1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (3 page)

 I can hear him now — "We're one of the First Families of the City, not some clan of rubbish-collectors'. If you must have your own copies to scribble in, for the One's sake, why couldn't you at least have bought a proper set in proper leather bindings!" And I'll just look at him and say, "Are the words inside any different!" And of course he'll throw up his hands and look disgusted.

 Baiting his father was one of Kellen's few pleasures, although it had to be done carefully. Pushed too far, Lycaelon could restrict him to the house and grounds, allowing him to leave only to go to his lessons. And an Arch-Mage found enforcing his will a trivial matter—and one unpleasant for his victim.

 He was about to get the bookseller's attention, when a faint hint of gilding caught his eye. It was at the bottom of a pile he'd dismissed as holding nothing but old ledgers. There were three books there, in dark bindings, and yes, a bit of gilding. Rather out-of-keeping with the rest of these shabby wares.

 Huh. I wonder what that is —

 Whatever it was, the very slender volumes bound in some fine-grained, dark leather, with just a touch of gilt on the spine, seemed worth the effort of investigating. At the worst, they'd turn out to be some silly girl's private journals of decades past, and he might find some amusement in the gossip of a previous generation.

 If he'd been in a regular bookseller's stall, Kellen might not have bothered. But…

 It might be something interesting. And it's bound to be cheap.

 If it wasn't a set of journals, the books might even do as a present for his father if the books were in halfway decent shape. An obsessive bibli-ophile, Lycaelon was always looking for things for his library. Literally anything would do so long as it wasn't a book he already had, and his Naming Day Anniversary would be in two moonturns.

 It would be a bit better than the usual pair of gloves I've gotten him for the past three years.

 It took Kellen some work to get down to the three volumes on the bottom of the pile, but when he did, he found himself turning them over in his hands with some puzzlement. There was nothing on the spine of each but a single image—a sun, a crescent moon, and a star. Nothing on the cover, not even a bit of tooling, and the covers themselves were in pristine condition—

 Odd. Definitely out of keeping with the rest of the wares here.

 He opened the front covers to the title pages.

 Handwritten, not printed, title pages…

 The Book of Sun. That was the first, and the other two were The Book of Moon and The Book of Stars. Journals after all? He leafed through the pages, trying to puzzle out the tiny writing. The contents were handwritten as well, and so far from being journal entries, seemingly dealt with magick.

 They shouldn't be here at all! Kellen thought with a sudden surge of glee. They looked like workbooks of some sort, but books on magick were very closely kept, with Students returning their workbooks to their tutors as they outgrew them, and no book on magick that wasn't a part of a Mage's personal library was supposed to leave the grounds of the Mage College at all.

 Perhaps some Student had made his own copies for his own use, and they'd gotten lost, to end up here?

 But they weren't any of the recognized Student books, or anything like them, as far as Kellen could tell. The handwriting was neat but so small that the letters danced in front of his eyes, and the way that the letters were formed was unfamiliar to him, slightly slanted with curved finials. But it seemed to him that he recognized those three titles from somewhere.

 Father be hanged. I want these. Without bothering to look through them any further, he put them on the top of his pile and caught the stallholder's eye. The poor fellow, sweating furiously, heaved himself up out of his chair, and got a little more lively when Kellen made only a token gesture at bargaining. Profit, evidently, was the sovereign remedy for what ailed him.

 He got out a bit of old, scraped paper and even began writing up a bill of sale with the merest stub of a graphite-rod, noting down titles and prices in a surprisingly neat hand.

 "Ah, got younger sibs at home, do you?" the man asked when he got to the last three special volumes.

 "No—" Kellen said, startled by the non sequitur. "Why do you ask?"

 "Well, children's stories—" The man gestured at Kellen's three prizes. "I just thought—" Then he shrugged, wrote down three titles and prices, and handed the receipt to Kellen, who looked down at it in confusion.

 There were his Student's Histories, Volumes Four, Five, Six, and Seven—but what was this? Tales of the Weald, Fables of Farm and Field, and Hearth-side Stories?

 There was nothing like that, nothing like that at all, inside the covers of those three books.

 He thought quickly. Perhaps he had better go along with this…

 "Cousins," he said briefly, with a grimace, as if he was plagued with a horde of small relatives who needed to be amused.

 "Ah," the man said, his curiosity turning to satisfaction, and stuffed the purchases in the carry-bag that Kellen handed to him without a second look.

 There was something very odd about those books… and Kellen wanted to get home now, before his father returned from the Council House to plague him, and give them a very close examination. An examination that could be made without any danger of interference. Armethalieh held many magical oddities, but where had he ever heard of a book that could disguise itself? How was a very interesting question—but more pressing than that was—

 Why?

 THE house of Lycaelon Tavadon was not set apart from the street by a wall. It didn't need to be. The two great stone mastiffs on either side of the walkway to the front door were not mere ornaments, but guardians. Anyone not invited, or not belonging to the household, would be… discouraged from entering. And as one long-ago thief had discovered, a knife has very little effect on a stone dog. Lycaelon's guardians were very, very good.

 The front garden, a geometric arrangement of walkway, sculptural shrubbery, and guardians, was not particularly large. The back garden was larger, but no more inviting. The former served to isolate the house from the common thoroughfare and as an ornament against the white stone walls of the mansion. The latter—well, Kellen would have thought that a back garden should be a private place to relax; a spot insulated and surrounded by greenery, to enjoy a bit of sun away from the prying eyes and the noise of the City. Lycaelon's back garden, home to tall, dark, somber cypresses planted along the wall, kept it too shaded for that, and far too cold except in the heat of summer when the sun was overhead. No grass grew there; only careful, somber evergreen plantings in raised beds, separated by gravel, and more statuary, though at least the statuary in the back garden wasn't animated. There was nothing to sit on, in any event, except the edges of the beds or the gravel. There was a single water-spike of a fountain that stabbed up at the sky. Not even birds could find anything to like in this place—though it was possible that, to spare his statues, Lycaelon had worked a little spell to chase the birds away.

 Kellen carried his burden up the walkway between the stone mastiffs. As he passed them, there was, as ever, the faintest suggestion of movement; the barest tilt of neck in his direction, the tiniest twitching of stone noses as the household guardians tested him, the hint of the glitter of life in those deeply carved and polished granite eyes.

 As always, the back of his neck crawled when he passed them. But he refused to go around by the back entrance just because the damned things intimidated him. He hated the sight of them, though—they were too like the worst aspects of their master, hard and cold, unchangeable and unyielding.

 The ebony door, inlaid with silver runes, swung open at his touch, and closed behind him without any effort on his part. More magick, of course; you could hardly do without ostentatious use of magick at every possible opportunity in the home of a High Mage. And when that High Mage was the head of the Council, well, it was actually more surprising that Lycaelon had human servants at all.

 He could have done without them, had he chosen to—but it would have meant a great deal of work on his part. Nothing came for free, after all; magick servants in the form of simulacra or homunculi were difficult to create and required an endless supply of magick to keep them working. The alternative, literally making dust vanish, food appear, clothes to clean themselves, was even more time and effort-consuming. Lycaelon would dispense with servers if he had an important gathering of his fellow Mages here, animating a single simulacra that he kept on view, serving double-duty the rest of the time as a chaste statue of a shepherd-boy, but with no one here to impress but his son, human servants were cheaper, easily replaced if they gave offense, and took very little thought on his part—only orders.

 On their part—well, the servants knew who they had to please. Lycaelon was generous with his money, but not with forgiveness if anything went wrong. Kellen, however, mattered not at all—except as Lycaelon ordered.

 As soon as Kellen set foot in the entryway—black and white marble floor, the pattern being square-in-square rather than checks, white walls, a few tasteful black plinths with tasteful black urns standing against the walls at aesthetic intervals—one of the servants materialized, dressed in the household livery of black and white. An oh-so-refined and elegant livery; hose with one black leg and one white, black half-boots, black, long-sleeved tunic coming to the knee, crisp, white shirt beneath it. The careful, rigid correctness of the man's expression relaxed a trifle when he saw who it was.

 "Good afternoon, Kellen," the servant said. He did not offer to take Kellen's book-bag from him. There was nothing about Kellen to command fear or respect from the servants, and no real consequences if they didn't offer him deference. Politeness, yes, they would be polite to him. If they were cheeky, it was possible that Lycaelon would come to hear about it, and then they'd find themselves on the street without references. But they regarded him, Kellen suspected, as a damned nuisance, and did their best to encourage him to stay out of their way as much as possible.

 Politely, of course.

 The servant turned and vanished before Kellen could return his greeting. Kellen shrugged, and followed in the man's footsteps, into the vast and echoing reception room at the end of the entryway. Here the decor was varied a trifle from the stark black and white of the entryway by the addition of two shades of blue. The ceiling was dark blue, with little Mage-stars glittering above, mimicking the movement of the stars in the night sky. And the three long, low couches and the discreet scattering of chairs were upholstered in satin a slightly paler shade of the same color. All the tables, ornaments, and other accoutrements (including a fireplace big enough to stand or lie down in) were white or black—alabaster and ebony. Even the famous simulacrum, standing on (what else?) another black marble plinth, looked like the finest white alabaster.

 There wasn't anything alive in this room; sometimes the rare female visitor would look about, smile knowingly, and say something about the place needing a "woman's touch." Such ladies were never invited back a second time. It was quite true, though, that Kellen couldn't remember flowers ever being in the vases, and the air in here never seemed to warm, no matter how the fire in the fireplace roared.

 There were no apparent doors, no openings into this room, other than the one by which he had just entered. Not even windows; the light came from glowing panels set high on the walls, which was how anyone who could afford Magelights would generally illuminate a windowless room.

 The servant was nowhere to be seen, which was no great surprise; having ascertained that the master was not the one who had just entered the front door, he considered his duty discharged. Kellen took a few echoing steps into the reception chamber, then turned right and went straight toward a panel of white marble set in the wall between two blue-and-ebony chairs. At a touch, it dissolved before him and he stepped through and onto a fine, handsome staircase.

 The panel was keyed to him and other members of the immediate household, of course; a stranger would still be facing a blank slab of marble. He was now in his own portion of the house; House Tavadon was a vast mausoleum, and there were probably sections he had never been in and never would have access to until Lycaelon died and the magic doors all opened. He had never been in his father's wing, for instance, and wasn't even quite sure where it was. He could come and go as he liked within his own rooms—bedroom, separate small library and study, magical workroom, bathroom—and within the set of public rooms comprising the main library, dining chamber, reception room, his father's "public" study—and he could make free use of the guest quarters, which were in this wing below his rooms, reached by a separate entrance from the reception chamber below. Kellen also knew from experimentation that he could also get into the servants' quarters and the kitchen, cellars, and storerooms, but he was usually ushered summarily back to the "proper" parts of the Tavadon manse if he was found in any of those areas.

 And the Chapel, oh, the Light forfend I should forget the Chapel! The Chapel had a wing all to itself, and differed from the rest of the house in that it was not done in black and white, but in honey alabaster and gold, as befitted the Eternal Light. Such a tasteful Chapel that it was, so pure and refined in style, with the Everburning Flame on a simple altar, and all the niches for the ancestral ashes set into the walls so that no one could ever forget just how many generations of important men had borne the familial name…