Evastany Read online

  Of course, we also had a crowd of students… poorly trained ones as yet, but not necessarily useless for all that. And…

  …and Ylona. Why didn’t I think of her before? If she wanted us to help her, let her help us, too.

  ‘I’ll be back!’ I cried, and did not wait for anybody to object. I was out the door in moments and barrelling down the corridor. In my enthusiasm and urgency I forgot to pay attention to where I was going, or to make note of how to get back to the hallway again. Eva would say I am terribly absent-minded about such things, and she would not be wrong.

  Fortunately Unaris came after me. ‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Where are you going?’

  I slowed and waited for her to catch up. ‘I need to talk to Ylona. We will need help extricating those two draykoni, and there is no one else to ask just now.’ It then occurred to me that I had no idea where to look for Ylona, either, and I sighed. I really am absent-minded. ‘Er, you don’t happen to know where to find her, do you?’

  Largely, Unaris did, and when she didn’t, she papered over the gap by the simple expedient of asking directions. Asking directions! I get so used to sneaking around that I forget about the more direct approach.

  We ended up outside of a featureless grey door that looked exactly the same as all the rest. Seriously, they do not go in for creative decorating out there. I knocked.

  ‘Thank you,’ I told Unaris. ‘You don’t need to stay, if you would rather be elsewhere.’

  She gave me a single nod and hastened away, for which I did not at all blame her. It wouldn’t do for a Maeval to be seen actually going into Ylona’s rooms; she had risked enough by openly asking where to find her.

  The door opened, and there she was.

  ‘Hello, Heli,’ I said.

  She grinned. ‘Mr. Vance! To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Dire emergency.’

  ‘Oh. In that case, why don’t you come in and tell me all about it?’

  It took me only half an hour or so — it might have been a little more — to wear down her reticence, paranoia, suspicion and reserve until she was prepared to offer us assistance. Another half-hour after that, or thereabouts, to bumble my way back to the room which housed the draykoni, Ylona striding along in my wake. She had camouflaged her face, I think, for nobody paid her any attention.

  She was intrigued by the matter of the captives, and I think it was this that encouraged her to help us, more than any sense of responsibility. Either way, she was efficient. She took one long look at each of the two bound draykoni, and snapped into action at once.

  ‘It’s a circuit,’ she told us, darting about the room. Those energy collectors were stationed all around; she went from one to the next to the next, tinkering with them, adjusting things, frowning in concentration and rambling as she worked. ‘They both drain and power each other — mutually dependent — quite clever really, and hard to disrupt, for they adjust for interference and cover for each other… ah, there we go.’ A harsh pulse of energy pounded through the room, the walls shook, half the energy collectors went dull and silent all at once, and one of the draykoni — a copper-coloured male — slumped to the floor.

  ‘And there!’ she said next, and it happened again. When she was finished, all the devices were dead-looking and quiet, and both the draykoni were free.

  ‘Good,’ I muttered, pleased but stymied. Their bindings might be dissolved, but how were we going to get them out of there? They were both unconscious and both enormous. Dead weight. They patently couldn’t walk far.

  Happily, Gio chose that moment to appear.

  ‘How did you find us?’ I asked, after I’d had a moment to finish feeling delighted to see him and remember the practicalities of the situation.

  ‘Hyarn.’

  ‘Wha... Dwinal’s Hyarn?’

  ‘He isn’t Dwinal’s anything, apparently.’

  Well, that explained the convenience of Unaris’s appearance. ‘We need to get these back to the Seven,’ I said tersely to Gio. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

  Gio looked at the copper creature, a gigantic beast, and then at the slightly (but only slightly) smaller sea-green female. ‘Impossible. I can’t carry those so far.’

  ‘Nindrinat—’

  ‘I had Eva’s help and it still almost broke us.’ He looked around. ‘Ylona?’ he called.

  Ylona immediately developed the chagrined look of a woman realising she ought to have beat a hasty retreat at least two minutes ago. ‘Under no circumstances!’ she proclaimed. ‘Those creatures are enormous!’

  ‘Then we need more help.’ Gio was unflappable, inflexible and rather imposing, and I felt inordinately proud of him.

  Ylona sighed deeply, muttered something unflattering about Gio’s parentage (not altogether unfair, considering his ancestry), and capitulated. ‘Moment,’ she said, and disappeared.

  She returned soon afterwards with two other Lokants, neither of whom I recognised. They were a bundle of efficiency between them, for the four had the copper drayk out of there within five minutes. The green-scaled female soon followed, and Ylona and team reappeared, panting for breath and weary but sound enough.

  But Gio was still absent. ‘Where—’ I began.

  ‘Coming,’ Ylona answered shortly. ‘He ran into a friend.’

  That mystified me, but not for long. Gio reappeared a couple of minutes later, with Nyden. Drayk-shaped Nyden, dragging along with him a few objects which looked worryingly like bleeding body-parts. ‘Found Nyden,’ said Gio unnecessarily.

  ‘Where…?’

  ‘HQ. We left the other two there for now. Made them as comfortable as possible. Best we can do for the present.’

  ‘Mm.’ I could not take my eyes off Nyden, who had an arm hanging out of his mouth and a couple of chunks of leg tucked under one great foreleg. ‘Those aren’t…?’

  ‘Rastivan, I imagine,’ said Gio, sparing a brief, expressionless glance at Nyden’s horrific trophies.

  ‘Oh.’ I swallowed. If I admit to experiencing a surge of nausea, shall you think less of me? I do not deal especially well with the bloodier aspects of our adventures. And while I am more than aware of the capability for violence that I possess in my more ferocious aspect, I have indulged in it only at dire need. Nyden’s way of revelling in it positively turned my stomach.

  ‘Did he… did he quite deserve that?’ I enquired of Nyden.

  Ny cast me a withering look, his jaws tightening on the severed arm. Yes, he said in my mind.

  Right, then.

  ‘Eva wants a report,’ Gio said, happily diverting my attention from the macabre spectacle Nyden made.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Plaguing Hyarn. She’s hoping he can find out where the island’s got to.’

  My befuddlement must have shown on my face, for Gio blinked, thought, and said: ‘Oh, yes. I suppose you haven’t heard about that yet.’

  ‘The island?’ I repeated. ‘You don’t mean Orlind…?’

  ‘Vanished,’ he confirmed. ‘Whisked away into the night. Has to be Grandmother, of course. Eva thinks she is trying to build a new Library on it.’

  It took me a couple of minutes to wring a more coherent version of events out of Gio. I was joined by Tren, who was as appalled by the news as I, but who took it rather better in stride. ‘Tricky folk,’ he murmured when Gio had finished. ‘I think we ought to have seen that one coming, though.’

  He was right: we should have anticipated something of that kind. Of course Dwinal wanted to build a new Library. Of course that’s what she had meant all along, with her talk of a “new establishment.” And if she was going to start a new Library, why wouldn’t she aim for the very top?

  Pinching the actual, physical island upon which the old best-ever-Library had been built was unexpected, and I don’t think any of us imagined that might be possible. But no matter. All we had to do was find it and go steal it back. Simple, right?

  ‘I had better go with you,’ I said to Gio.

 
‘Me, too,’ said Tren.

  Nyden spat out the arm. ‘That one is for here,’ he muttered.

  Poor Avane stared at him, the look of utter horror on her face probably reflective of mine. ‘Nyden,’ she whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Scattering the traitor.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Scattering the traitor’s bones. Then he can never be revived.’

  Avane approached, and laid a gentle hand on Nyden’s flank. ‘Ny. I think you need to put all of those… things… down.’

  ‘I am putting them down. One piece at a time.’

  Avane swallowed, and backed away again.

  Nyden snarled, transferred one of the legs to his jaws, and chewed off a piece.

  Right, then.

  ‘Shall we go?’ I said to Gio.

  ‘Please,’ said Tren fervently.

  We went… but not alone. ‘I need to see Eva,’ Nyden announced. ‘I have important information.’

  Even cool, impassive Gio winced. ‘Is it really that impor—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you could leave the parts behind—’

  ‘No.’

  Gio got a grip, folded his arms, and said sternly: ‘At least shift your shape. I am not at all interested in dragging you around unless you’re more portable.’

  Nyden’s black eyes narrowed, but he heaved a sigh and Changed human. He was still rolling his eyes when his form solidified. ‘Fine,’ he said, and walked towards us.

  To my dismay, he retained his grip on the bits of Rastivan’s legs.

  Gio rolled his eyes, too, but he made no further attempts to reason with Nyden. ‘We’re going,’ he announced.

  And away we went.

  Eva: The Island

  I had an hour or two of blissful peace, during which I consulted quite productively with Hyarn as to plausible locations for the stolen Island of Orlind.

  We were on the verge of drawing one or two useful conclusions when all that lovely peace was shattered by the arrival of some of my dearest loves.

  Tren I greeted with unalloyed delight. Everything is better when he is around, literally every single thing in life. He greeted me with a joy to equal my own, and that was lovely, and how wonderful and beautiful and there was Ori, too, with Gio, all of them positively bursting with news (good news, I hoped).

  And there was… Nyden. Dishevelled, clothes torn, hair askew, and incomprehensibly clutching a pair of bleeding stumps under one arm. His pockets bulged with further, deeply unpromising burdens.

  I surveyed all this with sky-high brows, and looked helplessly at Gio. ‘Why?’ was all I could find to say.

  Gio glanced at Nyden, and gave a vaguely apologetic shrug. ‘He insisted.’

  ‘Eva!’ said Nyden importantly. ‘It’s a trap!’

  ‘Another one?’ said I, as placidly as I could manage. ‘Do elaborate.’

  ‘Isn’t everything a trap?’ muttered Tren, and I could not disagree with him.

  ‘Rastivan. He found us deliberately. Dwinal told him to.’

  This was not the good news I’d been hoping for. ‘Tell me everything,’ I ordered.

  He did, and the emerging picture was every bit as unpromising as I was hoping it wouldn’t be. ‘Any idea why…?’ I tried, without much hope. ‘Why would she want us to know about the captives? Why hand over Rastivan? How did she manage to retract his ability to Change?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Nyden, and I sighed.

  ‘Rastivan said nothing else useful, I take it?’

  Nyden looked shifty. ‘No.’

  ‘Can we talk to him again?’

  Nyden would not meet my gaze. ‘Erm…’

  I looked again at the sundry severed parts in his collection, and felt a headache coming on. ‘I see.’

  Making no reply, Nyden devoted himself to tucking a thigh bone out of sight beneath one of the tables.

  Tren sighed. ‘He is scattering the pieces,’ he told me in a low voice. ‘You know, so nobody can revive the man again someday.’

  ‘Of all things, the most helpful,’ I observed.

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  I raised my voice. ‘Nyden. We are going to need those parts back.’

  That won me a fine show of outrage. ‘He is a traitor,’ Nyden snarled.

  ‘I realise.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Tough. We need him.’

  Ny became sulky. ‘You don’t need him. He told me everything he knows.’

  ‘Even if that proves to be true, you have gone too far. Too far, Nyden! This is cruelty beyond justification.’ I felt a stab of guilt that I had left Ny alone with Rastivan, knowing that he would inflict a harsh fate upon the betrayer. There was harsh, and then there was harsh.

  ‘I don’t know where they all are,’ Nyden muttered.

  ‘Better get to work on finding them, then.’

  Hyarn gave a slight cough and backed away. Was he trying not to vomit? I couldn’t blame him.

  ‘What other news is there?’ I said, looking to the others. ‘Some good news, please. Please?’

  ‘The best!’ said Ori enthusiastically. ‘We found the captives.’

  ‘I know. Did you get them out?’

  ‘Yes!’

  I brightened up at once. ‘All of them? Good. That’s such a relief.’ I could cross that off my mental list of things very, badly, deeply urgently to be done.

  ‘They are both at headquarters,’ Gio said. ‘Untended for the present, but they’re stable.’

  ‘Both?’ I echoed, suffering one of those unpleasant sinking feelings you get when the day unravels around you. ‘What do you mean, both?’

  ‘Both of them,’ Ori said with a tiny frown. ‘A male and a female, neither familiar, taken from—’

  ‘Two?’ I interrupted. ‘Only two? What about the other fourteen?’

  My two fine, young gentlemen blinked at me like I was crazy.

  ‘Fourteen?’ said Tren. ‘There are fourteen more?’

  ‘According to Rastivan.’ I raised a brow at Gio. ‘Did you not tell them?’

  ‘I didn’t think of it. I caught up with them late, we were busy getting the two out — I forgot they wouldn’t know.’

  I looked accusingly at Hyarn. ‘Was it not your duty to accommodate Dwinal’s “guests”? Where have you put the rest?’

  He looked pale and worried. ‘I… thought I was,’ he said in a helpless fashion I did not like at all. ‘I know nothing of any others.’

  The headache grew a little worse. I took a deep breath. ‘All right. Two down, fourteen to go. Any idea where the others might be?’

  They hadn’t, of course, and their source had vanished into the wind. Hyarn continued to deny all knowledge. But Dwinal had made certain we knew about all the others for some reason of her own. I began to feel that the two Ori and Gio had just rescued had been planted in our way, like bait. A little victory, to buoy us up, keep us focused. Keep us running after the other fourteen.

  But was Rastivan even to be trusted? Maybe he had fed us a lie, Dwinal’s lie. Were there sixteen? Were there any more at all, even? Perhaps there had only ever been three.

  No, I doubted that. Dwinal’s plans were on such a grand scale, a mere three enslaved draykoni could not possibly be enough. Rastivan was probably telling the truth, more or less, about the others. But why had Dwinal fed us that information? What did she expect us to do about it? Something that played into her plans, obviously, but what?

  We would spare no effort to find the rest and free them, of course. But how could that possibly benefit Dwinal? None of it made any sense and I was driving myself mad trying to figure it out.

  I took a few deep breaths. ‘Right,’ I decided. ‘It’s no good trying to second-guess Dwinal. We just have to proceed as best we can. Right now, finding the rest of the captives is of paramount importance, whatever the outcome. And finding out what’s happened to the missing island is no less vital. Hyarn?’

  He nodded, his face still averted from Nyden. ‘I�
��ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘I may know where the island is.’

  “Where the island is” turned out to be… directly next door. I am not joking.

  ‘Something odd happened earlier today,’ Hyarn explained. He then went on to describe what it was, but since it came attendant with a deal of Lokanty jargon we had no hope of understanding, I was not left with much comprehension of what he was talking about.

  The gist, though, proved to be as follows:

  — You may think it shouldn’t be that easy to just walk off with an entire island, but… well, no. You’d be right. It isn’t a case of waving a magic wand and tada, a spit of land obligingly toddles off. The Libraries are equipped with the means to move around, so therefore: if you want to relocate a piece of land, use a Library.

  — The “odd something” Hyarn noticed was the inevitable impact upon a Library like, for example, Sulayn Phay when it has been hitched up to a floating island and is subsequently being used to tow it away somewhere. Islands are heavy.

  — This process is slow. Therefore, the island (and the Library) cannot yet have gone far. Therefore! Both must still be somewhere in the environs of the coast of Irbel.

  This I relayed to Llandry with all possible speed. Good woman! She leapt to the task of discovering its whereabouts.

  ‘We should be able to find it fairly quickly, I hope,’ she confided, sounding jauntier than she had the last time we’d spoken. ‘We have a lot of people here.’

  ‘Do you?’ I said, in some doubt, for though I knew she had collected the entire citizenry of both Nuwelin and Anshalin about her, I also knew that those two villages were not blessed with a bustling population.

  ‘I’ve mustered Eterna’s colony.’

  ‘You’ve… is that safe?’ Eterna is not the worst person I have ever known, but it’s safe to say that she is not the easiest person to work with.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Llandry, cheerfully enough. ‘But desperate measures.’

  ‘How did you convince her?’ She being notoriously difficult to persuade into any course of action she hadn’t chosen to embark upon voluntarily.