Kaylin examined him as a healer, looking for death. She couldn’t see it. The connection between them—two palms—didn’t imply death. She’d touched corpses before, while watching Red in the morgue. This was nothing like that.
“No. I told you, death for us, death for you, it is very different. You are so slight, all of you—even the one whose vestigial name you seek. I gave what I was meant to give.”
She felt no resentment in this being. No anger. No sense that his life was a universal injustice. No Why me?
“Are you dead now?”
“No. No, Chosen. I am not, and I find it strange. I had purpose. I had meaning. I did what I was meant to do. Without purpose, what point life? I am one of the youngest of my kind,” he added. “And more attuned to the living because of it. The eldest were not; they could barely see the living, and could not always countenance their import, except in an intellectual way.
“But the youngest could. We were born—and that is not the right word, but it will have to do for now—into a world, into the many worlds, where life dwelled. Those worlds were replete with the idle creations of the elders before us. And we marveled at the mutations of those creations, achieved without further interference. Always, always, the delight of the unexpected, the unpredicted. It was the unpredicted that quickened us; some sought it actively, seeing in change the reason for life at all.
“That was not my purpose. It was not the reason I was born, the reason I became.”
He fell silent. That silence was broken by the warbling of birds.
Kaylin felt...outrage. Outrage that his parents—if they could be called that—had birthed him simply so he could die. She had seen neglected children, children who would have been better off as orphans, and children whose parents treated their entire existence as accessories. This was worse.
“No,” he said softly. “It is not. We exist, we come into being, with purpose. It is not what defines you—but your kind often seek the echoes of greater purpose without fully understanding the cost. I do not rage. I do not feel that I was thrown away, that I was meant to die in the stead of others. Perhaps that is not something you can fully comprehend. You have seen my blood in the Lake of Life.”
She stopped breathing for a long moment.
“Do you consider it unnecessary sacrifice? From the moment they were born, the entire Barrani race has lived, breathed, grown because of my blood. You have seen my blood in the chronicle—I believe you call it a mirror. There are places you have not touched, have not seen, but should you, there are traces of me in all of them.”
“But—”
“How came I to be here?” He smiled as if in approval. She thought a promotion from corporal to something higher wouldn’t have so instantly warmed her, and flushed at the thought.
“You think of this as...the outlands. As a place that exists beyond the borders of your plane. Your reality. But you have seen it in the heart of the being you call home; you have seen it in Hallionne, created to be shelter and peace for those who were weary.”
“I’ve seen it around Ravellon,” she said.
“Yes. Even there. It is not a place. It is possibility, except in one way: it cannot create sentience. Life? Yes. The trees you see here are alive. The insects, should I choose that detail, alive. But even the forest creatures of your world cannot be created entirely from the ether without will and some small part of ourselves as the price demanded.
“This is what all worlds were before they were touched and shaped; this is what all worlds came from, when words were invoked. The speaking was difficult; it drained the speakers, the words flowing from them to be lost forever, the lands whose tale they told immutable, fixed, the lives within them separate, the possibilities narrowed.” His smile was odd. “To us, then, your worlds might seem almost dead.”
“What?” She glanced at Hope.
Hope’s head was bowed, his eyes closed, his tiny jaw shut. He had withdrawn the wing that revealed nothing more unusual than her own eyes could see, and had folded it across his shoulders. He stood, however; the indolent drape that implied boredom was nowhere in sight.
“They are not dead. To those of us who came after, they are teeming with possibility. It is a constrained possibility. It has its own boundaries, its own form—but within that form, so many variations. You are one of them.”
He then raised his empty hand. Kaylin didn’t understand the words he spoke.
Hope lifted his wings, pushed himself off Kaylin’s shoulder, and came to stand on one of this being’s fingers. It made him look both tiny and far more transparent; she could see the entirety of the being’s hand through Hope’s body. He seemed to flicker there, and almost without thinking, she reached out to grab him.
The being looked down at her. “I mean him no harm. But he is ancient, and if whimsical, he has the ability—defined as life is defined—to choose his own purpose. I wished merely to discuss what the consequences of those varied choices have been.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, retaining her hold on Hope, “but we don’t have time. Azoria is out in my plane of existence, and she’s trying to kill most of my friends.”
“Most?”
“Some of my friends aren’t in Azoria’s strange mansion, or she’d be trying to murder them, too.”
“I see. I wish to speak with him, but I understand at least the constraints of time. What I do not understand is the loss of purpose. I do not understand why I exist as I now exist at all. I understand only one thing: you woke me. I believe, given the extent of my injuries, this person you sought tried. But you have the words of my people; she did not; she was not Chosen.” His eyes narrowed. “They are not your words, but they are yours to use. There is a telling there that I have not seen before. They are your purpose. And if they have spoken to me, if they have chosen to wake me, it means I am needed once again.”
“For what?”
He looked genuinely confused, and when he answered, his words were syllables with no meaning to Kaylin’s ears.
Hope, however, squawked. Loudly.
“It is not yet time,” was the soft reply—but this time, Kaylin could understand it. “And I am not yet whole enough to face any duty. Come, Chosen, find what you must find, do what you must do. I must think now.”
Kaylin nodded. Closing her eyes, she looked for Azoria’s name.
She had never asked any of the cohort whether her knowledge of the name she had carried back to them would have given her the power of control over them when the names were almost unattached to their corporeal selves. She expected to find the remnants of a Barrani True Name, thin and almost devoid of light.
“No,” the being said, “I cannot sense it. If it is to be found at all, you will have to find it. I am uncertain that a simple creation’s breath could control or contain me. But your kind were oft surprising and confounding.” She didn’t tell him that Azoria was definitively not her kind, being Barrani. She understood that to this being, there was probably very little difference—even if his blood was the Lake in which the entirety of the Barrani race rested, awaiting birth or rebirth.
“Can you find Azoria? Are you aware of her?”
“No, Chosen. But I know what was given the Lake, and there is nothing of that in me now. I understand your fear. It is not irrelevant. I am too new, and too unaware. Waking is rebirth. Sleep is death. Neither of these words describe what I am, but you would perish long before the end of the tale of who I am, even diminished by sacrifice and purpose.”
She could not see the words in him. Not by touch, not by healing. She could feel the weight of her marks, the light of them, the exhaustion in focusing the power inherent to them; she sensed no like words in the being whose hand she touched. It was these words, however, that she looked for now—or rather, words like them.
She felt, as she continued her search, a strange but familiar sensation. It took her a moment to place it: she had felt it when she had taken a new name from the Lake of Life—writ small and entirely unlike the actual Lake she would later see. This was...his blood, something entirely unlike hers, or Barrani blood, or Leontine blood.
No wonder she couldn’t perceive thought, intent, memory: it was...words. It was True Words—things she could hear if she listened carefully. But she’d never understood them beyond a flash of insight, an instinctive touch. She would die of old age—or starvation—if she made the attempt to do that here: there was just too much.
She didn’t try. But she thought she knew now where she had to look for Azoria’s name—or what was left of it. It was here, in an environment that was almost natural to its unhoused form. She almost wanted to give up before she’d started; there was just too much here to examine. Too much from which to separate a single transformed word. Azoria had seen the Lake of Life. Given Azoria, she might have understood that housed in this sleeping remnant of an Ancient god was a lake, very like the Lake of Life.
Think, Kaylin, she told herself. Think. What would you want, if you were Azoria? Would you be content to just embed the word?
No. She wouldn’t. Could she assume that Azoria understood what she had found? Yes. Better than Kaylin herself had. Azoria’s life was not a Hawk’s life. It wasn’t the life of a child who had been born fief-side, where law was whim and subject to change without notice.
Kaylin couldn’t have devoted the entirety of her life to study, to research, to ancient books and dead languages. She cared about living languages because they belonged to living people. The joy study gave Serralyn wasn’t in Kaylin. Never would be. She had studied, with intense focus, the things that she was certain she could use.
If Azoria intended to somehow anchor her life in a god, she wouldn’t randomly embed it. It wouldn’t be enough to be one of so many, many words. It wouldn’t give her control. It wouldn’t be her power. No.
She had watched Red work in his morgue; she had seen injuries that were fatal. She considered where she herself might have lodged her True Name in such circumstances: the heart.
But she wasn’t Azoria. That symbolism wouldn’t be Azoria’s. But the head, the mind: those were the things she prized, the things that she believed would yield power. The Ancient had been missing limbs, missing tongue. Flesh had been scraped and scarred so badly the scabs that had formed had become a prison.
And she remembered, then, the look of the gigantic word that they had approached in the distance. Not a True Word. Not a word that could ever return to the Lake. But it had been shaped as it had for a reason.
Entwining her fingers around fingers far larger than hers, she felt like a small child, but she took a figurative step back. Her sense of the giant, her sense of what he contained, she removed, layer by layer, until she was standing, in her mind’s eye, at the edge of the Lake of Life writ large. The waters were clear—clear and golden; they promised peace, offered both hope and despair, joy and sorrow, purpose and oblivion. They promised life.
There was never total freedom in life. Kaylin knew that better than Azoria had. But she’d found joy and a kind of freedom in becoming herself. In allowing hope, not fear, to guide her path forward. No path was smooth. No path was perfect. She stumbled. She tripped. She made different choices as she got back on her feet and dusted herself off. But she’d come to understand Corporal Kaylin Neya; she almost liked what she was now.
Azoria had made a different choice. She wanted to become something greater than she was.
Once, Kaylin would have mistakenly believed that they had had the same goal, the same driving need: to become better than they were. To become more. But it wasn’t the same. There were limitations that Kaylin had accepted as a child and as a fiefling that she should never have accepted—but there were limitations that could not be altered or changed: she was never going to be Immortal. She was never going to be beautiful. She was never going to be a hero. She was never going to see her mother again.
Azoria, in deciding to change her circumstances, accepted no limitations at all. The gift of immortality, the gift of life, was too scant, too stunted, too powerless. Azoria would have become a god, if she could.
She couldn’t. No more could Kaylin, Chosen. Kaylin had killed in the midst of anger, fear, and bitter self-loathing. Azoria had killed for different reasons. Both were murderers. Kaylin couldn’t judge her for that.
But Kaylin’s atonement, if it was that, was to prevent others from being what she had almost fully become. To save the people who would be their victims, or their future victims. To add justice to a world that didn’t innately possess it.
She let go of judgment, anger, hatred; she was entitled to none of them. Well, maybe hatred—but it didn’t help. It had never helped. The Consort had made clear that one couldn’t approach the Lake of Life that way. The moment the personal encroached, choices led to disaster, to mistakes.
Yes, she understood what she must do.
As she had once before, she plunged her hand into the Lake. Words scudded briefly against her palm. The surface of the Lake was illusion, an analogy she’d created. There was constant motion beneath the surface, and in that motion, she could feel the brief shape of passing words as they moved across her palm, across the back of her hand, and between her fingers.
She had come to the Lake once, and she had taken what she needed.
She came now to repay that favor. She couldn’t speak words, couldn’t pronounce them, couldn’t even understand intellectually what was needed. Or why. So she asked the Lake, instead, for what the Lake needed.
In answer, something scudded against her palm, and the waters went still. She knew it wasn’t water in any true sense; that she’d somehow made of this interior landscape a paradigm that she could understand, a way of approach that matched the only experience she had.
She carried that paradigm to its conclusion: she gripped this shape, this rough, almost spongelike texture, tightly, as she began to lift it from the waters. She had expected it to be difficult; had expected it to be almost too heavy to carry, too large to easily extract.
No. It was larger in size than the marks on her arms, spinning in their layered bracelets, but it was far, far lighter than any of the words or partial words Kaylin had carried from the Lake. It wasn’t golden; it was almost ash gray—the huge word writ small and shakily exact.
She drew the word from the Lake and as she did, she lost sight of the water; her hand was no longer in contact with the hand of the Ancient. In the palm of her left hand she carried an ash gray word—a word that was not a True Word, a word that was, linguistically, a part of a language that did not have immutable meaning.
Just as Kaylin’s spoken words didn’t have immutable meaning.
“I see,” the Ancient said. “It is a word from one of the many lesser languages.” They smiled. “What do you call the language?”
“Azoria,” Kaylin replied. “And it’s not a language. It’s a one-of-a-kind word.”
“No language can consist of one word.”
She nodded and then fell silent, thinking about what he had said. “No. This isn’t a language. It’s a single word. Language is... We use it to talk to people. To our friends. To our acquaintances. I mean, we avoid using words at all in the face of angry boss—”
“Boss?”
“It’s like lord or emperor.”
“Ah. Ruler.”
“But we use language. It’s the bridge between ourselves and other people.”
“You said language.”
Technically, the Ancient had said language and Kaylin hadn’t argued. She considered the single word in her hand. “New words come into languages all the time. But this isn’t meant to communicate. It’s not used to...share.”
It hit her, as she spoke, that the Barrani Lake, that the Barrani existences, were single words, part of an ancient language—possibly the first language—that the sum of those words was an entire race; that together, the Barrani formed a series of complex sentences, paragraphs, perhaps entire books or libraries of books.
That had never occurred to her before this moment.
Azoria Berranin had chosen to absent herself from that conversation. Kaylin looked up. “Can you fix this?”
“If by fix you mean return it to what it was before it was almost erased, no. It is not as simple as regrowth of a lost limb.” Which wasn’t simple at all.
“But I perceive that this is a dark, angry language, a language of isolation. Were it like your companion’s oddly textured name, I could do as you ask.”
“No, thank you,” Terrano said, speaking for the first time, his voice uncharacteristically grave and respectful. “Lord Kaylin, we must leave. If you have found what we sought, we must return to our friends.”
“Spike, can you take us back to the door?” Kaylin’s voice was a whisper.
Spike emerged from the palm of her hand; she felt the tremor in the tips of his protrusions.
The Ancient’s smile deepened, widened, as they looked at Spike. The recognition and delight in their expression cast a wave of envy—even jealousy—over the watching Hawk. When the Ancient spoke, she couldn’t understand a word they said, but Spike’s quivering increased. Kaylin knew it wasn’t fear that caused it.
Spike whirred, clicked, shook in place.
He wishes to remain, Hope said. The Ancient wishes to converse with Spike; Spike was, and is, a historian.
“Can you take us home? Like, without having to devour the marks?”
Your marks were never worthy of being a sacrifice, Hope replied, voice soft. They are your source of power, but it is not power that you prize.
“Fine. Can you take us home without having to devour Terrano, or one of my limbs?”
Terrano glared at the familiar on Kaylin’s shoulder. “I can take us back, thanks.”
“You wish to leave?” the Ancient asked, looking away from Spike. “They say they have been tasked with your safety, and they should not abandon you.”
“Tasked by who? No, never mind. Spike wants to stay with you and I’m not his responsibility. I understand Spike’s feelings. I’d stay if I could,” she added, embarrassed to mean it so viscerally. “But I have what I came for, and if I don’t get back, I might lose a lot of my friends. Their deaths won’t be like yours. They won’t wake again, no matter how much power we put into the attempt to revive them.”
“And you wish to find an exit to your world from the planes of eternity.”
Kaylin nodded.
“That, Chosen, I can do, if you will but relieve Spike of his duties. You will take that word with you?”
“That’s the hope, yes. Is it possible?”
“That word is, in part, of this plane. I am uncertain that removing the subtle roots will not destabilize the structure of the whole.”
“We’re not concerned with the structural stability of this particular attempt at creating a word. It’s bound to someone who was once Barrani; the heart of it came from the Lake of Life, and it will never return.”
For the first time, furrows appeared across the immaculate gold of the Ancient’s skin.
“First,” they said, and gestured. Between two of the pillars to the left of Kaylin, an arch appeared. “Your exit. Second, the word you have retrieved. Understand that I was not born as destroyer. It is not my gift, not my strength. It was never my purpose.
“I will not help you destroy. I will not aid you in killing. But I owe you a debt, and when I discover what new purpose I have woken to, I will pay it as I am able. Hold tight to what you carry. You are Chosen, and I believe some part of your gift, as the Chosen of your generation, is being served by your decision. No other could have found what you sought, and no other could remove it from this place.”
Kaylin offered the Ancient what she hoped was a perfect bow. Power expected both respect and reasonable manners, after all.
She then rose, turned to the left, and walked—swiftly—through the arch, followed by Terrano and Hope.
They found themselves in the hallway directly in front of the empty painting.
Noise returned, and not a little of it; the clank of steel against steel—or chitin—rang down the hall. Given that the fighting had been taking place on the second floor, in a different direction, the sounds caused Kaylin’s anxiety to instantly peak.
“No one’s died yet,” Terrano said, his own eyes the indigo of Barrani worry. Or fear. Or rage. “Teela’s injured; she’s taken the brunt of the damage.”
But Kaylin had reached out immediately for Severn; she knew Teela wasn’t the only one injured.
You’re back—hurry.
Mrs. Erickson? she asked, as she began to run. Severn wasn’t looking at the old lady or her ghosts, the latter of which he couldn’t see.
She’s safe. With Sedarias’s help, Teela’s prevented any attempt Azoria has made to reach Mrs. Erickson.
Good. It’s Mrs. Erickson’s show, now—or it will be soon. She took the foyer stairs two at a time.
Had she not known where the room was, she would have had no difficulty finding it: the moment she reached the landing of the second story, she could hear the sounds of conflict. As she rounded a corner, she could see the flashes of light in different colors, and she could hear shouting and the sounds—like thunder—of magical combat. Closer, and she could see where whole sections of interior wall had come down. No one was fighting in the hall; when she’d left, Azoria had been just one side of the frame.
She couldn’t sprint and sneak a glimpse of the battlefield through Severn’s eyes, but she was close enough now it wasn’t necessary. Terrano kept pace with her; Sedarias might be angry, but she wasn’t terrified—not that she’d ever own it if she were. Terrano, however, would know.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, raising his voice to be heard.
She nodded. She hoped Mrs. Erickson would understand what had to be done.
Three yards from what remained of the door, they slowed; there was too much rubble. She thought she could see what looked like a melted Wevaran limb, half-covered by debris; she could certainly see blood.
The sharp intake of breath prompted Terrano to say, “Teela’s, minor wound. Not poisoned.”
She stepped with more care; the last thing she needed was to trip over stone and wood before she had reached her destination. But the destination loomed; from the hall she could see Azoria’s back. Were it not for the extra limbs and the eyes that rose from the crown of her skull, Kaylin might have mistaken Azoria for a Barrani. But the limbs and the eyes were present, and two of them swiveled toward the late arrivals. Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised to see a mouth sprout from Azoria’s back.
But she had the attention she wanted now.
“Hope?”
Her familiar squawked. Quietly.
She lifted the hand in which she’d carried what remained of Azoria’s name—a word she had no hope of controlling because she would never be able to speak it. Not even the Ancient could. It was a word that had, over time, been eroded; all of the bright promise of its meaning forever lost.
Accepting your limitations might be bad, but accepting yourself, accepting your essential nature, was necessary. Kaylin now understood how easy it was to mistake one for the other.
“Azoria!” she said, raising her volume without shouting.
Azoria pivoted toward Kaylin then, all of the eyes on their flailing stalks almost lidless, they were so wide.
“You! What have you done?” Her voice was a shriek of sound that resonated in the hall—literally. It was like an earthquake made verbal. Kaylin, braced, retained her footing, her knees bent and moving. Had Azoria chosen to collapse the floor, she would have fallen.
“You didn’t want the life you were given,” Kaylin said. “You destroyed it with your own hands. But you destroyed many other people to do it.” She focused on the new word she’d cupped in her palm as Azoria leaped from the room toward her.
Kaylin!
Azoria bounced off the barrier Hope erected. Hope squawked up a storm; his verbalization sounded scathing, even if she couldn’t understand a word of it. Azoria didn’t have that problem.
Get Mrs. Erickson in line of sight of the...door. Tell her: she can command the dead.
Severn didn’t argue; he understood what Kaylin intended. Azoria, once Barrani, was impotent for the moment, and the moment was all Kaylin needed. The marks of the Chosen hadn’t settled back into their home on her skin. She reached for their power, as she had in the outlands, and it came at her call.
Healing was the only power granted by the marks she instinctively understood. Sometimes she caused pain; sometimes she had to. But none of that was meant to destroy. None of it meant to kill.
Her fingers froze; she couldn’t close them into fists.
She’d killed before. Once, in the distant past, she’d flayed the skin off slavers. She couldn’t at this moment remember how; their deaths had been the product of her endless, driving rage. Azoria would kill all of them. She knew that. But the rage that she’d felt on that single, long-ago day had marked the end of childhood. She could not summon it back.
Power filled her palms regardless, and she understood only then what she was meant to do. She poured that power—healing power—into the remnants of what had once been a Barrani name.
Azoria screamed in rage—the rage Kaylin couldn’t summon for herself. Beneath that rage was fear and pain, and perhaps that’s all rage ever was: fear and pain writ large. Azoria renewed her frenzied attack on the barrier Hope had erected; she spoke broken Barrani—or Barrani interspersed with words that were never meant for Barrani use.
Kaylin, Hope said, hurry. She is more powerful than she appears.
Kaylin nodded; behind Azoria she could see the glint of a sword—no, two. Teela and Sedarias harried Azoria from behind—if behind was the right word. Azoria’s extra limbs appeared to be omnidirectional.
They are, Severn said. She’s losing control. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.
Mrs. Erickson?
Holding up surprisingly well. She’s distraught about the children, though—whatever Azoria did to them, it’s upset her a lot.
Good. Keep close to her. I think we can end this immediately with her help.
Immediately.
As soon as I finish what I’m doing.
He didn’t ask her what she was doing. But she knew now; the word, small and porous, was almost like a body to the touch; a miniature body. Unless and until transformed by Shadow, bodies knew their correct shape, their ideal health.
Azoria had done something to shift and alter the word at her core—but clearly she had done the work very carefully over the passage of centuries. It still supported her life. Had she tried—and failed—to repair it? Was that what she sought the power of the living for? Or was she a very broken form of Barrani vampire?
The creature thrashing and snarling in front of her could answer that question, but she clearly wasn’t in a mood to converse. Kaylin closed her eyes. She couldn’t see Azoria, but she could see the marks of the Chosen. As she watched, as she poured the power of those marks into the thing she held in her hand, she could see the faintest of golden light begin to grow. She couldn’t see her hand, but could see what lay within it.
This wasn’t justice. Azoria deserved to suffer.
She suffers, Kaylin, Hope said. No happiness, no joy, could lead to what she has become.
Kaylin bit back her visceral, knee-jerk reply, knowing that Hope was right. But she destroyed so many lives.
Yes. And those people did not deserve the ending she gave them. But you will free those who remain trapped when this is done. You have killed. Those deaths destroyed lives. Yet you are here, and you have grown to believe in yourself. She will die. Do not ask more of her ending than that.
But if I heal her name—
It is not her name anymore. She is not the cohort; you cannot simply offer to return it to her. There is no place in her that could house it.
But I gave the names back to the cohort. And they’re not the Barrani they were born to be, either.
The cohort used—constantly—one element of their names. They spoke to each other through the name bond. They offered each other the knowledge of the names that give power; they knew each other. That knowledge was predicated on the names themselves; some part of what they could become remained what they were when they made their covenant.
Look.
She did. A word, a True Word, now rested where her hand would be. The marks that had encircled her arms retreated back to the base of her skin, but the light they shed remained gold.
She opened her eyes; the word, she carried. Beyond it, the woman who had once been blessed by the Consort at the Lake of Life continued her frenzied attack; she couldn’t see the word, and even had she, Kaylin was certain she wouldn’t recognize it.
But Kaylin could now see the tenuous connection between Azoria and the name that she had all but destroyed. She reached for it; it was as fine as spider silk, and as slender. Without a second thought, she snapped the thread.