She turned to the small dragon. "We're taking them both."
His eyes widened, although given their size in the rest of his face, it was hard to tell. She reached out for the rune, and gripped it firmly in her right hand, the left being occupied. She wasn't certain what to expect, but it was warm to the touch; as warm as the first rune had been.
Only when it was firmly in hand did the singing suddenly stop.
* * *
The silence was intimidating because it was so complete. She turned to look at the eagles; they were hovering in place; even the path of their flight, interwoven as it had been with the shadows, had disappeared. They were facing Kaylin. Since the shadows had no faces, it was harder to tell what they were looking at, if they looked at anything at all.
Barian had called them the nightmares of Alsanis.
She stood suspended in the air, her hands on two runes-not one. Nothing besides movement and sound had changed; the runes were still visible, and much larger than they had been on her skin. She'd hoped that the choosing of the words was the end of her responsibilities. When a mark had lifted itself off her skin in the dusty back rooms of the Arkon's personal collection, the Dragon spirit trapped there had flown free.
Clearly dead Dragons and Imperial libraries had nothing in common with empty, gray sky, although Kaylin personally thought they had a lot in common with nightmares. The two words did not collapse or merge; they stayed pretty much where they were.
But the eagles didn't. The shadows didn't. The sky didn't fall away from Kaylin's feet; they did. They suddenly folded wings and dropped in a dead man's dive. Kaylin kept her hands on the runes and glanced at the small dragon.
He warbled.
"I don't like it."
As was often the case, what she liked-or didn't-made no difference. Her companion hissed and folded the wings that had allowed her to move freely-if slowly-in what was nominally sky. Weight returned. Given weight and nothing to wedge it between or hang it from, so did falling.
She tightened her grip on the words she had chosen, but they didn't hold her up; they came with her. After a few seconds of panic, and the realization that she couldn't streamline her own dive while attached to the words, she accepted the fact that she could do nothing but go along for the ride.
She just hoped that the landing wouldn't be fatal, and that it would bring her closer to the absent Consort.
Chapter 9
She fell for what felt like an hour before she saw the first sign of actual geography. As landscape went, it wasn't promising: it looked like a small, dark pit. From this vantage, she couldn't see bottom.
As she approached the pit, she realized that small was the wrong word. It was huge. She thought it the size of a city block, and revised that as she fell; it was the size of a city. A large city. When she finally reached its upper edge, she wasn't surprised she couldn't see bottom; she could no longer see the whole of its shape.
Turning-which was difficult-she saw the sky recede as she continued to fall. The small dragon dug claws into the skin below her collarbone, and she cursed him in Leontine.
The Leontine bounced back in an echoing, strangled kitten sound-the usual result of the combination of human throat and the deeper Leontine curses. She chose a few of the less throaty words instead, and then, for good measure, switched to Aerian. It was the Aerian that caught her attention, probably because she mangled the pronunciation less. The echo was not attenuated. It wasn't stretched. It was almost exact, and it continued as she dropped.
She spoke in her mother tongue and listened to herself, growing quieter as syllables bounced off walls so distant they should never have reached them at all.
She then switched to Barrani. All languages had useful words, but it was hard to swear in High Barrani. Kaylin had always believed that High Barrani was the language of Imperial Law because it was the most stilted, pretentious, and boring of the Elantran tongues.
High Barrani returned to her in her own voice, but instead of a diminishing echo, she heard a resonance to the sound, an amplification. The runes in her hands-hands that were gripping tightly enough her fingers were beginning to tingle-shook. She stopped speaking; the trembling, however, continued.
She hated working in the dark. Figurative dark, literal dark-she was hemmed in by her own ignorance. There'd been solutions to that, in the Halls of Law. She'd worked. She'd learned. She'd studied-at least she'd studied the important stuff. Here, she had nothing to go on. Everything was a risk. Every decision had to be made on air and instinct and hope. She was afraid of the consequences because she couldn't even begin to predict them.
And...it didn't matter. She could fall forever-seriously, that's what it felt like-or she could take risks and pray that the only person who suffered when she did was herself.
She returned to High Barrani. She was unsettled enough that random words rolled off her tongue first; she shook her head, and when she spoke again, she began to recite the Imperial Laws. She was rusty, she knew; only the important ones were word-for-word clear: the ones that defined murder, kidnapping, theft, and extortion. She chose those because they were the ones around which she'd based her life.
They'd given her purpose. They'd given her wings. They'd given her family. Hope. Yes, her work regularly brought her into contact with the people most likely to break those laws, but she balanced the constant exposure to the least law-abiding citizens with her work at the midwives' guild and the Foundling Hall. The worst and the best.
That job had brought her here.
"Go left," she told the small dragon.
This time, he didn't warble; he huffed. She had the distinct impression he would have said "about time, idiot" if he'd actually been able to speak in a language she could understand. This was why Kaylin did not own cats. On the other hand, at least the small dragon listened; he spread his extended, diaphanous wings and she drifted toward the left wall. It was not close; it took a long time.
She wondered if time was passing for the Consort; she wondered if her own body had collapsed in the Consort's room.
Taking a deeper breath, she let go of that thought and returned to Imperial Law. It wasn't as dry as it should have been because it had meaning to her. She thought of the first murder investigation Teela and Tain had allowed her to tag along on. And of the first investigation she'd attended as an actual Hawk and not an unofficial mascot. Or an official one.
She'd never understood why the Barrani had chosen to take the Imperial Oath to the Halls of Law; she'd never understood why they served. They'd said they were bored. But...they were good at what they did. She'd learned a lot from Teela, and most of it was within regulations.
When she reached the far wall, her hands were vibrating because the runes themselves were shaking. It was as if the component parts wanted to fly free of each other, and that was so not happening right now. Not yet.
The small dragon dug claws into collarbone again. She bit back the urge to tell him to shut up or be helpful, because it was his wings that were moving them both. She forgot frustration as they at last approached surface.
It wasn't a wall. Or rather, it wasn't the side of a pit. It looked like-like a carved likeness of the flattened streets of a very, very bizarre city. Parts of that city were laid open, as if they'd been sheared; rooms were exposed-or what she assumed were rooms.
And what had she expected? The Consort had fallen unconscious because of the nightmares of Alsanis-and Alsanis was a building. A sentient building. She looked right, left, up, down-the vista, the flattened, exposed likeness of something that she'd be afraid to police-stretched out for as far as the eye could see. Everything was cast in shadow; it was not, as she'd thought at first glimpse, of black stone or rock.
Nor was it completely without light. Here and there, she caught flickers of something that might have been candle or lamp; she caught movement, but only out of the corner of her eye. It reminded her of cockroaches. She hated cockroaches.
The buildings themselves were not uniform. And, as she drew closer still, she realized they weren't squashed and flattened. But they had been. They seemed to gain dimension, stories unfolding where her flight brought her close. She could see what might have been streets, but they were dark hatches that grew even less distinct as the buildings themselves emerged following the trail of her flight path.
The runes in her hands, had they been alive, would be agitated and panicked; they'd probably be screaming. She wondered if those screams would be laden with fear or joy, which was an odd thought.
She nudged the small dragon, and he banked to the right; buildings rose out of their flatness, the flickering lights becoming the heart of windows and arches. Stone, she thought, and then reconsidered. This was some part of the Hallionne, if nightmare was a word that could be literally applied. The rules of normal architecture didn't mean anything here.
She had no idea what she was doing, but seeing a city unfold as she passed above it made her feel almost at home. It wasn't Elantra-but it wasn't an endless forest full of insects and talking Ferals, either.
On the other hand, it didn't seem populated. Small twitches at the corner of her eyes didn't become people of any stripe when she looked. It was a ghost city, a deserted town, absent the usual decay and dilapidation. She nudged the dragon, and he banked to the right, slowing as he straightened out their gliding path.