Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  “The living—”

  “All. What you see as a word is not a word. If we do not move the corpses, they will rise, and they will not be under our control.”

  “Will they be able to reach the Consort?”

  “Soon,” he replied, gesturing. Bodies rolled away from their stone beds at the motion. Severn had sheathed his blade; he walked as far as the rope that bound them would allow, and she followed, leaving Evarrim at her back. She didn’t count the dead as she moved; she didn’t, which was worse, count the living. She wasn’t careful about how she moved them, and if she started out by offering apologies to people that probably couldn’t hear them, she ended in grim silence. Evarrim had been right; the stone took the shape of a flat circle, and it wasn’t small.

  But the words in the stone that the dead left caught and held too much of her attention; they were deep and glittering. She didn’t touch them again, and absent her touch, they didn’t rise—but she knew they could now, and she was afraid of what they meant. They were not all the same word; that much was obvious, although they looked like perturbations and variations on a theme. She wondered if dying on the stone was an essential part of a plan she didn’t understand or if dying was the only way to somehow release the word itself.

  And then she stopped her frenzied rush and knelt by the body of an elderly man. He was half-bald, and his jaw was bruised; his forearms were bruised, as well. His feet were bare and bleeding. “Was physical contact with the ground here necessary?”

  “Demonstrably. They were left to stand in place, while alive.”

  She touched the man’s face. He was, as the boy had been, alive; as the boy, he was infected. But this time, instead of withdrawing, she moved inward, toward the old man’s heart. The heart was there; she had no trouble finding it. But she would have had the same ease had he been a corpse she was intent on dissecting; it was almost irrelevant to the body’s sense of self.

  Almost.

  But not quite, not yet. She knew she couldn’t do what she’d done to the Barrani; there, she’d all but cut off parts of their flesh in a mad race to stop whatever it was from spreading. Here, it had spread. It had done whatever it was intended to do. The small dragon warbled in her ear, and she reached up and pushed his head gently to the side. “Not now,” she whispered. “I have to listen.”

  She did. She let go of her sense of body and listened to the body’s almost nonexistent sense of self, because she realized, as she did, that it was telling a story. It was much like the story she told to the fire: it had no obvious narrative, no elements, no easily found beginning, no end; it was all middle. All of it. It had no easy meaning, and it was a meaning she required. She listened, stitching together the story of blood and bone and injury; of bruising, of scars, of teeth, their loss, of breath, the odd growth of hair, the slow descent of flesh. Mortality, writ small, made both personal and larger than the life that contained and defined it.

  Healing deep injuries had never been only about the physical; had it, the Barrani and the Dragons would raise no objections to being the healed.

  “Lord Kaylin,” Evarrim said. His voice had an edge, but it was distant, attenuated. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “I’m trying,” she said, her own voice oddly quiet, “to find him.”

  “To find who?”

  She shut him out, closed her eyes, and then realized they were already closed, which was disturbing, because she could see her hands against the man’s face, could see the almost minute movements that meant he was still breathing, could see—the small dragon. He hovered above the man’s chest, his wings like glass, like windows, spreading as he landed.

  He didn’t fold them; he kept them wide as he rose on his delicate, sharp claws; they pierced the man’s chest. Blood was slow to respond, but it did—and Kaylin, holding the man, could only barely feel the injury. She had healed for years—it had been the only advantage to the marks that had changed her life—and nothing in that time had prepared her for this.

  She almost jumped back when the man suddenly opened his eyes, blinking rapidly. He started to push himself up off the ground, met Kaylin’s eyes, and stopped. “Where am I?”

  His eyes were an unremarkable shade of brown. She had seen the citizens of Tiamaris taken by Shadow before—but their eyes looked like black opals, and when they spoke at all, it wasn’t in ordinary Elantran. They looked dead to her. This man, at this moment, did not. She swallowed, and when he looked down at her hands, flushed and removed them.

  “Where am I?” He asked again, and this time, he did push himself, weakly, to his feet. Kaylin rose, supporting his weight as he teetered. He brushed the front of his tunic down, but the motion didn’t dislodge the small dragon. His hands passed through the creature, as if he weren’t there at all, although he continued to cling to the front of the man’s clothing.

  Kaylin stiffened. She turned, slowly, to look at the ground and the landscape, and exhaled when the rest of the bodies were still visible. The relief didn’t last; Severn and Evarrim were not. Wherever she was at the moment, she didn’t occupy the same space. She turned slowly toward the center of what had been shadow, and saw, in its stead, a building.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, looking at the small dragon. He flew back to her shoulder and perched there, wings tensed for flight.

  “I don’t, either,” the man replied, assuming she meant the comment for him.

  “I’m Private Kaylin Neya, of the Imperial Hawks. You?”

  He looked nervous, but given they were standing in the middle of what could only barely be called fog, he said, “Brent.” No family name.

  “Are you okay to walk?”

  He nodded, shook himself, and straightened.

  She glanced at the stone circle. The marks engraved in the surface were still visible; they were not, however, red or glistening. They were gray, a much darker gray than the formless, featureless clouds. Alongside the marks were the sigils that graced every part of the stone, but even these were transformed: Iberrienne’s sigil was pale and amorphous, a thing of smoke and shadow, and the second sigil was a livid, pulsing green. It was the first time she had seen a sigil take that color. She hoped it would be the last.

  Turning to the old man, she said, “I need you to help me wake the rest of the people here up.”

  “That,” a new—and familiar—voice said, “will not be necessary.”

  Chapter 29

  Kaylin turned slowly in the direction of the voice. “Lord Iberrienne.”

  He inclined his head; it was—almost—a gesture of respect. “Lord Kaylin. You are far from your protectors.”

  The small dragon hissed.

  “Go,” she told him softly. “Help Brent wake the others.” He hissed again. “I’m not afraid of him here.”

  “And that is singularly unwise.” Lord Iberrienne stepped through folds of fog; it didn’t part so much as evaporate. At his back, the sky was a shade of blue-green. It was the same color as his eyes. Kaylin had seen the slow fold of emerald-green into blue many times; his eyes were not that color. They were paler, harder, and—as he approached—without whites. She took a step back as he lifted an arm. “You do not understand where we are,” he said, smiling. “You do not understand what we are when we are here.”

  She held her ground. The air around her was dry, although it looked like the densest of fog, and as Iberrienne walked toward her, it changed color, becoming a pale, bright gold; flecks of light glittered, as if the air were crystallizing.

  Iberrienne’s eyes narrowed as they began to shift in color, losing the appearance of pale turquoise shell to a livid bright green. She recognized the color: it imbued the second sigil evenly spaced upon sections of the stone ring. She realized, then, that both sigils were his.

  Or that he was not Iberrienne.

  What had Wilson’s brother said? There were two extra travelers but they couldn’t be Iberrienne, because neither had a name. Yet Iberrienne had entered the Hallionne, had eaten
at the table, and had been housed within its confines. Iberrienne was Barrani; he had a name.

  Two travelers.

  She glanced over her shoulder, at the people who were gathered behind her.

  It was a mistake; she realized it instantly when mists burned away in a flash of incandescent purple light; she was at its heart. But the fire—and it was fire, a fire she recognized from her brief walk through the border zone in the fiefs—failed to burn or destroy. Encircling her as she stood was a shimmering globe of pale light; the fire burned beyond its edge, obscuring sight of everything: Iberrienne himself, the people she had turned, without thought, to look at.

  “Go back!” Iberrienne shouted.

  The small dragon warbled and butted her cheek with his head.

  “I have given you my word that you will leave this place when your work here is done. Go back!”

  But Kaylin had been trained to speak—and speak loudly—over the voices of a crowd; to speak as if she was speaking, not shouting. The Swords were better at it, but the Hawks had all received some of their training, and she put those lessons to work. “Do not return to the circle. If you must move at all, head for the Tower.” As she spoke, the purple flame banked.

  Iberrienne’s eyes rounded. And, predictably, narrowed. “You interfere in things you do not understand.”

  She shook her head. “I interfere in things I do. You are killing these people.”

  “They are mine to kill.”

  She refused to engage in an argument about commerce and ownership, although her nails bit into her palms as they tightened into fists.

  “They will die, regardless. They were born to die. It is the fate of the animals.”

  Tighter, trembling fists.

  “But I have offered them a brief glory, Lord Kaylin. I have offered them a glimpse of grandeur and a window into a world that they would otherwise never see.”

  “An offer,” she replied, voice as tight as her fists, “implies choice. An offer implies negotiation. You needed these people, and you offered them nothing at all for their service.” She hesitated and then said, “You don’t belong here.”

  His brows rose. “I? I do not belong here? And what of you? You are mortal, you are only barely sentient, you are barely out of infancy, and you stand upon this hallowed ground.”

  Keep him talking, she thought, aware that it bought time—but time for what? The people who stood at her back in a disturbingly uniform crowd had been altered. There was no other word for it. The alteration had killed maybe half of them already; she’d bet the others were destined to follow, and soon. No one with half a thought would touch that bet.

  But they weren’t dead yet—and clearly, they were meant to die while standing on the circle. While they were alive, there was some hope that they could remain that way.

  “You don’t belong here,” she said again. “Or rather, Iberrienne doesn’t.”

  * * *

  “What did you just say?”

  “Lord Iberrienne does not belong here. None of the Barrani do. None of the mortals do,” she continued.

  “And you absent yourself from that number?” He was angry. He was angry, but something else invaded his tone.

  “I,” she replied, “wear the heart of the green. I bear the illuminations of the Hallionne. I,” she continued, raising her arms to half height, although her hands were still fists, “am Chosen. I can stand here without making any of the compromises you have made.” It was a guess. She spoke in High Barrani; the edge in her voice was less obvious in that language. “You are merely a Lord of the High Court.”

  Purple flames rose again, searing away more of the mist. Kaylin flinched, but the fire was so thick it hid her expression. She wasn’t afraid of the fire; not yet—the small dragon’s shield had been proof against an Arcane bomb. But she wasn’t certain what that fire would do to the people who waited, upon either her word or his. She had told them to go to the Tower if they must move at all—but clearly, they didn’t feel flight was necessary.

  The small dragon batted her head, harder. It wasn’t a slap, and there wasn’t enough force that it could be considered a punch, but it made clear that he had his opinions. When the curtain of fire lowered again, Iberrienne was much closer. His face was shorn of expression, his eyes still livid-green.

  “Magic, it appears, is not enough to dispose of you—but I now understand how you survived the attempt to destroy the Dragon.” He almost spit out the last word, as if having it in his mouth at any point was poisonous. She rarely saw such vehemence in the Barrani. Even in fury—no, especially then—they were cold and colder. He reached for her throat with his hands.

  This time, she moved, ducking beneath those outstretched hands, rolling across a ground she couldn’t see, and coming, in that motion, to her feet. She ran toward the crowd and through them; she couldn’t hear his steps at her back. She risked a glance over her shoulder. Sound or no, he was running; he hadn’t drawn weapon. Kaylin drew both of hers.

  “Stop her!” Iberrienne shouted.

  Kaylin cursed. There were more Barrani here?

  * * *

  It wasn’t Barrani that stepped from the mists to block her way. To her surprise, her enemies were people, and they wore the familiar clothing of the fiefs. Only their eyes made clear that they weren’t entirely human—they were the dark opalescence of Shadow.

  She skidded to a halt, daggers in left and right hand, as they moved toward her in silence. They were unarmed, unarmored; in other circumstances, they wouldn’t have been a threat. But they numbered three, and as she watched them, that number doubled, and doubled again. Between six and twelve, she knew that none of these were the people she’d helped to their feet here, because she recognized one of them: the first corpse she’d examined. The first of the dead.

  She cursed in loud Leontine, but she moved, jogging to the right and avoiding this unexpected blockade. She stubbed her toes, saw the stone circle beside her feet, and leapt up to its surface; it was the only clearly visible path in sight. They paused at its edge and began to walk along the inside of the perimeter. Maybe they couldn’t cross it?

  She took a step off the circular path and ran into something invisible. It was not, however, inaudible. “No, Lord Kaylin,” a familiar voice told her. “You can’t leave this circle. It’s not safe.” It was either Wilson or one of his brothers. She couldn’t tell; she couldn’t see anything but gray and had found them hard to distinguish even when she could.

  “I’m kind of having trouble staying inside it,” she said, gritting her teeth to prevent a second outpouring of less quiet Leontine.

  “Yes,” Wilson’s brother replied. “But the circle prevents all from entering it. It is the perimeter of the Hallionne’s domain.”

  “The Hallionne isn’t here.”

  “She is,” he replied. “But she will not last. We would help you, but we cannot breach the circle without the Hallionne’s permission—and that permission takes effort. We attempt to preserve the Consort and the Teller in your absence.”

  “Wait. Tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here.” She was jogging along the circle’s perimeter as the dozen not-quite-dead people followed. “Tell me where I am.”

  “You are in Orbaranne’s domain in the outlands,” he replied after a pause. “The circle is not as you see it. It is not anchored in ground, but in life.”

  “The people chasing me—can you see them?”

  “Yes, Chosen.”

  “Are they dead?”

  The answer was so long in coming, Kaylin wondered if Wilson or his brothers even understood the word. “Yes, Chosen. To you, they are dead.”

  “To you?”

  “They are part of this space; they cannot leave it. They are like your parchment, like your reports; they lay unread upon your desk.”

  They were so not like her reports.

  “You are overwhelmed by your reports, yes? And they are written? And you dislike them because you feel they express, poorly, the truth of
your experience, even if it is your experience that forces the choice of the words?”

  Gods damn it all.

  “They’re reports, Wilson.”

  “I am not—”

  “Fine. Robert. They’re reports. Reports. No one cares about them and they serve no purpose! They are so not the same!”

  “There is nothing else similar in your experience,” he replied. “That was all I could find.”

  “How can you even read my mind when I’m here and you’re on the other side?”

  “It is the gift,” he replied, “of your companion. Did you not know? We cannot do it with anyone else.”

  She wouldn’t have asked had she known, and didn’t consider it a gift to her. But as she jogged, aware that her stamina would give out even if theirs didn’t, she considered what he’d said. “Robert?”

  “Lord Kaylin.”

  “When these mortals died—and they’re dead—they left words on the stone. Some of the words are still here. Can you read them?”

  Pause. “No, I am sorry. They do not look like words to me.”

  “What do they look like to you? They’re engraved and they appear to be similar to the words on my skin. But when they separate from the stone, they look like very poorly crafted words; everything is slightly off shape, or so roughly carved they look distorted.” She took as deep a breath as she could. “Can you read them at all?”

  “They do not look like words to me,” he repeated. “They are as much words as your alphabet, randomly concatenated, would be.”

  Kaylin frowned. “Are they?”

  “Are they what, Chosen?”

  “Are they like an alphabet? If you look at all the nonwords on the perimeter, do they spell something to you?” It was not the way the runes worked, in her mind; they were composed of parts—of strokes, straight or curved, squiggles, dots, things that intersected to form a distinct whole. Some of these were very simple and some so complex it was hard to see them all. It was like trying to describe the shape of the Imperial Palace if you’d only ever seen the public face of its Library. But regardless of complexity, she had a sense when looking at them that they were complete.