A Darkling Plain

Chapter 32 London Journal

19th June

Seventeen days have passed since Wolf Kobold ran away. Everybody seems to be forgetting him. Even me, most of the time. Even Angie, now that her headache has faded and the lump is going down. Most people think that there’s no way Wolf could cross all those miles of Green Storm territory and get back to Harrowbarrow again. Even if he could, he would never be able to bring Harrowbarrow back east to eat New London, at least not unless war breaks out again. But work on New London is going ahead even faster, just in case.

When I first found out what they are building, I thought they were all a bit mad, to be honest. But when you see how hard everyone works here, and how much they all believe in this crazy new city the Engineers have dreamed up, you realize what it must have been like in Anchorage when Freya Rasmussen decided to take it across the ice to America. That was a mad idea too, and I’m sure there were a lot of people who thought it would never work—my mum was so sure of it that she betrayed the whole place to Arkangel when she couldn’t persuade Dad to leave. But she was wrong, because it did work, didn’t it? And I don’t want to be like Mum, so I’ve decided to believe that New London is going to work too.

Anyway, Dad’s been very keen to do his bit. At first he seemed intent on trying to help the Engineers, but the Childermass machines are so different from any technology he’s seen before that I think he just got in the way. So he started helping the men lug bits of salvage up to the hangar, but I had a quiet word with Dr. Childermass and explained about his heart trouble, and she had a q. word with Chudleigh Pomeroy, who took Dad aside and said what New London really needs is a museum, so that even if it roams to the far side of the world, the people who live aboard it will never forget the old London and what became of it. And since none of us have the time, Tom,” he said, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind putting together a collection?” So Dad has been appointed Head Historian and spends his days scouring the rust heaps for artifacts that will say something to future generations about his London—everything from old drain covers and tier-support ties to a little statue of the goddess Clio from somebody’s household shrine.

Meanwhile, I’ve been out patrolling with the other young Londoners. Mr. Garamond was v. opposed to it at first, but Mr. Pomeroy told him not to be such a bloody fool, and Angie and her friends are all very friendly, and most impressed when I told them I’d been in an actual battle and seen Stalkers and Tumblers and stuff. (I didn’t tell them how completely terrified I was, as it might be bad for morale.) Anyway, I’ve been right across the main debris field several times. It’s very spooky, esp. at night, but Angie and Cat and the rest are good company, and I’ve been given a crossbow to use if we’re attacked—I’m not sure I could actually shoot anyone, but it makes me feel a bit braver.

What I’d really like is one of the lightning guns the Engineers built to deal with Stalkers, but there aren’t very many of those, and only Mr. G’s most trusted fighters get to use them—Saab and Cat and people. The Green Storm’s Stalker-birds have been getting very nosy these past few weeks, and the danger bell at Crouch End is forever ringing, telling everyone to get under cover because some flea-bitten old dead buzzard is circling overhead, having a good look at us. Mostly we’ve just taken to ignoring them, but when one gets too close to the Womb, the boys on duty in the crow’s nests there shoot it down with their lightning guns; there are half a dozen hanging outside Crouch End now, all singed and charcoaly.

There is one other way of getting rid of them; it’s much more dangerous, and Angie and her friends treat it as a sort of sport. Last week, when we were out patrolling, a Stalker-bird came flying over us. We’re supposed to hide when that happens, but Angie said, “Let’s have a spot of mollyhawking! ” and jumped right out into the open, so I followed her. We went along one of the paths that wind between the wreckage heaps, and the bird came after us. I was worried it was going to attack, but Angie said they never do; they’re just spies, and she meant to serve it right for snooping.

We went on, walking quite fast, and soon I began to realize that we were heading toward the middle of the debris field, the bit they call Electric Lane. Till then I’d tended to agree with Wolf about the sprites—that they were just a fairy tale. But up there in the middle of London, where everything looks kind of scorched and melted, I suddenly wasn’t so sure. I asked Angie if it was safe, and she said “safe-ish,” which wasn’t very reassuring, but I didn’t want her to think I was a coward, so I kept going.

After a bit we came over a rise, and there in front of us was a sort of valley stretching right across the middle of the debris field. It looked quite peaceful, with ponds and trees on its floor, but the wreckage on either side was all charred and twisty-looking. Angie says that it’s the place where the core of MEDUSA fell, having melted its way right down through the seven tiers of London, and that’s why MEDUSA’s residue is strongest there. I don’t know if it’s true. Anyway, I only got a quick glimpse before Angie shoved me into a hollow of the wreckage all overhung with ivy. “Hide!” she said. The stupid old Stalker-bird didn’t see us, and went soaring out over the valley. It hadn’t gone fifty feet before a great snaggly fork of electricity came crackling out of the wreckage and roasted it; there was nothing left but a puff of smoke and some singed feathers that blew away on the wind!

I got a bit shuddery afterward, thinking what would have happened to the Jenny if we’d flown into Electric Lane that first day.

PS. Saab Peabody asked me out. I said I’d have to think about it and he said he supposed I had a boyfriend on the bird roads somewhere and I said I supposed I did. Silly, or what?

And now, because it’s late, and tomorrow is a big day—the first test of the new city—I am going to go to bed.

Chapter 33 The Test

The morning of the test dawned dull and cloudy, threatening rain. The wind came from the west in indignant squalls, scattering a confetti storm of petals from the blossom trees that had taken root amid the debris of London.

Not wanting to impose himself on Wren, who was going up to the Womb with her new friends, Tom made the trek from Crouch End alone. He scanned the mounds of wreckage beside the track as he walked, for he had fallen into a habit of looking everywhere for fragments that might fit into the New London museum, and give the children who would one day be born upon the new city some notion of what old London had been like. When you knew where to look, the rusting ruin heaps were full of relics; street signs and door handles, hinges and tea urns. He spotted a pewter spoon with the crest of the Historians’ Guild on its handle and slipped it into his pocket. He had eaten with spoons like that every day of his childhood; it was like a shard of memory made solid, and he liked to think of those future Londoners looking at it and imagining his life.

Of course, they would never know the details: how he’d felt and what his dreams had been; his adventures on the bird roads, in the Ice Wastes and America. You couldn’t expect a pewter spoon to convey that sort of detail.

Lately, watching Wren writing in her journal of an evening, Tom had wondered if he shouldn’t try to write down some of the things that had happened to him, before it was too late. But he was no Thaddeus Valentine. He wasn’t even a Nimrod Pennyroyal. Writing did not come easily to him. Anyway, it would have meant writing about Hester, and he didn’t think he could do that. He’d not even spoken his wife’s name since he came to London. If his new friends ever wondered who Wren’s mother was, they kept it to themselves; perhaps they assumed that she was dead, and that Tom would find it painful to speak of her—which was not so far from the truth. How could he write about Hester for future generations when he did not understand himself why she had done the things she had, or what had made him love her?

Drawing close to the Womb, he caught up with a crowd of his fellow Londoners, all heading in the same direction. Clytie Potts was among them, and she greeted him warmly, glad of his company; her husband was aboard New London with the Engineers. “Dr. Childermass is afraid her Magnetic Levitation system might work too well,” she explained. “She wants an aviator on hand to steer New London down again if it goes too high.”

“Really?”

“It’s a joke, Tom.”

“Oh.” Tom laughed with her, although he didn’t find it funny. “I’m sorry. So much has changed since we were young … so many new inventions … I don’t really know what New London is capable of.” He thought of the Mag-Lev prototypes that Dr. Childermass had shown him: platforms the size of dinner tables that maneuvered around the Womb as if by magic, hanging several feet above the ground. If the new city survived, the Engineers were planning to apply the same technology to actual tables next; floating chairs and beds as well, and hovering Mag-Lev toys, which they would trade as curios to other small cities. Tom had even heard talk of Mag-Lev vehicles, which made him feel oddly sad, because if they worked, they would surely bring an end to the age of airships, and his dear old Jenny Haniver would be obsolete.

The thought made his heart ache—or maybe that was the result of the climb from Crouch End. He swallowed one of his green pills and went with Clytie through the entrance to the Womb.

Inside the shadowy hangar New London waited, squatting heavily on its oily stanchions and looking less likely to take to the air than any object Tom had ever seen. Small figures were running about on its hull, gesticulating at one another. The Engineers seemed to be having trouble with one of their Magnetic Repellers. Tom scanned the crowd of onlookers for Wren and saw her standing near the front with Angie and Saab and a few other young people whose names he could never remember. He felt proud of her, and glad that she was settling in here and making friends. Seeing her from a distance, he was reminded of Katherine Valentine; she had something of Katherine’s grace and liveliness, the same quick, dazzling smile. It had never struck him before, but then he had not given much thought to Katherine before he’d returned to London. Now that he had noticed it, the strange likeness was inescapable.

Wren seemed to sense him staring at her; she turned and saw him, standing on tiptoe to wave at him over the sea of heads. Tom waved back and hoped it was not bad luck to compare her to poor, ill-fated Katherine.

A handbell started to ring. “This is it,” said Clytie. Engineers bustled through the crowd, warning people to stay back near the hangar walls. Everyone fell quiet, looking up expectantly. In the silence they heard Dr. Childermass, who was aboard the new city, call out, “Ready everybody? Now!”

There was a humming sound that rose quickly until it was too high to hear. Nothing else happened. One of the stanchions near the new city’s stern gave a long groan, as if it shared everyone’s disappointment. Then the other stanchions began to creak and squeak as well, and Tom realized that it was because they were relaxing; New London, whose dead weight they had supported all these years, was no longer pressing down on them. Scraps of rust came whispering down like November leaves. A forgotten paintbrush fell from a gantry and clattered on the Womb floor. The Magnetic Repellers swiveled slightly as Engineers in the city’s control rooms realigned them, but they still looked like big, misty mirrors; no crackling lightning, no mystical glow, just a faint flicker in the air around them, like a heat haze.

Slowly, slowly, like some ungainly insect taking flight, New London rose from its scrap-metal cradle and turned a little, first to one side, then the other. It edged forward, and again Tom sensed that faint hum. “It works!” people started to whisper, glancing at one another’s faces, making sure that they were not imagining this.

This was how it must have felt when the first airship flew, thought Tom, or when the divine Quirke first switched on London’s land engines. Lavinia Childermass’s machines were going to change the world in ways he could not imagine. Perhaps by the time Wren’s grandchildren were born, all cities would hover. Perhaps there would be no need for cities at all…

There was a sharp crack. Smoke squirted from some of the vents in New London’s keel. The heat-haze ripple around the repellers vanished, and the hovering city dropped gracelessly back onto its stanchions with a bellow of straining metal. The spectators groaned in disappointment, pressing themselves against the walls of the Womb as the stanchions swayed and workers ran forward to steady them.

“It don’t work!” complained a woman standing close to Tom.

“It’s a dud!” said another.

Lavinia Childermass appeared among the unfinished buildings at the edge of New London’s upper hull. The Womb’s acoustics and her own nervousness made her speech almost impossible to hear, but as Tom pushed his way to the exit, he caught a few fragments of what she was saying: “A small problem with the Kliest Coils … mustn’t give up … much work still to do … fine tuning … adjustments … wait a few more weeks …”

But do we have a few more weeks? Tom wondered. For as he stepped outside, he heard the drone of Green Storm airships heading west, and another sound, which he thought at first was thunder and then realized was the rumble of immense guns, somewhere beyond the western horizon.

Chapter 34 Displaced Persons

“I see you’re feeling better.”

“This is better?”

“Well, conscious. That’s an improvement.”

Hester rubbed her eye and tried to bring the ceiling into focus. She felt as thin as water, as if her whole body were just a damp stain drying slowly on this hard horsehair bed. A ghost leaned over her and solidified into someone she ought to know. She began to remember Airhaven; the girl she’d sprung from Varley’s freighter, Lady Naga. She remembered the blow on her head, the fight on Strut 13.

“You’ve been very ill.” Oenone talked like a doctor, and had changed her sackcloth dress for some kind of white military tunic, but she still looked like a schoolboy. Hester stared at her taped-together spectacles and crooked teeth. “You’ll be all right now; the wound is healing well.”

Hester remembered airships; the Shadow Aspect and then that big Green Storm job. Taking off into thunder. People yelling at each other; her yelling; Grike holding her. Grike must be disappointed that she’d survived. She raised her head from the pillow to look for him, but he was not there. She was alone with Oenone in a square ivory-colored room. Metal shutters had been folded open to let afternoon light in through a big window. On a chair in the corner her clothes were piled up, neatly folded, her pack and boots beside them on the floor. A couple of her larger guns were propped against the wall, solid and somehow reassuring in this unfamiliar space.

“What is this place?”

“We’re at Forward Command,” Oenone said. “It’s an old Traction City that the Storm took years ago.”

“Not in Shan Guo, then?”

“Not yet. The Fury was badly damaged when we left the line. The cities broke through faster than anyone expected, and their flying machines were everywhere. We limped this far, and we’ve been stuck here ever since. General Xao is here too. She’s trying to organize a second line of defense, and she’s promised to send us on our way as soon as the Fury can be repaired. But at the moment her mechanics are too busy keeping fighting ships airworthy to work on the Fury. There’s heavy fighting going on north and south of here. This place is just an island in an ocean of hungry cities…”

Hester half listened, trying to order her vague memories of her illness and the journey east. She knew now how Theo had felt after she’d rescued him from Cutler’s Gulp. She wished she’d shown him more sympathy.

“What about the others?” she said.

“Mr. Grike is here, quite undamaged. He sat with you all the time you were ill, but today General Xao has persuaded him to go out to the front-line trenches to help build the defenses. Manchester and a dozen other cities are closing in on us from the west, so she needs all the help she can get. I’ve sent word to him that you were stirring; he’s bound to be here soon. He’ll be delighted that you’ve pulled through.”

“I doubt it,” said Hester. “What about Theo?”

Oenone hesitated. “Professor Pennyroyal is here too. He’s been flirting shamelessly with General Xao—”

“Theo? What about Theo?”

Oenone looked down, hiding behind her annoying black bangs.

“Gods and goddesses!” Hester heaved herself sideways off the bed. She tried to stand, but her head swirled. Something tugged at her arm, and she looked down and saw a transparent plastic tube emerging from the flesh beneath her elbow, attached to an upturned bottle on a stand beside her bed. She cried out in horror and disgust.

“It’s all right,” Oenone promised, stopping her as she reached to tug the tube out. “It’s an Ancient technique; a way of getting fluids into you. You’ve been unconscious for days; we had to—”

Shaking, Hester sat on the bed’s edge, staring out of the window. Her sickroom seemed to be on the topmost tier of the disabled city; outside, rooftops and chimneys dropped steeply to a gray-green plain where clumps of soldiers were moving about, half-tracks dragging big guns into position. “She came for him, didn’t she? Lady Death…”

Behind her, Oenone said, “He went back into the trenches for some reason…” She came around the bed. Her hand brushed Hester’s bony shoulder. “By the time we knew he had gone, it was too late. He must have run straight into the cities’ bombardment.”

Hester reached out and grabbed the cord around Oenone’s neck on which her cheap Zagwan crucifix dangled. She pulled it tight, dragging the younger woman’s shocked face down to hers. “You should have gone after him! You should have saved him! He saved you!”

But it was herself she blamed. She should never have let Theo begin his harebrained rescue mission. Now he was dead. She let go of Oenone and covered her own face, frightened by the tears that were spilling out of her, the horrible moaning noise she couldn’t stop. She had promised herself she would never care about anyone again, and she should have stuck to it, but no, her stupid heart had opened up for Theo, and now he was dead, and she was paying the price for having loved him. She shouted at Oenone, “You should have prayed to that old god of yours! To keep him safe! To bring him back!”

Down on the plain below the city General Xao’s troops were digging frantic foxholes and city-traps. The blades of their spades and picks glinted rhythmically like a school of bright fish turning. Up through the sickroom floor came the sounds of marching feet and bellowed orders from the lower tiers, where tired subofficers were trying to forge new fighting units out of the drabbles of survivors who kept stumbling in from defeats in the west and north. Oenone and Hester sat side by side on the bed. After a while Oenone said, “If God could do things like that, the world wouldn’t look the way it does. He can’t reach down and change things. He can’t stop any of us doing what we choose to do.”

“What use is he then?”

Oenone shrugged. “He sees. He understands. He knows how you’re feeling. He knows how Theo felt. He knows how it feels to die. And when we die, we go to him.”

“To the Sunless Country, you mean? Like ghosts?”

Oenone shook her head patiently. “Like children. Do you remember what it was like to be a tiny child? When everything was possible and everything was given to you, and you knew that you were safe and loved, and the days went on forever? When we die, it will be like that again. That’s how it is for Theo now, in heaven.”

“How do you know? Did one of those corpses you Resurrected tell you this?”

“I just know.”

They sat side by side, and Oenone put her arm around Hester, and Hester let her. Something about this earnest, humorless young eastern woman touched her, despite her best efforts. It was her goodness, and her silly, indomitable hope. She reminded Hester of Tom. They sat on the bed waiting for Mr. Grike, thinking about Theo in heaven. Outside the window the day faded to a steel-gray dusk. The lights of advancing cities twinkled all along the western horizon.

Theo was not in heaven. He was trudging on foot across an immense, wind-whipped steppe somewhere northeast of Forward Command. He had been walking for so long that his boots were starting to disintegrate, and he had tied them together with strips of cloth, which kept coming undone, trailing in the mud.

He was not alone. Around him, the remnants of the Green Storm’s forward divisions were spilling eastward, spurred on by tales of hungry harvester suburbs and mercenary aviators raiding deep into Storm territory behind them.

When he clawed his way out of the ruins of General Xao’s dugout on the first day of the war, Theo’s first thought had been to get home somehow to Zagwa. But cities had been pushing through all along the line. Running from them, he had fallen in with this mass of defeated, fleeing soldiers and been swept along in the only direction that seemed safe: east. He had found a place on a half-track, but after a few days townie airships had bombed the bridges on the road ahead and he had been forced to get off and hobble along with the stragglers, the walking wounded, the ones deafened or driven mad by what they had seen on the line.

Theo felt half mad himself sometimes. Often in the night he woke shaking, dreaming of his time under the cities’ guns.

Mostly, though, he just felt miserable. The landscape didn’t help. It had been Storm territory for more than a decade, but the Storm had never known quite what to do with it. One faction had tried to nurture the natural growth of weeds and scrub that filled the old track marks, and then another had attempted to bulldoze the track marks flat and plant wheat. The result was an undulating, thinly wooded country that turned quickly into a quagmire under the boots of the routed army. From time to time they passed wind farms or small static settlements, but the buildings were all empty, the settlers fled, the fields and houses stripped by soldiers at the front of the column.

Theo wondered about Hester and Oenone and Professor Pennyroyal, and whether they had managed to escape. At first he hoped that they might come looking for him, but as the scale of the Storm’s defeat became clear, he stopped hoping. How would they know where to look? If even half the rumors he heard were true, whole armies had been smashed, and the eastern Hunting Ground must be filled with straggling columns of refugees like the one he’d joined, all trying to reach safety before the hungry cities caught them.

He reached the crest of a long slope and saw, away to the north, a jagged smear upon the plain. Some of his companions (he couldn’t call them friends; they’d been too stunned and weary even to ask one another’s names) had stopped to look at it, pointing and talking.

“What is it?” asked Theo.

“London,” said a Shan Guonese subofficer. “A powerful barbarian city that the gods destroyed when it tried to breach the walls of Batmunkh Gompa.”

“The gods were with us then,” said another. “Now they have turned their backs on us. They are punishing Naga and his whore for overthrowing our Stalker Fang.”

A signals officer, his eyes swathed in bandages, said, “I am glad I cannot see London. It is a bad-luck place. Even looking at it brings misfortune.”

“You think our luck can get any worse?” sneered the first subofficer.

A shout of “Airship!” went up from farther down the column, and everyone fell flat, some crawling under bushes, some trying to scrape holes for themselves in the wet earth. But the ship that came rumbling overhead was just a Zhang Chen Hawkmoth with the green lightning bolt of the Storm on its tail fins. It settled on the plain a few miles ahead.

The troops around Theo went quiet. This was the first Storm ship they had seen for many days, and they were wondering what it meant. But Theo was more interested in London. He stared through the mist at its spiny, unwelcoming skyline, trying and failing to imagine it as a moving city. Was Wren really in there somewhere? He dug in his pocket and took out the photograph, studying her face as he had studied it many times on this march east, remembering their long-ago kiss. Love, she had written at the bottom of her letter, but did she mean it, or was it was just one of those loves you end letters with, carelessly, not trying to suggest longing or desire?

Still, it gave Theo hope to think that Wren might be so close. London’s ghosts didn’t scare him—well, not much. He’d survived the Rustwater and the Line and Cutler’s Gulp, and he could not imagine any ghosts more terrifying than that. Like his Shan Guonese comrade, he didn’t believe his luck could get any worse.

An officer in a motorized mud sledge came roaring along the line, stopping at each cluster of soldiers to bellow through a bullhorn. “Fresh orders! We are moving southwest! General Xao is making a stand at Forward Command.”

Theo heard the soldiers around him muttering doubtfully. They did not believe the enclave at Forward Command could hold out for long. They wanted to push on to the safety of the mountains. Maybe in Batmunkh Gompa, which had stood for so long against the cities, there might be hope…

“Move!” the officer was shouting, as his sledge went slapping and growling on along the column. “Take heart! We are to join with General Xao and smash the barbarians! Food and supplies are waiting on the road to Forward Command!”

Even he didn’t sound as if he believed it, but everyone knew the penalty for disobeying an order from the Storm. Wearily the soldiers grabbed packs and guns, some grumbling, some cursing, others excited and vowing this time to stop the barbarians forever.

Not Theo. He was glad to hear that General Xao was still alive, but this was not his war; beneath his stolen greatcoat he was not even in the Storm’s uniform. He stowed Wren’s picture safely in his pocket and slid away from the others, creeping unnoticed down into a flooded track mark as they started to move off.

It was almost nightfall by the time he judged it safe to show himself again. He waded across the floor of the track mark and scrambled up the far wall onto flat ground. Nothing was left of the army he had traveled east with except for a few abandoned packs, a dead horse, some litter blowing about in the wind. The guns in the west were booming again as he started to pick his way across the plain toward the distant outline of the destroyed city.

Look for me in London.

Chapter 35 Uplink

The house at Erdene Tezh hums with the power of the old machines. Driven by a hydroelectric generator in the basement, lights gleam, needles quiver, and components stripped from antique Stalker brains tick and chitter to themselves. The room is webbed with cables. In the middle of this nest of machinery the Stalker Fang stands, tapping at ivory keyboards. Bright little fireflies dance for her behind the glass of an old Goggle Screen. She whispers to herself: strings of numbers, letters, cryptic code words culled from her memories of the Tin Book; the forgotten language of ODIN.

None of it means anything to Fishcake. When his Stalker does not want him to fix or carry something, he wanders the dead rooms or goes out into the garden and looks at the fish frozen in the ice on the pond, or simply sleeps, clutching his beloved wooden horse. He is sleeping a lot now, as his mind and body withdraw from the hunger and the cold. He has not had much to eat, for although he brought a bag of food with him from Batmunkh Gompa, it is running low. His stomach aches with hunger. He has mentioned the problem to his Stalker, but she ignores him. Now that her transmitter is finished, she is no longer interested in Fishcake.

Sometimes he dreams of escaping from this place. He casts hopeful glances at the keys to Popjoy’s air yacht, which, for reasons of her own, she has hung around her neck on a cord. He does not dare to snatch them, though; he knows he wouldn’t get more than three paces before she cut him down.

Tonight, because the rest of the old building is so cold, Fishcake has made his way to her room again, hoping to curl up in the faint warmth of her machines. She is still at work, still typing her chains of numbers. The clatter of her steel fingers on the keys sounds like Lady Death playing dice with dead men’s bones down in the Sunless Country. Hydraulics grizzle up above the ceiling somewhere, sending down a snow of crumbled plaster. Outside, where the real snow whirls around the roof and the Stalker-birds keep watch for snooping airships, a saucer-shaped aerial turns and tips to focus on a point high in the northwestern sky.

Far, far above, something large and old and cold rides the long dark, frosted with space dust, pocked by micrometeors. Solar panels give off a tired gleam, like dusty windows. Inside the armored hull a receiver listens patiently to the same wash of static that it has been hearing for millennia. But now something is changing: Inside the static, like flotsam washing ashore in the surf, comes a familiar message. The ancient computer brain detects it and responds. Many of its systems have been damaged over the long years, but it has others, fail-safes and backups. Power cells hum; glowing ribbons of light begin to weave through the coils of the weapon chamber; ice crystals tumble away in a bright, widening cloud as heavy shields slide open.

ODIN gazes down into the blue pool of the Earth and waits to be told what it must do.

Chapter 36 Intruders

22nd June (I think …)

I’m writing this in a very dismal spot on the western edge of the ruins of London, listening to the guns in the west. How far does the sound of gunfire travel? No one here is sure. But it’s pretty clear that the war is on again, and the Green Storm are losing. Already a few refugees have wandered through the edges of the debris fields—they’ve moved on of their own accord, or with a bit of prompting from Londoners hiding in the debris and making spooky noises, but what if more come?

And what if suburbs and cities come behind them? And what if Wolf Kobold is already on his way here aboard Harrowbarrow?

I’ll say this for the Londoners: They don’t give up easily. It’s been decided that New London simply has to be ready to leave by the end of this week, and although Lavinia Childermass and her Engineers look doubtful, they know there is no alternative.

While the Engineers get busy in the Womb, everyone else is starting to crate up the things that will be needed aboard the new city, and extra patrols have been sent out to keep watch on the western edges of the field for signs of approaching trouble. That’s what leads to me being out here in the wet, instead of tucked up snug in my bed at Crouch End. We’ve made a camp among the rust heaps, and we’ll sleep under the stars tonight (or at least under a sort of rusty overhang, which we are glad of since it will keep the drizzle off). Cat Luperini, who’s in charge of our little band, says we should take turns doing guard duty. She’s having first go, and I’m due to take over at—

Wren dropped her pencil and closed the book. Through the steady patter of the rain she had clearly heard the sound of a bird calling, the signal that the patrols used to communicate with one another across the wreckage. She went to tell Cat about it, but the other girl had already heard. “It’s Hodge’s lot,” she said. “They need us…”

The other members of the patrol—Angie Peabody and a small, shy boy named Timex Grout—were waking up, wriggling out from under their blankets and reaching for lanterns and crossbows. Wren’s heart beat quickly; it seemed to be wedged somewhere in the region of her tonsils. This could be it, she thought. What if Ron Hodge’s patrol on the southwestern edge had seen the lights of Harrowbarrow? What if advance parties from Harrowbarrow were already sneaking through the debris fields, ready to kill anyone they met? She fumbled a bolt out of the quiver on her belt and fitted it into her crossbow.

The birdcall came again. Cat called back, and the patrol set off quickly through the drizzle. The moon shone halfheartedly behind the clouds. Wren was glad of its light, but she was still terrified that she would lose the others and be left wandering in this insane rustscape all alone. Stories that she had scoffed at in Crouch End seemed very real out here in the night shadows. She started remembering all the scary scraps of London folklore she had picked up from her father: the dark supernatural shapes that haunted the nightmares of the old city; the ghosts of Boudicca and Spring-Heeled Jack; the awful salvage-stealing Wombles.

She almost screamed when a silhouette rose up in the path ahead, but it was just Ron Hodge, the rest of his patrol behind him.

“What’s going on?” asked Cat.

“Intruder,” said Ron shakily. “We got a glimpse of him, then lost him. He’s around here somewhere.”

“Just the one?”

“Don’t know.”

Cat took charge, ordering everybody to fan out and search. They called to each other as they crept through the spires and angles of the wreck, and they used words now as well as bird sounds; sometimes just the sound of voices emerging from the dead scrap piles was enough to make intruders turn tail and run.

There was no sign of anyone.

“What’s that?” yelped Timex. Wren ran to him, scrambling through drifts of rust flakes as crunchy as breakfast cereal. “There!” he hissed as she reached him, and she saw it too, just for an instant, a movement between two nearby blocks of wreckage. She tried to call out for Cat and the others, but her mouth was too dry. She fumbled for the safety catch of her crossbow, telling herself that if the stranger was one of Wolf’s men from Harrowbarrow, she would have to kill him before he killed her.

“Who’s there?” shouted a voice. A familiar accent; Theo’s accent. It made Wren feel shivery with relief. This wasn’t an attacker; just some lost African airman, another deserter from the retreating Green Storm armies that the lookouts had sighted passing by. Cat had said that half a dozen had stumbled into the fringes of the debris field over the past few days, and it had been easy enough to frighten them away. Wren wondered what would be the best way to convince this one that the wreck was full of restless spirits. Should she leap out waving her arms and going “Woooooo”?

Just then, a lot of things happened at once. The stranger, who was closer than he had sounded, appeared suddenly around the corner of an old engine block. Cat and Angie, coming over the crest of the wreckage behind him, unveiled their lanterns, the dazzling ghost lights that had driven off so many previous interlopers. The stranger, alarmed, ran straight toward Wren and Timex, and Timex barged backward, crashing into Wren, whose crossbow went off accidentally with a startling twang and a kick that nearly broke her arm. The stranger fell in the splay of light from the lanterns, and Wren, catching sight of his face, saw that he did not just sound like Theo, he was Theo.

“Ow!” he said weakly.

There was a sound of slithering rust flakes as the other Londoners came running. Wren stood shaking her head, rubbing her wrenched arm, waiting to wake up. This was a dream, and a pretty poor one. Theo could not be here. Theo was in Zagwa. That was not Theo, lying there dying on the metal in front of her.

But when she edged closer, and Cat held up her lantern, there was no mistaking his good, handsome, dark-brown face.

“Theo?” she said. “I didn’t mean to— Oh, Quirke!” She started to claw at his soggy coat, looking for the crossbow bolt.

Ron Hodge arrived, keen to assert himself now that the intruder had turned out harmless. “Leave him, Wren,” he ordered.

“Oh, go away!” yelled Wren. “He’s a friend! And I think I’ve shot him…”

But there was no hole in Theo’s coat; no blood, no jutting bolt. Her shot had gone wide. “I just slipped,” Theo said weakly, looking at Wren as if he did not believe it could really be her. He half sat up and stared warily at the young Londoners crowding around him. Wren couldn’t take her eyes off him. How thin and pained and tired he looked, and how glad she was to see him!

Theo tried out a smile. “I got your letter,” he said.

They made their way back to their camp, where Angie lit a small fire and heated up some soup for Theo, who was shivering with cold and exhaustion. Wren sat by him as he drank it. It felt strange to be with him again. She had been imagining him safe in sunny Zagwa. How did he come to be caught up in the Green Storm’s defeats? She had asked, but he’d just said, “It’s complicated,” and she hadn’t liked to press him.

She wondered if he still remembered kissing her at Kom Ombo Air Harbor, and supposed that he must; he had come all the way to London to find her, after all.

“We shouldn’t be mollycoddling him,” said Ron Hodge grumpily, pacing about at the edge of the firelight. “He’s Green Storm.”

“He’s not!” cried Wren.

“He’s in a Green Storm uniform.”

“Only the coat,” said Theo, lifting it open to show his flyer’s clothes beneath. “I stole it from a dead man on the way east. I’m not Green Storm. I don’t know what I am.”

“He’s a Zagwan,” said one of Ron’s group. “Zagwans are Anti-Tractionists. We can’t let an Anti-Tractionist into London. Wren and her dad have already brought one spy among us; now she’s asking us to take in a Mossie…”

“So what do you think we should do with him?” asked Cat Luperini. “Kill him?”

The boys looked sheepish.

“When daylight comes, me and Wren will take him over to Crouch End,” Cat decided.

Wren slept fitfully, curled up beside Theo. The wreckage made an uncomfortable bed, but even without the rivets and rust flakes digging into her, she could not have slept; she had to keep studying his sleeping face to make quite sure she had not dreamed him. And then she suddenly woke to daylight, and it was time to leave.

They walked eastward, Wren and Theo together, Cat following with her crossbow. As they went, Theo told Wren his story, and she learned how he had met her mother, and how they had traveled together all the way to the Green Storm’s lines.

“And after that?” asked Wren.

“I don’t know. I think she’s safe. Probably in Shan Guo by now.”

Wren was not sure what to feel. She’d grown used to thinking that Mum was dead. It was unsettling to find out that she was still alive, and to hear the way Theo spoke of her, as if he admired her. And that she should be traveling around with that horrible Stalker, Mr. Grike—Wren didn’t like to think about it, and she was almost relieved when Cat suddenly shouted, “Down!” and she was able to concentrate on dragging Theo off the path and into cover.

A Stalker-bird coasted low over the ruins, so close that Wren heard the sound of its wing feathers combing the air. Its too-big head swung mechanically from side to side.

Cat scrambled over to join Wren and Theo. “I saw it circling up high when we left the camp,” she said. “I’ve been keeping my eye on it while you two nattered. I hoped it would go on its way, but it’s watching us. Must have seen that fire we lit last night.”

Wren peeked out from under the slab of deck plate that hid them. The bird had gone higher, circling. As Wren watched, it flapped its raggedy wings and swooped off across the debris fields in the direction of Crouch End.

“They’re definitely getting nosier,” said Cat.

“Spy birds,” said Wren to Theo, thinking he looked scared. “They come over and take pictures of us for General Naga’s album.”

Theo shook his head. “That wasn’t a spy bird, Wren. That was a Lammergeyer. We had a flock of them aboard my carrier when I was with the Storm. They’re used for armed reconnaissance.” The girls looked blankly at him, as girls so often did when he slipped into the Storm’s military jargon. “They’re attack birds, Wren! I think your friends are in danger…”

The Green Storm’s birds were certainly taking a great interest in the debris fields that morning. As Tom worked away wrapping and packing the treasures he had found among the ruins ready for their transfer aboard New London, he kept hearing the clang clang clang of the danger bell, warning any Londoner who was out in the open to beware. By lunchtime the still-smoldering carcasses of three more spy birds were hanging outside the canteen, displayed as trophies by the keen lookouts who had shot them down with lightning guns when they showed too much interest in the Womb.

Tom felt pleased by the way the rekilling of the birds lifted his fellow Londoners’ spirits, but he could not help wondering whether shooting them had been wise. Might it not just make their masters even more suspicious about what was happening inside the wreck?

Chudleigh Pomeroy told him not to fret. “Those birds have seen nothing that would make the Storm think we’re anything but a rabble of squatters. Even if they had, the Storm have bigger worries than us. By the time they get around to sending airships over, New London will be gone.”

Tom surreptitiously touched wood. He knew the Engineers were working as hard as they could to perfect the Childermass engines, but he could not help thinking of the failed test yesterday. What if the next test was a failure too?

He wished he could do more to help. He had been moved when Chudleigh Pomeroy had asked him to become Head Historian, and he took his relic collecting seriously, but he knew that it was a made-up job, not really necessary. New London was about the future, not the past.

With lunch over, Pomeroy announced that he was going to the Womb, and Tom volunteered to go with him. He had repaired the Jenny Haniver often enough, after all; he was sure the Engineers could find some small welding or wiring task to entrust him with aboard their new city. But they had not gone more than twenty yards from Crouch End when the danger bell began to ring again.

“Merciful Quirke!” exclaimed Pomeroy, turning back toward the entrance. “How are we supposed to get anything done at all with these incessant interruptions? I’ve a good mind to write a stiff letter to General Naga and tell him it just ain’t neighborly…”

Tom had grown quite used to the sight of distant Stalker-birds, but those new carcasses strung up outside the canteen made him uneasy. He glanced at the sky as he hurried Pomeroy toward shelter, and he was glad he had. The birds had returned in force, and they were not circling dots this time, but hurtling black shapes, dropping like missiles out of the sun.

“Get down!” he shouted, shoving Pomeroy to the ground just as a bird swept over, its steel claws whisking past a fraction of an inch above the old man’s head. The danger bell was jangling again, and on the road to the Womb people were scattering and shouting. Saab Peabody, who’d downed a spy bird earlier, came running out of Crouch End with his lightning gun at the ready, keen to add another to his tally. A bird came down on him, flailing its razor claws at his face, and he dropped the gun and fell blinded and screaming. Other birds were crashing through the beanpoles in the vegetable gardens, harrying a small, terrified group of children as their teachers tried to herd them into the safety of Crouch End. Even in there, among the cozy huts, the dead wings flapped.

Tom watched it all, trembling, doing his best to shelter Pomeroy. Saab seemed to have passed out; his lightning gun had fallen only a few feet away, and in his younger days Tom might have tried to reach it and do something heroic, but he was terrified of having another seizure, and so scared of the birds that he could barely move.

Wren, Theo, and Cat had just emerged out of the rust hills west of Crouch End when the attack began. They all heard the bell clanging, and the two girls stared without really understanding as the people below them scattered before the swift, swooping shapes of the birds.

“That’s Dad!” said Wren, seeing Tom pinned to the ground beside Pomeroy, about thirty feet away. She turned to Theo, but Theo had already seen Tom for himself, and he was sprinting toward him through the bird-scoured sunlight.

Cat started to sob with panic. Wren snatched her crossbow and clicked the safety catch off. They acted very military, these young Londoners, but it had always been a game for them till now; they’d never seen real violence before. Wren had, and although she knew she would shake like jelly later, for the moment she was very calm. She took aim at a bird as it plunged toward Theo, and put a bolt through its body just before it reached him. One crossbow bolt would not rekill a Stalker-bird, but the blow was enough to throw it off course, and Theo ran on without even knowing the danger he had been in.

The bird’s attention had been drawn to Wren. It swerved toward her. She grabbed another bolt from Cat’s quiver, but the bird would be upon her long before she could reload. She dropped the bow, snatched up a twisted length of iron drainpipe from the mounds of wreckage beside the path, and smashed it out of the air as its claws came reaching for her. Then Cat grabbed a shard of metal too, and together they beat the thrashing bird to pieces.

Theo was halfway to Tom before he realized that he hadn’t a plan. He had only started running because he wanted Wren to see that he was brave, and because he had always thought that Mr. Natsworthy really couldn’t look after himself. Bird shadows whisked across the ground; the reflections of wings flashed up at him from puddles. He wasn’t even armed…

A little way beyond Tom and the old man a silvery gun lay on the ground. Theo threw himself at it, feeling claws rip the air above him as he dived. He rolled over, fumbling with the gun, feeling for a trigger among its complicated array of wires and tubes. He wished it had been something simpler— all soldiers knew that you couldn’t rely on that sort of back-engineered Old Tech garbage—but he told himself that beggars can’t be choosers, and pointed the gun at a passing bird. When he squeezed what he hoped was the trigger, a bolt of pure lightning dropped the bird limp and smoldering at his feet. Startled, he stood up, swinging the gun toward another bird. When he had brought down four of them, the others started to notice him, but by then Londoners were shooting at them too—gaudy crackles of energy leaping from other guns like his, smoking birds and showers of feathers falling all around.

And then, quite suddenly, the attack was over. A lone bird soared eastward, too high to be touched by the bolts of lightning that crackled up at it. The danger bell clanged on and on and on until someone went to tell the girl who was ringing it that she could stop now. People appeared nervously from the holes and clefts where they had been hiding, brushing rust flakes from their clothes, silent and pale with shock. The injured moaned; their friends shouted for help.

“Why did they attack?” people were asking. “Why now? After all these years…”

“That wasn’t a real attack,” said Theo, starting to shiver a little as he imagined what could have happened to him if those had been heavy assault birds instead of a reconnaissance flock. “That was a probe; they want to test your strength.” He stared about, getting his first real look at this unlikely settlement.

The Londoners stared back at him, wondering where he had sprung from, this young man in the uniform of their enemy.

Tom stood slowly and started to help Chudleigh Pomeroy stand too. His heart was beating very hard, but he did not feel ill; his only worrying symptom was a hallucination that would not fade; he seemed to see Theo Ngoni standing before him, clutching a lightning gun.

“Hello, Mr. Natsworthy,” said the hallucination, with a nervous wave.

And then Wren came running—dirty, and with a cut on her forehead, but otherwise unharmed, thank Quirke—running to hug him and ask was he all right? and say, “It’s Theo, Daddy; Theo’s here; you remember Theo; Theo’s come all the way from Africa to find us.”

Chapter 37 Love Among the Ruins

It was not a good time for a young Anti-Tractionist in a Green Storm greatcoat to arrive in London. People were frightened and angry, shaking their fists toward Shan Guo and asking what they had ever done to make the Mossies attack them. Things might have gone badly for Theo if it had not been for the fact that he had shot down five of the nightmare birds. “That don’t signify anything,” insisted Mr. Garamond. “That could all be part of their plan, to make us accept him so he can murder us all in our beds!” But Pomeroy told him to put a sock in it; the young man had saved him, and a lot of other people besides, and he, for one, was ready to welcome him.

Tom and Wren joined in, explaining how Theo had flown with them for a time aboard the Jenny and visited the Traction City of Kom Ombo without showing any desire to murder anyone. And slowly, grudgingly, people started to admit that Theo might not be an agent of the Storm after all; only a lost stranger who should be offered hospitality.

The injured were treated, the lookouts redoubled, the lightning guns recharged. Chudleigh Pomeroy, who looked badly shaken but insisted that he was quite all right, asked Theo a lot of questions about how the war was going, very few of which Theo could answer, because Chudleigh Pomeroy had a Historian’s notion of battles, all about tactics and the plans and decisions of generals, none of which Theo had really noticed while he was fleeing through the mud.

In the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight shone right into Crouch End and through the windows of their little shack, Tom and Wren were finally able to get Theo to themselves. Over cake and nettle tea that Wren scrounged from the kitchens, they told him the story of their adventures and listened to his own. And it was there that Tom first learned of Theo’s meeting with Hester; of how she had rescued him in the sand sea, and of what had followed, right up to the moment when she had boarded that corvette with Lady Naga.

Wren took her father’s hand as they listened. There were tears in his eyes. But all he said was, “Where is Hester now?”

Theo shook his head. “It was such chaos on the line. I think her ship got away safely. But wherever she is, she’ll be all right. I’ve never met anyone as brave or as tough as her. And Mr. Grike will look after her…”

“Grike,” said Tom, and shook his head. “So it was him you two met on Cloud 9. I thought I’d finished him forever on the Black Island. I hate to think of the old brute up and about again.”

“I wouldn’t be here now if he wasn’t, Mr. Natsworthy,” said Theo. “He’s changed since Oenone re-Resurrected him.”

Tom didn’t doubt what Theo said, but he still couldn’t shake off his memories of the old Grike, vicious and insane, who had hunted him through the Rustwater Marshes twenty years before. And now Grike and Hester were together again, just as they’d been when she was a young girl. A rare, bitter feeling filled him. He was jealous of the ancient Stalker.

In the evening, when the sun had gone down into the haze of the west and the sky above the debris fields was turning lilac, Wren took Theo up to the Womb so that he could see for himself what the Londoners were doing there. She felt nervous, for although he was a moderate, civilized sort of Anti-Tractionist, he was still an Anti-Tractionist, and had been brought up to hate and fear all moving cities. But New London had become so important to her that she had to show him; she had to know what he felt about it.

When they reached the hangar, he stood looking up for a long time at the new city, while Wren nervously explained how it had come to be, and what those funny mirror things were supposed to do. She couldn’t tell what he thought, or whether he was even listening.

“But it hasn’t got any wheels,” he said at last.

“I told you, it doesn’t need any,” said Wren. “So you needn’t be so old-fashioned about it; it isn’t going to churn up your precious green earth or squash any flowers or bunnies. It’s barely a Traction City at all. Think of it as a very large, low-flying airship.”

They walked through the shadows under New London. Above their heads Engineers clambered about like spiders on the city’s belly, making adjustments and repairs. All around them, on the hangar floor, kegs of water and crates of salted meat were waiting to be loaded aboard, along with coops filled with clucking poultry, and stacks of tinned food unearthed by salvage teams from lost groceries and storerooms deep in the debris fields. Even the shacks where the people of London had lived for so long were being dismantled and loaded on handcarts and scrap-metal sledges for transport to the holds of the new suburb. As Wren led Theo outside, they met a whole line of them coming up the track from Crouch End, filling the twilight with dust and rust flakes. From the northern end of the Womb came the voices of Len Peabody and his mates, busy clearing wreckage from in front of the hangar entrance and setting the demolition charges that would blast the doors off when the time came for New London to depart.

“So what do you think?” asked Wren, worried by Theo’s silence. She drew him off the track into a narrow cleft of the wreckage where apple trees grew. She thought a Mossie might feel more at ease there, amid the gentle whisper of the leaves. She thought he would be heartened by the way nature was reclaiming the ruins of London. “Tell me,” she said.

“You are set on going with them?” Theo asked.

“Yes,” said Wren. “Dad wants to. I want to too. I want to stand aboard New London and feel it moving, racing off to new places…”

“Hunting?”

“Trading, the way Anchorage used to.”

“Bigger cities will hunt you.”

“They won’t catch us.”

A bird fluttered in the undergrowth. Only a blackbird, but it made them both flinch, and they moved closer together.

“The thing is,” he said, “I didn’t expect any of this. I thought you were just exploring here.”

“That’s Pennyroyal’s fault,” said Wren, who always talked too much when she felt nervous. “If he hadn’t let my letter get all soggy, you’d have known about Wolf’s theory—”

“Hush…” Theo touched his finger to her lips to quiet her. He said, “I thought you’d be in danger now the barbarians are driving east again. I hoped I might find you and take you and your father home with me somehow, to Zagwa.”

Oh, bother! thought Wren, because she had been pretty sure that he was about to kiss her again, and now she saw it wasn’t going to work. He was a Mossie, and she was a city girl. He was never going to approve of New London. And then she thought, Well, what does it matter? The way things were going, they might both be eaten by Harrowbarrow or pecked to bits by Stalker-birds before tomorrow night.

So she kissed him instead.

A single electronic eye focused for an instant on Wren and Theo, zooming in on the smudge of their body heat amid the cold sprawl of the wreck. A computer brain considered them for a fraction of a fraction of a second, then forgot them.

ODIN swung its gaze westward, pulling back, struggling to make sense of the incomprehensible world it had awoken to. Where were the sprawling cities of its masters, New York and San Angeles, that it had been put into orbit to defend? Where had the new mountain ranges come from? All those new seas? And what were those huge vehicles creeping across Europe, trailing their long sooty smears of exhaust smoke behind them?

The old weapon clung to the one familiar thing that this changed world could offer it: the stream of coded data rising like a silken thread from somewhere in the uplands of central Asia.

Chapter 38 The million Voices of the Wind

The cities’ war was going well. Panzerstadt Winterthur had been lost and Darmstadt and the Dortmund Conurbation were bogged down in the Rustwater somewhere, but the rest had found resistance surprisingly light. Up in the smoky skies their flying machines wheeled and swerved, harrying the withdrawing schools of Green Storm airships, while their own ships, airborne gun platforms hung from armored gasbags, lured flocks of Stalker-birds in close and hammered them into tornadoes of slime and feathers.

When it was quite clear that the Storm’s armies had been shattered, Adlai Browne decided that the time had come for Manchester to do its bit. Within a few weeks the good old days of Municipal Darwinism would return, and he meant to see to it that Manchester was at the top of the food chain when they did. His city gathered a guard of harvester suburbs around it and rolled eastward with its jaws open, filling its gut with the rubble of watchtowers and fortresses, barns and farms and wind turbines.

By the time Wren kissed Theo in the ruins of London, Manchester was shoving its way through mile upon mile of lately planted forest toward the static settlement Called Forward Command. Around it swooped the Flying Ferrets, strafing Mossie rocket nests. The armored suburbs of Werewolf and Evercreech raced ahead of their mother city like well-trained dogs.

A flight of Fox Spirits rose from somewhere in the Mossie citadel and tore toward Manchester. Orla Twombley signaled the rest of her squadron, and the Ferrets pulled together, rising in a howling flock toward the ships, which broke right and left, scattering air-to-air rockets. Orla cursed as a machine on her starboard wing (the wicker gyrocopter Big Blue Plymouth) ran into an oncoming rocket and blew apart, blinding her with its smoke. She got onto the tail of the Fox Spirit that had fired the rocket and chased it westward, tearing chunks out of its steering vanes with the Combat Wombat’s cannon. She stitched incendiary bullets along its flank and watched as the gas cells started to burn. White escape balloons blossomed around the gondola as the crew bailed out. Some aviators regarded escape balloons as good target practice, but Orla had always insisted that the Ferrets shoot down ships, not people, so she swung around the collapsing airship and started back to help her comrades deal with the rest.

She was about three miles from Manchester when the sky split open. There was a shriek and a roar. Struggling to keep the Wombat’s nose up as it dropped toward the ground, she watched a lance of white fire lean across the sky. The Wombat’s canvas wings began to smolder. Orla called on various gods and goddesses, and trained her fire extinguisher on the burning patches. The sky was filled with smoke and light. She thought she saw the fire lance sweep northward, swerving toward one of Manchester’s suburbs. As it moved away and the shrieking, roaring sound faded, she realized that the Wombat’s engines had failed, and she could not restart them.

Surfing on the thermals above the burning forests, she turned toward Manchester, but Manchester was motionless, its armor holed, its tracks destroyed, tier upon ruined tier leaking flame into the scorched sky. Orla had never imagined that there could be so much fire in the world. She circled the carcass once, weeping, aghast at the thought of so many dead and dying. There was nothing she could do to help them. She steered northwest, searching for somewhere to set down. The light in the sky had gone out, but it had drawn a sweeping line of brush fires across the plains, and at points along the line great pyres were burning where suburbs and cities had stood.

At last, as the Combat Wombat began to lose height in the cooler air, an armored city loomed ahead. It was Murnau, motionless but whole, and its lookouts recognized Orla’s machine and opened a portal in the top-tier armor to let her inside. As the Wombat touched down on Über den Linden, she felt the wheels buckle, and then the whole undercarriage gave way; she slewed to a standstill in a storm of splintering wood and snapped string, a flapping of seared canvas. She hadn’t realized how badly the poor old kite had been burned.

Hadn’t realized how badly she’d been burned until she saw the men who ran to help her staring. Her pink flying suit was charred black; her face black too, except for the patches around her eyes where her goggles had protected her.

Smoke trailed from her gauntlets as she waved the medical crew aside and staggered coughing toward the Rathaus. She had to tell someone what she had seen; for all she knew, she was the only one who had escaped alive. “I must see the kriegsmarschall …,” she spluttered.

Von Kobold met her on the Rathaus steps. “Ms. Twombley? That light—those fires—We have lost contact with Manchester, Breslau, Moloch-Maschinenstadt… What the devil is going on out there?”

“Manchester’s gone,” said Orla Twombley. She collapsed, and von Kobold caught her, smudging his white tunic with soot and blood. “They’re all gone,” she said. “Turn your city about. Retreat! Run! The Storm have a new weapon, and it destroys everything…”

“A messenger, sir! A messenger from the front!”

The voice of Naga’s aide booms and echoes around the inside of the war room in the Jade Pagoda, echoes and booms around the inside of the general’s head. He can’t imagine what the man is so excited about. All week long there have been nothing but messengers from the front, and they have brought nothing but bad news. Naga isn’t even certain where the front is any longer. Whatever luck he had has deserted him. Maybe it died with Oenone.

“General Naga!”

Well, here he is, this famous messenger, and nothing much to look at: a moon-faced subofficer from one of the listening posts in the western mountains. “Well?”

The boy bows so low that pencils shower out of his tunic pockets and rattle on the floor. “A thousand apologies, General Naga. I had to come in person. All our Stalker-birds have been reassigned to the front, and there is something interfering with radio signals—”

“What is it?” barks Naga. At least, he tries to bark it; it comes out as a tetchy sigh.

“The Lady Naga, sir!” (How bright his eyes are, this boy. Was he even born when the wars began?) “She is alive, sir! A Stalker-bird came in from General Xao’s division. It was badly damaged, but we deciphered the message. Lady Naga is on her way home.”

The boy, who seemed so porridge featured and uninteresting a few moments ago, is actually remarkably handsome; brave; intelligent. What is the Storm thinking of, making a young man of his caliber carry messages for outlandish listening posts? Naga lurches to his feet and lets his armor carry him toward the map table. “Promote this man to lieutenant. No, captain.” He feels almost young again. Oenone is alive! A hundred new strategies bloom in his head like paper flowers dropped into water. Surely one of them will halt the townie advance?

She is alive! She is alive! She is alive!

He is so overjoyed that it is almost a whole minute before he stops to wonder about the young woman who came to him out of the desert with such graphic stories of Oenone’s death.

He snatches a sword from one of his generals. Officers and Stalkers scatter before him as his armor marches him out of the war room, up the stairs. “General Naga, sir?” shouts one of the men behind him.

“The girl Rohini, you fool!” he yells—or tries to yell. (The truth is starting to dawn: What has she done to me?) “Fetch the guard!” But he doesn’t really want the guard to deal with her; he wants to deal with her himself, with this good sword; he wants to split her head like a melon.

He doesn’t bother knocking when he reaches the door of her chamber, way out in the western wing. His armor carries him through it, and shards and splinters of antique wood rattle off him as he climbs the five stairs to her living space. She is rising from her seat to greet him as he reaches the top step, lovely and demure as ever, a big window behind her opening onto a moonlit balcony.

“My wife is alive,” says Naga. “She is flying home. Are you going to keep up the mute act, or do you have any final words?”

For a moment she stares at him, hurt, frightened, confused. Then realizing it just won’t wash anymore, she laughs. “You old fool! I’m glad she’s alive. Now she’ll see where her peace has brought us! To the edge of destruction! Not even you will listen to her Tractionist lies now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You still don’t understand?” Rohini laughs again, a little wildly. “She’s working for them! She’s always been working for them! Why do you think she married you? You’re not exactly the answer to a young girl’s dream, Naga. Half a man, wrapped up in clanking armor. Not even that, soon. I’m going to kill you, general, and your people will rise up and kill your traitor wife. Then they will be ready to welcome their real leader back, when she reveals herself.”

“What are you—” Naga starts to say. And pauses, because at this point Rohini pulls off her hair, which turns out to be a wig, beneath which two things are concealed: short, blond hair, which clashes oddly with her umber face, and a small gas pistol, with which she shoots him. Naga’s breastplate saves him from the bullet, but the impact makes him take a step backward, and he goes crashing and slithering down the stairs.

“—talking about?” he asks the ceiling, as he lies in the splinters of the wrecked door, dazed.

Rohini—or whoever she is—appears at the top of the stairs. The gun is still in her hand. This time she aims at his face, not his armor. She is still smiling. She says, “Cynthia Twite, of the Stalker Fang’s special intelligence group. A few of us kept the faith, General. We knew she would rise again.”

“You’ve been poisoning me! The tea! You—”

“That’s right!” says the girl chirpily. “And now I’m going to finish the j—”

Except she doesn’t even finish the sentence, because just at that moment a shaft of light stabs in through the window, so bright that it looks solid, so hot that it sets Cynthia and everything else in the room instantly on fire. A roaring, shrieking noise drowns out her screams. In the shadows of the stairwell Naga feels the heat on his face like the breath from an open furnace. Above him Cynthia Twite is a black branch, burning. There is a sound of crashing masonry. The Jade Pagoda heaves sideways, as if it’s having second thoughts about perching here on the mountainside. Naga tries to stand, but his armor won’t obey him. Cinders of Cynthia rattle down around him as the light fades. “Help!” he yells into the smoke. “Help!”

Behind him an ancient stone wall is tugged aside like a curtain. The main part of the Jade Pagoda is gone. He is looking down into the valley where Tienjing has stood, the capital of Anti-Tractionism, for a thousand years. There is nothing there but fire, and the million mournful voices of the wind.

Chapter 39 Firelight

Wren began to feel embarrassed as she and Theo walked down to Crouch End. They had been alone in that nook in the wreckage for much longer than she’d intended. She was pretty sure she had finally got the hang of this kissing business, but she couldn’t help but feel that everyone would know what she had been doing. Even when she let go of Theo’s hand, there was a sort of electric feeling in the air between them, and they couldn’t stop glancing at each other.

But although half of London seemed to be standing about in the open space outside Crouch End, none of them so much as looked at Theo or Wren. They were all staring westward. And as Wren joined them, she saw that the sky above the dinosaur spines of the wreckage was glowing red, as if a huge fire were burning just beyond the horizon.

“What is it, Mr. Luperini?” asked Wren, spotting Cat’s father standing nearby. “Is it the war?”

Luperini shook his head; shrugged. Faint, eerie noises blew in on the wind; shriekings and roarings. A ghostly wing of light lit up the western half of the sky, blanching the stars. Wren took Theo’s hand again.

“Reminds me of the night we zapped old Bayreuth,” someone said.

“Wren!” Tom came hurrying over to them. “I was wondering where you’d got to. What do you make of this, Theo?”

Theo shook his head. “How long has it been going on?”

“About a half hour—surely you must have noticed that first flash?”

“Urn …,” said Wren.

Theo frowned at the sky. “If it’s gunfire, it’s not like any I’ve seen before.”

Dr. Abrol came hurrying down the track from the listening post on the edge of the debris field where he spied on the Green Storm’s radio messages and on those of the approaching cities. Londoners gathered around him, calling out to ask what he had heard on the airwaves.

“It’s hard to be sure,” he said nervously, his spectacles flickering with reflections of the sky. “Something keeps interfering with the signals. But it seems … it sounds as if …” (“What? What?” the people around him urged.) He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple making a neat little bob. “Whole cities have been destroyed,” he said, and had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the cries, the curses, the hisses of indrawn breath. “Manchester. All sorts of Traktionstadts and suburbs …”

“Old Tech!” cried Chudleigh Pomeroy, who had come wandering out in his dressing gown to see what all the fuss was about. “It has to be. The Green Storm have some sort of Old Tech weapon…”

“But why wait until now to use it?” wondered Clytie.

“Who knows. Perhaps even they are scared of it. It must be horribly powerful.”

“But where did they find it?” other voices asked. “What on earth is it?”

Lurpak Flint stood behind Clytie, his arms wrapped around her. “Perhaps it is not anything on Earth at all. Remember, the Ancients left weapons in orbit. What if the Green Storm have found a way to wake one?”

“There are distress calls on the Green Storm’s airwaves too,” Dr. Abrol said. “Reports of an explosion at Tienjing. It’s very confused. Sorry.”

“Maybe the Traktionstadts have sent airships to Tienjing to try and blow up the transmitter that controls this weapon,” Pomeroy suggested.

Another pulse of arctic light lit the sky. “Doesn’t look like they hit it,” said Len Peabody. “This is bad, ain’t it? I mean, what’s to stop the Mossies turning their toy on New London as soon as they see us leaving the debris field?”

Pomeroy sighed; shrugged. “Why, nothing,” he said. “It is a problem, as you say. But it is not one we can do anything about. All we can do is pray to Quirke and Clio and all the other gods that the Green Storm will not think us worth wasting a blast of their spiffy new super-weapon on. New London is small, after all. Quirke willing, we may yet slip away. Go north, out of this horrible world the cities and the Storm have made. I fancy seeing the Ice Wastes before I die…”

He raised his voice a little, so that everyone else stopped staring at the sky and turned to listen. “This does not alter our plans. It may even help us, in a dreadful way; it may delay Harrowbarrow’s arrival. So go to your beds, and try and rest. There’s nothing to be gained by watching this fireworks party, and we have hard work ahead of us tomorrow. I, for one, could do with a snooze.”

The clumps of Londoners began to disperse, wandering away in ones and twos to their homes. Tom recognized the look on the faces of those who passed him. He had seen it at Batmunkh Gompa, nineteen years ago. It was the look of people who have just learned that a civilization quite opposed to their own has just become the most powerful on Earth. Despite Pomeroy’s brave words, they were afraid.

Only Wren and Theo, walking with heads together and their arms around each other’s waists, looked calm. They did not believe that some Ancient weapon could come between them; they imagined the feelings they shared were stronger than the Storm and the cities and all the Old Tech in the world. Tom let them go past him and watched them as they walked on ahead, remembering how he had once felt like that, with Hester.

He walked toward Crouch End beside Chudleigh Pomeroy. The old man was moving slowly, as if the Stalker-birds had shaken him more badly than he was admitting, but when Tom offered him an arm to lean on, he waved it away. “I’m not quite incapable yet, Apprentice Natsworthy. Though I must say, things have been getting jolly exciting since you and your daughter arrived. Birds and ’burbs and doomsday weapons … there’s barely a minute’s peace.”

Another pallid flicker of light came from the western sky. It seemed brighter this time, and Tom thought he saw a white blade of light slice across the stars, striking down at the Earth from some immeasurable height. Again, faintly, he heard that roaring, shrieking sound. “Great Quirke!” he whispered.

“They didn’t muck about, those Ancients.”

“Was Lurpak right? Is it really up in orbit somewhere?”

“It’s possible,” said Pomeroy. “There is all sorts of stuff still circling up there. The old records list a few weapons that the Ancients were supposed to have hung in heaven. The Diamond Bat, Jinju 14, the Nine Sisters, ODIN. Most of them must have been destroyed in the Sixty Minute War, or fallen out of the sky in all the millennia since. But I suppose it’s possible that one’s still up there, and Naga’s people have managed to awaken it.”

“ODIN,” said Tom. “I’ve heard that name somewhere…”

“Quirke preserve us! You must have actually been paying attention during one of my lectures, Natsworthy!” chuckled Pomeroy, but he sounded weary, and Tom started walking again, thinking that it could not be good for the old Historian to be hanging about here in the chill air. The white light had gone now, anyway; there was nothing to see but a sinister, reddish glow in the west.

“The name stood for Orbital Defense Initiative,” Pomeroy said as they strolled on together. “It was part of the American Empire’s last, furious arms race with Greater China. I wonder where on earth our Mossie friends dug up the access codes.”

“Quirke Almighty!” Tom said suddenly, with such concern in his voice that Pomeroy stopped again and turned to peer at him.

“Everything all right, Natsworthy?”

“Yes,” said Tom, but he was lying. He had remembered why the name ODIN sounded familiar. That had been the only legible word among the thousands of numbers and symbols scratched on the pages of the Tin Book of Anchorage, the relic that Wren had helped the Lost Boys steal from Vineland. Tom had almost forgotten about the book; he had assumed it was destroyed when Cloud 9 fell. Naga’s people must have taken it with them to Shan Guo, and used it to arouse the dreadful weapon in the sky.

“Please,” he said, “don’t mention any of this to Wren.”

Pomeroy chuckled again and nudged him. “Don’t want to spoil her romance, eh? Don’t blame you, Natsworthy. It’s good to see that our young people are getting on with the serious business of falling in love with each other, despite all these trivial distractions. And I like that Theo Ngoni. They’ll be good for each other.”

“If they live through this,” said Tom. “If any of us do.”

“The forces of History will decide that,” said Pomeroy. “I’ve studied History all my life, and the one thing I’ve learned for certain is that you can’t stand against it. It’s like a river in flood, and we are just swept along in it. The big people, like Naga, or those Traktionstadt fellows, may try to swim against the current for a time, but little people like us, the best we can hope for is to keep our heads above water for as long as we can.”

“And when we go under?” asked Tom. “What then?”

Pomeroy laughed. “Then it’s someone else’s turn. Your daughter and her young man, for instance. A London Historian’s daughter and an Anti-Tractionist. Maybe they’re the future.”

They were drawing close to his comfortable little book-lined hut. As he turned and took Tom’s hand, Tom said suddenly, “Mr. Pomeroy, if anything happened to me, you would look after Wren, wouldn’t you?”

Pomeroy frowned. He seemed about to say something flippant but then realized how serious Tom was, and nodded instead. “Wren has Theo to look after her,” he said. “But yes, I’d do my bit, if she needed me. So would Clytie; so would every other Londoner. You needn’t worry about her, Tom.”

“Thank you.”

They stood for a moment side by side. Then Pomeroy said, “Well, good night, Apprentice Natsworthy.”

“Good night, Lord Mayor. You’re sure …”

“Don’t fuss,” said Pomeroy amiably. “I’m perfectly capable of putting myself to bed. And don’t worry too much about the Storm, or Harrowbarrow, or any of the rest of it. London can take it.”

He shambled off, and Tom went slowly home to his own hut, where Theo was to be staying now as well. But as he reached the door, he heard Wren’s and Theo’s voices inside, where they must be waiting for him to return. They were talking too softly to make out any words, but he knew what they were saying. They were telling each other all the things he and Hester had told each other once; all the things that lovers had always said to one another, imagining that they were the first people ever to say them.

Not wanting to interrupt, Tom turned away and went out into the open air again. He walked up into the rust hills, going slowly to spare his heart. The western sky looked bruised. I ought to do something, he thought. I have done so little for New London; just brought trouble, really. I should try to do something about this. It’s my responsibility in a way; a family matter. But how could I hope to stop ODIN? I don’t even know where the Storm control it from…

And then he thought, I might not be able to stop ODIN, but perhaps I could stop them using it on New London.

General Naga was a good man—Wren had often spoken about how he had treated her on Cloud 9; how fair and civilized he’d been. Perhaps he was using the weapon only because he was scared, and desperate. Perhaps he was the sort of man who would listen to reason. If he could meet a Londoner, and hear firsthand about New London, surely he would understand that the Storm had no cause to fear it?

Tom was shaking so much that he had to sit down. Could it be done? He supposed it could. There was fuel enough in the Jenny Haniver’s tanks to reach Batmunkh Gompa. And then he remembered Theo telling him how Hester had rescued Lady Naga. Was she in Shan Guo, even now? Might she be able to help persuade General Naga to listen to what Tom had to tell him?

He walked back to Crouch End. He had been gone far longer than he’d realized; Wren and Theo had fallen asleep waiting for him. Tom went quietly past them to his pack, found paper and a pencil, and wrote a letter for his daughter. He left it beside her and stood looking down at her for a while, listening to her breathe, watching the small, sleeping movements of her fingers, just as he used to when she was a baby. He kissed her forehead, and she smiled in her sleep and snuggled closer to Theo.

“Night night, little Wren,” Tom said. “Sleep tight. Sleep tight.”

Then he went out of the hut and shouldered his pack and left Crouch End, heading for the Holloway Road and the place where the Jenny Haniver was moored.

On the plains west of London, Wolf Kobold stood on his favorite observation post, up on Harrowbarrow’s armored spine. The harvester was stationary, buried in a long hill of loose shale with just a few well-camouflaged gun emplacements and watchtowers protruding. It had traveled only by night since it broke away from the Murnau pack, for although the Green Storm’s armies were collapsing, these lands were still enemy territory; Wolf did not want his trip to London interrupted by any foolish battles.

But tonight, as the suburb prepared to move, a different sort of interruption had occurred.

Wolf swung his field glasses and counted seven … nine … twelve immense bonfires blazing in the west. He was too young to remember MEDUSA, but that was the name that came into his mind. His lookouts—trusted men—had reported a blade of light striking down from the sky and setting off those firestorms. He tilted his head, staring at the stars. They looked innocent enough now.

A nearby hatch squeaked open. Hausdorfer emerged.

“Well?”

“Talked to the radio boys,” said Hausdorfer. “They’ve been trying Manchester, Winterthur, Koblenz. Nothing. Some kind of distress signal from Dortmund, then they went dead too.”

Wolf stared at the burning horizon. “What of Murnau?”

“Can’t say. There’s interference on every frequency now. But it looks like the Mossies have found themselves a new toy.” He waited for an order. None came. “Do you want us to turn back, or what?”

“Turn back?” The notion was mildly surprising to Wolf. He considered it for a while, then shook his head. “Do you know what survived best after the Sixty Minute War, Hausdorfer? Rats and roaches. It’s true. I read it in a history book. Cockroaches and rats. So let the old cities burn. It’s Harrowbarrow’s time now. A time for cunning, creeping things. Fire up the engines. Steer straight on to London.”