Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  “But how is that even possible?”

  “I know who you are. I knew who you were when you first entered the Tower, moments after I woke.”

  “Yes. But how?”

  “How?”

  Kaylin nodded. Tara frowned. “How,” she finally said, “do the Tha’alani touch thought?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you breathe?”

  Great. Philosophy. Changing the subject, Kaylin said, “If you ask the mirrors—your mirrors—the same questions I did, will you see the words?”

  “I…do not know, Kaylin. But I think it unlikely.” She rose. “I will ask the mirror. But I think it best that you are not present.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am not as you see me. What I see might influence what you see.”

  “I’m not afraid of that.”

  “No, you are not. But I? I am afraid of it.”

  “But—but why?”

  “Because I do not want to be alone,” was the quiet reply. “I want friends, I want my Lord. I want you to come to visit. I want to keep my fief—and its people—safe. Those, you understand. But I was not built to be mortal, Kaylin. I was not meant to live. It was a gift, but it was a chaotic gift, and I think an unintended one. I have not used the mirrors, until you came with your story of the Devourer.

  “And when I did, I chose to reveal them—to you—in a way that other Towers would not. Other Towers draw upon information almost in sleep. It is part of what they must know. But they take only what they must know in order to fulfill their function.

  “You changed what I could do, Kaylin. You gave me room to be. But you could not change, at base, what I am. And what I am, what I can be—they are not the same.” She rose. “Will you wait? If you insist, you may accompany me.”

  “I’ll…wait.”

  “You will be angry?”

  “Yes, but not at you—I’m often angry at life, Tara. I’ll wait. But I want your answer, and we’re under a little time pressure here.”

  Tara smiled. “You always are,” she said.

  She came back an hour later, during which time Kaylin paced the length of the dining room. Severn had suggested, with varying degrees of politeness, that she sit down, but that had resulted in enough fidgeting that he’d given up.

  When Tara returned, her eyes were an odd shade of gold; odd because the whites were actually ebony.

  “What did you see?”

  “Not what you saw,” she replied. “I think I saw not what existed, but the birth of the world.”

  “You saw words?”

  “No. Or rather, yes, but…what was left was not a Word.”

  “You think it’s significant.”

  “I do. But before you ask, I don’t know how.” She hesitated for just a moment, and then added, “But you were right. The Imperial Court has convened, briefly. It now waits for the addition of the Barrani nobles. The Emperor, however, is all but persuaded that some attempt to drain the magic in the portal area must now be attempted, and to that end…he has agreed to confer with the Arcanum.”

  Kaylin blanched. If she disliked the Imperial Order of Mages—and she did, because they were so stuffy and arrogant—she loathed the Arcanum, which managed to combine those traits with actual danger.

  “What—what has Tiamaris decided?”

  “The Emperor is his Lord,” Tara replied quietly. “And he will accept the Emperor’s decision.”

  “We all more or less accept it if we want to be more than ash—what does he want, Tara?”

  “He wants, of course, the safety of his hoard. He is not completely convinced that these steps are either possible or necessary, but he has made this as clear as it is wise to make it. He will abide by their decision.”

  Kaylin nodded. “What do you want?”

  “I, too, want the safety of his hoard.” She wrapped the words around an almost self-conscious smile. “But I was created to protect my lands from the incursion of the Shadows and their change. I know of the Devourer, but I was not built to contain him.

  “This means,” she added, as she saw Kaylin’s expression, “that I will not work against you, in this. I do not know what you in tend, and perhaps it is best that I remain ignorant. But what you see, Chosen, we do not see.”

  “But aren’t we all supposed to be looking at the same thing?”

  Tara smiled. “We are. But you process the information in ways that we either don’t or can’t. If you look at a desk, you see a desk. Another might see the tree that fell to compose it. In some of the ways we see the same things, we bring different information to them. It’s not wrong or right. It can be useful.”

  “How?” she asked, starkly.

  “I don’t know. I do not contain the full history of the Chosen, and I do not understand why they are given the marks, or even what the marks are meant to do. Words are life, literally—but you are mortal. You have life without the words. Therefore it is not to grant you life that the words are given.

  “My…parents…did not explain the world to me, Kaylin. They did not give me your morality or your sense of ethics. No more did they give me the Draconian or Barrani versions of either. I am…new…to the life that you lead. But…I want it. I want my garden, and my broken streets, and my terrified people. I want my Lord, and his flight, and his fire. I want my Tower.

  “I have had them, since I woke. Do you understand?”

  Kaylin, clearly, didn’t. She shook her head.

  “I have had the same duties and the same responsibilities for the same stretch of what you call streets, since the moment I awoke to the whisper of the Shadows. But until you came back, until you brought Tiamaris, I did not see them. I could not touch them. They could not touch me. What you saw in me—and what I saw in both you and Tiamaris, although I did not realize it at the time—changed me. And yet, it left me the same responsibilities. I see them differently, and I approach them differently—but the goal, in the end, did not—and cannot—change.

  “Perhaps what you see in the world is like that. I cannot say. But I once acted in fear and in pain and in isolation, and I almost allowed my charge to be destroyed. I…do not want to act in fear or pain or isolation again.” She lifted an arm. “But you have, as you’ve said, little time. I do not know if you can prevent what will occur, in either case—the draining of the magic or the draining of the World.

  “But I have no doubt at all that you must try. I will not detain you. My Lord will not return for some hours yet, much though it chafes him.”

  They left the fief of Tiamaris without the usual nausea that accrued when leaving Nightshade, and they headed toward the bridge in as grim a silence as they could. It wasn’t as grim as it should have been, given the situation, because the fief had changed so much, Kaylin had to stop and at least look. The streets weren’t crowded, although it was still daylight, but they weren’t empty, either.

  If traffic came from the rest of the city, it came in a different form: the bridge was being used, but it was being used by wagons, and those wagons contained not bored, malicious men, but wood, nails, supplies. There were men waiting for them on the fief side, with directions; they were armed men, but they weren’t Barren’s men. They weren’t dress guards, but they were efficient and—for the fiefs—reasonably polite.

  Severn glanced at her, and then he smiled. “Evanton’s?” he asked.

  She looked at the sun. It was heading toward the wrong horizon; so much of the day had already escaped in the hours spent in the Palace and the High Halls. If it hadn’t started so damn early, it would be nightfall already.

  “Evanton’s. There, and then the office.”

  The streets of Elani were quiet and empty. At this time of day, that felt wrong, although Kaylin knew damn well why; the people who lived here had been evacuated. Some of them had been evacuated loudly, and were standing in various offices in the Halls of Law demanding redress. And probably demanding groveling apologies, as well. It was a good day not to be an office
Hawk.

  They were allowed through the barricade—such as it was—without trouble, but the Swords on duty looked both tired and tense. No wonder. The only other people who seemed to be coming and going were the mages, and mages of any stripe made anyone sane wary.

  Evanton was in his storefront, surrounded by beads, needles, pins, and the usual assortment of colored thread. He had the jeweler’s glass he favored—at what he called my age—cupped in his right eye; the left was shut in a tight squint. He hadn’t bothered to even look up when the doors chimed to let him know he had visitors.

  Then again, Grethan was standing almost in the door, looking miserable and nervous, so Evanton was clearly not in the best of moods. She tried to remember a day when Evanton had been in the best of moods, and failed. She started to say as much to Grethan, but Evanton chose that moment to lift his head. With the jeweler’s glass attached to his face, he would have looked comical, if laughter hadn’t been suicidal.

  “Private,” he said curtly. He shoved everything off his lap, and walked over to the counter before he remembered to remove the glass and slide it into one of the shapeless pockets of his apron.

  “Have things gotten worse around here?”

  “Worse in which way?” The tone of his voice made clear that the answer was yes.

  She’d had a couple of long days herself. “In the usual way.”

  “Which would be?”

  “End of the world variants.”

  He didn’t approve of her sense of humor, but his snort wasn’t up to the heat and arrogance of Dragons. “Where,” he said, “have you been?”

  “All over the city. The Halls of Law. The High Halls. The Oracular Halls. The fiefs. The Imperial Palace.”

  “You didn’t seek to return here.”

  “Evanton—I didn’t have time. When I came to see you yesterday, I got spit into a great, gray void between the Garden and your shop, and I made my way back to Nightshade. With his help.”

  “You wouldn’t have returned, otherwise?”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “I, frankly, can’t see how you managed to fall out of the world.” He spoke as if it were somehow her fault. When she stood there staring at him—and trying to decide whether or not she wanted to descend into an argument about fault—he snapped, “Are you going to stand there all day?”

  She snapped her jaw shut and followed him. He led her—of course—down the crammed tiny hall toward the Elemental Garden, pausing only to hurl instructions at his poor apprentice. Severn slid in behind her; he was proof against Evanton’s temper and Evanton’s tongue for reasons that Kaylin didn’t quite understand, and managed not to resent.

  “You’ve been to the Palace?” he said as he shuffled down the hall.

  “Yes.”

  “And the High Halls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Evanton, you know I’m not supposed to talk about this.”

  He shrugged. “I’m an old curmudgeon and I don’t get out much. I certainly wouldn’t spend my free time studying the protocols of either Halls or Palace. Or Hawks, for that matter.” He unlocked the door to the Garden. Kaylin looked inside and cringed.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Oh, please,” Evanton said. “This is a walk in the park compared to what it was like yesterday.”

  It was no longer a room. The door opened onto a landmass that seemed to extend forever. In all directions. There was grass around the door frame, but it was a wild, seedy grass. Kaylin could see no small pool, and wondered—if they walked far enough—if she would see ocean instead. The sun, and there was sun here, was hot, even though the wind had all but flattened the grass.

  “This,” he said, as he stepped through the door, “is the Elemental Garden, in case you were wondering. Next time there is a magical disturbance of this magnitude, do not attempt to enter it without me.”

  Crossing the threshold had caused the usual transformation in both Evanton and his clothing: he was robed, and he looked wiser and somehow more powerful for the wisdom. He didn’t, however, look any happier. Since he expected an answer, Kaylin nodded. “I hadn’t intended,” she said, in a slightly clipped voice, “to come back to the Garden at all.”

  “I hadn’t intended,” he replied, in the same tone, “to become its Keeper. So much for intentions. Are you going to stand there all day?”

  “Evanton—we don’t have the time to get lost in the Garden. Not now. The Imperial Court is meeting to discuss—” She bit her lip; it stopped the words.

  He grimaced, and let his hands fall to his sides. “My apologies, Private. I have had a very trying few days, and I’d hoped that you would—when you returned—come to see me instantly. I did attempt to send Grethan out with a message, but you’re apparently hard to pin down, and in any case, I don’t have the same weight with your Sergeant as the Imperial Court or the High Halls do. Corporal?”

  Severn nodded and entered the room; the door then closed with a slam.

  “Why are we having this discussion here?” Kaylin asked Evanton.

  It was a perfectly reasonable question, given the difficulties in the Garden. Even Evanton allowed that. “I’m required to spend more time in the Garden—not less—given the magical instability the storefront is otherwise suffering. I can—with effort—force the elements to conform to the shape of the Garden you’re most familiar with, but it is not, at the moment, the best use of my energy, and the elements are not yet unleashed. They are—more or less—peaceful.”

  She frowned. The grass wasn’t particularly inviting as a place to sit, but she sat on it anyway. “When the fiefs were having trouble, the elements knew. They more or less told you.” She’d been in the Elemental Garden during this “conversation,” and it had involved a gale, a lot of mud, and very poor visibility. “But this—”

  “They’re aware that something is changing,” he replied. “But it’s not—yet—a matter of this world.”

  Her frown deepened. “The door to the Elemental Garden—is it a portal of some kind?”

  “It is, very loosely, a portal of some kind. It’s not, in the traditional sense of the word, a portal. It’s not something you might experience in the Towers and the Castles constructed by the Ancients.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “It doesn’t take you someplace different. It takes you to the heart or the foundation of this world.”

  “But the portals in the Castle—”

  “Those exist,” he said softly, “to take advantage of the places that are not quite here. This,” he continued, lifting an arm to take in the whole of the world as far as they could see it, “is.”

  “But when I tried to enter—”

  “Yes. And I don’t, frankly, understand how it was that you entered the wrong place. I don’t like what it implies.”

  “What does it imply?” It was Severn who asked; Kaylin had had enough of the sharp edge of Evanton’s tongue, and had no intention of offering another opening for his criticism. At least for a few minutes.

  “That, among other things, she is adept at the art of travel, enough so that the small perturbation could open the ways to her. She is not well studied in any of the magical arts, and she is as cautious as…”

  “Thank you,” she said, when he failed to come up with a suitable ending for the sentence.

  “What, exactly, did you do when you attempted to enter the Garden?”

  Since she was already more or less frowning, her expression didn’t change. “I walked in.”

  “That’s all you did?”

  “Well, yes.” The frown deepened. It had been one of those weeks, and she lost track of events that seemed, on the surface, to be insignificant. “No. The door was—”

  He waited. Not patiently, but he did wait.

  “I touched it, and it hurt.”

  “Hurt?”

  “Like a door ward does. It was like putting my palm into fire.”

  “And then you opened the door?” When
she didn’t immediately answer, his frown deepened—and on his face, whole lines had been carved by his frown over the years. “Private, this is not a game.”

  “I…may have said something. I talk to myself when there’s no other alternative.”

  “What did you say to yourself?”

  “Technically? I said to the door, ‘Take me to the heart of the Elemental Garden.’”

  He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. She didn’t even object, because that’s how she was starting to feel. “You don’t normally talk to doors.”

  “Most doors don’t normally lead into the middle of a grassy plain and disappear when they’re closed.” She felt Severn’s glance as if it were a weight, and grimaced. “Why should it have made any difference? It didn’t take me to the heart of the Garden. It didn’t take me to the Garden at all. It took me to a—a mirage.”

  “An interesting choice of words, Private. It took you to an echo, an externalization. There was no substance to it—and you recognized this instantly.”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The Garden feels alive to me. I mean, more alive than grass or trees or plants. It’s—it’s not what it looks like. What it looks like is just…makeup.” She looked at the grass, and then lifted her head. “Have the elements ever spoken of the Devourer at all?”

  Evanton looked at her. “No,” he finally said. “But I know that a portal will open in the streets a few yards from the storefront. It’s happened before. It hasn’t happened as close to the Elemental Garden before, for which I’m grateful.”

  “The Garden told you this?”

  “Not in so many words, no. But…my understanding of the event is derived in part from the communication with the elements.”

  Although she knew she wasn’t in theory supposed to speak with Evanton, her shoulders slumped. “I think the Emperor and the High Lord of the Barrani Court want to stop it from opening.”