The Draykon Series (1-3)

Chapter Eight

   The pale moon rose high over Glour. It was almost full today, and cast a strong silvered glow down upon the buildings of the city; but its coveted radiance could offer little comfort to the citizens of Glour. Rumours swept the city streets, whispers of black beasts with the eyes of winter stalking through the houses on silent paws. The bulletin boards continued to issue their sedate, government warnings of danger. Privately printed news sheets offered more lurid accounts of the events of the past two days. Some thoughtfully included artists' impressions of the three deceased, heavy on the blood content. The mood across Glour was tense.

   Eva Glostrum sat shivering in the city library. It was a vast building, so of course it was cold. After hours of crouching miserably in her chair trying to ignore the freezing drafts, she felt like a block of ice. At her left elbow rested a stack of the dailies, all hysterically reporting a great deal of misinformation. At her right lay a leaning mountain of books hurriedly pulled from the library shelves. She had been studying throughout the darkest hours, poring over all the oldest texts on the shelves until her eyes were stinging with tiredness and her fingers coated with dust and ink. She had worked her way steadily through all the tales of the old days - days before the Summoners' Board had been formed, when creatures of all kinds had roamed the Seven Realms untamed, unrecorded and uncontrollable.

   She had read of gloeremes, finruks, gludrais and the inalo, fearsome beasts long banished from the Middles. She copied drawings of the caomdir, the cluine and the ulenath, creatures occasionally sighted in the Lowers but never above. Even the gwaystrel made its appearance between the pages, once a common sight and now so rare. Some of these beasts bore similarities to the creature she had seen, enough to give her a faint flicker of hope; but none perfectly fit the features she recalled so clearly.

   By moonset she was miserably frozen, appallingly tired and in a deeply poor temper. But she forced herself to keep reading. Glour needed answers to this mystery, and besides: as long as she kept her mind fixed on the task at hand, she couldn't sit and dwell, uselessly and destructively, on the events of last night. Meesa's face flickered through her thoughts hour after hour, chilling her with a new thrill of horror every time she recalled her glassy eyes and blood-soaked hair. Each time she pushed the thoughts ruthlessly away and refocused her tired mind on the texts before her.

   She was avoiding the truth, of course. Legend had it that the Board of Summoners had been founded several generations ago because of one particular beast; one animal too powerful to be controlled, too independent to be mesmerised, too violent to be safely approached. It was these qualities that made them popular as companions: their strength, their impressive physique and those chilling wintry eyes were more effective deterrents than even the most ferocious of guard dogs. But they caused havoc, repeatedly evading the control of their handlers and wreaking terrific damage whenever they succeeded in freeing themselves from command. The whurthag was the first name placed on the list of forbidden summons. The penalties for bringing banned beasts through from the Lowers were harsh.

   Nobody had defied the ban in living memory. There was no incentive to do so: if the summoner managed to evade the punishments imposed by the Board, then sooner or later they would fall prey to the ferocity of the whurthag. No sane summoner would risk being torn apart by their own companion. The Board of Summoners in Glour took great care to ensure that their trained summoners were stable, responsible people, and she knew that the corresponding organisations in Orstwych and Ullarn did likewise. Nobody, then, would be crazy enough to pull a whurthag through.

   So she told herself. Working steadily through all the oldest Catalogues of Beasts, she left the entries for whurthag until last, certain - hoping hard - that she would find an alternative explanation, some other label to place upon the thing she'd seen at the Wrobsley house. But deep down, she knew she was fooling herself.