We reappeared, winded and speechless, in the midst of another such complex.
Jay had described it as the largest henge complex in the area; that in no way prepared me for the sheer hugeness of it. Scarborough’s, impressive as it was, faded into insignificance in comparison. The complex must’ve been the size of a full football field, its surface intricately patterned with more henges than I wanted to try to count. Some of them were only about two feet across, large enough for a single person to travel through at a time.
Others… well. I tipped my head way, way back, trying to see the tops of a series of bloodstone pillars near the base of which we had emerged. The things must have been the height of a two-storey house, at least. The air bristled with jutting stones; sunlight glinted off a hundred different types of gem; and… something caught at my… everything, and pulled.
My left foot, I realised too late, had strayed into the edge of an alabaster circle. I don’t normally feel these particular kinds of magicks; not being a Waymaster, I’m as oblivious to them as a deaf person is to Mozart’s violin concertos.
This was different.
‘Ah…’ I said, filled with unease, as something deeply magickal about that henge-circle communed with something deeply magickal about me. ‘This is not—’
I fell sideways, and vanished in a spray of magickal fireworks.
‘Jay…!’ I shrieked as the world upended around me.
I thought I heard cursing as I disappeared.
I definitely heard cursing twelve seconds later.
When the world righted itself again and the nauseating blur faded from my eyes, I beheld the face of Jay, creased with annoyance. ‘This,’ he said, grabbing my hand in a vice-like grip, ‘is going to prove really inconvenient.’
‘This what?’ I was set on my feet upright, and towed after Jay, who walked straight back into the nearest henge (lapis lazuli, very nice) without pause.
‘This whatever is going on with you.’ I detected a wince, but he didn’t loose his hold on my hand.
‘I find it a trifle inconvenient myse—’ I began, but a rush of wind stole the rest of my words, as we vanished back into the Ways.
‘No harm done?’ said Emellana, seconds later. She and Miranda stood waiting with a placidity I might have found disconcerting, if I wasn’t so busy catching my breath.
‘She’s in one piece.’ Jay hadn’t let go of my hand, and did not seem to have any plans to do so.
As a probable consequence of which, his eyes were changing colour again.
I decided not to tell him.
‘Right, now we’re going,’ he said, and marched off, pulling me gently but firmly along behind him.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s going on? Am I a Waymaster now?’
‘Did you do that intentionally?’
‘No, but—’
‘Then you aren’t a Waymaster.’
‘Then what am I—’ I stopped dead, silenced, because unless I was crazy that was a familiar wide-brimmed hat vanishing into a milky labradorite henge about twenty feet ahead of us. ‘Is that… no, surely it can’t be.’
‘It was,’ said Jay grimly, and broke into a run. ‘Come on!’
I didn’t need much encouragement. That hat, with its distinctive curving shape, and floating as it had been about four feet from the floor, could only belong to our shady little “friend”, Wyr. The one who’d tried to sell Adeline to the beast-traders of Vale.
The one who’d purloined Torvaston’s scroll-case, and absconded with it.
I’d wondered at the time what he wanted with that item in particular, and hadn’t been able to come up with an answer.
Well, apparently he was as desirous of finding the Hyndorin Mountains as we were. Was there something in those lost mountains that interested the sticky-fingered little creep? That interested me rather a lot.
‘Em!’ I shouted, stretching out my free hand behind me. ‘Catch hold, and grab Mir. We’re going to be—’
Travelling tokenless, I was going to say, which would mean we’d have to keep hold of Jay if we wanted to be taken along. But there wasn’t time. Just as Em’s large hand closed around my small one, Jay ran full-tilt into the embrace of those milk-white stones, and my breath escaped in a rush as we fell headlong into the Ways once again.
We came out somewhere higher up, if the chill in the air was anything to go by. A vast blue sky dotted with clouds stretched overhead; I glimpsed feathery grasses, and smelled summer flowers. Several henges were spread over the hillside even up here, though these were all of a less polished appearance: limestone or granite, white and dark, moss-grown and aged.
There was no sign of Wyr.
Jay stood, panting, and turned us in circles, hoping to spot something of the thief. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell where he’s gone.’
‘Em?’ I said, kindly releasing her hand. I tried to detach myself from Jay, too, entirely for his benefit, but his fingers closed the more tightly on mine, until my bones creaked.
‘Don’t let go yet,’ said Jay. ‘Can’t be sure you won’t be swept away again.’
I abandoned my efforts with a small sigh. ‘Em, can you tell which circle’s been most recently used?’
Her eyes brightened, and she nodded. ‘I think so,’ she murmured, already in motion. ‘There is a certain residue, like a brightness…’ She dismissed a set of crumbling limestone blocks with a shake of her head, and shortly afterwards a taller series of dark, almost black granite stones. ‘Ah,’ she said then, pausing at the third. Humble, that one, to say the least: there were no stones visible, just a circuit of raised bumps in the grass. ‘This one.’
‘Sure?’ said Jay, watching her with intent, moonsilver eyes.
I winced.
Em did her brisk, authoritative nod, the one I always found reassuring.
Jay apparently did, too, for he didn’t hesitate. I had just time to grab hold of Emellana again and off we went, tumbling into the windy embrace of the modest, grassy henge.
On the other side, a wild, blasted heath awaited us, a landscape straight out of a Bronte novel. Not a scrap of greenery met my eyes, only tawny-brown scrub and bare earth. Huge boulders lay scattered about, haphazard; not henges, these, just socking great rocks. We were truly high up high, now; the wind whistled and howled past my ears, and around us stretched a rolling, rocky landscape bare of all signs of human habitation.
Well, almost. Someone had thoughtfully carved their names into the nearest of the gigantic boulders. Rufus & June. Nice touch.
I felt something shift, behind me. A disturbance, slight in truth, but prominent in my weirdly amplified state. I preferred to attribute my unseemly dizziness to the same source. I whirled, turning giddy in an instant, and contrived to fall heavily atop the small, scarcely-visible person attempting to slither unobtrusively away.
‘Hello, Wyr,’ I growled, catching hold of his jacket with both hands. ‘I’d really like to talk to you.’
3
‘That feeling,’ said Wyr, attempting to writhe out of my grip, ‘is not mutual.’
‘That’s too bad,’ I said, handing him off to Emellana. He didn’t stand much chance of getting away from her. ‘What are you doing here? And where’s our scroll-case?’
‘I sold it,’ he said, eyeing Em with distaste. ‘Obviously. What else would I do with it?’
‘Take an interest in a certain map that was drawn on it, by chance?’
‘What map.’
‘Ah. So your appearance up here is a coincidence.’
‘Apparently.’ He smiled at me, and flicked the brim of his hat.
I felt like sweeping that hat off him and hurling it (or him) off the peak.
‘Look, this is not going to fly. You’ve some kind of interest in the Hyndorin Mountains, and if you don’t speak up, Em’s going to break you into pieces and feed you to the birds.’ I’d seen a few large ones sailing overhead, birds of prey by the looks of them.
Wyr surveyed Emellana, unimpressed. ‘S
he’s big, but old ladies don’t tend to scare— argh!’
I don’t know what Em did, but obviously it hurt. She looked at him, cold as winter, and said, ‘Talk.’
‘I don’t—’ said Wyr, but this unpromising beginning was interrupted by a shimmer and a ripple of magick, emanating from the stony henge. Someone was coming through.
A tall figure appeared. Troll-tall, broad-shouldered, and achingly familiar. He paused only for a split second in the centre of the henge, and made as if to go away again — then saw me, and stopped dead. ‘Ves.’
A moment later, Baron Alban was bearing down on me with obvious intent to hug. Ruthlessly.
Remembering, in the nick of time, my uncuddleable state, I took a few hasty steps back. ‘Alban?’ I said, in disbelief. ‘Great. Now I’m hallucinating.’
‘Nope,’ said Jay succinctly.
Emellana smiled at the vision. ‘Highness.’
‘You’re really here,’ I said. ‘How.’
Alban stopped a few feet from me, uncertainty replacing the relief on his face. ‘Long story,’ he said.
‘It’s not you,’ I tried to explain, regretting my instinctive retreat. ‘It’s— uh, long story too.’
‘All right.’
‘You first?’
He sighed, and it struck me how weary he looked. In fact, he looked most unlike himself. He was clad in plain travelling clothes, devoid of ornaments, his head bare; the attractive, bluish-green tones of his skin and bronzed hair were gone, and he was merely brown-haired, with lightly tanned skin. It would be like me showing up in jeans and an old t-shirt, with my natural hair colour showing. ‘Is everything all right?’ I added.
‘It is now,’ he said, smiling at me, and he was the same old Alban again, even if rather less well turned-out. He looked around at Em and Jay and Miranda, and focused with a frown on Wyr. ‘Since you all appear to be hale and in one piece… who’s that?’
‘Our nemesis,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’
Wyr, visibly more disconcerted by the Baron’s presence than by Emellana’s, said nothing.
To my dismay, Alban swayed on his feet, and quickly sat down — outside the range of the henge. He held up a hand as I started forward. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve just been through one too many henges today, that’s all.’
‘As in, how many?’
‘As in, I’ve been travelling the Ways since last night trying to find you.’
‘All night? Why? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing terrible,’ he said, seeing the alarm in my face. ‘Or at least, probably not. Everyone at home is well. But some new information came to light shortly after you left, and I thought you needed to know about it.’ His gaze strayed to Wyr.
‘Can you bottle him up?’ I said to Em.
‘Gladly.’
‘Wait—’ said Wyr, then clapped his hands to his ears and made a disgusted face. ‘DEAF?’ he thundered. ‘GREAT. THANKS.’
‘It was that or an incomprehension charm,’ said Em with a faint smile. ‘Perhaps he’d prefer to hear everything in Swahili.’
‘I like this approach,’ I said. ‘Simple. Effective.’
Em inclined her head.
‘Can we leave it on him all the time?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Muting charm?’
‘No.’
‘Damn.’
‘Though I quite see the appeal.’
We all looked expectantly at Alban.
‘It’s two things,’ he said, shaking his head as though to clear it. ‘Firstly, Mother accelerated the translation process on Torvaston’s papers. She seconded half a dozen language scholars from anywhere she could get them. Certain research projects at the University have ground to a halt, but we got the document finished. Did you know — or guess — that Torvaston had made himself into a kind of human griffin?’
I blinked. ‘A what?’
‘I don’t mean half bird, or something like that. I’m not expressing this well.’
Small wonder, if he’d been criss-crossing back and forth between henge complexes for twelve hours straight. Or more. My unease grew. ‘Carry on.’
‘It’s more the way griffins operate, in the magickal sense. You know, how they function as a source of magick, increase its potency in areas they populate, that kind of thing.’
‘Got it. So Torvaston was doing the same thing?’
‘Not just Torvaston. Do you remember that odd kind of… ritual you read about, at Farringale? From the diary? Where members of the Court went up to the top of the peak and, um, absorbed some of the griffins’ excess magick.’
‘Yes.’
‘They were doing that to try to curb the overflow, or so we suppose, and that’s probably true, but did you consider the probable long-term effects of that?’
‘Sort of—’
‘Or how it was done?’
‘Sort of,’ I said again. ‘It’s all been speculation.’
‘Well, they had… tools, whether they knew it or not. A certain kind of metal — we don’t know what it was, except that it was called magickal silver by Torvaston in his book — has a property which permits it to soak up magick like a sponge. And that happened to be a fashionable material at the Court of Farringale. Everyone who was anyone had at least a trinket made from the stuff.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s no known source of that metal anymore, and most examples of objects made from the stuff have passed out of existence or knowledge. Most.’ He looked at me.
I had no trouble seeing where this was going. ‘So they absorbed… too much magick,’ I said faintly.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Whatever the cause, the general effect the griffins had on Farringale spread to many members of the Court, too. Which was like… quadrupling the griffin population of Farringale in the space of a number of years. You can imagine the outcome.’
‘That’s how Farringale was flooded?’
‘Probably. Torvaston’s notes stop before the crisis, so we can’t be sure, but the pieces fit.’
I felt saddened, somewhere under my unease. Torvaston’s desperate attempts to mend Farringale had most likely contributed to its demise. We’d speculated about just such a possibility, but I was sorry to have it largely confirmed.
‘But,’ said Jay. ‘But. What did they imagine they were doing with the excess magick? Absorbing it, however it was done, doesn’t just make it go away.’
He was looking at me as he said that last part, and indeed I was functioning as living proof of that concept.
‘Indeed not,’ said Alban. ‘Torvaston had a dual problem on his hands. He could see that Farringale was in danger of magickal excess — but he also had, we think, a touch of clairvoyance about him. His notes refer, more than once, to a “decline” he foresaw happening somewhere in the future. It seems he was attempting to manage a project which would solve both problems at once—’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Somehow using the dangerously excessive magick of Farringale to balance out the decline that was beginning elsewhere?’
‘Something like that,’ Alban agreed. ‘He began buying up all this magickal silver he could get his hands on. Almost bankrupted the royal family to do it, too. And he drew in all the brightest magickal minds he could get hold of in an attempt to build… some kind of device.’
‘A device?’
‘See, the problem with the flows of magick being under the influence of living creatures is that they can’t be… managed, very well. They breed too much, or they die off, and disasters happen. Either the enclave is flooded out, or its magick dries up and the place just dies. Torvaston wanted a solution that could be carefully maintained, and that meant a non-biological one.’
Jay said, ‘So he was building a… regulator.’
‘Right.’
‘Out of moonsilver. Or skysilver, or whatever the Yllanfalen call it.’
Alban looked oddly at him. ‘You guessed that part.’
Jay just looked meaningfully at me.
‘It has,’ I said. ‘I used it. I’m sorry.’
He looked me over, more carefully, and I felt the faint brush of his magick against mine. ‘Then I am too late,’ he said heavily.
‘Hey,’ I said, trying for brightness. ‘I’m still alive.’
‘It’s not that it’s deadly,’ said Alban, with a smile probably meant to be reassuring. ‘Just… difficult to manage. Or reverse.’
‘It does have its drawbacks,’ I said lightly.
‘And that’s probably why the whole lot of them fled over here,’ he continued. ‘They would have felt less painfully overwrought, in a more potently magickal landscape. And they would have been less of a danger themselves. This is why they didn’t join Her Majesty at Mandridore.’
And I sighed. If I’d hoped Alban would have some solution that said, You CAN go home, Ves! I was doomed to disappointment. ‘Why didn’t they throw away that damned magickal silver,’ I said, somewhat sourly.
He smiled at me. ‘Have you thrown away that lyre?’
‘Fair point.’
‘Magick has ever been seductive. Anything that can promise to amplify its potency, very much so.’
I couldn’t disagree. ‘And there’s the whole question of dependency.’
‘True.’
Which, secretly, bothered me the most. Swimming as I was in magick up to my very eyeballs, would it even be possible to go back to the way I was before? Would I… miss it? Would I need it? Had I, in fact, been turned into a raging magickal alcoholic overnight?
It didn’t bear thinking about. Because I had a horrible feeling that I would.
‘Okay, anyway,’ I said briskly, setting these unproductive ideas aside. ‘Do we know what became of Torvaston’s magickal regulator?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Alban. ‘We don’t know if the project succeeded. If it did… the thing might still be at the old court, of course, but then presumably the disaster there would never have happened.’
‘Baroness Tremayne would surely have said something about that, if it was,’ I said. ‘If she knew about it.’
‘She probably didn’t. Torvaston seems to have kept that particular project quiet, hence spending his family’s money on it instead of the Court’s.’
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