Tauran continued, as nonchalantly as he could. “Guard rotation means fewer chances of anybody watching the sky.”
“Got it,” Kalai said, and climbed the stairs. He passed the second balcony, then disappeared onto the floor above.
Tauran closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, giving his racing heart time to slow. A nagging thought wiggled its way to the front of his mind. He opened his eyes. The golden double doors below were in front of him, which meant...
Just behind him, on the other side of the tower wall, was the one place he’d lost everything, where he’d lain half-dead and broken, left leg pinned under the corpse of the dragon he’d loved like family. The sound of her scream when Andreus’ dragon, Sylvexes, dug his teeth into her throat came unbidden to Tauran’s mind, broken by the blasts of Tauran’s pistol as he emptied it through Sylvexes’ eye, the only part of a dragon vulnerable to bullets.
The horrible silence that followed.
Tauran’s nausea returned with a vengeance. He glanced at the stairs leading back down.
A sharp clang and a cry from the upper floors made him flinch.
Tauran pushed off the wall, tilted his head up and listened. “Kalai?” he called, his voice thrown back at him between the walls.
No answer.
Tauran swore. He shouldn’t have let Kalai continue alone. What had he been thinking? The entire place was a crumbling hazard.
Anxiety grew inside him at the thought of Kalai stepping on sharp metal or falling through broken floors.
“Fuck,” Tauran groaned and headed for the stairs. He took them two at a time despite the ache in his leg, both hands glued to the wall as if that would keep him safer. “Kalai?” he shouted again, when he reached the balcony, then continued upward.
The higher he climbed, the more his worry grew until his fear for Kalai had entirely replaced his fear of heights. He passed the library on the first floor with its rows upon rows of empty shelves. He passed the recruit classrooms on the second floor and the offices on the third and the sleeping quarters on the fourth and fifth.
Tauran paused near the top of the fifth floor to breathe. When he’d lived there, the stairs had been no obstacle at all. Now, the air burned in his lungs. He inhaled to call out Kalai’s name again when something fluttered by his head.
Tauran swore and staggered back, a small group of bats filtering out through the broken windows. He looked up. The ceiling was covered in bats.
“Tauran?”
“Kalai?” Tauran pressed on to the sixth floor and paused.
Kalai stood in the center of the empty room, looking perfectly fine. “Is everything all right? You don’t look so good.”
Tauran released a breath and sank down against the wall beside the stairs, gingerly stretching his leg. “I heard you shout,” he said. “I thought something had happened.”
“The bats scared me.” Kalai kneeled in front of him.
Tauran rubbed his brow. “I thought you were hurt. I called for you and you didn’t answer. Scared the shit out of me.”
Kalai’s eyes widened. “I was out on the balcony. I guess I didn’t hear you from out there.” He stood and offered Tauran his hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Tauran let Kalai help him up, although he braced his other hand against the wall so Kalai wouldn’t have to lift his whole weight. If nothing else, fear for Kalai had eclipsed his fear of heights and carried him to the sixth floor in a flash.
“What is this room?” Kalai asked and turned away from him. He spread his arms wide and spun slowly, looking up at the mosaic ceiling high above.
“This is the lower meeting chamber,” Tauran explained. “Riders returning from patrols would land here first and deliver their reports so the commanders and generals wouldn’t have to go all the way up to the nests on the top floors.”
Tauran couldn’t see Kalai’s expression in the dark, but he could hear his awe in the quiet laugh that escaped him. It struck Tauran as odd. For someone who’d been born at the foot of the Sharoani dragon temples, an old crumbled tower that had once housed dragons couldn’t be all that impressive. But it still filled Tauran with a warmth he couldn’t explain.
“Fantastic. All this history! How many dragons were here?” Kalai asked. He was no longer looking at the room, but directly at Tauran. Despite the darkness, Tauran could feel the intensity of the fascination in his gaze.
“Nine, when I was here,”