Modern Magick

The Road to Farringale: 6

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 three 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.