The House of Storms (29 page)

Some roofers came to fix the roof. Klade, who’d read many adverts for
Building Services
in old copies of the
Bristol Morning Post
by now, was tremendously excited. He watched through the thistles on the far side of No Through Road as they lifted ladders from their van. Smoke came streaming from the things they had burning on their lips. When one was thrown away, Klade combed the wet grass. Short and wet and white and stubby—he gave it a sniff, and nodded knowledge-ably to himself, for these guildsmen were definitely Browns.

He listened to their voices, that songless song.

‘How bad can it be, eh? Triple time on a Fiveshiftday. Just a roof, innit? But did you see that one—Jesus Christ… What a dump this place is! You’d never ever believe anyone actually lived here. And them things in that fucking wood. Fucking wafting about like stray bits of fucking washing …’

‘Excuse me.’

The roofers looked down at him from their ladders, grins frozen on their faces through teeth where were even brighter and sharper than the Huntsman’s until one of them spat them out into his hand and Klade saw they were the metal things called nails.

‘I was wondering if you might not be from Frandons of Frimley, who offer Services to all Kinds of Guilds and Reasonable Prices and Free No-Obligation Quotes,’ Klade said, pleased with himself for remembering the exact advert, and for not spitting once.

‘Come again?’

‘I was—’

‘Nah. You’re one of them, aren’t you? A little fucking troll. What d’you reckon, Eddie?’

Another roofer called Eddie peered down from a new patch of slate on which he was spread-eagled with a hammer. ‘Can’t be, can he? I mean, look at him.’

‘But—see, his wrist—he’s got no Mark. Old enough for Testing as well, I’d say.’

Klade looked down as well, studying the grubby off-white stretches of flesh where the veins met his palms and then holding them up for the two roofers to see as they balanced on the dripping roof and the winter sky poured in around them.

‘Or maybe it’s true. You know—all them tales. The bastard changelings really do steal our fucking babies. Just you wait ‘till I tell our Shirl…’

The men, turning away from Klade, went back to their work up amid the sky, and shouted at him soon after to get out of the way, you fucking freak, because it’s not safe down there. But their left wrists, Klade had noticed, all had the same small wound on their insides as if they’d all somehow caught themselves when they were cutting their hair or hammering. So, he noticed later on, did Brown and the other delivery men. He experimented with the same effect himself,
Snip snip
and some more of the fucking red came out of him, and Silus found him and spat all over his face as he told him he should never, ever, do that again, nor use that sort of language. He sent him away, and then came looking for him later to say he was sorry and that he sometimes forgot just how awkward things were.

‘The Outsiders,’ he said, ‘they have this Mark on their wrist which shows they’re not Chosen. It’s something we don’t have—or that we lose. And they don’t call us the Chosen, Klade. They have bad words for us. Words like the ones you were using. Troll and monster and sometimes—although this is not quite so bad; there are graduations even in these things—changeling. They fear us, and that’s why the roofers talked to you in the way they did.’

‘This Mark—where’s it from?’

A long pause. The song was oddly quiet and was mostly that new-roof smell, which was cut wood and raw stone. ‘The Mark comes from aether, Klade. It’s the same thing which makes us Chosen.’

‘What’s aether like? Is it like electricity?’

Silus considered this. The angles of his face were as smooth as a plate. ‘It’s best if I show you all the things that aether isn’t before I help you to understand what it is. After all, it’s time you learnt a little more about the world …’

Silus showed him the things called maps, which Klade had seen before in the adverts in newspapers—
How To Find Our Showroom
—but had never really understood. The blue, here, was water, and there was so, so much of it, and the green—and, yes, Klade, the brown as well—that was land. Klade touched his finger to the place to which Silus’s black nail had pointed, which was Einfell, then twisted his gaze out of the window and up past the tapping beech tree to see if he could see it coming down out of the clouds. Silus laughed at that.
Sometimes, Klade …

Klade came to love maps. The blue water you couldn’t drink because there was so much salt in it. He liked the ones best of all where the whole country they lived in, which was called England, was made tiny. He loved Africa, which was dark in its heart, yet hot and bright under a bigger sun. The people were mostly brown there as well—but here, Klade, you’re getting confused. And remember when you asked about electricity, and I told you there wasn’t any here in Einfell?

It was a warmer day, and the study window was open and the song was full of birds nesting and the moss which was growing over the new bit of roof. Silus gave a chuckling sigh. His eyes brightened.

‘This, Klade, is the first thing I was shown when I was apprenticed as an electrician. Despite all that’s since happened, I still remember it now.’ He took out a rod of something he called amber, which was beautiful and heavy, and rubbed it whisperingly with a fabric he termed silk. ‘Now. Watch what happens when I pass it over these scraps of paper …’

Klade gasped in wonder. They lifted and danced like snowflakes.

He tried walking the other way down No Through Road where thin trees grew up through slabs and there were fallen things called lampposts. He felt all the life and colour seeping from him until he saw in the downhill distance a fence fierce with firethorn and the hills of Outside rolling beyond in cloudy haze, and strung with marching poles and lines as if the world were sewn up and would otherwise fall apart. He stood there, breathless. The song was scarcely in him, and he pitied these greys, these browns, these Outsiders, for having to live in this empty world which they had made. Pitied, but was also fascinated.

There was a Meeting Place which lay on the far side of the woods. It was a newsprint-before-the-mouse-pee-had-got-to-it sort of place, grey and flat and surrounded by a wide space of lawn which the Master Mower, who was generally best avoided, came out to cut on summer twilights, hands which weren’t hands spinning like the webs of insects in the trembling dusk. The song here was like the passage of water in winter when ice grew across the Impassable Stream, and Klade was borne on its arms as he stepped inside and smelled the Meeting Place smell, which was overpowering, and yet no smell at all. Shivery with excitement, he clattered along the corridors.

Sometimes, people were brought to the Meeting Place—Chosen or Outsiders, Klade; these things don’t always matter. But, always, they were in Some Bad Way. Once, there was a thing there called a baby, which was like the cats having kittens, which an Outsider had left at the gate. It spoiled the clean Meeting Place corridors with its songless mewing and off-sweet smell. Klade, looking at it, prodding when it stopped squawking until it started again, twisted it around by the wrist to see if it was Chosen. He still wasn’t sure. But he didn’t like the way so many of the Chosen crowded around it: how even the Huntsman brought lumps of meat which he laid red-blue and bleeding on the Meeting Place front step to be found there in the mornings, and which Ida told him to get rid of and wash away. He didn’t like the way how even the song from the Shadow Ones in the deepest part of the wood changed.

The baby had a face which was drawn up with fleshy webbing and only one eye through which it didn’t seem able to see. That in itself, Klade, doesn’t mean it’s Chosen. Some things just didn’t come out right, which was like the kittens again which Silus collected in a bag to drop into the Ironmasters’ butts because that was a mercy. The baby didn’t last long either, which was at least something, although Silus grew as cross with Klade when he said this as if he’d used words like cunt or witch or monster or you bastard fucking changeling.

Then came what Klade thought of as the Diving Man. From what he’d glimpsed of him, he looked like a picture he’d seen in the
Bristol Morning Telegraph
of a guildsman dressed in a huge diving suit topped with a portholed brass helmet, although the outfit had become part of the Diving Man, so that he seemed to have been made from rubberised canvas and brass and glass and bloody flesh and loops of strappy leather. The Diving Man, Klade learned, was nothing to do with the sea and had in fact been some kind of aether worker. He’d come from a nearby place called Invercombe, where so much of the stuff had got into him that he was bright at night and dark in the day, which was called a
wyreglow.
Klade was warned on no account to go near him—
You most of all, Klade
—but he crept up to the Meeting Place anyway, and peered through a gap in the door into the shuddering gloom where the Diving Man lay on his bed dripping and gasping through his porthole face as Blossom tried to sing his pain away. Dark and light tendrils of gas like bits of the Shadow Ones floated around him.

Klade was happy when the Diving Man left them to lie under the earth and the Meeting Place went back to its old, empty ways. There was a sense of lost purpose along its corridors which reminded him of the announcements he found in newspapers for
Guild Open Days
which he now knew from the dates had taken place long ago. He came often to wander there when he was sure no one else was about, and brought with him the new tinned drinks of which he was growing especially fond and was always asking Master Brown to bring in his van. They were called Sweetness, which was exactly what they were, and they were
Made With Bittersweet
which was a
Product For A New Age.
There was
Ripe Raspberry
and there was
Honey Orange
and there was
Candy Apple
and there was
Mellow Tonic,
and the lists of their ingredients in tiny print were something Klade loved to read as he sat in the corridors with his back against the cold white walls. He wandered afterwards with their sweet secret bitterness still filling his mouth through rooms dedicated to the sad Ages when the Chosen were chained and imprisoned and marked with a cross and a big letter C. He found the mottled prints and photographs of the Chosen in all their marvellous variety both comforting and fascinating. He experimented, with a puzzled excitement which reminded him of the feeling he got when he looked at the adverts for
Hygienic Suspenders and Stays,
with closing the creaky manacles around his ankles and wrists, although they were mostly so big they simply fell off him.

Then more Outsiders were coming, for their own Outsider reasons, and in that sudden, inexplicable Outsider way. And no, Klade, they’re not bringing any produce—least of all those blessed tins. And they’re not in Some Bad Way, either. Sometimes, they’re like us and they come here because they want to say hello just as you might go to visit the Ironmasters. These particular Outsiders were from York, which Klade had discovered wasn’t in Africa at all, but nevertheless struck him as a coincidence which he wanted to share with Ida until he felt the sad turbulence of her song and smelled the charcoal wetness of her face.

‘You should stay down at this end of the Meeting Place,’ Silus told him. ‘I want you well out of the way when they come.’

‘Why’s that—is it because they think we’re goblins and steal their babies although in fact they simply leave them at our gates?’

Silus’s breathing lisped and rasped. His eyes settled like a slow fog on Klade.
I can’t get angry with you now. Please, just do as I say …

By now, Klade knew the doorways to slip behind and the corridors to duck along. Windows, especially, to peer through. And here they came. Outsiders. Big ones and little ones, with big and little voices and not a trace of the song, and holding on to each other as if they could scarcely see or had lost their way.

‘Come on, Stan. You said you would.’

‘Some bloody way to spend a Noshiftday.’

And here was Silus and here was Ida as well, fully dressed up in their big green cloaks and their hoods up so you could scarcely see them as if they were ashamed of being Chosen.

The one called Stan let out a barking moan. He said, ‘Jesus, Ida.’ Klade had a rough idea who Jesus was—he was dead, and important—and he knew his name was not a word you should use in that way.

I don’t know what to say. Were you my children—you’re so grown! Were you ever really mine? Is that you, Terry—whatever happened to your golden curls …

‘Christ, don’t do that—talking in my head!’

It’s all I can do. I have no—

Klade was surprised when Stan covered his ears with his hands against Ida’s song. Doing that didn’t even work very well with ordinary sounds, and it was obvious it wouldn’t stop Ida talking to you. But the whole scene went on surprisingly long, with a large amount of sobbing and howling from the Outsiders who were worse than the Farmers at milking time in the sounds they made. Klade didn’t particularly like these Outsiders—not with the way they were making Ida feel and behave. Silus’s lisp was getting worse than ever as well as he tried to
Calm Things Down
and created nothing but hiss and spray.

The Outsider called Stan eventually stumbled out of the Meeting Place into the grey light of the Master Mower’s fine lawn. Klade, curious, followed him through a side door and watched from around a corner as he wiped his face and looked across at the woods as if they were something terrible, although there would be no sign of the Shadow Ones or the Huntsman at this time of day. Then Stan made another barking sound and started laboriously coughing up lots of the stuff which was inside him, all of which struck Klade as surprisingly copious and colourful, considering little globs of brown were all Master Brown ever made.

Stan finished and wiped his mouth. He checked the thing on his wrist just below his Mark, which Klade knew was called a wristwatch, and his gaze trailed back towards the main door of the Meeting Place, then settled on Klade.