The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(10)

From then on, the Chronicles dealt with the great feats of Sorceresses who guarded the Crossing, how they turned back and banished all would-be invaders. Some Sorceresses had lived in relatively peaceful times and were dispensed with in a page or less that recounted who she had married, when she had given birth and how she had died. Every Sorceress, it seemed, met the same end. She won every battle until she lost one. Some of them were quite old when they finally fell, but no Sorceress retired. Eliza woke most mornings with her face pressed against the pages of the open book and was wracked with guilt when she found she had drooled all over a page about Freda’s banishment of a cohort of invading giants in the late Middle Days.

At last Eliza came to her grandmother. Selva’s Guide was a serpent that had been found wrapped around the baby in her cradle just days after her birth. Eliza read that while her great-grandmother Minorr fought valiantly in the war, banishing a great many of the Cra, giants, trolls and harrowghasters, the various mixed descendants of the vanished Demon race who flocked to Di Shang to prey on weak humans, Selva was sent to Tian Xia as soon as she had given birth to a daughter, to obtain something called the Gehemmis. She lost her life under a Faery Curse, and was greatly mourned, was all the book said. Eliza stared at the page, stunned. The Chronicles recorded in elaborate detail the final battle of each Sorceress since the Middle Days. Whether the Sorceress was felled by a horde of half-hunters, a giant with enchanted weapons, Faeries or evil wizards, the how and the why was written down in the most reverential language. And yet here, nothing at all.

Eliza had seen the word Gehemmis in one of the earlier books. She flipped through the pages until she found it. Indeed, four thousand years ago a famed Sorceress named Lahja had gone to Tian Xia, faced the Horogarth of the North, and brought back one of the four Gehemmis . Three other Sorceresses were said to have died or disappeared in Tian Xia on a quest for one of these Gehemmis.

At the end of the eighth book, Eliza read in Kyreth’s hand, The Sorceress Rea was seen from a young age in the company of a fox. At that time it was a pet to her. As she grew older, she became possessive and secretive regarding her relationship with the fox and would not speak of it but it was assumed to be her Guide. Her power outstripped that of the Sorceresses for a thousand years or more but her devious character led her into difficulty. She married a human in secret and bore a daughter by him. The damage to the line of the Sorceress was irrevocable. She hid this daughter for reasons unknown. Her greatest accomplishment was holding the Sorceress Nia in battle for one hundred days while the Mancers built her prison. The next line, She gave her life in this act of heroism, was crossed out. The text continued: When she was stripped of her power by the Sorceress Nia, she was stripped also of her Guide. There has been no sign of it since her rescue. Rea lives out the remainder of her life, crippled, amnesiac, and powerless, in the Great Sand Sea with the Sorma.

There was nothing in the book about Eliza. She tried to imagine what might be written about her one day, another young Sorceress far in the future perhaps reading about the Sorceress Eliza. She couldn’t think it would be terribly flattering. The first Sorceress without a Guide. Fathered by a mere human. Tricked by Nia into giving her a powerful book. Would she be given credit at least for finding out Abimbola Broom, for combating the Cra? What would be her final battle?

~~~

Eliza was looking through the table at her first lesson with Foss more than two years ago. It wavered unsteadily before her eyes. She could not hear anything but a rush of wind or wings. Foss looked distorted in the image, his eyes shooting out beams of startling light, and she herself looked terribly young and on the verge of laughter. There was a sound behind her and then her grandmother was looking at her through the table.

“No pity, then?” she said sadly, and her face fell away, a chasm rushing up to meet Eliza. She raised her head from the table, gripping its edges to steady herself.

“Pardon my interruption,” said Aysu, standing next to Foss across the table from Eliza. Aysu was considered the strongest of the five Emmisariae. Like Foss, she was a manipulator of water. Winter was her Ascendency and so her power was now at its height. During this season, she was second only to Kyreth. Eliza was surprised to see that she looked weary, her face drawn and her eyes somewhat dimmer than usual.

“I would like to show you something,” she said to Eliza.

Foss and Eliza exchanged a look and followed Aysu out of the Library. She led them in silence down to the ground floor of the north wing, and then further down the winding stone steps that led into the dungeons.

Eliza smelled them before she saw them – the putrid scent of damp feathers and oily skin that she had come to know so well. It made her skin crawl. She did not need to conjure a light, for the brilliance of the Mancers’ eyes lit up the dungeons. The small stone cells were full of the Cra, crouched and hissing and spitting, their wings straining against the invisible barriers that held them, their sharp-clawed fingers pressed up against unseen walls. There were hundreds of them. Eliza knew she should be elated. Instead, her mind was flooded with memories of all those mornings she had crouched by rivers and streams, washing their sticky black blood from her dagger and hands, gagging and weeping with disgust.

“Kyreth will not see you this afternoon,” said Aysu once they had passed right through the dungeons and re-emerged on the ground floor, where the manipulators of water had their chambers. “There is much to do.”