The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (35 page)

“But I don’t mind making their lives a little easier.”

“Why?”

Elianne didn’t want to have this conversation. Morse did. “What harm do they do? What do they have? A bucket. A shirt that they can barely afford to replace. A bunch of stones and a stick.”

“And you had so much more?”

Elianne frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing. Look at me. I don’t give a shit.”

“I’m not asking
you
to give a shit.” She saw the expression twist Morse’s mouth, and took a breath. “If they were rich, if they
had
everything, it wouldn’t
be
my problem.”

“It’s not your damn problem now. You’re
making
it your problem.”

People were now beginning to clear the streets to the side and ahead of where Elianne and Morse had stopped. “Does it matter?” Elianne said, struggling to keep her voice even; Morse’s hands were now forming loose fists. From loose to tight was only a matter of seconds. “I’m
doing
my job. I’m getting
good
at it.”

“You put two people who were
also
doing their jobs out of commission for a couple of weeks.”

“They weren’t doing their jobs then.”

“They can’t do their fucking jobs
now
.” Morse slapped Elianne. Or would have; Elianne dodged. Morse wasn’t serious enough to try again. “You don’t think he’ll hear about this?”

“They’re going to crawl back to Barren and tell him they were taken out by
me
?”

Morse opened her mouth and snapped it shut; Elianne heard her teeth. “Your point,” she finally managed. “But you’ve got to stop this.” She started to walk, and Elianne began to follow, trying to gauge what a safe distance was. She usually knew what would throw Morse into a mood; she hadn’t seen this one coming.

“You care about this shit, it’ll kill you. One way or the other, it’ll kill you. You can’t be careful, you care too much. You can’t do your job in the best way, or the safest—for you. You’ll take too many risks.”

“I didn’t.”

“Not yet. But what happens when you piss off enough people—”

“Stupid people—”

“They won’t all
be
stupid. They’ll be self-serving, cruel, malicious—yeah, all of that—but you can’t count on stupid just because they do things you don’t fucking like!” She drew air across her teeth, and Elianne moved to the side. “And you’ll piss them off. They’ll know. They’ll know enough about you to know where your own weaknesses are. You don’t think they’ll use them?

“You don’t think they’ll use them so they can take you down? They might not kill you. Not yet. Not if they think Barren’ll be pissed. But they’ll hurt you, and you’re letting them know
how.
” Her face was red enough that the white scars stood out, like broken, brittle strands of old webbing.

Elianne stopped talking. Her own anger turned sideways and slipped away, leaving her stranded with Morse’s and nothing to stand behind. She had never seen Morse this angry. She never wanted to see Morse this angry again. She tried to speak, swallowed the words, and trailed after her, like quivering shadow.

Because she knew—even then, she knew—that she could not make it, not yet, without Morse. If Morse turned her out, she was as good as dead. Or possibly, thinking about the houses closest to the river, worse off.

“I should
never
have taken you on. I should have known better.” Morse, by herself, had now cleared the streets the way a small squad of Barren’s men on a bender might have. When she wheeled and turned on Elianne, Elianne leapt back. “You need to decide what it is that you want. You want to learn how to kill a man? I’m your woman. You want to coddle fucking urchins? Run across the goddamn bridge and crawl up the steps of some fucking church!”

Kaylin’s foot touched bridge.

She couldn’t see it. She could see the gray and shimmering light of this particular portal, and while she didn’t much care for it, she didn’t much care for
any
magic. Gray was better than pitch-black, and at least it wasn’t winter-cold. It was also thin, like a veil or a curtain, rather than a big, heat-sucking void. She wondered, briefly, if Nightshade could change the entrance to his damn Castle so it didn’t chew her up and spit her out so badly anytime she visited.

Then again, she hadn’t actually gotten to the other side of this one yet.

Severn’s hand tightened around hers, and she took another step forward. More bridge. And it
was
a bridge; she was certain of it. It was the bridge across the Ablayne. She still couldn’t see it, and she walked slowly because of that, testing the planking beneath her feet to make certain it would support her weight.

What had felt thin and veil-like continued to hamper her vision. She reached out once, with her free hand, and touched rail. If she listened, and she did, she could hear the movement of the river beneath her feet.

“Kaylin—”

She turned. She couldn’t see Severn; if it weren’t for his hand on hers, she wouldn’t have known he was there. That, and the sound of his voice. But she
could
see, stretching out from the bridge, the backward streets of Barren. It was
her
Barren. It was not the Barren into which they’d walked a scant hour or two ago.

The streets were empty; the sun was low across the horizon. Ferals, if they ran, would be all but gone. All-but not being safe enough for most of the people who cowered behind doors or closed shutters, just as Kaylin had done for most of her life.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “I get it.”

“Get what?” Severn replied, his voice rising slightly in concern.

“What do you see?” she asked, shunting the question aside.

“You.”

“Anything else?”

“Mist. Grayer and denser than the usual riverside variety.”

“What are you walking on?”

After a long pause, he said, “We’re endeavoring not to answer that.”

She chuckled. “I’m walking,” she told him curtly, “on the bridge over the Ablayne.”

“Barren’s bridge.”

“The same.”

“Which way are you headed?”

“Out. To the City. I think. I can’t actually see what’s ahead of me. I can only see what’s behind.” She paused, and then grimaced. “Which technically doesn’t include any of the three of you.” She turned and saw gray; it was as if the portal—or what had moved within its stone frame—was constantly moving just out of range. But as it did, it revealed bridge, that old and bitter symbol of hope and failure. “Halfway there,” she told them softly. “I’m going to keep moving.”

Severn squeezed her hand twice.
Yes.

She continued walking—more quickly this time—until the bridge sloped toward the far bank, and the streets of the City itself. Only when her foot hit stone did the mist begin to clear.

CHAPTER 19

But the mist cleared across a cityscape that was entirely unlike the Elantra Kaylin knew. She turned to look back at the bridge. It was gone. So was the river, and the familiar bend of run-down buildings that housed the affluent on the wrong side of the Ablayne. Severn, on the other hand, had now appeared, his hand still clutching hers. So, too, had Tiamaris and the other Lord Nightshade. They were, to a man, as white as alabaster.

She frowned, studying their faces for a moment. Severn’s was set in familiar, neutral lines. They offered no comfort, but asked for none. He didn’t speak, and she knew, by the set of his lips, that he wouldn’t unless she pushed it. She didn’t. Tiamaris’s eyes were almost red, and she had never seen his skin so pale. One of his hands still held Severn’s, the other, Nightshade’s, but he didn’t seem—at this moment—aware of either anchor. He was staring past Kaylin’s shoulder, his lips thinned, the inner membranes of his eyes raised high.

Nightshade’s eyes were a blue so deep it was almost midnight. Tendrils of perfect, Barrani hair framed his face as if breeze moved them, although the air was stale and still. He, like Tiamaris, looked past her. Only Severn met her gaze, but only Severn seemed to be watching Kaylin.

Clearly, she didn’t see whatever it was they saw. She would have asked Severn to let go of her hand, but she wasn’t certain he would do it. Instead of asking, she turned back toward what should have been the City that was joined by a slender bridge to the Barren of her youth.

But that Barren? It was gone, as well. She had no idea where she was. She would have asked Nightshade what his first encounter with his Castle had been like, but this Nightshade had no answers for her, and she didn’t feel up to his questions.

Her hands were trembling. She would have forced them to her sides to hide that fact—but one of them was in Severn’s. He didn’t speak. She was grateful for the silence.

She looked at the remains of the entirely unfamiliar City to which the bridge had brought her. There were—or had once been—streets, but they were gone. So were the buildings that lined what had once been road, although some walls were still standing at various crumbled heights. Here and there, some hint that those walls had once owned roofs existed. There had been gates of some sort, fences of some sort, but even those were gone; poles or posts remained, as if they were markers.

As if, she thought, the whole of the City she could see was one large and untended grave. She began to walk toward the broken streets, beneath the gray and murky sky, and felt Severn’s hand tighten. It made her feel as if she were one of Marrin’s orphans.

“We might as well take a look around,” she told him, her fingers beginning the painful tingle that happened when they were basically being crushed. “Severn, what do you see?”

“What do you see?” he countered. He
was
tense.

“A whole lot of broken,” she replied. “Broken streets, buildings, bits of leaning fence posts. I think—I can’t tell—but I think I see statue bases in the distance. No statues. Some of the rubble on the ground is probably wall.”

“The sky?” he asked, in the same tight voice.

She frowned. “It’s gray.”

“Cloudy?”

“No, just gray.”

“Time of day?”

“I can’t tell from the shadows; there aren’t enough. I’d say it’s afternoon. It’s not cold enough to be morning at this time of year.”

“What time of year?”

Now, she frowned. “Spring? Fall? I…don’t know. It’s just one of those gray days. No rain. No sun.” She hesitated and then said, “What does the sky look like, to you?”

“Black.”

“Black?”

He pressed her hand twice, and she nodded. “Stars?”

“None.”

“Moons?”

“None.”

“Severn, when you say black—”

“He means shadow,” Tiamaris replied. “We see shadow, Kaylin.”

“And not just darkness.”

“Unless ‘just darkness’ roils with the hint of unpleasant color, no. Do you sense magic?”

“You mean, more magic?”

He grimaced. “That was perhaps not the most intelligent of my questions. But, yes.”

She shook her head. “Honestly, Tiamaris. I see a broken cityscape. It is definitely not Elantra. It might—possibly—be the City that Lord Nightshade knows.”

“It is no City I know,” the Barrani Lord replied. “Unless much has changed since we entered the Tower. It is no City that is safe to explore.”

Severn said, “It’s unlikely to be a City at all.”

“Ahead of you,” Kaylin replied, frowning. “Tiamaris, when you entered the Castle in—in the other fief, what did you see?”

“The first time? I will not speak of it.”

So. She squared her shoulders. “You didn’t
try
to take the Castle.”

“No.”

“But you were tested by the damn thing anyway.”

He said nothing. A lot of it. “It would be nice if tests like these varied at all.”

“Meaning?” Severn asked.

“A little less darkness and gloom, a lot less accusation.” She grimaced. “Way less Barren.” She began to walk toward the distant, broken streets, and this time, her companions followed.

After the silence had gone on for long enough, Severn said, “What do you think you’ll stumble across next?”

As the answer was rubble, and she’d hit it with her toe hard enough she almost hopped up and down, she answered in brief, curt Leontine. She felt, rather than saw, his smile. But when she had worked her way past the worst of the fallen stone, she said, “Probably more bodies.” It was a noncommittal answer, or it was meant to be. It would have been a
lot
easier to be able to use both of her hands; she couldn’t. Their only vision was filtered through her, and they were afraid they would lose it the minute the physical contact was gone.

There they were. Partly obscured by the rubble, the fallen walls, the shards of oddly sharp glass in this devastated landscape. She saw the outstretched arm first, blood trailing across it from wrist to elbow like wet webbing. Bending, she saw that the hand was missing a finger. She had no idea whose body it was; she would have had to remove stone for an hour to see if anything was left of the face. But she knew it was one of hers. One of her targets. One of her kills.

Like Sorco’s hand, she had probably removed something from it: a ring. Barren liked some proof that the work had been done. He also had some way of detecting whether or not the item was genuine; Morse had made that clear on Kaylin’s first outing. Whatever else she did—succeed or fail—attempting to lie to Barren and pocket whatever it was she’d taken would not end well.

She walked, slowly, the rhythm broken only by the turn in the street, the large piles of rock it was better to avoid than climb over. She saw a broken leg, another arm, a twisted hand. It was as if the streets had opened to swallow just enough of the bodies that they could be held in place, by cases and pedestals made of debris, for her inspection.

How many? she thought, as she walked. How many
more
could there be? The past answered. It told her she would know if she cared to take a good, hard look.

“What did he do?”

Morse shrugged. “Does it matter?” She glanced at Elianne, and then swore. “You gotta stop asking.”