Michelle Sagara – Cast in Silence (страница 18)

“Tiamaris,” Kaylin said, as she climbed into the cab, “if you’re going to make a habit of this, station an Imperial carriage by the bridge.”

He ignored her advice.

“I mean it. We have enough trouble with the Swords as is—I don’t need to file a counterreport to explain a small riot or a large panic if we don’t luck out with a decent driver.”

When they reached the palace gates, guards met the cab. They didn’t lead it into the courtyard, but they did clear the path as Tiamaris emerged. His eyes were a shade of orange that looked a little too deep, and none of the Imperial guards could fail to understand what that meant, but just in case, he lowered his inner membranes, so the color was much more pronounced. If they noticed his tabard—or Kaylin’s—they failed to be offended by it.

She followed Tiamaris into the Great Hall, and then stopped as he lifted a hand. “Wait here,” he told her quietly. “I go in haste to the Emperor, but even in haste, your poor understanding of Court etiquette would not be excused.”

She started to argue because it was automatic, and snapped her jaw shut before the words left her mouth, settling in to wait. Waiting in these halls, with the stray glances of guards who were no doubt paid triple what she earned was a bit intimidating, but she didn’t have to wait there long; Sanabalis emerged from the doors at the far end.

“Private,” he said as he approached her, making clear what the tone—at least in front of the guards—would be, “please follow me.”

She hesitated, aware that any other guard here wouldn’t have.

“No,” he added, when he noticed she wasn’t immediately dogging his footsteps, “I am not leading you to either an execution or a meeting of the Imperial Court.”

Since they would probably amount to the same thing, Kaylin relaxed and trailed behind the Dragon who was, truth be told, her favorite teacher, not that this said much. He led her to the rooms he used to meet with individuals, and she paused by the large, leaded windows that looked out at the Halls of Law. They seemed distant and remote to her, and she didn’t like it.

“Lord Tiamaris has made a preliminary report,” Sanabalis told her, as he sat heavily in an armchair designed to take the weight of a Dragon. “Some research is now being done by the Arkon, which may give you the luxury of a small break. I suggest,” he added, gesturing at the food that had been laid out on the small round table in front of him, “that you use it.”

The Arkon was the palace’s version of a librarian. He was also the oldest Dragon at Court, and technically not called Lord, and his hoard was the library. Kaylin’s understanding of the Dragon term hoard wasn’t exact, but time had made clear that it meant “touch any of my stuff and die horribly.”

She nodded and took the chair opposite Sanabalis. She even picked up the large sandwiches that had been made for her. Sanabalis never seemed to eat, and he deflected most of her questions about Dragon cuisine. Then again, he deflected most of her questions about Dragons, period, which was annoying because he was one, and could in theory be authoritative.

“Do you understand the significance of what Lord Nightshade revealed?” he asked her, coming to the point while she chewed. His tone of voice made clear that he expected the answer to be no.

She grimaced, wiping crumbs from the corners of her lips. “There’s some strong connection between a fief and its Lord,” she finally said.

He nodded.

“Liatt, a fieflord, rules the way Nightshade does. Barren doesn’t.”

“Do you understand why?”

“No. I’m not a fieflord. It’s never been one of my life ambitions, even when I thought I’d live there forever.” Seeing the stiffening lines of his face, which weren’t all that significant, and the slight darkening of the gold of his eyes, which was, she added, “I can infer that there is a building in each fief that is similar to Castle Nightshade.”

The color didn’t exactly recede, but it didn’t darken to orange. Sanabalis was not, by any stretch of the definition, in a good mood.

“If there’s a building like that in Barren, Barren doesn’t own it. He’s not its Lord or its master.”

“Did you know this?”

“Sanabalis—I was thirteen.” She spread her hands, one of which was full of sandwich, in a gesture of self-defense. “I’d never been inside the Castle—how the hell was I supposed to know it was significant? It was where Nightshade lived; the only chance I was ever going to see it involved death by cage. In public.”

“And in Barren?”

“More of the same,” she said.

He said nothing for a long moment, and it was Kaylin who looked away. “Not the same,” she said, and the food turned to ash in her mouth. “But I didn’t know that Barren wasn’t like Nightshade. I didn’t know—” She stopped. Swallowed. “What I knew doesn’t matter.”

Sanabalis nodded, conceding the point. “Do you understand what alarmed Lord Tiamaris?”

She nodded. She did. “Barren is unstable,” she said quietly. “And whatever lies at the heart of the fiefs isn’t contained anymore. If we can’t stabilize Barren—somehow—that will spill across the Ablayne.”

“And into the Emperor’s city, yes.”

“But Barren’s held it—”

“For ten years. Much longer,” Sanabalis added softly, “than we would have suspected was possible. We don’t know what’s changed,” he added, a note of warning in the words, “but something has.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

He spread his hands across the knobs at the end of his armrests. “What am I going to do? At the moment, very little.”

She snorted. “Fine. What am I going to do?”

“A more salient question. You are going to accompany Lord Tiamaris to the fiefs to investigate the difficulty. Think of how you’re going to approach this,” he added, as he rose. “If you require entry into Barren—”

Kaylin lifted a hand. “I know how I’ll get in,” she told him curtly. Then, trying to smooth the edge out of her voice, she added, “I have no idea how to do it with Tiamaris tagging along.”

“Tiamaris,” Sanabalis replied, “is not optional.”

Sanabalis left her abruptly, but his departure wasn’t the usual mystery; a Dragon roared, the palace shook, and when the tremors had died down, he was already out the door. She thought the voice sounded familiar, but it was hard to tell; the roar had momentarily deafened Kaylin.

She ate in silence, although she did so from the ledge of the window, watching the flags atop the Halls of Law. If she had sneered at those Halls as a child—and she must have, being a fiefling, although she honestly didn’t remember it—she felt no similar disdain now; the Halls served a purpose. One only had to cross the Ablayne to see the effects of the districts beyond their reach. Yes, the law wasn’t perfect; yes, its officers and representatives made mistakes.

But the alternative was so much worse. She’d lived it; she knew.

She had avoided the fiefs for over seven years now, approaching them solely at the request of her superiors in one Hall or another. It wasn’t simply cowardice or distaste; it wasn’t a desire to separate herself from her roots or her past. She was afraid of what the fiefs contained.

But if she let that fear govern her, unspoken and unacknowledged as it so often was, the fiefs would come to her. They would eat away at Barren, and if Barren himself deserved it, the people who eked out a miserable living in his fief probably didn’t; they did—as Kaylin had done in Nightshade—what they needed to, to survive.

She couldn’t judge them; didn’t even want to. That wasn’t her job.

The door opened, and she turned slowly to see Tiamaris—and the Arkon. Sanabalis, slightly shorter, stood behind them.

The Arkon lifted a slender, wrinkled hand. “Private Neya,” he said.

She slid off the ledge, and offered him a full bow. If it wasn’t a good bow, he didn’t appear to notice. Neither did Sanabalis, but she could see that in his case, it took effort.

“I am prepared,” the Arkon told her, as he entered the room, surveyed the chairs, and took the one Sanabalis habitually occupied, “to discuss Ravellon.”

CHAPTER 7

Kaylin had once been warned not to ask the Arkon about Ravellon if she valued her life, or at least having all her limbs attached. She reminded herself that she hadn’t asked as she took the nearest chair that would support her weight. Given the room was a hospitality suite for a Dragon Lord, that would be any of them.

“Lord Tiamaris, if you will be seated?” the Arkon said, in a tone of voice that made Marcus’s commands seem polite and obsequious.

Tiamaris, in this, was Kaylin’s superior; he apologized instantly for his inattentiveness, and he took his seat in perfect silence.

“Private Neya, it has come to my attention that you spent some time in Barren recently.”

She opened her mouth. Tiamaris stepped lightly—for a Dragon—on her foot. “By recently, of course,” Tiamaris told her, “the Arkon refers to anything that happened during the course of my lifetime.”

“Oh.”

The Arkon raised a white brow. “Understand that our knowledge of the fiefs is…incomplete. What understanding we have is not entirely reliable. The fiefs are not hospitable to those who are not their masters.”