I vaguely recognised one of my own maxims being repeated back to me there, and stuck out my tongue, forgetting that he could not see me either.
I wrestled the case from Goodie Goodfellow and tried to prise it open, but its ends were sealed fast and wouldn’t budge.
When, a moment later, a babble of voices abruptly cut through the prevailing quiet, coming from somewhere two or three rooms away, I mumbled a garbled curse and stuffed the case into my satchel. Jay was way ahead of me; I almost collided with him as I tore in the direction of the inexplicable tumult. Rob had gone that way.
We found him standing in the middle of a room I’d never seen before, a far larger chamber than the rest of the library. Its central hall, I surmised, for it had the cathedral-like height and splendid vaulting that might suit such an important spot. A smooth starstone floor stretched away into the near distance, inset with gilded curlicued ornaments, and — like the library at Mandridore — silvery puffs of cloud hung where the ceiling ought to be. There were fewer books here, and no actual bookcases. Instead, sections of the stone walls were covered over with glass, and behind that glass hung artefacts of, no doubt, unspeakable rarity and power. Most of them were great, gilt-edged tomes with ornate hinges, or — my heart sank a bit — scrolls in jewelled cases, awfully like the one the dear pup had just surrendered into my care.
The voices were coming from some of the books.
‘Giddy gods,’ I breathed. ‘More chatty tomes?’
‘I think,’ said Indira cautiously, ‘this is different.’
I saw her point. Unlike Mauf (or indeed Bill), who spoke like he had a mind stuffed somewhere into his bindings, these books were shrieking the same words over and over, like trained parrots. It burns us, it hurts us, take it away! yelled an otherwise sober-looking book in a black binding. We told you, we said so, we knew how it would be! repeated another, jauntier tome, flashing richly-coloured interior illuminations as it danced in agitation.
They weren’t all distressed, however. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, sang a little jade-coloured book, and I developed an immediate desire to take it home with us. It’s time, it’s time, how we’ve missed it! chortled another.
A scroll in a ruby-studded jacket simply cackled without cease.
‘Farringale’s lunatic asylum for books?’ suggested Jay, backing away a step.
‘Are they mad?’ I mused. ‘Or just really pepped up?’
‘I’m not sure “pep” is a word I’d use,’ said Jay. ‘Except maybe for that one.’ He waved a hand at the giggling scroll.
I turned and left the cacophonic hallway at a run. ‘I think we’re going to need Mauf.’
16
By the time I returned, two of the beleaguered books had begun beating themselves against the walls of their glass-fronted houses. Whether they were trying to escape, or merely entertaining themselves, was unclear.
‘Mauf,’ I yelled over the tumult. ‘What is going on here?’
‘They appear to be in a state of some excitement,’ said Mauf gravely.
‘Yes, I can see that, but why? Can you talk to them?’
‘I would as usefully talk to a wall. A more empty-headed set of volumes I never did encounter.’
‘Is that the truth, Mauf, or do you exaggerate for effect?’
‘A very little exaggeration only, Miss Vesper.’
What could he mean? The word “empty-headed” must be an expression he had picked up from us, or some other book; it could not literally apply here. Were the books devoid of useful content, or were they somehow empty of words altogether?
I wanted to examine one. Unfortunately, the glass walls behind which they were imprisoned must have been magickally reinforced; for all their pounding and bouncing, none had contrived to escape.
So I fetched out my Sunstone Wand, and with a flick and a whisper, sent a bolt of crackling fire at the nearest of them — which happened (entirely by chance, I swear) to be the happy-natured jade-green book.
My little fireball bounced harmlessly off the glass and fell to the stone floor, where it lay sulking and sizzling.
‘Damn.’
‘You want that one?’ said Rob, withdrawing the Lapis Lazuli Wand from his sleeve.
‘Please, and thank you.’ I smiled.
He did his glass-shattering trick. I’ve never been able to master it. The glass imprisoning my chosen book turned ink-black, then cracked into a thousand pieces and fell away in a rain of… sand, this time.
‘Ouch,’ Rob grunted. ‘Powerful enchantments in here.’ A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. He frowned, and stared at the Wand as though he’d never seen it before. ‘I feel like that shouldn’t have worked.’
I ran and snatched up the book before it could get any bright ideas about, say, flying away, and opened it with breathless eagerness.
I saw at once what Mauf had meant.
‘It’s not that there aren’t words,’ I said, showing the pages to the others. ‘But something’s… happened to them.’ Page after page was full of gibberish, the genuinely nonsensical kind. I didn’t see a single coherent word, not in any language I knew, and besides that they were no longer arranged in the tidy rows one tended to expect. A great many letters, and in some cases whole words, had wandered off, wriggling all over the page like snails at a picnic. As I watched, some turned odd colours and faded away, then reappeared.
‘It isn’t some kind of code?’ said Jay, but doubtfully.
‘Not consistent enough, surely?’ I said. ‘Do you see any coherence whatsoever?’
Mauf, still tucked under my left arm, said clearly: ‘Magick-addled.’
‘It’s what?’ I said.
‘Round the bend,’ clarified Mauf. ‘It probably gets worse every time.’
‘Every time what… uh, Indira?’ Something moved at the edge of my vision. I looked that way just in time to see Jay’s sober and serious sister shoot into the air like a firework, her dark skirt and airy white blouse fluttering. Her hair streamed in a wind I could not feel.
While it was not unusual to see Indira levitate, and most adeptly too, this was different. For one thing, she rose and rose to at least twenty feet up, rapidly approaching those gauzy and unlikely clouds. For another thing, she was laughing in a fashion most unlike her.
‘Indira?’ called Jay. ‘That’s too high. Come down now.’
‘Is that even possible?’ I breathed, awed. Levitating to twenty feet? Actually, forget it. Indira wasn’t even levitating anymore. She was flat-out flying.
‘I never saw her do that before,’ said Jay. ‘Indira!’
Mauf gave what felt curiously like a bookish sigh. ‘I can see you are all to become quite tiresome. Perhaps you might restore me to the other chamber? I was engaged in a most interesting conversation.’
I barely attended to this speech, for Indira was shouting something. ‘There is so much of it!’ she laughed. ‘It’s wonderful. Like drowning in chocolate.’ There was more, but she became less coherent and farther away in equal measure.
The floor was thrumming again. I discarded my shoes a second time, and my socks, too, pressing my bare feet to the stones. That felt quite nice actually, so I lay down and stretched out. The low thrumming filled me, too, in soft pulses of warmth; it was like lying in the grass on a warm summer afternoon, that feeling of balmy contentment exactly, only about fifty times as potent.
I’d put myself eye-level with my useless fireball from earlier. Should it not have burned out by now? But it lay there still, spinning lazily, and emitting occasional puffs of coloured smoke.
Mauf lay near me. ‘Miss Vesper,’ he said. ‘Far be it from me to question your choices, but might this not be an excellent time to leave?’
‘No,’ I said, and giggled. ‘It’s lovely, lovely, lovely.’ The jade-green book and I sang it together, and I was distantly aware that I was smiling like an idiot — dancing, too, despite my recumbent posture — but the part of me that might normally have cared about such peculiar beha
viour lay quiet and inert.
Rob sat slumped against a nearby wall. He’d stopped trying to fish Indira down and instead sat with his gaze fixed upon the clouds far above, smiling faintly. He still had the Lazuli Wand in hand; once in a while he gave it a spiralling little flourish, and some magickal thing leapt into being. A butterfly of painted silk. A tiny smoke dragon. A stream of miniature cars which roared across the floor, tooting tiny horns.
This looked like fun, so I joined in. I filled the air with dancing cakes, created a self-operating toot-organ with a taste for jazz (if you’ve never heard of a toot-organ, don’t ask me to explain for I’m sure I cannot). I even turned myself, briefly, into a pancake, but since this caused Rob to eye me hungrily I hastily changed back.
I slowly became aware of Jay standing over me, shrouded in a mantle of smoke dragons and gyrating cakes but nonetheless, inexplicably, frowning. ‘How can you be so severe,’ I said to him, and with a flick of my Wand I gave him a crown of sad faces etched in light and shadow.
‘Ves,’ he said. ‘We need to leave.’ His voice was slurred, and his movements sluggish, but he spoke firmly.
‘But how could we, when the furniture is so flatteringly eager for our company?’ For a party of chairs from a nearby chamber had that moment come clattering in. For all their graceful construction, silken upholstery and mahogany frames, they were clumsy in their movements, and chattered in coarse voices.
‘Look at that one,’ said their leader, scornfully. ‘Thinks it’s a chaise longue, does it? I’ve seen better padding on my grandmother’s couch.’ I realised, with a start, that the chair was speaking of me, for it delivered a kick to my shin with one slender, polished leg.
‘I like this one,’ said another, flouncing over to Rob. ‘Substantial. Firm. A chair you could trust.’
This, all told, was not an unreasonable description.
‘It is of no use,’ said Mauf. ‘You will have to wait until the flow has ebbed.’
‘The flow?’ said Jay, pausing in the act of prodding my various soft parts with his toe. Not gently.
‘Of magick.’
This made so much sense, I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauteous perfection of it. The possibility had entered our heads not so long ago, and now here we were experiencing something of that exact sort! I began to laugh, so delighted was I.
Jay, though, was neither so impressed nor so convinced. ‘Is it magick or are they high?’ he muttered, and retired to a corner.
‘Both,’ I tittered. ‘I think.’ I watched, some of my joy fading, as Jay slumped to the floor and sat with his head against the wall, his eyes closing. ‘Jay! Why aren’t you high?’
‘I feel unwell,’ he said shortly.
‘How unfair.’ I jumped to my feet. I don’t know what I was planning to do — run after him and make him enjoy the experience? — but a powerful headrush halted me where I stood, and I swayed.
A moment later I was back on the floor again, higgledy-piggledy.
‘Ouch,’ said Jay, apparently his idea of sympathy.
I looked up. Indira was still flying, swan-like, some way above. As I stared, glassy-eyed, something horned and yellow-furred and puppish floated slowly past, upside down and grinning.
‘You know,’ I said, tightly shutting my eyes. ‘Since you mention it, I’m not sure I feel so great either.’ That balmy, cocooned feeling faded in a rush, leaving me breathless in its sudden absence. Instead I felt squeezed, as though a great weight pressed down on me. Energy surged up from the floor, from the walls, from the very air, jolting through me like pulses of lightning; every hair on my body rose, and I began hyperventilating with the effort to breathe. I couldn’t sit still. I was too much of a livewire for that.
I thought I heard, as from a great distance, the voice of Mauf screaming, ‘Purple-hued malt-worm!’
All of this sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Only, it wasn’t. I felt exhilarated, like I could jump out of a plane — or, perhaps, like I just had. I felt more alive than I ever remembered feeling before; and when, some unmeasurable time later, the energies washed out of me like the tide and left me empty, I felt bereft and diminished.
I sat, quiet and listless, as details of my surroundings slowly filtered through to my befuddled consciousness. Mauf lay tutting a few feet away. ‘I told you to leave,’ he muttered darkly. Our purloined jade-green book had ended up stuffed up my shirt; I had no memory of putting it there, and hastily retrieved it. It had ceased to chortle, or to speak, and lay unmoving in my hand, somehow seeming to weigh twice as much as it had before.
Rob sat still against the wall, blinking and shaking his head. Jay I could not see, nor Indira — until both came hurtling into view together, falling at ill-advised speed from the heavens.
They landed with a crunch.
‘Ouch,’ I said.
Jay groaned.
‘I was fine,’ said Indira waspishly as she picked herself up.
Jay just lay there, grimacing. ‘You wouldn’t have been in another five minutes.’
He had a point. To my dismay, all of Rob’s smoke dragons and butterflies were dissolving into dust and winking away. My cake chorus was already gone, and I no longer felt either the desire or the capacity to turn myself into a giant pancake.
Whoever would’ve thought I’d ever say that last bit with such gravity, or with such regret?
I got up, and upon finding myself generally stable I went over to Jay, and hauled upon his arm until he righted himself. ‘Anything broken?’
‘Not for lack of trying.’
I looked at Indira. ‘So how many times have you broken a limb?’
‘Three,’ she said, unblinking. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason.’
Jay snorted.
I retrieved Mauf, and then Goodie, who I found stranded upon a shelf some six feet from the floor. I had not imagined the part about the flying Dappledok pup, then. Had I imagined any of it? No. Jay wasn’t wrong to use the word high, for we’d certainly lost touch with a few useful things like rationality and common sense. But we hadn’t been hallucinating.
I tried to remember when I had ever heard of such a surge happening before, or any similar effects if it had. Nothing came to mind — except, of course, the storyteller’s tale on Whitmore. ‘The Seas of Segorne,’ I mused aloud.
‘And the Vales of Wonder,’ said Jay.
Seeing Rob and Indira wearing twin expressions of confusion, I explained. ‘We heard a rumour on Whitmore. They said that the last king of Farringale — our Farringale, that is, so Torvaston the Second — escaped to the Fifth Britain with an entourage. And they went looking for places prone to excesses of magick.’
‘But no,’ said Indira, frowning. ‘Torvaston and Hrruna founded the new court at Mandridore.’
‘So the history books say, but they’ve been wrong before.’
Indira looked appalled, as well she might, studious girl that she was. The only comfort I could offer was a pat on the arm. ‘History’s a changeful beast. It’s one of the exhilarating things about it.’
‘Crushing and exhilarating,’ said Jay darkly.
‘Utterly crushing.’
‘But why wouldn’t Torvaston go to Mandridore?’ said Indira.
‘This is one of the questions we’re here trying to answer,’ I said. ‘The Troll Court had nothing about Torvaston, and precious little about the early days of Mandridore.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Not even a scrawled note.’
‘But that means…’
‘It means the story may have a kernel of truth to it. And Torvaston must have had a really solid reason for fleeing into the fifth instead of going with his wife.’
‘Like?’ That was Rob. He’d listened in silence up until then, but his grim face suggested that his thoughts were running along similar lines to mine.
‘It’s only a hypothesis, yet,’ I said cautiously. ‘But I’ve wondered before. What could possibly compel Torvaston to abandon his wife
, his people, his court, and flee? And what could motivate him to go looking for dangerously magick-drunk places like the Seas of Segorne? Jay, I think you might be right. I think they were expelled from the Court — because they were addicted to magick.’
Rob nodded.
‘Magick-drunk,’ Indira repeated. ‘You mean it literally.’
‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ I said, with a small smile. ‘I could get used to having that much magick around myself. I think the Court of Farringale did, too — or some of them, at least. Jay is proof that not everyone’s as deeply susceptible to the allure, but… such things have happened before. What might you do, if you needed your fix but there wasn’t enough around?’
‘Surely not,’ said Rob. ‘You mean to say Torvaston flooded Farringale?’
‘Yes,’ I said, utterly serious. ‘That’s exactly what I think happened.’
17
‘Farringale destroyed by its own king,’ said Jay, and whistled. ‘That would be reason enough to expel him from Mandridore, certainly.’
‘And to cover the whole thing up afterwards,’ I agreed. ‘I’m sure Hrruna wouldn’t have wanted her husband to be remembered that way.’
‘So they went off into the Vales of Wonder looking for a new source,’ said Rob. ‘And the excess of magick attracted the ortherex, who feed off some derivative of it; and they’re still here. It fits, Ves, but do you have any evidence for it?’
‘We’re working on that.’
Indira was shaking her head, though she did not speak.
‘What’s on your mind?’ I prompted.
‘Surely…’ she said. ‘Surely no king would ever make such destructive decisions. And Torvaston is spoken of as a wise leader.’
‘I don’t imagine he made any such decision consciously, or rationally. But who decides to become an alcoholic? It is the kind of thing that happens by slow degrees, usually driven by some other factor. Perhaps Torvaston was feeling the pressures of leadership. Farringale was, after all, the most powerful and famous of the Fae Courts at the time. He might find himself turning more and more to something that eased the pressure, made him feel better. Some of his courtiers might follow suit.’ I knew my ideas bordered upon treasonous, or they might be if I was a subject of Their Majesties myself. It’s why I had opted not to mention any of my thoughts to Alban. Nor would I, until I had sound evidence to support them. ‘Or it may have been unintentional. If I could turn myself into a pancake and Indira could fly, what else could you do with that much magick? What if they were trying to achieve something truly stupendous, and it got out of hand?’
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