Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra, #11)(132)

Kaylin. Your eyes.

And she understood, then, that these were the layers of which Gilbert had spoken; that every time, every second of time, was in some fashion its own discrete identity. That she existed in all of them, but that she could not live aware of each and every one. It would destroy her. She couldn’t see past the blur; couldn’t hear past the noise. She couldn’t move without colliding with someone or something.

And she understood, as well, that in this throng, if she concentrated, she had to find one Bellusdeo. One Sanabalis. One Maggaron. And they had to be the ones that belonged where she belonged, in the same when, the same now. But it was worse than that. Because more than just Bellusdeo and Sanabalis and Maggaron were trapped here.

Teela. Tain.

Anyone who had lived or worked on the Winding Path. Most of those people were people she did not know and had never met. Most of those people were not yet aware of where they were or what had happened—but as she watched, as she failed to close her eyes, she realized that they were becoming aware. They didn’t see as she saw—but they saw something. The tide of voices turned to confusion, and from there, to panic.

Panic was never good in a crowd. And this crowd was endless, eternal. It went on forever.

She wasn’t sure when the first death happened.

She wasn’t certain when it spread. But it did spread. She could see blood. Could hear screams. Could only stand, helpless, while the world spun and spun and spun.

*

Kaylin.

Severn. Severn’s voice. And Nightshade’s. They overlapped—but each voice was singular. It was not a crowd of voices. It was not multiple Severns or multiple Nightshades. They were on the outside. They were the people she had known. They were not every possible person she might know or could know at every stage of their lives or her own.

They were the people with whom she had a known history. She wanted to weep.

Can you see it? she asked them. Can you see what I see?

Yes. Again, they answered in concert.

Nightshade said, The disturbance has not spread to the fiefs. I am, however, unable to use the mirror network within the Castle.

She nodded. I think—I think we’ve been walking in the mirror network.

Doubt, from Nightshade.

Cautious, surprised agreement from Severn.

What did Gilbert do?

I—I’m not sure. I think he may have collapsed the network completely. I don’t understand how, or why, but—something was done to the network and its power, and I think... Gilbert could make halls or paths out of it.

The world around her became silent as she spoke.

She opened her eyes. She couldn’t remember closing them; she could remember being nagged to close them. She almost closed them again. She stood in the streets of her city. The street itself, the cobbled stones, had a curious, blurry quality. The bodies did not. They were stacked; they overlapped; they should have been a mountain of corpses. And they were, but they occupied the same space.

There was no clear path from this street to the house in which the theoretical murders had taken place, and Gilbert made it clear that he intended to climb over them.

Kaylin had seen corpses before. She had never seen a battlefield.

“Mandoran?”

“Here.” She turned, or tried to turn; the familiar bit her.

“Oh for hells’ sake, you stupid—” She bit back the words, because she could, once again, see Gilbert—and she decided that she did not need to see Mandoran and Annarion. Gilbert, in the great, carved halls beneath the city, had looked like the epitome of a one-off Shadow: tentacled, walking death. In the streets of Elantra, now, it was worse.

He didn’t climb over the bodies that littered the streets in uncountable numbers.

He ate his way through them. She could hear every bite, every swallow. Her hands were on her daggers; her arms glowed. So did Gilbert’s many eyes, because the damn things were still attached to her.

*

She looked at the eyes while Gilbert’s very disturbing meal continued. One part of her brain told her to calm the hell down: the people were dead. They couldn’t feel pain, and they didn’t care what happened to their bodies. It wasn’t as if they could use them for anything, anymore.

The other part of her brain was actually working.

“Gilbert,” she said while she looked at one of the many eyes. “I need you to find my friends.”

“Your friends?” he said. He swallowed. She really, really wanted to be sick.

“Bellusdeo. Sanabalis. Maggaron. I think Mandoran has Teela. And I think Teela has Tain.”

“And the rest?”

She said nothing for one long breath. “And the rest. But I don’t know them. I can’t tell you who to look for.”

“No, Chosen.” The eye to which she’d been directing most of this conversation began to blink rapidly. “But it is not necessary. I am not what I was when you first encountered me.”

He certainly wasn’t. The creature that he had become couldn’t fit in his house, for one. “What you did for me, as Chosen, was necessary, and I thank you.” The eye rose from her shirt. So did the rest of the eyes. “But what I must do cannot be done while I am so confined.”

As he spoke, he rose, and rose again, until the skies were all of Shadow, and eyes. He descended upon the house in which the murders—the non-murders—had taken place. And he froze part of the way there, in midmotion.