The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (41 page)

“No.” He laughed at the sour expression that didn’t quite hide her growing excitement. “Climb up on the back of my neck. Avoid the pinions. They move.”

“What—what about the others?”

He snorted, and a plume of smoke wafted in the air in front of his nostrils. He ate it. “I will barely feel their weight, if they can hold on. Come—we are meant to reach the top.”

“Is it wise, Lord Tiamaris, to play into the Tower’s demands?”

“Never,” the Dragon Lord replied gravely. “But the Tower has not yet heard ours. Come, Nightshade. The air is alive with magic. Can you not feel it?”

“I feel it,” was the quiet reply. “But it feels wild, and the taint of shadow is strong in it.”

“It is strong,” Tiamaris replied, “in all of the living, be they immortal or no. Let us see what waits above.”

Lord Nightshade nodded, but he let Kaylin and Severn find a place on the Dragon’s back first.

“Kaylin,” Lord Nightshade said, as he joined them. His voice was quiet. It was almost inaudible. Had he been any other man, she would have missed the sound of her name. But she turned, craning her neck to the side to meet his gaze; his eyes were the clear blue of sky. It was not a color she recognized in Barrani eyes, and she had no ready translation for it.

“The Tower is not yet done.”

She would have snorted, but he was Barrani; she contented herself with a nod instead, as the flesh beneath her moved. Her hands tightened. Here, the scales were small enough they felt smooth as snake’s skin; they looked slippery, but that was sun. Tiamaris was no longer entirely bronze, but the red of the night in the fiefs was absent.

“When it is, there is a choice to be made.”

“How do you know?”

“It is the nature of testing, and this Tower appears to be testing you. You, and the Dragon Lord.”

“But—”

“He is at ease, here.”

He wasn’t, but she didn’t say as much.

“Your choice will define the Tower. Be wary. Let it
be
your choice.”

“And not the Tower’s?”

He nodded. “You have left blood here. Unwise, but perhaps necessary.” He spoke again, but this time she lost the words to the roar of Dragon and the breathless harmony of the wind his flight caused.

It didn’t matter. They rose. She could feel the shift of Dragon musculature beneath her legs, and the smooth, supple surface of scales beneath hands that gripped too tightly. She could see the world shrink into a sea of green, and regretted bitterly the lack of City streets and tall buildings, because she had always judged her height above the ground by their size.

Tiamaris roared and roared, his voice a rumble that shook them all, defying both wind and gravity. Kaylin had never liked the sound of horns; they made her think of cows trying—and failing—to be musical. But she thought that this was what horns wanted to be: this arresting, this momentarily all encompassing.

The cliffs rose forever. Tiamaris followed them, but only barely; he didn’t seem eager to land. And why would he? How often did he have the freedom of the skies? He spoke to the land from above, and his voice traveled, bouncing off the cliff face and into the darkness of the approaching Aerie.

But eventually, he turned toward it. It was not built in a way that would allow Dragons easy access; he might have been able to walk in, with his wings furled tightly across his shoulders. There was, however, a long path to the rounded and carved entrance—again, it was meant for Aerians, who were human in size and shape if you ignored their wings. But if Dragons were power and majesty, they were also graceful. He made the landing, and a spray of loose pebbles flew, wingless, in arcs behind them, toward the ground.

“Is this,” he asked, when he had resumed his human form, complete with the bronzed plate scales, “the Aerie that you’re familiar with?”

She nodded. “They built the cave mouth so that it looked like an arch. It’s not a bear cave.”

“You’ve seen a bear cave?”

“Figure of speech.”

He chuckled. His eyes were a glowing gold. “Shall we enter, then?”

The cave face that presented itself vanished the minute the last of the light did. Fire, appearing in brief gusts, and always aimed down or away from the group, provided illumination for Kaylin until the moment Tiamaris decided that he was not a walking, intermittent torch. Then there was light, and it was a mage’s light. She felt the sharp shock of Nightshade’s surprise and disapproval.

Hers was louder. “Tiamaris—”

The Dragon snorted. “The passage we are in continues for some way. If we are not to be here all week, some light is required for both you and the Corporal.” He lifted a hand and traced the cave wall; Kaylin half expected to see words follow in the wake of his touch. These walls, however, didn’t change. “Where does this go?”

“I don’t know. I only came here a couple of times, and I wasn’t given free run of the Aerie. They thought I’d take a wrong turn and dump myself off the ridge, which Cliff said would be severely career limiting. But…I don’t think any of the passages were this long. There should be branches into other caverns and nesting zones.”

As if it could hear her words, the cavern now blurred; speech blurred with it, as if time itself had suddenly unwound. The strangest thing about the distortion was Tiamaris’s light; its glow was a steady warmth that did not shift or change at all. When it was over, the tunnel was as she remembered it from her previous visits, more or less. Nightshade was staring at her so intently her cheek warmed. Unfortunately, it was the one that bore the mark he had not yet placed there in his own time. “Where,” he asked gravely, “should we now go?”

Tiamaris looked at Kaylin. “Private,” the bastard said, “the lead is yours.”

She chose, after passing two branches, to veer to the right. It was arbitrary; she honestly didn’t remember where anything led—but if she hadn’t entirely lost her bearings, right was central; left eventually led to the small windows and openings that were seldom used except in emergency—fires being one. War, although she wasn’t aware of any major wars fought by Aerians, being the other. In either case, she didn’t want to give the Tower any ideas.

The inner passages led to living quarters, such as they were; the widest part of the inner cavern would be several stories high, like a set of connected apartments around an inner courtyard—but missing one exterior wall. The Aerians might have valued privacy, but they didn’t actually
have
a lot of it.

But the nesting area was a smaller series of rooms with lower ceilings and sandy floors; it maintained heat. Why they needed heat, she wasn’t certain; she understood that this is what chickens and other birds wanted—but Aerian babies were born the normal way. More or less.

Tiamaris caught her shoulder just before the passage widened. “Something,” he said softly, “is not right here. Lord Nightshade?” Tiamaris, hand on the wall, turned to the Barrani Lord.

Lord Nightshade nodded. “I sense them,” he said softly.

“Sense what?” Kaylin asked.

“The shadows,” was his quiet reply. “You cannot sense them, Kaylin?”

“I—” She closed her eyes. But her skin had been tingling slightly since before Tiamaris had gone Dragon; nothing felt different to her. “No.” Eyes still closed, she reached out and touched solid rock. “I feel the Aerie.” She turned, as she so often did, to Severn, and opened her eyes. It was dark in the passage, but Tiamaris’s spell still brought shape to the gray.

“I see the Aerie.” His voice was soft; he didn’t trust what he saw.

Fair enough. In this place, trusting what you saw was probably death. She continued down the passage. Tiamaris stepped beside her as it widened, and they walked two abreast, following its gentle, upward slope. She frowned, and slowed.

“Private?”

“I don’t remember the passages sloping up like this.”

“That,” he replied gravely, “is unfortunate, because I do.”

“You’ve been in the Aerie? But how did you get—”

“Not the Aerian one.
Aerie
is, in fact, a more general word.” His smile, in the scant light, was all teeth, and they looked preternaturally sharp. “I was born in one.”

“This isn’t—”

He lifted his head and fire spread itself in a thin, orange veil across the nubbled height of the ceiling. Above their head, writing appeared in glowing, gold letters. They were Barrani words, but they weren’t sentences; they were single runes. Sun. Wings. Claws. It looked like a child’s vocabulary.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as the letters dimmed.

“They’re sensitive to heat,” Tiamaris said, also gazing up. “And were meant to encourage the very young to use their breath. Learning to do so, and exercising the ability, is onerous for the young, and the young are famously lazy.”

“But these halls are people sized.”

“Their breath is not the only ability they were encouraged to use,” he replied. “And many games were played in mazes such as these, and just beyond. Hiding, if you will. One of the old Dragons who was famously indulgent used to chase us. We’d lie in wait, thinking ourselves very clever while we planned ambush after ambush.

“You cannot imagine how cramped the smaller tunnels became,” he added, in a tone of voice she had never heard him use. “And during one of those occupations, a number of hatchlings became stuck. There was quite a ruckus before they pulled down a small part of the wall.”

“The hatchlings could pull down a
wall?
”

“Not an entire wall, no. But enough of one.” He lowered his gaze. “These halls remind me of those ones. I do not think it accidental.”

“But it’s the Southern Ridge.”

“Yes. And I think that no accident, either. Let me make a suggestion. When the halls are familiar to me, I will lead. Where they differ, we can confer.” He led. She followed.

The halls were an amalgamation of a Dragon’s memories and a human’s, and the human memory was sketchy, at best. Kaylin took mental note of the shifts and changes, puzzling her way to something that she hoped would resemble an explanation at the end of their walk.

When they reached the foot of the stairs, however, she stopped. There had been no stairs—that she could recall—in the Aerie. “Tiamaris?”

“I believe, if you study them—” and here, he brightened the magical light “—you will recognize them. The guardrails—and attendant guards—are absent, and the walls are entirely wrong, but the design of the steps, the width, and the height, you should know.”

She didn’t spend a lot of time studying—or measuring—staircases. She usually ran up—or down—them, in a blind rush to get somewhere else. Instead of telling him as much, she backed up, jostling Severn and Nightshade as she did. “Sec,” she told them, and she made a direct run at, and up, the stairs.

And yes, steps beneath her boots, she
did
recognize them. They were the Tower stairs in the Halls of Law. She had run up them, late, more times than she cared to remember; she had all but crawled down them after interminably long debriefings in which she felt about as appreciated as a cockroach, albeit in better shape. She took the turns the same way she always did; she didn’t stumble and she didn’t find that they opened up into any strange passages.

But she did stop before she reached the top, and she turned to glance back. Tiamaris looked like thunder would if it had a face.

“
What
do you think you’re
doing?
”

She mumbled an apology. “I wanted to see if they were the right stairs,” she said, by way of explanation. If he’d been her teacher, she’d have failed the course on the spot. “But you’re right—these are the stairs to the Hawklord’s Tower.”

“Which we do not currently inhabit. You have no idea what could have met you on the stairs on your run up.” He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. The stairs rumbled with the force of his words.

She mumbled another apology. He glared. But he joined her, and he allowed her to walk a step—not more—ahead of him. She climbed; everyone else followed. But they followed in silence, like natural shadow, until they reached the flat landing in front of the Hawklord’s doors. The doors were familiar; they were well cared for, but showed age as if age were majesty. And they sported the doorward that she had come to hate during her first week here.

No, not here.
Not
here.

She lifted a hand; it hovered above the ward that crossed the closed door.

“Kaylin—” Severn caught her wrist. “Look at the ward.”

She did. “It’s the doorward.”

“Not to my eyes. Lord Tiamaris?”

Tiamaris frowned. “Private,” he told Kaylin softly. “Let me open the door.” It wasn’t a request. On any other day Kaylin would have agreed with alacrity.

“You think you can safely touch this ward?”

“Ah. No, you misunderstand me.” He lifted his arm, drew it back, and drove it into the planks. It took him five attempts to break through the wood, the door was that solid. As he was pulling what remained off the hinges, Kaylin said, “Well, that works. I don’t suppose I could get you to try that when we get back home?”

He offered her the glimmer of a smile. “You could,” he said, with some satisfaction. “It’s not as if I depend on the salary.”

When the door frame was clear, except for stubborn, sharp splinters, Tiamaris shone a light into the room. It was, more or less, the room Kaylin remembered, at least at first glance.

The dome was there, its stone petals closed to the sky; windows let in the endless sun. The long, oval mirror that the Hawklord used to access records stood where it always stood, and as Kaylin entered the room, she caught a glimpse of her reflection, and froze.

The room in the reflection wasn’t the room she was standing in.

For one, it was darker; the light was less natural. Flickers of firelight made long and trembling shadows by glancing off standing structures—the mirror, the chair, the recessed desk, the shelves against the curve of the rounded walls. The room was empty.

She knew this because it had
been
empty when she had first seen it, and it had been night. She hadn’t dared to make the climb during the day; the Aerians patrolled the sky, and if they were careless because they expected no trouble, they weren’t exactly blind. She had watched them for days. She had watched the building for days, as well. She had even gone into it—albeit from the public entrances that led to Missing Persons.