A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Theo slammed the hatch shut behind them and started to drag Wren away from it ; shouting something about Kobold’s men following them up, but before they had gone very far, the metal around them suddenly erupted in sparks and little spurts of smoke and dust, and she realized they were being machine-gunned—not very accurately, thank Quirke.

  Theo flung himself down, half on top of her, as a plump white shape soared above the wreckage to larboard. Through the spray of rust and soil flung up by Harrowbarrow’s tracks Wren saw that it was a rather elderly-looking airship with the markings of the Green Storm, gun turrets swiveling to squirt fire at the racing suburb.

  “The Storm are here!” she shouted.

  “We’re friends!” Theo yelled. Wren held on to him to save him from being thrown off Harrowbarrow’s back as he waved his arms and shouted, “Help! Help!” But to the aviators in that ship he was just another flea-size shape creeping about on the suburb they’d been ordered to destroy; they swung their guns toward him again, and Wren heard the bullets swishing overhead as she pulled him down beside her.

  A few yards from where they lay a circular hatch cover slid open in the suburb’s armor, and a revolving gun emplacement popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It had been built on the turntable of an old fairground carousel from a coastal pleasure town that Harrowbarrow had eaten long ago, and as it spun around and around, cheerful calliope music came from it, along with puffs of gun smoke and streamers of white steam. The barrels of its four long guns recoiled rhythmically into their armored housing as they fired, lacing the sky above the suburb with cannon shells. The airship that had shot at Wren and Theo burst into flames and was left quickly behind as the suburb went thundering on. Overhead, two other ships veered away, envelopes and tail fins filling with ragged holes.

  The coming of Harrowbarrow could be heard in the Womb by that time. As the Londoners struggled aboard their new city with whatever possessions they had managed to save, the scrap-metal clangor of the approaching suburb filled the sky outside and echoed around the central hangar.

  A Green Storm runner came to find Naga, who was waiting on the open stretch of deck plate at New London’s stern. “Our airships can’t hold her, sir. The Belligerent Peony has just been downed. Only the Fury and the Protecting Veil are left.”

  “Pull them clear,” ordered Naga. “Tell the ground troops to get aboard this … machine.” He turned as Lavinia Childermass came running out of the stairwell that led down to her engine districts. “Well, Londoner?”

  “We are ready, I think,” the old Engineer said.

  “Good. The harvester suburb is nearly upon us. I am going aboard my airship. I shall try to hold it off as long as I can, but it is strong. Best pray that your New London is fast.”

  “It is fast,” promised Dr. Childermass as Naga turned away, his stomping armor carrying him toward the boarding ladders up which squads of Green Storm troopers were hurrying. She ran after him, jostled by passing soldiers. “You should stay, General! The birth of a town is a great event!”

  Naga turned, and bowed, and hurried on. “Good luck, Engineer!” she heard him shout. She watched him go, thinking how strange it was that he should turn out to be New London’s midwife. Then, remembering her position, she went haring back to her own post. The deck plates were trembling as, one by one, her assistants threw the starting levers of the Childermass engines. By the time she reached her command room in the heart of the underdeck, the faint whine of the repellers had risen to a pitch beyond her hearing, and there was an odd, bobbing movement in the floor. New London was airborne.

  She reached for the speaking tube that linked her to the lord mayor’s navigation room, high in the new town hall. “Hello! Ready?”

  “Ready,” came Garamond’s voice, muffled and peevish. Lavinia Childermass hung the tube in its cradle and looked at the scared, expectant, grimy faces of her crew. Even down here she could hear the crash and rattle as Harrowbarrow shouldered its way toward her through the debris fields. She nodded, and her people sprang to their controls.

  Outside the Womb, Naga watched Harrowbarrow’s scouts scurry aside as the noise of their suburb’s approach grew louder. He fired his pistol at a couple of them, to speed them on their way. The sky above those rust hills west of Crouch End was filling with dust and debris, as if a scrap-metal geyser had erupted there. And suddenly the hills themselves shifted, slithered, bulged and burst apart, and tearing through them came Harrowbarrow’s brutal snout.

  The Womb lurched and seemed to settle. At its northern end Peabody’s men had set off their explosive charges, and with a dreamy slowness the tall, corroded doors at the hangar mouth fell forward, crashing down into the rust and rubble outside.

  Harrowbarrow ground its way over the ruins of Crouch End, bright rags of curtains and carpet snagging on its clawed tracks. The cruiser Protecting Veil fired a flight of rockets at it and rose out of range before the one remaining swivel gun on Harrowbarrow’s back could swing around to target her. The Fury swooped toward the Womb, and Naga ran forward and leaped aboard as she hovered for a moment just above the ground. By the time his armor had hauled him through the hatch and onto the flight deck, the ship was high again. An aviatrix came running to him with reports, but Naga waved her away, tense as an expectant father. He went to a gun slit and peered down at the mouth of the Womb.

  “Come on!” he muttered. “Come on!”

  Crouching on Harrowbarrow’s spine, Wren and Theo tried to shield each other as the rust hills broke over the suburb like a wave. Giant fists and fangs of metal came clattering and scraping over the armor, some tumbling high into the air, some caroming over the hull so close that Wren felt the wind of them as they whisked past her. Then they were gone, Crouch End was being crushed beneath the tracks, and ahead, on the crest of the next ridge, the Womb lay waiting. “Look!” she shouted. “Theo! Look!”

  From the open doorway of the old hangar New London was emerging, the magnetic mirrors on its flanks shining like sovereigns. It hovered outside the Womb for a moment, dipping a little, uncertain of itself. A newborn city, thought Wren, like something from the olden days, and she wished and wished that her father could be here with her to see it.

  Righting itself, New London started to move, the heat haze shimmer beneath its hull increasing as it put on speed, hovering away northward across the debris field. And Harrowbarrow swung northward too, the jolt of its snarling engines throwing Wren off her balance as it began powering in pursuit of the new city. She sprawled awkwardly backward, afraid for a moment that she would roll down the slope into the endlessly grinding teeth of the suburb’s tracks, but she managed to find a handhold. As she clawed her way back to Theo, she saw the hatch they had come through heave open again and Wolf Kobold climb out.

  He looked pleased to see them, but not in a good way.

  Chapter 50

  The Stalker’s House

  There were some blue squares. Dusty blue, against a background of black. Tom, who had not expected to wake at all, woke slowly, from half-remembered dreams. The squares were sky, showing through holes in a crumbling roof. The clouds had cleared; there was a patch of evening sunlight coming and going on the mildewed wall. He lay on something soft, and there were smells of must and damp around him. His hands and feet felt miles away; his head was too heavy to lift; someone had crammed a big, square slab of stone inside his chest. Faint jabs of pins and needles in his limbs let him know that he was still alive.

  “Tom?” A whisper. He moved his head. Hester bent over him. “Tom, my dearest … you blacked out. The Stalker said it was your heart. She said you were dying, but I knew you wouldn’t—”

  “The Stalker …” Tom began to understand where he was. The Stalker Fang had scooped him up and taken him inside with her. She had laid him on a bed; an old, worm-eaten, weed-grown bed whose draperies had been nibbled thin by moths, but still a bed; the place you put someone you meant to take care of.

  “She let us live,” he said.

  He
ster nodded. “She’s tied my hands and feet, but not yours. She didn’t bother with yours. If you can reach the knife in my belt…”

  She fell silent as the Stalker Fang limped into the room and sat down on the end of the bed, watching Tom with her cold green eyes.

  “Anna?” he asked weakly.

  “I am not Anna,” whispered the Stalker. “Just a bundle of Anna’s memories. But I’m pleased you’re here, Tom. Anna was very fond of you. You are her very last memory. Lying in the snow, and you looking down and calling her name.”

  “I remember,” said Tom faintly. “I thought she was already dead.”

  “Nearly,” whispered the Stalker. “Not quite. You’ll understand. Soon you’ll make the same journey.”

  “But I’m not ready.”

  “Nor was Anna. Perhaps no one ever is.”

  Behind her, through the open doorway, Tom could see a room stuffed with machines; lights and screens and bits of equipment too complicated for his tired, shocked brain to fathom. He said, “ODIN …”

  “I talk to it from here.”

  “Why did you turn it on your own people?”

  The Stalker watched him with her head tipped a little to one side. “An overture, before the symphony begins,” she whispered. “By attacking both sides, I made each think the other was to blame; they will be too busy with each other to come looking for me, and that will give me the time I need.”

  “To do what?”

  “I have been preparing a sequence of commands, a long and complicated sequence. I shall begin transmitting them soon, when ODIN comes clear of the mountains again. They will divert it onto new orbits, give it new targets to strike at.”

  “What targets?”

  “Volcanoes,” said the Stalker. She reached out gently and stroked Tom’s hair. “Tonight ODIN will strike at forty points along the Tannhäuser chain. Then on across the world: the Deccan volcano maze; the Hundred Islands…”

  “But why?” asked Hester. “Why volcanoes?”

  “I am making the world green again.”

  “What,” cried Tom, “by smothering it in smoke and ash, and killing thousands of people?”

  “Millions of people. Don’t get excited, Tom; your poor heart might not take it, and I am so looking forward to having someone sensible to talk to.”

  “And what about me?” asked Hester, as if she were afraid the Stalker was trying to steal Tom away from her.

  “As long as you don’t try to be foolish or destructive, you are safe. I suppose you will starve in a week or so—there is no food left here. But until then I shall enjoy your company. Anna always felt our destinies were linked, from that first night aboard Stayns…”

  The Stalker stopped talking and looked behind her, where a light had begun to flash among the thickets of cabling in the next room; red, red, red.

  “No rest for the wicked,” she whispered.

  Outside, Fishcake blundered sobbing along the lakeshore. His Stalker had hit him. She could have killed him. She had cast him out. She didn’t care about little Fishcake anymore. She had never cared, not really. He sniveled and whimpered, stumbling over rocks and shingle until he missed his footing and splashed into the shallows. The cold water startled him into silence.

  Away across the water the furnace that had been the Jenny Haniver was dying down into a comforting red bonfire. Fishcake tramped along the curve of the shoreline to the wreck site. There was nothing left of the airship now but struts and ribs and one buckled, glowing engine pod, but the explosion had showered the contents of her holds across the reed beds, and amid the debris Fishcake found a few food cans. Their labels were burned off, of course, but they made encouraging sloshing noises when he shook them, and one of them (Tricky Dicky be praised!) was a square tin of fish— sardines, or pilchards—with a key fixed to the lid. Fishcake twisted it open and ate greedily, scooping the fish and the delicious, salty juice into his mouth.

  He felt better with some food inside him and started to nose around among the reeds for other scraps. It wasn’t long before he heard the plaintive noises coming from among the rocks uphill. “Mmmmm! Mmmmm!”

  Fishcake crept closer, thinking that Tom and Hester must have had a companion aboard their ship who’d been wounded in the crash and whom they’d abandoned (how like them!). But when he reached the place, he found it was a poor old man, trussed up and gagged; another of Tom and Hester’s victims.

  “Great Poskitt!” the man gasped when Fishcake pulled the gag off, and “Brave boy! Thank you!” as Fishcake used the sharp edge of the sardine tin to saw through his ropes.

  “They’re inside,” said Fishcake.

  “Who?”

  “Hester and her man. The Stalker took ’em inside. Says they’re her friends. How could anybody think Hester was her friend? That face—enough to put you off your breakfast. If you’d had any breakfast. I haven’t had none for weeks. Help me open this tin, Mister.”

  He was asking the right man, said Pennyroyal, and as soon as the ropes parted, he reached inside his coat and fetched out an explorer’s pocketknife, a miraculous object that unfolded to reveal a can opener, a corkscrew, a small pair of scissors, and a device for getting stones out of airship docking clamps, as well as an array of blades that made brisk work of the ropes on his feet. It occurred to Fishcake to wonder why he had not mentioned the existence of the knife before Fishcake went to the trouble of cutting his hands free with a sardine tin, but he wanted to like his new friend, so he decided he was probably concussed. There were some gashes on his head, and blood had run down his face like jam. (Fishcake was still much preoccupied with thoughts of food.)

  They opened three tins. There was algae stew in one, rice pudding in another, and condensed milk in the third. It was the best meal Fishcake had ever tasted.

  “I say,” ventured Pennyroyal, watching him eat. “You seem a bright lad. Would you know a way out of here, at all?”

  “Popjoy’s sky yacht,” muttered Fishcake, wiping milk from his chin. “Over there near the house. I don’t know how to fly it.”

  “I do! Could we snaffle it, do you think?”

  Fishcake licked the lid of the rice pudding tin and shook his head. “Need keys. Can’t start the engines without keys, and you’d need engines among all these mountains, wouldn’t you?”

  Pennyroyal nodded. “Where are the keys? Just out of interest?”

  “She’s got them. Around her neck. On a string. But I’m not going up there again. Not after what she did! After all I went through for her!”

  The boy started to cry. Pennyroyal was unused to children. He patted his shoulder and said, “There, there,” and “That’s women for you!” He thought about keys and air yachts and glanced nervously at the house on the crag. Some sort of antenna thing on the roof was turning, glinting blood-red in the rays of the sinking sun.

  Ten miles away, in frozen silt on the bed of a mountain lake, Grike stirred. His eyes switched on, lighting up constellations of drifting matter. He remembered falling. He had fallen past crags and cliffs, and punched through the crust of ice on this lake, leaving an amusing hole the shape of a spread-eagled man. He could not see the hole above him, so he guessed the lake was deep, and that night was falling in the world above.

  He pried himself out of the silt and started walking. The water grew shallower as he neared the shore. Thick ice formed a rippled ceiling twenty feet overhead, then ten. Soon he was able to reach up with his fists and punch his way through it. He dragged himself free, an ugly hatchling breaking out of a cold egg.

  The moon was rising. Shards of the Jenny Haniver’s fallen engine pod shone on the scree high above him. He climbed toward it, sniffing for Hester’s scent.

  Chapter 51

  The Chase

  The Londoners had always imagined themselves leaving the debris fields in a leisurely way, perhaps moving at no more than walking speed until they grew used to New London’s controls. Instead, here they were, barreling north through the wreck of old London as fas
t as the new city could go, slaloming around tumbles of old tier supports and giant, corroded heaps of tracks and wheels. Down in the engine rooms the Engineers heaved desperately on the levers that angled the Magnetic Repellers, while up in the steering chamber at the top of the town hall Mr. Garamond and his navigators peered out through unglazed, unfinished viewing windows and shouted to the helmsmen, “Left a bit! Right a bit! Right a bit! Oh, I mean, left, left, LEFT!”

  Harrowbarrow raced after them, only half a mile behind, steam fuming from its blunt snout as it readied its mouth parts for the kill. It did not have to swerve and wriggle as New London did; tall heaps of wreckage that the new city had to avoid Harrowbarrow simply butted its way through. The constant crunch and shudder of these collisions kept threatening to jolt Wren and Theo off the precarious handholds they were clinging to, high on the harvester’s spine. But Wolf Kobold, who was well used to his suburb’s movements, never lost his footing, and barely paused as he came toward them, except to glance sometimes at the view ahead, and grin when he saw the gap narrowing between Harrowbarrow and its prey.

  “You see?” he shouted. “It was all for nothing, Wren! Another ten minutes and that precious place of yours will be in the ’Barrow’s gut. And you; you and your black boyfriend—I’m going to string your bowels off the yard roof like paper chains, and nail up your carcasses in the slave hold so your London friends can see what comes to those who try to make a fool of me!”

  He was close enough by then to swipe at them with his sword. They scrambled backward, away from him. The swiveling gun emplacement behind them let out another stuttering roar as a white airship soared past astern, but Kobold only laughed. “Don’t think the Mossies can save you! They won’t dare come in range of that gun.”