Tara raised a brow. "I am aware of your claims, Kaylin. I am aware of what you carry. I am not yet aware of how it affects either you, or the name itself; nor am I certain whether or not the name can be used against you, as true names can otherwise be used.

"But in the case of this man, the name can be so used; it is part of him."

"You can tell that just by looking?"

"You cannot?"

"Never mind." Kaylin turned to Maggaron and said, "Mejrah called you Ascendant. What does that mean?"

It was his turn to look confused. "You do not understand what an Ascendant is? But you-you are Chosen."

"I'm what pa.s.ses for Chosen in this world. And in this world, until a few weeks ago, there were no Norannir. And no Ascendants, either."

"I do not understand."

Join the club, Kaylin thought. "The Norannir now live in a world that's mostly populated by people like me. Or like my companion, Corporal Handred."

"And Dragons."

"There aren't so many Dragons as all that," Kaylin replied. "One of them is the Lord of this fief. I think there are five Dragons in total; one of those five is Emperor, so he'd be considered the Lord of the fief I live in. Which is not this one."

"And this Tower? Is it not yours?"

"No, it is definitively not mine. It's the home of Lord Tiamaris-the one with the large wings, the long neck, and the impressive set of teeth." Pausing, she added, "What are Dragons to the Norannir? I get the impression you didn't have them at home."

"Our stories of our own home are best told by the elder: she is the keeper of our tales." He had stopped walking, but so had Tara, and she'd tilted her chin in that particular way that meant she was paying attention.

Kaylin watched his expression as she asked her next question. "The Norannir clearly hadn't seen Dragons before they came here. They were really...uncomfortable...about their transformation to and from Dragon form the first time they saw it-they thought the Dragons might be Shadows.

"But you saw Tiamaris and recognized him. Maggaron, you knew Dragons."

CHAPTER 7.

Tara approached the closed double doors at the hall's end. They were exactly as Kaylin remembered them, as was the rest of the hall. They rolled open into a room that was also familiar: runes glowed on the walls, separated by standing pillars; these pillars surrounded a shallow, circular pool of water that was absolutely still.

Maggaron hesitated, still pinned by Kaylin's gaze. At length he turned and followed where Tara led. He hadn't answered the question; Kaylin knew it was because he would have lied. Which made no sense. "Maggaron-"

"If you want an answer I am sworn not to give, you have the option of forcing it from me."

She cursed briefly, and in Barrani. This cheered her up; she was going to have so much fun at the office with that word.

They entered the room, Severn pulling up the rear, and the doors rolled quietly-but not ominously-shut behind them. Every part of this building was in some way part of Tara; it was her physical form, her body. Sanabalis might not understand why the citizens of the fief didn't fear the Avatar, but Kaylin did; Tara, at her most terrifying, stood against things that had demonstrably killed-or worse-people's neighbors in the past few months. While people had famously short memories, they weren't that short.

"Kaylin?" Tara asked.

She lifted the sword that was still entirely without a scabbard.

Tara frowned. "Do you wish me to take it? You don't mind?"

Something about the way she asked the question caused an answering frown across Kaylin's lips. "Should I?" She held the weapon out. It was, absent runes, a sword. It looked decently forged, decently put together; the hilt was fancier than Kaylin would have ideally liked, because fancy hilts were a total pain in the b.u.t.t to keep clean.

Tara held out a hand, and Kaylin put the sword's hilt-not the blade, as Maggaron had done-into her palm. Tara was watching her face closely. "You feel...nothing?"

"Should I?"

"I don't know. I would have said, had I been asked, that you must." She turned to Maggaron. "You gave her this blade."

He nodded, and then his glance bounced off her gaze and landed somewhere on the wall just past her shoulder. "I did."

"Did you not feel its pull?"

He was silent.

Tara frowned again. She lifted the sword, examining the runes along the blade as if she were reading a letter.

"What do they say?" Kaylin asked her.

Tara was silent, absorbed in her inspection. When she spoke again, it was to the Norannir. "Could you have given her this blade at all if your name were entirely your own?"

He grimaced. "I do not know, Lady. The blades call us when we are finished our training and we are taken to the spire of ascension. If we are not called, we go no further, although many who have failed the test of sword have gone on to lead, and lead well."

"When you say call, what do you mean? Do the swords literally speak?" This question, Kaylin could have asked. She hadn't, but she was interested in the answer.

His answer was quiet, and long in coming. "Yes," he finally said.

Kaylin glanced at the blade that now rested in Tara's hand. "It didn't speak to me," she told the Avatar. "It changed shape, but it didn't speak."

Tara examined the sword once more. After a pause she spoke, and the word traveled down Kaylin's spine as if it had been hissed in her ear. The sword's runes began to glow, the color shifting from pale blue to a white gold that was hard to look at for long. Tara's eyes, when she looked up, were literal stone, which happened when she forgot to maintain their appearance. The rest of her face looked normal. "Tara, what do the runes say?"

Tara was silent for a long moment, scrutinizing the blade's flat. At length she said, "I cannot read them. I cannot see them clearly, Kaylin. I can sense that they are there, no more. The sword-it did not speak to you."

"No. Should it have?"

"But it took a shape that you could more easily wield. Maggaron, did the sword speak to you?"

"I answered-"

"No, not upon your ascension. Today. In the streets of the heartlands."

Once again, he turned away. "Yes, Lady."

"When? I apologize if this is uncomfortable," she added. The words were not gently spoken.

"When she spoke my name," was the soft reply. "When the Chosen spoke my name, the sword spoke to me." He started to speak, stopped, and turned away completely, but his expression was so wounded Kaylin reached out and caught Tara's shoulder, pulling her back.

Tara, eyes still marbled stone with no whites, no pupils, and no irises, frowned. "If we do not understand the nature of the weapon's interaction with this man, we will not understand the weapon itself."

"It doesn't matter," Kaylin said, pitching her voice as low as possible. "I think we can guess at the answer to at least that question."

Tara hesitated, and then color returned to her eyes as they lost that disturbing appearance of carved rock. "Can I ask him what the last thing the sword said was?"

Kaylin, looking at the blade, could also guess the answer. "I think-I think the sword told him to give it to-to someone else."

"To give it, Chosen, to you," was the soft reply. "I have not heard her voice for so long-" He shook himself then. "She must be speaking to you; her shape is now yours. You cannot hear her?"

"No."

"Have you tried?"

"Well, no. It's a sword-I didn't expect it to try to hold a conversation."

He appeared to be genuinely scandalized; it made him look younger. "Please-try. She has a voice, and if you hear it once-" his voice broke, but this time he continued "-you will hear it until you fall."

"As you did."

"As I did."

"And you can't hear her now?" It was hard, to give a sword a gender.

"No, Chosen. She is no longer mine, and I-I am no longer hers."

Tara, mindful of Kaylin's words, said, "But you carried her into the Shadow, and she absorbed some of what you absorbed."

He nodded.

"And you're certain the sword is both whole and safe?"

"Safe? She is as you see her."

"Safe to use. Uncorrupted."

"She cannot be corrupted." There was no doubt at all in his words.

Kaylin lifted a hand. "She might not be corruptible," she pointed out, "but the fact is you used her to cleave great chunks of ground to open a crevice that pa.s.sed beneath the borders here. It doesn't matter if she can't be changed if you can use her at the command of Shadows."

He said nothing.

"Maggaron-"

"I will not speak of it further unless you force the words from me," he replied. "But she is-as she always was-blameless. I could not cast her away; the weakness was mine. She is now in your hands. Mejrah knows; take her to Mejrah and she will begin to teach you."

Tara shook her head. "I do not like this," she finally said.

"The sword?"

"Or the connection between the sword and the bearer. There is something that is not quite right here." She turned to Kaylin. "I suggest that you do not wield the weapon until more of its nature is understood."

Kaylin shrugged. "I'm not great with a sword, anyway. Do you want to keep it for now?"

Tara hesitated again, and then nodded. She carried the sword to the still, and untouched, surface of the mirror, and lowered it gently toward the water. The mirror's surface began to ripple. Tara spoke slowly as she held the sword-Kaylin couldn't understand a word of the speech. But the rhythm of the words implied ritual, not conversation.

The water began to rise, and the Avatar frowned. She spoke again, and this time the cadence was different-but Kaylin saw no images reflected in the water's surface; there was too much turbulence. "Tara?"

Tara frowned. She shifted her grip on the hilt and brought it down into the water in one sudden rush of movement. The water parted. Anywhere where the sword's edge was, it wasn't.

"Tara, the water's not supposed to do that, is it?"

"It is not entirely water, and as you have apparently surmised, no."

"You weren't going to leave it in the water, were you?"

"No, Kaylin. But I wished to access information about the runes on the blade itself."

"You can't."

"I cannot access any information relevant to this weapon at all. The mirror does not...see it...clearly."

Kaylin wasn't certain how mirrors-of any kind-"saw." It wasn't one of the technical details explained in Magical Theory 101; if it had been, she'd probably have paid a lot more attention. But as a student in that particular cla.s.s, she'd been expected to accept as incontrovertible truth whatever the teacher laid down as "fact."

What she'd taken out of the cla.s.s, however, was basic: when magic was working properly, things were fine. When magic broke down-like, say, carriage joists-things went downhill very quickly, and not in entirely predictable ways. "Maybe we shouldn't try."

Tara lifted a brow. "Perhaps. But I find the sword disturbing. I am aware of the ways in which weapons were imbued with magic; with the oldest of magics, the enchantments were not entirely predictable. Even so, there is something about this blade that is strange. I will keep it for the moment."

Kaylin, however, shook her head and glanced pointedly at the roiling water. "It hasn't hurt me, yet," she told the Tower's Avatar. "And it hasn't had any effect on me that I can see. But it's certainly having an effect on the Tower. I'll keep it." She grimaced. "And try to find a d.a.m.n sheath for it." Turning to Maggaron, she said, "What did you use for a sheath?"

"A...sheath?" He stared at her for a moment, and then said in a clear and distinct voice, "What have I done? What did you ask me to do?"

She realized that he was speaking not to her but to the sword that currently rested in Tara's hands. What was disturbing was the attenuated sound of a disembodied snicker.

Tara returned the sword to Kaylin. "Perhaps you are correct," she said quietly. "But...be careful if you decide to use the blade." She stepped away from the pool and then said, "Have you eaten?"

Maggaron accompanied them into a hall that branched off the main one. He was silent in the way that badly shaken people are. Kaylin, who'd been perfectly serious about a sheath for the weapon, couldn't bring herself to ask again. But there were other questions she wanted to ask.

"Maggaron, how long have you been trapped in the-the heartlands?"

"I do not know, Chosen. Time does not pa.s.s in the Shadows the way it does in my homeland. The sun rises and sets in a manner that makes no sense, and night is oft long." He hesitated, and then added, "She would know."

He meant the sword. "She's not speaking to me, yet; I don't think she'd answer the question. How much can you clearly remember?"

"Enough. I was not always aware of where I was or what I did when under compulsion. I can be controlled; I can contain the Shadows, but only when controlled; they will not otherwise come at my call."