Cast in Oblivion

by Michelle Sagara

  No one else appeared to recognize him.

  He wore a cape of black, but the hood rested around his shoulders, and although his lips moved, the Consort didn’t add sound to the image she had dredged out of perfect, Barrani memory.

  “Spike?”

  Spike was whirring, but there were no accompanying clicking noises.

  The image of the Barrani High Lord shifted, the darkness of shadow melting in place. Shadow accreted and re-formed, becoming something far larger than a single man. This, too, Kaylin had seen, what felt years ago, and in a foreign country. She lost sight of Ferals, lost sight of the dead—but it had never been the sight of them that had haunted her. Just the echoing sound of their voices, the cries of the damned.

  What emerged, at last, from the darkness was a Shadow that resembled a Dragon’s form—but only skeletally. It had the head, the jaws, the neck; it had similar limbs and ebon claws. Absent were the wings, but even had they been present, it wouldn’t have made the creature seem less monstrous; it was the eyes. It had a multitude of eyes that opened at asymmetrical places across the whole of its face, and one eye that opened, larger than the rest, at the center of its chest.

  She could see the physicality of a roar when the creature opened its jaws, and she could see a tongue that was more disturbing than anything else about it; it seemed to be almost a fully formed humanoid, but glistening and wet.

  Spike began to click, the noise becoming high-pitched as it was joined by a whirring whine.

  “Spike wishes to ask if both the former and the latter forms are adopted by the same creature.”

  Kaylin nodded.

  Whir, click, whir.

  “Have you seen the Shadow adopt other forms?”

  “It can adopt other forms,” Kaylin said.

  Whir. Click click click. “Lady,” Helen then said, “Spike asks—if it is possible—that you show him any other forms the Shadow itself might have adopted. Spike understands that you are drawing from your personal experience—and explaining what ‘personal experience’ means is difficult—but asks if the forms are confined to these two for that reason.”

  “He used the larger one to attack us. I mean to physically attack us,” Kaylin said when the Consort failed to answer.

  “The Consort,” Helen then said, “does not believe that other forms have been used in her presence. Or rather, that forms other than the larger one and a selection of Barrani appearances have been used. It is of note that when he attacked the High Seat itself, he chose—or was perhaps confined to—a Barrani appearance.”

  Silence fell.

  This time, it was the Arkon who broke it. “I understand now why an unfortunate, noisy fate chose me as one of your guests for the evening.” He nodded to Helen. “I cannot speak for the Consort, and I cannot speak for the Barrani High Court. But the Dragon Court has long known what lies beneath the High Halls.

  “I am the oldest member of the Dragon Court, and my interest has long been in antiquities and history.” He then turned to Kaylin. No, not Kaylin, Spike, who now rested in a vibrating whir in her hand. He then rose and bowed to the Consort. “Lady, if you will, I will require the table and space at which to work. What you have presented is, no doubt, helpful to the young men and women who have gathered beneath Lord Kaylin’s roof, but what I will present may be of aid to Spike. I do not believe he has enough information; if he has suspicions, perhaps I may clarify them for him.”

  The Consort nodded and the image that rested above her hands dispersed. Plates did not return, but a tall glass did, and she clasped it in both of her hands. The surface of the water trembled. To Kaylin’s eye, the Consort was slightly off color; she looked exhausted. Perfect, but exhausted.

  The Arkon then began.

  * * *

  He didn’t put his hands on the table; he didn’t otherwise murmur or cast, as the Consort had done. Kaylin’s skin was almost numb at this point, but she flinched as a new wave of different pain ran across it, raising goose bumps. In the early years, she had assumed that all magic had this effect; her experience in the past year had made it clear that only certain types caused pain.

  Beside her ear, her familiar squawked. It wasn’t the angry variety; it was, for the familiar, almost quiet.

  “Yes,” the Arkon replied. “And for your information, there is no record that indicates that previous Chosen were afflicted with the same sensitivity to magic. Lord Kaylin is not the only mortal to be Chosen, but mortals who bore those marks were rare, and little remains of their history. Lord Kaylin does not consider use of magic in such circumstances to be a threat or a danger.” He did not look up as he rumbled—and he did rumble; his voice had taken on the cadence and depth of his race, although—thank whichever gods were listening—not the volume.

  Bellusdeo was leaning into the table now, her hands gripping its edge, knuckles white. Her eyes were red-orange, but anyone who lived with the Dragon expected that, since the discussion had moved to Shadow, and was likely to remain there for some time.

  The Arkon’s image did not start out as moving fog or smoke. It started, suddenly, in flame, a bonfire of orange, yellow and red, with a heart of white. It was the heart that gave way first, as something began to unfurl in its center.

  “This,” the Arkon said, and he had no difficulty adding words to the emerging images, unlike the Consort, “was at the height of the war, the first war. Geographically, you are unlikely to recognize it; it is much changed from what you will see. Much changed.”

  Kaylin expected to see forest. Or fields. Or something primitive. “Is it where Elantra was built?”

  The Arkon failed to answer.

  The heart of the fire widened; the last of the bracketing flames died away, as if starved of fuel. What remained, now, was a spire of stone that rose far above even the Towers in the fiefs. It might have looked small, but at its base was a building that looked almost like a fairy-tale palace; the walls were a gray-white that glistened, and colored windows were evenly spaced along portions of the visible wall.

  “Do you recognize it?” the Arkon asked.

  Kaylin started to answer, but the question wasn’t aimed at her, and she fell silent.

  “I do,” the Consort replied. “But only from images and paintings that survive the war. The building...did not.”

  “You believe that the Dragon Flights destroyed it.”

  “And you do not?”

  “No. But I know what did. And if the palace itself was a gutted ruin by the end of that war, the Tower remained.”

  “It was once like I was,” Helen replied softly. “With different imperatives.”

  “You know of this.”

  “I know only what I was told. I am not very mobile.”

  “And who told you?”

  “The Sorcerer for whom I was a partial residence.”

  “Now, watch,” the Arkon said. And in the distance, approaching that palace in an almost synchronized beat of wings, came Dragons.

  Chapter 11

  The Dragons grew larger as Kaylin obeyed the Arkon’s command. She had heard of Dragon Flights, but had never seen one in action. She had seen Dragons in combat—the entire Imperial Court had taken to the skies when the High Halls had come under attack by the ancient version of Barrani—and had thought she understood what the term meant.

  But watching these Dragons flying in formation made a lie of that. There was a cohesion to their flight patterns, a power to their movement and a far greater uniformity of color than there had been any other time she had seen a Dragon adopt its draconic form. They weren’t wearing uniforms or armor—Dragons didn’t need either—but might as well have been.

  What the Dragon Flights gave her was a sense of the size of the palace. She had always thought the High Halls immense; the ceilings towered, where there were ceilings, and the halls themselves were—at least near the front—wide enoug
h for an army to march through. They were modest in comparison to this.

  “Is there more than one Flight?” she asked, frowning.

  “There are four,” the Arkon replied. “There were not four by the end of this battle.”

  Ynpharion’s distress had lessened. He, like the Consort, Teela or anyone else in this room with the exception of the Arkon—and Helen—had not been alive at the time of this battle. He was now watching the Arkon’s magical display with an interest, a curiosity, that was very unlike him.

  “Which Flight was yours?” Kaylin asked.

  The Arkon, once again, did not answer. Bellusdeo, however, snorted smoke. Kaylin shut up.

  As the Dragons approached the palace Tower, their forces split, the flight formation shifting as they veered to either side. The Arkon had not chosen to grace his images with sound, but as the Dragons opened their jaws, she could almost hear the thunder of their war cries.

  From the ground—it must have been from the ground—lightning struck that living cloud.

  The image once again shifted, but the Dragons did not diminish in size; instead, the whole of the moving display expanded to rest above the entirety of the dining room table. Lightning struck again, and this time, one set of wings stuttered, causing a gap in the flight formation that broke the illusion of invulnerability, of death on wings.

  Kaylin could now see the army that claimed the ground. She could see the moment lightning leaped from within its far more numerous ranks and took to sky, to targets that were so large they should have been easy to hit.

  That is the High Lord’s banner, Ynpharion said. There, in the center of the formation.

  There were a lot of banners in that field of armored men.

  Kaylin flinched. Did the High Lord survive?

  Silence. She took that as a no. Maybe, on balance, this history lesson of the Arkon’s was not the best idea for a mixed dinner.

  “It is not the war itself that he is attempting to show us,” Helen replied. Given the brief movement of gazes, Helen hadn’t taken any care to keep this from the ears of her guests. “And no, the High Lord of the time did not survive this battle. But, Kaylin, I believe the Arkon is attempting to show the destruction of the palace, rather than the death of the High Lord.”

  “They are linked,” the Arkon said. “Ah, now. Look.”

  Kaylin did, but what she saw was flame, fire, lightning and a vortex of wind—visible because it made such a dent in the formation of the aerial attackers. These were elemental attacks.

  “Where were you?” Kaylin asked.

  “I am going to bite you if you continue to interrupt,” Bellusdeo snapped. “He is obviously flying in from the opposite direction; this would be the view he would have had at the time.”

  If it had been obvious, Kaylin wouldn’t have asked. She did shut up, though.

  Lightning. Fire. Arrows that glittered too brightly in the cloudy skies. Wind. No water that she could see, and the Barrani weren’t stupid enough to attempt to summon fire. But there was something on that field that rose like lightning but did not flash the same color, the same bright, harsh visual spear.

  “What,” the Consort said softly, seeing what Kaylin saw, and marking it in the same way, “was that?”

  The Arkon nodded with approval, and Kaylin wished she’d asked the question first, since the ones she had asked so far clearly weren’t the right ones.

  “In the noise and the clamor of battle, it is seldom that we have the time to observe or communicate what we’ve seen. It is not,” he added softly, “what every combatant on that field saw.”

  “You were not Arkon then.”

  “No. But it is because of my peculiar magical sensibilities that I was, in the end, selected to become so. Kaylin?”

  “Yes,” she said, almost curt. “I’ve seen that before. It’s...not quite Shadow; I think that would have been obvious to most observers. But...it’s got a distinctly purple-gray hue.”

  The Arkon nodded. “I do not know what history tells the Barrani of that battle, but given the existence of the second war, I can guess.”

  “We did not start that war,” the Consort said quietly.

  “I will not argue that point; I will simply say, Consort, that neither did we. And perhaps, with this hint—ah, see, again—you might understand how both your position and my position could be true.”

  She was white; it was not a good color. Her eyes were a midnight blue, a martial blue.

  “But even that, Lady, is not the point of this exercise.” The perspective shifted, and shifted again; Kaylin could now see the wings to either side of the viewpoint that must, as Bellusdeo had said, have been the Arkon’s. In color, they were a slate blue, trending to something brighter.

  Dragon wings obscured the view of the grounded Barrani—but even thinking that, Kaylin realized that not all of the Barrani were grounded. Some were mounted. A small handful. None of their mounts were creatures that Kaylin had seen before. But their shapes were much harder to define; they seemed blurry, as if they—and they alone—were being seen through fingerprint-smeared glass.

  Bellusdeo’s eyes—when Kaylin glanced at the golden Dragon—were red. Blood red. She was vibrating. And as if he could hear that vibration, Maggaron, her personal Ascendant, came bursting through doors that appeared to be made of evening sky.

  This caught the Arkon’s attention, but did not destroy his magic; instead, all of the moving images froze in place as the ancient Dragon looked up to meet the black of Norannir anger. Or fear.

  Bellusdeo was out of her seat before Kaylin had finished blinking. She stepped in front of Maggaron—probably the only person in the room who could make her look truly tiny—and placed a hand firmly in the center of his chest. He then staggered back, regaining certain footing a distance of three yards from that hand. Kaylin hadn’t even seen her push.

  She spoke a language that Kaylin didn’t understand; Helen didn’t bother to step in with a translation, either. But the Norannir eyes slowly regained their resting color, and although Maggaron didn’t slouch, he lost the appearance of height as he calmed down. He then looked up, to see the entire assembly around the open-air dining table, and blanched.

  His first attempt at an apology was a stammer in his native tongue. His second attempt was a stammer in Elantran.

  A very large chair appeared at the table, and Maggaron looked—pathetically—at Helen, who said nothing. Bellusdeo, however, caught him by the wrist and dragged him to that chair, and this time, Kaylin did see the Dragon exert herself. “My apologies for the interruption,” she said, a hint of a smile at play around her lips, her eyes more orange than they’d been since the first mention of Shadow. “It was entirely my fault. Maggaron is somewhat sensitive to my moods.”

  “Which is why he’s usually smart enough to stay well away from them,” Mandoran added, ostensibly to the rest of the table.

  A wave of chuckles cut the tension as Bellusdeo turned once again to the Arkon. “My apologies for the interruption,” she said in her sweetest voice. “Please, continue. I am sure this is educational in many ways for all of us.”

  The Arkon nodded. His eyes remained orange, but there was another shade entwined with it, possibly silver. The large image that took up most of the table, including the new spot that had been opened up for Maggaron, began to move once again.

  Kaylin watched as the lightning that had shot up from the ground began to shift and change. It was no longer a flash of power; it was slower, its reach extending so the witnesses could see its full trajectory. It was, after all, what the Dragon who had not yet been made Arkon—and one day, Kaylin would have to ask him exactly what that title meant—was searching for. There. There it was.

  “Records, enlarge,” she said, and then flushed.

  The Arkon didn’t apparently notice, and regardless, the image didn’t alter to accommodate her co
mmand. She wasn’t looking at Records. “Yes,” he said quietly. “You note the difference in that spell.”

  She did, although the mage in question wasn’t the only one on the ground—there appeared to be several, surrounded by armored men. But one man stood out, although it took her a moment to realize why: there was a subtle fuzziness about his image. She could see his armor clearly, could see a tabard—but didn’t know enough, even with the recent studying, to place it—could see the sword that he held in one outstretched hand.

  It was the sword, she thought. There was something wrong with the sword. It was limned in a barely visible, almost purple haze—a fog. The man who carried it was Barrani; he had the long, flowing hair. But the hair moved in a wind that seemed counter to the wind that moved through his defenders.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  It was Sedarias who answered. “The Lord of Brennaire. What the High Lord did during the attack on the High Halls was of lesser power than what the High Lord did in that first war. Now stop interrupting.”

  She hadn’t been talking at the time, but Kaylin didn’t point this out. Instead, she watched. She could see a stillness envelop the field; even the banners paused in motion, flattening as if they had been cut off from all source of wind. She saw fire splash like liquid twenty feet above the army’s head.

  And she saw a Brennaire Arcanist turn toward the High Lord from whom the stillness seemed to radiate. Kaylin moved—or started to move—and Severn caught her arm. Her arm was glowing—or rather, the marks that adorned it were; they could be seen beneath the fabric of her shirt.

  She almost smacked herself. This had happened centuries ago. It couldn’t be made to unhappen. There was nothing she could personally do for the Barrani or the Dragons of that time—and given their attitudes toward humans back in those days, did she really want to?

  The Consort watched. All of the Barrani cohort did. Teela’s knuckles were white.