Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  Kaylin started to respond and then stopped because the walls began to crumple, and the floor began to fracture. She had forgotten that she was holding Tara’s hands until they turned to ice in hers, the sudden cold almost blistering her skin. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered, eyes wide and haunted by bruises.

  “I won’t. But you need to let go of my hands.”

  She shook her head. “I let him go,” she said. “I let him go, and he found a way to leave me.”

  “He hasn’t left you. He’s still here.”

  But Tara shook her head again as the stone of the rounded room fell; there were no longer any struts to support its weight. Dust rose, glittering like motes caught in sunlight, and in the haze of those motes, she could see the figure of a man.

  “So,” he said, arms folded across his chest, “now you know.”

  “I know she let you go. Why did you return?”

  His laugh—the first such sound he’d made—was bitter. Not ugly, not quite that, but it was the only thing he’d said or done that hinted at the emotions she associated with the living. “She let me go? Is that what she told you?”

  Tara, hands now numbing Kaylin’s, stared at him in defiant, angry silence. “I let you go,” she said, voice shaky. “I let you go.”

  “She owned my name,” Illien continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “She owned it. She knew it. She used it.”

  Kaylin’s eyes widened and she turned to Tara. “Is this true?”

  Tara didn’t answer.

  Kaylin now remembered why any smart person avoided getting involved in anything that looked like a lover’s quarrel, although admittedly the circumstances didn’t permit that much discretion. “Tara,” she said, trying to shake her, which was hard, given the grip on her hands. “Is this true?”

  “He wanted to leave!”

  “Tara—”

  “He wanted to leave.” Her voice fell.

  “She had what she needed,” Illien continued, the laughter gone, his face once again smooth and unreadable. “She had the power to sustain her. I was not aware that I supplied it—not immediately. Did you watch what she showed you?” His demeanor was entirely different.

  Kaylin, understanding that Barrani lied as naturally as most people breathed, watched him like, well, a Hawk. But she nodded, her arms now painfully cold.

  “She did not show you all,” he said. “Or you did not understand it. You understand the harmonics inherent in the patterns of the runes as they are laid out?”

  “I’m sorry, but no.”

  “I…see. She will attempt to drain you, you know.”

  Kaylin looked down and saw that Tara’s face was looking less bruised and less swollen.

  “It is not the first time it has happened. I do not believe she will kill you.”

  “Barren,” Kaylin whispered.

  “The petty human mage?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Yes. Some years ago.”

  Kaylin looked away. “You should have killed him instead.”

  Lord Illien said nothing. Her elbows were numb. She couldn’t see the marks on her arms, and wondered what they now looked like, if they remained there at all. She had dreamed for years of getting rid of them, but this wasn’t the way she wanted to do it.

  “I am not the Lord of this fief. The fief has no Lord.”

  Tara said, “You are.” And then she stopped. “I have power,” she told him, as if it were a promise. “I have power. I don’t need—”

  He looked through her.

  Kaylin, however, looked down. Tears tracked their way across the face of the avatar, and as they did, age literally melted.

  “Pathetic is it not? I am not the author of this decay, this destruction. But I will it. In no other way will I be free.”

  “You didn’t give your name to the Darkness.”

  “No. I would have, but I was not—then—desperate enough. It doesn’t matter. She cannot stand long against what waits in Ravellon. I went to Ravellon,” he added. “The once. I wanted to understand the nature of life and the nature of Words. I understood enough of them to enact a change. I thought I understood the purpose, and the binding, of the old words. They are not the only language,” he added. “Do not venture into Ravellon or you will be unmade.

  “But when I understood the making and unmaking of life as the Ancients might have told it, I began to…revise.”

  “And she knew.”

  “She held my name,” he replied. “She held it truly and completely. I could hide nothing from her when she bent her will toward me, and she watched in terror. She understood, late, what I attempted; she understood that I was reshaping, reforging, the word within me, the name itself. I thought it would free me of her. But she did the unexpected, the unforeseen.

  “She changed with it, in order to continue to hold it. But she could not change much without destroying some essential part of her nature.

  “She did,” he added softly. “She remembers what she was but she can no longer achieve it; we will die here.”

  “Let her go,” Kaylin whispered.

  He laughed again, and it was bitter. “I let go centuries past, little human. My name is not what it was, and it cannot support life—not the life of the Ancients, not the life of my kin. I wanted knowledge, and knowledge I received.”

  “But you came to the Tower the first time, and it’s to this Tower that you returned. Why?”

  His gaze flickered for just a moment, eyes blue-green amidst striations of black. “I thought…I heard a voice. No other Tower spoke, not to me.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Kaylin looked at Tara as if Tara was not attempting to drain her of whatever power she had. There was no triumph, no guile, nothing malicious, in Tara’s expression; there was fear, pain, and a horrible desperation. Desperate people did stupid things. They did worse than stupid; they did ugly, ugly things that scarred—or destroyed—whole lives. Maybe they learned something from it, if they survived. Maybe they let the guilt of survival eat away at them from the inside, hiding from their own truths.

  No one knew this better than Kaylin.

  Why, then, did she have to fight the urge to kick the avatar? Why did she have to remind herself of what she herself had done, without the knowledge or the power the Tower had?

  Because, she thought bitterly, it was so much easier to hate other people for making the same mistakes you’d made—because you didn’t have the time to hate yourself if you did. And it was time to be done with it, because it wouldn’t help anything.

  “You came to her because she spoke.”

  “I heard her voice, like an echo, in this place. Like,” he added softly, his expression growing remote the way expressions did when people stared off into the distance, “the essence of loss or sorrow. It was a child’s voice, but it was an ancient voice.”

  Kaylin nodded, and Tara’s breath—which she had not heard until now—was sharp and painful, like a deep, clean cut.

  “She spoke to me, eventually. I listened. I decided, then, to stay.”

  “The Tower had a Lord.”

  He shrugged. “If he could hold the Tower against me, yes. He could not. It was a difficult fight, but it was challenging. Little was challenging then, but you do not understand why challenge interests the immortal. We grow bored.”

  And trading boredom for damnation is such a good idea.

  “I learned much in my time here. I learned about the nature of magic, and the nature of worlds. I learned about the nature of life, of our concept of life. I explored,” he added. “And it seemed at that time exploration was not desertion.” He did not look at Tara.

  Kaylin did. She seemed transfixed.

  “They will destroy the Tower, now,” he added softly. “Your companions. The Dragon, the darkchild. They will destroy the Tower, and we will be free.”

  “They won’t!” Tara shouted. “I have power now—”

  “They will,” he said quietly. “There is no one left to defend it. N
ot you, not I. The power you might once have taken from her, you cannot take now.”

  Kaylin’s numb arms argued against his words, but Tara’s eyes widened in panic as Illien continued to speak. “You can destroy her. She is presumably mortal. That is all.” He turned to Kaylin. “What will you now do, Chosen?”

  “You made no deal with whatever lies in the heart of Ravellon.”

  Illien shrugged. After a pause, he said, “There is no negotiation possible with the power at the heart of Ravellon. I ventured into Ravellon—that much is true.”

  “And I’m expected to be able to tell that you’re speaking the truth how?”

  “I am here. I did not risk existence and sanity to free myself from the grip of one master in order to become puppet—and less—to another, especially not an unknown. I failed,” he added. “She is bound to me, and I to her. I am free of her compulsion. I am not free of this place.”

  “What would you have of me?”

  “Death,” he replied. “True death. I have not achieved it.”

  The Tower whispered, “I’ll die if he dies.”

  “That,” Illien replied, “was a story you told yourself. It was never the truth.”

  It was a story that Kaylin had told herself, as well. “Tara,” she murmured.

  “In the end,” Illien continued, speaking to Tara, “I have never been able to give you what you feel you need. I was able to give you only what you required to function.”

  The Tower looked up. She was crying. Not weeping; not sobbing. Just…crying. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Kaylin.

  “So am I. Lord Illien?”

  “You understood what she showed you?” he asked, as if it were only barely a possibility. She’d had teachers take exactly that tone of voice before, but she didn’t bridle. Instead, she nodded.

  Tara grunted in pain.

  “I believe your companions are now attempting to reach you.” The color of his eyes was a braided mixture of blue and black. “Time, now, to have an end.”

  “The world will fall into shadow if you—”

  “Is it possible you believe that I care? One way or another, mortal, that end is coming. Were I whole, were I not encumbered by the ties I chose to accept and chose to break, even I could not long stand against it.”

  “I could have kept you safe!” Tara said, her voice rising.

  “And what force could keep me safe from you?”

  “I would never have hurt you! I wanted to keep you safe!”

  “Safety,” he said sharply, “is illusion. It has always been illusion.” As if it were an old argument.

  Kaylin could no longer feel her hands, and the bones in her forearms were aching. But she could see, and she could see clearly. The room. The shape of the floor, the rounding of the walls. The contours of Tara’s cheeks, the wetness of them some echo of any tears Kaylin had ever cried in her childhood. She saw the Old Ones flicker past her vision like ghosts going about their business, uncaring—or unaware—of observers.

  She heard their voices. She could no longer understand their speech—if they had spoken at all—but the texture of those voices, the rise and fall of syllables, their distinctly individual tones blending and harmonizing as they worked, calmed her. Tara’s eyes widened slightly.

  She turned to look just over Kaylin’s shoulder—at what, Kaylin couldn’t tell because she couldn’t move at all—and shook her head. The voices grew softer, as if the speakers were finally moving away.

  These things, in this name, are they good?

  To me? Yes. They’re some of the things I want, and I want them enough to try to build them, even on days when I’m certain I don’t deserve them.

  It was a shock to Kaylin to hear her own voice, because she didn’t recognize it at first; she might not have recognized it at all had the spoken words not been so clear, and so clearly Elantran. The words weren’t level; they weren’t soft; they weren’t mysterious and ancient.

  But they were confident, and they were spoken with that little bit of heat that’s on the right side of temper. They didn’t clash with the voices of the Old Ones; they didn’t clash with their meaning; nor did they shout over it. They blended, her words; theirs.

  She understood, then. I did this, Tara. I did this to you. But…she hadn’t called the storm that had taken them to the moment of the Tower’s awakening. She hadn’t called the storm that returned her to her own time. Tara had done that. But Tara’s knowledge was the knowledge imbued in her—written in her foundations—by her creators. It was more than confusing.

  Kaylin pushed confusion to one side. It didn’t matter. What she’d done in her own bumbling way was to give the Tower a name that meant something deeply personal—to Kaylin. She had given her a definition of home that meant something deeply personal—also, sadly, to Kaylin. They were things that Kaylin remembered so clearly, and still wanted so badly, no matter how hard it was to believe in them.

  And Tara had taken them in, blending them with the imperatives of unknown and unknowable Ancient gods. No wonder she was broken. No wonder. How can you want human things and still be immortal and unassailable?

  She felt the cold as she turned just her head to look at the walls. They were gray, stone walls; the livid red of Illien’s Tower had left them, but so had the soft, blue glow of the Old Ones. She saw cracks in those walls, and wondered if the cracks were literal. It didn’t matter.

  Severn.

  She felt his surprise; felt the sudden surge in worry.

  No, don’t. I’m fine. What you’re doing—whatever you’re doing—stop it. The Tower will break. Tell Tiamaris—the Tower will fall. It’s on the edge of existence now, and if we break it, we don’t have the power or the knowledge to build it again.

  Where are you?

  In a room. In the same room that you’re in, by look and feel. I think it’s the real room, she added. The one we saw was Illien’s illusion.

  Illusion?

  He wants to destroy the Tower. Or rather, he wants Tiamaris to do it. He was goading us. He was playing on our fears.

  There was a pause, and then Severn said, Well, he is Barrani. Another pause. Tiamaris asks what you would have him do. He is…not himself.

  Tell him to come to me.

  The pause was longer. Kaylin, he’s not—

  I don’t care. I don’t care if he’s gone Dragon again. You know how to talk to him, and I need you to do it. He’s been in a Tower before. If he thinks, he can figure out a way into this one. I need him here.

  Why?

  Because he knows something about ancient runes and the Old Tongue, and I need his help. I need to—to realign things. I need to harmonize what’s already written.

  Meaning you need him to do it.

  Something like that.

  Silence. Then, He’s thinking.

  Is he breathing? I smell something burning—

  That, too. But he isn’t melting stone, if that’s any consolation.

  Lord Illien frowned. His eyes were darkening as he watched Kaylin. “You’ve stopped them, somehow.”

  “It’s not in our interests to destroy the Tower.”

  “And it is in your interest to allow the Tower to relieve you of your power?”

  But she wasn’t afraid. She felt cold, yes, but she did not feel as if she were losing anything but heat. And when Tiamaris suddenly arrived in the heart of the Tower—inches from the huddled and wretched avatar who would not let go of Kaylin’s hands—even heat returned.

  His eyes were red. She’d thought she’d seen Dragon red before, but realized that she’d been mistaken, and she understood Severn’s hesitance now. But Tiamaris’s inner membranes were up, and his movements were minimal and very tightly controlled.

  Severn stood by his side. He nodded at Kaylin, but it was a clipped motion; his attention caught by Illien and couldn’t be pried away.

  “So,” Lord Illien said, gauging the Dragon’s mood in much the same way Kaylin had, “you fail, here.”

  “
It is your failure we attend, now,” was Tiamaris’s brittle reply. The air eddied around his face, the way air does on a very hot day.

  Illien nodded, and folded his arms loosely across his chest. “And how, now, will you compensate for my failure?”

  “Not him,” Kaylin replied. “Me.” She still couldn’t free her hands, but she didn’t need them. “Tiamaris, look at the room. No, look at it. Listen, if you can.”

  He drew breath, and she was afraid, given his expression, that its expulsion would be accompanied by flames. He closed his eyes completely; no one spoke. “I hear nothing,” he finally admitted.

  “I hear words,” Kaylin told him. “I don’t understand them, but I’ve heard similar words before. Sanabalis once told a story using only those words.”

  “You could see his words.”

  “I can almost see these ones. They’re engraved in the floor at your feet, and in the walls around us. There are cracks through some of the runes.”

  “What would you have of me, then?”

  “Look at the runes, if you can’t hear the words. I can’t move.”

  He glanced at the avatar for the first time, which didn’t help the color of his eyes much. “Tara,” he said, which surprised Kaylin.

  It surprised the Tower, as well; she looked up, her skin still bruised and wet with tears. “I remember you,” she said softly.

  He nodded. “You gave me the gift of flight.”

  “I can’t fly.”

  “No.” His lips curved a moment in a smile and the red of his eyes lost a little of its livid intensity. “But you had wings, for a moment, and so did I.”

  “They weren’t mine,” Tara told him. “They were hers.” And she nodded in Kaylin’s direction.

  “I definitely don’t have wings.” Kaylin said.

  But Tara didn’t argue, and didn’t seek to clarify. “I’m broken,” she told them both, and she turned, once again, to look at Lord Illien.

  “So is he,” Kaylin told her, gentling her voice. Tara hesitated for a moment, and then she opened her hands enough that Kaylin could pull away. Kaylin turned her hands around and caught Tara’s instead, which was hard, given her own felt like stone mittens at this point. She pulled Tara to her feet. “Come,” she said. “Walk with me.”