Silence, then. It was cold, and costly.
Kaylin drew breath, stopped speaking. She could not bring herself to apologize, but she did understand, because if Marrin were faced with the same choice? She would have asked the same thing. But Marrin ran the Foundling Halls, and Marrin took children like Kaylin into her home, feeding and guarding them because they had no one else to do it for them.
She turned, once again, to the heart of the light in this room, and said a single word. “Chosen.”
And the light answered, Yes.
The return from the Halls was silent. The Consort did not speak a word as she led Kaylin from the caves and through the paths of the Inner Court to the marble and heights of the outer building. She didn’t speak a word to the men who brought her carriage round, either, and she entered it like a winter storm. Kaylin almost offered to walk, but that would have meant speaking.
But as the carriage pulled away, the Consort said quietly, “What the Oracles see is not a given. Were it, we would have perished any number of times. They tell a slanted tale, and if their listeners understand it well enough, they can prevent catastrophe. You know this,” she added, a cool accusation in the words.
It was true.
“You must therefore accept it, on some level. The risk,” she added. “It is not a risk that I, or my brothers, would accept.”
“I don’t see any way of changing it. We don’t understand what’s being done well enough—”
“You wouldn’t destroy the portal, or stop it from opening, if you could. Let us see what the Imperial Court says.”
“How much of the truth will you tell them?”
She was silent for a long moment. “All of it,” she finally said. “The Dragons cannot be more of a threat than the Devourer, and my kin understand the threat the Dragons pose. We have faced it for centuries.”
“All of it,” in Barrani terms, was a lot less than it would have been in human terms. Kaylin wisely chose to let the Consort speak. The Consort, for instance, failed to mention the rune-covered cavern at the heart of the lake. She failed to mention the voices of the Ancients which had guided and advised the Consorts in their role as mother of the Barrani race for—actually, Kaylin had no idea how long it had been.
She did not fail to mention, however, what the Devourer was, what it ate, what it destroyed; she gave a cursory history of the Devourer, but then again, so had the Old Ones. When she was done, she fell silent, watching the Arkon.
The Arkon tendered her a very low bow. Nor did this seem to surprise her; she accepted it as her due. But when he rose, he turned to Kaylin. “Private Neya,” he said, his voice cool.
Severn, who had been content to watch and listen in the background now detached himself from Ybelline’s side and came to stand within arm’s reach of Kaylin. Or, she thought with a grimace, within foot’s reach.
“Arkon,” she replied.
“What transpired in the High Halls?”
“I believe The Lady has told you,” was her careful reply.
“She has told me much,” was his. “And I respect the risk she has taken. I respect the urgency with which she views the current difficulty. But she has said very little that directly involves you, and you have angered her. This is not terribly surprising. It is more surprising that you have not, prior to this, managed to cause offense. However.”
Kaylin stopped herself from shrugging, because it was a defensive fief gesture, and she was in a room with two castelords and two Dragons. “The Lady has, of course, told you everything of relevance about our current situation.” She spoke in High Barrani, and almost as flawlessly as she had ever spoken it.
“I…see.”
She wouldn’t have bet the smallest copper coin that that meant he was finished. And, indeed, he wasn’t. He turned to Sanabalis. “Lord Sanabalis, Private Neya is, at the moment, your student. You have had the time and the leisure to better understand her mood and her whim. She is bright enough for a mortal.
“What, in your opinion, is the difficulty now?”
Kaylin turned to her mentor in Magical Studies, as it was coined by the department. His eyes were actually gold, but he looked weary. “I would say,” the Dragon Lord replied quietly, “that she has been told that the best chance for our safety—and the safety of our world—is the prevention of the portal’s opening. Any portal.”
“And?”
“If the Oracular Halls are to be believed, the threat comes from the portal itself, in the end.”
“It does,” the Consort said coldly.
“But, if the Oracular Halls are to be believed—and I grant that Oracles are at best tricky until they are behind one—people will arrive, and in great number, in Elantra. She has heard some of their voices through one particular Oracle. It was to relay what was heard that the castelord of the Tha’alani was invited to attend us today.
“There are, among the multitude, both the young and the old. Private Neya is aware of this. She is, I would guess, aware as well that if the portal does not open, those people will be stranded in the lee of the Devourer, and they will die.”
“And?”
“That is all, Arkon.”
“They are not her responsibility.” The Arkon glanced at the Consort, and the Consort nodded.
“No,” Sanabalis replied. “They are not. Not yet.”
“Then I fail to see the difficulty.”
“I, too, fail to see the difficulty,” the Consort now added. “Given the threat, given the danger we face, given what we have to lose, I do not see that there is any choice. We must do what we can to make certain that the portal does not open.”
Sanabalis said nothing.
Kaylin tried to say nothing. She mostly succeeded, but her expression was now thunderous enough that Sanabalis raised a hand.
“Private?”
“If I understood what I was told today, we have thousands of people who are fleeing the utter destruction of the only home they knew. They are not an army. They are not an invasion. They’re doing what any one of us would do. Here, we’re safe, for whatever reason. And you want us to lock and bar the doors and let them be massacred because—”
“Because we risk—”
“Because of the risk. We don’t know how the Devourer does what he does. We have no idea. We don’t know for certain that the world will end the minute he touches it—but we know they’ll die. They’ll die there, Sanabalis.”
“Kaylin,” he said quietly.
“No! We arrived. The Aerians, I think, must have come the same damn way. The world didn’t end either time!”
“Perhaps the Devourer did not follow either your kin or the winged ones. You have no true names.”
“We don’t know that these people do, either! But we know that they’ll die. Even if the Devourer doesn’t find them, they’ll starve there.”
“Private Neya, they are not your people. Nor are they, any of them, the Emperor’s. You have sworn no oath to defend or protect them. They are not your problem.”
She was utterly silent then. But Ybelline crossed the room; Ybelline who had been as silent and still as Severn. Reaching out, she took one of Kaylin’s hands in her own. She didn’t, however, say a word. Kaylin resisted the visceral urge to lean against the Tha’alani’s shoulder, exposing her forehead to the touch of the slender stalks that characterized the race, in part, because she was certain that what she was thinking would be so blistering, it might cause Ybelline pain.
“Ybelline,” the Arkon said. “My apologies. The Dragon Court must now, I fear, convene. Private, Corporal, you are dismissed. High Lord,” he added, tendering the type of correct bow she had never seen him tender, “I believe, in the current circumstances, it would be to our mutual benefit to convene Court at your convenience.
“I understand that meeting the Emperor in the heart of the Imperial Palace on such short notice would be politically unwise, and I ask that you repair to the High Halls to consider where, and when, might be more suitable to our curren
t situation. We have, I believe, little time.”
“It is a meeting of castelords?”
“It is a meeting of the Dragon Court,” was the reply. “In military matters, the Emperor’s decision is law.”
Ybelline, it appeared, would go with the Dragons, which left Severn, Kaylin, and a lot of food for which Kaylin had no appetite. She waited until the door had closed before she let loose a volley of pure Leontine invective.
Severn said, when she had paused for breath—because if he waited until she’d finished, it’d take an hour—“You did well, there.”
This, of course, stopped her flat. “Define well.”
“No Leontine, for one. Or Aerian. No shouting. No accusations. Come on,” he added. “I think it’s time to head to the office.”
Kaylin shook her head. “I think,” she said quietly, “it’s time to head to the altar.”
“No.”
She stared at him, but didn’t move.
“Kaylin, why?”
“I want to ask it a question.”
“The Arkon will remove your head. If he’s feeling merciful.”
Kaylin headed out the door. “If he removes my head,” she told Severn, “I’ll be dead, and I won’t have to live with the knowledge of what they’re trying to do.”
Kaylin’s sense of spacial geography was pretty damn bad, when you got right down to it; Severn’s, on the other hand, was exceptional. Though he hadn’t been there the first time, he’d been able to take her vague directions and make them work. He led her in silence past the shelves and the grand artifact halls, toward the smaller, more crowded spaces that weren’t meant for display—or easy access. They looked familiar to Kaylin, but it would have taken her hours to find them; the Library was not a small place and its layout was not a simple, sensible one.
But when he at last reached the doors, he paused, and she grimaced. Three locks. And they didn’t have one working key between them. Kaylin thought she could pick the locks, as they didn’t seem enormously complicated—but she couldn’t pick them without any tools.
He said nothing. But he did step aside, and as he did, he held out a hand, palm up. She looked at it, confused. And then she looked at her wrist; she was wearing the bracer. She hesitated for just a minute, and then hit the studs in the combination that would unlock it. It clicked open, and she put it into Severn’s palm, which hadn’t moved.
“I don’t want to use magic here,” she said quietly. “Not now.” And never in the Arkon’s Library. “I don’t suppose you have—”
“I don’t at the moment carry equipment for picking locks, no.”
“Did you, when you were a Wolf?”
He shrugged. “We had different standard tools, yes.”
She nodded and turned to the door. It was dark in the hall, but Severn had carried light. He held it up now.
The problem with magic—or at least Kaylin’s magic—was it worked best when she didn’t have time to think. In these small, short halls, she did. Are they right? Her hand rested against the door’s surface. If the Devourer does follow, if we can’t contain it somehow—do we doom the city? Marrin and her Foundling Hall. The fiefs. The midwives. Marcus and his Pridlea. The Hawks.
She wasn’t good with lists, but she recognized one when she’d made it. What did she hold in balance against these things? Thousands of strangers, who might or might not present a danger all on their own to the city she called home. Maybe, she thought, without much hope, if we prevent them from opening a portal into Elantra, they’ll find someplace else. There has to be some other place. And then the magic that had screwed up a large part of the city, disrupting births and commerce and highly sensitive investigations among other things, would go away.
But if they found nowhere else to go, they would die.
So do you choose strangers who aren’t even your responsibility over the people you love? She glanced at Severn. Severn, as usual, let her work things out on the inside of her head, alone. Sometimes she hated that. Because sometimes it would be nice to have someone else come up with the answers.
Or would it?
She grimaced. The Emperor was probably coming up with the answer right now. Was she content to let him decide? To trust his ruling? Here she was, in the heart of the Arkon’s hoard, skirting the edge of his rules, for the sake of more information, in the hope of finding some other answer that could save these people.
Why? Why? Why?
As if it was the magical word, the locks in the door clicked open in slow succession. “You know,” she told Severn quietly, “it would be a lot easier to be me if what I wanted didn’t clash so badly with what I also wanted.”
He laughed. “You can have everything if you set your mind to it. You can’t have everything at the same time.”
“The trick, I suppose, is wanting what you do have.”
“That would be the trick, yes.”
She entered the cavern. This time, they held only a lamp—a nonmagical lamp—instead of torches. The room, however, wasn’t noticeably dimmer; the altar was shedding light as if it were a trapped moon. The runes on the altar’s side were also glowing, this time in a mix of blue and gold that reminded Kaylin of flowers she had once seen and had no name for.
The heavy rolling platform upon which she’d stood hadn’t been moved; it was still stationed above the water that served as an ancient mirror. Kaylin walked slowly toward it, Severn by her side. “Do you want to wait outside?”
“I don’t think that will mollify the Arkon, if that’s your concern.”
She grimaced. “It was. And you’re right. You might as well come up and take a look. You can stop me if I look like I’m about to fall in. Or,” she added, as she began to climb the ladderlike steps, “let me drown. It’ll probably be less painful.”
Kaylin stood on the platform and looked down into light. It was silver and sharp, but it wasn’t painful; it didn’t make her squint. “Severn?”
“I can see it.”
“Good. Can you see anything but light?”
“No.”
“Mirror,” she said softly. “Records.”
The light didn’t change, and she grimaced.
Severn, intuiting the problem as he usually did, said, “Keep trying. You had control of the Records here before.”
She’d had no intention of giving up. But she knelt to bring herself closer to the water, something that shouldn’t have been necessary; you didn’t have to touch mirrors to invoke them, and frankly, it just pissed off the people who wiped up your fingerprints afterward. Water, on the other hand, didn’t take fingerprints. She reached out, held her palm above the mirror’s surface.
Help me.
The water was absolutely still. She took a breath, and then another, and then exhaled about four inches of height.
Help me to help them.
The light shed by the rectangular surface of this ancient mirror began to condense. As it did, Kaylin wondered how it was that the water—which didn’t seem to her eyes to be all that deep—had actually lasted for all these years without evaporating or growing mold. It was the kind of stupid thing she could wonder in the face of the unknown.
It was not the kind of question she expected to have answered, on the other hand. But there was an answer, and as the light broke, fractured, and recombined, swirling into shapes, she saw it. She saw the almost ethereal faces of people that weren’t human, weren’t Barrani, and weren’t Dragon; she imagined that they were twice her height and possessed a hundred times her gravitas. But one of them, male, she thought, although it was hard to tell, opened his wrist. Literally opened it, as if the whole of a body could be bent at will to any task.
Blood ran into the engraved stone basin. It wasn’t red. It was gold, and as it touched stone, it became clear, like very thin honey. She heard the echoes of their distant voices, and saw the spoken words take shape and form above the mirror, sinking slowly and losing cohesion as the water dissolved them.
“Can you see that?” sh
e asked Severn.
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“The Ancients are blessing the water.”
“Blessing?”
“They’re speaking over it. Incantation?”
Even in a mirror vision, he didn’t see the words the way she did. “Can you understand any of it?”
“No. What did you ask the mirror?”
“You don’t want to know.” She watched the words as they joined the mirror, becoming part of the liquid, one by one, and wondered whether this was how the first creations had come to life, and if—and she bit her lip, shunting the thought aside. It could be bloody dangerous to just stand here and think; she’d get nothing but answers all day long and the world would probably burn down—or worse, fade out of existence—while she did.
Instead, she said two words: The Devourer. And waited.
The face of a familiar stranger now filled the mirror, with his oddly copper eyes and his long, graceful features. This time, however, he was not alone. To his right and left were two people she had not yet seen, a male and a female. “The Devourer is at the gates,” he said. He was grave.
Their eyes, she saw, now shaded to a copper that was as dark as his.
“We can stand, or we can travel,” he told them. “It was not dead, as hoped.”
“Travel?” the woman asked.
“There is a way. We can take those we can reach, and we can attempt to find a safer world.” He glanced, now, at the silent man to his left. The man nodded, but didn’t speak.
“What safety, in the end, can we find? The Devourer has found three worlds.” The woman spoke. “Everything we have ever been or done is here. If we can survive—”
“Can we? Can we stand where the others faltered? What we have at our disposal is less than what they had at theirs, but they are silent, now. There is only emptiness where they once stood and built.”
“Our life is here. What life will we have in a different world? How will we wake the newborn sleepers? How will we—”
Cast in Chaos Page 24