Cast in Silence Read online

  “Last time,” Severn offered, “there was a door.”

  CHAPTER 25

  There was dust on the floor; it was undisturbed by anything but the edge of Nightshade’s cape. Small shards of rock added texture to the walk, as did the visible webs of industrious spiders. There was no light. Kaylin glanced at Tiamaris, and the Dragon shook his head.

  “It is still a Tower. Magic here is unsafe.”

  “Even more so than it was the first time,” Severn added quietly. They turned to look at him as he knelt and examined the floor. When he rose, he glanced at them both. “If I understood everything that’s been said to date, this Tower is starved for power, for magic. The use of magic will draw its attention because it requires magic to fulfill its mandate.”

  Kaylin grimaced. “You not only didn’t fail magical theory,” she said, as she began to edge her way into the darkness, “you probably got the highest mark in your damn class.”

  “Which is your way of telling me I’m making sense.”

  “Pretty much.” She stood in the door frame, listening. Silence. She spoke a word. A name. Silence. She spoke a different name, with the same results. Nobody was home. She bent and touched the surface of the floor that the outer light could still reach. Severn bent to sweep the dust away, and she caught his wrist, pressing it tightly in warning. He stilled.

  “What is wrong?” Tiamaris asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. But…”

  “Is the Tower speaking to you?”

  “No.” That would be too damn easy. The building was as silent as most deserted buildings; the walls muffled the sounds of the nearby street, which wasn’t hard, given how deserted it was. “You?”

  “No. If we exchange words, I believe you will know.” Tiamaris glanced at her arms.

  “It’s like a crypt in here,” Kaylin said. “Can either of you see any doors?”

  Mindful now of the dust that Kaylin had prevented him from disturbing, Severn began to walk along the rounded wall. He walked full circle, some of it in darkness, and came back to them. “No doors,” he said, to no one’s surprise. “Nothing that looks like it might be either a window or a portal, either. The dimensions on the inside of this section of Tower appear to conform to the dimensions on the outside.

  “There are no stairs. It’s possible there might be a trapdoor under the dust along the floor.”

  “The floors are stone.”

  “The floors that we’ve examined in any detail are.”

  Kaylin completed her own circuit of the interior wall. He was right; it was what you’d expect if the building were entirely as it appeared. Except for its lack of stairs. Or a door that led into the rectangular part that jutted out the side.

  “Any ideas?” Severn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  It wasn’t possible to walk across the dust without disturbing it, but Kaylin made certain they walked carefully as she surveyed the floor. She couldn’t walk on her toes, and didn’t try, but she sectioned off a large part of the floor—verbally, as she’d brought nothing with her to do it the regular way—and then she began to brush the dust away.

  She did it carefully and methodically as Severn and Tiamaris watched.

  “Private, what are you doing?”

  “Writing,” she replied. She was. She had no ink, of course, but the dust itself was useful for that. Tiamaris took a breath, but no words followed. She lost track of time as she worked, writing first the large, crossed strokes of a T, followed by the steeple of an A, and the rather more difficult rounded R. The last A was slightly squashed by the perimeter left by careful feet.

  When she had finished, she motioned to Severn.

  But Tiamaris and Severn were already conversing, in low enough voices that she’d missed them while she worked. “Severn?”

  It was Tiamaris who answered. “What have you written, Kaylin?” The quiet hush of his voice made her instantly uneasy.

  “Her name. The name I gave her.”

  “Not your name.”

  “No. I think you’d recognize my—” She stopped. He’d also recognize the name she’d given the Tower. Turning, squinting into the pale light cast by a missing wall, she saw the floor. The dust had been cleared, all right—but the letters she had thought she was making and the ones that now existed in the temporary medium of age were in no way the same.

  She’d seen complicated religious mandalas that were simpler, albeit far more colorful, than this. “I did that?”

  “Yes,” Tiamaris said. “Surprising, isn’t it?” If he’d been Severn, she would have kicked him for the tone of his voice; she considered it, but it was a bad deal. She’d probably break her own toes without leaving so much as a bruise.

  “I don’t suppose you can read it?” she asked instead.

  “No.”

  “Recognize it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Old Tongue.”

  “Yes. But I will say this—it is of a piece. Whatever you wrote, it has a cohesive overall meaning.”

  “How can you say that if you can’t even read the language?”

  “Look at it.”

  She did, although it was more of a glare. Over her shoulder, Tiamaris’s voice continued. “The Arkon and Sanabalis have some experience with the written word—but it is scant experience, and much of it is secondhand. I have more firsthand experience with the written word, and very, very little with the spoken; the Arkon considers it a failing. Of mine,” he added, in case this wasn’t obvious. “There is some visual component to the written word, and in the case of stone or stand-alone carvings, some dimensional component, as well. Where the words combine in a specific way, there is an overall harmony to the whole.” When she failed to speak at all, he sighed.

  “If a wall is made of brick,” he added, “it is a wall. If you throw bits of wood and copper and wax into the whole while you’re constructing it, it is something else entirely.”

  “This,” she said, looking at the complicated pattern of lines, curves, and dots, “is a wall?”

  “I hope,” he replied, “for the sake of this City that it is either a key or a door, but yes, you grasp the general idea.”

  When the breeze began to move through the opening in the wall, Kaylin barely noticed; she was, for the moment, as tired as she might have been had she spent the entire evening with the midwives. But the breeze became wind, and when she turned to look into the open streets, she found that she could no longer see them. They’d disappeared, and she hadn’t noticed. In their place? A window, of sorts. The glass—if it was glass—was murky, but it looked solid enough that wind shouldn’t have passed right through it.

  She dug her fingernails into her palms, because pain sometimes pushed her into a state of wakefulness.

  “No,” Severn said quietly. “It’s not a natural wind. You’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.” But she grimaced. “I feel like I pissed off the general drillmaster and I’ve just finished running his forty damn laps.” Raising her hands, she tightened what passed for a knot of hair as the breeze blew tendrils into her eyes. It was, she discovered, always at her back—but that wasn’t the most striking thing about it.

  The wind lifted the dust. Both the dust she had cleared and the dust she had obviously painstakingly left in place. But it didn’t scatter the writing; it didn’t obliterate the work she’d done. Instead, the dust and the space where it had been pushed out of the way rose as a single piece, as if both dust and space were now solid.

  Tiamaris frowned like a classroom teacher, as if this sort of thing happened every day, and he was intent on marking it. When the wind had stilled again, the entire mandala was facing them and slowly—very slowly—rotating. He watched it intently, his frown deepening.

  “There is,” he said, as he moved, taking small and precise steps, “a distinct aesthetic to the writing. Have you noticed it?”

  “No. I don’t exactly spend long hours staring at the ba
cks of my legs or the insides of my arms.” To make a point, she held up her sleeve-covered arms.

  “Ah. Well.” He shrugged. “If you look at the words you scribed—in an admittedly unstable medium—you can see where the lines are slightly off, the spacing is off, the placement is crooked. It’s much the work of a beginner.”

  She turned to look at Severn, who saw the expression on her face, and offered a very fief like shrug in response.

  “But here—can you see this, Private?”

  Any response that came to mind would have been considered career-limiting. Biting her tongue, she watched as he carefully lifted a hand and began to touch the dust. Some of it clung to his fingers; if the rotating structure before them looked solid, it wasn’t: it was dust and the space that wasn’t dust.

  He frowned, and began to massage the dust, moving as the runic pattern rotated. If it had taken Kaylin a long time to write the initial words, it took Tiamaris just as long to fiddle with them. Longer, really, and to Kaylin’s eye, he was making no damn difference. But to his own, he was, and given that she’d thought she was writing elementary letters, she left him to it.

  When he finished, he stepped back. He was paler, and he was sweating. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him sweat before.

  “It’s done,” he said, his voice a hushed whisper.

  “Tiamaris?”

  He glanced at her, as if surprised that she were standing beside him.

  “Lord Tiamaris,” Severn began. Kaylin never heard what he’d intended to say, because light flared in the darkness of the Tower’s confines, and it was, in shape and size, the entirety of the pattern that she had written and Tiamaris had slowly nudged into shape. Dust became ethereal gold, and the lines, the dots, and the squiggles that were so distinctive, hardened in place, as if they had always been seeking a form.

  She still couldn’t read it; neither could Tiamaris. But they both felt its voice as if it were song or story, and they were held in place by it.

  Severn Handred was not. He touched them both, left hand on Kaylin’s shoulder, right on Tiamaris’s, although neither Kaylin or the Dragon liked to be touched much, and he shook them gently. “Lord Tiamaris,” he said, in a tone of voice he might have used on one of Marrin’s foundlings, “I believe that Kaylin made the door and you have unlocked it. We have little time, if Lord Nightshade is to be believed.”

  They both turned to look at him; Kaylin actually shook herself back to reality first. She watched Tiamaris with real concern as he slowly did the same. He was not particularly pleased by said concern, and his expression chilled into the glacial.

  He did, however, nod to Severn. “Indeed,” he replied. “Private?”

  She grimaced, and then realized that all of her hair was not, in fact, standing on end; her skin wasn’t so tingly it felt raw. “It’s—I don’t think it’s magic.”

  One dark brow rose. “You think it natural, then?” And she’d thought Dragons weren’t as capable of sarcasm as the Barrani.

  “No…but it doesn’t feel like magic to me. Or to the marks—” she bit back the rest of the words. “Never mind.” Taking a deep breath and ignoring, with effort, every word of warning Nightshade had left her with, she stepped into the runes.

  They were a portal, but it was a portal unlike any she’d experienced, which was just as well; she was likely to get only one meal today, and she didn’t much feel like losing what was left of it. If anything was; it felt as if she hadn’t eaten for days. Where the usual trip through a portal involved darkness and dizziness followed by a painful and disorienting ejection, this time there was light, and it was gentle, as if emitted in its entirety by golden dust.

  Where usually she lost all sense of up and down, in this transition she could feel the ground beneath her feet, and when she looked to either side, she could see both Severn and Tiamaris. Her voice—because she was Kaylin, she had to try to speak—was soft, the sound diffuse. But it was clear.

  “Severn?”

  He nodded. “I can hear you.”

  “Is this different for you from a normal portal?”

  He nodded again. “I don’t think it is a portal.” He turned to look back, and so did Kaylin.

  “There’s no door,” she pointed out.

  “No. But there’s a path. Portals don’t generally offer those.”

  “It is not part of the general mechanics of a portal,” Tiamaris added. “But the Towers bend the mechanics of magic as we currently understand them.”

  Or as Dragons did, at any rate. Kaylin paused and knelt. The floor felt strange; it had give. She thought it might be a very thick carpet, but when her hand touched smooth, cool stone, she changed her mind. “Where are we?”

  Tiamaris was silent for an uncharacteristically long time. “I am not entirely certain,” he said at last, which was hardly worth breaking silence for.

  “It feels…like…flesh. Flesh with stone skin.”

  He nodded. “I noticed. Take the path, Kaylin. Let us follow where it leads.”

  It led nowhere, as far as Kaylin could tell. The comfort that she’d first taken in the soft landing—as it were—gave way, step by step, to an uneasy sense that she would never again get her bearings. The floor continued to give slightly with every step she took, but she could feel no walls when she stretched her hands out to the sides, and without walls, there were no doors.

  No, that wasn’t true. The words she’d written had become a door. But it was a one-way door that led to a stretch of faintly illuminated nothing. She stopped walking and after a few seconds, so did her companions. “You didn’t encounter anything like this when you went to Nightshade’s Castle, did you?”

  “Nothing as harmless, no. And at the time, it was not Castle Nightshade.”

  She wanted to ask whose damn Castle it had been, but didn’t; this wasn’t the time or place for it. “So this isn’t like the other traps or resistances you encountered?”

  “No. I would not say that this is a trap, if my opinion is to count for much.”

  “What would you say it is?”

  “The Tower has very little power, Kaylin. I would guess that whatever it does have, it husbands it. It gives only what is necessary.”

  “What would this have been, if it had more power to give?”

  “This may come as a surprise to you,” he replied drily, “But I am not an Ancient. Nor am I, human philosophy aside, a living construct.”

  “Which means you don’t know.”

  “Which means, as you so succinctly put it, I do not know.”

  She blew hair out of her eyes because it was better than the alternative, which was a loud, long rant in Leontine. Leontine did not, at the moment, seem like the right language for this Tower. Then she sat down in the middle of what was a very narrow road, and wrapped her arms around her folded legs, resting her chin on her knees. “I can’t believe she did all this—”

  “It is not a she—”

  “Just to lose us here. She might have only had the power to bring us this far, but this has to lead somewhere.”

  “You feel we are approaching it incorrectly.”

  “Yes. It’s my life,” she added with a grimace, “so I can’t possibly get it right the first time.”

  What was a door, in this place? She had seen the basement of part of Castle Nightshade, and she had seen the writing on the floors and ceilings of the one room in which she’d first heard the voice of the Old Ones. “Tiamaris, does every Castle have writing in it?”

  “The Old Tongue?”

  “Yes. The marks.”

  “It is our suspicion that every Tower possesses them, yes. I did not encounter them in Nightshade.”

  “I did. And if Illien owned this Tower, he probably found them here.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because when I was in Nightshade, I heard the Old Ones. They spoke to me.”

  “Did they speak to Lord Nightshade?”

  She frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think
he was expecting what happened. But that’s when he—” She hesitated, and then said, “When he let me read his name. I needed to hold on to that. I’m not sure what would have happened, otherwise. I don’t think they were ever meant to speak with mortals.” She thought, for a brief moment, of the Leontines, their creation and their corruption.

  “Why do you feel that Illien found such a room?”

  “Because it was only after he had lived in the Tower for a while that he began to attempt to shed his name. I think he could understand some of what was written. He was supposed to be like that.”

  “Ah. You think what was written was inimical?”

  “No. I think it was inimical to him.” She closed her eyes and then, opening them, began to unbutton her sleeves. Severn helped; his fingers brushed her wrists in the low light. He rolled them neatly up until they gathered at the bend in her elbow. “I thought so,” she said softly.

  They were glowing. “Severn—look at the back of my neck, will you?”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he added, from behind her back. “They’re glowing. They’re not blue, and the light isn’t harsh.”

  “It’s like the light in this tunnel, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  “Grab my shoulders,” she told them both.

  Severn did as she asked; Tiamaris hesitated. “What are you attempting?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He raised one brow.

  “They’re glowing,” she told him. “That’s always meant something before.”

  “You’ve used the power before.”

  “Mostly unintentionally.”

  “That brings me little comfort, Kaylin. What do you intend now?”

  “To use it intentionally,” she replied.

  She closed her eyes. In the dim light, everything went dark; she could hear breathing—hers, Severn’s. Tiamaris, if he was breathing at all, was utterly silent about it. She listened for a moment longer, and then she let it go, concentrating instead on seeing. With her eyes closed.

  The marks on her arms were glowing. The marks on her legs were glowing, as well; she could even detect the faint luminescence of the marks that traced part of her spine from her back to the base of her skull. They didn’t speak to her, of course; she couldn’t read them. But she could look at them. With her eyes closed.