by ‘What the bloody hell?’ growled Rob, staring in awe.
I had no words to offer. They’d all gone.
If I’d wondered before how an abandoned city came to be so well-kept, I had my answer now. Farringale’s wide, white boulevard lay stretched before us, flanked on either side by grand mansions in pale or golden stone and brick. A legion of shabby broomsticks was abroad in the street, wielded by no one and yet engaged in a furious orgy of sweeping. The noise bordered upon cacophonous as bristles scraped ruthlessly over paving stones and pathways and walls, removing every speck of accumulated dirt and dust. Ragged shreds of cloth applied themselves to leaded window panes, buffing them up to a renewed shine. Greenish water drained slowly from collected puddles, and buckets of fresher, soapy water emptied themselves into the spaces they left behind, the brooms rushing in to scrub away the stains left by filth and algae.
The air freshened slowly as we watched, the aromas of stagnation fading in favour of wafting, floral fragrances.
I kept my shield up and sturdy, in case any of the household implements should take exception to our entrance and attempt to attack us. They did not. We went ignored as they completed their furious spring-cleaning, those that approached routing smoothly around us with the apparent ease of long practice.
After, perhaps, ten minutes of this, a bell tinkled brightly somewhere and this seemed to be a signal, for the broomsticks and cloths, buckets and brushes, all vanished with a concerted pop.
I thought, apropos of nothing and with a brief pang, of Alban. What a pity he had missed the broomstick ballet.
‘How do we get this at home?’ said Jay, who had come up next to me some minutes before.
‘We’ve a lesser version of it at Home already,’ I said. ‘Much lesser, and more discreet. I can’t imagine the kind of power it would take to operate the Sweeping Symphony on so large a scale.’
‘And who’s running it, anyway?’ said Rob. ‘Any symphony needs a conductor.’
‘Do you think someone is still alive out here?’ I said, thinking of Baroness Tremayne, the… shade, I suppose, of a former courtier I’d met on our previous visit. But no, she was not technically alive. Not technically dead, either, but hers was a shadowed existence. She was, surely, too distant from the material world to much affect it. That was how she’d managed to survive at all.
‘It’s hard to see how,’ said Rob, with which opinion I had to agree. Even if somebody non-troll had lingered in Farringale after the fall, and successfully avoided the ortherex, how could they survive so long here? Why would anyone try? There was nothing left — no food, no trade, no links with the outside world at all.
No, there had to be another explanation.
‘I suppose this answers your question about the corpses of the fallen,’ I said to Jay. ‘They were, um, tidied away.’
‘How efficient,’ he answered. ‘I wonder if the Symphony always had that function.’
‘Or if somebody added it in later, as need arose? Perhaps.’
Indira had the strained look of a young woman trying her damnedest to commit a wealth of information to memory. She was probably brilliant enough to figure out its workings at a glance. By next week, the Sweepers at Home might be receiving a significant upgrade.
‘There was a pattern to their movements,’ she suddenly said. ‘They weren’t as random as they seemed. It was fully choreographed.’
That interested me. ‘Could something so complicated survive indefinitely without direct oversight?’
‘Not easily,’ she said, and I caught the scholar’s gleam sparking in her dark eyes. It’s that rabid fervour some of us get when presented with a mystery. She had to find the answer. ‘There would have to be a strong anchor somewhere, something with a powerful and renewing source of magick. Probably with a web of smaller anchors across the city…’ her slender hands sketched a rapid grid-shape in the air, and she drifted away towards the nearest building, eyes alight.
‘Indira,’ I called, not without a certain reluctance. ‘Now’s not the time. Dangers, remember?’
Not that we had seen hide nor hair of any so far. The broomsticks were indifferent to us, and though the twilight-blue heavens roiled with snowy and golden clouds and crackled with lightning, as they had before, no griffin had swooped out of the skies to destroy us.
Nonetheless, I may be Ves but I am not that reckless.
‘Right,’ said Indira and drifted back, with only one, lingering look of regret at the pale brick structure she’d been heading for.
‘I’d like to find that anchor,’ said Rob.
‘And whatever source it’s drawing from,’ added Jay.
‘Seconded upon both counts,’ I said. ‘I’d also like to see what Goodie makes of this place.’
‘Goodie?’ echoed Indira.
‘Goodie Goodfellow, AKA Robin, AKA Pup.’ I hauled her out of the satchel as I spoke, ignoring her little grunt of protest — honestly, has there ever been a creature more addicted to slumber? — and set her down. ‘Goodie,’ I said in my stern voice. ‘We need your help. Find interesting stuff, but — and this is important — no running away. Understood?’
Ms. Goodfellow’s nose was already glued to the ground by the time I’d made it through half of this speech, and she took off at a rolling trundle, tail wagging. I was left to hope that the main gist of my instructions had got through to her somehow.
‘Not to mention,’ I said as I set off after her, ‘the library. Post-haste.’
‘Seconded,’ said Mauf from the vicinity of my shoulder bag.
‘Haven’t you spent enough time on those shelves already?’ This was inaccurate, of course; I sometimes forgot he was only identical to Bill the Book, not actually Bill. But since he was a copy, and possessed all of Bill’s knowledge, it amounted to much the same thing. Right?
‘I am over familiar with some portion of the library,’ said Mauf, ‘and I trust you will not be disposed to leave me there. But I anticipate an exploration of the rest of my colleagues with great eagerness.’
His colleagues, I supposed, were books. I anticipated the same myself, most eagerly.
‘Then let’s start there,’ I suggested, and called to the pup, who largely ignored me.
As I unfolded Alban’s map of the city and tore off in the direction of the library — a place which had, I freely admit, haunted my dreams for weeks — I was too aware of the swarming infestation of ortherex parasites heaving and churning somewhere beneath my feet. While I knew they posed little threat to me or my present companions, their presence added nothing to my comfort. Apart from anything, they looked repulsive, and that, however unfairly, is often enough to incite disgust. Just think of how unpopular spiders are, even the ones that can cause no harm whatsoever.
And then, the fact that they’d apparently eaten an entire city did little to endear them to me.
I tried not to think about them, other than to keep some of our driving questions at the forefront of my thoughts: what had brought them here? How and why had they stayed?
‘Ves,’ Jay called, interrupting my thoughts.
‘Mm?’ I looked up, and was treated to a view of an unfamiliar street. Human-sized dwellings predominated there, most of them built from a mixture of reddish brick and timber: I’d wandered into a row of merchant’s houses, I judged, or something like that.
Which was lovely, but not exactly to the point.
Do you know, I reckon this is why I can find nothing and nowhere. I might set off in the right direction, but then my mind wanders and I stop paying attention to where I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m supposed to be going.
Sheepishly, I retraced my steps and handed the map to someone with less of a fatal tendency to daydream, otherwise known as Jay.
He was kind enough not to rib me about it this time, or maybe he was just too focused on the mission. Like I was supposed to be.
I sighed.
He got us to the library steps within minutes. I trotted along with my shields up and my head in the clouds; Rob kept wary eyes on the velvety, lightning-laced sky; Indira moved like a woman on a mission, exhibiting all the laser-like focus I wish I had.
‘Stop,’ said Jay as we mounted the steps. ‘Something’s different here.’
Perhaps it was no surprise that it was me who noticed it first. ‘Colours,’ I said, elegantly terse — or fatuously unhelpful, depending on your point of view. I gestured at the long, long windows set into the front of the soaring, white-stone building before us. They were filled in with leaded lights: many small, diamond-shaped panes of glass fitted edge-to-edge. Previously the glass had been clear. Now, they were a wash of dazzling, rainbow colour through which a soft light shone. ‘I’d swear these weren’t stained glass before.’
‘Or lit up like a Christmas tree,’ said Jay.
Indira, to my confusion, squatted down right there in the street and laid a palm against one pale stone slab. ‘These are warm,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Is that significant?’ I wasn’t catching her drift.
‘Might be.’ She paused there in thought for a moment, then rose gracefully and re-joined us.
I noticed that Rob had drawn his lovely, terrifying silvered knives.
I also noticed that Ms. Goodfellow seemed to be having a very good time, though I could not determine why. Always a bundle of energy (except when comatose), she’d begun running in circles, a frenzy in miniature, her ears and tail flying. ‘Pause,’ I said to her, and scooped her up. Retrieving my hair-changing ring from her horn again (how did she keep doing that?), I gave her a swift sanity check.
She stared up at me with liquid eyes, tongue lolling in a canine grin.
‘You’re mad,’ I told her. ‘But I suppose that’s not so unusual.’
Jay had, cautiously, approached the main doors of the library, which opened to welcome him. The moment I set the pup down, she shot inside, yapping.
‘We should be careful—’ Rob was saying. He broke off with a sigh. ‘Okay, we can do it that way.’ He went after her, a silvery knife glinting in one fist and the Lapis Wand in the other.
Jay, Indira and I followed.
Something had changed inside, too. The air thrummed, a sound I might have connected with something like a central heating system if we weren’t standing in a building that far predated such modern conceits. What’s more, something was happening to the floor. I stepped out of my shoes, and soon saw what Indira had been talking about: the coloured tiles underfoot, which should have been cool, were toasty warm, and faintly pulsing.
I extracted my favourite book from his sleeping bag. ‘Mauf. You awake?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Did you ever experience anything like this before? Or your predecessor, I suppose. Did he? Any pertinent memories?’
‘I have not the pleasure of understanding you.’
‘The colours, the lights, the heat,’ I elaborated.
‘My predecessor (as you term him) having spent the greater part of three centuries blissfully insensate, I am afraid I can be of little assistance. The library certainly was not known to display such unseemly exuberance in those earlier days, when he found it possible to be awake.’ I detected a note of disdain. It was not the first time Mauf had displayed some little hostility towards the prototype of a book upon which he had been modelled.
‘Does Lady Tregawny say anything about such phenomenon?’ I hoped he’d had sufficient time to slurp up the contents of her memoirs by then.
‘Not a word.’
That might mean her ladyship’s memoirs predated these peculiarities, or it may mean merely that she had never had cause to discuss them. ‘Thanks,’ I remembered to say, my mind busy.
I went to stash him again, but he leapt in my hands and actually began to vibrate. ‘Wait! You promised.’
‘So I did. Come on, then.’ Avoiding the chamber nearest the main doors, from which spot Jay had originally snagged his predecessor, I followed Rob into a different chamber. This one was airy and light, a clear dome arcing over the ceiling. Spotless, of course; presumably the Sweeping Symphony had cleared away any dust that might previously have accumulated.
Mauf made a kittenish growl of pleasure. ‘Such erudition,’ he said dreamily.
‘Knock yourself out,’ I told him, and set him on a low table that stood between two towering bookcases. As yet, Pup had not re-materialised and I was becoming anxious about her. ‘Goodie?’ I called, uselessly. She probably did not yet understand that this dignified moniker was, approximately, her name.
But then the tick-tick of her claws upon the tiled floor alerted me to her approach, and she came bounding around a corner. She made for me at a flat run, hurtling headlong in my general direction, jaws fixed in a huge smile.
She had a jewelled scroll-case lodged between her teeth.
‘How lovely,’ I said, wincing as she collided with my legs. ‘Is it useful, Pup, or just pretty?’
‘Hey,’ said Jay from somewhere nearby. I couldn’t see him. ‘Some would argue that a thing may be both pretty and useful, no?’
I vaguely recognised one of my own maxims being repeated back to me there, and stuck out my tongue, forgetting that he could not see me either.
I wrestled the case from Goodie Goodfellow and tried to prise it open, but its ends were sealed fast and wouldn’t budge.
When, a moment later, a babble of voices abruptly cut through the prevailing quiet, coming from somewhere two or three rooms away, I mumbled a garbled curse and stuffed the case into my satchel. Jay was way ahead of me; I almost collided with him as I tore in the direction of the inexplicable tumult. Rob had gone that way.
We found him standing in the middle of a room I’d never seen before, a far larger chamber than the rest of the library. Its central hall, I surmised, for it had the cathedral-like height and splendid vaulting that might suit such an important spot. A smooth starstone floor stretched away into the near distance, inset with gilded curlicued ornaments, and — like the library at Mandridore — silvery puffs of cloud hung where the ceiling ought to be. There were fewer books here, and no actual bookcases. Instead, sections of the stone walls were covered over with glass, and behind the glass hung artefacts of, no doubt, unspeakable rarity and power. Most of them were great, gilt-edged tomes with ornate hinges, or — my heart sank a bit — scrolls in jewelled cases, awfully like the one the dear pup had just surrendered into my care.
The voices were coming from some of the books.
‘Giddy gods,’ I breathed. ‘More chatty tomes?’
‘I think,’ said Indira cautiously, ‘this is different.’
I saw her point. Unlike Mauf (or indeed Bill), who spoke like he had a mind stuffed somewhere into his bindings, these books were shrieking the same words over and over, like trained parrots. It burns us, it hurts us, take it away! yelled an otherwise sober-looking book in a black binding. We told you, we said so, we knew how it would be! repeated another, jauntier tome, flashing richly-coloured interior illuminations as it danced in agitation.
They weren’t all distressed, however. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, sang a little jade-coloured book, and I developed an immediate desire to take it home with us. It’s time, it’s time, how we’ve missed it! chortled another.
A scroll in a ruby-studded jacket simply cackled without cease.
‘Farringale’s lunatic asylum for books?’ suggested Jay, backing away a step.
‘Are they mad?’ I mused. ‘Or just really pepped up?’
‘I’m not sure “pep” is a word I’d use,’ said Jay. ‘Except maybe for that one.’ He waved a hand at the giggling scroll.
I turned and left the cacophonic hallway at a run. ‘I think we’re going to need Mauf.’
