The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (36 page)

She stopped asking Morse.
Barren wants him dead. You kill him. End of story.
And it was the end of the story—but Elianne wanted the rest of the story, as well. She always had.

Morse even understood why. Her sneer was one of Elianne’s strongest visual memories of life in Barren.
You think it’s cleaner somehow, you killing for money, if they did something? You think it squares it away so you can sleep at night?

Elianne had laughed. It was loud, brittle laughter, and it fooled no one, but Morse let it go. Elianne didn’t. She asked. She found out. She had to be careful who she asked; Morse blackened her eye the one time she found out. Elianne understood the lesson Morse meant to teach her: be more careful. She’d learned.

The streets were growing colder as Kaylin walked them. She walked them too slowly, but she couldn’t force herself to move faster. Blaming Severn, Tiamaris, and Nightshade came and went; she knew damn well her speed and their awkward human chain weren’t connected. She had to look at the limbs, or the hands or the occasional bleeding face. She had to see them. She wasn’t sure why.

Or maybe she was. She’d only lived in Barren for six months. She’d had time to get good—to think she’d gotten good, she amended—but she hadn’t had time to lay down a carpet of corpses that could easily cover more than a few City blocks, when lined up like this. And there was a lot more space than a few City blocks stretching out toward the gray and dim horizon.

It was too much to hope they’d be empty.

The next body she discovered was not buried. Nor was it lying across the ground like so much refuse. It was on display, pinned to crossed beams, its chest cut by shards of sharp glass. The blood had stopped running, but it was still red, still damp.

“Kaylin?” Severn said.

She was silent. This man, she hadn’t killed. But she knew damn well how he’d died. Everyone in the fief knew it. Everyone in the fief probably had some idea of why. He’d interfered with the money that had crossed the bridge over the Ablayne. He had killed an outsider, and left his body close enough to the bridge that it could be seen.

The people who lived across the river were used to a soft, safe, easy life. Death scared the crap out of them. When they were scared, they took their money and the business that would have been illegal in their own homes, and they crossed a
different
bloody bridge. Or they stayed home.

What everyone else did not know was that Kaylin had been assigned
this
death. Her first failure.

Finding information about Paul Moroes, and finding Paul Moroes were heading in the same direction: nowhere. Barren had sent his enforcers into the streets, where they met with the same luck, although they terrified more people.

Lost, as she seldom was, in thought, she was surprised when someone shouted at her. Her hands dropped to her sides, but not to her weapons; the voice belonged to an older woman.

“What d’you think you’re doing, standing like that in the middle of the street?”

Elianne turned, and saw the speaker clearly. She was, as her voice suggested, older; she had lost a few teeth to those years, and her eyes were sunken into the wreath of lines that was her face.

“Don’t you know it’s dangerous for a girl your age, here?”

Elianne glanced at the river. At the people on the far banks. She started to shrug, and then stopped herself. “Is it?” she asked, instead. “You’re here.”

“It’s not dangerous for me,” the old woman replied, indicating the whole of her body in one sweeping and dismissive gesture. “But you’ll get yourself a few years of trouble. Go on back home, girl.”

Instead, Elianne knelt in the street, over the bloodied ground.

“Aye,” the woman said, noting the blood. “But
that
kind of trouble won’t hurt you.”

“Someone died here.”

“Someone deserved it. It ain’t enough that they’ve got laws and freedom, over on their side of the damn river; they got to come down here and cause trouble. Well,” the old woman said, her smile growing edges, “sometimes they find it. That one,” she added, pointing to the street and the absent corpse, “he hurt a girl from down here. He hurt her bad. But her brother was home, and he came out hunting.”

“When—when did the girl get hurt?”

The woman frowned. “A week ago, maybe less. It was—oh, no, it was five days ago.”

“Days?”

“Aye, happened at end of day, before sunset. Girl wouldn’t have been out, otherwise. But she shouldn’t have been alone.”

Elianne nodded slowly. She didn’t ask the girl’s name, and she didn’t ask the man’s; she had them both, and didn’t need them. “You’re heading down to the out-towner stands?”

“Aye. So was she.”

“Mind if I keep you company?”

“I’m not much guarantee of safety,” the old woman replied, handing Elianne a worn, empty basket.

She had the information she wanted. She knew the
why.
The information she needed—where—was still out there, in someone else’s possession, and clearly, Barren’s offer of both reward and possible punishment had failed to get those other people to pass it on. The old woman, Arna, wasn’t an idiot; Elianne didn’t try to ask her where Paul Moroes was. She, like anyone who’d lived in the fiefs, tended to sharpen her suspicion; there was a lot to sharpen it on, and Elianne wanted it blunter.

She spent two days dogging Arna’s shadow. She carried water from the well, because it was
just
warm enough that you could get water; she carried empty—and slightly fuller—baskets. She carried sheets and clothing to the very cold running water of the Ablayne, and she listened to Arna chatter, gossip, and rant. Only at the end of the second day did she ask about the incident—but she didn’t ask about Paul; she asked, instead, about his sister.

“She’s your age. Maybe a year younger. You’re twelve?”

“I’m thirteen,” Elianne said, her smile freezing in place for just a second.

Arna chuckled. “At my age? There’s not much damn difference, girl.” But the chuckle quieted. “She’s home. We’re not sure she’ll make it past winter.

“Come on. I’m to stop there today, and if you’re up to carrying a bit, you can keep me company.” She had a sharp look to her face as she said it, but it wasn’t a suspicious one; it said
Purpose,
with capital letters.

Here, now, Kaylin looked at the body of Paul Moroes. The other bodies weren’t immediately visible, but it didn’t matter; like all good ghosts, they haunted her anyway. “Severn,” she said quietly, clutching his hand.

He nodded.

“Unwind the weapon chain; attach it to me. I need to—I need both of my hands.” He didn’t ask her why. She knew he wouldn’t. Most days, she took the silence for granted. Today she felt it as the gift it was. She transferred her free hand to his shoulder, in order to hold on to him; they both didn’t like what might happen here if they were separated. He unwound the weapon chain with care.

When he had passed the blade at one end of the chain around her, the links followed it with a cold musicality as he let the chain play out. Seen this way, in the endless gray of a sullen sky, it looked slender, decorative. She touched the links; they were warm with his body heat.

When he had finished, she lifted her hand from his shoulder, and turned to the corpse of Paul Moroes. She didn’t ask him questions; she didn’t beg his forgiveness. She said nothing at all as she began to cut him down.

“Private,” Tiamaris said curtly, “is this entirely necessary?”

“Is what necessary, Tiamaris?”

“Whatever it is you are doing.”

She ignored the question. There was only one sensible answer to it, and she didn’t much care to give it. No one liked feeling like an idiot.

She should have told Arna that she didn’t want to go. That’s where it should have ended. She even knew it, at the time. But she told herself that if she could make a favorable impression upon Sana and her mother, she’d have her best shot at getting to Paul Moroes, and she kept her growing uneasiness to herself as she followed in Arna’s steps.

Sana’s grandmother was a woman named Kora. She looked as if she was about the same age as Arna, but she was a good deal less talkative. “Put the basket on the table, girl,” Arna told Elianne, as she unwound a ratty great scarf and dumped it on a chair. “We’re not staying long,” she added, speaking to Kora. “But I thought there was a good chance you didn’t head out today, and you need to eat.”

Kora’s lined face was pinched and shadowed. “Aye, we all need that. But the food won’t help my granddaughter,” she added bitterly. “We’ve tried. Gods know, we’ve tried.” She covered her face a moment with both hands, and then pushed the curls out of her face with her palms. “Sit,” she told Arna. “You can fill me in on any news I shouldn’t miss.”

“Let me say hello to your daughter.”

“She might be sleeping,” Kora replied. “I hate to wake her.”

“Sana?”

Kora shrugged. It was not a fief shrug; it was a gesture used in place of all the words that you couldn’t say. “Aye,” she said. “You can see Sana. Maybe—” She took a breath, and inhaled the rest of the words.

But she lead Arna to a very small hall, and from it, to a room. The door was slightly ajar. She opened it and entered. Elianne, whose hope that she’d been forgotten was dashed by a determined Arna, entered, as well.

Kora’s daughter was, indeed, asleep. Like her mother, her face was creased and shadowed, but sleep deprived it of the edges and the unutterable weariness of the older woman’s expression. She was curled over a chair just to one side of the bed that occupied the far wall—where far, in this case, was a matter of ten feet away, if that.

But the girl in the bed? Her face was not so much gray as black and yellow. One eye was swollen almost beyond recognition, and the lid remained closed. The other, bruised, was a slit through which Elianne could just barely see awareness. Sana was awake; her mouth was slightly open, and she was drooling.

“You take a good look,” Arna whispered, bringing her lips to Elianne’s ear so that Kora wouldn’t hear what she had to say. “If you’re not careful, that’ll be you.”

CHAPTER 20

If you’re not careful.
She closed Paul Moroes’s eyes. They had left his eyelids intact, so she could.

“Kaylin.” Nightshade’s voice. “There is a danger here. You do not perceive it.”

She raised her face, looked across at him. The wind moved his hair across the perfect blue of his eyes; he ignored it. “What danger?” she asked quietly, her voice remote.

“You expose too much weakness.”

Her laugh was brittle, harsh. “And you’re going to take advantage of it? Here?”

“No. Not here, and not I. You stand in a building that not even the wise understand, and in our limited experience, these buildings test all visitors. Not everyone who chooses to enter is allowed to leave, if they even survive the attempt. Their bodies are not found.

“I…am not entirely aware…of the significance of what you see, but I am aware of what you see in a way that Lord Tiamaris and your human compatriot are not. No building offers the same test, but this one is in keeping with the tests that are known.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t about the Tower. It’s about me.”

“That,” he replied, “is the nature of the Towers. You must move, Kaylin. You cannot afford to stand here.”

“No. No, you’re right.” She was still crouching. Her knees were beginning to feel it; the air here was damp and cool. The street was still a fractured display of broken things, especially in the square in which his body had been discovered. There were no shovels, here. No pickaxes, nothing with which to dig into the unyielding ground.

She had left him, once, untouched, just as she had found him today. As if the intervening years had never happened. Today she cut him down, arranging his body to give it whatever dignity the dead cared for. Maybe, she thought, bitter now and angry, the
next time,
she would actually bury him.

It was impossible to see Sana and not understand what had driven her brother to the act of revenge that would be his eventual suicide. It was
exactly
what drove Elianne herself. Arna had meant to scare Elianne. Elianne was beyond fear of that type. She’d seen worse. Worse, because Jade and Steffi had died.

But this injured stranger hurt her in ways that she didn’t understand, not at first. She could barely bring herself to speak to the girl. Barely. She kept her distance, though, as if the injuries were somehow contagious. Sana couldn’t actually speak; her voice came out in a thin squawk. She had trouble closing her mouth properly, which is why she was drooling.

“She was in worse shape,” Arna told Elianne on the way out, “when they found her. She’d dragged herself half down the street, her legs broken, and one arm. We weren’t certain she’d survive.” For the first time, Arna hesitated, and then said, in a lower voice, “and we’re not sure Paul will, either.” It was the first time she’d mentioned his name.

Elianne should have felt some triumph at the sound of it; she didn’t. She should have asked what Arna meant, should have pretended she thought Paul was also injured. She couldn’t. She was hollow, nauseated, and frightened. But she couldn’t go home until she’d gotten enough of a grip that she could look normal; Morse would notice, otherwise, and she’d ask more than Elianne could reasonably answer.

“Did you kill him?” Severn asked, as she began to pick her way over rubble again. The question was a shock; not even Nightshade’s voice had felt so foreign.

She had no answer to give him; no answer but movement, although movement separated them only as far as the chain stretched. She didn’t remove it, but didn’t offer him her hand. She’d had enough of people, now; people, Dragons, and Barrani.

Morse had known. Kaylin had never been one of nature’s natural liars, and although she’d developed some skill at it during her weeks in Barren, that skill was a thin veneer over years of the exact opposite experience. She’d expected Morse to be angry, and she was—but the anger was a strange anger; it involved no fists, no slaps, no kicks. Instead, it involved a towering wall of silence.