Orlind

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Fine. Griel?’ Ana’s husband had stopped pacing and now stood eerily still, his gaze also following his wife’s progress. But he looked up at Eva. His face was stark white rather than pale, and his eyes were haunted.

  ‘She’s told me... what you said. I’m not sure I believe it.’

  Eva nodded. ‘We are prepared to prove it. If Ana will calm down somewhat.’

  ‘How are you going to prove it?’

  ‘By taking you to Limbane’s Library and introducing you to some of the other Lokants.’

  He stared at her, impassive, for a long moment. She didn’t bother to smile or to try to convince him further. He would either agree or he wouldn’t; and he looked desperate enough to try anything.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally.

  ‘Good. Then let’s get on with it. Time’s wasting.’

  Everyone looked at Ana.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she snarled.

  Eva just looked at her.

  Mercifully, the woman stopped pacing. She took a long, long, breath, then sought Griel’s hand. Finally, she looked back at Eva, her face calmer.

  ‘If this is a trap, I’ll kill you myself,’ she said pleasantly. ‘And Griel will kill your boy there.’

  Eva sighed. ‘Fine. If we’re ready?’ She gripped Ana’s wrist and took Tren’s hand. ‘We’ll be back,’ she said to Devary and the still-silent Indren. Bracing herself, for carrying three at once would not be easy, she closed her eyes and accessed the Map. Limbane’s Library was easy to find, for it shone in her mind’s eye. It was the work of a moment to fix upon it and begin the process of translocation.

  In another instant, all four stood in the room Limbane had given over to incarcerate Ana and Griel while they were here. The two “guests” were both partial Lokants, like Eva, with a full-Lokant ancestor somewhere back in their family trees. Eva suspected that Griel had no access to the Map; no partial Lokant had a full range of Lokant abilities and his weakness was probably the PsiTravel. But Ana could certainly do it. Her ability, though, was tuned to Krays’s Library; the frequencies across Limbane’s headquarters were completely different. She wouldn’t be able to travel back here.

  But now she knew where it was. If she betrayed them, Krays would soon know exactly where to find it too.

  Well. At this stage, they had to be willing to take risks.

  Ana looked around, using her mental Lokant senses more than her eyes. Watching her, Eva was surprised to see relief wash over her face. She’d really been afraid that Eva was lying, then, but the nature of the Library was obvious.

  ‘Are there more?’ she said suddenly, looking at Eva.

  ‘More what?’

  ‘Libraries. I always thought Krays’s was the only one, but this is clearly another. Are there more?’

  Eva exchanged a startled look with Tren. Why had that never occurred to them before? It was a perfectly valid, and most interesting, question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘We can ask Limbane, though I doubt he’ll tell us the truth.’ Speaking of whom, where was he? She didn’t want to leave her visitors unattended in order to search for him, and she certainly wasn’t leaving Tren alone with them.

  ‘One moment,’ she murmured. Crossing to the door, she tapped on it. It was secured by the complicated, virtually unbreakable coded locks the Lokants used, and Eva didn’t know how to unlock it.

  A few moments later, the door clicked open. Two full Lokants, named Rael and Egren, were guarding the exit and manning the lock. Eva didn’t know them well, though she’d met them before. They were two of Limbane’s most loyal colleagues and he employed them for all of his most sensitive projects.

  ‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘They’re here. Where’s Limbane?’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ said Egren. ‘He asked to be fetched.’

  Eva nodded and stepped back into the room, closing the door again behind her.

  ‘I want to look around,’ Ana said.

  ‘No,’ Eva replied. ‘At least, not yet. Limbane will talk with us first. Then he’ll decide what else is to be done.’

  Ana looked ready to explode again, but Griel drew her away and began talking to her in a low voice. Eva didn’t try to eavesdrop. Whatever they said was between the two of them.

  Thankfully, Ana’s fit of temper cooled. By the time Limbane arrived - translocating in and skipping the door altogether - she more or less resembled a rational being once more. She met Limbane’s scrutiny with a cold stare.

  ‘So,’ Limbane said. ‘You’re Krays’s lackeys.’

  ‘Limbane...’ began Eva warningly, but Ana’s laughter drowned her out. The sound sent a shiver up Eva’s spine. Unhinged, most definitely.

  ‘Once, we were,’ she hissed at last. ‘Lackeys indeed, for we questioned nothing. And he used us for everything. But he’s a fool. So stuck on his stupid machines, he could never see the potential.’

  ‘Of what?’ Limbane questioned sharply.

  ‘Of the draykon bone. He piled it all up like it was any other building material. Like so much wood and stone and metal. If we’d left it up to him, he’d have wasted it all.’

  ‘So you diverted it, hm? Rebuilt the draykon instead?’

  ‘Of course we did! I wanted it. Maybe I’ll still get my draykon, someday.’

  Limbane’s cunning old eyes turned sharp. ‘How did you know what it was? Did he tell you?’

  Ana snorted. ‘Share information? Not him. Not with his lackeys.’

  ‘Then how did you know that it was a skeleton? And how did you know you could resurrect it?’

  Ana’s expression turned shifty and she clammed up. It was Griel who finally answered. ‘There was a book. Found it in a tower down in the Lowers. All about the history of the place, it was, and it laid it all out.’

  Eva started. He must mean the tower belonging to Andraly Winnier: technically the woman was a partial Lokant, but she was an unusually powerful one. One of her parents had been a full-blood. She had long been assigned to keep an eye on the Lower Realm, or Ayrien as they called it, and she catalogued all her findings in a large book that Eva had had in her possession for a time.

  Eva hadn’t seen anything in there about draykon resurrection, but... there had been some missing pages, roughly torn out.

  Limbane was obviously reaching the same conclusion, for he was looking livid. Eva winced. Andraly would be in trouble later for that slip. Writing such things down and leaving the book lying around in her tower? Stupid.

  ‘Fine,’ Limbane said tightly. Their explanation didn’t please him, but at least it made sense. ‘Why aren’t you still working for him?’

  ‘He cast us out,’ Ana said. ‘He lied to us, kept us apart. He made me think my husband was dead! He punished me by using me in the lowest ways, when I couldn’t escape from him.’

  ‘But you betrayed him,’ Limbane said, relentless. ‘Perhaps you deserved those things.’

  The mad fury was coming back into her eyes. Eva hoped Limbane knew what he was doing.

  ‘And my husband?’ she demanded. ‘Did he deserve to be used as a test subject? He’ll never be the same!’

  Limbane’s sharp eyes flicked to Griel. Eva and Tren had tracked the man down to a tiny house in Ullarn, where he’d been hiding out. He had been running an underground trade in draykon bone out of that house, siphoning off Krays’s hard-won supplies and using them to raise funds for himself. Griel had shown them what Krays had done to him. He’d taken a knife, split open the flesh of his own arm and displayed the bone that lay beneath.

  It hadn’t been a human bone anymore. It was draykon bone, reworked into a shape that almost fitted Griel’s arm. Almost. His use of that arm was clumsy. The same had been done elsewhere in his body - some of his ribs, one of his legs. He was no longer as physically superior as he had been before, struggling with a limp as well as diminished use of his arm.

  For the first time, Eva wondered whether the probable object of Krays’s experiment had been achieved. Griel was a s
orcerer, so he already possessed some draykon blood somewhere in his family line. Had the insertion of the draykon bone enhanced his natural abilities? Was he a stronger sorcerer for it?

  She added that to her list of questions to be asked, whenever Limbane had finished with the two of them.

  ‘What do you think?’ Limbane asked of Griel. ‘Did you deserve that?’

  Griel’s answer was quiet. ‘No.’

  Limbane smiled for the first time since he’d entered the room. ‘I agree. My erstwhile colleague has always lacked a few things, like common sense. It’s his ego that does the damage, I’m afraid. He’d assume you would be far too afraid of him to ever consider betraying him again. But, of course, you only run away from him all the harder.’ He sounded pleased. That was a relief.

  ‘That being the case,’ he continued, ‘I won’t waste time threatening you. Let’s hope our common goal is sufficient to keep us moving in the same direction. Yes?’

  Ana nodded, wary.

  ‘Excellent,’ Limbane smiled, slipping all the way back into his role as a mild-mannered, jovial old gentleman. ‘Let’s have something to drink, and possibly a bite to eat, shall we? Then we can discuss how we can best put our new alliance to use.’ He turned and slipped out of the room. She could hear him talking to Egren and Rael through the partially-open door.

  Ana’s gaze found hers, and Eva was startled to recognise a question in her expression. The woman was looking for reassurance, and from her. Was it because they’d met before? She and Tren were more familiar to the two of them than Limbane was.

  Eva nodded confidently and smiled at Ana. She trusted Limbane. His drive to wipe out his rival would outweigh any other considerations he might have. That most definitely put them all on the same page.

  Soon a healthy luncheon was laid out on the table that occupied the centre of the room. They gathered around it, everyone except Tren who looked as uncomfortable as Eva felt. Associating with enemies was one thing; sitting down to a friendly meal with them was a step beyond that.

  ‘Very well,’ Limbane said after he’d eaten a little. ‘No doubt you’re aware that what we primarily need from you is information. Oh, I could storm Krays’s Library, but he knows how to hide his projects from me. We need an inside look at what he’s been up to.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Ana asked. Griel had put food on her plate, but she hadn’t touched it, and he was too busy worrying about that to eat anything himself. So much for Limbane’s picnic.

  ‘What is he doing?’ Limbane said, leaning forward. ‘What is the purpose of the draykon bone? Why is he building these machines? Tell me everything.’

  Ana looked at her husband, a long look full of some communication Eva couldn’t decipher. Finally Griel nodded.

  ‘We do not precisely know what his purposes are,’ he said. ‘But we will tell you everything that we know. You may make more of it than we have been able to.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Limbane said. ‘Do begin.’

  So Griel began. Eva was grateful that he had taken over the narration; his speech was clearer, less erratic and easier to follow than his wife’s. He was also generally the more rational of the two - an occasional paranoid fit notwithstanding - so his tale was constructed in a way that his audience could understand. He began his story with the discovery of the draykon bone, then known as the istore gem. Much of his tale ran along lines that Eva had expected: Krays had put the two of them, his most trusted agents at the time, in charge of collecting up every piece of that bone and bringing it back to him.

  Griel and Ana had used whurthags to achieve this, dangerous beasts native to the Lower Realms. He and Ana had only been able to control them because their Lokant blood gave them an advantage over ordinary summoners; even then their control had not been perfect. When it had slipped, people had died, including friends of hers and Tren’s. She swallowed the lump that suddenly rose in her throat as Griel narrated this part in the tale. In the chaos that had followed, poor Meesa had been almost forgotten. She deserved better than that.

  She felt Tren stiffen beside her as Griel talked of subverting Ed Geslin, a young sorc who had been employed as an aide on the Night Cloak. Tren’s best friend, he had been, and he had not survived his entanglement with this adventure.

  The rest of Griel’s tale coincided perfectly with everything they already knew, and Eva’s guesses. They’d woken the draykon and failed to control it. The creature (Pensould, as it turned out) had flown away, with the newly-Changed Llandry.

  Then came the interesting parts. Griel had been badly injured by Pensould, and Ana had used the Map to take him back to Krays’s Library. She now took over the tale briefly, recounting how Krays had taken Griel’s corpse from her and sent her away. Later he’d told her that he had been unable to save Griel - or rather, that he refused to. Griel had died, or so she’d been told.

  But Griel had instead been fed through Krays’s experimental programme with the draykon bone. After the sorcerer recovered from the implantation process, he had been sent to Ullarn, forced to take up a role with his master’s device design.

  ‘There were different types of machines we were trying to build,’ Griel said in his deep voice. ‘Some were creatures, designed to be aggressive but controllable. We used the whurthags as a pattern. They were a hybrid of biological and mechanical material, with embedded draykon bone. The prototypes were used as guards in the Library - I encountered some of them later. But those first ones were very crude. We built bigger, faster, better ones. They were created to be as physically powerful as possible, so as to be a match for any physical force. But he was most interested in the embedding of the draykon bone. They were to be as comfortable in the Off-Worlds as the creatures they were modelled on, only more easily controlled. That was the objective.’

  Limbane was frowning. ‘Why wouldn’t he just use real creatures? He has a strong enough will to dominate anything he chooses, I would’ve said.’

  Griel shrugged. ‘He is not given to freely sharing information. He told me only what I needed to know in order to run the projects.’

  Limbane nodded. ‘Damn him. What else did you build?’

  ‘Weapons. Guns mostly, but improved models. Those were mundane, no draykon bone involved. We also built energy collectors and directors.’

  ‘What? What are those?’

  ‘The collectors are supposed to siphon away Off-World energies and store them. The directors serve a similar purpose, only they don’t collect, they merely divert the energy. Acting as funnels, in a sense.’

  ‘Off-World energy?’ That was Tren. He leaned forward, his anger forgotten, listening to every word Griel spoke. ‘What do you mean?’

  Griel looked at him impassively. ‘You’re a sorcerer. You work with these energies yourself.’

  Tren nodded. Eva, however, was confused. As a summoner, her skill was with the creatures that roamed the Off-Worlds; she wasn’t tuned in to the patterns of things the way sorcs were. She realised Limbane was giving Tren the same questioning look she imagined was on her own face.

  ‘The Middles are relatively stable,’ Tren said. ‘In terms of the flow of natural energies, that is. Calm, controlled. That’s why we can live there. But the Off-Worlds are pretty violent in contrast. There are masses of conflicting energies in the Lowers; that’s why the landscape changes as it does, or so the scholars believe. I see them in colours, sometimes, if I try. Nobody really knows what those energies are, or why they have the effects they do.

  ‘But that’s why the animals have been going crazy. The draykoni seem to be tuned in to those energies in a way no other species can claim to be. Waking them up has stirred everything else up, too. The creatures are reacting to the energy flow, which is completely erratic and off-kilter now.’

  ‘Hm.’ Eva thought about that for a moment. ‘So it’s a natural power source. Is that what you’re saying?’

  Tren spread his hands. ‘Like I said, nobody knows. But I’ve never heard of anyone seriously trying to
manipulate it, let alone siphon it off.’

  Eva looked at Limbane. He hadn’t asked any questions. She had a feeling he knew more about this than he was saying, as usual.

  ‘How far did you get with this project?’ he said sharply.

  ‘We have tested a few prototypes,’ Griel replied. ‘None are yet successful on the scale Krays requires.’

  ‘What scale does he require?’

  Griel shrugged. ‘Larger than we have achieved. Always, he is unsatisfied. He wants greater capabilities.’

  Eva spoke up. ‘And you have no idea what he intends to do with these devices?’

  Griel shook his head.

  She sighed. ‘Ah well. It was worth a try.’

  ‘The question,’ said Tren, ‘is what do we imagine our good friend will be able to do with these devices? What will he do with the collected energies, if he succeeds?’

  Eva stared at Ana and Griel, who merely stared blankly back. Her heart sank: they’d hoped for answers, but instead they had gained more questions and more bad news. And this felt like seriously bad news. What would a man like Krays do with a vast natural power source? Certainly nothing good. What new disaster was about to befall their beleaguered cluster of worlds?

  Chapter Twelve

  No one was surprised to find that the missing draykoni were not in the Middle Realms. Llandry was relieved, though, in a way. She didn’t wish to see any other cities suffering the same fate as Waeverleyne; and if she was honest, she didn’t want the attention of the Seven Realms to be divided between multiple warzones. Her home city would need all the help they could get if it was to survive.

  But when the four draykons had crossed into Iskyr, something else had caught her attention and distracted her from the problem at hand. She had noticed a buzz of disturbance among the animal populations of the Seven Realms; her summoner senses, though untrained, had fed their distress through to her quite clearly. Once in the Off-Worlds, though, that buzz was intolerably amplified.

  She extended her thoughts, tentatively touching her mind to that of a few of the beasts that wandered the ground or dived through the air. Wincing, she dragged her mind back. What she felt in their confused brains was madness, pure and simple, the sort created by uncontrollable fear and real panic. The collective effect hurt, and soon a fierce headache beat at her brow.