To the water, Kaylin said, Can you look?
Yes. But I understand what Gilbert fears; I consider his advice wise. You will not make things real, as he states—but you will be drawn to them; they will be like gravity, and you, like a person who has taken steps off a very high cliff. They are possibilities, Kaylin—but you exist in a world of constant possibility. To look—left or right—is the equivalent of making a decision, of acting on it, yes? The action decides the course you follow; reality asserts itself around that choice. Your reality.
But people are—
Dying. Yes. And they are being born. And they are loving. And hating. And weeping in sorrow or joy. They are pleading. They are screaming. They are singing. Those are the sounds of your lives. She smiled as she spoke, but it was not a happy smile.
Kaylin nodded, exhaling. “We’re walking between possibilities.”
Yes.
“And if we choose one, we’ll fall off this path.”
Yes.
Fine. It made sense, in a strange way. To the Barrani, Kaylin said, “Do you guys see a door ahead of us?”
“If you call that a door, yes.”
The Arkon’s magic made Kaylin’s skin itch. As they walked, itch transformed to pain. She didn’t ask him what spells he was attempting to cast, because she was certain he felt they were necessary, and his was the voice that counted here, according to the Hawklord. But she was very grateful Kattea was no longer with them, because Gilbert...was losing solidity as he walked.
No, not solidity, exactly—but form. The darkness of his silhouette spread and thinned, and as it did, she could see the moving squiggles of opalescent color she associated with chaos, and only with chaos.
The small dragon squawked loudly and then, to make a point, exhaled.
He exhaled a stream of silver that was flecked with the same opalescence. Kaylin froze, and because she had, the Arkon walked into the back of her feet. “Private?”
“My familiar just exhaled.”
“Yes, and?”
“I’ve seen that breath destroy Ferals from the inside out, and I’d rather not get a face full of it.”
Squawk. SQUAWK.
“I believe you have insulted your companion,” Gilbert said.
“Not intentionally.” She straightened her shoulders. “Fine. I apologize for my instinctive and very reasonable reaction.” She closed her eyes and continued to walk. The air smelled of wilderness and forest and...cinnamon. When she opened her eyes, the particulate mist had not cleared; if anything, it had thickened. But it didn’t sting her face or her eyes.
“Does this count as you helping me do something I can’t do on my own?” She knew the price he had demanded for it the last time she’d asked, and she was not any more willing to pay it now.
No, her familiar replied. She recognized his voice instantly, and felt both gratitude and fear. Any place in which she could hear his actual words was never a good place. No, Kaylin, it does not. It is a variant of what your Arkon is attempting to do.
What, exactly, is he attempting to do?
Survive Gilbert.
Chapter 27
Survive Gilbert?
Look at him, Kaylin.
I’ve been looking at pretty much nothing else. Given that his eyes were part of him, this was mostly true.
You have not, the familiar said, with some exasperation, seen him.
She looked, and she saw it now: Gilbert was Shadow. Gilbert was darkness.
The halls beneath the city had reminded Kaylin of the High Halls because the ceilings were so tall.
Gilbert filled them. Not only in height, she saw that now, but in width. He was a moving cloud—a dense cloud, but one that implied spaces and gaps. His eyes were part of that; they weren’t, as they had appeared on first—or fiftieth—glance, separate. They existed on the end of shadow tendrils, and they moved around Gilbert as if he were some kind of Shadow octopus, but with more tentacles.
She had no idea how he had carried Kattea on his shoulder or in his arms, because she couldn’t see that he actually had either of those things.
Had she been standing on the border of Tiamaris, she would have tried to kill him.
No, actually, she would have accepted that she couldn’t, and she would have retreated, a fancy word for “run for her life.” She felt a moment of very visceral fear, but the fear was double-edged. The expected fear—of Gilbert—she accepted. She had no choice; it was there, rooted deeply by every other experience of Shadow she had ever had. But the unexpected fear, that maybe those other Shadows had been like Gilbert, and she had done her level best to kill them—that one was new.
And hadn’t she feared—and hated—the Tha’alani in exactly the same way? Hadn’t she viscerally, forcefully, made this clear every single time she mentioned them?
And hadn’t she been wrong—so very, very wrong—in the end? But she hadn’t killed the Tha’alani. She’d hated them, but she’d never killed them.
Shadows, she’d killed.
Yes.