Evastany Page 25

  Ylona looked, at last, a little weakened, but she was not conquered. ‘I cannot,’ she said simply. ‘Whether I will or no. What you want of me, I imagine, is to block Dwinal from absconding with the island. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. If she is no longer Lokantor—’

  Ylona held up a hand. ‘Exactly. Do you think it is so easy, to take over that post? If it was, the role would change hands rather more often, and much more violently. It is possible for a new Lokantor to be appointed in the absence of an old one — Dwinal is not the first person to walk out on the job — but it is a lengthy process. The Lokantor must be absent for an agreed length of time, a challenger must accumulate enough support to justify their claim… I cannot simply usurp Dwinal’s post at will. I definitely cannot do so in time to get in the way of her plans out there.’

  Well, damn.

  That neatly scuppered all my hopes. How else could we hope to block Dwinal?

  Llandry: The Stolen Island

  I may be used to writing in my own journal by now, but there is something odd about writing in someone else’s. Eva has put her precious book into my hands and asked me to recount what happened when Pense and I and virtually every living draykoni high-tailed it over to the stolen island of Orlind. She was stuck at Sulayn Phay at the time, futilely trying to wear down Ylona, and of course it must fall to someone else to tell this part of the tale. But does she not realise how poor an affair my writing will seem after her elegant, witty prose? I doubt that it entered her head, generous as she is.

  No matter. Perhaps nobody cares. All that is important is to make a record of events.

  We may have felt some doubts about Eva’s order but it came as a relief, having something to do right away. We had been dithering and doubting and arguing amongst ourselves for some time. Everyone agreed that something must be done, and that we must not let the island be carried any farther away from us. But the fact that we had entirely lost control of the place escaped nobody. What would come of an invasion, if we were to mount one? Even Eterna hesitated. I think she is more afraid of the likes of Dwinal than she would like to admit.

  Eva’s revelation that the island stood in immediate danger of being whisked off to the other side of somewhere did not reassure me, but it certainly heightened the urgency of the matter. A decision had to be made; Eva made it; we acted upon it. The prospect of imminent Lokant aid did not hurt.

  Away we went. Can I describe how it felt, to fly like that? The air around me was so full of draykoni I could hardly see the sky. We have never come together like that before, never acted in such concert. I suppose it couldn’t last.

  We left the coast of Irbel behind and flew like the wind, covering the mile or two or three (I do not excel at measuring distances) as fast as we could. Sulayn Phay grew larger in my vision, and what a vision it was. I had never before seen the outside of a Lokant Library. The nature of translocation means that, upon visiting, one is always smartly transported into the middle of the Library, and straight out again the same way. But oh my, they are incredible to behold.

  Sulayn Phay was a monolithic structure crouched atop a rocky spit of land just large enough to contain it. How can I describe the Library? My pen feels unworthy to the task. Its sheer size was impressive enough. Accustomed as I am to the glissenwol trees of home and the simple houses and bridges we build up and down their soaring trunks, I struggled to take in the vastness of Phay. It looked like a town all by itself. For all that its interior can sometimes seem stark, even clinical, its exterior was all beauty: spires and turrets and other features I have no words for, all built from smooth white stone (or something like it). The only thing it lacked for was windows, which struck me as odd.

  Next to it, our poor beleaguered island looked sadly bare indeed. A rough little piece of land, comparable in size to that which hosted Sulayn Phay (if not a little larger), but otherwise unimpressive. But it was swarming with people, and somehow, building was proceeding apace. Foundations were going up, walls were partially built. What arts were these, that could draw the beginnings of so proud a building out of nothing but the bare earth of Orlind? For so it appeared, as we flew en masse towards Orlind.

  The second Library was smaller than Sulayn Phay, which is not saying much. It was still vast and magnificent, composed of near infinite towers reaching like scattered fingers into the sky. Were the two of them powerful enough together to carry away Orlind? They could be. They looked it.

  We flew faster.

  What do we do, when we reach Orlind? That was Meriall’s voice in my mind, and unfortunately she echoed the same question I was turning over myself.

  Pense? I asked privately, a little desperate. Eva had issued her orders with her usual crisp, brisk confidence, the kind that sends lesser beings scurrying to obey without question. But now I wished I had questioned, because here we were hurtling towards the island with no notion whatsoever of what to do when we got there. No way to predict how our arrival might be greeted, either. How far behind us would Eva’s Lokant reinforcements be?

  I do not like the look of it, Pense said, as grim as I had ever heard him.

  Well, no. That went without saying.

  We braced ourselves as we neared the familiar, ragged coast of our island, awaiting… something. Some manner of response, possibly hostile; and who would blame them, if it was? What would you do, if you looked up to see a horde of angry-looking draykoni bearing down upon you? We were fully prepared to encounter resistance of the most forceful variety.

  But none came. We were spotted; people looked up, shouted things to each other, pointed at us. But they went on working. Nobody seemed concerned by our rapid approach, not even a little.

  I do not like the look of it either, I said to Pense, and to Meri I said: I don’t know, Meri. See what happens.

  It may sound odd, that I would have been less troubled by a violent objection to our appearance than I was by its absence. But it made my skin creep, for it proved that they did not in the least bit fear us. Not even in all our numbers, and all our indignation at their having stolen our home.

  There are draykoni down there! It was Larion who announced the discovery, and he was far enough off that I couldn’t see him. Somewhere to my right. I veered that way, Pense at my side.

  Soon enough, I saw what he meant. Gathered in a knot on the eastern edge of poor Orlind huddled a number of drayks, perhaps ten (I thought), or twelve. I now know, of course, that there were fourteen — the fourteen missing draykoni Rastivan had spoken of, and which had vanished from Sulayn Phay right under Eva’s nose.

  They were clearly in distress. Not because they were fighting or screaming or anything like that, but because they were too quiet, too still. We dove as one, every one of us who had seen them, and as we came in to land around them we felt it: a sickening pull about the energy of the place, that beloved, beleaguered amasku we had poured so much time and effort into mending. It was not corrupted again, not quite, but its patterns were not as they should have been. Somehow, it had been co-opted into serving as a binding force; not a life-force anymore, but a prison.

  That put paid to the theory that Lokants didn’t understand the amasku all that well. They may not be able to experience it the same way we do, and their comprehension may not run as deep, but that day proved that they can manipulate it in ways we have never even thought of.

  What’s more, the heart’s energy of each draykon there was depleted. Like the waning light of a dying sun, it pulsed feebly through them, in danger of going out at any moment. They had been sucked virtually dry.

  I paused only to note that there were no Lokants nearby — odd, I know, but I did not consider the peculiarity of it just then — and Changed human in an instant. I dragged out my voice box and, hands trembling so much I almost dropped it, I hastened to get hold of Eva.

  To my relief, she answered almost at once.

  ‘Llan?’

  ‘They’re here. Eva, the missing fourteen are here, and it’s bad. They’ll di
e soon if we don’t release them but I don’t know how because it’s like… it’s like the entire island’s been turned into an energy collector. I don’t…’

  And I almost dropped the box again, because I suddenly realised why nobody was concerned by our appearance in numbers that should have been daunting. Why the incumbent Lokants’ reaction to our bearing down upon them, en masse, was merely to note the fact and carry on building.

  ‘Llan?!’ Eva was shouting. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘They’re bait,’ I whispered. ‘Rastivan was planted in your way because this whole thing was bait. Eva, we were meant to leave the island, so they could move in on it — but then we were meant to come flooding back. Orlind is functioning as an energy collector and here we obligingly come, a hundred drayks all ready to be drained. They’re using these fourteen to power the building and now we’ve given them a hundred more…’

  There was an awful silence for several seconds, and then Eva began to curse. ‘Get out of there,’ she said, frantic. ‘I should have realised — it’s my fault — go, Llandry.’

  ‘But the island—’

  ‘Forget the island! GO!’

  It was too late, of course. Once we had so obligingly flown into their trap, were they likely to let us turn around and fly away again?

  I did not even have time to warn the others, could not even close off the voice-box before the trap sprung around us. Amasku encircled me like a vice, no longer the friendly, rejuvenating life’s energy it ought to be but a net to bind me tight, winding me up in its coils with suffocating force. I could not move, could barely breathe, and I felt a spreading weakness in my limbs that slowed my heartbeat to almost nothing.

  I did not notice myself sink to the floor, did not see my friends and family felled like a forest of saplings around me. I could see nothing, sense nothing; there was only the amasku and a creeping lassitude that soon carried my consciousness away.

  Eva: On the Small Matter of a Total Disaster

  Do not try too hard to imagine my dismay, my fear and my self-reproach after that desperate call of Llandry’s. Believe me, you cannot curse me more brutally than I cursed myself. How could I fail to see that coming? I, who knew full well that there is a clear, cold reason behind everything a Lokant does? Who knew that Dwinal must have some scheme in mind, who even knew that Rastivan had been sent to us on purpose!

  Abruptly, everything was horribly clear. Llan was right. Dwinal had thrown a mystery paired with an emergency in our path, and everyone had gone running to deal with it — leaving Orlind conveniently empty, unguarded. She and all her people had quietly moved in and taken it over, while we and the draykoni were running merrily around in their wake, blind and foolish, too late and too stupid to do anything meaningful to oppose them.

  Then she had waved the prospect of the missing fourteen under our noses and we had bitten — again. She had made a few flashy, carefully calculated gestures: moving the island a ways out, so we could see what was happening, so we could take fright at the prospect of its imminent disappearance out of our Cluster altogether. Making sure that a second Library made itself nice and visible in plenty of time to attract our attention, so that we could helpfully panic about it.

  Then put the missing fourteen somewhere suitably obvious, so that the enraged draykoni would see them the moment they went flying back in to reclaim their home.

  Dwinal is nothing if not efficient. If all she’d wanted was to steal Orlind, the island would be long gone by now. She would have lured out the draykoni, moved her helper Libraries in and whisked the island away, and that would have been that. We would have been left standing, helpless to intervene, powerless to follow.

  Everything she had done had been designed to manipulate the displaced draykoni of Orlind, probably with the full realisation that they, once properly motivated, would mount an attempt to win back the island — and bring plenty more draykoni along.

  Ylona and Tren stood by in wide-eyed silence as I cursed and cursed, the voice-box trembling in my shaking hands. Tren wisely retrieved it from me after a little while and tucked it into his own pocket, then took both of my hands in a stabilising grip. ‘Eva. Calm, love, and tell us what’s happened.’

  I told them. They were not much better pleased than I was, though at least they refrained from employing the kind of foul language to which I had resorted.

  ‘Hyarn,’ I spat, moved to consider another possibility. ‘Without his interference, we would have behaved differently, wouldn’t we? He’s a traitor too, a lying, manipulating—’

  ‘He is my brother,’ said Ylona coldly. ‘And he is no traitor. At least, not to you. He was planted with Dwinal all along, charged with espionage. Sabotage, if he could manage it. He grew tired of the assignment at last, but he performed his role well.’

  Another twist in this vilely complicated tale, another truth I had failed to grasp until I was bludgeoned over the head with it. I could almost have wept. ‘Is that why he killed Galywis? To win trust? Was it a test she set him?’

  ‘In part. It was not a duty he relished, but needs must.’

  Oh, tangled webs. How did I become so wound up in them? How could I still be so blind that I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of my own face, no matter how hard I tried?

  Well, a more unproductive line of thought would be difficult to imagine. I put my self-reproach aside for a while — there would be more than enough time to wallow in my own failures later — and turned to Tren.

  ‘We have to fix this,’ I said.

  ‘Immediately,’ he agreed.

  I looked at Ylona. ‘Do you think your brother could talk you into assisting us?’

  She looked back at me, and then at Tren. A tremor of some unnameable emotion crossed her face, and then she dropped her face into her hands and made what sounded like a growling noise. Frustration, I think. ‘No,’ she said upon a long sigh. ‘I suppose I cannot let Dwinal destroy the entire extant population of draykoni just for the sake of a new Library.’

  The phrasing struck me as odd, and I had to wonder what, in Ylona’s mind, would be worth decimating the draykoni for. That is an implication she probably did not mean to make.

  Probably.

  She produced the kind of superior voice-box Limbane is sometimes seen to wave around and spoke terse words into it. Hyarn appeared moments later, looking stricken.

  ‘I had no—’

  ‘No time,’ said Ylona, ruthlessly cutting him off. ‘Take some flyers, as many people as you can gather, and these two —’ (this last said with the kind of look at Tren and me that said please get these idiots out of my hair) — ‘and head out the north door. Dwinal’s gambled a lot on the timing of this thing and she’s about to lose. She’ll need a third Library to move that island and it’s not here. We’ve got time—’

  ‘It’s here,’ interrupted Hyarn.

  Ylona gave him a flat stare. ‘Then what are you waiting for?’

  Hyarn left, dragging me and Tren with him. What Ylona planned to do I was left to imagine.

  The next few minutes passed by in a blur. We charged through Sulayn Phay in Hyarn’s wake, periodically translocated hither and thither. All the while he had a voice-box in hand which he talked into as he walked, and it seemed like more Lokants joined us with every few paces that he took.

  What Ylona referred to as “flyers” turned out to be some of those flying machines I once saw during our battle for Orlind, when Krays was still alive. Those were Irbellian inventions, and as marvellous as they were, the Lokant variety naturally left them in the dust. Sleek, smooth, fearsome-looking machines, these. We were piled into one with Hyarn and a few others, then the machine hummed with building power and made ready to rise.

  ‘Wait!’ I yelled over the noise of the engines. ‘Where’s Nyden? We need Ny!’

  ‘Why?’ bawled Hyarn.

  ‘He’s the only Elder we have left! If there’s any chance of breaking the lock on the island—’

  ‘It would be the hei
ghts of foolishness to take another draykon to that place! We’ll have to disrupt it from Dwinal’s end.’

  He was right, but somehow I fretted over it. I ought to be glad that Avane and Nyden had escaped the fate of the rest of our friends, safely at Sulayn Phay as they were.

  …although that was rather a point. Where were they? I didn’t recall seeing either of them in a while. Were they all right? Had they ended up at Orlind, after all?

  I had no time to think about it, or to argue further. The flyer rose up into the air and sped towards the island at a pace that sent my hair streaming back in the wind, made my eyes sting. All around us more flyers were taking off, filling the chill air with a low, fierce thrumming of noise and machine-power. I saw the third Library that Hyarn had described: bigger than either of the others and awash with colour, what a glory. I could have stared at it forever, and spared a moment’s bitter regret that I saw such wonders only under the kind of urgent conditions that gave me no time to appreciate them.

  And I regretted — I regret — that such marvels are built and owned and led by people like Dwinal. How odd, that such beautiful, fantastic creations should be the product of such rotten souls.

  We reached the island faster than I would have believed possible, and the flyers landed on the southern shore. Lokants streamed out and headed en masse towards the new Library, its as-yet modest walls gleaming white in the distance. Ylona’s people, and Hyarn’s, ready at last to oppose Dwinal directly; ready to make it war.

  I turned my back on it all. Lokant clashes were emphatically not our business, and we could do nothing to help there. I lost sight of Hyarn almost at once.

  ‘We need to find Llandry,’ I said, and pointed. I’d kept my eyes open while we were flying towards the island, and I’d seen a glimmer of massed colour north-eastwards: a small sea of felled draykoni, or so I hoped.

  ‘Go,’ said Tren. ‘I’m with you.’

  We went.

  Ylona: That Bitch They Call Dwinal