Lokant (29 page)

‘Couldn’t you just
persuade
the draykoni not to attack?’ Eva’s tone was
sarcastic.

‘Draykoni design
includes a degree of imperviousness to those techniques,’ Limbane
said with a shrug. ‘Or perhaps it is merely their cursed
stubbornness. I said that it was terrifically hard to hold them
back the last time; I did mean it. Llandry and Pensould will likely
be much more successful in this, and much more quickly.’

‘But Krays had no
trouble with me,’ Llandry admitted. ‘He immobilised me, took over
my will. If Pensould hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have been able to
resist him.’

Limbane gave her a
genuinely kind smile. ‘Don’t trouble yourself over that, Miss
Sanfaer. You were human at the time, I imagine?’

She nodded.

‘And you are yet new to
your draykon heritage. You still think and operate largely as a
human does, but you are learning. You will grow stronger in
time.’

Llandry swallowed and
nodded. ‘I’m happy to do as you suggest, sir, to the best of my
ability, but what of Krays? He’ll come after me again, and I’m not
strong enough yet.’

‘Ah yes, that’s another
point. It’s possible that Krays’s intention is to use you to locate
more draykon graves. He will soon discover that you are not the
only person who can assist him with this, and his attention may
turn away from you. In case I am wrong, I will be sending Andraly
with you, and another Lokant.’

Llandry’s heart
hammered. ‘You speak of more hereditary draykoni?’

‘I can think of two
potential ones,’ he said. ‘Before you ask, yes, sooner or later
they too will be in danger from Krays. I don’t believe he knows of
their existence yet, as Sulayn Phay were not involved in our
draykoni project. But I’ve no doubt he will discover them one way
or another. While the rest of you are off averting disaster in
Glinnery and tracking down Krays’s operation, I will be locating
our other two hereditaries.’ He paused. ‘Or rather, I will be
delegating someone else to do it.’

Andraly laughed aloud
at that. ‘So I’m to visit Arvale? It’s been some time since I set
foot in the Daylands. Delightful prospect.’

Limbane rolled his
eyes. ‘I’m glad someone is happy.’

Limbane was having a
singularly unsuccessful day.

It started with the
matter of Mr Devary Kant. Opening this world’s PsiMap in his mind,
Limbane travelled to the small college in Draetre where he had met
Mr Kant not long ago. He had a task for the man, and it was
therefore highly inconvenient to find him missing.

Not just absent, but
missing. He was not at the university. He was not at home. Nobody
had seem him in days.

He was interested to
note that some of the staff, notably a female professor he’d met
before, seemed to be well aware that Mr Kant’s disappearance meant
bad news.

Krays,
he
thought. He wished briefly that he’d thought to record the unique
pattern of the agent’s tracer when he had seen him before. But it
was too late to think about that now.

He could have used Mr
Kant’s help in finding the two hereditary draykoni - after all, it
was more his line of work than Limbane’s - but he did not feel
disposed to launch an invasion on Sulayn Phay territory on account
of one man. Perhaps later.

He moved on.

Arvale. It had been
some time since his last visit, possibly as much as a century. The
place was busier than he recalled; the pace of population growth
did take him by surprise sometimes. But it had lost little of its
beauty. He made for the summoner school near the outskirts of
Waeverleyne.

It took him nearly
twenty minutes to find the administrative office. He might have a
Lokant’s PsiTravel technology at his use but he never had been any
good at ground level navigation.

But when he spoke the
name of Orillin Vanse to the secretary, the response was not
promising.

‘Mr Vanse - yes - ah -
I’ve a feeling you may be out of luck there, sir, but I’ll
enquire.’ She was gone before he could ask what she meant. He took
a seat, composing himself to wait with much impatience.

‘I’m afraid the boy was
taken ill last week, sir,’ she said a little later, strutting back
into the office on heels that clicked against the tiled floor.

‘Taken ill,’ he
repeated.

‘Yes, sir. He’s
expected to be confined to the sanatorium for some weeks.’

‘Which sanatorium?’

‘I don’t have that
information, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?’

He left the office in a
black mood. That a boy of nineteen years should suddenly fall so
violently ill as to require weeks of quarantine and care was highly
doubtful.

Krays again.

He visited the boy’s
parents. That they knew something was obvious; they were both
tight-lipped and unhelpful, though they dutifully repeated the same
tale that the secretary had given him. They were obviously afraid
of something.

Krays had that effect
on people.

Not for the first time,
he regretted the impossibility of working backwards through time.
His Library hovered on the edges of the time flow, barely touched
by it. He could stay in there for years, and when he left the
premises and returned to the regular time stream he would find that
little time had passed beyond its borders. His body didn’t age as
long as he stayed in the Library. These things were useful, but
there were frustrating limits to the technology. Lokants had worked
for centuries on the problem of moving themselves about in time,
but to no avail. He couldn’t jump back to last week and extract
Orillin before Krays could reach him.

And curses to that.

On, then, to Glour,
trying not to wish he’d listened to Andraly years ago and tracered
all the hereditary draykoni. Another female, this next one, older
than Llandry Sanfaer by more than fifteen years. He knew that much
about her; he knew her name, Avane Desandry; he knew she was a
sorcerer.

He knew absolutely
nothing else.

Cursing the ineptitude
of agents who got themselves hauled off by Krays, Limbane began the
tiresome process of tracking down one human (sort of) in the middle
of several hundred thousand of the creatures.

***

The Library really did
go on forever.

Or so Eva was
convinced. She had spent what felt like an entire day wandering the
halls, drifting through library after library, and they never
ended. The Lokants probably did have books on absolutely everything
somewhere in this building.

What interested her
particularly was the quantity of books that obviously had nothing
to do with her world, or Cluster as Limbane had said. The prospect
of other worlds out beyond the confines of her own was an inspiring
one.

Or it would have been
were she not feeling so essentially self-absorbed. For Limbane’s
revelations had shaken her to the core. He had spent some time
training the Lokant side of her, teaching her in particular the
ability that he called translocation. It required some manner of
implant, which she now wore buried somewhere in her body, and
continued with a great deal of rigorous mental training as he
taught her to access and use the PsiMap. She didn’t mind the work.
Learning these skills would make her more effective in the ongoing
struggle against Krays’s enigmatic projects, and besides, the
training kept her mind busy, preventing her from brooding.

Now Limbane had left
the Library, leaving her training in hiatus. He’d said he couldn’t
spare another Lokant to finish the training just now, and awarded
her a short holiday to recover her focus and spirits before the
next lesson.

She had spent it
wandering the corridors of the Library, feeling confused and so
very low in spirits that she hardly knew what to do with herself.
She was thinking back over the years of her life, reliving every
relationship she’d had with every friend, every colleague, every
lover. She thought of the students who’d worshipped her, the tutors
whose favourite she’d always been, the colleagues who’d deferred to
her, the shopkeepers who saved the best products for her and
charged her lower prices.

It wasn’t fair to say
she had never encountered opposition. There were certainly forces
stronger than her Lokant mind. Hatred, resentment and envy were
stronger; she’d encountered those before. She had taken on the
prejudices of others and failed to overcome them. She was not an
unstoppable force by any means.

But nonetheless she
enjoyed a far greater level of social success than was common. Her
summoner ability too: she was one of the strongest ever recorded in
Glour, that she knew, but now both of these defining
characteristics were called into question.

How much of her success
was down to her own efforts, her own personality and her own
determination? And how much of it was due to her essentially
cheating
with her Lokant magics? Could she trust the
sincerity of any friendship? Had any of her romantic relationships
had any true substance? And could she truly call herself a
summoner, let alone a former High Summoner, when her ability was
unfairly augmented by her Lokant heritage?

She had no answers to
these questions and she knew she never would. It would never again
be possible to trust in anybody’s affection for her, because she
would never be able to measure how much of it was real and how much
was imposed. Limbane assured her that she would learn to control
her mind; she would no longer employ those abilities across the
board and without intent or knowledge. But that wasn’t enough to
reassure her. She knew she wouldn’t trust herself again.

Given the nature of
these reflections, she was not pleased when the door to her
sanctuary creaked open and Tren wandered in, hands in his pockets
and a tentative smile on his face.

‘Found you,’ he said
lightly.

‘So you have.’ She
returned her gaze to the books in front of her, studying them with
a show of absorption. Most of the titles were in languages she
couldn’t read, but she didn’t see why that should be any obstacle
to her studying them instead of talking to Tren.

‘I was looking for
you,’ he persevered.

‘Why?’

‘Um, I was worried
about you.’

‘I’m fine, Tren, just
been busy training with Limbane.’

‘Uh huh.’ His tone was
profoundly sceptical. ‘Ever since Limbane’s little lecture you’ve
been looking like somebody died.’

In a way, she thought,
somebody did. Evastany Glostrum as she’d known herself had died.
She didn’t know how to live with her new self.

‘I’m fine,’ she
repeated. ‘It’s just that the revelations have come thick and fast
lately and I’m trying to keep up. This place, the Lokants,
hereditary draykoni and now my heritage... I need a bit of time to
think about everything. That’s all.’

‘That’s true enough.
I’m reeling a little myself.’ Tren wandered the room for a few
minutes, jingling something in one of his pockets. The insistent
sound disrupted Eva’s concentration and she scowled in
annoyance.

‘You know,’ Tren said
at last, ‘if you’re thinking you just manipulated everybody into
liking you, you’re wrong.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what you’re
thinking, isn’t it? I’d be thinking the same thing in your
position. But you’re wrong. That can’t be the whole story. There
are too many good reasons to admire you.’

En Diraja o Mahj
read the spine of the book directly before her eyes. She repeatedly
gravitated back to it because, unlike the rest on this shelf, she
could at least decipher the letters. The characters on the rest
were incomprehensible, written in an alphabet she’d never seen
before.

‘I’ve no doubt Vale
would agree with me,’ Tren continued, annoyingly persistent. ‘He
knows you well. He knows
you,
not just the persona you put
on for the world. He married you because he loves you, and that’s
an emotion that’s far too complex to be imposed from outside. You
could encourage people to admire you, worship you, make them
infatuated with you, that’s probably true. But to force real love
on someone? Real friendship? I think those things are beyond your
ability.’

Limbane had said
something similar, but it hadn’t soothed her in her present mood.
It still didn’t now.

‘I’m not married,’ she
said, suddenly feeling more tired than annoyed.

‘What?’

‘Vale didn’t marry me.
We ended our engagement. It was probably lucky for him.’

That statement was met
with complete silence. She turned to look at him at last, her
irritation returning. ‘What? I told you that before.’

His brows went up. ‘Er.
I’m
fairly
sure you haven’t mentioned it, no.’

She spluttered. ‘I
recall
with perfect clarity
my saying to you “I’m still Lady
Glostrum, Tren.” And you have been calling me that ever since, so I
believe you must remember it too.’

‘That’s not exactly
perfectly clear communication, is it? I thought you meant you’d
opted to keep your own name after marriage. It seemed like a
perfectly rational decision to make in your situation so I didn’t
enquire further.’

‘Why in the world would
I do that?’

He held up his hands.
‘All right, never mind that. You’re not married. I get it. But
everything I said still stands.’

‘Does it? How do you
know Vale didn’t shake off my manipulative influence and change his
mind? Cast me off?’

‘Impossible.’ He said
it with total confidence.

‘I could tell you
that’s what happened.’ She lifted her chin, looked him straight in
the eye.

‘You’d be lying.’

‘All right, I’d be
lying. I ended it. But I maintain that you can’t possibly know what
you’re talking about.’