Shade & Sorceress (The Last Days of Tian Di, #1)(10)

It was true, Eliza thought, that her bedroom door had just been there, like an ordinary door in the ordinary world ought to be.

“Gum?” said Charlie, offering her a stick. She took it and said, “Thanks.”

He watched her unwrap it and put it in her mouth and begin to chew as if he were expecting her to say something more. She was a bit annoyed at having her solitude disrupted but couldn’t think of any polite way to tell him to go away.

“It’s good gum,” she said finally.

“Lah, do you want to look at the Gallery?”

“Okay,” said Eliza. “I mean, yes.”

“It’s good if you’re bored,” he said again, jerking his head in the direction they were to go. She cast one more look out the window at the Inner Sanctum. Then she followed Charlie down the hall.

Truly his mother’s son, Charlie kept up a steady stream of talk about which kings and queens and presidents he had seen here, where the dragons were kept (in caverns beneath the Inner Sanctum, he claimed), how he knew where the dungeons were, and so on. Eliza listened politely until they reached the end of the south wing. A thin corridor wound its way around the tower, leading them into the east wing.

“What’s in the towers?” Eliza asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Not allowed in. I’ll find out eventually, though.”

“We could probably sneak in,” said Eliza. “Somehow.”

“Aye,” said Charlie, giving her an appreciative look. “I bet we could.”

They entered the Portrait Gallery through an arched opening that led into a high-ceilinged six-sided room. The room was dark and the white tile floor was inlaid with black tile crabs. The walls were lined with framed portraits of Mancers, white-robed and fiery-eyed, all with a black crab on their robes, over the heart.

“Manipulators of water from a long time ago,” said Charlie, leading her through another arched doorway into a nearly identical room. This room opened onto two others, also the same. “See, the ones in the gold frames were Emissariae.”

“What?”

“Emissariae. You know, the ones who can leave the Citadel.”

Eliza had been to a museum before, when she was six years old and visiting Kalla with her father. She remembered endless halls full of paintings and sculptures, the muted lighting and the eerie hush. This was like sneaking into a museum at night, deserted and unlit, the figures in the paintings glaring down from within their frames, as if they wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong.

“Simathien,” said Charlie, pointing to one portrait set in an ornate alcove above the others, as if it were of particular importance. Eliza nodded, though it meant nothing to her. He looked like every other Mancer.

They passed through seven-sided rooms with ruby birds tiled on the floors, turquoise serpents in eight-sided rooms, ivory bears set amid darker tiles in large nine-sided rooms, and golden human figures in five-sided rooms. She wanted to have a closer look at the portraits, but Charlie was getting impatient, leading her at a near-run up narrow marble staircases and through further mazes of portrait rooms to some particular destination. He stopped when they came out into a rectangular hall. Bright mosaics on the floor created a sea of colour but no discernible picture, and the portraits on the wall here were larger than what they had seen before.

“There’s twenty-eight of them,” said Charlie proudly, as if he’d painted them all himself. “From the first Supreme Mancer to the one now. Mancers only live about five hundred years, aye.”

“How old are you?” Eliza asked, amused.

“Thirteen,” he said, a bit defensively.

Eliza looked around at the portraits. Here by the door was Kyreth, she thought, though it was difficult to be sure. It was a hard, oblong face. The high brow gave him a thoughtful appearance, but his sharp cheekbones and jawline and his aquiline nose looked as if they had been carved out of rock. His mouth was a thin, stern line. With their strong, unlined faces and fair hair, the Mancers all looked rather similar, but up close one could detect differences in their features.

“Is Karbek here?” Eliza asked, for even she had heard of the Mancer who first separated the worlds, and for whom the great Di Shang mountain range was named. They crossed the hall so Charlie could point him out to her. He looked rather savage, she thought.

“Who painted them all?” she asked. “It couldnay have been painted while he was alive. It doesnay look old at all.”

“They dinnay get painted, exactly,” said Charlie. “Least, there’s no painter. Come on, I have a surprise for you.”

And again they were running through room after room of portraits. Eliza was vividly aware of how terrible it would be to get lost here. One could spend days, surely, wandering these rooms without finding one’s way out. They came to another big hall, but this one was different. It was lined not with portraits of Mancers but of women. Each one wore a black tunic over black leggings and each one bore the same slender white rod about the length of her arm.

“Is this...?” She let the question hang there, unable to finish it.

“These are the Shang Sorceresses,” said Charlie, grinning widely. “There are a lot more rooms like this one, but this is the most recent one. Come over here.”

Eliza found herself looking straight up at a life-sized portrait of her mother. She recognized her from her photograph, but her expression here was entirely different. She was wearing the same outfit as all the others and looking defiantly at something in the distance. She too was holding the white rod.