JULIEN
II
Chapter 42
Requietio interrupta
“Hey, come and have a look at this! There's a busted window in the dining hall!”
Julien jerked into wakefulness. He sat on his bed, which was one of two that had been shoehorned into a tiny room – the only other furniture was a small locker. He couldn't see a lot because the shutters were closed, but he could make out a little in the gloomy light filtering between the slats.
“The shutter's been vandalised! I reckon we've had burglars!”
The voices came from the dining hall, men's voices with a trace of an accent that Julien vaguely recognised but couldn't place. He supposed that it had to be local, though.
“Burglars? Why would they bother? There's bugger-all to steal here!”
“True, but we'd still better call it in. We're only here to fix the boiler – I'm not getting involved with security. Look, I'll go to the office and call the manager, and while I'm gone, see if you can get the sodding boiler to start.”
Julien got dressed in a hurry. He didn't know how long he'd been asleep, but he did feel a bit fresher. But it looked as if he was going to have to leave his refuge a lot quicker than he had hoped. He opened the window and then the shutter as quietly as he could, cursing himself for not having foreseen the possibility of someone visiting the site. He particularly regretted not having had the foresight to prepare a box of food that he could have taken with him, and nor had he taken the opportunity to go looking for a change of clothes. A sweater would have been particularly welcome. He decided to take one of the blankets he had found in the locker. Rolled up tightly in the military fashion it wouldn't be too cumbersome, and it might definitely come in useful.
Because the window was on the ground floor it was easy for him to slip outside and then run towards the shelter of the woods that weren't too far away. He decided to go back to the place where he had arrived, but he thought it would be best not to spend too much time walking around in the open. This was all the more important now, when there was a good chance that the cops would be alerted to his little bit of breaking and entering.
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When he finally reached what he thought of as 'the camp' he wasn't too surprised to find nobody waiting for him. Only a blackened circle on the ground bore witness to the Jaguar Patrol's visit, and thinking about his encounter with them somehow made his present situation seem all the more bleak.
He had no food. Due to his immense stupidity he still had no means of lighting a fire. He didn't have a tent, or even a bit of plastic sheeting that he could use to make a shelter. He didn't even have a water-bottle. He could only hope that it would be safe to drink the water in the stream.
He had to be honest with himself and admit that he wasn't going to last very long as he was. He would either have to risk jumping or surrender to the authorities. He had actually memorised the phone number that Grégoire of the Jaguars had given him, but he didn't have any money to make a phone call from a public call box. And of course he hadn't thought to look for a phone while he was in the holiday centre. But even if he had, what could a boy who lived hundreds of kilometres away in Paris do to help him here?
His initial challenges were to find food and a shelter for the night. As far as food was concerned, that was simple enough: he'd have to manage without. As for a shelter... he'd already been on a couple of so-called survival training camps in the Scouts, but even when issued with a ball of string the shelters he had managed to assemble, and the ones he'd seen others put together, were pretty pathetic and wouldn't have offered genuine shelter from even a brief shower of rain. Sadly, European woods were light on banana trees, the wide, waterproof leaves of which could provide a decent shelter for anyone who knew how to use them. And in any case he didn't even have any string. The only equipment he had was, as the saying goes, his knife and his todger, and while that was better than nothing, it still didn't allow him to view the future with any optimism. So he decided that the only thing he could do was to try a jump.
“Tchok...
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… tseh”
He had jumped!
Yes, but only to the exact spot in the meadow where he had landed a few hours previously.
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Chapter 43
Vigil
Dillik was asleep. The Health Masters had finally agreed that he could stay in Xarax's room, but they had spiked his drinking water with a harmless sleeping potion. The haptir was being kept unconscious in a sort of box in which the damaged parts of his anatomy could be fixed in the position best likely to aid their healing.
The fact that the haptir was unable to take any food except his master's enriched blood was an additional, and difficult, problem, especially since they knew he couldn't live for too long without a substantial input of energy. On the other hand, the fact that his digestive system was more or less unused made his abdominal wound a great deal less serious than it would otherwise have been.
Niil did his best to comfort Ambar, but he was finding it hard to hide his anger. He blamed himself almost as much as Tannder did for allowing such an attack to take place in an environment which he had thought secure, and he found it insupportable that one, and possibly two, of Julien's closest friends should have died as a result.
The Guild of Guides had been alerted and all of the greatest Master Guides had embarked on the search for the Emperor. The best of them were looking for a way to get to Earth, which seemed the most likely place to look.
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Lord Aldegard, Lord Tahlil, Master Subadar, Tannder and Dennkar held council in the navigation room of the trankenn. The two Mirrors didn't blame the Warriors for what had happened, even though security was their province and the enemy had obviously managed to outwit their precautions.
“I'm sure he'll come back on his own if the Guides don't manage to find him,” said Subadar. “I'm much more worried about Xarax. The Emperor's Haptir is no mere companion.”
“We know that, Subadar,” said Aldegard. “But our first priority still has to be to find Julien.”
“I don't think you've quite grasped the situation,” replied Subadar. “Xarax holds a large part of the Imperial memory, and he's also key to some of the Emperor's powers. And, as you know, he has no successor: the haptir egg kept in stasis at the Palace is dead. This is extremely serious: such a thing has never happened before. If he dies...”
“Do you mean that Julien will be unable to recover all his abilities?”
“To be honest, I don't know. There's a lot about the relationship between the Emperor and his haptir that I don't understand.”
“Do we know yet who attacked them?” asked Tahlil.
“Well,” said Tannder, if we go by their weapons we'd have to assume they were Dalannis. We assume that the ones who haven't turned themselves in are probably quite high up in the pecking order. People like that are likely to be ambitious and determined, and completely unscrupulous if it gets them what they want. It seems likely that they wanted to abduct Julien and negotiate with us for his release. That's why he's not already dead.”
“That makes sense,” agreed Dennkar. “They killed the Guide because they knew they wouldn't be able to capture Julien otherwise, and they tried to kill Xarax because they would know he was a dangerous bodyguard. But apparently they didn't know that the Emperor doesn't need a Guide with him to travel. Of course, hardly anyone knows that.”
“Are we sure Julien really did escape?” asked Aldegard. “His Gift has been very unstable recently.”
“Yes. It was the last thing Xarax told us before he lost consciousness,” said Tannder.
“When he comes back I'm afraid we're going to have to tell him to stay away from public places again,” said Aldegard.
“I'm fairly certain he'll tell us to find the people who are after him.”
“I'm sure you're trying to do that.”
“Of course. To start with we're probing every member of the trankenn crew, because I'd be amazed if there weren't at least one or two conspirators on board. The operation was too well-planned: they must have known our schedule in advance. Of course, if we're to probe the passengers as well we'll need permission from the Emperor's Mirror on Dvârinn.”
“You've got it,” Tahlil assured him. “After a murderous assault like this, of course you do. And I don't mind being probed first in order to set an example to our guests.”
Naturally they decided not to submit the younger members of the party to probing, but Niil insisted that as First Lord of the Ksantiris he ought to set an example, too.
“Besides,” he said, “for all I know I might have inadvertently opened my mouth in front of the wrong person. We shouldn't risk missing any opportunity to get some information, even if it doesn't seem likely.”
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There was no way that Dillik was going to leave the haptir's bedside. His friends took turns to stay with him for a while so as to give him a bit of company, and they did their best to remain upbeat despite the Health Masters' gloomy prognosis. His father even left his place on the bridge of the trankenn to visit and to assure him that he understood what he was going through.
His mother had visited, too, and she proved far more sympathetic than he would have thought possible, because she had never approved of her son's strange relationship with his dangerous friend. She was even less happy about the way he now lived a completely independent life, in which she was merely on the sidelines. But Dillik's obvious distress simply dissolved her resentment, leaving only unconditional love, which was exactly what he needed in his present situation. Furthermore, while Mistress Nardik had always felt a certain dislike at the sight of the haptir, seeing him as he was now, broken and powerless, made her feel a surge of compassion for him. Dillik felt it at once and that, more than anything else, made him feel a lot better.
Dillik had asked the Health Masters if it would be all right to hold one of Xarax's claws in order to try to communicate with him, and since receiving their permission he had tried it regularly. And when he fell asleep at the end of a day of watching anxiously over his friend he had a dream that would finally help him to do something about the fate which hitherto had seemed determined to crush them all.
He found himself flying, as he so often did in these dreams, and he was acutely aware of being both himself and Xarax. And as they whirled around the turrets of the Imperial Palace he heard the unmistakable voice Xarax used to speak to him, even though he could simply have shared his thoughts.
“You must find Julien,” it said. “I'll show you how. I can't go with a Guide – I can't even wake up properly. But I'm going to print the map and instructions in your mind. I'm sure Wenn Hyaď will be able to use them to find him.”
A few seconds later Dillik woke up, and immediately he started looking for someone who could find the Guide for him.
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