Tara nodded. Illien remained where he was standing; Tiamaris joined them. Severn did not; he simply watched Illien in silence. Which was smart.
“You know this room,” Kaylin told Tara. “And you know what was written here. Can you show us?”
Tara hesitated.
“Show us the words as they were when they were complete. Show us the words as they were when you first woke.”
Tara glanced at Tiamaris, as if she were nervous. Kaylin shook her head. “I’m not an Ancient,” she told Tara. “I’m human. I live for a brief span of years, and I die. Everything I learn will die with me. He’s lived for longer than I have, and he’ll live forever if nothing manages to kill him. I need his help.”
“It is wrong to need help,” she told Kaylin.
“Then I’m destined to be wrong.” Kaylin drew breath, held it, and expelled it without adding any colorful words. “Look, if we were meant to be Towers, we wouldn’t need you.”
She frowned, and Kaylin realized the metaphor made no sense to her. “We’re not meant to stand alone,” she added. “If we were, there wouldn’t be any other people.”
“But people betray you.”
“That,” Kaylin said, with some annoyance, “is Illien speaking. The Barrani don’t have a word for trust.”
Tara hesitated. And then she said a phrase that Kaylin didn’t understand. Tiamaris, who had been silent, looked at the avatar. “Private,” he said. “Repeat the word.”
“Repeat the what?”
“The word.”
“All that was one word?”
His eyes had shaded to orange, and simmered there when he turned them on her. Kaylin took a step back—a small one, because she was still attached to Tara—and then, haltingly, she began to pull syllables from short-term memory.
Tara watched her, and for a moment, her face lost its look of strained desperation. Like a child who suddenly realizes that someone else might—with effort—be capable of understanding them, she began to fill in the gaps provided by Kaylin’s decidedly mortal memory. When Kaylin got a syllable wrong, she shook her head and repeated it; when she got it right, she nodded, as if to encourage her.
Illien said, “What is the point of this futile exercise, Dragon Lord?”
Tiamaris snorted flame, which caused Kaylin to wince. The Tower didn’t seem to notice. She did, however, notice that Kaylin’s attention had been diverted, and she frowned and pulled on her hands. Or rather, pulled at her own, which Kaylin still held.
Kaylin mumbled an apology, and Tara made her start from the beginning again. This time, Kaylin managed the syllables more quickly, stumbling on fewer. When she had them all in place—and she thought there were twenty of them—Tara made her start it again. This time, she watched intently as Kaylin spoke, her eyes unblinking gray windows through which the faintest hint of internal luminescence shone.
But when she’d finished this final time, she saw the gray, misty wreaths of a moving, living word. It took shape both before and behind her, terminating lines curving around the three of them, dots and crosses and delicate loops adding something to the way they now stood, almost huddled together.
“What does it mean?” Kaylin asked Tara softly.
“It means…trust?”
Kaylin turned, then, and saw the word, absent three living people at its core, embedded in the far wall. It shone silver in the gloom. “That wasn’t one of the words they wrote,” she told Tara faintly.
Tara didn’t seem to hear her, and she turned to Tiamaris. “Tiamaris—”
He lifted a hand, as if her words were gnats in serious danger of needing to be crushed. She started to argue, but she stopped when she heard Severn’s voice; the sound of it made her hair stand on end.
“We’ve got trouble!”
Turning, she saw a wreath of black, black shadow, like the grease from tribal torches, climbing up through the cracks in the floor. At its center, immobile as a pillar, stood Lord Illien.
“Illien, don’t—”
Tara tugged at her hands, and Kaylin tightened her grip. “It’s not him,” she whispered. “He’s not doing it.”
“Tara—”
“It’s not him.”
Kaylin opened her mouth again, and Tiamaris stepped on her foot. “Continue what you have been doing, Private. I will deal with Lord Illien and the shadows.” He glanced once at Tara. “I will endeavor not to harm him,” he told her, after a brief but significant pause. “Private.”
She stared at the coalescing shadow, and saw it briefly as an absence of light, where the darker shades formed something akin to words. Shaking her head, she said, “Tara, quickly. Come.”
Tara was staring, as well, with something like hunger on her face—not the hunger of greed, but the hunger of starvation.
I don’t understand, Kaylin thought, tugging the avatar. I am in so far over my head I can’t see sky. Do you want to die? Do you want only what Illien wants?
And does it matter?
One rune now lived—if that was the right word—in the curved surface of wall. The others were guttered, their shapes lost to dim light and poor memory.
I don’t know what you wanted me to do, she thought to the Ancients. It wasn’t quite a prayer. She turned to Tara, and then to Tiamaris’s back; his arms were lifted, and light raced down them like liquid. The avatar was staring at his hands.
“Tara, please.”
“What do you need from me, Chosen? I—” She took a step toward Tiamaris, or tried. Tiamaris was also in the same direction as Illien, who stood, wreathed in shadow, almost oblivious to its presence. Illien gestured and rose toward the ceiling’s height as those shadows coalesced, amorphous lines becoming sharper and sharper as they watched. Stalks, eyes, and multiple legs formed, hardening and solidifying, until what they now watched was similar to a creature that Kaylin had already encountered in the streets of Barren. “Tiamaris—”
He roared. She shut up, and tried to concentrate over the sound of fighting. Tara pulled at her hands again; her eyes were wide and they no longer looked like human eyes. Or Barrani eyes, for that matter. “Let me go,” she said. “I have to stop it—”
“You can’t—you don’t have the power.”
“I have to try. It’s what I am.” She swallowed, and then said, “It’s what I should have been. It’s what I should have done.”
Kaylin hesitated for just a second, and then she did let go. Her hands were still heavy and clumsy with cold, and Tara’s face and body still bore bruises and superficial wounds. “Tara—”
“No,” she said, voice low. “I can’t take your power. He was right. Just your life. I won’t kill you, not yet.” And then she turned and she left Kaylin, with her imperfect damn memory, by the walls and the empty runes.
Kaylin was left in the near dark; there was no silence. She heard blade skitter off stone or chitin, and flinched. It was hard to pick the echo of syllables out of the air; they were tenuous and soft, if constant; the roars of a Dragon overwhelmed them every time she thought she’d fixed them in mind. She had no small child—or no grown woman, for that matter—encouraging her in her halting, stumbling progress, and after what felt like hours—but was minutes, if that, combat time, she threw up her hands in frustration. And fear.
She had never been good at sitting still and thinking her way through a fight; she had always relied on instinct. Think, dammit. Think.
She’d heard Sanabalis tell the Leontines their genesis story, and when he did, words formed. Severn hadn’t been able to see them; she had. But she wasn’t Sanabalis; it had taken her twenty minutes to repeat one word, and it would have taken half a life if Tara hadn’t been at her elbow, urging her on.
But…she’d written in the dust, in this Tower. She’d written Tara’s name, or so she’d thought. What the dust and the Tower and the ancient magics that had created it had made of their translation of her efforts, Tiamaris had been able to see clearly; so had she. But it wasn’t what she’d thought she was writing; i
t wasn’t what she’d labored over.
She glanced at the endless carvings on the walls and floors, her eyes drawn to the sight of the multi-eyed creature who was shooting beams into it. The creature shouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone walk, its limbs were so mismatched. But it had three jaws that she could see. Not three heads; that would have been too biological, too expected.
Light of various different colors were absorbed without apparent effect by the stone, but stone melted at least once, and Tara doubled over in pain at the impact. Staggering, she regained her feet, and Kaylin froze, one hand extended to her curved back. Tara knew.
Finish what you started, Tara said, her voice for the moment the only sound in the room. Finish it. The creature cannot destroy me, not yet, but it is trying. When she finished speaking, silence was left in the wake of her words. Yes, she said, hearing Kaylin’s thoughts. I can do that much. I can still do that much. And then, in a softer voice, Illien.
Except Illien is not what she said. Kaylin heard both the superficial name and what lay beneath it, and they were discordant sounds, each syllable struggling to free itself from the rest, each clamoring for supremacy.
Illien, Tara said again. It was a plea. If heartbreak had a voice, it was hers. And Illien turned toward her, as if dragged. For just a moment, his expression was the gaunt, gray look of a man who has been hunted to ground and has only enough energy left to face his pursuer.
Kaylin, Tara said, voice more urgent now. There are more. The shadows have taken the narrow path from the center. They are coming. I cannot—I cannot keep them out.
What do you need?
Power. But yours is not available.
Why?
I do not know. Do something. Do anything. I will fall here, and he will die.
He wants to die, Kaylin thought.
I’ve given everything I have to prevent that, Tara replied.
You don’t care what he wants.
I care about him!
You don’t care what he wants. Kaylin turned away, and then turned back, and all the while, the livid spray of light from eyes that girded a misshapen, shimmering body continued to strike. Nothing stood in their path; Tiamaris and Severn were far too fast, and Illien, floating above the creature, seemed to attract no attention at all.
He’s my whole world, Tara continued.
Kaylin looked at her, and then, finally, turned away. Her mother had been her whole world. When the world had ended, Severn had stepped in to take her place. And when Severn destroyed their world? She had fallen, stumbled and destroyed things as she tried to figure out how to stand on her own. She had lived with the guilt, and it had almost devoured her.
Were it not for the strange mercy offered her by a man she had been sent to kill, she might never have found a way out. Yes, she had done it to herself, and no, she didn’t deserve salvation. But sometimes you got what you didn’t deserve, and it was time now to live up to that single act of compassion. She hadn’t taken the job to defend the blameless. Or even to defend the helpless, although those were usually the people who called in the Law. She hadn’t offered the Oath of allegiance with the qualifier, “the law only applies to people I approve of and like.”
Good damn thing.
You want the same thing! You want the same thing I wanted—
Yes. Yes, Tara. And I only hope that I never think destroying myself will give it to me. You loved him the way I loved my mother. But he’s not your mother. He’s Barrani. He probably doesn’t even have children of his own, and if he did, there’s better than half a chance he’d wind up killing them in some stupid political war. What you wanted, he couldn’t give you.
He listened to me. He heard me.
Yes. But that’s a far cry from love.
“Kaylin!”
She pulled herself out of the argument at the sound of Severn’s voice, and turned. And then turned again. Was that what this was about? Was this about love and need and how the two aren’t the same? She flinched once, as if struck. Her skin began to tingle, the way it did when magic was in the air. The hair on the back of her neck did its familiar upward reach.
The marks on her arms were glowing so brightly her eyes narrowed in an instinctive squint. She briefly considered removing her pants and decided against it; she knew the marks there would be the same. Crouching, she placed her palms flat against the floor; felt the indentation of stone beneath them where letters had been carved.
She had climbed her own Tower.
Why?
She’d believed the dead needed revenge. And that she needed to be the one to deliver it. She’d walked through the darkness, rewriting her life and her beliefs without even realizing what she’d given up in the process. People were dead because of it.
She’d come to the pinnacle of the Hawklord’s Tower, and in the end she had failed to kill him. She had failed to truly try. Because no matter what she’d said or done, some part of her still wanted hope, still wanted to believe that other people could do the right thing, could live the right way, even if she’d failed. Because it meant it could be done.
He offered her that hope. Balanced between hope and revenge, she’d chosen hope. If it hadn’t gone entirely smoothly since then, she’d never regretted her decision. And it had been her decision. Her choice.
She had proven that she was so bad at making choices up to that point, no sane god, no sane universe, would have allowed her yet another chance to screw up. But if there was no inherent justice in life, it worked both ways: sometimes you got the opportunity you didn’t deserve, and what you made of it was defining.
Kaylin lifted her hands, palm out, exposing the insides of her arms, where the sigils lay. They seemed, as she watched them, to be moving, the familiar curves of lines extending and softening, the small dots and hatches contracting and expanding again in slightly different configurations. She couldn’t discern pattern, or the harmony Tiamaris had insisted existed; it was almost as if she were watching the lake of life in the heart of the Barrani High Halls.
A miniature lake.
Yes, Chosen.
She looked up at the sound of the voice. Saw nothing except for the lifeless engravings in the curve of the ceiling above her. She wasn’t a god. What they had written, she couldn’t write. She wasn’t a Dragon Lord, and she wasn’t a Tower, whose existence was somehow tied to the heart of a darkness she had never seen, not even in nightmare. Fief ling, Hawk, midwife and unpaid babysitter, she took a deep breath and reached out for stone walls.
Nothing happened, except for the roar of a Dragon’s fury, which shook the ground she was standing on. She touched the wall again. Still nothing, but this time she added a colorful Leontine phrase.
Think, dammit. How did you reach her in the first place?
With words. But she’d never been good with words—not like Severn, who, on the rare occasions he spoke, said the right thing. She had trouble saying what she meant; what she said instead often added to her troubles rather than alleviating them. And writing—rewriting—someone else’s life seemed a disaster in the making.
But it had to be better than the disaster that loomed if she didn’t.
She bent her head, closed her eyes, and finally knelt against the ground. Shadows whispered in the darkness; she heard them as if their hissing were language, another form of speech, a different set of choices, a different set of consequences.
Help me, she said, to the ghosts of the Ancients. There was no answer, but then again, they were gods.
CHAPTER 28
Tara. She had given the name to the Tower because it was hard to talk to a child made of walls, halls, joists, vast windows and changing spaces. The name was a confinement, a way of looking at things that didn’t normally speak and reducing them to something—or someone—that Kaylin could pretend to understand.
She gave up that pretense now. What Kaylin was and what Tara was were not the same, and were never meant to be the same; without Tara, the City would fall. But Tara didn’t see the
City; in the end, she couldn’t. She couldn’t move; she saw only what the fief lord saw, and perhaps not even that, anymore. Why, in the end, must she live in isolation and misery to defend something she couldn’t see, couldn’t touch, couldn’t interact with?
Start there. Start with why. Behind closed lids, she saw the lake beneath the High Halls; saw the words there, moving so quickly their shapes barely had time to catch the eye before they were gone. She reached for them carefully, trying to pierce the surface of form to find what she needed. She’d renamed a High Lord with less intent. Words came, but they didn’t cut or burn her hands; they were light, like dust motes in sunbeams. They were delicate, almost translucent, like the ghosts of words that might have been. She drew them in, and she held them as she thought of the City itself.
Good things came first. Evanton. The Halls of Law. The Southern Stretch. The Tha’alani. The Leontines, and in particular, their complicated Pridlea, the heart of their kind. But the rest followed, because it was a City. The banks of the Ablayne. The brothels. The merchants who tried to get out of every possible tax the Emperor levied. The men—and women—whose existence was reason for her employment: con men, thieves, murderers. Worse. It shouldn’t have worked, this City, this mix of people, good and bad—but it did, more or less.
And it relied, unknowing, on Tara and her kind. So: duty. Responsibility. A little bit of pride in being able to live up to a task that was so huge and so important. She didn’t try to speak to the how of it, because she had no hope of truly conveying or understanding that. What she did understand was that you worked with what you had, be it a rusty knife or a bleeding fist; what you did with what you had was what counted.
Words stilled as the thoughts took shape and form. She gathered them and moved on; she couldn’t clearly say how long it had taken. She wasn’t dead yet, and the ground hadn’t turned to melted rock beneath her legs, which was always a good sign.
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