Seven Dreams (31 page)

‘
Last
chance, Mae,’ Serena said softly. ‘At this point, I don’t see why I
shouldn’t give all the keys to Ylona and let her do what she wants
with them.’

That got Mae’s
attention. She turned pale and shook her head vehemently. ‘No! No,
you mustn’t do that.’ She sighed deeply, swaying a little, and gave
a single nod. ‘Very well, but it won’t be easy to explain. It’s no
simple matter.’

Serena
waited.

Mae chewed a bit
more on her lip. ‘I think it’s better if I show you,’ she said at
last.

‘
Oh?
How is that possible?’

‘
It’s
a secret.’ Mae grinned. ‘This isn’t a good place. Find me somewhere
private, and I’ll show you everything you need to know.’

‘
The
airship?’ Tren volunteered.

‘
But
do you mind if Bron...?’ Serena said vaguely.

‘
If
Bron what?’ Bron himself stepped forward from somewhere and flashed
Serena a dazzling grin. ‘Didn’t see me there, did you? I’ll teach
you that trick sometime.’

Serena sighed. ‘I
suppose it’s too late to keep you out of our hair.’

Bron nodded
gravely. ‘Much too late. Shouldn’t have borrowed my
ship.’

‘
It’s
not your ship, though, is it?’

Bron acknowledged
this perspicacious sally with an ironic bow.

Mae adopted a
steely expression. ‘Mr. Bron understands, I’m sure, that if any
sensitive details should escape through his agency, I will be
obliged to hold G.A.9 responsible.’ Her tone left no doubt as to
how unpleasant
that
would prove to be.

Bron gave her his
most charming smile, and another bow. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

Mae’s curious,
bouncing congeniality abruptly returned, and she smiled radiantly
upon them all. ‘Then that’s settled! Shall we go?’

Later, Serena’s
team assembled with Eva, Tren, Ayra, Wrob, Bron and Mae in the
airship’s largest cabin. Mae had brought some kind of construct,
the likes of which Serena had never seen before. It was boxy and
sharp-edged, and blinked with strange lights. It looked nothing
like the Irbellian engineering she was used to, not even the most
sophisticated examples.

‘
Are
we all ready?’ said Mae. ‘If you need to use the facilities, now
would be a good time. There will not be an opportunity until much
later.’

Nobody
moved.

‘
Very
good!’ said Mae brightly. She took a spherical, shining thing from
a pocket and inserted it into the boxy thing. Some more lights
flashed, and a whirring sound began to emanate from the top of the
device.

Mae did some
other things which Serena didn’t understand, pressing various
buttons and running her fingers over the device in a manner which
looked utterly futile to Serena. But finally she nodded, and said,
‘Good. We’re ready. Take a seat, everyone.’

Serena looked
around, but there were no seats left. Teyo caught her eye and
instantly began to rise, but she gestured for him to stop. It was
typically considerate of him to offer her his seat, but she had a
better solution. She perched on his knee instead, patting his head
gently in appreciation.

‘
Thanks,’ she murmured.

‘
You’re quite heavy,’ Teyo whispered back, surprising a laugh
from her.

‘
I’m
sure it won’t be all that long,’ she replied in a soothing
tone.

Teyo merely
grunted.

Something was
happening with the boxy device. Colours whirled through the air
directly above it, gradually forming into an image: a man’s face.
He bore the pure white hair of a Lokant, but he was reasonably
young; if he was human he would’ve been somewhere in his forties,
Serena guessed. With a start, she realised she had seen this face
before. His had been the visage that had appeared in the Dream of
Orlind, when she had found the key. The image expanded until his
entire body could be seen, and continued to grow, spreading to
comprise several other Lokant figures. The vision expanded until it
filled the room, and then something peculiar happened. Abruptly,
Serena was no longer viewing the images as external visions; they
were inside her mind, and as vivid and absorbing as though she
stood in the same room with these people.

The chamber was
as strange to her eyes as the device: the walls curved oddly and
glittered with faint colours, constructed from some strange, pale,
crystalline material she’d never seen before. The peculiarly-shaped
furniture was wrought from the same pale, glittering stuff and
seemed to grow out of the walls. The Lokant man whose face had
first appeared stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by six
other Lokants who looked younger than he. He was casually dressed
in loose trousers and a shirt, and his feet were bare. No formal
audience this, then.

‘
They’re all ready, father,’ said one of the younger Lokants, a
young man with a shock of wild white hair and a penchant for dark
clothing.

His father
smiled. ‘I knew you’d do well at this task,’ he said. ‘I’ll see
them, of course, but we must conceal the keys first. Matters are
growing urgent.’ He unhooked a bag from his belt and opened it. The
first item he drew from within made Serena catch her breath, for
she recognised the seashell shape and the cream and golden colours.
He handed the little stone to his son, and then proceeded to give
another stone to each of the other five assembled Lokants. The last
one went into his own pocket.

‘
Quickly, quickly,’ he said.

‘
Yes,
father,’ chorused the six young Lokants. Then, one by one, they
began to vanish, blinking out of existence until only their father
remained in the room. He removed the final stone from his pocket
and smoothed his thumb over the sky-blue surface, his expression a
little sad. Then he, too, disappeared.

‘
That
is Rhoun Torinth and his six children,’ came Mae’s voice, cutting
through the vision. ‘With draykon help, they created the Dreams as
hiding places for the seven keys. It was overly elaborate, perhaps,
but they were all highly creative. I believe they gloried in the
project, as necessary as it was. Anyway, let’s move on.’

The glittering
chamber vanished and an inky, consuming darkness filled Serena’s
mind for several discomfiting moments. Then her mind’s eye flared
with colour and light once more. She was looking at... a library?
The word was far too pale and feeble to describe the sheer,
mind-bending glory and complexity of what she was seeing. She
seemed to be standing in the centre of a chamber so vast, her mind
couldn’t take in the enormity of it. Shelves lined every inch of
the curving walls, even spanning the ceiling; how the books
contained therein didn’t fall down onto her head, Serena couldn’t
begin to imagine. Round doors appeared everywhere, each one made
from the same pale, glittering substance that Serena had seen in
Rhoun Torinth’s room. These, too, were scattered all over the
ceiling as well as the walls, cheerfully ignoring the usual rules
of the physical world.

Not every shelf
contained books in the way that Serena understood the term. There
were plenty of those, certainly, but many shelves bore row upon row
of spherical, shining objects similar to the one Mae had inserted
into the device. Did they, too, contain visions of past
events?

This was merely
one room in this vast and complex Library. Serena had no doubt that
every single one of the many doors led into similar chambers. The
probable extent of this labyrinthine place almost overwhelmed her
mind. How much knowledge, how many ideas, must be stored
here?

‘
The
repository,’ she said aloud, as her mind made the
connection.

‘
Yes,’
responded Mae. ‘It is often called that, though its true name is
Teoricq.
’

‘
It’s
a Library?’ asked someone else — Tren, probably.

‘
Something like that,’ Mae said.

This was what the
keys were for, Serena realised in an instant. This repository,
containing unfathomable knowledge, was locked away somehow and the
seven keys would open it. ‘Who made this?’ she asked.

‘
It
used to be the focus of all of our efforts,’ Mae replied. ‘Every
Library would contribute copies of every discovery they made, on
any topic, in any world. But it grew too large, and too powerful,
and many of the secrets it contains are dangerous. There was talk
of disbanding the repository, and redistributing its contents. Some
were in favour of destroying it altogether.

‘
It
was Rhoun Torinth, in the end, who sealed it off. He was gifted
with remarkable foresight; some said he could see the future, or at
least glimpses of it. He foresaw the conflicts over Orlind, the
site of the greatest and most powerful of our Libraries. There was
nothing we could not do with such a tool! He saw that there would
be war over it, and that the Library would be destroyed. And he
knew that the disagreements regarding Teoricq could easily reach
those levels — would inevitably do so, if we weren’t stopped. So he
sealed it, and he wouldn’t tell any of us how to undo it. It made
him somewhat unpopular, as you may imagine.’

‘
But
he made the keys,’ murmured Serena.

‘
Yes.
Not that any of us knew it, at the time, save for his children. He
also foresaw that a day might come when we would need some of the
contents of Teoricq urgently. The keys were meant to allow for a
way back, but only in the case of dire need.’

‘
Why
hide them on this world?’ asked Eva. ‘There are more. Many more.
And Lokants go everywhere.’

‘
Because of Orlind,’ said Mae simply. ‘This world was special
to us at that time. Many of our greatest works were completed here,
using the peculiar and as yet unequalled energies and facilities
that Orlind provided. And when I say “Orlind”, I mean both the
realm and the Library. The latter... well, it was our best. I doubt
we’ll ever see another like it.’ She paused. ‘Personally though, I
think that Rhoun also knew that we’d drift away from this world,
after Orlind’s destruction. All the better for a hiding
place.’

‘
So,
what’s the dire need?’ Teyo asked. ‘Why is Ylona trying to dig all
of this up? And how did she find out about the keys?’

‘
Ylona
Duna is her wedded name,’ Mae replied. ‘Her true name is Ylona
Torinth.’

Serena thought
that over. ‘She’s Rhoun Torinth’s daughter? But then she helped him
make all this.’

‘
Yes,
she did, in some part. But Rhoun didn’t even trust his children
with the entirety of the secret. They helped him to create the
Dreams, but I don’t think they knew where all seven of them were
placed, or where the keys were hidden.’

‘
So
Ylona knew roughly how to open Teoricq, but she lacked the
details,’ said Egg. ‘Fine. But why is she trying to get at it now?
What does she want from the repository?’

‘
Something came to light recently, among Lokant society,’ said
Mae. ‘Some of Rhoun’s notes surfaced. He was a far more remarkable
man than anybody realised. Quite brilliant. We still don’t know how
he could see, or sense, events that were yet to come, and we never
before knew that he’d developed a way to travel back to events long
past.’

Serena blinked.
‘Time travel? That’s what Ylona is after?’

Egg snorted. ‘Oh,
come on. That’s not possible.’

The vision of the
repository finally faded, and Serena stood blinking, confused, in
the sudden absence of it. Her gaze focused on Egg who stood, arms
folded, an expression of irritated incredulity on her face. ‘Lots
of pretty weird things have happened lately, I grant you. But time
travel?’

Mae raised an
eyebrow. ‘You can be spirited across the realms in the blink of an
eye; talk to someone far away with the aid of a box of metal
pieces; use the most powerful sorcery to create the Daylands and
the Darklands; communicate with animals as though they were human;
shapeshift into myriad alternate forms and sail the skies as
draykoni, but time travel is too much for you to
swallow?’

Egg looked
briefly disconcerted. ‘Well — but —’

‘
But
what?’ Mae interrupted. ‘Rhoun Torinth was always a bit of a
mystery to us. The discoveries he made, the things he knew, were
unthinkable to most of us. In your parlance, he was a genius.
Lokants bend time habitually; our Libraries hold it more or less in
stasis, in fact. These things are common to us. But to wander
backwards through time as easily as we wander forwards? Or to jump
ahead to a future era, as easily as hopping over a puddle? That’s
different. That’s awe-inspiring. And if Rhoun could do such things,
that explains a great deal.’

Serena began to
feel a sense of mild foreboding. ‘You talk about him in the past
tense,’ she observed.

Mae nodded at
her. ‘Rhoun Torinth was killed in the Orlind conflict. He almost
certainly saw it coming, but he chose to seal off Teoricq anyway,
and by doing so he closed the door on the one thing that could have
reversed his death.’

‘
Why?’
Serena asked. ‘Couldn’t he have used it to reverse the Orlind
conflict? To change something so it never happened? Maybe it would
have been a good thing, to share the time travel secret with the
rest of you.’