Shade and Sorceress (30 page)

So they walked. Eliza brought with her only her satchel with the Book of Barriers in it, and she carried her staff in her hand. She had the strange sensation of seeing something she had only ever seen before in dreams. The endless white landscape was so familiar.

The tiger came loping towards them out of the whiteness. It locked eyes with Eliza, then turned to lead them. Eliza saw that Charlie was very pale and looking around restlessly.

“You dinnay need to come any further,” she said to him. “You’ve done more than enough, aye. I’ll tell her it was you that brought me here.”

“Nay, I’ll come with you,” said Charlie. “I have a feeling though...she’s nay going to be too happy with me.”

As he spoke, there was a shimmer in the air and everything changed. They stepped into a large, brightly lit room that looked as if it had just been ransacked. Elegant sandals and silky bits of women’s underclothes were scattered about, paintings stood propped against the walls, and a giant iguana was crawling around eating bonbons that had been dropped all over the carpet. In the middle of the room, the most beautiful woman Eliza had ever seen was lying on a divan dressed in red silk pajamas, eating ice cream from a little dish and watching tv. Her red-gold hair was piled up on her head and her luminous, slanted eyes were a vivid green flecked with gold. Around her neck she wore a gold pendant and a vial full of some bright liquid. When she saw Eliza step through the wall she tossed aside the ice-cream dish and the tiny silver spoon – both disappeared in mid-air before hitting the ground – and leaped to her feet, crying, “Eliza! I’m
so glad
you’ve come!”

~ Chapter 17 ~

Bedraggled and surprised
in her damp, smelly furs, Eliza stood before the Sorceress. The blissful warmth of the room enveloped her. Charlie had vanished.

“You look like your father,” said Nia in lightly accented Kallanese, looking her up and down. “That’s a shame. I much prefer to have a good-looking nemesis. Now, your father is handsome enough as men go, but somehow, on you...well, lots of people grow into their looks. I personally have known some very ugly children to become quite lovely adults, and vice versa too. Except of course,” here Nia laughed lightly, “you won’t have time for that. Pity.”

Eliza barely heard what the Sorceress was saying. She had the strange, dizzying sensation of having arrived home, of having known this woman all her life. It was an unsettling feeling and she pushed it aside, gripping her staff.

“Where’s my da?” she demanded. She had hoped to keep her voice steady, but it squeaked a bit.

Nia laughed again. She had a very pretty laugh. “All business!” she exclaimed. “Just like your mother. Don’t you even want a bath?” She snapped her fingers and the television became a bathtub full of steaming water and scented bubbles. “Doesn’t that look tempting, after your long journey? Now, where is the Shade?”

They both looked around. Nia spotted him first, a tiny spider hiding where the wall met the floor. “There he is. He made a mistake dragging you off to Tian Xia as if
my time
was irrelevant. Although I’m dying to ask you about it – it’s been ages since I’ve been home.”

The spider made a mad dash up the wall and Nia pinned him with a glance. “Stop right there,” she said sweetly.

And then he wasn’t a spider anymore, or anything really. He looked like a distorted reflection in beveled glass or a shadow falling across a rippled puddle. He changed from dark to light to smoky grey, rippling and flickering and thinning to nothing but a long slender wisp, longer than Eliza, then darkening and thickening as if he were going to take shape, but he didn’t. In the struggling formless play of light and dark there was a sorrow and a loneliness older than time, and the sounds Eliza had heard when Foss had helped her Listen to his thoughts came back to her.

“Lah, Charlie,” she breathed. “So
that’s
who you are.”

“Shades are such odd things,” said Nia, regarding him briefly without interest. “They seem to make everybody uncomfortable, don’t they?” She looked back at Eliza, animated again. “We’ll leave him there for now and get on with our visit. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to insist that you bathe. You absolutely stink.”

Eliza tore her eyes away from Charlie’s undulating non-shape on the wall. Behind Nia, the white tiger was stretched out and watching her.

“I have the Book of Barriers,” she said, taking it out of her satchel. She didn’t know what kind of tone to take, how to behave. She had expected the Sorceress to be frightening, had braced herself for that. She was not prepared at all for this lovely, smiling woman in silk pajamas. “I’ve come for my da.”

She handed the book to Nia, who wrinkled her nose a little and took it, turning it over in her hands and flipping through a few pages.

“I’ve been on my own here,” Nia said with an annoyed look, “or practically alone, for quite some time. Your father is not exactly the best company I’ve ever had. You’ve been romping all over Tian Xia while I sat here twiddling my thumbs, and now I want to hear about it. So if you want to see your father you’ll wash your filthy self and stay long enough to have a nice gossip.” She slammed the book shut and tossed it onto the divan. Eliza was horrified to see the object she had risked her life and her friends’ lives to bring treated so carelessly.

“You said you just wanted the book...” she pleaded.

“What I
want,”
said Nia, and her eyes flashed dangerously, “is to
talk.
I’m
bored
out of my
mind
here, do you know that? I’ve been conjuring up my own entertainment for the last ten years. But I’m bored, and I’m homesick, and I’ve been waiting and waiting to see you, and now you just want to run straight off with your da. No. That is
not
how this is going to work. You are going to have a bath and put on something pretty and then we are going to have fun. All right?”

“All right,” stammered Eliza. Nia relaxed, smiling radiantly at her.

Without really meaning to, Eliza found herself putting down her staff and starting to remove the dragon claw from her neck. It required all her force of will
not
to remove the dragon claw. It was the only thing she had resembling a weapon, and she wasn’t about to give it up. She looked up at Nia obstinately, and Nia laughed.

“Swarn took a liking to you, I gather. Don’t worry; I can’t take it from you, even when you’re dead. I’m sure she told you that.”

The words
even when you’re dead
chilled Eliza. She didn’t want to take off the dragon claw or have a bath, and yet refusing seemed somehow impossible. She watched, appalled, as her own hands removed the long, black claw and laid it down by her staff. She turned away from Nia to undress herself.

“Oh, honestly,” said Nia, clicking her tongue impatiently. “We’re like family. No need to be shy.”

Eliza hurriedly took off the furs and Nell’s clothes and stepped into the tub. The water was lovely and hot. Next to the bath was a shelf with a sponge and crystal bottles of shampoo and scented soap. Now that she was in the bath, it seemed to her that she could have refused if she had really wanted to. She felt terribly vulnerable and rather ridiculous, too, taking a bath in front of the legendary, dangerous Xia Sorceress, all her weapons lying out of reach.

Nia threw herself down on the divan again. “So, you stayed with the Faithful,” she said conversationally, picking up a pillow which turned into a blue ribboned dress roughly Eliza’s size. She frowned and shook her head at it and it became a pillow again. “Their cuisine could use a little work, don’t you think?”

“You’ve been there?” said Eliza, surprised. “I thought you were at war with...them. Everyone.”

Nia smiled at that. “Not with everyone, silly. What do they say? The victors write history. But this story is far from over and I plan to write my own version when all’s said and done. Well, I stayed with them long before the Oracle and I fell out. What did you think of the Oracle, by the way? Isn’t she
horrible?”

“They wanted to kill me,” said Eliza. She had the urge to pour out the whole story, but she bit the words back. This was a spell, of course. She remembered what Foss had told her about floating the pencil, how it ought to be easy because the pencil had no will of its own to resist
her
will. Well, Eliza had a will of her own, and she wasn’t going to be pushed around by this Sorceress. She scrubbed herself vigorously with the sponge.

“Typical of them,” said Nia, eyeing her with a coy smile. She went back to concentrating on the pillow, which became a variety of party dresses, one after the other. She settled on a beige suede skirt and jacket lined with soft white fur and held it up for Eliza to see. “How about this? It fits the Arctic theme. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” said Eliza, simply because it was the easiest answer and least likely to offend. Nia tossed the dress aside. Matching boots appeared next to the divan.

“Show me your tattoos,” she said, leaning forward. Surprised, Eliza held up her palms. Nia studied the pictures carefully.

“What does the dagger signify?”

“I dinnay know,” said Eliza. “I dinnay know what the raven is, either.”

“Oh, don’t be obtuse,” Nia chided her, and grabbed her right hand to look at the dagger more closely. “Odd that it points
towards
you,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, with most beings I don’t care much one way or the other if they live or die. It’s not as if they’re going to
do
anything with their little lives. But I feel quite sorry about you. You’re so full of possibilities. I wish we could know somehow what you
would
do, if you had a chance to grow up. What do
you
think you would do?”

Eliza went cold with fear, even in the warm water. “I brought the book,” she said, and her voice shook. “I did what you asked.”

Nia gave a listless shrug.

With a splash, Eliza got out of the bath and dried herself on the large towel that lay where her clothes had been. She looked around for her furs and the clothes Nell had given her, but they were gone. She had no choice but to put on the outfit Nia had conjured up. It fit her perfectly and was very comfortable, but she felt foolish wearing something so girlishly fashionable. She hung the dragon claw around her neck again and snatched up her staff, feeling only slightly better to be clothed and armed again.

“Better,” observed Nia. “We still need to do something about the rest of you. We’ll be spending quite a bit of time together and I so prefer being surrounded by beauty. Look at me; you’d never guess that I was centuries old, would you? I won’t say how
many
centuries, but when you know the right Tian Xia Faeries there’s no need to worry about getting all wrinkly or having a heart attack. You know, I can’t think why miserable old Supreme Mancer-Nose doesn’t get off his high horse and arrange to be handsome, or at least bearable to look at. Honestly, that massive forehead!”

Eliza was warm and flushed from the bath but even through the dress the end of the dragon claw was ice-cold against her stomach. She clung to her staff to keep her hands from shaking, looked squarely at the Sorceress and asked again, “Where’s my da?”

Nia rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how silly you look, trying to be menacing.”

“You dinnay even care about the book,” said Eliza, the horrified realization creeping over her. Nia had scarcely looked at it since she’d handed it to her.

“Poor thing, when you’ve carried it all this way. Look, I don’t mean to say that it’s useless. Books are knowledge, and knowledge is never useless. But it’s not quite the same as power, is it? I mean, it would take
ages
to use this book to break the barriers, and patience and diligence are really not my thing.”

“What do you want, then?” demanded Eliza.

“Why,
you,
of course!” said Nia. “And now you’re here.”

Eliza found herself suddenly seated in a large, very soft chair. There was a tea table between the two of them and a monkey in a blue suit was pouring out tea into delicate little cups. Nia was watching Eliza eagerly for her reaction but Eliza refused to play along with this nonsense anymore. She leaped to her feet, spilling the tea and frightening the monkey, and pointed her staff straight at Nia.
I killed the hound of the Crossing,
she thought desperately.
I escaped from the Mancers and from the Triumvira. I’ve been through both worlds. I can do this.

“I...want...my...da,” she ground out between her teeth.
“Now.”

She had hoped beyond hope that when she needed it most, the staff the Mancers had given her might do something at last. But nothing happened.

“Look at you,” said Nia with an affectionate little smile, not putting down her teacup. “Adorable! A child with the barest smidgen of Magic and the sad delusion that you could last five seconds against me.” She was holding Eliza’s staff in her own hand now. She stood up slowly and bent close to Eliza. Eliza could smell the sugary tea on her breath. Nia wrapped one of Eliza’s damp, disorderly curls around her finger and gave it a little tug. “Well, little smidgen, you’ve come running straight into the only place left where I still have power, eager as anything, and now that you’re here, what fun we’re going to have. Although,” and here she gave Eliza’s hair a yank that made her cry out, “it might not be quite as much fun for you. You should have listened to your horrid Mancers.” She laid a hand on Eliza’s chest and gave her a push, and Eliza fell back into the chair. The monkey was cowering in a corner of the room while the tiger eyed it intently, licking its lips.