The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (45 page)

There was a door at the end of this hall. It was wide, dark, and banded across its width by what looked like iron. It was also barred. But the bars were on this side of the door, not the other side; Severn let her hand go for long enough to help her push them clear.

The doors opened into another hall; this one was taller and wider, and some light—possibly sunlight—filtered in from above. The walls looked, at first glimpse, to be made of the same stone, but as they approached, the walls began to shift, not in form, but in texture. They were, on the other hand, a very familiar gray.

Severn’s hand in hers, she approached the closest section of wall to the left. There were no hangings, no lamps, no paintings; there were no words carved in its surface, although she’d half expected them. Instead, the wall seemed flat and blank, smooth in the way glass was smooth, not in the porous way of stone.

“This is a window,” she said quietly.

“Yes. A window that would beggar all but the Emperor. Or maybe the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

She glanced at his face; it was as smooth as the wall. Which usually meant he was worried. “Please tell me you’re not worried about the investigation into the Chancellor’s affairs. We’re facing the end of the world, Severn.”

He shrugged. “The end of the world is easy. We’ll survive it, or we won’t. But if we do survive, the rest of life is waiting.”

They couldn’t get through the windows, of course. Kaylin had to push past her initial response to the breaking of window glass, because it was expensive, and expense implied people who cared enough to make you pay for the destruction one damn way or another. But the attempt to break the glass, which grew increasingly less hesitant as the minutes passed, resulted in nothing. No breakage. No change.

“What the hell is the point of all these windows anyway?” she muttered, because they all faced the same damn thing.

“There’s no point now,” Severn replied. The way he said it stilled her.

“You think they looked into something else at some point.”

“I think it likely. Then again, I don’t know what the Ancients saw when they looked at nothing. Maybe it was peaceful.”

She shook her head. “No, I think you’re right. This is what’s left.” She turned and headed back to the closed doors. “And if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter where we go.” She placed one palm firmly against the mark that girded the seam of the two doors. Nothing happened.

“What will you do?”

“Same as always,” she replied. “Talk a lot and hope that something gets through.”

Words described worlds, for the Ancients. Words described
life.
Souls, by any mortal understanding. Words described anything so precisely the Dragons said there was no variation in meaning, no drift due to context. No wonder it was a dead language; you’d have to live forever to even
learn
it. Or to learn enough context that everything had meaning. Kaylin had seen, in the altar-like mirror hidden at the heart of the Arkon’s hoard, the word for a world. She had seen, as well, the word for her world. There were differences, and had she the ability to lay them out side by side, she would have been able to enumerate them all.

But that would have taken months or years, and in the end? She’d be pointing at lines or squiggles or the size and the placement of dots. Any sense that the construction or representation was
real,
the way the fiefs had been real, was distant theory. She hadn’t experienced it, and couldn’t relate to it.

It was, however, all she had. So she began to speak.

Had, she realized, been speaking out loud the entire time, because every so often she heard Severn chuckle. She hadn’t—yet—said anything that would make him laugh out loud. But he’d always laughed. Not at her, but…about her, sometimes. His laughter had never driven her to despair or rage. It had never wounded her dignity.

“You don’t have much dignity.”

“Shut up. I’m trying to concentrate here. If those windows opened up on worlds that once existed, maybe the way to get
to
them, or one of the ways, was through this door. I just need to be able to…speak the word.” She’d asked for the name of the world. The problem with the word she’d been given in reply is that it didn’t contain Severn. It didn’t contain his laughter, or his silence, or his rare and enduring anger. It didn’t contain his shadow, his pain. Nor did it contain Marcus or Marrin or the Hawks; there was no sign of Clint or Teela or Tain. There were no Tha’alani, and there was no Ybelline. Or the Foundling Halls.

And maybe,
maybe
, if she knew how to look
hard enough
, or read carefully enough, she would see them, and she would know her world the way the Ancients did. But maybe the problem with the absent Ancients is that they
did
see the world in a way that was absent those things. Maybe they had no flexibility to see it any other way.

But their creations—if, truly, they were the creators—hadn’t the ability to conceive of the whole of a life in a single defined line. Kaylin couldn’t even decide what to have for dinner on most days; holding the shape of an entire life in her mind—even when it was her
own
—was beyond her. But it was still her life.

And her life was a web composed of other lives, lives she probably also didn’t and couldn’t see clearly. Things that made her laugh. Things that made her swear. Things that made her weep.

What would you create, if you could?

Why would I create at all? There’s already so
much
here, and I’ll never experience most of it.

“Kaylin, who are you talking to?”

“I think—I think I’m talking to the door.”

“You hate philosophical discussions.”

“I know. They seem so pointless.”

“And you’re discussing philosophy with a door.”

She shook her head fiercely and he quieted. This was important. She knew it. She also knew he was right. She groped for the sense of importance in the swamp of discussions she had always found tiring and pointless as she waited.

To quiet the darkness. Do you create nothing in your tiny state?

She struggled with the answer she’d been given, rather than the question that had followed it. To quiet the darkness. She’d done a lot in her life to quiet her own darkness. Her first impulse was to say that it had all been bad. But it hadn’t. Some of the choices she’d made for her life—for the life she lived now—were a response to some of the mistakes she’d made even earlier. There was no justice, of course; she
knew
that.

But if she gave up on it entirely, there was nothing. Just darkness. Just loss and fear.

I create,
she finally said, with care.
But not whole worlds. Not even whole lives. I can’t do that. I’m not a god. I can touch other lives. I can even end them. I can change them, hopefully for the better. Sometimes for the worse. I can make space for them.

And what waits you, when you are done?

She shrugged.
Death.

The mark on the door flared with sudden warmth, sudden light.

Severn said, quietly, “Well done. I think.” The doors began to roll open.

They opened into the gray. It wasn’t even mist, because mist you could walk in or through and in any case, you got wet. This wasn’t wet. It wasn’t hot, cold, dry; it wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t even gray; it was just without color.

The ground, such as it was, had the same dry-sand give as it had had before, so at least there was some consistency in the nothing. They held hands as they emerged, and when Kaylin looked over her shoulder, she wasn’t surprised to see that the doors had vanished. There were no landmarks now; behind looked the same as ahead, up or down. “You can sort of fall,” she told Severn. “I haven’t tried flying.”

“You haven’t?” He smiled. His smile, unlike the gray, was solid and real. “Where are we going?”

“I’m not certain. But I know what we’re looking for.”

“The Devourer.”

She hesitated, and then said, “The refugees. And this is probably the only place in existence where it’s going to be harder to find thousands of not very stealthy people than one large creature.”

“Why the refugees?”

“Because they’re how we’re going to get home.”

“You returned before.”

She nodded. “I did. I called Nightshade, and he answered. I’m going to do that, as well—but not yet.”

“Why?”

“Because calling Nightshade called the Devourer, and I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.” She hesitated, and then added, “And if I’m being honest, Nightshade makes me…nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“Nervous.” She looked around, and added, with a half smile, “I’m lost. But this time, I have a decent excuse.”

“And I’m supposed to be able to lead?” He laughed. “No pressure.”

She was serious when she said, “No. No pressure. Let’s walk. I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.”

They did. And she was wrong; it made some small difference. It calmed her. There were no familiar streets, no familiar buildings, no sandwich boards against which to vent spleen; there was no sweltering heat, no rain, no insects. There were no criminals, and more important, no victims. For a few moments, there was silence punctuated by breathing, and it was peaceful.

She gave herself those minutes. The past several months had been one rush from emergency to emergency, some of which involved her own life, and much of which involved the lives of strangers. Some of those strangers had become part of her life. Some had died. But death didn’t remove them from the pattern.

It made them more painful, but they were still part of her life. If she
had
a name, they were part of her lines, her brushstrokes, her squiggles, her dots. She stopped walking.

“Kaylin?”

“I’m thinking about names,” she told him. “Not names the way we use them. True names, the way the Barrani and the Dragons do. The Devourer can hear them, if they’re spoken. I don’t know if it understands them. I think we can safely say it destroys them. But we don’t know
why.
”

“And it matters.”

“I always think the why matters. But only up to a point. If you’re trying to sell children in the streets of the City, knowing why doesn’t change the way I’m going to react.”

He nodded. They were strolling, now; Kaylin could almost hear the water of the Ablayne as it moved past them to the side. “Do you remember what we wanted? Or what I wanted?”

He understood what she meant. “Yes. The City. The City over the bridge.”

“As if it were a rainbow,” Kaylin agreed. “And it’s just a bridge. All of them. Just bridges. Crossing them doesn’t change what we are. People are still afraid. They’re less hungry, so they spend their fear in different places.”

“What we want defines who we’ll become.”

“I hope so. Because what we did want was good. I still want it,” she added. “I still want to live in a better world. A safer world. I still want a world in which children don’t starve or freeze to death in the winter. I want a world in which power isn’t the only definition of strength.

“But I thought I would just be
given
that world if I walked that bridge. And I know now I have to try to
make
the world.” She stopped walking. “Huh.”

“What?”

“That was the answer. That was the answer to the question. Why do I always think of the right answers after the damn test is over?”

He chuckled. “Because you haven’t thought of the question before the test, and you’re still thinking?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking that there’s only
one
answer. Sometimes that would be nice.”

“But limiting.”

“Limits have their uses.”

Severn stilled. His hand tightened slightly around hers. “Sometimes, Kaylin,” he said softly, “you scare me.”

She didn’t ask him why. She didn’t need to ask. In the distance, as if they defined it, she could see the tiny shapes of people. Some of them were moving. Some were not. She could see, of all things,
wagons,
and sheltered in their lee, the less distinct forms of people huddling together. Not for warmth, because it wasn’t cold here, and it wasn’t windy. But the need for comfort wasn’t always driven by external forces.

“I don’t suppose,” she asked softly, “I can let you do the talking?”

“If these are the people whose approach has caused so much havoc in the City, no. On the other hand, if these
are
those people, you probably won’t be able to do much talking, either.”

Everly’s painting had been exact, but Kaylin’s less practiced artistic eye hadn’t picked up one important detail: they were
tall.
Taller, she thought, than the Barrani; broader than Dragons in their human form. They were also, if tired and lost, alert. Several of the still bodies moved, with purpose, toward Kaylin and Severn, pausing at the periphery of a camp they now defined. They were armed with greatswords. Or what would have been greatswords in Severn’s hands.

They did
not
look friendly.

Severn, however, didn’t arm himself; neither did Kaylin. They stopped about ten yards from the closest of the strangers, and waited. For the first time since they’d left what was arguably Evanton’s shop, Severn let her hand go; he held up both of his own, palms out, to show clearly that he was unarmed.

The strangers, however, didn’t seem to be either relieved or impressed. They were silent. At this distance, Kaylin couldn’t see the color of their eyes; the color of their clothing was muted. It wasn’t the dust and dirt of long travel that had dimmed the colors; the colors themselves were shades of browns, with some hints of variant greens in secondary layers. Kaylin lifted her own hands, exposing her palms as she did.

She received a glance, no more, as if her relative size made her a child, and at that, a child of little consequence. Usually this was mildly irritating; today, it wasn’t.

One of the men spoke. His voice was low and deep, and it rumbled through scant syllables like an imminent storm. Any hope that she would magically understand what he said vanished like last week’s pay. She said, slowly, “We can’t understand you.” Her hands were still spread, but the desire to at least drop one to a knife was getting stronger.