Yes. A bad one.
She could feel his brief chuckle. Before she could reply, she could hear the panicked shouts of people in the distance.
“I guess that answers that question: no, they weren’t.”
The distant language was mostly Barrani, but she recognized the word for Shadow: they made the same assumption that Kaylin would have made were it not for the Arkon. Starrante was, physically, a walking nightmare. She picked up her pace, breaking from a fast walk into a jog. All of the attention would be focused on Starrante.
“Dragon?” Bellusdeo asked as she caught up.
“Up to you. I think Starrante has—” The sound of steel against steel could be heard in the distance. Jog became run. Starrante hadn’t been carrying swords, and Kaylin was pretty sure swords were being used.
The main hall that had been cut off was a mass of bodies in motion. One of those bodies was Starrante. He was neither Dragon nor Barrani, with their immediate history of war; he was the thing that had forced pockets of peace upon both peoples at the height of their conflict.
Shadow.
Ravellon.
He was also apparently proof against the swords wielded by the mostly Barrani intruders; some of the humans had them, but most were standing back. Kaylin could feel the hair on her arms begin to rise as a precursor to cast magic; none of it caused by her companions.
Starrante didn’t appear to be casting spells. He had lifted four of his eight legs and was using them to parry the swords wielded by his attackers—people who had formed a line across the width of the hall. It was a wide hall. The width allowed three people to stand and fight, but not safely, and not well.
She wondered what was happening in the library now that she was no longer in it; she couldn’t speak to anyone she’d left behind. Sedarias could—unless Terrano had been blown out of the library by Candallar’s command, but in an entirely different direction. Or dimension.
Stay there, Kaylin said when she felt Severn’s decision to come down the hall from the other side, which would leave the effective equivalent of Barrani thugs trapped and fighting on two fronts.
Should I send Emmerian?
No—if Candallar retreats to that office, we want Emmerian with you. Can Robin get out a different way?
He’s more than willing to try—we’ve been practically sitting on him. He wants to be helpful, he added.
Tell him helpful is staying where he is. No, wait. Don’t.She hadn’t been Robin, but she’d been his age—and he’d been pretty damn helpful already.
Can you contact Killian? He had Starrante removed from the chancellor’s doorway because conflict—deadly conflict—involving members of the Academia is strictly forbidden.
I would—but I don’t think he’ll distinguish between Starrante as he was and Starrante as he is, and I think we want to get Starrante to the office somehow.
Severn, possessed of the same facts as Kaylin, nodded in the distance.
Sedarias and Bellusdeo had caught up with Starrante by this point, but Starrante had taken most of the hall’s width as his personal fighting position, and it left little room for Sedarias unless she wanted to leap over the heads of the people who had been ordered to secure the hallway and keep visitors from going any farther.
The halls were tall enough that Sedarias could—with some magical aid—clear the heads of Candallar’s gathered guards; she was less certain to clear their swords if they noticed, and she’d land as a force of one on the other side. Unless she had no intention of fighting, in which case she might be able to run toward Annarion, Severn and Emmerian.
Bellusdeo didn’t consider the height of the halls suitable for flight but seemed content to observe the third Arbiter as he muscled his way through the roadblock. She took position behind his left side, and Sedarias stepped in line with the Dragon to cover his right. Kaylin saw why.
The Barrani to the left and right of Starrante, pressed into the walls and parrying the Arbiter’s blows, would be left behind; they might be able to attack Starrante from the flanks more successfully than they had from the front. This didn’t seem to concern the Arbiter.
It should have concerned the Barrani more than it had, because annoyed Dragon—Bellusdeo—or annoyed Sedarias was probably more deadly than Starrante; they just weren’t as instantly viscerally terrifying.
Nightshade.
He was both annoyed and amused.
You said Killian had finished his lecture. Is he still there?
He is quizzing us.
What, without any time for study?Shut up, Kaylin.Sorry—whatever he did to Starrante, I need him to do to Candallar’s thugs.
