Ian R. Macleod - The Light Ages

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.73MB 429 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

======================

Notes:

This book was scanned by MoneyForBlood

If you correct any minor errors, please change the version number below (and in

the file name) to a slightly higher one e.g. from 1.0 to 1.1 or if major revisions,

to v. 2.0 etc..

Current e-book version is 1.0 (formatting errors have been corrected(for the

most part, was a good scan); semiproofed)

Comments, Questions, Requests(no promises): Please post to

alt.binaries.e-book.d Attn: MoneyForBlood.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK OF YOU DO NOT OWN/POSSESS THE

PHYSICAL COPY. THAT IS STEALING FROM THE AUTHOR. SUPPORT

THE AUTHORS YOU LIKE BY PURCHASING THEIR BOOKS.

--------------------------------------------

Book Information:

Genre: Science Fantasy

Author: Ian R MacLeod

Name: The Light Ages

======================

The Light Ages

by Ian R MacLeod

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE LIGHT AGES

An Ace Book

Published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

in any form without permission.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet

or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by

law. Please purchase only authorized electronic

editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of

copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

ACE and the "A" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First American edition: May 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacLeod, Ian R., 1956–

The light ages : a novel / by Ian R. MacLeod.

p. cm.

ISBN 0–441–01055–5

1. Yorkshire (England)—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.A24996L54 2003

823'.914—dc21

2003045111

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my wonderful daughter Emily,

who helped me stand for a while on the Turning Tower.

With love.

PART ONE

GRANDMASTER

I still see her now.

I see her in the poorest parts of London. Beyond the new iron

bridges which bear the trams above the ferries, where the Thames

spreads her fingers through tidal mud. I see her in a place beyond even

the furthest rookeries of the Easterlies, although you will not find it on

any maps. Plagued with flies and dragonlice and the reek of city effluent

in summer, greyed with smog and ice in winter, even the foulest

factories turn their backs away.

There, beyond the hovels and the wastetips of London, I see my

changeling.

I see her when I take the streets that lead away from my fine

Northcentral house. I see her when I'm worried or distracted, and when

the present seems frail. Past the tall Hyde houses. Past the elegant

grandmistresses walking their dogs, which — thin-legged, feathered,

flightlessly winged, crested like reptiles or covered in mossy clumps of

rainbow fur — scarcely seem to me like dogs at all. Skirting the huge

shops of Oxford Road, then the incredible trees of Westminster Great

Park where prams and parasols drift like paper boats, down Cheapside

where the streets grow smaller and dimmer as the sky also shrinks and

dims, hazing the roofs and chimneys as evening falls. Clerkenwell and

Houndsfleet. Whitechapel and Ashington. A smell of rubbish here and a

smell of dogs — by now ugly and ordinary — and the sound of their

barking. Not that shame or poverty could ever be said to lie here,

although the contrast with the districts where my journey began is

already strong. The people who live in these parts of the Easterlies are

still all masters rather than guildless marts: they have the jobs that

their guilds have granted them; proper furniture in their rooms.

Eventually, long after Cheapside has become Doxy Street, past

where the trams reach Stepney Terminus, the muddy streets heave and

the houses stick out like irregular teeth. Here in these far Easterlies, no

guildsmen dare live. I peer at these people as they scurry in a

landscape which seems concertinaed by giant hands, the women

cowled in grubby shawls, the men clouded with beerhouse reek, the

children quick and pale and subtly dangerous, wondering if this is

when the change into true poverty begins.

It always seems that I choose overcast days, late afternoons, dull,

hot summer evenings, midwinter Noshiftdays, for my long wanderings.

Or at least that, as I step away from the bright core of the Northcentral

life I have been living, is what each of these days subtly becomes. From

the best districts, I pass through tiers of London smoke and shadow. I

suppose that most guildsmen would give up here, if the wild impulse

had ever taken them this far. I suppose, looking up at the faces,

ageless and leering, that study my passage through holes in the

brickwork, hearing the whispering scurry of children both ahead and

behind, that I should begin to feel afraid. But people live here: I once

lived here, although that was in a different Age. So I walk on and skirt

the high walls of Tidesmeet where I once worked through a happy

summer. The scurries of the children quieten. The gargoyle faces no

longer peer. Someone dressed as I am dressed, practical and

understated in a dark coat, high boots to cope with the mud, yet

effortlessly conspicuous in the waxy sheen of wealth, clearly possesses

money. But I wouldn't bring it here with me, would I? No – or so I

imagine those ghost-grey children whisper as they congregate in alleys.

And a grandguildsman, too. The repercussions that would rain down

on them from the bastard police make murder and robbery seem

pointless. And I must have my reasons for coming this way – or I am

mad – and both thoughts will make them uneasy. I carry no

swordcane, no nightstick, no obvious weapon, not even an umbrella

against the rain which always seems to threaten on these overcast

days, but to ambush me in that space ahead where the houses press

their brows together – who knows what strange guildsman's spells I

might be carrying?

Lost also in thought, lost but mostly certain, I wander unmolested

through these stinking streets. There are better ways to circumnavigate

the far Easterlies and reach the wastetips, although I feel that I need to

acknowledge my debt to the place. There are taxi boats and smaller

ferries along the main river quays at the embankment and Riverside,

which will, on discreet payment of an excessive sum, bear you this way.

But the trade they carry is mostly male and drunk, and flounders at

midnight from the steps of clubs and guildhalls to sniff the coalsmoke air

and dismiss thoughts of home and waiting wives, or even the brothels

and dreamhouses, in favour of a different end to the day. Down, then, to

the dank sweep of the Thames, where, black-caped and top-hatted, the

grandmasters bargain and bluster before they clamber aboard the

slopping ferries like tipsy bats. The cough of a motor, the touch of a haft,

the whisper of a sail, then away.

It seems to me that all places of poverty are endowed with a sense

of waiting, but that is especially the case here, where the houses grow yet

flimsier and cease, at some indefinable point like the shifting of a dream,

to be houses at all, but shanty hovels of pillaged brick, cardboard and

plaster. They are like the theatre props of a play whose essential

meaning, despite everything, still escapes me. And the people who live

within them, those guildless people whom we call marts, lie so far down

the well of fortune from the bright world I inhabit that it is a surprise

when their voices come echoing back at me in choked versions of the

English tongue. But here, in the grey lull of this dark daytime, I am

suddenly the source of much open attention. The strangest thing is that

the children, younger now, unthreatening with stark puppy-dog eyes in

the bone-bleached thinness of their faces, come up to offer me money, of

all things. It lies there in the thin clasp of their fingers. Endless pennies

and pounds and farthings of it. Gleaming.

`Take it, guildmaster. A good penny in return ...'

`Fine stuff, the best spells,' agrees a slightly older colleague, a girl

with hair so mangy that her crown shines thought it, offering from her

pigeon hands what looks like a heap of diamonds.

`Last you this whole new Age. Last you a lifetime ...'

More of them gather around, sensing my hesitation, and the foul

air intensifies as their eyes glitter up at me. They are dressed in bits of

old curtain, barge tarpaulin, sacks. They sport jaunty grey frills of old

shirts like bits of filthy sea-foam. The threat of knives and ambushes I

can take, but this simple offer . . . And the money, of course, fades. Even

as I take a coin from them to inspect as they watch on, uncomplaining,

it feels loose, light, grainy.

I wonder now who it is that actually falls for this trick – and

whether the midnight visitors are ever quite so drunk, or so desperate.

Not that I don't succumb. I choose the child who has shown the

intelligence to form the most valuable-seeming handful, which is not

money at all, or jewels, but crumpled guild certificates, bonds and

promissory notes, and I snatch at paper which feels like winter fog, and

ball it in my fist and throw out in exchange all the coins I can find in my

pockets, scattering still more behind me as I hurry on.

The Thames never quite seems to be the river I know where it

meets the land here. It lies flat and shining as it surges past the ruined

shoreline far beyond the docks; oddly clean, all things considered, yet as

black – and seemingly solid – as polished jet. The ferries never venture

into these currents, and they hang tiny in the pewter distance of evening.

They, and the wyreglowing hills of World's End, belong to another world.

By now, the children have faded. What waits ahead of me, distant from

everything but this river, is a foul isthmus. Sounds are different here,

and the gulls remain oddly silent as they bob and rise. Here, it would be

said in a forever unwritten history, edged against the wastetips and

outflows, shadowed with cuckoo-plant ivy, scratched against the sky, are

the remains of the unfinished railway bridge which attempted to stride

across the Thames from Ropewalk Reach in another Age. The bridge still

rises from the city's rubbish in a tumbled crown. It fails only where the

second span buckles beneath the river, waving its girders like a drowning

insect. I move within the shadows of its ribs, clambering over slippery

horns of embedded concrete and guild-scrolled bearing-sleeves of

greenish brass. Here, rusted and barnacled but still faintly glowing with

aethered purpose, is the crest of a maker's plate. And a sea-diver's glove.

A pulley wheel. And all the endless filth that the river has washed here;

tin cans and shoe soles, eels of rope and condom, speckled mosaics of

tile and piping.

I begin to make my way up and along the arch which still plunges

out across the river, careful not to catch my cloak between the

stanchions. There are curls of mist beneath me now; faint shapes over

the quick black water which suggest limbs and faces as they twine and

turn amid the abutments. And the bridge itself seems to be growing,

beams and girders spinning out around me. But I've been here before,

and I know something of the ways in which changelings protect

themselves. Although my heart is racing and my hands are slipping, I

push on and soon I am squatting on a ruined bridge again, caught

between nothing but the land, the river, my own desperate need.

Almost level with me now and close to where the bridge's parapet

finally falls away clings an aggregation of dead metal and glass and

driftwood. Further off lies all of London; the life, the ferries, the

miraculous trees and the fine buildings. I clamber to the platform

beyond, then duck along the wire cage of a maintenance gantry through

which shards of glass and porcelain have been crammed with an intent

that could be either threatening or decorative. All things considered, the

air here is surprisingly pleasant. It smells mostly of rust.

The changeling who calls herself Niana dwells in the shadows at

the far end of this tunnel, and always seems to be waiting for me inside

her tepee-like dwelling. She stirs at my approach, and beckons me from

the rags of an old wedding dress.

`Grandmaster ...' She studies me in the glow of a bowl of

plundered wyrelight as she crouches in the furthest, darkest corner.

After all, you have decided to come .. .

Her voice, even as it sounds solely in my head, is light, ordinary,

flatly accented.

I flail through damp layers of curtain, clumsily conscious of the

feats of creation that have gone into this dwelling, clenched up here amid

these dying girders. This tilted boarding against which I'm leaning as I

catch my breath was perhaps once a cargo pallet, lashed to the heaving

deck of some steamer on the Boreal Seas. And the far wall, peppered

with daylight through thousands of rivetholes, was clearly part of the

outer plating of a large piece of machinery. Wan daylight mingles with

the wyrelight's aetherglow through the clouded eye of an old porthole,

along intricate tubes of glass piping of a purpose which — barely privy as

I still am to the true mysteries of the guilds — entirely escapes me. I try

to imagine the struggles which must unfold on the wastetips when a

particularly precious relic is heaved from the sidings by the pitbeasts: the

bickering gulls, the seething dragonlice, the scampering children. All

because of a broken haft; a sack of soup bones; a twitching sliver of iron;

a heaped clatter of old lamps .. .

I shrug and smile at Niana, torn as I always am between wonder,

curiosity, pity. There's a long cushion exploding in horsehair near to the

space where she crouches. Setting strings of bottletops chiming, I lower

myself onto the end that looks more likely to bear me. The iron floor

curves away from me, hanging at least thirty feet above the uncurling

river. And I'm squatting in a way that people of my rank are never

supposed to. Still, I'm glad to be here again. With a changeling, and no

matter how often or how rarely you encounter them, there's still always

for me that tingling sense that today you will finally witness the

unravelling of some lost, exquisite mystery.

Niana gets up now, greyly barefoot as always, and wafts around

this den of hers, half child and half hag as she hums to herself and

rummages out bits of things from the old teachests. She takes a chess

piece, a white rook carved from stained ivory, and lifts it to her lips.

`What do you do when no one's here, Niana?'

Her chuckle cuts like the chirp of an insect. `How many times,

grandmaster, do you people need to ask such a question?' `Until we get

an answer.'

`And what answer is it that you want? Tell me, and I'll give it to

you.'

`It's not unrealistic, is it,' I mutter, `for us both to feel a mutual

fascination . . . ?'

`But tell me, grandmaster. What is it that fascinates?' The cotton of

the wedding dress sighs like sand as she moves over to me. `Tell me, so

that I can understand. Exactly what is it that you want to know? Any

wish you want could be granted, grandmaster,' she says more

flirtatiously. Her face is the shadow of a face, cast through glass. Her

eyes are blacker than a bird's. `Surely that's not such a difficult

proposition?'

`And not that you'll be making any promises?'

`Of course. Promises are far too definite. You know the rules.' I

sigh and blink, wishing that she wouldn't treat me like this, wishing that

I could feel her breath on my skin instead of this falling emptiness.

Sensing my unease, perhaps even hurt by it, Niana straightens herself

and leans back. Just as the priests say, there is pure darkness inside

those open nostrils.

`Have you anything for me?'

`I might have, grandmaster. It depends on what you you're

prepared to give.'

`Niana, you told me last time—'

`Show a little imagination, grandmaster. You're a wealthy man.

What is it that you normally deal in?'

A difficult question. The power of my guild, I suppose. And the

strength of my will, the skills of mind and body I have acquired through

it. Or perhaps Niana means something more subtle. The influence,

which, when you get to a rank such as mine, you unavoidably must

wield. I think of summer parties, winter gatherings in the panelled rooms

around polished cedarstone tables; the subtle murmur of voices, the

clink of cut glass, the deep tidal surges of power and money as one trust

is set against the betrayal of another.

`Come, grandmaster. Surely it's the thing about you that is most

obvious. It's what draws people to you—'

`—I doubt if you mean my looks—'

`—so why don't we pretend we're both simply human for a moment

and make the usual exchange?' Her voice continues over mine.

`Grandmaster, why don't you give me some money?'

I try not to scowl. Niana's like a child. If I gave her coins, all she'd

do is add them to her trinkets, use them to buy aether, or taunt me in

just the way that she seems to be taunting me now .. .

Kindly forget your preconceptions, grandmaster, she responds,

although her lips are barely moving. We're not really trolls, you know — or

at least we're not monsters.

I twist myself on the springs of this couch to demonstrate to her

that my pockets are empty. But as I do so my fingers close on something

chilly. Remembering, lifting it out, I watch it flower, light as fog, on my

palm. The cheaply magicked promissory note that that poor girl gave me.

The words and the seals sparking, fading.

You see, grandmaster?

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

======================Notes:ThisbookwasscannedbyMoneyForBloodIfyoucorrectanyminorerrors,pleasechangetheversionnumberbelow(andinthefilename)toaslightlyhigheronee.g.from1.0to1.1orifmajo revisions,tov.2.0etc..Currente-bookversionis1.0(formattingerrorshavebeencorrected(forthemostpart,wasagoodscan);semi...

展开>> 收起<<

Ian R. Macleod - The Light Ages.pdf

共429页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Ian R. Macleod - The Light Ages

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: