The Road to Farringale Page 4

  Its decline is a sad tale, though not an uncommon one. Time passed, and gradually left Farringale behind. Other schools of magick and ideas supplanted it; other libraries and universities came to be pre-eminent. The Troll Court moved southwards in the early eighteenth century, and Farringale became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world — so much so that there is now considerable debate as to where it is actually situated. Far in the north of England; that is about as much as we can all agree upon. ‘Are we going there?’ I blurted. What a dream! A place steeped in such history, such mystery, such intrigue… what if its legendary libraries were still intact?

  ‘No,’ said Milady, and my hopes died. ‘You may not be aware that there is suspected to be some key to its decline that is not widely known about, though its precise nature has never been confirmed.’

  ‘Some catastrophe, you mean?’

  ‘Perhaps. Scholars at the Court have traced its deterioration to a mere handful of years, beginning around 1657. In March of that year, the Enclave was thriving. By December, it had shrunk to half its former size. Whether its inhabitants fled or died we do not know, but that there was something gravely amiss is not in doubt.’

  ‘Does Alban suspect a connection with that and the fate of South Moors?’ It seemed far-fetched to me, but apparently the baron had access to information I lacked. I felt the familiar envy grow in my breast: a kind of lust for knowledge denied.

  Someday I would need to cultivate a connection at the Troll Court, no doubt about that. What other secrets were they hiding in those libraries of theirs?

  ‘It is not an isolated occurrence,’ said Milady. ‘In 1928, the Garragore Enclave went fully Reclusive. It closed its doors to all outsiders, which is not in itself unusual; but nothing has ever been heard from it again, which is rather more so. It is thought that the settlement faded altogether, and is now barren. But its doors remain sealed, even to the Court. No explanation for its demise has ever been uncovered.’

  I’d heard of Garragore as well, though it was nowhere near in the same league as Farringale. Its name appeared in documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from time to time — mentions in private journals, newspapers, advertisements, that kind of thing. It had not occurred to me to notice that its name had stopped showing up after 1928. I’d had no reason to pay attention to it.

  ‘Are there more such stories?’ I asked, feeling slightly sick. Here was a most unpromising pattern.

  ‘There are. Baron Alban is greatly concerned that South Moors may go the way of Farringale and Garragore and the others, if help is not given. But how to help is a question no one can yet answer. The baron has requested our assistance.’

  ‘Why?’ said Jay. ‘Cannot the Troll Court muster the manpower to do it themselves?’

  ‘They are employing their own resources as they see fit. When it comes to the kind of investigation he has in mind, however: we can do it faster.’

  ‘Can we?’ I asked. ‘How?’

  ‘Because we have Jay.’

  That took me aback. Jay? What about him? Alas, my thoughts must have shown on my face, for Jay rolled his eyes at me, his lips twisting in irritation. ‘I am more than a chauffeur,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? What are you?’

  Jay’s face set into a disgusted expression and he said nothing, so it fell to Milady to explain. ‘I recruited Jay the moment he was free to join us, for one particular reason. He is a Waymaster.’

  Oh.

  6

  ‘Nobody thought to mention this before?’ I asked, unable to suppress a trace of bitterness.

  ‘It was not considered wise to make this ability widely known.’

  Waymasters are rare. That is an understatement. One who knows the Ways can make use of all the ancient portals that are spread all over Britain — and indeed, the world. Around here they take the form of henges, for the most part. The big, shiny, popular ones like Stonehenge are never used anymore; too many tourists in the way. But the country is littered with the more humble kind, henges of rock and wood and earth. If you can walk the Ways, you can step from one to another in the blink of an eye. It is an ability that used to be common, but like so much else of magick it has been fading away for generations. Nobody knows why.

  I understand that some would find all kinds of interesting, nefarious ways to exploit such an ability as Jay’s. But I wouldn’t. Did they not trust me?

  ‘Jay was assigned to you because you were the best person to train him,’ said Milady. ‘I wanted you to treat him as an ordinary recruit. I wanted him to learn how we manage day by day, with or without a Waymaster to hand, for he will not always have the ability freely at his disposal. It was not intended that you should be kept in the dark about it forever.’

  I did not feel much mollified, but I kept my dissatisfaction to myself. It is unprofessional to put one’s irritations on display. ‘Very well.’

  ‘What would you like us to do?’ asked Jay.

  ‘Baron Alban is well-travelled, and frequently visits the more populous and central Enclaves. He is not concerned about the well-being of any of those. There are a few far-flung or mildly reclusive settlements, however, whose fate is more in question. I need you to discover whether they are showing any signs of decay, like South Moors, or any unusual behaviour.’

  A mission that proposed to take me all over the country in a trice, and gave me the opportunity to explore several places I had never before visited, could only be welcome to me. ‘Yes ma’am!’ I said with enthusiasm.

  ‘Thrice the usual budget, Ves,’ added Milady, ‘and take whatever you need from Stores. You have one week.’

  Resources: Great. Time: Less so. I swallowed a mixture of mild panic and exhilaration and made my usual obeisance. ‘We’d better get started at once, then.’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  It is possible that when Milady said take what you need from Stores, she did not mean rob the place of everything that might conceivably come in handy, under any circumstances whatsoever. But if that wasn’t what she meant she ought to have particularised, for Jay and I had a daunting job to do and no time at all to do it.

  ‘See, when Milady says “a week”,’ I said to Jay as I palmed a handy sustenance charm, ‘she really means about three days.’ I found an unlocking charm — enchanted, unimaginatively, upon a huge bronze key — and pocketed that, too. The Stores at Home are wonderful: half a dozen rooms of varying size, the walls all lined with shelves and cabinets laden with all manner of artefacts, trinkets and Curiosities — and even a few genuine Treasures. Some of them are aged and delicate; you need a special permit to take any of those out. I didn’t touch them. I was more than contented with enchantments more recently Wrought, for they offered everything we could need, and one did not have to live in fear of breaking or losing one of them along the way.

  ‘Three days,’ murmured Jay. ‘Let’s see that list again?’

  I handed over the slip of paper I’d received from Nell: a computer print-out of all known Troll Enclaves still extant in Britain. The list consisted of twenty-six names, more than half of which she had subsequently crossed out in red pen. Baron Alban’s territories, I presumed; we did not need to investigate those. South Moors and Farringale were also crossed off, which left us with nine places to visit.

  Nine towns in three days.

  Feasible, I hoped, since one of us was a Waymaster. But damn. It was going to be intense.

  I could see when Jay had finished counting up the names, for his face registered the same dismay as I felt. I quickly took back the list. ‘One at a time. That’s all we have to think about.’

  ‘Right.’ He returned to watching me strip Stores of everything remotely useful, though I felt that his gaze rested more on me than on the surrounding treasures. How did that make sense? New recruits tended to salivate when we brought them in here, and I’d taken Jay straight to the largest of the storerooms. A fabulous late nineteenth-century statue of a mermaid rested on a shelf about t
hree inches from his face, a lovely thing Wrought from jade and something nacreous which visibly rippled with power. A protection charm of some kind was probably embedded therein; it was the kind of thing the wealthy used to like to keep on display in their fabulous houses, to keep thieves and such away.

  Jay didn’t even glance at it.

  ‘What?’ I said after a while.

  Jay chewed his lip. ‘I, uh. Think we may have got off on the wrong foot, just a little.’

  Well, he was right. I turned away again to hide my blush, for I had messed up. ‘I fear I have been patronising, and I apologise. But really. If they’d just told me that you were—’

  ‘Relevant?’ Jay offered.

  ‘Yes. Exactly.’ I took down a sweet little teacup painted with viper’s bugloss, but regretfully put it back again. I wanted it, but the chances of either of us coming down with a fever in the next three days were not high.

  ‘Apology accepted. But I was speaking more of myself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I think it was the unicorn symbol, and your…’ He trailed off. When I looked back, his gaze was travelling thoughtfully from my wildly-coloured hair, past my madly-coloured dress and all the way down to my whimsically-coloured shoes. He wisely chose not to finish that sentence. ‘Ves,’ he said instead. ‘That’s all anybody ever calls you. But you turn out to be Cordelia Vesper.’

  ‘Does that name mean something to you?’

  He grimaced. ‘I read your thesis. “Modern Magick and—”‘

  ‘—Magickal Heritage: The Changing Times. I remember.’

  ‘Right.’

  I waited, but that seemed to be it. ‘Did you…’ I paused to reflect, discarding my instinctive question, because did you like it? sounded appallingly needy. ‘Did you find it… useful?’ I hazarded.

  ‘It was interesting.’

  Interesting. Right.

  I took down one last Curiosity — a floral charm bracelet which, if I knew my charms, purported to change the colour of any bloom I chose to so deface — and stuffed it into my pocket. There was no possible way we could find a use for it, but what did that matter? Life is complicated, and happiness is made up of the little things. I’d bring it back when we got home.

  ‘Shall we go?’ I proposed.

  ‘At once, and immediately. Faster than the speed of light. We’ll arrive yesterday.’

  I blinked. ‘Really?’

  ‘Wha— no. No! It was a joke.’

  ‘Oh.’ Anything Jay did could only seem sadly mundane after hype like that, but perhaps that was well enough. Who knew what could be going on behind that impassive visage? Maybe Jay suffered from performance anxiety.

  And lo, it was my turn to be ignorant.

  Jay led us down into the cellar. This is not a part of the House I have ever had much cause to visit, before. It is mostly used for storage — the boring kind, not relics and artefacts and such — and one or two minor departments I never go to. Our destination therein proved to be a small chamber tucked into one corner, which we reached by way of a lengthy staircase and three winding corridors.

  The heavy oak door creaked horribly as Jay coaxed it open.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Jay, ushering me inside and closing the door behind me. ‘The Waypoint at Home.’

  I looked around, unimpressed. The room was barely furnished; naught but a single couch rested against one wall, looking inviting enough with its plump upholstery and overstuffed appearance, but it was not at all elegant. The walls could have used a new coat of paint, or perhaps just a thorough scrubbing; what had probably once been white had dulled to a drab cream. The floor was well enough, but its bare oak boards had not been swept in about a decade either, if I was any judge.

  There was nothing else in there, save only for one thing: a ring of nubs of wood, set into the floor. The remains, I judged, of an ancient henge, over the top of which the House had been built.

  Clever.

  Jay puttered about doing nothing that I could make any sense of, and I waited. I was already beginning to regret my excess of enthusiasm in Stores; the shoulder bag I carried seemed to be growing heavier by the moment. I occupied myself in transferring some of the smaller of its contents into the pockets of my long purple coat, pleased to find that the redistribution helped. A little.

  Curse my magpie tendencies.

  ‘So,’ I said after a while, when Jay still did not appear to be doing anything productive. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Uh… yes?

  ‘How can you have no idea how a Waymaster works?’ Jay was incredulous, which was unfair of him.

  ‘Jay. Nobody knows how a Waymaster works. Our last one left eight and a half years ago to take up a tempting employment offer in Jaipur, and that was the last I saw of her. And she never took me travelling with her anyway.’

  ‘Really?’ Jay was silent for a moment. ‘What kind of employment opportunity?’

  ‘Jay. Focus.’

  ‘Just how tempting was it?’

  ‘Jay!’

  He rolled his eyes, and… a lot happened all at once. He was standing in the middle of the room, and when he raised his arms the air swooped and whirled and gathered itself into a vortex of stars. That is the nicer way I can think of to describe it. If I said it also resembled a twinkly tornado, however, perhaps that better conveys its more alarming qualities.

  ‘Why do people call you Vesper?’ he yelled. I still couldn’t figure out what he was doing, but it involved some effort, for sweat was forming on his brow. ‘Why not Cordelia?’

  ‘I hate my name!’

  ‘It’s… it’s pretty.’

  ‘Cordelia? Yes! It’s a doll name, for pretty, well-behaved girls who take a lot of ballet classes and wear their hair in buns.’

  I thought he actually laughed, though that might have been a trick of the light — which was turning awfully peculiar. ‘Why not shorten it?’

  ‘To what? Cord? That’s a type of string. Dell? That’s a magickal reservoir. Or a computer.’

  ‘Ves is unique.’

  ‘Exactly. It—’

  I did not make it to the end of this sentence, for with a roar and a swoop and a nauseating sensation of the world tilting upside down, we were gone from the Waypoint in the cellar and deposited in an untidy, aching heap somewhere altogether else.

  7

  Jay looked like he was strongly disposed to vomit.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. Quite uselessly, for he clearly was not.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied through gritted teeth.

  ‘Your legs are shaking.’

  ‘My everything is shaking. But I’m fine.’ He got to his feet and stood, visibly trembling. But since he was also wearing the clenched-jaw look of a man who will not be helped, I left him to it and devoted myself to a largely futile attempt to figure out where we had ended up.

  We were in the middle of a henge, of course, though it was not the flashy kind that hordes of tourists come to see. Little remained of it but a ring of decaying wooden posts half-sunk in wet earth, and surrounding that (and us) were… trees. Straggly ones, thick enough to obscure whatever lay beyond but otherwise rather sad-looking.

  ‘Place requires some tending,’ I said.

  ‘Most of Britain requires some tending.’ Jay took a deep breath, stretched, cast a quick glance around himself and set his face resolutely in what appeared to me to be a completely random direction. ‘Ready to go?’

  ‘Where? I have no idea where we are.’

  ‘Somewhere in the vicinity of Glenfinnan. We’re a few miles away from Finnan Enclave.’ He checked my shoes and, oddly, smiled. ‘Boots. Good.’

  ‘Why do you seem surprised?’

  ‘I thought you might have shown up in heels or something.’

  ‘I am not that much of an airhead, Mr. Patel.’ I haughtily shouldered my bag. ‘Lead on.’

  Jay’s comment did not much surprise me. I am not expected to be much of a walker; you wouldn’t a
nticipate that about a woman with a fondness for delicate, impractical clothes and improbable hair, would you? But actually, I love to walk. I enjoyed our hike, for the environs of Glenfinnan proved to be green hill country, dotted with patches of woodland, and here and there glimpses of an expanse of clear, serene water. The air was bright and crisp and I breathed deeply, somewhat regretful that our errand was of such urgency as to prevent of our exploring.

  Jay clearly had no soul for scenery, for he marched on without ever pausing to admire. Nor did he ever waver as to direction. He certainly had focus. He seemed so little inconvenienced by his obvious shakiness before, I didn’t want to admit that my knees were shaking, too, and it took half an hour for the waves of nausea to stop assaulting my stomach. I pretended I was fine and so did Jay, and we accomplished our forced-march in rather less than an hour.

  Finnan Enclave’s front door proved to be at the base of one of those gorgeous, craggy hills, a bit like at South Moors. We stood in the twin shadow of two swelling peaks, one rising on either side of us. Drifty clouds had raced over the sun, and we stood bathed in a mild, unpromising gloom as we studied the green, heathery slopes before us.

  ‘Are you sure this is it?’ I said after a while, when Jay seemed undecided.

  ‘Yes.’

  All right, then. I waited while Jay rambled about a bit, looking this way and that in a decisive fashion, and occasionally touching protruding rocks.

  ‘Do you know where the door is?’ I said at last.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  I waited a little longer, watching in idle delight as a tiny pink skreerat poked its head out from in between a tuft of grasses, eyed Jay beadily, and vanished again.

  Jay finally gave up his futile search. ‘It’s one of these,’ he said, gesturing broadly at a tumble of fallen boulders.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I looked them up on Nell’s system before we left.’

  Clever of him, though it was not currently availing us much. I rummaged in my satchel, ignoring Jay’s disbelief as I extracted rather more objects from within than could reasonably fit inside. ‘Aha,’ I murmured, drawing forth my oversized key and a pendulum, the kind that had probably once belonged inside a grandfather clock. ‘This,’ I said to Jay, ‘is a basic burglar’s toolkit, magicker style.’ It was the work of a moment to coax the pendulum into activity and it began to swing gently in my hand, back and forth, back and forth. ‘It is a little clumsy, the pendulum,’ I observed as the charm did its work. ‘I would have enchanted a pathfinder’s charm onto something a bit more elegant, myself. A filigree compass, for example, with quartz fittings and a handsome chain. But—’ I paused as the pendulum’s sway slowed and eventually stopped, leaving the device pointing unerringly at a large, craggy black boulder about six feet away from where Jay had stopped. ‘It works, proving that elegance is not at all necessary in life.’ I smiled, packed the pendulum away again, and advanced upon the boulder.