A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Before he turned in that evening, Theo climbed onto the top of the envelope and stood in the wind on the tiny lookout platform there, watching for trouble. He saw none, nothing but a few small desert townlets on the move, dragging their long wakes of dust behind them, too busy with their own concerns to pay attention to a passing airship. The air was empty too, except for a distant sky train heading south, its long chain of envelopes gleaming like an amber necklace in the sun.

  Theo sighed, almost wishing that air pirates or assassins would attack, so that he could prove his usefulness to Lady Naga and Captain Rasputra. He imagined himself doing something heroic again (conveniently forgetting how frightened he had been aboard that Super-Gnat) and word of it spreading along the bird roads until it reached Wren. But when he tried to picture her, he found that the only face he could call to mind was that of the servant Rohini.

  Alone in her cabin in the stern of the Nzimu’s envelope, Oenone Zero, Lady Naga, knelt and bowed her head and made a steeple of her stained hands and started to say her prayers. She did not expect God to answer her, because she did not believe he worked like that. But she had felt his presence very clearly, ever since that night on Cloud 9 when she had thought she was about to die. He gave her strength, and comfort, and courage. It seemed to Oenone that the least she could offer him in return were her prayers.

  And so she gave thanks for her time in Zagwa, for the kindness of the queen and bishop and of Air Marshal Khora. She gave thanks for the bravery of Theo Ngoni, and prayed that he would come to no harm on this furtive voyage. And there she became distracted by a rather unspiritual thought. What a pity it was that her husband could not have been as young and handsome as Theo…

  She opened her eyes and looked at the portrait of Naga that she kept beside her bunk; his maimed body strapped into mechanized battle armor, his battered, ocher face screwed into the awkward smile of someone who has had no practice smiling. Whenever she saw it, she wondered what it could be that made such a man love her.

  She did not love him. She was just grateful for his protection, and glad that the leadership of the Green Storm had passed into the hands of a decent man. That was why she had been unable to say no when he asked her to be his wife. “Of course,” she’d said, and a feeling of numb astonishment had settled over her, which did not lift until she was dressed in her red bridal gown and standing on tiptoe to kiss her new husband in front of a vast assembly of officers and priests and bridesmaids and a nervous Christian vicar, flown in at considerable expense from some static in the Western Archipelago to give Oenone’s new god’s blessing to the marriage.

  A gentle knocking broke in upon her memories. The cabin door opened and Rohini came in, shy and silent as ever. Oenone sat down at her portable dressing table and unpinned her hair so that the girl could brush it. In the lamplight the ends of her hair shone faintly auburn, a reminder that some of her long-ago ancestors had probably been Americans who had fled to the remote Aleutian islands after the Sixty Minute War. Yet another reason for the Green Storm’s hard-liners to despise her …

  She tried to forget them and enjoy the gentle touch of Rohini’s hands and the soft, sleepy shushing of the hairbrush. She was glad that the girl had volunteered to come with her on this voyage. Rohini was so much quieter and sweeter than her other servants, who all seemed slightly resentful when Oenone tried to treat them like equals. Rohini was the only one who seemed genuinely fond of her, and appeared to appreciate the kindness that Oenone showed her.

  So it came as a horrible surprise when Rohini dropped the brush, looped the rain-colored belt of her robe around Oenone’s throat, and, pulling it tight, hissed in a voice Oenone had never heard, “We know what you did, you miserable city lover! We know how you destroyed our beloved leader, and seduced that fool Naga! Now you will see what the true Storm does to traitors…”

  Something had woken Theo, and he could not get back to sleep. It was cold in his cabin; his bunk was uncomfortable; he missed his home very much. He turned on the lamp and looked at his wristwatch, but there were several hours to go before he was supposed to relieve Rasputra at the helm. He groaned and turned the light out and snuggled under his scratchy blankets, trying vainly to sleep again.

  But as he lay there, he slowly became convinced that his ship had altered course. The sound of the wind against the envelope had changed in some subtle way. He had learned to pay attention to such details during his time aboard the carriers of the Tumbler Corps, where any unexplained course change might mean that the unit was going into battle. The Nzimu had not been due to alter her heading before she sighted the Tibesti Mountains, and Theo had not expected that to happen before sunrise.

  What was going on? He imagined a flock of barbarian flying machines closing in from windward, or a pirate cutter rising from some lair among the dunes. Just like Rasputra to try to outrun them without even telling him! He rolled off his bunk and started pulling on his boots and coat, the only items he had taken off when he turned in.

  Halfway down the central companion ladder he glimpsed Rohini on the walkway below him, heading aft toward Lady Naga’s cabin. He was about to call out and ask her what had happened when he remembered that she would not hear him. Besides, he did not want to alarm her over what might be an innocent course correction. Not until he’d talked to Rasputra.

  He waited until she had gone past, then slid down the last few sections of ladder and dropped into the gondola. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  But Captain Rasputra could not tell him, because someone had cut Captain Rasputra’s throat so deeply and so expertly that he had died before anything more than a look of mild surprise could register on his pleasant face.

  “Captain Rasputra?” said Theo. A movement at his side made him jump, but it was just his own reflection in a window, wide-eyed and stupid. He stared at himself. Who had done this? Was there an intruder aboard the Nzimu? Had some assassin boarded his ship the same way he’d boarded those Super-Gnats over Zagwa? But no; the smell of blood, the horror of finding himself alone with a dead man in this glass-walled place, reminded him vividly of things he and Wren had seen on Cloud 9. He knew now why Rohini seemed so familiar.

  He tugged down a fire axe from a hook on the wall and forced himself back to the ladder and up. As he ran along the walkway to the door of Lady Naga’s cabin, he heard someone inside say something about traitors. There was a scuffling and a noise of things falling and rolling. Theo shouted to give himself courage, and swung his axe at the lock on the door. It came apart under the first blow, and the door swung open.

  Inside, amid a tangle of bedding from the overturned bunk and a rolling glitter of vials and bottles from the dressing table, knelt Lady Naga, scrabbling with both hands at the belt that Rohini was using to strangle her. Rohini’s look of triumph faded only slightly when she looked around to see Theo standing in the shattered doorway.

  “Can’t you just knock?” she asked crossly.

  “Cynthia Twite,” said Theo.

  “Surprise!” the girl replied, with a smile.

  Lady Naga made a horrible gurgling noise, like the last of the bathwater heading down the plughole. Theo took a step forward and waved the axe, but he was too gentle to use it, and he knew Cynthia knew it. Remembering the girl’s vanity, he said, “You look different…”

  It worked. Tiring of Lady Naga for the moment, Cynthia gave the silk belt one last, sharp tug and let go. Her victim pitched forward and lay facedown, unmoving. “Good, isn’t it?” asked Cynthia, indicating her own black hair, which had been blond when Theo saw her last, and her brown skin, which had been fair. She smiled as if Theo had paid her a gallant compliment. It was her only weakness as a secret agent. She was so delighted by her own cleverness that she could never resist telling her victims how she had tricked them.

  Theo hoped that if he could keep her talking long enough, some helpful god might slip an idea into his brain.

  “The hair and skin were easy,” Cynthia was saying. “The eyes were
the real trick. I’m wearing little Old Tech things called ‘contract lenses.’ ” She touched a finger to one eye and blinked. When she took her hand away, the eye was its old cornflower blue, gazing incongruously at Theo out of her dark face. “If you were any good,” she said, “you’d have tried to hit me then. But I see you’re still a coward. I’m rather looking forward to killing you, Theo Ngoni. That’s why I was saving you till last.”

  “Please,” gasped Lady Naga, heaving about on the deck like something half drowned. “Don’t hurt him.”

  Cynthia stamped on her. “We’re talking!”

  “Cynthia,” shouted Theo, “why are you doing this?”

  Cynthia took another step closer, fixing him with her odd-colored eyes. “This Aleutian bitch betrayed our leader so that Naga could seize power. Do you really think those of us who loved the Stalker Fang would let her get away with it?”

  “But why here?” cried Theo helplessly. “Why now? You’re part of her household; you could have killed her in Tienjing… Killed Naga, too.”

  Cynthia sighed sharply, exasperated by his innocence. “We don’t want Naga dead,” she explained. “That would only mean civil war, and more distraction from the real business of killing townies. We just want to make him give up this truce. If you hadn’t interfered when I called our ships in at Zagwa, it would be over already. But I’m patient. In a few minutes this old rust bucket will go down in flames. Rohini will be the only survivor, and she’ll tell Naga how Zagwa betrayed us to the townies and the townies shot us down. That ought to put the mockers on any alliance between Naga and your lot. As for the townies, well, he’s hardly going to sit down and talk peace when he hears what they did to his pretty little wifelet. The guns will begin firing again. Our mistress will reward us when she returns to Tienjing!”

  “You mean Fang? But she’s dead!”

  Cynthia smiled eerily. “She was always dead, African. That is why she can never be killed. She is waiting for us to end this treacherous talk of truces and conditions. Then she will return, and lead us to total victory!”

  “You’re mad!” said Theo.

  “Oh, that’s rich, coming from somebody who goes around smashing down doors with a dirty great axe,” said Cynthia, and with no more warning than that, she swung her foot up and drove him backward with a kick, snatching the heavy fire axe from his hands as he went sprawling through the open doorway and tumbled down the companionway to the level below.

  A grated walkway hit him hard in the face, and he lay there for a moment tasting blood in his mouth and listening for the sound of Cynthia coming after him. He heard her footsteps pacing along the walkway overhead, and saw her shadow moving against the flank of the gas cell up there. He dragged himself into a crawlspace. After a moment the footsteps stopped. “Theo?” Cynthia called down. “Don’t think I’m going to come looking for you. I was looking forward to killing you, but I really can’t be bothered to play hide-and-seek. It won’t make any difference anyway. There’s a bomb under the central gas cell, set to explode at midnight. So I’m going to take one of your silly Zagwan kites and beetle off now; I’ve arranged to meet some friends of mine in the desert shortly. Toodle-oo!”

  The footsteps started again, and grew quieter as she climbed away from him. Theo guessed she was making for the emergency exit in the flank of the envelope. Just inside it was a locker where half a dozen kites were stored, workaday versions of the one he’d flown in Zagwa. He waited, and heard the hatch open, the sounds inside the envelope changing as the wind rushed in. Quickly he scrambled along a lateral support to a place where a glastic porthole had been riveted into the skin of the envelope. Out in the starlight, far away, a black bat wing showed for a moment against the silver waves of the desert.

  What about the other kites? Knowing Cynthia, she would have destroyed them. But maybe the delay that Theo had caused might have left her no time to deal with them. He glanced at his watch and saw with relief that there were still eight minutes to go before midnight. Ignoring the pain in his chest and side, he started climbing toward the kite locker. Even if he had not known where it was, he would have been able to find it by tracing the source of the cold wind howling in through the open escape hatch. Sure enough, the locker was empty; Cynthia had bundled the spare kites out through the hatch before she took flight herself. But when Theo stuck his head out, he saw one kite caught in the ratlines only a few yards from the hatch, and it was easy for him to reach out and drag it back aboard.

  Breathing hard, he started to strap himself into the kite. Then he remembered Lady Naga. The kite was big, and she was small; Theo was sure it would carry both of them. But was she even still alive? He glanced quickly at his watch. The climb to the kite locker had not taken nearly as long as he’d thought. He had to try to save Lady Naga. He had promised.

  He left the kite by the locker and flung himself back down the steep companionways to her cabin. She was lying where he had left her, but she started whimpering and trying to drag herself away when she heard him come in, imagining that he was Cynthia.

  “It’s all right,” he told her, kneeling down beside her and rolling her over.

  “Rohini,” she croaked.

  “She’s gone,” said Theo, trying to help her to her feet. “She was never Rohini anyway. Her name’s Cynthia Twite; she was part of the Stalker Fang’s private spy ring.”

  “Twite?” Lady Naga frowned and groaned. Thinking seemed to hurt. “No, she was a white girl, the Stalker’s agent on Cloud 9… Naga took her home aboard the Requiem Vortex, but she vanished when we reached Shan Guo… Oh, Theo, I have to get home. If I don’t, she or her friends will tell Naga that the townies killed me, and the peace will fail…”

  “Don’t try to talk,” said Theo, worried that she would injure herself still further by forcing all these words up her poor, bruised throat. “I’ll get you home, I promise. But first we have to get off this ship.” He checked his wristwatch. “There’s a b—” he said, and stopped.

  It was still eight minutes to midnight.

  The fall down the stairs, he thought. My watch is broken…

  He had just time to remember his father saying, “I don’t know why you youngsters wear these gimcrack bracelet watches. A pocket watch is more distinguished, and far, far more reliable,” before the explosion tore his ship apart beneath him.

  Chapter 7

  Brighton Rocks

  Brighton had taken a turn for the worse since Wren and Theo had left. The flying palace of Cloud 9 was gone, and it had taken most of the city’s ruling elite with it. Brighton was ruled now by the Lost Boys. Dragged aboard as captives by the Shkin Corporation, they had escaped from their pens on the night of the Green Storm raid and quickly made themselves at home, setting up their own small kingdoms among the smart white streets of Queen’s Park and Montpelier and the dank labyrinths of the Laines, gathering private armies of beggars and rebel slaves about them. They fought among themselves, or formed shaky alliances that could be broken over a stolen pair of shoes or a covetous glance at a pretty slave girl. You could never tell what a Lost Boy would do next. They were vicious and sentimental, greedy and generous. A lot of them were mad. By night their followers fought running battles on the litter-strewn promenades, avenging botched deals and imagined insults.

  Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys), and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guesthouses and frolic in the Sea Pool; but there was a certain sort of person—well-off artists from the comfortable middle tiers of cities that the war had never touched, and spoiled young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them— who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; the
y thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music, and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Ore with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St. Jean les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

  There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves, or gunrunners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy anything. And up at the bows, drenched in the spray that crashed over the gunwales every time the launch shoved its blunt nose through a wave, Fishcake stood staring at the approaching resort and wishing he had stayed safe ashore.

  In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead, he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he had encountered any of them, they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk, he realized he’d been wrong; the Lost Boys were the Brighton authorities.

  The launch swung across Brighton’s decaying stern, past dirty paddle wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime, where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveler from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, “Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!”