Fourth name down. Seven to go. “What are they doing?”
“They’re trying to kill everyone who isn’t us.”
“Any success so far?”
“None whatsoever. If it helps, whatever Teela did to the first Feral has caused alotof smaller Ferals to spawn. I don’t think they’re the original, though; they might be transformed rats. Literal rats,” he added when he saw her expression. “Those rats are smaller, faster, harder to pin down and kill. They don’t exist here,” he added. “Which is what I was sent to check.” He glanced up, and up again, while keeping pace with Kaylin.
“Where are your feet?” she demanded when name number five had been added to the back of her hand, which was getting crowded. The hand itself felt heavier, as if something was attached at the wrist. Or the palm. As long as it didn’t slow her down, she could deal with the extra weight.
“My what?”
“Never mind.” The sixth name was not nearly as easily grasped as the previous five had been. The external skin of the pillar was harder; it felt like literal glass. She could see the name itself, but the light it emitted was fainter.
He understands what you have done, Spike said.And he is now attempting to prevent it. My apologies, Chosen.
Spike had nothing to apologize for, and Kaylin opened her mouth to tell him that when the entire world shifted; the floor slanted up to become a pocked, hard wall, and the pillar, attached to the floor, went with it. Kaylin didn’t waste breath shouting; she reached out for the pillar itself, to break a fall she felt certain was coming. Her arms didn’t pass through it, but the world had only begun to spin.
She’d have to remember that some apologies were preemptive.
“Terrano?”
Silence. Whatever Spike had done, Terrano hadn’t immediately followed. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him, and gave up on trying. She closed her eyes. Again. With her eyes closed, she saw a circle made by extended wings; it enclosed her. She saw the marks of the Chosen. She saw a darkness that wasn’t terrifying, and she thought—for one confused moment—that she could hear its voice.
The pillar remained in the circle of her desperate clinch. Nothing else did. The world stopped spinning, although the sensation of movement remained, an echo of the transition itself. And it was a transition, from one place to another; it wasn’t the world that had been rotated, but Kaylin.
Or at least that’s how she explained it to herself.
She opened her eyes. She half expected to see the cohort, the Lords of the High Court, even the remaining Ferals; she thought to see Teela and Nightshade with their named swords. No one was here.
But she knew, now, where she was, because she had been in similar places before. She saw words: tall, liminal words, huddled together in the distance. How great a distance was more difficult to discern without actually moving—and she began to move, her hand heavy with the True Names of what had once been Barrani.
She was at the heart of the Tower.
Terrano was not by her side, and she now doubted that he could return. Hope, however, was present; his wings, like the distant True Words, were imbued with a golden light that spoke of power and life. She could not see Spike at all.
“He is not here,” Hope said quietly, a reminder that her thoughts were as clear as speech to her familiar. “But he will be here soon, if things go poorly.”
“If things go poorly?”
“You should not be here. You are here. The landscape that you viewed prior to this one should have been as close as you were allowed to come.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen the heart of a Tower.”
“It is not. It is why you are here, or can be here, at all.”
“Because I’m Chosen?”
“Because you have seen the heart of Towers and Hallionne before, and you have accepted what lies at their heart.”
This did not make sense to Kaylin.
“You have not attempted to make them your own. You have not attempted to shift or alter the structure of the words that were written. You have not attempted to draw power from those words to use in ways that even the Ancients could not conceive.”
“I don’t know how to do any of that.”
“Yes. Perhaps your ignorance is our salvation. But I do not believe it is ignorance that has opened this path.”
“I’m supposed to grab the rest of the names—”
