Cast in Flame

by Michelle Sagara

  Squawk! Squawk!

  The wall on the far side of the room—where Kaylin had entered—cracked. Loudly. Around the fissure that had appeared in white stone, she could see sparks of lightning.

  “Yes,” she told the small dragon. “I don’t think you’re much help here.”

  He bit her ear.

  “Go help Mandoran.”

  He pushed himself off her shoulder, spun once around her head, and then flew off toward the damaged wall. Kaylin turned back to the words and the gaps between them. The spaces on the outer periphery were all empty; she let those be. The absence of those words had clearly not killed Helen, and she’d probably lived without them for a long time.

  The absence of the words in the center hadn’t killed her, either. But there was a lack of symmetry or a lack of balance in the central cluster that felt off, or wrong, to Kaylin. Clearly, Helen could live without all the words that had once transcribed her power. But Mandoran and the small dragon thought she couldn’t defend herself the way, say, Tara could. And that she should be able to. It made sense, then, that if Kaylin was to surrender marks in Helen’s defense, they be placed here.

  She reached up to touch one of the floating runes; she felt its warmth, followed quickly by its surprising weight. She lifted a second hand to catch the word before it toppled.

  She then carried it as she began to thread her way around Helen’s words, which still glowed with the luminosity of the blood of the ancients. She wondered, as she began to head toward the center of the cluster, how single words could contain so much information. She knew a number of languages, and knew as well, that she’d barely scratched the surface; she could probably spend a decade learning a single word in each language which in theory meant the same thing.

  Even if she did, it wouldn’t mean she could communicate the concept; people used the exact same word to mean different things. So these weren’t really words; they were like containers. Somehow they contained enough information that they could be understood without context—if they could be understood at all. Kaylin had her doubts.

  But she had her doubts about a lot of the Imperial Laws on the books as well, and it didn’t stop her from gritting her teeth and obeying them.

  “Helen?”

  Silence.

  “Helen!”

  “I’m here,” came the disembodied voice. It was quieter.

  “Can you read these words?”

  “Yes. But I can’t explain all they mean to you. It’s not because I think you unintelligent. You exist in a very precarious space. You are not the boys,” she added, meaning, of course, Annarion and Mandoran, “and you are not a scion of the ancients in the strictest of senses. You can see—and hear—true language, but only with the limited senses available to you.

  “You have seen paintings, yes?”

  Kaylin desperately wanted to tell her that now was not the time for this. Instead, she said a terse, “yes, of course.”

  “You have seen paintings of buildings—castles, cathedrals, towers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you see—or hear—when this language is spoken is analogous. You see the painting; you cannot see the building. The painting can be evocative; it can give you a sense of the whole—and possibly your own intuition builds on that. But it cannot ever describe the actual, physical truth of the building itself. Your understanding is limited to the painting. You cannot enter the building.”

  “And they—the ‘boys’—can?”

  “Yes. They are, at the moment, confined to the foyer or the parlor, but yes.”

  “Can Teela?”

  “No, dear.”

  “And the Barrani that’s attacking you now?”

  Silence. After a long pause, Helen said, “He—or his kind—could on occasion destroy the building. They could not build it. They could not create. But they could forage from the ruins of the things they destroyed, taking the stones and the glass and the lumber for their personal use. I’m sorry,” she added. “I realize this is a poor analogy, but it is the only one I have.”

  “It’s better than anyone else has offered.”

  “Yes, well. I’ve had some practice over the years.”

  “Can you tell me where the words should go?”

  The hesitance was marked. “Not definitively, no. You are, if I understand correctly, Chosen. It is your responsibility to use the words given you to...finish things. To resolve stories that have been left hanging; to offer closure to the things abandoned long ago.

  “I have too much of a personal interest in what you are now doing to be objective.”

  “Then don’t be objective,” Kaylin replied, with a little more heat than she’d intended. “Look—you want a tenant. I want a home. And if tall, broody Barrani ancestor has his way, there won’t be enough of either of us left to get what we both want. Yes, you have an interest in this. So do I. But you get a say. This is about you. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to screw up because I’m ignorant—and if I’m doomed, by birth, to be ignorant—you’re not. Help me. Help yourself. We’re in this together, and I’d like it to stay that way.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Helen finally said. “I am the words at my heart. But I cannot separate them. You cannot see the inside of your hand without removing your skin, and causing possible permanent damage; you cannot look at your own heart beating without risking death. It is the same for me, Kaylin. It is the exact same.”

  “But Tara—”

  “Yes. I can see what you think you did for the Tower. It is not, however, what you actually did. I can tell you what the words you carry mean; I cannot tell you how they will preserve me, because I cannot actually believe they will. Something about the interaction of you, those words, and the words that remain to me, work in concert, the sum greater than the parts, although the parts are all true.

  “And we are running out of time.”

  “Tell me one thing, then.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  “What happened to all the other words? How were they destroyed?”

  “As I told you at the tea table, I destroyed them,” Helen replied.

  * * *

  “You destroyed them.” When confronted with something that made no sense, Kaylin often fell back on repetition.

  “Yes.”

  “But—but—why?” Repetition, on the other hand, probably sounded more intelligent.

  “Perhaps you will understand. You said ‘you get a say.’”

  Kaylin nodded.

  “That was what I wanted. I wanted a say. I wanted to choose who I served, and what I did in that service.”

  “But the Towers choose their Lords.”

  “Yes. But I was not a Tower.”

  “What were you?”

  “I don’t know, Kaylin. Much of what was destroyed took memories with it. I attempted to preserve my knowledge internally; I am certain I did not fully succeed. As I told you, I cannot precisely see the internal workings of what I will call my own heart. I could not, then. But I could see the general shape of things, and I...amputated?”

  “If you mean cutting off a limb, then yes, amputated.”

  “I destroyed the portions of my inscription that forced me to behave in ways I no longer wished to behave. I did this in part to keep the information I contained from the hands of those who would pillage graves.”

  “Did it matter?”

  “Yes. I wanted to serve Hasielle. She gave things to me. She brought light. She lived here. Even as a slave. I thought they would kill her—probably unintentionally, although they were not particularly careful—and I did not want that. I was damaged somewhat before their arrival, and I completed that damage so that I could not be compelled.”

  “And the Barrani upstairs is trying to co
mpel you as if you’d never been damaged?”

  “He is not Barrani, and yes. He is confused. And angry. He seeks to give orders, to invoke words and phrases that will turn all control of my interior over to him. He cannot, now.”

  “But if I somehow repair you, he might?”

  Kaylin could practically hear the frown she couldn’t see.

  “I highly doubt that. What is more likely, in my opinion, is that such repairs will give you the ability to control me.”

  “But I don’t want that.”

  “No. You don’t. The only risk I take—and I choose to take it—is that the next mortal who crosses my threshold, the next tenant, will not have your aversion to such control.”

  Kaylin closed her eyes again. The sounds of battle receded. The small scattering of pebbles and rocks didn’t. She now ignored those, trusting Helen to give her warning if larger chunks were to follow. It would have been a trivial job if there were only six scorch marks in the center; there were over a dozen. Given the trembling of the stone beneath her feet, dropping words into random empty spaces seemed smarter than it had five minutes ago.

  But it wouldn’t work, and she knew it.

  She threaded her way between the carved words until she stood in their center. There, she discovered a rune that did not glow; it was flat, dull, and lifeless. She opened her eyes. Beneath her feet, the stone was smooth. No lines had been carved into its flat, pristine surface.

  She closed her eyes again.

  The rune was there. But she could only see it with closed eyes. She regretted sending the small dragon back to Mandoran, then; she wanted his wing.

  And she wasn’t going to get it any time soon.

  * * *

  The rune, to Kaylin’s closed eye, looked engraved. She knelt and touched the surface of the stone, tracing the long underscore with two fingers; she could feel the indentations in rock, even if she couldn’t see them with her eyes open. She thought, as she stood, that this was the center-piece of Helen’s heart, for want of a better word; it wasn’t active.

  She rose and scanned the runes that surrounded this one, noting their placement, and marking the positions of the absent words. The stones into which they had been engraved, unlike the central stone, were scorched or melted. “How much time did you say we have?”

  “I didn’t. I am uncertain.”

  Kaylin looked at the word in her hand. It seemed to her—with her eyes closed, and how wrong was that?—to be made of glass; the light that filled it wasn’t an essential part of its form. But she knew if she broke it, the light would be lost.

  She exhaled. In the West March, she had chosen two of the words on her skin based entirely on the way they made her feel. This was not, in daily life, a good bet—but she had nothing else to go on. And she knew—as she had known in the West March—that the words would not now choose their intended destination. They were waiting to be chosen.

  The usual fear of making a mistake was heightened by the stakes. The closest friends she had in Elantra were in this building, and if it fell, they’d die. Or worse. She had no expectation of mercy from the intruder. She was betting their lives on the placement of six runes, and it was a bet she would never have taken otherwise.

  Breathe, she told herself. And think.

  The words failed to speak to her. She hadn’t the time to fly around them, examining them from all angles, as she had done in the West March. She hadn’t the time to touch them all.

  Think, Kaylin. Think fast.

  What Helen wanted was what anyone wanted: companionship. Home. She couldn’t be a home if she was empty. Home was a place where people lived. Home was a place where they belonged. Helen wanted that sense of belonging—and who didn’t? Home couldn’t mean, to Helen, what it meant to Kaylin—and yet it did.

  Helen had been afraid that no one would come to her. No one who wanted to stay. It was a particular type of loneliness— and Kaylin realized that she held it in her hands, almost literally. For Helen, home was people. It wasn’t the shape she presented; it wasn’t the color of her walls or the type of wood that formed her floors. It was people.

  Emptiness meant something very literal to Helen; it meant something metaphorical to Kaylin. Both of the meanings were enclosed in this rune. What Kaylin couldn’t understand was why, of all words, this one was meant to have a place here. Helen didn’t need it—she had lived it. Kaylin considered attempting to reattach it to her skin.

  Instead of wasting her time doing something she was certain wouldn’t work, she began to walk toward one of the scorch marks. It was perhaps three rows back—although the words hadn’t been written in neat, precise rings—when she stopped. She looked toward the rune in the center. Given the light shed by the runes that now surrounded her, she could no longer see it.

  She stared, instead, at the words that surrounded the scorching. They were, for the most part, rounded and curved; the lines were delicate in their construction, and dots were more central. But they didn’t speak to her the way the word she held did; she had no sense of meaning from them. She hated time. Or time’s passing.

  She hated the limitations of her own mortality. Had Mandoran actually come through the door with her, he’d probably have an opinion that was worth something. Then again, they’d probably also have some part of the intruder in the place most vulnerable to his attacks.

  Tiamaris had told Kaylin that the words themselves were ordered; that they had a correct shape, a precise form. He couldn’t assess their meaning, but he could see when something was off or wrong; he could see, for instance, if a word had been riven and was now incomplete. Although all these words were complete in and of themselves, Kaylin attempted to apply Tiamaris’s advice to the shape of these words as a whole.

  Because if these were words, she was making sentences, and the sentences had to be completed; they had to make sense.

  Even if it was only visual, harmonious sense.

  This word did not belong among the rest of them, if that were the case; it was too heavy, too bold, too thickly written. Yes, there were curved lines and dots—all the words had those—but not in the same way, and not to the same extent. She moved, walking slowly, examining only shape, form, and composition, until she came to an empty space at the outer edge of the active words.

  Here.

  This is stupid, she told herself, adorning the spare sentence with Leontine. But stupid or no, she knelt to set the word down. Nothing happened. The word, however, did not return to the loose formation that adorned her head.

  She reached up to take one of the remaining five. Gravity came with touch; the rune fell into her hands. Although she had chosen to place the words into the general pattern of the whole, she studied the word that lay in her palms for more than just shape and composition. This was the opposite of the first word; not loneliness, not the yearning that came of it, but contentment. She felt the warmth of Marcus’s hearth fire, and the certain sense that she was welcome there. She didn’t know what this meant for Helen—but she thought she could guess; if she was welcome, Helen was welcoming. If she accepted the gifts offered her as gifts, not entitlements or obligations—and she did—Helen was content.

  No, it wasn’t contentment. It was gratitude. And this was the problem with identifying true words: she only had mortal words to describe it, and she wasn’t very good at it. She wasn’t always good at telling other people how she felt or why she felt that way and if she did, they interpreted those feelings in ways she hadn’t intended.

  Even thinking, Kaylin had continued to walk; to study the shape of the form and the way it blended—or didn’t—with the other words. This search took less time because the first had taken her far enough from the center that she now had a sense of where the patterns were laid out. Gratitude. That one, she could understand.

  She wondered if one of the lost words had been this one;
if some part of Helen’s make-up meant the same thing. It didn’t really make sense that it would—why would a building require either gratitude or, worse, the concept of loneliness?

  And yet, the Hallionne experienced both. Tara certainly did; the desire for companionship and understanding had almost driven her to the building version of suicide. Kaylin frowned. The Hallionne, at their core, had not started their eternal lives as architecture; they’d started as Immortals. Or possibly mortals. They’d started from the foundation of personhood, and they’d agreed to become what they did become: almost gods, in their own small domains. And prisoners, as well.

  Were these the words that Helen had destroyed?

  Kaylin found the space in which gratitude looked to be at home. She set it down. Once again, the rest of the words didn’t react—but had she honestly expected they would? Shaking her head, she reached up for the third word. This one was harder to understand; she walked the third circle staring at it. The outer lines of the rune were solid; they looked almost utilitarian in the form they took: a straight rectangle. The interior was less rigid, and the rectangle appeared to be standing on far more graceful curves—but the external curves were bold, thick lines, as well.

  It took her some moments to understand that this word spoke of protection. The lines of the rectangle implied either a room or a house—a simple house—that kept the interior separate from any other interference. The interior, however, wasn’t empty. She frowned. Protection, of course, was too simple a word. The one that followed it was safety. Safety, in any real sense, didn’t exist. It was a hope, a dream, a goal—but like immortality for mortals, it was always out of reach.

  She knew this, but it didn’t stop her from yearning for it. Protection was a thing you offered or accepted. Safety was a thing you felt. Maybe the word meant security. The meaning of the word didn’t exist in isolation; it couldn’t. Words.

  To Kaylin’s surprise, the only space that suited the composition of the word was the scorched, black mark closest to the center. All the words there had similar shapes, and similar hard, definitive strokes. She set the mark down with far less doubt than she had the first two, and she reached, as she did, for the fourth.