Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “It was occupied, but it was occupied not by Barrani or Dragon although they did live within its boundaries. We think—we are not certain—that the Old Ones made their home here for some time, mimicking the lesser mortals, as if to see what they gained from their odd communities. We are not certain.

  “What we are certain of is this—the Towers, the Castles, were not created by Barrani, Dragon or any mortal race. Yet in our muddled histories, we have the odd record that indicates that the fiefs themselves, as they now exist, were not a barrier when the city was discovered. The…present difficulty…was a gift of shadowstorms and possibly the nature of the fiefs themselves.

  “But that does not answer your question, and I see you are impatient.”

  As she was actually listening with interest, Kaylin grimaced.

  “Lord Illien remade the Tower for a time in his own image, and he explored what he found within. Some of our knowledge of Old runes comes from that time, for there were parts of the Tower that were…akin in some fashion to the High Halls. Frequently, he would leave his Tower to venture into the High Halls during this period, and he would speak with one or two of his friends about his discoveries. But he traveled less and less with time. He was not Outcaste, he was not denied his role in the Court—but it ceased to interest him. Or so we thought.”

  “Nightshade can leave his Castle. He’s crossed the Ablayne.”

  The High Lord nodded. “He does not leave it often, however.”

  “How often do you leave the High Halls?”

  “Seldom,” was the quiet reply. “And perhaps, in the end, for similar reasons. Lord Illien discovered, as he rebuilt his Tower, that the hold that the Tower also exerted over him was substantial. It was subtle, but it was always present.”

  She hesitated, and then said, “I don’t think Nightshade views it the same way.”

  “Perhaps he does not.”

  “He is the fief, in some ways. That much, we know. He can be aware of almost anything that occurs in the fief if he wants to. I got the impression it was a lot of work to be that aware, and it requires a lot of focus. If he’s homing in on the small things, he can miss the bigger ones. Well, some of them—if you wanted to storm the Castle, he’d know no matter what he was doing.”

  The High Lord nodded.

  “But Nightshade is definitely not undying.”

  “No.”

  “And Illien wasn’t.” She frowned. “I don’t think—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know enough. But I don’t think he could have taken the Tower if he’d been undying.” She frowned again. “Nightshade told us something.”

  “Us?”

  “Tiamaris. Lord Tiamaris,” she added. “He’s one of the—”

  “Dragon Court. I am familiar with all of the Lords who comprise it.”

  She nodded. “He told us that Liatt—the fief of Liatt—is held. I don’t think it’s held by Barrani. I think—I’m not sure—that it’s held by a human. A woman.”

  The High Lord inclined his chin slightly.

  “But humans don’t have names. So I don’t understand how—” She stopped speaking for a moment, and looked at Severn. “If he attempted to divest himself of his name, and he succeeded, he wouldn’t, strictly speaking, be dead. But if it’s not entirely based on name—”

  “He would not lose the fief, no.”

  “But the fief—the fief has no name,” she told the High Lord.

  “You said it was Barren.”

  “It’s Barren, at least that’s what the people who live there call it. But I call Teela Teela; you call her Anteela. In either case, we’re not using her true name. People know who we mean. It’s the same with Barren. I think.” She stopped. She was missing something, and knew it.

  Swallowing, she looked up at the High Lord, enclosed by the circle and surrounded by sickly torches. “When you attempted to divest yourself of name,” she asked softly, “how did you do it?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The consort stiffened, and turned to look fully at Kaylin. Kaylin had the strong sense that she could have asked for the particulars of their sex life and caused less offense. Not that she was tempted to try, because one of them might actually answer.

  The High Lord said, after a pause, “If this Liatt can somehow name a fief, it is not a Barrani name, not an immortal name.” She recognized a deflection when she heard it. She almost accepted it, given the fact that the consort was still staring sharply at the side of her face.

  But even if it was true—and it was, she couldn’t deny it based on what she knew—it was also beside the point. “The fief of Liatt,” she replied, in her most reasonable tone of voice, “still has a name. Barren—” and it struck her as she said it that it was an appropriate name for the fief “—doesn’t. Not in a way that means something to the fief lords.”

  “Or,” Severn added softly, “to the shadows at the heart of the fiefs.” He took a step forward, although he did not attempt to step over the carved boundary of the circle itself. “What is occurring in the fiefs now—at least in the fief of Barren—has something to do with Illien, with the name that he attempted to surrender.”

  The High Lord laughed. It was a bitter, dark laugh, and his eyes were a green that looked like dead plants, not the heart of a living forest.

  The consort reached out, her arm crossing the circle, her feet remaining at its edge. He did not take her hand; didn’t even seem to notice it. Kaylin did; she also noted that the consort didn’t withdraw what was ignored.

  “Do you understand, Kaylin Neya, that I failed the test of the High Halls? Do you fully understand?”

  She nodded. “I would have failed,” she replied quietly.

  “You are not—you were never meant to be—High Lord.”

  She nodded again, but some of the edge left her expression as his shifted. “I would have failed that test,” she told him, “if I had taken it. I would fail it now,” she added softly, thinking of the darkness of the caverns below the High Halls, in which the damned waited in the only Barrani version of hell she had ever heard of. “You didn’t have your full name.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t have mattered then. My brother, the Lord of the West March, and my sister, my consort—” he met her gaze, then, although he still did not touch the hand that remained outstretched before him “—passed.”

  Kaylin said nothing. “You knew,” she finally said. “You knew, then, that you’d failed. But you didn’t attempt to strip yourself of your name until later.”

  “Until I knew that my father intended to perform the rites and surrender the High Halls—to me. Had they come to me, the creature that held my name would have controlled the Halls.”

  Kaylin swallowed. “I’m not Barrani,” she said, speaking in her native tongue. “I know it won’t mean much to you—but I can’t judge you, not in this. I would have tried the same thing. Except in my case, it would have been simpler.” Suicide, in theory, was. Give this to the Barrani: they couldn’t do anything simple if something more complicated and twisted could be done in its place.

  She looked at the consort. “The waters,” she finally said, “of life.”

  The consort nodded, but the nod was not an agreement; it was an acknowledgment of the words, no more.

  “All names, past and present, are there—somehow.”

  She nodded again. “You’ve seen them,” she finally grudgingly added.

  “The babies—your babies—they don’t wake without names.”

  “No.”

  “And you go to the waters to find their names. But you don’t know them.”

  “No.”

  “But the children—they’re not dead. Before they’re joined to their names.”

  “No.” The consort shook herself, and her face lost the cool chill of anger. “They breathe,” she said, her voice softening. “They can open their eyes, but they see nothing. We believe they hear little, as well.”

  “They eat?”

&nbs
p; The consort lifted a brow.

  “I’ll take it that’s a no.” It was her turn to frown. “But they don’t starve.”

  “They’re not mortal,” was the consort’s reply.

  “Do they grow?”

  “No. They do not change at all. They…wait. Only when they have their true name do they begin to interact with the world.”

  “The undying—”

  The consort grimaced. “Understand that our knowledge is limited, Kaylin. The undying are not children. We are not certain what they are. They have lived, often for centuries, and the rhythm of life does not leave them. They can speak, they can eat, they can sleep—although they do not seem to require it. They can converse and interact.”

  “Then why do they need the name at all?”

  “It is a question that our sages have oft asked when discussing philosophical issues. It is not a question that I, as consort, and mother of our race, will ever ask.” She glanced at the High Lord; her hand was steady, but still outstretched, and its silent grace was almost a demand.

  He ignored it.

  “When the Barrani die—if they die—their names are freed. Those names,” the consort added softly, “will return to the lake of names, to the waters of life, and they will flow there, among the others, until they are chosen again.” She paused, and then added, in a softer voice, “this is our lore, and this is our understanding.

  “But I am not my mother, or my grandmother. I have seen the dead, and if I do not know their true names in any way the Barrani understand, I can almost sense the shape of them. But I cannot—I have never been able—to find that shape in the waters. I looked,” she added quietly. “When my mother chose her end. When she allowed the waters to wash over her a last time. I looked for her.

  “Perhaps I couldn’t find her because if I did, I might choose that name for another because of my own attachment to it. I do not know. We have no gods,” she added softly. “But perhaps our creators meant this as a kindness.”

  “The names of the undying—are they meant to return to the lake?”

  The consort glanced at the High Lord.

  Silence.

  In the silence, for just a moment, Kaylin could hear the faint cries and pleas of a multitude of muted voices. She could, if she closed her eyes, see the dead who uttered them without hope, standing across a chasm that was bridged by a slender span of misshapen rock. Above them, rock, dripping over centuries into shapes that only ice took in the streets of the city; beneath them, hidden to Kaylin’s eyes, different rock, fire, the glimmering of a magic that was so old it didn’t truly feel magical at all.

  And before them, in command of them, pulling them from the darkness and sending them back at its whim, one creature, nameless and almost shapeless.

  Because beneath these Halls, in a darkness that had probably never seen light, the shadows gathered, waiting for one gap, one lapse of guardianship, that would allow them to run free. And while they waited, they held what they had taken: the Barrani who did not have the strength—if strength was the word for indifference—to walk away from the truth of their private vision of hell.

  She didn’t close her eyes.

  “They died,” she said quietly, her voice so soft even she had trouble hearing it. “Those who failed the test of the High Halls. They died.”

  The High Lord closed his eyes and turned his face away. It was a very Barrani gesture.

  “Yes,” the Consort replied, for he would not. “They died.”

  “But their names—”

  “Their names have never returned to the lake. They will never return while the shadows of the Old Ones remain.”

  Kaylin allowed the words to sink in, to take a shape and form that intuition alone didn’t give them. She waited until she could find her voice again and speak clearly and cleanly. Where cleanly in this case meant a whole lot of hushed Leontine invective.

  “It is to prevent our entire race from meeting that fate,” the consort said evenly, “that my brother is High Lord. Because of your intervention, he has the strength to ensure that we are safe while he is alive.”

  Kaylin nodded, still thinking. “If Lord Nightshade died, I couldn’t hold his name. I couldn’t hold him here.”

  “No.”

  “But the—”

  “The shadows beneath the High Halls are, in some ways, the Old Ones, Kaylin. They are half of the face of the only gods we knew. They created the words. What they can do, none of the rest of us can do, and for that, we must be grateful.”

  “High Lord,” Kaylin said, for he had still not spoken. “What did you do?”

  “I studied,” he replied. “For decades. I traveled, as I could, and I learned. You have heard the stories about the undying, no doubt. The Dragons have some understanding, but it is, as is so often the case with Dragon theory, flawed.”

  She was grateful that Tiamaris wasn’t in hearing range. Not that he would have done anything but respond with similar arrogance.

  “At the height of our power, in the absence of the Old Ones, there were those of our kin who had some understanding of the tongue of the ancients.”

  There were Dragons who did, as well; Kaylin didn’t point this out.

  “Understand that to us language is not a simple act of communication. Not the Ancient language; it is transformative. What you say becomes what you are, and if you say it well, and clearly, and with will, it will transform the landscape around you, altering it in subtle ways.

  “We came to our understanding of magic through our attempts to speak the Ancient Tongue.”

  Kaylin frowned. “But most magic—”

  “Does not require speech?”

  “Only if you’re bad—Sanabalis says speech and physical gestures are a type of crutch.”

  “That would be Lord Sanabalis, and yes, he is correct. Magic, as it is taught and understood, does not require speech. But our attempts to harness the Ancient Tongue taught us how to approach the magic that underlies this world.” He glanced at the consort. “Our names, our birthing rites, our waking into the world, were given to us by the Old Ones. We were said to be formed of stone, not flesh, until they gave our ancestors the First Names, and story says this is why we do not age as you do.”

  “I think I understand the difference between myth and history.”

  “Good. Understand that the concern of my kin has often been power. Without it, we die or we serve. There is not a man born among us who dreams—at first—of service, although in the end, many are bent that way.”

  She grimaced, and said nothing.

  “But in that dawn, when the world was young and the Old Ones had left us, we were powerful, Kaylin. We thought of ourselves as the new gods.”

  “So did the Dragons.”

  “Yes. They are the eldest,” he added after a slight pause. “Although I admit this is not completely accepted chronology among some of my kin.”

  She would have let him continue, but something about the words made her raise her hand. “Why do you believe they’re the eldest?”

  “They have two forms. The one that you see in the City, and the form of a great beast. They breathe fire, and smoke, and ash. They bear scales that only the very, very finest of our weapons could pierce.”

  She nodded; she’d seen it. “They were made that way, though.”

  “Yes. But…it is my belief that they were made when the Old Ones were not yet themselves at war, that some part of the chaos that is shadow and some part of the order that is not went into their building. The Dragon form is sharp and it is beautiful—but it is also kin, in some ways, to the beasts that leave the shadows when the shadows find some freedom.

  “But that is not to the point, and if I reach the point slowly, I am tracing a path toward it. Our ancestors played with the words the Old Ones appeared to have abandoned, and those words brought magic to us all. You have studied with Lord Sanabalis.” It wasn’t a question.

  Kaylin nodded.

  “You bore his medallion when we
first met. It was seen,” he added, “by the Lords of the Court, and if you did not understand it clearly at the time, they did. They could interfere with you, but in so doing, they courted the fury of a Dragon Lord. The Dragons are notoriously possessive.”

  Given that their most important laws involved hoarding, this was not news to Kaylin.

  “Magic, when it is taught to humans, is taught differently—but some of the fundamentals must remain the same. Tell me, have you encountered the test of the candle?”

  Kaylin cringed and bit her tongue to stop herself from cursing. “Yes,” she managed.

  “Did he not tell you to imagine—to discover—the name of fire?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Understand that this is not a simple convention. Fire has a name. Different students will arrive at it in entirely individual ways—especially the humans. But the name, the naming, is part of making it your own. This is the legacy of the Ancients, and some pale reflection of the glory they discovered when they began to attempt to invoke the Old Tongue.

  “Because they sought power, and they found it, they were content for a time. But as their power and knowledge grew, they came to understand that they had a fatal flaw, a singular weakness—the names that bound them. Those names, private and hidden, could be used against them, and all of the magic at their disposal would avail them nothing.”

  “You can’t just use a name. It has to be given.”

  “No, Kaylin,” he said quietly. “It does not.”

  She stared at him.

  “Do you think,” he added, opening his eyes and meeting hers, “that I willingly gave my name to the creature the High Halls imprisons? Do you think any of the damned did?”

  She was silent, after that. It didn’t last, but she felt that for the duration, it was a somber and qualitative silence. It certainly was compared to the first words she spoke. “I don’t understand.”