Cast in Ruin (12 page)

He lifted one hand. “Thank you, Private.”

CHAPTER 9

“You already know what he saw.” Kaylin kept accusation out of her voice with effort. She stopped walking, however.

Sanabalis didn’t. She had to jog to catch up. “No. I did not know until you spoke.”

“You suspected?”

“No, Kaylin.”

“Do you think she’s supposed to be a dead Dragon?”

“An interesting choice of words.”

Glancing at his profile she saw that his inner eye membranes were up. Even with their opacity, his eyes were now a bright orange. “We will go directly to the Palace,” he told her. “Corporal?”

Severn nodded.

“Private Neya’s visual memory is not always as…crisp…as it could be. Yours, on record, is excellent.”

Severn raised a brow, but it was Kaylin who said, “You’re going to give us the crystal.”

“Not precisely,” was the clipped response. “The availability of necessary materials within the Imperial Order is not guar anteed, and the process of requisition requires some entanglement with the Order’s very fine bureaucracy.”

“But?”

“The necessary materials—without the paperwork—can be found in only one place in the Palace. I leave it to your very fine mind to deduce where.”

The Palace, at the moment, was not where Kaylin wanted to be, although her next session with Diarmat wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow night. The Dragon to her right, on the other hand, was not someone she wanted to argue with, and since he was much closer, she headed—in silence—to the Palace.

The guards did not seem thrilled at the prospect of the naked-short-blade in Kaylin’s hand, and they seemed both underimpressed and derisive when they noted that she wore no sheath for it. It set her teeth on edge, but she failed to comment. Sanabalis, however, had no difficulty excusing its presence, and clearly he outranked them; they let her pass.

Word of this exception must have traveled, because no one else gave her trouble. Everyone else, on the other hand,
did
notice the sword.

“We will have to do something about that,” Sanabalis said under his breath. “Find a makeshift sheath for now if you will not leave the blade somewhere safe.”

“By now, you mean after we’ve finished speaking with the Arkon?”

“Don’t be clever, Kaylin. It’s been a very trying week.”

“Yes, Sanabalis.”

“Let me speak,” he cautioned her once they’d passed the officious man at the doors and the usual gauntlet of Imperial Guards, and had entered the wide, tall halls of the Palace proper.

“Unless he demands an answer, he’s all yours.”

“If he demands an answer, I will answer.”

She snorted, and wished, briefly, that the noise was also accompanied by smoke and a little fire. For someone with perfect memory—and all Immortals pretty much laid claim to that—his was certainly convenient; he’d clearly forgotten what the Arkon was like.

But at least when he approached the closed Library doors, Sanabalis was considerate enough to press his palms into the door wards; he didn’t demand that Kaylin do it herself. The doors rolled open.

Although the Library was the Arkon’s in any way that mattered, it was nonetheless staffed by mostly human attendants; set a few yards from the door was a long and impressive desk behind which one such employee sat. He looked up as the doors opened, his somewhat forbidding expression shifting when he saw who’d entered. He rose immediately and bowed.

“Lord Sanabalis,” he said as he rose. “I don’t believe the Arkon is expecting you.”

“No.”

This wasn’t the hoped-for answer, but the man nodded. Reaching for something beneath the lip of the desk’s surface, he said, “I will send word that you’ve arrived. Is it urgent?”

“It is not—at the moment—an emergency. If it is more convenient,” he added as a much younger man appeared from behind a long row of shelving, “I will approach him myself. Has he given orders he is not to be interrupted?”

“They’re standing orders,” was the slightly grim reply. “The Royal Librarian lost much valuable archival time during the last crisis.”

The younger man made his way to the front of the desk and stood in front of the older one, who was clearly—in the absence of the Arkon—in charge. But the older man grimaced. “Never mind, Wills. Lord Sanabalis has a message he wishes to convey in person. Lord Sanabalis, you will find the Arkon in the third hall of artifacts. The Hawks?”

“They are with me. They understand the rules of the Library. I will personally deal with any infractions.”

“Thank you, Lord Sanabalis.” He cleared his throat before they’d taken two steps, and the Dragon Lord turned back.

“Yes?”

“The Private,” he said, indicating Kaylin.

“What about her?”

“She is carrying a sword.”

Sanabalis glanced at the blade that Maggaron had given her. “My apologies,” he told the Librarian. “We wish the Arkon to examine it, and I believe he will find it of interest, but for the moment, we will leave it at the desk in your care.”

Turning to Kaylin, he added, “If that is acceptable to you?”

“It is.” She hesitated, and then said, “But I don’t think it’s safe for anyone else to actually attempt to wield it.”

“No one will wield it,” was the Librarian’s response. But he looked at the blade with distinctly less comfort. “No one will touch it. If you will bring it to the back of the desk?”

Behind the desk was what looked like a long counter. Its gleaming wooden surface caught light, which it then scattered because the Librarian lifted it. It was hinged, and beneath its surface was something that looked very much like glass casing. It made Kaylin queasy as she approached, which made it clear that it was magical.

“When artifacts are brought to the Arkon,” the man explained, motioning toward the empty case without once attempting to touch the sword in her hands, “this is where they are kept if they are deemed either fragile or magical and of unknown origin. I will remain here until you leave the Library. No one else, besides the Arkon, can open the case. If you will?”

Half relieved, she set the sword down and took a step back. He dropped the countertop, and it once again looked like normal, necessary desk space.

“Let me guess. The Arkon is not in the best of moods,” Kaylin ventured when they were out of the normal human earshot of the supervisor.

“He has certainly been in worse in your direct experience,” Sanabalis replied. “But he has been attempting to ascertain that no damage was done during the recent magical surge, and this takes both time and very focused attention to detail. He does not like,” he added, “to be disturbed.”

He had never
liked
to be disturbed. In the time she’d known him, he’d left the Palace exactly once, and that had involved the possible end of the world.

The Arkon was working in the third hall of artifacts, as the man at the desk had called it. Kaylin didn’t consider what was essentially a closed, dark room to be a hall. There were no windows, or at least if there were, none of them let any light in. She’d been in a similar room in the bowels of the Library before; the walls were mostly lined with shelves, and there were standing items that only spiders appeared to have touched in the intervening centuries since they’d been collected. Sanabalis was considerate enough to retrieve lamps for their use; the usual magical lights were forbidden.

The Arkon had already left off work when the light from the open door alerted him to their presence. He looked like a moving antique; the dust and the cobwebs that time and spiders had deposited clung to his robes and the edge of his beard. His eyes were a shade of unfortunate orange, but given both Tiamaris and Sanabalis today, he seemed relatively calm.

“This,” he told Sanabalis in a rumble of a voice that implied he was speaking Barrani out of a minimal courtesy that could vanish at any second, “had better be important.”

“In my opinion, it is,” Sanabalis replied.

“Obviously.” The Arkon now condescended to notice the two silent Hawks who had accompanied Sanabalis. He sighed, which sounded suspiciously like a snort, with about the same smoke content. “I have not failed to notice, Private Neya,” he said as he all but shoved them out of the doors and back into the light, “that Lord Sanabalis’s disdain for my orders that I remain undisturbed frequently intersect with his interactions with
you.
”

The Arkon’s annoyance at the interruption was not, sadly, improved by the nature of Sanabalis’s request. It did, however, leave him speechless and slightly openmouthed for at least thirty seconds. Sanabalis’s expression could have been carved out of stone; he didn’t even blink.

“I assume you have a more than adequate reason for this request?”

“I do. And it is, I believe, a situation in which time—in the mortal sense—is of the essence. The usual process for requisitions of note from the Imperial Order—which I will, of course, begin immediately—will require more time than we have.”

The Arkon was not impressed. Dusting his hands on the folds of his robes, he snorted more smoke. “This had better at least be interesting, Sanabalis. I have discovered some possible damage to some of the more unusual items in the collection, and I am not pleased.”

There wasn’t a colloquial phrase or curse that went something like “may your day be full of angry dragons” or “may every dragon you meet today be pissed off,” but there should have been. Had the floors not been so solid, the Arkon would have left footprints in the stone.

“Where is he going?” Kaylin asked as Sanabalis began to follow.

“Probably one of the conference rooms. The artifacts in the third hall are delicate, and shouting—in our native tongue—might cause them harm.”

The Arkon did indeed lead them to one of the almost featureless rooms several halls and a few doors away. It contained a table that was flat, long and practical; chairs were tucked beneath its surface. The walls were bare. The door was warded, or appeared to be warded, but the Arkon didn’t bother to touch it; he barked at it and it flew open. Even the inanimate objects in the Library apparently knew enough to try to stay on his good side.

The door slammed shut the minute Sanabalis entered the room behind Kaylin.

“Well?” the Arkon said, folding his arms across the trailing edge of his unkempt beard.

“There is a problem in the fief of Tiamaris.”

This didn’t seem to mollify the Arkon. “Given the known problems that occur in lands that border the fiefs, I fail to see how a projection crystal is justified. It is not a useful teaching tool.” He referred, Kaylin realized belatedly, to Sanabalis’s work with the Norannir. “Nor is it a shield against the incursions of Shadow. It is a fine research tool,” he added, “and any grant from my library will of course decrease the effective ability to do research
here.
”

Kaylin cleared her throat.

“Yes?”

“It’s also an effective tool for investigations.”

“It is, and the
usual
method for requisitioning such equipment results—on occasion—in a grant of a crystal for those purposes. Has the Hawklord acceded to your request?”

Silence.

“Ah, no, of
course
not. The fief of Tiamaris is not considered Imperial territory, and any investigations would not fall under the jurisdiction of the Halls of Law. Sanabalis,” he added, losing the honorific that he usually used, at least when in the presence of mere mortals. “Explain yourself. Now.”

“There have been a series of highly unusual murders in the fief of Tiamaris. While we are all aware that the general conditions of rule in the fiefs are somewhat lacking—” He glanced at Kaylin, who had clamped her jaw shut. She’d become used to the roundabout understatements of people who’d never actually had to live in the fiefs, but she was never going to like them. “There are indications that a subtle magic is involved.”

Mindful of Sanabalis’s orders to let him do the talking, Kaylin said nothing. She was, however, Kaylin; she said nothing
loudly.

It was not to Kaylin that the Arkon turned, however; it was to the almost invisible Severn. “Corporal Handred,” he said in his succinct and biting High Barrani, “I have been impressed with your calm and your sense of order in trying and difficult times. You accompanied Private Neya on this excursion into Tiamaris?”

“I did.”

“Good. I would like to hear your version of the difficulty, and your opinion about the use of the crystal.” When Severn did not immediately launch into speech, he added “Now.”

In very sparse words, and in an entirely even and matter-of-fact tone, Severn offered the Arkon an account of events. He made clear, in the same tone, that the only hands-on investigation either he or Kaylin had done so far was a brief and cursory examination of the bodies.

“On the morrow,” he added in his flawless High Barrani, “we will visit the discovery sites and attempt to discern what the victims may—or may not—have in common.”

But the Arkon had fallen utterly silent; he didn’t even seem to be breathing. “You are certain,” he finally said, “that all the bodies were identical? Mortals often look very similar.”

Kaylin winced; Severn didn’t. He nodded smoothly. “There are known cases of multiple births that result in children who appear—to strangers—to be identical. There are always distinguishing marks or differences that yield to a closer inspection.”

“You have reason to suspect that the seven discovered will not be the last?”

“No. Given the discovery of seven in such a short span of time, however, I feel it unlikely.”

“You do not possess the magical sensitivity that Private Neya has demonstrated.”

“No, Arkon.”

“Private Neya.” He glanced once at Sanabalis, and added, “You were not present, Lord Sanabalis. Your word will not carry the weight of hers here, no matter how carefully you speak. Or how carelessly she does.” He turned back to Kaylin. “You will wait here. I will return with the object you have requested.”

“Thank you.”

The Arkon raised a brow. “I am certain that when we are done you will be markedly less thankful. There is a second reason that the crystals are not deemed suitable for frequent use.”