House of Shadows(50)
“You are very tired,” Mage Ankennes said, amused. “So am I, as my night was also eventful, in its way. Finish your breakfast. Have a bath and a little nap. Come find me when you have rested and had a look through the beech door and the door with the carved animals. Not the other, just yet. Yes?”
“Yes!” Nemienne said, and flushed at the eagerness in her voice, but the amusement in the mage’s face only deepened. He left her in the warmth and she heard his heavy tread going… she listened carefully… up the stairs, toward his workroom. Or perhaps whatever else might be upstairs for him. She wondered whether the upper hall had also sprouted wonderful new doors for her during that long night.
Nemienne wanted very badly to go peek through the doors right away, but she was very tired. After having to be rescued from the porch like a stray kitten, she thought she had better be dutiful. So, a bath and a nap. Nemienne yawned her way from the kitchen to her small room and slept for five hours.
When Nemienne at last opened it, the beech door opened into a forest of leaves. Nemienne blinked. The smooth gray boles of trees crowded into her sight; the pale jade green of leaves fluttered overhead. Roots tangled beneath a carpet of golden leaves from past autumns. Here and there outcrops of white stone shoved up from the black earth. A thin silvery stream meandered gently across the wood, from an unknown source to an unguessable destination, and a warm breeze, smelling of green growth and damp earth, made its tentative way through the trees.
Charmed beyond words, Nemienne almost stepped into the wood and went looking for the source of the little stream. Only the memory of the last door she’d stepped through and immediately lost kept her from this adventure. She did not want Mage Ankennes to be forced to rescue her from an enchanted beech wood in some unknown country of dark earth and gentle streams.
Nemienne closed the door gently, half expecting it to vanish softly back into the paneling of the hall. But the smooth gray door simply shut with a gentle click. She almost thought she saw its carved leaves flutter in an unseen breeze. But when she touched one, it was only quiet wood under her fingers.
Nemienne was almost reluctant to go down the hall to the next door, feeling that whatever that door opened onto must surely be less amazing than the beech wood. And that, well, if it opened to reveal something disturbing or ugly, it would somehow soil the memory of the leaves and the woodland breeze. But at the same time she was very curious.
The carved animals contained within the sharp, jagged patterns on the second door were not ordinary creatures, she saw upon closer inspection. There were slender, elongated creatures a little like deer, only with longer legs and necks and a far greater delicacy of bone than ordinary deer, and with smooth straight horns instead of antlers. The jagged patterns surrounding them suggested cliffs, as though they leaped from ledge to ledge across the stark landscape of a mountain. Scattered among the deer were animals like dogs, longer legged and more graceful than ordinary dogs, but Nemienne could not tell whether they hunted the deer or not. On the uppermost panels there were birds like eagles, only everything about them was sharp edged, as though their feathers had been made out of slivers of glass and the edges of knives.
The eyes of the carved animals were set with jewels: agate and lapis and amethyst. Traceries of alabaster and mother-of-pearl and abalone shell had been inlaid here and there, along the elegant arched neck of an animal or weaving through the feathers of a bird. The light glittering from this inlay suggested movement, giving Nemienne the impression that in a moment the carved creatures might leap away or turn to look at her.
Nemienne opened this door cautiously. She did not know what she expected, only something exotic and amazing. What she found was a music room. As this did not seem as fraught with possibility as the beech wood—indeed, it seemed a little disappointing—Nemienne stepped through the doorway. An ornate floor harp stood in the center of the room. A dragon was carved all down its face—not the more familiar sea dragon, but a serpentine creature with a long elegant head. Its talons were of opal, its throat and spine edged with mother-of-pearl. Delicate antennae tipped with lapis nodded above its eyes, which were as dark as the winter sky. Above the dragon were set three beads, one above the next: a bead of smoky glass, a bead of hematite, and a silvery pearl. Nemienne at once thought of the book by Kelle Iasodde, of his discussion of the ephemeral versus the eternal. She resolved to search for what meaning the pearl might have when balanced against glass and iron.
Symbolic meaning aside, she could not begin to imagine what such an elaborate harp must have cost. She touched a harp string, but gently, not sounding the note.