The Serpent in the Glass (The Tale of Thomas Farrell) (20 page)

‘What do people learn here?’ Merideah asked, as they all moved further into the Hall.

The Headmaster looked her directly in the eye. ‘Things that have been forgotten, Miss Darwood.’

‘And, more importantly, what do you eat here?’ Penders asked.

Trevelyan chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Penderghast, the Grange puts on a good spread.’

Penders licked his lips. Merideah shook her head, but Thomas grinned and looked around at the paintings. Among the scenes of battle hung portraits of men seated on horses or upon thrones. Thomas took these to be kings or great generals from the history of Avallach. But it was the painting over the door that attracted his attention. Its ornate wooden frame surrounded a land of many pools and rivers. In the midst of this landscape sat a walled hill defending a grim-looking fortress. Thomas thought he’d seen the fortress somewhere before, though he didn’t know where. Perhaps it was some famous place in his world that he’d seen in a book. As Thomas turned, he thought he caught Trevelyan’s eyes flicker down from the painting to him.

‘Now, let’s explore the East Wing shall we?’ The Headmaster led them to the left, down one of the two corridors that led from the Hall.

Unlike the Hall, the corridor had no wooden panels, or even any paintings. It was made entirely of stone except for a gossamer-like substance that covered the tall, thin windows in place of glass.

Penders stopped and prodded the strange substance. ‘Eww, it’s sticky!’

Trevelyan stopped and turned. ‘Mr Penderghast, it takes the spiders a long time to spin the web glass. Please desist from poking holes in it!’

Jessica scrunched up her face. ‘It’s made of spiders’ webs?’ She didn’t like spiders.

‘Yes, one of my ideas. Do you like it? There was a nasty draft through here before I had them made. And they’re so much cheaper to replace than glass, though admittedly a tad less easy to clean — what with all the flies and things. Anyway, keep up!’ Trevelyan spun around and continued down the corridor.

They walked through a hall about half the size of Darkledun Hall. There were no tables or chairs in here, but strange markings covered the floor. Thomas thought they were perhaps lines for sports such as badminton or indoor football, but if they were then they looked very different to the ones on the floor of the assembly hall back at the Manor. Thomas saw some stairs, but Trevelyan carried right on past them. At the end of the building they passed into a corridor much the same as the first one, complete with its own web glass. It ended in a door.

‘Now, children,’ Trevelyan began as he opened the door. ‘This is the East Tower.’

Jessica suppressed a scream. There in the doorway stood a short man — if man he was — dressed from collar to floor in faded multicoloured robes. His long nose and wiry hair sat upon a wrinkled face as black as coal. He smiled, showing small white teeth. A look of displeasure swept across Jessica’s and Merideah’s face.

‘Ah, High Cap. Greetings on this fine morning!’

‘Hello, Master Fabula!’ Trevelyan replied enthusiastically. ‘Children, this is Master Fabula. He’s the storyteller here at the Grange.’

‘Felicitations!’ Master Fabula announced with a florid bow.

‘Storyteller?’ Treice said. ‘My parents said telling stories is bad.’

‘Not those sort of stories, Mr Montague,’ Trevelyan corrected. ‘Master Fabula teaches oral tradition.’

‘The history of dentistry?’ Penders offered, in an attempt to understand.

‘No,’ Master Fabula began, a quizzical look on his grotesquely lined face. ‘I relate the stories of our past, so that we don’t forget them.’

‘Can’t they just be written down?’ Thomas asked.

Merideah sighed impatiently. ‘That’s not the point. Relating stories orally is an art in itself quite separate from writing them down.’

‘Quite right, Miss?’ Master Fabula’s eyes seemed wide with delight.

‘Miss Merideah Constance Darwood,’ she replied. Penders’ eyes rolled up to the stone ceiling above.

‘Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you all, but I must practise the epilogue for a fireside tale this evening, so if you’ll excuse me?’ Master Fabula said, inclining his head.

Mr Trevelyan nodded. ‘Of course.’

After Master Fabula and his rustling multicoloured robes had gone, Mr Trevelyan ushered them through the door.

‘I’ve never seen a man with jet-black skin like that before,’ Thomas said, after they’d passed through the door.

‘His mother was a Dewg,’ Trevelyan said.

‘A Dewg?’ Thomas asked.

Trevelyan waited until Jessica had closed the door before he replied. ‘Yes, one of the races of Avallach, and not a very kindly people it must be said. But Master Fabula was brought up by his father and knows only of the Dewg from his own stories.’

‘Why’d he call you ‘High Cap’?’ Treice frowned and glanced at the top of Trevelyan’s head.

‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ Mr Trevelyan began, a look of surprise on his chubby face. ‘We don’t use the term Headmaster here, it’s High Cap instead.’

Penders didn’t look convinced. ‘But you don’t wear a cap.’

‘No, Mr Penderghast, but we don’t call the teachers at the Manor ‘masters’ and yet there I am the Head one.’

They now stood in a large room lit by several torches. A spiral staircase wound its way up through the tower from the middle of the rotund chamber. The stairs were of marble, and the black banisters were topped with silver. They walked up the stairs and round and round until Thomas felt quite dizzy. At various points along their ascent, landings led off to floors with many doors, but Trevelyan led them past all these until they reached what Thomas made the fourth floor. Here the staircase ended. They were at the top. Thomas wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The entire top level of the tower teemed with row after row of shelves filled with old-looking books of all sizes. Reading benches ran the length of some shelves, and tables and chairs had been dotted around the chamber haphazardly.

‘You’re now in Darkledun Library, the most exhaustive repository of knowledge in all of Avallach!’ Mr Trevelyan announced with some pride.

Merideah’s amber eyes glinted with curiosity. No doubt she wanted to get her head into the books.

‘Here,’ Mr Trevelyan continued, ‘you will find just about everything ever written on Avallach, her people, her history, her places, her ways. There’s even a rather nice section on cookery.’

As they rounded a rather tall bookcase, Thomas caught his first look at some Darkledun Grange Academy students. At least that’s what he supposed they were. They looked a year or two older than him, and the uniform they wore was quite unlike his own, except in one particular: though the badge bore no spear or horn, it did boast the emblem of the serpent. The fawn-coloured uniform comprised of black leather wrist bracers, short boots, and a long short-sleeved hooded cloak. The badge had been emblazoned on the right breast of both the tunic and the cloak. As they passed, a blond-haired student turned to look at them with piercing blue eyes. Thomas, surprised to see a boy and not a girl staring at them, grew even more surprised by the ears protruding through the student’s long hair: they were pointed!

Trevelyan had moved too far ahead for Thomas to ask him about the students, so he followed silently behind the others as the High Cap of Darkledun Grange Academy led them to a ladder that seemed to be fixed onto runners that ran the length of the shelves. The Headmaster leapt onto the bottom rung at a run and coasted several shelves down until the ladder stopped beneath a round hole in the ceiling. ‘Right, up you all come!’

Thomas was the last to ascend the ladder. He felt as if he’d just come up through a manhole in the street, except that this street was the roof of a tower complete with battlements. Near the hole he noticed another of the yellow markings he’d seen in the vestibule of the Hall and by the fountain.

Trevelyan swept his hand through the air once they’d all gathered next to him by the crenellations. ‘From here you can see the entire Grange.’

Thomas looked down to the Gardens of Arghadmon below. His eyes followed the garden path as it became the road they’d travelled down in the carriage. He saw the river, the stone bridge, the dark forest, the lake and grassy plains. About a mile away, or so he guessed, the road branched off to the right and ran, with an occasional bend, to a small cluster of buildings surrounded by brown and yellow fields on the near edge of the lake. Further on the landscape went, in lush grass and blue sky. There seemed no end to it.

‘Where did the Gate and the walls go, sir?’ Thomas stared out toward where he thought the Gate should have been. ‘It feels as if we’re inside, but it looks as if we’re outside, if you see what I mean?’

Trevelyan leant upon the battlements. ‘We’re inside a sidhe mound.’

‘A sidhe mound?’ Jessica asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘You might think of it as a hollow hill, Miss Westhrop,’ Trevelyan explained.

‘But I can see the sky, the sun, the horizon!’ Treice said as he looked around.

‘Yes, clever isn’t it? But we’re inside a hollow hill nonetheless.’

Sidhe
. The word echoed in Thomas’s mind. Had he heard it before? It seemed familiar. Suddenly, as if triggered by that very word, Thomas had an overwhelming feeling that he’d been here before, here on these very battlements. But, of course, that was impossible.

— CHAPTER FOURTEEN —

The Anywhere Lift

The West Wing consisted of a labyrinth of mainly windowless corridors hung with red tapestries and decorated with countless portraits of Avallach’s more prominent former inhabitants. Most looked very odd, especially that of a gawking Marganus the Misplaced, an ancient king of some land called Glywysing, according to the words at the bottom of the painting at least. The king’s thin crown sat unevenly upon his ginger-haired head, bending one of his ears down and making his appearance look quite comical.

After promising Merideah and Jessica that they could read some of the books in the library at some other time, Trevelyan had led them to this part of the Academy by way of the corridor on the other side of Darkledun Hall, identical — complete with web glass — to the one leading to the East Wing.

Trevelyan let them peek into a few of the classrooms as they went along. The chairs were all tall-backed, wooden and moderately ornate. The tables were long and dark, and none of the rooms were very well lit. Indeed, there appeared to be no electricity at all, and lanterns — and occasionally torches — lit areas where the sun’s rays never came.

The West Tower looked like a mirror image of the East Tower. This time, however, they climbed six floors before they reached the top, but this final floor contained no library or anything else come to that, for it stood quite empty. There wasn’t even a hole in the roof.

Penders stated the obvious ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Are you sure, Mr Penderghast?’ Trevelyan pulled a large ivory key from his robes. ‘Now, where is it today?’

Trevelyan thrust out the key and it seemed to pull his hand, first one way and then another until it had pulled him about ten yards across the empty level. ‘Ah, here!’ He inserted the key into something the children couldn’t see. Suddenly a door materialised, a plain wooden door with a silver knob.

‘Please, come in!’ the Headmaster invited as he opened the door. Inside, inexplicably, lay a room.

‘Most peculiar,’ Thomas heard Merideah mutter to herself, as she passed through the door behind him.

Once through the door, Thomas found himself standing in a room filled with books, papers, maps, framed pictures, and numerous objects he couldn’t put a name to. A bright red carpet adorned the floor and upon it sat a large desk and chair that looked to be several hundred years old.

Trevelyan moved over to the desk and sat in the large wooden chair. ‘Please pull up a seat, there are a few about if you can find them — or just sit on a pile of books!’

The children eventually all found seats of one kind or another. Thomas ended up sitting on a stack of books, the topmost of which was entitled
An Insight into the Mind of the Clabbersnapper
by Gylburne Tailz. He briefly wondered what a Clabbersnapper might be before his attention wandered to some of the other strange items in the room. A large glass case at the far end of the room, behind Trevelyan’s desk, contained a number of interesting items, including an hourglass in which the white-yellow sand stubbornly refused to move into the lower half of the vial, and a mirror that showed a reflection of an empty room. However, it was the large picture that hung on the wall to the right of Thomas that his eyes felt drawn to. It depicted a dozen silver-clad knights on silver-grey horses galloping through the clouds, each with a silver lance.

‘Would anyone like a drink and biscuits?’ Trevelyan asked, to which everyone replied that they would.

Trevelyan picked up a small silver bell from his desk and gave it a tinkle. Suddenly six tall shiny goblets appeared on the desk followed a couple of seconds later by a large silver plate of chocolate biscuits the size of saucers.

‘Neat!’ Penders’ eyes were almost as wide as the biscuits.

Trevelyan smiled as he separated the goblets into pairs. ‘Indeed, Mr Penderghast. Now, which drink will you take? We’ve two blackcurrant-and-apple, two peach-and-grape, and two lemon-and-gooseberry! Choices! Choices!’

Penders grabbed a blackcurrant-and-apple. The others were quick to grab hold of a goblet, leaving Thomas a lemon-and-gooseberry drink along with Mr Trevelyan.

‘Ah, a fine choice Mr Farrell!’ Trevelyan said before taking a sip from his goblet.

‘But I didn’t make a choice,’ Thomas protested.

Trevelyan smiled. ‘You chose to choose last. You see, there’s always a choice!’

Thomas frowned and then took a sip of his own drink. It tasted much nicer than he thought it would.

Merideah, who’d remained quiet but observant, put her drink down on the desk. Her face looked serious. ‘So the missing students came here?’

‘Well, where shall I begin?’ Trevelyan tapped his goblet. ‘We find some pupils at the Manor more willing to believe than others; usually it’s because they’ve more of the Old Blood in them.’