Michelle Sagara (11 page)

Did she understand what this rune signified? No. And staring at it wouldn’t give her that understanding. She needed to approach it more closely, and she needed to hear it over the competing songs that filled the air.

* * *

What she felt, as she approached, was the warmth of sunlight on a still, cold day. It was the hearth fire in Marcus’s house, when the Leontine kits were sprawled in one messy, living fur heap in front of it, and invited her—by more or less tackling her, knocking her over and dragging her—to join them.

Kaylin couldn’t imagine living with Marcus’s Pridlea; his wives, although she loved them, were terrifying. But from the first night he’d taken her home, she’d felt as if she almost belonged.

“I don’t suppose,” she asked the small creature who was both her passenger and her only form of locomotion, “that we could take both of them?”

The dragon said nothing. He didn’t even warble. When she hesitated, he bit her ear again. She growled. Marcus’s kits would have choked with laughter at the sound she considered a growl.

She wanted this word. She wanted what it reminded her of. She realized she had no
single
word to describe it. It didn’t matter. She knew that it wasn’t home, not exactly, but it was close: welcome, warmth, acceptance. Acceptance of Kaylin, a human, in a home meant for Leontines. Acceptance and a place for her. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even the promise of love.

But love could grow in a space like that if it was freely offered and freely accepted.

If she could only choose one word, it would be this one.

Thinking that, she looked over her shoulder. Only one? Was that what she had to do? Her arms ached; her legs ached; the back of her neck was burning. Only the mark on her forehead failed to cause pain, probably because it was singular.

In the absence of clear rules—hells, in the absence of murky ones—there was instinct. There was previous experience. Using the power granted her by the marks allowed her to heal—but healing didn’t change the marks themselves.

But freeing the trapped spirit of an ancient, dead Dragon had: one rune had vanished. Interacting with the Devourer had, as well—but she’d lost more.

Yet she’d also gained marks. She couldn’t be certain that they hadn’t always been there; she felt that they were emerging with time. Only the mark on her forehead was one she had chosen—and she hadn’t consciously decided to add it to her skin; she had been in a panic because she didn’t want to see it destroyed.

There were no rules.

She turned away from the rune that offered warmth across so many spectrums, and once again faced the one she thought of as mourning. She hadn’t examined it as closely because she didn’t
want
to return to what it evoked in her.
Mourning
was not the right word.
Grief,
maybe. But even that felt thin.

She reached out and placed a hand around one of the thinnest of the curved lines that comprised the rune that meant almost-home. When she started to move, it came with her. She was surprised that it had no weight, no drag; it wasn’t small and it appeared—to her eye—to be very solid. But it didn’t fade away; it didn’t return to its place on her skin—wherever that was.

Nor did the other rune disappear; it waited.

I don’t want to go there.
But want or no, she went; the wings were not, in the end, her wings.

* * *

There are places no one wants to revisit.

Kaylin was afraid of this word and what it meant, even though she’d seen enough at first glance to get the gist of it. This was not a word she wanted to define anything. The one that she now carried with her, yes. But not this one.

The dragon was singing. The eagles were singing. Their voices had flattened into a single thing; she could no longer hear harmonies or the subtle shifts that indicated multiple voices. Her own voice was silent.

She had been to so many dark places in her life. She had suffered so many losses. She had lost the only home she had known, but had never lost the desire for, the need for, a home. She had lost her family. She had lost the person on whom she had most relied. She had become something she hated, and stayed there for long enough it was still hard, on some days, to look in the damn mirror.

“I don’t want to do this,” she told the small dragon. But she flew toward the rune anyway. “I mean it.”

His squawk was turned to song and not to what often sounded like angry, harping lecture—absent intelligible words.

And she realized that it didn’t matter. She couldn’t understand the thing if she didn’t examine it. She probably couldn’t understand the whole of its meaning, regardless; she wasn’t an Ancient or an Immortal, or the distant relative of a world-devouring creature. This wasn’t, and would never be, her language; her understanding would always be imperfect.

But...the rune itself seemed so personal. It seemed, for just a moment, to be part of her, exposed, writ large. Since closing her eyes made no difference in this space, she gritted her teeth instead. She was angry.

But she’d been angry at herself, on and off, for a long time. Anger didn’t control her actions anymore; it just made long, hard days longer and harder. What she’d done in the past, she couldn’t change. She could refuse to make the same stupid choices; it wouldn’t stop her from making different stupid choices in the future. If she learned something from them—if she survived for long enough to learn something—she could narrow the stupidity options. She was human; she would never narrow them to zero. But no one did. Even the Hawklord made mistakes.

On most days, she pulled herself up off the ground from her figurative face plant, and kept moving, reminding herself that it was normal to make mistakes. Everyone had to fail sometimes. On some days, no.

And she could see failure in this rune. Failure. Loss. Grief.

But she couldn’t see rage, self-loathing, the desire to lash out and break everything in sight. She couldn’t see what she’d felt when she discovered the death of the two children she had known and loved best.

No, that wasn’t quite right. She could. She just couldn’t see
all
of what she’d felt. She couldn’t see her own sense of betrayal at Severn’s hand. She couldn’t see her certain sense that if it were not for
her,
both girls would still be alive. There was no self-loathing.

There was loss. Isolation. A hint of choice—but it was a choice that would be made, again and again, a defining choice. It was...it was like responsibility. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was duty. It was defining duty. It was as strong as her sense of duty to the Hawks.

Yes, she hated the bureaucrats. She hated the stupid regulations that seemed to serve no purpose, unless one
wanted
criminals to get away. She hated parts of Elani street, her regular beat. But she loved the work. She loved the sense of purpose it gave her life.

Would she still love it so much if every Hawk she knew and worked with now were dead and gone? Would she feel the same sense of purpose if she were the only one left to do the work? Would she still do the work? Could she?

Loss. Grief. Shades of things Kaylin could understand if she rearranged parts of life on the inside of her head.

She turned to the small dragon. “We’re taking them both.”

His eyes widened, although given their size in the rest of his face, it was hard to tell. She reached out for the rune, and gripped it firmly in her right hand, the left being occupied. She wasn’t certain what to expect, but it was warm to the touch; as warm as the first rune had been.

Only when it was firmly in hand did the singing suddenly stop.

* * *

The silence was intimidating because it was so complete. She turned to look at the eagles; they were hovering in place; even the path of their flight, interwoven as it had been with the shadows, had disappeared. They were facing Kaylin. Since the shadows had no faces, it was harder to tell what they were looking at, if they looked at anything at all.

Barian had called them the nightmares of Alsanis.

She stood suspended in the air, her hands on two runes—not one. Nothing besides movement and sound had changed; the runes were still visible, and much larger than they had been on her skin. She’d hoped that the choosing of the words was the end of her responsibilities. When a mark had lifted itself off her skin in the dusty back rooms of the Arkon’s personal collection, the Dragon spirit trapped there had flown free.

Clearly dead Dragons and Imperial libraries had nothing in common with empty, gray sky, although Kaylin personally thought they had a lot in common with nightmares. The two words did not collapse or merge; they stayed pretty much where they were.

But the eagles didn’t. The shadows didn’t. The sky didn’t fall away from Kaylin’s feet; they did. They suddenly folded wings and dropped in a dead man’s dive. Kaylin kept her hands on the runes and glanced at the small dragon.

He warbled.

“I don’t like it.”

As was often the case, what she liked—or didn’t—made no difference. Her companion hissed and folded the wings that had allowed her to move freely—if slowly—in what was nominally sky. Weight returned. Given weight and nothing to wedge it between or hang it from, so did falling.

She tightened her grip on the words she had chosen, but they didn’t hold her up; they came with her. After a few seconds of panic, and the realization that she couldn’t streamline her own dive while attached to the words, she accepted the fact that she could do nothing but go along for the ride.

She just hoped that the landing wouldn’t be fatal, and that it would bring her closer to the absent Consort.

Chapter 9

She fell for what felt like an hour before she saw the first sign of actual geography. As landscape went, it wasn’t promising: it looked like a small, dark pit. From this vantage, she couldn’t see bottom.

As she approached the pit, she realized that
small
was the wrong word. It was huge. She thought it the size of a city block, and revised that as she fell; it was the size of a city. A large city. When she finally reached its upper edge, she wasn’t surprised she couldn’t see bottom; she could no longer see the whole of its shape.

Turning—which was difficult—she saw the sky recede as she continued to fall. The small dragon dug claws into the skin below her collarbone, and she cursed him in Leontine.

The Leontine bounced back in an echoing, strangled kitten sound—the usual result of the combination of human throat and the deeper Leontine curses. She chose a few of the less throaty words instead, and then, for good measure, switched to Aerian. It was the Aerian that caught her attention, probably because she mangled the pronunciation less. The echo was not attenuated. It wasn’t stretched. It was almost exact, and it continued as she dropped.

She spoke in her mother tongue and listened to herself, growing quieter as syllables bounced off walls so distant they should never have reached them at all.

She then switched to Barrani. All languages had useful words, but it was hard to swear in High Barrani. Kaylin had always believed that High Barrani was the language of Imperial Law because it was the most stilted, pretentious, and boring of the Elantran tongues.

High Barrani returned to her in her own voice, but instead of a diminishing echo, she heard a resonance to the sound, an amplification. The runes in her hands—hands that were gripping tightly enough her fingers were beginning to tingle—shook. She stopped speaking; the trembling, however, continued.

She
hated
working in the dark. Figurative dark, literal dark—she was hemmed in by her own ignorance. There’d been solutions to that, in the Halls of Law. She’d worked. She’d learned. She’d studied—at least she’d studied the important stuff. Here, she had nothing to go on. Everything was a risk. Every decision had to be made on air and instinct and hope. She was afraid of the consequences because she couldn’t even begin to predict them.

And...it didn’t matter. She could fall forever—seriously, that’s what it felt like—or she could take risks and pray that the only person who suffered when she did was herself.

She returned to High Barrani. She was unsettled enough that random words rolled off her tongue first; she shook her head, and when she spoke again, she began to recite the Imperial Laws. She was rusty, she knew; only the important ones were word-for-word clear: the ones that defined murder, kidnapping, theft, and extortion. She chose those because they were the ones around which she’d based her life.

They’d given her purpose. They’d given her wings. They’d given her family. Hope. Yes, her work regularly brought her into contact with the people most likely to break those laws, but she balanced the constant exposure to the least law-abiding citizens with her work at the midwives’ guild and the Foundling Hall. The worst and the best.

That job had brought her here.

“Go left,” she told the small dragon.

This time, he didn’t warble; he huffed. She had the distinct impression he would have said “about time, idiot” if he’d actually been able to speak in a language she could understand. This was why Kaylin did not own cats. On the other hand, at least the small dragon listened; he spread his extended, diaphanous wings and she drifted toward the left wall. It was not close; it took a long time.

She wondered if time was passing for the Consort; she wondered if her own body had collapsed in the Consort’s room.

Taking a deeper breath, she let go of that thought and returned to Imperial Law. It wasn’t as dry as it should have been because it had meaning to her. She thought of the first murder investigation Teela and Tain had allowed her to tag along on. And of the first investigation she’d attended as an actual Hawk and not an unofficial mascot. Or an official one.

She’d never understood why the Barrani had chosen to take the Imperial Oath to the Halls of Law; she’d never understood why they served. They’d said they were bored. But...they were
good
at what they did. She’d learned a lot from Teela, and most of it was within regulations.

When she reached the far wall, her hands were vibrating because the runes themselves were shaking. It was as if the component parts wanted to fly free of each other, and that was
so
not happening right now. Not yet.

The small dragon dug claws into collarbone again. She bit back the urge to tell him to shut up or be helpful, because it was his wings that were moving them both. She forgot frustration as they at last approached surface.

It wasn’t a wall. Or rather, it wasn’t the side of a pit. It looked like—like a carved likeness of the flattened streets of a very, very bizarre city. Parts of that city were laid open, as if they’d been sheared; rooms were exposed—or what she assumed were rooms.

And what had she expected? The Consort had fallen unconscious because of the nightmares of Alsanis—and Alsanis was a
building.
A sentient building. She looked right, left, up, down—the vista, the flattened, exposed likeness of something that she’d be afraid to police—stretched out for as far as the eye could see. Everything was cast in shadow; it was not, as she’d thought at first glimpse, of black stone or rock.

Nor was it completely without light. Here and there, she caught flickers of something that might have been candle or lamp; she caught movement, but only out of the corner of her eye. It reminded her of cockroaches. She
hated
cockroaches.

The buildings themselves were not uniform. And, as she drew closer still, she realized they
weren’t
squashed and flattened. But they had been. They seemed to gain dimension, stories unfolding where her flight brought her close. She could see what might have been streets, but they were dark hatches that grew even less distinct as the buildings themselves emerged following the trail of her flight path.

The runes in her hands, had they been alive, would be agitated and panicked; they’d probably be screaming. She wondered if those screams would be laden with fear or joy, which was an odd thought.

She nudged the small dragon, and he banked to the right; buildings rose out of their flatness, the flickering lights becoming the heart of windows and arches. Stone, she thought, and then reconsidered. This was some part of the Hallionne, if
nightmare
was a word that could be literally applied. The rules of normal architecture didn’t mean anything here.

She had no idea what she was doing, but seeing a city unfold as she passed above it made her feel almost at home. It wasn’t Elantra—but it wasn’t an endless forest full of insects and talking Ferals, either.

On the other hand, it didn’t seem populated. Small twitches at the corner of her eyes didn’t become people of any stripe when she looked. It was a ghost city, a deserted town, absent the usual decay and dilapidation. She nudged the dragon, and he banked to the right, slowing as he straightened out their gliding path.

She saw why: the building that began its ascent as she approached did not stop unfolding; to avoid running smack into its side, the small dragon would have had to ascend just as quickly. She shouted because he didn’t even
try.

“Up! Up!”

He flew straight, the little winged rat. She had the horrible certainty she was about to discover just what these buildings were made of—by splatting against the wall. But beneath a roof with a spire that could impale Dragons in flight form, a balcony opened up. It was longer and wider than Kaylin’s entire apartment.
Former
apartment. The wall it jutted from was rounded, and it had no doors; instead, it had an arch that was open to air, as if it were a cloister. The dragon flew straight above balcony rails and beneath that arch, tucking his wings so they’d fit. He also wrapped his tail around her neck.

When they’d cleared the arch, he folded his wings entirely, and she fell a good six feet to the ground. Six feet wasn’t usually a problem. Six feet when both hands were occupied wasn’t the usual.

She sprained her ankle. At least, it felt like a sprain because it hurt like blazing fire, but she could stand and it more or less supported her weight. “This is
stupid,
” she said in Leontine. “I’m not even physically
here
and I have to hobble through this maze with a bum ankle?” She did not, by dint of full hands, punch the wall. Or kick it.

It wasn’t a maze, though. It
was
a cloister. Arches cascaded beyond the arch she’d entered; to her right was wall, to her left a shadowed courtyard. The air was still and dry; there was no sound but her breathing. Even the dragon was silent, although he batted her face with one wing. It wasn’t an improvement over ear-biting.

As she walked, simple stone walls gave way to small fountains, small statues; the open courtyard continued. She’d never been in a courtyard this large; she was certain it was at least four city blocks in length, and it showed no signs of ending. What she wanted from a city, she decided, was stable architecture and buildings that made sense. Who made a courtyard this bloody high off the ground?

She stopped, turned, and walked toward the open space to her left to look down. She couldn’t see bottom. The small dragon whiffled, but he didn’t bat the side of her face. “I’m
not
jumping unless we run into Ferals or a really, really ugly dead end. Got it?”

He exhaled—air, not cloud—and flopped across her shoulders, rolling an eye in her direction before he closed it.

“
Now
you’re clocking out? Are you kidding?”

He failed to answer.

She started in on a very Leontine reply, but something caught her eye; it was bright, gleaming. She turned to her right; there was a statue against the wall, between the right-hand pillars of two arches. It didn’t vanish when she looked at it. She realized that the gleam she saw was the reflection of the two words she was dragging along at her sides as if they were recalcitrant foundlings on an outing.

The statue was made, not of stone or marble, but...glass. It was glass. It stood on a pedestal of white marble. If it had been standing on the floor, it would still have been taller than Kaylin; Barrani were. It looked like a blown-glass representation of a ghost. A male ghost. Its features were delicate, the glass taking the form of ears, chin, perfect cheekbones. Probably perfect skin. Kaylin didn’t really believe in ghosts, but none of the stories she’d heard indicated bad complexions, and anyway, he was Barrani.

She stood, bracketed by the two words, watching the light play off transparent surface as if it were a window. A very beautiful window in a nonexistent frame. She peered through his chest, which was at eye level, given the pedestal. She did not see stone; she saw—thought she saw—night.

She wasn’t surprised when the window moved his arms. She should have been, but the minute she’d hit balcony, she’d given up on anything making sense. The statue reached out to touch the rune that meant grief and loss. His hand passed through what was, to Kaylin, appreciably solid.

She began to walk again, the statue, the ghost, trailing behind her, his open, empty eyes upon the words she carried. And why wouldn’t they be? They were the only obvious source of light.

* * *

He was not the only statue. Immediately ahead, between the pillars of two arches, stood another, also male. His face was broader, the cheeks wider, the chin more chiseled; he was otherwise tall and slender, although she thought him taller than the first. He wore a thin tiara across his brow, although it, too, was made of glass.

She stopped in front of him, watching the first ghost—she couldn’t quite think of them as Barrani, although it was clear that’s what they were meant to be. He, too, reached for the rune that spoke of grief and loss, stepping off his pedestal to do so. He didn’t seem to see the first ghost; nor did the first ghost see him. But his hand passed through the rune, as well, and a ripple of expression moved across his face like a liquid wave.

She would have let them take the runes, because there was something about them that was
not
Barrani. They seemed younger to her, and drawn only to grief. The second rune might not have existed at all. But she knew the words weren’t meant for them, because as she passed beneath the second such arch, she came to stand in front of a third glass statue.

Unlike the first two, this one was female; the slight swell of breasts and the delicate curve of hips would have given it away, but she also wore a Court dress—a Barrani Court dress—that hung in folds. She wore two rings, two glass rings, and a bracelet that looked almost martial; her hair fell from forehead to knees, unbraided. She was slightly shorter than the second ghost, and of a height with the first; she looked far haughtier than either of the first two. She didn’t attempt to touch the rune, but her chin dropped as she looked at it.

She wouldn’t reach for it, either, Kaylin thought, because she knew she could never touch it. But she, too, stepped from her pedestal, and she followed as Kaylin continued to walk.

* * *

She wasn’t surprised to see that there were eleven such statues by the time she reached the T junction at the end of the murderously long, open gallery. The rune had become heavier as she walked; she was practically dragging it, by the end. Two of the glass Barrani were women, nine were men.

Kaylin was annoyed. Not at the rune. Not at the ghosts. Not even at Alsanis.

No, she was annoyed at the High Court. Because they spoke of twelve lost children.
Twelve.
There were
eleven.
She had no doubt, in this amalgam of dream, nightmare, and Hallionne, that these ghosts were the ghosts of the eleven who had been so badly damaged by the ceremony in the green. They had been taken to Alsanis after the end of the recitation, when forbidden blood had been spilled during the telling, as if Alsanis was a jail. They had been sent to the West March by ambitious parents—and they had been sacrificed to that ambition.