A Darkling Plain me-4 Page 14

  “There is a hermitage on Zhan Shan,” she whispered. “We shall break the journey there.”

  Zhan Shan was a volcano so huge and high that Fishcake had been piloting the Spider Baby across its lower slopes for days without even noticing. The whole world seemed to form the roots of Zhan Shan, and its head was lost above the clouds. The narrow tracks that wound up and up across the lava fields were lined with shrines. Raggedy silk prayer flags clapped and fluttered and tore away in wisps of silk and cotton, carrying prayers to the realms of the Sky Gods.

  “This is a holy mountain,” said Fishcake’s Stalker, turning into Anna again and picking him up, because the path was steep and the air thin and he was close to exhaustion. He wondered why she had come back now. Had it been the sound of those flags flapping that had woken her?

  “No one knows how it came to be,” she whispered. “Perhaps it was the Gods who put it here, perhaps the Ancients. Something ripped the land open, and the hot blood of the earth welled out and made Zhan Shan and all the young mountains north of here. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun. The winter lasted for decades. But look how beautiful this land is now!”

  “You can’t see it.”

  “I remember it. I loved these mountains, when I was alive. It is good to be home.”

  After a day and a night, Fishcake saw a light ahead, twinkling at him through the twilight and the silent-falling snow. They passed a field where a few hairy cattle stood with blankets of snow on their backs. Beyond it lay a tiny house with a steep roof and eaves that curled up at the corners like burning paper. It was built from the black volcanic stone of the mountainside, but there were shutters and a pillared porch made of carved wood painted red and gold and blue, which gave it a cheerful look. A dog trotted out to greet the travelers, then slunk off whimpering when it sniffed the Stalker.

  “What is this place?” Anna whispered.

  “Don’t you know?” asked Fishcake. “You brought us here.”

  “I have never been here before. I just followed the road the other me set us on.”

  Fishcake looked critically at the little house. “She said there was a hermitage. She said we’d break our journey there. Is this it?”

  His Stalker did not know.

  The door had two gold eyes to ward off evil. Fishcake thumped with his small fist on the planks between them. He heard a movement behind the door, then silence. He knocked again. Above, on the sheer buttresses of the mountain, the evening mist made ghosts.

  The door opened. A person in a red robe of some thick, crude-woven fabric. A woman, Fishcake decided. She had a brown face, hollow and large eyed, and her hair had been shaved down to a shadow on her bony skull. “We need food, please, Missis, and water,” Fishcake began, but the woman was not even looking at him. She stared over his head at the Stalker. Her mouth moved, but no words came out, only little whimpering sounds. She put her left hand to her face, and then her right, and Fishcake saw that the right hand was not really a hand at all, just a shiny metal hook.

  “Anna?” the woman said. She took a step backward into the darkness of her little house. “No! You are not her!” she said. “I tried and tried, but you are not—”

  “Sathya!” whispered the Stalker, and lurched past Fishcake to wrap her steel arms around the frightened woman. Fishcake shouted out, because he thought for a moment that she had turned back into the Stalker Fang again and was murdering the stranger. When he saw that she was just embracing her, he felt relieved, and then jealous.

  “Sathya!” his Stalker whispered, tracing the lines of the woman’s face with her metal fingertips. “I haven’t seen you since—oh, that night at Batmunkh Gompa, the snow, and the fire, and Valentine… Oh Sathya, how old you’ve grown! And your poor hand! What happened to your hand?”

  Sathya looked at her, and looked at Fishcake, and fainted with a little sigh, collapsing on the flagstone floor.

  “She was my friend, my student,” the Stalker whispered, crouching over her. Her blind bronze face looked around at Fishcake. “What is she doing here? What has become of her?”

  Fishcake shook his head uneasily. How was he supposed to know anything about this hermit lady? His Stalker was the one who knew her. He said, “We ought to nick some food and get going before she wakes up.”

  “No! We must help her! I want to talk to her!”

  “But what if the other half of you comes again? She won’t want to talk, will she? She’ll just kill—”

  “Then you must watch for her,” his Stalker whispered. “You must warn Sathya when you think the other one is about to come. But perhaps she will not come at all.” She stroked Sathya’s face. “Such memories, Fishcake—all sorts of new memories! They make me stronger, I can feel it. Now help me; where is her bed?”

  That was easy; the hermitage had only one room, and the bed was in the far corner; a big bed, heaped with furs and blankets, with a fire of cattle dung burning in a space beneath it. Anna laid Sathya down and gently drew a coverlet over her. Sathya stirred.

  “Anna, is it really you?” she asked. “I think so,” the Stalker whispered.

  Sathya started to sob. “Anna, it is all my fault! I should have let you rest peaceful, but I couldn’t bear it! I made a deal with Popjoy.”

  “Who is Popjoy?”

  “An Engineer. He Resurrected you. He promised me that you’d be yourself again, but you didn’t remember me, you didn’t remember anything, you said you weren’t Anna…”

  “Sssssh,” the Stalker whispered, holding Sathya’s hand, pressing it against her cold bronze lips. “You brought me back, Sathya. Your love brought me back.”

  “Oh, oh,” moaned Sathya, and hid her face in the blankets, while Fishcake watched and waited for Anna to turn into the Stalker Fang. But she did not change, and slowly he started to hope that this meeting with her old friend had given her the strength to keep the Stalker Fang at bay for good.

  He slept on the floor that night, pillowed on rugs, warmed by the dung burning in the potbellied stove. The voices of Sathya and the Stalker washed over him and around him, speaking of places he had never been to and people he had never met, dropping now and then into languages he didn’t know.

  He woke hours later, to morning sunlight and the steady sound of a pump. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he went outside into the bright morning mist. His Stalker was sitting on the porch, her back to the sun-warmed wall, her blind mask turned inquisitively toward the sounds that Sathya was making as she worked the handle of the pump at the far corner of the house. It looked like hard work for someone with only one hand, so Fishcake went to help. When they had filled Sathya’s big leather bucket, they took a handle each and started carrying it to the house. “You’re wondering what this is for, I suppose?” said Sathya. “Well, it’s a bath, for you.”

  Fishcake yelped, protested, and almost dropped the bucket. He didn’t think he’d ever had a bath before, and he didn’t see why he should break the habit of a lifetime now. But Sathya and his Stalker would not listen to any excuses; working together they stripped off his grimy clothes and dumped him into Sathya’s zinc bathtub, and soaped and scrubbed him, and washed his lousy hair.

  That was the happiest day of Fishcake’s childhood, and he would remember it always. The sun rose high and burned away the mist, and all around Sathya’s lonely house the snowfields shone clean and dazzling, each summit exhaling a breath of wind-blown snow into the diamond sky. Sathya washed Fishcake’s clothes, and gave him some of her own to wear while they were drying: worn canvas trousers and a woolen shirt. He chopped wood for her, tugging big logs out of a pile that had been brought up to the hermitage as a gift by the people living in the deep valleys below, and splitting them with an axe. His Stalker helped him carry the split logs into the lean-to behind the house, and then Sathya led him down to the drystone enclosure where the cattle were. They frightened Fishcake at first, because they were so big and so alive, but Sathya showed him how gentle they were. He thought they were funny, the way their hair
y black ears twitched like mittened hands to bat flies away, and their pink tongues curled around the mouthfuls of hay he held out to them. He watched while Sathya milked the cow, and then carried the pail back to the house for her, careful not to spill a drop of the foamy, steaming milk.

  Meanwhile, Anna had unsheathed one of her claws and was using it to carve an off cut of wood she had found in the lean-to. When she had finished, she pressed the thing she had made into Fishcake’s hands. It was a little wooden horse, trotting with its head up and its tail flying out behind it like a flag.

  “What is it for?” asked Fishcake, turning it over, surprised.

  “For you,” whispered his Stalker. “It’s a toy. For playing with. My father used to carve toys for me when I was a little girl.”

  Fishcake looked at the horse in his hands. If he had been a normal child, he would have had lots of toys; he would have spent whole afternoons lying on the carpet inventing worlds of his own with toy animals and cities. If he had been a normal child, he might already think himself too old to play with little wooden horses. But he was a Lost Boy, and he had never owned a toy before. And he started to cry, because the horse was so beautiful, and he loved it so much.

  Later he and Sathya walked down to the river: a white rush of a river that spilled under a rickety rope-and-bamboo bridge and went shouting and splashing away toward the wooded valleys. They threw stones into the rapids, while Sathya’s dog barked and bounded up and down the bank. Fishcake found the pole from an old prayer flag washed down in last spring’s thaw from some shrine high on Zhan Shan, and threw that in too, and they watched the river carry it away. The sun was going down. The valleys filled with shadow, and the mountains glowed amber and rose.

  “You should stay here, Fishcake,” said Sathya, over the roar of the water.

  “I can’t,” Fishcake replied, not wanting to even think about it. “The Stalker …”

  “She can stay too.” She looked away from him, far away, beyond the mountains, into her own troubled past. “After I lost my hand and the Stalker took charge at Rogues’ Roost and the Green Storm seized power, I went a little bit mad, I think. I kept trying to tell people that she wasn’t really Anna, but they wouldn’t listen. The Storm wanted to execute me, but there were a few officers—Naga was one of them—who took pity on me, and they arranged for me to come and live here instead. The Stalker Fang must have signed the order, I suppose; that must be how she knew to find me here. I expect the others have all but forgotten me by now. I’m not allowed to leave, but the people in the valley settlements look after me; they bring me wood and honey and tea, and in return I go up onto Zhan Shan and tend the high shrines, and pray for them to the Sky Gods and the Mountain Gods.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?” Fishcake asked.

  “Of course I do. It’s a better life than I deserve, after the things I did when I was young. But if you wanted to stay for a while, there would be room for you. Just until you are ready to move on, or old enough to move down into the villages and make a life for yourself there… Fishcake, you’re only a child.”

  They walked together back to the house. The Stalker stood outside like a statue, her face tilted toward the mountains. Hearing them coming, she turned and whispered, “I must go now.”

  “No!” said Sathya.

  “No!” cried Fishcake, feeling his perfect day slipping away from him. He wondered if his Stalker had changed again, but she was still Anna.

  “I have been thinking,” she said patiently. “The Engineer who Resurrected me is still alive, isn’t he?”

  “Dr. Popjoy is a great man now,” said Sathya bitterly. “The Storm gave him a villa of his own, the house on the promontory at Batmunkh Gompa.”

  “I will go there,” said Anna. “I will ask him to look inside my head and destroy the other part of me. The Stalker Fang must not be allowed to survive. Who knows what she is planning?”

  “She wants to talk to somebody called Odin,” Fishcake offered. “That’s why she came here.”

  “And who is Odin?” asked his Stalker. “I do not trust her. I will make Popjoy quiet her forever. If he cannot, he must destroy us both.”

  “Oh, Anna!” cried Sathya, trying to hug her, but the Stalker drew away.

  “I cannot stay here,” she whispered. “If I change again, I might kill you. I must leave now, before my other self returns.”

  Sathya started to cry and plead with Anna to change her mind, but Fishcake knew that there was no point arguing. He’d come a long way with his Stalker, and he knew that the Anna part of her was just as stubborn as the other. He felt in his pocket, and his hand closed around the little horse she’d carved for him. “I’m coming too,” he said.

  “No, Fishcake,” said both women at once, the dead and the living, in perfect unison.

  “You need me,” he insisted. “Even the other you needs me. How far is it to this Batmunkh Gompa? Miles of walking, I expect. You can’t do it all alone, blind…” He was crying, because he did not want to leave the hermitage behind, but he did not want his Stalker to leave him behind either. He held tight to the toy horse and tried hard to look brave. “I’m coming too.”

  Chapter 17

  Storm Country

  Evening in no-man’s-land. Harrowbarrow had been moving slowly east all day, waiting motionless beneath the shale whenever an air patrol flew by above, surfacing sometimes when the sky was clear to let a haze of exhaust smoke billow out like fog from vents at its stern.

  Traveling underground in a burrowing mole suburb was one of those things that sounded terribly exciting but quickly grew dull when you actually did it, thought Wren. She walked briskly through Harrowbarrow’s smoggy, roasting streets, and the citizens stared at her as she passed, and turned so that they could carry on staring when she had gone by. She was afraid that her haircut and her clothes, which had made her feel so fashionable and grown-up in Murnau, just made her outlandish to these burrowing folk.

  She would have felt happier staying safe in the town hall, but Wolf Kobold had invited her down to join him on the bridge. He had invited Dad, too, but Dad was not feeling well, and Wren didn’t want Wolf thinking they did not appreciate his invitation, so here she was, passing the glass brick windows of the Delver’s Arms and taking a left onto Perpendicular Street, a ladderway that dropped into the suburb’s depths.

  The bridge was a movable building, spanning Harrow-barrow’s dismantling yards, with big greasy wheels at either end set in rails on the yard walls so that it could trundle forward to the jaws to oversee a catch or aft to watch the workers in the salvage stacks. Chains dangled from it, swaying and clanking with the suburb’s lurching motions, and two men lounged on guard duty at the foot of the ladder that led up into it. One of them stepped out to bar Wren’s way as she reached for the bottom rung, but his mate said, “Easy, she’s His Worship’s girl.”

  “I’m not anybody’s girl,” retorted Wren, but the men didn’t hear her. The scraping and grinding of shale against the suburb’s hull was deafening, and something about these hard, leather-faced scavengers made Wren’s voice come out very small and girly. She felt their eyes upon her as she lowered herself down the ladder, and heard one of them shout something to the other that made both of them laugh.

  “Wren!” Wolf cried happily, when she emerged through the hatchway in the bridge floor and stood breathless and bewildered, looking about her at all the racks of levers, the banks of dials and switches, the rows of gauges, the speaking tubes sticking down like stalactites out of the low metal ceiling. He sprang from his swivel chair and came to greet her, sidestepping nimbly as Hausdorfer and the other navigators hurried past him with rolled-up maps or orders for the engine rooms.

  “I’m glad you could come down! How’s Herr Natsworthy?”

  “All right,” Wren replied. “He’s having an after-dinner nap, I hope…” (Dad had not felt well since they’d come aboard the burrowing suburb, and he was looking pale and weak. She had left him with strict instructions to
get some sleep, but, knowing him, he was probably in Wolf’s library, studying charts of the land ahead.)

  Wolf took her arm. “You worry about him.”

  “I think Harrowbarrow is too hot and stuffy for him,” said Wren. She didn’t want to explain about Dad’s heart trouble. Dad put so much effort into trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he was all right, it would have felt like a betrayal to tell Wolf how ill he really was. “He’ll be fine,” she promised, smiling as brightly as she could.

  “Good,” said Wolf, as if they had settled something. He guided Wren to a place near his chair where a big brass thing covered in knobs and levers poked down through the ceiling. There were two eyepieces at the bottom of it. Wolf pulled it down until they were at the right level for Wren to look through. “I thought you’d like a look at the view.”

  Wren had almost forgotten that there were such things as views. The hours passed so slowly aboard Harrowbarrow that it already seemed like days since she had seen the sky, or the earth. Yet when she looked into the eyepieces of the periscope, she saw them both; the sky deep blue and almost cloudless, a crescent moon hanging bright above the weed-grown walls of the track mark that the suburb was running through.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Close to the Storm’s country,” Wolf replied.

  “Then why are there no fortresses? No settlements?”

  Wolf chuckled. “The Storm haven’t enough troops left to garrison all the new territories they captured. Out here they just have armored watchtowers every few miles. Air patrols too, sometimes.”

  “Then it’ll be easy to get the Jenny across?”

  “Easy enough. I have prepared a little diversion that will keep the Storm’s lookouts busy.”