The House of Storms (59 page)

‘Who would expect otherwise—after this war?’

He gave an inward shrug. More than ever, words seemed unnecessary between them. He found, also, that he could shape the figure he saw in the mirror before him into whatever he wanted. Yes, he understood how Marion felt about Alice Meynell. He could even dimly glimpse the bringer of revenge and chaos which others might perhaps encounter in his mother’s shape. But that wasn’t
her
. Not to him. He loved her, just as he was now entirely certain his father had. It was the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

‘How are Helen? Gussie? Flora?’

‘They’re all well, Ralphie. Or they were, and I’m sure they still are. They’ll be better still when we get this thing done…’

But I’m worried. I can’t last…

Ralph, you must never think like that. Remember all those long journeys across Europe …

The carriages, the foyers, the dinners on trays …

Her hand, reaching through the mirror, touched him. He breathed her fresh linen scent, and there was no pain at all. The Shadow Ones were with Ralph as well. They were the leaves of an endless book. They were light across the shore. As, through whispered chants and technical graduations and apertures and empowerments, Ralph broadened the bandwidth of the contact between Invercombe and Einfell and the open telephone systems of the entire East, he felt a lost and renewed sense of sharing with his mother, and a depth of closeness also with this house and all its purposes, which he would have loved to endlessly prolong. But part of him, the same part which had perhaps once lain in bed and battled fevers whilst the rest of him ranged across continents, felt the shudder of another shell. Then, with an urgency which affected him even in this remote and blissful state, all of Invercombe’s clocks began to chime.

‘These, Ralph, will unwind this war.’

The dark sheets of the spells of her portmanteau spilled with light. They looked to Ralph like the night sky, or the glitter of water when the summer sun is so bright that the troughs between each dazzling wavelet seem entirely black. He heard their chant. He felt their onrushing coolness. He breathed their salt. There were depths beneath him, and his lungs hurt.

This thing we’re doing …

In a moment of doubt, the waters contracted to the shallow brightness of that paddling pool in the Kite Hills. He tasted bittersweet chlorine and salt.

Will it… ? I honestly don’t know, Ralph. But…

A smile. Soft laughter. Hands. Protecting. Lifting.

‘We’ll soon find out.’

They both sang the spell together, and the Shadow Ones sang it as well.

Instinctively, Marion Price ducked, and Klade, clearly used to the whoosh of bullets, ducked with her as well. She crawled a few yards back towards a dip in the grass. Even the ravener, some part of its memory or instinct still working, had hunched down. Just ahead, in a series of yelps and soft socking sounds, the hapless and harmless balehound was being picked apart by bullets. The air rang and sang. Then there was silence.

Marion realised as she sucked back her breath that she was lying in a bowl of mud. The clump of earth and grass which loomed close to her face was all that lay between her and the guns which had flared ahead, and she wished that there was more. Should they really wait here? Then, as the silence stretched, she wondered if the soldiers ahead of them were still there, or were stealthily shifting closer. Perhaps Ralph was right—perhaps they’d seen them and retreated. But weren’t the deserters supposed to have fired back first? She’d never realised how many uncertainties arose the moment someone started shooting at you.

Thunder rattled. More light rolled over them, glinting with icy brilliance on the folly which lay perhaps eighty yards ahead, then the lumpy ground around them exploded with rattling blasts. Shell cases pinged out, but Marion felt no inclination to move. She was afraid. It was that simple. It wasn’t something you thought about. Your body did that all for you; the feeling washed straight up from your gut. But the fear wasn’t
her
. After all, she was Marion Price. At that moment, bullets rained close to where she and Klade lay, spraying up stones and mud, and Marion breathed the same fear-smoke-and-mud stench which she had washed from many bodies in these years of war. So familiar, yet entirely new here. Even though the thunder seemed to have lessened and the guns had stopped firing again, her vision had sharpened to a near-supernatural extent. She could see Klade more clearly now than she had ever seen him. She touched his hand, and he smiled back at her. He and these deserters were doing this for
her.
And the folly was ahead. It was merely a matter of rearranging her thoughts until they made sense again.

The dark lit up as both sides started firing. To Marion’s newly sensitised eyes, the bullets were thin trails of wyrebrightness, and she could distinguish the different bores of gun, and was aware of the greater power and purpose which the regular Western soldiers who lay between them and the folly were bringing to bear. Somebody shouted something, a flare drifted up, and they were bathed in a white light far more terrible than the short-lived brilliance of the shells. There was a particular concentration of fire against a nearby deserter, less lucky than she and Klade in the depth of the hollow they had crawled into. Jerked, puppet-like, he turned, rose, whitened, reddened, then collapsed, scarcely recognisable but still hanging half-upright on the shattered remains of his bones. Casting lengthening shadows, the flare fell hissing to the earth. The situation, it struck Marion, was entirely hopeless. And soon there would be another flare.

Suddenly, instantly, shouting to Klade to stay put, she was up. The feeling, to be skidding, near-flying, across this tussocked mud, was extraordinary. She fell into the space where the dead deserter squatted. Sliding, rummaging in a wet fall of flesh, she found the shape of his gun. Another flare was due any moment, but over there lay the place where the ravener knelt. Once more, she ran, and the giant creature snarled and shivered as she collided with its rank pelt. Even in this sleek blackness, she could clearly see the red of its eyes, the hooked curl of its black claws. Then came another flare, and the world turned white and was scarred by bullets’ black trails. Someone began screaming, and Marion stroked the greasy hillocks of the ravener’s spine and murmured through its stench to keep it calm and quiet. There was no doubt now in her mind that the Western soldiers had been ordered to protect this folly. She shifted her gun, feeling its runnels and rises. Just as the flare died, she rammed the snout into the ravener’s flank. Bellowing, the creature raised itself to its full height and staggered straight towards the folly. Marion also lunged, ducking left, skim-running, near-flying, sideways across the ragged earth as gunfire formed a blazing concentration on the ravener’s silhouette. Sprays of blood burst back from it, but still it lumbered forwards. By her own zigzag route, Marion also kept moving. And the folly, from this new sideways angle, drew desperately near.

It was shaped like a castle, but its battlements were mere decorations, its arrow slits were blank—all quite useless for the purpose they mimicked. That was why these soldiers had had to dig their defence outside. But this was also their weakness, for it meant that they were exposed and essentially static. And their attention was turned outwards. All of these things, anyway, were what Marion hoped. The ravener had fallen dead. The downpour of bullets had become a sporadic shower.

The Western soldiers were close to her left now. She could hear them muttering to their guns. Then another flare went up, and all she could do was run. She collided with the amazing reality of the transmission house. Flakes of cement skidded beneath her fingers as she felt her way around it through the blinding white light. Then, suddenly, amazingly, there was a doorway, and she was falling through it, crashing down on her knees into puddled concrete. It was darker in here, but not entirely dark—not even as the flare died. There were stairs ahead. Her gun raised, her breath rasping, scarcely believing she was here, Marion began to climb.

The light grew stronger as the narrow spiral unwound. Voices came as well, and a changing yellow glow. The men’s voices were urgent, but it was impossible to catch their exact words, and Marion didn’t doubt that they would shoot in the instant they saw her, even if she had caught them unawares. Once more, her fingers traced the shape of her gun. She whispered silently in her head all the many prayers and spells she had heard moaned and murmured in the delirium wards as the brick pillar at the centre of the stairs curved away from her, upwards and inwards towards the light. This next inch, this next step, and she was certain they would come into view. But the moment lengthened.

Suddenly, she was at the edges of a lantern-lit room, and two men who had been squatting over something were turning towards her, their faces registering slow surprise as she raised her gun. The noise was incredible as the thing barked and leapt in her hands. The men were blown backwards, and the wall behind them exploded into red scrawls which dragged into long smears as they slid down. Her gun fell silent. The room shrank back. Remembering to breathe again, she moved forward. The odd thing was, these men weren’t wearing uniforms, and neither did they seem to have guns. Inspecting them, Marion realised that they wore the talismans of the Western wing of the Great Guild of Telegraphers, and that the thing they had been squatting over was a toolbox. They were trying to disable this transmission house;
that
was what the Western soldiers outside were defending. What had Ralph said?—something about it being more difficult to entirely disconnect a transmission house than it was to enable it. Hoping that he was right, she tried to orient herself.

Even as gunfire rattled outside, there remained a dull, purposeful hum in this folly. It was like being inside a cramped version of the weathertop. Here, alarmingly close to where her ricocheting bullets had shattered the wall, were the main conductors. Here, in mushroom sprouts of anodised brass, were the registers of octaves and distance. Here, even, for this transmission house was an antique version of its type, was a small haft. Everything was different in many small details to the idealised device Ralph had attempted to describe to her, and yet, Marion realised as her fingers stroked the wires and metals, it was all essentially the same. There was nothing but that continuing hum as she began her work, then, with a sudden certain rush, she felt the nearness of Invercombe. No, its actual presence. For it was
here
, in dazzling leaps and bounds like an endless hall of mirrors, and she had no doubt that Ralph had established the connection. Marion smiled; it was impossible not to. She remembered the spell, the turns, the actions. And they remembered her. At the very time when she should have been anxious, she felt ridiculously calm. The only moment of panic came when she discovered that a fuse, a final keyshape to bridge the connection between West and the East, was missing. She looked around, registering the flat realities of this real place in which she found herself, and the continuing sound of gunfire, and the red-leaking bodies of the Western telegraphers which were slowly exuding their scents of death. Crouching, turning them over, feeling their sodden pockets, throwing aside a wallet, a cigarette lighter, Marion encountered a recognisably metallic lump and pulled it out, inserted it, male to female, into its home. The tone inside the transmission house grew louder. The task was nearly done.

Large, T-shaped and ceramic-handled, the final activating lever projected at 45 degrees from a slot in the wall, and there was a sense of weight even as she settled her hands around it; a feeling both strongly mechanical and yet marvellously magical. Marion’s bloody fingers skidded off the handle’s cracked white glaze as she pushed. The thing was even heavier than she thought. Wiping her hands down her coat, she leaned down with her full weight. Still, for a moment the lever held, then, the giving of something vast yet perfectly balanced, it moved. There was a mechanical
click
. Fractionally, the tone which filled the engine house rose. She stepped back. Something had changed, certainly, but she had no idea what. Something had changed outside as well. The gunfire had stopped.

Marion supposed that she had done her job, although the reek of death was getting stronger in here now. Automatically, in the way she would have done with any corpse, she laid out the bodies of the men. She straightened their guildpins and rearranged their clothes over the worst of their wounds. She closed their eyes. They were far younger than she’d thought, and had probably only ever plied their trade in this time of war. One was nursing a wispy moustache, the other bit his nails, and she didn’t know what to feel about what she had done. It was silent outside: the deserters had lost the brave resistance they had put up on her behalf, and Klade—but she couldn’t think that far. She picked up the gun again. The thing disgusted her now. But if she waited a little longer, the Western soldiers were sure to come up and finish off the job. But she was impatient. Gun raised, she headed back down the folly’s tight spiral stairs.

It was still night outside, and her eyes were slow to adjust. She turned, aiming randomly as she limped out on to the slippery earth, and pulled the gun’s trigger, but all she got from it was an impotent
click
. Then a ravener-like figure surged towards her from the dark. She cringed, then recognised its lopsided stance.

‘We’ve won,’ Klade lisped.

Four human deserters died along with the balehound and the ravener in what was to become known as the Battle of the Folly. Not one of the defeated Western soldiers—confused by the absence of any structured response from their attackers, and by their mad willingness to fight—had survived, although Marion, as they trudged into the silent dark away from that raised, prohibitory hand, knew enough not to ask how or why.

That sound, that shift in tone, still haunted her as much as the deaths. It was like the change of key in the most aching pan of a song; impossible to pin down. Had the war really ended? Had they done any of the things they were supposed to have done? She had no idea. Klade, in that moment of supposed victory, had drawn her against the large, surprisingly male shape of his body as she threw aside her gun, and she supposed she had hugged him back. But her head remained empty. Apart from the sense of that lever giving. Apart from this long, endless note … But the guns had stopped, and the sky was paling over the estuary in first anticipation of dawn. Dimly now, the shape of Durnock Head, and then that of the house, and its weathertop, were being revealed. Just as on every other day of its long existence, Invercombe was remaking itself.