“I did not recognize immediately what it was. My apologies. But I recognize it now; follow, and it will take us where we must go.”
“How are you so well acquainted with these halls?” the Arkon asked.
It was Kattea who answered. “Gilbert lives here.” She was once again perched—as if she was weightless—in the curve of his right arm; her own arms were around his neck. It made her seem much younger. She yawned.
“It is better,” Gilbert said, “that Kattea sleep. She will remember this as a dream or a nightmare when she wakes.”
Kattea lifted her head and shook it. “I’m not sleepy.”
“No, of course not.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“You are not leaving.”
“Will you save the city?”
“I will save the city.”
“Will you take me with you?”
“Hush, Kattea. I cannot see past your voice.” It was an odd thing to say, and it seemed to Kaylin that Kattea was struggling to keep her eyes open. Given the circumstance, this was surprising. Or maybe not. She glanced at the Arkon; his eyes’ inner membranes were high, but they were a steady orange. He nodded in answer to the question she didn’t ask.
Magic. But not a magic that caused Kaylin’s skin to ache. While they walked, the Arkon turned to Kaylin. “You said there were traces of six different mages along the wall in the basement that led to the corpses.”
She nodded. “There are no records of similar murders, not in the Halls. If this has happened before, it was never reported.”
“Or it happened before Records were kept.” He shook his head, murmuring softly. This time, Kaylin’s arms began their almost comfortingly familiar ache. “Gilbert does not see those corpses as dead.”
Kaylin nodded.
The Arkon directed the next question to Gilbert. “How do you see the living?”
“Kattea speaks. She eats. She breathes. So does Severn. They both...move. They respond.” It was growing darker in the tunnels; the light cast by the lamps seemed dimmer, somehow. The light cast by Gilbert’s swarm of eyes, however, was brightening.
“In what way did the three on the Winding Path seem like Kattea or Severn?”
“They speak.”
“They don’t speak in a way that the rest of us can hear,” Kaylin argued. “They don’t move in a way the rest of us can move. They don’t—I’m sorry—bleed.”
“Is bleeding necessary?” Gilbert asked. “You are not bleeding now.”
“Well, no—I haven’t been injured.”
“Ah.” He stopped. “Can you not hear them?” he asked her. “They sleep. They breathe. They murmur.”
“Not to us.”
“They are exactly like you, Kaylin.”
Since they were male and, well, dead, Kaylin felt understandably frustrated.
“They are exactly like you would be if you existed outside of time.”
*
“What do you mean, outside of time?”
He glanced back; Kaylin squinted in the light of a thousand eyes—or what felt like a thousand eyes. “They have been removed from time.”
“Kattea—”
“No. Kattea exists in time. At the moment, she exists in your time, for want of better words; she is here. She is present. I told you, you were created in such a way that you are like fish; time is your water. Removed from it, you will drown in air. They have been removed. They will die. But they are not yet dead. Time does not move for them the way it now moves for you.”
She struggled with this, and found she could almost accept it. What she didn’t understand was why. “Why did someone take them out of time? I mean—how is that even possible?”
“I am uncertain as to the mechanics,” Gilbert admitted. “But there is a schism here. A break in time. Something has tunneled into the structure; there is a crack, a fissure. It is what destroys you, in the end.”
“The fiefs—”
“The Towers protected the fiefs, as you call them. The break was infinitesimally small. We would never have noticed it under normal circumstances.”
“The entire city is gone.”
“Yes. But time moves to that point and past it. It is continuous. The only reason we are here at all is because of that break. I do not lie, Kaylin. It is possible for me to travel. It is not possible for me to interact with you while I do so. You are...so much a part of time you can hardly be seen. To my kin, the loss of your city—the loss of your world—would not register. It is only because of the inversion that I could speak with your Nightshade. When I left in search of a pathway that could return him to his home, I did not choose to surrender that inversion.
“But it is not natural, to me. It is not...simple.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I was...curious.”
Kattea lifted her head. “Because,” she said, “he’s lonely.”
Chapter 26