Ynpharion was grim, but silent; his Lady occupied the whole of his attention. He watched, discomfort and anger blending as the Consort lifted both hands and placed them, palms down, on the table. The dishes that had, moments before, decorated her place setting vanished; nothing remained between her palms and the polished, gleaming wood.
“Lady,” Teela said, her voice sharpened to an almost lethal point.
The Consort wasn’t listening. As she concentrated, Kaylin’s skin began to tingle. It went straight from tingling—which was slightly uncomfortable—to pain. In that moment, Kaylin remembered that the Consort, like many of her Barrani compatriots, was a mage. If her magic was odd and not immediately identifiable, it was nonetheless of a kind that made Kaylin’s magical allergies, as she called them, flare.
Above the tabletop, hovering inches from her hands, an image began to form. As if the Consort had summoned a Records mirror, it began in a whorl of fog and smoke, but that amorphous cloud began to condense and, as it did, to harden into an actual, visual image.
Kaylin was certain that there were things she would never forget, but memory at a distance was not as visceral as memory aided by images she could no longer clearly recall. And she recognized this one, understood Teela’s sharp tone and held her breath.
The cavernous roof opened first, as if the image itself needed to be contained, the lines of a cage drawn first. No one spoke; nothing but breathing could be heard, and most of the cohort, as Kaylin, appeared to be holding their collective breath.
Beneath the uneven surface of rock, lit only by torches, figures emerged.
To anyone raised in the fiefs, these figures were familiar nightmares: Ferals. They took the form of dogs—giant, dark dogs with faces full of fangs that made their heads seem slightly unbalanced. They formed slowly, the hints of their bodies a tangle of dark smoke that solidified as she watched. At their bristling backs, she could see other shadows embroiled in the darkness, waiting their turn—as if the Ferals were heralds.
She knew what would follow. She knew what she’d seen.
But she was wrong. The shadows behind the Ferals didn’t immediately merge; nothing bearing the face and form of a Barrani man came to greet them. She said, “There’s a bridge,” half speaking to herself. The Consort’s illusion shifted, pulling back as Records mirrors could, to reveal the bridge of which Kaylin had spoken.
All of the Shadows were on the far side. The Ferals. The mass behind them, waiting to take shape and form. Kaylin had seen the first of the forms offered: that of a Barrani man. And she had seen—Oh. The Consort hadn’t finished. Sweat beaded her brow now, and her lips were thinned as if with pain. As if? No, Kaylin thought, therewaspain. It wasn’t physical, but for someone like the Consort, that might have been easier.
The dead, in lighter fog, lighter smoke, began to fill the cavern on the other side of the bridge. The light in the darkness was contained entirely in them, and shed by them: they were pale, luminous, ghostly. And they were all Barrani.
Someone’s breath came out like a cut of sound, the swing of a blade.
The Consort did not speak. Kaylin did. “They’re all still there—everyone who failed the Test of Name. They died,” she added, as if it were necessary. When she’d seen them, it almost had been; they had seemed so full of pain, of fear, of life. “They were bound by their names, and whatever it is that lies at the base of the High Halls holds those names; none have returned to the Lake. None have been returned to the Barrani.”
“All of the dead are there?” It was Sedarias who asked.
“All of the dead who chose to take the Tower’s test—and failed.”
“And whatisat the heart of the Tower?”
The Consort had not spoken a word; the whole of her reply was contained in the images she had set in motion. The shadows at the back of the Ferals shifted and twisted, and in the end, they disgorged the perfect image of a Barrani man. A man Kaylin recognized.
Teela stiffened. Severn stilled. Ynpharion’s voice froze—it shouldn’t have been audible, but was, anyway. Kaylin was certain that the second guard felt exactly as Ynpharion did. They were seeing the current High Lord. The man who had been called the Lord of the Green, and would be called that until an heir to the High Seat was born.
No one else appeared to recognize him.
He wore a cape of black, but the hood rested around his shoulders, and although his lips moved, the Consort didn’t add sound to the image she had dredged out of perfect, Barrani memory.
“Spike?”
Spike was whirring, but there were no accompanying clicking noises.
The image of the Barrani High Lord shifted, the darkness of shadow melting in place. Shadow accreted and re-formed, becoming something far larger than a single man. This, too, Kaylin had seen, what felt years ago, and in a foreign country. She lost sight of Ferals, lost sight of the dead—but it had never been the sight of them that had haunted her. Just the echoing sound of their voices, the cries of the damned.
What emerged, at last, from the darkness was a Shadow that resembled a Dragon’s form—but only skeletally. It had the head, the jaws, the neck; it had similar limbs and ebon claws. Absent were the wings, but even had they been present, it wouldn’t have made the creature seem less monstrous; it was the eyes. It had a multitude of eyes that opened at asymmetrical places across the whole of its face, and one eye that opened, larger than the rest, at the center of its chest.
She could see the physicality of a roar when the creature opened its jaws, and she could see a tongue that was more disturbing than anything else about it; it seemed to be almost a fully formed humanoid, but glistening and wet.
Spike began to click, the noise becoming high-pitched as it was joined by a whirring whine.
“Spike wishes to ask if both the former and the latter forms are adopted by the same creature.”
Kaylin nodded.
Whir, click, whir.
