Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

Lights came on, and went out, as we moved from room to room.

All the rooms had only bits and pieces in them. They were clean, without dust, yet unlived in.

We did pass a bed, or a bed-frame, in a side chamber. And in a bath-place, a long towel trailed over the side of the tub. Venn half went as if to pick it up. Then moved quickly away. Probably she must have used it. Her towel.

But she was gone, long gone, as she had been from the Rise. Of course, I’d known it really, and perhaps so had he.

We wandered around. There was a wide room with lots of windows, and in the floor a pale burn. ‘I bet she worked in here too. Spilled something,’ he said.

We stopped under a kind of tree, which was a lamp-stand with many hanging china globes that didn’t light up.

‘This is pointless, he said. I didn’t argue. Nor when he added, ‘But I’ll just try up those steps, there …’

The steps wound round, and I kept thinking they’d suddenly lurch apart, like that stair behind her closet. But they didn’t.

We came out into an annexe, and there was a big wooden door ahead.

He and I stood looking at the door in the hard light.

‘Might as well,’ he said. But he didn’t go forward. ‘Claidi, Burand told me something – about this ring, the topaz. He said it could have done what their pipes did, to the vrabburrs—’

‘Why didn’t it, then?’

‘One has to – think through it – I wasn’t sure what he meant. But it may be the same with your own ring.’

‘My ring wasn’t made by Ustareth. It was Zeera’s.’

I thought, anyway, my ring hadn’t helped me. When I was kidnapped – nothing.

Venn crossed to the door, opened it – it had an ordinary door-handle – and walked into the room beyond.

I couldn’t see much into the room. There was a brocade curtain hanging just inside. But a softer light had come on.

I’d just wait, until Venn came out, said, That’s that, then. And we’d leave.

He didn’t come out.

Had he found something fascinating after all? Something of hers.

After a couple of minutes I called cautiously, ‘Venn?’

But he didn’t answer.

The sensible thing, of course, was not the thing I did. I ran forward and burst through the curtain.

There was a bench, and he was sitting on it. But I didn’t really take that in.

Across the room, under another of the tree-lamps, this one all lighted up, sat a woman in a black chair.

She was dark, she had a smoky skin. Very dark hair in a long, thick braid, that fell over one shoulder and then hung to her ankles, ending in a golden ball. An ivory satin dress sewn with pearls. Which seemed familiar … No other jewellery, no rings on her fingers.

Ustareth wasn’t beautiful, she was magnificent. She was like a dark lion.

I just stood there, in this scene to which I felt I didn’t belong.

Then Venn spoke to me. Or to someone.

‘She mostly used to wear plainer clothes at home. But I remember this dress. She wore it the day she left. I mean, left for ever. She’s wearing it now. That’s what threw me, when you found the dress in the closet; in her room off the Little Book Room. How could it have been there, when she’d worn it the day she went away?’

The woman in the chair said nothing. Her night eyes burned, unmoving, unblinking. I had to look somewhere else.

‘I thought then,’ said Venn quietly, ‘she must have changed into other clothes somewhere in the gardens, and Jotto had brought the dress back to the palace, put it away and forgotten it. After all, it’s not what you’d expect a woman to wear travelling down through a jungle, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t you go over and meet her, Claidi. My – mother.’

‘Venn—’

‘Go on. Shake her hand. I’m sure she won’t mind.’

I glanced back at – her.

She didn’t look as if she minded. I stared, and I took a step forward. And then I somehow saw that what seemed to be slight movement in her was only my own swaying about. I saw she really didn’t blink. She didn’t even breathe.

She was dead!

No. Not dead. She’d never been alive.

I did go forward then, and walked quickly over to her, all the time still expecting her abruptly to pull me up with some crisp comment, some regal gesture.

But she didn’t. When I was inches away, still she didn’t. She did look very – totally – real. Her skin, hair. Her eyes did, too, except for not moving. They shone so brightly. There was the faintest scent of perfume. And something chemical – as if she’d been handling things like that.

I could remember Argul saying sometimes Zeera’s hands would faintly smell of herbs she’d mixed up, or even chemicals. He didn’t mind, even when the herbs were bitter. It was her trade, her gift. He was proud of her.

Shake her hand, Venn had said.

So I leaned forward and picked up her hand. She was a little stiff, the way her arm moved. The lake damp must have got to her.

‘She’s a doll, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, Claidis.’

‘How vain,’ I said, scornful. ‘To make a doll just like herself – it is just like her, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly.’

I let go of the doll’s hand and looked at Venn.

‘But it wasn’t, Claidi, all that vain. Just common sense. Since the doll took her place.’

‘Yes, I see. You mean here in the village.’

‘No, I mean at the Rise. I mean,’ he got up, but didn’t move forward. ‘I mean when she left. She left this – in her place.’

‘But you’d remember it, wouldn’t you?’ I said.

‘I do remember it,’ he said. ‘I thought it was her.’

The roof might have just dropped in on me, on us. Or the whole room after all rushed off in a circle.

I jumped away from the doll of Ustareth in the chair.

‘But how could you ever – she’s a doll—’

‘Think