I felt faint.
‘Galy!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘What are you doing? What has happened to you?’
See, last time I saw Galywis he was in the Library of Orlind, yes, but very definitely as a separate physical presence. What was he now? Where was he? He seemed part of the building in ways which frankly disturbed me.
These were his memories we were seeing, or his ideas… perhaps some of both. The man who’d caught my notice in the ballroom? Now that I thought to make the comparison, his features were Galy’s. I had seen Galywis himself, as he had been in his younger days.
Galy was gone from the Library of Orlind because he had become it. He had merged his own mind with it for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at. And when Pense had shown up near the island, he had recognised him as a friend and followed him.
And thus, here we were.
Pense sat up and stared sleepily at me. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Um. Galywis has become a building and is trying to tell us something.’
Pense had nothing to say that right away, nor did I expect him to. He stared at me, sleepy and confused, and finally nodded. ‘Aha. Of course he has.’
No reply had come to my question to Galywis, which served to prove that ordinary communication was beyond him. I thought of the library full of books and how they had been either empty, or filled with gibberish. And the bonfires, which now struck me as a sign of… frustration.
Galy had been terribly mad when I had met him a few moons ago, and that was before he became a Library and wandered off. Communicating with him was not going to be easy.
And I didn’t want to think about what kind of emergency had occurred that could push him to such extremes.
I explained all this to Pense, Meri and Ny, as quickly and simply as I could. Nonetheless, Meri was looking a little wild about the eyes by the time I finished, and Nyden gave me one of his toothy smiles. I knew you would be more interesting than Eterna’s gang, he said. But I did not anticipate just how much.
Pense took it in stride. He ran a hand through his dark hair, messing it up even more than it already was, and nodded once at me. ‘Interesting,’ was all he said.
‘This Galywis is somebody that you’ve known for years and years, of course,’ said Meriall.
‘Well… no. We met him only once.’
Meri blinked. ‘Ah. But he proved himself to you in some obscure but decisive way, and you would trust him with your lives.’
I frowned and thought, and finally nodded, but with less certainty than I would like. ‘We fought off a Lokant invasion of Orlind together, and… er, well, he was on our side.’
‘At the time,’ added Pense helpfully.
Meriall’s lips quirked into a wry smile. ‘Wonderful,’ she muttered.
I watched Gio. I wasn’t sure I agreed with Meri, that she and Ny and Gio had ended up in here with us by accident. Was it a coincidence that a Lokant happened to be along just when we had disappeared into a Lokant Library? For that matter, was Gio’s appearance in my life truly unrelated to these events at all? He claimed to be the grandson of Limbane — and Limbane was one of the people whose wars over Orlind had led to its destruction.
On the other hand, he had been the source of a piece of useful information. I didn’t trust him, but as the only lucid and coherent Lokant we had access to, he could be tolerated.
Well, he would have to be. We couldn’t get rid of him.
I hesitated, torn between wanting to talk to him and wanting to avoid him forever. He sat now on the edge of his bed, with none of Pense’s rumpled appearance. His white hair was perfectly ordered, his clothes neat in spite of his having slept in them. He looked annoyingly handsome and even more aggravatingly at ease as he sat, oblivious to my scrutiny.
I sighed inwardly, cursed myself for an idiot, and went over to him. We would never find out anything more about him if we didn’t ask. If I didn’t ask.
‘You seem very comfortable,’ I told him. I sounded a bit more sour about it than I had intended.
Gio looked up at me, bemused. ‘Should I be panicking? But I am having a wonderful time.’
‘You’re what?’
He smiled, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. ‘This is the Library of Orlind! I have heard tales of it since I was a child — its history, its extraordinary nature, its remarkable powers. I never imagined that someday I might stand within it myself. More! That I might glimpse something of the old Library, before it was destroyed! I am grateful beyond words to Mr. Galywis for this magical tour.’
This was a way of looking at it that I had not considered. ‘Huh,’ I said, at my most searingly intelligent.
Gio raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you see nothing to enjoy?’
I was struck by this question, because truthfully, trying to enjoy anything that happened in my life was never a priority. In fact, it wasn’t even on my agenda. I was always too busy fearing something, or everything, and trying to manage anyway. And, more recently, trying to juggle my new responsibilities, just as soon as I figured out exactly what they were.
‘I am concerned,’ I told Gio, ‘because I think something catastrophic must have happened, to produce this result.’
Gio looked me over thoughtfully, and nodded. ‘I can understand that you might.’
I decided I’d had enough of Gio. I turned my back on him, and returned to my friends. ‘Are we all ready? I think we had better not delay any longer than is necessary.’
I am, said Nyden peppily, and Pense gave me a nod.
Meri looked about as happy about everything as I was. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, her face grim. But she met my gaze, sighed, and relaxed her forbidding posture a little.
‘All right!’ she yelled. ‘Galywis, Mad Master of the Library and self-appointed director of our fate, let us have it!’
I barely had time to reach Pense and grab onto him before the dormitory disintegrated in a shower of dust and darkness fell around us.
What followed was… confusion. When the light returned, it brought with it a sequence of Changes so rapid, we could not follow them. A succession of rooms and scenes and faces spun around us at dizzying speed, as though Galy was mentally flipping through the book of his memories, trying to fix upon a place to begin. The effect was staggering. After a minute or so of this, I shut my eyes and covered my ears against the blur of colour and sound and waited for Galy to settle down.
I was roused from this by Meri digging an elbow into my ribs. ‘Llan!’ she hissed.
I opened my eyes.
‘Uh,’ was all I could think of to say.
We were not in a room anymore. It was dark, wherever we had ended up, and the space was clearly not intended for habitation by humans. The walls curved oddly — if they could be called walls. They were soft-looking and reddish, and they glistened oddly. Strange structures, vast and unnameable, rose on all sides, most of them flexing or rippling or pulsing as with some indefinable function. Far overhead, a long beam curved away into the distance, oddly constructed out of matched segments melded together.
‘What is that sound…’ said Meri.
Rising above a plethora of noises I could put no name to was a dull thud-thud sound, regular and profound enough to echo.
‘It sounds like a heartbeat,’ I said, tentatively, for how could it be that?
‘It is a heartbeat,’ said Pense. He pointed at one of the structures, a pulsing, convoluted thing about six times our size. ‘There is the heart.’
It did not look like a heart. Not that I would know, really, for I have never seen one. But it was undoubtedly pulsing in time with the double thud of the beat. I frowned at it.
‘And that,’ continued Pense, pointing at another of the things, ‘is a stomach. And there is the spine.’ He pointed upwards at the long, curving beam.
I now saw that what I had taken for an odd kind of roof structure was undoubtedly a rib cage. I swallowed a sudden flutter of mild panic as I realised what the shapes and pro
portions must mean. ‘We… are inside a draykon.’
Pense gave me one of his more disturbing smiles. ‘Life with Galywis is never dull.’
I could find no response to make to that. We were inside a draykon. The fact that it could hardly be a real one and must be but a semblance of one was of some comfort to me, but not that much.
‘Life doesn’t get any less weird,’ I muttered.
‘It’s not boring,’ agreed Meri.
Gio merely seemed fascinated, for he wandered off at once to explore. Ny just sat humming some mad little tune to himself, his tail tapping out the beat.
I cleared my throat. ‘Well, Galy, we are with you so far,’ I said. ‘What are we meant to be seeing here?’
The organs around us vanished. Muscle, flesh and cartilage melted away until all that remained was the skeleton of the beast, shimmering in those beautiful colours I had always admired.
The bones pulsed with a flow of raw energy, shining silvery-pale. Amasku. We were witnessing the natural flow of the stuff. To see it like that, bound into the very bones of a draykon, brought home to me the extent of the connection between the two.
I then realised that the shine I had noticed in the flesh was derived from the same thing. It wasn’t just the bones. Amasku was knit into every part of every draykon, so deeply that the two could not, by any imaginable means, be separated.
As we watched, mesmerised, the silvery light dimmed and began to fade, the beautiful silvery energy extinguished almost to nothing. The bones soon began to suffer, turning pitted and pale and fragile. Some of them crumbled.
I watched in horror as bones dissolved around us one by one, and the rib cage that formed both walls and ceiling fell inwards.
The spine began to fail.
‘Galy!’ I screamed as the skeleton crashed in upon us.
Whatever I had been standing upon crumbled and gave way. I dropped, screaming. My wings flared open to catch my descent, but before they could slow my fall I was grabbed, as by an invisible hand, and whisked sideways. Light blazed, searing my eyes.
When the light faded, I saw a corridor stretching away before us, apparently into infinity for all I could tell. The ceiling was… missing. Above us yawned the heavens, dark and starlit and somehow more vast than they had ever appeared to me before.
Doors lined up along the corridor on both sides, set almost edge-to-edge. Each was a different shape, size and colour and I could not even begin to imagine what might lie behind them.
When I turned around, I saw much the same thing stretching out behind us. There must have been hundreds of doors.
‘Galy,’ I said, foolishly looking around as though I might see him somewhere. ‘We might need a little guidance here. Where do you want us to go?’
No reply came, nor any sign as to what we were expected to do. The corridor was empty save for ourselves, and eerily silent.
Ny shrugged his scaled shoulders, his wings rippling with the movement, and pointed the tip of his tail at a green door with thorns engraved around it. ‘That one, Mer!’ he commanded.
Meriall shrugged, too, and went to open it. Beyond it lay a tiny, one-room cottage with a stove, a neat table and chairs and wooden cupboards built into the walls. Colourful rugs covered the floor and the table was set for tea. There was nothing at all out of the way about it, except that it was upside down. The fact that the floor had taken up residence upon the ceiling did not appear to inconvenience either the rugs or the furniture very much.
I was intrigued.
But Ny merely said, quaint, and turned his back on it. Oddly fascinating as it was, I had to agree that its relevance was somewhat questionable, so I let it go.
By unspoken agreement we committed ourselves to opening as many doors as possible until we found something useful, and we spread out along the corridor. I went through a succession of portals rather quickly, and found behind them the following: an opulent bedchamber with a four-poster bed, its walls crusted with bright jewels; a square, featureless room flooded with steaming water, and filled with the scents of flowers; an apothecary’s shop in a state of disarray, half of its contents strewn all over the floor; some kind of closet containing about seventy examples of the same ruffled dress, in seventy different colours; and a tiny conservatory crammed with nara trees, though each one bore fruits of different shapes.
‘I feel like we have ended up in Galy’s cupboard of ideas,’ I said to Pense as I passed him.
‘Likely,’ he agreed. ‘What would yours look like, given physical form?’
‘Half empty, probably. With statues of you all over the place.’ I was childish enough to stick out my tongue at him. For this sally and its accompanying gesture I received a dig in the ribs and a kiss. Not a bad prize.
We went on, calling out our finds as we discovered them. I found a garden; a dark copse of mostly dead trees; a pit full of sand the colour of blood; a bubble of golden light and a room full of silver pipes all playing themselves at once. And, marvellously, a glade with a single tree, tall beyond belief, its trunk set with little doors and windows all the way up as though somebody lived within.
Meriall and Ny found a pool of pink water; a room full of sheets of parchment, all blank; an adjacent chamber full of broken pens; what looked like the inside of an egg, empty; and, alarmingly, a sheer drop into nothing.
Pense and Gio’s finds ranged from kitchens and dining chambers and other such mundanities through to an infinite expanse of stars and a cluster of spheres oddly suspended in mid-air, each one crowned with a miniature palace.
All of this interested me more than I can say, and I wanted to explore every single room (except for the sheer drop). But none of it bore anything that appeared to hold any relevance, either to the vision we had previously received or to anything Galy might reasonably be expected to tell us. It was all enchantingly, but frustratingly, random.
‘Galy?’ I called again as I closed a purple crystal door upon a small mountain of glittering gems. Ny passed by at that moment and wedged his tail in between the door and its frame, preventing me from closing it fully. His eyes lit up with avarice. I like this one, he informed me.
I nudged his tail out of the way with my foot. ‘You can’t have them.’
Why not?
‘Because they are Galy’s.’ I shut the door.
He invited us here. He wants me to have them! They are a gift!
‘They probably aren’t real.’
You don’t know that! The food was real!
I shrugged that off. ‘Shoo. We have work to do.’
Llandry! Open the door!
I refused, and Ny gave up the point eventually, albeit with very poor grace.
As he turned away, though, I noticed that his scales glittered oddly.
‘Ny.’
He stopped, and I went closer to examine him. ‘Your scales are diamonds,’ I said faintly.
They were unmistakeably so, black diamonds cut somehow into scaled shapes and laid over his hide like a coat. Then a mantle of gold and purple gems materialised over his shoulders, a crown of jewels encircled his head, and his claws turned to dark, glittering emeralds.
See, said Ny smugly. I knew they were for me.
This sign of Galy’s presence both reassured and troubled me, for should he be able to alter us with the same ease with which he Changed the Library around us? Had he, or was it just an illusion? I surreptitiously checked my own hands, in case my fingernails had turned into mother-of-pearl or something.
They hadn’t (slightly to my disappointment). I did notice, however, that arrows had appeared on the floor, pointing back down the corridor behind me.
I turned.
What was a long, straight corridor had now sprouted about a hundred new passages which went in a hundred different directions. (All right, I am exaggerating, but it might as well have been a thousand for all that we could expect to navigate that mess.) Worse, they shifted as I watched, swapping places, closing up only to open again in another spot, drifti
ng up heavenwards or swooping away into the floor… it was dizzying.
The arrows led straight into the heart of the chaos.
I sighed, squared my shoulders, and set off. ‘You couldn’t make it any easier, could you Galy?’ I asked, without much hope.
About three of the corridors obediently winked out. The rest writhed, if anything, more furiously than before.
‘Good try,’ I sighed.
Pense caught up with me and captured my hand, and we followed the arrow trail together, Ny and Gio and Meri falling in behind us. The arrows led into a passageway that soared skywards, and continued to do so even as we trudged up it. Its walls were translucent, and through them we could see the deep darkness of the sky outside, and the faint twinkle of its many stars. It was quiet, deeply so. The clink of Nyden’s bejewelled scales was all I heard, for our feet made no sound upon the floor.
At the distant end of the passage, there was a single, black door. It was perfectly round, with a large handle set into the centre.
Walking wasn’t getting us any closer to it. If anything, the door was growing farther away with every step we took. The corridor stretched, and the door all but disappeared from sight.
‘Galy!’ I said sharply, for I felt an almost palpable sense of fear. The walls pulsed and shivered with it. What was happening to him, that he was so afraid? Was that why he had been unresponsive before? He was in some kind of danger, I felt sure of it, but what could we do?
The door shrank almost to nothing — but then rushed back towards us with alarming speed. The floor buckled at the same moment, all but throwing us at it.
Pense got the door open, and we fell through it.
It slammed shut behind us with an echoing boom.
After such tension, I expected to find something remarkable and probably dramatic on the other side. Instead, we found a dull peace and thoroughly unprepossessing surroundings. The room we were in could even have been called bland.
It looked like somebody’s office. A large desk of uninteresting design dominated one wall, its surface stacked with books and papers and objects I had no name for. The rest of the place was so dull I can scarcely remember the details.
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