Cast in Silence Read online

  “You don’t think they’ll use them so they can take you down? They might not kill you. Not yet. Not if they think Barren’ll be pissed. But they’ll hurt you, and you’re letting them know how.” Her face was red enough that the white scars stood out, like broken, brittle strands of old webbing.

  Elianne stopped talking. Her own anger turned sideways and slipped away, leaving her stranded with Morse’s and nothing to stand behind. She had never seen Morse this angry. She never wanted to see Morse this angry again. She tried to speak, swallowed the words, and trailed after her, like quivering shadow.

  Because she knew—even then, she knew—that she could not make it, not yet, without Morse. If Morse turned her out, she was as good as dead. Or possibly, thinking about the houses closest to the river, worse off.

  “I should never have taken you on. I should have known better.” Morse, by herself, had now cleared the streets the way a small squad of Barren’s men on a bender might have. When she wheeled and turned on Elianne, Elianne leapt back. “You need to decide what it is that you want. You want to learn how to kill a man? I’m your woman. You want to coddle fucking urchins? Run across the goddamn bridge and crawl up the steps of some fucking church!”

  Kaylin’s foot touched bridge.

  She couldn’t see it. She could see the gray and shimmering light of this particular portal, and while she didn’t much care for it, she didn’t much care for any magic. Gray was better than pitch-black, and at least it wasn’t winter-cold. It was also thin, like a veil or a curtain, rather than a big, heat-sucking void. She wondered, briefly, if Nightshade could change the entrance to his damn Castle so it didn’t chew her up and spit her out so badly anytime she visited.

  Then again, she hadn’t actually gotten to the other side of this one yet.

  Severn’s hand tightened around hers, and she took another step forward. More bridge. And it was a bridge; she was certain of it. It was the bridge across the Ablayne. She still couldn’t see it, and she walked slowly because of that, testing the planking beneath her feet to make certain it would support her weight.

  What had felt thin and veil-like continued to hamper her vision. She reached out once, with her free hand, and touched rail. If she listened, and she did, she could hear the movement of the river beneath her feet.

  “Kaylin—”

  She turned. She couldn’t see Severn; if it weren’t for his hand on hers, she wouldn’t have known he was there. That, and the sound of his voice. But she could see, stretching out from the bridge, the backward streets of Barren. It was her Barren. It was not the Barren into which they’d walked a scant hour or two ago.

  The streets were empty; the sun was low across the horizon. Ferals, if they ran, would be all but gone. All-but not being safe enough for most of the people who cowered behind doors or closed shutters, just as Kaylin had done for most of her life.

  “Okay,” she said out loud. “I get it.”

  “Get what?” Severn replied, his voice rising slightly in concern.

  “What do you see?” she asked, shunting the question aside.

  “You.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Mist. Grayer and denser than the usual riverside variety.”

  “What are you walking on?”

  After a long pause, he said, “We’re endeavoring not to answer that.”

  She chuckled. “I’m walking,” she told him curtly, “on the bridge over the Ablayne.”

  “Barren’s bridge.”

  “The same.”

  “Which way are you headed?”

  “Out. To the City. I think. I can’t actually see what’s ahead of me. I can only see what’s behind.” She paused, and then grimaced. “Which technically doesn’t include any of the three of you.” She turned and saw gray; it was as if the portal—or what had moved within its stone frame—was constantly moving just out of range. But as it did, it revealed bridge, that old and bitter symbol of hope and failure. “Halfway there,” she told them softly. “I’m going to keep moving.”

  Severn squeezed her hand twice. Yes.

  She continued walking—more quickly this time—until the bridge sloped toward the far bank, and the streets of the City itself. Only when her foot hit stone did the mist begin to clear.

  CHAPTER 19

  But the mist cleared across a cityscape that was entirely unlike the Elantra Kaylin knew. She turned to look back at the bridge. It was gone. So was the river, and the familiar bend of run-down buildings that housed the affluent on the wrong side of the Ablayne. Severn, on the other hand, had now appeared, his hand still clutching hers. So, too, had Tiamaris and the other Lord Nightshade. They were, to a man, as white as alabaster.

  She frowned, studying their faces for a moment. Severn’s was set in familiar, neutral lines. They offered no comfort, but asked for none. He didn’t speak, and she knew, by the set of his lips, that he wouldn’t unless she pushed it. She didn’t. Tiamaris’s eyes were almost red, and she had never seen his skin so pale. One of his hands still held Severn’s, the other, Nightshade’s, but he didn’t seem—at this moment—aware of either anchor. He was staring past Kaylin’s shoulder, his lips thinned, the inner membranes of his eyes raised high.

  Nightshade’s eyes were a blue so deep it was almost midnight. Tendrils of perfect, Barrani hair framed his face as if breeze moved them, although the air was stale and still. He, like Tiamaris, looked past her. Only Severn met her gaze, but only Severn seemed to be watching Kaylin.

  Clearly, she didn’t see whatever it was they saw. She would have asked Severn to let go of her hand, but she wasn’t certain he would do it. Instead of asking, she turned back toward what should have been the City that was joined by a slender bridge to the Barren of her youth.

  But that Barren? It was gone, as well. She had no idea where she was. She would have asked Nightshade what his first encounter with his Castle had been like, but this Nightshade had no answers for her, and she didn’t feel up to his questions.

  Her hands were trembling. She would have forced them to her sides to hide that fact—but one of them was in Severn’s. He didn’t speak. She was grateful for the silence.

  She looked at the remains of the entirely unfamiliar City to which the bridge had brought her. There were—or had once been—streets, but they were gone. So were the buildings that lined what had once been road, although some walls were still standing at various crumbled heights. Here and there, some hint that those walls had once owned roofs existed. There had been gates of some sort, fences of some sort, but even those were gone; poles or posts remained, as if they were markers.

  As if, she thought, the whole of the City she could see was one large and untended grave. She began to walk toward the broken streets, beneath the gray and murky sky, and felt Severn’s hand tighten. It made her feel as if she were one of Marrin’s orphans.

  “We might as well take a look around,” she told him, her fingers beginning the painful tingle that happened when they were basically being crushed. “Severn, what do you see?”

  “What do you see?” he countered. He was tense.

  “A whole lot of broken,” she replied. “Broken streets, buildings, bits of leaning fence posts. I think—I can’t tell—but I think I see statue bases in the distance. No statues. Some of the rubble on the ground is probably wall.”

  “The sky?” he asked, in the same tight voice.

  She frowned. “It’s gray.”

  “Cloudy?”

  “No, just gray.”

  “Time of day?”

  “I can’t tell from the shadows; there aren’t enough. I’d say it’s afternoon. It’s not cold enough to be morning at this time of year.”

  “What time of year?”

  Now, she frowned. “Spring? Fall? I…don’t know. It’s just one of those gray days. No rain. No sun.” She hesitated and then said, “What does the sky look like, to you?”

  “Black.”

  “Black?”

  He pressed her hand twice, and
she nodded. “Stars?”

  “None.”

  “Moons?”

  “None.”

  “Severn, when you say black—”

  “He means shadow,” Tiamaris replied. “We see shadow, Kaylin.”

  “And not just darkness.”

  “Unless ‘just darkness’ roils with the hint of unpleasant color, no. Do you sense magic?”

  “You mean, more magic?”

  He grimaced. “That was perhaps not the most intelligent of my questions. But, yes.”

  She shook her head. “Honestly, Tiamaris. I see a broken cityscape. It is definitely not Elantra. It might—possibly—be the City that Lord Nightshade knows.”

  “It is no City I know,” the Barrani Lord replied. “Unless much has changed since we entered the Tower. It is no City that is safe to explore.”

  Severn said, “It’s unlikely to be a City at all.”

  “Ahead of you,” Kaylin replied, frowning. “Tiamaris, when you entered the Castle in—in the other fief, what did you see?”

  “The first time? I will not speak of it.”

  So. She squared her shoulders. “You didn’t try to take the Castle.”

  “No.”

  “But you were tested by the damn thing anyway.”

  He said nothing. A lot of it. “It would be nice if tests like these varied at all.”

  “Meaning?” Severn asked.

  “A little less darkness and gloom, a lot less accusation.” She grimaced. “Way less Barren.” She began to walk toward the distant, broken streets, and this time, her companions followed.

  After the silence had gone on for long enough, Severn said, “What do you think you’ll stumble across next?”

  As the answer was rubble, and she’d hit it with her toe hard enough she almost hopped up and down, she answered in brief, curt Leontine. She felt, rather than saw, his smile. But when she had worked her way past the worst of the fallen stone, she said, “Probably more bodies.” It was a noncommittal answer, or it was meant to be. It would have been a lot easier to be able to use both of her hands; she couldn’t. Their only vision was filtered through her, and they were afraid they would lose it the minute the physical contact was gone.

  There they were. Partly obscured by the rubble, the fallen walls, the shards of oddly sharp glass in this devastated landscape. She saw the outstretched arm first, blood trailing across it from wrist to elbow like wet webbing. Bending, she saw that the hand was missing a finger. She had no idea whose body it was; she would have had to remove stone for an hour to see if anything was left of the face. But she knew it was one of hers. One of her targets. One of her kills.

  Like Sorco’s hand, she had probably removed something from it: a ring. Barren liked some proof that the work had been done. He also had some way of detecting whether or not the item was genuine; Morse had made that clear on Kaylin’s first outing. Whatever else she did—succeed or fail—attempting to lie to Barren and pocket whatever it was she’d taken would not end well.

  She walked, slowly, the rhythm broken only by the turn in the street, the large piles of rock it was better to avoid than climb over. She saw a broken leg, another arm, a twisted hand. It was as if the streets had opened to swallow just enough of the bodies that they could be held in place, by cases and pedestals made of debris, for her inspection.

  How many? she thought, as she walked. How many more could there be? The past answered. It told her she would know if she cared to take a good, hard look.

  “What did he do?”

  Morse shrugged. “Does it matter?” She glanced at Elianne, and then swore. “You gotta stop asking.”

  She stopped asking Morse. Barren wants him dead. You kill him. End of story. And it was the end of the story—but Elianne wanted the rest of the story, as well. She always had.

  Morse even understood why. Her sneer was one of Elianne’s strongest visual memories of life in Barren. You think it’s cleaner somehow, you killing for money, if they did something? You think it squares it away so you can sleep at night?

  Elianne had laughed. It was loud, brittle laughter, and it fooled no one, but Morse let it go. Elianne didn’t. She asked. She found out. She had to be careful who she asked; Morse blackened her eye the one time she found out. Elianne understood the lesson Morse meant to teach her: be more careful. She’d learned.

  The streets were growing colder as Kaylin walked them. She walked them too slowly, but she couldn’t force herself to move faster. Blaming Severn, Tiamaris, and Nightshade came and went; she knew damn well her speed and their awkward human chain weren’t connected. She had to look at the limbs, or the hands or the occasional bleeding face. She had to see them. She wasn’t sure why.

  Or maybe she was. She’d only lived in Barren for six months. She’d had time to get good—to think she’d gotten good, she amended—but she hadn’t had time to lay down a carpet of corpses that could easily cover more than a few City blocks, when lined up like this. And there was a lot more space than a few City blocks stretching out toward the gray and dim horizon.

  It was too much to hope they’d be empty.

  The next body she discovered was not buried. Nor was it lying across the ground like so much refuse. It was on display, pinned to crossed beams, its chest cut by shards of sharp glass. The blood had stopped running, but it was still red, still damp.

  “Kaylin?” Severn said.

  She was silent. This man, she hadn’t killed. But she knew damn well how he’d died. Everyone in the fief knew it. Everyone in the fief probably had some idea of why. He’d interfered with the money that had crossed the bridge over the Ablayne. He had killed an outsider, and left his body close enough to the bridge that it could be seen.

  The people who lived across the river were used to a soft, safe, easy life. Death scared the crap out of them. When they were scared, they took their money and the business that would have been illegal in their own homes, and they crossed a different bloody bridge. Or they stayed home.

  What everyone else did not know was that Kaylin had been assigned this death. Her first failure.

  Finding information about Paul Moroes, and finding Paul Moroes were heading in the same direction: nowhere. Barren had sent his enforcers into the streets, where they met with the same luck, although they terrified more people.

  Lost, as she seldom was, in thought, she was surprised when someone shouted at her. Her hands dropped to her sides, but not to her weapons; the voice belonged to an older woman.

  “What d’you think you’re doing, standing like that in the middle of the street?”

  Elianne turned, and saw the speaker clearly. She was, as her voice suggested, older; she had lost a few teeth to those years, and her eyes were sunken into the wreath of lines that was her face.

  “Don’t you know it’s dangerous for a girl your age, here?”

  Elianne glanced at the river. At the people on the far banks. She started to shrug, and then stopped herself. “Is it?” she asked, instead. “You’re here.”

  “It’s not dangerous for me,” the old woman replied, indicating the whole of her body in one sweeping and dismissive gesture. “But you’ll get yourself a few years of trouble. Go on back home, girl.”

  Instead, Elianne knelt in the street, over the bloodied ground.

  “Aye,” the woman said, noting the blood. “But that kind of trouble won’t hurt you.”

  “Someone died here.”

  “Someone deserved it. It ain’t enough that they’ve got laws and freedom, over on their side of the damn river; they got to come down here and cause trouble. Well,” the old woman said, her smile growing edges, “sometimes they find it. That one,” she added, pointing to the street and the absent corpse, “he hurt a girl from down here. He hurt her bad. But her brother was home, and he came out hunting.”

  “When—when did the girl get hurt?”

  The woman frowned. “A week ago, maybe less. It was—oh, no, it was five days ago.”

  “Days?”

&
nbsp; “Aye, happened at end of day, before sunset. Girl wouldn’t have been out, otherwise. But she shouldn’t have been alone.”

  Elianne nodded slowly. She didn’t ask the girl’s name, and she didn’t ask the man’s; she had them both, and didn’t need them. “You’re heading down to the out-towner stands?”

  “Aye. So was she.”

  “Mind if I keep you company?”

  “I’m not much guarantee of safety,” the old woman replied, handing Elianne a worn, empty basket.

  She had the information she wanted. She knew the why. The information she needed—where—was still out there, in someone else’s possession, and clearly, Barren’s offer of both reward and possible punishment had failed to get those other people to pass it on. The old woman, Arna, wasn’t an idiot; Elianne didn’t try to ask her where Paul Moroes was. She, like anyone who’d lived in the fiefs, tended to sharpen her suspicion; there was a lot to sharpen it on, and Elianne wanted it blunter.

  She spent two days dogging Arna’s shadow. She carried water from the well, because it was just warm enough that you could get water; she carried empty—and slightly fuller—baskets. She carried sheets and clothing to the very cold running water of the Ablayne, and she listened to Arna chatter, gossip, and rant. Only at the end of the second day did she ask about the incident—but she didn’t ask about Paul; she asked, instead, about his sister.

  “She’s your age. Maybe a year younger. You’re twelve?”

  “I’m thirteen,” Elianne said, her smile freezing in place for just a second.

  Arna chuckled. “At my age? There’s not much damn difference, girl.” But the chuckle quieted. “She’s home. We’re not sure she’ll make it past winter.