Seven Dreams (16 page)

Fabian, though,
had been obsessed with it from the day of their father’s death, and
he possessed a burning need to exact some kind of revenge. It was,
she thought, the source of the black moods which sometimes assailed
him. Jailing Bironn Astre had been enough, for a little while.
Serena was not surprised, though she was dismayed, to learn that he
had taken up the matter once more.

She didn’t say
any of this out loud, of course. Fabian reacted badly to any
suggestion that he ought to let it lie. Instead, she merely said:
‘Who was this other person?’

‘
A
woman,’ he said. ‘Her name was Valore Trebel at the time, though I
don’t think it is any more. I can’t find any trace of
her.’

A renewed howl of
misery from the next room interrupted Serena’s train of thought,
and she looked to the door, feeling the first twinges of annoyance
with the disruption.

‘
I
can’t, I can’t!’ wept Iyamar. ‘Stop pushing me!’

Serena tried to
school herself to patience. She didn’t think that Iyamar was
naturally melodramatic or difficult; nothing she had seen until
today had suggested it. But the girl was very young, and bitter,
and very, very afraid.

‘
I
think it’s time to intervene,’ Serena muttered, setting aside her
cup. She strode to the door and threw it open.

A little parlour
lay beyond, much of the cramped room taken up with a table and six
chairs. Teyo was sitting at his ease in one of the chairs, his feet
set upon the table. Egg stalked about at the back of the room,
scowling fiercely. She was probably working herself up to kicking
something again.

Iyamar huddled in
a corner, clutching herself and sobbing.

‘
Iyamar,’ said Serena. ‘You do know that Teyo can shift into
other forms besides the draykon?’

Iyamar made no
response for a few moments. Then, she lifted her head and stared at
Serena. ‘You mean like... like Jisp?’

Serena smiled
inwardly; she’d hoped that would get Iya’s attention. The girl
adored Jisp, and frequently abducted the little lizard from Teyo’s
care. The prospect of being able to join her tiny playmate in a
similar shape couldn’t fail to appeal to her.

‘
If
you learn to shift between human and draykoni, you’ll also be
learning to shift into other forms,’ Serena continued. ‘It’s the
same thing.’

Iyamar said
nothing, but her tears had dried up and she appeared much struck by
the idea.

Serena turned her
attention to Egg. ‘You’d better come in here, Egg,’ she said
coolly. ‘The furniture cannot bear very much more violence today, I
think.’

She turned and
swept back into the living room, disposing herself comfortably upon
the divan once more. A moment later, Egg came trailing
in.

‘
Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Only it’s just so — so
very
—’

‘
I
know,’ said Serena.

Egg nodded and
went to the door. ‘Got to say, though,’ she added, pausing on the
threshold. ‘Kid doesn’t let anybody push her around. I like that.’
She left.

Fabian said, ‘I’m
going to chase it up.’

Serena just
looked at him. He stared back, unrepentant and uncowed.

She struggled
with herself. It wasn’t good for him to wear out his life and his
youth in bitterness and schemes of revenge, and she wished so very
much that she could do something to change his heart. But she
couldn’t, and it mattered to him more than anything else in the
world.

Fabian added, ‘We
might... we might get it all back.’

He meant the
house and the land. As though returning to the place of their
childhood would make everything better; that it would reverse,
somehow, the effects of their father’s ruin and suicide and their
mother’s madness. Serena didn’t think that it would, but Fabian...
Fabian believed it with all his heart.

‘
I’ll
help you,’ she said.

Fabian
smiled.

‘
But!’
she added, her lips curving into a mischievous smile, ‘I want your
help with the keys, too.’

Fabian grinned.
‘It’s to be a bargain, is it? That’s my sister.’ He stood up and
stretched, looking suddenly better. She watched him with a mixture
of gladness and concern. If only it had been something else —
anything else — returning that lively sparkle to his eyes! But he
was interested in nothing else. He was as he was, and Serena would
have to do what she did best: damage control.

She only hoped
she could rein Fabian in enough to avert the total disaster she
feared lay ahead. If Fabian felt that something lay between him and
his notions of justice — obstacles, people, anything —- no power
could stop him. He would do whatever it took to remove them, at any
risk to himself. And though he never willingly endangered either
his sister or his team, his actions couldn’t help but affect them,
too, sometimes.

Serena finished
the last of her cayluch, watching as Fabian left the room with a
new bounce in his step. She stood up and wandered to the window,
wrapping her shawl tightly around herself. Outside, the sun hung
low in the sky, golden and shining with that peculiar autumnal
radiance that she loved. The mist of the early morning had gone,
the clouds had dissipated, and the day was fine, if chill. The edge
of the city was spread before her, and beyond it, fields recently
harvested of their bounty. She gazed at all this goodness for some
time, reflecting with some little concern on the many complications
that were suddenly cropping up in her life. There was Iyamar’s
training to attend to, if she would permit it; Fabian was on the
trail of a second Bironn Astre, and like to grow obsessive over it;
full Lokants and partial Lokants and the LHB wandering in and out
of her life; mysterious artefacts and strange archaeological
discoveries cropping up all over the place; Halavere Morann and
Ylona Duna’s questionable loyalties; and all of that on top of her
regular job. At least Teyo and Egg were stable, steady and
reliable, and needed little of her help or guidance.

She hoped, with a
long, inward sigh, that the next few weeks would prove to be quiet
ones, and that Fabian would soon resolve this new mission and move
on.

A glitter of
something dark caught her eye, and she raised her gaze to the sky.
It was a bird of some kind, or probably a small flock of them.
Their behaviour was odd; they were hovering in a tight cluster in
the sky, in a fashion wholly incompatible with typical birdly
behaviour.

No. It was not a
bird, nor anything like. Her unbelieving eyes discerned the shape
of a letter forming in the sky, an S, in glittering, inky black.
More followed, until a word appeared.

Seven.

She watched,
transfixed, her heart pounding. More words appeared, bit by bit, as
though someone were writing each letter one at a time upon the
sky.

Seven
mortal Realms I saw and seven keys had I.

The sentence was
written clearly, like dark, silvered ink upon blue parchment. More
came.

Seven
Dreams I wrought anew and cast them sea to sky.

Find
the treasures, win the games and all the world explore,

Live
the fables, be the tales, and you will find the door.

There followed a
symbol, a round glyph of some kind, which it took Serena a moment
to decipher. It was, she realised, a representation of the seashell
spiral pattern that characterised the strange stone they had found
at the dig site.

‘
Wha...’ she murmured, stunned.

The door opened
behind her, and Egg’s voice interrupted her stupor. ‘Er, Serena?
There are words in the air.’

‘
I
know,’ she said faintly.

‘
Any
idea what that’s all about?’

‘
No
idea.’

‘
Should be fun,’ said Egg, and disappeared again. Serena
listened absently to her footsteps fading away, her brain
struggling to make sense of what she saw.

One thing only
was clear to her: all hope of a quiet few weeks must be abandoned.
Things were about to become... complicated.

‘
I
want to hire you,’ said Lady Glostrum, and smiled.

It was two days
later. Serena and her entire team — even Iyamar, who had mostly
recovered from her agonies — were assembled in Oliver Tullen’s
office. They had been peremptorily summoned by note, and urged to
make all due haste. That had alarmed Serena, just a little. Oliver
was never in a hurry.

On reaching his
office, however, she had swiftly discovered that it was not Oliver
who wished to see them, but Lady Glostrum. Her ladyship and her
husband were comfortably ensconced in Oliver’s better chairs,
though neither of them looked especially relaxed. They were
conferring together in hushed undertones as Serena’s team walked
in, while Oliver watched the play of images on a portable bulletin
board he possessed. Serena felt more than a little covetousness for
that device. They were fabulously expensive and had to be given
regular maintenance by the sorcerer’s guild of Irbel; very few
people could contrive to own one.

‘
Excellent!’ her ladyship had said upon seeing them arrive. The
smile she had bestowed upon them had been very friendly, but also a
little bit calculating. ‘That was quick, indeed. Excellent. I do so
like promptitude.’

Egg’s body had
stiffened with displeasure and suspicion upon seeing Oliver’s
visitors. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘And what are
we
doing here?’

‘
You
are here at my request, Ms. Rutherby,’ Oliver had said briefly,
without looking up from his board.

Egg had folded
her arms and glared. When her ladyship spoke the word “hire”, Egg’s
suspicions hardened into serious displeasure. ‘Ohhh,’ she said with
appalling sarcasm, ‘of course you do! It’s lucky that we’re
available to every random person who finds their way in here. Oh,
no, wait. We’re not.’

Oliver ignored
this outburst. Addressing himself to Serena, he looked up briefly
from his perusal of the news and said, ‘I imagine you will have
guessed the nature of the job, Ms. Carterett.’

‘
Something to do with the riddle?’ said Serena. She could not
entirely suppress the note of hope that crept into her voice. In
spite of Fabian’s indifference and Egg’s loudly-voiced disapproval,
she would like nothing better than to find herself involved with
this adventure.

The boards had
been full of nothing else since the glittering words had appeared
in the sky. The riddle had captured the imagination, and excited
the curiosity, of the whole world, or so it seemed. It was talked
of everywhere Serena went; everyone had some theory to share; and
everyone wanted to know what the keys were, and where the
mysterious door might lead.

It hadn’t taken
the boards’ journalists long to make the connection between the
Balbater dig site and the riddle that had appeared so soon
afterwards, either. Teams of scholars, adventurers and
treasure-seekers had quickly assembled and set out to seek more
sites like it. Nobody had yet discovered any new site, that she had
heard.

Oliver nodded his
head at Lady Glostrum, ceding the floor to her. ‘It
is
about
the riddle!’ said her ladyship. ‘However did you guess?’

Serena smiled.
‘But how can we help? We are not academics or
explorers.’

‘
But I
have plenty of those,’ she said. ‘Team LHB, as some are inclined to
call it, already sports a full cast of historians, geographers,
anthropologists, archaeologists, cartographers, explorers,
linguists and assorted others who all think they can find another
site like Balbater dig. I don’t need any more of those.’

‘
What
do you need?’

‘
I
need a small group of resourceful people with many unusual skills,
and who are accustomed to working together. And I do not think it
will hurt at all if two of them happen to be
shapeshifters.’

Serena glanced at
her colleagues. Fabian stood to her right with his hands in his
pockets, looking as though his mind was only half occupied with the
conversation. The other half, she supposed, was mulling over the
problem of Valore Trebel. Iyamar hung back near the door, a trace
of a frown creasing her young brow — probably prompted by the word
“shapeshifter”, Serena guessed. Teyo stood with silent attention,
showing no sign of either approval or disapproval.

Egg gave a
scornful laugh. ‘So you just want to pick us up and make use of us
at your convenience, is that it? We’ve got those interesting,
slightly illegal
skills and you never know when you might
need them.’ She paced in a tiny circle, working herself up into a
fine rant. ‘You aristocrats! As if owning half the world wasn’t
enough, you think you can pick up and drop the rest whenever it
suits you!’

Lady Glostrum did
not appear to be offended by this outburst. On the contrary, she
watched Egg with a mild kind of amusement. That, of course, only
incensed Egg more.

Serena remembered
Egg’s words when the riddle had appeared in the sky.
Should be
fun.