The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (55 page)

He cleared the streets around the building. He cleared the streets around the watchtowers, and then, with a roar, brought the watchtowers down. They were, as far as Kaylin could tell, deserted; she didn’t look too damn closely. She had never—would never, she admitted to herself—cared as much about Barren’s men as she did about the rest of the people. Possibly because she’d been one.

She let the air whip strands of hair out of her face as she watched, passenger to destruction.

When it was over, Tiamaris flew a few wide arcs above the White Towers, roaring as if he was his own herald. Kaylin couldn’t be certain if he was announcing his arrival to the denizens of the fief, or his defiance to the Dragons who still circled high above. He landed at last in the empty streets, at which point Kaylin, Severn, and Tara slid off his back.

Kaylin had pretty much decided that Dragons were to be classed with horses in terms of riding: never again unless her life—or livelihood—depended on it. She stepped away from Tiamaris into the street itself. Glass shards caught the sunlight and sent it straight at the unwary eye; bodies caught something less tangible. Kaylin stepped over them, bending here and there to check for a pulse she didn’t expect to find. She took care with the corpses that no longer looked human—or animal, if it came to that—but they weren’t moving, either.

Severn was doing the same; they moved up the length of the street, working in tandem, and found nothing alive. Sometimes this was good, sometimes it was bad. But it came to an end when they reached the White Towers. Some obvious—and involuntary—changes had been made to both the landscaping, such as it was, and the architecture. Half of the fence was still standing; half of the guardhouse was still standing. In the case of the guardhouse, it was the lower half.

The walls had seen fire—most of it Dragon—but they had seen something else, as well; some part of the front facade was no longer made of stone.

It was hard to tell
what
it was made of; it looked almost opaline, or it would have if opals were twisted and vaguely repulsive. At the core of this section of what had once been wall, light shone, pulsing as if it were an exposed organ.

Tiamaris glanced at it, and then furled his wings. “A moment,” he said to Tara, who nodded as she began to approach the section of wall that looked so wrong. He shed the size and majesty of his Dragon form, donning instead the armor of its scales. When the last of the scales had slid out of his skin and into place, he walked toward Tara.

“The wall,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “It is…still alive.”

“Can it see me?”

She nodded again. Kaylin didn’t ask
with what,
although she had to clamp her jaw shut to trap the words. “I can close its eye,” Tara told him softly.

“At what risk?”

She hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know.”

“No?”

She bent and touched the ground with the flat of both palms. “I can do this, now. I could not, before. I…am no longer certain what is possible. This…is not my world.”

“Leave it, then. We have time, later, to discover what is possible and what is not.” He walked to the door and lifted his head.

“Crossbows,” Severn said quietly.

Kaylin nodded. “At least three. Probably four or five. The buildings across the street are still standing.”

“And their aim can be trusted at this distance?” Tiamaris asked quietly.

Kaylin shrugged. After a pause she said, “Mine could be.”

He shrugged, but he would; the bolts probably wouldn’t hurt
him.
On the other hand, the streets were empty enough that they wouldn’t hurt noncombatants, either. She watched the door, scanning the shuttered windows. “He won’t come out,” she finally said.

“He will send someone.”

She nodded. “If anyone’s still alive in there.” She glanced at the wall.

“People on the other side of the wall are still live,” Tara said quietly.

“Unchanged?”

“They have not been altered by the shadow, no.”

“Then I know who we’re waiting for,” Kaylin told them. She dropped one hand to the hilt of a dagger and waited for the door to open. It took another ten minutes, and when it did, it opened to the sound of shouting, but the person who stepped out—on her own—was familiar. Kaylin even managed a tired grin.

“Hands full?” she asked Morse.

Morse’s grin was a slightly more bitter reflection of Kaylin’s. “Those who still have working hands, yeah. You’re here to see Barren?”

Kaylin glanced at Tiamaris, then shrugged. “He is,” she said, nodding at the Dragon Lord.

It wasn’t the first time Morse had seen Tiamaris, but this time she really looked. She didn’t even shrug when she turned her attention to Kaylin again. “Street’s clear.”

Kaylin nodded. “Pretty much all of them. We had some trouble with what might once have been ferals on the way, and he kind of burned what was left of the standing watchtowers to ashes, but there were no—” She grimaced. “Nothing that looked human was in the immediate vicinity.”

“That Hawkspeak?”

Kaylin shrugged. “You take information any way you can get it, if you trust the source.”

Morse offered Kaylin a slow smile. “That so? Whoever taught you that was no fool.”

“No. She wasn’t. What are you going to do?”

Morse shrugged. “I was sent to find out what he wants, and to take a look around. It got a lot louder when he arrived,” she added, with a thin smile. “And then it got a lot damn quieter. I think Barren hoped he’d be dead.” She glanced at Tiamaris, but still spoke to Kaylin. “What’s he want?”

“Want?” Kaylin asked, momentarily confused.

Morse snorted. “He’s not here to be neighborly.”

“He’s here to kill a few nightmares and save a few lives. Not that there were that many to save this close to the border.”

“Your idea?”

“No. I had no problems with it, if that’s any help.”

“Not really. It’s not news, either.” Which was Morse’s very polite way of saying
shut up.
“You working for him?”

Kaylin understood all of the question. “No.”

“No.”

“I work for the Lord of the Hawks.”

“Hawks don’t come here. The Law doesn’t come to the fiefs.”

“There’s only one law in the fiefs,” Kaylin replied, as if by rote. Then she shrugged, as well, and nodded at Tiamaris. “And it’s going to be his.”

“He’s a Hawk.”

“He’s a Lord of the Imperial Dragon Court. Or at least he was. He was only moonlighting as a Hawk. Will Barren come out?”

Morse laughed. “Would you?”

Kaylin grinned. “Don’t try anything stupid. The Dragon doesn’t owe me anything.”

“The Dragon,” Tiamaris interjected, “owes you a great deal, Private Neya. He does not, however, extend the debt to sparing the life of would-be assassins.”

Morse nodded. “You can come in. Usually we tell visitors to leave their guards at the door, but in your case it seems pretty pointless. You don’t have a weapon?” she asked Tiamaris.

“I had a sword. I never used it.”

“Got it.” She stepped out of the doorway, opening it in the process. “We weren’t expecting guests,” she told Kaylin, voice heavy with the usual Morse irony.

“It’s a bit of a mess?”

“Understatement.”

The transformation in the outer wall was the biggest change in the White Towers, but some of the shadows had leaked through, and part of the floor was both uneven and constructed of something that looked like shiny stone. Kaylin didn’t test this by actually walking on it, and neither did anyone else; they tread around it only after Tara pronounced it safe in her softly modulated voice.

But they trudged the familiar path up the stairs in silence. Morse was in the lead, and Kaylin kept an eye on her hands. She didn’t appear to have problems turning her back on Kaylin, and by extension Tiamaris.

Being Morse, she’d failed to acknowledge Severn or Tara.

The stairs were scorched and blood had seeped into what passed for carpets, but the bodies had been cleared away, or at least dumped into an adjacent room; the only open doors in the halls were the set Kaylin was most familiar with. She felt the line of her spine stiffen as they approached them.

Barren was waiting. He had four men in the room, and Morse joined him, taking up a position that was almost formal—for Morse—to his right and one step behind. He didn’t look pleased to see his visitors. Too damn bad.

It occurred to Kaylin as she watched him that it was over, for him. He had never truly been fief lord; he had called himself fief lord, and everyone who lived in the fief had obeyed him as if the words were true—because he could kill them, and did.
Even me,
she thought.
No. I was worse. I helped him. I was part of what terrified people. And killed them.

Because she had been afraid, too. Fear was like that; a disease—or worse—it crippled and destroyed not just one life, but the lives of everyone it touched. She could remember, watching him, why she had been afraid. She hated it, but she felt the fear as if it still lived inside of her, small but hidden.

She looked up, met his gaze, and saw him measuring her; trying to see how much of her he still had in his grip. “You went to the old tower,” he finally said, speaking to Kaylin.

Kaylin turned to Tiamaris, to make a point; the Dragon’s eyes were a pale orange. He wasn’t angry, yet; he was, however irritated. Barren wasn’t born in the fiefs; he had to know there was a cost to irritating Dragons. “She did.” It was the Dragon who replied.

Barren turned to him slowly, as if Barren, and not Tiamaris, were still fief lord. “You met its occupant.”

“I,” Tiamaris replied, “am now its occupant.”

Barren’s expression was shuttered and impassive; nothing escaped it.

“You are the reason,” Tiamaris said, breaking his silence, “that this fief stood so long against the borderlands. Both your power, which you gave involuntarily, and your foresight, which you applied in your choice of residence and the building of the watchtowers, formed a surprisingly effective guard against the shadows that lie at the center of the seventh…fief.”

Barren nodded carefully. If he’d been a cheap, stupid thug, he would have been grinning by this point; he was a suspicious, cautious man. A cruel one.

Tiamaris then waited. Having been a Dragon’s student for the better part of a few months, Kaylin understood the pressure that silence could bring to bear.

“What do you propose?” Barren finally asked. “This is not the Empire.”

“No.”

“The Eternal Emperor has never had an interest in another Dragon Lord ruling territory within his domain,” Barren continued, his expression completely neutral. Kaylin understood why, now. He thought he had a chance; the Dragons could fight it out, and Barren assumed that the Emperor would win.

It was a good assumption; the Dragon Court belonged to the Emperor.

Tiamaris nodded. “You misunderstand the Emperor. He has never had an interest in any others ruling territory within his claimed domain. The fact that I am Dragon does not change his opinion. The fiefs have been allowed to stand because he has never chosen to claim them as his own.

“None of us are interested in fighting a war that will cause our own destruction.” He paused, and then said, “The Emperor has never fully tested himself against the power of the Towers that sustain the borders. It would be an interesting contest.”

Kaylin remembered that she needed to breathe about a minute after his words sunk in.

“You intend to fight him if he comes.”

“The fief,” Tiamaris replied, “is
mine.
”

Barren took a moment before he spoke again. “As a Lord of the Dragon Court, your time was of great value. The minutiae of day-to-day life in the fief—”

Tiamaris lifted a hand. “If you mean to offer me your services, I’m afraid I cannot accept them. You are known as fiefLord here, and your obvious presence in a role of power would confuse the issue of rulership. I mean to leave no one in doubt.”

Barren looked slightly surprised for the first time since Tiamaris had entered the room. “Why did you come?” he asked.

“To acknowledge your contribution to the fief,” Tiamaris replied. “In recognition of that fact, I will allow you—and your men—to exit the building before I destroy it. You are free to go where you will. You will not remain within the boundaries of my fief. I believe,” he added, with the barest hint of an edged smile, “that you are familiar with the boundaries.”

Before Barren could frame an answer, Tiamaris turned to Kaylin. “If that is acceptable to you?”

She looked at Tiamaris, started to speak and stopped. He was fief lord. Not Hawk. Not a member of the Imperial Court. Laws and rules were defined by one man—or woman. How they upheld their laws was their own business, because the Law didn’t come here.

He could give her Barren. Barren, the man.

“He injured you, if I am not mistaken, in his tenure as Lord here.”

She swallowed. Nodded.

Barren didn’t try to argue with Tiamaris; he wouldn’t. He wasn’t afraid of Kaylin. He had nothing to fear from her. His men still stood around him, willing to follow his orders as long as it wasn’t too damn costly. The words of the new fief lord had not yet sunk in. “Well?” Barren said.

Her knuckles were white as they rested over the pommel of her dagger. She could kill him. It would silence at least one of the memories that haunted the worst of her nights. But…she had walked into Barren. She had been so focused on guilt and loss and anger, she had given her allegiance to a man who had never—would never—be worthy of it. She’d paid. But she wasn’t the only one.

And killing him for the sake of the dead wouldn’t ease her guilt or her culpability in their deaths.

“Elianne,” Morse said. Her old name. Kaylin looked across to Morse, who was standing where she always stood. Her face was shuttered, her expression remote; she wasn’t pleading for Barren. But she was asking for something. They hadn’t lived together long, and Kaylin had been so self-absorbed she couldn’t put two plus two together to save her life; she’d survived by accident and luck. But she wasn’t a thirteen-year-old on the run anymore, and she understood, suddenly, what it was. It changed things.