The three conferred in silence, skirting the edge of Tha’alaan. Two adult voices had been raised in the background, both aimed at the absent children. They didn’t have much time.
“Can we make one now?” the girl asked.
With what appeared—to Severn’s eye—to be infinite patience, the older woman said, “That is not, unfortunately, the way appointments work. You don’t ask us—we’re guards. We’re meant to keep the Oracles safe. You have to ask the Emperor.”
Silence, then. The wordEmperorput an instant damper on dreams, and increased the sense of danger. They had thought nothing of coming to the Oracular Halls—they would probably never leave the quarter again if they thought they’d be forced to encounter the Dragon. The Emperor and his wrath werefearedin the Tha’alaan. The Emperor was the reason the Tha’alanari, and its sacrificial members, existed at all.
None of the three dreamed of becoming Tha’alanari, although given the way they’d gone about escaping the grasp of their minders, Severn thought at least one of them would be a good candidate. At least from the outside, with his limited understanding of the Tha’alanari.
He wondered, then, how the guards saw them when they reacted to this news. The Tha’alani would have been perfect marks. It didn’t occur to them to hide their feelings or the expressions that made them clear to outsiders, because their feelings were always clear to their kin; they hadn’t yet learned the value or importance of secrecy, and the Tha’alaan was not the place to start.
But the guards were not interested in hiding their reactions, either. Clearly, the children looked crushed. The older woman turned toward her partner; she spoke words that were inaudible to the children, and the younger guard, casting a glance at the three, shook her head before she turned, opened a side door, and entered the building.
The boy who had engineered and planned this escapade craned sideways in an attempt to get a glimpse of the interior before that door was closed.
“Wait here,” the remaining guard said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The younger guard returned. She shrugged at the older, butoffered no words in the children’s hearing. The doors, however, rolled open. This surprised Severn, but he’d never come close to the drive that led to the Oracles, never mind the front doors. The Oracles didn’t feature prominently in any of the cases the Wolves had faced that had seemed relevant when he studied them in Records.
A man stood between the opening double doors. He was taller than either of the guards at the doors, but not obviously armed; he wore flowing robes much like the robes Ybelline wore, albeit in a different color. The children were wearing similar robes that better suited their heights.
Even had the man not been standing at the height of the stairs, they would have had to look up to meet his gaze. They looked up as one. Nothing about his gaze was friendly; they were all intimidated. But they believed him to be either an Oracle, ortheOracle, and they were hushed with awe and a giddy fear.
“You walked all the way from the Tha’alani quarter to the Oracular Halls?” he asked, his voice conveying a hint of surprise.
They clearly expected him to know all this—to know everything on sight. Severn realized, with a flash of insight, that they somehow expected the Oracles to be like the entirety of the Tha’alaan, but with the ability to see the future. The Tha’alaan existed as a weave of the present and the past; the future remained closed.
Expectations or no, they answered. “Yes.”
“You perhaps were not aware that an appointment is required.”
Again, they nodded.
“You have not made that appointment, and I cannot, therefore, take your request to the Oracles.”
Something pushed against the robed midsection of the man who now spoke. “I am not an Oracle,” he continued, as if he expected this not to become an interruption.
A younger face—much younger than the man in the robes—now peered around his waist. Bright-eyed, even if the eyes were a brown that was almost black, stood a child of a similar age. “I’m Random.”
“I’m Tessa,” the Tha’alani girl said. It was the first time Severn had heard her name. “This is Jerrin, and this is Tobi.”
“You’re Tha’alani,” Random said—if that was really her name.
They nodded.
“I’m not!” She looked up at the man who had opened the doors. “Master Sabrai, can they come in? It’s almost time for tea.”
As if in response, Jerrin’s stomach made a loud rumble.
“Random,” Master Sabrai began, his expression forbidding.
Random then ran out from behind his back, leaped down the stairs in one jump, and came to stand before Tessa, who happened to be the middle person in the grouping of three. “You want food? Today,Iwant food!” She caught Jerrin’s hand—he had one free—and tugged at it; as the Tha’alani hadn’t let go of each other’s hands, they were dragged up the stairs.
“Can they?” Random asked again.
“They have not been given leave to visit an Oracle,” Master Sabrai said, in the same forbidding tone.