A Darkling Plain

Chapter 40 What Have They Done to the Sky

Hester and her companions had watched from the gun slits of General Xao’s new headquarters as the fire from the sky reached down and touched the cities that were closing in on Forward Command, turning them one by one into plumes of blazing fuel and incandescent gas. Grike was with them but saw nothing. The pulses of energy from the mysterious weapon upset the equally mysterious machines inside his head, making his eyes go blank and his armored body shudder helplessly. Lesser Stalkers, who did not have Grike’s strength or Oenone Zero on hand to tend to them, fared even worse. At dawn the defenders of Forward Command found their battle-Stalkers scattered in the trenches like fallen lead soldiers. But by then it did not matter, for on the western plains, where cities and suburbs and flocks of airships had been massed, there was now nothing but smoke.

“What have they done to the sky?” asked Hester, looking from the window at breakfast time. She was still feeling weak from her head wound. She thought at first that the marbled haze that hung over the rooftops was the first sign of a relapse; something gone wrong with her eye or her brain. But a glance at the frightened faces of Oenone and Pennyroyal told her that they could see it too.

The sun rose, pink and shrunken. Flakes that looked like snow were drifting down everywhere. “Snow?” Pennyroyal complained. “In summertime?”

“it is ash,” announced Grike. ” the sky is full of ash.”

General Xao took advantage of the lull in the fighting to have the Fury repaired. “We cannot make contact with Shan Guo,” she told her guests. “The new weapon seems to have interfered with our radio sets. So I am sending you home to Naga with a message. We need orders. Are we to advance? Recapture the ground they took from us? Or do we simply wait for them to surrender?”

Oenone looked at the columns of smoke rising from the dead Traction Cities. She said, “I can’t believe Naga had such a thing and never told me of it. I can’t believe he used it. All those lives gone. It’s horrible!”

Xao bowed. “Personally, I agree. But let’s not say it too loudly, Excellency. My people are most impressed with the new weapon.”

And it was true; as they walked to the docking pan where the Fury lay, the four companions could hear the cheers and songs of victory rising from the lower levels of Forward Command and from all the trenches and fortifications around about. Gunshots popped like champagne corks as relieved.

Green Storm soldiers loosed off some of the ammunition they had been saving for the cities at the sky instead. When a bullet skipped off the metal pavement a few feet ahead of them, they assumed at first it was a spent round falling. “Sweet Poskitt!” cried Pennyroyal indignantly. “They’ll have somebody’s eye out in a minute!”

Only when a flushed, furious-looking soldier lurched out into their path, working another round into the chamber of his carbine, did they understand that the bullet had been aimed at Oenone.

“Aleutian!” the soldier shouted. He pointed her out to his comrades, who were hurrying up behind him. “There she is, friends! The Aleutian traitor who tried to destroy the Wind-Flower and set up Naga in her place!”

Grike stepped in front of Oenone and unsheathed his finger-glaives. The soldier’s companions drew back hastily, but he held his ground, still shouting. “Your time is over, Aleutian! She is risen! We have all heard the stories! A Stalker killing a thousand townies aboard Brighton! An amphibious limpet found on the sacred mountain! The Stalker Fang has returned!”

Hester pulled out her gun, but Oenone caught her wrist before she could shoot the angry soldier. “No. Leave him. Who knows what he’s been through?”

Already some of General Xao’s men were hurrying from the docking pans to pull the troublemaker away. As they seized him, the man screamed, “Naga could not have made the cities burn like this! This is her victory! The Stalker Fang has returned to Tienjing and killed the crippled coward! Fly home, Aleutian, so she can kill you, too!”

Xao’s men bundled him away. Oenone was shaking. Hester took her arm and guided her quickly toward the docking pan. “Don’t worry. He’s mad. Or drunk.”

“I have heard the same rumors from other once-born here,” said Grike. ” the idea that their old leader had returned was a comfort to them when defeat seemed inevitable.”

“But Fang is dead, isn’t she?” Pennyroyal said, trying to shield himself behind the Stalker. “You smashed her.”

“She is dead,” said Oenone. “She must be…”

But she was still trembling slightly half an hour later as the Fury carried her into the stained sky and began the journey homeward to Tienjing.

London. The night giving way to lightless dawn. Fog everywhere. Fog on the edge of the wreck, where the debris merges into green scrub country; fog in the wreck’s heart, where it rolls among the steep mounds of corroded deck plate. Fog on the Womb road, fog on the rust hills. Fog creeping into the cabins and huts of Crouch End, fog hovering around blind lookout posts and lifeless windmills, fog drooping on the steering vanes and rigging of the Archaeopteryx in her secret hangar. Fog piled so deep over the plain that Stalker-birds on watch above can see nothing of London beyond a few tall spires of debris that rise out of the vapor like jagged islands breaking from a white sea.

Wren woke from unsettling dreams to the drip, drip, drip of moisture falling from the eaves; Theo beside her (so at least he hadn’t been a dream); her father still not home. She slipped reluctantly away from Theo’s warmth and roamed through the chilly hut, peeking into each room. “Dad? Daddy?”

His letter crunkled beneath her feet as she came back to Theo. Her head was still stuffed with sleep; she had to read his short message twice before she started to understand.

Her cry woke Theo, and she thrust the letter at him.

My dear Wren,

By the time you read this, I shall already be in the air. I’m sorry to leave without saying good-bye, but, as you wrote once to me, “you would only try to stop me.” I don’t want to be stopped, and I don’t want to remember you crying and upset, or angry at me. I will remember you always as I saw you tonight, safe with Theo.

I am going to try and explain to the Green Storm that New London is not a threat to them. This new weapon has changed everything, but I believe General Naga is a good man, and perhaps if I can make him understand that we Londoners are not so very different to his own people, he will let us go in peace. Perhaps I can even persuade him to stop using the weapon. I have to try.

I hope I shall be back in a few days, to see New London leave, but if I die, it really doesn’t matter; the truth is, Wren, I am dying anyway. The doctor I saw in Peripatetiapolis told me that. I have been dying for a long time, and I shall soon be dead, with or without any help from the Green Storm.

The strange thing is, I don’t mind too much, because I know that you will live on, and see marvelous things, and one day I hope have children of your own, who will be just as much of a worry and a joy to you as you were to me. That’s what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation. Well, I’ve had my turn, and now it’s yours, and I mean to try and make sure that you live in a world that is free of at least one threat—

Wren had her coat on and was halfway to the door before Theo even finished reading. He was glad of an excuse to stop; the letter was private, and he felt wrong for looking at it. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“The hangar, of course!”

“He’ll be gone… He says—”

“I know what he says, but we don’t know when he wrote that, do we? He’s ill; it probably took him longer than he allowed for, going all along the Holloway Road.” She wasn’t tearful, just very angry at Tom for keeping such secrets from her. And how on Earth did he hope to fly all the way to Shan Guo without her to help?

She and Theo ran off together, stopping only to cadge a flask of water from the kitchens. Angie was helping make breakfast. Wren pushed the letter at her and said, “Wake Mr. Pomeroy and show him this!” and ran off before the other girl started asking questions.

The day was gray and cheerless. It seemed to Wren to smell of ash, as if the immense pall of smoke from all those slaughtered cities had drifted east overnight to blanket London. As they ran on, the murk grew thicker; fog hid the deeper parts of the debris field, and the spires and blades of wreckage that towered on either side of the trackway took on a ghostly look.

“Is what your father said true?” asked Theo as they ran. “Is he really that sick?”

“Of course not!” Wren replied. “He’s just saying that because he thinks I won’t feel so bad then about him going off to Shan Guo. His heart hurts him sometimes, but he’s got pills for it. Green ones.”

The fog grew deeper. By the time they reached the terminus at the eastern end of the Holloway Road, they could not see ten feet in front of them, and when they finally emerged from the old duct, they found themselves in a white world where they could barely see each others’ faces even though they stood side by side, holding hands.

At first they thought both airships were gone, but when Theo collided with the Archaeopteryx’s underside tail fin, they realized that only the Jenny Haniver was missing.

“Who goes there?” shouted a nervous voice.

“It’s me! Wren!”

A grayish stain appeared in the fog and condensed into Will Hallsworth and Jake Henson. “It is, you know,” said Jake. “Pass, friend,” said Will.

“Where’s my dad?” demanded Wren, who didn’t have time for games of soldiers.

“He came by early this morning,” said Jake.

“Very early,” agreed Will. “Said Mr. Pomeroy had asked him to take the Jenny on a reconnaissance trip and he’d be back soon. I ’spect he’s circling up there now, delayed by all this fog.”

“It’s a real London particular!” said Jake.

“Why didn’t you stop him, you idiots!” screamed Wren.

“Steady on!”

“He said it was orders from the committee. We couldn’t argue with that.”

“Was he armed?” asked Theo.

Will and Jake looked sheepish. “Not when he got here, no.”

“But he made us give him one of our lightning guns. He said he might need it if he ran into any of those Stalker-birds up above all this pea soup.”

Wren turned to Theo, almost fell against him. She was tired by their journey along the Holloway Road, and she felt that she would never see her father again. She was ready to cry. “He’s gone. He’s gone forever!”

Echoey sounds came out of the dank throat of Holloway Road. Footsteps and voices. Someone was approaching, and the sound of their coming was rolling ahead of them down the tunnel. Theo held Wren and tried to comfort her while they all waited for the newcomers to emerge. The hard beams of electric lanterns poked through the fog, lighting up all the little individual water droplets without illuminating anything.

“Zagwan?” said a tetchy voice from behind the torch glow.

“Me?” asked Theo.

“Put your hands up! Step away from the airship!”

“I’m nowhere near it,” protested Theo.

“No, that’s me,” said Will Hallsworth.

“Is it?” A shape blurred out of the fog. It was Garamond, holding the revolver he had taken from Wolf Kobold. “Where’s Wren?”

“Here,” said Wren. “What is all this about?”

“We caught you just in time, I see,” said Garamond. “Just in time for what?”

Other figures were appearing behind Garamond; they surrounded Wren and Theo in the fog like a circle of stones. Wren thought she recognized Ron Hodge and Cat Luperini among them.

“They were going to steal the Archaeopteryx!” said Garamond, loud and triumphant. “Natsworthy has taken his own airship east, and now he sends his daughter and their Green Storm accomplice to take the Archy. They planned to leave us with no way of escape when the Storm’s Stalkers march in.”

“What are you talking about, you silly little man?” shouted Wren. “My dad’s gone to try and talk to Naga—”

“Exactly! To betray us to his Green Storm paymasters; yes; we have read the letter. I thought it was a little too neat, your African friend turning up at the very moment the birds struck! You arranged that attack just so that he could appear to save us, thinking it would make us trust him. Well, Wren Natsworthy, I have news for you; I don’t trust him; I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust your traitor father!”

Wren’s fist caught him full on the nose. He went backward into the fog with a muffled squeal (“Ow! By doze! By doze!”). Theo held Wren back as she tried to fling herself upon him, though she couldn’t even see him anymore. Sobbing, she screamed at the fog that hid him. “What were you doing, reading my letter? That was private! From my father! I told Angie to show it to Mr. Pomeroy, nobody else!”

“Wren,” said Cat, coming to help Theo restrain her. “Wren, Wren …”

“It’s Garamond who’s the real traitor! When Mr. Pomeroy hears you tried to arrest Theo, he’ll—“Wren…”

“What?”

Cat hung her head, fog water dripping from her hair. “Mr. Pomeroy is dead.”

“What?”

“Angie found him when she took your father’s letter to his hut. All yesterday’s excitement must have been too much for him. He died last night, in his sleep.”

Garamond lurched out of the fog, one hand clutching his nose, blood dribbling down his chin. “Take theb both!” he ordered nasally. “Tie their hands. Brig theb to Crouch Ed. The Ebergency Cobbittee cad decide what to do with theb.”

Chapter 41 Back in Batmunkh Gompa

The Jenny Haniver Purred eastward through the poisoned sky, toward the wall of mountains that marked the eastern borders of Shan Guo, and the broad pass through them that was barred and guarded by Batmunkh Gompa. As he drew close to the fortress city, Tom opened the general channel on his radio set and sent out again the message he had been repeating ever since leaving London, explaining that he came in peace. There was still no reply. He turned the knobs on the front of the set, scrolling up and down the airwaves. Static spat and popped like a fir-cone fire, and some kind of interference shrilled. Faintly, behind the gales of white noise, someone was speaking Shan Guonese, fast and panicky.

Ten miles more to the mountains. Tom had flown through these skies before, with Hester, flying from Batmunkh Gompa to London in an attempt to stop another Ancient weapon.

He tried not to think about how that voyage had ended, but he could not keep the memories from welling up. Doubts started to gnaw at him. He had failed then, and he would fail again. His scheme of pleading with Naga, which had seemed so promising to him last night, began to feel more and more like madness. He should not be here! He should have stayed with Wren…

He started to put the Jenny about, but as he did so, he saw three arrowheads of dark shapes waiting for him in the sky astern. He felt his heart clench like a fist. Memories of yesterday’s attack and the birds on the long stair at Rogues’ Roost wheeled around him. He snatched Jake Henson’s lightning gun from the copilot’s seat, trying to ready himself for the attack. The birds would make short work of the Jenny, but at least he would take a few dozen of them with him.

The birds held their position. He started to realize that they were not attacking, just keeping watch on him. Perhaps they had been there ever since he had risen out of the fog banks over London. It was so hard to see anything in this hazy, tar-brown light.

And then, at last, the voice he had been waiting for came rustling out of the radio set: a stern voice, speaking in Shan Guonese. He looked eastward and saw the white envelopes of two Fox Spirits glowing in the gloomy sky. The voice translated its order into Anglish. “Barbarian airship, cut your engines. Prepare to be boarded. We are the Green Storm.”

Tom had just time to stow the lightning gun in a hiding place high in the envelope before they came aboard. They were as unfriendly as the Green Storm soldiers he remembered from Rogues’ Roost, but they were not arrogant anymore; they seemed afraid. “How did you know General Naga is at Batmunkh Gompa?” they demanded angrily, when Tom tried to explain what he was doing here in the air approaches of their city.

“I didn’t. Is he? I thought he’d be in Tienjing. That’s your capital, isn’t it? I thought from Batmunkh Gompa you would be able to take me to Tienjing.”

“Tienjing is gone,” said the leader of the Storm patrol, pacing about nervously on the Jenny’s flight deck.

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

The young officer didn’t answer. Then she said, “Anna Fang’s ship was called the Jenny Haniver. I saw a film about her life in basic training.”

“This is the same ship,” said Tom eagerly. “Anna was a friend of mine. I inherited the Jenny when she was—when she …”

“Quiet!” screamed the officer in Shan Guonese, wheeling around to quell the outburst of whispering that had broken out among her men. They seemed to come from half a dozen different countries, and were busy translating Tom’s words for one another. The officer barked more orders, and two of them came forward to hold Tom and manacle his hands. “You will come with us to Batmunkh Gompa,” she said.

“I just want a chance to talk to General Naga,” said Tom hopefully. “I have something important to tell him.”

“About the new weapon?”

“Well, partly, I suppose…”

More whispering, more orders, none in any language that Tom could understand. Some of the men returned to their own ship and reeled in their spidery boarding bridge. The officer took control of the Jenny Haniver, and Tom peered over her shoulder as they flew on toward Batmunkh Gompa, remembering how he had first come here with Anna and Hester all those years ago. The Wall was as sheer and black as before, and still armored with the deck plates of dead cities, vast disks of metal like the shields of Ancient warriors. But on the summit, where the oak-leaf banners of the League had blown, long lightning-bolt flags hung limply in the reddish sun, and between them an immense statue of Anna Fang stood pointing westward, summoning the people of the mountains to battle against the Traction Cities. As the Jenny descended past her, Tom noticed that she was a lot prettier than the real Anna Fang had been, and that a lot of bird droppings had drizzled down her face.

Then they were over the Wall, and sinking past the vertical city on its eastern side, the pretty laddered streets and swallow’s-nest houses all just as Tom remembered them, except that extra docking pans had been constructed on the lower levels, and hundreds of concrete barracks blocks now covered the valley floor at the western end of the lake. The Jenny flew over them, making for a cluster of buildings outside the city proper, on a crag that jutted out from the northern wall of the pass. Tom saw an old nunnery perched on the flat summit surrounded by what looked like an encampment of tents. The lightning-bolt flags were everywhere, interspersed with giant-size portraits of General Naga. On the pan at the crag’s foot where the Jenny set down, someone had scrawled big Chinese letters in whitewash, and then underneath, in shaky Anglish ones, SHE IS RISEN!

“What does that mean?” asked Tom.

“It means nothing,” snapped his captor. “The lies of anti-Naga troublemakers.” She was a grim young woman, and not in any mood to chat, but she did at least allow Tom to keep his green heart pills when her men hustled him across the pan to one of the squat blockhouses behind it, and then into a tiny lime washed concrete cell.

All the time he was being ordered about, or marched around, all the time someone else was in charge of him, Tom felt quite fearless; what happened next was not up to him, and barely seemed to matter. But as soon as the iron-bound door slammed shut on him and he was left alone, his fears came crowding in. What was he doing here? How was Wren coping, back in London? And what had that Green Storm girl meant when she said Tienjing was gone? Had he misheard her? Had she used the wrong word?

It was very quiet in the cell. Strangely so, for when he had last been in Batmunkh Gompa, one of the things that had hooked in his memory was the sounds: the puttering motors of the balloon taxis, the cries of street vendors, the music from the open-fronted teahouses and bars. He stood on the bunk in the corner of his cell and looked out the small barred window. The city stretched away from him, a scarp of stairs and houses where nothing moved but the flags. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no airships waited in the harbor, only a few scurrying figures could be seen on the steep streets. It was as if the city had been abandoned, and the people who remained had all pitched tents on the crag above. A mystery …

Footsteps, voices, out in the narrow entryway beyond his door. He jumped down, surprised. He had expected to wait hours or days for the Storm to deal with him. But the door opened, armed guards in white uniforms took up positions on either side of it, training their guns on Tom, and with a clank of armor a tall, yellowish man whom he recognized as General Naga came in, stooping as his exoskeleton carried him through the low doorway. Tom was relieved that his request for an audience had been taken seriously but astonished by the speed; panicked, too, for he had not quite finished working out what he was going to say to this fierce-looking soldier.

Naga’s narrow eyes narrowed even more as he looked Tom slowly up and down, taking in his travel-stained clothes and unkempt hair. His armor looked scraped and battered, and servomotors inside it whined and crunched unhealthily when he moved. There was a wound on his face, freshly dressed with lint and bandages.

“You are the barbarians’ envoy?”

Tom was taken aback. What was the man talking about?

“You came in the Wind-Flower’s old ship and claim to bring word of the weapon. But you look like a sky tramp. Not even in uniform. Are the Traktionstadts so certain of victory now that they expect me to surrender to a buffoon?”

“Surrender? But the new weapon …”

“Yes, yes!” shouted Naga. “The new weapon! You have destroyed Tienjing, you have destroyed Batmunkh Tsaka; you almost destroyed me!”

Tom felt as if a chart that had been guiding him through treacherous territory had suddenly turned out to be upside down all along. A bad-dream feeling. If Naga did not control the ODIN weapon, who did? The cities? But those fires in the west last night … Had the Storm not seen those cities burn? Had the news not reached them?

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. This was all beyond him. But he could still do what he had come here for. “I’m nothing to do with the Traktionstadts,” he said. “I come from London.”

“London?”

“I came to ask you … to beg you … The survivors there—I know you know of them—they are building something; have been building something for many years… They are making a new city; a city that hovers, and will not harm the Earth, and has no wish to eat any static city of yours. I’m here to tell you that they—we—mean you no harm; we have no quarrel with the Storm. If you could call off your birds, and let us go in peace when we leave the debris fields …”

Naga was frowning. “A hovering city?”

“It’s called Magnetic Levitation,” said Tom. “It sort of floats.” He waved his hands about, trying to demonstrate, and then remembered something Lavinia Childermass had said. “It’s not really a city at all, more a very large, low-flying airship. My daughter is there…”

Naga turned to one of the officers behind him and barked out something in Shan Guonese. Tom didn’t know many of the words, but he recognized the tone. The general was asking, “Is this fellow mad? Why are you wasting my time with him?” A moment later, without another look at Tom, he stalked out of the cell, his guards behind him.

“Please,” Tom shouted, “your wife will vouch for me! Is she here? Are her companions here?” (It had suddenly occurred to him that if Tienjing had been destroyed, Hester might have been destroyed with it.) He said, “Please, I am a friend of Theo Ngoni and Hester…”

“My wife?” Naga turned, glaring at him. “She is on her way home. I will certainly tell her all about you when she arrives.” But he made it sound like a threat, not a promise.

The door slammed shut. Tom was left alone again.

Outside, Naga stopped for a moment to think. His men clustered together, glancing fearfully toward the misty heights of Batmunkh Gompa. He knew what they feared. It seemed inconceivable that after destroying Tienjing, the barbarians had not turned their devil weapon on the Shield-Wall and opened a path for themselves into the mountain kingdoms. And yet, when the few airships he had managed to salvage from the disaster at Tienjing flew here at dawn, they found the place untouched, although the populace and half the garrison had already fled into the hills. What were the townies waiting for? (Naga had already discounted the reports that said that Traction Cities had been destroyed last night too. They must be mistakes, or lies put out by the enemy to add to the Storm’s confusion.)

And what did the appearance of this madman Natsworthy mean, aboard the Flower’s old ship?

“London,” he muttered. “Poor Dzhu told me something about London.”

One of his officers, a captain from the Batmunkh Gompa garrison, saluted smartly and said, “There has been increased activity among the squatters there, Excellency. We have been watching them with spy birds.”

“You have records?”

“There is a file in the Intelligence office on Thousand Stair Avenue.”

“Hurry there, and fetch it.”

The captain saluted and ran off, gray faced with fear and clearly expecting the fire from the sky to fall on Batmunkh Gompa at any instant. Naga watched him go. He thought wistfully for a moment of Oenone and then crushed the thought and muttered, “London…”

He remembered the night after the Wind-Flower died: how he had stood on the top of the Shield-Wall while the smoke of the burned Northern Air Fleet drifted up from the hangars below him, and faint and far away the lights of London glittered. It seemed to General Naga that all the troubles of the world began with London.

Chapter 42 The Funeral Drum

That afternoon, as the fog thinned and dirty sunlight broke over the debris fields, the people of London buried their lord mayor. Bareheaded, and with black mourning bands tied around their sleeves, eight members of the Emergency Committee carried the shrouded body of the old Historian along a winding, little-used path between the rust hills, while the rest of London followed, and Timex Grout beat out a solemn, steady rhythm on a drum made from an old oil can. Boom, boom, boom, the echoes rolled away, across the wreckage, out across the plains beyond, up into the mottled sky where a few Stalker-birds still circled, very high, watched all the time by lookouts with charged lightning guns.

In Putney Vale, a mossy space between the masses of debris, where trees grew thickly and shaded the graves of all the other Londoners who had died since MEDUSA night, they laid him to rest, and piled the earth over him, and marked the place with a metal marker, carved with the symbol of his Guild, the eye that gazes backward into time. Lavinia Childermass offered up a prayer to Quirke, asking London’s creator to welcome the old man when his soul reached the Sunless Country. (She did not believe in gods or afterlives, being an Engineer, but she had been Pomeroy’s friend as well as his deputy, and she understood the need for this ritual.) Then Clytie Potts stepped forward and sang in a thin, uncertain voice a paean to the goddess Clio.

“He should have been here to steer New London out of the debris fields,” said Len Peabody, angry at the unfairness of it all.

“Now,” said Mr. Garamond, “it’s time we elected a new lord mayor.”

“Lavinia will be the new mayor,” said Clytie Potts. “That’s what Mr. Pomeroy wanted.”

“Mr. Pomeroy is dead,” said Garamond. “The Committee must decide. And then we must discuss what’s to be done with the prisoners.”

Wren had not been allowed to attend the funeral. Other Londoners had pleaded her case, but Garamond, his nose swollen to twice its usual size and the color of an aubergine, stood firm; she and Theo were dangerous agents of the Green Storm, and he insisted that they should be locked up. And so they were put in two old cages, salvaged from the wreck many years ago, which had once held animals in the zoological gardens in Circle Park, and were now kept in a dank corner of Crouch End to confine intruders, murderers, and lunatics who Garamond imagined might threaten the security of London. They had never been used before, and he looked very pleased with himself as his apologetic warriors shoved Wren and Theo inside, padlocking the barred gates behind them.

There, in the shadows, on the mattress that was her only furniture, Wren said her own prayers for Chudleigh Pomeroy as the muffled boom, boom, doom of the funeral drum came echoing across the debris like a heartbeat.

“What now?” asked Theo from his cage. Dark as it was in this part of the End, Wren could see him looking out at her through the bars. If they both reached out, they could touch just their fingertips. “What will happen to us now?”

Wren didn’t know. It was hurtful to be accused and imprisoned like this, but she found it hard to be scared of silly old Garamond and all her London friends. Sooner or later it would all be sorted out, she felt sure. She barely had the strength to think about it, though; she was too busy mourning Mr. Pomeroy and worrying about her father.

They slept a little; talked a little; Wren made patterns with the straw on the floor of her cage. The day crept by. At evening time, when the dinner gong was summoning everyone to the communal canteen, Angie Peabody arrived with food and fresh water for them. She poked the tin bowls in through the bars of the cage and would not meet Wren’s eye.

“Angie?” Wren asked. “You don’t believe what Garamond says about us, do you? You know I’m not any sort of spy.”

“Don’t know what to believe anymore,” the girl replied gruffly. “There’s been nothing but trouble ever since you got here, I know that. Them birds coming yesterday, and your friend turning up… Saab got hurt badly, Wren; we don’t even know if he’ll see again, and he’ll always have the scars, and you don’t care a bit; you just went off yesterday evening with your boyfriend or whatever he is… It don’t look good, does it?”

Wren felt dazed with shame. It was true she hadn’t spared much thought for Saab or the others hurt in the attack; she’d been too taken up with thoughts of Theo. “That was wrong of me,” she admitted. “But it hardly makes me a Green Storm spy. Angie, a week ago Garamond was saying we were in league with Harrowbarrow; it was me and my dad who brought Wolf Kobold here. Remember?”

“How do we even know Kobold was what he said he was?” Angie retorted. “You say he went off to find this Harrowbarrow place. He might be Green Storm too, and safe in Batmunkh Gompa or somewhere now.”

That made Wren think of her father. She reached out through the bars, trying to touch Angie, who backed quickly away. “Angie, you’ve got to get me out of here! I have to find a way of going after Dad.”

Angie took another step backward, disappearing into the shadows. “Mr. Garamond said we ain’t to talk to you,” she said.

Wren threw herself down on her mattress, which rewarded her by bursting and poking her in the side with a sharp, rusty spring. “I’m sorry, Theo,” she said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is. If I hadn’t written you that letter, you’d have stayed with your own people. You’d never have come here.”

“And if you hadn’t talked to me that afternoon by Pennyroyal’s swimming pool on Cloud 9, I’d have been killed or captured when the Storm attacked, and you wouldn’t have to worry about me at all.”

Wren reached out of her cage and touched his fingers. She traced the hard, warm curves of his nails, the little rough bits of skin beside them, the whorls of his fingertips like contour lines on a tiny Braille map.

Late that night they were awoken by the last person Wren had expected to come visiting them. “Wren?” a voice asked, and she opened her eyes to see Lavinia Childermass hunkered down outside the gate of her cage. The Engineer had an electric lantern with a blue glass shade. In its dim light her bald head shone like an alien moon. Wren scrambled up, spearing herself on the mattress spring again, and heard Theo moving in the neighboring cage.

“Wren, my dear, are you awake?”

“Sort of. What’s happening? Is it Dad?”

“He has not returned, child.”

“Then …”

“We have a new lord mayor,” said the Engineer. “The Committee elected him this evening.”

“But I thought you were Mr. Pomeroy’s deputy. I thought—”

“The Committee decided that it would be unwise to have an Engineer as mayor,” Dr. Childermass said calmly. “They still remember Crome’s regime. And with the war drawing closer, they thought it wiser to elect someone with a security background…”

“You can’t mean—”

“Mr. Garamond is lord mayor of London now, Wren. He played on the fears of the Committee to make them support him. I am sorry to say that he has turned a lot of people against you. I think most of London believes that you and Theo and your father had something to do with those birds and the death of poor Chudleigh.”

“But …”

“Shhh! I think they will forgive you, Wren; you are a Londoner’s daughter, after all. But Garamond is going to propose that Theo be killed, and from the talk at the canteen this evening, I think a majority of the Committee will side with him. He argues that we cannot allow an Anti-Tractionist to live here, learning our secrets.”

“He’s mad!”

“Perhaps he is, a little. Paranoid, certainly. Poor Garamond; he was no older than you on MEDUSA night. He survived because he was in one of the Deep Gut prisons, where Magnus Crome had sent him for being an Anti-Tractionist sympathizer. The day after the disaster he led a band of survivors east, imagining that the Anti-Tractionists he had always admired would help them. But the soldiers they met upon the plains just gunned them down; poor Garamond only escaped by playing dead, hidden under the bodies of his friends.”

“You can see why he wouldn’t trust Anti-Tractionists,” said Theo.

“But it doesn’t give him an excuse to start killing people!” Wren complained. “And it certainly doesn’t give everyone else an excuse to let him!”

“I agree,” said the old Engineer. “But they are scared; the birds, the war, the new weapon. Even the prospect of leaving the debris fields is enough to unsettle them after so many years. And when people are scared, it can bring out the worst in them. That is why I am going to let you go. I am sure that Theo will be able to find you shelter at one of the Storm’s settlements. I don’t imagine the war will last much longer now that the Storm have this orbital terror weapon, so you will be in far less danger there than with us.”

She reached inside her rubber coat and brought out some sort of Old Tech device; the type of thing Engineers presumably kept in their pockets all the time. It looked like a can opener and buzzed like a horsefly, and made the padlock on Wren’s cage clack open. “I brought your pack with me, Wren,” Dr. Childermass said as she moved across to Theo’s cage, and Wren, still not quite believing that they were going, fitted her arms through the shoulder straps and heaved it on.

“I should carry that,” said Theo, scrambling out of his cage.

“I can manage. We’ll take turns.”

Lavinia Childermass led them to a small back way out of Crouch End; a hole in the roof plate at its lowest point where it sloped down to touch the ground. She scrambled out with them and stood watching as they set off together into the wreckage, moving closer together as they went away from her, as if they thought an old Engineer would not approve of people holding hands and wanted to be safely hidden in the shadows before they finally touched.

Lavinia smiled. She had had a child of her own, once, but in those days the Guild of Engineers had taken all infants straight to the communal nurseries, and she had never known her little Bevis. Dead long ago, she thought, and the sudden sadness made her remember the funeral drum, and Chudleigh Pomeroy lying cold under the earth in Putney Vale. If she had not been a logical, disciplined Engineer, she would have found the world too sad a place to live in.

She watched Wren and Theo until the shadows and the wreckage swallowed them. Well, she thought, that is one less thing to worry about. And she went quickly through Crouch End and up the Womb road, returning to her work aboard New London.

Chapter 43 Homecoming

The Fury reached Batmunkh Gompa shortly after sundown, crossing the Shield-Wall by the light of a smudged and bloodstained moon. She had been heading for Tienjing when the master of a passing freighter advised her captain to reroute. “Tienjing is burning! The barbarians have a new weapon! A lance of fire that strikes from the sky! Batmunkh Tsaka is gone too! Naga has fled to Batmunkh Gompa, but not even Batmunkh Gompa can stand against the fire from heaven! Save yourselves!”

“What’s happening?” grumbled Hester, tired and crotchety after the long flight, one hand pressed to her aching head. “Surely the cities can’t have a super-weapon too?”

“Typical!” said Pennyroyal. “You wait years for an all-powerful orbital heat-ray thingy and then two come along at once.”

“perhaps the storm do not control the new weapon,” said Grike.

“But it blew up cities! We watched it! Who else would want to do that?”

“a third force,” suggested Grike. “someone who hates the cities and the storm and wants to sow confusion.”

“Like who?” asked Hester. “the stalker fang.”

“But she’s dead!” said Pennyroyal. “Isn’t she?”

“perhaps the rumors we heard from the once-born at forward command are correct,” said Grike. “I was re-resurrected. what if someone has re-resurrected her?”

“And you think she is behind these calamities?” asked Oenone. She sounded afraid, but faintly hopeful too, as if it would be a relief to learn that her husband was not responsible.

Grike said, “when the new weapon struck, i remembered something that the stalker fang said before i disabled her. she spoke of a thing called odin. ‘the greatest of the weapons that the ancients hung in heaven.’ i believe she has awoken it just as she planned. she struck at tienjing because naga would be there, and at batmunkh tsaka in the hope of killing you, oenone zero.”

“But she’s dead,” insisted Pennyroyal.

“He’s got a point, for once,” Hester agreed. “You pulled her head off, Grike. Threw the rest of her off Cloud 9. That should have done the trick.”

But Oenone looked troubled. She had looked troubled all the way from Forward Command, and now she said, “Maybe not. She was a very advanced model. Dr. Popjoy had put in experimental systems that even I may not have understood. It’s possible that if someone gathered the body parts, they might have been able to …”

Her voice faded away. She shrugged unhappily.

“Oh, fantastic,” said Hester.

“I might be wrong.” Oenone went to the window, looking south into the haze of dirty smoke from Tienjing. “I hope I’m wrong. We must ask Dr. Popjoy. As soon as we dock at Batmunkh Gompa, I’ll send for him. Popjoy will know.”

The city behind the Shield-Wall lay in silence, only a few dozen lamps burning in its dark streets. More lights shone on the valley floor, a river of lanterns pouring eastward, reflecting in the waters of Batmunkh Nor. The population was fleeing, just as they had fled the threat of MEDUSA the last time Hester was there. She thought what an odd place it must be to live if you had to keep packing all your belongings into carts and running away, and then reminded herself that MEDUSA had been nearly twenty years ago, and that a whole generation had grown up since she and Tom left this city in the Jenny Haniver.

“Gods,” she said grumpily, rubbing her head again. “I’m getting too old for this…”

Fox Spirits guided the Fury to a temporary airfield below an old nunnery on a crag. The ancient building was surrounded by what looked at first like giant lichen, a shapeless mass of gray and brown and white. It was people. Refugees from the city, and survivors of Tienjing brought in aboard the ragtag fleet of freighters and military transports moored along the edges of the field. They huddled together against the cold, wrapped in furs and blankets, sheltering under awnings and tents. As Hester, still limping slightly, led her companions past them, they started to stand up and shuffle aside, forming an avenue of staring faces. A whispering, like the wind in trees, ran through the crowd, as people pointed out the Lady Naga and her Stalker to their neighbors and their children.

Maybe they were saying that she was to blame for their disaster; that if she had not destroyed the Stalker Fang, it would be the townies suffering instead. Maybe they had heard she was dead. Maybe, seeing Grike and Hester walking beside her, they thought she was a phantom come here from the Halls of Shadow with two demons to guard her.

Oenone barely noticed the stir that she was causing. She kept thinking of the Stalker Fang. I must speak to Popjoy, she thought, and looked east toward the lakeshore, where the old Stalker builder had his retirement villa—but the evening mist lay thick above the lake, and she was not even certain that Popjoy’s place could be seen from here.

At the door of the nunnery a tired-looking subofficer greeted them. “Lady Naga! You are safe! Gods be thanked!”

Safe, thought Oenone. Yes; even if Fang had returned, Naga would sort everything out. She was safe at last. She returned the boy’s salute, remembering him from her husband’s staff at Tienjing: a friendly boy with a flop of black hair always falling across his eyes. She was glad he had survived. She said, “My husband is here?”

“The general will be overjoyed! I shall take you to him!”

Oenone followed him through the tall, carved doorway.

Hester, Grike, and Pennyroyal went with her, not knowing what else to do.

“I shall need to see the scientist Popjoy,” Oenone told their guide. “Can you find him for me?”

The subofficer seemed nervous. “He is dead, Lady Naga. Murdered at his house by the lake, about three weeks ago. We think one of his Stalkers went wrong and …” He shrugged. “I heard what had been done to him. No human being could have had such strength…”

Oenone looked at Hester. Grike said, ” did you find the stalker that killed him?”

The boy looked startled at being spoken to by a Stalker, but he recovered, and said, “No. But Popjoy’s sky yacht was stolen. Perhaps if the killer was an experimental model, it might have had the wit to escape. Apparently Popjoy’s house was full of … horrible things.”

He addressed his words to Oenone, but he was looking past her at her companions, as if wondering for the first time who they were and whether he had been right to admit them to Naga’s emergency headquarters.

“These are my friends,” said Oenone hastily, and introduced them: “Mr. Grike; Professor Pennyroyal; Mrs. Natsworthy.”

The boy frowned. “Natsworthy?”

He took Oenone aside and they spoke for a moment in Shan Guonese. Hester heard the name Natsworthy mentioned several more times. She reached for the big gun on her shoulder and eased the safety catch off, then asked Grike, “What are they saying?”

Before the Stalker could translate, Oenone came back to join them, smiling. “Hester,” she said, “your husband is here.”

She might as well have carried on talking in her own funny language, Hester thought, for what she said made no sense at all.

“Tom Natsworthy,” said Oenone. She took Hester’s hands in hers and smiled into her face. “He arrived this morning, aboard Anna Fang’s old ship…”

“No,” said Hester, not believing it; not wanting to.

“He is being held in a cell down by the docking pans at the foot of this crag. But don’t worry; I shall tell Naga to free him at once. You should go to him, Hester.”

“Me? No.”

“Go to him.” Oenone pulled off the ring she wore and pressed it into Hester’s hand, folding Hester’s fingers over it. “Take this; tell the guards I sent you. Mr. Grike can translate for you. They will let you talk to him. Tell him that orders will soon be coming from my husband to let him go.”

“But he won’t want to see me. Send someone else.”

“You are still his wife.”

“You don’t know about the things I’ve done.”

Oenone stood on tiptoes and kissed her. “Nothing that can’t be forgiven. Now go, while I talk to Naga.”

Hester turned and went, Grike at her side, everyone in the passage turning to stare, wondering who she could be.

Pennyroyal lingered. “So Tom’s here, eh?” he said. “These Natsworthys do pop up in the most unlikely spots. But I’ll stay with you if I may, Empress. There’s the small matter of the reward you mentioned…”

“Of course, Professor,” said Oenone, and let him go with her as she followed the subofficer through the mazelike corridors. The god that was worshiped in this place went by a name different from hers, but she still felt calmed by the old incense smells and the centuries of prayers that had sunk into the carved ceilings and lime-washed walls. Nuns in nasturtium-colored robes clustered in doorways, watching. Green Storm officers hurried by, staring at her. Most of them did not look happy to see her, but she did not care. Thank God she had been able to come here! She felt glad that she had been able to reunite Hester with her husband, and looked forward happily now to her own reunion with Naga.

Up three stairs to an ancient door. The subofficer knocked, then held the door open for Oenone to walk through. Pennyroyal went with her. In his gray cloak he looked the part of a high-ranking Green Storm officer, and the guards inside saluted him smartly as he followed Oenone into General Naga’s makeshift war room.

Around a big table covered in charts stood several dozen people, the ragged remnant of Naga’s government. Some of them looked pleased to see Oenone. Naga, raising his eyes from his charts, just gazed at her. There were bruises and cuts on his face, and dents in his armor, and his good hand was mittened in dirty bandages. But he was alive.

“Thank God!” Oenone said happily. She wanted to hug him. But it would not be seemly for the leader of the Storm to be embraced, in public, in front of his captains and his councillors, so she controlled herself and lowered her eyes from his and bowed low and said, “Your Excellency.”

Naga said nothing. Around him wise people who knew how much he had longed for her nudged their moonstruck, staring comrades and started gathering up charts and swords and helmets and edging toward the chamber’s various doors, but Naga called them back. He still had not spoken to his wife.

“I heard about Tienjing,” said Oenone.

“It came from the sky,” said her husband, watching her face. “From one of those old devil weapons in high orbit, we think. A finger of light … of energy … it destroys all it touches… I am not the man to ask. When it struck Tienjing, I was flat on my back at the foot of a staircase.” He tried to gesture, but the gears in the shoulder of his battered exoskeleton grated and seized. “Damn it!” he muttered.

“Let me,” said Oenone, glad of an excuse to touch him. The watchful officers drew aside to let her go to him, but when she reached out to unscrew the bolts that held his shoulder piece in place, his bandaged fist caught her across the side of the head. She fell sideways, hit the table, and crashed to the floor amid a rattle of fallen teacups and compass dividers. Some of Naga’s officers cried out, and she heard one say, “General! Please!”

“Naga …,” Oenone said. She could barely believe what was happening. She thought his exoskeleton must have gone wrong and made him lash out without meaning to. But when she looked up at him, she saw that the blow had been deliberate.

“This is all your fault!” he shouted. His mechanical hand swept down and grabbed a handful of her hair. He heaved her upright like a sack. “Look what your peace has led to! You told me to treat the barbarians like human beings, and now they are destroying us!”

Oenone had never imagined this. She did not know how to cope with his anger. “No, no, no, no,” she said, “TractionCities have been destroyed too; I saw them burning. You must have heard reports—”

“Lies!”

“Naga, the Stalker Fang is back! She controls this thing!”

A murmuring in the room; cries of alarm, of disbelief.

“Think,” begged Oenone. “The reports from Brighton. The limpet found in Snow Fan Province… She wants us to think the townies have the weapon, so that she can use it against us all! She is insane! We have to find the transmitter she uses to speak with it and—”

“Lies!” said Naga. “I have already discovered where the thing is controlled from. It is the London Engineers again, just like MEDUSA. Those harmless squatters we have ignored for so long started busying themselves like ants a few weeks ago, and now this happens.” He snatched a photograph from the piles on the table, an aerial view of London taken by a spy bird. “Look! You can see their bald heads! They infest that wreck like maggots in a corpse! And today a Londoner came here with some wild tale to try and put us off the scent. It is MEDUSA all over again! It all begins and ends with London!”

“Then what about Dr. Popjoy?” babbled Oenone. “Fang must have needed him to repair her, and when he had done it, she killed him…”

“Popjoy was another Engineer! We thought he had come over to our side, but he was working for his old Guild all along! That body they found in his villa was so mangled, it could have been anyone! Your former master faked his death and escaped to London to help his old Engineer friends deploy the weapon.”

“No,” whispered Oenone. But his theory made a sort of sense. How could she hope to show him he was wrong?

Naga stared at her, breathing hard. “And you were part of their plan too, weren’t you Zero?” he said. His voice had grown softer and colder. “You were their creature all along, you Aleutian sorceress. It was Popjoy who first brought you to the Jade Pagoda. How shy and sweet you seemed! But you destroyed Fang and then distracted me, whispering about peace, about love…” He drew his sword. “And all along you were just buying time for the townies until their new weapon was ready!”

Oenone tried to control her helpless trembling. She stretched out her hands toward her husband. “Please believe me. I would never betray you. All I ever wanted was peace.”

Naga struck her again, a stunning blow from his mechanical fist. She went down on her knees, keening, her hands cupped to catch the blood from her nose. He shoved her head down and drew his sword. But the thin stalk of her neck, bared in the lantern light, looked so fragile and ivory pale that he could not bring himself to sever it. She had a scurf of grime along her hairline, dirt behind her small ears, like a child.

Naga slammed his sword down, burying the blade deep in the wood of the chart table. As Oenone dropped sobbing at his feet, he wheeled around and bellowed at his officers, “Take her away! Lock her up! I’ll hear no more talk of peace!”

He tried not to watch as they dragged her to the door. A few hard-liners, old opponents of the truce, shouted out, “Kill her!” One drew his own sword, and would have butchered Oenone there and then if his friends had not restrained him.

“No!” Naga shouted. The heavy door swung shut behind his wife. It was easier to be strong now that he could not see her frightened face. “I will behead the traitor Zero myself, in public, in the main square of Batmunkh Gompa!”

A few of his listeners looked almost as woeful as Oenone had, but most were pleased by his announcement; some even cheered.

“First,” Naga told them, “we must gather what ships we can, and fly to London. We shall capture the barbarians’ transmitter and turn the new weapon upon their own cities! This war is not lost! Follow me, and we shall make the world green again!”

Chapter 44 Pillar of Fire

“Nothing that cannot be forgiven,” Oenone had said, but it seemed to Hester, as she went in the cold wind down those long stairways to the docking pans, that she had done things that no one could forgive. She did not know what she could say to Tom; and did not like to think what he might say to her. But she hated to think of him cooped up in one of those little buildings, whose roofs she could see below her in the glow from the big lamps around the pans. There was a lot of activity down there: Airships were being fueled and filled, and one of them was the Jenny, a familiar, rusty-red envelope among the white of the Storm’s warships.

Everything went blurry, and Hester had to wipe her sleeve across her eye. She was glad Oenone and Pennyroyal weren’t there to see her sniveling. Only Grike was with her (she could hear the heavy, comforting tramp of his feet on the stairs behind her), and Grike had seen her weep before.

The narrow alleys behind the pans were full of loud confusion; the Storm seemed punch-drunk, and the simple business of preparing ships was leading to squabbles and rows between the remnants of different units who spoke different languages and dialects. Pushing through them, Hester felt a tightness in her chest and throat, a building panic at the thought of seeing Tom.

She stopped a passing aviator to ask the way to the cells, and was pleased at how he started bowing and saluting when she showed him Lady Naga’s oak-leaf ring. But as she climbed the stone steps to the building he indicated, she heard running footsteps behind her.

“IT IS THE ONCE-BORN PENNYROYAL,” announced Grike.

“What does he want?” grumbled Hester, though secretly she was glad of a reason to delay her reunion with Tom.

Pennyroyal came panting up the steps to her. She knew as soon as she saw him that something had gone badly wrong. “Hester! Grike!” he gasped. “Thank Poskitt! We’ve got to flee! I mean fly! That villain Naga!”

“What’s happened?” demanded Hester.

Pennyroyal waved his arms about, trying to find a gesture big enough to express the disaster. “I didn’t know what was happening; don’t know the lingo; but some of the men in there were speaking Anglish to one another, and they were saying she was a traitor—”

“Who’s a traitor?” Hester grabbed him by the collar of his cloak and shook him. “What’s happened, Pennyroyal? Where’s Oenone?”

“That’s what I’m telling you! She’s in prison! He broke her little nose, the brute! He blames her for this terror weapon. They’re saying he’s vowed to cut off her head once the cities are defeated. Oh, the poor child! Oh, merciful Clio…”

Pennyroyal was genuinely upset, and Hester felt a pang of grief and pity too as she began to understand what he was saying. She hid it in her usual way, by growing angry. “You mean it was all for nothing? All that trouble and traveling? Losing Theo? We just got her out of one prison and into another? Can’t the silly cow be left alone for a minute without getting herself locked up?” She looked at Grike, who was staring silently at the buildings above. “Reckon we can do something? Get her out?”

“No way!” said Pennyroyal instantly. “He’s locked her in some high turret. Stalkers and men with hand cannon to guard her.”

“THERE ARE MANY ONCE-BORN THERE,” agreed Grike. “I WOULD HAVE TO KILL DOZENS OF THEM. I COULD NOT DO THAT, AND DR. ZERO WOULD NOT WANT ME TO.”

“She’d want us to save our own skins!” Pennyroyal said firmly. “What if someone seeks us out? They’re running about like mad bees up there, getting ready to fly off and attack some poor city or other. And they’re hardly going to leave us on the loose, are they? If they think Oenone is a traitor, they must think we are too, and they’ll want our heads to complete the set…” He pawed at Hester’s back, sniveling with terror as she turned away from him. “Hester, your ship’s here; you’ve got to get me away…”

Hester turned and shoved him. He went backward with an indignant yelp, rolling down the steps. “We’ve traveled far enough together,” she shouted. “I told you in Airhaven, I don’t want you on my ship. You can make your own arrangements.”

Pennyroyal shouted something after her, but she did not look back. Above the noise from the docking pans she could hear other sounds: cheering and trumpet blasts coming down from somewhere above her as the remnants of the Storm celebrated Oenone’s arrest. The guard on the cell-block door heard it too, and Hester was relieved to see that he looked puzzled by it. Communications were ropy in this ramshackle harbor; no sign of telephones or speaking tubes, just small boys running to and fro with messages. It might be some minutes before word of Oenone’s fall from favor reached down here, and longer still before descriptions of her companions started to circulate.

Sure enough, the oak-leaf ring elicited more bowing and saluting from the cell-block staff. Hester was welcomed inside, while Grike explained her business in a language she didn’t know. A man ran and unlocked a heavy door, beckoning Hester through. “Wait here,” she told Grike, and stepped inside. An oil lamp had been lit, and in the slow flaring of the light she saw the prisoner sit up on his bunk and turn his face toward her.

The guard said something in his own language, but neither of them noticed. “Tom?” said Hester.

Tom rose and came toward her. He did not speak, which Hester guessed was because he was so surprised to see her; she imagined that he could not believe it was really her.

She didn’t know that Tom already knew she was in Shan Guo; indeed, from what Theo had said, Tom believed she’d been here for some days. It was a surprise to him when the cell door opened and she came in, but not a total one; surprise was not the reason why he did not speak. Hester had hurt him very badly, and when he thought of her, he still felt angry. But now that she was here, standing a few feet from him, her familiar smell blowing toward him on the draft from the open door, he found that he still loved her, too. If he could not speak, it was simply because he had too many different things to say.

“Well,” said Hester lamely. “Here we are again!”

“I left Wren in London,” he said, guessing what her first question would be.

“In London?”

“She’s with Theo; it’s all right; she’s safe, but—”

“Theo Ngoni? You mean he’s alive?”

“He found his way to London. Told us he’d seen you. How brave you’d been … Saving Lady Naga …”

The guard was staring at them. Hester swung her gun down from her shoulder and pointed it in Tom’s direction, saying to the guard in her creaky Airsperanto, “Unchain the prisoner; he’s coming with me.”

The guard shrugged; she couldn’t tell if he understood what she had said, but he seemed to get the general idea, and he quickly unlocked the shackles that chained Tom to the wall. Hester grabbed Tom by the arm and led him quickly away, nodding at the other guards. Tom wondered if he should refuse to go with her, tell her that he didn’t trust her anymore, after what she had done before. But this did not seem the moment, and besides, a part of him was glad to have her in charge again.

Outside, Grike was waiting. Tom flinched backward when the Stalker’s dead face turned to stare at him.

“It’s all right,” said Hester. “He’s a friend now.”

“Right,” said Tom, remembering what Theo had told him about the old Stalker but finding it hard to believe. “Hello, Mr. Grike. Sorry I killed you.”

Grike bowed faintly and said, “I DID NOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY.”

Above their heads, with a shriek and a roar, the sky ripped open down a long seam. Light drenched them, bright as day and white as death. The ground lurched. Grike gripped his head, and his eyes flared and flickered. The shouts of the soldiers and stevedores on the docking pans changed to frightened screams, and Hester screamed too and flung her arms around Tom, tugging him close. But the sword of light that blazed above them was not aimed at Batmunkh Gompa. It stood upon the mountains farther south, blazing and shrieking, too bright to look at and too tall to comprehend. The sky filled with vapor, and blue threads of lightning crackled and flashed.

“What is it doing?” shouted Tom. “There are no cities there…”

The glare faded; the shrieking ended in a thunderclap, and then the night returned. The ground still shuddered. Hester still held Tom tight. Grike hissed and shook himself, recovering. A pillar of cloud marked the place where the light had been, and at its foot a red glow gathered, a brazier brightening among the mountains.

“Zhan Shan!” Tom heard people saying. “Zhan Shan!” he said himself. He was very frightened. Hester’s embrace was comforting for a moment, until he remembered and pushed her away. “They have turned it on Zhan Shan! The holy mountain is erupting!”

“Who’d want to blow up a volcano?” asked Hester, angry at herself for having hugged him. Around them bells were ringing, whistles blowing, white ships rising into the night. Who could say when the weapon would strike again?

“Come on,” she said.

They wove through the busy harbor to the pan where the Jenny was moored. A group of Green Storm aviators ran toward her. Hester shouted at them that she was taking this ship. A hatch at the stern of the envelope hung open; she barked at the startled ground crew to close it and stand clear. The men shrugged and saluted, but as they drifted away, a harbor officer came hurrying over, shouting in Airsperanto. “Where are your orders? What’s your unit? All ships have been commandeered for General Naga’s strike against the barbarians!”

“No.” Hester held out her hand, showing him Oenone’s ring. “I’m taking her out myself; Lady Naga commands it.”

The man had started to salute when he saw the ring, but stopped when he heard whose it was. “Lady Naga is a lackey of the Municipal Darwinist conspiracy!” he shouted, turning. “Friends! Here! The traitor Zero’s accomplices are—”

Hester made her hand into a fist and the ring flashed as she punched the man hard in the stomach and again in the head as he curled over. She thought of killing him, but she did not want to with Tom watching. Leaving him gasping in the shadows at the edge of the pan, she hurried the others up the gangplank. Other ships were taking off” from the neighboring pans, big transports going to collect troops from the plateau above. Nobody noticed the Jenny rise among them, and her red envelope faded quickly into the night as she veered away across the lake of Batmunkh Nor. By the time the harbor officer recovered enough to start shouting for help, there was nothing to be seen of her but a wreath of exhaust smoke dissolving into the air above the pan.

They flew without lights, but the light of the eruption on faraway Zhan Shan came in through the gondola windows, red and unhealthy and bright enough to read by. While Hester steered, Tom stood at the window and looked out at the crescent-shaped gash that had been torn in the volcano’s northeastern side. The mountain itself was hidden in the darkness and the distance, so the gash seemed to hang in the sky like a burning moon.

“I still don’t understand,” Tom muttered to himself. “Why attack a mountain?”

Grike heard him. “ZHAN SHAN COULD GO ON ERUPTING FOR WEEKS,” the Stalker said. “THE PUMICE CLOUDS WILL DISRUPT AIR TRAFFIC OVER THOUSANDS OF MILES. WHOLE PROVINCES WILL BE SMOTHERED. IT IS A BLOW FROM WHICH THE GREEN STORM CANNOT RECOVER.”

“Then the cities do control ODIN…”

“THE STALKER FANG CONTROLS IT.”

“The Stalker Fang’s alive?” Grike nodded.

Hester, who had been intent on steering the airship past a rearing pinnacle of rock, relaxed a little as they flew into clear air beyond it, and looked back at her passengers. “We’ll circle around and head west,” she said. “I can set you down at London, Tom.”

“What about your friend Lady Naga?” asked Tom. He had never met the unfortunate young woman, but he felt guilty at leaving her locked up. “Perhaps when Naga’s ships have flown off, we could—”

“she is under guard,” said Grike. “they would not let us take her alive. if naga blames her for odin, there is a simpler way to save her: i will find odin’s ground station and prove who is really responsible.”

“But the ground station could be anywhere,” protested Hester.

“the stalker fang has returned to shan guo,” said Grike, turning, sniffing the musty air as if he hoped to pick up the other Stalker’s scent. He found a map of the Heavenly Mountains and spread it on the chart table. He stabbed his finger down on Snow Fan Province, then Batmunkh Gompa. “she abandoned the limpet here. she killed popjoy here. she is in these mountains somewhere. set me down, and i shall find her.”

“Anna Fang had a house at a place called Erdene Tezh,” said Tom. “We found the deeds to it among her things when we took over the Jenny.” He pointed to the place on the chart. “Maybe she’s gone home.”

“it is possible. the stalker fang claimed to have memories of her former life. perhaps they have drawn her back.”

Tom felt pleased that the Stalker liked his suggestion. “Do you think we should go back to Batmunkh Gompa and tell somebody?” he asked. “Definitely not!” said Hester.

“THEY WOULD NOT BELIEVE US,” said Grike. “THEY THINK WE ARE PAWNS OF THEIR ENEMIES. I MUST GO TO ERDENE TEZH AND SEARCH FOR HER MYSELF.”

“Is that your own idea?” asked Hester suspiciously. “Or is one of Oenone’s secret programs still running in that brain of yours?”

Grike turned to look at her. “I DO NOT KNOW. BUT DR. ZERO REBUILT ME FOR A PURPOSE. I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DESTROY THE STALKER FANG. I MUST SEEK HER OUT AND RE-ASSASSINATE HER.”

“Thought you couldn’t kill anybody.”

“STALKERS ARE NOT ALIVE, SO IT WILL NOT BE KILLING,” Grike said patiently. “EVEN IF IT WERE, IT WOULD HAVE TO BE DONE.” He waved one massive hand at the windows, at the mountain burning in the south. “IF SHE IS ALLOWED TO CONTINUE THIS DESTRUCTION, MILLIONS OF ONCE-BORN WILL PERISH.”

Tom swallowed and said nervously, “I can fly you to Erdene Tezh.”

“It’s not our business, Tom,” Hester warned him.

“It is,” Tom told her. “Because if you’re right, we’re the only people who really know who’s responsible for all this. What sort of world will be left for Wren if we let it keep happening? We have to do something.” He was about to explain the connection between ODIN and the Tin Book, but that would only make Hester think it was Wren’s fault, which wasn’t what he meant at all. “I have to do something,” he said weakly.

“All right,” said Hester. He was as lovely and infuriating as ever. She’d never been able to resist his stupid bravery. “All right. Let’s go to this Erdene Thingy place. It’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do. Only when we get there, you’re not going to do anything heroic; you’re not going to risk your life, or try and talk to the Stalker Fang. You’re going to stay safe in the airship and let Grike go and kill her. And this time he’d better do it properly.”

Chapter 45 Harvest

Wren, awakening, wondered for a moment where she was, remembered what had happened, felt afraid, and then decided that she did not care, because Theo was there with her, breathing softly, his face pressed into the curve of her neck, the heavy, comforting weight of his arm thrown across her.

They had gone west when they’d left Crouch End, because all the roads and paths Wren knew through the wreckage led west. They had walked for hours, listening out all the time for sounds of pursuit. They had seen the pulse of fire plunge into the mountains and stood in silence, hand in hand, watching the red glow gather in the sky behind Zhan Shan, throwing the summit of the giant volcano into silhouette. At last they had settled down to rest on the very westernmost edge of the debris field, where it petered out into a rash of smaller fields, scattered chunks of track and deck plate, towering wheels. They had taken shelter inside one of the wheels, in a cylindrical cave about twelve feet high where a crank must once have been attached. (Or a connecting rod, or a gubbins of some other kind; neither of them knew enough about the wheels of cities to say for certain.) It was, at least, dry, and not too cold, and they had cuddled together there with Wren’s pack as a pillow and fallen quickly asleep.

Now a halfhearted daylight filled the circle of the cave mouth. Wren woke Theo as gently as she could, and scrambled around him to the entrance. Peeking out, she saw the deserted margins of the wreck stretching away in hazy sunlight. She craned out farther. It was too misty to make out Zhan Shan, but she could see the tower of smoke that stood above it, wet-slate gray, and as tall as the sky. The ground seemed to shake faintly, and she thought she heard a distant rumbling.

“Well, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “Why would the Storm turn the weapon on their own land?”

“It must be another civil war,” said Theo. He poured some water for them from the canteen Lavinia Childermass had given them. “Naga’s probably zapping his rivals.”

“Charming,” said Wren. “And these are the people whose mercy we’re going to be throwing ourselves on?”

“Either that or go back to Mr. Garamond.”

“Fair point. What’s for breakfast?”

“Gravel,” said Theo, opening a box that Lavinia Childermass had put inside Wren’s pack. “I think it started out as some kind of flapjack. It’s probably very nutritious…”

“Shhhh!”

The rumbling sound was growing louder. The ground was definitely shaking, vibrations flaking small scales of rust off the old wheel.

“The volcano?” said Wren.

Theo shook his head.

They scrambled down out of their shelter and stood on the wheel’s rim, staring westward. The rumblings came and went, gusting on the wind. A ridge bulged and shivered, its profile altering as they watched. A gleam of metal showed beneath the scrub, and a fist of exhaust smoke rose triumphantly into the air.

“Oh, Quirke!” said Wren.

“Harrowbarrow,” whispered Theo.

Wren nodded. She had almost forgotten the existence of Wolf Kobold. Her first thought was Thank Quirke we got out of the debris field before he arrived, but it was drowned out immediately by another thought coming close behind it: What about the others?

“We’ve got to warn them!” she said.

“Why?” asked Theo. “They’ll know soon enough. If it moves as fast as it did when I saw it tear through the line, they’ll hear the engines in London before long.”

“But they might not,” said Wren. “The lookouts are young; they’ve never heard town engines; they’ll think it’s the volcano, like we did…” She tried to tell herself that it served the Londoners right for accusing people and locking them in cages, but all she could think of were her friends: Angie and Saab, Clytie, Dr. Childermass. Even Mr. Garamond didn’t deserve to be eaten by Harrowbarrow. The waste of it appalled her; those years of thought and effort and hard work—

“We’ve got to delay it,” she said. “I’ll go aboard and divert them somehow. Even if it only buys an extra half hour, it might help. Don’t you see? New London has to move today; now, ready or not! Once it’s out of the fields, it should be able to outrun Harrowbarrow.”

“Oh, not on your own,” said Theo.

“Yes, because I can’t take you, because you’re the mossiest Mossie in the whole world and a terrible liar and Wolf Kobold doesn’t believe people like you even deserve to be alive. So you’re going to go and be safe somewhere.”

“Wren,” he protested.

She hugged him, tight, tight. It would be so easy to just keep out of Harrowbarrow’s way and pretend that none of this had anything to do with her, but it had; what would her father think of her if he knew she’d had a chance to save his city and she’d fluffed it? What would she think of herself? She kissed Theo. “Go,” she said. “Harrowbarrow sends scouts out ahead sometimes, on foot. If they catch you, they won’t ask questions. Please go.”

“How will I find you again?”

“I don’t know,” said Wren, pulling away from him. Harrowbarrow’s engines snarled. “I’ll think of something,” she promised. She couldn’t quite bring herself to let go of his hands. “Look, the gods went to all this trouble to bring us together; you don’t think they’d let a silly little enormously dangerous armored suburb come between us, do you?” She checked herself, because she was starting to babble. It had been the same on that air quay at Kom Ombo. She seemed to be able to say anything except the thing she wanted to say.

In the end, Theo said it instead. “I love you.”

“Gosh, really? Me too! You, I mean. I, I love you.” She started to move back toward him, then pulled herself away. There, she thought, I’ve told him; now I’ll have one less regret when I get down to the Sunless Country. She turned and started to stumble away through the brambles and the gobbets of rusting wreckage, northward into Harrowbarrow’s path. “Hide!” she shouted at him, seeing him standing there watching helplessly from the shadow of the abandoned wheel. “Go and hide!” She pressed on, half afraid and half hoping that he would insist on coming with her.

When she looked back again, she could no longer see him.

Theo ran a little way into the thickets of alder that filled the scooped-out hollow of an old track mark nearby. There he stopped. He wanted to be with Wren, but he knew that if the Harrowbarrovians were as bad as she’d described, he would only be going to his death, and bringing more danger down on her by making Kobold wonder why she was with an Anti-Tractionist.

Yet he could not just hide.

He turned east and started loping toward the debris field. The Londoners were not bad people. They deserved all the warning he could give them. He would run to the hangar at the west end of Holloway Road and tell the lads on guard there what was coming for them.

Wren waded through the waist-high weeds. The day was dimming as the pall of smoke from the distant volcano spread across the sky. End-of-the-world weather. Harrowbarrow’s engines had fallen silent. She wondered if Wolf Kobold was on his bridge, watching the land ahead through his periscope. She pulled off her jacket and turned it inside out. The red silk lining was tatty and faded after all her adventures, but it was still the brightest thing about. She climbed up on a nameless chunk of wreckage and started to wave the jacket above her head, shouting, “Wolf! Wolf! It’s me! It’s Wren!”

After a few minutes she jumped down and started plodding on again. She could feel the ground stirring underfoot as the harvester suburb drew nearer. From time to time she waved the jacket and shouted, but she couldn’t even see Harrowbarrow anymore; it had squirreled down into a deep trench. Wren glanced at the sky. No Stalker-birds. Honestly, she thought, where were the Green Storm and their city-zapping super-weapon when you needed them? It was sheer incompetence, letting Harrowbarrow drive so far behind their lines.

A hummock of grayish earth ahead of her suddenly proved that it wasn’t a hummock after all, by standing up and pointing a gun at her and shouting “Stop!” Wren screamed and dropped her jacket. All around her, more gray-clad men were appearing from the undergrowth. She didn’t recognize their faces, but she knew by their getups and their tinted goggles that they were one of Harrowbarrow’s scouting parties. She raised her hands and tried not to let her voice wobble as she said, “I’m Wren Natsworthy. I’m a friend of your mayor.”

One of the men searched her for weapons, more thoroughly than Wren felt was really necessary (surely they must know that you couldn’t hide anything very dangerous inside your bra?). Their leader said, “You come,” and they were off, running quickly through the rough, stumbly country, squeezing through crannies in the walls of track marks and wading across their flooded floors. The men moved fast and easily, and shoved Wren when she showed any sign of flagging. She was exhausted by the time the armored flank of Harrowbarrow came in sight, half submerged in mud and torn-up bushes.

A hatchway opened. The scouts led Wren inside and slammed the hatch cover shut behind her. Then Harrowbarrow went grinding on its way toward the debris fields.

It felt very strange to be back in the streets of the burrowing suburb after all that had happened; very strange indeed to stand in Wolf Kobold’s town hall, on soft carpets, among velvet curtains and fine paintings and the gentle glow of argon uplighters. Wren stared at herself in a mirror and barely recognized the disheveled, weather-beaten young Londoner who looked out at her. “Wren!”

They must have called him up from the bridge. He wore boots and breeches and a collarless shirt with big fans of sweat spreading down from the armpits. He looked thinner than she remembered, and she wondered if it had been very hard for him, that journey alone across the Out-Country. Just for an instant she felt pleased and relieved to see him, and she seized on the feeling and used it to make a smile, a shy, warm smile. “Herr Kobold …”

“Why so formal, Wren?” He came to her and took both her hands in his. “I’m so happy you came to meet us. What brings you here? You are alone? Where is your father?”

“He is still in London,” she lied.

“Do the Londoners know of our arrival?”

“Not yet,” Wren told him.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come…” She let her smile fade, looked as if she were about to cry, to faint. Kobold helped her to a chair. “Oh, Wolf,” she said, “Dad’s a prisoner! After you left, the Londoners thought we must have been in league with you. They locked us in horrible cages, old animal cages from the zoo. Dad’s not well, but they won’t let him out. So I escaped, and I’ve been living in the debris at the edge of the field, waiting and waiting, and I thought you’d never come!”

Kobold’s arms went around her, pulling her face against his chest. Wren managed to squeeze out a few tears, and then found that if she thought hard about Theo and Dad, it made her cry for real. She said shakily, “Harrowbarrow is my only hope. You’ll keep Daddy safe, won’t you, when you eat New London?”

“Of course, of course,” said Kobold, stroking her hair. “By this evening we will be at Crouch End; the Londoners and all they have will be our prize; your father will be safe.”

Wren pulled away from him, looking horrified. “This evening? But you’ll be too late! They are to leave this afternoon! The launch date has been brought forward because of all the fighting… Oh, you must go faster!”

Wolf shook his head. “Impossible. It will take us that long to skirt the debris fields.”

“Show me,” said Wren, wiping her face with the back of her grubby hand.

She followed him along the fuggy walkways and across the dismantling yards, where gangs of men were preparing heavy cutting and rending engines. They climbed the ladder to the bridge and found Hausdorfer at the helm, his peculiar spectacles flashing as he nodded a greeting to Wren. He started to say something in German to Kobold, but the young mayor waved him away and led Wren across to the chart table, where a map of the debris fields had been spread out. Wolf must have drawn it from memory after returning to Harrowbarrow; Wren instantly saw several errors, as well as big blank spaces in the heart of the field, where Wolf had never been.

He pointed at the map with a pair of dividers, tracing a line that wriggled around the northern edge of the main field and then struck in toward Crouch End. “That’s my plan.”

“Why not go straight across the middle?” asked Wren.

“I don’t know what lies there. The wreckage might be impassable. And there are those electrical discharges the Londoners tell stories of—”

“Fairy stories,” said Wren dismissively. “It’s just as you suspected. The sprites are a tale they told us to keep us from nosing about. That one we saw the first day was faked by one of Garamond’s boys hiding in the debris with a lightning gun.” She smiled at him. “Look. If you want to be sure of reaching Crouch End before they get their new city moving, go this way. There’s a sort of valley stretching through the wreckage that will take you almost all the way there. There are no lookouts in that part, either, so you’ll stay undetected longer.”

She picked up a pencil that hung on a piece of frayed string from the corner of the table, and drew a line on the chart for Harrowbarrow to follow; west to east through the debris field; straight along Electric Lane.

The lads on watch beside the Archaeopteryx had heard the muffled engines in the west by the time Theo arrived. They were standing on a high promontory of wreckage outside the hangar, squinting into the murk. As he scrambled toward them, he heard one say, “I can’t see anything. It’s the volcano,” and the other reply, “Or maybe it’s an airship engine. Maybe there’s an airship circling above all this smog—”

“It’s not an airship!” Theo shouted, and ducked as they turned toward him, afraid that they would fire their crossbows at him. But they only stared. The same boys he’d talked to yesterday. He tried to remember their names; Will Hallsworth and Jake Henson.

“Will,” he said, walking toward them with his hands outstretched to show he was not armed. “Jake, there’s a suburb coming. Harrowbarrow. You’ve got to warn the others. Your new city has to move out now.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Jake warned his companion. “He’s a Mossie! Mr. Garamond said—”

“Mr. Garamond is wrong,” Theo insisted. “If I were a Mossie, what would I be doing coming to warn you about Harrowbarrow?”

“Maybe there is no Harrowbarrow,” said Will, thinking hard. “Maybe it’s a Mossie trick.”

A snarl of engines drowned out his voice, coming from somewhere to the southwest. A crash and clang of falling debris too. The Londoners stared. Smoke and clouds of dust and rust flakes drifted across the southern sky.

“It’s surfacing!” shouted Theo. “It’s reached the edge of the wreck! Come on!”

“What about the Archy?” asked Jake. “We can’t just leave her here!”

“We’ll have to fetch Lurpak or Clytie…”

“There’s no time!” shouted Theo, as the rusty deck plate beneath them shook and shifted, dislodged by the vibrations from the hungry suburb that was shouldering its way through the wreck a mile to the south.

“Well, we can’t fly her!” wailed Will.

“I can.”

“Yes, home to your stinking Mossie friends; we’re not falling for that one!”

“Will,” shouted Theo, “I’m not with the Green Storm! Trust me!” He scrambled into the hangar, staring at the Archaeopteryx. “Is she fueled?”

“I think so. Lurpak Flint was down here yesterday working on her.”

Theo rattled the gondola door. It was locked, and when he asked for the keys, Will and Jake looked blank. He picked up a hunk of metal and smashed the door in, then grabbed a knife from Will’s belt and started to hack at the ropes that anchored the airship. “Her controls will probably be locked,” he shouted as he worked. “But that doesn’t matter. The wind’s with us; even if I can’t get the engines on, it’ll still be quicker than running to Crouch End.”

Will and Jake started to object, then gave up and joined him. The airship shivered as the ropes fell away. Theo noticed two rockets resting in racks beneath the forward engine pods. If he could get to Crouch End and persuade the Archaeopteryx’s crew to return with him, there was a chance they could slow or stop Harrowbarrow; he’d heard stories of how a well-aimed rocket, shot down an exhaust stack or into a track support, could bring a whole city to a halt. Then New London would have time to escape, and perhaps Theo could find his way aboard the crippled harvester and reach Wren.

The three boys scrambled into the gondola as the un-tethered airship began to rise. On the flight deck, Theo found that he could work the elevator and rudder wheels, although he had no way to turn on the engines. Sunlight poked in through the gondola windows as the Archaeopteryx rose out of the top of the hangar, trailing camouflage netting and uprooted trees. The brisk wind boomed against the envelope, already pushing her westward, and Theo spun the rudder wheel so that her nose began to swing toward Crouch End.

The first rocket punched through the prow of the envelope and tore the whole length of the ship, exploding in the central gas cell and sending a spume of fire out through her stern. Theo heard Jake and Will scream as the gondola lurched sideways. Struggling with the useless controls; he saw another ship go sliding past behind the sheets of smoke billowing from the Archaeopteryx’s envelope: a small armed freighter in the white livery and green lightning-bolt insignia of the Storm. Machine guns opened up from a nest on her tail fins as she sped by, and bullets came slamming into the Archaeopteryx’s listing gondola, and into Will, smashing him backward through a shattering window. “Will!” screamed Jake, as Theo dragged him to the deck.

Peering through the smoke, he had a brief, dizzy view of the debris field. Above it, low and menacing, a school of white ships circled. The Green Storm had arrived.

Chapter 46 The Shortcut

The warships circled low over Crouch End, low enough for everyone to see the rockets glinting in their racks and the Divine Wind machine cannon twitching in the swiveling turrets. A few of the braver Londoners ran for crossbows and lightning guns, but Mr. Garamond shouted at them not to be so daft. He hated the Storm, but he knew that trying to fight them would be madness.

Someone tied a white bedsheet to an old broomhandle, and Len Peabody waved it frantically as the leading ship came down. She was the Fury, the only real warship in the fleet, but none of the Londoners noticed how tatty the other ships looked; they were too busy staring at the soldiers and battle-Stalkers who spilled from the Fury’s hatches as she descended.

General Naga was the first to jump down, relying on his armor to absorb the shock of landing. Straightening up, sword in hand, he breathed in the rusty, earthy air of the debris field and heard his troops disembarking behind him. He glanced to his right. Two of his ships had landed on top of the big wedge of wreckage there, and others were circling it. A party of his men was herding more Londoners down the track that led from it.

“The site is secure, Excellency,” announced his second-in-command, Subgeneral Thien, running to his side and dropping on one knee to salute.

“Resistance?”

“One of our armed freighters shot down a ship that rose from the western edge of the ruins. And the gunship Avenge the Wind-Flower was struck by some sort of electrical discharge and destroyed with all hands. She reported movements in the western part of the wreck before she was hit. I’ve sent the Hungry Ghost to investigate.”

Naga strode toward the waiting Londoners. His feet sank into the deep drifts of rust flakes with crunching sounds, each footstep unpleasantly like the noise Oenone’s nose had made when his fist struck it. He tried again to stop thinking of her. She was a traitor, he told himself sternly. Half the men in this fleet would have mutinied if he had not dealt firmly with her. He had to be strong if he was to save the good Earth from these barbarians and their new weapon.

But the barbarians were something of a disappointment. Ragged, unkempt, unarmed except for a few homemade guns and bows, which they had dropped when they saw Naga’s force landing. They had vegetable gardens, for the gods’ sake, just like real people! Their leader was a frightened little man with a scrap-metal chain of office around his neck. “Chesney Garamond,” he said, in Anglish. “Lord mayor of London. I’m here to negotiate on behalf of my people.”

“Where is the transmitter?” barked Naga.

“The what?” Garamond gaped fearfully at him.

Naga raised his sword, but the man’s bruised face and swollen nose reminded him suddenly of Oenone, and he lowered it again. His armor grated and hummed as it tried to compensate for the quick shivering of his sword arm. “Where are you hiding it?” he demanded. “We know the ground station is in London. Why else have you lurked here all these years? Why else did you destroy one of our ships just now with your electric gun?”

“That weren’t us,” said another man earnestly. “That was just power discharging from the dead metal. Your skyboys got too close to Electric Lane. I’m sorry.”

“And the movements the crew reported in the wreckage over there?”

“There’s nothing there except our youngsters on lookout,” said Garamond. “Please don’t hurt them; they’re just kids—”

Naga swung to address his waiting troops. “This savage knows nothing! Find me Engineers!”

“Coming, sir!” A subofficer ran up at the head of a squad of Stalkers, each carrying a struggling, bald-headed prisoner. An old woman was dumped on the ground at Naga’s feet. He waved his men back and watched her scramble up.

“Where is the transmitter?”

The Engineer looked curiously at him. Naga had the uneasy feeling that she could sense the swirl of guilt and fear behind the stern face he wore. She said, “There is no transmitter here, sir.”

“Then how do you talk to your orbital weapon?”

The way her eyes widened made Naga wonder, just for a moment, if he had been wrong. The Londoners started to murmur together, until his men cuffed and threatened them into silence.

The Engineer said, “They are surprised, General, because they all believed it was you who controlled this new weapon. Certainly we do not. We have no quarrel with anybody; we are simply building a new city for ourselves.”

“Ah, yes, your floating city! I did not believe that story when your agent came babbling of it at Batmunkh Gompa, and I do not believe it now. Shut those barbarians up!” he bellowed, rounding on his men. The barbarians stared fearfully at him. A little boy started to cry, and was quickly hushed by his mother. Naga felt ashamed.

When he turned back to the lady Engineer, she was holding out a thin, lilac-veined hand to him. “Come and see for yourself…”

The attack ship Hungry Ghost hovered over the smoldering wreck of the Archaeopteryx and made certain there were no survivors, then veered away toward the southwest to investigate the movements that the crew of Avenge the Wind-Flower had reported before that lasso of electricity had jumped out of the debris field to snare them. The Hungry Ghost’s captain took his ship higher, not wanting to meet the same end. Almost at once he saw the mounds of wreckage below him shifting and slithering. He stared down at the movements, not really understanding, until an old track tumbled sideways to reveal the scarred, armored carapace shoving along beneath it.

The suburb’s lookouts saw the ship above them at the same instant. Silos yawned open in its armor, and a flight of rockets tore through the Hungry Ghost, blasting her engine pods off, smashing the gondola in half, ripping off a tailfin. Smoldering, sagging, she drifted downwind, while Harrowbarrow plowed onward below her.

“Damn it! That’s all we need!”

Wolf Kobold’s angry shout made Wren cringe. She was sure that Harrowbarrow must be near the western end of Electric Lane by now, and she had been waiting and waiting for the first sprite to strike. When it did, Wolf would know that she had betrayed him. But for the moment, it seemed, she was still safe. He saw her flinch and came to stand with her, in the corner of the bridge where she had gone to get out of the way of his men.

“Nothing to worry about, Wren,” he said. “It seems my forward rocket batteries just shot down a Green Storm warship. The savages are in London already.”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry!” He laughed at the look of dismay upon her face. “We have dealt with the Green Storm before. My lookouts say that these ships are old; a ragbag of freighters and transports. Naga clearly doesn’t think your London friends are worth sending a real unit to deal with. We shall crush them easily.”

He shouted instructions at Hausdorfer, and the navigator shouted in turn down the speaking tubes beside the helm. The suburb increased its speed, and shocks came trembling through the deck and walls of the bridge as it butted massive chunks of rusting metal aside and track plates and sections of old building went tumbling over the hull or were crunched and crushed beneath the heavy tracks. Wren braced herself against the chart table. Wolf Kobold put his arm around her. “It will be all right,” he promised. “In an hour we’ll be there. Thank you for this shortcut, Wren. I won’t forget it.”

Maybe there would be no sprites, thought Wren. Or maybe they were striking Harrowbarrow’s hull already, dozens of them, doing no harm at all against its thick armor. Maybe all she had achieved by her ruse was to ensure that New London would be devoured even sooner.

And would it really be so bad if it was? It would serve the Londoners right for what they’d done to her. And good might come of it. She imagined Harrowbarrow growing strong and glorious on Dr. Childermass’s technology; a hovering city many tiers high. And she could be chatelaine of it all. Perhaps Wolf would make her Frau Kobold, lady mayoress of his new city. After her time in the debris fields the thought of a life surrounded by his tasteful furnishings and books seemed quite attractive. And she would tame him, make him treat his workers and his captives fairly…

“We’re entering your valley, Wren,” said Wolf warmly, listening to another report from Hausdorfer, who was taking a turn at the periscope. “The way is clear ahead, just as you promised.”

Theo and Jake ran through some trackless tangle of debris, pushing past wires and hawsers, girders, fallen tier supports like felled redwoods. Their clothes were singed and charred by the fires they had escaped from as the Archaeopteryx came down. They did not know where they were, or where they were going, and they could not hear each other speak because of the immense din of engines and scraping, grinding, tearing, squealing metal, which seemed to come from all around them, and from the sky above them, and up through the ground beneath their running feet.

A cleft between two rubble heaps ahead. A sort of path— or more likely just a streambed, where water sluiced down off the heights of the wreckage when it rained. Jake ran toward it, shouting something. Theo started to hurry after him and then glimpsed a sign in the debris, half hidden by the scales of rust that were avalanching down the sides of the heaps as they shook and shifted under the weight of the nearby suburb. A crude skull and crossbones. DANGER.

Theo remembered something Wren had told him about Electric Lane.

“Jake!”

Ahead of him Jake was stumbling out through the cleft into a broad, fire-stained valley. “Watch out!” Theo hollered over the noise that made it impossible to hear even his own thoughts. “Come back! The lightning will get you!”

“What?”

Something got Jake, but it wasn’t lightning. An immense steel snout burst out from the steep wall of wreckage that formed the far side of the valley. Jake started to run back toward Theo, and a segment of clawed steel track came down on him like a giant’s foot; a wheel two stories tall rolled over him and on, and then another and another. The suburb’s engines whinnied and growled as it dragged itself free of the wreckage and started to turn, making ready to speed east along the valley. Only a small suburb, but from where Theo stood it seemed world filling: an armored escarpment pocked and pitted with tiny windows, gun slits, air vents, hatch covers, and a stitchwork of rivets; people inside it somewhere all unaware of the boy they had just squashed beneath their tracks.

Theo scrambled backward as the wreckage he stood on began to slide and toss, churned into restless waves. He tried running, but the broad, flat fragment of deck plate he chose to run across began to tilt steeper and steeper, until he was climbing a hill, crawling up a cliff, struggling to keep a fingerhold upon a sheer wall. He fell, struck some other piece of wreckage, windmilled, tumbled down the valley’s side, and landed hard in mud and water at the bottom.

He lay there shivering, glad of the brackish water seeping through his clothes because its cold touch told him he was still alive. “Thank God!” he whispered. “Thank God!” And then, opening his eyes, realized that there was not as much to be thankful for as he had thought.

The stunted trees that grew around the edges of the pool he lay in were charcoal statues. Beyond them was Harrowbarrow. A steel tsunami, rolling straight toward him, tumbled debris foaming and frothing ahead of it. Theo pushed himself up and started to run, but from the wreckage ahead of him an immense brightness burst, crackling overhead, flinging his jittery shadow on the rust flakes at the edge of the pool.

Electricity, in blinding skeins, tied Harrowbarrow to the valley walls. Lightning tiptoed across its metal hide, licked in through windows and silo mouths, set fire to scraps of vegetation clinging to the tracks and bow shield. The engine roar faltered and failed, and in its place was a crackling, crinkling, cellophane noise, like God crumpling his toffee wrappers.

In the dancing blue light Theo splashed through the shallows and flung himself at the only thing that was not made of metal—a boulder, dredged from the earth by London’s tracks. He scrambled onto its dry top, praying that his movements and his wet clothes would not draw the surging electricity down on him. Above his head the sky was hidden by a cage of blue fire; Harrowbarrow was scrawled with scribbles of light. Sparks chased through the debris around the boulder’s foot, and the wet mud fizzed. A tree caught fire with a woof and burned like a match.

Then, abruptly, the storm ceased. A few last sparks, yelping like ricochets, arced across the gaps between Harrowbarrow and the valley walls. Wreckage slithered down around the suburb’s tracks with a sliding clatter. Smoke shifted slowly, smelling of ozone. Theo remembered to breathe.

Harrowbarrow lay silent, motionless, its armor scarred by smoldering wounds where the sprites had touched.

“Wren?” said Theo into the silence. “Wren?”

Chapter 47 The Battle of Crouch End

General Naga stood on the sloping floor of the Womb and looked up at New London. He could see himself reflected in the long curve of the tiny city’s underside, and again in one of those strange, dull mirrors that hung beneath it. Why would anyone build such a thing? Could Natsworthy have been telling the truth? Did the Londoners believe that this contraption would actually fly?

He tried to force his doubts aside. He was a soldier—he was used to doing that; but today, for some reason, the doubts stayed, nagging. If this mad city was really all that London’s Engineers had been building, then where was the transmitter that controlled the new weapon? Had Oenone been telling him the truth too? Had he shamed and struck her for no reason?

The soldiers he had sent aboard New London were returning, climbing down one of the steep boarding ladders. The young signals officer he had put in charge of the search ran across the oily floor and saluted. “Excellency, we have found no sign of a transmitter. Certainly nothing powerful enough to reach the orbital weapon.”

Naga turned away. He shut his eyes and saw Oenone smile her small, shy smile and say, “I told you so.” What now? he thought. What now?

“Should we destroy the barbarian suburb?” asked the signals officer.

Naga looked at it. All mobile cities were an abomination; the world must be made green again. But today, for some reason, he could not bring himself to give the order. He was glad of the distraction when another man came racing into the Womb, shouting, “General Naga! The Hungry Ghost has been shot down! There is something approaching from the west!”

Naga unsheathed his sword and strode outside into the glum, gray daylight, soldiers and frightened Londoners crowding out behind him. Faintly, over the rust hills and the rubble heaps, he heard the screel of C50 Super-Stirling land engines. Thank Gods, he thought. A harvester suburb! At last; something he could destroy without a qualm. He turned to the waiting officer to order an air attack, but before he could speak, the engine sounds cut off abruptly, and in their place there rose a crackling, a lashing… He turned and shaded his eyes and saw the western skyline fizz with lightning.

“Sprites!” one of the Londoners shouted. “They must have come straight through Electric Lane, the poor devils! They’ve been struck!”

On Harrowbarrow’s bridge the smoke stirred slowly, tying itself into gentle knots. Wren lay on her back on the floor and watched it. The dull red emergency lights flickered. Someone groaned. She began to hear other voices: cries and angry shouts coming from other parts of the suburb. No engine noise now to drown them out.

She tried to work out if she had been injured. She didn’t think she had. Someone had crashed into her, and she had fallen to the floor; perhaps she had been unconscious for a few seconds. She was shaking, and her head was full of memories of the things she had just seen—the sparks spewing from failing instruments and exploding control panels; the helmsman screaming as the metal wheel he was gripping became a mandala of blue light.

She supposed her plan had worked. She supposed she should feel pleased with herself.

Wolf Kobold stumbled to his feet. There was blood on his face, black in the red light. “Up!” he shouted hoarsely. “Everybody up! Get up! I want the emergency engines online at once! Hausdorfer, get down to the engine districts and bring me a damage report! Lorcas, pull us out of this damned lightning swamp… Zbigniew, organize scouting teams; get them out now, now!”

“But the lightning—”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone; spent for the moment. We mustn’t let this delay give the Londoners time to escape.”

Zbigniew started shouting orders into the speaking tubes, while Lorcas dragged the dead helmsman’s body from the wheel and flung it to the floor. Wren started to edge toward the companion ladder amid the sounds of Kobold’s dazed men stirring, groans and frightened questions, curses. Someone asked in Anglish, “What in the name of the Thatcher has happened?”

“Her,” said Hausdorfer. He was on his feet, gripping the back of Kobold’s chair for support. He was pointing at Wren, his hands shaking almost as much as hers. “She led us here!”

Kobold looked at her. “No.”

“It was her, Wolf!” growled Hausdorfer, unbuttoning the holster on his belt. “Think with your head, not your heart. She knew this would happen! She hoped to fry us and protect her friends!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wren!” bellowed a voice behind her.

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

“Theo!”

“Are you hurt?” asked Theo.

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

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

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

“I couldn’t just leave you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Angie, Mister. Angie Peabody.”

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

“You’re ’elping us, Mister? Cor, ta!”

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

Chapter 48 A Voyage to Erdene Tezh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“SO, PROFESSOR, WE MEET AGAIN.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where? And, indeed, why?”

“Because we think the Stalker Fang is there.”

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

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

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

“Tie him up in the stern cabin,” he said.

“But Tom, be reasonable!” Pennyroyal wailed.

“Tie him nice and tight. We can’t risk having him on the loose.”

Grike dragged the spluttering explorer away; Hester touched Tom’s face with her fingertips and followed, promising to tie the knots herself and leave Grike to guard him. Alone on the flight deck, Tom steered the Jenny between the snow spires of the Erdene Shan, up and up until the topmost peaks were sliding past the windows like vast, blind ships, snowfields ghostly in that ashen light.

When Hester came back to the flight deck, he said, “We’ll be over the valley in another half hour if Anna’s old charts are right.”

“They should be,” said Hester, hugging him from behind. “Erdene Tezh was her house, wasn’t it?”

Tom nodded, wishing he could kiss her again, but too wary of the spines and spikes of rock he was flying through to even glance at her. “Anna told me once she planned to retire here.”

Hester hugged him tighter. “Tom, when we get there, if it is her, we’re just going to let Grike kill her, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to talk to her, or argue with her, or appeal to her better nature, are you?”

Tom looked sheepish. Hester knew him too well; she had already guessed the half-formed plans he had been turning over in his mind all day. He said, “At Rogues’ Roost that time, she seemed to know me. She let us go.”

“She isn’t Anna,” Hester warned him. “Just remember that.” She kissed the hollow of his neck beneath his ear, where the swift pulse beat. “What I told you that night on Cloud 9, about you being boring, I didn’t mean it. You’re not boring. Or maybe you are, but in a lovely way. You never bored me.”

They crossed a high pass. On the eastern side the ground fell steeply, down, down, down, a valley opening, white and then green, a wriggle of river in its deep cleft, a lake at the far end, and, on an island there, the house of the Wind-Flower. Tom, through the Jenny’s old field glasses, saw a saucer-shaped antenna poking from its roof. Then the sky filled with wings.

Hester had just enough time to push him to the floor before the first wave of Stalker-birds shattered the Jenny’s front windows. Two of them came into the cabin, filling it with their flapping, the idiot flailing of their green-eyed heads. Hester snatched the lightning gun and shot the first before it saw her. The other came shrieking at her, its knife of a beak aimed straight at her eye. She fired the lightning gun at it and it exploded, filling the flight deck with gunge and feathers. She looked down at Tom. “Are you all right?”

“Yes …” He looked scared and white. Hester squirmed upright, hissing with pain as the movement wrenched strained muscles. She peered out the windows. More birds were circling the Jenny, and she could see a couple tearing at the starboard engine pod. She aimed the lightning gun through the side window and shot them both, then tossed it down to Tom and snatched her own gun down from an overhead locker. She started aft along the gondola’s central corridor. Pennyroyal was screeching in the stern cabin, and through the half-open door Hester saw the flap of wings and the gleam of Grike’s armor as he beat the birds back. “HESTER!” the Stalker shouted.

“I’m fine,” she promised. She heard wings and claws inside the little medical bay where Anna Fang had once treated her for a crossbow wound. She kicked the door open and turned her gun on the birds that had torn their way in through the roof there. The gun was a good one—the steam-powered Weltschmerz 60 with the underslung grenade launcher that she’d picked up for a song in El Houl—but it made more of a mess of the medical bay than the birds had, shredding the outer wall till it looked like a doily. Through the holes she could see more birds going for the engine pod, and heard it choke and die, the propeller slowing. “Oh, damn it,” she said, and pumped a grenade through the pod’s cowling, blowing it to pieces along with the birds.

Back out in the corridor she shouted, “Tom? You all right?”

“Of course! Don’t keep asking!”

“Put us down then.”

“Down isn’t a problem,” said Tom, checking the row of gas-pressure gauges on the instrument panel and seeing all the needles whirling toward zero. Unbalanced by the loss of the starboard pod, the gondola was tilting steeply sideways. Scary shapes flapped by outside, but Tom tried to ignore them, saving the lightning gun in case more got in. Gaudy yellowish light licked in through the larboard windows. The envelope was burning.

Hester kicked open the stern-cabin door. Grike was in the process of ripping a Resurrected eagle to pieces. He looked like a scarecrow, coated with slime and feathers, and he swung his dead face toward her and said, “THIS SHIP IS FINISHED.”

“Not the Jenny,” said Hester loyally. “Tom’ll get her down all right. Go forward. Keep him safe.”

She stood aside to let him go past her. She’d been hoping the birds would have killed Pennyroyal, but they’d been too busy with Grike. The explorer lay on the floor where she’d left him, bound and gagged, looking up at her with round, pleading eyes. She considered shooting him, then shouldered her gun and pulled her knife out, stooping. Pennyroyal gave a squeal of fright, but she was only cutting the ropes on his feet and his wrists.

As she stood up again, the remains of the long stern window disintegrated in an ice fall of smashed glass, and the wide black wings of a Resurrected condor filled the cabin. Its claws raked Pennyroyal’s head as it came flapping at Hester. She dropped the knife and tried to bring her gun to bear, but there was no time. She heard herself scream; a terrible, thin, little-girl scream, and suddenly Grike was back in the cabin with her, pulling her out of the way of the driving beak, grabbing the bird, its blades striking sparks from his armor as he crushed it to his body.

The Jenny Haniver lurched as another of her gas cells exploded; her nose tipped up, her stern down. Hester was flung on top of Pennyroyal, who clung to a bulkhead. She saw Grike stumble toward the stern, where the mountains glowed in the twilight beyond the smashed window. The bird was strong; half crushed, it still flapped and clawed. The spasmic beating of its wings overbalanced Grike. He smashed the bunk and crashed against the stern wall, which started to give way beneath him with a splintering sound.

“Grike!” screamed Hester, scrambling down the hill of the deck to help him.

“Hester, no!” yelled Pennyroyal through his gag, pulling her back.

The wall collapsed. Grike turned his face for a second toward Hester. Still clutching the condor, he fell. “Grike!” she shrieked again, as the gondola tilted back to the horizontal. She kicked herself free of Pennyroyal and scrabbled as close as she dared to that gaping rent where the wall had been. “Grike!”

No answer. Nothing to see in the smoke and the wind and the rain of burning fragments from her dying ship. Only the echoes of Grike’s last cry bouncing up at her from the abyss where he had fallen: “HESTER.!”

From the wall of the Stalker’s garden Fishcake watched the burning airship draw a long, bright trail down the sky, deep into the shadows of the valley. The wind was carrying the sound away, or maybe burning airships made no sound; at any rate, it all seemed to be happening in silence. It was very beautiful. The igniting gas cells were like fountains, showering out golden fragments that twinkled and faded as they fell. Blazing birds tried to flutter away from it, and they fell too, their bright reflections rising toward them in the waters of the lake until they met in a white kiss of steam.

A footfall in the snow behind him made Fishcake look around. The Stalker stood there, watching. “It is the Jenny Haniver,” she whispered calmly. “How sweet of somebody to bring her home…”

The airship settled in marshy ground on the lake’s far shore. As the smoke of its burning spread across the reed beds, Fishcake was almost sure he saw people running away from it. Mr. Natsworthy, he thought, and Hester. And he felt suddenly afraid, because he remembered what he had sworn to do to Hester, and was not sure that he had the courage to do it.

His Stalker’s hand rested on his shoulder. “They are no threat to us,” she whispered. “We will not hurt them.”

But Fishcake gripped the knife inside his jacket and thought about the last time he had seen the Jenny Haniver, flying away without him into the skies of Brighton.

Tom splashed through ankle-deep water and dropped into wet grass, hugging the precious lightning gun. Hester was close behind him, flinging down Pennyroyal. Survivors of the Stalker-bird flock clawed and shrieked around the blazing envelope, still trying to worry it to death. Hester lifted her gun and emptied the last of its grenades into the inferno. The explosion lit up the lake, the slopes and cliffs around it, the lonely house on its island. The Jenny’s rockets went up too, with orange flashes. Then there was only the swirling smoke, and the flames dancing in the smashed birdcage that had been their little airship; twenty years of memories burning away to charcoal and sooty metal. “Tom?” asked Hester.

“Yes,” he said. His chest ached, but not badly. Perhaps being with Hester again had healed his broken heart. He hoped so, because his green pills had been in the Jenny’s stern cabin.

“Our Jenny Haniver,” she said.

“She was only a thing,” said Tom, wiping at his eyes with a singed cuff, looking around. “We’re all right; that’s all that matters. Where’s Grike?”

“He’s gone. He fell. Up there somewhere…” She pointed toward the enormous silence of the mountains.

“Will he come after us?”

Hester shrugged uneasily. “He fell a long way, Tom. He saved me, and he fell. He might be damaged. He might be dead, and there’s no one to bring him back this time.”

“Just us then,” said Tom, and he took her in his arms again, and kissed her. She smelled just as she had on the night they first kissed, of ash and smoke and her own sharp sweat. He loved her very badly, and he was glad they were alone again, in danger and the wilds, where nothing that she had done mattered.

Not quite alone, of course. He had forgotten Pennyroyal, who knelt up in the bog and said in an irritable, gag-muffled voice, “Do you mind?”

Hester pulled away from Tom reluctantly and nodded toward the house. “This must be the place.”

“We’d better get on with it, then.” Tom took the lightning gun from his shoulder and checked it while Hester tied Pennyroyal’s hands and feet again, reknotting the ends of the cords she’d cut earlier.

“You can’t leave me here, bound and helpless!” Pennyroyal complained through his gag.

“We can’t have you running around free,” said Hester. “You’d sell us out to the Stalker for a handful of copper.”

“But what if you don’t come back?”

“Pray we do,” she suggested.

Tom felt unhappy about leaving the old man behind, but he knew she was right. They were already in enough danger, without a Pennyroyal on the loose behind them.

“How are you proposing to get out of this place?” Pennyroyal howled, as they started to leave, but they had no answer to that, so Hester just tied his gag tighter.

It was hard, rocky country, that valley of Erdene Tezh. Hester liked it. She could hear the grass singing, and smell the earth, and it reminded her of Oak Island. She took Tom’s hand, and they walked together through the gloomy light, looking over their shoulders from time to time at the burning brazier that had been the Jenny Haniver. The ground rose in a steep, grassy slope to a docking pan behind a windbreak of pines. The trees made a steady sighing sound as their needles combed the wind. The same wind boomed against the taut silicone-silk envelope of an air yacht. It was locked and abandoned-looking, but knowing it was there made them feel more hopeful. They moved on, dropping down toward the lake again, toward the causeway.

Hester took the lightning gun from Tom. He was breathing hard, sounding winded. “Stay here with the airship,” she said. “Let me go.”

He shook his head. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers; his mouth, warm in the cold. They started together across the causeway. Tom was slow, but she was glad of that, because it meant that she could draw ahead of him, ready to deal with whatever was waiting for them in that house. There was a creaking noise, but when she swung toward it, it was only plates of ice grinding and grating together at the edge of the lake. Farther out, clear water shone gray and still. She looked ahead again, toward the house.

There was someone standing on the causeway.

“Tom!” she yelled, raising the lightning gun. But she didn’t pull the trigger. It was not a Stalker that stood there watching her. Just a child. A pinched white face and shabby clothes and a lot of filthy hair. She took another few steps, and recognized him. How had he come here? But it didn’t matter. She lowered the gun completely and turned to Tom. “It’s Fishcake!”

Running feet behind her. She heard the boy grunt and, turning, saw the knife flash as he slashed it at her throat. She dropped the lightning gun and grabbed his thin wrist, bending the knife away, twisting his arm until he cried out and let it go. She caught it as it fell and stuffed it through her belt, like a stern teacher confiscating a slingshot. She pushed Fishcake away, and he fell down and started to cry.

“Tom,” said a whispering voice from above them. “Hester. How nice of you to drop in.”

The Stalker. She had been standing in the shadows at the causeway’s end where ten worn stone steps led up to a gate. She came carefully down the steps, limping, the gray light shining faintly on her bronze face.

“She’s my Stalker!” shouted Fishcake. “I found her after you left me behind. She’s been good to me. She’s going to help me kill you!”

Hester looked for the lightning gun, but it had fallen down among the rocks at the waterside. She started to scramble down to fetch it, but steel hands caught her, lifting her, dragging her, gripping her face; a metal arm went across her chest, pulling her back hard against an armored breastplate.

“No!” shouted Tom, running for the fallen gun.

“Please don’t be disagreeable, Tom,” whispered the Stalker, “or I shall break her neck. I could do it very easily. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

Tom stopped running. He could not speak. He felt as if someone had jammed a rusty skewer through his left armpit, deep into his chest. Pain ran down his arm, too, and up his neck, along his jaw. He fell to his knees, gasping.

“Poor Tom,” the Stalker said. “Your heart. Poor thing.”

Crouched by her feet, Fishcake watched hungrily. “Kill them!” he shouted in his thin, angry voice. “Her first, then him!”

“They were Anna’s friends, Fishcake,” said the Stalker. “But they left me behind!” sobbed Fishcake. “She murdered ’Mora and Gargle! I swore I’d kill her!”

“They will both die soon enough.”

“But I swore it!”

“No,” whispered the Stalker.

Fishcake shouted something and groped for the knife in Hester’s belt, but the Stalker swiped him aside, so hard that he was thrown right off the causeway, down onto the ice, which starred and moaned beneath him but did not give way. Howling with pain and betrayal, Fishcake crept back to the causeway. Sobbing, slithering over the wet stones, he ran away from the house.

The Stalker Fang let Hester go and stooped over Tom. Her steel hand rested on his chest, and her eyes flared as she sensed the erratic, stumbling beats of his heart. “Poor Tom,” she whispered. “Not long now.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Hester.

“He’s going to die,” said the Stalker.

“He can’t! Oh, he can’t! Please!”

“It doesn’t matter,” whispered the Stalker. “Soon everyone is going to die.”

She lifted Tom in her arms, and Hester followed her as she carried him up the steps and through her frozen garden, into her tomb of a house.

Chapter 49 Newborn

Pell-mell along stack Seven Sluice, the thick air full of the snattering of dynamos and clang of running repairs down in the district. Up rusty rungs that rose forever, trembling with vibrations as the engines came online. Wren exhausted, scared, hurting, each lungful of air a stabbing ache in the strained muscles of her chest and back, and the only thing that drove her on the fact that Theo was with her now. He reached out sometimes to touch her, encouraging her, but they could not speak, for it was too loud in these dank ladderways, these iron throats that filled with hot breath and angry bellowings as the wounded suburb struggled back to life.

They were soon lost. They wanted to go forward and down, but the tubular streets twisted around on themselves and looped blindly about, leading them up and aft instead. At last they emerged onto a catwalk high above some open square at the heart of the engine district, looking down past lighted windows and giant ducts into a space where a hundred fat brass pistons were pumping up and down in sprays of steam, their speed increasing as Theo and Wren leaned over the handrail to watch.

The handrail trembling; the whole suburb lurching forward. “It’s moving!” shouted Wren, but Theo couldn’t hear her, and there was no need to repeat it for it was quite obvious by then that Harrowbarrow was under way again. No time to repeat it anyway, for just then an engine worker in greasy overalls popped up through a hatchway in the catwalk and stared at them, mouth opening wide as he shouted down to his mates below.

Theo and Wren fled and found a spindly ladder leading up through the sousaphone maze of ducts and tubes that coiled above their heads. Condensation fell on them like warm rain as they dragged themselves up under the curve of the suburb’s armor. At the top of the ladder was a hatch; it took both of them to twist the heavy handles and heave it open. Daylight came pouring in, and fresh, cold wind. Wren looked down the ladder and saw flashlights moving on the catwalk below; men gathering to stare at her and point. Then Theo, who was already through the hatch, reached back to pull her up into the open air.

At least I’ll die in daylight, she thought, lying panting on the filthy armored back of Harrowbarrow. A narrow walkway ran along the suburb’s spine, without handrails. On either side of it a few hundred feet of battered armor sloped down to the suburb’s edges, where the tracks ground by, clogged with earth and hunks of rust. Beyond them the spires and spikes of ruined London sped past.

Theo slammed the hatch shut behind them and started to drag Wren away from it ; shouting something about Kobold’s men following them up, but before they had gone very far, the metal around them suddenly erupted in sparks and little spurts of smoke and dust, and she realized they were being machine-gunned—not very accurately, thank Quirke.

Theo flung himself down, half on top of her, as a plump white shape soared above the wreckage to larboard. Through the spray of rust and soil flung up by Harrowbarrow’s tracks Wren saw that it was a rather elderly-looking airship with the markings of the Green Storm, gun turrets swiveling to squirt fire at the racing suburb.

“The Storm are here!” she shouted.

“We’re friends!” Theo yelled. Wren held on to him to save him from being thrown off Harrowbarrow’s back as he waved his arms and shouted, “Help! Help!” But to the aviators in that ship he was just another flea-size shape creeping about on the suburb they’d been ordered to destroy; they swung their guns toward him again, and Wren heard the bullets swishing overhead as she pulled him down beside her.

A few yards from where they lay a circular hatch cover slid open in the suburb’s armor, and a revolving gun emplacement popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It had been built on the turntable of an old fairground carousel from a coastal pleasure town that Harrowbarrow had eaten long ago, and as it spun around and around, cheerful calliope music came from it, along with puffs of gun smoke and streamers of white steam. The barrels of its four long guns recoiled rhythmically into their armored housing as they fired, lacing the sky above the suburb with cannon shells. The airship that had shot at Wren and Theo burst into flames and was left quickly behind as the suburb went thundering on. Overhead, two other ships veered away, envelopes and tail fins filling with ragged holes.

The coming of Harrowbarrow could be heard in the Womb by that time. As the Londoners struggled aboard their new city with whatever possessions they had managed to save, the scrap-metal clangor of the approaching suburb filled the sky outside and echoed around the central hangar.

A Green Storm runner came to find Naga, who was waiting on the open stretch of deck plate at New London’s stern. “Our airships can’t hold her, sir. The Belligerent Peony has just been downed. Only the Fury and the Protecting Veil are left.”

“Pull them clear,” ordered Naga. “Tell the ground troops to get aboard this … machine.” He turned as Lavinia Childermass came running out of the stairwell that led down to her engine districts. “Well, Londoner?”

“We are ready, I think,” the old Engineer said.

“Good. The harvester suburb is nearly upon us. I am going aboard my airship. I shall try to hold it off as long as I can, but it is strong. Best pray that your New London is fast.”

“It is fast,” promised Dr. Childermass as Naga turned away, his stomping armor carrying him toward the boarding ladders up which squads of Green Storm troopers were hurrying. She ran after him, jostled by passing soldiers. “You should stay, General! The birth of a town is a great event!”

Naga turned, and bowed, and hurried on. “Good luck, Engineer!” she heard him shout. She watched him go, thinking how strange it was that he should turn out to be New London’s midwife. Then, remembering her position, she went haring back to her own post. The deck plates were trembling as, one by one, her assistants threw the starting levers of the Childermass engines. By the time she reached her command room in the heart of the underdeck, the faint whine of the repellers had risen to a pitch beyond her hearing, and there was an odd, bobbing movement in the floor. New London was airborne.

She reached for the speaking tube that linked her to the lord mayor’s navigation room, high in the new town hall. “Hello! Ready?”

“Ready,” came Garamond’s voice, muffled and peevish. Lavinia Childermass hung the tube in its cradle and looked at the scared, expectant, grimy faces of her crew. Even down here she could hear the crash and rattle as Harrowbarrow shouldered its way toward her through the debris fields. She nodded, and her people sprang to their controls.

Outside the Womb, Naga watched Harrowbarrow’s scouts scurry aside as the noise of their suburb’s approach grew louder. He fired his pistol at a couple of them, to speed them on their way. The sky above those rust hills west of Crouch End was filling with dust and debris, as if a scrap-metal geyser had erupted there. And suddenly the hills themselves shifted, slithered, bulged and burst apart, and tearing through them came Harrowbarrow’s brutal snout.

The Womb lurched and seemed to settle. At its northern end Peabody’s men had set off their explosive charges, and with a dreamy slowness the tall, corroded doors at the hangar mouth fell forward, crashing down into the rust and rubble outside.

Harrowbarrow ground its way over the ruins of Crouch End, bright rags of curtains and carpet snagging on its clawed tracks. The cruiser Protecting Veil fired a flight of rockets at it and rose out of range before the one remaining swivel gun on Harrowbarrow’s back could swing around to target her. The Fury swooped toward the Womb, and Naga ran forward and leaped aboard as she hovered for a moment just above the ground. By the time his armor had hauled him through the hatch and onto the flight deck, the ship was high again. An aviatrix came running to him with reports, but Naga waved her away, tense as an expectant father. He went to a gun slit and peered down at the mouth of the Womb.

“Come on!” he muttered. “Come on!”

Crouching on Harrowbarrow’s spine, Wren and Theo tried to shield each other as the rust hills broke over the suburb like a wave. Giant fists and fangs of metal came clattering and scraping over the armor, some tumbling high into the air, some caroming over the hull so close that Wren felt the wind of them as they whisked past her. Then they were gone, Crouch End was being crushed beneath the tracks, and ahead, on the crest of the next ridge, the Womb lay waiting. “Look!” she shouted. “Theo! Look!”

From the open doorway of the old hangar New London was emerging, the magnetic mirrors on its flanks shining like sovereigns. It hovered outside the Womb for a moment, dipping a little, uncertain of itself. A newborn city, thought Wren, like something from the olden days, and she wished and wished that her father could be here with her to see it.

Righting itself, New London started to move, the heat haze shimmer beneath its hull increasing as it put on speed, hovering away northward across the debris field. And Harrowbarrow swung northward too, the jolt of its snarling engines throwing Wren off her balance as it began powering in pursuit of the new city. She sprawled awkwardly backward, afraid for a moment that she would roll down the slope into the endlessly grinding teeth of the suburb’s tracks, but she managed to find a handhold. As she clawed her way back to Theo, she saw the hatch they had come through heave open again and Wolf Kobold climb out.

He looked pleased to see them, but not in a good way.

Chapter 50 The Stalker’s House

There were some blue squares. Dusty blue, against a background of black. Tom, who had not expected to wake at all, woke slowly, from half-remembered dreams. The squares were sky, showing through holes in a crumbling roof. The clouds had cleared; there was a patch of evening sunlight coming and going on the mildewed wall. He lay on something soft, and there were smells of must and damp around him. His hands and feet felt miles away; his head was too heavy to lift; someone had crammed a big, square slab of stone inside his chest. Faint jabs of pins and needles in his limbs let him know that he was still alive.

“Tom?” A whisper. He moved his head. Hester bent over him. “Tom, my dearest … you blacked out. The Stalker said it was your heart. She said you were dying, but I knew you wouldn’t—”

“The Stalker …” Tom began to understand where he was. The Stalker Fang had scooped him up and taken him inside with her. She had laid him on a bed; an old, worm-eaten, weed-grown bed whose draperies had been nibbled thin by moths, but still a bed; the place you put someone you meant to take care of.

“She let us live,” he said.

Hester nodded. “She’s tied my hands and feet, but not yours. She didn’t bother with yours. If you can reach the knife in my belt…”

She fell silent as the Stalker Fang limped into the room and sat down on the end of the bed, watching Tom with her cold green eyes.

“Anna?” he asked weakly.

“I am not Anna,” whispered the Stalker. “Just a bundle of Anna’s memories. But I’m pleased you’re here, Tom. Anna was very fond of you. You are her very last memory. Lying in the snow, and you looking down and calling her name.”

“I remember,” said Tom faintly. “I thought she was already dead.”

“Nearly,” whispered the Stalker. “Not quite. You’ll understand. Soon you’ll make the same journey.”

“But I’m not ready.”

“Nor was Anna. Perhaps no one ever is.”

Behind her, through the open doorway, Tom could see a room stuffed with machines; lights and screens and bits of equipment too complicated for his tired, shocked brain to fathom. He said, “ODIN …”

“I talk to it from here.”

“Why did you turn it on your own people?”

The Stalker watched him with her head tipped a little to one side. “An overture, before the symphony begins,” she whispered. “By attacking both sides, I made each think the other was to blame; they will be too busy with each other to come looking for me, and that will give me the time I need.”

“To do what?”

“I have been preparing a sequence of commands, a long and complicated sequence. I shall begin transmitting them soon, when ODIN comes clear of the mountains again. They will divert it onto new orbits, give it new targets to strike at.”

“What targets?”

“Volcanoes,” said the Stalker. She reached out gently and stroked Tom’s hair. “Tonight ODIN will strike at forty points along the Tannhäuser chain. Then on across the world: the Deccan volcano maze; the Hundred Islands…”

“But why?” asked Hester. “Why volcanoes?”

“I am making the world green again.”

“What,” cried Tom, “by smothering it in smoke and ash, and killing thousands of people?”

“Millions of people. Don’t get excited, Tom; your poor heart might not take it, and I am so looking forward to having someone sensible to talk to.”

“And what about me?” asked Hester, as if she were afraid the Stalker was trying to steal Tom away from her.

“As long as you don’t try to be foolish or destructive, you are safe. I suppose you will starve in a week or so—there is no food left here. But until then I shall enjoy your company. Anna always felt our destinies were linked, from that first night aboard Stayns…”

The Stalker stopped talking and looked behind her, where a light had begun to flash among the thickets of cabling in the next room; red, red, red.

“No rest for the wicked,” she whispered.

Outside, Fishcake blundered sobbing along the lakeshore. His Stalker had hit him. She could have killed him. She had cast him out. She didn’t care about little Fishcake anymore. She had never cared, not really. He sniveled and whimpered, stumbling over rocks and shingle until he missed his footing and splashed into the shallows. The cold water startled him into silence.

Away across the water the furnace that had been the Jenny Haniver was dying down into a comforting red bonfire. Fishcake tramped along the curve of the shoreline to the wreck site. There was nothing left of the airship now but struts and ribs and one buckled, glowing engine pod, but the explosion had showered the contents of her holds across the reed beds, and amid the debris Fishcake found a few food cans. Their labels were burned off, of course, but they made encouraging sloshing noises when he shook them, and one of them (Tricky Dicky be praised!) was a square tin of fish— sardines, or pilchards—with a key fixed to the lid. Fishcake twisted it open and ate greedily, scooping the fish and the delicious, salty juice into his mouth.

He felt better with some food inside him and started to nose around among the reeds for other scraps. It wasn’t long before he heard the plaintive noises coming from among the rocks uphill. “Mmmmm! Mmmmm!”

Fishcake crept closer, thinking that Tom and Hester must have had a companion aboard their ship who’d been wounded in the crash and whom they’d abandoned (how like them!). But when he reached the place, he found it was a poor old man, trussed up and gagged; another of Tom and Hester’s victims.

“Great Poskitt!” the man gasped when Fishcake pulled the gag off, and “Brave boy! Thank you!” as Fishcake used the sharp edge of the sardine tin to saw through his ropes.

“They’re inside,” said Fishcake.

“Who?”

“Hester and her man. The Stalker took ’em inside. Says they’re her friends. How could anybody think Hester was her friend? That face—enough to put you off your breakfast. If you’d had any breakfast. I haven’t had none for weeks. Help me open this tin, Mister.”

He was asking the right man, said Pennyroyal, and as soon as the ropes parted, he reached inside his coat and fetched out an explorer’s pocketknife, a miraculous object that unfolded to reveal a can opener, a corkscrew, a small pair of scissors, and a device for getting stones out of airship docking clamps, as well as an array of blades that made brisk work of the ropes on his feet. It occurred to Fishcake to wonder why he had not mentioned the existence of the knife before Fishcake went to the trouble of cutting his hands free with a sardine tin, but he wanted to like his new friend, so he decided he was probably concussed. There were some gashes on his head, and blood had run down his face like jam. (Fishcake was still much preoccupied with thoughts of food.)

They opened three tins. There was algae stew in one, rice pudding in another, and condensed milk in the third. It was the best meal Fishcake had ever tasted.

“I say,” ventured Pennyroyal, watching him eat. “You seem a bright lad. Would you know a way out of here, at all?”

“Popjoy’s sky yacht,” muttered Fishcake, wiping milk from his chin. “Over there near the house. I don’t know how to fly it.”

“I do! Could we snaffle it, do you think?”

Fishcake licked the lid of the rice pudding tin and shook his head. “Need keys. Can’t start the engines without keys, and you’d need engines among all these mountains, wouldn’t you?”

Pennyroyal nodded. “Where are the keys? Just out of interest?”

“She’s got them. Around her neck. On a string. But I’m not going up there again. Not after what she did! After all I went through for her!”

The boy started to cry. Pennyroyal was unused to children. He patted his shoulder and said, “There, there,” and “That’s women for you!” He thought about keys and air yachts and glanced nervously at the house on the crag. Some sort of antenna thing on the roof was turning, glinting blood-red in the rays of the sinking sun.

Ten miles away, in frozen silt on the bed of a mountain lake, Grike stirred. His eyes switched on, lighting up constellations of drifting matter. He remembered falling. He had fallen past crags and cliffs, and punched through the crust of ice on this lake, leaving an amusing hole the shape of a spread-eagled man. He could not see the hole above him, so he guessed the lake was deep, and that night was falling in the world above.

He pried himself out of the silt and started walking. The water grew shallower as he neared the shore. Thick ice formed a rippled ceiling twenty feet overhead, then ten. Soon he was able to reach up with his fists and punch his way through it. He dragged himself free, an ugly hatchling breaking out of a cold egg.

The moon was rising. Shards of the Jenny Haniver’s fallen engine pod shone on the scree high above him. He climbed toward it, sniffing for Hester’s scent.

Chapter 51 The Chase

The Londoners had always imagined themselves leaving the debris fields in a leisurely way, perhaps moving at no more than walking speed until they grew used to New London’s controls. Instead, here they were, barreling north through the wreck of old London as fast as the new city could go, slaloming around tumbles of old tier supports and giant, corroded heaps of tracks and wheels. Down in the engine rooms the Engineers heaved desperately on the levers that angled the Magnetic Repellers, while up in the steering chamber at the top of the town hall Mr. Garamond and his navigators peered out through unglazed, unfinished viewing windows and shouted to the helmsmen, “Left a bit! Right a bit! Right a bit! Oh, I mean, left, left, LEFT!”

Harrowbarrow raced after them, only half a mile behind, steam fuming from its blunt snout as it readied its mouth parts for the kill. It did not have to swerve and wriggle as New London did; tall heaps of wreckage that the new city had to avoid Harrowbarrow simply butted its way through. The constant crunch and shudder of these collisions kept threatening to jolt Wren and Theo off the precarious handholds they were clinging to, high on the harvester’s spine. But Wolf Kobold, who was well used to his suburb’s movements, never lost his footing, and barely paused as he came toward them, except to glance sometimes at the view ahead, and grin when he saw the gap narrowing between Harrowbarrow and its prey.

“You see?” he shouted. “It was all for nothing, Wren! Another ten minutes and that precious place of yours will be in the ’Barrow’s gut. And you; you and your black boyfriend—I’m going to string your bowels off the yard roof like paper chains, and nail up your carcasses in the slave hold so your London friends can see what comes to those who try to make a fool of me!”

He was close enough by then to swipe at them with his sword. They scrambled backward, away from him. The swiveling gun emplacement behind them let out another stuttering roar as a white airship soared past astern, but Kobold only laughed. “Don’t think the Mossies can save you! They won’t dare come in range of that gun.”

He lunged forward, and the point of his sword struck sparks from the suburb’s armor inches from Theo’s foot. Theo looked at Wren. Near her, where one of the chunky rivets that held Harrowbarrow’s armor in place stood slightly proud of the plating, a shard of wreckage had snagged. Theo threw himself down and pulled it free. It was an old length of half-inch pipe, rusty and sharp at the ends. It was too long and heavy to use for a sword, but Theo had nothing better, so he turned with a cry, swinging it at Kobold. Kobold jumped back, raising his blade to deflect the blow. He looked surprised; even pleased. “That’s the spirit!” he shouted.

Aboard the Fury, Naga said, “We have to silence that swivel gun. There is no other way we can get within range…”

“Sir!” one of his aviators interrupted. “On the suburb’s back—”

Naga swung his telescope along the wood-louse curve of Harrowbarrow’s spine. Twenty yards behind the gun emplacement two figures seemed to be dancing—no, fighting; he saw the flash of sparks as their swords met. “One of our men?”

“Can’t tell, sir. But if we fire on the gun, we may kill whoever it is…”

“That can’t be helped, Commander. Let their gods look after them; we have work to do.”

A flight of rockets sprang from the airship, and Wren ducked as one sizzled past her, close enough for her to glimpse the snarling dragon face painted on its nose cone and the Chinese characters chalked along its flank. It burst on the armor close to the gun turret, but not close enough to do more than rattle shrapnel against it. The other rockets went wide, exploding harmlessly on spikes of wreckage. Harrowbarrow was speeding through a region where long, jagged shards from London’s upper tiers lay heaped on top of one another, forming a lattice through which the westering sun poked its unhealthy crimson beams. Clinging to the armor with both hands, Wren looked up at the sharp spines flicking past. It was like rushing through an enormous, untidy cutlery drawer. If we run ourselves upon one of those, she thought, it will put an end to all our problems…

The blades did not seem to trouble Wolf Kobold. He waved his sword, shouting something to the gun crew, and the gun turned with a swirl of fairground music and filled the air astern with black puffballs, so that the airship yawed hastily and vanished for a while behind the wreckage. Then he renewed his attack on Theo, more earnest and less playful now, as if Wren and her boyfriend were a distraction he wanted to be rid of before the serious business began.

Theo did his best, grunting and shouting out with effort as he swung the rusty pipe to and fro, trying to parry Wolf’s blows, but he was no swordsman, and he found it harder than Wolf to keep his footing on the lurching, lumbering armor. After little more than a minute, during which Theo was driven steadily back toward the housing of the swivel gun, Wolf made a sudden feint, and Theo, lurching sideways to avoid his blade, lost his footing. He fell awkwardly, his head cracking against the armor underfoot. The pipe flew out of his sweaty hands. Wren caught it as it clattered past her. Wolf was already standing over Theo, sword raised to finish him.

She threw herself forward, not knowing what she meant to do, just determined that Wolf should not have it all his own way. She heard somebody scream, and it was her; a hard, ragged scream of terror and rage and panic that seemed to give her the strength she needed as she swung the pipe to fend off Wolf’s descending sword.

More sparks; a shock that jarred her arms in their sockets. For a comical moment Wolf stood amazed, staring at the sword hilt in his hand, the blade broken off halfway along its length. He looked at Wren. He shrugged and threw the broken sword away. He flipped his coat open and pulled a shiny new revolver from its holster.

Despite all the noise, the relentless speed, it seemed to grow very quiet and still on the back of Harrowbarrow in those last moments. Even the swivel gun had stopped firing. When Wren glanced around in the hope of spotting some miraculous escape, she saw the gunners gawping at her out of their little window.

“Good-bye, Wren,” said Wolf.

He hadn’t noticed that persistent white airship swinging into range again above his suburb’s stern. The rockets tore past him as he pulled the trigger, and the shot he fired went wide, flicking through Wren’s hair without touching her. The shock wave from the exploding swivel gun kicked him backward; he struggled to save himself, slipped, fell forward, and the sharp end of the pipe that Wren was still clutching went through him just beneath his breastbone. The impact knocked her down, and the other end of the pipe wedged against a seam in the armor, driving it clean through Wolf’s body.

“Oh!” he shouted, looking down at it.

“I’m sorry,” said Wren.

Wolf raised his head and stared at her. His eyes were very blue and wide, and oddly innocent. He looked as if he were about to cry. When Wren pulled at the pipe, with some idea of tugging it out of him, he lurched sideways, pipe and all, and went tumbling away from her like a broken doll down the long slope of the suburb’s flank until he hit the tracks.

Later she would pray that he had been dead by the time those sliding slabs of machinery caught him. She would tell herself that it had not been his screams she heard as he was snatched and mangled and plowed down into the earth, only the shrieking of stressed metal somewhere, some shard of long-dead London crying out as Harrowbarrow ground over it.

But by then they were on the outer edge of the debris field. A wide plain stretched ahead of them, empty as an ocean—except for the lights of New London, which was a quarter mile ahead and racing northward, crossing open country now, the wreck of its mother city left behind it like a sloughed-off skin.

“Girl!” someone was shouting, and in her shocked state Wren could not work out who it was; not Wolf, for sure; not his gunners, who had vanished with their swiveling turret; not Theo, who was struggling to his feet, his face streaked with blood from where he’d struck his head. She looked up. The Storm’s white ship hung low above her, keeping pace with her by some miracle of stunt flying that only an aviator could properly appreciate. Reaching down to her from a hatch in the gondola was something that she took at first to be a Stalker, until he shouted again, “Girl!” and beckoned irritably for her to take his hand, and she recognized General Naga.

The Fury’s gondola smelled of gun smoke and air fuel. Naga strode around issuing orders to his aviators, glancing at Wren just long enough to say, “You are Londoners? Captured by the harvester?”

Wren just nodded, clinging tight to Theo and finding it hard to believe that they were both still alive. It did not seem like the moment to try and explain that she and General Naga had met before. She could not stop shaking, or thinking about Wolf Kobold. As the Fury veered away from Harrowbarrow and flew toward New London, she let Theo go and went to crouch in a corner, where she was sick till her stomach was empty.

They touched down on New London’s stern, where a crowd of Londoners and Green Storm soldiers were waiting. “Wren!” cried Angie happily, waving, forgetting that Wren had ever been a suspected spy.

“Miss Natsworthy! Mr. Ngoni! Thank Quirke you’re safe!” shouted Mr. Garamond, helping them from the gondola. No thanks to you, Wren felt like saying, but then she realized that he already knew that, and that his clumsy hug was his way of saying sorry, and she hugged him back.

The new city had a curious feel; there were none of the tremors and half-muffled shocks and lurches that you felt aboard a Traction City, just a sense of dreamlike movement, and of speed. But perhaps not quite enough speed, for Harrowbarrow filled the view astern, its mouthparts opening to reveal a hot gleam of furnaces and factories inside.

“You’d have thought they’d stop when Kobold died,” said Theo.

“They don’t know,” Wren replied. “Or maybe they do, and they don’t care. Mr. Hausdorfer and the others can handle a simple chase without their master. Harrowbarrow never cared about Wolf the way Wolf cared about Harrowbarrow.”

She didn’t want to talk about Wolf. The way he had looked at her when he’d realized she’d killed him would stay with her always. She tried to tell herself that it was good she felt so guilty and so soiled by what she’d done. Better that than to be like her mother, and not care. But it did not feel good.

She took Theo’s hand, and together they went to stand among the other Londoners at the stern rail. Behind them, Naga was giving orders to his surviving officers, telling Subgeneral Thien, “You will return to Batmunkh Gompa with the Protecting Veil. My wife believes that the Stalker Fang controls the new terror weapon. Help her find it and destroy it.”

“Yes, Excellency…”

“And New London is to be granted safe passage through our territories.”

“Yes, Excellency…”

“Now I want everybody off the Fury before I take her up.”

“But Excellency, you cannot fly alone!”

“Why not? I flew alone at Xanne-Sandansky and Khamchatka. I flew alone against Panzerstadt Breslau. I should be able to handle a filthy little barbarian harvester like this.”

Thien understood; he bowed and saluted and started shouting orders. Wren, looking round to see what all the excitement was about, saw the Fury’s crew jumping down onto the deck plates, saw Naga heaving himself aboard. She looked away. What was happening astern was far more interesting than anything the Storm could do. She barely noticed when the Fury took off again.

Harrowbarrow was driving toward them through sprays of wet earth. Its armor was holed, there were fires on its upper decks, and one of its tracks was grinding, but Hausdorfer didn’t care. He’d been skeptical about this place his master had brought them so far to eat, but now he’d seen it move, seen it fly, he understood what young Kobold had been on about. “More power!” he screamed into his speaking tubes. “Open the jaws! They are defenseless! They are ours!”

Naga turned the Fury toward the oncoming suburb and took her down almost to ground level. She was a good ship; he enjoyed the way she answered to his touch on the wheels and levers, and the purr of her powerful engines when he switched them to ramming speed. As Harrowbarrow’s jaws opened, he aimed straight at the red glow of the furnaces in her dismantling yards.

When the Harrowbarrovians started to understand what he was planning, guns began firing from inside the jaws, shattering glass in the gondola windows, starting fires.

A shell from a hand cannon punched through Naga’s breastplate, but his armor kept him upright, and his mechanized gauntlets gripped the helm, keeping the blazing ship on course. The suburb was closing its jaws, but not quickly enough. Naga fired all the Fury’s remaining rockets, and watched them streak ahead of him into its maw. “Oenone,” he said, and her name, and the thought of her, went with him into the light.

The blast was brief; a sunflower blossoming in the dusk, stuffed with shrapnel seeds. There was a blunt, muffled boom and then other sounds; thuds and squelches as large fragments of wreckage rained down into the Out-Country. Aboard New London no one cheered. Even the soldiers of the Storm, who had grown up singing jolly songs about the destruction of whole cities, looked appalled. One or two small pieces of debris landed on the deck, plinking like dropped coins. Wren stooped to pick up one that fell near her. It was a rivet head from Harrowbarrow’s hull, still warm with the heat of the explosion. She put it in her pocket, thinking that it would make a good exhibit for the New London Museum.

What was left of Harrowbarrow—the broken stern section, half filled with fires—settled into the Out-Country mud. It would be part of the landscape soon, like old London. The survivors, stumbling clear, stared about in bewilderment. Some looked toward the debris fields that filled the southern horizon, wondering what sort of life they would be able to make there. Others ran after New London, shouting out for help, begging their fellow Tractionists not to leave them here defenseless in the lands of the Storm. But New London was beyond earshot, pulling away from them quickly across the vast, dark plain, smaller and smaller, until it was only a fleck, a gleam of amber windows dwindling in that enormous twilight.

Chapter 52 Last Words

The Stalker Fang limped around her chamber. Her bronze face was lit by the winking lights on the heap of machinery by the green numbers that flicked and squiggled on her Goggle Screens. Through the open doorway Tom and Hester watched, and each time her eyes were turned away from him, Tom made another little movement, easing himself closer to Hester, until he was able to reach out and touch the knife in her belt.

“Not long now,” the Stalker whispered, glad of this audience to whom she could explain her work.

Tom was thinking of Wren, hoping that New London would go nowhere near the Tannhäusers or any of the other mountains ODIN was to target. “Why volcanoes?” he asked. “I still don’t see how that can make the world green…”

The Stalker’s fingers spidered over ivory keyboards. “You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn’t only Traction Cities that poison the air and tear up the Earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It’s human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys. The Green Storm would never have understood that, which is why I didn’t tell them about my plans for ODIN. If we are really to protect the good Earth, we must first cleanse it of human beings.”

“That’s insane!” cried Tom.

“Inhuman, perhaps,” the Stalker admitted. “The ash of volcanoes will choke the sky and shroud the Earth in darkness. Winter will reign for hundreds of years. Mankind will perish. But life will survive. Life always does. When the skies clear at last, the world will grow green again. Lichens, ferns, grasses, forests, insects; higher animals eventually. But no more people. They only spoil things.”

“Anna would not want that,” said Tom.

“I am not Anna. I just use her memories to understand the world. And I understand that humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys that the good Earth cannot support. All human civilizations fall, Tom, and all for the same reason: Humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever.”

Tom struggled to rise, wondering if he could reach the machine, smash it, and pull out all those complicated cords and ducts. The Stalker Fang seemed to read his thoughts; the long blades slid out of her fingertips.

“Do be sensible, Tom,” she whispered. “You’re very ill, and I’m a Stalker. You’d never make it, and Hester wants you to stay alive for as long as you can. She loves you very much, you know.”

She moved behind her pile of machinery, making some adjustment to the cables that trailed up through the ceiling to the antenna on the roof. Tom tugged the knife out of Hester’s belt, and she fumbled it from him and clasped it between her hands, sawing awkwardly at the old ropes the Stalker had used to tie her wrists.

As he crept across the causeway, Pennyroyal tried to keep calm by imagining how he would describe all these adventures to his enthralled readership. Caution urged that I should stay away from that dreadful house, hut the fate of whole cities hung in the balance, and my poor companions were prisoners within. I knew that to run would leave an irredeemable blot on the honor of the Pennyroyals! (And I do need that key, Poskitt-damn-it!) My faithful native companion, Fishcake (can that be his real name?), led me to the end of the fatal causeway and would go no farther. I would not have allowed it anyway, for I could never let one so young risk his life in mortal combat with the Stalker. (Stalkeress? Stalkerine? Gods, I hope it doesn’t come to actual combat! I wish that lad had had the nerve to come instead of me; the beastly little coward…) It was a little unsettling, I confess, but as I went on alone through the gathering darkness, I began to feel curiously nerveless. I have found myself in a lot of dicey situations over the years, and what I’ve learned is that it’s always best to remain cool, collected, and— GREAT POSKITT’S HAIRY ARSE WHAT’S THAT?

Only an owl!

Only an owl…

Shuddering, Pennyroyal took a nip of brandy from his secret hip flask and started hunting along the water’s edge for Tom’s anti-Stalker gun. The boy had said that Hester had dropped it here somewhere. Pennyroyal didn’t mean to go any closer to that damned house without it. Ah! There it was. Still humming. Looked undamaged. A dashed odd-looking weapon, but they don’t call me Dead-eye Pennyroyal for nothing! Setting the stock of the strange gun firmly against my shoulder (is that where it’s supposed to go?), I resumed my catlike progress…

The Stalker Fang was busy with her machinery. From time to time the words and numbers crawling across the Goggle Screen were replaced with a furry, grayish picture. Tom realized that he was seeing what no human being had seen for millennia: the world from space, viewed through the eye of ODIN. Oddly, it was not very impressive.

Could ODIN really destroy humanity? Surely it would break, or run out of power, or something in that crazy stack of old machinery that the Stalker was using to talk to it would go wrong, and that would be the end of her plans. It made him angry that he and Hester had come so far and sacrificed so much to avert such a tatty effort. At least MEDUSA had looked worth dying for; its entrails had filled a cathedral, and its cobra hood had towered over London. This new weapon was just space junk, controlled by a mad old Stalker from a place that looked and smelled like a teenager’s bedroom…

Beside him, Hester gave a little grunt of triumph as the knife severed the rope on her wrists. She stooped to start work on the one that bound her ankles.

The Stalker Fang was talking to ODIN again, tapping at her ivory keys, whispering the codes to herself as she conducted her bargain-basement apocalypse. Sometimes she whispered something to Tom and Hester too: “Just think, my dears—all that pretty lava …” Anna Fang had liked having someone to talk to, and the Stalker she had become had inherited the taste. When Hester whispered, “Now!” and Tom rolled off the bed and stood up, she said, “Where are you going?”

“Come on!” hissed Hester, her arm around him, supporting him, dragging him toward the nearest window. She hadn’t Tom’s education, and she hadn’t really followed the Stalker’s rambling talk. All she cared about was saving Tom. She refused to believe that there was no hope at all.

But Tom knew there was little point in trying to outrun the Stalker Fang, who turned and came toward them as they neared the window. He twisted around to face her. Hester was still trying to drag him to the window, but Tom shook free of her. He had come to Shan Guo to talk, not to fight; if Naga wouldn’t listen to him, perhaps this Stalker might. I am not Anna, she had said, just a bundle of Anna’s memories… But what was anyone but a bundle of memories?

Tom reached out to her. “We can’t stay,” he said. “We have a daughter. She’ll need us.”

The Stalker’s eyes flickered. “A daughter …”

“Her name’s Wren.”

“A daughter …” She clapped her hands together with a clang. “Tom, Hester … How wonderful! When I, when Anna first saw you together, she, I knew you were meant for each other! And now you have a baby girl.”

“She’s not a baby girl anymore,” said Hester. “She’s a great big stroppy young woman.”

“We brought her up,” said Tom, “we kept her safe; we taught her things; she learned to fly the Jenny Haniver… And now you want to kill her along with everybody else.”

The Stalker shrugged—an odd movement for a Stalker; it made her armor grate. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette, Tom. Or is it the other way around? Where is she, this daughter of yours?”

“In London,” said Tom. “In the wreck of London. The people there are building a new city, a floating city…” He wished now that he had paid more attention to Dr. Childermass’s technical explanations. “It doesn’t claw up the ground, it doesn’t eat other cities, it doesn’t even use up much fuel. Why can’t it have a place in your green world? Why can’t Wren?”

The Stalker hissed and turned away, going back to her machines.

Tom stumbled after her, and Hester, who had resigned herself to listening to the two of them chat, went with him.

The Stalker’s fingers were rattling at her keyboards again. The gray image on the central screen changed, from a view of Zhan Shan’s blazing wound to a more distant panorama of the clouded limb of the Earth. Then it began to close in again, the machinery behind the screen wheezing and clicking, the images flicking past like shuffled cards. A charcoal-gray patch expanded to become the wreck of London, then filled the screen. Tom recognized Putney Vale and the Womb as ODIN’s gaze slid eastward, then north.

“Nothing moving …,” whispered the Stalker. “What are those bright patches?” asked Tom. “Those are burning airships.”

“What?” Tom stared as more specks of white fire slid past; then, just off the northern edge of the wreck, a burning sprawl like a hole torn in the screen. What had happened in the debris fields since he’d been gone? What had happened to Wren? His heart clenched into a fist and began to batter at his ribs.

“Ah!” hissed the Stalker. “That must be your floating city…”

She was quicker at reading the grainy pictures than Tom. It took him a moment to understand that he was looking down at New London. It was well outside the debris fields, moving north. And still the machinery whirred and nattered and the image on the screen kept flicking, changing, pulling closer and closer to the new city until he could make out people milling about on its stern. Dozens of people, lining the handrails, staring back toward the debris fields as New London bore them safe away. And he could make out faces now, the faces of his friends: Clytie and her husband, Mr. Garamond laughing for once, looking happy—and there was Wren, disheveled, smeared with what looked like soot, but Wren for sure; he cried out as her face slipped across the screen, and the Stalker swung ODIN’s gaze to focus on her, still zooming in and in.

“It’s Wren! She’s all right!”

Tom felt Hester’s hands tighten on his arm as she watched their daughter’s face swim up toward them out of the gray fuzz of the picture. “Wren,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky. “What’s she done to her hair? It’s all lopsided… And there, behind her, look! It’s Theo!”

ODIN zoomed again, and there was nothing on the screen except their daughter’s face. Tom went closer, pushing past the Stalker Fang, reaching out to touch the glass. At such close range the image started to grow vague; Wren’s face broke down into lines and specks and flares of light; this smudge of shadow an eye, that white smear her nose. He traced with his hands the curve of her cheek, wishing he could push through the screen somehow and touch her, speak to her. Surely she must be able to feel him watching her? But she only smiled and turned her head to say something to the boy behind her. Tom felt as if he were already a ghost.

The Stalker hissed like a kettle coming slowly to the boil. “Please don’t hurt her,” said Tom.

“She will die,” the Stalker whispered. “They will all die. For the good of the Earth. Your child will have a few years more, if she is lucky…”

“And what use will a few more years be if she’s starving and scared, watching the sky fill with ash?” asked Tom. He took another step toward the Stalker, excited by a sense that he was getting through to her, or to some weird, mechanized remnant of Anna Fang that nested within her. “Wren deserves to live a long time, in peace, and have children of her own, and see their children…”

“Sentimentality!” the Stalker sneered. “The life of a single child means nothing, compared with the future of all life.”

“But she is the future!” Tom cried. “Look at her! At her and Theo—”

“It is for the good of the Earth,” the Stalker repeated coldly. “They will all die.”

“You don’t believe that,” Tom insisted. “The Anna bit of you doesn’t. Anna cared about people. You cared about me and Hester enough to rescue us. Anna, don’t use the machine. Switch it off. Break it. Smash ODIN.”

He crumpled at the knees and would have fallen if Hester had not supported him. The Stalker was hissing angrily. Hester, thinking that she was about to attack, pulled Tom backward and turned so that her own body was between them. But the creature had swung away, flailing with one hand at its own skull. “Where is Popjoy?”

“Dead,” said Hester grimly. “You killed him. It’s the talk of Batmunkh Gompa.”

“Sathya, I…,” the Stalker said. “They must be exterminated. It is for the good of… Tom, Tom, Hester…”

That bony sound again; steel fingers on ivory keys. Green letters flicking up. “What is she doing?” asked Hester, afraid that the maddened Stalker was telling ODIN to drop fire on New London. Tom shook his head, as lost as her. The Stalker paused, studied a ribbon of green light that scrolled down another of her screens, typed again, hit a final key, and turned to them. She was trembling; a quick, mechanical vibration, like an engine pod on full power. Her marsh-gas eyes flared and flickered. She reached out to her guests with her long, shining hands.

“What have you done?” asked Tom.

“I have … she has … we have …”

From the far side of the room, through another doorway, they heard a crunch and slither of feet on broken tiles. The Stalker spun to face the noises, her finger-glaives sliding out, and Pennyroyal shouted out in terror as he stepped into the chamber and her green eyes lit up his face. He was holding the lightning gun in front of him, and as the Stalker tensed to spring at him, he squeezed the trigger. A vein of fire opened in the air, juddering between the gun’s blunt muzzle and the Stalker’s chest. The Stalker hissed and bared her claws, and Pennyroyal backed away from her wailing, “Argh! Poskitt! Please! Spare me! Help! Stay away!” and never taking his fingers off the trigger. The Stalker’s robes began to burn. Lightning was crawling across her calm bronze face, St. Elmo’s fire pouring from her finger-glaives. She fell heavily against the ODIN machinery, and the lightning wrapped that too. Stalker brains and Goggle Screens exploded, broken keyboards sent anagrams of ivory keys rattling across the floor like punched-out teeth, flames ran up the cables and set fire to the ceiling, and still Pennyroyal kept firing, and shouting, and firing, until the gun faltered and failed.

After a while, when they had started to grow used to the silence, he said, “I did it! I killed it! Me! You wouldn’t have a camera about you, I suppose?”

The Stalker Fang lay on her pyre of machinery. Tom waved away the smoke and went closer, watching her cautiously. Things were on fire inside her; he could smell the gamey stench, and see the firelight flicker beneath her armor. Her bronze mask had come off, baring the gray face beneath, shriveled and grinning. Tom tried not to feel disgusted as he looked at it; after all, he would soon be taking the same journey himself.

The dead mouth moved. “Tom,” sighed the Stalker. “Tom.”

Nothing more. The green glow in those headlamp eyes died to a pinprick, and went out.

Pennyroyal was staring at the spent gun in his hands, as if wondering how it came to be there. He dropped it and said, “There’s an air yacht moored down below. The keys are around that thing’s neck.”

It never occurred to Tom to ask him how he knew. He reached out and took the keys. They came away easily, for the cord they were threaded on had almost burned through.

“She is dead this time, isn’t she?” asked Pennyroyal nervously.

Tom nodded. “She’s been dead a long time. Poor Anna.” And then the pain came in his chest again and he couldn’t speak; he doubled over, groaning, while Hester clung to him and tried to soothe him.

“I say!” said Pennyroyal. “Is he all right?”

“His heart…” Hester’s voice was tiny, trembly; she’d not felt as helpless or as scared as this since she was a little girl watching her mother die. “Don’t die, Tom.” She groveled on the floor with him, holding him as tight as she could. “Don’t leave me, I don’t want to lose you again…” She looked up through her tears at Pennyroyal. “What shall we do?”

Pennyroyal looked as scared as she did. Then he said, “Doctor. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”

“No use,” said Tom weakly. The worst of the pain had passed, leaving him white and frightened, shining with sweat in the light of the rising flames. He shook his head and said, “I saw a doctor in Peripatetiapolis, and he said it was hopeless…”

“Oh, oh …,” wept Hester.

“Great Poskitt!” cried Pennyroyal. “If this doctor of yours had been any good, he’d hardly have been working in a little place like Peripatetiapolis, would he? Come on, we’ll find you the best medicos money and fame can buy. I’m not having you die on me, Tom; you and Hester are the only witnesses I have to the fact that I’ve just killed the Stalker Fang! Wait until the world hears about this! I’ll be back at the top of the best-seller lists in a flash!” He held out his hand. “Give me the key. He’ll never make it across the causeway. I’ll bring the sky yacht down in the garden.”

Hester glowered at him.

“Well, all right,” said Pennyroyal, “you go and fetch the yacht, and I’ll stay here with Tom.”

“Please stay, Het,” Tom said weakly.

Hester passed the key to Pennyroyal, who said, “Hold on, Tom. Back in a jiffy. You might want to wait outside,” he added as he hurried away. “This building’s on fire.”

Carefully Hester began to drag Tom after him, along the villa’s moldering halls and out into the cold of the garden. They heard Pennyroyal’s footsteps crunching off along the causeway, then silence, broken only by the rush of the flames inside the house. Firelight lapped across the gardens, gleaming on frosted grass and the ice-hung branches of bare trees. Beside a frozen fountain Hester laid Tom down, pulling off her coat to make a pillow for him. “We’re going to get you to Batmunkh Gompa,” she promised. “Oenone will sort you out. She’s a brilliant surgeon; saved Theo’s life; mine, too, probably. She’ll make you well again.” She held his face between her hands. “You’re not to die,” she said. “I don’t ever want to be parted from you again—I couldn’t bear it. You’re going to be well. We’ll take the bird roads again.”

“Look!” said Tom.

Above the mountains a new star had appeared. It was very bright, and it seemed to be growing larger. Tom managed to stand, walking a few paces away from the fountain for a better view.

“Tom, be careful… What is it?”

He looked back at her, his eyes shining. “It’s ODIN! It must have … blown up! That’s what she was doing, before Pennyroyal appeared. She ordered it to destroy itself…”

The new star twinkled like a Quirkemas decoration and then began to fade. At the same instant the roof of the house collapsed with a roar and a rush of sparks, and a spear of pain went through Tom’s side, so much worse than before that even as he fell, he knew this was the end of him.

Hester ran to him, her arms around him; he heard her screaming at the top of her lungs, “Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal!”

Pennyroyal reached the docking pan and saw the boy creep out of the pines to meet him. Even here the ground was lit by the glow of the fire on the island; the sky yacht’s silvery envelope shone cheerfully with orange reflections. Pennyroyal waved the key as he hurried toward it. “Nothing to fear now, young Fishpaste! I sorted your Stalker out. All it took was a bit of good old-fashioned pluck.”

He unlocked the gondola and climbed inside, the boy following. The yacht was a Serapis Sunbeam, rather like the one Pennyroyal had owned in Brighton. He squeezed into the pilot’s seat and quickly found the key slot under the main control wheel. Lights began coming on. The fuel and gas gauges all showed half full, and the engines worked after a couple of attempts. “First I must collect my young friends,” Pennyroyal said. After what they had just endured together, he felt Tom and Hester really were his friends; his comrades. He was determined that he would save young Tom.

“No,” said Fishcake coldly, from just behind him.

“Eh? But it’s all right, child; there’s no danger now…”

“Go now,” said Fishcake, and he reached around from behind the pilot’s seat and pressed one of the blades of Pennyroyal’s own pocketknife against his throat.

“They left me behind,” he said.

In the garden Hester heard the engines rumble and rise, and said, “He’s coming, Tom, the airship’s coming!”

Tom wasn’t listening. All he heard was the word “airship,” and as all pain and feeling began to leave him, he saw again the bright ships lifting from Salthook on the afternoon that London ate it, long ago.

The sky yacht rose and hung above the garden. The downdraft from its engine pods whipped Hester’s hair about and made the burning house behind her roar like a furnace. She looked up. Fishcake was staring down at her through one of the gondola windows. She recognized the look on his face, solemn and triumphant all at once, and she felt sorry for him, for all the things he must have seen and been through, and all the long miles he had had to come for his revenge. Then he turned from the window and shouted something at Pennyroyal and the yacht rose, curving away toward the mountains, the drone of its engines whispering into silence.

There’s no way out this time, Hester thought. And then she thought, There is always a way out. She pulled Fishcake’s long, thin-bladed knife out of her belt again and laid it down in the shadows beside her, where it gleamed with reflections from the fire; a narrow doorway leading out of the world.

She kissed Tom’s face, and for a moment he half woke, although he still didn’t quite know where he was; memories and real life were all tangled up inside his mind, and he thought that he was lying on the bare earth, on that first day, fresh-fallen out of London. But he didn’t care, because Hester was with him, holding him tight, watching him, and he thought how lucky he was to be loved by someone so strong, and brave, and beautiful.

And the last thing he felt was the touch of her mouth as she kissed him good-bye, and the last thing he heard was her gruff, gentle voice saying, “It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together, and it will all be all right.”

Chapter 53 The Afterglow

When they came for Oenone, it was still dark, and the breeze that blew in through the small window of the room where they’d been holding her smelled of ash. Faint Earth tremors shivered the floor. She had been feeling them all night in her sleep. Her dreams had been filled with the crash of falling masonry echoing across the valley from Batmunkh Gompa.

She washed her aching face in cold water and said her prayers, assuming they were taking her to be killed. But when they led her down the stairs, she found Subgeneral Thien waiting for her. He looked weary and slightly dazed, and his uniform was streaked with dirt.

“Naga is dead,” he said.

Oenone saw him staring at her broken nose and the bruises that had spread around her eyes. If Naga was dead, then Thien was the most senior officer in Batmunkh Gompa, she thought. He would try to seize power for himself, and he would not want her around to remind people of the man he was replacing.

“Come with me, please,” he said.

She followed him outside, onto a balcony where the cold wind tugged at her clothes. The southern sky was a wall of shadow, lit faintly from behind by the red flaring of the volcano. The voices of the nuns chanted steadily somewhere inside the building, the chant rising in volume for a while each time the ground shook. In the courtyard below the balcony Oenone saw hundreds of faces looking up expectantly; Green Storm soldiers and aviators; refugees from Tienjing.

She felt nervous in front of such an audience, but not afraid of dying. She knew that poor Naga would be waiting for her in heaven, and her mother and father, too, and her brother Eno; all those whom she had loved and lost, who had gone ahead of her.

“What do you make of it?” asked Thien. He was looking upward too, and she realized that it was not at her the people in the courtyard were staring, but at something above her head; above the roofs of the nunnery; above the mountains. Across the few patches of the sky that were still clear, hundreds of shooting stars were streaking, white and green and icy blue.

“What do you make of it?” asked Thien again.

He wanted her scientific opinion, Oenone realized. She licked her lips, which had grown very dry. “I would say that something—some things —are falling into the upper atmosphere.”

“More weapons?” Thien sounded very scared.

Oenone watched for a moment, thinking. “No. No, I think it’s a good thing. I think something big has exploded in orbit, and those stars are some of the fragments, burning up.”

“The cities’ weapon?” asked Thien. “You think it is destroyed?”

“It was not theirs,” Oenone said. She was about to explain her theory about the Stalker Fang, and tell him that Grike must have found the ground station and destroyed it, but it would be better kept a secret; if the cities learned who had turned ODIN on them, it would lead to more fighting. “It was all an accident,” she said. “Some old orbital, gone mad. Let’s pray it’s over.”

Thien nodded and reached for his sword. She had told him what he wanted to know, thought Oenone, and now she was no more use to him. She could not help squeezing her bruised eyes shut. She heard the ringing rasp of the long blade sliding from its scabbard. She heard the chink of metal against stone. She opened one eye, then the other. Thien was kneeling in front of her, laying his sword on the pavement at her feet. Down in the courtyard everyone else was kneeling too. Soldiers bowed their heads, saluting her, fist-to-palm.

“What are they doing?” she asked, bewildered. “What are you doing?”

“Our armies are smashed,” said Thien. “The barbarians’ cities are broken. The world is in turmoil. We need someone to lead us down new roads. I’m not the man for that.”

He rose and took Oenone by the arm, bringing her gently to the front of the balcony so that all the people waiting below could see their new leader.

The engines of the air yacht failed a few miles from Batmunkh Gompa, and Fishcake abandoned her there and set off walking, leaving Pennyroyal behind. Pennyroyal spent a while trying to restart the yacht, but ash had clogged its air intakes, and it would not work. Reluctantly, finding his way by the light of the meteor showers streaking across the northern sky, he set off on foot through the ash drifts to the nearest Green Storm base. There he attempted to surrender, but the Storm were in such a state of confusion that nobody wanted to be saddled with a townie prisoner. “At least send ships to Erdene Tezh!” he begged. “My friends may still be there! It was the ground station! The Stalker Fang was controlling the weapon from there…”

“No one was controlling the weapon,” said the base commander, waving a communique she’d just received from Batmunkh Gompa. “Naga’s widow says that one of the Ancients’ orbital devices malfunctioned, and it destroyed targets at random.”

“But …”

“You are free to go, Professor.”

It was months before Pennyroyal found his way back to Murnau. He used the time well, making use of the long waits at provincial air harbors and caravanserais to write his greatest work, Ignorant Armies. It was surprisingly truthful by Pennyroyal’s standards. He confessed all his previous lies in Chapter One, and kept as close as he could to the facts when he described what he had seen and done at Erdene Tezh.

But when he finally reached the Hunting Ground, he found himself in a world that was changing quickly. The predators were growing so savage and the prey so scarce that even the staunchest of Municipal Darwinists were starting to wonder how much longer the system could keep going. People were looking for new ways to live, and Murnau had shocked everyone by settling down on a hilltop west of the Rustwater and going static. Refugees from Zhan Shan were moving there, helping the Murnauers lay out fields and plant crops. Old von Kobold had kept on a few of his harvester suburbs, and an air force, led by Orla Twombley, that whizzed around the margins of his pale tract of farmland and scared off any predator that came too close.

Undaunted, Pennyroyal went in search of his publishers, but Werederobe and Spoor wouldn’t touch his new book. After Spiney’s expose, said those gentlemen, nobody would believe any more wild yarns from Nimrod Pennyroyal. Least of all them. Anyway, the Mossies were friendly now; had he not heard about the treaty von Kobold had signed with the Widow Naga? And, incidentally, what had happened to the advance they’d paid him for his previous book?

Pennyroyal spent ten months in debtors’ prison, boring his fellow inmates with endless stories of his wonderful adventures. When some of his old friends from Moon’s clubbed together and paid his debts, he slunk away to Peripatetiapolis, where one of his former girlfriends, Minty Bapsnack, still had a soft spot for him. He lived out his final years in her house, and they were not unhappy. But even Minty took his story with a pinch of salt, and she never lent him the money he needed to publish Ignorant Armies.

Fishcake did not see the shooting stars. By the time the wreckage from ODIN began to streak across the sky he was beneath the lid of smoke from Zhan Shan. He bypassed Batmunkh Gompa in the dark and walked on for days, up roads clogged with ash and refugees.

He was the only person traveling toward the volcano, not away. The eastern flank of the mountain had been ripped open, and the people who had lived beneath it were fleeing in ragged columns, with tales of whole towns being buried, whole cities swept away. But the western slopes, though shaken and dusted with ash, had not suffered so badly. When Fishcake came over the ridge above the hermitage, he saw the little house still standing, the cattle in their pasture eating bales of hay brought up from the lowlands, fresh prayer flags flapping on the shrine at the head of the pass. He shuffled toward the door on bare, bloody feet and collapsed on the step, where Sathya found him next morning when she came out to milk the cow. In his frostbitten hand he was still clutching the little horse that his Stalker had made for him.

He would stay there with Sathya for many years, growing into a strong, handsome young man of the mountain kingdoms. He would come to forget a lot of the awful things he had been through, but he never forgot what he had done at Erdene Tezh. That was his secret, and at first it made him feel strong and proud, because he’d carried out his promise to the gods and sent Hester Natsworthy and her husband to the Sunless Country. But later, when he was grown up and married, watching his own children play with Anna’s little horse in the dust outside his foster mother’s hermitage, he came to feel less certain about it. Those were the years when the Widow Naga was pushing hard for peace, preaching her policy of forgiveness toward old enemies. Sometimes Fishcake wished he had shown a little more forgiveness himself, and let the Natsworthys aboard that sky yacht after all. But at least (he told himself) he hadn’t killed Hester and Tom; he’d just taught them a lesson by abandoning them as they’d once abandoned him. They were tough and resourceful, and he was sure they had survived.

Chapter 54 Grike in the world to come

Grike had arrived too late. He ran like a ghost through the mountains, and came to Erdene Tezh just before dawn, when the sky above the lake was scratched with the trails of shooting stars.

The house was a ruin by then; gray ash; charred beams; a few trickles of white smoke still drifting across the garden. In a chamber full of carbonized machinery he found the remains of the Stalker Fang, and knelt beside her. The gimcrack Engineer-built part of her brain had stopped working, but he sensed faint electrical flutterings fading in the other, older part. He unplugged one of the cords from his skull and fitted it into a port on hers. Her memories whispered to him, and his mind drank them.

The sun rose. Grike went back out into the garden, and in the gathering light he saw Tom and Hester waiting for him by the fountain. He had not noticed them in the dark, for they were as cold as the stones they lay upon.

Grike went down on his knees beside them and gently drew out the knife that Hester had driven through her own heart. At first he thought that if he were quick, he could still carry her to Batmunkh Gompa and make Oenone Zero Resurrect her. But when he started to lift her, he found that she had clutched Tom’s hand as she died, and she was still clinging tightly to it.

If Stalkers could cry, he would have cried then, for he knew all at once that this was the right end for her, and that she would not want him to take her from this quiet valley, or from the Once-Born she had loved.

So he lifted them together, and carried them away from the house. As he crossed the causeway, the slack weight of their bodies shook a faint memory loose in him. He checked to see if it was one of those he had just absorbed from Anna Fang, but it was his own. Long ago, before he was a Stalker, he had had children, and when they were sleepy and he had carried them to their beds, they had lain just as limp and heavy in his arms as Tom and Hester lay now.

The memory was a fragment, a gift, a down payment on that knowledge of his past that Oenone Zero had promised would come to him when he died. But that would not be for a long time. He had been made to last.

He found a place at the head of the valley where a river tumbled down in white cataracts past a rocky outcrop; where a stunted oak tree grew. It reminded him of things Hester had told him about the lost island of her childhood. There he laid her down with Tom, side by side, still holding hands, their faces almost touching. Unsheathing his claws for the last time, he cut away their soggy clothes, the belts and boots they would no longer need. There was a shallow cave at the foot of the rocks nearby, and he went and sat down in it, watching and waiting, wondering what he would find to do in a world that no longer held Hester.

That evening airships buzzed down to land at the ruin on the lake. After a while they went away again.

Days flew over the valley of Erdene Tezh. In the fitful sunlight Tom and Hester began to swell and darken beneath their shroud of flies. Worms and beetles fed on them, and birds flew down to take their eyes and tongues. Soon their smell attracted small mammals that had been going hungry in that cheerless summer.

Grike did not move. He shut down his systems one by one until only his eyes and his mind were awake. He watched the graceful architecture of Tom and Hester’s skeletons emerge, their bare skulls leaning together like two eggs in a nest of wet hair. Winter heaped snow over them; the rains of spring washed them clean. Next summer’s grass grew thick and green beneath them, and an oak sapling sprouted in the white basket of Hester’s ribs.

Grike watched it all while the years fell past him, green and white, green and white. The small bones of their hands and feet scattered into the grass like dice; larger ones were tumbled and gnawed by foxes; they turned gray and crumbly, and it became hard to tell whose had been whose.

The oak sapling grew into a tree; spread out a canopy that blushed green in summer and threw dancing shadows over Grike; shed acorns that became new saplings; grew old, trailed beards of lichen; died and fell and rotted, giving up its goodness to the roots of younger trees that were spreading down the hillside to the lake.

Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.

At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowed.

A summer morning. Green light shining through the leaves of an ancient oak wood. Garlands of flowers decked Grike’s torso, and the remnants of older garlands lay dried and crumbling in his mossy lap. His shoulders were shaggy with ferns. A bird had nested in the crook of his arm. Of Tom and Hester nothing remained but a little dust blowing between the gnarled roots of the trees.

Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small Once-Born boy came and stood looking at Grike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ocher skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.

“HELLO,” said Grike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking to him in a language that he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Grike’s joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds’ nests and moss.

The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult Once-Born came to stare at Grike and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to decipher their language. They’d thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers’ mothers’ time.

Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Grike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Grike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates, he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring towers. Silvery disks, like misty mirrors, swiveled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat haze.

They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city’s heart. People crowded around him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine men out of the old stories?

Grike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate one another. The Once-Born laughed. Of course there weren’t; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad ideal.

“What are you for?” asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Grike looked down at him. He pondered awhile, thinking of something Dr. Popjoy had told Anna.

“I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE,” he said.

“What do you remember?”

“I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM.”

His listeners looked blank. Someone said, “Who were they?”

“THEY LIVED LONG AGO. IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY TO ME.”

The little girl who’d found Grike looked up at him and said, “Tell us!” Around her, people smiled and nodded, settling down cross-legged, waiting to see what stories he had brought for them out of the lost past. They liked stories. Grike felt, for a moment, almost afraid. He didn’t know how to begin.

He sat down on the chair they brought for him. He took the little girl on his lap. He watched dust motes dancing in the ancient sunlight that poured like honey through the hall’s long windows. And then he turned his face toward the expectant faces of the Once-Borns, and began.

“IT WAS A DARK, BLUSTERY DAY IN SPRING,” he said, “AND THE CITY OF LONDON WAS CHASING A SMALL MINING TOWN ACROSS THE DRIED-UP BED OF THE OLD NORTH SEA…”