They looked very much like the runes she had accidentally carved.
There are no accidents.
Who had said that? She thought it might be Marcus, but she couldn’t clearly remember. The runes she had carved in the medium of dust were far fewer than these; she tried to count them and lost track, in part because they began to move, growing brighter as they approached the edge of her field of vision, dimmer as she turned to look. And she did turn, or felt that she did; in the end, it didn’t matter, because in the end, they surrounded her, glowing in that same pale way as the light in these strange halls did.
She wondered if Tiamaris would see any harmony in the way these runes lined up, or if he would attempt to nudge them into a slightly better formation; it didn’t matter. He couldn’t see them. And they felt right to her. But she turned toward two—if it was only two—that glowed more brightly than the others, and reaching out, she touched them.
They were hot, and while the heat didn’t burn her figurative hands, it was on the wrong edge of painful. She held on anyway, using the grip to lever herself off the ground. Without opening her eyes, she said, “Follow me.”
They followed. She felt Severn’s presence by her side; she couldn’t feel Tiamaris, but she heard the rumble of Dragon breath. It was loud and deep, disturbing in such a small space. She opened her eyes.
The darkness was gone, as was the endless narrow path; they had walked from it into a room the size—and almost the shape—of a cavern. It was not, however, a natural cavern, because everywhere the eye could see, runes had been carved into the surface of stone, some of it curving its way to a height several stories above their heads. The floor was carved with runes, as well, but unlike the strokes and deep grooves that reached upward, these lay in a series of concentric circles, which very much implied that the base shape of the room was circular.
Kaylin took one step and stumbled; Severn caught her arm.
“I’m fine,” she told him, righting herself.
He said a very loud nothing. “What did you do?”
“I looked for the right words. I think—I think I found them.”
“That,” a new voice said, “is not all you have found. Welcome to my home.”
In the center of the room a man had appeared. He was hard to look at, not because he was ugly or intimidating, but because he should have been beautiful. He was tall, as all Barrani Lords were tall, and his hair was a sweep of black that trailed down his shoulders like the finest of cloaks. His skin was pale, his cheekbones high, his shoulders both broad and slender.
But his eyes were all of black; they showed no trace of the blue that meant anger or the green that meant contentment—not that contentment in the Barrani was a sure sign of safety. Kaylin stopped herself from taking a step back and schooled her expression. This, she was certain, was Illien; he was not—quite—alive.
“Lord Illien,” Tiamaris said, tendering the standing Barrani male a deep bow.
“I was,” the Barrani replied, after a long pause. “I was called Illien by my kin. You are not, I think, among their number.”
“No.”
“But the world has changed much. I bid you welcome.” He raised both of his arms in one sudden, sweeping gesture, and the runes along wall and floor began to glow a livid, ugly red. His arms then fell to his sides; the red, however, didn’t diminish.
It began to pulse, as if it were alive.
Don’t stand on the floor, was Kaylin’s first thought. Her second was, where the hell would you like us to stand?
But Tiamaris threw up one hand in a brief, sharp gesture, a twist of fingers and palm in the air, and when it was done, Kaylin’s skin developed the usual goose bumps and raised hair. She also developed a distinct lack of weight, and buoyed by the Dragon Lord’s magery, left the stone floor, hovering a foot or two above the ground.
Illien—the man who had once been Illien—nodded as if he’d expected no less; he wasn’t shocked, surprised or annoyed. In fact, he had no facial expression at all, which was why his face looked so disturbing. That, and the fact that he was sort of dead.
“I will take nothing from you,” he told them all, in a flat, neutral voice, “except what is needful. You need feel no fear.”
“Fear is entirely voluntary in this case,” Severn replied.
The Barrani Lord looked through Severn. This wasn’t uncommon, but usually it happened because Severn was merely human; in this case, Kaylin had the distinct impression it was happening because what Severn said made no sense to him. If anything did.
“Do not fight the Tower,” Lord Illien told them, and his arms moved again, almost a blur to the eye given how still he was otherwise standing. The floors and the walls didn’t change; the air did. It swept across them all like the edge of a storm, slamming them toward the rounded curve of walls, and the runes that waited there, continuing to pulse as if they were alive.
Tiamaris gestured. If he was slow—and compared to the dead Barrani Lord he was—he was timely; something invisible, and not terribly soft, inserted itself between the walls and the people who were rapidly approaching them; they bounced, and landed once again in midair.
Kaylin almost told Tiamaris to drop them because she couldn’t fight while dangling. But Illien hadn’t moved, and any fighting she was good at didn’t seem relevant. He did, however, frown. Or almost frown. His face lost some of its total absence of expression. She couldn’t call it composure; Severn, to the far right, was composed.
“The Tower,” Illien said, in a slightly different tone of voice, “is mine. It is mine.”
“It is yours,” Tiamaris said, in a tone that indicated no agreement, “only so long as you can hold it.”
“I can hold it,” the Barrani Lord replied, “forever. You do not understand, Dragon Lord, if Lord of anything you be.” Dead or not, he was still Barrani; something in Tiamaris’s expression indicated weakness. It was a weakness that not even magic was required to exploit. “Is that why you are here? Are you without purpose, Dragon Lord? Have you lost your hoard?”
Tiamaris said nothing for a long moment, and then he opened his mouth. Kaylin had time to shout a word of warning—no more—before the room was wreathed in flames.
Kaylin’s hair singed, which she expected.
The walls screamed, which she did not.
If runes could bleed, these did; the ugly, livid red now looked like blistered flesh when skin has been seared off. Tiamaris fell silent at once, and the flames that had left his mouth guttered, but the room smelled pretty much like it looked; it took effort not to wretch. Still caught in the grip of Tiamaris’s magic, which hadn’t faltered, Kaylin looked to Severn; Severn was watching the Barrani Lord.
“Lord Illien,” he said quietly, in the silence Tiamaris left.
“Tiamaris,” Kaylin said, ignoring him. “Let me go. Keep Severn away from the runes—keep yourself away—but put me down.”
Tiamaris hesitated for just a moment, and then nodded. She settled—slowly—to a ground that groaned in pain. She couldn’t comfort it—it was a damn floor. But she overrode her intense and unexpected squeamishness, and knelt carefully.
“Tara?”
The word seemed to make no difference to the floor’s expression of pain. It would almost have been easier had it opened eyes and a gaping maw, because then it would make sense. Briefly.
Severn, however, ignored her. “Lord Illien,” he said again. “You were once considered a sage. One of the wisest of your kin.”
Lord Illien was silent for long enough she wondered if he’d heard Severn, but eventually he nodded. He looked neither pleased nor flattered. “I was.”
“For years, you studied the words of the Old Ones. They brought you here.”
Something like blue light flickered in the black of his eyes. He nodded again. Even dead, the Barrani were capable of suspicion; it was their rest state.
“It’s our guess that every Tower has a room such as this, and you must have visited more than one Tower bef
ore you chose to take up residence here.”
Again, light flickered, pale streaks in the darkness, like the trail left by falling stars. Illien did not answer the question.
Severn waited until he was certain there would be no answer before he continued, “This is not the only Tower that you visited. There would have been few Towers that would be closed to you.”
Lord Illien nodded.
“Was this the last?”
“No. It was the first.”
“And you returned to it.”
“It is not relevant,” was the cool reply. “I have seen what lies at the heart of Ravellon. There is no escaping it.”
CHAPTER 26
The Dragon Lord shook his head. He had remained silent throughout, neither adding nor disagreeing. Now he said, “Have you found the freedom you sought, Lord Illien?”
“I am free,” he replied after a pause. “And the Tower is mine.”
“The Tower was built to serve a purpose.”
“Yes. But it has served. It can no longer function as it did. I would have let it feed. I have let it feed before, content to wait. I have eternity, and Ravellon will arrive sooner or later. It is reality, Dragon Lord. This,” he added, lifting his arm in a slow, wide arc, “is the daydream of senile gods.”
“And the mortals?”
“Who can say? They should never have been here at all. You’ve seen that. The Old Ones corrupted what they touched. But the humans? The winged ones? This is not their world. It is ours, and we are chained—chained—like the most base of dogs.” Light now, blue, deep blue, the color of anger or danger, shone in his eyes. It was still there, somehow.
In Illien, it was still there. Kaylin had seen no signs of emotion in the undead Barrani she’d encountered in the fief of Nightshade months ago. But Illien had been no fool, and he had had some understanding of the Old Ones, their language, and what he intended for himself; the others had been shades and shadows; animated corpses.
“What lies at the heart of Ravellon?”
For the first time, Illien smiled. Kaylin thought it was both the most beautiful smile she had ever seen, and conversely, the most repulsive. “You will see,” he told Tiamaris.
But Kaylin had heard enough. “And what of the Tower?” She rose, settling her hands on her hips in a pose the foundlings would have recognized.
“It is mine.”
“The hells. You chose this Tower for a reason. You made that clear. This one was different. And it’s still different. You knew that, then,” she added. It was an accusation.
“It is mine.”
“And what in the hells is left of you that you think you can lay claim to anything else?”
“I am what I was,” he replied. “But I am not bound. I cannot be chained. Not even by the Tower itself.”
Kaylin shook her head. “The Tower—”
“Yes. This Tower was different. I do not know why. But it can no longer take from me what it required. A gift,” he added, “of knowledge and planning.”
“You will kill it—”
“It is not alive.”
“How would you know life? You’ve given up yours!”
“And you, mortal, are you so swift to judge me? You were never born to the chain of word and command. You were given the breath of life and thought by the simple expedient of birth. No lake holds the name that someone else bestows upon you. No single word can force you to do what is against your very nature.
“I am,” he added, “what you are.”
She shook her head. “You’re not.”
“How so?”
“We die. We age, and we die.” And then she stopped speaking for just a moment, and she looked at Illien. There was no power in her gaze; no magic, no unconscious use of the runes that lay glowing across her skin—but he flinched for the first time. Dead, she had called them, when she had first seen them.
“Tiamaris.” Her voice was soft. “He has no name.”
“No. I believe that is the point of the undying.”
“He has no power.”
“He demonstrably has power, Private.”
“No power of his own.”
Tiamaris stiffened.
“The power is mine.”
“No, it’s not. It’s no more yours than your name, now. The power you use—”
“It is the Tower’s power—”
“No, it’s not. It’s not the Tower’s. The Tower’s power comes, in part, from names—from Old names. You have nothing to give the Tower, and that’s why the borders have all but crumpled.”
“The Tower,” he said again, “is mine.”
“Is that what you were told? That everything would still be yours?” It was a guess. He didn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer, not in so many words. But she was tugging at the thread of an answer anyway, and she followed it. “The lake,” she told him. “The lake you sneered at. It’s not a real lake. It’s not anything like that—but it’s life. It’s the life of the Old Ones.
“And it’s the life of the Dragons, the Barrani, and the Tower. You were the children of gods. It doesn’t matter what we are—your names are eternal. You can be destroyed, yes—but the name isn’t destroyed with you. It continues. Our magic—those of us who have it—is tied to our bodies. It withers us, consumes our life. Yours doesn’t.
“But you’ve given up the source of your power.”
“I have power.”
“It’s not yours. It’s not a power that the Tower can use. The Tower has taken power—somehow—from those who have it, but it’s not a power that can sustain either the Tower or the poor sod who—” She stopped for a moment. Barren.
“It’s trying to feed,” she told him.
“It cannot drain me, anymore.”
“It didn’t drain you—”
“I could not leave. Do you not understand?” Again, strands of blue in those eyes.
“And you can now?”
“As I please. I do not need the Tower.”
“The Tower,” Kaylin said with heat, “doesn’t damn well need you.” She launched herself across the red and blistered ground, and it rose like a wall of scored flesh to prevent her from reaching Illien. Kaylin managed to stop before impact. But she lifted a hand—her palms bare—and she touched runes misshapen by the unnatural rise of the floor.
If the Tower was hungry, as she knew it must be, it devoured nothing; she felt no pain, no loss of self, in the simple contact. The runes which were a livid, blistered red felt like…injured flesh, no more, no less. She’d seen a lot of that in her time. It had no face, of course, and no mouth with which to utter whimpering sounds of pain; it didn’t sweat, and it didn’t bleed. Well, maybe it bled.
But to Kaylin Neya, it felt alive, and injured. There was no shadow in it, no darkness, no malice.
“Tara,” she whispered.
The ground shook.
Tiamaris roared before she could speak again. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she knew, before she turned, what was happening. As he had done once before in the vast confines of the Tower’s artificial freedom, he did now in its cage: he assumed the great, scaled form of myth, of legend.
She turned, her palms still touching Tara, as if to offer comfort by sheer presence, and she saw the last of his transformation: the elongation of jaw, the growth of fangs, the unfolding of webbed, glittering wings. He was red, as he had been once before; she had never asked him about the variance in color and what it meant. If it was similar to eye color, the Barrani Lord was in trouble.
The room was huge. She’d thought it, coming in, but she had proof now: Tiamaris stretched his wings, tip to tip, before he bunched them behind his shoulders and they didn’t hit wall. Or floor. He pushed himself off the ground, and in this room, all surfaces adorned by reddened glyphs, he looked almost kin to them.
He breathed. Fire plumed from his open mouth, but this time, it was a tight, tight cone, similar to the one that Sanabalis might use to light a damn candle when he wanted to s
how off. It struck Illien, who remained standing in the flames as if they were merely weather.
Fire had killed the undying she’d encountered twice before; fire did not touch Illien. But the Tower, beneath her flattened palms, shuddered, rippling as if in agony.
“Tiamaris, stop!” she cried. “You’re hurting her! You’re hurting Tara!”
The fire banked; the Dragon landed. He said, “I will kill him, Kaylin,” and the ground shook, not as if it were in pain, but because his voice was like an earthquake. Except in the air.
Had Tara been a real child, and not a building too vast to measure, Kaylin would have gathered her in her arms and turned her back to Tiamaris and the fight itself—which, in the case of unknown magic, was a big risk. As it was, Tiamaris breathed again, but this time, on the ground, the cone was short and aimed entirely at Illien’s chest.
Fire wrapped itself around that chest like an orange, translucent hand—but nothing burned; not Illien. Not, thank the gods, the ground.
Severn, silent, had unwound his weapon chain from its berth at his waist. He glanced at Kaylin, whose hands were still pressed against the only part of the floor that had risen, like rock formation. She nodded grimly, and he began to navigate the runic surface of the floor, almost exactly opposite Tiamaris’s chosen point of first contact. Illien lifted his arms, a sweeping, sudden gesture, and the lights in the room flared white. Cursing, Kaylin closed her eyes.
The sound went out with the lights.
She opened her eyes immediately, but the sound didn’t return, and the light was a shimmering gold that transformed the people she knew: Tiamaris, Severn, and Illien. Tiamaris wavered in her vision, his Dragon wings and tail almost transparent. At his heart, she saw the man—or his human form—that she’d worked with. Severn was Severn, although his weapon was a bright, solid shape that was hard to look at.
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