Shade and Sorceress (12 page)

~

If Charlie had hoped that Eliza’s pretty friend would be frightened by the dungeons, he was disappointed. The only thing that frightened Nell was the prospect of an uneventful life spent in Holburg. A visit to the dungeons of the Mancers, by contrast, was a positive treat. He took them to the north wing and directly down a spiraling stone staircase that tunneled deep underground.

“I wonder why it’s so easy to get in,” mused Eliza. “We dinnay even have to conjure a door.”

“They’re nay trying to keep anyone out,” said Charlie. “The point is to keep prisoners
in,
aye. And they use barriers for that. The thing is, this place is empty most of the time.”

“How do you know?” asked Nell, always skeptical of a know-it-all.

“I hear things,” said Charlie coolly.

At last they came to the bottom of the stairs. It was so dark they couldn’t see anything at all. Undeterred, they stumbled in single file through the maze of long, narrow, pitch-black corridors and cold stone rooms without doors or locks. In the smothered silence of the dungeons their breath and footsteps seemed unusually loud.

“Here!” said Charlie suddenly in a clear, cheerful voice which made them jump. His voice echoed around them and they realized they had entered a large cavern.

“What
is
this place?” asked Nell. The question bounced back at them from the ceiling and walls:
is this place, is this place, is this place.

“Over here, come on,” said Charlie. They followed his voice to the wall. He grabbed Eliza by her injured arm and she yelped with pain.

“Oh! Sorry! Sorry! Give me your other hand, aye. I want to show you something.”

Eliza gave Charlie her good hand, still wincing as her right arm throbbed. He lifted her hand and touched it to something made of cold iron. It was, she realized as she ran her hand over it, an enormous chain, each link half the size of her body.

“For naughty dragons,” said Charlie, very pleased with himself.

“Where
do
they keep their dragons?” asked Nell.

“Underground,” said Charlie. “There are caverns under the Inner Sanctum, aye.”

“How do you
know?”
asked Nell again. It struck Eliza that she had never questioned anything Charlie had told her.

“I’ve been spending my holidays here since I was a tiny thing,” said Charlie defensively. “I
see
things, aye.”

“Okay, you see things, you hear things,” said Nell a bit sarcastically. She grabbed Eliza’s good hand. “Let’s see how big this room is. We’ll go right round the walls.”

Charlie was silent. Round and round the cold wall they went. They came to a gap in the wall, perhaps the entrance, though they couldn’t be sure.

“Is this the way we came in?” asked Nell.

“I’ve nary a clue,” said Eliza. She called out, “Charlie?”

There was no answer.

“Charlie!” Eliza yelled, his name leaping off the walls in a startled echo.

“He’s gone off!” said Nell, appalled.

“You should’ve been nicer to him, aye,” said Eliza, beginning to be afraid. How would they find their way out without him? If Missus Ash couldn’t find them for dinner would she notify the Mancers? Even if they were easy to enter, the dungeons were surely forbidden. They shouldn’t be here.

“We’ll find our own way back,” said Nell airily. “This must be the way we came in, aye. What kind of dragon cell would have two doors? Come on.”

Nell tugged at Eliza’s hand, confidently making off down the corridor.

“Wait, wait, Nell!” said Eliza. “This is nay the same way!” Her voice was still echoing. “The corridors we were in before were so narrow we had to go single file. This is like another cavern, aye.”

“You’re right,” said Nell. She sounded thrilled. “This must be how the dragons get
in.
They wouldnay be able to fit in that other corridor. Come on!”

“Nell, how are
we
going to get
out?”

“He’s nay going to leave us down here to starve and rot, Eliza. He’s just trying to scare us, aye, but he’ll come and get us eventually. Until then, we might as well have some fun! I want to see where this goes!”

Eliza was less concerned about starving and rotting and more concerned about having to explain to Kyreth why she had been snooping around in the dungeons, but she had to admit that she too was curious.

“I hope we dinnay run into a dragon unexpectedly,” she muttered. Nell laughed a little nervously. Unlike the twisting corridors they had followed Charlie through, the enormous tunnel ran in a straight line. It went on such a long way that Eliza began to worry.

“We should turn back, aye. Charlie’s prolly done with the joke now. He’s prolly looking for us, but if he cannay find us he’ll have to go tell someone.”

“That’s his own fault, aye,” said Nell breezily. “I want to find the dragons. He said they were kept under the Inner Sanctum, nay? This tunnel must lead all the way there.”

“Oh, Nell, we shouldnay go there. How do we even know if the dragons are...tied up or anything?”

“We’ll be careful, aye,” said Nell. “Oh...which way do we go?” They had come to a fork. The fork to the left reeked of sulfur and smoke.

“I think we know which way the dragons are,” whispered Eliza.

“But what’s the other way?”

It struck Eliza all at once.

“It must be the way out!”

She had searched the Citadel and found no way out, no way even of
looking
outside the outer walls. But for the Emissariae to travel about on their dragons, there had to be a way for them to come and go, a way big enough for dragons. Saying nothing further but still clinging to each other’s hands, they began down the fork to the right. Eliza kept waiting for a cool breeze to strike her face, or a glimmer of light, but there was nothing of the kind. The cavern was vast and black and unchanging. It seemed to Eliza that this tunnel was even longer than the previous one, in which case they must be beyond the Citadel walls by now.

“Where do you think it comes out?” she whispered to Nell. “Do you think we’re in Kalla? Or on an island in the middle of the sea?”

“Why are you whispering?” Nell whispered back. They both giggled and then struck a wall and screamed, darting back in a panic.

When Eliza had recovered from the shock she ventured forward again and touched the wall. It was cold metal.

“I think it’s a door, aye,” she said. Nell crept forward and touched it as well. They felt along to the edges, where the iron met the rock so tightly that not a crack of light showed through, if in fact there was any light beyond it.

“So much for our way out,” said Nell dispiritedly. “Do you want to go back and have a peep at the dragons?”

Eliza was about to reply when she felt a light touch on her shoulder. An unfamiliar rattling voice, neither male nor female, spoke in the darkness: “I have a message for you.”

Nell screamed, and the strange voice said, “Hush.”

“Who are you?” cried Eliza.

“A friend, by the Ancients! Quiet...” and then the being fell silent.

“What? Where are you?” hissed Eliza. Farther down the passage she saw two bright lights moving swiftly towards them. As they approached the cavern brightened, and she saw that it was Trahaearn, the manipulator of metal. She looked around but she did not see anybody besides herself and Nell. The messenger had vanished into thin air.

“You have wandered where you had no business,” said Trahaearn in a deep growl when he reached them.

“We got lost, aye,” said Nell.

“So you did,” replied Trahaearn. “And came very close to being a snack for the dragons. Come.” He turned, plunging them in darkness again, and they followed the shadow of his back down the corridor and back in the direction of the dungeons.

~ Chapter 7 ~

Neither Eliza nor Nell
said anything to Trahaearn about the voice they had heard in the cavern. Eliza knew it could only be the intruder who had worked some unknown magic on her first day in the Citadel. She should tell the Mancers that it was hiding in the dungeons, but something held her back. Whatever it was, it had called itself a friend and had claimed to be bearing a message. Of course, as Nell pointed out later, a scary non-corporeal voice in the dark wasn’t necessarily trustworthy; but, so long as Eliza was protected from harm by the barrier star, she was reluctant to give the messenger up to the Mancers. She wanted to know what he (or perhaps she) meant to tell her.

For his part, Charlie felt terribly guilty that his little prank had ended with them being caught in the tunnels, and he was thenceforth a perfect guide. As an act of conciliation, he showed Nell all around the grounds and took her to the Portrait Gallery to see Eliza’s portrait while Eliza resumed her lessons with Foss and Kyreth. When her lessons finished each day she ran straight outside, thinking she understood how prisoners must feel upon being released from jail. Curiosity winning over fear, the three of them ventured again into the dungeons but found no one and nothing.

“Whatever it was, it’ll nay hang around here now that the Mancers might know where to find it,” said Charlie.

“But where else could it have gone?” asked Eliza.

Charlie shrugged. “The Citadel is a big place, aye. I spec there are a lot of hiding spots for a creepy ghost-thing.”

“We dinnay know that it’s a ghost,” said Eliza.

“We heard it, and then it was gone!” said Nell. “There was nowhere to run away to. We were at a dead end!”

“Either way, I dinnay think you’re going to find it by looking,” said Charlie.

“So how am I going to find it?” she demanded.

“By waiting,” he replied. “If what it has to tell you is so important that it’s lurking around in the Mancer Citadel while the Mancers try to magic it out of its hiding spot, it’ll find you again I spec.”

And Eliza had to agree that looking for the messenger seemed futile. They spent their afternoons working on the tree fort instead. By now they had an altogether unnecessary rope ladder leading up the trunk and had built several new platforms. At the top of the tree they had fixed an old wicker laundry basket to serve as a crow’s nest and draped a colourful towel as a flag. The whole thing looked like a deformed boat obscured by foliage. That was Nell’s contribution, for Nell was obsessed with pirates and greatly mourned the fact that none ever came to Holburg. Eliza was glad that Nell and Charlie seemed to get on so well now – it would have been a difficult summer if they hadn’t – but she felt left out, stranded in the Library or in Kyreth’s study for most of the day. Even when she could play outside with them, her injured arm prevented her from being much use as a builder or swinging off branches the way they did. And so she was delighted when, a few days after Nell’s arrival, Foss requested that both Nell and Charlie come to Eliza’s lesson with her.

~

Nell stared straight up at the cliff-like bookcases, her eyes round and her mouth slightly open, and then looked at Foss with the same sort of wonderment, and then back up, and so on. Charlie, on the other hand, was fidgety and restless, as if Magic and the legendary Mancer Library interested him not in the least.

“Deep Listening is a complicated kind of Magic,” said Foss to the three children seated opposite him, directing his words mainly at Eliza. “It can be practiced on a number of levels, on others or even on oneself. My hope is that once we have mastered the basics, it will enable you to Listen to
yourself,
to find that which is buried deep within you and unlock your power. For if you cannot, I do not know what will become of you, Eliza Tok.”

“Would I nay just go home?” suggested Eliza.

“This is your home now, Eliza! This is where you belong! It is true, you have shown no propensity for Magic except under threat of imminent death, but do
not
be discouraged! We will begin with the simplest and most straightforward form of Deep Listening: listening to the thoughts of a willing partner. Before we begin, let me make the obvious point that the language of thought, if I may call it this, and the language of speech are entwined but not identical. Furthermore, different beings
think
in very different ways.”

Nell nodded sagely.

“The act of Deep Listening requires an acute sensitivity,” said Foss.
“Understanding
the mind of another is more difficult than you might imagine. This morning, I wish to make a simple demonstration, which is why I asked for your assistance.” Here he nodded graciously to Nell and Charlie. “Miss...Molly, is it? I would like you to think in
words,
as if you were speaking in your mind.”

“Nell,” said Nell.

“Pardon me?” said Foss.

“My name,” said Nell. “It’s nay Molly. It’s Nell.”