They liked their jewels, the Yllanfalen. Quartz and beryl and spinel and a hundred other gems adorned everything, and I could see that because they were all lit up with the same clear fire that had emblazoned the portal through which we’d entered (I’m giving up terming it merely a door. No word but portal could befit such absurd— I mean, such wondrous grandeur).
The fountain occupied the central position in the middle, where the ground arrived at its lowest point. It rose to the height of three Baron-Albans, composed of five tiers, and as far as I could tell from this distance it was made out of clear glass radiating moonlight. Lovely.
All the cavern around it would fill up with water, I supposed, to form that mythical lake we were looking for. Which presented one immediate problem: if we managed to switch on the Magick Fountain of Dreams, how were we to avoid promptly drowning in the Faerie Lake of Bespelled Waters?
One problem at a time, Ves, hm?
My wonderfully prosaic mother stood taking in all this magickal magnificence with an expression profoundly unimpressed. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘And how do we persuade that frippery thing to start spewing water?’
Ayllin looked pained at my mother’s soulless choice of words, as well she might. She made no answer, however. Instead she took up her own syrinx pipes and began to play a tune I can only term ethereal. The melody echoed around the cavern, swelling in volume and richness with every note. That softly-glimmering moonlight centred upon the fountain grew stronger, and clear water began to pour from its spout.
The melody was not a complicated one; I soon had its measure. I joined in, playing a low counterpart, and to my surprise the water flow promptly tripled. The skysilver really did give these things a bit more oomph, huh?
The fountain might be pumping away merrily, but it still seemed to me that the wide cavern would take weeks to fill. Soon, though, water was lapping at our toes, and then we were soaked to our ankles. ‘Er,’ said Jay. ‘Got a boat, or something?’
No sooner had he spoken than a boat appeared, drifting up to us with the serenity of a construct whose existence is in no way impossible. Never mind that it, too, appeared to be made of glass, and it shone with the same pale moonglow as the fountain. It had one of those fanciful swan’s head arrangements, too, and a slender set of oars. I eyed it with misgiving, but Jay got straight in and picked up the oars. Since he didn’t disappear through the bottom of the boat, I followed suit. As did Mother.
Ayllin, though, did not. She had levitated herself — standing, incomprehensibly, on some kind of a giant silvery leaf, and where had that come from, hm? Is the entirety of Yllanfalen made out of magick or something? She did not cease to play, even as her leaf rose smoothly to the ceiling, taking her with it.
My mother looked as though she’d like to take the boat’s pretty oars off Jay, but remembered her missing hand with chagrin. She sat scowling at him instead. ‘Don’t tickle the water. Row!’
‘To where?’ protested Jay, most reasonably.
But Mother lifted an arm — the one without the hand — and pointed her stump imperiously at the centre of the lake. The water had risen high enough now to engulf the fountain, as tall as it was, and a thick mist had collected where it once stood. Through the silvery-white fog I could just make out the outlines of a tiny spit of land.
The island-vault had checked in.
Jay rowed. The lake was not all that large, and there were no currents to fight with; we made rapid progress, and soon drew near to the island. I had time enough to note, with fascination, that the waters were full of lithe fish with twilight-blue scales, and that the bottom had developed a vibrant crop of pond weed, lake mosses and other vegetation — and then Jay had the boat up against the island and had jumped out. He stood holding a hand in my mother’s direction, but I could have told him that was a waste of time. She made a point of reaching the bank unaided, earning herself a sardonic flicker of Jay’s brow.
I accepted his help with gratitude, largely because it is quite tricky to navigate such a manoeuvre while also playing the syrinx pipes. Once my feet hit solid, quartzy ground, however, Ayllin ceased to play, so I let my song die away too. The sudden silence echoed.
‘Lyllora Var welcomes you,’ she said mysteriously, with a smile I did not much like. It had too much smug mischief in it.
‘How nice,’ said mother, folding her arms. She stared coolly at Ayllin. ‘You’re keeping a comfy distance, I note.’
Ayllin’s only response was a graceful wave, like a queen, and then she stepped off her leaf and — disappeared.
‘Do they have some kind of magick school here?’ I breathed. ‘I’d enrol like a shot.’
‘More importantly,’ said Jay. ‘We appear to be stranded.’
He was right. The boat had dematerialised as thoroughly as Ayllin, and the door through which we had entered must now lie several feet under water.
Mother snickered. ‘She got rid of us very neatly.’
She had, at that. If I had wondered at any point why she was so helpful, when the rest of Yllanfalen had been broadly evasive, here was my answer.
‘Well,’ I said, turning my back to the problem of the disappearing boat and the submerged door. ‘Let’s get what we came for. Then we can worry about how to get out.’
‘Right.’ Jay joined me. The swirling mists were so pervasive, they cloaked almost every inch of the island in an opaque shroud we could scarcely see through. It was pretty mist, I noted, like everything else in this absurd place: it shone as though under moonlight, and there were traces of something that glittered.
The ground was uneven and very hard. It, too, sparkled, so I observed that Ayllin had not exaggerated when she’d said the place was made out of quartz-rock. Nothing much seemed to be growing on it, save an occasional, blithely impossible patch of velvety moss. I linked arms with Jay on my left and Mother on my right, unwilling to lose either of them in the fog, and we walked slowly forward. The lights I’d sent up with a flick of my Wand did not help much, but at least they could prevent us from walking into anything.
Not that there proved to be anything to walk into. We walked from one side of the island to the other in the space of a few minutes, and encountered nothing at all.
‘There was something about a bubble of ligh—’ I began, and suddenly I saw it: a bubble indeed, pearly with moonglow, and floating about eight feet over our heads.
It was empty.
‘So the lyre’s really gone,’ Mother mused.
‘You thought they might be lying?’ I asked.
‘Yes. We got the same story from too many people, and promptly, too. Very consistent. Very like a collective lie.’
‘Why would they lie about its absence?’
‘To protect it from treasure-hunters like us,’ said Mother with her wolfish grin.
‘Fair,’ I said. ‘You might still be right. Ayllin’s cordially conducting us down here only to leave us stranded seems rather to support the idea.’
‘A decoy vault?’ said Jay. ‘A complicated solution, but I like it.’
‘It might explain why everything’s so sodding elaborate,’ I muttered.
‘Enough theorising,’ said Mother crisply. ‘Time for some facts.’ And, to my puzzlement, she sat cross-legged upon the ground where she stood and laid her hands — er, hand — against the rocky ground.
Nobody spoke for a bit.
‘Mum,’ I said after a while. ‘What are you doing?’
She’d shut her eyes, but now they snapped open again. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’
‘No idea.’
She blinked. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Her frown appeared. ‘I’m looking for traces of past magick performed here.’
‘You can do that?’ I was startled. It wasn’t so much that it was a rare ability, as that few people thought it worth the trouble of developing it. The Hidden Ministry had a team of magickal forensics experts, if you will, attached to their Forbidden Magicks department; oth
er than that, it was mostly popular with archaeolo— ‘Why do you think I became an archaeologist?’ Mother said, forestalling my thought. ‘It’s my best talent.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘We’ve discussed this before.’
‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘We haven’t.’
The frown deepened. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Mum. We pretty much haven’t discussed anything before.’
She had no response to make to that, apparently, for her eyes shut again and she fell silent.
Jay and I waited, he trying not to signal a thousand disapproving thoughts with his eyes, and largely failing. At least they were directed at Mother this time, rather than me.
‘Right,’ said Mother after a while. ‘It’s trickier than usual down here, because the whole damned place is soaked in magick. Everything we’re sitting on is the product of it. But there are traces of something that feels like music-magick still lingering here. Rather faded. Probably from at least a couple of decades ago. Might be the lyre? And there’s something else, too, something much bigger.’
‘Bigger?’ I prompted.
‘More powerful. And unusual. I’d say it’s a spell that was cast only the once, also some time ago, but it’s left a stronger residue for all that.’
‘And what was it?’
‘I think someone opened some kind of a gate.’ She stood up, dusting off her hand on her ragged trousers. ‘Much like the one we came through.’
‘You mean…’ I thought for a second. ‘You mean back into Britain proper?’
‘Most likely, yes.’
See, magickal gates aren’t exactly portals. They don’t transport you over large distances. They’re just doors that lead from regular Britain into the hidden magickal pockets like the Dells and Troll Enclaves — and, of course, the kingdoms of Yllanfalen.
However ordinary that makes them, however, it’s no easy matter to open one. No easy matter at all.
‘That sounds like the work of a thief, doesn’t it?’ said Jay. ‘Got down here somehow, snatched the lyre, and escaped into Britain with it.’
‘Could be,’ said Mother. ‘Though it isn’t so easy to open such a gate as all that.’
And that’s the truth. If it were easy, we’d spend a lot less time searching for existing gates when we wanted to cross realms. But this was an existing gate, near enough. ‘Next question,’ said I. ‘How far faded is it? Could it be revived?’
Mum looked at me. ‘You want to follow?’
‘Why not? We need a way out anyway.’
She nodded. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’
11
Mum was looking at Jay. ‘That trick with the nothingness. You said you’d open a door through the lindworm.’
‘Not the same kind of door. I was just trying to express the general concept in comprehensible language.’
‘All right. But could it be adapted for this gate?’
Jay took a moment to consider. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘A gate — the kind you mean — is an insubstantial thing, it has no tangible presence. In a sense it’s already nothing, and I can’t open a nothing in nothing.’
Mother took this philosophically, and lapsed into thought.
I wracked my brains, too. What was known about these intra-realm gates? It was the province of the various magickal authorities to maintain existing gate networks; The Hidden Ministry poured a lot of resources into it. And, naturally, they had all kinds of rules about how many gates should remain open, and which should be barred. The Society had no one with those skills, because it wasn’t part of our mandate.
That meant I, too, was rather more ignorant about the process than I liked. Opening a new gate is the kind of impossible even I won’t venture upon, so I’ve never considered the matter before.
Course, I told myself, we weren’t opening a new gate here. Just freshening up an old one, and purely for the purposes of detective work.
‘Ves,’ said Mother tightly. She was making strange gestures with her surviving hand, as though she was pulling on an invisible thread. ‘Help me here.’
‘How?’
‘Remember when I taught you to knit?’
‘You never taught me to knit.’
‘I did, when you were six. You were almost as bad at it as I was.’
‘How is this relevant?’
‘Well.’ She was sweating now, her face glistening in the moonlight. ‘If you think of the magickal world as a thing knitted up out of — of — well, magick, then it can also be unknitted. Someone’s gone through a door here, and they may have firmly closed it behind themselves, but the door’s still here.’
‘You’re unravelling it?’
‘So to speak. Here.’ She grabbed my hand and thrust it out before herself. And I felt something. Nothing tangible; more like a sensation that shivered through my skin, neither heat nor cold but something beyond those two things. Whatever it was wound around my hand like — ugh, like I’d thrust my arm into a knot of spider’s webs. ‘You feel that?’
‘I wish a bit that I didn’t, but yes.’
‘Great. Grab a handful and pull.’
I obeyed — but the moment Mum let go of my hand, the sensations vanished and I was groping at empty air. ‘You’ve a sensitivity I lack, Mum. You’ll need to guide me.’
‘Fine. I’ll do this, you do that.’
We did all that, Mum keeping a firm grip on my wrist with her healthy hand and me using both of mine to tear holes in the magickal fabric of the Halls of Yllanfalen. As mother/daughter bonding events go, it was a weird one, but I’d take it over nothing at all, any day.
After twenty minutes or so, Mum — who’d been periodically waving her stump of an arm about, apparently testing the tear we were making — said, ‘Stop. I think we can go through.’
I was happy to obey, for I was trembling with weariness by then. You wouldn’t think unravelling the very fabric of magick would take so much out of a person.
‘Just need a second,’ I gasped.
Mum rolled her eyes and stood up, which was humbling. The woman had lost three friends, a hand and a lot of blood in recent days, and she was still unstoppable.
I hastily pulled myself together.
‘You okay?’ said Jay, looking at me with a concern I both welcomed and mildly resented.
‘Fine,’ I said crisply, only belatedly aware of how much I’d sounded like my mother.
The thought crossed Jay’s mind too, for his lips twitched.
Mother said, ‘We’re wasting time,’ and promptly hurled herself head-first into nothingness. I tensed, half expecting her to land painfully on the quartz-rock ground, but she disappeared.
I smiled at Jay. ‘After me,’ I said, and leapt after Mother.
I’d expected to end up on some distant street in Britain somewhere, or perhaps a forgotten heath or moor in the wilder parts of the country.
That’s not what happened.
‘This,’ I said, picking myself up off the floor, ‘is not Britain.’
‘You don’t say,’ muttered mother.
We’d emerged at the top of a low, sloping hill ringed all around with pine and conifer trees. The surrounding forest had an air of utter impenetrability, and was shrouded in gloom.
How did I know it was not Britain? Because the same silvery mist that cloaked Lyllora Var poured out of those trees, and clung to the base of the hill. Said hill was grown all over with a grasses and moss of a tawny gold colour, and scattered with jewel-like flowers.
At the summit, about three feet away from where we were standing, was a low stone bier upon which lay a corpse.
It was, as one would expect from the Yllanfalen, a most attractive corpse. The man was clearly fae, as improbably beautiful as the rest of his kind, with pale golden hair and a face that looked sculpted from marble. He wore a long robe of the finest silk I’ve ever seen, richly embroidered, and a delicate golden crown encircled his brow.
Around his neck hung a set of syri
nx pipes that looked exactly like mine.
‘Found us a king,’ I observed.
Jay stood frowning down at the exquisite corpse. ‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone rip open a gate between the lyre-vault and the king’s tomb?’
‘I think this is the vault,’ said Mother. ‘That bubble back there was the gate.’
‘But there’s nothing here of value, except those pipes.’
‘Thief on the loose, remember?’
‘Then why not take the pipes, too? If they’re as similar to Ves’s as they look, that’s a Great Treasure just lying there unclaimed.’
‘Okay. Let’s try it.’ I reached for the pipes, and instantly a great bell tolled somewhere, at a volume that left my ears ringing. The ground shook beneath our feet, and thunder cracked the sky.
‘Ow,’ I said, and speedily withdrew my hand.
‘All right, that answers that,’ said Jay. ‘But then, how was the lyre taken? Was it here at all?’
‘I’d say yes,’ Mother replied after a moment. ‘There are traces of something that seems consistent with a musical Great Treasure. But, I thought that about Lyllora Var, too.’
‘Who could take it?’ I said.
They both looked at me with identical puzzled frowns. ‘What?’ said Mother.
‘Who could physically reach in and take the lyre, if it was once here? Who is that scary thief-repelling enchantment not protecting the lyre against?’
‘If you’ve got some idea, Cordelia, please just share it.’
‘The lyre belongs to the king, doesn’t it?’
‘Are we back with the idea that the king isn’t dead, because—’ Mother stopped, and abruptly bent over the king’s gorgeous corpse, her nose inches from his chin. Silence stretched. Then she said: ‘I was about to say you were crazy, but maybe not. There are about eighty layers of magick shrouding His Majesty here, and since he’s demonstrably not skeletal I might reasonably take them for enchantments of preservation, reverence and so on. But they don’t feel quite right. It’s something else.’
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