Grinding teeth, cursing in Leontine, she kept her hold on the stone, but shifted, turning her body, and therefore her head, her physical eyes—not Gilbert’s—toward the center of the triangle.
Standing there was a Barrani Arcanist. He was striking because his hair—like the Consort’s—was a white, long spill from head to midthigh; it was not the usual Barrani black. His skin was pale; he looked almost alabaster. His lips, his cheeks, the contours of his closed eyelids were so still. He wore a circlet much like the Arcanist Evarrim’s. Kaylin couldn’t tell what color the gem had once been. Now? It was scorched, cracked. She had seen this happen once, to a ruby, in the circlet of a different Arcanist.
Gilbert’s eyes couldn’t actually see the Arcanist. Kaylin’s now could. But Annarion and Bellusdeo continued to battle with someone or something Kaylin still couldn’t see clearly.
“Mandoran, Teela, can you see him?”
Teela lifted her head; her eyes narrowed. “Yes, kitling.”
“Can you—”
“He’s not corporeal,” Mandoran said.
“What else do we have to do?” Kaylin shouted. She had to shout to be heard over the growing noise of stones, people, combat. She had to shout to be heard over her own fear.
“Gilbert has to see him!”
And Gilbert couldn’t. But Mandoran could.
“Look at him!” Kaylin shouted.
“I am looking at him!” the Barrani who was not quite Barrani shouted back. Two of his eyes were blue; one was a golden orb.
She understood, finally, as she met its lidless stare, that the thing that shed light at its heart was a word.
A true word.
“Mandoran, look at him with all of the eyes in your head!”
“I can’t—” His blue eyes widened.
Kaylin turned the rest of Gilbert’s open eyes toward the Arcanist they couldn’t see. Mandoran turned the single, foreign eye in the same direction, at the same time.
Light blinded every one of Gilbert’s eyes that Kaylin could use. It might have blinded the one in Mandoran’s forehead; she didn’t know. She couldn’t see out of that one. She couldn’t see out of the one Annarion carried, either.
But the voices of the three stones converged into a single, resonant voice: a high cascade of syllables that sounded almost like the notes of a song. She nearly joined it, it was that compelling. She could feel it as much as she could hear it—probably because the entire front of her body was now plastered against the oddly warm stone surface. She couldn’t mute it in any other way.
Almost, she didn’t want to. Almost. But her familiar bit her ear. At this point, she was almost numb—his teeth couldn’t compete with the pain the magic was causing. Or they shouldn’t have—but he wasn’t just a translucent lizard.
Kaylin lifted her head; she’d tucked her chin, the way she always did when pain was harshest. Tears trailed down her cheeks. She was certain that blood also trailed down her ear, her neck. It was a different kind of pain; it braced her.
Arms shaking with both tension and the vibration of the stone around which her arms were wrapped, Kaylin understood that when the stone stilled, when this eerie, unintelligibly beautiful song faded, it would be too late.
She wasn’t the Arkon. She wasn’t an ancient Barrani. She wasn’t Gilbert or Tara or even Helen. She had straightened the lines and shapes of true words; she had touched them, intuiting meaning slowly and with effort; she had held them together. She had carried them—and was still, in some fashion, carrying them now. She had even spoken them.
She had never spoken them without the aid of someone who was an ancient, powerful immortal standing almost literally over her shoulder and speaking them into her ear. The small, ancient, powerful immortal sitting on her shoulder was only biting at the moment.
It was possible that Gilbert was trying to speak. It was possible that he was standing over her shoulder and screaming in her ear—if he could even find it, right now.
She met Mandoran’s borrowed eye, swallowed and spoke the word that gave it its light.
*
Or she tried.
Kaylin understood that this word, this word at the heart of Mandoran’s borrowed eye, could be spoken because she had seen Sanabalis do it. She had seen the Arkon do it. True words tugged at her memory. They always sounded familiar; they sounded like something she should recognize, should be able to repeat, should understand.
But her own fledgling attempts to speak them had always been a fumbling disaster. It had taken months to be able to think and hold the name of fire for long enough to light a bloody candle. She didn’t have months now.
You do, Kaylin. It was the familiar. If you require them, you do.
I don’t have time.
No? You don’t understand where you are or what Gilbert has done. You have time. You have all the time in the world.
What?
You have time, Kaylin. The path that makes your minutes and hours is—was—broken here. It is twisted and stretched. And...it is now a contained anomaly.
What will it cost?