Free The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod Page A

now half-drowned in engine ice, its tumourous roofs sagging or broken, the doors and windows draped, the pathways tumbling with froth. Our feet crunched and tinkled. We climbed to the ruins of the church, its tower fallen in a long, crusted tail, now shining and scaled, with gravestones leaning around it. It seemed colder and darker here; already edged with the beginnings of winter. But it would be good, I decided with an odd prescience as Annalise climbed over what had once been the church wall and the backs of her legs flashed white, if Bracebridge were to become like this one day; frozen in time, ornamented with engine ice.
    ‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she asked me.
    ‘No. Of course not. Why should I be?’
    At the foot of a bank, close by the river, the crystal rose in extravagant loops and claws, and the water hissed through brittle curtains which fanned like frosted weed from the shore. We came to the motionless waterwheel of an old millhouse still jutting into the frozen waters of its sluices. We climbed over ruined beams in the crackling marsh that surrounded it, glancing up, moment by moment, at the shouldering roof, the silent wheel. But for this strange frostfall, it was much like the old aether engines you found up on Rainharrow. Curtains of ancient weed fanned out, trapped within the glassy water in dense, inky waves. The sense of the past lay heavy here. In those days of the Second Age of Industry when this wheelhouse had thrived, aether could still be extracted from near the earth’s surface and the engines were mostly set on open ground like any other process of manufacturing. For eighty, perhaps ninety, years, villages such as this one had flourished too, growing stone by stone and roof by roof, burying their dead and raising their babies until they became too remote to be reached by the new railways, too high to be embraced by the canals. Then the aether started to run out. For a while, the waterwheel would still have turned as the children of the village left to find work in the big cities of Sheffield and Preston and the guildsmen struggled to keep the bearings of their outdated machinery turning, using up more and more of what aether they still extracted, leaving less and less to sell.
    We walked back up through the trees, clambering over rustling falls of crystal then on through the village until we finally reached the glinting gardens of the big house again. Viewed from this side, standing by the frozen froth of that fountain, it seemed even more scaled and ruined. We wandered inside, skidding listlessly across floors, bonging gongs in empty hallways, knocking off stalactites of growth that dissolved with glassy sighs as the air filled with twilight. Annalise led me along eerie passageways to a large, dim room. Its windows were curtained with engine ice and what little light they admitted glittered on the only item of furniture, something so whitened and misshapen that I thought for a moment it was composed of nothing but engine ice. But the lid of the piano came up surprisingly easily when Annalise raised it and the keys inside were uncorroded.
    I asked, ‘Can you play?’
    She answered with a scatter of notes.
    ‘Tell me, Robert …’ More notes. ‘What’s it like in Bracebridge?’
    I licked my lips. Where to begin? Where to end? ‘Well … There’s the sound, the feel. I mean, the aether engines. And we live in a row of houses. There are lots of rows of houses … My mother—I mean my father, he’s—’
    The piano rang out again. ‘What I mean is, what’s it like for you?’
    I thought for a moment. The room rippled into silence. ‘It’s …’ I shrugged.
    ‘Would you rather be here with Missy?’ Her figure was dim. Scarcely there. A shadow, receding. ‘Would you rather be me?’
    ‘I don’t even know what you are, Annalise.’
    She gave a chuckle. Soft and bitter, not quite a laugh, it seemed to come from someone much older. Once again, her fingers stroked the piano.