Irvyn

[Repost - originally posted 15th September]

Irvyn walked up the stone stairs to the main entrance of Duke?s Lodge. The night was misty, chilly and damp in the shadow of the mountain, and he fumbled his keys a bit with numb fingers .. he could have knocked and got Fitzpaine to open the door, but as usual these days he was tired and depressed and did not want fussing over. Fitzpaine was the only person who knew what was bothering Irvyn, and sometimes the silent but obvious sympathy got a bit much.

The heavy door swung open with a slight creak and a welcome rush of warmth from the fire in the hall. As he stepped forwards, he felt a crackle of paper under his right boot .. puzzled, he stooped to pick it up, and as he lifted it, smelt the familiar perfume. His heart leapt .. at last ... his other hand went automatically to the cloak pin which had remained dark and lifeless for weeks. He walked swiftly over to the fire, lit one of the lamps and eagerly unfolded the paper. He read the letter through several times, hearing the beloved voice in his mind, and feeling a great weight lifted off his shoulders. The warmth that spread through him was not just from the fire.


Irvyn slept soundly that night with the letter under his pillow. If there were dreams, he did not remember them, and woke in the morning feeling refreshed and considerably happier than he had been for a long time. As befitted his mood, the day was bright and sunny, with no trace of the damp and miserable mist of the day before. He kept the letter in his pocket, just to remind himself.

He made his customary Friday visit to the Trinsic Rose, where Kamar proudly showed off the cloak he had won at the darts. Raven was there, a little gloomy as usual, and Pierre deep in conversation with Gwyn. John had been trying to relax with a drink after helping with the fight against the void shadow; he thanked John for the report on the blackrock meeting and was overheard by a woman called Ravida, who seemed to be an expert on it. She gave him some books she had written on the subject ... he was grateful, but it brought back the memories, some of them painful, about the black dagger. But that also took his mind to Isidore who had helped bring him back from the madness.

So after that, he went back home again. It was time to get Isidore to Trinsic, start him off learning about the city. It was hard to repress his pride in his son. He was a bit shy still, but once he relaxed and got to know and rely on the guards and others sworn to the Duchy, he would do just fine. After introducing him to the guards at the gate, and Leisa the magistrate who happened to be there, he abandoned Isidore (not without a qualm) and went off to his office where he caught up on a few days? worth of the Morning Poste. An odd paragraph from a couple of days previously caught his eye: Chancellor Michael had gone missing from Spiritwood University.

A little later, he went out and found Isidore in the park with a few other people. Ikus came by and they all chatted for a while. Then someone else came to speak to Ikus, and Isidore suddenly remembered that he had a message for Irvyn. He handed him a note and message from Kaelyn. Irvyn looked at the piece of paper .. a torn piece of paper with Michael?s handwriting, but since when would Michael go tearing up his own notes? His uneasiness about the disappearance returned, especially when added to the appearance of a lot of blackrock which could well be connected ? Michael was a determined scholar with sometimes little thought for danger. Abruptly he made a decision to go to Spiritwood for a day or two. Isidore would do better without Irvyn hanging over him protectively, and Ikus was there to keep an eye on him anyway.


The next day he rose at dawn, and dressed himself in old plain clothes that no-one would remark on, the ones he?d used before to walk around freely without being noticed (except once in Skara, he thought with an inward smile). Reluctantly, he locked the letter away in the strongbox, along with the cloak pin. Best not to risk losing either. After giving Fitzpaine a few last minute instructions, he set off.

In spite of a faint nagging feeling in the back of his mind whenever the blackrock dagger popped into his mind ? almost as though someone or something were tugging at him from a long way off ? his spirits were high. As he stepped out of the gate to start the journey to Spiritwood, he even broke briefly into a merry whistle, and chuckled to himself at the guards? quickly hidden surprise.

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Irvyn

Irvyn had lost count of the number of days he had been there .. 11 or 12? It had taken the better part of 2 days just to break the leather straps that bound his hands and feet ... abrading his wrists against a rough piece of wood. He had plenty of time to think. But as to who had put him there, no ideas came at all.

The whole situation had started some months back really, with that conversation with Michael, and then carried on a few weeks ago with that letter from him, which was still in the office, in the miscellaneous pile. Then, when Michael had been reported missing, and that torn page of his notebook had turned up, the vague uneasiness Irvyn had felt about his ramblings (why couldn’t the man have been a bit more specific?!) crystallised into a determination to find the old man and save him from himself, if necessary. Scholarship was all very well, but stirring up ancient evils and getting yourself killed in the process was not even remotely sensible.

So he had gone off to Spiritwood. The University was very quiet these days ... a pity, it needed students again ... but everything seemed normal enough, on the face of it. Although, when he looked in the office, it did seem more than usually tidy. The library was too vast and impossible to search in detail, but a swift check of a few shelves showed nothing obviously missing or out of place. The lecture hall upstairs was empty, though there was a map on one of the desks, but the ink was so blurred and run that it could not be read.

The sun beat down relentlessly, day after day, interspersed with small rainshowers in the evenings. The sun burned him; there was virtually no shelter on the remains of the ship. It had been called the Azure Breeze, from the faint letters still visible on the bow. The rainwater collected in little hollows all over the wrecked ship. There was not much of it, and what there was tasted of woodrot and tarred timber, but it kept him alive.

He went up to the next floor, to the meeting room with its green benches and verite-coloured granite table. The colour reminded him of Seriya briefly, but he put the pleasant thoughts aside; he was here on business. The table did seem cluttered, with several piles of books, as though Michael had been in the middle of something. He decided to check the roof and then come back and look at the books.

On the roof there were signs that someone had been there recently. A pile of ashes on the stone, burned paper, still smelling strongly of smoke, so not very old. This was certainly not Michael’s work. He carefully sifted through the ashes but found only fragments of paper with nothing useful, until at the bottom he found a partially burned small notebook with a thick leather cover, which was no doubt what had saved it from total incineration. He put it in his trouser pocket to read later and went back down to the meeting room.

He found one of the strakes that was splitting diagonally, and after a struggle, he managed to get a fairly long pointed piece of wood. After many attempts, he finally succeeded in spearing a fish, which he devoured raw. He caught a few more and attempted to dry some of the flesh in the sun, but seabirds came and ate most of it, to his exasperation. But he continued to catch enough to keep him going.

One of the books appeared to be from the reference section, Primitive Cults Volume 4. He glanced at it briefly, but without knowing what Michael had been researching, it was not much help. He put it aside and picked up the other, the Tome De Animus Sera. It was about a group of people who could bind daemons and pay them in human souls, and had been defeated by the Guardians of Nature or the Council of Heirophants, which seemed to be the same group. But perhaps the knowledge of daemon-binding still remained, and there was a defence against it, something called the Animus Sera, which locked the soul to its owner and prevented it being given to a daemon.

Was that what Michael had been searching for? The knowledge to bind daemons and the defence of the Animus Sera? He began to read the book again. Suddenly there was a rustle of movement behind him, and something hit him very hard on the back of the head. He knew nothing more until he woke up, bound hand and foot, stripped of everything except his trousers and the burned notebook in his pocket, on a wrecked ship by the Serpent Pillars.

Sometimes dolphins came past, their leaping joy a spark of brightness. But at other times there were great monsters of the sea, huge serpents and once even a kraken ... he was grateful for his ability to remain still and hidden, gained first in his youth, hunting in the forests round his home, and refined and improved later in Trinsic ... there were times when being unobserved could be very useful. More worrying though ... the tides were getting progressively higher as the moons waxed full ... by the 9th or 10th day, he knew that the wreck would be drowned soon and himself with it.

And then on the 12th or maybe 13th day he woke up from an uneasy doze to hear voices and a ship. Iljian, Lance, Cutter .. at first he thought he was hallucinating. But in less than an hour he was back in Trinsic. He passed on everything his starved and dehydrated brain could remember, and then Gwyn escorted him back home to sleep.

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