Cast in Flame (34 page)

“There are people who are fleeing—sometimes from your Hawks, dear—who are looking for a place to hide. There are people who are looking for a change of venue—something more exciting or interesting to spice up their lives.

“None of these are innately bad.” At Teela’s lifted brow, Helen smiled. “Yes, dear, perhaps running from the Law would be considered bad in present company; that was not a well-chosen example on my part, but if you’ll forgive it, I’ll continue.

“These people have their eyes upon their futures, whatever those futures might be, and they will not be tied down by an old woman. Nor should they be. They need a
place,
” she continued, frowning at the word—just as she’d frowned when Kaylin herself had used it. “I’m sorry, dear. I understand—I truly do—that this is simply one part of your brief, mortal lives.

“And often, the people who do want a home have a dream of home that is ideal. It is perfect. I am not, perhaps, as worn out as your previous home—but I am far from perfect. Nothing living can be. I do try,” she added, slightly self-consciously.

“Why—why do you choose mortal tenants, then?” Kaylin asked. “If you
find
the tenant that’s perfect for you, he—or she—is going to die. And you won’t.”

“Ah, now that is a good question. It is rather a long answer, though. Your tea might get cold.”

“Believe that the rest of us are quite interested in the answer,” Teela—who had not touched her tea—told her.

“Well, then.” Helen smiled. “I suppose an interview does work in both directions. You have answered—perhaps unintentionally—the questions that are closest and most important to my own heart. I will try to answer yours.

“Immortals—like your fellow Hawk—do not use the word
home
the way you do. What they own, they own.”

Kaylin frowned. “Tiamaris—”

“There will be exceptions, of course—but I could not be home to a Dragon unless he had chosen to dedicate himself to me, as your Tiamaris has done with your Tara. His Tower
is
his hoard. He owns it; he claims it; he protects it. But—he treasures it, and defers to it, and speaks with it; it is not a simple place into which he has moved and over which he presides. It is not something that denotes hierarchy or personal power. The Tower—to Tiamaris—is alive. He owns it
and
is owned by it. It is not a simple exchange. Yes, he is Lord of the Tower. Yes, if he chose to do so, he could enforce every single one of his desires. It is, in part, what a Tower is designed to allow of its Lord.

“I was not built for mortals,” she continued, her gaze growing distant, her voice losing some of the frailty that her appearance all but demanded. “But I was aware of their fragile existences. They seldom spoke with power; it was very easy to lose track of their individual voices. My Lord was often away; in those days, the wars were fierce, and they transformed the landscape. I was, of course, safe from such transformations—but many, many things were not.

“Immortality is not invulnerability; Immortals know death. One day, my Lord did not return. I was left empty for a long passage of years, before another came to take his place. There was so much danger, dear, so much transformation and contamination. I was sensitive to it in a way the Lord was not, and within my confines, there was safety of a type.

“For him and his people.”

“Not for you?”

“I am old, as you know. I was created by the Ancients in a bygone era; the reasons for my creation are lost to history. The Towers may know; I do not.”

“Did you ever know?”

“Yes, once.”

Kaylin fell silent.

“The Lord was a man of power. I am not sure what you would call him now.” She looked to the left of Kaylin’s face, and a squawk made clear that she’d been speaking to the small dragon. “Ah. Sorcerer, perhaps. He was not an Ancient, but he envied their power; people often envy the powers they perceive they do not themselves possess. I had power. I had been constructed with power. He understood that words lay at the heart of my foundations—and the words themselves allowed me almost limitless control over my own form.

“He thought, if he could deconstruct some parts of me, he could learn to harness that power and use it outside of my walls.”

“You didn’t agree.”

“No. I didn’t. But—he was powerful, Kaylin. I protected what I could of myself; I injured him. In the end, he was destroyed—but not by my hand alone.”

“By whose?” Teela asked.

“I was still, in those days, in contact with the Towers that you speak of now. Before I took the most severe of my injuries, I asked for their help.”

“But they—”

“Yes. They did not have a mandate to protect each other. Or me. But they conferred with their Lords, and in the end, their Lords chose to leave their Towers to come to my aid.”

“They probably wanted the power—” Mandoran began. He didn’t finish. Teela’s look implied that he would be if he kept talking.

“Was he killed?”

“No. But he was driven out; I do not believe he remained in this world. There were portals at one time that opened onto other vistas. They are lifeless now—a consequence of his work. I had done what I could to protect my core functions—at least, that’s how I considered them at the time. I do not know what the other functions might have been; they are lost to me, the words riven and destroyed.

“Yes,” she added, glancing at Mandoran although he hadn’t spoken. “I was left crippled and adrift. I had no Lord, and none would take me; it would mean abandoning their necessary posts at the outskirts of the sphere. I expect they thought someone would come who would. And men did come. Men of power,” she added softly. “But they came to find the Sorcerer’s research and the artifacts of possible power he might have left behind.”

“We call those thieves,” Kaylin said.

Teela chuckled. “Don’t call them thieves in their hearing, and understand that their hearing is far superior to yours.”

“Searching the interior, as it had become, was not a simple task; nor was it safe. They discovered that they could not command me; that I did not conform to their desires as either guests or Lords. They were, in short, quite rude.”

“If they’d had better manners, you’d’ve given them what they asked for?”

“I’m not entirely certain, dear. What I was certain of at the time was that they offered me nothing in exchange.”

“You mean...like rent?”

“Very like that, although perhaps not in the way that you think. Where was I? Ah. Yes. It was not a trivial task, and it was not short. They came, somewhat as you did, dear, with retainers.”

Teela coughed. Bellusdeo coughed louder.

“They’re not my retainers,” Kaylin said; she didn’t need the dramatics as a prompt. “They’re my friends.”

“Ah, then perhaps they were different. They did not gather friends; they had servitors, servants. Possibly slaves. They had to spend the time here, and as I did not approve, they were forced to feed themselves, and to clean the quarters they’d chosen. They did not,” she added, with a slender smile, “choose to maintain quarters here for long. Only the powerless were left as witnesses, should I choose to change the environment.” She fell silent for a long moment, and then, to Kaylin’s surprise, drank the tea she’d poured herself.

“It was during this time that I became acquainted with mortals. I knew of them, of course, but they had never been relevant to my existence in any practical fashion. One of the servants was mortal. Ah, no, three were. But there was one. She was an older woman—older than you, dear—with gray hair; it was quite, quite long when she let it loose, but she always bound it and kept it off her neck. It got in the way of her work, she said.

“And it was such
odd
work. She swept the floors. She washed them. She washed the mantels—where they existed. I once put a small statuary in her way—and she cleaned that as well, although perhaps her language was a little on the colorful side at the end. She often said, ‘I’m not young anymore!’ while she worked.

“She came with flowers and branches and leaves; she came with small things—carvings, mostly, but sometimes small blown-glass figures. I broke some of them to see what she would do—I was younger myself, and less civil—and she swept up the pieces and removed them. Only once did she show some reaction. She was very, very quiet. Very still. She gathered those pieces by hand, one at a time.”

“What was it—what was the figure of?”

“Another mortal, I think. A child.” The woman said, “If you would like to see it, I kept it.”

“You said you broke it.”

“Yes. I did. But—her reaction made me look at it more closely. I could see no discernible merit to the figure; it seemed much of a style with the rest. But for some reason, it was personal to her. And one day, in apology, I gathered the broken pieces, and I fixed them. And then, in case the figure should happen to break again, I made more. Many more.” She smiled as she spoke, her eyes that kind of faraway that meant memory. “I left many of them in the room in which she slept. It was a small, dark room, with a single high window and a very narrow door; it was meant as a closet, at one point.

“When she returned to her room after a day’s work, she found the room changed. I didn’t think the lack of light would make my gift clear enough, so I altered the window. And the window itself was so flat it almost seemed like a prison window; I changed that. I did not change the size of the room, or otherwise alter its shape—I didn’t want the changes to be noticed easily by anyone but her.

“Her name was Hasielle.”

“What did she do when she saw what had happened?”

The smile deepened. “She froze in the door and stared at the window. I think it took her a while to notice the small figures that were on the sill, the light from the window so captivated her. She was not used to living in light—only working in it, always. She told me later she didn’t mind the dark, because in the dark, there was silence and peace. But—yes, she saw the figures after she managed to take her eyes off the window, all of them. She covered her mouth with her callused hands. She might have cried—I am really not allowed to say.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Mandoran asked. If Kaylin had been sitting beside him, she’d have kicked him. He’d have the most bruised shins in the
city.
“What? It might be relevant!”

“She’s protecting the person’s
privacy,
idiot,” Kaylin said. “She doesn’t mean Hasielle is going to threaten or hurt her if she talks.”

“She lived here. I did nothing for her for years. I made her life harder, rather than easier. But...she didn’t tell her masters about the figures—or the window. She kept the place clean; she cleaned up after them if they’d been particularly destructive. She was here for years before she injured her shoulder and her back.” The smile faded. “And then, she didn’t come for months. The others came. New people. New mortals. They were not like her. They didn’t bring me things. They didn’t bring their flowers and their curtains and their small, fragile figures. They didn’t hum while they worked.

“I was...sad. Not angry, not enraged—but sad. It was not a new feeling; I understood it; it was familiar. But I had no memories of feeling it before. I was particularly unfriendly during her absence—it was really unfair to the people who replaced her, because they had no choice in their work. They were terrified, by the end of two days; they had to be forced to enter the building at all.

“But their masters had mishaps as well, and of a kind which made the fears of their servants more relevant. I thought they would give up. I wanted them to give up. I wanted them to
leave.
” The last word was spoken with a force that none of the other words had contained; it caused Kaylin’s skin to tingle.

The small dragon rose, wings lifted; he roared. Sadly, it came out as a longer, louder squawk. Kaylin reached up and put a hand over his mouth. “You are going to deafen
me,
” she said, pointedly. He bit her hand, but not hard enough to draw blood. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting intruders to leave, either. Just—stop.” She turned her attention back to the landlord, whose eyes had shifted into a decidedly nonmortal appearance.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said.

“It’s all right. Tara has problems remembering her eyes, too.” There were a lot of questions Kaylin probably should have asked next; the landlord seemed to expect some. But at the moment there was only one question she wanted answered. “Did Hasielle come back?”

The landlord smiled. Her eyes had once again become normal human eyes; at this distance they were an indeterminate shade of brown, lighter than Kaylin’s. “Yes. But she came back after I was no longer anyone’s responsibility. I was so surprised to see her,” she said, her voice softer. “I knew she was mortal. I thought she had died of her injuries.”

“Injuries don’t always kill us,” Kaylin said.

“No. She looked much older, and her gait was so changed I almost failed to recognize her. She was afraid. Fear is so strong it taints the air; if someone is afraid of me, it’s often the first thing I hear. And she
was
afraid. But...it was a different sort of fear. She was anxious; she kept looking back over her shoulder—at the perimeter of the property. I could hardly believe it was her.

“And I knew—I thought I knew—what she was looking for. I moved the earth, for her—literally. I changed the front doors. I changed the stairs—they became a ramp, with a rail, so that she might walk up more easily. I unlocked the doors. I knew—I knew she would hate the rubble and the splinters that I’d allowed myself to gather, to become—so I swept them away.

“And the entire place had become a bit of a maze. It was only suitable for vermin, really—but that had been deliberate on my part. I considered all the visitors vermin, at that point. They were carrion creatures. They considered themselves, of course, somewhat differently. People always do.

“But—for the first time since Hasielle left, I saw myself as she would see me. She had always taken some pride in my appearance, no doubt for her own sake. She had such odd notions about tidiness, cleanliness, and order. I had never spoken a word with her. I felt that I couldn’t. I was not her master, but neither was she; she owed loyalty to the men and women who searched for the remnants of the Sorcerer’s research.