The Unmaking (5 page)

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.

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.”

“We will continue our lesson, then,” said Foss. “Perhaps outside. We could use some fresh air.”

Aysu left them and Foss and Eliza walked out into the chill winter air, breathing in deeply to rid their nostrils of the stench of the Cra.

“You have persuaded Kyreth to do a good thing,” said Foss carefully, after allowing several minutes of silence to pass. “But do not think it was indifference that kept him from doing it before. The Emmisariae are powerful and we have been forced to do without them these past many days as they rounded up the Cra. Given the necessity of maintaining the barriers in the Arctic, it was a calculated risk to let them go. Kyreth had been divided on the matter for some time and at last concluded it was necessary for
your
sake, to keep you from placing yourself in harm’s way and taking justice into your own, may I say,
inexperienced
hands. That is a dangerous thing to do, Eliza Tok.”

“I know,” said Eliza. She wanted to tell Foss how much she had hated hunting them, how relieved she was to have it finished, but somehow the words wouldn’t come. “I’ve been reading a lot,” she said instead. “About the Sorceresses before me.”

“Yes, you mentioned. The Chronicles.” Foss seemed relieved to have a change of subject. “For some years now I have been working on a Commentary on chapter six of the final volume. You must understand, Eliza, that the earlier texts were written long after the fact and are therefore not entirely reliable. They are myths, essentially, legends passed down for thousands of years. Did Zara ever exist? We believe so but Simathien himself mentions her only once in his Book of the Ancients. Some believe she is a composite of more than one Sorceress. Morhanna is called her twin sister, but how can this be, when each Sorceress bears only one daughter? Were they the first Sorceresses? Have there been two lines of Sorceresses from the beginning, as the Book of Origins suggests, or did one line separate into two at some point? The Chronicles raise as many questions as they answer, in my opinion, but provide
fascinating
reading all the same. Yours is a complicated heritage, Eliza Tok, and one to be proud of!”

He looked ready to continue for some time and so Eliza had to interject her question quickly, a skill she had perfected by now, “What about these Gehemmis
that get mentioned? Sorceresses going to Tian Xia to get them?”

“An example, Eliza Tok, of the unreliability of the Chronicles. The Gehemmis, supposedly, are gifts of the Ancients guarded by the Four Immortal Powers of Tian Xia. They are said to be endowed with the essence of Old Magic, possessing untold power. But do they exist, in fact? In the records of the Mancers you will find that sending a Sorceress on a quest for a Gehemmis has always been terribly controversial, quite simply because many Mancers do not
believe
in the Gehemmis.” He gave Eliza a sharp look suddenly. “Have you spoken to Kyreth about this?”

“Nay about the Gehemmis, exactly,” she said. “But he told me my gran died of a Faery Curse, aye, and it says in the Chronicles that she was trying to get one of the Gehemmis from the Faeries.”

“Yes,” said Foss, relieved. “And one Sorceress is said to have succeeded and obtained a Gehemmis from the Horogarth four thousand years ago.”

“I read about that. Her name was Lahja,” said Eliza.

“And yet, where is this Gehemmis? If she obtained it, why do we not have it here in the Citadel? And is it possible that a mere Sorceress, pardon me Eliza, could truly face the Horogarth, one of the children of the Ancients, and take something from him? I am skeptical, Eliza Tok, I am very skeptical.”

“Lah, then so am I,” said Eliza, smiling up at him. At that moment, a large raven flew straight at them, screaming, its beak wide. They both ducked, covering their faces, and then it was gone.

“I dinnay think they’re friendly,” said Eliza, her voice shaking, looking around her for the vanished raven.

“It is too soon to say,” replied Foss with a frown. “Let us return to the Library.”

~~~

Early the following morning Kyreth summoned Eliza to his study.

“The Shade approaches,” he said dryly. “Have you made plans?”

Eliza’s heart leaped but she kept her voice steady and answered as politely as she could. “When I asked you in the summer, you gave me permission to spend Winter Festival with my parents and the Sorma. Like last year, aye.”

“I remember,” said Kyreth. “But Winter Festival is still two weeks away.”

“I know. But I’ve nay seen my parents in months and the journey is tiring,” she said.

“The Festival lasts six days, does it not?”

“Yes.”

“That is a long absence, Eliza. And you have only recently returned to us.”

“When I come back, I promise to stay and study without interruption until the summer,” she said.

“I will hold you to that, Eliza. Remember that you are under our protection and need only to call us if you need us.” He indicated the crystal that hung around her neck. Eliza touched her hand to it and nodded.

It was their little ritual. He couldn’t stop her, really. She would not be kept against her will. As long as she was free to come and go, she studied hard. But for the sake of politeness she pretended to ask permission and he pretended to give it. Before leaving the room, she made herself look into his terrible, blazing eyes.