And it wasn’t the right place. Not yet.
The other voices drew her attention, because she couldn’t see who was speaking—if the staccato sounds could be called speech at all. She turned, stumbled again and this time righted herself with the nearest object that wasn’t Mandoran’s arm.
It was stone.
It was stone that felt warm; it was stone that was in motion, vibrating as if struck.
It wasn’t stone at all.
Across town, Evanton was attempting to use the stones in his Garden, or what remained of his Garden, as an anchor for...reality. She wondered if those stones were like these: these were almost like bells. Resonant, when struck, the sound growing louder before it died into stillness or the silence of the city—which was never truly silent.
Yes, her familiar said quietly.
The Garden’s stones resonated with the names of the elements.
These stones didn’t. Couldn’t. But they spoke with the voices of...men. Of mortals—
Not all.
—of people like Kaylin, or Teela, or Bellusdeo, or Maggaron.
Why these three?
Three were needed, the familiar replied. This is not the Keeper’s Garden; the three were meant to anchor one small space for one brief moment.
But why not immortals? Why not the Barrani whose name he owned?
The Wild Elements agreed to the cage of the Keeper’s Garden. The three who are here chose to be here. Those whose name he might have known would almost certainly not.
She turned then and threw her arms around the stone she’d used to shore up her weight. Her teeth rattled with the vibration she both absorbed and muffled.
The light in the room shifted. Kaylin didn’t turn to look at the triangle’s center. But she didn’t need to turn: she had Gilbert’s eyes, and she could see everything.
Chapter 29
Mandoran’s eyes widened. He abandoned his daggers, abandoned his position and—to a lesser degree—abandoned Kaylin. Kaylin grimaced. She didn’t have Mandoran’s True Name, or the True Name of any of his cohort, but she could practically hear Teela scream at him. She knew why he was there.
He threw himself around the second stone, just as Kaylin had thrown herself around the first one. Throughout, the men in the triangle stared straight ahead, as if they lacked solidity. As if they were simple illusions.
But nothing was simple.
The room shuddered again; the pain caused by magic increased. Kaylin clung tighter, not to still or muffle the vibrations, but to stop herself from screaming. She bit her lip, tucked her chin and cursed in slow, deliberate Leontine. It helped.
There was something in the center of the triangular formation after all.
She couldn’t tell Annarion to hug the bell. He wouldn’t survive it. She opened her mouth and closed it with a snap, but not before a single word managed to escape it. “Teela!”
One of her oldest friends—in all senses of the word—heard her. Or maybe she heard Mandoran. She flickered as she crossed the floor; she didn’t close the gap in any consistent way. She ran; she walked; she vaulted; she edged around Annarion. All of her possible movements were traced across the air and across Gilbert’s remaining open eyes, because each of his eyes could see her, and she wasn’t exactly the same in any of them.
But she was Teela in all of them, and she understood exactly what needed to be done.
The Barrani Hawk reached the third stone, skirting the sides of the implied triangle, and threw her arms around it. Kaylin heard her grunt. She heard it clearly. But she was no longer looking at Teela. She was looking at the center of the room.
A dense, almost sparkling haze was beginning to form there. It implied shape, form and solidity without possessing any of these things. It made Kaylin’s eyes ache.
No, not her eyes. Gilbert’s eyes. Gilbert’s eyes hurt. Gilbert’s eyes watered.
Kaylin opened the two she’d been born with. She couldn’t remember closing them, and it was very, very disorienting. Her two eyes saw less than any single eye of Gilbert—but they saw what they saw more clearly. Kaylin’s back was toward the other two stones, but she could see Bellusdeo, the Arkon, Annarion. Behind them, Maggaron, Sanabalis and Tain. She couldn’t tell if Sanabalis was still alive—not with her own eyes.
Gilbert’s could see Sanabalis so clearly she might have been standing beside him—but Gilbert’s eyes couldn’t check a pulse. They couldn’t touch anything, but they could, apparently, feel pain—and they could transmit that feeling to Kaylin, who was already in enough of it.