A Darkling Plain

Chapter 24 Manchester

The clang and tremor of docking clamps engaging shook Oenone from her dreams. She struggled to stay asleep, but the dull, hungry ache in her belly kept nagging at her, and she came awake groggily. She had been dreaming of home, the islands of Aleutia; gray stone and gray sky and gray winter sea, she and her brother Eno haring downhill in the sharp cold. The images faded quickly in the stuffy heat of the Humbug’s hold.

It was morning. The new-risen sun was poking in through rents in the Humbug’s envelope. Oenone lay curled on the floor of a wire-mesh pen, surrounded by crates and boxes full of dodgy gadgets and unsold trade goods that Napster Varley must once have hoped would make his fortune. There was no mattress in the pen, and Oenone was so stiff from sleeping on the hard deck that she could barely move. She lay there for a while, wondering what it was about her prison that seemed different this morning. Then she realized. The rattling engines that had been drilling their noise into her ears all the way from Cutler’s Gulp had stopped.

She could hear voices down below her in the gondola. Varley was shouting at his wife, as usual. As usual, the baby was crying. Oenone had never known a baby who cried as much as Napster Junior.

She drank water from the tin jug Varley had left her, peed in her cracked enamel chamber pot, and said her morning prayers. By the time she had finished, all was quiet below. She waited fearfully to see what would happen next.

To her relief it was not Varley who came up through the hatch, but Varley’s wife. Mrs. Varley was not exactly friendly toward the prisoner in the hold, but she was friendlier than her husband. She was a freckled, doughy girl with unruly red hair and frightened eyes, one of which was currently swollen shut and surrounded by yellowish bruises. Varley had bought her somewhere, and she had not made as good a wife as he had hoped. He beat her, and Oenone had often heard her screams and sobs echoing through the airship. She had come to feel a sort of comradeship with this exhausted young woman, as if they were both prisoners together.

“Napster says to give you breakfast,” Mrs. Varley said now, in her quivery little voice, and pushed a bowl of bread through the bars, along with half an apple.

Oenone started to shovel the food into her mouth with both hands. She felt ashamed, but she couldn’t help it; a few weeks of captivity had turned her into a savage, an animal. “Where are we?” she managed to ask between mouthfuls.

“Airhaven,” said Mrs. Varley. She looked about fearfully, as if she were afraid her husband might be lurking among the stacks of crates, ready to leap out and black her other eye for talking to the cargo. She leaned close to the mesh of the cage. “It’s a town that flies!”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“And it’s above something called the Murnau cluster,” Mrs. Varley went on, her excitement getting the better of her fear. “There’s more cities down there than I’ve ever seen in my life. A big fighting one, all hidden in armor, and trade towns too, and Manchester! Napster says Manchester’s one of the biggest cities in the world! He read about it in one of his books. He reads a lot of books, does Napster. He’s trying to improve himself. Anyway, it’s lucky we got here today, because there’s a big meeting of mayors and bigwigs there and Napster’s gone down there to … to see if one of them will buy you off him, Miss.”

Oenone thought she was used to being helpless and afraid by now, but when she heard that, she was almost sick with fright. She had spent most of her life hearing about the cruelty of the men who ruled the Traction Cities. She forced her hands out through the mesh and snatched at Mrs. Varley’s skirts as the girl turned away. “Please,” she said desperately. “Please, can’t you let me out of here? Just let me ashore. I don’t want to die on a city…”

“Sorry,” said the girl (and she really was). “I can’t. Napster’d kill me if I let you go. You know the temper he’s got on him. He’d throw my baby overboard. He’s often said he would.”

The baby, as if he had overheard, woke up in his crib down in the gondola and began to bawl. Mrs. Varley tugged her skirts out of Oenone’s grasp and hurried away. “Sorry, Miss,” she said, as she started down the ladder. “I have to go now…”

Manchester, which had been rumbling eastward all spring, detouring now and then to eat some smaller town, had finally reached the Murnau cluster the previous afternoon. Bigger and brasher than the fighting city, it squatted like a smug mountain a few miles behind the front line. Its jaws hung half open—officially so that its maintenance crews could clean its banks of rotating teeth, but it gave the impression that it had half a mind to gobble up a few of the small trading towns that thronged around Murnau’s skirts.

One by one the towns gathered in their citizens and started to crawl away, for they all knew that Manchester’s arrival meant trouble, even if it didn’t eat them. Adlai Browne was a well-known opponent of the truce, and most of the cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft were in debt to him. He had poured a lot of money into their war with the Storm, and now he wanted to see something in return. His couriers, flying ahead of the city, had summoned their leaders to a council of war in Manchester Town Hall.

By nine o’clock that morning airships and cloud yachts were converging on Manchester’s top tier from every city and suburb on the line. Watched from a safe distance by polite crowds of onlookers, the mayors and kriegsmarschalls made their way into the town hall, where they took their places on the padded seats of the council chamber and waited for the lord mayor of Manchester to mount the steps to the speaker’s pulpit. High above them, in the dome of the ceiling, painted clouds parted to let beams of painted sunlight through, and a burly young woman who was supposed to be the Spirit of Municipal Darwinism flourished a sword, putting to flight the dragons of Poverty and Anti-Tractionism. Even her eyes seemed fixed upon the podium beneath her, as if she too were eager to hear what Adlai Browne would say.

Browne leaned with both hands on the carved pulpit rail and surveyed his audience. He was a squat, florid man, whose immense wealth had made him permanently dissatisfied with everything around him. He looked like an angry toad.

“Gentlemen,” he said loudly. (“And ladies,” he added, remembering that there were several mayoresses among his audience, as well as Orla Twombley, leader of his own mercenary air force.) “Before we begin this historic conference of ours, I just want to say how very proud I am to be able to bring my city here, and to tell you how much your long years of sacrifice and struggle are appreciated back west, by the ordinary folk of more peaceful cities.”

There was polite applause. Kriegsmarschall von Kobold leaned over to his neighbor and muttered, “It is our money they appreciate. We’ve paid a fortune down the years for all the guns and munitions they have sent us. No wonder Browne is scared at the thought of peace.”

“Now I’m a plain-speaking fellow,” Browne went on, “so I won’t mince my words. I haven’t just come here to pat you on the back. I’m here to stiffen you up a bit; to give you a bit of a boot up the proverbial. To remind you, in fact …” He paused, letting the young man who was translating his words into New German catch up with him. “To remind you,” he went on, “that Victory is at hand! I know how much you have all welcomed this truce, this chance to open your cities to the sky again and enjoy a few months’ peace. But we who dwell a little farther from the battle lines, and fight the Green Storm in our own ways, are maybe able to see a few things that you can’t. And what we see right now is an opportunity to scour the Earth clean forever of the menace of Anti-Tractionism. And it is an opportunity that we must seize!”

There was another spattering of applause. Mayor Browne looked as if he had expected more but acknowledged it anyway, turning to check who his supporters were—von Neumann of Winterthur, Dekker-Stahl from the Dortmund Conurbation, and a few dozen battle-hardened mayors from harvester suburbs. He signaled for quiet before the applause had a chance to peter out of its own accord. “Some of you think I speak too boldly,” he admitted. “But Manchester has agents in the lands of the Green Storm, and for weeks now all of them have been telling us the same thing: General Naga is a spent force. That little Aleutian dolly bird he fell for is dead, and the old fool has lost the will to live, or fight, or do anything but sit alone in his palace and rail at the gods for taking her off him. And without Naga the Storm is leaderless. Gentlemen, this—oh, and ladies—this is the moment to attack!”

More applause, stronger this time. Several voices called out, “Well said, Browne!” and “We’ll all be in Tienjing by Moon Festival!”

Kriegsmarschall von Kobold had heard enough. He stood up and shouted in his best parade-ground roar, “It would not be honorable, Herr Browne! It would not be honorable to take advantage of Naga’s grief like that! We know the real cost of war, out here on the line. Not just money, but lives! Not just lives, but souls! Our own children are turning into savages, in love with war. We must do all we can to make sure this peace lasts!”

A few people cheered him, but many more shouted for him to be quiet, to sit down and stop spouting defeatist Mossie claptrap. Von Kobold had not realized that so many of his comrades would be ready to listen to Browne’s warmongering. Had these few months of peace been enough to make them forget what war was like? Did they really think there would be any winners if they let the fighting start again? They were as bad as Wolf! He glared about him, feeling indignant and hot and foolish. Even his own staff officers looked embarrassed by his outburst. He started to shove his way along the row of seats toward the nearest exit.

“Gentlemen,” Adlai Browne was saying, “what I’m hoping we can thrash out today is not so much a battle plan as a menu. The lands of the Green Storm lie before us, defended by a weary, ill-equipped army. Whole static cities like Batmunkh Gompa and Tienjing, countless forests and mineral deposits that the barbarian scum have refused to exploit, all lie waiting to be eaten. The only real question for us is: How shall we divide the spoils? Which city shall eat what?”

Feeling sick, the old kriegsmarschall pushed his way out of the council chamber. The sounds of cheering and booing and furious arguments followed him all the way down the corridors of the town hall and into the park outside, but at least out there the air was fresh and the breeze was cool. He hurried down the steps and ducked under the security barriers that Browne’s people had erected to keep sightseers at bay. The crowds had gone now, except for a few picnickers on the lawns. Paper hats and placards lay strewn among the fallen blossoms on the metal paths. A discarded newspaper blew past, Nimrod Pennyroyal’s photograph on the front page. Ridiculous! thought von Kobold. The whole world tilting back into chaos, and all the papers were interested in was the latest gossip about that absurd writer fellow…

He strode across the grass to an observation balcony. Standing against the railings, he breathed in deeply, gazing eastward toward the armored ramparts of his own city, and then east again, to no-man’s-land. It was three weeks since Wolf had left Murnau. What was he doing now? Where was that nasty suburb of his? What would become of it if the war began again?

“Von Kobold?” asked someone close behind him. “Kriegsmarschall von Kobold?”

He turned and saw an impertinent, overdressed stranger with ginger whiskers. The young man looked slightly demented. Kobold almost regretted that he had left his staff officers behind in the council hall. But he was not going to let himself be scared by a ferrety little scrub like this, so he drew himself to attention and said, “I am von Kobold.”

“Varley.” The stranger held out a hand, and he could think of no good excuse not to shake it. “Napster Varley,” said the man, beaming at him. A gold tooth blinked like a heliograph. “I popped down here, hoping to speak to your little conference, but they wouldn’t let me in. So I was hanging about, waiting for it all to finish so I could buttonhole one of you on your way back to your airships, and I noticed you wandering about. Stroke of luck, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Oh, it is indeed, Herr Kobold!” (Hair Kobold; his pronunciation made the kriegsmarschall wince.) “You see, sir, I’m in the air trade. A dealer in curiosities. And curious is the word for the little item I’ve got aboard my ship, sir, just waiting for the right buyer. So when I saw you, sir, walking through the park here, all alone, like, I said to myself, ‘Napster,’ I said, ‘the Gods of Trade have sent him here so you can go and tell him what a bargain is waiting for him, up at Airhaven.’”

“Airhaven?” said von Kobold, and glanced to leeward, where the flying town was drifting above a haze of city smoke a few miles away. Nobody was going to lure him to a place like that! A free port, probably a nest of Mossie spies and assassins. He stepped away from Varley and started walking back toward the town hall, calling over his shoulder, “Whatever you’re selling, Mr. Varley, I am not interested.”

“Oh, yes, you are, sir!” said the merchant, hurrying to catch him up. “Least, you will be when you find out what it is. Could be important, sir. For the war effort, like. I’m only trying to do my bit, sir.”

Von Kobold stopped, wondering what on Earth the man was talking about. Shady scavengers were always emerging from the Out-Country with bits of Old Tech that they claimed would end the war. Most of them were charlatans, but you could never be sure… “If you think it might be important,” he said, “you should take it to the authorities. Either here in Manchester or in Murnau. They’ll know what to do with it.”

“Ah, but I don’t suppose they’ll reward me for my troubles, will they, sir? And I’ve taken considerable trouble to acquire this item, so I shall want a considerable reward.”

“But if you are a good Municipal Darwinist and you think this thing can help us—”

“I’m what you might call a Municipal Darwinist second, sir,” said Varley, “and a businessman first.” He shrugged, and muttered, somewhat perplexingly, “Scatter cushions! Grandma had the right idea! I never thought it’d be so hard to find a buyer…”

Von Kobold turned away again, but before he could walk on, the merchant’s hand closed on his sleeve. “Look, sir!” he said. He was holding out some sort of photograph. Von Kobold, who was too proud to wear his reading glasses in public, could not make it out. He pushed Varley away, but the merchant stuffed the photograph into the breast pocket of his tunic and said ingratiatingly, “I expect you’ll want to come and arrange a price, sir. You’ll find my ship on Strut 13, Airhaven Main Ring. Varley’s the name, sir. And the reserve price is ten thousand shineys…”

“Well, of all the infernal—” von Kobold started to say, but he was interrupted by the voice of his aide, Captain Eschenbach. The young man was hurrying down the steps of the town hall, and Varley, seeing him, ducked between some nearby bushes and went scurrying away.

“Was that fellow bothering you, Kriegsmarschall?” asked Eschenbach, drawing level with von Kobold.

“No. A crackpot; nothing.”

“You should come inside, sir,” the young man said. “They are discussing battle plans. Deciding which city attacks which sector of the enemy’s territory. Browne has bagged the static fortress called Forward Command for Manchester; Dortmund is to take everything on the east shore of the Sea of Khazak. There’ll be nothing left for us, sir, if you’re not quick. We don’t want to lose out…”

“Lose out?” Von Kobold narrowed his eyes, scanning the park for Varley. There was no sign of him, unless he was aboard that balloon taxi lifting off from a platform at the tier’s edge. “Is this what it has all been for?” he asked. “Just so men like Adlai Browne can turn the Storm’s lands into one enormous all-you-can-eat buffet? Why can’t we let them live in peace?”

Eschenbach frowned, trying hard to understand but not quite managing it. “But they’re Mossies, sir.”

Von Kobold started to walk toward the town hall. “Poor Naga,” he said. He climbed the stairs and went inside to fight for his city’s corner, forgetting all about the photograph that Napster Varley had pushed into his pocket.

Chapter 25 Theo in Airhaven

By late afternoon the sky around Airhaven was humming with traffic. Everyone knew that Adlai Browne had brought Manchester east for the sole purpose of getting the war started again, and the air traders were eager to do as much business as possible before they took off for safer markets farther west. To and fro between the cities and the flying town went the freighters and the overladen balloons, while high above them, ever watchful, the Flying Ferrets wheeled like flocks of starlings. But Orla Twombley’s airmen were on the lookout for Green Storm attack ships, and they paid no attention to a greasy little Achebe 100 that came puttering out of the west that evening to slip into a cheap berth on Airhaven’s docking ring.

She was called the Shadow Aspect, and she had been captured from the old League long ago and converted into a merchantman. She was not much, but she was the best that Hester had been able to afford after selling her sand ship. All the way from Africa Hester had grumbled about her leaky cells and racketing engines, and cursed the used-airship dealer who had sold her such a death trap. But Theo, who had been doing most of the flying, had grown used to the Shadow’s little ways; he secretly thought she was a fine old ship, and in the quiet of the night watches he had whispered kindly to her, urging her on her way, “Go on; just a little longer; you can make it…”

And now she had made it; the long voyage was over, and the sight of all those cities arranged on the earth below him like monstrous chess pieces filled Theo with anger and fear. Cities were his enemies. They had been the enemies of his people for a thousand years. What was he thinking of, coming into the heart of this vast cluster of them? He had no hope of rescuing Lady Naga from whatever prison the townies had penned her in. She would not have expected him to try; she would not want anyone to die for her sake…

The Shadow’s docking clamps clanged against the strut. Theo cut her engines, and the sounds of Airhaven spilled into the gondola: shouts of merchants and stevedores, rattling chains, a hurdy-gurdy playing somewhere, a trader maneuvering at the next strut. A boy with a bucket and a long-handled squeegee came running to clean the Shadow’s windows, but Hester waved him away, and a glimpse of her angry, hideous face was enough to send him scuttling off.

Hester was in a foul mood. She had hoped to overtake the Humbug in midair, where she thought she could board it and rescue Lady Naga with ease. But although the Shadow Aspect had no cargo, and four engines to the Humbug’s two, it had taken Hester too long to discover where Napster Varley was going, and he had beaten them to Airhaven. Boarding the Humbug would be difficult here, where there were harbor officials and security men and passersby who would interfere. She looked around at Grike, standing statue still in the shadows at the rear of the flight deck. “Better hide yourself, old machine,” she said. “YOU MAY NEED ME.”

“Not here. There are a lot of townies aboard, and if they see you stalking about, they’ll think we’re Green Storm. Anyway, somebody might remember your last visit, when you tore the place half to pieces looking for me and Tom. Wait in the hold; if I need you, I’ll call you.”

Grike nodded and climbed the companion ladder into the envelope. Hester pulled up her veil, slipped on dark glasses, and opened the exit hatch. “Coming?” she asked Theo.

The tavern called the Gasbag and Gondola had survived through all Airhaven’s changes, and still occupied the same sprawling assemblage of lightweight huts that Hester remembered from her first visit to the free port. But in the intervening years the air trade had split, like the world below, into townies and Mossies, and the Gasbag and Gondola had become a townie haunt; NO DOGS, NO MOSSIES read a scrawled message in white paint above the door. The traders clustering around its small, dirty tables came from Manchester and Dortmund and Peripatetiapolis, from Nuevo-Mayan steam ziggurats and Antarctic drilling cities. Framed posters and cartoons on the walls mocked the Green Storm, and the dartboard was printed with the bronze face of the Stalker Fang.

Hester stopped at the shrine to the Sky Gods, just inside the door, and sighed irritably as Theo cannoned into her. She rummaged in her coat pockets and found a few pennies, which she dropped into the airship-shaped charity box of the Airman’s Benevolent Fund. A fat waitress bustled over, eyeing them roguishly, as if she thought that Theo was Hester’s boyfriend, and that Hester had done rather well for herself. Hester felt suddenly proud, as if it were true.

“We’re looking for Varley,” she told the woman. “Trader. Lately in from Africa. Heard of him?”

“You’re in luck. He’s by the window there. Watch out, though; he came back from Manchester in a nasty mood.”

Outside the circular window that the waitress pointed at, the evening clouds were glowing as the sun began to set, but the young man who sat at the table beside it was not enjoying the view. He was reading a book and reaching out from time to time to pick halfheartedly at a bowl of chargrilled locusts.

“Napster Varley?”

“Who’s asking?” Varley’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, looking Hester up and down. He closed his book. It was called The Dornier Lard Way to Successful Haggling, and a dozen pages had been marked with mean, grubby stubs of paper. When he saw Hester looking at the title, he hastily turned it facedown. “I don’t know you,” he said. “What ship you from?”

“Shadow Aspect,” said Hester.

“Never heard of her.” He studied Theo, and asked him, “What city do you come from? What’s your business?”

“We’re from—,” Hester started to say. Varley cut in. “I asked the boy.”

Theo, who was not a good actor, wished Wren were there instead of him. He still remembered the way she had run rings around old Pennyroyal and Nabisco Shkin with her stories back in Brighton. Doing his best to emulate her, he lied, “We’re from Zanzibar.”

“We heard you had something that we might want to buy,” said Hester.

Varley looked interested but still suspicious. “Sit down,” he said, pushing a chair out with his foot. “Have a locust. So what have you heard about my business, and where did you hear it?”

“Grandma Gravy,” said Hester.

“You trade with Grandma?”

“We’re old friends. She told me you had a very important prisoner aboard.”

“Shhh!” hissed Varley. He leaned across the table and said in a smelly whisper, “Don’t talk about my merchandise that way, lady. I don’t know who’s listening. The Airhaven authorities don’t like the slave trade. If they thought I was trying to shift a live cargo on their patch, there’d be hell to pay.”

Theo felt so angry and disgusted that he could happily have hit the man. He still bore the scars and bruises of his time in Cutler’s Gulp, and the shame of his captivity on Cloud 9 had never completely faded: He knew all too well what that harmless-sounding phrase “live cargo” meant.

Hester seemed unmoved. “Found a buyer yet?”

“I opened negotiations with the kriegsmarschall of Murnau a few hours ago,” said Varley. “Nothing’s been finalized.”

“I’m interested in buying,” said Hester.

Varley snorted, shook his head, and returned to his locusts, eating greedily now, as if talking business had brought back his appetite. “You couldn’t afford what I’m asking,” he said through a crunchy mouthful.

“Maybe I could.”

Varley looked up sharply, and spat out a wing case. “You ain’t from Zanzibar,” he said. “Your fancy-boy might be pretty, but he’s a lousy liar. Who are you?”

Hester said nothing and kicked Theo’s ankle under the table, warning him to stay quiet too.

Varley grinned. “Gods almighty!” He lowered his voice to a whisper again. “You’re the Storm, ain’t you? I been wondering if any of you lot would turn up. Don’t worry, I’m broad-minded. Gold is gold to Napster Varley, whether it comes from the coffers of a Traktionstadt or the treasure houses of Shan Guo. So what’s she worth to you, your empress? You’ll have to hurry, mind. Everyone’s saying the fighting’ll break out again in a day or so. You’ll want to get her safe in Mossie-land before that happens, won’t you?”

“What are you asking?” said Hester.

“Ten thousand in gold. Nothing less.”

“Ten thousand?” Theo had a hollowed-out feeling in the pit of his stomach. For a moment he had let himself imagine that it might just be possible to buy Lady Naga back, but… ten thousand in gold! Varley might as well ask them for the moon!

“I’ll think it over,” said Hester calmly, pushing back her chair. “Come on, Theo.”

Varley waved a locust at her. “You do that, honeybunch. My ship’s the Humbug, over on Strut 13. Just bring me the money, and hand it over nice and polite.”

“We’ll want to see the merchandise first,” said Hester.

“Not till I’ve seen the money. And I’ve got three big lads on watch, so don’t think about trying anything funny.”

Out on the High Street, electric lamps were being lit. Large moths zoomed about in the twilight, pursued by enterprising boys with nets who planned to roast them and sell them as tasty snacks. Some lingering maternal instinct made Hester flinch each time one of the urchins darted close to the unfenced edges of the quays. She told herself not to be so soft; these kids were born in the sky, too canny to fall; even if they did, the Airhaven authorities had stretched safety nets between the mooring struts to catch anyone who stumbled overboard.

She leaned against the handrail on the outer curve of the street and pretended to be watching the last smears of sunset fading in the west. She was actually studying Strut 13, where the black-and-white striped bulk of the Humbug lay at anchor. There were indeed three men loitering on the quay outside her single hatch. They were, as Varley had promised, quite big.

“He’s out of his depth,” Hester said.

“Who?” asked Theo. “Varley?”

“Of course Varley! He’s got the biggest prize of his career and he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. He’s terrified that someone’ll get wind of his prisoner and try to take her; hence all the hired muscle. But he daren’t approach the Traktionstadts directly for fear they’ll just swipe Lady Naga off him and give him nothing but a medal for his troubles; and when he tried doing it privately, they gave him the brush-off. That’s why he came back from Manchester ‘in a nasty mood.’ That’s why he’s hunting for new ideas in books. Us turning up is like an answer to his prayers. He’s an amateur, Theo.”

“But he still wants ten thousand in gold,” said Theo.

“He’ll settle for less. Half, even.”

“That would still be an enormous lot of money, and we don’t have anything at all! We’re here to rescue Lady Naga, not buy her! We can handle Varley and his three men easily. You rescued me, didn’t you? And I heard what you did at Shkin’s place last year…”

Hester glanced away, remembering the men she had killed to free Tom from the slaver’s tower in Brighton, and the shocked, betrayed way that Tom had looked at her afterward. That had been their last evening together. “It’s not just a question of getting Lady Naga out,” she said. “We have to get her away, right away, past all these fancy cities and safe across the Green Storm’s lines. If we cause a fuss getting her off Varley’s ship, we won’t get half a mile before those flying machines catch us and—”

She reached out and snatched a passing moth, dropping the crumpled body into the net of one of the urchin boys, who said, “Thanks, missus!”

“Are you saying we should give up?” asked Theo as the boy moved on.

Hester was silent, staring across the High Street.

“Mrs. Natsworthy?”

“No,” she said quite softly. She did not look at him. Her attention was fixed on a man who had just emerged from the doorway of a large, shabby building called the Empyrean Hotel. She reached back, found Theo’s arm, and squeezed it encouragingly. “No,” she said again. “We don’t have to give up. We just have to find someone who can give us an enormous lot of money.”

Chapter 26 Ruined!

The conference aboard Manchester had dragged on and on, as the leaders of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft hammered out the details of their new offensive. And “offensive” was the word, thought Kriegsmarschall von Kobold as he clambered out of the gondola of his air yacht and walked stiffly home to the Rathaus. His wife had already set off for Paris aboard the liner Veronica Lake, scared away by the rumors of war. He did not miss her. He had seen so little of her these past years that he did not feel he even knew her anymore. Glad that he would not have to spend another evening with her in their overdecorated, overscented official suite, he climbed the stairs to the small room on the top floor which he made his home when she and Wolf were away. The white walls, bare but for a portrait of his son, focused his attention on the windows, the bats flitting black outside against the afterglow, the sky streaked with the wind-combed contrails of flying machines.

Such a peaceful evening, thought the kriegsmarschall, pulling papers from the pockets of his tunic and throwing them down on his bed. Yet in the morning he would have to sign the orders that would take his city back to war. Young men would be recalled to their units, snout guns and airships made ready… Already the women and children were on their way to peaceful cities farther west. And tonight the armor would be closed. It might be months before he would be able to look out again at the evening sky from his own bedroom window.

He hung up his tunic and used the telephone above his dressing table to talk to his housekeeper, telling her that he would dine in his own room that night, and asking her to send up bread, cold meat, a glass of beer. As he returned to the door to check that he had not locked it, he noticed a face staring at him from the pile of papers on the bed.

He picked up the photograph, wondering what on earth it was doing there, among the tedious, typewritten transcripts of Browne’s speech. A woman’s face. It took him a moment to realize that this was what Varley had stuffed into his pocket in the park. In all the misery of the afternoon’s planning sessions, he had almost forgotten that seedy air trader. Now he grew furious. To think that a slaver was operating within a few miles of Murnau, which had never had anything to do with slavery, and had always made it a point of honor to free the slaves of every town it ate! And to think that Varley could imagine that he, von Kobold, would be interested in buying the poor, miserable-looking waif in this picture!

Photo in hand, he strode back to the telephone, winding the handle furiously and shouting at the startled operator to put him through at once to his chief of security. While he waited for the man to answer, he fumbled his spectacles on and looked more closely at the photograph. The girl was an easterner; dirty, bruised, huge eyed with fear. She seemed faintly familiar, though Kobold could not think why. That small, vulnerable mouth, those crooked teeth…

He remembered, suddenly, where he had seen her before. Intelligence had sent him pictures of General Naga’s wedding. The bride in her red finery. Thick, black brows and tilted cheekbones. That mouth.

“Herr Kriegsmarschall?” crackled the telephone. “What is it?”

Kobold hesitated, still staring at the photograph. “Nothing, Schiller,” he said softly. “It doesn’t matter.”

He returned the telephone gently to its cradle, then took a pistol from the dressing-table drawer, buckled on his heavy fighting sword, and put on the precious Kevlar body armor that his enemy had sent him all those years ago. He did not usually bother with armor, but it seemed appropriate that Naga’s gift should protect him when he went to rescue Naga’s wife.

He pulled a greatcoat on over the top and ran down the stairs, past the housemaid who was coming up with his dinner. “Sorry, my dear,” he told her. “Change of plan.” But he took the beer, drinking it as he hurried down to his private docking pan. The ground crew were moving his yacht Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers into her hangar for the night. “It’s all right, men,” he called, tossing the empty beer stein aside as he marched toward them across the pan. “I am taking her out again.”

“Tonight, sir?”

“Not much fuel in her tanks, sir.”

“I don’t need much,” said the kriegsmarschall. “I’m only going up to Airhaven.”

“Nobody of that name here,” said the clerk at the Empyrean Hotel. A dusty argon globe buzzed and flickered, light fluttering over threadbare carpets and tobacco-colored walls. Stairs went up into shadow. “Nice place,” muttered Theo.

Hester leaned across the receptionist’s desk. Behind her veil her blunt profile looked as hard as a fist. Theo was afraid that she was going to do something terrible to the insolent young man in the pillbox hat, but she just said, “You’re sure? Nimrod Pennyroyal. He’s a writer.”

“Oh, I know who he is, lady,” said the clerk, with the same witless grin. “Everyone’s heard of Pennyroyal. But we ain’t got no one of that name staying here.”

“I just saw him leave,” said Hester. “A fat man. Old. Bald.”

“That was just Mr. Unterberg,” said the clerk. “A commercial gentleman from Murnau, staying in room 128. He said he was popping round to the harbor office to— Look, here he is now!”

Hester and Theo both turned as the lobby door opened, letting in the noise of rowdy parties from the High Street bars, a few lost moths, and the man they were looking for. He had shaved off his beard, put on blue-tinted spectacles, and swapped his usual fine clothes for the dowdy pinstriped robes of a commercial traveler, but Hester and Theo recognized him at once.

“Oh, great Poskitt!” he gasped as they went to meet him. “Oh, Clio! Oh, ruddy Nora!”

“We’d like a little chat,” Hester explained.

She expected him to scream for help, to call for the police and Airhaven militia. After all, last time they’d met, Hester had tried to murder him, and only her softhearted daughter had stopped her. But Pennyroyal seemed more frightened of the clerk at the front desk than of her. He peeked nervously past her at the youth (who was watching wide-eyed, with his mouth hanging open) and hissed, “We can’t talk here!”

“Your room then,” said Hester.

Pennyroyal obeyed meekly enough, fetching his passkey from the astonished clerk and motioning for Theo and Hester to follow him up the stairs. Hester couldn’t help feeling she had missed something. She had never met anyone as pleased with himself as Nimrod Pennyroyal. Why would he pretend to be someone else?

Room 128 was on the top floor: sloping ceilings, a tap dripping into a grimy metal handbasin, empty wine bottles on every level surface. Pennyroyal sank into a wicker chair beside the window. Hester let Theo in and kicked the door shut behind him.

“If you’ve come looking for Tom and Wren,” the old man whimpered, “they took off days ago. Gone north, on some job for a fellow named Wolf Kobold.”

“Tom and Wren were here?” asked Theo.

Hester seemed disconcerted by this sudden news of her family. She stared at Pennyroyal for a moment, started to say something, stopped, and then recovered herself and snapped, “That’s not why we came. We need money, Pennyroyal.”

Pennyroyal let out a humorless bark, like a seal with bronchitis. “Money? You’ve come to me for money? Hal Never been much of a reader, have you, Hester? Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Why do you think I’m hiding in this dump?” He crouched down and pulled a tattered newspaper from beneath the heap of empty bottles and discarded socks under the bed. Shoving it at Hester and Theo, he said bitterly, “See? I’m ruined! Ruined! And it’s all thanks to that daughter of yours!”

The paper was called The Speculum. A picture of Pennyroyal filled most of the front page. Beneath his smug, smiling face, heavy, black type screamed:

Theo took the paper and leafed quickly through the first few pages. “ ‘Many experts have long believed that “Professor” Pennyroyal’s archaeological work is suspect,’ ” he read. “ ‘No proof has ever surfaced to support “Professor” Pennyroyal’s stories of his adventures in America and Nuevo-Maya…’ ” Then he turned to the end of the article and gave a cry of surprise, for there was Wren. The photograph was small, and she had done something to her hair since he’d last seen her (or had she been standing on a slope when it was taken?) but it was her. He scanned the paragraphs beneath the picture and glanced nervously at Hester before he read them aloud.

“ ‘Mr. Thomas Natsworthy, a respectable air trader, is none other than the husband of Hester Shaw, whose death Pennyroyal describes so touchingly in the closing chapters of his best-seller Predator’s Gold. Fans of that book may be surprised to learn that Ms. Shaw was alive and well last Moon Festival, when she and her husband separated, and that the couple have a charming daughter, Miss Wren Natsworthy (15), who says of Pennyroyal, “He does tend to exaggerate a little.”

“ ‘It is the opinion of this writer, and of an increasing number of the professor’s readers, that Pennyroyal exaggerates more than a little; that he is in fact nothing more than a fraud, a charlatan, a confidence trickster, a lounge lizard, and a master of deceit whose presence upon Murnau’s upper tiers offends against every tradition of that noble city.’ ”

Hester chuckled appreciatively behind her veil.

“You see?” said Pennyroyal. “The little minx! Talking to Spiney like that behind my back! Or did he trick her? Twist her words about? I wouldn’t put it past him. He will use any ammunition to hurl at me. I would set my lawyers on him, but alas, all proofs of my adventures burned with Cloud 9. Now Werederobe and Spoor are claiming that I have deceived them and want me to repay the advance on my latest memoir. And I can’t! I’ve spent it! Already warrants have been issued for my arrest in Murnau and Manchester! Where am I to go? What am I to do? I fled here hoping my friend Dornier Lard would take me away aboard his sky yacht, but he refused to know me! And I dare not try to buy passage on any common trade ship, lest the aviators recognize me and alert my creditors. Unless …” He gawped at Hester, trying to hide his fear of her and look plaintive and appealing. “Do you have a ship, Mrs. Natsworthy? Perhaps, for old times’ sake … Theo, dear boy, you remember how we got off Cloud 9 together; you and me taking turns to pilot the dear old Arctic Roll…”

“Money,” said Hester firmly.

“Oh, of course I can pay my way!” Pennyroyal began to fumble his clothes open, exposing his bulging, white-furred belly and a canvas money belt with many pouches. He took off the belt and started emptying coins onto the floor. “Just a little portable wealth I carry with me in case of emergencies,” he explained. “Only pocket money, really, but you are welcome to it if you can take me away from here, and keep quiet about it.”

“Pocket money?” Hester stirred the heaps of coin with the toe of her boot. “There must be four hundred shineys here, Pennyroyal.”

“Five hundred!” said the old man eagerly, pulling a roll of coins out of the lining of his coat and throwing it down with the rest.

“It’s a wonder you could walk.”

“Well, it’s all yours, if you can help me.”

Hester nodded, thanking him. “Take it, Theo,” she said.

“But it’s not enough—”

“It’s enough to get me aboard the Humbug. Once I’m past those heavies on the quay, I’ll improvise.”

Theo still didn’t see how she planned to satisfy Varley’s greed with five hundred in assorted gold bits, but he crouched down anyway and started shoveling the coins into his pockets. Pennyroyal watched with a strange expression, both pained and hopeful. “Which quay is your ship on?” he asked. “What is she called? Is she fast? I was wondering about Nuevo-Maya; I don’t believe The Speculum is very widely read in Nuevo-Maya.”

“You’re not coming with us,” said Hester.

“But you said—”

“I didn’t say anything, Pennyroyal. You’ve been doing all the talking yourself, as usual. I wouldn’t trust you aboard my ship, and even if I did, you wouldn’t want passage to where I’m going.”

Pennyroyal started to whimper. “But my money! My money!”

“You can’t do this!” cried Theo, turning to Hester. Pennyroyal had kept him as a slave once, and he knew he should be glad that the gods had finally punished him for all his lies. But he didn’t feel glad; he felt as if he were robbing a helpless, frightened old man. “We can’t just take his money!”

“Think of it as a charity donation,” said Hester, pulling the door open.

“I shall inform the authorities!” wailed Pennyroyal. “What, and give your hiding place away? I don’t think so.”

“It’s for a good cause, Professor,” promised Theo, lingering behind as Hester strode out of the room. He touched the old man’s trembling hand and said gently, “We’ll pay it back. Lady Naga’s a prisoner in a ship here. We’re going to get her to Shan Guo. When we do, General Naga will be so grateful … he’ll pay back ten times what we took from you.”

“Lady Naga?” whined Pennyroyal. “What are you talking about? She’s dead!”

“Theo!” shouted Hester, halfway down the stairs.

With a last worried glance at Pennyroyal, Theo turned and followed her out of the room, out of the Empyrean Hotel, out into the chilly, starry night.

The clerk at the front desk watched them go, then wound the handle of the hotel’s telephone and asked the operator to connect him to his brother, who worked in Airhaven’s radiotelegraph office. “Lego?” he whispered. “It’s me, Duplo. Can you send a message down to Murnau, double-quick?”

Alone in Room 128, Pennyroyal took a few deep, shivery breaths to calm himself. Curiosity was starting to get the better of his self-pity. What had young Theo meant? Could Naga’s wife really still be alive? Was she really in Airhaven? And if she was, what would the Traktionstadts not give to get her for themselves? Why, the man who captured her would be a hero, no matter what alleged irregularities lay in his past…

Pennyroyal poured himself a brandy to steady his nerves, and lifted the stained curtain aside to look out at the big, sleepy shapes of the moored airships down on the docking ring. Humbug: That was the name Hester had let slip. He’d not heard of her, but it would be easy enough to find out what strut she lay at. And there were sure to be some burly townies in the High Steet taverns who could help him out if things turned nasty.

In his mind’s eye the beastly stories that The Speculum had printed about him finally began to fade, and a new, more favorable headline appeared; something along the lines of “Pennyroyal Captures Leading Mossie…”

Chapter 27 Strut 13

Low cloud, blowing in from the west on the night wind, spread like a white carpet fifty feet beneath Airhaven, hiding the Earth below and all but the uppermost tiers of the largest cities there. An air yacht in the midnight-blue livery of Murnau came gliding through the cloud tops, curving toward a berth on the far side of the docking ring; probably some toff from the Oberrang come up to risk his inheritance in the casinos. As she leaned over the handrail of an observation deck on the High Street, the smell of mist reminded Hester of a night at Rogues’ Roost, long ago.

Beneath her was Strut 13. The Humbuglay alongside, the three guards lounging at the foot of her gangplank. A light showed in her gondola, another in a window low down in her envelope.

Hester turned to Theo. “Go back to our ship. Get her ready to pull out. If all goes well, I’ll be coming aboard with Lady Naga in a few minutes.”

“You can’t go down there alone!” Theo protested. “What if something goes wrong?”

“Then you’ll leave without me. Go east and tell your General Naga what really happened to his wife.” Hester was eager to get Theo safely out of the way so that she could start doing what she did best. She leaned over and kissed his cheek, feeling the warmth of his skin through her veil. Everything was so intense in these moments before action, as if her brain wanted to drink in everything—every sound, every smell.

Theo nodded and started to say something, then thought better of it. He walked away fast along the High Street, dodging the crowds of aviators who meandered between the bars and cafes. Hester watched till he was out of sight, thinking how badly she would have fallen in love with him if she’d been twenty years younger. Then, cursing herself for a sentimental goose, she ran down the stairway to Strut 13.

The men on guard were as bored and dozy as she’d been hoping. They were the sort of shabby, down-at-heel aviators who hung around the High Street bars looking for work. Varley must have hired them to guard his precious cargo, but they would rather have been off drinking than standing out here in the cold. She considered just killing them, and keeping hold of Pennyroyal’s gold for herself, but she couldn’t take them all down without a fight, and she didn’t want to risk that yet. She called out, “Where’s Varley?”

The men came to life, trying to look hard and competent.

“Who’s asking?” said one, pointing a spring-loaded speargun at her.

Hester shook the bag she was holding and let them hear the chinkle of Pennyroyal’s gold. Is chinkle a word? she wondered. She always grew very calm at times like this, and small questions like that became intriguing. Tom would know… But she mustn’t think about Tom.

One of the guards was backing up the Humbug s gangway, calling through an open hatch to someone inside. After a moment he jerked the speargun at Hester, and the others stood aside to let her go aboard.

In the Shadow Aspect’s gondola Theo was warming up the engines, testing the rudder controls, and hoping that no one aboard Airhaven would notice, for he had not asked anyone’s permission to depart. Behind him Grike paced to and fro, his heavy footfalls shaking the deck. “she should not have gone alone,” the Stalker said. “I told you—”

“you are not to blame, theo ngoni. but she should not have gone alone.” He let out a grating, mechanical noise that Theo supposed was the Stalker equivalent of a Sigh. “i should be helping her to free dr. zero. in other times i would have done it easily. taken out the airhaven power plant, sown confusion, and gone aboard the HUMBUG while the once-born were looking elsewhere… but i could not do that without killing.”

“You wouldn’t get far afterward, either,” Theo pointed out.

Grike didn’t seem to hear him. He stood at a porthole, staring out at the night and the silent, tethered ships, “I AM GOING TO HELP HER.”

“But you can’t! If you’re seen …”

“I WILL BE CAREFUL.”

Before Theo could stop him, Grike opened the hatch and jumped down onto the docking strut. No one was about. He crossed the strut in two long strides and dropped over the edge, his armor rippling with reflections from the harbor lights as if he were made of quicksilver. The underside of the strut was in shadow, hatched with girders. Grike crept along them until he was beneath the docking quays, and waited while a puttering dirigible balloon taxi passed beneath him on its way to the central ring. Then he began to pull himself along Airhaven’s underbelly toward Strut 13.

The dirigible taxi pulled in against one of the docking platforms in the center of Airhaven, and its wicker gondola creaked as Sampford Spiney scrambled out, followed by Miss Kropotkin and her enormous camera. The journalist had been at a dinner on the Oberrang when he received the message from Airhaven, and he had not had time to change out of his formal robes. He swayed slightly as he made his way across the mooring platform to where the clerk from the Empyrean was waiting.

“Well? Are you the one who claims to have seen Pennyroyal?”

“He’s been staying in my hotel, sir.”

“Is he there now?”

“No, sir. He ran out not long after I sent word to you…”

“Ran where?”

“I don’t know, sir. Some people came to talk to him. Then he went running off. I can show you his room, sir…”

“His room? His room? Great Thunderer! I can’t interview a room! Find me Pennyroyal himself, or you’ll not see a cent out of The Speculum.”

The clerk hurried toward the stairs that led up to the High Street, and Spiney went with him, snapping at his photographer to follow. “And make a note, Miss Kropotkin,” he added as they climbed. “I’m pretty sure that was the kriegsmarschall’s sky yacht we passed as we came in. What’s the old man doing in Airhaven? Gambling? Seeing a woman? Could be a story in that…”

The Humbug’s gondola reeked of wet nappies. The living quarters at the stern were full of them, draped on lines strung above the heating ducts. Poorly made bookshelves covered the walls, sagging under the weight of Varley’s self-help books. In one corner a slimy-nosed baby snuffled and started to cry. “Hush, hush, hush,” his mother said, looking up nervously as one of Varley’s heavies pushed Hester in.

Varley was waiting for her, looking more feverish and ferrety than ever, a half-eaten supper on the table in front of him. He’d taken off his jacket. His trousers were held up by snakeskin braces. “On your own this time?” he asked Hester. “Got my ten thousand?”

“Five,” said Hester. “That’s all we can get hold of.”

“Then I’ll be selling your Lady Naga to another buyer.”

“Oh, yes, I noticed the enormous queue all up the gangplank when I came aboard,” said Hester. “That was sarcasm,” she added as Varley sprang up to peer through a porthole.

“Face it, you haven’t got any other buyers. You’ll have to do business with me, before someone bigger and tougher hears who you’ve got stashed in your hold and comes to take her off your hands for free.”

Varley glared at her and said nothing. She opened her bag on the kitchen table, and shook out a pile of small, plump money bags. They jingled loudly, as well they might; two were full of Pennyroyal’s savings, and the other eight were stuffed with nuts and washers that she and Theo had bought at the all-night chandlery on the High Street. “Ten bags,” she said, opening one and tipping out a stream of gold. “Two hundred fifty shineys in each. Captain Ngoni will be bringing you the rest when I can assure him your cargo is alive and well.”

Varley eyed the money hungrily, but he wasn’t happy. “That black kid of yours is a captain? The Green Storm must be running short of men as well as money…”

Hester chose another money bag and emptied a second shining drift of coin across the tabletop. (“Look! Pretty!” said Mrs. Varley, bouncing the baby on her knee.)

“Take it or leave it,” said Hester.

Varley still hesitated. “I want to see your face,” he said sullenly.

“Believe me, you really don’t.”

The merchant sniffed, kicked a toy aside, and told his henchman, “Watch her, and don’t go thieving any of my money.” Then he pushed past Hester and vanished up a companion ladder into the Humbug’s envelope. The other man reluctantly pried his eyes away from the heap of gold on the table and watched Hester instead. The baby gurgled. The woman sang him a song that Hester remembered faintly from long ago, but she quickly stopped when Hester looked at her.

“You from Oak Island?” Hester asked.

The woman shook her head. “Red Deer.”

You could see Red Deer Island from the hills above Hester’s childhood home on Oak Island, when the weather was fine. No wonder she recognized the song. She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill this woman and her baby.

“Napster bought me in the wife auction there,” the woman started to explain, and then stopped suddenly again, because she had heard her husband’s footsteps on the ladder, coming back down. She shifted closer to the table to give him room as he dropped into the cabin, dragging his frightened cargo behind him.

Pennyroyal peered into half a dozen of the High Street’s crowded drinking holes before he found what he was looking for. In fact they found him: a gang of rowdy young militia officers up from Manchester on a twenty-four-hour pass, clutching girls and bottles, making their unsteady way from a casino above Strut 1, where they had been betting their pay on Ancient games of chance like Pick-a-Sticks and Buckeroo. Pennyroyal scurried alongside, calling out, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” and “I say,” but they paid him no attention until he shouted, “I am Nimrod Pennyroyal!”

The Mancunians turned to stare at him.

“Shove off!” said one.

“Scrag him!” suggested another.

“Chuck him off the docking ring!” roared a third. “Hoorah!”

“No,” said a fifth man, slightly more sober than the rest. “He is Nimrod Pennyroyal. I recognize him from the papers.”

“Chuck him off the docking ring anyway!”

“Hoorah!”

“He’s that fake explorer bloke, ain’t he?” said one of the girls, peering at Pennyroyal as if he were some mildly interesting animal in a zoo.

“I am not a fake!” Pennyroyal shouted. “I have come to ask your help! There is a high-ranking member of the Green Storm secreted aboard an airship down on the docking ring, and I need the help of some loyal Tractionists to take her into custody!”

“Huh huh huh huh,” went one of the Mancunians, laughing at some private joke. The rest struggled to follow what Pennyroyal was saying. One or two reached for their swords. “A Mossie? Here?”

“Lady Naga herself! I’ve been operating undercover to discover her whereabouts. All that stuff you read in the papers was just a ruse, designed to make the enemy think I was in disgrace. I’ve actually been working for the Murnauer Geheimdienst all along, you know.”

The Mancunians looked blank. None of them had heard the German name for Murnau’s intelligence service before. Pennyroyal cursed their ignorance [but only quietly] and pulled out the old envelope on which he had jotted down the Humbug’s details from the arrivals board in the Floating Exchange. He squinted at his own crabbed writing for a moment, then flourished the envelope like a battle flag. “Come gentlemen!” he cried. “Follow me to Strut 13, and to glory!”

A bruised face, a mat of greasy hair, a thin body shaking and shaking inside a sackcloth dress. Hester was astonished at the flood of pity she felt as she watched Lady Naga come creeping down the Humbug’s companion ladder. She’s not much older than Wren, she thought, and for a moment she wanted to rush forward and hug the poor, frightened creature and comfort her and tell her that she was safe now.

But she wasn’t safe, not yet, and anyway she would not have wanted to be hugged; she seemed as scared of Hester as she was of Varley. When Varley shoved her forward and said, “This nice lady’s come to buy you,” she hung back and let out a whine like a scared animal. Hester, in her black coat and her black veil, looked like the Goddess of Death.

“You’re Lady Naga?” she asked.

“Oenone,” said the young woman, blinking fearfully at her. Her glasses were held together by tape, and one of the lenses was cracked.

“Course she’s Lady bleedin’ Naga,” crowed Varley. “Look at her signet ring, and that Zagwan pendant thing. They’re extra, by the way. Now go and get me the rest of my money.”

Hester nodded and glanced past him, judging the distance between herself and the man with the speargun at the bulkhead door. She turned, back to the wall, one hand moving slowly to the knife inside her coat, and saw out of the corner of her eye the baby reach toward the pile of money bags on Varley’s table.

What happened next happened very slowly, but not slowly enough for her to stop it. The child’s fat hand grabbed the bag; the bag fell; the bag burst. Across the deck at Varley’s feet there went scattering a storm of nuts and washers. Varley, realizing he’d been tricked, let out a yell. Hester snatched her knife and threw it underarm at the man by the door, hitting him in the throat. His speargun went off as he fell, but the spear went high, passing over Hester’s head; she heard it thud into the bulkhead above her. Mrs. Varley was screaming. The baby howled. Something struck Hester a sudden, stunning blow on the top of her head. A flash of purple light went off inside her skull. She cursed and tried to turn, confused, imagining someone had got behind her. Things were falling all around her, punching her shoulders, thumping on the deck. She went down on her knees among them and saw that they were books. The dead man’s speargun had detached one of Varley’s homemade bookshelves from the wall, and it had struck her as it fell. It was a stupid sort of injury, but that didn’t make it any less serious. The spilled books seemed to whirl around her. Dodgy Dealing for Beginners. Investing in People. Make Your Fortune on the Bird Roads—and Survive to Spend It! She felt sure she was going to be sick.

Varley had an arm around Oenone’s throat. “Come on, lads!” he shouted. “Get her! Get her!” Hester remembered the men outside. Squinting with the pain in her head, she tried to stand up. Footsteps shook the gondola as the heavies from the mooring strut came aboard. Hester reached into her pocket and tugged out her pistol, shooting them one at a time as they came barging through the cabin door. The gas pistol made soft coughing sounds, which she hoped would not be heard out on the High Street. The men fell on top of the body of their friend, and one of them kept struggling, so she shot him again. She could feel blood running down her face. She swung the gun toward Varley but fainted before she could pull the trigger.

The next thing she knew, the merchant was wrenching the gun out of her hand. He had a stupid, mad grin, and his nostrils kept flaring. He pulled down Hester’s veil, and his grin grew even wider, as if her ugliness were some sort of victory for him. He spat in her face. “Well,” he said. He put down the gun (a dangerous thing to use on board your own airship) and pulled a knife out of his belt. “Nobody’s going to miss you.”

He looked surprised when his wife picked up the gun and shot him. It seemed to take him a moment to understand that he’d been killed. His grin faded slowly, and he sank down on his knees beside Hester and bowed his head and stayed there, kneeling, dead.

“Oh, God,” murmured Oenone.

Mrs. Varley lowered the gun. She was shaking. The baby howled and howled. Oenone scrambled across the cabin and helped Hester to her feet.

“You’d better go now,” said Mrs. Varley. She pulled a nappy down from one of the lines and started scooping the gold into it.

Hester touched the searing, throbbing place where the shelf had hit her, and her hand came away wet and red. She felt drunk. She held on to Oenone for support and said, “We came to rescue you. Me and Grike.”

“Mr. Grike? He’s here?”

“Theo too. There’s a ship waiting.” With Oenone’s help she started limping toward the exit hatch, which seemed suddenly to be miles away. “Gods, it hurts,” she grumbled. Somehow they reached the top of the gangplank. Out on the docking strut a man was waiting. He was all alone. He had probably heard that last shot. The wind flapped his long blue greatcoat open, and moonlight shone on the hilt of the heavy saber in his belt.

Hester groaned, nauseous and weary. She had no strength left with which to fight him.

“Lady Naga?” said the stranger. “I’m just in time, I see.”

Oenone cringed against Hester as the stranger walked toward her, putting one booted foot on the gangplank. In the dim light from the Humbug’s hatchway his face looked stern, but not unkind. He held out a hand. “I am Kriegsmarschall von Kobold. You must come with me to Murnau. Quickly, please.”

Hester gripped the gangplank rail and glared at him. “You’ll have to get past me first.”

Von Kobold looked respectfully at her. Her scarred face did not shock him, nor did the blood that matted her hair and dripped from her chin. He gave her a little bow. “Forgive me, young woman, but that does not seem too great a challenge. I take it you are an agent of the Storm, come to free your empress? Even if you were not wounded, you could never get her away from here. A dozen cities stand between you and your own territory, and not all of their leaders are as understanding as I. Come with me to Murnau, and I shall find a way to send you and your mistress home to General Naga.”

A blurt of noise from the docking ring made him look around. Someone was shouting; running figures showed against the lighted windows of an all-night Ker-Plunk parlor. “We have to trust him,” whispered Oenone, and helped Hester down the gangplank. But by the time they reached von Kobold, it was too late; the deck plates were thrumming with the stamp of booted feet. Along the strut toward them came six red-coated men with drawn swords, and behind them, urging them on, the podgy, hopping shape of Nimrod Pennyroyal.

“There they are!” Pennyroyal shouted. “They’re escaping! Stop them!”

“Who are you?” barked Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, in such a military voice that the men stopped short. Up on the High Street passersby began to gather at an observation platform to see what was happening down on Strut 13.

“We, sir, are officers of the Manchester Civic Guard,” said the tallest and most sober of the newcomers. “We have been informed that a dangerous Mossie is concealed aboard this airship…”

“Blimey!” said one of his comrades, pointing. “It’s her! Naga’s wife, just like the old man said!”

“What, in that getup?” asked another.

“It’s her. I seen her picture in the Evening News. Blimey!”

“You’re under arrest!” said the leader, striding toward Oenone.

“Stand back, sir,” snapped von Kobold, and drew his saber. “The lady is my prisoner, and I will not deliver her into the hands of your warmongering mayor.”

“Now, steady on!” called Pennyroyal, who didn’t want a squabble between Murnau and Manchester to ruin his chance of some favorable headlines. But before he could say more, the light of a flashbulb blinded him. A small man in formal robes walked out onto the increasingly crowded strut. There was a girl behind him, fumbling a new flashbulb into place on the top of her camera.

“Mr. Pennyroyal!” the newcomer called out pleasantly. “Sampford Spiney of The Speculum. Been looking for you everywhere. Do you have any message for your many disappointed fans?” His voice was affable and faintly snide; it faded into silence as he saw the Mancunians with their drawn swords, von Kobold with his saber, Oenone supporting Hester, who had crumpled to her knees at the foot of the Humbug’s gangplank. “I say!” he murmured excitedly. “What’s all this?”

But the leader of the Mancunians was tired of talking. He raised his sword and tried to barge past von Kobold, but the kriegsmarschall barred his way. Sparks flew as their swords met, directly contravening Airhaven’s strict fire-prevention laws. Up on the High Street people screamed. The Manchester swordsman screamed too, stumbling away with blood running down his arm. Von Kobold turned to face the others. “Defend yourselves!” he shouted, and most of them started to edge back, frightened of this fierce old soldier who seemed ready to take on five of them at once. Only one held his ground. He was a young man, red cheeked and running to fat. In addition to his uniform sword he had a revolver. He pointed it straight at von Kobold, and fired twice.

Theo, waiting aboard the Shadow Aspect, heard the shots. He ran to the hatch. He tried to tell himself that those bangs had not been gunfire, but he knew that they had, and he knew that they had come from the direction of Strut 13.

An alarm bell began to jangle. Theo jumped down onto the mooring strut and started to run toward the docking ring. A squad of men in the sky-blue uniforms of Airhaven was storming down a stairway from the High Street, crossbows held ready. From a docking pan near the town hall a red fire-fighting dirigible was lifting off, ready to train her hoses on any blaze that broke out.

Theo stood helpless, halfway between the Shadow Aspect and the docking ring. What could he do? How could he help?

A horrified scream reached him, blowing on the wind. Another. More shots. He turned and went hammering back to the Shadow.

As Kriegsmarschall von Kobold fell, the man who’d shot him sprang forward, reaching for Lady Naga. Hester heaved herself up to face him and suddenly, although she had done no more than glare at him, he dropped his gun and shouted, “Yaagh!” Looking down, Hester saw the sharp blades that had been driven up through the deck from beneath. There were five of them, and two had gone through the Mancunian’s boot and through the foot inside it. He screamed again, wrenching himself free, and the blades slid back through the deck, leaving ragged holes. “Get this, Miss Kropotkin!” Spiney was ordering his photographer.

The deck plate heaved. An armored fist punched up through the quay from beneath; clawed fingers widened the hole, and Grike scrambled out. He flared with light as another flashbulb fired, silvering his armor, his fingertips, and his gruesome metal grin.

“Stalker!” screamed the Mancunian gunman, trying to hop away. Grike picked him up and flung him off the edge of the strut; he flailed at the empty air for a moment and then fell with a terrible shriek, and landed bouncing in the safety net. Grike hurled one of his friends after him; the rest turned to run, and collided with the first squad of Airhaven militia arriving from the High Street.

Hester fainted again and fell down on the hard quay, waking a few seconds later when the Airhaven fireboat swung overhead, dowsing everyone with freezing water. There seemed to be a general belief that whole squads of Stalkers had been landed on Strut 13. Dozens of alarm bells were ringing, making horrid discords. At the end of the strut the Mancunians were fighting with the Airhaven men, who had somehow got the idea that they were Green Storm raiders in disguise. “No, no, no!” Pennyroyal was yelling. Below the strut, the Mancunians Grike had thrown off it were scrambling up the mesh of the safety net to the neighboring quay, where aviators from a Florentine highliner leaned out to haul them to safety.

Below that, dark against the cloud layer, the plump shape of an airship moved, rising upward.

“The Jenny Haniver,” said Hester, looking down at it through the holes in the deck plate. Then she realized that it couldn’t be; it wasn’t Tom coming to her rescue this time, but Theo, in the Shadow Aspect.

Grike had seen it too, or heard the mutter of its engines. He picked Oenone up under one arm, as if she were a parcel.

He turned and reached for Hester, but Hester was dragging herself away from him toward von Kobold.

In the scrum at the far end of the strut one of the Mancunians was yelling, “It was Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal lured us here! Into the claws of the Storm’s Stalkers!”

“That’s not true!” Pennyroyal shouted, skipping backward as an Airhaven soldier made a grab at him. “I’m the victim here! What about my money?”

The Shadow Aspect came up like a surfacing whale at the end of Strut 13. Hester saw Theo inside the gondola as she turned von Kobold over. The fat Mancunian’s gun had made two charred holes in the front of von Kobold’s coat. But he was only winded. Beneath his coat she saw the dull sheen of Old Tech body armor. He raised a hand to cup her face. “They breed you brave in the Green Storm’s lands,” he whispered.

“I’m not …,” said Hester, but there wasn’t time to explain.

“Tell Naga that not all of us want this war,” she heard von Kobold say. Then she passed out, and Grike swept her up and loped toward the Shadow with the bolts from Airhaven crossbows rattling against his armored back.

Pennyroyal scurried away from the men at the end of the strut and ran into Spiney. The journalist had been directing Miss Kropotkin while she took the pictures that would appear on the front of the next day’s papers beneath the headline “Manchester Men Battle Bravely Against Naga’s Raiders!” He flung himself at Pennyroyal with a vulpine grin. “What’s your part in all this then, Nimrod? How long have you been working for the Green Storm?”

Pennyroyal shoved him aside. An airship was maneuvering away from the strut with a deafening howl of engines, and he had a sudden, terrible fear that it was the Humbug, taking off with his gold still aboard. “What about my money?” he shouted at it.

“How much have they paid you, Pennyroyal?” called Spiney, stepping into his path again and flapping at Miss Kropotkin to bring her camera.

Pennyroyal gave a feeble roar of rage and pushed Spiney hard with both hands. Spiney fought back, flailing at Pennyroyal’s face, grabbing him by the collar. So much was happening on Strut 13 that no one saw the two writers stumble across the quay and plunge off the edge. Their screams harmonized for a brief moment as they fell.

On the Shadow’s flight deck Theo pushed all the engines to full power, preparing to shove the airship out into the open sky beyond Airhaven’s shadow, but as he reached for the steering levers, a steel hand clamped his wrist.

“THERE ARE TWO ANTI-AIRCRAFT HARPOON BATTERIES ON AIRHAVEN HIGH STREET,” the Stalker Grike announced. “AS SOON AS WE CLEAR THEIR AIRSPACE, THEY WILL FIRE ON US.”

“But we can’t stay here!” shouted Theo, waving at the windows. The glass was already starred by hits from a dozen crossbow bolts, although no one had dared to fire anything more dangerous yet, for fear of igniting a blaze that might engulf the whole of Airhaven.

“GO DOWN,” said Grike. “DROP INTO THE CLOUDS. THEY WILL HIDE US.”

Theo nodded, angry that he’d not thought of that for himself. A moment later the Shadow swung its engine pods upright and forced itself down into the white billows beneath Airhaven.

“Aaaaaaaaah!” wailed Pennyroyal and Spiney, and then, “Oh!” as the safety net beneath Strut 13 caught them and held them safe. They bounced together, as if they had dropped into a giant’s hammock.

“Great Poskitt!” whimpered Pennyroyal, thrusting the journalist away from him and trying to stand upright. He had forgotten the net’s existence until its thick, yielding mesh broke his fall. “I thought we were done for!” he gasped.

“You’re done for all right, Nimrod!” Sampford Spiney cackled. He had been just as scared as Pennyroyal, but he wasn’t about to show it. “Consorting with the Storm; taking part in a brawl; accessory to the attempted murder of a kriegsmarschall—here, was that bint on the strut really Naga’s wife? That’s what your Manchester friends are saying…” Excited at the thought of all the startling reports that he would soon be filing, the journalist began to bounce happily up and down.

“Do stop doing that, old man,” pleaded Pennyroyal. “You’re making me feel all queasy.”

“Not half as queasy as you’ll be when you see the next edition of The Speculum.” Spiney chuckled, bouncing harder. Odd noises started to come from the net: faint creaks, small twanging sounds.

“Spiney, I really think you should stop! This net looks old, and it’s already taken the weight of a brace of fat Mancunians tonight…”

With a sound like plucked harpstrings the bolts that attached one edge of the net to the underside of Strut 14 started to come free. Spiney stopped bouncing, and let out a strangled yelp.

“Help!” shouted Pennyroyal, as loudly as he could, but although Strut 13 was crammed with people the only one who heard him was Spiney’s photographer, Miss Kropotkin. Her face appeared over the edge of the strut. She stretched down toward the stranded men with one hand, but she could not reach them. Pennyroyal started trying to claw his way up the steep net toward her, but only succeeded in pulling some of the bolts on that side free as well. “Oh, Poskitt!”

“Miss Kropotkin!” Spiney shrieked. “Fetch help! Fetch help at once, or I’ll make sure you end up photographing pet shows and garden parties for the rest of your worthless—”

And with a presence of mind that ensured she would never have to photograph another pet show as long as she lived, Miss Kropotkin raised her camera as the net gave way and took the picture that would appear on page 1 of the next edition of The Speculum beneath the headline “Writers Perish in Airhaven Death Plunge Horror.”

Chapter 28 Storm Birds

As the Shadow Aspect sank into the clouds, Grike strode aft. In the curtained-off cabin at the stern of the gondola Oenone was crouching over Hester, using her fingers to try to stop the blood that was pouring from the gash on Hester’s scalp. She looked up at Grike. “Is there a medicine chest? Just a first-aid kit even?”

Grike stared at Hester’s gray, shocked face. Let her die, he wanted to tell Oenone, then use your skill to Resurrect her. In place of that scarred and ruined face give her a steel mask, more perfect than the Stalker Fang’s. In place of her breakable body build her a body as strong as this one. She would forget her life, but Grike felt certain that her spirit would survive. Over the millennia that they would have together, he would help her to recover it. His immortal child.

“Medicine chest!” shouted Oenone. “Quickly, Mr. Grike!”

Grike turned and found the Shadow’s first-aid kit in the locker above the bunk. As he handed it to Oenone, a blow shook the airship. He went forward onto the flight deck again. Theo was clinging to the controls, staring out of wet windows.

“we are under attack,” Grike said.

“What?” the boy looked around at him, wide eyes white in his dark face.

“we were hit. a projectile …”

Theo turned to the window again. “I can’t see another ship. I can’t see anything. This cloud—”

And then the Shadow Aspect dropped out of the belly of the clouds, and they both saw the flanks of cities rising all around them, the sky between filled with the running lights of dozens of airships. It was raining, and the drops flecked the windows and blurred everything into a kaleidoscope of glowing specks, but Grike could tell by their trajectories that the other ships were not searching for the Shadow Aspect. They were not military ships at all, but freighters and liners, heading west.

“murnau is evacuating its women and children,” he said.

“Preparing for war …,” whispered Theo, and then, remembering his plight, “What about us?”

“word of our departure may not have reached the other cities yet.”

“Well, it can’t be long,” said Theo. It seemed pointless to turn the Shadow eastward, for he did not believe they could escape from the Murnau cluster now, but he turned her anyway, peering out through the rain as she flew through a steep-sided canyon whose walls were the towering sides of Manchester and Traktionbad Braunschweig. He took the Shadow low so that the cities’ tall wheels slid past on either side of the gondola. Other ships poured through the canyon high above, most of them flying west. Ahead, across a few miles of mud crawling with small, fierce-looking suburbs, stood Murnau. The great fighting city had shut its armor. Theo started to steer the Shadow Aspect around its northern flank, still at track level. The rudder controls were sluggish. “I think the steering vanes are damaged,” he said, tugging irritably at the levers.

Remembering the blow that he had felt as the ship dropped away from Airhaven, Grike went aft again. Hester was conscious, groaning as Oenone cleaned her wound. “Tom! Oh, Tom!” Grike caught the sharp whiff of medical alcohol. He climbed the companion ladder, stooping as he stepped out onto the axial catwalk that led along the center of the envelope. At the sternward end was a small hatch, built for Once-Born and almost too small for him to squeeze his Stalker’s bulk through. Outside, the Shadow’s rain-wet tail fins shone silvery in the light from the passing windows of Murnau’s skirt forts. Holding tight to the ratlines, Grike made his way out onto the lateral fin. At the rear of the fin something had wedged among the control cables. Beneath the howl of the engines and the drumming of rain on the steep curve of the envelope above him, Grike picked up another sound, a rhythmic clatter. Was this some new weapon? He let go of the ratlines with one hand and unsheathed his claws.

The shape in the control cables shifted suddenly, reacting to the flick of wet light from the blades. A white, frightened face gaped up at Grike. “Great Poskitt!” it wailed.

Grike realized what had happened. This Once-Born must have fallen from Airhaven as the Shadow Aspect departed. He sheathed his claws and reached out to drag him to safety, but the Once-Born misunderstood; terrified, he let go his tight grip on the cables and began to fall again, shrieking as he tumbled into the sky. Grike lunged forward and grabbed him by the collar of his coat, swinging him around and safely up onto the fin again. The Shadow Aspect tilted, engines caterwauling, as Grike heaved the man over the aileron flaps and started to drag him along the fin toward the open hatch.

The airship’s sudden, uncertain movement drew the attention of lookouts in Murnau’s skirt forts. As Grike and his dripping, barely conscious burden regained the flight deck, the forts’ gun slits started to prickle with light. It looked quite pretty, until the first bullets began tearing into the gondola. Windows shattered; pressure gauges wavered as holes were torn in the gas cells. The engines howled, still driving the ship eastward, past towering jaws, out across rainswept, shell-torn mud. The gunfire stopped. Theo checked the periscope. Astern, three points of light were pulling clear of the immense bulk of the armored city; three bat-black shapes growing against the gray underbelly of the clouds.

High above, Orla Twombley wiped rain from her goggles and pushed her flying machine Combat Wombat into a dive that would bring it up on the Shadow’s tail. Behind her, the ornithopter Zip Gun Boogie and a rocket-propelled triplane called No More Curried Eggs for Me followed suit, wings slicing the wet air like blades.

Theo shouted out in fear and frustration. He knew that his sluggish, wounded Shadow could not outrun the Flying Ferrets. He saw Grike turn toward him, and thought the Stalker was about to warn him of the pursuing machines. “I know!” he yelled.

But Grike said, ” there are stalker-birds ahead.”

“What?” Theo tried to peer out through the rain-spattered forward window, but he could see only darkness and his own terrified reflection. Then a rocket from the pursuing machines tore past the gondola and exploded ahead, and he realized that the darkness was largely made of wings. Across the empty skies of no-man’s-land, from the direction of the Green Storm’s lines, an immense flock of Resurrected birds was flapping toward him.

“Christ!” cried Theo, and slammed the steering levers over, trying in vain to turn the ship about, for he would rather face rockets than the claws and beaks of the Storm’s raptors. But the Shadow’s rudder controls had been hit; she responded slowly, and long before she could come about, the sky outside the gondola windows was filled with beating wings and the green pinpoints of the dead birds’ eyes.

Astern, wind lashed and drenched in the open cockpit of the Combat Wombat, Orla Twombley saw the cloud of wings. Cursing inventively, she swung her machine about and signaled to her companions to do the same. She had lost enough people to the Stalker-birds at Cloud 9; nothing would make her engage them in such numbers. She checked that her men were with her, then soared back toward the fastnesses of Manchester, while skeins of birds, like the fingers of some gloomy god, closed around the Shadow Aspect.

On the flight deck, Theo waited for beaks and claws to start tearing through the thin walls. Over the rumble of the Shadow’s engines he could hear whooshing wingbeats, the flutter of feathers as the birds turned, matching the little airship’s course and speed.

“They’re not here to attack us,” said Oenone softly, coming to stand behind Theo, her hand touching his shoulder. “I think they’re an escort…”

Theo leaned forward, looking up past the bulge of the envelope. The wounded airship was flying inside a dark nebula of wings, where the eyes of hundreds of birds glowed like green stars. The birds were immense: resurrected kites and condors, eagles and vultures. As the gas vented from the Shadow’s shredded cells, hundreds of birds gripped her airframe with their claws and bore her up, their wingbeats carrying her eastward across the track scars and shell craters of no-man’s-land.

In through one of the shattered starboard windows came a smaller bird. It had been a raven when it was alive. It perched on the handle of a control lever and turned its head, its green eye whirring as it focused on Theo. It opened its beak, and the faint, crackly voice of a distant Green Storm commander came out of the tiny radio transmitter inside its ribs. He was speaking in a battle code that Theo did not recognize, but Oenone did. She replied in the same harsh language, and the raven spread its wings and flew past her through the window and away.

Oenone looked at Theo. “One of the Storm’s forward observation posts saw us come under attack. They assumed we must be their agents. I have told them the truth; that I am Lady Naga, coming home. The bird gave me the coordinates of the landing field where they want us to set down.”

Theo listened to the numbers she quoted, but he barely needed to alter course; the birds were already shepherding the Shadow Aspect in the right direction. He flopped down in his seat and looked at Grike. He was too wrung out with shock to feel more than mildly surprised when he saw that the wet, whimpering man the Stalker clutched was Nimrod Pennyroyal.

“What’s he doing here?” he asked.

“It was an accident!” said Pennyroyal fearfully, as if he thought he was about to be accused of boarding the Shadow Aspect by stealth. “I fell. Spiney and I—we fell out of Airhaven and landed on your tail fin. Well, I did. Spiney carried on down, poor devil. Still, it serves him right.” The thought of his enemy’s death seemed to restore his spirits slightly, but only for a moment; his eyes wandered past Theo to the storm of birds outside. “Ngoni, am I a prisoner?”

“I think we’re all prisoners, Professor.”

“But you’re Green Storm; they won’t harm you! I was mayor of Brighton. You’ll tell them, won’t you, I was always an Anti-Tractionist at heart? I only accepted high office so that I could subvert the system from within. And I treated captured Mossies well, didn’t I? You can vouch for me; you had it easy on Cloud 9, didn’t you—three good meals a day, and you never had to carry anything heavier than a sunshade.”

Oenone said, “I will tell them to treat you well.”

“You will? Thank you!”

“But I don’t know if they’ll listen to me. It all depends on whether the units who control these birds are loyal, or whether they want me dead.”

“Oh, Poskitt!”

Oenone squeezed Theo’s shoulder and said, “I must go and check on your friend.”

“How is she?” asked Theo, ashamed to find that he had completely forgotten about Hester.

Oenone looked solemnly at him.

“She’ll be all right?”

“I hope so. She has a serious head injury. I’ll do all I can. Who is Tom? She keeps asking for him.”

“Her husband. Tom Natsworthy. Wren’s father.”

Oenone nodded owlishly and went aft again. Grike dumped Pennyroyal on the deck and followed her. Left alone with the old man, Theo wondered if he should tie him up or lock him in the toilet or something. But Pennyroyal looked too trembly and sodden to try anything, and the host of Storm birds just outside the window was surely enough to keep him in his place. Theo lay back in his seat, tasting the blood that had trickled into the corner of his mouth from a small cut on his forehead. He thought of Zagwa and his family, and wondered if he would ever see them again. Whatever happened when he landed, he must try and get word to them.

“Letter for you,” said Pennyroyal, rather sheepishly.

Theo looked around. Pennyroyal was holding out a filthy, crumpled envelope. “She left it with me to send on to you, but I must confess, I forgot. Found it in my greatcoat pocket earlier, when I was looking for a scrap of paper to jot down the Humbug’s berth on. Thought you might as well have it. Better late than never, eh?”

Theo turned the envelope over and recognized Wren’s careful handwriting. He ripped it open and pulled out the letter, hissing with frustration as the wet paper tore. Her photograph smiled at him, the same picture that had been in the newspaper; that long, clever face, not as beautiful as he remembered her, but real, and lovely. He spread the letter on the control desk and tried to read it. The rain had fogged and buckled it until only a few phrases were legible. I am starting on a journey … loading provisions … didn’t even know London had any ruins that … A few lines above was a word that might have been survivors. Then, at the foot of the page: Look for me in London.

“London?” he said. He tried not to cry, but he couldn’t stop himself. “She has gone to London?”

“What?” asked Pennyroyal, startled. “No, no, you’ve misread it; they set off on some job for Wolf Kobold, the kriegsmarschall’s son. London? Nobody goes to London; it’s a ruin; haunted…”

There was only one more line that Theo could read. “With love,” it said, “from Wren.”

The sleeping quarters smelled thickly of blood and antiseptic oils. Hester lay with her head thrown back, her face whiter than the pillow it rested on. Looking down at her, Grike hoped that she would die without waking. When she was a Stalker like him, he would not have to suffer so much worry. Once-Born were so fragile; so disposable. Loving one was agony.

Oenone knelt to check her patient’s pulse, then looked up at Grike. In all the chaos of the fight on Strut 13 and the flight from Airhaven there had not been time for her to say, “Mr. Grike! What are you doing here?” or “Mr. Grike, how nice to see you again!” and it was too late now. Instead she said, “She is Hester Shaw, isn’t she?”

“YOU KNOW OF HER?”

“Of course. I studied your past before I reawakened you.”

Grike sensed the airship descending. He went to a side window and looked out. Through the darkness of the birds’ wings he could see long strings of lights flickering on the land ahead; lanterns and torches on the Green Storm’s front line. City-traps and concrete sound mirrors poked out of the mud like tombstones. Knowing that there might not be time for conversation once they landed, he spoke to Oenone’s reflection in the glass. “WHY HAVE YOU MADE ME LIKE THIS?”

“Like what?” she asked guiltily. “Do you not have all your memories back? I erased nothing; when you had destroyed the Stalker Fang, I meant you to become yourself again.”

“I CANNOT FIGHT,” said Grike. He turned to face her, feeling his claws twitch inside his steel hands. A spark of his old Stalker fury ignited inside him somewhere, like an ember glowing in a cold hearth. He wanted to kill her for what she had done to him, but what she had done to him meant that he could not kill her. “YOU MADE ME WEAK,” he said. “THE GHOSTS OF ALL THE ONCE-BORN I KILLED BEFORE HANG IN MY HEAD LIKE WET SHEETS. I HATE THE THINGS I HAVE DONE. WHY DID YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE THIS?”

Oenone moved closer. Her hand touched his armor. “I did not do it. I would not know how. These feelings come from inside you.”

“WHEN THE ONCE-BORN NATSWORTHY KILLED ME, ON THE BLACK ISLAND, I REMEMBERED THINGS. THEY FADED AS SOON AS YOU REPAIRED ME, BUT I THINK THEY WERE MEMORIES OF THE TIME BEFORE I WAS A STALKER; WHEN I WAS ALIVE, LIKE YOU… IS THAT WHERE THIS WEAKNESS COMES FROM?”

“I suppose it’s possible… Dr. Popjoy had a theory about the origins of Stalkers…” She smiled. Grike saw her white, crooked teeth; the first thing he remembered noticing about her when she dug him out of his grave. “I think it’s more likely that you have developed feelings and a conscience of your own. You are intelligent and self-aware, and you have had long enough to do it in, after all! I think you began the process long before I met you. I know how you saved Hester as a child, and how long you sought for her after she left home. That was one of the things that made me realize you were no ordinary Stalker. You have loved Hester since you first found her, haven’t you?”

Grike looked away. He was still a Stalker, and it was hard for him to talk about things like love. He said, “WILL THOSE MEMORIES OF MY ONCE-BORN LIFE EVER RETURN?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps next time you die. But that won’t be for a long, long time. I built you to last, Mr. Grike.”

The ground was close now. Grike looked down at Hester, thinking that he did not care how long he lived as long as she was with him. He said, “I WANT TO KEEP HER SAFE AND STRONG FOREVER. WILL YOU HELP ME?”

Oenone did not understand what he meant. “Of course I will,” she promised. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his face. Dabs of his preservative slime came off on her lips and the tip of her nose. “Congratulations, Mr. Grike. You’ve grown a soul.”

Chapter 29 Fun, Fun, Fun on the Oberrang

In the argon-lit rain Harrowbarrow heaved itself out of the mud off Murnau’s starboard side like a gigantic submarine surfacing in a very dirty sea. A boarding bridge was run out, and Wolf Kobold strode across and vanished into the larger city, where an express elevator carried him quickly up to the Oberrang. A bug was waiting for him there, along with an officer who began shouting at him as soon as he stepped off the elevator, “Sir, sir, come quickly! Your father is hurt!”

“Yes, I got your radio message,” said Kobold wearily, settling himself into the bug’s rear seat. How stupid, to be dragged all the way up here just so that he could pretend to be concerned about an old man he cared nothing for. Already he was longing to be aboard Harrowbarrow again, free of these mawkish conventions. He listened halfheartedly to the driver prattling about Airhaven and Green Storm spies as the little vehicle went swerving along Über den Linden to the Rathaus. Outside, young officers were saying farewell to their sweethearts, and workers were heaving shut the last open sections of the city’s armor, but Wolf barely noticed them. He stared at his own gaunt face reflected in the bug’s hood and thought of the long trek he had just made across the Storm’s territory, the sentry he’d strangled as he’d crept back through their lines into no-man’s-land, where good old Hausdorfer had had the ’Barrow waiting. He thought proudly of London, and of the fantastical machines that would soon be his.

At the Rathaus the servants led him to the main drawing room. His father sat in an armchair, his chest bandaged, being fussed over by frock-coated medical men. Adlai Browne stood close by, having come across from Manchester with flowers and grapes and a disclaimer he wanted the kriegsmarschall to sign, absolving the Manchester Militia of any liability for his injuries. Beside him stood the commander of his mercenary air force. Wolf had found Ms. Twombley attractive once, but now she struck him as rather brassy—all that pink leather and mascara. He thought wistfully of Wren Natsworthy, her innocent beauty and bright, malleable young mind.

“Wolfram!” cried his father, waving the doctors aside and struggling up to hug him. “They told me you were away somewhere…”

“Just a little business trip,” said Kobold, disgusted by the liver spots on the old man’s arms, the white curls of hair that showed above the bandage on his chest. “I got home to Harrowbarrow the clay before yesterday.”

His father studied him. “You look thin, my boy.”

Thin, unshaven, fever eyed, Wolf waved his words away. “It’s yourself you should be worrying about. They told me you’re hurt.”

“Just a few bruises, some broken bones.”

“I got home just in time, it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Great Thatcher! The Mossies tried to kill you, father! It was an act of war! We must retaliate immediately!”

“Just what I’ve been telling him!” boomed Adlai Browne, with the air of a man who had been waiting impatiently to resume an interrupted conversation. “We mustn’t let them get away with it!”

“Nonsense, Browne,” snapped von Kobold, wincing with the pain as he slumped back down in his chair. “It was one of your drunken louts who shot me!”

“Youthful exuberance,” protested Browne. “If you’d not been so keen to keep the prisoner for yourself …” He appealed to Wolf. “Have you heard the news? Naga’s missus herself was loose on Airhaven, with a gang of Stalkers to protect her. Hatching some plot with that renegade Pennyroyal, apparently.”

“I see.” Usually Wolf would have scoffed at such talk, the panicky, exaggerated stuff that flew about whenever fat city men got a whiff of real war. But tonight a little panic suited him. The sooner war broke out, the sooner Harrowbarrow could begin its journey to London. “They got away alive, I take it?”

Browne turned to the aviatrix at his side. “You tell him, lass.”

Orla Twombley bowed and said, “The airship was met over no-man’s-land by more Stalker-birds than I’ve ever seen in one place. There must have been someone or something of value aboard. There was nothing I could do to stop it escaping.”

It seemed to Wolf that there was plenty she could have done, had she not valued her life more than her duty. But he simply nodded and said, “This sounds bad. Who knows what plots the Mossies have set in motion, or what they’ve learned about our plans? There’s only one thing for it.”

“You mean—attack?” asked Adlai Browne hopefully.

“It’s the best form of defense. The Mossies struck first. We must retaliate. Attack at once, all along the line.”

Von Kobold rubbed his eyes. “Surely there must be another way…”

“If you don’t feel up to commanding this place—” said Browne, all mock solicitude.

“I shall do my part,” the old man promised wearily. “You’ll not call me a coward, Browne. If the other cities advance, Murnau will come too, and I’ll command her. Unless my son would care to take his place on the bridge?”

He looked at Wolf, who shook his head firmly. “Sorry, Father. I must get back to Harrowbarrow. When the attack begins, I’ll gnaw a nice big hole for you in the Mossies’ defenses.”

He shook his father’s hand, bowed to Browne and Ms. Twombley, and went out of the room, leaving silence behind him, and a feeling of sadness, like a lingering smell.

“Well,” said Adlai Browne, clapping his hands together. “I must inform the other mayors and kriegsmarschalls. Ms. Twombley, you’ll need to get your machines aloft. The obliteration of the Green Storm starts at dawn!”

Chapter 30 She Is Risen

Fulfill the vision of the Wind-Flower Airfield was an oblong of flat ground bulldozed out of the mud a few miles behind the Storm’s front line. It was ringed with landing lights and bunkers and big, whale-backed barns of airship hangars. Anti-aircraft cannon squatted watchfully in emplacements made from earth-packed wicker barrels. Searchlights stretched out their colorless fingers to brush the Shadow Aspect’s envelope as the cloud of birds steered her toward her docking pan.

Soldiers came running as she touched down, and crowded into the gondola when Theo opened the hatch. White uniforms; crab-shell helmets; guns. Oenone emerged from behind the curtain at the back of the flight deck, and they recoiled from her and raised their weapons, alarmed by her filthy, bloodstained clothes and the Stalker who stood behind her. She held out her hand, letting the light glint on her signet ring. “Before you shoot me,” she said politely, “I would like you to take care of my companions. Mr. Ngoni and Professor Pennyroyal are not enemies of the Storm.”

The subofficer at the head of the boarding party bowed low, placing his right fist against the palm of his left hand in the old League salute. “You are safe now, Lady Naga.”

Oenone returned the bow, nervous, still not quite trusting him. “There is a woman in the cabin who needs care. Is there a field hospital here?”

The soldier pointed toward a hummock of camouflaged bunkers on the horizon. “Shall I call stretcher bearers?”

“I WILL CARRY HER,” said Grike. He pulled the curtain aside and lifted Hester easily and carefully in his arms. Theo and the others made to follow him as he carried her to the open hatch, but the subofficer, feeling things sliding out of his control, moved quickly to stop them, barring their way with a raised hand.

“She will be well looked after, Ladyship,” he promised Oenone. “But you and these other foreigners must come with me. I have orders to bring you before the sector commander.”

The part of the line where the Shadow Aspect had landed was commanded by the motherly General Xao. Sleepy eyed but smiling, she welcomed Oenone and her followers to the dugout where she had her headquarters. It was a pleasant place, as dugouts went; not too damp, the floor flagged with slate, the wooden walls whitewashed and hung with pictures. In the general’s private quarters photographs of her dead family stood among the statues of her household gods on an elaborate shrine. A potbellied stove gave out a dry heat that made Pennyroyal’s soggy clothes steam so much, the general suggested he take them off, and made one of her plumper staff officers lend him a spare uniform and an elegant gray cloak. Oenone had also changed into Green Storm uniform, and had washed her face and hair; she still did not look like an empress, but at least she looked less like a street urchin.

The general’s servants brought rice wine, steamed rolls, tea. Theo pulled off his flying jacket and tried to stop himself from falling asleep on the folding chair that another servant set out for him. After the things they had been through that night, it all seemed impossibly luxurious. Although he had grown to hate the Green Storm, he had never doubted the strength or courage of their army, and it was a relief to think of all those brave soldiers and powerful guns standing between him and the cityfolk. He was not even worried about Hester, now that she was safe in the field hospital.

The general said, “My people are preparing a ship to carry you home to Tienjing, my lady. Her captain is a friend of mine, a supporter of General Naga; her crew can all be trusted. A Stalker-bird has gone east already to take the good news to your husband. I hope that it will restore his spirits.”

“He is ill?” asked Oenone, alarmed.

General Xao looked glum. “There have been no clear orders from Tienjing for weeks. We have warned your honored husband about the buildup on the other side of the line, and the harvester suburb that raided Track Mark 16 last month. We have told him that we cannot hold these positions if the cities attack; he does not seem to care. It is as if, when he heard word of your death, he gave up all hope.”

Oenone looked for a moment as if she would cry. She said hoarsely, “Can’t we contact him more quickly? I could talk to him by long-range radio…”

Xao shook her head. “I dare not risk it, Lady Naga. The barbarians could intercept your message, and try again to kill you.”

“It was not the barbarians who tried to kill me the first time,” said Oenone. “It was barbarians who saved me, with Theo’s help.”

“Indeed.” The general nodded, smiling at Theo and then at Pennyroyal. “We have heard of Professor Pennyroyal’s bravery.”

“Professor Pennyroyal’s bravery?” Theo almost choked on the roll he was munching. He wondered if the general was slightly drunk. First her defeatist talk about not being able to hold the line and now this! “What have you heard?” he asked.

“We have listening posts deep in no-man’s-land that eavesdrop on the townies’ radio transmissions,” explained the general. She reached for some papers on her desk. “This is a news bulletin that went out on Murnau’s public screens a few hours ago.” She skimmed the transcript’s first two paragraphs, then cleared her throat and read, “The raiders were helped by an agent within Airhaven, the notorious author, charlatan, and former mayor of Brighton, Nimrod B. Pennyroyal. As the Green Storm spy ship left, several eyewitnesses saw the traitor Pennyroyal running after it, shouting, “What about my money?”

“A traitor? Me?” Pennyroyal looked outraged.

“Only to the Tractionist barbarians,” said General Xao. “To our people you will be a hero.”

“But—gosh! Will I?”

“To think that the mayor of a barbaric raft town could come to see the error of his ways so clearly that he would risk his own life to free a Green Storm prisoner,” the general went on. “Your statue will stand in the Hall of Matchless Immortals in Tienjing. Naga will reward you richly. He—”

A junior officer entered, bowing nervously and murmuring something in Shan Guonese. The general frowned, standing up. “Forgive me; I am needed outside.”

“What is happening?” asked Oenone.

“Our sound mirrors are detecting engine noise from the cities… We have been expecting an attack, but not so soon. Great Gods, I’ve still not had the reinforcements I asked for last month!” A bell began to ring on the bank of field telephones in the next room; then another and another. General Xao snapped an order at her underling and said to Oenone, “Excellency, you must take ship at once. I will not risk—”

An enormous roll of thunder drowned out the remainder of her words. The floor shook, and dust sifted down between the planks of the low roof. Pennyroyal started to call on his peculiar gods again. Theo looked at the table where he had set down his teacup, and the cup was dancing, dancing to the boom, boom, boom of the thunder. A soldier came scrambling into the bunker, and although he was shouting his report in Shan Guonese, Theo and his companions knew what it meant, even before General Xao turned to them and said, “It is beginning! All their cities are on the move! Dozens of cities! Hundreds of suburbs!”

They stood up, indignant at being plunged into another adventure before they’d had a chance to recover from the last. “What about Hester and Mr. Grike?”

“I will have your friends meet you at the airfield,” shouted General Xao. “Now go quickly, and gods preserve us all…”

They followed a subofficer out of the headquarters and through trenches where hundreds of soldiers were hurrying to their positions. The thunder from the west was shockingly loud. The sky above the front-line trenches pulsed with light. Pennyroyal looked terrified. Theo, wincing at the noise of the blasts, kept reminding himself that most of it was probably the Green Storm’s artillery firing at the cities; any attack would soon be beaten off.

Only Oenone had been in the front line before. She recognized the complex shudderings of the earth in the same way a city person would understand what each movement in the deck plates meant. She knew that somewhere, not far away, fighting suburbs were advancing at high speed behind a rolling barrage of snout-gun shells. She prayed as she ran, wondering if even God would be able to hear her above all the din.

They zigzagged through a communications trench, and there ahead of them was the airfield. A corvette was waiting on a central pan while pods of Fox Spirits went snarling into the primrose sky from hangars dug into the hillsides behind her. She was called the Fury, and her engines were already in take-off position, the propellers a blaze of silver. As they crossed the muddy docking pan, a half-track marked with the caduceus symbol of the medical corps came speeding up, slewing to a halt near the foot of the Fury’s gangplank. Grike swung down out of its belly and reached back to help the bearers bring Hester’s stretcher out.

The subofficer started urging Oenone toward the ship, and Pennyroyal, needing no encouragement, trotted alongside. Theo was about to follow them when he remembered Wren’s letter, which was still in the pocket of his flying jacket, on the chair by the stove in Xao’s headquarters.

“I have to go back!” he shouted.

Only Grike heard him as he carried Hester up the gangplank. He looked around to see Theo plunge back into the maze of trenches. “THEO NGONI!” he shouted. Sometimes he could barely believe the folly of the Once-Born.

“Stalker! Get her aboard!” called an aviator from the Fury’s open hatchway.

“WE MUST WAIT,” Grike insisted. “THE ONCE-BORN THEO NGONI IS NOT WITH US.”

A snout-gun shell burst near the western perimeter of the field, crumpling a rising Fox Spirit and spraying mud and gravel against the Fury’s envelope. Grike looked toward the trenches but could see nothing but smoke. Explosions were going off steadily, and he made out another noise beneath and between the slamming of the guns—the deep note of city engines and the high, squealing counterpoint of rolling tracks.

“Come aboard, Stalker, or we take off without you!” yelled the frightened aviator, holding his helmet in place as blast waves chased one another across the docking pans.

Grike bellowed, “THEO NGONI!” once more into the storm of sound, then turned reluctantly, carrying Hester up the gangplank and through the hatch. Oenone ran to meet him in the corridor. “Where is Theo? I thought he was with us?”

The Fury jolted and leaped quickly into the air. Grike carried Hester to the medical bay and laid her on a bunk, ” look after this once-born,” he told the orderlies, and strode across the cabin to a window. Flying machines were swerving through the air outside, bullets from their machine guns pummeling the Fury’s armor. Below, shell bursts speckled the ground. All up and down the Green Storm’s line the heavy guns were firing, while steam trebuchets flung up their long arms and lobbed their bombs into the screens of drifting smoke that curtained no-man’s-land.

“Naga, it has begun!”

General Naga sits slumped in his favorite chair, beside the window of the quarters that he used to share with Oenone. The spiral stairways of the Jade Pagoda rumble like organ pipes as a gale blasts around the old fortress, blowing snow upward past Naga’s windows.

His old friend General Dzhu waits in the doorway, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, unhappy at delivering such bad news. “We have reports of heavy fighting in a dozen sectors. The Rustwater Marsh forts are under attack, and we’ve lost contact with Xao’s command post—”

“Ah,” says Naga, without looking up.

On the low table beside him stand a teacup and a pot of green tea. The girl Rohini brings it to him every morning at this hour, and plays to him on the shudraga, but today Dzhu sent her packing, insisting he must speak to Naga privately. A pity. She is a good girl, and sometimes Naga thinks that her kindness is all that keeps him alive. The music she plays reminds him of his boyhood: hunting duck in the flooded atomic craters of south China, joining the League’s air fleet that summer before London came crawling east. At the training college on Seven Tiger Mountain there was a girl called Sathya whom he had fancied, but she’d been in love with the Wind-Flower.

“Whatever happened to Sathya?” he wonders. “Do you think she’s still at that hermitage we found for her on Zhan Shan?”

“Naga, we’re at war!” his friend shouts. “What are your orders? Do I tell our commanders to stand, or withdraw?”

“Whatever you think necessary, Dzhu.”

Dzhu sighs; turns to go; turns back. “There is another thing; it seems minor, but Batmunkh Gompa is reporting a lot of activity inside the wreck of London…”

Naga flaps his words away. “London? A few poor barbarians, Dzhu; we’ve known about them for years. They’re harmless.”

“Are we sure of that? What if they are a fifth column, waiting to assist the enemy as he advances? I have ordered increased surveillance…”

Naga tries to shrug, but his mechanical armor isn’t made for shrugging. “I’m ill, old friend. I ache all over. I can’t sleep, but I’m never properly awake. My head buzzes like a nest of bees. You should take over command.”

“The people want you, Naga! You smashed the barbarians last spring, and they know you can do it again! They won’t trust me!”

“I miss Zero,” murmurs Naga. “I miss her so much.” Dzhu stares at him. “I’ll tell Xao to make a stand, if I can reach her.”

As he leaves the chambers, he sees Cynthia Twite waiting outside, watching him from the shadows. He forces her down a narrow stairway and out onto a balcony. Snowflakes flail at them, and the wind blows their hair about. “What’s happening to him?” hisses Dzhu. “I thought once we got rid of the Zero girl, he’d come to his senses and lead us to victory, but he just sits there! Is it just grief? Is he dying? Tell me!”

Cynthia smiles. “Green tea,” she says. “A pot every morning, like his poor wife used to make him.”

“You’re poisoning him?”

“Just a little. Not enough to kill him. Just enough to keep him helpless.”

“But we need him!”

“No we don’t, you fool.”

Dzhu is astonished. In the mountain kingdoms women respect men and young people respect their elders, but this girl talks to him as if he’s a child!

“Haven’t you heard the rumors, Dzhu? A Stalker killing Lost Boys aboard Brighton. An abandoned limpet found under a waterfall in Snow Fan Province. The murder of Dr. Popjoy. It all adds up. It’s all connected. Are you too blind to see what it means?”

Dzhu just stares at her. The snow’s so thick that her face keeps breaking up like a bad Goggle-Screen picture.

“She is risen!” Cynthia hisses triumphantly. “Soon she will reveal herself to us, and save us from the barbarians. Until she does, we must make sure that Naga is weak. When he has let the barbarians smash his divisions and devour our western settlements, the people will be ready to abandon him and welcome back their true leader!”

“You’re insane!” says General Dzhu, turning to go and warn his friend of her.

One of the long pins that hold Cynthia’s hairstyle in place is tipped with venom. She’s been saving it for just such an emergency. The sharpened tip makes only the tiniest scratch on Dzhu’s neck, but he’s dead before he can even cry out. Grunting with effort and cursing his fat belly, Cynthia heaves the body off the balcony and watches it plummet through the snowflakes to the sharp mountainside hundreds of feet below. She’s always had her doubts about Dzhu, and she has forged his suicide note already. It will be the work of a moment to plant it in his desk.

She thinks of her mistress, the Stalker Fang, out there in the mountains somewhere, waiting. If only she would show herself! Cynthia understands why the Stalker would want to punish the weaklings who flocked to Naga’s banner, but surely she knows that she can still rely upon her faithful private agents. For a moment, as she slips back inside and strolls toward General Dzhu’s quarters, she feels almost angry at her old mistress. It quickly passes. Whatever the Stalker Fang is planning will be dreadful and wonderful, and it is not Cynthia’s place to judge her.

Theo had always had a good sense of direction. He found his way quickly through the maze of trenches and was almost in sight of the dugout when an explosion went off just beyond the wire, kicking fans of earth and smoke high into the dawn sky. He crouched as the mud came spattering down. A sea of smoke filled the trench. Scared, fleeing soldiers blundered through it, throwing down their weapons as they ran, pulling off packs and bandoliers. Their mouths were open as if they were shouting, but Theo couldn’t hear them; he had been deafened by the blast of the shell.

Dazed, he scrambled up onto a fire step to see what they were running from. Beyond the bramble hedge of wire outside the trench, mountainous shapes were moving. Now and again, as the gusting wind hooked swags of smoke aside, he could see Murnau, only a few miles off, munching its way through the shell-battered city-traps, while a dozen harvester suburbs probed for mines or pitfalls. A nearby fortress was firing rockets toward it, but as Theo watched, the ground began to tremble sluggishly and up from the mud at the fort’s base an enormous blunt steel nose came shoving, lifting to expose giant drills and complicated mouthparts, knocking the fort to pieces and gobbling them down. WELCOME TO HARROWBARROW said a crude white slogan painted on the armored flank. Theo had plenty of time to read it as the weird suburb went grinding past him, crushing bunkers and wrecked gun emplacements beneath its tracks. Signal lamps blinked on Murnau’s upper tier, as if trying to call it to heel, but the suburb ignored them; it settled itself deep into the muddy earth again and went grinding on into Green Storm territory.

Theo jumped down from the step and stumbled on, confused by the smoke and the steep walls of earth that had been thrown across the trench by the explosions. Fresh blasts went off, spattering him with mud and muddy water, but it all happened in hissing, undersea silence, like a dream. He barely understood what was going on. How could the cities have broken through so easily? Where were the indomitable air destroyers and thousand-Tumbler quick-response units that he had been told of in the Green Storm’s propaganda films?

An airship drifted overhead, burning so fiercely that he could not tell which side it had belonged to. By its light he saw the dugout entrance and ran gratefully through it. The command post had already been evacuated, but Theo’s coat still hung on the back of the folding chair where he had left it. He pulled it on, feeling Wren’s letter crinkle in the pocket, her photograph pressing against his heart.

He didn’t hear the scream of the snout-gun shell descending. The first he knew of it was when the hot hands of the explosion lifted him off his feet. Then everything turned into light.

Chapter 31 The House at Erdene Tezh

The Stalker Fang pauses at the edge of the docking pan where Popjoy’s air yacht is tethered and turns her bronze face toward the west.

“What?” asks Fishcake. “What is it?” He looks westward too, but he can see nothing; just the mountains. How sick he is of mountains! They stand guard like frost giants all around this high, green valley, and their reflections shimmer in the windswept lake below the docking pan. “Gunfire,” the Stalker whispers.

“You mean the war is on again?” Fishcake strains his grubby Once-Born ears to try and hear what she can hear. “I must work quickly. Come.”

She starts limping toward the causeway, and Fishcake follows her, carrying on his shoulder one of the cases of equipment that she made him bring from Dun Resurrectin’.

Overhead, the dead birds that followed her from Popjoy’s place soar past, keeping watch for movements in the sky or on the steep pass at the valley’s western end.

The causeway is two hundred paces long. At its far end is a rocky island where a house stands, dark and cold as a tomb. It was a monastery once, sacred to the gods and demons of the mountains, whose faces still leer out of niches in the outer walls. Later it was Anna Fang’s home, a place of light and laughter where she relaxed between missions for the Anti-Traction League. She had planned to retire here, and raise horses in the steep green pastures, before Valentine’s sword unraveled all her plans.

In the first years of the Green Storm regime there had been talk of turning Erdene Tezh into a museum, where schoolchildren could come to see relics of the Wind-Flower and tread the same floors that she had trodden. But the Stalker she had become forbade it. She had the house locked, and let it fall into ruin.

The gate whines as the Stalker heaves it open. Fishcake crunches after her through the gateway, where patches of snow lie blue in the shadows. Safe in the loop of the thick stone wall is a garden; dead trees and dead brown grass, a fountain lacy with icicles. Fishcake trots after his Stalker up the frosty path to the house. She does not smash the door down as he has been expecting, but extends one of her finger-glaives, inserts it into the keyhole, and moves it carefully about in there until the lock clicks. As she opens the door, she looks back at Fishcake.

“Home again!” she whispers.

He follows her into the shadows. He can’t be sure anymore if she is Anna or the Stalker Fang. He thinks she may be both, as if Popjoy’s tinkering blended the two personalities somehow. She has not been unkind to Fishcake, and she still shares her memories with him, but she does not play with him anymore; she no longer takes his hand, or tousles his hair, or comes to hold him at night when he wakes from a bad dream. All he has left of that Anna is the carved toy horse, which he clutches tightly when he goes to sleep.

Whoever she is, the Stalker seems happy to be home. “Ah,” she sighs, passing through a reception room where the ceiling has collapsed and bird droppings lie thick on a fine tiled floor. “Oh!” she says, crossing the atrium and peering into a long chamber whose shattered windows stare out across the mere to the white heights of the Erdene Shan. “She had such parties here! Such happy times…”

The wind hoots through holes in the walls. Beyond the party room lies a bedroom, a canopied bed sinking like a torpedoed ship into a sea of its own moldering covers. At the far side of the bedroom is another locked door. And beyond the door…

The room exhales stale air when she unlocks it. Fishcake, creeping in behind her, guesses that this part of the house has been sealed. It smells a bit like Grimsby. The walls and floor are covered in metal, with rubber mats to walk on. Cobwebs and plastic swathe a curious mountain of machinery: wires and tubes, screens and boxes, valves and dials and colored electrical cords, keyboards torn from typewriting machines.

“Engineers were not the only ones who knew how to build things, back in the good old days,” the Stalker whispers. “Anna was clever with machines, just like you, Fishcake. She even built her own airship out of odds and ends. She was attempting to make a long-range radio transmitter here. It never worked very well, and others since have had much more success. But it’s a start. With what we brought from Popjoy’s workshop, and the radio set from his yacht, I am certain we can boost the signal.”

“Who are you signaling to?” asks Fishcake.

The Stalker lets out her hissy laugh. She takes him by the arm and drags him into the ruined bedroom, points through a hole in the roof, straight up, at the deep blue in the top of the sky.

“Up there. That’s where the receiver is. We are going to send a message into heaven.”