Read Online The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod - Free Book Online Page A

her sides. ‘What I mean is ..
    ‘Annalise should be here in another moment. Then we can begin our talk.’ Mistress Summerton came over to me, her pipe clamped within her withered lips. She studied me from our almost equal heights. ‘You’ve grown so finely Robert … It is still Robert, isn’t it? You look a Robert now, although not perhaps for life ..
    White smoke billowed around her. She seemed to be part of it, receding even as she drew closer and laid a hand on my shoulder which felt hot and light. Then she took off her glasses. Her eyes were brown and bright. In one sense, they were the most ordinary thing about her, but at the same time, they were too bright. The pupils were large and big and glittery as jet buttons. The whites had the gleam of wet porcelain.
    Then the door opened behind me.
    ‘Annalise! At last! And I have a job for you.’
    I turned slowly, wondering, after what I had already seen, what kind of sprite could possibly have such an affected name. I was disappointed; Annalise looked, in fact, like any other girl of about my age. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress of grubby white cotton, and even dirtier short white socks crumpled above scuffed sandals which might have been new some summers before. Her hair was pale blond, done up in tatters of velvet. She had a high forehead, and skin that would have been pale if it were clean, and eyes which were even greener than the sunlit grass outside. Her expression, as we 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 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