The ground trembled as Kaylin hesitated, and then her hesitation was broken by a familiar roar. Severn, silent and almost unnoticed, looked up. “That’s our sign to move,” he told her quietly.
She nodded. Turning to the old woman, she said, “I’m sorry—we don’t have time for this right now. And even if we did, neither of us has the words for it. We have to move.” The woman, who flinched at the sound of the roar, was silent and still.
Kaylin cursed, in Leontine. Reaching out, she grabbed the wrist of the old woman’s sword arm—because it was closest. She pulled her to her feet which meant the woman now towered over her, even though her shoulders were still turned down in a show of respect. It looked wrong while she was standing. The Devourer roared again, and this time, a flinch passed through everyone in sight, like a silent wave. Kaylin started to nudge the woman toward the wagons, which had now formed up in a single line that headed into gray. There was nothing to obscure them; she could see them in a distance that had no other geography.
More than a nudge wasn’t required. The woman assumed that Kaylin was attempting to remind her of her duties, and if Kaylin couldn’t divine the precise details of said duties, she understood the big picture: this woman was Marrin, absent claws and fur but with the extra bulk that came from disproportionate height.
The people were silent, for the most part. Parents could be heard murmuring to children who were too young to be quiet and still, or just old enough to be terrified. They were also, to Kaylin’s eye, hungry and tired; all in all, a bad combination even on a good day, which this wasn’t.
“What are you thinking?” Severn asked quietly, watching her expression.
“Kicking myself mentally,” she replied.
“For?”
“I didn’t ask the damn mirror how the refugees—from any world—found any other world.”
He nodded. “You didn’t expect to be here.”
“No. I didn’t. But that’s not an excuse.”
He didn’t say anything else because honestly, there wasn’t much to say. But they now followed the old woman, walking much more closely by her side than they had the first time. They attracted attention, mostly the attention of children, but not always. These were not people who had lived sheltered lives; their gazes were mostly full of suspicion.
In an odd sort of way, it made her feel at home. Her first home, in the fiefs of Nightshade, when the fieflord’s castle cast the longest of shadows, and his guards—and thugs—carried that shadow farther than it would otherwise reach. She wouldn’t have been huddled near the legs of parents or grandparents; she’d’ve been up above the street, looking down from a window, if she were stupid enough to look at all.
Think, Kaylin. She glanced at the old woman who still seemed subdued after seeing the marks on Kaylin’s arm. In the case of the one other group of refugees she had seen, it had been strongly implied that one man—Enkerrikas?—had been responsible for the route or the journey. To leave the world at all required some type of magic, some type of opening of the way; it probably wasn’t possible for people who weren’t wandering around in the Keeper’s hall without supervision to simply fall out of it.
So someone here had the ability—somehow—to open a door into nothing—a door large enough to let wagons and thousands of people through. Someone, therefore, had the ability to open a door that led out of that nothing. And Kaylin had no ability whatsoever to talk to the woman to find out who. Or to find out if it was the old woman herself.
She had no way of knowing if they were close, or if the physical movement of this long caravan mattered at all.
The roar focused her thoughts. She glanced over her shoulder, and saw only gray; she thought the Devourer was close, but was not yet aware of them. Not the way he had been aware of Vakillirae or Enkerrikas or their lost people. Did these strangers have true names? They were aware of words, or at least of the shape of the oldest of tongues, because the old woman had seen her arms, and she had recognized something in the runes.
But at this point, so did Kaylin, and she was no immortal.
She continued to follow the old woman, who finally made her way to the front of the waiting train. There, she signaled a stop, and she joined two others. They were standing, with an honor guard of six armed men, and when they caught sight of Kaylin, one of the two—both men—raised a brow. He was not as old as the woman; his brow was still dark enough to look silvered by gray. He, unlike the old woman and every other adult—or almost adult—that Kaylin had seen so far, was unarmed. The hilt of a greatsword over one shoulder implied that this wasn’t always the case. His shoulders were broad, and he was tall. Even for a race of diminutive giants.
His hands were large. They were unadorned; not even a simple ring marked them. He did wear the layered cloth that marked the rest of his people, but his robes weren’t also covered by something that looked like a breastplate. Waterskin, wide belt, and boots that were worn but practical completed the look. He wore two obvious knives at his side, but then again, Kaylin wore one and no one blinked; knives, clearly, weren’t considered weapons.
The man glanced, briefly, at Severn, and then turned back to the woman, who seemed to be waiting. He smiled, then. Nodded. The woman asked a question, and he nodded again; she fell silent as he turned.
“I am Kaylin,” Kaylin said, speaking clearly and slowly as she lifted a hand to her own chest. “Severn,” she continued, briefly touching her partner.
The man raised a brow, and then, without any exaggerated gestures, said, “Effaron.”
“Effaron.”
He winced slightly at her pronunciation, and she made a second attempt—which sounded almost the same to her, but was clearly an improvement judging by his nod. He spoke to Kaylin, and she lifted her hands, palms up, and shrugged apologetically. The man turned to the old woman who spoke in measured, but quick words. One brow rose.
“This,” he said, “is going to be difficult.”
Kaylin’s eyes widened.
She reached out, touched the man’s wrist; his own eyes widened as the place where their skin briefly met began to glow. “You’re the traveler,” she told him.
He turned to speak to the women, his words complete gibberish. But the old woman shrugged, and he turned back. “You are not speaking my tongue.”
“No. And you’re not speaking mine. But it sounds to me as if you are. How long have you been on the road?”
He grimaced. “Weeks. We cannot afford to stay on the road for much longer. We don’t have the supplies, even at the severe rationing in place now.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
He watched her closely for a long, silent moment, and then said, with no change of expression whatsoever, “No. I have no idea whatsoever. Since it appears you can’t talk with my people, I’m willing to expose this ignorance to you—but they can’t know. They exist now on hope, and it’s a thin, thin hope.
“How did you find us?”
“I don’t know. We weren’t looking for you.”
“You were looking for another world?” His expression was almost painful to look at, for just that moment—clearly it wasn’t only his people who depended on hope to keep going.
“No. My world—the one we’re both from—is still safe. Or as safe as a world ever is for the individual people who are trying to survive in it.”
He hesitated again, and then said, “Can you lead us there?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a traveler.”
“What is this traveler of which you speak?”
“Someone who can walk in this empty space from one world to another.”
“Yet you are here.”
“So are all the rest of your people.”
He nodded. “We are moving,” he added. “The storms here are strong.”
“Storm? Is that what you call it?”
“What else? It cannot be reasoned with, and it sweeps away all that remains in its path.” He turned to the woman again, and this time, she
nodded and left them.
“She’s terrifying,” Kaylin said.
The man raised a brow. “You do not look terrified.”
“No. I’m used to terrifying women. It makes me feel at home.” She smiled.
“You are a strange one, to feel at home even here. Can you lead us?” he asked again.
“I don’t know how. I can try.”
They spoke very little as they walked. Kaylin wanted to ask Effaron how, exactly, he traveled, and in particular, how he had opened a door—in this case an exit—from his world. But Effaron was in demand, and every half sentence was interrupted by someone. They were polite when they interrupted him, but Kaylin thought it had more to do with her presence than his own; they all stared at her.
But when the roaring grew loud enough and close enough, it ended all questions and any possibility of discussion.
“Effaron, how often have you escaped these storms?”
“Many times.”
“Did you ever try to stand and weather them?”
“No. We do not belong here, and we cannot live here for long. The storms know it, and they seek to scour the land clean.”
She didn’t argue with his interpretation. Instead, she said, “Have any of your people fallen to the storm?”
His silence, which was heavy, was enough of an answer. She didn’t press for more. The wagons were already moving. They didn’t move slowly, even given that they were pulled by men, not horses or oxen. All around their girth, people gathered. They needed food, sleep, and baths, not exactly in that order. But to get any of those things, they needed to leave this place.
The roar was louder and harsher, and this time, listening to it, Kaylin almost thought she could hear words in the rumble. She was certain that Nightshade had when she herself couldn’t. She was just as certain that these people hadn’t. The only difference she could think of was the name: Nightshade had a true name; Kaylin, and by tenuous extension, these people, didn’t. Nothing about their age looked like an affectation. They were mortal.
But…Kaylin was mortal and she had a name. Sort of.
It was a name she had taken for herself when she had faced the test of the Barrani High Halls, and she had taken it from the waters of their life. The fact that those waters had looked very much like the moving surface of a desk didn’t change the substance; it was Barrani after all. Not only could looks be deceiving, but in that culture, you lost style points if they weren’t.
But the Barrani didn’t exist without a name. They didn’t grow or change. They remained in a permanent half state. Which, come to think of it, might be a lot like this nothingness that bridged the gap between worlds. Kaylin, born in the fief of Nightshade, had not only grown, but had changed many times over her span of two decades. She didn’t need the name to exist, and she wasn’t even certain if the name itself granted any power to anyone who might know it.
Only Severn did.
And Severn, while he could invoke it to speak—at great need—behind the silence of shuttered expression, would never use it against her. Whatever he wanted from her, it wasn’t control or dominance. She glanced once over her shoulder to see the strangers; they were the only visible geography.
“Effaron,” she said quietly, “if you open a portal to my world, the storm will come.”
“That has always been my fear,” he replied, his low rumble of a voice very quiet. “But we cannot stay here for much longer.”
She didn’t argue; it was true. Instead, she took a deep breath.
“Lead,” she told him quietly. “I’m going to pull up the rear.”
“Why?”
“I want to try something, and I have no idea whether or not it will work. If you don’t trust me, send someone with me.”
“Mejrah trusts you. If she doesn’t stop you, no one will.”
Kaylin looked at her covered arms. “It’s not me she trusts,” she said, with a twinge of anxiety. “I’ve done nothing to earn it—it’s the marks.”
“Yes. But the marks are significant among our kin.”
Kaylin shook herself. They had, by dint of Severn, reached the end of the long train, and they did take up the rear, walking more quickly than the strangers to compensate for their smaller stride. She turned to Severn as the ground wobbled.
“I need you here,” she told him. “I need you to remember what you know of me.”
He was, as always, perceptive. “The name?”
“The one I took for myself from the living pools in the High Halls. I think—I think the Devourer, or whatever it is, is sensitive to true words, and it’s the only one I know I can use.” She held out a hand. After a moment, he took it, and she tried not to hold on too tightly.
He tried not to wince when she failed.
Ellariayn.
She said the word to herself, syllable by syllable. In her own mind, it felt like any other word she said to herself, absent the cursing ones. Nothing made it true or real in a way that elevated it above all the other language she knew. But it was real. To the Barrani, to the Dragons, and to the Ancients who existed as living ghosts now.
All right, then. How did they make a word real? Did it become concrete somehow because they’d lived in and with it for so long it became inseparable from what they were? Because if that was the case, she was in trouble. Or did they somehow tease meaning from it as they grew up? Did they grow into it, faults and all, because it was what they were?
She felt something in her unknot at that.
She’d seen enough in the Foundling Halls to know that babies and young children had personalities. They had preferences, differences of temper, and different needs. They were born with them, and they learned to either hide them or own them, depending—again—on the rest of their personality.
Kaylin, at twenty, was only beginning to understand the reasons for some of her reactions; she might not understand them all by the time she hit fifty, if she lived that long. Some of those reactions, she could trace back to mistakes she’d made and things she’d suffered because of them. Some, though—like hating the taste of shrimp—she couldn’t. She had no clear idea how much of who she was was learned, and how much she’d just come into the world with.
The Devourer was roaring; he was closer, now, but his voice still sounded like thunder to her ears. Her arms began to tingle; the back of her neck and the insides of her thighs began to ache. She wanted to tell the Devourer to shut the hell up because his roaring made it so damn hard to concentrate. But she wasn’t ready to speak to him yet—if speech even worked—and when she was, those probably weren’t the safest first words.
So, so, so. There was Kaylin, who had been born Elianne, and she was still working on that. And there was Ellariayn, come new to the world with Kaylin’s ascent to the Barrani High Court, all but ignored. If she understood the Barrani Consort’s words—or at least the friendly ones—the name itself was ancient; it had existed in the world forever. It was some part of the gods themselves, and it was what had given them, and their first children, life.
She poked at the name almost tentatively, as if it weren’t part of her.
Ellariayn.
This time, fighting the urge to close her eyes—which, in her experience, always made simple locomotion difficult—she said the word to herself, syllable by syllable, struggling with it, with the sense of its pronunciation. She stumbled over it, as if it were an entirely foreign word, and realized as she did that she had never tried to pronounce it before. Not even when she had given it to Severn.
Some things were deeper and larger than words. Even, it appeared, some words themselves. As she spoke it to herself for the first time, she saw the name form, and in its broad lower stroke, she saw the currents of ocean, the height of tides, the depth of the still pond in Evanton’s Garden. The shape of the stroke didn’t change; it was bold and clear.
As she repeated the name, the center strokes formed above the lower, broad stroke, and in these, she saw the cold, hard stone of Castle Nightshade; the
polished marble of the High Halls; the enduring tower from which the Hawklord ruled. Again, the shape of the stroke didn’t change, but it was almost a window, and it contained—perfectly—some part of her experiences. Across it, vertically, were two more lines. She was not surprised to see that they differed in color and texture from the first two; one was like new fire, and one, like sunlight, and above them both, drifting in a more delicate weight, something that invoked either cloud or smoke.
But the word wasn’t finished; the four strokes that comprised the center were decorated by three central dots, and then a trailing row to one side, and a squiggle to the other. These, too, had texture, but they were opaque to Kaylin; they showed her nothing of either herself or her experiences. Or perhaps she hadn’t had the experiences that would make them clear yet.
Even so, she saw the word as clearly now as she had ever seen another word, and she felt it not quite as her own, but not entirely separate from her. She turned to Severn, and said, “I’m ready.”
He nodded. “Will you stand and wait?”
“Yes. I think—I think Effaron will be able to open the portal. If I had to guess, he’s probably started something at the front of the train.” She glanced meaningfully at the hidden marks on her arms. Taking a deep breath she turned her back upon the refugees; even if they moved slowly, their stride was long enough to carry them farther away as she stared into the unchanging gray. Not all of the strangers left, however; four—all men—remained. They were armed, but they held their weapons as if they knew they were only there for comfort.
Drawing a deeper breath, Kaylin opened her mouth and shouted her name into the gray void. Her true name. It sounded, in the distance, like thunder, and it echoed across the whole of the plain as if it were storm.
Come, she thought, as a wind rose for the first time across the faceless plain. Come home.
She looked at the gray that contained the roaring of syllables and the thunder of voice, and it looked darker to her eyes. Darker, but not cohesive. “He’s coming,” she told Severn.
Cast in Chaos Page 37
