by 10:38am on a bright, shiny day in July (I’d lost track of the date), and I was beginning to get a deep sense of déjà vu.
‘The Hyndorin Mountains,’ I had said to about thirty-eight passers-by in succession, and received the same response from all of them: a puzzled frown and a shake of the head. ‘Sorry,’ they said. ‘Never heard of it.’
Which is pretty much exactly what happened a couple of days ago, when we went in search of the Vales of Wonder.
‘Maybe it’s just so far from Scarborough that the people here don’t know it,’ I said, stopping on a sunny street corner.
But Jay shook his head. ‘Someone ought to have at least heard the name before. We’re getting nothing but total incomprehension.’
I sighed. ‘Which means what, it’s had a name change? Like Vale?’
‘Could be.’
‘Or,’ said Emellana Rogan, my idol, ‘It is either inaccessible or it no longer exists.’
Why is it that the voice of reason always has to be so depressing?
‘It must exist,’ I objected. ‘Mountain ranges don’t just disappear.’
‘Is it a mountain range? Whatever Torvaston considered of interest in those parts, it cannot have been simply a piece of topography. Perhaps it was a town. Or an area within a wider mountain range, which can no longer be reached, and has therefore faded from public knowledge.’
‘Either way,’ said Miranda, ‘asking around doesn’t seem to be helping much.’
Quite right, we were wasting time. But coming from Miranda, who summarily failed to follow up her observation with a useful suggestion, I found it nettling.
‘Right,’ I said, hiding my irritation. ‘We could be looking for a piece of history, then. Fortunately, we’re good at that.’
‘To the library?’ said Jay, perking up.
‘To the nearest library, and post-haste.’ I asked the next passer-by for directions to the library, instead of the Hyndorin Mountains, and received a much more satisfactory reply.
‘Second to the left, and straight on till morning?’ said Jay.
‘I knew it was a good idea to bring the navigator.’
Jay bowed.
‘Alternatively, next street over on the right, around the corner, and across the road.’
‘Reality is always so prosaic.’
‘I know,’ I said, patting Jay’s arm. ‘It’s disappointing.’
I tried not to notice the way he flinched when I touched him, just as I’d tried not to notice that the others were surreptitiously giving me a wide berth.
‘Sorry,’ said Jay, noticing me noticing. ‘It’s just that it—’
‘Feels like a shot of pure bliss directly to the heart?’ I said hopefully.
‘More like an electric shock straight to the brain.’
‘I’ll work on that.’
The problem was, I was overflowing with magick. Ever since someone had put that wretched lyre into my hands, up at the top of the town of Vale. You know, right where its ancient magick was at its most potent.
It and I might since have parted ways, but I’d managed to take quite a lot of the magick with me. Or something. Whether I’d simply absorbed a small ocean of the stuff and failed to discharge it (making me a walking magickal battery), or whether I’d become some kind of magickal generator (like the griffins), was still under question.
I couldn’t tell. I just knew that every cell of my body buzzed with potential, like I could move mountains if I wanted to. The few, small experiments I’d ventured to perform (over the long, long night while everyone else slept, and I couldn’t), had demonstrated that I was indeed more magickally adept than I’d ever been before.
Something up there in Vale had supercharged me.
I wasn’t sure I approved. And the farther we got from Vale, where I had felt more or less on a level with my surroundings, the less sure I was. I certainly couldn’t go home in this state.
I hoped I wasn’t condemned to a lifetime of exile.
Libraries, though. Libraries are soothing. The moment we stepped through the big glass doors of the-fifth-Scarborough’s public library (leaving Pup on the doorstep, prudently tied to the railing), I felt subtly eased. The mere sight of all those books calmed me down. Hey, if I couldn’t have human touch, I could still have reading.
Hopefully. I did sometimes have an odd effect on inanimate objects, too.
The four of us paused on the threshold, taking in the feast of knowledge before us in appreciative silence. Not a bad sized library, considering that Scarborough isn’t a particularly large town. A big, airy room stretched before us, bookshelves arranged in neat rows across its floor, and all around the walls. Everything was neatly organised and labelled, just the way I like it.
I spotted a sign reading “history”, and made a beeline for it.
‘Right, Mauf,’ I said, hauling his huge bookly form out of my satchel. ‘All our hopes depend on you.’
‘Ouch,’ said Mauf.
I quickly set him down on the nearest table. ‘Great. Even my favourite book recoils from my touch.’
Mauf ruffled his pages, perhaps pleased with my shameless piece of flattery. ‘Dear Miss Vesper, never would I recoil from you.’
‘You’d suffer my proximity bravely, heroically, and without complaint, because you love me?’
‘Quite.’
‘I appreciate that.’
Mauf smiled bookishly. ‘What is it that I may do for you this morning, madam?’
‘We’re looking for those Hyndorin Mountains. You may recall, the ones on the scroll-case map.’
‘I recall it perfectly. Indeed, I retain a copy of the map in question.’
‘I thought you might. I don’t suppose the map has any hidden hints as to how to get there?’ It was always possible that Mauf might discern something undetectable to our feeble human perceptions.
‘I am afraid not. The map appears more along the lines of a memorandum than a practical guide, and contains no instruction as to how to reach it from any particular part of Britain.’
Curse it.
‘In that case, we rely on these shelves for information. Can you… search the books, somehow, for any mention of Hyndorin?’
‘Hyndorin anything,’ put in Jay. ‘As Em said, it might not be a mountain range. And by this time, four centuries after Torvaston drew the map, it could be anything at all.’
‘Like an inaccessible ruin,’ I said.
‘Including that.’
‘It will take some time,’ said Mauf.
‘Why don’t I wait here with Mauf,’ said Jay, taking a seat at the table. ‘Ves, you and Em could ask the library staff to check the catalogue?’
Me and Em, huh? I could almost swear Jay winked at me, like a match-making Mama out of some historical romance.
Had I made my girl crush so very obvious? Oops.
‘What about Mir—’ I began, in the smoothest subject change ever, but as I spoke I noticed her on the other side of the library, pulling books off the shelves. The sign over her head read “Zoology”, so that was her occupied for the next twelve years or so.
Away went Em and I to the librarian’s desk, me labouring to exude the kind of coolness Em achieved without effort.
‘Do you, um, have any other ideas?’ I tried.
‘Our current course of action is precisely what I would do myself.’
I felt an irrational little glow at what amounted to clear approval, and felt like an idiot. What was I, seven, and delighted with a word of praise from the teacher? Grown woman, Ves, I reminded myself, with as much effect as usual.
The librarian proved to be of the troll peoples; she and Em surveyed each other with obvious satisfaction.
‘Good morning,’ said Em. ‘We’re after information about the Hyndorin Mountains.’
The librarian, inevitably, looked blank. ‘Geography is at the back, on the right.’
‘We’re in a bit of a hurry,’ I said. ‘Could you maybe check if there’s anything listed in the catalogue?’
She did. There wasn’t.
‘Fiction’s that way,’ she said, pointing.
‘It definitely isn’t fiction. It’s marked on a map drawn a few centuries ago.’
Scepticism joined the befuddled look. ‘We’ve a mythology section. Perhaps there’s something in there.’
Demoted in a single sentence from serious scholars to dreamers on the trail of Atlantis. I stifled a sigh, thanked her, and drifted away.
But Em did not. ‘Do you perhaps have any reference titles on the mountains of the British Isles?’ she said.
‘Oh, certainly.’ A few minutes’ work with an enormous enchanted tome — I did rather like these magickal computers — and she had a list of two titles for us. These she wrote down on a slip of paper, which she handed to Em with a smile. ‘Good luck,’ she said, ignoring me entirely.
Comes of being short, I suppose.
We soon tracked down the books. ‘Let’s get these to Gallimaufry,’ she said, handing one to me. The Peaks of Britain, it called itself, and a flick through revealed a reasonable quantity of promising maps and discussion, some of them hand-drawn and pleasantly elderly-looking.
Jay sat with Mauf open on his lap, his back to the room. ‘Any luck?’ I said, taking the seat next to him — and drawing it a safe distance away. ‘We’ve got these.’
‘Not much,’ said Jay, taking a cursory glance at my book.
‘No one can report any instance of the word “Hyndorin” appearing anywhere in this library,’ said Mauf, and I realised that by “no one” he meant the books. ‘Nor anything similar.’
‘Curse it.’
‘Indeed. But there are two references to hidden mountain enclaves. Neither of them are detailed, nor are they from sources that might be termed properly academic. Mere hearsay.’
‘Old stories have often been our ally,’ I objected. ‘Hearsay sometimes has some truth lurking behind it.’
‘Nor does this seem so very far-fetched,’ said Em. ‘After all, even our own world, diminished as it is, retains a fair number of hidden magickal enclaves.’
Mauf sniffed. ‘I did say that neither was detailed. One speaks vaguely of Derbyshire. The other refers only to “the Peaks”.’
I sat up a bit. ‘But in our Britain, there’s a Peak District in Derbyshire, sometimes referred to simply as the Peaks.’ I leafed furiously through the book Em had handed me, and found a whole chapter devoted to the subject. Score.
‘Especially by locals,’ said Jay. ‘Who wrote that book, Mauf?’
‘It is unattributed. The book is at least a hundred years old, as far as I am able to determine, and appears to consist of a collection of somebody’s annotated explorations.’
‘Did the author get into this supposed mountain enclave?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Mmpf. Well, it’s better than nothing.’
‘It might be a lot worse than nothing,’ said Jay. ‘If it proves to be irrelevant.’
‘True. But we aren’t getting very far looking for references to these Hyndorin Mountains that don’t seem to exist, at least not around here. I vote we go down to Derbyshire and look around. Maybe we can dig up something more useful.’
‘I don’t have a better idea,’ said Jay, which was support of a kind.
Em gave me a slow nod, which I hoped meant “this, also, is exactly what I would do.” I beamed.
‘You about finished, Mauf?’ I said.
‘I do not believe there is anything more of use to be gleaned here,’ he said, with some disdain.
So much for the Scarborough Public Library. Mauf was so hard to please. ‘Ok, let’s go,’ I said.
But as I pushed back my chair, Miranda reappeared, carrying a big cloth-bound reference book. She dropped this onto the table before us; it landed with a bang, and a puff of dust. ‘Look,’ she said.
The cover was blank, but when I opened it up, the words The Care and Breeding of Magickal Familiars leapt out at me from the title page.
