“Is that a smart idea?” she demanded. “I mean—doing it here?”
He blinked. “It is only reading. I did not attempt to invoke their power in any way. I do not think they have power, independent of their original location.” He looked up at Kaylin. “I am considering your Arkon’s question. I did not see the sigil you speak of. But I understand differences in style and presentation.
“What was the purpose of the spell that caused the sigil to be written as smoke and darkness?”
Kaylin frowned. “At the time? It was meant to kill me. To kill us,” she added, nodding in Severn’s direction. She cursed the lack of immortal memory; it made her job much harder. Teela never had this difficulty. “The sigil didn’t look like a sigil to me, not at first. It really did look like black smoke. But the smoke formed curves, loops—cursive elements of actual writing. They had dimension. Usually sigils don’t. They’re kind of splashed across walls or floors or physical objects that happened to be in the blast radius.”
“And is that the similarity?”
“I don’t know. The smoke never stopped moving. By the time it had stilled enough, Sanabalis had dragged me out of the wreckage. I couldn’t read it, but I didn’t get a better chance to study it.”
The Arkon exhaled. “The street,” he said grimly.
“Did Sanabalis not tell you?”
“I will have words with him when this is over.”
*
The quartermaster was grim. Kaylin was not, and had never been, his favorite person; he considered her young, feckless and grossly irresponsible. Giving her a flare was not a problem; giving her a portable mirror was. Had she not had the Arkon literally standing over her shoulder, he would have refused; she hadn’t had time to wait for Hanson’s requisition order.
Though he always made a point of following strict procedure when dealing with Kaylin, he was clearly not willing to play that game with a member of the Dragon Court.
He was stickler enough that he demanded the Arkon’s signature, though. Kaylin, given the orange of the Arkon’s eyes, wouldn’t have dared. This was probably why she wasn’t the quartermaster.
The halls, as they walked swiftly through them, were silent—mostly because they were empty. It was likely that the Hawks had joined the Swords on the Winding Path. It had only been three weeks since the ancestors had attacked the High Halls; only three weeks since over a dozen Hawks had been buried. For the Swords, the losses had been higher; the Swords had been trained to deal with panicking crowds.
You didn’t send untrained men into those crowds and expect good results, although you could pray.
*
If the Halls of Law felt deserted, the streets surrounding them were not. And the thanks Hawks and Swords would get for putting their lives on the line in an emergency boiled down to invective, resentment and very harried compliance.
Some days, Kaylin hated people.
The Arkon appeared to dislike them even more than she did. If she wanted to kick them or curse them—and sadly, she did—she didn’t want them to wind up on the wrong side of angry Dragon breath. They were just as afraid and just as ignorant as she was, on bad days, and she didn’t feel she deserved reduction to ash, either.
People screamed and got out of the way when the Arkon, with no warning, transformed, the plates of his armor opening and falling, on invisible hinges, toward the ground. Kattea was one of those people. Gilbert scooped her up and took one step to the side as the Arkon’s wings exploded from between human-seeming shoulder blades. His neck lengthened. His tail appeared. His head expanded. This last made Kaylin snicker.
“We are going to your abode,” the Arkon said, without looking back. “Now. You can climb up on my back. Sit between the ridges. Or I can carry you in my claws.”
No one took him up on the latter, although Kattea was fearful enough that she might have been forced to, if not for Gilbert. Gilbert, holding her, leaped up. She turned into his chest, threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.
Ybelline’s hesitance was purely physical. None of it reached her face. She clearly wanted to go back to the Tha’alani quarter, but she didn’t ask. Anything that needed to be said to the other members of the Tha’alanari, she could say from here. Or from anywhere in the city.
Kaylin was only barely seated when the Arkon roared and pushed off the ground. She settled her hands against his back; Severn caught her waist and held it.
The Arkon had been injured three weeks ago. Injured enough that Bellusdeo had been—and still was—very worried. But she knew the Dragon would probably bite her arms off if she tried to heal him. Dragon bodies weren’t like mortal bodies; they were a duality. Kaylin wondered if she could sort of...sneak healing in while he was preoccupied.
“I will drop you,” the Arkon said loudly. “And if you’d deserve it, Kattea doesn’t.”
Which was a no. “Will you land in Helen’s tower?”