The House of Storms (43 page)

So Klade was heading Home, and people made signs to themselves when he risked asking directions and often cursed him, which he took as an encouraging sign. Home was Home, but Home was more than that. Home, whilst he was away from it, had grown bigger, and not just with memories. For Home, unless the maps had moved, which often seemed entirely likely on days when the rains beat through him and the sun was lost and the cold winds swirled too capriciously to guide, was close to another place called Inver-something, and at Inver-something there had once been a maid who had once had a baby. Here, and like the worsening weather itself, Klade’s thoughts often grew confused and contradictory. Perhaps he’d eaten too many maggots. Perhaps he was turning into that woman—the Beetle Lady. But here was the story which Silus had also told him, or a version of it, which was like the song of the Bonny Boy, which was always essentially the same, although it came in many styles and verses. And wasn’t that song about Home as well, and the sad and happy thing about the Boy returning there was that he was lying under a tree instead of a roof? But Klade’s thoughts were drifting, and he knew that that was bad for him and for them.

Yes.
No.
Look.
Listen.
He was almost sure of it. At a place called Inver-something, a girl or a woman who’d once been a maid had had a baby just like the cats had once done back at Home in the New Barn and that baby had been him. Wasn’t that exactly what Silus had told him as well as they stood outside that place in Bristol before the War Effort even began? But, here in the cling and swoop of Klade’s thoughts, came the biggest thing of all, for that girl or woman who’d once been a maid had a face in the tattered newspaper which the Beetle Lady had shown him before the soldiers had taken her off to do whatever it was that soldiers did to women, and that face had belonged to Marion Price. There, Klade sometimes thought, he had it. Plain, if you squinted to look, as the nose on your face. And then the wind boomed out at him and the hedgerows fluttered their drops of blood and maggot and the distant, looming guns and the scrawls on the walls of abandoned houses also screamed out her name. Ma-ri-on. Sometimes, in those moments, he had the thing all so nearly arranged he was sure he’d never lose it. And then, like water dribbled through his fingers over the wild face which peered up at him from the shattering surface of the puddles from which he drank, he lost it all. But still he pressed on.

Closer and closer. Souther and wester. The sun at sunset was a red berry he longed to pluck in his maggoty hands. Sometimes on the roadsigns, or what remained of them, he caught echoes of the places he was sure he and Silus had passed through as they went about their ways in the wagon. Not Bristol, no. What with the War Effort and the Damn You Bastard Changelings, Bristol was a place best avoided. But Luttrell, perhaps, and Hockton, as well, and the air and the light which breezed ahead of him now had changed in taste and scent. Not that Klade knew about seas or channels, but he understood that Einfell had always been close enough for the seagulls to be a nuisance, and there they were again, sailing around and ahead of him with that fresh drop of blood which was always on their beaks as if they’d been pecking at the sun. Then there was no doubt about it. The very turns in the roads sang out to him, even if the hedges had gone mad. A station, even, although abandoned, empty, bore Einfell’s name. Then fences, firethorn hedges, as if he was an Outsider and not some Troll Changeling Bastard and the wild and lovely place he was sure he could see beyond their rust and ivy was trying to keep him away. The rise, the puzzle, the harsh metal thorns which assaulted him, proved near impossible to surmount, but Klade was Klade, and this was Home. And Home was Sweetness, and he was crashing, falling, bruised and grazed, and Home was Everything. And Home was here.

Something was wrong. The quietness and the wildness were both more and less here than in his memories, and the memories themselves had sunk back down inside him now that he needed them the most. He stumbled along No Through Road in the quietness of a blustery evening. All that twirled around him were leaves. Not one single shadow or ghost. He fought open the door of the Big House. His voice shouted back at him, empty and dulled. He tore at the damp-rotted space in a pillow where Silus’s face should have laid, he smashed his fist through the songless glass which kept him from the Garden and the Woods. The Big House creaked and whispered complainingly against the storm of his anger, but only with dust and air and mush-roomy wood. Even outside, where he’d lived and laughed in the Garden, the Impassable Stream had betrayed him and coiled itself up into mud. Even the stones tasted different, and he drank instead his own blood as it oozed through shards of glass.

Still, there were always the Shadow Ones, even if he only caught the trace of a whisper of their once-vibrant song. Arms outstretched, catching the ragged darkness, Klade entered their thorny wood. He didn’t fear the Huntsman now, or the Master Mower, for they were like the Loved Ones over whom the followers had often sobbed, and Klade sobbed as well. He didn’t fear them. He didn’t hate; he loved. In truth, what Klade feared and hated that night as he raged through the empty darkness and howled at the taunting moon, was Klade. Fay—where was Fay, and the forgiveness he craved from her for the terrible crime of being Klade? Klade was trapped within himself. Trapped within his rage. Time, nevertheless, passed just as it always did, even if it offered no escape. Night left its reluctant threads between the weirdly ornamented trees, and with it a few strands of mist, but even they wouldn’t stay for him as he plucked at them with desperate fingers. This was just another morning, and Einfell wasn’t Home; it was just another place. Klade rocked himself and listened to the wintery birdsong taunting the near-songless silence. Songless, but not quite. Oddly, what called out to him most strongly was a brick shed-like thing he’d never attended to before. For a delirious moment, he even thought he’d found the Huntsman cowering inside, but it turned out to be some version of his own reflection fluttering in a mirror.
We don’t have mirrors here in Einfell,
Silus’s old voice reminded him, and Klade staggered out before the horrid thing or things could get to him.

He wandered through the trees into the morning as the cold sun peered down at him. So much for Home. So much for Einfell. So much for the War Effort. So much for Ida and Silus and Marion Price and the Beetle Lady. But then the sense remained that the song wasn’t entirely lost. For hadn’t the Beetle Lady said to him, at least in his wilder imaginings and her ghostgas ramblings, that Einfell was so close to Inver-something that you could almost see the place and taste the air, and hadn’t that Inver-something been part of Home as well? Klade wandered down the road which crossed the rough grey meadow which now surrounded the meetingless Meeting Place. Glaring at the empty woods in reproach, he passed through the iron yawn of the open front gate. Once again, and seemingly just as always, he was Outside.

Which way from here?
That was the question. He let his feet lead him down the quiet, empty lanes. The sky had clouded over and the wind had settled. He could hear the ragged pant of his own breath. It was like being indoors. It was warmer, as well. This was more like it. Whatever
this
was. He was the Bonny Boy returning, and he would have lain down under any of these trees, which still clung to earlier autumn days than the many which he had passed. Once more, there were berries, and then there were signs to tell him that there was Danger and No Admittance, but when had he ever heeded those? He would happily have laid himself to rest here amid any of their roots. But now he was running, being carried by his feet. He let out a yelp, and the sound came back to him as a song. He tilted his head, almost stopped, suspicious even at the moment when he seemed closest to the brink of everything, for how can you find Home in a place you have never been?

Unfolding hills like the splayed pages of a book. A larger hill at the spine of them, warted by some sort of church or temple. The sky unhazed. It was genuinely warmer here, and the trees were scarcely red. Further moments of doubt as Klade wondered whether he wasn’t somehow falling backwards through all his recent days. That larger headland still rose as if he really was approaching it, and there, off to the left, was a tiny castle, all spires and turrets—the sort of place fairies might live in, if fairies had ever existed in the first place. Now a gatehouse, and now a grass-tufted drive curling down towards a valley, and Klade’s hands and feet still had a mind of their own as they climbed the fences and chains and the slope led them down and on. The glow of something like a bald giant’s brass head, and the glint of windows, and the faces of flowers, barely withered, hovering armfuls of astonishing green. All of Klade’s previous thoughts on the subject of Home were confirmed and yet confounded, for he’d come to believe that Home was many different places, yet here, surely, was a Home for all. Its song called out to him in incredible range and power. And it was light and it was Sweetness—for, surely, here was that very scent…

Klade’s feet veered from the path and tumbled, half-fell down some steps. The sun pushed down at him. Moist grass untwined beneath his splaying hands and tickled his cheek. He was in some sort of grove, wherein it seemed that all the warmth he’d been craving these long last days had been preserved. A cluster of trees zigzagged their shadows at him, and the berries which hung from them were larger than apples, and they were green and they were orange and they were the brightest, brightest yellow, and their shades roared a blissful song into his head. Standing up, stretching, Klade reached for the nearest fruit. He’d never seen such a thing before—but then he realised that he had. Egg-shaped, and with a little knobble at each end, he’d seen it, oh, a million times, on the sides of cans of
Fizzing Lemon.
He even recognised, as his nails scrabbled at the waxy outer coating, that same bittersweet scent. He bit down and through hardness and pithy softness, and the juice at the heart was such sharp delicious agony on his fissured lips that he gave a choking, happy scream as it flooded into him.

Klade gorged himself until finally he was sated and lying in sticky amazement as he dug his hands into the towering earth. But the light still played, and he ungummed his eyes and felt a shifting of the song which was more than the sway of these boughs, much though that was. There, in the shadows
A
hich were not shadows, were jigsaws of movement. Klade belched an acid belch, and sat up, and felt a smile crack his face. The song had never been closer. For here were the Shadow Ones he’d so missed at Einfell, and yet even the Chosen were changed here. They were scarcely there to his sight, and yet their song was overwhelming. Here was the Master Mower, who no longer needed to mow. Here were the Farmers, who didn’t need to farm. Here was the Huntsman, unwanted. And he was the Bonny Boy, and he was Home at last.

T
HROUGH A CAULDRON RATTLE
of wind and rain and small-arms fire, Ralph breathed the necessary spell as he trained his binoculars along the pockmarked outer walls of Hereford, and the cheap lenses cleared to an impression of finely ground glass, and the city swam back into view through the hazing rain. The shifterm since his return had been a sleepless blur of endless problems and decisions, and meanwhile a large portion of the yards, workshops and dwellings which comprised this city had been reduced to rubble. Yet still it resisted, and he dared not risk a full assault with all the extra slaughter which that would entail.

He passed a sense of movement. Helmetless, ducking along the breached battlements, the man paused as if to admire the view. Smiling, and in need of shaving, he returned Ralph’s gaze. A Western soldier. Deep, narrow-set eyes. It was like one of those childhood games: who’d look away first? Then, in a spray of flesh and bone, the top of his head was blown away.

Unslinging his binoculars, Ralph handed them to the duty-captain, then descended the slippery duckboards which furrowed around to the slope of the hill facing away from the city. What had been fields two months before was now a settlement sprawling on trampled, ruined grain. Still, in many ways, it represented the pinnacle of what could be achieved at this particular moment in this late, technological Age. Last night, he’d watched as the last volleys of siege-dragons were prepared for launch. Not dragons at all, in the sense of the beasts used for pursuit by the wealthy in the hunt, although these ones did at least have something approximating the gift of breathing fire. Red-eyed, quivering and wheezing at their tethers, they drank from waiting drums of paraffin. A torch was lowered to ignite them, then they were released in a whoosh of wings and oily smoke, heading up towards the city like giant paper lanterns where, belching flame as their innards exploded in flaring gouts, they sought the targets which had been imprinted on their tiny minds. The moment was beautiful, even in the horror and terror it contained.

Coughing, refolding his big handkerchief so the bloodstains wouldn’t show, he crossed the shining sea of mud to reach the old farmhouse where main command was established for his evening briefing. Salutes were returned.

‘Sir? There are some things we’d like to show you. Captured ordnance …’

The rain, Ralph realised as it stung his face as they crossed the ruined yards, was becoming sleet. It twirled prettily through the arc-lights which had been erected around some kind of display as he leaned forward, thinking of that faraway morning when he and Helen had wandered Great Westminster Park, pausing to admire this or that display of guild ingenuity.

‘Wouldn’t get too close. It can still spit.’

Basically a distorted species of bat, the nocturne had a rot-and-sulphur reek, and looked to be dying as it clung to the stained titanium bars and the acids which had been somehow contained within its body leaked out. It was more spell than any man-made creature Ralph had ever encountered.

‘How come they don’t attack Western machinery and combatants?’