House of Shadows (39 page)

The prince put a hand out toward Karah, but then hesitated, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. He drew a breath, but then let it out again without speaking. But, though she did not say anything either, Karah took a step toward Prince Tepres, looking both shy and somehow confident at the same time. She took his hand in hers, turning to face Mage Ankennes at the prince’s side in a mute declaration of support and alliance. For what good that might do, which they both probably believed would be none at all.

Actually, Nemienne had some hope the gesture might prove more than merely symbolic. She herself walked slowly across the cavern to join the mage.

“Well?” he said to her.

Nemienne tried not to flinch under his severe gaze. “I had to come,” she repeated. Even to her own ears this sounded weak. She added, trying for a firm tone but not able to tell whether she managed it, “I dreamed of the Dragon.” This was even almost true; she felt in a way that she’d seen nothing else, waking or sleeping, since she’d first gazed upon its long sinuous form in this cavern. She
added, which was not true at all, “And of the
other
Dragon,” and glanced significantly at Prince Tepres.

“And found your own way here.” The mage sounded thoughtful. “I would not have expected that. Well… well, very well. Perhaps it’s as well you came to this place, since evidently you were so strongly drawn. And as you were drawn to be here, I am interested in your further impulses. However, now that you
are
here, you may do nothing without my permission, no matter how strongly you feel drawn to do it. Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes,” Nemienne assured him earnestly. She felt ill, and didn’t even know whether this was due to generalized terror of what would happen in this place, or because she lied so easily and yet she didn’t even know—not even yet—what if Ankennes was
right
, had been right about everything? What if Prince Tepres and all the Seriantes were irrevocably corrupt, and the stone Dragon of Lonne the creature of darkness and evil that had corrupted them? She did not
know
, even now that this wasn’t so—how could she dare do anything to stop Mage Ankennes when she didn’t even
know—

“Very well,” said the mage, and turned back toward his Kalchesene prisoner.

The Kalchesene drew a breath, bracing himself visibly to refuse any demand Ankennes might make. Ankennes, though he didn’t move, seemed to gather himself—Whatever he meant to do when the foreigner refused him again, he was ready to do it—

Behind the mage’s back, Nemienne shook her head sharply at the Kalchesene. She held out her hands and waved at him urgently:
Go on, go on!

Neither the foreigner nor Leilis exclaimed,
But what do you mean?
and so at least Ankennes did not turn and see Nemienne’s insistent gestures. The foreigner seemed uncertain. It dawned on Nemienne at last that whatever signs they made in Kalches to mean
go on
were different from the crossed-wrist palm-down gesture of Lonne. Her heart sank. But then Leilis leaned forward and spoke quickly to the young foreigner, and he arched an eyebrow of
his own and said slowly, to Ankennes, “And you will free me if I do this?”

“I will swear to it. I do swear to it. This is the only task I demand of you.”

“Well,” said the foreigner, and glanced at Leilis and then back at the mage and past him to Nemienne. He turned his gaze last toward Prince Tepres.

The prince, too, had seen Nemienne signal the foreign sorcerer. He gave Karah an indecisive glance, bending his head down to listen as she whispered to him. She put the kitten into his arms, and he lifted it absently to his shoulder. Then, as the foreigner turned toward him, his face stilled into an arrogant mask. He said nothing.

The Kalchesene sorcerer lifted the bone flute to his lips and began to play.

The flute had a soft, breathy tone, not quite pure. It was a sound that reminded Nemienne of the moist chill of mountain mist, of the bitter taste of wood ash, of the way the air smelled before a storm. The melody the bardic sorcerer played first rose up as a prisoned bird, freed, might fling itself skyward; then, as though the bird had struck the limits of a chain, it fell back again, descending with dizzying swoops through strange minor keys. The melody swirled around the cavern, and then seemed somehow to fade—absorbed, somehow, into the darkness under the mountain—the darkness that, underlying Ankennes’s brilliant light, was somehow still there. On the far side of the black pool, the Dragon of Lonne slept, impervious to the human folk who played out their small dramas in its cavern.

The light dimmed. Not the light of the circles that trapped Prince Tepres and Karah on the one hand and the foreigner and Leilis on the other. Those stayed bright. But the rest of the light in the caverns faltered. The waiting darkness crept forward on all sides, while the music of the flute spun a fine pathway through the dark. It was a path meant for the prince. It held his name and his heart. Within his circle, the prince’s expression passed from hard-held
arrogance to openhearted wonder. He took a step along that path, and another.

Karah clung to the prince’s hand. For a moment, the prince hesitated, held by that grip. He half turned, looking back toward Karah, but the bone flute called, beckoning, seductive. Prince Tepres turned again toward the pathway it showed him, trying absently to shake Karah loose. But she would not let go, and the prince, even enspelled, wouldn’t use violence to make her.

Beside Nemienne, Mage Ankennes exclaimed impatiently and made a sharp gesture. The circle of light suddenly contracted, exactly as it had previously expanded to include Karah. This time it excluded her, slicing between her and Prince Tepres, cutting through the dark where their hands were joined.

Both Prince Tepres and Karah cried out as the circle divided them, convulsing as the light burned through their bones. Their hands sprang apart. Karah took two stumbling steps backward.

The Kalchesene sorcerer hesitated in his playing, but the melody he had drawn from the eternal darkness somehow lingered. And Prince Tepres, no longer held by Karah’s grip, followed it. He passed through the magecrafted circle as though it was not there. But of course, Nemienne realized, he was not really moving forward—he was moving sort of sideways to the rest of them, at a slant to the familiar world. Even as she understood this, the prince blurred.

Karah gave a little cry of distress and alarm, and for a moment Prince Tepres wavered in their sight, looking back over his shoulder, held by the sheer force of her will even though their hands were no longer joined.

“Play!” snapped Mage Ankennes. “Or I will turn all her bones to fire, and we shall see if she can hold him then!”

“Oh, you can’t! You can’t!” Nemienne cried, but Ankennes disregarded her, and she knew he would do it.

The sorcerer stared at Ankennes, his expression remote. Then he lifted the bone flute back to his mouth, and as the disturbing melody slid through the caverns again, the prince turned away
from Karah and faded from sight. Leilis bit her lip and looked urgently at Nemienne.

Mage Ankennes gave a grunt of satisfaction, hefted his staff, and turned toward the quiescent dragon, striding rapidly through the shallow black water of the pool toward its head.

Karah gave another sharp little cry and ran suddenly into the dark, following the prince down the slantwise path that led through darkness and into death.

Nemienne cried out. She had meant her sister to hold the prince and draw him back to life, not lose her hold and then run after him toward death. She could still see Karah, but only faintly. The kitten was with them, Nemienne reminded herself—there was still hope, because if anybody could walk the pathways between the ephemeral world and the eternal dark, it was the cats.

The sorcerer continued to play. Nemienne hesitated for one moment longer and then ran for the path that led into the darkness. If she could follow that path herself—if she could only bring Karah back—if Karah could reach ahead and bring the prince back as well—then Ankennes wouldn’t be able to use the prince’s death to bring death against the true dragon the prince symbolized and everything would still be all right. But the path eluded her. When she tried to put her foot on it, it wasn’t there after all, but somewhere else, somewhere slantwise of any place Nemienne could enter. She screamed in frustration and tried again while her sister faded from her view, but with no greater success, and then ran instead to the edge of the black pool and stared in terror across it toward Mage Ankennes.

Ankennes had paused for a moment at the dragon’s head, gazing up at it with—what, satisfaction? A last moment of reluctant awe for the thing he was about to destroy? The top of its head, resting on one great clawed foot, was many feet higher than the mage’s own head; each of its long curved talons was as long as his leg, and its closed eye as large as his chest. Enkea had somehow crossed the pool with no one seeing her, at least without Nemienne seeing her, and was sitting upright and still beside the dragon’s foot. She seemed impossibly tiny beside those huge stone talons.

If Ankennes saw the cat, he didn’t find her presence reason to hesitate. He turned down to stride along that huge head toward its neck, beginning to lift his staff as though he meant to swing it like a sword. He called out in a deep, rolling tone, “The dragon is departed! The dragon is dead! The dragon is destroyed!” Then he whirled his staff over his head and brought it down toward the relatively slender area where the dragon’s head joined its long neck.

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—