Orlind (45 page)

Which put her in
mind of a question she wanted to ask. ‘What does this place
feel
like to you three?’

‘
Everything,’ Llandry said promptly. ‘It’s like bits of Ayrien
and Iskyr and the Middles all mixed up.’

‘
I’d
say the same,’ said Ori. ‘Like someone threw all three into a pot
and stirred them up with a giant mixing spoon.’

‘
What
an expressive image,’ she murmured. Her own senses were not so
powerful as to detect all that, but it made sense with the more
muted impressions she was getting. The three worlds, already so
closely situated, had somehow become oddly
scrambled
in this
tiny piece of the Cluster. That, perhaps, was the reason for the
disorder, or part of it. The island had no single natural state,
but three, all competing with one another. That explained the
Changes, too; the landscape had metamorphosed twice during their
short journey across the island, once into foul-smelling marshland
and then into a carpet of mushrooms rather like those she and Tren
had seen in Iskyr. The Changes were happening with frightening
speed, much more quickly even than they had in the
Lowers.

The truly odd
thing, though, was that she couldn’t sense a single animal anywhere
on the island.

A flight of
stairs materialised in the air before the impossible tower, tracing
a path up to the featureless stone base of the building. It was a
graceless thing of rough, heavy stone blocks without shape or
style, but it was functional. Ori beamed with
satisfaction.

‘
That’s ridiculous, Ori,’ Llandry said in deep disgust. ‘If you
are going to conjure a staircase out of thin air, at
least
do it with some style.’

In an instant the
repudiated stairs became a gracefully curving staircase of white
marble, with airy banisters and a strip of rich blue carpet running
up the centre.

‘
Very
pretty,’ Pensould said. ‘Let’s hope we can climb it in our current
state without falling down, hm?’

‘
Oh,’
said Llan, crestfallen. ‘I didn’t think of that.’

Pensould gave her
a quick hug. ‘All will be well, Minchu. I am happy to take a bruise
or two for the sake of
style.’
The words sounded mocking but
his smile was perfectly sincere, and he laid a kiss on her forehead
for good measure. Llandry smiled up at him in gratitude.

‘
I
hate to rush anyone,’ Eva said mildly, ‘but it’s
cold
out
here.’

‘
Sorry, m’lady,’ said Ori cheerfully, and began the ascent.
Llan’s design was superior over the first one at least in being
narrower and equipped with a rail; Ori was able to grip with both
hands as he made his way upwards. Llandry and Pensould
followed.

Tren stood back
and gestured for Eva to precede him. ‘I’ll catch you if you fall,’
he said wickedly.

‘
You’ll be well punished for that remark if you do,’ she
retorted, stepping onto the staircase. ‘I may
wish
I’d
retained the figure of my girlhood, but fortune has not been so
kind.’

‘
I
hope you aren’t suggesting there’s anything wrong with your
figure,’ Tren said. Turning her head to look down at him, she
realised his face was approximately eye-level with her behind and
he was eyeing it most appreciatively.

‘
I see
the general disorientation has done nothing to interfere with your
evil side.’ Turning her eyes resolutely forward, she proceeded
upwards at a quicker pace, trying to ignore her extreme vertigo.
She was not usually afraid of heights, and the altitude in question
was hardly considerable; but ascending such a contraption into
empty air when her brain still insisted she was the wrong way up
was... unnerving.

Tren made no
reply to this last sally of hers, and she guessed he too was
absorbed in the struggle to climb steadily upwards instead of in
some much more inappropriate direction. Nobody spoke at all until
all five were at the top of the stairs, staring up at the sheer
face of the tower.

‘
About
that door you mentioned,’ Tren said, nudging Ori.

‘
What
door? That door?’ Ori gave Tren an innocent look, hard put to
suppress a grin.

An enormous
double door had appeared in the previously solid wall, tall enough
to fit all five of them if they’d been standing on each other’s
shoulders. It
appeared
to be made out of solid
gold.

‘
Very
nice,’ Llandry said. ‘If a bit... over the top.’

‘
You
wanted style!’

‘
That
has gone well past style and emerged somewhere in the vicinity of
excessive vulgarity,
’ Eva said with strong disapproval.
‘Good gracious, Ori, where were you brought up?’

‘
Not
in a palace, anyway,’ he said with untouched cheer. ‘Oh well. It
will get us in. Open, door!’

The doors obeyed,
swinging ponderously inwards with well-oiled smoothness.

Nobody
moved.

‘
So
who wants to go first?’ Ori said after a moment.

‘
You,’
said Llandry promptly.

‘
Why
me?’

‘
Because you volunteered.’

‘
Yes,
well, I think I’ve had enough of being the leader.’

Pensould shook
his head. ‘I will take the lead. Ori will come behind me, then Llan
and Eva, and finally Tren.’

Eva wrinkled her
nose. ‘Is it a coincidence that we ladies are placed in the
middle?’

‘
No.’

‘
That’s very sweet, Pensould, but also a tiny bit patronising.
We don’t need to be defended, you know.’

‘
Yes,
you do.’

‘
Can
we just go?’ Tren said. ‘Much longer and nobody will be going
inside, because we will all have fallen off.’

Pensould nodded
once and strode through the doors. Ori darted after him, and Eva,
with poor grace, fell in behind Llandry. Though she wouldn’t have
admitted it, she did find it reassuring to have Tren close behind
her.

The moment they
were all inside, the doors swung closed again.

‘
It
might be better to leave them open, Ori,’ Eva said, suppressing a
flutter of nerves.

‘
I
didn’t close them,’ he protested.

‘
Llandry, then? Pensould?’

Both shook their
heads, looking as puzzled and troubled as she herself
felt.

‘
I
suppose you can open them again?’

Ori turned
around. ‘Um,’ he said, his face registering confusion. ‘The door’s
gone.’

A glance behind
confirmed Ori’s observation. ‘Excellent,’ she muttered. ‘More fun.’
Looking around for some clue as to the nature of this predicament,
Eva saw only a round stone room, devoid of objects or furniture
save for a flight of steps that spiralled around the wall up to the
ceiling. Her ears, though, picked up the distant sound of footsteps
approaching from somewhere above. The step was oddly arrhythmic, as
if some beast with four legs was using only three.

She saw why as a
human figure came into view, stepping through an apparently solid
wall onto the top step. He took three steps down then bent with
remarkable fluidity to put his hands on the floor, executed a
graceful forward tumble down three more, then restored himself to
his feet and repeated the process. His attire was eccentric, to say
the least; as he drew closer she could see that his garments were
crudely made, as by someone with minimal skill at tailoring. He
himself was as old as Limbane in appearance, his face mapped with
wrinkles, but he didn’t appear to be enfeebled by his
age.

His hair was pure
white, and when he finished descending the aerial stair to stand
before them she realised he was not a human but a
Lokant.

He looked all
five of them over with deliberate attention, one at a time. His
expression was suspicious, potentially hostile, but he made no move
to attack.

‘
Who
are you?’ he said at last. His manner was blunt and challenging,
but there was no violence in his demeanour. His language, on the
other hand, was odd indeed. Those three words were, she guessed,
the same ones Limbane or Krays would have used in their own tongue,
but this man’s intonation resembled nothing she’d ever heard
before.

‘
Explorers,’ Pensould said in answer to his question. ‘And who
are you, my good sir?’

‘
I am
the Master of Orlind!’ he said. ‘This is
my
Library. What
are you doing here, huh? Why are you here?’

Chapter Thirty

‘
Library?’
Eva gasped. ‘But this is... how can it be a
Library?’ The unstable buliding much more closely resembled the
fluid constructions of the Off-Worlds than the Libraries kept by
Limbane and Krays. Nothing here suggested that it was, or had ever
been, anything of that kind.

The
self-proclaimed Master of Orlind took a few rushing steps until he
was far too close for her comfort. Pushing his face at her, he
said, ‘What are you saying? Don’t like my Library?’

Eva took a
prudent step back. ‘It just doesn’t feel like a Lokant Library to
me.’

‘
And
it won’t, will it? Won’t ever again, most like.’ His suspicion
changed to sadness, then flashed through to resolution. ‘Best that
it doesn’t,’ he nodded to himself. ‘Quite right. Too
dangerous.’

Tren had eased up
alongside her while this speech was progressing. ‘Stay close,’ he
murmured in her ear.

Eva was quite
prepared to do that. The Master of Orlind’s manner gave her a
prickling sense of unease; he was as deeply broken as the rest of
this place. Judging from the wide berth that Llandry, Ori and
Pensould were giving him, it wasn’t just her instincts that were
bristling with alarm.

‘
Why
would it be dangerous?’ she asked, keeping her tone calm and
conversational. He was already paranoid, and his attention kept
returning to her with her white Lokant hair. She had no wish to
figure any more urgently as a danger.

‘
Asking stupid questions,’ he said in disgust and went rambling
off in a circle, oblivious to the way his visitors backed off at
his approach. He paced around a few times, tipping forward onto his
hands and rolling through on every fourth step. Eva watched,
mesmerised by the sheer oddity of this behaviour. He talked
incessantly in a stream of muttered words that she couldn’t catch.
Who could he be talking to?

Eventually he
came up to her again. ‘You’d better be off,’ he said with a weird
smile. ‘Shan’t be letting any Lokant push me out, not
me.’

‘
I’ve
no desire to push you out,’ Eva said coolly. ‘I simply want to know
what this place is.’

‘
I
have
told
you, haven’t I? Besides, you ought to know that.
It hasn’t been
that
long.’ He emphasised his words with
vigour, almost spitting them at her. ‘Used to be the reigning
monarch of the Libraries, that’s the case.’

‘
You
mean you were the reigning monarch?’

He snorted. ‘Not
me.
Her!’

‘
Her?
Who is she?’

‘
You’re standing in her,’ he said, beaming, and he realised
that he was referring to the building. ‘Used to be the very best,
oh yes.’ Pride and smugness shone in his face, then changed
abruptly to brooding resentment. ‘Until they tore her up. No
respect, that’s the truth.’

‘
I’m
sorry to hear that,’ Eva said with civility. ‘Who are the people
responsible for breaking this wonderful Library?’

‘
Wonderful. It was, that,’ he mumbled. Then his head jerked up
suddenly and he fixed her with a wide-eyed stare. He remained that
way for several long seconds, as though he was listening to
something that she couldn’t hear.

‘
No,
no, they aren’t here for that,’ he said, shaking his head. Then,
‘What? No! No, no, you’re wrong.’ He was shaking his head in
violent denial, growing more and more upset. ‘Don’t say that, she
can’t take any more...’

Eva guessed that
the ‘she’ in question was the building. ‘I promise you, we are not
here to damage the Library in any way,’ she persevered. ‘We are as
anxious to depart as even you could wish. Just please answer a few
questions-’

‘
Your
shoes!’ he thundered, staring at her in horror. ‘Give me your
shoes! All of you! Shoes!’

Eva blinked.
‘I... what? Why our shoes?’

‘
It’s
in the shoes!’ he shrieked, working himself into a frenzy. ‘Get
them off!’

‘
Better humour him,’ Tren murmured. ‘I don’t see as he’ll calm
down otherwise.’

Eva nodded
agreement and bent to unfasten her boots, moving slowly so as not
to frighten him further. Stepping out of them both, she backed
away, leaving the shoes surrounded by empty space. The Master of
Orlind pounced on them and began a frenzied exploration, searching
hard for something she couldn’t guess at. Hurling hers aside, he
repeated this operation on all four pairs that had been surrendered
to him.

‘
Bah!’
he spat at last. ‘Not the shoes, very well, not shoes. Here, have
them.’ He began throwing them haphazardly back at their owners,
pacing and muttering as he did so.