The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (52 page)

But the Devourer heard, and the Devourer turned; she could feel the movement of his internal eyes. His eyes.

She rose without any volition at all, approaching those eyes, which grew larger and larger. She had thought them deserts, both ice and sand—at a distance. Some sense of that emptiness remained, but none of the sense of geography; she would have lifted her hands to shield her eyes, but she couldn’t move her arms at all. She could barely close her eyes.

When she opened her eyes, she almost closed them again. She could see light and darkness and the uneasy blend of both; it was like a very spectacular hangover, but without the pain. Pain came from confusion. But the confusion, in this case, wasn’t hers—it rode her. Or she rode it. She couldn’t sense her body at all. The only thing she could sense—and it was the wrong word for what she now felt—was the immensity of emptiness. She was, she realized, the Devourer. She was part of him; she saw and felt what he saw and felt—but she could only dimly understand any of it.

Whatever parts of her that were Kaylin were so insignificant she couldn’t feel them at all. This was admittedly worrying; she took a very figurative deep breath. He didn’t. What he could see, she could now see—but interpreting it, making sense of it? It was as if what he could see was filtered through her very human, very normal vision. Which meant she was still herself. Somewhere.

He turned and she turned with him, as if they were indivisible. There was one solid thing in this blurred and shifting landscape, but she wasn’t certain what it was.

As she circled it in a frenzy, she realized what it
must
be, but the Devourer’s vision didn’t see words—even ancient, living words—the way hers did. These words didn’t look like runes; they didn’t look like fire, earth, air, or water to Kaylin, either. But their light was in motion, and as she watched—and she did, because she didn’t have much choice—they traced a complicated pattern, a type of dance, across the ether, and the trail of their luminescent shadows lingered where they’d passed. She
did
recognize those.

It was as if the words the Devourer saw and understood cast shadows, and those shadows were a type of ink, something that Kaylin could see and comprehend. She realized, then, that that’s all she’d really ever see of the words: the light they cast, the thing they left behind.

And what are we? What are the rest of us?
Nothing else cast those shadows, nothing else scrawled across the ether in the Devourer’s vision.

Kaylin.
She could hear Severn; he was her anchor.

Listen to me,
she said, to the Devourer.
Listen to what I tell you.

He paused in his frenzied circular motion.

She spoke of her world. She spoke of the things that she knew of it and imagined, as she did, that she was laying down the complex, complicated, lines of a world in a brief pencil sketch. But he understood
something
about what she tried so hard to tell him because he had made her part of him. He had taken her name.

The elements aided her, picking up threads of her story, leaving the shapes of other words in their wake; words that were in some part derived from their baselines, but also unique. But they moved so damn fast, Kaylin couldn’t follow it all, and she gave up trying. She let them speak; it wasn’t a conversation, exactly, but it wasn’t the noisy, shouting chaos of a mob, either; she could speak and she was certain she had his attention.

What she wasn’t certain of was how much of what she was trying to say was getting through; how much of it was being processed. She had no sense of the passage of time, but at the same point, Severn’s urgent—and silent—worry let her know that it was, damn it, passing.

Listen to me,
she said.

And this time he said: Who are you?

Put me down,
she told the Devourer after a long silence.
Put me down where you found me.
She expected the concept to be confusing because he hadn’t
exactly
picked her up; here, she trusted the conduit of name to translate some small portion of her thought into his vast mind.

She landed, with a whumpf, against the squishy, gray ground just behind Severn’s feet. She could see Severn again. She could see everything. The portal—and it looked like something majestic and vast, as different from the portcullis of Castle Nightshade as night from day—was open, and the ghost of Elani street was clearly visible. It was gray, but color was slowly appearing on its cobbles and its sandwich-board signs as she watched. Had she not been standing so close to the troop of Elders, for want of a better word, she wouldn’t have been able to see a damn thing; people were pressing in on all sides, and she wanted to tell them that if they stood that tightly packed with naked swords and axes, someone was going to lose a leg.

What she couldn’t see—at all—was the Devourer. He was there; she had no doubt. But he was gray and vast, like the nonworld itself. Without the roaring of his deadly storm, nothing gave his presence away.

You let me see what you saw,
she told the Devourer.
Try, now, to see what I see.

She looked at the portal, and then found herself looking away as the Devourer did, indeed, borrow her vision. He, however, had his own ideas about what was, or might be, interesting. So she saw what he wanted to see, but she saw it as Kaylin Neya.

What are they?

This was easier.
People.
She saw the word form in front of her, and knew that it was both ancient, and less ancient than the Devourer.

Why are they here?

They have nowhere else to go. They seek safety.
She hesitated, and then added,
They have no home.
Another word formed, and this one she knew. She knew it not because she’d seen it before, but because she could
feel
its truth so strongly it might have been her name.

But she noted that the Devourer made no frenzied attempt to pull apart either of the two words in a continuation of his desperate search.
Don’t,
she added, as she felt movement.
You’ll break them.

Severn touched her shoulder gently. “It’s almost done,” he said.

She nodded; she would have turned, but couldn’t; the Devourer was still looking, as she’d asked, through her eyes. Seeing what she saw
as
she saw it was confusing and strange to him.

She could almost feel him try to make sense of it, try to relate it to something familiar. Fair enough; it’s what she’d do.

She heard shouting, and she did turn then—because he’d heard it, as well; apparently he hadn’t confined himself to vision. He saw the strangers ready themselves, and saw them turn to the portal, toward which he now also turned. Both of him: the part of him that occupied Kaylin by force of will and use of the name she’d given him as a trapdoor, and the large, amorphous, world-eater.

Both froze.

He saw what she saw, yes, but he saw what he saw, as well: the luminosity of words, hidden and pale, in the distance. They were stronger than the words she’d spoken—but they were not as strong, not as vital, as the elemental names. He held himself in check because he understood that she meant to take him to where they
were.

But…he
wanted
these other, lesser, words, and it was a hunger which grew as the seconds passed. So she said to him,
take mine.
And this time, when she lifted her sleeves—which Severn was, she realized belatedly, deliberately not staring at, they were now so ragged—he looked
at
her arm.

One glyph rose from her skin, taking a shape in the air that almost dwarfed her. He touched it; she felt him. But it was odd; it was as if the word were meant, in its entirety, to be disassembled by him.

“Severn,” she said, as she saw the light of the rune begin to dim, “we have to move
now
.”

By dint of personality and presence, Severn made her will known, and as the streets at last gained their full color and shape, the old woman rallied her tired, her hungry, and her lost, and she called upon the men who guarded the train. She sent them through first.

Kaylin was on their heels.
Follow,
she said, and as she moved, the mark that she had sacrificed to his hunger moved with her, like a fancy carrot-on-a-stick. She almost laughed. Or wept. He brushed past the refugees as if they no longer existed, and they felt his passing as if it were a strong gust of wind.

Words,
he said as they cleared the thin membrane of portal.
Words!
It wasn’t all of what he was saying, but it was the only part that made sense to Kaylin. The hunger almost overwhelmed him. Kaylin shook her head, lifted an arm, and again, a glyph flew free. She wondered, as it began to dim, if this was the way she would lose her distinguishing marks forever. Realized, as she wondered, that if she’d once hated them, she’d grown attached to them; they were a part of what she now was.

If asked, she’d have sworn she’d be ecstatic to be rid of them. But ecstatic or no, she
did
it, and that had to count for something. She had one moment of numb fear when he breached the portal because the portal
folded,
buckling and rippling in a way that threatened to pull down the damn
sky.
She cried out in alarm, because the sky
was
tearing, and she could see red and black and iridescent gold in the rents.

But because he held her name, he felt her alarm. He didn’t understand it, but he stopped his feeding for long enough to look at the portal through her eyes. He paused as if caught, the hunger forgotten; she felt a ripple of something that might be concern, and then the portal straightened and the sky reasserted itself.

It was brighter, bluer, and
clearer
than it had been scant seconds before. This didn’t make her any happier; he was staring at it, and her own lips pursed in a frown. She asked the water what had happened, and received only silence in reply. She was here. The voice of the water was not.

But…the Devourer was here, almost here, as well. And she couldn’t see him—not with her own eyes. His, she didn’t ask to borrow again.

She would have marched straight to Evanton’s, but the way was blocked.

Armed men stood ten yards from the portal’s mouth, and when they saw the travelers who had walked so far and in such isolation to reach this city, they stiffened; no surprise there. Kaylin would have, had she been in their shoes. They were, of course, members of the Eternal Emperor’s Law: the Swords and the Hawks. Kaylin had no doubt at all that there were Wolves in the buildings above the portal spawn point.

But
these
people, Severn could talk with, and he separated himself from a veritable forest of bristling armed men and women, walking with his hands palms up until he reached the commander of the Swords. One palm snapped a perfect salute. She could hear him talk but she couldn’t make out the words; they were lost to a very familiar, very unwelcome roar.

It was answered by a very welcome one.

She couldn’t see him through the crowd given her height, and she didn’t try for long, but she recognized the Dragon roar of Tiamaris.

CHAPTER 29

It didn’t take him long to clear the crowd; even the Swords were familiar enough with the etiquette of the Dragon Court to give them passage. Tiamaris hadn’t come alone. He didn’t have Tara with him, but Kaylin thought it was impossible for the Tower’s Avatar to leave her fief; to her knowledge, she had never tried.

Instead, he came flanked by two Dragons: the Lords Emmerian and Diarmat. The Swords moved to make way for them; all three were wearing the crest of the Dragon Court. In Elantra proper, fief laws didn’t apply; Tiamaris was not, there fore, wearing the big scales and wings of his Draconic form. But in an emergency, he could—and the knowledge of that radiated from all of the Dragons present. They weren’t tall compared to the strangers who had begun to appear in the hundreds in the street, and their swords weren’t greatswords.

But their eyes were a dark shade of orange as they turned from the Captain of the Swords toward the unnamed and unknown intruders, and something about the color of their eyes made those strangers fall silent.

“Corporal,” Tiamaris said, without taking his gaze from the ring of guards that stood between the Swords and the less aggressive refugees. “Private. The danger?”

Kaylin tried to answer; the Devourer, however, was in control. She roared. Which should have sounded weak and unimpressive, especially when compared to a Dragon’s roar. It didn’t. It also sounded nothing like Kaylin. She wondered what color her eyes were. All three of the Dragon Lords turned to face her.

They’re the color of glass, Kaylin,
Severn told her.

Glass?

Yes. You can see through them.

That was disturbing.
See what?

Night.

Oh gods, Severn—it’s not Shadow—

No. Night. Moons, stars.

Tell them I’m still here. Tell Tiamaris—ask him—not to go Dragon. He’ll crush the Swords who are standing nearby.
The Dragons’ eyes were red. Kaylin knew it was illegal to make the transformation from human form to Dragon form without Imperial dispensation, but she was pretty sure they had it. And even if they didn’t, who was going to stop them?

Not the Swords.

And by the look of them, not the exhausted and grim people of the otherworld. They tightened their grip on their weapons and they looked to the old woman. The old woman, however, pointed at Kaylin, and at the marks on her arm, which were glowing. It was a coruscating light, different from the constant blue glow they usually shed when they shone.

No one moved.

Except for Kaylin. She stiffened as the Devourer roared. Tiamaris roared
back.
His roar, however, was different: he was speaking. The Swords—and, give them this, the scruffy strangers—were disciplined enough not to cover their ears.