The dance came to an end. The waltzers stopped and applauded the musicians, and then they began to fade.
Soon we stood as before, in an empty, silent ballroom.
‘Do you still want to call this place benevolent?’ said Meriall shakily. ‘Because that was nothing short of extremely creepy.’
I agree with the human-shaped girl, said Nyden with a strong shudder, earning himself an irritated look from Meri. Incorporeal people give me the shivers.
I couldn’t agree. The vision, whatever it had been, had seemed a happy one to me.
But then the room changed again, and the nature of the ballroom’s passing shook my pleasant feelings more than a little. The wallpaper turned to chaotically coloured slime and bled down the walls, the dome of the ceiling crashed inwards in a rain of shattered pieces which mercifully vanished before they hit us, and the curtains caught fire, burning to nothing within seconds. The flames were blue.
The walls sank inwards, shrinking the room around us — and then abruptly reversed and soared outwards again. They turned to sheet glass, through which I caught a glimpse of a forest of purple trees. Then vast drapes came crashing down, covering every inch of the walls in blue velvet.
Meriall came to a sudden stop the moment these disconcerting shenanigans began. The five of us stood stock-still, paralysed with fear that the ceiling would fall upon us, or the walls collapse altogether and bury us.
Mercifully, the tumult failed to affect us. After a minute or two of madness it calmed, and the blue velvet curtains slowly drew back.
Books. They ran from floor to ceiling in an array I could charitably term haphazard. But the word falls far short of expressing the extent of the chaos. Far too many volumes were crammed into the space, vast as it was. Tens of thousands of them there were, jumbled up in cascading piles in the corners and squashed every which way into shelves of asymmetrical proportions and uneven sizes.
As we watched, the books rearranged themselves. In fact they did this ceaselessly, jumping from shelf to shelf, opening and closing, vanishing and reappearing. It struck me that some invisible hand could almost be at work, furiously employed in attempting to impose some kind of order upon the mess. Such a being must be not only invisible but monstrously sized, and possessed of at least fifty arms besides.
I do not like this place, said Nyden, his scales shivering with tension.
Meriall agreed. ‘We may not have been brought here to be harmed,’ she said, narrowly avoiding being brained by a flying book by virtue of a luckily-timed duck, ‘but it may well be the death of us anyway.’
And once again, I heard, faintly but distinctly, the single word. Sorry.
Meriall twitched, and I wondered if she heard it, too.
I reached for a book on a nearby shelf, and was surprised when it promptly disintegrated in my hand. I caught another as it sailed by, but when I opened it, the pages were blank. What were the books here for, if not for us to read?
The third I got hold of contained words, and my heart leapt. But it was verse, and the merest nonsense. The words shuffled and reformed themselves as I watched, and the nonsense became pure gibberish. I let go of it, disappointed, and it sailed away to add itself to a stack forming in the centre of the floor.
I believe we were all a bit disconcerted when the towering heap of books piling up in the middle of the room suddenly combusted. Like the curtains, they were gone in seconds, devoured by a furious inferno of blue flames.
Another pile began to form.
I don’t mean to distract anyone from the show, said Nyden after a while, But there is a door over there.
He was right, and if it didn’t sound crazy I would say that the door was going out of its way to look inviting. It beckoned from in between two bookshelves, a balmy light streaming through it in a manner most appealing. Its proportions were indeterminate. It was just the right height and width for me to pass through, but as Ny wandered over, it smoothly expanded to accommodate his greater bulk.
I could swear that I heard the strains of a gentle, soothing melody coming from somewhere beyond.
‘That door is far too plausible,’ said Meriall.
I had to agree. But… ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’
‘I will go first.’ Pense strode up to the door before anybody could argue, supposing we had wanted to. He disappeared through it.
‘It is safe,’ he called back. ‘Weird, but safe.’
Ny stood back with a gentlemanly inclination of his draykonic head, and waited while Meri and I stepped through. I wasn’t sorry to have his comforting bulk at our backs.
Through we went.
The first thing I became aware of was a powerful and utterly delicious aroma, like a hundred types of fruit jumbled together.
We had entered some kind of conservatory — or it might be more apt to call it an orchard which happened to be glass-enclosed. Everywhere I looked, there were trees of myriad different species, each one bearing a heavy load of fruit. I was intrigued to note that I didn’t recognise any of them.
Meriall’s eyes sparkled with interest as she looked around, and when she spoke it was with approval. ‘This is more like it.’
Pense merely grunted, and Ny said nothing at all, being far too busy attempting to disentangle himself from a cluster of miniature trees into which he had somehow fallen.
I went to help him. ‘The turmoil grows a little trying,’ I could not help remarking as I picked feathery leaves out from between his toes.
Sorrysorry, said the voice, frantic.
I looked sharply about, but saw no one.
Considering the cramped conditions of the place, crowded as it was with trees, Pense consented to turn human as we left our corner to explore. Ny, though, steadfastly refused, despite his encounter with the trees. He remained serenely oblivious to the wreckage of toppled foliage he left in his wake.
Beyond a small forest of fruit trees, we discovered that there was more to this greenhouse than propagation. An array of tables was spread out in a clearing between the trees, the glassy ceiling soaring high overhead. They were littered with tools, equipment and gadgets I neither recognised nor could guess the purpose of. Each table — though actually they were more like benches, laboratory style — bore a complement of fruits, too, a different type to each one.
Each bench also had an attendant… person.
We stopped, alarmed, but nobody looked up. They continued their work, whatever it was, with no sign that they were aware of our presence at all.
Meri tested this by drifting up to the nearest bench. A woman of my mother’s age stood there, intent upon dissecting a spiny green fruit. Her white hair was caught up in a severe bun, and she wore a plain black coat.
‘Hello,’ said Meri.
The woman made no sign of having noticed.
‘They’re like the dancers,’ Meri reported.
‘Very like them,’ I agreed, emboldened enough to explore a little myself. ‘They are all Lokants.’
I stretched out my hand towards another of them, an elderly man wearing a similar black coat, and tried to grasp his shoulder. My hand passed straight through. ‘And incorporeal.’
Visions of Lokants, alive or long dead I could not say. But nothing else here was insubstantial. Nyden had proved that with the trail of disaster he had left behind among the orchard.
The old man reached out for a hooked tool that lay on the bench in between us. I snatched it up before he could secure it, and waited to see what would happen.
Nothing. The man’s hand curled as though he grasped the object I had just removed, and he went on working without seeming to notice that he held nothing.
Even more oddly, the flesh of the fruit he was dissecting parted in obliging obedience to his gestures, just as though he still held the tool.
I put the hook down, and noticed that my hand was coated in thick dust.
Llan, said Pense. You must see this.
He had wandered a little away, and it took me a mome
nt to find him among the many benches. When I reached him, he handed me a fruit.
It was palm-sized, blush pink, and faintly heart-shaped, with a little tuck at the bottom like a dimple. I raised it to my nose to test the aroma.
‘Nara fruit?’ I looked at Pense. ‘Where did you get this?’
He gestured behind himself. A wide bench was covered in further specimens of the fruit, each one slightly different in shape. A Lokant man was attendant over it, though he did not appear to be dissecting these. If anything, he was…
‘Is he building that one?’ I asked, aghast.
‘That is what it looks like to me, also,’ Pense agreed.
The man had a nara before him, about half complete. As I watched, he built up the outer shell of the fruit by slow degrees, using some kind of instrument I could not even describe for you. Then he painstakingly filled in the middle. The fruit completed, he studied it for a moment before setting it aside and beginning another.
I exchanged a wondering look with Pense.
‘These are my favourites,’ I said faintly. What were we seeing here? Was this a vision of past events?
Had Lokants made the nara fruit? Could that be possible?
Galywis claimed that Lokants made both humans and draykoni. But I don’t think I ever really believed it. It seemed too implausible… and Galy is mad. But the book Ori was reading seemed to agree, and here before me was a vision of direct interference in the flora of our worlds.
For the first time, I had to seriously reconsider.
It is an overwhelming idea. Perhaps that is why I suddenly became aware of a leaden tiredness, with no particular cause. I was ravenously hungry, too; the sight of my favourite fruit was enough to remind me of that.
I sighed and rubbed at my eyes, for my vision was going a little blurry.
‘Good point,’ said Pense. He scooped me up and walked off with me. ‘This lady needs to sleep,’ he called. ‘I give you fair warning, whatever you are. She requires an interval of peace and an area for repose, or I shall become angry.’
Pense has a way of getting his point across with things like that. He spoke as though he was more than capable of burning the place down if he wasn’t obeyed, and he wouldn’t for a second question his justification in doing so.
Fortunately, it is not an attitude he assumes very often.
His assumption that there was a sentient and responsive being in charge of our fate struck a chord with me. Sorry, sorry… we had both heard that voice. But would whoever it was listen to his demands? Was he, she or it genuinely interested in our well-being?
Apparently so, for the orchard reformed around us in prompt response to Pense’s demands. The trees disappeared, taking their heavenly fragrance with them, and all the eerie, silent, oblivious Lokants vanished along with them.
It was replaced by a dormitory, with several neat, narrow beds lined up in a row.
Reclining in one of them with a book in his hands was Gio. He returned my quizzical look with a tiny salute. ‘I wondered where you all got to.’
Never mind us. Where had he got to? But I was too tired to bother answering him just then. Tired, and obscurely annoyed to see him lounging there at his ease when we had narrowly avoided being burned to death in an unusually flammable library, grappled with ghostly Lokants and startling ideas and finally fetched up here, worn out and hungry.
Pense cast a disapproving eye over the furniture, but his displeasure did not focus upon Gio as I might have expected. ‘I hope I am not imagined to be inclined to sleep apart from my Minchu?’
Two adjacent beds shuffled hastily together and merged into one, a picture of contrition.
‘Better,’ said Pense, some of his anger dissipating. He paused, and thought, and added with one of his feral smiles, ‘Thank you.’
By way of response, a wave of balmy warmth washed over the room, bringing with it a comforting aroma of hot cayluch and baking bread.
Meriall coughed. ‘On which note,’ she said in a sweet tone I imagined deceptive, ‘I am about to expire from hunger.’
A table laden with dishes appeared along one wall and danced an inviting little jig.
‘I like you,’ said Meri, and fell upon the food with a will.
And so we ate, and drank, and slept. Nobody asked any questions about where the food came from, or how it was (thankfully) substantial when the people were not. We were too grateful to be fed. I wanted to ask Gio what had happened to him and why he hadn’t been with us, but I was too tired. Once I was fed, Pense bundled me into bed, wrapped me in a warm embrace and curtly dismissed Nyden to stand watch over us. I wondered how Ny, much older than the rest of us, would react to an undisguised command from Pense.
‘Ya, I have no need of sleep anyway,’ said Nyden sourly. But he didn’t seem too ruffled. The table of edible delights was holding his attention nicely.
I lay awake some time in spite of my tiredness, restless in that strange place. The things we had seen made no sense, and none of it provided any clues as to where we were or why we had been carted off like that. The presence I have several times detected may have proved benevolent, but its identity and purpose remained a mystery. What could we do, save go along with it all and see what happened? But such enforced passivity is neither natural nor comforting and I could not imagine how either Pense or Gio seemed so relaxed.
Eventually, I slept.
I woke to find Pense keeping watch, and he was glad to return to slumber while I took my turn.
Which I am now doing, and also taking the opportunity of updating my journal. Not neatly. All my fine structure is going by the wayside, because it is hard to write clearly about what is happening when I have no idea what that is. Perhaps I will be able to impose some better order upon it later.
Oh, Meriall is awake. More later, whenever I next get the chance.
29 VII (?)
I Become a Lot More Confused.
Also, Everyone Dies.
Meri approached me with a steaming mug of cayluch in one hand and a plate of some kind of fluffy bread in the other, and handed both to me. I noticed that the table had replenished itself since our last attack upon it.
When I had got halfway down the food, a tiny pot of something pink and glistening appeared on my plate.
I tasted it. Nara fruit preserves, tangy and sweet.
Meriall paused in her enjoyment of a stack of pastries and eyed the little pot. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You know the person in charge of this little party.’
‘Uhh. Not to my knowledge, no. Why do you say that?’
She nodded meaningfully at the preserves. ‘Somebody seems eager to please you. And couldn’t comply quickly enough with Pense’s demands yesterday.’ She took another bite of pastry and chewed thoughtfully. ‘I can’t help feeling that all of this is focused on you and Pense, somehow. The rest of us are just extras.’
‘All of what, though? I can see no sense in anything that’s happened, no pattern. The dancers, the library, the burning books, the orchard… if there is a mind behind it all, what is it for?’
‘I don’t know. But it has something to do with Lokants, that much is obvious.’
Yes. Everyone we had seen in the various visions was a Lokant. ‘The naras,’ I said slowly. ‘If it is true that they created them… it is something that must have happened in the past. A long way in the past.’
‘A very long way.’
‘Maybe they aren’t visions so much as memories.’ I thought of the voice I had heard, twice now. Sorry. And the man who had almost seemed to look straight at me as he had waltzed past me in the ballroom…
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said, growing frustrated. ‘I want to conclude that we are in a Lokant Library, but I’ve been in such places before. They do not behave like this. This is more like the Changes in Iskyr, which is draykon magic, but we cannot influence it.’
‘It is my belief that we are in the Library of Orlind.’ Gio had risen from his bed without our noticing, so engrossed were we in
our thoughts. He wandered past on his way to the food, giving me another little salute when I caught his eye.
‘How could that be possible?’ I demanded. ‘We were nowhere near Orlind when we were… um, swallowed.’
Gio nodded, and took a long gulp of cayluch with obvious appreciation. ‘So we weren’t. But there are some things about our Libraries which you might not know about.’
He stopped to eat, which was irritating. ‘And?’ said Meriall, fixing him with a disapproving glare. ‘Talk first, eat later.’
‘Sorry.’ Gio swallowed hastily. ‘You know that they move around?’
I blinked. ‘What?’
‘Some of them,’ he amended. ‘Orlind among them, for a time. It was eventually anchored in your world, on the island which you still call by the same name. But before that, it drifted.’
My mind spun. ‘So if it could be… unanchored?’
‘Right. If it could be wrested free of its moorings, so to speak, you wouldn’t have to be on the island of Orlind in order to end up in the Library of Orlind.’
‘But how could it be removed? Is that even possible?’
Gio shrugged and went back to his plate. ‘I have no idea if it is possible,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘I would certainly guess that the consequences of doing so would be… significant.’
I took a deep breath to steady myself. If Gio was right…
I have been in the Library of Orlind before, with Pense and Eva and Tren. It had crashed wildly through Change after Change, just as this place did. I would have made the connection sooner, save that it had appeared to be geographically impossible.
But what did that mean for Galywis?
I mustered my courage. ‘Galy?’ I said softly. ‘Is that you?’
The beds all leapt three feet into the air in perfect synchronicity, startling Pense who was still in one of them. Then a jubilant little tune played from somewhere, growing swiftly into a noisy fanfare. The tumult woke up Nyden, who uncurled himself with a snort of irritation.
Llandry Page 12