Shade and Sorceress (5 page)

It took them most of the morning to go right around the grounds. Just beyond the Inner Sanctum the Mancers kept pigs and chickens and cows, and this fenced grassy area was no different from well-kept human farms Eliza had seen. West of this there was a broad single-story stone building that Missus Ash said was the forge. It had a large padlock on the door. They skirted anxiously past the dark tangled wood in the northwest corner and took their time circling back towards the south wing, ambling among fragrant orchards and carved marble fountains, flower gardens where roses the size of Eliza’s head hung heavy from their thorny stems, gurgling streams where bright fish shed light behind them, and an aviary in which every kind of bird imaginable clamored together in discordant song. As the Mancers were all busy chanting in the Inner Sanctum, they met no one on their walk. Missus Ash kept up a steady narration, as if she were a tour guide, while at the same time peppering Eliza with questions about her father, her mother, and her life until now. They returned to the south wing and Missus Ash gave Eliza lunch in the large, cluttered kitchen: hot sandwiches, a fruit salad, and a tall glass of frothy milk fresh from the Mancers’ cows. After lunch Missus Ash told Eliza to entertain herself, as she had work to do.

Eliza was glad to be left to her own devices. Her mind was a tangle of questions, and a slow-burning anger at her father was working its way through her. He had not prepared her for any of this. The way they had moved from place to place, the fact that she had never even met her Sorma relatives, the little he had told her about her mother – all this had new meaning now, and she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

Nobody had told her where she could or couldn’t go, so she assumed she was free to wander where she pleased. It would take some time, but she decided to go right around the inside of the Citadel. In particular, she wanted to see what lay on the other side of its walls. In this, she was quickly disappointed. The only windows she found were narrow slits that faced onto the huge rolling grounds. None faced in the other direction. They could be in the middle of a city or on the top of a mountain, for all she knew. The hallways were all alike, vast and doorless, and so exploring them was not terribly exciting. Each window she came across, and they were few and far between, offered the same view of the grounds from a slightly different angle. She was looking out at the Inner Sanctum when a voice next to her said, “Lah, wonder if they found out who done it yet.”

Eliza nearly leaped out of her skin. Standing right beside her was a boy a few inches taller than she was, with dark, closely cropped hair, long-lashed brown eyes, and a friendly smile. His black eyebrows pointed up a little at the ends. She hadn’t heard him approach but quickly realized who he must be.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “Didnay mean to scare you.”

Embarrassed at having appeared so jumpy, Eliza said a bit gruffly, “I spec you’re Charlie.”

“And I spec you’re Eliza,” he said. “Ma told me you were exploring. Took me forever to find you.”

“This place is prize big,” said Eliza, then cringed. What an obvious thing to say!

“Have you seen the Portrait Gallery?” Charlie asked.

Eliza shook her head.

“You’re going in the right direction for it. The Gallery is good if you’re bored. I mean, it’s pretty much the only place to go if you cannay conjure a door. Can you conjure doors?”

“I dinnay think so,” said Eliza, remembering how the door to Kyreth’s study had appeared and disappeared. “No.”

“Me neither. There are a lot of places in this wing where you dinnay need to conjure a door, but they’re all just guest rooms and meeting rooms and the grand dining hall – places for human visitors. The only really good place without doors is the Portrait Gallery, aye.”

It was true, Eliza thought, that her bedroom door had just
been
there, like an ordinary door in the ordinary world ought to be.

“Gum?” said Charlie, offering her a stick. She took it and said, “Thanks.”

He watched her unwrap it and put it in her mouth and begin to chew as if he were expecting her to say something more. She was a bit annoyed at having her solitude disrupted but couldn’t think of any polite way to tell him to go away.

“It’s good gum,” she said finally.

“Lah, do you want to look at the Gallery?”

“Okay,” said Eliza. “I mean, yes.”

“It’s good if you’re bored,” he said again, jerking his head in the direction they were to go. She cast one more look out the window at the Inner Sanctum. Then she followed Charlie down the hall.

Truly his mother’s son, Charlie kept up a steady stream of talk about which kings and queens and presidents he had seen here, where the dragons were kept (in caverns beneath the Inner Sanctum, he claimed), how he knew where the dungeons were, and so on. Eliza listened politely until they reached the end of the south wing. A thin corridor wound its way around the tower, leading them into the east wing.

“What’s in the towers?” Eliza asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Not allowed in. I’ll find out eventually, though.”

“We could probably sneak in,” said Eliza. “Somehow.”

“Aye,” said Charlie, giving her an appreciative look. “I bet we could.”

They entered the Portrait Gallery through an arched opening that led into a high-ceilinged six-sided room. The room was dark and the white tile floor was inlaid with black tile crabs. The walls were lined with framed portraits of Mancers, white-robed and fiery-eyed, all with a black crab on their robes, over the heart.

“Manipulators of water from a long time ago,” said Charlie, leading her through another arched doorway into a nearly identical room. This room opened onto two others, also the same. “See, the ones in the gold frames were Emissariae.”

“What?”

“Emissariae. You know, the ones who can leave the Citadel.”

Eliza had been to a museum before, when she was six years old and visiting Kalla with her father. She remembered endless halls full of paintings and sculptures, the muted lighting and the eerie hush. This was like sneaking into a museum at night, deserted and unlit, the figures in the paintings glaring down from within their frames, as if they wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong.

“Simathien,” said Charlie, pointing to one portrait set in an ornate alcove above the others, as if it were of particular importance. Eliza nodded, though it meant nothing to her. He looked like every other Mancer.

They passed through seven-sided rooms with ruby birds tiled on the floors, turquoise serpents in eight-sided rooms, ivory bears set amid darker tiles in large nine-sided rooms, and golden human figures in five-sided rooms. She wanted to have a closer look at the portraits, but Charlie was getting impatient, leading her at a near-run up narrow marble staircases and through further mazes of portrait rooms to some particular destination. He stopped when they came out into a rectangular hall. Bright mosaics on the floor created a sea of colour but no discernible picture, and the portraits on the wall here were larger than what they had seen before.

“There’s twenty-eight of them,” said Charlie proudly, as if he’d painted them all himself. “From the first Supreme Mancer to the one now. Mancers only live about five hundred years, aye.”

“How old are
you?”
Eliza asked, amused.

“Thirteen,” he said, a bit defensively.

Eliza looked around at the portraits. Here by the door was Kyreth, she thought, though it was difficult to be sure. It was a hard, oblong face. The high brow gave him a thoughtful appearance, but his sharp cheekbones and jawline and his aquiline nose looked as if they had been carved out of rock. His mouth was a thin, stern line. With their strong, unlined faces and fair hair, the Mancers all looked rather similar, but up close one could detect differences in their features.

“Is Karbek here?” Eliza asked, for even she had heard of the Mancer who first separated the worlds, and for whom the great Di Shang mountain range was named. They crossed the hall so Charlie could point him out to her. He looked rather savage, she thought.

“Who painted them all?” she asked. “It couldnay have been painted while he was alive. It doesnay look old at all.”

“They dinnay get painted, exactly,” said Charlie. “Least, there’s no
painter
. Come on, I have a surprise for you.”

And again they were running through room after room of portraits. Eliza was vividly aware of how terrible it would be to get lost here. One could spend days, surely, wandering these rooms without finding one’s way out. They came to another big hall, but this one was different. It was lined not with portraits of Mancers but of women. Each one wore a black tunic over black leggings and each one bore the same slender white rod about the length of her arm.

“Is this...?” She let the question hang there, unable to finish it.

“These are the Shang Sorceresses,” said Charlie, grinning widely. “There are a lot more rooms like this one, but this is the most recent one. Come over here.”

Eliza found herself looking straight up at a life-sized portrait of her mother. She recognized her from her photograph, but her expression here was entirely different. She was wearing the same outfit as all the others and looking defiantly at something in the distance. She too was holding the white rod.

“Not
that
one,” said Charlie, nudging her and pointing. Eliza followed his finger to the portrait next to her mother’s. A bolt of alarm rocketed through her.

“That’s
me!”
she cried indignantly. “Why have they got one of
me?
Who painted it?”

“I told you, no one
painted
it,” said Charlie, watching her carefully. “Why dinnay you know about any of this mess? I thought you were...you know.”

Eliza couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t like looking at the portrait of herself, didn’t like the sullen expression that had been captured on her face. She noticed that all the portraits but hers had a date inscribed on the bottom of the frame, with a line in an unfamiliar script.

“Can you read this?” she asked Charlie, pointing to the inscription under her mother’s portrait.

To her surprise, he nodded. “We learn in school, aye. For reading Tian Xia literature or something. It’s the Language of First Days.”

“Lah, what does it say?”

“Killed in battle,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

Her heart plummeted. Her father had lied about this, too, then. About everything.

“What about this one?” she asked quickly, going on to her grandmother’s portrait.

“They all say the same thing, aye,” he said in a soft voice.

Eliza felt sick. She walked right around the hall, looking at all these women, supposedly her grandmother, her great-grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, and so on, every single one of them killed in battle. Clearly, being a Sorceress was a dangerous business. Kyreth’s talk about the line of the Sorceress had been abstract and confusing, but here in the Portrait Gallery it began to sink in. But even if her mother had been a Sorceress, Eliza thought to herself,
she
was not anything of the kind. It was a mistake, a horrible mistake. Her portrait did not belong here. She did not belong here.

Charlie left her alone for a while but he came back shortly and pulled her out of her reverie.

“The Mancers are done for the day,” he said. “They’re meeting in the grand dining hall. It’s the only place where they can all sit around a table.”

“Is there a door there?” Eliza asked immediately. “I mean, one we can find?”

“I know a better way if you want to eavesdrop,” he said. “That is what you want to do, nay?”

“Of course,” said Eliza, thinking that Nell and Charlie would get along famously.

~

In the kitchen back in the south wing, Charlie explained that the chimneys to the fireplaces were all connected and he made sure the flues were always open so that sound could flow freely. The two of them crouched right inside the wide fireplace. They could make out a good deal, if not all, of what the Mancers were saying.

“...The only possible culprit. None other would be powerful enough to work Magic that resists our detection,” Kyreth was saying.

“Your Eminence, may I speak?”

“Speak, Obrad,” said Kyreth.

Obrad.
The one they had intended for her mother. If her mother had obeyed them, Eliza would not exist.

“If we are certain the intruder came
with
the girl, as a hitchhiker of sorts, then it did not need to break any barrier. Unwitting, we brought it with us. The spell itself...” Eliza did not hear the end of his sentence, but Kyreth responded angrily.

“How it came is irrelevant. The spell it worked once here was undoubtedly Great Magic.”

“But we have confirmed that the...other one is still safely imprisoned,” came another voice. “The intruder cannot possess much power of its own or we would have felt its presence today from the Inner Sanctum. Whatever spell it worked must have been prepared ahead of time. By
her.”