Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  The air, when it came, came not at the call of the Dragon, nor at the invocation of the Garden’s Keeper. It came as it pleased, dallied a moment in cape and hair, and then settled in the center of the platform, in a spinning vortex that had, as the fire had had, no human shape. It wasn’t cold, the way winter winds could be cold; it wasn’t cool, the way summer breezes could be cool. But it radiated both of these things, adding a hint of the dampness of sea squall and the howl of storm.

  Air, Kaylin thought. Breath.

  All of the elements were necessary for life, and all of them could end it in their absence.

  The wind whistled; Severn whistled back. His whistle was a familiar fief tune, absent words; the wind’s, however, was nothing remotely known. And it was long.

  “Evanton?”

  “It’s speaking.”

  “I gathered that. What’s it saying?”

  “Listen carefully, Private. And yes, that is my way of telling you to shut up.”

  She did. She even listened. Evanton, when annoyed, was conversely not very annoying. But the wind’s language was one she couldn’t understand; if there were syllables, even the half-familiar syllables of the ancient tongue, in its folds, she couldn’t pick them up, couldn’t tease them apart.

  But Sanabalis could. She knew this because he replied, and it was deafening. Lord Sanabalis, absent the robes and the long fringe of white beard, glittered in the light. He was beautiful. Foreign, yes, and ultimately unknown—but compelling. If he could have been silent, she would have been content to stare at him for hours.

  As it was, she grimaced and lifted her hands to her ears.

  He spoke to the air, and the air answered; she saw it as much as she heard it, because she could see the shifting of the folds of the Dragon’s silvery wing membranes. Sanabalis roared again, and this time the wind howled. But she had no sense that it was angry, no sense that it threatened.

  “We don’t fear the fire,” Sanabalis said, speaking in a deep and booming Barrani, “but the storms? We fear the storms.”

  “And it knows this?”

  He laughed. It was disconcerting, given the size of his mouth and his throat. “How do you think we fly? We are, like the Aerians, the beneficiaries of magical flight, Kaylin. The air listens when we push ourselves off from the ground, and it releases us from the shackles of earth. Of course it knows.

  “Fire is the element of our birth, in story. Air is the element in which we come of age.” He roared again. His wings were spread, not gathered, as if he’d found thermals. “I will stay with the air, Keeper, if that is your wish.”

  “It’s the air’s wish,” Evanton replied. “But before you settle in up here, we’d appreciate a lift down.”

  Evanton led them from the base of the tree back into the confines of the neatly tended Garden. It was to the rock garden that he went, and it was that: in place of flowers or trees, rocks of different heights and different textures stood atop a small field of carefully placed pebbles. Here, there was also a small shrine, and a small stone shelf, and candles were lit in honor of the element, in this case, earth. Why the earth was represented by stone, Kaylin didn’t understand.

  Nor did she really understand a garden composed of rocks, if it came to that. But Evanton now looked at her with care. “This,” he told her, “is where I must stop, I think.”

  “And us?”

  “You must leave.”

  She cast an eye toward the door that appeared as he spoke. The last time she’d exited a door like this one, it hadn’t gone well. “You said I wasn’t to enter or leave without you,” she tried.

  “I did indeed. But the plans of even the wise shift and change. I’ve left you your Corporal,” he added, as he approached the large rock that was the small garden’s centerpiece. It was a striated marble that seemed polished, and when he touched it, his hands began to glow gently. “Follow the path, Kaylin.” His voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “Where will it take me?”

  “If you hold true to your intent, it will take you where you need to be. Corporal.”

  Severn nodded.

  “Don’t lose her. If you need to, tie yourself to her in any way that’s practical.”

  Kaylin snorted. But as it was usually Severn who had the better sense of geography, she didn’t argue. “Why are you all doing this, anyway?”

  “We’re reminding the elements,” he replied, closing his veined eyelids.

  “Of what?”

  “Of life. Of what life means, in this place. They’re part of it, essential to it, and inimical to it, all at once. But here, for the moment, they’re content to converse, and the conversations—all of them—must take place.” He paused, but he hadn’t finished; Kaylin waited with more patience than she usually showed.

  “You, too, must converse,” he finally said. “And I have no idea at all with what, or what you must say. But if the elements are part of the Garden, and if they believe that your Devourer—”

  “It is not my Devourer, Evanton!”

  “If they believe that the Devourer belongs in this Garden, then it, too, must be reminded of the way in which it is part of—and inimical to—the living.”

  “We don’t even know what it is!”

  “No,” was the serene reply. “But that is now no longer my problem.”

  Severn approached the door first, and Severn opened it. He then held out a hand, palm up, to Kaylin. He said no words because no words were necessary, and she took both a deep breath and his hand. “When all of this is over—if we’re still alive—I want a vacation.”

  He smiled. “If you consider lessons with members of the Imperial Court a vacation, I’m sure Marcus will be happy to sign off on it.”

  “I could probably get around Sanabalis.”

  “True.”

  It wasn’t Sanabalis he was thinking about. “I don’t suppose a mouse could get around Diarmat.”

  “Lord Diarmat, and no, not if his reputation is anything to go by. Are you ready?”

  “No. I never am. I just make do.” He held the door open; Kaylin looked suspiciously into the hall. It wasn’t the hall that had led to the Garden. For one, it was, or seemed to be, composed of stone; the walls were smooth; the floors themselves were hard and gray. For two, it was a much wider hall than Evanton’s, although Evanton’s hall was admittedly so crowded with books it was hard to tell.

  There were, however, shelves against some of these unfamiliar walls. Severn, still holding her hand, came to stand by her side. He glanced through a door that wouldn’t fit two people. Then he glanced over her shoulder at Evanton.

  “I don’t like it,” Kaylin muttered. “Do you think he knows where it goes?”

  “I think he knew it wouldn’t open up into the shop. What will you do?”

  She tightened her grip on his hand and headed into the unknown.

  CHAPTER 25

  The unknown, in this case, was as solid as the previous hall. The floor had no give, and the walls didn’t immediately disperse into vapor or mist or gray nothingness. Nor did Kaylin hear the distant roar of what she assumed was the Devourer. She heard nothing except the sound of their boots on stone, the sound of their own breathing.

  The hall was lit not by windows but by small lamps that hung between the shelves at regular intervals. She paused in front of one of those shelves. She wasn’t the Arkon; she wasn’t even passingly familiar with the titles of the volumes that stood here in bound leather, in more or less orderly rows. But they seemed like an anchor of sorts, something by which she could get her bearings.

  Severn let her take the lead. It came to her that he often had, even when she was five, although many of those memories were thankfully dim now. “Hall’s longer,” she said, giving up on the books. She could read some of the titles; some were impregnable, although she recognized the very stylized forms of High Barrani. The older scribes tended to crunch the letters together so they ended up looking like the same series of curved lines and loops, with small var
iations, rather than distinct words.

  “Where do you think we are?”

  “In the store,” Severn replied.

  She nodded. “The Elemental Garden’s existed for as long as the world, or at least that’s what the Dragons think. Evanton certainly hasn’t.” When she’d first met him, on the other hand, he looked—to her—as if he had. Seven years hadn’t done much to change him; it had, on the other hand, taken her across the border that separated adults from everything else. “Do you think this is what existed before he took over?”

  He nodded. “It’s possible this is what exists when anyone new takes the job. It’s a building, It’s possible that it’s a building very like Castle Nightshade.”

  “You think the Old Ones built it?”

  He nodded again.

  How had the Old Ones seen the universe? Their buildings changed like seasons, but less predictably. Their words woke whole races, and she wondered what started when the gods actually paused to converse.

  There was a door at the end of this hall. It was wide, dark, and banded across its width by what looked like iron. It was also barred. But the bars were on this side of the door, not the other side; Severn let her hand go for long enough to help her push them clear.

  The doors opened into another hall; this one was taller and wider, and some light—possibly sunlight—filtered in from above. The walls looked, at first glimpse, to be made of the same stone, but as they approached, the walls began to shift, not in form, but in texture. They were, on the other hand, a very familiar gray.

  Severn’s hand in hers, she approached the closest section of wall to the left. There were no hangings, no lamps, no paintings; there were no words carved in its surface, although she’d half expected them. Instead, the wall seemed flat and blank, smooth in the way glass was smooth, not in the porous way of stone.

  “This is a window,” she said quietly.

  “Yes. A window that would beggar all but the Emperor. Or maybe the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

  She glanced at his face; it was as smooth as the wall. Which usually meant he was worried. “Please tell me you’re not worried about the investigation into the Chancellor’s affairs. We’re facing the end of the world, Severn.”

  He shrugged. “The end of the world is easy. We’ll survive it, or we won’t. But if we do survive, the rest of life is waiting.”

  They couldn’t get through the windows, of course. Kaylin had to push past her initial response to the breaking of window glass, because it was expensive, and expense implied people who cared enough to make you pay for the destruction one damn way or another. But the attempt to break the glass, which grew increasingly less hesitant as the minutes passed, resulted in nothing. No breakage. No change.

  “What the hell is the point of all these windows anyway?” she muttered, because they all faced the same damn thing.

  “There’s no point now,” Severn replied. The way he said it stilled her.

  “You think they looked into something else at some point.”

  “I think it likely. Then again, I don’t know what the Ancients saw when they looked at nothing. Maybe it was peaceful.”

  She shook her head. “No, I think you’re right. This is what’s left.” She turned and headed back to the closed doors. “And if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter where we go.” She placed one palm firmly against the mark that girded the seam of the two doors. Nothing happened.

  “What will you do?”

  “Same as always,” she replied. “Talk a lot and hope that something gets through.”

  Words described worlds, for the Ancients. Words described life. Souls, by any mortal understanding. Words described anything so precisely the Dragons said there was no variation in meaning, no drift due to context. No wonder it was a dead language; you’d have to live forever to even learn it. Or to learn enough context that everything had meaning. Kaylin had seen, in the altar-like mirror hidden at the heart of the Arkon’s hoard, the word for a world. She had seen, as well, the word for her world. There were differences, and had she the ability to lay them out side by side, she would have been able to enumerate them all.

  But that would have taken months or years, and in the end? She’d be pointing at lines or squiggles or the size and the placement of dots. Any sense that the construction or representation was real, the way the fiefs had been real, was distant theory. She hadn’t experienced it, and couldn’t relate to it.

  It was, however, all she had. So she began to speak.

  Had, she realized, been speaking out loud the entire time, because every so often she heard Severn chuckle. She hadn’t—yet—said anything that would make him laugh out loud. But he’d always laughed. Not at her, but…about her, sometimes. His laughter had never driven her to despair or rage. It had never wounded her dignity.

  “You don’t have much dignity.”

  “Shut up. I’m trying to concentrate here. If those windows opened up on worlds that once existed, maybe the way to get to them, or one of the ways, was through this door. I just need to be able to…speak the word.” She’d asked for the name of the world. The problem with the word she’d been given in reply is that it didn’t contain Severn. It didn’t contain his laughter, or his silence, or his rare and enduring anger. It didn’t contain his shadow, his pain. Nor did it contain Marcus or Marrin or the Hawks; there was no sign of Clint or Teela or Tain. There were no Tha’alani, and there was no Ybelline. Or the Foundling Halls.

  And maybe, maybe, if she knew how to look hard enough, or read carefully enough, she would see them, and she would know her world the way the Ancients did. But maybe the problem with the absent Ancients is that they did see the world in a way that was absent those things. Maybe they had no flexibility to see it any other way.

  But their creations—if, truly, they were the creators—hadn’t the ability to conceive of the whole of a life in a single defined line. Kaylin couldn’t even decide what to have for dinner on most days; holding the shape of an entire life in her mind—even when it was her own—was beyond her. But it was still her life.

  And her life was a web composed of other lives, lives she probably also didn’t and couldn’t see clearly. Things that made her laugh. Things that made her swear. Things that made her weep.

  What would you create, if you could?

  Why would I create at all? There’s already so much here, and I’ll never experience most of it.

  “Kaylin, who are you talking to?”

  “I think—I think I’m talking to the door.”

  “You hate philosophical discussions.”

  “I know. They seem so pointless.”

  “And you’re discussing philosophy with a door.”

  She shook her head fiercely and he quieted. This was important. She knew it. She also knew he was right. She groped for the sense of importance in the swamp of discussions she had always found tiring and pointless as she waited.

  To quiet the darkness. Do you create nothing in your tiny state?

  She struggled with the answer she’d been given, rather than the question that had followed it. To quiet the darkness. She’d done a lot in her life to quiet her own darkness. Her first impulse was to say that it had all been bad. But it hadn’t. Some of the choices she’d made for her life—for the life she lived now—were a response to some of the mistakes she’d made even earlier. There was no justice, of course; she knew that.

  But if she gave up on it entirely, there was nothing. Just darkness. Just loss and fear.

  I create, she finally said, with care. But not whole worlds. Not even whole lives. I can’t do that. I’m not a god. I can touch other lives. I can even end them. I can change them, hopefully for the better. Sometimes for the worse. I can make space for them.

  And what waits you, when you are done?

  She shrugged. Death.

  The mark on the door flared with sudden warmth, sudden light.

  Severn said, quietly, “Well done. I think.” The doors began to roll open.
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  They opened into the gray. It wasn’t even mist, because mist you could walk in or through and in any case, you got wet. This wasn’t wet. It wasn’t hot, cold, dry; it wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t even gray; it was just without color.

  The ground, such as it was, had the same dry-sand give as it had had before, so at least there was some consistency in the nothing. They held hands as they emerged, and when Kaylin looked over her shoulder, she wasn’t surprised to see that the doors had vanished. There were no landmarks now; behind looked the same as ahead, up or down. “You can sort of fall,” she told Severn. “I haven’t tried flying.”

  “You haven’t?” He smiled. His smile, unlike the gray, was solid and real. “Where are we going?”

  “I’m not certain. But I know what we’re looking for.”

  “The Devourer.”

  She hesitated, and then said, “The refugees. And this is probably the only place in existence where it’s going to be harder to find thousands of not very stealthy people than one large creature.”

  “Why the refugees?”

  “Because they’re how we’re going to get home.”

  “You returned before.”

  She nodded. “I did. I called Nightshade, and he answered. I’m going to do that, as well—but not yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because calling Nightshade called the Devourer, and I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.” She hesitated, and then added, “And if I’m being honest, Nightshade makes me…nervous.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Nervous.” She looked around, and added, with a half smile, “I’m lost. But this time, I have a decent excuse.”

  “And I’m supposed to be able to lead?” He laughed. “No pressure.”

  She was serious when she said, “No. No pressure. Let’s walk. I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.”

  They did. And she was wrong; it made some small difference. It calmed her. There were no familiar streets, no familiar buildings, no sandwich boards against which to vent spleen; there was no sweltering heat, no rain, no insects. There were no criminals, and more important, no victims. For a few moments, there was silence punctuated by breathing, and it was peaceful.