‘You will have to eat some humble pie,’ I warned him. ‘Can you manage to look suitably shame-faced and repentant?’
Nyden’s head drooped and his eyes appeared to double in size. He looked piteously at me, a soulful show of remorse somewhat belied by the mischievous glint of one protruding tooth.
‘Your fang’s showing,’ I said.
It disappeared. ‘I’ll practice.’
I beamed at him. ‘Good. Who are you taking with you?’
His eyes widened and he sat up very straight, chest puffed out with pride. ‘Oh my, I get to pick a team?’
‘If you please. It would help if we could get an idea of who’s willing to go along, of course.’ I addressed the latter to the group in general, afraid that nobody would volunteer.
Nyden eyed Avane hopefully, but she hesitated, and said nothing. His shoulders drooped a little.
‘Right, I need recruits!’ he bellowed. ‘Smartish, we do not have all day.’
In the end, he managed to round up five: two of the people unfamiliar to me, together with Liat from Nuwelin and two from Avane’s village, Anshalin.
Avane herself approached me soon afterwards, still clad in her wings and scales. I am worried about the corruption, she told me. If we don’t stop it spreading, it will reach my village. I have to take a group and deal with that, somehow.
Take as many ancients as you can get. Elders, if you can find any. I caught her up on our findings there, and Nyden’s curious effect upon the putrescent energy of Orlind. Careful, though, I finished. It won’t easily touch them, but... we saw what happens when an Elder goes mad. If it does get on top of them, it won’t be pretty.
Avane twitched her tail three times, a gesture characteristic of her. It seemed to mean general approval. I will take everybody who’s not already assigned elsewhere. There ought to be enough of us to make a difference.
And with that, all was agreed and arranged. Nothing remained but to throw ourselves upon Gio’s mercy once more and venture back to Sulayn Phay. I couldn’t quiet the voice in my mind that questioned my sanity in doing so. We still had no way to be certain that Gio could be trusted, only a gut feeling that he was sincere. But we had no other choices by then. We had to act quickly. There was no time to delay while we searched for some other Lokant with access to Krays and Dwinal’s Library, and of whose trustworthiness we could be more certain. It would have to be Gio, and we would have to make it work.
I had to take a few deep breaths before I was ready to leave. We were heading back into danger, and so much was riding on our success... or failure. I felt the pressure keenly.
But I would have Pense and Ori, the two people I trust most in the world besides my parents. And we made a group of five drayks and one Lokant, which made us by no means powerless. We would be all right. We had to be.
I toyed briefly with the idea of leaving Sigwide behind once again, but he was so unhappy at the prospect that I swiftly dismissed the thought. Besides, I had no one to leave him with. Larion would be coming along with me, and everybody else was assigned to some other task.
You will have to behave very well, Sig, I told him with a vague attempt at sternness. This is important, what we’re doing. And dangerous.
Sigwide said nothing, but he touched his tiny nose to mine and quivered with love and I had to be satisfied with that.
Galy opened up the roof, and Ny’s team began to depart on the wing. I stole a glance out at the remaining Lokants; all they could do was watch as a half-dozen draykoni emerged without warning from the black fortress and vanished into the distance. I took heart from their perplexed and faintly worried expressions. It must be clear that much was afoot, and they could guess at none of it.
‘Hold the fort, Galy,’ I said aloud. ‘We’ll be back.’
The stones rumbled in reply.
‘Will he be all right?’ Meriall said doubtfully. ‘He’s already been murdered by these people.’
‘Yes, that was when he was a squishy human. I mean, Lokant. Now he’s a building and he could squash Dwinal with a single block of stone. None of them will get in here without his say-so.’
‘Ready?’ Gio said. He looked nervous. So did Larion... actually, so did everyone. Even Pense was unusually tense.
‘Not at all,’ I said, with a tiny smile. ‘But let’s go anyway.’
15 VIII
We Band of Fools Go After the Lokants.
I am losing track of the date, again. There is no real calendar in Iskyr, no time-keeping. There isn’t even a cycle of days as there is in Glinnery. That problem is much worse in the Lokant Libraries. Venture out there and who knows where you end up in the timestream.
So, all this probably happened on the fifteenth. Who knows.
Who cares.
Gio translocated us into Sulayn Phay in two groups: me and Pense and Ori first, then Meri and Larion. He took us to the same closet as before, which was even more fun with extra people. We had to wait in the enclosed space until Gio had all of us assembled, and then we waited again while he ventured out to check if it was safe to emerge. He was noticeably more cautious this time than he had been before. Word of his defection would spread fast, and he could not rely on going unchallenged if he was spotted.
‘Be careful,’ Ori whispered before Gio left.
Gio nodded. ‘It will be all right. If anybody asks, I am here to collect my personal effects.’
With that, he was gone, leaving us to huddle in doubtful suspense until he returned.
He was not long. ‘Come out,’ he whispered, opening the door a crack.
We emerged and stood blinking in the white light of that same, stark hallway. Gio set off at once, leading us in the other direction this time. ‘The route from here to Dwinal’s quarters is clear for the moment, but we will have to move fast.’
We obeyed, traversing corridors as quickly and silently as we could. Gio kept up his station some way ahead, checking each turn in the hallway before he permitted us through.
All went smoothly. ‘Three more minutes,’ Gio said tersely.
But at the next turn, he stopped abruptly and held up a hand. Wait.
We waited, hardly breathing. Footsteps sounded close by, and Gio nodded to somebody just out of our sight. He spoke, in a dialect I could not decipher. It was almost familiar enough for comprehension, but not quite.
Somebody replied, a male voice.
Gio took a step back, and another. He held up his hands in a gesture both placatory and, I thought, an attempt to prevent the further progress of whoever he had encountered.
But in vain, for another Lokant swept past him and stopped in shock upon seeing us. The man was about Gio’s own age, but thinner and sickly-looking. His eyes narrowed when he saw us, and he rounded upon Gio, a torrent of angry words pouring from his lips.
Gio merely stared at him, and the flow of vituperation came to a swift end. Then the sickly man’s head bowed in submission. He turned and walked away again, back the way he had come.
What just happened? asked Meriall.
Lokant thing, Ori replied. Gio just laid a compulsion on him.
Which means what?
Dominated his will, made him see and do whatever he wanted. It’s his strength. He is amazing at it. Ori’s mental voice rang with pride at this display of Gio’s skill, and I gathered he had seen Gio do it before.
That is creepy beyond all reason, Meriall said flatly.
I had to agree. Eva is pretty good at it, too, but it has always chilled me to watch her do it. It has its limits — Eva could only so manipulate one person at a time, and it did not last indefinitely. Soon, the sickly Lokant would shake off Gio’s commands and remember the truth. But in the hands of somebody skilled and trained, it is frighteningly powerful.
Gio did not look happy about it, however. I wondered whether the man he had just manipulated had been a friend, once.
Gio stepped out again and we followed. There were no further interruptions, and we arrived at a door Gio found rele
vant within a couple of minutes.
The door looked featureless to me, not even a doorknob or a handle in sight. But it was not so to Gio, apparently, for he laid a hand against it with a practiced gesture and waited for three seconds. Then he pushed at the door, confident that it would open.
It didn’t.
He stopped, blinking in surprise, and tried again. The result was the same.
Gio sighed, and rubbed at his eyes. ‘That was fast,’ he muttered.
Ori touched his arm. ‘What’s amiss?’
‘Grandmother has already had me locked out of her quarters. I need to find someone with access. Wait here.’ He set off up the corridor.
‘We can’t just stand here,’ Meri called after him, but to no avail. Gio disappeared from view.
Larion shrugged, and took up a relaxed stance against a wall. ‘Nothing we can do but wait.’
Pense walked away a few steps and took up a guard posture. He was ready to Change at a moment’s notice, if necessary, and I had no doubt he would eat anybody who tried to harm us. I hoped, for the Lokants’ sake, that nobody would come this way before Gio returned.
Ori and I followed his example, and waited. My heart was pounding uncomfortably hard, though I tried not to show fear. I felt horribly exposed, standing helplessly in the middle of a corridor somewhere in Krays’s Library with no Gio, nowhere to hide at need, and no way of getting out either. A traitorous thought snaked through my mind: what if Gio never came back? What if he had left us here?
It took him far too long, twenty minutes at least, and each minute seemed twice as long as the last. We waited, nerves growing by the second. But he did return.
‘Sorry,’ Gio mumbled as he reappeared. He hurried to the door and laid his hand against it again. His hands were bloodied, and he had something small, complex-looking and metallic strapped to his wrist. That, too, was covered in blood.
The door opened, and he hustled us inside, and shut the door behind us.
We were in a sitting room, reassuringly empty and ordinary enough, with arm chairs and a rather chic table. I scarcely looked at it. Gio’s bloodied hands had all of my attention.
‘Gio...’ I said. ‘Er. How did you get us in?’
He looked down at his hands with a frown, and rubbed them on his dark red cloak. It didn’t really help. ‘Access is biological,’ he said in a hurried way, his eyes scanning the sitting room. ‘Grandmother lets all her relatives in here, until she doesn’t. If that stops working then I have to do it the hard way, which means taking somebody else’s access. If you aren’t a blood relative it’s done by way of an implant.’
He stopped there. It was not necessary for him to elaborate. Had he really tracked down some hapless Lokant with access to Dwinal’s quarters and hacked some kind of an implant out of them? I was shocked to silence, and so was everybody else, for nobody spoke.
‘He won’t die,’ Gio added, his frown deepening. ‘It was the only way I could help you. You did say it was important?’ He looked at Ori, uncertain.
Ori looked taken aback, but he recovered quickly and smiled at Gio. ‘We couldn’t get this far without you.’
True, but I could not help feeling shocked. What manner of upbringing had Gio had, that he could coolly cut open one of his former colleagues and seem so unaffected? But considering what his family were like, he probably deserved credit for not being much more of a psycho.
‘We have to walk a bit,’ Gio said, setting off towards a door at the back of the sitting room. ‘All her personal chambers are irrelevant, she keeps nothing useful in those. What we want is at the back. There’s a lab and a storage room and a cell.’
A cell? Seriously, this family is messed up. Who keeps a cell at the back of their personal quarters?
‘We need to be quick,’ said Gio tersely. ‘Someone will find Gharo before long and there will be trouble.’
We ran into the second problem at the door to Dwinal’s lab. Her rooms had been empty up until that point, but a low growl and an echoing snarl spelled the end of our period of peace. Pacing up and down before the door was a whurthag... or something like it.
You might have seen those before, in the news if not in the flesh. A few moons ago, when the realms were in chaos and gates were opening everywhere between the worlds, we had a lot of whurthags roaming through the Seven. It wasn’t a good time. They are brutal and vicious and hard to subdue. I had hoped I had seen my last whurthag some time ago, for they are native to Ayrien and not Iskyr and the Summoners’ guilds are keeping them out of the Seven.
It took me a moment to realise that this one was not quite a whurthag, or not as I knew them. It was black-furred and big and four-legged as I would expect, its massive jaws bristling with teeth, its eyes ghost-pale and eerie. But its movements were odd, its shape peculiar. It was half mechanical at least, its hide stretched over parts made of something else — metal or whatever.
How very Krays. He had terrorised my poor Waeverleyne with mechanical draykoni, fire-breathing and everything. How like him to co-opt the design of another fearsome creature and make a weird mechanical hybrid of that, too.
We stayed well back from the creature, alarmed by its snarling but mildly reassured that it had not yet attacked us. It was intent upon guarding the door, and as long as we did not approach it seemed it would not leave its post.
‘Typical,’ Gio sighed. I expected something more from him — some idea of how to deal with the creature, perhaps, some attempt at formulating a plan.
Instead, he tensed and hurled himself at the thing.
The whurthag-thing greeted Gio with a flurry of snarls, and man and creature rolled in a mass of black hide and red cloak as Gio fought with it. I could not even tell what he was trying to do.
Ori leapt forward with a cry of alarm, his body a blur as he began to Change — only to realise that the room was far too small to accommodate his draykon shape. Pense and I were a step behind him, though there was precious little we could do. Could I Change into a whurthag? I had never done so before, and there was no time to think about it.
‘Stay back,’ Gio shouted.
Then it was over. The whurthag slumped to the ground and lay inert, eerily so. It looked like a model, like a thing that had never had life enough to move.
Gio stood up shakily, his arms striped with bloody wounds inflicted by raking teeth. ‘They can be disabled, if you know where the switch is.’
‘And if you don’t mind it tearing you to ribbons in the process.’ Ori growled the words, rigid with anger, but he was gentle enough as he tore a strip off Gio’s cloak and bound up his bleeding arm. ‘Idiot,’ he said roughly, but he softened the accusation with a kiss, and Gio did not appear to mind too much.
I watched with some alarm. Twice in quick succession, Gio had gone to extraordinary lengths to help us. Either he was determined to allay our suspicions in the furtherance of some nefarious scheme, or he really was as desperate to please us as he seemed. The one possibility filled me with foreboding, but the other tore at my heart.
In another moment, Gio had the door to the lab open.
And there were the energy collectors, or some of them. We found only three, though we searched thoroughly. The lab struck me as too neat and too unassuming by half. Considering we had wandered into the lair of evil here, I was expecting something more sinister than clear benches, a neatly-swept floor and cupboards full of nothing especially recognisable or interesting. A half-completed project would have been nice — something that clearly demonstrated both the intent and level of progress our opponents had achieved. Failing that, some kind of manifesto of villainy would have been acceptable too. A sheaf of notes, perhaps, clearly detailing what they expected to get out of haunting Orlind, murdering Galy and a slew of my people and setting Gio on us.
They were singularly uncooperative villains, alas, for there was nothing of use. Just three of the cumbersome energy collectors waiting quietly at the back of the room.
‘Only three?’ said Meriall
in disgust. ‘That’s a let-down. I can hardly imagine that will be enough for us to do anything useful with.’
‘But it is three fewer machines with which they can kill Elders,’ Pense said, and hefted one of them. He grimaced, his arms shaking. ‘They are heavy. I advise two to each machine.’
I hurried to help him. Meri and Larion secured a second between them, and Gio and Ori took the third. ‘Moment,’ said Gio. He went silent, his eyes closed, and I wondered what he was doing. ‘Right,’ he said then, and vanished with Ori, leaving the rest of us to await his return.
He was soon back, reappearing in precisely the spot from which he had departed moments earlier. He had set himself a translocation point, then, in Dwinal’s lab. I never did understand how that works, because I do not think Eva can do it — she can only use those points set by full Lokants. Gio is a handy ally to have, in that respect.
Away Gio went again, this time taking Meri and Larion and the second energy collector with him. Ori had returned with him after his first trip, but the others did not; when Gio reappeared he was alone.
‘Last one,’ he said to me with a smile. He looked tired, whether because translocating frequently and with such burdens was so exhausting, or because of the strain of transgression and the fear of discovery I could not guess. The lost blood cannot have helped, either. I felt a little concern for him.
‘Thank you,’ I said to him as he took hold of us, and smiled back at him.
His smile turned warmer, but he looked startled. I felt that tug of sympathy at my heart once again. How could a person be so surprised and so delighted by a mere smile? It was like no one had ever treated him kindly in his life before.
I braced myself for the nauseating whirl of translocation, but before we could depart, I felt a wild writhing and scrabbling against my chest. Sigwide was going mad, clawing at his carry-pack and chattering at the top of his voice.
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