Cast in Flame (40 page)

“If you mean cutting off a limb, then yes, amputated.”

“I destroyed the portions of my inscription that forced me to behave in ways I no longer wished to behave. I did this in part to keep the information I contained from the hands of those who would pillage graves.”

“Did it matter?”

“Yes. I wanted to serve Hasielle. She gave things
to
me. She brought light. She
lived
here. Even as a slave. I thought they would kill her—probably unintentionally, although they were not particularly careful—and I did not want that. I was damaged somewhat before their arrival, and I completed that damage so that I could not be compelled.”

“And the Barrani upstairs is trying to compel you as if you’d never been damaged?”

“He is not Barrani, and yes. He is confused. And angry. He seeks to give orders, to invoke words and phrases that will turn all control of my interior over to him. He cannot, now.”

“But if I somehow repair you, he might?”

Kaylin could practically hear the frown she couldn’t see.

“I highly doubt that. What is more likely, in my opinion, is that such repairs will give
you
the ability to control me.”

“But I don’t want that.”

“No. You don’t. The only risk I take—and I choose to take it—is that the next mortal who crosses my threshold, the next tenant, will not have your aversion to such control.”

Kaylin closed her eyes again. The sounds of battle receded. The small scattering of pebbles and rocks didn’t. She now ignored those, trusting Helen to give her warning if larger chunks were to follow. It would have been a trivial job if there were only six scorch marks in the center; there were over a dozen. Given the trembling of the stone beneath her feet, dropping words into random empty spaces seemed smarter than it had five minutes ago.

But it wouldn’t work, and she knew it.

She threaded her way between the carved words until she stood in their center. There, she discovered a rune that did not glow; it was flat, dull, and lifeless. She opened her eyes. Beneath her feet, the stone was smooth. No lines had been carved into its flat, pristine surface.

She closed her eyes again.

The rune was there. But she could only see it with closed eyes. She regretted sending the small dragon back to Mandoran, then; she wanted his wing.

And she wasn’t going to get it any time soon.

* * *

The rune, to Kaylin’s closed eye, looked engraved. She knelt and touched the surface of the stone, tracing the long underscore with two fingers; she could feel the indentations in rock, even if she couldn’t see them with her eyes open. She thought, as she stood, that this was the center-piece of Helen’s heart, for want of a better word; it wasn’t active.

She rose and scanned the runes that surrounded this one, noting their placement, and marking the positions of the absent words. The stones into which they had been engraved, unlike the central stone, were scorched or melted. “How much time did you say we have?”

“I didn’t. I am uncertain.”

Kaylin looked at the word in her hand. It seemed to her—with her eyes closed, and how wrong was that?—to be made of glass; the light that filled it wasn’t an essential part of its form. But she knew if she broke it, the light would be lost.

She exhaled. In the West March, she had chosen two of the words on her skin based entirely on the way they made her
feel.
This was not, in daily life, a good bet—but she had nothing else to go on. And she knew—as she had known in the West March—that the words would not now choose their intended destination. They were waiting to be chosen.

The usual fear of making a mistake was heightened by the stakes. The closest friends she had in Elantra were in this building, and if it fell, they’d die. Or worse. She had no expectation of mercy from the intruder. She was betting their lives on the placement of six runes, and it was a bet she would never have taken otherwise.

Breathe,
she told herself.
And think.

The words failed to speak to her. She hadn’t the time to fly around them, examining them from all angles, as she had done in the West March. She hadn’t the time to touch them all.

Think, Kaylin. Think fast.

What Helen wanted was what anyone wanted: companionship. Home. She couldn’t
be
a home if she was empty. Home was a place where people lived. Home was a place where they belonged. Helen wanted that sense of belonging—and who didn’t? Home couldn’t mean, to Helen, what it meant to Kaylin—and yet it did.

Helen had been afraid that no one would come to her. No one who wanted to stay. It was a particular type of loneliness— and Kaylin realized that she held it in her hands, almost literally. For Helen, home was people. It wasn’t the shape she presented; it wasn’t the color of her walls or the type of wood that formed her floors. It was people.

Emptiness meant something very literal to Helen; it meant something metaphorical to Kaylin. Both of the meanings were enclosed in this rune. What Kaylin couldn’t understand was
why
, of all words, this one was meant to have a place here. Helen didn’t need it—she had lived it. Kaylin considered attempting to reattach it to her skin.

Instead of wasting her time doing something she was certain wouldn’t work, she began to walk toward one of the scorch marks. It was perhaps three rows back—although the words hadn’t been written in neat, precise rings—when she stopped. She looked toward the rune in the center. Given the light shed by the runes that now surrounded her, she could no longer see it.

She stared, instead, at the words that surrounded the scorching. They were, for the most part, rounded and curved; the lines were delicate in their construction, and dots were more central. But they didn’t speak to her the way the word she held did; she had no sense of meaning from them. She
hated
time. Or time’s passing.

She hated the limitations of her own mortality. Had Mandoran actually come through the door with her, he’d probably have an opinion that was worth something. Then again, they’d probably also have some part of the intruder in the place most vulnerable to his attacks.

Tiamaris had told Kaylin that the words themselves were ordered; that they had a correct shape, a precise form. He couldn’t assess their
meaning,
but he could see when something was off or wrong; he could see, for instance, if a word had been riven and was now incomplete. Although all these words were complete in and of themselves, Kaylin attempted to apply Tiamaris’s advice to the shape of these words as a whole.

Because if these were words, she was making sentences, and the sentences had to be completed; they had to make sense.

Even if it was only visual, harmonious sense.

This word did not belong among the rest of them, if that were the case; it was too heavy, too bold, too thickly written. Yes, there were curved lines and dots—all the words had those—but not in the same way, and not to the same extent. She moved, walking slowly, examining only shape, form, and composition, until she came to an empty space at the outer edge of the active words.

Here.

This is stupid,
she told herself, adorning the spare sentence with Leontine. But stupid or no, she knelt to set the word down. Nothing happened. The word, however, did not return to the loose formation that adorned her head.

She reached up to take one of the remaining five. Gravity came with touch; the rune fell into her hands. Although she had chosen to place the words into the general pattern of the whole, she studied the word that lay in her palms for more than just shape and composition. This was the opposite of the first word; not loneliness, not the yearning that came of it, but contentment. She felt the warmth of Marcus’s hearth fire, and the certain sense that she was welcome there. She didn’t know what this meant for Helen—but she thought she could guess; if she was welcome, Helen was welcoming. If she accepted the gifts offered her as gifts, not entitlements or obligations—and she did—Helen was content.

No, it wasn’t contentment. It was gratitude. And this was the problem with identifying true words: she only had mortal words to describe it, and she wasn’t very good at it. She wasn’t always good at telling other people how she felt or why she felt that way and if she did, they interpreted those feelings in ways she hadn’t intended.

Even thinking, Kaylin had continued to walk; to study the shape of the form and the way it blended—or didn’t—with the other words. This search took less time because the first had taken her far enough from the center that she now had a sense of where the patterns were laid out. Gratitude. That one, she could understand.

She wondered if one of the lost words had been this one; if some part of Helen’s make-up meant the same thing. It didn’t really make sense that it would—why would a building require either gratitude or, worse, the concept of loneliness?

And yet, the Hallionne experienced both. Tara certainly did; the desire for companionship and understanding had almost driven her to the building version of suicide. Kaylin frowned. The Hallionne, at their core, had not started their eternal lives as architecture; they’d started as Immortals. Or possibly mortals. They’d started from the foundation of personhood, and they’d agreed to become what they did become: almost gods, in their own small domains. And prisoners, as well.

Were these the words that Helen had destroyed?

Kaylin found the space in which gratitude looked to be at home. She set it down. Once again, the rest of the words didn’t react—but had she honestly expected they would? Shaking her head, she reached up for the third word. This one was harder to understand; she walked the third circle staring at it. The outer lines of the rune were solid; they looked almost utilitarian in the form they took: a straight rectangle. The interior was less rigid, and the rectangle appeared to be standing on far more graceful curves—but the external curves were bold, thick lines, as well.

It took her some moments to understand that this word spoke of protection. The lines of the rectangle implied either a room or a house—a simple house—that kept the interior separate from any other interference. The interior, however, wasn’t empty. She frowned. Protection, of course, was too simple a word. The one that followed it was safety. Safety, in any real sense, didn’t exist. It was a hope, a dream, a goal—but like immortality for mortals, it was always out of reach.

She
knew
this, but it didn’t stop her from yearning for it. Protection was a thing you offered or accepted. Safety was a thing you felt. Maybe the word meant security. The meaning of the word didn’t exist in isolation; it couldn’t. Words.

To Kaylin’s surprise, the only space that suited the composition of the word was the scorched, black mark closest to the center. All the words there had similar shapes, and similar hard, definitive strokes. She set the mark down with far less doubt than she had the first two, and she reached, as she did, for the fourth.

The fourth was like gossamer. It seemed impossibly delicate. She could imagine herself chiseling—badly—any of the first three; the fourth would defeat her before she’d started. The lines seemed to both cross and curve into one another; it was hard to tell, looking at the writing, which element had been laid down first, and which had followed. There were just too damned many parts. She had no sense at all what this word meant, even as she carried it, searching for its place. It was so complicated in appearance, she thought it must mean something that made sense to a specific type of Immortal—the type that got turned into buildings.

It reminded Kaylin of the words she had once seen that were, in total, the name of a world, an entire world; she could study it for the whole of her life and never truly understand the entirety of its meaning. Hells, she could barely find the meaning in her own life on a bad day.

She didn’t have to understand. She told herself this. But there was no place for this fourth rune; it seemed to match none of the spaces that had been created when other words had somehow failed or been destroyed.

She frowned and returned it to its orbit, and it went. She dealt with the fifth and sixth runes first.

The fifth felt like responsibility or duty or honor or something similar; it shone. Even in her palms it seemed to rest above her touch, as if it were meant, always, to be a little bit out of reach. It almost made Kaylin feel uncomfortable—as if, somehow, the word itself was judging her. But it didn’t mean judgment, not exactly. Kaylin understood the whole being judged thing.

It wasn’t the judgment of
others.
It was her own judgment. It was comprised of both the harshness and the forgiveness that one aimed at oneself. None of her Elantran words encompassed it until she set it down and began to walk away.

Self-respect.

This entire endeavor had become surreal. Not that most of Kaylin’s encounters with true language had ever been anything else. But she had an ambivalent relationship with self-respect, and understood why it had hovered just out of the reach of her palms. She couldn’t imagine that Helen needed whatever the word would give her—but she often couldn’t imagine that anyone else did, either; everyone else seemed to have the self-respect that Kaylin struggled so hard to reach.

* * *

She held the second to last of the words in her hand; she was walking along the second circle of carved, glowing runes. The word was smaller and tidier than any of the others; it was simpler, as well. It reminded her of Maggaron’s name—the name that he no longer possessed.

It meant honesty. Or truthfulness. Or truth. And truth was such a personal thing, in the end. As a Hawk, she’d come to understand, very early, that no two people experienced an event the same way; witness testimony differed. Sometimes the differences made you wonder if the witnesses had even been standing on the same damned street—but the witnesses believed that their version of events was the only version.

Kaylin, who had believed at age thirteen, that everyone lied, wasn’t offended at what she assumed were lies—but she was almost shocked when the Tha’alani made clear that they weren’t lying. The witnesses were attempting to fully cooperate with the Hawks; their testimony was true—to them. It just didn’t match the testimony of other witnesses.