The Light Ages (2 page)

I begin to make my way up and along the arch which still plunges out across the river, careful not to catch my cloak between the stanchions. There are curls of mist beneath me now; faint shapes over the quick black water which suggest limbs and faces as they twine and turn amid the abutments. And the bridge itself seems to be growing, beams and girders spinning out around me. But I’ve been here before, and I know something of the ways in which changelings protect themselves. Although my heart is racing and my hands are slipping, I push on and soon I am squatting on a ruined bridge again, caught between nothing but the land, the river, my own desperate need.

Almost level with me now and close to where the bridge’s parapet finally falls away clings an aggregation of dead metal and glass and driftwood. Further off lies all of London; the life, the ferries, the miraculous trees and the fine buildings. I clamber to the platform beyond, then duck along the wire cage of a maintenance gantry through which shards of glass and porcelain have been crammed with an intent that could be either threatening or decorative. All things considered, the air here is surprisingly pleasant. It smells mostly of rust.

The changeling who calls herself Niana dwells in the shadows at the far end of this tunnel, and always seems to be waiting for me inside her tepee-like dwelling. She stirs at my approach, and beckons me from the rags of an old wedding dress.

‘Grandmaster …’ She studies me in the glow of a bowl of plundered wyrelight as she crouches in the furthest, darkest corner.
After all, you have decided to come …

Her voice, even as it sounds solely in my head, is light, ordinary, flatly accented.

I flail through damp layers of curtain, clumsily conscious of the feats of creation that have gone into this dwelling, clenched up here amid these dying girders. This tilted boarding against which I’m leaning as I catch my breath was perhaps once a cargo pallet, lashed to the heaving deck of some steamer on the Boreal Seas. And the far wall, peppered with daylight through thousands of rivetholes, was clearly part of the outer plating of a large piece of machinery. Wan daylight mingles with the wyrelight’s aetherglow through the clouded eye of an old porthole, along intricate tubes of glass piping of a purpose which—barely privy as I still am to the true mysteries of the guilds—entirely escapes me. I try to imagine the struggles which must unfold on the wastetips when a particularly precious relic is heaved from the sidings by the pitbeasts: the bickering gulls, the seething dragonlice, the scampering children. All because of a broken haft; a sack of soup bones; a twitching sliver of iron; a heaped clatter of old lamps …

I shrug and smile at Niana, torn as I always am between wonder, curiosity, pity. There’s a long cushion exploding in horsehair near to the space where she crouches. Setting strings of bottletops chiming, I lower myself onto the end that looks more likely to bear me. The iron floor curves away from me, hanging at least thirty feet above the uncurling river. And I’m squatting in a way that people of my rank are never supposed to. Still, I’m glad to be here again. With a changeling, and no matter how often or how rarely you encounter them, there’s still always for me that tingling sense that today you will finally witness the unravelling of some lost, exquisite mystery.

Niana gets up now, greyly barefoot as always, and wafts around this den of hers, half child and half hag as she hums to herself and rummages out bits of things from the old teachests. She takes a chess piece, a white rook carved from stained ivory, and lifts it to her lips.

‘What do you do when no one’s here, Niana?’

Her chuckle cuts like the chirp of an insect. ‘How many times, grandmaster, do you people need to ask such a question?’

‘Until we get an answer.’

‘And what answer is it that you want? Tell me, and I’ll give it to you.’

‘It’s not unrealistic, is it,’ I mutter, ‘for us both to feel a mutual fascination … ?’

‘But tell me, grandmaster. What is it that fascinates?’ The cotton of the wedding dress sighs like sand as she moves over to me. ‘Tell me, so that I can understand. Exactly what is it that you want to know? Any wish you want could be granted, grandmaster,’ she says more flirtatiously. Her face is the shadow of a face, cast through glass. Her eyes are blacker than a bird’s. ‘Surely that’s not such a difficult proposition?’

‘And not that you’ll be making any promises?’

‘Of course. Promises are far too definite. You know the rules.’ I sigh and blink, wishing that she wouldn’t treat me like this, wishing that I could feel her breath on my skin instead of this falling emptiness. Sensing my unease, perhaps even hurt by it, Niana straightens herself and leans back. Just as the priests say, there is pure darkness inside those open nostrils.

‘Have you anything for me?’

‘I might have, grandmaster. It depends on what you you’re prepared to give.’

‘Niana, you told me last time—’

‘Show a little
imagination,
grandmaster. You’re a wealthy man. What is it that you normally deal in?’

A difficult question. The power of my guild, I suppose. And the strength of my will, the skills of mind and body I have acquired through it. Or perhaps Niana means something more subtle. The influence, which, when you get to a rank such as mine, you unavoidably must wield. I think of summer parties, winter gatherings in the panelled rooms around polished cedarstone tables; the subtle murmur of voices, the clink of cut glass, the deep tidal surges of power and money as one trust is set against the betrayal of another.

‘Come, grandmaster. Surely it’s the thing about you that is most obvious. It’s what draws people to you—’

‘—I doubt if you mean my
looks—’

‘—so why don’t we pretend we’re both simply human for a moment and make the usual exchange?’ Her voice continues over mine. ‘Grandmaster, why don’t you give me some money?’

I try not to scowl. Niana’s like a child. If I gave her coins, all she’d do is add them to her trinkets, use them to buy aether, or taunt me in just the way that she seems to be taunting me now …

Kindly forget your preconceptions, grandmaster, she responds, although her lips are barely moving. We’re not really trolls, you know—or at least we’re not monsters.

I twist myself on the springs of this couch to demonstrate to her that my pockets are empty. But as I do so my fingers close on something chilly. Remembering, lifting it out, I watch it flower, light as fog, on my palm. The cheaply magicked promissory note that that poor girl gave me. The words and the seals sparking, fading.

You see, grandmaster?

Niana blurs into a windless grey gale as she snatches it from me. Then she floats off, holding it to her nose as if it really was a flower, inhaling as I suppose we have all done at some time or another to discover if there really is a smell of wealth, a scent of power, a perfume of money. An odour which is in fact nothing but sweat, smoke, the dullness of liquor; the same staleness you’ll find lingering on your clothes after attending a ball at the grandest of mansions.

Niana absorbs whatever is left of the paper flower’s fading substance. And it’s growing duller in here now; the afternoon is fading, and so is Niana. The brass bowl of aether strengthens in response, throwing out more of its characteristic wyrelight as she wafts amid hanging tins and bottles and curtains. But I fear that this is still all just a refinement of whatever joke that she’s playing, and worry, as I notice that the immodest rents and tears across that ancient wedding dress give glimpses of black nothing, that she’ll simply keep me waiting here forever.

‘I know, grandmaster, that a wide and empty space seems to stretch between us. But it’s like the walk you undertook this afternoon through the Easterlies. If you follow the wrong or right roads, it’s never so very far to get to the place you dream of. In fact, who truly knows where the boundary ends, or where it begins? But you’ve seen the ordinary people, grandmaster, that so many others of your kind choose to ignore. After all, you were once one of them. The marts in the Easterlies. You know how dim they too can become even though their flesh remains unchanged …’ She chuckles. My skull rings with the sound.
And if you knew how you looked now, grandmaster, in that night cloak, in those night boots, with hollows for eyes, with your sagging jaw and the night odours of age and death that even now are starting to cling to you …

Barely any light flows now through the clouded porthole. But for the sea-whisper of Niana’s voice, I could almost be alone. Even that old wedding dress has slipped into the spinning shadows. A waft of mist, Niana bends to inspect the contents one of her teachests. As she lifts out clattering spears of old curtain rod, clots of rag and swarf, I try to keep in check that rising sense of excitement that always comes over me at these moments.

‘It was
here,
I’m sure,’ she mutters prosaically.

I give an involuntary sigh. It’s odd, but part of me suddenly wishes to be gone from here now, to hurry back up through the streets to my fine house on Linden Avenue, my fine grandmaster’s life—but the sense remains dim, and it fades entirely as Niana drifts closer to me now, glinting, changing. She’s all the creatures and wonders I dare or dare not imagine, and her smile uptilts. The fact is, I’d much rather be here-waiting for a true moment of exchange.

‘Tell me, Niana, don’t you miss—’

—The smell of fresh grass in spring, grandmaster. The jewelled feel of frost at Christmas. Beetles bright as brooches. Clouds changing and unchanging. Running down a hill when you can’t stop from laughing. But I’m glad for my cup of stars, grandmaster. And I’m glad that you come here-you and your sort, even if I pity you all for your small requests, your little desires. Why, after everything else you guildsmen have to go through, should you want to be taunted by trolls, changelings, half-real hags, vampires, Methuselah mermaids?

‘It isn’t like that. I don’t want—’

What do you want, grandmaster?

‘To know—’

But I’ve given you my gift, grandmaster, by taking what you offered. I’ve done everything you asked of me. Now it’s your turn. To take what I have, you must also give as well.

All in all, a typically ridiculous changeling bargain. Here I sit, on this empty bridge above the speeding river as Niana shapes the air with symbols no guildsman would ever recognise. They billow silver about me. They blossom in a summer storm. And I can feel the iron around me straining and growing, this ruined bridge returning to the life it never attained in the failing last Age, forming and striding huge across the water as the whole city changes and the wastetips recede. And with it gathers the thrilling hum of an approaching engine. It comes clattering over the girders and beams, trailing clouds, sparks, and pounding, pounding.

The deep holes of Niana’s eyes are upon my face as she crouches before me. She blinks once, twice. She smiles.

So tell me, grandmaster. Her fingers curl around me like smoke. Tell me just how it was that you became human …

I
T WAS THE BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
of my life. At the ripe age of eight, and on a typically freezing October Fiveshiftday, all of my dreams had been dashed from me. Afterwards, I stood outside the Board School railings and watched my classmates exchange shrill barks of relief and laughter amid the smoke and fog. For all of us, today had been a special day, our Day of Testing, and we all had the Mark, the stigmata—puffy on our wrists, blistered and bleeding like a cigarette burn—to prove it.

A steam tractor blared its whistle and lumbered past, the weight of its wheels wheezing the cobbles, the steamaster’s face a black mask. Worrying mothers blustered through the throng, bleating out the names of their offspring.
Said you were a silly to worry, didn’t I?
But my mother wasn’t there-and I was glad now that she wasn’t coming, because I’d avoided the embarrassment of having my head kissed and my face spit-cleaned, all for the sake of something we’d been endlessly told was nothing, normal, ordinary. The other mothers soon drew into gossip or headed back to their laundry and their children swirled into hostile clusters as they remembered the guilds and loyalties of fathers. Elbows dug, shoves and glances were exchanged. Knowing that I would soon be swept into this myself, I turned around the railings and climbed the spoil heap at the back of the school, from where there would have been a fine view down across the graveyard and the valley if today’s fog hadn’t obscured it.

I rolled up my left sleeve. There it was. The scar you saw on everyone once they had reached my age, although it still had the fresh look of outrage. It was the wound which lasted a lifetime and provided ineradicable proof of my undimmed humanity. The Mark of the Elder was God’s ultimate blessing, if Father Francis was to be believed. The shocked rings of inflamed skin around its edges still glittered with tiny crystals of engine ice. Of course, it would never fully heal. That was the point. There would always be a faintly glowing scab there which I could pick at and study in the dark, which I supposed would be consolation of sorts.

And I’d been looking forward to the arrival of the trollman, even though he was a harbinger of pain. First, there were the rumours of his coming. Then the police who appeared with their lists of names on leather clipboards, and the sound of their boots in our alleys, and the bang of their nightsticks on our doors. All of this, and the rumours. Deformed offspring hidden in dungeons and attics; Brownheath shepherds of sixty or more who’d somehow managed to avoid this process for their whole lives. And trolls, changelings—so many you’d expect to find them teeming around every street corner instead of lingering at the edges of your dreams. Of course, these stories came as regularly as the trollman himself, but I wasn’t to know that then.

His name, disappointingly, was Tatlow—and a plain Master at that, from something which was technically known as the Gatherers’ Guild. He must have travelled most of Brownheath to earn his strange living with his carpetbag and his small mahogany case of implements, flashing his official pass before settling down each night in the room of a different inn. Next morning, he’d be woken by the clatter of wagons, and would run his finger along those painstakingly acquired lists to appraise the day’s work, until, as I envisioned it, his stumpy digit would settle on my own name;
Robert Borrows …