The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (53 page)

The Devourer spoke a single word through her mouth. It was, of course, a Dragon word. Kaylin felt it, but couldn’t understand it—and for the sake of her very human throat, hoped that Tiamaris understood it the first time.

He must have; he became utterly still. He was the only one of the Dragons who did; Emmerian and Diarmat took a step back. She understood why, in part: the Devourer’s word meant the whole of emptiness, lack of purpose, lack of duty, lack of—of joy, of place. It wasn’t like loneliness—that one, she understood well. But it occupied the depths of which loneliness was sheer surface.

Tiamaris then said a Dragon word, and this one, she knew:
Hoard.

The Devourer fell silent; it was not a long silence. But it was broken by the rumbling of the earth beneath her feet, and the ground fractured, cobbles cracking in a line that seemed to extend along the whole street, or at least what she could see of it. She couldn’t turn to look behind her; she didn’t have that much control over her body.

But she could see, out of the corner of her eye, the familiar panes of the windows of Evanton’s shop.

Severn! Tell Tiamaris I have to get to Evanton’s. We have to reach the Garden before—

Water began to fill the crack in the street, and along the sides of what wouldn’t have passed muster as riverbanks in the clumsy drawings of five-year-olds, flowers began to bloom. The strangers shouted and the stiff and wary silence of their first few minutes broke.

But the Devourer couldn’t or didn’t hear them, and Kaylin therefore couldn’t turn. She took a step toward Tiamaris, whose eyes were a darker red than she’d ever seen them. Severn stepped between them.

Severn, no—

And went flying. She couldn’t even say where, because the act of throwing him out of the way was as consequential as his words had been to the creature who now rode inside of her. She understood what he wanted, then.

Tiamaris had a name. A word.

But so did Kaylin, and although she had no physical control of her body, a rune rose from her skin, and it grew to occupy the space that Severn had occupied for a few brief seconds.

Severn!

I’m all right.

Tell Tiamaris and the other Dragons to get back—

She could feel, rather than hear, his snort.

Okay, that was stupid. But the Devourer can see that they’re immortal. He can see that they have names, and he, he’ll try to consume them. He’s not trying to destroy them,
she added more urgently.
But that’ll be the net effect.
She cringed as the single rune, gifted by the Ancients, began to dim.

Tiamaris asks if you can stop him—

From what?

From destroying the street.

Not if everyone doesn’t
get out of the damn way.

They’re worried about the small army that’s materialized in the street.

Kaylin wanted to scream, which, given the Captains present, would probably have been career limiting.
I need you to get them out of the way.

She felt his nod; she couldn’t see it. And she felt the heat of Tiamaris’s breath pass around her like a charnel wind. She understood why; the fire didn’t hurt. But it stung.

She felt the rune dwindle, and she cursed as another took its place. She wanted to read the word before it was lost to her forever, but she wanted to survive, as well. She threw fear at the Devourer as if it were a rock and he were a closed bedroom window two stories above the ground.

But his attention flickered toward her and she caught it and held it for just a moment. She spoke a single word that she felt and heard as
home;
she knew that he heard it as if it were larger than anything she could comprehend, and he did turn then, like a ponderous, slow beast.

She prayed because she did that when she was terrified; it was better than whimpering or screaming. Sometimes it helped. Today? It was answered. Tiamaris, Emmerian, and Diarmat withdrew; the Swords, shifting numbers so they faced the obvious threat—to their mind—also made way, forming a tunnel that led from the foot of the portal to Evanton’s storefront.

The Devourer, who was used to roaming the vast and empty wastelands, couldn’t tell the difference between a door and a window, and the window shattered to give them passage. Grethan was standing behind the bar, his jaw dropping toward the floor in a slow, painful fall. It was, however, still attached to his face.

She didn’t tell him to get the hell out of the way, because she couldn’t; she didn’t
need
to tell him to pick up the stuff that her hurried passage was knocking over to the left and right. He’d lived with Evanton for long enough that bending in panic to retrieve his fallen garbage was second nature. But she walked past him; she couldn’t turn her head or speak a word, her gaze was now so focused. The Devourer knew where to go, because she knew, and she concentrated on it as if her life depended on nothing else.

They made their way through a corridor jammed on either side with shelves; it had never seemed so narrow. The slats beneath her feet were slightly warped wood, and they creaked in all the right ways for her size and her weight. The hall led to a locked door, as it always did.

This door, she knew. She knew its shape and its texture and the ways in which it could be opened. She knew that in theory only Grethan and Evanton could unlock it. Theory, however, didn’t and couldn’t contain the Devourer; he was part of a different story, a much older one, and the structural rules for
this
story had no place for him.

But he lingered at the door, and he seemed—for just that instant—to lose all sense of enormity, of the unknown and unknowable wilderness that was ancient magic. What he felt—or what she interpreted the emotion as—was something that was entirely contained in her experience: his desperate frenzy, the insanity and ferocity of
loss,
had, at last, given way to uncertainty. Fear.

This is where he wanted to be, and he wasn’t certain that it was where he belonged. The vast, empty wastelands had been his home for so long it was in, and of him. He was changed, and he didn’t know if the changes would allow him any return at all. And he wanted it; he wanted it so badly she could taste it.

It tasted of wind and rain and cold snow on tongue; it tasted of ash and smoke; it tasted of rock and stone and soft dirt. But it felt like…memory. She couldn’t understand his at all, but drifted, on the strength of the familiarity of the emotions they evoked, into her own.

She could only barely remember what her mother looked like, it had been so long since she’d seen her in anything but dream—or nightmare. But she could, conversely, remember her mother’s expressions: joy, anger, fear, pride. Love. And she could remember the feel of her mother’s arms around her, her mother’s voice in her ear—things she had to hold on to because there would never
be
any other memories. Not good ones, not bad ones. Nothing.

But she’d accepted the fact of her mother’s death. She was gone. The Devourer had no word for acceptance; he had no word for peace.

As if he could see or feel Kaylin’s memories, she felt them vanish, and she felt, in place of their comfort, the visceral, immediate agony of the fact of two different deaths: Steffi. Jade. The children that she’d adopted when she was no more than a child herself.

That loss was sharper and harder, and it cut her the way it always did when she returned to it; she felt her throat both dry and thicken until she couldn’t even swallow. She had worked her way to acceptance of their absence; she thought she had accepted the fact of their death, and she had.

But it was the
only
memory that the Devourer felt was akin to his own in some tiny, insignificant way, and he tore it up from its resting place. Some things, she’d buried for a reason. You had to look away from them if you were going to keep moving.

She remembered her walk through the streets of the Tower of Tiamaris, and she remembered what the Tower had said when she had confronted the Tower’s Avatar with her anger at that forced reminiscence of Hell:
What did I do? I spoke with you. It was hard. I tried to show you that I understood your pain.

Kaylin never wanted to communicate with anything ancient or immortal again. She also wanted to throw up. Instead she lifted her hands and placed both palms against the door, and this, the Devourer allowed.

She remembered what she’d lost now, because he made her remember it, and she
also
remembered why she had loathed and feared the Tha’alani so damn much. This, this invasion, this stranger tromping through the bits of her life that interested him, invading and exposing all of the darkness, was everything she had ever dreaded the Tha’alani would be. She’d been wrong, and tried to remember it.

She struggled with the anger, because now was not the time for it, and the anger was—she knew, although it was hard—misplaced. He
was
trying, in some small way, to communicate with her; he
didn’t
have all of the words. These emotions, these losses—they were the only similarity he could easily find.

Knowing it helped; knowing—or praying—that it would stop when he reached the Garden did the rest.

She opened the door. There were no wards, and she had no key, but her arms were burning, her legs almost shuddering with the tingling that had long passed the barrier between pleasure and pain.
I am trying,
she said, clenching her teeth,
to get you home, damn you!

The door swung in, the hinges creaking as if it were exactly as careworn and rickety as it appeared to be, and what the Devourer feared he would never find again, Kaylin found in an instant: she could hear the voice of Elemental Water, and through it, the voice of Ybelline.

Kaylin,
the castelord said, making a question of the name that held all of her concern, her worry, and her vast affection.

If she could have, she would have dropped to her knees and hugged the ground. But the Devourer wouldn’t cross the threshold, and at the moment, he occupied most of her.

I’m here,
she told Ybelline.

You must bring him into the Garden,
the castelord said carefully.

I think he’s afraid.

The castelord’s silence was slightly more complicated than usual.
How do you know this?
she finally asked.

Because he’s dredged up every memory I’ve ever had that’s grim and ugly, and he’s made it so strong I—
She shook her head, or tried.
I think he’s trying to tell me that this is how he feels.
She was somehow touching the Tha’alaan because she stood on the border of the Elemental Garden, and the water had her name.

Thank you, Kaylin,
Ybelline said.
I believe the water will speak with you now.

The water, wordless, wasn’t silent; Kaylin heard its movement. She opened her eyes, and she saw, not the garden with which she was mostly familiar, but the heart of the ocean itself. From it rose a wave that would have destroyed half the City had it hit. It was framed by a door that Kaylin only briefly considered shutting; she didn’t try.

No,
the water said.
You won’t.

Maybe because he won’t let me.

Water thundered and fell in denial. Kaylin got
very
wet. So, sadly, did Evanton’s books. If he survived, he was going to be
pissed.

It is not because you have no volition,
the water said,
but because you trust me. You are not elemental, and you are not wild. You are not ancient. You live, and die, so quickly your thoughts are fleeting and hard to grasp. I am not, and will never be, what you are.

But you trust, regardless.

He will never be what you are, and of all of us, he is the least affected by the brevity of your lives. He destroys them because he cannot even comprehend them, they move past so quickly. What he sees in you now is confusing. Were it not for your name, Kaylin-who-is-not-immortal, he would not see it at all.

He struggles to do what you have chosen to do, time and again, according to my daughter.

Daughter?

Ybelline Rabon’alani. You have chosen, time and again, to place trust and hope over fear and uncertainty. Teach him, Kaylin. Teach him this. He is changing the world in which you stand. If you did not stand in the lee of the Garden, you would not even recognize that world now.

But why—

It is his nature.

Tell him—

We have been speaking, Kaylin? Can you not hear us?

She nodded, because she could—but she was tired and in pain, and the sounds were natural sounds, not words, not deliberate communication.

Teach him. Show him how.

She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell the water that it
wasn’t
true. On bad days she didn’t even
like
people. Trusting them?

She spent her days patrolling Elani street, where sandwich boards and gaudy merchant windows made a mockery of trust; trust was for fools and the quirky rich. Trust, Morse had told her, was fine for corpses. Trust, she had learned in Nightshade, was just another tool to exploit, a weapon that
you
gave the exploiter if you weren’t careful.

Trust was for the willfully blind. She’d seen the corpses of women murdered by their husbands, their fathers, and once, their sister; she’d seen husbands murdered by their wives, and children murdered by strangers that they had inexplicably chosen to trust. It wasn’t a daily occurrence, not even in her years in the Hawks—but it was reality.

She was
not
a trusting person.

You trusted the Hawklord.

She was used to arguing with herself, and she even tried.
I thought he would kill me. I expected him to kill me. Trust didn’t
cost
anything.