Draykon (42 page)

Abruptly the
flight was over. Devary's cloud-coloured dream-beast swooped to the
ground and opened its talons, letting him settle into the engulfing
embrace of Glinnery's thick blue mosses. Its mouth opened,
revealing long, pearlescent teeth; it emitted an ear-splitting
shriek as it hurled itself back into the sky. Devary blinked,
mistrusting his vision. The beast had vanished into the air, its
pursuer disappearing along with it.

Doors were flung
open and the sky filled rapidly with winged human figures,
chattering in shock and excitement. Devary realised that he had
been deposited at the base of Ynara's tree, and here was the lady
herself, descending from the heights with her glorious dark blue
wings spread wide.

'Oh, Dev,' she
gasped, dropping to her knees beside him. She paled to a stark
white, looking into his face with the wide eyes of fear. He
wondered idly how bad his wounds were. He became aware, distantly,
of a warm body clinging painfully to one of his legs. Glancing
down, he saw grey fur and a stub of a tail. Ynara prised Sigwide
off him, and the pressure eased on Devary's calf and
shin.

Aysun came up
behind her and frowned down at him. Devary tried a weak smile, but
his face wouldn't work properly.

'Right,' said
Aysun, slowly. 'Lucky the infirmary's not far.' Devary was suddenly
surrounded by people, faces bobbing blearily at him and voices
raised in a babble of indistinguishable sound. He felt himself
lifted again, and pain radiated outwards from the wound in his
belly.

'Dev,' said
Ynara's voice from somewhere. 'Where's Llandry?'

He tried to
answer, but the sky fell in on him and he dropped into
darkness.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Nobody moved for
a long time after the draykons had flown away. Ana was slumped over
Griel's body, as motionless as he. Tren had the vacant look of a
man whose world has suddenly inverted itself. As indeed it had. The
whurthags had vanished, and a profound silence reigned in the
forest that was slowly reverting back to Ana's stone-built
chamber.

Eva felt
stupefied. It seemed impossible to equate the day's events with
anything that ought to be possible within the laws of nature and
magic. No matter how hard she pushed her shocked brain, the edges
refused to match up. At length she stopped trying. She stood up
slowly, careful of her spinning head, and took a few deep breaths.
The questions she placed to one side, to be examined later. A more
pressing problem was Ana and Griel, if he was even still
alive.

Ana looked up as
she approached. Her face was initially blank, but when she
registered Eva's identity her expression grew harsh.

'I suppose you've
come to be kind to me.' She was a mess, her hands and hair stained
with blood and her clothes torn. She wore it with a kind of
incongruous insouciance, her air defiant rather than crippled. For
the first time, Eva truly saw how dangerous she was.

'I was more
inclined to arrest you.'

Ana laughed, a
high-pitched sound with an edge of hysteria. 'You?'

'Mr. Warvel,
actually, as the nearest representative of the Chief Investigator's
Office.'

Tren came up next
to her and stood looking down at the wreck of a sorceress. 'You're
under arrest,' he said gravely. 'Anything to say?'

Ana snarled
something inarticulate. She grabbed Griel's body, dragging it close
to her own. Then she disappeared.

'Inevitable, I
suppose,' Tren murmured.

'Perfectly,'
agreed Eva. 'I really must learn how she does that,' she
added.

'Add it to the
list of mysteries.'

'There's already
enough there to keep us busy for a couple of decades, I should
think.'

'Then it's lucky
that we're young and bursting with energy.'

Eva laughed
faintly. 'Speak for yourself.'

Tren grinned
lopsidedly. 'I don't think I was, even. I feel at least one hundred
and fifty.' He rolled his shoulders, grimacing as joints cracked
and popped. 'So... what just happened?'

'Why are you
asking?'

'Because if I
wasn't dreaming, a girl just appeared out of thin air, transformed
into a draykon and flew away. It seemed significant.'

'I mean. Why are
you asking
me
?'

Tren smiled
tiredly. 'I view you as a fount of knowledge, that's why. If you're
as confused as me, that's fine. You can just say that.'

'I have some
theories, but I wouldn't like to hazard anything without conducting
some research.'

'Admit it. You
have no idea.'

Eva grimaced.
'Fine. I'm a useless scholar and I have no notion what in the world
is going on.'

'Good. Well
said.'

'We can work on
that later. The important point is that we have two draykons on the
loose. One of them was a bag of bones until today, and the other
used to be a human. That's the kind of thing that ought to be
reported pretty quickly.'

Searching for
traces of her companions, Eva found the shortig cowering beneath a
small table that was tucked into one corner of the room. Now that
it was empty, the chamber seemed vaster than ever. Her footsteps
rang sharply as she crossed the stone floor, the sound echoing off
the bare walls. She coaxed the shortig out from his retreat,
handing the small, shaking body to Tren.

'Keep a hold of
him for a moment, if you will,' she murmured, her thoughts already
seeking for Rikbeek. She was distantly aware of Tren's nod as he
folded his arms around the little dog, stroking the fur that
virtually stood on end with stress.

Rikbeek,
predictably, had flown as far away as he could get. He was
plastered to the wall near the ceiling, virtually insensible with
fright. It took her much longer to soothe him. At last he unsealed
himself from the wall and flew down, making straight for her
skirts. He hid himself in the folds and refused to move. That was
fine with her.

'It's a pity
we've lost the book,' she said regretfully.

'Actually, it's
not lost. I hid it. I'll take you to it in a moment, but we should
search this place before we leave. There might be more books like
that one.'

'Good thinking,'
she said, flashing Tren an appreciative smile. 'Fortunate that one
of us is still in possession of his mental faculties.' To her
surprise Tren flushed slightly and looked away. He set off towards
the far door, the one that lead back towards Eva's erstwhile
prison.

The search was
conducted thoroughly, but with the swiftness of weary people
anxious to be gone. Many of the books Eva found were copies of
common texts, duplicates of many that she herself possessed at
home. She found one exception, a half-finished work entitled
'Advanced Workings of the Sorcerous Mind.' No author was listed.
Eva discovered it lying open in a tiny antechamber furnished only
with a desk and chair. The book lay open, surrounded by pens and
pots of ink. This and its unfinished state strongly suggested to
Eva that Griel was its author. She took it.

Tren had stumbled
over what appeared to be Ana's library. In it were all the core
texts on Summoning that Eva had been familiar with for years, along
with a few she'd never heard of.

'We'd better take
all of those,' Tren murmured, flicking through a small
leather-bound volume. 'This one's a novel. I suppose Ana got bored
sometimes.' He tossed the book back onto the shelf. 'There's
nothing else very interesting here.'

Eva nodded and
picked up two of the unusual texts. Naturally they were enormous
and staggeringly heavy. She made a pile out of them, adding Griel's
book to the top of the stack, and collected them all into her
arms.

'Let me,' said
Tren. He was already carrying three others that looked at least as
heavy, but he insisted on taking Griel's book off her and adding it
to his own stack. 'I'm sure we can find a bag or something to carry
them in.'

They couldn't, as
it turned out. In the end Eva took off the remains of her cloak and
fashioned a makeshift one. She watched with misgivings as Tren
stubbornly piled all the books into it and hefted it, throwing it
over his shoulder.

'It's fine,' he
said as she tried to object. She rolled her eyes at this display of
machismo but she let him have his way.

'Where's the
other book?' she asked. He nodded his head in the direction of the
draykon chamber.

'Back that way. I
left it in the tunnel.'

'The
tunnel?'

He nodded,
setting off at a brisk pace. She followed, trying not to wince at
the obvious discomfort of the bundle of books on his back. The
tunnel proved to be a long corridor only just tall enough for a
six-foot-something man to walk comfortably through. It was paved in
stone like the rest of the house. Tren paused at the end of it,
searching the darkened stonework with keen eyes. Then he dropped to
his knees and slid his fingers under the edge of a protruding
stone, lifting it. In a hollow beneath the stone lay her satchel
and Tren's. She was relieved to find that the book was still
inside, unharmed.

'How convenient a
hiding place,' she observed.

'Thank you,' said
Tren modestly. 'Actually I made it. I didn't have time to be
precise about it or I'd have lost sight of Griel.'

Eva chuckled.
'You're an adept student. What of the door?'

Tren stood up
again and tugged at the wall over his head. A door opened,
illuminating a set of steps that wound upwards into the open air.
She followed Tren as he climbed up them, his steps heavy with
tiredness. Bartel, somewhat recovered, trotted listlessly at her
heels as she emerged into a white sandy landscape.

Tren closed the
door behind them. There was the arrow and the smiling face that
he’d described. 'How curious,' she said, confounded.

'I thought I was
being so stealthy, following Griel like that. I'm convinced now
that he knew I was there. He even found an excuse to pause briefly
if I fell behind, to make sure I didn't go through the wrong door.
I don't see why he didn't just kill me in the tunnel, if he was
going to lure me down here.'

Eva thought fast.
'Odd, but I got the impression he didn't share his wife's fervour
for her "project". He probably realised it was headed for disaster.
Perhaps he hoped we could tip the scales in her favour.'

Tren shrugged. 'A
rational possibility. I suppose we won't ever find out for
sure.'

The light changed
as he spoke, the moon turning to an unpromising shade of greenish
brown. Abandoning her train of thought, Eva looked up into skies
that were partially covered with fat clouds threatening
rain.

'Why do I get the
feeling things are about to turn unpleasant,' she
muttered.

Moments later,
the white sand was gone. In its place a marsh had emerged,
saturated with stagnant water and stinking of decay.

'Ah, yes,' Eva
sighed. 'Perfect.'

Epilogue

Ynara frowned
down at Devary's prone form, absently smoothing the blankets over
him. He had been delirious for two days, obviously hallucinating.
She hadn't been able to gain a clear picture of what had happened
to him and Llandry, despite her repeated questioning. He rambled
incoherently about scaled beasts and wings like sails; the word
'draykon' even passed his lips at one point. Ynara thought briefly
of the terrific, bestial shriek that had sent her and her husband
racing down from their treetop abode to find Devary unconscious at
the bottom. An unusual sound it had undoubtedly been, but Ynara did
not credit Devary's ramblings. Gracious, the woods were already
thick with the sorts of creatures long since banished to the pages
of storybooks. Any number of strange, unidentifiable sounds
resounded through the trees from the moment the sun rose through to
the softest of the dusk hours. Some one or other of those had
undoubtedly made that shuddering cry.

Doubt flickered
through her for a moment, undermining her certainty. So many
supposedly extinct or non-existent beasts had lately emerged,
stepping through the gates that still opened and closed themselves
with unusual frequency across the Seven Realms. If the muumuk, the
whurthag and the gloereme were as real as she, why not the king of
them all? Why not draykons, indeed? The thought made her heart beat
hard and quick with fear, and she pushed it resolutely away. She
had not seen this supposed draykon, and she had been out of her
house within moments of hearing that cry. Neither had any of the
other bystanders present. The prospect of their simply failing to
spot something so enormous was absurd. She took a deep breath,
feeling better.

Devary's eyes
opened. He had been sleeping peacefully for more than two hours
now, and she hoped that the delirium had passed. She bent over him,
adopting a reassuring smile.

'Hello, Dev,' she
said quietly. 'You're looking a little better. Not so grey in the
face. How do you feel?'