The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(9)
Kyreth’s eyes bored into her. She kept her own gaze trained on the Supreme Mancer’s great gold hands, lined and powerful, folded together on the marble desk.
“Your grandmother Selva is dead, Eliza,” said Kyreth in a low rumble. “She was felled by a Faery Curse, attempting to retrieve an object of great power jealously guarded by the Faeries.”
Eliza continued staring at the table mutely.
“What did she say to you, Eliza? In this dream?”
“I dinnay remember much of it,” admitted Eliza. “She kept talking about stones and snakes.”
“Her Guide was a serpent,” murmured Kyreth.
“She said she had a present for me. Oh! And she also said ‘she’s coming’. Like the raven!”
Kyreth sat back and the fire of his eyes dimmed enough for her to look up at his face. It was full of sorrow and she remembered that her grandmother Selva had been his wife. It was never really possible to think of Kyreth as her grandfather, though she knew it to be true.
“The spirit world is the greatest mystery of all,” he said. “I do not know if this dream of yours was of your own creation or indeed your grandmother reaching out to you from the land of the dead. I cannot know. The very strangeness of her speech may be due to the difficulty of coherent communication between the living and the dead. In any case we should not ignore what she has said to you, most particularly since the vision of the raven has echoed it. You are being warned, and yet...she is coming...it may indeed refer to our enemy. It is well to be wary.”
“Who else could it refer to?” asked Eliza.
“Perhaps your Guide,” said Kyreth, with the faintest trace of a smile.
~~~
That night Eliza returned alone to the southeast tower. She walked the narrow corridors around it, brushing her hand against the walls. She could feel the heavy enchantment on them. All the towers were protected in this way. There was no use even trying to conjure a door here. Of course, she could cut right through the wall with her dragon-claw dagger, but that would be a desecration of the Citadel and she dreaded to think what the consequences would be. She leaned against the wall, pressed her cheek to the cool stone.
“Are you there?” she whispered.
The night was silent and still, and gave her no reply. As she made her way back to her bedroom in the dark, all the things she did not know and all the things she had to fear seemed terribly near, massed against her and invisible behind a wall of secrets.
Chapter
3
The weeks flew by, then a month, and then two months. With January came a biting frost, unusual this far south. The sensational trial of Abimbola Broom began in the capital and the Emmisariae were frequently gone but Eliza scarcely had time to pay attention to it. Her days were filled entirely with her studies. She spent mornings in the strenuous practice of Deep Seeing with Foss. After lunch she went to Kyreth’s study and they ploughed through dense Commentaries until dusk, when he dismissed her. By evening her head was pounding and her eyes were swimming. Even so, she could not resist picking up the Chronicles of the Sorceress and reading until her eyes would not stay open any longer. Here at last was a book that might tell her something about herself, her heritage, who or what she was.
The book began at the very beginning of the Worlds, when it was still One World. Faery Dominion in the Early Days of Tian Di had been near absolute. Humans slaved in their mines, the Demons formed their army, and the Mancers were their Scribes and Record-Keepers. Though Mages often lived solitary lives in far-flung places, they too had to answer to the Faeries when called upon for a potion or a spell. Everything changed when the Great Mancer Simathien organized the Mancers to build a Citadel deep in the Irahok mountains and began in secret to assemble a Library there. He married a human Sorceress by the name of Zara and she was his partner in this task. Refused entry and jealous, Zara’s twin sister Morhanna told the King of the Faeries, Amadeo, of the Citadel and the Secret Library. When the King laid claim to it, Simathien persuaded the Mancers to erect barriers around the Citadel to keep out the Faeries and their Magic. Outraged, the Faeries sent their army of Demons to destroy the Mancers. The Sorceress Zara turned herself into a giant brown bear with an impenetrable hide and in this form she decimated the Demon army. The story of the battle took up several pages and Eliza skimmed through it to the part where Simathien and Zara bore a daughter, first in the long line of Mancer-born Sorceresses. They named her Quyen. When Quyen was three years old, a hawk came and carried her off to the Yellow Mountains. The Mancers were appalled, Zara bereft, but Simathien told them not to pursue the hawk. A year later the hawk returned with the child. She knew all the ways of birds and grew up to be a powerful Sorceress. From this time on, the Sorceress was always trained by, and later married to, one of the Mancers, while the mystical Citadel moved about the farthest reaches of Tian Di to elude the ever-wrathful Faeries.
As winter set in, Eliza came to the separation of the worlds. She read huddled under her covers for warmth until she hadn’t the strength to maintain her tiny conjured light and it faded and winked out. The Sorceress Ebele begged the Mancers to give aid to the humans, who were rising up against the Faeries in futile and bloody rebellions. In the final, greatest act of Old Magic in all the history of Tian Di, Karbek initiated the separation of Tian Di into two worlds, Di Shang and Tian Xia. Karbek was the first Mancer to bear the title of Supreme Mancer and Ebele the title of Shang Sorceress. Her Guide was a lynx and it was written that her mother gave birth to them together, as if they were twins.