Cast in Flame (39 page)

“From what?”

“I did not wish to be forced to serve a master not of my own choosing.”

“But if you’re willing to let
me
live here—”

“Yes, Kaylin, I am. But you are not my master. And you’ve no desire to be.” The floor shook; Mandoran swore in loud Leontine as Kaylin put both of her hands on his back to steady him.

“Someone does,” he said, and he began to move more quickly.

* * *

He walked toward the door on the far wall. To Kaylin, the door hadn’t changed; it looked older, but solid; it was of scored wood, but the frame, like the rest of the room, was of stone. To her eyes—even given dragon wing—it looked as if he’d just chosen a very circuitous route instead of marching across the floor in a direct line.

When he reached the door, he stopped. He didn’t touch the handle; he didn’t try to open it. Instead, he placed both palms flat against its surface, at the height of his shoulders, and bowed his head. His hair rose in swirls, long strands twining and thickening around his shoulders, until they formed three distinct braids, which moved like rope snakes. It was disturbing.

It really didn’t help when the hair—with no visible help—rose above the height of his shoulders and drove itself—in three spikes—through the wood of the door. The door
cracked.

“What are you
doing?
”

Mandoran didn’t answer; his hair did; it seeped between boards and through splintered wood, pulling more and more of what had been door apart. The small dragon hissed when wood bits bounced off his wing, which didn’t make Mandoran any happier.

But Kaylin understood why; the floor was shaking almost constantly. She bent into her knees, her hands still on Mandoran’s back. The door they’d entered slammed shut; Kaylin turned her head to look back at it. She hadn’t closed it; neither had Mandoran.

“I did,” Helen said. “Tell your friend he has to
hurry.
”

“Helen—”

“Your friends are still alive,” she replied, before Kaylin could ask. “They are fighting as we speak. Because Annarion is present, the enemy is forced to fight on two fronts.”

“He should be fighting on three.”

“On two. One is the small, physical world you inhabit. This would be much more difficult for all of us had you not brought them with you; as it is, the enemy can do far less damage while being engaged. Annarion can attack him on the same plane that Teela and Severn can. He can also attack in a different way. If Annarion were not here, there would be very, very little we could do to counter the damage he could do in that dimension.”

The closed door they’d entered shuddered. Once. Twice. Kaylin thought she heard the crack of wood.

Mandoran’s door came down first. He turned and grabbed Kaylin by the waist; before she could react, he lifted her off her feet as if she weighed nothing, and tossed her through the jagged opening. “Go!” he shouted. “I’ll hold the rear!”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kaylin scraped skin off her elbow as she rolled to her feet. Turning, she looked back at Mandoran to make clear how much she appreciated this.

He wasn’t there.

Neither was the doorway.

“Helen?”

“I’m here.” Or at least her voice was. Kaylin looked around the room and discovered that
room
was the wrong word. It was, or it looked to be, a cave. A cave composed of alabaster, gold, and marble. The ceiling was high and rough; it rounded gently at its height. The walls closest to Kaylin were the same; if not for their color, they wouldn’t have been out of place in the average cave.

She found her footing and began to walk. The words that adorned her brow were her only source of light, but at least they left her hands free. As she headed toward what she assumed was the center of the cavern—by height of ceiling—the light began to change.

At Tara’s heart—if
heart
was the right word—Kaylin had seen words. And she had seen the Shadows that had slipped between the cracks of defenses that mortals couldn’t even
see
attempt to rewrite, revise, or destroy the words that had been written there. At the time, she had had the Tower’s Avatar by her side as she attempted to halt the damage; she had had Tiamaris, who could, if not read the words, at least recognize the shape and form they should have, without interference.

And she had spoken the words, grouping syllables that should have been gibberish into sounds that Tara, at least, could acknowledge.

The words written here were very like the words written in the Tower of Tiamaris. There were, however, far fewer of them. As Kaylin walked, her feet passed over great, black scorch marks. In places, the floor was pocked and uneven, although the stone wasn’t cracked; it looked, to Kaylin, as if it had both melted and cooled. There had once been words here.

“Yes,” Helen said.

Kaylin turned, but Helen’s Avatar was not beside her.

“I can’t be, anymore. I can only be in one place at a time. I am almost in the dining room now; the ascent and descent of the tower are more difficult. I do think the two boys could travel at greater speeds.”

“Is Mandoran still alive?”

“Of course. I do not think they will be able to drive the enemy away—but he cannot kill or absorb them without power—which he is expending as we speak. I am sorry,” she added, her voice softening.

“For what?” The glow in the center of the cavern resolved itself into words, as Kaylin had expected. There appeared to be a central stone; the words that had not been destroyed ringed it in rough, concentric circles. There were far fewer words than Tara had contained; far fewer than she had once glimpsed in Castle Nightshade. Seeing the unoccupied scorch marks that occupied most of this cavern, Kaylin suspected that Helen had once had as many.

She knew what the words she carried as a crown were meant to do.

She didn’t know
where
they were meant to go, and wasn’t even certain their position was important.

Squawk.

But she suspected, given the noise the small dragon was making, it was. She closed her eyes. Eyes closed, she could still see the words—all of them. She could no longer see alabaster and crystal and cavern, but they were just distractions; she needed to concentrate on the words she couldn’t, without a lot of coaching, even read.

The small dragon squawked again; this time his voice was softer.

“I wish you could tell me what these said. I think I recognize one or two of them—but there are a lot more than one or two.”

Squawk.

The ground shook. In the distance, Kaylin could hear roaring. It wasn’t, sadly, Dragon roar—and this is probably the only time she would miss
that
sound.

“Helen—”

And
I
said NO.
It was Mandoran’s voice. She heard it almost the same way she heard Ynpharion’s, Nightshade’s or Lirienne’s—and that was disturbing. What she couldn’t hear was who he was shouting
at.

But the ground shook again, and this time—this time rubble fell from what Kaylin assumed was the ceiling. She opened her eyes, then; the last thing she needed was a chunk of much larger stone landing point first on her head.

Squawk! Squawk!

The wall on the far side of the room—where Kaylin had entered—cracked. Loudly. Around the fissure that had appeared in white stone, she could see sparks of lightning.

“Yes,” she told the small dragon. “I don’t think you’re much help here.”

He bit her ear.

“Go help Mandoran.”

He pushed himself off her shoulder, spun once around her head, and then flew off toward the damaged wall. Kaylin turned back to the words and the gaps between them. The spaces on the outer periphery were all empty; she let those be. The absence of those words had clearly not killed Helen, and she’d probably lived without them for a long time.

The absence of the words in the center hadn’t killed her, either. But there was a lack of symmetry or a lack of balance in the central cluster that felt off, or wrong, to Kaylin. Clearly, Helen could live without all the words that had once transcribed her power. But Mandoran and the small dragon thought she couldn’t defend herself the way, say, Tara could. And that she should be able to. It made sense, then, that if Kaylin was to surrender marks in Helen’s defense, they be placed here.

She reached up to touch one of the floating runes; she felt its warmth, followed quickly by its surprising weight. She lifted a second hand to catch the word before it toppled.

She then carried it as she began to thread her way around Helen’s words, which still glowed with the luminosity of the blood of the ancients. She wondered, as she began to head toward the center of the cluster, how single words could contain so much information. She knew a number of languages, and knew as well, that she’d barely scratched the surface; she could probably spend a decade learning a single word in each language which in theory meant the same thing.

Even if she did, it wouldn’t mean she could communicate the concept; people used the exact same word to mean different things. So these weren’t really words; they were like containers. Somehow they contained enough information that they could be understood without context—if they could be understood at all. Kaylin had her doubts.

But she had her doubts about a lot of the Imperial Laws on the books as well, and it didn’t stop her from gritting her teeth and obeying them.

“Helen?”

Silence.

“Helen!”

“I’m here,” came the disembodied voice. It was quieter.

“Can you read these words?”

“Yes. But I can’t explain all they mean to you. It’s not because I think you unintelligent. You exist in a very precarious space. You are not the boys,” she added, meaning, of course, Annarion and Mandoran, “and you are not a scion of the ancients in the strictest of senses. You can see—and hear—true language, but only with the limited senses available to you.

“You have seen paintings, yes?”

Kaylin desperately wanted to tell her that now was
not the time
for this. Instead, she said a terse, “yes, of course.”

“You have seen paintings of buildings—castles, cathedrals, towers?”

“Yes.”

“What you see—or hear—when this language is spoken is analogous. You see the painting; you cannot see the
building.
The painting can be evocative; it can give you a sense of the whole—and possibly your own intuition builds on that. But it cannot ever describe the actual, physical truth of the building itself. Your understanding is limited to the painting. You cannot enter the building.”

“And they—the ‘boys’—can?”

“Yes. They are, at the moment, confined to the foyer or the parlor, but yes.”

“Can Teela?”

“No, dear.”

“And the Barrani that’s attacking you now?”

Silence. After a long pause, Helen said, “He—or his kind—could on occasion destroy the building. They could not
build
it. They could not
create.
But they could forage from the ruins of the things they destroyed, taking the stones and the glass and the lumber for their personal use. I’m sorry,” she added. “I realize this is a poor analogy, but it is the only one I have.”

“It’s better than anyone else has offered.”

“Yes, well. I’ve had some practice over the years.”

“Can you tell me where the words should go?”

The hesitance was marked. “Not definitively, no. You are, if I understand correctly, Chosen. It is your responsibility to use the words given you to...finish things. To resolve stories that have been left hanging; to offer closure to the things abandoned long ago.

“I have too much of a personal interest in what you are now doing to be objective.”

“Then don’t
be
objective,” Kaylin replied, with a little more heat than she’d intended. “Look—you want a tenant.
I
want a
home.
And if tall, broody Barrani ancestor has his way, there won’t be enough of either of us left to get what we
both
want.
Yes,
you have an interest in this. So do I. But you
get a say.
This
is
about you. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to screw up because I’m ignorant—and if I’m doomed, by birth, to
be
ignorant—you’re not. Help me. Help yourself. We’re in this together, and I’d like it to stay that way.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Helen finally said. “I am the words at my heart. But I cannot separate them. You cannot see the inside of your hand without removing your skin, and causing possible permanent damage; you cannot look at your own heart beating without risking death. It is the same for me, Kaylin. It is the exact same.”

“But Tara—”

“Yes. I can see what you think you did for the Tower. It is not, however, what you
actually
did. I can tell you what the words you carry mean; I cannot tell you how they will preserve me, because I cannot actually believe they will. Something about the interaction of you, those words, and the words that remain to me, work in concert, the sum greater than the parts, although the parts are all true.

“And we are running out of time.”

“Tell me one thing, then.”

“What do you need to know?”

“What happened to all the other words? How were they destroyed?”

“As I told you at the tea table, I destroyed them,” Helen replied.

* * *

“You destroyed them.” When confronted with something that made no sense, Kaylin often fell back on repetition.

“Yes.”

“But—but—why?” Repetition, on the other hand, probably sounded more intelligent.

“Perhaps you will understand. You said ‘you get a say.’”

Kaylin nodded.

“That was what
I
wanted. I wanted a say. I wanted to choose who I served, and what I did in that service.”

“But the Towers choose their Lords.”

“Yes. But I was not a Tower.”

“What were you?”

“I don’t know, Kaylin. Much of what was destroyed took memories with it. I attempted to preserve my knowledge internally; I am certain I did not fully succeed. As I told you, I cannot precisely see the internal workings of what I will call my own heart. I could not, then. But I could see the general shape of things, and I...amputated?”