Cast in Oblivion

by Michelle Sagara

  Was it Iberrienne who taught you how to do whatever it is you were doing with your name and your physical form?

  Yes. He was not the only such teacher.

  Clearly. You mentioned that mortals—or mortal Arcanists—may have been involved. I doubt we’ll find them here—but we’re going to have to find them in the future. Speaking, she moved toward the Ferals.

  Their feet seemed to be anchored—literally anchored—to the floor. The floor on which Kaylin was standing. She flinched as her eyes followed their paws, her gaze then moving to the Shadow beneath them. If they were the Shadow’s peak, the Shadow’s physical manifestation, what lay beneath them was far larger, far darker.

  Ynpharion, tell Teela and Severn that these are not like the forest Ferals. They seem to be anchored to, and drawing power from, a much greater pool of Shadow. If it’s possible—if they need to fight—tell them to try to take out their legs.

  Pardon?

  Or tell them to somehow detach the Ferals from the ground they’re standing on. She frowned. It may be the reason they’re not leaping—literally—to attack. I don’t think they’ll attack until they can extend their jaws and start biting faces, or whatever else they can reach.

  Can you see their names?

  Not yet. Not quite. She could see the armor that should have been fur. Her gaze, her focus, had first gone to the breadth of darkly smooth chest, as if she were looking for the heart of the beast, because on some level she believed the name resided there; her gaze had dropped to the floor when she realized the shadows cast by these Ferals were not the shadows she would have expected, even of creatures of their size.

  Her gaze left the floor and rose, past the chest that in theory contained heart or lungs. When she reached the head, her attention momentarily snagged on ebon jaws; she forced it up. Yes, she told Ynpharion. Yes, I’ve found their names.

  * * *

  The names were not like Bellusdeo’s name; they were far more like Ynpharion’s—a single rune she’d have some hope of transcribing, rather than a mess of different lines and textures that overlapped and faded from memory the minute she looked away. Once she’d caught sight of the names, she wondered how she’d managed to miss them; they were glowing, golden sigils that appeared to be anchored to the foreheads of the Ferals by gravity and Shadow. They weren’t flat; they were dimensional.

  She hesitated. She had taken Ynpharion’s name; he hadn’t offered it to her. Although she could see the names, they weren’t on offer, either. One angry, condescending voice in her head was more than enough. If she could, she’d forget the name entirely; it would free her from a constant stream of criticism.

  “You do not have to take the name,” Hope said quietly.

  “I have to do something with the name—”

  “Yes. Think, Kaylin. The last time you encountered Ynpharion, you had not named me. There were things I could not do, interactions that were impossible. Now you have more flexibility. I cannot do what you must do, but the ability is yours.”

  “Because I’m Chosen.”

  “Because,” he agreed, “you are Chosen. When the Lady carries names to the newborn, does she take and keep the knowledge of those names? Do those names have power when they are not wed to the living, as they were intended to be?”

  “They have to have some power, or the newborn wouldn’t wake.”

  Hope made a frustrated noise that almost sounded Leontine.

  The Lady wishes to know what you are attempting to do.

  Tell her I’m trying to figure out how not to be saddled with more people like you, Kaylin snapped.

  Noted, he responded, his interior voice stiff and almost neutral.

  I can carry the names, she thought. But how can I carry them without separating them? She hadn’t removed Ynpharion’s name from his body; she had touched it, grabbed it, taken the knowledge of it. She had given in to her immediate desire—survival, which was perfectly reasonable—but she hadn’t literally removed the name.

  She’d taken the name of a bisected Feral before it was devoured. But that name hadn’t come with syllables that could be spoken, could be pronounced. She had caught it, and slapped it almost literally on the closest available patch of skin, where it had stuck. And she had used it, later, to stabilize Gilbert’s physical form in her own reality. It had been a type of healing.

  The name hadn’t been returned to the Lake. Maybe it would one day, if Gilbert died. She didn’t know. But she’d felt none of the Consort’s rage or sorrow at its loss. If the names had been created to breathe life into still, sleeping bodies, it had done a variant of its job.

  The carrying of names that were still in use seemed impossible—the two goals were mutually exclusive. She couldn’t carry something that was demonstrably still being used. Hope knew this. She was certain he knew it. Which meant he either assumed she was capable of things that couldn’t be done, or she wasn’t looking at this the right way.

  “Everything,” Hope said softly, “is metaphor. What you see now is a metaphor. It is something you’ve built to allow you to navigate byways that were never meant for your kind. Remember that.”

  She understood what he meant by metaphor, but it was difficult. Kaylin wasn’t an Imperial mage. She wasn’t an Arcanist. She was a ground Hawk. A Hawk. Her job wasn’t to make metaphors of things. It was to assess evidence, examine crime sites, prevent new crimes from happening if at all possible. To do that, she had to be firmly grounded in reality; she had to become aware of how her own life led to inevitable prejudices; she had to question some of her own experiences. But those experiences, conversely, made a lot of her job easier.

  Marcus had drilled pragmatism into her head. He’d made certain she understood what her job was, what her responsibilities were; he’d made clear that he expected her to live up to both—but also made clear that he thought she could. She’d needed that, and clung to it.

  She was accustomed, however, to trusting what she’d seen, heard, touched. She’d built that confidence over seven years, sometimes rockily. This was going against every lesson she’d learned in that time.

  No, she thought, straightening her shoulders. Not every lesson. She had a job to do here. She had a responsibility. It wasn’t the job she’d been trained to do—but that didn’t matter. If Severn and Teela faced these Ferals in this narrow space, they weren’t going to escape unscathed. Not even Teela. Nightshade could back them up—but only if one of them fell, or fell back. It wasn’t like the forest. The walls couldn’t be strategically placed or moved around.

  She could make the difference.

  But...no pressure. She grimaced, straightening her shoulders again. She didn’t know what she could do. She had been afraid, for years, of what the marks might signify. Children had died because of these marks—murdered in some sacrificial, sympathetic magic that would allow someone else to define their shape, altering what had been placed there by—by someone or something.

  She understood that that fear wasn’t useful. The guilt wasn’t reasonable. But fear and guilt weren’t rational responses; what she made of them was. Or could be.

  She walked toward the names of the Ferals. As she did, the bodies of creatures that were, or had been, Barrani became clearer, more well-defined. The eyes that looked ahead—the Barrani eyes—began to waver. They hadn’t seen her before. They couldn’t see her easily now. But they could sense her presence, as if she were the faintest of starlight that could only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes.

  Kaylin approached the left-most Feral. As she did, Hope followed, and with him, the halo of light his wings shed. She watched the ground beneath the Ferals’ feet, where the deep well of Shadow lay. Illumination did not gentle it; it brought out the hidden swirls of chaotic, moving color that implied life. But the shadows cast by the bulk of the Ferals themselves did change in the light; they became longer, but more defined.

 
They were human shaped. No, she thought, Barrani shaped. Some knot of tension in her neck and shoulders dissolved. She didn’t ask Ynpharion if her physical body was moving. It wasn’t. She could feel her hands, clenched in too-tight fists by her sides, could feel her legs, slightly bent at the knees. But she could also feel her hands as she lifted her left arm. Barrani eyes in bestial faces flickered. She heard distant growls. No; she felt them. The Ferals were silent.

  She reached for the name and realized she couldn’t actually see her own arm or her hand. She could feel them; she could see the name; she could see the Ferals and the Shadow and the light. She cast no shadow herself. Her eyes were closed, and she was afraid to open them, afraid to be in the real world having achieved nothing. Metaphors, she decided, were hard.

  Hope had said she could open her eyes here. But the things she could see with her eyes closed—the words, for instance—she had always been able to see with her eyes closed. She wasn’t seeing them with her actual eyes. Later, she thought. Later, when she was in the safety of her own home, surrounded by people who were not trying to kill her, she would try opening her eyes.

  She reached for the name again, focusing only on the sigil. As she did, it grew larger. I’m approaching it, she thought. It’s not changing size. The size, however, was necessary to see what she’d missed at a reasonable distance; as the word grew larger, cracks appeared across the bold, solid lines. Colors bled into the light, changing it. Darkening it.

  She could see the source of that darkness. It was a slender thread of Shadow, narrower than infant’s hair. No, she thought, not a single thread; there were more—but all were very fine. She could break them just by passing a hand through them. And she did. Her left hand. The hand which was sometimes gloved in a lace made of Shadow.

  She held the sigil in the palm of her right hand; she broke the small filaments with her left. The small filaments, however, reached up from the Feral’s body, like rising fur, to replace what she’d broken. The third time she tried, she cursed; she could feel Leontine rumbling in a distant throat not mean for Leontine.

  Carry the name, he’d said.

  Carry the name without taking it. Carry the name without hearing the truth of its syllables. She’d done that, once. She done it for the High Lord; she’d done it for herself. But she’d taken the name from a metaphorical desk; she’d dipped her hand into a distant lake without realizing what she was doing. If she carried the name, wouldn’t she effectively be killing the person it currently inhabited?

  “Yes, Chosen,” Hope said. “But they will return, in the end. They will be born as Barrani.”

  “Could I have done this to Bellusdeo?” It was the heart of her fear. She knew what she was like when she was in a bitter, despair-fueled rage. And people who had those shouldn’t have the power to do what she was now certain he was telling her to do.

  “No. She is wed to her name, bound to it. It is where it should be. Her desire has never been to escape the truth of herself.”

  No. She wanted to be herself. And as the only female Dragon, the only person who could propagate a race, she couldn’t. Kaylin stared at the name that was closest to her; it was the name she had tried to dust free of what appeared to be living cobwebs.

  These would not be the first people she had killed in her life. They wouldn’t be the first people she’d killed since she’d crossed the bridge. But...killing in a fury of red rage was not the same as killing this way; slitting a person’s throat wasn’t the same as stabbing them from the front while they were trying to kill her.

  Ynpharion.

  Lord Kaylin.

  Would it have been better—for you—if I had killed you instead of taking your name?

  How would you have managed to accomplish that?

  Just pretend I could. Would it have been better?

  His frustration was an endless well; it threatened to become a geyser. Why must everything devolve into permission with you? If you can kill them, kill them. We do not have the time—

  Killing a person. Enslaving a person. Both were bad—but she’d done both before. If the situations were different, the end result was the same: death or enslavement.

  Kaylin’s shoulders sagged. Hope placed a hand on one of them, and she felt a jolt of warmth, of something that was almost like the essence of home. “Why can’t you do this?” she asked, because asking put off the decision for a few minutes.

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “This is not my power, Kaylin. It is yours. It is the power of the marks of the Chosen, funneled through the person who now carries them. They are wed to you; nothing you do here could not, in the end, be done by you. It requires no sacrifice. Were I not here, you would still be in this space; you would still see the words clearly.”

  “And I could take them.”

  “And you could take them.” Voice gentle, he said, “Decide, but decide quickly. I will not judge you for either decision. Nor would your companions.”

  “It’s not their judgment I’m worried about.”

  “Yes. You must live with yourself, regardless.”

  Kaylin exhaled. The Ferals, attached somehow to a greater well of Shadow, were probably already enslaved. Probably. Maybe. It was a justification, an excuse. Ynpharion as Feral had not been Ynpharion as Barrani. Any thought of the Shadow, any thought of the people who had taught him how to live in a “less restricted” way, enraged him. He would not choose to go back to what he had been.

  You would have killed me, had you realized you could.

  Yes. Yes, she would have. But she’d done what she’d done to save her own skin while attempting to save Orbaranne. And, she thought as she forced her shoulders into a more upright position, she’d do what she did because she was attempting to reach the cohort. Annarion. Mandoran. Prickly, autocratic Sedarias. She’d do it because the Consort was with her, and Teela, and Severn. She wouldn’t let Nightshade die, either, if she could prevent it.

  She reached out with her left hand, caught the name and listened.

  Chapter 23

  In the darkness of Shadow and gold, Kaylin listened to the syllables, which were blurred and indistinct if even a hint of stray thought intruded. The sound of breathing, even her own, fell away; she could hear no internal voices. She listened, until the only sound she could hear was a name.

  Edelonne.

  As Ynpharion had, he fought. He moved, leaping toward her, although he also remained in place, beneath her hand. It was disorienting enough that she ignored it, although Teela’s raised voice could be heard, regardless.

  Edelonne.

  Speaking the name, saying it, was like the rumble of thunder, but syllabic. Light stabbed her right eye—or something like light—and she held on to the name as he attempted to rush across it to reverse the direction of the control. It was like trying to hold on to a horse, and was the entirety of the reason that Kaylin had never taken well to riding lessons. Luckily, horseback was only required for the Swords. It was recommended for Hawks.

  She shouldn’t be thinking about anything but Edelonne now, but in a perverse way, it helped. It grounded Kaylin. It centered her, for the moment, in the life and the responsibilities she’d chosen. She was a Hawk. Private Kaylin Neya.

  And Edelonne was a man who, for whatever reasons, had chosen to join the Barrani who even now conspired against the cohort, against her friends and—probably in ignorance—against the Consort, who brought life to them all.

  Guilt left. Doubt fled. She held on to the name in a grip that was tight enough it restricted all movement. It struggled to evade; it was like trying to hold on to a glowing snake. A poisonous snake that she had by the head; if she didn’t hold on, it was going to be costly.

  But as she repeated the name, the force of the single spoken word causing tremors in the air and the ground, it stilled. It stilled enough that she could examine it closely. The strands, minute and recurri
ng, were gone. Nothing attempted to reach for the word, to pull it back, to center it again. It was in her hand.

  She felt the shock, the confusion, the fear—that was the hardest—of yet another person in her coterie of nameheld, and was surprised to discover that Edelonne was female.

  Nightshade said, What you did there, do again. One of the creatures that was blocking the hall has reverted to a more familiar shape. She is not entirely cogent, but she is no longer a threat.

  I’m not sure I’m going to get all three of them, Kaylin replied as she grabbed the next name. She made an attempt to grab both, but the Feral farthest from her appeared to be retreating.

  He or she is retreating. The other is now standing in place.

  She stopped speaking to Nightshade. She stopped attempting to catch or hold the retreating name. She concentrated, again, on the one in her hand, listening to the sound of it, until it resolved into a set of syllables that she could pronounce, in sequence, as if that sequence had meaning.

  Averen.

  Averen.

  He did not fight her as Edelonne had fought; speaking the syllables was harder than holding the name. And as she sank the knowledge of it into her thoughts, she could see what he saw: the Consort. Teela wielding Kariannos. Nightshade bearing Meliannos. He turned once, almost wildly, to look over his shoulder; Kaylin could not see what he saw, but didn’t try. She understood that he was looking for Shadow.

  Possibly looking for the third and last member of their number.

  Come back, Nightshade said, his voice sharper, the two words almost a command. She wanted to tell him that’s not the way names worked, but didn’t, because she felt the tremble start in her arms; her legs, braced for action, had locked in place, but their ability to hold her up seemed to suddenly be in question.

  She opened her eyes. Her arms were stiff and, yes, trembling in fists by her sides. She inhaled, exhaled, inhaled; her head hurt. The lights in this hall were too loud.