by 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 regular. 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.
An enraged griffin. A fathomless anger was there, and a din filled my ears as of a thousand griffins screaming in unison.
A unicorn, its hide rippling in waves of shifting colours. Its horn vanished, reappeared, multiplied; wings sprouted and faded; it melted into a pool of pale water and disappeared.
A mighty troll took its place, a figure towering so high in my mind’s eye that the world fell away before him. He wore a crown I’d seen before, and in his face was a granite resolve tinged with incipient madness.
I saw a tide of magick — a chaotic flood of colour, sound, light, cacophonic music — sweep over a Britain I knew, leaving nothing unchanged in its wake.
Is this what people come to the peak for? I thought, distantly, and dissolved into a mirth I knew to be inappropriate, but could not contain.
‘It’s all right, Ves,’ Jay murmured in my ear, and I could hear him, though he spoke softly. The howl of the winds had died. ‘Are you okay?’
I wasn’t immediately sure how to answer. It took me three long seconds to remember that Ves was me, my own name, and the man behind me with his hands over my face was Jay, and we’d come to this place of shrieking insanity for a good reason.
What was it?
‘It’ll come to me,’ I said aloud.
‘I’ll take that as no,’ said Jay, though he carefully loosened the grip of one hand, and I regained a glimmer of sight in my right eye.
And hastily closed it again, tight, for the gloaming somehow blazed with light, more brightly than high noon, though it was a pallid rather than a vivid glow, and everything ethereally a-shimmer.
Emellana stood in the centre of it like a goddess, taller than seemed possible, and her eyes were afire with the same light.
The lyre, to my mixed disappointment and relief, was no longer in her hands, and the music was gone.
‘So it’s been an interesting half-hour,’ I commented, as I waited for my seared eye to stop watering.
‘Could say that,’ Jay agreed.
I thought I heard someone sobbing. ‘They’re enslaved,’ Miranda was saying. ‘Slaves.’
Who? I wanted to ask, but realisation dawned as my sluggish brain caught up, and I didn’t need to. She meant the griffins, of course, and the unicorns.
Including my Adeline.
Emellana’s shoulders sagged. She swayed like a young tree in the wind, and would have fallen had not Jay and I hastened to catch her. We helped her to sit down, and she did so without appearing to notice the seeping wet earth beneath her, or the wind driving rain into her eyes. ‘I am very well,’ she insisted, smiling up at us, and I wondered how much the deep magick of that place, and whatever she had done to it, had addled her brain. If at all.
‘It is an old spot, you know,’ she said after a little while, looking around at the gloomy hilltop. ‘Ancient. Much older than Torvaston and his court. I found layers of magick running deep, so deep…’ She stopped speaking, and stared mistily over the landscape. ‘The griffins have always been here,’ she continued at length. ‘The griffins, and their like. The enchantments which bind them, however, are much newer.’
‘How much newer?’ I said.
‘Measurements of time are arbitrary constructions,’ she said, smiling vaguely at me. ‘It is impossible to determine anything of that kind from the traces I have lately read. I could not say this number of hundred years ago, or since that event. I can only say, that they have permeated the earth and the air of this place, but not to any great depth.’
I thought about that. ‘If I understand you rightly, you mean to say that they probably were not laid down by Torvaston, or anybody else, as much as four centuries ago.’
‘Perhaps not, indeed,’ Emellana agreed.
‘But I saw him,’ I said. ‘At least, I am fairly sure it was him.’
Emellana’s gaze turned upon me, and, at last, sharpened. ‘Saw him?’ she echoed.
‘I had visions,’ I elaborated, looking first at Em and then at Jay. ‘Surely it wasn’t just me?’
Jay just looked at me.
‘Oh. Well, I saw… everything was very confused. I don’t quite know what much of it was. Enraged griffins, chaotic unicorns, and a troll king…’ I could dredge nothing more concrete out of my churning thoughts.
‘A king?’ said Jay. ‘How do you know he was a king?’
‘Because he was wearing a crown.’
‘That would narrow it down,’ Jay agreed.
‘And we saw that crown in the museum at Farringale,’ I continued.
‘Are you certain?’
‘Perfectly. Though, I cannot say that it means anything. I may have added that detail myself, or interpreted the crown in question as one that was familiar to me. It was a… confusing experience.’
Jay said, thoughtfully, ‘That might be so. Otherwise, it’s going to be hard to explain how you saw Torvaston here wearing a crown he left behind in the old Britain.’
‘It could be a mental construction of Ves’s own,’ Emellana said, some of her old calm returning. ‘Time will tell, I suspect.’ She levered herself to her feet, leaning heavily upon me and upon Jay, and stood in silence for a moment.
I began to wonder what had become of Miranda, and my pup. The latter I saw trotting gaily through the rain, apparently untouched by it, though her fur was slicked with wet. It took rather more effort to locate Miranda. I saw her at last, far on the other side of the hill, a bedraggled, sopping-wet figure with her face turned up to the rain, searching the sky. She’d got as close as she could to the griffins, whose regular flight patterns brought them nearest to that side of the hill.
‘Is she right?’ I said, nodding in Miranda’s direction. ‘Are they truly enslaved?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Emellana. ‘It is not mere pacification, or coercion. They are absolutely bound, stripped of all independent thought, or capacity for independent action. It is the type of magick long banned in our Britain.’
‘And here they’re using it to farm ancient mythical creatures like cattle,’ I said, feeling unusually grim. And it wasn’t just because I was wet to the skin and I had snakes coiling in my hair.
