Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,114

make a habit of picking up men from the roadside on my travels, although I hear that’s how the tale is told.”

Nathan had heard no such tales, and his chest was proving difficult in the sudden change of air within this hot compartment which was padded with buttoned velvet, and lit from some strange source. The woman who sat opposite was dressed entirely in a shade of black far deeper than that he remembered she had once worn on her sole visit to his mill. No silks or trimmings. Her hair had dimmed as well; trails of grey smoked though it. Only the flame in her eyes was unchanged.

“I suppose,” she murmured, “you think we’re deadly foes?”

“Isn’t that what we are?”

She waved a hand. “Merely competitors, like your fellow millers. And it was never as if—”

“Fellow millers!” Nathan wheezed. He cleared his throat. “There are few enough of us.”

“But when you say us, Nathan, why must you exclude me? We make the same product. I bid for the same grain in the same halls. And you and I…There’s a new science. It’s called phrenology, and it allows you to determine a man’s—I mean a person’s—nature merely from studying the bumps on their head. I’ve had it done myself, and mine reveal me to be stubborn and obstinate, often far beyond my own good interests.” She attempted a smile. “And you…” She reached across the carriage. Her fingers brushed his bald scalp. “You’re an easy subject now, Nathan. One hardly needs to be an expert to understand that you’re much the same. And I suppose you remember that offer I made…” The steam carriage, which was a clumsy, noisy thing, jolted and jostled. “Of sharing our skills. It could still be done. Of course, I have to employ men from the new guilds to see to the many magics and technicalities of running a steam mill. In all their talk of pressures, recondensing, and strange spells—I can barely understand what they mean even when they’re not talking the language of their guilds. Once, I could snap my fingers…” She did so now. There was no flame. “And that mill of yours. The dusty air—anyone can see what it’s doing to you. We could still…”

She trailed off. The machine rumbled on through the night, splashing through puddles, trailing spark and flame.

“There’s no point, you know,” she said eventually as they neared Stagsby. “You can’t resist things which have already happened. Those men, the ones who give themselves that stupid name and are causing such damage. They imagine they’re playing some game, but it isn’t a game. The Enforcers will—”

“That’s not what counts—someone has to put up a fight against steam!”

The lines deepened around her eyes. “You’re not fighting steam, Nathan. What you’re fighting is time itself.”

More than the grain and the flour, more even than the mill, the winds were Nathan’s now. Work or no work, whatever the state of the air and the clouds, they encompassed him and the mill. He talked to them in their lean-to, unhooked them, stroked their bruised and swirling atmospheres, drew them out. As the rest of the world beyond his hilltop went on with whatever business it was now engaged in, Nathan’s mill turned, and he turned with it. He laughed and he danced. Strident winds from a dark north bit his flesh and froze his heart. Lacy mare’s tails of spring kicked and frisked. His winds swirled around him in booming hisses as he sang out the spell which made them unbind, and they took hold of his and the mill’s arms. In that moment of joyous release, it seemed to him that he was part of the air as well, and that the horizons had changed. There were glimpses of different Lincolnshires through their prism swirl. He saw the counterglow of brighter sunsets, the sheen of different moons. It reminded him of some time—impossible, he knew, too ridiculous to recall—when, godlike, he’d looked down on the brightly flowing tapestry of the entire universe, which span like some great machine. He saw the ebb and flow of cities. He saw the coming of flame, and of ice, and the rise of vast mountains pushing aside the oceans. He saw glass towers and the shining movements of swift machines along shimmering highways of light. He believed he glimpsed heaven itself in the sunflash of silver wings amid the clouds. The visions faded as the mill took up the strain of the wind, but they never