The Light Ages (61 page)

‘No! Not after all the havoc you’ve wreaked!’ Mistress Summerton stood up and the sinking light of the room was sucked into her. ‘There’s my car ..

The last of the sun was blazing through the clouds, stretching enormous shadows. The river was a deep trough, and the city beyond it was tipped with fire. Hallam Tower, through some trick of the light, blazed once again, but then so did Dockland Exchange and the spires of all the churches and the cranes of Tidesmeet and the brassy domes of the guildhouses. London was coated in gold. Then, as if in celebration, its bells began to ring in a rising, joyous and incessant surge as we followed Mistress Summerton through a thorny maze between the dazzling roses. I could hear children shouting, sighs and shudders as things collapsed. But we were lucky—we were seen by no one as we hurried past the dried-up boating lake and the fallen swings and the signs towards the Tropic Wing.

‘It’s here.’

We ran from the trees, then stopped. Children were clambering over the car beneath the open corrugated shed. Two women were preening and laughing in floral hats as they pretended to drive it. Many of its panels had already been cast off. Even if we could get these people—who were too absorbed in their gleeful destruction to notice us—away, I doubted if the machine would still work. I caught Anna’s arm and was turning back through the trees, but Mistress Summerton strode forward.

‘This is
mine,
you wretches!’ Her voice was an eerie screech. ‘Leave it alone!’

There was a pause. The springs of the car creaked. Faces turned towards her. Distantly, London’s bells still clamoured.

‘Leave here
now …’
An emanation of the deepening twilight, she strode across the space of winter grass.

The women exchanged glances and climbed out, whilst a lad who’d been jockeying astride the car’s dented bonnet began to slide down, but, as he did so, his boot pressed on the horn’s rubber bulb. The thing gave a prolonged
parp.
People started laughing. When they turned their attention back towards Mistress Summerton, there was a different look in their eyes.

‘So? This is
yours
is it?’

‘And who exactly says
that?’

Taunts about the wrongness of ownership and possession came easily now.

‘Just who do you think you are, anyway?’

The horn gave another squawk. Laughter came and went in a quick surge. More citizens were being drawn towards this spot by the voices and the sound of the car’s horn. After all, there were rumours about who or what lived at World’s End. And those damn roses, these bloody tins! And hadn’t there been a sign, somewhere, from the trollmen? But in truth, these people needed to be reminded of none of those things, for Mistress Summerton, as she stood and cursed them, with her head bared and bald and her withered face exposed, her hands like the claws of bare winter trees, looked exactly what she was.

Witch …

Troll …

Changeling …

I still stood with Annalise beside the trees, fully expecting Mistress Summerton to flee the hissing, chanting, gathering crowd. Instead, she moved towards them and I grabbed Anna’s arm before she could do the same.
Witch. Parp. Troll. Parp.
The lad had ripped the horn from the car’s body and was squeezing it to the rhythm of the voices. In the distance, London’s bells still clamoured, and the sun’s dwindling rays spiralled across the sky like an explosion of stained glass.
Get it, someone! Get it, before it escapes!
The first of the children jumped at Mistress Summerton with a wild yell. She threw him far back through the air. He landed squealing, clutching his ribs. The power of the shadows poured into her as the sky deepened, and the second of her assailants was thrown back just as easily as the first.
Witch. Parp. Troll. Parp.
She grew stronger with every fresh taunt. But the people were circling, chanting, and their numbers were growing. Bodies and elbows began to push around Anna and I as she tried to pull herself away from me.
Witch. Parp. Witch. Parp.
Surge by hopeless surge, we were swallowed by the crowd. Somewhere, far ahead of us now, a wave of citizens grabbed Mistress Summerton. She was lifted; a writhing bundle of rags. She was dropped, then lifted again. Still, the chanting and the sound of that car horn went on. Anna fought against me, but, for once, I was stronger than her. But we were both helpless now, driven by the will of the crowd.

Mistress Summerton’s body was borne up. Higher this time.
Witch. Parp. Witch. Parp.
But what to do with such a prize? There was only one answer. After all, there was so much kindling around this place. And these fucking roses—they needed getting rid of as well. Even without the incentive of a witch to burn, flames would have flickered across World’s End that evening. But now there was an exultant purpose such as sometimes seizes a crowd. I’d seen and felt it before, and the most terrible thing was that Anna and I seemed to be part of it as we were dragged onwards by the press of bodies and our own horrified need.

Past the signs and displays. Past the twilit and glittering mountains of glass. Like an army of ants, the crowd was carrying beams and panels and great snagging heaps of the thorny roses over their heads. The sky was fading, the ruins were sinking back. I looked down, almost losing Anna as I stumbled, and saw that we were trudging upwards now across the great hills of engine ice. Ahead of us, rising up across these waves of white, was the darkly breaking edge of the crowd. Mistress Summerton was no longer visible, but I could tell where she was from the deeper sense of purpose which clustered around her. Dimly then, came the smell of smoke, and a vast and terrible
aaaaah!
swept back. We pushed on. These, as light flickered over them in all their teeming variety, were the faces I’d seen all my life. Straddle-legged women who humped tubs of washing down their back steps. Men who smoked and read newspapers as they queued for work outside the houses of their lesser guilds. Children I’d shared my long desk with at Board School. Old men who shoved dominoes in the noonday gloom of pubs. They were all here, and they were laughing and they were pushing against Anna and I as we drove through them towards the thickening smell of the smoke and the cackle of flames.

Somehow, we were near the front, and the scene really was like something from a woodcut. Mistress Summerton had been bound in roses to the wooden mast of an uprooted sign which still pointed lopsidedly towards the Tropic Wing, then hoisted amid all the wreckage which had been borne here. The air shimmered. The fire danced and licked, glowing in towards its core. Gleefully, the wind rose in twirls of sparks with the
whoosh
and
ahhh
of the crowd. Already, it was too late. If Mistress Summerton had struggled before, there now seemed an inevitability about the way the flames closed in on her. Apart from the roses, which writhed and spat, the fuel was tinder-dry, and I told myself as I held Anna and the heat surged against us that she had probably already stopped breathing, that the air had been sucked from the fire’s core …

The wind rose. It urged on the flames and set the engine ice hissing around our feet. It drew upwards as the pyre plumed and glimmered as far as the sky. Mistress Summerton was now a twisting, blackened thing within the flames. I imagined that this movement was an effect of the heat and this strange wind, but then she began to scream. The sound went on and on. People covered their ears. No one who was there and survived will ever be able to describe it, and no one who was not will ever understand. It was in our heads. It burrowed beneath our flesh. It made us part of her pain. And the searing wind was still rising, shrieking with it, tearing at the loose engine ice until that, too, tumbled into the flames and there was nothing but bitter heat, and one last, terrible scream.

The wind was so powerful now that the earth itself seemed to fade, glittering and blurring as the hill we stood on was sucked from beneath us in swooshing waves. People were cowering and trying to turn their backs, to somehow cover their eyes as well as their ears. But the screaming was still rising, twisting beyond all sense and into one great sensation which the flames had torn from the sky. From those further back, perhaps, or the thousands who were gathering on the far bank of the Thames to witness the scene, it might perhaps have looked beautiful, a swirling combination of the Biblical pillars of smoke and fire, but for those of us who were close, it was terrible. People, blinded and helpless, were stumbling and shrieking as they tried to escape the spreading chaos of wind and fire.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the wind subsided. And the screaming stopped with it, and the flames diminished into the ordinary realms of light and heat. The citizens, coughing and glittering, looked at each other. Almost, they began to smile and stumble back towards their lives. From the still air, as they sought out their friends, there still came a gentle hissing as a fine prismatic snow of soot and engine ice resettled about them. It
did
seem lighter. But the flames were still sparking and the ruined thing at their centre was spitting and glowing. The realisation that the earth itself, the hill of engine ice on which we all still stood, was continuing to subside, came slowly, and for many it was already too late.

Saul, who had been watching the scene from the top of Dockland Exchange, was one of the quickest to arrive, and he brought many citizen-helpers with their clubs and guns. Even before this outburst of madness, he and many others understood that the city would still need to be tamed before it could be governed. But I think that he was one of the first to appreciate what was happening, if not yet, perhaps, its full import. After all, and despite the proudly guildless heritage of which he had come to boast, he was his mother’s son. In Marm’s dreamhouse, he must often have seen the gleam of vials far more powerful than the dull oils and catalysts upon which it was most guildsmen’s lot to gaze. Better than many, he knew the wyreglow of aether, and he saw it now—even if it came from the white hills of World’s End, where everything but its ashes had long expired.

‘Robbie! Robbie!’

He found me. People, not just children, but adults who should have known better were playing in the fiercely glowing ribbons which threaded between their feet. They were crouching in spreading pools of the stuff, cupping it in their hands and spilling it through their fingers, laughing wildly as the gas of visions poured around them even as their flesh suppurated and bled.

‘Look …’ Saul grabbed and shook me. ‘We’ve got to get some sort of
cordon
around this place. We’ve got to get these people
away.’
Then a pause. Momentarily, pouring up from the earth all around us, the wyrelight was in his eyes as well. ‘But do you realise what this
means,
Robbie! D’you realise what this gives us?’

For aether is power even more than it is magic, and those who were swarming across the thawing river—those who did not drown—were awe-struck as they saw the white hills of World’s End begin to blaze. Thousands fell to their knees. Millions took it as a sign. All of us, and all who heard the news as it spread across England and then the world, knew that this, finally, was the moment when this new Age of Light began.

I stumbled back from Saul, away from the glowing smoke and the wreckage as more of the hill hissed and subsided and the thing within the pyre, the burnt-out matchstick which still somehow resembled Mistress Summerton, finally sank into the glowing ash. My head was buzzing and empty. In my stupid absorption, and amid the distraction of Saul’s arrival, whole minutes had fled. But when I looked around, I still imagined that I would find Anna beside me.

N
IANA UNCURLS HERSELF.
It has long been dark up here on the ruined bridge, although the sky above and the river beneath her eyrie still have that steely gleam which, in London, they never lose. And there are lights—always, now, there are many lights in the distance.

‘Yes,’ she hisses as the water hisses endlessly below. ‘I
remember
that night, grandmaster. The flames, the crowds—although I’d thought the screaming was my own. Of course, I was merely a child, and for me it had simply been an outing across the frozen river to escape the wreckage of the town in those terrible days. But I remember my old tin tray for sliding down the hills, and the blanket for sitting on, and the slippery river. I even remember the smell of rot and smoke, and the toot of that car horn, although I’d imagined it was a trumpet. But how
old
could I have been, to have been there at all, and then to remember? And my parents, my family—I wonder what became of them?’

‘Perhaps they suffered the same fate as you.’

‘Fate?
Must you call it that? And must you still describe us all as trolls and changelings, grandmaster, when you know there’s a much better word.’

‘Words are just spells.’

‘And spells are for casting.’ She’s colder and greyer before me now than the night-breath of the river. ‘And that sad old creature—the one you kept talking about whom we citizens finally burned—I’d never realised that she was both so innocent and yet so much to blame for it all. But, whatever
she
was, please think of me, grandmaster, if you think of me at all, as a Child of this Age. That’s what we all are, even the likes of you who returned from those shining hills superficially unchanged, as well as the many of us who did not ..

Children of the Age; such a sweet, innocent phrase. Yet she’s right. It fits Niana and those of her kind who were changed in the first wild effusion of new aether that night in a way which it would never have fitted Mistress Summerton—or even Annalise. And I realise in an odd, strange rush how much younger than me this creature is.
I must be getting old,
the thought quickly follows,
when even the tr—
the word I cannot think or mention, in this enlightened Age—
seem young.
And there is a much greater tolerance now. So many of them came into being that first night and, with so much new aether, there have been so many since. They seem different, as well. Fairer and more fey, stranger and paler; far harder to reach and understand. They truly belong to this new Age.