A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  He lunged forward, and the point of his sword struck sparks from the suburb’s armor inches from Theo’s foot. Theo looked at Wren. Near her, where one of the chunky rivets that held Harrowbarrow’s armor in place stood slightly proud of the plating, a shard of wreckage had snagged. Theo threw himself down and pulled it free. It was an old length of half-inch pipe, rusty and sharp at the ends. It was too long and heavy to use for a sword, but Theo had nothing better, so he turned with a cry, swinging it at Kobold. Kobold jumped back, raising his blade to deflect the blow. He looked surprised; even pleased. “That’s the spirit!” he shouted.

  Aboard the Fury, Naga said, “We have to silence that swivel gun. There is no other way we can get within range…”

  “Sir!” one of his aviators interrupted. “On the suburb’s back—”

  Naga swung his telescope along the wood-louse curve of Harrowbarrow’s spine. Twenty yards behind the gun emplacement two figures seemed to be dancing—no, fighting; he saw the flash of sparks as their swords met. “One of our men?”

  “Can’t tell, sir. But if we fire on the gun, we may kill whoever it is…”

  “That can’t be helped, Commander. Let their gods look after them; we have work to do.”

  A flight of rockets sprang from the airship, and Wren ducked as one sizzled past her, close enough for her to glimpse the snarling dragon face painted on its nose cone and the Chinese characters chalked along its flank. It burst on the armor close to the gun turret, but not close enough to do more than rattle shrapnel against it. The other rockets went wide, exploding harmlessly on spikes of wreckage. Harrowbarrow was speeding through a region where long, jagged shards from London’s upper tiers lay heaped on top of one another, forming a lattice through which the westering sun poked its unhealthy crimson beams. Clinging to the armor with both hands, Wren looked up at the sharp spines flicking past. It was like rushing through an enormous, untidy cutlery drawer. If we run ourselves upon one of those, she thought, it will put an end to all our problems…

  The blades did not seem to trouble Wolf Kobold. He waved his sword, shouting something to the gun crew, and the gun turned with a swirl of fairground music and filled the air astern with black puffballs, so that the airship yawed hastily and vanished for a while behind the wreckage. Then he renewed his attack on Theo, more earnest and less playful now, as if Wren and her boyfriend were a distraction he wanted to be rid of before the serious business began.

  Theo did his best, grunting and shouting out with effort as he swung the rusty pipe to and fro, trying to parry Wolf’s blows, but he was no swordsman, and he found it harder than Wolf to keep his footing on the lurching, lumbering armor. After little more than a minute, during which Theo was driven steadily back toward the housing of the swivel gun, Wolf made a sudden feint, and Theo, lurching sideways to avoid his blade, lost his footing. He fell awkwardly, his head cracking against the armor underfoot. The pipe flew out of his sweaty hands. Wren caught it as it clattered past her. Wolf was already standing over Theo, sword raised to finish him.

  She threw herself forward, not knowing what she meant to do, just determined that Wolf should not have it all his own way. She heard somebody scream, and it was her; a hard, ragged scream of terror and rage and panic that seemed to give her the strength she needed as she swung the pipe to fend off Wolf’s descending sword.

  More sparks; a shock that jarred her arms in their sockets. For a comical moment Wolf stood amazed, staring at the sword hilt in his hand, the blade broken off halfway along its length. He looked at Wren. He shrugged and threw the broken sword away. He flipped his coat open and pulled a shiny new revolver from its holster.

  Despite all the noise, the relentless speed, it seemed to grow very quiet and still on the back of Harrowbarrow in those last moments. Even the swivel gun had stopped firing. When Wren glanced around in the hope of spotting some miraculous escape, she saw the gunners gawping at her out of their little window.

  “Good-bye, Wren,” said Wolf.

  He hadn’t noticed that persistent white airship swinging into range again above his suburb’s stern. The rockets tore past him as he pulled the trigger, and the shot he fired went wide, flicking through Wren’s hair without touching her. The shock wave from the exploding swivel gun kicked him backward; he struggled to save himself, slipped, fell forward, and the sharp end of the pipe that Wren was still clutching went through him just beneath his breastbone. The impact knocked her down, and the other end of the pipe wedged against a seam in the armor, driving it clean through Wolf’s body.

  “Oh!” he shouted, looking down at it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Wren.

  Wolf raised his head and stared at her. His eyes were very blue and wide, and oddly innocent. He looked as if he were about to cry. When Wren pulled at the pipe, with some idea of tugging it out of him, he lurched sideways, pipe and all, and went tumbling away from her like a broken doll down the long slope of the suburb’s flank until he hit the tracks.

  Later she would pray that he had been dead by the time those sliding slabs of machinery caught him. She would tell herself that it had not been his screams she heard as he was snatched and mangled and plowed down into the earth, only the shrieking of stressed metal somewhere, some shard of long-dead London crying out as Harrowbarrow ground over it.

  But by then they were on the outer edge of the debris field. A wide plain stretched ahead of them, empty as an ocean—except for the lights of New London, which was a quarter mile ahead and racing northward, crossing open country now, the wreck of its mother city left behind it like a sloughed-off skin.

  “Girl!” someone was shouting, and in her shocked state Wren could not work out who it was; not Wolf, for sure; not his gunners, who had vanished with their swiveling turret; not Theo, who was struggling to his feet, his face streaked with blood from where he’d struck his head. She looked up. The Storm’s white ship hung low above her, keeping pace with her by some miracle of stunt flying that only an aviator could properly appreciate. Reaching down to her from a hatch in the gondola was something that she took at first to be a Stalker, until he shouted again, “Girl!” and beckoned irritably for her to take his hand, and she recognized General Naga.

  The Fury’s gondola smelled of gun smoke and air fuel. Naga strode around issuing orders to his aviators, glancing at Wren just long enough to say, “You are Londoners? Captured by the harvester?”

  Wren just nodded, clinging tight to Theo and finding it hard to believe that they were both still alive. It did not seem like the moment to try and explain that she and General Naga had met before. She could not stop shaking, or thinking about Wolf Kobold. As the Fury veered away from Harrowbarrow and flew toward New London, she let Theo go and went to crouch in a corner, where she was sick till her stomach was empty.

  They touched down on New London’s stern, where a crowd of Londoners and Green Storm soldiers were waiting. “Wren!” cried Angie happily, waving, forgetting that Wren had ever been a suspected spy.

  “Miss Natsworthy! Mr. Ngoni! Thank Quirke you’re safe!” shouted Mr. Garamond, helping them from the gondola. No thanks to you, Wren felt like saying, but then she realized that he already knew that, and that his clumsy hug was his way of saying sorry, and she hugged him back.

  The new city had a curious feel; there were none of the tremors and half-muffled shocks and lurches that you felt aboard a Traction City, just a sense of dreamlike movement, and of speed. But perhaps not quite enough speed, for Harrowbarrow filled the view astern, its mouthparts opening to reveal a hot gleam of furnaces and factories inside.

  “You’d have thought they’d stop when Kobold died,” said Theo.

  “They don’t know,” Wren replied. “Or maybe they do, and they don’t care. Mr. Hausdorfer and the others can handle a simple chase without their master. Harrowbarrow never cared about Wolf the way Wolf cared about Harrowbarrow.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Wolf. The way he had looked at her when he’d realized she’d killed him
would stay with her always. She tried to tell herself that it was good she felt so guilty and so soiled by what she’d done. Better that than to be like her mother, and not care. But it did not feel good.

  She took Theo’s hand, and together they went to stand among the other Londoners at the stern rail. Behind them, Naga was giving orders to his surviving officers, telling Subgeneral Thien, “You will return to Batmunkh Gompa with the Protecting Veil. My wife believes that the Stalker Fang controls the new terror weapon. Help her find it and destroy it.”

  “Yes, Excellency…”

  “And New London is to be granted safe passage through our territories.”

  “Yes, Excellency…”

  “Now I want everybody off the Fury before I take her up.”

  “But Excellency, you cannot fly alone!”

  “Why not? I flew alone at Xanne-Sandansky and Khamchatka. I flew alone against Panzerstadt Breslau. I should be able to handle a filthy little barbarian harvester like this.”

  Thien understood; he bowed and saluted and started shouting orders. Wren, looking round to see what all the excitement was about, saw the Fury’s crew jumping down onto the deck plates, saw Naga heaving himself aboard. She looked away. What was happening astern was far more interesting than anything the Storm could do. She barely noticed when the Fury took off again.

  Harrowbarrow was driving toward them through sprays of wet earth. Its armor was holed, there were fires on its upper decks, and one of its tracks was grinding, but Hausdorfer didn’t care. He’d been skeptical about this place his master had brought them so far to eat, but now he’d seen it move, seen it fly, he understood what young Kobold had been on about. “More power!” he screamed into his speaking tubes. “Open the jaws! They are defenseless! They are ours!”

  Naga turned the Fury toward the oncoming suburb and took her down almost to ground level. She was a good ship; he enjoyed the way she answered to his touch on the wheels and levers, and the purr of her powerful engines when he switched them to ramming speed. As Harrowbarrow’s jaws opened, he aimed straight at the red glow of the furnaces in her dismantling yards.

  When the Harrowbarrovians started to understand what he was planning, guns began firing from inside the jaws, shattering glass in the gondola windows, starting fires.

  A shell from a hand cannon punched through Naga’s breastplate, but his armor kept him upright, and his mechanized gauntlets gripped the helm, keeping the blazing ship on course. The suburb was closing its jaws, but not quickly enough. Naga fired all the Fury’s remaining rockets, and watched them streak ahead of him into its maw. “Oenone,” he said, and her name, and the thought of her, went with him into the light.

  The blast was brief; a sunflower blossoming in the dusk, stuffed with shrapnel seeds. There was a blunt, muffled boom and then other sounds; thuds and squelches as large fragments of wreckage rained down into the Out-Country. Aboard New London no one cheered. Even the soldiers of the Storm, who had grown up singing jolly songs about the destruction of whole cities, looked appalled. One or two small pieces of debris landed on the deck, plinking like dropped coins. Wren stooped to pick up one that fell near her. It was a rivet head from Harrowbarrow’s hull, still warm with the heat of the explosion. She put it in her pocket, thinking that it would make a good exhibit for the New London Museum.

  What was left of Harrowbarrow—the broken stern section, half filled with fires—settled into the Out-Country mud. It would be part of the landscape soon, like old London. The survivors, stumbling clear, stared about in bewilderment. Some looked toward the debris fields that filled the southern horizon, wondering what sort of life they would be able to make there. Others ran after New London, shouting out for help, begging their fellow Tractionists not to leave them here defenseless in the lands of the Storm. But New London was beyond earshot, pulling away from them quickly across the vast, dark plain, smaller and smaller, until it was only a fleck, a gleam of amber windows dwindling in that enormous twilight.

  Chapter 52

  Last Words

  The Stalker Fang limped around her chamber. Her bronze face was lit by the winking lights on the heap of machinery by the green numbers that flicked and squiggled on her Goggle Screens. Through the open doorway Tom and Hester watched, and each time her eyes were turned away from him, Tom made another little movement, easing himself closer to Hester, until he was able to reach out and touch the knife in her belt.

  “Not long now,” the Stalker whispered, glad of this audience to whom she could explain her work.

  Tom was thinking of Wren, hoping that New London would go nowhere near the Tannhäusers or any of the other mountains ODIN was to target. “Why volcanoes?” he asked. “I still don’t see how that can make the world green…”

  The Stalker’s fingers spidered over ivory keyboards. “You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn’t only Traction Cities that poison the air and tear up the Earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It’s human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys. The Green Storm would never have understood that, which is why I didn’t tell them about my plans for ODIN. If we are really to protect the good Earth, we must first cleanse it of human beings.”

  “That’s insane!” cried Tom.

  “Inhuman, perhaps,” the Stalker admitted. “The ash of volcanoes will choke the sky and shroud the Earth in darkness. Winter will reign for hundreds of years. Mankind will perish. But life will survive. Life always does. When the skies clear at last, the world will grow green again. Lichens, ferns, grasses, forests, insects; higher animals eventually. But no more people. They only spoil things.”

  “Anna would not want that,” said Tom.

  “I am not Anna. I just use her memories to understand the world. And I understand that humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys that the good Earth cannot support. All human civilizations fall, Tom, and all for the same reason: Humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever.”

  Tom struggled to rise, wondering if he could reach the machine, smash it, and pull out all those complicated cords and ducts. The Stalker Fang seemed to read his thoughts; the long blades slid out of her fingertips.

  “Do be sensible, Tom,” she whispered. “You’re very ill, and I’m a Stalker. You’d never make it, and Hester wants you to stay alive for as long as you can. She loves you very much, you know.”

  She moved behind her pile of machinery, making some adjustment to the cables that trailed up through the ceiling to the antenna on the roof. Tom tugged the knife out of Hester’s belt, and she fumbled it from him and clasped it between her hands, sawing awkwardly at the old ropes the Stalker had used to tie her wrists.

  As he crept across the causeway, Pennyroyal tried to keep calm by imagining how he would describe all these adventures to his enthralled readership. Caution urged that I should stay away from that dreadful house, hut the fate of whole cities hung in the balance, and my poor companions were prisoners within. I knew that to run would leave an irredeemable blot on the honor of the Pennyroyals! (And I do need that key, Poskitt-damn-it!) My faithful native companion, Fishcake (can that be his real name?), led me to the end of the fatal causeway and would go no farther. I would not have allowed it anyway, for I could never let one so young risk his life in mortal combat with the Stalker. (Stalkeress? Stalkerine? Gods, I hope it doesn’t come to actual combat! I wish that lad had had the nerve to come instead of me; the beastly little coward…) It was a little unsettling, I confess, but as I went on alone through the gathering darkness, I began to feel curiously nerveless. I have found myself in a lot of dicey situations over the years, and what I’ve learned is that it’s always best to remain cool, collected, and— GREAT POSKITT’S HAIRY ARSE WHAT’S THAT?

  Only an owl!

  Only an owl…

  Shuddering, Pennyroyal took a nip of brandy from his secret hip flask and started hunting along the water’s edge for Tom’s anti-Stalker gun. The boy had said that Hester had dropped it here som
ewhere. Pennyroyal didn’t mean to go any closer to that damned house without it. Ah! There it was. Still humming. Looked undamaged. A dashed odd-looking weapon, but they don’t call me Dead-eye Pennyroyal for nothing! Setting the stock of the strange gun firmly against my shoulder (is that where it’s supposed to go?), I resumed my catlike progress…

  The Stalker Fang was busy with her machinery. From time to time the words and numbers crawling across the Goggle Screen were replaced with a furry, grayish picture. Tom realized that he was seeing what no human being had seen for millennia: the world from space, viewed through the eye of ODIN. Oddly, it was not very impressive.

  Could ODIN really destroy humanity? Surely it would break, or run out of power, or something in that crazy stack of old machinery that the Stalker was using to talk to it would go wrong, and that would be the end of her plans. It made him angry that he and Hester had come so far and sacrificed so much to avert such a tatty effort. At least MEDUSA had looked worth dying for; its entrails had filled a cathedral, and its cobra hood had towered over London. This new weapon was just space junk, controlled by a mad old Stalker from a place that looked and smelled like a teenager’s bedroom…

  Beside him, Hester gave a little grunt of triumph as the knife severed the rope on her wrists. She stooped to start work on the one that bound her ankles.

  The Stalker Fang was talking to ODIN again, tapping at her ivory keys, whispering the codes to herself as she conducted her bargain-basement apocalypse. Sometimes she whispered something to Tom and Hester too: “Just think, my dears—all that pretty lava …” Anna Fang had liked having someone to talk to, and the Stalker she had become had inherited the taste. When Hester whispered, “Now!” and Tom rolled off the bed and stood up, she said, “Where are you going?”

  “Come on!” hissed Hester, her arm around him, supporting him, dragging him toward the nearest window. She hadn’t Tom’s education, and she hadn’t really followed the Stalker’s rambling talk. All she cared about was saving Tom. She refused to believe that there was no hope at all.