Authors: Ian R MacLeod
The corridors were bustling when Anna and I left Sadie’s suite. It wouldn’t have been safe to open the door to the Turning Tower yet, even now we had Sadie’s whisperjewel—and it was still before the time I’d promised Saul. So there was little for Anna and I to do other than to return to our rooms, and pretend to prepare for the ball. A suit sprawled on my bedspread like a beautiful corpse. I sat down. I stood up. I gazed from my window at the snowlit parkland. I decided against running myself another bath. I touched the swallows on the walls. All of this, one way or another, would be taken from me in the morning. A hotel, a hostel, a citizen’s university, a roofless and ivied ruin—Walcote House might become any of those things in the coming Age, but in its heart, and in mine, it would remain the place I remembered tonight. The people who bustled towards the ball along the passageways outside could be as graceless and disappointing as the worst inhabitants of the boroughs of the Easterlies but there was a beauty to this building, and the entrapments of wealth, which I told myself I would be sad to lose.
Fully dressed in white tie and tails, I held Sadie’s whisperjewel, and the breath of Walcote House sighed out to me in whispers of holly and dark. I thought of the springs here which I would never see, and of firelit autumns, and endless days and nights of dream. Even now, the place was stirring with light and colour in the ballroom as the Master of Ceremonies began the call of names. Bows and smiles, the beckoning music, rustles of taffeta in crimson and green …
There was a brisk knocking. ‘Robbie? Are you in there?’
Anna had also dressed for the ball. I blinked and swallowed as I gazed at her, in a red gown, her shoulders bare … ‘You look—’
‘Let’s just get this thing
done
shall we—before someone finds out or we both change our minds.’
But no one would have suspected us, not the couple I glimpsed in mirrors as we swept along the empty hallways, who were sleek and handsome and proud.
It was almost a surprise to find that the ceiling above the willow-green wall still bore a crack in it.
‘You’ve got the numberbead, Sadie’s whisperjewel?’
Anna took them from me as I glanced back along the empty corridor, sure now, somehow almost willing, that someone, something, would come—but her manner was brisk as she clasped the whisperjewel and began speaking. The door had formed itself and was beginning to open even before she’d finished the spell. Then we ducked in, and it slammed shut, and we were scurrying up the stone spiral stairs. For a moment, with Anna bustling ahead of me, it was almost like being back in that hotel on Midsummer, the two of us searching for nothing more than a decent set of clothes, but then we reached the summit of Walcote House.
There were no clouds and the moon was high and its light flowed over the grounds, etching every shadow. The frozen lake shone and the dark, breathing mass of the sea loomed to the stars beyond the southern walls. Over there, sullying the snow, were the encampments of the guards with their balehounds and there, along Marine Drive, was the glitter of Saltfleetby, so sharp tonight that you could count the slates of the rooftops, the spars of the ships moored in the little harbour. Beyond that, Folkestone was a larger, twinkling, sprawl. Inland, too, far beyond the gardens’ huge and intricate whorls, you could see villages and farmhouses and lives stretching all the way to a grey, glowing mass like the last settlings of a fire which was surely London …
I looked at Anna and she looked at me. Our breath clouded and hung. Already we were shivering. Below us in the ballroom, the music surged, and the lights from its windows steepled far out across the snow-sweep of the gardens. The clocks chimed midnight. The new Threeshiftday had started. If things went as Saul was hoping, there would be decoys and disruptions as the massed citizens commenced their march. But I knew more than he did about the power of the guilds. In London, the main watch of telegraphers would be replacing the skeleton one which had nursed England through the dream of Christmas. Already, they would have ascended Dockland Exchange and a thousand lesser transmission houses. By now, they would have set aside their kitbags and jokes and would be placing their hands against their hafts. Whilst down along Threadneedle Street, the messenger boys would be sharing cigarettes around braziers outside the great trading houses.
The haft of the Turning Tower was sheer black in the moonlight. Shoulders gleaming, her dress rustling, Anna walked around the frozen parapet to study it. It cast no shadow.
‘I’d like you to help me.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She held out the numberbead. Our fingers clasped around it, and I felt once again the pages which Master Simpson had sung. No wonder Saul had smiled. They were so simple, so obvious. After our long journey, after all that I thought I knew, it boiled down to two documents which any mart could have obtained. One was the weather report for Bracebridge over the last ten winters, listing the many terms when the tracks south around Rainharrow were blocked by snow. The other, covering the same period, was the page from Mawdingly & Clawtson’s Shareholders’ Report which detailed the receipt of aether at Stepney Sidings. The two didn’t match; aether was received when none could possibly have been sent. It had been Anna herself who’d insisted on this simplicity when I’d wanted to say everything. People, she said, could only absorb so much. And they weren’t stupid—they could draw their conclusions, make their own enquiries, far better than we could. But it seemed scarcely anything now; a couple of obscure pages and a small contradiction, even if we would be transmitting it with the highest priority from a prime haft bearing the seal and spell of the Telegraphers’ Guild and Walcote House.
We stepped together towards the haft, and Anna reached out her hand. I’d expected something powerful, terrible, dizzying, but instead I was instantly immersed in a warm song. There were no barriers here, no blockages. We were
known,
we were
expected …
How, as my sense of being teemed out and was joined by a thousand others, could it ever have been otherwise? For the telegraphs knew, the telegraphs understood, the telegraphs sang. This was all of England, the hovels and the palaces, the guildsmen and the mistresses—even the marts—and it was beautiful and filled with a simplicity of purpose which I had never imagined. There were no guilds, or rather there was one great guild, and we were all its acolytes. We sang aether’s praises even as we swam in our mothers’ wombs; our last breath was its spell. The ballroom dancers below us, yes, they were also part of it, but so were the sleeping farmers and the cold and angry men gathering their weapons in Caris Yard—so, too, were the telegraphers and the ironmasters and the captains on their ships in iceberg waters. In other countries, in other latitudes and languages and lives, amid bondsmen and savages and lives yet to be made, it was always, always the same beautiful, innocent song …
Robbie! You’ve got to help me …
The haft was Anna as well. Simply and seemingly effortlessly, we tunnelled down through gates and sluices and along the pylons which strode across the frozen countryside into London and the web of Northcentral which, even now, still roared. I could feel our numberbead as something small and hard and neat. We passed through the stone walls of guildhalls, through glass and plaster, paper and ink. Messages for the traders and bankers and investors were swirled into the heavy aethered millstones of telegraph offices. Here and there, a guildsman looked up, briefly startled, as we passed by them in an invisible wind, but for Anna and I it was simply a matter of leaving the contents of the numberbead
here
and
here
and
here …
Goldsmiths’ Hall, the vaults and the trading rooms, wave upon golden wave of wealth, surged through us, and already the words and numbers were trickling out, as tickertape and shorthand, pinned through carbons or beneath the clacking keys of stenographers who worked too quickly to read their words, for they, too, were all just part of the same mechanism, the same song, which our message as it multiplied, copy on copy, pinned and licked and enveloped and posted, became part of …
The snowy roofs of Walcote House fizzed into view. Anna was no longer touching the haft. The music was still playing below. It was colder than ever. The moon shone across the grounds.
‘Did we do it?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Where’s the numberbead?’
‘It’s here.’ She held out a cindered lump.
‘It seemed too …’ Easy? But Anna’s teeth were chattering as she brushed the ash from her hands into the snow.
‘Let’s just get down from here, eh?’
The house was quiet, but the band was playing in the blaze of the ballroom, and the people were turning. A servant floated past, silver tray aloft. Anna grabbed two glasses, and then another, and drank them down, their facets flashing on her throat.
‘Are you sure we should be here?’
‘What have we got to lose now?’ She suppressed a most un-Anna-like burp. Her face was pale. Her eyes were blazing. ‘Let’s dance!’
The ceiling spun, the chandeliers turned, faces and dresses loomed and fell away from me, and it was the lancers, then the quadrille. Mad gallops and slow turns, legs and arms and feet, the push and the lunge, but of course I could do everything when I was with Anna. The fever-heat of her flesh and her hot wheaty scent poured out through the fabric of her dress. She was white, her face was shining, and her shoulders were marbled with sweat.
Come on, Robbie. This is what you always wanted, isn’t it?
But this was like some mad fairground ride, with the rainbowed light of the chandeliers flooding overhead. Finally, I fell back, but Anna was still determined. She grabbed the arm of one of the old gang, one of the faces from the pier, and drew him to her before he could shake his head. I staggered towards the wall, my lungs rasping. Nothing had changed here. Nothing ever would. The only thing I noticed, and this was hard to tell at first through my sweat-damp clothing, was that the air seemed colder; it was as if a window had been opened somewhere.
There was a pause in the dancing. The band was replaced by a string quartet and the guests drifted towards the clawfoot tables around the edges of the ballroom as supper was served. I looked up at a cherub clock. Their wings were already pointing past two thirty. Anna had found a plate and another glass of wine. I followed her and watched in disbelief as she heaped herself cutlets and peas. Tonight, her arms were entirely bare. She had seemed so complete to me before that I hadn’t noticed that the Mark on her left wrist had entirely vanished. I leaned towards her. ‘Shouldn’t you…?’
‘Oh,
that.’
She knew instantly what I meant. But she was speaking loudly enough for the people on either side of us to glance at us. ‘What difference does a little thing like that make now?’ She waved the serving spoon to emphasise her point. Gravy splattered the front of my shirt. ‘Oh, dear.’ She giggled and grabbed a serviette. ‘Now, spit ..
I shook my head, breathless.
‘Well,
don’t
then.’ People watched as she pressed the cloth to my chest. The stain vanished. ‘There you are.’ She looked at them. ‘And what on earth are you all staring at?’ There was a muttering. Word was fanning out. After all, there
had
been rumours about Anna Winters since that night at the Advocates’ Chapel. The things,
dreadful things,
which had been shouted at her by poor, mad Highermaster George. And
now
she—but at that moment the Master of Ceremonies announced that the greatgrandmaster and his daughter the grandmistress would lead the next dance. For now, at least, the faces turned away from us, towards the man and the woman who were emerging from opposite sides of the shining and empty dancefloor.
Sadie was slimly and somewhat sombrely dressed in stormy greys and blues. She’d done little to her hair and her face since we’d last seen her, but she made a fine sight compared to the overdone herbaceous borders of rustling gown which surrounded her, and her father did, too. Perhaps, I thought, these. people really are special—after all, isn’t that what we’re supposed to think? Then the violin sighed its first note, playing with the melody as, graceful as the music itself, the tall and elegant couple began to turn. I doubt if I was the only person who glanced then towards Greatmaster Porrett, and it would have been hard not to think that he was the wrong partner for her. This man—this darkmaster—and Sadie, they plainly belonged to each other. The way he held her, the way his arms clasped her back and his face lay close to her hair, would have been almost scandalous for a father and daughter were they not the people they were, and for the rightness of how they seemed together. No wonder, I thought, he persuaded Grandmaster Harrat and Edward Durry to take the risks they took. No wonder, even now, that he seems to float above his slim reflection as he swirls with Sadie across the dancefloor.
It really was getting colder now. Some of the women were pulling on their stoles, and you could see the greatgrandmaster’s breath hanging amid Sadie’s hair as his hand touched the whisperjewels at her neck, fingers drifting along them like some sensual rosary. Then the flow of the music changed. It was the point in the melody where its ache was the strongest. The darkmaster’s fingers paused amid the whisperjewels as he caressed his daughter’s neck and I saw his eyes widen slightly as his knuckles clenched and loosened on that missing space. The dance moved on and he murmured something, a question, an endearment, a spell, into Sadie’s ear, and she replied, and said something more, and their whispers mingled as the slow, stately dance continued. No one but Anna and I would have known that they were exchanging anything more than loving words. Still, there was something strange and shocking about the conclusion of their dance. The music stilled and the two dancers drew apart. One or two guests started clapping, but the sound only added to the empty clip of the greatgrandmaster’s heels as he turned and walked across the dancefloor and left the ballroom.
There was a pause. Streams of condensation froze on the windows. Sadie stood alone. Then, with a clatter of silverware, a guildmistress started screaming. She was by the serving tables, and from the commotion around her an odd sight emerged; the lid of the big silver tureen seemingly moving by itself, leaving a brown trail in its wake. Finally, someone leapt forward and picked the thing up. Beneath, coated in gravy but otherwise unmistakable, was a huge dragonlouse. The brave guildsman stamped on it until it was dead, then, in the absence of any nearby servants, managed to scoop it up using the tureen whilst several guests retired to be more or less ostentatiously sick.