House of Shadows (13 page)
“I am going out this evening,” the mage told her. “You will be well enough here alone?”
Nemienne blinked, recalled to the moment. This was a question that should have seemed condescending or insulting, the sort of question you would ask a much younger child, not a girl Nemienne’s age. But this house
was
a little confusing, sometimes. Parts of it were even a little frightening—sometimes. Nemienne said firmly, “Yes, of course. I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“Of course. Besides, Enkea will be here,” Ankennes assured her, stroking the cat, who half closed her green eyes and sat up straight on his knee. He picked her up and handed her to Nemienne.
“Of course,” said Nemienne, taking the cat and stroking her throat. She was pleased. The cat could always lead Nemienne wherever she wanted to go in the house, although sometimes she wouldn’t leave a comfortable chair for any coaxing. Mage Ankennes had commented, shortly after Nemienne had become his apprentice, that Enkea had already been in this house when he’d purchased it. This had startled Nemienne, who in the back of her mind had assumed the mage had lived in this house forever. But no. Less than fifteen years, he’d told her when she asked. So Enkea was an old cat—older than she looked—but not as old as Nemienne’s first startled assumption. Though surely it had been a mage who had built this house, mages who had always lived here—she was sure Enkea had always been a mage’s cat.
She wandered through the house after the mage had gone, Enkea on her shoulder. The house itself seemed in some ways a test of aptitude for magecraft, like lighting a candle with the memory of fire. Navigating it took practice and a certain amount of luck. Nemienne liked the challenge of it. She thought she could feel herself stretching to meet this challenge, as she had somehow never seemed to meet the ordinary challenges of day-to-day life in her father’s house.
Nemienne shifted uneasily at this thought. Was it disloyal to her family to be glad she was in the mage’s house, to like the strangeness of it? The solitude? She felt the occasional twinge of homesickness, yes; she missed her sisters, yes. The knowledge that her father was gone was a constant ache at the back of her mind. And yet… and yet, it seemed to her that she had fallen into the mage’s house as a fish falls into the sea. Already she could not imagine living anywhere else, and though she read them avidly, letters from her sisters seemed like messages from another country.
Ankennes’s house always struck Nemienne as oddly outsized, but now, with the mage absent, it seemed even larger than usual. Nemienne had accepted halls that stretched out for surprising distances and turned at odd angles. On the uppermost floor of the house, besides the workroom, she was aware of only two small
libraries and a musty scriptorium. Well,
usually
these were all on the uppermost floor. She had never been down to the lowest level of the house because the door at the bottom of the stair was always closed.
On the main floor, Nemienne could almost always find her own room, though occasionally she had to hunt back and forth for its door. The room was small, but she had it all to herself. Nemienne liked her room’s small size; it felt very private and enclosed. The quiet of the room, in which she might think or read or study without interruption, had quickly gone from seeming like extraordinary luxury to seeming natural. She found her room now without difficulty and wandered in, glancing around possessively.
The room had a soft rug, tawny gold and brown, on the floor beside the narrow bed, and walls painted in dusty green and taupe. Above the bed was a shelf on the wall, which held the half-dozen books she was reading. Including the dense Iasodde, from which she was to write her essays. Nemienne opened the volume, thinking she might start that at once, but then, finding herself for some reason restless, closed it again and set it aside.
Karah’s letter lay on the table. Karah had written with descriptions about lessons and clothing and small details of daily life in a keiso House. Nemienne had read her sister’s letter eagerly, but found it hard to write back; she found her own lessons and the details of her own life difficult to put into words.
The kitchen, almost as stable as the workroom or the scriptorium, could usually be found along the hall and down a short flight of stairs from her room. It was a large, friendly room with a heavy iron stove capable of producing prodigious heat. Enkea was often to be found stretched out in the chair nearest the stove, luxuriating in heat that seemed as though it should have been too intense for any reasonable creature. She jumped off Nemienne’s shoulder now and leaped up on her chair, purring.
Exploring the ice pantry, Nemienne found cold roast chicken and noodles dressed with a spicy brown sauce and pink pepperberries. Nemienne, wondering where the mage might have gone—
the possibilities seemed endless, and endlessly exotic—ate her supper and fed bits of chicken to Enkea. The cat accepted them with the air of one conveying a favor.
Nemienne washed her supper dishes, but found herself abruptly consumed, as happened at odd moments, by the memory of doing such homely chores in company with Tana and Miande. Tears prickled suddenly behind her eyes. Nemienne put the dishes to drip by the sink and, lifting Enkea back to her shoulder, hastily left the kitchen. She turned into the long hallway that led to the stairs. She meant to go up to one of the libraries and distract herself by looking at the books there, but when she came to the main landing and began to turn to the right, Enkea leaped from her shoulder and disappeared instead down the stairs to the left. The slim cat blurred at once into shadow, save for her white foot, which flashed in the dim light as she moved. She looked back at Nemienne once. Her eyes caught the light of the landing and cast it back like smoky green lanterns.
Nemienne hesitated on the landing. When Enkea did not return, she slowly went down the stairs after the cat. They were not quite level; each step was worn a little in the center where traversing feet had fallen for many, many years. Nemienne wondered whose feet those had been, before her master’s. It seemed impossible that ordinary folk had ever dwelled in this house.
The walls held tall candles in sconces, none lit. The walls, like the stairs, were stone. Cold rolled off them in almost visible waves, so that Nemienne was shivering before she had gone halfway down.
At the bottom of the stairs, there was a small landing and a great oaken door bound with brass. Nemienne had seen this before. But this time, the door was standing ajar. Beyond the door was the featureless dark. Enkea was nowhere to be seen.
For what seemed a long time, Nemienne stood on the lowest step and simply looked into the darkness. She
was
afraid of it, and yet… if she learned to call light into the darkness tonight, then tomorrow she could impress Mage Ankennes with her confident
skill. She liked that idea. And there was the door, right here, so if she couldn’t summon light, she could always back up a few steps and find herself again in the safe—well, familiar—well, sort of familiar—house.
At last she took a candle from a wall sconce and drew fire from the air to light it. This time the flame came without difficulty. It rose off its wick long and white and nearly smokeless, casting a pool of light that poured across the steps and the landing and accented every unevenness and roughly mortared crack in the stone. But the light somehow seemed reluctant to press beyond the door.
Slowly, Nemienne stepped down to the landing and put a hand against the door. It was cold. Even the wood was cold, and the brass almost seemed to
burn
with cold. But the instant she touched it, the door swung wide open to the darkness beyond. Nemienne jumped back. Then she scolded herself—what, did she think the darkness was going to leap out at her?
But the idea didn’t seem as silly as it should have. Her heart pounded. But the thought of impressing Mage Ankennes kept her on the landing. And besides… it frightened her, that open door, but it drew her as well: She wanted to run away, but she also wanted to accept the door’s invitation. Or challenge. It almost seemed like that. Like a
dare
.
Well… and there was nothing in the darkness but more darkness, and was she a baby, to be afraid of that? Besides, she
did
have a candle—already lit, this time. Lifting it high, Nemienne edged forward, not quite through the doorway. Light, forcing its way into the dark, showed her a floor of stone and walls of fitted brick running featurelessly back as far as she could see. Which was not very far. But far enough to see Enkea. Nemienne felt a rush of confidence at the sight of the slim little cat sitting in the middle of the floor, at the farthest extent of the candlelight, staring ahead into the darkness. When the light touched her, Enkea turned her head and looked at Nemienne over her shoulder, her eyes shining in the dimness.
Then the cat rose to her feet and walked away into the darkness, her tail swaying with evident satisfaction and her white foot flashing as though she carried a tiny lantern of her own. She looked back once more before she vanished, straight at Nemienne. Then she was gone. The cat might as well have spoken aloud:
Follow me.
Surely Enkea, however whimsical she might be, wouldn’t try to get Nemienne into trouble?
“Well,” Nemienne said aloud, and stopped, startled by the echo of her own voice. She stood hesitating on the threshold between dark and light, between the cold that rolled through the great doorway and the warmth that waited in the friendlier places upstairs. She did not know what drew her, in the end, to step through that doorway: the cat who had gone before her, or simple curiosity, or a wish to impress Mage Ankennes, or some stranger impulsion.
The candle created a small pool of light around Nemienne’s feet without in any way seeming to trouble the darkness beyond the door. The darkness itself seemed, in a very few steps, to grow infinite, as though Nemienne had found her way out of the mage’s house entirely and into the measureless places within the heart of the mountain. When she turned, she could not see the open door behind her. When she moved experimentally sideways, she could not find the brick wall she had seen close to the door. Indeed, she could not find a wall of any kind, but only space that opened out and out before her as she went on. In the far distance, she thought she might be able to hear a slow dripping of water, falling from stone onto stone.
The candlelight illuminated an area perhaps an arm’s length on each side of her, not enough to gain a sense of the place in which she stood. The light she carried with her seemed to create, not a rival for the darkness, nor even a contrast to it, but only an accent that clarified its sweep and power. There was no sign, now, of the cat.
Nemienne had never been afraid of any ordinary dark. But
this
darkness pressed down upon her with the weight of the whole mountain behind it. Even the candle flame seemed to burn lower
and flatter and with less light than it had out on the landing. And this time, there was no mage waiting to pull her out of the dark if she could not break it herself. Nemienne found herself setting her teeth against fear. She deliberately tried to relax the tense muscles in her back and neck, with little effect.
Holding the candle before her in both hands, Nemienne looked into its long white flame and tried to think about light. As earlier, however, nothing she did brought more light into the darkness. All she had was the candle she had carried with her.
And then the darkness, pressing ever more heavily and coldly against the fire she carried, put out the candle.
Nemienne made a small sound, not quite a scream. More an embarrassing little squeak of terror. The silence came down on her like a mountain falling. In her alarm, she dropped the candle she held, and then fell to her knees and scrabbled across the stone for it. But it was as though the candle had fallen away into some place more amenable to light, for though she felt all around, she could not find it.
She sat back on her knees after a moment, clinging, barely, to the last remnants of her self-control. Worse than being stuck in the dark was surely being
panicked
in the dark. Even
thinking
about panic made her want to leap to her feet and race into the darkness, and just knowing how foolish that would be didn’t help
enough
… She realized she was gasping in short, frightened breaths and tried to make herself breathe more slowly. Telling herself she was being stupid helped a little. Stubborn pride helped more.
Nemienne thought of light as hard as she could. She was no longer trying to call light into the darkness, she realized. She had given up on that. She was thinking instead of the warmly lit life she had left behind when she had stepped through the mage’s doorway. Getting to her feet, Nemienne thought hard of light and stepped forward blindly into the dark.
