House of Shadows (17 page)
The door swung open and the proprietor came in. Taudde, ducking sideways and down, got just enough of a glimpse to recognize the man. He dropped to his knees, out of sight behind a bank of shelves that held more blanks and a large collection of clay jars and opaque glass bottles. Some of the bottles rattled gently as his abrupt motion rocked the shelves, and Taudde held his breath, listening intently. He could hear the proprietor moving unhurriedly about the shop and began to believe that he was, for the moment, undiscovered. This was good, although it did not answer the larger question of how he was going to get out of the shop. Bardic sorcery was out of the question; he certainly couldn’t play a single note without the proprietor hearing, and any suggestion of sorcery connected with this shop… No. It would be very bad to have anyone make
that
connection.
Taudde silently uncorked one of the bottles on the shelf in front of him and sniffed at its contents. Something sharp, astringent… familiar. He identified the smell after a moment: a cleaning solution used to remove glues and waxes from a craftsman’s hands. He put the cork back in the bottle and set the bottle back on the shelf, then picked up a second bottle. This one contained a heavily viscous oil used to cure certain kinds of reeds and light woods. He hesitated over this bottle, but then put it back and selected a third.
There were mysterious scraping sounds, wood against wood, which after a moment Taudde identified as the sound of shutters being opened… It occurred to him, belatedly, that he had forgotten to close the shutters over the window above the table. He
cursed inwardly, listening to the approaching steps. And the pause in those steps. The man had just noticed the open shutters, Taudde surmised. Either the proprietor was asking himself how he’d managed to forget to close them the previous evening, or else he was asking himself
whether
he’d forgotten. Probably he was also noticing the smell of burning lamp oil; possibly he was even reaching out to touch the lamp and confirm that it was still hot from recent burning… Who knew what else Taudde had altered and then forgotten, which the shop proprietor would instantly notice?
Taudde uncapped the third bottle. The scent of this one’s contents was heady and strong: rosemary oil, used to keep the skin of an instrumentalist’s hands supple. Perfect. Taudde splashed the oil generously across two wooden blanks, set them alight with his candlelighter as the scent of rosemary rose around him, and threw both blanks high over the shelves toward the back of the shop.
The clatter and alarmed gasp that resulted was gratifying, but Taudde did not stay to listen. It wouldn’t take the man long at all to put out the fires; unlike the curing oil, rosemary oil wouldn’t burn with any great vigor. He ducked low around the other end of the shelves and sprinted for the door.
It was locked. Taudde, not expecting this, was momentarily too startled to do anything but jerk on the handle. Ominous sounds behind him indicated the shop’s proprietor might already have dealt with the little fires and be heading through the clutter toward the front of the shop. Taudde found his flute in his hand. The temptation to simply use sorcery to slip across distance and out of peril was overwhelming.
But if he used sorcery here, and the shop’s proprietor realized it—and if the man knew his own stock well enough to guess what Taudde had made—he might even be perceptive enough to put the pieces together after Taudde’s pipes were put to the use for which he’d made them. The risk was impossible, but the heavy door wasn’t going to yield to any simple blow, either. From a table near the door, Taudde swept up the heavy brass statue of a rearing horse, spun back toward the door, took the one long step required,
and slammed the statue end-on directly against the lock. He hid a short, whistled, precisely calculated melodic phrase in the crash the statue made as it struck the door, and the lock shattered. One more blow and the door was open, and Taudde was through it on that instant and sprinting down the wide street.
Twenty feet, thirty, forty and he could at last cut sideways down a different street—he threw a look over his shoulder as he ran and glimpsed the proprietor just emerging from his shop. Not likely the man had gotten much of a look at Taudde—he thought—and in the wide, empty streets of the early-morning Paliante, he now had the space he needed for proper sorcery. Though hardly the breath he needed to play himself out of the Paliante and across Lonne, straight back into the safety of his rented house. Relative safety. Taudde played the merest whisper of inattention and invisibility as he slipped past Nala and Benne and up the stairs into his own room. Then, shivering, he dropped his flute into its pocket, closed his shutters against the brilliance of the morning, and collapsed to sit on the floor next to his bed. For a while, he did nothing but sit there, his head tilted back against the mattress and his eyes closed. Then, eventually, he took out the two sets of twin pipes he’d made—at such unexpected hazard, and carrying worse hazard within their seeming innocence—and laid them out on the floor next to his knee.
The pipes were beautiful. A fine example of the bard’s craft. Taudde had made too many sets of pipes to recall, but he couldn’t remember when he’d made better. But he could see the death they carried within their craftsmanship, and he could hardly stand to look at them.
S
tepping out of darkness, stepping into remembered light, Nemienne found herself in the middle of the long gallery that ran along the back of her father’s house. She turned in a bewildered circle, for that first moment not trusting that she had come home. Her eyes were dazzled by the light that filled the gallery from the eight lanterns that hung on hooks from the ceiling.
Then Jehenne, sitting beside Miande on the next bed over, screamed with startled joy and jumped forward into Nemienne’s arms. Nemienne reflexively caught her little sister and held her tightly. Lifting her eyes, she met Miande’s wide bewildered gaze, and then found Liaska and Tana, equally astonished, clinging together and looking not quite certain whether they should be happy or alarmed.
It was Miande who came forward after that brief pause and took Nemienne’s hands, exclaiming at how cold they were. It was Miande who sent Tana to bring Enelle, and who fetched a blanket from her own bed to toss around Nemienne’s shoulders, and who pulled Nemienne over to the fireplace at the far end of the gallery. Jehenne clung to Nemienne’s hand through this, and then sat on the floor nestled up against her when Nemienne, shivering with cold and reaction, sank down by the hearth.
“Go bring some mulled cider,” Miande told Liaska, who clearly needed a job to settle her down. Then Miande knelt down next to Nemienne and looked anxiously into her face. “Are you well?”
She did not ask,
Where did you come from?
Or,
How did you come like that out of the air?
Nemienne, though she had known her sisters loved her, had somehow not expected such evidence of it. She felt almost overwhelmed by affection for Miande and Jehenne—for all her sisters, but perhaps especially for these two, who had so clearly missed her. Guilt at how little she had missed them in return scored her heart. She missed them now, retroactively, as though their absence in the past days echoed suddenly forward into this startling present. She put an arm around Jehenne and hugged her close. “I’m well—I’m happy—except I miss you, love. All of you,” she added, reaching out to pat Miande’s arm. “And have
you
been well? I know you’ve been busy. Have you been helping Enelle?” she asked Jehenne.
“Yes, I wrote out all the invitations,” Jehenne answered, with shy pride. “And Miande is making these amazing cakes for the wedding.”
Enelle came up the stairs and into the gallery, not running, but at a very dignified adult pace. She had Liaska with her and the same questions Miande had not quite asked in her eyes. But Enelle didn’t ask those questions either. She said only, as Liaska pressed a mug of cider into Nemienne’s hands, “Ananda is with Petris. They’re drawing up plans for their wedding. I didn’t want to alarm Petris. If you don’t need to see Ananda, I think we oughtn’t disturb them. I left Tana with them to preserve propriety.”
The care and thoroughness with which Enelle always approached every task was exactly as Nemienne remembered, but the edge of bitterness was new. Nemienne put her hands up for Enelle’s and drew her sister down to sit with her by the fire. Enelle resisted the tug for a moment, but then yielded and sank down. Jehenne pressed in from the other side and held Nemienne’s hand. The fire, burning with a somehow more ordinary kind of heat than Mage Ankennes’s fires ever seemed to, warmed their backs.
“Everything is very well,” Nemienne told Enelle—told them all. This reassurance tasted oddly ambiguous on the back of her tongue, and she hesitated for a second. But it was perfectly true,
after all. “Mage Ankennes is kind and generous, exactly as the mother of Cloisonné House said. His house is strange but not—not generally alarming. I took a… a wrong turn, I suppose, and got…” She edited her explanation hastily. “… lost.”
“Lost? In the
house
?” Liaska seemed more intrigued than alarmed by this. “I’d like to see a house you can get lost in!”
“It’s… well, it’s a strange house. But beautifully strange,” Nemienne assured her youngest sister. “Usually. I like it. And I love what I’m learning—Mage Ankennes is teaching me wonderful things.” She tried to think of some things she’d learned that seemed charming and harmless and didn’t have anything to do with frightening reaches of heavy darkness. “How to find small things that have been lost. How to read words in a language you don’t know. How to call a fire out of the air to light a candle.”
“Is that better than lighting a candle with a candlelighter?” Miande asked, baffled.
“Well,” Nemienne said, laughing a little at this practical question, “it’s different. I like it.” She met Enelle’s eyes as she said this, and Enelle gave a little nod, her tight expression easing a little.
“It would be really splendid to be able to read languages you never learned,” exclaimed Jehenne, who had recently begun learning the languages of the far islands, Erhlianne and Samenne, and found them heavy going.
“I’ll try to teach you someday, after I know the way of it better myself,” promised Nemienne. “But the house can be, well, difficult. I got lost tonight, and when I thought of light and warmth and…” She did not want to say
safety
. “Anyway, I came here.” She looked around the gallery where her bed still stood, at the interested, bewildered faces of her sisters and the cheerful fire. “How nice it is here!” she exclaimed. “I have my own room in Mage Ankennes’s house, you know…”
“Your own room,” Liaska repeated enviously. “Is it pretty?”
“Yes, and I love it, but I hadn’t realized I miss all this warmth and crowding. Tell me—tell me everything. The wedding plans are nearly finished, Enelle, surely? Jehenne, will you find one of your
invitations to show me? Miande, have you decided what you’ll serve the guests? Are you keeping out of trouble and helping Enelle, Liaska?”
Everyone, even Enelle, tried to answer at once, and for an hour Nemienne lost herself in the familiar warmth and chatter. She tried not to talk about herself or Mage Ankennes, for nothing about the mage or his strange house seemed quite real here in the noisy company of her sisters. But Jehenne brought Nemienne a book from Samenne and listened, fascinated, as Nemienne tried to explain how you could read a new language without learning it first. And then Liaska wanted to see Nemienne light a candle without a candlelighter.
“That’s enough, now, Liaska,” Enelle said firmly. “If Nemienne wants to, and if she thinks it would be all right with Mage Ankennes, she can show you that in the morning.”
“Oh,” Nemienne, startled, and looked at the hourglass on the fireplace mantel. She said reluctantly, “I had better go back.”
“Already?” said Miande.
“But you just came!” protested Jehenne.
“You have to show us all the other magic things you’ve learned!” cried Liaska.
“Is it so urgent you should go back?” asked Enelle, cautiously. “Is Mage Ankennes so strict?”
Nemienne stood up, drawing Enelle up with her. She embraced her sister and smiled at her, around at them all. All the brief terror of the strange darkness seemed distant and much less disturbing in this familiar place. She said—and was relieved to hear no unexpected ambiguity in the statement—“I’m happy being apprenticed to Mage Ankennes. I am happy.” She paused to appreciate this thought, still odd to her, especially in these familiar surroundings. “The mage is kind to me, and he is teaching me so many things I never knew—never knew I wanted to learn. I’ve loved seeing you all, but look at the glass! Time’s passed so fast! And I don’t want to be gone when Mage Ankennes looks for me in the morning.”