fantasy fiction

There was, for a short time, uproar. The other three glaistigs re-materialised, hissing something at me that I couldn’t catch. This was partly because my own team were raising vociferous protests at the same time.

‘Ves, did you just challenge a quartet of murderous ghosts to a dance-off?’ Jay was saying, sounding really very surprised, which was unreasonable of him; hadn’t he met me already?

‘A brilliant plan,’ Emellana was saying, and I think she meant it, ‘but with one grave flaw: I have no talent for dancing. At all.’

Zareen was losing it altogether. This took the form of wordless cackling, which, emanating as it did from her death’s head of a face, enhanced nobody’s comfort at all.

Indira just stared at me, silent and pale. When I caught her eye, she simply said: ‘I can’t dance.’

I smiled encouragement at my four trusty colleagues. ‘I know we haven’t exactly rehearsed anything, but you can trust me. Please. Will you?’

Jay knew me well enough to smell a rat. I could tell from the way his eyes narrowed when he looked at me, and then he folded his arms and I knew I was in trouble. ‘Trust you,’ he repeated.

‘I won’t hurt you.’

He sighed. He knew I was asking a lot more than I seemed to be. He knew, or he guessed, what I was proposing to do.

I knew he wouldn’t like it.

But it was still better than an actual battle, and it was also better than fleeing the scene, defeated (supposing we were permitted to do so without further torment). I knew it. Jay knew it.

He inclined his head in a nod.

‘Thank you,’ I said in relief. For a moment, I’d been afraid he wouldn’t back me up.

Emellana raised her brows at me. Her lips curved in a faint, wryly amused smile. ‘I trust you know what you’re doing,’ said she.

‘As usual,’ I replied, ‘I haven’t a clue.’

She saluted me, with more than a hint of irony about it, but she was still smirking, so I decided I’d take it.

‘All with me?’ I asked of my team.

Zareen had stopped cackling in favour of an utterly terrifying grin. ‘I get so bored when I’m not on assignment with you,’ she said, which was a yes more than it wasn’t.

That just left Indira. She still resembled a frightened doe more than the competent, powerful woman I knew her to be, and that worried me a little. But she took her cues from Jay, especially when it came to me, and if he was choosing to go with the crazy, Ves-flavoured flow… I watched her eyes stray from my face to his, and back again. He’d given her a reassuring smile.

‘I can’t dance,’ she said again.

‘It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.’

She nodded.

All right, then.

I turned back to the glaistigs. ‘Out of interest,’ I said, addressing their apparent leader. ‘Are you Silvessen?’

‘I am.’ Her ghostly visage flickered for a moment, and I saw again the Yllanfalen woman underneath. The woman she’d been in life.

‘I’m sorry for what happened to your people,’ I said. ‘When we’re done, we would like permission to carry all those left to a place of rest, employing any rites or practices you’d prefer.’

‘We accept,’ said Silvessen. Instantly, without so much as a moment’s thought.

Had she and her companions lingered here all these years merely in want of someone to bury their remains?

How had it taken so long?

‘Do you also accept our challenge?’ I said.

She gave no answer, at least in words. Instead, she and her three companions joined hands and began to sway. A ripple of music began, haunting and sad, quiet at first. The violin was back on the balcony, and a pipe had joined it, though the strains I heard were complex and layered; the work of many instruments, though we saw only two. The song was palpably sad, a heartbreaking lament that tore at my soul. My face dampened with tears.

The music swelled, rising in volume until it was a blast of sound, almost physically painful. A freezing wind tore around the ballroom, centred around the four glaistigs; the whirling currents tore at my clothes, shoving me backwards.

My back hit the wall. My team were similarly afflicted; we were pinned there like a row of butterflies, flapping weakly against the insurmountable forces of the elements ranged against us. I could hear nothing over the tumult of wind and music, so whatever Jay was helpfully shouting at me was lost forever.

It wasn’t a true dance-off, of course. For that we’d need rules and judges and an audience and costumes and there was no chance of any of that.

This was a contest of magick, expressed through music. And dance. That being so, it might be considered unwise of me to challenge a group of angry Yllanfalen; proposing to compete with them in a contest of musical magick is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Oops.

That said, we had Jay. And Indira.

And me.

‘I’m going to do my brilliant and incredibly effective music-thing,’ is what I guessed Jay was trying to yell at me. Because he straightened after that, and began walking directly into that fell wind with all the controlled power of an action hero. He stretched out a hand to Indira, and she took it in a white-knuckled grip.

The two siblings advanced on our foes like an unstoppable tide.

The glaistigs might have opened with music, but they were dancing, too. Sort of. The swaying had turned into a fluid, free-form, interpretive-dance situation; very Kate Bush in ‘Wuthering Heights’. More graceful than it sounds, despite the flailing arms and flying hair.

The roar of music began, blessedly, to diminish. Soon I could hear Jay. He was shouting something.

‘Your turn, Ves.’

Right.

There are two main advantages to long attendance at boarding school, and those are: boredom, and extracurricular activities. There isn’t much to do during evenings and weekends. It’s homework or dance classes, and what kind of a person chooses homework?

Ballet was Mondays, tap on Tuesdays, jazz on Thursdays and ballroom on the weekends. I had range. And, okay, I hadn’t done any of those things for some time, but my body remembered the moves.

I crossed the floor in a series of piqué turns (passable), ending with an arabesque. Pirouette en dedans, messed up my fouetté but never mind, onto a series of chaînés, bourrée—

‘Ves,’ Jay was yelling. ‘You’re supposed to have shoes for that.’

Yes, yes I was. Pointe shoes, with wooden blocks to protect the toes (or mince them, whichever happened first).

‘It may surprise you to learn that pointe shoes are not typically included in my emergency travel kit.’ I was a little out of breath, being more than a little out of practice, but my toes were fine, because where I lacked suitable shoes I didn’t lack for suitable magick. If I could manipulate the air around me to open a bunch of doors, I could sure as hell use it to waft myself along like a dandelion seed on the wind.

The effect was charming, if I do say so myself.

My routine set, I caught Zareen up and drew her along with me. Piqué, arabesque, pirouette en dedans, fouetté — and Indira made three, and we were a flurry of leaves floating on the wind, Indira a being of perfect grace, Zareen a sweeping figure of intense, concentrated motion—

Jay shook his head, but resistance was futile, and he knew it.

***

And that’s how we ended up at saut de basque sodecha, by way of a solid series of jetés, pirouettes à la seconde and a pretty spectacular cabriole.

Maintaining sole control over a five-person dance troupe without messing it (or them) up or shredding my own sanity? No picnic. If I wasn’t Merlin there’s no way I could have pulled it off. And I’m pretty sure this is not what Ophelia had in mind when she handed over the keys to an ancient and indescribably powerful magickal archetype, but what can I say? Nobody died. A few pulled muscles were sustained and a bruise or two, but there was no bloodshed whatsoever and everybody walked away sane. Who can say fairer than that?

Half an hour later, we were winded and sweating and aching in more than a few places.

‘Double tour en l’air, Ves,’ Jay insisted, so I obliged, and I regretted it, but fair’s fair.

Then it was Emellana’s turn. She isn’t built for ballet, but let me tell you, she’s spectacular at flamenco.

Jay and I closed with a dazzling waltz.

‘Wonderful job, everyone,’ I applauded, gasping for air and smiling from ear to ear.

‘Fantastic,’ Zareen panted. ‘Just one problem.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’ve lost our opponents.’

I turned around, searching the ballroom. No glaistigs visible to the eye. No glaistigs visible to my other senses, either.

They’d gone.

‘I’ve found a skeleton,’ I said aloud. The words burst from my lips, quite loud; the product of pure surprise. Of all the things I might have expected to find in here, contorted skeletal remains definitely weren’t it.

The poor soul had not enjoyed a peaceful death. That much seemed clear from the pose: twisted as though in agony, mouth agape. I could tell little else: clothes and flesh alike were long decayed, leaving only bones and dust.

I backed away, returning to the table.

The house was curiously intact, considering the state of its occupant. A pottery plate and cup stood atop the table; nothing valuable in either, but still odd. Possessions tend to be passed on when their owner dies, and considering the antiquity of this cottage and its contents, they most certainly would have found a home elsewhere. Useful objects were in short supply back in the mists of time; you couldn’t just pop down to Tesco to replace a broken glass or a chipped plate. People repaired things. People reused things. So what were these still doing here?

I poked around a bit more, and found various other articles forgotten by time: a hair comb of yellowed bone, an iron pot, a set of copper syrinx pipes.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard Jay calling my name.

‘Let me guess,’ I said, going to the door. ‘You’ve found dead people.’

‘They’re just — lying there.’ He looked disturbed. Agitated. He gestured, sweepingly, towards a couple of houses across the street. ‘Like they lay down in bed and nobody ever came back for them.’

‘They look… pained,’ Indira added, coming up behind Jay. ‘Like they suffered.’

I exited the cottage and took several long steps away from it, as though I could leave the terrible vision of its owner’s last moments behind me. ‘Same story in there. The house is full of stuff. I think you’re right, Jay. No one ever did come back for them.’

I looked around for Zareen, but couldn’t see her.

Em, though. She’d wandered away from her original spot, was coming towards us. Her face was drawn, ashen. I waited, sickened, for her insight.

‘There isn’t much left to find,’ she said when she reached us. ‘But there are traces of big magick.’

‘Big, bad magick,’ I guessed.

She nodded. ‘I’ve come across something like this once before.’ She stopped.

We waited, but she only frowned, troubled.

‘Where?’ I finally prompted.

She sighed. ‘There was a village in the Rhine valley. Lassenthaler. Some kind of feud got out of hand, and… someone worked a hex.’

‘A hex?’ I stared. ‘I didn’t know — is that even possible?’

Her mouth twisted, half wry, half disgusted. ‘They don’t teach it at the Hidden University, Ves. You can see why. This is what a hex does.’ She gestured around at the dead and rotting village of Silvessen, littered with the bones and abandoned possessions of its inhabitants.

Of course, nobody had come back for them. There’d been no one left to come back for them.

‘A hex can be like a curse of misfortune,’ Emellana continued. ‘You can twist somebody until they destroy themselves, they can’t help it. Or it can be like — this. A kind of plague. Far more contagious than any natural plague, because it’s baked into the bricks of every house in the village. It cannot be avoided. And it kills.’

Silence followed Emellana’s revelations. I didn’t know what to say. My mind shied away from the enormity of what somebody had done to Silvessen.

‘Why would somebody do that?’ Indira finally said. Her voice was very quiet, like she felt compelled to ask the question but did not really want to think about the answer.

‘Some people are abominations.’ Emellana’s answer was rather short, almost snapped. She didn’t want to think about it, either.

I physically shook myself. ‘Right. We need to move on.’

‘Ves,’ said Jay. ‘No. We need to do something about this.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We can’t just leave all these poor people here. They should be — buried, or something. Laid to rest. And we will. But we can’t do that in the next hour.’

He sighed, and cast a last, lingering look at the cottage he and Indira had explored. ‘I suppose we’ll never know who did it, or why.’

I wasn’t so sure. My mind had wandered back to the glaistigs at the big house. Their state made a lot more sense, now. They were spirits who hadn’t departed the way they were supposed to — however that worked — because they’d had too much bitterness, too much rage. And they had a right to that rage.

But I wondered. They were some of the victims of this tragedy — weren’t they?

Was the perpetrator lurking up there, too?

‘We should be careful,’ I said.

Jay looked at me like I’d just announced an intention to quit the Society and take up a new life as a legal secretary, or possibly a call centre operative. ‘Careful?’ he repeated. ‘You?’

I scowled. ‘I do caution.’

‘When?’

‘Right now. We’re going back up there and we’ll be all kinds of cautious.’

‘Ves. Going back there is the opposite of cautious. You can see how that works, right?’

Apparently my dark little thought had occurred to Jay, too. ‘We’re going to need their permission to bury these people,’ I pointed out. ‘Some of these remains probably belong to them.’

Jay gave that sigh he does when I’m right, and he’s annoyed about it. ‘Fine. One question to go.’

‘First we need Zar—’

‘Right here,’ came Zareen’s voice. Sort of. It had a hollow quality to it that I didn’t like, and a coarseness. She didn’t speak so much as she rasped, and something about it made my skin prickle.

I turned around with pounding heart.

I take back what I said before. I’m not getting used to the way Zareen looks when she’s deep in the Stranger Arts, and I never, ever will.

‘Where’ve you been,’ I croaked.

She smiled, and I wished she wouldn’t. She looked like she had just crawled out of her own grave, having been down there quite some time: skeletal and bone-pale, her dark hair wreathing her head like black smoke, eyes dark, deeply sunken hollows. Her smile was a death’s head grimace.

‘I’ve been having a chat with the fine people of Silvessen,’ she said in answer.

‘You found them.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ The smile stretched.

I shuddered. ‘Zar, I can’t express how much I respect your work, but you’re scary beyond all reason.’

‘I know.’ She smirked.

‘Em thinks Silvessen was hexed.’

‘She’s right. Nasty stuff.’

‘Okay. So we’ll do something important and respectful about that soon, but for now, we’ve answered question two.’

‘Maybe,’ said Indira.

Everyone looked at her, which made her so uncomfortable she transferred her own gaze to her feet.

‘Maybe?’ I prompted.

‘It’s just that it’s odd phrasing,’ she informed her shoes. ‘A more natural way to phrase the question might have been: “What happened to Silvessen?” Or, “What became of the town?” But she said: “How did Silvessen die?”’

‘True,’ said Jay, frowning. ‘You don’t normally talk about a town’s having died. You say that about a person.’

Indira nodded.

‘So you think it’s a trick question,’ I concluded. ‘She wasn’t talking about the town. She was talking about a person the town was named after.’

‘Somebody important,’ Emellana said. ‘Somebody who would live in the best house.’

‘The biggest one,’ I sighed. ‘The really haunted one.’

‘Social leaders are also spokespeople,’ Jay suggested. ‘They take the lead.’

Zareen grinned. ‘Yeah. I think we’ve met her.’

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘it’s time to go talk to her again.’

***

‘We’re ready,’ I said, half an hour later.

We’d made it back to the ballroom with mere minutes to spare. The house hadn’t wanted to let us back in; the front door was locked, and no amount of pounding upon it or jiggling the handle had made any difference. Closed.

Just when I’d begun to wonder if we’d been played — that first question hadn’t been a question at all, merely a means of getting us out of the building — Indira found a side door that swung open at a touch. On the other side of it was the ballroom.

My words echoed in the empty air, settling like dust.

The air shimmered, and the glaistig appeared. The ghost of Silvessen?

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘The first question: which door leads outside?’

I pointed at the door through which we’d entered. It still stood open, revealing the dead earth beyond.

She didn’t blink. ‘The second. How did Silvessen die?’

‘She died from a hex,’ I answered.

No reaction to that, either. ‘The third. What am I thinking?’

‘To that question, I have several answers,’ I replied. ‘You’re thinking that we are a cursed nuisance and you would like us to leave, but also that we make a convenient stand-in for whoever worked that hex and you’d like to torture us a bit more, too. You’re thinking that the world and everyone in it owes you something for the injustice of your death, and that of your townspeople. And in all of the above points, you’re right. More or less. There has been a terrible injustice done you, and we have been pretty annoying.’

No response. Silvessen, if it was she, stared at me in silence.

‘Besides that,’ I continued, unfazed. ‘You’re thinking that when I said a contest of physical prowess I meant a fight. With weapons. Possibly to the death. And you liked that idea, because the angry part of you really wants an excuse to hurt somebody.’

Finally: a reaction. Her features tightened, as though a frown or a grimace were suppressed. ‘And was I right in that, as well?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid not.’

She inclined her head, seemingly an admission of defeat. ‘Well, then. In what way am I to be challenged?’

I smiled, removing my thick winter coat, and hurled it at the nearest wall. ‘I challenge you,’ I said, raising my voice, so the syllables echoed off the bare, mouldy walls. ‘To a dance-off.’

‘A game?’ Jay echoed. Released from my mental grip, he took a quick step back from me, shaking his head.

I felt a stab of guilt, and tried an apologetic smile. Jay didn’t smile back.

Note to self, Ves: don’t push your friends around. Ever.

I set the thought aside. ‘A game,’ I repeated. It was a gamble, I admit, but at least maybe we could all get out of this without bloodshed. Or defeat. ‘Winner takes all,’ I added, recklessly.

The fae often like games. I don’t mean cute parlour games like Charades, or a round of Cluedo. The fae — some of them — enjoy risky games with difficult win conditions and high stakes. Beating them at any game they’d consent to play wouldn’t be easy.

But they also tended to be sticklers for honour. If we could pull it off, they’d fulfil any win conditions set.

I certainly had the attention of the glaistigs, though they didn’t speak. All four of them watched me with their pallid eyes, still and focused as a predator stalking defenceless prey…

Jay’s face clearly said: I hope you know what you’re doing, Ves.

I hoped so, too. But I thought of the tricks and stratagems they’d displayed so far — waltzing, for heaven’s sake — and thought that maybe I was on the right track.

They seemed to like playing games.

‘If we win,’ I went on, ‘You consent to let us leave without further interference, and we’re permitted to test our device in the village before we go home.’

The glaistigs didn’t move.

‘If you win,’ I continued, ‘You can do with us whatever you like.’

‘Ves.’ Emellana uttered my name low, warningly. Too late. I could only shrug. I’d committed us, and I’d done so with the fullest confidence that my team could beat these creatures at any conceivable game. There hadn’t really been the option to talk it over first.

And it was still better than a pitched battle. Right?

‘One more thing,’ I added, as the glaistigs stirred. ‘In any duel of honour, the challenged party gets to choose the method of combat. And since we were subjected to an unprovoked attack, and have yet to level any harm whatsoever in return, that privilege is ours.’

Zareen folded her arms. Her expression was hard, unreadable, but her attention was focused on the glaistigs. Emellana had closed up, too, hiding any further thoughts she was experiencing as to my reckless gambit.

Indira and Jay were stoic. I chose to interpret this as support.

‘Not so,’ said the glaistig, the chatty one. ‘You trespassed.’

‘Unknowingly,’ I said quickly. ‘We thought the house empty, because you hid yourselves from us.’

They muttered at this, and a chill wind wafted past my face. I tried not to let my deepening unease show on my face.

‘You trespassed,’ said the glaistig again.

‘Fine. Then there shall be two events, one to be chosen by each party.’

More muttering. More rage.

I stood my ground, and waited.

‘We agree,’ said the glaistig at last.

‘Excellent.’ I beamed, trying not to imagine what they might like to do with us if we lost. ‘What, then, is your choice?’

‘A contest of wits,’ came the answer, though it was not the same glaistig who spoke. This one stood to my right, and came drifting nearer, smiling in ominous fashion. The expression stretched her face too wide.

‘Then our choice shall be a contest of physical valour,’ I countered.

‘Done.’

‘What if it’s a draw?’ asked Jay. ‘We each lose one and win one.’

‘It won’t be a draw.’ I smiled with as much palpable confidence as I could muster. It couldn’t be a draw. We needed to win, decisively enough to leave no doubt in the minds of these ghostly ladies that we’d bested them fair and square. Or there’d be complications, and I hate that.

Jay only sighed.

‘Well then, shall we begin?’ I directed my smile at the more talkative of the glaistigs, and waited.

She did not immediately answer. Instead, she drew herself up to her full height — rather more considerable than mine, though she was shorter than Emellana. I mean, who isn’t?

Something was changing about her. She grew, steadily, less ethereal; more solid; the tattery blue gown mended its rips and rents before my eyes, and knitted itself back into the semblance of a whole, respectable garment. Her hair ceased to toss in an invisible breeze, hanging straight and black around a face no longer withered and weathered with time.

Before me stood a woman who was, unmistakeably, Yllanfalen.

The same transformation took place among her companions, and I mentally rearranged my ideas as to the nature of Silvessen. It had been an Yllanfalen town. Interesting.

Lucky I hadn’t declared a musical contest, although we did have Jay…

‘A contest of wits,’ said the tall Yllanfalen. Her voice had ceased to hiss and slither; now it was ringing and clear. ‘Questions, then.’

By which she meant: riddles. Inevitably. I suppressed a sigh. Fae and their riddles.

‘To win, you must answer three questions to our satisfaction,’ she continued. ‘If you fail to answer all three, the contest is forfeit.’

‘We accept,’ came the answer, though for once it wasn’t from me. It was Indira who spoke, and she uttered the words with every bit as much confidence as our challenger. She’d drawn herself up, too, even if her height wasn’t so imposing, and stood with her chin high.

Interestingly, her dress had also mended itself.

I shot a look at Jay, containing a question. Is she good at riddles?

The tiny smirk I received in reply proved answer enough.

A little of my tension eased.

‘Very well. Then: listen.’ Our challenger looked at each of us in turn. ‘Your first question. Which door leads outside?’

I opened my mouth, foolishly; the answer seemed obvious, therefore it must be anything but.

Even as I framed the thought, the single door set into the far wall became two, then three, then more… the only thing I could feel certain of was: the original door was no longer the exit.

‘I suppose we can’t answer that by just trying them,’ I hazarded.

‘The first door you touch is your chosen answer,’ she replied.

‘Right.’

Indira spoke up. ‘Do you mean outside as in, out of this room? Or outside as in, out of the building?’

‘The latter.’ The words emerged snappishly; our questions were irritating our challenger.

‘Your second question,’ continued the glaistig. ‘How did Silvessen die?’

Not a riddle, then, but a question. A mystery. Unexpected.

‘Your third question: what am I thinking?’

Impossible to answer. The triumphant glint in our opponent’s eyes told me she knew it, too.

I looked at Indira. Her confidence hadn’t flickered.

I took heart.

‘We will require time to confer,’ I said.

‘You have one hour.’ With these words, the glaistig faded away, together with her companions.

We were left alone in the ballroom.

The silence lengthened.

‘Ves,’ Zareen said at last. ‘I’d ask if you’re sure about this, but it’s a bit late, isn’t it?’

‘I am sure,’ I said anyway. ‘We’ve got this.’

‘Might’ve been easier to just leave and pick a new ghost town.’

‘Might have,’ I agreed. ‘But probably not. Couple of hours, and we’ll be out of here.’

She answered only with a sour look, which I decided to interpret as concurrence.

‘So,’ I said, mostly to Indira. ‘We have a history quest, which we like.’

‘I do like history quests,’ she allowed.

‘To solve question two, we first need to get out of here, which means solving question one.’ I smiled hopefully.

‘And question three?’ Emellana put in. ‘That’s the deal-breaker.’

‘I’ll handle question three,’ I answered.

‘How?’

‘By wily means.’

‘In other words, cheating,’ said Jay.

‘Probably. But they cheated by giving us an unanswerable question, so I’d say all’s fair.’

Indira ignored the conversation. Her quick gaze was busy with the doors, all twelve of them.

‘The problem,’ she observed, ‘is: there aren’t any clues.’

True. Each door was identical to all the others: tall, wrought from dark wooden boards and set into stone frames with rounded arches. They all bore a heavy iron handle on the left side.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask.’

That won me a mystified look from more than just Indira, but we didn’t have time for a long conversation about it just then. I closed my eyes, tuned out my esteemed colleagues, and focused on the house.

I tried asking directly. Which door would take us outside? I layered the question with visions of fresh air, mud underfoot, and the scents of grass and leaf-mould.

Either the house didn’t understand me, or it didn’t choose to answer. Maybe it favoured the glaistigs. They’d been living here a while, presumably.

So I listened, instead. Go deep, Ves, Ophelia had said, and it had worked before.

I sat down, and dived deep into the stones of the haunted house. The air curled in sluggish gusts, stale; no one had opened a window in many a year. No one had needed to.

I drifted along with it, wafting past door after door. Did I detect a fresher note somewhere? A hint of a brisk breeze streaming under the boards…

No. It wasn’t going to be that simple, either.

Words pierced my awareness. Indira. ‘The first door you touch is your choice,’ she was saying. ‘Can we open them without touching them?’

A thought. A good one.

I caught up a current of air and fashioned it into a shape of my liking: a beguiling tendril, a flexible tool in my hands.

Away drifted my tendril, and tackled the nearest door. The latch clicked open.

I caught up all the air in the room, and sent it sailing after.

The door groaned as it slowly swung open.

I did not pause to survey the effects of my efforts; I still had eleven doors to open. No easy task, this. My focus fractured after the sixth, and only by ferocious effort of will could I bring my mind back to bear.

Five more, then three…

When I opened my eyes, all twelve doors stood open, and my four companions were staring at me with some perplexity.

‘How did you do that?’ Emellana asked.

‘I magicked it up out of thin air,’ I answered. Literally true.

This meant something to Em, though. She nodded, studying my face with interest. ‘You look a little different,’ said she.

‘I… do?’ I patted my hair, looked down at my clothes. No discernible change.

‘Your skin looks…’

Jay finished the sentence for her. ‘Stony.’

Stony? Had I become one with the house so thoroughly that I was starting to meld with it?

Hideous thought. Also, considering what had happened with the Fairy Stone, interesting.

‘It’ll get better,’ I said, with a confidence I had no reason to feel. Now wasn’t the time either to explore that idea or to panic about it. My skin would have to remember what a Ves looks like on its own.

‘Merlin stuff?’ Zareen asked.

‘Presumably. It’s hard to tell.’ Which was true. It’s not like Merlin’s borrowed powers had awarded me some kind of a magickal toolbox I could draw from at will. I could no longer tell where my magickal efforts were coming from; I was just doing different things. Sometimes.

My peculiar efforts had paid off, this time: one of the dozen doors opened onto a barren field of scrubby grass, and in the near distance, the houses of Silvessen.

‘One question down,’ I said, satisfied. ‘Next.’

‘How did Silvessen die.’ Emellana shook her head. ‘There’s so rarely a single reason why a settlement, or a civilisation, fails. The contributing factors are usually myriad, and complex. Understanding them requires far more research than we can accomplish in an hour.’

‘Another unanswerable question, then,’ said Zareen. ‘I think we’ve been tricked.’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I mean, there is probably a trick in there somewhere.’

Silence fell. We were all looking at Indira.

‘I have an idea about that,’ she said. ‘But nothing to suggest it might be correct. Did anyone find a library anywhere?’

Jay rolled his eyes. ‘You mean while we were wandering around stewing in our own fears? No.’

‘I did,’ said Emellana. ‘If you could call it that. Only a few volumes survive, and they’re mostly rotted away.’

I thought about consulting Mauf, but discarded the idea. He’d already been consulted, and had uncovered barely anything about Silvessen. Only Sumla of Witheridge’s account of it as ‘a deathly place’, which sounded accurate to me. Plus something about a wand-wright.

‘No library,’ I mused aloud. ‘And no help from Mauf. How do we solve a mystery without books, team?’

‘I hope that isn’t just a hypothetical question,’ said Jay.

‘It’s not. It’s time for a thrilling exercise in impromptu field archaeology.’ I marched towards the door showing us the view of Silvessen; it was probably only ten minutes’ walk from here. Maybe less.

‘We don’t have time for a lot of digging,’ Jay pointed out, but he did follow me.

‘No, true. We’ll have to rely on what we can see above ground.’

‘We do have me,’ Emellana remarked.

Right. Em and her capacity to sense traces of past magicks. ‘You think there might be some magickal reason why Silvessen died?’ I asked.

‘It’s a recurring theme lately.’

‘True,’ I allowed. She was referring to Farringale, plus a few other troll Enclaves that had been choked out by the parasitical ortherex. ‘But this isn’t a troll settlement.’ We could be certain of that. The houses we’d passed in the village were nowhere near large enough, nor did they exhibit any recognisable features of troll architecture.

‘Nonetheless, it’s a possibility,’ Em replied, which was true.

‘Zar,’ I said, as we set off across the rough, half-frozen earth between us and Silvessen. ‘Let us know if you can sense any more lingering spirits somewhere out here.’

‘Didn’t before, but I can try.’

Indira said nothing, which wasn’t unusual. I didn’t press her about the idea she’d mentioned. she didn’t like to hazard guesses unless they were likely to prove correct; I’d noticed this before. Perfectionism, of a sort. She’d tell us when she had evidence, and that had to be good enough.

Back in Silvessen, we gathered in a ragged knot in the middle of the main street, glancing uncertainly at the still and silent houses in their dejected, tumble-down rows. I checked the time. Twenty-two minutes had passed since the challenge began, and we’d need ten minutes to get back to the house. Less than half an hour to investigate.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘This is one time when it makes sense to split up.’

Jay didn’t oppose me, for once. ‘We’ll go this way,’ he announced, drawing Indira towards the tallest building in the street: a cottage of two complete storeys, the roof mostly fallen in.

Zareen set off in the opposite direction, and Emellana chose to stay where she was. Her eyes were closed. I figured she was communing with the remains of long-faded magicks, and let her be.

I picked a little house with crooked oak beams and gaping windows like lachrymose eyes, and headed for the doorway. Less than half of the door remained, hanging limply from rusted hinges. I stepped over it, and went inside.

I was immediately struck by the strangeness of the place. The remains of furniture were in evidence, albeit of a simple kind: plain oak construction, any upholstery long rotted away. A low table took pride of place in the single chamber, a pair of chairs accompanying it. One of these was pushed back, as if someone had but lately risen from it. But the quantity of dust and mould everywhere told me that couldn’t be the case.

At the rear of the room, an oaken frame suggested the erstwhile presence of a simple bed. Time had reduced the mattress and blankets to a decayed and indeterminate mass; in the gloom, I could distinguish little clearly.

It took me a long moment before I realised, with a thrill of horror, that the bed’s long-dead occupant was still in it.

The house was waiting, and I don’t say that lightly. A great, soaring construct of dark stone and heavy wood, bristling with chimneys and begrimed windows, it crouched there like a spider awaiting the approach of dinner.

I felt watched by a hundred eyes.

Zareen halted first. And if the Scary Lady’s too intimidated to proceed, then the rest of us sure as hell aren’t going anywhere. We stopped as a group, and stared up at the place with collective unease.

Finally, Zareen shook her head. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘This is all too obvious.’

‘Too… obvious?’ Jay echoed.

‘Look at it.’ She made a dramatic, disgusted gesture at the terrible house. ‘It could have been taken from a textbook on haunted houses. Even the Addams Family had more subtlety than this.’

‘You do have a point, except I’m fairly sure I’m not getting it,’ I said.

‘The point.’ Zareen considered. ‘Exactly. What is the point of it? I’d say it’s being operated by people who’d like to be left alone, and we’re supposed to be too scared to go in. But then all they had to do was hide. Even I might never have realised this was here.’ She took a few steps forward, visibly squaring up to the house. ‘Instead, they’ve rolled out a red carpet leading straight to the door, which means we’re supposed to go in, but for no purpose we’re likely to enjoy.’

A fell gust of wind swept up at her words and howled through the clearing, freezing me to my bones. I began to shiver.

‘So,’ I said, slowly. ‘Are you saying we go in, or not?’

‘I’m saying…’ Zareen lifted her voice, and screamed into the wind, ‘Challenge accepted, bitches!’

She went forward with the unstoppable stride of a general at the head of an invincible army (which we weren’t, but I didn’t feel like telling her that). The damned door swung slowly open as she approached, complete with a terrible, wrenching groan. There was a light behind it, but not the welcoming kind.

Zareen, unfazed, stepped over the threshold.

I’m both pleased and sorry to say that the rest of us were right behind her.

The door — or more rightly doors, for they were enormous double doors of iron-hinged oak — swung shut behind us, with a boom that echoed through the house.

Jay, behind me, tested the handles. ‘Locked,’ he confirmed.

‘Well,’ I said cheerfully. ‘We’re in for it now.’

‘Hello?’ Zareen yelled. The word echoed and echoed, the sounds taking far too long to fade.

Indira and Emellana were silent, alert, looking around. So was I.

The hallway was huge and empty. Completely empty. The dark stone walls were unplastered and unadorned, the floor of near-black oak boards was bare, and there wasn’t a lick of furniture. An enormous staircase wound its way up to a higher floor, bare of carpets but lined with ornate iron-wrought banisters. Passageways opened off the hallway on either side, leading into dark places I didn’t really want to go into.

I couldn’t see where the light was coming from. We should have been shrouded in total darkness; there were no lamps, no sconces, no chandelier. But a strange glow came from somewhere; just enough for us to see where we were going, nowhere near enough for us to feel comfortable.

Good times.

‘All right, we’ll have to do this the fun way,’ said Zareen, brightly, but with a brittle note to the words. I fervently hoped she was as well recovered as Milady seemed to think she was. Nothing about this house was going to be easy.

I watched as the whites of her eyes filled in with black and, shuddering, looked away. I’ve seen that happen a few times before. I’m getting used to it by now. Sort of.

Everyone seemed to judge it best not to rush the Scary Lady, so we waited in uneasy silence while Zareen did… whatever it is that Zareen does when her eyes turn into twin pools of fathomless shadow.

At length she said: ‘Well, we’ve got company.’

‘Figured,’ said Jay tightly.

‘Quite a lot of it. In fact, I’d say the whole damned village is hanging around out here.’

‘Any idea why?’ I put in.

‘They aren’t talking.’

‘Hey,’ I said, more loudly. ‘You wanted us to come here, well, we’re here. And we’re not here to cause anyone any harm, but we are rather busy. So tell us what you want, and maybe we can make some kind of arrangement.’

Zareen sighed. ‘Far as I can judge, we have a host of silent spirits and a few… ringleaders.’

‘These ringleaders are controlling the others?’ Emellana asked.

‘I believe so. They’re certainly running this little show. But they won’t speak to me directly.’

A door to the left of the hallway creaked as it swung open.

‘That’s clear enough,’ said Jay.

‘Too clear,’ said I. ‘We’re not playing this game.’

‘Ves,’ Zareen hissed in a whisper. ‘If you think I can exorcise this many spirits then please, get your head out of the clouds.’

‘So we are playing this game.’

‘For now.’

Emellana sat down in the middle of the hall, which was brave of her, because the place was bone-chillingly cold and that stone floor had to be freezing. She placed both her hands palm-flat against the floor, eyes closed. I wasn’t particularly surprised when she presently said: ‘A lot has occurred here. Most of it would fall within the realms of Zareen’s particular arts, I would judge.’

‘Yes,’ said Zareen tightly. ‘Lots of very bad things.’

If I was parsing that correctly, Zareen and Emellana were implying that the departed inhabitants of the former village of Silvessen were still in residence in this ancient wreck of a house, but was that by their own volition or not? Were they the captives of these ringleaders Zareen spoke of, or were we dealing with a swarm of ghosts all in horrible league with one another?

Questions, questions.

I eyed the door that had opened in dreadful invitation. Whatever lurked beyond it lay sunk in impenetrable shadow.

‘Okay.’ I sat down in the middle of the floor and opened my bag, emptying it of one last item of special interest. The plastic wrapping crackled promisingly as I spread it open, revealing a hoard of treasure.

‘Ves?’ said Jay, doing his befuddled-face with the eyebrows. ‘What are we doing?’

‘Council of war,’ I answered. ‘Please, join me.’

Jay was the first to do so, proving himself a staunch sidekick once again (even if he did roll his eyes a bit on the way down). He sat cross-legged at my left elbow, shrugging his shoulders in answer to his sister’s look of puzzled enquiry. Indira followed suit, and Emellana. Zareen was the last, and I didn’t rush her. She was still more nearly resembling some kind of semi-undead horror than the woman I knew, and you don’t hassle people fitting that description if you know what’s good for you.

She sat opposite me, and stared at me with those blank black eyes.

I met them squarely.

‘I hereby declare the first Semi-Recumbent Biscuit Council in session,’ I announced. ‘Please take a comestible.’

From the hoard of treasure I’d brought, Jay selected a custard cream. Indira chose a bourbon biscuit, Emellana a shortbread finger and Zareen a gingernut.

I grabbed a chocolate Hobnob.

Twenty seconds of quiet ingestion of sugar followed, after which the atmosphere of tension had somewhat eased.

‘Right,’ I proceeded. ‘We have choices. Option one: we declare this entire building Someone Else’s Problem and walk away.’

‘The doors are locked,’ Zareen reminded me.

‘Yes, but Jay has that thing where he makes fathomless voids in obstacles through which a person may safely escape, and while his personal ethics are frequently against his actually using it, I believe this occasion may prove an exception. Is that the case?’ I raised an eyebrow at Jay.

He actually paused to think about it; apparently something in him still felt like it would be wrong to make a hole in someone’s front door for his personal convenience, even if the convenience in question consisted of escaping an eldritch horror. But he nodded. ‘I could do that.’

‘But then do we test the regulator or not?’ Indira asked.

‘If we don’t,’ Emellana put in, ‘we will have wasted the time, and the opportunity. It won’t be so easy to keep sneaking out of our respective organisations without our purpose being divined.’

‘I would prefer to complete the assignment,’ I agreed. ‘Can we test it in the village without disturbing the residents of this house?’

‘That seems unethical,’ Jay argued. ‘They may no longer be alive, but they are still technically in residence. Silvessen was chosen for being, supposedly, unoccupied.’

I looked at Zareen. ‘And you don’t think we can, um, render it unoccupied.’

‘I sure as hell can’t.’ She shook her head. ‘Besides, while it pains me to sound like Jay—’

‘Thanks,’ Jay said.

‘—it’s considered unethical to perform exorcisms without either the spirit’s consent or clear cause, such as a direct threat to one’s own personal safety or that of someone else.’ She sounded like she was quoting from a health-and-safety manual, which, perhaps, she was. ‘That goes triple for mass exorcisms,’ she continued. ‘Even if I were capable of it, we can’t just vaporise all these spirits merely because they’re in our way.’

‘So we need their consent,’ I concluded. ‘Either to exorcise them, or to perform the test of the regulator while they remain in residence.’

Zareen and Jay both nodded. So did Indira.

Emellana and I remained dubious; I read doubt in her face, and she notably failed to concur with the others. No wonder. She’d spent her long lifetime travelling the world, undergoing numerous and challenging adventures in the name of magickal progress. A little problem like this wouldn’t seem like much to her, and she had probably done worse than exorcise a few cantankerous (and likely dangerous) spirits in her time.

Me, I just wanted to get the job done, and I never take well to pointless obstruction.

But Jay’s grasp of ethics is superb, and I trust him.

‘Perhaps we can attempt a negotiation,’ I suggested to Zareen. I surveyed the remains of the broken biscuit box I’d brought, through which we’d been steadily munching our way as we talked. We had several decent biscuits left, mostly intact, and even a couple of chocolate ones. ‘Might they accept two custard creams, several Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, some rich tea biscuits and a chocolate bourbon in exchange for leaving us to work in peace?’

‘Ves,’ said Zareen, ‘I know this can seem like a foreign concept to you, but these people aren’t friendly and we do actually have to take this seriously.’

Coming from the woman who’d once turned all the oak trees lining House’s driveway upside down, just for fun, that had to mean something. ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘What do they want?’

‘That seems clear,’ said Jay. ‘They want us to go through that door.’

‘Where we will doubtless encounter a nameless but horrifying doom.’

‘Bound to.’

‘All in favour?’ I proposed.

Everyone glanced at the shadowy door.

Nobody raised their hand.

‘Me neither,’ I agreed. ‘Zar, what information do you have about them?’

‘Some are human,’ she replied. ‘Or, they were in life. Some weren’t. A mixed settlement. But the ones who are running this show, they definitely aren’t. Or weren’t. Aren’t? To be honest with you, I’m not certain all of them are even dead. Technically.’

That boded ill. The kinds of non-human beings whose day-to-day business proved relevant to the School of Weird were not good news.

‘Fae?’ I prompted.

‘Glaistig,’ she replied. ‘I think. More than one.’

I searched my memory. I haven’t run into a glaistig before, but as I recall from my university days, they aren’t necessarily malevolent, though if you catch one in a bad mood then they can be very bad news. They’re usually female, usually ghostly, and always complicated.

Judging from the signs, we were dealing with the malevolent type. Possibly vengeful.

‘Still not talking?’ Jay prompted.

Zareen shook her head.

It was Emellana who polished off the last biscuit, and rose to her feet. ‘We appear to have two choices,’ she said as she hauled herself off the floor. ‘Either we find out what they want, or we leave.’

Two things nobody wanted to do.

Oh well. Life’s tough.

‘If anything happens to me,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Tell Addie I love her.’

With which words, I completed my dramatic exit by making straight for the beckoning door, and going through it.

Darkness swallowed me, and all sounds of my companions faded.