free fantasy serial

Baroness Tremayne lived between the echoes, as she had once put it. Then again, did she in fact live? Her insubstantial shadow world bore little resemblance to the vivid reality I knew. She’d pulled me sideways, as she had done before, and landed me in the middle of it, with all its darkness and distracting, flickery lights. I was still in the vaulted hall, but in some blurred, altered version. Between the echoes. I still did not understand quite what that meant.

The baroness, unchanged, regarded me gravely. She wore the same wide-skirted silk gown, ruffled with lace; the same artfully piled and curled arrangement graced her white hair. ‘How curious a mind,’ she said. ‘Why do you return here? Did I not already satisfy your needs?’

‘Oh! Yes,’ I said, watching Jay out of the corner of my eye. He was prowling the hall, searching for me, his form shadowed and his movements jerky in my vision. ‘May we invite my companion to join the conversation?’

The baroness did not even blink, but in the next moment Jay stood beside me.

‘Jay, this is Baroness Tremayne,’ I said. ‘The lady who gave us the cure. Baroness, my colleague from the Society, Jay Patel.’

It felt a touch peculiar, making so mundane an introduction under such unusual circumstances. But Jay took it with aplomb. He made the baroness a bow, and flashed one of his more charming smiles. ‘You saved many lives, ma’am.’

‘I could not have done so without you to carry my aid to the afflicted, hence I suffer your presence now.’ She spoke coldly. ‘But you trespass, and you steal. What is it you now want from my poor Farringale?’

‘We are here by royal command,’ I said quickly. ‘Their Majesties at the newer court, Mandridore, seek to learn more of the fate of Farringale, and sent us to discover what we could.’ I opted to keep the other part of their vision, the restoration of the city, to myself for the time being. First things first, and how might the prickly baroness react to the idea?

‘And what is your success?’

Any hopes she might be eager to tell all evaporated on the spot. ‘Well, we have some theories—’

‘As I heard.’

‘Are they… accurate?’

The baroness just looked at me. At last she said: ‘What will become of this knowledge, if ‘tis given to you?’

‘Ah… that would be up to Their Majesties,’ I said tactfully.

Baroness Tremayne said nothing. I could not even tell if she was thinking it over. Her face was impassive.

‘If I may ask,’ Jay stepped in. ‘Why do you linger, Baroness? By whose will, or order?’

‘And, how?’ I added.

The baroness drew herself up. ‘I remain by order of Her Majesty, Queen Hrruna, and His Majesty King Torvaston.’

I exchanged a look with Jay, my heart leaping with excitement. I saw the same hope reflected in his face. But gently, gently; the baroness was wary. ‘Are you here to care for the place?’ I suggested.

Her lips quirked. ‘Care for a dead land? What would be the use, pray?’

‘It isn’t dead, though, is it?’ said Jay. ‘Its people are gone, but the city goes on. The magickal surges. The griffins. The Sweeping Symphony — is that your doing? Everything has changed, and yet, nothing.’

‘And nothing has aged,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Including you.’

‘Requires life, to grow older,’ said she. ‘The life poured out of Farringale long ago, and from me.’

‘You’re an echo,’ I said. ‘Are you? Though we might term it a shade.’

‘Matters the word so greatly?’

Fair point.

‘Baroness,’ said Jay. ‘Please. Tell us what happened when Their Majesties left Farringale.’

‘Her Majesty required a promise of me, and I will keep it. I shall not tell.’

‘Was it Torvaston, the king?’ I probed. ‘He was… ill, wasn’t he? He and many of the Court. Magick-drowned, like Farringale itself.’

Her eyes flicked to me, but still she did not speak. I thought she grew more still and silent with every word I spoke.

Jay said, ‘If Farringale lives on, it is Their Majesties’ doing, and by Their will. It must be. Who else could wield such influence over this place? And they set you and others like you to watch over it all the long ages through. Why? It is because they did not want it to pass out of existence forever. They were trying to preserve it, Baroness, weren’t they? For the future. And we come here by order of Their Majesties’ descendants. They want to restore it to the world. If that day comes, your long vigil will be over and you may rest. Knowing this, will you not help us?’

Baroness Tremayne, caught between a promise to a long-dead queen and a command from the current one, grew hostile. ‘You come from Their Majesties, in sooth? How do I know it to be so? You are mere adventurers. Already you divest Farringale of its treasures.’

I thought guiltily of the jade-coloured book and the jewelled scroll case. ‘We carry some part of those treasures back to the new Court,’ I said. ‘And we are no adventurers. How, if so, do we come to be here at all? There is but one door to Farringale that ever opens now, and there are three keys to open it. Two remain with the Court, as I think you know well, Baroness. How came we to get those keys — not once, but twice — without the Court’s approval? You must know how impossible it must be to take them without it.’

‘And that door is significant, too,’ said Jay. ‘Why leave a way back at all, unless someone, someday, was supposed to use it?’

The mystery of the third key flitted, once more, across my mind. Why did House have the third key? How was it that the Baroness Tremayne knew our House well, as she’d previously claimed? Had someone, so long ago, foreseen the Society, and intended that it should be involved in the ultimate saving of Farringale?

That was absurd, wasn’t it? How could it possibly be so?

I gave my head a shake to clear it. One problem at a time, Ves. (Or, more accurately, seven or eight).

To my intense disappointment, the baroness did not speak again. She looked from Jay to me, visibly torn — and then, with a thin, whispering sigh, faded away. Jay and I found ourselves blinking in the bright light of the hall, the shadowed echoes dissolved around us.

‘Damn,’ said Jay softly.

I was inclined to agree — until I noticed Rob, standing in the middle of the hall with a huge tome in his hands. Another lay at his feet. Both were bound in dark leather, with polished silver hinges.

‘Ouch,’ he said.

‘Ouch?’ I echoed.

‘Came looking for you. Fell over these. We can add “books appearing out of nowhere” to the list of Farringale’s oddities.’

As one, Jay and I rushed over there to look.

The title page of the book Rob held read as follows:

A Treatise Upon Magicke: Its Sources and Histories, penned by Torvaston Brandilowe.

‘From before he became king?’ said Jay. ‘He was a scholar?’

‘Not just any scholar,’ said Rob, holding the book steady as I carefully turned pages. ‘This is about ebbs and flows — what we’re calling surges, is my guess.’

‘And the whole question of Dells and their sources or fonts,’ I added, speedily scanning pages. ‘We have nothing like this.’

Jay squatted down to examine the second book. Smaller than the first, it had a shabbier look about it, as though it had been more regularly used: the leather of its bindings was worn in places, and some of the page edges ragged. ‘Looks like a journal,’ Jay reported. ‘The author doesn’t identify him or herself, but the handwriting’s the same.’

Torvaston’s own diary. My heart beat quick with excitement. What a prize! ‘Written in Court Algatish,’ I said. ‘Archaic usage, naturally. Val and I would need a few weeks alone with these to wring the sense out of them.’

Indira dropped lightly down beside me, descended from somewhere above, and her hands weren’t empty either. She carried a heavy crown, wrought from some metal I did not recognise: it looked coppery, but brighter, and also vivid gold, and somehow silvery as well. Plus, like any good royal crown, it positively blazed with jewels.

‘How did you get that?’ I gasped.

‘I… didn’t? It fell into my hands.’

We all turned to look up at the distant walls where Indira had lately flitted. One of the glass compartments was empty, its glass front not so much broken as absent.

‘Our thanks, Baroness,’ said Jay, echoed quickly by me.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve got enough, for the time being. Let’s go home.’

As may be imagined, the crown in particular caused a sensation back at Mandridore, though I think its effects upon Alban were mixed. Like his adoptive parents, Their Majesties the Royals, he gazed at it with the starry-eyed awe one cannot help feeling in the presence of something so fabulously beautiful and expensive — and, in this case, significant. But in him I detected a trace of dismay, too. Would this ornament, heavy with precious metals and duty alike, someday adorn his head?

Upon our arrival at Their Majesties’ retreat house, we’d been greeted with rapture. By the time we’d arrived, the hour was far advanced and night long since fallen; but if we had turfed our royal employers out of bed, they made no sign of it.

It was just Jay and me again, too. Rob had elected to take Indira home, somewhat to her irritation, but he was right. We weren’t justified in hauling Indira (or Rob either) across the country at three in the morning.

‘Successful venture then, Ves?’ Alban had said when he had collected us from Farringale’s doorstep. I’d fallen into his car, bruised and laden with loot, and groaned.

‘Fabulously,’ I grinned, thrilled despite the bruises. Jay was right behind me, carrying the larger of the two tomes Rob had fallen over, with the crown set atop.

The baron’s — prince’s — brows rose into his hairline at that.

An hour or so later, we’d been plied with refreshments (to my relief), and sat ensconced with Their Majesties in their favourite parlour, our acquisitions set carefully upon a low walnut table nearby. Their Majesties, for a time lost for words, were beginning to rally.

‘We haven’t had chance to read the books closely yet,’ I said. ‘You might do so more speedily than we. And that one — the little green one — is still indecipherable. I think it’s magick-drunk. As is the scroll case, which inexplicably contains zero scrolls because it’s occupied by a silver fork, a gilded pocket-watch and a snuff box with a picture of a rather sexy troll lady enamelled into its lid.’ I’d had some time to work on the sealed ends during the drive back to Mandridore, and had at last prised them off.

‘We will have them studied and deciphered,’ King Naldran assured me, politely glossing over the snuff box.

‘These are wondrous finds,’ said Her Majesty Ysurra, her usually rather dull eyes shining with excitement. ‘This is Torvaston’s crown, is it not? I believe it must be. My husband’s is said to be the very same once worn at Farringale, but I have always thought that to be false. It has not the look of such an heirloom. A replica.’

‘I begin to suspect that everything contained in that hall belonged to Torvaston or Hrruna, or was of some importance at Court,’ I said.

‘It does have the air of a museum,’ Jay agreed. ‘They knew they would have to leave a little before the final crisis, of course — what we know of Farringale’s fall always said its decline took place over several months. So they prepared a sort of memorial hall. It’s another item in support of our theory that they were trying to save something for the future. I think they hoped someone would someday find the way back.’

‘Though,’ I put in thoughtfully, ‘why put Torvaston’s crown there? Even if Torvaston himself wasn’t to join his wife at Mandridore, the crown could have been passed on to the next heir.’

‘A salient question,’ said King Naldran. ‘And there are so many.’

‘Why did they not destroy the griffins?’ said Queen Ysurra. ‘If, as you propose, they are the source of these magickal surges?’

I tried to imagine the stone heart that could destroy so much majesty, and failed. ‘I believe it was an arrangement that worked well for the city, for many years,’ I said. ‘They celebrated the surges, and made use of them. Only at the end did it… get out of hand, and the ortherex descended. We still do not know quite what happened.’

King Naldran nodded. ‘And who would not wish for such a magickal surplus, from time to time, if it could be harnessed in some way?’ He paused, but not in thought. He surveyed me, and subsequently Jay, with a speculative air.

Alban — seated, I had noted, much farther away from me than might previously have been his wont — smiled faintly at his father. ‘You had better tell them,’ he said.

The king nodded, but it was the queen who spoke. ‘We hoped you would be successful, though you have far exceeded our expectations,’ she said. ‘We have a proposition for you, if you will hear it.’

‘Say on,’ said Jay, and I nodded.

The queen hesitated. ‘We understand you to be without fixed employment at present. But, it has also become apparent that your ties with the Society remain strong. Perhaps we have been misinformed?’

Tricky question. ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

‘Ah. Our idea was predicated upon the former, and it is thus: if you indeed seek to begin anew as your own entity, the Court would like to fund your enterprise, and bring it under our aegis.’

I was too surprised to speak. Whatever I might have anticipated by way of reward (if that’s what it was), this wasn’t it.

‘Forgive me,’ said Jay, more astute than I was. ‘May I ask why?’

Queen Ysurra inclined her stately head. ‘We have long admired the Society’s work, and its… unusual methods. And it is apparent that the Court could benefit greatly from a similar force, particularly if we wish to pursue the question of Farringale. Since our various goals may be fulfilled by the same means, I propose this solution for us both.’

What to say? It was a generous offer, and would have been perfect — if it weren’t for the fact that our secession from the Society had only ever been a sham.

Alban knew that, of course, or he’d guessed. I looked for a moment at him, but he gazed blandly back, giving me nothing. What was he up to?

‘I think we couldn’t accept,’ said Jay. ‘As you say, our ties with the Society remain strong…’ He, no more than I, could find a simple way of explaining that we’d been lying through our teeth.

Alban’s tiny, cynical smile appeared. ‘They’re still Society folk, mother. I did tell you.’

The queen sighed. ‘Unfortunate.’

‘Perhaps not,’ I said. ‘We have no real desire to set up independently, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other here. Why not form a partnership with the Society? You may assemble a joint force to work on the Farringale problem, of which we could conceivably be a part. And,’ I added, with a wry smile of my own, ‘I think we’d need their help anyway. After all, they’ve got the third key.’

Queen Ysurra did not look entirely happy about that last part, which intrigued me. ‘So they do. We will think upon your suggestion, Miss Vesper.’

‘With,’ put in Alban, ‘the firm intention of finding it an exceptionally good idea.’

‘Though I’ll add this: any restoration plan involving the destruction of those griffins is unlikely to find favour, either with us or with the rest of the Society.’

The queen looked down her royal nose at me, but she nodded.

So, that was that. I made a private resolve to pump Milady for information about that third key, next time I got the chance. How was it that the Society came to have it — and why had Baroness Tremayne claimed to know our House so well? Problems to pursue later.

Course, it also turned out later that the pocket-watch was Torvaston’s and served a more complicated purpose than merely telling the time; the snuff box contained a signet ring, though not a royal one; and the inside of the scroll case was etched with a map of the Seas of Segorne on one half and the Vales of Wonder on the other. The plot, as they say, promptly thickened.

But that’s a story for later, because what happened next was the one thing guaranteed to derail the Life of Ves in pretty short order.

My phone rang.

This may seem like a disappointingly mundane occurrence considering the build-up I’ve just given it, but it all comes down to who was on the other end.

‘Ves,’ I said crisply. I don’t usually answer my phone that way, but this was a number I didn’t recognise.

‘Cordelia?’

It was a woman’s voice, one I hadn’t heard in years.

‘I do not know why you insist on calling yourself by that peculiar abbreviation,’ continued the voice. ‘I gave you the most beautiful name I could think of.’

‘…Mother?’ I croaked.

‘Hello, dear.’

Dear? Since when was I dear? ‘How did you get this number?’ I said, turning my back on Jay, whose expression of incredulity was just too much to be borne.

‘I have spoken to Milady.’

‘Milady gave you my number?’

‘I needed to speak to you.’

‘Wait. How do you know Milady?’

‘Honestly, Cordelia. Everyone knows Milady. Now, listen. I need you to come here at once, and bring those pipes of yours.’

‘My…’ I paused to breathe. ‘My pipes? How do you know about my pipes?’

‘I consulted the register of known Great Treasures and their present owners. Imagine my surprise to find your name on the list! And it couldn’t be more perfect. Bring the pipes, and the Waymaster. I’ll see you soon.’

‘Mother—’ I began, using what has sometimes been termed my dangerous voice. For one thing, that list is privileged access only, it’s not like you can just Google it or something. For another, how dare she call me out of the blue and propose to haul me off to goodness-knew-where?

And what was Milady doing enabling her?

But she’d ended the call. I uttered a few choice expletives, and ended up glowering darkly at Jay.

‘Your mother doesn’t have your number?’ He could’ve said, you’ve got five lungs and a double spleen? in approximately the same tone.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘I see that.’

I took a deep breath. ‘We appear to have a change of plans.’

Turn page ->

***

Next stop: a “fun” outing with Ves’s family. I’ll tell you, it’s not going to be pretty…

First though, permit me to introduce you to this episode’s shiny ebook edition, in case you’d like your own copy (paperback to come!). And since it’s a tradition now, let me also discreetly put this nice Patreon thing here for a second, in all its extra-stories and advance-release-episodes glory.

That done… on with the Ves&Jay show!

‘I think so,’ whispered Indira, gazing at our griffin companion like a woman ensorcelled.

If true, the implications were astounding. It has long been supposed that magickal beasts are drawn to the magick that soaks every inch of a Dell or Enclave. What if, sometimes, it was the other way around? What if it was the beasts who brought the magick to the Dells? Or some combination of the two?

We’d let griffins die out. They’d been hunted for their claws and horns and bones: “For he hath his talons so long and so large and great upon his feet, as though they were horns of great oxen or of bugles or of kine, so that men make cups of them to drink of. And of their ribs and of the pens of their wings, men make bows, full strong, to shoot with arrows and quarrels.” (Mandeville again). Their talons and feathers and eggs were said to have various restorative or curative properties, and perhaps that was even the truth. There was also the incidental fact that they could be somewhat dangerous. For all these reasons and more, they had been hunted to destruction centuries ago.

A chagrined thought drifted across my mind. If magick had declined, was this partly why? We’d been killing off some of its most potent sources for the sake of a feather or two.

I’m occasionally ashamed to classify myself as human.

One of the griffins was staring right at me.

I managed not to squeak, and I was proud of myself for that small victory. The griffin in question might have been the smallest of the three, but that was not saying much. It could still have swallowed me in a single snap of its beak.

I stared back.

Those eyes, the deep green of fresh moss, held a spark of liveliness I found surprising considering the potency of my magickal lullaby. All right, maybe it was arrogance to think my own mere magicks could hold a trio of griffins for more than three seconds. But I had got those pipes from a creature of similar magickal eminence, which said a lot for their efficacy; and it had worked before, when I had almost been swallowed by one.

This griffin, though, was definitely not lulled. Nor was it making violent objection to our foray into its territory. It looked like… dared I believe it? Like it was not so much tranquillised by the music as simply… enjoying it.

‘Well,’ Jay croaked. ‘If you’re right about this lot, it’s just possible they won’t eat us.’

Indeed. Because according to Lady Tregawny, the population of Farringale had made festive pilgrimages out here to the griffins’ mountain in order to… what, exactly? Our new hypothesis cast her account in a different light. They had allotted me a fair draught… what had they been doing? Were they celebrating those surges of magick, or — or making use of them?

Especially Torvaston.

‘Considering we are the first people to set foot in Farringale for quite some years—’ I began.

‘As far as we know,’ put in Jay.

I inclined my head in acknowledgement of this point. ‘Their earlier aggression may have had more to do with surprise than a deep-seated need to rend us apart.’

‘They can’t be the same ones as were here in Torvaston’s day,’ Jay said, shaking his head.

‘Can’t? Do you know how long griffins live?’

‘No,’ he allowed. ‘How long do they live?’

‘I’m not sure anyone knows. We kept killing them for their feathers.’

Jay grimaced. ‘Right.’

Something unpleasant was happening to the floor. I’d become aware of it first as a faint warmth, and then a low, peaceful, thrumming, as of nectar-drunk bees.

Then the ground began to pulse, slowly, rhythmically, like a heartbeat.

It was a heartbeat. The goldish lightning crackled and buzzed around the three griffins, whose lassitude fell away. Soon, all three wore sheet lightning like cloaks, and the jolts of energy made my teeth buzz.

I realised what was happening, but too late.

‘This is going to hurt,’ I gasped, and was all too swiftly proved right.

Perhaps half an hour later, the four of us lay, felled like little trees, alone upon the mountainside. Our griffin “friends” had gone.

Okay, they had left us intact, and that was nice. But they had used us like some kind of magickal dumping-ground and that I did somewhat resent.

Despite my weakness, Lady Tregawny had said, and that, too, suddenly made sense. If you pumped a frail witch full of this much magick, she might not swound so much as suffer a heart attack on the spot. How fortunate that her ladyship had survived the experience long enough to write about it.

I tried to speak, but only a strangled choking sound emerged.

Rob began to cough. I’m pretty sure somebody else vomited, but I could not tell who.

‘Right,’ I managed, after another minute or so of deep breathing. ‘Let’s turn this to good effect, shall we?’

‘How?’ gasped Jay.

‘First, I’m going to need my chair back.’ I staggered to my feet, and limped over to the broken remains of my little vehicle. My technique was poor, I’ll give you that. I merely rammed lumps of wood roughly together and welded them there by pure force of will and magick. The result was as graceless as I so often was, which seemed fitting. Plus, I enjoyed a fractional lessening of the teeming magick that soaked my every pore.

Jay was getting into the spirit of things. ‘I want some more books,’ he said faintly, having managed to clamber into his own chair.

‘The shiny ones,’ I mumbled. ‘In the glass.’

‘Yep. Those.’

‘And then we are getting out of here,’ said Rob, sternly. ‘I think we’ve had enough fun at the Farringale party for today.’

The way I felt just then — like a wrung-out dishcloth, or a withered prune, while at the same time pulsing with magick like an overcharged battery — even I was not tempted to argue.

I will spare you an account of our somewhat ragged journey back into Farringale. Let’s just say that breaking my chair to bits and then clumsily shoving it back together did little to improve its navigational capabilities. Since I was also bashed up myself, and remained so despite Rob’s hasty magickal medicine, I cannot say that I enjoyed the experience much.

As we trailed away, forming a straggling line across the sky, those great, roiling storm-clouds shifted; bright lightning flashed; and out came the griffins. They remained aloof from us this time, distant shapes soaring far overhead, wheeling upon the winds. An occasional, hollow cry drifted down to us below, a piercingly lonely sound.

Liberating some more treasures from their enchanted glass houses proved more difficult than we were hoping. Even Rob’s splendid glass-breaking trick proved ineffectual when performed outside of a magickal surge, magick-soaked as he was. They had their uses, it seemed, even if they did render one too squiggly to easily take advantage.

So, we waited. I sat on the floor in one corner of the vaulted hall, feeding porridge alternately to myself and Ms. Goodfellow (it wasn’t half bad, after all, though it could have done with a liberal lacing of chocolate spread). I tipped the contents of my satchel over the marble tiles and surveyed the loot.

One Mauf, previously acquired.

One hand-written book, apparently written in gibberish.

One set of memoirs, penned by the mysterious Lady Tregawny.

One as-yet-unidentified scroll in jewelled case, courtesy of Pup.

‘You know what confuses me about this place?’ I said after a while, but no one answered. Jay had wandered off to the other side of the wide hall, and applied himself to a study of some of the titles shelved there. Indira was floating in a chair somewhere over my head, scrutinising the long rows of glass-bound treasures (or Treasures?) stored farther up. ‘They aren’t all books!’ she had announced some minutes before, and then maintained a steady report of her findings: ‘A bunch of keys. A… hat, or something. Can’t tell. Oh, a crown!’ My ears pricked up at the word “crown”, especially when it was shortly followed by: ‘A few Wands, a sceptre, orb…’

Hmm.

‘It’s the fact that everything is so well-kept,’ I continued, even if no one was listening. ‘Look at it. Dust-free, grimeless. All right, so the Sweeping Symphony would keep that under control. But it’s more than that. It’s like the Starstone Spire in here. These books are insufficiently aged. Same goes for the furniture, the buildings themselves — the only signs of decay we’ve seen are an occasional stagnant puddle and some day-to-day level building deterioration. I mean, look at this.’ I opened the hand-written journal with its pretty jade covers. ‘This has to have been written hundreds of years ago, but the ink hasn’t faded at all. I could conclude that someone put a pretty powerful preservation charm on it, but would that last so long, or so well? And has someone done the same with every single object in this entire city? I think not.

‘Then there’s the ortherex. Those surges of magick might explain why they’re still here, but I doubt it. If they could thrive on nothing but magick alone, why do they bother with trolls at all? If there are no living hosts left here, then they cannot breed, and should have died off long ago.’ I’d had some of these questions lurking at the back of my mind for weeks, without arriving at any particular conclusions. Now they were really piling up.

Jay drifted nearer. ‘You’re not veering back to that time travel theory, are you?’

‘No. Not quite that.’

‘Not quite?’ Jay propped himself upon my chosen wall and surveyed my little haul thoughtfully. ‘You’re right, of course. I’ve been wondering the same things.’

I banged my head back against the wall in frustration. ‘Why is there no information on this? It’s maddening. And I could go on. The griffins. Why are they still here? Is it just that, with Farringale being closed off, no one could get in to hunt them down? It might be that simple, but then again maybe not. And what if my tossed-off suggestion was right? What if they are the same ones that were here when Farringale fell? What would that mean?’

‘Either they live an incredibly long time,’ Jay said. ‘Or, like everything else in here, they apparently don’t age.’

‘That’s it.’ I pointed a finger at Jay, sitting up straighter. ‘That’s it. Is everything incredibly well preserved in spite of the passage of time, or is it not experiencing the passage of time? If nothing ages, is it because the process has been interfered with, or is it simply not happening at all?’

‘You mean time doesn’t pass in Farringale? No. It must, or why would there be any need for the Sweeping Symphony? How would those stagnant puddles develop?’

I gnawed a fingernail. ‘Maybe it does, but just… not much of it. Maybe it’s still pretty much 1658 in here.’

‘Ves, you can’t put a stasis enchantment on an entire city.’

‘I can’t, no, and neither could you. I’m pretty sure none of us could pull that off now. But we’re talking about centuries ago, before the decline of magick. And, we’re talking about a city that’s drenched in so much magick it’s drowning in it. Was it impossible here, so many years ago? Oh! You know what else, that would sort of explain how Baroness Tremayne’s still here, too. Or was, the last time.’

I remain, whispered the Baroness, so near to my ear that I jumped with a shriek.

‘What?’ Jay said, scrambling towards me. But he was too slow. By the time he reached the spot I’d been sitting in, I was gone.

Turn page ->

Indira had flown higher, much higher. I stared up at the distant underside of her elegant chair with some concern. Given her propensity for shattering bones, I didn’t want to end up taking her home in several pieces. ‘Indira?’ I called.

‘Give her a moment,’ said Jay.

Well, if Jay didn’t feel like being older-brother-protective, far be it from me to play Mother Hen. I waited, my thoughts busy.

If Jay was right and all four mountains were illusory: why? And what was causing it? We each saw only one mountain, which meant we were each being fed a separate vision. By… something. Well, by the mountain. If it was indeed the source of magick for Farringale Dell, what might it not be capable of?

But why did it wish to hide itself?

‘If you were an age-old magickal mountain with a penchant for griffin headgear, where and why might you hide?’ I said.

Rob, having positioned himself directly below Indira, did not answer. Catching our youngest team member if she happened to plummet to her inevitable death seemed like a great priority to me, so I didn’t interrupt him.

‘For some reason, I’m having trouble fitting myself into the headspace of a rock-based landmark.’ Jay kept a close eye on Indira, too, which might not have been helping his focus.

Focus, focus. Hm.

How about if I stopped thinking of it as a mountain? Perhaps more importantly, it was (if we were right) a magickal… font, I suppose. Terms vary for such things, and we don’t truly understand them very well. To call the heart of a magickal Dell a “font” likens it to some kind of fountain, merrily pumping out magick all the livelong day, and that’s in no way an accurate idea. You can’t switch it on or off, like a tap. But Dells — capital D, because they really are markedly different from your common-or-garden dingle — grow up around such a source. It’s what makes them magickal, and sets them apart. It’s rare, but once in a while a Dell falters and dies, because its source fails. We still have no idea why. I’d been inclined to think it a consequence of the decline of magick, but we’d since learned that it happened on the fifth Britain, too, so that idea was out.

In this instance, we had the opposite problem going on. That this occurred on the fifth Britain was no surprise whatsoever; the place was bursting with magick. But for it to happen here? Different situation entirely. The Heart of Farringale Dell was in no danger of drying up; on the contrary it was prone to giving rather too freely of itself. And its former citizens had been disposed to celebrate the fact.

First point, then: did I believe that the entire Court of Farringale would go tramping many miles through forest and dale to reach this magickal mountain, on the occasion of their festival? No. They could have flown, of course, as we were doing, but that would take a lot of chairs, and anyway, nothing about Lady Tregawny’s memoirs had implied she might have been airborne for any part of it. Had they all flown, like Indira? Probably not, but maybe. Even if they had, how far could a swarm of people safely fly, even pumped up on magick?

So that suggested the mountain was situated not too far from the city, or (more sensibly) vice versa.

Right, then.

‘Indira!’ I yelled. ‘You’re my spotter.’

‘What?’ The word floated faintly back to me on the wind.

‘You see anything move, scream.’

‘Ves,’ yelled Jay. ‘What are you doing?’

This I ignored. Not because I was indifferent to my partner’s concern but because I was a bit busy.

Step one: I summoned up the strongest wards I had, and cloaked all four of us in them. I added a splash of camouflage into them this time. Whether it would help much in the circumstances I did not know, but it couldn’t hurt.

Step two: I wafted a little higher, and began a wide circle of the city. In one hand I had my Sunstone Wand; in the other, my syrinx pipes.

I took the precaution of laying a gentle sleep-spell on the pup before I began. I didn’t want her leaping out of the chair.

The melody I chose was a mixture of two distinct things: the first being the pacifying charm I had employed on our last visit to Farringale, and the second pure siren call. I’ve put a lot of time and practice into the art of pipe-playing and music-based magick over the past decade or so. You do, when you’re unexpectedly put in possession of a great Treasure and even permitted to keep it. My music soared over Farringale, haunting and alluring and calming all at the same time.

‘You’re a madwoman, Ves!’ shouted Jay, but I felt him join his magick to mine even as he spoke. The music gained in both intensity and volume, enough to spread to every corner of Farringale Dell.

‘You got a better idea?’ I yelled back.

I thought I heard a distant chuckle from Rob, but it may have been a trick of the wind.

Indira spotted something. Perhaps it wasn’t movement, for there was a distinct lack of screaming. Instead she raised one slim arm in the air, Wand in hand, and sent a burst of scintillating light flying high into the sky, like a flare. The light split and spread and poured down again, swirling chaotically around an apparently featureless stretch of dappled green-and-golden trees.

‘Gotcha,’ I muttered, and veered that way. My chair shot through the skies at dangerous speed by then; wind whipped into my face, stinging my skin, and the cold threatened to numb my lips.

As soon as I drew near to the rosy-lit trees, I began to see why Indira had lit them up. A suppressed shimmer of magick lay under every leaf, and when I got within twenty feet or so the trees themselves wavered like water.

You’d think this would have been warning enough. In my defence, I was probably moving too fast to stop in time anyway. Intent upon the maintenance of my rippling melody, I angled my chair in between the broad trunks of two ancient trees — and they disappeared in a flash. What I saw instead was the rugged, rocky expanse of an undeniably solid mountain rising steep and sharp before me.

I had about two and a half seconds to admire the view before I collided with it. The crunch was sickening.

I lay, spread-eagled and dazed, among the wreckage of my poor chair, blessing the shields which had — slightly — cushioned the fall. I only blazed with hurt almost everywhere.

‘Pup?’ I croaked, and groped for my satchel. Ms. Goodfellow came crawling out, and curled up upon my stomach.

‘Good,’ I gasped, and returned my pipes to my lips. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried playing a wind instrument when all the wind has just been smartly knocked out of you, but it isn’t easy.

Jay came bombing into view. Being forewarned, courtesy of Ves, he did not repeat my graceless performance but landed with a crisp snap and leapt out of his chair. ‘How the hell is it that you manage to keep not being dead?’ he said, at (I thought) unreasonable volume.

I waved a hand at him in a hush, you gesture. ‘They’re coming,’ I said, removing the pipes but briefly from my lips.

‘Who are— oh my god.’ A shadow passed over the sun; Jay looked up, and up, and stood mouth agape, for soaring overhead was a magickal beast straight out of legend. The size of a small ship, with a lion’s body and a bird’s plumage, it was mottled in white and tawny-yellow and red, its body wreathed in crackling lightning. Its beak was shut, talons peacefully curled as it spiralled its lazy way down to where I and my pipes lay.

Another two came wafting down behind it.

Considering that, last time, we’d been greeted with sharp beaks and claws, I thought this something of an improvement.

But Jay stood rigid as a rock, until the first griffin landed barely five feet away and he began to tremble. ‘Uh,’ he whispered, and apparently ran out of words.

I couldn’t blame him. I make it a point of honour never to visibly lose my shit, but it was difficult not to. The last time I had been in close quarters with a griffin, it had been trying to eat my face. Easily thirty times my size, this one was passive only because I played. Probably? What would happen if I ran out of breath?

Rob. Rob would happen. A dark shape flitted across the sky not far from the majestic griffins; Rob was ready, his enchanted knives in hand, to get those blades between me and the griffin if necessary.

Keep it together, Ves, I told myself. I didn’t want us to die that day, but I didn’t want any griffins to die that day either.

‘Ves,’ said Indira, very softly, from behind me. I jumped. I hadn’t seen or heard her approach. ‘Ves, you can stop playing.’

I leaned back my head, and signalled with my eyes that she was insane.

She smiled faintly. ‘No, really. It’s all right. Stop.’

Returning my wary gaze to the nearest of the three griffins, I tentatively let my song trail off. The melody continued without me, its volume a little muted, but the enchantment held.

‘The rocks have got it,’ said Indira.

Of course they did. ‘Right,’ I said, and, very carefully, sat up, resettling my unhappy pup in my lap. ‘You realise you two could rule the world if you wanted to?’ I added, addressing Indira and Jay.

‘Some other time,’ said Jay tightly.

‘Where did you get those pipes?’ said Indira.

I considered trotting out the line I’d used on Jay (classified, sorry), which was true enough, but I felt I owed Indira for the rocks thing. ‘Got them from a unicorn,’ I said nonchalantly.

Jay eyeballed me. ‘Of course you did. Would this be a good time to enquire what we’re doing playing chicken with a trio of griffins?’

‘We’re getting a good look at everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Mountain plus occupants.’ I made a go-on motion with my hands.

Jay gave a slightly shaky sigh, and squared his shoulders. ‘Should’ve been a librarian,’ he muttered under his breath.

Indira, however, was already way ahead of him. And, for that matter, me. ‘It’s not the mountain,’ she said softly.

“It”, I supposed, meant the magickal heart of Farringale Dell, and she was right. It was a shapely and attractive mountain, to be sure, and all aflourish, but it was no magick-soaked source of one of the most potent Dells in history.

The griffins, though. Those were highly interesting.

Back in the mid thirteen hundreds, a fine fellow named Sir John Mandeville wrote a travel memoir. Val has a prized early edition in the original French, which no one — no one — is permitted to go near. In this wondrous volume, he describes the griffin thus (loosely translated): “…Some men say they have the body upward as an eagle and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth, that they be of that shape. But one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than an hundred eagles such as we have amongst us…” I’d now say even this princely description rather understated the case. Eight lions? Maybe triple that number, and… keep going.

They were mesmerising, terrifying, awe-inspiring — and they radiated magick. They had so much of it they couldn’t hold it; hence the gold-touched lightning that rippled and flickered ceaselessly over their glossy feathers, even when they stood, heads drooping, gently at rest.

I risked a quick glance upwards. We had attracted three. How many more were up there?

‘Is it the griffins?’ I said in awe. ‘Are they the heart of Farringale?’

Turn page ->

‘Farringale destroyed by its own king,’ said Jay, and whistled. ‘That would be reason enough to expel him from Mandridore, certainly.’

‘And to cover the whole thing up afterwards,’ I agreed. ‘I’m sure Hrruna wouldn’t have wanted her husband to be remembered that way.’

‘So they went off into the Vales of Wonder looking for a new source,’ said Rob. ‘And the excess of magick attracted the ortherex, who feed off some derivative of it; and they’re still here. It fits, Ves, but do you have any evidence for it?’

‘We’re working on that.’

Indira was shaking her head, though she did not speak.

‘What’s on your mind?’ I prompted.

‘Surely…’ she said. ‘Surely no king would ever make such destructive decisions. And Torvaston is spoken of as a wise leader.’

‘I don’t imagine he made any such decision consciously, or rationally. But who decides to become an alcoholic? It is the kind of thing that happens by slow degrees, usually driven by some other factor. Perhaps Torvaston was feeling the pressures of leadership. Farringale was, after all, the most powerful and famous of the Fae Courts at the time. He might find himself turning more and more to something that eased the pressure, made him feel better. Some of his courtiers might follow suit.’ I knew my ideas bordered upon treasonous, or they might be if I was a subject of Their Majesties myself. It’s why I had opted not to mention any of my thoughts to Alban. Nor would I, until I had sound evidence to support them. ‘Or it may have been unintentional. If I could turn myself into a pancake and Indira could fly, what else could you do with that much magick? What if they were trying to achieve something truly stupendous, and it got out of hand?’

‘But how?’ said Jay. ‘How does a magick-drunk king flood an entire city?’

‘Right. Top question. We need to find the source of magick for Farringale Dell and get a good look at it. I’m thinking it might be possible to draw on it, in some way, or to goose it — I don’t know. Magick is too weak in modern Britain to pose any such problems. I doubt anyone’s been magick-drunk in decades, if not centuries.’

‘If they have,’ said Jay, ‘it’s been as adroitly covered up as Torvaston’s fall.’

A sobering thought. The Hidden Ministry was, after all, dedicated to keeping magickal secrets — besides being rather a secret itself. Had something like this happened more recently? I should call Mabyn, at the Forbidden Magick department. If it had, maybe she would know.

But, priorities. ‘Mauf,’ I said. ‘Lady Tregawny’s memoirs. This is why I brought them. Does she speak of anything that sounds like it might be the magickal heart of Farringale Dell?’

‘Not as such,’ said Mauf, but he spoke hesitantly. ‘She was writing a little before Torvaston’s day, of course, but she writes of a festival at midsummer. It was held only once every five or so years. We processed out of the City and into the Dell, my fellowes and I, garbed in festive raiment and all of a tumult, with our Gaiety and our Song. Their Majesties went ahead of us, as is Their Wont, and equally Their Right; and we of the Lesser Court did not reach the summit for some hours. When at last our moment came, so spongy was I that forward I went, hugger-mugger, and swounded quite away. ‘Gramercy,’ said I when once more I was myself, for despite my unseemly weakness they had allotted me a fair draught…’

‘Spongy?’ I said, befuddled.

‘Drunk,’ Mauf supplied.

‘Perhaps she meant inebriated in the ordinary sense,’ said Jay. ‘But if she did, what is the “fair draught”? It hardly makes sense for it to be some kind of beverage, or why did they go out into the Dell for it?’

‘And the summit?’ put in Rob. ‘Of what, and why were they going there?’

‘She does not say, in any greater detail than I have already shared,’ said Mauf.

‘Why would she?’ I said. ‘She was describing a familiar ritual. One headed up by Their Majesties and their Court…’ Something about the word summit nagged at me.

‘There is a mountain,’ offered Indira in her quiet way. ‘I saw it.’ Rather than add any more words to her sentence, she pointed upwards. She’d seen it when she was flying.

And that reminded me. ‘There is a mountain somewhere out there,’ I said excitedly. ‘Alban mentioned it when we first came here. He said that, according to legend, it was so tall that its peak touched the clouds. It’s where the griffins are supposed to have nested. Maybe that’s the source! The festival! You said five years or so, Mauf. It wasn’t every five years precisely?’

‘Lady Tregawny implies that the dates were variable,’ said Mauf. ‘In the year she speaks of, the festival came upon them apparently by surprise.’

‘So it was early!’ I was growing excited, for everything was falling into place in my mind. ‘Don’t you see? These magickal surges had been happening for a while, but only rarely — approximately once every five years. But even by Lady Tregawny’s time, some years before Torvaston, they were becoming more frequent. When they were rare, they could be celebrated and enjoyed. But when they became more common, they’d soon become disruptive and alarming. If the Court was in the habit of drawing heavily upon these surges when they came, like binge drinkers on a Saturday night, couldn’t that easily get out of control? Couldn’t some people end up taking far too much?’

‘If that’s the case,’ said Rob, ‘maybe it was not Torvaston who flooded Farringale.’

‘He and his courtiers might have hurried the process along,’ I argued. ‘Something changed a welcomed and celebrated event into a catastrophe. We need to find that mountain.’

Rob raised a hand. ‘Slow down, Ves. Think. If the mountain was as tall as all that, how were so many people reaching the summit?’

‘I’ve just spent three and a half minutes as a pancake.’

‘I take your point. Indira, where is this mountain?’

This simple question puzzled clever Indira more than it ought. She took her time in answering. ‘A long way off,’ she said. ‘And at the same time, very close. I cannot say… I think my perceptions were disordered.’

‘We were all a little disordered,’ said Rob kindly.

‘Then again, maybe not,’ I said. ‘Indira just pulled a great fairy routine, and Ms. Goodfellow was both airborne and upside down.’

Rob, Indira and Jay looked at me blankly. ‘What point are you making?’ said Jay.

‘Nothing else made sense for that period of time. Why should a mere immoveable landmark prove unaffected? Perhaps it was both near and far away. I suspect that reaching it might not be so simple as walking to it.’

‘So, then,’ said Jay, folding his arms. ‘We find the unfindable mountain, climb its unclimbably tall peak, and see if we can get ourselves magick-drunk enough to fall off again?’

‘Well.’ I blinked. ‘Except for maybe that last part, yes.’

‘Is anything ever going to be simple around you?’

‘Around me, no. But if you ask Milady nicely, she might assign you a quieter duty. You’d excel at rare books. That’s usually about trawling the non-magicker libraries for misplaced spell tomes and the like. Rarely gets exciting. Or you could maybe—’

‘Not serious, Ves.’

‘Oh.’

Rob, damn him, was hiding a grin with very little success. Even Indira looked amused, somewhere behind her mask of composure.

‘Let’s get a move on,’ I said hastily. ‘Mauf, we need a clue. Does Lady Tregawny give any hints as to where the procession started off from, or what route they took?’

‘I am afraid not, Miss Vesper.’

‘There might be something else, somewhere in here,’ said Indira, turning in a circle to take in the full extent of the enormous library.

‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘The first problem is finding it. The second… well, I don’t know that we’d find an A-to-Z Manual of Magickal Surge Festivities or anything like that. Nobody writes dreary tomes about birthday parties or stag dos for the same reason. We all know our own traditions too well to need instruction on the basics. We learn it growing up.’

‘Mr. Maufry,’ said Indira. ‘There is nothing about the mountain, I suppose?’

‘If I had a week to search…’ said Mauf.

We could have stayed for a week, if we had needed to. That possibility was why I had brought things like the porridge-pot along. But who wanted to spend a whole week sitting around in the biggest, best and most beautiful library on the planet, reading book after book after book after… all right, I did. I do. But not right then, and not if I had to do it on a steady diet of porridge. Those joys could wait until after we’d restored Farringale to habitability.

Ha, ha. Said I confidently, as though there weren’t about a thousand obstacles to get past in the process.

Ves. Focus!

For some reason, I’m starting to hear those words in Jay’s voice. I do not know what this means.

‘For once,’ I said, breaking in upon a debate between Indira and her brother as to the likelihood of a useful book’s being unearthed inside of a week. ‘I mean, I never thought I would say this, but: I don’t think books are the answer here.’

‘Not?’ Jay was incredulous.

‘Not.’

‘Are you the real Ves?’

‘I’m the Ves who recently spent three splendid minutes as a pancake. You decide.’

‘I withdraw the question.’

‘Thank you. I think Mauf and Rob were right: we shouldn’t spend too long here while these surges are going on.’

‘Did I say that?’ objected Rob.

‘I could see you thinking it, several times. And it’s true. We don’t know how often these surges are going to happen, and they could be dangerous. Last time, the Patels almost broke three or four limbs apiece and I seriously considered spending the rest of my life as a perfectly-cooked breakfast dish. A few more doses of that, and who knows what could happen? We should finish up our immediate business and get out.’

‘I concur,’ said cautious Jay, not at all to my surprise.

‘Fine. So we do not have time to spend a week searching the library. Which means! It’s time to play Trial and Error.’

‘Oh god.’ Jay actually backed away from me.

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Are we still pretending the griffins don’t exist?’

‘Er.’ To be truthful, I had forgotten them a bit. Their habit of lurking (at least by report) right at the top of the very peak we were aiming for was a tad bit inconvenient.

However.

‘We’ve survived them before. Let’s go.’ I scooped up Mauf, the happy jade-green book and Ms. Goodfellow, stuffing all three into my satchel (well, the books anyway. I placed my pup into her sleep-nest with tender care). Then I marched out of the great, marble hall in the direction of the exit.

Behind me, I heard a great, weary sigh from Jay. ‘Ves. It’s this way.’

‘Right.’

In the end, we made Indira lead, which did not at all make her happy. But she was the only one of us who had yet set eyes upon this mountain.

Not that it helped much. She headed off confidently enough when we regained the street, but soon faltered and became confused. ‘The problem is,’ she said, ‘I received no clear impression of its direction from my former vantage-point. And it is deceptive.’

‘Vantage-point,’ I mused. ‘Right. Rob, Jay, would you fetch us some of those chatty chairs?’

‘On it.’ Rob dived back into the library with Jay at his heels.

‘Except not the rude one,’ I called after them. ‘The one that insulted my padding?’

They returned with two chairs apiece, and set them all before me. It was my very great pleasure to witch them up in a trice, and I say that because it was shockingly easy. Apparently I was still fizzing with magick.

No wonder people got addicted to it.

‘Hup,’ I said, hurling myself into the arms of the nearest chair. I’d chosen one with a wide seat and a thick cushion: space enough for my all-important satchel.

Up we went. There was a movement recently to mandate the use of seat-belts in all airborne apparatus, chairs included, which was thankfully shouted down, but I began to see their point when a gust of air almost upended my chair and me with it.

‘Be advised,’ I called down, my heart all a-pound. ‘Playful currents up here.’

‘To say the least,’ said Jay, rising unsteadily to my approximate level.

I turned my chair in a slow circle, and received a dazzling view of the city laid out before me like a bejewelled chess board. Its layout was not dissimilar, vaguely grid-like, with the dappled lights and darks of sturdy buildings, though the roads curved and wound their way sinuously in between.

Beyond the confines of the city spread the rest of Farringale Dell: lusciously forested, and interspersed here and there with clear, sparkling lakes. Perhaps some part of it had once been tamed and inhabited; if so, those days were long gone. The forest had reclaimed the Dell, and begun to encroach upon the streets of the city, too.

I saw no mountain.

Then, suddenly, I did. It shimmered into view, cresting the sea of broad-leaved trees like some kind of desert mirage. ‘There!’ I shouted, pointing excitedly. Clouds swirled around the peak, as advertised, lightning shooting in crackling golden coils. Griffins, presumably, lurked somewhere within.

I became aware that my announcement had not caused quite the sensation I’d expected. As I was trying to bounce out of my chair with excitement, Jay was doing the same not far away — only he was waving his arm in a different direction altogether.

So was Rob.

So was Indira.

‘Wait, wait,’ I said, and brought my chair to a hovering halt. ‘There cannot be four such mountains.’

Even as I said the words, a voice at the back of my mind said: Whyever not?

‘No!’ I said, smothering it. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Only one can be real.’

‘Or none,’ said Jay.

‘Right. Where then is the real one?’

Turn page ->

By the time I returned, two of the beleaguered books had begun beating themselves against the walls of their glass-fronted houses. Whether they were trying to escape, or merely entertaining themselves, was unclear.

‘Mauf,’ I yelled over the tumult. ‘What is going on here?’

‘They appear to be in a state of some excitement,’ said Mauf gravely.

‘Yes, I can see that, but why? Can you talk to them?’

‘I would as usefully talk to a wall. A more empty-headed set of volumes I never did encounter.’

‘Is that the truth, Mauf, or do you exaggerate for effect?’

‘A very little exaggeration only, Miss Vesper.’

What could he mean? The word “empty-headed” must be an expression he had picked up from us, or some other book; it could not literally apply here. Were the books devoid of useful content, or were they somehow empty of words altogether?

I wanted to examine one. Unfortunately, the glass walls behind which they were imprisoned must have been magickally reinforced; for all their pounding and bouncing, none had contrived to escape.

So I fetched out my Sunstone Wand, and with a flick and a whisper, sent a bolt of crackling fire at the nearest of them — which happened (entirely by chance, I swear) to be the happy-natured jade-green book.

My little fireball bounced harmlessly off the glass and fell to the stone floor, where it lay sulking and sizzling.

‘Damn.’

‘You want that one?’ said Rob, withdrawing the Lapis Lazuli Wand from his sleeve.

‘Please, and thank you.’ I smiled.

He did his glass-shattering trick. I’ve never been able to master it. The glass imprisoning my chosen book turned ink-black, then cracked into a thousand pieces and fell away in a rain of… sand, this time.

‘Ouch,’ Rob grunted. ‘Powerful enchantments in here.’ A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. He frowned, and stared at the Wand as though he’d never seen it before. ‘I feel like that shouldn’t have worked.’

I ran and snatched up the book before it could get any bright ideas about, say, flying away, and opened it with breathless eagerness.

I saw at once what Mauf had meant.

‘It’s not that there aren’t words,’ I said, showing the pages to the others. ‘But something’s… happened to them.’ Page after page was full of gibberish, the genuinely nonsensical kind. I didn’t see a single coherent word, not in any language I knew, and besides that they were no longer arranged in the tidy rows one tended to expect. A great many letters, and in some cases whole words, had wandered off, wriggling all over the page like snails at a picnic. As I watched, some turned odd colours and faded away, then reappeared.

‘It isn’t some kind of code?’ said Jay, but doubtfully.

‘Not consistent enough, surely?’ I said. ‘Do you see any coherence whatsoever?’

Mauf, still tucked under my left arm, said clearly: ‘Magick-addled.’

‘It’s what?’ I said.

‘Round the bend,’ clarified Mauf. ‘It probably gets worse every time.’

‘Every time what… uh, Indira?’ Something moved at the edge of my vision. I looked that way just in time to see Jay’s sober and serious sister shoot into the air like a firework, her dark skirt and airy white blouse fluttering. Her hair streamed in a wind I could not feel.

While it was not unusual to see Indira levitate, and most adeptly too, this was different. For one thing, she rose and rose to at least twenty feet up, rapidly approaching those gauzy and unlikely clouds. For another thing, she was laughing in a fashion most unlike her.

‘Indira?’ called Jay. ‘That’s too high. Come down now.’

‘Is that even possible?’ I breathed, awed. Levitating to twenty feet? Actually, forget it. Indira wasn’t even levitating anymore. She was flat-out flying.

‘I never saw her do that before,’ said Jay. ‘Indira!’

Mauf gave what felt curiously like a bookish sigh. ‘I can see you are all to become quite tiresome. Perhaps you might restore me to the other chamber? I was engaged in a most interesting conversation.’

I barely attended to this speech, for Indira was shouting something. ‘There is so much of it!’ she laughed. ‘It’s wonderful. Like drowning in chocolate.’ There was more, but she became less coherent and farther away in equal measure.

The floor was thrumming again. I discarded my shoes a second time, and my socks, too, pressing my bare feet to the stones. That felt quite nice actually, so I lay down and stretched out. The low thrumming filled me, too, in soft pulses of warmth; it was like lying in the grass on a warm summer afternoon, that feeling of balmy contentment exactly, only about fifty times as potent.

I’d put myself eye-level with my useless fireball from earlier. Should it not have burned out by now? But it lay there still, spinning lazily, and emitting occasional puffs of coloured smoke.

Mauf lay near me. ‘Miss Vesper,’ he said. ‘Far be it from me to question your choices, but might this not be an excellent time to leave?’

‘No,’ I said, and giggled. ‘It’s lovely, lovely, lovely.’ The jade-green book and I sang it together, and I was distantly aware that I was smiling like an idiot — dancing, too, despite my recumbent posture — but the part of me that might normally have cared about such peculiar behaviour lay quiet and inert.

Rob sat slumped against a nearby wall. He’d stopped trying to fish Indira down and instead sat with his gaze fixed upon the clouds far above, smiling faintly. He still had the Lazuli Wand in hand; once in a while he gave it a spiralling little flourish, and some magickal thing leapt into being. A butterfly of painted silk. A tiny smoke dragon. A stream of miniature cars which roared across the floor, tooting tiny horns.

This looked like fun, so I joined in. I filled the air with dancing cakes, created a self-operating toot-organ with a taste for jazz (if you’ve never heard of a toot-organ, don’t ask me to explain for I’m sure I cannot). I even turned myself, briefly, into a pancake, but since this caused Rob to eye me hungrily I hastily changed back.

I slowly became aware of Jay standing over me, shrouded in a mantle of smoke dragons and gyrating cakes but nonetheless, inexplicably, frowning. ‘How can you be so severe,’ I said to him, and with a flick of my Wand I gave him a crown of sad faces etched in light and shadow.

‘Ves,’ he said. ‘We need to leave.’ His voice was slurred, and his movements sluggish, but he spoke firmly.

‘But how could we, when the furniture is so flatteringly eager for our company?’ For a party of chairs from a nearby chamber had that moment come clattering in. For all their graceful construction, silken upholstery and mahogany frames, they were clumsy in their movements, and chattered in coarse voices.

‘Look at that one,’ said their leader, scornfully. ‘Thinks it’s a chaise longue, does it? I’ve seen better padding on my grandmother’s couch.’ I realised, with a start, that the chair was speaking of me, for it delivered a kick to my shin with one slender, polished leg.

‘I like this one,’ said another, flouncing over to Rob. ‘Substantial. Firm. A chair you could trust.’

This, all told, was not an unreasonable description.

‘It is of no use,’ said Mauf. ‘You will have to wait until the flow has ebbed.’

‘The flow?’ said Jay, pausing in the act of prodding my various soft parts with his toe. Not gently.

‘Of magick.’

This made so much sense, I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauteous perfection of it. The possibility had entered our heads not so long ago, and now here we were experiencing something of that exact sort! I began to laugh, so delighted was I.

Jay, though, was neither so impressed nor so convinced. ‘Is it magick or are they high?’ he muttered, and retired to a corner.

‘Both,’ I tittered. ‘I think.’ I watched, some of my joy fading, as Jay slumped to the floor and sat with his head against the wall, his eyes closing. ‘Jay! Why aren’t you high?’

‘I feel unwell,’ he said shortly.

‘How unfair.’ I jumped to my feet. I don’t know what I was planning to do — run after him and make him enjoy the experience? — but a powerful headrush halted me where I stood, and I swayed.

A moment later I was back on the floor again, higgledy-piggledy.

‘Ouch,’ said Jay, apparently his idea of sympathy.

I looked up. Indira was still flying, swan-like, some way above. As I stared, glassy-eyed, something horned and yellow-furred and puppish floated slowly past, upside down and grinning.

‘You know,’ I said, tightly shutting my eyes. ‘Since you mention it, I’m not sure I feel so great either.’ That balmy, cocooned feeling faded in a rush, leaving me breathless in its sudden absence. Instead I felt squeezed, as though a great weight pressed down on me. Energy surged up from the floor, from the walls, from the very air, jolting through me like pulses of lightning; every hair on my body rose, and I began hyperventilating with the effort to breathe. I couldn’t sit still. I was too much of a livewire for that.

I thought I heard, as from a great distance, the voice of Mauf screaming, ‘Purple-hued malt-worm!’

All of this sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Only, it wasn’t. I felt exhilarated, like I could jump out of a plane — or, perhaps, like I just had. I felt more alive than I ever remembered feeling before; and when, some unmeasurable time later, the energies washed out of me like the tide and left me empty, I felt bereft and diminished.

I sat, quiet and listless, as details of my surroundings slowly filtered through to my befuddled consciousness. Mauf lay tutting a few feet away. ‘I told you to leave,’ he muttered darkly. Our purloined jade-green book had ended up stuffed up my shirt; I had no memory of putting it there, and hastily retrieved it. It had ceased to chortle, or to speak, and lay unmoving in my hand, somehow seeming to weigh twice as much as it had before.

Rob sat still against the wall, blinking and shaking his head. Jay I could not see, nor Indira — until both came hurtling into view together, falling at ill-advised speed from the heavens.

They landed with a crunch.

‘Ouch,’ I said.

Jay groaned.

‘I was fine,’ said Indira waspishly as she picked herself up.

Jay just lay there, grimacing. ‘You wouldn’t have been in another five minutes.’

He had a point. To my dismay, all of Rob’s smoke dragons and butterflies were dissolving into dust and winking away. My cake chorus was already gone, and I no longer felt either the desire or the capacity to turn myself into a giant pancake.

Whoever would’ve thought I’d ever say that last bit with such gravity, or with such regret?

I got up, and upon finding myself generally stable I went over to Jay, and hauled upon his arm until he righted himself. ‘Anything broken?’

‘Not for lack of trying.’

I looked at Indira. ‘So how many times have you broken a limb?’

‘Three,’ she said, unblinking. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, no reason.’

Jay snorted.

I retrieved Mauf, and then Goodie, who I found stranded upon a shelf some six feet from the floor. I had not imagined the part about the flying Dappledok pup, then. Had I imagined any of it? No. Jay wasn’t wrong to use the word high, for we’d certainly lost touch with a few useful things like rationality and common sense. But we hadn’t been hallucinating.

I tried to remember when I had ever heard of such a surge happening before, or any similar effects if it had. Nothing came to mind — except, of course, the storyteller’s tale on Whitmore. ‘The Seas of Segorne,’ I mused aloud.

‘And the Vales of Wonder,’ said Jay.

Seeing Rob and Indira wearing twin expressions of confusion, I explained. ‘We heard a rumour on Whitmore. They said that the last king of Farringale — our Farringale, that is, so Torvaston the Second — escaped to the Fifth Britain with an entourage. And they went looking for places prone to excesses of magick.’

‘But no,’ said Indira, frowning. ‘Torvaston and Hrruna founded the new court at Mandridore.’

‘So the history books say, but they’ve been wrong before.’

Indira looked appalled, as well she might, studious girl that she was. The only comfort I could offer was a pat on the arm. ‘History’s a changeful beast. It’s one of the exhilarating things about it.’

‘Crushing and exhilarating,’ said Jay darkly.

‘Utterly crushing.’

‘But why wouldn’t Torvaston go to Mandridore?’ said Indira.

‘This is one of the questions we’re here trying to answer,’ I said. ‘The Troll Court had nothing about Torvaston, and precious little about the early days of Mandridore.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Not even a scrawled note.’

‘But that means…’

‘It means the story may have a kernel of truth to it. And Torvaston must have had a really solid reason for fleeing into the fifth instead of going with his wife.’

‘Like?’ That was Rob. He’d listened in silence up until then, but his grim face suggested that his thoughts were running along similar lines to mine.

‘It’s only a hypothesis, yet,’ I said cautiously. ‘But I’ve wondered before. What could possibly compel Torvaston to abandon his wife, his people, his court, and flee? And what could motivate him to go looking for dangerously magick-drunk places like the Seas of Segorne? Jay, I think you might be right. I think they were expelled from the Court — because they were addicted to magick.’

Rob nodded.

‘Magick-drunk,’ Indira repeated. ‘You mean it literally.’

‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ I said, with a small smile. ‘I could get used to having that much magick around myself. I think the Court of Farringale did, too — or some of them, at least. Jay is proof that not everyone’s as deeply susceptible to the allure, but… such things have happened before. What might you do, if you needed your fix but there wasn’t enough around?’

‘Surely not,’ said Rob. ‘You mean to say Torvaston flooded Farringale?’

‘Yes,’ I said, utterly serious. ‘That’s exactly what I think happened.’

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‘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.’

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