Kaylin turned to Terrano. “When you broke into Orbaranne you said you weren’t aware that you were standing in a Hallionne.”
Terrano nodded, looking suspiciously at the familiar perched upright on Kaylin’s shoulder.
“You didn’t mean to slide under her defenses—but you said you had to push through to enter the safe space.”
He nodded again, looking even more suspicious, although this time suspicion was aimed at Kaylin.
“What, exactly, were you running from that you needed the space?”
He paused to consider this. “It’s not something that would harm you. Or could harm you. I don’t think it’s sentient the way we are—but there are predators in the outlands. Like wild animals, but hungrier. You get used to them,” he added, shrugging. “I recognized the space Orbaranne occupies as a space that predators wouldn’t go. They were avoiding it.”
“Those predators wouldn’t see me?”
“Not as you are now. I think.”
“Could you lead us there?”
“To where? Orbaranne?” He looked doubtful, and glanced at Sedarias as if for guidance. Which would have been ridiculous, except the ghostly Sedarias shook her head.
“I was thinking of Alsanis.”
Terrano frowned. “I think so.” The frown grew edges. “Dragon lady, you said you had experience fighting Shadow?”
Kaylin glanced at the gold Dragon; her eyes were now a deep blood red. “Yes.”
“I think now would be a good time to prepare.”
Kaylin, however, shook her head. “We need to get back to Alsanis.” She remembered, clearly, the way his Avatar had begun to melt, its form lost to what Terrano had called anger. And she remembered, as well—how could she have forgotten for even a minute?—what the cohort had tried to do to Orbaranne. They had not intended to destroy her, although that would have been the outcome of their goal; she would have been simple, collateral damage.
No, what they had hoped to derive from Orbaranne was the power inherent in the True Words at her heart. They required that power to free themselves, fully and finally, from Alsanis.
The war band led by Lord Barian’s mother had distracted the Lord of the West March and Lord Barian. Neither man remained within the Hallionne. Spike said there were two presences toward which the Shadow was moving. He had shown them two Barrani, with a human associate who had not accompanied them here.
And here, she thought, was the outlands. Of course he hadn’t.
Kaylin had asked if the Barrani were in need of rescue. What she hadn’t asked was if those two presences were actually in control of the Shadow, if it moved at their command. If it did, and if the Barrani Arcanists—and she assumed they must be Arcanists—were here in the outlands, they might be trying to do what Terrano had taught them, however imperfectly, to do.
She doubted very much they intended to approach Orbaranne. Not again. But she and Bellusdeo had fallen through the literal floor of Alsanis to land unceremoniously here. Here, where the cohort had been entrapped and almost devoured. They must be much closer to Alsanis than Terrano immediately realized.
“We need to go back to Alsanis,” she said. “That’s where the Shadows are heading.”
This time, the words caught the easily distracted Terrano, and his eyes widened. He had spent centuries perfecting his escape from Alsanis’s confines—but he did not hate the Hallionne. In some fashion, that Hallionne had become his only true home.
He was not the only one who felt that way; the whole of the cohort stiffened and turned. Sedarias spoke—silently, of course—but Terrano didn’t bother to make the attempt to catch her words. Grimmer now, he seemed older as he turned. This time, he nodded.
“Bellusdeo—”
“Get on,” the Dragon rumbled—at Terrano.
“The others—”
“It’s your duty to drag them with us. It’s your only duty.” Kaylin didn’t like the sound of that. “Kaylin—you find Alsanis.”
What Kaylin wanted to know was the how. Given that Barrani—Lords of the High Court—were demonstrably involved, she understood the why. People in power wanted more power, and people in power often felt that the rules that applied to others could be safely circumvented, rules being meant for the powerless.
But she understood, from one glance at Terrano, that Bellusdeo’s command would require the whole of his concentration.
“And you,” the Dragon said, not to Kaylin, but to the translucent familiar, “make sure we don’t get lost.”
Squawk.
“Yes, I know. I’m searching for the Barrani I now suspect are infested. Kaylin is searching for Alsanis. When we find one, I think we’ll find both.”
* * *
In the end, it was not Kaylin who found Alsanis. Nor was it Terrano. He was literally sweating—which the Barrani of Kaylin’s acquaintance did not do—with the effort of keeping his companions both together and in range, when he suddenly shouted.
“Sedarias, no!”
Sedarias, if ghostly and insubstantial, was not compliant and docile. She was angry, had been angry, since Terrano pulled her out of what was only metaphorically a cave, and she hadn’t gotten any calmer. Bellusdeo had taken to the air; Terrano had started to tell her to stay on the ground when the familiar had snapped at him.
After that, he had offered no further argument. He didn’t even have the energy to curse, so his expression had to speak for him. It spoke volumes, on the other hand. The cohort in their ghostly bodies walked—at speed and on air—alongside the fully aerial Dragon, until the moment Sedarias peeled away from the group. Allaron and Eddorian exchanged a telling glance; they looked to Terrano, miming action, before they followed her.
“Why,” he demanded, through gritted teeth, “did I even come here at all? Why am I trying to rescue them?”
“They’re your family,” Kaylin replied. “Bellusdeo—”
“On it.” The Dragon immediately corrected her course and headed in the direction Sedarias had taken, which was, in this case, to the left and down.
* * *
Before they’d even caught sight of what could only loosely be called ground, Kaylin’s arms and legs began to tingle as her natural—and painful—allergy to magic flared up. She’d never quite figured out why some magic—say, Helen’s magic—didn’t cause that reaction, and at the moment, it didn’t matter.
“We’ve got magic incoming,” she told the Dragon.
Terrano had fallen utterly silent. Kaylin glanced at him, and then reached out and grabbed his arm; to her eye, he was becoming alarmingly translucent. “I need to go to where they are.”
“We’ve got no way of fishing you out, if you do.”
“Send your familiar.”
“The one who very recently tried to kill you in a rage?”
“...Good point.”
Hope bit her ear, but she didn’t feel it; the tingling across the surface of her skin—the skin that bore the marks of the Chosen—became painful. This was both good and bad. Good, in that they probably wanted to go in the direction of the magic, and bad because: pain. Sedarias was only barely visible, as were the two who had followed her; the rest of the cohort stayed with Terrano, but they were all turned as one toward their distant leader.
Kaylin wondered if Mandoran had elected to accompany Annarion because it meant he could get away from Sedarias—but she was always in his thoughts anyway. Literally.
As expected, Kaylin’s arms began to hurt; the sleeves of her shirt and the legs of her pants now caused acute pain if she so much as twitched. Given that she was riding a Dragon who wasn’t exactly placid and still, there was a lot more than just twitching. But as she started to count in Leontine—one of the first vocal exercises she’d learned, to the great amusement of Marcus’s kits—the ground appeared.
* * *
If she’d had any doubts about the speed at which Bellusdeo had been flying, they were shattered, because they couldn’t have approached ground any faster if they’d been falling. But the gold Dragon was not a fledgling, and she veered what felt like inches from the surface, changing her angle to avoid collision. Kaylin’s stomach still felt like it was hundreds of feet above them as the Dragon roared. And breathed.
Fire fanned out across the landscape, changing its color in a brief burst of orange and yellow. In the midst of those flames, a Barrani voice shouted a warning. It was a little late. Or maybe not; the fire had not consumed him and he clearly wasn’t screaming.
Sedarias gave the Dragon the side-eye, but nodded grimly when their eyes met. Terrano slid off the Dragon’s back—or tried. Kaylin’s familiar flew at his face, and his instinctive backward movement resettled him.
“I don’t think he wants you to leave. Whatever you’re doing for the cohort is working—for them. But I think he’s trying to tell you that the rest of us may need to move.”
“I can’t fight from here.”
Kaylin shrugged. “Neither can I. But he clearly considers the possibility that you’ll be lost—to us—more of a danger.” Before he could reply, she added, “Without you, we’ll lose the rest of them. You’re what’s keeping them here.”
This mollified him, but only enough that he looked sulky and not as determined. “They’re not staying put.”
They weren’t. Sedarias walked directly into the line of Bellusdeo’s open jaw. She reached out to touch the underside of the Dragon’s jaw; her hand passed through it, which seemed to satisfy some unspoken curiosity.
“The things that are likely to kill us—”
“Kill you.”
“—kill the rest of us aren’t likely to hurt them.” But even saying it, Kaylin wasn’t certain. “And I think we’ve found our two Shadow controllers.” She did not, however, see the Shadow itself. “Do you know where we are?”
He said nothing, and not just because he was sulking; his eyes had shifted to opalescent black, which was possibly her least favorite eye color, ever.
“Can you hear your namebound?” he asked.
Kaylin shook her head.
“That’s unfortunate.”
“We’re at the Alsanis end of the portal path?”
“No. This is Alsanis.”
* * *
Kaylin believed Terrano, but wanted to argue with him anyway, because she could not sense Alsanis at all. She expected the wild chaos of the portal paths by this point, but did not expect to find them within the Hallionne himself. Lifting her left arm, she rolled back her sleeve, almost weeping as she did; she felt as if she were peeling off the skin itself.
The marks across her arms were now an odd shade of gray blue. They were glowing, but the glow was faint and muted. On some occasions the symbols lifted themselves from her skin, as if they had life and will of their own; this time, they remained flat. She rolled the second sleeve up to join the first as Bellusdeo followed in Sedarias’s wake.
“Is Allaron carrying a sword?”
“He is,” the Dragon rumbled.
“So are the other two,” Terrano added.
“What does he expect a sword to do, in his state?”
No one answered. Bellusdeo, however, spoke three sharp words, and Kaylin clenched her jaws to keep a small scream from escaping.
“Apologies,” the Dragon said.
Kaylin barely heard her. Something had shifted in the wake of Bellusdeo’s spell, and she could see both the ground and what lay across it far more clearly. Her heart, such as it was, sank, and if her stomach had finally rejoined the rest of her, she almost wished it hadn’t. They were standing on stones; the stones were large, smooth and perfectly interlocked.
And there were words written across their surfaces.
As Bellusdeo continued her forward movement, those words began to rise, the flat inscription gaining volume as the lines, squiggles, and dots that comprised them asserted their existence in three dimensions. Kaylin sucked in air. Terrano was right, but in the worst possible way. Yes, this was Alsanis—but this was the heart of Alsanis. These were the words that defined him; the words that gave him absolute power within his own boundaries. The words that gave him life.
They were dark, not golden, and the edges of their various lines gleamed in a way that implied they were sharp enough to cut.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kaylin told the gold Dragon.
“I’m willing to entertain better suggestions.”
“I think we need to walk very, very carefully here.”
“Implying that I can’t.”
“You can walk carefully at your size, yes—but the gaps between the words here aren’t obligingly hall width. And I wouldn’t bet on Dragon scale as a defense against those edges.”
“How did the Barrani evade them?”
“Hells if I know.”
The familiar squawked.
“We are not going to walk through this mess holding hands as if we were Kaylin’s foundlings,” the Dragon replied, in her iciest voice.
Terrano grimaced. “Can I improvise?” he asked the familiar.
The familiar snorted, the gesture a miniature version of Bellusdeo’s, with smoke. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Terrano eyed the small cloud and grimaced. “Seriously?”
Squawk.
“Don’t look at me,” Kaylin said, when Terrano did swivel his glare. “I can’t understand him.”
The gold Dragon, however, could, and she collapsed once again into a gold plated warrior princess. “Next time,” she told Kaylin, “I am bringing a sword.”
* * *
“How can he even be your familiar if you can’t understand him?” The gleaming field of risen words didn’t seem to bother Terrano at all. The fact that those words appeared to be in the innermost sanctum of Alsanis didn’t, either. No, the only thing that seemed to be of concern were the cohort and the distance that had grown between them.
“I can understand him some of the time,” she replied, trying not to feel defensive.
“Well now would be a good time, don’t you think?”
He spoke in Barrani, but spoke as if it were Elantran, which was a neat trick that Kaylin hoped never to learn; High Barrani forced her speech into more acceptable patterns. “Where are the cohort?”
“They’ve gone ahead a bit.”
One, the tallest of the number, had jogged back. Although he couldn’t interact with them physically, he nonetheless avoided the edges of the words that now formed columns. Kaylin thought they’d be deadly if they started to move. He spoke to Terrano, his lip movements slow and exaggerated.
Terrano made a face. “They want us to hurry,” he finally told Kaylin. “Sedarias has reached the edge of the containment I’ve put in place, and she’s not happy about being restrained.”
“That’s more words than he used,” Bellusdeo observed.
“I filled in all the blanks.”
* * *
Kaylin started to jog. She could maintain a slow jog for a very long distance, and could move into a sprint if the situation demanded it. Bellusdeo had no difficulty keeping up; Terrano seemed to resent the pace. Or at least being forced to keep it using actual legs.
But they didn’t catch up with the cohort; Allaron hadn’t lied. Sedarias was both angry and intent. The moment she realized she could safely proceed again, she did—and all of the cohort went with her.
Alsanis’s words started to move. They were anchored in place, each to a very large stone, but they could, and did, cover the range of that stone; in places, they came together like a wall of blades.
“Should we try flying over them?” Bellusdeo asked; she clearly felt that Kaylin’s directive had been the wrong one.
Kaylin shook her head. “I think they can move up and down at will. They seem to be confined horizontally.” She glanced at her familiar; he nodded. But he didn’t lift a wing; whatever she could see with her own eyes, he considered good enough.
The travel toward Sedarias grew much more treacherous; the stones into which words had been engraved were smaller, and the words themselves appeared to be more intricate. Bellusdeo managed to avoid them; Terrano, accustomed to a variety of traveling forms, didn’t. He didn’t instantly get turned into diced pseudo-Barrani, but he did get cut, and he did bleed. He seemed almost offended by the injury, and threw the familiar a baleful glare, but proceeded far more cautiously after that.
Caution, however, only carried them so far.
* * *
“That’s a pretty solid wall,” Kaylin said to the Dragon as she looked at the words that lay ahead of them. The stones upon which the words had been carved, and from which they’d risen, were smaller, which narrowed the space between what were effectively spinning blades.
The Dragon concurred. “Is flight still forbidden?”
The familiar nodded. As a small lizard, his facial expressions were limited, but he looked concerned, to Kaylin.
“How did the cohort get past this?”
“Don’t ask me—I’m not one of them anymore.”
Kaylin exhaled. “But you’re here.”
“Obviously I have an intelligence deficit.”
“Fine. You recognized this as Alsanis.”
“I spent most of my existence trapped here.”
“So did the cohort. What did Sedarias do—if she managed to do anything—that allowed them safe passage?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because my skin feels like it’s being flayed off, and that’s probably not a good sign—for Alsanis.”
Terrano fell silent for one long beat.
“What are you doing?”
“Be quiet.”
Bellusdeo shook her head when Kaylin opened her mouth again, and Kaylin closed it, missing Severn. He was generally content to let her do most of, if not all of, the talking. But as she watched Terrano, she had a feeling that he was talking, and in a way she couldn’t. For perhaps the first time, she considered the advantages of being Terrano and Mandoran. She didn’t much like the idea of getting stuck in walls, though.
The words spun slowly—and loudly—to a halt. And the air grew less heavy, the ground less hard. She couldn’t hear Alsanis, and that still bothered her, but she now had a faint sense of his presence.
“What did you do?” Bellusdeo demanded.
Terrano grimaced. “When we were struggling to find our way out of our cage, we developed different forms of communication. There were layers to it; we could communicate almost entirely truthfully while obscuring small, but critical facts.
“It was obfuscation that was the important part, then. Of course, Alsanis was aware of our various attempts—he’s a Hallionne. So it became a bit of a game. We have ways of communication that in theory shouldn’t exist, and he created systems to hear that nonexistent communication. We had successes, but most of them didn’t last long—it was always work to keep ahead of Alsanis.”
“So you were—”
“Using one of the older secret modes, yes. If Alsanis has somehow been cut off from communication with us—I mean with you and the Dragon—there’s a strong chance that the rest of the modes we developed were not considered when the interference was put in place.” For a moment, he seemed highly pleased with himself, which once again emphasized his youthfulness.
“Did he answer you?”
Terrano pointed at the word forms. “He never used the undercurrent to speak with us; that would have made it clear, immediately, that he could. But he learned to listen.”
“While he has this much control, let’s get moving. Ummm, I don’t suppose he could make the edges of those lines less sharp?”
Terrano snorted. “You might as well ask if he can make you less clumsy. If the edges are too sharp, don’t touch them.”
Bellusdeo’s eyes lightened as she snickered, because clearly, that’s what friends did. Kaylin forced herself not to reply, and began to navigate toward the distant cohort. She had questions, of course—but questions had to wait.
The tighter congregation of words did not diminish; neither did their edges. While it was easier to walk between them when they did not spin or move, following Terrano’s advice was difficult, and became more so as they continued their awkward pursuit of Sedarias and company.
Three words in, Kaylin knew she was going to need a new shirt; the current one had been cut in three places, and the third cut wasn’t small enough to patch. There’d been almost no friction; the slicing of cloth had made no sound. She glanced at Bellusdeo, but the Dragon scale was more hardy than simple cloth.
The fourth cut broke skin. It was a very shallow cut, more of a scrape or a scratch than a wound, and blood beaded from it slowly, welling up in uneven blobs of red. In the stillness, Kaylin didn’t even curse.
She did curse the fifth time; the cut was deeper, and the blood, rather than beading, ran down her arm, as if it were trying to underline the injury. This time, that blood spread across her skin, running across the marks that lay there, flat and glowing a gentle gray. Her familiar squawked in her ear, in the tone of voice she imagined Terrano would use if he’d noticed.
And this time, the cut was deep enough that some of Kaylin’s blood was left on the line of the word she’d been trying to circumnavigate. Terrano cursed as he turned to look, his eyes rounding, his jaw falling open. It would have been comical at any other time; now, it was vaguely terrifying.
“What—what did you do?”
It was the Dragon who answered, her eyes once again a darker orange. “She didn’t manage to avoid the middle stroke on that word. I don’t suppose you know what the word is?”
Terrano shook his head. “We weren’t exactly trying to learn how to speak True Words.” But even saying it, his gaze narrowed. “Well...not all of us. Eddorian might know. Or Serralyn.”
The two names were names Kaylin didn’t often hear at home. “Ask them,” she said. Her thoughts caught up with her mouth only after the words had escaped. “...Sorry. I am so accustomed to Mandoran and Annarion. I forgot you can’t.”
Terrano said nothing. It was the wrong kind of nothing. He managed a shrug, turned away from the word and began to walk. Kaylin almost joined him, but Bellusdeo caught her by the shoulder. “Look at the word,” she said, her voice the wrong kind of soft—the kind you got when you lost control of your voice and couldn’t speak more loudly than a shaky whisper.
Kaylin had been looking at almost nothing else.
The word had started an odd shimmer the moment Kaylin had bled on it; she’d been watching because she was afraid it would start to move again, and if it did, she’d be shredded. But that fear was unfounded; whatever Alsanis had done, the word remained much more tightly anchored in space. What changed, now, was its color. Where the word had been dark, almost obsidian, something began to spread across its visible surfaces, until the whole was a pale, almost pulsing, gray. To Kaylin’s eye, it was uglier, but she understood, as she watched, that the whole thing was transforming itself to better resemble the marks on her skin—marks that remained stubbornly flat.
“What have you done?” the Dragon asked, in the same soft voice.
“Nothing deliberate.”
“You’re going to have to do something about that. Accidentally tripping over the security precautions of a building that’s like Helen, but on a far grander scale, is not something you should be doing carelessly.”
Since Sedarias was the one who had chosen the direction, Kaylin thought this wasn’t particularly fair. She was old enough now that she didn’t bother to put the feeling into words, although in part this was because Terrano came running back. The sharp edges of these words did not cut him; he seemed to pass through them. Or they passed through him.
“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” He was almost breathless, which was unusual for a Barrani.
“Why?”
“...Sedarias said it’s helpful.”
The cut, which wasn’t deep, was already drying, and Kaylin really didn’t fancy shredding herself—deliberately—on the sharp, gleaming edges of these words. She wished, again, that she’d dragged Mandoran with her to Evanton’s, rather than the Dragon; she was pretty certain if he were here with her, he could talk to Sedarias no matter how far ahead she was. Terrano couldn’t.
But Terrano’s trust in Sedarias had not wavered in his absence from the cohort, and if he could not entirely return to his friends, he had returned to that trust.
Kaylin gritted teeth, forced herself to walk to the next word, and cut the mound of her left palm.
“Are you choosing the words at random?”
“Yes,” Kaylin said, as Spike said, “No.”
She’d forgotten about Spike in the surge of adrenaline that accompanied the knowledge that the invaders were inside Alsanis. This wasn’t the first time she’d encountered Shadow at the heart of a building, and they’d managed to repel those Shadows. The Shadows had been trying to revise, to rewrite, the words at the heart of a Tower, in the fief that was now Tiamaris.
But Terrano and his allies had been trying something entirely different, when they had almost destroyed Orbaranne. They’d been trying to absorb, to drain, the power of the words themselves. Kaylin understood that words had power—but that power was supposed to be metaphorical.
Here, it was not.
To speak these words one had to be Immortal. Or more. She remembered, dimly, the vision of one of the Ancients cutting into himself so that his blood ran into a basin—an ancient version of the mirrors upon which the city of Elantra now depended.
Her blood was not his blood. She was not a creator, not a god, if the word even applied. What she did here wasn’t the same—but if her blood was mortal and thin and the wrong color—not golden but red—she bled anyway. She offered that blood, grimly, to Alsanis. Instead of avoiding the edges of words, she practically leapt between them, because she really did not want to cut herself every single time.
“What do you mean, it’s not random?” she heard Bellusdeo ask.
Spike’s words were underlined with a whirring; clicks broke the syllables as he replied. “Random implies that she is not making choices. But she is following a specific path; you will note it if you—”
“I can see where she’s going.”
“—read the words.”
It was the Dragon’s turn to be frustrated, and she wasn’t above expressing it; the air at Kaylin’s back grew much warmer. Kaylin was fairly certain that Dragon breath wouldn’t harm these words. And she understood the frustration, because she was choosing words with no understanding of their meaning; she chose the ones with slightly wider forms while she picked her way across a nonexistent path.
But these words, like the first one, turned an even, almost glowing gray. She stopped once to look back, to see the path she’d taken. Terrano, however, had once again disappeared, running back to Sedarias as if afraid she would be lost here.
And as Kaylin cleared the last word, or rather, looked ahead to see an almost open space, she skidded to a halt so suddenly Bellusdeo ran into her.
* * *
The open space was a clearing, ringed in a circle of bristling, standing words, each bearing edges that could scar dragon scale. Kaylin understood that this was the heart of Alsanis, the heart of the words that defined his existence. It was in a similar space that Terrano and his associates had once attacked Orbaranne, seeking power.
Terrano was not the attacker here, but the space itself wasn’t empty. Two very physical Barrani were at its center. They weren’t dressed the way they had been in Spike’s Records replay, but his images had been correct: one was male, one female. Their robes appeared to be dusty with travel. If they had come here through the portal paths, they had not found an entrance through the Hallionne—any of the Hallionne. Had they, the Hallionne would have been forewarned.
They were armed, and they turned toward Kaylin. She could see the glint of swords; the man was either left-handed or ambidextrous. Either way, he was Barrani, and Kaylin suspected that if he were here, in this room, he was also an Arcanist; the sword was almost irrelevant.
She ducked immediately behind the nearest word; she would still be visible, but the words themselves weren’t lifeless architecture. As if he thought the same thing, he failed to cast anything resembling a spell—but against Kaylin, he wouldn’t need it. The familiar sat up while Kaylin navigated, and plastered a wing across her face.
She didn’t immediately realize why; the man looked no different viewed through the familiar’s wing than he had through her unaugmented vision, and it wasn’t always easy to move in a way that kept the wing firmly over her eyes. But he never smacked her face this way unless he thought there was something she should see. She looked.
Both the moving Barrani man and the woman who appeared to be standing sentinel remained unchanged. But through the wing, she could see the cohort clearly; she could not see Terrano. If he was here at all, he was hidden.
Bellusdeo was not.
The Barrani man stopped walking when the Dragon stepped out, gleaming in golden armor; he raised his sword as she inhaled. She didn’t bother with warnings or threats; that wasn’t her way. She breathed. The man spoke three harsh words, and the sword in his hand split the flame. Kaylin wondered, briefly, if it were one of The Three, the swords created by Barrani master smiths in a bygone age to kill Dragons. She lost that thought when the metal cracked and shattered. The shards flew out and away from the man, but the woman had seen Bellusdeo.
“Hold her off!” she shouted, although her hand was also on the hilt of a sword.
Kaylin noticed that the woman’s sword, which she had assumed was in a rest position, was actually in contact with the stone beneath it. And she noticed that the tip—in the familiar-winged view—was glowing; it was a red glow, striped with gray, and it was dark enough that glow was not quite the right word to describe it.
But that reddish gray light was spreading; beneath the tip of the sword, Kaylin could now see a network of lines that made the rock beneath them look cracked or fractured, but not yet broken.
Kaylin knelt immediately to the side of Bellusdeo’s battle, and placed one hand flat on the stone.
“What are you doing?” Terrano demanded.
The question half surprised her; she assumed, and had always assumed, that what she saw through the crutch of familiar wing, Terrano saw without effort.
She didn’t answer the question, in the vain hope that the woman carrying the sword would fail to hear it. Terrano, on the other hand, was not exactly quiet.
Kaylin lifted only her head. “Bellusdeo—it’s the other one you have to stop!”
The Dragon roared; the ground shook. Terrano, however, was no longer bothering Kaylin. He headed toward the woman with the sword and checked his steps as Bellusdeo swung her head and sent the woman’s partner flying. Unfortunately, that was literal, and if Kaylin had entertained the small hope that the man was not an Arcanist, it was dashed when he failed to fall.
The woman was not Terrano; she did not curse. The Barrani she used was clear and entirely recognizable. “Stop them!”
Kaylin once again bent her head. Beneath her hand, the stone over which she’d walked was warm; it had the give of muscular flesh. The word that hovered above her was not engraved into its surface, and Kaylin wondered if it had been, before the Barrani arrived.
Reaching up, she cut her hand and let the blood flow freely as she reached more gingerly for the sharp edge of a long, looped line. The word absorbed her blood, the shift in color obvious almost immediately. To Kaylin’s discomfort, it was almost exactly the same color as the web pulsing beneath the woman’s sword.
Terrano came back to Kaylin. “Hold on to something. No, not that—you’ll lose a limb.”
“What are you doing?”
“Talking to Alsanis.”
“Is he replying?”
“I hope so.” He turned toward the woman who appeared to be in charge. “I didn’t come here planning to fight.” There was a grimace in his voice; Kaylin couldn’t see it, because he was now standing entirely in front of her, barring the way. “Whatever it is you’re trying to do, do it quickly.”
Kaylin was not under any illusion; she could be bled dry and she wouldn’t be able to cover all of the words at Alsanis’s core; he was far more complex than Helen. Her familiar didn’t lower his wing, and as she bent once again to study the lines that seemed to travel like veins beneath skin made of stone from the tip of the Barrani woman’s sword, she saw that they had spread, and were spreading, beneath her.
She didn’t know what would happen when they stopped; didn’t know what their purpose was. She assumed that it was...not good. Her familiar bit her ear, which, given the position of his wing, took real flexibility.
Kaylin put the bleeding hand flat against the stone, and pushed.