“Have you seen my snake?” The woman asked, looking around. “We are often apart these days because we are not happy, not clear, and sometimes there are many and I don’t know what to do. It never rains here and my room is fine but not the finest of all and the stones are cold and he is sad when he sees me. Look, I have been bitten, by mice or bats perhaps. They live in my bed between the sheets and they gnaw at me all night long. I cannot sleep.”
The woman showed Eliza her bare arms covered in bite marks. They looked as if they had been made by human teeth, and indeed when Eliza noted the angle of the marks it was obvious the woman had bitten her own arms. Eliza frowned and looked up into her face again. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“I have a present for you but I’ve forgotten it,” the woman replied, suddenly backing towards the door, her eyes wide with alarm. “It will be colder before spring comes. Lost, poor thing. Have you no pity? I did not give it to you, it was a good day but then I forgot it. I will go and get it and you will make it all right. Promise me, child, you will make it all right.”
“Wait,” said Eliza, scrambling out of bed. “Where are you going?”
All at once it came to her. She knew where she had seen this woman before.
“Hurry, hurry, it will be colder and all the songs will be sung twice over before you find it, I know that, I know, and she is coming. No pity. What? What will you do?” With that, the woman turned and fled the room. Eliza chased after her down the hall. The woman was tall and long-legged and in spite of her white hair she was much faster than Eliza. Eliza lost sight of her on a set of stairs but continued chasing her footsteps. When she reached the southeast tower the woman was gone.
“Where are you?” Eliza called softly. There was no reply. She did not go back to bed. Instead she rounded the tower and made her way through the darkened portrait gallery of the east wing. Far below, on the lower floors of the east wing, the manipulators of wood slept in their chambers, but Eliza was not worried about being found wandering at night. The Mancers rose and went to bed with the sun and it would take a great deal to wake them now.
There were more than twenty stories of portrait rooms, the size and shape of each room varying depending on which kind of Mancer was depicted therein – manipulator of fire, water, metal, wood, or earth. The portraits depicted all the Mancers, living and dead, going back as far as the Great Mancer Simathien, and in vast halls on the upper floors, all the Shang Sorceresses, including Eliza. It was to the most recent of these halls she went, to the one that contained her portrait and her mother’s. She knew the way by heart, even in the dark, for she often came here to look at the images of her ancestors. She murmured a spell and a tiny light appeared at her shoulder. She sent it up along one of the portraits to illuminate the face. There she was, the woman who had come to her room. In the portrait she had short fair hair and a steady gaze but it was unquestionably the same woman. Selva. Her grandmother. At the bottom of the portrait, the inscription read, Killed in Battle.
~~~
“I saw my gran last night,” Eliza told Foss bluntly the next morning. They were in the Old Library, with its marble cliff-like shelves of books towering above them, hung with ropeways and ladders and amber lights. Foss thought the power of the Early Texts would help or inspire Eliza during their lessons and she was too polite to complain about their rather distracting smell.
Foss seemed preoccupied by something else and gave Eliza an impatient look. “What do you mean you saw her? In a dream? What a thing to say, Eliza Tok! Rea used to tell me her dreams. She thought to parse them for meaning no doubt, but the frequency with which she dreamed of cake suggested to me that –”
“It wasnay a dream, Foss. She came into my room and talked a lot of nonsense...ranting, aye, as if she was crazy, and then she ran off down the hall. I chased her but she disappeared near the southeast tower. I thought my grandmother was killed in the war. Is that nay what you told me?”
“Not in the war,” said Foss, the light of his eyes fading and then flaring up again. “Not exactly, although it was the same time as the war. She went to Tian Xia on a mission and she did not return. I am not privy to the details, but Eliza, I am sure you did not see her.”
“I did see her,” said Eliza. “What kind of mission was it?”
“I have heard tell...well, it is only hearsay. You must ask Kyreth if you wish to know more,” said Foss.
Seeing how anxious he was, Eliza dropped the subject immediately. Foss’s position among the Mancers was still tenuous after he had let her escape the Citadel more than two years ago and she did not like to put him in a difficult position. If it was a matter of rooting out secrets, there were other ways.
“I’ll ask him, aye,” she said.
Foss looked grateful. “Then let us begin the lesson.”
Since the summer they had been working on the basics of Deep Listening and Deep Seeing. She was pleased with how easy it had been to Listen to Abimbola Broom’s thoughts, though of course it was only because he was human, like her, and hadn’t known she was eavesdropping. She had been stretching the truth, however, when she told him that she would be able to find out what he had been doing by touching his coat. In theory it was possible, but Eliza’s grasp of this Magic was shaky at best. She was able to catch glimpses of an object’s history, things that had happened in the vicinity of the object, but she could not control the Magic enough to look methodically for a particular moment. Before her latest excursion, she had been practicing with the library table where they had their lessons. Foss had concluded that it would be a useful method of review to try and find particular lessons he had given her in the past by Deep Seeing through touch. She placed both her hands flat on the table, and then lowered her forehead to the table as well, as this sometimes helped her.
“I want you to find our lesson on simple barriers from last spring,” said Foss now. “If you are going to run about chasing down the Cra, that would be a useful one for you to review.”
The little jab irritated Eliza and she was still thinking about her grandmother appearing at her bedside, so it took a while for her to clear her mind and utter the words of the spell Foss had taught her, asking that the table reveal to her its past. She stared into the wood and it opened into nothingness before her eyes. It was as if she was peering through a gap in the table at herself and Foss in the library, seeing the present moment from somewhere outside time. But it was only a flash. She could not hold onto the moment or keep her concentration steady. She was swept into a storm of images of Mancers and books and fair-haired, serious Sorceresses, chanting and speaking incantations, a thousand voices clamouring together. Then, all these sounds and images burst into a black cloud of birds and scattered. One raven remained staring at her through the table, its eyes like little black stones. It opened its ugly beak and said, She’s coming.
Eliza yanked her head off the table with such force that she fell over backwards in her chair. She lay on the floor in shock, her heart hammering against her ribcage, until Foss’s face appeared above, looking down at her.
“It would appear, Eliza Tok, that the table is still stronger than you are.”
“I need to talk to Kyreth now,” she said.
~~~
Kyreth agreed with Foss that the trouble was her own mental weakness, her inability to control what was revealed to her. He put it rather less delicately than Foss, too.
“I know that and I’ll work on it,” said Eliza, struggling to remain patient. “But what about what the raven said? She’s coming. What could that mean but Nia, lah?”
Kyreth shook his head thoughtfully. “We are working hard to maintain the barriers and I see no sign that she is any nearer to freeing herself than before. I will take what you saw as a warning to be even more vigilant, but it seems most likely that your own fear was taunting you, lost and overpowered by the spell as you were.”
“Praps you’re right,” said Eliza hopefully. “Lah, it’s the first time a raven has spoken to me.
Even if it wasnay a real raven. I wish I knew if it was my Guide or not.”
Kyreth stood and took a stack of heavy books down from his bookshelf.
“I have been waiting to give you these,” he said. “I think now is the right time. These are the eight volumes of the Chronicles of the Sorceress. You will find some information here about Guides. Like the Guardians that enforce the limits of all things, of Magic, of Life, of Space and Time, they are mysterious to we who live in the worlds. They do not have desires as we do, but they have purpose. If the ravens are your Guide, it will become clear to you. In the meantime, take care, for they may signify something else.”
“Will we study these books together?” asked Eliza, daunted by the pile on the desk before her.
“No, Eliza. These are for your private study. We will continue with the thirty-seventh commentary on Simathien’s Book of the Ancients.”
“Oh.”
This commentary was a very dry tome, which outlined the genealogy of all living beings, extrapolating from Simathien’s statement that the mortal beings in Tian Di were Mancer, Mage, Demon, Human, and Animal. It was much impressed upon Eliza that the Mancer line had remained pure, but that mingling of the others had given rise to the vast diversity of beings in the worlds now. The Cra, she remembered, were part bird, part demon. They had left off last time tracing the elaborate lineage of Centaurs. She felt weary just thinking of it. Kyreth was scanning the shelves for the book. Unable to think of a natural lead-in, Eliza asked simply, “What happened to my gran?”
Kyreth’s eyes flamed a little hotter as he turned them on her. “You know the answer to that, Eliza Tok.”
“Nay the exact answer,” said Eliza. “Only that she was killed.”
“Why do you ask me this now?”
“Because...” She considered a moment and then lied, though she couldn’t have said why. “I dreamed about her.” She was not a good liar and had to look down at the desk as she spoke.
Kyreth leaned forward, suddenly intense. “What did you dream?”
“I dreamed she came to my room and talked a bunch of nonsense and then ran away. I chased her down the hallway, aye, but I couldnay catch her. Lah, the dream felt very...real.”
Kyreth’s eyes bored into her. She kept her own gaze trained on the Supreme Mancer’s great gold hands, lined and powerful, folded together on the marble desk.
“Your grandmother Selva is dead, Eliza,” said Kyreth in a low rumble. “She was felled by a Faery Curse, attempting to retrieve an object of great power jealously guarded by the Faeries.”
Eliza continued staring at the table mutely.
“What did she say to you, Eliza? In this dream?”
“I dinnay remember much of it,” admitted Eliza. “She kept talking about stones and snakes.”
“Her Guide was a serpent,” murmured Kyreth.
“She said she had a present for me. Oh! And she also said ‘she’s coming’. Like the raven!”
Kyreth sat back and the fire of his eyes dimmed enough for her to look up at his face. It was full of sorrow and she remembered that her grandmother Selva had been his wife. It was never really possible to think of Kyreth as her grandfather, though she knew it to be true.
“The spirit world is the greatest mystery of all,” he said. “I do not know if this dream of yours was of your own creation or indeed your grandmother reaching out to you from the land of the dead. I cannot know. The very strangeness of her speech may be due to the difficulty of coherent communication between the living and the dead. In any case we should not ignore what she has said to you, most particularly since the vision of the raven has echoed it. You are being warned, and yet...she is coming...it may indeed refer to our enemy. It is well to be wary.”
“Who else could it refer to?” asked Eliza.
“Perhaps your Guide,” said Kyreth, with the faintest trace of a smile.
~~~
That night Eliza returned alone to the southeast tower. She walked the narrow corridors around it, brushing her hand against the walls. She could feel the heavy enchantment on them. All the towers were protected in this way. There was no use even trying to conjure a door here. Of course, she could cut right through the wall with her dragon-claw dagger, but that would be a desecration of the Citadel and she dreaded to think what the consequences would be. She leaned against the wall, pressed her cheek to the cool stone.
“Are you there?” she whispered.
The night was silent and still, and gave her no reply. As she made her way back to her bedroom in the dark, all the things she did not know and all the things she had to fear seemed terribly near, massed against her and invisible behind a wall of secrets.
Chapter
~3~
The weeks flew by, then a month, and then two months. With January came a biting frost, unusual this far south. The sensational trial of Abimbola Broom began in the capital and the Emmisariae were frequently gone but Eliza scarcely had time to pay attention to it. Her days were filled entirely with her studies. She spent mornings in the strenuous practice of Deep Seeing with Foss. After lunch she went to Kyreth’s study and they ploughed through dense Commentaries until dusk, when he dismissed her. By evening her head was pounding and her eyes were swimming. Even so, she could not resist picking up the Chronicles of the Sorceress and reading until her eyes would not stay open any longer. Here at last was a book that might tell her something about herself, her heritage, who or what she was.
The book began at the very beginning of the Worlds, when it was still One World. Faery Dominion in the Early Days of Tian Di had been near absolute. Humans slaved in their mines, the Demons formed their army, and the Mancers were their Scribes and Record-Keepers. Though Mages often lived solitary lives in far-flung places, they too had to answer to the Faeries when called upon for a potion or a spell. Everything changed when the Great Mancer Simathien organized the Mancers to build a Citadel deep in the Irahok mountains and began in secret to assemble a Library there. He married a human Sorceress by the name of Zara and she was his partner in this task. Refused entry and jealous, Zara’s twin sister Morhanna told the King of the Faeries, Amadeo, of the Citadel and the Secret Library. When the King laid claim to it, Simathien persuaded the Mancers to erect barriers around the Citadel to keep out the Faeries and their Magic. Outraged, the Faeries sent their army of Demons to destroy the Mancers. The Sorceress Zara turned herself into a giant brown bear with an impenetrable hide and in this form she decimated the Demon army. The story of the battle took up several pages and Eliza skimmed through it to the part where Simathien and Zara bore a daughter, first in the long line of Mancer-born Sorceresses. They named her Quyen. When Quyen was three years old, a hawk came and carried her off to the Yellow Mountains. The Mancers were appalled, Zara bereft, but Simathien told them not to pursue the hawk. A year later the hawk returned with the child. She knew all the ways of birds and grew up to be a powerful Sorceress. From this time on, the Sorceress was always trained by, and later married to, one of the Mancers, while the mystical Citadel moved about the farthest reaches of Tian Di to elude the ever-wrathful Faeries.
As winter set in, Eliza came to the separation of the worlds. She read huddled under her covers for warmth until she hadn’t the strength to maintain her tiny conjured light and it faded and winked out. The Sorceress Ebele begged the Mancers to give aid to the humans, who were rising up against the Faeries in futile and bloody rebellions. In the final, greatest act of Old Magic in all the history of Tian Di, Karbek initiated the separation of Tian Di into two worlds, Di Shang and Tian Xia. Karbek was the first Mancer to bear the title of Supreme Mancer and Ebele the title of Shang Sorceress. Her Guide was a lynx and it was written that her mother gave birth to them together, as if they were twins.
From then on, the Chronicles dealt with the great feats of Sorceresses who guarded the Crossing, how they turned back and banished all would-be invaders. Some Sorceresses had lived in relatively peaceful times and were dispensed with in a page or less t
hat recounted who she had married, when she had given birth and how she had died. Every Sorceress, it seemed, met the same end. She won every battle until she lost one. Some of them were quite old when they finally fell, but no Sorceress retired. Eliza woke most mornings with her face pressed against the pages of the open book and was wracked with guilt when she found she had drooled all over a page about Freda’s banishment of a cohort of invading giants in the late Middle Days.
At last Eliza came to her grandmother. Selva’s Guide was a serpent that had been found wrapped around the baby in her cradle just days after her birth. Eliza read that while her great-grandmother Minorr fought valiantly in the war, banishing a great many of the Cra, giants, trolls and harrowghasters, the various mixed descendants of the vanished Demon race who flocked to Di Shang to prey on weak humans, Selva was sent to Tian Xia as soon as she had given birth to a daughter, to obtain something called the Gehemmis. She lost her life under a Faery Curse, and was greatly mourned, was all the book said. Eliza stared at the page, stunned. The Chronicles recorded in elaborate detail the final battle of each Sorceress since the Middle Days. Whether the Sorceress was felled by a horde of half-hunters, a giant with enchanted weapons, Faeries or evil wizards, the how and the why was written down in the most reverential language. And yet here, nothing at all.
Eliza had seen the word Gehemmis in one of the earlier books. She flipped through the pages until she found it. Indeed, four thousand years ago a famed Sorceress named Lahja had gone to Tian Xia, faced the Horogarth of the North, and brought back one of the four Gehemmis . Three other Sorceresses were said to have died or disappeared in Tian Xia on a quest for one of these Gehemmis.
At the end of the eighth book, Eliza read in Kyreth’s hand, The Sorceress Rea was seen from a young age in the company of a fox. At that time it was a pet to her. As she grew older, she became possessive and secretive regarding her relationship with the fox and would not speak of it but it was assumed to be her Guide. Her power outstripped that of the Sorceresses for a thousand years or more but her devious character led her into difficulty. She married a human in secret and bore a daughter by him. The damage to the line of the Sorceress was irrevocable. She hid this daughter for reasons unknown. Her greatest accomplishment was holding the Sorceress Nia in battle for one hundred days while the Mancers built her prison. The next line, She gave her life in this act of heroism, was crossed out. The text continued: When she was stripped of her power by the Sorceress Nia, she was stripped also of her Guide. There has been no sign of it since her rescue. Rea lives out the remainder of her life, crippled, amnesiac, and powerless, in the Great Sand Sea with the Sorma.
The Unmaking: The Last Days of Tian Di, Book Two Page 3
