Cast in Deception by Michelle Sagara
Terrano said nothing. It was the wrong kind of nothing. He managed a shrug, turned away from the word and began to walk. Kaylin almost joined him, but Bellusdeo caught her by the shoulder. “Look at the word,” she said, her voice the wrong kind of soft—the kind you got when you lost control of your voice and couldn’t speak more loudly than a shaky whisper.
Kaylin had been looking at almost nothing else.
The word had started an odd shimmer the moment Kaylin had bled on it; she’d been watching because she was afraid it would start to move again, and if it did, she’d be shredded. But that fear was unfounded; whatever Alsanis had done, the word remained much more tightly anchored in space. What changed, now, was its color. Where the word had been dark, almost obsidian, something began to spread across its visible surfaces, until the whole was a pale, almost pulsing, gray. To Kaylin’s eye, it was uglier, but she understood, as she watched, that the whole thing was transforming itself to better resemble the marks on her skin—marks that remained stubbornly flat.
“What have you done?” the Dragon asked, in the same soft voice.
“Nothing deliberate.”
“You’re going to have to do something about that. Accidentally tripping over the security precautions of a building that’s like Helen, but on a far grander scale, is not something you should be doing carelessly.”
Since Sedarias was the one who had chosen the direction, Kaylin thought this wasn’t particularly fair. She was old enough now that she didn’t bother to put the feeling into words, although in part this was because Terrano came running back. The sharp edges of these words did not cut him; he seemed to pass through them. Or they passed through him.
“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” He was almost breathless, which was unusual for a Barrani.
“Why?”
“...Sedarias said it’s helpful.”
The cut, which wasn’t deep, was already drying, and Kaylin really didn’t fancy shredding herself—deliberately—on the sharp, gleaming edges of these words. She wished, again, that she’d dragged Mandoran with her to Evanton’s, rather than the Dragon; she was pretty certain if he were here with her, he could talk to Sedarias no matter how far ahead she was. Terrano couldn’t.
But Terrano’s trust in Sedarias had not wavered in his absence from the cohort, and if he could not entirely return to his friends, he had returned to that trust.
Kaylin gritted teeth, forced herself to walk to the next word, and cut the mound of her left palm.
“Are you choosing the words at random?”
“Yes,” Kaylin said, as Spike said, “No.”
She’d forgotten about Spike in the surge of adrenaline that accompanied the knowledge that the invaders were inside Alsanis. This wasn’t the first time she’d encountered Shadow at the heart of a building, and they’d managed to repel those Shadows. The Shadows had been trying to revise, to rewrite, the words at the heart of a Tower, in the fief that was now Tiamaris.
But Terrano and his allies had been trying something entirely different, when they had almost destroyed Orbaranne. They’d been trying to absorb, to drain, the power of the words themselves. Kaylin understood that words had power—but that power was supposed to be metaphorical.
Here, it was not.
To speak these words one had to be Immortal. Or more. She remembered, dimly, the vision of one of the Ancients cutting into himself so that his blood ran into a basin—an ancient version of the mirrors upon which the city of Elantra now depended.
Her blood was not his blood. She was not a creator, not a god, if the word even applied. What she did here wasn’t the same—but if her blood was mortal and thin and the wrong color—not golden but red—she bled anyway. She offered that blood, grimly, to Alsanis. Instead of avoiding the edges of words, she practically leapt between them, because she really did not want to cut herself every single time.
“What do you mean, it’s not random?” she heard Bellusdeo ask.
Spike’s words were underlined with a whirring; clicks broke the syllables as he replied. “Random implies that she is not making choices. But she is following a specific path; you will note it if you—”
“I can see where she’s going.”
“—read the words.”
It was the Dragon’s turn to be frustrated, and she wasn’t above expressing it; the air at Kaylin’s back grew much warmer. Kaylin was fairly certain that Dragon breath wouldn’t harm these words. And she understood the frustration, because she was choosing words with no understanding of their meaning; she chose the ones with slightly wider forms while she picked her way across a nonexistent path.
But these words, like the first one, turned an even, almost glowing gray. She stopped once to look back, to see the path she’d taken. Terrano, however, had once again disappeared, running back to Sedarias as if afraid she would be lost here.
And as Kaylin cleared the last word, or rather, looked ahead to see an almost open space, she skidded to a halt so suddenly Bellusdeo ran into her.
* * *
The open space was a clearing, ringed in a circle of bristling, standing words, each bearing edges that could scar dragon scale. Kaylin understood that this was the heart of Alsanis, the heart of the words that defined his existence. It was in a similar space that Terrano and his associates had once attacked Orbaranne, seeking power.
Terrano was not the attacker here, but the space itself wasn’t empty. Two very physical Barrani were at its center. They weren’t dressed the way they had been in Spike’s Records replay, but his images had been correct: one was male, one female. Their robes appeared to be dusty with travel. If they had come here through the portal paths, they had not found an entrance through the Hallionne—any of the Hallionne. Had they, the Hallionne would have been forewarned.
They were armed, and they turned toward Kaylin. She could see the glint of swords; the man was either left-handed or ambidextrous. Either way, he was Barrani, and Kaylin suspected that if he were here, in this room, he was also an Arcanist; the sword was almost irrelevant.
She ducked immediately behind the nearest word; she would still be visible, but the words themselves weren’t lifeless architecture. As if he thought the same thing, he failed to cast anything resembling a spell—but against Kaylin, he wouldn’t need it. The familiar sat up while Kaylin navigated, and plastered a wing across her face.
She didn’t immediately realize why; the man looked no different viewed through the familiar’s wing than he had through her unaugmented vision, and it wasn’t always easy to move in a way that kept the wing firmly over her eyes. But he never smacked her face this way unless he thought there was something she should see. She looked.
Both the moving Barrani man and the woman who appeared to be standing sentinel remained unchanged. But through the wing, she could see the cohort clearly; she could not see Terrano. If he was here at all, he was hidden.
Bellusdeo was not.
The Barrani man stopped walking when the Dragon stepped out, gleaming in golden armor; he raised his sword as she inhaled. She didn’t bother with warnings or threats; that wasn’t her way. She breathed. The man spoke three harsh words, and the sword in his hand split the flame. Kaylin wondered, briefly, if it were one of The Three, the swords created by Barrani master smiths in a bygone age to kill Dragons. She lost that thought when the metal cracked and shattered. The shards flew out and away from the man, but the woman had seen Bellusdeo.
“Hold her off!” she shouted, although her hand was also on the hilt of a sword.
Kaylin noticed that the woman’s sword, which she had assumed was in a rest position, was actually in contact with the stone beneath it. And she noticed that the tip—in the familiar-winged view—was glowing; it was a red glow, striped with gray, and it was dark enough that glow was not quite the right word to describe it.
But that reddish gray light was spreading; b
Kaylin knelt immediately to the side of Bellusdeo’s battle, and placed one hand flat on the stone.
“What are you doing?” Terrano demanded.
The question half surprised her; she assumed, and had always assumed, that what she saw through the crutch of familiar wing, Terrano saw without effort.
She didn’t answer the question, in the vain hope that the woman carrying the sword would fail to hear it. Terrano, on the other hand, was not exactly quiet.
Kaylin lifted only her head. “Bellusdeo—it’s the other one you have to stop!”
The Dragon roared; the ground shook. Terrano, however, was no longer bothering Kaylin. He headed toward the woman with the sword and checked his steps as Bellusdeo swung her head and sent the woman’s partner flying. Unfortunately, that was literal, and if Kaylin had entertained the small hope that the man was not an Arcanist, it was dashed when he failed to fall.
The woman was not Terrano; she did not curse. The Barrani she used was clear and entirely recognizable. “Stop them!”
Kaylin once again bent her head. Beneath her hand, the stone over which she’d walked was warm; it had the give of muscular flesh. The word that hovered above her was not engraved into its surface, and Kaylin wondered if it had been, before the Barrani arrived.
Reaching up, she cut her hand and let the blood flow freely as she reached more gingerly for the sharp edge of a long, looped line. The word absorbed her blood, the shift in color obvious almost immediately. To Kaylin’s discomfort, it was almost exactly the same color as the web pulsing beneath the woman’s sword.
Terrano came back to Kaylin. “Hold on to something. No, not that—you’ll lose a limb.”
“What are you doing?”
“Talking to Alsanis.”
“Is he replying?”
“I hope so.” He turned toward the woman who appeared to be in charge. “I didn’t come here planning to fight.” There was a grimace in his voice; Kaylin couldn’t see it, because he was now standing entirely in front of her, barring the way. “Whatever it is you’re trying to do, do it quickly.”
Kaylin was not under any illusion; she could be bled dry and she wouldn’t be able to cover all of the words at Alsanis’s core; he was far more complex than Helen. Her familiar didn’t lower his wing, and as she bent once again to study the lines that seemed to travel like veins beneath skin made of stone from the tip of the Barrani woman’s sword, she saw that they had spread, and were spreading, beneath her.
She didn’t know what would happen when they stopped; didn’t know what their purpose was. She assumed that it was...not good. Her familiar bit her ear, which, given the position of his wing, took real flexibility.
Kaylin put the bleeding hand flat against the stone, and pushed.
23
A cut to the palm or the arm was nowhere near the worst of the injuries she’d sustained in the line of duty, but the only advantage her assailants got from those injuries was the hope that they might slow her down. This was different and she knew it.
Her blood seeped instantly into the stone, as if the stone itself were entirely illusory. It crawled—there was no other word for it that wasn’t more disturbing—toward the web that spread from the tip of the sword, and met up with its strands, as if it were a small stream joining a large river. There was almost no visible difference between the two; only by tracing the lines back to their respective sources could Kaylin differentiate.
She’d hoped that somehow she would have control over her own blood, her own part of that moving web; she didn’t. She started to lift her hand, but her familiar bit her ear again, harder this time.
Past her left shoulder, purple fire blossomed. It splashed across an invisible barrier. The Barrani woman shouted a warning, then; she was angry. Or afraid. With the Barrani, it was often hard to separate the two. It took Kaylin a moment, vision split, to understand what was happening: the woman was screaming at the man to stop using the purple fire.
“I’m fighting a Dragon!” he shouted back, dodging the very unpurple draconic breath. Which is more or less what Kaylin would have said had she been the person in midair without one of the three Dragon slaying swords to hand. But as the ground shuddered beneath her knees, almost knocking her over, the woman’s concerns made more sense.
“She’s afraid his actions will engage the interior protections,” Terrano remarked. Both of his hands were in the air, palms facing out, as if he were intent on surrender.
“That barrier—that was you?”
“You’re not a Dragon; the fire will kill you if you don’t move out of its way. We should have help soon. And Sedarias will be really, really angry if you die here.”
“Why?”
“Because then she’ll have to deal with Mandoran and Annarion.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault!”
“You really haven’t spent much time talking with Sedarias.”
Purple fire gave way to purple rain. Terrano cursed and changed his position.
“Do you recognize them?” she asked.
“I’m a little bit busy now. Ask me later.” He grimaced as some of that rain passed just to his left, and seared an ugly line through his tunic. Kaylin remembered that Terrano’s current clothing was now much closer to Dragon armor than anyone else’s. It was like another skin.
Bellusdeo took to the air. Although she was a much larger target, she wasn’t much slower in full Dragon form than the Barrani Hawks; she made the most of her agility.
The Barrani woman moved as if the sword were a tether. But Bellusdeo’s breath was a ranged weapon, and Terrano was right: something was happening within this room.
“Is Alsanis going to know that Bellusdeo isn’t a danger?”
“You’re watching her and you’re telling me she isn’t dangerous?”
“I mean it, Terrano.”
“Yes. He’ll know. Because Bellusdeo is a guest he’s already accepted, and she’s fighting to protect herself from intruders. Unless everything collapses here, he will not harm her.” The last words were spoken in much slower, less frenetic Barrani. “Now stop talking and do something.”
Kaylin opened her mouth to tell him that she’d already done what she could, but managed to snap her jaws shut before the words escaped. Terrano, not an Arcanist, could provide magical protection; Bellusdeo could provide the necessary attack. What Kaylin was doing—what she was supposed to do—could be done by neither. She didn’t have to be a Dragon or an Immortal to be useful.
And Terrano was right. Useful had a short lifetime.
She lifted her hand to check the cut and the flow of blood while the familiar chittered like a bird trying to imitate an insect. The web came with it. She froze, staring at the strings that had been unmoored from beneath the surface of stone.
And she remembered the glove of shadow lace that had covered her hand during the defense of Moran’s Aerie, hundreds of miles away. She remembered how it had come into existence: she had been attempting to prevent Mandoran from being possessed by Shadows that were worming their way into his body.
The familiar crooned.
She had prevented that possession by wrapping those strands around her hand, and in the end, those strands—inert—had remained. They reminded her, in some fashion, of the marks—but they had faded into invisibility. Bellusdeo, sensitive to all things Shadow, could not detect them, and everyone had assumed that they were gone. Even Kaylin.
Kaylin spent entirely too much time in wishful thinking.
Instead of laying her palm back against the rumbling ground, she raised it, and the strands of webbing that had looked so much like blood vessels gone bad elongated; moving her hand, she began to wrap those strands around her palm. The odd thing was, i
Nor did the woman holding the sword notice, at first.
The motion of the ground beneath Kaylin’s knees had passed from tremors to waves—kneeling on it was like standing on the surface of moving water. But worse. The Barrani woman tried to drive the sword farther into the ground, and at first, it seemed she was successful. But Kaylin could see the way the ground itself moved around the swordpoint, as if avoiding it; what was no longer stone, although it still appeared that way, was creating a sword-shape pit, or sheath, for the weapon itself.
Three things happened at once.
* * *
Someone shouted her name—the words came at what felt like a great remove. The voice was familiar, but to hear it any more clearly, Kaylin would have had to tell Bellusdeo to shut up, which was never going to happen.
The Barrani woman realized that the sword was no longer penetrating the surface of the Hallionne’s core.
And the cohort suddenly gained solidity. Kaylin noted the latter only because she could see them, now; they were standing much closer to the Barrani woman and her sword than they had been. The air in the room, which was thick and hazy, had all but rendered them invisible, at least to Kaylin’s eyes; the color they seemed to be gaining as the seconds passed made them all appear more real, more present.
They wore no obvious armor, but three carried weapons—weapons that gained in color and substance as their bearers did.
The stranger looked up, instantly aware of them, although her shoulders were still bent in the attempt to either withdraw the sword or push it through the impromptu casing. She shouted for her partner, but her partner—while surprisingly not dead yet—had a Dragon to worry about, and the Dragon wasn’t playing. Much.
Kaylin continued to rotate her hand, to wind thread by thread of an ugly, terrifying web around it. She understood that at base it was Shadow, that Shadow was transformative, that it was poison—but she also understood that what she was doing was having some positive effect. And if she couldn’t imagine what the Barrani would do with the power of a Hallionne, she was pretty damn sure she—and the laws she served with her life—wouldn’t like it.