The Arkon exhaled smoke.
“Would you like to take over the rest of this conversation?” she demanded.
“Yes. There will be fewer interruptions of an entirely pointless and frivolous nature. You,” he added, “may help Kattea find the stairs.”
* * *
There were, as it turned out, no stairs. Kattea, however, found a trapdoor. She stepped away and Severn pulled it open, using the hook built into the handle to hold it in place. “Stairs?” Kaylin asked.
“Not exactly. I think there’s a ramp.”
“Think?”
“We’re going to need some light.”
* * *
Light was found—Evanton’s store had lamps with varying levels of oil—and Severn was proved correct: there was a ramp. It was, however, made of wood; sliding down was out of the question unless one wanted a backside full of splinters. The Arkon looked about as amused at the idea of ramps as Kaylin was at the idea of a backside full of splinters.
Mandoran and Annarion went down first.
Gilbert followed; when he was halfway down the ramp, Kattea leaped onto his back, which nearly sent him tumbling into the Barrani. The Arkon was pretty much steaming at this point. He glared dubiously at the ramp. “Private, Corporal, you go first.”
Kaylin opened her mouth.
“I do not believe the ramp will sustain my weight.”
He wasn’t wrong. Although he looked—for the moment—like an armored old man, his weight was closer to the draconic end of the scale; the ramp snapped when he was halfway down the incline. Fortunately, the rest of their party had already cleared the area.
“Have you considered the significance of these halls?” The Arkon asked, after he’d picked himself up and dusted himself off.
“I consider them pretty significant,” she said, after a pause. “But—Evanton wasn’t aware of halls beneath Elani, and I would have bet real money that they didn’t exist before Gilbert and Kattea made their way here.”
“Do you think they were created by the water?”
A good question. “No.”
“But the water found Gilbert and Kattea and moved them—two people who were not, originally, from our time—here?”
“Well, yes—I don’t think Kattea was lying.”
“And Gilbert?”
“Gilbert doesn’t understand enough about our way of life to be a good liar. No. I don’t think either were deliberately falsifying events.” She hesitated. Gilbert had forbidden the use of mirrors. And mirrors existed across the city—even in the fiefs. Except for now.
Now the fiefs were off the network; they could be reached by foot, but not by the magic that powered mirrored communication. “Has anyone heard from Tiamaris?”
“Yes.”
“Did Tara knock the fief off the mirror network?”
“Yes.” The Arkon glanced at Kaylin with obvious surprise, which was slightly insulting, and approval, which should have been, but wasn’t.
“And the fiefs exist post-disaster, whatever that disaster was.” She turned to Gilbert. “Are these halls a reflection of the mirror network?”
Gilbert said, “I believe so, yes. Helen believes that the underpinning magic of that network has been extant for far longer than your Empire. The magic is used, and channeled, but it is not well understood by your kind.”
“Or by yours?”
His smile was slight. “Or by mine. I believe the halls, as you experience them, are an instability in the underlying magic. As such, we can enter almost any building to which the network itself has been granted access. I do not believe it is sentient,” he added softly. “But it responds to sentience.”
“Not to ours,” Kaylin told him.
“No, perhaps not. To the water, yes, in some fashion.”
Kaylin nodded.
“I did not recognize immediately what it was. My apologies. But I recognize it now; follow, and it will take us where we must go.”
“How are you so well acquainted with these halls?” the Arkon asked.
It was Kattea who answered. “Gilbert lives here.” She was once again perched—as if she was weightless—in the curve of his right arm; her own arms were around his neck. It made her seem much younger. She yawned.
“It is better,” Gilbert said, “that Kattea sleep. She will remember this as a dream or a nightmare when she wakes.”
Kattea lifted her head and shook it. “I’m not sleepy.”
“No, of course not.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“You are not leaving.”
“Will you save the city?”
“I will save the city.”
“Will you take me with you?”
“Hush, Kattea. I cannot see past your voice.” It was an odd thing to say, and it seemed to Kaylin that Kattea was struggling to keep her eyes open. Given the circumstance, this was surprising. Or maybe not. She glanced at the Arkon; his eyes’ inner membranes were high, but they were a steady orange. He nodded in answer to the question she didn’t ask.
Magic. But not a magic that caused Kaylin’s skin to ache. While they walked, the Arkon turned to Kaylin. “You said there were traces of six different mages along the wall in the basement that led to the corpses.”
She nodded. “There are no records of similar murders, not in the Halls. If this has happened before, it was never reported.”
“Or it happened before Records were kept.” He shook his head, murmuring softly. This time, Kaylin’s arms began their almost comfortingly familiar ache. “Gilbert does not see those corpses as dead.”
Kaylin nodded.
The Arkon directed the next question to Gilbert. “How do you see the living?”
“Kattea speaks. She eats. She breathes. So does Severn. They both...move. They respond.” It was growing darker in the tunnels; the light cast by the lamps seemed dimmer, somehow. The light cast by Gilbert’s swarm of eyes, however, was brightening.
“In what way did the three on the Winding Path seem like Kattea or Severn?”
“They speak.”
“They don’t speak in a way that the rest of us can hear,” Kaylin argued. “They don’t move in a way the rest of us can move. They don’t—I’m sorry—bleed.”
“Is bleeding necessary?” Gilbert asked. “You are not bleeding now.”
“Well, no—I haven’t been injured.”
“Ah.” He stopped. “Can you not hear them?” he asked her. “They sleep. They breathe. They murmur.”
“Not to us.”
“They are exactly like you, Kaylin.”
Since they were male and, well, dead, Kaylin felt understandably frustrated.
“They are exactly like you would be if you existed outside of time.”
* * *
“What do you mean, outside of time?”
He glanced back; Kaylin squinted in the light of a thousand eyes—or what felt like a thousand eyes. “They have been removed from time.”
“Kattea—”
“No. Kattea exists in time. At the moment, she exists in your time, for want of better words; she is here. She is present. I told you, you were created in such a way that you are like fish; time is your water. Removed from it, you will drown in air. They have been removed. They will die. But they are not yet dead. Time does not move for them the way it now moves for you.”
She struggled with this, and found she could almost accept it. What she didn’t understand was why. “Why did someone take them out of time? I mean—how is that even possible?”
“I am uncertain as to the mechanics,” Gilbert admitted. “But there is a schism here. A break in time. Something has tunneled into the structure; there is a crack, a fissure. It is what destroys you, in the end.”
“The fiefs—�
��
“The Towers protected the fiefs, as you call them. The break was infinitesimally small. We would never have noticed it under normal circumstances.”
“The entire city is gone.”
“Yes. But time moves to that point and past it. It is continuous. The only reason we are here at all is because of that break. I do not lie, Kaylin. It is possible for me to travel. It is not possible for me to interact with you while I do so. You are...so much a part of time you can hardly be seen. To my kin, the loss of your city—the loss of your world—would not register. It is only because of the inversion that I could speak with your Nightshade. When I left in search of a pathway that could return him to his home, I did not choose to surrender that inversion.
“But it is not natural, to me. It is not...simple.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I was...curious.”
Kattea lifted her head. “Because,” she said, “he’s lonely.”
Chapter 26
Gilbert did not deny Kattea’s simple statement. Kaylin wondered if he understood what it meant.
But she thought of Tara, and her long search for—in the end—Tiamaris. She thought of Helen, and her patient wait for a tenant who would value her and—yes—love her for everything that she could, and wanted to, give. She thought of the Hallionne Kariastos singing a lullaby in the quiet of a West March night. She thought of the Hallionne Bertolle, whose brothers she had woken from their figurative graves, and his gratitude for it.
And she thought, in particular, of Hallionne Oberon’s Avatar, cradled weeping in the arms of the Lord of the West March.
Not by any stretch of the imagination were these buildings—and they were buildings—mortal or normal. And yet, they all understood loneliness.
She wondered if being lonely was part of the base state of existence. Hadn’t the Devourer been lonely, in the end? Was it really so hard to believe that Gilbert was lonely?
No. No, it wasn’t.
Was it impossible to believe that Gilbert could want—could make—friends? That he could come to feel friendship with Nightshade strongly enough that he felt moved to help him?
Kaylin exhaled. No.
Nightshade was still in his Castle. He had been pushed ahead to this time, weeks after the first disruption. Kaylin was pretty damn certain that what was happening on the Winding Path was the disaster that caused his Castle to throw him into the heart of Ravellon.
But if they prevented the disaster that caused the Castle to send Nightshade into the heart of Ravellon, Gilbert would not meet him.
Yes, she thought. Yes, Kattea. You’re right.
But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
* * *
By the time Gilbert came to a halt, the underground was bloody cold. It was also...wet. Water lapped around the edges of their boots and continued for as far as the eye could see. Gilbert’s many eyes provided illumination that was simultaneously disturbing and welcome.
The water had carried Gilbert through the halls before.
“Yes,” Gilbert said, although she hadn’t spoken. “We are close. Be cautious here; the water is not consistently deep. There are unexpected—what do you call them? Wells?—beneath the surface. They are not wide, but they are also not,” he added, “easily navigated. Mandoran, please watch your step.”
“We can see them,” Mandoran replied. He was nervous.
Kaylin was nervous as well, possibly for the same reason. She wasn’t particularly surprised when the water grew choppy, and six inches began to swell into something closer to midthigh. “I want a boat,” she said to Kattea, who had continued her struggle to stay wakeful.
“If we—if we fix things, if we save the city, can I meet my parents?” she asked. She asked in the same tone she might have used to ask if she could have wings. Kaylin knew. She’d asked both questions, in her distant childhood—even when she knew the answer was, and would always be, no.
“Yes. You can meet your parents. Or at least your father.”
She nodded into the crook of Gabriel’s neck. “I don’t want to sleep,” she murmured. “You’ll just leave me behind.”
“He will not recognize you,” Gilbert said gently. “He will not know you.”
“I...I know that.”
“You cannot apologize to him.”
“I know. I know that.”
Gilbert’s eyes—about half of them—turned to Kaylin. “I do not understand this.”
But Kaylin shook her head. “Yes, you do. You left the gardia, and home, to free Nightshade. He won’t remember you. He won’t be grateful. You will be no part of his life. He’s not the most trusting or friendly of men—he couldn’t be, and still be fieflord. Even if you wanted to make friends with him again, it wouldn’t happen. He was willing to be vastly more open with you than he is with anyone because he had nothing to lose.
“You know that you’ll lose that, but you came anyway. Kattea wants to see her father in the same way. Just—to see him. To know that he survives, and that he has a life, and that eventually he’ll have her. She wants to see her mother for the same reason. But...”
The Arkon caught her shoulder and gripped it tightly enough that she fell silent.
Kattea lifted her head. “Why are you stopping her?” she asked, in a bleary tone. “She’s not saying anything I don’t know. Gilbert’s Nightshade won’t exist, if we save people. And that means I won’t exist, either. The city won’t be lost. My parents won’t flee across the bridge. Their daughter will live in Elantra. She’ll grow up here. Maybe she’ll become a Sword. I don’t know.”
“Is that—”
“I was going to die anyway. I was going to die. Gilbert found me. Gilbert saved me. But in my future, in a future without Gilbert? I’m already dead. And it hurt.” She shook her head. “There’s no future for me, no matter what I do. I get that. But there’s a future for my mom. There’s a future for my dad.
“I wasn’t a great daughter.”
“You don’t think your father understood that you loved him?”
“It doesn’t matter. I told him—” She buried her face. “It doesn’t matter. Just—promise I can see him, if we all survive.”
“I promise.”
* * *
Gilbert led them, at last, to his room. The halls appeared to travel the length of the city; they branched in multiple places. There were no doors that Kaylin could see, but there were places that appeared to be almost entirely underwater.
“Yes,” Gilbert said, again as if she’d spoken out loud. “If you take this stretch, you will find yourself in the Tha’alani quarter. I do not believe the water will drown you.” He glanced at the Barrani and added, “That applies purely to Kaylin. It is not safe for the rest of us.”
“And you know this, how?”
“The water is speaking,” Gilbert replied. “It is...angry, but sane. It is here that the water will remain while it retains its human sentience.”
“Does the water kill the Tha’alani?”
“If you do not know, I cannot answer; I cannot sense their deaths. I am not in the moment of those deaths.”
“Gilbert—you said when you arrived here you could no longer see time.”
“Yes.”
“Can you see it now?”
“No. But I can sense it now. I am not certain what will happen to you if you ascend the stairs,” he added. He had come to stairs. Kaylin even recognized them. “Kattea, wait in my room.”
“No.”
“Kattea—”
“No. I’m not gonna say goodbye. I’m not. This time, I’m going, too.”
Gilbert looked—well, a swarm of eyes did—to Kaylin for support. She wanted to give it to him. Kattea was a child. She was an older child, true—but there was r
oom for her in the Foundling Halls, and Marrin would see that she was both safe and fed.
Kaylin meant to say as much. She opened her mouth to say it.
But from a remove of years—and years—she could see Kattea from the inside of the girl’s life. She could feel the want—and the decision—as if it were her own. How old had she been when she went to work for Barren? How old when she’d learned a dozen ways to kill? How old when she’d killed?
Kaylin, Severn said.
I can’t. Don’t ask me. I can’t.
“Kattea,” Severn said, “I am neither Gilbert nor Kaylin; I am not a Dragon and I am not Barrani. I’m not certain I have much to contribute beyond this point—will you wait in Gilbert’s room with me? We have much in common.”
Kattea looked at Severn, really looked at him.
“I’m not certain I have much to contribute; I may distract Kaylin because she’ll be worried. You may distract Gilbert for the same reason. He’s asking you to remain behind because you’ll be safe.”
“But you’re her partner.” Kattea was the daughter of a Sword. An officer of the Halls of Law. She knew how partnerships worked.
“But she’s Chosen.”
“What does that even mean?”
“She can cheat. She can use powers the rest of us can’t—not even the mages.”
“So...you’re like the lame duck?”
“Yes.”
Severn—don’t lie to her.
“You’ll stay with me?”
“Yes.”
“Gilbert, you promise you’ll come back for me?”
“Yes, Kattea.”
Kaylin had very, very mixed feelings about leaving her partner behind, but very clear feelings about what he was now doing. “He will keep you safe,” she told Kattea. “He kept me safe for years. My mother died when I was five, and I never knew my father. I just had Severn and the streets of the fiefs.”
“Teela’s not impressed,” Mandoran whispered.
“Tell her not to report me. If we actually manage to get out of this in one piece, I could finally make corporal.”
“Not leaving your backup behind, you won’t.”
Kaylin cursed but kept on walking. Gilbert found the door to his room. It was not in the same location it had been when Kaylin had come to heal him—if healing was even what she’d done. But as she crossed the threshold, her arms began to glow. Kattea’s giggle made it clear that her neck was doing the same; the girl thought it funny because Kaylin had a soft halo around her head.
Cast in Honor Page 38
