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  Rikbeek, though, had other ideas. At least as fond of being wet and cold as I was, he had been making his displeasure felt for some time. I had ignored it.

  He resolved this communication issue by biting me.

  ‘Ouch,’ I shrieked, for the nasty little beast had made it a good, deep bite. The pain was intense, and the flow of blood no doubt swift. I tore him free of the breast-pocket in which he had been hiding, tearing the pocket from my favourite blue shirt in the process, and tossed him into the air.

  Keep watch, I ordered him. If our friends down there begin to stir, inform me at once.

  Normally I make at least some effort to coax Rikbeek into obedience, or he grows stubborn and intransigent. But we had no time for that, and I was angry with him. He’d left a weal on the left side of my torso that smarted and stung and might actually scar.

  It rains, he said in reply. Water from the sky, cold.

  Tough. I kept my will on him, forcing him back into the sky when he tried to return. He’d made his choice, and anyway I needed him up there. I watched the tiny, dark shape of his body and out-flung wings vanish into the curtain of drizzle and felt a vindictive satisfaction.

  ‘Here,’ said Tren and fell to his knees before me, so abruptly that I almost fell over him.

  ‘Let me have that thing you shouldn’t have,’ I said curtly to Gio. ‘Someone ought to watch for more flyers.’

  He looked at me, all tilty-head puzzlement. ‘Why you? Shouldn’t I do that?’

  ‘You dig better than I do.’ Which was true. I lacked the muscular development that the gentlemen sported in their arm areas, which hampered my efforts to keep pace with them.

  I didn’t add that I badly wanted to try out the shooty-thing, because I thought that might give Gio an excellent reason to refuse.

  To my mingled terror and delight, he accepted my logic and put the sleek, white shooter (I am calling it a shooter because I have no idea what its name is, and shooting is what it does) into my hands. There turned out to be a cool, round tab underneath that felt like metal.

  ‘To fire, squeeze both sides at once and touch that tab,’ he told me, and left it at that. He fell to with digging, and I turned to face the dark, looming outline of Sulayn Phay, all ready to fire at the first sign of incoming trouble.

  I hoped.

  Trouble was not long in coming. I do not know by what means they were monitoring those collectors but it was clearly efficient.

  When we dug up the first one, they sent one flyer.

  When we unearthed the second, they sent… a few more. I counted ten tiny, dark shapes in the sky before I stopped and focused on the problem of how to deal with them. At least ten flyers versus me with my one shooting device?

  How do I get myself into these messes?

  I don’t know that we expected to be left to wreck the vortex entirely unopposed, but this level of opposition was far more than we were prepared for. The shooter, held before me at arm’s length and aimed at the sky, began to shake, and I realised my hands were trembling. My whole body was a-quiver, in point of fact; my heart pounded fit to burst; I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe.

  If you have never witnessed your own abrupt, premature and violent death winging its way towards you through a rain-sodden sky, I do not recommend the experience.

  I tried to fire, but it proved harder to accomplish than I was hoping. Squeeze both sides at once and touch the tab. That required a degree of control and composure that I had temporarily lost, and I regretted volunteering myself for a duty I could only prove inept at carrying out. That said, what matter if Gio was holding the shooter? Even he could not hope to prevail against so many foes with such minor equipment.

  The flyers soared closer and I tried again to fire — and again. I fell to a fumbling, frantic assault upon the shooter and almost dropped it altogether, my hands wet with rain and slippery with sweat.

  Then it jolted in my hands and I did drop it — but not before it had fired a beam of something indefinable in the general direction of the massed flyers.

  It hit nothing.

  ‘Missed,’ said Gio laconically from behind me.

  How did the man remain so calm?

  ‘Are we making any progress back there?’ I made sure my voice was as calm as Gio’s as I bent, with a fine show of nonchalance, to retrieve the shooter.

  ‘Almost there,’ panted Tren.

  Well, good. We might manage to release the draykoni, just in time to get the lot of us mown down by Dwinal’s fine fellows.

  I fired again. It only took me five attempts that time, and I hit a wing! Down went a flyer with a boom!

  Of course, there were still at least nine more. And now they were close enough to fire, for the first missile hit the sand several feet in front of me and sprayed earth into my face.

  ‘I can’t find the bone…’ gasped Tren, and I grimly resisted the temptation to run and help, or simply to run at all. I fired the poor, beleaguered shooter again and again and hit nothing, nothing…

  Then I was down in the sand with my eyes to the sky, for one of the damned things had hit me. Dazed, I became aware of an intense pain in the right side of my torso. I was shuddering, with shock as well as fear, and my breath came in shallow, too-fast gasps.

  ‘Eva!’ Tren’s voice, but he sounded so far off. I tried to muster a reply but my lips would not work.

  The flyers soared overhead and… and turned. They turned, and began barrelling away again. Where were they going? As I watched, two of them exploded in pretty puffs of flickering fire and fell out of the sky. Then a third followed.

  ‘What…’ That was all I could manage, one syllable, before I lost the battle for wakefulness and fell into a far more comfortable blankness.

  Tren: On Catastrophe

  When will you stop getting into these messes?

  You asked the question, my love, and I can tell you the answer right away.

  The answer is: never.

  And that’s okay. I love you anyway. Just try not to actually get yourself killed, all right? You were not trying very hard on that day. You thought yourself harm-proof, I am sure of it, as you stood there standing guard over your weary diggers while death descended from the skies.

  I have never been more proud — or more annoyed.

  I may have muttered something like damned fool as I hung over your poor bloodied body splayed lifeless in the wet sand. I had a fistful of draykon bone and the draykoni were stirring around me, but what did that matter, when you were dying?

  The air was full of fire, too. I called your name, over and over, and I thought I saw your lips move, but if you answered me I could not hear it over the tearing noise of flying machines exploding into flinders overhead. You had not chosen a convenient spot in which to play dead, sweetheart, for debris rained down around us and I tried to shield you from it, but I had only my own body with which to protect you and what use was that? I would only get us both killed.

  What you did not see, my love, was the second wave of flyers emerging from one of the other two Libraries stationed around the island. Neither Gio nor I saw them either, not until they were almost upon us. And we thought, in that moment, that we were done for. A single, intense look was all we had time to exchange, but his face said: this is it, then. And I knew that mine did, too. I swallowed, and forced my hands, shaking with exertion as well as fear, to wrest the elusive chunk of bone from the broken energy collector.

  I knew as I did so that it was enough, that the gap we had opened up in that terrible circuit was enough to cause a faltering in the whirl of energy. It did not dissolve around us, or anything so dramatic; I sensed only a flicker in the pattern, like a missed heartbeat, and I hoped desperately that it would be enough.

  Then I turned and lay down beside you, for if we were to be shot to pieces I would far rather be exploded into bits at your side. Is that not romantic? Having lived through that day I propose that we confine our romantic gestures to safer activities for the foreseeable futur
e. Motion passed. I do not need to ask if you agree.

  I wondered, as I lay there, why it was deemed necessary to bring out another wave of flyers, for were the ten (or nine, your having shot one down, my marvellous love) enough to deal with a mere three, virtually defenceless people? Perhaps they intended to slay all the draykoni after all, rather than risk their returning to vengeful wakefulness. That made a miserable kind of sense, so I shut my eyes and waited to die.

  Dying has few advantages, but one of them ought to be its blessed, blissful peacefulness. Seconds passed, maybe minutes, and my world was no less rent with execrable, unbearably violent noise. I was confused by this, confused still more when my eyes opened upon command and focused upon a sky full of chaos.

  The flyers, you see, were no longer shooting at us. They were targeting each other. There was full-blown air battle going on up there and it was brutal. Those lovely, delicate machines were cheerfully blowing holes in each other and ripping each other’s wings off. As I watched, another toppled in a crumpled heap to the ground and lay there smoking, flames rippling over its sleek metal surfaces.

  ‘Gio,’ I managed to utter. I could not see him but I hoped he was close enough to hear me. ‘What in the world is going on up there.’

  Silence, for a time — actual silence, for the battle had been swift and brutal and quickly wore itself out. I watched with bemused interest as a trio of flyers beat a hasty retreat towards Sulayn Phay, one trailing smoke from its left wing.

  Then Gio spoke. ‘It’s my guess that Grandmother was deceived. One of those Libraries most certainly was not here to help her.’

  It filtered through to my dazed, shocked mind that I was not dead. I was not, but you, my love, might be. I rocketed into motion, another wave of terror setting my whole body to shaking, until I ascertained that you still breathed, still lived. You were stark white, however, and bleeding, and I had never seen you look so small and frail and fragile.

  Gio was as unscathed as I, and I smothered a sudden, fierce wish that one of us had been hit rather than you. It was unworthy of me.

  ‘We need to get help,’ I said, and my voice shook almost as much as my hands.

  ‘I am help,’ Gio said, still so cool, so untouched. He was help, of course he was; though you have never mastered the Lokant art of healing, my love, Gio is something of a master at them all. And thank goodness that he is, for he tended to you with a brisk efficiency which soothed me in ways nothing else could have done. Your bleeding stopped, your colour improved, and your breathing deepened.

  Gio sat back, and ran bloodied hands through his hair. His hands shook, the barest tremor, and he took the shuddering breath of a deeply rattled person. He may look inhumanly composed, my love, but he is human enough. I never thought to encounter the person who could outdo you for iron control.

  ‘She needs more consistent care,’ he said to me. ‘But she is stable now. She won’t die.’

  I gripped your limp hand and kissed it and my eyes were so blurred I did not notice when Llandry came up behind us. When she spoke, I jumped about a mile.

  ‘You’ve made a terrible mess of my island,’ she said. She sounded weak but hale, and I swept her up in an impulsive hug because I was so full of gladness I had to take it out on somebody.

  ‘Ouch,’ she breathed after a moment and I released my bone-crushing grip. There was Pense behind her, still in his draykon form, groggy but sound. In the near distance I saw all the draykoni of Iskyr and Ayrien rousing themselves, dazed and befuddled for the moment but anger must soon follow.

  Gio looked longingly in their direction, and then back at you, my love. He was clearly torn. ‘I need to get her to an infirmary.’

  Llandry read that look, and interpreted it in an instant. ‘Ori’s there somewhere? We will find him.’

  Cool, undemonstrative Gio actually grabbed Llandry’s hand and kissed it. I did not see how she received this uncharacteristic salute, for Gio grabbed you, love, and me, and whisked us away from the wreckage and the smoke and the pouring rain, and that was that.

  Limbane: About That Third Library

  Yes, yes, her ladyship has even talked me into contributing to her memoirs. I will not go so far as my colleague Ylona, and term the project absurd, for historic value has been wrung from far cruder documents. Nonetheless I am a busy man and I do not have a great deal of time to devote to such a project, so I will keep my remarks brief.

  That third Library? That was mine, Estinor. I was initially surprised that her ladyship did not realise this fact at once, but she could not be expected to recognise the structure at sight. Nor could she be expected to follow my line of reasoning without elucidation, so I must excuse her lapse of understanding.

  [Too kind, Limbane. Aware as I am that I lower the tone of my report in so saying, and damage its academic credibility still further: I hate you too. — Eva]

  Upon receiving Lady Glostrum’s information, it was forcibly borne in upon me that matters had proceeded to a state of grave urgency. Accordant with my duties as a member of the Lokantor Council, I took action at once, and depressed Dwinal’s inappropriate pretensions in full compliance with the Council’s established protocols for the interception, detainment and incarceration of aberrant Lokantors.

  No, Lady Glostrum, I will not elaborate. I refuse to trivialise this account with an absurd dramatisation of the facts.

  [Upon reading this I reminded Limbane that I had almost died in the course of cleaning up the mess he had summarily failed to deal with. I also showed him my wounds. It was a brutal tactic and I am not proud of it, but it succeeded and that’s all that matters.— Eva]

  Fine.

  Here is what happened.

  We, the Council, had been watching Dwinal for some time, and we were desirous of performing some intervention which would clear her out of everybody’s way. But though her practices were often questionable, she was far more devious than I would like. On the face of it she was always beyond reproach, and therefore it was never possible for us to pursue her. Even had it not been so, Council protocol bound my hands at every turn. Ours is an advanced society, enlightened; we do not believe in capital punishments. A criminal must be given the opportunity to repent and reform. Such elasticity of moral fibre ought to be possible, ought it not? For such well-honed intellects as we possess must be capable of understanding their errors, and subsequently of reforming their judgements and choices for the future.

  It is of no use to argue that the entirety of our long history proves this optimistic attitude misguided. Oh, I am fully in support of this approach in most cases; I am no savage. But when one is faced with the guile, the cunning, and the unapologetic amorality of Krays and Dwinal, of what use is it to suggest that, with the right guidance, they will meekly abandon their inconveniently selfish ways? That they will someday be instilled with a new appreciation for our system of rule and law, and come to act responsibly? The whole notion is preposterous.

  Something agreeably permanent has already been done about Krays, and what a recommendation for the advantages of savagery that was. I confess, I had been living in hope that her ladyship and friends might find it possible to dispose of Dwinal in much the same fashion, but I came to realise that they might require a little assistance in order to carry it off. Dwinal is much slipperier than her former husband.

  When her ladyship brought news to me of Dwinal’s plans, I saw my opportunity to dispose of Dwinal once and for all.

  I hastened to the designated spot off the Irbellian coast with all due speed. We were slower to arrive than I might have wished, for I have never had occasion to convey my Library to that particular area before, and we lacked the infrastructure to transport ourselves there more expediently. When my beloved Estinor came to dock off the shores of the stolen island of Orlind, I observed that Sulayn Phay remained in residence, and that a second Library was anchored nearby.

  I had expected to encounter some manner of opposition from Dwinal’s forces upon our arrival, and was surprised
to find myself mistaken. Having read the pertinent excerpts from Lady Glostrum’s account, I have since concluded that Dwinal was, indeed, anticipating the arrival of some one or two more such structures, and mistook my Estinor for one of those. Her ladyship is not alone in struggling to tell our Libraries apart, when there is nothing by which to judge them save a glimpse of some part of their exteriors. The same problem frequently afflicts my own people, and for the same reasons. How useful a peculiarity, on this occasion.

  Dwinal was pressed for time. She was aware of the efforts of her ladyship’s friends, and the likes of Ylona Duna, to disrupt her plans, and was naturally anxious to withdraw from the Cluster as soon as possible — provided she could do so with Orlind in tow. Upon seeing that third Library emerge, then, she hastened to Sulayn Phay, with a view to issuing the order to depart. There she encountered the siblings, and was repelled.

  This meeting I missed, chancing to arrive shortly after Dwinal had fled Sulayn Phay in anger. It was not difficult to guess where Dwinal might then go: to the Lokantors of the other two Libraries, her supposed allies. She would first seek to determine whether the island might be moved with two alone, thus obviating the need for Sulayn Phay altogether. If that failed, she would recruit some other aid — perhaps choosing among those four camouflaged draykoni whose loyalty she had won, for what better way to overcome a mere Lokantor? — and return to conquer Sulayn Phay.

  We found her within the second Library, in the Lokantorrsquo;s private quarters. The Lokantor — a youngish, energetic man known as Vabind, all stooped shoulders and mismatched clothing — was also present, which simplified our errand nicely. The two were engaged in heated argument when I arrived.

  Dwinal looked at me with the eyes of hate, uttered the syllable “You!” in sepulchral tones, and immediately leapt at me.

  I own myself surprised. Dwinal has always been more in favour of the subtly manipulative approach to winning her battles, and prefers to prevail by wits than by brawn. I attribute her unusually aggressive attitude to the effects of pressure, and perhaps of surprise, for she could never have expected to be brought face-to-face with me.