House of Shadows (28 page)

Nemienne had no doubt of that. Not anymore. She only wished she knew exactly what it meant, to be inside the mountain. And she wished she knew how to get out again. She had a sudden, vivid idea that she might perhaps walk with her sister, through the dark, forever. How long would it be, if they could not find their way out, before they left their bones here, surrounded by stone, to whiten in the dark where no one would ever see them?

The sound of dripping water had become much louder, and the sound had gained a reverberant echo that was somehow disturbing. They were going toward it, Nemienne realized, and for no reason that she understood, she felt a jolt of terror at the thought. She stopped in her tracks.

Karah, still holding Nemienne’s hand, perforce drew to a halt as well. “Nemienne?” Karah asked, not frightened herself. Or not yet.

Nemienne, unable to explain her own fear, stood wordless.

Ahead of them, Enkea turned and gazed back over her shoulder at them, her green eyes glowing like small lamps. Karah’s smoke-and-silver kitten slipped out from Karah’s hair again and jumped down to the stone. This time the kitten didn’t dash about and play but stepped solemnly forward to join the older cat. She looked like a puff of silver steam next to the nearly invisible Enkea, but her eyes were the same glittering emerald, and her air of not-quite-patient waiting was the same as well.

“We don’t have to follow them,” Karah pointed out, “if you’d rather not, and if you know another way out.”

“They’re not leading us out of the dark at all,” Nemienne answered, though not knowing how she knew this. “They’re leading us toward something else…”

“Really? What?”

Nemienne only shook her head. She remembered perfectly well the homely, everyday light she’d held in her mind previously, when she had stepped out of the dark and into that remembered light. She could do that again, probably. Probably she could even bring Karah with her. She was sure she could. That kind of ordinary light glimmered around the edges of her mind and memory in implicit invitation. But if she took that way out, she’d never know toward what goal Enkea and the kitten were leading them. And she was curious as well as frightened. What was it that lay beneath stone, within Kerre Maraddras, at the heart of darkness?

“I’m not sure we should follow them, if they’re not showing us the way out,” Karah said. Her tone was still reasonable, still matter-of-fact, as though this were some practical decision they had to make. “It’s terribly late, I think—or terribly early. I’m sure I should be back in Cloisonné House by the time everyone’s stirring. And you…” Her eye fell worriedly on her sister.

Nemienne shook her head, though a moment ago she had been the one frightened, the one who had wanted to turn aside. “It’s not a question of what we
should
do. It’s a question of what we
need
to do.” This came out more confusing than she’d intended, but she didn’t know how to put what she felt into words. She took a step forward again. Ahead of them, both cats immediately started forward again as well. Enkea’s white foot flashed with her steps, and the kitten’s pale form flickered at the older cat’s side like a silver fish swimming through dark waters. Nemienne had not released Karah’s hand, and so her sister was drawn after her.

Ahead of them, the endless darkness was in fact ending at last. Uneven walls of pale stone became visible before the girls, glimmering with a subdued light that seemed to pass through them,
as the light of a candle might pass through a translucent screen. Like the light that clung to Nemienne’s hands, this light was green tinged. The green light seemed less to push back the darkness than…
accent
it, somehow. Nemienne suspected that this was not the sort of light Mage Ankennes had in mind when he tried to teach her to summon light as a defense against the dark.

And yet, now that they were able to see them properly, the caverns were unexpectedly beautiful. On all sides, glistening pale stone folded into curtains and pillars. Powerful stalactites and delicate spines descended from unseen heights, each beaded with moisture that slowly gathered at its tip before dripping to the moist stone beneath. But these drops of falling water were not what had haunted Nemienne through this darkness.

What she had heard… what echoed through the caverns here… was the sound of fat drops of water falling into a deep pool of black water that, as they came around one last curtain of stone, lay unexpectedly before them. Though the water was black, it seemed to glimmer with a light of its own, and each drop of water that fell into the pool glowed like a live ember. And when each drop fell, it seemed to Nemienne, it struck the black pool with a reverberant liquid chiming, as though a bell was somehow ringing under the water.

Beyond the pool… and this took time to grasp, for it was so unexpected and so vast that at first the eye did not focus on it… but beyond the pool lay, carved in deep relief from the pale stone, a dragon. Nemienne at once recognized the long serpentine form as the dragon from Mage Ankennes’s harp. In the book by Kelle Iasodde that Mage Ankennes had given her to study, Nemienne had found images of dragons like this one, drawn in fine black inks and illuminated with gold and crushed pearl.

But
this
dragon had been carved in more detail than any little image engraved in ink. Indeed, it was so detailed that it might have been living, except it was half embedded within the stone of the cavern. The dragon was enormous. If it could have torn itself out of the mountain and taken to the air, it would surely have shaded
half of Lonne with the shadow of its outspread wings. But here, within the mountain, those wings were folded.

Water gathered, drop by drop, along the carved edge of one great wing and fell, glittering, into the black water:
plink
. Ripples spread out on the surface of the pool every time a drop fell, and each ripple seemed to run up against the shallow edge of the pool with a not-quite-audible sound of its own, like the vibration that lingered in the air after the note of a plucked kinsana string had faded. This was the sound that had so troubled Nemienne, and now that she saw its source, she could believe she would hear that sound in her dreams forever, that she would never be beyond the reach of that persistent vibration.

The dragon was curled in a loose half circle against the vast wall of the cavern, with the pool of black water spreading out between it and the girls. Nemienne felt a strange relief that the pool was there, as though the water was somehow a protection or a barrier between them. As though they needed that protection.

The dragon’s head and part of its neck had been carved free of the far wall. Its head, huge enough to engulf a small house without difficulty, was nevertheless surprisingly graceful. Stone antennae rose in supple curves above the dragon’s eyes, more delicate than even the finest cave formations. Behind the head, the dragon’s sinuous neck melded imperceptibly into the wall of the cavern. Some distance farther back, the great muscled bulk of its shoulder swelled again out of the wall, leading in turn to the suggestion of a deep chest. Far away along the wall, the dragon’s tail looped in and out of the stone of the cavern like a reiterated melody, disappearing and reappearing as though the stone carvers had wanted to suggest infinite length.

“
Oh
,” Karah breathed.

Nemienne knew how her sister felt. She herself felt half dazed by the size and beauty of the carving. A king must have commanded it done. Several kings. Surely this dragon was too vast to have been the work of just one king. How many generations had it taken to carve this dragon in the heart of the mountain?

“How beautiful,” Karah whispered. “How splendid.”

Nemienne glanced at her sister. Karah was transfixed, her hands gripping each other, her head tipped back, staring at the dragon as though she would never be able to look
enough
. She did not seem frightened at all.

Nemienne, in contrast, felt as though they stood on the edge of a great height, where a sudden gust of wind might press them forward and send them tumbling through clouds to the unseen rocks far below; or as though they stood underneath a vast avalanche that was poised to roar down toward them. Stunned by the dragon’s magnificence, she was also frightened of it, though she could not guess what peril it might pose to them. “We… I don’t think we should be here,” she whispered. She was afraid to speak too loudly, as though too loud a voice might loose the avalanche.

Karah put an arm around Nemienne’s shoulders and hugged her close. “You’ll find the way home,” she said, not as though she was offering reassurance, but confidently, as though she sincerely believed this.

Nemienne shook her head. She was flattered by her sister’s confidence, but she didn’t know how to explain that she wasn’t afraid because she thought they were lost. It wasn’t even
fear
she felt, exactly. Not really
fear
. It was more like awe. She thought there were depths to the darkness here that her sister didn’t see. But
she
saw those depths, or at least guessed they were there. She said again, almost in a whisper, “We shouldn’t be here.” Then she added, “This isn’t a place for men at all.”

“Well, then—”

“Yes,” said Nemienne. “Shh.” She looked at the cats, who both sat at the extreme edge of the black pool with their tails wrapped around their feet and gazed back at her with pale light glimmering in their unreadable green eyes.
We’ve brought you here
, their eyes seemed to say.
Now it’s up to you to understand what this place is, and why you needed to see it
. And if Nemienne had no ideas about that, well, she should learn to think like a cat, she supposed.

In fact, though she had no idea why Enkea should have brought
them to this place and had never felt farther from the ordinary places of home and hearth, Nemienne was somehow becoming increasingly confident that she could indeed find a path for Karah and herself from this uncanny cavern to that ordinary world. She almost thought she knew how to do that right now. The other time she had been trapped in the dark, she had drawn herself back into the world by remembering ordinary light. Now, in this place where nothing was ordinary, she shut her eyes in favor of the more familiar darkness behind her own eyelids, and searched within that personal darkness for some place more recognizable than the dragon’s cavern. The sound of water droplets falling from the dragon’s wing intruded, each musical
plink
echoing across the next until the reverberations of sound crept into her bones. That reverberation was almost familiar, but not quite.

Beside her, Karah murmured, “Nemienne, what are you thinking? You’re frowning.”

“Am I?” Nemienne whispered. It still seemed to her—she couldn’t quite decide why—that it would be rude or imprudent, even dangerous, to speak aloud in this place. “Karah, does this cavern remind you of somewhere else?”

“Remind me—” Her sister’s answering whisper seemed incredulous. “No! What place could possibly be like this?”

“Not
like
. Just… you know… not similar, but in sympathy?” Nemienne didn’t know how to express what she meant, and stopped. Without opening her eyes, she turned toward her sister. There was a faint greenish light that trailed out behind Karah and wavered away into the dark. It did not precisely illuminate a path, but perhaps, Nemienne thought, the echo of a path. She stepped sideways through the dark after that rippling light, drawing her sister after her into the echo of some other place, she did not know quite where… Karah made a surprised sound, but let herself be tugged along.

Nemienne’s foot came jarringly down on a surface that was not the stone of the cavern floor. She found gritty, dusty stone under her palm, in a tight-cramped space that pressed her down to her
hands and knees. She would have lost her grip on Karah’s hand, except that her sister also clung tightly. The air in this place was nothing like the chill damp air of the dragon’s cavern. This place, whatever it was, smelled of ash and unfamiliar musky incense and, most strangely, flowers. Nemienne coughed. Ash rose around her, chokingly. She coughed again and couldn’t stop.

Then a voice exclaimed, and a strong, slim hand closed around hers, and Nemienne was dragged forward, hard. She crawled into a strange room. There was something strange about that grip as well, but Nemienne did not have time to consider what this oddness might be before she was released again. She was coughing, and her eyes were tearing, but there was suddenly space and air and light. Karah crowded forward after her, also coughing, their hands still linked. Nemienne, frightened despite herself, was glad her sister was with her in this… Where
were
they?

“
What
is this?” exclaimed the voice, and Nemienne blinked her sight clear and found herself on her knees, on the wide hearth of a great fireplace, in an unfamiliar chamber. She was facing a stern-faced young woman about Ananda’s age.

The room was a bedchamber, plain but painstakingly neat. The bed was narrow; in fact, the chamber itself was narrow and small. The coverlet on the bed, a good heavy one, was a rich blue, but dyed unevenly so that the blue was streaked all down one side. There was a slim vase on a small table at the foot of the bed, which held in this season only a few plumes of dried grass. There was no ornament in the room but this single vase.

A single long window was placed high on one side, beneath a slanting ceiling. Morning light came in through the window, rose and gold. It was later than Nemienne had thought—breakfast time, at least. Her heart sank. Mage Ankennes would certainly realize she had gone before she could get back. She didn’t exactly think he would be angry, but she also didn’t look forward to explaining that she had got herself lost beneath the mountain
again.
Well, at least this time she could say truthfully that she hadn’t deliberately gone through any doors into the dark.