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posture before; he was
working his summoner magic, striving to impose his will on a nearby
creature. Aysun stiffened, for if Eyas was so employed it meant
that a dangerous animal had moved up on them without his hearing or
seeing any sign of it.
    At last Eyas moved and
took a long breath. Twining around his leg was a snake, its scaled
ivory-coloured hide liberally splotched with vivid purple. Nyra
hissed and backed away from the fire.
    ‘Don’t leave the fire,
Nyra,’ said Eyas quickly. ‘I can sense six more of these within a
few feet of us.’
    Nyra froze.
    Aysun stood and
shouldered his pack. ‘Best move on, then.’
    Standing, Rufin was a
couple of inches taller than Aysun. He grinned down at his old
friend and unstrapped his shotgun.
    ‘I’ll take the lead,
shall I?’
     
    A few hours later,
Aysun was close to despair. His device was malfunctioning; it had
to be. According to the display, Llandry was moving far faster than
they were. No matter how quickly he forced his company to move, she
continued to draw further away. He knew she could fly fast with her
Glinnish wings - she and her mother had often outpaced him on the
ground, even when Llandry was a child - but even so, it shouldn’t
be possible for her to put so much distance between them at such a
rate.
    A halt was called some
hours after they had encountered the snakes. Eyas at last declared
it safe to rest, but while the others slept Aysun worked on his
location device. He worked relentlessly, ignoring his tiredness,
searching for the fault in the machinery that was causing the
problems with the display.
    But all his efforts
only made it worse, for after an hour’s work something remarkably
strange happened. The point of light that represented Llandry’s
position abruptly reversed its direction and began to head back
towards Aysun’s group. He calculated that her position must be more
than fifty miles ahead of them, but she closed that distance with
impossible speed. Over the space of a mere few minutes, her path
traced an arc around them, passing a few miles to the northeast.
Then that taunting dot of light veered away once more.
    Aysun was an engineer,
hailing from the realm of Irbel where talent with machinery was
common and highly valued. He was a skilled practitioner of the
mechanical arts himself, and had long worked with the outpost of
Irbellian engineers based in Glinnery. He was aware of several
projects developing vehicles that would move faster than
nivven-drawn carriages, but he had never heard of anything that
would allow the kind of speed his display was showing. It was
unimaginable.
    It must be broken, but
he could find no fault and as such there was nothing to repair.
    Without the reliable
help of his locator, how could he ever expect to find Llandry in
this fluid place, where nothing stayed the same and no landmark
could be relied upon? Despairing, Aysun tossed the device into his
pack and turned his back on his companions. He wanted to sleep, but
he couldn’t; not while Llandry was lost somewhere in the Uppers. He
was one of the foremost engineers of Irbel: he had to find the
solution.
     
     

Chapter
Four
     
    ‘Who would you
recommend as your successor?’
    Guardian Islvy Troste regarded Eva with some
sadness as she posed the question. Eva’s eleven years as High
Summoner had just come to an end; Islvy had been at the head of
Glour’s government for seven of those years, and the two women had
often worked together. They had never been close friends, but they
had been able to rely on each other.
    ‘Roys Alin,’ Eva
replied. She hadn’t had to think hard for an answer to that
question. Roys was no aristocrat, and that must speak against her
when it came to government appointments. But she was a summoner
whose natural strength almost equalled Eva’s own, and had long been
Eva’s second in command. She was a rational, dedicated woman; she
would do well in the role of chief of the realm’s summoner
practitioners.
    The Guardian