The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (30 page)

It left nothing in its wake. But the first layer of destruction was simple, the rest, less so.

The paths, little one, were closed then. The barriers were built. We understood that the paths themselves existed as a beacon for the Devourer who waited to feed. It was…difficult. We sundered ourselves—each world—forever from our brethren. We made this choice.

But…life is surprising. There exists—there have always existed—some fleeting thoughts that combine in ways we could not expect. We discovered that some of our children could travel. They could make paths or find paths between one world and the next that were now closed, even to us. We do not know how, or why.

They risk the Devourer. Perhaps they
flee
the Devourer. We cannot say.

“Some do,” Kaylin said quietly, because she could. “They flee, where they can.” For she remembered the face of the stranger in the waters of the mirror hidden at the heart of the Imperial Palace. “What does it want?”

We must say, to destroy. To utterly destroy. We cannot and do not know why. We attempted to communicate with it, once. Twice. A third time. There is silence now, where those attempts were made, and nothing will break it. We will not try again.

“How did they fight it?”

Silence. Kaylin waited for that silence to break in growing agitation. She turned to look back at the Consort, who had not moved.

“If it can devour
everything,
why does
anything
still exist?”

It lives in the void between worlds,
the voice replied.
And only there. But if it finds purchase, it brings the void with it, slowly and completely, until only that void remains.

“And it finds purchase by entering the world.”

Yes. We do not think it can find the worlds on its own, but it is drawn to life.

No, Kaylin thought. And then, yes. Because behind her, the lake waited, moving and speaking in a voice that never quite coalesced into something Kaylin could comprehend. “It’s drawn to
words.
To your words. To echoes of them. We arrived here, somehow. My people. And the Devourer didn’t follow because the world is still here.”

She turned back to the Consort, in the lee of a god’s ghost, and said, “Can you hear what he’s saying?”

“I can.”

“People
are
coming, Lady. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent it.”

“The Devourer will follow if we cannot.”

“They’ll
all die
if we do.”

The Consort’s brows rose, the delicate shape of her eyes rounding in obvious surprise. Kaylin had shocked her. “They are not even native to our world, Lord Kaylin. If I understand everything that I have heard this past day, they are travelers and they flee the ruins and destruction of their own. They lead the Devourer to us.”

“
Humans
aren’t native to your world,” Kaylin replied. “I don’t think—if what Sanabalis guesses is correct—that the Aerians are, either. But…if we somehow figure out a way to keep them out—they all die. And possibly with them the last of their race.”

The Consort’s eyes were a shade of familiar blue; she was angry.

Kaylin’s cheeks, however, had gone a shade of familiar red; so was she. “You didn’t hear or see the Oracle. I did. Yes, they’re coming in numbers—but if you listen, if you hear what the Old Ones are saying, or did say, or
whatever
—they’re fleeing. There were children there. Old people. This, whatever it is—it’s the last act of desperation. Somehow, some
one
of them, was able to figure out
how
to escape.”

“I did not bring you here,” the Consort said, in a voice that defined ice in an entirely new—and unpleasant—way, “so that you might turn your back upon
our
responsibilities. And our responsibilities as lords of the High Court and guardians of the lake—”

“I’m not a guardian of the lake,” was the quiet reply. “I’m a Hawk. You’ve lived here for all of your life. In the High Halls, or in the West March. You’ve had power, money, parents, and
even
siblings who weren’t trying to kill you.
I
had no fixed home, in the fiefs. I never had
enough
to eat, I was never certain I would have enough to
wear,
and I did whatever I had to do to survive.

“I know what that means. I even know what it might mean to people whose language I don’t understand. They want what
I
wanted. They want,” she added, “what
you
want.”

The Consort opened her mouth.

Kaylin continued. “And it
doesn’t
matter. The Oracles are
clear.
The portal is coming, Lady. It’s going to open, here, in the heart of our city, a stone’s throw from the High Halls and the Imperial Palace. If we can’t find a way to stop the Devourer, somehow, we will
all
die. Strangers, Barrani, Dragon, Aerian. It won’t matter if the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a slimy, cheating bastard. It won’t matter if the Arcanists are looking for new and interesting ways to rule the world by killing anyone who can prevent them. It won’t matter that the Shadows overrun the heart of the fiefs—
nothing
will matter.”

Silence, then. It was cold, and costly.

Kaylin drew breath, stopped speaking. She could not bring herself to apologize, but she
did
understand, because if Marrin were faced with the same choice? She would have asked the same thing. But Marrin ran the Foundling Halls, and Marrin took children like Kaylin into her home, feeding and guarding them because they had no one else to do it for them.

She turned, once again, to the heart of the light in this room, and said a single word. “Chosen.”

And the light answered, Yes.

The return from the Halls was silent. The Consort did not speak a word as she led Kaylin from the caves and through the paths of the Inner Court to the marble and heights of the outer building. She didn’t speak a word to the men who brought her carriage round, either, and she entered it like a winter storm. Kaylin almost offered to walk, but that would have meant speaking.

But as the carriage pulled away, the Consort said quietly, “What the Oracles see is not a given. Were it, we would have perished any number of times. They tell a slanted tale, and if their listeners understand it well enough, they can prevent catastrophe. You know this,” she added, a cool accusation in the words.

It was true.

“You must therefore accept it, on some level. The risk,” she added. “It is not a risk that I, or my brothers, would accept.”

“I don’t see any way of changing it. We don’t understand what’s being done well enough—”

“You wouldn’t destroy the portal, or stop it from opening, if you could. Let us see what the Imperial Court says.”

“How much of the truth will you tell them?”

She was silent for a long moment. “All of it,” she finally said. “The Dragons cannot be more of a threat than the Devourer, and my kin understand the threat the Dragons pose. We have faced it for centuries.”

“All of it,” in Barrani terms, was a lot less than it would have been in human terms. Kaylin wisely chose to let the Consort speak. The Consort, for instance, failed to mention the rune-covered cavern at the heart of the lake. She failed to mention the voices of the Ancients which had guided and advised the Consorts in their role as mother of the Barrani race for—actually, Kaylin had no idea how long it had been.

She did not fail to mention, however, what the Devourer was, what it ate, what it destroyed; she gave a cursory history of the Devourer, but then again, so had the Old Ones. When she was done, she fell silent, watching the Arkon.

The Arkon tendered her a very low bow. Nor did this seem to surprise her; she accepted it as her due. But when he rose, he turned to Kaylin. “Private Neya,” he said, his voice cool.

Severn, who had been content to watch and listen in the background now detached himself from Ybelline’s side and came to stand within arm’s reach of Kaylin. Or, she thought with a grimace, within foot’s reach.

“Arkon,” she replied.

“What transpired in the High Halls?”

“I believe The Lady has told you,” was her careful reply.

“She has told me much,” was his. “And I respect the risk she has taken. I respect the urgency with which she views the current difficulty. But she has said very little that directly involves you, and you have angered her. This is not terribly surprising. It is more surprising that you have not, prior to this, managed to cause offense. However.”

Kaylin stopped herself from shrugging, because it was a defensive fief gesture, and she was in a room with two castelords and two Dragons. “The Lady has, of course, told you everything of relevance about our current situation.” She spoke in High Barrani, and almost as flawlessly as she had ever spoken it.

“I…see.”

She wouldn’t have bet the smallest copper coin that that meant he was finished. And, indeed, he wasn’t. He turned to Sanabalis. “Lord Sanabalis, Private Neya is, at the moment, your student. You have had the time and the leisure to better understand her mood and her whim. She is bright enough for a mortal.

“What, in your opinion, is the difficulty now?”

Kaylin turned to her mentor in Magical Studies, as it was coined by the department. His eyes were actually gold, but he looked weary. “I would say,” the Dragon Lord replied quietly, “that she has been told that the best chance for our safety—and the safety of our world—is the prevention of the portal’s opening. Any portal.”

“And?”

“If the Oracular Halls are to be believed, the threat comes from the portal itself, in the end.”

“It does,” the Consort said coldly.

“But, if the Oracular Halls are to be believed—and I grant that Oracles are at best tricky until they are behind one—people will arrive, and in great number, in Elantra. She has heard some of their voices through one particular Oracle. It was to relay what was heard that the castelord of the Tha’alani was invited to attend us today.

“There are, among the multitude, both the young and the old. Private Neya is aware of this. She is, I would guess, aware as well that if the portal does not open, those people will be stranded in the lee of the Devourer, and they will die.”

“And?”

“That is all, Arkon.”

“They are not her responsibility.” The Arkon glanced at the Consort, and the Consort nodded.

“No,” Sanabalis replied. “They are not. Not yet.”

“Then I fail to see the difficulty.”

“I, too, fail to see the difficulty,” the Consort now added. “Given the threat, given the danger
we
face, given what
we
have to lose, I do not see that there is any choice. We must do what we can to make certain that the portal does not open.”

Sanabalis said nothing.

Kaylin tried to say nothing. She mostly succeeded, but her expression was now thunderous enough that Sanabalis raised a hand.

“Private?”

“If
I
understood what I was told today, we have thousands of people who are fleeing the utter destruction of the only home they knew. They are not an army. They are not an invasion. They’re doing what
any one of us
would do. Here, we’re safe, for whatever reason. And you want us to lock and bar the doors and let them be massacred because—”

“Because we risk—”

“Because of the
risk.
We don’t
know
how the Devourer does what he does. We have no idea. We don’t know for certain that the world will end the minute he touches it—but we
know
they’ll die. They’ll die there, Sanabalis.”

“Kaylin,” he said quietly.

“No!
We
arrived. The Aerians, I think, must have come the same damn way. The world didn’t end either time!”

“Perhaps the Devourer did not follow either your kin or the winged ones. You have no true names.”

“We don’t
know
that these people do,
either!
But we know that they’ll die. Even if the Devourer doesn’t
find
them, they’ll starve there.”

“Private Neya, they are
not
your people. Nor are they, any of them, the Emperor’s. You have sworn no oath to defend or protect them. They are not your problem.”

She was utterly silent then. But Ybelline crossed the room; Ybelline who had been as silent and still as Severn. Reaching out, she took one of Kaylin’s hands in her own. She didn’t, however, say a word. Kaylin resisted the visceral urge to lean against the Tha’alani’s shoulder, exposing her forehead to the touch of the slender stalks that characterized the race, in part, because she was certain that what she was thinking would be so blistering, it might cause Ybelline pain.

“Ybelline,” the Arkon said. “My apologies. The Dragon Court must now, I fear, convene. Private, Corporal, you are dismissed. High Lord,” he added, tendering the type of correct bow she had
never
seen him tender, “I believe, in the current circumstances, it would be to our mutual benefit to convene Court at your convenience.

“I understand that meeting the Emperor in the heart of the Imperial Palace on such short notice would be politically unwise, and I ask that you repair to the High Halls to consider where, and when, might be more suitable to our current situation. We have, I believe, little time.”

“It is a meeting of castelords?”

“It is a meeting of the Dragon Court,” was the reply. “In military matters, the Emperor’s decision is law.”

Ybelline, it appeared, would go with the Dragons, which left Severn, Kaylin, and a lot of food for which Kaylin had no appetite. She waited until the door had closed before she let loose a volley of pure Leontine invective.

Severn said, when she had paused for breath—because if he waited until she’d finished, it’d take an hour—“You did well, there.”

This, of course, stopped her flat. “Define
well.
”