Modern Magick 5 Read online

  I gave an experimental bop. ‘You know, Jay, I think you were made for this place.’

  ‘Told you I wanted to stay.’

  Alban had wandered off in the direction of the spire, threading his way through the singing people with surprising ease given his size. Then again perhaps it was because of his size; when Jay and I followed, we frequently found ourselves boxed in, blocked or pushed. I quickly abandoned politeness in favour of pushing back, making full use of my elbows. Jay looked a bit shocked, but he’s never been five-foot-not-much. You do what you must. I kept one hand clamped firmly over my shoulder bag en route; the last thing we needed just then was for my over-excitable pup to bounce out and dash away. I’d never find her again.

  By the time we finally caught up with Alban, we found him leaning casually against the spire, arms folded, surveying the partying Whitmore with an expression of faint bemusement. I hoped it might have put the twinkle back in his eyes, but I hoped in vain. ‘And I thought the Court had a talent for dissipation,’ he said. It was a creditable attempt at his old humour, even if his smile was crooked.

  ‘If only Westminster would take a leaf out of Whitmore’s book,’ I said, smiling back. ‘Parliamentary debates would be so much more interesting.’

  Back already? came Melmidoc’s voice, at a thundering volume. The tall, narrow door of the pale spire rattled in its frame, and then sprang open with a hollow boom.

  ‘I still haven’t figured out how to world-hop,’ said Jay. ‘I need more practice.’

  World-hop?

  Some of our modern terminology escaped Melmidoc, perhaps especially when we were being sarky.

  ‘Jump from Britain to Britain,’ Jay explained. ‘You did say you’d teach me?’

  I did, Melmidoc allowed. But that was before a hundred more of you appeared.

  ‘They’re all gone,’ Jay said quickly. ‘It’s just the three of us.’

  You were supposed to be amnesiated.

  Jay coughed. ‘We… sort of were…’

  I judged it a good moment to interrupt. ‘What’s going on here today? With the music, and everything?’

  It is the Feast of Delunia! The most important festival of the magickal year, marked by a full week of celebration.

  I swallowed my dismay at the word week. ‘And what is being commemorated?’

  The spire consented to stop swaying for a moment, though I felt a faint tremor in the floor that ran in time with the beat. Melmidoc was, in effect, tapping his feet. In the dark ages of the later seventeenth century there were those who feared magick. The result was a growing movement to ban it, which is precisely what happened in certain other, lost Britains. Delunia was one of the greatest sorceresses who ever lived, and a talented politician besides. Thanks to her diligence and dedication, these motions were never passed, and instead of dying out, magick went thereafter from strength to strength. She faced great personal danger in order to do it, too, for some called for her to be burned — indeed, she almost was! Without her, the fifth Britain would not be as you see it today. He gave a windy sigh, and added wistfully: She was beautiful, too.

  ‘Is there feasting as well as music?’ said Alban.

  Every imaginable delicacy! Melmidoc uttered these words with an enthusiasm for food that might even rival mine. Could a building imbibe comestibles? I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about it.

  Alban grinned at me. ‘Does that reconcile you to a week of tumult, Ves?’

  ‘It just might,’ I conceded.

  ‘Course,’ said Alban, straightening his face. ‘We are here to work.’

  ‘Serious work,’ I agreed. ‘Zero dancing.’

  ‘Little bit of feasting.’

  ‘Little bit. Melmidoc, we’ve come to pick your brains.’

  I shall teach the little Waymaster, he announced. After the party.

  Jay looked torn between delight at the concession and affront at the word “little”. ‘Thanks,’ he managed.

  Hey, welcome to my world.

  ‘That’s completely wonderful,’ I said. ‘But actually we’re here about something else.’

  Jay trod on my foot.

  ‘As well!’ I yelped. ‘Something else as well as the Waymaster training.’

  I shall be intrigued to hear it, said Melmidoc, in a voice that suggested otherwise.

  ‘It is nothing onerous.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ put in Alban.

  ‘Hopefully it’s nothing onerous. Melmidoc, is there — or was there — a Farringale here?’ I didn’t feel the need to explain about Farringale to him. The Redclover brothers hadn’t disappeared from our Britain until around 1630. At that time, Farringale was still the most powerful Fae Court in the land; it hadn’t begun to decline until nearly thirty years later. Indeed, Melmidoc had undergone a few battles with the monarchs of Farringale himself.

  Was? he echoed blankly. Is there not a Farringale everywhere?

  Interesting. ‘There was a Farringale in our Britain, but it’s gone now.’

  ‘Not quite gone,’ corrected Alban. ‘The city is still there, even if it is empty.’

  Empty? Melmidoc didn’t speak for a while. Then he said, sharply, What became of the Court?

  So we explained: about the sudden, hurtling decline of Farringale after Melmidoc had vanished into the fifth Britain; about the move to Mandridore; about our own visit into what was left of Farringale, and what we had found there. About the ortherex parasites who had swallowed the city whole, and the few sentinels from the Old Court who had, at great personal cost, lingered as fading guardians ever since.

  It made for a splendid, if heart-breaking tale.

  Even Melmidoc seemed to feel it so, for all his resentments over past troubles. The spire ceased to sway, and I’d swear the music receded more and more as we talked, as though he was muting it to match his own feelings.

  The brutality of time, he said, once we had finished our tale. So much is lost.

  ‘That’s literally what our entire job is about,’ I agreed. ‘Trying to salvage what is left of magick before we lose the lot. That being the case, this assignment is highly interesting. It isn’t often we have the option of bringing something back.’

  ‘If we do,’ Alban said. ‘It’s a dream.’

  ‘Dreams come true sometimes.’ I smiled at him, but he did not smile back.

  The ortherex, said Melmidoc, and stopped. He was silent for a while, perhaps thinking. What do you know of those creatures?

  ‘They feed primarily upon troll-kind,’ I said. ‘Not their flesh, exactly. They lay eggs in living troll-flesh and the growing parasites feed off the magickal energies of the host, draining them dry. Usually, the troll dies.’

  ‘They can be countered,’ put in Jay. ‘To some degree. We brought a cure out of Farringale, or the recipe for one. It treats the effects of ortherex-infestation, though I think the poor sod still has to be operated upon to remove the eggs. Many sufferers have been saved, since.’

  I would be interested to learn of this recipe, Melmidoc said. The ortherex are a persistent problem in this magick-drenched Britain, and they do not limit themselves to troll hosts alone.

  ‘Mauf probably has it,’ I offered.

  Mauf?

  ‘My cursed book.’ I rummaged in my shoulder bag. We’d moved inside the spire by then, so I closed the door and let the pup out. She stretched, yawned hugely, and tottered off to explore. I was pleased to see a dish of water and a matching dish of meat appear at the bottom of the stairs. Melmidoc was used to the Dappledok pups.

  I drew Mauf out, showing off his handsome purple binding. ‘But if the ortherex are such a problem, does that mean you have no way to destroy them?’

  They are like any pest or parasite. They breed at incredible speed. To eradicate them entirely must be an impossible dream.

  I was crestfallen to hear that; my hopes of a speedy solution to the problem evaporated. ‘Do you have any way of combating them? Anything that might help to clear Farringale?’

  I believe y
ou are asking the wrong questions, said Melmidoc.

  I paused in the process of opening Mauf’s cover. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The pertinent question is not: how to remove the ortherex. The question must be: why are they still there? If the city is empty as you say, and has remained so for centuries: on what are they feeding? If they need live hosts in which to lay their eggs, how is it that they are breeding?

  Jay and I exchanged a look that said: We are the biggest idiots currently breathing.

  Alban, however, seemed electrified. ‘You’re right. They should have died off long ago.’

  Indeed. Let us consider, then. Perhaps there is no way to destroy them, but an alternative solution is to remove whatever is keeping them alive.

  8

  ‘You said the ortherex of this Britain are stronger,’ I said to Melmidoc. ‘And they don’t confine themselves to just troll hosts. What else do they like?’

  All of the more distinctly magickal races have suffered their share of infestations, Melmidoc replied. Though, interestingly, it is only sentient creatures who are afflicted. There have been no recorded cases of ortherex feeding upon, or breeding within, any species of magickal beast.

  That eliminated my first theory. The only other living creatures we had encountered at Farringale were griffins. While they were splendidly magickal, I did not think they were sentient.

  Probably.

  ‘Mauf, are griffins—’ I began, opening the rich purple cover of my precious book. But there I stopped, for I’d received an eyeful of his title page. ‘….That’s new,’ I observed.

  ‘In point of fact,’ said Mauf loftily, ‘It is a very old technique.’

  ‘I know that, but I’ve never seen you employ it before.’

  ‘I understand my predecessor to have been stolen, once. I humbly suggest that he would not have been, had he taken the correct precautions.’

  ‘Like this one, for example?’

  ‘Precisely like this one.’

  I read the title page aloud. ‘Whoever steals this book, may they be drowned in water. And if they be not drowned in water, may they be burned in fire. And if they be not burned in fire, may they be hanged from the neck. And if they be not hanged from the neck, may they ingest poison. And if they do not ingest poison, may they be eaten by wolves. And if they be not eaten by wolves, may they fall from a great height. And if they do not fall from a great height…’ I turned the page and stopped reading, for it went on. And on.

  ‘Taking no chances, eh, Mauf?’ said Jay.

  I patted the book gently. ‘Maufry, you do know that medieval thief-curses don’t work?’

  ‘Who says that they do not?’

  The practice had persisted in some quarters well past the medieval era, in fact, for the belief in their efficacy as curses had endured. It had taken a large study, sponsored by the Hidden Ministry in its earlier days, to establish that many were fake. Or not so much fake as insufficient; they were just words, usually written down by those who had no magick. A real thief-curse needed no words, and since the authentic kind were genuinely deadly, they had, of course, been banned by the Ministry long ago.

  But Mauf was bristling in my hands, and the tone of his dusty book-voice was both defensive and slightly injured. So I said, ‘Never mind,’ and weakly changed the subject. ‘Ortherex, Mauf. I am sure you must know a lot about those.’

  ‘Having sat helpless upon my shelf while they ate up my city around me, I can say with some justification that I do.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They drank up the magick of Farringale and dined upon its inhabitants, until the population lay dead in droves.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I do not know, Miss Vesper. I, like my fellow tomes, fell deeply into slumber. What was left to wake for?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jay, frowning. ‘We were there. We saw empty streets, quite clean. It was nothing like Darrowdale. If the people all died, why didn’t we see bones? Skeletons?’

  ‘Did they all die?’ said Alban. ‘Some fled, and founded Mandridore.’

  ‘And stuck around long enough to clean up the streets before they left? With the place infested with ortherex, and the threat of catching the infection any moment?’

  He was right; that didn’t make sense.

  I was silent, for another question was swirling about in my mind. If the parasites existed still in the fifth Britain, and had in fact grown stronger down the ages… why had there been no Farringale incident here? Why were they still accounted only as pests, not as disasters?

  How was it that the things had suddenly grown so all-powerful in the 1650s as to wipe out Farringale within a year?

  I was beginning to realise that this was in no way normal.

  I relayed these thoughts, and Alban’s frown deepened. ‘Their Majesties believe it to have been something along the lines of a natural disaster,’ he said. ‘Tragic, but no more preventable than a hurricane or a volcanic eruption. Perhaps they’re wrong.’

  ‘If so, this could be a lot more complicated than simply clearing out the ortherex,’ said Jay. ‘We need to make sure they stay gone — and that means we need to know how they got there in the first place, and how they proliferated so fast.’

  Maybe Their Majesties had more of an inkling than Alban suspected, for had I not asked myself why they had involved Jay and me? We were human. The ortherex of our Britain left humans alone, or so Baroness Tremayne had said. The king and queen couldn’t send people like Alban back into Farringale; they would be in terrible danger. But the Society’s members mostly weren’t trolls. Were we to be sent back to Farringale, once we’d found the way to fight the ortherex? I felt a flicker of excitement at the idea. This was hero-tale stuff.

  Anyway. Focus. Answers first, heroics later. ‘Alban,’ I said. ‘How much is known of Farringale’s history directly before its demise?’

  ‘Not as much as you’d think. Those who fled the city salvaged what they could, but they were fleeing for their lives. It wasn’t all that much. Most of the library was left behind, as you saw, and those who founded Mandridore weren’t necessarily scholars. They were too busy building the new Court to produce detailed accounts of what they’d left behind them, or so we assume. It’s a hazy period.’

  ‘I am beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on,’ I said. ‘Did the Court have enemies?’

  ‘It was a supremely powerful Court. Of course it had enemies.’

  ‘Any among rival powers?’

  Alban looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Interesting question, Ves.’

  ‘Those were brutal times. The non-magickal folk were chopping the heads off their own kings. Who’s to say what the Fae Courts might have been doing to one another?’

  ‘Interesting, hideous question, Ves.’

  ‘Where can we go to get more answers?’ I said. ‘Mel, you implied there is a Farringale in this Britain.’

  Mel. How charmingly brief.

  I’d heard the dragon, Archibaldo, address Melmidoc as “Mel,” but perhaps I had not yet earned that right. Fair.

  ‘Mr. Redclover,’ I amended.

  The air rippled with amusement. It is indeed the case that Farringale reigns on over the fifth.

  ‘And is it still a centre of learning?’

  Some even believe that it rivals Whitmore as such.

  Melmidoc obviously disagreed.

  ‘What have you got here?’ interjected Jay. ‘Anything good on the ortherex?’

  After a short silence, Melmidoc said: I do not recall that the scholars of Whitmore have made a specialty of the study, but I am certain something can be found to interest you.

  I tapped Mauf’s gold-edged pages. ‘Anything to add, Mauf?’

  ‘Not a great deal, Miss Vesper.’

  I should like to borrow that book.

  ‘What?’ I said, surprised. ‘Mauf?’

  It is a highly interesting piece of work.

  ‘It?’ said Mauf. ‘I am a gentleman,
sir.’ His front cover snapped crisply shut, sending a puff of dust flying out from… somewhere.

  Precisely my point.

  ‘If Mauf does not object, I am sure you may have an audience with him,’ I offered.

  I shall be very much obliged.

  Mauf maintained an offended silence for a few seconds, but flattery has ever worked wonders upon his vain little heart. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said huffily. ‘If Miss Vesper would like me to have conversation with this ghost, I shall, as always, be delighted to please her.’

  I’ll here own up that flattery works wonders upon my vain little heart, too. I smiled.

  ‘However uncouth he may be,’ added Mauf.

  I smirked. ‘You two will get along splendidly.’

  The main problem with Whitmore as a prominent centre of learning is that it is rather small. Being already the Centre of Government for the North, or whatever Mel had called it, as well as the home of a reasonably thriving population of scholars, sorcerers and assorted others, there is already a lot to make room for. By the time you’ve added in a smattering of classrooms, magickal laboratories and lecture halls, that’s about it for space.

  As such, the library to which we were later escorted was dishearteningly compact. Scarcely larger than the library at Home, in fact. Which was not to disparage it too much; Val’s library is a wonderful resource, one which has come to my aid many a time. Only, when one is looking for detailed knowledge upon a specialist, if not outright esoteric, subject, one hopes for a certain breadth.

  I’d left Mauf lounging at the spire, giving Melmidoc a hard time. The pup, however, came along with us. I thought she was in sore need of some exercise, and perhaps a bit of social time with some others of her own kind. Mel assured us she would not wander off for long; they were loyal, the Dappledok pups. Nonetheless, I’d suffered a twinge of anxiety as we left the spire, for the pup had bombed straight past us and disappeared up the street at a gallop, ears and tail flying. We hadn’t seen her since.

  The music had met us with a roar as we’d made our way to the library Mel described, and I’d spared a hope that it would be as muted among the books as it had been inside Melmidoc’s spire. I love music, but it is no easy task to study through someone else’s ear-shattering party.