House of Shadows (37 page)
“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.
N
emienne 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 distrac
tion 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 sound.
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.
