Page 199 of Cast in Conflict

Tell her no!

I have indicated that I would not be here if I suspected that he was, yes. She is heading to the former fief of Candallar now.

“Pay attention. I need your help now,” Mandoran was saying. Kaylin’s head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her stomach was more than queasy. Her ears were also ringing.

“What do you need me to do?”

“We need to shift a bit to avoid easy detection by the Shadows here.”

Tell him that is impossible.

“Bakkon doesn’t believe we can do that.”

“I didn’t say we’d be invisible—I said we’d be harder to detect. Does that pass muster?”

What does he intend? The depth of suspicion in the question was like screaming the word no, loudly, in her ears. It wasn’t, however, a No.

“We’re not like Shadow,” Mandoran said—a fact that Kaylin knew well. She assumed he was speaking for Bakkon’s sake as well as her own. Fire changed the temperature of the air at their back, but the fire was Dragon fire, not outcaste fire; it didn’t cling. Or it didn’t cling to Bakkon. “But we’re no longer entirely like the rest of our kin, either. Terrano believes we can navigate—for a brief period—in Ravellon without falling prey to the corruption that lies at its heart.”

“How in the hells does he know what lies at its heart? He said he’s never been stupid enough to try to enter!”

“Not asking that question Right Now,” Mandoran snapped back. “But Terrano thinks it’s how you could get in here at all.”

“I got in through you!”

“I wasn’t here until you did whatever the hells it was you did!”

“You must have been partly here—that was the whole point of the Shadow spears!”

Bakkon cleared his throat. Loudly. “While it goes against my upbringing to stop the younglings from killing each other, there is a time and place for everything.” He spoke in Barrani. “Chosen, if you are to have any chance of leaving this place, if you are to do the duty for which you were Chosen, you must come up with better answers. I am sorry to add to the pressure.”

“I told you—I got here by listening. And I’m pretty damn sure what I was listening to so intently won’t get us to the other damn side of this wall!”

Fire. Shadow. Where they met, the Shadow screamed and withdrew—or at least most of it did. The parts that were visible to Kaylin. She was so accustomed to having Hope slap a wing across her face she felt as if she’d lost the ability to see at all.

What had she done? Truly, she’d just listened. She’d listened really, really intently. Why? Because she was almost certain that what she heard was part of not-Mandoran, even if she could hear it because she was touching his injured body.

“Here!” Mandoran shouted.

Bakkon came to a skittering stop. While the streets were smoking—literally—he looked to an ebon wall—a wall in which hints of all known colors swirled beneath a solid surface. She wasn’t surprised when the wall sprouted eyes.

She was surprised when they opened and focused on Bakkon, leaving the wall on the slender stalks that Bakkon’s eyes also possessed.

Emmerian, above, had come to a halt, and now circled in the air in almost a holding pattern. The Aerians—those few that remained in the sky—were engaged enough they couldn’t immediately attempt to turn the Wevaran, and his passengers, into pincushions.

Bakkon froze for one long moment, and then began to speak. The sounds—chittering and clicking and the soft music of bells—continued for some time. During it, Mandoran dismounted to once again join Emmerian in the air. She could hear him giving directions; could see the fire Emmerian exhaled in plumes seconds later.

Emmerian, who had been so worried about the cohort’s possible attack on Bellusdeo that he had practically broken into Helen to intervene, had chosen to trust the cohort. Not just Mandoran; Emmerian wasn’t a fool. He knew that the cohort was, in many ways, one being that cast a lot of shadows when in the light.

The eyeballs withdrew only when Bakkon had finished speaking.

Do not speak to me for a moment, he said before she could ask him what he’d said. I need to concentrate now. I need to listen—as you listened.

“Kaylin, we really need to get moving. I don’t want to panic you, but an actual Tower is growing in the center of Ravellon—and we do not want to be here when the doors of that Tower open!”

As they had never wanted to be here at all, Kaylin tried not to grind her teeth. Instead, she took a few steadying breaths, and then slid off Bakkon’s back. Or tried. Bakkon caught her and pushed her back into her impromptu seat. It is not safe for you to touch the ground here.

Is it safer to touch the wall?

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