The House of Storms (56 page)

Twisting the door’s iron handle, she felt for lights. The great energised pillar at the device’s core rose up through the gantried levels as they flooded on. There was a purposeful humming, a sound like that of generators and reckoning engines, and the sigh of telephone lines and the buzz of lightbulbs, but differently tuned and refined; the song of this Age, or perhaps of the one to come. The dials twitched, calibrations revolved, and the temptation was too great as she climbed the weather-top’s levels not to try tweaking some of the controls. Imagine: to possess such power, to turn its winds against the stupidities of this war…

She glanced around. What was
that
? Probably nothing but her own presence caught in an angled display. Or perhaps it was one of the Shadow Ones. She curled her hands around the machine warmth of a delicately knurled knob, but the thing wouldn’t budge. Neither would the next. They were all locked, frozen, but then she saw one of the big levers which she knew controlled barometric pressure slide upwards in a smooth glide. Another, in a slow reciprocal ballet, moved down. The weathertop hummed. Light slid on brass. More warily, but still fascinated, she climbed inside the whispering brass seashell.

It took a moment for her sight to adjust when she stepped out on to the weathertop’s outer gantry, but it wasn’t entirely dark. The Bristol Channel still shone. The Western landscape, in and beyond the valley, unrolled. It was hard to believe that it was near midwinter, for the wind which poured about her and sang across the railings was damply warm. The sky flickered. Perhaps a bigger storm was brewing, although hadn’t Weatherman Ayres once told her that this was the safest place of all to be? She gazed across the landscape, amazed at how far she could see. That way lay the remains of Clyst, the lights of Luttrell, then Hockton beyond. She could almost be flying. And there was Einfell. But surely not, for the place was alight, alive. Blinking, looking north and east in the hope that her sight would adjust, Marion saw more movement there as well. There were campfires, the tiny jewelled necklaces of trains, the pale lanterns of tents. These, unmistakably, were the lights and shapes of two gathering armies. And there were sounds as well. Drums and flickering cannon, which the thunder gleefully echoed.

She fled back through the weathertop and towards the house. Whatever would happen in this coming encirclement, she was certain the people here would look to her to guide them. But she had no idea what to do—not the faintest. Consulting Ralph with his illness and confused allegiances seemed laughable, but nevertheless she was heading in search of him across the inner hall when the bell above the telephone booth beneath the best stairs suddenly began to ring.

Breathless, disbelieving, still trailing the grubby threads of her old coat, Marion stopped and turned. Much as she disliked these devices, she knew it was her responsibility to answer whoever was calling Invercombe. She opened the door of the booth and sat down.

‘Marion. I thought I might find you here.’

Unmistakably beautiful, entirely unchanged, Alice Meynell smiled at her from the mirror’s far side.

T
HE CENTRE OF THE EYE
was an infinite falling, but it was a journey Alice no longer feared. There were stars inside that swirling blackness. There were empires of light.

To get to this place of final understanding had been the work of a lifetime. She saw that now as well. Her parents aboard that yacht had been sailing towards it even as they drowned. So had her aunt as she squirmed beneath the grey waters beside the falls of that ghastly house. The journey had continued in Lichfield, and walking Stow Pool with Cheryl Kettlethorpe, and in the smell of gas and damp and cats in the hovel they’d lived in, and the many guildsmen their thighs had enclosed. Then Dudley and pianos and the boredoms of parasoled Noshiftday afternoons in the castle grounds. And on to London, and the dream still unfinished, and Silus a staging post, just as Tom had finally turned out to be. Yes, even when she’d arrived as a greatgrandmistress, she’d still been travelling, and life and time had streamed past her, eroding flesh and bone—hope, even—yet leaving the vital truth, which was the journey itself, untouched. It had continued with Ralph, as well, in railway carriages which rocked endlessly into the feverish night, and his drowning gaze which she had always feared to meet, yet now she saw was just another part of the tunnel down which lay all knowledge.

And now she had reached the place which was known as Einfell, and nothing was behind her now, and everything waited ahead in Invercombe’s falling dark. The matter of turning this winter campaign to her own will had been, even by the standards of her own machinations, an extraordinary task. She had called in debts, threats, liaisons which had lain dormant for so long that their holders had perhaps imagined they would never be brought to account. She had cajoled and argued for a fresh advance across the shining map which High Command in London tended, and then for it to be performed with a swiftness which went against all the rules of planning which they so worshipped. But that was the whole
point
, that was the whole
purpose
. This war would otherwise become an endless deathly dance.
That
was what she had had to make them see.

Alice knew she had only been partially successful. Yes, there had been consent to a diversionary advance. Indeed, she had been congratulated on the swiftness of her battalion’s movements, which, just as she’d predicted, had taken the West entirely by surprise. But her orders and authorisations had been somewhat at variance to the actions she had finally performed, and that variance had expanded to a point where it could no longer be ignored. Alice had diverted far more of the East’s resources towards this manoeuvre than had ever been approved, and had then failed to report back or secure supply lines to such an extent that even the grudging support she had once received from London was retracted. Of course, if she succeeded in reaching the channel and turning upstream towards Bristol she would be acclaimed as the Angel of the East. But Alice knew as well as the greatgrandmasters back in London that important practicalities had been neglected, and dubious deaths had occurred, and that her time, as the armies of the West finally wheeled themselves to face her in far greater numbers, was running out. But a military assault was the last thing she planned.

Everything had come together in these last few shifterms. Recently, she had submitted herself to the pull of the telephone’s mirror with a recklessness which she had long denied herself. Even as her forces surged madly south and west, she had poured through the blackness at the core of her own eyes and ridden with the aether, soared on the light and the dark. She saw, just as a hawk must see the landscape of its hunting ground, how all the conflicts and confusions of Europe and Thule had tightened into the particularities of English hopes and prejudices, and then knotted into war. Threads of it coiled like angry veins across the whole country, but ahead was the core, a heart, an ever-widening pupil, a nexus, waiting for her within Invercombe’s stormy pillars of cloud.

She knew that the men who still executed her orders were close to mutiny. Only the fact that they were bound irresistibly to her by the wild onrush of this advance had led them this far. That, and the dumb respect for title and hierarchy which even now infused everything about the guilds. Alice, in recent shifterms, had insisted on conducting all serious business through the telephone so as to avoid the bother of meeting face to face. What, after all, was vision, but a random play of assumptions, lies and light? Only
she
saw the real truth, and that lay far inside the mirror, beyond the falling depths of her eyes.

Admittedly, Einfell’s desertion had come as a slight disappointment, for she’d looked forward to re-encountering those pale lost shapes which Silus had once called the Shadow Ones, and with whom she now felt she shared some kind of identity. But, on second consideration, it all made sense, for her forces had recently been moving in the wake of some ragged procession, and the evidence of their passing lay here in smell of smoke and ordure, in the burned and ransacked buildings, and in MARION scrawled upon the walls. They, too, had moved on. For them, just as for her, this pale ruin of Einfell had only ever been a staging post. Invercombe always was the goal.

Dressed in the hooded cape she now affected, dragging the ageing bones which she soon planned to depart, Alice reached a clearing in the woods where many arrangements and orderings already seemed entirely satisfactory to her, although the wary men who followed her with their guns affected puzzlement and shock. Here, even, was a mound of new earth, which she had had dug up. Something in the slippery remains within their shroud of seething insects—a trace of identity or memory-had nagged at her. But no matter, for, having brought her own personal portable telephone booth with her this far—having, indeed, insisted on the protection and maintenance of a maximum bandwidth line back towards the East whilst arrangements for mere food and munitions lay in disorder—she now had a far more satisfactory alternative.

She remembered this small brick building from her previous visit to these woods in Einfell, and she had her tent and quarters erected over and beside it, and some dinner plates which she’d discovered nearby laid decoratively across the bare earth. Once finally established and alone and freed of the bother of acting the greatgrandmistress, she set her gramophone playing in the lovely swish of an out-groove. Dancing to the lit air’s movements, inspecting and rearranging the burnt and bird-like corpses which scattered her enclave, she then set about the relatively simple business of re-energising the booth. The connection of this ancient station ran only to one place, but as the sappers and telegraphers unwound and restrung cables back towards the East, that would soon be corrected. And Invercombe, to begin with, was more than enough.

All Alice felt as the mirror finally cleared was a wondering sadness that she had ever troubled about how she appeared. Shrugging off her hood, wiping off what remained of her make-up with the balled-up fabric of her gloves, she regarded herself more closely. Haggard. Lividly pale. More like the dead, earthy thing they had recently dug up than the Alice Meynell of old. With a slight relaxing of some inner nerve, which was something she now could will and unwill with near total control, she could now actually see entirely through herself. She glanced towards her battered portmanteau and smiled. Too long, indeed, she had toyed with creams and potions and worries about the line of her chin. A mere effort of her undying will, and she could remake herself without all the bothersome practicalities of her notebook. Even as she studied herself, the strung, translucent flesh she saw in the mirror grew creamily smooth. Her near-lipless mouth plumped, softened, reddened, then parted in a slight smile over perfect teeth and a wetly playful hint of tongue. Cheekbones to die for. Jawline like the wings of a swan. Hair neither gold nor silver but that endlessly refined metal which the alchemists had long sought. She lowered the cloak further. She smiled as her hands touched the shining divide between her perfect breasts. Yes, she was Alice, Alice Meynell, even if all beauty was an illusion. She was the crackle of a gramophone and she was the song of a dying lover’s sigh, and her eyes, in their dark core at the heart of her beauty, had never, ever changed. She fell through them. On into the blackness, and beyond.

Ah, Invercombe. Yes, Invercombe. Amazing, indeed, how beautifully perfect everything remained. The chimneys, the trees, the windows, the grounds. This place, in its power and mystery, had always called to her, but she, foolish Ulysses tied to the mast of her greatgrandmistress’s duties, had for too long ignored its siren song. She had summoned the Falling from here, certainly, but she had remained far away for too long, over-fearful of the dullards who surrounded her.

She followed. She watched and waited. She made discoveries of things she had long known. With a flurry of sadness and relief, she saw, working amid the whispering pages of the library, the hunched and haggard creature her poor son had become. Just as she’d suspected. Ralph had been amongst the ragged band who had headed towards Invercombe before her. She sensed, as well, in stray flickers of light and song, the whispering passage of the Shadow Ones, who had been drawn to Invercombe for reasons far closer to her own. Outside as the sun flared and sank, a bonfire hung tremulous. The figures which murmured around it were far wilder and more dangerous-looking than those which cleaned and cooked inside. Some, indeed, were not human at all. But one especially caught Alice’s eye as she swirled amid the uncoiling smoke. Something about his face … Something of way he held himself… It was—could only be. Alice, an angel of flame towards whom several of those gathered and chanting around the fire were now gazing, smiled. For here was the child Ralph had sired with that shoregirl. Then the wind surged through the fire, and she blew away in a laugh of leaves. Hovering higher, she saw another figure moving through the waving pines towards the weathertop in the light’s last glow with a stooped and purposeful gait.

Odd, really, how the shoregirl she’d always imagined as some greater or lesser rival would soon become her most vital ally in the work ahead. But not so very odd. There were a million ways in which Alice could have destroyed Marion Price. But she had always held back. Call it instinct, destiny. Whatever and however, Alice watched her now as she stood on the weathertop’s gantry. Even with that badly cut, grey-threaded hair and that filthy coat, there was
something
about her—the way she looked, moved. Some females, Alice had often thought, observed, attained a second and far higher level of beauty after the first easy victories of youth when character and the demands of life had imprinted themselves. It was far more than mere good looks, and Marion Price possessed it now. Forget about advances in the administration of medicine—
that
was why people followed and so adored her. And she didn’t even realise, or care. Yet that was part of her loveliness as well…