Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  “The rest was relevant. If you go back and look at my transcripts, I passed that part.”

  “Indeed,” he replied, with a nod to Dragon memory. “However, you passed in a fashion that was less than laudable.” He lifted a hand before she could speak again. “Humans are not native to our world. If you need proof of that, you have only to examine what you know of species that were created in, and of, the world itself.

  “It is why the Arkon strongly believes in the overlapping world theory. The spontaneous creation of an entire species—or three—is otherwise lacking in credibility. Not when they are, to all intents and purposes, sentient.”

  Since this was about as complimentary as the Immortals generally condescended to be when discussing the merely mortal, Kaylin managed to stay silent.

  “There are one or two scholars who disagree with this commonly held view,” he added. “And if you wish to peruse their papers, the Arkon can point them out to you. They are in the normal section of the Library, in which it is much, much more difficult to earn his ire.”

  His abuse of the word commonly was about as bad as Kaylin’s abuse of the word punctual.

  “So…humans arrived here, heralded by freak storms and two-headed Barrani babies.”

  “That is not exactly what I said, but it will do.”

  “How did they arrive?”

  “That,” he replied, “is the question. We have no solid information from that period. It was not recent, and much of the information we had was lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Lost,” he replied, in a tone of voice that approximated the sound of a very heavy door slamming. “If the Arkon’s conjecture—and it is a tentative conjecture—proves true, we will have an answer.”

  “And you expect we’ll also have a large crater in the middle of the city.”

  “That is, unfortunately, one of our fears, yes. The Emperor has already called an emergency meeting with the Lord of Swords and the Lord of Hawks. I believe the Lord of Wolves is also involved, but in an advisory capacity.”

  It made sense; evacuating even a small building in times of emergency generally required the Swords. Evacuating blocks and blocks of small buildings—many of them somewhat upscale—would probably require an army. “You can’t move Evanton,” she said.

  “No. The Keeper, however, is likely to survive whatever occurs. He is not our concern.”

  She nodded. “If it’s close to where he is, though, could he do something to stop it?”

  “If it is necessary, perhaps.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “No. And it is my belief that it would pose a risk to the Garden should he try.”

  “Making the cure more deadly than the disease.” She glanced out of the window as the carriage turned up the drive to the Halls. The guards that stopped the carriage stopped it for a matter of seconds; Sanabalis was a recognized visitor, and even had he not been, the carriage was marked all over with signs of Imperial ownership. “I don’t suppose the human Caste Hall has any useful libraries?”

  “Compared to the Imperial ones? No. And I would thank you not to repeat that question in the Arkon’s hearing.” The carriage pulled to a stop very close to the guarded doors. “Come. Master Sabrai is expecting us.”

  Master Sabrai was, in fact, waiting at the doors. He looked, at first glance, as if he’d gotten about as much sleep as Kaylin; she wondered what was keeping his eyes open. Hers were now running on the certainty of impending doom. He executed an enviable, perfect bow as Sanabalis crossed the threshold. “Lord Sanabalis.”

  “Master Sabrai,” the Dragon replied, returning the bow with a nod. He waited until Master Sabrai had straightened out to as much of his full height as a bleary-eyed, clearly exhausted man could attain before he added, “The evening was eventful?”

  “Let us just say,” Master Sabrai replied, with a wince, “that your inquiries were not untimely.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “It has not—yet—reached the proportions of the previous incident. Not all of our Oracles are almost sharing the same dreams or visions, and we have not—yet—reached the point where those who can live off grounds are also simultaneously entering a vision state.”

  “You expect it.” Flat words, no question in them.

  “If last night was any indication, Lord Sanabalis, yes. I do. Some preparations are being made. They are being handled by Sigrenne and her assistant. I have some written reports, mostly taken by Sigrenne and two of the other attendants. I was…otherwise occupied or I would have seen to it myself.”

  Sanabalis grimaced, a clear indication that he did not consider Sigrenne’s transcription to be of the highest quality. “Have you examined them?”

  “I have not had the chance to examine all of them, no. If you are looking for an estimate of convergence, I cannot give you one that would meet the standards of the Oracular Halls.”

  “What estimate would you hazard, if you were not held to those standards?”

  It was clearly the question that Sabrai had been both expecting and dreading. “Everly did not sleep at all last night. He has been painting like a possessed man.”

  “How serious an attempt did you make to stop him?”

  “It’s only the first day,” was the evasive reply. “It is not, yet, a matter of safety. He will eat, if food is provided, and he drinks when water is provided. But he does not otherwise interact with anything but the painting.”

  “Not a good sign,” the Dragon Lord said softly. He glanced at Kaylin.

  “No.”

  “What is his subject?”

  “That, I believe, you will have to see for yourself,” was the quiet reply. “I cannot describe it.”

  “It’s not, in your opinion, trivial?” Kaylin asked, speaking for the first time.

  “No, sadly, it is not.”

  Everly’s room smelled of paint; it was the first thing Kaylin noticed when the door was open, in large part because she wasn’t as tall as either Sabrai or Sanabalis and she couldn’t actually see past their bulk into the gallery that served as the boy’s room. They stood in the door for that little bit too long before finally moving through it and out of her way.

  The canvas that Everly had been stretching with such focus now sat on a large set of wooden legs. The back of the painting, as usual, faced the door, obscuring the artist himself; the windows at Everly’s back provided the light by which he was, in theory, working. Kaylin wished, for a moment, that the office could be more like this; usually work was punctuated with little things like obscenities, gossip, and the damned window, which never, ever, shut up.

  Master Sabrai approached the side of the painting, and disappeared behind its edge; Sanabalis, after a pause, did the same. Five minutes of silence later, Kaylin repented: she had heard funerals which were more lively. She didn’t wait for an invitation; she also took a small detour around the edge of Everly’s canvas, but chose the opposite side. The small, flat table that held his palette, paints, brushes, various cloths, and a box of charcoal sticks of varying widths and lengths happened to be on that side; she almost ran into it, and managed to dodge collision at the last second.

  Everly had clearly been working without stop. The edges of the canvas were almost blank; some sketching had been done, and what looked like flat representations of nearly familiar buildings rose in black and gray against a white sky, like inverted ghosts. No obvious signs or flags marked those buildings; they were clearly abstracted from an Elantran street, but Kaylin, who was more than passingly familiar with most of them, couldn’t immediately place which one.

  And placement was made urgent by what Everly had painted.

  A cloud made of night hovered above cobbled stones that were clearly colored by the sun at its height. Its edges were blurred and indistinct, but this wasn’t just smudging of paint or color sketching. Stars could be seen, and the livid glow of some thing that seemed either red moon or blood sun hung close to the blurred edge itself. The cloud was contai
ned in what seemed almost a garish, ornate door frame, absent a door.

  He had worked on that odd, messy frame, in which daytime colors overlapped in startling contrast with night colors; he had taken care to paint stars and a haze of mist that twisted, like an incongruously delicate veil, across a foreign sky. He had taken care to paint its height, and seeing that, she almost flinched; it was as tall as some of the unpainted buildings, and if it was in any perspective at all, it swallowed the road.

  But at its center was white space. He had done no sketching there.

  Everly, oblivious to his audience, continued to work. He was using the darker spectrum of his palette, applying paint here and there as carelessly as Kaylin applied words, but achieving the effortless effect of a slowly coalescing reality that Kaylin’s careless words couldn’t.

  “Given the speed at which he’s painted this,” Kaylin said quietly, “we’ll have some idea of what’s going to emerge tomorrow. Or later tonight.”

  “It is not…small, if the area he’s left is indeed something that emerges and not further scenery.”

  “It’s not really the center we need, anyway.”

  Sanabalis raised a brow.

  She pointed to the buildings that lined either side of the street in their frustrating lack of detail. “We need to know where—roughly—this vision takes place.”

  “It is not a concrete representation of place, Private,” Master Sabrai said curtly. “That is not the way Oracles work.”

  “I’ve been the subject of one of his Oracles,” she replied, just as curtly. “And I think the clues will be there if we can read ’em. We need them.”

  Sanabalis cleared his throat. Loudly. The sound was enough to cause Everly to lift his head for a few seconds as if he were testing the air. Speech, however, failed to hold his attention, and he went back to his quick, light movements. “Master Sabrai is correct in this, Private. What he paints is not predictive in the sense you hope for. You cannot direct him. What he finishes, he finishes.”

  But she looked at the space that he had not yet started to touch, and she felt cold, although she was standing in sunlight. “Tonight,” she told Sanabalis quietly.

  “I concur. I do not think, however, that it will be necessary to stand here for the entire eight hours while he paints. We now have other things to examine.” He turned to Master Sabrai. “If you will deliver the transcripts of the dreams that interrupted the Halls last eve, we will begin to attempt to make some over-arching sense of the impending difficulty. Thank you,” he added, in a more clipped tone.

  Master Sabrai shook his head as if to clear it. “As you say, Lord Sanabalis. If you will return to my office, I will give you what I’ve managed to transcribe.”

  “I am willing to deal with Sigrenne’s less than perfect penmanship.”

  Not reminding Sanabalis of this definitive statement was difficult, because it would sound smug; Sigrenne’s hand was neither neat nor precise, and Sanabalis had clearly not spent as much time deciphering human scribbles as Kaylin had. Most of the Hawks were not in the running for world’s best penman.

  Sanabalis sat in the carriage opposite Kaylin; smoke drifted from his nostrils and the corner of his lips, and his eyes were a decided shade of orange. Given the way he glared at the pile of papers—and the paper was by no means uniform in size or shape, which made it ungainly—Kaylin was half-surprised they hadn’t gone up in that smoke.

  Every so often he glared over the top of a curling fold. At least one session was partially illegible because either someone with wet hands had picked it up, or it had been put down, briefly, in water. Or worse.

  To prevent Kaylin from being too amused, Sanabalis handed her the occasional bit he couldn’t read. She took them with gratitude, since it was better than doing nothing, and safer than mocking a Dragon Lord. Especially given the lack of sleep. Kaylin, reading the various notes, cringed. She had an easier time interpreting Sigrenne’s scrawl, but because she had no context, it was hard to guess what the words she couldn’t read meant.

  But she understood enough. In many of these dreams, there were visitors. Some were monsters. Some were ghosts. Some were—she thought the words were stray kittens, which caused some head scratching.

  “How the hell does Sigrenne know that it’s an Oracle and not a normal dream?” she muttered.

  “She probably doesn’t,” was the curt reply. “Which means she has to take as many notes as possible. It isn’t all Sigrenne’s writing. Some of it is probably Notann’s. The one that looks like a series of ink blots is almost certainly Weller’s. When the Oracles dream like this, one person is not going to get to all of them in time. I have another door-locker.”

  She glanced across the carriage. “No, that’s the same one. That’s Tylia. Her name’s up in the left corner.” She caught a few words, and added, “but that’s more detailed than she was. There’s a door but no walls. Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, the lack of walls means the sky is falling, and Tylia can’t find a roof to hide under. See, there. That lines up with Everly’s painting.”

  “Possibly. This is merely our attempt to understand why, and perhaps where, some future difficulty must be intercepted. I will let you out at your own Halls. I would take you to the Palace, but the Arkon dislikes interruption and you are not the quietest of visitors. You possibly also have a job, or several, to do.”

  The guards at either set of doors were tense enough that the usual good-natured mockery failed to occur. Kaylin missed it.

  The office wasn’t quiet. The window wasn’t impressed; it was hard to tell which was louder. Marcus was bristling, which, given the state of emergency, was expected. Caitlin was quiet and grim. Not a single groundhawk could be seen in the office, not even Severn.

  “Neya!” Marcus shouted.

  She walked past the duty roster, glanced at it, and shuddered. The fact that she could read it at all, given that there were now more changes than there had been original postings, was due to thirteen years of experience with the way Marcus’s writing was affected by his moods. One thing was clear: all of the Hawks were out on patrol, and it was a very tight patrol: it centered in the section of city that featured Elani at its core.

  “The Swords,” Marcus told her, as she approached his desk, “have been ordered to begin evacuation.” He stabbed a piece of paper on his desk. It was the map of the streets that lay within the two circles. There were holes at the corners of a square area within the circle itself. “They’re starting at Strathanne, between Highpost and Delbaranne. They’re clearing straight through to Lattimar.”

  She opened her mouth in order to let at least one question out; he flexed his claws. It was one of his more serious versions of shut up. He did, however, answer the question. “While you were out, Lord Diarmat of the Dragon Court mirrored. The Imperial Order of Mages tendered the report from their initial exploratory investigation.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “If you’re a member of the Imperial Order’s scouting forces, bad.”

  She closed her eyes. “How many did they lose?”

  “One death. Three casualties.”

  His tone of voice made death seem like the better deal. She schooled her expression. “Did they transmit the Imperial Records information here?”

  “No. Lord Diarmat didn’t feel it was necessary, and frankly, it is not my problem. I don’t need to worry about mages right now. The Arcanists are, in theory, the Swords’ problem. Teela has gone, by way of the Barrani High Halls, to deliver the news.”

  “What news?”

  “We’re sealing off the portion of the city the Swords are now evacuating. We’ve set up roadblocks and guards on all routes in and out. Evacuation should take three days at the outside. Teela is at the Halls. Tain and the rest of our crew are spread out among the Swords.”

  The Swords were going to love that.

  “Why?”

  “Because the Arcanists are now interested, and one or two of them are causi
ng the Swords some difficulties. While I’d like to resolve it by jailing them,” he said in a tone of voice that made jail and death synonymous, “we are understaffed. If it were up to the Lord of Swords, we’d be extending the blockade to the full perimeter of the outer circle.”

  “We can’t,” she said, voice flat.

  “Funny, that’s what I told him. The perimeter would include the Halls and the Palace. The Emperor declined the Swordlord’s request, and this is the compromise. I can see why he doesn’t like it. We can keep the Arcanists out of this area. We have no hope of keeping them out of the circle. The Emperor had implied that he’d just keep them locked in their damn tower.”

  “On what charges?”

  “Not my problem.”

  She snorted. It would be, if they tried. Still, the Arcanists would be vastly less likely to cause trouble for Barrani Hawks, and if they were babysitting the Swords, the roadblock would probably not spontaneously—and conveniently—combust. Kaylin nodded grimly. “Where do you want me?”

  “You’re up on the roster.”

  She bit her lip; it prevented suicidal words from emerging. “I’ll check now,” she told him. She was relatively certain it wouldn’t take too damn long to find her name in the hideous mess of ink and pencil marks.

  “Good. Go.” He paused, and then added, “You might want to remove your bracer and toss it somewhere.”

  She’d found her name. It was beside Severn’s, and was, in fact, their regular Elani beat. “You’re sure?”

  “We have Imperial Permission,” the Leontine replied, and she caught the brief flash of teeth that was their version of black humor. “Lord Diarmat looked like he’d just found out he’d been put on a vegetarian diet when he delivered it.”

  Leontines, in theory, held Dragons in high regard. It was no wonder that fact had come as a huge surprise to Kaylin, because Marcus did not. “Lord Diarmat was difficult?” she asked.

  “Stop gabbing, and get moving.”

  Kaylin had once or twice in her seven years with the Hawks—admittedly most of them as unofficial mascot—seen roadblocks and quarantines within Elantra. They were mostly put in place to contain outbreaks of summer wasting sicknesses, but not always. Occasionally the Arcanists on the Wolf hit list didn’t bother to make a break for the outer walls or the fiefs; they headed into extremely crowded areas and attempted to hold out by using sorcery, with whole city blocks as hostages.