Michelle Sagara (29 page)

The brother fell silent. “It is almost too late. Come, Lady. Come, Chosen. Alsanis waits.” He turned to Nightshade and the Lord of the West March. “Be prepared. There are too many stories and too little time.” He began to walk toward the shadowed, crystal building.

* * *

The eagles didn’t return. There were no other fallen shadows on the straightest path between their current location and the cracked wall, and Kaylin hesitated. She remembered the brothers of Bertolle.

“We are awake now, and we are here. We are not Bertolle’s kin, but Alsanis’s. More forms are not necessary.” He glanced at the Consort and shook his head. “Now is not the time. No song of awakening is necessary, Lady. He is awake. He does not sleep. He has not slept since the green was washed in the blood of the dying; he will not sleep until the tale is done. And until now, he could not speak with us
unless
he slept.

“But, Lady, when the time comes, if it does, you will know. Sing then.” He fell silent, his dark eyes narrowing, his frown etching literal lines in his face, his hair spreading down his back and his legs to blanket the ground at his feet. She had seen Bertolle’s brothers lose control of their shape, but still found the fluidity of something that looked
almost
natural disturbing.

“The children are awake. They are not happy.”

“Have they
ever
been happy?” Kaylin asked; it was a rhetorical question.

The brothers of the Hallionne did not apparently do rhetorical. “Yes, once. They remember. But it is thin, Chosen. It is an echo. A shadow. They hear Alsanis. They hear what he does not say. They hear his sorrow and his rage and they hear the echoes of us. He has not slept,” he repeated. “And he does not dream.”

Kaylin didn’t argue; they had reached the cracked wall. If she’d expected to see a door, or anything that implied door, she was doomed to disappointment. The brother placed one palm over the point from which the fractures had spread. “They mean to hold the door.”

Kaylin didn’t point out that there was no door.

“They speak to Alsanis now; they are loud.” He drew his hand away from the wall. Kaylin had time to throw her arms over her eyes before he slammed a fist down. She heard the crack of crystal. She didn’t, however, hear the tinkle of falling pieces that generally meant it had shattered.

He struck again, undeterred, with the same effect. Kaylin lowered her arms as he lowered his hand. He turned to face them, his brows a single line across a subtly changed face.

“Bearer,” he said, his voice grave. It was to Severn he spoke. It was to Severn’s blades that he looked.

* * *

Severn didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward, one blade in either hand. “They were damaged in the outlands. I do not know if they will succeed where you have failed.”

“You fail to understand the nature of the blades,” the brother replied. “And yet, you wield them. They were not damaged; they served the purpose for which they were forged. They must serve again. I cannot command you, bearer, but we will find no purchase in Alsanis if you do not surrender them to the wall.”

Severn nodded. He glanced, once, at Kaylin, and grinned. She felt what he didn’t put into words, and shied away from it. This weapon was part of his identity; it was as much his as the Hawk’s tabard was Kaylin’s. But he didn’t doubt Alsanis’s brother, and he didn’t argue or bargain. Instead, he pulled both blades back and thrust them into the wall, at the same spot it had been struck multiple times.

The brother spread his hands as the wall shattered, flesh becoming—in an instant—a thin, flexible shield. If the shards of former, crystalline wall were sharp, the brother didn’t bleed; he didn’t seem to notice. But he didn’t shed the bits and pieces, either; instead, the shield shrank, until it once again formed two separate, Barrani hands.

Beyond him, beyond them all, was a gaping, jagged hole. Kaylin was fairly certain that the edges were sharp enough to cut anything that wasn’t a multidimensional Immortal.

The walls were not the only thing that had shattered, though.

The blades had done so, as well. She could see shards of metal among the crystalline pieces, and hilts in Severn’s hands. They shook, briefly; he sheathed their remains in silence. He didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t mourn; he’d made the decision. He’d made the decision understanding exactly what Alsanis’s brother had asked—and what the cost would be.

That much she felt before she tried to avert her mental gaze. She settled on Alsanis’s brother as the safest because there was nothing mortal about him, and the building to which he was related didn’t generally respond to normal grief, rage, or fear as if they were emotions relevant to, well, being a building.

“Do not bleed in the Hallionne,” he helpfully told them. Lifting his face—or some of it, which was just as disturbing as it sounded—he roared to the sky; small pieces of wall shook loose as the sound reverberated.

The dragon descended.

It was a good damn thing the gap in the shattered wall was so large; descent didn’t cause him to lose any of his impressive size. She thought his eyes were the size of her fists, and deliberately avoided looking at his jaws or the curve of claws that seemed to pass through the ground, rather than sinking into it.

But she reached out and touched the space between what would have been dragon nostrils, which would
also
have been courting dismemberment if this were any other dragon. He met her gaze and blinked.

“He ate one of my marks,” she said, turning to the Consort. “When he first hatched. I don’t think it counts as naming him, but I think—I think it must have provided some sort of anchor.”

“That would explain much. It will not satisfy Lord Evarrim.”

“Nothing satisfies Lord Evarrim.”

“Do you remember what the word was?” the Consort asked. She hesitated for a long moment, and then lifted her hand and set it just below Kaylin’s. “He is not warm.”

“No. I don’t remember what the mark was; if we were in the city, we could dig it out of Records by process of elimination.” She didn’t ask if it mattered; she now believed it did. “How long do you have?” she asked him.

He shook his head, dislodging their hands. Alsanis’s brother approached. He didn’t bow, as he had bowed to the Consort; he met—and held—the dragon’s gaze. “Time,” he finally said, “does not mean, for us, what it means for your kind.”

“Mortals?”

“No. The living. He does not intend you harm; he very much wishes the opposite. But he chose to wear the jess of your mark, Chosen, and he has all but consumed it.”

She didn’t point out that
eaten
had a specific meaning, because she doubted, for the small dragon—or the large—it did. “Can I give him another one?”

“Yes.”

But of course, no marks rose from her skin, and she really didn’t think that biting off a chunk of her arm would have the same results.

* * *

Kaylin was accustomed to the interior of sentient buildings. Judging by the interior of this one, Alsanis was no longer sane. If the exterior wall had resembled shadow-imbued crystal—albeit somewhat malformed—the interior did not match. Here, the ground was uneven, and it was only barely ground. There were patches of what she would bet were sky to the left, shimmering slightly in the uneven light.

Nothing cast that light.

Interspersed with that sky was jagged rock, but the rock itself seemed to be composed of layers of detritus; Kaylin thought she could see a door jutting out from one large, flat curve. She definitely saw windows, and most of them weren’t in walls. Then again, she couldn’t actually see many walls.

The Consort linked arms with Kaylin, to Kaylin’s surprise.

“You have a tendency to get lost,” she said, smiling slightly. “And while it generally has interesting results, I would like to be lost with you should it happen.”

“You don’t—”

“Oh, not for your sake. The men worry; it is unpleasant. What do you see, Lord Kaylin?”

“Everything. I mean—a bit of everything. There’s a pillar, there—it’s broken. There’s a half wall that melts into gray mud. There’s an...arm, I think. I can’t tell, it doesn’t end in a hand. In the distance, I think there are mountains. There are windows in the ground to the far right—or holes that open into sky, because there
also
seems to be a lot of sky. That one’s raining. I don’t see much furniture, and I don’t see any other people.”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No; I hear them, though. Can you hear Alsanis?”

Kaylin shook her head. “You do?”

“I do. The lost are with him.”

“All of them?”

The Consort frowned. “I cannot be certain; I cannot count voices.”

“Do you hear—do you hear Teela?”

“No. But that is not a bad sign; were I to hear her from this remove it would mean that we are too late.”

Alsanis’s brother shook his head. “What you fear is impossible, Lady.”

“Oh?”

“Every Barrani in the West March—every Barrani the green might touch—will be altered and lost to you first. Teela cannot be touched.”

Kaylin frowned. After a long pause, spent picking her way over what looked like stone slats, she said, “Why?”

“The price was paid, Chosen. It was paid in life’s blood—Teela is beloved by the green; it feels always, and only, the affection and the terrible fear of her mother, and it has accepted the geas that death placed upon it. No harm, no change, will come to Teela while she stands upon the green.”

Kaylin almost missed a step. She said, quietly, “The children are trying to destroy the green.”

“Yes. They themselves are confined by their attachment to Teela. If she cannot join them while the green exists, they will destroy the green. It will,” he added softly, “destroy them; that is Alsanis’s fear.”

Kaylin didn’t understand why he cared.

“No, you do not. He has labored here these many centuries, with no respite, to find some way of preserving them. They are his guests. He hears their voices. They are not what they were when they came to him; they are not what they might be were they free. But he cannot confine all of what they have become. He cannot speak in a way that moves them; they are too intent upon what they see and hear. They will not be moved.

“Can Teela talk to them?”

“She cannot speak—”

“I mean, can she change their mind? Can she convince them to—”

“To what?”

“To stop trying to destroy the green.”

“An odd question.”

“It’s not—”

“Do you not think Teela desires what they desire?”

“No!”

The Consort’s hand tightened. “Lord Kaylin. Kaylin. It is often more complicated than simply yes or no. Teela was raised with children who were lost to the recitation. They were not rivals. They were not from the same lines; they were not in competition with each other. Had they been blood kin, it is unlikely they would have become as close as they did.”

“There is
no way
Teela wants the green to be destroyed!”

“No. But I am not so certain, were there not another way, she would not join them. Can you be?”

“Yes!” Kaylin pulled her arm free of the Consort—or she tried. The Consort was Barrani, and she didn’t want to let go. There’d probably be bruises. Teela had certainly left similar ones in her time. And probably for the same reasons. Kaylin knew what she
wanted
the truth to be. But she’d known Teela for less than a decade. In Barrani time, she was just a passing acquaintance. She fell silent.

It didn’t last. “Where are you taking us?”

“To the heart of Alsanis,” Alsanis’s brother replied.

Kaylin developed a healthy respect for the Tower of Tiamaris as she attempted to follow Alsanis’s brother. Tara kept the halls wide, the ceilings tall, and the windows even and long. The floors were either stone or wood, and they didn’t sag or change texture unexpectedly beneath passing feet. Chunks of roof did not suddenly liquefy and fall on the group like a wet, rotting corpse. Doors did not rear up like frothing, panicked horses and attempt to drop on her visitors, and the landscape wasn’t filled with the sounds of screaming, weeping—or laughter that made screaming and weeping sound good in comparison.

There weren’t any doors between the hole in the wall—a hole that pretty much vanished from sight when they’d walked what Kaylin estimated was ten yards—and their unseen destination.

But there were wards.

The first time they encountered one, the Consort froze. Kaylin could see her eyes darken to pure midnight. The Warden was likewise on alert—but Nightshade, Iberrienne, Lirienne, and Ynpharion didn’t appear to be as upset.

“Lady,” the Lord of the West March said. “What has happened?”

It was Kaylin who answered. “There’s a ward here.”

“I see no ward.” Lirienne glanced at Barian, and Barian nodded grimly.

“Calarnenne?”

“I do not see it.”

Severn?

I do.

Why?

He didn’t answer. And she realized she couldn’t force an answer from him because the ownership of the name went in the wrong direction. Not that she would ever have tried. She felt his amusement at both thoughts.

Kaylin really wanted a name to hang on Alsanis’s brother. It was hard to say, “hey, you” more than once or twice; Kaylin wasn’t always big on manners, but it seemed kind of rude even to her. Absent name, she turned to him. “Can you see the ward?”

He frowned. “This?” He asked her, pointing. “You call it a ward?”

“That’s what it looks like, to me. What do you call it?”

“A place,” he replied. “A belief. A statement of intent. It is meant to mark significance.”

“And if I touch it?”

“Why would you touch it if you do not understand what it is meant to invoke?”

Since this was an intelligent question, Kaylin bit back the short string of Leontine trying to force its way out of her mouth. She turned to Barian, who had, if she understood his position as Warden, more experience with wards than anyone else in the building.

Barian said, “It is as you see it. It is a ward of the green.”

“Do you know which one?”