A Darkling Plain me-4 Read online

  It wouldn’t do, Wren decided. She scrumpled the page and lobbed it into a nearby bin. She was getting to be quite a good shot. This must be the twentieth letter she’d written to Theo, and so far she’d not mailed any of them. She had sent a card at Christmas, because although Theo wasn’t very religious, he lived in a Christian city and probably celebrated all their strange old festivals, but all she had written was “Happy Xmas” and a few lines of news about herself and Dad.

  The trouble was, Theo had probably forgotten her by now. And even if he did remember her, he was hardly likely to be interested in her clothes, or her haircut, or the rest of it. And that bit about how much she liked city life would probably shock him, for he was an Anti-Tractionist through and through and could be rather prim…

  But she could not forget him. How brave he had been on Cloud 9. And that good-bye kiss, on the Kom Ombo air quay, amid all those oily ropes and heaped-up sky train couplings and shouting stevedores and roaring engines. Wren had never kissed anyone before. She hadn’t known quite how you went about it; she wasn’t sure where her nose was meant to go; when their teeth banged together, she was afraid that she was doing it all wrong. Theo had laughed, and said it was a funny business, this kissing, and she said she thought she might get the hang of it with a little more practice, but by then the captain of his airship was hollering, “All aboard that’s coming aboard!” and starting to disengage his docking clamps, and there had been no time…

  And that had been six months ago. Theo had written once—a letter that reached Wren in January at a shabby air caravanserai in the Tannhäusers—to tell her that he had made it home safely and been welcomed by his family “like the prodigal son” (whatever that meant). But Wren had never managed to compose a reply.

  “Bother!” she said, and ordered another coffee.

  Tom Natsworthy, Wren’s father, had faced death many times, and been in all sorts of frightening situations, but he had never felt any fear quite so cold as this.

  He was lying, quite naked, on a chilly metal table in the consulting room of a heart specialist on Peripatetiapolis’s second tier. Above him a machine with a long and many-jointed hydraulic neck twisted its metal head from side to side, examining him with a quizzical air. Tom was pretty sure that those green, glowing lenses at its business end were taken from a Stalker. He supposed that Stalker parts were easy to come by these days, and that he should be glad that all the years of war had at least spawned a few good things: new medical techniques, and diagnostic machines like this. But when the blunt steel head dipped close to his torso, and he heard the machinery grating and whirring inside those shining eyes, all he could think of was the old Stalker Grike, who had chased him and Hester across the Out-Country in the year London died.

  When it was all over, and Dr. Chernowyth switched off his machine and came out of his little lead-walled booth, he could tell Tom nothing that Tom had not already guessed. There was a weakness in his heart. It had been caused by the bullet that Pennyroyal had shot him with, all those years ago in Anchorage. It was growing worse, and one day it would kill him. He had a year or two left, maybe five, no more.

  The doctor pursed his lips and shook his head and told him to take things easy, but Tom just laughed. How could you take things easy in the air trade? The only way he could take things easy would be if he went home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but after what he had learned about Hester, he could never go back. He had nothing to be ashamed of— he had not betrayed the ice city to Arkangel’s Huntsmen, or murdered anyone among its snowy streets—but he felt ashamed for his wife’s sake, and foolish for having lived so long with her, never suspecting the lies she had told him.

  Anyway, Wren would never forgive him if he took her home now. She had the same longing for adventure that Tom himself had had at her age. She was enjoying life on the bird roads, and she had the makings of a fine aviatrix. He would stay with her, flying and trading, teaching her the ways of the sky and doing his best to keep her out of trouble, and when Lady Death came to take him to the Sunless Country, he would leave Wren the Jenny Haniver and she would be able to choose whichever life she wanted for herself: the peace of Vineland or the freedom of the skies. The news from the east sounded hopeful. If this truce held, there would soon be all sorts of opportunities for trade.

  When he left Dr. Chernowyth’s office, Tom felt better at once. Out here, beneath the evening sky, it seemed impossible that he was going to die. The city rocked gently as it rumbled northward up the rocky western shoreline of the Great Hunting Ground. Out upon the silver, sunset-shining sea a fishing town was keeping pace with it beneath a cloud of gulls.

  Tom watched for a while from an observation platform, then rode an elevator back to base tier and strolled through the busy market behind the air harbor, remembering his first visit to this city, with Hester and Anna Fang, twenty years before. He had bought Hester a red scarf at one of these stalls, to save her having to keep hiding her scarred face with her hand…

  But he did not want to think about Hester. When he started thinking about her, he always ended up remembering the way they had parted, and what she had done made him so angry that his heart would pound and twist inside him. He could not afford to think of Hester anymore.

  He began to walk toward the harbor, rehearsing in his mind the things he would tell Wren about his visit to the doctor. (“Nothing to worry about. Not even worth operating…”) Passing Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms, he stopped to let a crowd of traders spill out and thought he recognized one of them, a woman of about his own age, rather pretty. It looked as if she had been successful at the auction, for she was carrying a big, heavy package. She didn’t see Tom, and he walked on trying to remember her name and where he had met her. Katie, wasn’t it? No, Clytie, that was it. Clytie Potts.

  He stopped, and turned, and stared. It couldn’t have been Clytie. Clytie had been a Historian, a year above him in the Guild when London was destroyed. She had been killed by MEDUSA along with all the rest of his city. She just couldn’t be walking about in Peripatetiapolis. His memories were playing games with him.

  But it had looked so like her!

  He took a few steps back the way he had come. The woman was going quickly up a stairway to the level where the airships berthed. “Clytie!” Tom shouted, and her face turned toward him. It was her, he was suddenly certain of it, and he laughed aloud with happiness and surprise and called again, “Clytie! It’s me! Tom Natsworthy!”

  A group of traders barged past him, blocking his view of her. When he could see again, she was gone. He started hurrying toward the stairs, ignoring the little warning pains in his chest. He tried to imagine how Clytie had survived MEDUSA. Had she been outside the city when it was destroyed? He had heard of other Londoners who had escaped the blast, but they had all been members of the Merchants’ Guild, far off on foreign cities when it happened. At Rogues’ Roost Hester had encountered that horrible Engineer Popjoy, but he had been in the Deep Gut when MEDUSA went off…

  He pushed his way up the crowded stair and saw Clytie hurrying away from him between the long-stay docking pans. He could hardly blame her, after the way he’d yelled at her. He must have been too far away for her to recognize him, and she’d mistaken him for some kind of loony, or a rival trader angry that she’d outbid him in the auction rooms. He trotted after her, eager to explain himself, and saw her run quickly up another stairway onto Pan Seven, where a small, streamlined airship was berthed. He paused at the foot of the stairs just long enough to read the details chalked on the board there and learn that the ship was the Archaeopteryx, registered in Airhaven and commanded by Cruwys Morchard. Then, careful not to run, or shout, or do anything else that might alarm a lady air trader, he climbed after her. Of course, with her Guild training, Clytie Potts would have had no trouble finding a place aboard an Old Tech trader. No doubt this Captain Morchard had taken her on as an expert buyer, and that was why she had been at the auction house.

  He paused to catch his breat
h at the top of the stairs, his heart hammering fiercely. The Archaeopteryx towered over him in the twilight. She was camouflaged, her gondola and the undersides of her envelope and engine pods sky blue, the upper parts done in a dazzle pattern of greens and browns and grays. At the foot of her gangplank two crewmen were waiting in a pool of pale electric light. They looked rough and shabby, like Out-Country scavengers. As Clytie approached them, Tom heard one man call out, “You get ’em all right, then?”

  “I did,” replied Clytie, nodding to the package she was carrying. The other man came forward to help her with it, then saw Tom coming up behind her. Clytie must have noticed his expression changing, and turned to see why.

  “Clytie?” said Tom. “It’s me, Tom Natsworthy. Apprentice Third Class, from the Guild of Historians. From London. I know you probably don’t recognize me. It’s been … what? … nearly twenty years! And you must have thought I was dead…”

  At first he felt sure that she had recognized him, and that she was happy to see him, but then her look changed; she took a step backward, away from him, and glanced toward the men by the gangplank. One of them—a tall, gaunt man with a shaven head—put a hand to his sword, and Tom heard him say, “This fellow bothering you, Miss Morchard?”

  “It’s all right, Lurpak,” said Clytie, motioning for him to stay where he was. She came a little closer to Tom and said pleasantly, “I’m sorry, sir. I fear you have mistaken me for some other lady. I am Cruwys Morchard, mistress of this ship. I don’t know anyone from London.”

  “But you …,” Tom started to say. He studied her face, embarrassed and confused. He was sure she was Clytie Potts. She had put on a little weight, just as he had himself, and her hair, which had been dark, was dusted with silver now, as if cobwebs had settled on it, but her face was the same … except that the space between her eyebrows, where Clytie Potts had rather proudly worn the tattooed blue eye of the Guild of Historians, was blank.

  Tom began to doubt himself. It had been twenty years, after all. Perhaps he was wrong. He said, “I’m sorry, but you look so like her…”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said with a charming smile. “I have one of those faces. I am always being mistaken for somebody.”

  “You look so like her,” said Tom again, half hopefully, as if she might suddenly change her mind and remember that she was Clytie Potts, after all.

  She bowed to him and turned away. Her men eyed Tom as they helped her up the gangplank with her package. There was nothing more to say, so he said “Sorry” again and turned away himself, blushing hotly as he made his way off the pan. He started across the harbor toward his own ship’s berth, and had not gone more than twenty paces when he heard the Archaeopteryx’s engines rumbling to life behind him. He watched her rise into the evening sky, gathering speed quickly as she cleared the city’s airspace and flew away toward the east.

  Which was curious, because Tom was certain that the signboard beside her pan had said she would be in Peripatetiapolis for two more days…

  Chapter 3

  The Mysterious Miss Morchard

  “I am sure it was her!” Tom said, over supper that night at the Jolly Dirigible. “She was older, of course, and the Guild-mark wasn’t on her brow, which threw me a little, but tattoos can be removed, can’t they?”

  Wren said, “Don’t get agitated, Dad…”

  “I’m not agitated, only intrigued! If it is Clytie, how come she is still alive? And why did she not admit who she was?”

  He did not sleep much that night, and Wren lay awake too, in her little cabin up inside the Jenny’s envelope, listening to him pad along the passageway from the stern cabin and clatter as quietly as he could in the galley, making himself one of those three-in-the-morning cups of tea.

  At first she was worried about him. She hadn’t quite believed his version of what the heart doctor had said, and she felt quite certain that he should not be staying awake all night and fretting about mystery aviatrices. But gradually she started to wonder if his encounter with the woman might not have been a good thing after all. Talking about her at supper, he had seemed more alive than Wren had seen him for months; the listlessness that had settled over him when Mum left had vanished, and he had been his old self again, full of questions and theories. Wren couldn’t tell if it was the mystery that appealed to him, or the thought of a connection with his lost home city, or if he simply had the hots for Clytie Potts, but whichever it was, might it not do him good to have something other than Mum to think about?

  At breakfast next morning she said, “We should investigate. Find out more about this self-styled Cruwys Morchard.”

  “How?” asked her father. “The Archaeopteryx will be a hundred miles away by now.”

  “You said she bought something at the auction rooms,” said Wren. “We could start there.”

  Mr. Pondicherry who was a large, shiny sort of gentleman, seemed to grow even larger and shinier when he looked up from his account books to see Tom Natsworthy and daughter entering his little den. The Jenny Haniver had sold several valuable pieces through Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms that season. “Mr. Natsworthy!” He chuckled. “Miss Natsworthy! How good to see you!” He stood up to greet them, and pushed back a great deal of silver-embroidered sleeve to reveal a plump brown hand, which Tom shook. “You are both well, I hope? The Gods of the Sky are kind to you? What do you have for me today?”

  “Only questions, I’m afraid,” Tom confessed. “I was wondering what you could tell me about a freelance archaeologist called Cruwys Morchard. She made a purchase here yesterday.”

  “The lady from the Archaeopteryx?” mused Mr. Pondicherry. “Yes, yes; I know her well, but I’m afraid I cannot share such information.”

  “Of course,” said Tom, and, “Sorry, sorry.”

  Wren, who had half expected this, took out of her jacket pocket a little bundle of cloth, which she set down upon the blotter on Mr. Pondicherry’s desk. The auctioneer purred like a cat as he unwrapped it. Inside lay a tiny, flattened envelope of silvery metal, inset with minute oblong tiles on which faint numbers still showed.

  “An Ancient mobile telephone,” said Wren. “We bought it last month, from a scavenger who didn’t even know what it was. Dad was planning to sell it privately, but I’m sure he’d be happy to go through Pondicherry’s if…”

  “Wren!” said her father, startled by her cunning.

  Mr. Pondicherry had put his head down close to the relic and screwed a jeweler’s glass into his eye. “Oh, pretty!” he said. “So beautifully preserved! And the trade in trinkets like this is definitely picking up now that peace is breaking out. They say General Naga hasn’t time to fight battles anymore, now that he’s found himself a lovely young wife. Almost as lovely as Cruwys Morchard…” He looked at Tom and winked, one eye made huge by the glass. “Very well. Just between ourselves, Ms. Morchard was indeed here yesterday. She bought a job lot of Kliest Coils.”

  “What on earth would she want with those?” wondered Tom.

  “Who knows?” Mr. Pondicherry beamed and spread his hands wide, as if to say, Once I have my percentage, what do I care what my customers do with the rubbish they buy? “They are of no earthly use. Trade goods, I suppose. That is Ms. Morchard’s profession. An Old Tech trader, and a good one, I believe. Been on the bird roads since she was just a slip of a girl.”

  “Has she ever mentioned anything about where she comes from?” Wren asked eagerly.

  Mr. Pondicherry thought for a moment. “Her ship is registered in Airhaven,” he said.

  “Oh, we know that. I mean, do you know where she grew up? Where she was trained? You see, we think she comes from London.”

  The auctioneer smiled at her indulgently, and winked again at Tom as he slipped the old telephone into a side drawer of his bureau. “Ah, Mr. N, what romantical notions these young ladies do have! Really, Miss Wren! Nobody comes from London!”

  Afterward they took coffee on a balcony cafe and looked out eastward across the endles
s plains of the Great Hunting Ground. It was one of those warm, golden days of spring. A haze of green filled the massive ruts and track marks that passing cities had scored across the land below, and the sky was full of swerving swifts. Away in the east a mining town was gnawing at a line of hills that had somehow been overlooked until now.

  “The strange thing is,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where. Cruwys Morchard. I suppose it was on the bird roads, in the old days…” He poured Wren more coffee. “You must think me very silly, to let myself be so affected by it. It’s just that the thought of another Historian, still alive after all these years …”

  He couldn’t explain. Lately he had been thinking more and more about his early years in the London Museum. It made him sad to think that when he died, the memory of the place would die with him. If there really was another Historian alive, someone who had grown up among the same dusty galleries and beeswax-smelling corridors as him, who had snoozed through old Arkengarth’s lectures, and listened to Chudleigh Pomeroy grumbling about the building’s feeble shock absorbers, then the responsibility of remembering it all would be lifted from him; the echoes of those things would linger in other memories, even after he was gone.