The Striding Spire

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Disappearances, plural?’ put in Jay.

  ‘He disappeared,’ persevered Mauf. ‘Repeatedly. Four times were recorded, though there may have been more. The first time was in 1599, at the age of sixteen, when he was but a scholar and had not yet distinguished himself by any particular measure. He was absent for three and a half months, and was either unable or unwilling to give any account of his movements upon his return. He vanished again six years later, for almost a year. His third disappearance came at the more advanced age of forty-three, and lasted only three weeks. And he vanished again, for the fourth and (to my knowledge) final time, in 1630, at the age of forty-seven. He was never seen or heard from again.’

  A silence fell which could only be termed Flabbergasted. Yes, with a capital F.

  ‘There is clearly more to this than meets the eye,’ said Mabyn.

  ‘I have heard the name,’ said Jenifry. ‘I have seen him, even. Not in the flesh,’ she said hastily, as everyone turned to look at her. ‘His portrait. There is a gallery devoted to former headmasters of the school, and some few others whose contributions are considered to be of particular significance. Melmidoc Redclover is one of them. The odd thing is…’ She hesitated, a deep frown clouding her brow. ‘Your unusually talkative book asserts that he disappeared at the age of forty-seven?’

  ‘So it is written,’ said Mauf, somewhat huffily.

  ‘He is, in essence, a library all in one,’ offered Jay. ‘He has absorbed the entire contents of the library at the Society, and quite a lot of… of other libraries, too.’ Perhaps he hesitated to name Farringale just then for fear of derailing the conversation altogether; probably wise of him.

  Jenifry gave a faint smile. ‘I do not doubt you, for he is obviously a marvellous enchantment. The thing is, this portrait is clearly labelled as Melmidoc Redclover, and judging from the clothes he is wearing, and the style of the painting, it dates indeed from the mid seventeenth century. But… but you see, he is depicted as a rather older man. His hair is entirely grey, his face much more lined than that of a man not yet fifty. I took him to be twenty years above that age, at least.’

  Stranger and stranger. ‘Could the portrait have been made retrospectively?’ I suggested. ‘As a commemoration, perhaps, of the man he might have been had he not disappeared?’

  ‘It is possible,’ Jenifry conceded. ‘But…’ she paused again, seeming unsure how to phrase her thoughts. ‘It is his expression,’ she said. ‘The portrait lingered in my memory because it is much more — more real, than many of the others. It is not a stiff, staged piece. His face is full of character, and life, and humour. I used to like to look at it. It looks like a portrait taken of a model who was very much alive, and in no way resembles a fading memory of a man who had not been seen for at least twenty years.’

  ‘I cannot imagine, though, why a man would be universally set down as vanished for good if he was not, in fact, gone.’

  ‘Has the painting always hung in that gallery?’ asked Jay.

  Jenifry blinked. ‘I do not know. Mabyn?’

  Mabyn slowly shook her head. ‘I do not particularly recall it from my day, but that does not mean it was not there. I never did take much of an interest in the gallery.’

  ‘Except for your own portrait,’ said Jenifry.

  Mabyn took this unabashed. ‘Except for that one.’

  I called Val. She did not answer, so I left a message for her. ‘Val, please find everything you can about one Melmidoc Redclover, of the Redclover school in Dapplehaven. Matter of grave urgency.’ I chose not to relay the things we had already learned about him, for they were mightily confusing, and I did not want to influence Val’s thinking or cloud her findings.

  Next, I called Zareen, who picked up after two rings. ‘What’s up, Ves?’ she said briskly.

  ‘So that mass exorcism you pulled,’ I said without preamble. ‘I don’t suppose it can be undone, can it?’

  ‘You mean can I bring three vaporised ghosts back from oblivion? No.’

  ‘Damnit.’

  ‘Why?’

  I filled her in. It took a few minutes. When I had finished, she gave a low whistle. When she spoke, I could hear her grin. ‘Nice little mystery you have there. So you were wanting to ask them a few questions?’

  ‘I was. The thing is, Zar, that there is a pattern emerging here. This began with a vanishing house, and now we have a vanishing Redclover on our hands to boot. Coincidence?’

  ‘No such thing as,’ she said cheerily.

  ‘Yes there is.’

  ‘Fine, but not often. Tell you what, there’s one thing I can do.’

  ‘Anything would be good.’

  ‘I’ve wondered before about all the places that house was going to. I dug up a few instances of its wandering about near (or in) the town of Bury St. Edmunds, but I never looked beyond — and there are gaps of years between most of those reported sightings. I’ll see if I can find out where else it might have been parking itself.’

  ‘Especially around the first half of the seventeenth century,’ I said. ‘Those were the Melmidoc Redclover years.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Don’t get your hopes up too high though, Ves. It wasn’t a distinctive cottage, and unless other people saw it literally vanish into the mist, I won’t be able to track it.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Zar.’

  I hung up, to find that the rest of my companions had gone into a huddle. Jay looked up as I joined them. ‘We have a plan,’ he told me, with great solemnity. ‘Jenifry is to investigate the portrait. Mabyn is going to “raid” the school and scour its records.’

  ‘Raid?’ I echoed, intrigued by the emphasis he had laid on the word.

  ‘The school is a little… private, about its records,’ said Jenifry, a little shamefaced. ‘Even I have been unable to gain access to everything, and that has occasionally made me curious. Jay thought that Mabyn might be able to make better progress, if she makes a show of authority.’

  Mabyn looked as though she would very much enjoy making a show of authority.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘And when that fails?’

  ‘When?’ Jay looked a bit hurt.

  ‘It is a good idea as a diversion,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘But if you get pushy with people, they usually push back. At best, they’ll make a show of compliance while secretly opposing you every step of the way. While someone is kindly showing Mabyn around the records room, with a suitable show of deference, someone else will be quietly relabelling, or hiding, or outright removing, anything that isn’t judged to be suitable for public consumption.’

  Jay frowned. ‘What do you suggest, then?’

  ‘Mabyn and Jenifry proceed as planned. Meanwhile, you and I will infiltrate the records room and have a poke around. And if we spot anybody trying to hustle any juicy-looking boxes of papers out of the way, we can intercept them.’

  ‘You just like sneaking around,’ said Jay.

  ‘I do, actually. I adore sneaking around.’ I beamed at him.

  I detected traces of annoyance in Jenifry’s face, though I could not guess at the reason why. Mabyn, though, was more amiable. ‘I think she is right,’ said Mabyn, and my heart warmed to her on the spot. ‘There is one problem, though.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

  She was not looking at me. Her gaze was fixed somewhere over my head, at the approximate level of the horizon. ‘Archibald,’ she said.

  I turned, and there indeed was the purple-scaled vision of dragonhood winging its way rapidly towards us. ‘But don’t you two go way back?’ I said, turning back to Mabyn.

  ‘Archibald obeys the orders of one person only, that being the Mayor,’ said Mabyn. ‘He is usually employed to summon miscreants to an impromptu audience.’

  ‘Is that what happened before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you weren’t taken to the Mayor, were you?’

  She blinked at me. ‘I was. That’s Cousin Doryty.’ />
  ‘She’s the Mayor?’ said Jay. ‘What was she doing answering the door?’

  Mabyn shrugged. ‘Dapplehaven is a peaceful place, most of the time. Perhaps she was bored.’

  ‘Or perhaps she was more interested in our presence here than she let on,’ I suggested.

  ‘Either way,’ sighed Mabyn, ‘Archie is here to pick up at least one of us, and that means Doryty’s changed her mind about letting us wander off.’

  We turned as one to watch the approach of the dragon called Archibald. He gained on us with appalling speed and swooped, claws extended. I tried to convince myself that he was going for Mabyn again, but no. Those claws reached out, glittering bright silver in the sun, and the person they grabbed this time was — inevitably — me.

  11

  And, as it turned out, Jay. Archibald wrapped one set of claws around my shrinking middle, and the other around Jay, and took off with both of us in tow. We watched, helpless, as Mabyn and Jenifry Redclover receded beneath us — and Jory the kennel-keeper, too, with our pup still in his arms.

  ‘Inconvenient,’ observed Jay, the word emerging as a squeak.

  Archibald’s grip was a bit tight, at that. I was feeling breathless myself, and I felt like I had an iron band vice-tight around my ribs. ‘Archie,’ I called. ‘You couldn’t squeeze a bit less, by any chance? We are fragile creatures, prone to breakage.’

  The dragon expelled a whistle of air through his nostrils, and to my surprise, huffed out a clear No.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘You might fall,’ the dragon explained.

  ‘That would make for some serious breakage,’ I had to agree.

  ‘Fair,’ said Jay. ‘But don’t squeeze too tight. We ought to arrive alive at the Mayor’s, no?’

  ‘The Mayor?’ said Archibald. ‘Why would you want to see her?’

  ‘That… isn’t that where we are going?’

  ‘No…’ said Archibald, and something about the way he said the word struck me as a bit shifty.

  I patted his leg with the hand that wasn’t clinging desperately to my shoulder-bag, and Mauf. ‘Where are we going, then?’ I asked.

  ‘There is something you should see,’ said the dragon.

  ‘Oh?’

  A pause. ‘I… I heard what you were saying,’ said Archibald, and he definitely sounded shamefaced now.

  ‘From how far away?’ Jay yelped.

  ‘I have very good ears,’ said Archibald with dignity.

  ‘And a fair bit of magick, too?’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said the dragon. ‘I used to take Melmidoc places.’

  ‘You knew Melmidoc Redclover?’

  ‘His brother was the longest-running Mayor Dapplehaven has ever had,’ said Archibald. ‘They were always together, and so… we were always together, too.’

  Could a dragon be forlorn? Apparently. ‘You miss your friends?’ I guessed.

  ‘I do not like Doryty,’ said Archibald. ‘She is foul-tempered.’ His enormous tail thrashed.

  ‘We did not like her very much either,’ I said soothingly.

  ‘No one does.’

  ‘Odd, then,’ said Jay, ‘that she is the Mayor. How did that happen?’

  ‘No one else wanted the job. It is very boring.’

  I risked a glance down. Archibald was taking us well away from Dapplehaven, and the ground was rising steeply beneath us. We were, I judged, sailing up the side of a low peak I had briefly glimpsed at some distance from the town. It did not, at least from this angle, look scaleable by any normal means.

  ‘Is this where you used to take Melmidoc?’ I asked.

  ‘Melmidoc and Drystan,’ said Archibald happily. ‘All the time!’

  Jay put in, ‘Have you taken anybody else there since?’

  ‘Once. The Mayor made me do it. They took away everything that was Melmidoc’s, and they made it so I am not allowed to land there.’

  ‘They… how did they do that?’ said Jay.

  ‘Oh, there are spikes,’ said the dragon cheerfully. ‘So I will have to drop you.’

  ‘Onto spikes?!’

  ‘There is a bit that is safe,’ said Archibald, with enviable serenity. ‘You will not break, because you are smaller than I am.’

  ‘How are we…’ I began. I had been going to say, How are we going to get off the mountain? For if Archibald could not land there, he could not retrieve us either. But the wind whipped my words away as we began to descend towards a windy, and lamentably cold, hilltop, and since we were, moments later, released from Archibald’s claws without warning and flying through the air, there was not much point in finishing the sentence.

  It hurt, rather a lot.

  ‘Ouch,’ croaked Jay, to my relief, for it proved at least that he was alive.

  ‘Nnngh,’ I said, somewhat less coherently. I’d landed on one arm and one hip, both of which smarted painfully, particularly since the ground up there was all highly uncomfy rock. You’d be surprised how little difference a liberal covering of moss and heath make when falling from… any kind of height at all.

  I hauled myself, creakily, to my feet. ‘Mauf?’ I said. ‘Still alive?’

  ‘Can I be said to be living?’ answered Mauf, in his dry, didactic tone. ‘Arguably—’

  ‘Great,’ I cut in. ‘Let’s talk about that later.’ I looked around. Archibald had not been exaggerating about the spikes. The ground was covered in them. They were at least a foot long each, they were made of something as hard and bright silver as steel, and they had sharp points. The spot we had landed in was only a few feet across, and an uneven patch in the ground suggested that there might once have been a tree growing there. I wondered whether Archibald had happened to the tree.

  ‘They really didn’t want anybody coming up here,’ I said.

  ‘But why not?’ Jay turned in a circle, surveying the scene. There wasn’t much to see. The peak of the hill was not very wide, and it declined steeply on all sides to the ground some way below. We had a fine view over Dappledok Dell, and it made for a glorious vision: rolling dales, vibrant meadows, and the town of Dapplehaven nestled adorably in the middle.

  Lovely, but unhelpful. All there seemed to be at the top was a roughly circular space full of spikes.

  ‘Archibald?’ I looked up, but he had gone. ‘Did he expect this to somehow make sense to us?’ I said with a sigh.

  Jay looked around again. ‘Are we missing something obvious? What’s up here?’

  ‘Spikes.’

  ‘All right. Why are there spikes up here?’

  ‘To prevent Archibald from landing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was bringing people like Melmidoc up here, and someone disliked that for… reasons unknown.’

  ‘Those are the obvious answers. What about the less obvious? Maybe these spikes were not aimed at Archibald.’

  ‘How many dragons do you suppose there are in Dappledok? They are not exactly common.’

  ‘It’s probably fair to say that most magickal beasts were once a lot more common than they are now,’ Jay pointed out. ‘But it does not have to be a dragon, does it? I wouldn’t think anything could land up here with these in the way.’

  I thought about that. ‘The ground is quite flat.’

  ‘It is. Unusually flat for the terrain, would you say?’

  ‘I might say that, indeed.’

  ‘And,’ said Jay, picking his way through the spikes to the edge of the plateau, ‘if some of these bushes and such were to be cleared away, we might discover it to be unusually circular, too.’

  ‘So it’s shaped. That suggests that…um.’ I hauled Mauf out of the bag again. ‘Mauf, do you know anything about this place?’

  ‘No,’ said Mauf.

  There were, after all, a couple of drawbacks to Mauf the Magick Book. For one thing, he could only know about something if someone had obligingly written it down, and people often did not do that with secrets. For another, there was no getting at what he did know if y
ou didn’t come up with the right question.

  ‘Nothing about anything called, say, Dappledok Peak or Mount Dappledok? Something like that?’

  ‘No,’ said Mauf again, and then: ‘Is that where we are?’

  ‘How about buildings?’ said Jay. ‘Any lost or unaccounted for—’

  ‘Dapplehaven Tower,’ said Mauf.

  Jay and I blinked stupidly at each other. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘Dapplehaven Tower, occasionally referred to as the Striding Spire. It used to, er, tower over the town of Dapplehaven, if you will excuse the pun, but it was dismantled in 1630.’

  ‘1630! Why was it dismantled?’

  ‘The official reason cited was unstable foundations. There were safety concerns in high winds.’

  I jumped up and down a couple of times. ‘Would you say there is anything in the world less unstable than solid rock?’

  ‘I would not,’ answered Jay.

  ‘Now, why was it called the Striding Spire?’ I spoke as calmly as I could, but my heart was racing with excitement in anticipation of Mauf’s answer.

  ‘Because it wasn’t always observed to stand in the same spot,’ said Mauf, confirming all my hopes. ‘While it was never described as walking around in any literal sense, it was obviously perambulatory.’

  ‘Melmidoc Redclover disappeared in 1630,’ said Jay. ‘Do you suppose he walked off with the tower?’

  ‘Or the Striding Spire walked off with him!’

  ‘And for some reason, it never wandered back. So that begs the question: where did the Spire wander off to, and what kept it from returning?’

  ‘Other than the spikes?’

  Jay considered them with a raised brow. ‘Why would someone want to stop the Spire from striding back?’

  ‘Maybe they disapproved of whatever it was Melmidoc Redclover was doing with it.’

  ‘Melmidoc and Drystan,’ corrected Jay. ‘Archibald said they were always together, didn’t he?’

  ‘And Drystan was a Headmaster.’ There was something important to be construed from all of that, but I could not decide what it was. I lifted my chin. ‘Archibaaaaald!’ I yelled to the sky.

  ‘Dragon likes towers,’ observed Jay.