by We found Wyr furiously waving my Sunstone Wand around: poking the door with its tip, trying to slot it into those twin keyholes I’d noticed, drawing invisible symbols over the stone surface, and occasionally shaking it in irritation. We watched this display in silence for a few seconds, with (at least on my part) great enjoyment.
‘Hi!’ I said after a moment.
Wyr jumped, and spun around. ‘Damnit,’ he growled. ‘You can’t have these back.’ He stood braced, as though he would withstand our combined attack by force of will alone.
‘All right,’ I said mildly. For the moment at least, I did not seem to need them.
I tested this by flicking my fingers over my hair. Its pink hue did not fade, but it was joined by six or seven other shades, until I had a shimmering rainbow mane.
I gave this a casual toss, while I thought about what precisely to do to Wyr.
‘Ves,’ murmured Jay. ‘I hate to be a downer, but I don’t think a change of hair colour is going to help much here.’
‘I’d think you would know better by now,’ I said.
It took him a second to realise that I hadn’t retrieved my colour-changing ring from Wyr’s possession. It still adorned our unwilling comrade’s thumb.
I caught the sideways glance he threw at me then, the narrowing of the eyes.
By then I had decided. ‘This is nothing personal,’ I said to Wyr. ‘Or, not very much. But you’re in the way.’
‘Wait—’ said Wyr, as I stretched out my hand.
Too late. An instant later, a small tree grew where Wyr had been standing. It only rose as high as my waist, but its slim branches were laden with the cherry-scented apples we had seen back down in the valley below.
‘Hrm,’ I said, frowning at it. ‘I was going for pancakes.’
‘You…’ Jay said, before words apparently failed him. ‘You’ve turned him into a tree.’
‘It could at least have been a pancake tree,’ I said, sadly. ‘I need some practice.’
Jay took a big step back from me, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Not on me!’
‘No, that would be silly,’ I agreed.
‘That would be silly?’ Jay yelped.
‘Never underestimate a woman with rainbow hair,’ murmured Alban.
‘Noted,’ said Jay.
I noticed something else. The smell of fresh cherries emanating from the Wyr-tree was creating a sensation I hadn’t experienced since Vale: hunger.
I was hungry again!
And… and tired. Tired like a woman who had sat in a magick-warping chair all night while her companions slumbered around her, too wired to close her eyes.
Damnit. Poor timing.
‘Anyway,’ said Miranda. ‘How long will he stay like that?’
I looked down at my handiwork. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Perhaps we’d better get on, then?’
‘Right.’ I held up my right hand, in which I wielded the double-pronged implement of (hopefully) opening, and intoned, ‘Fork.’ I turned to test my theory as to where it went.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Alban. Perhaps you’d better do this part.’ I handed him the fork.
Alban, troll-tall and able, therefore, to reach the keyhole, carefully inserted the fork-key into the twin holes. It slotted in easily, a perfect fit.
I waited, holding my breath, for the sounds of a lock clicking back, or hinges creaking as the door opened for us.
All I heard was Pup’s whimper as she pawed at the Wyr-tree. I pretended not to notice when she squatted and, er, watered the base of its trunk.
‘It doesn’t turn or something?’ I said to Alban.
He shook his head, and demonstrated its absolute immobility. ‘It fits in there, but… that’s all.’
I looked at Emellana. ‘Any ideas?’
She considered the question in what I hoped was a promising silence, then said, ‘No.’
I sighed. ‘Anybody?’
‘There were three things in that case,’ Jay pointed out. ‘Perhaps there’s more to this than a weird key.’
I took out the watch. Being of troll craftsmanship, it was a lot bigger than most of the examples I had seen, and heavy. ‘No tarnish,’ I murmured, running my thumb over the gleaming, silvery metal. ‘Has anyone cleaned this?’
‘I don’t know for certain,’ said Alban. ‘It hasn’t been under my care.’
It had no glass, the mechanical parts instead protected by an ornately-patterned silver case. I opened it, and beheld a clock face made from something resembling ivory. I hoped it wasn’t unicorn horn, but based on everything we had seen at Vale, I did not hold out much hope there. No numerals were etched into that circular face; instead, intervals were marked with tiny bubbles of coloured jewels embedded into the ivory/unicorn horn/whatever it was.
I counted. Nine, not twelve.
Also, a new detail I had failed to note before: it did not have two hands. It had three. One, perhaps, had been concealed behind another, the last time I had taken a brief glance at it. Now, all three were splayed out around the face, and none of them appeared to be moving.
‘Not a clock,’ I said, passing it to Emellana.
Jay was deep in study of the snuff box, with (slightly to my surprise) Miranda leaning over his shoulder. ‘There’s nothing in it?’ she was saying.
Jay opened the lid to display its emptiness. ‘It really looks like a snuff box, but—’ he lifted it to his nose, and inhaled. ‘It doesn’t smell like it’s ever held anything like snuff.’
‘It’s old,’ Miranda pointed out. ‘If it’s been empty for a long time, there might not be any lingering smell.’
‘Maybe,’ Jay agreed. ‘But snuff’s pungent stuff, especially the flavoured blends. It does linger.’
‘So you think it wasn’t used to hold snuff?’
‘I can’t think of a reason why Torvaston would keep something so mundane in so important a scroll-case, alongside the key to this door,’ said Jay. ‘Can you?’
‘No. So, what was it supposed to hold?’
‘No clue.’
‘Alban,’ I said, sidling his way. ‘There wasn’t anything in the papers that might give us a hint?’
He shook his head. ‘Torvaston never mentioned any of this.’
‘He wouldn’t, I suppose,’ I said, remembering. ‘The papers date from before the fall of Farringale, right?’
‘Right.’
I sighed, disappointed. And stymied. The watch (or whatever it was) might be pretty, and intriguing, but to look at it was to receive no indication whatsoever of its function, and an empty box could be of no use at all.
‘Ves,’ said Emellana.
I looked up. ‘Tell me you have something.’
She had walked away to the very edge of the plateau, and now walked back, holding the watch out in front of her. ‘Walk with me.’
I obeyed, Alban falling in beside me. We paced from one side of the plateau to the other, eyes fixed upon the jewelled clock-face.
Almost imperceptibly, one of the three silver hands moved.
‘I think,’ said Emellana, ‘that maybe it is not a watch, but more some kind of a… compass.’
‘With three hands?’ said Alban.
‘Whatever it is attracted to is perhaps complicated.’
‘Doubtless,’ I said, excitement rising. ‘Em, you might have cracked it!’
Emellana returned to the stone-slab of a lift, and stepped onto it. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said.
Ten minutes later, we made another discovery.
Following Em’s lead, we wandered through the sunlit valley, watching breathlessly as one or another of the three hands slowly moved around the compass’s face. It wasn’t just the hands that were affected by movement, either; while it was difficult to detect in the bright light of the morning, the jewels around the rim brightened and dimmed with a faint magickal glow. They were collected broadly into three colours, too: blue and gems formed a row of three, followed by shades of green, and finally three purplish jewels. They tended to react in concert.
‘Pick a colour,’ I said after several minutes of tramping aimlessly about. ‘Look. When the shortest hand moves, the blue ones shine. The green ones seem to respond to the middle hand, and the purple ones to the longest.’
‘Purple,’ said Em, and adjusted her direction. Instead of walking in circles, we walked until the longest of the three silver hands edged around the face, and kept to that direction. The compass led us back into the orchard of tangled trees, some distance from the mountain — which had, a glance back revealed, faded once again into the white mist.
Nothing emerged from the trees, nothing met my eyes that might explain why the compass had brought us tramping in this direction, and we were only getting farther from the door. My excitement began to ebb. What if neither the compass nor the box had anything to do with opening the way? Were we wasting time?
Emellana stopped, in between two withered old orchard trees. In the shadow cast by their arching boughs, the soft glow of the purple jewels appeared stronger.
Or maybe they shone brighter because we were onto something. The long hand had stopped in the dead centre of those three purplish gems, and as we watched, the glow grew brighter and deeper.
‘Em,’ I said in awe. ‘You’re purple.’
She glanced down at her amethyst-coloured shirt. ‘I know.’
‘No. I mean… you’re glowing.’ A swirl of something misty billowed up around Emellana, shimmering and purple, and soared into the sky.
I watched in silence as a trio of butterflies drifted into the whirl of light and hovered there, softly aglow.
‘What happens if you step out?’ said Jay.
Emellana took three big steps away, and the mist and lights promptly died away.
Alban took the compass from her. ‘And back?’ he said.
When Emellana returned to her former spot, the glow returned. What’s more, it was definitely coming from her. Even her skin glimmered with that weird purple light.
‘It seems I am stuck here,’ she said, ruefully.
‘We’ll find the other two,’ I said. ‘And giddy gods, I hope this doesn’t only work for trolls, or we’re a team member short.’
Alban eyed the compass in his hands, and gave a tiny sigh. ‘I perceive it is my fate to become a magickal beacon.’
‘Only for a little while,’ I promised, hoping I spoke the truth. ‘Pick a colour.’
‘Blue.’
‘Be quick,’ Em said. ‘It is my belief that these points move around.’
‘Why would they—’ I began, and shut up. ‘Of course. Why would there need to be a compass, if the beacon-points were fixed?’
‘Precisely.’
We left Emellana standing in her whorl of magick, and followed the compass once more, moving rather faster than before. Blue turned out to live a few hundred feet away, in an open spot in the meadow. Alban lit up like a sapphire-coloured firework — not quite so explosively, thank goodness — and stood there, arms folded, as butterflies settled in his hair. ‘Okay. And who’s taking green?’
‘It will have to be you or me,’ Jay said to Miranda. ‘Whatever’s going on with Ves I don’t know, but she seems to be the best person to head inside first.’
Was that a compliment, or was I being fed to the wolves? ‘It could be dangerous,’ I said to Jay, glowering.
‘And you’ve just turned a person into a tree.’
‘… good point.’
‘You’ll have one of us with you, too.’
I pick you, I thought, but did not say aloud.
Miranda, though, is not stupid. ‘Fine,’ she sighed, and held out her hand for the compass.
Alban gave it over. ‘It tickles,’ he informed her gravely.
‘The light?’
Alban nodded once.
‘Lucky that I’m not ticklish,’ she said, marching off. ‘Oh no wait, I am.’
I looked back once, in the direction we’d left Emellana. I could still see her flurry of purple mist and light, flowing into the skies. By now it was thick with butterflies and, doubtless, other wingy things.
I disliked having to leave three-fifths of my team behind in keeping the things activated, but if it had to be that way, then so be it.
I hoped, at least, that it would successfully open the door.
‘Right,’ said Miranda shortly afterwards, installed atop the half-rotten stump of a fallen tree, and lit up with verdant green. ‘Please get on with it, before I drown in insects.’
A quick glance, to check. There was Em’s beacon, still aglow, and Alban’s column of blue. Miranda’s gathered quickly in radiance, until it hurt to look at her.
‘We’ll be—’ I said.
‘Ves.’ Jay hit my arm, and pointed.
‘What— giddy gods.’ The mountain was back. We were nowhere near it, but whatever enchantment had hidden it from a distance was visibly evaporating into nothing. The mountain loomed over the valley, glittering with snow and magick and — gods, the griffins. They were whirling up there, hundreds of them, and a whirl of coloured light — familiar colours, these, purple and green and blue — engulfed the whole lot.
I could just see the gigantic door as it… vanished. Indeed, half the rock-face disappeared.
‘It’s not a mountain,’ I breathed. ‘It’s a tower.’
