Lokant (Ebook)

The moon was barely up when the post carrier arrived, bearing a parcel so large that the driver struggled to lift it. In the graceful, distinctive script of the address, Lady Evastany Glostrum recognised the elegant handwriting of her friend Ynara Sanfaer. She waved the postman inside and signed the paperwork with a smile, though she felt considerably puzzled.

She had recently dispatched a letter to Elder Sanfaer, requesting an urgent meeting. Ynara lived in Glinnery, a Daylands province where darkness never came. Herself a resident of the Darklands, Eva could not comfortably travel to Glinnery; her largely nocturnal eyes could not bear the glare of the sun. As such, she had expected Ynara to come to her.

Instead her friend had sent a parcel. It took Eva some minutes of work with a pair of scissors to open the well-packed box, and then subsequently to work her way through the packaging that shrouded the contents. At length she lifted out a completely unidentifiable contraption made from metal and glass, finding no accompanying letter of explanation along with it.

She turned the thing over in her hands, puzzling. It was bulky, though not particularly large. Two rounded pieces of glass adorned what could be the front; behind them lay several other similarly sized pieces, though their shapes varied. They vaguely resembled spectacles, though of no variant Eva had ever seen before.

That thought sparked off an idea. Hadn’t there been reports of new developments in spectacle technology? She had heard of glasses — goggles, really — that could fully protect a Darklander’s eyes against the sun. Ynara’s husband was a prominent engineer; small wonder if he had been involved in this project.

She tried them on. It took a little adjusting to fit the headgear correctly, but at length the pieces slid into place and the goggles clamped firmly over her eyes, instantly smothering all light.

Eva blinked in the sudden complete darkness. Well, so far so good. They were certainly good at blocking out light. On the other hand, the headset was heavy: already her neck was beginning to hurt. Eva took the thing off with a grimace. Presumably Aysun Sanfaer intended to refine the idea somewhat before it went into production for general distribution.

In other circumstances, the prospect of freely wandering the Daylands would have delighted her. She had seen very little of Glinnery and nothing at all of Irbel. Nothing either of Orlind, though nobody could claim to have visited that distant, untouchable realm. She couldn’t even visit Nimdre; it was the only one of the six accessible realms that retained an ordinary day-night cycle, enjoying too many hours of full daylight for the comfort of Darklander vision. As a worldly woman fond of travel, the prospect of seeing the Daylands was attractive.

But the timing was, to say the least, unfavourable. She had returned to her home in Glour City less than a moon ago, and duties and obligations crowded upon her. She had neglected her role as High Summoner for many days while she hunted a criminal with one of the Chief Investigator’s men. Her possession of two skilled tracking companions — a shortig hound and a web-winged gwaystrel — had made her instrumental to the task, but she had been hard-pressed to catch up on her duties on her return. And she had had very little time to address some important questions that had been raised on the journey.

But Ynara was worried about her daughter. Only a couple of moons ago, Llandry Sanfaer had accidentally discovered an unusual gemstone which she had named istore after the stars. That stone had captured the attention of thousands of people all the way across the Seven Realms, and eventually it had led to thefts and even murders. Llandry herself had been inevitably caught up in the affair; she had journeyed secretly into Nimdre with a friend of her mother’s and there she had disappeared. Eva was one of only two people who knew what had happened to Llandry. If Ynara would not, or could not, come to her, then she must go to Ynara. She owed it to her friend.

Eva’s carriage conveyed her only as far as the border between Glinnery and Glour, a journey of some ten hours. Few carriage-ready roads wound through the dense forests of Glinnery: since the residents held the benefit of wings, they had little use for carriages. Eva disembarked with a sigh: she had never been one to relish the prospect of a long walk.

Luckily for her, the Sanfaers lived in the capital city, Waeverleyne, a mere few hours’ walk from the border — though it felt like a much longer trek to Eva’s pampered physique, not used to strenuous walking or to the heat of the sun. The beauty of her surroundings occupied her mind for a time as she walked through Glinnery’s famed glissenwol woods. Could these shades of blue and green and lavender, so vivid and bright, truly be real? Or were they enhanced by the lenses of the headgear that she wore? She was entranced by the soft blue moss and the fronded purple-leaved ferns, the glitter of dayflies in the air and the fragrances of sun-warmed blossoms.

At least until the discomfort in her feet and legs reminded her of the wearisome toil of the adventure. Recently she’d been obliged to do a lot of walking, pursuing Edwae Geslin overland with her tracker hound. If anything, that only made this episode harder, for she was already tired. She trudged along in a state of intolerable dishevelment, her hair blown out of its pins by the wind and her cotton gown sticking unpleasantly to her skin. When at last she reached Ynara’s home she took the opportunity to pause and admire the property... and perhaps to catch her breath and smooth her hair while she was at it.

The Sanfaer home was situated close to the edge of the city. In Glour this position might have indicated a lower status, but what mattered more in Glinnery was the height of the glissenwol tree in which the dwelling was situated, and the extent of the expansion around the trunk. Ynara’s home was magnificent: her family had three storeys spanning from the middle of a vast glissenwol trunk up to the top. Seeking a way in, Eva observed a staircase winding its way up the tree. That made sense, for Ynara’s husband Aysun did not have wings like his wife and daughter.

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