Orlind

by Charlotte E. English

  Which put her in mind of a question she wanted to ask. ‘What does this place feel like to you three?’

  ‘Everything,’ Llandry said promptly. ‘It’s like bits of Ayrien and Iskyr and the Middles all mixed up.’

  ‘I’d say the same,’ said Ori. ‘Like someone threw all three into a pot and stirred them up with a giant mixing spoon.’

  ‘What an expressive image,’ she murmured. Her own senses were not so powerful as to detect all that, but it made sense with the more muted impressions she was getting. The three worlds, already so closely situated, had somehow become oddly scrambled in this tiny piece of the Cluster. That, perhaps, was the reason for the disorder, or part of it. The island had no single natural state, but three, all competing with one another. That explained the Changes, too; the landscape had metamorphosed twice during their short journey across the island, once into foul-smelling marshland and then into a carpet of mushrooms rather like those she and Tren had seen in Iskyr. The Changes were happening with frightening speed, much more quickly even than they had in the Lowers.

  The truly odd thing, though, was that she couldn’t sense a single animal anywhere on the island.

  A flight of stairs materialised in the air before the impossible tower, tracing a path up to the featureless stone base of the building. It was a graceless thing of rough, heavy stone blocks without shape or style, but it was functional. Ori beamed with satisfaction.

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Ori,’ Llandry said in deep disgust. ‘If you are going to conjure a staircase out of thin air, at least do it with some style.’

  In an instant the repudiated stairs became a gracefully curving staircase of white marble, with airy banisters and a strip of rich blue carpet running up the centre.

  ‘Very pretty,’ Pensould said. ‘Let’s hope we can climb it in our current state without falling down, hm?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Llan, crestfallen. ‘I didn’t think of that.’

  Pensould gave her a quick hug. ‘All will be well, Minchu. I am happy to take a bruise or two for the sake of style.’ The words sounded mocking but his smile was perfectly sincere, and he laid a kiss on her forehead for good measure. Llandry smiled up at him in gratitude.

  ‘I hate to rush anyone,’ Eva said mildly, ‘but it’s cold out here.’

  ‘Sorry, m’lady,’ said Ori cheerfully, and began the ascent. Llan’s design was superior over the first one at least in being narrower and equipped with a rail; Ori was able to grip with both hands as he made his way upwards. Llandry and Pensould followed.

  Tren stood back and gestured for Eva to precede him. ‘I’ll catch you if you fall,’ he said wickedly.

  ‘You’ll be well punished for that remark if you do,’ she retorted, stepping onto the staircase. ‘I may wish I’d retained the figure of my girlhood, but fortune has not been so kind.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t suggesting there’s anything wrong with your figure,’ Tren said. Turning her head to look down at him, she realised his face was approximately eye-level with her behind and he was eyeing it most appreciatively.

  ‘I see the general disorientation has done nothing to interfere with your evil side.’ Turning her eyes resolutely forward, she proceeded upwards at a quicker pace, trying to ignore her extreme vertigo. She was not usually afraid of heights, and the altitude in question was hardly considerable; but ascending such a contraption into empty air when her brain still insisted she was the wrong way up was... unnerving.

  Tren made no reply to this last sally of hers, and she guessed he too was absorbed in the struggle to climb steadily upwards instead of in some much more inappropriate direction. Nobody spoke at all until all five were at the top of the stairs, staring up at the sheer face of the tower.

  ‘About that door you mentioned,’ Tren said, nudging Ori.

  ‘What door? That door?’ Ori gave Tren an innocent look, hard put to suppress a grin.

  An enormous double door had appeared in the previously solid wall, tall enough to fit all five of them if they’d been standing on each other’s shoulders. It appeared to be made out of solid gold.

  ‘Very nice,’ Llandry said. ‘If a bit... over the top.’

  ‘You wanted style!’

  ‘That has gone well past style and emerged somewhere in the vicinity of excessive vulgarity,’ Eva said with strong disapproval. ‘Good gracious, Ori, where were you brought up?’

  ‘Not in a palace, anyway,’ he said with untouched cheer. ‘Oh well. It will get us in. Open, door!’

  The doors obeyed, swinging ponderously inwards with well-oiled smoothness.

  Nobody moved.

  ‘So who wants to go first?’ Ori said after a moment.

  ‘You,’ said Llandry promptly.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you volunteered.’

  ‘Yes, well, I think I’ve had enough of being the leader.’

  Pensould shook his head. ‘I will take the lead. Ori will come behind me, then Llan and Eva, and finally Tren.’

  Eva wrinkled her nose. ‘Is it a coincidence that we ladies are placed in the middle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s very sweet, Pensould, but also a tiny bit patronising. We don’t need to be defended, you know.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Can we just go?’ Tren said. ‘Much longer and nobody will be going inside, because we will all have fallen off.’

  Pensould nodded once and strode through the doors. Ori darted after him, and Eva, with poor grace, fell in behind Llandry. Though she wouldn’t have admitted it, she did find it reassuring to have Tren close behind her.

  The moment they were all inside, the doors swung closed again.

  ‘It might be better to leave them open, Ori,’ Eva said, suppressing a flutter of nerves.

  ‘I didn’t close them,’ he protested.

  ‘Llandry, then? Pensould?’

  Both shook their heads, looking as puzzled and troubled as she herself felt.

  ‘I suppose you can open them again?’

  Ori turned around. ‘Um,’ he said, his face registering confusion. ‘The door’s gone.’

  A glance behind confirmed Ori’s observation. ‘Excellent,’ she muttered. ‘More fun.’ Looking around for some clue as to the nature of this predicament, Eva saw only a round stone room, devoid of objects or furniture save for a flight of steps that spiralled around the wall up to the ceiling. Her ears, though, picked up the distant sound of footsteps approaching from somewhere above. The step was oddly arrhythmic, as if some beast with four legs was using only three.

  She saw why as a human figure came into view, stepping through an apparently solid wall onto the top step. He took three steps down then bent with remarkable fluidity to put his hands on the floor, executed a graceful forward tumble down three more, then restored himself to his feet and repeated the process. His attire was eccentric, to say the least; as he drew closer she could see that his garments were crudely made, as by someone with minimal skill at tailoring. He himself was as old as Limbane in appearance, his face mapped with wrinkles, but he didn’t appear to be enfeebled by his age.

  His hair was pure white, and when he finished descending the aerial stair to stand before them she realised he was not a human but a Lokant.

  He looked all five of them over with deliberate attention, one at a time. His expression was suspicious, potentially hostile, but he made no move to attack.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said at last. His manner was blunt and challenging, but there was no violence in his demeanour. His language, on the other hand, was odd indeed. Those three words were, she guessed, the same ones Limbane or Krays would have used in their own tongue, but this man’s intonation resembled nothing she’d ever heard before.

  ‘Explorers,’ Pensould said in answer to his question. ‘And who are you, my good sir?’

  ‘I am the Master of Orlind!’ he said. ‘This is my Library. What are you doing here, huh? Why are you here?’

  Chapter Thirty

&nbs
p; ‘Library?’ Eva gasped. ‘But this is... how can it be a Library?’ The unstable buliding much more closely resembled the fluid constructions of the Off-Worlds than the Libraries kept by Limbane and Krays. Nothing here suggested that it was, or had ever been, anything of that kind.

  The self-proclaimed Master of Orlind took a few rushing steps until he was far too close for her comfort. Pushing his face at her, he said, ‘What are you saying? Don’t like my Library?’

  Eva took a prudent step back. ‘It just doesn’t feel like a Lokant Library to me.’

  ‘And it won’t, will it? Won’t ever again, most like.’ His suspicion changed to sadness, then flashed through to resolution. ‘Best that it doesn’t,’ he nodded to himself. ‘Quite right. Too dangerous.’

  Tren had eased up alongside her while this speech was progressing. ‘Stay close,’ he murmured in her ear.

  Eva was quite prepared to do that. The Master of Orlind’s manner gave her a prickling sense of unease; he was as deeply broken as the rest of this place. Judging from the wide berth that Llandry, Ori and Pensould were giving him, it wasn’t just her instincts that were bristling with alarm.

  ‘Why would it be dangerous?’ she asked, keeping her tone calm and conversational. He was already paranoid, and his attention kept returning to her with her white Lokant hair. She had no wish to figure any more urgently as a danger.

  ‘Asking stupid questions,’ he said in disgust and went rambling off in a circle, oblivious to the way his visitors backed off at his approach. He paced around a few times, tipping forward onto his hands and rolling through on every fourth step. Eva watched, mesmerised by the sheer oddity of this behaviour. He talked incessantly in a stream of muttered words that she couldn’t catch. Who could he be talking to?

  Eventually he came up to her again. ‘You’d better be off,’ he said with a weird smile. ‘Shan’t be letting any Lokant push me out, not me.’

  ‘I’ve no desire to push you out,’ Eva said coolly. ‘I simply want to know what this place is.’

  ‘I have told you, haven’t I? Besides, you ought to know that. It hasn’t been that long.’ He emphasised his words with vigour, almost spitting them at her. ‘Used to be the reigning monarch of the Libraries, that’s the case.’

  ‘You mean you were the reigning monarch?’

  He snorted. ‘Not me. Her!’

  ‘Her? Who is she?’

  ‘You’re standing in her,’ he said, beaming, and he realised that he was referring to the building. ‘Used to be the very best, oh yes.’ Pride and smugness shone in his face, then changed abruptly to brooding resentment. ‘Until they tore her up. No respect, that’s the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Eva said with civility. ‘Who are the people responsible for breaking this wonderful Library?’

  ‘Wonderful. It was, that,’ he mumbled. Then his head jerked up suddenly and he fixed her with a wide-eyed stare. He remained that way for several long seconds, as though he was listening to something that she couldn’t hear.

  ‘No, no, they aren’t here for that,’ he said, shaking his head. Then, ‘What? No! No, no, you’re wrong.’ He was shaking his head in violent denial, growing more and more upset. ‘Don’t say that, she can’t take any more...’

  Eva guessed that the ‘she’ in question was the building. ‘I promise you, we are not here to damage the Library in any way,’ she persevered. ‘We are as anxious to depart as even you could wish. Just please answer a few questions-’

  ‘Your shoes!’ he thundered, staring at her in horror. ‘Give me your shoes! All of you! Shoes!’

  Eva blinked. ‘I... what? Why our shoes?’

  ‘It’s in the shoes!’ he shrieked, working himself into a frenzy. ‘Get them off!’

  ‘Better humour him,’ Tren murmured. ‘I don’t see as he’ll calm down otherwise.’

  Eva nodded agreement and bent to unfasten her boots, moving slowly so as not to frighten him further. Stepping out of them both, she backed away, leaving the shoes surrounded by empty space. The Master of Orlind pounced on them and began a frenzied exploration, searching hard for something she couldn’t guess at. Hurling hers aside, he repeated this operation on all four pairs that had been surrendered to him.

  ‘Bah!’ he spat at last. ‘Not the shoes, very well, not shoes. Here, have them.’ He began throwing them haphazardly back at their owners, pacing and muttering as he did so.

  ‘Listen,’ Eva said in desperation. ‘Perhaps we could introduce ourselves. What is your name, besides the Master?’

  He looked sideways at her, eyes narrowed, his whole expression one of calculating speculation. Then he was suddenly all affability. He charged forward and grabbed her hand, shaking it with painful enthusiasm. ‘Galywis,’ he barked. ‘And you are?’

  Eva introduced everyone, using only their first names to avoid confusion. As before, he focused almost entirely on her, ignoring everyone else. ‘Eva!’ he beamed. ‘Good of you to come. Not many people visit an old man like me, out here by myself. Not many at all, no. Haven’t much to offer you, sorry. The old girl’s ailing.’

  ‘You mean the Library?’

  ‘Why, I do mean the Library!’ he cried in exaggerated delight. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I... just a guess,’ she said, taken aback. ‘Why is she ailing?’

  ‘Oh, broken, broken. Long time ago now.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘It was the fighting that did it,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Wanted everything, didn’t they? And they got nothing at all! Ha!’ He laughed, an unpleasant sound. ‘But the old girl suffered the most, didn’t she? Always the way.’

  He talked as though the Library was a living entity, capable of independent thought. As wondrous as the Libraries were, Eva was fairly certain that this was beyond them. How long had Galywis been out here?

  ‘Do you have company?’ Eva asked him. ‘Anyone else here?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Just me.’

  Good gracious, she thought faintly. Orlind had been lost for a long, long time. If he had been here all along, alone and ceaselessly assailed by the mind-bending peculiarities of the place, no wonder he was completely mad. He may have been like Limbane, once, but his sanity must have gone long ago. How long could the five of them remain here before their wits began to unravel?

  ‘Galywis,’ she said with a smile. ‘Do you know the names of these people? The fighters who wanted the Library?’

  He nodded vigorously. A premonition of the answer made her wait, holding her breath, for his next comment.

  ‘Those boys ought to have known better,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘Hey, you aren’t with them are you? You aren’t, are you?’

  The suspicion was back. Eva backed away a step under the glare he threw at her, her nervousness growing. ‘I’m not here for anyone, but you’ll have to tell me who you mean if you want me to be sure.’

  ‘Both wanted to be Lokantor,’ he growled. ‘But that was me, see? And I knew better than they did, much better. Took better care of the old girl.’

  Eva opened her mouth to ask him again, but she was distracted by a sudden ripple in the air. The hallway in which they were standing warped and changed in a flash, becoming an enormous greenhouse teeming with plants. She smelled the mingled aromas of many fruits and blossoms, heard the dull buzzing of insects in the air.

  The change seemed to please Galywis, for he settled down again at once. This was promising, only he then wandered off into the thick of the plants, apparently forgetting about his visitors.

  ‘Galywis?’ she called, adding a curse under her breath when he disappeared altogether. ‘The man is completely maddening!’

  ‘Come and see my trees!’ he shouted.

  Rolling her eyes, Eva plunged into the undergrowth after him, following the sounds of rustling leaves. The greenhouse was crowded with plants, so thickly that she had real trouble finding her way through the clustered pots and crates. At length she burst free of the greenery int
o a little clearing ringed with fruit trees. Galywis had gathered an overflowing armful of fruits, which he now offered to her with touching eagerness.

  ‘The old girl’s come up with something after all! Must like you, eh? Try!’

  Eva eyed these offerings doubtfully, but they looked sound. She took a fat purple fruit with powdery skin, sniffing it dubiously as Galywis turned to each of her friends in turn and thrust various others at them. A tentative nibble revealed soft, sweet-tasting flesh, and she ate the rest gladly.

  ‘That was good of you, Galywis,’ she smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  He beamed, but the smile vanished almost immediately. ‘Talking, weren’t we? What was it you said?’

  ‘I...’ Eva stopped, astonished, as Galywis took a seat on his back, with his shoeless feet stretched up against the trunk of a small tree. He continued to look at her expectantly, his being now upside down no apparent impediment to their carrying on a conversation.

  Well, it shouldn’t be. Only, looking at him in his inverted posture was playing havoc with her carefully-balanced notions of direction. That traitorous part of her mind still insisted that she was the wrong way up, and now her physical vision seemed to be agreeing with it. She grabbed hold of Tren to steady herself, fighting the temptation to close her eyes.

  ‘Um, I had asked about the people who broke the old girl,’ she said. ‘Maybe I know them.’

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he said to them all, stretching out his arms to gesture, most hospitably, at the damp floor. ‘Those boys, yes. But can I remember?’ He thought for a while, screwing up his eyes. ‘Yes! I do remember! Erritas and Meevel, those were the names.’

  Eva felt both disappointed and bewildered. Who were these people?

  ‘One question,’ Tren interjected. ‘Is Galywis your first name or your family name?’

  He thought about that for a while. ‘Father was called Galywis. Brother. Cousins. Must be a family name! Come to think of it, I can’t remember if I had a first name. Suppose I must have.’