The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (50 page)

“Of course.”

“Is he going to try to stop you?”

“There is only one way that he can,” was her reply. An actual cut appeared across her forehead.

Yes, Kaylin thought, with growing anger.
And he’s trying to do it now. With our help.
She wanted to kill him.

“No, don’t,” Tara whispered. “It’s my fault.”

Kaylin started to answer, and the light changed sharply. She could no longer see the shimmering forms of Tiamaris and Severn moving around her like golden ghosts. Instead, she could see a room—which looked a lot like the one they had entered to greet Lord Illien—which was covered in runes.

The runes were carved and precise, but there was a flow to their lines and curves, the way the dots meshed or completed a pattern that reminded her of Tiamaris’s speech about harmony and placement. No chisel had carved these, she thought, and as she did, she turned. And there they were: larger than life—literally—working in a room that dwarfed Kaylin and the avatar of the Tower, but that suited their size. They were not human, did not look human; nor did they appear to be Barrani or Dragon. But they had two arms, two legs; one had wings with iridescent webbing that were folded across giant shoulders. She could not see the face of the creature that owned those wings.

But she couldn’t clearly see the faces of those that walked: there were three, and they paced the room with care, examining the walls, the floors—and the two small women who now bore witness. They were brilliant, on the edge of painful to look at, they were glowing so brightly.

Chosen,
one said. He was tall, and broad, his face was long, his cheeks high; of the three he looked most like the Barrani, although they fell short of the quiet confidence, the certainty of power, he radiated.

His companions turned as he spoke the single word, and Kaylin now saw that the owner of the wings had a long face, as well—but it was almost Draconian in form and shape.

This is the only life we are capable of sustaining.

Tara turned to her, her eyes now sunken and black, her skin sallow. “This did not happen,” she whispered.

You will touch this youngest of our seven children, and you will be there when she wakes. Understand what it is that we do; understand what it is that quickens her.

Kaylin nodded. Her mouth was too dry to manage speech, which, given her ability to offend her superiors, was probably a damn good thing. Her arms began to ache. Her legs. The back of her neck. It was a familiar pain.

The man—god?—then bent until one knee touched the surface of the floor. He traced the runes that were carved there with care, his brow furrowed slightly in concentration. Light began to fill those runes; the same blue light she had seen once in Castle Nightshade’s forest of a basement.

It spread slowly, and as it did, the other two began to do as he had done; they did not kneel, but instead moved to sections of the covered wall, touching them, concentrating on them. Gods, Kaylin thought, in labor.

The runes across the wall came to life slowly, the light filtering evenly across the whole of its curved surface. She watched the light spread, until no surface was not touched by it, and then she turned again to the three. She drew a sharp breath.

The light that had illuminated them was all but gone. They were glowing, faintly, but the harshest of their brilliance had been shed. It had, she realized slowly, become one with the runes. It was
their
power. No, she thought, as they came to stand together, it was their life.

Their life that gave the words life.

Their life that had given the Tower life.

You will touch this child,
the man who had first spoken said.
What you touch, you will change. Because you are alive. And she, too, is alive. Life cannot long be contained or confined, although we have tried. It is our nature to try.

It is your nature to grow. Grow in a way that does not destroy life, and we must be content.

“This didn’t happen,” Tara said again.

But decide, Chosen. You have influence in this story. Choose wisely. Choose quickly.

I didn’t ask for this, Kaylin thought.

No more did they,
he replied.
No more did we. Not all events of significance, be they birth or death, are in our hands.

Kaylin turned to Tara, who was staring at her creators. At, Kaylin supposed, her parents. “Tara,” she said quietly. “What did you show Illien? What did he see?”

“Not this,” Tara whispered. “This didn’t happen.”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re gods. Gods break all rules.”

Not all, Chosen,
the creature with a graceful variant of a Dragon’s face said. She couldn’t tell if it was smiling or not; that many exposed teeth never looked friendly.
But where we can, we try.

The first god to speak said one sharp word, and the air crackled. But the Dragon god did not seem ruffled. Kaylin turned her back on them because looking at them demanded too much of her attention, and she needed what she could manage to pull together.

“What did he see?” she asked again.

“He saw the words graved. He saw the words given life.”

“He saw the gods? The Old Ones?”

“He saw the creators, yes.” She staggered. “He’s coming, now,” she whispered. She was afraid—not resigned, not tormented by the certainty of her own failure, but fearful.

“He has other things to worry about.”

Tara shook her head. “Not while I live.”

I was afraid of that,
she thought.

You weren’t. You weren’t even thinking it,
Severn replied. It was like having another voice to give her unwanted second thoughts.

Kaylin started to respond and then stopped because the walls began to crumple, and the floor began to fracture. She had forgotten that she was holding Tara’s hands until they turned to ice in hers, the sudden cold almost blistering her skin. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered, eyes wide and haunted by bruises.

“I won’t. But you need to let go of my hands.”

She shook her head. “I let him go,” she said. “I let him go, and he found a way to leave me.”

“He hasn’t left you. He’s still here.”

But Tara shook her head again as the stone of the rounded room fell; there were no longer any struts to support its weight. Dust rose, glittering like motes caught in sunlight, and in the haze of those motes, she could see the figure of a man.

“So,” he said, arms folded across his chest, “now you know.”

“I know she let you go. Why did you return?”

His laugh—the first such sound he’d made—was bitter. Not ugly, not quite that, but it was the only thing he’d said or done that hinted at the emotions she associated with the living. “She let me go? Is that what she told you?”

Tara, hands now numbing Kaylin’s, stared at him in defiant, angry silence. “I let you go,” she said, voice shaky.
“I let you go.”

“She owned my name,” Illien continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “She owned it. She knew it. She
used it
.”

Kaylin’s eyes widened and she turned to Tara. “Is this true?”

Tara didn’t answer.

Kaylin now remembered why any smart person avoided getting involved in anything that looked like a lover’s quarrel, although admittedly the circumstances didn’t permit that much discretion. “Tara,” she said, trying to shake her, which was hard, given the grip on her hands. “Is this true?”

“He wanted to
leave!
”

“Tara—”

“He wanted to leave.” Her voice fell.

“She had what she needed,” Illien continued, the laughter gone, his face once again smooth and unreadable. “She had the power to sustain her. I was not aware that I supplied it—not immediately. Did you watch what she showed you?” His demeanor was entirely different.

Kaylin, understanding that Barrani lied as naturally as most people breathed, watched him like, well, a Hawk. But she nodded, her arms now painfully cold.

“She did not show you all,” he said. “Or you did not understand it. You understand the harmonics inherent in the patterns of the runes as they are laid out?”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

“I…see. She will attempt to drain you, you know.”

Kaylin looked down and saw that Tara’s face was looking less bruised and less swollen.

“It is not the first time it has happened. I do not believe she will kill you.”

“Barren,” Kaylin whispered.

“The petty human mage?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Yes. Some years ago.”

Kaylin looked away. “You should have killed him instead.”

Lord Illien said nothing. Her elbows were numb. She couldn’t see the marks on her arms, and wondered what they now looked like, if they remained there at all. She had dreamed for years of getting rid of them, but this wasn’t the way she wanted to do it.

“I am not the Lord of this fief. The fief has no Lord.”

Tara said, “You
are.
” And then she stopped. “I have power,” she told him, as if it were a promise. “I have power. I don’t need—”

He looked through her.

Kaylin, however, looked down. Tears tracked their way across the face of the avatar, and as they did, age literally melted.

“Pathetic is it not? I am not the author of this decay, this destruction. But I will it. In no other way will I be free.”

“You didn’t give your name to the Darkness.”

“No. I would have, but I was not—then—desperate enough. It doesn’t matter. She cannot stand long against what waits in Ravellon. I went to Ravellon,” he added. “The once. I wanted to understand the nature of life and the nature of Words. I understood enough of them to enact a change. I thought I understood the purpose, and the binding, of the old words. They are not the only language,” he added. “Do not venture into Ravellon or you will be unmade.

“But when I understood the making and unmaking of life as the Ancients might have told it, I began to…revise.”

“And she knew.”

“She held my name,” he replied. “She held it truly and completely. I could hide nothing from her when she bent her will toward me, and she watched in terror. She understood, late, what I attempted; she understood that I was reshaping, reforging, the word within me, the name itself. I thought it would free me of her. But she did the unexpected, the unforeseen.

“She changed with it, in order to continue to hold it. But she could not change much without destroying some essential part of her nature.

“She did,” he added softly. “She remembers what she was but she can no longer achieve it; we will die here.”

“Let her go,” Kaylin whispered.

He laughed again, and it was bitter. “I let go centuries past, little human. My name is not what it was, and it cannot support life—not the life of the Ancients, not the life of my kin. I wanted knowledge, and knowledge I received.”

“But you came to the Tower the first time, and it’s to this Tower that you returned. Why?”

His gaze flickered for just a moment, eyes blue-green amidst striations of black. “I thought…I heard a voice. No other Tower spoke, not to me.”

CHAPTER 27

Kaylin looked at Tara as if Tara was not attempting to drain her of whatever power she had. There was no triumph, no guile, nothing malicious, in Tara’s expression; there was fear, pain, and a horrible desperation. Desperate people did stupid things. They did worse than stupid; they did ugly, ugly things that scarred—or destroyed—whole lives. Maybe they learned something from it, if they survived. Maybe they let the guilt of survival eat away at them from the inside, hiding from their own truths.

No one knew this better than Kaylin.

Why, then, did she have to fight the urge to kick the avatar? Why did she have to remind herself of what she herself had done, without the knowledge or the power the Tower had?

Because, she thought bitterly, it was so much easier to hate other people for making the same mistakes you’d made—because you didn’t have the time to hate yourself if you did. And it was time to be done with it, because it
wouldn’t help anything.

“You came to her because she spoke.”

“I heard her voice, like an echo, in this place. Like,” he added softly, his expression growing remote the way expressions did when people stared off into the distance, “the essence of loss or sorrow. It was a child’s voice, but it was an ancient voice.”

Kaylin nodded, and Tara’s breath—which she had not heard until now—was sharp and painful, like a deep, clean cut.

“She spoke to me, eventually. I listened. I decided, then, to stay.”

“The Tower had a Lord.”

He shrugged. “If he could hold the Tower against me, yes. He could not. It was a difficult fight, but it was challenging. Little was challenging then, but you do not understand why challenge interests the immortal. We grow bored.”

And trading boredom for damnation is such a good idea.

“I learned much in my time here. I learned about the nature of magic, and the nature of worlds. I learned about the nature of life, of our concept of life. I explored,” he added. “And it seemed at that time exploration was not desertion.” He did not look at Tara.

Kaylin did. She seemed transfixed.

“They will destroy the Tower, now,” he added softly. “Your companions. The Dragon, the darkchild. They will destroy the Tower, and we will be free.”

“They
won’t!
” Tara shouted. “I have power now—”

“They will,” he said quietly. “There is no one left to defend it. Not you, not I. The power you might once have taken from her, you cannot take now.”

Kaylin’s numb arms argued against his words, but Tara’s eyes widened in panic as Illien continued to speak. “You can destroy her. She is presumably mortal. That is all.” He turned to Kaylin. “What will you now do, Chosen?”

“You made no deal with whatever lies in the heart of Ravellon.”

Illien shrugged. After a pause, he said, “There is no negotiation possible with the power at the heart of Ravellon. I ventured into Ravellon—that much is true.”