THUNDERCLOUDS PILED BLACKLY Overhead,and the rumble of distant thunder was a constant undercurrent to the argument. “No!” Keman shouted, his tail lashing. “I don’t believe you, Mother! Shana is my sister, she’s more my sister than that lazy lump of spite everyone else calls my sister! She is in danger, and you took me away before I could help her! And I’m going back there, and nothing you can say is going to stop me!”
“Keman—” His mother glanced over her shoulder uneasily; they were arguing in the middle of the Lair valley, and his shouting was beginning to attract a crowd.
“I told you, I’m going back, and you can’t stop me!” he repeated, uncomfortably aware that his voice was cracking from the strain, which wasn’t doing much for the confident, adult image he was trying to project.
“Maybe she cannot,” a voice rumbled warningly behind him, “but we can. The halfblood was cast out, young Keman, and there’s an end to it.”
Keman managed to suppress the immediate reaction of turning round about and cowering submissively to Keoke. The time was over for submission, and the fact that Keoke was an Elder had very little bearing on the matter. Keoke was wrong , and Keman had decided on the flight home, ignobly carried in his mother’s claws, that he was no longer going to submit tamely to injustice, even if it was delivered by an Elder.
“Shana was punished, when Rovy should have been, and you all know it, Mother! I am not going to stand here and let your cowardice hurt her any—”
A wing-buffet from behind sent him rolling end over end, coming up against a rock, and sprawling ungracefully at the foot of the cliff.
Keoke towered over him, the Elder’s eyes red with anger, but it was to Keman’s mother he spoke, not to Keman.
“That is beyond the bounds, even for your son, shaman,” Keoke growled. “I suggest that you confine him to your lair until he has learned some manners and some concern for the Kin instead of placing so much importance on his own peculiar ideas of justice.”
Alara hung her head as the rest of the dragons around her rumbled their agreement. Keman stood up, shaking his head to clear it, and found himself surrounded too closely even to allow him to spread his wings. He had no doubt that if he tried, the others would seize them, and too bad if the membranes tore in the process.
He was “escorted” to the lair, his mother trailing along behind, and he sulked every step of the way.
Rocks for brains and stones for souls, every one of them, he thought angrily, making no effort to shield his thoughts, and not caring who happened to overhear. Too stupid to change and too complacent to want to. If we were back Home right now, they’d probably refuse to use the Gate! Hidebound, overfed, underexercised, feckless, selfish, prejudiced, unreasonable, obstinate —
:That will be quite enough, Keman,: his mother said sharply. .-Everyone in the Lair knows your opinion by now, I’m sure .:
Good, he thought. :Fine, let them cast me out too ,: he replied bitterly. . I deserve it as much as Shana. After all, I didn’t sufficiently humble myself to Rovy, so obviously I provoked him into a justifiable attack on—:
:I saidenough, Kemanorel ,: his mother interrupted. Warned by her tone, Keman subsided until they both were deep inside the lair. Their escort had tactfully remained outside.
Alara paused; Keman didn’t. He kept going right past her, head down, tail dragging, making straight for the dubious sanctuary of his own cavelet.
“Keman,” she said tentatively.
“What?” he replied churlishly, smoldering with anger and making no effort to hide it.
“Keman, I’ll find Shana, and I’ll take her somewhere safe,” she said. “I’ll do my best—”
He turned, and looked her straight in the eyes. “Mother,” he said coldly and clearly, “I don’t believe you.”
And with that, he flung himself into his cave, extinguished the light, and curled up in the dark with his back to the entrance.
He waited, while Alara stood just outside, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Finally she left, without saying a word.
Thunder echoed down through the entrance of the lair, and the earth shook with it, even this far underground. This would be a storm of monumental force—
Which suited Keman’s plans entirely.
Keman waited a moment to see if his mother would return, but there was no sign of her. But rather than creep to the entrance of his cave and look, he stretched himself out on his hoard, rested his chin on his foreclaws, and closed his eyes.
He reached out, carefully, delicately, with his mind.
He made no attempt to make contact with those minds he sensed around him, only to identify who they were and, more importantly, where.
In the passageway leading to the rear entrance, swelling with self-importance, was Myre. Just beyond her, lurking outside the entrance, Rovy. Predictably, the bully was lurking above the entrance, so that he could drop down on Keman if he tried to escape that way. And lying across the front entrance was his mother, her mind dark with guilt.
So. They thought they had him pinned down.
They thought they’d covered all the entrances.
But none of them had accompanied Shana on her little rounds of exploration, and none of them knew that the wall at the rear of the storage caverns that separated Alara’s lair from an empty one was no longer quite intact.
Keman slunk out of his cave, belly flat to the ground, his scaled hide changed to a rough blue-gray texture that matched the stone around him. Whenever he thought he heard or sensed something, he froze. Unless someone knew exactly what to look for, they never would have spotted him.
He reached the storage caves without incident, while thunder continued to roll down the long, echoing tunnels of the lair, giving only a hint of the fury outside.
He took his time, carefully displacing stones so that they wouldn’t rattle against each other and alert Myre or his mother. He considered, briefly, trying to build it up again from inside, then decided against it. He wouldn’t be back to need this particular escape route again. He had every intention of seeing to it that he never set eyes on another of the Kin.
The next lair was a small one, in poor repair.
Thunder pounded through it, echoing off every wall as clearly as if he stood beneath the open sky. Fitful flashes of directionless light accompanied it. He picked his way carefully across the stone-strewn floor, sometimes catching a claw on a stray rock, or stubbing a toe painfully. Fortunately he and Shana had fully explored this little retreat; and once he reached the far wall, he saw clearly what he had been watching for: the flickering blue fire of lightning, illuminating the ceiling and the chimney-hole that pierced the center dome of the lair.
That hole was his route to freedom, which would take him outside above the heads of everyone watching for him, under cover of the storm.
All he had to do was reach it.
He sighed, transformed his claws into something much more suited to rock-climbing. Talons thickened, straightened into short, hard spikes; claws became more handlike, and covered with tough skin. He set all four feet into the wall, and began his ascent.
Outside nothing was visible but a tree-covered hill. There was no sign of anyone living here, much less all this!
Shana stood at the entrance to the cave, with the mage-curtain sparkling behind her, and gawked without shame. If the Kin ever saw this, it would start a whole new fashion! Buildings inside a cave—and this one must be bigger than that place they held her in. She still couldn’t believe it.
“This is the Citadel,” Rennis said, waving his hand at the edifice beyond. “You can’t see all of it, of course; the old wizards used a lot of the tunnels and caverns behind the building as well. That tripled the size of the inhabited section, at least at the height of our glory. So, there it is: the Citadel, never discovered, never taken, not even when the wizards themselves were defeated.”
Even in ruins, with the facade of the building crumbling from age, and what plaster remained spotted with mildew, it was an impressive sight. The ceiling of the cave was hidden, as in the elven lords’ buildings, behind a soft, amber glow. Unlike the little light-balls created by the dragons, this magically created light-source illuminated clearly everything in the main cavern. The shield-wall spell across the entrance, which would admit only those it was keyed to, effectively hid the reality of the Citadel behind an illusion of a shallow, uninteresting rocky cavity in the hillside, floored with dry leaves and sand and hosting only a spider or two.
This was not a water-carved cave as was the lair—or at least, there was no sign here of the hand of nature. Floor, walls, and ceiling were smooth, unmarked expanses of rock. A shallow staircase, also carved from the living rock, led down to the floor of the place. The entire hill had been hollowed out by magic, energies still resonating faintly in the walls, with the massive, yet graceful building dominating the farther wall, and artificially nurtured plants and trees growing right up to the staircase at their feet. Sheep grazed in little white clumps across the cavern, completely unconcerned that their backs were being warmed by magic, and not natural sunlight.
A stone-paved path led across a lawn of rough, sheep-cropped grass towards the building. The Citadel was made of the same yellow stone as the cavern, constructed as completely unlike an elven lord’s hall as possible. This place was multistoried, and virtually all the space that was not load-bearing was devoted to windows looking out on the artificial park.
Zed, growing impatient, pushed past them, muttering something.
Over the yellow stone, plaster had been applied, to make the building glow a pure, unsullied white.
It must have been magnificent when it was new, Shana thought, wishing that she could have seen it.
Surely it had gleamed in its little green park like a moonstone on velvet.
Now most of the windows were dark, empty sockets. The plaster had fallen from the stone, leaving large patches of yellow. The stonework itself was cracked, and the grass was taking over the path. The trees and bushes had been allowed to spread without hindrance, and were shaggy and unkempt, except where the sheep had nibbled them.
Still, there was something impressive about it even yet. Certainly taken as a unit, with the building and the cavern that housed it counting as “the Citadel,” it was the single most remarkable piece of human handiwork Shana had ever seen. They rivaled even the elven-built city in some ways, because the city had been mostly built by human hands, not elven magic. The Citadel was entirely halfblood work, and constructed entirely by magic.
And that it all stood after these many hundreds of years was a further testament to the powers of those old wizards. They must have been so powerful …
“Well, come along, Shana,” Rennis said, patting her on the shoulder, startling her. “You have a lot of things you have to do so you can get settled in.” He walked forward and down the steps, leading his horse carefully so that it didn’t stumble.
“I do?” she said, following him, while Zed strode ahead of them stiffly, already leading his horse up the path to the Citadel.
“Of course,” Rennis replied indulgently, looking back over his shoulder at her. “You’ll have to meet your master, be shown your quarters, learn where everything is—”
“Wait!” Shana said, stopping dead in the middle of the path, alarmed at the word “master.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any slaves here!”
“What?” Rennis turned back to her with a face full of astonishment. “Of course there aren’t any slaves—”
She planted her feet far apart, and set her hands on her hips. “Then why am I going to have a master?” she asked, raising her chin aggressively.
To her surprise—and anger—Rennis began to laugh. She’d had more than enough of being laughed at lately, she thought with annoyance. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t understand things! She would very much have liked to see how he would do, plopped down in the middle of the Lair!
“I’m sorry, child,” Rennis said—though he didn’t sound in the least sorry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I keep forgetting how little you know of us. Your ‘master’ will be a senior wizard, Denelor Vyrthan, and he will be your ‘master’ only in the sense that he is the master of his magical abilities and your teacher, while you will be his apprentice and his pupil. Along with several other young wizards, of course. Mind, you will be expected to clean up and cook for him, and do a few other things for him; that’s what apprentices do to pay for their teaching. But you’ll have several other youngsters to share the work with you.”
“Oh,” Shana replied, since some sort of reply seemed in order. “All right, then. But I can’t cook.”
“I suppose not,” Rennis replied thoughtfully. “Well, you ought to learn. If you go out on a journey, how do you expect to get your meals otherwise?”
She’d eat them raw, of course, she thought derisively. What was wrong with that?
“Now, first things first,” Rennis said, resuming his journey towards the building. “Let’s see about your quarters…”
Shana had somehow gotten the impression that living among the wizards would be very like living among the Kin.
She learned that in some ways she had been right, but in most ways she was completely wrong.
Dragons seldom needed to “clean up” anything, with the exception of Keman, who needed to clean the pens of his pets, sometimes daily. But that was a simple process of raking out excrement and throwing down fresh sand or straw.
When Shana had been held in the slave pens, there hadn’t been anything to “clean up” either. Slaves owned nothing, their bedding was taken away periodically and exchanged for new, their tunics taken away daily, and they themselves washed daily.
But the wizards had possessions, and created others, and in the process, created a mess. Things needed to be cleaned; bedding, garments, dishes, dwellings. Things needed to be put away; clothing, books, writing materials, personal possessions.
There were other considerations to this new lifestyle. The slaves had been “hosed down,” as Zed put it, once a day. Two-leggers, when not enslaved, did not always care to clean themselves as slaves did. Some, especially the old and stiff-jointed, or the young and sybaritic, preferred long soaks in deep tubs of hot water—which needed to be scrubbed afterwards.
The wizards had leisure time and the freedom to indulge themselves in it. That meant hobbies and other recreational pastimes, and those usually produced some kind of a mess. Floors collected dirt, and needed to be swept.
Then there was food. Shana had always eaten everything raw when she’d been with the Kin, and as a slave she had eaten what she’d been given. Here, meals had to be cooked, which meant they not only had to clean the dishes food was eaten from, but also all the varied cookware used to produce the meal.
It was a complicated life, with much of the drudgery being done by the apprentices.
As the newest of Denelor’s apprentices, and the only one who could not cook, and had no idea of how to properly put things away, Shana got most of the truly tedious or unpleasant tasks, and most of those involved cleaning something. It was a continual puzzle to her, this obsession with possessions that the two-leggers had. If they had owned less, their lives would have been considerably less complicated.
Then again, she had to admit that there were aspects of two-legger life that were profoundly superior to life with the Kin. Cooked meals—real meals, and not the bland, watery fare served up to the slaves—came as a surprise and a real, anticipated pleasure. Denelor’s senior apprentice, who did most of the cooking, served up food with flavors and combinations of flavors Shana had never even dreamed of.
There were other pleasures associated with her new life—those hot baths, for one; the wonderful, cushioned sleeping-room for another. She had her own, private room which was always warm and dry, with one of the sleeping-places called a “bed” and a chest to put things in. She never quite came to place the kind of value in clothing and self-ornament that some of the others did, but it was good to have clean trews and tunics all the time, even if she was the one who had to wash them.
Music was another delightful surprise. The dragons never sang; the closest they came was the recitation of epic poetry. Shana had listened with pleasure to birds singing, of course, but the first time she heard Denelor pick up a katar and sing to its strumming, she nearly exploded with excitement. Much to her own chagrin, she soon discovered that she had no talent in that direction. Her “range” was about three notes, and she had no sense for anything but rhythm patterns. But she could—and did, with great enthusiasm—still enjoy the efforts of others.
The others never forgot that she was an outsider, though, and neither did she. Most of them had either been brought here as small children, kidnapped before they could be collared, or as babies, left on the hill to die by their frightened mothers. The penalty for bearing a halfblood child was death for the mother and child alike, which tended to keep such conceptions secret when they occurred, and forced the mothers to rid themselves of the infant as soon as possible after it was born. Some, because of circumstances, could not expose the halfbloods as infants; the ones that didn’t kill the children themselves lived in fear—until the day when their child went out to play and did not return, or vanished from his bed. Then they breathed sighs of relief as they reported the missing child to their overseer.
The wizards combed the hills for such abandoned children, and kept careful watch for the “noise” of untrained magic-use to catch the children that had escaped exposure. Those they either bought at auction, as they had bought Shana, or used their magics to abduct, a safe enough procedure, since the children of human slaves were seldom watched too closely. Shana was the first of their numbers in a very long time to have joined as a near-adult, and the first to have had such an extensive retrieval effort made on her part.
She had a few friends, mostly apprentices, though the young wizard Zed seemed to thaw once he had reached the safety of the Citadel. But she was afraid to allow anyone too close, given the lessons she had learned from losing Keman and Megwyn. She was simply not willing to risk so much of herself to a deep friendship, and most of the apprentices seemed to find her too alien to want anything beyond mere acquaintance.
Her chores occupied the mornings, for when she wasn’t cleaning up after her master or herself, she was “loaned out” to wizards who had no apprentices, or only one or two; in the afternoons, she joined half of Denelor’s apprentices in her lessons in magic.
And those were revelations in themselves.
Floor-sweeping kept her occupied until just after the lessons were scheduled to start. She tossed her apron in a corner and ran for the stairs to Denelor’s quarters, expecting a rebuke when she got there. But when Shana knocked on the door and joined the group, she saw to her surprise that all of Denelor’s six apprentices were present, instead of only half.
She took a place on the floor, near the back of the room. There were only three chairs in the room, and Denelor had one of those. The other two had been taken by the youngest apprentice, Kyle, and the other girl, Mindi. Shana didn’t mind: the floor of Denelor’s room was carpeted with something soft and warm, a vast improvement over the stone of the caves and the tile of the slave pens.
“All right, children, it’s our turn for procurement,” said the portly, soft-spoken Denelor, as he gathered his apprentices about him for what ordinarily were the afternoon lessons. As always, the lesson was held in Denelor’s quarters, in a room he called the “sitting room,” which nomenclature had thoroughly confused Shana. After all, she reasoned, couldn’t you sit anywhere? Why have a single room devoted entirely to sitting?
The oldest apprentice, a wraith of a boy who so closely resembled his elven father that his mother had actually gone to the “wizard woods” an hour after giving birth to leave him there, sighed dramatically. “I thought it was Umbra’s turn,” he complained. “I know her ‘prentices all went through a lot to bring that gold up out of the mine, but I never heard anyone change the rules about rotation just because someone did something extra—”
Denelor shook his head, his mild green eyes wide with amusement. “Umbra did last week, right on schedule, and the schedule is posted, you know. It’s our turn, fair and square, Lanet. Unless you’d rather eat mutton and lentils for the next several days…”
Lanet shuddered dramatically. “I think not, Master Denelor. Procurement it is.”
Shana waited patiently, as she had learned to wait since arriving here, for an explanation of “procurement.” Denelor might remember that she was new—and he might not. If he did, he’d explain; if he didn’t, she would find out if she kept her ears open.
Denelor chuckled, and handed the apprentice a piece of smudged paper. “Your choice, lad. Mostly it’s food this time, but winter’s coming on, and there are a couple of new apprentices with no winter clothing, and a lot more who’ve grown out of theirs…”
That seemed to remind him of Shana’s presence, and he looked for her among the others. “Procurement is when we use our magic to get things we need from the elven lords, my dear,” he said over Lanet’s head. “All the masters and apprentices take it in rotation, six days at a time, and we actually work only three days out of the six. That is because it’s wearying work, and you won’t be good for much but eating and sleeping the day after you fetch your allotment.”
Shana noticed that he was no longer using the tone and simple sentences with her that he had been; speaking to her as if she were a very small child.
When she had called lightning she must have convinced him she wasn’t simpleminded. That little incident might well be responsible for a few more of the white hairs among Denelor’s sandy-brown.
Lanet looked the list over and sighed dramatically. “I guess I really ought to leave the smaller stuff for Shana, since it’s her first time. Winter clothing, I suppose. Ugh. That means I’ll have to look for it, too.”
Lanet took his scrying-stone out of his pocket, threw his white-blond hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head, and placed the polished slab of emerald beryl on the carpet in front of him. He stared into its crystalline green depths for a long moment, then finally spoke. “There’s quite a lot of clothing stockpiled in Lord Dyran’s warehouses, at the edge of his estate. I doubt he’d miss a bale or two of slave tunics and trews.”
But Denelor shook his head immediately. “No; I can’t permit that. Doing anything around Dyran is too dangerous. He might not have shielded his storehouses, but he’s certainly warded the estate, and we don’t dare take the chance of alerting him to our existence.”
Shana shifted her weight restlessly. There it was again; that law of theirs. “Never be discovered.” They’d never do anything if it brought a chance that some elven lord might figure out that the wizards were back again. There must have been hundreds of children they never rescued. Sometimes they never even retrieved their own agents when they got into trouble because of that fear. I’m surprised they went after me, really. Fire and Rain, they’re as bad as the Kin —
The Kin—suddenly an entire series of realizations clicked into place, like the pieces of a puzzle. Oh . Oh.
What if that was the reason why Foster Mother hadn’t helped her—not that she didn’t want to, but that the others wouldn’t let her, for fear the elves would discover the existence of dragons? From what she had seen the Kin had as much to fear from the elven lords as the halfbloods…
Lanet startled her out of speculations. “Well,” he said, sounding weary already, “there’s a wagon-load of something on its way to Altar’s estate. I don’t know if it’s got winter clothing in it or not, but it’s full of bales and the bales have Redrel’s mark on them.”
“And since Redrel’s specialty is the manufacture of slave and bondling clothing, it’s a good bet,” Denelor said with satisfaction. “I doubt one or two bales will be missed until it’s too late. Is the wagon covered, or open?”
“Covered, of course,” Lanet replied, with obvious irritation. “I wouldn’t bother reporting an open wagon, they’re useless for our purposes.”
“True enough, lad. Well, the bales won’t be missed until the wagon is unloaded. Fine, that’s a good target, Lanet.”
Lanet didn’t reply, he just raised his hands over his head and stared at a place on the carpet just beyond his scrying-stone. The other apprentices got out of the way to give him plenty of room. After a moment or two, his hands seemed to be glowing; a moment more, and Shana saw that it wasn’t his hands that were glowing, but the rosy mist of light surrounding them.
And in the back of her mind, as she had now learned to “hear,” the manifestation of the spell was accompanied by “noise.” Not a great deal of noise, for Lanet was quite good at keeping his magic “quiet,” but there was certainly an audible component to his magic. When compared to Lanet, Shana’s magic roared like a spring thunderstorm, a fact she was profoundly ashamed of once she learned it.
Shana’s magic sometimes sounded like music, and sometimes like thunder. Lanet’s magic had the sound of a very light rain, a soft pattering, barely perceptible.
Shortly after the glowing mist formed around Lanet’s hands, a tiny, rose-colored spark of light appeared above the spot he was staring at. It increased in size, until there was a globe of the rosy mist floating above the carpet itself, a globe just big enough to hold two bales of the size clothing usually .was bundled into.
A ghost-image appeared within the mist, of something bulky, box-shaped, and brown. It solidified, until it was no longer an image, but seemed to be a real bale. It was joined shortly by a second, brought into manifestation in the same way.
“Two had better be enough,” Lanet said, his voice weak, “because they were farther than I thought. That’s it, Master Denelor.”
He clapped his hands together and the rosy light vanished. The bales fell to the carpet with a thump . followed by Lanet as he sagged forward with weariness.
Mindi eased forward and carefully cut the burlap covering of one of the bales, exposing a bit of burnt-orange that looked like wool. “Well, it isn’t slave clothing,” she said, “because it’s dyed in colors. It might be blankets, though.”
“Either bondling clothing or blankets will do fine,” Denelor said with satisfaction. “If it’s blankets they can be cut and sewn into warm over-tunics. That’s enough, Lanet; well done, and thank you.”
“It had better be enough,” came the muffled response, “because that’s all you’re getting from me today.”
Now that Shana had seen what was to be done—use whatever form of distance-seeing worked for you, then use the transportation-spell to bring the sought-after objects to Denelor’s room—she thought she could probably do her share. But it would be noisy—which meant that if she was going to escape detection by the elven lords, she’d better steal something that was well away from one of the powerful magicians. And that might be a little hard to do.
“I’ll take the flour,” Denelor was saying, handing the list to Mindi. “It’s the bulkiest, so it would be the hardest for you youngsters. That leaves some easier foodstuffs for you youngsters.”
“Butter,” said Mindi after a quick look at the list. “And cheese. My mother worked in the dairy at Altar’s estate; the dairy is half the estate away from the Great House. I know where everything is stored, and I should be able to filch some of both from there without making too big a show.”
“I don’t know,” Kyle mumbled doubtfully, while Shana took a peek over his shoulder at the list. When she saw the fourth item, she suddenly had an idea.
“Master Denelor, would anyone object to fork-horn—I mean, deer—for the meat?” she asked the master wizard.
“I don’t think so,” he replied, though he looked confused. “Why? What did you have in mind?”
“I know how to find animals, how to scry them out,” she said confidently. “I used to scry them for my foster brother.” And that was no lie; she used to find Keman the creatures for his kills all the time. She didn’t know how to scry then, either. She didn’t see why she shouldn’t be able to find about any kind of animal now. “I know right now I can’t try to manifest anything living and have it survive the trip, but that wouldn’t matter if all I was after was meat. I could find a live fork-horn and bring it in ready to clean and skin.”
“And that neatly gets around your problems with being so noisy,” Denelor said with warm approval. “Excellent notion, Shana. Although, I do think trying to manifest an entire grown deer might be a little beyond your strength. Are you sure you wouldn’t care to settle for a flock of ducks or a few rabbits? You could take them one at a time.”
She didn’t say anything; she simply let him think she agreed with him. Then she sent her mind ranging, looking for a fork-horn. The larger, the better.
She found what she was looking for right away; a buck just out of his prime, a buck that was hanging around the fringes of a herd, with fresh battle-scars on his hide. That meant he had lost his herd to a younger, stronger male. In the way of nature, he was redundant now, as he would pine away over the winter and die in the spring.
Unless she interfered.
She raised her hands, closed her eyes, and began the manifestation.
She was so lost in the spell that she really didn’t hear what was going on in the room; all she knew was the moment of trigger, when the (now dead) buck was fully materialized and she could release the spell. She sagged, her chin down on her chest, as the wave of exhaustion hit her.
There was nothing but dead silence in the room.
She looked up finally, when no one even took an audible breath—and met six pairs of round, shocked eyes.
She glanced over at the buck taking up most of the free floorspace; a nice one, if a little bigger than the fork-horns she was used to. He ought to supply enough meat for the entire Citadel for the next week or so.
She looked back at Denelor; he looked positively speechless. He blinked and cleared his throat. In fact, he cleared it three times before he managed to get a word out.
“Th-thank you, Shana,” he said carefully. “I think you can take the rest of the week off. You have quite exceeded your—ah—quota.”
When Shana wasn’t doing chores or having lessons, she liked to explore the unused corridors and tunnels behind the Citadel. Ever since she had learned to make light, she had spent as much time as she could back there. It felt a little like “home,” the tunnels of the Lair, except that these tunnels were so regular. Still, as long as she was in the deserted sections, she could dim the light and imagine herself back with Keman, playing hide-and-seek among the caves.
From time to time, it seemed to her that dragons might have had a hand in the building of the Citadel, particularly in the tunnel complex. There were many things that were familiar in the way the tunnels were carved and organized that reminded her of the Lair, most particularly the careful layering, and the multiple entrances and exits. The use of a building to mark the beginning of the tunnels themselves might be coincidence, but that, too, was typical of Kin work.
When Denelor dismissed her, she didn’t even go back to her room. Aside from a moment of exhaustion, she felt fine—even though she had moved as much material as Lanet, and Lanet had to be helped to his bed.
But she was never really tired, she thought, watching as one of Rennis’s ‘prentices came to help Lanet up to his room. Not the way the others were, anyway. Was that what Rennis meant when he said she had a lot of power? Or was it just that Lanet spent a lot more energy in keeping quiet than she did? Did that mean that when she learned how to be really quiet that she would be as worn out as he got when she did magic?
That hardly seemed worth the price of “silence.”…
Whatever the cause, she simply wasn’t ready to rest when Denelor let her go. So instead of returning to her room, she turned down the corridor into the unused sections, created a light-ball to follow her, and headed for the last place she had been in her explorations.
After a bit of retracing of her steps in the dust, she found the place she had marked with an X of chalk on the wall. She rubbed the mark out, and prepared to explore new territory. This was definitely the oldest part of the Citadel; undisturbed dust lay thick on the floors, and the rock walls were not quite as perfectly finished as in the living quarters. The rooms here also had the look of storage areas; every door she peeked into opened into a place lined with shelves, although whatever had once adorned those shelves was gone.
The room she had last visited, like several others along this corridor, had a name carved into the door: SUPPLIES. She had run out of time when she’d last been here, and had to turn back.
Today she ventured farther along the corridor, only to discover that it made an abrupt right-angle turn when she went beyond that last door and could see farther. She turned that corner, expecting to find only another tunnel, and instead, came to a dead end. The corridor ended, disappointingly, in another heavy wooden door, with a word carved into it.
But she kept going rather than turning back, and she found herself staring at an entirely different word. It had been carved into a thicker door than the others, and was partially worn away by the touch of many hands.
RECORDS, it said.
She felt a tingle of excitement; she unlatched it and pushed the door open. Like all the rest, this room was unlocked, but unlike all the rest, this room contained something. Quite a bit, in fact. And her skin tingled with the unmistakable feel of magic…
A magic that must have been used to preserve the contents of this room.
Records, indeed. Books, scrolls, and piles of loose paper. Thin metal plates with words etched into them, vellum black with age, and yellowed parchment. Row after row, shelf after shelf, an entire roomful of writings. It took her a moment to realize what it was she had stumbled upon.
The—the records of the old halfbloods, the ones that started the Wizard War! Fire and Rain—nobody had ever come looking for them, they’d told her that all the records had been destroyed, but they hadn’t been, they were here all along!
Her first impulse was to run back to the inhabited section and fetch her teacher, Denelor. But a second thought stopped her before she even turned around.
She didn’t know what was stored here yet. It could be the records everyone claimed they wanted to find. It could just be copies of things they already had. And it could be a worthless lot of junk. She had better see what was here, first, before she got too excited about it.
She chose something at random; a massive, handwritten book that looked important, if weight was anything to go by. The dust that flaked off of it when she picked it up made her sneeze, and the thing proved to be so heavy that she had to put it down on the floor before she could open it to read the first page.
From the Pelugian Chronicles of Laranz, Late Truth-Seeker of the Citadel: In the five hundredth day after the great plague of stygian-hearted beasts called the Elven Kind came to rule over the arid wilderlands called the Uncertain Sands (though not completely, for they never mastered the full-human rovers called the grel-riders) the quills of humans and halfbloods both arose to record one of those unpredictable happenstances which arise from time to time to shift the balance of both the Seen and the Unseen.
The so-called “civilized” Clans of the Elven Lords—most especially the High Lords, whose power is of the greatest, and whose magic seems to know no bounds—looked upon the Desert as a vexing and frustrating enigma, that seemed to exist only as a continual goad and irritant upon the refined and delicate sensibilities of their enlightened kind. Truthfully, the grel-riders had no organization to speak of, owing to their particularly intractable nature, the impossibility of ruling over such an expanse of nothingness, the hereditary hatred with which each Clan of a particular lineage greeted every other Clan, and the Desert itself, with its extremes of heat and cold, its poisonous creatures, its lack of water, and its unpredictable weather. Therefore the Elven Lords let necessity make a virtue of the inevitable, and permitted the grel-riders to not only maintain their hold upon the Desert expanse, but establish lawless trade-enclaves upon the borders of their estates, often to the detriment of their own stock, and the peace and prosperity of their bondlings.
For the grel-riders were the last agents of rebellion, and the only members of the human race who had not fallen in subjugation to the Elven Kind. Yet, because of the implacable hatred which they held for those who lived not in the Desert, they held the rest of mankind to be as much their enemies as the Elven Lords.
Seeking allies, the rebels among the Elven lands sent agents to the riders, but all to no avail, and three half-crazed sisters even sought a tripartite talisman among the ruins of the cities the Elven
Lords had destroyed, a talisman that was said to be the final protection of Mankind against any and all foes. They died horribly, and—
Shana blinked, and closed the cover of the book. “What on earth did they do?” she asked the other volumes about her. “Pay this fellow by the word?” Then she looked again at the thickness of the book. “Or was it by the weight?”
She regarded the book thoughtfully for a moment. Finally, she shoved it against the door, which kept threatening to swing shut. It made an admirable doorstop. In fact, it might have been created just for that purpose.
She smiled and turned back to the shelves again—skipping anything that was too heavy to lift.