Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “Come on. I’m to stop there today, and if you’re up to carrying a bit, you can keep me company.” She had a sharp look to her face as she said it, but it wasn’t a suspicious one; it said Purpose, with capital letters.

  Here, now, Kaylin looked at the body of Paul Moroes. The other bodies weren’t immediately visible, but it didn’t matter; like all good ghosts, they haunted her anyway. “Severn,” she said quietly, clutching his hand.

  He nodded.

  “Unwind the weapon chain; attach it to me. I need to—I need both of my hands.” He didn’t ask her why. She knew he wouldn’t. Most days, she took the silence for granted. Today she felt it as the gift it was. She transferred her free hand to his shoulder, in order to hold on to him; they both didn’t like what might happen here if they were separated. He unwound the weapon chain with care.

  When he had passed the blade at one end of the chain around her, the links followed it with a cold musicality as he let the chain play out. Seen this way, in the endless gray of a sullen sky, it looked slender, decorative. She touched the links; they were warm with his body heat.

  When he had finished, she lifted her hand from his shoulder, and turned to the corpse of Paul Moroes. She didn’t ask him questions; she didn’t beg his forgiveness. She said nothing at all as she began to cut him down.

  “Private,” Tiamaris said curtly, “is this entirely necessary?”

  “Is what necessary, Tiamaris?”

  “Whatever it is you are doing.”

  She ignored the question. There was only one sensible answer to it, and she didn’t much care to give it. No one liked feeling like an idiot.

  She should have told Arna that she didn’t want to go. That’s where it should have ended. She even knew it, at the time. But she told herself that if she could make a favorable impression upon Sana and her mother, she’d have her best shot at getting to Paul Moroes, and she kept her growing uneasiness to herself as she followed in Arna’s steps.

  Sana’s grandmother was a woman named Kora. She looked as if she was about the same age as Arna, but she was a good deal less talkative. “Put the basket on the table, girl,” Arna told Elianne, as she unwound a ratty great scarf and dumped it on a chair. “We’re not staying long,” she added, speaking to Kora. “But I thought there was a good chance you didn’t head out today, and you need to eat.”

  Kora’s lined face was pinched and shadowed. “Aye, we all need that. But the food won’t help my granddaughter,” she added bitterly. “We’ve tried. Gods know, we’ve tried.” She covered her face a moment with both hands, and then pushed the curls out of her face with her palms. “Sit,” she told Arna. “You can fill me in on any news I shouldn’t miss.”

  “Let me say hello to your daughter.”

  “She might be sleeping,” Kora replied. “I hate to wake her.”

  “Sana?”

  Kora shrugged. It was not a fief shrug; it was a gesture used in place of all the words that you couldn’t say. “Aye,” she said. “You can see Sana. Maybe—” She took a breath, and inhaled the rest of the words.

  But she lead Arna to a very small hall, and from it, to a room. The door was slightly ajar. She opened it and entered. Elianne, whose hope that she’d been forgotten was dashed by a determined Arna, entered, as well.

  Kora’s daughter was, indeed, asleep. Like her mother, her face was creased and shadowed, but sleep deprived it of the edges and the unutterable weariness of the older woman’s expression. She was curled over a chair just to one side of the bed that occupied the far wall—where far, in this case, was a matter of ten feet away, if that.

  But the girl in the bed? Her face was not so much gray as black and yellow. One eye was swollen almost beyond recognition, and the lid remained closed. The other, bruised, was a slit through which Elianne could just barely see awareness. Sana was awake; her mouth was slightly open, and she was drooling.

  “You take a good look,” Arna whispered, bringing her lips to Elianne’s ear so that Kora wouldn’t hear what she had to say. “If you’re not careful, that’ll be you.”

  CHAPTER 20

  If you’re not careful. She closed Paul Moroes’s eyes. They had left his eyelids intact, so she could.

  “Kaylin.” Nightshade’s voice. “There is a danger here. You do not perceive it.”

  She raised her face, looked across at him. The wind moved his hair across the perfect blue of his eyes; he ignored it. “What danger?” she asked quietly, her voice remote.

  “You expose too much weakness.”

  Her laugh was brittle, harsh. “And you’re going to take advantage of it? Here?”

  “No. Not here, and not I. You stand in a building that not even the wise understand, and in our limited experience, these buildings test all visitors. Not everyone who chooses to enter is allowed to leave, if they even survive the attempt. Their bodies are not found.

  “I…am not entirely aware…of the significance of what you see, but I am aware of what you see in a way that Lord Tiamaris and your human compatriot are not. No building offers the same test, but this one is in keeping with the tests that are known.”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t about the Tower. It’s about me.”

  “That,” he replied, “is the nature of the Towers. You must move, Kaylin. You cannot afford to stand here.”

  “No. No, you’re right.” She was still crouching. Her knees were beginning to feel it; the air here was damp and cool. The street was still a fractured display of broken things, especially in the square in which his body had been discovered. There were no shovels, here. No pickaxes, nothing with which to dig into the unyielding ground.

  She had left him, once, untouched, just as she had found him today. As if the intervening years had never happened. Today she cut him down, arranging his body to give it whatever dignity the dead cared for. Maybe, she thought, bitter now and angry, the next time, she would actually bury him.

  It was impossible to see Sana and not understand what had driven her brother to the act of revenge that would be his eventual suicide. It was exactly what drove Elianne herself. Arna had meant to scare Elianne. Elianne was beyond fear of that type. She’d seen worse. Worse, because Jade and Steffi had died.

  But this injured stranger hurt her in ways that she didn’t understand, not at first. She could barely bring herself to speak to the girl. Barely. She kept her distance, though, as if the injuries were somehow contagious. Sana couldn’t actually speak; her voice came out in a thin squawk. She had trouble closing her mouth properly, which is why she was drooling.

  “She was in worse shape,” Arna told Elianne on the way out, “when they found her. She’d dragged herself half down the street, her legs broken, and one arm. We weren’t certain she’d survive.” For the first time, Arna hesitated, and then said, in a lower voice, “and we’re not sure Paul will, either.” It was the first time she’d mentioned his name.

  Elianne should have felt some triumph at the sound of it; she didn’t. She should have asked what Arna meant, should have pretended she thought Paul was also injured. She couldn’t. She was hollow, nauseated, and frightened. But she couldn’t go home until she’d gotten enough of a grip that she could look normal; Morse would notice, otherwise, and she’d ask more than Elianne could reasonably answer.

  “Did you kill him?” Severn asked, as she began to pick her way over rubble again. The question was a shock; not even Nightshade’s voice had felt so foreign.

  She had no answer to give him; no answer but movement, although movement separated them only as far as the chain stretched. She didn’t remove it, but didn’t offer him her hand. She’d had enough of people, now; people, Dragons, and Barrani.

  Morse had known. Kaylin had never been one of nature’s natural liars, and although she’d developed some skill at it during her weeks in Barren, that skill was a thin veneer over years of the exact opposite experience. She’d expected Morse to be angry, and she was—but the anger was a strange anger; it involved no fists, no slaps,
no kicks. Instead, it involved a towering wall of silence.

  These streets were mercifully unlike any streets she had ever walked before. “No,” she told Severn. It sounded like yes.

  Paul Moroes had been a shock, Kaylin admitted that. But once she had seen him, she had lingered by his side, showing him the respect that no one in the world cared about, anymore. Not his sister. Not his mother.

  Not Arna, either.

  It wasn’t long before she found their bodies, mixed in the rubble, the way she’d known she would. They hadn’t been killed in the same way that Moroes had; they weren’t on public display in the open streets. Paul’s crime had to be discouraged, Morse had said. But their crime? It was the usual. Death was fine.

  Only death was fine.

  “You know,” she told Severn, when she could speak normally again, “I hate these places.” Turning to Nightshade, she added, “I am never going to complain about your portal again for as long as I live—”

  And stopped.

  “Tiamaris, is he going to remember all of this?”

  “The Barrani are famed for their memory.”

  “He never mentioned it to me.”

  “Perhaps he had some reason for his silence.” He said it in a tone of voice that implied that Nightshade’s silence, and her lack of it, were strongly connected. He wasn’t pleased with her at the moment.

  Then again, neither was she. Reaching out carefully, she took Severn’s hand. “I went to Barren,” she told him, “because there was nowhere else for me to go. I didn’t even realize I’d crossed the border. I found Morse, and Morse promised she would teach me how to kill a man. It was the only thing I cared about.

  “But Morse? She worked for Barren. She trained me so that I could do the same thing. Work for Barren. I did. For six months.” Her fingers tightened as she spoke, as if she were afraid he’d pull away. “He told me who to kill, and I figured out how. I killed them,” she added. “The bodies in the first door that opened were the bodies of the first men I killed.”

  His hand tightened around hers, but he didn’t speak a word. Didn’t really need to. “And the rest of the bodies?”

  “The rest of the bodies, until the man I cut down, were bodies of people I’d killed. For Barren.”

  “All of them?”

  She frowned. “Yes, I think. I didn’t stop to dig them all out, and not all of them could be identified by their arms or legs.” She shrugged.

  “These bodies?”

  She flinched. “These…were different. The man who was nailed to the posts? I was supposed to kill him.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I…no. I didn’t. I understood what he’d done. I understood why. It was what I would have done. What I wanted to do. It would’ve been like killing a part of myself. I thought I could do it. But I couldn’t.” Her voice dropped. “I left him a message, with his mother. He understood what it meant. I think he—he might have tried to move his mother and his sister. I don’t know.

  “But Morse—or someone who worked for Barren—must have been following me. I wasn’t as careful, then. Not then. They must have heard what I said to him. I did try, Severn. I tried to kill him. But I couldn’t. We fought. I was injured. He was injured. I told him—I told him to clear out. I told him to cross the bridge.”

  Severn looked away. He did not withdraw his hand.

  “Yes. They heard that, too,” she told him quietly.

  “What happened?”

  “Moroes died.”

  “And you?”

  “I lived, more or less.”

  “Kaylin—”

  But he didn’t have to tell her; she knew. The shadows were gathering in his vision, but they were gathering in her chest, as well, constricting breath and words and thought. She had never told anyone about Barren. She hadn’t even told Morse, and Morse was kind enough—or brusque enough—not to try to guess. Morse didn’t offer sympathy, and she didn’t hold out hope; she offered life, and it was the life of a person who ends anyone else’s, on command.

  “He didn’t have me killed,” Kaylin said, surprised at the sound of her own voice. “He didn’t even sound angry. He sounded sad. And quiet.”

  “You do not have to say this,” Severn told her. “Not to me.”

  “But I do,” she replied, keeping her voice even and her hands still. “Because if I don’t, we don’t leave.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Yes, she is,” Tiamaris said. “But as is often the case with Kaylin’s undereducated guesses, this one is, I believe, correct.”

  “If I’m right,” Kaylin continued, “I’ll see other bodies. Other victims, not of my knife, but of my stupidity, my carelessness. People who died by chance, by being in the wrong place, by seeing the wrong damn thing. I didn’t wield the knife, and no one paid me, but I did kill them.

  “I think,” she added, “that’s why you can’t see what I see; I’ve never let you. It’s dark, it’s horrible—it’s everything I believe about myself. The Tower is speaking to me, yes. Bit by bit, it’s unraveling all the lies of omission, even the ones I told myself. Maybe especially those. It’s pulling out the things that I kept hidden because I couldn’t stand to think about them.

  “I don’t know who I am, Severn. I don’t think I’ve ever known who I am. But I know who I want to be, now. Maybe that’s all I’ll ever know. What I was is so large in my own mind I can’t break through it if it’s hidden. And I keep it hidden because I’m afraid. Of what it says about me. Of what it’ll say about me to people whose opinion I actually care about.

  “I’m not proud of it,” she added. “But I can pretend I accept it—as long as I never have to acknowledge it. And this,” she said, throwing her arm wide, “is what it is. It’s too big. I need to let it be what it was.

  “Barren never called me an idiot after that. He—” She shook her head. “I knew I’d failed. I knew I’d failed Morse.”

  “And Barren?”

  “Until then, I honestly didn’t give a shit about Barren.” She sucked in air. “After, I knew what I was to him. I knew I was his. I understood Morse better.” She looked at her hands, turning them so the palms were visible. “I knew I didn’t deserve more, Severn. When we lived in—in the other fief, I had hope. I had you, and I believed in you. When you killed the girls, it shattered.”

  He flinched then, for the first time since she’d started.

  “No,” she told him, gentling her voice. “This is not about you. This isn’t even really about the truth, because truth is so damn slippery. It’s about me. It’s about what I—as a thirteen-year-old—believed. I wanted to believe there was a reason for what you did. But I couldn’t. And because I couldn’t, the only reason I had to go on was you. In a twisted way, it was you.”

  She turned toward the ruins surrounding her on all sides.

  “I thought, if I killed you, the nightmares would stop. But they were worse, because I was killing. Me. I thought I could just kill Barren’s thugs, and that would be all right. I could justify that, to myself. But when Paul Moroes and his family died…I lost that.

  “They aren’t the only ones who are here,” she added softly. “But they’re the first. They made me understand just how worthless I was.” She lifted a hand and pressed it to his mouth, which had opened, sealing in the words. “They died because I was an assassin and a coward—they were neither.”

  Straightening her shoulders she glanced at gray sky; lightning streaked groundward in the distance, from the roil of green-gray cloud. “Storm coming,” she told him softly. “It would have been different, if I could have accepted what their deaths taught me about myself. I couldn’t. So I hated the Emperor.”

  Tiamaris cleared his throat, and she grimaced. “I hated him anyway. It was safe to hate him—he didn’t care about the fiefs; it wasn’t as if he’d launch himself out of the safety of his palace and fly down to burn me to cinders. I hated the Halls of Law, and I hated the fact that they were supposed to protect people like
Paul Moroes, but didn’t, just because he lived on the wrong side of the Ablayne.

  “I hated them for not doing what I couldn’t do. I hated them for not stopping me.” She looked at Severn. “Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t make much sense, then.

  “Mostly, I hated the Hawks because those were the officers I saw. I saw Swords, on occasion, but not damn often. We never saw Wolves. Just the Hawks, patrolling the far banks.”

  “Where you patrol now.”

  “Where we patrol now, yes.” She hesitated, and then said, “After Moroes killed the stranger, the Hawks clung to the banks near the bridge. They couldn’t prevent people from crossing, but they could stop them, inspect their cargo if they had any and question them. So people stopped coming to Barren. They probably crossed the bridges to every other damn fief. Except where the walls are. I imagine those were harder.

  “None of which mattered to Barren. He tried sending his men out to case the bridge, and to offer the possibility of threat—but they couldn’t touch the Hawks, and they knew it. I went a couple of times, but I hung back, watching.”

  “He sent you across the river, then?”

  “Not immediately, no. I think he tried bribing the Hawks first.”

  Severn raised one brow. “I bet that went over well.”

  “How much are you betting?”

  He laughed. It was almost a shock of sound, even though it was his usual, low laugh. She wanted more of it, but at this moment, she didn’t have the energy or the creativity to draw it out.

  “It didn’t work. I think Teela broke someone’s arm; I know Tain broke someone’s jaw. Not that they have anything against the concept of bribery; they just felt the amount was insulting. Then again, they’d probably find any amount the merely mortal could offer insulting, and at least I grew up in a fief where insulting the Barrani was a life-shortening proposition.

  “It was after that, that I left Barren. But before that, I was sent out to kill. Barren made some of the hits ‘invisible’ hits. People weren’t supposed to know it was him, so they couldn’t know it was me. Looking back, it was practice, of a sort. I learned how to scale buildings, how to use ropes and grapples and any old thing that might support weight. I learned when to do it.