Evastany Read online

  Gio left.

  Now, then. We come to a convoluted part of this narrative, and as you may very well imagine, I could not be everywhere at once. I cannot relate every step of this story myself, so I beg your leave to turn this journal over to the direction of others, as appropriate.

  Beginning with the matter of Nyden. We left him carting Rastivan off for an unpleasant chat, full of bloodthirsty plans and positively quivering with rage. Since the outcome of that little meeting proved more significant than I had imagined at the time, I have invited Nyden to recount it.

  Nyden: On the Little Matter of Rastivan, the Traitor

  I don’t do hatred.

  I really don’t. Not ever. What would be the point? Life is long, people are foolish, the world continues regardless. Why waste energy on fury, futile resentment, hate? It is tiring. I dislike being tired.

  Besides, who is there to hate? Little Llandry, sweet tentative girl that she is, hiding her fierce draykon heart behind her layers of doubt and fright and too great a desire to please? Pense and Larion and Meriall and all the others, very good fellows all? Or mighty Eva, with her wit and her excellent table, always replete with succulent delights?

  Why would I hate Avane, whose scent alone is sufficient to drive me into paroxysms of delight? Why would I despise the delicious little chicks from Ayrien she has taken under her ample wings?

  I cannot even be bothered to hate Eterna, leader of my old colony, who cannot help but start wars wherever she goes. Why her followers continue to accept her leadership is beyond me, but what can I say? Blind fury sells. Conflict sells. War is sexy. So turns the world.

  When I tell you, then, that I hate, hate, despise traitors, I hope you will understand my full meaning. Eterna may err, over and over again, but at least she acts in the fashion she believes is best. But a traitor? Is there not something particularly wicked, especially unforgiveable, about the man who betrays his own friends, his own kind, for naught but personal gain? For that is what it’s always about. If I do this, hand over this person or that friend, something good will be awarded to me. Something I want. And what could possibly be more important than my receiving everything I could possibly want in life?

  So when I found myself left in sole possession of one Rastivan, he who cheerfully sold his own kind into Lokant slavery and felt no remorse, I was elated. And enraged. I wanted to kill him. Tear open his lying throat and drink his traitorous blood; watch the undeserved light die out of his filthy, too-pretty eyes; tear him limb-from-limb and scatter his parts to the far corners of the world.

  Eva knew this, but she let me take him anyway. She did not send anybody along to intervene. She did not even say, Now Nyden, nothing too permanent, hm? She merely patted me on the head (figuratively speaking), wished me good hunting (again figuratively), and departed.

  Leaving me with a whole day — two entire, delicious days! — to spend encouraging Rastivan to see the error of his ways.

  Tricky, tricky, because much as I would like to tear open his chest and devour his heart, I could not help feeling a mild curiosity as to why he behaved as he did. What did he stand to gain from selling out his own kind?

  I regretted the delay, but this question had to be answered. What if there were more Rastivans out there? Probably there were. Rastivan would tell me aaallll about them.

  I took him down into the cellar of Eva’s abandoned headquarters. The water had mostly subsided by then, but the place was still dank, partially flooded, dark and freezing cold.

  How perfect.

  I slung Rastivan in a careless heap in the middle of the floor, making sure that his head landed in one of the deeper puddles of cold water. Then I locked the only exit behind me, and waited for him to wake up.

  When he did, he found me crouched over him, a vast, looming shadow in the darkness. My hide is night-black, unblemished by anything so vulgar as colour, and I am excellent at creating a certain impression.

  I bared my teeth in his pseudo-human face, and he screamed.

  That last part might have been because I had my claws buried deep in his shoulders. ‘First,’ I told him in a low, purring voice (I had plenty of time to practice while he lay unconscious and allow me to assure you: no more menacing words were ever spoken). ‘First,’ I said, ‘I must make sure you don’t run away.’

  When you are as big as me and your victim is wearing a flimsy human shape, it is not difficult to tear off a man’s leg with your bare claws. He screamed and screamed and I smiled and smiled and some part of me hated myself, but I could not stop. I didn’t want to.

  ‘You have three limbs left,’ I pointed out, when he had finally stopped screaming. ‘Four, if you are so obliging as to return to your proper shape and allow me to get at your tail. Do not doubt that I shall take all the rest, if you do not satisfy me.’

  He looked properly, gratifyingly terrified, but he was also beginning to be angry. I saw the fight flicker to life in his eyes, and made the prudent choice to sit on his chest for a while. That knocked the air out of him altogether, and all he could concentrate on was the effort to breathe. I am rather large.

  ‘Tell me,’ I purred. ‘Why did you betray our people to the Lokants?’

  He tried to speak, but of course he had not breath enough. Reluctantly, I eased the pressure of my weight a little.

  ‘They,’ he panted, ‘created us.’

  ‘So it has been said,’ I agreed. ‘And good for them! But that does not answer my question.’

  ‘They made us,’ Rastivan repeated. ‘Without them, none of us would ever have lived at all. Not me, not you.’

  ‘Nor the people you gave into slavery, so that justifies it, does it?’ I stuck my claws into his other thigh, motivated more by anger than expedience. I am not proud of it, but I did promise Eva to be honest in this account. So I am telling you the unvarnished truth, as they say. Despise me if you will; what do I care?

  Rastivan gasped and writhed, but I held him fast. ‘They made us,’ he said again, shuddering with pain. ‘They could unmake us just as easily.’

  ‘Could they? How?’

  Rastivan had gone a bit too pale, and I realised that maybe removing his leg had not been the best idea. He was bleeding so much. Oops.

  ‘I do not know!’ Rastivan protested. ‘But they could. They said they could and I believe them because I… have you not heard? You are an Elder! You must know how they have died around us, picked off one by one, or in groups! They are unstoppable, she is unstoppable…’ He trailed off into a daze of pain.

  ‘That was not Dwinal,’ I told him. ‘She did not kill any of those Elders. It was a man called Galywis who did that. Galywis was the leader of the project that resulted in our existence, and he slew his own creations because he was mad.’

  But Rastivan shook his head. ‘No,’ he panted. ‘Or if he did, she gave him the idea. She told him how, she put him up to it.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘She said we are broken and cannot be mended. That we should have been terminated long ago, that something better might have been made.’

  It could be the truth. I could picture Dwinal going after Galywis like that. Galywis was old and confused and deeply mad. I could see her needling him about the faults in our species.

  Did you know that Elders are flawed somewhere inside, that we sometimes go mad? Just like that, without warning? Mad beyond hope, beyond recall? I didn’t, not until recently. I like to pretend that I still don’t know it. The prospect of my own mind’s suddenly flipping inside out at a moment’s notice does not add much sunshine to my day.

  Was Galywis the type to regret such a flaw? Probably. So says Llandry. She said he was tortured by the errors he made, the imperfection of his work, and the pain suffered by those like me, when that odd little something went wrong and madness was the result.

  But did he come up with all of that guilt himself? All of a sudden, so many centuries after the fact? He might have. But somebody else might well have put the ideas int
o his head, goaded him, blamed him, belittled his work and sent him into a deeper madness. The kind of madness where you think that throwing all your work away is the only sensible thing to do. He killed many of my kind. I was not impressed with him. If Rastivan was right and Dwinal had something to do with that, well… I was just a shade or two less impressed with her, too.

  But that said…

  ‘Why would that matter to her?’ I repeated. ‘If she wanted to make something “better”, she could do that without destroying us first.’

  Rastivan did not answer, because he had died.

  Oops.

  So I bound up his ruined leg and revived him. It is a tiring process. I do not like being tired.

  My mood, when he returned to life and consciousness, was a bit worse. ‘Why does Dwinal care?’ I repeated, my teeth an inch from his face. ‘Why do you? Why were you helping her?’

  ‘So she wouldn’t kill me, too,’ he whispered, grey in the face.

  Something was off. I looked at him, still all human-shaped in an inert heap beneath me, all the fight gone out of him. And I wondered. A draykon, threatened by another draykon and in grave danger, does not sit meekly in human shape, taking whatever punishment is meted out and making no effort at self-defence.

  ‘Why did you not Change?’ I demanded.

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘You… you what?’

  ‘I cannot!’ he spat. ‘She took that. Trapped me like this… someday she will… release me.’

  I was too filled with horror to speak. ‘How?’ I roared at him. ‘How?!’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he whispered.

  ‘So you handed sixteen more into her revolting keep?’ I was roaring in earnest now, too angry to think clearly. ‘How could you?!’

  ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘You should have come to us for help!’

  ‘What can you do?’ he smiled faintly, though it was more a grimace of pain. ‘She will kill you, too, before long.’

  He was about to die again and I had no problem letting him. But before he expired for the second time he said in a hoarse whisper: ‘There is something else you should know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She sent me to find your friends.’

  I froze. ‘What? When?’

  ‘Today. It was no accident that they found me. I found them.’ He grimaced. ‘I was to ingratiate myself with them, spy on them… if I had known what— what would happen—’

  He did not finish the sentence, for life fled and left him an empty husk. I played with that husk for a while, roaring a bit more and getting the cellar very bloody indeed. But at last I managed to recall myself to sanity, and sat a time in thought.

  This did not bode well, not well at all. Dwinal had wanted us to encounter Rastivan. Which means she wanted us to know about him. She wanted us to know about the others she had taken. She must have known we would take him to pieces and patently did not care, so she was finished with him. Did that mean she was also finished with the sixteen others?

  Why had she wanted us to know about any of this? Why had she gone to such lengths to make sure that we did?

  Eva needed to know about this, and immediately. I surged out of the cellar, filled with an angry energy, bursting to set forth and make things right at once.

  It was only once I reached the hallway that I realised I had no way to return to Sulayn Phay, no way to reach Eva or any of the others, and no way to communicate with them either.

  Ori: The Sixteen

  Let me tell you about the draykoni captives. (Eva did float the notion of my sharing the narrative with Gio but he developed an acute case of stage fright on the spot, and declined with the fervour of a man refusing an invitation to, say, jump off a cliff or be eaten alive by a pack of worvilloes. So it will be just me).

  So Eva vanished, carting Nyden and his prey (otherwise known as Rastivan) off to Somewhere Else so he could dine in peace. Gio went with them. I asked him later why he did that, for Eva did not require the assistance. He said he was worried about leaving her alone with a ruthless traitor like Rastivan and a madman like Ny. I mean, Ny is a good man but he did seem rather out of his mind just then, so I couldn’t altogether argue with the logic of that. See why I love Gio? He has such a kind heart.

  Once they had gone, that left me with Tren, Adonia and Avane at hand but with no obvious course of action to take. We had not been sitting long with Rastivan, when Eva found us. Conversation had been halting and tentative, because we were afraid of scaring him away. Looking back, though, I am not sure why we were. We should have let Nyden go to work on him there and then.

  Anyway, Rastivan had not told us where the draykoni captives were being kept. Perhaps he would have, if we’d had more time, but we were not too worried. Either Nyden or Eva would get that information out of him soon enough.

  As it happened, we did not have to wait for that occurrence. Five minutes later, when we were in the midst of a friendly argument as to what to do next (wait for Eva and Gio right there, or take ourselves off in favour of some more productive pursuit?), there came a knock at the door.

  I opened it to find a young-looking Lokant woman on the other side. She looked nervous.

  ‘May I come in?’ she whispered, and glanced about as if unwilling to be seen standing just there.

  ‘Why, of course,’ I said with as much gallantry as I could muster, and opened the door wider. Perhaps it was foolish, for I had never seen her before. But she was patently afraid and I could not leave her standing there.

  She scuttled inside like a wole whisking out of the rain, and stood staring at my companions with obvious trepidation. ‘I am sorry to interrupt,’ she whispered, and I marvelled at this miraculous thing, a tentative, polite Lokant with exquisite manners. ‘I heard that you were looking for… information.’

  Now, this was more than possible. We had spent many days up there, quietly but persistently poking our noses into everything, peeking around all the doors (as far as we could), asking questions, and generally making nuisances of ourselves in the most unassuming way we could manage. It was a fine balance to strike: making enough noise to attract the notice of helpful souls like this lady, but without drawing too much attention from people such as, say, Dwinal, who might like to take our faces off for it.

  Success! And finally! For I cannot say we had achieved much by it before. ‘What kind of information?’ said Tren, with one of those reassuring smiles I am a little envious of. I swear, the man could put anyone at their ease in seconds flat, no question.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ added Avane in her soft way. ‘You are doing the right thing, and all will be well.’

  Tren’s smile and Avane’s reassurance worked on the girl, for she smiled back and said: ‘About… about the draykoni?’

  That electrified everybody at once. I practically had to hold Adonia down; her enthusiasm was such that she looked ready to pummel the information out of the poor girl. ‘Where are they?’ she all but bellowed.

  The girl, whose name turned out to be Unaris by the way, shrank back from Adonia and took cover nearer to Tren. ‘I am one of those charged with caring for them,’ she admitted, her chin drooping in shame. ‘I am… I am a Maeval, you see. Dwinal is my several-times-great aunt. It is hard to deny her anything, but those poor creatures… will you save them? I can show you where they are kept.’

  Now, if Eva was present this display of sweet, tender consideration and down-trodden mistreatment would have had her hackles up in an instant. She would have narrowed her eyes, looked Unaris Maeval over like she was three months out of fashion, and up would have gone those eyebrows.

  Truthfully I experienced a few of those feelings myself, for how pretty and perfect a picture did she make! And how conveniently timed! For all our attempts at finding just such an informant, we had consistently failed — until that day, when both Rastivan and Unaris had suddenly fallen into our nets.

  I had my suspicions. But what to do? Dismiss her? She might be telli
ng the pure truth. Even if it was some kind of trick or trap, she might still have real information for us, and that we desperately needed.

  ‘Show us,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll help them,’ added Tren, with another of those smiles, and I swear I saw her fall in love with him on the spot.

  ‘Come with me,’ she whispered.

  We ended up a long way from Eva’s suite. I cannot rightly say where, for after a certain number of identical, winding corridors I tend to lose track. Unaris led us to a door so plain, one would naturally assume it led only into somebody’s frightfully dull office or something.

  But then she opened it, and of course there was a large hall on the other side, and dull it really was not.

  ‘Oh,’ breathed Avane, and went inside at once. I tried, belatedly, to grab her, to point out that checking for dangers, threats, traps et cetera might be a wise start, but she was gone. Honestly. I adore Avane for that beautiful tender heart of hers, but sometimes she can be such a twit.

  Thankfully, nothing sprang out to eat her alive. She crossed the wide hall apparently unscathed as the rest of us poured in behind her, and went at once to the prone figure of a bound, captive draykon resting in a lifeless heap on the far side. Almost lifeless. I could feel the amasku whirling around that place, bleeding out of the two prone draykoni in a ceaseless trickle, every wisp of it caught up and drained off. Another lay on the other side of the chamber, slumped against the plain white wall, as helpless and inert as the first.

  I paused to look around. I know I said this was about the sixteen draykoni but in that room there were only two. At the time, we did not know there were supposed to be more. Rastivan’s information had not yet reached us.

  What was to be done? We had no Nyden, because he was busy tearing strips off Rastivan. We had no transport, because Eva and Gio had gone with Ny. What we had was two hereditary draykoni, one sorcerer and a secretary.

  Nowhere near sufficient for the demands of the situation.

  ‘Tricky,’ I muttered, eyeing the nearest captive in despair. It’s a fiendish little binding they put on those poor souls, horribly hard to unravel without causing intolerable pain and possibly lasting harm to the drayk.