House of Shadows(9)

The room behind the door was wide and warm, filled with light from lanterns and four generous windows on its far side. The windows did not look out into the Lane of Shadows but rather over the mountain heights. Nemienne, fascinated, went to the nearest and put her hands on the sill, standing on her toes to peer out. Cold struck, knife sharp, through the glass of the window. Mist blew across the jagged peaks, veiling and unveiling gray stone streaked with ice. Nemienne could almost discern the unfolding wing of a great insubstantial dragon in the shifting of the mist. Sunlight glinting from the ice was like the opening of a crystalline eye.

Enelle crossed the room and put a hand nervously on Nemienne’s, as unhappy with the strange sharp beauty of the mountain heights as Nemienne was drawn to it. Her hand trembled. Nemienne put an arm around her sister, turning away from the windows. Indeed, once her attention had been pulled from the heights, she found herself looking with real fascination around the room in which they had found themselves.

An enormous table stood, surrounded by mismatched chairs, before an even more enormous fireplace that took up almost the entire wall behind it. The fire that burned in that fireplace occupied only a small area in the center, but it was intensely hot and very fragrant. Nemienne wondered what kind of wood the mage might be burning.

The entire surface of the table was cluttered with glass jars, piles of loose papers, angular metal objects that Nemienne thought might be a geometer’s tools, and a tall stack of books that seemed likely at any moment to slide down and crush a spun-glass confection of no obvious purpose. A much smaller and neater writing desk sat to one side of the fireplace, its tall-backed chair pulled out and turned as though inviting somebody to sit down in it. At the moment, the cat was sitting in that chair. No one else was in the room. The cat groomed its shoulder, ignoring the girls.

Enelle let out a breath and gazed around with interest, looking much happier in the warmth and light. “Isn’t this just exactly the workroom of a mage?” she said in a low voice to Nemienne. “What do you suppose that glass thing on the table is for?”

Both the comment and the question were so precisely what Nemienne had been thinking that she blinked and so missed the exact instant Mage Ankennes entered the room.

The mage was a broad man with powerful shoulders; he looked at first glance more like a man accustomed to earn his bread with the strength of his body than with his magecraft. But a second look found that his face was carved with lines of discipline and silence, and his slate-gray eyes were as secretive as the windows of his house. He looked at Enelle and Nemienne curiously, as he might have looked at two odd, foreign insects that had inexplicably turned up in his workroom, and Nemienne felt a shiver of disquiet run down her spine and lift the fine hairs on the back of her neck. She leaned closer to her sister, and Enelle simultaneously leaned toward her, so that their shoulders touched.

Then Ankennes smiled, and immediately the impression of chilly secretiveness vanished. His eyes met Nemienne’s, and if the curiosity in them sharpened, this was offset by the warmth of his smile. He said courteously, in a deep smooth voice, “May I hope for the opportunity to serve you?”

“I—” said Enelle, with some confusion. “We—”

“The Mother of Cloisonné House suggested we might come to you,” said Nemienne, quickly, to cover her sister’s distress.

“Charming Narienneh!” said the mage. And added, his eyes still on Nemienne’s, “Clever Narienneh. Yes, I can well believe she might. By all means, please sit. Will you have tea?” At the table, two of the chairs slid back, turning invitingly, and hot tea poured itself out of the air into a pair of heavy white porcelain mugs that had suddenly appeared amidst the clutter.

“I believe I may guess what has brought you young women to my house,” said Ankennes, pulling a steaming mug out of the air for himself and dropping heavily into the biggest chair at the table. The cat leaped lightly down from its chair, wove its way among table and chair legs, and jumped up on the table to sit at his elbow. The mage made room for it absently, shoving jars out of the way. He said, “But you had better tell me, eh?”

Enelle sat down gingerly in a chair, mindful of a stack of papers weighted with a jar of round red marbles close by her left elbow. Nemienne took the other chair and breathed in the fragrant steam from her mug. The tea was spiced with something unfamiliar and not quite sweet.

Enelle cleared her throat. “Our father was Geranes Lihadde,” she said. Her tentativeness was giving way again to her practiced businesslike manner.

“Yes,” said the mage, both interest and sympathy in his tone. “I had heard of your father’s untimely death. I sorrow for your loss.”