Cast In Secret (25 page)

“I feel I must offer a word or two of warning before we enter, however.”

She nodded. “Will the Arkon be there?”

“No. He knows that you are escorted by two Dragons.”

“Good.”

“Touch nothing, Kaylin. If you feel the urge to do so, tell us instantly, and we will prevent it.”

“O-kay… ”

“There is a reason for the lack of a door-ward. It may or may not become clear as we enter.”

“Is this some sort of test?”

“Indeed. Everything that doesn’t kill you is.”

He pushed the door open into darkness.

“Mind you,” he added, “surviving doesn’t always mean you passed.”

He could be such a comfort.

The first thing she heard as the door swung shut was a mild curse.

“You didn’t bring a lamp?”

“There are lamps here.”

“I notice they’re not lit,” she said, struggling to keep the heavier sarcasm out of the words, and succeeding as well as she usually did.

“No. Would you care to light them?”

“Light them? I can’t even
see
them!”

“Oh, very well.” Sanabalis was suddenly illuminated by the glow of an oil lamp.

“You didn’t use magic?”

“No.”

“Then how did you – ”

“I breathed on it,” he replied.

“What – you can breathe
fire
in this shape?”

“Of course. The tricky part is breathing only enough to light the wick.”

“I couldn’t,” Tiamaris told her.

“If you cared to practice, it would come easily.”

Kaylin had the feeling that the Dragon definition of
easily
encompassed more than her life’s worth of years.

Tiamaris’s fireless snort was as much of an answer as he cared to give.

She watched the old dragon as he traversed the room – which looked oddly like a cave to her eyes. He kept his back toward her, but every time he passed an unlit lamp, it woke in his wake, little tongue of flame leaping at dead air. And it
was
dead air. There was no movement of breeze in this place, and nothing to suggest that breeze had ever touched it. Certainly no breeze had disturbed the dust and the numerous cobwebs that clung to it.

“People don’t come here much, do they?”

“What gave you that idea?” Dragons, clearly, could be just as sarcastic as any other race. “Don’t feel it necessary to make idle chitchat, Kaylin. I enjoy the rare moments of silence I’m granted.”

As her eyes became accustomed to the light, which was gloomy and orange, she stopped walking. “Sanabalis – ”

“Yes?”

“Tell me that that isn’t a body in the corner.”

“I can tell you that isn’t a corner, if it’s of any help,” he replied. “And technically,
body
is perhaps too fleshy a word.”

Technically true. It was a skeleton, ribs curving up toward the light as it lay supine across floor. “Why is it here?”

“If you mean, how long has it been here, the answer is a good number of years. If you mean why is it considered part of the library, you could try moving it. You could, however, only try
once.
”

“You told me not to touch anything.”

“Good girl.”

“Would the Arkon kill me?”

“I doubt he would have the chance, although the inclination would probably exist.”

But the skeleton seemed to be wearing a helm of some sort, one that revealed empty sockets. Its long arms were bare, but its wrists were girded in – in something that looked suspiciously like golden bracers. Around what remained of its neck – which really wasn’t much – an amulet caught light, returning it in a flash of blue and gold. If the blue was sapphire, it was a round dome of sapphire, the size of an egg, surrounded on all sides by gold and smaller gems.

Kaylin inched toward the skeleton, and Tiamaris picked up a lamp that stood on a dust-covered pillar. The dust came with it, like a graceless cloud.

“Lord Sanabalis,” Tiamaris said softly.

The figure of the robed, elder Dragon stopped moving. He turned slowly to face his former student, as his current student knelt carefully before the skeleton, keeping her hands above her lap as she undid her shirt’s buttons at the wrist, and pulled them up to reveal the bracer that she thought of as her own personal cage.

“This came from here,” she said, a hint of question in the statement.

“Yes,” was the quiet reply.

“What kind of a library signs out artifacts?”

“This one, obviously.”

She looked at her wrist and inhaled dust sharply. “The gems – ”

But Sanabalis had come back, and Tiamaris was standing above her. They could both see that the gems that studded the bracer – the gems that had to be pressed in sequence in order to open it – were flashing in quick bursts of light, with no hands to touch them or invoke them.

She watched the sequence with wide eyes. “It’s not – it’s not – ”

“No. It is not the pattern to open the bracer.” His pale brow rose slightly. “Why did you think to look?”

She shook her head.

And cried out in shock as her arm lifted of its own accord.

Tiamaris caught her arm at the elbow, taking great care not to touch the bracer itself. She thought he would break her arm, because her arm kept
moving,
and dragging the weight of a grown Dragon with it as it went. Kaylin was struggling to help Tiamaris in any way she could, but she wasn’t his match in either size or strength, and what he couldn’t do, she had no hope of achieving.

“What are you trying to touch?” Sanabalis asked sharply.

“Nothing!”

But she knew that her wrist was moving in a straight line toward the body itself, toward the pendant that still glowed a shock of blue, incandescence trapped in crystal. “The pendant – ”

“What pendant?” he asked, his voice even more sharp than it had been. The day had just gone from bad to worse, something she would have bet her own money against being possible.

“The
glowing blue pendant around his neck
.”

“Tiamaris?”

“I do not see it, either, Lord.”

“Pick her up and take her out of the room, now.”

“She seems to have gained a lot of weight in the past few minutes,” was his reply, although it was strained. He was trying to lift her, one hand on her arm, and the other around her slender waist. And it wasn’t working. “Any aid you would care to offer would be appreciated,” he added.

Sanabalis cursed softly – softly enough that Kaylin, with her special affinity for swearing, couldn’t catch the words. He set his lamp down somewhere, and he came to her other side, catching the arm that wasn’t moving and attempting to pull her back.

“Tell me what you see,” the Dragon said in her ear, as he grunted with pointless effort.

“He’s wearing a gold necklace. It has a large pendant that’s weighing it down. Big rock. Looks like a sapphire, except no facets. It’s circled in gold, and there are gems in the gold – ”

“Kaylin!”

“Flashing gems,” she said, and cursed in Leontine. “You can see the bracer?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I think it’s flashing in time with the stones on the pendant – two diamonds, two rubies, two sapphires.”

His curse this time was distinctly louder, and she still couldn’t understand it. Tiamaris, however, could. “She was not to know,” he said, breathing heavily between syllables. “There is not one of us, save perhaps the Emperor himself, who understands the workings of the artifact she wears.”

“Yes, and it’s
that
Emperor who is going to be asking the questions if we don’t get her out of here.”

Inch by agonizing inch – which was a pretty accurate description because it felt as if her tendons were going to give – she drew closer to the pendant. Close enough to touch it, although her hand was curled in a fist, denying till the last what seemed inevitable. Sanabalis’s weight and strength, combined with Tiamaris’s, had slowed her enough that she could now clearly see what she hadn’t seen before: there was a mark at the center of the smooth, round crystal, and it was the mark itself that radiated blue in such profound brilliance.

She said, “It’s a word.”

“What?”

“There’s a word at the heart of the pendant.”

“What word?”

“I can’t read any of the ones on me,” she snapped. “But it’s the same language.”

Indeed,
a voice said. And not a voice she recognized.

“Sanabalis?”

“Do not touch it – ”

“I don’t think it matters anymore.”

The empty sockets beneath the helm began to glow, and the color was orange, the exact orange that heralded the slow build of Dragon rage.

The skeleton rose.

And this, this evidence of life where none existed, was plainly obviously to both of the Dragons who were clinging to Kaylin. “I don’t suppose either of you knew who he was – ”

“No,” was Sanabalis’s grim reply. “But I’ve no doubt we’ll soon know more than any Dragon before us save perhaps the Emperor or the Arkon.”

Daughter.

He rose, and as he rose, the glow from his eyes spread out across his bone structure, covering it, masking it in light, if flesh could be light. She could see through it, but only the Hawk in her noticed.

Why have you come?

“Can – can either of you hear him?”

“No.”

“He’s talking to me – ” The bracer at her wrist clicked, opened, and fell. Kaylin and two dragons suddenly toppled backward in an awkward splay of limbs. They scrabbled to their feet just as awkwardly, Kaylin’s hand hitting the sheath of her dagger as she steadied herself.

Sanabalis
roared
.

And so, too, did the stranger.

“Sanabalis,
don’t
– ”

But he had heard the roar, where the words had been silent to him, and he stilled. It was not a relaxed stillness.

She said, “Oh my God, he’s a Dragon… .”

Tiamaris whispered something that Kaylin couldn’t understand, and Sanablis lifted a hand to stem the words.

But the dead man – Dragon – had heard them anyway. Because he could.

“Yes,” he said, his voice dry as dust, but somehow heavy and deep and resonant at the same time. “And I died as you see me.”

Tiamaris closed his eyes and looked away. Sanabalis, older, did not, but he bowed his head, and Kaylin thought it was merely to avert his gaze for a moment. Nor was she wrong.

“We did not know,” he said when he again lifted his head. “Forgive us. We did not know.”

Kaylin looked at the three of them, the two who were undeniably living, the one who was not. “It’s bad to die… as a man?” she whispered at last.

“It is why so many chose the long sleep,” Sanabalis replied, “who might otherwise have chosen to serve. This is the death we fear,” he added. “Trapped, in every way, in our frailty and vulnerability, denied our hoard and the roar of the wind.”

Dead is dead,
she started to say. Thought better of it, for once, before the words left her mouth. After all, dead men didn’t speak, and this one was. He was
speaking.
And glowing.

“I earned my death,” the dead Dragon said, speaking, she knew,
in
Dragon, although she could understand him. “I failed.”

“But you – you’re here now.”

“Yes. I am trapped here, now.”

“And you want to be free?”

He laughed. It was a roar; her body shook with the sound, as if she were crystal and his cry the resonant note that would shatter her. She lifted her hands to her ears without thinking. It made no difference.

“That would be a yes,” Tiamaris said in quiet Elantran.

“Kaylin, I do not mean to alarm you,” Sanabalis added in slightly strangled Barrani, “but your arms are glowing.”

She took them from her ears and saw that he was partly right: the symbols were glowing, pale blue and misted orange, a blend that should have hurt to look at, but didn’t. It wasn’t, in the end, much different than the colors that marked the dead Dragon. “That part where there’s supposed to be no magic in this room – I just broke that rule, didn’t I?”

He nodded. “I was foolish,” he added in a soft voice.

The roar had died into a heavy silence.

“What is freedom to the dead?” Her voice. She was surprised to hear it because everything about it sounded wrong. She was not as surprised, however, as Tiamaris; Sanabalis was impassive.

“You come late,” he told her quietly. “I waited, and you did not come, and my watch failed.”

The fact that she wasn’t alive at the time seemed irrelevant. “I could not hear you,” she said at last. “I could not hear your call.”

“Not bound as you were, no. I will not ask you how you came to be so bound. I have freed you from the binding with what little strength I could gather.”

Again, the fact that she could easily – if not completely
legally
– free herself, seemed to belong to a different story. She bowed instead, as if in thanks.

“But my failure was not complete if my kin still live,” he said slowly. “And perhaps it was for this moment that I waited. Come, Chosen. Take the burden I can no longer bear, as is your right and duty.” His head lifted, his tarnished helm glinting oddly, his eyes – for she could see them clearly now – unlidded luminescence.

“Kaylin – ” Lord Sanabalis said, making of her name a warning.

But Sanabalis for a moment was no more part of this story than the words Kaylin had managed not to utter. She shrugged herself free of his restraining hand. “Trust me,” she told him, looking only at the ghost.

“To do what?”

“Oh fine, ask the hard question.”

But the Dragon, dead, was not deaf. “Child,” he said to Sanabalis, “do not seek to interfere. My hoard is scattered, my wings are broken. Will you face me?”

“Not all of your hoard is scattered,” Kaylin told him, stepping forward slowly, her arms tingling, her spine aching. Words all over her body were coming to life; she could feel them as they were written, and written again, over and over.

His smile was sharp. “Duty became my hoard, Chosen. And it is not a hoard that the dragons understand. I failed – ”

“
No
. You did not fail.” For she could see, now, that the pendant was the same color as the runes on her inner arms, and she understood what it meant. For just a moment, she understood. “Look. You still bear it, burden and hope. And we have need of it now.”