A Darkling Plain

Chapter 1 Super-Gnats Over Zagwa

Theo had been climbing since dawn; first on the steep roads and paths and sheep tracks behind the city, then across slopes of shifting scree, and up at last onto the bare mountainside, keeping where he could to corries and crevices where the blue shadows pooled. The sun was high overhead by the time he reached the summit. He paused there awhile to drink water and catch his breath. Around him the mountains quivered behind veils of heat haze rising from the warm rocks.

Carefully, carefully, Theo edged his way onto a narrow spur that jutted out from the mountaintop. On either side of him sheer cliffs dropped for thousands of feet to a tumble of spiky rocks, trees, white rivers. A stone, dislodged, fell silently, end over end, forever. Ahead Theo could see nothing but the naked sky. He stood upright, took a deep breath, sprinted the last few yards to the edge of the rock, and jumped.

Over and over he went, down and down, dazed by the flicker of mountain and sky, mountain and sky. The echoes of his first cry bounded away into silence, and he could hear nothing but his quick-beating heart and the rush of the air past his ears. Tumbling on the wind, he emerged from the crag’s shadow into sunlight and glimpsed below him—far below—his home, the static city of Zagwa. From up here the copper domes and painted houses looked like toys; airships coming and going from the harbor were windblown petals, the river winding through its gorge a silver thread.

Theo watched it all fondly till it was hidden from him by a shoulder of the mountains. There had been a time when he had thought that he would never return to Zagwa. In the Green Storm training camp they had taught him that his love for home and family was a luxury, something that he must forget if he was to play his part in the war for a world made green again. Later, as a captive slave on the raft city of Brighton, he had dreamed of home, but he had thought that his family would not want him back; they were old-fashioned Anti-Tractionists, and he imagined that by running away to join the Storm, he had made himself an outcast forever. Yet here he was, back among his own African hills; it was his time in the north that seemed to him now like a dream.

And it was all Wren’s doing, he thought as he fell. Wren, that odd, brave, funny girl whom he had met in Brighton, his fellow slave. “Go home to your mother and father,” she had told him, after they had escaped together. “They still love you, and they’ll welcome you, I’m sure.” And she had been right.

A startled bird shot past on Theo’s left, reminding him that he was in midair above a lot of unfriendly-looking rocks, and descending fast. He opened the great kite that was strapped to his back and let out a whoop of triumph as the wings jerked him upward and his dizzy plunge turned into a graceful, soaring flight. The roar of the wind rushing past him died away, replaced by gentler sounds: the whisper of the broad panels of silicone silk, the creak of rigging and bamboo struts.

When he was younger, Theo had often brought his kite up here, testing his courage on the winds and thermals. Lots of young Zagwans did it. Since his return from the north, six months ago, he had sometimes looked enviously at their bright wings hanging against the mountains, but he had never dared to join them. His time away had changed him too much; he felt older than the other boys his age, yet shy of them, ashamed of the things he had been: a Tumbler-bomb pilot, and a prisoner, and a slave. But this morning the other cloud-riders were all at the citadel to see the foreigners. Theo, knowing that he would have the sky to himself, had woken up longing to fly again.

He slid down the wind like a hawk, watching his shadow swim across the sunlit buttresses of the mountain. Real hawks, hanging beneath him in the glassy air, veered away with sharp mews of surprise and indignation as he soared past, a lean black boy beneath a sky-blue wing invading their element.

Theo looped the loop and wished that Wren could see him. But Wren was far away, traveling the bird roads in her father’s airship. After they had escaped from Cloud 9, the mayor of Brighton’s airborne palace, and reached the Traction City of Kom Ombo, she had helped Theo find a berth aboard a southbound freighter. On the quay, while the airship was making ready to depart, they had said good-bye, and he had kissed her. And although Theo had kissed other girls, some much prettier than Wren, Wren’s kiss had stayed with him; his mind kept going back to it at unexpected moments like this. When he kissed her, all the laughter and the wry irony went out of her and she became shivery and serious and so quiet, as if she were listening hard for something he could not hear. For a moment he had wanted to tell her that he loved her, and ask her to come with him, or offer to stay—but Wren had been so worried about her dad, who had suffered some sort of seizure, and so angry at her mum, who had abandoned them and fallen with Cloud 9 into the desert, that he would have felt he was taking advantage of her. His last memory of her was of looking back as his ship pulled away into the sky and seeing her waving, growing smaller and smaller until she was gone.

Six months ago! Already half a year… It was definitely time he stopped thinking about her.

So for a little while he thought of nothing, just swooped and banked on the playful air, swinging westward with a mountain between him and Zagwa; a green mountain where rags and flags of mist streamed from the canopy of the cloud forest.

Half a year. The world had changed a lot in that time. Sudden, shuddering changes like the shifting of tectonic plates, as tensions that had been building all through the long years of the Green Storm’s war were suddenly released. For a start, the Stalker Fang was gone. There was a new leader in the Jade Pagoda now, General Naga, who had a reputation as a hard man. His first act as leader had been to reverse the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft’s advance on the Rustwater Marshes, and smash the Slavic cities that had been nibbling for years at the Storm’s northern borders. But then, to the astonishment of the world, he had called off his air fleets and made a truce with the Traction Cities. There were rumors from the Green Storm’s lands about political prisoners being released and harsh laws repealed; even talk that Naga planned to disband the Storm and reestablish the old Anti-Traction League. Now he had sent a delegation to hold talks with the queen and council of Zagwa—a delegation led by his own wife, Lady Naga.

It was this that had driven Theo to rise at dawn and bring his old kite up into the high places above the city. The talks were beginning today, and his father and mother and sisters had all gone to the citadel to see if they could catch a glimpse of the foreigners. They were excited and full of hope. Zagwa had withdrawn from the Anti-Traction League when the Green Storm took power, appalled by their doctrine of total war and their armies of reanimated corpses. But now (so Theo’s father had heard) General Naga was proposing a formal peace with the barbarian cities, and there were even hints that he was prepared to dismantle the Storm’s Stalkers. If he did, Zagwa and the other African statics might be able to join again in the defense of the world’s green places. Theo’s father was keen for his wife and children to be at the citadel for this historic moment, and anyway, he wanted to have a look at Lady Naga, who he had heard was very young and beautiful.

But Theo had seen all he ever wished to of the Green Storm, and he did not trust anything Naga or his envoys said. So, while the rest of Zagwa crowded into the citadel gardens, he swooped and soared on the golden air and thought of Wren.

And then, below him, he saw movement where nothing should be moving; nothing except birds, and these were too big to be birds. They were rising out of the white mist above the cloud forest, two tiny airships, envelopes painted in wasp stripes of yellow and black. Their small gondolas and streamlined engine pods were instantly familiar to Theo, who had been made to memorize the silhouettes of enemy ships during his Green Storm training. These were Cosgrove Super-Gnats, which the cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft used as fighter-bombers.

But what were they doing here? Theo had never heard of the Traktionstadts sending ships into Africa, let alone as far south as Zagwa.

And then he thought, They are here because of the talks. Those rockets that he could see shining like knives in the racks under their gondolas would soon be lancing down into the citadel, where Naga’s wife was; where the queen was. Where Theo’s family was.

He was going to have to stop them.

It was strange how calm he felt about it. A few moments ago he had been quite at peace, enjoying the sunlight and the clear air, and now he was probably about to die, and yet it all seemed quite natural, another part of the morning, like the wind and the sunlight. He tipped his kite and dropped toward the second of the Super-Gnats. The aviators had not seen him yet. The Gnats were two-man ships, and he doubted they were keeping much of a watch. The kite took him closer and closer, until he could see the paint flaking from the ships’ engine-pod cowlings. The big steering fins were emblazoned with the symbol of the Traktionstadts-gesellschaft: a wheeled and armored fist. Theo found himself almost admiring the daring of these aviators, who had flown so deep into Anti-Tractionist territory in their unmistakable ships.

He kicked the kite backward and stalled in midair, the way he had learned to do when he was younger, riding the thermals above Liemba Lake with his school friends. This time, though, he came down not into water but onto the hard, curved top of the airship’s envelope. The noise of his landing seemed horribly loud, but he told himself the men down in the gondola would have heard nothing over the bellowing of their big engines. He freed himself from the straps of his kite and tried to tuck it beneath the ratlines that stretched across the surface of the envelope, but the wind caught it and he had to let go to stop himself being pulled away with it. He clung to the ratlines and watched helplessly as it went tumbling astern.

Theo had lost his only means of escape, but before he could worry about it, a hatch popped open beside him, and a leather-helmeted head poked out and stared at him through tinted flying goggles. So someone had heard him after all. He threw himself forward, and he and the aviator tumbled together through the hatch and down a short companionway, landing heavily on a metal walkway between two of the airship’s gas cells. Theo scrambled up, but the aviator lay unmoving, stunned. She was a woman; Thai or Laotian by the look of her. Theo had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadts. Yet here she was, in one of their ships and one of their uniforms, flying toward Zagwa with full racks of rockets.

It was a mystery, but Theo hadn’t time to ponder it. He gagged the aviatrix with her own scarf, then took her knife from her belt and cut a length of rope from the netting around the gas cells, which he used to bind her hands to the walkway handrail. She woke while he was tying the last knots and started to struggle, glaring out angrily at him through her cracked goggles.

He left her writhing there and hurried along the catwalk to another ladder, climbing down between the shadows of the gas cells. Engine noise boomed around him, quickly drowning out the muffled curses from above. As he dropped into the gondola, the light from the windows dazzled him. He blinked and saw the pilot standing at the controls, his back to Theo.

“What was it?” the man asked in Airsperanto. (Airsperanto? It was the common language of the sky, but Theo had thought the Traktionstadts used German…)

“A bird?” asked the man, doing something to his controls, and turned. He was another easterner. Theo pushed him against a bulkhead and showed him the knife.

Outside, the city was coming into view beyond a spur of the mountains. The crew of the leading Super-Gnat, with no idea of what was happening aboard her sister ship, angled her vanes and started to swing toward the citadel.

Forcing the pilot down into his seat, Theo groped for the controls of the radio set. It was identical to the radio he’d had in the cabin of his Tumbler bomb during his time with the Storm. He shouted into the microphone, “Zagwa! Zagwa! You’re under attack! Two airships! I’m in the one behind!” he added hastily, as puffballs of anti-aircraft fire began to burst in the sky all around him, and shrapnel rattled against the armored gondola and crazed the window glass.

The pilot chose that moment to try and fight, lurching out of his chair and butting Theo bullishly in the ribs. Theo dropped the microphone, and the pilot grabbed his knife hand. They struggled for control of the knife, until suddenly there was blood everywhere, and Theo looked and saw that it was his own. The pilot stabbed him again, and he shouted out in anger and fear and pain, trying to twist the blade away. Staring at his opponent’s furious, clenched face, he did not even notice the leading airship vanish in a sheet of saffron flame. The shock wave came as a surprise, shattering all the windows of the gondola at once, and then the debris was slamming and jarring against the envelope. A torn-off propeller blade sheared through the gondola like a scythe. The pilot went whirling out through the immense gash where the side wall had been, leaving Theo with an afterimage of his wide, disbelieving eyes.

Theo stumbled to the radio set and snatched up the dangling microphone. He didn’t know if it still worked, but he shouted into it anyway, until exhaustion and terror and loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he heard, as he slipped down onto the deck, were voices telling him that help was on its way. Twin plumes of smoke were rising from the citadel. Above them, blue as damselflies, the airships of the Zagwan Flying Corps were climbing into the golden sky.

Chapter 2 Matters Of the Heart

From: Wren Natsworthy

AMV Jenny Haniver

Peripatetiapolis

24th April 1026 T.E.

Dear Theo,

I hope life in Zagwa is not too dull? In case it is, I thought I should sit down and write you a proper letter to tell you all that I have been doing. It seems hard to believe that it’s been so long … it seems like only yesterday—Brighton, and Cloud 9, and Mum…

Soon after you left for Zagwa, Professor Pennyroyal left us too; he has friends in other cities, and he’s gone to stay with some of them—or sponge off them, I suppose, because he didn’t bring anything with him out of the wreck of Cloud 9, only his clothes, and they were too outlandish to fetch much at the Kom Ombo bazaar. I felt almost sorry for him. He was a help, getting us to Kom Ombo and then blustering at those hospital doctors until they looked after Dad for free. But he will be all right, I think [Pennyroyal, I mean). He told me he is planning to write a new book, all about the battle at Brighton. He promised me that he won’t lie, especially about you or me, but I expect it was one of those promises he will forget the instant he sits down at his typewriter.

Dad is all right too. Those Kom Ombo doctors gave him some green pills to take, which help his pains a bit, and he hasn’t had any attacks since that awful night on Cloud 9. But he seems awfully old, somehow, and awfully sad. It’s Mum, of course. He really loved her, despite what she was like. To be without her, not even knowing if she’s alive or dead, upsets him terribly, tho’ he tries to be brave.

I thought that once he was well enough, he would want to take me straight home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but he hasn’t suggested it. So we have been traveling the bird roads ever since, seeing a little of the world and doing a little trading—antiques and Old Tech mostly, but harmless stuff, not like that awful Tin Book! We’ve done quite well—well enough to get the ship afresh coat of paint and have her engines overhauled. We’ve changed her name back to Jenny Haniver, which is what she was called before Prof Pennyroyal stole her from Mum and Dad all those years ago. We wondered at first if it would be dangerous, but I don’t think anyone remembers anymore that that was the name of the Stalker Fang’s old ship, and if they do, they don’t much care.

Have you heard about the truce? (I always thought General Naga was a good sort. When we were captured by the Storm at Cloud 9, his soldiers were very inclined to prod me with their guns, and Naga stopped them doing it. It’s nice to know that the new leader of the Storm takes a firm stand on prodding.) Anyway, everyone is very excited about the truce and hoping the war is over, and I hope so too.

I am getting quite used to life as an air trader. You would think me ever so much changed if you could see me. I’ve had my hair cut in the latest style, sort of lopsided, so that it comes down below my chin on one side but only to ear level on the other. I don’t want to sound vain, but it looks extremely sophisticated, even if it does make me feel sometimes as if I’m standing on a slope. Also I have new boots, tall ones, and a leather coat—not one of those long ones that Daddy and the other old-style aviators wear, but a tunic, with a red silk lining and pointy bits at the bottom called tappets or lappets or something. And at this moment I am sitting in a cafe behind the air harbor here in Peripatetiapolis, feeling every inch the aviatrix, and just enjoying being aboard a city. I could never really imagine what real cities were like, growing up in sleepy old Anchorage as I did, but now that I spend half my time aboard them, I find I love them—all the people, and the bustle, and the way the engines make the pavements throb as if the whole of Peripatetiapolis is a great, living animal. I am waiting for Dad, who has gone up to the higher tiers to see if the Peripatetiapolitan doctors can find some better pills than the ones the Kom Ombo lot prescribed. (He didn’t want to go, of course, but I talked him into it in the end!) And sitting here, I got thinking about you, the way I do quite often, and I thought…

It wouldn’t do, Wren decided. She scrumpled the page and lobbed it into a nearby bin. She was getting to be quite a good shot. This must be the twentieth letter she’d written to Theo, and so far she’d not mailed any of them. She had sent a card at Christmas, because although Theo wasn’t very religious, he lived in a Christian city and probably celebrated all their strange old festivals, but all she had written was “Happy Xmas” and a few lines of news about herself and Dad.

The trouble was, Theo had probably forgotten her by now. And even if he did remember her, he was hardly likely to be interested in her clothes, or her haircut, or the rest of it. And that bit about how much she liked city life would probably shock him, for he was an Anti-Tractionist through and through and could be rather prim…

But she could not forget him. How brave he had been on Cloud 9. And that good-bye kiss, on the Kom Ombo air quay, amid all those oily ropes and heaped-up sky train couplings and shouting stevedores and roaring engines. Wren had never kissed anyone before. She hadn’t known quite how you went about it; she wasn’t sure where her nose was meant to go; when their teeth banged together, she was afraid that she was doing it all wrong. Theo had laughed, and said it was a funny business, this kissing, and she said she thought she might get the hang of it with a little more practice, but by then the captain of his airship was hollering, “All aboard that’s coming aboard!” and starting to disengage his docking clamps, and there had been no time…

And that had been six months ago. Theo had written once—a letter that reached Wren in January at a shabby air caravanserai in the Tannhäusers—to tell her that he had made it home safely and been welcomed by his family “like the prodigal son” (whatever that meant). But Wren had never managed to compose a reply.

“Bother!” she said, and ordered another coffee.

Tom Natsworthy, Wren’s father, had faced death many times, and been in all sorts of frightening situations, but he had never felt any fear quite so cold as this.

He was lying, quite naked, on a chilly metal table in the consulting room of a heart specialist on Peripatetiapolis’s second tier. Above him a machine with a long and many-jointed hydraulic neck twisted its metal head from side to side, examining him with a quizzical air. Tom was pretty sure that those green, glowing lenses at its business end were taken from a Stalker. He supposed that Stalker parts were easy to come by these days, and that he should be glad that all the years of war had at least spawned a few good things: new medical techniques, and diagnostic machines like this. But when the blunt steel head dipped close to his torso, and he heard the machinery grating and whirring inside those shining eyes, all he could think of was the old Stalker Grike, who had chased him and Hester across the Out-Country in the year London died.

When it was all over, and Dr. Chernowyth switched off his machine and came out of his little lead-walled booth, he could tell Tom nothing that Tom had not already guessed. There was a weakness in his heart. It had been caused by the bullet that Pennyroyal had shot him with, all those years ago in Anchorage. It was growing worse, and one day it would kill him. He had a year or two left, maybe five, no more.

The doctor pursed his lips and shook his head and told him to take things easy, but Tom just laughed. How could you take things easy in the air trade? The only way he could take things easy would be if he went home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but after what he had learned about Hester, he could never go back. He had nothing to be ashamed of— he had not betrayed the ice city to Arkangel’s Huntsmen, or murdered anyone among its snowy streets—but he felt ashamed for his wife’s sake, and foolish for having lived so long with her, never suspecting the lies she had told him.

Anyway, Wren would never forgive him if he took her home now. She had the same longing for adventure that Tom himself had had at her age. She was enjoying life on the bird roads, and she had the makings of a fine aviatrix. He would stay with her, flying and trading, teaching her the ways of the sky and doing his best to keep her out of trouble, and when Lady Death came to take him to the Sunless Country, he would leave Wren the Jenny Haniver and she would be able to choose whichever life she wanted for herself: the peace of Vineland or the freedom of the skies. The news from the east sounded hopeful. If this truce held, there would soon be all sorts of opportunities for trade.

When he left Dr. Chernowyth’s office, Tom felt better at once. Out here, beneath the evening sky, it seemed impossible that he was going to die. The city rocked gently as it rumbled northward up the rocky western shoreline of the Great Hunting Ground. Out upon the silver, sunset-shining sea a fishing town was keeping pace with it beneath a cloud of gulls.

Tom watched for a while from an observation platform, then rode an elevator back to base tier and strolled through the busy market behind the air harbor, remembering his first visit to this city, with Hester and Anna Fang, twenty years before. He had bought Hester a red scarf at one of these stalls, to save her having to keep hiding her scarred face with her hand…

But he did not want to think about Hester. When he started thinking about her, he always ended up remembering the way they had parted, and what she had done made him so angry that his heart would pound and twist inside him. He could not afford to think of Hester anymore.

He began to walk toward the harbor, rehearsing in his mind the things he would tell Wren about his visit to the doctor. (“Nothing to worry about. Not even worth operating…”) Passing Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms, he stopped to let a crowd of traders spill out and thought he recognized one of them, a woman of about his own age, rather pretty. It looked as if she had been successful at the auction, for she was carrying a big, heavy package. She didn’t see Tom, and he walked on trying to remember her name and where he had met her. Katie, wasn’t it? No, Clytie, that was it. Clytie Potts.

He stopped, and turned, and stared. It couldn’t have been Clytie. Clytie had been a Historian, a year above him in the Guild when London was destroyed. She had been killed by MEDUSA along with all the rest of his city. She just couldn’t be walking about in Peripatetiapolis. His memories were playing games with him.

But it had looked so like her!

He took a few steps back the way he had come. The woman was going quickly up a stairway to the level where the airships berthed. “Clytie!” Tom shouted, and her face turned toward him. It was her, he was suddenly certain of it, and he laughed aloud with happiness and surprise and called again, “Clytie! It’s me! Tom Natsworthy!”

A group of traders barged past him, blocking his view of her. When he could see again, she was gone. He started hurrying toward the stairs, ignoring the little warning pains in his chest. He tried to imagine how Clytie had survived MEDUSA. Had she been outside the city when it was destroyed? He had heard of other Londoners who had escaped the blast, but they had all been members of the Merchants’ Guild, far off on foreign cities when it happened. At Rogues’ Roost Hester had encountered that horrible Engineer Popjoy, but he had been in the Deep Gut when MEDUSA went off…

He pushed his way up the crowded stair and saw Clytie hurrying away from him between the long-stay docking pans. He could hardly blame her, after the way he’d yelled at her. He must have been too far away for her to recognize him, and she’d mistaken him for some kind of loony, or a rival trader angry that she’d outbid him in the auction rooms. He trotted after her, eager to explain himself, and saw her run quickly up another stairway onto Pan Seven, where a small, streamlined airship was berthed. He paused at the foot of the stairs just long enough to read the details chalked on the board there and learn that the ship was the Archaeopteryx, registered in Airhaven and commanded by Cruwys Morchard. Then, careful not to run, or shout, or do anything else that might alarm a lady air trader, he climbed after her. Of course, with her Guild training, Clytie Potts would have had no trouble finding a place aboard an Old Tech trader. No doubt this Captain Morchard had taken her on as an expert buyer, and that was why she had been at the auction house.

He paused to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, his heart hammering fiercely. The Archaeopteryx towered over him in the twilight. She was camouflaged, her gondola and the undersides of her envelope and engine pods sky blue, the upper parts done in a dazzle pattern of greens and browns and grays. At the foot of her gangplank two crewmen were waiting in a pool of pale electric light. They looked rough and shabby, like Out-Country scavengers. As Clytie approached them, Tom heard one man call out, “You get ’em all right, then?”

“I did,” replied Clytie, nodding to the package she was carrying. The other man came forward to help her with it, then saw Tom coming up behind her. Clytie must have noticed his expression changing, and turned to see why.

“Clytie?” said Tom. “It’s me, Tom Natsworthy. Apprentice Third Class, from the Guild of Historians. From London. I know you probably don’t recognize me. It’s been … what? … nearly twenty years! And you must have thought I was dead…”

At first he felt sure that she had recognized him, and that she was happy to see him, but then her look changed; she took a step backward, away from him, and glanced toward the men by the gangplank. One of them—a tall, gaunt man with a shaven head—put a hand to his sword, and Tom heard him say, “This fellow bothering you, Miss Morchard?”

“It’s all right, Lurpak,” said Clytie, motioning for him to stay where he was. She came a little closer to Tom and said pleasantly, “I’m sorry, sir. I fear you have mistaken me for some other lady. I am Cruwys Morchard, mistress of this ship. I don’t know anyone from London.”

“But you …,” Tom started to say. He studied her face, embarrassed and confused. He was sure she was Clytie Potts. She had put on a little weight, just as he had himself, and her hair, which had been dark, was dusted with silver now, as if cobwebs had settled on it, but her face was the same … except that the space between her eyebrows, where Clytie Potts had rather proudly worn the tattooed blue eye of the Guild of Historians, was blank.

Tom began to doubt himself. It had been twenty years, after all. Perhaps he was wrong. He said, “I’m sorry, but you look so like her…”

“Don’t mention it,” she said with a charming smile. “I have one of those faces. I am always being mistaken for somebody.”

“You look so like her,” said Tom again, half hopefully, as if she might suddenly change her mind and remember that she was Clytie Potts, after all.

She bowed to him and turned away. Her men eyed Tom as they helped her up the gangplank with her package. There was nothing more to say, so he said “Sorry” again and turned away himself, blushing hotly as he made his way off the pan. He started across the harbor toward his own ship’s berth, and had not gone more than twenty paces when he heard the Archaeopteryx’s engines rumbling to life behind him. He watched her rise into the evening sky, gathering speed quickly as she cleared the city’s airspace and flew away toward the east.

Which was curious, because Tom was certain that the signboard beside her pan had said she would be in Peripatetiapolis for two more days…

Chapter 3 The Mysterious Miss Morchard

“I am sure it was her!” Tom said, over supper that night at the Jolly Dirigible. “She was older, of course, and the Guild-mark wasn’t on her brow, which threw me a little, but tattoos can be removed, can’t they?”

Wren said, “Don’t get agitated, Dad…”

“I’m not agitated, only intrigued! If it is Clytie, how come she is still alive? And why did she not admit who she was?”

He did not sleep much that night, and Wren lay awake too, in her little cabin up inside the Jenny’s envelope, listening to him pad along the passageway from the stern cabin and clatter as quietly as he could in the galley, making himself one of those three-in-the-morning cups of tea.

At first she was worried about him. She hadn’t quite believed his version of what the heart doctor had said, and she felt quite certain that he should not be staying awake all night and fretting about mystery aviatrices. But gradually she started to wonder if his encounter with the woman might not have been a good thing after all. Talking about her at supper, he had seemed more alive than Wren had seen him for months; the listlessness that had settled over him when Mum left had vanished, and he had been his old self again, full of questions and theories. Wren couldn’t tell if it was the mystery that appealed to him, or the thought of a connection with his lost home city, or if he simply had the hots for Clytie Potts, but whichever it was, might it not do him good to have something other than Mum to think about?

At breakfast next morning she said, “We should investigate. Find out more about this self-styled Cruwys Morchard.”

“How?” asked her father. “The Archaeopteryx will be a hundred miles away by now.”

“You said she bought something at the auction rooms,” said Wren. “We could start there.”

Mr. Pondicherry who was a large, shiny sort of gentleman, seemed to grow even larger and shinier when he looked up from his account books to see Tom Natsworthy and daughter entering his little den. The Jenny Haniver had sold several valuable pieces through Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms that season. “Mr. Natsworthy!” He chuckled. “Miss Natsworthy! How good to see you!” He stood up to greet them, and pushed back a great deal of silver-embroidered sleeve to reveal a plump brown hand, which Tom shook. “You are both well, I hope? The Gods of the Sky are kind to you? What do you have for me today?”

“Only questions, I’m afraid,” Tom confessed. “I was wondering what you could tell me about a freelance archaeologist called Cruwys Morchard. She made a purchase here yesterday.”

“The lady from the Archaeopteryx?” mused Mr. Pondicherry. “Yes, yes; I know her well, but I’m afraid I cannot share such information.”

“Of course,” said Tom, and, “Sorry, sorry.”

Wren, who had half expected this, took out of her jacket pocket a little bundle of cloth, which she set down upon the blotter on Mr. Pondicherry’s desk. The auctioneer purred like a cat as he unwrapped it. Inside lay a tiny, flattened envelope of silvery metal, inset with minute oblong tiles on which faint numbers still showed.

“An Ancient mobile telephone,” said Wren. “We bought it last month, from a scavenger who didn’t even know what it was. Dad was planning to sell it privately, but I’m sure he’d be happy to go through Pondicherry’s if…”

“Wren!” said her father, startled by her cunning.

Mr. Pondicherry had put his head down close to the relic and screwed a jeweler’s glass into his eye. “Oh, pretty!” he said. “So beautifully preserved! And the trade in trinkets like this is definitely picking up now that peace is breaking out. They say General Naga hasn’t time to fight battles anymore, now that he’s found himself a lovely young wife. Almost as lovely as Cruwys Morchard…” He looked at Tom and winked, one eye made huge by the glass. “Very well. Just between ourselves, Ms. Morchard was indeed here yesterday. She bought a job lot of Kliest Coils.”

“What on earth would she want with those?” wondered Tom.

“Who knows?” Mr. Pondicherry beamed and spread his hands wide, as if to say, Once I have my percentage, what do I care what my customers do with the rubbish they buy? “They are of no earthly use. Trade goods, I suppose. That is Ms. Morchard’s profession. An Old Tech trader, and a good one, I believe. Been on the bird roads since she was just a slip of a girl.”

“Has she ever mentioned anything about where she comes from?” Wren asked eagerly.

Mr. Pondicherry thought for a moment. “Her ship is registered in Airhaven,” he said.

“Oh, we know that. I mean, do you know where she grew up? Where she was trained? You see, we think she comes from London.”

The auctioneer smiled at her indulgently, and winked again at Tom as he slipped the old telephone into a side drawer of his bureau. “Ah, Mr. N, what romantical notions these young ladies do have! Really, Miss Wren! Nobody comes from London!”

Afterward they took coffee on a balcony cafe and looked out eastward across the endless plains of the Great Hunting Ground. It was one of those warm, golden days of spring. A haze of green filled the massive ruts and track marks that passing cities had scored across the land below, and the sky was full of swerving swifts. Away in the east a mining town was gnawing at a line of hills that had somehow been overlooked until now.

“The strange thing is,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where. Cruwys Morchard. I suppose it was on the bird roads, in the old days…” He poured Wren more coffee. “You must think me very silly, to let myself be so affected by it. It’s just that the thought of another Historian, still alive after all these years …”

He couldn’t explain. Lately he had been thinking more and more about his early years in the London Museum. It made him sad to think that when he died, the memory of the place would die with him. If there really was another Historian alive, someone who had grown up among the same dusty galleries and beeswax-smelling corridors as him, who had snoozed through old Arkengarth’s lectures, and listened to Chudleigh Pomeroy grumbling about the building’s feeble shock absorbers, then the responsibility of remembering it all would be lifted from him; the echoes of those things would linger in other memories, even after he was gone.

“What I don’t understand,” said Wren, “is why she won’t admit it. Surely it would be a selling point, in an Old Tech trader, to say they came from London and were trained by the Historians’ Guild.”

Tom shrugged. “I always kept quiet about it, when your mother and I were trading. London was unpopular in those years. What the Guild of Engineers had done upset the whole balance of the world. Scared a lot of cities, and led to the rise of the Green Storm. I suppose that’s why Clytie took another name. The Pottses are a famous London family; they’ve been producing aldermen and heads of guild since Quirke’s time. Clytie’s grandfather, old Pisistratus Potts, was lord mayor for years and years. If you want to pretend you’re not a Londoner, it wouldn’t be a good idea to go around with a name like Clytie Potts.”

“And what about those things she bought at Pondicherry’s?” Wren wondered.

“Kliest Coils?”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“There’s no reason why you would have,” her father said. “They come from the Electric Empire, which thrived in these parts before the rise of the Blue Metal culture, around 10,000 B.T.”

“What are they for?”

“Nobody knows,” said Tom. “Zanussi Kliest, the London Historian who first studied them, claimed they were meant to focus some sort of electromagnetic energy, but no one has ever worked out a practical use for them. The Electric Empire seems to have been a sort of technological cul-de-sac.”

“These coils aren’t valuable, then?”

“Only as curios. They’re quite pretty.”

“So what’s Clytie Potts going to do with them?” asked Wren.

Tom shrugged again. “She must have a buyer, I suppose. Maybe she knows a collector.”

“We should go after her,” said Wren.

“Where to? I asked at the harbor office last night. The Archaeopteryx didn’t leave any details of her destination.”

“She’ll be heading east,” said Wren, with the confidence of someone who had been studying the air trade for a whole season and felt she had its measure. “Everybody is going east now that the truce seems to be holding, and we should too. Even if we don’t find Clytie Potts, there will be good trading, and I’d love to see the central Hunting Ground. We could go to Airhaven. The Registration Bureau there must have some more details about Cruwys so-called Morchard and her ship.”

Tom finished his coffee and said, “I’d been thinking you might want to go south this spring. Your friend Theo is still in Zagwa, isn’t he? I expect we could get permission to land there…”

“Oh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” said Wren casually, and blushed bright red.

“I liked Theo,” Tom went on. “He’s a good lad. Kind and well-mannered. Handsome, too…”

“Daddy!” said Wren sternly, warning him not to tease. Then she relented, sighed, and took his hand. “Look, the reason Theo has such good manners is that he’s really posh. His family are rich, and they live in a city that was part of a great civilization when our ancestors were still wearing animal skins and squabbling over scraps in the ruins of Europe. Why would Theo be interested in me?”

“He’d be a fool if he isn’t,” said her father, “and he didn’t strike me as a fool.”

Wren gave an exasperated sigh. Why couldn’t Dad understand? Theo was in his own city, surrounded by lots of girls far prettier than her. His family might have married him off by now, and even if they hadn’t, he was sure to have forgotten all about Wren. That kiss, which had meant so much to her, had probably meant nothing at all to Theo. So she did not want to make a fool of herself by chasing off to Zagwa, knocking on his door, and expecting them to pick up where they’d left off.

She said, “Let’s go east, Dad. Let’s go and find Clytie Potts.”

Chapter 4 Lady Naga

Theo, who had been adrift for days on slow tides of pain and anesthetic, came to the surface at last in a clean, white room in Zagwa Hospital. Through veils of mosquito netting and smudged memories he could see an open window, and evening sunlight on the mountains. His mother and father and his sisters Miriam and Kaelo were gathered around his bed, and as he gradually recovered his senses, Theo realized that his wounds must have been very grave indeed, for instead of teasing him and telling him how silly he looked lying there all bruised and bandaged, his sisters seemed inclined to cry and kiss him. “Thank God, thank God,” his mother kept saying, and his father, leaning over him, said, “You’re going to be all right, Theo. But it was touch and go for a while.”

“The knife,” said Theo, remembering, touching his stomach, which was wrapped in clean, crisp bandages. “The rockets … They hit the citadel!”

“They exploded quite harmlessly in the gardens,” his father assured him. “Nobody was hurt. Nobody but you. You were badly wounded, Theo, and you lost a lot of blood. When our aviators brought you in, the doctors were ready to give you up for dead. But the ambassador heard of your plight— the Storm’s ambassador, Lady Naga—and she came and worked on you herself. She used to be some sort of surgeon before her marriage. She certainly knows a thing or two about a person’s insides. That is a claim to fame, eh, Theo? You have been healed by General Naga’s wife!”

“So you saved her life, and she saved yours,” said Miriam.

“She will be delighted to hear that you are on the mend!” said Mrs. Ngoni. “She was very impressed by your bravery, and takes a great interest in you.” She pointed proudly to a mass of flowers in a corner of Theo’s hospital room, sent by Lady Naga. “She came to see me herself, to tell me how well the operation had gone.” She beamed, clearly rather taken with the visitor from Shan Guo. “Lady Naga is a very good person, Theo.”

“If she is so good, what is she doing in the Green Storm?” asked Theo.

“An accident of fate,” his father suggested. “Really, Theo, you would like her. Shall I send word to the citadel to tell her that you are better? I am sure she will want to come and talk to you.”

Theo shook his head and said that he did not feel strong enough. He was happy that he had been able to stop the barbarians, and grateful to Lady Naga for saving his life, but he felt awkward at finding himself in debt to a member of the Green Storm.

He was allowed home the next day. In the weeks that followed, as he grew slowly stronger, he tried not to think about Lady Naga, although his parents often spoke about her. Indeed, all Zagwa was talking about Lady Naga. Everyone had heard how she had taken off her fine clothes and put on a doctor’s smock to save the life of young Theo Ngoni, and as the weeks went by, there were other stories about her: how she had visited the ancient cathedral church that had been hollowed out of the living rock of Mount Zagwa in the Black Centuries, and prayed there with the bishop himself. Everyone seemed to think that this was a good sign—except Theo. He suspected it was all just another Green Storm trick.

Two of the queen’s councillors came to ask him about his memories of the airship he had boarded. They told him that the aviatrix he had captured was being questioned but would not cooperate. They congratulated him on his bravery. Theo said, “I wasn’t being brave. I had no choice.” But secretly he felt proud, and very pleased that everyone in Zagwa would think of him as a hero now instead of only remembering that he had once run away to join the Storm. “I’m glad I was able to stop those townies before they hurt anyone,” he told the councillors. The councillors exchanged odd, thoughtful looks when he said that, and the younger of the two seemed about to say something, but the older one stopped him; they left soon afterward.

Outside his parents’ house Zagwa baked in the sun. The city was not quite so magnificent when you saw it from ground level; the buildings were shabby, bright paint peeling off the walls, roofs sagging. Weeds grew through cracked pavements. Even the domes of the citadel were streaked with verdigris. Zagwa’s great days were a thousand years behind it; the mighty empire it used to rule had been laid waste by hungry cities. In the shade of the umbrella tree across the street men gathered in the afternoons to talk angrily about the latest news of townie atrocities from the north. Maybe some of the young ones would grow so angry that one day they would go off to join the Storm, just as Theo had. Theo watched them from the window sometimes, and tried to remember being that sure of things, but he couldn’t.

One afternoon, almost a month after the air attack, he was reading in the garden room when his father and mother brought a visitor to see him. Theo barely looked up from his book when they entered, for he had grown used to visits from his many aunts and uncles, all embarrassingly keen to see his scars and remind him what a tearaway he’d been when he was three, or introduce him to the pretty daughters of their friends. It was not until his mother said, “Theo, my dear, you remember Air Marshal Khora?” that he realized this visit was different.

Khora was one of Africa’s finest aviators, and the commander of the Zagwan Flying Corps. He was a tall man, and handsome still, though he was nearing fifty and his hair was turning white. He wore ceremonial armor, and around his shoulders hung the traditional cloak of the queen’s bodyguard: yellow with patterns of black dots, representing the skin of a mythical creature called a leopard. He bowed low to Theo, greeting him like an equal, and small, inconsequential things were said that Theo was far too overcome to remember. Khora had been his hero since he was a little boy. When he was nine, he had whiled away a whole rainy season making a model of Khora’s flagship, the air destroyer Mwene Mutapa, with a little inch-high Khora standing on the stern gallery. It was such a surprise to see him here, actual size, in the familiar surroundings of home, that it took Theo several moments to notice that he had not come alone. Behind him stood two servant girls, foreigners dressed in robes of rain-colored silk, and behind them, in plainer clothes, another woman, very short and slight, whom Theo knew from photographs in the Zagwan news sheets.

“Theo,” said Air Marshal Khora, “I have brought Lady Naga to meet you.”

Theo knew that he ought to say, “I don’t want to; I don’t want anything to do with her or her people,” but he was still tongue-tied in Khora’s presence, and anyway, as the ambassador came toward him and he saw her delicate face and the heavy black spectacles (which she had not been wearing in those news photographs), he discovered that he knew her.

“You were on Cloud 9!” he blurted out, startling Khora and the servant girls, who had been expecting some more formal greeting. “The night the Storm camel You’re Dr. Zero! You were with Naga and—”

“And I am still with Naga,” the woman replied with a faint, puzzled smile. She was young, and quite pretty in a boyish way. Her hair, which had been short and green when Theo first met her, was longer now, and black. The neck of her linen tunic was open, and in the hollow of her throat hung a cheap tin cross that she must have bought from one of the stalls outside the cathedral. She reached up to touch it as she said, “So you were with us aboard Cloud 9 last year, Mr. Ngoni? I’m afraid I don’t remember …”

Theo nodded eagerly. “I was with Wren. You took us away from the Stalker Fang and asked Wren about the Tin Book…” His voice trailed off. He had just remembered the uniform she had been wearing that night. “She used to be some sort of surgeon,” his father had said, but that had only been half true; she had been a surgeon-mechanic, a builder of Stalkers for the Green Storm’s dreaded Resurrection Corps.

“That was you?” she asked, still smiling. “I’m so sorry. So much happened that night, and so much has happened since… How is your wound? Healing?”

“It is better,” said Theo bravely.

Khora laughed, and said, “The young heal quickly! I was wounded myself once, at Batmunkh Gompa, back in the year ’07. A damned Londoner stuck his sword through my lung. It still hurts me sometimes.”

“Theo, my boy,” his father said, “why don’t you show Lady Naga the gardens?”

Awkwardly, Theo indicated the open door, and Lady Naga followed him outside with her girls trailing at a respectful distance. Glancing behind him, he saw Khora deep in conversation with his parents, and his sisters watching and giggling. They were probably wondering which of the ambassador’s servants he would fall in love with, Theo realized. Both girls were very beautiful. One was Han or Shan Guonese; the other must have come from somewhere in the south of India; her skin was as dark as Theo’s, and her eyes, which met his as he stared at her, were the blackest he had ever seen.

He looked away quickly, and tried to cover his confusion by pointing out the path that led to his favorite part of the garden, the terrace overlooking the gorge. The shadowed walk was overhung by trees heavy with orange flowers; Lady Naga stooped to pick up one that had fallen on the path, and turned it in her hands as they walked on. Watching her, Theo noticed that her small fingers were dappled with patches of bleached skin and tea-colored stains. “Chemicals,” she explained, seeing that he had noticed. “I worked for a long time with the Resurrection Corps. The chemicals we used …”

Theo wondered how many dead soldiers she had Stalkerized, and how six short months could have turned a shy little officer from the Resurrection Corps into the wife of the leader of the Storm. As if she guessed his thoughts, Lady Naga looked up at him and said, “It was I who killed the Stalker Fang that night. I rebuilt another old Stalker, Mr. Grike, and set him to attack her. General Naga was impressed. He seemed to think I’d been very brave. And I suppose he felt I needed protection, for there are a lot of people in the Storm who worshiped her, and would be glad to see me dead. And—well, you know how sentimental soldiers can be. At any rate, he took good care of me on the voyage home to Tienjing, and when we had got there, and he was secure in the leadership, he asked me to marry him.”

Theo nodded. It was embarrassing, to be talking about such private things with her. He had seen Naga, a fierce warrior who clanked around inside a motorized metal exoskeleton to compensate for his lost right arm and crippled legs. He could not imagine that Dr. Zero had been in love with him. It must have been fear, or lust for power, that had made her say yes.

“The general must miss you,” was all he could think of to say.

“I think he does,” said Lady Naga. “But he is a good man, and he really wants peace. He wants to see friendship restored between Zagwa and the Storm. I persuaded him that I should be the one to talk to your leaders. He thought I would be safer here. There are still elements of the Storm who hate Naga for trying to end their war, and hate me for destroying their old leader and letting Naga take over power. He thought that by flying halfway around the world, I might escape them for a while. It seems he was wrong about that.”

Theo wondered what she meant. But at that moment they reached the edge of the trees; the sunlit terrace opened before them, and for a few minutes Lady Naga could say nothing but “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “What a magnificent view!”

It was magnificent. Even Theo, who had known it all his life, felt awestruck sometimes when he stood on this terrace and looked over the balustrade. The steep sides of Zagwa gorge dropped sheer to the aquamarine curve of the river far below, and the mountains rose above, thick green cloud forest giving way to snow, soaring up and up toward the dazzling sky where greater mountains hung: giant storm clouds, white and ice blue in the sunlight. A few wind riders were hanging on the thermals overhead, reminding Theo of his own flight, and the kite he’d lost. It occurred to him that Lady Naga had not yet thanked him for saving her from the townie air strike. He had thought that was what she had come here for.

“Whatever made you want to leave all this and join the Green Storm?” she asked.

Theo shrugged awkwardly, unhappy at being reminded of his time as a flying bomb. “It’s all under threat,” he said. “The Flying Corps do their best to defend our borders, but every year more and more of our farmlands and forests are eaten. The cities of the desert move south, and bring the desert with them. I had listened so long to my father and my friends talking about it, and I just wanted to be doing something. I thought the Green Storm had the answer. I was younger then. You think things are simple when you’re young.”

Lady Naga smiled quietly. “How old are you, Theo?”

“Now? I’m nearly seventeen. Oh, be careful!” he cried, for the dark servant girl, apparently quite fearless and as taken as her mistress with the view, had leaned far out over the crumbly balustrade to look down. “Careful!” Theo shouted. “It’s very old! It may give way!”

The girl paid him no attention at all, but the other servant said softly, “Rohini,” and reached out to gently pull her back. Her black eyes gazed at Theo, startled and confused.

“Rohini cannot hear you,” explained Lady Naga. “She is a deaf-mute, the poor thing. She came to me as a slave; a wedding gift from Naga’s oldest friend, General Dzhu. Of course, I do not hold with slavery, so she has her freedom now, but she has chosen to stay with me. She is a good girl.”

The girl Rohini bowed to Theo, thanking him for saving her, or apologizing for putting herself in danger. “It’s all Right,” he said, “it doesn’t matter …” and then remembered that she couldn’t hear and tried to mime it, which made both girls laugh. They were as bad as his sisters, Theo thought, but he didn’t really mind.

Just then, down a stairway from the upper level of the gardens, came Air Marshal Khora, with Theo’s parents. All three looked very solemn. Khora shot Lady Naga a look that seemed to mean something, though Theo could not guess what. The two servant girls stopped laughing at Theo and took themselves quickly away to the other end of the terrace. Some of the house servants appeared with folding tables, chairs, iced red tea, and honey biscuits. Mrs. Ngoni fussed about arranging seats and sending up to the house for a parasol, for she imagined that an ivory-colored person like Lady Naga could very easily catch sunstroke, and did not want it happening in her garden.

“Now,” said Khora, when all was done, “to business, Theo. I have a job in mind for you. It may be dangerous, it should be interesting, and it might be of supreme importance both to Zagwa and the world. Of course, you must not accept it unless you truly want it; you have already served Zagwa well, and no one will think the worse of you if you turn it down.”

“What is it?” asked Theo. He glanced at his parents. His father looked proud, his mother worried. “What do you want me to do?”

Instead of answering directly, Khora stood up and went to the balustrade, looking out across the bright gorge. “Theo,” he said, “when you boarded that barbarian airship, did you notice anything unusual about her crew?”

Theo was not sure what he meant. “They were easterners,” he said at last. “I remember thinking that I had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft.”

“Nor have I,” said Khora. “Nor has anyone. That aviatrix you captured claims that she and her comrades were mercenaries from the raft city of Perfume Harbor, in the pay of one of the German cities. She has papers that seem to prove that, and we found letters of marque signed by the mayor of Panzerstadt Koblenz in the wreckage of the other airship. We cannot prove that they are forgeries. And yet it doesn’t quite ring true. Some of their equipment was surprising, too.”

“The radio set on the ship I boarded …,” Theo remembered. “It was a Green Storm model.”

Khora returned to his seat, leaned closer to Theo, and spoke quite softly. “I think what you foiled was not an attack on Zagwa by barbarians but an attempt by elements inside the Green Storm to assassinate Lady Naga.”

“Why?” Theo started to say, and then remembered what Lady Naga had been telling him. “Because of what she did to the Stalker Fang?”

“Because they hate me,” said Lady Naga.

“It is not just that,” said Khora. “Lady Naga is too modest to say so, but the recent moves toward peace have largely been due to her influence. General Naga adores her, and does everything she asks.”

“I try to guide him,” said Lady Naga, blushing.

“But of course there are others in the Storm who cannot bear the idea of making peace with the Traction Cities,” Khora went on. “It would serve them very well if Lady Naga were to be killed, and it would serve them even better if she were to be killed by Tractionists. Naga would hardly push for peace with people he thought had murdered his beloved bride.

“That is why they went to all the trouble of disguising their attack as the work of the Traktionstadts. But now that their plan has failed, who knows what they will try next? She is safe while she is here, but they may attack her ship on its way back to Tienjing. They will be watching for her on the bird roads east of Zagwa, waiting for another chance to strike.

“So we have decided,” he said, “to play a little trick on Lady Naga’s enemies. The talks are supposed to last another week, but between ourselves the talking is all but done. Lady Naga has convinced us of her husband’s good intentions, and we have agreed to help him. A few days from now an unremarkable merchant airship will leave Zagwa air harbor and fly northwest across the sand sea to Tibesti Static, then north again toward the heights of Akheggar. But somewhere over the desert it will change course and make for Shan Guo. Lady Naga will be aboard it, incognito, with one or two of her people to keep her company. No one will expect her to travel by such a route, on such a ship, and by the time her own ship takes off, after the official conclusion of the talks, she will already have been delivered safe to her husband in Tienjing.”

“You talk about me as if I were a parcel,” complained Lady Naga, embarrassed at being the cause of so much trouble.

“The ship Lady Naga travels on should have an African captain,” said Khora. “If our enemies heard that a ship commanded by easterners had left Zagwa, they might smoke our plan, but with a Zagwan in charge, she will appear to be nothing more than a local trader. Of course, it will have to be someone who has proved his courage and his loyalty, and who can perhaps speak a little Airsperanto.”

“Me?” said Theo, catching his drift at last. He looked at Lady Naga, then his parents, and saw that they were all waiting for his answer. His father sat frozen with a honey biscuit halfway to his mouth, and as Theo watched, it slowly came in half and the lower part dropped stickily into Father’s lap. “You want me to go?” he said. He felt frightened and excited. To fly north again, to see the world, to be entrusted with such an important mission … He looked around him at the pleasant house, the steep sunlit gardens, then back to the grave faces of his parents. He had defied them once, running away to join the Green Storm’s war. Surely they would not let him leave again?

“Father?” he asked nervously. “Ma?”

“The choice is yours, Theo,” said his father, putting one arm around his wife’s shoulders. “You’ve proved more than capable of looking after yourself, and we know you’ve been restless, cooped up here, longing to return to the sky.”

“Like a caged bird,” said his mother.

“We will miss you if you go, and fear for you, and pray as we did before for your safe return, but we will not stop you from going, if that is what you want,” his father said. “It is a great honor that the air marshal has chosen you.”

“You do not have to decide now,” said Khora kindly. “The ship does not depart until Tuesday, in the dark of the moon. Think on it tonight, and talk with your mother and father, and let me know your decision in the morning.”

But it did not take as long as Khora had expected for Theo to make his decision. Lady Naga had saved his life, and despite all he had been through in the past year, the urge for adventure was still strong in him. And he could not help wondering whether, on the bird roads of the north, he might meet Wren Natsworthy again.

On Tuesday night, in the dark of the moon, Theo walked at the air marshal’s side across Zagwa air harbor, which stood on a low plateau outside the city walls. In a well-lit hangar Lady Naga’s cruiser Plum Blossom Spring sat in splendor. She was the loveliest airship that Theo had ever seen, but he barely glanced at her; his attention was fixed on the ship that sat waiting for him on an unlit pan at the very edge of the harbor. She was not a remarkable ship—in fact she had been chosen because she was so unremarkable—but Theo could see at once that she was well built. A sturdy little Achebe 1040 with tapered engine pods and long, graceful steering fins. Such ships were used all over Africa as freighters and transports, and this one had clearly had a long life, during which she had grown rather grubby and tattered, but she was Theo’s first command, and he was convinced that she was a better ship than even the Plum Blossom Spring. Her name was Nzimu.

Theo had already made his good-byes, and so, it seemed, had Lady Naga, for she was waiting for him at the foot of the Nzimu’s boarding ladder with just two other people: a young officer who had swapped his Green Storm uniform for the shapeless robes of a trader, and the deaf-mute servant girl Rohini. Khora explained that the other girl, Zhou Li, would be staying behind in Zagwa to wear her mistress’s clothes and stand in for her at next week’s official banquet. She was taller than Lady Naga, and Han rather than Aleutian, but they were enough alike that any spies who were watching might be fooled into thinking the ambassador was still in Zagwa.

“Theo,” said Lady Naga, taking his hands in greeting as he stopped in front of the Nzimu. “You remember Rohini, don’t you? And this is Captain Rasputra, who insists on coming as my bodyguard.”

“She’s a precious cargo,” said Rasputra, a white smile flashing at Theo out of his black spade of beard. “I promised Naga I’d not let her out of my sight.”

“It will be just the four of us,” Lady Naga said.

“When you refuel at Tibesti,” Khora said, “let everyone believe that Lady Naga and the captain are your passengers, and Rohini is your wife.”

“Right,” said Theo, glancing at the beautiful servant girl and feeling glad that his sisters were not here to giggle.

Captain Rasputra said, “The wind is rising.”

Lady Naga turned to Khora. “You have a beautiful country, Air Marshal. I hope to return one day, when peace has come back to the world.”

“I hope that day will be soon,” said Khora, returning her bow. The breeze fluttered their cloaks. As Khora straightened, he said, “Lady Naga, I owe you special thanks for ridding us of the Stalker Fang. I knew Anna Fang in life, and I loved her. The thought of that unholy thing walking about with her face …”

“I know,” said Lady Naga. “I know how it feels. My own brother … But you must not fear for Anna Fang. She is at peace.” She looked past him at Theo, and stretched out her small hand to him again. “Theo. Shall we go aboard?”

Chapter 5 A Boy and His Stalker

Fishcake hurried down a side alley deep in the under-tiers of Cairo. There were a lot of people about, even at this late hour, but that did not worry him. He was only ten years old, and little more than waist high to most of the passersby. They barely noticed him as he wove his way among them, clutching his bag of stolen Old Tech under his robes. From time to time he paused among the knots of men who gathered to argue and haggle in front of stalls heaped high with scraps of machinery. They loved to argue, down here in the Lower Suq, and if Fishcake timed it right and waited till the debate had reached its height, they never saw his skinny white hand dart out to snatch a piece of circuitry or a fragment of dented armor.

When he had what he needed, he stopped at a food stall and stole a sticky pastry, which he ate on the move as he scurried down the long maze of ladderways and stairs and ’tween-tier maintenance catwalks that led down eventually into Cairo’s drains. The city was rumbling across rough country toward the shores of the Middle Sea ; and the fetid spillways of its storm-drain system rang with the squeal and grumble of the vast axles turning. It was mostly shadows down there, except where spokes of red light from furnaces and refineries splayed down through the gratings. The stench, the noise, the fumes would have been too much for most people to bear, but for Fishcake this was home. He felt safe in the city’s noisy belly, where almost no one came.

He checked all the same to make sure he had not been followed before he pried open a grating in the wall of the main drain and threw his heavy bag through the hole, then slithered after it.

It was dark in the little side chamber he dropped into. Dark and dry. A hundred years before, Cairo had gone hunting far to the south, in lands where the rains came hard and frequently. It had needed its network of storm drains then, but since it had returned to the desert, they had been sealed off and forgotten. In the Lower Suq Fishcake sometimes heard men saying that the drains were haunted by djinni and evil ghosts, and it always made him smile, because they were right.

He picked up his bag and started wading through the moraine of greasy food wrappers and empty water bottles on the chamber floor. Near the back of the chamber, where light flickered in fitfully through another grating, something moved.

“Fishcake?” whispered a voice.

“Hello, Anna,” said Fishcake. He was glad it was her. He switched on his lamp, a stolen argon globe fed by power that he leeched from a cable upstairs. His Stalker was propped in a corner. She had unsheathed her claws when she heard him coming, and the long blades were still bared, raised in front of her blind bronze face. Fishcake felt what he always felt when he came home to her: pride, and loathing, and a sort of love. Pride because he had built her himself, cobbling her together from the pieces of her smashed body that he had rescued from the desert. Loathing because she had not turned out as well as he had hoped. Her armor, which must once have been so smooth and silvery, was dull and dented as an old bucket, scabbed with solder and riveted-on patches that he’d made by stamping soup tins flat. And although he had never seen a Stalker in action, he was sure her joints and bearings were not supposed to grate like that each time she moved…

As for the love, well, everybody needs to love someone, and the Stalker was all Fishcake had. She had saved him in the desert, told him what to do, told him how to rebuild her. She was a strange companion, and scary sometimes, but it was better than being alone.

“I found some couplings,” said Fishcake, emptying out his bag in the corner of the chamber where he kept his stolen tools. The chamber rocked and shuddered with the movements of the city. Light spiked through the gratings, shining on the Stalker’s unchanging face, her comforting bronze smile. “I’ll put you together again soon,” Fishcake promised. “Tonight…”

“Thank you, Fishcake. Thank you for taking care of me.”

“That’s all right.”

Fishcake had learned that his Stalker was really two people. One was the Stalker Fang, a stern, merciless being who had ordered the Green Storm about for years and now ordered Fishcake instead. But from time to time she would jerk and quiver and go silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, she would be Anna, who was much gentler, and a bit bewildered.

At first Fishcake had thought that Anna was just the result of a short circuit inside the Stalker’s complicated brain, but over the months he had come to understand that there was more to her than that. Anna remembered all sorts of things that had happened long ago, and she liked to talk about people and places that Fishcake had never heard of. A lot of her stories made no sense; they were just lists of disconnected images and names, like random pieces from a hundred mixed-up jigsaws. Sometimes she just made sobbing noises, or begged Fishcake to kill her, which he did not know how to do, and wouldn’t have done even if he had, in case she turned back into the Stalker Fang while he was doing it and killed him instead. But he liked Anna. He was glad it was Anna tonight.

He found her legs, stacked in a corner beneath some newspapers. He had rebuilt them months ago, and he was quite pleased with them, even though the bottom part of the right one and the right foot were missing and he had had to use an old metal table leg instead. He had never managed to attach them to the rest of his Stalker, because he couldn’t find the right couplings, but tonight in the Suq he had struck lucky at last. It was because of this truce out east; traders were arriving in Cairo from all sorts of places that had been war zones until quite recently, from the territory of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft and the battlefields of the Altai Shan. (There was no shortage of smashed Stalker bits in the Altai Shan.)

Fishcake drank some water and set to work. He said, “We’ll soon be away from here.”

“You have found an airship?” whispered the Stalker. She sounded eager. (One thing that the Stalker Fang and Anna parts of her had in common was that they both kept nagging at Fishcake to finish the repairs and take them away to a place called Shan Guo. The Stalker Fang had something important to do there. Anna just wanted to go home.) “I had an airship of my own once,” she whispered. “The Jenny Haniver. I built her myself, secretly, in Arkangel, stole parts from Stilton’s salvage yards, and flew away…”

“Not an airship,” said Fishcake, who was tired of that story. “How do you expect us to nick an airship? The air yards are three tiers up; it’s too dangerous.”

“But we cannot walk to Shan Guo. It will take too long.”

Fishcake placed a leg in position and busied himself connecting wires and cords. “We won’t have to walk,” he said. “I picked up some news in the Lower Suq today. Guess where Cairo’s heading. Brighton. We’re going to park beside the seaside and trade with Brighton. Boats and things will go across. And I reckon there’s still limpets in Brighton. We could get to Shan Guo easy in a limpet.”

“Eyes,” whispered his Stalker. She turned her face to him, showing him the smashed lenses of her eyes. “I will need to see, if we are to reach Shan Guo. You will find me new eyes.”

Her voice had changed. It was still a whisper, but it was harsher and hissier, and Fishcake knew that he was in the presence of the Stalker Fang. He kept his nerve. “Sorry. No eyes. I can’t find none anywhere. Maybe in Brighton, eh? Maybe I’ll find some Stalkers’ eyes in Brighton?”

But he had a feeling he wouldn’t. In fact, several of the stalls he frequented in the Lower Suq had Stalkers’ eyes for sale, big glass jars full of them, like jawbreakers. Fishcake had decided very early on that he would not be stealing any for his Stalker. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that she was stronger and faster and cleverer than him. But as long as she was blind, she would need to stick with her little Fishcake.

“Maybe in Brighton,” he told her again, and set to work on the other leg.

Chapter 6 Rain-Colored Silk

The Nzimu flew north-northwest all night. By dawn she was cruising in calm air above a seemingly endless desert. Theo, whose nerves had been on edge as he guided his little ship over the mountains north of Zagwa, soon started to feel rather bored. Everything was running smoothly. The ambassador stayed in her cabin, high in the envelope. Her pretty servant came down the companionway in a rustle of rain-colored silk from time to time to stare at the view from the gondola windows. Once or twice that day he turned and found her watching him. Each time, her dark eyes darted quickly away from his, seeming suddenly very interested in the ducting above the main control station, or the flickering altimeter needles.

There was something familiar about her, and it nagged at Theo through the long, dull hours of northing. Was it Wren whom she reminded him of? But she was much prettier than Wren…

Captain Rasputra, meanwhile, turned out to be friendly, competent, polite, and perfectly sure that he could fly Lady Naga home to Tienjing without any help from Theo Ngoni. “Look, my dear fellow,” he said, when he came down to relieve Theo that evening. “Let us sort ourselves out. I’m an aviator with twelve years’ experience in General Naga’s own squadron. You, on the other hand, are what? An amateur. A failed Tumbler pilot. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you are commander of this tub for official purposes only, so that we may maintain the fiction that she is a Zagwan vessel on a trading voyage. For practical purposes, while we are up here in the blue, I think you had better leave things to me, eh?”

Before he turned in that evening, Theo climbed onto the top of the envelope and stood in the wind on the tiny lookout platform there, watching for trouble. He saw none, nothing but a few small desert townlets on the move, dragging their long wakes of dust behind them, too busy with their own concerns to pay attention to a passing airship. The air was empty too, except for a distant sky train heading south, its long chain of envelopes gleaming like an amber necklace in the sun.

Theo sighed, almost wishing that air pirates or assassins would attack, so that he could prove his usefulness to Lady Naga and Captain Rasputra. He imagined himself doing something heroic again (conveniently forgetting how frightened he had been aboard that Super-Gnat) and word of it spreading along the bird roads until it reached Wren. But when he tried to picture her, he found that the only face he could call to mind was that of the servant Rohini.

Alone in her cabin in the stern of the Nzimu’s envelope, Oenone Zero, Lady Naga, knelt and bowed her head and made a steeple of her stained hands and started to say her prayers. She did not expect God to answer her, because she did not believe he worked like that. But she had felt his presence very clearly, ever since that night on Cloud 9 when she had thought she was about to die. He gave her strength, and comfort, and courage. It seemed to Oenone that the least she could offer him in return were her prayers.

And so she gave thanks for her time in Zagwa, for the kindness of the queen and bishop and of Air Marshal Khora. She gave thanks for the bravery of Theo Ngoni, and prayed that he would come to no harm on this furtive voyage. And there she became distracted by a rather unspiritual thought. What a pity it was that her husband could not have been as young and handsome as Theo…

She opened her eyes and looked at the portrait of Naga that she kept beside her bunk; his maimed body strapped into mechanized battle armor, his battered, ocher face screwed into the awkward smile of someone who has had no practice smiling. Whenever she saw it, she wondered what it could be that made such a man love her.

She did not love him. She was just grateful for his protection, and glad that the leadership of the Green Storm had passed into the hands of a decent man. That was why she had been unable to say no when he asked her to be his wife. “Of course,” she’d said, and a feeling of numb astonishment had settled over her, which did not lift until she was dressed in her red bridal gown and standing on tiptoe to kiss her new husband in front of a vast assembly of officers and priests and bridesmaids and a nervous Christian vicar, flown in at considerable expense from some static in the Western Archipelago to give Oenone’s new god’s blessing to the marriage.

A gentle knocking broke in upon her memories. The cabin door opened and Rohini came in, shy and silent as ever. Oenone sat down at her portable dressing table and unpinned her hair so that the girl could brush it. In the lamplight the ends of her hair shone faintly auburn, a reminder that some of her long-ago ancestors had probably been Americans who had fled to the remote Aleutian islands after the Sixty Minute War. Yet another reason for the Green Storm’s hard-liners to despise her …

She tried to forget them and enjoy the gentle touch of Rohini’s hands and the soft, sleepy shushing of the hairbrush. She was glad that the girl had volunteered to come with her on this voyage. Rohini was so much quieter and sweeter than her other servants, who all seemed slightly resentful when Oenone tried to treat them like equals. Rohini was the only one who seemed genuinely fond of her, and appeared to appreciate the kindness that Oenone showed her.

So it came as a horrible surprise when Rohini dropped the brush, looped the rain-colored belt of her robe around Oenone’s throat, and, pulling it tight, hissed in a voice Oenone had never heard, “We know what you did, you miserable city lover! We know how you destroyed our beloved leader, and seduced that fool Naga! Now you will see what the true Storm does to traitors…”

Something had woken Theo, and he could not get back to sleep. It was cold in his cabin; his bunk was uncomfortable; he missed his home very much. He turned on the lamp and looked at his wristwatch, but there were several hours to go before he was supposed to relieve Rasputra at the helm. He groaned and turned the light out and snuggled under his scratchy blankets, trying vainly to sleep again.

But as he lay there, he slowly became convinced that his ship had altered course. The sound of the wind against the envelope had changed in some subtle way. He had learned to pay attention to such details during his time aboard the carriers of the Tumbler Corps, where any unexplained course change might mean that the unit was going into battle. The Nzimu had not been due to alter her heading before she sighted the Tibesti Mountains, and Theo had not expected that to happen before sunrise.

What was going on? He imagined a flock of barbarian flying machines closing in from windward, or a pirate cutter rising from some lair among the dunes. Just like Rasputra to try to outrun them without even telling him! He rolled off his bunk and started pulling on his boots and coat, the only items he had taken off when he turned in.

Halfway down the central companion ladder he glimpsed Rohini on the walkway below him, heading aft toward Lady Naga’s cabin. He was about to call out and ask her what had happened when he remembered that she would not hear him. Besides, he did not want to alarm her over what might be an innocent course correction. Not until he’d talked to Rasputra.

He waited until she had gone past, then slid down the last few sections of ladder and dropped into the gondola. “What’s happening?” he asked.

But Captain Rasputra could not tell him, because someone had cut Captain Rasputra’s throat so deeply and so expertly that he had died before anything more than a look of mild surprise could register on his pleasant face.

“Captain Rasputra?” said Theo. A movement at his side made him jump, but it was just his own reflection in a window, wide-eyed and stupid. He stared at himself. Who had done this? Was there an intruder aboard the Nzimu? Had some assassin boarded his ship the same way he’d boarded those Super-Gnats over Zagwa? But no; the smell of blood, the horror of finding himself alone with a dead man in this glass-walled place, reminded him vividly of things he and Wren had seen on Cloud 9. He knew now why Rohini seemed so familiar.

He tugged down a fire axe from a hook on the wall and forced himself back to the ladder and up. As he ran along the walkway to the door of Lady Naga’s cabin, he heard someone inside say something about traitors. There was a scuffling and a noise of things falling and rolling. Theo shouted to give himself courage, and swung his axe at the lock on the door. It came apart under the first blow, and the door swung open.

Inside, amid a tangle of bedding from the overturned bunk and a rolling glitter of vials and bottles from the dressing table, knelt Lady Naga, scrabbling with both hands at the belt that Rohini was using to strangle her. Rohini’s look of triumph faded only slightly when she looked around to see Theo standing in the shattered doorway.

“Can’t you just knock?” she asked crossly.

“Cynthia Twite,” said Theo.

“Surprise!” the girl replied, with a smile.

Lady Naga made a horrible gurgling noise, like the last of the bathwater heading down the plughole. Theo took a step forward and waved the axe, but he was too gentle to use it, and he knew Cynthia knew it. Remembering the girl’s vanity, he said, “You look different…”

It worked. Tiring of Lady Naga for the moment, Cynthia gave the silk belt one last, sharp tug and let go. Her victim pitched forward and lay facedown, unmoving. “Good, isn’t it?” asked Cynthia, indicating her own black hair, which had been blond when Theo saw her last, and her brown skin, which had been fair. She smiled as if Theo had paid her a gallant compliment. It was her only weakness as a secret agent. She was so delighted by her own cleverness that she could never resist telling her victims how she had tricked them.

Theo hoped that if he could keep her talking long enough, some helpful god might slip an idea into his brain.

“The hair and skin were easy,” Cynthia was saying. “The eyes were the real trick. I’m wearing little Old Tech things called ‘contract lenses.’ ” She touched a finger to one eye and blinked. When she took her hand away, the eye was its old cornflower blue, gazing incongruously at Theo out of her dark face. “If you were any good,” she said, “you’d have tried to hit me then. But I see you’re still a coward. I’m rather looking forward to killing you, Theo Ngoni. That’s why I was saving you till last.”

“Please,” gasped Lady Naga, heaving about on the deck like something half drowned. “Don’t hurt him.”

Cynthia stamped on her. “We’re talking!”

“Cynthia,” shouted Theo, “why are you doing this?”

Cynthia took another step closer, fixing him with her odd-colored eyes. “This Aleutian bitch betrayed our leader so that Naga could seize power. Do you really think those of us who loved the Stalker Fang would let her get away with it?”

“But why here?” cried Theo helplessly. “Why now? You’re part of her household; you could have killed her in Tienjing… Killed Naga, too.”

Cynthia sighed sharply, exasperated by his innocence. “We don’t want Naga dead,” she explained. “That would only mean civil war, and more distraction from the real business of killing townies. We just want to make him give up this truce. If you hadn’t interfered when I called our ships in at Zagwa, it would be over already. But I’m patient. In a few minutes this old rust bucket will go down in flames. Rohini will be the only survivor, and she’ll tell Naga how Zagwa betrayed us to the townies and the townies shot us down. That ought to put the mockers on any alliance between Naga and your lot. As for the townies, well, he’s hardly going to sit down and talk peace when he hears what they did to his pretty little wifelet. The guns will begin firing again. Our mistress will reward us when she returns to Tienjing!”

“You mean Fang? But she’s dead!”

Cynthia smiled eerily. “She was always dead, African. That is why she can never be killed. She is waiting for us to end this treacherous talk of truces and conditions. Then she will return, and lead us to total victory!”

“You’re mad!” said Theo.

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from somebody who goes around smashing down doors with a dirty great axe,” said Cynthia, and with no more warning than that, she swung her foot up and drove him backward with a kick, snatching the heavy fire axe from his hands as he went sprawling through the open doorway and tumbled down the companionway to the level below.

A grated walkway hit him hard in the face, and he lay there for a moment tasting blood in his mouth and listening for the sound of Cynthia coming after him. He heard her footsteps pacing along the walkway overhead, and saw her shadow moving against the flank of the gas cell up there. He dragged himself into a crawlspace. After a moment the footsteps stopped. “Theo?” Cynthia called down. “Don’t think I’m going to come looking for you. I was looking forward to killing you, but I really can’t be bothered to play hide-and-seek. It won’t make any difference anyway. There’s a bomb under the central gas cell, set to explode at midnight. So I’m going to take one of your silly Zagwan kites and beetle off now; I’ve arranged to meet some friends of mine in the desert shortly. Toodle-oo!”

The footsteps started again, and grew quieter as she climbed away from him. Theo guessed she was making for the emergency exit in the flank of the envelope. Just inside it was a locker where half a dozen kites were stored, workaday versions of the one he’d flown in Zagwa. He waited, and heard the hatch open, the sounds inside the envelope changing as the wind rushed in. Quickly he scrambled along a lateral support to a place where a glastic porthole had been riveted into the skin of the envelope. Out in the starlight, far away, a black bat wing showed for a moment against the silver waves of the desert.

What about the other kites? Knowing Cynthia, she would have destroyed them. But maybe the delay that Theo had caused might have left her no time to deal with them. He glanced at his watch and saw with relief that there were still eight minutes to go before midnight. Ignoring the pain in his chest and side, he started climbing toward the kite locker. Even if he had not known where it was, he would have been able to find it by tracing the source of the cold wind howling in through the open escape hatch. Sure enough, the locker was empty; Cynthia had bundled the spare kites out through the hatch before she took flight herself. But when Theo stuck his head out, he saw one kite caught in the ratlines only a few yards from the hatch, and it was easy for him to reach out and drag it back aboard.

Breathing hard, he started to strap himself into the kite. Then he remembered Lady Naga. The kite was big, and she was small; Theo was sure it would carry both of them. But was she even still alive? He glanced quickly at his watch. The climb to the kite locker had not taken nearly as long as he’d thought. He had to try to save Lady Naga. He had promised.

He left the kite by the locker and flung himself back down the steep companionways to her cabin. She was lying where he had left her, but she started whimpering and trying to drag herself away when she heard him come in, imagining that he was Cynthia.

“It’s all right,” he told her, kneeling down beside her and rolling her over.

“Rohini,” she croaked.

“She’s gone,” said Theo, trying to help her to her feet. “She was never Rohini anyway. Her name’s Cynthia Twite; she was part of the Stalker Fang’s private spy ring.”

“Twite?” Lady Naga frowned and groaned. Thinking seemed to hurt. “No, she was a white girl, the Stalker’s agent on Cloud 9… Naga took her home aboard the Requiem Vortex, but she vanished when we reached Shan Guo… Oh, Theo, I have to get home. If I don’t, she or her friends will tell Naga that the townies killed me, and the peace will fail…”

“Don’t try to talk,” said Theo, worried that she would injure herself still further by forcing all these words up her poor, bruised throat. “I’ll get you home, I promise. But first we have to get off this ship.” He checked his wristwatch. “There’s a b—” he said, and stopped.

It was still eight minutes to midnight.

The fall down the stairs, he thought. My watch is broken…

He had just time to remember his father saying, “I don’t know why you youngsters wear these gimcrack bracelet watches. A pocket watch is more distinguished, and far, far more reliable,” before the explosion tore his ship apart beneath him.

Chapter 7 Brighton Rocks

Brighton had taken a turn for the worse since Wren and Theo had left. The flying palace of Cloud 9 was gone, and it had taken most of the city’s ruling elite with it. Brighton was ruled now by the Lost Boys. Dragged aboard as captives by the Shkin Corporation, they had escaped from their pens on the night of the Green Storm raid and quickly made themselves at home, setting up their own small kingdoms among the smart white streets of Queen’s Park and Montpelier and the dank labyrinths of the Laines, gathering private armies of beggars and rebel slaves about them. They fought among themselves, or formed shaky alliances that could be broken over a stolen pair of shoes or a covetous glance at a pretty slave girl. You could never tell what a Lost Boy would do next. They were vicious and sentimental, greedy and generous. A lot of them were mad. By night their followers fought running battles on the litter-strewn promenades, avenging botched deals and imagined insults.

Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys), and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guesthouses and frolic in the Sea Pool; but there was a certain sort of person—well-off artists from the comfortable middle tiers of cities that the war had never touched, and spoiled young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them— who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music, and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Ore with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St. Jean les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves, or gunrunners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy anything. And up at the bows, drenched in the spray that crashed over the gunwales every time the launch shoved its blunt nose through a wave, Fishcake stood staring at the approaching resort and wishing he had stayed safe ashore.

In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead, he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he had encountered any of them, they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk, he realized he’d been wrong; the Lost Boys were the Brighton authorities.

The launch swung across Brighton’s decaying stern, past dirty paddle wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime, where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveler from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, “Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!”

“Lost Boy submarines!” the boy said. “You can buy pleasure trips aboard them and see the city from beneath. And that’s not all they’re used for. Lost Boys are still pirates at heart. I’ve heard stories of little towns that have crossed Brighton’s path and never been seen again…”

“Ugh!” said the girl again, but she looked delighted at the thought of boarding a city where real live pirates lived.

Fishcake did not share her enthusiasm. Returning seemed less and less like a good idea.

The launch entered a channel of calm, filthy water between the central hull and the outrigger district of Kemptown. Abandoned pleasure piers arched overhead, their corroded gantries sending down a rain of rust flakes as Brighton shifted on the swell. The voices of the launch crew echoed across the narrowing gap to dockers waiting on the mooring stair. Smells of oil and brine. A dead cat bobbed in a mat of drifting scum. The launch backed its engines, and the other passengers began to gather their bags and pat their clothes, checking that wallets and money belts were still secure, but Fishcake just turned up his collar and tugged down the peak of his greasy cap and wished that he could stay aboard the launch and let it take him back to Cairo.

His Stalker, who was standing silently beside him, wrapped in the long, hooded robe that he had stolen for her from the Lower Suq, seemed to sense his fear. Her steel fingers closed gently on his arm, and she whispered, “There is nothing to be afraid of. I am with you.”

She was Anna today. He took her hand in his and held it tight and felt a little braver. He did not even worry too much when a gust of wind snatched his cap off and sent it whirling up into the sunlight.

Two tiers above, in a fortified hotel on Ocean Boulevard, a Lost Boy named Brittlestar jerked around to stare as the lost cap went whirling past his window. “What was that?” he demanded.

His friends and bodyguards fingered the weapons in their belts and said they didn’t know. One of his slaves said she thought it was just a hat.

“Just a hat?” hissed Brittlestar. “Nothing is just anything! It meant something! Where did it come from? Whose was it?”

The bodyguards, friends, and slaves swapped weary glances. Brittlestar was growing increasingly paranoid, and sometimes at night he woke the whole gang as he thrashed around in his sleep and screamed about Grimsby and somebody called Uncle. The bodyguards and friends were starting to think it might soon be time to pitch him overboard and offer their services to some less sensitive Lost Boy, like Krill or Baitball.

Brittlestar, the hem of his silk dressing gown swooshing behind him over the expensive carpets, went rushing to the room where he kept his screens. All the Lost Boys had screens, and all had crab-cameras that they sent sneaking about Brighton to spy on other Lost Boys. Everyone had grown quite used to the scraping of the machines’ metal feet inside the city’s ventilation shafts, and the echoey, rattling fights that broke out when two rival cameras met. Sometimes at dawn the pavements beneath air vents were littered with torn-off metal legs and shattered lenses, the debris of desperate battles that had raged through the shafts all night.

“Everything means something!” Brittlestar assured his followers, as they gathered in the doorway to watch him grapple with the screen controls. “You say it’s a hat, I say it’s a sign. It could be a message from Uncle!” Brittlestar had been dreaming a great deal about Uncle lately. Uncle kept whispering to him. He had come to believe that the old man was still alive, and would soon punish his Lost Boys for letting themselves be captured by Brighton.

But it was not Uncle he saw when he trained one of his cameras on the group of visitors disembarking at the Kemptown Stair. He wasn’t sure whom he was seeing at first, only that there was something familiar about the little boy leading the cripple in the black robe. Then one of his slaves, a woman named Monica Weems, who had once worked for the Shkin Corporation and had a better memory for faces than Brittlestar, suddenly pointed at the screen and said, “Look! Look, master! It’s little Fishcake!”

Little Fishcake hurried his Stalker along litter-strewn pavements under the colonnades at the city’s edge, past boarded-up cafes and looted amusement arcades, out at last into the metallic sunlight of Plage Ultime. TO THE BEACH read a stenciled sign on a white wall, and Fishcake and his Stalker followed where it pointed, past abandoned hotels and empty swimming pools, past the gigantic housings of the resort’s Mitchell Nixon engines, down to where the limpets waited.

There was a chain-link fence and a padlock on the gate, but fences and padlocks meant nothing to the Stalker. She snapped the lock, and Fishcake pushed the gate open and ran among the limpets, feeling a strange nostalgia for the old days in Grimsby. Their armored cabs and crook-kneed legs, patched with barnacles and gull droppings, gave the limpets the appearance of enormous prehistoric crabs. Fishcake knew them all: the Sea Louse and the Thermoclyne Girl, the Hagfish 2 and the Finny Denizen, but he settled on the smallest, sleekest, newest one, the Spider Baby. It stood closer to the water than the rest, and had a board propped against its foreleg offering pleasure trips beneath the city, so he hoped it might already be fueled.

He looked for his Stalker, but he had left her behind. Poor thing, stomping along on that table leg, she couldn’t keep up with him! He started to walk back through the zigzag shadows under the limpets, calling out, “Anna! Come here! I need you to open the hatch!”

With a howl of electric engines two bugs came speeding out of the streets beneath the engine housings and through the open gate. They were driving much too fast, and both were overloaded, with men and boys packed into their small cabins and standing on the roofs and running boards. Fishcake, noticing the swords and flare pistols and harpoon guns that they were waving at him, turned to run, but the only way out was through the gate, which the men spilling from the bugs quickly pushed shut. Whimpering, Fishcake veered toward the sea, but the Drys were all around him, and with them, staring at him, was a boy he knew: a tall, thin, highly strung redheaded boy named—

“Brittlestar,” said Brittlestar. “Remember me? ’Cos I remember you, Fishcake.” He was carrying a speargun. “You’re the sneak, ain’t you? The one as told Shkin where Grimsby lay? Don’t think I’ve forgot. We none of us have, we Lost Boys. Maybe when I show ’em that I’ve caught you, they’ll give me a bit of respect. Maybe Uncle will spare me when he comes to punish us. Maybe—”

Somehow, suddenly, Fishcake’s Stalker was standing behind Brittlestar. She gripped his chin and his red hair and twisted his head around so sharply that the noise of his neck snapping echoed like a gunshot. The last thing Brittlestar saw was his own surprised face reflected in her bronze mask. His finger tightened on the trigger of his speargun, which was pointing at the sky. A silver harpoon shot up into the sunlight, up through the steam from the idling engines, high into the clear air above the city.

Fishcake had just enough of his wits left to throw himself down beside Brittlestar’s flapping body as bullets began to bang and whine among the parked limpets. He watched the harpoon rise higher and higher, slower and slower, until it seemed to hang for a moment suspended in the blue sky, a flake of silver among all the gliding gulls. His Stalker bared her claws. As the harpoon started to fall, she began killing Brittlestar’s gang one by one, finding them by their scent and the sound of the guns they shot at her. By the time the harpoon clattered on the deck plate, they were all dead.

The Stalker sheathed her claws and helped Fishcake to stand, asking him gently if he was damaged.

“Anna?” said Fishcake, surprised. “I thought you had turned into—”

“The other is still asleep, I think,” his Stalker whispered, and patted at her robe, which was smoldering where someone had fired a flare pistol at her.

“I didn’t think you would be so …,” said Fishcake awkwardly, looking at the blood that smeared her hands and sleeves. On the deck plate beside him Brittlestar had stopped flapping and lay still. Fishcake remembered how, in Grimsby, Brittlestar had always been rather kind to him. He said, “I thought it was only her who would do things like that.”

His Stalker said, “I have had to kill people sometimes. I had forgotten, but I remember now. I used to be quite good at it. In my work for the League. And at Stayns that time, to save poor Tom and Hester…”

“You know Tom and Hester?” asked Fishcake, almost more shocked by those names than by the sudden deaths of Brittlestar and his crew.

But his Stalker had taken him by the wrist and was leading him briskly toward the limpet he had chosen. She did not bother to answer his question, and as she climbed the boarding ladder and started to force the heavy hatches open, she was hissing to herself about Shan Guo and ODIN. Kind, murderous Anna had sunk once more beneath the surface of her mind, and she was the Stalker Fang again.

Chapter 8 On the Line

Wren had been dreaming about Theo, but what he had been saying or doing in her dream she did not know; the details, which had seemed so vivid and clear just a moment before, all faded in an instant as she woke. Her father was shaking her gently and calling her name.

“Bother,” she mumbled. “What is it?”

She was in her bunk aboard the Jenny Haniver, snuggled beneath a lot of furs and blankets, because although it was spring, the bird roads were still cold. Outside her porthole the sky was dark. She sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “What is it?” she asked, more clearly this time. “Is something wrong? You’re not ill?”

“No, no,” said Tom, “and I’m sorry to wake you early, but there’s a sight ahead that you won’t want to miss.”

Wren’s father believed firmly that there were certain sights in the world that were so beautiful, or awesome, or educational, that Wren would never forgive him if he let her sleep through them. He often recalled his own first glimpse of Batmunkh Gompa, and his first sight of the Tannhäuser volcano chain, and several times during the journey east he had dragged Wren out of her bunk to see a beautiful sunrise or the approach of some fine city. Wren, who was a teenager and needed her sleep, was not always as grateful as he expected.

But on this particular morning, when she came grumpily onto the flight deck and saw what was framed in the Jenny’s nose windows, she forgave him at once.

They were flying low, and beneath them stretched the same featureless, rut-scarred plain that they had been passing over for days. To the south, a whitish smear of mist hung over the Rustwater Marshes and the Sea of Khazak, but that was not what Tom had woken her for. Ahead, rising like mountains into a murk of their own smoke, stood more Traction Cities than Wren had yet seen in her life. Lighted windows and furnace vents shone like jewels in the predawn dark. Towns and cities that Wren would once have thought impressive were rolling to and fro, but they were dwarfed by the colossal armored ziggurats at the eastern edge of the cluster, ziggurats whose ten or fifteen tiers of homes and factories rose from base plates a mile across, all armored like medieval knights and prickly with guns and the mooring gantries of aerial warships. The Jenny Haniver had arrived at the line that marked the easternmost boundary of Municipal Darwinism. She was flying into one of the great city parks of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft.

Fourteen years earlier, while Wren was busy learning to crawl and alarming her parents by eating stones, beetles, and small ornaments, the Green Storm had swept down from their strongholds in the mountains of Shan Guo to spread war and destruction across the Great Hunting Ground. Their air fleets and Stalker armies had surged westward, herding terrified Traction Cities ahead of them and destroying any that did not flee fast enough. Then Arminius Krause, the bürgermeister of Traktionstadt Weimar, had sent envoys to eleven other German-speaking cities and proposed that they join together and turn to face the Storm before every mobile town and city was driven off the western edge of the Hunting Ground into the sea.

And so the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was born. The twelve great cities, swiftly joined by others, swore that they would eat no mobile town until the Green Storm was destroyed. They would survive instead by devouring Mossie ships and forts and static settlements until they had made the world safe again for Municipal Darwinism, which every civilized person knew was the most natural, sensible, and fair way of life ever devised.

They turned, they fought, and they forced the startled Green Storm to a stalemate. Now a broad ribbon of no-man’s-land wriggled across the Hunting Ground from the southern fringes of the Rustwater Marshes to the edges of the Ice Wastes, marking the boundary between two worlds. To the east of it the Green Storm were struggling to plant new static settlements and reclaim for their farmers land that had been plowed up and polluted by centuries of Municipal Darwinism. To the west, life went on almost as before, with cities hunting towns and towns hunting villages; the only difference was that most mayors sent a portion of their catch to feed the Traktionstadts.

Over the years there had been all manner of battles as each side tried to break the line. Stretches of churned mud and empty marsh changed hands again and again, at the cost of thousands of lives, but always, when the months-long thunder of thrust and counterthrust had faded, the line remained much as it had been before, a river of dead ground winding across a continent.

Now that the truce seemed to be holding, some of the braver merchant cities and industrial platforms from the west had come to see the line for themselves, and trading clusters had formed around each concentration of Traktionstadts. The Jenny Haniver was flying into one of them. Tom took her low, beneath the gray lid of the cities’ smoke, and Wren peered down at the upperworks of cities and merchant towns, and then down again to the earth, where smaller towns were scuttling along the narrow ridges of land between deep trenches made by larger cities’ tracks. She saw tiny scavenger-villes down there, and speedy fighting suburbs that Tom said were called harvesters. The sky was filled with other airships, balloon taxis, and lumbering sky trains. Once a squadron of ungainly flying machines roared rudely across the Jenny’s bows. “Air hogs!” said Tom, and grumbled about old-fangled inventions and pilots who had no respect for the ways of the bird roads, but Wren was thrilled; the flapping, tumbling machines reminded her of the Flying Ferrets, those brave aviators whom she had seen in action over Cloud 9.

A fighting city called Murnau slipped by outside the windows, a colossal armored wedge, wormholed with gun slits and sally ports. Its tiers were long triangles, narrowing to a sharp prow where a ram jutted out beneath the city’s jaws. It was breathtakingly big and powerful looking, but the sky was brightening quickly now, and Wren could see five or six similar cities in the distance, stretching off in a long line down the western edge of the Rustwater Marshes. Some looked even bigger than Murnau.

The Jenny’s destination was much more peaceful. Hanging in the sky a few miles from Murnau was a small doughnut of deck plate, crammed with lightweight buildings and fringed with mooring struts, supported by a bright cloud of gasbags like a helpful thunderhead. Wren had been aboard that doughnut often during her brief time on the bird roads, in cold northern skies and sticky southern ones. Finding it here above this clutter of armored cities made her feel a little as if she were coming home.

Airhaven!

The long-faced clerk at the harbor office looked thoughtful when Tom asked him about the Archaeopteryx, and shuffled off to rummage in his filing drawers, returning after a few minutes with a musty ledger that he said held details of every ship registered in the flying free port. “Cruwys Morchard, mistress and commander,” he said, and peered through his pince-nez at a cloudy photograph of the aviatrix, paper clipped to the page that held the Archaeopteryx’ s details. “Ah, yes, I remember! A handsome woman. Buys up Old Tech.”

“What sort of Old Tech?” asked Tom.

“Magnetical curiosities mostly, to judge by her customs records. Harmless old gadgets and gewgaws from the Electric Empire. Though she also shops for medical supplies, and a little livestock. Just a lass, she was, when she registered with us. Eighteen years ago!”

“The year after London was destroyed,” said Tom. He unclipped the picture and turned it around. It had been taken long ago, when its subject was still a young woman, her curly hair a cloud of darkness. “It is Clytie Potts!” he murmured.

“Eh, sir?” The clerk was a little deaf. He cupped one hand to his ear while the other snatched back the photograph. “What’s that?”

“I think her real name is Potts,” said Tom.

The clerk shrugged. “Whatever it is, sir, the Sky Gods must like her. There’s not many last eighteen years in the air trade.” And to prove his point, he turned the ledger around and showed Tom and Wren the index pages, where, amid a long list of airships, there were many names crossed through in red, with neat little notes beside them saying things like “missing,” “crashed,” or “exploded at her moorings.”

The clerk thought that Ms. Morchard had bought her ship in the Traction City of Helsinki, and when Tom slipped a golden sovereign under the cover of the ledger, he suddenly recalled that she had purchased her at Unthank’s airship yard there. But where she had come from before that, where she had found the money for an airship, and what precisely her business was, he did not know; and, alas, old Mr. Unthank and all his records had been destroyed ten years ago when one of his apprentices lit a cigar inside the envelope of an unexpectedly leaky Cosgrove Cloudberry. (“You can still see the scorch marks along the edges of Helsinki air harbor,” the clerk said helpfully, as if he hoped it might earn him another sovereign, but it didn’t.)

Outside his little office, the High Street was starting to come to life, and stallholders were rolling up their shutters and laying out trays of vegetables and fruit, flowers, cheeses, and bolts of cloth. Watching them, Tom recalled following Anna Fang past these same stalls on a honey-colored evening twenty years before. It had been his first visit to Airhaven. He remembered how Hester had slunk along beside him, hiding herself from the gaze of passersby behind her upraised hand…

“Oh, Gods!” said Wren, stepping out of the harbor office behind him and pointing to someone on a nearby quay. “Look who it is!”

For an instant, confused by his memories, Tom thought that it might be Hester come to find them. He felt strangely disappointed when he saw a shapely aviatrix in a pink leather flying suit.

Wren was jumping excitedly up and down and calling, “Ms. Twombley! Ms. Twombley!”

The aviatrix, who had been deep in conversation with some of her comrades, looked around in surprise, then strode gracefully across the quay to find out who was hailing her with such enthusiasm. “It’s Orla Twombley,” Wren told her father. “She used to work for Brighton.” And as the aviatrix drew nearer, her puzzled frown changed into a smile of recognition. She and Wren had not known each other well, but each was glad to find that the other had come safely out of the battle on Cloud 9.

“It’s Wren, isn’t it?” Ms. Twombley asked, and took Wren’s hands in hers. “The little slave girl from the Pavilion? I had imagined you dead, or captured by the Storm. How good to see you safe and well! And this fine gentleman is your husband, I suppose?”

“Father,” said Tom, going bright red. “I’m Wren’s father.”

“And wasn’t I always thinking Wren was one of those Lost Girls!” cried Ms. Twombley, astonished. “A poor motherless orphan from away out in the western sea somewhere …”

“Motherless, but not fatherless,” said Wren. “It’s a long story. But I am glad to see you so well, Ms. Twombley. I thought you’d been shot down…”

“That was a bad night, to be sure,” the aviatrix admitted, and shook her head at the memory of the dogfights that had raged around Cloud 9. “But it’d take a lot more than a few Stalker birds and poxy old Fox Spirits to bring down my Combat Wombat. I re-formed the Flying Ferrets. We work for Adlai Browne, lord mayor of Manchester. He’s bringing his city up to the line, and he sent us ahead as his advance guard.”

Wren nodded. They had passed Manchester a week before, a huge, grimy city lumbering southeastward, bristling with cranes that had been busy fitting shiny new plates of antirocket armor over its upper tiers.

“But what has brought you here?” asked Orla Twombley. She looked expectantly at Tom, but Tom said nothing. He had been wondering if those had been some of Ms. Twombley’s flying machines that had cut up the Jenny Haniver on her approach, and whether he should complain to her about them, but Ms. Twombley was so beautiful that he couldn’t quite bring himself to.

Wren jumped in quickly. “We’ve come looking for an old friend of Dad’s. She calls herself Cruwys Morchard. You don’t know of her, I suppose?”

“The archaeologist?” Orla Twombley nodded. “I saw her once at the Pavilion, in Brighton. She used to buy Old Tech from Pennyroyal. In fact, I think they were supposed to have been an item at one time—but then, Pennyroyal’s name has been linked with so many ladies. Even with me!”

“But I thought that you and Professor Pennyroyal were—” said Wren.

“Oh, only in his wife’s imagination, and in the gossip pages of the Brighton Palimpsest.” Orla Twombley laughed. “I just flirted with the old rogue a little, to make sure he’d renew the Ferrets’ contract. Mind you, when I heard how brave he’d been that night, I almost wished I had been his lover. Who could have thought that an old relic like Pennyroyal could outwit the Stalker Fang.”

Wren laughed. “Is that what people say he did?”

“Haven’t you heard of it?” cried Orla Twombley, as if Wren had confessed to not knowing that the world was round, or that high-collared flying suits were out of fashion. “It has been the talk of the season out here on the line! Isn’t Professor Pennyroyal the great hero of the world? And has he not been dining out on the stories of his exploits aboard all the Traktionstadts?”

“He’s here?” cried Tom.

“Aboard Murnau at this very instant,” the aviatrix confirmed. “I know—you must ask him about your friend Cruwys Morchard! He is sure to know all about her! If I know him, he’ll be having breakfast now at Moon’s, down on Murnau’s second tier.”

“Oh, yes, Dad!” said Wren cheerfully. “Come on, let’s find him, and ask!”

Tom put a hand to his chest, to the wound that Pennyroyal’s bullet had made. He didn’t want to go and have breakfast with the man who had shot him. And yet Pennyroyal had behaved decently enough aboard Kom Ombo, and now that he thought about it, he half recalled Pennyroyal telling him a story once about an aviatrix he knew who had ventured inside the wreck of London. Could her name have been Cruwys Morchard?

“I’ll take you to see him myself,” said Orla Twombley, and it was settled. She led them both away toward the center of Airhaven, where balloon taxis were waiting to ferry people to the towns and cities below.

As their taxi sank toward Murnau, Wren prattled excitedly about the exploits of the Flying Ferrets and how their midgelike flying machines had hurled themselves at giant air destroyers over Brighton. But Tom heard none of it. He was too busy thinking about the mystery of Clytie Potts. Where was her airship’s home port? Why was she buying Old Tech and medical supplies? Why livestock?

An answer occurred to him as he pondered what the clerk had just told him. It was a wild, unlikely sort of answer, and he didn’t quite dare to believe it, for he was afraid it might have more to do with his own nostalgic longing for London than with a cool assessment of the facts. He must wait and see what Pennyroyal knew, he decided. Perhaps Pennyroyal would remember something about the Archaeopteryx and her mistress that would prove Tom’s theory, one way or the other.

He found that he was quite looking forward to meeting his murderer again.

Chapter 9 Breakfast at Moon’s

The taxi set down on a platform outside an entry port in Murnau’s armor, where there were a lot of guards and questions. The guards were polite enough, but reluctant to let dubious-looking characters like Tom and Wren up to Tier Two even when Orla Twombley promised that she would vouch for them, and showed the guards the ornamental sword she’d been presented with for shooting down three of the Green Storm’s destroyers at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal. At last, exasperated, she said, “They are old, old friends of Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal!” and that was enough; the guards stopped being merely polite and became quite friendly; one of them put through a telephone call to his commander, and a minute later Tom, Wren, and Ms. Twombley were aboard an upbound elevator.

In these days of peace Murnau had taken to opening the shutters in its armor during the daylight hours, to let the sunlight in. Even so, Tier Two felt gloomy. Many and many a time on their way from the elevator station, Tom and Wren passed empty places where whole streets had been collapsed by rockets and flying bombs. The buildings that still stood had Xs of tape across their windowpanes, giving them the look of drunks in comic strips. On every square inch of wall there were posters and stenciled slogans, and you did not have to speak New German to understand that they were urging the young men of Murnau to volunteer for the Abwehrtruppe, Murnau’s military. Most of the young men Wren could see had taken their advice and were dressed in smart midnight-blue uniforms. The few who weren’t, those who were missing an arm or a leg, or half their face, or who were being pushed along in wheelchairs, all wore medals to show that they had done their bit against the Storm. A lot of the young women were uniformed too, but not so magnificently as the men. Orla Twombley said, “Murnau women are not allowed to fight, poor dears. They play their part by working in the factories and the engine district while their menfolk crew the guns.”

They crossed a square called Walter Moers Platz, heading for the tall, narrow cafe named Moon’s. A shutter had been opened in the city’s armored cowling a few streets away, letting in the bright spring sunshine, but it came too late for the trees and grasses in the little park at the center of the square, which were all dead and brown and withered after years in the shade. Through the bare branches Wren caught glimpses of silent fountains and a rusting bandstand. She thought this the saddest city she had ever been to.

But when she followed Orla Twombley through the front door of Moon’s, it was as if she had stepped out of Murnau and into another city altogether. The café’s scuffed and mismatched furniture looked faintly arty, and the walls were covered with paintings and drawings and photographs of people having fun. It reminded Wren of Brighton, and the resemblance was deliberate. There was a generation of young people aboard Murnau who had lived all their lives with war and duty. They had heard about the sort of freedom people enjoyed on other cities and were determined to taste it for themselves. And so they came to Moon’s: the artists and the authors and the poets and the young men on leave from the Abwehrtruppe who dreamed of being artists and authors and poets, and they did their very best to be Romantic and Bohemian.

They weren’t very good at it, of course. There was something too stiff about the careless poses they struck in Moon’s tatty old leather armchairs. Their casual, baggy clothes were too well pressed, and their too-long hair was always neatly combed. The few real artists among them, like the painter Skoda Geist, they found rather scary. So when Nimrod Pennyroyal had arrived on Murnau, they had welcomed him eagerly. Here was a man who had made his fortune by having highly Romantic adventures and writing books about them, and who had once been mayor of Brighton, that most artistic of cities. Yet unlike Geist he never laughed at them, or mocked their poems and paintings; quite the contrary, he was always ready to praise their little efforts, and happy to let them buy him drinks and meals.

He was in the middle of an enormous breakfast when Tom and Wren walked in on him. Quite literally in the middle of it, for the couch he sat on, in an upstairs room, was surrounded on all sides by small tables laden with rolls and cooked meats, fruit, croissants, algae waffles, fried eggs and mushrooms, toast, kedgeree, omelettes, jam, and cheese. A silver coffeepot sent curlicues of steam up into the play of sunbeams from the taped-over windows, and all around, packed onto other couches or sitting rather daringly on the floor, artistic young Murnauers listened as he described the book he was at work on.

“… I have just reached the bit where I faced that dreadful Stalker Fang,” he explained, through a mouthful of moss loaf. “Rather a painful episode to put on paper, for I don’t mind admitting that I was scared. I quaked! I quivered! I never planned to fight her, you understand—I do not mean to set myself up as some sort of hero. No, I came on her by accident while I hurried through the gardens in search of a way to escape from the Storm…”

His audience nodded eagerly. Some of them had served in Murnau’s skirt forts and faced Stalkers themselves, and most recalled the dreadful battles of the year ’14, when Green Storm airships had landed squads of the Resurrected on Murnau’s upper tiers. They all wanted to hear how this valiant old gentleman had managed to overcome the most terrible Stalker of them all.

But Pennyroyal, for once, seemed lost for words. His mouth hung open, he set down his fork, and one by one his listeners turned to see the newcomers standing in the doorway.

“Two old friends to see you, Professor!” said Orla Twombley, finding herself a place to sit among the Murnauers.

“Tom!” said Pennyroyal, standing. “And Wren! My dear child!”

He came to greet them with his arms outstretched. Their sudden appearance had surprised him, but he was genuinely happy to see them both. He had always felt guilty about shooting Tom, but by saving Wren from the Lost Boys, helping her fly The Arctic Roll to Kom Ombo, and then magnanimously allowing them to keep the little airship, he hoped that he had made up for that unfortunate incident at Anchorage. Now that Tom’s horrible wife had vanished, Pennyroyal felt glad to count the Natsworthys among his friends.

“My dears!” He beamed, hugging them each in turn. “How happy I am to see you! I was just telling my friends here about our adventures on Cloud 9, which are to be the subject of my forthcoming book. A respectable Murnau publishing house, Werederobe and Spoor, has paid a whopping advance for a modest account of my part in the downfall of the Stalker Fang and the rise of General Naga, that peace-loving gentleman. You will both feature in the tale, of course! After all, Wren, was it not you, my loyal former slave girl, who flew The Arctic Roll up to Cloud 9 to rescue me when all hope seemed gone?”

“Was it?” asked Wren. “That’s not how I remember it…”

“She is modesty itself!” cried Pennyroyal, glancing over his shoulder at his young friends, and to Wren herself, rather more urgently, he muttered, “I had to alter the facts a little, just here and there, to add some color, you know.”

Wren looked at her father, and they both shrugged. She thought how tiring it must be to be Pennyroyal, and build a past for yourself out of so many interlocking lies. He must have to spend such a lot of time tinkering with his stories to make sure they fitted, and surely he must live in fear of the day when the whole shaky edifice collapsed?

But perhaps Pennyroyal felt that the rewards made it all worthwhile. He certainly looked as if he were prospering. He wore an outfit of his own invention that managed to make him look important and military without actually being a uniform: a short, sky-blue dolman-sleeve tunic over a red waistcoat (both covered in frogging and pointless silver buttons), a lilac sash, purple breeches with gold embroidery and a six-inch crimson stripe, and bucket-topped boots with gold tassels. Compared to the Pennyroyal she had known in Brighton, Wren thought he looked quite tasteful and restrained.

He made room for Wren and Tom on his own couch, and invited them to help themselves to some of his breakfast while he introduced his friends. Wren was not used to meeting so many new people so quickly. She managed to grasp that the bespectacled man in civilian robes was Sampford Spiney, Murnau correspondent of a journal called The Speculum, who was writing a profile of Pennyroyal, and the quiet, bespectacled young woman clutching an enormous camera was his photographer, Miss Kropotkin. The rest of the introductions passed in a blur of ranks and names. The only person whom Wren was really interested in—a tall, lean young man who stood on his own by the stove—Pennyroyal seemed not to know, which was a pity. He wasn’t as handsome as some of the other young officers, and his old blue greatcoat was shabby and travel stained, but there was something magnetic about him that kept pulling her eyes back to his wry, watchful face.

Pennyroyal poured coffee for his guests, and there was some polite chat about the truce, the weather, and the handsome advance that Pennyroyal had been paid by his new publishers. Then he asked Tom, “How is the good old Arctic Roll? And what has caused you to bring her here?”

“She is the Jenny Haniver again now,” said Tom, “and we have come looking for someone. A lady.”

“Indeed?” Pennyroyal narrowed his eyes thoughtfully; he considered himself a bit of an expert on the fairer sex. “Anyone I might know?”

“I think so,” said Tom. “Her name is Cruwys Morchard.”

“Cruwys!” cried Pennyroyal. “Yes, by Poskitt, I know her well. Great Gods, but it must be twenty years since I first ran into her.” (The journalist Spiney scribbled in his notebook with a stub of pencil.) “She called on me at Cloud 9 a couple of times,” Pennyroyal went on. “Still flying that Archaeopteryx of hers, and still as big a mystery as ever…”

“Why a mystery, sir?” asked one of the Murnauers.

“Why, because nobody knows where she comes from,” said Pennyroyal. “Shall I tell you what I know of her? It is an extraordinary tale…”

“Oh, please do, Professor,” cried Wren. “And tell us just the truth, with no alteration of the facts or added color…”

“Oh, yes, please!” cried half of Pennyroyal’s audience, and “Bitte!” agreed the rest, when their Anglish-speaking friends had translated for them.

“Very well,” said Pennyroyal, but Wren’s request had made him nervous. “Perhaps I should say it is a fairly extraordinary tale. I believe I have heard stranger in my time. But Cruwys Morchard stays in my mind anyway, because of her extraordinary personal charms, and because of the way I met her.”

“It was in Helsinki, some nineteen years ago,” said Pennyroyal. “The city was hunting for semistats out near the Altai Shan. I was down in the Gut, paying a call on a very charming young salvage supervisor named Nutella Eisberg, when Ms. Morchard came aboard with a couple of companions— rough-looking coves, but touchingly devoted to her. Walked right in off the tundra, they did—the city’s jaws being open at the time so that the maintenance crews could clean its teeth—and asked the foreman of the Gut for sanctuary.

“It caused a bit of a stir, I can assure you! This was the year after London was destroyed. There had already been a few atrocities by Green Storm fanatics, and the cities of the eastern Hunting Ground were getting edgy. I think the Helsinki folk would have kicked Ms. Morchard and her friends straight back into the Out-Country, for fear they might be saboteurs or spies, but luckily I happened to be passing at the time, and I said I’d vouch for her. Her beauty touched me, d’you see? And her youth, of course, for at that time she was not much older than Wren is today.”

Everyone turned to stare at Wren, who blushed.

“I took Ms. Morchard to the city’s upper tier with me,” Pennyroyal continued, “and I even offered to let her come and stay in my own suite at the Uusimaa Hotel, if we could find suitable accommodations for her hairy friends. But she said, ‘I have no need of charity, sir. I have a great deal of money, and I have come to this city to buy an airship. If you wish to help me, perhaps you might introduce me to an honest secondhand airship dealer.’ Well I took her straight to old man Unthank. And do you know, she did have money! Wrapped up in a secret belt and concealed about that charming person were dozens of gold coins, and each of her companions was similarly burdened. I got a look at the stuff while she was bargaining with Unthank, and I recognized it at once; London gold, each piece stamped with the portrait of Quirke, the god of that unlucky city!

“You may imagine my astonishment! London was gone. Had I not seen with my own eyes the baleful flash of its explosion? ‘How did you come by all these Quirkes, my dear?’ I asked, and Ms. Morchard, after a moment’s confusion, confessed that she was an archaeologist, and that she had been hunting for salvage among the ruins of London!”

A ripple of excitement spread among Pennyroyal’s listeners. People whispered eagerly to one another in New German (a handsome language; the words had corners). Tom leaned forward eagerly in his chair. A young lady in a frock decorated with hundreds of blue eyes said, “But Herr Professor, London’s wreck is haunted!”

“Indeed,” replied Pennyroyal. “In the months that followed London’s destruction, a dozen different scavenger suburbs went hastening east to devour its twisted and blackened remains. None of them ever returned.”

“Because the air fleets of the old Anti-Traction League caught them as they neared the debris field and bombed them to bits,” said a clear, faintly mocking voice. The young man whom Wren had noticed earlier had come to the edge of the circle of Pennyroyal’s friends and was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, listening intently. His eyes twinkled. His long mouth widened sideways in something that was almost a sneer.

“So we are told, sir,” Pennyroyal agreed, glaring at him. “So we are told. But have we not all heard eerier rumors?”

The Murnauers nodded and muttered. It seemed they all had.

“Cruwys Morchard was a rational, scientific sort, like our friend here,” Pennyroyal went on. “She paid no heed to talk of ghosts. But she had seen things inside London that had turned her hair gray! No sooner had her party landed among the ruins than a fork of mysterious lightning came crackling out of the debris and destroyed their airship! More lightning followed, leaping upward from the dead metal and striking all around the explorers, as if it were drawn to the warmth of the blazing ship—or perhaps to the warm bodies of Ms. Morchard and her comrades! One of her party was burned to ashes. The others panicked and fled, but the ruins seemed to shift and twist about them, so that they could not find their way out of the debris fields. A dozen of them died during the week it took them to struggle back to the Out-Country. And it was not just the lightning that killed them. There were … other things. Things that made even the valiant Ms. Morchard grow pale as she spoke of them. Things that drove men mad, so that they flung themselves from high places in the wreckage rather than face them.”

“What sort of things?” asked the young lady with the eyes on her dress, all agog.

“Ghosts!” whispered Pennyroyal. “I know, Fräulein Hinblick, you will tell me there is no such thing; you will say that nobody returns from the Sunless Country. But Ms. Morchard swore to me that she had met with phantoms in the ruined streets of London. And since Ms. Morchard is the only person who has ever walked those streets and lived to tell the tale, I think we should take her word for it.”

There was a silence in the room. It seemed to have grown rather cold. Fräulein Hinblick snuggled closer to her companions, and a young man with medal ribbons and a wooden hand said softly, “It is a haunted place. When I flew with the Abwehrtruppe, I saw it from a distance. Ghostly lights flash and glimmer there at night. Even the Green Storm fear it. Over the rest of the old eastern Hunting Ground they have put settlements and forests and farms and windmill fields, but for a hundred miles around the wreck of London there is nothing.”

Tom leaned forward in his seat. It was time for him to try out the theory that he had been working on over the past few days. He was shaking slightly. He said, “I think Ms. Morchard may have been deceiving you a little. You see, I believe that she comes from London. I knew her when she was Clytie Potts, a member of the Guild of Historians. Somehow she survived MEDUSA. Perhaps she made up her tale of ghosts and lightning to keep people from going to London? To scare off scavengers who might try to loot the wreck? Could it be that other Londoners survived the explosion, and that she uses the Archaeopteryx to fly in and out of the ruins, ferrying supplies to them?”

The young Murnauers were far too polite to say that they didn’t believe him, but Wren could see by their faces that they did not. Only the shabby young man watched him with interest.

“Medical supplies and livestock,” Tom said hopefully. “That’s what the clerk at Airhaven told us she carries…”

Pennyroyal shook his head. “A nice idea, Tom, but a bit unlikely, wouldn’t you say? Even if anyone had survived that terrible disaster, why would they still be living in the ruins, all those hundreds of miles behind the Green Storm’s lines?”

Wren felt embarrassed for her father. She wished he had tried out his crazy-sounding idea on her before he let everybody else hear it. Poor Dad! He really missed his old city, even after all these years; that was why he had let his imagination run away with him.

The breakfast party was beginning to break up, the room filling with a low buzz of conversation as Tom spoke eagerly to Pennyroyal, and Fräulein Hinblick explained what had just been said to some of her friends who spoke no Anglish. A few of them looked doubtfully at Tom, and there was some laughter. Wren turned to search for Orla Twombley and instead found the shabby stranger standing close behind her.

“Your father’s imagination is almost as vivid as Professor Pennyroyal’s,” he said.

“Daddy is a Londoner himself,” Wren told him. “It’s only natural that he should be interested in what has become of London.”

The man seemed satisfied. He was better-looking than Wren had thought at first, and younger, too; just a boy really, eighteen or nineteen, with clear, pale skin and a faint stubble showing on his chin and upper lip. But his ice-blue eyes seemed to belong in a much older face. They stared past Wren at her father as he said, “I should like to talk to him. But not here.” He thought for a moment, then reached inside his coat and took out a square, thick, creamy card, which he gave to Wren. Curly writing was embossed on it, an address on the Oberrang, Murnau’s upper tier. “My father is giving a party tomorrow afternoon. You should both come. There we may speak in private.”

He studied her face for a moment. Wren looked down at the invitation, and when she looked up again, the young man had turned away; she saw the skirts of his coat swirl as he reached the stairs and started down; his hair glinted gold in the lamplight. Then he was gone.

Wren turned to her father, but Tom was talking to the journalist Spiney, trying not to give too much of the truth away as Spiney quizzed him about how he knew Professor Pennyroyal. Wren went over to Orla Twombley instead. “Who was that man?” she asked. “The one who interrupted the Professor’s story?”

“Him?” The aviatrix looked around quickly and, seeing that the young man had left, said, “His name is Wolf Kobold. Son of Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, the old soldier they made mayor of Murnau when this war began. Look, there they are together in that print above the fireplace… Wolf’s a brave fighter. Handsome too, don’t you think?”

Wren did, but she was too shy to admit it. She tried not to blush as the aviatrix steered her across the still-crowded room to show her the picture. There stood the kriegsmarschall, a stern, stiff gentleman whose enormous white mustaches made him look as if a wandering albatross had chosen his upper lip as a perch. Beside him was the young man to whom Wren had just spoken, looking younger still— the picture must have been five or six years old, for it showed Wolf as a rather angelic schoolboy. Wren wondered what had happened to him in the years since to make him so grim.

“He’ll be kriegsmarschall himself when the old man finally retires or dies,” Orla Twombley was saying. “Until then he has been acting as mayor of one of Murnau’s harvester suburbs. He drops into Moon’s sometimes, when he visits Murnau on family business, but he’s a solitary type. I’ve never talked with him.”

Wren showed her the invitation she’d been given, and Orla whistled softly. “Wren, my dear, you are going up in the world! I declare, you’ve barely been aboard this city an hour, and already you’ve been invited to the kriegsmarschall’s garden party.”

Chapter 10 The Black Angel

Oh, what’s this? Here on the high seas of the desert, where the rippling horizons seem more liquid than land, something solid has appeared. It is just a speck at first; a dark triangle shimmering above the silver mirages that lie across the dunes, but it grows clearer and harder by the moment; a blade, a shark’s fin, a black sail bellying in the desert wind. Listen; you can hear the sand singing under racing tires. Look; you can see the sun’s reflection like diamonds in a line of portholes.

Imagine a pond skater, but magnify it until it is as big as a yacht. Fix a wheel to each of its long legs, and raise a mast above it. Then set it skimming over sand instead of water. It is a sand ship, the vehicle of choice for desert scavengers and bounty hunters, and as it passes, if we turn to look, we can see what has brought it into this mineral ocean. The region ahead of it is crowded with towns, their smokestacks and upperworks dancing behind the curtains of reflected heat that sway above the dunes.

This is a rare event, the nearest thing to a trading cluster that you will find in the dried-out, town-eat-town world of the desert deeps. A big, slow suburb that should be preying on fishing hamlets along the far-off coast has blundered into the sand sea by mistake, and been hunted to a standstill by a pack of speedy predators. The hunters have huge wheels, huge jaws, huge engines, and huge appetites to match. They have cornered their prey in a dusty bowl of sand called Bitumen Bay, ringed by mined-out hills. They are tearing it apart, and for a day or so, while they are too busy digesting their catch to eat one another, an uneasy peace prevails. Merchants go from one fierce town to another, and far-wandering airships appear out of nowhere to flog Old Tech and knickknacks. Even the swift, shy scavenger towns come creeping close to try to sell the scraps they’ve found among the sands.

The black sails of the nameless ship crinkle and flutter like the petals of an opium poppy as its pilot brings it up into the wind, slowing, sweeping around in a long curve that will take it into the school of other sand ships around the cluster.

The townlet of Cutler’s Gulp had parked itself on the slopes of an enormous dune a half mile from the feeding frenzy and kept its engines idling, ready to take off in a moment should any of the predators show signs of fancying it for dessert. It was a long, low thing, its single deck overshadowed by fat sand wheels. It consisted mainly of engines, and of the bloated ducts and flues and exhaust pipes that served them. The inhabitants made their homes in what little space was left, stretching their awnings between the ducts and building small dwellings of mud and papier-mâché on the few bare patches of deck among the engine housings. Sand ships came and went from garages in its belly, and a jaunty black-and-white-striped air trader called the Humbug came buzzing across the dunes to touch down at the harbor, a blank space near the bows where a couple of the mud buildings had recently collapsed.

The master of the Humbug was a merchant named Napster Varley. VARLEY SON said the signs on his ship’s engine pods, but little Napster Junior was only three months old, and not yet taking an active part in the running of the business. Varley had hoped that a wife and child might give him the respectability he needed to escape from these tin-pot desert trading towns and set up in one of the big cities. But so far they had brought him nothing but noise, annoyance, and expense, and if he had not needed his wife to help him pilot the Humbug, he would have kicked them both overboard months ago.

As the sun sank westward and the shadows started to lengthen, Varley found himself ambling aft along the Gulp’s ramshackle walkways with the boss of the place, Grandma Gravy.

They made an odd pair. Napster Varley was a slight, pasty young man, with flakes of sunburned skin peeling off his snub nose. He was a keen reader of business books, and in one of them (How to Succeed at the Air Trade by Dornier Lard) he had read that a successful businessman must always dress distinctively, that his customers shall remember him. So despite the heat he wore a purple frock coat, a fur stovepipe hat, and a pair of baggy yellow pantaloons with a crimson windowpane check.

Grandma Gravy, meanwhile, covered herself with so many layers of flapping, rust-colored shawls and robes and skirts and djellabas that she looked as if one of the nomad tents of the deep desert had decided to get up and walk about. But if you peered closely at the space between her massive shoulders and her wide-brimmed hat, you could see, behind the close mesh of her fly-proof veil, a fat, yellowish face and a pair of tiny, calculating eyes that glittered slightly as she studied Mr. Varley.

“Got somefin to sell,” she told him. “Aye. Found it out in the deeps, few weeks by. Valooble.”

“Really?” Varley dabbed at his neck with a handkerchief and waved the flies away. “Not Old Tech, is it? The price of Old Tech has dropped something shocking since this truce began…”

“More valooble’n Old Tech,” muttered Grandma Gravy. “Mossie airship gone down, dinnit? My boys saw the fires in the sky. My town was first at the wreck. Not much left, no. Jus’ a few struts and engine parts and this item, this valooble item.”

She led him up a metal stairway and in through the door of one of the mud-brick towers that rose like termite hills out of the tangle of ducts at the townlet’s stern. Inside were more stairs, and Grandma panted and rattled as she climbed them. The hems of her robes were bedecked with magic charms: a human jawbone, a monkey’s hand, little greasy-looking leather pouches filled with gods-knew-what. Grandma Gravy had a reputation for witchcraft, and used it to keep her people in line. Even Varley felt a little nervous as he followed her up the winding stairs, and he touched the medal of the God of Commerce that hung around his neck beneath his paisley cravat.

They came to an upper room, hot, and filled, like the rest of Grandma’s tower, with a brownish haze and a faint smell of burned fat. In the middle of the room someone lay chained by the feet to a ring in the metal floor. A boy, Varley thought, until she raised her head and looked up at him through tangles of filthy hair and he saw that she was a young woman. She was dressed in rags, and there were bruises on her throat, and sores on her bony ankles where the shackles had rubbed.

“Sorry, Grandma,” said Varley quickly. “I’m not buying no slaves.” (He had no moral objection to the slaving business, but the great Nabisco Shkin, in his book Investing in People, advised would-be slavers to buy only the healthiest stock. Varley could see at a glance that this scrawny little quail was already half dead.)

“She’s far more valooble than just some slave,” said Grandma Gravy in her rasping, breathless voice. She waddled across the room and grabbed the captive by her hair, twisting her face toward Varley. “What do you think she be?”

Varley fished a monocle out of his breast pocket and squinted through it at the captive’s dull, almond-shaped eyes. Her skin, under all the dirt and sunburn and exposure sores, had once been ivory colored. He shrugged, growing tired of the game. “I don’t know, Grandma. Some kind of half-breed eastern trash. Shan Guonese? Ainu? Inuit?”

“Alooshan!” crowed Grandma Gravy. “Bless you, Grandma.”

“From Aloosha.” Grandma Gravy let the woman’s head drop and came waddling back to where Varley waited. Her breath went hur, hur, hur behind the fly-proof veil. “Know ’oo she is then, young trader? She’s that Mossie general’s wife. She’s the queen of the Green Storm!”

Varley said nothing, but his posture changed. He took his hands out of his pockets and licked his lips, and his eyeglass flashed. He’d heard a story about Lady Naga’s airship going down in the sand sea. Was this her? It could be. He’d seen a picture of her once in the Airman’s Gazette, and he tried hard to remember it, but she had been in her wedding finery, and anyway, all these easterners looked the same to Napster Varley.

“Found this on her,” said Grandma Gravy, and produced from inside her tent of robes a signet ring. Gold, with an oak-leaf design. “And look at that cross around her neck: that’s Zagwan workmanship.”

Varley held a silk handkerchief to his nose and went close to the woman. “Are you Lady Naga?” he asked, very loudly and slowly.

She stared at him and nodded faintly. “What has become of Theo?” she asked.

“She’s talking ’bout some Zagwan kid what was traveling with her,” Grandma Gravy explained. “We stuck him in the engine pits. Dead by now, I s’poze. Anyway, merchant, what I’m asking is, what’s to be done with her? I can’t go on keeping her in luxury like this. She’s too weak to sell for a common slave, but she ought to be valooble to someone, aye? The queen of the Mossies…”

“Oh, indeed,” said Varley thoughtfully.

“I been thinkin’ we might skin her, see,” suggested Grandma Gravy. “Her hide might fetch a tidy sum, aye? We could turn her into a nice rug, or some scatter cushions.”

“Oh, Grandma Gravy, no!” cried Varley. “It’s her brain that is the valuable part!”

“You mean a paperweight or somefin?”

Varley leaned as near to Grandma as he could bear and tapped one finger on his temple. “What she knows. I could take her to Airhaven and offer her to the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. They might pay well for her.”

“Then you’ll buy her whole? What’ll you give?”

“Oh, well, of course, I will have transport costs to factor in, and other overheads, and this unfortunate truce has upset the market, but let me see …”

“Ow much?”

“Ten gold dollars,” said the merchant.

“Twenty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Course,” said Grandma Gravy thoughtfully, “I could always make little talismans out of her fingies and toes and sell ’em off individual…”

“Twenty it is,” said Varley hastily, and started counting the coins out into her hand before she could up the price.

The black sand ship found a berth in one of the garages on the flanks of Cutler’s Gulp. Its robed and hooded pilot furled its sails and then jumped down to make the ship fast. He seemed to be only a servant, or a crewman, for when his work was done, he stood waiting patiently until a woman came down from the ship to join him. Then, together, they climbed the stairs and started along the iron walkways that bridged the townlet’s furnace pits, heading for the huddle of cantinas and coffee shops near the stern. Beggars stretched out bowls to them, then saw their faces and thought better of it. Rough desert types with half-formed plans of robbery and violence changed their minds and backed into the shadows under ducts. Even the dogs ran away.

The woman was tall, and very thin, and she carried a long gun on her shoulder. She was dressed all in black: black boots, black breeches, black waistcoat, and a long black duster coat that flew out behind her like black wings when the wind caught it. In a place where everyone went masked or veiled, you might have expected her to wear a black veil too, but she chose to go bareheaded. Her gray hair had been tied back, as if she wanted everyone to see that she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump, and her single eye stared out of the wreckage as gray and chill as a winter sea.

Her name was Hester Shaw, and she killed people.

She had appeared in the desert six months earlier. Her companion, a Stalker named Mr. Grike, had carried her aboard El Houl, one of the towns that was eating the wreck of Cloud 9. She had been ill, and Grike had demanded that the townspeople take care of her. They did not want to argue with a Stalker, so they called a doctor, who examined the woman and declared that there was nothing wrong with her beyond a few cuts and scrapes and a sort of settled melancholy that he had seen before in the survivors of calamities.

“Has she lost someone who was dear to her, Mr. Grike?” he asked.

“SHE HAS LOST EVERYTHING,” the Stalker replied.

So the woman lived for a week or two in one of the sackcloth-curtained cubbyholes that passed for houses on the underdecks, and the Stalker cared for her, and fed her on bread and milk, which he mashed up for her with his metal hands, and the people watched and whispered and tried to imagine what relationship there could be between this dazed, ugly woman and the Resurrected man.

Then, one day, the township’s engine master came to visit Grike and said, “Stalker, I want you to kill me someone. The sheikh who rules this town is old and fat. He takes too much of the salvage for himself. Kill him for me, and I’ll see you live in comfort on the topmost tiers, with fine food and a featherbed for your um, ah …”

He was still hunting for a word that might describe Hester when Grike said, “I WILL NOT KILL.”

“But you’re a Stalker! Of course you kill!”

“I CANNOT. MY MIND HAS BEEN … TAMPERED WITH.”

The engine master scowled and wondered about throwing the useless Stalker off his town, but he didn’t see how it could be done. He shook his head, and was about to leave when the scarred woman said quietly, “I’ll kill him for you.”

“You?”

“I’m Hester Shaw. My father was Thaddeus Valentine, the famous secret agent and assassin,” she said. “You want your sheikh dead? Give me a weapon and tell me where to find him.”

“But you’re only a woman!” objected the engine master.

So Hester Shaw found herself a fork and a crowbar and climbed the stairs to El Houl’s upper tier. She kicked open the doors of the sheikh’s house. She killed the sheikh. She killed his guards. She killed his dogs. She moved through the smoky rooms like a plague and left nothing alive behind her. She was more like a Stalker than her Stalker, who would only watch and wait for her.

With the money the engine master gave her, she bought a sand ship and a few guns, and she and her Stalker left El Houl forever, much to the relief of its inhabitants. Since then she had become one of the legends of the deep sands: the woman bounty hunter and her companion, the Stalker who would not kill. Even Theo Ngoni had heard a garbled version of the story, as he toiled away in the engine pits of Cutler’s Gulp, but the man who’d told him had spoken partly in Arabic, and had referred to the Stalker as a djinn and to Hester Shaw as the Black Angel. So it came as a complete surprise to him when he glanced up that afternoon to see them striding along the walkway that led above his station, and recognized them both.

For a moment Theo could not remember where he had seen either of them before. Cloud 9 seemed such a long time ago. Even the wreck of the Nzimu seemed long ago. He dimly remembered how he had dragged Lady Naga out through a rent in her cabin wall as the airship filled with fire, and how they had clung to a hawser on the steering vanes while the wreckage sank toward the desert, but it all seemed like something that had happened to somebody else; or something he had only read about.

He had been working hard ever since, on eighteen-hour shifts, whipped and beaten and abused, given little water and less food. He had begun to have bad dreams even when he was wide awake, and at first he thought it was just another dream when he saw Wren’s mother walking above him in the dazzling sunlight. But he shook his head, and pinched the sweat from his eyes, and she was still there, and the terrible Stalker beside her.

“Mrs. Natsworthy!” he shouted, and let go of the handles of the fuel hopper that he had been pushing toward the furnaces. Grandma’s overseers were on him almost at once, smashing him to the deck with their clubs of woven rope. But Wren’s mother had heard him, he was sure, for he saw her horrible face turn and stare at him in the instant before he fell.

“leave him,” grated the voice of the Stalker, louder than the clatter of the townlet’s engines, and no more human.

The overseers backed off. It had fallen very quiet in the engine pit. Theo could hear the men’s quick breathing. He tried to stand, but he was too weak; he fell on his knees on the hot, sandy deck. “Mrs. Natsworthy,” he said again, meeting the eye of the woman on the walkway. He did not really think that she could help him, and he knew that as soon as she turned away, the overseers would beat him to death. He just wanted her to know that he was here. Maybe she would be able to tell Wren one day that this was what had become of him. He said, “We met. Remember? On Cloud 9?”

“I KNOW YOU,” said the Stalker Grike.

“I don’t,” said Hester Shaw. Hearing her old name shouted out like that had unsettled her. She stared at the boy in the pit below her, a gaunt black boy like a bundle of burned sticks. His teeth were bared in something that she supposed was meant to be a smile, and blood was running down his face where the townsmen had struck him. “Who is he?” she asked Grike.

“HE IS THE ONCE-BORN CALLED THEO, WHO WAS WITH YOUR CHILD ON CLOUD 9.”

“Is he?” Hester had vague recollections of Wren having a boy in tow that last time they’d met. Perhaps they’d even been introduced. Hester wished he had not called out to her. She was trying to forget her past. She had come to Cutler’s Gulp only for fresh water and supplies. She didn’t want to get involved.

But as she started to turn away, Grike caught her arm. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

“Why not?”

“HE WILL DIE.”

“Everybody dies,” said Hester. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

“Damn you, Grike. What did that Green Storm witch do to you, to make you so soft?”

“YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

“Well, you ain’t taking him!” shouted a voice from the pit. The foreman of the furnaces, Daz Gravy, had come out of his shady lair to see what all the fuss was. Stalkers didn’t frighten Daz; he was Grandma Gravy’s favorite grandson, and around his fat neck hung dozens of charms she’d given him to ward off bullets and the evil eye. All he cared about was keeping Grandma’s engines running smooth. He grabbed Theo by his iron slave collar and heaved him back toward his abandoned hopper. “He’s ours. We found him, square and fair. Dragged him out of a wrecked Mossie airship. Grandma says we can do what we like with hi—”

In a single motion Hester swept the gun off her shoulder, flipped up the safety catch, and shot him dead. He fell with a wet thud and a clattering of good-luck charms. Hester shot his companions down so quickly that the shots and the echoes of the shots all ran together, like a drumroll. She ran down the iron stairs and held out her hand to Theo, but he was shaking too badly to stand, and so the Stalker had to heave him up and carry him away from the engine pit like a child. Hester followed with her gun held ready. In the silence that had come after the gunshots, she could hear the shuffling sounds and the mutterings as people stepped quickly out of her way.

For some reason, as she ran after Grike to the sand ship and Grike unsheathed his claws and severed the mooring ropes, she kept remembering Stayns: how she and Tom had run from slavers’ men there, and Anna Fang had saved them. She fired a warning shot across the garage as she scrambled up her ship’s side, and cursed herself for being maudlin. This wasn’t Stayns, and Theo wasn’t Tom, and anyway, she didn’t want to think about it.

Napster Varley heard the shots and shouting as he readied his airship for the sky, and he swore under his breath, hoping that nothing would delay his departure from the Gulp. Grandma’s boys had slung Lady Naga into his hold a few minutes before, and he was shivery with excitement at the thought of the price she would fetch out on the line. If he lingered too long, Grandma Gravy might think better of selling her. So he didn’t run outside to watch the sand ship go racing off across the desert. He ordered his wife to put the baby down and go fire up the engines, and blacked her eye when she did not go quick enough. “Move it, you dozy mare!” he shouted, over the baby’s wailing. “Let’s leave these sand hoppers to their squabbles. We’ve business to attend to!”

Chapter 11 Wolf Kobold

Tom was uncertain about accepting Wolf Kobold’s invitation; he had been brought up to know his place, and he knew that it wasn’t on the Oberrang, which towered above the rest of Murnau like an ornate crown. It took Wren several hours to persuade him.

“You really need to talk to this Wolf person,” she told him. “He seemed so interested in what you had to say about Clytie Potts. I’m sure he knows something.”

Tom shook his head. “I’m not sure I really believe any of that myself. It was just an idea; I have no proof. Pennyroyal didn’t believe it, and he’s the man who claims that Ancient rubbish bins were really ritual centers and that the Ancients had machines called ‘eye-pods’ where they could store thousands of songs on tiny little gramophone records. If he thinks my London theory is unlikely, maybe it really is just a daydream.”

Wren tried another tack. “Don’t you think it would be good for my education, though? To mix a little in high society? Orla said she has a friend who can lend you formal robes.”

It was hard work, but she won him over in the end. Next afternoon they went aboard Murnau and took an elevator to the Oberrang, Tom looking awkward in his borrowed robes, Wren wearing her usual aviatrix’s gear, because she felt it suited her and she knew that nothing she could buy in the bazaars of Airhaven could compete with the finery the rich ladies would be wearing. Looking around at her fellow passengers as the elevator grumbled upward, she wondered if she had made the right decision; she drew some strange looks from the smart officers in their blue dress uniforms and the ladies in elaborate hats and gowns. She heard several people whisper, “Who is that extraordinary girl?”

It was a relief when the elevator stopped and she took Tom’s arm and walked out of the terminus building with him, into bright sunlight. Like the rest of Murnau the Oberrang was covered by an armored roof, but large sections had been folded open to let in the light and air. The party-goers walked toward the spiky bulk of the town hall along a boulevard called Über den Linden, with a glass pavement through which you could look down on the trees in a park on the tier below. It must have been beautiful in the old days, before the war, but now the trees were all dead, and the bare, scratchy branches reaching up toward her gave Wren an eerie feeling.

A broad swathe of parkland ringed the Rathaus, Murnau’s gothic town hall. There, upon a sparse, patched, mossy lawn, the kriegsmarschall’s garden party was getting underway. Brightly colored pavilions and marquees had been erected, and lines of colored flags strung among the dead trees and the battle-damaged colonnades, along with Chinese lanterns that would be lit later, when it grew dark. Enormous numbers of people were wandering about, for the kriegsmarschall of Murnau was entertaining the mayors and councillors of all the other cities in the cluster. A band played on a flag-decked podium, and people were dancing complicated, formal dances that looked more like applied mathematics than the old-fashioned northern jigs and reels that Wren had learned in Vineland. She wished she had listened to her father and stayed away from this do. She’d only once attended anything as grand as this; that had been on Cloud 9, and she had been there as a slave, handing around trays of drinks and nibbles.

She was just about ready to flee back to the elevators when Wolf detached himself from a small group of officers standing near the band and came to greet her. He had smartened himself a little, but even in formal uniform and a scarlet sash there was something faintly careless and shabby about him. The sword at his side was heavier and cheaper than the ornate ceremonial weapons the other men wore; it looked as if it had been used. His grin was full of sharp teeth. “My friends!” he called out, bowing low to Tom, taking Wren’s hand and kissing it. “I am so glad you could come!”

Wren was not used to having her hand kissed. She blushed and bobbed a curtsy. Wolf’s thumb brushed the raised weal on the back of her hand: the brand of the Shkin Corporation, whose property she had been in Brighton. She snatched her hand away quickly, ashamed, but Wolf just looked inquisitively at her, as if it did not trouble him at all that she had been a slave.

“You have led an interesting life, Fräulein Natsworthy,” he said, taking her arm, leading her and Tom through the busy garden.

“Not really, Mr. von Kobold. But I suppose I’ve packed in quite a bit in the last six months or so…”

“Please,” he said, “call me Wolf. Or at least Mr. Kobold. ‘Von’ is an old honorary title; my parents use it, but I have no time for such nonsense.” He bent closer to Wren and said, “You need not feel ill at ease among these silly women in their silly frocks. Most of them have been living in safer cities than Murnau since the war began, and have only come back now that the guns are quiet. Look at them! They are like overgrown children. They know nothing of real life at all.”

Wren felt glad of his company, and pleased at the slightly envious way the Murnau women watched as she walked by with him, but it disturbed her a little that he had been able to guess so easily how she was feeling.

“You must forgive me for bringing you here,” Wolf went on, addressing Tom. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk. I had not realized how lavishly my family entertain since this foolish truce began. Come, we will go inside…”

He steered them past the bandstand toward the looming, armored walls of the Rathaus, but halfway there they were headed off by a formidable-looking lady in a gown of gray silk so stiff and pointy that she looked armored, too. “Wolf, dear heart,” she said sweetly, “everyone is asking me who your friends are.”

Wolf bowed neatly and indicated Wren and her father. “Mother, let me present Tom Natsworthy, an aviator, and his daughter, Wren. Tom, Wren, my mother, Anya von Kobold.”

“Delighted,” said his mother, though she seemed rather pained as she looked Tom and Wren up and down, as if it physically hurt her to meet anyone so common. “Wolf has developed such quaint, democratickal notions since my husband gave him command of Harrowbarrow, one simply doesn’t know whom he is going to bring home next. Aviators. How very interesting…”

“Ignore her,” said Wolf, as his mother moved on to greet a clump of aldermen and their wives. “She knows nothing of life out here on the line. She deserts Murnau whenever the fighting starts, and flies off to a hotel on the upper tiers of Paris. All she knows or cares about are clothes and pastries.”

He spoke loudly enough for his mother to hear, and a lot of the other guests looked around, shocked and disapproving. Tom, embarrassed, asked innocently, “Harrowbarrow? Is that the name of your suburb? I don’t believe I’ve heard of it…”

Wolf stopped glaring at his mother’s broad back and smiled. “It is very small, sir, barely a suburb at all; just a little specialized place that came into Murnau’s possession during the war. But it is my own, you know, and I have hopes for it, high hopes.”

As he ushered them into the Rathaus, Wren wondered what sort of place it might be, this Harrowbarrow. The fighting suburbs she had seen on the journey east had looked horrible: low, vicious, and armored like wood lice. Yet Wolf spoke of his with affection. She supposed it was the same sort of pride you met among aviators, who would never hear a bad word about their own ship, even if she was just some leaky sky tug…

Once they were inside, the sounds of the garden party quickly faded. Wolf took his guests into a large, silent room where slender metal pillars held up the roof, giving Wren the feeling that she had stepped into an iron forest. There were chairs, and they all sat down while Wolf rang the bell for a servant and ordered refreshments. Then he waited a moment, studying Tom and Wren as if he were not quite sure that he had done the right thing in bringing them here.

“London,” he said at last. His face twisted into the same wry grin it had worn the previous day when he was listening to Pennyroyal’s story. “I understand that you were once a Londoner yourself, Herr Natsworthy?”

Tom nodded, and told him about his training in the Guild of Historians and how he had happened to be out of the city when the MEDUSA device went off.

“Interesting,” said Wolf when he had finished. Then, rather cautiously, he said, “I have my own London story, you know. That is why I came to listen when I heard what old Pennyroyal was saying yesterday. Look…” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small disk of metal, which he tossed to Tom. “If you are who you say you are, Herr Natsworthy, you will know what that is.”

Tom turned the disk over in his hands. It was the size of a large coin, and there was a coat of arms embossed on it. He had not seen such a thing for nearly twenty years, but he knew it at once, and gave a little gasp. Wren saw tears in his eyes when he looked up again at Kobold. “It is a rivet head from one of London’s tier supports,” he said. “From one of the lower tiers, I’d guess; it’s only iron, and the ones on the upper levels were all brass…”

Wolf grinned. “My souvenir of London,” he said.

“You’ve been there?” asked Tom.

“Briefly. About two years ago, before I was given my own suburb, I persuaded Father to let me join a kommando of the Abwehrtruppe on a raid deep into Mossie territory. We were attempting to destroy their central Stalker works. Unfortunately we never got there; we were attacked, and my own ship was forced down on the plains not far from Batmunkh Gompa. Alone, I sought shelter in the wreckage of London. I was scared, of course, for I had heard nothing but ghost stories about that dreadful old place. But the Mossies were hunting for me, and it seemed better to take my chances with the ghosts than let them catch me. So I wandered into that landscape of rust, looking for water and food and a place where I might shelter…”

He paused. Music from the party drifted through the corridors of the old building, faint and ghostly.

“It is a curious place, the debris field,” he said. “I saw only the very southeasternmost fringe of it. The wreckage is terribly twisted and flung about. Hard to believe that it was once a great city, although here and there one sees something familiar: a door, a table, a pram. Those rivet heads, for instance; they were scattered everywhere. I pocketed that one you are holding, thinking that if I ever made it home, I would want some proof to show my friends that I had been inside the wreck of London.

“Toward nightfall, as I struck north into the interior where the ruins rise high and eerie, something happened. I’m not sure what. I noticed movements in the wreckage. Too deliberate to be animals. They seemed to follow me. After a while there were noises, too, unearthly groans and wailings. I drew my revolver and loosed a couple of shots into the shadows, and the noises stopped. In the silence I became aware of another sound. It seemed like machinery, although it was far off, and never clear enough for me to be certain. I sat down amid the debris to rest and … I blacked out. Later I seemed to remember someone coming up behind me—but perhaps that was only a dream; the memory is very unclear.

“The next thing I knew, I was ten miles away, lying in the open country west of the wreck, hidden from Mossie patrols beneath the foliage in an old track mark. My wounds had been bandaged with field dressings; my canteen had been filled with water and my pack with bread and fruit.”

“By whom?” asked Tom eagerly.

Wolf looked sharply at him. “You do not believe me?”

“I didn’t say that…”

Wolf shrugged. “I have never told anyone of this before. All I know is there is somebody inside the wreck of London. They are not Mossies, or they would have killed me when they had the chance. But they have their secrets, and they guard them well.”

Wren looked at her father. She thought Wolf’s story far spookier than Pennyroyal’s. “Who could it be?” she asked.

Tom didn’t answer her.

“I have often wondered,” said Wolf. “I’ve asked around. Some of my lads aboard Harrowbarrow are ex-scavengers who’ve lived rough in some bad places, and seen some strange things there. They’ve never heard of scavs living inside London. But a couple of times I’ve heard mention of the Geistluftschiff—the phantom airship. It crosses no-man’s-land in silence, when the wind’s from the west, and flies off into Mossie territory. No markings. Not part of any known unit, ours or theirs.”

“Ghosts again,” said Wren.

“Or the Archaeopteryx” said Tom. His voice trembled slightly. He was trying not to make his feelings too obvious, but he was moved and excited by what Wolf had told him, and what he suspected it might mean. “The Archaeopteryx, flying home to London.”

Wolf leaned forward. “I believe your theory, Herr Natsworthy. I believe survivors of MEDUSA live on secretly inside the wreck.”

“But why would anyone want to?” asked Wren. “There’s nothing left there, is there?”

“There must be something,” said Wolf. “Something that makes it worth staying there, and guarding. I have done a little research of my own into Cruwys Morchard since I heard you ask about her. Our intelligence corps keeps a file on most ships that pass through these skies, and their notes on the Aerial Merchant Vessel Archaeopteryx made interesting breakfast-time reading. It seems your Ms. Morchard has been buying a lot of Old Tech in the last few years.”

“She is an Old Tech trader,” said Tom reasonably.

“Is she? It doesn’t look to me as if she ever sells many of the old machine parts she buys. So what becomes of them? Perhaps she just flies home with them to London. And what was London famous for?”

“Engineering,” admitted Tom, rather reluctantly. He was remembering the man he had seen with Clytie on the docking pan at Peripatetiapolis, a man with a gleaming, shaven head. “And Engineers,” he said.

Wolf nodded, watching him. “What if some of those Engineers of yours have survived? What if they live in the debris fields? What if they are building something there? Something so wonderful that it is worth living twenty years inside a ruin to preserve the secret of it! Something that could change the world!”

Tom shook his head. “No, no. Clytie would never work for the Guild of Engineers—”

“The Clytie you knew might not. But she may have changed her mind, in twenty years.” Wolf stood up and walked to the windows, which he flung open, letting in the sounds of the party on the lawn. “Come,” he said, beckoning them out with him onto the balcony. Below, the bright gowns and uniforms of his parents’ guests speckled the garden like petals; like butterflies. For a moment, as he gazed down at them all, the young man’s face wore a look that could almost have been hatred.

“The truce will not last long,” he said. “But while it does, we should make the most of it.”

What does he mean “we”? wondered Wren. She wasn’t sure how her father’s dream had suddenly been swallowed up by Wolf Kobold’s, and she still wasn’t entirely sure that she liked this attractive young man.

“I have often thought of returning to London,” Wolf went on. “The war has kept me too busy, though. But now I see my chance. I’ve been finding out about you, Tom Natsworthy. It seems you are a fine aviator. And that old League ship of yours could be just the vessel for a jaunt behind the enemy’s lines…”

“You mean that I should go to London?” asked Tom. “But that’s impossible! Isn’t it? We’d never get past the Green Storm’s patrols…”

“You couldn’t get across here,” agreed Wolf, looking past the garden party and the buildings at the edge of the Oberrang and out across the scumbled mires of no-man’s-land toward the Storm’s territory. “Naga’s entire ninth army is dug in out there in the mud, waiting for us to make a move. Even if they didn’t shoot you down, our own side would assume you were trading with the enemy and open fire on you. But there are places northeast of here, where the line is less well defended.”

He turned to Tom with a boyish grin. “Harrowbarrow could get you across. I often take her hunting in no-man’s-land. She’ll get you right up to the borders of Storm country, where an aviator of your skill could easily slip across the line and follow the old track marks east. That’s what Clytie Potts must have been doing all these years, after all.”

“And will you be coming with us, Mr. Kobold?” asked Wren.

Tom glanced at her. “You’re not coming, Wren. It’s far too dangerous. I don’t even think I should go myself…”

Wolf laughed. “Of course you will go!” he said. “I can see it in your eyes. You want more than anything to know what is going on in London. And I will come with you, because this peace bores me and I long to see what lies in the debris fields. Don’t worry; I will make all the arrangements, and I will pay you well for your trouble. Shall we say five thousand in gold, transferred into an Airhaven bank account?”

“Five thousand?” cried Tom.

“I come from a very wealthy family,” said Wolf. “I’d rather see the fortunes of the von Kobolds spent on an expedition like this than frittered away on garden parties. Of course, for that sort of sum I shall have to insist that Wren accompany us as copilot. She is a young woman of great courage, and we will need her help to fly all that way.” (He smiled at Wren, who felt herself start to blush.)

“I’m still not sure,” said Tom, but he was. How could he refuse? He had never had much money, and had never wanted much, but he had Wren’s future to consider. The sum this boy was offering would make her a rich woman, and if Wren were to set up as an air trader when he was gone, it would do her no harm to be known on the bird roads as the aviatrix who had been inside London.

The truth was, he longed to return to his city and find out what was left of it; to see for himself if anything (or anyone) had survived. He longed to take Wren with him too, so that she could see for herself the place where her father’s adventures had all begun. And so it was easy for him to find ways to justify going, and taking her, and to belittle all the dangers they would face. After all (he told himself), he and Hester had flown the Jenny Haniver to far worse places, in their young days…

“It is decided, then,” said Wolf. “Move your ship into the Murnau air harbor. We shall meet in a day or two to discuss arrangements. But please don’t mention to anyone where we are going; not to anyone at all. The Storm and the other cities have spies everywhere.”

They shook hands before going back down together to the garden, to the laughter and the music and the lengthening shadows. Pennyroyal had arrived, surrounded by bright young women and waving cheerfully at Tom and Wren as they passed. Wolf excused himself and went to speak to his father. He looked awkward and slightly nervous standing beside the old kriegsmarschall, and Wren found herself liking him more; she had had parent problems of her own. It was Wolf’s experiences in the war that made him seem hard sometimes, she thought; underneath, he was probably shy and kind, just like Theo.

Wondering what it would be like to travel east with him, she squeezed her own father’s hand. “If you go,” she said, “I’m coming too. Like Wolf Kobold said. Don’t think you can make me stay here. So there’s no point even trying to argue about it. I can look after myself.”

Tom laughed, for it was such a Hesterish thing to say. He looked at Wren and saw her mother’s strength and stubbornness in her. “All right,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Between Wolf Kobold and his father the conversation did not flow so easily. Somehow, somewhere in the years, they had lost the easy friendship that they had had when Wolf was little. They thought in different ways now, the kriegsmarschall and his son. Still, the old man seemed to think that he should take advantage of Wolf’s rare visit to try to talk seriously to him. He led him away between the dead trees, through dry brown beds of withered shrubs that, before the war, had been one of the glories of Murnau. They crossed a footbridge over a boating lake (the lake drained, of course, its dry floor scabbed with rust) and climbed some steps to a little pillared gazebo where a statue of a goddess in antique dress gazed out over the tier’s brim.

“This was one of your favorite spots when you were a lad,” said the kriegsmarschall, stroking his mustaches, as he always did when he felt nervous. “You used to be fascinated by this little lady on her pedestal.”

“I don’t remember,” said Wolf.

“Oh yes…” The statue’s face was streaked with damp, as if she had been weeping green tears. The kriegsmarschall pulled out his pocket handkerchief and started trying to clean her up. “You always wanted to know who she was, and I would tell you how she represented Murnau. Strong but gentle. Nobility. That’s it.” Working away at the mossy statue meant that he did not have to meet his son’s gaze. He said, “You should come back, Wolf. Your mother misses you.”

“My mother will go skulking off to Paris again as soon as this truce breaks down. Anyway, what do you care? Everyone knows your marriage has been a sham for years.”

“Well, I miss you.”

“I’m sure that is not true.”

“When I suggested you take charge of that harvester suburb, I meant it to be for a month or two. I did not intend for you to live there permanently! You belong here, Wolfram! Damn it, you should be preparing to take over from me. I’m just an old soldier. Now that peace is returning, Murnau needs younger men to guide it. Men of vision.”

“The peace will not last,” said Wolf.

“How can you be so sure? I think Naga means well. I have fought against him, remember. He held out against Murnau for six weeks on the Bashkir Gradient. His people fought like tigers, but he made them spare all the prisoners on the towns they captured. He never used Tumblers unless he had to. And when he heard I’d been wounded by one of his snipers, he sent me a get-well present, a vest of Old Tech body armor, with a note that said, ‘Sorry we missed you.’ He may be my enemy, but I like him more than most of my friends.”

“Very touching,” yawned Wolf, who had heard that story many times before. “But the Mossies must still be exterminated.”

“Nonsense!” said his father crossly. “The Traktionstadtsgesellchaft was not founded to exterminate anyone, only to defend honest cities from the Storm. Let Naga and his Anti-Tractionists live up in their horrible mountains in peace, as long as they promise not to trouble us.”

Wolf rounded on his father angrily but did not say anything. Instead he walked to the edge of the gazebo and looked out between the dead trees, east across the rough, torn landscape that the war had made to the plains beyond, imagining London out there somewhere, waiting.

After a while, Kriegsmarschall von Kobold said, “Manchester is coming east. I had a communique from the mayor, Mr. Browne…”

“Ah! Our paymaster.”

“It is true that Manchester has helped to finance our struggle… He plans to hold a conference aboard his city as soon as it reaches the line. The mayors of all the Traktionstadts are to meet and decide how to proceed. I plan to make the case for a lasting peace with the Storm. I would like you to be there, Wolfram. There at my side, so that everyone can see you are my heir…”

“I shall be going home to Harrowbarrow tomorrow or the day after,” said his son. “I have business to attend to.”

“With your sky-tramp aviator friends?”

Wolf shrugged.

The kriegsmarschall turned away, hesitated, then shook his head and marched briskly down the steps and across the bridge. He had fought countless battles against the Storm, met Stalkers in hand-to-hand combat on the steps of his own home in the red winter of ’14, but his own son always defeated him.

Wolf stood alone and watched him go. After a while he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched too. He turned, and there was the statue of the goddess gazing at him with her calm, blind eyes. Despite what he had told his father, Wolf could remember how, as a little boy, he had liked to sit in the statue’s lap and look up at her while his father told him stories of Murnau’s glorious past. He drew his saber and hacked through the slender neck with three furious blows, sparks flaring as the blade sliced stone. Then he kicked the severed head down the stairs into the empty lake and strode quickly away through the gardens to start preparing for his journey.

Chapter 12 The Sand Ships

It seemed to Theo to be raining. He could not feel the rain, for he was indoors, in bed. He could not see the rain, for it was dark. But he could hear it, the gentle hiss of steady falling rain, and even the sound was refreshing after those parched days on Cutler’s Gulp. It rushed and sighed and soothed and shushed, and wove together his disjointed dreams.

And sometimes, briefly, he came fully awake, and knew that the hissing rain sound was just the noise of the sand singing beneath the wheels of the black sand ship.

“Don’t be afraid,” someone told him.

“Wren?” he asked.

“Was she with you when you were taken by Grandma Gravy’s boys? Were Wren and Tom with you?”

“No, no,” said Theo, shaking his head. “They’re far away.

They’re in the north, on the bird roads. Wren sent me a card at Christmas… I hoped I might find her when we reached the north…” Remembering the wreck of the Nzimu, he struggled to rise. “Lady Naga… What about Lady Naga?”

A hand touched his face, gentle and shy. A mouth brushed his forehead. “Don’t be afraid, Theo. Sleep.”

He slept, and woke again, and saw that the woman who sat beside him was Wren’s mother. Above her head an argon globe in a squeaky gimbal swung to and fro, sloshing black washes of shadow up the cabin walls. When the shadows hid Hester’s face, Theo could imagine that it was Wren sitting there beside his bunk, but when she saw that he was watching her, she said harshly, “Awake, are you? You’d better pull yourself together. There’s no room for slackers on my sand ship.” It was as if she hoped that he would not remember the gentle things she had said to him earlier.

Theo tried to speak, but his mouth was drier than Bitumen Bay. Hester reached out roughly and raised his head and pushed a tin cup against his lips. “Don’t drink too much,” she said. “I can’t spare it. I was only in Cutler’s Gulp for food and water, and thanks to you I had to leave before I found either. That lout I shot was Grandma Gravy’s golden boy. She’s not best pleased.”

The sand went on singing against the hull of the speeding ship. Theo slept again. Hester stood up and climbed the ladder to the open cockpit, where Grike stood at the tiller, his green eyes glowing. The ship was west of the sand sea, running across plains of roasted shale. Away in the east a band of pale light showed on the horizon. The wind thrummed in the rigging. “He keeps going on about someone called Lady Naga,” Hester said. “I think she must have been with him when the scavs found him. Ever heard of Lady Naga?”

Grike said, “there are ships behind us.”

“What? Damn!”

Hester had expected the old witch at Cutler’s Gulp to send someone after her. Grandma’s reputation for black magic meant that her men were likely to be more scared of Grandma than they were of Hester or her tame Stalker. She squinted at the horizon until she could see them too, the thin, sharp shapes of their sails, like the teeth of fish. She had expected one or two, feared three, but Grandma had sent six, ranging in size from a tiny cutter to a big, twin-hulled dune runner. “I suppose we ought to be flattered,” she said.

The sun rose out of the ragged hills astern, and the lookouts on the masts of the pursuing ships saw the black sail ahead. A flare rose from the dune runner, signaling “chase to leeward.” A few minutes later there was a puff of smoke aboard one of the smaller ships, and Grike and Hester saw a dune a few hundred yards astern explode in flames and flung sand.

“they will soon be in range,” Grike said impassively. “if they hit our tires while we are traveling at this speed, the vehicle will be destroyed.”

“Damn,” said Hester again. She went below to the gun locker and took out something she had stolen from a bandit she’d killed way out in the Djebel Haqir. It was an automatic jezail, taller than her, with pretty silver chasing on its walnut stock. If the bandit had been sober, he might still have been alive; it was a good gun, with a range of several miles. Hester loaded big brass shells into the chambers and filled her pockets with more. She checked that Theo was still sleeping. He was, curled up like a child, gentle and vulnerable. Hester made herself turn away. If she wasn’t careful, she would start to care about him, and she knew too well that when you cared about people, you opened yourself up to all kinds of pain.

She climbed out into the light, which was hard and white. The scouring wind was full of sand, and the ships were closer. The one that had fired first was smallest and fastest; it was coming up quickly on the starboard quarter, and Hester could see the men on its hull taking aim at her with some kind of swivel-mounted cannon. It puffed out white smoke, and she felt the shot whisk past her, exploding among a stack of biscuit-colored rocks a hundred yards to larboard.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve and steadied her gun against the cockpit rail. “Be easier if you could do this,” she told Grike, pushing her sand goggles up her forehead and squinting through the jezail’s telescopic top sight. “I can hardly see them…”

“i cannot,” said Grike. “I have told you many times. something dr. zero did to me; some barrier in my mind …”

“I wish I had your Dr. Zero here right now,” grunted Hester, trying to focus on the little knot of men busy with their sponges and ramrods around the swivel gun. “I’d put a barrier in her mind.” She squeezed the jezail’s trigger and cursed as the stock slammed against her shoulder. The empty cartridge casing went tumbling astern. Where the bullet had gone Hester could not say, but she had not hit her target. She was no sharpshooter. Her talent wasn’t shooting, only killing.

Luckily the men on the other ship were no better than her; shot after shot went past her as she worked her way steadily through a pocketful of ammunition. She was about to start on the second pocket when the other ship suddenly veered off course.

“Did I do that?” she asked.

The enemy ship was out of control. Maybe one of Hester’s stray shots had severed a cable or pierced a tire. It curved across the line of ships, and a three-wheeler close behind it swerved wildly and collided with a little armed yacht. Tangled together, both ships overturned and started to cartwheel impressively across the sand, shedding spars, wheels, sails, and scraps of broken mast. The leading ship had overturned too, throwing up a billowing scarf of sand that hid the remaining three for a while, but they emerged again, vague at first, then sharp and clear and gaining fast. Bullets from a steam-powered machine gun mounted on the big dune runner started thumping against the woodwork close to where Hester crouched. She said something filthy and lay down out of sight.

“THEY ARE TRYING TO CAPTURE THIS SHIP, NOT DESTROY IT,” Grike guessed. “NOW THAT THEY HAVE LOST THREE OTHERS, GRANDMA GRAVY WILL NOT WANT THEM TO RETURN WITHOUT A PRIZE.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” said Hester, looking up at him from ankle height as the bullets hanged off his armor. “What are you going to do when they board us?”

“IT WILL NOT COME TO THAT.”

“What if it does?”

“THEN I SHALL DEFEND YOU IN ANY WAY I CAN,” said the Stalker patiently, “I WILL SNATCH AWAY THEIR WEAPONS. I WILL RESTRAIN THEM. I WILL STAND BETWEEN THEIR BLADES AND YOUR BODY. BUT I WILL NOT KILL THEM.”

“And if they kill me?”

“THEN I WILL KEEP THE PROMISE I MADE YOU ON THE BLACK ISLAND.”

Hester squeezed off a couple more shots at the dune runner. Overhead, the sails were starting to fill with holes, but the silicone silk was tough and did not split. “Why did she do this to you?” Hester shouted. “I mean, tricking you into smashing that Anna Fang thing, fine, but why couldn’t you just go back to normal once the job was done?”

“I AM SURE THAT DR. ZERO HAD HER REASONS FOR LEAVING ME WITH A CONSCIENCE.”

“Well, I miss the old Grike.”

“AND I MISS THE OLD HESTER.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But she never found out, because at that moment the dune runner pulled alongside, and grappling hooks came hurtling across the narrowing gap between the two ships, and it was time to drop her jezail and pull out her pistols and fight.

The hammer blows of bullets against the hull got into Theo’s dreams, so perplexing and out of place in the quiet green spaces he was drifting through that he had to wake up to find out what they meant. He lay on the bunk for a moment, wondering where on earth he was and why it was jolting about so. The portholes on the wall above him were shuttered, so it was shady in the cabin, but just above his head someone had stretched a golden cord right across from one wall to the other. Theo wondered why anyone should do such a thing. Was it a washing line? If so, it was more beautiful than any washing line he’d seen before; so bright, so shimmer. He put his hand out to touch it, and his fingers slid straight through it. It was made from warm light.

Theo sat up. There were more of the cords stretched all across the cabin, like a cat’s cradle. Every now and then there would be a thud against the hull and another would appear. They were shafts of sunlight, poking in through the bullet holes that were appearing in the cabin walls.

Dizzy with sleep, Theo rolled off the bunk and landed on the deck. The smooth wood bucked beneath him as the sand ship sped over the rough desert floor. Theo started crawling toward the metal ladder at the rear of the cabin. He could hear shouting above him, and the slam and cough of handguns. As he reached the foot of the ladder, a man came down it headfirst, dead, his turban smoldering where the flash from Hester’s pistol had set it on fire. Theo looked up the ladder through the open hatch. A confusion of struggling shapes blocked out the sun.

He climbed the ladder. Out on the deck in the white, blinding light a scruffy battle was taking place, almost silent apart from the stamp and scuff of feet on the deck boards. A ragged brown dune runner was keeping pace with the sand ship, attached to it by ropes and grappling hooks. Men had jumped across the gap, thinking it would be easy to overpower a one-eyed woman and a Stalker who would not kill, but three of them were already dead, tangled in the rigging or draped across the rail. A fourth was struggling with Grike, who had taken his gun and was holding him away from Hester. A fifth circled Hester, who had thrown her empty pistols aside and was holding a knife, jabbing it at the man each time he lunged at her. He had a sword, much longer and heavier than Hester’s knife, but he had not yet worked up the courage to get close enough to use it.

Theo stood unnoticed in the cabin hatchway. The fight and the desert swirled around him; the heat and light came down on his head like a fall of bright water. On the deck at his feet lay a boarding axe, and the light seemed to pour from its blade. He picked it up and hacked at the rope that stretched from the nearest of the grappling hooks. The rope was old and greasy and parted easily after a few blows. The sand ship lurched, starting to pull away from its attacker. Theo scrambled toward the next hook. “Theo!” he heard Hester shout. He looked up. A man stood in the dune runner’s rigging, grinning at Theo and aiming a blunderbuss. Hornets were buzzing past, and Theo felt one sting his arm. A knife appeared, sticking out of the man’s neck, and he dropped the blunderbuss and fell out of the rigging into the storm of sand between the two ships.

Theo looked at Hester. She had flung her knife at the man with the blunderbuss, and now she was defenseless. Without thinking he swung the flat of his hatchet at the swordsman who was attacking her. The man still hadn’t noticed Theo, and the blow caught him by surprise. He crashed sideways against the rail and over it, away into the swirling dust. Grike dropped the man he had captured down after him, and Theo saw them clamber to their feet in the sand ship’s wake and stagger painfully away, waving at the surviving ships, which were slowing and starting to turn, dismayed by their losses and abandoning the chase. “Good work,” said Hester.

Theo nodded, still dizzy, but proud that he had won her respect.

“You all right?” she asked.

He looked down at his arm, where the hornet had stung. It hadn’t really been a hornet, of course, but the wound was a scratch, not deep. He knelt on the deck and watched Hester pick up the hatchet and cut the remaining ropes. As the dune runner veered away, pilotless, she turned and said, “Stupid! I didn’t rescue you so you could get yourself killed.” But Theo sensed beneath her scorn a sort of rough kindness, and remembered the gentle way she had sat with him in the night, and knew that she was not so unlike Wren after all.

The dust was clearing. The black ship ran on, slowing now, because its sails were full of holes. It began to pass through the shadows of tall towers of rock around whose summits hopeful vultures wheeled. Some of the towers looked like crude, wind-worn statues, and perhaps they were, for all sorts of civilizations had made their mark on the old earth, and some had left some very strange things behind. The towers filled the desert ahead, whittled by the wind into flutes through which the dry breeze moaned. In their crisscross shadows Theo began to feel safe again.

The sand ship slowed, slowed, and came into a shady place where dwarf acacia trees grew. Grike flung out the anchor and furled the sails. He jumped overboard and scaled one of the smaller towers, climbing the fissured rock quickly and easily like a steel lizard. He stood for a while on the summit and then clambered down, calling out that the pursuers had turned tail, and that nothing else was moving in the desert. The sand ship creaked under his weight as he came back aboard. Theo, who had always hated Stalkers, recoiled from him.

Grike sensed the boy’s unease, “I will not harm you,” he said. “even if i wanted to, i could not.”

“Why?” asked Theo, remembering how Grike had spared the man he’d caught during the battle. “That’s what Stalkers are for, isn’t it? Harming people?”

Grike’s steel teeth gleamed as he tried to smile, ” not in dr. zero’s opinion.”

“Dr. Zero? She built you?”

“i was built by the nomad empires. i am older than the storm. older than municipal darwinism. the last of the lazarus brigade. but i was rebuilt by oenone zero, and she must have altered me. now if i think of killing once-born, my head fills with pictures of all the once-born i hurt and killed before, and i cannot do it.”

“Dr. Zero’s here!” said Theo eagerly, remembering his promise to protect Oenone. “She’s aboard Cutler’s Gulp! She’s called Lady Naga now. They said she was being sold to that trader Varney… We have to go back! We have to help her!”

Hester, coming out of the cabin with food and the makings of a fire, looked coldly at him. “We don’t have to do anything, boy. We’re not going back. And if you mean Napster Varley, I saw his Humbug lift off from the Gulp as we were pulling away. Anything he bought there he’ll have taken with him.”

Grike hissed like a thoughtful kettle. “WE COULD GO AFTER HIM.”

“Not you as well!” cried Hester angrily. “For all the gods’ sakes, Grike, she’s the vet who neutered you! What do you care if she’s been ’slaved?”

Noises came from inside Grike’s armored skull. Theo wondered if they were the sounds of thoughts whizzing through the Stalker’s brain. “IF I CAN FIND HER, SHE WILL TELL ME WHY SHE HAS DONE THIS TO ME. WE COULD GO NORTH, SELL THE SAND SHIP AND BUY AN AIRSHIP. NAPSTER VARLEY’S VESSEL IS SLOW. ITS WIDMERPOOL-12 AERO-ENGINES ARE INEFFICIENT. WE COULD CATCH IT UP DESPITE HIS HEAD START.”

Hester turned away from him and kicked the gunwales of her sand ship. “I like the desert,” she said angrily. “It’s good. It’s simple. It’s clean. I can make a living here.”

“YOU ARE NO MORE ALIVE THAN ME,” said Grike.

“No?” Hester glared at him. She was good at glaring; she could glare better with that one eye than most people could with two. “Well, isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you always want to make a Stalker of me, so we could wander about dead together?” She appealed to Theo. “Grike wants to make me like him. That’s the only reason he’s stayed with me since Cloud 9 came down. He’s not got the stomach anymore to kill me himself, so he’s been waiting for one of these sand rats to do it for him. Then he’ll take my carcass to his old friends in the Storm and get me Resurrected.”

“Oh!” said Theo, horrified. Resurrection was the worst fate he could imagine, yet Hester spoke of it as if it were nothing.

“I won’t care,” she said. “I’ll be dead. He can do what he wants with what’s left.”

“no,” said Grike. If he could have whispered, he would have whispered it, but all Grike’s words came out the same, loud and sharp and scraping. He wished Oenone Zero had done something about his voice instead of tinkering with his brain. He said, ” when your death comes, i will have you resurrected, as we agreed long ago. but i can wait. i want to see you live again and be happy. you will be neither while you stay in this desert.”

Hester sat down and hid her face in one hand. She was only in her middle thirties, but she looked ten years older, and very tired. Theo felt sorry for her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he didn’t think she’d like that. He glanced at Grike, but the Stalker seemed to have said all that he was going to.

“Mrs. Natsworthy,” said Theo, “it’s not just Dr. Zero who’s in danger. It’s lots of people. The truce depends on her. Who knows what General Naga might do if he doesn’t get her back? He loves her.”

“He’s a fool, then,” muttered Hester. “People shouldn’t love each other. It only leads to trouble.” She looked at Theo. “I don’t care about your truce. I don’t care about General Naga or this wife of his.”

She jumped down onto the sand and started walking away from the ship, gathering dry acacia branches to make a fire. Although she kept her back to Grike and Theo, she knew that they were both watching her. She felt shivery, and cold despite the heat, as if she had a fever coming on, but she knew it wasn’t fever.

At first, when she’d found herself alone with Grike, she had been terrified. She had remembered his ghoulish plans for her, and imagined that he was going to kill her at once. But when she learned that he couldn’t or wouldn’t kill, she had decided that Grike was the person she belonged with. Had it not been Grike who rescued her, all those years ago, after her own father tried to murder her? Grike had looked after her when she was a child, long before she met Tom; now her life with Tom was over, and she was with Grike again. There was a Tightness about it.

Anyway, she was glad of someone to talk to. During these months in the desert she had told him things that she had never told anyone before. She told him about her first meeting with Tom, and how she had fallen in love with him; about the Jenny Haniver, and Wren. And she told him how she had betrayed Anchorage, and murdered Piotr Masgard, about how she had driven her own daughter away.

Grike did not judge her the way a human being would have; he just listened patiently. Hester felt that when she had told him everything, then she would be able to forget her previous life; she would become as blank as the sand and the red-rock hills, and her memories would not be able to hurt her anymore.

And now this boy had dropped into her life like a shower upon the desert, making all sorts of things stir under the parched surface. Hope, for instance. Little dreams. She tried not to let them grow, but couldn’t stop them. Theo was still in touch with Wren and Tom, and one day he might tell them of his meeting with Hester in the sand sea. She liked the idea that he might have something good to say about her. She imagined her husband and daughter, in some far-off harbor, hearing that she had done something good again, just once, to balance all the bad things.

She turned and started lugging her bundle of branches toward the ship. “All right, old Stalker,” she said when she drew near. “All right. All right then. Let’s sell this old tub and find ourselves an airship.”

Chapter 13 Time to Depart

AMV Jenny Haniver

Murnau Air Harbor

21st May

Dear Theo,

I thought I should write to you, because I am starting on a journey, and it may be dangerous, and I shouldn’t want to die and disappear and leave you thinking that I just hadn’t got in touch because I couldn’t be bothered. A wealthy Murnau gentleman, Wolf Kobold, has hired us to do a little exploring, and we have been in Murnau Harbor for the past week, loading provisions and making plans. Mr. Kobold has left now, gone north to a suburb he runs called Harrowbarrow. (He’s important enough that he can just commandeer Abwehrtruppe airships to give him lifts, which makes you wonder why he needs us, but I think he likes to do things for himself really, and not make use of all the privileges his position brings.) Tomorrow we shall fly out to join him on Harrowbarrow, and our journey will begin. So I am going to leave this letter at the Air Exchange and hope that they will pass it on to the captain of a westbound ship who will pass it on to someone else, and before the year’s out it might, with luck, find its way to Zagwa, and to you.

This is all rather complicated to explain, but I shall try. It seems that some survivors may be living still among the ruins of London. This is news to me, because I didn’t even know that London had any ruins—I thought it had been completely burned up. But apparently there are quite a lot of bits left, scattered about in the Out-Country west of the Green Storm fortress at Batmunkh Gompa. Wolf Kobold went there once, and wants to go back and find out more, and Dad is keen to take him, not just because of all the money he is paying us, but for old times’ sake. And I want to go too. It sounds exciting: just the sort of adventure I used to imagine when I was stuck in Anchorage. I’ve seen old pictures of London, and heard Dad’s stories of it, but imagine actually being there, and walking in the ruins of those streets Dad walked along when he was little! I’m a Londoner’s daughter, which makes me a Londoner too, in a way; at least, it’s part of me, and I want to see it nearly as badly as Dad.

Sorry, no time to write more. Dad is over at the air chandler’s, and I promised him I would prep the Jeunet-Carots for takeoff before he gets back. Hopefully, by the time this reaches you, I will be safe in friendly skies again. If not, look for me in London.

Wren hesitated, then wrote carefully at the bottom of the page:

With love,

From Wren

She blotted the letter and started to read through it, then realized that if she did, she would lose her nerve and crumple it up, the way she had almost all her letters to Theo. She folded it quickly and slipped it into an envelope.

A few days earlier, while she was studying the price list in the window of a photographer’s shop at the Murnau Air Exchange, Professor Pennyroyal’s journalist friend Sampford Spiney had appeared and offered to photograph her for free. She had sat in the sunshine near the harbor mouth while his colleague, Miss Kropotkin, took half a dozen portraits, and Spiney chatted pleasantly and listened with interest to Wren’s account of her adventures in Brighton. She had done her best not to expose any of Pennyroyal’s fibs, though several times Spiney had picked up on something that contradicted one of the Professor’s accounts. “He does tend to exaggerate a little,” she admitted at last, and the reporter seemed quite satisfied.

The finished photographs had arrived at the Jenny’s berth that morning. Wren thought they made her look grown-up and serious, and they didn’t show her spots too badly, so she slipped one into the envelope along with her letter before she sealed it. She liked the idea that Theo would have it to remember her by if they never met again.

Letter in hand, she set off through the busy harbor, making for the Air Exchange. She had not gone far when she met her father coming back from the chandlery, where he had been settling the Jenny’s account. She guessed the bill had been fairly enormous, for not only had the little ship been repainted and refueled and overhauled, but Dad had bought a new compass and altimeter and filled her holds and lockers with tinned food and bottled water, and laid in stocks of rope and envelope fabric, spare valves and hoses and engine parts, enormous rolls of camouflage netting, and everything he could think of that might be needed on a voyage into hostile territory. Still, it was affordable enough when you remembered what Wolf Kobold was paying them, and Dad didn’t look too shocked.

Wren waved to him, then remembered the letter and tried to hide it behind her.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Just a letter,” said Wren. “I was going to ask one of the balloon taxi men to—”

Tom took the letter and looked at the address. “Wren!” he cried. “Great Quirke! You can’t send this! If the Murnau authorities find out you’re writing to somebody in Zagwa, they’ll think you’re a spy, and we’ll both end up in a prison on the Niederrang!”

“But Murnau’s not at war with Zagwa! The Zagwans are neutral!”

“They’re still Anti-Tractionists.” Tom put one arm around her shoulders and started to lead her back to the Jenny. “I’m sorry, Wren.”

Just then, from a neighboring pan, they heard a loud, familiar voice. “Of course, I used to fly my own ships. Got quite expert at it, riding the Boreal hurricanoes and so forth. But I can’t be bothered on these little intercity hops. I remember a time in Nuevo-Maya when—”

Pennyroyal was strolling toward a smart and expensive-looking dirigible taxi, whose crew were waiting beside the gangplank for him to board. His companion, a handsome high Murnau lady in a dress that had probably cost more than the Jenny Haniver, was listening with great attention to his anecdote, and looked annoyed when he broke off to call out, “Tom! Wren! How are you, my dears? Have you met my dear friend Mrs. Kleingrothaus? We are just on our way up to Airhaven. We have been invited to dine with Dornier Lard, the airship magnate, aboard his sky yacht there.”

“Airhaven!” cried Wren. “Then you could take this letter for me, couldn’t you? Just leave it at the harbor office and ask them to put it aboard a ship bound for Africa.”

Pennyroyal glanced at the envelope as she pressed it into his hands, along with a silver coin to pay for postage. “Zagwa?” he hissed. “Good lord…”

“I know the Murnauers would not approve, but you aren’t afraid of them, are you?” urged Wren.

“Of course not!” said Pennyroyal at once, with a glance at his companion to make sure she understood how brave and helpful he was being. He tucked Wren’s letter into the innermost pocket of his coat and winked slyly at her. “Never fear, Wren! I shall make sure young Ngoni gets your billet-doux if I have to take it to him in person!” He looked at Tom. “I noticed at the Air Exchange that you are scheduled to leave Murnau tonight.”

Tom nodded. He knew that Pennyroyal wanted to know where the Jenny Haniver was bound, but he wasn’t planning to tell him.

“I heard a rumor that you were working for young Kobold?”

“We talked,” said Tom casually.

Pennyroyal nodded, beaming. “Excellent, excellent,” he said. “Well, we mustn’t keep Mr. Lard waiting, must we, dear?” He made his bow and wished Tom and Wren bon voyage, but as his lady friend strolled gracefully toward the waiting ship, he turned and called, “Don’t miss the June edition of The Speculum, Tom! Available at all good newsagents’, and the lead article is to be Spiney’s piece on me!”

Tom waved, wondering where he would be come June. The Speculum was published in several languages and sold aboard all sorts of different cities, but he didn’t think he would be able to buy a copy among the ruins of London.

Chapter 14 General Naga

Twenty miles away, at the westernmost edge of the Green Storm’s territory, General Jiang Xiang Naga stood on a fire step in a forward trench and studied the lights of Murnau through the brass eyepieces of a periscope. An aide twiddled the knobs on the periscope tripod and the instrument turned slowly, showing Naga the neighboring lights of smaller cities and countless suburbs, another Traktionstadt farther down the line.

“New cities are arriving almost daily from the west,” said one of the officers standing in the trench. “Intelligence says that even Manchester, one of the last great urbivores, is moving toward the Murnau cluster. Excellency, they are preparing an attack.”

“Nonsense, Colonel Yu,” snorted Naga, turning from the periscope. “They are trade towns, taking advantage of the truce to come and do business with those fighting cities.”

“Yes, to sell them fresh weapons and supplies!” insisted Yu. “This truce is providing the barbarians with a breathing space; a chance to rearm.”

“It is giving us the same chance,” said his neighbor, General Xao, a short woman with a creased yellow face like an old purse. She smiled. She had lost three sons to the Green Storm’s war, and it was a long time since anyone had seen her smile. “More than a month now, and nobody killed anywhere on the line,” she said. “Even if the townies break truce tomorrow, it will have been worth it. Listen.”

Naga listened. He could hear the low voices of soldiers in the neighboring trenches, the whisper of the breeze in his wolfskin cloak, and faintly, far off, the song of a bird. Was it a nightingale? He wished he knew. He would have liked to tell his wife, when she came home from Africa, “We heard a nightingale singing, right out there on the front line!” But he had been too busy all his life with war to study such things as birds. If the peace held, he thought suddenly, he would learn all about them; birds, and trees, and flowers. He would walk with Oenone in green meadows, and they would point out the birds and blossoms to each other, and he would be able to tell her what each was called…

“There!” he said, and his mechanical armor broke the stillness with a hiss and a clank as it swung him down off the fire step. He clapped Colonel Yu on the shoulder with a steel hand like a Stalker’s gauntlet. “There! That’s what we have been fighting for, Yu Wei Shan. We didn’t go to war because we wanted to smash cities, but because we wanted to be able to hear the birds sing again. And if fifteen years of war won’t do it, maybe we will have to try talking to the barbarians instead.” He waved his arm, indicating the wastelands that lay beyond the wire: the immense shell craters and concrete city-traps, the wrecked suburbs foundering in weeds, the million bones. “We were supposed to be making the world green again,” he said, “and all we have been doing is turning it into mud.”

It was something his wife had told him once. It had sounded better when Oenone said it. Later, in the airship, on his way to the sector headquarters at Forward Command, he found himself longing for her. If she were here, he would find it easier to keep to this difficult road she’d set him on. Half his people thought that he was mad for trying to make peace with the cities, and he sometimes wondered if they weren’t right. But what choice did he have?

The Green Storm was in a bad way. Naga had had no idea how bad until he seized power. Under the Stalker Fang the Storm had always made sure that soldiers like him were never short of food or equipment. But in their own lands everything was falling apart; the people who used to run things in the old League days had all been arrested when the Storm took over, and the young fanatics who had taken their places didn’t know how to do their jobs. In the liberated zones that Naga and his comrades had fought so hard to clear of mobile cities, no one seemed to know what crops to plant, or how to arrange the plumbing and transport systems in the ramshackle new static settlements. No one knew where the money was to come from to pay for anything. Stopping the war would help; the old administrators whom Naga was releasing from the prison colonies of Taklamakan might know what to do, but the task was huge. Too huge, Naga sometimes felt, for an ignorant soldier like him…

Still, he knew that if he could talk to Oenone, she would soon soothe all his doubts away. The white sky slid past his window. He dozed, and he could almost smell her, and feel the warmth of her small body. Where was she? he wondered. He wished that he had not let her volunteer for that mission to Zagwa. But she had wanted to go, and he could think of no one more likely to bring the Zagwans over to his side than little Zero, with her unwarlike ways and that quaint old god of hers.

Forward Command was a disabled Traction City, squatting on a low hill north of the Rustwater behind defensive walls built from its own cast-off tracks. It had been part of the Storm’s front line during the battles of the previous year. Now that the Traktionstadts had been driven back beyond the marshes, it was turning into a full-scale settlement; clusters of civilian houses were sprouting on the slopes below the city, and in the fields around them some kind of root crop seemed to be failing miserably. Wind turbines dotted the steppe, flailing their long arms like idiot giants.

A gaggle of officers waited on the docking pan, fussing around a dark-skinned servant girl whom Naga vaguely recognized. He could tell from twenty yards away that they had bad news.

“Excellency, word has come from Africa…”

“This is your wife’s servant, Excellency, the mute girl, Rohini…”

“She arrived on foot at the Tibesti Static, out of the desert, all alone.”

“Your wife, Excellency—her ship was jumped by townie warships a day out from Zagwa. The Zagwans must have betrayed her, Excellency. Lady Naga is dead.”

Later, in one of the citadel’s council rooms, she told him everything; how three townie airships had ambushed the Nzimu, how her crew had fought to defend his wife, and how they had been overwhelmed. She wrote it all laboriously out on papers that an aide read aloud.

When she was a little girl, Cynthia Twite had dreamed of being an actress. Her parents had both been actors; arty, Anti-Tractionist types from the Traction City of Edinburgh who had fled their home for what they imagined would be an idyllic life in a static in Shan Guo. They had always encouraged their daughter to dress up and perform, fondly believing that she might be a star one day. And how right they had been!

Good, tolerant people that they were, they had been taken aback by the sudden rise of the Green Storm. “Not all city people are barbarians,” they kept telling Cynthia, rather plaintively, as ferocious Green Storm slogans crackled out of the loudspeakers that the new regime had erected all around their settlement. But Cynthia thought it all very exciting; she enjoyed the flags and uniforms, and the warlike songs she got to sing at school, and she loved the Stalker Fang, so strong and shiny. She soon grew tired of hearing her mum and dad moaning, and reported them to the Storm as Tractionist elements.

After they were taken away, she went to live in a government-run orphanage at Tienjing. From there she was recruited into the intelligence wing, and then into the Stalker Fang’s private spy network. That was when Cynthia discovered that she had inherited her parents’ love of theater. Putting on disguises, adopting other names and voices and mannerisms, these were the things she most enjoyed, and she knew that she did them very well. Her only regret was that she could never claim the applause that she deserved. But it was tribute enough to watch the tears trickle down Naga’s face while he listened to all the dreadful things the townies had done to his wife.

Naga had probably never wept in public before. His aides and officers looked quite appalled. Even General Dzhu, who had hatched the plan to kill Lady Naga and helped Cynthia to infiltrate her household, looked uneasy when he heard his old friend sniffling and saw the tears drip off his chin. In the end, he cut short Cynthia’s performance. He had arranged Lady Naga’s death because he wanted to shock Naga out of his silly notions of peace with the cities, not to destroy him.

“Enough!” he said, holding up his hand to stop the man who was reading out Cynthia’s words. “Naga, you should not listen to any more of this. Two things are clear. We cannot trust the Zagwans. And the truce with the Tractionist barbarians must end. My division is ready to attack tomorrow, if you command it.”

“And mine,” said several other officers, all at once.

“Destroy All Cities!” shouted another, seizing on a Green Storm slogan from simpler times before the truce began.

“No,” said Naga angrily.

There was a mutter of surprise from everyone in the chamber. Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing a deaf mute and stop herself from crying out.

“No!” the poor fool said again, thumping the tabletop with his mechanical hand. “Oenone would not have wanted to see the world go tumbling back into war on her account.”

“But Naga,” insisted General Dzhu, “she must be avenged.”

“My wife did not believe in vengeance,” said Naga, trembling. “She believed in forgiveness. If she were here, she would say that the actions of a few townies in the sand sea do not mean that none of them can be trusted. We must continue to work for peace, for her sake.” He looked straight at Cynthia, who modestly averted her gaze. “What of this girl? What reward can we offer her? She has been brave, and loyal.”

Annoying, having to wait while someone wrote down his question on a piece of paper before she could scribble her answer. She allowed herself a little smile as she wrote it, and it pleased her to think that everyone else in the room thought she was smiling because she was such a good, loyal girl.

I ask only that I be allowed to serve General Naga just as I served his beloved wife.

Chapter 15 The Invisible Suburb

Dawn found the Jenny Haniver above the scarred brown moors of no-man’s-land. The cheerful cluster of cities that surrounded Murnau had sunk below the southwestern horizon sometime in the small hours, and the only city in sight now was a far-off armored hulk called Panzerstadt Winterthur, grumbling north on sentry duty. The Traktionstadts-gesellschaft and the Storm each kept watch on this region out of habit, for they had been outflanked before, but neither seriously imagined the other launching an attack across this marshy, pockmarked landscape, which grew only uglier and less inviting as the light increased. There was nothing down there beneath the mist except the immense track marks of towns.

Some of the older marks were a hundred yards across, steep-walled canyons running straight into the east, their bottoms filled with loose shale and chains of boggy ponds. Looking down at them, Tom thought he recognized the tracks of London, which he and Hester had followed long ago. Soon he would follow them again. This time, Quirke willing, they would lead him home.

“Well, I can’t see a suburb anywhere,” said Wren, wrapping her wet hair in a towel as she came through from the galley, where she had been washing in the sink. The lemony scent of her shampoo filled the flight deck as she went to each window in turn, looking down at the slabs and slopes of mud all shining in the gray dawn. “Nothing!”

“We must be patient,” said Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy. It did not seem like Wolf Kobold to be late… He circled again. The Jenny felt light and playful, as if pleased to be back in the sky. Her holds were empty, on Wolf’s instructions; presumably he envisaged himself flying home from the wreck of London with a shipload of loot. But where was he?

The radio gave a sudden crackle and began to squeal. It had been tuned in advance to a frequency that Wolf had provided, so it seemed safe to assume that the shrill, ear-splitting noise coming out of the speakers was the call sign of Harrowbarrow’s homing beacon.

Tom scrambled over to turn down the volume, while Wren ran back to the windows. The land below them was as featureless as ever. “I can’t see any suburbs,” said Wren. “It must still be over the horizon.”

“Can’t be,” said Tom, wincing as the signal increased again. “It sounds as if we’re right on top of it.”

It was Wren who spotted the movements in a broad track mark about a mile to the east. The pools of water there were emptying away, and the trees and bushes that had grown around them were starting to move, turning and twisting and falling one against another. The floor of the track mark heaved upward into a high dome of earth, which split and slithered and fell away to reveal a bank of immense, spiraling drill bits and then a scarred, armored carapace. A gray fist of exhaust smoke punched into the sky. “Great Quirke!” murmured Tom.

In the Wunderkammer at Anchorage-in-Vineland there had been the shell of something called a horseshoe crab. Later, when she was trying to explain what Harrowbarrow looked like, Wren would often compare it to that crab. The suburb was small—barely a hundred feet across, and about three times that in length. It was entirely covered by its armored shell. The front end was a broad, blunt shield, into which the drill bits were being retracted now that it was on the surface. (The shield also covered Harrowbarrow’s ugly mouthparts, and could be raised when it wanted to tear chunks off the small towns it hunted, or gobble up a Green Storm fort.! Behind the shield, Harrowbarrow tapered to a narrow stern, protected by overlapping plates of armor. Several of the plates were sliding aside, and Wren glimpsed heavy tracks and wheels beneath them, and a metal landing apron that slid out slowly on hydraulic rams, flickering with landing lights.

“Is that where we’re meant to put down?” asked Wren.

Tom said that he supposed it must be. “Kobold said his place was specialized,” he said wonderingly, “but I had no idea…”

He didn’t like the look of this place, but he told himself that it was just the first step on the way to London, and guided the Jenny carefully down onto the landing platform.

Wolf Kobold was waiting, ready to answer all their questions. It was nearly a week since Wren had seen him, and she had forgotten just how striking he was. The gray dawn and the landing lights and the wind flapping his coattails about made him look more handsome and piratical than ever. But Wren had always had a soft spot for pirates, and at least Wolf’s smile was friendly and welcoming.

Not so his town. All she could see beneath the folded-back armor were blocks of drab gray flats, punched with tiny windows. The people looked gray and drab too as they hurried forward to take the travelers’ bags; stocky scowling scavengers in capes and overalls, with goggles or beetlish dust masks shielding their eyes from the gathering daylight.

“No, Harrowbarrow does not exactly burrow,” Wolf was saying, in answer to something Tom had asked him. “We cannot bore through bedrock or anything like that—it would be far too slow a way to get about! But there are great many nice deep track marks crisscrossing our world, and their bottoms are mostly filled with loose shale and silt and tumbledown; more than enough of it to hide this little place.”

They watched while his men secured the Jenny Haniver to the mooring apron, and then followed him through an alley between the metal buildings and forward along Harrowbarrow’s central street. Stairways rose from it to the second storys of the buildings, poky tenements squashed in under the armored roof. Others led down through the deck plate to engine rooms, whose heat came up through the pavement and the soles of the travelers’ boots. An alcove between the snaking air ducts held an eight-armed image of Thatcher, all-devouring goddess of unfettered Municipal Darwinism.

“Is this your first visit to a harvester?” Wolf asked, watching his guests’ faces as they walked along beside him. “We make no pretense at gentility here, as the larger cities do. It’s a good, sound place, though. It was a scavenger once, till it got captured by a hunting city up in the Frost Barrens. They thought it might be useful for the war effort, so they delivered it to Murnau whole, and my father gave it to me to knock into shape. I’ve recruited people from other harvester suburbs to help me. Rough types, but loyal.”

The whole place smelled like a stove: smoke and hot metal. Wren thought that if she had to live underground, she would take every chance to go outside and breathe fresh air, but the Harrowbarrovians did not seem inclined even to venture out onto the landing apron; they stayed in the shadowed parts of their suburb, and those whose business took them into the daylight hid their eyes behind sunglasses and goggles and wrapped themselves up against the cold in pea jackets and gray felt mufflers.

“Not many women aboard,” said Wolf, with a sideways look at Wren. (She couldn’t tell if he was apologizing to her for the lack of female company or hinting at how pleasant it was to have a visit from a pretty aviatrix. Both, maybe.) “No families live here. It’s a hard life aboard Harrowbarrow. You mustn’t mind my lads if they stare.”

And stare they did, their mouths hanging open in their stubbly faces, as their young mayor led his visitors up a rackety moving staircase into the town hall, a crescent-shaped building that stood on stilts, overlooking the dismantling yards inside the suburb’s jaws. It was ugly, and rather small, but Wolf had furnished it well. There were hangings and tapestries to hide the metal walls, and well-chosen works of art, and when his servants closed the shutters to hide the views of machinery outside, it had a homey feel.

Wolf took them to a long, narrow dining room, the ceiling painted blue with little white clouds as a reminder of the sky outside. “You have not breakfasted, I trust?” he asked, not waiting for an answer as he ushered them to seats around the dining table, making sure that Tom took the place of honor at the head. Another man entered: elderly, short, and sallow, with pocked skin and complicated spectacles. Wolf greeted him warmly and held out a chair for him, too. “This is Udo Hausdorfer, my chief navigator,” he explained. “When I am away, it is he who keeps things running smoothly. One of the best men I know.”

Hausdorfer nodded, blinking at each of the guests in turn. If he was one of the best men Wolf knew, Wren would not have liked to meet the rest, for Hausdorfer looked like a villain to her. But she could see that Wolf liked him; more than liked him—if she had not known better, she would have taken them for father and son. She could not help thinking how much more at ease Wolf was with this shifty-looking old scavenger than he had seemed with his real father.

Serving women with eyes like bruises moved silently about carrying plates and dishes and pots of coffee. Kobold smiled at his guests and raised his cup.

“My friends! How pleasant to have new faces at my table! I am happy to say that we have real, fresh coffee, taken from a scavenger town we ate last Tuesday. The fruits of the hunt!”

“You are still hunting?” asked Tom. “I thought the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft had sworn not to eat other towns until the war was won.”

Wolf laughed. “A silly, sentimental notion.”

“I thought it rather noble,” said Tom.

Wolf looked thoughtfully at him as he slurped his coffee. Then, setting down his cup with a clatter, he said, “It may be noble, Herr Natsworthy, but it is not Municipal Darwinism.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tom.

“I mean that I have lived aboard Murnau, and I have seen at first hand the way our great Traction Cities have tied themselves up in petty rules and taboos.” He speared a kipper with his fork and used it to point at Tom. “The big cities are finished! Even if they win this war, do you think the Traktionstadts will ever hunt again as real cities should? Of course not! They will cry, ‘Oh, we must not hunt Bremen; Bremen gave us covering fire when we bogged down on the Pripet salient,’ or ‘It would be wrong to chase little Wagenhafn, after all that Wagenhafn did for us in the war.’ That is why they cannot defeat the Mossies, you see. They insist on helping each other, and as soon as you start helping others, or relying on others to help you, you give away your own freedom. They have forgotten the simple, beautiful act that should lie at the heart of our civilization: a great city chasing and eating a lesser one. That is Municipal Darwinism. A perfect expression of the true nature of the world: that the fittest survive.”

“And yet you’re part of their alliance,” argued Tom. “You fight in their war.”

“For the moment, because it suits us. The Storm must be smashed. But I never let my people forget that we are free. We hunt alone, and we eat whatever we can cram into our jaws.”

Tom looked unhappy. Wren hoped he was not about to say something that would offend Wolf. “You make Harrowbarrow sound no better than a pirate suburb,” he mumbled at last.

Wolf was not offended. He laughed. “Thank you, Herr Natsworthy! I have always suspected that piracy is the purest form of Municipal Darwinism!”

“But you’re only temporary mayor of this place, aren’t you?” asked Wren. “I mean, you’re heir to Murnau…”

Wolf shrugged and ate his kipper. “I shall never take over my father’s job. Not if he begged me. Why rule a lumbering mountain full of merchants and old women when I could be out here, hunting, free? Places like this are the future now. When the Mossies and the big cities finish tearing one another to pieces in this endless war, Harrowbarrow and others like it will inherit the earth.”

“Gosh, well, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Wren stammered. She was sure he was wrong, but he was so certain of himself that she could not think of a counterargument.

Wolf laughed again. “I’m so sorry. I should not talk politics at breakfast time! And I have not even filled you in on the details of our journey. We shall set off soon, heading due east across no-man’s-land. If all goes well, we should reach the Storm’s outer defensive line sometime after midnight. I have found just the place for the Jenny Haniver to cross unnoticed. Until we reach it, you must make yourselves at home. You are my guests.”

He bowed, and his eyes were fixed on Wren. Tom wondered if there was still time to pull out of this expedition; or at least to find some excuse to take Wren back to Murnau, away from this attractive, dangerous young man. But he so wanted her to see London…

And anyway, it was too late. Through the thin walls came the scrape and boom of the suburb’s armor sliding shut, and the dull bellow of its engines starting up again. Harrowbarrow crawled on its way along the bottom of its chosen track mark, gathering speed, shoving its bank of drills into the earth, working itself deeper until it was just an unlikely, moving mound, like a rat under a rug, grinding eastward toward the rising sun.

Chapter 16 Fishcake on the Roof of the world

Remember little Fishcake and his Stalker? Not many people do. The death of Brittlestar and the theft of the Spider Baby had been a surprise to Brighton, but the other Lost Boys had instantly started to squabble among themselves for possession of Brittlestar’s slaves and houses, and by the time the bullets and the Battle Frisbees stopped flying, nobody remembered the odd events that had sparked all the trouble.

A few days later a raft town cruising in the crater maze east of the Middle Sea reported losing fuel from its storage tanks, and the captain of a submersible diving for blast glass on the crater floors claimed to have seen a strange craft swim by above him, silhouetted against the sunlit surface. But the captain was a drunkard, and the few people who believed his story just shook their heads and muttered that the Lost Boys must be up to their old tricks again.

From crater to flooded crater the Spider Baby crept north and east. It crossed a spur of the Great Hunting Ground, swimming along flooded track marks and scuttling nervously over the ridges between them, while the ground shook beneath the weight of prowling cities. It crept through the Rustwater Marshes and found its way at last into the Sea of Khazak. The sea had been a battlefield not long before, and there were sunken suburbs and drowned airships lying all over its silty floor. Fishcake burgled their rusting fuel tanks and surfaced in a cleft on the rocky shore of the Black Island to recharge the limpet’s batteries. Then he submerged again and pressed on eastward.

The Spider Baby had passed beyond the edge of Lost Boy charts weeks earlier, but Fishcake’s Stalker seemed to have a map of this country in her mind. Beyond the sea a broad river curved down out of the eastern hills. Fishcake did as she told him, following the river east, past Green Storm airbases and under bridges rumbling with convoys of half-tracks and armored trains. Pontoons had been stretched across the river in case townie raiders tried to sneak inland in boats, but the Spider Baby slid under them, passing like a ghost through the lands of the Storm.

“Why don’t you make yourself known?” asked Fishcake, looking through the periscope at settled statics, farmland, the green lightning-bolt banners flapping confidently from forts and temples. “These are your people, aren’t they? When they see that you’re alive—”

“They betrayed me,” his Stalker hissed. “The Once-Born have failed me. They follow Naga now. I shall make the world green again without them.”

“But you’ll have me, won’t you?” said Fishcake nervously. “I can help you, can’t I?”

His Stalker did not answer him. But later, while he was resting, he woke to find her sitting at his side. She was Anna again, and she touched his hair with her cold hand and whispered, “You are a good boy, Fishcake. I am so glad of you. I should have had a son of my own. I should have liked to watch a child grow, and play. I never see you play, Fishcake. Would you like to play a game?”

Fishcake felt himself turn hot with shame. “I don’t know any games,” he murmured. “They didn’t—at the Burglarium— I mean, I don’t know how to.”

“Poor Fishcake,” the Stalker whispered. “And poor Anna.”

Fishcake huddled himself on her lap, wrapping his arms around her battered metal body and laying his head against her hard chest, listening to the tick and shush of the weird machines inside her. “Mummy,” he said quietly, just to find out what shape the word made in his mouth. He did not remember calling anybody that before. “Mummy.” He was crying, and the Stalker comforted him, stroking his head with her clumsy hands and whispering an old Chinese lullaby that Anna Fang had heard in her own childhood, on the bird roads, long ago.

And Fishcake slept, and did not wake until she turned into the Stalker Fang again and stood up, dumping him onto the floor.

Mile by mile, up rivers, through marshes, clumping on its eight steel feet through empty valleys, the Spider Baby edged its way eastward. One night, when Fishcake went out onto the hull to breathe fresh air, the moonlit mountains of Shan Guo stretched along the horizon ahead of him like a white smile.

The river shallowed, choked with rocks and boulders that spring floods had washed from the overhanging hillsides. The Spider Baby moved only by night, stalking up white rushing rapids in the starlight, hiding at dawn in the dense forests of pine and rhododendron that cloaked the riverbanks. The Stalker Fang grew impatient during these delays; she bared her claws and listened enviously to the convoys of Green Storm airships that passed overhead from time to time. But when she was Anna, she liked the forests. She held Fishcake’s hand and led him down the quiet, resin-scented aisles between the trees, or turned girlish and silly and threw pine-cones at him. “We’re playing!” she whispered excitedly, as he chased after her laughing, throwing pinecones of his own. “Fishcake, this is what playing feels like!”

Fishcake lived for the times when she was Anna. He hated the Stalker Fang, and Anna did too. “She scares me,” she told him once. “The other one. So cold and fierce. When she comes, I can’t even hear myself think…”

But the Stalker Fang was scared of Anna, too. Each time she regained control, her first question was always, “How long was I malfunctioning? What did the Error do? What did it say?” That was her name for the Anna part of her: the Error.

“This unit is damaged,” she declared. “I need repair.”

“I don’t know how,” whined Fishcake. “I don’t know anything about Stalker brains.” If he had, he would have shut down the Fang part of her and made her be Anna all the time. Then they could take the Spider Baby away into the empty mountains somewhere and live there and be happy together, the Lost Boy who wanted a mother and the dead woman who wanted a child. But he knew it was hopeless. If the Fang part of her found out that Fishcake had tried to help the Error, she would kill him.

So he went east and north with her, following her whispery directions, while the river grew steeper and narrower, until one night the Spider Baby surfaced in the plunge pool beneath a tall white waterfall and Fishcake realized that it could carry them no farther. At first he felt relieved. But the Stalker Fang was not disheartened for a moment. “We shall leave the limpet here and walk,” she whispered.

“Walk to where?” asked Fishcake.

“To talk to ODIN.”

“How far is it?”

“It is two hundred and ninety-four miles away.”

“I can’t walk that far!” protested Fishcake.

“Then stay here,” his Stalker said. She left the limpet and started to feel her way up the steep, spray-wet ladder of rocks beside the cataract. Fishcake quickly filled a burgling bag with provisions, ready to go after her. When he scrambled out onto the hull, he found her waiting for him. She was still the Stalker Fang. She had decided that he might be useful to her after all.

“There is a hermitage on Zhan Shan,” she whispered. “We shall break the journey there.”

Zhan Shan was a volcano so huge and high that Fishcake had been piloting the Spider Baby across its lower slopes for days without even noticing. The whole world seemed to form the roots of Zhan Shan, and its head was lost above the clouds. The narrow tracks that wound up and up across the lava fields were lined with shrines. Raggedy silk prayer flags clapped and fluttered and tore away in wisps of silk and cotton, carrying prayers to the realms of the Sky Gods.

“This is a holy mountain,” said Fishcake’s Stalker, turning into Anna again and picking him up, because the path was steep and the air thin and he was close to exhaustion. He wondered why she had come back now. Had it been the sound of those flags flapping that had woken her?

“No one knows how it came to be,” she whispered. “Perhaps it was the Gods who put it here, perhaps the Ancients. Something ripped the land open, and the hot blood of the earth welled out and made Zhan Shan and all the young mountains north of here. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun. The winter lasted for decades. But look how beautiful this land is now!”

“You can’t see it.”

“I remember it. I loved these mountains, when I was alive. It is good to be home.”

After a day and a night, Fishcake saw a light ahead, twinkling at him through the twilight and the silent-falling snow. They passed a field where a few hairy cattle stood with blankets of snow on their backs. Beyond it lay a tiny house with a steep roof and eaves that curled up at the corners like burning paper. It was built from the black volcanic stone of the mountainside, but there were shutters and a pillared porch made of carved wood painted red and gold and blue, which gave it a cheerful look. A dog trotted out to greet the travelers, then slunk off whimpering when it sniffed the Stalker.

“What is this place?” Anna whispered.

“Don’t you know?” asked Fishcake. “You brought us here.”

“I have never been here before. I just followed the road the other me set us on.”

Fishcake looked critically at the little house. “She said there was a hermitage. She said we’d break our journey there. Is this it?”

His Stalker did not know.

The door had two gold eyes to ward off evil. Fishcake thumped with his small fist on the planks between them. He heard a movement behind the door, then silence. He knocked again. Above, on the sheer buttresses of the mountain, the evening mist made ghosts.

The door opened. A person in a red robe of some thick, crude-woven fabric. A woman, Fishcake decided. She had a brown face, hollow and large eyed, and her hair had been shaved down to a shadow on her bony skull. “We need food, please, Missis, and water,” Fishcake began, but the woman was not even looking at him. She stared over his head at the Stalker. Her mouth moved, but no words came out, only little whimpering sounds. She put her left hand to her face, and then her right, and Fishcake saw that the right hand was not really a hand at all, just a shiny metal hook.

“Anna?” the woman said. She took a step backward into the darkness of her little house. “No! You are not her!” she said. “I tried and tried, but you are not—”

“Sathya!” whispered the Stalker, and lurched past Fishcake to wrap her steel arms around the frightened woman. Fishcake shouted out, because he thought for a moment that she had turned back into the Stalker Fang again and was murdering the stranger. When he saw that she was just embracing her, he felt relieved, and then jealous.

“Sathya!” his Stalker whispered, tracing the lines of the woman’s face with her metal fingertips. “I haven’t seen you since—oh, that night at Batmunkh Gompa, the snow, and the fire, and Valentine… Oh Sathya, how old you’ve grown! And your poor hand! What happened to your hand?”

Sathya looked at her, and looked at Fishcake, and fainted with a little sigh, collapsing on the flagstone floor.

“She was my friend, my student,” the Stalker whispered, crouching over her. Her blind bronze face looked around at Fishcake. “What is she doing here? What has become of her?”

Fishcake shook his head uneasily. How was he supposed to know anything about this hermit lady? His Stalker was the one who knew her. He said, “We ought to nick some food and get going before she wakes up.”

“No! We must help her! I want to talk to her!”

“But what if the other half of you comes again? She won’t want to talk, will she? She’ll just kill—”

“Then you must watch for her,” his Stalker whispered. “You must warn Sathya when you think the other one is about to come. But perhaps she will not come at all.” She stroked Sathya’s face. “Such memories, Fishcake—all sorts of new memories! They make me stronger, I can feel it. Now help me; where is her bed?”

That was easy; the hermitage had only one room, and the bed was in the far corner; a big bed, heaped with furs and blankets, with a fire of cattle dung burning in a space beneath it. Anna laid Sathya down and gently drew a coverlet over her. Sathya stirred.

“Anna, is it really you?” she asked. “I think so,” the Stalker whispered.

Sathya started to sob. “Anna, it is all my fault! I should have let you rest peaceful, but I couldn’t bear it! I made a deal with Popjoy.”

“Who is Popjoy?”

“An Engineer. He Resurrected you. He promised me that you’d be yourself again, but you didn’t remember me, you didn’t remember anything, you said you weren’t Anna…”

“Sssssh,” the Stalker whispered, holding Sathya’s hand, pressing it against her cold bronze lips. “You brought me back, Sathya. Your love brought me back.”

“Oh, oh,” moaned Sathya, and hid her face in the blankets, while Fishcake watched and waited for Anna to turn into the Stalker Fang. But she did not change, and slowly he started to hope that this meeting with her old friend had given her the strength to keep the Stalker Fang at bay for good.

He slept on the floor that night, pillowed on rugs, warmed by the dung burning in the potbellied stove. The voices of Sathya and the Stalker washed over him and around him, speaking of places he had never been to and people he had never met, dropping now and then into languages he didn’t know.

He woke hours later, to morning sunlight and the steady sound of a pump. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he went outside into the bright morning mist. His Stalker was sitting on the porch, her back to the sun-warmed wall, her blind mask turned inquisitively toward the sounds that Sathya was making as she worked the handle of the pump at the far corner of the house. It looked like hard work for someone with only one hand, so Fishcake went to help. When they had filled Sathya’s big leather bucket, they took a handle each and started carrying it to the house. “You’re wondering what this is for, I suppose?” said Sathya. “Well, it’s a bath, for you.”

Fishcake yelped, protested, and almost dropped the bucket. He didn’t think he’d ever had a bath before, and he didn’t see why he should break the habit of a lifetime now. But Sathya and his Stalker would not listen to any excuses; working together they stripped off his grimy clothes and dumped him into Sathya’s zinc bathtub, and soaped and scrubbed him, and washed his lousy hair.

That was the happiest day of Fishcake’s childhood, and he would remember it always. The sun rose high and burned away the mist, and all around Sathya’s lonely house the snowfields shone clean and dazzling, each summit exhaling a breath of wind-blown snow into the diamond sky. Sathya washed Fishcake’s clothes, and gave him some of her own to wear while they were drying: worn canvas trousers and a woolen shirt. He chopped wood for her, tugging big logs out of a pile that had been brought up to the hermitage as a gift by the people living in the deep valleys below, and splitting them with an axe. His Stalker helped him carry the split logs into the lean-to behind the house, and then Sathya led him down to the drystone enclosure where the cattle were. They frightened Fishcake at first, because they were so big and so alive, but Sathya showed him how gentle they were. He thought they were funny, the way their hairy black ears twitched like mittened hands to bat flies away, and their pink tongues curled around the mouthfuls of hay he held out to them. He watched while Sathya milked the cow, and then carried the pail back to the house for her, careful not to spill a drop of the foamy, steaming milk.

Meanwhile, Anna had unsheathed one of her claws and was using it to carve an off cut of wood she had found in the lean-to. When she had finished, she pressed the thing she had made into Fishcake’s hands. It was a little wooden horse, trotting with its head up and its tail flying out behind it like a flag.

“What is it for?” asked Fishcake, turning it over, surprised.

“For you,” whispered his Stalker. “It’s a toy. For playing with. My father used to carve toys for me when I was a little girl.”

Fishcake looked at the horse in his hands. If he had been a normal child, he would have had lots of toys; he would have spent whole afternoons lying on the carpet inventing worlds of his own with toy animals and cities. If he had been a normal child, he might already think himself too old to play with little wooden horses. But he was a Lost Boy, and he had never owned a toy before. And he started to cry, because the horse was so beautiful, and he loved it so much.

Later he and Sathya walked down to the river: a white rush of a river that spilled under a rickety rope-and-bamboo bridge and went shouting and splashing away toward the wooded valleys. They threw stones into the rapids, while Sathya’s dog barked and bounded up and down the bank. Fishcake found the pole from an old prayer flag washed down in last spring’s thaw from some shrine high on Zhan Shan, and threw that in too, and they watched the river carry it away. The sun was going down. The valleys filled with shadow, and the mountains glowed amber and rose.

“You should stay here, Fishcake,” said Sathya, over the roar of the water.

“I can’t,” Fishcake replied, not wanting to even think about it. “The Stalker …”

“She can stay too.” She looked away from him, far away, beyond the mountains, into her own troubled past. “After I lost my hand and the Stalker took charge at Rogues’ Roost and the Green Storm seized power, I went a little bit mad, I think. I kept trying to tell people that she wasn’t really Anna, but they wouldn’t listen. The Storm wanted to execute me, but there were a few officers—Naga was one of them—who took pity on me, and they arranged for me to come and live here instead. The Stalker Fang must have signed the order, I suppose; that must be how she knew to find me here. I expect the others have all but forgotten me by now. I’m not allowed to leave, but the people in the valley settlements look after me; they bring me wood and honey and tea, and in return I go up onto Zhan Shan and tend the high shrines, and pray for them to the Sky Gods and the Mountain Gods.”

“Don’t you get lonely?” Fishcake asked.

“Of course I do. It’s a better life than I deserve, after the things I did when I was young. But if you wanted to stay for a while, there would be room for you. Just until you are ready to move on, or old enough to move down into the villages and make a life for yourself there… Fishcake, you’re only a child.”

They walked together back to the house. The Stalker stood outside like a statue, her face tilted toward the mountains. Hearing them coming, she turned and whispered, “I must go now.”

“No!” said Sathya.

“No!” cried Fishcake, feeling his perfect day slipping away from him. He wondered if his Stalker had changed again, but she was still Anna.

“I have been thinking,” she said patiently. “The Engineer who Resurrected me is still alive, isn’t he?”

“Dr. Popjoy is a great man now,” said Sathya bitterly. “The Storm gave him a villa of his own, the house on the promontory at Batmunkh Gompa.”

“I will go there,” said Anna. “I will ask him to look inside my head and destroy the other part of me. The Stalker Fang must not be allowed to survive. Who knows what she is planning?”

“She wants to talk to somebody called Odin,” Fishcake offered. “That’s why she came here.”

“And who is Odin?” asked his Stalker. “I do not trust her. I will make Popjoy quiet her forever. If he cannot, he must destroy us both.”

“Oh, Anna!” cried Sathya, trying to hug her, but the Stalker drew away.

“I cannot stay here,” she whispered. “If I change again, I might kill you. I must leave now, before my other self returns.”

Sathya started to cry and plead with Anna to change her mind, but Fishcake knew that there was no point arguing. He’d come a long way with his Stalker, and he knew that the Anna part of her was just as stubborn as the other. He felt in his pocket, and his hand closed around the little horse she’d carved for him. “I’m coming too,” he said.

“No, Fishcake,” said both women at once, the dead and the living, in perfect unison.

“You need me,” he insisted. “Even the other you needs me. How far is it to this Batmunkh Gompa? Miles of walking, I expect. You can’t do it all alone, blind…” He was crying, because he did not want to leave the hermitage behind, but he did not want his Stalker to leave him behind either. He held tight to the toy horse and tried hard to look brave. “I’m coming too.”

Chapter 17 Storm Country

Evening in no-man’s-land. Harrowbarrow had been moving slowly east all day, waiting motionless beneath the shale whenever an air patrol flew by above, surfacing sometimes when the sky was clear to let a haze of exhaust smoke billow out like fog from vents at its stern.

Traveling underground in a burrowing mole suburb was one of those things that sounded terribly exciting but quickly grew dull when you actually did it, thought Wren. She walked briskly through Harrowbarrow’s smoggy, roasting streets, and the citizens stared at her as she passed, and turned so that they could carry on staring when she had gone by. She was afraid that her haircut and her clothes, which had made her feel so fashionable and grown-up in Murnau, just made her outlandish to these burrowing folk.

She would have felt happier staying safe in the town hall, but Wolf Kobold had invited her down to join him on the bridge. He had invited Dad, too, but Dad was not feeling well, and Wren didn’t want Wolf thinking they did not appreciate his invitation, so here she was, passing the glass brick windows of the Delver’s Arms and taking a left onto Perpendicular Street, a ladderway that dropped into the suburb’s depths.

The bridge was a movable building, spanning Harrow-barrow’s dismantling yards, with big greasy wheels at either end set in rails on the yard walls so that it could trundle forward to the jaws to oversee a catch or aft to watch the workers in the salvage stacks. Chains dangled from it, swaying and clanking with the suburb’s lurching motions, and two men lounged on guard duty at the foot of the ladder that led up into it. One of them stepped out to bar Wren’s way as she reached for the bottom rung, but his mate said, “Easy, she’s His Worship’s girl.”

“I’m not anybody’s girl,” retorted Wren, but the men didn’t hear her. The scraping and grinding of shale against the suburb’s hull was deafening, and something about these hard, leather-faced scavengers made Wren’s voice come out very small and girly. She felt their eyes upon her as she lowered herself down the ladder, and heard one of them shout something to the other that made both of them laugh.

“Wren!” Wolf cried happily, when she emerged through the hatchway in the bridge floor and stood breathless and bewildered, looking about her at all the racks of levers, the banks of dials and switches, the rows of gauges, the speaking tubes sticking down like stalactites out of the low metal ceiling. He sprang from his swivel chair and came to greet her, sidestepping nimbly as Hausdorfer and the other navigators hurried past him with rolled-up maps or orders for the engine rooms.

“I’m glad you could come down! How’s Herr Natsworthy?”

“All right,” Wren replied. “He’s having an after-dinner nap, I hope…” (Dad had not felt well since they’d come aboard the burrowing suburb, and he was looking pale and weak. She had left him with strict instructions to get some sleep, but, knowing him, he was probably in Wolf’s library, studying charts of the land ahead.)

Wolf took her arm. “You worry about him.”

“I think Harrowbarrow is too hot and stuffy for him,” said Wren. She didn’t want to explain about Dad’s heart trouble. Dad put so much effort into trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he was all right, it would have felt like a betrayal to tell Wolf how ill he really was. “He’ll be fine,” she promised, smiling as brightly as she could.

“Good,” said Wolf, as if they had settled something. He guided Wren to a place near his chair where a big brass thing covered in knobs and levers poked down through the ceiling. There were two eyepieces at the bottom of it. Wolf pulled it down until they were at the right level for Wren to look through. “I thought you’d like a look at the view.”

Wren had almost forgotten that there were such things as views. The hours passed so slowly aboard Harrowbarrow that it already seemed like days since she had seen the sky, or the earth. Yet when she looked into the eyepieces of the periscope, she saw them both; the sky deep blue and almost cloudless, a crescent moon hanging bright above the weed-grown walls of the track mark that the suburb was running through.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Close to the Storm’s country,” Wolf replied.

“Then why are there no fortresses? No settlements?”

Wolf chuckled. “The Storm haven’t enough troops left to garrison all the new territories they captured. Out here they just have armored watchtowers every few miles. Air patrols too, sometimes.”

“Then it’ll be easy to get the Jenny across?”

“Easy enough. I have prepared a little diversion that will keep the Storm’s lookouts busy.”

Wren frowned. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a diversion when they’d planned this trip, in Murnau. But before she could ask him what he meant, Hausdorfer approached them, and Wolf turned to speak in German with him. After a few words he grinned, and slapped the older man on the shoulder, and Hausdorfer started bellowing orders down the speaking tubes in a language Wren didn’t even recognize—Slavic? Roma? The suburb shuddered and canted, changing course.

“When we’re moving slow like this, I send scouting parties out ahead of us on foot. Some of them have just come in to report. We’re almost at the Storm’s front line.” Wolf slapped her on the shoulder and grinned; he was having fun. “You should fetch your father. We’ll be going through within the hour.”

Where the deep, twenty-year-old track marks of London cut through the Green Storm’s border, they had been filled with banks of earth, topped by stone-filled wicker gabions, iron huts, and rocket batteries. Ten years earlier a pack of harvester suburbs had tried to break through there, and their ruins had been added to the fortifications; upended sections of chassis and track, pierced with gun slits and painted with the angry slogans of the Storm: STOP THE CITIES! THE WORLD MADE GREEN AGAIN! WE SHALL WASH THE GOOD EARTH CLEAN IN THE BLOOD OF TRACTIONIST BARBARIANS!

In the rocket battery at Track Mark 16a sentry thought she heard the growl of land engines and went out onto the parapet to look, but all she could see was the mist. That morning’s patrols had reported all the barbarians sitting safe and snug and stationary on their own lines, almost like real people. The engines probably belonged to a Green Storm half-track taking soldiers out to some advance listening post in no-man’s-land. Poor devils. Sentry duty stank, and Track Mark 16 was a worthless sewer. The soldier went back inside, where there were hot noodles and a stove to sit beside, and letters from her family in Zhanskar.

Tom was dreaming of London when Wren came to wake him. In his dream, he had already reached the wreck site, and to his delight the old city was not nearly as badly damaged as he had feared. In fact, all that had changed was that Tier Two was open to the sky, and the sun shone brightly down into the streets of Bloomsbury, where Clytie Potts was waiting for him on the steps of the museum. “Why did you wait so long to come home?” she asked, taking his hand. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“Well, you’re here now,” she told him, leading him in through the familiar portico. The dinosaur skeletons in the main hall all turned their bony heads to look at him, and mooed their greetings. “Now you can get on with the rest of your life,” said Clytie. He looked past her and saw his own reflection in a sheet of ancient tinfoil that hung in one of the cabinets, and he was not old and ill-looking but well again, and young.

“Dad?” asked Clytie, turning into Wren, and he woke reluctantly to the stuffy dark of Harrowbarrow, groping for his green pills.

“Are you all right?” Wren asked him. “We’re nearly at the line. Wolf says to make ready…”

The thought that they would soon be leaving made Tom feel a little better; so did the pleasant memory of his dream. He dressed and followed Wren aft to the hangar near the suburb’s stern, where the Jenny Haniver sat waiting to resume her journey. Wolf met them there. “Get your stuff aboard,” he ordered. “Be ready to move out as soon as I come back.”

“Where are you going?” asked Tom, surprised that they were not to take off at once.

“To the bridge. We are not across the line yet, Herr Natsworthy. I am arranging for a little distraction so that the Mossies don’t spot us crossing.”

He left, hurrying forward along one of Harrowbarrow’s tubular streets. Tom and Wren stowed their bags in the Jenny’s gondola, then waited outside, standing close together in the noisy turmoil of the hangar. The note of the idling engines changed suddenly, rising from a murmur to a scream, and Wren grabbed at Tom for support as the suburb surged forward.

“What’s happening?”

Tom was not sure, but even in the windowless hangar there was an immense feeling of speed. With all its auxiliary engines churning, Harrowbarrow raced along the track mark, throwing up a thick bow wave of soil and vegetation as it rose to the surface. The startled Green Storm soldiers had time to fire off a few salvos of rockets, which burst harmlessly against the suburb’s armor. Then the barriers, the fortresses, and the rocket projectors were slammed aside as Harrowbarrow tore through the front line into Storm territory. Sally ports popped open in her flanks, and squads of fierce scavengers swarmed out with guns and knives and maces to attack the survivors scrambling from their dugouts. With a steep skirl of engines Harrowbarrow swung itself sideways, smashing the walls of the track mark down, toppling a watchtower.

A moment later Wolf ran into the hangar, shouting, “Go! Go!” and yelling orders in Roma and German to the men waiting by the hangar door controls. Heaving on brass handles, they started to haul the doors open. As smells of damp earth and cordite swilled into the hangar, Tom and Wren caught their first glimpse of what was happening outside. In the red glow of countless fires a battle was raging across the steep, mashed sides of the track mark. Harrowbarrow was still turning, so the scene slid past quickly, but there was time to see the flattened barracks blocks, the spiky tangles of barbed wire showing spidery against the flames, and the figures struggling and slithering and scrambling in the mud; the flash of gunfire; the glint of blades, the sliding, tumbling dead.

“Get aboard!” shouted Wolf, shoving Wren up the Jenny’s gangplank. “We must be well on our way before reinforcements arrive.”

“All this, just so we can cross the line?” cried Tom. “You never said—”

“I said I would get you across.” Wolf shrugged. “I did not say how. I thought you realized there would be a little unpleasantness involved.”

“But the truce …,” said Wren.

“The truce will hold; we’ve given them no reason to think we’re part of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft…”

“All those poor people…”

Hurrying her onto the flight deck, Wolf grinned kindly at her, as if her softheartedness amused him. “They’re not people, Wren; only Mossies. They chose to live like animals on the bare earth. Now they will die like animals…”

Harrowbarrow had turned right around now; its bows pointed back the way it had come; its stern, and the open doors of the hangar, pointed east into Storm country. Tom was working frantically at the Jenny’s controls. Wren felt the engines coming to life, but she could not hear them above the louder roar of Harrowbarrow’s own engines and the battle going on outside. A few bullets sparked against the frame of the hangar doors, but most of the Green Storm defenses had been silenced. Wolf slapped Tom hard between the shoulder blades and shouted, “Go! Fly! Now!” Tom glanced at Wren and then, grabbing the control levers, he cut the power to the Jenny’s mooring clamps and took her quickly up and forward, out of the hangar, eastward along the foggy floor of the track mark.

Wren left the flight deck and ran aft to the stern cabin.

Through the long window there she had her last sight of Harrowbarrow, a leviathan wreathed in fog and battle smoke, rearing up to gobble and crush another Green Storm fortress before it sank down into the track mark and drove westward. The Jenny was flying fast, the branches of trees in the floor of the track mark scratching and snatching at the gondola’s keel. Soon even the glow of the fires faded into the fog astern, and there was no sound but the familiar purr of the Jeunet-Carot engines.

“I doubt any Mossies noticed us leave,” said Wolf. How long had he been standing behind her? Wren turned. He was watching her kindly, eager to allay her fears. “If they did, my boys will have killed them by now. Hausdorfer will smash a few more of their defenses and then head back into the badlands before reinforcements come. The Storm will think it was only a greedy scavenger town, hungry for scrap metal and Mossie blood. They won’t come looking for us.”

“You didn’t tell us,” said Wren coldly. “You said it would be easy to cross the line! You didn’t say we’d have to fight a battle.”

“That was easy,” said Wolf. “You can’t even imagine what a real battle’s like, Fräulein Aviatrix.”

Wren pushed past him and went back to the flight deck. Tom was staring out through the big forward windows: nothing out there but mist. Sometimes a buttress of earth and rocks where the wall of the track mark they were flying in had partially collapsed. Each time that happened, Tom would make a quick, calm adjustment to the steering levers, guiding the Jenny expertly around it. Wren envied him for having something to concentrate on. All she could think of were those struggling figures she’d glimpsed through the hangar doors. She felt guilty for having been part of the attack, and more and more afraid. Despite what Wolf said, she was sure the Storm must know that the Jenny Haniver had pierced their line; at any moment rockets or Stalker-birds would come howling out of the mist, and they would be the last thing she would see.

“I’m sorry,” said her father softly, sounding as shocked and miserable as her. “When he said he knew a place where we could cross, I just thought …”

Wren said, “How could he do that? All those people?”

“There’s a war on, Wren,” Tom reminded her. “Wolf’s a soldier.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “I think he enjoys it.”

“Some people are like that,” agreed Tom. He had recognized the light in Wolf’s eyes as the battle raged; Hester had had the same look, that night at the Pepperpot when she’d murdered Shkin’s guards. He said, “Wolf has some strange ideas, but then he’s led a strange life. He’s very young, and he’s never known anything but war. Underneath, I think, he’s a decent young man.”

“Must be pretty deep underneath,” said Wren.

Tom smiled. “I knew a man called Chrysler Peavey once. A pirate mayor, boss of a suburb nearly as fierce as Harrowbarrow, but he wanted more than anything to be a gentleman. Wolf’s the other way round: a gentleman who wants to be a pirate. But there’s another side to him. He’s treated us well, hasn’t he? Now that we’ve got him away from his suburb, we might see that side of him again.”

Wren nodded cautiously, as if wishing she could believe him. Tom wished he believed himself. He had been wrong to accept Wolf’s offer, he was certain of that now. What would become of Wren if anything happened to him on this flight and she was left with only Wolf Kobold to look after her?

But as the Jenny flew on, mile after lonely mile, and no rockets or birds appeared, he began to feel more hopeful, and started to remember the sense of peace that had come to him with his dream of the museum. He did not like what Kobold had done, but at least they were on their way. From somewhere ahead, beyond these midnight plains, he could feel the tug of London’s gravity, drawing the Jenny Haniver and her passengers toward it like a dark star.

Chapter 18 That Colossal Wreck

After a few hours the fog thinned, and Wren was able to see properly for the first time the landscape that she was flying over—or rather flying in, for Tom was still keeping the airship as low as he dared, hiding her behind the steep fans of dried mud that towered between London’s old track marks. As far as Wren could see, the land around her was not much different from the plains the cities rolled across back on their side of the line. The Green Storm had cleared these eastern steppes of Traction Cities, but they had not yet built settlements of their own. Sometimes, through clefts in the walls of the track mark, the distant lights of forts or farmsteads showed, far off across the churned, weed-tangled land; but if they were keeping watch at all, they were not watching for a single small airship.

London’s wake ran ruler straight toward the east. Each of the city’s tracks had plowed a trench two hundred feet wide and often almost as deep. Tom steered the Jenny along the northernmost one until the ribbon of sky above him started to turn pale. Then he set her down to wait out the hours of daylight.

Later, sitting watch on the silent flight deck while he slept, Wren looked up into the sky and saw dozens of Green Storm airships pass over, very high and heading west. Then the rhythmic wingbeats of a flock of Stalker-birds caught her eye, also flying west. She pointed them out to Wolf Kobold, but he said, “Nothing to worry about. Routine troop movements.”

As angry as she had been at him the night before, Wren felt glad that he was there with them; glad of his soldierly certainty; his confidence. And already, as Harrowbarrow fell behind, he seemed to be softening, just as Tom had promised. His voice and his expression had grown gentler, and when Wren asked him to do something, he obeyed meekly, as if conceding that, aboard the Jenny Haniver, she was the expert.

He was right about the birds, though. None came low or close enough to see the Jenny’s russet envelope amid the red earth of the track mark.

That night they flew on, and the next day passed in the same way, except that there was a deep, clear pool of water close to where Tom set the airship down, and Wren swam in it. The water was numbingly cold, its surface filled with bright reflections that shattered ahead of her. She turned on her back and floated, feeling her swimming dress balloon around her, listening to the silence. Her old life, Vineland and Brighton, seemed impossibly far away.

Stones scampered down the steep wall of the track mark and plopped into the water, spreading rings of overlapping ripples toward her. Wolf was clambering between the trees that jutted from the track wall. He saw Wren and waved. “Just taking a look!” he called.

Wren swam ashore and changed quickly into her clothes, making sure that the Jenny Haniver was between her and Wolf. When she emerged, wet haired and shivery, she could not see him, but when she scrambled up to the top of the track mark, she found him lying on a flat, grassy ledge, peering through a pocket telescope across the Storm’s country.

“What can you see?” she asked.

“Nothing to worry about.”

He handed Wren the telescope and she put it to her eye. Southward, a plain of brown grass rolled away toward distant blue hills. A cluster of the Storm’s silly wind turbines flickered in the sunlight above a small static. Farther east something else was moving; a long, low town, Wren thought at first, then realized that it couldn’t be.

“Supply train, heading west with provisions for their armies,” said Wolf. “They’ve laid railways all the way from the mountains of Shan Guo to the Rustwater. That’s how I got home from London last time: hiding in a freight car. Most of the trains aren’t manned.”

“What, not even a driver?” asked Wren, focusing on the black electric locomotive at the front of the train, a blunt, windowless thing, charging along like a bull.

“The engine is the driver. A Popjoy Mark XII Stalker, controlled by a Resurrected human brain. Some poor dissident or captured soldier whom the Storm have turned into a train engine. They aren’t worth getting sentimental about, Wren. They’re savages, and it is either them or us.”

Wren knew he was referring to the night battle, apologizing, or explaining. She tried to think of a riposte, but nothing came.

“Look, it’s slowing,” said Wolf, taking back the telescope. “Must be a bridge or weak bit of rail there. That would be a useful place to climb aboard, if we ever need to.”

“What do you mean?”

Wolf grinned at her. “If anything goes wrong with your airship, we’ll be walking home. A lift aboard one of those trains will cut weeks off the journey.”

Wren nodded. She knew he was hoping to unsettle her, and refused to let him. “Look,” she said, pointing. “The trees grow close to the rails there. You could hide there while you waited for a train.”

Wolf laughed, pleased by her show of bravery. “I like you, Wren! There are no girls in Murnau who would make a journey like this and stay so cool about it. You are—how would you say it—cold-blooded.”

“Must take after my mum,” said Wren.

“Not far now,” Tom announced, as he started the engines that night. Wren had gone aft to catch up on her sleep in the stern cabin, but Wolf was pacing the flight deck, pausing from time to time to stare out over the control panels into the blackness ahead, waiting impatiently for a glimpse of London. “We’re close,” he said softly, as if to himself. “We’re very close now…”

Sails of dried mud thrown up by London’s tracks blotted out the night sky. Twice the sounds of the engines woke birds, which came flapping past the gondola windows and startled Tom. The second time he cried out, and brought Wolf springing to his side.

“It’s all right,” Tom said sheepishly. “Nothing. Just birds. I was in a fight with the Storm’s flying Stalkers, years ago. I’ve been nervous of birds ever since.”

“You’re a brave man, Herr Natsworthy,” said Wolf, relaxing, going back to his pacing.

“Brave?” Tom laughed. “Look at me. I’m shaking like a leaf!”

“Even brave men feel fear. And the things you’ve done … Wren has told me some of the wonderful adventures you had when you were young.”

“They didn’t feel wonderful at the time,” said Tom. “I was just scared stiff, mostly. It was only luck that brought me through alive. Every time I tried to do anything, it all went wrong…”

They flew on. After a few hours Wren relieved Tom at the controls. He switched on the coffee machine and shook Wolf, who was dozing on the window seat. “Coffee?”

The young man frowned. “What time is it? Are we at the debris fields?”

“Not yet.”

“Dad?” said Wren from the pilot’s seat. “Dad, look!”

Forgetting the coffee, Tom went to stand beside his daughter, leaning over the banks of control levers to peer out through the nose windows. The sky was pale, the first hint of dawn starting to show behind the distant mountains. Closer than the mountains, black against the sky, stood a squat, windowless tower, blocking the track mark ahead. For a panicky instant Tom wondered if the Green Storm had built a fortress here to guard the wreck of London.

“It’s a wheel,” whispered Wolf, staring over Wren’s shoulder, fascinated.

As Wren eased the steering levers back and the Jenny rose, and the rounded thing slid by beneath her, Tom saw that the other man was right; it was buckled, corroding, shaggy with weeds, but unmistakably one of London’s wheels. Beyond it the Out-Country mud was strewn with immense, dark shapes; more wheels, lengths of twisted axle, strange melted masses of metal flung out from the exploding city. Cast-off tracks were strewn across it all, like ruined roadways leading toward the mountain of scrap that was just coming into view through the mist ahead.

Tom held his breath. He remembered the last time he had seen London, blazing and wracked by explosions, on the morning after MEDUSA. Hester had been with him then; they had been cast adrift together in the Jenny, and she had comforted him, and made him turn away from the sight of his dying city. By the time he had looked again, the wind had blown them far from London.

“Do you want to land?” asked Wren.

Tom rubbed a hand quickly across his eyes and looked at Wolf. Wolf said, “Not yet. This is just the western edge of the debris fields. Nothing here but wheels and tracks and a few burned-out suburbs that came looking for salvage and got bombed by the Anti-Traction League…”

“Or blasted by the ghost lights,” joked Wren, and then wished she hadn’t, because the silly ghost stories she had heard in Moon’s did not seem silly at all now. The silent wreckage of London was slipping past on either side of the gondola: empty-windowed husks of broken buildings looming out of the night like a fleet of ghost ships.

“We’ll head eastward for a bit,” Tom decided.

The landscape beneath the Jenny Haniver was altering quickly. Soon she reached the main debris field, where the earth was completely hidden by deep, dense heaps of tangled scrap. She passed over a burned-out suburb, wheels and engine array dissolving into the greater ruin of the city it had come to feast on. Trees stirred softly in the clefts between steep-tilted jags of deck plate. Ahead the wreckage heaped upward into spiny hills. Tom sighted a flat place, half-hidden by the overhanging plates of a sloughed-off track, circled back to check it, and set the Jenny down quietly and carefully in the shadows there.

“Gosh!” whispered Wren in the silence that closed in once Tom had killed the engines.

Wolf Kobold opened the hatch, letting in cold, moist air and a smell of wet earth. “Nobody about,” he said. “No welcoming committee…”

Tom could feel his heart pounding. He struggled to calm himself. Furtively swallowing one of his green pills, he found an excuse to stay on the flight deck while Kobold and Wren busied themselves outside, tethering the Jenny securely with landing anchors and draping her engine pods and steering fins with the camouflage netting he had brought from Murnau. She was too big to hide, but with luck passing airships or Stalker-birds would miss her, tucked into that rusty cave of track plates with the netting softening her outlines.

They gathered the things they needed: their canvas packs; lanterns; the old gun that Tom had never used, taken down from the locker above his pilot’s chair. Outside, the sky above the debris fields was turning gray, stars fading as the dawn approached. They drank tea, and Wolf took a nip of something stronger from his hip flask.

“Perhaps you should stay here with the ship, Wren,” Tom suggested. “At least until we’ve had a look around…”

“We should stick together,” said Wolf firmly, and no one disagreed; they were on the ground again now, back in his realm, and they let him go ahead, a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, as they stepped out one by one into the shadows of the lost city.

It seemed silent at first. An eerie, awful, graveyard silence, broken only by the footfalls of the newcomers. The white gardens of the Moon must be this quiet, thought Tom. But gradually, as they picked their way along the narrow, aimless tracks, he became aware of small sounds. Drips of water pattered down from overhangs; a scrap of curtain flapped in an empty window; flakes of rust shifted and stirred, piled in deep drifts among the hollows of the wreckage.

“No one about,” muttered Wolf.

“How does it feel to be home, Dad?” asked Wren.

“Strange.” Tom stooped to run his fingers over a buckled metal sign that lay among the rust scraps underfoot, tracing the familiar name of a London street; FINCHLEY ROAD, TIER FOUR. “Strange and sad…”

“Quiet,” warned Wolf, standing a little ahead of the others, watchful, his gun in his hand.

“If there’s anyone here, they must have heard the Jenny’s engines when we set down,” Tom reminded him. “They know we’ve arrived. I wish they’d show themselves…”

A bird cried, away in the ruins somewhere. They pressed on eastward, pulling on their goggles to shield their eyes against the peach-colored glare of the rising sun. The debris fields had looked big from the windows of the Jenny Haniver, but from ground level they were simply vast. London was another country; a mountainous island whose central peaks stood several hundred feet high. Parts of the wreck were still recognizably the remains of a city; there were whole streets of empty-eyed buildings, and a row of upside-down shops with the fading, blistered signs still in place above—now below—their doors. But in other sections everything was so twisted, so jumbled up, so distorted that it was hard to say what it had been before MEDUSA. And twice, among the enormous heaps of rust, Tom made out subsidiary wrecks; the carcasses of suburbs. He remembered hearing in Murnau about suburbs that had gone to tear salvage from the wreck soon after it fell, and had never come back because the Anti-Traction League had bombed them. But these suburbs, deep in the ruins, one with its jaws still clamped around some tasty mass of scrap, did not show the scars of any bomb or rocket blasts. It looked to Tom as if the reason they had never gone home was because they had melted.

At the top of a low rise he stopped and shouted, “Hello!”

“Ssshh!” hissed Wolf, whirling around.

“Yes, Dad!” said Wren. “Someone will hear you!”

“That’s what we want, isn’t it?” asked Tom. “Didn’t we come here to find people, if there are people here at all? And Wolf, you said yourself that they weren’t hostile…” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted again, “Hello!” Echoes ran off and hid themselves among the wreckage. As they faded, there was a shrill, trilling whistle, but it was only another bird.

The path led through a shadowy canyon between the rust crags and then out into sunlight again. Tier-support pillars, broken gantries, and shards of deck plate lay jumbled together, blackened and fused by unimaginable heat. The travelers scrambled over a tangle of rusting six-inch hawser, like gnats creeping through a bowl of congealed spaghetti. Beyond it a wrenched rind of deck plate arched over the pathway. As they passed beneath it Wren sensed movement above her and looked up, but it was only a bird—a nice, ordinary, non-Stalkerized bird—gliding higher and higher on the thermals that were rising from the sun-warmed wreck. They moved on, passing through the cool shade of the arch and out into sunlight again.

And behind them a sudden babble of shouts and howls broke out, spinning them around, making Wolf curse and Wren grab for her father’s hand.

The steep screes of rust flakes beside the path had come alive with raggedy, careering figures, and more were letting themselves down on ropes from hiding places in that twisted arch. Wolf aimed his gun at one of them, but Tom shouted, “No, don’t!” and snatched at his arm so that the shot went wide. Before Wolf could fire again, he was surrounded by grimy young people with homemade weapons, all shouting, “Hands up!” and “Don’t move!” and “Throw down your guns!” Some of them had feathers in their hair, and had drawn stripes of rusty mud across their faces like war paint. One, a girl in a grubby white rubber coat, jumped down close to Wren and pointed a crude crossbow at her.

Wren had had all sorts of things pointed at her since leaving Anchorage—everything from clunky old Lost Boy gas pistols to shiny new machine guns. It never got boring. She knew of nothing quite so uncomfortable as finding that your life was suddenly in the hands of someone you had never met, who did not seem to like you very much, and who could snuff you out in an instant by simply squeezing a trigger. She raised her hands and smiled weakly at the crossbow girl, hoping she wasn’t prone to twitchy fingers.

Tom was trying to explain to his captors that he was a Londoner and a Third Class Apprentice in the Guild of Historians, but they didn’t seem interested. Someone had snatched Wolf’s pistol and was pointing it at him. Wolf looked so angry and ashamed at being captured that Wren felt sorry for him, and wished she could think of something she could say to comfort him. It had not been his fault, and she was glad that her father had stopped him from shooting anybody.

The man who seemed to be the leader of the ambush came stumping over to peer suspiciously at Wren. He was older than the others, short and squarish, with cropped gray hair and a tattoo just above the bridge of his nose in the shape of a little green compass. Wren sensed that he was afraid of her, which was a bit rich when you considered that he had a dozen heavily armed juvenile delinquents on his side. He was clutching a gun of his own; a strange thing, covered in wires and tubes, with a flat zinc disk where the muzzle ought to be.

“Well, young woman?” he demanded tetchily. “What is your game? What are you doing in London?”

Wren tilted her chin at him and tried to look haughty. “We’ve come to see Clytie Potts,” she said.

“What?” The man looked surprised. “You know Clytie?”

“This one keeps saying he’s a Londoner, Mr. Garamond,” shouted one of the boys who had captured Tom.

“Rubbish!” The man looked at Wren again, chewing his lower lip as he considered what to do.

“Very well, everyone,” he said at last. “Bind the prisoners’ hands. We shall take them to the lord mayor.”

Chapter 19 The Holloway Road

With their hands tied in front of them, surrounded by the fierce-looking young Londoners, the travelers resumed their journey. Their captors did not lead them east, into the heart of the debris field, as they had expected, but turned north instead. The girl guarding Wren pointed with her crossbow toward the central heights and said, “Lots of ’ot zones in there. Round ’ere, too, only not so bad. If you’d kept going, you’d have ended up slap bang in Electric Lane. Nasty.”

Wren had no idea what she was talking about, and before she could ask, Mr. Garamond shouted angrily, “Be quiet, Angie Peabody! Stop fraternizing with the scavengers!”

“I ain’t fraternizing with nobody!” cried the girl indignantly.

“We aren’t scavengers,” said Tom politely. “We are simply—”

“Be quiet!” insisted Garamond, like a teacher struggling to keep an unruly class in order. He held up his hand for silence. Around his neck on a length of cord hung a curious little machine with many aerials, and he was frowning at a gauge on its top. “Sprite!” he shouted suddenly. “Everybody down!”

His young followers obeyed him instantly, flinging themselves down in the mud and pulling Tom, Wren, and Wolf down with them. There was a faint buzzing sound that grew quickly louder and higher pitched until it passed beyond the reach of human hearing; then a gigantic arc of lightning crackled across a gap between two spires of melted deck plate.

“What was that?” gasped Wren, trying to rub the afterimage off her eyes as crossbow girl helped her to her feet.

“Lingering energy from MEDUSA,” said Tom’s guard cheerfully. “We call ’em ‘sprites.’ That one was pretty pathetic compared with the monsters we used to get. In the old days the whole of London was hot.”

“Please be quiet, Will Hallsworth,” shouted Mr. Garamond, waving the party onward. Hallsworth glanced at Wren and grimaced like a cheeky schoolboy, making her smile. She decided that she had been captured by far worse people than these young Londoners in her time.

The path they were following veered away from the deeper ruins, and they passed through no more hot zones. Twice they crossed places that were almost free of wreckage, stretches of open ground where crops were ripening. Among the rubble heaps scrap-metal windmills rose like rusty sunflowers.

They descended into a broad, V-shaped valley, whose walls were dead buildings and whose muddy floor lay deep in shadow. Looking up, Wren saw that the sky was hidden by the branches of overhanging trees and by a complicated mesh of knotted ropes and hawsers, through which dead branches and scraps of fabric had been threaded, forming a sort of roof. A few shafts of sunlight shone in, falling like spotlights on the airship that lay tethered on the valley floor.

“The Archaeopteryx!” cried Tom, recognizing the handsome little ship he had last seen pulling away from Airhaven.

“So this is where they hide her…” Wolf sounded grudgingly impressed. He was starting to forget the indignity of his capture, and was looking about with as much interest and curiosity as the others.

They passed the silent airship, then a line of battered tanks labeled fuel and lifting gas, and finally a small guard post with tattered deck chairs, and views of old London tacked to the tin walls. The valley ended at a sheer cliff of metal, and Garamond ordered his party into a tunnel that seemed to lead under it.

The roundness of the tunnel, and its ribbed walls and roof, puzzled Tom, until the Londoners lit lanterns and he realized that it was one of the old air ducts that lay looped like lifeless snakes throughout the wreck. Rails had been laid along the bottom of the duct, and a couple of wooden carts stood ready at the buffers. Above them, on the curving wall, an old enamel sign gleamed in the lantern light. It was the name plate from a London elevator station; a broad red ring in the middle of a white square, crossed by a vertical blue bar. In white letters on the blue were the words holloway road.

“This is how we get ’eavy cargoes out of the Archy and into London,” whispered Wren’s guard, Angie. “The Mossies’ spy birds can’t see us if we keep inside this old duct. We call it ‘taking the tube.’ ”

“The Hollow-Way Road,” said Wren, reading the sign again. “Oh, very funny…”

“Well, yer gotter ’ave a laugh, ain’t yer?”

They followed the Holloway Road for what felt like a mile or more, sometimes by lantern light, sometimes through patches of sunshine that spilled in through rents in the skin of the old duct. The way twisted and turned, and the floor sloped steeply sometimes where the duct dipped down into a hollow of the earth or lay draped across another section of wreckage. Underfoot the dust between the rails was stamped with the prints of passing boots.

At the end of the duct they passed more makeshift cargo carts and another set of buffers, and emerged into daylight again to find a pathway of metal duckboards leading between two steep hills of scrap. Beyond the hills stretched an open space that had been cleared of wreckage. Kitchen gardens had been laid out in raised beds full of peaty soil, and people broke off from picking cabbages and digging potatoes to stand staring as the prisoners were led by.

Tom stared back. There were not just people inside London; there were lots of people. He looked at their faces, but there was no one he recognized. It didn’t matter; they were Londoners, that was what was important. Many of them bore the marks of old injuries; he saw missing limbs and fingers, a man with a burned face, a blinded woman being guided along by her children, who were telling her excitedly about Tom, Wren, and Wolf. Scars everywhere. Hester would have felt at home here, he thought, and he wished that the wind had blown the Jenny Haniver the other way on that morning after MEDUSA, and carried him and Hester into London instead of away from it. How different things might have been if they had lived in the debris fields…

At the far side of the garden area a massive section of deck plate lay propped upon the ruins, forming a low-ceilinged cave. Garamond led his party in through the long, letterbox-shaped opening. The iron roof was so low that everyone had to stoop, but in the shadows dozens of small huts and houses had been erected, built from scraps of metal and wood. Crowds were waiting there, alerted by the children who were running excitedly ahead of the procession. “Where’s Miss Potts?” shouted Garamond over all the noise, and a bald-headed gentleman in a grubby white rubber coat (An Engineer!, thought Tom uneasily) replied, “She’s at the town hall, Garamond.”

The procession went marching on, deeper and deeper into the metal-roofed cavern until the deck plate overhead was so low, they had to bend almost double to save themselves from cracking their heads on the old bolts and fittings that poked down from it. “This is why it’s called Crouch End,” said Wren’s friendly guard. “It ain’t a very convenient place to live, but in the old days, with sprites and Mossies and Quirke-knows-what-else to hide away from, a roof over our ’eads was very welcome…”

“Angie Peabody,” barked Mr. Garamond, “I thought I told you to shut your cakeholel”

Wedged in under the lowest corner of the deck plate was a building fashioned out of an old Gut Supervisor’s office and bits of many other things, all nailed and bolted together in a workmanlike way and painted a cheerful shade of red. london emergency committee someone had written above the door, in careful capitals. Garamond left his charges outside while he went in and had a muffled conversation with someone. Then he came out again and pushed the door wide open. “Step along now, prisoners,” he said. “And show a bit of respect. You are entering the presence of the lord mayor of London!”

The floor inside the building had been dug out so that there was no need to stoop. Tom went first, with Will Hallsworth at his side, warning him to watch out for the steps. He tripped down them anyway, and landed in a big, slope-ceilinged room where a map of the debris fields covered one wall, marked all over with tickets and flags and mysterious red pins. Around a battered old tin table in the center of the room a dozen people were gathered, looking as if they had been in the middle of a meeting when they were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Garamond and his prisoners. One of them was Clytie Potts. She stood up when she recognized Tom. “Oh, Quirke!” she said.

Beside her, another of the committee was already rising to greet the new arrivals, and his shabby red robe and chain of office marked him clearly as the lord mayor. Tom felt relieved. For a moment he had feared that he was about to come face-to-face with Magnus Crome, the sinister Engineer who had ruled London in his childhood. But this ancient, portly gentleman with tufts of white hair sprouting like steam around his ears was not Crome. And after the relief came astonishment, for Tom found that he knew that round, red face, and meeting it here was even more of a shock than his first encounter with Clytie Potts. “Chudleigh Pomeroy!” he cried.

“I— Great Quirke and Clio!” the old man said, his white eyebrows leaping in surprise. “By the Sacred Black Flannel of Sooty Pete! If it isn’t young Apprentice Thing! Young Whatchamacallit! Young, um…”

“Natsworthy,” said Tom. He had always been a little afraid of the Deputy Head Historian, but meeting him here, realizing that he had survived down all these years and against all these odds, made him weep with happiness. He wiped the tears away and said in a wobbly voice, “Tom Natsworthy, Mr. Pomeroy; Apprentice Third Class. I’ve come home.”

Chapter 20 Children of MEDUSA

Chudleigh Pomeroy called for refreshments to be brought from the settlement’s communal kitchen, and fussed at his colleagues to clear away their piles of paper and make room at the table for the visitors. Tom, who was starting to recover from his shock, turned to look at the other committee members. Two of them were Engineers—a small, brown-skinned man and a rather severe-looking old lady, as bald as two pebbles, and wearing tattered white rubber coats. The rest were just ordinary Londoners; people of all shapes and sizes and several different colors, including a wiry, leathery little man who waved at Angie, prompting her to wave back and say, “ ’Ullo, Dad!” He looked to Tom as if he’d been a Gut laborer before MEDUSA went off; certainly not the type of person you would have found in London’s council chamber in the old days.

At last three seats were cleared for the newcomers. Chudleigh Pomeroy beamed at them as they sat down. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Natsworthy” he said, reaching across the table to shake Wren’s hand when Tom introduced her. “And Herr Kobold. We’ve heard a lot about the bravery of your city and its allies. Miss Potts here keeps us up-to-date with the war news. Welcome to London.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Wolf, bowing neatly his hand moving to where his sword hilt would have been if Mr. Garamond had not taken his sword away from him. “This is not my first visit. The last time I was here, I found myself ejected before I could actually meet any of your people…” He smiled slyly at the puzzled faces around him and quickly explained the story of his first visit to the debris fields.

“Great Quirke!” muttered Garamond. “I remember him now…”

“You’re not the first lost soldier to seek shelter here,” said Pomeroy. “The lost and wounded of both sides blunder into the fringes of the wreck sometimes. We couldn’t risk any of them going off and blurting out our secrets to the outside world, but we didn’t want to murder them or anything, so we came up with the notion of simply scaring them away. A few mysterious moans are usually enough to set the bravest of ’em running, but now and then we come across one who’s more inquisitive. When we do, we knock ’em out with chloroform before they can see anything and dump them outside the wreckage. Most of them get the message. You’re the first to return.”

“So why didn’t you knock us out and carry us into the Out-Country?” asked Wren.

“Good question,” grumbled one of the committee men, glaring at Garamond.

“It wasn’t practical!” said Garamond huffily. “They came in by airship, not on foot. They seemed like scavengers, not castaways. And Mr. Natsworthy here doesn’t look any too healthy. If my lads had chloroformed him, he might never have woken up…”

Tom started to protest that there was nothing wrong with him; that he would have positively welcomed a good, bracing dose of chloroform. Luckily, before an argument could develop, the food arrived: bread and butter, apple crumble and home-baked biscuits, elderflower wine in old tin water bottles.

“I see you have learned to live off the bare earth,” said Wolf Kobold softly. “Just like the Mossies.”

Clytie Potts smiled brightly at him; she was taken with this handsome young newcomer, and missed the faint edge of disgust in his voice. “Oh, we grow all sorts of things in the patches of soil between the rust heaps. It’s very fertile. Some of the survivors were workers in the agricultural districts before MEDUSA, and they have taught us all about growing food. And our scavenging teams find all sorts of things among the ruins: tinned goods, sugar, tea. There are fewer than two hundred people in London now, so we’ve enough for everyone.”

“We hunt, too,” said Angie eagerly. “Rabbits and birds and things make their ’omes in the debris fields…” She stopped as Mr. Garamond turned to glare at her; the other youngsters had been made to wait outside, and Wren suspected that Angie wasn’t supposed to be in the committee room at all.

“And Clytie brought in a few goats and sheep aboard that ship of hers,” added the quiet, elderly lady Engineer.

“But I don’t understand,” Tom was saying. “I mean, how did you survive at all? How do you come to be here? I thought…”

“You thought we were all dead,” said Pomeroy kindly, “which, by the way, is what I thought about you; that villain Valentine told me you’d fallen down a waste chute in the Gut. I’ve felt guilty ever since about having sent you down there that night. Wine?”

He filled a motley collection of tin beakers and enamel mugs, and another of the committee handed one to each of the newcomers while Pomeroy sat beaming at them, gathering his thoughts. Then, while they ate and drank, he told them of the last hours of London; of how the tension between the Guild of Historians and Crome’s power-hungry Engineers had ended with open warfare in the halls of the museum, and of how Katherine Valentine and Apprentice Engineer Pod had set off up the secret stairway called the Cat’s Creep to try and stop MEDUSA being used.

“Soon after that,” he said, “the Engineers attacked in force, and things grew rather confused. We fought like tigers, of course, but they had Stalkers and things, and they drove us back into the Natural History section. There weren’t many of us left by that time; Arkengarth and Pewtertide and Dr. Karuna had all been killed, and Clytie here was hurt pretty badly. I decided to make a last stand behind that old model of the Blue Whale—it had been taken down from the ceiling for some reason, and was lying on the floor, where it made a passable barricade. And as we crouched behind it, waiting for those Resurrected fellows to come and finish us, suddenly, boom! The building started to come apart at the seams…”

“Mr. Pomeroy threw me in through the whale’s mouth,” said Clytie Potts, looking sadly down at her hands as she spoke, as if the memories still upset her.

“Yes,” agreed Pomeroy, “and then, with extraordinary presence of mind, I jumped in after her. Just in time! I think the whole of Tier Two must have given way at that point. Light blazed in at me through every rent and bullet hole in the whale’s hide, and I felt it start to roll, to slide, to tumble through the air! After that I don’t remember much. Surfing down the sides of disintegrating cities inside fiberglass whales isn’t really my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I passed out fairly promptly.”

“The whale eventually came to rest between two fallen tier supports over on the southern edge of the main debris field,” explained Clytie, taking up the story. “Some workers from the salvage yards found it there, and helped us out. That was when I saw what had happened to the city. It was … oh, I can’t begin to describe it. There was fire everywhere, and dirty smoke boiling into the sky, and explosions going off all the time, so there was always wreckage rattling down, and ash falling softly everywhere, like black snow. And sometimes, out of the middle of the ruins, a huge claw of white light would come crackling, groping its way across the ground as if it were feeling for us…”

“Yes, those were dicey times,” said Pomeroy, nodding solemnly. “The League was about, too, hungry for revenge. We watched some of our fellow survivors venture out of the wreckage to give themselves up to a League patrol, and they were all shot on the spot. So Clytie and me and our salvage-yard friends decided to stay put. After a while we started to make contact with other little groups of survivors, and we banded together and wondered what to do. We thought about sneaking back west along the track marks, but where would that get us? Just into the slave holds of some scavenger town, probably, where we’d be no better off than with the League. So in the end we decided to stay here. London might have come a cropper, but it was still London, eh? Still home…”

His colleagues all nodded and muttered agreement, and Pomeroy gave the wall of the committee room an affectionate pat, which made it wobble alarmingly.

“We moved into Crouch End because it seemed safe from sprites,” explained Clytie, “and we were hidden here from the air patrols that the League kept sending over in those early days. There’s a big section of the Gut lying fairly undamaged about a half mile east of here, and we salvaged a lot of useful stuff from it; even a trunk full of money. So later, when the League patrols thinned out a bit, some of us were able to sneak out and buy the Archaeopteryx and start picking up a few other things we needed.”

“It must have been dangerous,” said Tom, thinking of his own experience of crossing the Green Storm’s lines.

“Impossible, sometimes,” admitted Clytie. “But we usually manage a few trips a year…”

“Collecting Old Tech, I gather,” said Wolf Kobold.

Clytie looked uncertain. Several of the councillors shifted uncomfortably in their salvaged chairs.

“And what about these Engineers?” Wolf Kobold went on, nodding at the bald-headed man and woman. “You seem very friendly with them, considering it was all their fault that London exploded in the first place.”

The lady Engineer said softly, “Not all of our Guild supported Magnus Crome and his insane plans. Those of us who opposed him were banished to lowly jobs in the prisons and factories of the Deep Gut. I suppose that’s what saved us. All Crome’s supporters were with him on Top Tier when MEDUSA failed.”

“We’ve been very glad of our Engineers over the years,” said Angie’s father, the wiry former laborer. “They’ve knocked together all sorts of handy contraptions for us— bicycle-powered electric hot plates, solar collectors, windmills, lifting gear. Electrical guns that can knock out the Green Storm’s mechanized spy birds. Dr. Abrol here”—he pointed to the other Engineer, who grinned modestly—“has built a receiver that allows us to listen in on the Storm’s radio traffic, so we’ll have fair warning if they ever do come looking for us. And Dr. Childermass, our deputy mayor, used to be head of the Mag-Lev Research Division. It’s she—”

“Now, Len,” said the lady Engineer in a warning voice.

“The Green Storm must know that you’re here,” said Wolf. “All these windmills and fields and so forth. They must have seen you.”

“I suppose so,” said Clytie Potts.

“Yet they choose to leave you in peace. Perhaps they think you are Anti-Tractionists, like them?”

“Well, they’d be wrong then,” said Angie’s father, sensing the challenge in Kobold’s question and bristling. “They don’t know our plans, no more than you do…”

“Len,” said Dr. Childermass, and Chudleigh Pomeroy cut in hurriedly to say, “Anyway, now that young Natsworthy and his chums are here, we’d best make them comfortable; decide where they’re to stay and so forth.”

“Oh ; we don’t want to trouble you,” Kobold told him. “We’ll just stop a few days, have a nose about, and then head back to the Jenny Haniver.”

“But you can’t leave so soon!” protested Pomeroy. “You’ve only just got here!”

“What he means is, you can’t leave at all,” said Mr. Garamond, who had been listening impatiently to all this from his perch near the door. “These are important times for London. We can’t risk having you tell somebody we’re here.”

“Come, Garamond,” said Pomeroy, “Mr. Natsworthy is a Londoner like us!”

“That’s as may be, but his daughter isn’t, and as for this other gentleman … As head of the Security Subcommittee I have a duty to point out that we don’t know them, and we can’t trust them.”

“Hear, hear,” said Angie’s father, nodding vigorously. “It’d be a right shame if we hung on here for all these years only for some nosey parker to go and squeal about us to a scavenger just when we’re about ready to—”

“Len!” snapped Dr. Childermass.

“But I’m afraid Garamond’s right,” said Pomeroy apologetically. “I think it would be best if our young people keep a twenty-four-hour guard on the Holloway Road and the airship park. Tom, Wren, Herr Kobold, I hope you will consider yourselves our guests, but I’m afraid that there is absolutely no question of you leaving. Another biscuit, anyone?”

Chapter 21 Paging Dr. Popjoy

Sixty miles beyond dead london, where the young mountains of Shan Guo rose steeply from the plains, stood the fortress city of Batmunkh Gompa. It guarded a pass through which, for centuries, Traction Cities had kept trying to break into the fertile Anti-Tractionist kingdoms of the east. But now that the Green Storm had pushed their frontier westward, it had become a sleepy, faded shadow of itself, like a harbor from which the sea had retreated. A small garrison still manned the Shield-Wall, but the city served mainly as a base where armies and supply convoys paused on their way west to the new battlefields of the line.

In the valley behind it, along the pleasant shores of the lake called Batmunkh Nor, lay stilted fishing lodges and the pretty, steep-roofed villas and weekend homes of senior Green Storm officials. One, prettier than the rest, stood among pine trees on a finger of land pointing out into the lake. The lights in its teardrop windows made long reflections in the water, and the roofs curled at each corner like the toes of a sultan’s slippers in a fairy tale. Anyone bold enough to peek between the bars of its high spiked gates would notice some curious statuary in the gardens and a nameplate beside the paved drive that read:

It was the home of another survivor of MEDUSA: Dr. Popjoy, late of the Guild of Engineers, and more recently head of the Resurrection Corps. The villa was his reward from the Storm for all the armies he had built them.

“That is the house,” said Fishcake’s Stalker, when he described what he could see as they came down the mountain road that night. “When Sathya was stationed at Batmunkh Gompa, we went for boat trips on the lake and looked at that house from the water. It belonged to an artist then; a master calligrapher. Sathya used to say that when she was old and rich, she would live there herself.”

Fishcake stopped at the last steep turn of the road above the lakeshore. He was cold and tired, footsore after the long trek from the hermitage, and very afraid that they would be challenged as they neared the outskirts of the city. He had insisted on walking most of the way, although his Stalker had offered to carry him, because he did not want her to think that he was weak. An ache had begun in the back of his knees after a few miles, and had now spread to every part of him, making it hard to walk at all. He knew that he should be happy that the journey was over, but he just felt afraid.

When his Stalker turned to find out why his footsteps had stopped, he said, “Don’t go down there.”

“But Popjoy can mend me,” she whispered. “Then I will be Anna all the time.”

“You don’t need him!” Fishcake said. It seemed to him that she was mended already. She had been Anna ever since the day they’d climbed up onto Zhan Shan. He was dimly starting to understand that the Anna part of her was made stronger by memories; the fluttering flags written with prayers to her old gods had woken her again, and the familiar mountains and the talks with Sathya had made her stronger than ever; perhaps the Stalker Fang part had been crushed for good. Why risk trusting this Popjoy person?

But he was too tired and shivery to explain all that to his Stalker. She came and picked him up and said, “Don’t be afraid, Fishcake. Dr. Popjoy will mend me, and then we shall go back to Sathya. Now be my eyes again, and tell me, is there anyone about?”

There was no one, and no one challenged them as she carried him to Popjoy’s gate. It was late. Batmunkh Gompa was a glittering curtain of lights drawn across the sky beyond the lake. Snow was falling, flakes patting Fishcake’s face like chilly little fingers; like the cold fingers of the ghosts of children.

The Stalker set Fishcake down and smashed the gate’s strong locks and Fishcake pushed them open, looking nervously at the lighted windows of the house that showed through the trees at the far end of a long drive. His Stalker took his hand as they stepped together through the gateway, the gate swinging shut behind them. “We shall ask Dr. Popjoy to give you some food before he works on me,” she promised.

“What if he won’t?” asked Fishcake. “Work on you, I mean?”

“I will make him,” whispered the Stalker. “Don’t worry, Fishcake.”

Fishcake looked again toward the house, and put a hand into his pocket to clasp the little horse she’d made him. He still didn’t want his Stalker to put herself at the mercy of this sinister-sounding Engineer. He almost pulled her back through the gate, but already it was too late. In the garden ahead, where shadows lapped beneath the trees, things were moving. Spiky shapes that had looked like statues suddenly turned their heads; green eyes lit like flames.

“Stalkers!” whispered Fishcake’s Stalker, hearing the clank and hiss as they came to life. She sounded scared.

“But you’re a Stalker,” Fishcake said.

“Oh, so I am. Thank you, Fishcake. I forget sometimes…” She pushed him gently behind her, out of harm’s way, and unsheathed her claws.

The house had three guardians; big, polished battle-Stalkers customized by Dr. Popjoy, finned and spiked like heraldic dinosaurs. Light silvered their spade-shaped, featureless faces as they loped across the snowy lawns. Fishcake’s Stalker limped toward them. They were stronger, but she was cleverer. She dodged their clumsy, flailing blows. Her blades flashed as she drove them through the couplings of each Stalker’s neck in turn. Sparks spewed and fluids squirted. The beheaded bodies lurched aimlessly about, colliding with one another and falling over, thrashing and clattering on the flagged path as Fishcake’s Stalker turned toward him. She reached out to him with one hand and then snatched it away, touching her own face. Her sightless eyes flared; her head jerked. “No!” she whispered.

“Anna!” wailed Fishcake. He squidged himself back against the cold bars of the gate as she struggled with herself. She shook herself and came toward him. She grabbed his chin, twisting his face upward. She was not Anna anymore. What had made her change? Had the fight with the other Stalkers tripped some circuit in her head? Or had Fishcake done it himself, by reminding her of what she was? He shook with sobs, wishing there were some way he could bring Anna back.

“What is this place?” she hissed, listening to the wind in the trees, the lap of waves along the lakeshore. “How long was the Error in control?”

“D-Doctor Popjoy,” was all that Fishcake could say, through his tears. “He lives here…”

“Popjoy?”

“Anna thought, she thought …”

“She thought that he could make her even stronger,” the Stalker whispered, and gave a hissing laugh.

“What about Sathya?” he said. “What about my horse? Remember—”

“Be silent.” She let Fishcake go and went over to the ruined Stalkers, who were falling still at last. Bending down, she felt across the ground until she found a wrenched-off head. She unplugged one of the cables from her own skull and inserted it into a socket on the head. The dead Stalker’s eyes began to glow again. She lifted the head and held it up in front of her like a lantern. As she swung it toward Fishcake, he understood that she was looking out at him through its eyes. He wondered if she was disappointed, after all their time together, to see how small and frail he was.

“Come,” was all she said. “We will see Popjoy, as the Error intended. I will make him expunge her permanently.”

Fishcake wanted to run, but he went with her instead, as he always did. He didn’t know what “expunge” meant, but he could guess. He wanted to hold his Stalker’s hand, in the hope that his touch might somehow bring Anna back, but she was not in a hand-holding mood; she flapped him away and went limping fiercely along in front of him, still holding up the baleful head.

As they neared the house, a dozen big Stalker-birds launched themselves from the trees outside and began to circle the intruders, closer and closer, slivers of light falling from their beaks and claws. Fishcake tried to hide himself in the folds of his Stalker’s filthy robe, but she just raised her arms and whispered to the birds in some battle code, and they settled meek and watchful on the lawns, waiting for her next instruction.

The front door was ironwood, bound and studded with actual iron, but it splintered easily under a few kicks from the Stalker Fang’s good leg. Behind it lay a pillared atrium where a Resurrected butler lumbered out of an alcove to bar the way. “What is your business?” it droned.

“I have come to meet my maker,” replied the Stalker Fang in her usual cool whisper. She smashed the butler to pieces and left its wreckage scattered on the tiles. Fishcake scurried after her across the atrium, through another shredded door, and down three stairs into a sunken den walled with soft draperies and lit by a toffee-colored glow. A small, bald-headed old man was rising from his couch to ask what the commotion was about. He went very still when he recognized his visitor. A glass fell from his hand, splashing wine across the carpet.

“Keep away! My birds will fetch help! They’ll fly to Batmunkh Gompa and—”

“Your birds are under my control now, Dr. Popjoy,” whispered the Stalker. “Stupid creatures, but they have their uses.” She moved toward him, swinging the head in her outstretched hand so that the light from its eyes swept the room. Fishcake glimpsed things running away—Stalkerized insects and animals, a dog with the head of a dead girl. On a plate balanced on the arm of Popjoy’s couch sat a neat wedge of fruitcake, which Fishcake snatched and crammed into his mouth. Eating messily, he pushed open a door in the far wall and looked through into some sort of workshop: cadavers on slabs and shelves heaped high with curious machinery.

“It wasn’t me!” Popjoy was whimpering, assuming that the Stalker Fang had come for revenge. “I didn’t know Grike would attack you! It was all that girl’s doing; that Zero girl! She’s dead now; did you hear? The townies got her, down in Africa. Naga’s quite cut up about it, they say; sticks to his quarters and won’t issue orders. Everyone will be relieved to hear that you’re back! You’ll be on your way to Tienjing, I suppose? To reclaim power? I can help you…”

“Tienjing no longer matters,” whispered the Stalker, holding the head out to stare at him. “The Green Storm no longer matters. The world will not be made green again by air fleets and guns and the squabbling of the Once-Born.”

“Of course not, of course not.” Popjoy edged away until he was pressed against a wall and could edge no farther. His face shone sweatily in the green light. “So what can I do for you, Excellency? What small service can this feeble Once-Born offer … ?”

The Stalker did not answer at once. She moved the severed head, following the flight of a Resurrected bee around a lamp on a side table. Then, in a voice softer even than her usual graveyard whisper, she said, “I remember things.”

“Ah…”

“I remember being Anna Fang.”

“Oh? Interesting.” Fishcake, who was watching from behind the couch, could see that Popjoy really was interested, despite his fear.

“The memories overwhelm me sometimes,” the Stalker confessed. “It has been worse since I reached Shan Guo. Sometimes it is as if I become her.”

“Then the stuff I installed has started to work at last!” cried Popjoy triumphantly. “The damage you suffered must have dislodged something, or perhaps in repairing itself your brain has made some connection that I could not achieve with my crude instruments.”

“How is it possible?” demanded the Stalker. “Are they real memories?”

“Hard to say,” mused Popjoy. “How do you define a real memory? But it’s nothing to be frightened of. I think I can correct it… May I take a look? Inside?” He tapped his own bald head, and grinned, his fear replaced by a nervous excitement. “If you could wait till morning, when my laboratory assistants arrive to help me with my little retirement projects…”

“No.” The Stalker Fang was already moving toward Popjoy’s workshop. “No one must know that I am here. You will do it now. The boy can help you.”

The workshop stank of death and chemicals. Racks on the walls held shiny displays of scalpels and bone saws. Fishcake, who still didn’t trust the old Engineer, helped himself to a long, thin-bladed knife and hid it inside his coat.

The Stalker Fang shoved a cluttered bench aside and knelt down on the floor, in the spill of light from a hanging argon globe. Kneeling, she was still so tall that her bowed head reached halfway up Popjoy’s chest. The Engineer circled her, licking his lips and fidgeting. “You, boy,” he snapped, holding out his hand to Fishcake without ever looking at him. “Pass me that tray…”

The tray was metal, covered with delicate, finely made instruments. It rattled and clattered in Fishcake’s shaking hands as he passed it over. The instruments made a mockery of the crude tools he had used to repair his Stalker. He saw the Engineer wince at the sight of the cheap iron bolts with which he had fixed her death mask in place.

“Who made these repairs? A real botch job…”

“The child has done well,” said the Stalker, and Fishcake felt proud.

Popjoy had surgeon’s fingers, slender and clever. Within half a minute he had the mask off, baring the dead woman’s face beneath. Another half minute and the top of her skullpiece came free and was laid on a table. “Lamp, boy,” he said, and strapped the small flashlight that Fishcake passed him around his head. He peered down into the tangle of machinery and preserved brain tissue inside the Stalker’s skull.

“Sometimes she is just Anna, for days and days,” said Fishcake, hoping that Popjoy would take the hint, destroy the Stalker part of her, and save his Anna. “It was the Anna bit that wanted to come here, so you could help her. I think Anna Fang is trapped inside her somewhere, and sometimes when she remembers who she is, the Stalkerish side shuts down…”

“The ghost in the machine…” Popjoy looked at him and winked. “I’m afraid not, lad. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, you know.” He selected a long, thin probe from the tray and inserted it into a crevice of the Stalker’s brain. The Stalker’s head lifted with a jerk; her dry lips moved; she whispered, “Stilton … I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, but it was the only way—”

“Anna?” said Fishcake eagerly.

Her eyeless, desiccated face turned toward him. “Fishcake?”

“It’s her!” Fishcake told Popjoy, “Keep her! Hold on to her! Don’t let the other one come back!”

Popjoy was busy with his probes and instruments. He didn’t even bother to look at Fishcake. “You have it all wrong, boy,” he said. “These memories aren’t a person. They’re just residue that the Stalker brain has scoured out of the dead brain cells of the host. Eighteen years too late, mind, but better than never…”

Something sparked, down inside the Stalker’s head; the flash lit up the inside of her mouth, which had fallen open.

She jerked again and said, “No tricks, Popjoy.”

“What, you think I’d sabotage my finest work?” cried Popjoy hurt. “I am just making a few minor adjustments.”

“You have found the Error? The memories? Remove them!”

“Great Quirke, certainly not!”

“Remove them!”

“But Excellency, they are what distinguish you from the mindless Stalkers, the battle models… They are what make you the finest Stalker of the age; the pinnacle of Resurrection technology…”

Either Popjoy’s words or the pleading tone that had crept into his voice caught the Stalker’s attention. She nodded cautiously, prepared at least to hear him out.

“Those memories have always been there, submerged beneath the surface,” the Engineer explained. “They give you levels of experience and emotion that no other Stalker of mine can draw on. Recently, thanks to the damage Mr. Grike inflicted, they have become intense, overwhelming your conscious mind. But we should soon be able to strike a healthy balance.”

“What are they?” insisted the Stalker. “Where have they come from? Why do I remember being Anna?”

“I’m really not sure,” admitted Popjoy, groping for a tiny pair of pliers and setting to work. “The fact is, the brain I fitted you with isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. Certainly not one of those clunky modern models we London Engineers built, and not like old Mr. Grike’s, either. It’s much older, and much stranger.

“You see, when your friend Sathya first took me to Rogue’s Roost all those years ago and ordered me to bring Anna Fang back to life, I panicked a bit. I knew it was impossible. So to buy myself some time, I set up an expedition and took a Green Storm airship out into the Ice Wastes, hunting for an Old Tech site that I’d heard rumors of ever since I was an apprentice in dear old London. The Engineers had looked for it but never found it. I had better luck. Right up to the top of the world we went; so far north we started going south again. And there, half buried in the snows of a tiny, frozen island, we found a complex built by some forgotten culture that must have flourished in the days before the Nomad Empires. Inside the central pyramid sat a dozen dead men and women on stone thrones. Some had been crushed by roof falls or encased in ice, but there were a few who, when we entered their chamber, began to whisper to us in languages we couldn’t identify. They were Stalkers, of a sort, although they had no armor or weapons, and they’d clearly not been built to fight.”

“Then why?” asked Fishcake’s Stalker.

“I think they were built to remember,” said Popjoy. He rummaged in a drawer for a set of Stalker’s eyes and started wiring them into his patient’s sockets. “I think that when great leaders of that culture died, their scientist-priests would take the body to the pyramid at the top of the world and stick a machine in their head, and there they’d sit, remembering. They’d remember all the things they’d done in life, and pass on those memories to their successors, and tell the stories of the times they lived in so they’d never be forgotten. Except they were forgotten, of course; their culture vanished from the earth, and the Nomad Empires that came after them picked up a crude version of the same technology and used it to build undead warriors like old Mr. Grike.

“That pyramid was the only relic of the first Stalker builders, and I’m afraid my Green Storm minders dynamited it for fear some other scavenger would stumble on the secret. But in one of the smaller buildings, among a lot of religious paraphernalia and irrelevant old texts, I unearthed an almost complete Stalker brain. I took it back to Rogues’ Roost for study and repairs, connected it to a brain of my own design that controls your motor functions and suchlike, and installed the whole caboodle in the carcass of old Anna Fang.”

The Stalker tilted her head on one side. “So am I Anna Fang?” she asked.

“No, Excellency,” said Popjoy. “You are a machine that can access some of the memories of Anna Fang. And they give you strength.” He replaced her mask and skullpiece, fastening them into place with neat new bolts. “You want to make the world green again; you yearn for it. That’s not because you have been set to obey Green Storm instructions, like some brainless battle-Stalker, but because you can subconsciously remember how much Anna Fang wanted it; you can remember what the townies did to her, and to her family, and how it felt when those things happened. Her memories, those feelings, are what drive you.”

“I remember dying,” said the Stalker, not in the hesitant voice of Anna but in her own harsh hiss. “I remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. The sword in my heart, so cold and sudden, and then that sweet boy kneeling over me, saying my name, and I couldn’t answer him… I remember it all.”

She unplugged her cable from the severed Stalker head and slung it aside. When she reinserted the cable into her own skull, her new eyes filled slowly with green light. “Now it is time for us to go.”

She stood and turned, and Popjoy’s smile faded. “Excellency, you can’t leave now! I need to make further tests and observations! With your help I might be able to make more like you! I’ve spent so many years trying to repeat my success with you, and all I’ve been able to turn out are tin soldiers and silly curiosities.”

“You have an airship?”

“Yes. A yacht, in the hangar behind the house. Why?”

“I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker thoughtfully. “But I am here to do what she would have wanted. I shall take your ship and fly to Erdene Tezh. There I shall speak with ODIN.”

“No!” said Popjoy. “No!”

“You have heard of ODIN, I see.”

“My old Guild … But even they … It was impossible, the codes are lost—”

“The codes are found,” the Stalker said. “They were recorded in the Tin Book of Anchorage. I saw them on Cloud 9. I have carried them safe in my head ever since.”

“It’s madness! I mean, ODIN … Don’t you understand the power of it?”

“Of course. It is the power to make the world green again. Where the Storm has failed, ODIN will succeed.”

Popjoy clenched his plump hands into fists, as if he were about to attack her. “But Excellency, what if it goes wrong? We barely understand these Ancient devices. Remember MEDUSA! ODIN would be incomparably more dangerous than MEDUSA…”

The Stalker’s claws slid from her finger ends. “Your opinion is irrelevant, Doctor. You are no longer needed.”

“But—but you do need me! Your memory problems … with the right trigger, they could flare up again… No!”

The Stalker Fang caught him as he tried to dodge past her to the door. “Thank you for your assistance, Doctor,” she whispered.

Fishcake shut his eyes tight and covered his ears, but he could not quite block out the crunch and spatter of Popjoy’s dying. When he looked again, his Stalker was helping herself to things from the shelves: fragments of circuitry, wires and ducts, the brains of lesser Stalkers. The walls of the workshop had been redecorated with eye-catching slashes of red.

“Find food and water for yourself, boy,” she whispered. “I shall need your help when we reach Erdene Tezh.”

Chapter 22 Wren Natsworthy Investigates

London (!!!)

28th May

I’ve always thought that only smug, self-satisfied people keep diaries, but so much has happened in the past few days that I know I’ll forget half of it if I don’t write it down, so I have cadged this notebook off of Clytie Potts and made a promise to myself to write a journal of my time in London. Maybe if we ever get back to the Hunting Ground, I can turn it into a book, like one of Professor Pennyroyal’s. (Only true!)

It seems hard to believe that it is only two days since we arrived in the debris fields. So much has happened, and I have met so many new people, and found out so much, that it feels as if I have been here a year at least.

I’ll try to start at the beginning. After our meeting with the lord mayor, Mr. Garamond and some of his young warriors took Dad back to where we’d left the Jenny Haniver and made him move her round into the same secret hangar where the Archaeopteryx is kept. They say she will be safer there, and won’t be seen by the Green Storm spy birds that cruise over from time to time. But I think it’s also so they can keep an eye on her; they keep saying we’re not prisoners, but they obviously don’t want us sneaking off. They seem terrified that we’ll tell some other city that they’re here, which seems a bit pathetic—I mean, what do they have that another city would want to cross hundreds of miles of Storm Country to eat?

Later, after an evening meal in the communal canteen, we were all three of us brought to this house, which is to be our home while we’re in London. I say house, but it’s really just a sort of hut; a lot of sheets of old metal bolted and welded together at the base of one of the old brake blocks that support Crouch End’s roof. There are wire grilles over the window holes, but I don’t know if they’ve been put there to keep us from escaping or just because there’s no glass in London. Inside there are three rooms, linked by a lot of winding passages, the floors dug down into the ground so that we can stand upright inside. It’s a little damp, but homey enough, and close enough to the edge of Crouch End that the sun shines in for a half hour or so in the evenings, which is nice. Dad has the biggest room, Wolf is next to him, and I have chosen for myself a little semicircular chamber at the back; one wall is made from an old tin advertising sign (stick-phast paste—accept no imitations), and I have a window that lets in a little sunlight, and the light of the moon at night.

I thought that Wolf would try to escape or something, but he seems quite content at the moment, very interested in this little world the Londoners have made for themselves. He’s a strange person. It’s hard to tell what he is thinking.

Dad is just glad to be home, of course. I was half hoping he’d find True Love with Clytie Potts, but it turns out she’s married (to an Engineer called Lurpak Flint, who flies her airship for her, so she’s not just Clytie Potts and Cruwys Morchard but Clytie Flint as well—I’ve never known a woman with quite so many names).

29th May

I think I like London. It’s funny—I’ve come so far, and I’ve ended up in a place that’s very like Anchorage-in-Vineland. It’s secret, and hidden, and so small that everyone knows everyone else, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I think I can’t wait to get back on the bird roads, but at other times I wish I was a Londoner myself. And it’s beautiful. You wouldn’t think there would be beauty in a great smashed-up heap of rubbish, but there is. In all the clefts and stretches of open earth, trees and ferns grow, and in every soil-filled nook among the debris too. Birds sing here; insects buzz about. Angie says that in another month the scrap-heaps above Crouch End will be pink with foxgloves.

Angie is my best friend here. (Her name is short for Ford Anglia—her dad, Len Peabody, named all his children after Old Tech ground cars.) She’s sensible and funny, which is a good combination, and she reminds me of a badger or a mole or something; small and stocky and slightly furry, always busy with something. She’s been all over the debris fields, because she goes on patrol with Garamond’s militia, keeping an eye out for intruders and the Green Storm. All the young Londoners are always going off on patrol, or hunting, or scouring about for salvage in the farthest corners of the wreck. I suppose the Emergency Committee think it’s a way of using up all that teenage energy. I’d like to go with them, and use up some of mine, but Garamond says I can’t, because he still doesn’t trust me. What a fusspot that man is! He says that me and Wolf (Wolf and I?) have to spend our days helping the old folk dig over the vegetable plots, or listening to Dad talk History with Mr. Pomeroy.

2nd June

For all their kindness I am starting to feel sure the Londoners are hiding something from us. Wolf has said this from the first, but I thought he was wrong. Now I’m starting to believe him. It’s just little things, like the way people look at us, and the way Dr. Childermass kept shushing Len Peabody that first morning— what was she afraid he’d tell us? Sometimes, when Dad and Wolf and I go into the communal canteen in the middle of Crouch End where everybody eats, people who are deep in conversation about something suddenly stop and start talking about the weather instead. And when Dad asked Clytie Potts why she had been collecting Kliest Coils and other bits of Electric Empire technology, she went all red and changed the subject.

Last night I heard voices outside again while I was trying to get to sleep, so I went to my window and pulled the curtain aside (it’s just a bit of old sack, really) and what do you think I saw? Engineers! Lavinia Childermass and half a dozen others! They were leaving Crouch End and walking off up a track that leads eastward over a steep ridge of debris. Where were they going? It looked a lot more purposeful than just a moonlit stroll. Do they do this every night? Maybe that’s why I hardly ever see any of the Engineers around in the daytime—they must be catching up on their sleep!

Well, I always dreamed of being a daring schoolgirl detective, like Milly Crisp in those books I used to read when I was little. So this afternoon I wandered off on my own up that track that I saw the Engineers taking last night. From the top of the ridge you can see it winding on across the debris fields for about half a mile, toward a really big, wedge-shaped chunk of wreckage that looks as if it must have been a section of London’s Gut.

Nobody about, but something flashed in one of the holes or window openings in the side of that big old chunk. Then, all of a sudden, I heard footsteps behind me, and there was Mr. Garamond with a couple of his favorite young warriors, Angie’s brother Saab and a girl called Cat Luperini. “What are you doing here?” he shouted, all purple with rage, nearly as cross and ugly as Mum. I tried to explain that I’d just felt like stretching my legs, but he wouldn’t have any of it. “You’re on the edge of a hot zone!” he shouted, and Cat got hold of me and started steering me back toward Crouch End. Saab leaned over and said, “You mustn’t go wandering off like this, Wren. That’s a dangerous part of the fields. We don’t want you to get crisped by a sprite.”

He was quite kind about it, actually. I like Saab. But if that part of the wreckage is so dangerous, why is there such a well-trodden track leading through the middle of it?

Later, I talked about some of this with Wolf. He doesn’t believe in the sprites at all. When I reminded him about the one that almost fried us on our first day here, he just laughed and said it had been “remarkably well timed.” He thinks the sprites are a sort of trick the Engineers have dreamed up to keep people out of the wreck. He’s got a point, hasn’t he? I mean, if they can make those electric anti-Stalker guns, why not sprites, too?

Well, I’m not going to let stupid old Garamond put me off. He leaves a couple of his people on guard outside our hut at night, for fear we’ll try and run off to sell this little static to a predator, but the guards don’t really believe we will, and they usually just chat and then fall asleep. Tonight, as soon as all is quiet, I am going to creep out and see what’s really going on in that big old wedge of rust they have out there.

(If this is the lust entry in this journal, you’ll know that Wolf is wrong about the sprites, and I’ve been roasted crispier than Milly Crisp herself…)

Wren put away her pencil, slipped her notebook into the inside pocket of her flying jacket, and lay waiting. She listened to Tom’s soft, steady breathing coming through the gaps in the tin wall from the room next door, and wondered what he was dreaming about. Did he have any suspicions about the Londoners? He had not said anything. He just seemed happy to be home.

She could hear Wolf moving about in the room to her right. Little metal noises; clicks and scrapings. What was he up to? Outside, Mr. Garamond’s guards spoke softly to one another.

Wren did not remember going to sleep, but she must have, because she woke suddenly to find that the luminous hands of her wristwatch stood at half past three.

“Oh, Clio!” she groaned, rolling off her bedding and scrambling to her feet.

She went to the door and looked out into the narrow passage. For some reason she felt uneasy. Wolf’s door was half open, moonlight spilling through. She crept to it and peered into his tiny room. His bedroll was empty. Wren ran to the window and stifled a cry as the steel-mesh shutter came free in her hands. Wolf had unfastened it somehow, and hung it back in position after he’d climbed out so that the guards would not notice anything wrong.

“Oh, Gods!” Wren whispered, thinking of the Jenny Haniver. She had not forgotten the ruthless streak in Wolf’s nature. What if he were already creeping away through the debris fields to steal the Jenny? How long had he been gone? Was it the sound of his going that had woken her?

She scrambled out under the loosened grille and peeked around the corner of the hut. The guards were sitting on the doorstep, bored and sleepy; one was already snoring, and the other’s head was nodding. Wren tiptoed away, then ran between the silent shacks and huts and out of Crouch End. The ruins of London were a maze of stark moonlight and inky shadows. Eastward, a figure showed for a moment on the spiky skyline.

Wolf! Wren started after him, relieved that at least he was not heading for the Jenny. So what was he doing? Snooping about, she guessed, just as she had been planning to snoop. It annoyed her to think that he had beaten her to it. She had wanted to learn London’s secrets herself, and impress him with her discoveries over breakfast…

She started to go after him, up the track that she had taken earlier. She told herself there was no reason to be afraid; the Londoners were softies, and even if they caught her, they would do nothing worse than return her to her prison and screw the window grilles down tighter. But she could not help feeling tense, and when a shape suddenly stepped out of the shadows beside the path to grab her, she cried out loudly and shrilly.

An arm went round her middle, and a strong hand covered her mouth. She twisted her head around and saw Wolf Kobold’s face above her in the moonlight. “Shhhh,” he said softly. His hand left her mouth, but lingered for a moment on her face. “Wren … what are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you, of course,” she said, her voice wobbling slightly. “Where are you going?”

Wolf grinned and released her. He pointed along the moonlit road to the enormous segment of wreckage that lay ahead. In some of the openings lights were moving about, bobbing like marsh lanterns.

“Listen!” he said.

Across the wastes of moonlit metal came a low rumbling noise, rising and falling, then cutting out altogether. White light flashed and flickered out of the openings in the hulk.

“Sprite?” asked Wren.

Wolf shook his head. “Machinery of some sort. The same sound I heard two years ago.”

“Engineers come up here at night,” she whispered. Wolf just nodded. “I’ve seen them too. And I’ve seen people bringing crates up here; crates filled with salvage from the debris fields. And Engineers poring over plans. Why? What are they building in there, Wren?”

Wren felt a little annoyed that he had found out more than her. Milly Crisp never had this sort of competition. She tried to look as if his findings came as no surprise to her.

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

Side by side they hurried on, and soon reached the Gut segment. It really was immense; a sea cliff pitted with countless caves where ducts and corridors had once linked it to the rest of London. Wolf clambered in through one of them, and reached back to haul Wren up behind him. “It looks like some kind of factory from London’s Deep Gut,” he whispered. “It seems to have survived almost intact.”

They moved deeper. The floors were tilted at a slight angle, making walking tricky. Metallic noises echoed along the drippy corridors. They reached a bolted door, retraced their steps, climbed a flight of sloping metal stairs. They passed a wall stenciled with the symbol of a red wheel and the words LONDON GUILD OF ENGINEERS: EXPERIMENTAL HANGAR 14. The higher corridors were lit by shafts of stuttering white and orange light that grew brighter as Wren and Wolf crept on into the heart of the building. The steady, reassuring glow of argon lamps shone through hanging curtains of transparent plastic.

Wren felt more excited than afraid now. She let her hand brush against Wolf’s, and he gripped it and squeezed it reassuringly as he pushed the curtains aside.

Together, hand in hand, they looked down into an immense open space at the center of the hangar.

“Great Gods!” Wren whispered. “So that’s it!” said Wolf.

“Put your hands up, Mr. Kobold,” said another voice, quite close behind them. “You too, Miss Natsworthy. Both of you, put your hands up and turn around very slowly.”

Chapter 23 The Childermass Experiment

Hester?” mumbled Tom, waking slowly. He had been dreaming of the old London Museum again, but this time it had been Hester who was leading him through the dusty galleries. In his dream, he had been happy to see her.

Now someone was crouching beside his bed, shaking him. He remembered that it could not be Hester and sat up. A lantern dazzled him. He turned his head away and saw a couple of Garamond’s boys in the doorway. The person who had woken him was Clytie Potts.

“There’s a problem, Tom. It’s Kobold and your daughter. Oh, they’re quite all right, but—I think you’d better come.”

Out across the ruins. Moonlight and scrap metal. Clytie walked with Tom, the two of them surrounded by silent Londoners, some carrying guns.

“What has Wren been doing?” he asked as they hurried him along.

“Spying,” said Clytie. “She and Kobold were found … where they should not be.”

“Wren’s just a girl!” Tom protested. “She may be inquisitive and foolish, but she’s not a spy! What was she spying on, anyway? What is this place you found her in?”

“Easier to show you than explain,” said Clytie.

Tom pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn’t just the cold that made him shiver. He had a feeling that he was close to learning the secret of his city. Had Wren discovered it already for herself? Was that was this was all about? He felt proud of her bravery, but worried too, in case she was in danger.

In an open doorway at the foot of a wall of wreckage Dr. Childermass and five of her fellow Engineers stood waiting; six bald heads like a clutch of eggs. “Mr. Natsworthy,” said the Engineer with a faint, weary smile, “you may as well see the project. No doubt your daughter and her friend will tell you about it anyway. As long as we can dissuade our more excitable colleagues from shooting them, that is.”

Up a stairway, through a plastic curtain, and out onto a narrow metal viewing platform where Garamond and a gaggle of his people stood around Wren and Wolf Kobold. They had both been made to kneel, and their hands were tied. Dr. Childermass said, “Oh, don’t be such a twerp, Mr. Garamond!”

“They were in a restricted area! Spying!” Garamond complained.

“Only because you let them come here,” retorted the Engineer. “Really, Garamond, your people are appallingly slack. Now let them go.”

Garamond and his young followers reluctantly freed their prisoners and let them stand. Tom ran to hug Wren, intending to tell her how foolish she’d been, but just as he reached her, he noticed what lay below, filling the hangar, and surprise drove all the words out of his head.

It was a town. Not a large town, nor a very elegant one (most of the buildings on its upper deck were missing, and there were no wheels or tracks) but a town nonetheless. It had no jaws, but in most other ways it seemed to Tom to match the basic blueprint of a London suburb: those small places like Tunbridge Wheels and Crawley that London had built to carry her excess population during the golden age of Municipal Darwinism.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” asked Clytie, gazing down with a look of awe and affection at the unfinished town.

Dr. Childermass said, “The fruit of many, many years of hard work, now nearing completion.”

A big saw was at work somewhere beneath the town, which was resting on a cradle of rusty stanchions. A spray of sparks scattered across the hangar floor like boisterous glowworms.

“You built this?” asked Tom, letting go of Wren and moving over to stand at the edge of the platform, gripping the pitted metal of the handrail to convince himself that it was not all a dream.

“Not quite,” said the Engineer. “The chassis and most of the upperworks were here already. My division began working on this project long before MEDUSA. Luckily this experimental hangar was deep enough in the Gut to survive without too much damage.”

“But why didn’t I know about it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, if London was building a whole new suburb, surely it would have been news?”

Dr. Childermass shrugged. “It was a secret. My Guild was very keen on secrecy. Anyway, this little place was only intended as a prototype. Experimental Suburb M/Ll is its official designation. We designed it as an answer to London’s problems, but Magnus Crome was never keen on it. He thought that MEDUSA was a better solution, and gradually he withdrew more and more funding from my Mag-Lev Research Division and diverted it to MEDUSA. Now those of us who survived MEDUSA’s failure have been able to pick up the work. It is not just the Engineers’ project anymore, Tom. Everyone in London has worked together on it.”

“And please don’t think of it as a suburb,” said Clytie. “It may be small, but to everyone in London it is a city; our new city. Soon we shall climb aboard it and leave these debris fields behind forever.”

Tom gazed down at the tiny forms of Londoners clambering over the new city, laying cables, welding girders, marking out the shapes of streets and buildings on the bare deck plates.

“But it’s got no wheels,” Wren pointed out.

“I can see you don’t know what Mag-Lev stands for, my dear,” said Dr. Childermass.

“It’s a code name, isn’t it?” asked Tom, who didn’t know either.

“Oh no,” Dr. Childermass said. “Mag-Lev is just a shorter way of saying Magnetic Levitation.”

“It floats!” said Wolf, gazing down at the new city entranced. “Like a gigantic hovercraft…”

Dr. Childermass gave him a graceful nod, pleased that at least one of her listeners was keeping up. “Rather quieter than a hovercraft, Herr Kobold, and not nearly so hungry for fuel. More like a very large, low-flying airship. You see those silvery disks along the flanks and underbelly?”

Tom, Wren, and Wolf nodded in unison. There was no missing the disks, dirty metal mirrors fifty feet across, swivel-mounted like an airship’s engine pods.

“Those are what I call Magnetic Repellers. Once they are powered, the whole city will be able to swim in the currents of the earth’s magnetic field. It will hang a few feet above the ground—or above the water; indeed, it makes no difference. The small prototypes we made worked splendidly. All we need do now is to complete the electromagnetic engine that powers the repellers—”

“The Kliest Coils!” cried Wren, like a plucky schoolgirl detective making a brilliant deduction.

“Yes,” admitted Dr. Childermass. “We were having trouble generating enough power until Mr. Pomeroy told me about Dr. Kliest’s work on the Electric Empire machines. I guessed at once that something like that was what we needed. Clytie has managed to acquire several dozen, along with the materials we need to fabricate new ones.”

Wren glanced at Wolf and saw him gripping the handrail and staring at the little city with the wide, shining eyes of someone who has been granted a vision of the future.

“So you see why we’re nervous about spies,” said Clytie Potts. “It’s taken us nearly twenty years to put New London together. We’d hate a scavenger to get wind of it now that we’re so nearly finished.”

“New London!” said Tom softly. “Of course…” You could not go on calling a place “Experimental Suburb M/L1” forever, not if you meant to live aboard it, and carry the culture and memories of your city away on it to new lands. New London.

“I’ll help!” he said. “I mean, if you can use me. I can’t stay here, eating your food, getting in your way, doing nothing, while you all do so much. I’m a Londoner. I want to see London move again as much as any of you. I’m no Engineer, but I kept the Jenny Haniver ticking over all right, and at Anchorage I helped Mr. Scabious build the hydroelectric system. I’ll stay, and help … that is, if Wren doesn’t mind…”

“Of course I don’t,” said Wren, and Tom could see that she was just as impressed as him by New London. “And I expect Mr. Kobold will want to help too,” she said, turning to draw their companion into the conversation.

But Wolf Kobold was gone. While everyone had been listening and looking down at New London, he had slipped silently away.

Garamond turned white and started shouting things about securing the perimeter and organizing searches. Dr. Childermass stared hard at him. “See?” she said. “Slack.”

News of Wolf’s escape went ahead of Tom and Wren. By the time they reached Crouch End, they found search parties being organized, armed with crowbars, crossbows, and even lightning guns. “We’ll catch ’im!” Angie Peabody vowed, buckling on a quiverful of crossbow bolts. “He ain’t going to sell New London out to no dirty pirate suburb.”

“Oh, be careful,” Wren warned. “He’s dangerous!”

“There are dozens of us and only one of your friend, Miss Natsworthy,” snapped Mr. Garamond. “And we know these debris fields a lot better than him. It’s Kobold who’s in danger, not us. Come along, everyone! Move out!”

“We’ll come with you,” said Tom.

“I think not, Mr. Natsworthy. As far as I’m concerned, you and your daughter are Kobold’s accomplices. You’re staying here.”

“Nonsense, Garamond,” snapped Chudleigh Pomeroy, emerging from his hut in dressing gown and nightcap. “Tom and Wren have as much to lose as any of us. Kobold is probably planning to make off aboard that airship of theirs.”

Wren hugged her father. “You stay here, Daddy,” she said and, snatching a lantern, ran off with Angie and her brother, Saab. Tom watched them go, the bobbing lamps disappearing into the hillocks of scrap, Mr. Garamond yelling orders that were meant to be military but made him sound like a panicky teacher in charge of a school outing. “At the double! Work in pairs! Watch where you’re pointing that lightning gun, Spandex Thrale!”

Fanning out across the rubble, the searchers moved away from Crouch End, combing every path and cranny of the rust hills for traces of Wolf. “He can’t have got far,” Wren heard people whispering. But he could, she thought. He’s a soldier; he’s already made his way back to Harrowbarrow once before, hundreds of miles through Green Storm territory. Hiding from us in a maze the size of London won’t be hard.

At least he had not made it to the airship hangar yet. The Jenny and the Archaeopteryx sat where they had been left, untouched. Garamond loudly detailed Saab and a few others to reinforce the guard on them, and the search parties moved on.

“It’s useless,” said Wren miserably, as she and Angie tramped away from the hangar, along that narrow path she had come in by on the first day. “He could be anywhere. He’s skilled at hiding. His whole suburb hides.”

“Oof!” said Angie.

It seemed a funny sort of reply. Wren turned to look at her friend and found herself, for the second time that night, unexpectedly face-to-face with Wolf Kobold.

“You’ve found me, Wren!” he said brightly. “Now it’s your turn to hide…”

He stooped over Angie, who had crumpled at his feet, knocked down by a blow from behind with some heavy object—there was no shortage of blunt instruments in the debris fields. Wren opened her mouth to scream for help, but before she could force a sound out, Wolf straightened up again, pointing Angie’s crossbow at her.

Wren wasn’t sure if she was supposed to raise her hands or not. She flapped her arms uncertainly, wondering if Angie was alive or dead. “You’ll never get away!” she said. “There are guards in the airship hangar, with lightning guns—”

“I don’t need an airship, Wren,” said Wolf, laughing. “I thought once that the Engineers’ secret might be something I could carry away aboard your Jenny Haniver, but now I’ve seen how wrong I was. I shall have to bring Harrowbarrow east…” Keeping the crossbow pointed at her, he started pulling off Angie’s belt, with its quiver of bolts and canteen of water. “Look, I have all I need for a trek across the Out-Country. I’ll ride on one of the Storm’s convenient Stalker trains. Hausdorfer will have Harrowbarrow waiting for me just across the line.” He grinned at Wren and held out one hand. “Why not come with me?”

“What?”

“You’re wasted in the life you lead, Wren. Trailing about after your dad. How long is he going to keep you trapped here, skivvying for these mudlarks? Come home to Harrowbarrow with me.”

“And watch it eat New London?” asked Wren. “I don’t think so.”

“Then think harder. This new technology the lady Engineer has developed is wasted on the Londoners. Well-meaning fools! They haven’t even put jaws on their new city. I’m going to take it for myself, and use it to make Harrowbarrow the most powerful predator on earth. A flying predator, armed with electric weapons! Think of it!”

Wren did. She didn’t like it.

Wolf laughed again, then blew her a kiss as he turned away. “There’ll always be a place for you in my town hall, Wren,” he said.

Wren bent over Angie. The girl groaned as Wren touched her face, which she hoped was a good sign. “Help!” she screamed, as loudly as she could. “Help! Help! He’s here! Over here!”

They came running: Saab, Garamond, Cat Luperini.

Someone with more medical know-how than Wren bent over Angie and said, “She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine.” But of Wolf there was no sign, and although the others kept hunting him until the sky above the wreck turned gray with morning, he was not sighted again; he had faded away, as if he had been just another of London’s ghosts.