Cast In Secret (42 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know?
” His brows rose, and his eyes shivered instantly into an orange that was just a little too tinged with red for comfort. But he was utterly still. As if he had to be.

Miserable in ways she hadn’t known she could be, she answered his anger with silence.

“Kaylin,” Severn said, his voice so soft it wouldn’t have traveled had he not bent to speak in her ear.

“I can’t say,” she told them both miserably.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“It’s the same thing.”

“I do not believe the Emperor would see things the same way.”

And for the first time, Everly spoke. His voice was soft and flat, the words almost like brush strokes in their deliberation. “If you take her to the Emperor, he will eat her.”

Not, as first words went, all that promising.

Master Sabrai’s jaw had slid open and seemed stuck that way as he watched the painter Oracle.

Everly clambered down from the stool, the odd expression that stole personality from his face slowly fading. He walked almost listlessly to the side of the Dragon lord and caught his sleeve, pulling it, his eyes slightly rounded.

The Dragon lord walked over to the picture. Looked at it. Looked at Kaylin. “So you can speak, boy,” Sanabalis said softly.

But Everly said nothing. As if a lifetime of effort had gone into the single sentence he had spoken, his shoulders suddenly rounded.

Sanabalis caught him before he hit the ground, and carried him, very gently, to the Master of the Oracle Hall.

“Is it enough?” Master Sabrai whispered, as he took Everly from a Lord of the Imperial Court.

“He believed it was enough,” Sanabalis replied. When he looked at Kaylin again, his eyes were a pale gold, with flecks of orange. He looked both tired and old. “Tend to the child, Master Sabrai. Accept the apologies of the Imperial Court for any injury done him.” He bowed to the Master of the Oracle Hall.

Master Sabrai, pale and tired, nodded, holding Everly tightly. The boy was still breathing, but his skin had lost all color, as if the color itself had been leeched out of him in service of his painting. In service of the Emperor.

The
same
Emperor who had acceded to the request of an Arcanist, and had allowed the Tha’alani to be driven almost insane. For one sharp minute, Kaylin hated him.

“How damn
long
did you keep him awake? How long has he been working like – like this?”

She felt, rather than saw, Severn’s gaze; felt the warning in it. Even understood it through the momentary haze of a surprising fury. Sanabalis might play the old Dragon, the old teacher, the avuncular master – but he
was
a Dragon. She couldn’t force herself to apologize or to take the words back, but she managed to stop herself from adding to them.

They waited in silence while Master Sabrai left the room. Severn followed him and opened the door for him.

“I will leave you to the work,” Sabrai said without looking back.

By unspoken consent, they waited to resume the conversation that Kaylin didn’t want to have; she had already managed to discard the one that had been threatening to choke her, and Sanabalis, to his credit, appeared not to have noticed her display of fury.

When the door clicked shut and Severn crossed the room to join them again, Sanabalis spoke.

“Secrets at this time are not safe, Kaylin. Had you any understanding of the history of the races that comprise the Empire – had you shown any capacity to listen, to absorb, to think clearly – it would be easier to grant you privacy.”

“It’s not my privacy,” she said quietly. “It’s not about
me
. If it were, I would tell you.”

“And is it so important that you must keep it to yourself when the fate of the city rests in the balance?”

She nodded.

“You can be certain that it is necessary? That you, alone, can analyze the situation, approximate the danger, and confront it?”

“Sanabalis,” she said, forgetting titles and Oracles and his momentary display of terrifying temper, “
I don’t know
. I don’t know if I can do it. But if Everly’s painting is any guide, I won’t
be
alone. What I learned yesterday – it wasn’t
meant
to be learned by someone like me. Or someone like you. Or Severn. But I learned it as a Hawk, and I know my duties.

“I’ll uphold the Emperor’s Law.”

Sanabalis glanced at Severn.

Severn said quietly, “I trust her.”

“I trust her intent,” the Dragon lord said wearily. “But intent is not enough. The cost if she fails – ”

“The cost if I betray what I know is just as great. Maybe greater. This isn’t the first time a city has fallen in this place,” she added. She spoke a Dragon’s name. A dead Dragon. “But the world didn’t end, and the mortal and immortal races gathered again, built again. I’m afraid that if I tell you, one at least of those races will never be able to do that.

“Sanabalis, you trusted me, in the Barrani High Court, when there was just as much at stake.”

“I had little choice in the matter.”

“Pretend that you have as much choice now.”

It rankled. She could see that. But she held her ground for a minute. Two minutes. Three. She could count the seconds as they moved past because nothing else moved in the room.

And then, as if reaching a decision, she began to unfasten the ties that bound the plain dress she wore. It wasn’t a fine dress. It wasn’t the extremely expensive Court garb that the Quartermaster decried. She didn’t need help putting the dress on, or taking it off. But her hands trembled anyway as she began to pull the fabric up and over her head. Her hair stick clattered to the ground, and she cursed it, but only in two languages – Leontine and Elantran.

And when the dress was just empty, shapeless cloth, she handed it to Severn, who took it without comment.

Lord Sanabalis looked at the dress she had worn beneath the one she’d purchased with her own money. His eyes were golden, but his lower lids fell, and he took a step toward her.

She flinched as he spoke because he spoke in his mother tongue, and the whole room seemed to tremble with the aftershock. Then he spoke a word that she recognized, not as a sound, but as the essence of fire.

Flame lapped at the dress in a ring that rose from the floor. She turned sharply to Severn, shaking her head; she could see that his hand rested – casually – on the weapon chain around his waist. He had come prepared for a fight, and if he was smart enough to know he had no chance against a Dragon, he was Severn enough not to care.

But
she
cared. “Wait,” she told him, when she thought the gaze wouldn’t say enough.

A ring of fire rose and as it did, it began to shrink, until its inner edge touched the dress. The fire guttered instantly.

“Interesting,” Sanabalis said.

“The essence of water,” Kaylin replied.

“Girl, if you had the patience and the wisdom to sit and learn, there is nothing I could not teach you.”

“You couldn’t teach me to fly,” she said bitterly.

“Could I not?” was his soft reply. And giving it, he offered her the hint of a familiar smile, worn around the edges. “I could ask you to understand the essence of air.”

“But not today.”

“No, Kaylin, not today – and perhaps never, if I understand correctly what you wear.”

“I don’t understand it,” she confessed. “But it’s something to do with water, elemental water.”

“Oh, it
is
that.” Sanabalis shook his head, and the weariness was transcended, for just a moment, by something she had never seen in his eyes before: wonder. “You make me remember my youth, and my own ignorance. Very well, Kaylin Neya. What you ask, I will grant you. But we have still not located Donalan Idis. Any of the men that we knew as his friends – if he had them – or his associates have heard nothing from him.”

“If they’re Arcanists, they’ll lie.”

“I told you – Dragons are in the Arcanum. But they are not alone. The Emperor requested that the Arcanists subject themselves to the Tha’alani, and they agreed.”

She winced. “I bet it wasn’t pretty.”

“There were only two deaths.”

“I’m not all that fond of Arcanists,” she replied, although she had to squelch her shock at the words. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“I don’t know where Donalan Idis is, but I can guess where he’ll be.”

“Oh?”

“It’s in the painting,” she said grimly.

“I see no landmarks in the painting.”

“No. Do you see Evanton?”

“I see the Keeper,” was his slow reply.

“I’ve seen him look like that. Once. And if I had to guess, I’d say there’s only one place he
can
look like that.”

“What do you mean, Kaylin?”

“Those robes – he wore them when he invited Severn and me into the Elemental Garden.”

Sanabalis was a tall man, and Severn wasn’t exactly short. Kaylin hadn’t bothered to put her dress back on; the uncomfortable stares of guards and the Oracles she wasn’t allowed to talk to had lost a great deal of import. It was not as if she had that much dignity to lose, after all.

They left the grounds, and Sanabalis spoke a moment to the guards on the insides of the gate. The guards had a hard time keeping their eyes off Kaylin, and she had a passing urge to swear at them in Leontine. She bit it back. If you walked around in a dress like this one, it was bound to get attention.

But the guards came with Sanabalis’s carriage. She was almost glad to see it – of all the carriages she’d been in, the Imperial carriages were the most comfortable. They were also bloody heavy, so bad driving had less of a chance of upending them messily.

They got into the carriage and the horses pulled away from the Oracle Hall. Sanabalis spoke when it was well behind them. “I trust you,” he told her quietly, and she wondered if he was repeating it for her benefit or his own. “But, Kaylin, Evanton’s abode has stood in that street since before it
was
a street. It has withstood fire, flood, and earthquake. It has withstood mage-storms.”

Severn whistled.

Kaylin gritted her teeth. “Mage-storms?” She finally forced herself to ask. Severn and Sanabalis exchanged a glance.

She could almost see, in that glance, the drawing of straws, and wondered who had gotten the short one.

Severn, apparently. “Where mages war,” he said carefully, “and it has happened only a handful of times, none of them in living memory, the magics – if powerful enough – unleash a backlash. We call this backlash a mage-storm. In it, all laws are suspended. No, not Imperial Laws, Kaylin. Natural laws. Anything can happen, and much of what passes under a mage-storm is… significantly changed by the passage.”

“But Evanton’s… shop?... is different,” Sanabalis continued. “It has existed, unchanging, in all forms of the Empire, and in all cities that existed before Elantra. The wise of both orders would consider the destruction of that shop to be impossible.”

“Both orders?”

“The Order of Imperial Mages,” he replied, “and the Arcanum.”

“So you don’t think – ”

“No. If I am to trust instinct, I will trust it fully. I believe that you are correct.”

“But – ”

“The Keeper is not beholden to Imperial Law.”

“I thought that was only the Emperor.”

“He is not beholden to Imperial Law in exactly the same way the sunrise is not. Were there some way to control it and use it, the Emperor would have done so. But it is the sun, it is necessary, and it rises and sets over his Empire. It does not threaten it.

“In a like way, the Keeper exists.”

“Idis stole something from the garden.”

“So it is believed. The question is not what he stole, but how. He should never have been able to gain entrance to that place, and that he did so without the knowledge of the Keeper bodes ill.”

“But if he did it with the knowledge of the Keeper – ”

“It would never happen,” Sanabalis said flatly. “You’ve made the Law your life, and in a far more complete and intense way, the Keeper has made the Keeping of that Garden his. He would no more allow Idis entry unescorted – or, if I had to guess, escorted – than he would allow the Emperor. Or the Dragon lords.”

“You think he’s going to tell you to drop dead.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. And if he does not – then we have far more pressing problems.”

“More pressing than the end of the city?”

Sanabalis was silent as the wheels bumped over the more egregious cracks in the cobbled stone. “What you said,” he told her at last, “was true. There has often been a city in this place. The city has often been destroyed. But the peoples who comprise any city have returned, time and again, and rebuilt.”

“What, exactly, is the purpose of the garden?”

“I wondered if that would occur to you.” His tone implied
and about time,
although he didn’t insult her by saying it in so many words.

“And the answer?”

“To the best of our knowledge, as the Keeper is not of a mind to answer our questions, the garden keeps the elemental forces bound.”

“But if it did that there would be no elementalists.”

“Kaylin, there will always be fire. Water. Air. There will always be earth. Where these things exist, an echo of ancient power also exists, and men with the will and knowledge to summon that power can do so in safety.

“But in the garden, the waking of what slumbers – ”

She lifted a hand. “You’re telling me it’s not just about water.”

“No. Not if we meet Idis there.”

“Then we’d better bloody well make it in time,” she snarled. She propped herself up on the window’s ledge and shoved her upper body through it – she was smaller than Severn or Sanabalis, and she could. Barely.

“Hey! Move it!”

Sanabalis winced slightly.

Severn said, in as mild a tone as he could while raising his voice to be heard, “What is the first thing you learned about riding in a carriage?”

“I didn’t stick my arms out,” she said, as she fell back into her seat with unwanted help from Severn.

The carriage, however, began to move faster, and Kaylin had the happy task of trying to be grateful for the speed. She managed to be grateful that it wasn’t Teela driving.