Chapter Three
What goes up must come down, although
that can take between seconds and millennia,
depending on whether one is a man or a mountain.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
The train arrived in Aberystwyth just after noon. Both Professors Tarrant disembarked from their separate carriages, several yards apart. They looked around the station and the luminous azure sky beyond. They double-checked their luggage. They watched a seagull glide on ocean-scented breezes that scudded along the platform. Finally, when every single excuse had been used, they began to look at each other—
“Professor Tarrant!”
Elodie turned so fast she made herself dizzy. A sallow young man was running toward her, waving a clipboard. She watched him apprehensively through windswept hair, fearing he might be a student who’d tracked her all the way to Wales to complain about her course prerequisites…
Suddenly, Gabriel appeared at her side in a protective stance, arms crossed, expression indomitable. Well, goodness, Elodie thought. How chivalrous contemptuous of female capabilities! Did he think her some fainting damsel? Why, she’d been dragging herself out of bogs, dusting herself off after falling out of trees, and, um, perhaps this wasn’t the most helpful line of thought after all.
The young man arrived in front of them, breathing heavily as a consequence of his short dash across the station platform. “Professor Tarrant,” he said between gasps. “I’m Algernon Jennings, an accountant with the Home Office. I was appointed yesterday to manage this assignment, and I took the overnight train in the interests of our budget.”
The implied criticism of their having caught a more expensive morning service did not escape Elodie. She gave Mr. Jennings a closer look. Dressed in a cheap, undersized gray suit, with an old suitcase in one hand and a tent rolled up under his arm, he was apparently planning to camp out in an office. His thin brown hair contained so much pomade a tornado wouldn’t have been able to stir it, let alone the afternoon’s breeze that played havoc with Elodie’s. Testosterone was attempting to cultivate a mustache above his upper lip without much success.
This must be the other problem Motthers had tried to warn her about. Elodie did what she always did in the face of problems: she smiled. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jennings.”
The young man blinked as if only just noticing her presence. “Hello, are you Professor Tarrant’s secretary?”
Her smile vanished faster than doughnuts in a faculty lounge. “No, I most certainly am not.”
“I beg your pardon. How good of the professor to bring his wife along on the job.”
Elodie blinked. Beside her, Gabriel developed a sudden cough.
“I’m not Professor Tarrant’s wife,” she said tersely. “I mean, I am , but that is beside the point.” (Actually, she would rather like to take the point and stab someone with it just now. Either of the two men in her vicinity would do.) “I’m also a professor in my own right. Why have we been given a manager?”
Algernon Jennings looked at Gabriel as if seeking permission to reply. Fed up, Elodie picked up her suitcase, turned on a heel, and began striding toward the station exit. Gabriel joined her, and Algernon scampered to catch up.
“Too many field operations have come in over budget lately,” he explained. “Just last month Mr. Kapoor bought new binoculars, even though one lens of his existing pair still worked perfectly well. And—”
“You won’t need that tent,” Elodie said, having stopped listening to his speech after the first sentence. She did not actually care why he was joining their assignment. She’d just realized that he would provide a convenient third presence between her and Gabriel, which elevated him from a “problem,” into a godsend. “The weather forecast is too unstable for camping,” she explained. “We’ll be staying at the village inn.”
Jennings’s eyes widened. “The inn?! But the cost of renting rooms for an entire team…uh, where is the team?”
“We’re it,” Elodie told him. “Hurry up, please, we’ve no time to waste.”
“But—but—” Algernon dropped his clipboard, then almost tripped as he hastened to retrieve it. Elodie and Gabriel did not pause in their stride, and he was forced again to catch up. “But there’s been a disaster!”
“Well yes,” Elodie replied briskly. “That’s why we’re here.”
“No, I mean another one!”
They came to an abrupt halt. Gabriel frowned at Algernon. “Talk fast.”
“The townsfolk are in a tizzy,” the young man gabbled. “The Rheidol river’s turned bloodred in places!”
“No doubt from erosion of the Old Red Sandstone common in this area,” Gabriel said.
“And, a strange fog sent a whole crowd of peddlers running back to town! They swore fairies were calling to them.”
“Cattle lowing. The sound would be distorted by the fog.”
“Oh.” Algernon seemed rather crestfallen, as if fairies were somehow more interesting than acoustic attenuation and dispersion in relation to water molecules.
Elodie set down her suitcase so as to brush the hair away from her face. “There’s really no need for superstitious panic in town,” she said. “Magic does exist, of course—”
“Sensible, scientific magic,” Gabriel interjected. “Not fairies.”
“—but the 5-SEQ fey line is some four miles from Aberystwyth. For any overflow to reach across such a distance, the energy intensity would have to be unprecedented. You’d see consequences, such as fires, between here and the line.” She angled to point southward and blinked at the sight of a large smoke plume rising beyond the edge of town. “Er, well, more of such things.”
“What does any of this have to do with getting us to D?lylleuad?” Gabriel asked, glancing pointedly at his wristwatch.
“No one will take you there,” Algernon explained. “Even though the fog has cleared, they say they won’t risk the…um, lowing cattle. Professor Jackson had to go out on a bicycle.”
Elodie stiffened. “Did you say Jackson? As in Woodrow Jackson, formerly a professor of Oxford?”
“Yes. He teaches at Aberystwyth University now, so the Home Office sent him out as an advance scout.”
Elodie and Gabriel exchanged a glance darker than the cave from which they and their fellow students had barely escaped after Professor Jackson took them to see singing stalactites that turned out to be razor-sharp spinning stalactites.
Clearly this was Motthers’s “other problem.” If Jackson was currently on-site, they could not get there fast enough.
The breeze whipped through her hair yet again, and she swiped irritably at the strands tangling across her face. Suddenly, Gabriel’s hand appeared before her, an elastic band between its thumb and forefinger. “Good heavens,” she remarked in surprise. “You just happen to have one of those on you?”
“Of course,” he said, looking straight ahead, expressionless. “I’m a geographer.”
“And I’m perfectly capable of—”
“Take the elastic band, Ellie.”
She almost gasped. No one had called her Ellie in years. All at once she was back in Oxford’s quaint little coffeehouse Jabbercoffee, laughing with other students and trying not to look at the handsome, bespectacled boy who sat, usually with his nose in a book, at the edge of the group. Their peers and teachers always treated them as a matching pair— the prodigies —but nothing could be less true. Gabriel was a remarkable scholar, Elodie a wild card. Gabriel had an instant answer for any mathematics question; Elodie could say “My, what a big rock” in seven languages. And whereas Gabriel wore smart tweed jackets and was never seen around town without a tie, Elodie had once got halfway to class before realizing she’d been so occupied with daydreaming about flame trees, lakes of jewel-colored water, and the ethereal landscapes of Tennyson’s poetry that she’d forgotten to change out of her nightgown.
Even so, there had grown over the years a bond of memory and collegiality between them, a kind of belonging together that not even her wedding ring made her feel. Her stomach swooped.
Taking the elastic band, employing assiduous care that their gloved fingers did not graze each other, she murmured thanks. Gabriel did not reply, except to flex his hand against his thigh, which was certainly eloquent enough. Elodie considered employing the elastic band as a tiny slingshot directed at his face, but decided she really did need it.
“Listen,” she told Algernon as she tied back her hair. “There is an obvious solution to this predicament.”
“Walk?” Algernon guessed.
“No.”
“Then…what…?”
—
“Oh my God,” Algernon wailed for the thirteenth time in an hour. “A hot air balloon!” He clasped the edge of the wicker basket as if his life depended on it rather than on the harness and two safety belts he’d insisted upon wearing.
Elodie looked at him wearily. She’d tried to point out that it was a motorized hot air balloon that operated on both kerosene and flaming hot gas, but for some reason this failed to ameliorate his concern. “We’re almost there,” she assured him, raising her voice above the whir of the motor blades.
“How do you know?” Algernon demanded.
“I’m paid to judge distances. Besides, just look down.” She pointed to the small village that lay like a brooch on the green patchwork of countryside below.
“Look down?!” Apparently, this suggestion did not meet Algernon’s standards of reasonable behavior. “When they told me this job was a ground-level position, I took them literally!”
Elodie glanced at Gabriel, if only to avoid rolling her eyes, and saw him rolling his own. He was leaning back against the side of the basket, arms and ankles crossed, tension limning his features as he stared into the middle distance. Elodie assumed he felt unhappy being on this assignment with his so-called spouse. Well, so did she .
She turned back to Algernon. “You’re quite safe. In fact, you’d be in more danger on the ground, crossing fey lines.”
“The lines are stable ninety-nine percent of the time!”
This was true; indeed, a person could go their entire life never experiencing a single disturbance from the rare, magic-infused minerals that lay scattered beneath the earth and that flared only when natural conditions mixed in unlikely ways. But for Elodie, whose career focused on the one percent, and who therefore lived within a frequent storm of magic and its disastrous consequences (interspersed by equally exhausting periods of teaching university students), Algernon’s hysteria over a tranquil balloon ride was difficult to sympathize with.
Unfortunately, the pilot, Mr. Bloyd, did not help matters by saying just then, “I reckon that’s some bad weather coming, it is.” He pointed southwest, to the cumulonimbus formation Elodie herself had been watching for some time now. Its vast, billowing white heap was stained beneath with a heavy, somber darkness that promised storms. Belatedly she recognized that Gabriel watched it too and that this explained his taut expression.
“It’ll be raining old women and sticks soon, mark my words,” Bloyd predicted, his face etched with worry. “I should never have agreed to this trip.”
“Think of the noble service you’re providing to science,” Elodie told him.
“Think of the small fortune we paid you,” Gabriel added.
“Money won’t do me much good if lightning hits this balloon,” Bloyd grumbled.
“Oh my God!” Algernon wailed.
Bloyd sneered at him. “You’re a right lembo , ain’t you?”
“What does that mean?” Algernon asked weakly. “I studied math; I don’t understand foreign languages.”
“I say,” Elodie interjected before someone threw the accountant overboard. “Do you think we’ll be able to land before that weather arrives?”
“Land, maybe,” Bloyd said. “I’m not sure about taking off again, though. And I ain’t staying any more than a minute in that rhyfedd place.” He spat over his left shoulder (and in a complete coincidence , the wind current flung the spittle into Algernon’s face).
Suddenly, the basket convulsed.
“Aaagghh!”
Elodie winced at Algernon’s scream. Bloyd, with muttered curses, began urgently adjusting the gas tank’s valve. Gabriel raised an eyebrow.
“What’s haaaappening?” Algernon shrieked.
“Turbulence,” Elodie told him. “Don’t worry, it’s just air currents—”
Thwomp! A gust smacked into the basket, causing it to swing. The atmosphere flashed eerily with a bright, glimmering blue light that set the gas flame flickering wildly.
“Actually, that’s magic,” Elodie amended.
“But I thought magic was in the ground!” Algernon wailed.
“It is, but it rises up through fissures in the land, or in water vapor, or with the respiration of plants. That’s how it ensorcells people and creates atmospheric conditions like—”
Thwack . Her lecture was interrupted by a practical demonstration that shook the basket. Algernon howled. Elodie sighed testily. Gabriel straightened the handkerchief in his jacket pocket.
“I’m not going to be able to hold her for long!” Bloyd shouted. “We’ve got to turn back!”
“No, wait!” Elodie urged. “We’re almost there. I’ll pay you another ten shillings.” She reached into her skirt pocket, pulling out a handful of coins (and fascinating pebbles and a single earring whose partner she’d lost somewhere). Looking closer at them, she amended, “Eleven shillings.”
“Oh well, if it’s eleven ,” Bloyd said sardonically. Reducing the flame, he vented air, and the basket began to lower. Whoosh went the magically charged breeze. “Eeeek!” went Algernon as sparks flew.
“It’s fine,” Elodie told him. “They’re coming from outside.”
Algernon evidenced no reassurance at this, perhaps because one of the sparks had set a corner of the basket alight. Indeed, he began flailing his arms, creating more of a risk to their safety than the weather or the fire. Elodie nudged him aside, removed her coat, and beat it against the flames until they were snuffed.
“See,” she said soothingly. “We’re perfectly—”
Thud . As another gust rocked the basket, everyone stumbled.
“Just take us as low as you can,” Elodie told Bloyd even as Gabriel opened one of the ER kits and began pulling out ropes and a harness. “We’ll rappel the rest of the way.”
There followed a thorough explanation from Algernon as to why he could not agree with this proposed action, mainly consisting of the words never , oh God , and Mummy! Elodie ignored it. Behind her, Gabriel was strapping on a harness, looking entirely calm, as if he were preparing to walk into a classroom. Elodie hastily stripped off her skirt and petticoat until she was left only in long drawers, thus enabling her to don a harness also. Then, taking coils of rope from her kit, she crammed as much of her personal luggage into the newly available space as she could, hoisted the kit onto her back, and set about securing the rope to one of the basket’s uprights while Gabriel did the same opposite her.
“Mr. Jennings, are you ready?” she asked as she tied a bowline knot.
“No!” he shouted, shaking his head with vigor.
“For goodness’ sake,” Gabriel snapped. “Go home, boy. And once there, try to locate your backbone.” He turned Elodie around and began tugging on the buckles and straps of her harness to check their security, causing her own backbone to feel like it was melting. Memories of him undressing her on their wedding night skittered over her skin, making her tingle and blush. Forcibly repressing them, she checked his harness in turn, like the sensible professional that she was, then they stepped apart, neither of them meeting the other’s eye.
“Ready?” Gabriel asked.
“Of course,” Elodie replied.
Without another word, they tossed their ropes over the edge of the basket.
“Oh God, you’re insane!” Algernon wailed. “You’re going to diiiiie!”
Clipping her harness buckle onto the rope, Elodie hauled herself over the basket’s edge with the ease of someone whose job involved climbing rocks (and occasionally outrunning them), then paused with her bootheels propped against the woven cane until Gabriel was in the same position on the other side. He looked across at her with solemn steadiness. She grinned in return.
“Race you.”
Gabriel frowned. “Certainly not. Safety regulations state—”
With a laugh, Elodie pushed herself off into the sky. Half a second later, Gabriel followed.
Elodie’s stomach swooped with exhilaration as she rappelled down. Wind-shredded light flickered across her face like the bright memory of birds. Magic kissed her skin, warm and sweet. Bloyd had managed to bring them directly above D?lylleuad, and as Elodie descended toward it, she admired the picturesque cluster of white-washed cottages, tucked among lush meadows that lay between low, wooded hills. The Ystwyth River wound a placid course nearby like a glinting dream of the sea. Autumn brightness flared among the greenery as if ancient, mythical gods had scattered copper, gold, and rubies when they stalked the land. Elodie was just beginning on a simile involving sheep and pearls when she came to the village’s cobblestone street and the end of her descent. Her feet hit the ground with a jolt; at the same moment, Gabriel landed.
“It’s a tie,” she told him, giddy with adrenaline.
“It wasn’t a race,” he replied punctiliously. “But just for the record, my left foot touched down half a second before either of yours.”
Elodie scoffed. They unclipped themselves, and Gabriel waved to Bloyd, who immediately accelerated the balloon away. Closing her eyes, Elodie inhaled a scent of old leaves, chimney smoke, and shimmery magic. A bewitching thrill tingled through her as it always did at the start of an assignment, when everything was wild, unknown, and free from students begging wretchedly for deadline extensions.
“Hell’s bells, what a bricky sensagger!”
Instantly, her tingles turned to ashes. She knew that dialect, and it was not Welsh. Opening her eyes, she turned to discover that she’d been so busy enjoying the landscape during her descent, she’d entirely missed the people within it. Two young ladies in white lace dresses beneath white lace parasols, alongside a trio of young gentlemen with beige boater hats, beige suits, and thin beige mustaches, stared at her amazedly. All that was missing to complete the picture was a tea service, someone holding a cricket bat, and an emphysemic bulldog.
“I say, that was bang up to the elephant, what!” one of the gentlemen declared.
“Balmy on the crumpet,” said another excitedly.
“Dimber-damber ekker, sure puts footer in the wagger pagger bagger!” contributed the third.
Elodie was aghast. Only one species talked so incomprehensibly: the well-educated man. She leaned a little toward Gabriel. “Did we somehow get turned around and end up back in Oxford?”
“Hm,” he replied, which Elodie understood to mean unless they are landforms that happen to resemble people, I’m not interested . Setting down his ER kit, he began unbuckling his harness, ruthlessly leaving Elodie to deal with the human geography aspect of the job. Repressing a sigh, she put on her best professional countenance and moved forward, hand extended…
Then stopped and looked over her shoulder as something bashed against her thighs. Seeing a loose strap of her harness, she tried to reach it, then concluded she’d be better off just removing the whole thing, whereupon…
—
“Good afternoon,” Gabriel said, stepping forward in the bewildered silence to shake first one man’s hand and then another while Elodie muttered under her breath, wrestling with her harness. “The name’s Tarrant.”
“How d’you do?” replied a fellow whose trim mustache lay so crookedly above his lip, Gabriel wanted to bring out a ruler and razor blade to fix it. “Pimmersby, at your service. Have you come for the fun?”
“Fun?” Gabriel repeated.
“The magic, of course. Such frabjous excitement! Calloo! Callay! ‘Airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth—’?”
Bloody hell . The fellow was either an incoherent lunatic or a humanities student. (Gabriel did not always find it easy to spot the difference.) “You mean the manifestations of dangerous, unconstrained thaumaturgic energy,” he said, frowning severely.
“Yes, exactly! Hapsitch and I were en route to Oxford for Noughth Week when we heard the news and turned around at once. Mumbers here was holidaying in Aberystwyth—”
“Spot of pleurisy,” the aforementioned Mumbers interposed with a cheerful smile. “My phrenologist says damp sea air’s the best cure for it.”
“—and the Misses Trevallion abandoned an exploration of Tintern Abbey. No longer did they ‘repose here, under this dark sycamore,’ but instead came, er, here…”
“And where were you when you heard about the hijinks?” one of the Misses asked Gabriel in a voice that lifted its hem coyly and flashed a silk-stockinged question mark.
Gabriel’s frown deepened from severe to the level of Puritan at Christmas . “I was in my office in Merton College when informed by the Home Office about D?lylleuad’s life-threatening situation.”
“Ooh,” chorused the ladies. The gentlemen, however, shuffled back upon this revelation that they faced their natural foe, a university don.
“Dr. Tarrant and I are with Her Majesty’s geographic emergency response team,” Gabriel explained. “We will be assessing the hazards triggered by this crisis and organizing whatever aid may be required.”
It was in fact the smallest part of their job and provided cover for the greater: locating the source of the magical disruptions and, as much as possible, making any initial fixes until the secondary team could arrive. If a landslip had exposed a seam of thaumaturgic minerals that were flaring in response to the weather conditions, they would cover it again. If a magic-infused pool of water had flooded, they would shore up its banks. Such a task must always be highly classified, however, since geographers had long ago learned that if you announced a site of dangerous magic existed nearby and might explode at any given moment, it wouldn’t so much induce panic as send people rushing to that site so they could poke their finger in it, take their photograph beside it, and establish a souvenir shop at the edge.
Indeed, this lot were a case in point. Only idiots rushed toward a thaumaturgic crisis on purpose. Excepting him, of course…and Elodie…their peers…thaumaturgy students…geologists…news reporters…army reserves… nurses… but it was not at all appropriate for civilians. Storm chasing ought not be a species of tourism!
“Excuse me,” a Miss ventured, holding up a delicate, lace-gloved hand. Gabriel looked at her expectantly. “I wonder if you’d help me with my sextant,” she said, batting her eyelashes with such vigor it was a wonder she could see at all.
Abruptly, Gabriel reached the limit of his conversation tolerance. He snapped a glance at Elodie, and she dropped her harness, offering a smile so radiantly charming it no doubt would have won the group’s full attention had she been wearing more than a shirtwaist and lace drawers. “We want to be sure everyone is safe,” she explained, “and—”
Thump .
It took Gabriel a second to realize this was not his heart reacting to the sight of other men ogling Elodie’s legs, but in fact Algernon Jennings landing bum-first on the road. The lad seemed to bounce a few times, yelping in fright, before Elodie hurried over to unclip his harness from the rappelling rope. Seconds later, his suitcase landed mere inches from where he sat.
“Lembo!” came a shout from above. Looking up, Gabriel saw Bloyd make an angry gesture before once again directing his flying machine back toward Aberystwyth.
“By George, they’re all crackers!” Pimmersby exclaimed, whacking his boater hat against his thigh in emphasis.
“Such derring-do!” sighed a Miss Trevallion dreamily.
“Can we have your autographs?” begged the other.
Gabriel pressed a finger to his brow, trying to remind himself that patience was the better part of valor (or something like that; his only real experience of Shakespeare involved using a volume of the collected works to press flower specimens for a field study). He’d chosen to study physical geography not only because of all the fun math involved, but also because he assumed there’d be minimal association with humans, and by the time he’d been introduced to words like “diplomacy” and “negotiations” and “teaching students if you want to get any income from your work,” it had been too late to become a tax auditor instead.
He stared at the group, waited quietly until he had their full attention, then spoke in a calm, polite voice.
“Talk to her.”
And pointing at Elodie, he turned his focus away to the verdant landscape beyond.
The Geographic Paranormal Survey placed the major trove of thaumaturgic minerals northwest of D?lylleuad. Gabriel looked in that direction, seeking evidence of a disturbed fey line, such as broken trees, charred land, or a rooftop made from feathers instead of thatch. He saw nothing of the kind, and yet this place definitely was, as Bloyd had put it, rhyfedd . Weird. The cool autumn air seemed to tremble with latent magic.
Beside him, Elodie was trying to explain to the Misses Trevallion that lace-trimmed drawers were sadly not the latest fashion in outerwear. Gabriel touched her arm, and when she turned with an inquiring look, he nodded northwest. “The trove is that way,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” she answered with just the merest undertone of I am capable of reading a map. For a moment they stood in professional silence, scanning the view. Then—
“There,” Elodie said, pointing to a church graveyard at the far edge of the village. “That could prove a trouble spot.”
“I agree,” Gabriel said. “Decomposing matter tends to absorb and intensify thaumaturgic energy.” His eyes narrowed as he laid a mental image of the Geographic Paranormal Survey map over the scene and traced the fey line’s vector. Its scattering of minor deposits between this trove and the next, some fifty miles southeast, ran close to the village. Too close. And it was sparking. Even as he watched, blue light began flickering across the hedge-trimmed fields, causing dirt and grass to erupt along a course that trailed the fey line. Somewhere in the village, glass shattered.
Elodie grinned. “Things are about to get interesting.”
“This situation appears on the verge of disorder,” Gabriel said at the same time.
Crack!
A pebble farther along the road exploded. They pivoted to stare at it. Crack! Another went up in flames. The air blanched with a phantasmal, silvery-blue sheen.
“Magic,” Elodie gasped.
“Eek!” Algernon cried, clutching his hands to his mouth.
Gabriel’s pulse ticked up. “Everyone indoors!” he shouted. “Now!”