Читать книгу Cast in Chaos - Michelle Sagara - Страница 13

“P-pardon?”

“Humans are not native to this world, as I believe we’ve mentioned before.”

“But—” She stopped talking for a few minutes. It wasn’t hard; there were too many words trying to get out the door at the same time, and the collision made her seem speechless. She dealt with the mess as quickly as possible.

He raised a brow. “If you have some disagreement to offer, attempt to apply both rationality and historicity.” His lips curved in a grin, and he added, “I will live forever. If you require some tutoring and study in either of these, I can be persuaded to wait.”

“Can I just mention that the history of humans offered in class—such as it was—involved the Caste Courts, their separate laws, and their role in the politics of the Empire? Nowhere, in any lesson, was Origin of Species covered. I would have been interested in that.”

“And not in the rest?”

“The rest was relevant. If you go back and look at my transcripts, I passed that part.”

“Indeed,” he replied, with a nod to Dragon memory. “However, you passed in a fashion that was less than laudable.” He lifted a hand before she could speak again. “Humans are not native to our world. If you need proof of that, you have only to examine what you know of species that were created in, and of, the world itself.

“It is why the Arkon strongly believes in the overlapping world theory. The spontaneous creation of an entire species—or three—is otherwise lacking in credibility. Not when they are, to all intents and purposes, sentient.”

Since this was about as complimentary as the Immortals generally condescended to be when discussing the merely mortal, Kaylin managed to stay silent.

“There are one or two scholars who disagree with this commonly held view,” he added. “And if you wish to peruse their papers, the Arkon can point them out to you. They are in the normal section of the Library, in which it is much, much more difficult to earn his ire.”

His abuse of the word commonly was about as bad as Kaylin’s abuse of the word punctual.

“So…humans arrived here, heralded by freak storms and two-headed Barrani babies.”

“That is not exactly what I said, but it will do.”

“How did they arrive?”

“That,” he replied, “is the question. We have no solid information from that period. It was not recent, and much of the information we had was lost.”

“Lost?”

“Lost,” he replied, in a tone of voice that approximated the sound of a very heavy door slamming. “If the Arkon’s conjecture—and it is a tentative conjecture—proves true, we will have an answer.”

“And you expect we’ll also have a large crater in the middle of the city.”

“That is, unfortunately, one of our fears, yes. The Emperor has already called an emergency meeting with the Lord of Swords and the Lord of Hawks. I believe the Lord of Wolves is also involved, but in an advisory capacity.”

It made sense; evacuating even a small building in times of emergency generally required the Swords. Evacuating blocks and blocks of small buildings—many of them somewhat upscale—would probably require an army. “You can’t move Evanton,” she said.

“No. The Keeper, however, is likely to survive whatever occurs. He is not our concern.”

She nodded. “If it’s close to where he is, though, could he do something to stop it?”

“If it is necessary, perhaps.”

“You don’t think so.”

“No. And it is my belief that it would pose a risk to the Garden should he try.”

“Making the cure more deadly than the disease.” She glanced out of the window as the carriage turned up the drive to the Halls. The guards that stopped the carriage stopped it for a matter of seconds; Sanabalis was a recognized visitor, and even had he not been, the carriage was marked all over with signs of Imperial ownership. “I don’t suppose the human Caste Hall has any useful libraries?”

“Compared to the Imperial ones? No. And I would thank you not to repeat that question in the Arkon’s hearing.” The carriage pulled to a stop very close to the guarded doors. “Come. Master Sabrai is expecting us.”

Master Sabrai was, in fact, waiting at the doors. He looked, at first glance, as if he’d gotten about as much sleep as Kaylin; she wondered what was keeping his eyes open. Hers were now running on the certainty of impending doom. He executed an enviable, perfect bow as Sanabalis crossed the threshold. “Lord Sanabalis.”

“Master Sabrai,” the Dragon replied, returning the bow with a nod. He waited until Master Sabrai had straightened out to as much of his full height as a bleary-eyed, clearly exhausted man could attain before he added, “The evening was eventful?”

“Let us just say,” Master Sabrai replied, with a wince, “that your inquiries were not untimely.”

“How bad was it?”

“It has not—yet—reached the proportions of the previous incident. Not all of our Oracles are almost sharing the same dreams or visions, and we have not—yet—reached the point where those who can live off grounds are also simultaneously entering a vision state.”

“You expect it.” Flat words, no question in them.

“If last night was any indication, Lord Sanabalis, yes. I do. Some preparations are being made. They are being handled by Sigrenne and her assistant. I have some written reports, mostly taken by Sigrenne and two of the other attendants. I was…otherwise occupied or I would have seen to it myself.”

Sanabalis grimaced, a clear indication that he did not consider Sigrenne’s transcription to be of the highest quality. “Have you examined them?”

“I have not had the chance to examine all of them, no. If you are looking for an estimate of convergence, I cannot give you one that would meet the standards of the Oracular Halls.”

“What estimate would you hazard, if you were not held to those standards?”

It was clearly the question that Sabrai had been both expecting and dreading. “Everly did not sleep at all last night. He has been painting like a possessed man.”

“How serious an attempt did you make to stop him?”

“It’s only the first day,” was the evasive reply. “It is not, yet, a matter of safety. He will eat, if food is provided, and he drinks when water is provided. But he does not otherwise interact with anything but the painting.”

“Not a good sign,” the Dragon Lord said softly. He glanced at Kaylin.

“No.”

“What is his subject?”

“That, I believe, you will have to see for yourself,” was the quiet reply. “I cannot describe it.”

“It’s not, in your opinion, trivial?” Kaylin asked, speaking for the first time.

“No, sadly, it is not.”

Everly’s room smelled of paint; it was the first thing Kaylin noticed when the door was open, in large part because she wasn’t as tall as either Sabrai or Sanabalis and she couldn’t actually see past their bulk into the gallery that served as the boy’s room. They stood in the door for that little bit too long before finally moving through it and out of her way.

The canvas that Everly had been stretching with such focus now sat on a large set of wooden legs. The back of the painting, as usual, faced the door, obscuring the artist himself; the windows at Everly’s back provided the light by which he was, in theory, working. Kaylin wished, for a moment, that the office could be more like this; usually work was punctuated with little things like obscenities, gossip, and the damned window, which never, ever, shut up.

Master Sabrai approached the side of the painting, and disappeared behind its edge; Sanabalis, after a pause, did the same. Five minutes of silence later, Kaylin repented: she had heard funerals which were more lively. She didn’t wait for an invitation; she also took a small detour around the edge of Everly’s canvas, but chose the opposite side. The small, flat table that held his palette, paints, brushes, various cloths, and a box of charcoal sticks of varying widths and lengths happened to be on that side; she almost ran into it, and managed to dodge collision at the last second.

Everly had clearly been working without stop. The edges of the canvas were almost blank; some sketching had been done, and what looked like flat representations of nearly familiar buildings rose in black and gray against a white sky, like inverted ghosts. No obvious signs or flags marked those buildings; they were clearly abstracted from an Elantran street, but Kaylin, who was more than passingly familiar with most of them, couldn’t immediately place which one.

And placement was made urgent by what Everly had painted.

A cloud made of night hovered above cobbled stones that were clearly colored by the sun at its height. Its edges were blurred and indistinct, but this wasn’t just smudging of paint or color sketching. Stars could be seen, and the livid glow of some thing that seemed either red moon or blood sun hung close to the blurred edge itself. The cloud was contained in what seemed almost a garish, ornate door frame, absent a door.

He had worked on that odd, messy frame, in which daytime colors overlapped in startling contrast with night colors; he had taken care to paint stars and a haze of mist that twisted, like an incongruously delicate veil, across a foreign sky. He had taken care to paint its height, and seeing that, she almost flinched; it was as tall as some of the unpainted buildings, and if it was in any perspective at all, it swallowed the road.

But at its center was white space. He had done no sketching there.

Everly, oblivious to his audience, continued to work. He was using the darker spectrum of his palette, applying paint here and there as carelessly as Kaylin applied words, but achieving the effortless effect of a slowly coalescing reality that Kaylin’s careless words couldn’t.

“Given the speed at which he’s painted this,” Kaylin said quietly, “we’ll have some idea of what’s going to emerge tomorrow. Or later tonight.”

“It is not…small, if the area he’s left is indeed something that emerges and not further scenery.”

“It’s not really the center we need, anyway.”

Sanabalis raised a brow.

She pointed to the buildings that lined either side of the street in their frustrating lack of detail. “We need to know where—roughly—this vision takes place.”

“It is not a concrete representation of place, Private,” Master Sabrai said curtly. “That is not the way Oracles work.”

“I’ve been the subject of one of his Oracles,” she replied, just as curtly. “And I think the clues will be there if we can read ’em. We need them.”

Sanabalis cleared his throat. Loudly. The sound was enough to cause Everly to lift his head for a few seconds as if he were testing the air. Speech, however, failed to hold his attention, and he went back to his quick, light movements. “Master Sabrai is correct in this, Private. What he paints is not predictive in the sense you hope for. You cannot direct him. What he finishes, he finishes.”

But she looked at the space that he had not yet started to touch, and she felt cold, although she was standing in sunlight. “Tonight,” she told Sanabalis quietly.

“I concur. I do not think, however, that it will be necessary to stand here for the entire eight hours while he paints. We now have other things to examine.” He turned to Master Sabrai. “If you will deliver the transcripts of the dreams that interrupted the Halls last eve, we will begin to attempt to make some over-arching sense of the impending difficulty. Thank you,” he added, in a more clipped tone.

Master Sabrai shook his head as if to clear it. “As you say, Lord Sanabalis. If you will return to my office, I will give you what I’ve managed to transcribe.”

“I am willing to deal with Sigrenne’s less than perfect penmanship.”

Not reminding Sanabalis of this definitive statement was difficult, because it would sound smug; Sigrenne’s hand was neither neat nor precise, and Sanabalis had clearly not spent as much time deciphering human scribbles as Kaylin had. Most of the Hawks were not in the running for world’s best penman.

Sanabalis sat in the carriage opposite Kaylin; smoke drifted from his nostrils and the corner of his lips, and his eyes were a decided shade of orange. Given the way he glared at the pile of papers—and the paper was by no means uniform in size or shape, which made it ungainly—Kaylin was half-surprised they hadn’t gone up in that smoke.

Every so often he glared over the top of a curling fold. At least one session was partially illegible because either someone with wet hands had picked it up, or it had been put down, briefly, in water. Or worse.

To prevent Kaylin from being too amused, Sanabalis handed her the occasional bit he couldn’t read. She took them with gratitude, since it was better than doing nothing, and safer than mocking a Dragon Lord. Especially given the lack of sleep. Kaylin, reading the various notes, cringed. She had an easier time interpreting Sigrenne’s scrawl, but because she had no context, it was hard to guess what the words she couldn’t read meant.

But she understood enough. In many of these dreams, there were visitors. Some were monsters. Some were ghosts. Some were—she thought the words were stray kittens, which caused some head scratching.

“How the hell does Sigrenne know that it’s an Oracle and not a normal dream?” she muttered.

“She probably doesn’t,” was the curt reply. “Which means she has to take as many notes as possible. It isn’t all Sigrenne’s writing. Some of it is probably Notann’s. The one that looks like a series of ink blots is almost certainly Weller’s. When the Oracles dream like this, one person is not going to get to all of them in time. I have another door-locker.”

She glanced across the carriage. “No, that’s the same one. That’s Tylia. Her name’s up in the left corner.” She caught a few words, and added, “but that’s more detailed than she was. There’s a door but no walls. Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Well, the lack of walls means the sky is falling, and Tylia can’t find a roof to hide under. See, there. That lines up with Everly’s painting.”

“Possibly. This is merely our attempt to understand why, and perhaps where, some future difficulty must be intercepted. I will let you out at your own Halls. I would take you to the Palace, but the Arkon dislikes interruption and you are not the quietest of visitors. You possibly also have a job, or several, to do.”

The guards at either set of doors were tense enough that the usual good-natured mockery failed to occur. Kaylin missed it.

The office wasn’t quiet. The window wasn’t impressed; it was hard to tell which was louder. Marcus was bristling, which, given the state of emergency, was expected. Caitlin was quiet and grim. Not a single groundhawk could be seen in the office, not even Severn.

“Neya!” Marcus shouted.

She walked past the duty roster, glanced at it, and shuddered. The fact that she could read it at all, given that there were now more changes than there had been original postings, was due to thirteen years of experience with the way Marcus’s writing was affected by his moods. One thing was clear: all of the Hawks were out on patrol, and it was a very tight patrol: it centered in the section of city that featured Elani at its core.

“The Swords,” Marcus told her, as she approached his desk, “have been ordered to begin evacuation.” He stabbed a piece of paper on his desk. It was the map of the streets that lay within the two circles. There were holes at the corners of a square area within the circle itself. “They’re starting at Strathanne, between Highpost and Delbaranne. They’re clearing straight through to Lattimar.”

She opened her mouth in order to let at least one question out; he flexed his claws. It was one of his more serious versions of shut up. He did, however, answer the question. “While you were out, Lord Diarmat of the Dragon Court mirrored. The Imperial Order of Mages tendered the report from their initial exploratory investigation.”

“Good or bad?”

“If you’re a member of the Imperial Order’s scouting forces, bad.”

She closed her eyes. “How many did they lose?”

“One death. Three casualties.”

His tone of voice made death seem like the better deal. She schooled her expression. “Did they transmit the Imperial Records information here?”

“No. Lord Diarmat didn’t feel it was necessary, and frankly, it is not my problem. I don’t need to worry about mages right now. The Arcanists are, in theory, the Swords’ problem. Teela has gone, by way of the Barrani High Halls, to deliver the news.”

“What news?”

“We’re sealing off the portion of the city the Swords are now evacuating. We’ve set up roadblocks and guards on all routes in and out. Evacuation should take three days at the outside. Teela is at the Halls. Tain and the rest of our crew are spread out among the Swords.”

The Swords were going to love that.

“Why?”

“Because the Arcanists are now interested, and one or two of them are causing the Swords some difficulties. While I’d like to resolve it by jailing them,” he said in a tone of voice that made jail and death synonymous, “we are understaffed. If it were up to the Lord of Swords, we’d be extending the blockade to the full perimeter of the outer circle.”

“We can’t,” she said, voice flat.

“Funny, that’s what I told him. The perimeter would include the Halls and the Palace. The Emperor declined the Swordlord’s request, and this is the compromise. I can see why he doesn’t like it. We can keep the Arcanists out of this area. We have no hope of keeping them out of the circle. The Emperor had implied that he’d just keep them locked in their damn tower.”

“On what charges?”

“Not my problem.”

She snorted. It would be, if they tried. Still, the Arcanists would be vastly less likely to cause trouble for Barrani Hawks, and if they were babysitting the Swords, the roadblock would probably not spontaneously—and conveniently—combust. Kaylin nodded grimly. “Where do you want me?”

“You’re up on the roster.”

She bit her lip; it prevented suicidal words from emerging. “I’ll check now,” she told him. She was relatively certain it wouldn’t take too damn long to find her name in the hideous mess of ink and pencil marks.

“Good. Go.” He paused, and then added, “You might want to remove your bracer and toss it somewhere.”

She’d found her name. It was beside Severn’s, and was, in fact, their regular Elani beat. “You’re sure?”

“We have Imperial Permission,” the Leontine replied, and she caught the brief flash of teeth that was their version of black humor. “Lord Diarmat looked like he’d just found out he’d been put on a vegetarian diet when he delivered it.”

Leontines, in theory, held Dragons in high regard. It was no wonder that fact had come as a huge surprise to Kaylin, because Marcus did not. “Lord Diarmat was difficult?” she asked.

“Stop gabbing, and get moving.”

Kaylin had once or twice in her seven years with the Hawks—admittedly most of them as unofficial mascot—seen roadblocks and quarantines within Elantra. They were mostly put in place to contain outbreaks of summer wasting sicknesses, but not always. Occasionally the Arcanists on the Wolf hit list didn’t bother to make a break for the outer walls or the fiefs; they headed into extremely crowded areas and attempted to hold out by using sorcery, with whole city blocks as hostages.

This was like the latter case, except there were no Arcanists you could kill to end the threat.

The roadblock was going up when she slid through. On this side of the square, the Arcanists wouldn’t be a problem, so there were no Hawks here. She nodded, briefly, and headed straight for Elani.

Since she had no way of signaling Severn when she reached Elani, she did a quick perusal of the street. The Swords had arrived, and they were, even now, knocking on doors. One Sword carried a very long, very ornate roll, around which was wrapped a long scroll. The writing on the scroll itself couldn’t be clearly seen at this distance, but the illuminated bits for the capital letters could. The scroll looked impressive, expensive, and Official.

It was, of course.

The Sword in question wore her weapon around her waist, but carrying it was optional; she was flanked by Swords who had nothing better to carry. Kaylin sometimes envied the Swords their jobs, because for the most part, their jobs were easy. But riot duty and evacuation duty made envy pretty damn hard, and the situation was dire enough that petty satisfaction was just as hollow. She cringed when she heard a door slam, because she would have bet money it had just slammed in their faces.

But Elani was close to the center of the circular area that rain had allowed them to map; here, there was no leeway possible. She wondered how many people would leave their homes voluntarily, and how many would have to be carried, or thrown, out.

It wasn’t just homes, of course; some of the merchants didn’t live above their storefronts, choosing instead to rent them out. The boarders were, like any other resident, being ordered to leave; the merchants were also being ordered to leave. Kaylin was just petty enough to smile at the sound of Margot’s operatic rage as she hurried toward Evanton’s.

There were no Swords at Evanton’s door. The door itself was ajar, and Kaylin could see Grethan standing in the window and staring, eyes rounded, at the commotion that Elani had become. She walked in, and Grethan jumped.

“I’m not here to throw you out,” she said quietly. Glancing around the empty store, she added, “Where’s Evanton?”

“He’s in the Garden,” Grethan replied. “With your partner.”

Grethan had a natural affinity for the Elemental Garden, or rather, for entering it. It wasn’t, however, necessary.

“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.