Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

“No.”

  Kaylin said, “He had no name.”

  They both turned to look at her.

  Kaylin cleared her throat. Had she the choice, she would be outside in the hall with Morse. “Tiamaris,” she said quietly, “ask him how he found the Tower.”

  Tiamaris frowned.

  “He said—when you asked—that the fief’s name was Barren. The fief’s name wasn’t Barren ten years ago. We know that,” she added. “He wasn’t born here. He didn’t come up through the streets.”

  “Careful, Eli,” Barren said.

  “Why is it significant? I found the Tower,” Tiamaris told her.

  “You found the Tower when Illien ruled from it.”

  He frowned.

  “Barren found the Tower when it was, in theory, empty.”

  Barren was watching her. She realized, then, that he had always watched her. His attention, profoundly unwelcome, had always made her uncomfortable; it had never occurred to her, not at thirteen, that the entire point of that watchfulness wasn’t her discomfort or her revulsion.

  Careful, Kaylin. Careful. Now is not the time to go there.

  “You found the Tower,” Kaylin said, forcing herself to remain in the present. “But you were looking for it. Was Barren?”

  Tiamaris frowned again. “Were you?” he asked.

  “No more than she was,” he replied. Kaylin knew that if the fate of his fief wasn’t hanging in the balance she wouldn’t have left the room alive. He wouldn’t have taken his time, either; she would just be dead.

  “She has answered all relevant questions,” Tiamaris replied, as if the momentary venom of Barren’s answer was beneath concern.

  “She hasn’t answered mine.”

  “Ah. I believe I am misunderstanding what must be a human interaction,” Tiamaris replied.

  Barren raised a brow.

  “You are asking for aid. We are in a position to offer it. We are not applying for a job or a position on your staff. Your questions would seem, to me, to be irrelevant. Private?”

  Kaylin shrugged. “I’d say you understand the interaction fairly well.”

  Barren was silent for a long moment. “I was on the run,” he finally said. “It was the outer gates, the port, or the fiefs—and I didn’t have much time to make a decision. Only a madman runs into the fiefs,” he added. Pride and bitterness were braided through those words. “I didn’t have much time to pack. I didn’t expect to remain here. But it was driving rain, and I wanted shelter. I wanted shelter,” he added, “that wouldn’t immediately be tracked. If that had been less of a concern, I would have kicked a door in.”

  “You were worried about witnesses in the fiefs?” Kaylin said. Tiamaris gave her a look.

  “I wasn’t familiar with the fiefs at the time,” Barren replied. His tone and his language had shifted in subtle ways as he spoke. “I knew the stories,” he added, “and I knew the legends.”

  “Legends?”

  “I don’t expect someone who was born in the fiefs to know them.”

  Kaylin shrugged.

  “You refer,” Tiamaris said, “to the heart of the fiefs.”

  Barren said nothing. After a long pause, he continued. “I saw the Tower. It didn’t look occupied.”

  Tiamaris frowned. “It was in the same state of disrepair it is currently in?”

  “Yes. I climbed the fence.”

  “In the rain,” Kaylin said.

  “Private.”

  “He didn’t climb—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Barren snapped. “I went over the damn fence. The wall isn’t solid. Some of the rocks near the foundation have crumbled. I found a way in through those.” He looked across at Tiamaris. “The inside was not what I expected.”

  Tiamaris nodded. Even Kaylin was not surprised.

  “You didn’t enter the Tower?” Barren asked her.

  This wasn’t a conversation; it was an interrogation. Kaylin knew this, but in spite of that, she answered. “No. It wasn’t raining. It was dark. There were ferals somewhere nearby—I could hear them. I went to ground behind the fence, in the grass.”

  “Grass doesn’t usually stop ferals.”

  “Fences do. Sometimes.”

  He shrugged. “You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

  “No one ever is.”

  Tiamaris nodded as if he approved of the reply, which was good—it wasn’t the first one that had come to mind, and she’d had to struggle to offer it.

  “I am not entirely interested in what the Tower looked like,” Tiamaris told Barren. “I am interested only in its occupants. You said that you met Illien.”

  Barren’s nod was slight.

  “You invaded his Tower. He could not have been pleased to see you.”

  “Oh, he was pleased,” Barren replied. He smiled, and the smile was a thin, sharp edge of an expression. “At least he was at first.”

  “What did he want from you?” Kaylin asked.

  “I imagine he wanted the same thing from me that he wanted from you.”

  She gritted her teeth. “And that would be?”

  “Power.”

  “He wanted you to serve him?”

  “No. In fief terms, he wanted to eat me.”

  “Barren—”

  Tiamaris lifted a hand. “Private,” he said. At least that’s what she thought he said; the two syllables felt an awful lot like “shut up.” He faced the fief lord. “You were an Arcanist,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  Barren’s brow rose. After a moment, he nodded.

  “Fief Law and Imperial Law are not the same.”

  “Tell the Wolves that.”

  “The Wolves are not here. And even if they were, I think it unlikely they would look for their quarry in the fief lord.”

  Kaylin looked back and forth between the Dragon Lord and the fief lord. Barren had been hunted by Wolves. And he had come here. She should have been surprised, but she wasn’t. She didn’t even wonder what he had done to merit the peculiar death sentence of a hunting Wolf. Or Wolves. She’d spent almost five months under his tutelage; she had no trouble imagining that he deserved it.

  But…she had never seen Barren use magic. It’s true that he might have chosen the more subtle, and less visible, spells—but she’d never felt the uncomfortable and painful prickly feeling that magic almost always caused.

  “Tiamaris,” she said quietly. This time he nodded. “I spent months in Barren, and I spent some time in his company. He didn’t use magic.”

  Tiamaris nodded, as if this were not a surprise.

  “You don’t know Barren,” Kaylin continued. “If he were an Arcanist of any note, if he were dangerous enough that they could send the Shadow Wolves after him, he would have used magic. He’s not a subtle man. He’s always been all about the power.”

  Tiamaris nodded again. And then, as if he were Sanabalis, he said, “What does this tell you, Private?”

  “That he didn’t have any.”

  “Not of note, no.”

  She’d had a long damn day. It took her a moment to understand what he was implying. But when she did, she looked at Barren. “Illien,” she whispered.

  He said nothing for a long moment, and then he nodded.

  “Now,” Tiamaris told the fief lord, “I understand why the fief did not fall immediately. Whatever power protected its borders, and however weakly—it wasn’t Illien’s. It was yours. You should have contested his control of the Tower.”

  “With what?”

  The Dragon Lord did not reply. Instead he turned to Kaylin. “Private,” he told her quietly, “we are done here for now.” He paused, and then he offered Barren a bow. “We will return on the morrow. We can discuss the nature of the fief, and the defense of the fief, then.”

  Barren nodded. He almost spoke, but chose to withhold the words. The door opened on Tiamaris’s sentence.

  “Good,” Morse told them both. “Because we’ve lost two sentry towers.”

  Barren looked up a
s if slapped.

  “I sent Seeley,” Morse continued. “He’s cleaning up now.”

  The fief lord turned to the Dragon Lord.

  Kaylin, however, turned to Morse. “Cleaning up?”

  Morse nodded grimly.

  Kaylin glanced, briefly, out the window. “It’s barely late afternoon,” she told Tiamaris. “We’re not due back to report for hours, yet.”

  “The information that we’ve received is not information I fully understand,” Tiamaris replied. “And it is crucial, if we are to participate in the defense of the fief, that we speak to those who might.”

  Morse shrugged. “Go,” she told Kaylin. “We’ll still be here in the morning.”

  “Hell with that,” Kaylin snapped. She turned to Tiamaris. This time the Dragon Lord nodded.

  “Go, Morse,” Kaylin told her. “We’ve got your back.”

  Morse looked as if she would speak, but she glanced at Barren instead, and shrugged. “Boss?” she said.

  “Take them.”

  Kaylin noted that the fief lord did not leave the room.

  “What the fuck is an Arcanist?” Morse asked as she jogged down the walk and toward the guardhouse. Morse had been listening in, then. No surprise.

  “Mage,” Kaylin replied, just as tersely. Morse was pissed, but Kaylin wasn’t much happier. “We’ll still be here in the morning?”

  “What the fuck was I supposed to say?” Morse could spit words as easily as she could throw daggers. “You want sniveling and groveling, go kick a door down.”

  “You could have—”

  “I didn’t want you back in the first place. I don’t want you here now.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t get it, do you? You know what an Arcanist is. You understood most of what Barren said—and you still don’t get it. I don’t have all that fancy education—and I do.”

  “What I got,” Kaylin replied, as the guards in the guardhouse got the hell out of their way, “was that you’re not certain you won’t die here.” They headed out into the street. The streets looked pretty much the same as they always had, this close to the White Towers: they were lined with buildings that seemed dingy, but here at least, they stood alone; whoever had built them once, in a bygone age, hadn’t packed them cheek by jowl. They were also empty.

  The shutters in the buildings that faced the Towers were closed. Kaylin wondered if anyone lived in them, now. No one with anywhere else to go would—but if you lived in the fiefs, you probably didn’t have many other options.

  But the buildings were standing; they hadn’t burned down, and they hadn’t been riddled with holes; if creatures like the one she had faced on Capstone were as common as Tiamaris feared—and he did fear it, even if he kept that fear to himself—she thought the streets would have been a standing wreck.

  “I’m never certain I’m not going to die,” Morse said. “Hey! We’re not going that way. West and Southwest watches.”

  Kaylin shook herself. “Sorry. Old habits.” She reversed direction, and once again kept pace with Morse.

  “You and your damn old habits.” Morse slowed for a moment, dragging her hands through the short brush of her hair. “Tell me you at least killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever you wanted to kill so badly you came to work for me.”

  Kaylin, no longer thirteen, looked at Morse. “No.”

  Morse swore. She began to jog again, but this time, Kaylin had a much clearer idea of where they were going: she could see smoke rising in the distance.

  “Did you?” Kaylin said, keeping as much of a safe distance as an attempt to combine running and conversation allowed.

  “Did I what?”

  “Kill the man you wanted to kill so badly?”

  It could have gone either way. But Morse chose to grimace, and she chose to keep up her steady jog. “No. But I’m not done yet. You?”

  Kaylin shook her head. “I’m done,” she told Morse quietly.

  “You ever kill anyone outside of Barren?”

  Kaylin flinched and looked away. “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  She almost smiled. It was Morse, after all; Morse never regretted any death she caused. “Good?”

  “Hate to see my time go to waste,” Morse told her. She slowed as they turned a corner.

  Kaylin froze.

  “Welcome,” Morse said, with a grin that was pure black, “to Barren.”

  What Kaylin had assumed was smoke at a distance was not, in fact, smoke. It rose and it twisted in the air in thin, amorphous streams, and it was dark enough—at a distance—that it should have been smoke. But there was no fire beneath it.

  She stared, her head falling backward as she craned her neck up. “Tiamaris,” she whispered. “What do you see?”

  She couldn’t tell if he looked at her at all; for a moment all she could see was the azure of sky paling into insignificance before the tendrils that reached into its heart.

  “I don’t see what you see.”

  She swallowed. “There’s shadow here.” It was an understatement. Shadow enfolded the wooden legs of what might have been a tall, freestanding structure. A watchpost, Morse had called it. It climbed up those legs, blackening wood as if it was trying to consume it.

  “Yes. That much, I can see.”

  She closed her eyes. “Morse, what are we going to find there?”

  “If you’re lucky, corpses,” Morse replied, in a tone of voice that made clear just how unlucky Morse thought they would be.

  “Kaylin,” Tiamaris said, touching her shoulder. She turned to look at him. “What do you see?”

  “I thought it was smoke,” she told him.

  “Now?”

  “It’s—I think it’s a sigil.”

  “What the fuck is a sigil?” Morse said. Her voice was not as faint as Kaylin’s and it was a good deal less friendly.

  “It’s a mage thing,” Kaylin replied. “The reason we can track mages—and, you know, kill them if we need to—is that they leave a…a signature when they work a spell.”

  “A signature?”

  “Not on purpose. It’s just an artifact of the magic. Every mage alive works slightly differently. There’s some theory that says—”

  Morse spit.

  Fair enough. Kaylin had rolled her eyes—like a spoiled, wayward child—the first time she’d heard this, seated in the confines of a classroom that had never felt so far away. “Never mind. We can tell who cast a spell if we’ve seen that mage’s work before.”

  “And you see that here?” Morse said sharply. “’Cause I see squat. Besides the shadow.”

  “I see a sigil. A sigil,” Kaylin added softly, because she was almost afraid of the words, “that’s taller than the tower itself.”

  Tiamaris swore. In Leontine.

  Morse looked at Kaylin. “What did he just say?”

  “It wasn’t in Elantran.”

  “Got that. Dragon?”

  Kaylin shook her head. “Leontine. Leontine has a huge number of words that are useful at times like this.”

  “So you have been learning something useful.” Morse grinned. It was a gallows grin, but Kaylin had responded in kind before she could stop herself.

  “Yeah. I’ll teach you the good ones. There are a few Aerian phrases, as well. Dragons and Barrani don’t need ’em; they just tend to rip out your throat or cut off your head if they’re pissed off.”

  “Which your friend isn’t.”

  “He’s surprised,” Kaylin told her. “Which is usually a bad thing.” She swallowed and let the grin fade from her face. The sigil still hovered. “What does it mean, Tiamaris?”

  “What do you think it means?” Anyone else had said those words, they would have been laced with sarcasm; the Dragon’s voice held none.

  “My skin’s itchy, if that helps.”

  “Not perhaps as much as I would like,” Tiamaris replied. His eyes were a shade of bronze that was verging, slowly, toward copper. His inner
membranes were high; his hands were fists. He grimaced, loosened those fists, and began to gesture; the gestures were both familiar and strange.

  She had known for a while that Tiamaris had been one of Sanabalis’s students. His second last. She’d seen him use magic precisely once—but the way the hair on the back of her neck was suddenly prickling, she thought she was about to see a second incident. She couldn’t say why, but Tiamaris actually using magic seemed wrong, to her.

  Maybe it was the Hawk.

  But whatever magic he now invoked was subtle. No fire erupted; no light fled his hands; nothing appeared before him in the air. He simply stood there, staring at the sky. He frowned once or twice, and he repeated his gestures, but the repetitions were shorter, sharper. He finally said another curt, Leontine word, and turned back to Kaylin.

  “I cannot see it,” he told her.

  “See what?”

  “The sigil.”

  “Try again,” she told him. “But expand the field of vision. Pretend you’re looking at a spell that’s affecting something the size of our port.”

  “For someone who has yet to master the simple act of lighting a candle,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “you seem comfortable giving advice.” He actually sounded irritated.

  She shrugged. “Sanabalis didn’t try to teach me the one I think you’re doing.”

  “He hasn’t tried to teach you anything.”

  “Well, he said he was working on teaching me patience.”

  Tiamaris snorted. “I imagine,” he told her, his brows bunching together, “that he is continuing to work on mine. If he weren’t, he would have sent any other Hawk.” His gestures changed only slightly. His expression changed a whole lot more.

  “It’s not a sigil,” he told her, voice flat.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a storm.” He glanced at the buildings that girded the street. “Stay out of it. Stay out of its reach.”

  “Tiamaris—”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re wrong. If it’s a storm, it’s directed. It looks like a huge version of the shadow-sigil I saw in the Leontine quarter.”

  “It may well be both,” he told her. “Kaylin, I cannot go into that shadow. Not now. We must avoid it.”

  But Morse said, “Can’t.”