The Wonders of Vale

by Charlotte E. English

  Jay was frowning, shook his head. ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘Would you perhaps like to verify the information?’ Mauf offered.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, stopping in the middle of a placid residential street full of sleepy bungalows. ‘What?’

  ‘I believe I can recall the details of the maps, if you should like to see them again.’

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Yes, please. Definitely.’ I opened Mauf’s covers to the first blank page he had, and waited.

  16

  The thick, creamy paper shimmered, and lines etched in black ink began to appear, snaking across the pages. Torvaston’s map of the Vales of Wonder was first rendered, and then the ragged outlines of a mountain range. Helpful as Mauf’s recreation was, I still couldn’t see anything on it that would explain Wyr’s apparent interest.

  But one thought did enter my head.

  ‘Mountains,’ I said, and pointed at the one before us (even if it was only a tall hill, in truth).

  ‘What?’ said Jay.

  ‘Griffins. Wherever we’ve seen griffins, we’ve seen high ground.’

  ‘We’ve only seen griffins twice.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘Twice could be a coincidence. You need three for a pattern.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll bet you a stack of pancakes as tall as that hill that these Hyndorin Mountains are stuffed full of griffins.’

  ‘That,’ said Jay, looking way, way up, ‘would be a lot of pancakes.’

  ‘I am confident of winning.’

  ‘To say the least.’

  ‘And that would make three, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Mm. I think I won’t take that bet.’

  ‘Jay! Why not?’

  ‘Because if you eat that many pancakes you’ll explode, and we need you.’

  I smirked. ‘You know I’d win, too.’

  ‘I suspect you might be onto something, let’s put it that way.’

  We were fast approaching the base of the hill, now. Vale had been built right up against it; some of its houses were built straight into the hillside. ‘I get the impression this town was once more populous than it is now,’ I said. ‘It’s too big for its population.’

  ‘Could be,’ Jay agreed. ‘This has to be the old quarter.’

  He was right, or so I judged. The houses nearer the great hill were timber-framed structures, though not all of them would own up to the fact. Some sported stucco frontages in improbable colours, and like the newer parts of the town, they were… unusually animated. Chimney pots sprouted from roofs and exploded into clouds of dust; a grasshopper sitting upon the step of one such home suddenly expanded to thirty times its regular size, chirruped loudly, and shrank again; one house grew bored of its ground floor, apparently, and shifted the rooms upwards, taking a stretching set of steps up with it.

  ‘Are they actually doing all that?’ I said plaintively. ‘Or is it me that’s deranged, and all this is going on in my own head?’

  ‘That cottage is growing a hat,’ said Jay calmly. ‘It’s a blue stovepipe, and there’s smoke coming out of — oh, it’s a chimney.’

  A glance verified these words to be perfect truth, but I wasn’t altogether sure that made it any better. ‘Moving swiftly on,’ I said.

  Miranda was way ahead of us, already climbing the hill, her legs pumping. Did she mean to power straight to the top? ‘Ves!’ she suddenly yelled, turning. ‘Get up here!’

  ‘What?’ I shouted back. ‘Why?’

  She was pointing, up and behind me. I spun — and saw a familiar-looking winged unicorn swooping past far overhead, though where she had acquired that shell-pink colour I couldn’t have said. It was certainly Addie, though. For one, she was still wearing the silvery harness. For another… it’s been ten years for us. I’d know her anywhere, whatever colour she wore.

  I began to run, pulling my pipes out of my shirt as I went. It’s not easy to run uphill and play a wind instrument at the same time, let me tell you, but such was my relief at seeing Adeline hale and unharmed that I spared no effort. By the time I reached Miranda I was winded and, most likely, lobster-red in the face, but I was playing Addie’s song with every scrap of breath I could muster.

  She heard me. I don’t know how I could tell, but I had no doubt.

  She didn’t come down.

  ‘She’s up there for a reason,’ I said, relief giving way to curiosity.

  ‘She’s not the only one,’ said Miranda. ‘I’ve counted five winged unicorns up there since we left the Emporium. Ves, they’re as messed up as the griffins. Look. Watch her.’

  We stood there for some time, watching intently as Adeline soared far over our heads. Mir was right: others joined the aerial dance from time to time, weaving in and out of Addie’s path with such perfect grace, the display looked… choreographed. And Addie was part of it.

  ‘The griffins are the same,’ said Miranda after a while.

  Jay joined us, Emellana leaning on his arm. Formidable she might be, but a steep hill proved a challenge after all. For some reason, I was reassured by this sign of ordinary mortal weakness — and glad we had Jay to think of things like that. All thought but of Addie had gone out of my head.

  ‘It is some kind of enchantment, holding them there,’ said Emellana, slightly breathlessly. ‘I can feel it, even from down here.’

  I looked keenly at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘It is a familiar magick, to me. It is a variation on a series of charms sometimes used at Mandridore.’

  ‘Where at Mandridore?’

  She returned my gaze in silence for so long, I thought she would not answer. But at last she said: ‘The Royal Menagerie.’

  ‘There’s a Royal Menagerie?’

  ‘It is not a matter for public knowledge,’ said Emellana. ‘The creatures there are highly endangered, and, I need hardly add, highly valuable.’

  ‘What creatures?’ I said. ‘This is important, Em.’

  ‘There are three unicorns, two of them winged. One griffin, though she is of such age, it is not thought that she will live more than another few years. Dragons of several species, two of them pygmy. A lirrabird, such as Miranda now possesses.’ She inclined her head in Mir’s direction. ‘A goldnose, like your pup; that is a very new acquisition. In fact, we have a breeding pair. Assorted other species, I need not name them all. Suffice it to say that it is the broadest, and rarest, collection of its type in Europe.’ She amended that to, ‘In our Europe.’

  It crossed my mind to wonder how the Court had got hold of a pair of goldnoses, until I remembered Alban. He’d had one or two secret assignments out at the fifth that he hadn’t shared with me, hm?

  Jay said, ‘And they’re under enchantment?’

  ‘Minor behavioural influences, that is all,’ said Emellana. ‘A pacifying charm, commonly used by those of Miranda’s profession. They are not controlled, precisely, but they are… encouraged in certain directions.’ She nodded at the unicorns winging over our heads, and the griffins farther beyond. ‘This is a much, much stronger version of it.’

  ‘But what are they being compelled to do?’ I said. ‘They’re just circling.’

  ‘If I may be permitted,’ said Emellana. ‘I’d like to use the lyre.’

  ‘It isn’t mine,’ I said bluntly.

  But she was looking at Jay.

  ‘Ves needs to be protected,’ he said.

  ‘Hey,’ I objected. ‘I’m standing right here.’

  He ignored me. ‘She’s at risk from the lyre, in ways we don’t yet understand.’

  ‘I don’t need protecting,’ I growled.

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ Jay said, briefly squeezing my hand. ‘Everyone needs help from time to time.’

  ‘Fine,’ I sighed. ‘What are you doing with the lyre, Em?’

  ‘I intend to ascend to the summit,’ she said. ‘I suspect that most major, truly compelling magicks in this town have been performed from up there, particularly those affecting the beasts hereabouts. I would li
ke to read the traces. But we are dealing with ancient, unusually potent magicks, and I will require aid. The lyre is the tool I need.’

  Not for the first time, I wondered at Milady’s apparent ability to anticipate the needs of any given assignment unusually early, and to arrange for their being available. Once or twice, I’d almost plucked up the courage to ask her if there were by chance any fortune-tellers in her family tree. But I never had. It’s not like she’d tell me the truth if I did.

  Meanwhile, we had more immediate problems. I tilted back my head, shading my eyes against an insistent drizzle of rain, and took a good, long look at just how far away the summit was. The hill might have been only a hill, not a true mountain, but it would still take us over an hour’s solid climbing to reach the top. And Emellana was a thousand years old. ‘Forgive me,’ I said to her. ‘But you can’t climb that.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, smiling. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

  ‘We need chairs,’ said Jay, looking around, as though he might see an abandoned dining set standing forlornly amidst the rubble and bracken of the hillside.

  I said nothing, assailed by a feeling of disquiet. We were in a hurry, too much of a hurry to go trawling back down the hill looking for chairs to thieve. And we were in such a hurry because the deep, deep magicks of Vale were getting the better of us, minute by minute. The effects might yet be mostly cosmetic, but that would change. I did not want to be halfway up the hill, airborne and in charge of a tricky array of charms to keep us that way, when the magicks of Vale overwhelmed my sanity.

  But how else could we ascend the hill, if we couldn’t climb and we couldn’t fly?

  I conveyed some of this.

  ‘Right,’ said Jay. ‘True. Okay. But, this is the fifth Britain. The henge complexes, and the bubble transports, tell us that there’s major magickal infrastructure. And if Emellana is right, and a lot of important stuff has happened at the peak, then what are the chances that someone’s installed an easier way to the top by now?’

  ‘High!’ I enthused.

  ‘It will be at the bottom,’ said Jay.

  I stared in mild dismay at the distance between us and the ground. Hard-won, in Emellana’s case. ‘Down we go, then,’ I said heartily, and off we went. Rain made for damp ground, and our progress was more of a slither-and-slide than a stout trek, but we made it back to town-level in one piece. Or indeed, four pieces.

  It was Jay’s happy thought to cut down on the searching by snagging the first passerby he saw: a reassuringly ordinary-looking man, with only a glowing jewel through his nose to remind us of where we were.

  ‘The peak?’ he repeated.

  I did not at all see why this concept was proving hard to grasp, but I pointed upwards, just to be clear. ‘The peak,’ I agreed.

  He blinked at us. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Why… wouldn’t we be?’ I said.

  His smile was faint. ‘There’s a lift,’ he said. ‘Around that way.’ He indicated a winding path that snaked away to my right.

  ‘Thank you, kind sir.’

  Jay didn’t budge. ‘Is there anything up there we should know about?’ he asked.

  Our friendly interlocutor shrugged. ‘All the things you’d go up the peak for, correct?’ With which superlatively unhelpful statement, he turned away, and left us to our fate.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said, with a winsome smile, ‘we look like people who know what we’re doing.’

  Jay looked from me, to Miranda, to Emellana, palpably in doubt. ‘Uh huh.’

  I had to see his point. Emellana might have an air of formidable wisdom, but she was rather elderly, and looking tired to boot. Miranda looked more distracted even than usual, her clothes were in holes, and moths were crawling out of her hair.

  As for me, who knew? But I had a feeling that a head full of flowers was only the beginning.

  ‘We’re people who know what we’re doing,’ I repeated more firmly.

  Jay nodded. ‘And if you say something often enough, it becomes true.’

  ‘Always.’

  I looked up and up, gazing for a moment at the distant heights of the mini-mountain before us. The rain returned, dropping fat, chilly droplets into my eyes. ‘Addie’s up there,’ I said.

  ‘Together with a lot of other beasts that need our help,’ Miranda added.

  Jay nodded, and squared his shoulders. ‘Are we ready for this?’

  ‘Let me at ‘em,’ I said.

  He smiled, but without mirth. ‘Then up we go.’

  17

  I don’t know that I want to describe what Vale means by the term “lift”. Let’s just say that the inhabitants of that fine town have stronger stomachs than you or I.

  We were… conveyed… to the summit of (for lack of a better name for it) Mount Vale, and when we had finished shrieking (me), gibbering (Miranda), cursing (surprisingly, Jay), and shaking (Emellana), we were at leisure to notice a few things about it.

  One: the wind. One might expect a high wind up at such a height, certainly, but the hair-tossing, screaming, ferocious wind we encountered up there was… shall I call it vindictive? I stood braced at the summit, the peculiar, motley town of Vale spread far below me, hanging onto my shirt for grim death because the damned mischievous mistral seemed intent upon wresting it from me.

  ‘Everyone all right?’ I yelled over the noise, and I’m fairly sure no one heard so much as a syllable.

  Two: Unusual light conditions. The afternoon was wearing on by then, but it shouldn’t have been anywhere near dark yet. At the top of Mount Vale, though, a deep, glimmering twilight reigned, and attractive as it was, I found the effect foreboding.

  Three: magick. I ought perhaps to have mentioned that first, because Emellana’s instincts were promptly proved more or less right. If Vale in general was a magick-drowned town, up there was the centre, the source of it all, and no wonder the light and the weather weren’t right. Nothing could be, in a mess like that. Magick thrummed through the ground beneath my feet, and set my bones vibrating. Magick made my head swim and my heart pound; magick made me mighty and weak, shallow and profound, pink and purple— no, lost the train of thought. Magick. Made it difficult to think clearly.

  I shut my eyes for a while, hoping by that means to force my disordered brain to focus.

  It worked. Sort of.

  What we didn’t find up there was much of anything but wind and whimsy and gloaming. Unsurprising, perhaps? What manner of structure could survive such conditions? If it withstood the weird weather, it couldn’t resist the magick. Five minutes, and it would make a bubble of itself and float away, or stalk back down the mountain again on chicken legs.

  I mean, anything was possible up there. Anything.

  There were griffins, though.

  Oh my, were there griffins.

  I’ve been up close and personal with a griffin or two before. You may recall. The first time, I was convinced I was about to get eaten, and didn’t get much chance to examine the creature. The second time was better, but still… I’ve never been so close to a griffin before, nor had such leisure to admire it.

  They’re beautiful, and terrifying. Majestic. Magnificent. Vast, all muscle and feather and hide, wreathed in magick of a potency I couldn’t have dreamed of only a few weeks ago.

  And that was bad, because Mir was right: these creatures were wrong. They wafted past us on the wing, utterly oblivious to our presence, dancing upon those currents of air with the grace of butterflies. Lightning — not light at all, but raw, intense magick — glittered around them, darting from wing to wing, crackling over their backs and igniting their claws with white fire. There was far too much there, far, far more than the griffins of Farringale had borne. And still they ignored us.

  We stood in awed silence for a time, watching as those mighty beasts circled slowly around the summit of Mount Vale, and around us, standing motionless at its centre. And I realised that the winds and the griffins danced in tandem, and in a pattern perfectly reg
ular. Like automated figures on a cuckoo-clock, their perfect circuit never varied.

  Strong enchantments, indeed.

  I realised that Jay was attempting to get my attention. This occurred to me only when he put his lips two inches away from my left ear and yelled, ‘Ves!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Em’s using the lyre,’ he screamed. ‘Forgive me.’

  He swept me up in a brutal… embrace, I couldn’t quite call it, for it was restraining, not affectionate. His hands clamped over my eyes, blocking out my view of those magnificent griffins. My objections went unheeded, and Jay proved as strong as an ox; nothing that I did loosened his grip one bit.

  I was grateful for it a few moments later, for whatever Em was doing with that lyre was… like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Emellana Rogan began to play; the ancient lyre’s thrumming notes sounded over the arcane winds at Mount Vale; and around me, the world went insane.

  It began with a heightening of the already mad winds, until a veritable cyclone spun around and around us. Only, some part of it must have been no wind at all, or we would have been swept up into the skies. A sensation as of powerful currents tore at my clothes and my hair and howled in my ears; over the tumult, I distantly heard a griffin shriek.

  Then came a tide of rain, like an ocean flipped upside down and poured upon our shrinking heads. My clothes clung to my skin, icy-cold, and I struggled to breathe through air turned to torrents of water. Colours flooded my mind, rain turned moon-pale and ice-white, eventide-blue and moss-green and every conceivable variation of hue, and shining like drowned stars. Did I imagine it? Throughout, the feel of Jay’s hands tucked firmly over my eyes did not lessen, and still he held on.

  Emellana’s music turned haunting, morose. Its melody melded with the winds, took the rains inside itself and spun it out again in a ripple of strident notes.

  I began to see things.

  Visions filled my turbulent mind, sense and nonsense hopelessly jumbled together. I saw a litter of snow-white cubs with striped tails, which became goldnoses — all of them my pup, like little clones — and then they were changed to lirrabirds, like Miranda’s. My mind’s eye filled in with gleaming, tawny-amber colour, something that shimmered like polished jewels; downy feathers ringed the gleaming sphere, a mote of black at its centre, and I realised I stared deep into the eye of a griffin.