The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (37 page)

These streets were mercifully unlike any streets she had ever walked before. “No,” she told Severn. It sounded like yes.

Paul Moroes had been a shock, Kaylin admitted that. But once she had seen him, she had lingered by his side, showing him the respect that no one in the world cared about, anymore. Not his sister. Not his mother.

Not Arna, either.

It wasn’t long before she found their bodies, mixed in the rubble, the way she’d known she would. They hadn’t been killed in the same way that Moroes had; they weren’t on public display in the open streets. Paul’s crime had to be
discouraged,
Morse had said. But their crime? It was the usual. Death was fine.

Only death was fine.

“You know,” she told Severn, when she could speak normally again, “I
hate
these places.” Turning to Nightshade, she added, “I am never going to complain about your portal again for as long as I live—”

And stopped.

“Tiamaris, is he going to remember all of this?”

“The Barrani are famed for their memory.”

“He never mentioned it to me.”

“Perhaps he had some reason for his silence.” He said it in a tone of voice that implied that Nightshade’s silence, and her lack of it, were strongly connected. He wasn’t pleased with her at the moment.

Then again, neither was she. Reaching out carefully, she took Severn’s hand. “I went to Barren,” she told him, “because there was nowhere else for me to go. I didn’t even realize I’d crossed the border. I found Morse, and Morse promised she would teach me how to kill a man. It was the only thing I cared about.

“But Morse? She worked for Barren. She trained me so that I could do the same thing. Work for Barren. I did. For six months.” Her fingers tightened as she spoke, as if she were afraid he’d pull away. “He told me who to kill, and I figured out how. I killed them,” she added. “The bodies in the first door that opened were the bodies of the first men I killed.”

His hand tightened around hers, but he didn’t speak a word. Didn’t really need to. “And the rest of the bodies?”

“The rest of the bodies, until the man I cut down, were bodies of people I’d killed. For Barren.”

“All of them?”

She frowned. “Yes, I think. I didn’t stop to dig them all out, and not all of them could be identified by their arms or legs.” She shrugged.

“These bodies?”

She flinched. “These…were different. The man who was nailed to the posts? I was supposed to kill him.”

“You didn’t.”

“I…no. I didn’t. I
understood
what he’d done. I understood why. It was what I would have done. What I wanted to do. It would’ve been like killing a part of myself. I thought I could do it. But I couldn’t.” Her voice dropped. “I left him a message, with his mother. He understood what it meant. I think he—he might have tried to move his mother and his sister. I don’t know.

“But Morse—or someone who worked for Barren—must have been following me. I wasn’t as careful, then. Not then. They must have heard what I said to him. I did
try,
Severn. I tried to kill him. But I couldn’t. We fought. I was injured. He was injured. I told him—I told him to clear out. I told him to cross the bridge.”

Severn looked away. He did not withdraw his hand.

“Yes. They heard that, too,” she told him quietly.

“What happened?”

“Moroes died.”

“And you?”

“I lived, more or less.”

“Kaylin—”

But he didn’t have to tell her; she knew. The shadows were gathering in his vision, but they were gathering in her chest, as well, constricting breath and words and thought. She had never told anyone about Barren. She hadn’t even told Morse, and Morse was kind enough—or brusque enough—not to try to guess. Morse didn’t offer sympathy, and she didn’t hold out hope; she offered life, and it was the life of a person who ends anyone else’s, on command.

“He didn’t have me killed,” Kaylin said, surprised at the sound of her own voice. “He didn’t even sound angry. He sounded sad. And quiet.”

“You do not have to say this,” Severn told her. “Not to me.”

“But I do,” she replied, keeping her voice even and her hands still. “Because if I don’t, we don’t leave.”

“You’re guessing.”

“Yes, she is,” Tiamaris said. “But as is often the case with Kaylin’s undereducated guesses, this one is, I believe, correct.”

“If I’m right,” Kaylin continued, “I’ll see other bodies. Other victims, not of my knife, but of my stupidity, my carelessness. People who died by chance, by being in the wrong place, by seeing the wrong damn thing. I didn’t wield the knife, and no one paid me, but I did kill them.

“I think,” she added, “that’s why you can’t see what I see; I’ve never let you. It’s dark, it’s horrible—it’s everything
I believe about myself.
The Tower is speaking to me, yes. Bit by bit, it’s unraveling all the lies of omission, even the ones I told myself. Maybe especially those. It’s pulling out the things that I kept hidden because I couldn’t stand to think about them.

“I don’t know who I am, Severn. I don’t think I’ve
ever
known who I am. But I know who I
want
to be, now. Maybe that’s all I’ll ever know. What I
was
is so large in my own mind I can’t break through it if it’s hidden. And I keep it hidden because I’m afraid. Of what it says about me. Of what it’ll say about me to people whose opinion I actually care about.

“I’m not proud of it,” she added. “But I can pretend I accept it—as long as I never have to acknowledge it. And
this,”
she said, throwing her arm wide, “is what it is. It’s too big. I need to let it be what it
was
.

“Barren never called me an idiot after that. He—” She shook her head. “I knew I’d failed. I knew I’d failed Morse.”

“And Barren?”

“Until then, I honestly didn’t give a shit about Barren.” She sucked in air. “After, I knew what I was to him. I knew I was his. I understood Morse better.” She looked at her hands, turning them so the palms were visible. “I knew I didn’t deserve more, Severn. When we lived in—in the other fief, I had hope. I had you, and I believed in you. When you killed the girls, it shattered.”

He flinched then, for the first time since she’d started.

“No,” she told him, gentling her voice. “This is
not
about you. This isn’t even really about the truth, because truth is so damn slippery. It’s about me. It’s about what I—as a thirteen-year-old—believed. I wanted to believe there was a reason for what you did. But I
couldn’t.
And because I couldn’t, the only reason I had to go on was you. In a twisted way, it was you.”

She turned toward the ruins surrounding her on all sides.

“I thought, if I killed you, the nightmares would stop. But they were worse, because I was killing. Me. I thought I could just kill Barren’s thugs, and that would be all right. I could justify that, to myself. But when Paul Moroes and his family died…I lost that.

“They aren’t the only ones who are here,” she added softly. “But they’re the first. They made me understand just how worthless I was.” She lifted a hand and pressed it to his mouth, which had opened, sealing in the words. “They died because I was an assassin and a coward—they were neither.”

Straightening her shoulders she glanced at gray sky; lightning streaked groundward in the distance, from the roil of green-gray cloud. “Storm coming,” she told him softly. “It would have been different, if I could have accepted what their deaths taught me about myself. I couldn’t. So I hated the Emperor.”

Tiamaris cleared his throat, and she grimaced. “I hated him anyway. It was safe to hate him—he didn’t care about the fiefs; it wasn’t as if he’d launch himself out of the safety of his palace and fly down to burn me to cinders. I hated the Halls of Law, and I hated the fact that they were supposed to protect people like Paul Moroes, but
didn’t,
just because he lived on the wrong side of the Ablayne.

“I hated them for not doing what I couldn’t do. I hated them for not stopping
me.
” She looked at Severn. “Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t make much sense, then.

“Mostly, I hated the Hawks because those were the officers I saw. I saw Swords, on occasion, but not damn often. We never saw Wolves. Just the Hawks, patrolling the far banks.”

“Where you patrol now.”

“Where we patrol now, yes.” She hesitated, and then said, “After Moroes killed the stranger, the Hawks clung to the banks near the bridge. They couldn’t prevent people from crossing, but they could stop them, inspect their cargo if they had any and question them. So people stopped coming to Barren. They probably crossed the bridges to every other damn fief. Except where the walls are. I imagine those were harder.

“None of which mattered to Barren. He tried sending his men out to case the bridge, and to offer the possibility of threat—but they couldn’t touch the Hawks, and they knew it. I went a couple of times, but I hung back, watching.”

“He sent you across the river, then?”

“Not immediately, no. I think he tried bribing the Hawks first.”

Severn raised one brow. “I bet that went over well.”

“How much are you betting?”

He laughed. It was almost a shock of sound, even though it was his usual, low laugh. She wanted more of it, but at this moment, she didn’t have the energy or the creativity to draw it out.

“It didn’t work. I think Teela broke someone’s arm; I
know
Tain broke someone’s jaw. Not that they have anything against the concept of bribery; they just felt the amount was insulting. Then again, they’d probably find
any
amount the merely mortal could offer insulting, and at least
I
grew up in a fief where insulting the Barrani was a life-shortening proposition.

“It was after that, that I left Barren. But before that, I was sent out to kill. Barren made some of the hits ‘invisible’ hits. People weren’t supposed to know it was him, so they couldn’t know it was me. Looking back, it was practice, of a sort. I learned how to scale buildings, how to use ropes and grapples and any old thing that might support weight. I learned when to do it.

“Sometimes,” she added, with a shrug, “I worked at night. No one’s careful at night except the people who are down on the streets. I didn’t know Barren as well as—as the other fief. But I knew it well enough. I was almost always in the same area. Morse didn’t like it,” she added. “But I was beyond caring at that point.

“I stopped asking what they had done. The victims. My victims. I stopped asking questions, because I didn’t want to know. Knowing, needing to know, had only killed three people—or four—who’d done nothing to deserve it. I think—I think that’s what Morse was trying to tell me when she got so angry.” She inhaled, and in the silent space of breath, she heard distant thunder.

“I was never as good as Morse. But I would have been, had I stayed. I don’t know if I would have ever been as scary.” She exhaled. “I would have been hunted, in the City, had I lived there. I would have been a dead man had I crossed the bridge, if the Hawks had any idea of what I did.

“And Barren ordered me to cross the bridge, in the end. The Hawks still lingered, choking off his money. He had trouble, near riverside, from the men who ran some of his operations, because they weren’t making enough money, either. They wanted him to do something about the Hawks.

“He decided to send them a message.” She shrugged. “I would have been just as happy to hit the men who were giving him trouble; I think Morse was sent to take out at least one of them. But that wasn’t for me. He never trusted me,” she added softly. “I—I don’t know that he ever trusted Morse, but he trusted her to kill them.

“Me? He sent me across the river. Morse argued with me. I didn’t have much to say.” But she did, and she could remember the conversation, playing out as if the years had unwound the moment she had entered the Tower. “Well, not much that was useful,” she added.

“I don’t know why he sent me. I know that he didn’t intend me to survive it.” She shrugged. “I didn’t really think about it, then. Later, yes. But even if I had, I don’t think I would have cared.”

The thunder was closer now.

“Kaylin,” Tiamaris said. “The shadows are moving. I can see some light, now.”

“Is that a good sign, or a bad sign?”

“It’s generally safest to assume anything you see in the Tower is ambivalent. You see a storm of some kind, as well.”

“Yes. It looks natural. For a value of natural that would give hives to the harbormaster.” Her grip on Severn’s hand tightened, and she realized that she had been speaking to Severn. It didn’t matter who else might hear.

He turned to look at her. “You can see me clearly?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see the rest of the City?”

He frowned, his eyes narrowing in something that was like a squint, but more subtle. “Not clearly. And it’s not much of a City.”

She shrugged. “It’s what’s
left
of a City. Is that better?”

“Is there a way out?”

“How should I know? We’re surrounded on all sides, as far as I can see.” She frowned. “You think I should know because it’s all fashioned on my experience somehow.”

“It’s fashioned on the way you hold on to your experiences.”

She nodded. “Can I make a way out?”

He laughed. “I think only you can.”

“Ugh. Welcome to my life.” She tried to smile, and found half of one; it was awkward.

“I told you,” he said quietly, “I don’t care what you did when you ran. I half expected you would die—” He looked away. “Because you weren’t in Nightshade. I looked. I knew everywhere you might go. You didn’t die. Whatever else you did doesn’t matter to me.”

“It matters to me,” she said quietly.

“Yes, and it should—but I’m not you.”

“I noticed.” And sometimes, she was grateful for it. “It’s different, for you. You wouldn’t change anything. And me? I would change it
all
.” She took a deep breath, and wiped dust off her hands. “But I can’t.”

“No. You can only do what the rest of us do—move forward.”