The House of Storms (47 page)

I
N THE FIRELIGHT,
rings around the cold, they gathered. Faces and not faces, eyes and not eyes. The wounded and the variously whole. Those who had ears listened with their ears, and those who hadn’t listened in any way they could to the song. The Beetle Lady rocked and sang. The Beetle Lady cried and beat her fists.

‘Can’t you hear it?’ she said, and the air made shapes before her. ‘Can’t you feel it in the air … ?’

It’s coming!
agreed the others, and the acclamation passed mouth to mouth, and the dead trees beyond in the darkness and the gathering nightlock sighed and thrashed in celebration.

In the requiem dark, they came. In the winding-sheet light, they stayed or hid or burrowed. Day by day and moment by moment, on and on through the unending, ever-changing winter. Crawling limb by limb through mud and snow, the followers followed.

‘Listen—can’t you hear the song of the trees? Listen! The most beautiful place, and it’s calling to us. No, not Einfell even, but the place beyond. Imagine this—imagine the summer of your dreams. Forget life. No, no—listen,
listen. Dreams.
Imagine…’ As the wind rose and the snow resettled and gusted, rising white from the black ground and twinkling in flakes of flame towards the black, black sky. ‘Imagine the scent of grass and the red shine of fruit. Wind and water, and light and air, sweet sunlight strewn like bedstraw along cool corridors amid the shadows. Listen. Imagine …’

Here the words grew past saying, and the heat of the fire at their faces and the cold at their backs and the shapings of the one beside her, the one who had a face of potpourri, petals dried beyond their season and scent, ignited and became the full glory of the song. Oh, how the snow danced, how it laughed and pranced! Through garden archways, onward and onward in the tunnelling dark towards the place they had always known. Ralph, rousing himself, chuckled as the warm light laughed over him and sweet breezes stirred within the snow. Yes, yes,
listen
! In cracked tones, between gasps and shudderings, he raised his head and joined in with the song.

The followers had gathered around Hereford and the scents of battle just as they always did, even as it was made beautiful with snow. No, not terrorists or guerrillas, nor freedom fighters or Easties or Westies, the Beetle Lady had muttered to him as she half-dragged and half-pushed him past the snow-drowned flags of mine-clearance work to the ruined walls where others almost as madly attired as her were waiting. Not mad or sane or sensible or deluded, for such distinctions were silly and stupid. Not all or any of those things, for they were the followers, fruit of the battle, and, as they murmured and wailed to the urging of this essentially quite small and shrewish woman, the followers were being led.

Ralph had gauged from the first sunset as they trudged away from of what he supposed he could no longer call his army that they were heading approximately south and west. The snow had settled and deepened, and he lost all feeling from his face and limbs. Gasping, near-drowning in the next tidal wave of white, he’d sensed the Beetle Lady’s roughly impatient hands hauling him out and on.

‘Listen, listen, Master Meynell. You of all people can’t give up …’

The singing, the chanting, was dying now with the fire. A chorus of snores and grunts—an extraordinarily ordinary sound after all the evening’s shrieking and moaning—arose from the dark. How many days had it been now? Almost wilfully, an act of forgetting, Ralph had lost count. He’d lost touch, as well, with any proper sense of whether he was hostage, captive, deserter, prisoner of war. After all, as the Beetle Lady had often muttered amid all the many other things she told this ragged gang, such distinctions had become foolish. They were all simply followers. And, day by day, night by night, mile by mile, their numbers were growing. Not just the disaffected Western and Eastern soldiers whom the Beetle Lady had somehow persuaded to organise that ambush, but many civilians, if civilians could be said to truly exist in war, men and women and children—and other things as well. A ravener squatted nearby, anteater claws hooked over hairy haunches, its mastiff maw droolingly composed. Beside it slept a balehound, one side of its flanks shiny-roasted by the heat of some explosion, but calm as a puppy and seemingly oblivious to all pain. Both, Ralph supposed, had either been created with the instruction to kill faultily inserted, or lost during exposure to battle. And then there was that creature of petals … Ralph coughed and wiped his mouth. His fevers and hallucinations were becoming so much more convincing than the actual realities which surrounded him—if realities was what they truly were.

‘
There
you are …’ the Beetle Lady said conversationally as she squatted down beside him. Ralph had no idea where she’d got glow-worms from at this time of year, but she certainly had a glow about her, unless she’d simply ornamented herself with the embers of the fire. ‘Not so far now, eh?’

‘Do you really expect us to get to Invercombe?’

‘Ahh—but I’ve been there many times. Just as you have, Master Meynell. Why, otherwise, do you think we’re so alike?’

If he strained his eyes—or if he closed them, which was far easier—Ralph could sometimes imagine he could see the prim woman with whom he’d once shared a dinner at Invercombe, and then met with Marion at Hotwells. But it was like most things; it came and went. No wonder, he thought as something small and black-backed crawled from the edge of the Beetle Lady’s mouth and she picked it from her cheek and cupped it and set it flying into the dark, that he hadn’t recognised Doctress Foot when he’d seen her captured in the pit in that Droitwich engine house. But then, he almost
had
, hadn’t he? Once again, the uncertainties began. And from there, if the story she told and ornamented and amended and expanded according to her and the other followers’ moods was to be believed, she’d been released in some abandoned village and had reached Invercombe just as summer was fading. Whatever it was she’d seen there had given her madness this greater focus—that, or this war, or what his own soldiers had done to her—but she was certainly possessed of an appealingly delirious certainty. No wonder the followers were drawn.

‘Why did you claim you were Marion Price, when my men arrested you?’

‘How else would you have come to me, eh? And Marion is here—she’s with us all. Listen!’ The Beetle Lady cocked her head. ‘Can’t you hear it in the guns?’

Not that there were any guns firing within their hearing at that moment, but Ralph knew what she meant, just as he now found he generally understood whatever the Beetle Lady was driving at; he’d even ceased to find it worrying. For Ma-ri-on was everywhere, even in these mutters and snores. And so was the place of lost rest and summer and repose which was Invercombe. It was true that he’d been there many times in his mingled memories and dreams, just as the Beetle Lady said. He coughed and inspected his hands, but they were so filthy that he couldn’t tell if there was any fresh blood. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered so very much now. They were heading towards Invercombe. Whatever it was that was waiting there, he couldn’t think of a better place to die.

T
HE NEW HALLS OF THE GREAT GUILD OF TELEGRAPHERS
could be said to face both East and West, for the light of dawn and sunset shone entirely through them. Set midway along Wagstaffe Mall, the structure appeared to hang on wires, and played tricks with the refracted images of London which were captured in its many huge planes of angled glass. Hallam Tower often hung there; a dancing needle. So, frail and refracted, did the massive pyramid of Great Westminster Park. It was on the itinerary of every recently published guidebook of London. Birds flew into it, imagining it part of the sky.

To Alice, it had come to represent much of her guild’s ambition. It was resolutely modern, uplifting, transparent, and yet solidly well engineered. The onrush of the war, though, had caught the building at a precarious moment, and many contracts for the final fittings and decorations were left unfulfilled. The building was a monument, in the botched interior construction and misuse of intended spaces, to the demands of this conflict.

Up in her office a shifterm after news of Ralph’s bizarre arrest and yet more bizarre disappearance had reached her, and in no mood to exchange her usual pleasantries with the staff, she stood out on her balcony. The structure was glass, moulded entire with spells and filaments of crystal. Alice, as she stood there, seemed to hang in nothing but space and air. London was blue and grey and gold beneath her. The tiny traffic moved along Wagstaffe Mall. The trees were flames of phoenix feather. She’d dreamed of moments such as this long ago back in her aunt’s house by the waterfall when she’d merely been Alice Bowdly-Smart, but in truth the day-to-day business of being Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell often left her wearied.

Alice sighed a cloudy breath. She’d have leaned against the cold rail for support were the glass not so sharp. She had a meeting at eleven with High Command, and their eyes, she knew, would be looking questioningly at her. Life was so grimly unfair. Even the maternal anguish she felt to think of her only son roving ill and unprotected across the war-ravaged landscape—for she was sure that he was still living—seemed a poor shadow of her old feelings. Like this sunlight, like this beautiful city, nothing now touched her with the strength it once had. Her bones ached. Her mind swarmed with half-grasped thoughts and feelings. Her beauty was fading. Of course, she was still referred to as
striking
, as
graceful
, as
elegant
, as—and this was the most hateful phrase of all—
exquisitely well preserved.
But they were comparing her to the harpies and bloated sea-beasts who wrongly imagined they shared their age with her, and not with laughing and youthful debutantes.

Feeling discomfort in her hands, raising them from the crystal rail, she saw that she had been gripping it so hard that they were smeared with blood. Mere scratches, but the potions and foundations which she now so carefully applied over her entire flesh had smudged and run. She turned the revealed flesh in this brighter light. No longer quite flesh at all; it reminded her more of part-thawed ice, and this late autumn sun was so bright that she could see her bones as well, which looked fine enough, considering the pain they nowadays caused her, although they, too, were edged with a sort of translucency …

This was nothing like the near-instant changing she had once inflicted at Battersea on poor Silus—now
what
had been his second name?—but cumulative aether poisoning, according to most of the many books she’d now studied on the subject, was at least as common as a single catastrophic event. She put her state mostly down to all the years of spells she had cast from her portmanteau, and perhaps to Invercombe as well, and the wilder experiments of disembodiment she’d risked that summer there, and to the backwash of the Falling which had so nearly killed her.

She had wondered over the older texts which portrayed the changed as monsters, witches, goblins and demons. They had been burned then, or ostracised. Later, they had been branded and chained and put to use for the unusual proficiency they sometimes possessed in the mastery of spells. The same was apparently happening during this war, especially in the West, which of course had the benefit of a ready supply from Einfell. More interesting still were the gaudier tales and myths which flourished about the lives of some changelings. Goldenwhite, for example, who was said to have led the poor and the dispossessed to the very gates of London in the Wars of Reunification before she was betrayed and burned at the stake.

The time of her meeting with High Command was growing closer, and Alice knew that she would have to go back inside and remake-up herself for it. But it would be amusing, really, to come lolloping in to see them one day as whatever it was that she was becoming. Of course, she’d never imagined herself receding into bland dotage. And how much worse, she sometimes wondered as she studied the Mark which was now nearly entirely faded on her wrist, would her life become if she was Chosen, changed? And she was sure that she was beginning to experience some of what might possibly be the benefits of this new state. Just as her ears were growing weaker, she sometimes found herself hearing things which, from the surprise with which people responded to them, she realised they had merely thought. Of course, it all added to her reputation for perspicacity. And then there was the extra pull of spells. Aether, this city and all the people in it and the westward-threading telephone lines of her own guild, seemed to be calling to her in inexpressible song.

It was a far more composed and energetic and, indeed, happy greatgrandmistress who faced High Command on that unseasonably bright November morning than any of its members might have expected. If there had been a slight loss of faith in her, a feeling that she was no longer quite the acutely able and maturely beautiful woman whom they all admired and secretly coveted, it was soon dissipated by the challenging gaze of her blue eyes and the smile with which she swept the room. Even the sad business of her son—the sheer
grace
with which she’d accepted it!—enhanced rather than diminished her. Still, and even then, there would normally have been queries and murmurs at what she was proposing. Not that any of them would have ever doubted her ability—individually, they all knew and owed her too much—but there were, or at least should have been, practical considerations of security and chains of command to be addressed.

But light shone through the windows, and Alice Meynell shone with it. Even the cynics, and that included most who sat around this long table, were inexpressibly moved. For they were sick of this war and its death and mayhem, and had privately come to wonder whether questions of free trade and taxation and slavery and local influence had ever been worth the sacrifices which were now being made. They feared, as well, that the general population would challenge the prosecution of this war if it didn’t end far better and more quickly than now seemed likely, and that they would be challenged with it. And here was Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell offering to go west herself, and either take or destroy the continuing open sore which was Hereford. This, as she raised her arms and her hair fell sheer and silver as the light and her whole body and everything else about her seemed to float on nothing but sheer hope and aspiration like the building she’d engendered, was the essential truth they’d lost in these years of attrition.