The Wonders of Vale

by Charlotte E. English

  I began to find the wondrous Vale a fraction less charming.

  Troubled about Addie, heartsick about the farms, I packed my purloined possessions back into my bag — and came up an item short. ‘Mir, the scroll-case?’

  Miranda blinked, and glanced down at her own hands, as though she might find herself still carrying it. ‘Um, didn’t I already give that to you?’

  I double-checked. ‘No. I’ve got the Wand, the panic button, Mauf, my pipes…’

  ‘It isn’t on me,’ said Miranda, looking stricken.

  ‘Your bird definitely got it back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I glanced at Emellana, and Jay. ‘Anybody else got it?’

  They both shook their heads. ‘Wyr?’ Jay growled.

  Doubtless. ‘Damn that little sneak,’ I sighed. ‘No wonder he wandered off.’

  ‘He’ll be on the other side of bloody Vale by now,’ said Jay.

  Emellana looked more thoughtful than outraged. ‘Now, why did he take that one article, and not the others?’ she said.

  ‘Because it’s smothered in jewels?’ I offered.

  ‘Does that not seem mundane, as an attraction for a person like Wyr?’ said Em. ‘He struck me as consistently more interested in objects of magickal or arcane significance.’

  Like “Majestic” unicorns, for example. ‘But the scroll-case hasn’t a scrap of magick about it,’ I said. ‘Has it?’

  ‘Not that I could discern,’ said Emellana. ‘Nor has it ever been the subject of any past magicks.’

  ‘That may not be true for much longer,’ said Jay.

  I raised a brow in his general direction.

  ‘Well, what can Wyr want with it?’ he said. ‘It’s of no use as a map, and I don’t see why he would need one anyway. He’s obviously very familiar with Vale. It’s got to be something to do with its provenance. He played down the significance of Furgidan the Dispossessed, even in Vale, but he could’ve been lying.’

  ‘I’d say that one never told a word of truth in his life, if he could help it,’ I muttered, and gave a sigh. ‘So we need to get that back. Along with my poor lost Adeline, and then we can proceed with the mission.’ I had to think for a moment to remember what that even was.

  Torvaston’s expedition to the Vales of Wonder. What, where, when, how, and why.

  Right.

  I shook my head to clear it, without much success. ‘How long do those potions last?’

  Emellana looked at me. ‘Your hair’s growing flowers again.’

  ‘I was afraid of that.’ I hefted my shoulder bag. ‘Next stop, the potion shop,’ I said, and made it two steps before my darling pup came running up, ears perky, tail furiously a-wag.

  She had a severed unicorn horn in her mouth.

  ‘Oh,’ I said upon a long sigh, and took it from her. ‘Thanks, pup.’

  Little Goodie Goodfellow grinned a huge puppy grin at me, immensely pleased with herself.

  The Potion Shop was actually called, with rather greater sophistication, Benbollen’s Elixir Emporium, and to call it eye-opening would be to sadly understate the case. I wondered how Emellana had kept her implacable cool, turned loose in the place by herself not long since, for it was like walking into a sweet-shop at the approximate age of five. What had that woman even seen, in her long, long life, to be so unimpressed? For the shop was vastly larger on the inside than it had any right to be, considering the very modest proportions we’d glimpsed from outside. It was also… taller. Far taller. The ceiling was up there somewhere, I could almost swear it. But, like the library at Mandridore, it was far distant, and obscured by floating wisps of cloud.

  Every wall was crammed with shelves, and every shelf was crowded with elixirs. They were presented in bottles of every size, shape and material — not just glass, ladies and gents, because why stop there? These were amethyst and onyx and granite and silver and a host of substances I couldn’t identify. Those that were clear displayed potions of every possible colour, many of them unusually active. They swirled and rippled and bubbled and glittered and spun in their elegant bottles, and I could’ve cheerfully stayed all year until I’d had chance to try every single one of them. Or at least to learn what they did.

  Seldom have I seen such a wealth of colour… and magickal possibility.

  I inched nearer to Emellana, who stood with her usual poise in the centre of the shop floor, glancing occasionally at some potion or another with an expression of polite interest. She could not be so totally unmoved as she appeared. Surely.

  ‘Ever seen anything like this at home?’ I asked her.

  ‘No,’ she said, but then added, ‘Well. The markets at Cairo in the thirties were remarkable. More informally presented, of course, but full of marvels.’

  ‘Were?’ I echoed.

  ‘It’s all gone now.’ I thought I saw a trace of regret in her calm features, but couldn’t be sure.

  For the first time, it occurred to me that Emellana was old enough to have seen some of our world’s magickal decline first hand. What had the world of her youth been like? I opened my mouth to ask, but shook my head. Not the time, Ves. Practical matters first. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but how did you pay for the first batch of potions?’

  Her eyes gleamed with something like… amusement? A trace of smugness? But she only said: ‘The same way I paid for your pot. Your pup is an enterprising creature. She dug up a jewel not half an hour ago, which the shopkeeper appeared to consider valuable.’

  I wondered briefly why pup had chosen to make Emellana the beneficiary of her peculiar brand of largesse, and let the thought go. If pup was as much inclined as I was to develop a mild crush on the magnificent older lady, I could hardly blame her.

  And she had brought me the prize article, even if it was one I did not especially welcome. I retrieved the horn from my bag, trying not to look at its ragged, bloodied end. The damned thing was freshly harvested. ‘Do you think they’d accept a barter?’

  A flicker of distaste crossed Emellana’s face as she looked at the horn. ‘Yes, let us dispose of it.’

  I approached the proprietor, an elfin lady younger and shorter than myself, with the kind of bright, slightly fixed smile common to practiced shop assistants everywhere. ‘Welcome to Benbollen’s,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I gather you sold this lady a batch of potions earlier today.’ I indicated Emellana with a wave of my hand. Something had caught her attention and she’d wandered off.

  ‘Four doses of Tylerin’s Suppressants?’ she said promptly. Her gaze took in the flowers bobbing gently in my hair.

  ‘Right. Can I get a repeat order of that? Two, even, if this is sufficient to cover it.’ I displayed the severed horn.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said, to my relief. ‘Did you want only the two? That’s enough alicorn to make four or five batches.’

  15

  I wondered if I’d heard correctly. ‘One second,’ I said. ‘To make four or five batches?’

  ‘I’d think so. I mean, I’m not an alchemixer, but—’

  ‘Tylerin’s Suppressants are made out of unicorn horns?’

  ‘The very finest,’ she said, with horrible cheer. ‘And every bottle’s steeped in unicorn hair, and, um… traces of dragon blood… I’ve got the literature on it somewhere.’

  I interrupted her search for a no doubt horrifically informative leaflet. ‘That’s okay, I don’t need to read about it.’

  She stopped searching, and thankfully took the horn from me. ‘So five batches, then?’ she said.

  I took a moment to grope for words, and to dispense with the raging I was sorely tempted to embark upon. ‘I don’t quite… I mean, how is it a suppressant if the stuff pumps us full of magickal elements?’

  ‘I know it seems confusing, but it’s really very clever,’ she enthused. ‘Tylerin theorised that the effects of Vale, and other potent sources of magick, are due to an imbalance between the environment and the subject. You’re overwhelmed because you yoursel
f are significantly less magickal than your surroundings. Do you see? So the suppressant actually bumps up your magick rating until it’s more comparable with the environment, and then you can move through even a strong magickal surge more or less safely.’

  ‘More or less,’ I repeated.

  ‘These are calibrated for Vale,’ she said. ‘We sell a range of grades adjusted for body mass and magickal talent, but unless you get a dose custom-made for yourself there’ll be some variation in the results.’ She brightened. ‘Would you like custom doses? Our best alchemixer is in today, and she’d be delighted to assist you.’

  ‘No!’ I said, backing away. Whatever the consequences might prove to be, I couldn’t bring myself to imbibe any more of Benbollen’s wondrous elixirs now that I knew what went into them.

  ‘I mean, I know it’s not much different from eating a burger, when I happen to think well of cows,’ I said a little later to Jay, once we stood in a mildly disconsolate knot on the pavement outside the shop. ‘I still can’t bring myself to drink any more of it.’

  I observed what appeared to be a suppressed shudder in Jay. ‘That’s sort of why I don’t eat burgers,’ he said. ‘But I take your point.’

  ‘You… you don’t?’

  Jay shook his head. ‘Vegetarian.’

  I blinked. ‘I feel I ought to have noticed that before now.’

  He grinned. ‘I don’t really expect you to pay that much attention to my quirks.’

  ‘This place is vile,’ said Miranda with energy, erupting from the shop behind us. She had remained behind, for the pleasure of wrangling with the shop assistant. I doubted her attempts at remonstrating with them over the morality of their business had been productive of much. She stalked past us into the street, stiff with rage.

  ‘Have they seen the error of their ways?’ I called after her.

  She merely bristled — visibly — and declined to answer.

  Emellana smiled faintly, and said nothing.

  ‘We’d better work fast,’ said Jay. ‘If we aren’t using any more suppressants. Or whatever they are.’

  ‘Right.’ I forced my spinning brain to focus. ‘Griffins. Torvaston. Magickal surges. Um…’ I hauled Mauf out of my bag and wandered after Miranda, keeping half an eye out for… cars? No. We hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a car in all of the fifth Britain. ‘Mauf, have you had chance to brush up on Torvaston’s magnum opus?’

  ‘The fragmentary sections of it you have yet seen fit to give me?’ said Mauf. ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘The rest is coming, I swear, whenever the scholars at Mandridore have finished translating it. Is there anything juicy in what we’ve got?’

  ‘Anything on the topic of griffins in particular,’ Jay put in.

  ‘Or unicorns,’ I added. ‘Dragons, any such creatures.’

  ‘It distresses me more than I can express to disappoint you, madam,’ said Mauf, apparently ignoring Jay. ‘But there is little on those subjects among the lost king’s notes.’

  ‘Notes?’ I echoed. ‘I thought this was his great work of scholarship. And therefore, you know, finished.’

  ‘Perhaps it may prove to be, once I receive the rest. But the majority of the material I have yet received is in note form.’

  ‘Very well. Can you give us a precis of what it says?’

  ‘Farringale is a source of some of the purest and most potent magick I have ever encountered,’ quoted Mauf, and added as an aside, ‘I paraphrase, madam, you understand.’

  ‘I do indeed. Paraphrase away. We’re in a hurry.’

  ‘Right.’ Mauf cleared his throat. ‘In full flow, it is like an ocean; an unstoppable tide, engulfing all in its wake. And yet, it does not destroy. It empowers. Those whose strength and might are such as to permit them to harness such a force — of what may such magicians not prove capable? The most remarkable feats of magick lie within our grasp, if only we can learn to ride these waves. Imagine the prospects! Our Britain, transformed by magick.

  ‘I look into the future, and see — decline. This must not be. I will not permit it. The means to avert this future lie in my own hands; of this I am certain. And Farringale is, must be, the key.’

  Mauf paused in his recitation. ‘There is a deal more in this general style, madam, but I would not judge that it serves to illuminate the matter further. I shall skip to…’ He paused, and I pictured him mentally leafing through pages. ‘Ah. There is a single mention of “great birds”, which we may take, with reasonable confidence, to mean the griffins; but I should not like to be quoted upon that.’

  ‘Understood, Mauf.’

  ‘The great birds of Mount Farringale dwindle in number,’ continued Mauf. ‘Even as the tides of magick dissipate. In my lifetime alone, the ocean has become a sea; in future years, shall there be nothing of it left? What is the reason for this decline? I make it my life’s work to understand its causes, and to reverse it. This I vow.’

  ‘I wonder,’ I mused. ‘Was that how Farringale came to fall? Did Torvaston try to reverse the decline, and succeed a little too well?’

  ‘His notes do not yet make that clear, madam,’ said Mauf.

  ‘Is there anything about another Britain?’ Emellana put in.

  ‘I am getting to that, my lady,’ said Mauf coldly.

  ‘My apologies,’ said Emellana, gravely, but with a small smile.

  Mauf sniffed. ‘There is a degree of waffle on the subject of other shores. Ahem. So like Farringale, and yet so other. Here magick fades; there it burgeons. What crucial differences render the patterns thus? In what fashion do we fail? The answers lie otherwhere, and thither I go.’

  ‘He could have been talking about any place,’ I said. ‘He never mentions another world.’

  ‘No, but he has not mentioned a city either,’ said Emellana. ‘We may fairly conclude that he was speaking of this Britain. We do know, beyond reasonable doubt, that he came here.’

  She was right. Don’t go looking for complications, Ves. ‘Is that it, Mauf?’ I said.

  ‘That is it, as you put it. At least, I doubt that you are much interested in his musings on his own personal state of health, or his growing dependency on the magickal flow, as he puts it.’

  ‘We might be. What does he say?’

  ‘Briefly,’ put in Jay. ‘In a hurry, recall.’ I’d been so focused on what Mauf was saying that I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were going. Fortunately, Jay had, and I was so used to wandering along in his wake that I had followed him without thinking. We had left the Elixir Emporium behind, and much of the town with it. The mountain around whose base Vale was built loomed before us, bigger with every step we took. Miranda had her gaze fixed firmly upon the distant, wheeling figures far above us, and I remembered what she’d said about the oddities of their flight patterns.

  ‘Mir,’ I began, but changed my mind when she did not look round. Time for that later. ‘Sorry,’ I said to Mauf, collecting my scattered wits. ‘What does Torvaston say about dependency?’

  ‘A deal about the sweet, intense sensations,’ answered Mauf. ‘It seems he developed a habit of being mountain-side whenever the surges happened, for he deemed that the centre. Indeed, in perusing his notes I wonder whether he spent much time anywhere else, after a while.’ Mauf was speaking very rapidly, Jay’s urgency infecting him. ‘He began it in hopes of better understanding the nature of the flow, and discovering a way to improve its potency once more. He may not have been aware himself of its increasing hold over him; his coherence decreases in such a fashion as to lead me to suspect that he was…’

  ‘What?’ I prompted, when Mauf trailed off.

  ‘Losing his marbles, I believe is the phrase?’

  ‘Ah. Well. Considering our own less than stellar performances when under the influence of an extreme magickal flow, I wouldn’t be surprised. If you’re not used to it, it’s…’

  ‘Intense,’ offered Jay.

  ‘Sweet,’ I added, and swayed. My hair was a mass of flowers. Jay sported a short, gl
eaming-white pair of horns peeking from among his tousled black hair. Miranda looked to be growing wings, though she was not yet aware, except for perhaps an itching sensation at her shoulder-blades, for she kept rolling her shoulders in irritable fashion.

  Emellana, as ever, appeared unaffected.

  I really wondered about her.

  ‘Mauf,’ said Emellana, even as I formed the thought.

  ‘Yes, my lady.’

  ‘You have spent some little time in close quarters with that lost scroll-case, have you not?’

  ‘Yes, my lady. I found it an uncouth companion, much puffed up in its own conceit.’

  ‘Indeed?’ One white brow lifted. ‘Why is that, do you imagine?’

  ‘In the way of books, scrolls and other such volumes,’ said Mauf, ‘there can be no denying that the case is especially well-dressed.’

  ‘You refer to the jewels.’

  ‘Yes, my lady. Furthermore, it appeared to think itself a composition of enormous importance.’ Mauf’s tone grew indignant. ‘And this in spite of the fact that it boasted an array of mere scribblings, from the pen of an incompetent scribe! I would be embarrassed to call myself a work!’

  ‘Curious,’ Emellana remarked. ‘It did not happen to share with you its reasons for imagining itself so significant?’

  ‘No, my lady.’ Mauf hesitated. ‘I found its manner obnoxious, and did not encourage its further acquaintance. I apologise if I have thus erred.’

  ‘I do not imagine I would have acted differently,’ she said graciously.

  ‘Thank you, madam.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘And I could have sworn it had nothing on it but a hastily-outlined map of the Vales.’

  ‘And the Hyndorin Mountains,’ Jay reminded me.

  ‘Yes, though… it did not seem, in either case, that anything of note was marked upon it. Did it?’