Cast in Chaos by Michelle Sagara
“It was just a thought. Records,” Kaylin repeated, not because it was necessary—she had no idea what was necessary—but because it was familiar. Light across the surface of the pool—larger than any single mirror Kaylin had ever seen—began to break in a way that was both familiar and disturbing. Strands of different colors began to travel across the circle, moving faster and faster, as if they were seeking something. She thought they were like prettier versions of water worms. It wasn’t comforting.
They didn’t so much coalesce as interweave, squirming closer and closer together until they couldn’t be easily distinguished, and once they did that, the image sharpened. She knew where she was—or rather, what was being depicted: the inside of Evanton’s shop, in his very crammed back hall. The door opened.
“No,” she said, a little too quickly.
Tara’s frown could be felt; Kaylin was desperately thinking at the water in an attempt to displace the open image of the Keeper’s Garden, so she didn’t actually look at the Avatar to catch it. The image dispersed, but Kaylin thought that had more to do with Tara than with any attempt to save her own neck on her part.
She tried again, but this time she closed her eyes and faced out from the immaculate and somehow sterile version of the wrong damn garden, through an open door which faced a rapidly receding hallway. “Records,” she said, in a more subdued tone, when she was certain she had the image fixed in her mind’s eye.
This time, the world unfolded in gray; the only real color was, as it had been then, the glimpse of a familiar hall. Those halls, she thought, Evanton would forgive her. The Garden, never. The image followed Kaylin’s memories, probably more exactly than Kaylin herself could; the image shifted as if it had just taken a step. And then another.
“The hall?” Tara asked.
“I couldn’t reach it.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t run fast enough. There was no real ground—but what there was felt like dry, soft sand.”
“Records,” Tara now said. “Above.”
Nothing except the glimpse of hallway changed. Above—and below, which was the next instruction—looked pretty much the same as straight ahead, or behind. Kaylin looked across at Tara. Her eyes were still obsidian, but some spark of light—like lightning in a storm—now crossed their small, convex surfaces.
“This is bad?” Kaylin asked, keeping her voice as even as she knew how.
“It is…not good,” the Tower replied. She had lost the inflections that often made her sound like a young, excitable girl. Absent those, her voice was like a Barrani voice or a Dragon voice: the surface expression over the ancient. “How long were you—”
A low rumble entered the stillness. Tara’s eyes widened, her lips opening on a total lack of words, her question forgotten. She whispered a single word—an unfamiliar word that had at least ten syllables—before she dropped to her knees. She lifted both of her hands, palms down, and placed them flat against the surface of the pool; as she did, the rumbling grew louder. Much louder, in fact, than it had been for most of Kaylin’s endless, pointless walk.
Tara shook her head, and her hair flew free, caught by a nonexistent breeze in the still room. “Kaylin, where were you when this happened?” Her voice was low and urgent.
“In the—in a store—” I hate this. “I was in the Keeper’s home.”
“The Keeper?” She frowned, and then nodded. “The Elemental wild ones. You were there?”
“No. I was supposed to be there, but the door opened into a different place.”
“Different how?”
“Looked the same, but…it was empty. There was no life in it, no real movement, no sense of…of…” She muttered something in Leontine. “I knew it wasn’t the right place.”
“You crossed a threshold.”
“Yes.”
“A portal.”
“No.” She grimaced, and then added, “Not like the portals in the Towers, no. It’s always been a normal door. It doesn’t even have door wards. It has a boring, normal key.”
“It is very, very old,” Tara replied. “I have…no memory of it.”
“You probably weren’t built—”
“I have memories of things that occurred before I was created. It is part of my function. I was created to serve a purpose. Without knowledge of why—all of which would have occurred before my birth—I could not do so with any competence. But I do not retain that memory. If it is a portal, it is not a portal in any modern sense.”
The Tower’s use of modern in this context made Kaylin want to sneeze.
“However…it must fulfill that function. You opened the door and you entered an echo-world. You were aware of it. It is often not something that is clear.”
“What the hell is an ‘echo-world’?”
“Irrelevant,” was the curt reply. “I will speak more to the question later, if you remember to ask it.” She closed her eyes, concentrating on gods only knew what. “But this…space…is the great desert. This, I retain in memory. The memories are not clear. They are mostly fragmentary.”
Kaylin, who had not done particularly well in any geography that was not confined to Elantra, nonetheless knew what a desert was, and this, leaving aside the sense of sand beneath her heavy patrol boots, was not it. “Not in the normal, mortal context, it’s not.”
Tara frowned. “You should not have been able to reach it at all. Records,” she added. “Marks of the Chosen.”
The image obligingly shifted until Kaylin was looking at the insides of her arms—writ huge—as they had been when she’d inspected them after leaving the fake garden. They were, like the space that Tara called the great desert, colorless but glowing. It was more disturbing here than it had been there.
“Tara,” Kaylin said, struck by a sudden thought. “Can you read those marks?”
“Some of them,” the Tower replied, in the distracted way Kaylin sometimes answered the pestering questions of foundlings in the Foundling Halls.
“Are they responsible for—for the desert?”
“No. Nor are they entirely responsible for your presence in it. Show me.”
“Show you?”
“How did you leave? How did you find your way back to here?”
“I…called Lord Nightshade.”
“Called?”
“I called him.”
Tara’s eyes widened slightly as the import of those words sank in. But she didn’t press further, not directly. Instead, she said, “And he heard you?”
“Yes. Yes, he heard me.”
“If you have his—” She glanced at Andellen, pursed her lips, and said, “Perhaps this is something else we should speak of at a later time. I interrupted you. I apologize. Show me. Records cannot contain how you called him,” she added. “The act is not a matter of simple elements of memory, like vision or sound.”
Kaylin grimaced, nodded. “Records,” she said. This word was different; it was tighter and more clipped. Tara was afraid of something, and the Tower’s fear was impossible to ignore.
A small rip appeared in the fabric of nothing, shaped like an eye but sideways. In its center stood Lord Nightshade. Where the space itself was colorless, the tear in it was dark—obsidian dark. The only light it shed came from the Barrani fieflord himself. Tara said something; it was a low, low rumble of sound. Kaylin recognized it—it was Dragon.
She probably knows all the good words by now, she thought, and then felt instantly embarrassed.
Nightshade grew larger in the field of the pool’s vision, and this time, Kaylin could actually look at his face, examining both his expression and the darkness of his surroundings. What had looked like simple black was not; there were elements of subtle luminescence in the darkness that framed him, like the faint flecks in black opals. She saw his hands in literal fists around whatever it was he was holding, and she noticed then that his fingers—the portions that were exposed to the nonworld—were almost translucent.
His eyes were so dark a blue the
She heard the roar—and apparently this pool was not as solid as a mirror, because the whole of the image rippled at the sound. Looking up, she saw Tara’s eyes; they were, like Nightshade’s, black. Unlike his, they still possessed no whites. Kaylin knew the moment she leaped toward the opening, and she knew the moment something wrapped itself around her legs, pulling her back.
Or trying. Nightshade held her. Nightshade, who would have cut off her legs before he allowed her to be pulled back. It was the type of salvation she didn’t want.
“What happened here?” Tara’s voice was so sharp it sounded entirely unfamiliar.
“Something…caught me,” Kaylin said quietly.
The Avatar’s hands were splayed flat against the water’s meniscus, and she grimaced as the image began to turn—toward what Kaylin hadn’t seen. Kaylin froze as it came into view, the edges of the portal, of Nightshade, of her own struggling body, giving way to what she had called the ‘nonworld.’ If she did speak to the Arkon about this, she was going to have to come up with another damn name.
And she’d speak with the damn Arkon. She’d speak with the Emperor himself, and risk immolation or being the source of brief indigestion. Because this time, she didn’t see shapeless, endless gray. This time she could see the voracity of hunger; the sky was a face, and it was as black as Tara’s eyes, as black as Nightshade’s heart, as black as the Dragon Outcaste who had retreated to the heart of the fiefs. But it was larger in all ways; she felt, for a second, that its only desire was the desire to consume—everything.
Tara was frozen.
But the creature grew larger and larger, and although it had no eyes that Kaylin could see, she could feel them. It roared. Its roar was encased in syllables, and they shook not only the image, but the room itself; she could feel it beneath her feet. She tried to look at Andellen but she couldn’t quite tear her gaze away from the mirror, and she saw that her legs, like Nightshade’s fingers, had grown translucent; she could see through them.
She could see through them except for where the marks were.
Tara spoke again, her hands so rigid they were stone—stone of Tower, stone of form and birth, waiting for the right word to give them breath and heart—and she opened her mouth, but there were no words at all. Kaylin frowned, and then she bent, grabbing the Avatar’s wrists in each of her hands. Her arms, her legs, and half the skin on her back, shrieked in sudden protest, as if some idiot was running his fingers along the slate boards, and she happened to be those boards.
She cursed—she thought it was in Leontine, but it was so automatic she couldn’t actually tell—and yanked the Avatar’s hands away from the water. Or tried. She would probably have had more luck moving Tiamaris. While he was in his Dragon form.
“Andellen,” she said, although it came out in a series of grunts. “Help me. No, don’t touch her—grab me. Pull, damn it.”
The water shook. The image grew larger, the sense of hunger stronger. Kaylin thought the shape and the size of the pool couldn’t contain it—and she did not want to know what would happen if it somehow spilled out. Magic, never the most predictable of tools, could accidentally destroy whole city blocks, and she was standing at ground zero.
The creature roared; the walls shook with the force of its words—and the horrible thing about it was they were words. And they weren’t. In the face of them, she lost all of her own; what was left was the impulse that formed beneath speech, impelling action. The light in the room began to pulse, as if it were alive; the runes etched across the face of the circular walls flickered wildly.
Another roar, louder, closer; she thought it would crack the stone she was standing on. But this roar was different. Blessedly different. She managed—with effort—to close her eyes, and she heard the raging syllables of a familiar yet unknown language. It was Dragon.
Tiamaris had come.
He was not in Dragon form, but he wore the plated armor that appeared when Dragon scales were somehow pushed to the exterior of the human form; he wore no helm, no cloak. This much, Kaylin could see out of the corner of her eye; her eyes were still focused on the mirror, and on what it contained.
And what it contained less than ten seconds after she became aware of the Dragon Lord was his flame, his fists, a large splash, and a series of ripples that somehow made tidal waves seem like the kiddie end of the public pools near the Imperial Palace. Neat trick.
The image was gone; what remained was a glowing—and moving—pool of water, surrounded on all sides by a lip of circularstone. Which was as much as Kaylin saw before she, Andellen, and Tara all fell over in the type of straining heap you get when you play tug-of-war and the opposite side suddenly lets go of the rope. The usual tangle of limbs, and the usual bruises—because Andellen, in plate, was not exactly a cushion—occurred, and three people—well, two people and the Avatar of one damn strange building—all looked up from more or less the same vantage at the Lord of the Tower, who stood, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes a bright, blazing red that was, even as Kaylin cringed, fading to orange.
“Would someone care to explain,” he said, in a voice that managed to be both icy and burning at the same time, “what exactly was being attempted, here?” His inner eye membranes rose, muting a color that was never a good sign, and his lips thinned slightly. “Lord Andellen?”
Andellen would have been the first to rise, but he was mostly on the bottom of the pileup, and only an idiot would have shoved at least one of the two people higher up the pile off in a big rush to stand. He managed, on the other hand, to sound like the usual dignified Lord of the Barrani High Court, regard less. “Lord Tiamaris. Forgive the intrusion.”
“I may,” was the quiet reply. “If I assume that you are here at the behest of Private Neya.”
This wasn’t technically the case, but given the color of Tiamaris’s eyes, Kaylin let it pass. She slid off both the Avatar and the Barrani Lord, rolling more or less to her feet. Then she turned and offered Tara a hand. Tara took it and Kaylin lifted her; she weighed almost nothing. Then again, she could probably shift that weight as much as she wanted, at least in the confines of the Tower.
Andellen’s dignity was Barrani; no one offered the Barrani that kind of help. Tiamaris waited until they were all on their feet, and then he turned to glance down at the pool of clear, still water. Kaylin noticed, however, that the runes that were carved in the surface of every inch of wall that wasn’t door were still present.
“Lady,” Tiamaris said gravely. “Why did you summon me?”
“Not for this,” Tara replied, “but thank you.”
“What did you see? What were you looking for?”
“Answers.” She turned now to Lord Tiamaris. “Kaylin…traversed the dreaming road, if I understand what I saw correctly.”
Tiamaris frowned. It was similar to the frown Kaylin offered, but clearly more significant. “The dreaming road?”
“There are other words for it, but there are no true words. It is not an exact description.”
“And what I saw when I entered?”
“That…I fear that was the Devourer.”
Again, the Dragon Lord waited, and it was slightly comforting to see that Tiamaris, who was centuries older, was at least as ignorant as Kaylin. “What is the Devourer?”
“We do not entirely understand what it is, nor did we. But it exists on the dreaming road, and it hunts for things that fill the emptiness, even in small ways. What it finds, it devours.”
“Thus, the name?”
“Thus the name.” She hesitated.
But Kaylin understood the hesitation, now. “It found me.”
“It found you, yes. But it found you quickly, Kaylin. Too quickly. It is almost as if—”
“As if it were already sniffing around the area.”
“If the dreaming road can have an area, then yes. Th
“But not all worlds and not all doors are safe. That, we learned. The dreaming road was the space between worlds. You could not take doors to reach them, not the first time, perhaps not even a second. You walked in the emptiness and it either devoured you, or it led you. If it led, you would find a world similar to, and different from, the one you had left.
“Forgive me, Lord,” she added, and she looked almost embarrassed. “But the information I have is…not complete. I was created with an awareness, but there was no specific instruction.
The Devourer exists only on the dreaming road, but it is said that he can exist—for some time—upon other worlds, and in other places.
“And it is said, if he does, his nature will, in the end, destroy the world, or the node, upon which he stands. He will reduce a world, bit by bit, into motes of dust and light.”
“And how, exactly, does he do this?” Kaylin asked, trying to keep the disrespectful edge of disbelief out of her voice—and mostly, to her surprise, succeeding.
“We do not know. But where worlds once existed before the Devourer reached them, no worlds existed after. Some said the worlds were sundered, but it was not the belief of most of the Ancients. They spoke of an end.”
Tiamaris’s eyes had now shaded to a pale copper, which was probably about as gold as they were going to get this afternoon. “And what you saw?”
“It is the Devourer. I am certain of it.”
“And you have seen this creature before?”
“No. No memories exist of him, just stories. Just poor words, not true ones. But—his voice, I know. I felt his voice, Lord, and I know it.”
“How does he enter a world?” Kaylin finally asked.
“I do not know. No one—nothing—would be foolish enough to invite him. He must wait for, or stalk, a traveler. Lord Nightshade perhaps did not understand what he faced. I think the Barrani and the Dragons have too little information of this kind, for they were never meant to be a race of travelers. They exist here. They are of this world.”