Cast in Deception

by Michelle Sagara

  But she understood, from one glance at Terrano, that Bellusdeo’s command would require the whole of his concentration.

  “And you,” the Dragon said, not to Kaylin, but to the translucent familiar, “make sure we don’t get lost.”

  Squawk.

  “Yes, I know. I’m searching for the Barrani I now suspect are infested. Kaylin is searching for Alsanis. When we find one, I think we’ll find both.”

  * * *

  In the end, it was not Kaylin who found Alsanis. Nor was it Terrano. He was literally sweating—which the Barrani of Kaylin’s acquaintance did not do—with the effort of keeping his companions both together and in range, when he suddenly shouted.

  “Sedarias, no!”

  Sedarias, if ghostly and insubstantial, was not compliant and docile. She was angry, had been angry, since Terrano pulled her out of what was only metaphorically a cave, and she hadn’t gotten any calmer. Bellusdeo had taken to the air; Terrano had started to tell her to stay on the ground when the familiar had snapped at him.

  After that, he had offered no further argument. He didn’t even have the energy to curse, so his expression had to speak for him. It spoke volumes, on the other hand. The cohort in their ghostly bodies walked—at speed and on air—alongside the fully aerial Dragon, until the moment Sedarias peeled away from the group. Allaron and Eddorian exchanged a telling glance; they looked to Terrano, miming action, before they followed her.

  “Why,” he demanded, through gritted teeth, “did I even come here at all? Why am I trying to rescue them?”

  “They’re your family,” Kaylin replied. “Bellusdeo—”

  “On it.” The Dragon immediately corrected her course and headed in the direction Sedarias had taken, which was, in this case, to the left and down.

  * * *

  Before they’d even caught sight of what could only loosely be called ground, Kaylin’s arms and legs began to tingle as her natural—and painful—allergy to magic flared up. She’d never quite figured out why some magic—say, Helen’s magic—didn’t cause that reaction, and at the moment, it didn’t matter.

  “We’ve got magic incoming,” she told the Dragon.

  Terrano had fallen utterly silent. Kaylin glanced at him, and then reached out and grabbed his arm; to her eye, he was becoming alarmingly translucent. “I need to go to where they are.”

  “We’ve got no way of fishing you out, if you do.”

  “Send your familiar.”

  “The one who very recently tried to kill you in a rage?”

  “...Good point.”

  Hope bit her ear, but she didn’t feel it; the tingling across the surface of her skin—the skin that bore the marks of the Chosen—became painful. This was both good and bad. Good, in that they probably wanted to go in the direction of the magic, and bad because: pain. Sedarias was only barely visible, as were the two who had followed her; the rest of the cohort stayed with Terrano, but they were all turned as one toward their distant leader.

  Kaylin wondered if Mandoran had elected to accompany Annarion because it meant he could get away from Sedarias—but she was always in his thoughts anyway. Literally.

  As expected, Kaylin’s arms began to hurt; the sleeves of her shirt and the legs of her pants now caused acute pain if she so much as twitched. Given that she was riding a Dragon who wasn’t exactly placid and still, there was a lot more than just twitching. But as she started to count in Leontine—one of the first vocal exercises she’d learned, to the great amusement of Marcus’s kits—the ground appeared.

  * * *

  If she’d had any doubts about the speed at which Bellusdeo had been flying, they were shattered, because they couldn’t have approached ground any faster if they’d been falling. But the gold Dragon was not a fledgling, and she veered what felt like inches from the surface, changing her angle to avoid collision. Kaylin’s stomach still felt like it was hundreds of feet above them as the Dragon roared. And breathed.

  Fire fanned out across the landscape, changing its color in a brief burst of orange and yellow. In the midst of those flames, a Barrani voice shouted a warning. It was a little late. Or maybe not; the fire had not consumed him and he clearly wasn’t screaming.

  Sedarias gave the Dragon the side-eye, but nodded grimly when their eyes met. Terrano slid off the Dragon’s back—or tried. Kaylin’s familiar flew at his face, and his instinctive backward movement resettled him.

  “I don’t think he wants you to leave. Whatever you’re doing for the cohort is working—for them. But I think he’s trying to tell you that the rest of us may need to move.”

  “I can’t fight from here.”

  Kaylin shrugged. “Neither can I. But he clearly considers the possibility that you’ll be lost—to us—more of a danger.” Before he could reply, she added, “Without you, we’ll lose the rest of them. You’re what’s keeping them here.”

  This mollified him, but only enough that he looked sulky and not as determined. “They’re not staying put.”

  They weren’t. Sedarias walked directly into the line of Bellusdeo’s open jaw. She reached out to touch the underside of the Dragon’s jaw; her hand passed through it, which seemed to satisfy some unspoken curiosity.

  “The things that are likely to kill us—”

  “Kill you.”

  “—kill the rest of us aren’t likely to hurt them.” But even saying it, Kaylin wasn’t certain. “And I think we’ve found our two Shadow controllers.” She did not, however, see the Shadow itself. “Do you know where we are?”

  He said nothing, and not just because he was sulking; his eyes had shifted to opalescent black, which was possibly her least favorite eye color, ever.

  “Can you hear your namebound?” he asked.

  Kaylin shook her head.

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “We’re at the Alsanis end of the portal path?”

  “No. This is Alsanis.”

  * * *

  Kaylin believed Terrano, but wanted to argue with him anyway, because she could not sense Alsanis at all. She expected the wild chaos of the portal paths by this point, but did not expect to find them within the Hallionne himself. Lifting her left arm, she rolled back her sleeve, almost weeping as she did; she felt as if she were peeling off the skin itself.

  The marks across her arms were now an odd shade of gray blue. They were glowing, but the glow was faint and muted. On some occasions the symbols lifted themselves from her skin, as if they had life and will of their own; this time, they remained flat. She rolled the second sleeve up to join the first as Bellusdeo followed in Sedarias’s wake.

  “Is Allaron carrying a sword?”

  “He is,” the Dragon rumbled.

  “So are the other two,” Terrano added.

  “What does he expect a sword to do, in his state?”

  No one answered. Bellusdeo, however, spoke three sharp words, and Kaylin clenched her jaws to keep a small scream from escaping.

  “Apologies,” the Dragon said.

  Kaylin barely heard her. Something had shifted in the wake of Bellusdeo’s spell, and she could see both the ground and what lay across it far more clearly. Her heart, such as it was, sank, and if her stomach had finally rejoined the rest of her, she almost wished it hadn’t. They were standing on stones; the stones were large, smooth and perfectly interlocked.

  And there were words written across their surfaces.

  As Bellusdeo continued her forward movement, those words began to rise, the flat inscription gaining volume as the lines, squiggles, and dots that comprised them asserted their existence in three dimensions. Kaylin sucked in air. Terrano was right, but in the worst possible way. Yes, this was Alsanis—but this was the heart of Alsanis. These were the words that defined him; the words that gave him absolute power within his own boundaries. The words that gave him life.

>   They were dark, not golden, and the edges of their various lines gleamed in a way that implied they were sharp enough to cut.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kaylin told the gold Dragon.

  “I’m willing to entertain better suggestions.”

  “I think we need to walk very, very carefully here.”

  “Implying that I can’t.”

  “You can walk carefully at your size, yes—but the gaps between the words here aren’t obligingly hall width. And I wouldn’t bet on Dragon scale as a defense against those edges.”

  “How did the Barrani evade them?”

  “Hells if I know.”

  The familiar squawked.

  “We are not going to walk through this mess holding hands as if we were Kaylin’s foundlings,” the Dragon replied, in her iciest voice.

  Terrano grimaced. “Can I improvise?” he asked the familiar.

  The familiar snorted, the gesture a miniature version of Bellusdeo’s, with smoke. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Terrano eyed the small cloud and grimaced. “Seriously?”

  Squawk.

  “Don’t look at me,” Kaylin said, when Terrano did swivel his glare. “I can’t understand him.”

  The gold Dragon, however, could, and she collapsed once again into a gold plated warrior princess. “Next time,” she told Kaylin, “I am bringing a sword.”

  * * *

  “How can he even be your familiar if you can’t understand him?” The gleaming field of risen words didn’t seem to bother Terrano at all. The fact that those words appeared to be in the innermost sanctum of Alsanis didn’t, either. No, the only thing that seemed to be of concern were the cohort and the distance that had grown between them.

  “I can understand him some of the time,” she replied, trying not to feel defensive.

  “Well now would be a good time, don’t you think?”

  He spoke in Barrani, but spoke as if it were Elantran, which was a neat trick that Kaylin hoped never to learn; High Barrani forced her speech into more acceptable patterns. “Where are the cohort?”

  “They’ve gone ahead a bit.”

  One, the tallest of the number, had jogged back. Although he couldn’t interact with them physically, he nonetheless avoided the edges of the words that now formed columns. Kaylin thought they’d be deadly if they started to move. He spoke to Terrano, his lip movements slow and exaggerated.

  Terrano made a face. “They want us to hurry,” he finally told Kaylin. “Sedarias has reached the edge of the containment I’ve put in place, and she’s not happy about being restrained.”

  “That’s more words than he used,” Bellusdeo observed.

  “I filled in all the blanks.”

  * * *

  Kaylin started to jog. She could maintain a slow jog for a very long distance, and could move into a sprint if the situation demanded it. Bellusdeo had no difficulty keeping up; Terrano seemed to resent the pace. Or at least being forced to keep it using actual legs.

  But they didn’t catch up with the cohort; Allaron hadn’t lied. Sedarias was both angry and intent. The moment she realized she could safely proceed again, she did—and all of the cohort went with her.

  Alsanis’s words started to move. They were anchored in place, each to a very large stone, but they could, and did, cover the range of that stone; in places, they came together like a wall of blades.

  “Should we try flying over them?” Bellusdeo asked; she clearly felt that Kaylin’s directive had been the wrong one.

  Kaylin shook her head. “I think they can move up and down at will. They seem to be confined horizontally.” She glanced at her familiar; he nodded. But he didn’t lift a wing; whatever she could see with her own eyes, he considered good enough.

  The travel toward Sedarias grew much more treacherous; the stones into which words had been engraved were smaller, and the words themselves appeared to be more intricate. Bellusdeo managed to avoid them; Terrano, accustomed to a variety of traveling forms, didn’t. He didn’t instantly get turned into diced pseudo-Barrani, but he did get cut, and he did bleed. He seemed almost offended by the injury, and threw the familiar a baleful glare, but proceeded far more cautiously after that.

  Caution, however, only carried them so far.

  * * *

  “That’s a pretty solid wall,” Kaylin said to the Dragon as she looked at the words that lay ahead of them. The stones upon which the words had been carved, and from which they’d risen, were smaller, which narrowed the space between what were effectively spinning blades.

  The Dragon concurred. “Is flight still forbidden?”

  The familiar nodded. As a small lizard, his facial expressions were limited, but he looked concerned, to Kaylin.

  “How did the cohort get past this?”

  “Don’t ask me—I’m not one of them anymore.”

  Kaylin exhaled. “But you’re here.”

  “Obviously I have an intelligence deficit.”

  “Fine. You recognized this as Alsanis.”

  “I spent most of my existence trapped here.”

  “So did the cohort. What did Sedarias do—if she managed to do anything—that allowed them safe passage?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because my skin feels like it’s being flayed off, and that’s probably not a good sign—for Alsanis.”

  Terrano fell silent for one long beat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Be quiet.”

  Bellusdeo shook her head when Kaylin opened her mouth again, and Kaylin closed it, missing Severn. He was generally content to let her do most of, if not all of, the talking. But as she watched Terrano, she had a feeling that he was talking, and in a way she couldn’t. For perhaps the first time, she considered the advantages of being Terrano and Mandoran. She didn’t much like the idea of getting stuck in walls, though.

  The words spun slowly—and loudly—to a halt. And the air grew less heavy, the ground less hard. She couldn’t hear Alsanis, and that still bothered her, but she now had a faint sense of his presence.

  “What did you do?” Bellusdeo demanded.

  Terrano grimaced. “When we were struggling to find our way out of our cage, we developed different forms of communication. There were layers to it; we could communicate almost entirely truthfully while obscuring small, but critical facts.

  “It was obfuscation that was the important part, then. Of course, Alsanis was aware of our various attempts—he’s a Hallionne. So it became a bit of a game. We have ways of communication that in theory shouldn’t exist, and he created systems to hear that nonexistent communication. We had successes, but most of them didn’t last long—it was always work to keep ahead of Alsanis.”

  “So you were—”

  “Using one of the older secret modes, yes. If Alsanis has somehow been cut off from communication with us—I mean with you and the Dragon—there’s a strong chance that the rest of the modes we developed were not considered when the interference was put in place.” For a moment, he seemed highly pleased with himself, which once again emphasized his youthfulness.

  “Did he answer you?”

  Terrano pointed at the word forms. “He never used the undercurrent to speak with us; that would have made it clear, immediately, that he could. But he learned to listen.”

  “While he has this much control, let’s get moving. Ummm, I don’t suppose he could make the edges of those lines less sharp?”

  Terrano snorted. “You might as well ask if he can make you less clumsy. If the edges are too sharp, don’t touch them.”

  Bellusdeo’s eyes lightened as she snickered, because clearly, that’s what friends did. Kaylin forced herself not to reply, and began to navigate toward the distant cohort. She had questions, of course—but questions had to wait.

  The tighter congregation
of words did not diminish; neither did their edges. While it was easier to walk between them when they did not spin or move, following Terrano’s advice was difficult, and became more so as they continued their awkward pursuit of Sedarias and company.

  Three words in, Kaylin knew she was going to need a new shirt; the current one had been cut in three places, and the third cut wasn’t small enough to patch. There’d been almost no friction; the slicing of cloth had made no sound. She glanced at Bellusdeo, but the Dragon scale was more hardy than simple cloth.

  The fourth cut broke skin. It was a very shallow cut, more of a scrape or a scratch than a wound, and blood beaded from it slowly, welling up in uneven blobs of red. In the stillness, Kaylin didn’t even curse.

  She did curse the fifth time; the cut was deeper, and the blood, rather than beading, ran down her arm, as if it were trying to underline the injury. This time, that blood spread across her skin, running across the marks that lay there, flat and glowing a gentle gray. Her familiar squawked in her ear, in the tone of voice she imagined Terrano would use if he’d noticed.

  And this time, the cut was deep enough that some of Kaylin’s blood was left on the line of the word she’d been trying to circumnavigate. Terrano cursed as he turned to look, his eyes rounding, his jaw falling open. It would have been comical at any other time; now, it was vaguely terrifying.

  “What—what did you do?”

  It was the Dragon who answered, her eyes once again a darker orange. “She didn’t manage to avoid the middle stroke on that word. I don’t suppose you know what the word is?”

  Terrano shook his head. “We weren’t exactly trying to learn how to speak True Words.” But even saying it, his gaze narrowed. “Well...not all of us. Eddorian might know. Or Serralyn.”

  The two names were names Kaylin didn’t often hear at home. “Ask them,” she said. Her thoughts caught up with her mouth only after the words had escaped. “...Sorry. I am so accustomed to Mandoran and Annarion. I forgot you can’t.”