“Well now would be a good time, don’t you think?”
He spoke in Barrani, but spoke as if it were Elantran, which was a neat trick that Kaylin hoped never to learn; High Barrani forced her speech into more acceptable patterns. “Where are the cohort?”
“They’ve gone ahead a bit.”
One, the tallest of the number, had jogged back. Although he couldn’t interact with them physically, he nonetheless avoided the edges of the words that now formed columns. Kaylin thought they’d be deadly if they started to move. He spoke to Terrano, his lip movements slow and exaggerated.
Terrano made a face. “They want us to hurry,” he finally told Kaylin. “Sedarias has reached the edge of the containment I’ve put in place, and she’s not happy about being restrained.”
“That’s more words than he used,” Bellusdeo observed.
“I filled in all the blanks.”
*
Kaylin started to jog. She could maintain a slow jog for a very long distance, and could move into a sprint if the situation demanded it. Bellusdeo had no difficulty keeping up; Terrano seemed to resent the pace. Or at least being forced to keep it using actual legs.
But they didn’t catch up with the cohort; Allaron hadn’t lied. Sedarias was both angry and intent. The moment she realized she could safely proceed again, she did—and all of the cohort went with her.
Alsanis’s words started to move. They were anchored in place, each to a very large stone, but they could, and did, cover the range of that stone; in places, they came together like a wall of blades.
“Should we try flying over them?” Bellusdeo asked; she clearly felt that Kaylin’s directive had been the wrong one.
Kaylin shook her head. “I think they can move up and down at will. They seem to be confined horizontally.” She glanced at her familiar; he nodded. But he didn’t lift a wing; whatever she could see with her own eyes, he considered good enough.
The travel toward Sedarias grew much more treacherous; the stones into which words had been engraved were smaller, and the words themselves appeared to be more intricate. Bellusdeo managed to avoid them; Terrano, accustomed to a variety of traveling forms, didn’t. He didn’t instantly get turned into diced pseudo-Barrani, but he did get cut, and he did bleed. He seemed almost offended by the injury, and threw the familiar a baleful glare, but proceeded far more cautiously after that.
Caution, however, only carried them so far.
*
“That’s a pretty solid wall,” Kaylin said to the Dragon as she looked at the words that lay ahead of them. The stones upon which the words had been carved, and from which they’d risen, were smaller, which narrowed the space between what were effectively spinning blades.
The Dragon concurred. “Is flight still forbidden?”
The familiar nodded. As a small lizard, his facial expressions were limited, but he looked concerned, to Kaylin.
“How did the cohort get past this?”
“Don’t ask me—I’m not one of them anymore.”
Kaylin exhaled. “But you’re here.”
“Obviously I have an intelligence deficit.”
“Fine. You recognized this as Alsanis.”
“I spent most of my existence trapped here.”
“So did the cohort. What did Sedarias do—if she managed to do anything—that allowed them safe passage?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because my skin feels like it’s being flayed off, and that’s probably not a good sign—for Alsanis.”
Terrano fell silent for one long beat.
“What are you doing?”
“Be quiet.”
Bellusdeo shook her head when Kaylin opened her mouth again, and Kaylin closed it, missing Severn. He was generally content to let her do most of, if not all of, the talking. But as she watched Terrano, she had a feeling that he was talking, and in a way she couldn’t. For perhaps the first time, she considered the advantages of being Terrano and Mandoran. She didn’t much like the idea of getting stuck in walls, though.
The words spun slowly—and loudly—to a halt. And the air grew less heavy, the ground less hard. She couldn’t hear Alsanis, and that still bothered her, but she now had a faint sense of his presence.
“What did you do?” Bellusdeo demanded.
Terrano grimaced. “When we were struggling to find our way out of our cage, we developed different forms of communication. There were layers to it; we could communicate almost entirely truthfully while obscuring small, but critical facts.
“It was obfuscation that was the important part, then. Of course, Alsanis was aware of our various attempts—he’s a Hallionne. So it became a bit of a game. We have ways of communication that in theory shouldn’t exist, and he created systems to hear that nonexistent communication. We had successes, but most of them didn’t last long—it was always work to keep ahead of Alsanis.”
“So you were—”
“Using one of the older secret modes, yes. If Alsanis has somehow been cut off from communication with us—I mean with you and the Dragon—there’s a strong chance that the rest of the modes we developed were not considered when the interference was put in place.” For a moment, he seemed highly pleased with himself, which once again emphasized his youthfulness.
“Did he answer you?”
Terrano pointed at the word forms. “He never used the undercurrent to speak with us; that would have made it clear, immediately, that he could. But he learned to listen.”
“While he has this much control, let’s get moving. Ummm, I don’t suppose he could make the edges of those lines less sharp?”
Terrano snorted. “You might as well ask if he can make you less clumsy. If the edges are too sharp, don’t touch them.”
Bellusdeo’s eyes lightened as she snickered, because clearly, that’s what friends did. Kaylin forced herself not to reply, and began to navigate toward the distant cohort. She had questions, of course—but questions had to wait.
The tighter congregation of words did not diminish; neither did their edges. While it was easier to walk between them when they did not spin or move, following Terrano’s advice was difficult, and became more so as they continued their awkward pursuit of Sedarias and company.
Three words in, Kaylin knew she was going to need a new shirt; the current one had been cut in three places, and the third cut wasn’t small enough to patch. There’d been almost no friction; the slicing of cloth had made no sound. She glanced at Bellusdeo, but the Dragon scale was more hardy than simple cloth.
The fourth cut broke skin. It was a very shallow cut, more of a scrape or a scratch than a wound, and blood beaded from it slowly, welling up in uneven blobs of red. In the stillness, Kaylin didn’t even curse.