The House of Storms (58 page)

‘He’s very ill.’

‘But he’s a fighter, isn’t he? He’s the son of his mother…’

‘And what should I tell him?’

‘Tell him…’ Alice Meynell paused. Her expression changed. ‘Tell him, we’ll soon find out.’

Then the mirror hung blank. All Marion saw before her was herself.

There were already stirrings, for by now the near-presence of these two armies had been observed by others as well, but Marion found Ralph sitting at the long white table in the west parlour with the first course of soup cooling before him. He looked even paler now. Almost like Alice Meynell in the moment when the mirror had seemed to fail her.

‘I’ve just been on the telephone,’ Marion said, ‘speaking to your mother.’

This was surely some joke, and Ralph attempted a smile.

Carefully, slowly, her heart once again racing, Marion sat down. The soup, sloppily ladled, remained uncollected, and voices grew louder in the inner hall as she explained. Even without these things she was telling Ralph, Invercombe was falling towards panic and disorder.

Ralph, to his credit, listened. The only times she had to pause were for his coughing spasms. There was nothing he didn’t seem to understand.

‘Do you trust her?’ he said eventually.

Marion shook her head. ‘I believe she’s done terrible things. It’s unnatural—no one is as well preserved as she is—everything about her is entirely wrong. I even think that she’s more responsible than anyone else for this bloody war.’

Ralph’s sunken eyes gazed at, and then through, her. He knew far more about Alice Meynell than he could admit to himself, let alone to her. And breath by breath, pulse by pulse, he was diminishing. Marion couldn’t help selfishly wondering if he was up to this thing.

‘Ralph, there was something she wanted me to say to you. Just a phrase—
We’ll soon find out
.’

Ralph smiled. Slowly, he nodded. ‘It was what we used to say to each other when we were travelling, wondering what the next place we came to would be like …’ Hands slipping on the tablecloth, cutlery jingling, he climbed up from his chair. There were red spillages, Marion noticed, on the tablecloth, although the wine they had left untouched was white. ‘We must get started …’

These were the things, he whispered—hands too weak to tremble, too frail to feel cold, laid on hers—that she must do to re-energise the transmission house on Invercombe’s borders and open the way to the West.

‘Funny,’ she said to him. ‘That folly—it always looked so appealing in the distance. Yet we never went there.’

The hands still kept their hold. ‘You can’t go alone.’

‘Why draw attention to—’

‘You don’t
understand,
Marion. The two armies will be making reconnaissance, finding out resistances and the lie of the land.’

‘We can’t fight—that’s the whole point.’

‘They won’t be looking to engage. If you come across a Western scout party in the darkness, all you need do is fire a few shots. They’ll retreat, and report back. That’s how it works.’

Ralph’s flesh was heat now. Fierce and remote as the sun. All this talk of the chaos of battle, and suddenly he was explaining the whole thing as some courtly dance.

‘Take some of the deserters with you, Marion. They’ve been soldiers, and they’ll follow you anywhere.’

‘But where’s Klade … ?’

Guns were shouldered, bullets were counted, and the deserters passed along the lit terrace beside Invercombe’s tall and beautiful windows as a shine of faces and metals, with the bale-hound trotting ahead and the ravener, the hackles of its huge and mangy pelt raised, loping warily behind. The other followers had gathered on the terrace to watch, and they chanted and cheered. Pipes gave their familiar discordant toot. A space formed around Marion and Ralph.

‘How will you know when I’ve reached to the place?’ she asked.

Lightning flickered. Ralph raised himself more upright. ‘I’ll know as soon as the connection is made.’

‘And if nothing happens?’

He smiled. ‘Then we’ll be no worse off than we are.’ Thunder boomed.

‘So—’

In a whistling rush, a shell came to split the parterre gardens with light. The air grew solid in their faces and then fell away in a hissing suck as scraps of shrapnel, still writhing and aether-energised, tinkled down.

‘That was bound to happen,’ Ralph said calmly as vegetation sparked and burned. ‘It could be the East, or more probably the West. The gunners are testing their aim,. making themselves known. It won’t damage the telephone lines—they’re buried underground. Now go. Go … !’

Marion turned. She and the deserters headed off into the night, and then Ralph, who had sent many such groups into dark uncertainties, limped back inside the house with the other followers. Clearing the blockage in his throat, he issued instructions that everyone should move down into the servants’ halls, where they would be safe from any stray shell. Not that he expected any significant bombardment, but he needed to be alone.

His feet dragged as he crossed the floor of the west parlour, where the candles which had been lit for their meal had long guttered out. The inner hall was emptier and brighter, blazing under the electric chandelier, and he was glad that he had to haul himself no further, and especially not ascend those stairs. His breath was loud in his head now. His heart was pounding. If anything, he felt yet more dreamily remote from this house than he had when he’d first entered it inside the fishtank of that helmet. In a few moments, he would speak again to his mother. It seemed quite impossible, yet he didn’t feel a fraction of doubt. This was the work he had started that snowy day outside Hereford, and tonight, one way or another, he and it and the war would be ended for good.

Just a few more steps to reach the booth now. Then he could rest his body, exercise his mind. At least there were no more shells. Not yet, anyway. He wondered, indeed, if he’d lied to Marion about the intentions of these armies, and if it mattered, and just how much he really loved her, and what had happened to poor Klade, and how little any of them had left to lose. Then, vaguely, happily, he thought of Helen back in London, and how Flora and Augustus—Gussie—would probably sleep through all of this as London fell darkly quiet. And in the morning. Well, in the morning …

Ralph paused, swaying. He realised he wasn’t alone. The changed figures Klade called the Shadow Ones had emerged from Invercombe’s hidden spaces. Silvery-light as stirred fragments of dust, scented with sea and stone and Age-old wood, crossing the carpet in shifts and sighs, they struck him no longer as sad or terrible, but queerly beautiful. Ralph left the door of the telephone booth open, and their presence was around him as he dialled. All the pain passed from him as he made the connection to Einfell, and his head was filled with inexpressible song.

K
LADE SCURRIED ACROSS THE FLICKERING NIGHT
landscapes of Invercombe’s grounds in the wake of Marion Price and the other Outsiders. A thunderous rushing came out of the sky. Trees, madly ragged with endless autumn, flared. Rages of wind battered his face. But he was Klade and he was the Bonny Boy and this was the scene of battle. He was not deterred.

The sky split again in a white gash. Shadows splayed across the dying ground. The earth erupted into light, then smoke, then falling cascades of stones. Klade glanced back towards Inver-something. Joined by pillars of light and dark, it was now the fulcrum of earth and sky. The house was the war and it was the storm, and the earth was turning beneath his feet and the air hung solid as he ran. More light came, further off this time; a glowing rush. He found the other Outsiders as they cowered amongst the bushes amid curses and the click of guns.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Marion Price’s voice. ‘Klade …’ Her face was paler now amid the deep silence between the thunder-guns. A heart. A mask. ‘You must go back.’

He shook his head.

‘This isn’t safe.’ Her hand on his cheek. This time, he didn’t flinch.

‘Where
is
safe?’ he said.

Some of the other Outsiders chuckled. He saw Marion Price smile. ‘Then stay by me. We must move on.’

Klade had no idea where they were heading, although he knew that something vital must be accomplished with as much speed and stealth as was possible—something which would extinguish this war. Knew also, as if it needed knowing as the guns thundered their deep
Ma-ri-on
songs all around them, that they must do all that was necessary to protect Marion Price. And here ahead, on a slight rise, gloriously crystalline, rainbowed turrets raised like a beckoning hand.

This strange edifice of glassy stone seemed to move towards them across the wrecked ground. Almost there. The other Outsiders scanned the falling silence with the cold black eyes of their guns. For all its glinting strangeness, this building was no ghost, for a path led to its mock turrets. There was a door, even, towards which Marion Price, breaking from the protective corral of Outsiders, began to run. Klade ran with her as well, and it was in that moment that the darkness emptied in the flare of bullets.

Alice Meynell reached deep inside her portmanteau as, breathing its lost glamours, little more than a breath herself, she scooped up the wyreblack pages in her translucent hands. The ideographs, white swirls of aethered ink, comets, turning planets, circling stars, sang out to her. It was the same with the commonest spell a knife-grinder might cast as he honed a steel—that sense that what you were making had always waited, and you were simply drawing its perfection through the small wound your desire for it had made in the substance of the world—but never this strong. Not even in the keystone of the greatest building, or the powers which bound the moon to the earth. Not even in the greatest of all makings when the entire universe was willed by God the Elder himself. Although this, Alice imagined, as she ordered these flakes of falling night with senses she could no longer describe, must have been very much how He felt.

Doubt had never been something which had greatly afflicted her, but all the enterprises of her life seemed like abject wavering in comparison to now. Was the telephone on? Yes, of course it was on. Telephones, like the tides and the seasons and her continuing urge to be more of what she already was, had no state of off. But the mirror before her—hung inside what her eyes told her was an edifice of old, damp brick, although strangely ornamented, and lit by a bare single electric bulb—flared and sparked. The voices of the men within her near command, who had grown too fearful now to approach her directly, had keened like the calls of distant birds, and what was left of the old Alice Meynell dealt with their queries with a briskness which her old self would have admired. Western guns were lobbing in shells. Not a full assault, but a range-finding, a tuning-up, and she ordered them to make response from decoy positions whilst their main guns remained silent and unrevealed, just as the West’s main guns undoubtedly were. When it came down to it, both sides in battle were essentially the same. The only thing which had ever mattered was who imagined they had won, and even that would soon be irrelevant.

Alice had had no reason to lie to Marion Price. She really had planned the exact consequences of the wrecking spell she had described. East and West, and lands beyond, would be brought to a paralytic halt. Most likely, peace would be sued for as well. England would probably be reunited. Even when judged by standards other than her own, there was much to be desired in the state which Alice planned to bring about. But, as always, such matters were incidental to her; cards you might pretend to possess according to how you wished to direct the flow of the game. It was logic which had always driven her. Sometimes, admittedly, it had taken her to degradations and sadnesses which—much like this war, or in facing her lost and ailing son—she believed she was capable of feeling much like anyone else. But Alice’s difference, her beacon, her own personal Invercombe, had always been that she could see through such things to the greater truths beyond.

Now,
she thought, as she poised herself in the waiting depths of the mirror,
I can even see through myself
. But, for all this situation’s apparent strangeness, nothing but a clear and well-made path lay ahead. When the spell she would soon dictate to Ralph was cast, everything which she had promised Marion would happen. But there would be one last thing. She, or what she was to become, would also join with the spell and make that joyous leap into the networks, systems and reckoning engines on which this modern Age and the one which lay beyond it would depend. She would become deathless. Pure power. In essence, which was all she would be, the new Alice Meynell would control this land. It was a giddy prospect, certainly. But she was sure she had neglected nothing. Carefully, and for the last time, she consulted her portmanteau, and applied a little cream and foundation, dabbed some blusher to her fading face. Then she remembered the green velvet box in which she had long kept the trophies of her small conquests. Buttons and brooches and hatpins and pendants, they mostly seemed anonymous to her now, but she put them on in any case.
These
, she thought with a final triumphant shudder as she anointed her neck with the silver chain of a teardrop pendant,
are all the shackles I will soon cast off
.

Then the telephone began to ring, and Alice knew merely from its tone that this call came from Invercombe, and that it was Ralph. She smiled, happy as any mother might be that her son had chosen to ring her, rather than it being necessary for her to ring him.

How long had it been since he had last seen his mother? Ralph had to stretch his brain to recall the time when he had sat with her in the last summer warmth in the glassed-in gardens of her London house, and the thought left him exhausted. He wondered how much of himself there was left, and what she would make of the wraith he had become.

‘Ralph.’ As always, her eyes saw through him. And then, and as in the old days, he felt some of the pains and doubts which had beset him begin to dissolve. ‘My darling. We’re nearly there now.’

‘I’ve …’ He realised as he paused that he was past coughing. He could barely hear the sound his voice was making, but he knew that she heard. ‘I’ve changed from the man I was.’