~ Chapter 3 ~

After taking Eliza back to her room, where she washed her face and brushed her teeth at the porcelain sink in the corner, Missus Ash led her straight outside onto the grounds. It was a sultry day and the garden was full of birdsong. Eliza could see rows of white-robed Mancers heading for the large domed building at the centre of the grounds.

“Is that the Inner Sanctum?” she asked Missus Ash, remembering what Kyreth had said.

Missus Ash nodded her head. “The manipulators of earth live there, and it’s where they all join together to work Great Magic,” she said, with something a little like wonder, or maybe fear, in her voice. “You know what they say about Mancers... It can take them days, or years, or even centuries to work a spell, but once the spell is complete it is nigh unbreakable. Theirs is a slow Magic, but a very strong Magic, aye. Now I spec they’re going to try and find out what caused that siren. If someone besides the Mancers is working Magic here, that can nay mean any good.”

“Well, it was nay me.”

“No,” said Missus Ash thoughtfully, looking Eliza straight in the eyes for the first time. Her eyes were brown and kind. “I dinnay imagine it was.”

“You’re from the archipelago,” said Eliza. “Did you know I’m from Holburg?”

Missus Ash smiled at her. “Lah, so I heard, lass. I hark from Schon, a long time back.”

“How did you end up here?” asked Eliza, but Missus Ash didn’t seem to hear her, pointing out a large red bird watching them from the trees, “You watch for those, aye, they’ll pluck at any shiny thing they see, barrettes or rings or what have ye,” as they walked up the slope towards the lake Eliza had seen from the window. Eliza had more pressing matters on her mind, in any case.

“Do you know anything about the...you know, that one the Mancers imprisoned?” asked Eliza. After Kyreth’s reaction, she didn’t want to say the Xia Sorceress.

“Only that we’re all better off since the Mancers locked her away,” said Missus Ash rather sharply.

“Kyreth said she was looking for me,” said Eliza.

“Lucky for you that the Mancers found you first, then,” said Missus Ash, in a tone that ended the conversation.

Like all children in the Republic, Eliza had grown up knowing the Xia Sorceress to be the most ruthless and terrible and evil being in the worlds. Nobody knew why she had been banished from Tian Xia half a century ago, but no doubt it was for some unspeakable crime. All manner of wicked beast had followed her to Di Shang to support her in her quest to rule this new world, and even the Scarpathians had thrown in their lot with the otherworldly threat. Ten years after the end of the long war, with Scarpatha occupied and under the stern yoke of the Republic, and the Sorceress imprisoned in the Arctic, still she inspired a deep horror in ordinary people. Wherever Eliza and her father went there were whispered rumors about the Sorceress: that she had died, that she had escaped, that she was amassing an army. Every few months there was an official government announcement to the effect that she was still alive and still imprisoned. Eliza’s entire world had been thrown into confusion, but strangest and most horrifying of all was the fact that this bane of two worlds somehow knew about her, had been looking for her.

A gravel trail marked out a pleasant walk towards the lake among flowering trees and bushes, but Eliza’s gaze was repeatedly drawn towards a tangled wood at the far corner of the grounds that didn’t allow any light in at all. Black ivy climbed up the tower behind the wood.

“What’s that place?” she asked Missus Ash, pointing.

“I dinnay rightly know,” said Missus Ash. “A place for a certain kind of Magic, and a dark Magic, I should think. I dinnay ask too many questions.”

“So, are you a witch?”

Eliza’s knowledge of witches was limited, but she knew they sometimes looked like ordinary humans. Stories of witches being discovered in Di Shang, where they did not belong, were not uncommon.

“Me? Nay, I’ve no power at all. They trust me, is all. I take care of a few things need taking care of, food for human guests and the like. Being a person myself, I know what a person needs to be comfortable.”

“Dinnay the Mancers eat?” asked Eliza.

“Lah, but you’re one for questions!” said Missus Ash, amused. “I’ve never seen it, but I dinnay rightly know. Seems to me every kind of being eats something, it’s just the something they eat that differs. Now, I wonder if my Charlie is about somewhere? That boy just disappears sometimes. Nice for him that you’re here now, aye. It’s lonely for a lad, spending his holidays in a place like this.”

“Who’s Charlie?” asked Eliza, hoping Missus Ash wouldn’t comment on her asking another question.

“Charlie’s my own boy, aye. Just about your age, he is. The Mancers arranged a very good education for him and I’m grateful to them for that. Best school in the capital. But I think he’s bored in the holidays, hanging about here without his friends. Oh, he spends some time visiting them too, but I like to see a bit of him myself, aye, and I’ve no home but this one. I can nay leave, you see. That was part of the arrangement.”

“Our school holidays dinnay start for another two weeks,” said Eliza, surprised. “I should be at school today.”

They came to the lake through a cluster of tall oak trees and crossed a stone bridge to an island in the middle of it. Eliza could see bright fish leaving streams of light behind them in the clear, dark water of the lake as they swam to and fro. A sonorous chanting rose up from the white dome at the centre of the grounds and the fish all disappeared, diving deep into the water.

“That’s them doing their Magic,” said Missus Ash, with a frown.

~

Missus Ash clammed up when Eliza attempted again to raise the Xia Sorceress as a topic of conversation, but was more than happy to talk at length about the Mancers and the layout of the Citadel. She told Eliza that the south wing, from which they had emerged, housed the offices and guest accommodations, as well as the private chambers of the manipulators of fire.

“South is their point of the compass,” Missus Ash explained. “And as it’s summer, it’s their ascendancy, as they call it. You can fairly feel ‘em buzzing with power, aye. Now, just about the whole north wing is the Mancer Library – you’ve heard of that, no doubt! And that’s where the manipulators of water have their chambers too. East wing houses the Portrait Gallery and the manipulators of wood; west wing houses the Treasuries and the manipulators of metal.”

“But where are we?” asked Eliza. “I mean, we’re still in the Republic, nay? Is this Kalla?”

Missus Ash laughed brightly. “Dinnay rightly know! It moves about, they say, but lah, nobody leaves except the Emissariae. They go off to visit kings and queens and prime ministers and such, and every now and then they bring some important humans here. Nearly cost me my job when my boy Charlie caught some crickets from around the lake and set up a race through the Queen of Boqua’s guestroom.”

It took them most of the morning to go right around the grounds. Just beyond the Inner Sanctum the Mancers kept pigs and chickens and cows, and this fenced grassy area was no different from well-kept human farms Eliza had seen. West of this there was a broad single-story stone building that Missus Ash said was the forge. It had a large padlock on the door. They skirted anxiously past the dark tangled wood in the northwest corner and took their time circling back towards the south wing, ambling among fragrant orchards and carved marble fountains, flower gardens where roses the size of Eliza’s head hung heavy from their thorny stems, gurgling streams where bright fish shed light behind them, and an aviary in which every kind of bird imaginable clamored together in discordant song. As the Mancers were all busy chanting in the Inner Sanctum, they met no one on their walk. Missus Ash kept up a steady narration, as if she were a tour guide, while at the same time peppering Eliza with questions about her father, her mother, and her life until now. They returned to the south wing and Missus Ash gave Eliza lunch in the large, cluttered kitchen: hot sandwiches, a fruit salad, and a tall glass of frothy milk fresh from the Mancers’ cows. After lunch Missus Ash told Eliza to entertain herself, as she had work to do.

Eliza was glad to be left to her own devices. Her mind was a tangle of questions, and a slow-burning anger at her father was working its way through her. He had not prepared her for any of this. The way they had moved from place to place, the fact that she had never even met her Sorma relatives, the little he had told her about her mother – all this had new meaning now, and she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

Nobody had told her where she could or couldn’t go, so she assumed she was free to wander where she pleased. It would take some time, but she decided to go right around the inside of the Citadel. In particular, she wanted to see what lay on the other side of its walls. In this, she was quickly disappointed. The only windows she found were narrow slits that faced onto the huge rolling grounds. None faced in the other direction. They could be in the middle of a city or on the top of a mountain, for all she knew. The hallways were all alike, vast and doorless, and so exploring them was not terribly exciting. Each window she came across, and they were few and far between, offered the same view of the grounds from a slightly different angle. She was looking out at the Inner Sanctum when a voice next to her said, “Lah, wonder if they found out who done it yet.”

Eliza nearly leaped out of her skin. Standing right beside her was a boy a few inches taller than she was, with dark, closely cropped hair, long-lashed brown eyes, and a friendly smile. His black eyebrows pointed up a little at the ends. She hadn’t heard him approach but quickly realized who he must be.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “Didnay mean to scare you.”

Embarrassed at having appeared so jumpy, Eliza said a bit gruffly, “I spec you’re Charlie.”

“And I spec you’re Eliza,” he said. “Ma told me you were exploring. Took me forever to find you.”

“This place is prize big,” said Eliza, then cringed. What an obvious thing to say!

“Have you seen the Portrait Gallery?” Charlie asked.

Eliza shook her head.

“You’re going in the right direction for it. The Gallery is good if you’re bored. I mean, it’s pretty much the only place to go if you cannay conjure a door. Can you conjure doors?”

“I dinnay think so,” said Eliza, remembering how the door to Kyreth’s study had appeared and disappeared. “No.”

“Me neither. There are a lot of places in this wing where you dinnay need to conjure a door, but they’re all just guest rooms and meeting rooms and the grand dining hall – places for human visitors. The only really good place without doors is the Portrait Gallery, aye.”

It was true, Eliza thought, that her bedroom door had just been there, like an ordinary door in the ordinary world ought to be.

“Gum?” said Charlie, offering her a stick. She took it and said, “Thanks.”

He watched her unwrap it and put it in her mouth and begin to chew as if he were expecting her to say something more. She was a bit annoyed at having her solitude disrupted but couldn’t think of any polite way to tell him to go away.

“It’s good gum,” she said finally.

“Lah, do you want to look at the Gallery?”

“Okay,” said Eliza. “I mean, yes.”

“It’s good if you’re bored,” he said again, jerking his head in the direction they were to go. She cast one more look out the window at the Inner Sanctum. Then she followed Charlie down the hall.

Truly his mother’s son, Charlie kept up a steady stream of talk about which kings and queens and presidents he had seen here, where the dragons were kept (in caverns beneath the Inner Sanctum, he claimed), how he knew where the dungeons were, and so on. Eliza listened politely until they reached the end of the south wing. A thin corridor wound its way around the tower, leading them into the east wing.

“What’s in the towers?” Eliza asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Not allowed in. I’ll find out eventually, though.”

“We could probably sneak in,” said Eliza. “Somehow.”

“Aye,” said Charlie, giving her an appreciative look. “I bet we could.”

They entered the Portrait Gallery through an arched opening that led into a high-ceilinged six-sided room. The room was dark and the white tile floor was inlaid with black tile crabs. The walls were lined with framed portraits of Mancers, white-robed and fiery-eyed, all with a black crab on their robes, over the heart.

“Manipulators of water from a long time ago,” said Charlie, leading her through another arched doorway into a nearly identical room. This room opened onto two others, also the same. “See, the ones in the gold frames were Emissariae.”

“What?”

“Emissariae. You know, the ones who can leave the Citadel.”

Eliza had been to a museum before, when she was six years old and visiting Kalla with her father. She remembered endless halls full of paintings and sculptures, the muted lighting and the eerie hush. This was like sneaking into a museum at night, deserted and unlit, the figures in the paintings glaring down from within their frames, as if they wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong.

“Simathien,” said Charlie, pointing to one portrait set in an ornate alcove above the others, as if it were of particular importance. Eliza nodded, though it meant nothing to her. He looked like every other Mancer.

They passed through seven-sided rooms with ruby birds tiled on the floors, turquoise serpents in eight-sided rooms, ivory bears set amid darker tiles in large nine-sided rooms, and golden human figures in five-sided rooms. She wanted to have a closer look at the portraits, but Charlie was getting impatient, leading her at a near-run up narrow marble staircases and through further mazes of portrait rooms to some particular destination. He stopped when they came out into a rectangular hall. Bright mosaics on the floor created a sea of colour but no discernible picture, and the portraits on the wall here were larger than what they had seen before.

“There’s twenty-eight of them,” said Charlie proudly, as if he’d painted them all himself. “From the first Supreme Mancer to the one now. Mancers only live about five hundred years, aye.”

“How old are you?” Eliza asked, amused.

“Thirteen,” he said, a bit defensively.

Eliza looked around at the portraits. Here by the door was Kyreth, she thought, though it was difficult to be sure. It was a hard, oblong face. The high brow gave him a thoughtful appearance, but his sharp cheekbones and jawline and his aquiline nose looked as if they had been carved out of rock. His mouth was a thin, stern line. With their strong, unlined faces and fair hair, the Mancers all looked rather similar, but up close one could detect differences in their features.

“Is Karbek here?” Eliza asked, for even she had heard of the Mancer who first separated the worlds, and for whom the great Di Shang mountain range was named. They crossed the hall so Charlie could point him out to her. He looked rather savage, she thought.

“Who painted them all?” she asked. “It couldnay have been painted while he was alive. It doesnay look old at all.”

“They dinnay get painted, exactly,” said Charlie. “Least, there’s no painter. Come on, I have a surprise for you.”

And again they were running through room after room of portraits. Eliza was vividly aware of how terrible it would be to get lost here. One could spend days, surely, wandering these rooms without finding one’s way out. They came to another big hall, but this one was different. It was lined not with portraits of Mancers but of women. Each one wore a black tunic over black leggings and each one bore the same slender white rod about the length of her arm.

“Is this...?” She let the question hang there, unable to finish it.

“These are the Shang Sorceresses,” said Charlie, grinning widely. “There are a lot more rooms like this one, but this is the most recent one. Come over here.”

Eliza found herself looking straight up at a life-sized portrait of her mother. She recognized her from her photograph, but her expression here was entirely different. She was wearing the same outfit as all the others and looking defiantly at something in the distance. She too was holding the white rod.

“Not that one,” said Charlie, nudging her and pointing. Eliza followed his finger to the portrait next to her mother’s. A bolt of alarm rocketed through her.

“That’s me!” she cried indignantly. “Why have they got one of me? Who painted it?”

“I told you, no one painted it,” said Charlie, watching her carefully. “Why dinnay you know about any of this mess? I thought you were...you know.”

Eliza couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t like looking at the portrait of herself, didn’t like the sullen expression that had been captured on her face. She noticed that all the portraits but hers had a date inscribed on the bottom of the frame, with a line in an unfamiliar script.

“Can you read this?” she asked Charlie, pointing to the inscription under her mother’s portrait.

To her surprise, he nodded. “We learn in school, aye. For reading Tian Xia literature or something. It’s the Language of First Days.”

“Lah, what does it say?”

“Killed in battle,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

Her heart plummeted. Her father had lied about this, too, then. About everything.

“What about this one?” she asked quickly, going on to her grandmother’s portrait.

“They all say the same thing, aye,” he said in a soft voice.

Eliza felt sick. She walked right around the hall, looking at all these women, supposedly her grandmother, her great-grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, and so on, every single one of them killed in battle. Clearly, being a Sorceress was a dangerous business. Kyreth’s talk about the line of the Sorceress had been abstract and confusing, but here in the Portrait Gallery it began to sink in. But even if her mother had been a Sorceress, Eliza thought to herself, she was not anything of the kind. It was a mistake, a horrible mistake. Her portrait did not belong here. She did not belong here.

Charlie left her alone for a while but he came back shortly and pulled her out of her reverie.

“The Mancers are done for the day,” he said. “They’re meeting in the grand dining hall. It’s the only place where they can all sit around a table.”

“Is there a door there?” Eliza asked immediately. “I mean, one we can find?”

“I know a better way if you want to eavesdrop,” he said. “That is what you want to do, nay?”

“Of course,” said Eliza, thinking that Nell and Charlie would get along famously.

~

In the kitchen back in the south wing, Charlie explained that the chimneys to the fireplaces were all connected and he made sure the flues were always open so that sound could flow freely. The two of them crouched right inside the wide fireplace. They could make out a good deal, if not all, of what the Mancers were saying.

“...The only possible culprit. None other would be powerful enough to work Magic that resists our detection,” Kyreth was saying.

“Your Eminence, may I speak?”

“Speak, Obrad,” said Kyreth.

Obrad. The one they had intended for her mother. If her mother had obeyed them, Eliza would not exist.

“If we are certain the intruder came with the girl, as a hitchhiker of sorts, then it did not need to break any barrier. Unwitting, we brought it with us. The spell itself...” Eliza did not hear the end of his sentence, but Kyreth responded angrily.

“How it came is irrelevant. The spell it worked once here was undoubtedly Great Magic.”

“But we have confirmed that the...other one is still safely imprisoned,” came another voice. “The intruder cannot possess much power of its own or we would have felt its presence today from the Inner Sanctum. Whatever spell it worked must have been prepared ahead of time. By her.”

Now Kyreth was speaking softly and rapidly and Eliza heard only fragments: “...until we know more...vigilance...best she does not know too much.”

“And if the girl cannot...?” somebody asked. Eliza strained for the end of the sentence but could not catch it.

Kyreth murmured some reply, the only part of which she understood being, “Tomorrow she will begin.” Then he raised his voice and said, “The sun is setting. Go. Rest.”

Eliza and Charlie sat in the ashy fireplace and looked at each other. Eliza’s heart was thumping painfully.

“I’ve got homework, aye,” said Charlie, abruptly getting up and brushing his pants off. “See you tomorrow.”

“Homework?” exclaimed Eliza. “Is it nay your summer holiday?”

“We get piles of homework for the summer,” he said with a roll of his eyes that she hoped was intended for his teachers and not for her. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and sauntered off, whistling. Eliza sat in the fireplace, alone with her turbulent thoughts, until Missus Ash happened upon her.

“That’s no place to sit about. Lah, you’re filthy! You’ll have to wash up before supper.”

Missus Ash was terribly excited by the day’s events. She put Eliza’s chicken stew in front of her, saying, “I will say, lass, you’ve brought a good deal of excitement with you. Almost all day they spent in the Inner Sanctum! An intruder, we’ve got! We’ll have to keep an eye out. But no need for you to fret. The Mancers will protect you. Powerful, powerful beings they are, aye. What I can nay fathom is how an intruder got in here, with all the mystical barriers they’ve got. They must be puzzling that out themselves.”

“They said it came with me.”

“Oh, did it, aye? Little invisible something hanging on to you? Is that what they think?”

“I dinnay know what they think.”

“Lah, dinnay worry, little mite, they’ll sort it all out in no time. No one can get at you with that trinket you’re wearing, aye.”

Eliza found this small comfort. Missus Ash took her back to her room after supper, where she changed into the nightgown she’d left on the floor and lay down on the huge bed. A profound loneliness gripped her and she curled into a ball.

Eliza was no stranger to change and upheaval. She had been only seven years old when she’d had to walk an hour down the mountainside in the snow and the freezing wind to the little school in the Karbek mountains. The mentor there, a man with chapped red hands and watery eyes, had introduced her to the six other students, whom she saw only as a group of pinched, unwashed faces staring at her with undisguised hostility. She remembered how she had felt sitting down at her desk that first day, shivering and miserable in her boots and coat. It had seemed impossible, intolerable that this would be her life from now on. And yet within a few weeks that long walk to and from school was simply habit, and if she was lonely at school, that too was nothing out of the ordinary. She got used to everything in the end, simply waiting out the worst until she and her father moved on.

But this was stranger and more frightening than the Karbek mountains, the scowling men with guns at their hips in Huir-Kosta, or the bandit raids in Quan, and she was entirely alone, without her father to comfort and take care of her. She longed for his broad, cool hand on her forehead, his wry grin and laughing eyes. She wanted to be in Holburg, in her own bed, listening to the wind in the trees, straining for the sound of the surf. A sob swelled in her chest. Before she released it she heard a little scuffling sound and a soft mew. She looked up to see a lanky grey cat at the foot of the bed looking at her with bright, inquisitive eyes.

“Hi, you,” said Eliza, reaching out a hand. The cat approached, sniffed her fingers once or twice, then rubbed its face up against her hand. A purr rose from its throat. Eliza lifted the cat onto her stomach and lay back against the pillows, her tears unshed. In fact, she was terribly tired. With the warm body of the cat against hers, its deep purr soothing her, she fell quickly and soundly asleep.