by Whisht.
The sound broke in upon my reverie. Light splintered.
I woke up, partially.
I wasn’t Ves just then. I couldn’t have said what I had done with my eyes or my limbs or my fabulous hair, nor what shape I presently wore. I felt at ease with the landscape, as though I had grown there. Perhaps I had.
Cordelia Vesper, came the voice again, and I had regained enough of myself to recognise Baroness Tremayne’s tones.
How she perceived me in that state, I couldn’t imagine.
Baroness? I attempted to reply.
I sense you but I see nothing of you. How comes this about?
I mulled over how to answer that, when I had so little information myself. What had I done, exactly? What did I look like, just then? I’ll explain later, I decided, for time pressed, and I had no idea how long I had spent in my sunlit haze. Can you get Jay and Rob in, without their being seen? They’re waiting just outside the portal.
Cannot you?
Fair question, that. Since I had no real idea what I had done to myself, I had no real idea how to do the same to anyone else—nor even if it were possible. I was hoping you could take all of us into the echoes, I went on, ignoring that question too.
A moment.
A flash and a sickening shift; I felt wrenched out of the earth, like an uprooted tree.
Golden light dimmed to a pale, muted silver, and the soft sounds of the city—birdsong, the wind through ancient eaves, and, somewhere, voices—faded. I felt swaddled in mist, my senses muffled.
I had passed into the baroness’s strange world.
‘Ves,’ someone was calling, thin, distorted sounds, as though we hung suspended underwater. Jay. He was here somewhere.
I steadied myself with a breath or two, and looked about me. The baroness had moved me in distance as well as time; I stood in a white-walled room, small by troll standards. A single armchair rested, lonely, in a corner, besides which the chamber bore scant decoration: a plain stone mantel crowned a narrow fireplace; shelves built into the walls might once have held books; the bare boards of the floor might once have been covered with a cheerful rug. Perhaps I was in one of those modest merchant’s townhouses I’d seen on a prior visit. Shadows flickered oddly in the corners, light crackled and shifted; I blinked, shaking my head. I don’t know how Baroness Tremayne has contrived to live in this odd, mutable space for so many years. Perhaps she finds solidity disconcerting, now.
A door stood open opposite me, and in another moment Jay barrelled through it. ‘There you are,’ he said, with palpable relief.
My heart eased a notch at the sight of him. ‘Is Rob with you?’
He jerked his head in terse reply: behind him.
I couldn’t see the baroness, but this was her turf: she, of all of us, could be relied upon to handle it.
Her voice emanated out of nowhere even as I framed the thought, and I jumped. Art prepared?
Were we prepared. For what? Disasters innumerable and unnameable? Almost certain catastrophe? Slight, but not insignificant risk of actual death?
Eh, probably. I’ve got used to calling that “Tuesday”.
‘Art prepared,’ I answered firmly. ‘Ready for mission briefing.’
This puzzled the baroness; there was a palpable pause. I’d forgotten, for a moment, how she lived—giving new meaning to the term “out of touch”. ‘Occupation,’ she said after a moment, ‘seems centred around the library, though there are pockets of activity in other places.’
The library. Of course, the first thing these people had done upon invading Farringale was take control of the library.
Although… I frowned, rapidly revising my ideas. The first thing I would do upon invading a sovereign territory—however empty—would be to take over the library. But this wasn’t me. ‘Who are these people,’ I muttered, though I was beginning to develop an idea. If the library was their first, or even sole, objective, then they were a lot like us—only more ruthless.
‘Three guesses,’ said Jay.
‘Too generous,’ put in Rob.
I was beginning to agree. If I didn’t find Fenella Beaumont somewhere at the back of this mess, I might be eating a couple of hats.
I sighed. ‘Let’s go to the library, then,’ words I usually uttered with more genuine joy, it has to be said.
I braced myself against another sickening lurch through space and time, but nothing happened. ‘Tis but a short distance,’ the baroness told us. ‘This is the librarians’ quarters.’
I imagined a complex of dormitories, like a university campus, all housing the multitudinous librarians that must once have staffed the sprawling archives of Farringale: part of a bustling hive of intellectual activity, the likes of which the world may never have seen again. The shattering tragedy of its loss hit me afresh.
‘Oh,’ said Jay, realisation dawning, as I continued to stand there. ‘I’m up.’
‘Delighted as I generally am to lead,’ I confirmed, ‘I’m still me.’ Merlin or not, I still couldn’t find my way out of a paper bag without assistance.
Jay went to the door and passed out of the room, Rob motioning me to follow. He brought up the rear, guarding us, I supposed, from threats materialising behind us. Strange feeling; Farringale, as yet, seemed almost as empty as it had ever been, the only signs of other life hitherto being a faint babble of voices—and only then when I’d been merged with the land, Merlin-style. It felt almost like playing some kind of game; let’s pretend we’re on a quest to save a lost kingdom from a terrifying threat. I’ll be Merlin, you can be a Waymaster of indescribable power…
I followed Jay into a large vestibule, high of ceiling, with a pair of griffin statues flanking the tall door to the outside. Jay went straight out; I paused only to pat one of the statues on its smooth stone head as I passed. I couldn’t have said why. It seemed friendly.
The moment we stepped outside, all my comforting notions of make-believe fell into tatters.
Someone whisked past the librarian’s house, close enough to touch Jay: he halted abruptly. My heart stuttered; for an agonising moment I expected to be seen, to be caught; then the odd dimness of the noontide light, the shimmering, flickering haze over everything we saw, reminded me that we were undetectable. Hopefully.
We waited in brief, frozen silence, immobile—my mind spiralled back into childhood games and Granny’s Footsteps—a most inapposite desire to giggle rose in me, and I choked it down. The pressure was making me hysterical.
The person, whoever it was, passed by at a near-run, and it struck me that the hive of activity I’d been imagining moments before had returned to Farringale after all. If only they weren’t uninvited, irresponsible, and destructive—
‘This way,’ Jay whispered, stepping confidently out. I trailed after, heart pounding—it takes serious nerve to wander down a street, out in the open, and just trust that nobody will be able to see you.
Nobody did, but we saw plenty. Jay led us on a short, winding route around a cluster of stone-built houses—the rest of the librarians’ quarters, I supposed—and several people passed us, moving at considerable speed.
Now that we were closer, I was able to see that they were carrying armfuls of stuff. Books.
‘They’re stripping the library,’ I hissed, a surge of such rage swelling my heart that I couldn’t breathe.
‘I feel bound to point out that we did the same thing,’ Jay said. ‘Not that I mean to defend them, of course.’
‘We did not. We took several books, and only to save them. They’re taking—everything—’ I shut up, and breathed.
‘Maybe they’re saving them,’ Rob put in, but in a dry tone.
I scoffed audibly at that. ‘Of course they are. Zero personal interest involved.’
They were all human, these bustling thieves, which did not surprise me. Though the notable lack of any trolls did interest me a little: was that mere happenstance, or had these invaders known about the state of Farringale, known that any trolls they brought here would be in severe danger?
The existence of the ortherex; the fate of Farringale, and other Troll Enclaves; these things were not secrets, exactly. It had taken a huge, concerted effort to save some of the beleaguered Enclaves, involving the Society, the Troll Court, and other organisations; word of it must surely have spread.
Still. This was looking more and more like a carefully planned operation by somebody with considerable information. Someone who’d been paying close attention to what we had been doing this past year.
We turned a corner, and the library rose before us: a statuesque construct, a cathedral to knowledge, its gleaming white walls glittering with glass. Another person came barrelling out of the entrance as we watched and hurtled down the steps, a woman with soft brown hair, an armful of books, and a harried expression. They weren’t wasting any time: clearly they expected this incursion wouldn’t remain a secret for long.
Was this their only goal? Robbing the library?
Would that alone have rattled the unflappable baroness so?
Jay stealthed up the wide stone steps to the entrance, neatly evading further bandits dashing out with more books. I wondered where they were taking them, pictured trucks driven up to the gates of Farringale somewhere and filled up with stolen material. What a coup—if they could pull it off.
I smothered a rebellious corner of my soul that traitorously wished we had thought to come here with trucks and empty the library—there were reasons why we hadn’t, we had ethics and standards and we didn’t do this sort of thing, let it go, Ves—and followed Jay up the stairs.
Inside, chaos reigned.
On our last visit here, the library had been shrouded in dust and silence, like Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted tower. Spellbound, as though the city had fallen asleep, and might wake at any moment.
Now it bustled with the worst kind of activity. Easily twenty people were looting the shelves, hastily, haphazardly, scooping armloads of delicate tomes onto the floor and shoving them into boxes. Others merely grabbed eight or ten off the nearest shelf and ran for the door. I winced at the thud, thudding as more and more books fell off their shelves and landed in crashing heaps, sending waves of dust into the air.
Rage set my heart afire; I could have screamed my fury.
As much as I could understand the desire to loot every single page of precious knowledge out of the lost library of Farringale, I could never condone this—this—this travesty, this piracy. Nobody cared if the books were damaged during this shambles of a process; nor did they care that the right of ownership over them was emphatically not theirs.
They weren’t emptying the great library of Farringale; they were destroying it.
My feelings were echoed in Jay and Rob, for the three of us stood frozen in shared horror for some minutes. It defied belief, that anybody with a value for knowledge could treat the place with such a total lack of respect—how could they—
‘Right,’ I said, crisply, and the syllable contained worlds of steely resolution.
‘Right,’ Jay agreed, grim as death.
Rob merely nodded. We were agreed. Whatever it took, we were stopping these people.
But we were here on reconnaissance only. We didn’t have the numbers to mount a counter offensive, and it would take days to muster that kind of a force and get it all the way down here (we had only the one Waymaster, and there was no conceivable way Jay could be expected to cart a hundred Society members across such a distance).
By the haste with which these thieves were working, they knew this. They weren’t planning to be here in a few days’ time; they were getting the goods and getting out. By the time reinforcements arrived, it would be too late—at least for the library.
If there was ever a good time to go catastrophically, devastatingly Merlin on somebody, this was it.
