“I’m not in the mood to listen to you whine about door wards.” Teela was never in that mood.
“This is a door that Gilbert, Annarion and Mandoran can’t see. If small and squawky were a reasonable size, I’d look at it through his wings; as it is, if he sits on my shoulder it’ll only be because I’m flat out on the floor. I don’t imagine this is a normal door ward. If it is, I will do my level best not to—as you put it—whine.” When Teela failed to move, Kaylin continued, “Gilbert didn’t think it was safe for you to open this book. If he thought it was safe for you to open the door, I’d let you do it and be grateful.
“But since he can’t see it, his opinion doesn’t count.”
Teela glanced at Tain. Tain shrugged.
Kaylin placed her palm against the ward.
*
She was braced for the sharp jolt of pain that door wards always caused, and mindful of Teela glowering at her side. She was not prepared for the pain to stop.
But it did. The marks on her arms, although they still shed light, were once again flat, a colored part of her skin. As a bonus, the door swung open.
Teela’s skepticism was practically physical.
The room beyond was dark. The only thing that shed light was the floor, because this floor very much matched the floor in the other room—the one she’d seen only when she made direct contact with Gilbert. It was a steady stream of chaos, colors bubbling up to its surface as if it were lava. The air, however, was cold enough to cause breath to mist.
“What are you hoping to find here?”
“Words” was Kaylin’s flat response. “Don’t close that door.” She rolled back both of her sleeves and lifted her arms. “Can you guys tell me what you see?”
Teela hesitated. “What do you see, kitling?”
“Not much. It’s cold and it’s dark. I can just make out the ceiling, which is flat. Teela?”
“It looks like a morgue.”
*
“A morgue.” Kaylin exhaled. She moved toward the center of the room, but she didn’t run into any tables. Or chairs. Or, more relevant to Teela’s description, bodies. “No wonder Mandoran and Annarion are having such a hard time.”
“Pardon?”
“There are no slabs here. There are no chairs. There are no cupboards and no corpses. Why morgue?”
“There’s a sheeted corpse,” Tain said quietly.
“Is it human?”
“I said it was sheeted. It is roughly human in size.” He then spoke to Teela so quietly Kaylin couldn’t pick up his words. Teela’s were clearer. She was cursing in Aerian.
“It’s not human.”
“Leontine? Tha’alani? Anything mortal?”
“No.”
Kaylin, frustrated, turned toward Teela, to find that she had vanished. Only her voice remained; hers and Tain’s. It was disorienting and very, very uncomfortable, but it was also a reminder: Kaylin was still, somehow, attached to Gilbert. What she saw now was, in some part, a function of that. “You can’t identify the race.”
“It is not draconian; it is not Barrani.” Teela hesitated.
“Is it an ancestor? I mean, like the ones that woke up in Castle Nightshade?”
“No,” Tain said. “We’re wrong. I don’t think it is a corpse.”
Tain had seen his share of corpses. They all had. It was not an easy mistake for the Barrani corporal to make. Kaylin was frustrated; she wanted to see. She approached Tain—or rather his voice—because that was all she had to go on.
Severn said, “It feels like ice.”
“It’s not ice,” Teela replied. “Marble, maybe; it’s too polished for stone.”
“It looks like a corpse, not a statue,” Tain added.
As she approached their familiar voices, the air grew colder. The mist produced by warm breath in cold air grew more dense. She could not see any of the other Hawks in the room. Nor could she see the body or statue or whatever it actually was. She saw her arms, her breath and layers of darkness that were parted by the light the marks on her arms shed.
She needed to see what they were seeing, and there was only one way to do that.
Severn.
He was there instantly.
I’m sorry.
Don’t be. You mostly stay on your own side of the fence. She felt the undercurrent of humor.
You can see what they see?
Yes.
I need to see it, too. This might be uncomfortable—
Kaylin.
Right. She stopped wasting time on apologies or explanations. She had a True Name. She wasn’t born to it, hadn’t been given life by it, but it was there. None of the Barrani really understood what a True Name meant for a mortal, and as a result, the mortal in possession of that name didn’t understand it, either. But she had given her name to Severn.
She could speak to Severn, and Severn could speak to her. They didn’t have to be in the same room, although in this case being in the same room was no guarantee of anything. More than that, they could see what the other person saw, or hear what the other person heard—with effort.