“Yes. No.”
“Which is it?”
“Bellusdeo!”
The gold Dragon nodded. Her body began to shift from the human to the Dragon form, flowing as if molten gold.
“I believe there is—or are—others of your kind here. The Shadow is moving toward them.” Spike’s words were interspersed with a type of clacking sound that made Kaylin think of chitin.
“My kind?”
“He means living people like you. Either of you,” Terrano helpfully explained.
“Are they going to need rescuing?”
Both Terrano and Bellusdeo snorted in disgust, which Kaylin took as no.
“Can the Shadows sense you?”
“No.”
“Can the Shadows senseus?”
“I do not think so. The ground here has been established across a spectrum.” He whirred and clicked, and the spikes that were responsible for Kaylin’s impulsive name choice began to extend, changing the space he occupied.
“Spike, do you recognize the person or people the Shadow is moving toward?”
A whirring, clicking noise was his only response.
The air in the immediate vicinity began to shimmer. Sedarias moved closer as an image coalesced from that sparkling air at Spike’s unspoken command. Kaylin glanced at Terrano, who was fidgeting. She didn’t expect to recognize whatever it was Spike chose to show them. The only person here who might was Terrano, whose left foot was now doing the equivalent of a nervous dance all on its own.
The man in the image was Barrani. The woman beside him was also Barrani. Nothing unexpected there. But the third person in the still tableau was human.
“There’s a human here?” Kaylin all but demanded.
Spike whirred and the human faded from view, but not before Kaylin had gotten a pretty good look at his face. It was an older man’s face, lines worn into the forehead and the corners of his mouth; he was clean-shaven, his nose was slanted slightly to the left of his face, as if it had once been broken. He was not otherwise well dressed, but something about his expression implied power. Very little of Kaylin’s experience of power made that a positive.
“So, he’s not here. Are both of the Barrani?”
Whir, click.Squawk.
“That’s a yes,” Bellusdeo said, in the quietest of her draconic voices. She tensed to leap and Terrano shrieked.
“You need to stay on the ground! The familiar can fly because he’s not like the rest of you, but we’ll lose you if you take to the air. You won’t find the Barrani you’re looking for, and you probably won’t be able to find us again. Whatever was done to the portal paths has completely sundered them from the influence of the Hallionne at either end. Sometimes there are storms or environmental effects that will damage the path, but the path itself begins—and ends—at the terminal points.”
“Which is not what happened here.”
“Obviously. I think the pathdoesexist as created, but neither my friends nor our group ever stepped foot on it.”
“Did we even see it?”
“I don’t see the way you see; I don’t know.”
“You were there, too.”
A brief shift in expression that might have indicated guilt or humiliation chased across his face. “I was preoccupied.”
“We all were. So...whatever we stepped on wasn’t what the Hallionne created; it was something created by someone else.”
