Shade and Sorceress Read Online Free

and fruit-bearing trees. Colourful birds dipped and swooped and sang, and at the centre stood a white domed edifice. It was quite beautiful, though at that moment Eliza barely noticed the beauty, was only frightened by the strangeness of it all.
“Where am I?” she asked, spinning around to face the Mancer.
“If you mean where in Di Shang, the location is not fixed. It moves,” said Anargul. “But this place is the Mancer Citadel.”
Eliza took a deep breath and managed to keep her voice steady as she asked, “Is my da here?”
“A visit will be arranged soon,” said Anargul. “Now you must dress yourself. His Eminence the Supreme Mancer is waiting to see you.”
Eliza looked down and saw that she was wearing a white nightgown. Her clothes were washed and pressed and sitting on a chair next to the bed. It was bright day outside, but she had no idea if she had slept for an hour or even for days. She turned away from Anargul and dressed herself quickly, closing her teeth over her fear, grinding down on it with her jaw. She willed her eyes dry and her voice steady and her gaze hard and sharp as an axe.
“I’m ready, aye,” she said to Anargul.
The moment she said it an ear-splitting sound rent the air, a wail so shrill and powerful that Eliza fell to her knees with her hands over her ears. She felt Anargul’s large hand close around her wrist. The brilliant face of the Mancer was transformed, twisted with fear, white and loathsome. Her voice leaped into Eliza’s mind, What have you done?
Eliza cried, “Nothing! I didnay do anything!” but she couldn’t hear her own voice over the siren. The sound stopped all at once and the silence was like a great muffling blanket. Eliza was still on her knees, shaking. Anargul yanked her to her feet and without another word pulled her out into the hallway. Eliza had to half-run to keep up with the long, swift strides of the Mancer. The hallway was broad and tall enough that a Giant would be able to walk down it quite comfortably, which gave Eliza the unsettling feeling that this place was not designed for beings like her at all. Anargul led – or rather, pulled – Eliza down a staircase and along yet another hallway that seemed to stretch on towards the end of the worlds. There were no doors, no windows, no pictures, just the white marble of the walls and ceiling and a thick red carpet underfoot that swallowed the sound of their footsteps. Anargul stopped suddenly and knocked on the wall. Where she knocked, the marble seemed to ripple and then a door appeared. Eliza blinked, trying to take this in. But there was no time to wonder at it. Anargul opened the door and firmly directed Eliza through it. Then she shut the door behind her, leaving Eliza alone with the formidable being within.
~
“Eliza Tok,” said a voice like a great bell. “I have waited too long to meet you.”
They were in a spacious, wood-paneled study lined with bookshelves on two sides. Blank scrolls hung on the far wall, around a stone fireplace. There were two chairs facing the broad marble desk in the centre of the room, and behind the desk sat a Mancer. The brilliance of his eyes lit the room like sunlight bursting through cloud, and so she could not look closely at his face. What she saw of him, at first, were simply his powerful gold hands folded before him on the desk.
“Sit, won’t you?” His voice reverberated in her very bones and at the roots of her hair. “Are you hungry?”
“Nay,” she said. She didn’t want to sit, but her fear was greater than her anger now and she obeyed. The chair was much too large for her and her feet dangled foolishly off the ground.
“But you had better eat, I think,” said the Mancer, and he smiled. Squinting at his face through the brightness, she glimpsed a row of gleaming white teeth. The smile was brief, crumbling almost as soon as it began. “I am Kyreth, Eliza Tok.”
“What do you want with me?” she demanded. Her voice sounded small and weak to her