Orlind (44 page)

This improvement
helped immeasurably, but they were not yet safe. As soon as Llandry
was no longer focusing on the cold and the fight to breathe, she
began to realise how tired she was. Her frozen muscles were
cramping badly and her heart laboured so hard she feared for
herself. Pensould was right: they
must
land, and
soon.

Everyone all
right?
Ori asked, ending his descent a few hundred feet above
the surface of the water.

All still
here,
Pensould replied.
Including the humans.

Straining to see
Ori some way ahead of her, Llan noticed an obscuring cloud lying
low on the horizon. At least it
looked
like a cloud, only it
appeared to be too near to the water for that.

That’s some
mist,
Ori commented.
Reckon it’s something to aim
for?

Llandry looked
around. No alternatives offered; everywhere she looked she saw more
featureless water.

Go for it,
she said.
It’s a better alternative to the sub-aquatic
notion.

Right.
Ori
set a cracking pace, hurtling towards the mass of cloud-stuff too
fast for Llandry to keep up with him. Her smaller size, and her
burden, made that impossible.

Too
fast, Ori!

I’m checking
for dangers!
he shot back.
Catch up with me when you
can.

Ori,
Eva said we must stay together!

I’m not going
to be far ahead.
With that he was gone, dwindling to figure no
larger than a bird in her vision.

We can manage
just a little more speed, Minchu,
said Pensould, sounding
worried.

Speak for
yourself,
she retorted, but nonetheless she tried. Pense drew
alongside her, the tips of his outstretched wing brushing hers. A
flood of energy raced through her, revitalising her exhausted body,
and she shot forward.

Pense, you shouldn’t...

No
help for it. We can’t let Ori get too far ahead.

Llandry couldn’t
argue with that. To her relief they began to gain on Ori
again.

They were less
than two hundred feet away when the sun dimmed and disappeared and
mist enveloped her. The quality of light changed utterly. It was
more than the simple obscuring of direct sunlight by the drifting
fog. It felt to her like the cool blue twilight she had so admired
in Nimdre at that time when the sun was close to setting and night
was creeping in. But the sun had been high in the heavens only
moments ago.

Next came a more
alarming realisation. Without landmarks of any kind, Llandry was
losing her sense of direction. This, too, went beyond the
reasonable. Not only was she unsure which way was
forward
and which
back the way she had come,
she had also forgotten
which way was
up
and which
down.
Was she even
upright? Suffering a panicked conviction that she was not, Llandry
spun herself around. But this, too, felt wrong and she quickly
reversed her action.

Was Pense calling
for her, or was that her imagination? His voice was thin and
distant, and soon it faded altogether. Panicking, she tried to
force herself to think clearly. This place was strange and wrong
but it did not feel wholly unfamiliar. Had she been unaware of her
real location she would have assumed herself to be in Iskyr or
Ayrien; she felt the same sense of fluidity that characterised the
Off-Worlds, the same currents of magical energy tugging at her. The
peculiar part was that it felt like neither one nor the other
Off-Realm, but rather both.

No matter. If
they had strayed into the Otherrealms, she ought to be able to
manipulate it in the same way she could rework the patterns of
Iskyr. She had better do so fast, for she had completely lost
control of herself and her surroundings. Panicked, she flapped her
wings harder, trying to catch herself. She was falling!

... But somehow
it felt as though she was falling
upwards.
Air rushed past
her face and beat down upon her wings, forcing her ever higher. Or
was it lower? She might simply be upside-down, a thought which made
her panic anew for Eva would surely have fallen off her back by
now.

Clumsy in her
hurry, she clutched at the fabric of this peculiar place and forced
it into a new shape. The air reworked itself at her instigation,
cushioning her descent (or ascent) until her pace slowed. Without
pausing to think, she threw the effect outwards as far as she
could, hoping that it would extend far enough to benefit her
companions.

Then all she
could do was wait as she drifted in the sky like a daefly, making
her gentle way upwards or downwards or sidewards to wherever she
was bound.

***

To Eva, the
journey over the mountains seemed interminable. The cold first
confused, and then finally numbed, her thought processes until she
was barely aware. All she could think to do was cling desperately
to the collar Llandry wore for her benefit, praying that her frozen
hands wouldn’t weaken. A strong piece of rope fastened her belt to
Llandry’s collar, but she didn’t dare rely on it to catch her if
she fell off.

The flight passed
in a haze, her awareness of time or distance fading to nothing as
she dreamed endlessly of warmth. The heating pipes under the floors
of her home; the ceramic hot bricks that her maid placed under her
blankets at night; the wealth of quilted coats, thick petticoats
and soft wool gloves she had to choose from when the cold seasons
came... these passed through her mind in a succession of torment,
and she only felt colder in comparison.

Then she came
alert with a jerk. Her circumstances had changed... was she
falling? Her mind, still fogged with cold, could make no sense of
her predicament. She was travelling fast, in the abandoned sort of
way that suggested a headlong fall. Which way was she facing? She
couldn’t be falling
sideways,
surely?

Her thoughts were
too fuzzy for panic, so she accepted this with a strange calm until
the sensation suddenly ended. Now she was floating, but that too
was odd because she was turning slow circles in the air, helpless
to right herself. The feeling was more pleasant than otherwise; she
felt cocooned as if within an enormous bubble, enveloped within a
cloud of warm air. Under this benign influence her body slowly
warmed and her wits reasserted themselves to discover that all
motion had stopped. She lay with her eyes closed, feeling oddly as
though she lay with her face against a ceiling and empty air under
her back...

She opened her
eyes.

At first she saw
nothing but blackness, which sent a buzz of apprehension shooting
down her spine until the environment slowly lightened around her.
Limbane’s glasses adjusted themselves to the new light levels until
her vision was clear once more, and she saw...

Not a great deal.
She presently established that despite the instincts of her
befuddled senses she was lying on the ground in a reassuringly
ordinary fashion. Above her stretched an indigo sky, topped with a
lowering mass of grey cloud. Turning her head to the right, she saw
a blue haze which eventually registered as water. Bare rock
stretched perhaps fifty feet in front of her, before it ended, to
all appearances, in a sheer drop into the sea.

Turning her head
to the left, she saw a fortress of white stone, its four rotund
towers stabbing pugnaciously at the sky. Seeing that it was
apparently hovering some few hundred feet above the ground, she
began to worry that she had hit her head. The enormous building
hung there with no discernible means of support, supremely
unconcerned that its existence defied every known law of nature. It
also had neither door nor windows, at least on the face that she
could see.

Her perusal of
this puzzling place was interrupted by a voice calling her name.
Tren! She had been so busy with her struggle to make sense of her
surroundings that she’d quite forgotten the reason she was here, or
the party that she’d come with.

‘
I’m
here,’ she croaked. ‘Here!’ she repeated, managing a more
creditable shout. Tren appeared in her field of vision, looking
anxious. He dropped to his knees beside her with a sigh of
relief.

‘
Eva,
thank goodness. Are you hurt?’

Eva flexed her
limbs and back experimentally. ‘I don’t think so.’

Tren picked up
each of her arms in turn and pulled off her thick gloves, inspected
her fingers and chafed her hands when he found them intact. He
repeated this performance on her feet and legs, then planted a
swift kiss on her lips.

‘
All
is well. Up we get, now. Careful.’ He hauled her upright, obliged
to support most of her weight until she got her feet under her. No
sooner did he release her than a wave of dizzy confusion sent her
tumbling back to the ground.

‘
Okay,
here’s the thing,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘Something
about this place is putting your various senses at war with each
other. Your eyes are telling you you’re upright, looking at a sky
above you and rock below you and various other things to left and
right. But your other senses are interpreting everything in several
other directions. That’s the nearest we can get to an explanation
so far.’

‘
We?
Are the others well?’ Eva tried shutting her eyes to block out the
muddle, but doing so achieved the opposite for she was gripped with
a conviction that she was balancing on her head. She opened her
eyes again hurriedly and focused on Tren.

‘
All
alive. Yes, don’t do that. Keep your eyes open. I achieved a near
perfect head-stand before I figured that out.’

Eva blinked at
him. ‘I never knew you had a talent for gymnastics.’

‘
Neither did I.’

‘
Let’s
try this again,’ she said, pushing herself to her feet. Tren took
hold of her shoulders, steadying her while she adjusted to the
curious confliction of her different senses.

‘
I
think I’m stable,’ she said after a few moments. ‘Keep hold of my
hand, though.’

Tren did so, and
led her away. After a minute or two’s walk they came upon Llandry,
Pensould and Orillin in human form, all holding tightly to one
another as they tottered about on shaky legs.

‘
Eva!’
Ori yelled, throwing up a hand in greeting. ‘What do you make of
that?’

He flung an arm
in the direction of the fortress. Only it had stopped being a
fortress and had decided to be a castle instead, the sort with
turrets and flags but with no door, no windows and certainly no
drawbridge. And the bare rock over which it floated had turned into
a sea of waist-high bushes, lavender-leaved, red-blossomed and
writhing with insects. Eva twitched her nose in distaste, noticing
the cloying, repulsive floral scent emitted by the strange
vegetation.

‘
I
think this whole island is pure distilled madness,’ she said
calmly, ‘and the sooner we get away from it the better.’

Ori beamed. ‘I
knew you’d say that.
I
think it’s terrific.’

‘
Well
then please feel free to take the lead. We’d better find a way into
that... er, building.’

‘
Nothing so simple,’ he assured her. ‘Llan and Pensould and me
will get us in.’

Half amused, half
reassured by this swaggering confidence, Eva exchanged a look with
Tren.

‘
Follow that boy?’ Tren said with a chuckle.

‘
Link
arms with me,’ she said, threading her arm through his. ‘If I try
to turn on my head you’ll stop me, I hope, and vice
versa.’

‘
That
or we will achieve a most interesting tandem hand-stand.’ Tren
smiled down at her with a creditable attempt at his usual
insouciance.

‘
At
least nobody’s looking if we do,’ she muttered. The two of them
waited for the three draykoni to pass, then fell into step behind
them.

This short
journey was by far the strangest of Eva’s life. Never could she
have imagined it would be so hard to put one foot in front of the
other without veering off track, or inverting herself. She and Tren
suffered an ignominious tumble at one point, but being unhurt they
were soon on their feet again (their feet, Eva was quick to check,
and not their hands), and back on their way. The three ahead kept
to their purpose with a little more style and a little less
involuntary comedy, and soon all five stood at the base of the
strange building-in-the-sky.

It had morphed
again, losing most of its surface area in favour of immense height.
It was shaped like a needle and looked woefully unstable. Eva eyed
it with grave misgivings.

‘
Still
no door,’ Tren observed.

‘
There
will be,’ Ori said with unshaken confidence.

Eva thought of
her time in the Lowers with Tren, when the two of them had climbed
their way up a similar tower without noticeable means of entrance.
They had reached the tiny window at the top; Eva had then moulded
it into a size wide enough to admit her person. That had been
possible because they were in Ayrien, and she was possessed of
enough draykon heritage to make the relatively simple procedure
work. What could three full draykoni do?