Cast in Honor

by Michelle Sagara

  “No kidding. Did you come underground?” Another eye. And another.

  “As you have surmised, yes.”

  “You didn’t find Kattea underground.” She reached for the eyes that hovered above her head, as if closing them would give her more space.

  “No. I found it difficult to find Kattea at all.”

  “Were you looking specifically for her?” She crouched; more eyes closed. With them went some of the light in the room. The balance of the light now resided in her marks. They hurt.

  “No. I was simply looking for someone who existed in this time and place. Time is a dimension and an anchor. To people like you, who are wed to it, it is unavoidable. It is part of your essential nature. Without time, you do not exist.”

  “And you do.”

  “Yes, Kaylin Neya. I do. So, too, does your Lord.”

  She bristled; her hand froze. “If you’re referring to Nightshade, he is not my Lord.”

  “I feel his presence only when I am near you, but I find your language so limiting, I may be expressing myself poorly.”

  “Very, very poorly,” she replied. “The floor—”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not—it’s not stone anymore.”

  The shape of Gilbert’s open eyes changed; she could almost trace the expression—confusion, possible frustration—from the subtle narrowing. He asked a question—or at least it sounded like a question by the intonation.

  The familiar answered in the same language. Kaylin couldn’t name it, but she recognized it; it was the language the Arkon had chosen to speak to Mandoran. It was, however, a language that Kaylin thought, with time, she could learn; it didn’t have the enormous weight and echo of true words.

  “The floor does not look different to my eyes,” Gilbert said. “There are patches of your city that do—but they are not areas I can navigate.”

  More eyes shuttered. Kaylin’s arms began to burn. It wasn’t pleasant. The words seem to be struggling to escape her skin, but it was almost as if they were trapped, and the burning was a simple consequence of their attempt to break free.

  This had never happened before.

  Then again, no healing had ever worked this way, either. The fact that she could see her familiar made it clear that she was not entirely in the space she had occupied before she had taken Gilbert’s hands in her own. She was in a place that Annarion and Mandoran occupied if they didn’t focus properly. They at least looked normal, for Barrani.

  * * *

  “Choose.” Like the eyes, the voice seemed to come from all around. It did not sound like Gilbert’s—but maybe it was. Gilbert had a thousand eyes; he quite possibly had a thousand mouths, as well.

  She had chosen words before—in a dream, or in what she thought of as a dream. This was not the same. That choice had been painless, and the words had been giant representations of themselves, things that could not fit on her skin.

  She had needed them. She had known it, the way one knows anything in a dream.

  But that dream had profoundly affected the reality it wasn’t a part of. She had apparently skipped the dreamlike state that had made the entire endeavor of choosing words somehow safer. This was reality.

  “Kaylin.” Her familiar’s voice brought her back to herself.

  “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Choose a word.”

  “But I—”

  “Choose a word, Chosen, or lose them all. If Gilbert has time—and he does, although not in a fashion that you would understand—you do not. Were it not for those words, you could not be here at all. Choose.”

  “You can read them—you choose.”

  “If I could, I would make that choice for you. But it would change all of the bindings that hold us together, and in ways that you would not, in the end, appreciate. You live, as Gilbert said, in time; once you have made a choice, taken an action, there is no way to undo it, no way to return to what existed before.”

  “I think I like it better when I can’t understand you.”

  He smiled.

  Her arms ached. So, now, did her legs, her back, the back of her neck—any part of her skin that was marked. She wondered if her entire body was bulging the way her arms now were. Probably. She could only see her arms.

  What purpose did these words serve, in the end?

  What purpose did any words serve? The Barrani Lake of Life was a repository of true words—those that could become names. These words weren’t the same—and even thinking it, she realized that the lone mark on her forehead did not burn or struggle to escape her skin. So: the words she bore, and had born, were not True Names. They didn’t grant life. They didn’t wake stone.

  She had lost such marks before. The Devourer of Worlds had eaten the ones she had offered. But so had the familiar, when he had managed to struggle his way out of his shell. She hadn’t chosen which words she’d surrendered either time. She hadn’t chosen the word that had freed the trapped spirit of an ancient Dragon, deep within the bowels of the Arkon’s collection.

  But she’d chosen the words that had freed the Consort from her sleep in the heart of the green. She had had the time to choose. She had had some understanding that she needed to communicate, somehow, with the heart of the green; that she had to show it an experience that was similar to its own. She couldn’t speak the words necessary.

  She hadn’t needed to speak them.

  Here, now, she could speak, and Gilbert could listen. She could make herself heard. The purpose of whatever word she chose was not the same.

  It was hard to think while her arms hurt, but she had some experience with that. “Hope.”

  “I am here, Kaylin.”

  “Is the city safe?”

  “Yes, for the moment. Yes and no. Gilbert came here for a reason, and I can now perceive it in the edges of his thoughts.”

  “I can’t feel his thoughts at all.”

  “Yes, Kaylin, you can.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You are standing on them, or above them, almost literally. You are—carefully—quieting some of them.”

  “They’re not thoughts. They’re eyeballs.”

  “...Eyeballs.”

  “Yes.”

  The familiar fell silent for one painful beat. He then said, to Mandoran, “That is what she actually sees.”

  Mandoran’s eyes were attached to his face—which was probably good, because he widened them so much, so quickly, they might have fallen off, otherwise.

  “What do you see?” she demanded, through clenched teeth.

  “Not eyes. Why eyes?”

  It was Annarion who answered, although he spoke without certainty. “Eyes may represent observation. You are an Imperial Hawk. Observation is an integral part of what you do, and what you do defines you.”

  Kaylin wanted to laugh. She grunted, instead.

  “Observation requires your presence. You can’t observe what you can’t see. Your observation is active. It does not—in your case—rely on vision alone. I would almost expect to see ears—”

  “Please don’t. Just—don’t.”

  “Gilbert can act and observe in a variety of ways that you can’t. I think he can do so in a variety of ways that we can’t.”

  “Meaning your cohort, minus Teela.”

  “Yes. We think—Sedarias thinks—that what you are experiencing as discrete instances of multiple eyes is a representation of the myriad ways in which Gilbert observes or interacts with your world.”

  “Our world.”

  “The world we are attempting to live in now, yes.”

  “And he’s doing this because he’s injured?”

  “We cannot clearly perceive any injury.”

  “And the chaos? The Shado
w?”

  There was a longer pause. “We are uncertain. If you were, in reality, standing on Shadow as you perceive it, we would not be having this conversation. You are normally aware of some part of your patient’s thoughts when you heal?”

  “If the injury is extensive, yes.”

  “She suggests that the Shadow you perceive is some part of Gilbert’s memory or thought. If it hasn’t killed you yet.”

  “And the Shadow I perceive in the mess of what is possibly a body?”

  Silence again. “Sedarias says, ‘You’re the healer.’”

  Which meant she didn’t know. The problem was that Kaylin didn’t know, either. She’d sent her power out. She’d touched the rudiments of the body’s structural components, and it all felt wrong to her.

  And what if that wrongness was the very thing that allowed Gilbert to be in Elantra safely? What if she got it wrong, made a mistake, brought the rest of his Shadow to the fore?

  She exhaled. She’d long lived under the principle that it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. But corpses didn’t have a lot of meaningful forgiveness to offer.

  The power that she had attempted to send to Gilbert had not gone to Gilbert. It had, instead, turned back on itself. It had flowed into the marks of the Chosen, which were probably going to cook her alive if she couldn’t figure out what the hells she was supposed to do.

  Words. Shadows. Ancients.

  Words.

  Shadows.

  “Gilbert.”

  “I am here.”

  “Barrani and Dragons possess True Names. They require them to live. The name is part of their functional identity. It’s not a soul—not in the way most mortal religions define soul—but it might as well be.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ancients created Barrani and Dragons.”

  “Yes.” He sounded slightly confused.

  “I’ve heard the Ancients called Lords of Law and Lords of Chaos.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Lords of Chaos, in theory, created Shadow.”

  “I fail to see—”

  “Did Shadow not require True Names?”

  Silence.

  * * *

  Kaylin lifted an arm and brought it closer to her eyes, squinting to see the shape of the marks through their light. “Hope.”

  “Kaylin.”

  “When the Arkon spoke in the library, you saw the words, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “True words have meanings. True words are complete in and of themselves. If you were to speak to someone who can understand them, they would understand your meaning.” She spoke the statements as if they were a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Names, True Names, true words—these were created by the Ancients. But if the very nature of the Lords of Chaos was transformative, what brought them to life?”

  “Words, Kaylin.”

  “Different words? False words? Did they even have the concept for those, back then?”

  “Chaos was a whisper. Law was a shout.”

  “But whispers and shouts use the same words.”

  Silence.

  Kaylin was bloody tired of silence.

  * * *

  All of the words seemed to strain upward, as if they needed the space—and looking at them carefully, Kaylin thought they did. They had developed a rough dimensionality; they looked like glowing welts.

  “Gilbert, can you see the marks of the—of the Chosen?”

  “Yes. I do not think anyone in this room could miss them.”

  “Can you read them?” Into the silence that followed, Kaylin added, “I need an answer. I’m not asking for the good of my health.”

  “I can...hear them.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I can hear them, Chosen. They move too quickly to be easily read.”

  They weren’t moving at all, not that they weren’t trying. She exhaled. The eyes beneath her feet were now the only eyes she had not closed. If her familiar was right, the Shadow she saw was not actually present; it was the visual artifact of Gilbert’s prior memories.

  As she closed the remaining eyes, breath half-held, she thought of every other time the marks on her arms had been somehow used. Twice they’d been eaten. She discarded those; she didn’t think Gilbert could devour the words themselves. She didn’t understand how the words could be physical, could provide sustenance. They weren’t, like True Names, singular. They were mostly like awkward tattoos.

  The word on her forehead, rescued in the Outlands, was the only one that wasn’t straining against her skin. It was also the only one Kaylin was certain was unique. It had the power to wake Barrani babies. To bring them to life.

  The rest of the marks were not like that one, although they looked very similar to the naked eye. But if they weren’t like that, they were just...components of language. She couldn’t read them; it hadn’t occurred to her, when they had first appeared over half her body—they’d spread a bit since—that they were words.

  Something twitched in her memory. She turned and caught it before it escaped; it was a feeling, an instinct. She had been in this place before.

  When? She had certainly never met a sentient Shadow that wasn’t trying to destroy everything in its surroundings. She had never touched one voluntarily; the idea of healing one was so foreign, it was almost laughable. She knew what Shadows did.

  But she had known what the Tha’alani did once, as well: they were evil mind readers who tore a person’s darkest secrets from them. Everyone had known that about the Tha’alani.

  And everyone had been wrong. So wrong.

  No, it’s different. I was afraid of the Tha’alani for no reason. The Tha’alani aren’t like the Shadows. They don’t kill. They don’t blackmail. They don’t judge. The Shadows do destroy. It’s different.

  She shook her head, trying to clear it, but the doubts clung. She had never walked into Ravellon. She had only seen what walked out of it. Was it too much to believe that not everything that lived there was evil?

  Everyone had their own story. Her eyes narrowed as she rose, turning the thought over. Everyone had their own story.

  Kaylin had known very little about Dragons. She’d learned a lot more when Bellusdeo crashed into her life—but she still tripped up, because Dragon was a word that had weight; it was almost mythic. Myths did not have bad days. They didn’t have good ones, either. They didn’t suffer loneliness, isolation, despair; they didn’t have desires. Myths were not alive.

  The word Shadow, like the word Dragon, existed as a modern myth. And at base, myths were...stories.

  She struggled with this. She had never thought of Shadows as individuals until she had met Gilbert. And were it not for Kattea, she would never have made the attempt to heal him. But if she thought of Shadows as people—with their own lives, their own stories, their own reasons...

  Silence.

  The last of the eyes beneath her feet closed.

  Chapter 14

  Kaylin breathed a sigh of relief when she did not fall into the whorls of chaos below her.

  Cautiously, she looked around the room. She could see Mandoran, Annarion and her familiar; she could see walls, a bed and the very disturbing floor.

  She could not see Gilbert.

  The walls of the room hadn’t changed the way the floor had; the bed was still a bed. The desk was still a desk; it was a bit battered and dinged, suggesting age. But the shelves nearest the desk drew her eye. Kaylin had noted there were books on them when she’d first entered.

  It was to the books she now looked. She didn’t trust the floor, but she trusted her familiar. She walked across the room, her gaze fixed to the spines of Gilbert’s many volumes.

  Gilbert didn�
�t speak, but the temperature in the room plunged; the air was now colder than his hands had been.

  The books weren’t uniform in size; the tops of the spines didn’t form a neat and even row. The dust was thick, even on the cobwebs. Whatever Gilbert kept here, he hadn’t touched in a while. Certainly not for cleaning, which was a stupid thought. Shadows as housekeepers.

  Kaylin was used to thinking of them as death.

  She picked a book up off the shelf—or tried. The books were so tightly packed, the random volume she’d chosen didn’t budge. When she applied strength, half a dozen books came free with it.

  “What are you doing?” Mandoran asked.

  “Looking for words.”

  “You might want to consider doing that later.”

  “There’s not going to be a later if I can’t find them now.” She collected the books that had been pulled loose and set them on the shelf’s edge. The book she’d chosen, she opened.

  The color of light in the room changed.

  * * *

  Books generally had pages. This one was not an exception. It had a lot of pages. But it didn’t seem to have a beginning; it didn’t seem to have an end. Opening the cover of the book didn’t lead to a first page of any kind. This wasn’t a problem, because the pages were also blank.

  Kaylin closed the book and set it down. She retrieved a different book from the small stack and opened that one instead. The same thing happened. The book opened to some nebulous part of the middle, and it opened in a fan of blank pages.

  Grimacing, Kaylin looked at the shelves. There were a lot of books.

  Was this the right place? Was this where she would find what she was looking for? Ugh. “Gilbert, what’s in the other room?”

  Silence. She almost shrieked in frustration.

  “Apologies, Chosen, but I am uncertain. To which other room do you refer?”

  “The room behind the door on the far wall.”

  He didn’t answer. “If you tell me there is no door on the far wall, I’ll consider serious violence.”

  Silence.

  Kaylin exhaled. “The door opposite the one I entered? Same shape, same general size?” Her eyes narrowed; her shoulders fell. “The one with the door ward instead of a knob?”