Cast in Conflict

by Michelle Sagara

  “I am Bakkon,” the Wevaran said. “You are both unusual. You should not be here,” he added, as he slowly approached. “But the book should be returned to its shelf. You will give it to me,” he added. “Your handling of something so precious is appalling.” His tone implied a growl of disapproval.

  He approached; Kaylin forced herself to stand still, rather than to retreat. Every story she had ever told herself about spiders and poison reared its terrified head. But Starrante had saved Robin, and he was gentler in interaction than either the Dragon or the Ancestor who formed the other two points of the librarian triangle. She held the book out, trying to stop her arm from shaking.

  It wasn’t that he could kill her—most of her friends could. But none of those friends invoked that visceral response. To part of her brain, the Wevaran were death; everything else about those friends was part of normal life.

  Bakkon reached out with two limbs to take what she held out. His arms froze inches from the book. “What are the marks you bear?”

  Since the marks were mostly hidden, Kaylin hesitated.

  Mandoran, however, said, “She is Chosen. She bears the marks of the Chosen.”

  “Impossible. She is mortal. Even I can taste that.”

  “She is not—in this world—the only mortal to have borne those marks.”

  “What has happened to the world while I’ve been sleeping?”

  It was Kaylin who answered. “It depends. Where did you go to sleep? In this library?”

  “Is that what you call this space? It is not an accurate description.”

  “We’ve seen the library in the Academia, and it seems similar.”

  “You have seen Starrante’s space. Once, we might have been able to meet—but not now. I am concerned,” he continued, his body rising as his legs lengthened. “You should not be here. We have taken precautions—but even precautions must age and wither. Time is kind to none of us. If we do not feel it as the continual wound that you experience, we feel it nonetheless.” Bakkon exhaled. “It has been too long. I should have destroyed you when I first sensed you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Kaylin stepped, hard, on Mandoran’s foot.

  “Time,” was the soft reply. “Our kin—my kin—leave the nest having devoured most of our clutch; it is a fight for both dominance and survival. It is only once we leave that we truly open all of our eyes; only once we interact with adults—and with outsiders—that we understand that there is more, must be more, than hunger and survival.

  “You are not my kin. You are not young in the way we are young. And here, in this empty space, I have perhaps desired a reminder: I am not a youngling. Not a child. You remind me. It has been so long.” He did not take the book. Instead, he turned away, his legs stretching. “It is not safe for you to walk in this place. You, because you are mortal; you, because you are unstable.”

  “We’re trying to leave.”

  “If you are Chosen, you might be able to do so. I do not give much for the chances of your friend.”

  “Can you get us out of here? With the web portals?”

  “The portals are anchored,” he replied. “There is no external area into which you might safely walk. Do you not understand where you are?”

  “Ravellon.”

  25

  The ground beneath their feet rumbled.

  The Wevaran clicked and screeched. Kaylin wondered if the latter was the Wevaran version of cursing. It was an oddly comforting thought.

  “Chosen,” Bakkon said, “why have you come?”

  “I didn’t intend to come here. Where we live, this place is death. Worse than death. It’s surrounded by six Towers, and Shadow is trapped within it. We can walk into it, and we can leave. But the Shadow—”

  “That is not the way it works,” was the soft reply. “I have preserved this space for far longer than you have been alive, hoping. Why did you come?” he asked again, as if aware that she hadn’t really answered his question.

  Problem was, she wasn’t sure she had an acceptable answer. “I’m not sure how I arrived here. But—outside of the barrier, we were under attack and my friend—the unstable one—got hit with...Shadow spears.”

  Kaylin couldn’t tell if Bakkon’s gaze had moved to Mandoran, he had so many eyes.

  “He is not afflicted now.”

  “No—but I couldn’t heal him in midair, which is where most of the fight was taking place.”

  “You were outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you are inside.”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not deliberately attempt to enter.”

  “No—that’s what I’ve been saying. I was trying to heal him—to remove the Shadow the injury had introduced to his body.”

  He said nothing.

  “But...I could hear the Shadow. No—not exactly that, but I could hear something that wasn’t my friend, and it was speaking. It wasn’t loud, but it was steady. I focused on that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know—I thought that maybe if I could separate the two voices, I could more easily separate the invasive Shadow from the healthy body. I could separate the voices, but...we ended up here, and not where we were. We ended up in the streets of...wherever this place is.”

  Bakkon hissed.

  She lifted her hand. “And I picked this up, there.” Her palm was open. She could see the purple-white light reflected in all of the eyes that were turned toward her. Or visible.

  The eyes widened. “You picked this up how?”

  “I stopped to examine what I thought was a weed.”

  To Mandoran, he said, “What is this weed?”

  Clearly the Wevaran was not much of a gardener. Which was fair; neither was Kaylin.

  “It’s a term that refers to plants in a garden or road that grow where they’re not meant to grow.”

  “Are you a weed?” he asked of Kaylin.

  Mandoran coughed back obvious laughter.

  “I’ve been called worse. I don’t have roots in the ground, but I don’t always fit comfortably in most places.”

  “And you are Chosen.”

  “And I’m Chosen. Most of my kind ignore that.”

  She could sense that Bakkon was appalled. “And you allow this?”

  “I can’t force people to pay attention to me if they don’t want to.”

  “You are Chosen; I am certain you have means of gaining their attention.”

  “I don’t want their attention. And we’re kind of losing track of what we were talking about.”

  “I have not lost track of any of it,” Bakkon replied. “I am not as easily distracted as the younger races often are, and can see multiple possibilities from each slender line; it is how we weave, after all. But that mark was not given to you by the Ancients.”

  Kaylin’s brows rose. “You can read it?”

  The Wevaran missed a beat. His response was decidedly chillier. “You cannot?”

  “No.” She still hated it when people thought she was stupid. And she knew there was no way to avoid it here, other than lie. She almost did.

  “How is that even possible?”

  “No one asked before putting marks all over my body, maybe?” Having confessed ignorance, if resentfully, Kaylin said, “What does it mean?”

  He appeared to be staring at her. A chittering sound escaped a very large mouth before he shuddered in place. When he spoke, he spoke a word Kaylin didn’t recognize, in a language she didn’t know. But she knew that it was a single word, broken into syllables with pause for breath.

  A True Word.

  The Wevaran repeated the word as she closed her eyes. Eyes closed, she could see the marks—even the new one—glowing brightly; purple gave way to gold, the light she was most familiar with. Even the new mark on her hand
adopted that color, its edges burning.

  He said the word a third time; she could feel every spoken syllable as a beat against the palm that currently contained the mark, as if the mark itself were alive, its heart exposed. This wasn’t a particularly comforting metaphor.

  “You know I don’t understand that, right?” When Bakkon failed to respond, she spoke in High Barrani, the words far more formal.

  To Mandoran, the Wevaran said, “Did you understand what you heard?”

  “No. I’m sorry. It’s not a language that my people are now taught.”

  “It was never a language that was taught,” the Wevaran replied. “You are—both of you—younger races.”

  “You always understood it?”

  “How could we not? It is the heart of all language. It is what lies beneath the skein of the language we speak now; it is the drive to communicate without prevarication. There was always risk in that; we hide. We seek the shadows—there is safety in being unseen.

  “But unseen, we cannot speak truth. And to speak this tongue at all is to refuse to hide. Perhaps you cannot understand that.”

  It was Mandoran who answered. “We understand the need to be unseen.”

  “Yes. When I was young, I learned to hide. I hid my strength. I hid my weakness. I made a web of both; I was hungry. We were hungry. I did not speak these words. None of us dared to speak them; they could be heard. They could be felt. They could be seen.

  “We are many at birth and few when we leave the birthing ground; it is our nature. Those who die, die; those who are strong, live. I see, from your expression, that you do not approve.”

  Kaylin shrugged. She didn’t—but human birth wasn’t Wevaran birth.

  Mandoran seemed to have no difficulties, however. “The strong live. The weak die. We don’t...consume each other the way you do, and we have far fewer young.”

  “Don’t you ever think about what those others might have become if they survived?” Kaylin demanded.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they did not survive.” The last word tailed up, as if the Wevaran didn’t understand the question. “Regardless, when we heard the words, we understood them.”

  “Wait, if you didn’t speak them, where did you hear them? Did your mother speak them?”

  “Our parent? Yes. Our parent spoke the words. They would have to be spoken or we would not emerge.”

  “Do you have True Names?”

  Silence stretched around the question, as if the Wevaran were examining it carefully. Or as if he didn’t understand it. Maybe both. Kaylin was reminded, again, that language arose from cultural experience, something she had never considered as a child in the fiefs. Words were words, then.

  Even learning Barrani hadn’t changed that feeling; the learning had been entirely in service to translating one set of words—those she naturally spoke—to another.

  But True Words had meanings, and those meanings did not shift with the speaking or with the experience of the speaker. She’d been told this, and she believed it. True Names were True Words—but words that were owned, words that were lived.

  To reveal a True Name was the ultimate risk, the ultimate vulnerability.

  “I do not understand your question,” Bakkon finally said.

  “The Barrani—Mandoran is Barrani—have a word at their core. They do not wake without the word itself. The Dragons have words in a similar fashion—”

  “It’s not similar at all,” Mandoran interjected.

  “—and in both cases, if one knows the word, which we call the True Name, of the Barrani or the Dragon, we can communicate with them without speech. And we can—if we are strong enough—force the Barrani or the Dragon to do what we command them to do.”

  “I see. And you wish to know if I have such a word?”

  “I wish to know if your people have such words, yes.”

  “Your people do not?”

  “No. My people do not. It is why the Barrani sometimes consider the mortal races to be little better than animals.”

  “And these animals?”

  “Do not speak.”

  “I see.” The Wevaran chittered again. “No. We do not have words as your friend has words. We do not have words as your skin now does. But the words themselves, like the words on your hand, we speak. We speak them among our own kin—or we did, before the fall.

  “It is the language we hear at birth; it is the language we speak—must speak—at death. We speak to each other in this fashion where it is required. But it takes effort, Chosen. It takes will.”

  “Why?”

  “Because truth carries inherent risks.”

  “So do lies.”

  “Not in the same fashion. We are responsible for our truths.”

  Kaylin felt that people were responsible for their lies as well, but failed to say this.

  “But the words themselves are part of our weaving. The words are the reason we can open doors into other worlds, other states; the words are the reason we can survive our explorations. It is not wise to speak often, but in our thoughts, it is those words we utilize in order to understand what we are seeing. It is those words for which we reach.”

  “And this word?” she said, coming back to what she felt was the point.

  “It is an ending. An ending, a finality.” Chittering. “I find the Barrani tongue so slight I must struggle to find words that might somehow trace the entirety of this meaning. But you said you picked it up on the streets?”

  She nodded.

  The clicking became more frenetic, and the Wevaran began to move in a circle, counterclockwise.

  “Is this a good idea?” Mandoran whispered, in Elantran.

  “Where we are?” she replied, in the same fashion. “There are no good ideas here. If we relied on good ideas, we’d be at home.”

  The Wevaran trembled and finished with a keening that almost sounded like a distant scream.

  The scream echoed in the library; the ground and the shelves began to shake. Kaylin couldn’t speak Wevaran. She couldn’t speak True Words without effort and a lot of serious coaching, none of which she had now. But she needed neither. She knew grief when she heard it.

  Mandoran stiffened, retreating in place, as people did when confronted with unexpected grief; he didn’t know what to do; didn’t know what it was safe to do. He did nothing.

  Kaylin took her biggest risk. She released Mandoran’s hand and reached out with her left hand, stepping beneath the Wevaran’s raised legs and attempting to avoid what she assumed was his mouth.

  She touched him. Beneath her hand she felt hair and chitin and an unexpected warmth. Life, she thought, was warm. Bakkon was alive. He wasn’t Starrante, but Starrante had had to deal with students at the Academia. Kaylin suspected that Bakkon had dealt with no one for a long damn time.

  Bakkon froze instantly. All noise—chittering, clicking, even breathing—stopped. Before Kaylin could withdraw her hand, before she could even consider it, two of his arms snapped out and folded around her; it looked, given the angle, as if they should have broken.

  Mandoran moved, then; the Wevaran lifted two more of its limbs to block the Barrani. She lifted her right hand and placed it beside the left. She wished that Wevaran bodies were soft and furry; they weren’t. They felt very much like they looked: large, hairy, chitinous insects. With too many eyes, too many legs, and a mouth that seemed much larger when viewed at this distance.

  She fought instinctive terror. If she’d intended to give in to visceral fear, she would never have approached him.

  Even as she thought it, the marks began to glow—to glow and to rise from her skin. The only mark that remained where it lay was the one on the palm that was now pressed against Wevaran flesh.

  “What happened?” she asked, voice soft. She might have been speaki
ng to a foundling.

  Bakkon shook. “I do not want to kill you,” he said. Which was promising, in a fashion.

  She felt no Shadow in him, which she hadn’t expected. But she hadn’t touched Starrante; she trusted the Arbiter because he had saved Robin, and Robin had not been afraid. Robin, a child, had not been afraid.

  Kaylin wished she could be that child. She had to fight fear, here, but she fought it. “I would prefer that you didn’t try to kill me, too.” She had no doubt, given the lack of her familiar, that she’d be dead if he wanted her dead. “Why do you think you might have to?”

  Mandoran coughed and Kaylin turned to look, briefly, in his direction. His back was against one of the shelves and his feet were no longer touching the ground; she could see a delicate skein of webbing around his legs and arms. “Possibly not the smartest question to ask right now.”

  She shrugged, watching the marks as they rose. So did Bakkon.

  The marks didn’t rise evenly; some hovered above her arm, and some rose to the level of her eyes. She didn’t recognize most of them; they looked different in three dimensions than they did when they were flat against her skin, as if her skin were parchment.

  But Bakkon did. She didn’t speak the words; she couldn’t. She didn’t fully understand their meaning, either; she could sometimes choose words that had meanings solely by the feel they invoked—but it took a long time. She therefore hadn’t consciously or deliberately chosen the floating words.

  The Wevaran’s eyes were glowing the same color as the marks, as if they absorbed the whole of his attention, his focus. He didn’t answer the question, but as they stood—one human, one Wevaran, and the marks of the Chosen—he once again began to keen.

  “They spoke,” he finally whispered, his Barrani shaky. “We heard their voices. We always heard their voices.”

  “Whose? Whose voice?”

  “Ravellon.” The word that she heard and the word that he spoke were not the same. She tried to catch the syllables, to impress them in memory, but failed; her own understanding overlapped his voice.

  The ground shook, and shook again.

  “You should not have come here, Chosen.”

  At any other time, she would have reminded him that she hadn’t arrived deliberately; now, she simply listened, her hands relaxing.