Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  Brushing her hair took time; she’d managed to get paint on the ends somehow. But she finished, twisted it, and shoved a stick through the bunched folds behind her head.

  “Have I ever thanked you?” She perched on the end of her bed.

  He smiled. “Not often in so many words, but yes.”

  “In so many words,” she said softly, “thanks.”

  He turned his back toward her, setting food on plates; she wasn’t fooled. “Severn?”

  He turned and offered her a plate, which she took. She balanced it in her lap.

  “It’s hard,” she said quietly, while she ate. She didn’t look at him, because it was easier. “All this—sometimes it’s hard. I know I shouldn’t find it hard, but when you’re here, it’s like you bring safety with you, from years away. I feel like a child. Or like I can be one.”

  “You don’t want to be a child.”

  “No, I don’t. We didn’t have the easiest childhood, and I can do things here. I can make a difference. To my life. To the lives of others, even if I’m only in them for a few hours.”

  He waited, and she thought he also ate; she wasn’t sure because she didn’t look. “But…sometimes I want the safety. Not the rest of the life, not that—but the sense that somewhere is safe.” She swallowed. There was food in it, as well as words. “What I don’t understand—what I never thought about, back then—is what you get out of this.” She turned, then.

  He was, as she had suspected, eating. He was also silent, and sadly, much less messy than Kaylin. But as she was about to give up on getting an answer, he said, “Does it matter?”

  She nodded. She’d finished, of course—but she’d always been the faster eater. “Because I’m not a child. I can’t just take and take and give nothing in return, anymore.”

  “Because you won’t trust it if you do?”

  That hadn’t been how she’d been thinking of it, but put like that, it made sense. “Maybe.”

  He nodded, finished the last of the eggs on his plate, and rose. Rinsing his plate in the water, he waited until she’d done the same. “Time to go,” he told her quietly.

  The walk there was not the usual five-minute sprint during which Kaylin was desperately hoping that time had somehow collapsed and she wouldn’t be late. It wasn’t a stroll, either, but it did allow speech. Severn started.

  “I don’t have a way of asking you for what you can’t give. If I did—if I tried to make a balance sheet—” When she raised a brow, he sighed, and added, “a budget. Oh, wait, we haven’t had time to sit down and do that yet, either.”

  “You’re just trying to make me see silver linings on freaking huge thunderclouds, aren’t you?”

  He chuckled. “Let me try again. I’m not keeping score.” She opened her mouth, and he added, “Betting pools don’t count.”

  She did laugh, then.

  “If I want what you can’t give, if I want what you don’t want, and you try to give it to me, either because you feel that I’m owed—” He shook his head. “I don’t spend a lot of time around other people. As a Wolf, there wasn’t much time. But I did spend time observing other couples. And that interaction—it doesn’t work. Never has. You take two fairly decent people, people you like, people you more or less respect, and you put them together like that, where they’re both trying to be things they aren’t because it’s what the other person needs—it’s painful. At its worst, they’re both feeling hurt, and they both see the other person as the villain.

  “If I need something you can’t give, I need to walk away, because sooner or later, all I’ll see is what you can’t give. I won’t be able to see what you can.”

  “But—”

  “But?”

  “You don’t speak all that much. But when you do? You’ve always been better with words. Than me. Always.”

  It was true; he didn’t bother to deny it. But he said, “I was older. You should try words some time—I think you’ll find you’ve gotten better.”

  She grimaced. “I am trying, thankyouverymuch.”

  He smiled, then. She saw that much before she dropped her gaze to her feet. Well, to their feet. “I don’t know what you get out of this. That’s all. I know what I get.”

  “And?”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  He nodded. But he didn’t answer. The Halls came into view.

  Marcus was in a better mood, which was to say: she didn’t hear his growling from the hall. She glanced at Severn, but Severn never looked concerned when he entered the office. She suspected only the remnants of an all-out slaughter would change that.

  Kaylin jogged to the right, to the duty roster, out of force of habit. It was still a mess. But she managed to find her own name in that mess. She also found Severn’s. “We’re at the Palace, today,” she told him.

  “I suspected we would be.”

  She turned and made her way as quietly as possible to Caitlin’s desk. Caitlin, surrounded by the usual stacks of paper that never looked quite as precarious on her desk as they would have on anyone else’s, looked up. She was tired, but clearly happy to see Kaylin. “I hear you had a busy day, yesterday.”

  Kaylin nodded. “Is Marcus—”

  “Lord Sanabalis left a mirror message for Sergeant Kassan sometime last night. He received and reviewed it this morning, and then went up to the Tower. He’s still there, dear.”

  “Is he in a better mood?”

  “He is no longer concerned for your safety. You’ve noted your reassignment?”

  Kaylin nodded. “I’m not sure it’s the smartest idea.”

  “You are, of course, free to discuss that with the Sergeant once he returns to his desk.”

  Kaylin winced. “I think most of the trouble we’re going to see is going to occur on or around Elani. Severn and I should be there. So should the rest of the groundhawks, and at best guess, two-thirds of the Swords.”

  Caitlin lifted a brow, but didn’t otherwise comment. She didn’t have to, though; Marcus had now entered the office.

  “Private Neya!”

  A quick rundown of the previous day’s events was in order. Kaylin, having had to go through parts of it at least twice the previous day, didn’t make her usual nervous-in-the-presence-of-angry-Leontine hash of it. Marcus’s eyes, however, were a strong shade of orange by the time she’d finished. He had interrupted her maybe twice, a sure sign that he’d heard most of it from another source.

  “Your presence has been requested at the Palace by Lord Sanabalis. On behalf of the Emperor.”

  Kaylin nodded. “Ybelline Rabon’alani will be there, as well.

  I think—”

  “On occasion.”

  She grimaced. He was still, clearly, in a bit of a mood.

  “I think,” she continued, “we’re going to see a large number of unidentified people suddenly show up someplace in the city.”

  “Large?”

  “Thousands, at a rough guess.”

  He raised a brow. His ear tufts were also standing on end. On the other hand, his fangs were still hooded by his lips.

  “But it’s not the people who are going to be the problem.”

  Marcus snorted. “Tell that to the Swords,” he replied. “Lord Sanabalis is sending a carriage to retrieve both you and Corporal Handred. The usual warning applies.”

  “Don’t embarrass the department while I’m at the Palace?”

  “Indeed. Do not lose the Corporal, either. I should have sent him to the Halls with you yesterday morning, because my wives would be marginally less enraged if I tore out his throat.”

  The carriage was waiting when they hit the yard. As carriages went, Imperial Carriages were by far the most comfortable, and this one had the added advantage of not already being full of Dragon. Kaylin clambered into the interior and sat on the padded seat. The windows were curtained, but she pulled those back and looked out into the street as the horses began to pull.

  “Have you been able to dig up any more information about t
he Chancellor?” she asked Severn.

  “Some.”

  “Did they move in?”

  He shook his head. “Apparently some of the ledgers and some of the documents they require are now missing. Margot’s little mishap gave them at least that much time. Records access is required—but the Records required are located at the Palace, and Records use at the Palace is under strict embargo. Mirror access at the Palace is also under embargo, but exceptions—to mirror embargo—can be made.

  “We’re not certain whether Records are being made of anything that is currently occurring within the Palace itself. It’s apparently caused the Palace Guard some concern.”

  “Right. Because random assassins might somehow sneak in and do in the Emperor.” She snorted. Anything dangerous enough to kill the Emperor quickly wouldn’t have to worry about sneaking anywhere. Come to think, anything dangerous enough to kill the Emperor at all, wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

  Severn, however, raised a brow. “They serve a useful function,” he said, in the mild tone of voice reserved for correction. “If the Emperor doesn’t require protection, many of the people who serve him do. Ybelline, for instance.”

  Kaylin snorted, but conceded the point. “It’s just that they’re so stuck-up.”

  “They’re not actually all that stuck-up. They take their job seriously.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “Take their job seriously? Demonstrably not.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “They also serve an important function. The Emperor is not required to, as you often put it, go Dragon in times of difficulty. He has his guards, and they’re his defense. He is not therefore required to rend people limb from limb for every small legal stupidity, because most of the egregiously stupid will never reach him.”

  On some days, Kaylin didn’t see this as a plus. Then again? She had never once been allowed within yards of the Emperor, so maybe she’d have to rethink that.

  One of the best things about significant reduction in the use of magic in the Palace? The doors had to be opened the normal way; the door ward and its attached alert system had been disarmed. Probably another thing that was giving the Imperial Guard hives. The bad thing? The doors were bloody heavy, something she’d had no real cause to discover; usually they just rolled open on their own, having taken a figurative bite of her palm first. Happily, Sanabalis had met them at the entrance.

  The Arkon, however, was waiting for them. He was seated behind a desk, one usually occupied by the humans who filed various cards and carted books from one end of these sweeping, high-shelved rooms to the other. He was the only thing behind the desk; Kaylin half wondered if he’d eaten his assistants. He rose as they closed the doors behind them.

  “Has the Tha’alani castelord arrived?”

  “Yes. She was on time,” the Arkon added. He set the small pile of cards to one side of the desk and rose. “Private.”

  “Arkon.”

  “Lord Sanabalis has taken the liberty of recounting the events in the Oracular Halls. He was, apparently, absent for the beginning of those events.” The chill in his tone sounded so natural it was almost impossible to believe fire would ever leave those lips again.

  “I don’t think he missed anything important.”

  “Don’t think,” was the curt reply. It was the exact opposite of what the Arkon generally demanded, but she liked her arms attached and didn’t point this out.

  “Ybelline was reading Everly while he painted, because he’d been speaking for—as far as I can tell—hours. But they both…froze. I can’t explain it. They looked like they’d been hit by lightning, but without the obvious burns. They were having standing spasms.”

  “And you felt it was necessary to interfere at this point.”

  “No, I—” She started to mention Sigrenne, stopped, swallowed, and said, “Yes, Arkon.” Severn, utterly silent, nodded very slightly. “I picked up a brush and I started to paint.”

  “You meant to paint those runes?”

  “Well…no. I wanted to do something to get Everly’s attention. I suppose I could have tried to take a knife to the painting, but I’m not sure that would have helped. So I started to paint.”

  “And you intended to paint those words?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, exactly, did you intend?”

  “I intended to fix the buildings, if you want the truth. He’d done something to them, somehow, during the last phase of his painting, and they were fading. I didn’t actually like it. I think I found it more disturbing than the corpses in the foreground. So…I thought I’d try to paint them back to the way they’re supposed to be.”

  The Arkon glanced at Sanabalis. “It is a small miracle to me that Private Neya is allowed past the gatehouse of the Halls, never mind over the threshold.”

  “As you say,” Sanabalis helpfully replied. Normally, this might have been annoying, but at this point if the Arkon had said “red is blue,” Kaylin would have saluted the new blue, so she couldn’t really blame Sanabalis.

  “Are you aware of the meanings of the runes you did paint?”

  The question, of course, that she’d both expected and dreaded. “No, Arkon.”

  “You chose to depict them, however—”

  “I thought I was painting over the buildings.”

  “You were, in my opinion, painting over the most dangerous structure that existed in Everly’s Oracle. But—you’ve seen those runes before.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The Arkon actually spoke—with no warning whatsoever—in Dragon. And even though it was almost deafening, Kaylin did her best to memorize the syllables, because she was pretty damn sure it was, in the Hawk vernacular, one of the useful words. “If magic use were not, at this moment, all but prohibited, you would be carrying a memory crystal until you died of old age.” His tone indicated that this could not happen soon enough.

  “They looked like the words Sanabalis spoke in the Leontine Quarter the one time he visited,” she said quickly, trying to placate.

  Smoke—absent the usual pipe that produced it—streamed from his nostrils. “They were not the words Sanabalis spoke.”

  “No, I didn’t mean they were the same—but they looked like his words, to me. His spoken words.”

  “I remember. That you could see them,” he added, “in ways that we, Dragon, or human, could not. Until you touched them,” he added, his voice softening ever so slightly. “We could see them, clearly, then. Come, we are almost there. I dislike the sound of hungry mortals. It is almost pathetic. I have therefore made sure food is present. You will eat neatly and quickly.”

  Ybelline had not, as Kaylin half feared, been led into what was essentially a dark big cave in the heart of the Palace—or beneath it, it was hard to tell—and left alone there. The Arkon had clearly decided to forgo Records for this particular meeting, and she waited in one of the small, round rooms behind the Library’s main chambers to the left. Kaylin tried to remember which direction this actually was—she thought maybe East—but it didn’t matter. Ybelline rose as they entered the room, and as usual, she came forward and hugged Kaylin, brushing her forehead with her stalks.

  He hasn’t been angry with you, has he? Kaylin asked; it was clear she meant the Arkon, and she didn’t need to use the words when they talked this way.

  No. He is difficult and extremely didactic, but I am actually fond of him. He is angry because he is worried.

  You’re worried, too. She was. More than she had been the night—the very late night—before.

  I am. I spent much of the night in the Tha’alaan, and even now, debates rage. We are not certain whether or not we should attempt to evacuate at least the young from the City. But I think, if we fail here, there will be little point.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Arkon cleared his throat before Ybelline could continue, and Ybelline graciously took the hint. She let her arms fall first, her stalks finally breaking the connection seconds before sh
e turned to the table.

  True to his word, he had had food set out. Dragons obviously ate a lot when they were hungry, because there was enough here to feed the whole department, and send them home with leftovers. Kaylin had eaten breakfast, thanks to Severn’s intervention, but that didn’t stop her from eating a very early lunch, because telling the Arkon that she was not, in fact, hungry never even occurred to her.

  Severn did the same.

  Sanabalis had taken a chair; the Arkon had not. He now paced the room like a caged and angry beast, while they ate in his thunderous silence. “Private Neya,” he said, when she’d finished. “You will be Seconded—that is the word, is it not? For some reason I want to say remanded—to Lord Sanabalis for the duration of this event. We believe—” An alarm sounded. Had the Arkon been carrying anything in his hands, it would have snapped in two instantly. The air almost did. “Sanabalis,” the Arkon snarled. “Please retrieve our guest. Tell him he is to have two guards, no more. I don’t care what’s done with the others.”

  Sanabalis didn’t seem to notice that the Arkon had dropped the honorific entirely. He bowed instantly, and he exited the room they had barely entered. The Arkon, in the meantime, breathed a little fire. Which would, Kaylin thought, explain the small scorch marks on the floor.

  She glanced at Ybelline, but Ybelline seemed entirely unruffled at the obvious sight of Dragon frustration.

  “The world,” the Arkon said coldly, “would end if it depended on my ability to work unhindered by pointless interruptions.”

  Since Kaylin and Severn had been one of those pointless interruptions, silence greeted the comment. She wanted to know who the visitors were, but didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “Lord Sanabalis informed you of Everly’s Oracle?”