Page 192 of Cast in Conflict

She had never liked spiders. The part of her that screamed he’s not a spider was almost too quiet. But spiders didn’t have eyes all over their bodies either. She spun sideways as Bakkon leaped above the fog, too preoccupied with staying seated to look down. The marks on her arms were glowing, the gold giving way to the brilliance of white.

Bakkon grunted as he leaped again, as if the marks had a weight that he could feel, even if Kaylin couldn’t. Mandoran let loose a volley of Leontine, and that pulled Kaylin back to reality.

Shadow tendrils burst out of the fog, thin and dark and faintly opalescent; they caught the web Bakkon was barely spinning, and began to burn. Mouthless, they screamed. The web ignited; Kaylin could see purple fire race up the strands the tendrils had grasped. She focused on staying on the Wevaran’s back and keeping one hand on each of her two companions.

“Chosen!” Bakkon shouted. “Speak!”

Words—not that there were many available—would have failed her completely. “Speak about what?”

Bakkon growled; the growl extended into a roar.

Chosen. She looked at her arms; the marks were glowing. Speak. The marks remained flat against her skin; there was only one mark that had fully risen, and she had left it in the library, if any of the library remained.

But it had done something to the blob-Shadow, which had bought them just enough time to get through the doors and out. She looked over her shoulder as Bakkon leaped; cursed in Leontine because it was better than screaming, and tried to think. Hard, when her stomach was trying to find an entirely different place in her body to sit.

“Mandoran—can you fly? Can you carry us?”

“I could carry you,” he shouted back. “I don’t think I could carry the spider!” He spoke in Elantran.

Praying that Mandoran wouldn’t get hit with another Shadow spear, Kaylin lifted a hand; it was the hand gloved in Shadow. In the light of these particular streets, she could see the strands as a dense web of lines. Those lines were moving, crawling in place as if struggling to escape. It was not a comforting thought.

But the Shadow on her hand didn’t speak; it didn’t try to take control; it sat there, above her skin, the same way the marks of the Chosen did. Even here, in the heart of the fiefs: Ravellon.

She touched Bakkon with the gloved hand; she touched him with the marked hand. He had heard the mark that had risen from her skin—and he’d wept. She had seen the Dragons speak these words. She had seen the words themselves when the former Arkon made the attempt. She had seen the marks on her arms grow in size—but she’d attributed that, until today, to the quasi-dream state that she’d been in.

Bakkon had heard the words she couldn’t say because she didn’t have syllables. Bakkon spoke them. Bakkon was something that had been trapped in Ravellon. She wasn’t certain he could leave it—and that probably should have been her first thought.

But there were Wevaran in the actual Tower of Liatt. And if the Tower accepted them, it meant they weren’t like Spike; they weren’t physically Shadow in the way that Gilbert had been. Bakkon should be able to join the few kin that remained, hidden, from the rest of Elantra.

If, that is, they could even reach the border. Kaylin wasn’t particular about which border at this point, and her geographic sense of the fief boundaries was completely flattened by the warped streets and buildings across which Bakkon leaped.

“Chosen!”

Trying not to panic, she glared at her arms. The marks remained stubbornly flat; she couldn’t hear them. None rose. And she couldn’t just choose one that meant “die” or “freeze.” But...but if she could get Bakkon out of here, he might be willing to teach her. The only other possible teacher was the former Arkon, the current chancellor of an institution that he must both build and protect.

Bakkon, she thought. At the moment, he no longer had a job.

She exhaled, closing her eyes, her hands now anchored only to the Wevaran. Eyes closed, she could see the one rune she had left in Bakkon’s library—even if it was theoretically behind her.

She listened, trying to separate the sounds of escape, of climbing, of spitting, from the sound of the word itself. The syllables fell into place and she began to speak them, almost to chant them. She’d never been any good at singing, but she’d been trained to shout—and to shout in a way that projected voice without sounding as if she was panicked or on the verge of screaming.

She did that now. She pitched those syllables into the growing noise of a mob, her voice rising above it. As she spoke, the mob stilled. Tendrils of shadow still strained upward in a cluster as they attempted to catch Bakkon, but they moved more slowly.

The mark had eclipsed the building they’d fled; it rose above the twisted, melting heights, and continued to spread past what would in a normal city be its walls, its boundaries. She could see what she’d identified as fog begin to darken—perhaps in response to the light the word shed.

She spoke more emphatically, repeating the word, and as she did, the gray seemed to settle into the core of her. She thought of Bakkon’s reaction—but Bakkon was himself. The Shadows who had gathered in the streets to stop Bakkon were not. But the blob had stopped as the word had made itself clear to him—and the Shadows were slowing and turning toward what she saw as a word. Not to Kaylin—who was speaking it—but to the word itself.

The light of the rune dimmed, thinning as the fog began to gather around it; she could see tendrils of shadow curl up the lines and swallow the smaller dots. Shadow could influence the shape of True Words—she’d seen that in the Tower of Tiamaris.

But this word was not the very heart of a Tower. It wasn’t the heart of anything; it was a word. A word that she thought the Shadows might understand, even if she didn’t. She could see the lines of it thin, elongate; could almost hear the sound of it change, as if there were now two voices speaking its syllables—hers and the bending rune itself.

It was like an argument, and Kaylin felt sweat bead and trickle down her forehead, almost as if she carried the weight of the larger-than-building rune just by speaking the syllables that comprised it. Mandoran’s grip on her arm shifted, as if he understood that Kaylin, at his back, was beginning to flag—while trying to stay seated on the back of a giant spider who was making a run for the border of Ravellon.

She couldn’t see it; couldn’t see anything but the words and the Shadows. And that made no sense, if she stopped to think about it; she had always been able to see the marks, when they glowed, with closed eyes; she had never been able to see Shadow the same way.

Here, she could. And she had no more time to think about it, about what that meant, because thinking broke the rhythm of the syllables, and the syllables had caught the attention of the Shadows, diminishing pursuit.

Mandoran loosed a volley of Leontine; Bakkon barked an order in a clicking screech that neither she nor the Barrani cohort member could understand. Kaylin’s eyes flew open as a cone of distinctly purple fire attempted to incinerate the Wevaran—and the passengers he carried.

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