A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  The deck plate heaved. An armored fist punched up through the quay from beneath; clawed fingers widened the hole, and Grike scrambled out. He flared with light as another flashbulb fired, silvering his armor, his fingertips, and his gruesome metal grin.

  “Stalker!” screamed the Mancunian gunman, trying to hop away. Grike picked him up and flung him off the edge of the strut; he flailed at the empty air for a moment and then fell with a terrible shriek, and landed bouncing in the safety net. Grike hurled one of his friends after him; the rest turned to run, and collided with the first squad of Airhaven militia arriving from the High Street.

  Hester fainted again and fell down on the hard quay, waking a few seconds later when the Airhaven fireboat swung overhead, dowsing everyone with freezing water. There seemed to be a general belief that whole squads of Stalkers had been landed on Strut 13. Dozens of alarm bells were ringing, making horrid discords. At the end of the strut the Mancunians were fighting with the Airhaven men, who had somehow got the idea that they were Green Storm raiders in disguise. “No, no, no!” Pennyroyal was yelling. Below the strut, the Mancunians Grike had thrown off it were scrambling up the mesh of the safety net to the neighboring quay, where aviators from a Florentine highliner leaned out to haul them to safety.

  Below that, dark against the cloud layer, the plump shape of an airship moved, rising upward.

  “The Jenny Haniver,” said Hester, looking down at it through the holes in the deck plate. Then she realized that it couldn’t be; it wasn’t Tom coming to her rescue this time, but Theo, in the Shadow Aspect.

  Grike had seen it too, or heard the mutter of its engines. He picked Oenone up under one arm, as if she were a parcel.

  He turned and reached for Hester, but Hester was dragging herself away from him toward von Kobold.

  In the scrum at the far end of the strut one of the Mancunians was yelling, “It was Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal lured us here! Into the claws of the Storm’s Stalkers!”

  “That’s not true!” Pennyroyal shouted, skipping backward as an Airhaven soldier made a grab at him. “I’m the victim here! What about my money?”

  The Shadow Aspect came up like a surfacing whale at the end of Strut 13. Hester saw Theo inside the gondola as she turned von Kobold over. The fat Mancunian’s gun had made two charred holes in the front of von Kobold’s coat. But he was only winded. Beneath his coat she saw the dull sheen of Old Tech body armor. He raised a hand to cup her face. “They breed you brave in the Green Storm’s lands,” he whispered.

  “I’m not …,” said Hester, but there wasn’t time to explain.

  “Tell Naga that not all of us want this war,” she heard von Kobold say. Then she passed out, and Grike swept her up and loped toward the Shadow with the bolts from Airhaven crossbows rattling against his armored back.

  Pennyroyal scurried away from the men at the end of the strut and ran into Spiney. The journalist had been directing Miss Kropotkin while she took the pictures that would appear on the front of the next day’s papers beneath the headline “Manchester Men Battle Bravely Against Naga’s Raiders!” He flung himself at Pennyroyal with a vulpine grin. “What’s your part in all this then, Nimrod? How long have you been working for the Green Storm?”

  Pennyroyal shoved him aside. An airship was maneuvering away from the strut with a deafening howl of engines, and he had a sudden, terrible fear that it was the Humbug, taking off with his gold still aboard. “What about my money?” he shouted at it.

  “How much have they paid you, Pennyroyal?” called Spiney, stepping into his path again and flapping at Miss Kropotkin to bring her camera.

  Pennyroyal gave a feeble roar of rage and pushed Spiney hard with both hands. Spiney fought back, flailing at Pennyroyal’s face, grabbing him by the collar. So much was happening on Strut 13 that no one saw the two writers stumble across the quay and plunge off the edge. Their screams harmonized for a brief moment as they fell.

  On the Shadow’s flight deck Theo pushed all the engines to full power, preparing to shove the airship out into the open sky beyond Airhaven’s shadow, but as he reached for the steering levers, a steel hand clamped his wrist.

  “THERE ARE TWO ANTI-AIRCRAFT HARPOON BATTERIES ON AIRHAVEN HIGH STREET,” the Stalker Grike announced. “AS SOON AS WE CLEAR THEIR AIRSPACE, THEY WILL FIRE ON US.”

  “But we can’t stay here!” shouted Theo, waving at the windows. The glass was already starred by hits from a dozen crossbow bolts, although no one had dared to fire anything more dangerous yet, for fear of igniting a blaze that might engulf the whole of Airhaven.

  “GO DOWN,” said Grike. “DROP INTO THE CLOUDS. THEY WILL HIDE US.”

  Theo nodded, angry that he’d not thought of that for himself. A moment later the Shadow swung its engine pods upright and forced itself down into the white billows beneath Airhaven.

  “Aaaaaaaaah!” wailed Pennyroyal and Spiney, and then, “Oh!” as the safety net beneath Strut 13 caught them and held them safe. They bounced together, as if they had dropped into a giant’s hammock.

  “Great Poskitt!” whimpered Pennyroyal, thrusting the journalist away from him and trying to stand upright. He had forgotten the net’s existence until its thick, yielding mesh broke his fall. “I thought we were done for!” he gasped.

  “You’re done for all right, Nimrod!” Sampford Spiney cackled. He had been just as scared as Pennyroyal, but he wasn’t about to show it. “Consorting with the Storm; taking part in a brawl; accessory to the attempted murder of a kriegsmarschall—here, was that bint on the strut really Naga’s wife? That’s what your Manchester friends are saying…” Excited at the thought of all the startling reports that he would soon be filing, the journalist began to bounce happily up and down.

  “Do stop doing that, old man,” pleaded Pennyroyal. “You’re making me feel all queasy.”

  “Not half as queasy as you’ll be when you see the next edition of The Speculum.” Spiney chuckled, bouncing harder. Odd noises started to come from the net: faint creaks, small twanging sounds.

  “Spiney, I really think you should stop! This net looks old, and it’s already taken the weight of a brace of fat Mancunians tonight…”

  With a sound like plucked harpstrings the bolts that attached one edge of the net to the underside of Strut 14 started to come free. Spiney stopped bouncing, and let out a strangled yelp.

  “Help!” shouted Pennyroyal, as loudly as he could, but although Strut 13 was crammed with people the only one who heard him was Spiney’s photographer, Miss Kropotkin. Her face appeared over the edge of the strut. She stretched down toward the stranded men with one hand, but she could not reach them. Pennyroyal started trying to claw his way up the steep net toward her, but only succeeded in pulling some of the bolts on that side free as well. “Oh, Poskitt!”

  “Miss Kropotkin!” Spiney shrieked. “Fetch help! Fetch help at once, or I’ll make sure you end up photographing pet shows and garden parties for the rest of your worthless—”

  And with a presence of mind that ensured she would never have to photograph another pet show as long as she lived, Miss Kropotkin raised her camera as the net gave way and took the picture that would appear on page 1 of the next edition of The Speculum beneath the headline “Writers Perish in Airhaven Death Plunge Horror.”

  Chapter 28

  Storm Birds

  As the Shadow Aspect sank into the clouds, Grike strode aft. In the curtained-off cabin at the stern of the gondola Oenone was crouching over Hester, using her fingers to try to stop the blood that was pouring from the gash on Hester’s scalp. She looked up at Grike. “Is there a medicine chest? Just a first-aid kit even?”

  Grike stared at Hester’s gray, shocked face. Let her die, he wanted to tell Oenone, then use your skill to Resurrect her. In place of that scarred and ruined face give her a steel mask, more perfect than the Stalker Fang’s. In place of her breakable body build her a body as strong as this one. She would forget her life, but Grike felt certain that her spirit would survive.
Over the millennia that they would have together, he would help her to recover it. His immortal child.

  “Medicine chest!” shouted Oenone. “Quickly, Mr. Grike!”

  Grike turned and found the Shadow’s first-aid kit in the locker above the bunk. As he handed it to Oenone, a blow shook the airship. He went forward onto the flight deck again. Theo was clinging to the controls, staring out of wet windows.

  “we are under attack,” Grike said.

  “What?” the boy looked around at him, wide eyes white in his dark face.

  “we were hit. a projectile …”

  Theo turned to the window again. “I can’t see another ship. I can’t see anything. This cloud—”

  And then the Shadow Aspect dropped out of the belly of the clouds, and they both saw the flanks of cities rising all around them, the sky between filled with the running lights of dozens of airships. It was raining, and the drops flecked the windows and blurred everything into a kaleidoscope of glowing specks, but Grike could tell by their trajectories that the other ships were not searching for the Shadow Aspect. They were not military ships at all, but freighters and liners, heading west.

  “murnau is evacuating its women and children,” he said.

  “Preparing for war …,” whispered Theo, and then, remembering his plight, “What about us?”

  “word of our departure may not have reached the other cities yet.”

  “Well, it can’t be long,” said Theo. It seemed pointless to turn the Shadow eastward, for he did not believe they could escape from the Murnau cluster now, but he turned her anyway, peering out through the rain as she flew through a steep-sided canyon whose walls were the towering sides of Manchester and Traktionbad Braunschweig. He took the Shadow low so that the cities’ tall wheels slid past on either side of the gondola. Other ships poured through the canyon high above, most of them flying west. Ahead, across a few miles of mud crawling with small, fierce-looking suburbs, stood Murnau. The great fighting city had shut its armor. Theo started to steer the Shadow Aspect around its northern flank, still at track level. The rudder controls were sluggish. “I think the steering vanes are damaged,” he said, tugging irritably at the levers.

  Remembering the blow that he had felt as the ship dropped away from Airhaven, Grike went aft again. Hester was conscious, groaning as Oenone cleaned her wound. “Tom! Oh, Tom!” Grike caught the sharp whiff of medical alcohol. He climbed the companion ladder, stooping as he stepped out onto the axial catwalk that led along the center of the envelope. At the sternward end was a small hatch, built for Once-Born and almost too small for him to squeeze his Stalker’s bulk through. Outside, the Shadow’s rain-wet tail fins shone silvery in the light from the passing windows of Murnau’s skirt forts. Holding tight to the ratlines, Grike made his way out onto the lateral fin. At the rear of the fin something had wedged among the control cables. Beneath the howl of the engines and the drumming of rain on the steep curve of the envelope above him, Grike picked up another sound, a rhythmic clatter. Was this some new weapon? He let go of the ratlines with one hand and unsheathed his claws.

  The shape in the control cables shifted suddenly, reacting to the flick of wet light from the blades. A white, frightened face gaped up at Grike. “Great Poskitt!” it wailed.

  Grike realized what had happened. This Once-Born must have fallen from Airhaven as the Shadow Aspect departed. He sheathed his claws and reached out to drag him to safety, but the Once-Born misunderstood; terrified, he let go his tight grip on the cables and began to fall again, shrieking as he tumbled into the sky. Grike lunged forward and grabbed him by the collar of his coat, swinging him around and safely up onto the fin again. The Shadow Aspect tilted, engines caterwauling, as Grike heaved the man over the aileron flaps and started to drag him along the fin toward the open hatch.

  The airship’s sudden, uncertain movement drew the attention of lookouts in Murnau’s skirt forts. As Grike and his dripping, barely conscious burden regained the flight deck, the forts’ gun slits started to prickle with light. It looked quite pretty, until the first bullets began tearing into the gondola. Windows shattered; pressure gauges wavered as holes were torn in the gas cells. The engines howled, still driving the ship eastward, past towering jaws, out across rainswept, shell-torn mud. The gunfire stopped. Theo checked the periscope. Astern, three points of light were pulling clear of the immense bulk of the armored city; three bat-black shapes growing against the gray underbelly of the clouds.

  High above, Orla Twombley wiped rain from her goggles and pushed her flying machine Combat Wombat into a dive that would bring it up on the Shadow’s tail. Behind her, the ornithopter Zip Gun Boogie and a rocket-propelled triplane called No More Curried Eggs for Me followed suit, wings slicing the wet air like blades.

  Theo shouted out in fear and frustration. He knew that his sluggish, wounded Shadow could not outrun the Flying Ferrets. He saw Grike turn toward him, and thought the Stalker was about to warn him of the pursuing machines. “I know!” he yelled.

  But Grike said, ” there are stalker-birds ahead.”

  “What?” Theo tried to peer out through the rain-spattered forward window, but he could see only darkness and his own terrified reflection. Then a rocket from the pursuing machines tore past the gondola and exploded ahead, and he realized that the darkness was largely made of wings. Across the empty skies of no-man’s-land, from the direction of the Green Storm’s lines, an immense flock of Resurrected birds was flapping toward him.

  “Christ!” cried Theo, and slammed the steering levers over, trying in vain to turn the ship about, for he would rather face rockets than the claws and beaks of the Storm’s raptors. But the Shadow’s rudder controls had been hit; she responded slowly, and long before she could come about, the sky outside the gondola windows was filled with beating wings and the green pinpoints of the dead birds’ eyes.

  Astern, wind lashed and drenched in the open cockpit of the Combat Wombat, Orla Twombley saw the cloud of wings. Cursing inventively, she swung her machine about and signaled to her companions to do the same. She had lost enough people to the Stalker-birds at Cloud 9; nothing would make her engage them in such numbers. She checked that her men were with her, then soared back toward the fastnesses of Manchester, while skeins of birds, like the fingers of some gloomy god, closed around the Shadow Aspect.

  On the flight deck, Theo waited for beaks and claws to start tearing through the thin walls. Over the rumble of the Shadow’s engines he could hear whooshing wingbeats, the flutter of feathers as the birds turned, matching the little airship’s course and speed.

  “They’re not here to attack us,” said Oenone softly, coming to stand behind Theo, her hand touching his shoulder. “I think they’re an escort…”

  Theo leaned forward, looking up past the bulge of the envelope. The wounded airship was flying inside a dark nebula of wings, where the eyes of hundreds of birds glowed like green stars. The birds were immense: resurrected kites and condors, eagles and vultures. As the gas vented from the Shadow’s shredded cells, hundreds of birds gripped her airframe with their claws and bore her up, their wingbeats carrying her eastward across the track scars and shell craters of no-man’s-land.

  In through one of the shattered starboard windows came a smaller bird. It had been a raven when it was alive. It perched on the handle of a control lever and turned its head, its green eye whirring as it focused on Theo. It opened its beak, and the faint, crackly voice of a distant Green Storm commander came out of the tiny radio transmitter inside its ribs. He was speaking in a battle code that Theo did not recognize, but Oenone did. She replied in the same harsh language, and the raven spread its wings and flew past her through the window and away.

  Oenone looked at Theo. “One of the Storm’s forward observation posts saw us come under attack. They assumed we must be their agents. I have told them the truth; that I am Lady Naga, coming home. The bird gave me the coordinates of the landing field where they want us to set down.”

  Theo lis
tened to the numbers she quoted, but he barely needed to alter course; the birds were already shepherding the Shadow Aspect in the right direction. He flopped down in his seat and looked at Grike. He was too wrung out with shock to feel more than mildly surprised when he saw that the wet, whimpering man the Stalker clutched was Nimrod Pennyroyal.

  “What’s he doing here?” he asked.

  “It was an accident!” said Pennyroyal fearfully, as if he thought he was about to be accused of boarding the Shadow Aspect by stealth. “I fell. Spiney and I—we fell out of Airhaven and landed on your tail fin. Well, I did. Spiney carried on down, poor devil. Still, it serves him right.” The thought of his enemy’s death seemed to restore his spirits slightly, but only for a moment; his eyes wandered past Theo to the storm of birds outside. “Ngoni, am I a prisoner?”

  “I think we’re all prisoners, Professor.”

  “But you’re Green Storm; they won’t harm you! I was mayor of Brighton. You’ll tell them, won’t you, I was always an Anti-Tractionist at heart? I only accepted high office so that I could subvert the system from within. And I treated captured Mossies well, didn’t I? You can vouch for me; you had it easy on Cloud 9, didn’t you—three good meals a day, and you never had to carry anything heavier than a sunshade.”

  Oenone said, “I will tell them to treat you well.”

  “You will? Thank you!”

  “But I don’t know if they’ll listen to me. It all depends on whether the units who control these birds are loyal, or whether they want me dead.”