Cast in Flame

by Michelle Sagara

  The Consort lifted platinum brows. “We are willing to entertain suggestions for how that might be achieved, given that we cannot, at the moment, leave the High Halls. The Dragon Court does battle at the edge of our lawn—and while none of the Dragons have fallen, neither has our enemy. I would suggest your demand is slightly ambitious.” The black humor that informed her tone dissipated. “What do you know of this building, then? Why do you fear it?”

  “It is as old,” Evarrim replied, “as the Towers that gird the fiefs. It is not a Tower; it is not, therefore a necessity. Research has been done in ages past, upon the building.”

  “In what sense?”

  Evarrim shrugged. “We wished information that the building was rumored to contain. That information was never found. It was almost found,” he added, gesturing at the mirror. The image banked abruptly, turning into clouds of smoke and nothing. “With your permission, Lady?”

  “What do you attempt to access?”

  “The archives of the Arcanists. You will not,” he added, “be able to peruse them at your leisure; they will respond to me—and only to me. I will, however, accept your commands.”

  He must be desperate, Kaylin thought. Ynpharion agreed; they were both uneasy and deeply suspicious.

  The High Lord and the Consort conferred; Kaylin wanted to scream. She wanted the mirror to go back to the streets and the aerial combat; she wanted to see. The ground beneath her feet shuddered; she couldn’t immediately tell whether it was the marble floors of the High Halls or the carved rock of the dark cavern.

  It is the High Halls, Ynpharion told her.

  “You have our permission,” the High Lord told Evarrim. “But the Consort is concerned; this is one of the few windows we have to the outside world at the moment, and we cannot afford to have it compromised or broken.”

  Evarrim then took control of the mirror. The mirror responded sluggishly; the images were unclear. Ynpharion made it clear they were just as vague to him.

  “Include Lord Ynpharion in your search,” the High Lord said—without looking away from whatever the mirror showed him.

  Evarrim was not a fool; he obeyed the mild command without apparent concern. That’s going to cost you, Kaylin said.

  Yes. But as even you have noticed, everything is costly at the High Court.

  The image of a building sprang—almost literally—into view. It did not remain contained by the flat surface of the mirror, but grew out of its surface as if it had dimension. It was a tower. The peak was so high and narrow it looked like a spear’s head, but the base was wide and blocky. It wasn’t rectangular; it wasn’t circular. Kaylin couldn’t divine its shape in this view, but she wasn’t an architect.

  It has six points, Ynpharion told her, if it is symmetrical.

  It looks nothing like Helen.

  Helen?

  Damn it. The building’s name is Helen.

  Ynpharion coughed. Sadly, the cough was not entirely on the inside of his mouth. It is your influence, he told her sourly. And of course, I will bear the consequences. He dropped into an instant bow. “Apologies, Lord.”

  “There is very little that is either amusing or outrageous occurring to my knowledge,” the High Lord replied. “You will, of course, explain.”

  Ynpharion didn’t want to explain anything in front of Evarrim—and Kaylin didn’t want him to, either. It was the second time this evening that they were in lock step. Evarrim is less of a concern than the displeasure of the High Lord.

  Kaylin didn’t believe it. I’m not going to stop you. I’m not going to try. But—I don’t trust him.

  Of course not, was his impatient reply. The miracle of you is that you trust anyone at all, and survive. “Lord Kaylin believes that the building’s name is...Helen.”

  She tried not to feel defensive at the looks she received. Or the looks Ynpharion did. That’s what she calls herself, she said. I didn’t name her.

  “That is not how the building appears now.”

  “That is not,” Evarrim replied, “how the building appears from the street; it is, however, the material space the structure nonetheless occupies. To our knowledge, the building has remained unoccupied since well before the founding.”

  The building hasn’t been unoccupied.

  “The building,” Ynpharion said aloud, “has been occupied intermittently.”

  Evarrim’s lip curled, reminding Kaylin of all the reasons she detested him. As if he knew she was listening, he said, “When mice or other rodents find their way into the cracks of a building, are they said to be occupants? They are vermin, no more.”

  Kaylin brought both fists down against the floor and let out a volley of heartfelt, furious Leontine.

  He is trying to annoy you, Ynpharion said, with discernible contempt.

  Well, he’s succeeding.

  Yes. That is why you should feel ashamed.

  She left off the cursing, because the only target who could hear it probably didn’t deserve most of it.

  “The Tower was damaged in the wars against the ancestors,” Evarrim was saying. She’d missed anything else he’d added after his gratuitous insult; Ynpharion was, of course, right. “Much of its control mechanisms probably took the brunt of the damage; the commands we were able to retrieve did not have the desired effect. We know the Tower was occupied,” he continued, gesturing. The Tower faded; a Barrani Lord appeared in its stead, standing almost as tall as Evarrim. Barrani never looked friendly, with one or two notable exceptions; this man looked like the personification of the gallows. Even the expected, unearthly beauty did nothing to quell the fear he invoked.

  He’s not Barrani.

  No, Ynpharion replied.

  “This was the Tower’s first known occupant.”

  “One of the ancestors.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he fight against us?”

  “He could not have,” Evarrim replied. “We would not now be standing in this city—even ruled by a Dragon as it is—had he chosen a different side. We have very little information about him; he is believed to have perished during the long war.”

  “You are certain that he was the Tower’s Lord?”

  “Yes. His image—with a suitable, dire warning—appeared when the first of the researchers attempted to enter the Tower.”

  “Did they survive?”

  “There were deaths,” Evarrim said, in about as bored a tone as he had spoken of vermin. “But the method of death was not considered dangerous enough that the attempts were instantly abandoned. The first Lord of the Tower had conducted research, much of which was locked within the bowels of the building; some small proof of this was uncovered, but the Tower itself proved resistant to excavation. If it was damaged, it was still active.

  “Our belief was that the previous Lord’s commands still held sway; the Tower could not functionally accept the Lord’s absence as death. Attempts over the next century were made to circumvent the Tower’s functional protections—to little avail. In the end, the Tower collapsed. Much of the secondary research was lost, and the project itself abandoned as the Dragons were proving difficult.

  “The research itself was never resumed. The building has stood fallow in the meanwhile.”

  That is not true, Kaylin snapped.

  There is little point in venting fury at me, Lord Kaylin. I am not the one tendering the opinion.

  You don’t disagree.

  Ynpharion chose not to reply, and Kaylin, aware that he had already put his reputation on the line in service to the High Court, didn’t press. There wasn’t any good point in asking more of people than they were capable of giving—not in an emergency.

  The image of the ancestor or sorcerer or whatever it was the Barrani called them faded.

  “Why,” the Consort asked, “did the resea
rchers feel they could circumvent the Tower’s innate protections? We would not take that risk with the Hallionne.”

  “The Hallionne are distant cousins to the Towers; were it a Hallionne, we would not have made the attempt. But the Hallionne would not allow the research to be conducted within their domain; there would be no reason to excavate.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  Kaylin held her breath. She understood, suddenly, that the Consort was attempting to help her. The Consort had probably recognized the building about which she claimed ignorance.

  “My apologies, Lady,” Evarrim replied. His expression was glacial—but that was its default state. She thought he suspected what Kaylin herself now suspected. Regardless, he gestured again. The image that formed was smoke or mist to Kaylin’s eye; it was, given the Consort’s frown, no clearer to her; the Consort, however, didn’t curse. She waited.

  Since Kaylin couldn’t be heard by anyone else, she cursed.

  “It is difficult to discern,” Evarrim said, gesturing again. The mist moved, rotating in place, and as it did, Kaylin could see that it had a form. The form itself seemed abstract; it didn’t solidify into a known shape, the way Evarrim’s previously recalled records had. But in motion, it had a discernible shape. It was like the ghost of a true word.

  A complex, dense word.

  The Consort saw it, as well. Her familiarity with the shape and the function of true words was second to none among her kin; she couldn’t fail to see the significance of Evarrim’s discovery. She did, however. “I am not certain how this would lead to the exploration involved. Exploring the area known as the fiefs is all but forbidden. Would this Tower, as you call it, not fall under the same prohibition?” She shook her head; the white spill of hair shimmered. “We are not a people who take well to such prohibitions, as history has shown. Were I curious, I might venture to the building on Ashwood—but such an image would not invoke that curiosity in me.

  “What do you see in it that I do not?”

  Evarrim clearly wanted to reply “Nothing.” He didn’t. “I see the shape and form of language. A hint, no more.”

  “I see that, as well. What, in this rune, gives you pause?”

  “It is not, as you can see, a true word.”

  She nodded.

  “But it is our belief that it once was; it is, if you are inclined to the fanciful, a ghost; it is what remains when the essential force of a word itself is consumed.”

  * * *

  Kaylin had seen words consumed. The Devourer had consumed the marks that had risen from her skin for, she thought, just that purpose. And the small dragon had done the same—although admittedly he was a lot cuter about it. She didn’t have the visceral reaction the Consort did to Evarrim’s pronouncement. Then again, neither of the two, devourer or familiar, had left even a trace of those words behind.

  But the words on Kaylin’s skin didn’t give Kaylin life; Kaylin wasn’t a Tower.

  “Where,” the Consort asked, after a long pause in which her eyes had shifted to a blue so dark they looked black, “did you find this?”

  “In the Tower itself.” Evarrim said, “We were not surprised; is it not the reason that the ancestors attempted to destroy us? They wished to utilize the names at the center of our beings to create new sentences and new races.”

  “They wished,” the Consort replied, in a voice that pretty much defined icy, “to empty the Lake of Life.”

  Evarrim immediately folded—literally; for a moment Kaylin thought his forehead would hit the ground. “It is not beyond possibility that they thought to do so with the Towers themselves; the Towers—like the Hallionne—have long been known to be built on a foundation of words such as these.”

  “And your interest?” Oh, the cold in her voice.

  “It was not purely academic on the part of the initial exploration. It was felt that if the method of extraction were better understood, defenses could be built specifically to resist it.”

  He lied like a rug. The resentment Kaylin felt at this amused Ynpharion.

  If no one present believes the lie—and the liar does not expect to be believed, is it a crime? It merely shows his willingness to expend social effort to be plausible; it shows his concern for his position.

  “We were not alone in our interest. Very few of the researchers could even see the remnants of the word, and it could not, of course, be moved; attempts were made, some of significant power and planning. The word itself in some essential nature was wed to the Tower. In time, the researches were abandoned. Some attention, however, has been paid to the house itself over the passage of centuries. There have been visitors who have both arrived and left the premises intact; they have not, to our knowledge, removed anything of value.

  “One of those visitors would be the current Keeper. He is not considered a threat. I consider that unwise—but if the Keeper constitutes a threat, there is very little anyone can safely do to contain him.”

  “Other visitors of significance?”

  “In the past three centuries, very few; four in total. Three of these four were Dragons; one was a Barrani High Lord.”

  Nightshade.

  “They did not remain long. One of the Dragons spent almost a month in the Tower, but survived.”

  “Which Dragon?”

  Evarrim’s smile was unpleasant. “I do not believe he is a member of the Dragon Court; he is outcaste.”

  * * *

  Why, Ynpharion demanded, do you insist on cursing so constantly?

  Why, she countered, don’t you? She could figure out who the other two Dragons were: the Arkon and Tiamaris. Tiamaris, who had spent a good deal of time exploring the Towers and the Shadows in the fiefs before he’d claimed one of those Towers for his own.

  She didn’t bother asking what they’d discovered; there was no way that information would be given to Evarrim. The other members of the Dragon Court might know—but it didn’t help Kaylin now.

  The Barrani had found the ghost of a word. Kaylin hated the description; she wanted something solid and factual in its place. But true words didn’t lend themselves to solid facts. They never had. And she was sitting in the dead center of Helen’s heart; she presided, in utter blackness, over the words that the researchers had attempted to reach—no doubt to pillage or destroy for their own purposes.

  They had been full of the light she associated with them when she had started her attempt to heal Helen. They had guttered the moment she’d placed the last of the six words down. Before she had put the last rune in place, nothing had changed. She couldn’t understand why the last one drained all light out of the rest.

  And she could not ask Evarrim for advice or explanation. She would never, ever be rid of the bastard if she did; Helen would always be at risk.

  “We consulted with sages,” Evarrim was saying. “We consulted with those among our people—and outside of it—that might give us some clue to the meaning of this rune; some clue to its function and the ability to call that function.”

  “That is not how true words generally work,” was the Consort’s cool reply.

  “It is not how true names function,” the Arcanist countered. “But there is general agreement that the words that serve as names are almost linguistically distinct from the words that serve as ancient descriptors. Over time, the researchers gleaned what they felt was enough information to at least begin; they assembled a reasonable force and entered the Tower.

  “They attempted to speak the word itself. It is possible their conjectures were entirely in error, but I have seen some of their work; I do not believe it was.”

  “They attempted to speak the word at the center of the Tower?” the Consort asked.

  “They could not,” Evarrim replied, with barely concealed impatience, “reach the Tower’s center.”

  “So
they spoke this word within the confines of the Tower to no effect?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Thank you, Lord Evarrim. I believe you are wanted in the upper reach.”

  Evarrim looked as if he wanted to argue.

  Lord Evarrim is not the most controlled or measured of Barrani Lords. He is not unlike you in that fashion.

  Kaylin knew Ynpharion meant no insult, but was insulted anyway. She watched as Evarrim left the chamber. He was escorted by two of the High Lord’s men; only the High Lord, Ynpharion, and the Consort remained. That, and the ghost of a complicated word.

  The Consort did not likewise dismiss Ynpharion. Instead, she turned to face him. “I know,” she said, in weary Elantran, “that this isn’t your fault. Had you been responsible for waking the ancestors, you would already be dead.”

  “I’m in the Ashwood Tower’s heart.”

  “Of course you are. Where else would you be? I don’t understand your affinity for buildings. At the moment, I’m trying to be grateful for it.”

  “Can we go back to the Dragons?”

  Ynpharion helpfully added, “I believe Lord Kaylin refers to the mirror’s view.”

  “No. What I do here may be the only aid I am able to tender anyone in this fight.” She raised her chin and said, to her brother, “I’m sorry. But I must ask you to leave.”

  “Lord Ynpharion will bear witness to anything that is discussed.”

  “Yes. But his presence is a necessity; he is the only conduit I have to the Chosen.” She exhaled and added, “If I cannot trust you, my Lord, there is no purpose to trust at all. But our best chance of escaping to join the fray is in the upper reach; the power of the ancestor does not seem to be as concentrated above the ground. There is a reason that the Dragons have not chosen to land.”

  The High Lord reached out to touch his sister’s cheek. He then turned to Ynpharion. Kaylin was certain he meant to threaten his Barrani liege, but he did not speak.

  Does this mean he’s going to kill you later? Kaylin asked.