Lokant (22 page)

Llandry studied him. He
did not seem threatening, but his appearance troubled her. How had
she failed to sense his approach? Nor had Pensould apparently
noticed anything. He had appeared as abruptly and as noiselessly as
the man who had tried to take her. That thought made her
shiver.

She hesitated, then
allowed her body to reform into her human shape. The process still
felt odd to her; almost as if her bones and muscles and skin melted
and then moulded themselves into the new shape. It was unpleasant.
She blinked her human eyes at the man and took a few steps
backwards.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Limbane,’
he said with a bow.

‘Limbane? What is your
first name?’

‘Just call me Limbane.
May I address you as Llandry, or do you prefer Miss Sanfaer?’

‘Until I understand who
you are and what you want, I am unconcerned with what you call
me.’

Limbane nodded. ‘I’ve
been looking for you for some time, but you mustn’t let that alarm
you. I have nothing to do with the man who tried to abduct you. His
name is Krays, by the way.’

Llandry started. ‘How
do you know about him?’

‘Because I have spoken
to your friend Mr Kant.’

Fear gripped her at
that name. ‘Did you hurt him? Is he all right?’

‘Of course I didn’t
hurt him. I met him in a library at Draetre. We had a perfectly
civilised conversation. I would like to have the same with you, but
I must suggest we hold it elsewhere. You’ve created a disturbance
here that I could feel a long way off; and if I could feel it then
I imagine Krays will soon be along as well.’

She shuddered at that
prospect. ‘Is that how you found me?’

‘Yes. Pulling a draykon
out of the ground tends to create some waves. I imagine even your
friends in Glinnery will feel the effects.’

‘I don’t
understand.’

‘You do, I think. You
saw the effects of last moon’s events. When the draykon bones began
to be disturbed, all the worlds felt it. All the beasts felt it. I
imagine we’ll be seeing more of those pesky rogue gates making a
nuisance of themselves, and a lot of confused beasts wandering
between the worlds. I might suggest you refrain from waking any
more draykons at present.’

‘I don’t-’ she began,
but then she stopped. Another figure blinked into existence, one
with white hair, a colourless face and a cold expression.

‘Limbane,’ said Krays,
without an ounce of warmth.

‘Ah, Krays. I had a
feeling we would be seeing you.’ He eyed the younger man with no
sign either of surprise or trepidation. He turned back to
Llandry.

‘I would urge you and
your companion to consider my offer fairly urgently,’ he said.

The presence of Krays
decided her.
Pensould, come with me.

He bristled with
suspicion.
Are you sure?

No. But I’m going to
trust him.

Pensould replied only
with a snarl of annoyance, but he rapidly adopted his human
shape.

‘Excellent,’ Limbane
said. He took Llandry’s arm in one hand and gripped Pensould’s
wrist with the other. With a cool nod to Krays, he disappeared.
Llandry had just time enough to grab Sigwide before she was whirled
away.

When Eva arrived at the
tower in the Lowers, it had the unpromising air of abandonment
about it. Not a whisper of sound or movement reached her as she
walked around the base of the narrow building. Her heart thumped
oddly with suppressed anxiety at the thought that Tren might not be
here after all.

It still hadn’t
developed a discernible door, so she took the other route. Her
practiced fingers sank easily into the stone; working it like clay,
she moulded the first few rungs of a ladder in the side of the
stonework. To a strong magical practitioner like herself, it was a
simple matter to reform parts of the realm of Ayrien according to
her needs, though it was only recently that she had begun to learn
how far it was possible to take the technique.

Urgency lent her speed,
and she was up the side of the tower and through the window at the
top within a matter of minutes. Inside she found the round chamber
that she’d visited before, only it didn’t look the same. Someone
had tidied up. She wondered who; had Ana been back here?

That prospect made her
wary in spite of the silence. Finding a door partially hidden
behind a curtain, she eased it open and listened for a moment.
Nothing. She stepped softly down the stone stairs that wound down
into the depths of the tower. Finding another door halfway down,
she went through it.

Light-globes flared
into life as soon as she stepped into the room. The sudden flash
made her blink, and for a few moments she couldn’t see. She stood
still until her sight cleared. The presence of the charged globes
suggested that somebody still used the tower, and she didn’t want
to blunder into Ana.

The room proved to be
empty. It appeared to be a reading chamber, and for a single
occupant. A lone wing-backed chair was placed before a cold, dark
hearth. Rugs covered the floor to ward off the chill, and bookcases
lined the walls. Eva gave them a cursory perusal, but no titles
caught her eye as significant.

She returned to the
staircase and descended another storey. The next chamber down was
some kind of laboratory. Eva lingered here rather longer, examining
the instruments that sat atop the high counters. She recognised
tools for magnification among them, but most were beyond her
comprehension.

The stairs went on and
on, descending further than seemed possible given the apparent
height of the building. Eva was standing with her hand on the
doorknob of the next room down when she caught the sound of slow
footsteps coming towards her. She froze, her heart picking up
speed. The stairwell was bare of hiding places; her only option was
to conceal herself in the room ahead and hope to remain
undiscovered.

But then a voice began
speaking and she realised that her presence was already known.

‘It’s only recently
that I have taken the trouble of installing wards in this building.
I never needed to before, because your kind tend to be shy about
wandering about down here and the Others never took much interest
in Ayrien. But here again, more of you.’ The voice was female, low
in tone and authoritative. And unmistakeably annoyed. It was
certainly not Ana’s voice.

‘Then again, you’re a
bit more elusive than some of the others. Harder to pinpoint your
location. And that’s unusual.’

Eva turned to face the
stairs. The woman’s legs appeared and then the rest of her, not
quickly for she apparently did not think it worth hurrying her
pace. She was wearing trousers, Eva was interested to note; not
absolutely unheard of but certainly uncommon in Orstwych and Glour.
She had abundant chestnut hair and an ageless face. Her expression
was annoyed, but when she saw Eva it changed to something closer to
shock.

‘Ah,’ she said after a
moment. ‘That explains it.’

Eva blinked.
‘What?’

‘Lokant heritage,’ the
woman replied with a speculative smile. ‘Trained, it would appear,
which must mean you’re one of Theirs.’ She circled Eva, her posture
full of menace. Her fingers closed around Eva’s wrist in a harsh
grip.

‘Lokant,’ Eva said,
keeping her voice steady. ‘I’ve seen that word before, though I
don’t know what it means.’ She tried to withdraw her arm, but the
woman’s grip only tightened further.

‘Is that a denial?’

‘Of what?’ Eva
retorted. ‘I don’t know who you mean by “they”, if that’s what you
are asking.’

The woman’s eyes
narrowed. ‘You’ve
seen
the word, you say. Where?’

‘Here. In a book. Or on
it, actually.’

The woman’s face
registered sudden comprehension. ‘You wouldn’t be Lady Glostrum, by
chance?’

‘I am.’ Eva yanked her
arm, sharply, and the hand that gripped it fell away.

‘Still more
interesting,’ said the other woman, then she smiled. ‘Your pardon
for my rudeness then, your ladyship. How curious that Pitren did
not speak more of you.’

‘Tren?’ Eva advanced on
the woman, elated and alarmed by turns. ‘You’ve seen him? Where is
he? Have you taken him somewhere? Who
are
you anyway?’

‘My name is Andraly
Winnier,’ she replied, her eyes sparkling with some emotion that
looked offensively like amusement.

‘Ahh,’ said Eva slowly.
‘That makes sense.’

‘Yes, I have taken your
friend somewhere, but no, he isn’t hurt. Worry not; you’ll be
coming along too.’

Eva stiffened. ‘To
where?’

‘You’ll find out. It
would be useless trying to explain.’

Eva surveyed Andraly
warily. ‘I suppose I’m to have a choice in the matter?’

‘You want to see Tren,
you’re coming along. I can promise to leave limbs, organs and
ocular devices intact.’

Eva felt a headache
coming on. Too many questions, too many mysteries. What did she
even know about Andraly Winnier? Precious little, save that the
woman knew far more about the realm of Ayrien than seemed possible.
And if her memoirs were to be believed, she was unnaturally
long-lived. What in the world did she mean by “Lokant” anyway?

None of that mattered,
however. If Andraly knew Tren’s whereabouts then Eva would make no
objection to being taken to him. Which was lucky, because without
waiting for an answer Andraly grabbed Eva’s wrist again and pulled.
With a brief rush of dizziness, Eva found herself elsewhere.

‘Wait here,’ Andraly
said, and vanished. Dizzy and numb, Eva could only obey.

She stood alone in the
centre of a bare, empty room. The chamber was truly gigantic. The
ceiling was so far above her, Eva could only barely discern that it
was domed. The round walls stretched and stretched, probably
covering a distance of a mile all the way around. The decoration
was curious: the plain, pale walls were covered in lines, vertical
and horizontal, marked starkly in black. Clearing her
disorientation with a shake of her head, Eva began to cross the
room for a closer look. It took her some time to reach the
wall.

On doing so, she
realised that the horizontal lines were in fact letters. Words,
written so small that it was difficult to read them. And the wall
was not covered in plaster or paper as she might have expected. The
material resembled the interactive bulletin boards back in Glour,
if anything: smooth and flat and pale, with a faint shimmer of
possibility. As Eva stared at individual phrases the words enlarged
themselves for her benefit until she could read them.

They were names. She
stepped back, startled. There must be hundreds of thousands of them
scribed around the walls of this room. And the floor. And probably
the ceiling. Spidery ladders crawled up the walls, set on rails and
wheels to allow access even to the data scribed near the top. A
cursory survey revealed that the arrangement was a family tree of
some kind, vast and impossibly exhaustive. She moved slowly around
the room, scanning the names that appeared on this mesmerisingly
complex tree.

Then she heard a door
swing open behind her - though she hadn’t seen any exits set into
the walls - and she spun around.

***

Tren felt apprehensive
as he stepped into the chart room. Eva was indeed there, as Andraly
had said. She turned, stared at him in shock. She looked tired and
unusually dishevelled; her hair was coming loose from its elegant
braids and her clothes were disordered. Her face registered such
infinite relief on seeing him that his heart sank under the weight
of sudden guilt.

But in an instant she
metamorphosed into a vision of pure anger.

‘Tren! You foolish,
ignorant, impossible, utterly
absurd and unbearable piece of
stupidity
! What could possibly
possess
you to go
jaunting off to the Lowers without me?’ She advanced on him as she
spoke, her hands spread as though she would like to fasten them
around his throat. He backed off, clearing his throat
nervously.

‘It’s so good to see a
friendly face.’

‘Tell me you took
somebody with you.
Someone.
If it couldn’t have been me,
tell me you at least took another summoner with you. Or a guard.
Something.’

There wasn’t a
favourable answer to give to that, so he didn’t attempt one.

‘
Idiot,
’ she
spat. ‘Of course you didn’t. Arrogant, stupid bloody youth. You
think you’re immortal! You think it couldn’t possibly happen to
you!’

‘
Hey,’
he said,
getting rattled now. ‘You did exactly the same thing when you were
younger.’

‘Yes! I was a raging
idiot too, just like you. You know why I stopped wandering merrily
through the Lowers by myself?
Because I almost died.’

‘Ah...’ He swallowed,
stuffing his hands into his pockets in a defensive gesture he’d had
since childhood. He couldn’t understand why she was so toweringly
angry. Maybe it was time to change the subject. ‘How... why are you
here?’

She raked him with a
withering look. ‘I came looking for you, of course.’

‘Um...’ That silenced
him for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might come
after him. ‘Ah... I hope you brought someone with you.’

It was a feeble attempt
at a joke, and it didn’t go down well. She looked ready to strike
him.

‘You could have
died!’

‘But I didn’t.’

‘That’s just luck.
Promise you don’t do it again, Tren.’

‘I can’t promise
that!’

‘Why not?’ She stood
right in front of him now. She had to look up into his face, but
not by very much. She was a tall woman. The expression of fury in
her eyes hadn’t diminished.