The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (23 page)

“Lord Tiamaris has said, when he became aware of the incursion of shadow—and the possibility of shadowstorm—he did not proceed into the area of the fief that was thus afflicted. You, however, did.”

She nodded. And hesitated. One glance at Tiamaris’s shuttered expression told her she was going to get no help from that quarter.

The Arkon however said, “Lord Tiamaris did mention that what you saw and what he saw were substantially different. You claimed that the shadow was sigiled.”

“That’s what it looked like to me but—” and here, she transferred her glance to Sanabalis “—I’ve only seen something like it once, and it was a hell of a lot smaller.”

“Where?” Sanabalis asked quietly.

“In the Leontine quarter,” she replied. “The magic of the tainted.”

His gaze was sharp, and his eyes were an unfortunate shade of bronze, which Kaylin tried not to take personally. “The exact sigil?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think—I know I don’t know enough about magic, but I don’t think
any
two shadow sigils would be exactly the same.”

Sanabalis and the Arkon exchanged a glance. It was, sadly, a significant glance, and of a type that would normally have caused Kaylin to demand an explanation in an office meeting. On the other hand, aside from Marcus, no one in the office was likely to rip her throat out or reduce her to ash for making such demands. She was pretty sure Sanabalis wouldn’t; the Arkon, on the other hand? Not so much.

“You know enough,” Sanabalis finally said. “But remember—what you see and what our magic shows us is not the same.”

“It looked like a sigil the size of, oh, the Wolf Tower. Tiamaris couldn’t see it—”

“We are aware of Tiamaris’s perceptions,” the Arkon said, in a brittle tone of voice. “They are not, now, our concern. His understanding is greater than yours, and any information of use on that subject has already been extracted.”

“But he did something, and then he said it was a—a storm.”

“As I said—”

Sanabalis lifted a hand. To the Arkon he said, “She is not of the Court, and not of our kind. It is possible that she requires more explanation than we have given.”

“It should not affect her observations. They happen independent of—”

“It will affect what she observes and understands in future.”

The Arkon’s silence was chilly, and Sanabalis didn’t break it again. But after a moment, the oldest of the Dragons present gave a very curt nod. His eyes were hard to see in this light; Kaylin wasn’t certain why. She could read very little of his mood from their color.

Lord Sanabalis then turned fully to Kaylin. “Ask,” he said curtly, as if aware that questions were trying to break out from between the tight line of her compressed lips.

“What is a shadowstorm?”

Sanabalis hesitated, and this time, the Arkon snorted. “Oh, no,” he said, lifting a hand. “I leave the explanation, in its entirety, to you.”

Tiamaris coughed.

Sanabalis grimaced.

Kaylin felt, for just a moment, as if she were thirteen years old again, and in the exotic comfort of Marcus’s den, surrounded by wives who were more experienced, and far more knowledgeable, than she. They had been both terrifying and strangely attractive, and she had sat, in one corner, watching them as they rolled over and around each other, touching—always touching—unselfconsciously. They were clearly all individuals, they had different personalities, different colors, chose different words; you could even distinguish their snarls with a little practice. But they
were
a family.

They weren’t what she was. They had never been what she was. They could kill—she knew that, had developed at least that much instinct in Barren—but they
didn’t
. And they watched the outsider, gave her space, and left
just
enough of an opening that she could, if she wanted, find some way in.

But the way into the pridlea was a way into something that was warm, inclusive, and nurturing—if perhaps a bit bruising at times, because the cubs played rough. What the three Dragons offered was different.

She wasn’t sure she wanted it, either. But they watched her, and after a moment, she said, “This has something to do with true names.” She meant it as a question, but it came out flat.

They exchanged another glance, but this time, the Arkon nodded.

“The Barrani—”

“The Barrani would suffer the effect of a storm in a similar way. To you,” he added, “there would be very little difference.”

“Why?”

She thought no one would answer. It was, to her surprise, the Arkon who chose to do so. “It is the nature of our life, and of life as it began. We
are
our names, Kaylin. You will not and cannot see them as they are. What you see,” he added, “is significant, but it is significant to you, as the bearer of those marks. The shadows and the darkness are things out of which something akin to life comes, but it is a chaos that knows and accepts no order, no governance, and no rules.” He lifted a hand. “I speak not of rules of law or etiquette, but of simple biology. There are rules that govern birth, life, death, that make us in some sense what we are.

“What we are, however, is bound to the names that move us and give us life. The storms can change those.”

“But—”

“The change can be either brutally obvious or subtle. It can be physical,” he added, “or it can go almost—almost—undetected.” He paused, and then rose. “Sanabalis and Tiamaris are both too young to remember the shadowstorms of my youth.

“But I remember them.” He walked to the window and stared out. “They do not come, now. That much was won. The Old Ones do not walk at the heart of the storm, and they do not call it. The storms do not strike at random.

“But in my youth—” His voice was soft “—they did. Not when I was a child—and yes, we were all children once, even the Dragons. Then? We were the new gods.”

Tiamaris’s eyes rounded very, very subtly. He was surprised. Sanabalis, on the other hand, could have been carved out of rock.

“We built, Kaylin. We built cities such as you could not imagine, aeries that make the palace itself look tiny and cramped and unimposing. We had art—it was not your art, but it was ours—and magic, and we ruled from the skies.”

She was certain the Barrani had something to say about that, but kept this to herself.

“But, as so many do who acquire power and the learning to wield it with greater and greater ease, we flew where we should not have flown, and we tried to acquire what we could not, in safety, hold.

“And then,” he said softly, “the storms came.”

Tiamaris was watching the Arkon’s back as if the Arkon were the only thing in the room.

“You have, I’m informed, been told why Elantra stands where it stands. You understand the import of the High Halls, and understand why the war, at last, was laid to rest here.”

She nodded. And hesitated. He marked the hesitation.

“I was told,” she finally said, keeping her voice even, and more important, keeping accusation out of it, “that the City existed before that. That the heart of the fiefs was once a center of knowledge, a—a normal place.”

“It was never,” he said softly, “normal. Never that.” He glanced at Tiamaris and Sanabalis. His eyes were lidded; the opacity of the lower membranes was almost nonexistent. “But for a time, it was a haven.” He glanced out the window again, and this time she knew his gaze went, not to the Halls, but beyond it.

“We did not understand the nature of those storms at first,” he said, speaking to the glass. “When the first storm struck, we did not see it as shadow. We did not understand its nature. It was not dark, not the way you perceive darkness. It was
wild.
It was the essence of chaos, unleashed.” He lifted his head a moment, and she wondered if he saw this sky, or a different one.

“We did not understand why it came, and it had no immediately discernable pattern. I remember,” he said, his voice deepening. “I remember flying over the plains while the storm raged.”

Tiamaris drew a sharp breath, but didn’t speak. Kaylin didn’t, either.

“There were no cities there,” he continued. “No aeries. Nothing but tall grass, and the animals that hunted or fed there. They knew,” he added. “They startled, and they fled, as if from fire.

“The storm reached some who could not flee, and it changed them. It was a subtle change,” he added, “but the effect was startling. Even the grass itself was slowly transformed in the wild rain. It was—beautiful, in a fashion. The animals, even changed, were not a threat to us. Nor was the grass, although it was not entirely grass as we understood or knew it. And there were flowers and trees that bloomed there, after, that were entirely new. They could not be classified, and they could not—easily—be destroyed. They were unique.

“There was magic, in the transformation,” he said. “It was a magic that could inspire awe, even in Dragons. I was young, then.

“What we did not understand, until the first storm in an aerie, was what the storms
meant.
”

She didn’t, either. She opened her mouth to ask, and closed it again, remembering her training. Sometimes it was better to let them talk. Whoever they were.

“But they came, and when they came to the aerie, we learned. It was bitter,” he added softly, “and many, many were the young who were lost to us, then. I was not among them. The eggs,” he added, and this time, she saw the momentary twist of his lips reflected in the surface of glass, “we had to destroy.

“But the aerie itself was changed. Some changes were subtle. The hall of mirrors seemed unmarred, until one glanced at one’s reflection. Some changes were not; the hatchery was not.” His silence was longer. She wondered if he would break it.

“Some of our oldest and most powerful were sent to the hatchery to guard the eggs.”

Tiamaris lifted his head.

“When they emerged from the hatchery, they were no longer, in any sense, Dragons. What they
were,
” he added, “was not even a shadow, not a mimicry. They were entirely and utterly changed. They could fly, yes, and they could still breathe the heart of flame. They could speak its name as if it were their own.

“But they recognized none of us as kin. In form,” he added, “they were like stone, but moving and gleaming, as if they had been reborn, and their forms were sharpened or…worse. It was not a pleasant birth.” He shook his head. “They could not be unmade. But what knows life, knows change, and they were changed.”

“The names?” she asked.

“Yes, but that we knew almost immediately. They were few,” he continued, “or we would have perished. After we gathered, after the hatchery was destroyed, we returned to the plains and to the sites of other storms, and we studied what we could. What we discovered,” he added, “was that the subtle changes in the base animals were magnified—greatly—in Dragons.”

“Animals have no names.”

He nodded. “Do you understand?”

She wanted to say no. Instead, she said, “The storms exist at the heart of the fiefs.”

“Yes. Only there.”

“But Tiamaris knew—”

“He knows what to watch for, Kaylin. All of the Dragons in the Empire do. So, too, the Barrani, although their knowledge is less expansive. It has been a very long time since a storm has escaped the heart of the fiefs.”

“How far can they reach?” She looked around the room. At Sanabalis. At Tiamaris.

“Until now? No farther than the interior border of the fiefs. What was built in the fiefs was built upon the foundations of a magic not one of the living now fully apprehend. The Towers. The Castles. The High Halls is the only structure to our knowledge that retains some of that power but exists outside of the fiefs.” He turned back to them, then. “We do not understand the nature of those who created us. We do not understand the nature of those who would re-create us.

“But we understand that it is our death.”

After a long pause, she said, “What would a storm do to the High Halls?”

He raised a pale brow, and then nodded. “You do understand.”

She frowned. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I’m wondering,” she finally said, “what changes the undying would suffer, if they’d suffer it at all.”

“The undying.”

She nodded slowly. “The undying surrender names. They attempt to live without them.”

“You’ve seen the undying.”

“Yes. It’s not much of a life. But—without names—”

“They can still be affected. Or at least that is my belief. I admit that we have not experimented with the undying and the fiefs. Perhaps,” he told her, “you should ask the Barrani.”

She nodded. “I will.”

Kaylin had no time to hit the market, and anyway, at this time of day everything would be bruised, stale or broken. There were, thankfully, no messages waiting her in the mirror when she finally made it home, other than the usual, which was offered by her reflection. She was so damn tired, she didn’t even notice that Severn was sitting in her chair, having helpfully cleared it of dirty laundry, until she saw his reflection, as well. “I did give you keys?”

“More or less.”

“I didn’t ask for them back?”

He raised a dark brow and then chuckled. “What does tomorrow look like?”

She stretched, trying to ease the knots of tension out of the back of her neck, where they were threatening to give her a headache that would last for weeks. “Tomorrow morning I have to go to the High Halls.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t even ask.

“After which, I return, with Tiamaris, to Barren.” Watching his expression in the mirror, she paused. “What happened?”

“I am to accompany you when you return to Barren,” he replied.

“But—”

“I have been seconded, for the duration of my investigation, by the Wolves.”

CHAPTER 13

To no one’s surprise, Severn showed up in the morning, where morning was defined by a sky night hadn’t quite finished with, and no one, of course, was Kaylin. On the other hand, he brought breakfast, and he was vastly less cranky than Kaylin herself as she crawled out of bed. The aftereffects of the fight in Capstone made themselves known as she swung her legs off the mattress.