The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(7)

The woman laughed, and then looked startled by the sound she had made. “Did you hear that?” she asked Eliza, and her eyes rolled about wildly in her head. “It was so unexpected. When I am quiet I think I am in the garden and he is kind to me and we have nothing to fear. Silence, silence. I long for it, my ears are buzzing always, there is no rest. How will you get there without a Guide? Oh, you mustn’t get lost in the woods, child. It isn’t safe. All manner of beast will prey on such tender flesh.”

“I’m nobody’s prey,” said Eliza coldly. “It would be a foolish beast who’d take me for such.” But she let go of the dagger.

“Have you seen my snake?” The woman asked, looking around. “We are often apart these days because we are not happy, not clear, and sometimes there are many and I don’t know what to do. It never rains here and my room is fine but not the finest of all and the stones are cold and he is sad when he sees me. Look, I have been bitten, by mice or bats perhaps. They live in my bed between the sheets and they gnaw at me all night long. I cannot sleep.”

The woman showed Eliza her bare arms covered in bite marks. They looked as if they had been made by human teeth, and indeed when Eliza noted the angle of the marks it was obvious the woman had bitten her own arms. Eliza frowned and looked up into her face again. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“I have a present for you but I’ve forgotten it,” the woman replied, suddenly backing towards the door, her eyes wide with alarm. “It will be colder before spring comes. Lost, poor thing. Have you no pity? I did not give it to you, it was a good day but then I forgot it. I will go and get it and you will make it all right. Promise me, child, you will make it all right.”

“Wait,” said Eliza, scrambling out of bed. “Where are you going?”

All at once it came to her. She knew where she had seen this woman before.

“Hurry, hurry, it will be colder and all the songs will be sung twice over before you find it, I know that, I know, and she is coming. No pity. What? What will you do?” With that, the woman turned and fled the room. Eliza chased after her down the hall. The woman was tall and long-legged and in spite of her white hair she was much faster than Eliza. Eliza lost sight of her on a set of stairs but continued chasing her footsteps. When she reached the southeast tower the woman was gone.

“Where are you?” Eliza called softly. There was no reply. She did not go back to bed. Instead she rounded the tower and made her way through the darkened portrait gallery of the east wing. Far below, on the lower floors of the east wing, the manipulators of wood slept in their chambers, but Eliza was not worried about being found wandering at night. The Mancers rose and went to bed with the sun and it would take a great deal to wake them now.

There were more than twenty stories of portrait rooms, the size and shape of each room varying depending on which kind of Mancer was depicted therein – manipulator of fire, water, metal, wood, or earth. The portraits depicted all the Mancers, living and dead, going back as far as the Great Mancer Simathien, and in vast halls on the upper floors, all the Shang Sorceresses, including Eliza. It was to the most recent of these halls she went, to the one that contained her portrait and her mother’s. She knew the way by heart, even in the dark, for she often came here to look at the images of her ancestors. She murmured a spell and a tiny light appeared at her shoulder. She sent it up along one of the portraits to illuminate the face. There she was, the woman who had come to her room. In the portrait she had short fair hair and a steady gaze but it was unquestionably the same woman. Selva. Her grandmother. At the bottom of the portrait, the inscription read, Killed in Battle.

~~~

“I saw my gran last night,” Eliza told Foss bluntly the next morning. They were in the Old Library, with its marble cliff-like shelves of books towering above them, hung with ropeways and ladders and amber lights. Foss thought the power of the Early Texts would help or inspire Eliza during their lessons and she was too polite to complain about their rather distracting smell.

Foss seemed preoccupied by something else and gave Eliza an impatient look. “What do you mean you saw her? In a dream? What a thing to say, Eliza Tok! Rea used to tell me her dreams. She thought to parse them for meaning no doubt, but the frequency with which she dreamed of cake suggested to me that –”

“It wasnay a dream, Foss. She came into my room and talked a lot of nonsense...ranting, aye, as if she was crazy, and then she ran off down the hall. I chased her but she disappeared near the southeast tower. I thought my grandmother was killed in the war. Is that nay what you told me?”

“Not in the war,” said Foss, the light of his eyes fading and then flaring up again. “Not exactly, although it was the same time as the war. She went to Tian Xia on a mission and she did not return. I am not privy to the details, but Eliza, I am sure you did not see her.”

“I did see her,” said Eliza. “What kind of mission was it?”

“I have heard tell...well, it is only hearsay. You must ask Kyreth if you wish to know more,” said Foss.

Seeing how anxious he was, Eliza dropped the subject immediately. Foss’s position among the Mancers was still tenuous after he had let her escape the Citadel more than two years ago and she did not like to put him in a difficult position. If it was a matter of rooting out secrets, there were other ways.

“I’ll ask him, aye,” she said.