Modern Magick

Royalty and Ruin: 15

'What the bloody hell?' growled Rob, staring in awe.

I had no words to offer. They'd all gone.

If I'd wondered before how an abandoned city came to be so well-kept, I had my answer now. Farringale's wide, white boulevard lay stretched before us, flanked on either side by grand mansions in pale or golden stone and brick. A legion of shabby broomsticks was abroad in the street, wielded by no one and yet engaged in a furious orgy of sweeping. The noise bordered upon cacophonous as bristles scraped ruthlessly over paving stones and pathways and walls, removing every speck of accumulated dirt and dust. Ragged shreds of cloth applied themselves to leaded window panes, buffing them up to a renewed shine. Greenish water drained slowly from collected puddles, and buckets of fresher, soapy water emptied themselves into the spaces they left behind, the brooms rushing in to scrub away the stains left by filth and algae.

The air freshened slowly as we watched, the aromas of stagnation fading in favour of wafting, floral fragrances.

I kept my shield up and sturdy, in case any of the household implements should take exception to our entrance and attempt to attack us. They did not. We went ignored as they completed their furious spring-cleaning, those that approached routing smoothly around us with the apparent ease of long practice.

After, perhaps, ten minutes of this, a bell tinkled brightly somewhere and this seemed to be a signal, for the broomsticks and cloths, buckets and brushes, all vanished with a concerted pop.

I thought, apropos of nothing and with a brief pang, of Alban. What a pity he had missed the broomstick ballet.

'How do we get this at home?' said Jay, who had come up next to me some minutes before.

'We've a lesser version of it at Home already,' I said. 'Much lesser, and more discreet. I can't imagine the kind of power it would take to operate the Sweeping Symphony on so large a scale.'

'And who's running it, anyway?' said Rob. 'Any symphony needs a conductor.'

'Do you think someone is still alive out here?' I said, thinking of Baroness Tremayne, the... shade, I suppose, of a former courtier I'd met on our previous visit. But no, she was not technically alive. Not technically dead, either, but hers was a shadowed existence. She was, surely, too distant from the material world to much affect it. That was how she'd managed to survive at all.

'It's hard to see how,' said Rob, with which opinion I had to agree. Even if somebody non-troll had lingered in Farringale after the fall, and successfully avoided the ortherex, how could they survive so long here? Why would anyone try? There was nothing left — no food, no trade, no links with the outside world at all.

No, there had to be another explanation.

'I suppose this answers your question about the corpses of the fallen,' I said to Jay. 'They were, um, tidied away.'

'How efficient,' he answered. 'I wonder if the Symphony always had that function.'

'Or if somebody added it in later, as need arose? Perhaps.'

Indira had the strained look of a young woman trying her damnedest to commit a wealth of information to memory. She was probably brilliant enough to figure out its workings at a glance. By next week, the Sweepers at Home might be receiving a significant upgrade.

'There was a pattern to their movements,' she suddenly said. 'They weren't as random as they seemed. It was fully choreographed.'

That interested me. 'Could something so complicated survive indefinitely without direct oversight?'