The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (33 page)

But standing still was worse. She thought, briefly, and began to run again, moving at a diagonal—and away—from the howls.

The only good thing about the run? Halfway through it, she developed a very strong dislike for Sorco.

In the end, she wound up at a familiar street, with a familiar, fallen set of gates, a familiar opening through which she could slide, if she turned sideways. It was still cold, but she was better dressed for it now; Morse had money, and if she bitched about spending it, she spent it anyway. Elianne could hear the ferals at her back. She couldn’t tell if they were getting closer because she didn’t pause to listen; she just kept going until she passed near the ruins of an old tower.

There, she stopped, found the opening in the fence, and slid into the stiff, dry grass. She didn’t lie flat, didn’t curl up on her side; she crouched, her knees coming up to her chin as she curled both arms around her lower legs. She drew a long knife and held it, more for comfort than protection; this lasted about ten minutes, because even in the grass, she could feel the air’s bite, the touch of wind.

Here, though, she could close her eyes; she could listen.

They were closer. She waited five seconds, counting breaths, and then she heard the sound she most hated: they had caught living scent. She prayed it wasn’t hers.

The ferals were closer, now. They were howling like a storm. But a storm was just water and a light show; unless you were really, really unlucky, it couldn’t kill you. With the ferals, the opposite was true, and Kaylin had never been lucky. She waited silently, gathering and stilling all movement until she was barely breathing. Closer, yes. Closer.

The howl suddenly shifted and changed.

She didn’t see the ferals first, though. That was the worst of it. She saw
Morse.
Morse, sweating in the cold, her short brush of hair almost gleaming, her hands gripping knife hilts and pumping air as she tried to lengthen her stride. Morse was heading
to
this Tower, and the Tower’s fence.

If Elianne were unlucky, Morse would duck in here, and the ferals would follow. Two against the ferals was better than one—but honestly, in a space like this, not that much. Elianne
knew
this. Knew it. If you’d asked her, she could have written a test on the
smart thing to do
when ferals were hunting someone else. And unlike most of Morse’s tests, she’d’ve passed that one, first go.

But that would have involved thinking, and what she did next involved no thought at all. No memory. Nothing but instinct. She shot out of the grass like a startled animal, and she sprinted to the fallen gate, the slender passage that had led her, twice, to safety. She passed her knife from right to left hand—that much, she had the sense to do instinctively—and then she reached out, with hand and voice.

“Morse!”

Ferals ten yards behind, Morse running full out. But Morse was good at picking up little details, even in an all-out sprint to save her own neck—because some of those details might be relevant to the saving. She saw Elianne, saw the arm she extended, and she zigged toward her, only barely losing speed.

Elianne caught her wrist—Morse hadn’t dropped either knife, and wouldn’t—and yanked hard, praying that Morse would
fit.
Morse was larger, wider, more muscular—and being stuck in the fence for even a minute would be a gruesome death. But being heavier gave Morse momentum, and being desperate did the rest; she barreled through the opening and the fence creaked so damn loudly, Elianne thought half of it would fall over.

“What the hells were you doing out at this time of night?” Elianne shouted. She had to shout, just to be heard. The sound of her voice drove the ferals into a frenzy of teeth and snarling howls. It would have chilled her blood, had any of it still been running.

“Being a fucking idiot,” Morse shouted back.

She looked at the fence—at the precariously
leaning
fence—for a minute, and then sheathed one of her long knives. Bending, she started to root around in the grass. She came up, after a minute punctuated by snapping jaws and howling, with a rock the size of her palm.

Elianne stared at her.

Grinning like a madman, Morse headed closer to the fence; the ferals began to try to
leap
it as she cleared the thickest of the grass. She snarled back at them, and then she threw the rock. It smacked one of the ferals square in the middle of the face, and he howled in rage. Real rage. In the moonlight, his eyes looked red.

“Morse, what the hell are you
doing?
” Elianne screamed.

“Pissing them off. Here, grab a rock!” Morse shouted back, in obvious delight.

Elianne stared. Morse repeated this, ranging a little farther for heavy enough rocks as she did. On the fifth throw, she paused. “What the hell are you waiting for?” she shouted, grinning.

Elianne hesitated for another minute, and then she heard Morse laugh. It was an odd, high laugh, unlike any other laugh she’d ever heard from Morse, and she found herself hefting a rock that seemed to have leapt from the ground to her hand as if by magic. She had to get nearer to the fence to throw hers; she didn’t have Morse’s bulk or musculature.

Over the snapping and snarling and howling of enraged and frustrated ferals, Elianne watched Morse bend, lift a rock and throw it. Morse had to shout to be heard, but after a while, it didn’t sound like shouting; she was giddy but calm, and she was precise.

Elianne cleared the fence on her fourth attempt. It was hard to tell whether or not the rock did any damage when it hit—but it was also impossible
not
to hit something; the ferals didn’t seem to care enough to get out of the way of the rocks.

“What the hell,” Elianne said, grunting as she threw, “were you doing
outside
at night?”

“Taking a walk,” Morse answered, notably grunt-free as she also let a heavy stone fly.

“Taking a walk
where?
”

Morse cursed, and turned, pausing as she did. “You didn’t come home, idiot.”

Elianne closed her eyes. She wanted more, and she knew Morse would never give her more. So she grabbed stray words instead, making a sentence out of them. “I found him,” Elianne said, her voice dropping.

“Found who? Oh, Sorco?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s dead?”

Elianne grimaced, and bent and found another rock.

“So he’s not dead,” Morse said, bending to do the same. The rocks flew over the fence in unison; Morse was definitely the better throw.

“Barren’s going to be pissed, isn’t he?”

“Probably.”

“What’ll he do?”

For a moment, the gift of glee deserted Morse’s face. Elianne had no words to describe what was left in the gap before her expression closed into the familiar sneer. “Sorco’s not dead. I didn’t kill him. He didn’t say much about ferals. Let’s see if we can kill one.”

Elianne found her laughter. The fence was going to hold. They were going to make it. In the morning, they’d eat, and they’d plan. She’d find Sorco. She’d worry about his guards later.

Morse had come out—at
night
—for her.

Elianne would have bet against that ever happening. She would have bet that Morse, seeing the last of the sun, would have shrugged and gone to sleep. One less mouth to feed, if Elianne was gone. One less test to worry about passing. But she was here, now, and she was teaching Elianne how to throw rocks the size of her fist.

Elianne’s arms tired long before Morse’s did. But although it was cold, and the breeze was biting, she felt the echo of familiar warmth at the base of this deserted Tower, the ferals singing their raging, chaotic chorus. She couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want to sleep.

Here, they played like the children they weren’t.

In the morning? The ferals retreated, their howls dropping to whining as the sky steadily paled. Only after they’d gone—and Morse was certain they weren’t coming back—did they leave the overgrown grounds that had provided such unexpected safety—and such unexpected joy.

CHAPTER 18

“Kaylin?” Severn touched her shoulder and she jumped.

Sorco’s body—and it was Sorco—lay in front of her. The last time she’d been this close to it, she’d been checking to see if he was still alive.

You can botch things, you get too nervous. You can think you’re done, when you’re not. You need to think and be aware.

He’d been alive enough that his eyes, wide with shock, searched for some sign of her face, but not alive enough to understand what they saw when they hit it. He wasn’t alive now. But…he wasn’t dead by much. She’d seen enough corpses over the past several years to know.

He certainly wasn’t seven years dead.

“Kaylin?”

She looked up from her crouch, her hand still against his cold skin. “Sorco,” she said roughly. “He was one of Barren’s collectors.”

“Seven years ago?”

She shrugged. “Whatever that means, now.” She glanced up at the Tower, as if to make her point.

He nodded as she rose, wiping her hands on her thighs. Too much memory, here.

“How—or why—do you think they’re here?” he asked. Tiamaris and Nightshade had retreated from speech entirely.

Kaylin snorted. “How else?” was her despondent—and angry—reply. “Magic. As usual.” Her arms ached.

Sorco was dead. On the surface of things, she was fine with that. She’d been fine with it the minute she was certain it had happened, although the reasons then had been different. He would have killed her—or sold her—just to alleviate boredom. He’d probably killed countless others before she’d been sent to take him out. He wasn’t worth tears or nausea or guilt.

But then? She’d felt the stillness of that nausea as it grew with the realization that she had done this: she had killed a man. The blood on her hands had been—mostly—his. She had taken him down by surprise, Morse’s advice; he had never really seen her as much of a threat. Scrawny street urchin, too much fief in her.

She had cut off his ring finger. Because it had a ring on it, and Barren wanted the ring as proof. That was it. The body, she’d dragged all the way to the Ablayne. She’d meant to push it into the water. She hadn’t. She wasn’t sure what the corpse would do there. Bodies in wells made the water undrinkable. Maybe it worked the same way for rivers.

Maybe it didn’t; maybe it only poisoned them subtly.

She left the body by the shore. It wouldn’t be the first corpse to turn up there, and even had it been, Barren would only laugh; there, by the one symbol of freedom the fiefs had for anyone whose only experience of power was fear, she’d left proof of his strength. But Morse wasn’t pleased.

She had the apartment door open before Elianne had even cleared the stairs.

Morse took one look at her and stepped out of the way. Elianne swallowed, opening her mouth to tell Morse what had gone down—but Morse didn’t ask. Instead, she pointed toward the large room in which they both ate and strategized, and nodded to the table; it was more or less empty. So was the chair.

Elianne took the chair; Morse remained standing. She didn’t, however, remain still; she picked something up off the table, glanced at Elianne and shrugged. She handed Elianne a glass full of amber liquid.

“Drink.”

“What is it?”

“Just drink it, Eli.”

Elianne took the small glass in both hands, waiting. Waiting for questions. Waiting to make a report. Waiting for pride or joy or even anger. For
something
. Morse gave her silence, and this damn glass. At any other time she would have asked Morse where she’d picked it up—it was heavy, clear, entirely unscratched. Worth money.

Today, money belonged in another life.

She drank.

And choked. She managed not to drop the glass, but the same couldn’t be said of the contents, which spilled down the front of her shirt, mingling with dried blood. It had been too cold by the river to try to wash it out.

Her eyes watered. She was half afraid that she’d just let Morse poison her. But Morse wasn’t smug enough. She wasn’t even amused—and Morse usually found people’s discomfort amusing.

“Drink.”

This time, she sipped. Morse nodded. After a few minutes, she left and returned, carrying a tunic. Holding out her hand for the glass, she handed it to Elianne.

Wordless, Elianne took it and changed, abandoning her chair. Her face felt flushed and warm; her hands were shaking. She untied strings, loosened sleeves, stood for a moment in half-naked silence before she remembered what she’d been doing. Then she pulled the clean clothing over her head and her shoulders, letting it fall. Morse took the old clothing away.

Clothing had been a problem for Elianne for all of the life she could remember. Finding it. Finding anything that would fit. Keeping it for as long as she possibly could. Finding clothing for Steffi and Jade.

Her throat tightened; she gagged.

Morse was there, just behind her. But Morse didn’t touch her, and didn’t speak. Elianne expected a lecture. About the clothing. About
anything.
Morse surprised her. There were no lectures.

Just the gift of silence, because silence was cleanest, safest; you could hide in it without ever having to lie. And if there were no lies big enough to hide the truth, there was no need for truth.

Truth was just words.

Kaylin stepped away from Sorco’s body, retreating from the past as if it burned. It did, but she’d almost gotten used to the sensation. She half wondered why people were so damn keen on memory; hers never seemed to do her any good.

“The other two?” Severn asked.

She shook her head. “His guards, I think. I didn’t—I don’t know how they died.” It was true. She hadn’t killed them. Just Sorco. She stretched, drawing night air into her lungs. Then she turned to the Tower. “A conversation?” she said quietly.

“I believe you said it could go straight to hell.”

“It probably has,” she replied, with a twist of lips that might have been a grin on a different day. “Which is about where I am, at the moment. Come on. I want to see what the follow-up is.” She nodded in the direction of Sorco’s corpse.