Orlind

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

‘So,’ said Tren as Llandry turned away. ‘Exploring, huh?’

‘Haven’t you ever been curious about the Daylands?’ Eva asked, turning her face up to the sun. The lens in her glasses reacted to the increased light and steadily darkened the tint, keeping the light level comfortable for her. She wondered briefly if Limbane might let her keep them.

‘I suppose,’ said Tren. ‘Well, yes, but I haven’t got so far as to make it a priority wish of mine. There’s plenty of the Darklands I haven’t even seen yet.’

‘I concur. We should make some more excursions into the Lower Realms sometime. Or Ayrien, I should say. I still haven’t got used to that.’

‘It’s a much prettier name,’ Tren said, pacing away a few steps. ‘So… you want to just walk around?’

‘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.

They weren’t fast enough. The drauks were vivid in her mind, closing rapidly on them. She couldn’t help picturing those wicked claws, and the agonising mess they would make as they ripped through her flesh…

Something hit her hard, and she tensed herself for the pain. But then she was airborne, the ground dropping dizzily away from her as she shot into the sky. A draykon’s roar shook the wind, and Eva’s panicked mind belatedly understood.

Llandry had come looking for them, in her draykon form. A set of enormous claws clutched her, firmly but not painfully, and beside her Tren was similarly imprisoned in the talons of Llandry’s other front foot. Eva looked up to see an expanse of shimmering ghost-grey scales blocking the sky, and a glimpse of enormous webbed wings bearing them away. Llandry’s head turned on her long, swan-like neck and she glanced briefly down, perhaps to check on the security of her two human passengers. Eva smiled in relief. The girl had excellent timing.

Llandry bore them back to Rheas’s house. The distance that had taken them half an hour to walk was covered in minutes, and soon they were back in the green-and-gold valley with the little stone house nestled comfortably among the grasses. Eva frowned a little, noticing the rapid change from mushrooms and boulders back to the valley. Was Rheas controlling the environment around his house? She wondered how he managed to maintain so consistent an effect. Then again, if he was a near ancestor of Llan’s he must have strong draykon heritage himself, and that would make him a powerful sorcerer or summoner too. Perhaps he had learned some new tricks during his long sojourn up here.

As Llandry carefully set them back on the ground, Eva listened for the raging panics that had so assailed her before. Nothing. She heard nothing at all, sensed no animals anywhere nearby other than Rikbeek, who still clung frantically to the fabric of her skirt.

That was most interesting. There was no logical reason why the animals would avoid this place. It had to be something to do with Rheas. What was he doing to keep his home inviolate? And what else might he be able to do? She made a note to have a talk with Mr Rheas Irfan, and soon.

Llandry had transformed herself back into her human shape, and now she came running up to them.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she panted. ‘Mamma’s awake, you see, and I lost track of time. I’m so sorry. Are you both all right?’

Somewhat impulsively, Eva hugged her. The poor girl looked so stricken with guilt that her eyes were filling with tears, but that was unfair. She had, in all likelihood, saved both their lives.

‘All is well,’ Eva said soothingly. ‘You were in perfect time.’

‘Amazingly good time,’ Tren said cheerfully. ‘And thank you, for I am convinced I wouldn’t make good drauk food. You saved those poor creatures an awful meal.’

Eva laughed, and noticed with approval that Llandry was smiling a little too.

‘Now then,’ Eva said to her, letting her go. ‘What’s this about your Mamma?’