The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (44 page)

“He won’t be able to do this again, will he?”

“Possibly never. It depends. Are you going to loiter here all day?” If he spoke almost deferential High Barrani to the Dragons, Kaylin clearly didn’t merit the effort.

Kaylin wasn’t surprised when he turned a corner, crossing a large outcropping of brown-gray rock that vanished as she followed. Severn and Sanabalis were a step behind. “Where are we going?” she asked him, as they stood once again in the Garden.

“To the shrine of air.”

She frowned. As far as she’d been able to see, there was no shrine to air; it moved freely through the Garden. Curious, she nodded, although it made no difference; she would have followed anyway. He took a small, stone path that wound its way between the small shrines that were otherwise visible: water and earth. The path led to a tree.

It wasn’t a small tree, and she wondered how she could have missed it every other time she’d visited. But the Garden’s geography was more fluid than even Castle Nightshade’s.

“Here,” Evanton told her, as he paused in front of a gnarled, knotty root. He pointed toward the trunk of the tree. “There are foot and handholds. I’m afraid we have to climb.”

Climbing, at least, she could do.

It wasn’t a
short
climb, and even Kaylin was tiring by the time they’d reached what seemed the midpoint of the trunk. Evanton, however, urged them to continue, and they did. The tree extended upward for as far as Kaylin could see with her head stretched back at right angles to the top of her neck.

“It’s there,” he said.

“I can’t see anything but branches.”

“You’re not looking in the right direction.”

“Story of my life,” she replied, and looked down again. This time, she followed his arm. He wasn’t, as it had first appeared, pointing to a random patch of the sky that existed between forked branches; he was pointing to what looked like a small patch of floating, almost transparent floor. Above it, more solid—but only barely—was a telltale altar and a very small shelf.

Below it, however, there was nothing familiar. Like, say, stairs. Or foundations. Kaylin turned to stare at him. “There doesn’t also happen to be an invisible
bridge
from here to there?”

He frowned. Turned to Sanabalis. “She
is
observant, but I assume she’s hell in a classroom.”

“She is not generally known for either her patience or her humility,” Sanabalis replied. “But I have had worse.”

“Did they survive?”

“Not all of them, no.”

“Ah, well. Too much to hope for.”

Severn was chuckling. “I assume,” he said to Evanton, “that we’re to jump?”

“Unless you can fly. The branches here are more than strong enough to bear our weight.” He added, to Kaylin, “There’s a reason you’ve never been to the shrine of air. All joking aside, it’s an unpleasant climb, and my usual method of visiting doesn’t always agree well with others.”

“Meaning?”

“They tend to fall.” He began to edge his way along the branch, and when he reached the midpoint, he jumped off. Unlike the Dragons, he didn’t pretend at age; it wasn’t a particularly graceful or limber jump. But landing didn’t appear to break anything. Severn made the jump with ease, as did Kaylin; the landing itself was a lot softer than she’d expected, and she stumbled as the “ground” gave.

Sanabalis, however, glanced dubiously at both the shrine and the branches that in theory led to its safety. “I fear that I will have some difficulty,” he said at last.

Evanton raised a brow. “How so?”

“I am unsure as to the solidity of the branches.”

Evanton snorted. It was a Draconian snort, but lacked smoke. “If you feel you can’t make the jump—”

The branch cracked beneath Sanabalis as he climbed out toward the platform.

“Oh. Right,” Evanton said, as it broke.

The branch listed, and Sanabalis fell. It was a long drop—one Kaylin could see most of, although much of the view was obscured by other branches. Which also snapped as he hit them.

Evanton gritted his teeth, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted down toward the direction Sanabalis had fallen. “Take the easy way up! You have my permission and this is
not
Imperial ground!”

Sanabalis roared in response. Even at this height, the sound was almost deafening. Five minutes later, he rose, but at a greater distance from the tree’s branches. His wingspan was longer than Tiamaris’s, and his color was a pale shade of gray that was almost silver in the sunlight. Or the light; Kaylin wasn’t entirely certain it was shed by sun.

“Hold there a moment. We’ll come to you,” Evanton said.

Kaylin was dubious, but kept her silence. Which was good; Evanton could be smug. The platform on which they were standing did, indeed, move. It moved evenly and slowly until it was inches from the end of the Dragon Lord’s jaw.

“This is as close as we get,” Evanton told him. “Can you fit yourself on the edge?”

“Is it necessary?”

“No.”

“Then, no. I suspect that none of the three of you would survive an accidental fall.”

“Two,” Evanton said.

“My apologies, Keeper,” was the Dragon’s grave reply.

The air, when it came, came not at the call of the Dragon, nor at the invocation of the Garden’s Keeper. It came as it pleased, dallied a moment in cape and hair, and then settled in the center of the platform, in a spinning vortex that had, as the fire had had, no human shape. It wasn’t cold, the way winter winds could be cold; it wasn’t cool, the way summer breezes could be cool. But it radiated both of these things, adding a hint of the dampness of sea squall and the howl of storm.

Air, Kaylin thought. Breath.

All of the elements were necessary for life, and all of them could end it in their absence.

The wind whistled; Severn whistled back. His whistle was a familiar fief tune, absent words; the wind’s, however, was nothing remotely known. And it was long.

“Evanton?”

“It’s speaking.”

“I gathered that. What’s it saying?”

“Listen carefully, Private. And yes, that
is
my way of telling you to shut up.”

She did. She even listened. Evanton, when annoyed, was conversely not very annoying. But the wind’s language was one she couldn’t understand; if there were syllables, even the half-familiar syllables of the ancient tongue, in its folds, she couldn’t pick them up, couldn’t tease them apart.

But Sanabalis could. She knew this because he replied, and it was deafening. Lord Sanabalis, absent the robes and the long fringe of white beard, glittered in the light. He was beautiful. Foreign, yes, and ultimately unknown—but compelling. If he could have been silent, she would have been content to stare at him for hours.

As it was, she grimaced and lifted her hands to her ears.

He spoke to the air, and the air answered; she saw it as much as she heard it, because she could see the shifting of the folds of the Dragon’s silvery wing membranes. Sanabalis roared again, and this time the wind howled. But she had no sense that it was angry, no sense that it threatened.

“We don’t fear the fire,” Sanabalis said, speaking in a deep and booming Barrani, “but the storms? We fear the storms.”

“And it knows this?”

He laughed. It was disconcerting, given the size of his mouth and his throat. “How do you think we fly? We are, like the Aerians, the beneficiaries of magical flight, Kaylin. The air listens when we push ourselves off from the ground, and it releases us from the shackles of earth. Of course it knows.

“Fire is the element of our birth, in story. Air is the element in which we come of age.” He roared again. His wings were spread, not gathered, as if he’d found thermals. “I will stay with the air, Keeper, if that is your wish.”

“It’s the air’s wish,” Evanton replied. “But before you settle in up here, we’d appreciate a lift down.”

Evanton led them from the base of the tree back into the confines of the neatly tended Garden. It was to the rock garden that he went, and it was that: in place of flowers or trees, rocks of different heights and different textures stood atop a small field of carefully placed pebbles. Here, there was also a small shrine, and a small stone shelf, and candles were lit in honor of the element, in this case, earth. Why the earth was represented by stone, Kaylin didn’t understand.

Nor did she really understand a garden composed of rocks, if it came to that. But Evanton now looked at her with care. “This,” he told her, “is where I must stop, I think.”

“And us?”

“You must leave.”

She cast an eye toward the door that appeared as he spoke. The last time she’d exited a door like this one, it hadn’t gone well. “You said I wasn’t to enter or leave without you,” she tried.

“I did indeed. But the plans of even the wise shift and change. I’ve left you your Corporal,” he added, as he approached the large rock that was the small garden’s centerpiece. It was a striated marble that seemed polished, and when he touched it, his hands began to glow gently. “Follow the path, Kaylin.” His voice was surprisingly gentle.

“Where will it take me?”

“If you hold true to your intent, it will take you where you need to be. Corporal.”

Severn nodded.

“Don’t lose her. If you need to, tie yourself to her in any way that’s practical.”

Kaylin snorted. But as it was usually Severn who had the better sense of geography, she didn’t argue. “Why are you all doing this, anyway?”

“We’re reminding the elements,” he replied, closing his veined eyelids.

“Of what?”

“Of life. Of what life means, in this place. They’re part of it, essential to it, and inimical to it, all at once. But here, for the moment, they’re content to converse, and the conversations—all of them—must take place.” He paused, but he hadn’t finished; Kaylin waited with more patience than she usually showed.

“You, too, must converse,” he finally said. “And I have no idea at all with what, or what you must say. But if the elements are part of the Garden, and if they believe that your Devourer—”

“It is
not
my Devourer, Evanton!”

“If they believe that
the
Devourer belongs in this Garden, then it, too, must be reminded of the way in which it is part of—and inimical to—the living.”

“We don’t even know what it is!”

“No,” was the serene reply. “But that is now no longer my problem.”

Severn approached the door first, and Severn opened it. He then held out a hand, palm up, to Kaylin. He said no words because no words were necessary, and she took both a deep breath and his hand. “When all of this is over—if we’re still alive—I want a vacation.”

He smiled. “If you consider lessons with members of the Imperial Court a vacation, I’m sure Marcus will be happy to sign off on it.”

“I could probably get around Sanabalis.”

“True.”

It wasn’t Sanabalis he was thinking about. “I don’t suppose a mouse could get around Diarmat.”

“
Lord
Diarmat, and no, not if his reputation is anything to go by. Are you ready?”

“No. I never am. I just make do.” He held the door open; Kaylin looked suspiciously into the hall. It wasn’t the hall that had led to the Garden. For one, it was, or seemed to be, composed of stone; the walls were smooth; the floors themselves were hard and gray. For two, it was a much wider hall than Evanton’s, although Evanton’s hall was admittedly so crowded with books it was hard to tell.

There were, however, shelves against some of these unfamiliar walls. Severn, still holding her hand, came to stand by her side. He glanced through a door that wouldn’t fit two people. Then he glanced over her shoulder at Evanton.

“I don’t like it,” Kaylin muttered. “Do you think he knows where it goes?”

“I think he knew it wouldn’t open up into the shop. What will you do?”

She tightened her grip on his hand and headed into the unknown.

CHAPTER 25

The unknown, in this case, was as solid as the previous hall. The floor had no give, and the walls didn’t immediately disperse into vapor or mist or gray nothingness. Nor did Kaylin hear the distant roar of what she assumed was the Devourer. She heard nothing except the sound of their boots on stone, the sound of their own breathing.

The hall was lit not by windows but by small lamps that hung between the shelves at regular intervals. She paused in front of one of those shelves. She wasn’t the Arkon; she wasn’t even passingly familiar with the titles of the volumes that stood here in bound leather, in more or less orderly rows. But they seemed like an anchor of sorts, something by which she could get her bearings.

Severn let her take the lead. It came to her that he often had, even when she was five, although many of those memories were thankfully dim now. “Hall’s longer,” she said, giving up on the books. She could read some of the titles; some were impregnable, although she recognized the very stylized forms of High Barrani. The older scribes tended to crunch the letters together so they ended up looking like the same series of curved lines and loops, with small variations, rather than distinct words.

“Where do you think we are?”

“In the store,” Severn replied.

She nodded. “The Elemental Garden’s existed for as long as the world, or at least that’s what the Dragons think. Evanton certainly hasn’t.” When she’d first met him, on the other hand, he looked—to her—as if he had. Seven years hadn’t done much to change him; it had, on the other hand, taken her across the border that separated adults from everything else. “Do you think this is what existed before he took over?”

He nodded. “It’s possible this is what exists when anyone new takes the job. It’s a building, It’s possible that it’s a building very like Castle Nightshade.”

“You think the Old Ones built it?”

He nodded again.

How had the Old Ones seen the universe? Their buildings changed like seasons, but less predictably. Their words woke whole races, and she wondered what started when the gods actually paused to converse.