A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  The boys looked sheepish.

  “When daylight comes, me and Wren will take him over to Crouch End,” Cat decided.

  Wren slept fitfully, curled up beside Theo. The wreckage made an uncomfortable bed, but even without the rivets and rust flakes digging into her, she could not have slept; she had to keep studying his sleeping face to make quite sure she had not dreamed him. And then she suddenly woke to daylight, and it was time to leave.

  They walked eastward, Wren and Theo together, Cat following with her crossbow. As they went, Theo told Wren his story, and she learned how he had met her mother, and how they had traveled together all the way to the Green Storm’s lines.

  “And after that?” asked Wren.

  “I don’t know. I think she’s safe. Probably in Shan Guo by now.”

  Wren was not sure what to feel. She’d grown used to thinking that Mum was dead. It was unsettling to find out that she was still alive, and to hear the way Theo spoke of her, as if he admired her. And that she should be traveling around with that horrible Stalker, Mr. Grike—Wren didn’t like to think about it, and she was almost relieved when Cat suddenly shouted, “Down!” and she was able to concentrate on dragging Theo off the path and into cover.

  A Stalker-bird coasted low over the ruins, so close that Wren heard the sound of its wing feathers combing the air. Its too-big head swung mechanically from side to side.

  Cat scrambled over to join Wren and Theo. “I saw it circling up high when we left the camp,” she said. “I’ve been keeping my eye on it while you two nattered. I hoped it would go on its way, but it’s watching us. Must have seen that fire we lit last night.”

  Wren peeked out from under the slab of deck plate that hid them. The bird had gone higher, circling. As Wren watched, it flapped its raggedy wings and swooped off across the debris fields in the direction of Crouch End.

  “They’re definitely getting nosier,” said Cat.

  “Spy birds,” said Wren to Theo, thinking he looked scared. “They come over and take pictures of us for General Naga’s album.”

  Theo shook his head. “That wasn’t a spy bird, Wren. That was a Lammergeyer. We had a flock of them aboard my carrier when I was with the Storm. They’re used for armed reconnaissance.” The girls looked blankly at him, as girls so often did when he slipped into the Storm’s military jargon. “They’re attack birds, Wren! I think your friends are in danger…”

  The Green Storm’s birds were certainly taking a great interest in the debris fields that morning. As Tom worked away wrapping and packing the treasures he had found among the ruins ready for their transfer aboard New London, he kept hearing the clang clang clang of the danger bell, warning any Londoner who was out in the open to beware. By lunchtime the still-smoldering carcasses of three more spy birds were hanging outside the canteen, displayed as trophies by the keen lookouts who had shot them down with lightning guns when they showed too much interest in the Womb.

  Tom felt pleased by the way the rekilling of the birds lifted his fellow Londoners’ spirits, but he could not help wondering whether shooting them had been wise. Might it not just make their masters even more suspicious about what was happening inside the wreck?

  Chudleigh Pomeroy told him not to fret. “Those birds have seen nothing that would make the Storm think we’re anything but a rabble of squatters. Even if they had, the Storm have bigger worries than us. By the time they get around to sending airships over, New London will be gone.”

  Tom surreptitiously touched wood. He knew the Engineers were working as hard as they could to perfect the Childermass engines, but he could not help thinking of the failed test yesterday. What if the next test was a failure too?

  He wished he could do more to help. He had been moved when Chudleigh Pomeroy had asked him to become Head Historian, and he took his relic collecting seriously, but he knew that it was a made-up job, not really necessary. New London was about the future, not the past.

  With lunch over, Pomeroy announced that he was going to the Womb, and Tom volunteered to go with him. He had repaired the Jenny Haniver often enough, after all; he was sure the Engineers could find some small welding or wiring task to entrust him with aboard their new city. But they had not gone more than twenty yards from Crouch End when the danger bell began to ring again.

  “Merciful Quirke!” exclaimed Pomeroy, turning back toward the entrance. “How are we supposed to get anything done at all with these incessant interruptions? I’ve a good mind to write a stiff letter to General Naga and tell him it just ain’t neighborly…”

  Tom had grown quite used to the sight of distant Stalker-birds, but those new carcasses strung up outside the canteen made him uneasy. He glanced at the sky as he hurried Pomeroy toward shelter, and he was glad he had. The birds had returned in force, and they were not circling dots this time, but hurtling black shapes, dropping like missiles out of the sun.

  “Get down!” he shouted, shoving Pomeroy to the ground just as a bird swept over, its steel claws whisking past a fraction of an inch above the old man’s head. The danger bell was jangling again, and on the road to the Womb people were scattering and shouting. Saab Peabody, who’d downed a spy bird earlier, came running out of Crouch End with his lightning gun at the ready, keen to add another to his tally. A bird came down on him, flailing its razor claws at his face, and he dropped the gun and fell blinded and screaming. Other birds were crashing through the beanpoles in the vegetable gardens, harrying a small, terrified group of children as their teachers tried to herd them into the safety of Crouch End. Even in there, among the cozy huts, the dead wings flapped.

  Tom watched it all, trembling, doing his best to shelter Pomeroy. Saab seemed to have passed out; his lightning gun had fallen only a few feet away, and in his younger days Tom might have tried to reach it and do something heroic, but he was terrified of having another seizure, and so scared of the birds that he could barely move.

  Wren, Theo, and Cat had just emerged out of the rust hills west of Crouch End when the attack began. They all heard the bell clanging, and the two girls stared without really understanding as the people below them scattered before the swift, swooping shapes of the birds.

  “That’s Dad!” said Wren, seeing Tom pinned to the ground beside Pomeroy, about thirty feet away. She turned to Theo, but Theo had already seen Tom for himself, and he was sprinting toward him through the bird-scoured sunlight.

  Cat started to sob with panic. Wren snatched her crossbow and clicked the safety catch off. They acted very military, these young Londoners, but it had always been a game for them till now; they’d never seen real violence before. Wren had, and although she knew she would shake like jelly later, for the moment she was very calm. She took aim at a bird as it plunged toward Theo, and put a bolt through its body just before it reached him. One crossbow bolt would not rekill a Stalker-bird, but the blow was enough to throw it off course, and Theo ran on without even knowing the danger he had been in.

  The bird’s attention had been drawn to Wren. It swerved toward her. She grabbed another bolt from Cat’s quiver, but the bird would be upon her long before she could reload. She dropped the bow, snatched up a twisted length of iron drainpipe from the mounds of wreckage beside the path, and smashed it out of the air as its claws came reaching for her. Then Cat grabbed a shard of metal too, and together they beat the thrashing bird to pieces.

  Theo was halfway to Tom before he realized that he hadn’t a plan. He had only started running because he wanted Wren to see that he was brave, and because he had always thought that Mr. Natsworthy really couldn’t look after himself. Bird shadows whisked across the ground; the reflections of wings flashed up at him from puddles. He wasn’t even armed…

  A little way beyond Tom and the old man a silvery gun lay on the ground. Theo threw himself at it, feeling claws rip the air above him as he dived. He rolled over, fumbling with the gun, feeling for a trigger among its complicated array of wires and tubes. He wished it had been something simpler— all soldier
s knew that you couldn’t rely on that sort of back-engineered Old Tech garbage—but he told himself that beggars can’t be choosers, and pointed the gun at a passing bird. When he squeezed what he hoped was the trigger, a bolt of pure lightning dropped the bird limp and smoldering at his feet. Startled, he stood up, swinging the gun toward another bird. When he had brought down four of them, the others started to notice him, but by then Londoners were shooting at them too—gaudy crackles of energy leaping from other guns like his, smoking birds and showers of feathers falling all around.

  And then, quite suddenly, the attack was over. A lone bird soared eastward, too high to be touched by the bolts of lightning that crackled up at it. The danger bell clanged on and on and on until someone went to tell the girl who was ringing it that she could stop now. People appeared nervously from the holes and clefts where they had been hiding, brushing rust flakes from their clothes, silent and pale with shock. The injured moaned; their friends shouted for help.

  “Why did they attack?” people were asking. “Why now? After all these years…”

  “That wasn’t a real attack,” said Theo, starting to shiver a little as he imagined what could have happened to him if those had been heavy assault birds instead of a reconnaissance flock. “That was a probe; they want to test your strength.” He stared about, getting his first real look at this unlikely settlement.

  The Londoners stared back at him, wondering where he had sprung from, this young man in the uniform of their enemy.

  Tom stood slowly and started to help Chudleigh Pomeroy stand too. His heart was beating very hard, but he did not feel ill; his only worrying symptom was a hallucination that would not fade; he seemed to see Theo Ngoni standing before him, clutching a lightning gun.

  “Hello, Mr. Natsworthy,” said the hallucination, with a nervous wave.

  And then Wren came running—dirty, and with a cut on her forehead, but otherwise unharmed, thank Quirke—running to hug him and ask was he all right? and say, “It’s Theo, Daddy; Theo’s here; you remember Theo; Theo’s come all the way from Africa to find us.”

  Chapter 37

  Love Among the Ruins

  It was not a good time for a young Anti-Tractionist in a Green Storm greatcoat to arrive in London. People were frightened and angry, shaking their fists toward Shan Guo and asking what they had ever done to make the Mossies attack them. Things might have gone badly for Theo if it had not been for the fact that he had shot down five of the nightmare birds. “That don’t signify anything,” insisted Mr. Garamond. “That could all be part of their plan, to make us accept him so he can murder us all in our beds!” But Pomeroy told him to put a sock in it; the young man had saved him, and a lot of other people besides, and he, for one, was ready to welcome him.

  Tom and Wren joined in, explaining how Theo had flown with them for a time aboard the Jenny and visited the Traction City of Kom Ombo without showing any desire to murder anyone. And slowly, grudgingly, people started to admit that Theo might not be an agent of the Storm after all; only a lost stranger who should be offered hospitality.

  The injured were treated, the lookouts redoubled, the lightning guns recharged. Chudleigh Pomeroy, who looked badly shaken but insisted that he was quite all right, asked Theo a lot of questions about how the war was going, very few of which Theo could answer, because Chudleigh Pomeroy had a Historian’s notion of battles, all about tactics and the plans and decisions of generals, none of which Theo had really noticed while he was fleeing through the mud.

  In the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight shone right into Crouch End and through the windows of their little shack, Tom and Wren were finally able to get Theo to themselves. Over cake and nettle tea that Wren scrounged from the kitchens, they told him the story of their adventures and listened to his own. And it was there that Tom first learned of Theo’s meeting with Hester; of how she had rescued him in the sand sea, and of what had followed, right up to the moment when she had boarded that corvette with Lady Naga.

  Wren took her father’s hand as they listened. There were tears in his eyes. But all he said was, “Where is Hester now?”

  Theo shook his head. “It was such chaos on the line. I think her ship got away safely. But wherever she is, she’ll be all right. I’ve never met anyone as brave or as tough as her. And Mr. Grike will look after her…”

  “Grike,” said Tom, and shook his head. “So it was him you two met on Cloud 9. I thought I’d finished him forever on the Black Island. I hate to think of the old brute up and about again.”

  “I wouldn’t be here now if he wasn’t, Mr. Natsworthy,” said Theo. “He’s changed since Oenone re-Resurrected him.”

  Tom didn’t doubt what Theo said, but he still couldn’t shake off his memories of the old Grike, vicious and insane, who had hunted him through the Rustwater Marshes twenty years before. And now Grike and Hester were together again, just as they’d been when she was a young girl. A rare, bitter feeling filled him. He was jealous of the ancient Stalker.

  In the evening, when the sun had gone down into the haze of the west and the sky above the debris fields was turning lilac, Wren took Theo up to the Womb so that he could see for himself what the Londoners were doing there. She felt nervous, for although he was a moderate, civilized sort of Anti-Tractionist, he was still an Anti-Tractionist, and had been brought up to hate and fear all moving cities. But New London had become so important to her that she had to show him; she had to know what he felt about it.

  When they reached the hangar, he stood looking up for a long time at the new city, while Wren nervously explained how it had come to be, and what those funny mirror things were supposed to do. She couldn’t tell what he thought, or whether he was even listening.

  “But it hasn’t got any wheels,” he said at last.

  “I told you, it doesn’t need any,” said Wren. “So you needn’t be so old-fashioned about it; it isn’t going to churn up your precious green earth or squash any flowers or bunnies. It’s barely a Traction City at all. Think of it as a very large, low-flying airship.”

  They walked through the shadows under New London. Above their heads Engineers clambered about like spiders on the city’s belly, making adjustments and repairs. All around them, on the hangar floor, kegs of water and crates of salted meat were waiting to be loaded aboard, along with coops filled with clucking poultry, and stacks of tinned food unearthed by salvage teams from lost groceries and storerooms deep in the debris fields. Even the shacks where the people of London had lived for so long were being dismantled and loaded on handcarts and scrap-metal sledges for transport to the holds of the new suburb. As Wren led Theo outside, they met a whole line of them coming up the track from Crouch End, filling the twilight with dust and rust flakes. From the northern end of the Womb came the voices of Len Peabody and his mates, busy clearing wreckage from in front of the hangar entrance and setting the demolition charges that would blast the doors off when the time came for New London to depart.

  “So what do you think?” asked Wren, worried by Theo’s silence. She drew him off the track into a narrow cleft of the wreckage where apple trees grew. She thought a Mossie might feel more at ease there, amid the gentle whisper of the leaves. She thought he would be heartened by the way nature was reclaiming the ruins of London. “Tell me,” she said.

  “You are set on going with them?” Theo asked.

  “Yes,” said Wren. “Dad wants to. I want to too. I want to stand aboard New London and feel it moving, racing off to new places…”

  “Hunting?”

  “Trading, the way Anchorage used to.”

  “Bigger cities will hunt you.”

  “They won’t catch us.”

  A bird fluttered in the undergrowth. Only a blackbird, but it made them both flinch, and they moved closer together.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I didn’t expect any of this. I thought you were just exploring here.”

  “That’s Pennyroyal’s fault,” said Wren, who always talked too mu
ch when she felt nervous. “If he hadn’t let my letter get all soggy, you’d have known about Wolf’s theory—”

  “Hush…” Theo touched his finger to her lips to quiet her. He said, “I thought you’d be in danger now the barbarians are driving east again. I hoped I might find you and take you and your father home with me somehow, to Zagwa.”

  Oh, bother! thought Wren, because she had been pretty sure that he was about to kiss her again, and now she saw it wasn’t going to work. He was a Mossie, and she was a city girl. He was never going to approve of New London. And then she thought, Well, what does it matter? The way things were going, they might both be eaten by Harrowbarrow or pecked to bits by Stalker-birds before tomorrow night.

  So she kissed him instead.

  A single electronic eye focused for an instant on Wren and Theo, zooming in on the smudge of their body heat amid the cold sprawl of the wreck. A computer brain considered them for a fraction of a fraction of a second, then forgot them.

  ODIN swung its gaze westward, pulling back, struggling to make sense of the incomprehensible world it had awoken to. Where were the sprawling cities of its masters, New York and San Angeles, that it had been put into orbit to defend? Where had the new mountain ranges come from? All those new seas? And what were those huge vehicles creeping across Europe, trailing their long sooty smears of exhaust smoke behind them?

  The old weapon clung to the one familiar thing that this changed world could offer it: the stream of coded data rising like a silken thread from somewhere in the uplands of central Asia.

  Chapter 38

  The million Voices of the Wind

  The cities’ war was going well. Panzerstadt Winterthur had been lost and Darmstadt and the Dortmund Conurbation were bogged down in the Rustwater somewhere, but the rest had found resistance surprisingly light. Up in the smoky skies their flying machines wheeled and swerved, harrying the withdrawing schools of Green Storm airships, while their own ships, airborne gun platforms hung from armored gasbags, lured flocks of Stalker-birds in close and hammered them into tornadoes of slime and feathers.