Cast in Sorrow

pretentious, and boring of the Elantran tongues.

High Barrani returned to her in her own voice, but instead of a diminishing echo, she heard a resonance to the sound, an amplification. The runes in her hands—hands that were gripping tightly enough her fingers were beginning to tingle—shook. She stopped speaking; the trembling, however, continued.

She hated working in the dark. Figurative dark, literal dark—she was hemmed in by her own ignorance. There’d been solutions to that, in the Halls of Law. She’d worked. She’d learned. She’d studied—at least she’d studied the important stuff. Here, she had nothing to go on. Everything was a risk. Every decision had to be made on air and instinct and hope. She was afraid of the consequences because she couldn’t even begin to predict them.

And...it didn’t matter. She could fall forever—seriously, that’s what it felt like—or she could take risks and pray that the only person who suffered when she did was herself.

She returned to High Barrani. She was unsettled enough that random words rolled off her tongue first; she shook her head, and when she spoke again, she began to recite the Imperial Laws. She was rusty, she knew; only the important ones were word-for-word clear: the ones that defined murder, kidnapping, theft, and extortion. She chose those because they were the ones around which she’d based her life.

They’d given her purpose. They’d given her wings. They’d given her family. Hope. Yes, her work regularly brought her into contact with the people most likely to break those laws, but she balanced the constant exposure to the least law-abiding citizens with her work at the midwives’ guild and the Foundling Hall. The worst and the best.

That job had brought her here.

“Go left,” she told the small dragon.

This time, he didn’t warble; he huffed. She had the distinct impression he would have said “about time, idiot” if he’d actually been able to speak in a language she could understand. This was why Kaylin did not own cats. On the other hand, at least the small dragon listened; he spread his extended, diaphanous wings and she drifted toward the left wall. It was not close; it took a long time.

She wondered if time was passing for the Consort; she wondered if her own body had collapsed in the Consort’s room.

Taking a deeper breath, she let go of that thought and returned to Imperial Law. It wasn’t as dry as it should have been because it had meaning to her. She thought of the first murder investigation Teela and Tain had allowed her to tag along on. And of the first investigation she’d attended as an actual Hawk and not an unofficial mascot. Or an official one.

She’d never understood why the Barrani had chosen to take the Imperial Oath to the Halls of Law; she’d never understood why they served. They’d said they were bored. But...they were good at what they did. She’d learned a lot from Teela, and most of it was within regulations.

When she reached the far wall, her hands were vibrating because the runes themselves were shaking. It was as if the component parts wanted to fly free of each other, and that was so not happening right now. Not yet.

The small dragon dug claws into collarbone again. She bit back the urge to tell him to shut up or be helpful, because it was his wings that were moving them both. She forgot frustration as they at last approached surface.

It wasn’t a wall. Or rather, it wasn’t the side of a pit. It looked like—like a carved likeness of the flattened streets of a very, very bizarre city. Parts of that city were laid open, as if they’d been sheared; rooms were exposed—or what she assumed were rooms.

And what had she expected? The Consort had fallen unconscious because of the nightmares of Alsanis—and Alsanis was a building. A sentient building. She looked right, left, up, down—the vista, the flattened, exposed likeness of something that she’d be afraid to police—stretched out for as far as the eye could see. Everything was cast in shadow; it was not, as she’d thought at first glimpse, of black stone or rock.

Nor was it completely without light. Here and there, she caught flickers of something that might have been candle or lamp; she caught movement, but only out of the corner of her eye. It reminded her of cockroaches. She hated cockroaches.

The buildings themselves were not uniform. And, as she drew closer still, she realized they weren’t squashed and flattened. But they had been. They seemed to gain dimension, stories unfolding where her flight brought her close. She could see what might have been streets, but they were dark hatches that grew even less distinct as the buildings themselves emerged following the trail of her flight path.

The runes in her hands, had they been alive, would be agitated and panicked; they’d probably be screaming. She wondered if those screams would be laden with fear or joy, which was an odd thought.

She nudged the small dragon, and he banked to the right; buildings rose out of their flatness, the flickering lights becoming the heart of windows and arches. Stone, she thought, and then reconsidered. This was some part of the Hallionne, if nightmare was a word that could be literally applied. The rules of normal architecture didn’t mean anything here.

She had no idea what she was doing, but seeing a city unfold as she passed above it made her feel almost at home. It wasn’t Elantra—but it wasn’t an endless forest full of insects and talking Ferals, either.

On the other hand, it didn’t seem populated. Small twitches at the corner of her eyes didn’t become people of any stripe when she looked. It was a ghost city, a deserted town, absent the usual decay and dilapidation. She nudged the dragon, and he banked to the right, slowing as he straightened out their gliding path.

She saw why: the building that began its ascent as she approached did not stop unfolding; to avoid running smack into its side, the small dragon would have had to ascend just as quickly. She shouted because he didn’t even try.

“Up! Up!”

He flew straight, the little winged rat. She had the horrible certainty she was about to discover just what these buildings were made of—by splatting against the wall. But beneath a roof with a spire that could impale Dragons in flight form, a balcony opened up. It was longer and wider than Kaylin’s entire apartment. Former apartment. The wall it jutted from was rounded, and it had no doors; instead, it had an arch that was open to air, as if it were a cloister. The dragon flew straight above balcony rails and beneath that arch, tucking his wings so they’d fit. He also wrapped his tail around her neck.

When they’d cleared the arch, he folded his wings entirely, and she fell a good six feet to the ground. Six feet wasn’t usually a problem. Six feet when both hands were occupied wasn’t the usual.

She sprained her ankle. At least, it felt like a sprain because it hurt like blazing fire, but she could stand and it more or less supported her weight. “This is stupid,” she said in Leontine. “I’m not even physically here and I have to hobble through this maze with a bum ankle?” She did not, by dint of full hands, punch the wall. Or kick it.

It wasn’t a maze, though. It was a cloister. Arches cascaded beyond the arch she’d entered; to her right was wall, to her left a shadowed courtyard. The air was still and dry; there was no sound but her breathing. Even the dragon was silent, although he batted her face with one wing. It wasn’t an improvement over ear-biting.

As she walked, simple stone walls gave way to small fountains, small statues; the open courtyard continued. She’d never been in a courtyard this large; she was certain it was at least four city blocks in length, and it showed no signs of ending. What she wanted from a city, she decided, was stable architecture and buildings that made sense. Who made a courtyard this bloody high off the ground?

She stopped, turned, and walked toward the open space to her left to look down. She couldn’t see bottom. The small dragon whiffled, but he didn’t bat the side of her face. “I’m not jumping unless we run into Ferals or a really, really ugly dead end. Got it?”

He exhaled—air, not cloud—and flopped across her shoulders, rolling an eye in her direction before he closed it.

“Now you’re clocking out? Are you kidding?”

He failed to answer.

She started in on a very Leontine reply, but something caught her eye; it was bright, gleaming. She turned to her right; there was a statue against the wall, between the right-hand pillars of two arches. It didn’t vanish