Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(120)

Kaylin shook her head. “They have the lives of warlords in their past. There’s nothing you’ve done that compares to the pain of those memories.”

Evanton cleared his throat. “If, however, you are determined to remain, come stand where I’m standing and do not move until I tell you to move.”

Kaylin, however, understood. “He wants you to leave,” she said quietly. “He wants you safe. You found the Garden on your own. The Garden let you in without Evanton’s permission. If something happens to Evanton here, you can find your way in again.”

But Grethan shook his head, his eyes dark and shadowed. “There will be no Garden,” he said. “The water said that the Garden will be broken and lost.”





Chapter 25

“Grethan!”

Grethan jumped at the change in Evanton’s voice. He moved to Evanton’s side. “You see the stones,” he said.

So did Kaylin. There were four in all. Not three, as there had been in the basement of the house on the Winding Path. “Is the number significant?” she asked.

Evanton frowned.

“The number of stones.”

“These have words,” Evanton replied. “At their base. And before you ask, no, I am not turning them over for your inspection.” Instead, he spoke, his voice low and resonant; it might have been a Dragon voice, given the way it carried.

Words appeared in the air above each of the four stones, and Kaylin recognized them instantly, although she only knew two: fire and water. The other two, air and earth, she had never attempted to use. She understood the purpose of these stones.

No, she thought, that was wrong. “Evanton, why do you have these stones? I mean, why are they here and why couldn’t you hear or see us until we were practically standing on top of them?”

“They are the foundation of my garden,” he replied. “They are...tent pegs, driven into the fundamental layer of reality in which we live. They are not cages,” he added, “but containers; the words at their base are words given willingly, and written by the elements. Water as you drink it, water in your wells, water when it is not summoned, exists. It exists as part of the world, and it is not sentient. The glass of water you drink doesn’t think. The water with which you bathe doesn’t think.

“The fire over which you cook, the earth over which you walk—they are part of the elements. They are like—like fingernail cuttings, or the dead skin you scrub off. Within my Garden, the elements are sentient. They are also contained—but understand, Kaylin, that they are ancient, ancient forces. They do not exist in one simple fashion; there is water here. There is water where the familiar guides you to look. There is water in the past and water in the present and there will be water in the future; it persists.

“We persist in a similar way until our deaths—but only on the narrow path of ‘world.’ Pretend the world is like a very fine, many-layered cake. We cannot exist on any layer but the top. Or the bottom. The limitations on our perceptions, the limitations of our physical forms, demand it. There are stories—old stories that perhaps even your Arkon has forgotten. During the time of creation, many creatures were made.

“But many of them could not survive. Just as fish need water, men—and in this, I count all the races that have ever lived in Elantra or beyond its borders—need solidity. They need a fixed place, a living world.

“Worlds were made. They were made like the cages small rodents live in. They were made larger, of course, and the bars were meant to be invisible.

“But the elements you see and touch and summon can live in any layer of existence, and do. What they are in the other layers is—should be—irrelevant to us, here.” He hesitated.

She marked it. In general, Evanton’s hesitations were a sign of growing temper—but this was different.

“Mandoran does not live the way Teela lives, although he is trying. He can walk, speak, think, in dimensions to which he was not born. It is why the water reacted so poorly when he visited the Garden the first time.”

“It’s not doing that now.”

“No. It cannot see him now.”

“I don’t know what you’ve done to the Garden, but we need to know how it works.”

Evanton, in shadow, could still somehow stare a hole through her. “Do you think this is something I do regularly? Perhaps you are unaware of the term emergency? Perhaps—”

Grethan caught his master’s arm.

“Your Garden isn’t the only place in the city that’s functionally disappeared. A space like this—very like this—exists in the center of the Winding Path. And it’s growing. We need to stop it.” She hesitated. “The water told you what happens in the future. The city is destroyed—or at least the Tha’alani quarter is. Gilbert is here—no, Kattea is here, from the future after that destruction.

“I have no idea where here is,” she continued. “But...I can hear Nightshade. He’s alive.”

“You could not hear him until you entered this space?”

“No.” She hesitated. “Does this mean we’re somehow outside of...time?”

*

Kaylin.

The voice was stronger. It dispelled doubt. It was Nightshade.

What...is happening? Where are you?