The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [17]
What a sorry bunch.
Click, click, click.
Everyone looked up at the newcomer.
She carried a staff, too. Black as mine, but somehow more…used. Her hair was flaming red, and I could tell that her eyes were ice-blue. Dust covered a freckled face that made her look younger than she was. She could have passed for my age but was much older, at least five or six years.
“What a sorry bunch.” Her voice was cheerfully hard.
“Speak for yourself.” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken until I heard the words.
“I am speaking for myself.”
“I’m Lerris. Who are you?”
“Tamra will do.” Her hard eyes scanned the others and ended up back on me. “Aren’t you a little young to be here?”
“Aren’t you a little presumptuous?”
“Tamra…Lerris,” interjected Sammel, standing up. “Whoever is here is here with the acceptance of the masters. Can we leave it at that for now?”
“Fine with me.” I was ready to throttle the red-haired bitch in her hard-heeled black boots and dark-gray trousers and tunic. She was wearing as close to black as she could decently get away with in Recluce, and flaunting it.
“The masters this, the masters that…what difference does it make?” Her voice was disgusted, but she took off her pack just like the rest of us as she came down the stairs. Then I realized she only came to my shoulder but she had carried a pack fully as big as mine, and while she was fine-featured and slender, she was not thin like Krystal nor muscular like Wrynn. She was about the same size as Dorthae, but she had a certain presence.
She didn’t sit down either, but put her pack at the end of the right-hand bench, next to Sammel’s stuff. Then she looked at the pictures, which outside of their somberness seemed unremarkable to me. She ignored the quality of the woodwork and kept comparing the pictures.
Since she was ignoring me, like the whole sorry bunch, I walked over and stood in front of the picture on the left, trying to figure out why Tamra felt it was so interesting.
The man in the picture was in black, but not in the official-type robes of a master, and his hair was silvered gold, much like my father’s. Even though they didn’t look much alike, the more I looked at the portrait, the more I could sense a certain likeness. I pushed that thought away and looked for the technical details.
A shadowed bar behind his right shoulder caught my attention next. The height and the positioning indicated that it had to be a staff of some sort, but unlike the detail shown in the man’s face, none of the background was depicted clearly at all.
I looked around the room. Tamra was still studying the other portrait. Wrynn and Krystal were talking in little more than whispers. Sammel and Myrten looked at the stone flooring, and Dorthae sat on the bench with her eyes closed.
My eyes returned to the portrait. It was the only thing in the whole foyer, besides the other portrait, that had any detail. That had to mean something—but what? I shook my head. More riddles. The masters had more riddles than a world full of jesters, and no one wanted to ask them anything.
For a moment I thought the man in the picture had come alive and was looking at me, but when I concentrated on the picture, it was as lifeless as ever. Accurate, perhaps, but lifeless.
I glanced at Tamra. She was looking at me.
She wanted to look at the picture of the man. I could tell. I nodded and moved aside.
Not a word from her as she walked over and stood where I had been standing. So I walked back to where she had been and tried to concentrate on the picture of the woman in black. The portrait woman was not blond, but brown-haired, and the artist had caught a glint in her eyes though they were black. The only live black in that picture was that of her eyes.
I was no artist, but it seemed to me that the same person had painted both portraits. That would have been hard to do, painting a series of masters, if you knew that these were the people who controlled Recluce.
Enough