Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  What she wasn’t certain of was how much of what she was trying to say was getting through; how much of it was being processed. She had no sense of the passage of time, but at the same point, Severn’s urgent—and silent—worry let her know that it was, damn it, passing.

  Listen to me, she said.

  And this time he said: Who are you?

  Put me down, she told the Devourer after a long silence. Put me down where you found me. She expected the concept to be confusing because he hadn’t exactly picked her up; here, she trusted the conduit of name to translate some small portion of her thought into his vast mind.

  She landed, with a whumpf, against the squishy, gray ground just behind Severn’s feet. She could see Severn again. She could see everything. The portal—and it looked like something majestic and vast, as different from the portcullis of Castle Nightshade as night from day—was open, and the ghost of Elani street was clearly visible. It was gray, but color was slowly appearing on its cobbles and its sandwich-board signs as she watched. Had she not been standing so close to the troop of Elders, for want of a better word, she wouldn’t have been able to see a damn thing; people were pressing in on all sides, and she wanted to tell them that if they stood that tightly packed with naked swords and axes, someone was going to lose a leg.

  What she couldn’t see—at all—was the Devourer. He was there; she had no doubt. But he was gray and vast, like the nonworld itself. Without the roaring of his deadly storm, nothing gave his presence away.

  You let me see what you saw, she told the Devourer. Try, now, to see what I see.

  She looked at the portal, and then found herself looking away as the Devourer did, indeed, borrow her vision. He, however, had his own ideas about what was, or might be, interesting. So she saw what he wanted to see, but she saw it as Kaylin Neya.

  What are they?

  This was easier. People. She saw the word form in front of her, and knew that it was both ancient, and less ancient than the Devourer.

  Why are they here?

  They have nowhere else to go. They seek safety. She hesitated, and then added, They have no home. Another word formed, and this one she knew. She knew it not because she’d seen it before, but because she could feel its truth so strongly it might have been her name.

  But she noted that the Devourer made no frenzied attempt to pull apart either of the two words in a continuation of his desperate search. Don’t, she added, as she felt movement. You’ll break them.

  Severn touched her shoulder gently. “It’s almost done,” he said.

  She nodded; she would have turned, but couldn’t; the Devourer was still looking, as she’d asked, through her eyes. Seeing what she saw as she saw it was confusing and strange to him.

  She could almost feel him try to make sense of it, try to relate it to something familiar. Fair enough; it’s what she’d do.

  She heard shouting, and she did turn then—because he’d heard it, as well; apparently he hadn’t confined himself to vision. He saw the strangers ready themselves, and saw them turn to the portal, toward which he now also turned. Both of him: the part of him that occupied Kaylin by force of will and use of the name she’d given him as a trapdoor, and the large, amorphous, world-eater.

  Both froze.

  He saw what she saw, yes, but he saw what he saw, as well: the luminosity of words, hidden and pale, in the distance. They were stronger than the words she’d spoken—but they were not as strong, not as vital, as the elemental names. He held himself in check because he understood that she meant to take him to where they were.

  But…he wanted these other, lesser, words, and it was a hunger which grew as the seconds passed. So she said to him, take mine. And this time, when she lifted her sleeves—which Severn was, she realized belatedly, deliberately not staring at, they were now so ragged—he looked at her arm.

  One glyph rose from her skin, taking a shape in the air that almost dwarfed her. He touched it; she felt him. But it was odd; it was as if the word were meant, in its entirety, to be disassembled by him.

  “Severn,” she said, as she saw the light of the rune begin to dim, “we have to move now.”

  By dint of personality and presence, Severn made her will known, and as the streets at last gained their full color and shape, the old woman rallied her tired, her hungry, and her lost, and she called upon the men who guarded the train. She sent them through first.

  Kaylin was on their heels. Follow, she said, and as she moved, the mark that she had sacrificed to his hunger moved with her, like a fancy carrot-on-a-stick. She almost laughed. Or wept. He brushed past the refugees as if they no longer existed, and they felt his passing as if it were a strong gust of wind.

  Words, he said as they cleared the thin membrane of portal. Words! It wasn’t all of what he was saying, but it was the only part that made sense to Kaylin. The hunger almost overwhelmed him. Kaylin shook her head, lifted an arm, and again, a glyph flew free. She wondered, as it began to dim, if this was the way she would lose her distinguishing marks forever. Realized, as she wondered, that if she’d once hated them, she’d grown attached to them; they were a part of what she now was.

  If asked, she’d have sworn she’d be ecstatic to be rid of them. But ecstatic or no, she did it, and that had to count for something. She had one moment of numb fear when he breached the portal because the portal folded, buckling and rippling in a way that threatened to pull down the damn sky. She cried out in alarm, because the sky was tearing, and she could see red and black and iridescent gold in the rents.

  But because he held her name, he felt her alarm. He didn’t understand it, but he stopped his feeding for long enough to look at the portal through her eyes. He paused as if caught, the hunger forgotten; she felt a ripple of something that might be concern, and then the portal straightened and the sky reasserted itself.

  It was brighter, bluer, and clearer than it had been scant seconds before. This didn’t make her any happier; he was staring at it, and her own lips pursed in a frown. She asked the water what had happened, and received only silence in reply. She was here. The voice of the water was not.

  But…the Devourer was here, almost here, as well. And she couldn’t see him—not with her own eyes. His, she didn’t ask to borrow again.

  She would have marched straight to Evanton’s, but the way was blocked.

  Armed men stood ten yards from the portal’s mouth, and when they saw the travelers who had walked so far and in such isolation to reach this city, they stiffened; no surprise there. Kaylin would have, had she been in their shoes. They were, of course, members of the Eternal Emperor’s Law: the Swords and the Hawks. Kaylin had no doubt at all that there were Wolves in the buildings above the portal spawn point.

  But these people, Severn could talk with, and he separated himself from a veritable forest of bristling armed men and women, walking with his hands palms up until he reached the commander of the Swords. One palm snapped a perfect salute. She could hear him talk but she couldn’t make out the words; they were lost to a very familiar, very unwelcome roar.

  It was answered by a very welcome one.

  She couldn’t see him through the crowd given her height, and she didn’t try for long, but she recognized the Dragon roar of Tiamaris.

  CHAPTER 29

  It didn’t take him long to clear the crowd; even the Swords were familiar enough with the etiquette of the Dragon Court to give them passage. Tiamaris hadn’t come alone. He didn’t have Tara with him, but Kaylin thought it was impossible for the Tower’s Avatar to leave her fief; to her knowledge, she had never tried.

  Instead, he came flanked by two Dragons: the Lords Emmerian and Diarmat. The Swords moved to make way for them; all three were wearing the crest of the Dragon Court. In Elantra proper, fief laws didn’t apply; Tiamaris was not, there fore, wearing the big scales and wings of his Draconic form. But in an emergency, he could—and the knowledge of that radiated from all of the Dragons present. They weren’t tall compared to the strangers
who had begun to appear in the hundreds in the street, and their swords weren’t greatswords.

  But their eyes were a dark shade of orange as they turned from the Captain of the Swords toward the unnamed and unknown intruders, and something about the color of their eyes made those strangers fall silent.

  “Corporal,” Tiamaris said, without taking his gaze from the ring of guards that stood between the Swords and the less aggressive refugees. “Private. The danger?”

  Kaylin tried to answer; the Devourer, however, was in control. She roared. Which should have sounded weak and unimpressive, especially when compared to a Dragon’s roar. It didn’t. It also sounded nothing like Kaylin. She wondered what color her eyes were. All three of the Dragon Lords turned to face her.

  They’re the color of glass, Kaylin, Severn told her.

  Glass?

  Yes. You can see through them.

  That was disturbing. See what?

  Night.

  Oh gods, Severn—it’s not Shadow—

  No. Night. Moons, stars.

  Tell them I’m still here. Tell Tiamaris—ask him—not to go Dragon. He’ll crush the Swords who are standing nearby. The Dragons’ eyes were red. Kaylin knew it was illegal to make the transformation from human form to Dragon form without Imperial dispensation, but she was pretty sure they had it. And even if they didn’t, who was going to stop them?

  Not the Swords.

  And by the look of them, not the exhausted and grim people of the otherworld. They tightened their grip on their weapons and they looked to the old woman. The old woman, however, pointed at Kaylin, and at the marks on her arm, which were glowing. It was a coruscating light, different from the constant blue glow they usually shed when they shone.

  No one moved.

  Except for Kaylin. She stiffened as the Devourer roared. Tiamaris roared back. His roar, however, was different: he was speaking. The Swords—and, give them this, the scruffy strangers—were disciplined enough not to cover their ears.

  The Devourer spoke a single word through her mouth. It was, of course, a Dragon word. Kaylin felt it, but couldn’t understand it—and for the sake of her very human throat, hoped that Tiamaris understood it the first time.

  He must have; he became utterly still. He was the only one of the Dragons who did; Emmerian and Diarmat took a step back. She understood why, in part: the Devourer’s word meant the whole of emptiness, lack of purpose, lack of duty, lack of—of joy, of place. It wasn’t like loneliness—that one, she understood well. But it occupied the depths of which loneliness was sheer surface.

  Tiamaris then said a Dragon word, and this one, she knew: Hoard.

  The Devourer fell silent; it was not a long silence. But it was broken by the rumbling of the earth beneath her feet, and the ground fractured, cobbles cracking in a line that seemed to extend along the whole street, or at least what she could see of it. She couldn’t turn to look behind her; she didn’t have that much control over her body.

  But she could see, out of the corner of her eye, the familiar panes of the windows of Evanton’s shop.

  Severn! Tell Tiamaris I have to get to Evanton’s. We have to reach the Garden before—

  Water began to fill the crack in the street, and along the sides of what wouldn’t have passed muster as riverbanks in the clumsy drawings of five-year-olds, flowers began to bloom. The strangers shouted and the stiff and wary silence of their first few minutes broke.

  But the Devourer couldn’t or didn’t hear them, and Kaylin therefore couldn’t turn. She took a step toward Tiamaris, whose eyes were a darker red than she’d ever seen them. Severn stepped between them.

  Severn, no—

  And went flying. She couldn’t even say where, because the act of throwing him out of the way was as consequential as his words had been to the creature who now rode inside of her. She understood what he wanted, then.

  Tiamaris had a name. A word.

  But so did Kaylin, and although she had no physical control of her body, a rune rose from her skin, and it grew to occupy the space that Severn had occupied for a few brief seconds.

  Severn!

  I’m all right.

  Tell Tiamaris and the other Dragons to get back—

  She could feel, rather than hear, his snort.

  Okay, that was stupid. But the Devourer can see that they’re immortal. He can see that they have names, and he, he’ll try to consume them. He’s not trying to destroy them, she added more urgently. But that’ll be the net effect. She cringed as the single rune, gifted by the Ancients, began to dim.

  Tiamaris asks if you can stop him—

  From what?

  From destroying the street.

  Not if everyone doesn’t get out of the damn way.

  They’re worried about the small army that’s materialized in the street.

  Kaylin wanted to scream, which, given the Captains present, would probably have been career limiting. I need you to get them out of the way.

  She felt his nod; she couldn’t see it. And she felt the heat of Tiamaris’s breath pass around her like a charnel wind. She understood why; the fire didn’t hurt. But it stung.

  She felt the rune dwindle, and she cursed as another took its place. She wanted to read the word before it was lost to her forever, but she wanted to survive, as well. She threw fear at the Devourer as if it were a rock and he were a closed bedroom window two stories above the ground.

  But his attention flickered toward her and she caught it and held it for just a moment. She spoke a single word that she felt and heard as home; she knew that he heard it as if it were larger than anything she could comprehend, and he did turn then, like a ponderous, slow beast.

  She prayed because she did that when she was terrified; it was better than whimpering or screaming. Sometimes it helped. Today? It was answered. Tiamaris, Emmerian, and Diarmat withdrew; the Swords, shifting numbers so they faced the obvious threat—to their mind—also made way, forming a tunnel that led from the foot of the portal to Evanton’s storefront.

  The Devourer, who was used to roaming the vast and empty wastelands, couldn’t tell the difference between a door and a window, and the window shattered to give them passage. Grethan was standing behind the bar, his jaw dropping toward the floor in a slow, painful fall. It was, however, still attached to his face.

  She didn’t tell him to get the hell out of the way, because she couldn’t; she didn’t need to tell him to pick up the stuff that her hurried passage was knocking over to the left and right. He’d lived with Evanton for long enough that bending in panic to retrieve his fallen garbage was second nature. But she walked past him; she couldn’t turn her head or speak a word, her gaze was now so focused. The Devourer knew where to go, because she knew, and she concentrated on it as if her life depended on nothing else.

  They made their way through a corridor jammed on either side with shelves; it had never seemed so narrow. The slats beneath her feet were slightly warped wood, and they creaked in all the right ways for her size and her weight. The hall led to a locked door, as it always did.

  This door, she knew. She knew its shape and its texture and the ways in which it could be opened. She knew that in theory only Grethan and Evanton could unlock it. Theory, however, didn’t and couldn’t contain the Devourer; he was part of a different story, a much older one, and the structural rules for this story had no place for him.

  But he lingered at the door, and he seemed—for just that instant—to lose all sense of enormity, of the unknown and unknowable wilderness that was ancient magic. What he felt—or what she interpreted the emotion as—was something that was entirely contained in her experience: his desperate frenzy, the insanity and ferocity of loss, had, at last, given way to uncertainty. Fear.

  This is where he wanted to be, and he wasn’t certain that it was where he belonged. The vast, empty wastelands had been his home for so long it was in, and of him. He was changed, and he didn’t know if the changes would allow him any return at all. And he wan
ted it; he wanted it so badly she could taste it.

  It tasted of wind and rain and cold snow on tongue; it tasted of ash and smoke; it tasted of rock and stone and soft dirt. But it felt like…memory. She couldn’t understand his at all, but drifted, on the strength of the familiarity of the emotions they evoked, into her own.

  She could only barely remember what her mother looked like, it had been so long since she’d seen her in anything but dream—or nightmare. But she could, conversely, remember her mother’s expressions: joy, anger, fear, pride. Love. And she could remember the feel of her mother’s arms around her, her mother’s voice in her ear—things she had to hold on to because there would never be any other memories. Not good ones, not bad ones. Nothing.

  But she’d accepted the fact of her mother’s death. She was gone. The Devourer had no word for acceptance; he had no word for peace.

  As if he could see or feel Kaylin’s memories, she felt them vanish, and she felt, in place of their comfort, the visceral, immediate agony of the fact of two different deaths: Steffi. Jade. The children that she’d adopted when she was no more than a child herself.

  That loss was sharper and harder, and it cut her the way it always did when she returned to it; she felt her throat both dry and thicken until she couldn’t even swallow. She had worked her way to acceptance of their absence; she thought she had accepted the fact of their death, and she had.

  But it was the only memory that the Devourer felt was akin to his own in some tiny, insignificant way, and he tore it up from its resting place. Some things, she’d buried for a reason. You had to look away from them if you were going to keep moving.

  She remembered her walk through the streets of the Tower of Tiamaris, and she remembered what the Tower had said when she had confronted the Tower’s Avatar with her anger at that forced reminiscence of Hell: What did I do? I spoke with you. It was hard. I tried to show you that I understood your pain.