The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  There was much work to be done. To introduce the spell within the chalcedony into the production process required that it be inserted into the shackle between the three huge pistons and the fetter which gripped the rock. The existing shackle was a marvel of engineering, a yard-long cat’s-cradle of metal and the highest grade engine silk spun like the chrysalis of a butterfly, yet it could not accommodate the stone. So a new shackle had to be fashioned. The process, the secrecy, was fascinating, and Durry always sensed, that, in their secret heart, all the great guilds were looking down on their task with encouragement and approval. When a far higher guildsman than Harrat came up one day from London, and smiled and listened, and raised his hand from his dark cloak and laid it on Edward Durry’s shoulder, why, that seemed right. And the planning was a mighty work. Even if this process, this insertion, was done openly, you couldn’t just stop the pistons as if you were the steamaster of some poxy train. Even done gradually, with a lessening of pressure, the aether would at some point snap back all the way from the quickening pools. To get the pressure up again would be the work of several shifterms. So the insertion must take place between one beat of the engines and the next.

  Organising the day itself, arranging the absence of the rest of his shiftgang, was all another part of the spell they were weaving. Durry’s men were incurious, happy to spend their day up top with their families, and he enjoyed the way Central Floor emptied of its previous shift. The machine was his. He was on his own and relishing the task ahead when Harrat finally arrived by forgotten tunnels from that hidden room with a squeaky trolley on which the carried the newly made shackle with the chalcedony glowing within it. This was all as they’d arranged, but he’d brought others with him as well. Two women from the paintshop, and Aethermaster Edward Durry, were he still living, would have sworn on the creed of his guild that it was Harrat rather than he who had made that decision. To bring his wife Kate down here, and then that friend of hers Mary Borrows as well, as if this was some parlour show. Even beyond his own highermaster, the last person Durry had thought of confiding in was Kate. Not that he didn’t love her, but, if truth be told, he loved his engines far more, and often felt a little empty when he went up to the world of sunlight and cobbles and cooking, which seemed in comparison a waking dream. Paintwork needed to be done, as Durry was fully aware, so that the new shackle was freshly adorned with all the necessary spells before it was inserted. And such ornamentation would, it was true, normally be performed by the girls of the paintshop, but Durry hadn’t doubted that he could do at least as good a job.

  After the forced, surprised, Why are you here? greeting, an argument between the two men ensued. But their relationship had been tempered with, if not a liking, at least a mutual respect, and Durry came to see that Harrat had a point. After all, there were many other things to get done. And the girls were experienced in their work. Kate—at least—was one of the best in the paintshop, even with the distraction of that growing lump in her belly. They would do it quicker and better, and who else was Harrat to choose? As the two women stood in the pounding and oddly empty lower floor and exchanged puzzled glances, Durry came around to seeing that, just like everything else which had happened, it was all another part of the spell.

  So the two women set to work, dipping their brushes in the aether pots Harrat had provided and wreathing the new shackle in a glowing tapestry which, Durry had to admit as he loosened the bolts and cotters which held the old shackle in place, was finer than anything he could have accomplished. The new device, beautiful to him already, became a thing of wonder, glowing within from the chalcedony, and without from the aethered scrolls made by the women’s brushes. Their shadows danced as they worked, were strewn as soft comets across the ceiling of Central Floor. They were the stone’s acolytes.

  Harrat removed himself to the control room, which was a brick dome which the shiftworkers called the igloo. With its steel supports and portholes, it was by far the safest place to be at the moment of insertion, but Durry understood that it was necessary for someone to be in there to check the readings. He, on the other hand, was standing right between the fettered rockface and the driving pistons, holding the lanyard of rope which would release the new shackle from its temporary wooden cradle above the old one. The two women were beside him, still working. For the extraordinary thing was how quickly their spells faded; like ink into blotting paper, spit on a hot stone. That chalcedony, for all the power it contained, was sucking in more and more magic through its woven casing. Kate was on the far side of the mechanism, leaning over the swell of her belly in a way that gave Durry a brief pang, and Mary was on his side of it.

  Durry studied his pocket watch as the second hand beat towards the hour of three. He glanced back along the pounding tubes towards the brick igloo and saw Harrat raise a thumb through one of the portholes. Durry’s fingers tightened. Mary Borrows, sensing the coming moment, stepped back a little, tripping slightly as she did so. Kate continued working. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM. The moment was perfect, and he pulled the rope.

  The new shackle dropped beautifully in the shuddering pause between the beats, falling and displacing the old one with precision and a certainty beyond the mere pull of gravity. The old device shattered on the stained concrete in a tumbling spray of steel and silk, whispering up in smoke. Fragments of its metal spun around them and Durry heard Mary Borrows give a small gasp. But the new shackle fitted instantly, wonderfully, into its cradle, and its chalcedony glowed. The whole moment was such a triumph and the stillness which followed seemed so right, that even Aethermaster Edward Durry’s senses were momentarily bewitched. But the silence held. The engines, without a single moment of slowing or hesitation, had stopped beating.

  Several things, then, happened at once. Those three perfect pistons, solidly aethered, could halt more easily from one moment to the next than the hands of his watch. But they were powered through the great axle from Engine Floor above. In stopping, their pistons drove that force back up. Durry heard, felt, the long, solid axle sheer and give, sheer and give, all the way up through the rock towards the surface. But those many fractures weren’t enough. From up top, the silence was rent by a series of earthquake detonations.

  But the other thing which happened was that the glow of the chalcedony, which was already searing, increased. Spires of light broke out through the shackle, solid as polished steel. Somehow, without moving, they revolved, focused, pulsed. The scene would have been beautiful were it not too quick and too terrible for his dazed senses to understand. Then, like a snake coiling, like the snap of a chain gone wild, the glow turned in on itself, burst in a silent thunderclap and regathered as a glowing sphere-some new, unrecorded state of aether—which drove upwards and out across Central Floor at the exact point where Kate was standing with such wyrebrightness that Durry was sure he saw the shine of her bones, the grin of her skull, the beat of her blood and the shape of her baby. Then it puffed out. And was gone.

  But for the tick of astonished dials, lower floor was silent. The chalcedony had lost almost all of its glow. Kate was just standing there looking shocked whilst Mary Borrows was sucking at a cut on the heel of her palm. They all stepped away, still gazing at the stilled pistons as Harrat stumbled from the igloo. They moved first towards the lift, which had lost all power, then found the iron stairway of the emergency route.

  All the people of Bracebridge stopped what they were doing at three o’clock on that July Halfshiftday in the 75th year of the Third Age.

  Dogs began barking. Babies cried. Slates slithered from roofs. The old ropeworkers’ tower and several other of the town’s frailer buildings collapsed in pale sighs of dust. Black-white plumes poured up from the crackling ruin of Engine Floor as the whole town rushed towards those famous gates with their friezes of Providence and Mercy. Word, as Aethermaster Edward Durry’s fellow gangsmen instinctively sought each other out, quickly spread that he’d been down there alone. But as the first figures of the steamworkers emerged bleeding, coughing fro
m the smoking wreckage, Edward Durry shrugged off the questioning hands and drove into that spilling heat. Truly, that afternoon, he was a man possessed. He saved six, eight men. He lifted up one of the fallen main beams single-handed. He moved through the ruins with the strength of an automaton, although, as the heat beat against him, his flesh became as blistered and smoking as the men he’d rescued. He was almost a hero and the story was that they’d finally had to hold him, strap him to a stretcher, when they’d given up screaming at him that there was no one left to save.

  But most of Edward Durry was already gone by then. He understood, in the instant after the one when the engines stopped beating, that he’d betrayed his guild in the grossest possible way, and that he was ruined. When he awoke to the smell of mop buckets and bleached laundry and the slippery stick of pain in the astonishing, engineless quiet of Bracebridge’s Manor Hospital, he was already the Potato Man. He was in a ward with three other men. They took it in turns to scream. Oddly, for him, there was less pain, although the figure who was sitting beside him in a spill of summer moonlight seemed so dark and powerful that for a moment he almost cried out. But it was only Grandmaster Harrat.

  Harrat was in tears, offering limp apologies. Just like Kate and Mary Borrows, he’d managed to become part of the crowd when they stumbled up through the escape hatch from Central Floor. He’d escaped, near enough, and soon he fell out of his tears. Guild business, after all, was guild business, and life was life, even if Durry’s own seemed wasted. There was bound to be an enquiry. But Harrat had been to his office to obliterate certain records and he’d used—he’d had to use, seeing as the snivelling little man had somehow found things out—a certain uppermaster of the Toolmakers’ Guild to go back down to Central Floor and destroy the new shackle and somehow get rid of that damn chalcedony. Whatever evidence there was now would be confusing at best, and Harrat still had his friend from the south, that dark guildsman who’d laid the warmth of his approving hand on Durry’s shoulder. Even though he didn’t quite know his name and full status and had had no success in his attempts to contact him, he still really hoped that that great guildsman would come to his aid. Still, it looked as if things could be smoothed over. But a price, as always, had to be paid. And at that point, Harrat, who’d never exactly been a pillar of strength in Edward Durry’s estimation, started crying again. The Potato Man waited. Eventually, as the man subsided unattended into murmurs and moans, he began to understand the deal which Harrat had made.

  After all, Durry’s life was gone, ruined. He’d be thrust out of his guild. He’d become a mart and quite possibly become changed as well. But he’d also been a hero of sorts yesterday and people of this town, if they were given the choice, would much rather think that way of him. So what if he was to let Edward Durry die, and take all of the blame? There’d be a funeral, a decent tombstone, an oration. The enquiry would be quickly over and forgotten, and people wouldn’t spit when they mentioned his name …

  Harrat stood up from the bedside. He was running out of words and the tears were coming back again. Somewhere, a door was open. Across his ruined flesh and through the sight of one eye and the dark space which was left by the other, the Potato Man sensed its breeze. He climbed up from the pain of his bed. The whole hospital was oddly quite as he limped out from it into the bright silence of the summer’s night beyond. Harrat was already gone, a mere silhouette hurrying back along Withybrook Road into town, to his life, his career, his guilt and his worries. But there was Mary Borrows with a bandage on her one hand, and his wife Kate, who seemed beautiful as ever as she stood beneath a tree beside the old postbox, even if her hair had somehow greyed. The Potato Man knew he must look terrible to them as he lumbered over, but their faces registered almost nothing. Look, he moaned in his changed voice. This is our chance to escape … But Kate half smiled and said nothing. The tree was a lace of shadow. Up there in the moonlight, Rainharrow gleamed like the moon herself. And Kate’s eyes gleamed as well. We can go … But she only smiled that smile again. It was like talking to a ghost, and he’d known already that she couldn’t possibly go with him into the life he planned to lead. The Potato Man genuinely thought he’d already lost every last vestige of his old self when he tried to touch farewell to his wife’s face. But something was wrong. Even though she was standing in the shade of the moon, Kate was glowing. And his hands, ruined and clumsy in their burns and bandages, snagged in her hair, which crumbed and broke in bright shards. Whatever it was—the spell within that stone—had caught her and left her changed. And it was then, rather than as he glanced back at the dark stain on his bed inside the hospital, that Edward Durry really died The Potato Man wiped his mouth. The fruitcake was entirely eaten, and the tale, at least to judge by his silence, was entirely told.

  ‘So my mother took Kate to Redhouse?’

  He grunted and picked a currant from the back of his mouth. ‘And you went with her?’ Anna asked.

  The Potato Man shook his head, gave a long, convulsive snort, then buried his ruined face in his ruined hands. Anna leaned forward and tried to put her arms around him, but now, when he saw her face, bright in the firelight, he drew away with a moan. He’d been dragged back into his lost life and Anna’s face, like the face of Kate Durry who had frozen into engine ice and died in bearing her, was too much for him. I realised as he sobbed and cowered that the Potato Man was right; Edward Durry really had died. His grave was up there in the churchyard of St Wilfred’s for anyone who cared to visit it.

  We tried to make the Potato Man spend the night by the warmth of our fire. We offered him clothes to replace the curdled rags he was wearing. We’d have given him more food as well if we’d had any. But he was up and lumbering away from us. And that bastard Harrat had died as well hadn’t he? he muttered. Only it had been slower—and who was he to say which way was the worse? You, lad! He gestured. You were there at his house, weren’t you? So keep away, keep away! He gave a slobbering howl. The fireplace gloomed and the room pulsed and pounded with his dull, sad rage. Then the front door slammed open and my carefully collected lists and cuttings flew up in a storm. But there was still one thing which I wanted to know.

  ‘Wait! Please wait ..

  The Potato Man cocked his red eye and cowered.

  ‘That man—that dark guildsman Harrat talked about. You said you saw him. You said he laid his hand on your shoulder …’ I grabbed a wodge of the swirling papers and thrust them towards him. ‘Would you recognise him if I showed you a picture? Could you tell me who he was?’

  But the Potato Man was still backing away. Beyond the flapping front door the night screamed through the trees in a white howl. Looking desperately about for something to give him, I saw the sugarbowl. It glittered like a small pile of engine ice.

  ‘Here. Take this ..

  The Potato Man cradled the spilling bowl to his body, breathing heavily as he shuffled back through the chaos of papers, his clothes flapping like black flames. But what could I show him? Where was I to begin? It was useless. But then he snatched a recent copy of the Guild Times, which Anna and I had used to study the progress of George’s trial.

  ‘That’s not …’ I began, but the Potato Man was sniffing at the pages.

  ‘Him …’ The copperplate flurries of a dying regime. ‘He’s changed, but not much. People like that don’t change …’

  I prised the page from him. Deaths and Marriages—photographs as well, and the Potato Man’s bloated finger stabbed at some ceremony to do with the final preparations for the marriage of Grandmistress Sarah Elizabeth Sophina York Passington, which was to be the event of the season down at Walcote House. Sadie was standing in an elaborate dress with her lips half framed as if to say something, and looking more formal than ever, and less herself There was no sign of the groom-to-be. The only other presence was that of her father, who had laid a proud hand on her shoulder and was standing at her side as he smiled his faint, handsome smile.

  ‘That’s him,’ the Potato Man said with a smudg
ing thrust of his thumb. ‘He was the man who came to see Thomas Harrat.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  But already he was blundering away from me, out into the blowing hall and through the open door into the night.

  The house was dark and empty. The lantern had guttered with the last of the oil and the coals had fallen through the parlour grate. Barring that one precious sheet of the Guild Times, I decided that Mistress Nutall could burn the rest of these scattered papers. But her gossip about the way we had lived, the words over fences, even the beat of the engines and the screech of the wind across Brownheath, seemed already remote. All that remained of the Potato Man was his dimming, rancid stench—and the looming answer, still too big for me to behold that night, to my question which he had finally brought me.