A Darkling Plain me-4 Read online

  “No,” said Wolf again, but Wren saw his face change as he struggled to keep on believing she was innocent, and failed.

  She ran. A man standing near the top of the ladder reached out to grab her, but she kicked him hard between the legs and twisted past him and down through the floor of the bridge. The steel rungs still tingled with electricity under her hands, sending little numbing shocks kicking up her arms. She heard Wolf shouting, “Catch her!” and his men scrambling to obey, but they were too sluggish for her, and she was already climbing down into the smoke and shadows of the dismantling yards.

  She jumped the last few feet, landed on something soft, peered through the smoke at it, and realized that it was a dead man, burned by the currents that had surged through the suburb’s deck plates. She felt sick for a moment, knowing that she was responsible. Was this how Mum felt, she wondered, when she killed the Huntsmen?

  “Wren!” shouted Wolf’s voice, somewhere above her.

  “You don’t think you can escape, do you?”

  She forgot her guilt and fled. If anyone was to blame, she thought as she pounded across the yards, it was Wolf Kobold for bringing his town here hunting in the first place. Ahead of her, stairs led up into the maze of Harrowbarrow’s residential streets. As she ran toward them, the metal beneath her feet began to judder, jerkily at first, then settling into a steady, pulsing rhythm.

  “They’re already starting the backup engines, Wren!” called Wolf.

  Ducking behind an abandoned town grinder, she peered through the gloom and saw him crossing the yards, calling out watchfully, like the seeker in a game of hide-and-seek. “Weren’t expecting that, were you? Thought you could destroy the ’Barrow by luring us into that lightning, but the ’Barrow’s stronger than you know, Wren. We’ll be moving again soon, and we’ll eat your precious London friends for supper. If you’re very nice to me, I’ll keep you alive long enough to watch them die…”

  A damaged power coupling close to him spurted sparks, and she saw the sword in his hand flash. He went out of sight behind a support strut, and she took her chance and ran, up the stairs and into the smoky, dingy streets.

  They were not quite as dingy as before; big rents had been torn in Harrowbarrow’s hide, as if someone had gone to work on the armor with a colossal can-opener. Bars and planks of smoky sunlight stuck down through the holes, and the shade-loving Harrowbarrovians tried to avoid them as they hurried around making repairs. Squads of armed men ran past, but they were not looking for Wren. She kept to the shadows like everybody else and jogged toward the stern, looking for a way out. A few of the sally ports were opened, but they were all clogged with scavengers hurrying out into the debris field. Wren tried not to think what they would do when they reached Crouch End. At least the Londoners would be warned of their coming: the noise of those sprites must have been heard halfway to Batmunkh Gompa. But even if they had time to prepare, how could they stand up for themselves against Harrowbarrow’s ruthless scouts?

  “Wren!” bellowed a voice behind her.

  She turned onto a dingy, tubular street called Stack Seven Sluice. She was halfway down it when she heard the running feet coming up fast behind her. “Wren!” the voice was inhuman, distorted by echoes. She tried to run faster, but strong hands caught her, swung her around.

  “Theo!”

  “Are you hurt?” asked Theo.

  Wren shook her head. She tried to speak, but she could only croak. She hugged Theo.

  “I came in through a hatch down near the bows,” he said. “It came open when the lightning struck. I climbed in and started looking around, and I heard people hunting for you. I came aft and I saw you, and I shouted…”

  “I heard. I thought you were Wolf Kobold. I thought you were far away by now, safe.”

  “I couldn’t just leave you.”

  She hugged him tighter and said, “Theo, we can’t stay here. We’ve got to find a way off this place. It’s going to be moving again soon. It’s all been for nothing. I thought I could stop them, but all I’ve done is made them angry.”

  * * *

  Naga ran down the track to Crouch End while his makeshift air fleet launched itself into the skies above London again, the big shadows of the airships rushing across the huddled prisoners. He looked for Garamond and found him sitting miserably on the edge of a raised vegetable bed. “Get your people under cover,” he ordered. “There’s a harvester out in the wreckage there somewhere. They’ll probably have raiding parties closing in on us. Move everyone into that Womb place; we can defend that against them.”

  Garamond looked up at him, dazed and scared and not quite understanding. As if to convince him, quick puffs of smoke burst from a dozen points in the wreckage, and something hummed over his head and clanged against Naga’s breastplate, causing the general to stagger backward a few paces before his armor compensated for the blow. Two of the Green Storm soldiers waiting nearby spun about and fell, flinging their limbs out so clownishly that several of the watching children laughed. The other soldiers began to run for cover, guns at the ready, shouting at panicking Londoners to get out of their way. Garamond started yelling, “Everybody into the Womb, please! Into the Womb, everyone! Quickly!”

  Above the rust hills one of Naga’s airships burst suddenly into fans of smoke and belching scarlet flame. Another fired rockets down at some target on the ground and came to a shuddering halt as cannon fire from below ripped off its engine pods and rudders. Whatever the suburb was, it had clearly survived the electric trap it had blundered into. “Harrowbarrow,” the Londoners had said. Naga recognized the name vaguely; a shadowy place that even the Storm’s intelligence wing knew only from rumors. But Naga had come up against plenty of other harvesters in his time: Evercreech and Werewolf, Holt and Quirke-Le-Dieu. They were hard places; rip off their tracks and destroy their engines and they would still keep coming, extending spare wheels and firing up emergency motors. He shielded his eyes against the light and watched his airships burning—four of them now, a good crop of escape balloons drifting downwind, thank gods. He knew he had a fight on his hands.

  He looked behind him to check that the Londoners were doing as he’d ordered, and saw them hurrying up the track to the Womb. Some carried bundles of belongings; others clutched the hands of scared children or helped the old and sick hobble along. Subgeneral Thien was ordering squads of battle-Stalkers into the rust heaps to stop any Harrowbarrovians who tried to circle around and cut them off.

  Naga took a carbine from one of his dead soldiers and threw it to the first Londoner he saw, a wide-eyed girl. “Covering fire,” he ordered. For a moment he wondered if he had done the wrong thing and she was going to turn the gun on him, but she ran away to join his own troops, who were crouched among the heaps of scrap metal west of the vegetable gardens, taking potshots at any townies who moved up in the rust hills.

  “What about the Londoners’ new city, Excellency?” asked Subgeneral Thien, running over to crouch at his side. “Shall we destroy it?”

  Naga stared at the long wedge of the Womb while bullets whirred past him like wasps. What would it be like to live all these years in a rubble heap, to work so hard, only to see the thing you had built snatched away when it was almost finished?

  Subgeneral Thien was saying, “We can’t risk the Engineer technology falling into the hands of these Traktionstadt vermin.”

  Naga patted him on the shoulder. “You’re right. Find that woman Engineer and tell her to start her engines. The new city must leave at once.”

  Thien gaped at him, eyes wide behind his visor. “You’re letting it go? But it is a mobile city! We are sworn to destroy all mobile cities—”

  “It’s not a city, Subgeneral,” said Naga. “It’s a very large low-flying airship, and I intend to see that it comes to no harm.”

  Thien stared a moment longer and seemed to understand. He nodded and saluted, and Naga saw him grinning as he hurried off, crouched low and zigzagging to avoid the bullets. Beneath his armor Naga
felt himself trembling; it was not easy to go against everything he had believed for so many years. But Oenone had taught him that there sometimes came a time when beliefs had to be abandoned, or altered to suit new circumstances. He knew that she would approve of what he was doing.

  He ran across open ground to the vegetable gardens and crouched down beside the young London girl he had given the gun to. “What’s your name, child?”

  “Angie, Mister. Angie Peabody.”

  He squeezed her shoulder with his mechanical hand, sharing his courage with her the way he had so many times with so many other frightened youngsters in tight corners like this. “Well, Angie, we’re going to fall back to the Womb, and keep these devils at bay until your people can get their new city moving.”

  “You’re ’elping us, Mister? Cor, ta!”

  Her young face and bright, startled smile reminded Naga so strongly of Oenone that as he went running on to pass the same message to his own troops, he had to pull his visor shut so that they wouldn’t see his tears. He thanked his gods that the harvester had come, and that he had a battle to fight and people to defend; no politics to confuse him, no super-weapons to worry about, just a chance to die like a warrior, sword in hand, facing the barbarians.

  Chapter 48

  A Voyage to Erdene Tezh

  Above the white knives of the mountains the sky was full of memories. Tom and Hester didn’t talk much as the Jenny flew away from Batmunkh Gompa, but they didn’t have to: Each knew what the other was thinking of. All the voyages they’d made in this little ship; all the castles of cloud they’d flown her around, the glittering seas they’d seen below, the tiny, toylike cities, the convoys and the trading posts, the ice mountains calving from Antarctic glaciers … The memories linked them together, drawing them closer, but they were all stained and spoiled by the things Hester had done.

  So they did not talk. They took turns to sleep; to eat; and when they were together on the flight deck, they spoke only about the mountains, the wind, the sinking pressure in number three gas cell. Tom fetched the lightning gun from its hiding place and explained how it worked. They flew over small towns, high, sparse pastureland, and ribbons of road. They saw no other ships. Tom kept the radio switched on, but all they heard were a few confused scrabblings of battle code and garbled distress calls on elusive frequencies, interspersed with pulses of interference, like breakers on a pebble shore. The sunlight faded. The sky was veiled with volcanic ash and city smoke. The Jenny crossed a high plateau. Ahead rose the snow spires of the Erdene Shan.

  A sad, unwelcome thought came into Tom’s head: This was the last journey of his life.

  And as if she guessed what he was thinking, Hester took his hand. “Don’t worry, Tom. We’ll be all right. Hopeless missions are what we do best, remember?”

  He looked at her. She was watching him solemnly, waiting for a smile, some sign of forgiveness or approval. But why should he forgive her? He snatched his hand away. “How could you do it?” he shouted. All the stored-up anger he had been nursing since she’d left came out of him in a rush that sent her reeling back as if he’d hit her. “You sold Anchorage! You betrayed us all to the Huntsmen!”

  “For you!” Hester’s face was flushed, her scar dark and angry-looking. Her voice slurred the way it always did when she was upset, making it hard to hear what she said next. “For your sake, that’s why I did it, because I was afraid you’d go off with Freya Rasmussen.”

  “I should have done! Freya doesn’t kill people, and enjoy doing it, and lie about it afterward! How could you lie to me, all those years? And in Brighton too … abandoning that little Lost Boy—how could you?”

  Hester raised one hand to shield her face. “I’m Valentine’s daughter,” she said.

  “What?” Tom thought he’d misheard. “Valentine was my father.”

  Tom was still angry. He thought this was another lie. “David Shaw was your father.”

  “No.” Hester shook her head, her face hidden now by both her hands. “My mum and Valentine were lovers before she married. Valentine was my father. I found out a long time ago, at Rogues’ Roost, only I never told you, ’cos I thought if you knew, then you’d hate me. But now you hate me anyway, so you might as well know the truth. Valentine was my dad. His blood’s in me, Tom; that’s why I can lie and steal and kill people and it doesn’t feel wrong to me; I know it’s wrong, but I don’t feel it. I’m Valentine’s daughter. I take after him.”

  Her one gray eye peered out at him between her fingers, as if she had turned back into the shy, broken girl he had fallen in love with all those years before. A memory came to him, clear as sunlight, from Wren’s thirteenth summer, when she and Hester had just been starting to fight: Hester standing at the bottom of the staircase in their house at Dog Star Court and shouting up at her sulky daughter, “You take after your grandfather!” At the time he’d thought she’d been talking about David Shaw, and he’d thought it surprising, because she’d always said that David Shaw had been a quiet, kind man. But of course she had been thinking of her real father.

  He felt the last of his anger drain away, leaving him shaky and ashamed. What must it have been like for her, keeping such a secret for so long?

  “And Wren too,” she snuffled, weeping now. “He’s in her too—why else would she steal that Tin Book thing? Why else run out on us? That’s why I had to go, Tom. Maybe if she just has you, she’ll be all right, maybe the Valentine in her won’t come out.”

  “It’s not Thaddeus Valentine whom Wren takes after,” Tom said gently. He went to her and took her hands, pulling them aside and down so that he could see her face. “If you could see her now, Het—she’s so brave and beautiful. She’s just like Katherine.”

  He had thought that he didn’t want to kiss her, but all of a sudden he realized that he had wanted nothing else, ever since they’d parted. The things she had done that had made him so angry, the lies she’d told him and the men she’d killed, only made him want her more. He had loved Valentine when he was a boy, and now he loved Valentine’s daughter. He kissed her face, her jaw, her damaged, tear-wet mouth. “I don’t hate you,” he said.

  From his station high in the envelope, where he had been keeping watch for pursuers, Grike heard the sounds from the flight deck: their rustling movements and the things they whispered to each other. Hester’s constant weakness for the other Once-Born saddened him. Scared him, too, for he could tell from the sick, arrhythmic stutter of Tom’s heart that Tom would not live long. What would Hester do without him? How could she have invested all her hopes in something so fragile? And yet her small voice, audible only to a Stalker’s ears, still drifted up the companionway, murmuring, “I love you I love you I always loved you Tom oh only you and always…”

  Embarrassed, Grike tried not to listen to her, concentrating hard upon the other noises around him. And faintly, faintly, beneath the noise of engines and envelope fabric and the wind in the rigging, he sensed a third heartbeat, another pair of lungs filling and emptying, the familiar chattering of frightened teeth.

  A few empty crates stood between the air-frame struts. A heap of tarpaulins quivered in a corner. Grike ripped them aside and stared down at the Once-Born huddled underneath.

  It was hard for a flat, mechanical voice like his to sound weary, but he managed it.

  “SO, PROFESSOR, WE MEET AGAIN.”

  “THERE IS A STOWAWAY ON BOARD,” the old Stalker announced, climbing down the companion way with his captive. Tom and Hester sprang apart, straightening their clothes and their ruffled hair, turning their attention reluctantly to Nimrod Pennyroyal as Grike shoved him onto the flight deck.

  “Please, please, please, forgive me!” he was begging, pausing to add, “Oh, hello, Natsworthy!”

  Tom nodded awkwardly but did not say anything. He knew that there would be no more time for him to be alone with Hester, for the plateau below was narrowing and rising, and the steep buttresses of the Erdene Shan were only a few miles ahead.

 
; “Throw him out the hatch!” said Hester angrily, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt. “Give him to me; I’ll do it myself!” She felt that dropping Pennyroyal thousands of feet onto some nice pointy rocks would help her regain her dignity. But she knew that Tom would not want that, so she restrained herself, and asked, “How in the gods’ names did you slip aboard?”

  “I couldn’t just let you leave me in Batmunkh Gompa, could I?” Pennyroyal started babbling. “I mean, for Poskitt’s sake, I wasn’t going to hang around and let Naga chop my head off or something. Authors lose all their appeal to the public if they are only available in kit form. So I sneaked aboard while those Green Storm chappies were fueling her, and hid in the hold. If Mr. Grike hadn’t come poking about, I’d still be there, being no trouble to you at all. Where are we going, anyway? Airhaven? Peripatetiapolis? Somewhere nice and safe, I trust?”

  “Nowhere’s safe anymore,” said Tom. “We’re going to Erdene Tezh.”

  “Where? And, indeed, why?”

  “Because we think the Stalker Fang is there.”

  Pennyroyal’s eyes bulged; he writhed in Grike’s grip. “But she’ll kill us all! She’ll have airships, soldiers, Stalkers…”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I think she’s quite alone. How else would she have been able to return without Naga’s intelligence people suspecting anything?” He grunted and clutched his chest, feeling his heart straining in the thin high-altitude air. For a moment he felt an absolute hatred of Pennyroyal. What was the old man doing here? Why was he haunting them? He wondered if he should tell Hester about his failing heart. When she learned that the old wound was going to kill him, she would murder Pennyroyal out of hand…

  But he still did not want to tell Hester how ill he was. He wanted to cling for as long as possible to the pretense that he was going to survive, and sleep in her arms tonight, and fly on with her in the morning to fresh adventures in other skies.