‘This is it, Klade.’ Silus wiped his raw wet lips. ‘This is the place you said you wanted to see.’
The horses were calmer now, but Silus’s feelings were infectious even when he did his best to disguise them, and Klade could tell as they climbed down that he was afraid. But this was such a peaceful place. There was a long wall with spikes of rosebush showing over it, a rusted wrought-iron gate with the sign which spelled, in twists of metal and a few caught leaves, St Alphage’s Refuge for Distressed Guildswomen.
‘It’s never been in the newspapers. It’s not that sort of place. Klade.’
The path to the house was overgrown with spillages of sallow and lavender and the windows were shuttered. It had never struck him before that there were many different qualities to the songless silence of Outside, but this one spoke of long emptiness. And the gate was chained and sealed with the kind of device Klade knew would hurt him with a spell if he tried to open it. Whatever business this place had been engaged in had ceased many years before.
‘You didn’t know it had closed?’
‘We never kept in touch. It was an arrangement, Klade—an agreement.’
‘How convenient.’
‘It wasn’t like that. Girls used to go to Alfies—’
‘Alfies?’
‘That was what people used to call this place. Girls, women, used to come here if they were expecting a baby which they didn’t feel they could raise. You can’t imagine how difficult the Outsiders make life for someone who has a child outside marriage. Usually, the children were adopted by what is termed good families. Always, and as with you, their origins were kept rigorously secret. There was nothing disreputable about the place—at least not outwardly.’
‘My mother came here to have me? What was her name?’
‘I don’t know, Klade. The whole point of Alfies is—was—that the child was given a new start.’ The slate wiped clean. ‘I think she was a maid working at a place called Invercombe. I’m not entirely sure. But your father was certainly much more highly guilded.’
‘They abandoned me?’
‘I don’t know. It’s quite possible they both imagine you’re dead, if they know you exist at all…’ Alfies was a place of secrets, Klade.
‘And I’m one of them?’
I suppose you could say that…
Beyond the house, the grainy bowl of Bristol expanded and fell in shimmers of smog. This was so, so far from the city of Fay’s dreams.
‘Something happened long ago, Klade. Between me and a woman. A greatgrandmistress. I should never—should never have allowed myself to get involved with her. But I did. I did things, Klade, which were wrong. I betrayed the people who trusted and needed me most of all. Becoming Chosen changes many things, but it can’t change regret. And when Alice Meynell came to me again, when she came to us, at Einfell, I found that I was still in her debt, despite all that she had done to me.’
Through Silus’s gaze, this woman, Alice Meynell, smiled a knowing smile at Klade with eyes which were both bright blue and colourless.
‘She asked that we adopt you, Klade. I think you were the child of her son, who was called Ralph and had been ill for some years. And we really had no choice. The Chosen aren’t powerful, Klade, and the settlement she gave us was generous. The high-guilded are their own kind of Chosen, Klade. You can’t possibly fight them …’
Klade nodded. The world he had come from was like this city which roiled and burned in his throat. It was browned newsprint and the burrowings of unwritten things which happened beneath the pages like the bad words he’d taught himself not to think. Unwanted offspring—bastard; and wasn’t that the real meaning of the word? Stupid, really, to have expected anything else. The Chosen were as blind as the Outsiders.
I’m sorry, Klade. I should never…
They climbed back into the carriage and drove back through Bristol. One of the sugar factories had gone up in flames, and Klade’s throat was dry, his eyes ached.
‘I always thought it was a lie,’ he said, ‘when the Outsiders said you stole their babies. Now, what am I supposed to think?’
Back at Einfell, Klade slumped down in the hot haze of the barn. The smell of Bristol’s burning was still on his cloak. He threw it off and stared at the boxes of stores. He read their comforting tales—addresses of factories and competition medals—as he experimented with varieties of ways of expressing his situation until he’d finally boiled it down to its essential dregs. You’re the unwanted child of some nameless maid, Klade. You’re sired, Klade, by some guildsman who probably doesn’t even know you were born. All these years, he’d probably been wiser than he’d thought in accepting Silus’s wariness. Lies weren’t something which existed in Einfell, but then neither was the truth. The cats came prowling and purring around him. Stroking them absently, he felt the dig of their claws.
Reaching for the tin opener he kept in here, he levered triangular holes into the top of a tin of Cherry Cheer. The fluid was salt-warm as pebbles on the bed of a dry stream until the sweetness of it finally kicked in as it gushed over his teeth and tongue. He sucked a dribble from the corner of his mouth, and ran his finger around the rim of the tin and offered it to the nearest malnourished tabby, which licked it all away with precise, tickly roughness. He tried to remember the names Silus had used. Alice-something, he’d said. Meynell, wasn’t it? Which meant that she was his grandmother, although Silus had danced lightly around the subject as if he’d feared that he might fall through into something else entirely if he settled on it for too long. But she was high-guilded; one of those faces you saw in the Society Pages. Alice Meynell. It almost sounded familiar. That smile, that face, and her son, whose name was perhaps Ralph, and who’d possibly been staying in a house called Invercombe, and who’d impregnated a nameless maid. Klade found another tin of Ripe Raspberry and the kittens swarmed needily around it as he drank.
He’d noticed before that one of the pleasing contradictions of drinking Sweetness was that it made you feel more thirsty. Previously, he’d always been too frugal to succumb, but he was in a reckless mood on this late, hot afternoon. The bright tops of the tins flashed cool and enticing, and there was nothing he could do now but puncture them and lift their warm metal lips to this mouth. Klade’s lips were gummed. He belched. The cats crowded around him in their fur heat. Yes. He was Klade, and he was the song. Finally, the tins emptied and his throat raging, he stumbled from the barn. The sky was the colour of Blackcurrant Dream, with clouds of Fizzing Lemon stranded around the sunset. He wandered on up No Through Road. He was the song and the Sweetness and the light. He was bittersweet itself, and he’d have whistled if his lips weren’t so sticky. He crossed the thistle fields where the air mazed with late insects and swallows. He rapped, tum-ti-tum, on Fay’s corrugated roof, then squat-walked his way inside.
As always, a darkening concentration of the sheeny dusk, she was there.
‘I’ve been Outside, Fay. I tried to find out how I became.’
She scratched, stirred.
‘I’ve been to the place Silus calls Bristol. Although I much prefer the city you take me to.’
What are you, then, Klade?
‘I’m a story no one seems to be bothered to know the whole of—or is too ashamed. I came as a baby from somewhere called Allies.’
Alfies …
‘You’ve heard of it?’
It was the place our schoolmistresses said we might go to if we didn’t behave. I didn’t believe it was real, though. Any more than I really believed in Einfell, or Hades …
‘And here we are.’
I’m sorry, Klade.
‘No.’ He shook his head. Bastard fucking changeling fairy. ‘Please don’t be sorry for me.’
And I’ve been thinking as well, Klade. I remember more and more of it now—the time before I was changed.
The roof had been basking in the sun all day. Now, it creaked and squealed as it cooled with a sound like that the house martins were making as they swooped t
he thistle fields.
Do you want me to show you?
Hungry for a better Bristol than the one he’d visited today, Klade let Fay touch him with the moist tips of her swirling fingers, and opened his mind to her song.
You feel different today, Klade. Not just the way you’re thinking.
‘I’ve been drinking Sweetness.’
Ah—I remember that as well.
Remembered also the flocky glitter of the room where she had slept and lived, where she had brushed and rebrushed her ebony hair. Fay’s skin had gained an extra layer of sensitivity in those long hours as the shining handle pulled and swept. She could feel the sparks; crackling surges of lazy light which hung in the air. Fay loved her bedroom, which she’d made her own in many small ways. The pictures on the walls, which she’d collected whenever her fancy was taken as she wandered the markets. Egypt or Thule, other climes and Ages. The mirror’s bevelled glass gleamed so highly in the light of the tasselled lampshade that it reminded Klade of the pictures up in the Meeting Place. But now all he saw was the red of Fay’s lips and the shine of her bosom and hair.
‘You’re beautiful. Do you know that?’
Fay shook her dark and sparkly head, but not in negation. It was hotly dark now; as hot and dark as it would ever get, which was hottest and darkest of all inside Fay’s hide here at the edge of the woods in Einfell. The vision in the mirror, the softly glowing hair and room, vanished as the hands of the changed creature who was with him withdrew.
I’m sorry, Klade. I don’t remember anything more—not even what guild I belonged to. Stupid, really.
‘What happened was just an accident, Fay. A misjudgement, at worst. That’s the thing to remember about being Chosen. It could happen to anyone.’
But didn’t, did it? It happened to me. You don’t understand. How could you?
She was just a sense of breathing, and Klade was breathing hard as well, the airless heat pouring in and out of him. His mouth still tasted of Sweetness and the powdery softness of Fay’s old room. The song was in him now. It was there as strongly as he had ever felt it. But changed. It turned and joined, a secret unfurled like an airless breeze across his bunched and sweating limbs. The song the need to feel, to know, to touch, to understand. It was glimpses of Fay as she turned and pouted. It was her red-lipped smile as she presented herself in the mirror.
Klade stirred. He felt as he had felt when Ida used to cut his hair. He felt as he had when the apprentices had tried to tip him over the Clifton Dam. He felt as he’d done when he’d lifted those heavy shackles in the Meeting Place’s exhibition rooms and tried them around his wrists and arms. He felt, as well, like those long times of looking at the adverts for Ladies Particulars in the back pages of the Evening Telegraph, with Fine-Stitched Fabric stretched taut against secret flesh. He felt as he did when he rubbed himself and the stuff which came out seemed for a moment as if it might be purest aether, but then pooled salt-leaden and stickier than Sweetness in his palm.
‘Fay.’ This time he reached out. ‘Please—I want you to show me …’
He moved. Fay skittered, and her hands scrabbled against him. He grabbed them.
No…!
‘You don’t understand.’
Pressing down, he gripped the trembling slopes of her flesh, imagining one Fay and finding another, and then another still, a tumbling arrangement of limbs and resistances which he was determined to unravel. He’d seen the animals that the Farmers kept. He’d seen the cats, the kittens, and he’d read what little there was to be found about the ways of the flesh in newspapers. He touched ridges, hollows.
Fay fought, bucked. Her song was an outraged scream in his head. Only the dulling of the Sweetness made it bearable. If it hadn’t been for this heat, this darkness, perhaps he’d have stopped. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t. She drew away. The roof clattered in a raw rush of metal.
Stop!
There was Fay, crouching and mostly naked. Her flesh was like the moon’s, cast over with cloud. She was the Chosen and he wasn’t, and her eyes were trapped in pure fear. Klade gasped, his sight pulsed. Stickiness seeped across his belly.
‘I’m so sorry Fay.’ He moved towards her, wanting to atone, but her fear rent the air and bit through the last residue of the Sweetness. Uselessly blocking his ears, stumbling out, pushing through the litter of the den, Klade staggered away.
He spent the night crashing amid undergrowth. Stings and scratches flayed across his limbs, and at some point it began to rain. He tilted his head up and let the heavy drops fill his mouth, wishing there was more of it to wash everything away. Dimly, in the dark and on through the dawn, he could hear Silus’s voice, and Ida’s song, calling hopelessly for him.
The rain didn’t last. As the morning ungreyed, Klade found himself standing once again at the edge of the thistle fields. Rain had pooled in twinkling furrows across the dents in the corrugated roof of the shelter he’d made for Fay. He peered inside. Nothing. Fay had gone to hide deep in the woods with the other Shadow Ones. Perhaps that was where she’d always belonged.
Careful to avoid the Big House and the Ironmasters’ ringing, gleeful shouts, Klade lumbered back along the edge of No Through Road. He’d never felt so remote from the song. He reached the place in Einfell’s fence where the landscape of Outside rolled away and the cables stitched the hillside close to the firethorned fence. Where did he belong? Outside—or here? More likely, he was the fence itself, harsh and heedless and destructive. He considered climbing it, blooding himself snip fucking snip on its thorns until his body was nothing but Marks. The hills shimmered, gold, yellow and green. Then something, a wave, a tremor, swept across the landscape. Quietly thunderous, it passed west to east, blazing in the telephone lines, roaring with power and aether and electricity, bowing the corn.
III
IN THE HOT LIGHT of that same midday, the London air rose up from the pavings and warehouse roofs of Tidesmeet and pushed down from the sky to roil about the pinnacle of Dockland Exchange. A weatherman, somewhere, was calling a breeze, but all it brought was the sour breath of an oven. This was a Halfshiftday in the hundred and fourteenth year of this Age of Light, although people had long given up counting, and the telephone lines hung weary of messages, and it seemed as if time as well might hang this way for ever, with the sun unable to shift and the clock of the world finally unwound. Then something happened. It passed first across the Westerlies. In the zoo, dragons fluttered in their cages and elephants started dustily trumpeting. Across Hyde and along Wagstaffe Mall, loitering cabsmen extinguished cigarettes and looked up at the sky as if in expectation of rain. In Goldsmiths’ Hall, the reckoning engines left to nurse England’s ailing economy gave an odd surge in the breathless heat. Something massive was coming.
Whatever it was moved on towards Tidesmeet. Telephone lines thickened with darkness. Power cables sighed. Those who looked up at that moment saw them writhing as if caught in a windless storm as they surged upwards from the pinnacle of the Dockland Exchange. The ground shook, London dimmed, and a huge pulse of lightning-veined darkness spewed out. A shuddering blast was followed by a grinding of unstuck masonry and screaming steel as the intricate network which the exchange had anchored flurried up into the sky. The snapped cables continued to rise, shearing up from their pylons for miles across London.
Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell had been hard at work high up in her office at the moment the spell struck. She’d conceded some of her usual elegance to the August heat and was in a short-sleeved blouse and had taken off her shoes, and was fanning herself with the file she should have been reading. She’d spent the whole morning distracted by the knowledge that she should act entirely normally, and that, as always, there were papers in need of her perusal. Then, they would need Ralph’s signature, but in truth he’d made an uncertain greatgrandmaster these last nine years. She’d hoped that induction would change him. Then marriage. Then children. But they hadn’t, any more than had Invercombe, or Highclare. He still looked to
her to guide things along their appointed path. In some ways that was disappointing, in that he reminded her so much of poor Tom in his unnecessary concerns, although in many other ways it suited her well enough.
The doors to her balcony were open, letting in the smoke and rumble of the docks. This, really, was a quite impossible place for her to be, at this of all times. But in Alice’s experience, the eye of the storm was often the safest haven. Then it came. A tremendous wave, and she was sure as pictures slipped from the walls and her bones juddered that the entire exchange was actually taking off into the sky like some Christmastime rocket. The balcony doors flapped, and then there were no doors at all, and no balcony either. There was a tremendous sense of falling iron and masonry. The spell she had summoned was aimed at the keyplate which was embedded in the scant foundations of the Dockland Exchange which had been laid in the slippery London mud two Ages before, but as it dissolved the entire great building was coming to the shuddering realisation that the ordinary physical laws of friction, gravity and tensile strength were all that now bound it, and that they weren’t enough.
One half of the ceiling crashed in on Alice’s office. Energised, hurrying to the floor below, she found her personal staff battling storms of paperwork. Of course, they had no idea what was happening—was it just this room, this floor, was it all of London?—but she knew from the building’s blueprints that the main stairways would be blocked already, and shouted for everyone to follow her down the service stairs which spiralled tightly around the core of the exchange. The building groaned. A lift clattered by like an express train. The floors were falling in on each other now. Whatever she’d imagined, it certainly hadn’t been this.
People were already being drawn from the Easterlies and across Northcentral to witness the spectacle of the expiring exchange. It blazed brighter than Hallam Tower, and, in the fevered atmosphere which had already seen bombs in wastepaper bins at Great Aldgate Station and several high-profile kidnappings, few doubted that the terrorist agitators of the West were to blame. Fire bells and sirens started clanging. Pumps started coughing jets of water which sprayed and glittered uselessly over the first few floors of the smoking exchange. It seemed by now that everyone who was ever likely to escape had done so—and thank the Elder this was a Halfshiftday—when Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell and her ragged but surprisingly long line of followers began to emerge. The newspapermen were there already, and volleys of flashguns exploded through the murk.
The House of Storms Page 25