Cast in Silence

by Michelle Sagara

  “She did not want it,” he replied. “Like you, she would have taken it, and like you, she would have failed the Tower.”

  “The Tower? I failed the Tower? The Tower failed me.”

  Flame wreathed the Dragon’s muzzle. “You do not know what you want. Either of you. You,” he said, nodding at Kaylin, “with your doubt and your fear, and you,” he continued, turning to the Barrani Lord, “who chose this place as your own because you were bored. It has always seemed to me that the Barrani were almost mortal in the weakness of their focus.”

  Illien was Barrani enough to find Tiamaris’s observation offensive; Kaylin was self-aware enough to accept it.

  But Tiamaris, his deep quake of a voice gentling, said, “It is not enough to accept responsibility for another life as an act of fear or duty, Private.”

  “You serve the Emperor,” Kaylin pointed out.

  “That was never simple duty. When you see him, you will understand. If you survive that meeting, you will have to come and tell me what you saw. I will not be there to see it.” His wings extended slowly.

  “But—”

  “I want this, Kaylin. I have never wanted anything but this. This is mine. Nothing but death will take it from me.”

  “You’ve been to other Towers before—”

  “They were not mine. This is.” He lifted his head again, and spoke a single word in his native tongue. She recognized it, although she shouldn’t have. It was the Dragon word for hoard.

  Tara seemed to recognize it, as well, but she had the advantage of being a Tower. She stood transfixed for a moment, and then she whispered a word that Kaylin couldn’t understand. It was followed by words that she could, however.

  “It was you. It was you I heard.”

  His eyes were golden, bright, incandescent. “Yes. It was me. It was both my emptiness and my desire.” His voice shook the ground, but managed, conversely, to be gentle. “Now come, Tara. There are shadows and invaders in my domain. Their presence does not please me.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “You do not wish to join me?”

  She did. Only a moron could have asked that question. Kaylin was wise enough to keep this opinion to herself.

  But he shook his head. “You do not understand what Kaylin intended. You cannot leave me. That she could not change. But she thought you capable of learning to love the people your very existence protects if you could walk, and live, among them. Today, however, you—and I—will fly.” He waited.

  She stared at him for a moment longer, and then she made her way across a floor that was now, once again, defined by carved runes and symbols. She did not look at Illien; Illien watched her.

  “Come,” Tiamaris said again, and he lowered himself to the ground—or as close to the ground as something his size could get. Kaylin thought—although she wasn’t certain—that he was larger, in Dragon form, than he had been any other time she’d seen him.

  Tara climbed up on his back, and Tiamaris then turned to face Kaylin and Severn. “You two, as well,” he said. “Come. There is work, now, to be done.”

  “You’re not—you’re not going to fly?”

  “I am,” he said, voice rumbling in something that sounded suspiciously like the Dragon equivalent of a cat’s purr. “This is mine, now, Kaylin. I will fly these skies, and if the Emperor wishes, he may come in person to contest the aerial territory. Come.”

  She glanced at Illien.

  “He will not leave the Tower yet,” Tiamaris told her. “He cannot.”

  “But he—”

  “He is, for the moment, my guest.”

  “If you can hold me,” the Barrani Lord said quietly.

  “Do you doubt it?” Tiamaris shrugged, as if Illien’s doubt were insignificant. “Tara?”

  She nodded, and the ceiling opened, as if the stone were the cleverly designed aperture of the Hawklord’s tower. The sky appeared, azure against the darkness of the previously enclosed space, as the walls unfolded.

  “Kaylin. Severn. Climb.” He paused, and then said, “Am I more terrifying than the Hawklord? Kaylin, you love to fly. You begged, pleaded, cajoled, and nagged the Aerians to take you flying. Come. Fly.”

  She looked at Illien once again, and then glanced around the room. No trace of him remained in it except he, himself. “Go,” he said, lifting a hand almost carelessly. “I consider myself in your debt, to some degree. I will wait.”

  She didn’t trust him.

  “Go, while you still have time. Nothing new will enter the fief, but nothing that is already here will leave it untouched.”

  She turned, then, and crawled her way up Tiamaris’s back, lodging herself between the others in a position suspiciously close to the place where his wings joined the rest of his body. He flexed them and laughed when she jumped.

  Before she could say anything, his body tensed beneath her, and he pushed himself up and off the ground, heading for a collision with the open sky. The Tower fell away as if it were a veil; what lay beneath them, when Kaylin had opened her eyes again, was Barren writ small.

  Tara, seated in front of her, shouted something; the wind carried it back.

  “They’re people,” Kaylin shouted back. “Isn’t that what they looked like to you before?”

  “No!”

  “Well, what did they—Tiamaris! Stop here!”

  He roared, but the sparsely crowded streets were already emptying, and no one had time to spare to look skyward at a new threat when the threat they faced was so much closer. People were fleeing—as they could—from something that looked, at this remove, like a feral pack. Except for the part which had them roving in broad daylight.

  The ground rushed up to meet them. As far as flight went, this was almost exactly like falling, except the landing only tossed Kaylin off the Dragon’s back and into the streets; it didn’t kill her.

  The ferals—which weren’t ferals, seen up close—tried, on the other hand. They were larger, for one, and while the bulk of their bodies resembled giant dogs, the resemblance ended there. Kaylin personally discovered that their tails were both prehensile and barbed when one wrapped itself around her leg and sliced into her thigh.

  Tiamaris snapped the creature in half.

  The others, like ferals, were too stupid to know when to run, which was good; they were also too stupid to stop hunting, turn around, and face what was otherwise certain death. Bodies lay beneath them in the street. Most of them had long since stopped moving.

  But Tiamaris made certain that the only additional corpses would be theirs; he was so fast, and so light given his size, that Kaylin only had time for defensive maneuvers; all the offense was delivered by the Dragon. It was glorious and brief.

  Tara clung—literally clung—to his back for the entire fight; only when the sound of the not-quite-ferals had been silenced did she straighten her back and look around her. Her eyes were wide and shining, the latter no trick of the light.

  “Not yet,” Tiamaris told her, in a voice that was so gentle it seemed impossible that it came from a Dragon’s mouth. “There is more—much more—to do. But we have time,” he added. “Come, Kaylin. We go to the borders.”

  She glanced up at the sky. “There might be trouble,” she said softly.

  “Here?” He snorted. Smoke came out of his nostrils in tufts.

  She pointed. In the distance, in the air, she saw what the rest of the City—fief or no—must have seen: the extended wings and graceful necks of Dragons in flight.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Dragons were high enough above the ground that Kaylin couldn’t place their colors. She didn’t try. She could see numbers: there were three. Three to one.

  Tiamaris, however, elongated his neck and nudged her—where nudged, in this case, meant knocked her over. “Climb,” he told her grimly. “We are needed.”

  “Where are we going?” She glanced again at the sky as Severn wound his chain around his waist and joined them in silence.

  “The White Towers
. There is a man who calls himself the fief lord. He needs to be disabused of the notion.” All of the smile in the words was in the tone, and none of that smile was pleasant.

  It caused the shadow of a similar smile across Kaylin’s lips, but it was tenuous, and it broke when Severn’s hand gripped her shoulder. She shifted, turning to meet his glance, and was jerked backward when Tiamaris left the ground. He was clearly unaccustomed to passengers. Then again, he hadn’t had to watch Kaylin grow up.

  And even if he had, to give in to her desperate desire to escape the confines of gravity would have been his death. Looking over her shoulders to see the circling Dragons above, she wasn’t certain it wouldn’t be his death now. He didn’t care. She felt the ferocity of a savage joy in the freedom of his flight, and she thought she would never understand Dragons or the Dragon Court.

  But that Court remained at a distance, circling. She noted with heat that they didn’t attempt to land or help the people who were running in the streets. Later, maybe, she’d have a few words with at least one of them. Now? She went where Tiamaris went, landed where he landed, and managed not to lose any more clothing to the unpredictable placement of limbs, jaws or tails. She did get her hair singed twice, but unpredictable placement of small eyes that shot magical beams was a bit trickier.

  The streets nearest the White Towers were already pretty damn empty of anything but the shadows; here or there, those shadows had dissolved, or staved in, walls. Tiamaris caught them all as he moved toward the border, and she wondered if he now had the same connection to Barren that Nightshade had to his fief. She didn’t ask; there wasn’t time.

  He cleared the streets around the building. He cleared the streets around the watchtowers, and then, with a roar, brought the watchtowers down. They were, as far as Kaylin could tell, deserted; she didn’t look too damn closely. She had never—would never, she admitted to herself—cared as much about Barren’s men as she did about the rest of the people. Possibly because she’d been one.

  She let the air whip strands of hair out of her face as she watched, passenger to destruction.

  When it was over, Tiamaris flew a few wide arcs above the White Towers, roaring as if he was his own herald. Kaylin couldn’t be certain if he was announcing his arrival to the denizens of the fief, or his defiance to the Dragons who still circled high above. He landed at last in the empty streets, at which point Kaylin, Severn, and Tara slid off his back.

  Kaylin had pretty much decided that Dragons were to be classed with horses in terms of riding: never again unless her life—or livelihood—depended on it. She stepped away from Tiamaris into the street itself. Glass shards caught the sunlight and sent it straight at the unwary eye; bodies caught something less tangible. Kaylin stepped over them, bending here and there to check for a pulse she didn’t expect to find. She took care with the corpses that no longer looked human—or animal, if it came to that—but they weren’t moving, either.

  Severn was doing the same; they moved up the length of the street, working in tandem, and found nothing alive. Sometimes this was good, sometimes it was bad. But it came to an end when they reached the White Towers. Some obvious—and involuntary—changes had been made to both the landscaping, such as it was, and the architecture. Half of the fence was still standing; half of the guardhouse was still standing. In the case of the guardhouse, it was the lower half.

  The walls had seen fire—most of it Dragon—but they had seen something else, as well; some part of the front facade was no longer made of stone.

  It was hard to tell what it was made of; it looked almost opaline, or it would have if opals were twisted and vaguely repulsive. At the core of this section of what had once been wall, light shone, pulsing as if it were an exposed organ.

  Tiamaris glanced at it, and then furled his wings. “A moment,” he said to Tara, who nodded as she began to approach the section of wall that looked so wrong. He shed the size and majesty of his Dragon form, donning instead the armor of its scales. When the last of the scales had slid out of his skin and into place, he walked toward Tara.

  “The wall,” he said quietly.

  She nodded. “It is…still alive.”

  “Can it see me?”

  She nodded again. Kaylin didn’t ask with what, although she had to clamp her jaw shut to trap the words. “I can close its eye,” Tara told him softly.

  “At what risk?”

  She hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know.”

  “No?”

  She bent and touched the ground with the flat of both palms. “I can do this, now. I could not, before. I…am no longer certain what is possible. This…is not my world.”

  “Leave it, then. We have time, later, to discover what is possible and what is not.” He walked to the door and lifted his head.

  “Crossbows,” Severn said quietly.

  Kaylin nodded. “At least three. Probably four or five. The buildings across the street are still standing.”

  “And their aim can be trusted at this distance?” Tiamaris asked quietly.

  Kaylin shrugged. After a pause she said, “Mine could be.”

  He shrugged, but he would; the bolts probably wouldn’t hurt him. On the other hand, the streets were empty enough that they wouldn’t hurt noncombatants, either. She watched the door, scanning the shuttered windows. “He won’t come out,” she finally said.

  “He will send someone.”

  She nodded. “If anyone’s still alive in there.” She glanced at the wall.

  “People on the other side of the wall are still live,” Tara said quietly.

  “Unchanged?”

  “They have not been altered by the shadow, no.”

  “Then I know who we’re waiting for,” Kaylin told them. She dropped one hand to the hilt of a dagger and waited for the door to open. It took another ten minutes, and when it did, it opened to the sound of shouting, but the person who stepped out—on her own—was familiar. Kaylin even managed a tired grin.

  “Hands full?” she asked Morse.

  Morse’s grin was a slightly more bitter reflection of Kaylin’s. “Those who still have working hands, yeah. You’re here to see Barren?”

  Kaylin glanced at Tiamaris, then shrugged. “He is,” she said, nodding at the Dragon Lord.

  It wasn’t the first time Morse had seen Tiamaris, but this time she really looked. She didn’t even shrug when she turned her attention to Kaylin again. “Street’s clear.”

  Kaylin nodded. “Pretty much all of them. We had some trouble with what might once have been ferals on the way, and he kind of burned what was left of the standing watchtowers to ashes, but there were no—” She grimaced. “Nothing that looked human was in the immediate vicinity.”

  “That Hawkspeak?”

  Kaylin shrugged. “You take information any way you can get it, if you trust the source.”

  Morse offered Kaylin a slow smile. “That so? Whoever taught you that was no fool.”

  “No. She wasn’t. What are you going to do?”

  Morse shrugged. “I was sent to find out what he wants, and to take a look around. It got a lot louder when he arrived,” she added, with a thin smile. “And then it got a lot damn quieter. I think Barren hoped he’d be dead.” She glanced at Tiamaris, but still spoke to Kaylin. “What’s he want?”

  “Want?” Kaylin asked, momentarily confused.

  Morse snorted. “He’s not here to be neighborly.”

  “He’s here to kill a few nightmares and save a few lives. Not that there were that many to save this close to the border.”

  “Your idea?”

  “No. I had no problems with it, if that’s any help.”

  “Not really. It’s not news, either.” Which was Morse’s very polite way of saying shut up. “You working for him?”

  Kaylin understood all of the question. “No.”

  “No.”

  “I work for the Lord of the Hawks.”

  “Hawks don’t come here. The Law doesn’t come to the fiefs.”


  “There’s only one law in the fiefs,” Kaylin replied, as if by rote. Then she shrugged, as well, and nodded at Tiamaris. “And it’s going to be his.”

  “He’s a Hawk.”

  “He’s a Lord of the Imperial Dragon Court. Or at least he was. He was only moonlighting as a Hawk. Will Barren come out?”

  Morse laughed. “Would you?”

  Kaylin grinned. “Don’t try anything stupid. The Dragon doesn’t owe me anything.”

  “The Dragon,” Tiamaris interjected, “owes you a great deal, Private Neya. He does not, however, extend the debt to sparing the life of would-be assassins.”

  Morse nodded. “You can come in. Usually we tell visitors to leave their guards at the door, but in your case it seems pretty pointless. You don’t have a weapon?” she asked Tiamaris.

  “I had a sword. I never used it.”

  “Got it.” She stepped out of the doorway, opening it in the process. “We weren’t expecting guests,” she told Kaylin, voice heavy with the usual Morse irony.

  “It’s a bit of a mess?”

  “Understatement.”

  The transformation in the outer wall was the biggest change in the White Towers, but some of the shadows had leaked through, and part of the floor was both uneven and constructed of something that looked like shiny stone. Kaylin didn’t test this by actually walking on it, and neither did anyone else; they tread around it only after Tara pronounced it safe in her softly modulated voice.

  But they trudged the familiar path up the stairs in silence. Morse was in the lead, and Kaylin kept an eye on her hands. She didn’t appear to have problems turning her back on Kaylin, and by extension Tiamaris.

  Being Morse, she’d failed to acknowledge Severn or Tara.

  The stairs were scorched and blood had seeped into what passed for carpets, but the bodies had been cleared away, or at least dumped into an adjacent room; the only open doors in the halls were the set Kaylin was most familiar with. She felt the line of her spine stiffen as they approached them.