by And, as it turned out, Jay. Archibald wrapped one set of claws around my shrinking middle, and the other around Jay, and took off with both of us in tow. We watched, helpless, as Mabyn and Jenifry Redclover receded beneath us — and Jory the kennel-keeper, too, with our pup still in his arms.
‘Inconvenient,’ observed Jay, the word emerging as a squeak.
Archibald’s grip was a bit tight, at that. I was feeling breathless myself, and I felt like I had an iron band vice-tight around my ribs. ‘Archie,’ I called. ‘You couldn’t squeeze a bit less, by any chance? We are fragile creatures, prone to breakage.’
The dragon expelled a whistle of air through his nostrils, and to my surprise, huffed out a clear No.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘You might fall,’ the dragon explained.
‘That would make for some serious breakage,’ I had to agree.
‘Fair,’ said Jay. ‘But don’t squeeze too tight. We ought to arrive alive at the Mayor’s, no?’
‘The Mayor?’ said Archibald. ‘Why would you want to see her?’
‘That… isn’t that where we are going?’
‘No…’ said Archibald, and something about the way he said the word struck me as a bit shifty.
I patted his leg with the hand that wasn’t clinging desperately to my shoulder-bag, and Mauf. ‘Where are we going, then?’ I asked.
‘There is something you should see,’ said the dragon.
‘Oh?’
A pause. ‘I… I heard what you were saying,’ said Archibald, and he definitely sounded shame-faced now.
‘From how far away?’ Jay yelped.
‘I have very good ears,’ said Archibald with dignity.
‘And a fair bit of magick, too?’ I suggested.
‘Well, anyway,’ said the dragon. ‘I used to take Melmidoc places.’
‘You knew Melmidoc Redclover?’
‘His brother was the longest-running Mayor Dapplehaven has ever had,’ said Archibald. ‘They were always together, and so… we were always together, too.’
Could a dragon be forlorn? Apparently. ‘You miss your friends?’ I guessed.
‘I do not like Doryty,’ said Archibald. ‘She is foul-tempered.’ His enormous tail thrashed.
‘We did not like her very much either,’ I said soothingly.
‘No one does.’
‘Odd, then,’ said Jay, ‘that she is the Mayor. How did that happen?’
‘No one else wanted the job. It is very boring.’
I risked a glance down. Archibald was taking us well away from Dapplehaven, and the ground was rising steeply beneath us. We were, I judged, sailing up the side of a low peak I had briefly glimpsed at some distance from the town. It did not, at least from this angle, look scaleable by any normal means.
‘Is this where you used to take Melmidoc?’ I asked.
‘Melmidoc and Drystan,’ said Archibald happily. ‘All the time!’
Jay put in, ‘Have you taken anybody else there since?’
‘Once. The Mayor made me do it. They took away everything that was Melmidoc’s, and they made it so I am not allowed to land there.’
‘They… how did they do that?’ said Jay.
‘Oh, there are spikes,’ said the dragon cheerfully. ‘So I will have to drop you.’
‘Onto spikes?!’
‘There is a bit that is safe,’ said Archibald, with enviable serenity. ‘You will not break, because you are smaller than I am.’
‘How are we…’ I began. I had been going to say, How are we going to get off the mountain? For if Archibald could not land there, he could not retrieve us either. But the wind whipped my words away as we began to descend towards a windy, and lamentably cold, hilltop, and since we were, moments later, released from Archibald’s claws without warning and flying through the air, there was not much point in finishing the sentence.
It hurt, rather a lot.
‘Ouch,’ croaked Jay, to my relief, for it proved at least that he was alive.
‘Nnngh,’ I said, somewhat less coherently. I’d landed on one arm and one hip, both of which smarted painfully, particularly since the ground up there was all highly uncomfy rock. You’d be surprised how little difference a liberal covering of moss and heath make when falling from… any kind of height at all.
I hauled myself, creakily, to my feet. ‘Mauf?’ I said. ‘Still alive?’
‘Can I be said to be living?’ answered Mauf, in his dry, didactic tone. ‘Arguably—’
‘Great,’ I cut in. ‘Let’s talk about that later.’ I looked around. Archibald had not been exaggerating about the spikes. The ground was covered in them. They were at least a foot long each, they were made of something as hard and bright silver as steel, and they had sharp points. The spot we had landed in was only a few feet across, and an uneven patch in the ground suggested that there might once have been a tree growing there. I wondered whether Archibald had happened to the tree.
‘They really didn’t want anybody coming up here,’ I said.
‘But why not?’ Jay turned in a circle, surveying the scene. There wasn’t much to see. The peak of the hill was not very wide, and it declined steeply on all sides to the ground some way below. We had a fine view over Dappledok Dell, and it made for a glorious vision: rolling dales, vibrant meadows, and the town of Dapplehaven nestled adorably in the middle.
Lovely, but unhelpful. All there seemed to be at the top was a roughly circular space full of spikes.
‘Archibald?’ I looked up, but he had gone. ‘Did he expect this to somehow make sense to us?’ I said with a sigh.
Jay looked around again. ‘Are we missing something obvious? What’s up here?’
‘Spikes.’
‘All right. Why are there spikes up here?’
‘To prevent Archibald from landing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was bringing people like Melmidoc up here, and someone disliked that for… reasons unknown.’
‘Those are the obvious answers. What about the less obvious? Maybe these spikes were not aimed at Archibald.’
‘How many dragons do you suppose there are in Dappledok? They are not exactly common.’
‘It’s probably fair to say that most magickal beasts were once a lot more common than they are now,’ Jay pointed out. ‘But it does not have to be a dragon, does it? I wouldn’t think anything could land up here with these in the way.’
I thought about that. ‘The ground is quite flat.’
‘It is. Unusually flat for the terrain, would you say?’
‘I might say that, indeed.’
‘And,’ said Jay, picking his way through the spikes to the edge of the plateau, ‘if some of these bushes and such were to be cleared away, we might discover it to be unusually circular, too.’
‘So it’s shaped. That suggests that…um.’ I hauled Mauf out of the bag again. ‘Mauf, do you know anything about this place?’
‘No,’ said Mauf.
There were, after all, a couple of drawbacks to Mauf the Magick Book. For one thing, he could only know about something if someone had obligingly written it down, and people often did not do that with secrets. For another, there was no getting at what he did know if you didn’t come up with the right question.
‘Nothing about anything called, say, Dappledok Peak or Mount Dappledok? Something like that?’
‘No,’ said Mauf again, and then: ‘Is that where we are?’
‘How about buildings?’ said Jay. ‘Any lost or unaccounted for—’
‘Dapplehaven Tower,’ said Mauf.
Jay and I blinked stupidly at each other. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘What?’
‘Dapplehaven Tower, occasionally referred to as the Striding Spire. It used to, er, tower over the town of Dapplehaven, if you will excuse the pun, but it was dismantled in 1630.’
‘1630! Why was it dismantled?’
‘The official reason cited was unstable foundations. There were safety concerns in high winds.’
I jumped up and down a couple of times. ‘Would you say there is anything in the world less unstable than solid rock?’
‘I would not,’ answered Jay.
‘Now, why was it called the Striding Spire?’ I spoke as calmly as I could, but my heart was racing with excitement in anticipation of Mauf’s answer.
‘Because it wasn’t always observed to stand in the same spot,’ said Mauf, confirming all my hopes. ‘While it was never described as walking around in any literal sense, it was obviously perambulatory.’
‘Melmidoc Redclover disappeared in 1630,’ said Jay. ‘Do you suppose he walked off with the tower?’
‘Or the Striding Spire walked off with him!’
‘And for some reason, it never wandered back. So that begs the question: where did the Spire wander off to, and what kept it from returning?’
‘Other than the spikes?’
Jay considered them with a raised brow. ‘Why would someone want to stop the Spire from striding back?’
‘Maybe they disapproved of whatever it was Melmidoc Redclover was doing with it.’
‘Melmidoc and Drystan,’ corrected Jay. ‘Archibald said they were always together, didn’t he?’
‘And Drystan was a Headmaster.’ There was something important to be construed from all of that, but I could not decide what it was. I lifted my chin. ‘Archibaaaaald!’ I yelled to the sky.
‘Dragon likes towers,’ observed Jay.
‘Seems to.’ Archibald reappeared in the sky, winging his way back towards us. ‘Archie!’ I bellowed. ‘Was there a tower here?’
He swooped and grabbed me — but missed Jay. The world lurched and spun crazily as Archibald soared away, banked, turned and dived again towards my hapless partner.
The poor boy stood there, braced for impact, trying manfully not to cringe as the enormous purple dragon bore down on him once again.
A yelp might have escaped him as Archie’s claws closed around his chest, but this I cannot confirm.
I, on the other hand, shrieked. There is no other word for it.
‘Sometimes it was a tower,’ Archibald said as he bore us away from the peak once more. ‘I liked that the best, because I could sit at the top. The others were not so comfortable.’
‘Others?!’ Jay and I said it together, and with emphasis.
‘They did not like me to sit on the others,’ said the dragon mournfully. ‘I was always being sent away. But,’ he added in a more considering tone, ‘some of them were too small anyway, I did not fit. The tower was the best one.’
‘They who?’ I said.
‘Oh, the people inside.’
I was beginning to feel that Archibald, obliging as he was, lacked something in the way of brain. ‘What kind of people were they?’ I said, as patiently as I could. ‘People like Melmidoc and Drystan?’
‘Yes, people like them.’
‘Magickal people?’
‘People like you,’ said Archibald. Then he shook the leg in which he held Jay, not at all to Jay’s satisfaction. There was another yelp. ‘Some of them were a lot like this one.’
‘In what way?’ I said, feeling a little desperate. I mean, for goodness’ sake.
Archie lowered his head to sniff at Jay, his huge nostrils flaring. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally pronounced.
‘Waymaster,’ Jay yelled despairingly. ‘He means Waymasters! Must have been.’
Of course. The Greyers’ cottage was perambulatory because it had a dead Waymaster bound into its walls. I hoped that those operating the Striding Spire had not been enslaved ghosts as well, for that promised to cast an entirely different light on the whole Redclover operation. ‘Were they… alive?’ I asked the dragon.
‘Of course they were.’ He huffed at my stupidity.
‘Jay, when you get amazing enough to haul our entire House around at will, let Milady know! She’ll be thrilled.’
The glimpse I caught of Jay’s face suggested he felt more nauseated than inspired by the idea. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘It is now, but I suppose it wasn’t always.’
‘I suddenly feel like a weakling.’
‘Utterly feeble,’ I agreed. ‘Pathetic excuse for a Waymaster.’
‘Hey. There are times when you are supposed to contradict your friends, Ves.’
‘Are there?’
‘This was one of those times.’
‘Was it?’
I got scowled at. I cannot say it was undeserved.
‘By the way, Archie,’ I called to the dragon. ‘Whereabouts are we going now?’
‘Oh. The people you were with are at Doryty’s now. Would you not like to go there?’
‘That will be fine.’
‘I don’t have to take you there.’
‘No, really. It is a good place to go next.’
‘I can take you somewhere else, if you like. Doryty will not like it, but I would not mind.’
‘Take us to the Mayor, Archie,’ I said firmly. ‘Then you will not be in any trouble, and we need to talk to our friends anyway.’ I hoped they had put some part of our earlier plan into action, but more likely they were trying to find out what had happened to Jay and me.
‘I am always in trouble,’ said the dragon gloomily. ‘She will not like my taking you to the spikes.’
‘She does not have to know about it,’ I suggested.
A pause. ‘You will not tell her?’
‘Never,’ I solemnly swore.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ added Jay.
Archibald’s long, purple tail swished happily. ‘Can I keep you?’
‘Uhh. We can’t stay all that—’
‘Of course you can,’ interrupted Jay, with a wink at me. ‘You’re the best dragon I’ve ever met.’
Archibald puffed up, much the same way Mauf did when praised. Though perhaps not so literally. ‘Would you like to be the Mayor?’ he replied. ‘It is a boring job, but I would make it interesting! We could fly places, and…’ He trailed off, apparently unable to think of anything else fun he and Jay could do when Jay was the Mayor of Dapplehaven.
Jay suppressed a laugh with admirable grace, and said only: ‘I’ll give it some thought, Archie.’
