CHAPTER 1

Fynn looked about the café, and treated himself to another martyred sigh.
It was nearly twelve thirty, and the café was bustling under the lunchtime trade. The sullen girl at the till had scowled at him when he'd spilt just two drops of indifferent tea onto his tray. Dipping into the topmost layers of her mind, he'd discovered that she had bad head, probably aggravated by a fight with her boyfriend. The boyfriend Fynn could do nothing about, but he silently told her that the headache had faded as she stood there. He'd watched the minute lines fade on her face as the enchantment took hold, only to wrinkle again as she smiled at him. Fynn didn't notice- women had been smiling at him since he was about fourteen.
"Eyeing up the totty again?"
Fynn managed not to jump. He should have known they'd sent Fran. Summoning a social smile, he turned to face his ex-girlfriend, who was casually flicking a piece of card from finger to finger.
"Go on, then, what do they want me for?"
Fran sniffed. She was good at that. "Not even a hello, then?"
"Hello." Fynn wriggled round so that he could look at her without craning. "You didn't answer the question."
"Fine." Fran started shuffling pointless papers. "It's like this. There's a city missing."
"Excuse me?"
Fran grimaced. "It's like this. You ever heard of Erehaven?"
"I… I did once. What about it?"
"Ye bog-standard modern city. About half a million people, shops, high street, cathedral and so on. Only, it's not there any more. First, it's faded out of mortal memory- and now only us enchanters can remember it- then it faded from Ordnance survey maps, and now that." She waved a piece of blatantly fake parchment at Fynn.
"Just me, Fran."
"No need to get snappy at me." Was that just a trace of hurt? It wasn't like Fran to get sentimental. "You can get these maps at tourist places, castles and suchlike. They're replicas of maps first drawn in 1610. Look, you can see Erehaven, such as it was then, is almost faded out."
"You're saying the disappearance is moving back in time?"
"Exactly. You can see why we want to find out what the hell's going on. You up for it?"
Fynn sighed. "I have a choice? Where am I looking?"
Fran laid the map flat. "The river Ere is more a trickle, it flows into the Derwent here. It's as good a place as any to start. Do you want to take anyone with you?"
Fynn looked up sharply. She wasn't trying to get herself invited along, exactly, but he could see the concern in her face. Sweet, that. "It's all right, Fran. I can't hide behind other people all my life. If I'm not back in a couple of days, assume I've vanished too, okay?"
"Wait, wait, wait." Fran handed Fynn a tangle of silver and waxed cord. It was actually her lucky charm- a present from her late father. Inactive, the pendant formed a circle of sterling silver, but against someone's skin, it reacted to their thoughts and tried out different forms, always seeking the wearer's idea of a perfect Celtic knot. It was difficult to make, and ultimately pointless, and Fynn was grateful.
"Bye, Fran."
"Bye."

As soon as Fynn arrived, he found the slight discrepancy that revealed the sodden fields as the lost city. All he could see were neglected fields imperfectly fenced against the trickle of water gamely trying to flood the grass, but his feet felt the tarmac below them, and the occasional cobbles. Fynn nearly broke both ankles.
Once he was used to the illusion, though, he simply looked about for the nearest landmark. He had no idea how to reach the city, but he knew it hadn't completely wiped itself from time yet, so there had to be…
It wasn't all fencing, he realized. There was an area where the hedgerow tried vainly to block the gusts of cold that lifted the longer grasses. The hedge was, predictably, hawthorn, but there was also some tall ash in there. Come on, thought Fynn, there's two out of three- he spotted it then, a scrawny sapling, but already putting forward a few wildly over-optimistic oak leaves. At his collar, the Celtic knot suddenly formed a sharp point, like a compass settling on North.
"Gotcha," he muttered. Oak and ash and hawthorn. Heading where the three grew together, he was rewarded by a slight taste in the air. It was the smell of sap in springtime, but Fynn knew no human could have picked it up.
As it was, he tripped over his prize. It was a small, well-weathered block of local stone. It had once been carefully chipped into a cuboids, and embedded deeply into the earth, but that was long ago.
Fynn knelt, almost respectfully, and tried visualizing what should be around the block, rather than what was. There'd be a road there, rough-worn by horses, not wheels, and then…
He felt it gradually at first, the idea that his imagination was being shaped, before a nagging sound in his mind's ear caused him to look up, annoyed.
Cattle. Lots of them. And at the back, a dozy-eyed boy with a long stick, used to tap the rump of any cows that strayed. All the time, calling out in a local accent.
"Come on, come on, come on…"
Fynn stood, sheepishly. He wasn't entirely sure of his welcome here, but it was probably going to be awkward, at least. "Hello."
The boy held back his fringe. "'Ullo, there. You all right? Oh, I see. Makin' devotion, was it?"
Fynn knew without looking round, in fact was filled with the conviction, that if he looked around now, the oak would be full grown, and it's branches dripping under the weight of silver and copper, little offerings dangling under the leaves, tied with ribbons and baler twine. The stream had been diverted into a hollow, which was filled with further coins and scraps of paper, little twists in balls of waterproof wax balls. Fynn had a sudden idea.
"Genius loci. Flip! Um, may I join you on my way to, uh, the market?"
The boy's face wrinkled in acceptance. "How're you at herding?"

Half an hour later, Fynn was completely bewildered.
As it happened, he wasn't bad at herding. He was an enchanter by birth, but his father, and most of the fathers before him, and been raising sheep on inhospitable Welsh mountains since just after the mountains were formed, and by subtly manipulating the boy into becoming a collie dog, Fynn took the cattle into the market with no bother.
The town itself showed clearly the problems of erasing yourself from history. There weren't nearly the amount of people there should have been, nor were there the usual shops that studded every High Street in Britain. But there was a large, modern library, and Fynn slipped gratefully into the familiar-feeling building.
Even here, there was no peace from the strangeness. All the books were carefully packed into tea chests, the librarian frantically darting from chest to chest, covering them in tarpaulin.
"Hello," he giggled. Well, that's the Schrodinger's chests all wrapped up tight."
Fynn frowned. "What are you trying to do?"
"Well," the librarian waved his hands excitedly. "We wanted to protect the books that hadn't been written yet. This way, you don't know if they're there or not, which is quantum uncertainty and time's never had a clear relationship with that, oh no! But it you open the chests, the wave front will collapse, and then we'll either have Iain M. Banks or the Venerable Bede. As we travel back in time, less books are being written, but, well, here they are! And when we open the chests, they'll all still be there, maybe, despite not being written, ever."
Fynn raised a finger, and lowered it. "You don't have a clue, do you?"
"Not a one," agreed the librarian cheerfully.
"I can tell. My pendant's trying to form a Mandelbrot Set. Anyway, you just want to read the books before they're written, which is fair enough. Who's in charge around here? Uh, of the mortals, that is."
Something close to a frown crossed the librarian's face. "You don't that? It's the mayor, down at the Guildhall."
"Thanks you," said Fynn quickly, and walked briskly away from the unspoken questions.

Fynn had a headache, trying to fit said head around the city.
It was smaller than it would have been, but he knew by now that the city had travelled before the Industrial Revolution. It was mostly domestic industry, so he could see a windmill not far off, the spare space being taken up by fields of hay and corn and barley. The baker got the flour from the mill, and most of a former office block was now taken up by delicious cooking spells. There were inns, the hop-and-horse feed smell issuing from their back rooms. The plumbing seemed contemporary, though, robbing the almost medieval scene of it's more unfortunate aspects. The herbalists sold prescription drugs alongside strange powders made of such-and-such a wort, some of the names seemingly invented for their humour value. There were farriers- blacksmiths, as they would have been called in these times, who seemed to be regarded with as much honour as the healers. Fynn had his suspicions about the healers.
He tried to walk off his headache, his pendant ceasing it's writhing as though to help sooth him. As he got to the outlying houses he noted more and more of them had big bowls of good cream outside, sometimes with a bottle of washing-up liquid by them in case the brownie receiving the offering hadn't quite got the hint. Fynn grinned- obviously the inhabitants had made sacrifices, not least their dishwashers. A few more had sprigs of mountain ash, what Fynn's mother had taught him was called rowan, tied to doors and windowsills, and he frowned slightly at that. What needed repelling?
The most immediate answer was the two burly men, clearly itching for less amusing livery, who clamped hands on Fynn's shoulder.
"'Ullo, sir," one of them growled in a voice that made Fynn's pendant scrunch in alarm, "His Honour 'ud like a word with you."
"Perfect." Fynn gave them the mortals a look that made them hang back a pace, and strode to the Guildhall.

© Naomi Claydon, 2000