The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (45 page)

“Tara,” she said slowly, “means many things, to me. I don’t know if you’ll understand all the words I use.”

She only
looked
like a child; she didn’t bridle at all.

“It means home. It means hope. Warmth. Safety. It means love that asks nothing.” It means, Kaylin thought, loss. She didn’t say that.

But the Tower said, “Loss?”

Kaylin winced. If she hadn’t had experience with Nightshade’s ability to read her thoughts through the questionable gift of his mark, all of her hair would be standing on end.

“Why?”

“I’m human. We don’t like—no, let me try that again. What we think, what we do our best
not
to say out loud, is private. If we wanted other people to hear it, we’d say it. Out loud. When you answer my thoughts like that, you’re ignoring my attempt to maintain any sense of privacy, and you’re exposing things to anyone else who’s listening.”

“You don’t want them to hear us?”

Kaylin froze. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly and carefully. “No, I’m fine with it now. Please don’t do anything they’d regret later. Which is beside the point. I was telling you—”

“What
Tara
means.”

“Yes. But loss? When you have something special, when you have something good, you sometimes don’t recognize how important it is until it’s gone. When it’s gone—when it’s too late—you realize what you had, and you miss it. That’s loss, pretty much. And it’s that loss that’s in the name, for me. In a better world, I would never have had to experience it.

“And if I dwell on the loss, you won’t understand
why
the loss was so bitter. So stop reading my mind and stop interrupting me.”

“May I read your mind if I don’t interrupt?”

“Since I can’t stop you anyway, yes.”

The child smiled, and Kaylin, still kneeling in front of her, spoke as softly as she could about her mother—or about what she remembered. She had been young enough when her mother died that she had few solid memories now, and one or two of those involved her mother’s infrequent temper. She hesitated, and then shared those, as well, wincing but grinning as she did.

“But I am not your mother.”

“No. That’s not what the name is supposed to mean. It’s what the name means to me, and I want you to take the good parts of it—or all of it—and make it something different, something of your own.”

“What is your name?”

“You already said I don’t have—” She stopped, and then held out her hand. The child took it in both of hers. Kaylin did not feel up to explaining the manners behind a polite handshake, because they really made no logical sense when you got right down to it. “My name is Kaylin.”

“Kaylin.”

“Yes. It’s a name I chose for myself. It was meant to be a lie,” she added. “But it was a lie I wanted to believe so badly, I’ve been busy ever since then trying to make it my truth.”

“Can you make truth of a lie?”

“I don’t know. When I was your age—I mean, the age you look—I would have said no. Now?” She shrugged. “Time will tell. I’m happier than I was, I think.” She hesitated. “You can make up a name, if you don’t like the one I gave you. I just wanted something to call you because I’m used to talking to children who have names—or at least names as I understand them.”

“These things, in this name, are they good?”

“To me? Yes. They’re some of the things I want, and I want them enough to try to build them, even on days when I’m certain I don’t deserve them.”

“It is important to be loved?”

If Kaylin could have handpicked an audience for this discussion it would never have included the Barrani Lord and the Dragon. It might not have included Severn, but that was less certain. But as she met the girl’s gaze, she was caught by it. In some ways, the Tower was—as Tiamaris had said—newly wakened. It was, in whatever ways a mystical creation of walking gods could be, in its infancy; it had confusion and uncertainty, even if it also read minds and cut to the heart of the worst of your fears and self-loathing just to expose them.

“It’s important. For some people it’s too important. For some, it’s never been important enough. It’s not magic—it doesn’t make you a god or anything. It doesn’t cure the world of evils, and it doesn’t keep you fed. But…it takes the edge off of everything—envy, resentment, insecurity. More, it makes it easier to give to, or to care for, other people in turn.

“I’m not good at explaining things,” she added. “I’ve never been good at it. But even if I don’t remember her well, I remember that she loved me. I don’t know—I guess I thought of her name because she
was
my home, and you’re a—a Tower. A building. But you could
be
someone’s home. Just not mine.

“And if you’re going to be a home for someone, a good home—not a home with ferals and evil multi-eyed bastards in the basement—would be better.”

“Tara.”

“It sounds sort of like Tower,” Kaylin offered. Tara’s hands tightened, briefly, around hers.

“You won’t stay with me,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“You can. You won’t.”

Children were always perceptive when you least wanted it. Kaylin nodded, her expression carefully neutral. She wasn’t talking to a child, but had to remind herself forcefully of this. “The City I care about—the City I was born into—hasn’t happened yet.” This would have confused a real child; Tara simply nodded. “I’m not sure how I got here, and I’m not sure how I’ll get back—but I have to go back. We’re fighting a war with the shadows that live in the heart of—of this place.”

“Fight them now,” Tara said. “Fight them. I’ll help you. It’s all I’ve been waiting for. You cannot imagine how long.” If something that was essentially made of stone could look sly—clumsily sly, like a foundling—she now did. “You can do more damage here. You can change things now so that your City won’t be facing the dangers they face without your intervention.”

Kaylin met, and held, her odd, colorless gaze. “Truthfully?” she said, after a long pause. “Can you tell me that and mean it?”

She thought the child would lie. But she
knew
it would be a lie; it was that obvious. The child’s gaze slid away from hers, as if it were oiled.

“No, then,” Kaylin said. “Tara, I’m sorry. I can’t stay here, and I think you already know that.”

The worst possible thing—for a value of worse that didn’t involve mutilation, torture, or the end of the world—happened, then. The child began to cry. Silent tears slowly filled her eyes and rolled, unhindered, down her pale cheeks, catching the odd light in the room and transforming it, for a moment, into isolation and loss.

Very few of her co-workers came to Kaylin with their crises; that was left to Caitlin, or each other. Their heartbreak often seemed so inexplicable to Kaylin, her response was always practical—and people were quick to point out that logic and emotion weren’t the same thing. Which, conversely, she already knew.

But other people always seemed to be so steady or stable compared to Kaylin, at least in her own eyes.

The Tower was not a person. Not a child. But it was not yet old—if it matured the way living creatures generally did—and it was clearly afraid of being left alone. Of being, Kaylin thought, deserted. It was a fear she understood because she had feared it, and it had happened anyway.

For a moment she wanted to stay, just to quell that pain. It tugged at her in a way threats never could.

But Severn chose that moment to touch her shoulder. She didn’t even shrink away; it steadied her. Nothing bad, she thought, would happen to this Tower. It, unlike so many of the other lives she had destroyed just by wandering through them so carelessly, would remain standing when all of the other buildings had fallen into the half ruins so common in the fiefs.

“But I will fail,” the Tower told her, the tears still wet on her cheeks. “You have told me that.”

“No, I—”

“If the shadows have broken the confinement, and they have only done so in my demesne, I have failed.”

“How can
you
fail? You’re a Tower. The man who took responsibility for you—and for the rule of these lands—failed. He failed utterly. But you?”

The Tower looked up at Kaylin, and then took a step back; her arms were extended because she had not let go of Kaylin’s hands. “It is time,” she said quietly, and she looked up toward the closed dome. On cue, it opened.

Above them, the sky was an angry shade of what might have been gray. Kaylin’s hands tightened—around nothing. The girl still stood in front of her, but she was shining and transparent now, like a ghost.

“Tiamaris, is that—”

“Yes,” he said, his voice soft. “She has summoned the storm.”

“Tara, did you—”

The Tower nodded. “It will take you,” she told Kaylin, “where I cannot go. But I will remember you, Kaylin. I will look for you in the streets of my City. You fight what I fight; you can’t help it. You were made, like me, to stand against it.” She turned her face away so that Kaylin could see the small, snub nose in profile. Her eyes were glittering like opals, but the rest of her face was still all child.

Kaylin reached out to touch her face. Not to grab it, not to force it to turn, but to touch it. Her fingers felt warmth without texture, and Tara turned to look at her, her eyes widening in surprise. “We’ll come for you,” Kaylin said. “We’ll come for you, if we can.”

Tara hesitated and then nodded. “If you can, and if I can allow it. But I will look for another, now. I will find someone who will make these lands strong.”

Kaylin started to speak and bit back the words. A lecture on the nature of strength had no place here, but it was work not to give it. Instead she swallowed the words and nodded. “Remember me, if you can. Remember what I said.”

“I will. I do not think I am allowed to forget anything.”

She lifted her arms, and the sky descended, eating away at the lines of the open roof as if it was corrosive.

Kaylin grabbed Severn’s hand and levered herself to her feet as the child vanished. “We’re done,” she told Tiamaris. He gazed at the falling sky and grimaced.

“An unfortunate human idiom.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“No. But meaning is often decided by your intended audience. Lord Nightshade?”

Magic, hidden until this moment, flared in the room. How much longer it would be a room wasn’t clear; darkness now dribbled like ink down the rounded curve of the Hawklord’s Tower walls, taking stone with it as it fell.

Kaylin.

It was Nightshade’s voice, but her name felt almost tentative as it touched her. She nodded; she rarely spoke to him this way if he was actually standing in the room.

The Tower will look for you.

“I know. It already has, once. I didn’t understand it, then.”

And I, little one. I will look for you, as well.

She said, with just a trace of bitterness, “I know. I don’t know if this changes anything. I don’t know if it’s always been in the past. I don’t understand what’s happened at all. But…I know.” Severn was holding her hand.

“Private.” Tiamaris’s voice was steady.

She swallowed. “I think—I think we’re meant to be in it.”

“It is not to my liking.”

“No. Maybe you could stay. You’d be a lot older by the time I saw you again.”

“Or perhaps simply dead. Most of my kind are.” His smile was vivid and brief. “I do not regret this,” he added. “I regret none of it.” He looked around the Tower as it dissolved into the primal storm.

“You’re not afraid of—”

“No. Not
this
storm. Come. Corporal, Private.” He glanced once over his shoulder at the Barrani Lord. “You are welcome to join us.”

“I think not. Whether or not you fear it, it is what it is—primal and wild. If it is bent to a will, the will behind it is not to be trusted.”

“The Barrani never trust.”

“Indeed. I will find my way out of the Tower,” he added. “It will not be the first time, and I will be unburdened, now, by the frailty of mortal companions.”

“It is not so troublesome a burden as we were taught,” Tiamaris replied, surprising Kaylin. “Or perhaps, in spite of that, it is not unwelcome in the end. You might find that the Empire, when it arrives, will surprise you.” He paused, and the rest of the words he might have said were lost as the shadows spoke.

They spoke in a language that Kaylin both recognized and failed to understand; the words pressed into her skin on all sides, as if a drunk scribe were attempting to leave his mark on living parchment. Light flared in the darkness, and if the darkness was described as shadow, it was all the wrong word. Shadows were things light cast. What existed in this darkness was not static, and it was not the by-product of standing beneath, or beside, light; it was like a living forest in a gale that moved first one way and then the other, with no recognizable pattern behind it.

But when they spoke—when it spoke—light answered; blue light, limned in a silver-gold nimbus. She knew what the source of that light was: the marks on her arms, her legs, the back of her neck. She could see them rise, like slender serpents, from her skin, swaying in the black wind as if to devour it—or be devoured by it.

Which, given they were part of
her
arm, was damn uncomfortable.

Three times the shadows spoke; three times the light that was her marks flared. There was no fourth time. Instead, the storm broke, and as it did, it retreated over broken stones and dead weeds, slowly unveiling the warped facades of buildings that had been old a hundred years ago. No faces peered out of the windows, but then again, the windows were boarded or shuttered; it was the fiefs, after all.

She looked immediately to her right and left, and found she was bracketed by Severn and Tiamaris. The sky above returned to something resembling normal.

“That,” Tiamaris said, “was enlightening. And costly, if I am not mistaken.”

“Costly?”

“Costly. Come, Private. We were ordered to investigate Illien’s Tower.”

She almost laughed. “Haven’t we already done that?”

“If you feel you have a report that would satisfy either the Arkon or the Emperor, yes.”