The Chronicles of Elantra 5 - Cast in Silence (21 page)

“And you see that here?” Morse said sharply. “’Cause I see squat. Besides the shadow.”

“I see a sigil. A sigil,” Kaylin added softly, because she was almost afraid of the words, “that’s taller than the tower itself.”

Tiamaris swore. In Leontine.

Morse looked at Kaylin. “What did he just say?”

“It wasn’t in Elantran.”

“Got that. Dragon?”

Kaylin shook her head. “Leontine. Leontine has a huge number of words that are useful at times like this.”

“So you have been learning something useful.” Morse grinned. It was a gallows grin, but Kaylin had responded in kind before she could stop herself.

“Yeah. I’ll teach you the good ones. There are a few Aerian phrases, as well. Dragons and Barrani don’t need ’em; they just tend to rip out your throat or cut off your head if they’re pissed off.”

“Which your friend isn’t.”

“He’s surprised,” Kaylin told her. “Which is usually a bad thing.” She swallowed and let the grin fade from her face. The sigil still hovered. “What does it mean, Tiamaris?”

“What do you think it means?” Anyone else had said those words, they would have been laced with sarcasm; the Dragon’s voice held none.

“My skin’s itchy, if that helps.”

“Not perhaps as much as I would like,” Tiamaris replied. His eyes were a shade of bronze that was verging, slowly, toward copper. His inner membranes were high; his hands were fists. He grimaced, loosened those fists, and began to gesture; the gestures were both familiar and strange.

She had known for a while that Tiamaris had been one of Sanabalis’s students. His second last. She’d seen him use magic precisely once—but the way the hair on the back of her neck was suddenly prickling, she thought she was about to see a second incident. She couldn’t say why, but Tiamaris actually
using
magic seemed wrong, to her.

Maybe it was the Hawk.

But whatever magic he now invoked was subtle. No fire erupted; no light fled his hands; nothing appeared before him in the air. He simply stood there, staring at the sky. He frowned once or twice, and he repeated his gestures, but the repetitions were shorter, sharper. He finally said another curt, Leontine word, and turned back to Kaylin.

“I cannot see it,” he told her.

“See what?”

“The sigil.”

“Try again,” she told him. “But expand the field of vision. Pretend you’re looking at a spell that’s affecting something the size of our port.”

“For someone who has yet to master the simple act of lighting a candle,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “you seem comfortable giving advice.” He actually
sounded
irritated.

She shrugged. “Sanabalis didn’t try to teach me the one I think you’re doing.”

“He hasn’t tried to teach you anything.”

“Well, he said he was working on teaching me patience.”

Tiamaris snorted. “I imagine,” he told her, his brows bunching together, “that he is continuing to work on
mine
. If he weren’t, he would have sent any
other
Hawk.” His gestures changed only slightly. His expression changed a whole lot more.

“It’s not a sigil,” he told her, voice flat.

“What is it?”

“It’s a storm.” He glanced at the buildings that girded the street. “Stay out of it. Stay out of its reach.”

“Tiamaris—”

“What?”

“I think you’re wrong. If it’s a storm, it’s directed. It looks like a huge version of the shadow-sigil I saw in the Leontine quarter.”

“It may well be both,” he told her. “Kaylin, I cannot go into that shadow. Not now. We must avoid it.”

But Morse said, “Can’t.”

“Why?” The word was a rumble that reminded Kaylin of the thunder that sounds almost immediately after lightning has flashed.

“Because if we avoid it, there’s not much cleanup done. We can run,” Morse added.

“Your one-offs come out of that shadow?” he asked her.

“I’d guess that’s exactly where the one we fought today came from.”

“You’re expecting more?”

Morse’s expression was unexpectedly grim. “Not like that,” she finally said. “I hear swords up ahead.” She took a sharp breath and then drew a long knife in either hand. She glanced at Kaylin, who had daggers equipped, and nodded before she headed directly for the base of what had once been a watchtower. “You’ll see.”

Kaylin glanced at Tiamaris.

Tiamaris shook his head. “You and your friend—and her compatriots—may well be able to weather what lies at the heart of that shadow. I, my kin, and the Barrani, would not necessarily do as well. I will wait for you,” he added. “I will not prevent you from following. What you see, remember.”

It was a reminder. Her hand ached briefly as she remembered the memory crystal the Arkon had placed into her palm. She nodded.

But he hadn’t quite finished. Glancing at the sky, seeing whatever it was his spell allowed him to see, he said, “This is what we feared.”

Morse said, “So there are things even a Dragon is afraid of.”

“Looks like.”

“What about you? What are you afraid of?”

“You know me,” Kaylin said with a grimace.

“Too damn stupid to be afraid.” Morse grinned. It was an ugly expression, but it held no anger; it held what some strange alchemy of emotion made anger from. Pain, maybe. “You’ll need the throwing knives here,” she told Kaylin, forcing that glimpse of the abyss from her face. “And you’ll need to be able to move.

“Don’t let them touch you. If it comes to that, kill them first.”

Kaylin nodded.

“Eli.”

“What?”

“I
mean
it. No stupid shit here. Whatever you see, whatever the hell you think you see—it doesn’t matter. It’s all shadow, it’s all a mind-fuck. What comes out of that shadow, whatever it is that comes for you—kill it.”

“If it’s a mind—”

Morse slapped her. Kaylin raised a hand and a knife glinted in the sunlight; it was inches from Morse’s throat, but Morse didn’t raise a long-knife to block it; she stood there as if she were made of stone and the worst Kaylin could do with the damn knife was blunt it.

“Welcome to the shadows,” Morse snarled. “What you see
can
be killed. Whatever you see, kill it if it won’t keep its distance.”

“Morse—”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll have to kill you.”

The shadow that had seemed so dense and confined grew amorphous as they jogged down the street. If Kaylin had wondered where Morse was leading them, she had her answer: there were men at the end of the street, in the more natural shadows cast by the overhang of taller buildings. These men, in workaday armor, with weapons that would never have passed inspection in the Halls, looked up as Morse slowed.

“Morse,” one said, “get your ass out of the street!”

“Good to see you, too, Killian. Where’s Seeley?”

The man, older than Morse by a good five years, lifted a hand and slid it across his throat. Morse swore.

“We were late,” Killian said grimly.

“How many we lose?”

“Those buildings,” he replied, pointing. There were two, facing each other, the watchtower—or what was left of it—in between them. There was nothing remarkable about either building; each was tall, and it was separated from its neighbors by dead grass and weeds.

“Many people in ’em?”

“It’s the watch border. Not many. No one smart.”

“What about the men on the tower?” Kaylin broke in.

Killian glanced at her, and then back at Morse. “She’s new,” he said. No question.

“Hasn’t been in these parts for a while, at any rate.” Morse added, to Kaylin, “They were dead before the shadow started to take hold. Trust me.”

“How many?” Kaylin asked.

“Four per tower. We can’t spare more. If they’re paying attention instead of playing dice, they’ve got a good chance to get out with their lives.” She shrugged. “Killian, word from the Southwest Tower?”

“Not yet, but that’s looking good. Compared to this.”

“Yeah, well. So is hell.”

Killian snorted; it was his version of a brief laugh. “When we get there,” he told Morse, “they’re going to have to come up with something good, ’cause compared to this, they got nothing.”

“Only if you listen to priests,” Morse snapped. She didn’t.

But Kaylin wasn’t done yet, and she wasn’t—quite—content to be a passive observer. “How do you fight it?” she asked them both, gesturing at the mass of shadow.

“We don’t. We kill anything that comes out of it, and we wait. We wait long enough,” Morse added, “and either something big comes out and kills most of us, or it shrinks and goes back to hell. Something big came out, but it didn’t stick around here. We’re left with the waiting and the cleanup.”

“But you don’t just pull back.”

Morse shook her head. “Cleanup’s necessary. Learned that the hard way. Heads up, Eli.”

Kaylin settled instinctively into a fighting stance and turned toward the shadow, the wall of the building at her back. She expected to see ferals, or something similar, coalesce out of the shadows that moved as if caught in the heart of a storm; she’d seen shadow this dense beneath the High Halls, and she’d seen what it produced.

But she was wrong.

Struggling her way out of the shadows, its tendrils wrapping themselves around her legs and arms as if they were webbing, was an old woman. Kaylin grimaced and almost sheathed her knives; Morse barked a single word that was so harsh Kaylin didn’t recognize it as anything but a command to stay her ground.

It’s the watch border. Not many. No one smart.

No one smart, Kaylin thought, with sudden, bitter fury, or no one mobile. No one who had somewhere else to go. Who did that leave? The elderly, certainly.

Morse darted forward, right arm raised. Right, left—with Morse, it didn’t matter. You could arm her with a damn spoon and it was deadly. Kaylin, knowing this, couldn’t stop herself from moving ahead of where Morse had chosen to stand. “Morse, don’t—”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Morse snarled. “Wrap your empty outer-city head around it. There’s not one fucking thing you can do.”

“She’s hurt—”

Morse laughed. “You have no clue,” she said. But she didn’t kick or strike Kaylin, who now watched the woman weave her way slowly up the center of the street. Her hands were curved in the way old hands often were, and her shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off blows. She was not screaming for help—she was in Barren, after all—but she didn’t speak, either; she was keening softly in distress.

Because Morse was at her back, Kaylin didn’t relax her stance; she didn’t sheathe her weapon, although the weapon was hardly likely to make her look like less of a threat to a panic-stricken old woman. All of the Hawks were required, in their first year, to take riot training with the Swords; they were required to take classes—classes which Kaylin had even passed—in handling people made mindless by either fury or fear.

Barren’s men—and women—certainly weren’t.

Kaylin took a step forward; Morse stayed where she was. Kaylin should have known, then. She should have remembered what Morse’s idea of
lesson
meant. Morse didn’t have the Halls behind her; she didn’t have their experience, and the laws that governed them. The only law that Morse understood, the only one that mattered, was survival.

And if you couldn’t survive, you were obviously too damn stupid to learn fast enough for Morse.

The old woman moved closer, and she moved slowly; she appeared to be alone; there was no one else for her to lean on, no one else to hide behind. It wasn’t suspicious, not to Kaylin—she’d seen that a lot, growing up in Nightshade. She’d almost been on the other end of the spectrum: five years old, nowhere to go, no one to ask for help.

But she’d had Severn, in the end. Severn, who had hurt her more than anyone, or anything, that she had ever faced.

She took a step forward slowly, and then another, and she sheathed one dagger; the other, she let fall to her side. Holding out a hand, she approached the old woman; she heard Morse’s sharp breath, but Morse didn’t speak.

Yes, she should have known.

The old woman sensed her standing there alone, and raised her pale, white-crowned head.

Her eyes were the color of black opals in the lined mask of her face.

CHAPTER 12

But it was an old woman’s face that surrounded those horrible, unnatural eyes. There were no extra eyes, no stalks, no ears, no sudden tendrils of dark, roiling shadow contained in the shape of flesh. Her mouth, when it opened, contained the normal set of teeth—where normal, in the fiefs, meant a lot of extra gaps—and those teeth were the yellow, flattened teeth you could find in any underfed, old woman’s mouth.

They weren’t fangs, and her mouth didn’t suddenly stretch and distort so it was double the length of her face. But she didn’t speak; she keened. It was almost an animal sound.

It was also a sound of distress, of fear, shorn of something as sensible or intelligible as words.

Kaylin froze as the woman stumbled toward her.

Behind Kaylin—not so far behind that she was inaudible, Morse cursed. “What did I fucking tell you?” she said, her voice not nearly distant enough.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.” Kaylin was in stance now; she was set to move, if movement was necessary. But to, or away, she wasn’t certain. Her dagger—Tiamaris’s dagger—was cool in her palm, and her hands felt dry and cold. She wanted the Dragon, not his gift of knives, but he was gone.

The woman reached for her, and Kaylin moved, sidestepping, dancing away from both her arm and Morse’s voice. She could throw the dagger, in theory. But in practice? It was hard. Her arms ached; her legs, where cloth brushed them as she shifted her feet, felt raw.

“What will she do?” Kaylin said, moving again. The old woman did
not
move quickly.

“Grab you, if she can.”

“I got that.”

“I should let her,” Morse spit out. “It’d serve you damn right.” Light flashed; Morse had raised a long knife. She moved toward the old woman with both speed and caution.

“It spreads,” Morse told her. “It spreads.”