by Philip Reeve
“Nobody knows, Wren. Maybe he died before he could say, or maybe it’s just been forgotten. The Tin Book is just another of the many mysteries the Ancients left us. All we know is that the name of an old god crops up several times among all those numbers: Odin. So maybe it was a religious text. Oh, and the picture on the front is the presidential seal of the American Empire.”
Wren looked critically at the eagle. “It looks more like some sort of bird to me.”
Miss Freya laughed. She looked beautiful standing there in the wash of afternoon sunlight from the library windows; as big and golden as the Earth Goddess herself, and Wren loved her, and felt ashamed for planning to rob her. She asked a few more questions about the Tin Book, but she wasn’t really interested in the answers. She gave the thing back as soon as she could, and left Miss Freya to her gardening, promising to come back soon and talk about becoming a teacher.
The day was passing quickly, the shadow of the Winter Palace sweeping across the city’s rusty deckplates as the sun climbed the sky. Soon it would be time for Wren to keep her rendezvous with Gargle. She was starting to feel more and more nervous about it. However dashing and brave and handsome he was, however much she liked the idea of helping the Lost Boys, she could not steal from people she had known all her life. Sooner or later the Tin Book was sure to be missed, and when it was Miss Freya would remember the interest Wren had shown in it, and know who was responsible.
And what was the Tin Book anyway? What made Gargle want it so? Wren was not stupid. She knew that documents from the Ancient era sometimes held clues to things that were very dangerous indeed; Dad had told her once that London, the city he grew up in, had been blown entirely to pieces by a machine called MEDUSA. What if the Tin Book contained instructions for building something like that, and Gargle had found a way of reading it?
She wandered to the south side of Anchorage and down the well-worn fishermen’s stairs to the mooring beach, where she sat in the shade of an old, rusted-up caterpillar unit and tried to work out what to do. Her huge secret, which had seemed so exciting, was beginning to feel like a bit of a burden. She wished there was someone she could share it with. But who? Certainly not Mum or Dad or Miss Freya; they would be horrified at the thought of Lost Boys in Vineland. Tildy would probably panic, too. She imagined telling Nate Sastrugi, and asking him to help her, but somehow, now that she knew Gargle, Nate Sastrugi seemed not nearly so handsome; just a boy, rather dull and slow, who didn’t know much about anything except fishing.
She didn’t notice the rowing boat nosing in towards the beach until her mother got out of it and shouted, “Wren? What are you doing? Come and help me with this.”
“This” was a poor little deer, stone dead with a hole in its chest, and Mum was dragging it out of the boat and getting ready to take it up to Dog Star Court, where she would butcher it and salt the meat for winter. Wren stood up and went towards her, then noticed how high the sun was. “I can’t!” she said.
“What?”
“I’ve got to meet someone.”
Hester put the deer down and stared at her. “Who? That Sastrugi boy, I suppose?”
Wren had been trying not to start another argument, but the tone of Mum’s voice was enough to make her temper flare. “Well, why not?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t have to be as miserable as you all the time. I’m not a child any more. Just because no boys ever liked you when you were my age—”
“When I was your age,” Mum said, low and dangerous, “I saw things you wouldn’t believe. I know what people are capable of. That’s why we’ve always tried to protect you, and keep you close and safe, your dad and me.”
“Oh, I’m safe all right,” said Wren bitterly. “What do you think is going to happen to me in Vineland? Nothing ever happens to anybody here. You’re always hinting about what a terrible time you had, and saying how lucky I am compared with you, but I bet your old life was more exciting than this! I bet Dad thinks so! I’ve seen the way he looks at that picture of your old ship. He loved being out in the world, flying about, and I bet he would be still if he hadn’t got himself stuck here with you.”
Mum hit her. It was a hard, sudden slap, with the flat of Mum’s open hand, and as Wren jerked her head backwards away from the blow Mum’s wedding-bracelet grazed her cheek. Wren had not been slapped since she was small. She felt her face burning, and when she touched it little bright specks of blood came away on her fingers from where the bracelet had caught her. She tried to speak, but she could only gasp.
“There,” said Mum gruffly. She seemed almost as shocked as Wren. She reached out to touch Wren’s face, gently this time, but Wren whirled away from her and ran along the beach and into the cool shadows under Anchorage, running beneath the old city and out into the pastures behind, with her mother’s voice somewhere behind her shouting furiously, “Wren! Come back! Get back here!” She kept to the woodshore so the pickers in the orchards wouldn’t see her, and ran, and ran, barely thinking about where she was running to until she arrived tearful and out of breath among the crags at the top of the island, and there was Gargle waiting for her.
5
NEWS FROM THE SEA
He was all kindness and concern, sitting her down on a mossy stone, taking off his neckerchief to wipe her face, holding her hand until she was calm enough to speak.
“What is it, Wren? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing really. My mum. That’s all. I hate her.”
“Now I’m certain that isn’t true.” Gargle knelt down beside her. She didn’t think that he had looked anywhere but at her face since she found him, and his eyes, behind the smoked blue glasses that he wore, were a friend’s eyes, kind and worried. “You’re lucky to have a mum,” he said. “We Lost Boys, we’re just kidnapped when we’re little. We none of us know who our mums or our dads are, though we dream about them sometimes, and think how sweet it would be if we could meet them. If your mum’s hard on you I think it’s just a sign that she’s worried about you.”
“You don’t know her,” said Wren, and held her breath to stop hiccuping. When she had finished she said, “I saw the book.”
“The Tin Book?” Gargle sounded surprised, as if he’d been so worried about Wren that he’d forgotten the thing that brought him to Vineland in the first place. “Thank you!” he said. “You’ve done in a morning what might have taken a limpet crew a week or more. Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Wren. “I mean, I don’t know if I should tell you. Not unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but… Why would anybody want it? What’s it for?”
Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the pines. Wren thought he looked angry, and was afraid that she’d offended him, but when he turned to her again he just seemed sad.
“We’re in trouble, Wren,” he said. “You’ve heard of Professor Pennyroyal?”
“Of course,” said Wren. “He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to ruin. He stole Mum and Dad’s airship and flew off in her…”
“Well, he wrote a book about it,” Gargle said. “It’s called Predator’s Gold, and in it he talks about what he calls ‘parasite pirates’ who come up from under the ice to burgle cities. It’s mostly rubbish, but it sold like hot cakes among the cities we used to live off of; the north Atlantic raft towns and the ice-runners. They all started installing Old-Tech burglar alarms and checking their undersides for parasites once a day, which makes it kind of hard to attach a limpet to them.”
Wren thought about Professor Pennyroyal. All her life she’d been hearing stories of that wicked man. She’d seen the long, L-shaped scar on Dad’s chest where Mrs Scabious had opened him up to fetch the bullet out. And now it turned out that the Lost Boys were Pennyroyal’s victims, too!
“But I still don’t see why you need the Tin Book,” she said.
“We’ve had to send our limpets further and further south,” Gargle explained. “Right down into the Middle Sea an
d the Southern Ocean, where the raft cities don’t bother to keep watch for us. At least, they never used to. This past summer, we’ve started losing limpets. Three went south and never returned. No word, no distress signal, nothing. I think maybe one of those cities has got hold of some kind of device that lets them see us coming, and they’ve been sinking our limpets, or capturing them. And if some of our people are captured, and tortured, and talk…”
“They might come looking for Grimsby?”
“Exactly.” Gargle looked thoughtfully at her, as if he was glad he had chosen to tell all this to such an intelligent, perceptive girl. He took her hands again. “We need something that will get us ahead of the Drys again, Wren. That’s why I need the Tin Book.”
“But it’s just a load of old numbers,” said Wren. “It came off some old American submarine…”
“Exactly,” said Gargle. “Those Ancients had subs way ahead of anything we’ve got. Ships the size of cities that could cruise right round the world without once having to come up for air. If we had that kind of technology we’d never have to fear the Drys again. We could set the whole of Grimsby moving, and they’d never find us.”
“So you think the Tin Book is a plan for a submarine?”
“Maybe not exactly. But there might be enough clues in there to help us learn how they worked. Please, Wren. Tell us where it is.”
Wren shook her head. “Miss Freya and the rest aren’t as scary as you think,” she promised him. “Come down to the city with me. Introduce yourself. I asked my dad about you. He says you helped save Vineland. And you’ve been hurt by Pennyroyal, just like us. I expect Miss Freya will be happy to give you the Tin Book as a gift.”
Gargle sighed. “I’d like that, Wren. I’d love it. But it would all take time. There’d be so much explaining to do, so much mistrust to overcome. And all the time we stay here, more limpets might be disappearing, and whoever’s taking them may already be zeroing in on Grimsby. I’m sorry, Wren. We have to do it the Lost Boy way. Tell me where the book is and we’ll take it tonight and be off. And maybe, when we have it, and Grimsby’s safe again, maybe then I’ll return, and introduce myself, and there’ll be peace and friendship between our two cities.”
Wren pulled free of him and hurried away between the trees, almost running, to a place where she could look down upon the rooftops of Anchorage. He didn’t mean what he had said about coming back, she was sure of that. He had just said it to make her feel better. Once he left this place, he would never return. Why should he, when he had a whole world to roam in? A world of cities that floated and flew and rolled beneath skies filled with airships. That’s what Gargle would be going back to, while she, all she had to look forward to was being Miss Freya’s assistant and growing old and bored in Anchorage and one day – if Mum would let her – becoming Mrs Nate Sastrugi and having a lot of bored little children of her own.
“Wren,” he said, behind her.
“No,” she said. She turned to face him, trying not to let her voice shake too much. “No, I won’t tell you where to find the book. I’ll take it myself, and bring it to you, tonight. And then I’ll come with you.” She laughed and made a big gesture with both arms, trying to take in Anchorage, the lake, the hills beyond, the whole Dead Continent. “I hate this place. It’s too small for me. I want to go with you when you leave. I want to see Grimsby, and the Hunting Ground and the Traction Cities and the Bird Roads. That’s my price. I’ll bring you the Tin Book, if you’ll take me with you when you leave.”
6
WE ARE MAKING A NEW WORLD
Dr Zero took her work seriously. Often she carried on late into the night, long after the Stalker Works were quiet and empty, her busy fingers tinkering inside Shrike’s chest cavity or in his open brain. And as she worked, she talked to him, filling the old Stalker in on things he’d missed during his years in the grave. She told him of how the hard-line faction called the Green Storm had seized power in the Anti-Tractionist nations of old Asia and the North, and of their long war against the Traction Cities. She told him of their immortal leader, the Stalker Fang.
“A STALKER?” he asked, surprised. He was growing used to the Green Storm’s Stalkers; mindless, faceless things who couldn’t even recharge themselves, but had to have their batteries laboriously extracted and replaced after a few days of action. They were the sort of creatures who gave the living dead such a bad name. He could not imagine one of them leading armies.
“Oh, the Stalker Fang is nothing like the rest,” Dr Zero assured him. “She is beautiful, and brilliant. She has an Old-Tech brain, like yours, and all sorts of special adaptations. And she was built using the body of a famous League agent, Anna Fang. The Storm like people to think that Anna Fang has come back from the dead to lead our glorious war against the barbarians.”
The thought of war stirred instincts deep in Shrike’s Stalker-brain. He flexed his hands, but the blades which he knew should be housed inside them did not spring out.
Dr Zero said, “I have removed your finger-glaives.”
“HOW AM I TO FIGHT IF I AM UNARMED?” he asked.
“Mr Shrike,” Doctor Zero told him, “if we just wanted another lumbering battle-Stalker, I could have built one myself. There is no shortage of dead bodies to Resurrect. But you are an antique, more complex than anything we can build. You’re not just a thing, you’re a person.” She touched his harmless hands. “It made a nice change, to work on a Stalker who was not just another soldier.”
An airship named The Sadness of Things arrived to carry Shrike to a place they called Forward Command. He stood at Dr Zero’s side in the observation gondola as they flew west, over high snow-clad mountains, then the plains of the eastern Hunting Ground, which were Green Storm territory now, with here and there the wreck of a destroyed Traction City rusting in the grass.
“This land was all captured in the first weeks of the war, nearly fourteen years ago,” said Dr Zero, still keen to educate her patient. “At first the barbarians were taken completely by surprise when our air-fleets came sweeping down on them out of the mountains. We drove west, herding terrified cities ahead of us, smashing any that dared turn and fight. But slowly the cities started to group together and defend themselves. A union of German-speaking industrials called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft stopped our advance westward and pushed us back to the Rustwater Marshes, and a rabble of slavic traction towns attacked our settlements in Khamchatka and the Altai Shan.
“There has been stalemate ever since. Sometimes we push west and destroy a few more cities, sometimes they push east and devour a few of our forts or farms.”
The landscape below was changing; pitted and scarred by recent fighting. Enormous shell-craters shone like mirrors stitched into a blanket of mud. From this height, the vast track-marks of the enemy’s fighting suburbs and the complicated entrenchments and fortifications of the Storm looked almost identical.
“They say we are making the world green again,” sighed Dr Zero, “but all we are doing is turning it into mud…”
Forward Command turned out to be a captured city; a small, four-tiered place standing motionless on the slopes of a hill at the northern end of the Rustwater Marshes. Its tracks lay curled on the mud around it. The wheels and lower tiers were scorched and ruined, but on the upper levels lights showed dimly in the deepening twilight. Warships came and went from makeshift air-harbours, and flocks of birds wheeled above the wrecked rooftops. Shrike was surprised at the intelligent way the flocks veered to avoid the airships, until The Sadness of Things passed close to one and he saw that they were not living birds but Stalkers, their eyes glowing with the same eerie green light as his, their beaks and talons replaced with blades. Below, on roadways bulldozed through the mud, more Stalkers marched, some man-shaped, others bulky, crab-like, multi-legged.
“THE GREEN STORM HAS MANY STALKERS,” he said.
“The Green Storm has need of many, with so many battles to fight,” replied Dr Zero.
The Sadness of T
hings settled on a landing-field under the walls of the city’s town hall. A man was waiting for them there, a small, bald-headed old man in fur-lined robes, flinching at the sporadic rumbles of gunfire rolling from the marshes to the west. He grinned when he saw Shrike come down the Sadness’s gangplank. “Shrikey! Good to see you up and stalking again! Remember me? I was one of old Twixie’s assistants. Helped examine you, back in poor old London.”
Shrike’s brain, which used to hold images of ten thousand once-born faces, now remembered only Dr Zero and a few technicians from the Stalker works. He studied the old man’s yellowing teeth, the tattoo of a red wheel sunk in the wrinkles between his bushy eyebrows, then turned to Dr Zero like a child looking to its mother for reassurance.
“This is Dr Popjoy,” she told him softly. “Founder of the Resurrection Corps, and our leader’s personal Surgeon-Mechanic.” Then, to the old man, she said, “I am afraid that Mr Shrike has few memories of his former career, Dr Popjoy. That section of his brain was severely damaged; I was unable to unlock it.”
“Pity,” said Popjoy absent-mindedly. “Might have been nice to have a chin-wag about the old times. Still, maybe it’s for the best.” He walked all round the Stalker twice, reaching out to pat Shrike’s shiny new body-work and tweak the flexes which trailed from his steel skull. “Excellent!” he chuckled. “A right proper job, Treacle! Couldn’t have done it better myself!”
“I seek only to please the Stalker Fang,” said Dr Zero meekly.
“As do we all, Treacle. Come on now, we’d best go up; she’s expecting us.”
Hurricane lanterns burned in the long corridors of the building. Uniformed once-born hurried about shouting commands, waving sheets of paper, talking loudly into field-telephones. Many of them had dyed their hair green as a symbol of their loyalty to the Storm. They spoke in clipped battle-codes which Shrike found that he could understand perfectly; Dr Zero’s doing, no doubt. As he followed her and Popjoy up the broad stairways he wondered what other adjustments she had made.