Orlind (7 page)

‘
And
look at things. Yes.’ There was plenty to admire. Her glasses
filtered out much of the light but somehow the colours remained
astonishingly vivid to Eva’s eyes. She had expected to see
something similar to Glinnery’s glissenwol forests, but she and
Tren stood in an entirely different landscape. Rheas’s house lay in
a valley, carpeted in green-and-gold grasses and feathered with
purple alpine foliage at its highest points. It was ringed in
mountains glimpsed but distantly on the horizon, their grey-purple
shapes stretching into the sky. Few trees grew here; Eva saw only
three, widely spaced across the sloping ground. All three were very
different: one sported leaves of a bronze colour echoing the shades
of the grass around its trunk, another was decked in dazzling
green, and the third had no leaves but instead wore a dress of
reddish-purple vinery. Even the smallest of the trees was enormous,
dwarfing Eva and Tren as they walked beneath it.

Even Rikbeek was
impressed. Her grouchy gwaystrel extricated himself from the folds
of her skirt and went aloft. She wondered for a moment how he could
comfortably do so when he was a native of the dark Lower Realms,
but then remembered he didn’t have much vision anyway. He used
other means of finding his way around. He flew about in mad
approval, his thoughts buzzing with enthusiasm. This was odd.
Nothing excited Rikbeek that much except blood; she’d never known
him go into a tizzy over mere flowers and mushrooms.

Eva turned her
steps towards the bronzed tree, but before she could reach it the
scenery underwent a slow, subtle transformation into something
else. It was nothing like the abrupt alterations that occurred in
Ayrien; there, the light of the Changing Moon shifted its colour
and the landscape would transform itself almost instantly. These
slow changes felt soothing in comparison.

The mountains
faded away and grassy valley gradually vanished. The ground turned
to moss and stones and mushrooms of every imaginable colour popped
up underfoot, scattered with weird blossoms on contorted stems.
Boulders marched across the landscape, many of them five or six
times Tren’s height and all crusted with lichen and moss. There
were no trees at all, only tall, gnarled bushes delicately dropping
deep green needles all over the floor. Eva sensed many animals
wandering this strange environment and longed to investigate, but
Tren distracted her. He had picked something up from the ground,
and now he offered it to her.

‘
Flower?’ he said, handing her a plucked stem with a bow. The
stalk was dark blue and impossibly twisted; atop it drooped a
collection of purple bell-shaped blossoms that jangled faintly as
they were handed over.

‘
Thank
you,’ Eva said gravely. ‘Is it edible, too?’

‘
Probably not,’ Tren said in tones of regret. ‘But! I have
these.’ He held out his other hand to reveal a collection of
mushroom caps. He had picked all the most virulently coloured
ones.

‘
If
I’m not mistaken,’ Eva said with a smirk, ‘those are the type of
edible goods you give to someone you strongly dislike.’

Tren looked down
at his palmful of mushrooms. ‘I thought they were pretty. No death
wish intended or implied.’

‘
Oh,
decorative,’
she said, then stopped, lifting her head. She
was hearing something, though not with her ears. Her summoner
senses increasingly picked up a feeling like a subdued roar of
emotion. As she focused on it, it grew to such a pitch that she
felt a headache coming on, instant and sharp. Laced through that,
piercing her heart, was Rikbeek’s keening distress.

‘
Tren...’ she began, but her concentration scattered before she
could form a sentence. Animals were everywhere, camouflaged within
the masses of multi-coloured mushrooms that grew over every
surface. They were in a frenzy, some state between fear and deep
confusion; not a one went about its ordinary business.

She thought back
a moon or two, when Llandry had first disturbed the draykon bone
and Ana and Griel had begun rebuilding the creature. The balance of
the two Off-Worlds had been disturbed; the life force and powers of
the draykoni race were so closely bound up with the energies of
Ayrien and Iskyr that this sort of upheaval was inevitable. The
realms had adapted to the absence of their draykoni masters, and it
had taken them some time to adapt to the reappearance of one of
those powerful creatures.

It had caused
rogue gates to open with unnatural speed between the Off-Worlds and
the Seven Realms that existed adjacent to one another. It had also
sent the native animals into a wandering confusion, and in their
daze they had frequently strayed through those gates and become
stranded in the Seven. Some of them had become aggressive. The
Sorcerer and Summoner guilds had been busy for a while, sending the
animals back to their homes and closing the gates behind
them.

All that had
happened because
one
draykon had resurrected. Eva knew of at
least three that now wandered the realms once more; those three had
gone straight to Glinnery - or Arvale, as they called it - and
launched an attack. Llandry had told her she expected them to wake
more of their fellow draykoni.

How many more?
And if one draykoni resurrection had been enough to cause so much
trouble, what degree of havoc would ten or twenty or thirty
create?

Eva spared a
moment to curse herself. She should have anticipated this problem,
but her mind had been focused too exclusively on Krays’s
activities. What she was sensing was the animal population of Iskyr
slowly going mad under the unprecedented flow of power moving
through the realm.

Now she
understood Rikbeek’s odd behaviour. The effects on him began with
excitement and increased energy, then steadily eroded his serenity
and turned him into a bundle of nerves.

The realm’s
energies would settle eventually and the animals along with them,
but Eva had no possible way to tell how long that might take. She
dampened her summoner senses, cutting off the agonising roar of the
animals’ distress, and turned back to Tren. He was standing quite
close, watching her with obvious trepidation.

‘
Bad
news?’ he said as she looked at him.

‘
We
need to get away from here,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’ She grabbed his
hand, sending an unquestionable, imperative order to Rikbeek to
return to her side. But a shriek split the air - one that they both
heard - and she knew she was too late.

Behind them stood
a drauk. Or it looked like a drauk; it had shiny blue-black scales,
a long snout and even longer tail, and hideously sharp claws. Only
most drauks were barely two feet long in the body, and this one was
far larger. Much too large.

If the unsettled
energies of Iskyr were enough to send even the gentlest, most
pacifistic creatures into a frenzy, the effect on creatures that
were naturally aggressive was alarming indeed. The oversized drauk
snarled and came at them, moving horribly fast in spite of its
bulk. Tren swore, grabbed hold of Eva and yanked her aside just as
the drauk’s jaws snapped.

Eva blinked,
trying to focus. The din in her physical ears and in her
summoner-soul was incredible, despite her attempts to control it,
and she could barely think. If they had been in the Seven Realms
then the solution would have been simple: Tren would open a gate
through to the relevant Off-World and Eva would dominate the beast
long enough to send it through. Then Tren would close the gate
again, and all would be well.

They couldn’t do
that now. If they banished it through a gate, it would emerge
somewhere in the Seven Realms Daylands, where it would cause havoc.
They had nothing to fight it with. The only option was for Eva to
take control of its mind and will, with her combination of summoner
powers and Lokant abilities. She was strong enough, but she’d never
had to do it with such a shrieking din disrupting her
concentration.

All this passed
swiftly through her mind. Tren had dragged her well out of the
drauk’s reach and under the overhanging edge of a large boulder. He
was using his sorcerer’s abilities to hide them in the shadow cast
by the rock, working a miniature version of the vast Night Cloak
that kept the sun from the realm of Glour. It halted the drauk for
a while, but Eva feared it would scent them out even if it couldn’t
see them. She would have to deal with it. Swallowing her fear - not
merely fear of
this
drauk, but of any other violent beasts
that might pass at any time - Eva stepped out from under the
rock.

Tren grabbed at
her arm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘
You
know what I’m doing. Stay there.’ Predictably, Tren ignored that
instruction, insisting on standing beside her. The movement was
enough to catch the drauk’s attention, and once alerted it could
probably smell them. It turned in their direction, its snout lifted
to test the air. Eva braced herself and gathered her
will.

Then something
distracted the drauk’s attention from Tren and Eva and it turned
away from them. Eva was more alarmed than relieved by this; only an
instant ago the drauk had been intent on rending the two of them to
pieces and, suddenly, all its fervour had vanished. Only something
much more powerfully interesting could be responsible for
that.

Then she felt it.
A gate was opening between Iskyr and the Seven Realms. The gate was
only ten feet or so from her position, so she judged. A wave of
nausea hit her as the portal ripped a passage between the two
worlds, creating a churning field of energy.

It mesmerised the
drauk, and the creature began to shuffle towards it.

‘
No!’
she cried. If the drauk went through, it would be set loose upon
whichever Daylands realm they were closest to just now. It would
kill people, people who had no way to defend themselves against it.
She ran forward, Tren barely a step behind her. Planting herself
squarely in front of the drauk, she took a quick breath and turned
her will on the creature.

It was hard; not
just because her own focus was poor, but also because this drauk
was strong in mind as well as body and deeply disturbed. It fought
her attempts to control it, its head weaving back and forth and its
jaws snapping as they wrestled together. At least it was fighting
her
and not attacking Tren.

Eva gritted her
teeth and bore down on it with every ounce of her determination.
She silently thanked Limbane for his insistence on training her
will and focus, even though she hadn’t thought that she needed it.
It helped her now as she was forced to fight two battles at once:
one against the mind of the drauk and one against the collected,
frenzied minds of all the other animals in the area that threatened
to overwhelm her.

Without her
unusual combination of draykon and Lokant heritage, she feared she
would have lost this battle. As it was, the drauk began to weaken
at last and steadily, more gently now, she brought it under her
will. It calmed slowly as she mastered its mental processes,
smoothing away the panic that had gripped it before.

The nausea had
faded. Turning, she saw Tren but no sign of the gate.

‘
Closed it,’ he confirmed, and she nodded. Thank goodness he’d
been with her. She was no sorcerer; she couldn’t manipulate the
energies of the Off-Worlds the way he could, so she would have had
no way of closing that gate. And she had no idea whether the pull
of the gate would have been a stronger influence over the drauk
than she was.

‘
Thanks,’ she murmured. The drauk waited patiently, calm now,
but she was wary of releasing it. How long would her imposed calm
last against the influence of the disrupted energy flow of
Iskyr?

Not long, she
feared. But there was nothing else she could do for it just now,
nor for the other animals whose distress still buzzed in her
summoner’s ears.

She paused a
moment to look for Rikbeek. He was nearby, to her relief, flying in
mad circles around a boulder that towered some way over her head.
Focusing on him, she calmed him down until he consented to return
to the protection of her skirts. Good.

‘
Tren,’ she said then. ‘I am going to release this thing, then
I must take us
straight
back to Rheas’s house. Keep close to
me.’

He nodded and
clutched her hand. But then her grip on her own mind suddenly
melted away, ripped to shreds by a renewed roar of aggression and
panic that sliced through her concentration. She sensed more drauks
on the edges of her range, moving fast. They had spotted - or
smelled - the two humans, and were coming at them with all the rage
she’d so narrowly managed to suppress in the first.

She counted
three, four, five. Far more than they could handle. And they were
closing fast.

‘
Run!’
she cried. She and Tren turned as one and fled. The stone-littered
ground with its carpet of mushrooms hindered their progress, and
when her foot tangled in the hem of her skirt she would have fallen
if not for Tren hauling her up and dragging her onwards. As they
ran, she tried to access Limbane’s Map and pinpoint a destination.
If not Rheas’s house, then just about anywhere would do - as long
as it wasn’t here. But it was one thing to accomplish this without
distractions while standing in one place; quite another to do so on
the run, with five drauks close behind her.