate uncertainty.
Nemienne understood that very well. She whispered, “I think he will. I think he has the strength to walk it all the way. Surely he will! He’s his father.”
The man glanced down at her. He asked her quietly, as though she were someone who might know, “Is there nothing we can do to help him?”
“No—” Nemienne said uncertainly, and glanced over at Leilis’s sorcerer. The Kalchesene was now sitting on the stone floor of the cavern, leaning back against Leilis. His eyes were still closed, his face tight and strained. He let notes fall one at a time into the air, left each lingering as long as possible before playing the next. Nemienne looked up at Leilis and asked, “There isn’t, is there?”
“Should I know?” said the woman, but then she leaned down and said softly in the sorcerer’s ear, “They have almost won back. You have held the way almost long enough.”
There was no sign on the young man’s face that he’d heard her. But he drew a shuddering breath and began a series of long, sweeping phrases: one note after another that blurred into another, higher pitched, that gave way in turn to another that rose higher still. Like waves running against a gentle shore, Nemienne thought. No. Like the tide coming in, where it rose higher and higher and drowned the sand… in the bone flute, she thought she could hear the sea.
House of Shadows Page 29
