The ground beneath their feet rumbled.
The Wevaran clicked and screeched. Kaylin wondered if the latter was the Wevaran version of cursing. It was an oddly comforting thought.
“Chosen,” Bakkon said, “why have you come?”
“I didn’t intend to come here. Where we live, this place is death. Worse than death. It’s surrounded by six Towers, and Shadow is trapped within it. We can walk into it, and we can leave. But the Shadow—”
“That is not the way it works,” was the soft reply. “I have preserved this space for far longer than you have been alive, hoping. Why did you come?” he asked again, as if aware that she hadn’t really answered his question.
Problem was, she wasn’t sure she had an acceptable answer. “I’m not sure how I arrived here. But—outside of the barrier, we were under attack and my friend—the unstable one—got hit with...Shadow spears.”
Kaylin couldn’t tell if Bakkon’s gaze had moved to Mandoran, he had so many eyes.
“He is not afflicted now.”
“No—but I couldn’t heal him in midair, which is where most of the fight was taking place.”
“You were outside.”
“Yes.”
“And now you are inside.”
“Yes.”
“You did not deliberately attempt to enter.”
“No—that’s what I’ve been saying. I was trying to heal him—to remove the Shadow the injury had introduced to his body.”
He said nothing.
“But...I could hear the Shadow. No—not exactly that, but I could hear something that wasn’t my friend, and it was speaking. It wasn’t loud, but it was steady. I focused on that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—I thought that maybe if I could separate the two voices, I could more easily separate the invasive Shadow from the healthy body. I could separate the voices, but...we ended up here, and not where we were. We ended up in the streets of...wherever this place is.”
Bakkon hissed.
She lifted her hand. “And I picked this up, there.” Her palm was open. She could see the purple-white light reflected in all of the eyes that were turned toward her. Or visible.
The eyes widened. “You picked this up how?”
“I stopped to examine what I thought was a weed.”
To Mandoran, he said, “What is this weed?”
Clearly the Wevaran was not much of a gardener. Which was fair; neither was Kaylin.
“It’s a term that refers to plants in a garden or road that grow where they’re not meant to grow.”
“Are you a weed?” he asked of Kaylin.
Mandoran coughed back obvious laughter.
“I’ve been called worse. I don’t have roots in the ground, but I don’t always fit comfortably in most places.”
“And you are Chosen.”
“And I’m Chosen. Most of my kind ignore that.”
She could sense that Bakkon was appalled. “And you allow this?”
“I can’t force people to pay attention to me if they don’t want to.”
“You are Chosen; I am certain you have means of gaining their attention.”
“I don’t want their attention. And we’re kind of losing track of what we were talking about.”
“I have not lost track of any of it,” Bakkon replied. “I am not as easily distracted as the younger races often are, and can see multiple possibilities from each slender line; it is how we weave, after all. But that mark was not given to you by the Ancients.”
Kaylin’s brows rose. “You can read it?”
The Wevaran missed a beat. His response was decidedly chillier. “You cannot?”
“No.” She still hated it when people thought she was stupid. And she knew there was no way to avoid it here, other than lie. She almost did.
“How is that even possible?”
“No one asked before putting marks all over my body, maybe?” Having confessed ignorance, if resentfully, Kaylin said, “What does it mean?”
He appeared to be staring at her. A chittering sound escaped a very large mouth before he shuddered in place. When he spoke, he spoke a word Kaylin didn’t recognize, in a language she didn’t know. But she knew that it was a single word, broken into syllables with pause for breath.
A True Word.
The Wevaran repeated the word as she closed her eyes. Eyes closed, she could see the marks—even the new one—glowing brightly; purple gave way to gold, the light she was most familiar with. Even the new mark on her hand adopted that color, its edges burning.
He said the word a third time; she could feel every spoken syllable as a beat against the palm that currently contained the mark, as if the mark itself were alive, its heart exposed. This wasn’t a particularly comforting metaphor.
“You know I don’t understand that, right?” When Bakkon failed to respond, she spoke in High Barrani, the words far more formal.
To Mandoran, the Wevaran said, “Did you understand what you heard?”
“No. I’m sorry. It’s not a language that my people are now taught.”
“It was never a language that was taught,” the Wevaran replied. “You are—both of you—younger races.”
“You always understood it?”
“How could we not? It is the heart of all language. It is what lies beneath the skein of the language we speak now; it is the drive to communicate without prevarication. There was always risk in that; we hide. We seek the shadows—there is safety in being unseen.
“But unseen, we cannot speak truth. And to speak this tongue at all is to refuse to hide. Perhaps you cannot understand that.”
It was Mandoran who answered. “We understand the need to be unseen.”
“Yes. When I was young, I learned to hide. I hid my strength. I hid my weakness. I made a web of both; I was hungry. We were hungry. I did not speak these words. None of us dared to speak them; they could be heard. They could be felt. They could be seen.
“We are many at birth and few when we leave the birthing ground; it is our nature. Those who die, die; those who are strong, live. I see, from your expression, that you do not approve.”
Kaylin shrugged. She didn’t—but human birth wasn’t Wevaran birth.
Mandoran seemed to have no difficulties, however. “The strong live. The weak die. We don’t...consume each other the way you do, and we have far fewer young.”
“Don’t you ever think about what those others might have become if they survived?” Kaylin demanded.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they did not survive.” The last word tailed up, as if the Wevaran didn’t understand the question. “Regardless, when we heard the words, we understood them.”
“Wait, if you didn’t speak them, where did you hear them? Did your mother speak them?”
“Our parent? Yes. Our parent spoke the words. They would have to be spoken or we would not emerge.”
“Do you have True Names?”
Silence stretched around the question, as if the Wevaran were examining it carefully. Or as if he didn’t understand it. Maybe both. Kaylin was reminded, again, that language arose from cultural experience, something she had never considered as a child in the fiefs. Words were words, then.
Even learning Barrani hadn’t changed that feeling; the learning had been entirely in service to translating one set of words—those she naturally spoke—to another.
But True Words had meanings, and those meanings did not shift with the speaking or with the experience of the speaker. She’d been told this, and she believed it. True Names were True Words—but words that were owned, words that were lived.
To reveal a True Name was the ultimate risk, the ultimate vulnerability.
“I do not understand your question,” Bakkon finally said.
“The Barrani—Mandoran is Barrani—have a word at their core. They do not wake without the word itself. The Dragons have words in a similar fashion—”
“It’s not similar at all,” Mandoran interjected.
“—and in both cases, if one knows the word, which we call the True Name, of the Barrani or the Dragon, we can communicate with them without speech. And we can—if we are strong enough—force the Barrani or the Dragon to do what we command them to do.”
“I see. And you wish to know if I have such a word?”
“I wish to know if your people have such words, yes.”
“Your people do not?”
“No. My people do not. It is why the Barrani sometimes consider the mortal races to be little better than animals.”
“And these animals?”
“Do not speak.”
“I see.” The Wevaran chittered again. “No. We do not have words as your friend has words. We do not have words as your skin now does. But the words themselves, like the words on your hand, we speak. We speak them among our own kin—or we did, before the fall.
“It is the language we hear at birth; it is the language we speak—must speak—at death. We speak to each other in this fashion where it is required. But it takes effort, Chosen. It takes will.”
“Why?”
“Because truth carries inherent risks.”
“So do lies.”
“Not in the same fashion. We are responsible for our truths.”
Kaylin felt that people were responsible for their lies as well, but failed to say this.
“But the words themselves are part of our weaving. The words are the reason we can open doors into other worlds, other states; the words are the reason we can survive our explorations. It is not wise to speak often, but in our thoughts, it is those words we utilize in order to understand what we are seeing. It is those words for which we reach.”
“And this word?” she said, coming back to what she felt was the point.
“It is an ending. An ending, a finality.” Chittering. “I find the Barrani tongue so slight I must struggle to find words that might somehow trace the entirety of this meaning. But you said you picked it up on the streets?”
She nodded.
The clicking became more frenetic, and the Wevaran began to move in a circle, counterclockwise.
“Is this a good idea?” Mandoran whispered, in Elantran.
“Where we are?” she replied, in the same fashion. “There are no good ideas here. If we relied on good ideas, we’d be at home.”
The Wevaran trembled and finished with a keening that almost sounded like a distant scream.
The scream echoed in the library; the ground and the shelves began to shake. Kaylin couldn’t speak Wevaran. She couldn’t speak True Words without effort and a lot of serious coaching, none of which she had now. But she needed neither. She knew grief when she heard it.
Mandoran stiffened, retreating in place, as people did when confronted with unexpected grief; he didn’t know what to do; didn’t know what it was safe to do. He did nothing.
Kaylin took her biggest risk. She released Mandoran’s hand and reached out with her left hand, stepping beneath the Wevaran’s raised legs and attempting to avoid what she assumed was his mouth.
She touched him. Beneath her hand she felt hair and chitin and an unexpected warmth. Life, she thought, was warm. Bakkon was alive. He wasn’t Starrante, but Starrante had had to deal with students at the Academia. Kaylin suspected that Bakkon had dealt with no one for a long damn time.
Bakkon froze instantly. All noise—chittering, clicking, even breathing—stopped. Before Kaylin could withdraw her hand, before she could even consider it, two of his arms snapped out and folded around her; it looked, given the angle, as if they should have broken.
Mandoran moved, then; the Wevaran lifted two more of its limbs to block the Barrani. She lifted her right hand and placed it beside the left. She wished that Wevaran bodies were soft and furry; they weren’t. They felt very much like they looked: large, hairy, chitinous insects. With too many eyes, too many legs, and a mouth that seemed much larger when viewed at this distance.
She fought instinctive terror. If she’d intended to give in to visceral fear, she would never have approached him.
Even as she thought it, the marks began to glow—to glow and to rise from her skin. The only mark that remained where it lay was the one on the palm that was now pressed against Wevaran flesh.
“What happened?” she asked, voice soft. She might have been speaking to a foundling.
Bakkon shook. “I do not want to kill you,” he said. Which was promising, in a fashion.
She felt no Shadow in him, which she hadn’t expected. But she hadn’t touched Starrante; she trusted the Arbiter because he had saved Robin, and Robin had not been afraid. Robin, a child, had not been afraid.
Kaylin wished she could be that child. She had to fight fear, here, but she fought it. “I would prefer that you didn’t try to kill me, too.” She had no doubt, given the lack of her familiar, that she’d be dead if he wanted her dead. “Why do you think you might have to?”
Mandoran coughed and Kaylin turned to look, briefly, in his direction. His back was against one of the shelves and his feet were no longer touching the ground; she could see a delicate skein of webbing around his legs and arms. “Possibly not the smartest question to ask right now.”
She shrugged, watching the marks as they rose. So did Bakkon.
The marks didn’t rise evenly; some hovered above her arm, and some rose to the level of her eyes. She didn’t recognize most of them; they looked different in three dimensions than they did when they were flat against her skin, as if her skin were parchment.
But Bakkon did. She didn’t speak the words; she couldn’t. She didn’t fully understand their meaning, either; she could sometimes choose words that had meanings solely by the feel they invoked—but it took a long time. She therefore hadn’t consciously or deliberately chosen the floating words.
The Wevaran’s eyes were glowing the same color as the marks, as if they absorbed the whole of his attention, his focus. He didn’t answer the question, but as they stood—one human, one Wevaran, and the marks of the Chosen—he once again began to keen.
“They spoke,” he finally whispered, his Barrani shaky. “We heard their voices. We always heard their voices.”
“Whose? Whose voice?”
“Ravellon.” The word that she heard and the word that he spoke were not the same. She tried to catch the syllables, to impress them in memory, but failed; her own understanding overlapped his voice.
The ground shook, and shook again.
“You should not have come here, Chosen.”
At any other time, she would have reminded him that she hadn’t arrived deliberately; now, she simply listened, her hands relaxing.
“You should not have come.”
“No. If it’s possible to safely leave this place, we’re going to leave. But...Mandoran was being pulled here.”
“It’s not my fault,” Mandoran said.
“I didn’t say it was.”
Bakkon coughed. It was much louder than Mandoran’s prior cough but had the same meaning.
“Can you help us leave?”
“No. If I leave, this space will collapse and everything in it will be lost. I have been asleep here, waiting, since the madness began.”
“Will you be safe if we leave?”
This was not the question he had been expecting. It was clearly not the question Mandoran had expected either. “I do not understand the question.”
“We fell into your space. Into the library, I mean. And we need to leave it. I assume the doors lead out. But if we open the doors, will your library be at risk?”
“The doors lead out of the library; they do not lead out of this space. I no longer know what you will find if you open the doors; they have not been opened since the fall.”
“Why can’t you leave your space and come back to it? Starrante could.”
“It is too complicated a question to answer; I would have to teach you much about my kin in order for you to understand it. And I do not wish to risk the whole of the collection. It is not mine—but it is my duty to preserve the knowledge here.”
“What is the knowledge here?” Mandoran asked.
The Wevaran lifted a leg and Mandoran fell off the wall, landing easily and gracefully on two feet.
“Our history,” was the soft reply.
“The history of the Wevaran?”
“No—our history. You will not understand it. You will never live it. You will never see its like again.” Each word wavered. Kaylin had heard this before, as well, and it hit her far more strongly than the fear of spiders could.
“We have to leave. Our allies are fighting the Shadows that have flown out of Ravellon.” This wasn’t strictly true, but she too felt she would have to explain far more for it to make sense. “We can’t stay here. You could come with us.”
Mandoran grimaced but said nothing.
“You could come with us, and you could visit Starrante.”
“I cannot leave this place.” He disengaged his limbs, allowing Kaylin free motion once again. She was loath to remove her palms; the marks that now floated in front of her face—three in all—were still glowing. Something should be done here; she wasn’t certain what.
Lifting a hand, she touched one of the three marks; felt its immediate weight as it lost buoyancy. The new mark on her palm became instantly heavy as well, as if the two words—old and new—were now interacting or merging to form a single whole.
She didn’t know what either meant, but she could guess, given the Wevaran’s reaction to the new one. Somehow, the new mark encapsulated what she had heard—what she had tried to hear clearly. Her attempt to do so had brought her to this place.
Kill me. Free me.
As if death and freedom were the same thing. And she knew that one too well. On the day she had first entered the Hawklord’s Tower, they had had the exact same meaning to her: death was the only freedom she was allowed. There was no other way to escape from...herself.
From the truth of what she had done and been. From the future that stretched out, endless, before her: more of the same. More killing. More failure. More death. If she had died as she had intended, she would have rid the world of one more ugly thing it didn’t need.
And yet, death wasn’t what had awaited her there. Death wasn’t what she’d been offered. The horror that she had turned her life into was not the only life she could live; it was perhaps the first time she had truly seen that since she’d fled Nightshade.
Her life had become more than pain and self-loathing. She had done everything she could—everything, no matter how resentfully—to walk a different path. To seek a different end. To live a life that had never seemed possible. It was a life she had wanted. A life she still didn’t believe—on the bad days—she deserved. She was arresting people who had done far less than she’d done in Barren.
But she was grateful to the Hawklord. To the Hawks. To the life they had offered someone who didn’t deserve it. She was grateful to see the foundling hall, the midwives’ guild, the Leontine quarter. Even the Tha’alani.
She knew that death was not the only freedom she was allowed.
And she knew that death was the freedom that voice—thrumming through Mandoran’s body—wanted. Had she followed it, had she desperately listened for it, because of her personal experience? She wanted to tell whatever was whispering or shouting those words that there was another way. A better way. A different way.
Harder, she thought, but better.
As if he could hear what she did not put into words—and given her experience with people who built and owned the spaces they occupied, she thought he might—he said, “You are not the same. You are mortal, child. There is an end to you. There is an end to your words, your voice. There is an end to the words that you might speak with any truth or strength.”
“And there’s no end for you.”
“Not that way. Time itself is not an enemy. It is not a friend.” But speaking, he looked at the word she now carried in her hand.
“Do you see it?” she asked, because she was now aware that others didn’t see what she saw when she looked at her marks.
“I hear it,” was his quiet reply. “I hear what you are saying, even if you do not. I wish you had fallen through a different wall—and that is unlike me.”
“What will you do?”
“Is that really the question you should be asking?”
Kaylin shrugged. “Probably not.” Most of the training she had received when it came to asking questions involved crimes, possible criminals, and general interrogation. “But I’m not sure how long this space will last.”
“The instability is unusual,” Bakkon replied. “It will not last.” The entirety of the Wevaran’s body shook, as if he were a wet cat who had come in out of the rain. All of the many eyes closed as Kaylin withdrew.
The mark, however, remained suspended in the air between them; the rest once again came to lie flat against her skin, their light dimming. She opened her hand to see that the new mark was also flattened against her right palm.
“How important are these books to you?”
“They are not more important than my life.”
She thought of Starrante. And then of the Wevaran who comprised Liatt’s Tower. And last, of the baby spiders devouring each other. This time, it was Kaylin who shook, as if to clear her head.
“Your life won’t be in danger if you stay?”
“I do not think it matters,” was the thin reply. “Mandoran, I must ask you to refrain from touching the books.”
“I wasn’t touching them. I was brushing off webs. Are you ready to go?” he added, in Elantran.
“I don’t think we should leave him behind,” Kaylin replied in the same language.
“If he’s like any other librarian you’ve ever met, I don’t see how you have a choice.”
The Wevaran headed toward the books that Mandoran had been dusting, for want of a better word.
“I think—if we can leave here at all—we can take him with us.”
“I think that’s about as good an idea as enraging a Dragon.” Mandoran grimaced. “You’re worried because he was crying.”
She nodded.
“You don’t even know why he was crying. And no, I’m not asking him. Or her. And I’m not sure we can leave.”
“I’m sure we can—the outcaste and his deformed Aerians did.”
“You can’t fly.”
This was true. “Candallar’s Tower let the Barrani carrying Spike pass through the border. He wasn’t flying, either.”
“And that doesn’t make you more suspicious?”
She exhaled. “It makes me worried, yes. But the Towers didn’t stop us from reaching the streets. I think, if we can return to those streets safely, we can make it out. I’m worried,” she added.
“Which would be smart if you were worried about yourself. Or us, even.”
“What if someone else gets hit by one of those spears?”
“None of the cohort will. Not now.”
“They’re not the only people there.”
Bakkon cleared his throat. The sound was very loud. “Perhaps,” he said, in the Barrani neither Kaylin nor Mandoran were using, “you might have the rest of this discussion when someone who cannot understand it is not present. In my day—which clearly far precedes yours—it was considered rude to speak a language that all people present could not understand.” The ground shook beneath their feet, but Bakkon didn’t sound angry.
Kaylin could see the mark that had detached itself from her body; it floated—very slowly—toward Bakkon.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Mandoran said—in Elantran.
“As much as I ever do.”
“That’s bad.”
“Apologies for my terrible manners,” she then said, to the Wevaran, and in Barrani. “We were discussing the chance that we make it out of here alive. Ummm, what are you doing?”
“I am gathering volumes of particular interest.” Which is what it looked like he was doing. He paused to spit a glob of webbing. From here, it looked almost opalescent. “There are books here that you will find nowhere else—not even in the vaunted library girded by the Academia.”
Her heart, such as it was, sank. If he had simply pulled a couple of books off the shelves, she would have been fine—but if he intended Kaylin and Mandoran to carry these, they’d be staggering down streets heavily overburdened. Running would be out of the question. She opened her mouth. Closed it.
“He doesn’t mean for us to carry those, does he?” Mandoran asked, in Elantran.
“You could ask him,” she replied—in Barrani.
The Wevaran began to move more quickly, scuttling up the sides of shelves to pluck a single book or two from the heights; he vanished around the corner without bothering to come back down to floor level.
“What’s happening now?” Mandoran whispered.
“I have no idea.” She glanced, once, at the word that had separated itself from her skin; it was growing in size. This, too, she had seen before—but not usually in someplace as physically solid, as real, as this.
“There is no reason to shout,” Bakkon said, his voice carrying from wherever it was he had scuttled toward.
“I was not shouting,” Kaylin said, raising her voice. “Bakkon—what are you doing?”
“I am, as I said, collecting those books that are unique, now. I will not be long.”
The ground shook again. This time, Kaylin could hear a steady, slow thump, as if the stone of the floor had been situated above a giant who intended to physically join them. She almost said, Can you hurry? but stopped the words from leaving her mouth. “Can we help?” she asked instead.
“I highly doubt you can help with the collecting. You do not strike me as a scholar, and it is highly unlikely that you have spent enough time in libraries that you might immediately recognize those books that are singular. There is history in the knowledge, but I do not imagine you would, in the time you are allotted, gain enough knowledge to be of use in an emergency.”
“Never mind. Can Mandoran help?”
“I would rather he not touch the books. Some are delicate and some are...not books as you would understand them. He is, to my eyes, unstable; he could be injured, or the books might be damaged.” It was clear which of the two was the primary concern.
Mandoran rolled his eyes but said nothing.
This continued for what felt like hours.
But she was more concerned with the floor than the books or the librarian. The tremors had become much stronger, the floor buckling and cracking beneath her feet. Mandoran was no longer on the ground; Kaylin, impeded by gravity, had to struggle to remain standing. She eventually crouched.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Mandoran asked, as she pressed her hand—her left hand—against the stone.
“Probably not. The stone is warm.”
“I highly doubt it’s stone.”
“Bakkon—we can’t carry half your library out the door, never mind down the streets.”
“Of course not.”
The words she said next were lost to the sudden sound of things hitting the floor. Many things. Kaylin rose and sprinted immediately in the direction of the sound. Mandoran followed, drifting above the stone she had said was warm.
Bakkon didn’t appear to be injured. Kaylin had assumed a book, stuck between too many other books, had caused the Wevaran to pull the contents of a shelf down.
She was wrong.
One book remained curled in the folds of a limb; the Wevaran threw it to Kaylin—or Mandoran, as they were both approaching from the same general direction. The volume flew over Kaylin’s head—she’d ducked instinctively; Mandoran caught it and staggered back, coming to ground to gain traction.
She drew her knives.
Standing on the other side of the Wevaran, between two very tall shelves that seemed to be bowing inward, was a Shadow.