by ‘That feeling,’ said Wyr, attempting to writhe out of my grip, ‘is not mutual.’
‘That’s too bad,’ I said, handing him off to Emellana. He didn’t stand much chance of getting away from her. ‘What are you doing here? And where’s our scroll-case?’
‘I sold it,’ he said, eyeing Em with distaste. ‘Obviously. What else would I do with it?’
‘Take an interest in a certain map that was drawn on it, by chance?’
‘What map.’
‘Ah. So your appearance up here is a coincidence.’
‘Apparently.’ He smiled at me, and flicked the brim of his hat.
I felt like sweeping that hat off him and hurling it (or him) off the peak.
‘Look, this is not going to fly. You’ve some kind of interest in the Hyndorin Mountains, and if you don’t speak up, Em’s going to break you into pieces and feed you to the birds.’ I’d seen a few large ones sailing overhead, birds of prey by the looks of them.
Wyr surveyed Emellana, unimpressed. ‘She’s big, but old ladies don’t tend to scare— argh!’
I don’t know what Em did, but obviously it hurt. She looked at him, cold as winter, and said, ‘Talk.’
‘I don’t—’ said Wyr, but this unpromising beginning was interrupted by a shimmer and a ripple of magick, emanating from the stony henge. Someone was coming through.
A tall figure appeared. Troll-tall, broad-shouldered, and achingly familiar. He paused only for a split second in the centre of the henge, and made as if to go away again — then saw me, and stopped dead. ‘Ves.’
A moment later, Baron Alban was bearing down on me with obvious intent to hug. Ruthlessly.
Remembering, in the nick of time, my uncuddleable state, I took a few hasty steps back. ‘Alban?’ I said, in disbelief. ‘Great. Now I’m hallucinating.’
‘Nope,’ said Jay succinctly.
Emellana smiled at the vision. ‘Highness.’
‘You’re really here,’ I said. ‘How.’
Alban stopped a few feet from me, uncertainty replacing the relief on his face. ‘Long story,’ he said.
‘It’s not you,’ I tried to explain, regretting my instinctive retreat. ‘It’s— uh, long story too.’
‘All right.’
‘You first?’
He sighed, and it struck me how weary he looked. In fact, he looked most unlike himself. He was clad in plain travelling clothes, devoid of ornaments, his head bare; the attractive, bluish-green tones of his skin and bronzed hair were gone, and he was merely brown-haired, with lightly tanned skin. It would be like me showing up in jeans and an old t-shirt, with my natural hair colour showing. ‘Is everything all right?’ I added.
‘It is now,’ he said, smiling at me, and he was the same old Alban again, even if rather less well turned-out. He looked around at Em and Jay and Miranda, and focused with a frown on Wyr. ‘Since you all appear to be hale and in one piece… who’s that?’
‘Our nemesis,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’
Wyr, visibly more disconcerted by the Baron’s presence than by Emellana’s, said nothing.
To my dismay, Alban swayed on his feet, and quickly sat down — outside the range of the henge. He held up a hand as I started forward. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve just been through one too many henges today, that’s all.’
‘As in, how many?’
‘As in, I’ve been travelling the Ways since last night trying to find you.’
‘All night? Why? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing terrible,’ he said, seeing the alarm in my face. ‘Or at least, probably not. Everyone at home is well. But some new information came to light shortly after you left, and I thought you needed to know about it.’ His gaze strayed to Wyr.
‘Can you bottle him up?’ I said to Em.
‘Gladly.’
‘Wait—’ said Wyr, then clapped his hands to his ears and made a disgusted face. ‘DEAF?’ he thundered. ‘GREAT. THANKS.’
‘It was that or an incomprehension charm,’ said Em with a faint smile. ‘Perhaps he’d prefer to hear everything in Swahili.’
‘I like this approach,’ I said. ‘Simple. Effective.’
Em inclined her head.
‘Can we leave it on him all the time?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Muting charm?’
‘No.’
‘Damn.’
‘Though I quite see the appeal.’
We all looked expectantly at Alban.
‘It’s two things,’ he said, shaking his head as though to clear it. ‘Firstly, Mother accelerated the translation process on Torvaston’s papers. She seconded half a dozen language scholars from anywhere she could get them. Certain research projects at the University have ground to a halt, but we got the document finished. Did you know — or guess — that Torvaston had made himself into a kind of human griffin?’
I blinked. ‘A what?’
‘I don’t mean half bird, or something like that. I’m not expressing this well.’
Small wonder, if he’d been criss-crossing back and forth between henge complexes for twelve hours straight. Or more. My unease grew. ‘Carry on.’
‘It’s more the way griffins operate, in the magickal sense. You know, how they function as a source of magick, increase its potency in areas they populate, that kind of thing.’
‘Got it. So Torvaston was doing the same thing?’
‘Not just Torvaston. Do you remember that odd kind of… ritual you read about, at Farringale? From the diary? Where members of the Court went up to the top of the peak and, um, absorbed some of the griffins’ excess magick.’
‘Yes.’
‘They were doing that to try to curb the overflow, or so we suppose, and that’s probably true, but did you consider the probable long-term effects of that?’
‘Sort of—’
‘Or how it was done?’
‘Sort of,’ I said again. ‘It’s all been speculation.’
‘Well, they had… tools, whether they knew it or not. A certain kind of metal — we don’t know what it was, except that it was called magickal silver by Torvaston in his book — has a property which permits it to soak up magick like a sponge. And that happened to be a fashionable material at the Court of Farringale. Everyone who was anyone had at least a trinket made from the stuff.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s no known source of that metal anymore, and most examples of objects made from the stuff have passed out of existence or knowledge. Most.’ He looked at me.
I had no trouble seeing where this was going. ‘So they absorbed… too much magick,’ I said faintly.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Whatever the cause, the general effect the griffins had on Farringale spread to many members of the Court, too. Which was like… quadrupling the griffin population of Farringale in the space of a number of years. You can imagine the outcome.’
‘That’s how Farringale was flooded?’
‘Probably. Torvaston’s notes stop before the crisis, so we can’t be sure, but the pieces fit.’
I felt saddened, somewhere under my unease. Torvaston’s desperate attempts to mend Farringale had most likely contributed to its demise. We’d speculated about just such a possibility, but I was sorry to have it largely confirmed.
‘But,’ said Jay. ‘But. What did they imagine they were doing with the excess magick? Absorbing it, however it was done, doesn’t just make it go away.’
He was looking at me as he said that last part, and indeed I was functioning as living proof of that concept.
‘Indeed not,’ said Alban. ‘Torvaston had a dual problem on his hands. He could see that Farringale was in danger of magickal excess — but he also had, we think, a touch of clairvoyance about him. His notes refer, more than once, to a “decline” he foresaw happening somewhere in the future. It seems he was attempting to manage a project which would solve both problems at once—’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Somehow using the dangerously excessive magick of Farringale to balance out the decline that was beginning elsewhere?’
‘Something like that,’ Alban agreed. ‘He began buying up all this magickal silver he could get his hands on. Almost bankrupted the royal family to do it, too. And he drew in all the brightest magickal minds he could get hold of in an attempt to build… some kind of device.’
‘A device?’
‘See, the problem with the flows of magick being under the influence of living creatures is that they can’t be… managed, very well. They breed too much, or they die off, and disasters happen. Either the enclave is flooded out, or its magick dries up and the place just dies. Torvaston wanted a solution that could be carefully maintained, and that meant a non-biological one.’
Jay said, ‘So he was building a… regulator.’
‘Right.’
‘Out of moonsilver. Or skysilver, or whatever the Yllanfalen call it.’
Alban looked oddly at him. ‘You guessed that part.’
Jay just looked meaningfully at me.
‘I was hoping,’ said Alban, ‘that the lyre hadn’t—’
‘It has,’ I said. ‘I used it. I’m sorry.’
He looked me over, more carefully, and I felt the faint brush of his magick against mine. ‘Then I am too late,’ he said heavily.
‘Hey,’ I said, trying for brightness. ‘I’m still alive.’
‘It’s not that it’s deadly,’ said Alban, with a smile probably meant to be reassuring. ‘Just… difficult to manage. Or reverse.’
‘It does have its drawbacks,’ I said lightly.
‘And that’s probably why the whole lot of them fled over here,’ he continued. ‘They would have felt less painfully overwrought, in a more potently magickal landscape. And they would have been less of a danger themselves. This is why they didn’t join Her Majesty at Mandridore.’
And I sighed. If I’d hoped Alban would have some solution that said, You CAN go home, Ves! I was doomed to disappointment. ‘Why didn’t they throw away that damned magickal silver,’ I said, somewhat sourly.
He smiled at me. ‘Have you thrown away that lyre?’
‘Fair point.’
‘Magick has ever been seductive. Anything that can promise to amplify its potency, very much so.’
I couldn’t disagree. ‘And there’s the whole question of dependency.’
‘True.’
Which, secretly, bothered me the most. Swimming as I was in magick up to my very eyeballs, would it even be possible to go back to the way I was before? Would I… miss it? Would I need it? Had I, in fact, been turned into a raging magickal alcoholic overnight?
It didn’t bear thinking about. Because I had a horrible feeling that I would.
‘Okay, anyway,’ I said briskly, setting these unproductive ideas aside. ‘Do we know what became of Torvaston’s magickal regulator?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Alban. ‘We don’t know if the project succeeded. If it did… the thing might still be at the old court, of course, but then presumably the disaster there would never have happened.’
‘Baroness Tremayne would surely have said something about that, if it was,’ I said. ‘If she knew about it.’
‘She probably didn’t. Torvaston seems to have kept that particular project quiet, hence spending his family’s money on it instead of the Court’s.’
‘Would he have left it behind?’ said Jay.
‘That’s the thing we were thinking,’ said Alban, shaking his head. ‘If he had to leave our Britain, it seems far-fetched to imagine he’d abandon his life’s work. And where better to complete so ambitious a project, but here?’
‘Ohh,’ I said, and stood straighter, electrified. ‘It’s here.’
‘Specifically, probably, somewhere in those very mountains you’re looking for,’ said Alban. ‘If it wasn’t in Vale.’
‘How do you know we already went to Vale?’
He grinned. ‘Because I went up there first. Something about the trail of disaster and chaos I found struck me as very Ves-like.’
I blushed. ‘It was necessary.’
‘It always is.’
‘So we’re looking for Torvaston’s masterpiece,’ I said hurriedly. ‘A thing which, if it had ever worked, could’ve saved Farringale.’
‘And which could save countless other enclaves,’ said Alban. ‘Both those over-flooded with magick, and those starving to death without it.’
My eyes widened. ‘This is big.’
‘Very. And there’s one more thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You aren’t the only ones.’
‘What?’
Almost imperceptibly, he winced. ‘That’s the other thing I needed to tell you. There was a… spy uncovered, at Mandridore.’
‘Uh oh.’
‘Um, more than one. We’ve reason to think somebody gained access to these papers some time ago, may have had opportunity to translate at least parts of it. And someone, probably the same someone, had been trying very hard to get their hands on that scroll-case from Farringale.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said, with sinking heart. ‘Someone with ties to Ancestria Magicka.’
‘Bingo. And, Ves, I think they’re already here.’
Of course they were. It was the answer to every question I’d ever asked myself about Fenella Beaumont’s motives, or Ancestria Magicka’s aims.
The mere thought of such an artefact falling into those hands brought me out into a cold sweat.
And they were, once again, way ahead of us.
‘Giddy gods,’ I said faintly. ‘We’re doomed.’
