The House of Storms (30 page)

Klade just stood there. Stan just stood there for a while as well, his mouth going loose and tight and gulping like the fish in the Impassable Stream, and his face turning even more blotchy white.

‘Sweet Elder—this place is even worse than I thought…’ Stan coughed again, staggering away from Klade and spitting and hawking. Then he went back in through the shining doors of the Meeting Place, and Klade hid—properly this time—and then eventually he and the other Outsiders went away. This wasn’t the first occasion Klade had had a bad experience with Outsiders. He already knew that whatever it was about the Chosen which made them react was something which he seemed to have strongest of all; stronger than the Master Mower, even, which was saying something. Normally, he wasn’t bothered, not even by the things Master Brown said to him as long as he brought him his tins of Sweetness, but today he was upset in a way he couldn’t explain. Ida came to him as he sat on the empty edge of the desk in the furthest of the Meeting Place’s rooms, kicking the boomy metal of a filing cabinet. Her mood was wet and her mood was grey; the sadness leaking out of her like rain from the sky.

I’m so, so sorry. People can be so hurtful. In a sense, Einfell really is a haven—

‘Why else would we live here?’

He gave the filing cabinet another booming kick.

We all start as Outsiders, Klade. Being Chosen—it’s being caught in a spell.

Klade nodded.
Boom, Boom
went the filing cabinet with a hollowing of the song which was just how he felt.
Boom.
He knew all these things which Ida was trying to tell him.
Boom.
He stared at the wall. There were photographs there—but in this particular room they were not of the Chosen but of Einfell’s so-called benefactors and friends. Men and women. Guildsmen and mistresses. Ladies and gentlemen. Stan and Eddie and Mum and Terry. All those names they gave themselves. Fuck the fucking bastard cunting lot of them.

When you came here, Klade. When we first brought you here, we thought—

‘Don’t tell me! I don’t ever want to know.’

But—

‘—NO!’

Even as the afternoon was deepening, it remained bright in this room, with the windows kept clean here and the glass sheets of the picture frames shining so strongly that they washed away the photographs which lay inside in the pureness of their light. Klade studied each one, and the face in the glass which blinked and flinched in surprise was that of an Outsider, and was always the same.

Klade was growing. Klade, in his own different way, was changing as well. He helped Master Brown unload each shifterm’s produce mostly unaided, and stacked it himself in the so-called New Barn where the cats kept the rats away. Master Brown, whose first name was Abner, talked to him more easily now, and spat less often, even though he still chewed his wads of tobacco, which he told Klade was a filthy habit he should never acquire. Klade took a hand now in deciding what was ordered, especially the new promotions and the tins of Sweetness in all their surprising new flavours.

‘It’s all right,’ he would say when he saw a new face climbing from a van or wagon as he crossed the Fold Yard, for he’d now learned how to distinguish one Outsider from another with almost complete accuracy, ‘I’m really not what you think …’ He’d practised and refined that phrase and the smile he put on with it in the glass of the Meeting Place’s picture frames. He’d learned, in these moments of meeting and interaction, how to make the song fall quiet within him so as not to become distracted. For Klade understood now that he wasn’t like the Diving Man, who had been poisoned by aether, but that he was like that baby which had mewed and stank. Not that he’d ever been in A Bad Way, but he’d been left by his mother in some Bristol institution, which struck him as pretty much the same as being dumped at Einfell’s gates.

Sometimes, Silus or one of the other Chosen went Outside. After all, it was only a matter of climbing into the shining green wagon and hooking up the fine horses the Farmers tended. Still, it was a surprise to Klade when Silus came to him one morning, dressed in his best grey cloak, and announced that it was time that Klade also went.

‘Why?’

Silus made a sound which approximated to laughter. After all the newspapers you read, Klade!’
I’d have thought you’d have been desperate…
‘You should wear this.’ Silus was holding out in his white hands another cloak.

‘But won’t I… ? I mean—how will they … ?’

‘The thing is, you’re with me, Klade.’ You’ve seen how people react…

The horses were already waiting in the Fold Yard, and Klade was glad of his cloak as the carriage started moving and bits of Einfell began sliding away. Past the edges of the wood, which looked dark and homely and strange. Across the lawn, with the Meeting Place afloat at its green centre. Silus talked to the horses. His song was absorbed and strange.

‘Will you get those gates for me, Klade. You just lift that latch.’

Rusty metal complained. A wonder, really, that he’d never thought to do this thing himself. Then he was back in the carriage, and they were Outside. The hedges were green, and the road was long and flat. There were fields. Beyond, and sometimes closer, lay the neatly ridged backs of houses. A dog came scrabbling beneath a wooden gate. It was the first dog, out of the pages of books and Ida’s thought imaginings, which Klade had ever seen.

On that first and his other subsequent journeys Outside, Klade was struck just how similar everything was. How one field was square, and then so was the next. He wondered how the Outsiders understood which house to go in at night when they wanted to sleep, and how Silus knew which turn to take along these daunting lanes. The song had drained, was almost gone, and the silence was clamorous with the noise of the horses and the rattle of the carriage. Breath and heartbeat, the feel of his buttocks against the bench and his tongue lying trapped and songless in his mouth, and the dim focus of Silus as he steered. Other carriages now. Whole clusters of houses, their chimneys straight, not beckoning, their gardens like tiny fragments of field, and just as square. Windows as well, glass eyes staring. Some Outsiders looked and some didn’t, Klade noticed, as their carriage went by. Some twisted their heads and spat like Abner Brown and others pulled the little Outsiders to them and made shapes with their red mouths and signs across their chests.

There were, Klade discovered, snatches of the song to be heard Outside. One of the first came when they passed a forge, which was recognisable from its smoke and banging, and then from the salty singing of men—who were ironmasters, and yet had fleshy Outsider faces and hands. Klade felt a homesick ache. Then there came trills and cascades of other notes, abrupt and surprising, from places called guildhalls, and from the bustle of other workshops and mills and factories, and then as their carriage passed under the black lines which looped here and there on the long fingers of poles, where it was whispering and intense. Klade cocked his head and brightened as he saw another line knitting the space between treetops and sky. But the song here was different. Scarcely a song at all, but nevertheless surging pale and familiar. The hairs on his hand prickled. There were, he had learned, two types of pylon. There were those of the Telegraphers which bore messages, and those of the Electricians which bore electricity, and both were the pride and the emblem of their separate guild.

They reached Bristol. The song here was in the buildings as well, if buildings was what they were, for, torn out of the newsprint, unflattened and daubed with dimension and colour, they were extraordinary beyond Klade’s imaginings. And it was joined by shouting tumults of ordinary sound and guild-house bells. Outsiders were teeming here like woodlice, up and down the streets and in and out of the traffic, within which their small carriage was indistinguishably lost.

Things to be done that first time Klade went Outside on what Silus called Business, which, it transpired, involved settling the many bills which Einfell’s running of incurred and arranging for the organisation of the funds which had been established at the start of this Age. Klade learned how to brace himself as he stepped from their carriage, and remembered to pull up his hood. Cold shock of the pavement. Bodies, elbows and smells. Words hawked to the pavement by his feet in shining gobs. Troll. Bastard. Changeling. As he stood waiting for Silus to arrange for the keeping of their horses, Klade leaned to look above at the looping lines, both telephone and electric, at the advertisements from his newspapers made elephantine.
Snowberry Sweetness. Mistress Bessie’s Water-Apple Pie.
Then dark offices, walls and ceilings laden with ornament, and the song sometimes heavy and sometimes dim in the smoke-hung air as Outsiders called accountants consulted machines which were both far off and near and were called reckoning engines, which, Klade surmised, were quite different to the engine which drove Abner Brown’s van. In time, there were many things in this Outsider world which he came to understand. The gaze of the men behind desks which lingered on him when he wasn’t looking, then scurried away when he did. Tremble in the hands as they offered Silus a pen to sign. The breathing through the nose as if there was something bad they couldn’t resist smelling. Words muttered more quietly as they were leaving than they were spat on the street, but the same words nonetheless.

Fuck

Changeling

Witch

Jesus

The Lord Blood Elder

Troll

Silus took Klade to Clifton Dam. Here, the song was joined; aether and electricity—and water as well. As they stood on abutments high above the city, it arched out in streaming jets to fall far into the distant gorge. For long moments as he stood there, Klade didn’t feel lonely. The song here was almost as strong as in Einfell, but purer, sleeker, and the pylons marched off across the hillsides and his mind journeyed with them and his skin tingled in the charged, misty air. Silus was involved in debate over crackling sheets of plans, and the guildsmen were almost bowing close to him and had nearly lost the panic in their eyes. Klade wandered off along the thrumming gantry. He let his fingers stroke dewed loops of pipe above the marvellous drop. He even let his hood slip a little from his face as he looked down.

‘Hey, if it isn’t the freak-face.’

‘Freakiest thing about him is, he looks normal.’

‘Wonder if he’s got a dick, though.’

‘Did you see the other one. Face like a skull with the eyes still in it.’

‘Old Manny’s been of a tremble all morning.’

Klade turned to the source of these comments. ‘It’s all right. I’m not really what you—’

‘Can talk as well.’

‘Clattery pissings, I’d say.’

‘What sort of accent do you call that, mate?’

Two young Outsiders. Men—lads, really, for Klade could now tell these things—with sleeves rolled and their bodies slung with toolbelts. One had a cigarette behind his ear, and the other’s face was somewhat disfigured by red eruptions—although he certainly wasn’t Chosen. Klade could smell their flecky, meaty, Outsider breath on his face. He took a step back. The rail of the gantry nudged cold against him.

Fingers plucked his cloak. Klade was clothed underneath, but he felt naked.

‘Maybe he
has
got a dick—’

‘Wouldn’t know how to use it.’ The hand which had been tugging at his cloak made a downwards swoop. Its fingers tightened around a surprising part of Klade’s anatomy and gave a testing squeeze. ‘Poor bastard.’

‘Maybe we should shock him. See how many volts …’

‘Easier still. Let’s just have him over the edge.’

‘Upsadaisy.’

‘Bloody heavy for something made of fairy wishes.’

The sense of being physically surrounded by Outsider flesh was so strange to Klade that he was slow to realise that his feet were no longer on the gantry and that its rail was slipping beneath him. Soon, he was nearly hanging in space, although the hand which was no longer holding his crotch had left such a strong impression there that he could still feel it. He glimpsed the whole side of the dam, its marvellous walls which were the song made concrete, that endlessly falling water, and the places far below were dimpled and spumed. The fact was, it all felt oddly pleasant, and it was with a sense of regret that he heard shouts, and was jarringly dropped against the gantry. The lads dusted him down. With grins, they straightened his cloak. Just a bit of fun and games. No need to get upset. But on the way back to Einfell, Klade thought that Silus really did look as fearsome as the Outsiders sometimes muttered he did. He cracked the reins, was angry with the horses.

Klade made sure now that he received the most up-to-date papers: the
Bristol Morning Post
and the
Evening Telegraph
or the
London Times,
or the plain old
Taunton Advertiser
if there was nothing else. He read them top to bottom, main headline to shipping news. In many ways, he came to feel he could understand the world of Outside far better through newsprint than he could when he was actually in it.

‘You really shouldn’t be buying that stuff,’ Abner Brown told him one day out in the Fold Yard as a new generation of cats swirled around his legs and Klade carried off a two-dozen box of the latest flavour of Sweetness, which was
Blackcurrant Dream,
which he could almost taste already even though he had never tried it. ‘Nothing but chemicals—it’s doing good Bristolians and the sugar estates in the Fortunate Isles out of a job.’

By the time Klade had returned from the barn to pick up the next box, he’d already decided that it would be useless pointing out to Abner that he should simply cease selling the stuff if he objected to it. Outsiders were almost like the Chosen in their inability to see the obvious, and he knew what Abner and the other tradesmen’s reaction was when he ventured an opinion which didn’t support theirs. After all, he was just some changeling, and all the more freakish for looking like an Outsider—
Will you listen to the child fucking goblin
—even if he was Klade.

But still, it remained obvious to him. Even Silus had commented that the trust funds which had been set up on Einfell’s founding were no longer producing the income they once had. Money, to Klade, was a simple concept, based on the logic of adding one pound to another—or not, as the case might be. He understood about falling share prices as well, and also that if there was less profit people would inevitably be paid less, and would thus have less to spend, which was what the editorials in the
Bristol Morning Post
called a vicious circle. He saw the way things were going in the fact that Abner’s van had been crudely repainted to read
Foresters’ Fine Supplies
and then sanded off shortly afterwards so it didn’t say a thing. He saw it in Silus’s hissing complaints about making ends meet.