Page 9 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Bye.’ Thaniel stood and watched til he was out of sight, which was barely ten yards.

Thaniel rearranged his scarf and sank his hands into his pockets.

His left closed around some folded sheets of manuscript paper. He took a couple of pieces everywhere so he could write on the train. He had the bones of a symphony, but lately he couldn’t pull them into the right shape. It had begun strong last year, when he had taken over one end of the long bench in the workshop and worked while Mori did. Mori had never said anything, too gentlemanly to make anyone feel like they were being scrutinised, but if Thaniel turned shy over a difficult section and tried to write in the parlour instead, Mori started making tea, which might as well have been a summons, because something in Thaniel’s knees was wired to get up the second he heard a kettle sing.

But lately there was a dampness in the part of his mind that fired when he was really writing, not just tinkering. Whenever he tried to dig down into himself for more verve, all he found was a maddening mental IOU note that said he would think about it after the post arrived. And of course, after the post arrived, there was always tomorrow’s post.And now – now, he was going to Tokyo by himself. Possibly Mori would appear if the weather was all right, but Thaniel couldn’t picture it. There was every chance he wouldn’t see him for a year. A year of waiting for the post.

‘Oh, shut up,’ he told himself aloud. ‘You sulky bloody mess.’

Away over the other side of the lake, a cluster of flares hung suspended, will-o’-the-wispy. The light upset a heron, somewhere among the reeds. It made a prehistoric noise and clattered away.

He walked for what felt like the right amount of time and then slowed again, worried that he had gone past the gate. In a tree that must have been very close, an owl hooted.

‘Thaniel,’ Mori’s amber voice said from a little way off. ‘It’s this way.’

FOUR

Thaniel swung around and didn’t believe what he’d heard until he saw him. Mori was waiting between a pair of trees in a thinner patch of fog. He didn’t look how Thaniel remembered. He never did; he had a changeling’s ability to alter nearly everything about himself depending on where and when he was. His coat had a fur collar, there was silver stitching on his gloves, and he had cut the last of the light dye out of his hair. It was back to its own glassy black.

For a long time, it had struck Thaniel as unlikely that a clairvoyant samurai would ever bother with a gamekeeper’s son who’d left school at fourteen with all the natural refinement of a shovel. But Mori was one of those men who liked anybody willing to be tenacious with him.

His clairvoyance was the reason for that. Not many people wanted to live with someone who knew nearly everything, or so he said.

Mori remembered possible futures. It was just like ordinary memory, but it worked forwards as well as backwards. If something was about to happen, he knew it clearly – in just the same way anyone else knew what had just happened a minute ago. If something was only a distant, hazy possibility, he remembered it like it had happened twenty years ago, buried under all the more recent, more likely things. The second a thing was no longer possible, he forgot it. It was why he maintained that a book was nothing but a dead story, thank you, and he preferred them while they were still alive, fluttering about in someone’s mind, with lots of possible endings and interesting side bits, before the editor pulled them off and pinned it down on paper and he forgot all the good parts. Mori was still annoyed with Arthur Conan Doyle for reasons he couldn’t remember anymore.

So it was a funny sort of acquaintance. Anyone sensible would have thought they could never have anything in common, or a solitary thing to say to each other. They didn’t even have mutual friends. But Thaniel was good at making up better endings for Sherlock Holmes stories, and Mori seemed to think that was more than enough to be getting on with.

‘Kei.’ For a long second Thaniel was paralysed with relief and joy, and awkwardness. ‘You came back,’ he managed.

‘Of course I came back,’ Mori said, laughing. ‘How are you?’

‘Good.’ Thaniel tried to think of something sensible. It occurred him that the polite thing would be to ask if everything was finished in Russia.

‘It is more or less,’ Mori said before he could ask. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written for a bit, I was ill and I got stuck in Paris.’

Thaniel saw Mori notice that he’d replied to something that hadn’t happened aloud yet, and the flicker of anxiety and irritation that always came with it. He didn’t like doing it, even with people who knew he could.

‘Ill?’ said Thaniel. Mori was either upright and going about his day, or unconscious. By ill, he didn’t mean he’d had a cold. ‘Are you all right now, what—’

Mori looked lost and exhausted for a moment, before he shook his head and cast the look off like a scarf. ‘Yes – I just hate Paris. I’m surprised more people don’t have some sort of allergic reaction.’

Thaniel decided to let it lie, whatever it was. ‘Only you could hate Paris.’

‘Thaniel, I grew up bowing to immediate family. Every random Frenchman thinks that the only proper way to say hello is indecent assault. I thoroughly hate Paris.’

Thaniel laughed. Mori tipped his shoulder to suggest they go. They skirted a coughing family coming the other way, then set out across the grass, which crackled as the frost shards broke. If Thaniel had been king of everything, this would have been the test he gave to anyone who claimed they were clairvoyant – to walk unguided through London in fog. Mori went as fast at night and in fog as he did on bright mornings.

He took Thaniel’s hand. They would have lost each other even a foot apart. The tea-stain haze was thicker outside the park, where Knightsbridge had funnelled it into a dense column. Thaniel squeezed his fingers. It felt safe and private. Mori pressed his knuckles and pulled him to the right, onto Filigree Street.

Not for away, the electric lights at Harrods were bright enough to give the shop doors a halo, but Filigree Street was medieval. The houses leaned further and further towards each other in a way that always put Thaniel in mind of a row of companionable drunks, so close at the far end that even on a sunny day the road was always in shadow, and far too narrow to ride through. In the confined space, the fog closed in and concentrated itself all the more, until it furled in almost solid patterns, tentacles brushing at the tiny-paned windows. The lower floors were mainly occupied by small, exquisite shops and they were still open, each one with ten or twelve candles outlining the path to the doors. The lights were so dim they were hardly more than phantoms.A caped policeman coalesced from the murk just ahead of them, and touched his hat.

Thaniel let go of Mori’s hand. He couldn’t help it. He felt like his skull had turned to glass and any casual observer would see all his thoughts finning around.

Number twenty-seven was all alight. When Mori pushed the workshop door open, the clear air inside tasted sweet. In the window, the clockwork birds were all sleepy, though usually they fluttered about between each other’s perches in little silver and bronze flashes. The mechanical fireflies had come out instead. They pootled gold lines around the ceiling and down among the birds, which sometimes stirred in the light. Thaniel had caught one once, but he still couldn’t work out what it was that glowed inside the glass case. It was a powder of some kind which flared brighter the more it was disturbed. A sort of pollen, Mori said, from Peru, although privately Thaniel suspected he’d made that up because he was embarrassed about having invented something completely anachronistic.

A barn owl settled on the window sill. Thaniel smiled. He’d got so used to owls haunting Filigree Street that he’d stopped noticing them, but a while ago they’d stopped coming. It was good to see one again. He had a silly feeling that it knew Mori had come back.

Mori took off his coat. Thaniel watched him in the reflection. His image in the glass looked much more solid than Thaniel’s did, because his colours were clearer and deeper. Thaniel was the rough mock-up someone’s apprentice had folded together out of paper scraps, and Mori was the real thing, enamelled, and finished in gold.