Cast in Wisdom

by Michelle Sagara

  Do they get in the way?

  They hinder speed. If you require words or complicated gestures to enter the correct state of mind, you will find your abilities lend themselves only to the scholarly; you will never make use of magic—legal magic—in your duties as a Hawk. He exhaled. No smoke, though. Mages learn how to grasp their power, how to recognize it, in entirely different ways. You are aware that those who can see the echoes of magic do not see them in the same way?

  She’d nodded. She nodded now, as she tilted her head up, lifting an arm—the exposed left arm—to touch the top of the door frame.

  You see sigils. Words. Others see fabric, a weave—loose or tight. Colors. Some hear the echoes. They hear the names of those who cast spells strong enough to leave those echoes. But all of magic, all of our ability to use it, to channel it, to bend it in the direction we wish it to take, is like that. You attempt to reach the source; how you reach it is not as important.

  Unless I’m wasting time with inefficient words or gestures? With a wand?

  By the time that is a concern, you will understand how to arrive at your destination, and you may make adjustments, yes.

  * * *

  She touched the door.

  The frame was wood. It wasn’t alive. The normal healing paradigm was not going to work here. But elements of that paradigm might. The ability to heal had come with the marks. To heal, she had to bridge the gap caused by skin. Her skin. Her patient’s. She had never considered the actual how of building that bridge.

  The door was an inanimate object. But...she knew, in the moment she attempted to begin to heal it, that her understanding of the practical and pragmatic—some lucky people called this reality—had overlapped to form a tiny bridge that gave her confirmation of that information. Her arm fell away from the door as she lowered it.

  She lifted a hand to touch her familiar and thought better of that. Instead, she called Severn over. She touched his cheek. Severn was alive. If she looked now, she could get lost in the internal details of his body. He suffered from no life-threatening injuries. She lifted her hand from his cheek, breaking that connection, and then gently touched him again. This time, she concentrated on the brief, brief second before she began to look at his physical health.

  She exhaled, reclaimed her hand and tried the door again.

  “Why are you reaching for the top of the frame? Why not the sides?” Bellusdeo asked.

  “Keystones,” Kaylin replied.

  “There are no keystones here—this is not an arch.”

  “I know. But...humor me.”

  The Dragon fell silent, but the rustle of cloth at Kaylin’s back implied that she’d folded her arms.

  Kaylin touched the height of the door frame as if it were Severn’s cheek, but with a lot more fingertip and less palm. She felt a flicker of something that wasn’t quite magic; a tremor.

  “We’re either going to be in real trouble soon,” she told the Dragon grimly, “or there’s something in the walls here, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Never mind. Can you take the entire door frame down?”

  The Dragon snorted.

  “I mean the way people who can’t breathe fire would have to. I have to be able to touch the stone, and I can’t if you heat it too much.”

  “There’s a lot of exposed stone in this interminable hallway. You can’t touch that instead?”

  Kaylin shook her head. “It’s the door. I’d be willing to bet on it.”

  “With your own money?”

  “Yes. Lots of.”

  “Fine. I will remove the door the normal way, regardless of any inefficiency.”

  * * *

  It took longer than reducing the door to ash, but she did destroy the central part of the door with fire, weakening its structural stability enough that she could then peel away the frame remaining and toss the wooden bits to the side.

  Kaylin lifted her left arm and grimaced; without the frame, it was harder to keep her hand in contact with the building. She wondered if the need to touch was one of the crutches Sanabalis often talked about. Probably.

  There. She slowed the point of contact to see it better. Felt the moment when she confirmed the fact that the doorway was not alive.

  Felt the disconnect when she realized this was not entirely true. The wooden frame was gone; what she touched now was stone. No. It was like stone; it felt like stone beneath her fingertips. But there was something other about it.

  “You know how I said I thought this might be a sentient building?”

  No one answered.

  “I’m about to test that.”

  When she tensed her arm again, she saw that the marks across her skin were glowing faintly. The glow was even; all of the visible marks were a pale blue now. No single word seemed to stand out. No mark rose that might accomplish her goal. The goal, however, was clear. She wanted this doorway—absent actual door—to take her to an exit, some way of leaving this endless iteration of the same damn hall.

  The stone was alive. Not in the way that she, Severn or Bellusdeo were. Maybe in the same way Helen was. She had never tried to touch Helen in the way she now approached this empty frame.

  No, Hope said. But you have never had the need. Mark this well, Chosen.

  She spoke to the stone through the tips of her fingers. She wasn’t certain if she was speaking the words aloud. Probably not. Her thoughts weren’t easily poured into actual words, and it was the thought, the intent, the need to leave this space, that she kept at the forefront. But some small contaminant remained: she was trying to communicate with a nebulous something she wasn’t even certain existed. She introduced herself, wordless, arm raised, marks glowing.

  She listened. If listening took physical effort, she made it—and here, it did.

  There was no answer.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing,” Bellusdeo said.

  No answer she could hear or grasp, no subvocal communication that flowed into her or through her. She realized she had closed her eyes, and opened them with effort; her eyelids felt as if they weighed as much, individually, as her arms.

  What was left of a doorway opened into a hall, which was different. The doors on either side of this single hall—still made of stone, and still shorter in height—had increased in number. There were four doors. They were all closed. There was no door at the end of this hall; there were stairs. Stairs that ascended.

  Severn slid past Kaylin and into this new hall; Bellusdeo, after a brief discussion, did the same.

  Thank you, Kaylin said in the theory that manners never hurt when dealing with the equivalent of ancient, localized gods. I’m sorry we broke your doors.

  * * *

  Severn made no attempt to open the new closed doors, and Kaylin saw why instantly: at least two of those doors had seen use. The knobs retained tarnish and fingerprints. There was dust in this hall, in the corners; the center stretch of floor was clean.

  Severn moved the way a cat moves; he was silent but swift. He headed directly for the stairs.

  Bellusdeo could not move as quietly; her clothing, if nothing else, didn’t allow for it. Her eyes were orange, but it was a gold-orange; she was not afraid of anything that might—just might—inhabit the rooms.

  Only when she reached the stairs did Kaylin relax. Relax in this case meant allow different worries to take over. Severn was ahead of her in that regard. He didn’t expect trouble, but he wasn’t certain where this building was actually located. The eyeball was firmly in the border zone. But the building itself?

  It can’t be located in the fiefs. I don’t think the Towers would accept it.

  It could be located in the city beyond the fiefs. Say, in the warrens.

  The warrens? No way.

  Because?

  Because there’s a huge chunk of river between here and the warren
s. And because a building’s power tends to be centered in an actual space.

  The jurisdictions of the Towers are the fiefs they stand in.

  And Helen can’t leave her boundaries. Look—if something has an area of effect that’s larger than the Tower of the fief, there’s no way it’s in the warrens. It’s a building.

  Did it speak to you?

  No.

  But it responded to something you did.

  Looks like it. She felt uneasy then.

  Exactly. Severn picked up on everything. Always had. Either we’re wrong about the sentience, or the building itself was somehow broken in the creation of the fiefs. If we’re wrong, and we’re not in a sentient building...

  Then I just broke a magical spell of some kind.

  Or you used one to force the trap to release us. You only think it’s a building because you weren’t sick when you passed through the portal, the eye’s gaze.

  She nodded. I think it’s a building, though. There was something there. Something that wasn’t quite in reach—but something that felt like it might be sleeping. And no, I don’t want to try to wake it up while we’re inside its stomach, relatively speaking.

  * * *

  The stairs opened up into another hall, which seemed identical to the hall they had just left. There was, however, one long streak, slanted between the two halls, that implied someone had charred the flooring.

  “It wasn’t me,” Bellusdeo said as Kaylin knelt to examine the floor. “I only remove doors. If a floor gives way, it causes more problems than it usually solves.”

  “You know this from personal experience?”

  “I occasionally lost my temper in inconvenient places, yes.”

  They spoke in low tones; Severn lifted a hand, and they fell silent. In silence, Kaylin could hear the creak of floors. It was a familiar sound, given her old apartment and the new rooms that Helen had created to make Kaylin feel more at home. The older, warped floors meant nothing larger than a rat could sneak up on her, or sneak into her room.

  That wasn’t going to be an issue, living with Helen—but old habits had kept her alive in places far less safe. She hadn’t lost those bitter instincts yet. She wondered if she ever would. If she did, she wondered if she’d regret it. The creaking stopped, but Bellusdeo’s tread, no matter how delicate her movements, was never going to be silent. Both Severn and Kaylin could manage it.

  Hope, however, squawked. Loudly.

  “Will you cut that out?” Kaylin whispered.

  He squawked in response. Or rather, not in response. Ever since she had gone into the High Halls with the cohort, she could understand Hope when he was attempting to speak directly to her. His words to anyone else were just as angry—birdlike as they’d always been.

  Kaylin glanced at Bellusdeo; the Dragon’s eyes were a deep orange now, but her forehead had folded into a frown. It wasn’t an expression of annoyance or anger; she was concentrating. Concentration often looked like ill temper to Kaylin.

  Severn lifted a hand. Kaylin froze. Bellusdeo was not far behind, but her eyes weren’t getting any lighter. She gestured, her brows furrowing; Kaylin’s arms tingled. Having received whatever information she sought from the spell, Bellusdeo then moved past where Severn stood at the corner of a wall.

  She reached for a weapon she wasn’t carrying and exhaled a stream of smoke as she lowered her hand. The weapons that Hawks carried—daggers, sticks—were not, in the Dragon’s opinion, weapons at all; Severn carried the weapon chain that the Halls of Law had granted dispensation for when he’d been a Wolf.

  The Hawklord had never rescinded it. Neither had Marcus, but the latter was probably because it required paperwork. Kaylin thought if Bellusdeo accidentally sneezed a gout of flame on his paperwork, he might like her a lot more; no one would dress down a Dragon, or rather, no one in the Imperial Court would.

  The Hawklord, however, might take a dimmer view.

  Bellusdeo didn’t slide around the corner; she stepped firmly past it and turned to her left. “Good afternoon,” she said, raising her voice until the syllables were underscored by a Draconic rumble. “We appear to be lost.”

  “You do indeed,” an unfamiliar voice replied. “I would consider this a poor choice of hiding place if you wish to remain hidden.”

  Kaylin stepped in immediately behind the Dragon, because Hope was on her shoulder and his protection against magical attack had a very small radius. She almost called Severn in when she saw the person who addressed Bellusdeo. He was Barrani.

  * * *

  Barrani had strikingly regular features unless they had retained a permanent injury. This man had. It wasn’t something as subtle as a chipped tooth, either; he had lost an eye. He right eye socket sat, obviously empty, in the center of a network of scars. Kaylin wondered if that had been the result of Dragon flame. The single eye he possessed was Barrani blue—midnight blue. Bellusdeo’s eyes could no longer be seen, because she kept Kaylin behind her.

  The Dragon offered the Barrani a nod. He returned it, the glimmer of a smile changing the shape of his closed mouth. It was brief.

  “You are far from home,” he said.

  “Farther than you could imagine. And you?”

  “For the nonce, I am at home. It is convenient. Your presence will likely make it less so.”

  “If you would care to show us the exit, we will apologize for encroaching—unintentionally—upon your home.”

  “Ah. And if I do not?”

  “The floors are of wood, and this is not a Hallionne.”

  His brow—his left brow—rose at her use of the word. “How come you to know of the Hallionne?”

  “We have always known of them. I have, however, had a recent opportunity to stay as the guest of Hallionne Alsanis.”

  “Truly?”

  Bellusdeo nodded.

  “You are well away from your lands, and to travel so—does that mean the war has at long last ended?”

  “The wars between our people have ended, at cost to both.”

  Hope squawked loudly. Both the Barrani and the Dragon ignored him, and he pushed himself off Kaylin’s shoulder to hover above them both at the height of the hall.

  His squawking grew agitated—or angry. With Hope, it was sometimes hard to tell. The Barrani man did not seem to hear him. Bellusdeo did; she lifted a hand, flattening her palm at right angles to her arm, and Hope landed, still squawking up a storm.

  The stranger wasn’t deliberately ignoring Hope, as Bellusdeo and Severn had been. The Barrani man frowned as Bellusdeo lifted an arm, and his hands rose to chest height in response. Hope, however, seemed invisible to his remaining eye.

  Agree, Severn said. This was probably more bond-talking than he’d ever done. Call Hope back. I want you to look at the Barrani through his wing.

  Hope usually slaps me in the face with the wing when he thinks I’m missing something, was Kaylin’s doubtful reply.

  You just don’t want an earful of that squawking.

  No kidding. But she was standing within arm’s reach of the Dragon, and when she called Hope, he came, huffing in frustration. Kaylin didn’t tell him what to do, given the Barrani stranger, but she pointedly indicated her eyes.

  Hope landed and thwacked her in the face with his wing. To Kaylin’s eyes—beneath Hope’s wing—she was looking at a one-eyed Barrani man of average Barrani height. His hair was a drape of black sheen, and everything else about him seemed in the correct place. His clothing was a bit odd—but on some occasions, a bit odd was practically the new normal.

  Hope snorted and lowered his wing.

  “Have you,” the Barrani man was saying to Bellusdeo, “paid the price of passage?”

  “I seldom pay a price in ignorance. And even were I to do so in desperation, I am uncertain that the price would be yours.”

  He laughed, then. He had even,
perfect teeth. “Very well, Dragon Queen. I will lead you to an exit while the possibility still exists for you. But you had best be away, and soon.”

  “Where does the exit lead?” Kaylin dared to ask, as the man turned away.

  “Out.”

  * * *

  Kaylin didn’t expect a Barrani to be true to his word. Not if it weren’t signed in blood, or signed in triplicate. But she trusted her ability to find a way out less than she trusted that single word, and even if she hadn’t, Bellusdeo had started to follow. While Bellusdeo was tagging along, she was the most important person in any room; the most important in any meeting, and while patrolling any street.

  “You live here, right?” Kaylin asked the Barrani man’s back.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea why your house is at least partly attached to the border zone?”

  “The border zone? I am afraid I do not understand this term.”

  “The border zone is what we call the borders between the fiefs.”

  “Fiefs?”

  “How old are you?”

  Bellusdeo cleared her throat. It was a warning, and as the sound was largely Draconic, no words were necessary.

  He ignored this. “How old are you, that you ask?”

  “I’m twenty.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Twenty years old.”

  He did stop, then, turning to look past the Dragon to the private. No, no, the corporal. She was corporal now. “Your world changes so swiftly, then. And perhaps that is why you guard your own name so poorly.” He held up a hand as if forestalling further comment, but his gaze had moved to the Dragon as he did. “I intend no harm to your young charge.”

  “I am not her—” Kaylin stopped because Bellusdeo held up the same restraining hand.

  “No? But she has the care of you, yes? She is your defense. And it is just and reasonable that it be so: you bear the marks of the Chosen.”

  The marks were not glowing in any way. But Kaylin had pulled her sleeve back in the reiterating hall below; there was some possibility that he had seen them when she’d done so. It soured her opinion of him, not that she had much of one to begin with.