Still, there were always the Shadow Ones, even if he only caught the trace of a whisper of their once-vibrant song. Arms outstretched, catching the ragged darkness, Klade entered their thorny wood. He didn’t fear the Huntsman now, or the Master Mower, for they were like the Loved Ones over whom the followers had often sobbed, and Klade sobbed as well. He didn’t fear them. He didn’t hate; he loved. In truth, what Klade feared and hated that night as he raged through the empty darkness and howled at the taunting moon, was Klade. Fay—where was Fay, and the forgiveness he craved from her for the terrible crime of being Klade? Klade was trapped within himself. Trapped within his rage. Time, nevertheless, passed just as it always did, even if it offered no escape. Night left its reluctant threads between the weirdly ornamented trees, and with it a few strands of mist, but even they wouldn’t stay for him as he plucked at them with desperate fingers. This was just another morning, and Einfell wasn’t Home; it was just another place. Klade rocked himself and listened to the wintery birdsong taunting the near-songless silence. Songless, but not quite. Oddly, what called out to him most strongly was a brick shed-like thing he’d never attended to before. For a delirious moment, he even thought he’d found the Huntsman cowering inside, but it turned out to be some version of his own reflection fluttering in a mirror. We don’t have mirrors here in Einfell, Silus’s old voice reminded him, and Klade staggered out before the horrid thing or things could get to him.
He wandered through the trees into the morning as the cold sun peered down at him. So much for Home. So much for Einfell. So much for the War Effort. So much for Ida and Silus and Marion Price and the Beetle Lady. But then the sense remained that the song wasn’t entirely lost. For hadn’t the Beetle Lady said to him, at least in his wilder imaginings and her ghostgas ramblings, that Einfell was so close to Inver-something that you could almost see the place and taste the air, and hadn’t that Inver-something been part of Home as well? Klade wandered down the road which crossed the rough grey meadow which now surrounded the meetingless Meeting Place. Glaring at the empty woods in reproach, he passed through the iron yawn of the open front gate. Once again, and seemingly just as always, he was Outside.
Which way from here? That was the question. He let his feet lead him down the quiet, empty lanes. The sky had clouded over and the wind had settled. He could hear the ragged pant of his own breath. It was like being indoors. It was warmer, as well. This was more like it. Whatever this was. He was the Bonny Boy returning, and he would have lain down under any of these trees, which still clung to earlier autumn days than the many which he had passed. Once more, there were berries, and then there were signs to tell him that there was Danger and No Admittance, but when had he ever heeded those? He would happily have laid himself to rest here amid any of their roots. But now he was running, being carried by his feet. He let out a yelp, and the sound came back to him as a song. He tilted his head, almost stopped, suspicious even at the moment when he seemed closest to the brink of everything, for how can you find Home in a place you have never been?
Unfolding hills like the splayed pages of a book. A larger hill at the spine of them, warted by some sort of church or temple. The sky unhazed. It was genuinely warmer here, and the trees were scarcely red. Further moments of doubt as Klade wondered whether he wasn’t somehow falling backwards through all his recent days. That larger headland still rose as if he really was approaching it, and there, off to the left, was a tiny castle, all spires and turrets—the sort of place fairies might live in, if fairies had ever existed in the first place. Now a gatehouse, and now a grass-tufted drive curling down towards a valley, and Klade’s hands and feet still had a mind of their own as they climbed the fences and chains and the slope led them down and on. The glow of something like a bald giant’s brass head, and the glint of windows, and the faces of flowers, barely withered, hovering armfuls of astonishing green. All of Klade’s previous thoughts on the subject of Home were confirmed and yet confounded, for he’d come to believe that Home was many different places, yet here, surely, was a Home for all. Its song called out to him in incredible range and power. And it was light and it was Sweetness—for, surely, here was that very scent…
Klade’s feet veered from the path and tumbled, half-fell down some steps. The sun pushed down at him. Moist grass untwined beneath his splaying hands and tickled his cheek. He was in some sort of grove, wherein it seemed that all the warmth he’d been craving these long last days had been preserved. A cluster of trees zigzagged their shadows at him, and the berries which hung from them were larger than apples, and they were green and they were orange and they were the brightest, brightest yellow, and their shades roared a blissful song into his head. Standing up, stretching, Klade reached for the nearest fruit. He’d never seen such a thing before—but then he realised that he had. Egg-shaped, and with a little knobble at each end, he’d seen it, oh, a million times, on the sides of cans of Fizzing Lemon. He even recognised, as his nails scrabbled at the waxy outer coating, that same bittersweet scent. He bit down and through hardness and pithy softness, and the juice at the heart was such sharp delicious agony on his fissured lips that he gave a choking, happy scream as it flooded into him.
Klade gorged himself until finally he was sated and lying in sticky amazement as he dug his hands into the towering earth. But the light still played, and he ungummed his eyes and felt a shifting of the song which was more than the sway of these boughs, much though that was. There, in the shadows A hich were not shadows, were jigsaws of movement. Klade belched an acid belch, and sat up, and felt a smile crack his face. The song had never been closer. For here were the Shadow Ones he’d so missed at Einfell, and yet even the Chosen were changed here. They were scarcely there to his sight, and yet their song was overwhelming. Here was the Master Mower, who no longer needed to mow. Here were the Farmers, who didn’t need to farm. Here was the Huntsman, unwanted. And he was the Bonny Boy, and he was Home at last.
V
THROUGH A CAULDRON RATTLE of wind and rain and small-arms fire, Ralph breathed the necessary spell as he trained his binoculars along the pockmarked outer walls of Hereford, and the cheap lenses cleared to an impression of finely ground glass, and the city swam back into view through the hazing rain. The shifterm since his return had been a sleepless blur of endless problems and decisions, and meanwhile a large portion of the yards, workshops and dwellings which comprised this city had been reduced to rubble. Yet still it resisted, and he dared not risk a full assault with all the extra slaughter which that would entail.
He passed a sense of movement. Helmetless, ducking along the breached battlements, the man paused as if to admire the view. Smiling, and in need of shaving, he returned Ralph’s gaze. A Western soldier. Deep, narrow-set eyes. It was like one of those childhood games: who’d look away first? Then, in a spray of flesh and bone, the top of his head was blown away.
Unslinging his binoculars, Ralph handed them to the duty-captain, then descended the slippery duckboards which furrowed around to the slope of the hill facing away from the city. What had been fields two months before was now a settlement sprawling on trampled, ruined grain. Still, in many ways, it represented the pinnacle of what could be achieved at this particular moment in this late, technological Age. Last night, he’d watched as the last volleys of siege-dragons were prepared for launch. Not dragons at all, in the sense of the beasts used for pursuit by the wealthy in the hunt, although these ones did at least have something approximating the gift of breathing fire. Red-eyed, quivering and wheezing at their tethers, they drank from waiting drums of paraffin. A torch was lowered to ignite them, then they were released in a whoosh of wings and oily smoke, heading up towards the city like giant paper lanterns where, belching flame as their innards exploded in flaring gouts, they sought the targets which had been imprinted on their tiny minds. The moment was beautiful, even in the horror and terror it contained.
Coughing, refolding his big handkerchief so the bloodstains wouldn’t show, he crossed the s
hining sea of mud to reach the old farmhouse where main command was established for his evening briefing. Salutes were returned.
‘Sir? There are some things we’d like to show you. Captured ordnance …’
The rain, Ralph realised as it stung his face as they crossed the ruined yards, was becoming sleet. It twirled prettily through the arc-lights which had been erected around some kind of display as he leaned forward, thinking of that faraway morning when he and Helen had wandered Great Westminster Park, pausing to admire this or that display of guild ingenuity.
‘Wouldn’t get too close. It can still spit.’
Basically a distorted species of bat, the nocturne had a rot-and-sulphur reek, and looked to be dying as it clung to the stained titanium bars and the acids which had been somehow contained within its body leaked out. It was more spell than any man-made creature Ralph had ever encountered.
‘How come they don’t attack Western machinery and combatants?’
‘We think they probably do. It’s just that they’re left to eat their way out of thin wire cages as the army retreats.’
Clever, to think of a weapon which would work best in defeat. Clever as the ironblight which blistered and corroded any type of metal it came into contact with, or the mines which clicked to a numbered passage of feet or the tug of specific spells before exploding, or as the slobbering monstrosities of claws and teeth they’d found buried in basements. Even when their assault began—and were it to be successful—Hereford would be a nightmare to claim. Ralph coughed. His hands, he saw, were crimson.
‘Sir? Are you all right?’ He sensed his staff officers’ faces, glistening and hooded against the sleet, gathering round. ‘We’re a little concerned—’
‘Save your concern for the enemy,’ he snapped.
He threw his jerkin down on a chair in his farmhouse bedroom when the briefing was finally completed. That damn nocturne; this fluttering blackness behind his eyes. He shivered and ached, but couldn’t bring himself to think about sleep, and there were things he needed to study. Of course, there were files, printouts, numberbeads—all the endless detritus of raw military intelligence—but they had ceased to the main subject of his attention in the wretched stalemate of Hereford. Since his return from London, his researches had focused with a horrid compulsiveness on discovering more of the true history of Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell. He knew by now that his mother’s high-guilded lineage wasn’t all that she claimed it to be; knew as well that a freakish series of serendipities and misfortunes seemed to surround those who opposed her. She was lucky, certainly. And manipulative. And she didn’t always tell the entire truth. In many ways, he, personally, had always been in her thrall. But, just as when he was on the edge of discovering Habitual Adaptation, he sensed that he was on the brink of a far bigger realisation.
A stray numberbead rolled playfully towards the hollow in the mattress as he sat there. He trapped it between fingernails still reddened with blood. A compendium of interrogations of Western captives; shellac recordings transcribed into aethered stone. As his weary consciousness slipped from the bedroom, his attention was drawn to a particular extract, which was unusual for the prisoner being a changeling. This one, its name recorded as Silus Bellingson, had apparently had access to much potentially useful information about the Western power grid—or so its interrogators claimed…
After the denials, there were inhuman howls, then strange crackling laughter as the buzzing decreased. Ralph couldn’t imagine what the creature must be suffering, nor what it looked like.
‘There’s a weak contact in that rotator …’ it hissed. ‘You should have it resoldered. I told you this was the work to which the West put me. The same work I did before I was… Before she … You think I don’t know about electricity …’
The hum increased. The howling returned.
‘And what other punishment should I expect?’ A sound of spitting. ‘But let me tell you this. Let me tell you something. About your precious greatgrandmistress. Please keep your hand away from that dial. It’s not what you think. I loved her once, you see …’
The recording, at a point where it had surely lost any military relevance, crackled on.
‘She came to London, and she was the most beautiful creation I had ever seen. Things between my wife and I had—no, I don’t need to offer excuses. Alice was mocking, radiant, flirtatious, and she needed me and I had power then, gentlemen. Power in your precious East, and we were lovers, me and Alice Smart, as she was then. Oh, I knew that she was dangerous. But at the same time I didn’t. Or perhaps it was the danger that I liked. She has that effect on you, you see, gentlemen. She blurs what you know and … The fact is, she moved her attentions towards a young telegrapher, a great-guildsman who would have been the catch of this or any other season. After all, she’d got what she wanted from me. I was no longer needed. And there I was, gentlemen. Alice took my old life and left me as you see me. It’s a sort of trademark of hers, I think, that the person she wishes to destroy seems to have brought it upon themselves—and it’s probably the truth. After all, we’re human and polluted—yes, even us changelings—and Alice, Alice, Alice Meynell—she rides above it all. Yes, it’s entirely my fault, gentlemen, and not hers that I’m here and as you see me, and for that I deserve to be punished …’
With a buzzing howl, the recording hazed into the interrogatee’s screams.
In the morning, Ralph wiped the crusted blood from his face, pulled on his jerkin and, quite unable to face breakfast, went straight out to inspect his troops. Walking a captured outer street, he was as much struck by the destruction his own armaments had wrought as by the traps and dangers left by the enemy. The charred trail of a dying siege-dragon ended in a blackened mass of feathery flesh. A dusty boom rolled across what remained of the rooftops. Could be another mine going off, but it was more likely by now to be his own engineers dealing with one of the many Eastern shells which—either through poor manufacture or some resisting spell the West had developed—had failed to explode on impact. It seemed as if the West and the East were unknowingly joined in the same busy task, the meaning and eventual purpose of which was obscured in all the blood and smoke and rubble and rhetoric.
The frosty air drifted as he called for a halftrack to take him south along the front. One of his deputies cleared his throat.
‘There’s been a little concern, sir, about the state of your health. We’ve been given authority—’
But here came the halftrack, and Ralph climbed in, and the wrecked city vanished behind him amid humped brown hills of mud. This early thrust around the city had failed to achieve anything resembling encirclement, and the majority of the wreckage along its route was civilian; wheelbarrows and wardrobes cast aside in the act of fleeing. Then, as lingering drays and cows were also discarded, it became bony and bloody. Any wandering cattle were shot on sight by the Eastern troops for fear that their malnourished bellies contained bombs. There were no flies—it was, and this was one small blessing, getting too late in the year for that—although the crows were feasting; more flutters of black to confuse his eyes.
There was blackness behind this blue sky, and clouds—look how quickly they formed—were unrolling like smoke from the south-west. Ahead now, the landscape grew yet more ragged. Vehicles were sprawled. Drays neighed. Men stood around or guarded their backs, made yet more edgy by the silence as they awaited some fresh assault. Ralph climbed out from the halftrack where the road stopped at a huge, loose hedge. The officer in charge saluted and welcomed him.
‘Is this it, then? Nightlock?’
‘Stalled us all shifterm, sir. It’s like untangling a huge ball of barbed wire …’
The men who were cutting through the spring-like tension of the purplish double-thorned stems wore full armourplate and wielded heavy wire-cutters.
‘You’ve tried burning it?’
‘Only makes it stronger, sir. We’ll get through, but it’ll take an age.’
‘No trouble from the rear?
’
‘None at all, sir. But it just makes you wonder what they’ve got cooking …’
Off to the right, and surrounded by red mine clearance flags, lay a small telephone relay station where two sappers, telegraphers in their civilian days, were unloading as they prepared to reconnect the wires back towards London. Ralph inspected their workings as a few first flakes of snow, large and light as goose feathers, hung in the air, and then told them that he’d keep an eye on their equipment if they took a tea break. Somewhat bemused, they saluted and headed towards a brazier tent.
They’d left a testing box open on the bare earth floor inside the squat brick hut. Beside, freshly tamped and refitted, lay the arm-thick bundle of aethered steel and copper which would soon bear messages East. Studying the testing box, Ralph realised that it lacked the handcrank of similar devices he’d used back at Highclare. Otherwise, it was a simple enough device from a mechanical viewpoint, although in a magical sense it was enormously complex. This, after all, was the boundary of all communication. This was where East no longer met West. He lifted the discarded Western end of the cable which the telegraphers had been about to destroy and tightened it to the binding posts. His lungs cleared and his frosted breath uncurled as he incanted the activation spell. Since the Falling, massive failsafe gateways had been placed throughout the Eastern grid to stop any such Westerly connection, but a carrier signal remained necessary to keep the entire system alive. He touched the twin binding posts on top of the testing box. The world rippled. Working telegraphers often disdained mirrors, and sang like their forefathers who’d stood at the haft, although Ralph was aware that he was taking this technique a little far. Still, the process was alarmingly easy, and it was a relief to leave the aches of his body and push as close to a state of pure information as any sane telegrapher would ever dare. In the swish and sigh of information, he was soon recognisably within the network of the city of Bristol, and sought the heaviest, busiest cluster of data, a veritable maelstrom, an erupting volcano. This, surely, was the High Command of the Merchant Venturers.
The House of Storms Page 34
