Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(121)

Look, she told him.

I am. I see darkness. I see...shadow. My brother?

He’s somewhere safe. Well, safer. Do you know the date?

Silence. She filled the silence with a furious rush of information. Nightshade didn’t interrupt her; he had no need. What her words couldn’t convey, her thoughts did. But she felt his growing uneasiness.

Kaylin, who is Gilbert?

She froze. Gilbert. You met him in Ravellon.

I am not foolhardy enough to enter Ravellon unless at great need.

Silence then. It took Kaylin a moment to reorient herself. Or Nightshade. Where are you?

I am in my Castle. It is...difficult to maneuver here.

Andellen?

I...do not...know. Nor, at the moment, did he appear to care. Who is Gilbert? he asked again.

She told him. Or tried to tell him. His frustration grew. Whatever she was telling him, he couldn’t understand. She tried again. She tried to visualize Gilbert as she’d seen him when she’d healed him. She knew she was speaking, knew she was thinking, could visualize it herself. But Nightshade couldn’t hear her when she did.

Nightshade was no longer uneasy; she thought he was afraid.

“Evanton, are we outside of time?”

Gilbert, however, answered. “You cannot be outside of time,” he replied. “Were you, you would be very like your fish out of water. You would die.” As he spoke, darkness condensed until it resembled a silhouette of Gilbert. He looked much like Evanton did, to the unmasked eye.

“Would it be instant?”

“Very close. Perhaps the fish analogy is incorrect.” He approached Kaylin, Kattea in his arms. Kattea, unlike Gilbert or Evanton, looked like her normal self. She was pale but silent, and her fingers, where they gripped Gilbert, were white-knuckled. She looked through Kaylin, her eyes blinking rapidly.

“Kattea?”

“She cannot hear you,” Gilbert said gently. “I do not have the gifts that your familiar does. She is...safe, with me. But she perceives only darkness. She does not speak, and she doesn’t see or hear.”

Kaylin could see nothing in this darkness as clearly as Gilbert’s eyes. There were the three he’d been left with when she’d healed him.

And there were the dozens that she had gently closed. They surrounded him like a swarm of moths might surround the fire that would kill them.

She’d thought that this darkness, this shadow, this swirl of gloom and fog, were familiar. She now knew why. They reminded her of Gilbert’s rooms. Of Gilbert’s endless rooms. They reminded her of the darkness in which she’d found—and closed—his eyes.

She had called it healing. But when she’d finished, she had no better idea of what Gilbert actually was. She didn’t have that now, either. But she watched as Gilbert’s eyes—the ones not immediately attached to his face—began to open.

“Gilbert—don’t—”

He smiled. The light from his embedded eyes revealed his familiar face, although the rest of his body remained in darkness. The unattached eyes did not stop opening; lids curled up and vanished. This was not comforting.

“I believe I understand some part of what has occurred here. Keeper, we have disturbed you in your very necessary work.”

“But—”

“No, Kaylin. This choice is not the choice your Keeper would have made had it not been for the recursion of the water. It is a choice he must make if your city is to have any chance of survival. But you—and I—have other tasks. I understand now.”

Kaylin wasn’t certain if it was Nightshade’s fear or her own that made thinking difficult. She hated fear. What good was it? If Evanton’s Garden was—tenuously—in Evanton’s hands, the rest of the city wasn’t. While Evanton tended to the Garden, in whatever form it currently existed, the Winding Path waited.

And time. Time had passed. Breathe, idiot. Time had passed, but if Gilbert was right, what Evanton was doing now bought them more of it. The regular, garden-variety version that Kaylin actually lived in.

“Evanton, how do we get to your basement?”

“My what?”

“Your basement. The hall is gone. I guess it’s here, wherever this is. But beneath the hall I could see the basement—and it’s not much of a basement.”

Silence.

“There are halls—there are stone halls. They’re a hell of a lot wider than your actual hall, and you could probably ride an army through them without threatening the stability of the floor.”

More silence.

“Grethan, tell him.”

Grethan, however, was silent, as well. His silence, on the other hand, didn’t last. “There—there were no halls. I mean, I didn’t see them.”

Figures. Kaylin poked the familiar. The familiar pretended she didn’t exist. “We’re leaving—if we can. But if you’ve got some sort of mirror access here, don’t use it.”

“Is there difficulty with the mirrors?”

“Severe difficulty, actually. And no, before you ask, we have no idea what it is. But in their future memories, Ybelline and the Tha’alanari made a last stand in the long house. They cast a barrier spell of some sort—one meant to repel elements—and it worked. It was the use of the mirror that killed them. Something came through the mirror, which was on the inside of their defenses.”