Seven Dreams (20 page)

He shifted back
to his human form, praying that he wouldn’t set some screaming
alarm off in the process. Nothing happened to break the silence,
and he breathed a little easier.

Okay, drawers. He
looked closely at the nearest ones, hoping for some guidance as to
its contents or how to open it. Nothing. The drawers were all
unmarked and identical. They didn’t even have handles. Gingerly, he
set his fingers to one of them, probing for something — a handle, a
catch, anything.

An alarming red
light began to glow before his eyes, and a voice from nowhere said,
‘Access attempted.’

Teyo jumped
back.

‘
Teyodin Bambre,’ continued the voice. ‘Welcome.’ The drawer
he’d touched slid open.

Teyo sagged a
little in relief, and blessed Devary Kant. The man was certainly
efficient. Cautiously, he approached the cabinet again and peered
inside the drawer.

He saw a great
many gadgets nestled inside, none of which he recognised. They were
so far beyond his comprehension, in fact, that he felt an obscure
shudder at the mere sight of them, and quickly moved on. The stone
wasn’t there, anyway. He touched the next drawer down, which slid
open exactly like the first, and perused its contents.

Ten minutes and
half a room later, Teyo found the key. It lay snugly inside a
little velvet tray, thoughtfully cushioned upon silk, its black
stone veined with silver and white. Teyo could picture Halavere
Morann, the dedicated and triumphant agent, coming in here with a
colleague or two and showily placing it inside a secure drawer
within the most secure room in the building. When it was stolen
later on, nobody would be blaming
her.
He grabbed it,
stuffed it into his pocket, and shut the drawer.

Next problem:
exit. The door looked thoroughly impregnable, but if he had access
to the drawers, he probably had access to the door as well,
right?

Right. He touched
it and the same disembodied voice announced his name. ‘Have a
pleasant day,’ it added, which Teyo thought was a nice
touch.

Still human, he
made his careful way back to the stairs, keeping eyes and ears open
for wandering agents. He didn’t dare shift at this point. If he
took a tiny shape like Jisp’s, the chances of being seen were
minimal, but how could he convey the key? Anything larger would
attract a lot more attention than a middle-aged man in LHB uniform
was likely to excite. So he risked it.

He saw no one,
and made it all the way back down to the ground floor without being
stopped. He was just beginning to feel that everything might be all
right when a door suddenly opened and a woman stepped out. She was
tall and white-haired and just a little bit haughty. For a
heart-stopping second Teyo thought it was Halavere Morann, but a
moment’s scrutiny revealed that she was not. His feelings of relief
were short-lived, as he realised that he recognised her. This was
the same woman that had taken the key from Baron Anserval’s
treasure store.

Teyo instantly
averted his face and walked on, hoping hard that she would ignore
him. But she didn’t.

‘
Excuse me?’ she called after him.

Reluctantly, he
turned.

‘
It’s
late,’ said the woman sternly. ‘What are you still doing
here?’

‘
Working late,’ he said gruffly.

‘
Whatever it is you’re doing can wait,’ she decreed with
decided hauteur. ‘Off you go.’

Teyo needed no
further invitation, and took himself off at once. She had been
almost as displeased to see him as he was to see her, he judged;
she must be here for the key, and had expected the building to be
empty by now. Well, he was happy to oblige.

To his relief, he
found Iyamar human again and sitting companionably with Egg, Jisp
perched atop her left knee. He’d been half afraid that they might
get into another altercation if they were left alone together for
long — or worse, that Iya would get some crazy idea into her head
of following him up to the top floor and “helping” him out.
Youngsters got those kinds of notions sometimes.

‘
Time
to go,’ he said tersely. ‘Now.’ He all but threw the exterior door
open and charged out into the soft light of the Evenglow. There had
been a tinge of suspicion in the woman’s gaze that he didn’t
like.

The three of them
left the vicinity of LHB HQ at a run. Teyo didn’t permit them to
slow down until they’d reached the station and boarded the nearest
railcar. He slumped down into his seat and let out a long
sigh.

‘
Did
you get it?’ Egg whispered urgently.

‘
Teyo
nodded once, earning himself a broad smile.

‘
You
were both great,’ he said, smiling back. ‘Thanks.’

‘
Oh,
yeah,’ Egg said, grinning. ‘I can sit on boxes with the best of
them.’

His lips curved
in a lopsided smile. ‘You got us into the building,
Egg.’

‘
Yep,
that’s my contribution. Twenty-one seconds of work.’

‘
Twenty-two,’ said Iyamar.

‘
That
extra second makes all the difference,’ Teyo agreed.

Egg made a rude
gesture at them both, and turned her head to look out of the window
as the railcar began to move.

‘
How
was the shifting?’ Teyo asked Iya.

‘
It
was great!’ she said, sitting up straighter. ‘Much easier this
time. And it was fun.’

‘
Being
a Jisp-a-like, or conducting reconnaissance?’

‘
Both!’ she enthused. ‘It was fun and exciting.’

So she liked the
danger, did she? Teyo made a mental note of that. For himself, he
more tolerated than enjoyed those aspects of the job. If he felt
entitled to free choice, he would be running a small fruit farm
near the south-eastern coast of Nimdre and spending his days in
peace. But that was his own fault. He’d messed up as a youth, and
done a lot of things he shouldn’t. Until he was finished paying his
self-imposed debt to society, he would have to stick to only
dreaming about orchards and fresh milk in the mornings.

‘
So,’
said Egg slowly, without turning her gaze away from the window.
‘It’s back to waiting?’

‘
Reckon so,’ said Teyo. Egg’s posture betrayed her displeasure
at this idea, and Iyamar’s excited expression faded into chafed
disappointment.

Teyo, in
contrast, felt a flicker of satisfaction, or possibly relief. He
could put up with the “excitement”, as Iya called it, of breaking
and entering and thieving and running, but he liked to have a nice,
calm interval in between episodes. It usually took a day or two for
his heart rate to slow down.

Ayra Delune’s
navigational plan worked perfectly, right up until the wind got
involved.

‘
I
don’t see that anybody invited it,’ said Lady Fenella petulantly,
after a few frigid, windy, miserable hours of trying futilely to
penetrate the fog bank that hovered above the highest peaks of the
Sammerill Mountains. The area it covered was not vast, but it was
surrounded by some kind of endless cyclone which repelled every
attempt the pilot made to steer the airship into it. Some damage
had been suffered in the process, and the Baron had at last
declared a halt to the endeavour.

‘
Quite
right,’ said Lord Bastavere, his hands shoved deep into his coat
pockets against the biting cold. ‘Stand aside! I shall simply
order
it to take itself off. It cannot possibly refuse
me.’

‘
A job
for darling Eva, perhaps?’ responded Lady Fenella, not quite in
jest. If Eva (for as bosom friends they had of course progressed to
first names by now) could order Iyamar back into her human form,
who was to say she couldn’t order a cyclone around as
well?

Her new best
friend shook her head, amusement glinting in her eyes. ‘How lovely
that would be! But no. The weather has no will, you see, and
therefore I can have no effect upon it whatsoever.’

‘
If
you could,’ put in Tren, ‘no cloud would ever dare rain upon you
again.’

Eva’s face lit
up.

‘
And!’
her husband added, ‘you wouldn’t be cold anymore,
either.’

Eva did indeed
look just a shade or two more miserably frozen than the rest of
them. She was swaddled in so many layers her own shape was
completely indiscernible beneath them, and she wore at least two
scarves that Serena could see. Despite this, she was shivering
violently and her face was stark white.

Eva sighed. ‘Stop
tormenting me.’

At the Baron’s
instruction, the pilot had directed the airship away from the
circling winds that guarded the skies over the peak. They did not
appear to be regaining any particular course, Serena noticed; the
force of those winds emanated a long way out from the peak, and the
ship flailed helplessly under it, drifting and turning apparently
at random. The shuddering, jerky motion had become familiar over
the last couple of hours, and everybody was stationed near to
something solid they could hold onto — and as far from the ship’s
rails as possible. Serena had considered going below, thus avoiding
the dangers of the deck and some of the cold. But to be shut into a
small cabin and thus miss all of the developments above was an
intolerable prospect, and besides, she was afraid that the motion
of the ship would soon make her ill.

She was
nonetheless engaged in eyeing the distant railing with distinct
misgivings when the Baron strode up to the little shivering knot of
people. The man was insane as well as infuriating, Serena had long
since concluded; he made no effort whatsoever to protect his own
safety, instead striding about the deck as though he were
invulnerable to incidental forces of nature like screaming
winds.

‘
I’ve
spoken to my pilot,’ he announced, his voice raised to shout.
‘She’s trying to get us out, but it will take some time.’ He looked
uneasy, Serena thought. It could not be the prospect of personal
injury or death that troubled him; perhaps it was the prospect of
costly damage to his precious ship.

Or something
else?

Eva said: ‘Do we
know where we are?’

The Baron’s
unease grew more visible, and he shook his head, his lips tightly
pressed together. ‘We have gone about too many times for Ayra to
keep track.’

Eva glanced
around, the Baron’s discomfort echoed in her face.

‘
What
is it?’ said Serena.

Eva sighed.
‘We’ve been blown well over the mountains, I suspect. I fear we
will end up in Orlind, if we haven’t already.’

The word “Orlind”
operated powerfully upon Serena. The mythical Seventh Realm had
been abandoned and desolate until a couple of years ago, when an
expedition led by Eva herself and the first draykoni, Llandry
Sanfaer, had made some startling discoveries there. There had been
talk of late of its being resettled by one of the new draykoni
clans, though she was not sure whether anything had come of
it.

Why any of this,
or their proximity to it, should trouble Eva, was unknown to her. A
question sprang to her lips; at the last instant she remembered the
Baron’s presence and her own role, and changed it to a rapturous
expression and a tiny bounce upon her toes.

‘
Oh,
but would that not be marvellous!’ she uttered, every word dripping
with joy. ‘Only think! Orlind itself! How much I shall have to tell
my friends on our return.’

Something
flickered across Eva’s eyes, possibly annoyance, and she shook her
head. ‘I haven’t been back since... well, since two years ago. And
at
that
time, it was — not habitable. Not logical, or
stable, or ... it was very dangerous. Especially to anyone
airborne.’

It was unlike her
ladyship to be so inarticulate, Serena thought with a flicker of
alarm.

‘
Airborne?’ echoed the Baron sharply. ‘Why?’

Eva merely shook
her head, her vocabulary apparently exhausted. ‘I can’t
explain.’

‘
We
went draykon-back,’ offered Tren. ‘Flew in over these mountains,
though we never came up this far. Once we entered Orlind, it was as
though... as though up and down had turned themselves around, or
ceased to exist altogether. We didn’t know which way up we were,
let alone which direction to go in. We were very lucky not to be
injured.’

‘
Or
killed,’ added Eva bleakly. ‘We owe that to our draykoni friends, I
think. They kept their wits about them, and landed us safely. I’m
not eager to repeat the experience in an airship.’

Nobody said
anything for a while. The prospect of sailing helplessly into
Orlind only to be upturned, spun about and ultimately dashed to
pieces thrilled no one. Even the impervious Baron was visibly
disturbed.

‘
How
experienced is your pilot?’ said Tren at last.

The Baron’s lips
tightened further. ‘Enough. I hope.’

An hour passed,
or so Serena’s watch believed. To her, it felt more like two or
three days. The wind’s unsettling influence upon their ship
gradually lessened as time passed, and the beleaguered craft ceased
to shudder and rattle so badly. However, this could only be because
they had been pushed farther and farther away from the fog over the
peak, and closer and closer to Orlind. Without Eva’s and Tren’s
stories, Serena would have welcomed this as a good thing. Now she
wasn’t so sure.