The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (31 page)

“No Leontine, for one. Or Aerian. No shouting. No accusations. Come on,” he added. “I think it’s time to head to the office.”

Kaylin shook her head. “I think,” she said quietly, “it’s time to head to the altar.”

“No.”

She stared at him, but didn’t move.

“Kaylin, why?”

“I want to ask it a question.”

“The Arkon will remove your head. If he’s feeling merciful.”

Kaylin headed out the door. “If he removes my head,” she told Severn, “I’ll be dead, and I won’t have to live with the knowledge of what they’re trying to do.”

Kaylin’s sense of spacial geography was pretty damn bad, when you got right down to it; Severn’s, on the other hand, was exceptional. Though he hadn’t been there the first time, he’d been able to take her vague directions and make them work. He led her in silence past the shelves and the grand artifact halls, toward the smaller, more crowded spaces that weren’t meant for display—or easy access. They looked familiar to Kaylin, but it would have taken her hours to
find
them; the Library was not a small place and its layout was not a simple, sensible one.

But when he at last reached the doors, he paused, and she grimaced. Three locks. And they didn’t have one working key between them. Kaylin thought she could pick the locks, as they didn’t seem enormously complicated—but she couldn’t pick them without any
tools.

He said nothing. But he did step aside, and as he did, he held out a hand, palm up. She looked at it, confused. And then she looked at her wrist; she was wearing the bracer. She hesitated for just a minute, and then hit the studs in the combination that would unlock it. It clicked open, and she put it into Severn’s palm, which hadn’t moved.

“I don’t want to use magic here,” she said quietly. “Not now.” And never in the Arkon’s Library. “I don’t suppose you have—”

“I don’t at the moment carry equipment for picking locks, no.”

“Did you, when you were a Wolf?”

He shrugged. “We had different standard tools, yes.”

She nodded and turned to the door. It was dark in the hall, but Severn had carried light. He held it up now.

The problem with magic—or at least Kaylin’s magic—was it worked best when she didn’t have time to think. In these small, short halls, she did.
Are they right?
Her hand rested against the door’s surface.
If the Devourer does follow, if we can’t contain it somehow—do we doom the city?
Marrin and her Foundling Hall. The fiefs. The midwives. Marcus and his Pridlea. The Hawks.

She wasn’t good with lists, but she recognized one when she’d made it. What did she hold in balance against these things? Thousands of strangers, who might or might not present a danger all on their own to the city she called home.
Maybe,
she thought, without much hope,
if we prevent them from opening a portal into Elantra, they’ll find someplace else. There has to be some other place.
And then the magic that had screwed up a large part of the city, disrupting births and commerce and highly sensitive investigations among other things, would
go away
.

But if they found nowhere else to go, they would die.

So do you choose strangers who aren’t even your responsibility over the people you love?
She glanced at Severn. Severn, as usual, let her work things out on the inside of her head, alone. Sometimes she hated that. Because sometimes it would be
nice
to have someone else come up with the answers.

Or would it?

She grimaced. The Emperor was probably coming up with the answer
right now.
Was she content to let him decide? To trust his ruling? Here she was, in the heart of the Arkon’s hoard, skirting the edge of his rules, for the sake of more information, in the hope of finding some
other
answer that could save these people.

Why? Why? Why?

As if it was the magical word, the locks in the door clicked open in slow succession. “You know,” she told Severn quietly, “it would be a lot easier to be me if what I wanted didn’t clash so badly with what I
also
wanted.”

He laughed. “You can have everything if you set your mind to it. You can’t have everything at the same time.”

“The trick, I suppose, is wanting what you do have.”

“That would be the trick, yes.”

She entered the cavern. This time, they held only a lamp—a nonmagical lamp—instead of torches. The room, however, wasn’t noticeably dimmer; the altar was shedding light as if it were a trapped moon. The runes on the altar’s side were also glowing, this time in a mix of blue and gold that reminded Kaylin of flowers she had once seen and had no name for.

The heavy rolling platform upon which she’d stood hadn’t been moved; it was still stationed above the water that served as an ancient mirror. Kaylin walked slowly toward it, Severn by her side. “Do you want to wait outside?”

“I don’t think that will mollify the Arkon, if that’s your concern.”

She grimaced. “It was. And you’re right. You might as well come up and take a look. You can stop me if I look like I’m about to fall in. Or,” she added, as she began to climb the ladderlike steps, “let me drown. It’ll probably be less painful.”

Kaylin stood on the platform and looked down into light. It was silver and sharp, but it wasn’t painful; it didn’t make her squint. “Severn?”

“I can see it.”

“Good. Can you see anything but light?”

“No.”

“Mirror,” she said softly. “Records.”

The light didn’t change, and she grimaced.

Severn, intuiting the problem as he usually did, said, “Keep trying. You had control of the Records here before.”

She’d had no intention of giving up. But she knelt to bring herself closer to the water, something that shouldn’t have been necessary; you didn’t have to touch mirrors to invoke them, and frankly, it just pissed off the people who wiped up your fingerprints afterward. Water, on the other hand, didn’t
take
fingerprints. She reached out, held her palm above the mirror’s surface.

Help me.

The water was absolutely still. She took a breath, and then another, and then exhaled about four inches of height.

Help me to help
them.

The light shed by the rectangular surface of this ancient mirror began to condense. As it did, Kaylin wondered how it was that the water—which didn’t seem to her eyes to be all that deep—had actually lasted for all these years without evaporating or growing mold. It was the kind of stupid thing she could wonder in the face of the unknown.

It was not the kind of question she expected to have
answered
, on the other hand. But there was an answer, and as the light broke, fractured, and recombined, swirling into shapes, she saw it. She saw the almost ethereal faces of people that weren’t human, weren’t Barrani, and weren’t Dragon; she imagined that they were twice her height and possessed a hundred times her gravitas. But one of them, male, she thought, although it was hard to tell, opened his wrist. Literally opened it, as if the whole of a body could be bent at will to any task.

Blood ran into the engraved stone basin. It wasn’t red. It was gold, and as it touched stone, it became clear, like very thin honey. She heard the echoes of their distant voices, and saw the spoken words take shape and form above the mirror, sinking slowly and losing cohesion as the water dissolved them.

“Can you see that?” she asked Severn.

“Yes.”

“What do you see?”

“The Ancients are blessing the water.”

“Blessing?”

“They’re speaking over it. Incantation?”

Even in a mirror vision, he didn’t
see
the words the way she did. “Can you understand any of it?”

“No. What did you ask the mirror?”

“You don’t want to know.” She watched the words as they joined the mirror, becoming part of the liquid, one by one, and wondered whether this was how the first creations had come to life, and if—and she bit her lip, shunting the thought aside. It could be bloody dangerous to just stand here and think; she’d get nothing but answers all day long and the world would probably burn down—or worse, fade out of existence—while she did.

Instead, she said two words:
The Devourer.
And waited.

The face of a familiar stranger now filled the mirror, with his oddly copper eyes and his long, graceful features. This time, however, he was not alone. To his right and left were two people she had not yet seen, a male and a female. “The Devourer is at the gates,” he said. He was grave.

Their eyes, she saw, now shaded to a copper that was as dark as his.

“We can stand, or we can travel,” he told them. “It was not dead, as hoped.”

“Travel?” the woman asked.

“There is a way. We can take those we can reach, and we can attempt to find a safer world.” He glanced, now, at the silent man to his left. The man nodded, but didn’t speak.

“What safety, in the end, can we find? The Devourer has found three worlds.” The woman spoke. “Everything we have ever been or done is
here.
If we can survive—”

“Can we? Can we stand where the others faltered? What we have at our disposal is less than what they had at theirs, but they are silent, now. There is only emptiness where they once stood and built.”

“Our
life
is
here.
What life will we have in a different world? How will we wake the newborn sleepers? How will we—”

“We risk never waking them again at all!” It was the first time he had raised his voice, and it was in anger.

“The Devourer will find us, if we travel.”

“The Devourer has found us
now.
If we travel, Kallinda, there is
hope.
”

“And for hope, you abandon the hope we have now?” She turned from him, her anger not less than his.

“We have no hope now,” was his stark reply. “And you must choose. For myself, I will begin to gather those who are willing to make this voyage.”

The second man, silent until now, nodded. “I will watch,” he said. “I will travel with you, and I will record until the moment there is nothing at all to record.”

Her hands were slender fists, and her eyes were now red—but with weeping; the deep, blood color of true Dragon or Leontine fury didn’t touch her irises. “I cannot condone this,” she said. “I cannot desert our kin.”

The man Kaylin had first seen, the man whose name she didn’t know, bowed his head, and fury left him. The woman, Kallinda, walked away, and when she had left the image, the man raised his head. He, too, was crying, but the tears didn’t change his expression.

“You knew she would not leave.”

He nodded. “Hope is often bitter, but it drives us, and we cling.” He turned, and straightening his shoulders, added, “We will begin. I will start the preparations. We have three days.”

CHAPTER 17

Kaylin recognized parts of the next scene, although it was entirely new. She thought the man had gathered some thousand—possibly more—of his kin. They were what you might expect if you’d reached across as much of the city as you could and taken only those who were willing to listen: old, young, men and women in various different styles of dress. They were pale, and the eyes of all but the youngest were a uniform copper.

But some of the youngest? Like children everywhere, even in the wake of loss and disaster, they were golden-eyed and curious. They wandered as far as their parents or guardians allowed, and she could almost swear she heard someone say
leash
with resigned longing.

Clearly, food was necessary, especially in the middle of nothing. Food had been taken, but it was carried in backpacks, since they were walking. There were, she thought, wagons of some sort—but whatever was in them was tied down tight, and the wagons themselves were harnessed by men, not beasts. She wasn’t certain why. They stopped, they gathered, they ate. She could see that they had organized in a way that allowed them to head count.

But she could also hear, in the distance, a familiar thunder. A growling.

They moved, stopped, moved; these were shown quickly, like a series of still pictures interposed one on top of the other.

Kaylin knew who one man was. Vakillirae. She saw him clearly as he turned; she saw him address his people, and she saw their open dismay, their unchecked tears, their hope and their lack of hope. And then she saw a second man, and she thought he must be the traveler, for he, too, spoke. She saw the light in his hands, and she saw that it calmed those who were not too far gone to
be
calmed.

But Vakillirae remained when his people began to rise; he remained standing when they began to move. He watched them in silence and stillness until they had all but passed from view, and then he smiled. It was a grim, bitter smile. He turned, and the view in the mirror turned with him, always on his face.

She heard the roaring now, a counterpoint to his movements, and saw the set of his lips change before he opened his mouth. He began to speak, and she both recognized and failed to understand
any
of his words. But Sanabalis had used them, once, and she had seen them form around him, like some sort of living grid. This man and his ancestors had, at the start of their racial history, the same gods as the Barrani and the Dragons.

The words that she recognized began to form in a ring around him, as they had when Sanabalis had told the Leontines their story. The roaring grew louder. She understood, then, that he had summoned the creature by speaking them, and that he knew, before he started, this is what he would achieve. But she had no idea what he said, or spoke; she had no idea if this story, like Sanabalis’s, was a story of creation.

“What do you see?” She didn’t turn to Severn.

“I see a man with copper eyes. He’s speaking.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“You don’t recognize the language?”

“No.”

The gray of the sky—and the ground—began to darken; wind caught his hair and blew it back in a horizontal line. He was stone, or very like it, except that he continued to speak.