A Darkling Plain (8 page)

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.

***

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."