The Draykon Series (1-3)

Lokant: Chapter Twenty-Nine

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.