by Whitmore is a centre of learning, Melmidoc had said. He had banged on a bit about this point, smugly self-satisfied about all the academics (even from our Britain!) who flocked to the Centre of Government for the North on the fifth Britain. Not only politically effective but scholastically, too. Lovely. Excellent.
Only, when Miss Makepeace pulled up on the cliff-top over the sea for our second visit there, it did not much resemble either of those things.
The first thing that attracted our notice was the music. It pulsed through the floor, a thumping beat reverberating through Millie’s crumbly old walls, and somewhere out there was a large crowd of people raucously singing.
Millie approved. I gathered this from the way she immediately began singing along.
I didn’t, so much.
Crunch them, punch them, bash their faces in! sang Millie, bouncing along to the beat.
Jay, Alban and I decided in unison to exit stage left. We erupted out of the house at a run, and having put a safe distance between ourselves and the wildly gyrating farmhouse, we stood in momentary, flabbergasted silence.
‘Those aren’t really the lyrics, are they?’ I said after a while. The general tumult made it pretty hard to tell.
‘I don’t think it’s English,’ said Alban.
Leave it to Millie not only to make up her own lyrics, but to go all in for violence while she was at it. I began to question the wisdom of having forged an alliance with that one.
‘So, party’s on,’ said Jay, looking around.
‘You reckon?’ Millie had taken us to the end of the same street we’d run down (a couple of times) a few days before. Apparently it was her favourite spot to loiter in. But the other houses in the row were different today. As mismatched as before — higgledy-piggledy thatched-roof cottages rubbing elbows with elegant starstone properties — they were all decked alike in colourful bunting. This being Whitmore, the bunting did not hang limply against the whitewashed or bluish-stone walls, as they would in our Britain. The bunting floated up there by itself, and it wiggled and bopped along to the beat with as much enthusiasm as Millie.
So did the cottages.
‘Oh, lord,’ I sighed. I mean, I’m a sucker for life and colour and music, I really am. But when literally nothing around you is standing still, the effect quickly becomes dizzying.
I put my hands over my eyes.
‘There’s the spire,’ said Jay. I dared to uncover my eyes, only to see, when I followed the line of Jay’s pointing finger, Melmidoc’s spire enthroned at the highest point of the island, swaying from side to side.
‘They really like their music out here,’ I muttered.
Jay was getting into it. I knew this because he was bopping, too. ‘It’s like being on a boat,’ he said, catching my eye. ‘Try too hard to act like you’re on normal ground and you’ll probably fall over. But when you learn to go with the flow…’
I gave an experimental bop. ‘You know, Jay, I think you were made for this place.’
‘Told you I wanted to stay.’
Alban had wandered off in the direction of the spire, threading his way through the singing people with surprising ease given his size. Then again perhaps it was because of his size; when Jay and I followed, we frequently found ourselves boxed in, blocked or pushed. I quickly abandoned politeness in favour of pushing back, making full use of my elbows. Jay looked a bit shocked, but he’s never been five-foot-not-much. You do what you must. I kept one hand clamped firmly over my shoulder bag en route; the last thing we needed just then was for my over-excitable pup to bounce out and dash away. I’d never find her again.
By the time we finally caught up with Alban, we found him leaning casually against the spire, arms folded, surveying the partying Whitmore with an expression of faint bemusement. I hoped it might have put the twinkle back in his eyes, but I hoped in vain. ‘And I thought the Court had a talent for dissipation,’ he said. It was a creditable attempt at his old humour, even if his smile was crooked.
‘If only Westminster would take a leaf out of Whitmore’s book,’ I said, smiling back. ‘Parliamentary debates would be so much more interesting.’
Back already? came Melmidoc’s voice, at a thundering volume. The tall, narrow door of the pale spire rattled in its frame, and then sprang open with a hollow boom.
‘I still haven’t figured out how to world-hop,’ said Jay. ‘I need more practice.’
World-hop?
Some of our modern terminology escaped Melmidoc, perhaps especially when we were being sarky.
‘Jump from Britain to Britain,’ Jay explained. ‘You did say you’d teach me?’
I did, Melmidoc allowed. But that was before a hundred more of you appeared.
‘They’re all gone,’ Jay said quickly. ‘It’s just the three of us.’
You were supposed to be amnesiated.
Jay coughed. ‘We… sort of were…’
I judged it a good moment to interrupt. ‘What’s going on here today? With the music, and everything?’
It is the Feast of Delunia! The most important festival of the magickal year, marked by a full week of celebration.
I swallowed my dismay at the word week. ‘And what is being commemorated?’
The spire consented to stop swaying for a moment, though I felt a faint tremor in the floor that ran in time with the beat. Melmidoc was, in effect, tapping his feet. In the dark ages of the later seventeenth century there were those who feared magick. The result was a growing movement to ban it, which is precisely what happened in certain other, lost Britains. Delunia was one of the greatest sorceresses who ever lived, and a talented politician besides. Thanks to her diligence and dedication, these motions were never passed, and instead of dying out, magick went thereafter from strength to strength. She faced great personal danger in order to do it, too, for some called for her to be burned — indeed, she almost was! Without her, the fifth Britain would not be as you see it today. He gave a windy sigh, and added wistfully: She was beautiful, too.
‘Is there feasting as well as music?’ said Alban.
Every imaginable delicacy! Melmidoc uttered these words with an enthusiasm for food that might even rival mine. Could a building imbibe comestibles? I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about it.
Alban grinned at me. ‘Does that reconcile you to a week of tumult, Ves?’
‘It just might,’ I conceded.
‘Course,’ said Alban, straightening his face. ‘We are here to work.’
‘Serious work,’ I agreed. ‘Zero dancing.’
‘Little bit of feasting.’
‘Little bit. Melmidoc, we’ve come to pick your brains.’
I shall teach the little Waymaster, he announced. After the party.
Jay looked torn between delight at the concession and affront at the word “little”. ‘Thanks,’ he managed.
Hey, welcome to my world.
‘That’s completely wonderful,’ I said. ‘But actually we’re here about something else.’
Jay trod on my foot.
‘As well!’ I yelped. ‘Something else as well as the Waymaster training.’
I shall be intrigued to hear it, said Melmidoc, in a voice that suggested otherwise.
‘It is nothing onerous.’
‘Hopefully,’ put in Alban.
‘Hopefully it’s nothing onerous. Melmidoc, is there — or was there — a Farringale here?’ I didn’t feel the need to explain about Farringale to him. The Redclover brothers hadn’t disappeared from our Britain until around 1630. At that time, Farringale was still the most powerful Fae Court in the land; it hadn’t begun to decline until nearly thirty years later. Indeed, Melmidoc had undergone a few battles with the monarchs of Farringale himself.
Was? he echoed blankly. Is there not a Farringale everywhere?
Interesting. ‘There was a Farringale in our Britain, but it’s gone now.’
‘Not quite gone,’ corrected Alban. ‘The city is still there, even if it is empty.’
Empty? Melmidoc didn’t speak for a while. Then he said, sharply, What became of the Court?
So we explained: about the sudden, hurtling decline of Farringale after Melmidoc had vanished into the fifth Britain; about the move to Mandridore; about our own visit into what was left of Farringale, and what we had found there. About the ortherex parasites who had swallowed the city whole, and the few sentinels from the Old Court who had, at great personal cost, lingered as fading guardians ever since.
It made for a splendid, if heart-breaking tale.
Even Melmidoc seemed to feel it so, for all his resentments over past troubles. The spire ceased to sway, and I’d swear the music receded more and more as we talked, as though he was muting it to match his own feelings.
The brutality of time, he said, once we had finished our tale. So much is lost.
‘That’s literally what our entire job is about,’ I agreed. ‘Trying to salvage what is left of magick before we lose the lot. That being the case, this assignment is highly interesting. It isn’t often we have the option of bringing something back.’
‘If we do,’ Alban said. ‘It’s a dream.’
‘Dreams come true sometimes.’ I smiled at him, but he did not smile back.
The ortherex, said Melmidoc, and stopped. He was silent for a while, perhaps thinking. What do you know of those creatures?
‘They feed primarily upon troll-kind,’ I said. ‘Not their flesh, exactly. They lay eggs in living troll-flesh and the growing parasites feed off the magickal energies of the host, draining them dry. Usually, the troll dies.’
‘They can be countered,’ put in Jay. ‘To some degree. We brought a cure out of Farringale, or the recipe for one. It treats the effects of ortherex-infestation, though I think the poor sod still has to be operated upon to remove the eggs. Many sufferers have been saved, since.’
I would be interested to learn of this recipe, Melmidoc said. The ortherex are a persistent problem in this magick-drenched Britain, and they do not limit themselves to troll hosts alone.
‘Mauf probably has it,’ I offered.
Mauf?
‘My cursed book.’ I rummaged in my shoulder bag. We’d moved inside the spire by then, so I closed the door and let the pup out. She stretched, yawned hugely, and tottered off to explore. I was pleased to see a dish of water and a matching dish of meat appear at the bottom of the stairs. Melmidoc was used to the Dappledok pups.
I drew Mauf out, showing off his handsome purple binding. ‘But if the ortherex are such a problem, does that mean you have no way to destroy them?’
They are like any pest or parasite. They breed at incredible speed. To eradicate them entirely must be an impossible dream.
I was crestfallen to hear that; my hopes of a speedy solution to the problem evaporated. ‘Do you have any way of combating them? Anything that might help to clear Farringale?’
I believe you are asking the wrong questions, said Melmidoc.
I paused in the process of opening Mauf’s cover. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The pertinent question is not: how to remove the ortherex. The question must be: why are they still there? If the city is empty as you say, and has remained so for centuries: on what are they feeding? If they need live hosts in which to lay their eggs, how is it that they are breeding?
Jay and I exchanged a look that said: We are the biggest idiots currently breathing.
Alban, however, seemed electrified. ‘You’re right. They should have died off long ago.’
Indeed. Let us consider, then. Perhaps there is no way to destroy them, but an alternative solution is to remove whatever is keeping them alive.
