The House of Storms (44 page)

‘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.

A telephone pinged, and he was able to watch the Western soldier, who was dressed in uniform not dissimilar to his own, get up from his desk and reseat himself before the mirror. His expression changed as soon as he saw Ralph. He was quick—not some superannuated dotard—which was good. There was even a dim sense that he and Ralph had probably met at some party or meeting in London or Bristol or Dudley, long before the war …

‘I’m Greatgrandmaster Ralph Meynell. I’m in command of the Second Eastern Battalion of the Loyal Forces.’

The man’s gaze flickered. ‘Why are you calling me?’

‘I want to talk about peace.’

To his credit, the Western general remained composed. He pursed his lips. Then there was a wrenching lurch. Ralph found that he was sprawled back on the cold earth of the transmission house when his consciousness returned, and Eastern soldiers in full body armour were blocking the door’s light.

He was steered back to a halftrack, where his second-in-command, a bluff, gruff, ginger-moustached ex-Savant named Arundel, was already waiting. In convoy, another halftrack ahead and behind, they moved off down the slushy road back towards Hereford. It was snowing more strongly now, the winter’s first whiteness coming down so heavily that the dark ground seemed to rise to meet it.

‘Have some of this.’ Arundel offered him a shot of spirit from a flask, which Ralph did his best to hold in his unruly hands as the halftrack jumped and juddered, and then work down his burning throat. ‘You look as though you need it. We’ll probably be able to get you on a train back to London later on, if this bloody snow doesn’t really set in.’

‘I’m a traitor. I don’t deserve this kind of treatment.’

‘You’re ill, Meynell.’ Arundel took back the flask, thought about taking a slug himself, then glanced at Ralph and capped it and lit a cigar. ‘What did you say to the Westies?’

Ralph, who had no reason to dislike the man, did his best to describe the circumstances of his call to the West.

‘That was
all
you said?’ Arundel spat over the side of the halftrack and wiped his moustache. ‘That you wanted peace—and your name and rank?’

‘I was interrupted.’

‘You’re hardly in a position to deliver peace, man. None of us are.’

‘But I’m sick of delivering war.’

‘Look, Meynell—you’re plainly unwell and under stress. What you did back there today was so hopelessly stupid that people will laugh it off. Tell them what you’ve told me when you get back to London, and all they’ll give you is a few shifterms’ rest. You’ll be back here in God-forsaken Hereford before we ever take the place.’

‘In that case, I’d better tell them something different.’

They both chuckled. Sometimes, in this war, it was hard not to laugh. The snow drifted. The treacherous landscape was softening and receding. It looked beautiful as sleep. Then the halftrack ahead of them tilted. It puffed and churned impotently as it lodged in a deeper rut, forcing them to a halt as well.

Arundel cursed and ground out his cigar. ‘Why can’t you lot—’ He began to stand up. Then, at the same moment as something out in the blurring white went
snap,
he gave a grunt and slumped back down, half-covering Ralph with his considerable weight. Heat seemed to be flooding out of the man although, even with all he’d seen and experienced, it was a long, shocked moment before Ralph realised that it was the hotness of blood and urine. He tried to lever him away. Arundel, with what was left of his fading life and consciousness, groaned and pushed and struggled back.

The soldiers in the other halftracks were tumbling out as the white air grew suddenly loud with the sound of shouts and guns. Finally, Ralph extricated his limbs from Arundel, and scrambled down as well. Bullets whanged and whined against armour plating. The snow swirled with smoke and orange flashes. He had no idea what was happening, although it was as likely that this attack was from some Eastern soldiers spooked by this poor visibility as that it was anything to do with the West. He rolled away from the halftracks and fell into a ditch at the edge of the road and coughed and vomited before he regained his senses, and began to crawl through the filthy water.

The ditch tunnelled on. Behind him, the shouts and the gunfire continued. Ahead was only whiteness and dark. The stupid thought—he couldn’t help it—turned in his mind that this early onset of winter would play hell with supplies. Then, for all that he was now plainly a traitor, he wondered if he might be able to reach the next checkpoint and raise the alarm. On hands and knees, pausing now and then to cough and retch thin, bright sprays of blood, he scrambled through thickening scums of ice and mud. The sound of the guns had almost faded. Then there was a shape ahead, and with it came a voice, and that voice was humming.