by ‘You said the ortherex of this Britain are stronger,’ I said to Melmidoc. ‘And they don’t confine themselves to just troll hosts. What else do they like?’
All of the more distinctly magickal races have suffered their share of infestations, Melmidoc replied. Though, interestingly, it is only sentient creatures who are afflicted. There have been no recorded cases of ortherex feeding upon, or breeding within, any species of magickal beast.
That eliminated my first theory. The only other living creatures we had encountered at Farringale were griffins. While they were splendidly magickal, I did not think they were sentient.
Probably.
‘Mauf, are griffins—’ I began, opening the rich purple cover of my precious book. But there I stopped, for I’d received an eyeful of his title page. ‘….That’s new,’ I observed.
‘In point of fact,’ said Mauf loftily, ‘It is a very old technique.’
‘I know that, but I’ve never seen you employ it before.’
‘I understand my predecessor to have been stolen, once. I humbly suggest that he would not have been, had he taken the correct precautions.’
‘Like this one, for example?’
‘Precisely like this one.’
I read the title page aloud. ‘Whoever steals this book, may they be drowned in water. And if they be not drowned in water, may they be burned in fire. And if they be not burned in fire, may they be hanged from the neck. And if they be not hanged from the neck, may they ingest poison. And if they do not ingest poison, may they be eaten by wolves. And if they be not eaten by wolves, may they fall from a great height. And if they do not fall from a great height…’ I turned the page and stopped reading, for it went on. And on.
‘Taking no chances, eh, Mauf?’ said Jay.
I patted the book gently. ‘Maufry, you do know that medieval thief-curses don’t work?’
‘Who says that they do not?’
The practice had persisted in some quarters well past the medieval era, in fact, for the belief in their efficacy as curses had endured. It had taken a large study, sponsored by the Hidden Ministry in its earlier days, to establish that many were fake. Or not so much fake as insufficient; they were just words, usually written down by those who had no magick. A real thief-curse needed no words, and since the authentic kind were genuinely deadly, they had, of course, been banned by the Ministry long ago.
But Mauf was bristling in my hands, and the tone of his dusty book-voice was both defensive and slightly injured. So I said, ‘Never mind,’ and weakly changed the subject. ‘Ortherex, Mauf. I am sure you must know a lot about those.’
‘Having sat helpless upon my shelf while they ate up my city around me, I can say with some justification that I do.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They drank up the magick of Farringale and dined upon its inhabitants, until the population lay dead in droves.’
‘And then what?’
‘I do not know, Miss Vesper. I, like my fellow tomes, fell deeply into slumber. What was left to wake for?’
‘Wait,’ said Jay, frowning. ‘We were there. We saw empty streets, quite clean. It was nothing like Darrowdale. If the people all died, why didn’t we see bones? Skeletons?’
‘Did they all die?’ said Alban. ‘Some fled, and founded Mandridore.’
‘And stuck around long enough to clean up the streets before they left? With the place infested with ortherex, and the threat of catching the infection any moment?’
He was right; that didn’t make sense.
I was silent, for another question was swirling about in my mind. If the parasites existed still in the fifth Britain, and had in fact grown stronger down the ages… why had there been no Farringale incident here? Why were they still accounted only as pests, not as disasters?
How was it that the things had suddenly grown so all-powerful in the 1650s as to wipe out Farringale within a year?
I was beginning to realise that this was in no way normal.
I relayed these thoughts, and Alban’s frown deepened. ‘Their Majesties believe it to have been something along the lines of a natural disaster,’ he said. ‘Tragic, but no more preventable than a hurricane or a volcanic eruption. Perhaps they’re wrong.’
‘If so, this could be a lot more complicated than simply clearing out the ortherex,’ said Jay. ‘We need to make sure they stay gone — and that means we need to know how they got there in the first place, and how they proliferated so fast.’
Maybe Their Majesties had more of an inkling than Alban suspected, for had I not asked myself why they had involved Jay and me? We were human. The ortherex of our Britain left humans alone, or so Baroness Tremayne had said. The king and queen couldn’t send people like Alban back into Farringale; they would be in terrible danger. But the Society’s members mostly weren’t trolls. Were we to be sent back to Farringale, once we’d found the way to fight the ortherex? I felt a flicker of excitement at the idea. This was hero-tale stuff.
Anyway. Focus. Answers first, heroics later. ‘Alban,’ I said. ‘How much is known of Farringale’s history directly before its demise?’
‘Not as much as you’d think. Those who fled the city salvaged what they could, but they were fleeing for their lives. It wasn’t all that much. Most of the library was left behind, as you saw, and those who founded Mandridore weren’t necessarily scholars. They were too busy building the new Court to produce detailed accounts of what they’d left behind them, or so we assume. It’s a hazy period.’
‘I am beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on,’ I said. ‘Did the Court have enemies?’
‘It was a supremely powerful Court. Of course it had enemies.’
‘Any among rival powers?’
Alban looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Interesting question, Ves.’
‘Those were brutal times. The non-magickal folk were chopping the heads off their own kings. Who’s to say what the Fae Courts might have been doing to one another?’
‘Interesting, hideous question, Ves.’
‘Where can we go to get more answers?’ I said. ‘Mel, you implied there is a Farringale in this Britain.’
Mel. How charmingly brief.
I’d heard the dragon, Archibaldo, address Melmidoc as “Mel,” but perhaps I had not yet earned that right. Fair.
‘Mr. Redclover,’ I amended.
The air rippled with amusement. It is indeed the case that Farringale reigns on over the fifth.
‘And is it still a centre of learning?’
Some even believe that it rivals Whitmore as such.
Melmidoc obviously disagreed.
‘What have you got here?’ interjected Jay. ‘Anything good on the ortherex?’
After a short silence, Melmidoc said: I do not recall that the scholars of Whitmore have made a specialty of the study, but I am certain something can be found to interest you.
I tapped Mauf’s gold-edged pages. ‘Anything to add, Mauf?’
‘Not a great deal, Miss Vesper.’
I should like to borrow that book.
‘What?’ I said, surprised. ‘Mauf?’
It is a highly interesting piece of work.
‘It?’ said Mauf. ‘I am a gentleman, sir.’ His front cover snapped crisply shut, sending a puff of dust flying out from… somewhere.
Precisely my point.
‘If Mauf does not object, I am sure you may have an audience with him,’ I offered.
I shall be very much obliged.
Mauf maintained an offended silence for a few seconds, but flattery has ever worked wonders upon his vain little heart. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said huffily. ‘If Miss Vesper would like me to have conversation with this ghost, I shall, as always, be delighted to please her.’
I’ll here own up that flattery works wonders upon my vain little heart, too. I smiled.
‘However uncouth he may be,’ added Mauf.
I smirked. ‘You two will get along splendidly.’
The main problem with Whitmore as a prominent centre of learning is that it is rather small. Being already the Centre of Government for the North, or whatever Mel had called it, as well as the home of a reasonably thriving population of scholars, sorcerers and assorted others, there is already a lot to make room for. By the time you’ve added in a smattering of classrooms, magickal laboratories and lecture halls, that’s about it for space.
As such, the library to which we were later escorted was dishearteningly compact. Scarcely larger than the library at Home, in fact. Which was not to disparage it too much; Val’s library is a wonderful resource, one which has come to my aid many a time. Only, when one is looking for detailed knowledge upon a specialist, if not outright esoteric, subject, one hopes for a certain breadth.
I’d left Mauf lounging at the spire, giving Melmidoc a hard time. The pup, however, came along with us. I thought she was in sore need of some exercise, and perhaps a bit of social time with some others of her own kind. Mel assured us she would not wander off for long; they were loyal, the Dappledok pups. Nonetheless, I’d suffered a twinge of anxiety as we left the spire, for the pup had bombed straight past us and disappeared up the street at a gallop, ears and tail flying. We hadn’t seen her since.
The music had met us with a roar as we’d made our way to the library Mel described, and I’d spared a hope that it would be as muted among the books as it had been inside Melmidoc’s spire. I love music, but it is no easy task to study through someone else’s ear-shattering party.
The library, as it turned out, was everything I could have wished for. Almost eerily silent, with a web of complex enchantments to block out all sound from beyond the walls; stuffed floor to ceiling with books, making the most of every available inch of space; and, considering that it was party season, encouragingly deserted. I do so enjoy having a library to myself.
Well, not quite to myself, but I did not mind sharing with Jay and Alban.
We were met by the librarian on duty. Sort of.
When I said they were making the most of every possible inch, I mean that their attitude to space was a little different to ours. On our Britain, we need things like walls to support bookcases, and floors upon which to stand desks and chairs. On the fifth, apparently they do not. The librarian sat at a heavy oak desk floating some eight feet above our heads, surrounded by a small fleet of other such furniture. She reached for a book as I watched, and plucked it from a shelf tucked just under the ceiling. Well, why bother clambering up ladders to fetch the books down when you can go up to meet them? It was like my flying chair trick, only about ten times more powerful.
A deep lust uncurled in my covetous soul, and I suddenly had no trouble understanding why Jay had been reluctant to leave.
So absorbed was the librarian in her work, whatever it was, that she did not notice our entry. At length, Jay discovered a bell hovering near the door, and lightly rang it.
‘Oh!’ said she, peering down at us. ‘Just a moment. Sorry.’
“A moment” turned out to be more like three or four minutes, but at last she drifted down — her chair did, anyway, with her seated upon it; the desk remained up near the ceiling. She smiled at us and said: ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody today.’
Justifiably enough; the people of Whitmore really knew how to party. ‘We’re visiting,’ I told her. Her appearance fascinated me a little. She was as short as me, but thinner, even fragile-looking, with pale, wispy hair and sea-green eyes. Human enough, I thought, but not human through-and-through; her features, her air of ethereal delicacy, suggested to me that she had significant fae heritage somewhere in her family tree. Was that common for Whitmore? Or perhaps across the whole of the fifth? Perhaps it was. If the magick half of the world had no need to hide themselves, it stood to reason that intermingling would lead to more people of mixed heritage.
I liked this.
‘Melmidoc sent us down here,’ Jay told her, which wasn’t a bad move. ‘We’re looking for anything you have on ortherex infestations.’
Her face lit up at mention of Melmidoc’s name — and then fell again at Jay’s next words. Hardly surprising. Could there be a more deeply unsexy subject than pest management?
‘Our focus tends to be on more arcane subjects, but I’ll see what I can find.’ She went off, on foot this time, to consult an enormous tome chained to a pedestal some way behind her. An old-school library catalogue, a foot thick, its spine supported by chunky bronze hinges and its pages clad in thick green leather. Did they not have computers on Whitmore? Not that I was displeased. My nerdy little soul blazed with delight at sight of so beautiful a book.
I heard a cheery yip from behind me, and whirled. There was my pup!
…and at least twenty others. They came streaming in the library door, tails waving like flags, noses scooting along the ground as they scattered everywhere.
‘Oops,’ said Jay. ‘Maybe should not have left the door open.’
‘Um.’ I eyed the wriggling yellow furries doubtfully. ‘Which one of you is Pup?’
‘You still haven’t given her a name?’ said Alban, and then pointed out one of the pups — the one presently trying to climb the leg of the nearest desk. ‘There she is.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘She’s got your ring on her horn.’
She did, too. My right ring finger was bare of the labradorite hoop that usually adorned it. The jewel lay instead around the base of my disgraceful pup’s single horn, a glint of pearly rainbow colours among her yellow fur.
‘How did you—?!’ I resisted the temptation to clutch at my golden hair, the colour of which could not be changed without that ring, and set off after her.
‘How about Robin Goodfellow?’ Alban called after me.
