The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(8)
Foss looked grateful. “Then let us begin the lesson.”
Since the summer they had been working on the basics of Deep Listening and Deep Seeing. She was pleased with how easy it had been to Listen to Abimbola Broom’s thoughts, though of course it was only because he was human, like her, and hadn’t known she was eavesdropping. She had been stretching the truth, however, when she told him that she would be able to find out what he had been doing by touching his coat. In theory it was possible, but Eliza’s grasp of this Magic was shaky at best. She was able to catch glimpses of an object’s history, things that had happened in the vicinity of the object, but she could not control the Magic enough to look methodically for a particular moment. Before her latest excursion, she had been practicing with the library table where they had their lessons. Foss had concluded that it would be a useful method of review to try and find particular lessons he had given her in the past by Deep Seeing through touch. She placed both her hands flat on the table, and then lowered her forehead to the table as well, as this sometimes helped her.
“I want you to find our lesson on simple barriers from last spring,” said Foss now. “If you are going to run about chasing down the Cra, that would be a useful one for you to review.”
The little jab irritated Eliza and she was still thinking about her grandmother appearing at her bedside, so it took a while for her to clear her mind and utter the words of the spell Foss had taught her, asking that the table reveal to her its past. She stared into the wood and it opened into nothingness before her eyes. It was as if she was peering through a gap in the table at herself and Foss in the library, seeing the present moment from somewhere outside time. But it was only a flash. She could not hold onto the moment or keep her concentration steady. She was swept into a storm of images of Mancers and books and fair-haired, serious Sorceresses, chanting and speaking incantations, a thousand voices clamouring together. Then, all these sounds and images burst into a black cloud of birds and scattered. One raven remained staring at her through the table, its eyes like little black stones. It opened its ugly beak and said, She’s coming.
Eliza yanked her head off the table with such force that she fell over backwards in her chair. She lay on the floor in shock, her heart hammering against her ribcage, until Foss’s face appeared above, looking down at her.
“It would appear, Eliza Tok, that the table is still stronger than you are.”
“I need to talk to Kyreth now,” she said.
~~~
Kyreth agreed with Foss that the trouble was her own mental weakness, her inability to control what was revealed to her. He put it rather less delicately than Foss, too.
“I know that and I’ll work on it,” said Eliza, struggling to remain patient. “But what about what the raven said? She’s coming. What could that mean but Nia, lah?”
Kyreth shook his head thoughtfully. “We are working hard to maintain the barriers and I see no sign that she is any nearer to freeing herself than before. I will take what you saw as a warning to be even more vigilant, but it seems most likely that your own fear was taunting you, lost and overpowered by the spell as you were.”
“Praps you’re right,” said Eliza hopefully. “Lah, it’s the first time a raven has spoken to me. Even if it wasnay a real raven. I wish I knew if it was my Guide or not.”
Kyreth stood and took a stack of heavy books down from his bookshelf.
“I have been waiting to give you these,” he said. “I think now is the right time. These are the eight volumes of the Chronicles of the Sorceress. You will find some information here about Guides. Like the Guardians that enforce the limits of all things, of Magic, of Life, of Space and Time, they are mysterious to we who live in the worlds. They do not have desires as we do, but they have purpose. If the ravens are your Guide, it will become clear to you. In the meantime, take care, for they may signify something else.”
“Will we study these books together?” asked Eliza, daunted by the pile on the desk before her.
“No, Eliza. These are for your private study. We will continue with the thirty-seventh commentary on Simathien’s Book of the Ancients.”
“Oh.”
This commentary was a very dry tome, which outlined the genealogy of all living beings, extrapolating from Simathien’s statement that the mortal beings in Tian Di were Mancer, Mage, Demon, Human, and Animal. It was much impressed upon Eliza that the Mancer line had remained pure, but that mingling of the others had given rise to the vast diversity of beings in the worlds now. The Cra, she remembered, were part bird, part demon. They had left off last time tracing the elaborate lineage of Centaurs. She felt weary just thinking of it. Kyreth was scanning the shelves for the book. Unable to think of a natural lead-in, Eliza asked simply, “What happened to my gran?”
Kyreth’s eyes flamed a little hotter as he turned them on her. “You know the answer to that, Eliza Tok.”
“Nay the exact answer,” said Eliza. “Only that she was killed.”
“Why do you ask me this now?”
“Because...” She considered a moment and then lied, though she couldn’t have said why. “I dreamed about her.” She was not a good liar and had to look down at the desk as she spoke.
Kyreth leaned forward, suddenly intense. “What did you dream?”
“I dreamed she came to my room and talked a bunch of nonsense and then ran away. I chased her down the hallway, aye, but I couldnay catch her. Lah, the dream felt very...real.”