Orlind (16 page)

‘
No,’
Eva replied. ‘At least, not yet. Limbane will talk with us first.
Then he’ll decide what else is to be done.’

Ana looked ready
to explode again, but Griel drew her away and began talking to her
in a low voice. Eva didn’t try to eavesdrop. Whatever they said was
between the two of them.

Thankfully, Ana’s
fit of temper cooled. By the time Limbane arrived - translocating
in and skipping the door altogether - she more or less resembled a
rational being once more. She met Limbane’s scrutiny with a cold
stare.

‘
So,’
Limbane said. ‘You’re Krays’s lackeys.’

‘
Limbane...’ began Eva warningly, but Ana’s laughter drowned
her out. The sound sent a shiver up Eva’s spine. Unhinged, most
definitely.

‘
Once,
we were,’ she hissed at last. ‘Lackeys indeed,
for we questioned nothing. And he used us for everything. But he’s
a fool. So stuck on his stupid machines, he could never see the
potential.’

‘
Of
what?’ Limbane questioned sharply.

‘
Of
the draykon bone. He piled it all up like it was any other building
material. Like so much wood and stone and metal. If we’d left it up
to him, he’d have wasted it all.’

‘
So
you diverted it, hm? Rebuilt the draykon instead?’

‘
Of
course we did! I wanted it. Maybe I’ll still get my draykon,
someday.’

Limbane’s cunning
old eyes turned sharp. ‘How did you know what it was? Did he tell
you?’

Ana snorted.
‘Share information? Not him. Not with his
lackeys.
’

‘
Then
how did you know that it was a skeleton? And how did you know you
could resurrect it?’

Ana’s expression
turned shifty and she clammed up. It was Griel who finally
answered. ‘There was a book. Found it in a tower down in the
Lowers. All about the history of the place, it was, and it laid it
all out.’

Eva started. He
must mean the tower belonging to Andraly Winnier: technically the
woman was a partial Lokant, but she was an unusually powerful one.
One of her parents had been a full-blood. She had long been
assigned to keep an eye on the Lower Realm, or Ayrien as they
called it, and she catalogued all her findings in a large book that
Eva had had in her possession for a time.

Eva hadn’t seen
anything in there about draykon resurrection, but... there had been
some missing pages, roughly torn out.

Limbane was
obviously reaching the same conclusion, for he was looking livid.
Eva winced. Andraly would be in trouble later for that slip.
Writing such things down and leaving the book lying around in her
tower? Stupid.

‘
Fine,’ Limbane said tightly. Their explanation didn’t please
him, but at least it made sense. ‘Why aren’t you still working for
him?’

‘
He
cast us out,’ Ana said. ‘He lied to us, kept us apart. He made me
think my husband was dead! He punished me by using me in the lowest
ways, when I couldn’t escape from him.’

‘
But
you betrayed him,’ Limbane said, relentless. ‘Perhaps you deserved
those things.’

The mad fury was
coming back into her eyes. Eva hoped Limbane knew what he was
doing.

‘
And
my husband?’ she demanded. ‘Did he deserve to be used as a test
subject? He’ll never be the same!’

Limbane’s sharp
eyes flicked to Griel. Eva and Tren had tracked the man down to a
tiny house in Ullarn, where he’d been hiding out. He had been
running an underground trade in draykon bone out of that house,
siphoning off Krays’s hard-won supplies and using them to raise
funds for himself. Griel had shown them what Krays had done to him.
He’d taken a knife, split open the flesh of his own arm and
displayed the bone that lay beneath.

It hadn’t been a
human bone anymore. It was draykon bone, reworked into a shape that
almost fitted Griel’s arm. Almost. His use of that arm was clumsy.
The same had been done elsewhere in his body - some of his ribs,
one of his legs. He was no longer as physically superior as he had
been before, struggling with a limp as well as diminished use of
his arm.

For the first
time, Eva wondered whether the probable object of Krays’s
experiment had been achieved. Griel was a sorcerer, so he already
possessed some draykon blood somewhere in his family line. Had the
insertion of the draykon bone enhanced his natural abilities? Was
he a stronger sorcerer for it?

She added that to
her list of questions to be asked, whenever Limbane had finished
with the two of them.

‘
What
do you think?’ Limbane asked of Griel. ‘Did you deserve
that?’

Griel’s answer
was quiet. ‘No.’

Limbane smiled
for the first time since he’d entered the room. ‘I agree. My
erstwhile colleague has always lacked a few things, like common
sense. It’s his ego that does the damage, I’m afraid. He’d assume
you would be far too afraid of him to ever consider betraying him
again. But, of course, you only run away from him all the harder.’
He sounded pleased. That was a relief.

‘
That
being the case,’ he continued, ‘I won’t waste time threatening you.
Let’s hope our common goal is sufficient to keep us moving in the
same direction. Yes?’

Ana nodded,
wary.

‘
Excellent,’ Limbane smiled, slipping all the way back into his
role as a mild-mannered, jovial old gentleman. ‘Let’s have
something to drink, and possibly a bite to eat, shall we? Then we
can discuss how we can best put our new alliance to use.’ He turned
and slipped out of the room. She could hear him talking to Egren
and Rael through the partially-open door.

Ana’s gaze found
hers, and Eva was startled to recognise a question in her
expression. The woman was looking for reassurance, and from
her.
Was it because they’d met before? She and Tren were
more familiar to the two of them than Limbane was.

Eva nodded
confidently and smiled at Ana. She trusted Limbane. His drive to
wipe out his rival would outweigh any other considerations he might
have. That most definitely put them all on the same
page.

Soon a healthy
luncheon was laid out on the table that occupied the centre of the
room. They gathered around it, everyone except Tren who looked as
uncomfortable as Eva felt. Associating with enemies was one thing;
sitting down to a friendly meal with them was a step beyond
that.

‘
Very
well,’ Limbane said after he’d eaten a little. ‘No doubt you’re
aware that what we primarily need from you is information. Oh, I
could storm Krays’s Library, but he knows how to hide his projects
from me. We need an inside look at what he’s been up
to.’

‘
What
do you want to know?’ Ana asked. Griel had put food on her plate,
but she hadn’t touched it, and he was too busy worrying about that
to eat anything himself. So much for Limbane’s picnic.

‘
What
is he
doing?
’ Limbane said, leaning forward. ‘What is the
purpose of the draykon bone? Why is he building these machines?
Tell me everything.’

Ana looked at her
husband, a long look full of some communication Eva couldn’t
decipher. Finally Griel nodded.

‘
We do
not precisely know what his purposes are,’ he said. ‘But we will
tell you everything that we know. You may make more of it than we
have been able to.’

‘
Excellent,’ Limbane said. ‘Do begin.’

So Griel began.
Eva was grateful that he had taken over the narration; his speech
was clearer, less erratic and easier to follow than his wife’s. He
was also generally the more rational of the two - an occasional
paranoid fit notwithstanding - so his tale was constructed in a way
that his audience could understand. He began his story with the
discovery of the draykon bone, then known as the istore gem. Much
of his tale ran along lines that Eva had expected: Krays had put
the two of them, his most trusted agents at the time, in charge of
collecting up every piece of that bone and bringing it back to
him.

Griel and Ana had
used whurthags to achieve this, dangerous beasts native to the
Lower Realms. He and Ana had only been able to control them because
their Lokant blood gave them an advantage over ordinary summoners;
even then their control had not been perfect. When it had slipped,
people had died, including friends of hers and Tren’s. She
swallowed the lump that suddenly rose in her throat as Griel
narrated this part in the tale. In the chaos that had followed,
poor Meesa had been almost forgotten. She deserved better than
that.

She felt Tren
stiffen beside her as Griel talked of subverting Ed Geslin, a young
sorc who had been employed as an aide on the Night Cloak. Tren’s
best friend, he had been, and he had not survived his entanglement
with this adventure.

The rest of
Griel’s tale coincided perfectly with everything they already knew,
and Eva’s guesses. They’d woken the draykon and failed to control
it. The creature (Pensould, as it turned out) had flown away, with
the newly-Changed Llandry.

Then came the
interesting parts. Griel had been badly injured by Pensould, and
Ana had used the Map to take him back to Krays’s Library. She now
took over the tale briefly, recounting how Krays had taken Griel’s
corpse from her and sent her away. Later he’d told her that he had
been unable to save Griel - or rather, that he refused to. Griel
had died, or so she’d been told.

But Griel had
instead been fed through Krays’s experimental programme with the
draykon bone. After the sorcerer recovered from the implantation
process, he had been sent to Ullarn, forced to take up a role with
his master’s device design.

‘
There
were different types of machines we were trying to build,’ Griel
said in his deep voice. ‘Some were creatures, designed to be
aggressive but controllable. We used the whurthags as a pattern.
They were a hybrid of biological and mechanical material, with
embedded draykon bone. The prototypes were used as guards in the
Library - I encountered some of them later. But those first ones
were very crude. We built bigger, faster, better ones. They were
created to be as physically powerful as possible, so as to be a
match for any physical force. But
he
was most interested in
the embedding of the draykon bone. They were to be as comfortable
in the Off-Worlds as the creatures they were modelled on, only more
easily controlled. That was the objective.’

Limbane was
frowning. ‘Why wouldn’t he just use real creatures? He has a strong
enough will to dominate anything he chooses, I would’ve
said.’

Griel shrugged.
‘He is not given to freely sharing information. He told me only
what I needed to know in order to run the projects.’

Limbane nodded.
‘Damn him. What else did you build?’

‘
Weapons. Guns mostly, but improved models. Those were mundane,
no draykon bone involved. We also built energy collectors and
directors.’

‘
What?
What are those?’

‘
The
collectors are supposed to siphon away Off-World energies and store
them. The directors serve a similar purpose, only they don’t
collect, they merely divert the energy. Acting as funnels, in a
sense.’

‘
Off-World energy?’ That was Tren. He leaned forward, his anger
forgotten, listening to every word Griel spoke. ‘What do you
mean?’

Griel looked at
him impassively. ‘You’re a sorcerer. You work with these energies
yourself.’

Tren nodded. Eva,
however, was confused. As a summoner, her skill was with the
creatures that roamed the Off-Worlds; she wasn’t tuned in to the
patterns of things the way sorcs were. She realised Limbane was
giving Tren the same questioning look she imagined was on her own
face.

‘
The
Middles are relatively stable,’ Tren said. ‘In terms of the flow of
natural energies, that is. Calm, controlled. That’s why we can live
there. But the Off-Worlds are pretty violent in contrast. There are
masses of conflicting energies in the Lowers; that’s why the
landscape changes as it does, or so the scholars believe. I see
them in colours, sometimes, if I try. Nobody really knows what
those energies are, or why they have the effects they
do.

‘
But
that’s why the animals have been going crazy. The draykoni seem to
be tuned in to those energies in a way no other species can claim
to be. Waking them up has stirred everything else up, too. The
creatures are reacting to the energy flow, which is completely
erratic and off-kilter now.’

‘
Hm.’
Eva thought about that for a moment. ‘So it’s a natural power
source. Is that what you’re saying?’

Tren spread his
hands. ‘Like I said, nobody knows. But I’ve never heard of anyone
seriously trying to manipulate it, let alone siphon it
off.’

Eva looked at
Limbane. He hadn’t asked any questions. She had a feeling he knew
more about this than he was saying, as usual.

‘
How
far did you get with this project?’ he said sharply.

‘
We
have tested a few prototypes,’ Griel replied. ‘None are yet
successful on the scale Krays requires.’

‘
What
scale does he require?’