Evastany

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Why didn’t you come for us?’ I couldn’t help saying it. What was the absurd boy doing, dealing with this alone when he had assistance to hand?

  ‘I did! When I got back to headquarters nobody seemed to know where you were. I’ve just spent ages going all over Glour City trying to find you, and finally someone said you had gone in search of me. I came back, eventually ran into Hyarn who told me he had sent you here…’ He shook his head, frustrated. ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  I thought of Hyarn, and his calm as he dispatched us to Gio’s rooms. Interesting.

  ‘Ori,’ I said briskly, ‘you’ve the best chance of working out how to solve this. Can you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ori joined Gio before the spellbound draykon, and the two tightly gripped hands. ‘I have never seen anything like this, never heard of anything… she’s bound somehow, bound up in the flow. It’s sort of symbiotic. It’s draining her but also, somehow, keeping her alive… I don’t think I can break it alone.’

  ‘So we need help. Gio, we have Avane and Nyden at headquarters. I’m going to get them, I’ll bring them straight back. All right?’

  Gio blinked vaguely at me. ‘Nyden? Wha— never mind. Tell me later.’

  Tren wanted to go with me, I could see it, but he knew it would be hard enough for me to bring two draykoni back here without having to try to carry him along as well. So he contented himself with an intense look that said, You had better be all right.

  I treated this with the contempt it deserved. Of the two of us, he was the one who would be stuck in dangerous territory, however briefly.

  Away I went.

  As easily as I can use transloc points, I cannot weave them. Happily, Gio can, and he had long since equipped himself with a few in useful places around Glour City — including inside our headquarters. I materialised in the main hallway, startling two students who were loitering there.

  ‘Avane and Nyden,’ I barked. ‘Where are they?’

  One of the two looked too surprised by my appearance and manner to know how to answer. The other, though, was Fostiger, and he had wits enough about him to make me a reply. ‘Classroom three.’

  I nodded thanks and left at once, taking the stairs at a run.

  Lessons were obviously over for the day, or so I hoped, for I found Nyden reclining upon the floor in front of the desk. He looked thoroughly at his ease, but Avane did not. I wondered distantly what she was doing in there alone with him. ‘I need you,’ I informed them. ‘Both of you. Quickly, please.’

  Nyden made to object, but to my surprise Avane instantly shushed him, and ruthlessly. ‘Obviously an emergency. Get up.’ She nudged him with her toe, so forcefully I could almost have termed it a kick in the ribs.

  Even more to my surprise, Nyden instantly rose, dusted off his suit, and nodded to me. ‘We follow, wise leader.’

  I eyed him, finding his compliance highly suspect, but I didn’t have time to think about it just then. I grabbed his arm and Avane’s and dragged them bodily through the aether back to Sulayn Phay, ignoring the way my muscles screamed and my head pounded with the effort. I couldn’t take them straight back to Gio’s rooms, of course, so I chose the closest transloc point I could find and then hauled them to Gio’s on foot.

  I entered the strange parlour again to find everyone unmoved. The draykon was unchanged; Ori and Gio crouched still before it, inspecting her predicament without much hope of discovering a solution; and Tren stood near one of the energy collectors, eyeing it with a professional interest tinged with disgust and desperation.

  I heard twin gasps of horror and revulsion from Avane and Nyden as they entered the room behind me, and spared a moment’s regret that I had not had time (nor had it occurred to me) to warn them before I had brought them here.

  ‘Before you ask, nobody knows how this happened,’ I said. ‘We need to get her out of there.’

  The two of them stared at the beleaguered draykon in heavy silence, and Avane looked as stricken and helpless as Ori. They were both out of their depth, too new to their powers, their understanding of their own abilities still incomplete.

  Nyden, though, acted at once. I felt a rippling pulse shudder through the room, and the walls shook. ‘This is an abomination,’ he snarled.

  I wanted to admonish him, tell him this was not the time for anger, or railing against the unknown perpetrators of this atrocity. But I did not have to. He spat the words as though they tasted bad, but the moment passed; his eyes closed, and I felt him…

  … I don’t know, exactly, but I compared notes with Ori later and we agreed that it felt like Nyden had joined himself with the flow of energy, become a part of it — or made it a part of himself. The effect was immediate, and appalling. He grimaced with pain and shuddered, a violent, uncontrollable, painful-looking tremor. And his vitality dimmed… whatever had dulled the draykon’s vivid scales took the lustre from his skin, the shine from his hair, the light from his eyes. He withered before our horrified gaze, visibly diminishing.

  ‘Nyden,’ Avane whispered.

  He shook his head violently, held up a hand. Avane let it go, and we watched, appalled and afraid, as Nyden struggled to conquer whatever it was that held the draykon bound.

  For a while, I thought it would conquer him. Elder though he was, stubborn though he was, he was failing that battle. His skin turned grey, and though he gulped in air with great, desperate gasps, it didn’t seem enough. My heart sank a mile down and I thought, I did this. I took Nyden from his home, only to break him…

  But gradually, slowly, something changed. Nyden gritted his teeth and held on, and the rapid deterioration of his health ceased. He took a more natural breath, and another.

  Movement. The bound draykon twitched, and shuddered.

  ‘Steady her,’ rasped Nyden, and Ori and Avane ran to obey.

  In another breath, it was over. The draykon’s bindings snapped as one and fell away, and the appalling tension in the air broke. If she had not been supported, she would have fallen to the ground in a boneless heap.

  ‘Careful, careful,’ cautioned Avane, as alarmed as I by the creature’s obvious weakness. The two of them eased her down and proceeded to do what they could to stabilise her, make her more comfortable; I do not know how they tended to her, but they quickly began to look tired, while the prone draykon almost imperceptibly began to revive. Her scales flushed with returning colour, and she took deeper, stronger breaths.

  Avane looked at Nyden. ‘That was amazing,’ she said softly.

  But Nyden did not respond to this compliment as I might have expected. It barely seemed to touch him, though it came from the woman he adored. He had spent most of his own energy upon the rescue, and looked drawn and withered himself. More than that, he looked deeply, profoundly troubled, and that frightened me almost more than anything else. Carefree, flippant Nyden, congenitally incapable of taking anything seriously whatsoever, who had to be coaxed into performing even small duties… Nyden was worried, and disgusted, and angry, and that told me clearly enough that we were in for a world of trouble.

  The rest of that day was chaos and exhaustion, and I do not like to think of it now. You may imagine, perhaps, with what effort we succeeded in removing the once-captive draykon from Gio’s rooms. I do not need to describe the mood, as we settled Nindrinat — as her name proved to be — at HQ, and watched as Nyden fussed and fretted over her like she was his own child. This new, responsible, serious Nyden was frightening us all, and we were glad enough to leave him to it for a time.

  ‘We cannot convey her to Orlind,’ Tren said, as we convened in the kitchens. We were all utterly exhausted, but there was no time for sleep; not then. It was cups of cayluch all round, and an emergency meeting right away.

  I had to agree. I was not up to trying to cart her there myself, and anyway, there were no transloc points on Orlind yet. ‘She needs serious help. So does Ny. And Llandry needs to know about this.’

  Llan and I had anticipated a need for reason
ably fast communication, and had agreed upon a plan before my departure from the island. There are birds aplenty across Glour and Glinnery, some of which are as comfortable flying at night as they are during the day, or vice versa. I had already taken the precaution of befriending a few of these, and encouraging them to stay close to Headquarters. It would not be difficult for me to task some with taking a message to Orlind. I’d choose the three fastest, and beseech Llandry and Pense to join us in Glour City right away.

  Nyden joined us just as this point was settled. He still looked drawn, unhealthy. I was worried about him.

  I handed him a cup of cayluch in silence, which he stared at without seeming to see it.

  ‘How is she?’ asked Avane.

  ‘Weak. She suffers.’

  ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘With the right help, yes. Probably.’

  I told him of our plan to entreat aid, and he looked relieved. Also, to my surprise, slightly alarmed. ‘Do not bring any Elders here.’ He said this grimly, without a trace of his customary humour.

  ‘Why… why not?’ I faltered. I felt no doubt that Nyden had been able to help Nindrinat precisely because he was an Elder; if we had not had him with us, what could we possibly have done?

  ‘Nindrinat is an Elder,’ Nyden said. ‘Alyndim. And that is not a coincidence.’

  My mind went in a few directions at once.

  Ori had said they — whoever had captured and bound her — were using her to generate amasku. Of course she was alyndim. Considering everything Llandry had discovered, what other draykoni could be thus employed?

  If one Elder had been put to such a purpose, Nyden was right to advise caution. Here we were, up to our eyeballs in Lokants, and some of them would slap Nyden in chains as soon as look at him. I felt a pulse of fear for Ny himself. How had Nindrinat’s captors known she was alyndim? Would they realise the same about Nyden, if they saw him?

  And another thought drifted through my mind: a note from Llan’s journal, a question she had never managed to answer. Gio. He had been sent to Nuwelin, Llan’s draykon village on Iskyr, by his grandmother — and she had sent him there with instructions to find Elders. He had rebelled, in his quiet way, and reported back that she had no Elders in residence, thus shielding Nyden. But no one had ever learned, or guessed, why Sulayn Phay’s Lokantor had an interest in identifying alyndim draykoni in the first place. The question became rather buried, I think, by the doings of Galywis, and the greater and more immediate threat that had posed to the Elders of the race at the time.

  Was this the reason for Dwinal’s interest? Was she behind the capture of Nindrinat? It looked all too likely. Who else had access to Gio’s old room?

  Then again, why had she cheerfully dispatched Gio there, knowing what he would find when he arrived? Without warning him, without explanation? And why would she have chosen such an odd spot to keep her captured Elder, anyway?

  For that matter, why capture Nindrinat at all? How had she done so? What was she trying to achieve?

  I shared these reflections. They are the sort of questions which raise yet more questions, and quickly.

  Ori was particularly struck with the question of how a Lokant, or group of such, could possibly capture and bind an Elder so effectively. ‘Back on Orlind,’ he said, ‘we were afraid for a while that somebody of ours was betraying Elders to whoever was killing them. I think we discarded the idea once we found out about Galy, because he did not really need an informant. But perhaps we shouldn’t have. Whoever did this — Dwinal, if it was her — needed draykon help, and a lot of it. Especially if there are more held captive somewhere in Sulayn Phay, and that seems too probable for comfort.’

  Nobody could find sound reason to argue against this likelihood, which left us with so many problems we hardly knew where to begin. Had I been wrong to think that Dwinal could not secure draykon help without using me as a go-between? Had she somehow found herself a draykon ally?

  Somebody needed to search Sulayn Phay for more such victims, and extricate them at once. And somebody needed to investigate how, and through whose help, Nindrinat and possibly others were being captured, and put a stop to it.

  Tall orders, both.

  7 V

  A few tense days passed. The school proceeded, but in a state of some disorder. I was conscious of Tynara and Dan in our midst, people who were loyal to Dwinal, and who must not learn of Nindrinat’s presence if we could possibly help it. This was not easy, with everyone housed in the same (admittedly large) building. We achieved it by assigning attic quarters to Nindrinat, in a disused chamber no one had any other cause to go into. But the necessity of secrecy, of tending to the draykon without alerting any more of our number to her presence, placed an extra strain on Ori, Avane, Tren, Nyden and me, one which we would have gladly done without.

  We were all thinking similar things: were we now training our part-Lokant, part-draykon hybrids by order of Nindrinat’s tormenter? What exactly was she planning to do with our most talented graduates, anyway?

  Another question: if Dwinal conceivably had draykon help with projects like Nindrinat, why did she need us? There were too many holes in everything, too many questions, too many reasons to doubt everything we thought we knew.

  Nindrinat revived enough to speak, but she refused to address anybody save Nyden; she was too cowed, I believe, for she would willingly suffer nobody else’s near presence, and shrank back if we approached too near. She and Nyden engaged in long conversations, of use to us only in one particular.

  Nindrinat did not know how she had come to be bound and enslaved in the middle of a Lokant Library. She did not remember any attack, because there had, in all probability, never been one. She had come awake to find herself alone in an enclosed space she did not recognise, unable to move, and in a state of some pain. Last time she remembered being awake… well, Nyden had not been able to establish precisely when that was, but that it was an extremely long time ago was not in doubt.

  You know, I imagine, that the draykoni can revive each other from death? They do not think of it as death, even: they call it the Long Sleep, because to them, that’s more or less what it is. If a draykon dies, and its body decays to nothing but bones, it is not necessarily the end for them. If the skeleton is whole, the spirit still lives and the assistance of sufficient of its fellows is at hand, the dead draykon may be restored to life. It is a startling ability which is shared by no other species of creature in this world. It fascinates the Lokants no end, because though they created the draykoni they did not anticipate that the creatures would be able to do anything so marvellous as that.

  What we can conclude about Nindrinat, then, is that she had “died” long ago, slipped peacefully into her Long Sleep, and remained in that state while the ages passed. Until somebody discovered her skeleton, conveyed it to Sulayn Phay, and — we conclude — there revived her to life, bound and at their mercy.

  In other words, this was proof positive that other draykoni must have been involved. How would Dwinal discover her skeleton, otherwise? The Off-Worlds are vast. One cannot simply go out there with a shovel and dig, expecting to stumble over draykon bones at any moment. But the draykoni can sense each other’s presence, including the near presence of the dead — that is how Llandry came across Pensould.

  And how came she to be revived? The draykoni ability to rejuvenate took their creators by surprise; it is not impossible that Dwinal, or someone else, might since have developed a way to restore a dead draykon themselves, but it seems unlikely. In all probability, a draykon (or more than one) found Nindrinat’s skeleton, delivered it to Sulayn Phay, and rejuvenated her in captivity.

  It is a chilling, horrible thought, is it not? That Nindrinat spent some time in conditions of the worst kind, put to the most painful and degrading use, and was not likely to be released alive, is horrific enough. That she was probably condemned to it by people of her own race — people who were far better able to understand what it would mean for her, how it
would feel, than any Lokant — is still worse. I was sickened by it. Ori, Avane and Nyden were so appalled they hardly knew how to react.

  The arrival of Llandry and Pense came as a relief. It felt like a breaking of the status quo, a flicker of hope. Even Ori’s unfailingly cheerful spirits had suffered, and begun to flag; I could imagine how he felt, too, considering that the death of Galywis and many alyndim happened very recently, and he was deeply involved.

  Llan and Pensould flew in late this afternoon, and Ori in particular greeted their appearance with the kind of enthusiasm that’s usually born of desperation. It was his turn to almost topple Llandry with the force of his affection, and she responded with similar fervour.

  They were not happy. The ease, the cheer, the optimism they had displayed only a short time before, was all gone. Now they were as troubled as Nyden, and requested to be taken up to Nindrinat without delay, their faces as grim as their manner was tense.

  Nyden was with Nin, as usual, but I dared not follow. I knew that my presence would only disturb Nindrinat more, and she already had two unfamiliar draykoni to cope with.

  So I waited with Tren below, anxious and chafing at the delay, but determined not to show it. As was he. We made a fine, unconvincing show of insouciance between the two of us, then gave it up as hopeless, and occupied ourselves with a survey of the classrooms and a show of interest in how our students were progressing.

  They were progressing well, not that anybody cared overmuch that particular hour. Three or four passed before Llan and Pense came down from the attic, and when they emerged, Nyden was not with them.

  ‘She is from a part of Ayrien we’ve never been to before,’ Llandry reported. ‘It is unclear how they found her, but… most of my people, and Avane’s, have been over at Orlind for the past moon or so. There could be vast search parties going on across the Off-Worlds and we might not have even noticed.’