She did curse the fifth time; the cut was deeper, and the blood, rather than beading, ran down her arm, as if it were trying to underline the injury. This time, that blood spread across her skin, running across the marks that lay there, flat and glowing a gentle gray. Her familiar squawked in her ear, in the tone of voice she imagined Terrano would use if he’d noticed.
And this time, the cut was deep enough that some of Kaylin’s blood was left on the line of the word she’d been trying to circumnavigate. Terrano cursed as he turned to look, his eyes rounding, his jaw falling open. It would have been comical at any other time; now, it was vaguely terrifying.
“What—what did you do?”
It was the Dragon who answered, her eyes once again a darker orange. “She didn’t manage to avoid the middle stroke on that word. I don’t suppose you know what the word is?”
Terrano shook his head. “We weren’t exactly trying to learn how to speak True Words.” But even saying it, his gaze narrowed. “Well...not all of us. Eddorian might know. Or Serralyn.”
The two names were names Kaylin didn’t often hear at home. “Ask them,” she said. Her thoughts caught up with her mouth only after the words had escaped. “...Sorry. I am so accustomed to Mandoran and Annarion. I forgot you can’t.”
Terrano said nothing. It was the wrong kind of nothing. He managed a shrug, turned away from the word and began to walk. Kaylin almost joined him, but Bellusdeo caught her by the shoulder. “Look at the word,” she said, her voice the wrong kind of soft—the kind you got when you lost control of your voice and couldn’t speak more loudly than a shaky whisper.
Kaylin had been looking at almost nothing else.
The word had started an odd shimmer the moment Kaylin had bled on it; she’d been watching because she was afraid it would start to move again, and if it did, she’d be shredded. But that fear was unfounded; whatever Alsanis had done, the word remained much more tightly anchored in space. What changed, now, was its color. Where the word had been dark, almost obsidian, something began to spread across its visible surfaces, until the whole was a pale, almost pulsing, gray. To Kaylin’s eye, it was uglier, but she understood, as she watched, that the whole thing was transforming itself to better resemble the marks on her skin—marks that remained stubbornly flat.
“What have you done?” the Dragon asked, in the same soft voice.
“Nothing deliberate.”
“You’re going to have to do something about that. Accidentally tripping over the security precautions of a building that’s like Helen, but on a far grander scale, is not something you should be doing carelessly.”
Since Sedarias was the one who had chosen the direction, Kaylin thought this wasn’t particularly fair. She was old enough now that she didn’t bother to put the feeling into words, although in part this was because Terrano came running back. The sharp edges of these words did not cut him; he seemed to pass through them. Or they passed through him.
“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” He was almost breathless, which was unusual for a Barrani.
“Why?”
“...Sedarias said it’s helpful.”
The cut, which wasn’t deep, was already drying, and Kaylin really didn’t fancy shredding herself—deliberately—on the sharp, gleaming edges of these words. She wished, again, that she’d dragged Mandoran with her to Evanton’s, rather than the Dragon; she was pretty certain if he were here with her, he could talk to Sedarias no matter how far ahead she was. Terrano couldn’t.
But Terrano’s trust in Sedarias had not wavered in his absence from the cohort, and if he could not entirely return to his friends, he had returned to that trust.
Kaylin gritted teeth, forced herself to walk to the next word, and cut the mound of her left palm.
“Are you choosing the words at random?”
“Yes,” Kaylin said, as Spike said, “No.”
She’d forgotten about Spike in the surge of adrenaline that accompanied the knowledge that the invaders were inside Alsanis. This wasn’t the first time she’d encountered Shadow at the heart of a building, and they’d managed to repel those Shadows. The Shadows had been trying to revise, to rewrite, the words at the heart of a Tower, in the fief that was now Tiamaris.
But Terrano and his allies had been trying something entirely different, when they had almost destroyed Orbaranne. They’d been trying to absorb, to drain, the power of the words themselves. Kaylin understood that words had power—but that power was supposed to be metaphorical.
Here, it was not.
To speak these words one had to be Immortal. Or more. She remembered, dimly, the vision of one of the Ancients cutting into himself so that his blood ran into a basin—an ancient version of the mirrors upon which the city of Elantra now depended.
Her blood was not his blood. She was not a creator, not a god, if the word even applied. What she did here wasn’t the same—but if her blood was mortal and thin and the wrong color—not golden but red—she bled anyway. She offered that blood, grimly, to Alsanis. Instead of avoiding the edges of words, she practically leapt between them, because she really did not want to cut herself every single time.
“What do you mean, it’s not random?” she heard Bellusdeo ask.
Spike’s words were underlined with a whirring; clicks broke the syllables as he replied. “Random implies that she is not making choices. But she is following a specific path; you will note it if you—”
“I can see where she’s going.”
“—read the words.”
It was the Dragon’s turn to be frustrated, and she wasn’t above expressing it; the air at Kaylin’s back grew much warmer. Kaylin was fairly certain that Dragon breath wouldn’t harm these words. And she understood the frustration, because she was choosing words with no understanding of their meaning; she chose the ones with slightly wider forms while she picked her way across a nonexistent path.
But these words, like the first one, turned an even, almost glowing gray. She stopped once to look back, to see the path she’d taken. Terrano, however, had once again disappeared, running back to Sedarias as if afraid she would be lost here.
And as Kaylin cleared the last word, or rather, looked ahead to see an almost open space, she skidded to a halt so suddenly Bellusdeo ran into her.
*
The open space was a clearing, ringed in a circle of bristling, standing words, each bearing edges that could scar dragon scale. Kaylin understood that this was the heart of Alsanis, the heart of the words that defined his existence. It was in a similar space that Terrano and his associates had once attacked Orbaranne, seeking power.