Evastany Read online

‘Idiot,’ I said after a while.

  ‘Prat,’ Tren agreed. ‘But it is vital information.’

  I cracked my knuckles. ‘So. If you were an Elder draykon who’s survived the twin threat of Galywis and Dwinal, and you were inexplicably happy to lend yourself to a scheme that involves draining the rest of your kind for every drop of amasku they can muster, and you’re presumably expecting to get something nice out of Dwinal for it later… where would you be at this moment?’

  ‘I am surprised they aren’t here,’ Tren said, looking around. ‘Watching over the flock. Making sure nobody gets out. Bringing others in.’

  ‘Indeed. Perhaps they cannot approach too closely, for fear of succumbing themselves.’

  ‘So they’re doing something… else.’

  ‘Wherever Dwinal is… maybe we’ll find them too.’

  ‘Back to square one,’ Tren sighed.

  But we weren’t, because I was having ideas. These draykoni had been involved all along, we just hadn’t seen them. Or heard of them.

  Well; we hadn’t heard of them, but others had.

  There are rumours, Ylona had said. Whispers that there are draykoni hidden amongst us, shapeshifted to look like us.

  ‘They look like Lokants,’ I said.

  Tren blinked at me. ‘What… oh. Of course they do.’

  ‘Do you remember, from Llandry’s journal? She said Eterna once appeared before them in human shape, and they never saw her coming. They never even sensed her. Llan only knew it was Eterna at all because she had previously encountered her human form.’

  ‘So draykoni can camouflage themselves very well indeed, even from other draykoni.’

  ‘If they are very old and very powerful, yes. Which means—’

  ‘We’ve already met these people.’

  I nodded, feeling grim as winter. ‘Oh, yes. We’ve met them, all right.’

  Ori: Treachery, Fakery and Other Adventures

  Gio found me in the schoolroom.

  I’d been in there talking to the students. Some of them had spent rather more time with Dan, Tynara and the like than the rest of us had; I suppose I was harbouring hopes they might have picked up something useful over the course of their lessons. I mean, besides what they were supposed to be learning.

  I was destined for disappointment. Susa frowned and said: ‘They didn’t talk to us.’ Faronni echoed that, and elaborated: ‘Actually they barely spoke at all. Mostly they gave us books.’

  And so I was reminded. A person might be an expert in a given art, and yet have no aptitude whatsoever for teaching it successfully. Books? We could have given them books, and left them to study the texts alone. We’d requested help because we wanted more than that for our students. Dan and Tynara’s apparent lack of interest in teaching their own arts at a school inaugurated (in part) for their purposes was puzzling, but perhaps they were simply inept.

  Either way, nobody knew what the two of them did when they weren’t “teaching”, and nobody had ever heard either of them refer to Dwinal. Or anything much else.

  Anyway, Gio had wandered off for a while — actually we both had. I didn’t know what Gio had been doing but there wasn’t time to ask, as I was too busy greeting him like he was a shower of rain and I had spent the past twelve years in the desert.

  He bore this for a short time, then withdrew from me and said: ‘Llandry’s been caught.’

  ‘What? How? Where is she?’

  ‘She is on Orlind, with the rest of the draykoni.’

  That was news to me, too. By the time Gio finished telling me what had happened, I was in a fine state of mild panic and itching to dash out there right away and do something about it!

  Yes, with hindsight I should have asked more questions. I ought to have done more than note in passing that Gio seemed oddly calm about it all, and write it off to a slight excess of his typical impassive composure. I should have asked how Llandry had been caught, and what had felled so many draykoni.

  I also should have asked why we needed to take a flyer out there; why we couldn’t just translocate, as we would normally do.

  But I didn’t. Llandry is like my sister. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, or if there is, I can’t call it to mind right now.

  So I was an idiot, and I let Gio take me out there. I did not pause to think about what I was going to do once we reached the island. I was a hot-headed fool, and I deserved what I got.

  What happened was predictable (or you will find it so, having read Llandry’s account). Gio whisked me out there sharpish, me all brimming with confidence that he and I would make it right, somehow. After all, is there anything we cannot achieve, if we are together?

  The moment I stepped out of the flyer, I was a goner. That vortex of amasku scooped me up like a leaf in the wind, my mind turned inside out like a glove, and I was face down in the earth in seconds.

  We made a fine sight, I dare say. So many fierce, elegant draykoni gathered in one place, scaled hides glimmering in every imaginable colour. Has there ever been such a vision?

  Shame that every last one of us was comatose.

  Eva: The Vortex

  All things considered, I was a bit more suspicious than poor Ori had been when Gio showed up.

  He came striding towards us over the bare earth of Orlind, all grim and purposeful and with his red coat billowing in the wind. He looked like a vision out of some hero tale. ‘Where is Ori?’ he said, the moment he was within earshot.

  I waved an arm towards the Library I thought was Sulayn Phay. ‘Somewhere in there.’ It disturbed me that I could not answer the question more accurately. When was the last time I saw Ori?

  ‘He is not. I have searched everywhere.’ He stopped in front of us and stood there like a wall of rock, absolutely not moving until we answered his question to his satisfaction. He had a tight-lipped intensity about his chiselled face that revealed a degree of tension I have never seen in him before. Gio was desperately worried.

  If it was Gio.

  I opened my mouth, but could think of nothing to say except “oh dear me” or perhaps “are you really Gio?”, so I shut it again.

  Tren’s thoughts were running along similar lines as mine, for he gave vague voice to my second question. ‘Gio?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Tren stuck his hands in his pockets, adopted a pose I can only describe as Sceptical Swagger and surveyed Gio from his perfect white hair down to his shiny black boots. ‘Really?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’ Gio was not even looking at Tren. He was gazing behind us at the litter of felled drayks, his eyes restlessly scanning through them. He soon abandoned this approach and walked off towards them, his pace quickening to a jog. ‘Help me search!’

  ‘He is not here!’ I called after him. We had searched among them enough, hadn’t we? Neither of us had caught a glimpse of Ori’s draykon form, and he is distinctive with his golden scales.

  But I was to be proved wrong, for it did not take Gio long to discover our error. Ori was there all right — in human shape. He was tucked behind a great mountain of a beast whose red hide was so eye-catching, we had never noticed Ori’s slight form lying nearby. Compared to the size and grandeur of the creatures around him, he looked frail and so, so young, crumpled and discarded like a sheet of paper.

  Somehow, seeing him like that crystallised all the anger and frustration that had been building within me. Maybe it was the way he was lying there, curled up as though trying to protect himself from something.

  ‘How long has he been here?’ Gio said, in a half-broken voice, and I no longer wondered whether he was really Gio.

  Neither Tren nor I knew the answer to that, and we did not try to advance one. ‘We need to break this vortex,’ said Tren grimly.

  ‘Instantly. Time to think.’

  I shared our shiny new theory about the draykoni Lokant-lookalikes with Gio, who greeted it with indifference.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You already knew?’

  He
looked blankly at me. ‘Did not you?’

  Ouch.

  ‘All right,’ I said, folding my arms. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘They could be anybody.’

  ‘I know.’

  I clawed a bit at my hair, and sighed. ‘How are they doing this?’

  ‘This? Oh, they aren’t. At least, they probably set it in motion but it’s maintained by something else. Has to be, or they’d be trapped in it like the rest.’

  Aha. Aha! ‘Something that’s both able to affect the amasku but is impervious to its effects!’

  ‘The collectors!’ said Tren. ‘That’s what they were for!’

  Those energy collectors. We had encountered them before. They are curious devices, constructs fitted with draykon bone, designed to pull and absorb amasku. Krays distributed several around the island of Orlind some time past, and Galy redistributed them. Under Galy’s direction, they were employed to keep what was, at the time, corrupted energy cycling around the island, keeping it in an eternal loop that prevented it from spreading beyond the borders. Llandry encountered quite some trouble recently when she discovered they were missing.

  Well, they were missing for a while. Probably they were being altered somehow, their functions a little bit adjusted. And then put back, buried again, and that clever loop Galy had designed was now being used to keep an eternal vortex spinning around this place, coupled with a drain upon the energy of any draykon caught in it… cruel, cruel. Their own life’s energies were feeding the very trap that had caught them.

  ‘We probably don’t need to find them all,’ I said, already searching the horizon as though I expected to see one sitting in some conveniently obvious spot. ‘The circuit is important. Dislodging one or two might be enough to loosen its hold.’

  ‘Right.’ Tren strode out and I followed suit. We had no idea where we were going or how we were going to find the collectors, but it felt good to be doing something. I was filled with a restless urgency, a need to act. How long had we spent trailing uselessly behind Dwinal and her repulsive followers! Always just too late to realise what they were doing, always too gullible to spot their ploys ahead of time. And here was the result: almost all of our friends and loved ones, trapped in sleep until we finally figured out how to release them.

  Now we knew, and nothing was going to prevent us from getting them out. The fact that the authors of the hideous vortex could not safely come too close to it was to our advantage, for the site was as yet uncontested. We needed to fix the problem at once, and get to Dwinal.

  Which reminded me. ‘Gio, where’s your grandmother?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Please find her and ruin her day. Tren and I will deal with this.’

  I wanted to be the one to wreck Dwinal’s plans, but I had to admit that Gio had a far better chance of tracking her down than I had.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I am not leaving until Ori’s free.’

  ‘But Dwinal—’

  ‘Can wait.’

  I cast a speaking look at the three Libraries assembled around us. They had formed up into a three-point circle around Orlind, the far-most one out of sight save for the tops of its turrets. They looked ready to leave.

  ‘We’d better hurry, then,’ was all that Gio said.

  Indeed.

  ‘The collectors,’ said Tren, declining to participate in my efforts to persuade Gio. ‘They have draykon bone in them.’

  ‘Presumably they still do, yes.’

  ‘Do you remember when Llan told us about how she found Pensould? He was nothing but a pack of bones buried underground but she sensed him somehow. Sensed the bones. Surely we can do that.’

  ‘Llan is full draykon,’ I said, dubious. ‘We are far from it. If they’re buried deep, I doubt we can feel them.’

  ‘They won’t be buried deep. Who digs a twenty-foot hole when two feet will do? Try it. Can you sense the draykoni over there?’ He nodded at the sleeping captives. We had wandered perhaps fifty feet away, and that was too far, for me. I tried, but though I could see them with my eyes, I could not find them with what Llan calls the other senses.

  ‘Well, I can. If I can feel those, I can find a collector buried a couple of feet deep. We just have to get near enough to them.’

  I started walking. ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to circle the entire island.’

  ‘Doubtful. All these drayks were caught as they flew in from the coast of Irbel, which means the vortex was positioned to capture them as they arrived. No need to cover the entire island. We just need to follow the coastline until we find one.’

  The theory seemed sound, so off we went. I tried to ignore the way my sodden trousers clung to my legs, the water dripping into my eyes from my straggling hair and the unpleasant sensation of my heels sinking into the waterlogged earth, but I won’t lie. It was a slog.

  But a successful slog, for we found one about ten minutes later.

  ‘Freshly turned earth,’ said Tren in triumph, pointing at a patch of ground far enough ahead that I couldn’t see what he was indicating. I saw an expanse of flat, rain-soaked ground so absolutely unbroken I had to wonder if hope was making Tren hallucinate.

  But no. He really could sense those collectors, it seemed, for he broke into a run and headed unerringly for a spot almost at the water’s edge. The tide was in, and sleet-grey seawater lapped only a few feet away from an oblong patch of ridged earth.

  It looked disturbingly like a grave.

  ‘How do we—’ I began. I was going to ask with what we were going to dig, but I shut my mouth, because my dear Tren and poor desperate Gio attacked the earth with their hands. They clawed up mud and dirt with their fingers, heedless of the mess they made of themselves and their clothes and I stood, speechless in awe and disgust, for approximately three seconds.

  Then I sighed, bid a wistful farewell to my fingernails, and joined them.

  Happily, Tren was right about the depth. It was not long before he crowed in triumph, for there emerging from the ground was something metallic (I think?) and sort of oblong and tucked into a nook at one end was a chunk of pretty, silvery, indigo draykon bone.

  I pitied the poor creature whose parts had been broken up and put to such abominable use.

  Tren wasted no time. He grabbed the piece of bone in a white-knuckled grip and tore it out by sheer brute force alone.

  I was impressed.

  He made as if to throw it away, but thought better of it and put it into the pocket of his long black coat. I noticed in passing that he looked every bit as gorgeous with his dark hair plastered to his head and water dripping off the end of his nose as he did when perfectly groomed, and spared a moment’s regret that I almost certainly did not.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered, and shut his eyes. What was he doing?

  ‘The vortex is still up,’ he continued a moment later, and flashed me a weary smile. ‘On we go.’

  He could sense the vortex, too? I felt deaf, blind and dumb in comparison, but deeply relieved to have him along. We’d never had cause to compare our respective aptitude with the draykon arts before; intriguing, to find Tren more adept than I. And galling, but only a bit. Honest.

  We ventured forth, following the curve of the coastline on and on. But we had not gone far before Gio stopped, tension wrought in every line of his body, his head up and listening.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said tersely. He turned and searched the skies in between us and the Library of Sulayn Phay. After a few seconds, I heard it too: the whine of an engine.

  A flyer appeared in the sky. It looked delightful from that distance, almost like a daefly: all delicate grace, pale hues and sleek wings. But I had no trouble believing that this airborne beauty heralded a problem for us.

  A big, huge, vast problem, for we swiftly learned that these flyers not only flew; they could also shoot.

  I discovered that the one urgent, tumultuous emotion I had not experienced during tho
se few hours was knee-weakening, gut-clenching fear, and I instantly set about making up for the lack. By the bucket load. Tiny, speedy, life-ending missiles slammed into the earth around us, thud thud thud, spraying great spurts of mud into the air. We ducked (as if that would help) and ran (as if that would help either). What else could we do? Panic stole my breath and my wits in equal measure, and I felt acutely vulnerable, pinned as we were on open ground at the mercy of the flyer in the sky. Every second, I expected to feel a flash of pain and a warm flow of blood as one of those missiles tore through my body.

  My heel sank deep into the wet earth and I stumbled. I might have been done for, but Tren barrelled into me, hauled me up and kept me moving. What would either of us have done without Gio? All we could do was keep running until we were, inevitably, mown down.

  But Gio had come prepared, whether for an incoming flyer specifically or for threats in general I do not know. But he turned out to be considerably more armed than I had ever suspected, for when next I glanced in his direction — terrified that he might already have fallen — he was standing stock-still, arms raised, face intent as he pointed a weapon at the flyer which I must assume was some manner of gun. It was unfamiliar to me: an innocuous-looking object, rounded to fit comfortably in the hands (I suppose), made from something pure white and smooth. It tapered slightly at its business end. That was all, but though it was featureless it was certainly functional. It shot something at the flyer and whatever that something was, it hit a wing. The flyer went into a spiralling descent and plummeted into the water with a terrific splash.

  ‘What is that?’ I panted. Why did I even ask? What did it matter? I think I was becoming slightly hysterical.

  ‘Something I shouldn’t have,’ Gio said. ‘I stole it from Grandmother.’

  Interesting.

  ‘Come on,’ said Gio. ‘That was no coincidence. They’ll have some kind of tracker on those collectors, and they’ll know when they are disturbed. There’ll be more flyers. We need to hurry.’

  At that point, we hardly needed to be encouraged to pick up our pace. We went on at a run, and I no longer cared that I was chilled to the bone and looked like some drowned thing. All that mattered was finding the next collector and wrecking it, and the next one and the next, until the vortex spun itself out.