Orlind
Page 34
Then Ori stopped. ‘Something’s weird,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t Krays be trying to channel the energy out? Isn’t that what we agreed would make sense? But it isn’t going out. It isn’t going anywhere. He’s stirring it up nicely but it’s maintaining the old pattern, round and round the island.’
Eva fought to make sense of that. The problem was, it didn’t make sense. She doubted she could account for it even if her tired brain wasn’t already fighting a constant battle against the effects the corrupted amasku had on her.
Unless... a glimmer of an idea occurred to her.
‘It was Galywis who set that up, wasn’t it? The enclosed circuit, I mean. Do you suppose...?’
‘Ha!’ Tren laughed. ‘Wily old man. If he’s managed to connect Krays’s machine up to his own I may just have to hug him when I see him again. Imagine that.’
Eva could imagine it very well. If her theory was correct, Galywis had turned Krays’s machines against him. The devices were causing plentiful disturbance, but they were working with Galywis’s devices to direct the amaskan energy in the same whirling circle as before. The disturbance was severe, but it was - she hoped - still confined to Orlind.
And Krays might not even know it. ‘Do you suppose he can sense it?’ she whispered.
‘Probably not,’ Ori volunteered. ‘If he’s made himself part draykon, that puts him on a par with you and Tren. That doesn’t make him a full-blood draykon.’
And Eva wouldn’t have known about this development without Ori. She could feel the increased volatility of the realm, and the whirling amaskan energy affected her, but more than that she could not see or sense.
‘Let’s hope we’re right,’ she said. ‘Onward now. He’s getting ahead of us.’
Krays, it emerged, was making his slow way towards the Orlind Library. Had he anticipated how much more deeply the corrupted amasku would affect him, once he had implanted himself with draykon matter? Perhaps not. It was reassuring to know that the handicap they fought against also affected their enemy.
Eva kept an eye out for Galywis as they followed after Krays, gaining on him by slow degrees. But she saw no sign of the Master Librarian.
Soon they were barely ten paces behind Krays, all conversation at a halt as they strove to reach him. Their predicament struck Eva as faintly absurd: four people conducting an urgent chase across the island of Orlind, barely managing more than a slow walking pace between them... she might have laughed had it not been so serious.
They’d closed the distance to only five paces when Krays finally realised he was being pursued. ‘Who’s that?’ he called, calmly and without a trace of doubt or fear. He sounded like a man whose project was going precisely according to plan. Eva hoped he was deceived on that count.
He did not wait for a reply. Turning away, he achieved a stumbling run as he raced for the Library, Rikbeek in close pursuit. Krays’s machines were having a grave impact on the confused building and it now cycled through its changes with alarming speed, flashing from shape to shape approximately once every thirty seconds. Eva, Tren and Ori picked up their own pace and hastened after him as fast as they could manage; but still he made it up to the top of the precarious stairs before they had ascended more than the first few steps.
This proved to be a blessing as Krays paused at the base of the building and turned. Under the influence of his new, stolen draykon abilities, the staircase disappeared. Eva and her companions fell back to the ground, a distance that - mercifully - was only a few feet.
‘Ouch,’ Eva grumbled anyway. Krays was beginning to annoy her. Far above, the Lokantor wrought a small door in the face of the Library and went through it. The door vanished behind him.
‘Does he imagine that will stop us?’ Tren said, picking himself up.
‘A sensible precaution,’ Eva sighed. ‘He still doesn’t know who, or what we are.’ Ori forged a new set of stairs and they hurried up them and through a new door that Tren made, trying to ignore the way the castle hallway warped into a reading room as they did so.
Krays was nowhere in sight, but raised voices could be heard coming from beyond an open door in the far wall. They ran for it, bursting into another room lined with bookshelves to find Krays - and Galywis. Krays had the old man by the shoulders and was shaking him.
‘Why are you still here!’ Krays was shouting. ‘How are you still here! If you’ve interfered with my constructs...!’
Galywis, oddly, was howling with laughter. ‘B-beautiful devices!’ he managed around his mirth. ‘Never saw better!’ He laughed even harder, and Eva felt a knot of tension ease inside her. Galywis’s amusement suggested that she’d been right: he had indeed tampered with Krays’s constructs.
‘Drop the invis,’ she said to Tren, not bothering to lower her voice.
A moment later Tren and Ori appeared beside her. A glance down told her that she, too, was visible once again.
‘Congratulations,’ Tren said lightly to Krays. ‘You broke the world.’
Krays let go of Galywis, to Eva’s relief, and spun around.
‘You again?’ he snarled. ‘But you’re...’
‘Not a Lokant, no,’ Tren smiled. ‘Sorry.’
‘Then what the...?’ He looked at Eva and then at Ori, his expression halfway between incredulity and chagrin. ‘More of you out there hassling my planes, I suppose?’
Eva wasn’t sure whether “plane” referred to his flying machines or his energy collectors, but she didn’t let that show. ‘Trying to turn back time, Krays?’ she said mildly.
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t reply. Turning back to Galywis, he smiled. ‘I’ll unseat you yet, Lokantor.’
Then chaos erupted. The greenhouse had reasserted itself while they had talked, but now it disappeared and a square, metal-walled room took its place. Eva barely had time to realise that the walls were rushing inward at horrific speed before they hit, slamming into her, squeezing her body like a vice. Heart pounding with fright, she mustered her will and pushed back, until the crippling pressure eased. A glance told her that Galywis was compressed into a huddle with Eva and Ori and Tren, all battered and shaken. Krays had fashioned a ledge for himself someway above their heads, out of the way of the crushing walls.
‘Get rid of the walls,’ Ori yelled, and she focused again on the red-tinged metal that formed their prison. Those walls would soon succumb to their combined will.
Only, they encountered a problem. The Library may be fluid and changeable but it was solid in some indefinable way, and would not suffer itself to be outright dissolved. As hard as they pushed, the walls refused to disappear.
‘Moss!’ Ori said and Eva instantly changed her approach, envisioning the metal walls as composed of the soft, spongy red moss that covered parts of the Orstwych forests. The effect was muddled; the three of them had imagined different types of moss and so the walls came out a patchwork of colours and textures. But the goal was achieved: the soft, yielding surface had no power to crush them.
There was no time to celebrate this small victory, however, as the distant ceiling rumbled and rocks began to fall from above. Instantly Eva threw out a protective frame of solid metal to enclose the four of them. Her improvised armour shuddered but held, deflecting the missiles with alarming clanking sounds. The boys then worked together to redirect Krays’s rocks, sending them flying at their creator instead. With a muttered curse, Krays jumped down from his aerial platform and onto a stair that rose at his feet.
‘Up,’ Ori said tersely. A column of rock rose under him, elevating him to Krays’s level. Eva and Tren quickly followed suit, leaving a dazed Galywis under the protection of her metal shield.
‘Krays!’ she yelled. ‘What’s the purpose of all this? Leave be and go home!’
He snarled and a gun appeared in his hands. He aimed it at her, but before he could fire it turned into a large and very purple fish.
‘That one was for Avane,’ Ori panted, grinning as Krays cursed again and dropped his transformed gun.
‘And all you have to do is mend the damage that you yourself inflicted all those years ago!’ she threw back.
His brows came down, his eyes paling to ice-blue in his fury. ‘That cursed fool! If he hadn’t involved the draykoni the Library would have been mine.’
‘I suppose you mean Limbane, in which case I’ve something to thank him for after all,’ she retorted. ‘The fate of Orlind was sad, but I can only imagine you as Master Lokantor to be a worse prospect.’
Krays grinned, and the column on which Eva stood dissolved into cloud. With a startled cry, she fell...
... and landed on a mattress of feathers. Working quickly, she jumped to her feet and summoned some of that drifting cloud, fashioning it to solidity. Stepping on, she found it would hold her weight. Her little cloud levitated beautifully, bringing her back to eye-level with Krays.
He was busy fending off a volley of missiles hurled by Ori and Tren. Each one turned into water before it hit him, so he remained unharmed, but it took all his concentration to keep up.
‘Need to finish him,’ Tren panted. ‘Any ideas?’
She didn’t. They were holding their own but so was he; so far they had only succeeded in maintaining a tense stand-off which neither side was winning or losing. How could they gain an advantage over him?
The battle raged on and Eva watched Krays, hoping he would tire. He showed no signs of it. How strong was he? He was old, even ancient, but that didn’t seem to slow him down. And any hint of awkwardness about his movements had gone: he had recovered from the surgeries that made a semi-draykon of him, then, and emerged stronger than ever.
She, however, did not possess inexhaustible energy. Her concentration began to fray, her mental stamina close to exhaustion. Her body ached from being frozen and thawed and dropped and over-exerted. But she struggled on. Krays worked a tangling net in the skies and let it drop, seeking to bind the three of them in its folds. She turned it to dust and it disintegrated - but already he had another ready, then a rain of needles, and then a cloud of poisonous gas. He turned their precarious pedestals to water, and the ground below into sharp rocks. They countered him at every turn, but rarely did they gain an opportunity to strike back.
It was his mental agility that was the problem. Neither she nor Tren nor Ori were lacking in intelligence; quite the opposite. But they weren’t full Lokants either. A Lokant with draykon powers was a fearsome foe indeed.
She blinked, then, her attention distracted by the strange antics of the ceiling. Stone dissipated into mist and streamed away from the centre, leaving a large hole. A draykon-sized hole, positioned behind Krays where he couldn’t see it. Eva’s heart leapt with hope. Ori couldn’t simply cause the ceiling to vanish but he could rearrange it and she was willing to bet that he was behind this ploy. She averted her gaze from the coruscating mist, unwilling to alert Krays, and glanced instead at Ori. The grin that flashed over his face confirmed her hopes: Llandry or Pensould or both were nearby. All they had to do was keep Krays from realising it too, or from having time to react if he did.
‘You know,’ she said, flicking a drop of acid rain into his face, ‘if you and Limbane had joined forces you would have overthrown Galywis easily.’
Krays flinched as the acid hit him, burning a red mark on his face. ‘Join with that fool?’ he growled. ‘And how would we determine who was to rule?’
‘Maybe both of you could have ruled.’
Krays laughed his derision at that idea. He opened his mouth to say something else, but at that moment an enraged cloud-grey shape tore through the opening in the sky and hurled itself at him. Behind Llandry came Pensould, his blue-green scales luminous in the twilight as he followed her lead. Krays had time for nothing more than a startled exclamation as he fell under the combined weight of two draykoni.
Llan and Pensould didn’t waste any time: they knew how tricky he was. Two pairs of heavy jaws snapped down; eight sets of wicked talons set to work to rend and tear and shred; one ancient Lokant form was torn to pieces, his remains contemptuously dropped to litter the floor of Orlind’s beleaguered Library.
Nobody spoke for a full minute. Eva felt numb with shock; Krays’s demise was exactly what she’d sought but the suddenness and the ferocity of it appalled her. She stared, revolted, at the pieces of Krays that lay, still bleeding, around her.
She looked at Pensould, and swiftly wished she hadn’t. What in the Lowers was he... that couldn’t be an arm he was chewing.
Retching, she turned away. Tren was beside her in an instant, steadying her, smoothing her hair. She managed a weak smile for him. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Um, people...’ Ori, somewhere behind her, spoke with suppressed panic. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Eva turned, alarmed. ‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘Amasku’s out of control,’ he said. ‘Feel that?’
Focusing on the Library, Eva saw what he meant. The distressed building was quivering with energy only barely contained; the whirling cyclone of energy had taken its toll, and their strange war with Krays had damaged it further. The Library flashed through its Changes at the rate of one every few seconds and the atmosphere shook, an explosion building up somewhere behind it.
‘Everyone out!’ she screamed.
Ori, still enthroned atop his stony plinth, jumped into the air and changed in an instant to draykon form. He grabbed Tren, who was closest to him, and took off, disappearing through the hole he had wrought in the ceiling.
Llandry-as-draykon was coming for Eva, feet stretched out ready to close around her. Eva winced: this would hurt.
It did hurt. Llandry collided with her at speed, snatching her up and soaring away. This tilted perspective was too much for Eva’s strained mind; she lost her grip on herself altogether and her brain dissolved into helpless confusion.
‘Don’t forget Galywis!’ she managed to scream before sense deserted her altogether.
She came to herself an unknowable time later to find she was lying in a field of grass scattered with tiny flowers. The scent in her nostrils was fresh and pleasant and the air cool. Twilight still blanketed the diminished island that comprised the fallen realm of Orlind. Time seemed unmoved and immeasurable in the chaos of the Seventh Realm.
Only when she turned her head, somewhat painfully, to one side did she notice the empty space that had once held the Library.
‘She’s awake,’ Llandry said from somewhere nearby. Strong hands supported her as she sat up, then Tren sat down behind her, encouraging her to lean on him.
‘We’re still in Orlind,’ she said stupidly.
Llandry appeared in her field of vision, offering a tentative smile. ‘None of us were in good shape after all that,’ she said. ‘We didn’t think it was safe to fly back right away.’
‘Won’t delay much longer though,’ Tren said.
‘And the Lokants?’ Krays was gone, but he had had allies flying the machines, and potentially there had been others on the ground.
‘What Lokants?’ Pensould grinned savagely. ‘Llandry and I cleaned them up.’
Remembering the image of Krays’s severed arm sticking out of Pensould’s mouth, Eva decided not to ask how Pense had “cleaned them up.”
‘Why was I the only one to pass out,’ she muttered, flushed with embarrassment.
‘You weren’t,’ Llandry said, smiling. ‘I came to only a few minutes ago. Ori had a spell, too.’
‘Hey,’ Ori said from somewhere behind her. ‘I was hoping to save face.’
Eva chuckled. ‘So the Library is gone?’
‘Quite gone,’ Llandry said. ‘I can’t decide whether to be sad or not.’
Eva wasn’t sure she could, either. The passing of such a remarkable creation was undeniably sad; but if it was gone, it could no longer serve as a tempta
tion to the likes of Limbane and Krays. There would be no more Lokants damaging her world in their bid to restore, and reclaim, the Library of Orlind.
That thought reminded her about the former Master of the Library, and she turned where she sat, looking for him. ‘Did Galywis get out?’
‘Yep,’ Llandry said. ‘Pensould got him.’
‘We’ll have to take him back with us,’ Eva said, frowning. ‘But I can’t think what to do with him after that. I wonder if he could recover his sanity, given time?’
Llan was shaking her head. ‘He doesn’t want to leave. Pensould’s making him a new house. Galy says he’ll stay and care for the island for a while longer.’
For a while longer. Without the Library, of course, his ageing would resume as normal, and he would die. Possibly soon. That thought saddened her immeasurably. So much of his potential had been wasted in the futile guardianship of his beloved “old girl”; now he would spend his remaining life alone on this isolated rock, his mind gone.
But it was his choice. And somehow she felt sure that he knew exactly what he’d chosen, and welcomed it. He was, after all, a very strange man.
She spent an hour or two resting and talking over the recent events with Tren, Ori and Llandry. Weariness deadened them all, and their speech was desultory and reluctant. She longed for nothing so much as her bed, at home in her own house in Glour. With hot bricks under the blankets, and Rikbeek hiding in the curtains.
And Tren. She would add him to the familiar picture, too.
When Pensould was finished, they were all summoned to admire his work. And it was impressive. He had conjured a comfortable little cottage, with neat furniture and a vegetable patch and orchard at the back. Galywis tried to be pleased with it, but palpably failed. She understood that well enough. Nothing could replace his old girl.
The cottage would suffice, though, for as long as he needed it. She bade him farewell with real gratitude, for without his help they might never have succeeded.