The House of Storms (62 page)

Silver-spoked wheels crackled across the wet gravel as it pulled up beside Invercombe’s front door. Wipers stopped sweeping, headlights blinked off, and two men of military bearing, although they wore no recognisable uniform, bustled out. Suspiciously, they eyed Invercombe’s gutter-weeping frontage, its bare trees. After an exchange of nods, they opened the car’s rear door, and a figure in a dark green cloak emerged. Standing to its full height, it cast back its hood and looked around with eyes of unfathomable grey.

Silus had never been to Invercombe before, yet he felt he knew this place almost too well. In a lopsided attempt at orderliness, a few buckets had been placed inside beneath the worst drippings and leakings in the great hall, but many of them had overflowed, and loose windows banged, and the predominant smell was of wet plaster and spoiled carpets. This was much like Einfell, even down to the sense of things which needed doing, but most probably would never be done. But he could tell that the house was not merely ailing, but dying. The song, what remained of its foundation spell, was a mere whisper, easily drowned by the choppy surgings of the tides in the deep tunnels against which it had long fought. And the Shadow Ones had gone.

Silus felt that he knew these faces as well. Yes, this was the man who had once nearly died here, then taken command of much of the Eastern forces during their recent pointless war, and then nearly died again. He seemed bright enough now, although Silus could tell that the disease had weakened him, and that he would live to no great age. And this, surely, was the girl this man had once loved—Klade’s mother, the famous Marion Price who had become so much of a legend it was hard to believe that she was really standing before him, and all the more so when she looked this drenched and pale, and her thoughts were so wary and confused. Clearly, though, things had played themselves out here in a way which went back to the times when this third figure he now saw approaching, this stoop of flesh borne on a rattling stick whom he knew he should recognise but truly didn’t, had once reigned over his desires in a way which now scarcely seemed credible. Silus wanted to ask Alice and Ralph and Marion about Klade, who was surely nearby, but at the same time there was this dread darkness, a near-falling, which made him hesitate. He’d had his fill of bad news lately. And of pain. Above all, he was prepared to take his time.

It was suggested that they take what would surely be the house’s last meal in Invercombe’s gently collapsing west parlour. After some debate, Silus’s two minders, the one appointed by Bristol’s Merchant Venturers and the other by London’s Great Guilds, who distrusted each other far more than they distrusted him, agreed. The gaps in the windows were wedged with damp-swollen cushions, and candles were placed at the end of the table where the plaster had not yet fallen in. Tins of food were decanted, cold and unheated, upon harlequin plates, and there were jugs of the rainwater from the overbrimming butts to drink, and Silus was content, for this was exactly how he and poor lost Ida had once lived.

Amid the tick of rain and of cutlery, he attempted to explain himself. It always seemed such a difficult task in front of a human audience, but in truth there was little enough to relate, even if he used his mouth to speak. There was his so-called enlistment along with many others into the Western needs of war. There were the weary years of travel and work. Then his capture by the East. He lifted his cloak a little further from his arms to display the silvered tracks of the electrodes they had used in their questioning of him.
See, I, too, now have my Mark.
To Silus, it seemed a fine, rich joke, but no one else ever smiled, and they did not do so now. The fact was, he supposed, that they feared him.

‘After that, I was taken East. There were months of boredom. A tiny cell, with a single bulb was all I had left to sing to. Then came the night of the changed song, and in an instant, everything went dark. People were screaming. The guards could no longer work the locks. But it all seemed to me a small enough thing …’

But it was also large: he’d known that as soon as he’d led his captors and fellow inmates out into the chaotic London night where all the windows and streetlamps were entirely dark. He knew it now. Even if he and the other changed, Chosen—however you cared or cared not to term them—who emerged blinking and shrieking from their hiding places and their corrupted locks and broken chains had taken the task of undoing the song as some pressing debt, it would be the work of years. But Silus, who had once been a man of power, still recognised its substance when he held it in his changed hands, and step by step, tier by tier, he ascended the councils of the guilds as the city dissolved into riot in the days which followed. He explained time and again how the shift in pitch was something he and all the other Chosen could whistle, hum, sing, dance to as easily as the humblest ditty. He was presented with frozen axles. He made them turn. More tentatively, a small electric generator in one of the lesser guildhouses was produced. It, too, came to life. More warily yet, he was transported to a small reckoning engine at the relay house of one of the lesser guilds, which was of greater significance to them than those who brought him there were prepared to admit. This task he refused, until various conditions regarding the treatment of the other Chosen were met. Of course, the guildsmen could have killed him, or put him back in cheap, unaethered chains, but then where would they have been? And he had already established contact with the presence of the Shadow Ones who somehow no longer seemed to exist as flesh, but deep within the core of the country’s networks. Slowly, the Chosen were regathering, but this time they would not be bonded by any conditions other than of their own making. It was all merely a matter of patience and time. That, and a few further requests.

‘For once, Alice, I was ruthless in a way I think you would applaud and recognise. But I am also entirely content that I’ve done the right and necessary thing …’

The old woman looked at him blankly across the table, and Silus realised that her sight was poor, and that she probably found it hard to hear his lisping voice over the noise she made in eating. Of the two of them, Alice was now by far the most changed. She was like this leaking, dripping house; a lost and dying spell. Soon, he knew, he would have to rouse himself and start the process of unpicking England’s frozen note, just as he had promised the guilds of London and Bristol. But even then, even when the wheels finally started spinning and the generators began to hum, their spells would not be the ones their old masters recognised, or would ever be able to learn. On one thing, Silus explained in all frankness, he was determined. From now on, the working of aether would remain in the hands of those who had felt it and had suffered from it the most. It seemed, he suggested to the tired faces at this table, a fair exchange.

A thing of clotted mud, Klade had roused himself from the grave in which he’d been lying and crawled through the estate in the first shinings of winter dawn. One last sight of the house, he told himself, and he would be gone. Invercombe was already so empty. Most of the followers had left, driven away by this foul weather and the prospect beyond of a changed world, and every one of Inver-something’s chimneys had fallen. Still, it was with considerable surprise that he encountered the fine and purposeful machine which stretched before the front door. He touched its drop-beaded chromes and leathers and sniffed the warm salts of its engine and listened to its odd, faint song. How had it managed to get here at all, when nothing was supposed to work?

Klade saw a gleam spreading across the terraced paving from the west parlour. He heard voices through the rain, and he felt something more. Something lost. Something familiar. A presence—and a voice which was like the spitting of the rainspout above him, yet made him grind his muddy hands across his face. Klade stumbled over the squishy lawns and hunched where the rain thudded over the dead black leaves of an umbrellifer. From here, he could see through the fractured panes of the French windows, but those inside could not see him, or sense him, either—not even Silus, who sat at the head of the table making gestures which Klade recognised by now as signifying command.

He could crouch here for ever, or he could beat at that window and beg to be let in. Silus would give a snaky smile, and he and his Bonny Boy, who really had grown, would finally be reunited, but Klade now understood that that wasn’t what happened to the lad in the song. For the Bonny Boy grew because he was buried in a hole like the ones he and Marion had dug yesterday, and all Klade needed to do to be the same was to wait for the roots and the worms to have their fill of him. He could think of far worse things than turning into flowers and leaves. Like the changed look in people’s eyes whenever they saw him. Like the terrified gasps and squirms of Marion Price beneath him yesterday. Or being with Silus, and yet never quite being with him at all. Just as he had never quite been with Ida, or with Fay, or even with the Ironmasters as they beat their metal hands and sang their jolly songs. Just as he had never been or belonged with anyone or anything either inside or outside Einfell.

The trees, the rain, the voices, the candlelight, flickered across the teeming gardens. Moving out from his patch of shadow, then further around the house, Klade came to a space of lawn where forgotten washing still dripped, and entered the house through the servants’ quarters, and picked his way past mould-flowering frames, and felt for stairways, and headed down.

It grew dark. No longer the hiss of the storm, but the deeper moan of the restless salt water which had long surged below Invercombe filled his ears. On hands and knees, then on his belly in the wet blackness, he wormed his way amid the groaning stone. It was difficult work. Dangerous, as well. Not that danger mattered to him, but these passages were teetering on collapse, and with them would go the entire headland, the gardens, the house. Another day, another few hours, and he would have left it too late. But, glistening in shifting blotches before his eyes, a little light began to come. This, as far as he could tell, was something resembling the direction his father had led him a few days before, even if the stones tilted and echoed into spaces he couldn’t comprehend. For a moment, the slippery ceiling both in front and behind him seemed to press irresistibly down, and Klade was certain that he really would be buried, but then, with a sideways shift which the very push of the land seemed to be urging upon him, he was standing near-upright in a corridor, and light and the sound of waves and the feel of the salt air showed him the way.

Here, in this small chamber in the cliffs, nothing had changed. Klade, washed and stripped of his rotting clothes by his struggles amid the grasping rocks, gazed at the alcove. Two glass vials still glowed and flickered. They pulsed with the heave of the sea. His father had talked about power and money when he had shown him these things. That, and something about a thumb eater, and a life ahead for Klade which he’d known even then that he’d never be able to live. He lifted a vial. He felt the charge of its light, the roar of its song. For this was aether, brought here from far away in the days before he was even born, when Marion Price and Ralph Meynell had briefly imagined they loved each other, and the sad old creature people called Old Alice had done things which no one seemed able to forgive. For this was aether, and this moment was his.

Some resistance to the stopper, then it was open, and the vial brimmed dark and sang out to him as he lifted it to his lips. Klade’s hand trembled in a final moment’s human uncertainty. Then he drank, and all he saw was light, all he heard was song.

B
RISTOL BONEYARD, ON A SPRING MORNING
in the first year of this new and still nameless Age, was a surprisingly beautiful place. As Marion walked up between the larger memorials, the faces and voices of those whom they had been built to commemorate no longer called out to her, and the crushed fragments of marble of the white path were silent. The spells which had been infused into the stones had faded, and their resurrection was no one’s priority, least of all the Chosen, and perhaps not even the grieving families which had once had them cast at such expense. But this seemed to her, as Bristol murmured and smoked below in all its varieties of life, to be no bad thing. It was time the dead were left buried; time for those still living to be allowed to live.

The small monument lay amid a field which, neglected as well, had become a sweep of high grass and flowers. It was of plain black marble, and not particularly well cut or engraved, for stonemasons, like every other variety of guildsperson, were having to relearn their trade. But its rough unevenness seemed appropriate, and her fingers, as they traced the chipped engraving, liked the cool finality of the stone.

Here lie the bodies of

Sally Price

Who lived and died before this Age

And her father

Bill Price

‘Dad’—a proud shoreman

Then, in slightly smaller and even rougher script:

Here also lies Marion Price

The faintly flattened track which lay between the wavering bluebells and seedheads told her that others had come this way. Perhaps they were the fellow followers, or soldiers or riverfolk Marion Price had once tended, or those who had read about her in the Western papers and brought one of the cheap amulets which bore her face. But there were few enough of them, and Marion felt no particular alarm at the thought that she might be discovered here, and less still that she would be recognised, or that anyone now would really care.

Straightening up, she scanned the meadow this graveyard had become. The reason life grew so wildly and well here, she realised, was due to the number of times this earth had been turned over to accommodate the dead of the war. England’s soil had been especially well-fertilised in recent years, as she supposed Noll would have sardonically pointed out, although the thought no longer struck her as sad, or poignant, or even humorous. It was just the way the world was.