Michelle Sagara - Cast in Chaos

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.

“You need me to go somewhere.” It wasn’t a question.

“I need—I’m not sure what we need. But, Kaylin—” she shuddered “—things are—things are going wrong with some of the births in a way we’ve never seen. And one or two pregnancies. I—”

“You want me there? Or do you want to give me an address?”

Marya bit her lip. Marya never did something as impractical and quavering as biting her lip. Kaylin lost her appetite.

“Come here,” the midwife finally said. “I’ve got the other addresses, and…and I don’t want to send you out there for nothing, but I don’t— Just, come here.”

It didn’t rain. The sky was the kind of clear that threatens rain, but doesn’t quite deliver. That was about as much as Kaylin noted on her run to the midwives’ guild. She was aware that it might be a long damn night, and she had forced herself to eat, which was never much fun when anxiety made one’s stomach actively revolt. She also changed her clothing, peeling herself out of things that were way more sticky than they should have been. She wouldn’t have bothered, given Marya’s tone and expression—but if she was sent out to help anyone, showing up covered in dried blood wasn’t likely to make her job any easier.

She made it to the guild on foot, glancing briefly at the visible moon and wondering how much it had shifted its position. The guild’s doors were open. Lights were on, and could be seen through the slightly opaque windows.

As a building, the guildhall was not terribly impressive; it didn’t boast the size—or the expensive stairs, doors, and decorative bits that stuck out at all levels—of something like the merchants’ guild. It also didn’t boast the same prime real estate, but at the moment it was situated outside of the Circle From Hell, closer to the Ablayne, on Kirri street. The street was one of the oldest of the Imperial streets, and the name on the very few signs that marked it was actually about ten paragraphs longer than Kirri, which is why it deserved a diminutive.

Kaylin hurried in.