Cast in Peril

by Michelle Sagara

  But…there were two exceptions, and both were significant: the High Lord and Bellusdeo. In the High Lord’s case, Kaylin had retrieved and carried what she knew was a word, a True Name. It was complete in and of itself—but in giving it to the High Lord she understood that it was also a component; it was half the name he was meant to bear. Neither the name that had given him life nor the name that had renewed it were incomplete on their own; had they been, he would never have opened his eyes.

  Bellusdeo’s was similar and at the same time entirely different. Like the High Lord, she had had some variant of a name, but unlike the High Lord, it had been, in the end, not half the name she would encompass, but a ninth. The first name hadn’t been taken from the Barrani Lake of Life; Bellusdeo was a Dragon, and the Dragons didn’t require a name to waken. They just required a name to be Dragons. She had found a word for herself, with the help of an ancient enemy, and it had both transformed and sustained her. But it was only in the combination of that single word and the eight she absorbed from her dead sisters that she emerged as she was meant to be.

  Yet incomplete, her first name had been a name, a word, something that had meaning in and of itself.

  Robert was silent for so long Kaylin thought he’d run off. And he had, apparently; he’d run the perimeter of the circle he couldn’t cross, to wind up at her side behind a wall of gray mist. “I will ask Wilson.”

  * * *

  “Lord Kaylin.”

  “Wilson?”

  “Yes.” She could almost see him, although he was indistinct; a gray, shadow outline of a Barrani male. She knew this was bad. “It is. The Hallionne is retreating; she may collapse.”

  “What will happen if—”

  “You will die,” he replied.

  “And the others?”

  “We may be able to defend them if we retreat to Bertolle; we will not be able to reach the West March.”

  “Can anyone hear the Hallionne?”

  “You can,” he replied.

  She couldn’t. She could hear Wilson and her own breathing.

  “I did not say you do; I said you can. Robert has asked me your question; he has relayed the information you offer.”

  “Can you see Severn?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see me? I mean, is there another unconscious me where he is?”

  “No, Lord Kaylin. You do not require the anchor. Everything else in this space does, save the Hallionne—but if the Hallionne shifts position, she is lost.”

  “She won’t be under attack—”

  “She is under attack on all planes, Lord Kaylin. She is under attack on the forest road, she is under attack on the portal roads, and she is under attack in the heart of her domain.”

  “I’m in the heart of her domain.”

  “Yes. You, the mortals, and Lord Iberrienne. Lord Severn and Lord Evarrim cannot reach you. Lord Severn is upset,” he added. “Lord Evarrim is angry.”

  “And water is wet.”

  “I do not understand how,” Wilson continued, ignoring her observation. “But you may be correct. The writing you see—the writing we do not see as writing—may be the components of a word.”

  “Why would it even be written this way?”

  She could feel his confusion. “Written what way?”

  “When I write words—” She let the sentence trail off.

  “Yes,” he replied. “You have never written a word. None of you have ever written a word. You have heard words, Lord Kaylin; you have read them. I believe you have even spoken them. But you have not written them; you have always come to the language that is already extant.

  “If what you suspect is true, Lord Iberrienne is attempting to write a word.”

  “Why?”

  “Words,” he replied, “have power. The Hallionne are the sum of their words; each Hallionne is bound by the word that gives them life.”

  She looked at the stone beneath her feet and understood why it was where it was. It was the boundary of the Hallionne’s domain. The end of the space transcribed—in ways that made no sense to mortals—by a word.

  “Yes,” he replied. “This can only be attempted at the heart of a Hallionne. Bertolle is alarmed. He says this should be impossible. Humans do not require words; they cannot contain them. If Iberrienne had attempted this with Barrani—”

  She lifted her arms. There, the runes glowed.

  “He considers your counterargument, Chosen, and he asks that you attempt to…”

  “Attempt to what?”

  “There are no words in your language. In any of your languages. Save the Hallionne.”

  “I want to save the people.”

  “Your only hope of that is to save the Hallionne.” His tone made clear that he thought it scant hope, regardless. But Kaylin had experience living on next to no hope.

  She nodded. “How?”

  “I am sorry,” Wilson replied, “but Bertolle does not know. He asks you to consider what you did to aid him.”

  “That’s not the same!”

  “And what you did to waken us.” Wilson paused. “Lord Kaylin,” he said, his voice rising as if in question, “what do you see?”

  “Here? People, walking undead, a Barrani who isn’t Barrani, and a large Tower. And the circle.”

  “That is not what we would see, were we there. You did not see Bertolle that way, when you first approached the Hallionne.”

  “You’re telling me I choose what I see.”

  “No. But it is chosen.”

  “Great. How do I deal with the Shadows?”

  “They are not Shadows,” he replied. “You see their eyes and you make assumptions. Those assumptions are not correct. They cannot exist as they do outside the confines of this circle. Everything about them is contained here. I ask you to think of your Leontines.

  “I must leave you now. The Consort faces the reborn.”

  * * *

  Think about Leontines. Kaylin felt this gave permission to vent her frustration—and yes, to take the edge off her fear—in her language of choice. The walking dead, for want of a better description, continued to follow her, but they moved slowly. They had also increased in number. They didn’t speak, shout, or move in any way other than to pursue, and she was far enough ahead of where they walked that she wasn’t in immediate danger.

  She wasn’t certain the same could be said of the people who were not yet dead. How, she thought, were words written? The Barrani Lake of Life existed. The Consort didn’t add names to its very metaphorical water: she extracted them, delivering them to their bearers. Kaylin slowed to a brisk walk.

  When she had first seen the Lake of Life, it hadn’t been a lake. Not even in the abstract. It had looked to her eyes like the surface of a very fine-grained desk. Only when she traveled by the side of the Consort—please let the Consort forgive her before she died—did she experience it as a lake. It had never occurred to her to ask what the Consort or Nightshade had seen when they looked at Bertolle on the night she’d wandered into the cage of his name, cutting herself against its components.

  And it had never, ever occurred to her to ask how words were created. She knew the Lake of Life was a gift from the Ancients. She’d never considered how more words might be added—if that was even possible.

  But…words were the source of Barrani life. They were the source of Draconic life. They were the entirety of the Hallionne. The small dragon bit her ear. “Yes,” she said, “probably you, too.”

  We’re alive without True Names. We’re alive without words. But we’re alive. Biting her lip, she came to an abrupt halt before one of the graven marks. Kneeling, she touched it.

  * * *

  The rune in this place was a dark gray; it didn’t look like shed blood. But when she touched it, it was warm. It was warm the way flesh was; it was also soft, as if the stone itself were a carapace, beneath which the rest of the body lay protected. As she withdrew her hand, the rune began to rise, in shape and form no different fr
om the red mark Severn and Evarrim had seen as a beating heart. Her fingers were stained, as if she’d touched wet ink. Given that it wasn’t ink, she felt uneasy, but she didn’t try to wipe it off; the only cloth she had she was wearing, and if the ink itself was something inimical, she’d rather not commit treason by damaging or destroying it.

  Instead, she rose and headed toward the next mark. She touched this one as well, and it rose to the level of her chest, pulsing faintly as if it were the heart that Severn and Evarrim had seen. She had no idea why she was doing this, not to start; Evarrim had been appalled by the casual way in which she’d touched the first bloodred marks.

  But it wasn’t spite. She was, she realized, trying to understand the alphabet, the syllabus, of language. She approached it by touch because it was dimensional; it had texture, shape, color. She couldn’t speak it, couldn’t—in any real sense—read it. She had no other way of coming to an understanding of what it was, because she certainly wasn’t going to bite it. She did listen.

  She heard Iberrienne shouting commands, and she wanted to countermand them—but as the walking dead continued to pursue her, one of the words she’d pulled up from its casement of stone began to stretch, to elongate. Kaylin didn’t hold it; it slid easily beyond the reach of her fingers, unanchored, and traveled toward one of the dead men. He stopped as it hit him. Tendrils that might have been part of the letter form reached into his heart center, as if seeking anchor there. They took root, and as they did, the word buried itself in the man’s chest.

  It drew no blood, but as it disappeared from view, the man’s eyelids began to blink like insane shutters, and when they stopped, his eyes were normal eyes. She couldn’t tell what color they were at this distance. But she noticed one thing: her pursuers moved past the man. They moved with less cohesion; it was almost as if they could sense what had just happened to one of their number, and they wanted it for themselves.

  Iberrienne screamed in what sounded like rage. Within the circle, purple flares went up. When she paused to watch where they landed, the small dragon bit her ear again. “We are going to have words when this is over,” Kaylin told him. But she moved, touching each of the graven runes; by the end, she didn’t even pause to watch them emerge.

  She saw Iberrienne only once, and it was clear from the way he moved that he didn’t see her. That he couldn’t. It made no sense, but nothing did at the moment, and at least this was a good crazy. It was a gift.

  When she had pulled the last of the runes from the stone circle, the entire circle began to rise, to form a wall that literally stretched up, beyond her view. This was either very good or very bad, and judging by Iberrienne’s cry, he considered it the latter.

  What had he been trying to do here?

  What could be gained by trying to write new words? New truths? She leaned against the wall, catching her breath. Trying to sort out what she knew about True Words. They were whole; their meaning, if you could converse in true language, was complete. There were no shades, no subtleties, and no misinterpretations; context didn’t matter. Single words were necessary for the Immortals to live, but the Immortals didn’t speak the tongue, or if they did, they didn’t speak it the same way the Ancients had.

  She frowned, pulling herself away from the wall. The Tower still dominated the area enclosed by the new walls.

  The Arkon could tell ancient tales. Some of them were true. Sanabalis could recite the story of the Leontines—and that, too, was true. What truth meant, in the case of the dragons, was simply that she could see the words emerge. She couldn’t speak them, couldn’t understand them as language; she could see them as structures. But hearing them didn’t change her; speaking them hadn’t noticeably changed Sanabalis. Hearing them had, in the age of the Ancients, changed the Leontines. It had birthed their race. It had given them speech, awareness, a community that was rooted in whatever it was they’d been before the tale had started.

  The story, recounted, had resonance for the Leontines, but it did not have the power to alter them again. It had no power to alter Kaylin or Sanabalis. Nor did it apparently grant the Leontines True Words of their own. Kaylin wondered if such a story had been told at the birth of her own race, or the race of the Aerians; if the Tha’alani had likewise emerged from an entirely different race; if there was some creature, somewhere, who could retell the story in a way that she could touch and examine.

  She walked toward the people she had gathered into a group. Iberrienne had told them to return to the stone circle; she had told them to head to the Tower. They remained standing between the two. Unlike Iberrienne, however, they saw her as she approached.

  “Kaylin,” Brent said. “We’re waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For the others,” he replied. He paused as a young woman jostled her way into the crowd. “They are gathering.” He glanced at her hands; they were black.

  “What will you do when they’re all here?”

  He smiled. There was something very odd about his smile. The confusion—and the fear—he’d experienced on waking was gone. “Brent, did Iberrienne tell a story when you arrived here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you understand it?”

  “No. Not then.”

  “And you understand it now?”

  He frowned. “Not all of it,” he finally replied, as if he was struggling with the same concepts that now plagued her. “We have no True Names. We do not live forever.”

  As he said it, she stilled. “Do we need True Names to live forever?”

  “We need True Names,” he replied, “if we are not to change. Growth is change. Age is change.”

  “The Barrani age. They’re not born full-grown,” Kaylin pointed out.

  Brent glanced at the child who stood beside him, and without dropping a beat, the child continued the conversation. “They grow into their name and become it; it holds them, it holds their shape.”

  “Is that what Iberrienne was trying to do? Give you words? Make you immortal?”

  The old man chuckled, but so did the child. It was truly disturbing. “It is what he has promised the Caste Court: immortality.”

  “In return for the money he used to bribe the fieflords.”

  “To buy us, yes.”

  Iberrienne came to stand to one side of the boy; he was shouting, which was all kinds of wrong coming from a Barrani. The livid-green light had leaked from his eyes, changing his pallor; he did not look healthy. Maybe, she thought, he would die here.

  “He cannot die here.”

  “I can’t kill him?”

  “You can. But he cannot die here.” He turned once again, as the edge of the crowd rippled, growing in size. “Mortals cannot be made immortal, Lord Kaylin.” The man frowned as he regarded her. “You carry the cage within yourself. I do not know what it will make of you.” She realized, as she listened, that Brent was no longer speaking Elantran. She also realized, as she struggled to identify the language he was speaking, that she didn’t actually know it.

  “What did he do to you?” she whispered.

  “It is done. It cannot be undone; we listened, and we are now here.” He raised a hand to his chest. Every other person mirrored the movement.

  “What did you hear?” Her voice was lower, softer; her hands felt cold. The marks on her arms, however, were bright and almost hot.

  “Did you know,” he asked, turning once again to face the Tower, “that we were once told a great and complicated story? It was the story of a world,” he continued, “vast and almost endless.”

  “Iberrienne told you that story?”

  He frowned. “No. Not Iberrienne.” And he spoke a word that registered as a cacophony of sound; musical notes, the harsh crack of thunder, the crackle of branch in flame, the wail of wind, and more, much more than that. “It was the story of a world. It had a beginning, but we have not yet arrived at its end. We cannot contain it; we contain only its echoes, and the echoes are broken and fractured.”

  The words,
she thought, her hands falling slowly to her sides. The words engraved in stone, the words that Severn had seen as hearts. They weren’t words; they were the echo of words, the shadow of something told them in a language they would never, ever master but nonetheless understood on some level. Understood, she thought, in the way she had understood Sanabalis’s story of, and to, the Leontines. When the Leontines heard it, they heard it in a way that she didn’t, because she was not, no matter how much she adored some of them, Leontine; she was not of them.

  “The Arcanists have a theory,” the child continued. He turned to a woman a few years older than Kaylin, and the woman continued the story, her voice softer than his. “The Ancients created all life, in all its many forms, but they did not create the mortal races from nothing. They told a different tale to those they had selected, transforming them in the process into something other, something different. At the dawn of the many worlds, the Ancients at play did not understand how to create people like us.

  “They understood Dragons, Barrani; they understood how to create a race that was an echo of their own, diminished and dwindling. They did not understand how to create animals that could think, reason, argue. Only later, much later, did they develop the subtlety to do so. Lord Iberrienne does not subscribe to this theory; he prefers to think that their power had dwindled so significantly they could not create something as impressive as his own race.”

  Now Kaylin was worried. All the people here looked as if they’d lived in the fiefs for the whole of their lives—but no fiefling spoke like this. Whatever Iberrienne had intended, it couldn’t be what she was witnessing now.

  The woman smiled. “No,” she agreed. “That was not his intent. You interrupted his endeavor. It was too late for the people who are your concern, but too early for them.”

  “Them?”

  “Iberrienne,” she replied. “Iberrienne and the reborn.” She lifted her arms, and in silence, the young boy to one side and the old woman to the other took her hand. Hands stretched out immediately, from all quarters. Only Kaylin remained separate; no one offered a hand to her.