The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (42 page)

The Halls were crowded enough that she could leave Missing Persons without much difficulty, but bypassing the guards standing in front of any other set of closed doors became instantly too difficult; she didn’t want them to take note of her. She had tied her hair in pigtails and divested herself of any obvious weapons, in order to appear younger. This was rewarded by “Are you lost?” or, worse, “Are you lost, dear?” rather than snarling or suspicion.

But if she were honest—and she clearly had trouble with that, which was ironic given how bad she was at lying—she could admit that she’d
wanted
the climb. She’d spent weeks practicing. She could scale the outside of the tallest building in the City, and she could
make
it. They’d wonder how she’d gotten in.

Getting down was always harder, but she’d worry about that later. Always later.

She could see that in the face of her reflection—her reflection, seven years younger, and hungrier in ways that she couldn’t clearly remember. Oh, she remembered the fact of it—but it had no teeth, now; it didn’t make her bleed.

She studied her younger self. Her eye was bruised; she’d forgotten that; her cheek was rubbed raw, probably by sliding down stone. Her hands were at her sides. But her own hands were empty; her reflection’s bore daggers; when she lifted a hand, her younger hand rose, as well, blades glinting briefly. The blades were flat and small.
You’ve come here,
she thought
, to kill the Hawklord
. But the Hawklord was not yet in the Tower. Her reflection turned to the door, and then shrugged and moved out of Kaylin’s field of view, to find a place to hide.

She hadn’t come here to challenge him, after all; she’d come here to kill him. How she achieved it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about bravery or honor, just death. Death and her own survival.

She let her hands fall, and turned to Tiamaris. Tiamaris stood to one side of the mirror, his back toward its reflective surface. He was staring at the Hawklord’s chair. As he did, Kaylin thought the chair shifted in place, the lines of it becoming taller, wider and more severely grandiose. What had been wood—albeit it finely oiled and expensive—glittered with something brighter and shinier. Gold? Gold leaf, at least.

This is not the past,
she reminded herself. Because in the past, the Hawklord didn’t occupy a throne. No one occupied this one, now. It sat like an invitation or a promise.

“Understood,” Nightshade said quietly. He glanced at Lord Tiamaris.

“The Tower is not subtle,” Tiamaris agreed, although he was tense. “But it is newly invoked, newly infused with whatever power we saw; subtlety, where it exists, will come.”

Lord Nightshade’s gaze trailed over Kaylin’s face. “I am curious,” he finally said. “What does the Tower offer to tempt you?”

“I’m mortal,” she said with a grimace. “Powerful things don’t bother to tempt us when they can squash us flat without effort. This is a perfect example. Tiamaris—Lord Tiamaris,” she added quickly, “gets a throne. I get a reflection of my younger self that’s a lot more real than I wanted to see.”

He surprised her. He laughed.

“You,” she said, with slight heat, “get amusement at our expense. So far, only the Corporal is out in the cold.”

“And he’s more than content to remain so,” Severn added.

Lord Nightshade lifted a hand and touched her cheek, covering his mark with the tips of cool fingers. “You do not fear me.” There was a trace of surprise in his voice.

He meant the touch to be discomfiting, and it was. She stood her ground in spite of that. “I did, once,” she told him, since she was in the Tower and the Tower seemed to demand as much honesty as she could offer. “I was terrified of the shadow of your Castle.”

“My…Castle?”

Dammit.

Severn shrugged; Tiamaris looked momentarily impassive.

“Castle Nightshade,” she said. “In the fief of Nightshade, where you rule.”

“And you lived in this fief of…Nightshade?”

“For almost all of my life until—until—” This, she would not share, not yet. Maybe not ever, although her Lord Nightshade knew. “Until I had to leave. When I left, I came here, to the fief we call Barren in my time. This Tower is Barren’s Tower.”

“And the fief?”

“The fiefs are what’s left of the interior of the City. Or the ring around the interior. They’re divided into six parts; the parts aren’t even, and I’ve no idea how the division was decided.”

“The Towers decide,” Tiamaris said. “Private, you speak too much.”

“I know. I do.” She turned to look at the mirror again. “I’m not sure why you get offered a throne and I get offered the truth.”

“We are offered,” Tiamaris told her, “some part of what we know, and of what we hide.”

“You hide thrones?”

He smacked the back of her head, but lightly enough that he might have been human. “Come away from the mirror,” he told her. “Come look at the throne instead.”

It was a welcome invitation. “Is there something wrong with it, other than the fact that it’s a throne?”

He didn’t answer, and it was the wrong kind of silence. She walked across the room, cutting in front of Tiamaris, until she stood three feet away from the throne itself. “I wouldn’t sit in it,” she said, and as she did, something beneath the surface of the bright and shining throne moved, curling slowly in on itself, like a snake pressed beneath glass, but not quite crushed.

“No,” he replied. “But it was not meant for you.” He came to stand by her side. He did not, however, approach the throne. “What will happen here, Kaylin?”

“You’re asking me that as if you expect me to have an answer. If the throne is for you, and the mirror for me, you have just as much chance as I do of predicting what comes next.”

The Dragon’s smile was thin and strange, because none of the rest of his face seemed to move. “The Tower is attempting to have two conversations at once, with predictable difficulties. But I believe that it is not yet aware that it is speaking to two distinct entities.”

“I’m not going to like how you know this, am I?”

“Probably not. You appear to still be sane.” He lifted an arm, and drew her gaze up to the closed aperture of the Hawklord’s Tower. She watched, squinting, as it began to open. It let in, not sunlight, as she would have expected from the light that poured in through the windows, but night—a night broken by stars, and the hint of silver that was moonlight. One moon; the other lay hidden by the curved petals of roof itself.

But she lost that, and the night sky, as she saw what descended through the opening. The first thing she saw were wings. She had never seen black wings on an Aerian before, and decided then that she’d been happier for the lack. Flight feathers almost gleamed in the light Tiamaris’s spell still shed, as if they were edged, and waiting to cut.

It was only the wings that were black; the figure that descended was robed in gray, and its hands were almost alabaster, they were so pale. One ring gleamed on the slender fingers of the right hand; it was green and gold, and large.

She recognized it instantly.

She’d worn it that morning to the High Halls. She stopped breathing as the figure descended; it landed directly in front of the throne itself. The robes were hooded, and as the figure touched down, it lifted graceful—impossibly graceful—hands to push the hood aside.

It needn’t have bothered; Kaylin knew whose face she would see.

CHAPTER 23

It was, of course, her own face. Her face, but paler, and completely unscarred and unbruised. Something as common as a pimple had never touched that skin.

Tiamaris caught Kaylin’s wrist as she moved. Since she’d had no intention of moving, it came as a surprise, and she pulled at her wrist, which was about as useful as pulling at rock and hoping the bits stuck between your fingers would come off in your hands. “Wait,” he said.

She nodded, but he didn’t release her wrist.

In the sudden night of the Tower, the figure nodded almost regally, and then, folding her wings, took her place upon the throne. Kaylin snorted, and the figure’s almost impassive reflection of Kaylin’s living face turned toward her.

“Aerians,” Kaylin said, “don’t sit in high-backed chairs. They can’t.”

“It is,” the not-Aerian replied, “a special chair.” Which was creepy; it spoke with Kaylin’s voice, but without any of Kaylin’s usual inflections; it sounded too damn smooth, too chilly. “Why are you here, Elianne?”

Tiamaris’s fingers tightened. They would, Kaylin was certain, leave bruises. Bruises were better than this. She started to say,
I’m not Elianne,
but she couldn’t. “I’m fine, Tiamaris,” she told the Dragon Lord. When he didn’t respond, she added, “Can I have my arm back?”

“I’ll break it,” he whispered, “if you do not act with caution.”

She nodded, and he let go. Rubbing her wrist, she thought, yes, definitely, bruises. But she looked at the figure on the throne as she did, aware that she had still not answered the question. Looking around a room that was, except for the throne and the wrong version of her, familiar, she said, “I’m here because you called me.”

A slight frown creased the pale, perfect mirror of Kaylin’s face. “I think you misunderstand the question. Perhaps I did not ask it correctly the first time.”

“No, I understood it the first—”

“Why are you here?”

This time, she spoke with the voice of Lord Grammayre, the Hawklord, and
his
voice shook the Tower.

Why are you here?

She had watched him from the top of the aperture. She had timed things perfectly, but if she hadn’t, she would never have come this far. All she had to do now was wait, drop, and kill. He wasn’t—according to Barren—a mage; he was just an Aerian.

Just an Aerian. Barren had made it seem as if Aerians were something less than men—but Barren had made her feel as if she were less than one, as well. In the dark of this almost-night, she could hear Barren’s voice, Barren’s words; she could feel hands that would leave bruises and the subtle scars that she would only understand years later.

Fief truth: survival was all. Well, she’d survived. She’d killed, continued to kill, for Barren. She didn’t question him, anymore. When he’d assigned her this kill, she’d crossed the bridge, scuttling across the Ablayne like a terrified spider. Only Morse had questioned her decision. Only Morse had fought it. But she’d fought with Elianne, not Barren, and Elianne was therefore here.

Some part of Elianne had expected every single person she met here to be happy, cheerful, grateful for the lives they had never had to lead. That part was to be disappointed; she could live with that. But she had also expected the people here to see, clearly, what and who she was, what she’d done on the other side of the river—as if she bore obvious marks across her brow.

They didn’t, of course. They barely even saw her, they were so wrapped up in their own lives. She had passed between them in the open streets, except when she failed to notice them in time—the streets here were more crowded than she was used to on an instinctive level. Some had apologized, some had cursed her—it was really no different.

But when she’d finally arrived at her destination—a small inn, owned by a man to whom she’d given a letter and received keys for a room and no questions—she had made her way to the Halls of Law. There, for the first time, she had seen the Aerians in flight. She had seen them leave the ground; she had seen them land. She had seen their wings fold and open as they gained height or lost it rapidly.

The Hawklord is just a man with wings. Nothing special.

But he had to be, to command these. He
had
to be, to be one of them.

That had been her first mistake. She made up for the lost time by studying the Aerians and their flight patterns as they skirted the height of the Tower, and she marked the changes of their guard.

Barren had given her the climbing gear she would use on this mission. He had made clear she was not to lose it until the Hawklord was dead, after which she was to lose it immediately and in a place it was unlikely to be found. Which meant, Elianne thought, across the Ablayne. Maybe she’d drop it in Nightshade.

The night was cool, and the sky was cloudy; everything had gone to dark gray. She tried to find her anger, as she waited. She tried to find the bitter envy and resentment she felt for the people on the right side of the bridge, because the man beneath the aperture roof protected them, watched over them, and offered justice for the wrongs done
them
. Who had ever done that for the fief of Nightshade or the fief of Barren?

She had seen examples of Nightshade’s justice, hanging in public cages. She had experienced examples of Barren’s in private.

Anger eluded her, even so. She felt tired. Resigned. Her sheaths were strapped to her thighs; she had enough rope to guide her fall, and she wore open-fingered gloves on her palms so the rope didn’t burn on the way down.

Ready,
she thought.
I’m ready.

She took a breath, and as the Hawklord finally moved, she
moved.

The height from the ceiling to the ground wasn’t insignificant; it didn’t have to be. The only people who used the roof as if it were a door had wings; height didn’t bother them. It didn’t bother Elianne, either. She dropped rope, and she dropped herself almost immediately after it, landing in a head over feet roll, knees bent into her chest so that she could unfold herself into a standing start.

He was already facing her when she stood, daggers out, her muscles gathered to leap. But he held no weapon, and he didn’t attempt to leap out of her way; his eyes were the color of sky that hasn’t quite faded into night.

“Why are you here?” he asked. His wings twitched slightly at his back, but he didn’t open them.

She wanted to say
Why do you think I’m here?
because she had daggers in either hand and she obviously hadn’t come up the stairs. But when she opened her mouth, the words that fell out were, “To kill you or die trying.”