by Mum was looking at Jay. ‘That trick with the nothingness. You said you’d open a door through the lindworm.’
‘Not the same kind of door. I was just trying to express the general concept in comprehensible language.’
‘All right. But could it be adapted for this gate?’
Jay took a moment to consider. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘A gate — the kind you mean — is an insubstantial thing, it has no tangible presence. In a sense it’s already nothing, and I can’t open a nothing in nothing.’
Mother took this philosophically, and lapsed into thought.
I wracked my brains, too. What was known about these intra-realm gates? It was the province of the various magickal authorities to maintain existing gate networks; The Hidden Ministry poured a lot of resources into it. And, naturally, they had all kinds of rules about how many gates should remain open, and which should be barred. The Society had no one with those skills, because it wasn’t part of our mandate.
That meant I, too, was rather more ignorant about the process than I liked. Opening a new gate is the kind of impossible even I won’t venture upon, so I’ve never considered the matter before.
Course, I told myself, we weren’t opening a new gate here. Just freshening up an old one, and purely for the purposes of detective work.
‘Ves,’ said Mother tightly. She was making strange gestures with her surviving hand, as though she was pulling on an invisible thread. ‘Help me here.’
‘How?’
‘Remember when I taught you to knit?’
‘You never taught me to knit.’
‘I did, when you were six. You were almost as bad at it as I was.’
‘How is this relevant?’
‘Well.’ She was sweating now, her face glistening in the moonlight. ‘If you think of the magickal world as a thing knitted up out of — of — well, magick, then it can also be unknitted. Someone’s gone through a door here, and they may have firmly closed it behind themselves, but the door’s still here.’
‘You’re unravelling it?’
‘So to speak. Here.’ She grabbed my hand and thrust it out before herself. And I felt something. Nothing tangible; more like a sensation that shivered through my skin, neither heat nor cold but something beyond those two things. Whatever it was wound around my hand like — ugh, like I’d thrust my arm into a knot of spider’s webs. ‘You feel that?’
‘I wish a bit that I didn’t, but yes.’
‘Great. Grab a handful and pull.’
I obeyed — but the moment Mum let go of my hand, the sensations vanished and I was groping at empty air. ‘You’ve a sensitivity I lack, Mum. You’ll need to guide me.’
‘Fine. I’ll do this, you do that.’
We did all that, Mum keeping a firm grip on my wrist with her healthy hand and me using both of mine to tear holes in the magickal fabric of the Halls of Yllanfalen. As mother/daughter bonding events go, it was a weird one, but I’d take it over nothing at all, any day.
After twenty minutes or so, Mum — who’d been periodically waving her stump of an arm about, apparently testing the tear we were making — said, ‘Stop. I think we can go through.’
I was happy to obey, for I was trembling with weariness by then. You wouldn’t think unravelling the very fabric of magick would take so much out of a person.
‘Just need a second,’ I gasped.
Mum rolled her eyes and stood up, which was humbling. The woman had lost three friends, a hand and a lot of blood in recent days, and she was still unstoppable.
I hastily pulled myself together.
‘You okay?’ said Jay, looking at me with a concern I both welcomed and mildly resented.
‘Fine,’ I said crisply, only belatedly aware of how much I’d sounded like my mother.
The thought crossed Jay’s mind too, for his lips twitched.
Mother said, ‘We’re wasting time,’ and promptly hurled herself head-first into nothingness. I tensed, half expecting her to land painfully on the quartz-rock ground, but she disappeared.
I smiled at Jay. ‘After me,’ I said, and leapt after Mother.
I’d expected to end up on some distant street in Britain somewhere, or perhaps a forgotten heath or moor in the wilder parts of the country.
That’s not what happened.
‘This,’ I said, picking myself up off the floor, ‘is not Britain.’
‘You don’t say,’ muttered mother.
We’d emerged at the top of a low, sloping hill ringed all around with pine and conifer trees. The surrounding forest had an air of utter impenetrability, and was shrouded in gloom.
How did I know it was not Britain? Because the same silvery mist that cloaked Lyllora Var poured out of those trees, and clung to the base of the hill. Said hill was grown all over with a grasses and moss of a tawny gold colour, and scattered with jewel-like flowers.
At the summit, about three feet away from where we were standing, was a low stone bier upon which lay a corpse.
It was, as one would expect from the Yllanfalen, a most attractive corpse. The man was clearly fae, as improbably beautiful as the rest of his kind, with pale golden hair and a face that looked sculpted from marble. He wore a long robe of the finest silk I’ve ever seen, richly embroidered, and a delicate golden crown encircled his brow.
Around his neck hung a set of syrinx pipes that looked exactly like mine.
‘Found us a king,’ I observed.
Jay stood frowning down at the exquisite corpse. ‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone rip open a gate between the lyre-vault and the king’s tomb?’
‘I think this is the vault,’ said Mother. ‘That bubble back there was the gate.’
‘But there’s nothing here of value, except those pipes.’
‘Thief on the loose, remember?’
‘Then why not take the pipes, too? If they’re as similar to Ves’s as they look, that’s a Great Treasure just lying there unclaimed.’
‘Okay. Let’s try it.’ I reached for the pipes, and instantly a great bell tolled somewhere, at a volume that left my ears ringing. The ground shook beneath our feet, and thunder cracked the sky.
‘Ow,’ I said, and speedily withdrew my hand.
‘All right, that answers that,’ said Jay. ‘But then, how was the lyre taken? Was it here at all?’
‘I’d say yes,’ Mother replied after a moment. ‘There are traces of something that seems consistent with a musical Great Treasure. But, I thought that about Lyllora Var, too.’
‘Who could take it?’ I said.
They both looked at me with identical puzzled frowns. ‘What?’ said Mother.
‘Who could physically reach in and take the lyre, if it was once here? Who is that scary thief-repelling enchantment not protecting the lyre against?’
‘If you’ve got some idea, Cordelia, please just share it.’
‘The lyre belongs to the king, doesn’t it?’
‘Are we back with the idea that the king isn’t dead, because—’ Mother stopped, and abruptly bent over the king’s gorgeous corpse, her nose inches from his chin. Silence stretched. Then she said: ‘I was about to say you were crazy, but maybe not. There are about eighty layers of magick shrouding His Majesty here, and since he’s demonstrably not skeletal I might reasonably take them for enchantments of preservation, reverence and so on. But they don’t feel quite right. It’s something else.’
‘Like what?’ said I.
She grinned suddenly. ‘Ever heard of a faerie stock?’
‘You mean the doll type things some of the fae used to leave in the place of stolen human children?’
‘That’s it, though they’re a lot more realistic than a typical doll. Significantly, they do a terrific job of looking like a recently expired person.’
‘So,’ said Jay. ‘These aren’t preservation spells, because this man was never alive?’
‘I’m thinking so. Which doesn’t mean the real king is still alive; he’s just as likely to be taking up ground-space as a skeleton somewhere. This is some kind of… shrine to his memory.’
‘So it probably included the lyre,’ said Jay.
‘If the King’s pipes are here, it would’ve made sense to put the lyre here too,’ Mother allowed.
‘Did the king have any children?’ said I. ‘Surely the role of monarch would go to one of them when he died. They could’ve taken the lyre.’
‘But not the pipes,’ said Jay.
‘You’re really harping on that point.’
‘Because it’s a detail that makes no sense. I don’t think the thief hypothesis is working too well.’
My dreams of being involved in a daring heist story evaporated. Jay was right.
‘Unless,’ said Mother, ‘whoever took the lyre had a specific use for that one instrument only.’
‘Such as?’ Jay said. ‘I can’t recall that anyone’s ever said what the thing does, except get passed around at parties.’
‘That may prove a crucial question,’ said Mother.
‘Mum, how about you do your magick-tracing trick so we can get out of here,’ I said. ‘His Majesty here is giving me the creeps.’ Perhaps because (real corpse or not) he looked like he’d died about twelve seconds ago. Just lain down on his personal bier and… died.
‘Right.’ Mother wandered off, her steps describing a wide circle around his dead-but-not-decaying majesty’s bier.
On a whim, I picked up my pipes and played Addie’s song.
She appeared so promptly, she cannot have been far away. Up she trotted, unusually lively, shaking her head and whinnying loudly.
‘Ves,’ said Jay. ‘Look. That song’s—’
‘Done something? I see it.’ A pearly light shimmered around the dead king, or his effigy, and I half expected him to wake up.
He did not. Addie, though, went wild. She trotted around the bier, stamping her hooves, and nudging the body with her nose so hard she almost threw the king onto the floor.
Then she picked up her silvery feet and charged away down the hill, mane and tail flying in the winds that blew up out of nowhere.
Jay and I watched this display in wide-eyed silence.
‘Follow that unicorn,’ said I, and began to run.
‘Follow—?’ said Jay. ‘Can you keep up with a unicorn at full gallop, because I—’
The rest of his sentence was lost to the winds, as I ran full tilt away from him in the direction Adeline had gone. Down and down the hill we went, my feet thudding in the grass, fey winds tossing my hair. There was music in that wind, faint strains but half-heard, but they lent me speed and energy and I could almost have danced my way down the hill.
Adeline still left me far behind, but I ran on, breath turning short as I neared the bottom of the hill and the edge of the dense, dark forest that surrounded it.
Ahead of me, Adeline plunged heedlessly into the trees, her bright, moon-pale coat swallowed up instantly in shadow.
I paused for a moment on the edge of that forest, attempting without success to peer into the gloom.
‘Seriously?’ panted Jay, drawing up beside me. ‘We’re going to follow a unicorn into the dark depths of a faerie forest? Did you learn nothing from your bedtime stories as a child?’
‘I learned that adventure lies beyond the borders of the familiar.’
‘We’re way beyond the borders of the familiar already. Does it have to be a dark forest, Ves?’
‘I’m trusting Addie.’
‘She’s literally a magickal faerie creature.’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ I grinned, with a shade of my mother’s wolfish smile about it. ‘So am I. Where’s Mum?’
‘Here,’ growled my mother. ‘Don’t be a fool, Cordelia.’
‘Whyever not? It’s been working well for me for the past thirty-one years.’
Mother was limping. The pelting run down the hill hadn’t been good for her. ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ I added. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Without waiting for further arguments, I plunged into the trees, conscious that Addie drew farther away with every minute’s delay.
I’ll never admit it to my mother, or to Jay, but I instantly regretted it. Three steps was all it took; the trees closed in around me, cutting off most of the light, the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees, and even sounds faded to a muffled distance. I felt cut off from the world, and utterly alone.
‘Right,’ I said stoutly, and took another step. ‘This had better be worth it, Adeline.’
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