Cast in Silence Page 32

  Tiamaris nodded.

  “Severn? Nightshade?”

  The Barrani Lord did not seem to be offended at the lack of affixed rank. His eyes were a mix of green-blue that meant alertness, but offered no danger.

  “Yes,” he said quietly—for their benefit, not hers. “I can see grass. There are trees in the distance, and a river.”

  “Do you recognize the river?” Kaylin asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I don’t.”

  He raised one brow. “Do you not?”

  “I’ve never traveled outside of the City.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” he replied quietly. “It is the Abiliani.”

  “The what?”

  He raised a brow, and the strangely pronounced word suddenly came into focus. “It’s the Ablayne?”

  “I believe that is how it is often pronounced by your kind.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. “Do you even remember a time when there was no City here?”

  “No. Nor do I believe Lord Tiamaris does.”

  She glanced at the Dragon Lord.

  “He is correct,” Tiamaris replied. “But we are all, now, in the Tower. What we see reflects some amalgamation of the Tower and ourselves.”

  “Where do we go from here?” she asked him.

  “The trees,” he replied.

  But Severn was gazing beyond the trees. Beyond, and above. She touched his shoulder to get his attention, and instead of looking at her, he lifted a hand and pointed to the Southern Ridge. It was part of Elantra, but the buildings and the horizon they made usually obliterated most of its majestic rise. Here, nothing impeded the view of the sharp, stone cliff with its almost invisible caves.

  “They’re not far,” she told him quietly. “But we don’t have much way of scaling the cliff face.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get there.”

  It was a pleasant walk, as they’d dispensed with the rope linking them. It was not even, in Kaylin’s experience, particularly grueling; her daily patrols covered more distance, if not more ground. No one spoke, but no one felt the need to speak; there was nothing on the horizon for as far as the eye could see that posed much of a threat. The grass bothered Kaylin, though. It continued, the perfect representation of a rich person’s lawn, in its green stretch. There were no flowers, no weeds, no stones—nothing to break it at all. There was also no sign of what had done the work to keep it in such an unnatural state.

  She knew it wasn’t real; she just wanted more reality. Not that she was grading the Tower’s presentation, but still. Severn, judging from his minute frown, had noticed; Nightshade, as guarded as any Barrani stranger, seemed above noticing, and Tiamaris? It escaped his attention. The Southern Ridge did not.

  Nor did the shadows that began to flit across grass as they approached the foot of the cliff. Kaylin looked up instantly, squinting against the sunlight that blanketed the cliff face. She could see nothing in the sky that cast those shadows, but they continued their movement, from one side of the ridge to the other.

  They weren’t uniform, and they weren’t entirely regular, but she recognized them; they were what sun and distance made of Aerian wings, of Aerians in lazy flight. There was no stop and start; the Aerians that she couldn’t see except in the afterthought of cast shadow, were patrolling the ridge from above. They never patrolled it on foot; there was no point. No one approached the ridge from the ground.

  No one, she thought with a grimace, sane.

  “Are there stairs?” Lord Nightshade asked.

  “Are their Aerians, in your time?”

  “There are.”

  “And they live in your City?”

  “No. Our City does not extend this far. They live…separate from it.”

  “The High Lord accepts that?”

  “Let us just say that the structural changes required to affect a difference would significantly alter the shape of the City he rules. He has not—yet—decided that it is necessary.”

  “Do they cause him any trouble?”

  “None.”

  “Beyond the irritation of their independence.”

  He glanced at her, and smiled. “Beyond that. But for a man accustomed to the absolute obedience that comes with power, that is more than enough. In my world—and not the Tower’s—they are not friendly. They are not actively hostile, but you will find no easy way up to the aeries.”

  “The Aerians,” Tiamaris said quietly, “would never agree to serve those bound to land.”

  Nightshade nodded. “Nor would we, had we their ability. It is not in our nature to serve.”

  When they reached the foot of the cliff, they stopped. The sun had neither risen nor fallen during their walk, as if it were an artist’s perfect rendition of the object, and not the object itself. Like props, Kaylin thought. She walked to the base of the cliff, where rock gave way suddenly to grass, looking for some sign of stairs or a path cut into the side of the stone; she wasn’t terribly surprised when she found none.

  Because this cliff could be climbed. It could be—with difficulty and not a little risk—climbed by her. She began to walk again, looking for the best place to start, and watching the possible hand and footholds become smaller and smaller as they ascended. Shrugging her shoulders out of her pack, she knelt, untying her regulation boots. She knotted them together by their laces and dropped them into the pack.

  Remembering, as she did, another climb, a different impossible height to scale. At the top of it waited the last assignment she had accepted from Barren—the one that had caused the last big argument with Morse. She was careful, even in thought, not to call it a fight, because Morse did not lose fights, and Kaylin had walked—not limped, not bled—out of the apartment that had been their home for six months. Her face had been white and red with the imprint of Morse’s open palm and her own anger.

  That had lasted as she’d walked into the intermittent flow of people in the streets of Barren, evaporating only as she approached the bridge. She stood to one side of it, near the bank of the river, looking across at the outer City. Barren’s men had been told she was passing through; they weren’t to hassle her—but she wasn’t to linger. It looked bad.

  She hadn’t much cared what it looked like, then. She’d probably picked a fight with his thugs just by walking halfway across the damn bridge four times before turning back, but it was a fight she could more or less finish if she had to, so it didn’t frighten her.

  The City did. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she thought they would notice that she didn’t belong. Maybe they would notice why.

  But…maybe they wouldn’t.

  The second thought had frightened her more, but she couldn’t have said why.

  Severn joined her, and she startled. “Climbing?”

  “I can, yes. There don’t seem to be stairs or portals. I’m not complaining about the lack of portals,” she added quickly, just in case the Tower was listening.

  Severn chuckled. He’d been scanning the rocks, as well, but he said nothing, merely waited for Kaylin to find her first handhold and start.

  But as she did, the hair on the back of her neck began to rise, and she froze, one foot on the ground, and one already rounding to accommodate both her weight and the uneven surface of a large rock.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tiamaris roared, and the wind that howled and whistled fell silent, as if in embarrassment at the inevitable comparison. Kaylin’s foot found solid ground as she turned; her hand still touched the cool surface of rock.

  Tiamaris looked at her, and then craned his neck, briefly, toward the height of the cliff, where the aeries could barely be seen from their vantage. “I do not think,” he said, with a very odd smile, “that that will be necessary.” His eyes were gold, and they shone.

  She started to speak, stopped, and then said, “Lord Nightshade, I’d advise you to move.” The Barrani Lord was perhaps ten feet away from the Dragon Lord. He raised a dark brow, and then glanced at Tiamar
is. When he backed away, he moved slowly and gracefully, but he did move, although Kaylin could feel his stiff reluctance to take advice from…mortals. He came, however, to stand between Kaylin and Severn, the cliff face at his back.

  Tiamaris stretched his arms to the sides; wind caught his hair, pulling at it as if it were a small, nagging child who wanted attention now. He felt it; his smile shifted, becoming, for a moment, indulgent. “Private,” he said, “this is the heart of a Tower. It exists in the gap between worlds.

  “There is no Emperor here. There is no law.”

  She knew what he intended before his body began the shimmering and vaguely terrifying process of shedding humanity in favor of the primal power of the true Dragon form. “You have—I am told, with frequency—spent many years cajoling any Aerian unwise or unfortunate enough to stand his ground to take you up into the air.”

  She winced. “They’re exaggerating.”

  Tiamaris fell forward, his hands splayed flat against the unnatural grass in the lee of the great, stone cliff face. Those hands grew, changing shape and texture. The mail of gauntlets that were entirely composed of scale gave way to scales, and to claws, each much longer than his fingers had been. His neck stretched as his body did; his legs, like his hands, seemed to absorb the bronze plates that had been greaves, and anything bootlike or bootshaped moved fluidly away from his midsection, transforming as it did into the hind legs of a giant lizard.

  Not that she would ever use that word where he could hear it.

  Wings unfurled from his back, breaking through his shoulder blades as if they had just fled jail time. They went on forever, catching sunlight and reflecting it in a spray across the short grass Tiamaris was crushing simply by existing.

  He roared again, and in some ways it was a comfort—it was almost the same sound that he had uttered to get her attention the first time. Deeper, yes, and rumbling—but it was recognizably his voice. And when he lifted the jaw that had opened on that roar, he swung his massive head toward her. His eyes were the size of her fists. Or maybe Severn’s.

  “Come, Private. You like to fly, and you have never flown like this.” He lowered his neck, stretching it so that she could approach. She did, but she hesitated. “I don’t—I can’t—ride,” she finally confessed. “The Aerians carried me. But horses tend to throw me just for the fun of it. Or step on my feet when their trainers aren’t looking.”

  He chuckled. The ground shook. “They tend to run screaming from me. I will not throw you. I will attempt to catch you if you fall.”

  She looked pointedly at the mess his claws were making of the ground. “You get a lot of practice catching things you aren’t trying to kill?”

  “No.” He laughed at the sour expression that didn’t quite hide her growing excitement. “Climb up on the back of my neck. Avoid the pinions. They move.”

  “What—what about the others?”

  He snorted, and a plume of smoke wafted in the air in front of his nostrils. He ate it. “I will barely feel their weight, if they can hold on. Come—we are meant to reach the top.”

  “Is it wise, Lord Tiamaris, to play into the Tower’s demands?”

  “Never,” the Dragon Lord replied gravely. “But the Tower has not yet heard ours. Come, Nightshade. The air is alive with magic. Can you not feel it?”

  “I feel it,” was the quiet reply. “But it feels wild, and the taint of shadow is strong in it.”

  “It is strong,” Tiamaris replied, “in all of the living, be they immortal or no. Let us see what waits above.”

  Lord Nightshade nodded, but he let Kaylin and Severn find a place on the Dragon’s back first.

  “Kaylin,” Lord Nightshade said, as he joined them. His voice was quiet. It was almost inaudible. Had he been any other man, she would have missed the sound of her name. But she turned, craning her neck to the side to meet his gaze; his eyes were the clear blue of sky. It was not a color she recognized in Barrani eyes, and she had no ready translation for it.

  “The Tower is not yet done.”

  She would have snorted, but he was Barrani; she contented herself with a nod instead, as the flesh beneath her moved. Her hands tightened. Here, the scales were small enough they felt smooth as snake’s skin; they looked slippery, but that was sun. Tiamaris was no longer entirely bronze, but the red of the night in the fiefs was absent.

  “When it is, there is a choice to be made.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It is the nature of testing, and this Tower appears to be testing you. You, and the Dragon Lord.”

  “But—”

  “He is at ease, here.”

  He wasn’t, but she didn’t say as much.

  “Your choice will define the Tower. Be wary. Let it be your choice.”

  “And not the Tower’s?”

  He nodded. “You have left blood here. Unwise, but perhaps necessary.” He spoke again, but this time she lost the words to the roar of Dragon and the breathless harmony of the wind his flight caused.

  It didn’t matter. They rose. She could feel the shift of Dragon musculature beneath her legs, and the smooth, supple surface of scales beneath hands that gripped too tightly. She could see the world shrink into a sea of green, and regretted bitterly the lack of City streets and tall buildings, because she had always judged her height above the ground by their size.

  Tiamaris roared and roared, his voice a rumble that shook them all, defying both wind and gravity. Kaylin had never liked the sound of horns; they made her think of cows trying—and failing—to be musical. But she thought that this was what horns wanted to be: this arresting, this momentarily all encompassing.

  The cliffs rose forever. Tiamaris followed them, but only barely; he didn’t seem eager to land. And why would he? How often did he have the freedom of the skies? He spoke to the land from above, and his voice traveled, bouncing off the cliff face and into the darkness of the approaching Aerie.

  But eventually, he turned toward it. It was not built in a way that would allow Dragons easy access; he might have been able to walk in, with his wings furled tightly across his shoulders. There was, however, a long path to the rounded and carved entrance—again, it was meant for Aerians, who were human in size and shape if you ignored their wings. But if Dragons were power and majesty, they were also graceful. He made the landing, and a spray of loose pebbles flew, wingless, in arcs behind them, toward the ground.

  “Is this,” he asked, when he had resumed his human form, complete with the bronzed plate scales, “the Aerie that you’re familiar with?”

  She nodded. “They built the cave mouth so that it looked like an arch. It’s not a bear cave.”

  “You’ve seen a bear cave?”

  “Figure of speech.”

  He chuckled. His eyes were a glowing gold. “Shall we enter, then?”

  The cave face that presented itself vanished the minute the last of the light did. Fire, appearing in brief gusts, and always aimed down or away from the group, provided illumination for Kaylin until the moment Tiamaris decided that he was not a walking, intermittent torch. Then there was light, and it was a mage’s light. She felt the sharp shock of Nightshade’s surprise and disapproval.

  Hers was louder. “Tiamaris—”

  The Dragon snorted. “The passage we are in continues for some way. If we are not to be here all week, some light is required for both you and the Corporal.” He lifted a hand and traced the cave wall; Kaylin half expected to see words follow in the wake of his touch. These walls, however, didn’t change. “Where does this go?”

  “I don’t know. I only came here a couple of times, and I wasn’t given free run of the Aerie. They thought I’d take a wrong turn and dump myself off the ridge, which Cliff said would be severely career limiting. But…I don’t think any of the passages were this long. There should be branches into other caverns and nesting zones.”

  As if it could hear her words, the cavern now blurred; speech blurred with it, as if time itself had suddenly unwoun
d. The strangest thing about the distortion was Tiamaris’s light; its glow was a steady warmth that did not shift or change at all. When it was over, the tunnel was as she remembered it from her previous visits, more or less. Nightshade was staring at her so intently her cheek warmed. Unfortunately, it was the one that bore the mark he had not yet placed there in his own time. “Where,” he asked gravely, “should we now go?”

  Tiamaris looked at Kaylin. “Private,” the bastard said, “the lead is yours.”

  She chose, after passing two branches, to veer to the right. It was arbitrary; she honestly didn’t remember where anything led—but if she hadn’t entirely lost her bearings, right was central; left eventually led to the small windows and openings that were seldom used except in emergency—fires being one. War, although she wasn’t aware of any major wars fought by Aerians, being the other. In either case, she didn’t want to give the Tower any ideas.

  The inner passages led to living quarters, such as they were; the widest part of the inner cavern would be several stories high, like a set of connected apartments around an inner courtyard—but missing one exterior wall. The Aerians might have valued privacy, but they didn’t actually have a lot of it.

  But the nesting area was a smaller series of rooms with lower ceilings and sandy floors; it maintained heat. Why they needed heat, she wasn’t certain; she understood that this is what chickens and other birds wanted—but Aerian babies were born the normal way. More or less.

  Tiamaris caught her shoulder just before the passage widened. “Something,” he said softly, “is not right here. Lord Nightshade?” Tiamaris, hand on the wall, turned to the Barrani Lord.

  Lord Nightshade nodded. “I sense them,” he said softly.

  “Sense what?” Kaylin asked.

  “The shadows,” was his quiet reply. “You cannot sense them, Kaylin?”

  “I—” She closed her eyes. But her skin had been tingling slightly since before Tiamaris had gone Dragon; nothing felt different to her. “No.” Eyes still closed, she reached out and touched solid rock. “I feel the Aerie.” She turned, as she so often did, to Severn, and opened her eyes. It was dark in the passage, but Tiamaris’s spell still brought shape to the gray.