“Master Sabrai,” the Dragon replied, returning the bow with a nod. He waited until Master Sabrai had straightened out to as much of his full height as a bleary-eyed, clearly exhausted man could attain before he added, “The evening was eventful?”
“Let us just say,” Master Sabrai replied, with a wince, “that your inquiries were not untimely.”
“How bad was it?”
“It has not—yet—reached the proportions of the previous incident. Not all of our Oracles are almost sharing the same dreams or visions, and we have not—yet—reached the point where those who can live off grounds are also simultaneously entering a vision state.”
“You expect it.” Flat words, no question in them.
“If last night was any indication, Lord Sanabalis, yes. I do. Some preparations are being made. They are being handled by Sigrenne and her assistant. I have some written reports, mostly taken by Sigrenne and two of the other attendants. I was…otherwise occupied or I would have seen to it myself.”
Sanabalis grimaced, a clear indication that he did not consider Sigrenne’s transcription to be of the highest quality. “Have you examined them?”
“I have not had the chance to examine all of them, no. If you are looking for an estimate of convergence, I cannot give you one that would meet the standards of the Oracular Halls.”
“What estimate would you hazard, if you were not held to those standards?”
It was clearly the question that Sabrai had been both expecting and dreading. “Everly did not sleep at all last night. He has been painting like a possessed man.”
“How serious an attempt did you make to stop him?”
“It’s only the first day,” was the evasive reply. “It is not, yet, a matter of safety. He will eat, if food is provided, and he drinks when water is provided. But he does not otherwise interact with anything but the painting.”
“Not a good sign,” the Dragon Lord said softly. He glanced at Kaylin.
“No.”
“What is his subject?”
“That, I believe, you will have to see for yourself,” was the quiet reply. “I cannot describe it.”
“It’s not, in your opinion, trivial?” Kaylin asked, speaking for the first time.
“No, sadly, it is not.”
Everly’s room smelled of paint; it was the first thing Kaylin noticed when the door was open, in large part because she wasn’t as tall as either Sabrai or Sanabalis and she couldn’t actually see past their bulk into the gallery that served as the boy’s room. They stood in the door for that little bit too long before finally moving through it and out of her way.
The canvas that Everly had been stretching with such focus now sat on a large set of wooden legs. The back of the painting, as usual, faced the door, obscuring the artist himself; the windows at Everly’s back provided the light by which he was, in theory, working. Kaylin wished, for a moment, that the office could be more like this; usually work was punctuated with little things like obscenities, gossip, and the damned window, which never, ever, shut up.
Master Sabrai approached the side of the painting, and disappeared behind its edge; Sanabalis, after a pause, did the same. Five minutes of silence later, Kaylin repented: she had heard funerals which were more lively. She didn’t wait for an invitation; she also took a small detour around the edge of Everly’s canvas, but chose the opposite side. The small, flat table that held his palette, paints, brushes, various cloths, and a box of charcoal sticks of varying widths and lengths happened to be on that side; she almost ran into it, and managed to dodge collision at the last second.
Everly had clearly been working without stop. The edges of the canvas were almost blank; some sketching had been done, and what looked like flat representations of nearly familiar buildings rose in black and gray against a white sky, like inverted ghosts. No obvious signs or flags marked those buildings; they were clearly abstracted from an Elantran street, but Kaylin, who was more than passingly familiar with most of them, couldn’t immediately place which one.
And placement was made urgent by what Everly had painted.
A cloud made of night hovered above cobbled stones that were clearly colored by the sun at its height. Its edges were blurred and indistinct, but this wasn’t just smudging of paint or color sketching. Stars could be seen, and the livid glow of some thing that seemed either red moon or blood sun hung close to the blurred edge itself. The cloud was contained in what seemed almost a garish, ornate door frame, absent a door.
He had worked on that odd, messy frame, in which daytime colors overlapped in startling contrast with night colors; he had taken care to paint stars and a haze of mist that twisted, like an incongruously delicate veil, across a foreign sky. He had taken care to paint its height, and seeing that, she almost flinched; it was as tall as some of the unpainted buildings, and if it was in any perspective at all, it swallowed the road.
But at its center was white space. He had done no sketching there.
Everly, oblivious to his audience, continued to work. He was using the darker spectrum of his palette, applying paint here and there as carelessly as Kaylin applied words, but achieving the effortless effect of a slowly coalescing reality that Kaylin’s careless words couldn’t.
“Given the speed at which he’s painted this,” Kaylin said quietly, “we’ll have some idea of what’s going to emerge tomorrow. Or later tonight.”
“It is not…small, if the area he’s left is indeed something that emerges and not further scenery.”
“It’s not really the center we need, anyway.”
Sanabalis raised a brow.
She pointed to the buildings that lined either side of the street in their frustrating lack of detail. “We need to know where—roughly—this vision takes place.”
“It is not a concrete representation of place, Private,” Master Sabrai said curtly. “That is not the way Oracles work.”
“I’ve been the subject of one of his Oracles,” she replied, just as curtly. “And I think the clues will be there if we can read ’em. We need them.”
Sanabalis cleared his throat. Loudly. The sound was enough to cause Everly to lift his head for a few seconds as if he were testing the air. Speech, however, failed to hold his attention, and he went back to his quick, light movements. “Master Sabrai is correct in this, Private. What he paints is not predictive in the sense you hope for. You cannot direct him. What he finishes, he finishes.”
But she looked at the space that he had not yet started to touch, and she felt cold, although she was standing in sunlight. “Tonight,” she told Sanabalis quietly.
“I concur. I do not think, however, that it will be necessary to stand here for the entire eight hours while he paints. We now have other things to examine.” He turned to Master Sabrai. “If you will deliver the transcripts of the dreams that interrupted the Halls last eve, we will begin to attempt to make some over-arching sense of the impending difficulty. Thank you,” he added, in a more clipped tone.
Master Sabrai shook his head as if to clear it. “As you say, Lord Sanabalis. If you will return to my office, I will give you what I’ve managed to transcribe.”
“I am willing to deal with Sigrenne’s less than perfect penmanship.”
Not reminding Sanabalis of this definitive statement was difficult, because it would sound smug; Sigrenne’s hand was neither neat nor precise, and Sanabalis had clearly not spent as much time deciphering human scribbles as Kaylin had. Most of the Hawks were not in the running for world’s best penman.
Sanabalis sat in the carriage opposite Kaylin; smoke drifted from his nostrils and the corner