Evastany

by Charlotte E. English

  So Gio was absent and one of our draykon tutors was largely incapacitated by worry. And much as I hate to admit it (I like to at least pretend to live up to my reputation for cool, unruffled composure), I was not much less anxious myself. When you are dealing with Lokants, anything that seems wrong… probably is.

  I watched as Ori danced another agitated figure-of-eight around my visitor’s chair, chewing upon his fingernails and generally presenting a picture of abject misery. It struck me how hard on him it was to wait, lacking the means to follow Gio himself. He had to rely on me.

  ‘Where is Tren?’ I said, rising from my own chair where I had been reclining at my ease.

  Ori understood my gist at once. He shot me a grateful look, said breathlessly, ‘I’ll get him!’ and charged out of the room.

  I took a few moments to inform one or two people of where we were going — Avane, specifically, for I trusted her the most out of those we were leaving behind — and awaited Tren and Ori at the office door.

  They soon arrived, Ori looking desperately anxious but also a bit relieved (to be doing something productive about Gio’s absence, no doubt).

  ‘So we’re going?’ said Tren.

  ‘Immediately,’ I replied.

  ‘Good. I don’t like this silence.’ He took hold of my left hand, and Ori my right, and I translocated us away.

  Translocation is a fairly easy process, once you get the hang of it — that is, translocating alone. Taking other people along gets a lot harder, because people are heavy and one has to more or less drag them through the fabric of the world. I am not all that physically strong. Taking two fully grown men along with me was not the most pleasant experience.

  I’d chosen a transloc point near the schoolroom we had now emptied out. We all but fell into the room, with an embarrassing lack of grace. Ori was raring to go in search of Gio at once and immediately but I needed a breather. My arms hurt, my head hurt and I was gasping for breath.

  ‘Hold up a moment, Ori,’ said Tren, while doing that nice solicitous thing he does when I have done something either exhaustingly impressive or impossibly stupid (or both).

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ori with a sigh, but he could not stand still. He paced the corridor, peered through the door into the schoolrooms, paced a bit more.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, only slightly untruthfully. ‘We should not go haring off willy-nilly, however.’ (Willy-nilly is such a wonderful word, is it not? I don’t get nearly enough opportunities to use it). ‘Let’s think. Where is Gio likely to be, and what might reasonably have happened to him?’

  I looked at Ori as I said it, because he had spent time up here with Gio before. If anybody knew where Gio had lately taken to lingering, it would be Ori. I only knew that Dwinal was probably the last person to have lately seen her grandson.

  ‘I know where his new quarters are,’ Ori volunteered. ‘He ditched the ones in Dwinal’s wing but Ylona gave him new.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Lead on.’

  Ori hesitated. ‘I, um. Don’t know how to find them from here.’

  ‘Which part of the Library are they in?’ I summoned the Map in my mind, and tried to mentally muster the strength for another transloc.

  ‘It’s, um.’ Ori blinked.

  I waited.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shame-faced.

  I suppose there had to be something our star scholar was no good at. Apparently, finding his way around wasn’t always his strongest point. Will you blame me if I admit to feeling a tiny, tiny flicker of relief? It is unnatural for a person to be so entirely without weakness or failing as Ori has thus far appeared to be.

  It was an inconvenient time to manifest such a flaw, admittedly. I looked at Tren, vaguely hopeful of some small miracle. Perhaps he, somehow, would know where to look?

  He shook his head with a rueful smile, and my hopes were dashed.

  And both of them stood there, waiting for me to figure out what to do.

  Egads.

  I mentally reviewed our options. Asking someone was the most obvious solution, but it raised one or two difficulties. One was simply how to explain our presence in the Library at all, considering that I wasn’t supposed to have an implant. And what were we going to ask?

  ‘You know, I think we are in Dwinal’s wing,’ I offered. ‘That dining area I went through is nearby, and it was pretty full of people who seemed to be her associates.’

  Ori and Tren nodded thoughtfully. ‘So,’ said Tren, ‘That means…’

  ‘That means we are probably on the wrong side of the Library. Ylona does not like Dwinal at all, why would she base herself and her supporters anywhere nearby?’

  ‘It’s the best logic we’ve got,’ said Ori dubiously.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He gave me a sheepish grin. ‘Sorry.’

  I collected up my unhelpful gentlemen, braced myself, and whisked us off to the other side of Sulayn Phay. I’d picked a transloc point at random; over there was uncharted waters as far as I was concerned, and I had no idea where we were going. Time to be intrepid, if we wanted to find Gio.

  We came out in a library. Fitting, I suppose; we were in a Library, capital L, and hitherto I hadn’t seen much in the way of books or records or suchlike. It was a pretty room, long and narrow with a staggeringly high glass ceiling. All of the walls were fitted with shelves as one would expect, but the library otherwise deviated from the classical structures with which I was familiar. One side of the room was crowded with objects I would recognise as books; leather-bound, for the most part, and scrupulously dusted. Most of the other shelves housed an array of objects I did not recognise, made from unfamiliar materials… I would hazard a guess that they are for the storage of information, too, but more specifically than that I cannot say.

  ‘I like this place,’ said Ori, staring at the book-crowded side with undisguised avarice.

  It would have been so beautifully convenient if the library had been empty, but of course it wasn’t. Seated in a chair underneath the grand, clear, arching window was Hyarn.

  ‘Perfect,’ I muttered. So much for my brilliant logic.

  It was too much to hope that he might not have seen us, of course. Absorbed in a book as he appeared to be, he nonetheless looked up when we blew in, and greeted us with a polite, even kindly, smile.

  That smile put me on my guard immediately.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, trying to be casual.

  ‘You are looking for a book, perhaps.’ He took in my two companions with mild interest, and apparently decided to pretend that we had all come in by the door, for he said nothing about our mode of travel.

  ‘Actually,’ — and I decided on the spot not to bother dissembling, because it grew tiresome and we lacked the time — ‘We are looking for Gio.’

  Hyarn closed his book. ‘I can assist you there. Gio is with his grandmother.’

  ‘What?’ Ori blurted.

  ‘I know, it may surprise you.’ Hyarn regarded Ori with that same kindly smile. ‘I am happy to tell you that there has been something of a reconciliation between the two. They are on excellent terms, and Gio has returned to his old quarters. You may find him there.’

  That rang false to all of us, but I was not unduly worried. Gio had mentioned that Ylona wished for him to return to his grandmother’s side, for the purposes of learning about her doings. It did seem oddly abrupt, considering how little I knew he liked the assignment, but doubtless he had his own reasons.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Hyarn. I hesitated a moment, wondering whether he was minded to say anything else, for he had the air of one about to speak. But he said nothing, and we went away — via the door, like ordinary people. I think it unlikely in the extreme that Hyarn remained unaware that I had been translocating around his Library, but why make that problem worse?

  Rikbeek shifted in my skirts, and began muttering darkly in my mind. He was thinking about biting, and I almost sent him after Hyarn just because. The man irritated me, and he had
killed Galy. He deserved to be munched upon.

  I managed to hang onto my essential decency, however, and left Hyarn unmolested by tiny gwaystrel.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ grumbled Ori as we left.

  ‘Calm,’ I advised. ‘We will soon learn what’s afoot.’ I shared the same sense of foreboding, though I did not want to admit to it.

  ‘If you can get us to the main library building in Dwinal’s wing, I can probably find Gio’s old quarters,’ offered Ori. I remembered that he had spent some weeks up here with Gio before, prior to the demise of Orlind.

  ‘Wonderful.’ I realised with a sinking feeling that I would now have to cart everybody back across the Library again. What joy is mine.

  I did so without complaint, which perhaps you will agree was gracious of me. I managed not to scream on the other side, too, for which I was proud of myself. My poor body. It did not appreciate such treatment.

  I had no real idea which was the main library building, of course, but it wasn’t that hard to guess: the Map made it easy to pick out a room that was bigger than all the others, and thither I went. It proved to be much like the room in which we had encountered Hyarn, only much larger.

  ‘Onward,’ I instructed Ori, who led the way briskly and with an air of purpose.

  Gio’s rooms proved to be situated a few minutes’ solid walking from the library. It is striking how vast those Libraries really are. We wound our way down many corridors, through a few more libraries of varying sizes, and a number of rooms of ambiguous purpose. At last, Ori stopped at the end of a short corridor lined with doors.

  ‘This one’s Gio’s,’ he said, tapping on the blue door before which he had halted.

  I summoned the Map. ‘Are you sure?’

  Ori looked sharply at me. ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘There is no transloc point around here.’

  ‘There has to be. There was, before.’

  ‘Then it has been removed.’

  Ori began to look genuinely afraid. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he admitted. ‘There is no way we can get through that door, if we can’t translocate. And I cannot think why his transloc point would be gone.’

  Tren tried the door. Optimistic, but of course it was locked.

  ‘It was worth a try,’ he shrugged.

  I looked at the lock. It bore no keyhole; no point of entry for anything resembling any kind of a key, either. That made me think of the doors upon those lovely suites in which Tren and I had been briefly housed.

  I looked at my arm. ‘I wonder…’ Gio prepared my implant. Had he modelled it on his own?

  ‘Try it,’ said Tren.

  I laid my hand against the panel I thought might house the lock.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Damnit,’ muttered Ori, and began again to pace.

  Undeterred, I moved my hand about, trying various parts of the panel. I had no idea how those locks work (I still don’t). Obviously they respond to touch somehow, if you are a person with designated access, but how that operates I don’t know. Do you have to touch some particular part of the lock, with some particular part of your anatomy?

  I tried this, applying my hands, palms, fingers, until at last… a click, and the door drifted ajar.

  ‘Gio planned this,’ I said. ‘Or he expected… something. He built access to his quarters into my implant.’

  ‘Yes,’ hissed Ori, and instantly ran inside.

  ‘Ori—’ I tried, eager to advise caution, but he was gone.

  ‘We can but follow,’ observed Tren, and as he was right, that is what we did.

  Gio’s quarters consisted of a small complex of rooms, the first being a mere antechamber. Three doors led off it, all of them open. Ori had charged ahead of us into the room on the right, and there he had stopped, blocking the doorway. We had to push him aside to see what had provoked such a reaction, and that gave me a thorough scare, I can tell you. I had visions of Gio’s limp corpse strung up from the ceiling, or strewn across the floor in dismembered parts…

  How shall I prepare you for what we found inside? I cannot, I think. It was too unexpected, too shocking. For a full minute, not one of the three of us could speak or, I think, breathe.

  We found Lania’s draykon.

  The creature was not dead, I hasten to reassure you. I have made everything sound most dire, and so it was, but it was no slain corpse that we discovered.

  The room had probably been used as some kind of parlour at one time, but by then it was cleared of furniture. The atmosphere in there was odd; it prickled at my senses, my other senses, as Llandry would call them. The part of my soul that derives its nature from my distant draykon ancestor did not at all like whatever was going on in that room. It made me dizzy, nauseated.

  Stationed in each of the room’s corners was an energy collector. We have seen those before, on the island of Orlind during the battle with Krays. He built them, he put them there. Their purpose was to siphon off the energies of the place, energies known as amasku. Those energies are the source of the powers of the draykoni, and as such, they have long been of interest to people like Krays.

  On Orlind, that energy had been corrupted beyond repair. Galywis had diverted Krays’s collectors; instead of collecting and siphoning off energy, they were simply directing it around the island in a safe circuit, keeping it from spreading and infecting the rest of the Seven.

  The collectors in that room were doing the same thing. Someone had set up a vortex of amasku — the unhealthy kind, I was certain of it — and kept it moving in a tight, ceaseless whirl. Each machine was fitted with lengths of that pretty, lovely draykon bone, and they flared silver with power.

  The draykon occupied the centre of the room. It was smaller than it should have been, smaller by far, otherwise it could never have fitted into the parlour. I remembered Nyden’s shrinking trick of only a few days before and felt sick, because I doubted not that this poor drayk had somehow been forced into performing the same feat. The creature was immobilised, though I could not tell how. Oh, it was tightly bound, but I did not think that the restraints were what was holding it still. Its eyes were blank and there were no signs of life about it at all, save that it was — just barely — breathing. Its hide was marbled in celadon and gold, but those prismatic scales were dulled and faded.

  I stared, but I could not work out what was going on. No powerful draykon am I, just a summoner. ‘Ori?’ I whispered, when I’d found my voice.

  Ori swallowed. ‘They are, um. Using it.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To… generate energy.’

  ‘You mean… amasku?’

  He nodded without speaking.

  Nobody spoke, for a while. We were all trying to process the horror of it — and the strangeness.

  ‘They who?’ said Tren after a while. ‘And what in the world is the poor thing doing in Gio’s room?’

  A horrible possibility occurred to me, of course, even if it didn’t occur to trusting Tren. I could guess from the sick horror on Ori’s face that he was thinking the same thing.

  What was it doing in Gio’s room? Perhaps Gio had put it there. He was a Lokant, after all. Some small part of my heart — the part that was frustrated beyond sense with the likes of Limbane and Krays, that would infinitely prefer to forget that they had ever existed — was ready to condemn poor Gio on the spot as exactly like the rest of them, everything he had ever said to us a lie.

  But my better self struggled. I remembered everything I had seen about Gio that spoke well of his heart, his mind and his good sense. I thought of everything Llandry had written of him in her journal; how difficult it had been for her to come to trust him, and how she had come to do so in spite of herself.

  Gio had done nothing to deserve my distrust, and this was mere circumstantial evidence. I banished my unworthy suspicions, and laid a comforting hand on Ori’s arm. It was not that he was any more eager than I to condemn Gio, nor any less likely to trust him. It was pure fear that shone in his eyes, te
rror that he was mistaken after all, that he’d been made a fool of.

  ‘There will be an explanation,’ I told him.

  Either the words or my calm tone steadied Ori a bit, for the terror faded and he nodded.

  ‘I am going to check the other rooms,’ said Tren softly, and departed. Ori cast him an agonised look as he left, and I felt the same: what if there were more to be found, more draykoni like this?

  But Tren soon returned, with a shake of his head that said he perfectly understood our thoughts. “Empty.”

  I looked back at the suspended draykon, feeling an urgent need to help the poor creature. ‘We need to do something.’ I went forward, stepping carefully, half expecting to feel a backlash of energy or something if I got too close. But nothing happened, and I fell to inspecting the bindings that strapped the draykon’s wings against its sides and bound up its legs. They were shockingly tight, and made from something indestructible, or so it seemed. I pulled at them uselessly, unable to affect them in any way.

  Tren went to the nearest energy collector and began to wrestle with it. ‘I can’t find a way to shut it off,’ he said rather desperately. ‘There’s nothing, no switch, lever…’

  Gio’s voice interrupted, speaking from the doorway. ‘Don’t do that!’ He ran to Tren and shoved him away from the machine. ‘You don’t understand, just… don’t touch that.’

  Tren stared at Gio in dismay, and confusion. ‘Don’t shut it off? But the draykon—’

  ‘I know.’ Gio looked at Ori, and I couldn’t fail to notice the worry in his eyes, the beseeching look. ‘This… I feel like a character in a cheap melodrama in saying this, but this isn’t what it looks like.’

  ‘I never imagined it was,’ said Ori, probably not with perfect truth.

  Gio approached the captive draykon and crouched, staring into the creature’s eyes with anxious concern. ‘I don’t know who did this. I got in touch with Grandmother, made things right, which… wasn’t as easy as I just made it sound. But she gave me my old rooms back, and when I came here, this is what I found. I don’t know who put her here but I don’t think it was my grandmother — why would she send me here, only to find this? I haven’t been able to help her. I shut off the collectors right away, but it only… hurt her, somehow. I do not know if she was dying, but she began to scream… I had to power them back up, and only then did she quiet again.’