The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (11 page)

She glanced at Tiamaris, who didn’t seem to be surprised, and gave up. “Yes. But I didn’t understand why. And I still don’t understand why
now
.” The words sank into the silence that followed them. “It’s gotten worse,” she said, voice flat. “Recently.”

Lord Nightshade said, “It has, as you guess, recently become much more unstable.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. The interior is completely invisible to both my magic and my information network.”

“Do you
think
it has something to do with the Outcaste Dragon?”

“He was injured, when he retreated from our previous encounter,” Nightshade replied, his voice completely neutral. “The injuries he sustained were not insignificant, and unless he were capable of healing them quickly—” his tone made clear that he thought it highly unlikely “—it is doubtful, to me.”

She slid her hands to her hips, and then let them fall back to her side. “Nightshade, please—”

“When the tainted Leontines ran into the heart of the fiefs,” he told her softly, “it is just possible that their need and their voices woke something that should
not
have been woken. This is conjecture, on my part, no more, and for that reason I am hesitant to offer it.”

She swallowed. “I-it can’t be them.” The shakiness of her words failed to convince even Kaylin, and she’d
said
them. She looked at Tiamaris.

The Dragon Lord said, quietly, “The Eternal Emperor and the Dragon Court have decreed that the child of the tainted is not to be killed. They will not destroy him when they receive word of Lord Nightshade’s conjecture, Kaylin. That much, your service has bought the infant.”

That much, Kaylin thought. She tried to ignore her fear, but fear was hard that way. Swallowing it, she turned back to the mirror. Wondering what might wake in the shadows and the darkness of something that had looked, at first glance, like the rest of the city.

“Tiamaris, what happens if Barren somehow falls?”

“Falls?”

“If the shadows—if the heart of the fief—somehow expands to fill it?”

“You’ve lived in Nightshade,” was his quiet reply. “Your life was informed, in some ways, by the presence of those shadows, whether you knew it or not. The Emperor will hold the city,” he continued, after a pause.

Lord Nightshade raised a brow, but did not comment.

“But it will know ferals, and possibly worse. The Imperial Palace is not what Castle Nightshade is.”

“The High Halls—”

“The
Barrani
High Halls,” Tiamaris said.

She winced.

“You see the difficulty.”

She did. But she plowed on, regardless. “Could the High Halls hold out against the—the shadows?”

“Almost certainly, given the change in rulership. But it
will not
happen while the Eternal Emperor still breathes. He will not surrender an inch of his established domain to the Barrani.”

Lord Nightshade nodded. “I can enter Barren,” he told her quietly. “But it is not, then, safe for Nightshade. Not now; there is already too much instability and too much weakness.”

She had lived most of her life under Nightshade’s rule. In no way could she call it either just or fair. But the shadows—in the fiefs, and under the High Halls—would be far, far worse, and she accepted this. Because, she thought bitterly, she lived on the
outside,
where his law and his casual cruelty had no purchase. For just a moment, the bitterness of that hypocrisy caused her throat to thicken. She swallowed it, anyway. Time to move on.

“What borders Barren on the other side?”

“Understand that what I tell you is not fact in the way that Liatt is fact; the fief does not border
me.
But if information gathered in the fiefs in the usual way can be trusted, Candallar.”

“Will Candallar hold?”

Nightshade said nothing. It was not helpful.

Tiamaris bowed to Nightshade. “I must leave,” he told the fief lord.

Nor did the fief lord appear surprised by the abrupt announcement. “Will you allow the Private to remain for a few moments?”

“I cannot leave without her; the orders I were given were quite…explicit.”

This, too, did not appear to surprise Nightshade. Kaylin felt his amusement, but also his annoyance; they were almost perfectly balanced. His eyes, however, were the emerald green of Barrani calm, with perhaps a hint of blue to deepen the color. “Then escort her,” he told Tiamaris. “She will return.” He offered the briefest of bows to the Dragon Lord. “The information I can surrender in safety, I will. If anything changes along the borders, I will inform Private Neya; she may then inform the Emperor.”

Tiamaris nodded and turned to leave the room, but Lord Nightshade had not quite finished. “Kaylin.”

“Yes?”

“I will not surrender you to Barren.”

Tiamaris did not run back to the bridge. Dragon dignity was good for something. He did, however, walk
quickly,
and the difference in their relative strides meant that Kaylin’s dignity had to suffer; she had to jog to keep up. Only when they had crossed the bridge itself—with a distant crowd of witnesses who were too curious to clear the streets and too damn smart to approach—did he turn.

“We go to the palace,” he told her.

She nodded; she’d expected that much.

“You are not yet relieved of your duty for the day. Accompany me.”

She nodded again, not that he noticed. “Tiamaris—” she began, as he stepped into the street.

He failed to hear her, which was probably deliberate. Dragons didn’t flag a carriage down; they simply stood in the way and waited for it to stop. This was, in Kaylin’s experience, a risky proposition, but on the other hand, Dragons were built in such a way that if the risk played out poorly it didn’t exactly kill them.

“Tiamaris,” Kaylin said, as she climbed into the cab, “if you’re going to make a habit of this, station an Imperial carriage by the bridge.”

He ignored her advice.

“I mean it. We have enough trouble with the Swords as is—I don’t need to file a counterreport to explain a small riot or a large panic if we don’t luck out with a decent driver.”

When they reached the palace gates, guards met the cab. They didn’t lead it into the courtyard, but they did clear the path as Tiamaris emerged. His eyes were a shade of orange that looked a little too deep, and none of the Imperial guards could fail to understand what that meant, but just in case, he lowered his inner membranes, so the color was much more pronounced. If they noticed his tabard—or Kaylin’s—they failed to be offended by it.

She followed Tiamaris into the Great Hall, and then stopped as he lifted a hand. “Wait here,” he told her quietly. “I go in haste to the Emperor, but even in haste, your poor understanding of Court etiquette would not be excused.”

She started to argue because it was automatic, and snapped her jaw shut before the words left her mouth, settling in to wait. Waiting in
these
halls, with the stray glances of guards who were no doubt paid triple what she earned was a bit intimidating, but she didn’t have to wait there long; Sanabalis emerged from the doors at the far end.

“Private,” he said as he approached her, making clear what the tone—at least in front of the guards—would be, “please follow me.”

She hesitated, aware that any other guard here wouldn’t have.

“No,” he added, when he noticed she wasn’t immediately dogging his footsteps, “I am not leading you to either an execution or a meeting of the Imperial Court.”

Since they would probably amount to the same thing, Kaylin relaxed and trailed behind the Dragon who was, truth be told, her favorite teacher, not that this said much. He led her to the rooms he used to meet with individuals, and she paused by the large, leaded windows that looked out at the Halls of Law. They seemed distant and remote to her, and she didn’t like it.

“Lord Tiamaris has made a preliminary report,” Sanabalis told her, as he sat heavily in an armchair designed to take the weight of a Dragon. “Some research is now being done by the Arkon, which may give you the luxury of a small break. I suggest,” he added, gesturing at the food that had been laid out on the small round table in front of him, “that you use it.”

The Arkon was the palace’s version of a librarian. He was also the oldest Dragon at Court, and technically not called Lord, and his hoard
was
the library. Kaylin’s understanding of the Dragon term
hoard
wasn’t exact, but time had made clear that it meant “touch any of my stuff and die horribly.”

She nodded and took the chair opposite Sanabalis. She even picked up the large sandwiches that had been made for her. Sanabalis never seemed to eat, and he deflected most of her questions about Dragon cuisine. Then again, he deflected most of her questions about Dragons, period, which was annoying because he was one, and could in theory be authoritative.

“Do you understand the significance of what Lord Nightshade revealed?” he asked her, coming to the point while she chewed. His tone of voice made clear that he expected the answer to be no.

She grimaced, wiping crumbs from the corners of her lips. “There’s some strong connection between a fief and its Lord,” she finally said.

He nodded.

“Liatt, a fief lord, rules the way Nightshade does. Barren doesn’t.”

“Do you understand why?”

“No. I’m not a fief lord. It’s never been one of my life ambitions, even when I thought I’d live there forever.” Seeing the stiffening lines of his face, which weren’t all that significant, and the slight darkening of the gold of his eyes, which was, she added, “I can infer that there is a building in each fief that is similar to Castle Nightshade.”

The color didn’t exactly recede, but it didn’t darken to orange. Sanabalis was not, by any stretch of the definition, in a good mood.

“If there’s a building like that in Barren, Barren doesn’t own it. He’s not its Lord or its master.”

“Did you know this?”

“Sanabalis—I was
thirteen.
” She spread her hands, one of which was full of sandwich, in a gesture of self-defense. “I’d never been inside the Castle—how the hell was I supposed to know it was significant? It was where Nightshade lived; the only chance I was ever going to see it involved death by cage. In public.”

“And in Barren?”

“More of the same,” she said.

He said nothing for a long moment, and it was Kaylin who looked away. “Not the same,” she said, and the food turned to ash in her mouth. “But I didn’t know that Barren wasn’t like Nightshade. I didn’t know—” She stopped. Swallowed. “What I knew doesn’t matter.”

Sanabalis nodded, conceding the point. “Do you understand what alarmed Lord Tiamaris?”

She nodded. She did. “Barren is unstable,” she said quietly. “And whatever lies at the heart of the fiefs isn’t contained anymore. If we can’t stabilize Barren—somehow—that will spill across the Ablayne.”

“And into the Emperor’s city, yes.”

“But Barren’s held it—”

“For ten years. Much longer,” Sanabalis added softly, “than we would have suspected was possible. We don’t know what’s changed,” he added, a note of warning in the words, “but something has.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

He spread his hands across the knobs at the end of his armrests. “What am I going to do? At the moment, very little.”

She snorted. “Fine. What am I going to do?”

“A more salient question. You are going to accompany Lord Tiamaris to the fiefs to investigate the difficulty. Think of how you’re going to approach this,” he added, as he rose. “If you require entry into Barren—”

Kaylin lifted a hand. “I know how I’ll get in,” she told him curtly. Then, trying to smooth the edge out of her voice, she added, “I have no idea how to do it with Tiamaris tagging along.”

“Tiamaris,” Sanabalis replied, “is not optional.”

Sanabalis left her abruptly, but his departure wasn’t the usual mystery; a Dragon roared, the palace shook, and when the tremors had died down, he was already out the door. She thought the voice sounded familiar, but it was hard to tell; the roar had momentarily deafened Kaylin.

She ate in silence, although she did so from the ledge of the window, watching the flags atop the Halls of Law. If she had sneered at those Halls as a child—and she must have, being a fief ling, although she honestly didn’t remember it—she felt no similar disdain now; the Halls served a purpose. One only had to cross the Ablayne to see the effects of the districts beyond their reach. Yes, the law wasn’t perfect; yes, its officers and representatives made mistakes.

But the alternative was so much worse. She’d lived it; she knew.

She had avoided the fiefs for over seven years now, approaching them solely at the request of her superiors in one Hall or another. It wasn’t simply cowardice or distaste; it wasn’t a desire to separate herself from her roots or her past. She was afraid of what the fiefs contained.

But if she let that fear govern her, unspoken and unacknowledged as it so often was, the fiefs would come to her. They would eat away at Barren, and if Barren himself deserved it, the people who eked out a miserable living in his fief probably didn’t; they did—as Kaylin had done in Nightshade—what they needed to, to survive.

She couldn’t judge them; didn’t even want to. That wasn’t her job.

The door opened, and she turned slowly to see Tiamaris—and the Arkon. Sanabalis, slightly shorter, stood behind them.

The Arkon lifted a slender, wrinkled hand. “Private Neya,” he said.

She slid off the ledge, and offered him a full bow. If it wasn’t a good bow, he didn’t appear to notice. Neither did Sanabalis, but she could see that in his case, it took effort.

“I am prepared,” the Arkon told her, as he entered the room, surveyed the chairs, and took the one Sanabalis habitually occupied, “to discuss Ravellon.”

CHAPTER 7

Kaylin had once been warned not to ask the Arkon about Ravellon if she valued her life, or at least having all her limbs attached. She reminded herself that she hadn’t asked as she took the nearest chair that would support her weight. Given the room was a hospitality suite for a Dragon Lord, that would be any of them.