House of Shadows(35)

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.