Infernal Devices Page 27

  "Me too," said Fishcake. He could see the twisted fittings around the edges of the skull where the bronze mask had been torn off. He took the mask out of his coat and fixed it back into place as best he could.

  "Please help her," the head whispered, and then, "You will repair me."

  "I don't know how."

  "She --I will tell you."

  Fishcake looked around. Bits of the Stalker's body were edging toward him through the sand, homing in on the head. The clutching movements of the fingers made him think of crab-cams he'd repaired for Gargle. "I might be able to," he

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  said. "Not here. I'd need tools and stuff. If we could gather up all your bits and find a city or something ..."

  "Do it," commanded the head. "Then I will travel east. To Shan Guo. To my house at Erdene Tezh. I will have my revenge upon the Once-Born. Yes, yes ..."

  "I'll come with you," said Fishcake, eager not to be deserted again. "I can help you. You'll need me."

  "I know the secrets of the Tin Book," the head said, whispering to itself. "The codes are safe inside my memory. I will return to Erdene Tezh and awaken ODIN."

  Fishcake did not know what that meant, but he was glad to have someone telling him what to do, even if she was only a head. He stood up. A little way off, a torn gray robe flapped from the branches of a bush. Fishcake pulled it free and knotted it into a sort of bag. Then, while the Stalker Fang's head whispered to itself about The World Made Green Again, he began collecting up the scattered pieces of her body.

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  35 Marooned in the Sky

  ***

  IT SEEMED VERY QUIET on Cloud 9 once the storm Were gone. The wind still sang through the drooping rigging, the remaining gasbags jostled against each other, and the crash of collapsing floors came sometimes from inside the burning Pavilion, but none of them were human sounds, so they did not seem to matter.

  Theo and Wren carried the unconscious Pennyroyal into the shelter of a grove of cypress trees between his boathouse and the ornamental maze. There was a fountain at the heart of the grove, and they laid Pennyroyal down and did their best to make him comfortable. Then Theo sat down and rested his head on his arms and went to sleep too. That surprised Wren. Tired as she was, she knew she was far too scared and anxious to sleep. It was different for Theo, she supposed. He'd been in battles before; he was probably used

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  to this sort of desperate uncertainty.

  "Boo-Boo, my dove, I can explain everything!" muttered Pennyroyal, stirring and half opening his eyes. He saw Wren sitting beside him and mumbled, "Oh, it's you."

  "Go back to sleep," said Wren.

  "You don't like me," said Pennyroyal grumpily. "Look, I'm sorry about your father, I really am. Poor young Tom. I never meant to hurt him. It was an accident, I swear."

  Wren checked his bandages. "It's not just that," she said. "It's that book of yours. It's so full of lies! About Miss Freya, and Anchorage, and about my mum cutting a deal with the Huntsmen ..."

  "Oh, but that bit's true," said Pennyroyal. "I admit I may have spiced up the facts a little here and there, purely for reasons of pacing, but it really was Hester Shaw who brought Arkangel down on us. She told me so herself. 'I'm the one who sent the Huntsmen here,' she said. 'I wanted Tom for myself again. He's my predator's gold.' And a few months later, among a bunch of refugees from Arkangel, I ran into a charming young person called Julianna. She'd been a slave girl in the household of that lout Piotr Masgard, and she told me she'd seen the deal done: An aviatrix came to her master with word of Anchorage's position. A young aviatrix, barely more than a girl, with her face split in two by a terrible scar ..."

  "I don't believe you," said Wren crossly, and left him there and went out into the gardens. It couldn't be true; Pennyroyal was up to his old tricks again, twisting the truth about. But why does he insist on sticking to that part of his story, when he's admitted the rest was fibs? she wondered uneasily. Well, maybe he believed it. Maybe Mum had told him that,

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  to scare him. And as for Masgard's slave girl, just because she'd seen Masgard talking to a scarred aviatrix, that didn't mean it was Mum: The air trade was a dangerous life; there must be lots of aviatrices with messed-up faces....

  She shook her head to try to drive the disturbing thoughts away. She had better things to worry about than Pennyroyal's silly stories. Cloud 9 was wobbling beneath her feet, and the night air was filled with the groan of stressed rigging. Smoke poured across the tilted lawns, obscuring scattered bodies and overturned buffet tables. Wren gathered up some fallen canapés and stood staring at the Pavilion while she ate them. It was hard to believe the change that had come over the beautiful building. It was stained and sagging, and the only light that came from its broken windows was the reddish glow of spreading fires. The great central dome gaped like a burst puffball. Above it, the gasbags seemed to be holding, but they were smoke blackened, and some of the fiercer flames jumping up from the roof of the Pennyroyals' guest wing were getting dangerously close to their underbellies.

  And as she stood there watching it, Wren became aware of someone standing nearby, watching her. "Theo?" she said, turning.

  But it was not Theo.

  Startled, she lost her balance on the steep grass and fell, hiccuping with fright. The Stalker did not move, except to brace himself against the tilting of the garden. He was staring at Wren. How could he do anything but stare, with only those round green lamps for eyes? The firelight gleamed on his battered armor and his stained claws. His head twitched.

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  Oil and lubricant dripped from his wounds. "you are not her," he said.

  "No," agreed Wren in a shrill little mouse-squeak. She had no idea who the horrible old machine was talking about, but she wasn't about to argue. She wriggled on her bottom across the grass, trying to edge away from him.

  The Stalker came slowly closer, then stopped again. She thought she could hear weird mechanisms whirring and chattering inside his armored skull. "you are like her," he said, " but you are not her."

  "No, I know, a lot of people get us mixed up," said Wren, wondering who he could have mistaken her for. There was no point running, she told herself, but her body, with its eagerness to go on living, wouldn't listen. She pushed herself up and fled, slithering on the wet grass, careering down the sick slope of the gardens.

  "come back !" begged Grike. " help me! i have to find her !" He started to run after her, then stopped. Chasing the girl would only add to her fear, and he had already been appalled by the terror and loathing of him that he had seen in that strange, familiar face. He watched her fade into the smoke. Behind him, the Pavilion's central dome collapsed into the ballroom in a gush of sparks. Catherine wheels of debris went bowling past him to crash into fountains and flower beds or bound off the deck plate's edge entirely and plummet down into the desert.

  Grike ignored them and tilted his head inquisitively. Above the noise, his sensitive ears had picked up the drone of aero-engines.

  ***

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  Whooping for breath, her heart hammering, Wren plunged back into the cypress grove. Pennyroyal was asleep or unconscious again, but Theo leaped up. "Wren, what is it?"

  "Stalker!" she managed to gasp. "The Green Storm left a Stalker behind. That big ugly one that fought the other one ...

  Pennyroyal groaned and stirred. Theo drew Wren gently away. "Wren, if this Stalker had wanted to kill us, it would have found us by now, wouldn't it? It would have chased you, and be here by now."

  Wren thought about that. "I think it was damaged," she said.

  "There you are then."

  "I think it was mad," she went on, remembering the strange way the Stalker had spoken to her. She giggled nervously. "I suppose if ordinary Stalkers are meant to go around killing people, maybe a mad one is the best sort to be stuck on a doomed hovery island thing with. Maybe it just wanted to have a nice chat about the weather. Or knit me a cardigan."

 
Theo laughed. "Anyway," he said, "it's going to be all right. At the rate we're losing gas, we should touch down in the desert in another half hour or so."

  "You say that like it's a good thing."

  "It is," said Theo. "Come and see."

  She went with him through the trees to the far side of the grove. From there, only a short, steeply tilted stretch of lawn separated them from the deck plate's edge. Beyond the handrail they could see the ground, and Cloud 9's shadow slithering over curved dunes and barren outcroppings of

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  stone. All around, clusters of lights and ghostly fans of dust marked the approach of small towns and villages, racing toward the place where they thought Cloud 9 would fall.

  "Scavenger towns!" wailed Wren. "We'll be eaten!"

  "Cloud 9 will be eaten," said Theo. "We won't. We'll get off into the desert before the towns arrive and go aboard them as travelers, not prey. We'll take some gold or Old Tech or something from the Pavilion to pay our way. We'll be all right."

  Wren calmed herself. This is what brought Mum and Dad together, she thought. There's a togetherness that comes from sharing adventures like this, and it's strong enough to overcome anything: mistrust, ugliness, anything. Not that Theo was ugly. Far from it. She turned her head to look at him, and their faces were so close that the tip of her nose brushed his cheek.

  And it was then--just when Wren knew that they were about to kiss, and half of her really wanted to and the other half was more scared of kissing than it was of scavenger towns--it was then that the lawn, like the deck of a boat in a stormy sea, dropped suddenly from beneath her feet, throwing her against Theo and Theo against a tree.

  "Bother!" she said.

  Bad things were happening up among Cloud 9's corona of gasbags. Roasted by the flames leaping from the Pavilion, the central cell had ruptured, and the gas was blurting out in a rush of blue fire. A few of the lesser bags still held, but they were not enough to support the weight of Cloud 9 for long. The deck plate tipped even more steeply, and the water from fountains and swimming pools poured off the brim in brief white cataracts. Debris fell too: statues and summerhouses,

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  potted palms and garden furniture, marquees and musical instruments, dropping like manna on the dunes below.

  The brindled towns of the desert increased their speed, jostling and squabbling in their haste to be first at the crash site.

  The Jenny Haniver flew through smoke and dust into the shadow of Cloud 9. Seen through her larboard windows, the tilted underside resembled a vast, ruined wall, pocked with shell craters and burned-out wrecks. Hester turned the searchlight on it and watched as some twisted maintenance walkways slid by, then a warning notice in stenciled white letters ten feet high: NO SMOKING. The cable car swung from severed hawsers, blood-stained ball gowns and evening robes billowing from the shattered cabin.

  "We're too late," said Hester. "There's not going to be anyone alive up there."

  "Don't say that!" Tom told her. He spoke sharply, still feeling scratchy and shaky from their argument. He did not want to argue anymore, because finding Wren was what mattered now, but things had altered between himself and Hester, and he was not sure they could be put right. The hardness of her, the calm way she had abandoned Fishcake, made his insides curl.

  Angrily, he tugged at the Jenny's controls, swinging her up over the top edge of the deck plate and carefully in through the tangle of rigging. He wished suddenly that Freya were with him instead of Hester. She would not have left poor Fishcake behind. She would have found some way out of Shkin's tower without murdering all those poor men. And

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  she would not have given up hope of finding Wren so easily.

  "Remember London?" he said. "Remember the night of MEDUSA, when I came to fetch you from London? That looked hopeless too, but I found you, didn't I? And now we're going to find Wren."

  Below them, Cloud 9 swung like a censer. Hester aimed the searchlight at its ruined gardens.

  Dragging Pennyroyal between them, Wren and Theo went crabwise across the steep face of the gardens, looking for a place where they could shelter when the deck plate touched down.

  "Good work!" Pennyroyal told them, briefly coming to. "Splendid effort! I'll see that you get your freedom for this...." Then he passed out again, which made him impossibly heavy. They laid him down, and Wren sat next to him. The ground was five hundred feet below, perhaps less; Wren could make out individual scrubby bushes struggling to grow among the long crescents of rock that dotted the desert, and individual windows and doorways on the upperworks of a town that was bounding along on big, barrel-shaped wheels in Cloud 9's shadow. The air was filled with the sounds of overstrained rigging. Beneath the long-drawn-out metallic moans, another noise was rising. Wren looked up. Through the tangles of hawsers that swayed across the garden, the beam of a searchlight poked, dazzling her. Then it swung away, a long finger of light tracing aimless paths across the lawns, and behind it she saw a small airship.

  "Look!" she shouted.

  "Scavengers," groaned Theo. "Or air pirates!"

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  The people in the town below seemed to have the same idea, for a rocket came sputtering up to burst in the sky behind the little ship. It veered away, then came edging back, steering vanes flicking like the fins of an inquisitive fish. A face showed at the gondola window. The steering vanes flicked again, the engine pods swiveled, and the ship touched down on a metal patio, not too close to Wren and Theo, but not so far away that Wren could not recognize the people who climbed out of the gondola and came scrambling toward her across the canted lawn.

  At first she refused to believe it. It seemed so impossible that Mum and Dad could be here that she closed her eyes and tried to make the hurtful hallucination go away. It couldn't be them, it couldn't, no matter what her silly eyes were telling her; clearly the adventures she had lived through had all been too much for her, and she had started imagining things.

  And then a voice cried, "Wren!" and someone's arms went round her and held her tight, and it was her father, and he was hugging her, laughing and saying, "Wren!" over and over, while tears made white channels through the ash and dust that smeared his face.

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  36 Strange Meetings

  ***

  "I'M SORRY," SHE SAID. "I'm so sorry, I've been so stupid--" and after that she couldn't speak; she couldn't think of a single thing more to say.

  "It's all right," Dad kept telling her. "It doesn't matter; you're safe, that's all that matters...."

  Then Dad stepped aside, and it was Mummy hugging her, a harder, tighter hug, pulling Wren's face against a bony shoulder, and Mum's voice in her ear asking "You're all right? You've not been hurt?"

  "I'm fine," sniffled Wren.

  Hester stepped back and cupped Wren's face in her two hands, surprised at how much love she felt. She was crying with happiness, and she almost never cried. Not wanting Tom and Wren to think she'd gone soft, she looked away and noticed the tall black boy hanging back behind Wren, watching.

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  "Mum, Dad," said Wren, turning to pull him closer, "this is Theo Ngoni. He saved my life."

  "We saved each other," said Theo shyly. He was crying too, imagining how his own mother and father would welcome him if ever he found his way home to Zagwa.

  Hester looked suspiciously at the handsome young aviator, but Tom shook his hand and said, "We'd better get aboard."

  He turned away toward the waiting airship and Theo went with him, but as Hester started to follow them, Wren said, "No, wait; Pennyroyal ..."

  Tom and Theo didn't hear her, but her mother did.

  Wren hurried through the trees to the fountain. Pennyroyal, revived by the sound of aero-engines, was struggling to his feet. He grinned as he saw Wren, and said weakly, "What did I tell you, eh? Never say die!" Then, recognizing the figure who loomed behind her, he added, "Oh, Great Poskitt!"

  The last time Hester had seen Pennyroyal, he had been running
away into the snow and dark of Anchorage the night she'd killed the Huntsmen. The last time she had spoken to him had been shortly before that, in the ransacked kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Aakiuq's house, when she had told him how the Huntsmen had come to be there.

  Pennyroyal backed weakly away, his face a dead, cheesy white beneath the crusted drizzles of blood. Hester caught him with two swift strides, knocked him down, drew her knife as he groveled and pawed at her feet.

  "Please!" he whined. "Spare me! I'll give you anything!"

  "Shut up," said Hester, baring his throat to her blade,

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  bending so the blood wouldn't splash her new coat.

  Wren hit her from the side, shoving her away. "Mummy, no!" she yelled.

  Hester grunted, winded and angry. "You stay out of this...."

  But Wren would not stay out of it. She had seen the look in her mother's eye when she saw Pennyroyal. Not hate, or anger, or a thirst for revenge, but fear. And why would Mum be frightened of Pennyroyal unless the thing that Pennyroyal had said about her was true? As Hester started toward him again, Wren leaped between them, spreading her arms to protect him. "I know!" she shouted. "I know what you did! So if you want to silence him, you're too late! If you want to keep it secret now, you'll have to kill me too."

  "Kill you?" Hester grabbed Wren by the collar of her jacket and pushed her hard against a tree. "I wish you'd never been born!" she shouted. She turned the knife, changing her grip on the worn bone handle. The blade filled with firelight. Reflections slid across Wren's appalled, defiant face, and suddenly it seemed to Hester very like the face of her own half sister, Katherine Valentine, who had died defending her from their father's sword.

  "Mummy?" asked Wren, in a tiny, shocked voice.