“What—what are you going to do?”
The woman closed her eyes. “You will have to oppose Iberrienne,” she said, which wasn’t exactly a comforting response.
“But the Hallionne—” An ominous, very real crack interrupted her. She turned—was the only one who turned—in the direction of the sound, in time to see a very large section of the wall tumble. Framed in the large, gaping hole it left behind were the forest Ferals.
Chapter 30
“They heard a different story,” the woman said, although in theory neither she nor any of the other people had bothered to look in the direction of the sound. “They will kill you if they can.”
No kidding. Kaylin didn’t bother with weapons now; there was almost no point. She could see the Feral as it walked through the yawning hole in the wall; it was joined by a second such creature. The third didn’t make it. The opening in the wall snapped shut, crushing its midsection. Half of it toppled forward, howling. No, screaming. The scream was mercifully brief.
To her surprise, the two turned at the sound, their heads lifting as they examined the smooth, unbroken wall. Clearly, the Hallionne was not yet defeated. They padded back to nudge the body, murmuring to each other. Kaylin wondered whether they’d been dogs that had been transformed and empowered by Shadow. By what Wilson wouldn’t call Shadow.
She didn’t ask out loud, because there was no need. As the third of the Ferals died, blood seeping into the mist-covered ground, the answer was made clear: it wasn’t dogs. The black, large claws of a predator began to dwindle in shape and size until they were hands, attached to arms. Not human arms. Barrani arms.
As she watched, almost frozen in place, the Barrani form—half a body, bisected very messily at the hips—began to shimmer. The two Ferals stepped back as the body started to glow. There was no other word for it, but Kaylin held her breath because she almost recognized the light: it was golden. The livid-green that appeared to characterize magic in this space was entirely absent.
She began to walk toward the body, frowning. The Ferals were still there, and they should have been the greatest danger present; in case her insanity wasn’t clear, Iberrienne finally joined them. Nor did he attempt—as he had done on the forest road—to kill them. He approached them as if they were no threat at all.
The body continued its shift into incandescence. As she watched, as she moved, it melted, the light coalescing into a shape that was instantly recognizable: it was, of course, a word. A name. A Barrani True Name. Kaylin had seen Barrani corpses before—but not often and not so immediately after death. She understood that the Barrani believed that their names, upon death, returned to the Lake of Life. She’d never really examined her own beliefs, because until very recently, there’d been no reason. If something she was fighting could kill a Barrani, she had bigger, better worries, none of which involved a close study of corpses unless she wanted to become one herself.
The small dragon bit her ear, which was getting tiresome. “Forward or back?” She favored back, because she was sane, but felt compelled, in spite of that sanity, to walk toward the word itself. If Barrani names returned to the Lake of Life, this one didn’t appear to be able to make it there on its own. It wasn’t anchored to the body; it didn’t appear to be in search of a host, the way the gray not-quite-words were. It hovered, as if waiting to be read.
Iberrienne raised his arms. They were trailing green light, and she realized as she watched that the hearts were not the only things to be anchored in this space; there were thin lines, like webbing, that ran from his hands to the gray murk that passed for ground. Purple flames didn’t emerge from those hands; nothing did. But the name that she saw suspended in the air very close to the former breach in the wall began to move, slowly and evenly, toward his outstretched palms.
The Ferals watched him in silence; one of the two growled. Whatever it was Iberrienne was doing did not merit instant approval. The small dragon bit her ear harder; when she failed to move—either forward or back—he began to squawk, and his small claws bit through green fabric so sharply Kaylin was pretty sure she’d see blood. She was surprised that he remained on her shoulders at all. She began to walk toward Iberrienne, and the dragon subsided.
“I wish you could talk,” she told him. “I’m certain I’d regret it later, but it would be really helpful at the moment.”
The growling grew louder. Kaylin instinctively understood why: the name of their fallen companion had finally come to rest before Iberrienne. He reached out to touch it. Kaylin had touched words before, with no ill effects—that she knew of—to either herself or the words. But Kaylin was clearly not Iberrienne.
As she watched, as she picked up her pace, the golden light that illuminated the word began to diminish, as if the word itself were a glass container that had developed a large crack. The small dragon’s frenzied noise wasn’t necessary; she understood exactly what was upsetting him. She felt the same visceral fear, revulsion, and—yes—anger she would have felt had Iberrienne been strangling a young child in front of her eyes. She could stop him, but stopping him too late would be pointless. He could be brought to justice, he could be arrested, but the child would still be dead.
If asked, she would have said she had no attachment to True Names. Clearly, she would have been wrong. She threw herself into him as soon as she was close enough to safely make that leap. She did not, however, hit him first. One of the Ferals did, and when she landed, she got a face full of unexpectedly soft fur for her trouble. That, and the attention of the Feral and the Lord.
Iberrienne’s hand fell away from the rune as he gestured; purple flame engulfed the Feral. She wasn’t clear on where she was, on who the Ferals were, or on how much of their presence here was tangible and physical—but her nostrils filled with the smell of singeing fur, burning flesh. The Feral, burning, was slowed, but not so much that his jaws couldn’t snap shut on part of Iberrienne’s arm. The Barrani Lord’s bone snapped. Kaylin could hear it.
Could hear it, but didn’t care. What Iberrienne had done, she now did: she reached up to touch the rune. She was surprised by its texture; it was soft, the way flesh beneath skin was; it was warm in the same fashion. As she held it in place, the marks on her arms, golden, all began to dim; in response, the rune brightened.
Iberrienne didn’t give the other Feral orders; the other Feral seemed content, for the moment, to observe. He didn’t attempt to attack Kaylin; he didn’t appear to see her at all. She turned to the small dragon and said, “Help the furry one.” But he tightened his claws, shaking his head in the universal gesture of refusal. He was silent, now that the word was in her hands, and she even thought she understood why: she had no intention of releasing it; she certainly had no intention of handing it over to Iberrienne.
On the other hand, her hands were now full of something that felt too much like a body organ. Whatever Iberrienne had intended for the word, it wasn’t good, but carting it around—if it would even move—was going to be bloody difficult. The dragon eyed it, and without thinking she said, “Don’t you dare try to eat it.” Remembering, as she said it, that he’d done exactly that with one of the marks that was no longer on her skin.
He warbled.
“I mean it.” She instinctively pulled the rune in so she could cover it with both her arms, and as she did, it shrunk, dwindling in size until it was no bigger than any of the visible marks on her arms. It did not, however, join the marks on her arms—or her hidden legs or back; that would have been too easy. It floated up, while she tried to maintain her grip on it, and flew at her face, where it landed—if the brief shock of heat was any indication—on her bloody forehead.
The small dragon made a coughing noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter as she turned her attention to Iberrienne and his opponent. The Feral was smoldering; Iberrienne was bleeding. There was now distance between them, covered by growling and Iberrienne’s harsh, low words. “What do you think you protect here? We are not what we were—would you ret
urn to that cage? We have finally found what we’ve been seeking. The Hallionne is not yet without resource, and the mortals will not last long enough.
“We have sacrificed none of our own—not willingly. But we need power, and there is power here.” He looked up, his green, hard eyes widening. The word over which they were fighting was not where it had been, and as he searched the area frantically with gaze alone, Kaylin was once again invisible.
“Are you doing that?” she asked the small dragon.
He nodded.
Iberrienne snarled in rage, and the Feral that had stayed out of the combat said, “She is there, Iberrienne.” His voice was cool, elegant, and very Barrani. “She retrieved Karian’s name.”
“We need that name,” was Iberrienne’s tense reply.
“I do not think you will have it, if I understand what I saw.”
“She did not—”
“No. She did not. There were rumors in Court that the Chosen had seen the Lake of Life. I did not give them credence.” If Ferals could smile, this one was doing so. In spite of the two rows of teeth in an obscenely large set of jaws, it was a typical Barrani smile. “She has preserved the name, I believe.”
“Where is she now?”
“If she has not moved?”
Kaylin moved. She didn’t stay to hear the rest of the conversation. She ran. She stopped once—only once—when she heard the cracking of stone at her back. She didn’t wait to see what emerged from the breach. The sound came again as she worked her way around a crowd that was now a series of human walls, and again as she finally settled on a spot near the front of the gathering.
She turned to the crowd. “The Hallionne is failing.”
No one answered. Their eyes were mortal eyes; their bodies were mortal bodies. The story that Iberrienne had told them, if it was a story with any truth in it at all, had not given them the freedom to choose their form—if the Barrani Ferals even had that. No, she thought. It wasn’t that. But what? What had he hoped to gain? What was he struggling to preserve, in this space, and why, damn it, this space? How could mortals destroy a Hallionne?
“Not destroy,” they said, speaking as one, but speaking softly. “We were not to speak to the Hallionne at all. And we cannot.”
The small dragon moved and she turned to face him before he could bite her ear. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll go to the Hallionne.”
Thunder roared again; this time the ground shook. She glanced once at the people who would never return to the fiefs. Their lack of terror, their lack of pain, eased her. It allowed her to leave them behind.
* * *
What the walls suffered, the Tower did not. It was, in shape and form, whole and impregnable. Which was a pity if you were actually trying to find a way in. There were no doors, no windows, no arrow slits; there were no stairs. The ground that surrounded it was the same formless gray that existed wherever Iberrienne wasn’t standing. She stopped running in circles around it, because she could see Ferals begin to pace through the crowd. Or to pace around its edge; they didn’t have much luck in mowing down a chain made of bodies and arms—proof, if it was needed, that they weren’t in the real world anymore.
Instead she placed both hands firmly against the Tower’s walls and pushed. She shouldn’t have been surprised when she fell through, but she was. The Tower’s walls felt, in the brief second of contact, like hewn stone. What she landed on felt like grass. The small dragon warbled, jumping off her shoulder as she fell. Her hands and knees took the brunt of the impact, and she rose, automatically dusting off her dress.
Sadly, her hands were still black from their contact with too many dark runes, and apparently, unlike ink, it didn’t completely dry; it left marks on her dress—they looked like long smudges of handprints. The dress, which was so obligingly dirtproof, did not immediately clean itself. While she examined the skirt in growing dismay, the small dragon reclaimed his perch.
“All right, now what?”
* * *
The ground that had felt like grass over dirt appeared to be grass over dirt. The apparently permeable stone walls had opened into what she assumed was a courtyard; the assumption lasted until she turned around to look at the entrance. It was gone. She stood on a plain of grass, beneath an azure sky that, while beautiful, looked natural. There were clouds in the distance, but they didn’t appear to be rain clouds, and the breeze was mild.
Given that Bertolle had pretty much looked like a field of grass, Kaylin began to walk. Her passenger squawked. She stopped. After a moment, she sat down and lifted a hand. “This is what we know. The Ferals are Barrani.” She folded one finger. “They weren’t on the road to kill the Consort. They were on the road to find her; they want the Lake of Life.” The small dragon was silent. “They clearly still have their names—and the name I rescued looks like a word. It’s not the same as the gray runes.” She folded two fingers.
“They clearly value the names. I don’t think the Feral would have attacked Iberrienne otherwise. Whatever Iberrienne hoped to do by somehow extracting the echoes of ancient words from us he could do far more easily with words that already exist. But even transformed, the Barrani won’t allow it.
“In their current state, the humans here remember being told two stories: Iberrienne’s and…someone…else’s.” She stopped. Stared at her hands, which were still mostly blackened. “They remember…” What the Leontines remembered. None of the Leontines could possibly have heard the story that Sanabalis told them before. None of them had been alive. It had happened centuries, at best guess, prior to the birth of the oldest member of the audience. But if asked, she was certain—given the Leontines of her acquaintance—that they wouldn’t remember it on their own. Sanabalis had to have presented it.
“Iberrienne couldn’t tell the second story, could he?”
The small dragon shook his head.
“Something he told them here allowed them to remember it. And now they remember it, but Iberrienne, of course, doesn’t—and can’t. Do you think he intended to have them reconstruct that tale somehow? They said it was the story of a world.” She shook her head. “But I saw the story that Sanabalis told the Leontines—it wasn’t nearly complicated enough. I don’t understand.”
It frustrated her. “The names,” she said, forehead creasing, “looked like words. Bertolle’s name was the same. Like the words of the Leontine story, or the Arkon’s story. They were solid, they were real. Could Iberrienne use those words? Could he gain power from simple retelling?” He couldn’t. There was no possible way Sanabalis or the Arkon would expose those stories to witnesses if they could be somehow used or twisted.
“You are wrong.”
Kaylin looked up as clouds passed over the sun. Standing before her, in a pale white gown reminiscent of the Consort’s dress, was a woman. Kaylin had expected a Barrani.
“No,” the Hallionne said. “That is not my truth.”
* * *
She seemed young, to Kaylin. Her taking a seat in the grass beside the Imperial Hawk didn’t do anything to change that perception. She folded her knees beneath her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs, gazing into the distance as the clouds moved in. The breeze had matured into wind.
“You’re Orbaranne?”
“That is what I was called.”
“You don’t look like a Barrani. The rest of the Hallionne do.”
“They take the form that most closely resembles their guests’ forms.”
“So if there were Barrani here, you would be Barrani?”
“I would. Perhaps I would. I was not like Bertolle when I was created,” she added softly. “I was one of the last of the Hallionne.”
“You couldn’t have been mortal.”
“Could I not? You make one mistake in your assumptions.” She curled her arms more tightly around her legs. “The story you heard the Dragon tell the Leontines was the story of their beginning. It was not the entire story of their creation. It required subtlety and finesse, not because consc
iousness is difficult—I believe it more difficult in experience than in observation.”
“What did I hear, then?”
“The revision,” was her soft reply. “The Leontines were not created from nothing. They were elevated from an existing race of creatures.”
“I know.”
“What you do not understand is that the creatures themselves were part of one long, vast story. You think that the truth of a name is the defining characteristic of the Barrani; it is but one. The other is more difficult. Words are alive. But they are not alive as you are. They do not know change, or age, or decay; their meaning does not drift. There are no colloquialisms; they are absolutes. Once written, they persist.”
“They can be destroyed.”
The Hallionne said nothing for a long moment. “You dislike rats.”
It was so not the comment Kaylin had been expecting. “Do we have time for this?” she asked, gazing at the clouds.
“You dislike…cockroaches?”
It was, however, the conversation she was going to have. “I hate them both.”
“Understand that their stories began at almost the same time the story of the Barrani did. It is not a story that your Dragons could tell. Nor is it a story that I could. It is long, complex, and in seeing one rat, you do not see the beginning—or end—of their story; you see one rat. You will never see the beginning or the end, but there was a beginning, and writ in those words, there is an end.”
“What happens when the end is reached?”
The Hallionne’s smile was bitter. “There will be no more rats.” She rose, unfolding slowly and hesitantly as the sky continued to darken. “Your Dragons did not speak the whole of the story—how could they? They spoke the affirmation of the smallest part of its vast middle.”
Kaylin froze. “The story that the people remember—”
“Yes, Kaylin. You feel that recounting the story of the Leontines did not open the race to the possibility of tampering, and in that, you are correct. In your world, on your plane, in the place where life gathers, it cannot be done. Even the most powerful in that modality of existence can at most change what they touch.”
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