Ian R. MacLeod The Light Ages

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regarded each other like cats forced to share each other's territory, was a
scowl of disinterest.
She had the look of a once-treasured doll that had been left out in the rain.
`When I say job, Annalise I mean a task,' Mistress Summerton was saying. `And
I hope a pleasant one. This here is Robert Borrows and I
was thinking, well, I was wondering, if you two ...' Her scratchy fingers
steered me towards the door. Annalise stepped back. A moment later, we were
both standing alone in the long corridor.
`Do you even know what this place is?' she asked eventually. I
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shook my head.
Annalise stared at me with disdain. `If you want to know, it's actually called
Redhouse,' she said. `If you're interested in facts. Which I
suppose you're probably not.'
She turned and strode off. One of her sandals had a loose buckle, which
jingled lightly with each step. Unable to think of anything better to do, I
followed her.
`So you're a changeling as well, then?'
`What do you think, little Robert Borrows?' Perhaps deliberately, she was
holding her arms tightly in at the sides. I couldn't see her wrist.
`Do I
look like one?'
`I don't know. I mean no of course you don't. But living here, in this place
. . .' I was walking sideways to her as I struggled to keep up.
`Although you seem ordinary.'
`Why should I care what you believe?' she muttered.
My body reacted before I had time to think. I stopped, grabbed
Annalise's arm, and spun her around. As I did so, the air was sheared by a
thin, inaudible shriek.
`Look . . .' I was breathless as I faced her. The ruined corridor seemed
suddenly endless. `I'm like you. Nobody asked me about today, about coming
here. I can either go off on my own and sit somewhere and wait for my mother,
or I can stay with you. In fact, I '
`All right . . .' I was still holding Annalise's left arm just above the
wrist. My fingers tingled as, seemingly of their own accord, they let go.
Beneath the grime, and but for the reddened marks made by my fingers, and to
me quite incredibly, her skin was unmarked. `But don't think I'm like you,'
she added. `Because I'm not.
'
But Annalise was totally unique to me. And I suppose that in many ways I was
almost equally strange to her; an ordinary lad from the ordinary world in
which she seemed to feign disinterest. But I also felt, even then as she
turned from me as she began to walk on, that our oppositenesses fitted
together. That we made a kind of a pair. More and more of the crystal growth
became apparent as we crossed into what
would once have been the state rooms of Redhouse, although most of their roofs
and the once-ornate plaster of many of the walls had fallen away. At first,
there were just tiny grains of engine ice powdering the ruined floors. Then,
larger, chandelier-like excrescences began to droop from the few remaining
beams that spanned the ceilings.
`Lots more people used to live here,' Annalise said matter-of-factly.
`But they had to stop. They used to work aether engines here, just like in
Bracebridge ..
So she'd heard of Bracebridge! But the questions, the marvels, were coming too
quickly. We had entered a room which reached all the way up through the house
to the oval dome of a huge and miraculously intact skylight. It was walled
with spilled and sagging cliff faces of books, tiered with balconies. The
place soared far beyond my comprehension of a library, although clearly it had
once performed that function. Here, also, the two quietly warring sides of the
house entwined. Darkly veined, the glowing growths of engine ice clogged the
shelves, dripped down the stairways in a glittering foam that broke across the
floor in frozen waves.
Even the glass dome was half covered like a blinking eye. I touched some of
the ice. The crystal was cool and brittle. It crumbled with a fizzing,
tinkling sound.
Annalise's breath was close on my cheek.
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`I like to read here,' she said.
`I like reading too, or at least '
` looking at the pictures, I suppose. The only problem is,' she continued
before I had a chance to deny it, `this whole library's too old.
The books fall apart.'
I lifted a tome which lay at the top of a pile which had spilled to the floor.
The pages fluttered out like snow. It seemed a sad thing; all this dying
knowledge. But when I turned to Annalise, she was smiling.
`Come on! Bet you can't catch me!' She scrambled up a banister, grabbed a book
from a shelf and threw it down at me. I ducked. It skidded across the tiles.
The spine was ridged with crystal.
`Looking at the pictures!
Bet you can't even read!'
Another book whizzed past.
Half angry, half laughing, I stared to climb up after her. The wood creaked
and splintered. Engine ice fizzed down. Annalise fled ahead of me, slinging
more books and insults.
`Have you heard of Plato?' she shouted, tossing out a tome from the rail above
me which crashed below with the thud of a brick. `He was a person just like
you, although a lot more intelligent. He invented aether long before the
Grandmaster of Painswick, although he really just thought about it. It's the
fifth element, and it just goes around in circles when all the others travel
in a straight line.' Another book shot past me, spiralling down through long
bars of sunlight, flapping its jewelled covers. More and more books flew by,
their pages fluttering like birds, offering bright glimpses of their coloured
plates. They rose and circled around me before sliding across the library's
distant chequered floor. I
began to throw books out myself from the shelves around me, climbing from
ledge to ledge as Annalise darted ahead. Finally, we reached a truce, and lay
spread-eagled and breathless on the tiles amidst the wreckage of our battle. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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