“You can walk carefully at your size, yes—but the gaps between the words here aren’t obligingly hall width. And I wouldn’t bet on Dragon scale as a defense against those edges.”
“How did the Barrani evade them?”
“Hells if I know.”
The familiar squawked.
“We arenotgoing to walk through this mess holding hands as if we were Kaylin’s foundlings,” the Dragon replied, in her iciest voice.
Terrano grimaced. “Can I improvise?” he asked the familiar.
The familiar snorted, the gesture a miniature version of Bellusdeo’s, with smoke. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Terrano eyed the small cloud and grimaced. “Seriously?”
Squawk.
“Don’t look at me,” Kaylin said, when Terrano did swivel his glare. “I can’t understand him.”
The gold Dragon, however, could, and she collapsed once again into a gold plated warrior princess. “Next time,” she told Kaylin, “I am bringing a sword.”
* * *
“How can he even be your familiar if you can’t understand him?” The gleaming field of risen words didn’t seem to bother Terrano at all. The fact that those words appeared to be in the innermost sanctum of Alsanis didn’t, either. No, the only thing that seemed to be of concern were the cohort and the distance that had grown between them.
“I can understand him some of the time,” she replied, trying not to feel defensive.
“Wellnowwould be a good time, don’t you think?”
He spoke in Barrani, but spoke as if it were Elantran, which was a neat trick that Kaylin hoped never to learn; High Barrani forced her speech into more acceptable patterns. “Where are the cohort?”
“They’ve gone ahead a bit.”
One, the tallest of the number, had jogged back. Although he couldn’t interact with them physically, he nonetheless avoided the edges of the words that now formed columns. Kaylin thought they’d be deadly if they started to move. He spoke to Terrano, his lip movements slow and exaggerated.
Terrano made a face. “They want us to hurry,” he finally told Kaylin. “Sedarias has reached the edge of the containment I’ve put in place, and she’s not happy about being restrained.”
“That’s more words than he used,” Bellusdeo observed.
“I filled in all the blanks.”
* * *
Kaylin started to jog. She could maintain a slow jog for a very long distance, and could move into a sprint if the situation demanded it. Bellusdeo had no difficulty keeping up; Terrano seemed to resent the pace. Or at least being forced to keep it using actual legs.
But they didn’t catch up with the cohort; Allaron hadn’t lied. Sedarias was both angry and intent. The moment she realized she could safely proceed again, she did—and all of the cohort went with her.
Alsanis’s words started to move. They were anchored in place, each to a very large stone, but they could, and did, cover the range of that stone; in places, they came together like a wall of blades.
“Should we try flying over them?” Bellusdeo asked; she clearly felt that Kaylin’s directive had been the wrong one.
Kaylin shook her head. “I think they can move up and down at will. They seem to be confined horizontally.” She glanced at her familiar; he nodded. But he didn’t lift a wing; whatever she could see with her own eyes, he considered good enough.
The travel toward Sedarias grew much more treacherous; the stones into which words had been engraved were smaller, and the words themselves appeared to be more intricate. Bellusdeo managed to avoid them; Terrano, accustomed to a variety of traveling forms, didn’t. He didn’t instantly get turned into diced pseudo-Barrani, but he did get cut, and he did bleed. He seemed almost offended by the injury, and threw the familiar a baleful glare, but proceeded far more cautiously after that.
Caution, however, only carried them so far.
* * *
“That’s a pretty solid wall,” Kaylin said to the Dragon as she looked at the words that lay ahead of them. The stones upon which the words had been carved, and from which they’d risen, were smaller, which narrowed the space between what were effectively spinning blades.