'Gods curse it,' I swore, groping for my pipes and my wand. I should have been better prepared, but it had happened so damned fast — Ayllin hadn't even reached the bottom of the staircase.
'Pipes,' barked my mother to me.
'Ayllin—'
'Pipes. Your job is to ruin that damned lindworm.'
I don't know what Mother planned to do, but Jay had his rubescent Wand in hand and was running for the stairs. My mother was going to extract Ayllin with her bare hands, apparently — or hand, anyway.
Me, though. Ruin. Right.
This time when I played, I went for a different song. The last one was a lullaby; my only goal had been to keep the thing pacified long enough for us to escape. Lindworms aren't up there on the same level of rarity as, say, griffins, but we don't wreck them without good cause either.
Considering the state of my mother's dead companions, her missing hand, and now the probable state of our guide, I figured Mum was right. This was good cause.
I blew a swift, sharp blast on my pretty pipes, and the sound split the air with the intensity of a thunderclap. I repeated the sound, twice — thrice. The lindworm was a mass of roiling, scaled flesh by that time, with poor Ayllin wound up somewhere within its muscular coils. The second wave of sound sent a tearing shudder through its miserable carcass. The third brought it to a temporary, shuddering halt.
At the fourth, there was blood.
I went after it, blazing fury, my song growing more intense and more discordant with each shrieking note I played. I forced the damned thing into submission, alternating blasts of my pipes with waves of layered curses shot from the tip of my lovely Sunstone Wand.
By the time I was finished, the lindworm lay insensate, its massive body filling the passage below from floor to ceiling. Blood had leaked from its eyes, its mouth, what passed for its ears, and run all over the stairs. Its jaws hung slack, revealing rows of shark-teeth that would never chew anybody to bits again.
'That's for my mother's gods-damned hand!' I shrieked at it, and kicked it.
Ayllin, mercifully, was alive, though bathed in such a quantity of blood that I feared it couldn't be for long. Once again, I wished fervently for Rob, and cursed my mother's secretiveness. I ran over to Jay and my mother, who were supporting Ayllin between them. I think I hadn't imagined the moment, mid-battle, where Ayllin had popped free of the lindworm's coils and gone sailing into the air, only to float down in a flurry of feathers.
'Will she live?' I gasped.
'Most of the blood isn't hers,' said Mother tersely, checking Ayllin over with a remarkably professional air for someone with zero knowledge of medicine. 'Lindworm's,' she added unnecessarily.
Ayllin groaned, and shook herself. She looked more dazed than destroyed, to my relief — but also to my surprise. The worm had hit her with the force of a train. 'Borrow— your — pipes?' she panted, looking at me.
This time, I handed them over promptly.
She began a lilting song much better suited to their airy, faerie delicacy than the Song of Ruin I'd been playing a moment before. I felt cocooned in sound, and, gradually, refreshed; it was like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold winter day, and pumped full of hot chocolate.
Ayllin began to look revived.
Immediate alarm over Ayllin passed, I was at leisure to notice Jay.
'What?' I said.
He blinked his wide, wide eyes, and went on staring at me in... horror? Awe? 'What the bloody hell did you do to that worm?'
'Ruined it.'
'I see that.'
I shrugged. 'Had to.'
'Did I know you could do that?'
'You know when Rob said I could handle myself in a fight?'
'No, but okay.'
'Well, he did, and that's what he meant. I just don't like to do it.'
'It's Rob's job.'
'That it is, and he's better at it by an order of magnitude.'
'That scares the living daylights out of me.'
'It should. You never want to get on Rob's bad side.'
Mother spoke up. 'Rob Foster's still with the Society, is he?'
That got my attention. 'You know Milady and Rob?'
'I've been alive for a while.'
'So what? Rob's the quiet type, and Milady never leaves Home.'
Mum raised a brow. 'Doesn't she?'
Jay and I maintained identically stunned silences for about four seconds.
'Er,' said Jay.
'What?' said I.
Mother gave her secretive smile, and I rolled my eyes.
'She's just messing with us,' I told Jay. 'She does that.'
Mum nodded and turned back to Ayllin. 'That must be it.'
And, curse her, she left a note of doubt growing in my mind.
'Right,' I said. 'Anyway. On with the larceny show?'
Ayllin looked sharply at me, and I coughed.
'On with the detecting show, I meant. It just feels like larceny, what with all the fighting-past-lindworm-guardians and breaking-into-ancient-vaults...'
'It is starting to feel remarkably like a heist,' Jay agreed.
I played a few notes from the theme to Ocean's Eight.
'Stop it,' said Mother.
I sighed, and trailed up to the felled lindworm. Thankfully, it had stopped twitching. 'Next problem,' I said, trying futilely to see past the creature. Its enormous body blocked the entire passage, both ways. 'How do we get past this thing?'
'Can't you, I don't know, liquify it or something?' Jay made hand-waving-magick-casting gestures, as though that might help.
'No,' I said. 'Can you?'
'I'm just the new guy.'
'With Waymastery powers to die for, an odd talent for fae music he still thinks is a secret, and with gods-know-what other skills shoved up his black leather sleeves — but just the new guy.'
'She's too perceptive,' said Jay to my mother.
'Annoying, isn't it?' said she.
Jay grinned at me. 'The thing about being a Waymaster is, nobody ever wants to talk about anything else.'
'So are you hiding any talents that might vaporise a lindworm?'
'Still nope.'
'Damnit.'
'I might be able to open a door in it, though.'
'Open a— in it? What?'
'It's a kind of warped sidespell of Waymastery.'
'No it isn't,' said Mother flatly. 'If you mean what I think you mean, that's advanced stuff. Do you think just anybody can open a damned void in a fresh corpse?'
'True,' said Jay. 'But it occurs more commonly in Waymasters. Nobody knows why.'
'Jay,' I said. 'Whatever Milady's paying you, it's nowhere near enough.'
Jay glanced meaningfully at the destroyed lindworm. 'I'd say the same of you.'
'And now you're starting to scare me too.'
'I can't do it on anything that's alive,' Jay said quickly. But then, to my horror, he paused. 'Well. I don't know for certain that I can't, as I've never tried. If I did, the Ministry would sign an immediate warrant for my capture and execution, and I'd turn myself in gladly.'
'Let's get on with it,' Ayllin cut in.
She had a point. The day was wearing on. I stepped back out of Jay's way — I didn't want to be too near him while he was boring holes in organic matter.
He did some things. Don't ask me what, I cannot even begin to comprehend what was going on with him.
But when he'd finished, a neat circular hole had appeared, running right through the centre of the lindworm's body. It was just about tall enough for us to pass through, if we stooped.
Its edges were so perfect, it could've been bored by a machine.
'Hang on,' I said, as Mother made to stride straight on. I lit up a fireball and sent it through.
The plan was to light up the other side, so we could see if any other lindworms were lying in wait. But my fireball sputtered and died before it had passed more than halfway through the lindworm.
'It's a patch of nothing,' Jay reminded me. 'No air.'
'Right. We do it the exciting way, then.' I went in, trying not to think about why my feet squelched as I walked through Jay's void-door. I lit up another fireball the moment I reached the cold corridor beyond, and let it shine brightly.
The corridor was reassuringly empty.
'We're good,' I called. 'Onward.'
Ayllin marched past me, swiftly followed by Mother. Jay and I brought up the rear. I felt a moment's concern for Ayllin out there in front, again — what if there was more than one lindworm down here? But, the woman appeared to be indestructible. Whatever she was doing to protect herself was clearly effective. I was getting curious about Yllanfalen magick.
The King's Halls were rather better supplied with cellars and under-passages than I'd imagined, for we went down and down into the bowels of the building, and it got steadily colder and darker. Not that this had much of an effect on the stunning beauty of the place. When it's Yllanfalen, it's not the frigid, miserable chill of early February, with not a scrap of warmth or joy looming on the horizon; it's the glittering cold of snowflakes and clear ice, a darkness that's velvet and enchanting rather than gloomy.
'I'd really like to talk to your interior designers,' I said to Ayllin, as we marched through some kind of subterranean ballroom draped in cobwebs — the attractive, misty kind, of course — and hung with exquisite silks.
'Can't,' she said tersely.
'Not all of them, certainly. All this must be the work of hundreds—'
'Zero,' said Ayllin.
'I beg your pardon?'
'None of this,' and she waved a hand, somewhat impatiently, at a rose-marble fountain in miniature singing airily to itself as it poured icy water into the air, 'was built by either mortal hand or faerie.'
'Then by whose?'
She shrugged. 'By magick. The Halls develop as they will. Though, they have ceased to grow at the rate they once did. I believe only two new rooms have manifested in the past twenty years.'
Manifested? 'Giddy gods, you mean to say all this just appears?'
'It isn't that simple. Though at the same time, it is.'
'Could you maybe just explain?'
'If I could, I... well, I might.' I heard that mischievous flash of a smile again in her voice. 'It is a process that is not fully understood. The prevailing theory is that it is the product of the dreams of the Yllanfalen, that the Halls respond to our collective ideas, needs and wishes.'
'If this is what the inside of an Yllanfalen head looks like...' I began to reconsider my ideas about my possible parentage, for who wouldn't want to generate such ethereal beauty with a thought? Then again, this must be an argument for my being one hundred percent human. The inside of my head looked like... a cluttered yard, with books, teapots and pancakes piled willy-nilly about, too many colours crammed into a small space (some of them clashing), and a litter of half-finished notions and abandoned dreams coating everything like dust.
'I don't know how you find your way through it,' growled Mother. 'Last time I was here, I was lost within two minutes. But, that was part of the fun at the time.'
'Most of it is ancient,' said Ayllin. 'Hush, now. We draw near the fountain.'
We'd drawn near to, and passed, about eight fountains already; I gathered that the fountain held some kind of special significance in the collective consciousness of the Yllanfalen, if this was indeed the manifestation of their dreams. Since every one of those fountains had been utterly exquisite, I had high hopes for the important one.
They were not disappointed.
We fetched up before an enormous stone door, its surface deeply etched with runic characters all filled in with quartz. I couldn't read them; I didn't even recognise the language. The door had an inflexible air I found most unpromising, for by the looks of it, we'd as easily persuade a mountain to step aside.
But Ayllin said something incomprehensible in a voice that rang with a faint melody, and the bejewelled runes lit up with white fire.
The door creaked ponderously open.