Cast in Chaos

“It’s not locked,” he told Kaylin, half-apologetically. “Not when he’s in it.”

“Hmm. Have you considered locking it behind him when he’s in a mood?”

Grethan’s eyes rounded slightly, which was a definite No. On the other hand, if Evanton got out of the locked Garden, the minor hilarity of trapping him in it probably wouldn’t be worth the consequences. But the young apprentice’s eyes narrowed again as he grinned. “There’s only one key.”

The itchy feeling that covered most of Kaylin’s body—not coincidentally the same portions that were also covered by glyphs—was almost painfully intense as she stood in front of the rickety, narrow door that led into Evanton’s Elemental Garden.

She touched it. It wasn’t warded—she was half-certain that attempting to ward this door would just destroy it, because the wood would probably collapse under any attempt to enchant it—but her palm suddenly hurt, and she withdrew it almost instantly.

Suspicious, she examined the door as Grethan’s slow steps retreated. But there was no rune or mark on it, certainly not where her palm had touched it. To make matters worse, the flesh on her arms was now goose-bumping. She grimaced, but still, she hesitated. Since her own hesitations annoyed her, she shook them off and opened the door.

“All right, door,” she muttered under her breath, “take me to the heart of the Elemental Garden.”

The door didn’t open into a gale that would have sunk ships in the harbor if it had happened on the outside of the Garden.

Given the last time she’d visited, this came as a relief. She walked into the Garden, leaving the door open at her back; she didn’t walk very far. The Garden itself seemed, in composition, to be in its rest state: she could see the small shrines and candelabras, the shelves and reliquaries, clumped together in at least three areas.

She could see the surface of the small pond that was water’s domain, and she frowned as the light slid across it. What she couldn’t see was Severn or Evanton. She started forward; the grass was soft, short, and smooth. She even cast the normal shadow one would expect when the sun was at this height. Lifting her face, she felt no breeze. In the Garden, that was rare. But maybe the Elemental Air was calm today.

She headed toward the small pond in the Garden’s center. It was there, as it always was, and moss beds lay against the flat, large stones to one side. There was a small mirror that lay face-down on the stone, as if it had been casually lifted and set aside; she didn’t touch it.

But…the pond looked wrong. She stood at its edge, her toes almost touching the water. The water was still, and it was clear. But some of the darkness that hinted at its endless depth was…missing. Bending, Kaylin touched the ground. It felt like, well, grass with a bit of dirt underneath.

In fact, the Garden itself felt like the cozy, quiet retreat of a rich eccentric. Which was, of course, what was wrong with it. That, and she could see no sign of Severn or Evanton at all. It was as if she’d taken a turn through the wrong damn door and ended up in something that looked like Evanton’s Garden, without any of its substance or life.

It was not a comforting thought.

Turning, she headed back in the direction she’d come. The door stood slightly ajar, and she stopped five feet from the narrow glimpse of hall, resting her hands lightly on her hips. She realized, as she looked at it, that there had never been a door out without Evanton, something she should have bloody well considered before she’d entered. But here it was, and it looked, from this vantage, to be the same door into the same dim hall, lined with the same bookcases, half of which were so packed they looked as if they were about to dump their contents on the poor fools who wandered by at the wrong time.

This was wrong. It felt wrong. She took a step toward the door anyway, and felt the hair on the back of her neck begin to rise. The fact that the Garden was magical was known. The fact that she felt magic only here, this close to the door, was bad. And, of course, she hadn’t yet removed the bracer that existed to confine her own magic. She had no idea—at all—if the damn thing would follow Severn home, the way it normally and inexplicably did, if she took it off and dropped it here.

Cursing in Leontine, which sounded unnaturally loud in the sudden and suspicious silence of this Garden, she pulled up her sleeves, exposing the gemstones that lay in a vertical line on the inner side of the thick, golden manacle. She pressed them in sequence, and waited until she heard the familiar click. Prying it off her wrist, she looked at the grass, the Garden, and the now-distant pond, and then she shoved it into her tunic, above her belt.

She reached out to touch the door, and her hand froze just before it made contact. The air around her hand was wavering. The closest thing she’d ever seen was a heat mirage, but heat mirages generally didn’t come with color, and, aside from the sweat the heat itself caused, didn’t cause sensation.

Something intensely uncomfortable passed through the whole of her body, like a moving, permeable wall. She grimaced, jumped back, and found that the distance didn’t cause the sensation to stop. But it did change the perspective through which she viewed the door, or rather, the hall on the other side of said door.

What had been the span of a door frame away now seemed to be visible through a long, long tunnel. The tunnel itself was not door-shaped; it seemed to have no shape at all. It was as if the frame and the world to which it was attached had been sundered, and what lay between them was a gap into sky, or cloud, or unbound space.

Walking through it to the door was almost not an option. She glanced over her shoulder at flat, empty garden, and wondered where it was, truly; it seemed, for a moment, as substantial as the space that now existed between the frame of the door and Evanton’s shop. Color was here, yes, and the grass was not dry or dead. It looked right, but everything else about it was missing.

Note to self, she thought, clenching her jaw. Do not enter Elemental Garden when magic is unpredictable right next-damn-door. On the other hand? There weren’t any shadows here; it wasn’t as if she’d walked into the heart of the fiefs on an aimless stroll. At the moment, whatever might kill her—and given the total chaos of unpredictable magic that wasn’t even her own, that could be anything—was likely to be starvation if she didn’t leave. The shelf-lined hall was not getting any closer.

Backing up, she tensed, bent into her knees, and approached the door at a sprint. Passing through the frame was easy. Getting to the other side, not so much. There was solid ground beneath her feet, but running across it was like running across soft sand; it ate momentum. She couldn’t see what lay beneath her boots; it seemed to exist without any visual component.

And that, of course, was magic; the marks along the insides of her thighs, arms and the back of her neck were now aching in that all-skin-scraped-off way. She clenched teeth, gave up on sprinting, and walked instead. She could walk quickly. The hall on the other side, however, seemed to be moving, and it wasn’t moving in the right direction.

Come on, legs. Come on. Widening her stride, she tried to gain speed; she managed to gain enough that she wasn’t losing ground. But she wasn’t gaining any, either. A pace like this, she could keep up all day. But magic in its infuriating lack of predictability probably wouldn’t give her all damn day, and if the sight of those damn bookshelves suddenly faded, she’d be stranded in the middle of a nowhere that was ancient and totally unknown.

Because she was certain it was ancient. The only place she had encountered anything similar was in the heart of a Tower in the fiefs, and those Towers had been constructed by gods. When the rest of the city had started their decline into crumbling ruins, the Towers had mimicked them—but nothing destroyed them. Nothing broke them.

They, on the other hand, were perfectly capable of destroying the people who wandered through their doors. She walked. The hall receded, as if it were teasing her. But it was the kind of teasing that caused tears and heartbreak.

“Severn! Evanton!”

Her voice was clear, strong, and completely steady; she was proud of the last one. There was no echo, no subtle resonance that indicated either geography or architecture in the distance to either side. The only clear reality loomed ahead, always ahead.

She had no idea how long she’d been walking; she broke into a run every so often, but the run was almost as slow as the walk, and it was more tiring. Her arms and legs still ached, and at length she rolled her sleeves as high as they would go because the cloth brushing her skin was almost agonizing.

It didn’t surprise her much to see that the runes were glowing. Their color, on the other hand, did: it was gray, almost an absence of color, in keeping with the rest of her environment. It made the runes seem, for a moment, like windows into the Other, and windows were not meant to grace the arms of living people. She let her arms drop back into the wide pumping swing of a brisk walk, and then stopped and lifted them again.

Severn.

No answer. No answer at all. She tried again, gazing at the only reality she could see. Silence. Turning, she dared one backward glance over her shoulder. There was no frame, no door, no Garden; the gray of this nonplace had swallowed them.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose so sharply they might as well have been quills. She turned instantly, and then stopped moving. She had taken her eyes off her destination, and the destination had, like the Garden, vanished.

CHAPTER 7

Kaylin had had nightmares like this, but they didn’t usually start someplace bucolic. They didn’t usually end in a gray, empty space, either. They ended, frequently, with the voice-of-pissed-off-Leontine on the other end of an active mirror. She didn’t panic, largely because she wasn’t in pain, didn’t appear to be close to death by starvation, and, more important, it wouldn’t do her any damn good.

Instead, she kept moving forward. There wasn’t anything to move toward, anymore, and the movement didn’t appear to be doing any good, but she still hoped. And cursed. There was an awful lot of Leontine cursing where no one could hear it; she also practiced her Aerian, and her translation of either into common.

Since there was no sun, and none of the usual geographic markers by which she told time, she had no idea how much had passed. It could have been very slow minutes—and probably was—but it felt like hours. And hours. And hours. The whole lot of nothing began to wear on her nerves, and she let it. More time passed.

And more.

And more.

She could jog with her eyes closed, because there wasn’t anything to trip over, run into, or avoid. Sometimes it helped, because the darkness beneath lids felt natural, and this was as close to a dream—albeit boring and featureless—as anything real generally came. Unfortunately, dreams had a way of taking sharp turns or steep drops into nightmare. She opened her eyes.

When her stomach growled, she was almost grateful, because it gave her some sense that time—in a decent interval—was passing, not that she wasn’t often unreasonably hungry at random times throughout the day. But when she heard the second growl—a distinctly external one, she froze. Her legs and arms still ached; nothing short of getting away from this damn place was going to solve that.

She fell silent, listening; she wondered if her stomach’s growl could produce the echoes her natural voice—in tones of Leontine, even—couldn’t. Funny, how little she appreciated the answer. The growl—the only other evidence that someone else was also in this space, seemed to come from somewhere below her feet.

She stopped cursing. Which meant she stopped speaking at all, and started to move.

She could hear the sound of deep and even breathing. Sadly, it wasn’t hers; hers was now shorter and sharper. And quieter. There was no obvious wind—but it felt, now, as if the gray, amorphous endless space was a living thing, and she was trapped inside it. She left off the specifics of where, because it didn’t seem to have anatomy, and any answer she came up with was not good.

She stopped jogging. Stopped running. She kept moving, because it was better, for the moment, than standing still. The bracer was now warm against her stomach, and she thought about tossing it away. Thought about what the Emperor would say—possibly even to her—if it failed to reappear again, ever. Or the Arkon. She had some suspicion that it came, indirectly, from his hoard.

Then again, that would mean he’d parted with it, so maybe that was inaccurate.

She crouched, pressed her hand against the ground. Her palm passed through it, as if it didn’t exist. She hated magic. Her feet, clearly, were being supported by something; her hands, however, couldn’t touch it. She stood, took a step forward, and fell.

So much for exploration.

Falling was like flying without options.

She didn’t scream; it wouldn’t have done any good. But she held her breath for an uncomfortable length of time while she waited for the ground—or what passed for ground here—to rise up and splatter her. When it failed to happen—or at least, when that breath ran out—she swallowed air and opened her eyes. She’d closed them when the ground had suddenly dropped out from under her. It hadn’t made much difference.

The sickening sensation of stomach being pressed up against throat diminished; instead of falling she was now floating. But the growling grew slowly louder, and almost instinctively she began to jog again. Falling stopped, and not the usual way, which involved ground and pain. This was good. But the growling had changed or shifted; it wasn’t directional, and it seemed to bypass her ears and head straight for the base of her spine, where it then traveled up and down like a hysterical child.

Severn!

The silence was worse, this time; it hit harder. The growl that answered—that seemed to answer—the silent invocation was now louder. She spun, hands dropping to daggers, but could see the same nothing she’d seen since she’d arrived.

Severn…

No answer.

This time, she realized that no answer would come. He would look for her, if he knew—but the chances are, he didn’t. He was with Evanton, and the real Garden, in some other place. He hadn’t known that she was coming; he therefore didn’t know that she hadn’t arrived. She had given him her name, it was true: the name she had taken for herself from the Barrani stream of life. But she’d taken no name for him; what he gave her, as always, was acceptance.

She didn’t have his name.

If he called hers, she might hear it—she wasn’t certain, because she had no damn idea where she was. But…he had never used it. He understood that in some ways it felt wrong, to her; it wasn’t her, it wasn’t what she knew of herself. He let her approach. He let her speak, in the silent and private way that Barrani names conferred, and he didn’t pull back, didn’t hide, didn’t offer her fear.

But he didn’t call her. He didn’t invoke what was so foreign and inexplicable.

She swallowed. The growling was louder and thicker; it was one sound, but it seemed to come from everywhere. Closing her eyes, she whispered a single word.

Calarnenne.

Silence. She opened her eyes, and the world was still gray, still formless, still empty. Her marks were the same shade of empty, but the edges of each rune were glowing softly, not that the light was necessary. She looked up, down, and shuddered once as the only other sound she’d heard since she arrived repeated itself.

It wasn’t Feral growling; it wasn’t angry dog; it wasn’t the Leontine sound that meant you were a few seconds away from needing a new limb or a new throat. She’d dreaded all of these in her life, but the sound she heard now?

It was death.

Kaylin personally preferred a civilized, more or less human personification of death, which was the one that usually got into the stories she’d heard as a child. Hells, as an adult. She drew her daggers for the first time since entering the nonworld. They looked pathetic in her hands, but they were all she had, and they were better than nothing.

She began to curse the growling noise in soft, steady Leontine—because that seemed to make no difference, either, and it made her feel better. A little. She threw in an Aerian curse or two, and dropped a few brittle words of High Barrani into the mix; she saved the most heartfelt of her curses for later use.

But cursing, she finally heard something that wasn’t a growl, although it was, in its own fashion, as deadly, as dangerous, and ultimately, as unknown.

Kaylin.

She froze. She had just enough experience with the Lord of the fief of Nightshade to know when he wasn’t particularly pleased by something she’d done, and she’d had twelve years in the fief he ruled to develop a visceral and instinctive fear of his anger.

But she’d had seven living well away from Nightshade, and if her automatic reaction was to drop or hide, she could fight through it and remain more or less calm. Less, today, but she didn’t usually have conversations like this while standing in the middle of nothing.

Nightshade.

You…called me.

She swallowed. I did. I can’t—I didn’t—

You did not mean to compel.

She hadn’t even tried. In theory, she could, if she were strong enough. She held his name. But she’d always doubted that she would be strong enough, and if she weren’t, and she tried, she’d be dead.

I only wanted to get your attention.

Ah. And now that you have it?

There’s a difficulty in Elantra. She swallowed. It was habit; she wasn’t actually speaking. But if she had stopped, the growling hadn’t, and she heard it clearly.

Kaylin. His voice shifted, the sound simultaneously sharpening and losing some of its edge. Where are you?

Funny thing, she began, as the growl grew louder.

Kaylin. Sharper, sharper. Wherever you are, leave. Now. When she didn’t answer, he added, This is not a joke. It is not a matter for your mortal sense of humor. You are in danger. You must leave.

I…I don’t know how. It was hard, to say it. To admit it. Especially to Nightshade. Ignorance was weakness.

No, she thought. Ignorance was only weakness if you clung to the damn thing. Obviously, hours in gray nowhere had unsettled her, and Nightshade’s voice pretty much always had that effect; they weren’t a good combination.

But he could hear her. She thought he was possibly the only person she knew who would.

I can hear you, he continued. But I cannot see where you are. I cannot see what you see.

Kaylin. Call me.

Running, she closed her eyes and she called his true name again, putting a force into the syllables that she never spoke aloud. And this time, she felt the syllables resist her; she felt them slide to one side or the other, their pronunciation—if you could even call it that, because she didn’t open her mouth—shifting or changing as they struggled to escape.

Again.

She ignored the urge to point out who held whose name, be cause there was, in the absolute intensity of the command, the hint of desperation. That, and the damn growling had finally reached a level where she could feel it. Not as strongly as she could feel Nightshade’s voice, though. It almost seemed—

Whatever it is—it can hear you. It can hear you clearly, she told him. And then, before he could answer, she struggled with his name. Struggled to say it, while he pulled back, while he fought her. Because she suddenly understood what the point of the seemingly pointless exercise was. When she struggled for control of the syllables, when she struggled to force them to snap into place, she could feel him pushing back against them; she could feel the way they slid when he exerted his will.

But more significant, she could feel, for just the moment she encountered each small act of resistance, the direction from which it came.

It can hear me. It is surprising that it cannot clearly hear you. Come, Kaylin. Come to me.

She called his name once more, and this time she let the syllables slide as far as they could without losing them; she existed for as long as she could in the moment of the struggle, as if conflict were the only road home.

Opening her eyes, she saw, in the gray folds of nothing ahead, something dark that wavered around the edges. It wasn’t Nightshade, but it was something.

Closer. Closer, Kaylin. Be ready.

For what? She didn’t ask.

But he heard it anyway. You will not have long. I do not know how you came to be where you must be—but I cannot join you. I can hold a window open. You must take it.

The growling—

Yes. A very small window. I am sorry. I have neither the resources nor the ability to offer more.

The dark patch of space became larger and more distinct as she approached it, and she saw, standing at its heart, the Lord of Nightshade, his eyes almost black in the shadows, both hands extended to the sides as if, by physical force, he had ripped a hole in the world. His arms were shaking with the effort.

The gray beneath her feet began to ripple, as if it were the back of a horse that was trying, with unexpected savagery, to unseat her. Spikes formed, like stalagmites made of cloud, glittering although there was no source of light. She dodged them, because she could, but the ground directly beneath her feet still felt like soft sand.

Soft, hot sand. Or miles of flesh.

She pivoted sideways between two growing, jagged spikes; one clipped the inside of her arm. She bled. Where blood struck ground, it sizzled.

She felt Nightshade’s curse. It had the force of Marcus in fury, although it was entirely subvocal; High Barrani lacked the words to encompass it. But she kept running. Nightshade didn’t recede the way the halls of Evanton’s shop had, and she knew that if she lost sight of him now, it would be because he couldn’t hold.

She felt his response; he didn’t form words around it. He was not, however, pleased at the doubt the thought implied. You had to love Barrani arrogance.

And at the moment, she did.

She stopped trying to say his name. She stopped trying to do anything but reach him. He didn’t offer her a hand; he couldn’t. The weight of the world—as if strange, shapeless clouds could have weight—wasn’t something he could support with one hand.

But all she could see was Nightshade: Nightshade and darkness. There was no hall behind him, no stone floors beneath his feet, no glimmer of torches or lamps; even his hair seemed to blend with the background, highlighting pale skin and sapphire eyes by contrast.

Kaylin—quickly. Quickly.

Gods, the ground was thick now. She’d run across mud that had less give—and that had been ankle bloody deep.

Kaylin!

She tensed, grinding her teeth as she felt something sharp cut the back of her left calf. She heard roaring; the growling had clearly escalated into something that could handle primal rage. Dragon roars were just as loud, but far less threatening.

She saw the wavering shape of this hole in the middle of nothing begin to collapse, and although she wasn’t close enough to make a clean leap through what was left of it, she tried anyway. Nightshade—

She felt his curse; he didn’t speak. But more than that? She felt the mark on her cheek begin to burn. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck straighten as if they were made of fine quills, and she felt the inside of her thighs and her arms almost freeze in sudden protest.

Magic. His magic. The momentum the ground and her own legs couldn’t give her, his power could. She cleared what was left of the dwindling rent in space, her arms and right shoulder hitting his chest and driving them both back. His own arms fell instantly; he grabbed hold of her, and he pulled.