“Probably in the library with Terrano and the Arkon.”
“Then I will take the rear.”
“I don’t need—”
Bellusdeo roared. Kaylin shut up and let Sedarias take the rear.
Chapter 26
The stairs led to the hall. The hall was unchanged. There were closed doors on either side of the narrow stone hallway. Bellusdeo marched down the hall toward the closed door at its end.
“If you can somehow bespeak Killian,” she began.
The door she had just passed on the right burst open. Or rather, it burst outward, sending large chunks of heavy wood and small splinters flying. The bulk of the heavy wood slammed into the wall inches behind Bellusdeo, who was already on the move.
They passed almost a foot in front of Kaylin. Splinters scraped her face and lodged in her hair. Neither the splinters nor the hair was of much concern right now. The creature in what remained of the doorway was.
She had seen it through Severn’s eyes, sitting on the large desk in the chancellor’s office. Seeing it in person was a new—and unwelcome—experience. Its head was high upon the hairy, leg-like neck, swiveling in a full circle to take in its surroundings; its eyes—all four eyes—were crimson.
Without taking a breath for thought, Kaylin jumped forward, not back. Legs rose on the creature’s left. Kaylin didn’t attempt to count how many; she leaped past them before two implanted themselves firmly in the stone of the floor. Reaching out, she placed one palm safely against the bulk of its body—its hairy, disturbing body. Eyes opened on either side of her hand.
This creature really did remind Kaylin of the most dangerous of the Shadows thatRavellonproduced: it had too many eyes, too many legs and a mouth the size of a Dragon’s sitting sideways in what passed for a face.
Behind her, she could hear Sedarias shout a warning, and she shouted back, “No, wait, both of you!”
Fire did not consume the spider creature. Which was good, because while it probably wouldn’t have killed the spider, it certainly wouldn’t have done Kaylin any good. The spider’s flesh was much warmer than she’d expected.
Warmer, fleshier, the feel belying its appearance—then again, she’d never tried to touch a spider, and certainly had never tried to heal one. If this could be called healing at all.
She couldn’t see a True Name centered within it, but she didn’t have time to look. What she wanted now was to understand the shape and the constitution of Arbiter Starrante. To heal him, in fact.
Hope’s suggestion—that she somehow heal the word—had met with uneven success. Maybe because words weren’t alive without people behind them. Maybe because what Hope perceived in the shape of True Words wasn’t what Kaylin herself perceived. Or maybe because life—as she understood it—existed only in True Names. Power existed in True Words, in True Language—she’d seen the truth of that herself. But life?
Starrante was alive.
If she had never seen someone from his race before, it didn’t change that fact. He was alive; he had once lived in the same reality Kaylin occupied most of the time. He’d lived, breathed, eaten—no, wait,do notthink about that—and probably slept. Something about the book that Larrantin had passed, without warning, into her hands had been damaged or broken in a way that allowed Candallar to command Starrante.
“No,” Starrante said, his voice the same grating screech of sound that it had been when she’d heard it through Severn’s ears. Its neck had curved in a half circle, which allowed the very large mouth to move much closer to Kaylin’s face than anyone without a death wish would have liked.
“It is the chancellor’sregaliathat gives him rudimentary control. The chancellor has the right—in an emergency—to engage the services of the Arbiters. It is that contingency that has controlled my actions. My apologies if I have harmed you. You have an odd taste about you—are you Chosen, perhaps?”
“How did your book get out of the library?”
“Ah. That is a perplexing question.”
“Do you still feel like killing us?”
“At the moment? No. I feel remarkably clearheaded, given the terrible confusion and disorder of recent days.” His head tilted, but it was hard to tell by features other than the placement of neck whether or not it was upside down. “The young these days are impatient and foolish; they do not understand that rituals came into being for a reason. I apologize; I was perhaps annoyed at the state of my captivity, and the door was locked.
“Are you well?” he added, his head leaving the vicinity of Kaylin’s face and turning toward Bellusdeo.
“I am uninjured,” Bellusdeo replied. “You are not.”
“Ah, no. But the injuries were largely self-sustained, and I believe the Chosen is repairing them as we speak.”
Kaylin winced. If healing was what she was doing, it was almost accidental. The shape of Starrante’s body was surprisingly normal, if one didn’t consider the configuration—it certainly felt more natural than a Dragon’s duality and the threads that bound both forms into a single whole.
The legs were legs, the arms—which looked a lot like legs except for the odd digits at the end—were arms. There was muscle beneath what had appeared chitinous, and that muscle was connected to a circular spine within which the major organs were housed and protected. The neck that had been so disturbing was very similar to the legs, but the head could actually retract into the body almost entirely.
