Orlind (30 page)

‘
Agreed.’ Guiding her with unusual gentleness, Pensould led her
to the little house they used as a safe haven and put her to bed.
Drawing her into a comforting embrace, he tucked blankets around
her throat and laid a kiss on her hair.

‘
Sleep,’ he instructed. Feeling protected and safe, Llandry
allowed her fevered mind to slide into unconsciousness.

She was woken
soon afterwards by the sounds of heart-broken sobbing.

‘
Who’s
that?’ she mumbled, opening her heavy-lidded eyes.

Pensould was
already out of bed. ‘I think it is Avane,’ he said, helping her to
stand. The sounds came from the next room; the walls were thin and
crude and did little to block out the noise. Her heart fluttering
with dismay, Llan trotted through to the little living parlour,
praying she wasn’t about to hear yet more bad news.

Avane was huddled
on the floor, convulsed with tears. Ori was hovering over her with
an air of desperation, obviously lacking any notion of what to
say.

‘
Avy,’
Llan murmured, going to her knees beside the woman. ‘What’s
happened?’

‘
N-nothing, exactly,’ Avane sobbed, ‘only with all those
Lokants here I w-wondered what’s b-become of Lyerd, and I feel so
awful for leaving him alone all this time, and I realised maybe
I’ll never be able to get back to him and he’ll b-be alone forever,
and...’ Her words dissolved in a renewed flood of tears. ‘I’m
s-sorry,’ she stammered, gulping in air. ‘I’m just n-not cut out to
b-be a soldier.’

‘
I
don’t think any of us are,’ Llan said frankly. ‘But we can keep
going, because we’re needed and we have to.’

Avane nodded,
uttering a damp sniff. She didn’t meet Llandry’s eye.

‘
Lyerd
is fine, I’m sure of it. He is much safer out there than he would
be here. And if Yora was summoned along with the others, she will
have got someone else to care for him. She wouldn’t leave him
alone.’

Avane nodded
again, her tears more or less under control now. ‘I just want this
to be over.’

‘
Me
too,’ Llandry said with a long sigh. She wrapped Avane in a hug,
full of sympathy for the poor sorceress. Other than Ori, Avane had
had the least time of any of them to adapt to her new life. Lacking
any kind of ambition, she didn’t revel in the power of it the way
Ori did. She was also old enough that her youthful fearlessness -
if she’d ever had any - was long gone. Being a parent as well only
took her situation from bad to worse. If Llan could have kept her
out of the conflict somehow, she would have. But the inescapable
truth was that they were going to need her. Four draykoni against
the invaders was already poor odds; three would be beyond
saving.

‘
Green
flare,’ Ori said suddenly.

Llandry sat up.
‘What?’

‘
Green
flare!’ Ori repeated. ‘That’s a summons, right?’

‘
Should be,’ Llandry said, her heart beginning to pound. The
Commander wanted them! ‘Maybe the Commander’s ready to make a major
attack,’ she suggested, torn between hope and dread at the idea.
‘It might be the beginning of the end of all this mess.’

Avane nodded, not
looking hopeful. Llandry didn’t feel hopeful on that score either,
but she made herself appear so.

‘
Let’s
see what the Commander wants,’ she said, drawing Avane to her
feet.

Leaving the
cottage, Llan suffered a moment’s severe apprehension about
trekking back across the city to the Commander’s base. She toyed
with the idea of shape-shifting into a small bird’s body and
winging her way there, but since most of the conflict was taking
place in the air this struck her as a singularly bad idea. If a
draykoni didn’t spot her, she’d be lucky to avoid the streams of
bullets her father’s machines were once again spraying into the
air.

But on foot,
they’d be all the more visible; and what of the whurthag mechs? Had
Limbane’s people dealt with those, or had some of them reached the
city? Llan had suffered injuries enough at the hands of a real
whurthag; the prospect of facing one or more of the chilling
mechanical ones was a paralysing thought.

But these fears
vanished when she found two Lokants waiting outside, one of whom
was Avane’s friend Yora.

‘
Limbane sent us to fetch you,’ she said. ‘We’re to spirit you
past the mess.’ Catching sight of Avane’s tear-stained face, she
wrapped an arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘Lyerd’s fine,
Avane,’ she assured her. ‘I left him with my grandmother. Some of
us had to stay with the Library, after all. They’re getting along
swimmingly.’

Avane looked so
relieved Llandry feared she might dissolve into tears again, but
she mastered herself. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered with deep
gratitude. Then, to Llandry’s admiration she squared up her
shoulders, swallowed her distress and adopted a look of
determination. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’

A few moments
more brought all six of them into the Commander’s presence. The
second Lokant - a man Llandry didn’t recognise - released the hold
he had on her wrist and stepped away with a polite nod. Thanking
him, Llandry went straight to Limbane.

‘
My
parents?’ she asked at once.

He nodded
briskly. ‘Located successfully. Your mother and her friend are in
Irbel, and your father is back in this city.’

Llandry let out a
long sigh of relief, welcoming the release of tension that this
news brought her. ‘Thank you, Limbane,’ she said with grave
sincerity.

Limbane waved a
hand. ‘Your father tells me that there is a fair chance that his
home realm will send aid. If that is the case, then it was worth
the diversion. In the meantime, I need the four of you to assist
me.’

Limbane’s motives
were, as always, odd. His words implied that it would
not
have been worth the effort if there hadn’t been the possibility
that Ynara would bring help.
Never rely on the friendship of
Lokants,
she thought with some bitterness.

Llandry directed
an enquiring look at Commander Iver, who was standing slightly to
one side. He looked haggard, and she could only imagine his state
of mind. Men and machines lost, and command taken out of his hands
by a stranger... but a hint of relief lurked in his eyes,
too.

‘
Listen closely,’ Limbane said, drawing the four of them to
him. ‘Those draykon mechs are your biggest problem. They haven’t
been belching flame for some time now, so I believe Pensould was
right about the solar power and the regeneration time. But they’re
protecting the live draykoni and we can’t get near them. We need to
take them down as soon as possible - certainly before they regain
enough energy to resume burning your trees.’

‘
How
many of them are there now, sir?’ Ori enquired.

‘
Four.
The biggest difficulty is getting near them. Some of Iver’s
soldiers have tried it, but they can’t fly fast enough. They’re
being picked off far too easily, if not by the mechs then by the
living draykoni. What we want to do is get these up there.’ He
showed them a box small enough to rest in the palm of his hand.
‘Highly explosive. Nothing’s penetrating that cursed hide of
theirs, so the only approach we can come up with is to blow the
damn things up. We need you to shape-shift; something winged, big
enough to carry this but no bigger. You’ve got to get in without
being seen by the draykoni, deposit these and get out of there,
fast. I’ll have people on the ground setting them off once they can
see you’re clear. Got that?’

Limbane rattled
this off in such a hurry that Llan struggled to keep up. He spoke
to them as though they were his own people, used to his manner of
instructions.

‘
I
think so,’ she said, sounding anything but sure.

Limbane eyed her.
‘Any questions, out with them now.’

Nobody
spoke.

‘
Then
get to it. Yora will equip you with the explosives. I don’t need to
tell you that it’s imperative to keep hold of them once you’ve
picked them up.
Don’t
drop them on the city!’

Chapter Twenty One

‘
Is
everything prepared?’ Krays phrased it as a question, but his
manner was confident. Offensively so.

‘
We
are ready to take you to Limbane’s study,’ Eva confirmed, working
hard to sound as confident and unconcerned as he did. But at her
answer, Krays’s manner changed from expectant to outright smug; he
even
smiled
, a little bit. Seeing him in good spirits was
far more unnerving than any threatening behaviour. Eva couldn’t
shake the feeling that they had just played directly into his
hands, in some manner she wasn’t aware of.

But it was too
late to back out.

‘
Then
do so now,’ Krays said coldly.

Suppressing a
shudder, Eva forced herself to hold out a hand to Krays, wrapping
her fingers around his wrist with a feeling of acute revulsion.
Tren took her other hand. She paused long enough to utter a silent
but fervent hope that they were doing the right thing.

Then she accessed
the Map. Having grown used to manipulating this strange piece of
magic, it was a simple matter for her to locate Limbane’s private
and very secure reading room. With a final pang of misgiving, she
completed the Travel process and deposited the three of them in
Limbane’s jealously protected space.

‘
Excellent,’ said Krays with another of his chillingly
good-humoured smiles.

Eva made no reply
save a curt nod, and stood back with Tren as Krays looked around
the room. They had made careful preparations before bringing Krays
here. For one thing, Tren had designed a complex illusion to
conceal the door. If Krays was hoping to go from here into the rest
of the Library, he would have a difficult time locating the exit.
Even Eva couldn’t tell where it was.

They had also
spoken with the handful of Lokants who remained in the Library.
Those few had colluded with Eva to make it seem as though the
Library still operated on full capacity, in case Krays did escape
the reading room.

And finally, Eva
knew well that Limbane’s alarm system was part of the test. Krays
had asked them to prove their power in Limbane’s domain by finding
a way for him to visit the reading room
safely.
If she and
Tren wanted to convince him of their usefulness, they had to find a
way to turn the alarms off.

So they had. The
alarms on Krays’s room had been silenced, not without considerable
trouble on the part of the other Lokants. Now she watched, heart
beating too fast, as Krays prowled around, poking into bookshelves
and opening up chests, cupboards and Limbane’s desk. He seemed
comfortable enough so far, a fact which gave her vague hope that
they might pass this test.

Then Krays
stopped before a glass-fronted bookcase, surveying it closely. The
glass was more of the strange stuff that Eva saw everywhere in the
Library: the same material, or so she thought, that filled the
lenses in her daylight-proof glasses and made up the surface of the
walls in the chart room. Krays began to manipulate the bookcase’s
glass doors in ways she couldn’t understand, touching some areas,
drawing his fingers over the transparent surface. To her
astonishment, the books that she could see through the glass
changed: the worn leather-and-cloth spines faded away and stacks of
compact boxes appeared, like the ones she had seen in Krays’s
Library.

Krays kept on
with this for some time. Finally, he made a small sound of
satisfaction, unhooked a set of diminutive tools from his belt and
went to work on the keyhole. He got it open with minimal effort,
extracted a single box, then shut the doors again. A quick check of
the box revealed a thin slice of some kind of metal or crystal or -
in fact, she had no idea what it was. But that it contained some
kind of information she didn’t doubt.

Krays looked up
with another of those satisfied smiles. ‘Thank you for your help,’
he said. The words were polite, but the tone in which he uttered
them was mocking.

Then he
vanished.

‘
Um,’
Tren said. ‘He’s... gone?’

Eva suffered a
moment’s paralysing panic that he had got into the rest of the
Library somehow, in spite of their efforts. Maybe she was wrong to
think he couldn’t Travel inside the Library. If so, he could be
anywhere, with nobody to stop him from taking control of Limbane’s
domain...

But no. That was
not a reasonable fear. The other Lokants had assured her - several
times - that the Library was protected against this kind of
problem. Each Lokant had to have an implant in order to use the
PsiMap, and the Library’s wards specifically blocked all implants
save those of Limbane’s own people. Eva hadn’t understood precisely
how, but she didn’t need to: as long as the Lokants were sure of
it, that was fine with her. And they had been sure. She’d got the
uncomfortable impression that this theory had been tested, and
proved, many times over.

So, Krays almost
certainly wasn’t in the Library anymore. He had most likely gone
back to his own.