The Striding Spire

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Fair enough. But what’s your role in all this?’

  ‘I’m the advance party. Seeing as I already have a contact at the Society, and a pretty spectacular one at that—’ He paused here to waggle his eyebrows at me, which was far more charming than it had any right to be —‘I was sent to get the details straight from the source.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got the details.’ I smiled at him, hoping my lips were not as visibly sugar-crusted as I feared. ‘I doubt I’ve told you anything more than Milady already relayed, though.’

  ‘It’s good to get a fuller account.’ He was being generous, but he was good at doing it unobtrusively, so I overlooked it. ‘The other thing…’ he said, and hesitated again.

  ‘Oh yes, rumour number two. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘You found something…unusual, recently?’

  ‘My dear Baron, we are the Society for Magickal Heritage and I am one of its finest field agents. Our entire job consists of going out into the world and finding highly interesting things whose existence is probably under threat. Could you be more specific?’

  That sheepish smile again. ‘Of course. Uh, the existence of this particular thing is not so much under threat as… disputed? Extinguished? Impossible?’

  ‘Oh! You mean the puppy.’

  He blinked at me. ‘It’s a puppy?’

  ‘Not in the way you are thinking. Miranda called it a dappledok pup. No relation to the canine species of creature, I’m fairly sure. I may someday get very, very tired of asking you this, but: how did you hear about that?’

  ‘Milady again, but she was cagey about it. Dropped a hint, primarily by asking if we happened to have any experts on extinct magickal beasts mooching around at the Court.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, but she’s somewhere in the Caribbean right now, on the trail of some impossibly rare bird whose name I have forgotten.’

  ‘Were you sent to ask me about the pup, too, or is this mere private curiosity?’

  ‘Some of both.’ His eyes strayed to the bag I had left leaning innocently against the back of the adjacent chair.

  Too sharp for his own good, that Baron.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said, rolling my eyes at him. ‘I’ll show you.’ I lifted the bag’s flap, carefully in case the puppy fell out. But she was still tucked securely in the nest I had made out of three pairs of socks, and still asleep. She was so motionless that for a moment my heart stopped, but when I touched her, I could feel the slow rise and fall of her furred side. I tickled her.

  She did not move.

  ‘She sleeps like a champion,’ I said to the Baron. ‘She has had a hard time of it, though. Her siblings starved, and she wasn’t far off going the same way when we found her.’

  ‘Let her sleep, then,’ said the Baron, staring at her with his eyes as wide as saucers and a dopey grin on his face.

  It wasn’t just me who found her utterly charming, then. Reassuring.

  She was looking particularly cute, all curled up in a tiny ball barely larger than an orange. She has tufts of goldish hair growing around the base of her little unicorn horn, the tips of which swayed with the rhythm of her breathing.

  ‘I imagine she will wake up soon, for it’s time for her feed, and she’s not one to miss out on breakfast.’ Neither am I, of course, though I have nothing like her excuse. Nobody’s ever tried to starve me. Nonetheless, I felt that it made us kindred spirits.

  I noticed Baron Alban eyeing my cleared plate, probably thinking along similar lines. He refrained, however, from comment.

  Wise man.

  It probably was more than an hour since she had last had her milk, so I opted to tickle her until she woke. She did so at last with a grumpy little snort, and sat up, stretching. I was ready with her bottle, and she soon clamped her jaws around the teat and got to work.

  The Baron and I watched with the breathless silence of brand new, doting parents.

  ‘You know what a dappledok pup is, of course?’ said the Baron after a while.

  ‘Other than the fact that it’s been completely extinct since the eighteenth century?’

  ‘It has indeed. But before that?’

  ‘No. I asked Miranda but she gabbled something largely incoherent — she was wrestling with a clawed, very unhappy creature at the time, in her defence — and I never did make sense of it.’ I’d asked Val, too. Her response had been, “I’ll get back to you,” which meant that she did not know at that precise moment where the books were on that topic, but she would soon find out.

  ‘Spriggans,’ said Alban, incomprehensibly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Fae-folk, native to Cornwall. Fond of shiny stuff. They bred the dappledoks out of a few other fae beasts, the goal being to create a species with a nose for treasure. They were said to be amazing trackers of anything or anyone carrying gold.’

  I was quiet, because only the previous day I had gone into my jewellery drawer for my favourite gold ear-studs and found them missing. I’d assumed I had simply put them somewhere they shouldn’t be, but suddenly I wondered.

  ‘How did they come to die out?’ I asked.

  His mouth twisted in a grimace. ‘Think it through, Ves. Cute, largely defenceless little creatures that are literally the road to riches? Spriggans can be unwisely boastful, to boot. Word spread, everyone wanted a dappledok, and… the rate of thefts across Britain, the Enclaves, the Dells, everywhere, positively soared. In the end they were banned. It became illegal to breed them. They survived a while after that, of course, through secret breeding-programmes, but eventually they petered out.’

  ‘Spriggans,’ I said.

  ‘Spriggans.’

  This was not the very best of news, for the fae-folk can be tricky. To say the least. There are more of them still about than non-magickers tend to think; they’ve just learned to hide better than they used to. But they can still cause a world of trouble for magickers and non-magickers alike, and spriggans… well, they have a reputation for being among the worst for sheer hell-raising mischief.

  I’ve tried to avoid tangling with the fae as much as possible.

  ‘So did I tell you where I found this pup?’ I said.

  ‘Pray do.’

  Remember when I said we’d almost been swallowed by a haunted house? That’s where we found the pup: curled up in a corner with two others, both dead. And this particular house was the kind that moves around, courtesy of its resident ghost of a Waymaster. It dated from the fourteen hundreds, if not even earlier, and it really felt like it.

  I told all this to the Baron.

  ‘Triple haunting?’ he mused. ‘That’s unusual.’

  ‘Yes. But. While I did not have much opportunity to chat with the residents, it did not strike me as likely that any of them would have cared much about operating a secret dappledok breeding programme. What would be the point?’

  ‘So you think someone else might have been using the cottage?’

  ‘Presumably with their consent, yes. It’s possible. Or someone merely dumped the pups there. Or the pups might even have found their own way in.’

  ‘In other words, you have no idea.’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  The Baron’s green, green eyes laughed at me again. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Good talk.’

  I grinned back. ‘I might be able to find something out,’ I offered.

  ‘Do you know, I was hoping you might say that?’

  3

  Later, happily replete with pancakes and with the Baron’s teasing smile echoing in my mind, I wandered through the corridors at Home with my shoulder bag clutched to my chest, whispering soothing words to the pup. She wanted to get out, but Alban’s words made me wary. She was more valuable even than I had imagined; not just supposedly extinct, but a potential source of riches. And if we indeed had a mole wandering these same hallways, it suddenly seemed like a very poor idea to show her off.

  I was heading for the east wing, and Miranda’s quarter
s in the Magickal Beasts division. I needed to talk to her right away.

  Unusually, she was not to be found among any of her creatures. I trawled through room after room, eyed a seemingly endless succession of cages, pens and indoor paddocks, and though a dazzling array of weird and wonderful creatures met my eyes, there was no Miranda.

  I found her at last in the east wing common room, apparently meditating over a cup of coffee, and firmly ensconced in a deep, plumply-stuffed arm chair. At least, she did not look up when I walked in, her gaze remaining fixed upon the window. I looked. There was nothing much going on outside, though the view was quite lovely: sunlight glinted on the meadows surrounding the House, and given the time of year the grasses were all frilly and much strewn with new flowers.

  Serene and gorgeous as it was, I didn’t think it likely that Miranda was quite so mesmerised by it as all that.

  ‘Mir?’ I said, when she still did not appear to notice my presence.

  Her head turned, and she blinked at me. ‘Ves! Sorry, I was miles away.’

  ‘I noticed. Everything all right?’

  ‘Yep,’ she said succinctly, and smiled. Never one for long speeches, Miranda.

  I offered her the bag, which she took, setting her coffee cup down on a side table. ‘Nice puppy nest,’ she commented, opening the flap.

  ‘I’ve been hearing all about dappledoks today, and the news isn’t all good,’ I told her. ‘You probably know what they were once used for?’

  Miranda gave me a quizzical look. ‘Used for? There was an odd reference in one letter to “treasure-dogs” and something similar in a book I once browsed through, but it was an offhand comment. Their gold fur is probably enough to account for such notions, and perhaps those horns — they’re being conflated with legendary creatures. Superstition more than anything.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ I related the Baron’s tale, which prompted a frown from Miranda.

  ‘Banned by who?’ she said, once I had finished. ‘The Troll Court?’

  ‘That was the implication, though if it succeeded in wiping out the dappledoks I conclude it must have been agreed upon, and enforced by, most of the magickal councils of the day.’

  ‘Which would be highly unusual.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it? I got to thinking. A spate of thefts would be unwelcome and disruptive, to be sure, but if the response was such a total and inflexible ban, then I wonder what it was that the pups were digging up?’

  ‘Did you ask his Baronship?’

  I had, of course, prior to our leaving the improbably wonderful café. But predictably enough, he had merely twinkled at me and fended off my questions with distractions, charm, counter-questions or, when I proved impervious to any of that, the flat statement of: ‘Court secrets, Ves. Sorry.’

  He ought to have known better than to say that to me.

  ‘Stonewalled me,’ I told Miranda.

  ‘Scandal,’ she said with a grin. ‘Intriguing.’

  ‘So, I am going to do some digging. In the meantime, the pup is a problem. If there is anybody else floating around who knows that the Legend of Dappledok might have some truth to it, I don’t want them finding out that we happen to have one. Do we have anybody good enough at illusion to camouflage a living creature?’

  ‘Oh, several. Leave her with me, and I’ll get somebody to come up here and sort her out.’

  ‘If she looks like a chihuahua or a dachshund or something, nobody would question that.’

  Miranda shook her head. ‘Too mundane. This is the Society, and you’re Cordelia Vesper — flamboyant to a fault, and notorious for being up to your elbows in magick all the livelong day. We’ll make her look like a miniature gorhound or something.’

  ‘Purple,’ I said.

  Miranda raised her brows.

  ‘This thing?’ I said, raising my left hand to show her the Curiosity I always wear: the ring that changes the colour of my hair. ‘It works on animals, too.’

  ‘Hah. Purple it is.’

  I disliked walking out of there without my pup with me, but it was in a good cause. Anyway, there is no one at the Society who can be better relied upon to take good care of her than Miranda.

  I was on my way to Val, next, but my phone buzzed. When I grabbed it, there was no call to answer or message to read: instead, the lock screen displayed an animated image of a handsome, eighteenth-century chocolate pot of wrought silver, glittering steam coiling from its spout.

  Or in other words, Milady wanted to see me.

  I changed course at once, and headed for the stairs.

  Once I had finished laboriously climbing up to the very top of the tallest tower, I discovered that the summons had not been limited to just me. Waymaster Jay was already there, and — more interestingly — Val. Valerie, Queen of the Library, is rarely dragged all the way up to Milady’s tower. It might be because it is somewhat harder for her to get up there than the rest of us, seeing as she’s confined to her chair (albeit a witched-up, conveniently floating one). But the House has a helpful way of whisking her anywhere she wants to go in the blink of an eye, so it’s more likely that Val simply has the kind of autonomy at Home that the rest of us can only dream of.

  I was the last to arrive, apparently, for the tower door closed behind me, and the incorporeal voice of Milady began at once to speak.

  ‘Chairs, please, dear,’ she said.

  It took me a moment to realise that she had not, in fact, addressed any of the three of us by that unusually endearing title, but had been speaking to the House. Chairs promptly appeared for Jay and me: nice, fatly stuffed ones in tapestry upholstery, very comfy indeed.

  This worried me. Milady rarely provided chairs. How long did she expect us to be here for?

  I took a chair anyway, sinking gratefully into its plush embrace. I may be well used to the long climb to the top of the House, but I don’t care how fit you are, it is still tiring.

  Jay smiled at me. ‘Had fun?’

  Word really travels fast at the Society.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There were pancakes.’

  ‘An incomparable date.’

  Well, sort of. I was still stinging just a bit from the fact that the Baron’s purpose had been so very all business, but I did not feel like admitting that to Jay. Call it pride, if you will. So I said, ‘Completely,’ and let the subject drop, for Milady interposed.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Thank you all for coming. As you are unhappily aware, we have had a… situation at Home, which has not yet been resolved. And since we are on the brink of another, I consider it wise to discuss our options.’

  ‘Another?’ I said, startled.

  ‘Relating to your recent find at the cottage, Ves.’

  ‘We do seem to have a talent for making spectacular, but highly inconvenient finds,’ murmured Jay.

  ‘You certainly do,’ I said. ‘First Bill, then the pup. I wait with breathless anticipation to see what you’ll stumble over next.’

  Jay flashed me a smug smile.

  ‘And whether or not we will survive it.’

  The smile disappeared.

  Milady cleared her throat. ‘First of all, let me assure you that I do not anticipate a repeat of the Bill incident. While clearly special, a dappledok pup is in no way likely to be as fiercely sought-after as a book like that — or its creator. Nor are its unusual talents widely known about, or much believed in nowadays.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘The pup is basically a gold mine.’

  ‘Not so much,’ said Jay. ‘It’s not fifteen thirty-seven anymore. People don’t store their wealth as stacks of gold or jewels anymore. When they do have valuable jewels, they’re in safes — or behind stoutly locked doors protected by house alarms. I wouldn’t say a dappledok is useless in two thousand seventeen, but the best she could do is facilitate a few petty thefts.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I had to agree. ‘But you’re talking about the non-magicker world. What about our world? We know little about her talents. Is it just gold and
silver she can sniff out? Jewels? What jewels? Imagine if she could stick her little nose to the ground and trundle off after, say, a major Wand or something.’

  ‘And that is a fair point, Ves,’ said Milady. ‘So I am pleased to hear that you have taken steps to have the pup disguised. It is a reasonable precaution, at least until we are able to discover the extent of the pup’s talents.’

  ‘What’s the nature of the situation, then?’ asked Jay.

  ‘As Ves will already be aware, I have sought help with the matter of the… disloyalty we have sadly suffered among our ranks. I would first like to privately assure you all that I do not in the smallest degree doubt your integrity. I will, however, ask that you submit to an interview with the Truthseeker, like the rest of your peers.’

  ‘A Truthseeker?’ Jay whistled. ‘I didn’t know there were any of those left.’

  ‘There are not many. Regarding the other matter, has it occurred to you to wonder in any detail where the pup came from?’

  ‘Somewhat,’ I said. ‘I do not think the cottage had much to do with it. For the breed to survive for two centuries, there must have been a concerted effort going on somewhere to preserve it. But if it has remained a secret all this time, then it must be somewhere very, very hidden. How those three pups came to be in the cottage I couldn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t equipped for a breeding programme on that scale, and it showed no signs of having been inhabited by anybody living for a long time. The source must lie elsewhere.’

  ‘They are also delicate,’ Val added. ‘Difficult to breed, almost as difficult to nurse to adulthood. It would take specialist knowledge, and a great deal of time and money to bring it off.’

  ‘Which suggests,’ I said, ‘that somebody out there has a clear purpose in mind for them.’

  ‘Might have been using them for something all along,’ said Jay.

  Good point. Electrifying point. I sat up, my thoughts awhirl.