She realized then that Spike had spit him out for a reason. Terrano drew no weapons, but they didn’t matter; he intended to come with her.
Yes, Spike said.
She wanted to argue. She almost did. But Spike was not the only person who would follow her into the breach. Hope touched her shoulder. “You could not have come here alone,” he told her quietly. “Your cohort, the Consort, Lord Nightshade, Evarrim, Ynpharion and Spike—especially Spike—were, and are, necessary. Had they come without you, they could stop the Barrani from opening a gate through which the Adversary might, at last, be free of his prison.
“They could not do what you can do. The Tower alone could not achieve it, either. Look at the Adversary, Chosen. Understand what it is that you see.”
This wasn’t the first time she’d looked at the Adversary. It wasn’t the first time she’d faced a threat that could not consume her the way it could consume the others.
“I don’t understand one thing.”
Terrano, even given the gravity of the situation, snorted.
She ignored this. “If there’s a cage, if the Tower can’t breach its own barriers to destroy an intruder, how could the intruder reach out to gather the names?”
“The Adversary didn’t reach out,” Terrano said, his tone in keeping with the snort. “They reached in.”
“How? You were captive in Alsanis for a long damn time—and no one was allowed to ‘reach in,’ as you put it.”
“Alsanis is not this Tower,” Terrano said softly. “They were created in different eras, for different purposes.”
“And you know this how?” She didn’t argue; she agreed with the facts. Spike was still in the way.
“Spike told me. The Tower is allowed to offer choice. It is not allowed to enforce it on any of those who now reside here. It...never has been. Alsanis could. Helen could—and can. But the Tower was created in part for the preservation—and study—of a new generation of...species. The Ancestors,” he said. “And those that followed. It’s why Sedarias’s stupid brother can do what he’s doing at all.”
“But if that’s the case, why is the Adversary trapped here?”
“He’s not of the new generation. He’s one of the things the Ancients wanted to protect us from. Helen and Alsanis were created after the Ancients realized that the thing we’d need the most protection from in our daily lives was...each other. But the Ancients hoped to create a species, if that’s the right word, that wasn’t in a constant state of war. The species—according to Spike—was fragile. New. It was too easy to destroy them or change them irrevocably.
“The heart of this Tower isn’t Barrani or human or Ancestor. It’s older. As old,” he added, “as Spike. It can stop the Adversary. It can...prohibit interactions with the Barrani within this confined space—as long as the Barrani themselves don’t seek to interact. But they do. Some of them. They have to approach. But the approach affects them, and only them.
“Spike says that your approach will be different. Because of that thing you’re wielding.”
“And I shouldn’t wield it?”
“Oh, no, he thinks you should. But you can approach because you’re mortal. The Tower cannot.” Before she could argue, he said, “It’s the nature of choice.”
“This is the stupidest thing ever!”
“Clearly you’ve never listened to Mandoran when he really gets going.”
“I’ve been there when he’s gotten himself thoroughly stuck in a wall.” She exhaled.
It was Hope who broke the silence, because Spike still hadn’t moved. She barely prevented herself from kicking him, not that her foot would have had much of an effect, given the current difference in their size. “Chosen, choice is the defining factor of independent life. For better or worse. If the parents restrict choice, reserve it, forbid it, their children will remain children for the entirety of their existence.
“Perhaps, as a person who serves the Halls of Law, this is not obvious to you. To you, the laws are perhaps a way of circumscribing choice, a way of infantilizing people.”
“They’re not.”
“You’re grinding your teeth,” Terrano helpfully observed.
“In order to be adult—that is not the correct word, but it is the analogous word, I believe—choices must have consequences, for good or ill. This Tower was not created to shepherd children.”
“And the Hallionne were?”
“The Hallionne were later creations. The complications of choice and consequences were...better understood, by that point. The permanence of consequence, better understood, as well. I believe that the Hallionne were created to prevent people from making—or acting on—extreme impulses that would otherwise pass. The moment of action should not always define the entirety of the rest of a life.” There was a small hesitation, and then he added, “Helen is more maternal than perhaps a building might otherwise be.
“She considers her centuries of experience to be relevant in comparison to your decades. But she will also abide by your decisions; it is part of how she was created. She can make choices, and does, but that was costly, as you know. She could not now do what this Tower is doing. I’m not sure she could ever do what this Tower is doing.”
“Spike, I need you to move.”
“And you as well are given choice by the Tower. It has stretched itself to its utmost limits to give you that choice, to support it. Were it not for your nature as Chosen, even this would be denied the Tower. Spike,” he added. “I believe they are ready.”
To Kaylin’s extreme irritation, Spike moved. Terrano was trying not to laugh, which didn’t really help.
But the minute Spike moved—the second he began—she almost froze. She carried a sword, and she faced something that appeared to be the High Lord, surrounded by his people. The sword was not her own; it was part of the Tower. The heart of the Tower.
Why is this creature so dangerous?
You are here to free the names of the dead—the damned—and you can ask that question? It was Ynpharion, frustration and condescension a constant in the timbre of his internal voice.
I know why I think he’s dangerous. I don’t understand why Spike thinks he is.
Ynpharion didn’t understand, either—but it didn’t bother him. The things trying to kill him did. Kaylin did. Spike’s opinion was irrelevant.
Terrano nudged her, or tried. His hand passed through her shoulder. It was disturbing. She could feel his palm connect, and the passage through what she assumed was solid flesh was slow. It was also unnecessary. She could see a path form in front of her feet, bridging the chasm that separated the Adversary and his captives from the rest of the room.
“I cannot cross that bridge,” Hope said, his voice both soft and distant. “And Spike cannot cross it, either.” Before she could speak, he added, “We will be here, when you return.” It sounded a lot like if.
“Can you keep Terrano here?”
“No, Chosen. Not unless Terrano wishes to stay.”
“I can’t,” Terrano said. “I don’t think she can walk that bridge without me.”
At any other time, Kaylin would have been offended. But the sword in her hand trembled as she took a step across what she had thought to be stone. If it was, it was incomplete, a structure built by a Tower that hadn’t the will or strength to finish what it had started. It was gray, and—yes—opalescent. It looked like pale Shadow, to Kaylin. But she had come to terms with the fact that Shadow was not a single thing.
No, she thought as she began to walk, it was a manifestation of potential. Helen, stripped bare, probably looked like this. Alsanis. The Tower itself. Everything that they created—whole rooms and everything those rooms contained—probably started from here. Everything they no longer required probably returned to it.
She wondered what Terrano saw; he followed her. No, he walked beside her.
His feet, however, didn’t touch the bridge. They hovered above whatever it was that lay beneath it. Terrano didn’t look down. Kaylin was not afraid of heights, and did. She could see darkness. There was no light, and nothing that looked like bottom. But there was no Shadow, either; no glints of moving, squirming color.
She was certain that if she stepped off this bridge, she’d fall. Terrano didn’t appear to be bothered by gravity. No, she thought, it was more than that; he appeared to be avoiding the bridge. He looked across it. Straight across it.
The man on the throne rose. As he left that throne, it dissolved, losing shape and cohesion. What was left did not become unformed Shadow, or even half-formed Shadow. No, she thought, clenching fists. It became words.
Flecks of color rose from beneath Kaylin’s feet, as if they were mutant moths, fluttering and passing each other in their awkward flight. She was surprised when they attached themselves to the sword’s blade—surprised and afraid.
But fear was not as strong as anger, and the sight of the words, dissolved and returning to the mass of the gathered, and the trapped, did anger her. She didn’t know—couldn’t know for certain—if the words were the ghosts she had seen the first time, or if their cries and pleas were an artifact of the Adversary’s power. Certainly the name she had salvaged in the West March had not spoken to her at all.
Yet it was the appearance of the dead that drove the living who had ventured here. Sometimes it drove them to their own deaths, and their names, the words upon which their lives depended, had joined the trapped, because guilt and the pain of loss had allowed them no other option.
The Adversary lifted an arm. To his hand came a blade—and that blade was of Shadow; the flat was ebon, but beneath its surface, color squirmed.
“Don’t listen to him,” Terrano said sharply.
Kaylin started to point out that he hadn’t said anything when he opened his mouth.
Words flew from between his lips. Golden words, more seen than heard. He gestured as he continued this odd variation of speech. On the far side of the bridge, something rose at his back; it looked like the bottom of a cliff, sculpted in a dark, silvery gray; colors gathered in the crevices. But she saw, as she approached on a bridge that seemed, somehow, to be extending even as she walked, that that cliff flowed from his cape, or what appeared to be his cape, extending out and up toward a nonexistent sky.
She did hear the thunder of his spoken words, so different in texture from True Words. She even understood them; they were in High Barrani.
“Stop what you’re doing and finish the summoning!”
She wondered what the words would do or be if the Barrani lords had not been stopped. She wondered how much power the Adversary now had, because the Ferals had only partly been uprooted, the mooring they provided destroyed.
But she didn’t wonder what would happen to the words that he had trapped and contained for as long as he had been prisoner here. She understood, as she struggled to reach the end of the bridge, and the Adversary who was waiting, what the fate of those words would be.
Kaylin—you must hurry. Nightshade, his voice sharper and louder than it had ever been.
She started to run. She didn’t ask why—given the Adversary’s command, she could guess. Running, however, didn’t make the damn bridge any shorter. It didn’t make her legs any longer.
Terrano kept easy pace with her. He didn’t seem to be working at all. She stopped moving. Terrano stopped, as well, but again, without effort, as if he was anchored to Kaylin in a fashion she couldn’t discern. “Are you done?” he asked, barely masking his frustration.
Nightshade fell silent, but the urgency, the necessity, of motion remained as a resonant echo. Regardless, running here did no good. Walking in the heart of the Tower had done no good, either, not immediately. And she was still in the heart of the Tower. She looked up. Looked at the peak of the edifice behind the Adversary, and followed it down to the Adversary himself.
Kaylin had grown up in the shadows of power; she knew to fear it, to avoid it. Everything in the fiefs had had more power than she’d had, as a child. Everything. Her mother. Severn. Any adult she met. The Ferals. The thugs that served the fieflord. She had been utterly powerless.
She had thought—she remembered this as she stood on the bridge—that when she became an adult she wouldn’t be powerless. She would be like the other adults she could see. She’d be stronger. She wouldn’t be afraid of everything. As a child, she had even believed that.
She was an adult now—all Teela’s worries aside. She’d become the woman that she’d dreamed of being as a child. But the lack of fear hadn’t followed. The world she could see as a child was not, had never been, the whole world. The world she could see now was bigger, and the power in it, greater. The thugs—at least the mortal ones—that had peripherally served Nightshade were irrelevant, yes. She could handle them herself without blinking.
But the things that terrified her now were vaster, stronger, deadlier than those thugs had been. Was there never a time in life when she wouldn’t have to be afraid? She swallowed. She had the marks of the Chosen. She had the ability to save a life that no other doctor could save. She had saved mothers in difficult childbirth; she had saved infants in the same situation. She had saved foundlings injured by their reckless, childish courage. She had done more. She had brought the cohort back.
All but one.
“You ready?” Terrano asked softly, as if he could hear the whole of her thoughts.
Kaylin shook her head.
“Be ready soon, hmm?”
She looked at the Adversary, who wore the face of the High Lord. He could wear other faces, other forms; he could look like the worst of the unique Shadows that lined the interior border of Ravellon. But the form he took when he confronted those who wished to take the Test of Name was not his own.
What did he actually look like when appearances were stripped away? Monstrous? Terrible? Was that how she had to see him in order to carry—and use—this sword?
Or did the sword take the shape it had taken because she saw this as a literal battle? Given what was happening on the other side of the bridge, she didn’t feel that that was wrong, either. It was a battle. He was the enemy.
“You’ve never been in a war,” Terrano said, confirming that her thoughts were somehow visible, audible, to him. He spoke Elantran.
“Neither have you.”
“I have. I’ve seen the wars between familial lines. I’ve lost siblings and cousins to them. On the ground, they were all fighting to survive. They killed because the alternative was dying. Their enemies weren’t Shadows—but it doesn’t matter to the dead. Shadow, Barrani, Dragon—it’s all just death. They didn’t have to make monsters or be monsters. They wanted to survive.
“He’s an enemy. Either you will walk away from this, or he will. That’s all you need to know.”
But it wasn’t. If that had been all the knowledge she needed, she’d already be there, on the other side of the bridge. The Tower didn’t speak to her. She had taken—had been given—some part of the words that comprised its heart and its purpose, and they armored her, armed her; they were the weapons the Tower intended for her to use.
And yet. She wondered if they had taken those forms—if she had somehow dictated the forms—because that was the paradigm she was familiar with. War. Violence. Death.
The fire whispered to her, its voice a wordless crackle. She felt its heat, but it didn’t burn; it warmed. Without thought, she told the fire a story about the necessity of warmth in winter, without which there was ice and death. It was short, but the crackle quieted.
She looked across at the Adversary.
“What,” she said, raising her voice, “do you look like? What do you actually look like?”
The High Lord’s face smiled. It was the smile of incipient death. But he lowered his upheld arms, and said, “Do
es it matter?”
“Actually, yes. I think it does.”
“What do you wish to see? What do you fear to see?”
Kaylin shook her head. “My fears and desires are mine, not yours. I know most of them. Some ambush me by surprise, but they’re not yours. I want to know what you look like. I want to know what you want.” As she spoke, Terrano snorted, and she began to walk again. This time, however, she moved. She thought if she ran, she could close the distance quickly, but wasn’t certain.
She lowered the sword, but had no way to sheathe it.
“It is not my desires that are tantamount here, Chosen.” He spit the word out, and others came with it—True Words, all.
“Do you have none?” It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to Kaylin until this moment. About the Adversary. About the fieflords. About anything that had terrified her. She had been terrified. The assumption, the natural assumption, was that fear was the intent. “When you came here the first time, when you attacked the High Halls, when you attacked the High Lord—what did you want?”
Silence. Even the flow of golden words around his person froze.
Terrano nodded, as if this were somehow the right question. He was transparent now. She thought he was fading, and reached instinctively to grab him, to hold him here. If he left now, she thought he’d be lost forever.
“What if I want to be lost?” His voice was soft.
Her hand tightened, anyway. It would crush the cohort. It might crush Teela. And there would be a lot of things attempting to crush them. He could wait in line.
“Would you trap me as the Adversary has been trapped?”
“No!”
“Would you trap me as my friends are trapped?”
“They aren’t trapped anymore!”
“They’re caged,” Terrano said quietly.
“They’re not—they’re home.”
Cast in Oblivion Page 44
