Cast in Chaos. Michelle Sagara

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СКАЧАТЬ taken from the wood of the West March,” Sanabalis told her. “Some of the trees there are highly prized for their magical properties. They are also zealously guarded.”

      “Which is why you weren’t speaking Dragon.”

      “Indeed. There are some things that we can do, and some things we can’t. The wood itself resists much.” He passed a palm over the table, and then said, again in High Barrani, “Map.”

      The image shifted into a very familiar-looking map; she’d last seen it in the office. The more elegant lines of the much larger city that Sanabalis had roared into being across a bank of windows were gone. The central image now displayed showed the two concentric circles that neatly enclosed one section of the city; all of the streets external to the outer circle were in pale gray lines.

      “Sergeant Kassan said that the preliminary boundaries—and the conjectured extrapolation—were due to your efforts.” He glanced up at her. “For this reason, we will overlook the hour of your arrival. I did, however, speak with Master Sabrai, and he was under the impression that you had information to report.”

      She nodded, frowning. “You spoke about a magical-potential leak,” she said, looking at the streets contained by the inner circle.

      “I did.”

      “Is it significant that it fades out in this pattern? The Palace, here—” she let her finger hover over the streets that surrounded the Palace without actually touching them “—and the Halls, here, are almost at the edge of the circle. But Elani—where we first noticed the incidents—is almost directly at its center.

      “Is that position significant? Does your leak, or any leak of this nature, grow weaker as you move away from its core?” Her frown deepened. “And is it just me, or does it look awfully close to Evanton’s shop?”

      Sanabalis nodded, as if this were a classroom and she had just done well on the first of a series of grueling questions. “Our direct experience—”

      “Your direct experience,” the Arkon interjected.

      “—is very limited. The difficulties in the Palace to date have been confined to irregularities in Records. And one difficulty elsewhere, which was not disastrous and cannot be spoken about. The only known difficulty the Halls of Law have experienced appears to involve a window.”

      “A talking bloody window that gets offended by ‘curse’ words.”

      “That was not how it was described. I believe your explanation is more concise.”

      “The rain hit everyone.”

      “It did. I have taken the liberty of sending out a small team of Imperial mages. They are in Elani now.”

      “What are they looking for?”

      “The source of the leak,” he replied.

      “Why mages? If magic is amplified in a bad way—”

      “Mages have a much more rigid intellectual structure for thinking about the use of magic. Without solid control and concentration, they cannot use it. With solid control and concentration, and with an awareness of the potential growth, they can confine what they do use to the correct parameters. I believe that mages—not Arcanists—will have more luck at avoiding careless invocation or unusual wish fulfillment than the under-educated.”

      “Meaning people like me.”

      He didn’t bother to answer. “What occurred at the Oracular Halls?”

      “I was taken to see Everly,” she replied. “He was stretching canvas. It was not a small one.”

      “I…see.”

      “I’ll check in again tomorrow or the day after, depending on what Marcus has me doing.”

      “Private Neya,” the Arkon said quietly. Very quietly. But he was the Arkon; it carried anyway.

      She gave him her immediate—and respectful—attention. “Arkon.”

      “When you visit Everly, take Lord Sanabalis with you.”

      Sanabalis bowed, and held that bow while the Arkon swept out of the room. He then rose. “At times like this,” he told Kaylin, with a grimace, “I miss the presence of Lord Tiamaris. The Arkon, like many of the eldest and wisest of any race, has a store of impatience he reserves for the young, and if it is spent on the young, it is exhausted.”

      “And you’re now young?”

      “Compared to the rest of the Dragon Court, no. Compared to the Arkon, yes. I will meet you in the morning—first thing in the morning—at the Halls of Law.”

      “When do you think the mages of the Imperium will make their report?”

      “As soon as they either have definitive information, or one of them manages to commit suicide in a remarkable and unusual fashion.”

      It was late enough that Kaylin decided to go straight home, because first thing in the morning by Dragon definition skirted the edge of dawn. Probably from the wrong side. The streets between the Palace and her apartment were decidedly empty for this time of night; it reminded her of living in the fiefs, although there were no Ferals. The rain had gone on for long enough, and had caused—she assumed—enough panic that no one wanted to be exposed to sky.

      Fair enough. She didn’t particularly care for a repeat, either.

      But when she made her way up the stairs and through her door, she saw her mirror flashing. She had bread and cheese and meat in the basket that Severn had given her, and if she disliked magic—and she did—it was still damn useful. The bread wasn’t stale enough to cut herself on, and the cheese hadn’t dried out. Nor was the meat likely to be sour enough to poison her. She grabbed all of those, and headed to the mirror; it was her personal mirror, after all, and no one could dress her down for leaving fingerprints on it.

      She lost most of her appetite when the screen’s image solidified and the familiar face of Marya took up most of the frame. Marya was as close to head of the midwives’ guild as made no difference, and she looked haggard. The circles under her eyes—which were often there because her sleep hours were worse than Kaylin’s—had almost overtaken her cheekbones.

      She wasn’t speaking; the mirror wasn’t active; this was just a placeholder to indicate she’d tried to reach Kaylin earlier. Kaylin, around a mouthful of meat, muttered Marya’s name. The mirror twitched twice, and took its sweet time connecting, but it finally did.

      Marya’s face swam into view.

      “Kaylin!” Marya, who was probably in her sixties although it wasn’t safe to ask her actual age, looked horrified.

      The midwives’ guild was not, Kaylin suddenly remembered, within the circle in which rain had turned to blood. She cursed, briefly and quietly, just before she swallowed the overly ambitious mouthful she’d just bitten off. “I’m sorry, Marya,” she said quickly. “It’s not what it looks like. I’m not bleeding, I wasn’t in a fight for my life, and I didn’t kill anyone else.”

      Marya’s expression shifted from pale horror to something almost as bad.

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