The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (47 page)

“This,” she said, looking at the complicated pattern of lines, curves, and dots, “is a wall?”

“I hope,” he replied, “for the sake of this City that it is either a key or a door, but yes, you grasp the general idea.”

When the breeze began to move through the opening in the wall, Kaylin barely noticed; she was, for the moment, as tired as she might have been had she spent the entire evening with the midwives. But the breeze became wind, and when she turned to look into the open streets, she found that she could no longer see them. They’d disappeared, and she hadn’t noticed. In their place? A window, of sorts. The glass—if it was glass—was murky, but it looked solid enough that wind shouldn’t have passed right through it.

She dug her fingernails into her palms, because pain sometimes pushed her into a state of wakefulness.

“No,” Severn said quietly. “It’s not a natural wind. You’re all right?”

“I’m fine.” But she grimaced. “I feel like I pissed off the general drillmaster and I’ve just finished running his forty damn laps.” Raising her hands, she tightened what passed for a knot of hair as the breeze blew tendrils into her eyes. It was, she discovered, always at her back—but that wasn’t the most striking thing about it.

The wind lifted the dust. Both the dust she had cleared and the dust she had obviously painstakingly left in place. But it didn’t scatter the writing; it didn’t obliterate the work she’d done. Instead, the dust and the space where it had been pushed out of the way rose as a single piece, as if both dust and space were now solid.

Tiamaris frowned like a classroom teacher, as if this sort of thing happened every day, and he was intent on
marking
it. When the wind had stilled again, the entire mandala was facing them and slowly—very slowly—rotating. He watched it intently, his frown deepening.

“There is,” he said, as he moved, taking small and precise steps, “a distinct aesthetic to the writing. Have you noticed it?”

“No. I don’t exactly spend long hours staring at the backs of my legs or the insides of my arms.” To make a point, she held up her sleeve-covered arms.

“Ah. Well.” He shrugged. “If you look at the words you scribed—in an admittedly unstable medium—you can see where the lines are slightly off, the spacing is off, the placement is crooked. It’s much the work of a beginner.”

She turned to look at Severn, who saw the expression on her face, and offered a very fief like shrug in response.

“But here—can you see this, Private?”

Any response that came to mind would have been considered career-limiting. Biting her tongue, she watched as he carefully lifted a hand and began to touch the dust. Some of it clung to his fingers; if the rotating structure before them looked solid, it wasn’t: it was dust and the space that wasn’t dust.

He frowned, and began to massage the dust, moving as the runic pattern rotated. If it had taken Kaylin a long time to write the initial words, it took Tiamaris just as long to fiddle with them. Longer, really, and to Kaylin’s eye, he was making no damn difference. But to his own, he was, and given that she’d thought she was writing elementary letters, she left him to it.

When he finished, he stepped back. He was paler, and he was sweating. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him sweat before.

“It’s done,” he said, his voice a hushed whisper.

“Tiamaris?”

He glanced at her, as if surprised that she were standing beside him.

“Lord Tiamaris,” Severn began. Kaylin never heard what he’d intended to say, because light flared in the darkness of the Tower’s confines, and it was, in shape and size, the entirety of the pattern that she had written and Tiamaris had slowly nudged into shape. Dust became ethereal gold, and the lines, the dots, and the squiggles that were so distinctive, hardened in place, as if they had always been seeking a form.

She still couldn’t read it; neither could Tiamaris. But they both felt its voice as if it were song or story, and they were held in place by it.

Severn Handred was not. He touched them both, left hand on Kaylin’s shoulder, right on Tiamaris’s, although neither Kaylin or the Dragon liked to be touched much, and he shook them gently. “Lord Tiamaris,” he said, in a tone of voice he might have used on one of Marrin’s foundlings, “I believe that Kaylin made the door and you have unlocked it. We have little time, if Lord Nightshade is to be believed.”

They both turned to look at him; Kaylin actually shook herself back to reality first. She watched Tiamaris with real concern as he slowly did the same. He was not particularly pleased by said concern, and his expression chilled into the glacial.

He did, however, nod to Severn. “Indeed,” he replied. “Private?”

She grimaced, and then realized that all of her hair was not, in fact, standing on end; her skin wasn’t so tingly it felt raw. “It’s—I don’t think it’s magic.”

One dark brow rose. “You think it natural, then?” And she’d thought Dragons weren’t as capable of sarcasm as the Barrani.

“No…but it doesn’t feel like magic to me. Or to the marks—” she bit back the rest of the words. “Never mind.” Taking a deep breath and ignoring, with effort, every word of warning Nightshade had left her with, she stepped into the runes.

They were a portal, but it was a portal unlike any she’d experienced, which was just as well; she was likely to get only one meal today, and she didn’t much feel like losing what was left of it. If anything was; it felt as if she hadn’t eaten for days. Where the usual trip through a portal involved darkness and dizziness followed by a painful and disorienting ejection, this time there was light, and it was gentle, as if emitted in its entirety by golden dust.

Where usually she lost all sense of up and down, in this transition she could feel the ground beneath her feet, and when she looked to either side, she could see both Severn and Tiamaris. Her voice—because she was Kaylin, she had to try to speak—was soft, the sound diffuse. But it was clear.

“Severn?”

He nodded. “I can hear you.”

“Is this different for you from a normal portal?”

He nodded again. “I don’t think it
is
a portal.” He turned to look back, and so did Kaylin.

“There’s no door,” she pointed out.

“No. But there’s a path. Portals don’t generally offer those.”

“It is not part of the general mechanics of a portal,” Tiamaris added. “But the Towers bend the mechanics of magic as we currently understand them.”

Or as Dragons did, at any rate. Kaylin paused and knelt. The floor felt strange; it had give. She thought it might be a very thick carpet, but when her hand touched smooth, cool stone, she changed her mind. “Where are we?”

Tiamaris was silent for an uncharacteristically long time. “I am not entirely certain,” he said at last, which was hardly worth breaking silence for.

“It feels…like…flesh. Flesh with stone skin.”

He nodded. “I noticed. Take the path, Kaylin. Let us follow where it leads.”

It led nowhere, as far as Kaylin could tell. The comfort that she’d first taken in the soft landing—as it were—gave way, step by step, to an uneasy sense that she would never again get her bearings. The floor continued to give slightly with every step she took, but she could feel no walls when she stretched her hands out to the sides, and without walls, there were no doors.

No, that wasn’t true. The words she’d written had become a door. But it was a one-way door that led to a stretch of faintly illuminated nothing. She stopped walking and after a few seconds, so did her companions. “You didn’t encounter anything like this when you went to Nightshade’s Castle, did you?”

“Nothing as harmless, no. And at the time, it was not Castle Nightshade.”

She wanted to ask whose damn Castle it had been, but didn’t; this wasn’t the time or place for it. “So this isn’t like the other traps or resistances you encountered?”

“No. I would not say that this
is
a trap, if my opinion is to count for much.”

“What would you say it is?”

“The Tower has very little power, Kaylin. I would guess that whatever it does have, it husbands it. It gives only what is necessary.”

“What would this have been, if it had more power to give?”

“This may come as a surprise to you,” he replied drily, “But I am not an Ancient. Nor am I, human philosophy aside, a living construct.”

“Which means you don’t know.”

“Which means, as you so succinctly put it, I do not know.”

She blew hair out of her eyes because it was better than the alternative, which was a loud, long rant in Leontine. Leontine did not, at the moment, seem like the right language for this Tower. Then she sat down in the middle of what was a very narrow road, and wrapped her arms around her folded legs, resting her chin on her knees. “I can’t believe she did all this—”

“It is not a she—”

“Just to lose us here. She might have only had the power to bring us this far, but this has to lead somewhere.”

“You feel we are approaching it incorrectly.”

“Yes. It’s my life,” she added with a grimace, “so I can’t possibly get it right the first time.”

What was a door, in this place? She had seen the basement of part of Castle Nightshade, and she had seen the writing on the floors and ceilings of the one room in which she’d first heard the voice of the Old Ones. “Tiamaris, does every Castle have writing in it?”

“The Old Tongue?”

“Yes. The marks.”

“It is our suspicion that every Tower possesses them, yes. I did not encounter them in Nightshade.”

“I did. And if Illien owned this Tower, he probably found them here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because when I was in Nightshade, I heard the Old Ones. They spoke to me.”

“Did they speak to Lord Nightshade?”

She frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he was expecting what happened. But that’s when he—” She hesitated, and then said, “When he let me read his name. I needed to hold on to that. I’m not sure what would have happened, otherwise. I don’t think they were ever meant to speak with mortals.” She thought, for a brief moment, of the Leontines, their creation and their corruption.

“Why do you feel that Illien found such a room?”

“Because it was only after he had lived in the Tower for a while that he began to attempt to shed his name. I think he could understand some of what was written. He was supposed to be like that.”

“Ah. You think what was written was inimical?”

“No. I think it was inimical to him.” She closed her eyes and then, opening them, began to unbutton her sleeves. Severn helped; his fingers brushed her wrists in the low light. He rolled them neatly up until they gathered at the bend in her elbow. “I thought so,” she said softly.

They were glowing. “Severn—look at the back of my neck, will you?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he added, from behind her back. “They’re glowing. They’re not blue, and the light isn’t harsh.”

“It’s like the light in this tunnel, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“Grab my shoulders,” she told them both.

Severn did as she asked; Tiamaris hesitated. “What are you attempting?”

“I’m not sure.”

He raised one brow.

“They’re glowing,” she told him. “That’s always meant something before.”

“You’ve used the power before.”

“Mostly unintentionally.”

“That brings me little comfort, Kaylin. What do you intend now?”

“To use it intentionally,” she replied.

She closed her eyes. In the dim light, everything went dark; she could hear breathing—hers, Severn’s. Tiamaris, if he was breathing at all, was utterly silent about it. She listened for a moment longer, and then she let it go, concentrating instead on seeing. With her eyes closed.

The marks on her arms were glowing. The marks on her legs were glowing, as well; she could even detect the faint luminescence of the marks that traced part of her spine from her back to the base of her skull. They didn’t speak to her, of course; she couldn’t read them. But she could look at them. With her eyes closed.

They looked very much like the runes she had accidentally carved.

There are no accidents.

Who had said that? She thought it might be Marcus, but she couldn’t clearly remember. The runes she had carved in the medium of dust were far fewer than these; she tried to count them and lost track, in part because they began to move, growing brighter as they approached the edge of her field of vision, dimmer as she turned to look. And she did turn, or felt that she did; in the end, it didn’t matter, because in the end, they surrounded her, glowing in that same pale way as the light in these strange halls did.

She wondered if Tiamaris would see any harmony in the way these runes lined up, or if he would attempt to nudge them into a slightly better formation; it didn’t matter. He couldn’t see them. And they felt right to her. But she turned toward two—if it was only two—that glowed more brightly than the others, and reaching out, she touched them.

They were hot, and while the heat didn’t burn her figurative hands, it was on the wrong edge of painful. She held on anyway, using the grip to lever herself off the ground. Without opening her eyes, she said, “Follow me.”

They followed. She felt Severn’s presence by her side; she couldn’t feel Tiamaris, but she heard the rumble of Dragon breath. It was loud and deep, disturbing in such a small space. She opened her eyes.

The darkness was gone, as was the endless narrow path; they had walked from it into a room the size—and almost the shape—of a cavern. It was not, however, a natural cavern, because everywhere the eye could see, runes had been carved into the surface of stone, some of it curving its way to a height several stories above their heads. The floor was carved with runes, as well, but unlike the strokes and deep grooves that reached upward, these lay in a series of concentric circles, which very much implied that the base shape of the room was circular.

Kaylin took one step and stumbled; Severn caught her arm.

“I’m fine,” she told him, righting herself.

He said a very loud nothing. “What did you do?”