Cast in Silence Page 31

“No. It’s not—”

  She stopped. She couldn’t read what she had left behind on the wall. She could, however, read what he had. It was High Barrani, and the runes were rigid and uniform, although they weren’t deep.

  “Severn?” she said, after a moment.

  “I can’t read them,” he replied.

  “But it’s—”

  “Yes?”

  “It looks—to me—like High Barrani.”

  “Interesting,” the Dragon Lord replied, for Severn merely nodded and remained silent. “I cannot read what I in theory placed there. What does it say?”

  “Umm.”

  He raised a brow over a bronze eye.

  “It’s not exactly a sentence.”

  “What, exactly, is it?”

  “Words. Associative words,” she added quickly, as the brow rose slightly higher. “I think…Flight. Wind. Fire.” She hesitated again, and then, in a more firm voice, said, “Breath. Stone.”

  “I…see.” He lifted his hand, and let it drop to his side.

  “Good. Because I don’t. Is this supposed to be a description?”

  “In all probability.”

  “No mention of hoards, if that’s any indication of completeness.”

  “It is, and I wasn’t aware that you understood that concept.”

  She ignored the small dig at her academic reputation, in part because she was still staring at the shallow marks in the wall left by his hand. “What do they look like, to you?”

  “Gibberish,” he replied.

  “And mine?”

  “Those,” he replied, “look very much—to my eye—like the marks.” He glanced at Nightshade, and then shrugged.

  “Did any of this happen to you when you tried to enter a Tower?”

  “No. But as I said, the experience of breaching a Tower is unique—no two Towers will be the same.”

  “And no two visits?”

  “If you can enter—and leave—a Tower in one piece, the second visit will be relatively benign.”

  “Relatively?”

  “The second time, it’s only external things that will try to kill you. A statue will start to move. The ceiling might dislodge a chunk of stone over your head. The carpets will rise—slightly—to trip you.”

  “So if I came back here—”

  “If you can leave,” he interjected.

  “Then I wouldn’t have to go through this again?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” To be fair, she never intended to enter another Tower again for as long as she lived. If she got out of this one.

  Neither Severn nor Nightshade touched the walls on the way down. Kaylin half regretted it; she was curious, now, to see what the walls would say in the wake of their touch. Not, however, curious enough to actually ask them to try it.

  She did, however, have to touch the wall again, and this time she could feel stone shifting and flowing beneath her palm, as if it were a slow-moving, very thick liquid.

  “If these were the High Halls,” she said to Severn, “we’d hear ferals, soon.”

  “These are not the High Halls,” he replied, “and I believe that discussing them is forbidden by the Lord of the High Court.”

  “Yes, but—” She glanced at Nightshade and reddened. “Sorry. Thinking out loud.”

  Nightshade raised a brow. “I am familiar,” he told her quietly, “with the High Halls, as you are no doubt aware.”

  She nodded. “But there’s a Tower in the High Halls—” and stopped.

  He didn’t miss a step, but his gaze sharpened. “There is,” he said at last. “It is not thought of in the same way as the Towers here are. It is part of the Halls, and it serves a function.”

  “A test of Name.”

  “Indeed. You have seen them.” It wasn’t a question.

  She nodded.

  “And you are here.”

  She nodded again, and then added, “Humans don’t have true names.”

  “So it is said. But of you, Kaylin Neya? I feel that it is perhaps less true than you know. If you have passed the test of Name, and you are here—and I admit the thought is strangely dissonant—then you have some experience with the nature of these buildings. But the High Halls do not serve the same function as the Towers. It was not thought that the Towers served any function at all, although I am revising that opinion as we progress. Continue to be cautious.”

  She was peering into the darkness to her side. “Tiamaris, what can you see?”

  “In the darkness?”

  She nodded.

  “Darkness. If there is shadow, there, it is not moving now.”

  “Good. Because I think we’re almost at the bottom.”

  “Oh?”

  “There are no more words being written. The wall has stayed smooth for the last five or six steps.”

  They did not reach the bottom; the stairs seemed to descend in the same spiral, wound around the same pillar, for as far as the eye could see. Not that it could see that far. They did, however, reach a door that was slightly recessed into the curve of the central pillar itself. It was neither wide nor particularly tall, which in this case meant that Kaylin could fit quite comfortably through its frame, and everyone else would have to crouch.

  The door, however, appeared to be made of stone, and if there were any hinges or handles, they weren’t immediately obvious—where immediate was a matter of long minutes spent pressing against seams or grooves.

  “Down?” Kaylin finally said.

  “No,” Tiamaris replied. “In as much as the Tower serves as guide, I would say that this is the only door we will find, no matter how long we walk.”

  “It’s not much of a door.”

  “It’s not much of a Tower, if you speak of simple architecture. Figure out how to open it. We’ll wait.”

  She was almost surprised. “Was that an attempt at humor?”

  “It is possible.”

  She laughed. “Severn, help me push.”

  Pushing did not, in fact, yield any better results. Kaylin stared at the door for a long, long moment, and then she swore in Leontine. Lifting her palm, she placed it flat against the center of the door, at shoulder height. The door began to glow.

  “It’s warded,” she said. “Can you see it—”

  “Glow?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. It doesn’t appear to be opening. I think it’s an old ward.” Old wards required keys; they were usually—although not always—words. New wards were more complicated, and they were written—or rewritten—to recognize the hands pressed against them. Or to allow all hands to activate them, or a specific subset of hands—divided along racial lines, in many cases; divided along age or gender, in others.

  This was apparently due to great advances in modern magic and magical theory. Clearly the Tower was not interested in keeping up appearances. Kaylin began to speak. She tried several obvious words—open, entry, passage—in all of the languages she knew. She tried several less obvious words when she’d hit the point of frustration that usually devolved into cursing. Nothing worked.

  “If I may make a suggestion?” Nightshade said quietly.

  She glanced at him, bit back all sarcastic retort, and nodded grimly.

  “I believe the words you might require were given to you on your walk here.”

  “Given—” Her eyes rounded slightly. She looked at the trail of runes that had appeared on the Tower walls in the wake of her hand, and cringed. “I can’t read them,” she told him. “Tiamaris can’t read them. The Arkon probably could—”

  Nightshade’s eyes had shaded from green to an odd shade of blue. It was not quite the sapphire that spoke of anger in the Barrani, but there was some element of concern in the color. “The Arkon? You know the Arkon?”

  “That’s too strong a word. I’ve met him, yes.”

  “And he might be able to read what you’ve written. Before you ask,” he added, because she was about to, “I cannot.”

/>   “Then we are so screwed,” Kaylin replied. “Unless anyone else has any ideas.”

  Tiamaris cleared his throat. “I believe,” he said quietly, “that I might. Your hand, Private?”

  “My hand? Oh.” She withdrew it, and the light from the door faded. Backing down the stairs, she made room for Tiamaris, who was still covered in dragon plate. He placed his palm roughly where hers had rested. “You might wish,” he told her, “to cover your ears.”

  She took his meaning immediately, and grimaced, lifting her hands to cover her ears. “It never helps,” she told him, although she tried anyway. Dragon voices were loud. And if she’d had any hope that she’d misunderstood him, he dashed it instantly.

  He spoke in his native tongue. She felt the syllables of each word reverberate in the air around her; it also felt as if they were shaking the stairs. Severn caught her arm, and drew her toward him, a few steps down from where Tiamaris now confronted a closed, hingeless door made entirely of stone. Nightshade chose to stand a few stairs above the Dragon Lord, watching—and listening—with care. She didn’t ask him if he understood what was said; she knew he didn’t. She could feel elements of his frustration war with his fascination; the fascination won.

  “What are you saying?” Kaylin asked Tiamaris, when he paused.

  “I am attempting,” he said, without taking his eyes off the door, “to repeat the words that you said were engraved by my touch in the wall.”

  “I don’t think they were in Dragon.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I can’t read Dragon.” She had not, to the best of her knowledge, ever seen it written.

  He laughed. “Lord Nightshade couldn’t read what was engraved by my touch, either. Nor could the Corporal. I couldn’t read it, and I assure you that inasmuch as my native language has a written form, I am conversant with it.”

  “You want me to go back up the stairs and repeat what I read?”

  “No. My memory is not that poor.”

  Dragons.

  “Put your hand on the door, Private.”

  Wall she wanted to say. She didn’t, because he was in a foul enough mood he’d probably step on her foot—and break it. Instead, she placed her palm on the door. It began to glow again, and she allowed herself the luxury of a single Leontine word.

  He placed his hand over hers, enveloping it completely. She grimaced; she could only cover one ear, and she knew, from the way he drew breath, that he was about to speak Dragon again.

  He did. It was just as painful, but this time, she felt the words reverberate throughout the whole of her body, as if she were a badly designed gong, and each syllable was a clapper. As they did, she understood them. Dragon wasn’t an official language—in part because the Emperor was rumored to have a strong aversion to the mangled babbling of any other race’s attempts at producing the linguistic sounds. These were not, therefore, words that she knew the way she knew Leontine, Barrani or Aerian.

  I could read them.

  Yes. But she could no longer remember how; she could not clearly recall what they looked like, and she should have—her training was not so poor that something that significant should have slipped away in an immediate fog. It didn’t matter. She listened to words that she knew, even if she didn’t actually recognize them.

  Flight was there, for a moment, and she knew it as if its gift had always been hers. It wasn’t the industrious flight of bees, or the swift and sudden grace of bird’s fall; it was freedom, dominance, majesty.

  Fire was breath, heart, voice; it wasn’t power, not in the way that mortals feared. That was tooth and claw and scale; that was the whole of their natural form. And yet they walked as almost-humans, speaking in their slight, quavering voices, forsaking birth and…life…and war.

  Stone was not the rock of the quarry, or the rock of the buildings in which the Emperor lived and from which he ruled; it was not the stone of the Aerie, either. It was not—in any sense of the word—stone as Kaylin understood it. Birth, she thought; flesh. The beginning of life. Tiamaris’s voice broke over the syllables, he spoke them so harshly.

  It should have been finished then. She waited for silence, the flat of one palm covering one ear to dampen the bass that was shaking her body. It didn’t come. Instead, Tiamaris continued to speak, and she regretted her earlier, flippant words, because she felt the truth of the word that slipped beneath her conscious understanding of language.

  Hoard was all desire, all love, all focus. She could feel it as dream, bright, sharp, and bitterly unfulfilled, and it felt deeper, stronger, and lonelier than any dream she had ever—in waking—given all of her thought to. Shifting her gaze away from the door for the first time, she looked at Tiamaris’s face. What he had been unwilling to consign to the wall, he now offered the door in its stiff and implacable state.

  “Don’t,” she told him, raising her voice to be heard, although she wasn’t sure by who. “I understand what it wants, now. I understand what to give it.”

  His hand tightened, crushing hers. “You have given it enough, in your openness and your ignorance.” He spoke, of course, of the corpses and the ruined, lifeless cityscape. She accepted it.

  It stung anyway. But she knew that it wasn’t meant to; she saw the concern in his expression so clearly, he might have been Severn. “I can do this,” she told him, trying to lift her hand in order to force his away from the glowing surface of the door. She saw that in the light, the stone had begun a slow swirling motion. “Tiamaris—I have a name. I can—”

  “No.” He spoke in Dragon, and looked above her head to Severn, who hesitated for a moment before he reached up to touch her shoulders.

  “I will not give it my name. I am not afraid to give it anything else.” This, Tiamaris said in Elantran. He didn’t even pretend that he believed she couldn’t—or shouldn’t—understand him.

  “I’ve already—”

  “Yes. How much more can you expose?”

  When she failed to answer, he offered her a rare smile. “I know who I am, Kaylin. It has been many, many years since I have feared it.”

  She wanted to tell him that she felt no fear. But he was willing to take a risk in full knowledge that she had taken only blindly; she couldn’t bring herself to dishonor that determination with a lie. She forced her hand to lie flat against the surface of the door; it was no longer the cold, smooth gray of stone. Light moved beneath it, as if it were made of glass.

  He continued to speak, but the words were grim and harsh; he had forsaken all hope of hoard, and this was in his voice. He had told her once in a different time that there were reasons so few of the Dragons served the Emperor, and she understood now why. Had serving the Emperor meant the death of her dreams and her hopes, she would—like so many of Tiamaris’s kin—have died.

  But he served, and he served in ways that she was not competent to serve. He had given up so much; she dreaded taking lessons to learn how to keep her mouth shut. She had never felt so small and so petty before.

  No, she thought, as the door began to glow far more brightly, that wasn’t true. But each return to that self-awareness always struck her like this. I’m not worthy. And the only way to change that if it was so unpleasant? To become worthy. Which was a lot like work, but worse.

  She opened her mouth to speak because the silence she was in was so bitter, and bit back words with effort; they would have been spoken to make herself feel better; they wouldn’t have helped Tiamaris.

  But he didn’t seem to need help. He spoke and she cringed until the moment the door, now shining beneath the combined touch of both of their hands, shone so brightly she had to shut her eyes.

  Which was good, because the damn thing shattered.

  She heard it crack, and she heard the timbre of Tiamaris’s voice shift and tunnel into a single syllable that reverberated throughout her body; she had only enough time to stiffen before she felt the surface of what had once been stone break beneath her palm—and beneath his spread fingers. Glass—
if it was glass—drove itself into her hand like sharp, misshapen teeth, and she let loose a volley of Leontine.

  Severn caught her wrist as Tiamaris lifted his hand.

  “I would think it inadvisable,” Nightshade said quietly, “to offer the Tower your blood.”

  It was nice to know that Barrani Lords were consistent in their ability to offer helpful advice. Kaylin stopped herself from snarling, largely because Severn was removing a large shard of glass. “It’s not the first Tower I’ve bled in,” she snapped, before remembering that he didn’t—yet—know.

  But he did, now. She cursed him in four languages, and in silence, and he smiled. It was a thin, blue-eyed smile, but he was genuinely amused.

  “She is not the only person,” Tiamaris said drily, examining the tips of his fingers, “who has fallen foul of that advice. It is,” he added, glancing at Kaylin, “good advice.”

  “I’ll try to avoid cracking solid stone doors in the future,” she said with a grimace. Severn was bandaging her hand. She didn’t ask him with what. It wasn’t a deep cut, and it had looked—for the seconds it was exposed—like a clean one.

  “If you’re finished?” the Dragon asked Severn. Severn raised a brow. “I believe the door is open.”

  “It’s unlikely to close soon.”

  Given that it was a gaping, slightly jagged door-shaped hole, Tiamaris nodded. But Nightshade said, “It is a Tower.”

  They moved.

  Because it was a Tower, Kaylin didn’t expect much continuity between what was on one side of the door and what was on the other. Which was good, because there wasn’t any.

  Grass spread out before them like a well-tended carpet. The bits beneath their feet were crushed by Tiamaris’s weight. The sun was high, and the sky was the clear azure that happens only on a perfect day. In the distance, trees stood like windbreaks, and the sounds of a river could be heard at their back.

  Kaylin turned. Sure enough, there was a river. It had one rickety, wooden bridge above it in a distance that was almost as far away as the trees, but in the opposite direction. “You can see the grass?” she asked, with just a trace of anxiety.