Terrano was not the attacker here, but the space itself wasn’t empty. Two very physical Barrani were at its center. They weren’t dressed the way they had been in Spike’s Records replay, but his images had been correct: one was male, one female. Their robes appeared to be dusty with travel. If they had come here through the portal paths, they had not found an entrance through the Hallionne—any of the Hallionne. Had they, the Hallionne would have been forewarned.
They were armed, and they turned toward Kaylin. She could see the glint of swords; the man was either left-handed or ambidextrous. Either way, he was Barrani, and Kaylin suspected that if he were here, in this room, he was also an Arcanist; the sword was almost irrelevant.
She ducked immediately behind the nearest word; she would still be visible, but the words themselves weren’t lifeless architecture. As if he thought the same thing, he failed to cast anything resembling a spell—but against Kaylin, he wouldn’t need it. The familiar sat up while Kaylin navigated, and plastered a wing across her face.
She didn’t immediately realize why; the man looked no different viewed through the familiar’s wing than he had through her unaugmented vision, and it wasn’t always easy to move in a way that kept the wing firmly over her eyes. But he never smacked her face this way unless he thought there was something she should see. She looked.
Both the moving Barrani man and the woman who appeared to be standing sentinel remained unchanged. But through the wing, she could see the cohort clearly; she could not see Terrano. If he was here at all, he was hidden.
Bellusdeo was not.
The Barrani man stopped walking when the Dragon stepped out, gleaming in golden armor; he raised his sword as she inhaled. She didn’t bother with warnings or threats; that wasn’t her way. She breathed. The man spoke three harsh words, and the sword in his hand split the flame. Kaylin wondered, briefly, if it were one of The Three, the swords created by Barrani master smiths in a bygone age to kill Dragons. She lost that thought when the metal cracked and shattered. The shards flew out and away from the man, but the woman had seen Bellusdeo.
“Hold her off!” she shouted, although her hand was also on the hilt of a sword.
Kaylin noticed that the woman’s sword, which she had assumed was in a rest position, was actually in contact with the stone beneath it. And she noticed that the tip—in the familiar-winged view—was glowing; it was a red glow, striped with gray, and it was dark enough that glow was not quite the right word to describe it.
But that reddish gray light was spreading; beneath the tip of the sword, Kaylin could now see a network of lines that made the rock beneath them look cracked or fractured, but not yet broken.
Kaylin knelt immediately to the side of Bellusdeo’s battle, and placed one hand flat on the stone.
“What are you doing?” Terrano demanded.
The question half surprised her; she assumed, and had always assumed, that what she saw through the crutch of familiar wing, Terrano saw without effort.
She didn’t answer the question, in the vain hope that the woman carrying the sword would fail to hear it. Terrano, on the other hand, was not exactly quiet.
Kaylin lifted only her head. “Bellusdeo—it’s the other one you have to stop!”
The Dragon roared; the ground shook. Terrano, however, was no longer bothering Kaylin. He headed toward the woman with the sword and checked his steps as Bellusdeo swung her head and sent the woman’s partner flying. Unfortunately, that was literal, and if Kaylin had entertained the small hope that the man was not an Arcanist, it was dashed when he failed to fall.
The woman was not Terrano; she did not curse. The Barrani she used was clear and entirely recognizable. “Stop them!”
Kaylin once again bent her head. Beneath her hand, the stone over which she’d walked was warm; it had the give of muscular flesh. The word that hovered above her was not engraved into its surface, and Kaylin wondered if it had been, before the Barrani arrived.
Reaching up, she cut her hand and let the blood flow freely as she reached more gingerly for the sharp edge of a long, looped line. The word absorbed her blood, the shift in color obvious almost immediately. To Kaylin’s discomfort, it was almost exactly the same color as the web pulsing beneath the woman’s sword.
Terrano came back to Kaylin. “Hold on to something. No, not that—you’ll lose a limb.”
“What are you doing?”
“Talking to Alsanis.”
“Is he replying?”
“I hope so.” He turned toward the woman who appeared to be in charge. “I didn’t come here planning to fight.” There was a grimace in his voice; Kaylin couldn’t see it, because he was now standing entirely in front of her, barring the way. “Whatever it is you’re trying to do, do it quickly.”
Kaylin was not under any illusion; she could be bled dry and she wouldn’t be able to cover all of the words at Alsanis’s core; he was far more complex than Helen. Her familiar didn’t lower his wing, and as she bent once again to study the lines that seemed to travel like veins beneath skin made of stone from the tip of the Barrani woman’s sword, she saw that they had spread, and were spreading, beneath her.
She didn’t know what would happen when they stopped; didn’t know what their purpose was. She assumed that it was...not good. Her familiar bit her ear, which, given the position of his wing, took real flexibility.
Kaylin put the bleeding hand flat against the stone, and pushed.
23
A cut to the palm or the arm was nowhere near the worst of the injuries she’d sustained in the line of duty, but the only advantage her assailants got from those injuries was the hope that they might slow her down. This was different and she knew it.
Her blood seeped instantly into the stone, as if the stone itself were entirely illusory. It crawled—there was no other word for it that wasn’t more disturbing—toward the web that spread from the tip of the sword, and met up with its strands, as if it were a small stream joining a large river. There was almost no visible difference between the two; only by tracing the lines back to their respective sources could Kaylin differentiate.
She’d hoped that somehow she would have control over her own blood, her own part of that moving web; she didn’t. She started to lift her hand, but her familiar bit her ear again, harder this time.
Past her left shoulder, purple fire blossomed. It splashed across an invisible barrier. The Barrani woman shouted a warning, then; she was angry. Or afraid. With the Barrani, it was often hard to separate the two. It took Kaylin a moment, vision split, to understand what was happening: the woman was screaming at the man to stop using the purple fire.
“I’m fighting a Dragon!” he shouted back, dodging the very unpurple draconic breath. Which is more or less what Kaylin would have said had she been the person in midair without one of the three Dragon slaying swords to hand. But as the ground shuddered beneath her knees, almost knocking her over, the woman’s concerns made more sense.
“She’s afraid his actions will engage the interior protections,” Terrano remarked. Both of his hands were in the air, palms facing out, as if he were intent on surrender.
“That barrier—that was you?”