Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “And if you’re going to be a home for someone, a good home—not a home with ferals and evil multi-eyed bastards in the basement—would be better.”

  “Tara.”

  “It sounds sort of like Tower,” Kaylin offered. Tara’s hands tightened, briefly, around hers.

  “You won’t stay with me,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You won’t.”

  Children were always perceptive when you least wanted it. Kaylin nodded, her expression carefully neutral. She wasn’t talking to a child, but had to remind herself forcefully of this. “The City I care about—the City I was born into—hasn’t happened yet.” This would have confused a real child; Tara simply nodded. “I’m not sure how I got here, and I’m not sure how I’ll get back—but I have to go back. We’re fighting a war with the shadows that live in the heart of—of this place.”

  “Fight them now,” Tara said. “Fight them. I’ll help you. It’s all I’ve been waiting for. You cannot imagine how long.” If something that was essentially made of stone could look sly—clumsily sly, like a foundling—she now did. “You can do more damage here. You can change things now so that your City won’t be facing the dangers they face without your intervention.”

  Kaylin met, and held, her odd, colorless gaze. “Truthfully?” she said, after a long pause. “Can you tell me that and mean it?”

  She thought the child would lie. But she knew it would be a lie; it was that obvious. The child’s gaze slid away from hers, as if it were oiled.

  “No, then,” Kaylin said. “Tara, I’m sorry. I can’t stay here, and I think you already know that.”

  The worst possible thing—for a value of worse that didn’t involve mutilation, torture, or the end of the world—happened, then. The child began to cry. Silent tears slowly filled her eyes and rolled, unhindered, down her pale cheeks, catching the odd light in the room and transforming it, for a moment, into isolation and loss.

  Very few of her co-workers came to Kaylin with their crises; that was left to Caitlin, or each other. Their heartbreak often seemed so inexplicable to Kaylin, her response was always practical—and people were quick to point out that logic and emotion weren’t the same thing. Which, conversely, she already knew.

  But other people always seemed to be so steady or stable compared to Kaylin, at least in her own eyes.

  The Tower was not a person. Not a child. But it was not yet old—if it matured the way living creatures generally did—and it was clearly afraid of being left alone. Of being, Kaylin thought, deserted. It was a fear she understood because she had feared it, and it had happened anyway.

  For a moment she wanted to stay, just to quell that pain. It tugged at her in a way threats never could.

  But Severn chose that moment to touch her shoulder. She didn’t even shrink away; it steadied her. Nothing bad, she thought, would happen to this Tower. It, unlike so many of the other lives she had destroyed just by wandering through them so carelessly, would remain standing when all of the other buildings had fallen into the half ruins so common in the fiefs.

  “But I will fail,” the Tower told her, the tears still wet on her cheeks. “You have told me that.”

  “No, I—”

  “If the shadows have broken the confinement, and they have only done so in my demesne, I have failed.”

  “How can you fail? You’re a Tower. The man who took responsibility for you—and for the rule of these lands—failed. He failed utterly. But you?”

  The Tower looked up at Kaylin, and then took a step back; her arms were extended because she had not let go of Kaylin’s hands. “It is time,” she said quietly, and she looked up toward the closed dome. On cue, it opened.

  Above them, the sky was an angry shade of what might have been gray. Kaylin’s hands tightened—around nothing. The girl still stood in front of her, but she was shining and transparent now, like a ghost.

  “Tiamaris, is that—”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice soft. “She has summoned the storm.”

  “Tara, did you—”

  The Tower nodded. “It will take you,” she told Kaylin, “where I cannot go. But I will remember you, Kaylin. I will look for you in the streets of my City. You fight what I fight; you can’t help it. You were made, like me, to stand against it.” She turned her face away so that Kaylin could see the small, snub nose in profile. Her eyes were glittering like opals, but the rest of her face was still all child.

  Kaylin reached out to touch her face. Not to grab it, not to force it to turn, but to touch it. Her fingers felt warmth without texture, and Tara turned to look at her, her eyes widening in surprise. “We’ll come for you,” Kaylin said. “We’ll come for you, if we can.”

  Tara hesitated and then nodded. “If you can, and if I can allow it. But I will look for another, now. I will find someone who will make these lands strong.”

  Kaylin started to speak and bit back the words. A lecture on the nature of strength had no place here, but it was work not to give it. Instead she swallowed the words and nodded. “Remember me, if you can. Remember what I said.”

  “I will. I do not think I am allowed to forget anything.”

  She lifted her arms, and the sky descended, eating away at the lines of the open roof as if it was corrosive.

  Kaylin grabbed Severn’s hand and levered herself to her feet as the child vanished. “We’re done,” she told Tiamaris. He gazed at the falling sky and grimaced.

  “An unfortunate human idiom.”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “No. But meaning is often decided by your intended audience. Lord Nightshade?”

  Magic, hidden until this moment, flared in the room. How much longer it would be a room wasn’t clear; darkness now dribbled like ink down the rounded curve of the Hawklord’s Tower walls, taking stone with it as it fell.

  Kaylin.

  It was Nightshade’s voice, but her name felt almost tentative as it touched her. She nodded; she rarely spoke to him this way if he was actually standing in the room.

  The Tower will look for you.

  “I know. It already has, once. I didn’t understand it, then.”

  And I, little one. I will look for you, as well.

  She said, with just a trace of bitterness, “I know. I don’t know if this changes anything. I don’t know if it’s always been in the past. I don’t understand what’s happened at all. But…I know.” Severn was holding her hand.

  “Private.” Tiamaris’s voice was steady.

  She swallowed. “I think—I think we’re meant to be in it.”

  “It is not to my liking.”

  “No. Maybe you could stay. You’d be a lot older by the time I saw you again.”

  “Or perhaps simply dead. Most of my kind are.” His smile was vivid and brief. “I do not regret this,” he added. “I regret none of it.” He looked around the Tower as it dissolved into the primal storm.

  “You’re not afraid of—”

  “No. Not this storm. Come. Corporal, Private.” He glanced once over his shoulder at the Barrani Lord. “You are welcome to join us.”

  “I think not. Whether or not you fear it, it is what it is—primal and wild. If it is bent to a will, the will behind it is not to be trusted.”

  “The Barrani never trust.”

  “Indeed. I will find my way out of the Tower,” he added. “It will not be the first time, and I will be unburdened, now, by the frailty of mortal companions.”

  “It is not so troublesome a burden as we were taught,” Tiamaris replied, surprising Kaylin. “Or perhaps, in spite of that, it is not unwelcome in the end. You might find that the Empire, when it arrives, will surprise you.” He paused, and the rest of the words he might have said were lost as the shadows spoke.

  They spoke in a language that Kaylin both recognized and failed to understand; the words pressed into her skin on all sides, as if a drunk scribe were attempting to leave his mark on living parchment. Light flared in
the darkness, and if the darkness was described as shadow, it was all the wrong word. Shadows were things light cast. What existed in this darkness was not static, and it was not the by-product of standing beneath, or beside, light; it was like a living forest in a gale that moved first one way and then the other, with no recognizable pattern behind it.

  But when they spoke—when it spoke—light answered; blue light, limned in a silver-gold nimbus. She knew what the source of that light was: the marks on her arms, her legs, the back of her neck. She could see them rise, like slender serpents, from her skin, swaying in the black wind as if to devour it—or be devoured by it.

  Which, given they were part of her arm, was damn uncomfortable.

  Three times the shadows spoke; three times the light that was her marks flared. There was no fourth time. Instead, the storm broke, and as it did, it retreated over broken stones and dead weeds, slowly unveiling the warped facades of buildings that had been old a hundred years ago. No faces peered out of the windows, but then again, the windows were boarded or shuttered; it was the fiefs, after all.

  She looked immediately to her right and left, and found she was bracketed by Severn and Tiamaris. The sky above returned to something resembling normal.

  “That,” Tiamaris said, “was enlightening. And costly, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Costly?”

  “Costly. Come, Private. We were ordered to investigate Illien’s Tower.”

  She almost laughed. “Haven’t we already done that?”

  “If you feel you have a report that would satisfy either the Arkon or the Emperor, yes.”

  She spoke a few choice Leontine words. “I’m not really ready to go back. I’m hungry, tired, I’ve only just left, and I wasn’t certain we’d all make it out.”

  “I am not at all certain we will all make it out a second time. As I said, the choice is yours.”

  She looked toward the heartland. She wasn’t close enough to the border that she could clearly see the White Towers, Barren’s home.

  “Yes,” Severn said, in a much quieter voice than the Dragon’s. “It’s the Tower or Barren. The Tower or the border.”

  “I’m not sure the border will hold much longer.”

  “It won’t,” Tiamaris said, voice flat. “That much must now be obvious to you. What the Tower did was a last act of desperation. It has, I think, little left to offer.”

  If they were at the border when whatever contained shadow broke, they might be able to save some lives. Tiamaris, at least, could fly. Kaylin wasn’t entirely certain what she could do, but the curse and the gift of these damn marks would almost certainly make some damn difference.

  Not as much of a difference, she thought, as the Tower. Or Castle Nightshade. Or any of the other buildings that had, if she had understood all she’d heard correctly, been created to contain and withstand what lay at the heart of the fiefs.

  “All right,” she said, sucking in air. “Tower first.”

  The streets were empty for the time of day. Empty enough that it made Kaylin wonder if the storm had delivered them to yet another time and place. “Were we even in the Tower? Was it all an artifact of the storm?”

  “I will leave that to the theorists to decide,” was the Dragon’s reply. “But if you are uncertain about our location—and time—don’t be.”

  “Why?”

  “The Emperor is close,” he replied curtly.

  “You know that?”

  The smile that touched the corner of his lips failed to touch his eyes. “Yes, Kaylin. I, and all my kin. Take comfort from that fact if you can.”

  “I can,” she said. Can you? She didn’t ask. She didn’t understand Dragons at all.

  Or perhaps, just perhaps, she did. What had his choice been, after all? To serve or to die. What had hers been? The same. And she’d done it, because she’d seen no other damn choice. It had never occurred to her to judge him, and it was probably suicide to pity him.

  “Tower,” she repeated, because it was safest.

  The difference in the Tower was immediately obvious, perhaps because they’d just left it. It looked like a standing ruin, albeit a ruin of stone, surrounded by a sea of weeds and a fence that made leaning and falling synonymous. In spite of the last fact, there were very few gaps in it through which to fit a Dragon Lord. Kaylin had found her way in once, and found her way in again with ease. This time, however, she held on to Severn’s hand as she made her way into the weeds, and he followed her lead in silence.

  She paused. Where there had been a door in the past, there was nothing now.

  Nothing except a hole in the wall, and standing in that hole, Lord Nightshade. He was leaning against the standing stone, and it clearly supported his weight.

  “What are you doing here?” Kaylin asked. “Why are you not in Nightshade?”

  He smiled. It was not an entirely pleasant expression, but that was to be expected from a Barrani smile. He turned to Tiamaris. “Lord Tiamaris,” he said, bowing. The gesture was both respectful and familiar, something only a Barrani could carry off. “You have been missing for hours, and in those hours, there have been further difficulties in the fief of Barren.”

  Tiamaris nodded. “I had noted the change of the sun’s position.” He said nothing else.

  Then again, he didn’t have to; Kaylin was there. “What happened?” she said, her tone sharpening. She started to add more and stopped as she looked more carefully at the Lord of Nightshade’s face. It was pale, but not in the flawless way of normal Barrani skin. Had he been human, she would have said he was exhausted.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, voice flat.

  He inclined his head. “But here,” he replied, “is where the fief will stand—or fall. What is left of Barren in the wake of the breach, I will not venture to guess. Look, and look carefully, Hawk.”

  Kaylin frowned, as his gaze grazed the sky. She looked up, as did Severn and last, Tiamaris. It wasn’t unusual to see Aerians on patrol in the skies above the City; the heights were part of their beat. But these Aerians—and she recognized their wings in the distance, they couldn’t be anything else—weren’t flying above the outer City—their path was too low for that.

  They were flying over Barren.

  “How bad is it?” she asked softly, watching the skies.

  “Bad enough,” Lord Nightshade replied, “that the Dragon Court is rumored to be preparing to take wing, as well.”

  Tiamaris said, “Come, Kaylin. We have no time.”

  “Should we—”

  “No time. The Emperor will not summon me back from the Tower, regardless of what the Court does or does not do. It is the Tower that is at the heart of the danger, and it is to the Tower that I was sent.” He started toward the opening in the rounded, thick wall, and Nightshade slid to one side.

  “I have delivered what word I can,” he told Kaylin. “And I will deliver, as well, one gift.” He lifted a hand, and he cupped her cheek. It was the cheek upon which he had placed his mark, and where his skin touched hers it burned and it froze simultaneously. Magic at work. “I would go with you,” he told her, as he let his hand—which was smooth and unblemished—fall away. “But the boundaries are not stable, between my fief and this one. I stand upon the boundary,” he added.

  “You’re standing in the fief.”

  “Yes. But I have no power, here. All of the power I can bring to bear holds the boundaries fast.”

  “Nightshade is safe—”

  “No, Kaylin, it is not. Not one of the fiefs is safe if Barren falls, but it will be Nightshade and Candallar who will crumble first.”

  “Candallar?”

  “The fief to the other side of Barren,” he replied. “It is not, in size, the equal of Barren or Nightshade, and it is narrower, but its defenses hold.”

  “The fief lord there was rumored to be—”

  “Barrani, yes. I have heard the rumors.”

  “Is he?”

  “It is not relevant. What is relevan
t is this—Illien was the fief lord of these lands, the last true fief lord. What Barren is, his name implies. If Illien chose to escape his name in the way of the foolish, you must find out why the Tower still holds his memory, or why he still holds the Tower.”

  “But we—”

  “I saw what you did, when you first ventured here. You have returned. If anything of that Tower remains in this one, find it. Wake it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “No. You are bound to me. Even when we first met it was true, although I did not understand the reasons for it. The Tower cannot take what you cannot offer.”

  “Lord Nightshade,” Tiamaris began.

  “Lord Tiamaris. I leave you now. Kaylin—”

  She had started to enter the darkness, and turned. “You’re worried,” she said, half surprised.

  “I am concerned, yes. Given the circumstances, I do not think it a sign of undue weakness. Be careful, in the Tower. Be careful with your wishes, be careful with your fears. Expose as little as you possibly can.”

  Severn, who seldom spoke when Nightshade was present, said, “If the fate of the City depends upon that, we’re already doomed; what the Tower saw when we visited it a few hours ago—in subjective time—will give it everything it needs, if it intends harm.”

  “It is not perhaps the Tower itself that is the concern. The will of the Tower is not the only will present when the Tower is active.”

  “The Tower isn’t active or we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Kaylin snapped.

  “Is it not?” Nightshade replied. “Touch the walls, Kaylin. Trace the circles on the floors.” He stepped away from the gaping hole itself. “It was not a simple matter to gain entry.”

  “We walked in through the gap in the fence.”

  “Yes. I…did not. And I fear that leaving will take some effort. I will leave,” he added, “while you enter. One of us will have a less difficult time because the attention of the Tower will be split.” He nodded to the Dragon Lord, and to Severn.

  Kaylin lifted a hand to her cheek. Then she grimaced. “Haven’t we done this before?”