Cast in Wisdom (Chronicles of Elantra #15) - Michelle Sagara Page 0,35

not immediately.

She looked across the city. There were three other buildings, distinct from Helen. Outside of the fiefs, Helen was, or had been, the only sentient building of which she’d been aware. Ah, no. There.

She recognized the old High Halls. It looked remarkably like the new High Halls; the period between creation and...repair...had been erased. That was two.

The Imperial Palace was not a sentient building. Kaylin sort of understood why. If a building like Helen existed, and the Imperial Palace could have been constructed around it, the Emperor was not the man to let anything else make decisions for him. Not when there were no effective remedies or consequences for the wrong ones.

There were two buildings left, but she focused on only one of them: it seemed to be in the center of the city. Near, if not in, Ravellon; the map itself was not large, and the building had not been created with scale in mind.

“This one,” she said.

Three other buildings, including her own home, melted into liquid and vanished. The fourth remained.

Unlike Helen, this building didn’t radiate doom on the surface. It appeared to be similar to what the High Halls had been prior to the repair of its central sentience. It was large—how large was hard to assess, given the lack of actual scale—and she remembered that Killian had said it had once been a school.

What kind of school would it have been? What would classes taught by something that could literally change the environment of its students on a whim have been like?

“Lannagaros?” Bellusdeo rumbled, concern in her voice.

“It is nothing. Continue, Corporal.”

“I think this is the building we were in.”

“You said that the building appeared to extend from the border zone between Tiamaris, to the one between Nightshade and Liatt.” The Arkon’s expression was now composed of chiseled lines.

Kaylin nodded.

“I do not believe that this building would cover that distance.”

“Not outside of the border zone, no.”

“The border zone itself is comprised of a space between the territories of each Tower. Those border areas do not, in theory, extend across fiefs in a fashion that renders the fiefs irrelevant, invisible.”

“Fine. But this building—I think it was in the border zone when the Towers were created.” As she spoke, the faint, flat map of the modern city faded into invisibility. The landscape changed abruptly, although some of the streets were old enough that she almost recognized the direction they traveled, the shape they retained, even now. The map that emerged from the heart of this mirror was foreign in most ways, a strong reminder that history was a different country, a different place.

The center of this map was not Ravellon as it existed now. The fiefs were not the fiefs. Those who had lived near the center of this foreign city lived in larger buildings; there was greenery here, and a sense of wealth. The smaller buildings existed, as well; it was almost as if the people who lived in this place before the fall of Ravellon had desired to be as close to Ravellon has possible, and had packed themselves into the various spaces accordingly.

In this context, the building was no longer its symbolic size; it was nestled in a large patch of otherwise unoccupied land.

“What happened?” she whispered.

“Pardon?”

“What happened in Ravellon that things changed so much?”

“I would not ask that question if you do not wish to stand on that ladder for the next eight hours.”

“Give me the short version.”

“The short version? We don’t know. Some entity that made Ravellon its home fell, and Ravellon with it. There was no armed insurrection; no actual combat. Something changed. The change was slow and subtle at its beginning, and therefore hard to see; it was not so subtle at the end.

“But there was warning enough that the Towers could be built.” As the Arkon spoke, the area that was now Ravellon darkened; the buildings and streets that led to it vanished from view. A visual barrier of dark shadow spread from a point in the center of the map to the edges of the lands it now occupied.

“I thought you couldn’t speak to the mirror if you weren’t speaking in your native tongue.”

“I am not speaking to the mirror. You are.”

“I didn’t ask it for Towers. Or Ravellon.”

“Not consciously, no. I find this both interesting and disturbing.”

“Can we just stay on the interesting side of that equation?”

He snorted smoke.

Towers grew as the shadow spread. Kaylin had no sense of time passing; it was her private opinion that