by It was a close-run thing. As we drew nearer, I could see the way Indira wobbled as she sat, the currents of wind knocking her about like a stray leaf.
No time to think. We swooped, Addie’s broad wings battling a gust of wind as she banked and turned. Jay leaned—grabbed—he had her; and away we went, spiralling downwards. Strong as she was, Addie couldn’t carry three of us for more than a few minutes; we had to get her hooves on the ground, and quickly.
‘Thanks,’ gasped Indira, breathless.
‘What the hell—’ said Jay, breaking off abruptly as Addie thudded into a heavy landing. We’d come down in a street I didn’t recognise, almost too narrow for Addie’s wingspan. Tall, stone-built houses rose on either side, as empty and dead as the rest of Farringale, their small, square gardens riotously overgrown.
‘Surge,’ Indira said to her brother as she slipped lightly down. ‘Boosted me higher than I meant to go, and then the wind caught me.’ She made a whoosh gesture with one hand, most illustrative.
Jay made no reply, it being a bit late for such niceties as “you should be more careful.”
‘We were looking for you,’ I said, choosing not to get down from Addie’s back just yet. The surge roiled on, stirring all the magick in me into a dizzying whirlpool, and I was beginning to feel nauseated.
But that was a good thing; it meant we weren’t too late.
‘I was looking for you, too,’ Indira answered, and produced, from one of her air-pockets, two regulators.
No. I took a second look: three lay nestled in her palm, winking starry silver in the sunlight.
‘Rob got the one from the griffins!’ I guessed.
Indira nodded. ‘Couldn’t find you, but he found me.’
I handed mine to her, completing the quartet. Four of them. Would it be enough?
It would have to be. And to echo Jay: what we couldn’t accomplish with four, we probably couldn’t accomplish with five either.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘It’s time.’ I tasted bile as I spoke, the product of raw fear. I wasn’t ready. I’d never be ready. But if I couldn’t make this happen, who else could? Fenella? Improbable, and undesirable besides. Mandridore couldn’t be left beholden to such a person as that.
Jay slid down off Addie’s back, joining his sister on the ground. But he stayed close, and looked up at me with perfect confidence as he said: ‘Where to?’
‘The library.’ Back to where it all began; where I’d first encountered Baroness Tremayne. Where we’d found Bill, and consequently gained Mauf. The trail had begun there: those first clues leading us from Farringale to Mandridore and all the way to another Britain entirely. It was fitting that our journey would end there, too.
Jay set off unerringly, leading us in a slow procession up the near-silent street. We were silent, too, sober with the weight of responsibility, dry-mouthed with fear, light-headed with magick. When I tried to speak—some nonsense or other to break the deathly quiet—my words emerged half-strangled, a mere wordless croak.
Jay looked back at me. ‘Are you okay?’
We were a bit beyond polite lies, so I went for the truth. ‘Nope.’
He nodded. ‘We can do this,’ he said, and his voice rang with all the conviction I’d forgotten how to feel.
I smiled back, a little. ‘Let’s hope so.’
***
If the streets above had seemed quiet, the cellars beneath the library were like a tomb.
I didn’t have to walk through walls, this time—or be dragged, like a sack of potatoes. Jay found a winding way through the bare-walled chambers—stripped, now, of their precious books—along a narrow passage, and down a cramped, spiralling staircase, and we stepped out into a cool, stone-walled subterranean chamber, empty apart from the three of us, and shrouded in an unearthly silence.
I’d had to leave Addie outside, and was already suffering from the separation. But those walls were sturdy and solid, the stone very cold under my hands as I steadied myself against them.
We needed no light. A pallid, sickly glow emanated from the floor, thrown off by a writhing mass of tiny, hungry parasites. I shuddered at the sight of them, a chill of pure horror rippling down my spine. I knew they wouldn’t hurt me—they were devourers of magick and, by preference, trolls. They had no interest in a Cordelia.
Still, to set my feet into that mess of wriggling bodies took more nerve than I thought I possessed. I descended from the stairs very carefully, and paused.
Indira, behind me, made a sound of disgust, and her footsteps stopped on the steps.
‘Stay there,’ I suggested. ‘If you can deploy the regulators from up there, then there’s no need to come any farther down.’
Indira accepted this suggestion with obvious gratitude. Jay, though, visibly steeled himself, and waded into the echoing chamber to stand beside me. He waited, steady and calm, solid as the stone walls of the cellar itself.
The surge was dissipating at last, its tide of magick spent. The right moment neared; not yet, but soon. I set my lyre down on the bottom step of the stairs, near my feet. It glimmered with a pale light of its own, but a cleaner, comforting glow, and I breathed more easily for it.
‘Indira,’ I said. ‘When it’s not surging, Farringale’s latent magick runs rather low. Probably because it’s been empty for centuries. When it hits its lowest ebb… we need to use that momentum. Keep it going.’
‘Going—where?’ asked Indira.
‘I don’t know. Ebbing. Dissipating. I want it as dead as Silvessen in here.’
‘You want to strip all the magick out of all of Farringale.’ Indira spoke in tones of disbelief.
‘As close to it as we can get, yes. It’s the wild magick that’s been sustaining these things. I can’t remove them as long as they’re still feeding off it.’
‘Can you remove them anyway?’ Jay asked. ‘All of them?’
He meant how; by what possible method did I propose to obliterate a city-wide infestation of parasites? I didn’t have a clear answer, for him or for me.
‘Yes,’ I told him anyway. One problem at a time. First, the magick; then, the ortherex.
Indira said nothing more, but set about deploying the first of the regulators. I hoped her silence indicated confidence.
A tremor ran through the walls and the floor underfoot; a soft buzz of magick taking effect. Metal scraped over stone, cracking and grinding, and ceased with a jolt. ‘One down,’ said Indira.
The air split, shattered, and spat out a tall, bulky figure: too much of both to be the baroness. A male troll, simply dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and pantaloons, his hair bone-white with age. He said nothing, but his presence was imposing enough; Jay was instantly alert.
‘Wait,’ I asked him, holding up a hand. The gentleman had offered us neither violence nor threat, and a stray memory teased at me…had not Baroness Tremayne spoken of others like herself, a year ago? The long-forgotten guardians of Farringale, lingering like ghosts in the walls, had numbered three.
I bowed to the newcomer, for he bore an air of nobility about him. ‘Have you come to help us?’ I asked hopefully.
He regarded me levelly. ‘Can you in truth rid us of these creatures?’
I wished people would stop asking me that. The word “no” kept trying to pop out in response. ‘We are going to try our best to do so,’ I managed to say instead.
Another grinding, crunching, teeth-aching sound, and the walls shuddered: the second regulator.
‘I will watch over you,’ said the guardian. ‘Foes abound.’
They did indeed. I was going to thank him, but before I could speak I was wrenched out of the world, soul and body together. The room splintered around me, dissolved into the strange, juddering, shadowy alternate reality that I was beginning to despise. We were between the echoes again, one half-step to the left of the flow of time.
‘That’s one way of watching over us,’ said Jay with a grimace.
I watched Indira, poised to assist, for I didn’t think she had experienced this particular strangeness before. But she was absorbed in her task, oblivious—or at least, unflappable. A third regulator took effect: one to go.
And the environment was stabilising by the minute, the surge rushing away like the outgoing tide. The regulators were humming, a melodic fizzing in my ears, my bones. ‘Jay,’ said Indira, his name a summons, a plea, and he went to her.
I left them to it, for they didn’t need me for this. I picked up my lyre, and cradled it with momentary tenderness. I think I knew, somewhere in me, what was to come…
‘Ves,’ said Indira, softly. ‘They’re in.’
‘Good.’
‘But—I don’t know if you understand. Magick can’t just dissipate. It has to go somewhere. There’s only so much the regulators can do—’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’ I was already turning my mind away from the regulators, from the clever and capable Patels; from the library cellar, writhing with infestation, and from the silent guardian who attended our efforts to save it. I spread my awareness like a net, out through the silent ruin of the library, and down, down, deep into the rock beneath. My fingers plucked a plaintive air from the strings of the argentine lyre, each rich note reverberating through the air, through the floor, through me.
It was worse than stepping into the midst of the ortherex—worse than wading barefoot through the mess and the mass of them. As I opened my mind to the land around me, feeling the cold earthiness of rock and dirt, the clear dampness of groundwater, the bright, surprising freshness of roots winding down from above, I felt the ortherex, too: felt them like a cloak of ants crawling over every inch of my skin. They bit at me, raged at me, a million motes of wrongness and disease.
I shuddered, shaking with the effort to curb my revulsion, to hold my mind down there in that terrible space. There was too much magick, still, swirling in airy currents, like gusts of wind: I could feel it with a startling clarity, the Merlin in me recognising it, welcoming it. The magick was ancient, here; almost as ancient as Merlin himself. It called…
No. This magick was not for me; I was not for it. I was here not to lend it my strength, call it back to all its former potency, but to do the opposite: to dampen it, shutter it, drain it away. Every natural impulse in me rebelled at the idea, and rebelled again: the magick belonged here, deep in the bones of the land, and it was my task—Merlin’s task—to protect it. To help it grow.
‘I will,’ I promised it, distantly. ‘Later.’
I bore down with a will, encouraged by the pulse of the regulators around me, my lyre joining with their delicate hum, carolling a dulcet lullaby. If it could not be removed, then perhaps it could be lulled; sink itself down into the bowels of the earth, far below the beleaguered city that was Farringale.
Go, I bade it, and added, pitifully, please.
It reacted instead with a surge, a flourishing. It drew me deeper into its flow, made of me a link in its web, a thread in its tapestry of power. More gathered around me, faster and faster; I became a brightening core, a burgeoning nexus of wild magick.
Giddy gods. This was like the lyre, but worse. The magick in me—Merlin’s magick—attracted that of Farringale; like spoke to like; I was making it stronger.
A tactical error, I thought with distant hysteria. I’d been wrong. I wasn’t the best person for this task, I was the worst; what I had thought to be an advantage proved to be the opposite.
And I was stuck down deep, melded with the sleeping earth below Farringale as magick sank into the very essence of me, and shone.
This was what it was like to be a griffin. Perhaps that had been an error, too; deprived of its foci, the magick of Farringale had not disappeared, but rather altered in shape, in sense, in current; had seized me, their substitute, and would not let me go.
I couldn’t fight it. I was strong, but my strength was no asset here: together, we were stronger still, in all the wrong ways.
Well. So.
An alternative idea drifted through my labouring thoughts, and at first I rejected it, utterly and completely. Every cell in me revolted at the notion, strained as I already was. The regulators were beginning to affect me, too, merged as I was with magick: they pulled at me, dragged at me, smothered the spark of my life in thick, grey dullness.
I didn’t have much time. I couldn’t say what would become of me, under all these competing forces, but I felt frayed like an old blanket, coming apart at the seams. There wouldn’t be much of me left, soon.
I searched my sluggish mind for another idea, any idea at all, and found nothing. There wasn’t another option.
Focus, Ves. I could bear it—probably. Hopefully.
In the space of a single breath, I stopped resisting the influx of magick, stopped pushing against it, stopped warding myself against the inexorable onslaught. If it wanted me, very well: let it have me. All of it.
I opened myself to it entirely, without barrier, and it came to my call: a vast, onrushing flood of it, drowning me in power—in possibility—in life. I had drowned like this once before, in Vale, when I’d first taken up the lyre; but this, this, was as the ocean to a lake: unimaginably immense, and far beyond my capacity to contain.
Were it not for the regulators, and the griffins’ absence—had I attempted it with the surge at its highest—it would undoubtedly have destroyed me.
As it was, I held it—barely, and briefly; I needed only to focus my attention, frame my intent, fix everything I had upon that other devouring sea, the ortherex.
Power arced about me in a haze of lightning, lethal starfire exploding from the very core of me, setting me alight; I screamed, and screamed again, but it wasn’t agony, not quite—
As all the magick of Farringale spiralled and built and blazed around me, I gathered one last surge of will: let it blaze, then, let it burn.
Magick tore through me, and I shattered; into a thousand motes, into a million. A current ripped through Farringale, stronger, far stronger, than even the most potent of its surges: stones thundered and crumbled around me.
And with every pulsing wave that shuddered through the ground, ten thousand ortherex flared with starfire, and winked out.
