Shade and Sorceress (9 page)

They returned to the kitchen for supper and Missus Ash served up a pot roast. Rom had brought a little magnetic chess set with him and they played a game at the table after their meal. Neither of them played well and Eliza won.

When they had finished the game and were sipping hot cocoa, Rom said seriously, “They won’t let me stay, Eliza. I asked, but they don’t want me here. They’ve promised I can visit often and we just have to accept that for now. No scenes when I leave, or they might decide it’s too much trouble. I’ll talk to them about you visiting Holburg and the Sorma eventually, but we can’t push them. Not yet.”

“Okay,” Eliza whispered, her heart sinking.

“I know it seems like I just let them take you,” he said, his voice pained. “But I’m no match for the Mancers, Eliza. I couldn’t have stopped them. I wanted to, but there was just no way. It’s important that we cooperate if I’m going to be allowed to see you at all. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Brave girl,” he said, and touched her cheek gently. “So, how angry are you with me?”

“Zero,” she said, and even managed to smile.

~

After saying goodbye to her father, Eliza went to her room and unpacked the bag he had brought. Among a few clothes and schoolbooks were two envelopes. One contained her only precious photograph of her mother, and the other, a letter from Nell. After some thought, she placed the photograph of her mother under the mattress of her bed. Then she tore open the letter and read it through several times, grinning widely.

Dear Eliza,

Your da says you’ve gone to live with the Mancers to learn to do Magic, I cannay believe it, you are so lucky!! You have to promise to write to me and tell me everything about it, this is the most amazing, prize thing that has ever happened. It’s all anyone is talking about on the island, of course, the Mancers and their dragons and how they all knew there was something different about you, when really they nary knew a thing. Did YOU know it, Eliza?? Are ye a witch then? But if so, why is it the Mancers want to teach you instead of banishing you from Di Shang? Your da could nay tell me much, or nay wanted to, and I may well be the first person ever to actually die of curiosity. Lah, Mentor Frist says he hopes the Mancers have better luck teaching you than he did, ha ha, but I spec Magic is a lot more interesting than Arithmetic.

I really miss you. Yesterday and today I hung about with Maddy and Alanah but it’s nay the same. I’ll nay show them any of our secret places and hope you can still come back to visit. This is so amazing, you must be having the prize time of your life. If you learn Magic you HAVE to teach me. Your da said he’s going to see you and can take a letter but he’s going soon so I dinnay have time to write more. I’ll write another letter later but you HAVE to write to me and tell me EVERYTHING. What is going on???

Lots of love from your best friend, Nell

Eliza sat on the bed re-reading the letter until Smoky came and nosed it out of the way, climbing onto her lap. She rubbed the cat behind his ears and he set up a rhythmic purr. She didn’t feel like crying anymore. She felt almost empty of emotion, wrung dry. She fell asleep on top of the covers, still dressed, with Smoky on her stomach and Nell’s letter on the bed beside her. She dreamed she was planting a little tree in the snow, digging at the frozen soil beneath the snow with her bare hands, which were torn and cold.

“It won’t bloom,” said Anargul, manipulator of wood, behind her.

Eliza gritted her teeth in the dream and didn’t answer. When she put the tree in the frozen ground she felt its roots stretch gratefully, eagerly, as if it were a part of herself. Ravens wheeled in circles overhead, crying out in almost human voices.
Poor little tree,
somebody else said, a woman’s voice, but Eliza couldn’t see her.
How will it weather the storm when it comes?

~

The days after her father’s visit passed swiftly. Always quick to pick up new dialects, Eliza was at least able to please Foss with her rapid progress in learning the Language of First Days. However, each lesson began less successfully with the practice of Magic. Foss would place a pencil before her, or one enchanted amulet with two ordinary amulets, or he would tell her how to mix a simple potion. But since she could not make the pencil float, or distinguish the enchanted amulet from the others, or make an effective potion, they began to spend less and less time in practice and devoted more and more of the lesson to writing and reading out loud. She quite enjoyed these mornings in the Library, poring over huge musty books and learning how to decipher the mysterious script within them. She particularly liked being allowed to climb the ladders way up to fetch books, balancing carefully along the ropeways, following the leaping amber lights that spun and twirled acrobatically. She felt like she was climbing about in a forest of books, as if they grew naturally from the lofty marble shelves.

But every day around lunchtime her stomach began to work its way into a knot of anxiety. Her afternoon sessions with Kyreth left her always bewildered and depressed, seeing sunspots from the brightness of his eyes. Most days he read to her from Commentaries on the Early Texts, reading each passage in the Language of First Days before translating it into Kallanese for her. The books varied. Sometimes they were about applying Magic to Deep Astronomy or Deep Physics, which Eliza found nearly impossible to follow. Sometimes he read from a book called The History of Symbols, a dry, ponderous tome which described in far too much detail how particular symbols had come into use and what they were used for, but the key points were so buried in excess information that Eliza found she could remember almost none of it at the end of the lesson. Occasionally, without referring to books, Kyreth simply lectured her on topics such as The Interpretation of Prophecy, or Moral Uses of Magic, or Dyads and Balance. He encouraged her to ask questions and voice opinions, but Eliza was mute with confusion and left his study always with the greatest relief. She knew he was disappointed in her and it was an awful feeling.

Her favorite part of the day was the late afternoon, before supper, when she was free to run outside. She found Charlie always waiting for her. They made a few half-hearted attempts to find a way into the towers, but beyond looking for doors they knew they wouldn’t find there was not much they could do. Mostly they roamed about the grounds, picking fruit to feed to the farm animals and trying to lure pale fawns out of the woods around the lake with berries. They had seed-spitting contests, which Charlie always won, and climbing or jumping contests, which Eliza usually won even though she was smaller. They never approached the dark wood in the northwest corner. Eliza felt inexplicably afraid whenever she looked at it. She wondered whether Charlie felt the same way but didn’t ask in case he then insisted they go have a look.

She ate her meals alone. Missus Ash and Charlie ate separately, in their own quarters, and Eliza was never invited to join them. After supper, she went to her room and practiced writing the Language of First Days with a brush and ink. She sounded out the words as she wrote and tried to make the sweeping characters as perfect and beautiful as the ones in the book she was copying from.

At night she had difficulty sleeping. She lay in the large bed fingering the barrier star around her neck and talking to Smoky, her only companion through the lonely evenings.

“What I cannay understand,” she told the cat, “is why they still want me here at all, aye. It’s obvious now that I’m nay a Sorceress. I cannay do any of the things they want me to! So why do they nay just send me home?”

Smoky tilted his head on one side and regarded her most intelligently, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

Though Eliza did not know it, the Mancers were asking similar questions. Why try to teach a girl with no ability? Some of them had begun to openly question whether she was, in fact, Rea’s daughter, implying that she might be a trick or decoy. Finding her after a decade of searching had been a great triumph, a cause for celebration. But as the weeks passed with no evidence of her power the Mancers were plunged in doubt and morale was low. Kyreth tried to assuage their doubts, but he too was concerned. They needed incontrovertible proof of her heritage. They had to know if she had power, whatever the cost.

~

She was in the Library with Foss, who had just finished demonstrating how to mix a potion that turned the drinker invisible for a few minutes.

“A little spinal juice from a Tian Xia invisible eel makes it very potent indeed,” said Foss, “but I don’t fancy being invisible all day.”

He drank back the murky liquid, and to Eliza’s amazed delight he slowly faded away. She was trying to hit him by tossing pencils, giggling uncontrollably, when Kyreth appeared behind them.

“We’re working on her
Deep Knowing,”
came Foss’s voice from an entirely unexpected direction, sounding rather sheepish.

“You’re over
there?”
exclaimed Eliza. “I thought you were by the potion books, aye!”

But when she looked up at Kyreth she was chastened.

“Today I will teach you what you are,” he rumbled. “This lesson, you cannot fail to understand.”

He did not touch her but as if he had caught her by the scruff of the neck Eliza found herself trotting breathlessly at his side down the hallway, with Foss just behind them gradually becoming visible again. He took them to the west wing and down so many sets of stairs, first marble and then grey stone, that Eliza thought they must surely be headed underground. The corridors here were cold flagstone, narrow and dark. They came to a large iron door without any handle. Kyreth struck it with the palm of his hand and shouted a string of words in the Language of First Days. Eliza, insensitive though she was to Magic generally, could
feel
the potency of the words as they poured out of him, and she was reminded of the strange things she had seen in his study on her second day in the Citadel. The door swung open. Rather frightened now, she followed Kyreth down a narrow torch-lit stairway into a stone room so low the Mancers had to bend to enter it.

“This is the Treasury of the Sorceress,” said Kyreth. Eliza looked around her, puzzled, for the room was small and dark and empty.

“But there’s nothing
here,”
she said.

“Wrong, Eliza Tok,” murmured Foss just behind her. Kyreth struck the wall with his palm and uttered a single word. The stone flamed for a moment and then opened into a small alcove. Inside it hung a black tunic, a pair of leggings and boots, and a white staff the length of her arm.

“Put it on,” said Kyreth. “Take the staff. We will wait upstairs.”

He and Foss turned and disappeared up the stairs. Eliza changed hurriedly out of her clothes and into the outfit hanging on the wall. It fit her perfectly, even the boots. She took the staff in her hand, heart pounding. She wasn’t sure what to do with her own clothes but decided finally to leave them there and mounted the stairs to where Kyreth and Foss were waiting. They were speaking intensely in low voices. She felt self-conscious and rather silly standing before them in this peculiar get-up.

“The Shang Sorceress has been the most powerful tool of the Mancers for millenia,” said Kyreth, turning his flaming eyes towards her so that she was bathed in light. “Since the separation of the worlds she has defended Di Shang from its enemies unto her death. Your mother and your grandmother and those who came before them gave their lives to this cause. It is who you are. Do you hear me, Eliza?”

“Aye,” she said, growing more and more surly as he spoke. She had to bite her tongue to keep from adding,
How could I nay hear you when you’re shouting right in my face?
She didn’t much like being called a tool, either.

“Then come with me.”

“If I may, Your Eminence...” Foss faltered and then continued in a stronger voice. “We have had no luck with the simplest of spells. I think such a test may prove...I think she is unready.”

“She will never be ready,” said Kyreth, “until she has to be.”

“But we cannot risk...”

“If she cannot work Magic she is no use, there is no Shang Sorceress, the line is finished. We risk nothing. But we must know.”

“Your Eminence, she is not only a Sorceress, if she is that at all. She is also a human child.”

“Go, Foss!” Kyreth thundered.

Foss looked stricken, but he bowed and turned away. Unable to break away from Kyreth’s side, Eliza followed him up the stairs, back into the Citadel she was familiar with and out into the bright sunshine of the grounds. He made straight for the dark wood in the northwest corner that she had avoided instinctively until now.

“This place leads to the Crossing,” he said, sensing her resistance. “We will not go far. As well you know, certain beings bent on destruction still cross over from time to time. The first duty of the Shang Sorceress is to guard the Crossing and banish these creatures that threaten humanity to the place from whence they came, barring their return with magic. While there is only one Crossing, there are many points of entry. This one belongs to the Mancers. The staff you bear will channel your power, give it focus. It was fashioned by the manipulators of wood thousands of years ago from a Tian Xia tree and it cannot be broken. Take off the barrier star and give it to me.”