Book One – Chapter 19

“Yes?” someone said.

Yu heard. Then, he noticed. He noticed just so. That he was watched. That he was spoken to. That someone sat with him. That there were about eight empty tables in this room, and Yu had sat down at the one that was taken.

He struggled to pull his consciousness into the common room with his body, into the here and now. It would not hold. It was like trying to reattach a torn-out feather; no matter how hard he pressed and burrowed the shaft into the skin, it would not stick on its own. Still, as long as he held it with his beak, as long as he refused to release and just kept pushing it into that shredded, bleeding flesh of mind, at least one trembling feather of thought stayed in place. On that fragile barb of focus, Yu recognised the krynn.

“Yes?” the krynn asked again.

“Uhm,” explained Yu.

The krynn stared.

Yu stared back.

First at the krynn, then down at the table, where he registered a single sheet of paper. It was a formal document. Yu’s eyes stole the words before he meant to read them, and then he really stared.

The krynn’s left hand shifted toward the paper, but stopped beside it. “Is there something you wanted?”

Yu tried really hard not to stare any further.

“Do you have word on my companions?” the krynn asked.

Yu searched and found some words. They came slow and diluted, like ink dredged from black water. “I don’t know.”

Not the right ones.

He tried again, scraping for the guard-mask, forcing it forward as it fought with the split face beneath. “I mean, not about the human. They still … help her.”

“And the selder?”

The mask sought smoothness, dutiful cadence. The two jagged parts underneath repelled each other.

“She’s … She’s with him …”

The sentence broke at the edges, a throbbing distortion in his own ears. Every word, from himself or the krynn, was distant and raw and painful, as though someone had poured ice water into his earholes and each sound that tried to push through just drove the water in deeper. It was not just words. Yu was almost deaf. All sounds had lost their breath. Most that should be there had been drowned without a trace. Those that still surfaced were stripped of all substance. They showed only grotesque and hollow features.

“Your shaman?” The krynn leaned back.