The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (17 page)

This hall was as tall as anything in the Imperial Palace, but it was wider; the walls were largely unadorned. Doors could be seen along either side, and doors lay like tiny statements at the far end. But between that end and the one they now stood in, a Dragon could walk. He couldn’t fly, not here—but Kaylin would have bet every copper she owned that there were vast, vast caverns beneath these halls in which he could.

“There are,” Tara said, cheerfully.

Andellen glanced at Kaylin, who shrugged. “It’s not like I’m not used to visiting fieflords and having my thoughts plucked out of thin air. Are we going to the end of the hall?”

“We are,” Tara replied.

Kaylin hesitated, and Tara marked it.

“There is no danger to you, here,” she said quietly.

“I…might have a bit of a problem with portals, if we need to enter one.”

Tara stopped walking then. “Why?”

“I’m not sure—but I got out of nowhere with the help of Lord Nightshade.”

“Impossible,” was the flat reply. “He cannot travel to where I believe you might have been.”

“He didn’t exactly travel there,” Kaylin replied. “He went into the portal of Castle Nightshade, and he—he made a rip in the world. He pulled me through that. And he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to use his portal, afterward—I don’t think he thought I’d get to someplace I wanted to go. I’m thinking that probably applies to any portals that you’ve made, as well.”

Tara was quiet—and motionless—for what felt like a long damn time. Andellen, taking his lead from the Lord of this Tower as if she were Lord Nightshade, stilled, as well, which left Kaylin feeling distinctly fidgety. “Did he send you here?” Tara finally asked.

“Not exactly. But—he implied that everything about what I did, or what I experienced, is ancient, and it’s ancient in a way that he has no access to. And I thought—you were created when the world was ancient. But
you
can talk in a way that his Castle can’t. Or won’t,” she added quickly.

“There is a possibility,” Tara replied, without a trace of annoyance, “that you could touch Castle Nightshade. It would not have the same effect it had on me, because the Castle has been awake for centuries with no sense of who, or what, you are—but I believe, if you tried, it would hear you.”

“And I’d survive?”

The Tower’s eyes darkened into perfect obsidian orbs. They even reflected light. “You would survive,” she said, her voice, like her eyes, both dark and cool. It was disturbing, because she was still wearing her smudged and dirty gardening clothing—and none of it actually
looked
out of place. “I am not entirely certain what such communication would do to the current fieflord, and I assume he has forbidden the attempt.”

Kaylin nodded slowly, remembering—because it was so easy to forget—that the Tower could be damn scary.

“But it is not entirely necessary for you to retreat to the interior of the Tower, and perhaps not wise.” She turned once again and began to walk down the hall. Kaylin joined her and listened to the echoing fall of their steps in the acoustically unforgiving heights until they reached the doors—which were no longer all that tiny. Tara waved them open, a fact which made Kaylin love her even more, and they rolled into a room that was both huge, round, and almost empty.

Almost
referred to the large, circular pool of water that lay in the center of the floor. It was surrounded by about ten feet of stone on all sides, and while the walls had no obvious lights and no obvious magic—at least none that Kaylin could feel in the usual aching tingle of her skin—and there didn’t
seem
to be a window at the top of the curved ceiling, the whole of the room was lit as if it were a public fountain near the Imperial Palace at midday.

Tara’s chin, as she approached the still water without hesitation, began to glow, and Kaylin realized that the light was coming from the water itself. She started to follow, but Tara lifted a hand in the universal gesture for “stop.” Kaylin stopped.

In theory, Tara didn’t have eyes in the back of her head; in practice, she didn’t need them. She could, with very little effort, see most of what was happening anywhere within the boundaries of the fief, let alone the Tower itself. She lifted her head and raised her arms, and as she did, Kaylin saw the faint, translucent outline of delicate wings rising above her shoulders. They
really
looked odd considering the rest of what she was wearing.

She spoke, and as she did, the stone of the walls began to crumble. It was a slow, delicate crumble, as if rock were being turned to sand—or dust. But it wasn’t all of the wall; it was very selective bits. Kaylin watched as a gentle breeze came and brushed those aside, until what was left was a wall engraved with familiar runes.

“Tara—”

“No, it is not a danger,” Tara replied. But the words felt murky to Kaylin, almost muffled. “These are not what lies at the heart of me. I do not need to show you those,” she added, and her voice softened as she spoke, losing the hard edge of perfect, ancient knowledge, and returning, for a brief moment, to the soft vulnerability of a young girl.

Andellen glanced at Kaylin, raising a brow.

Tara replied, “No, she wrote them. Or rewrote them.”

The Barrani Lord’s eyes widened.

“But they’re not the ones she wants now,” Tara continued. “And even if they were, she can’t read them without help anyway.” She took a deep breath—there was some question about whether this was an affectation or a necessity on her part—and then spoke.

Or sang.

It was hard to tell the difference.

What was not hard to tell was the effect it had. One by one, the newly engraved words that rested within the confines of the circular walls beyond the edge of the glowing pool, began to glow with a bright, azure light.

CHAPTER 10

Show me,
Tara said.

Kaylin, staring at the blue light that now blazed across the walls as if it were fire, shook herself and turned to face Tara. Tara had taken two steps to the edge of the pool, lowering her arms to her sides. Her hands, like the runes, were glowing. “Show you?”

Show me the where that you were.

“That’s not normally how we say it,” Kaylin replied, joining the Avatar at the edge of the still water. She caught Andellen’s expression, and added, “She wants us to correct her use of what she calls idiom.”

“How would you normally say this?” Tara asked, speaking out loud, as if only remembering that she could.

“We’d say ‘show me where you were.’ Well, actually, only the Tha’alani would be able to say that in this case. The rest of us would say, ‘Tell us where you were.’”

“Show me.”

Kaylin nodded hesitantly. “Uh, how?”

“The water.”

“You want me to touch the water?”

“Yes.”

Kaylin bent and stretched out a hand.

“No! Not like that!”

She stood again, grimacing. Her reflection was perfectly clear. “How?”

“It’s a—think of it as a mirror,” she said. “Like your mirrors. This is one of mine. Just—talk to it, the way you talk to your Records.”

They weren’t Kaylin’s Records, and Kaylin had no idea how most of the information
in
Records actually
got
there. It had never occurred to her to wonder. But she nodded, as if information were now contained in…water.

“Just—think at it.”

“Think at it.”

“The way you think at me.”

“I don’t think
at
you, Tara. You hear what I’m thinking
at me
.”
Then think
, the Tower replied, with just a hint of frustration,
at yourself. But through the water.

Kaylin nodded, pretending the instructions made sense. “Records,” she said, automatically. Tara had, however, been as helpful as she could in the creation of this place: the surface of the water shimmered, and the light began to break.

“You can’t just skip the water and take it from my thoughts?”

“No. Not as easily. There’s too much and it’s hard to separate what’s relevant from what’s constantly just there. And it’s not only you who will be using my mirror,” she added, with the hint of a sniff. “I’ll need to show you things, as well. Maybe.”

“It was just a thought. Records,” Kaylin repeated, not because it was necessary—she had no idea what was necessary—but because it was familiar. Light across the surface of the pool—larger than any single mirror Kaylin had ever seen—began to break in a way that was both familiar and disturbing. Strands of different colors began to travel across the circle, moving faster and faster, as if they were seeking something. She thought they were like prettier versions of water worms. It wasn’t comforting.

They didn’t so much coalesce as interweave, squirming closer and closer together until they couldn’t be easily distinguished, and once they did that, the image sharpened. She knew where she was—or rather, what was being depicted: the inside of Evanton’s shop, in his very crammed back hall. The door opened.

“No,” she said, a little too quickly.

Tara’s frown could be felt; Kaylin was desperately thinking
at
the water in an attempt to displace the open image of the Keeper’s Garden, so she didn’t actually look at the Avatar to catch it. The image dispersed, but Kaylin thought that had more to do with Tara than with any attempt to save her own neck on her part.

She tried again, but this time she closed her eyes and faced out from the immaculate and somehow sterile version of the wrong damn garden, through an open door which faced a rapidly receding hallway. “Records,” she said, in a more subdued tone, when she was certain she had the image fixed in her mind’s eye.

This time, the world unfolded in gray; the only real color was, as it had been then, the glimpse of a familiar hall. Those halls, she thought, Evanton would forgive her. The Garden, never. The image followed Kaylin’s memories, probably more exactly than Kaylin herself could; the image shifted as if it had just taken a step. And then another.

“The hall?” Tara asked.

“I couldn’t reach it.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t run fast enough. There was no real ground—but what there was felt like dry, soft sand.”

“Records,” Tara now said. “Above.”

Nothing except the glimpse of hallway changed. Above—and below, which was the next instruction—looked pretty much the same as straight ahead, or behind. Kaylin looked across at Tara. Her eyes were still obsidian, but some spark of light—like lightning in a storm—now crossed their small, convex surfaces.

“This is bad?” Kaylin asked, keeping her voice as even as she knew how.

“It is…not good,” the Tower replied. She had lost the inflections that often made her sound like a young, excitable girl. Absent those, her voice was like a Barrani voice or a Dragon voice: the surface expression over the ancient. “How long were you—”

A low rumble entered the stillness. Tara’s eyes widened, her lips opening on a total lack of words, her question forgotten. She whispered a single word—an unfamiliar word that had at least ten syllables—before she dropped to her knees. She lifted both of her hands, palms down, and placed them flat against the surface of the pool; as she did, the rumbling grew louder. Much louder, in fact, than it had been for most of Kaylin’s endless, pointless walk.

Tara shook her head, and her hair flew free, caught by a nonexistent breeze in the still room. “Kaylin, where were you when this happened?” Her voice was low and urgent.

“In the—in a store—”
I hate this.
“I was in the Keeper’s home.”

“The Keeper?” She frowned, and then nodded. “The Elemental wild ones. You were
there?
”

“No. I was supposed to be there, but the door opened into a different place.”

“Different how?”

“Looked the same, but…it was empty. There was no life in it, no real movement, no sense of…of…” She muttered something in Leontine. “I knew it wasn’t the right place.”

“You crossed a threshold.”

“Yes.”

“A portal.”

“No.” She grimaced, and then added, “Not like the portals in the Towers, no. It’s always been a normal door. It doesn’t even have door wards. It has a boring, normal key.”

“It is very, very old,” Tara replied. “I have…no memory of it.”

“You probably weren’t built—”

“I have memories of things that occurred before I was created. It is part of my function. I was created to serve a purpose. Without knowledge of
why
—all of which would have occurred before my birth—I could not do so with any competence. But I do not retain that memory. If it is a portal, it is not a portal in any modern sense.”

The Tower’s use of modern in this context made Kaylin want to sneeze.

“However…it must fulfill that function. You opened the door and you entered an echo-world. You were aware of it. It is often not something that is clear.”

“What the hell is an ‘echo-world’?”

“Irrelevant,” was the curt reply. “I will speak more to the question later, if you remember to ask it.” She closed her eyes, concentrating on gods only knew what. “But this…space…is the great desert. This, I retain in memory. The memories are not clear. They are mostly fragmentary.”

Kaylin, who had not done particularly well in any geography that was not confined to Elantra, nonetheless knew what a desert was, and this, leaving aside the sense of sand beneath her heavy patrol boots, was not it. “Not in the normal, mortal context, it’s not.”

Tara frowned. “You should not have been able to reach it at all. Records,” she added. “Marks of the Chosen.”

The image obligingly shifted until Kaylin was looking at the insides of her arms—writ huge—as they had been when she’d inspected them after leaving the fake garden. They were, like the space that Tara called the great desert, colorless but glowing. It was more disturbing here than it had been there.

“Tara,” Kaylin said, struck by a sudden thought. “Can you
read
those marks?”

“Some of them,” the Tower replied, in the distracted way Kaylin sometimes answered the pestering questions of foundlings in the Foundling Halls.