“I’m Kara Gillian,” I replied, doing my best to hide my disappointment that she wasn’t Eilahn. “Fair greetings. I don’t suppose you’re here to rescue me from all this?” I gestured to encompass the dingy palace and Safar as well. “Sorry, big guy,” I said to him. He merely snorted, but Ilana gave a chiming laugh that wasn’t mean or derisive in any way.

“I cannot take you from Mzatal’s custody, gentle one, but I would be honored if you would accept my company while you walk Szerain’s grounds.”

“I would be the one honored,” I replied.

She looked to Safar, and a heartbeat later he leaped into the air and winged his way to the central tower of the palace proper, high above the double doors.

The syraza parted her lips and curled them back a smidge in what I interpreted as a syraza smile. She headed for the double doors, and I was about to ask why seeing the grounds entailed going back in, but then decided to go with the flow. It wasn’t as if I had any sort of schedule or agenda. We walked the long corridor toward the set of double doors at the far end. Déjà vu familiarity hummed.

“You’re with Mzatal?” I asked as we walked. I’d almost asked if she served Mzatal, but somehow that didn’t seem quite right.

“I am his ptarl. His counselor,” she explained. “The lords bear much responsibility, and each has one of the Elder syraza as ptarl, though Rhyzkahl, Szerain, and Kadir are separated from theirs.”

Elder syraza. I noted the differences between Ilana and the only other two syraza I’d seen: Eilahn, and Marr, who I’d summoned to pass the eleventh level of summoning. Where the younger syrazas’ foreheads were smooth, Ilana’s had a subtle vertical ridge from high mid-forehead to the top of her head. She also had prominent ridges in her hide, on her back and lower torso, that were absent in the others. I made mental notes of it all. “How many lords are there?” I asked.

“There are eleven qaztahl…lords.”

Comprehension dawned. Eleven. Eleven walls. Eleven fissures. Eleven columns. These guys sure as hell put a lot of stock in themselves.

“Rhyzkahl, Szerain, and Mzatal you know,” she said, and I didn’t miss that she obviously knew about Ryan. “The others are Jesral, Amkir, Kadir, Vahl, Seretis and Rayst, Elofir, and Vrizaar.”

No way would I remember all of them, but my summoner training had required me to develop pretty good memorization skills that also proved useful in police work. I filed away what I could and figured I’d at least recognize a name if I heard it again.

As we approached a cross-corridor about halfway down, Ilana laid a long, three-fingered hand on my arm to stop me. “Anomaly,” she said, gesturing toward the passage ahead. I peered toward where she pointed and could barely see a flicker in the air, like a spark that cast light and sucked it right back in.

“A very minor one,” she noted. “Easily dealt with.” With astonishing speed, the syraza traced a series of sigils and sent them spinning around the tiny spark. A heartbeat later the sigils flashed and a crack echoed down the corridor, not unlike the sound made when I dismissed a demon. “And now it is sealed.”

“Um,” I said, displaying my amazing intelligence. “What was that?”

“A remnant of the cataclysm.” She tucked her arm through mine as if it was the most natural act in the world and strolled on. “Left unchecked, rifts in the dimensional fabric can cause much destabilization and damage. Best to seal them quickly, even the very small ones like that, and always the larger ones.”

I kept my arm looped through hers. Her touch held a deep comfort and reminded me of what I’d felt from Eilahn, though with Ilana it was much more palpable. Perhaps a syraza characteristic? “What if one of those happens way out in the wilderness where no one sees it forming?”

“Such rarely happens,” she said as we came up on the double doors. “And when it does, the demahnk, the Elders, feel it. They most often occur in or around the demesnes of the lords because those are the areas of the greatest arcane torsion.” Before I could ask even more stupid questions, she said, “Come, I will show you the grove.”

The reverence with which she said the word told me that this wasn’t going to be a stand of orange trees or anything like that. She opened one of the doors enough for us to slip through. We stepped out into open air again, confirming my déjà vu and observational suspicion that the corridor led from the courtyard all the way through the central palace. Off to the left—east—loomed the barren hills and jagged mountains I’d seen from the Cracks of Doom balcony. I felt as much as saw them, like festering splinters.

Before us, a swath of grass sprinkled with turquoise wildflowers sloped down into a shallow wooded valley with rolling hills that rose to low, forested mountains. Woods in the full leaf of summer dominated the view, but it was a particular stand of trees that captured my attention. Twice the height of the not insubstantial surrounding forest, they stood in a ring near the verge of grass. Two parallel lines of these giants leaned toward one another, forming an inviting, shadowy tunnel from the ring to the edge of the wood. Their leaves shimmered in sparkling amethyst and brilliant green against white trunks, and I had no doubt this was the grove. A stone-paved pathway ran from the tree tunnel to where we stood just below the tower that held the summoning chamber—a distance of perhaps a hundred yards.

“That’s beautiful,” I breathed. “What is it?” It was pretty obvious that this was more than just a bunch of really old and awesome trees.

She cocked her head. “It is difficult to fully explain. At its simplest, it is the locus of an organic network, cultivated and propagated for use by the lords to travel from one to another near instantaneously.”

“You mean like teleportation?” I asked.

She spread her wings in an elegant flutter-motion that I had no doubt was a syraza version of a shrug. “The means are far different but the end result is the same. Only the lords and the Elder syraza are able to use them.”

“It’s beautiful,” I repeated. It felt beautiful too, like subtle waves of peace breaking over me with the sigh of wind through the leaves.

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “Very beautiful.” She stood with her arm still looped through mine. “Each grove has its own caretaker, a mehnta. A very special union.”

I nodded, considering that. I’d only summoned one of the bizarre tentacle-mouthed mehnta, and that was simply to pass that summoning level. Their saliva had some antibacterial and antiviral properties, but these days it wasn’t in as much demand as it would have been even as recently as fifty years ago. “What’s it like to travel through a grove?” I asked.

“When we leave here you will experience it.”

I tore my eyes from the grove to look at her. “Leave?” Then I realized. “Oh. Right.” We were returning to Mzatal’s realm so that he could take the mark from me. Cold knotted in my gut as I wondered again what that would entail and what the consequences would be. I hated not knowing what was going on, even in the safest of settings. Here it only served to add another layer to the overall stress and fear.

I lifted my chin toward a cleared area in the forest just this side of the grove. A small stone structure rose from a sea of wildflowers in the clearing. “What’s that?”

She bared her teeth lightly in a syraza smile. “It is a place very dear to Szerain. One of his focal points. He spent much time there.”

The coil of incessant fear gave way to deep curiosity about Szerain. The memory rose of that one kiss in the last seconds with Ryan before the summoning took me. So much had been said in that kiss. He’d told me he loved me. And I’d told him I loved him. But what did that even mean? It had felt so perfect, so right at that moment.