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  The Arkon then reached the top of the altar, joining the Dragon and the Hawk; Severn neither asked for a ladder nor expressed an interest in seeing what the altar contained.

  Bellusdeo, however, drew breath. “This is a mirror.”

  “It is an ancient mirror, yes.”

  “Tara’s version of a mirror appears to be similar to this—and she doesn’t require an ancient cavern and a hall that is meant for—”

  “Me,” Kaylin said quickly; the Arkon’s eyes were a shade of orange that Bellusdeo didn’t generally cause.

  “Records,” Bellusdeo said. She spoke in Elantran, and followed it with Barrani. Kaylin had enough time to cover her ears before she tried it a third time in her native tongue.

  The Arkon waited until the echoes had died out—which, given they were in a cavern, took a while. “If you will allow me. The mirror is old. It requires a specific language.”

  “You might have warned me.”

  “You might have listened, but my experience has taught me better. I am too old to waste breath.”

  “You are wasting it now.”

  Kaylin thought it, but could not be paid enough to say it out loud.

  The Arkon exhaled smoke. “Perhaps. I will need to concentrate. I am speaking in the old tongue.”

  Bellusdeo’s eyes widened, but she fell silent and stayed that way.

  Kaylin had come to understand that the old tongue and true words were almost the same. The Arkon found them difficult to speak—but he had an easier time than Kaylin, who spoke them only with prompting and coaching by others. Languages had been one of the few so-called academic subjects in which she’d been any good—but no basic classes of any kind taught true words.

  The Arkon spoke, and as he uttered each syllable, Kaylin saw a golden rune begin to take shape in the air above the still, almost clear, water. She had seen it once, or something like it, the only other time she’d been brought to this cavern.

  “We don’t have the information in basic Records anywhere?” Bellusdeo nudged her gently. Kaylin, however, persisted. “This is about the Towers in the fiefs, right?”

  The Arkon finished speaking, and the rune speech had produced, glowing brightly in the poor light, began to revolve in the air. Bellusdeo didn’t seem to see the word the way Kaylin did, but she did see the marks on Kaylin’s arms begin to glow, as if in sympathy. Or resonance. It didn’t hurt, and the marks stayed where they were, beneath a layer of shirt.

  “I will excuse you your infernal impatience,” the older Dragon said as the word his speech had brought into being began its slow descent into the liquid the altar contained. “Because you have so little natural time. No, Corporal, this is not about the Towers in the fiefs. I’m certain you could just ask the Barrani.”

  “They don’t generally answer.”

  “You are not offering them the right incentives.”

  “I can’t fly, breathe fire or otherwise easily kill them, no.”

  The Arkon snorted. “The names you have mentioned are, I believe, the names the Towers were given when they were first created. But the name of Towers change. The Towers are not the Hallionne, although the Hallionne have similar function with regards to Shadow and its contaminant.

  “Shadow is flexible. The form and shape it might take could not easily be predicted. Ah, no. The knowledge of future forms and shapes could not be predicted. The Hallionne have no masters. The Towers, however, do. The reason for that difference lies entirely in Shadow and its lack of predictability. The living lords are meant to inform and update the Towers so that knowledge is gained and understanding remains firmly wed to the present.

  “But the lords of the Towers are not meant to exercise that control to the benefit of Shadow. There are, therefore, some lines that cannot be crossed; the base internal structure of the Tower will not permit it. You housed Gilbert.”

  “Not housed, exactly.”

  “The Towers could not, no matter the desire of their lords.”

  “Helen’s not a Tower.”

  “No. But in my opinion, Helen is unique. She desired self-determination, had the will to destroy those parts of herself that prevented it, and did not manage to destroy the parts necessary for her to become the home that she now is. What she now provides for you—and by extension, your guests—was not what she was created to provide; it lacks ambition.”

  “I don’t know, Lannagaros,” Bellusdeo said. “I consider it beyond ambitious, given the difficulties Kaylin stumbles into on a constant basis. And in my experience, a happy, safe home is a daydream. It’s an idle wish, an impossible yearning.”

  The Arkon’s gaze had moved to Bellusdeo, and the gold of his eyes dimmed. The inner membrane rose, muting the color even further.

  “If a Tower or a Hallionne could grant that wish, could maintain it in the face of the truth of the rest of the world, I would think it a grand design on the part of the Ancients. She could house my people. Maggaron is happy with his rooms—happy enough he almost never leaves them.”

  The Arkon bowed his head; his hand touched his beard. It was almost as if he were offering respect for the dead and the lost.

  “That’s unfair. He left them today,” Kaylin said.

  “Yes, true. But he is not what he was and I am not what I was; I think he feels at a loss. I should return him to the Norannir.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he wants.”

  “Sometimes what we want isn’t what we need.” Bellusdeo shook herself. “My apologies. I did not mean to interrupt, and these ladders are not particularly comfortable.”

  “I should have my beard singed off for this,” the Arkon replied—in Elantran. “You may, with my permission, forgo the ladder; try not to destroy the dress in the process; the Emperor is always uncomfortable with the armor in the open streets.”

  It took Kaylin a moment to fully understand that the Arkon was giving Bellusdeo permission to transform. There was certainly enough room for it, given that this was a cavern.

  Bellusdeo hesitated for one long breath, and then leaped off the ladder, landing heavily enough to cause a tremor. She then disrobed; Kaylin turned away from her as she transformed. She’d seen it often enough that it shouldn’t have been disturbing to watch, but it was; there was something about watching flesh melt that was always going to be a bit uncomfortable.

  Bellusdeo returned to the altar. Or rather, the altar side. She could now look down on the surface of the mirror without effort.

  Hope squawked at her.

  She roared back.

  The Arkon roared, as well.

  Kaylin wished she were at her unambitious home, where Helen could mute conversational Dragons. “Records,” she said. The surface of this gold-tinged mirror began to glitter. “If it’s all right with you,” she added to the Arkon, “the mirror will respond to me when I speak at the volume my ears were made for. You have to speak in your native tongue, and...I’d really, really appreciate it if you told me what you wanted to know and let me ask.”

  Bellusdeo chuckled. The Arkon did not. He did, however, nod. “We wish to know about the creation of the Towers.”

  Kaylin exhaled. To the mirror, to the swirling, moving water, she said, “Killian. Helen.”

  “Helen’s name is not a name that should exist within these Records.”

  “No. I’m testing a theory.”

  Chapter 7

  “Not smart,” Bellusdeo rumbled.

  Kaylin looked up and met the Arkon’s eyes. “Sorry. I should have asked first.”

  “Continue.”

  “Groveling?”

  “Explaining yourself.”

  The mirror, however, was now shimmering in place. The liquid was affected by a tremor that touched nothing else. As she watched, her attention split between annoyed Dragon and ancient Records, the liquid itself rose, as if it were elemental w
ater.

  A sculpture emerged as bits of the water fell; in the end, what was left was a building. No, Kaylin thought. Two buildings. Three. Four. One of these, she was certain, was Helen. No. It was what Helen had been on the eve of her creation. Kaylin couldn’t tell which of the four was meant to be the building she now called home. Nor was she certain that one of the other three was the building that Killian called home.

  The Arkon’s eyes were a less deep orange; he lowered his inner membranes, his frown becoming one of concentration, rather than annoyance at the presumption of a lowly Hawk.

  “Your theory, Corporal?”

  “That the mirror responds not to the commands, but the person who is making them.”

  “You will not test your theories in the future without explaining them and receiving the requisite permission.”

  “The Towers were created after Ravellon fell, right? But there were buildings that were created before that fall. The Hallionne, for one. Helen. I want to see the buildings that existed in what eventually became Elantra, because buildings don’t—in theory—have the ability to move.”

  The Arkon nodded.

  “You’ve seen this before.”

  “Many, many times.” The words were almost bitter.

  “Do you know which one is Helen?”

  “Ask the mirror to separate the buildings by geography. I can—with difficulty—command Imperial Records to overlay the boundaries of Elantra as it is currently constituted over it.”

  With difficulty meant a lot of spoken Dragon. Kaylin grimaced. “I’m not sure that’s necessary,” she said far too quickly.

  He stared at her, unblinking.

  “...but it could be helpful.”

  He then continued in his native tongue. There was a moment of serious dislocation; the water shuddered so violently in place, Kaylin wasn’t certain it wouldn’t explode outward—which would have been a career-limiting disaster of the worst kind given the Arkon, his hoard, and the fact that she would be tangentially related to the damage.

  She exhaled only when the shaking stopped. The water sculptures then shrank, separating as a faint map of the city of Elantra came into view. It was, unlike the buildings, flat; it was difficult to read. If she hadn’t been familiar with maps, and with this one in particular because it related to work, she wouldn’t have been able to read it at all.

  “Couldn’t you do it in reverse?” When the Arkon failed to answer, she added, “Take the contents of this mirror and append them to Imperial Records?”

  “Ask your Helen, when you return home, why I have made the decision not to do so.” And don’t, his curt tone implied, bother the Arkon. “This,” he added, indicating one building, “is where your Helen now stands.”

  The building looked nothing at all like Helen. It looked far more like a Tower, and at that, an unfriendly one. It was situated in the center of a much larger patch of land than Helen currently occupied. Helen could—and did—change her appearance to better suit her inhabitants. But it was a pretty drastic change, in Kaylin’s opinion. This building looked impressive and forbidding.

  It was not Helen that she was interested in, or not immediately.

  She looked across the city. There were three other buildings, distinct from Helen. Outside of the fiefs, Helen was, or had been, the only sentient building of which she’d been aware. Ah, no. There.

  She recognized the old High Halls. It looked remarkably like the new High Halls; the period between creation and...repair...had been erased. That was two.

  The Imperial Palace was not a sentient building. Kaylin sort of understood why. If a building like Helen existed, and the Imperial Palace could have been constructed around it, the Emperor was not the man to let anything else make decisions for him. Not when there were no effective remedies or consequences for the wrong ones.

  There were two buildings left, but she focused on only one of them: it seemed to be in the center of the city. Near, if not in, Ravellon; the map itself was not large, and the building had not been created with scale in mind.

  “This one,” she said.

  Three other buildings, including her own home, melted into liquid and vanished. The fourth remained.

  Unlike Helen, this building didn’t radiate doom on the surface. It appeared to be similar to what the High Halls had been prior to the repair of its central sentience. It was large—how large was hard to assess, given the lack of actual scale—and she remembered that Killian had said it had once been a school.

  What kind of school would it have been? What would classes taught by something that could literally change the environment of its students on a whim have been like?

  “Lannagaros?” Bellusdeo rumbled, concern in her voice.

  “It is nothing. Continue, Corporal.”

  “I think this is the building we were in.”

  “You said that the building appeared to extend from the border zone between Tiamaris, to the one between Nightshade and Liatt.” The Arkon’s expression was now composed of chiseled lines.

  Kaylin nodded.

  “I do not believe that this building would cover that distance.”

  “Not outside of the border zone, no.”

  “The border zone itself is comprised of a space between the territories of each Tower. Those border areas do not, in theory, extend across fiefs in a fashion that renders the fiefs irrelevant, invisible.”

  “Fine. But this building—I think it was in the border zone when the Towers were created.” As she spoke, the faint, flat map of the modern city faded into invisibility. The landscape changed abruptly, although some of the streets were old enough that she almost recognized the direction they traveled, the shape they retained, even now. The map that emerged from the heart of this mirror was foreign in most ways, a strong reminder that history was a different country, a different place.

  The center of this map was not Ravellon as it existed now. The fiefs were not the fiefs. Those who had lived near the center of this foreign city lived in larger buildings; there was greenery here, and a sense of wealth. The smaller buildings existed, as well; it was almost as if the people who lived in this place before the fall of Ravellon had desired to be as close to Ravellon has possible, and had packed themselves into the various spaces accordingly.

  In this context, the building was no longer its symbolic size; it was nestled in a large patch of otherwise unoccupied land.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  “Pardon?”

  “What happened in Ravellon that things changed so much?”

  “I would not ask that question if you do not wish to stand on that ladder for the next eight hours.”

  “Give me the short version.”

  “The short version? We don’t know. Some entity that made Ravellon its home fell, and Ravellon with it. There was no armed insurrection; no actual combat. Something changed. The change was slow and subtle at its beginning, and therefore hard to see; it was not so subtle at the end.

  “But there was warning enough that the Towers could be built.” As the Arkon spoke, the area that was now Ravellon darkened; the buildings and streets that led to it vanished from view. A visual barrier of dark shadow spread from a point in the center of the map to the edges of the lands it now occupied.

  “I thought you couldn’t speak to the mirror if you weren’t speaking in your native tongue.”

  “I am not speaking to the mirror. You are.”

  “I didn’t ask it for Towers. Or Ravellon.”

  “Not consciously, no. I find this both interesting and disturbing.”

  “Can we just stay on the interesting side of that equation?”

  He snorted smoke.

  Towers grew as the shadow spread. Kaylin had no sense of time passing; it was her private opinion that she, and people like her, would never have noticed the “fall” that was s
o catastrophic; they’d be born and they’d die before it finally became what it now was.

  Either that, or the Towers had been constructed in a day. Given they were created by the Ancients, that was possible.

  Yes.

  Kaylin didn’t recognize the voice. She shook her head, as if to dislodge all the other familiar voices that could intrude at any moment. She didn’t hear it again.

  The Towers grew; the buildings around them were abandoned by those who had either the desire or the ability to move. The land surrounding the six Towers took on a tinge of color; six different colors in all. There was no overlap.

  She watched the sentient building that had once stood so close to Ravellon. It faded slowly from view. It wasn’t, like the other buildings, abandoned. It was bisected by two of the Towers, its land absorbed on either side by what would now be Nightshade and Liatt, the latter a fief that Kaylin had never seen except on maps like these.

  The building itself vanished, crumbling into mist and nothing as Kaylin watched.

  “What are the border zones?”

  No answer, no new image, no new words from an unfamiliar voice, came to answer that question.

  The Arkon cleared his throat, which gave Kaylin enough time to cover her ears.

  The map of the fiefs and the Towers sank, once again, into liquid. The Arkon spoke, and spoke again; the mirror failed to respond. Or it responded in a fashion that she couldn’t see; with this mirror that was possible.

  * * *

  The Arkon did not speak again until they had trudged back through the cavern, the doors, the narrow short hall, and the various private areas. They were surrounded by the office again when he at last spoke.

  “The lands that surrounded Ravellon were contaminated by the will of the ruler of Ravellon; their existence as ‘normal’ lands had been heavily compromised. This would include the building nearest Ravellon. The Towers were created to anchor those lands, to return them to a base state that those who dwelled in them would recognize, and that Shadow could not as easily manipulate.”