by Philip Reeve
Nabisco Shkin was not usually a man who let his emotions show, but there were a great many birds, and it seemed a terribly long way to the ground. He screamed all the way down.
30
CAPTIVES OF THE STORM
The man in the mechanical armour was called Naga. Wren heard his men call him that as they took the Tin Book from her and started marching her back towards the Pavilion. It was a scary sort of name, and he looked pretty scary too, stomping along inside that hissing, grating exoskeleton, but he seemed civilized enough, and told his men off when they prodded Wren with their guns to make her walk faster. She was surprised, and relieved; she’d heard stories about the Storm shooting prisoners on sight. She thought about asking Naga what he meant to do with her, but she wasn’t quite brave enough. She glanced at Theo, hoping he’d explain what the Green Storm soldiers were saying to each other in their strange language, but Theo was walking with his head down, and would not look at her.
They climbed one of the Pavilion’s outside stairways, past a walled garden where a crowd of captured slaves and party guests had been penned by a company of Stalkers. Boo-Boo Pennyroyal was there, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up with a rousing sing-song, but it didn’t look to Wren as though it was working.
She assumed at first that she and Theo were being taken to join those other captives; but the soldiers kept them moving, past Pennyroyal’s swimming-pool, which had emptied itself across the tilting deck in a broad wet stain. Outside the ballroom windows stood a Stalker far more frightening than the mindless, faceless brutes Wren had seen so far. He was big, and gleaming, and his armoured skull-piece did not extend down to hide his face the way those of the others did, but left it partly bare; a dead, white face, with a long gash of a mouth that twitched slightly as his green eyes lighted on Wren. She looked away quickly, horrified at catching the thing’s attention. Was he going to speak to her? Attack her? But he just returned Naga’s salute and stepped aside, letting the Stalkers and their captives past him into the ballroom.
Someone had got the lights working again. Medical orderlies were taking Cynthia out on a stretcher. Wren heard her groan as they carried her past, and felt glad that her friend was still alive, then remembered that she had only been a fake friend, and wasn’t sure if she should be glad or not.
Up on the podium where the musicians should have been playing, a group of officers had gathered. Naga marched over to them and saluted smartly, making his report. The tallest of them turned to stare at the captives. Her face was a bronze death-mask, pierced by two glowing emerald eyes.
“Oh!” cried Theo.
Wren knew at once that this was the Stalker Fang. Who else could it be? She seemed to exude power; it crackled in the air about her like static electricity, making the small hairs on the back of Wren’s neck stand up on end. At her side she could feel Theo shaking as if he were in the presence of a goddess.
Naga said something else, and the Stalker stepped gracefully down from the podium, her eyes glowing more brightly as he drew the Tin Book from a hatch in his armour. Snatching it, she studied the symbols scratched into its cover, and gave a long, shivery sigh of satisfaction. Naga pointed at Wren and Theo and asked something, but the Stalker waved his question away. Settling herself cross-legged in the rubble, she opened the Tin Book and began to read.
“What now?” muttered Theo. “I thought she’d want to question us…”
“I think Naga thought so too,” said Wren. But it seemed they had been forgotten by the Stalker Fang. The Green Storm troops were watching her, as if waiting for more orders, but she was engrossed in the Tin Book. Naga muttered something to one of his companions. Then a woman – young and pretty, in a black version of the white uniforms the others wore – spoke to him, bowed, and jumped down from the podium, making her way to where the three prisoners waited. “You will please come with me,” she said in Anglish.
Wren felt relieved. This person looked less stern than the rest of the Green Storm landing party. Dr Zero said the printed name-tag on her uniform, under a pair of squiggly characters which Wren guessed would say the same in Shan Guonese. She looked far too young to be a doctor. Her tilted eyes and broad cheekbones reminded Wren of Inuit friends at home in Anchorage, and that cropped green hair suited her elfin face surprisingly. But there was no kindness in her voice. She took a gun from one of the troopers and levelled it at the two captives. “Outside, please. Now!”
They did as she said. As she herded them out on to the sun-deck Wren glanced up and saw the big Stalker watching her again. What had she done to interest him so? She looked away quickly, but she could still feel that green gaze following her.
Dr Zero motioned with her gun for the prisoners to cross the sun-deck and go down the stairs, as if she were taking them to join the others in the walled garden. But at the stairs’ foot, on a half-moon-shaped terrace out of sight and earshot of the ballroom, she suddenly stopped them and said in her soft, accented Anglish, “What is that thing the Stalker took from you?”
Wren said, “The Tin Book. The Tin Book of Anchorage…”
Dr Zero frowned, as if the name were one she had not heard before.
“Isn’t it what you came here for?” asked Theo.
“Apparently. Who knows?” Dr Zero shrugged, and glanced back in the direction of the ballroom, lowering her voice as if she feared that her mistress might overhear her. “Her Excellency did not see fit to share with anyone her reasons for attacking your city. What is this Tin Book? What makes it so important that she had to come here with warships to get it?”
“Cynthia said that whoever had the Tin Book could win the war,” said Wren.
She was trying to be helpful, but Dr Zero just stared at her. Was it only the moonlight that drained her face of colour? Her eyes were wide, looking through Wren towards some terrible vision of things to come. “Ai!” she breathed. “Of course. Of course! The book must be a clue to some kind of Old-Tech weapon. Maybe something like MEDUSA, powerful enough to destroy whole cities. And you have given it to the Stalker Fang! You fools!”
“That’s not fair!” protested Wren. “It wasn’t our fault…”
Dr Zero let out a little laugh, but there was no trace of humour in it, only fear. “It’s up to me now, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s up to me to stop her!”
She turned and started to run, back up the stairs towards the ballroom, flinging her gun aside as she went.
31
THE MOMENT OF THE ROSE
General Naga, still angry at being denied a chance to tackle Benghazi and the rest of the cluster, had led his shock-troops off to scour the lower levels of the pavilion, hoping to find some lurking nest of townie warriors who might put up a decent fight. In the ballroom, a few battle-Stalkers stood guard while the Stalker Fang sat reading. The metal pages of the book glowed softly green in the light from her eyes; her steel fingertips, tracing the ancient scratch-marks, made faint clicking sounds.
Shrike waited at the window, watching his mistress, but not really seeing her. He focused instead on the face in his mind; the face of the young girl prisoner whom Oenone Zero had just led away. He was sure, or almost sure, that he had seen that face before – those sea-grey eyes, that long jaw, that coppery hair, had all sent sparks of recognition darting through his mind. And yet, when he tried to match the girl’s features to the other faces in his memory, he found none that fitted.
Running feet on the sun-deck. Shrike turned, and sensed behind him in the ballroom the other Stalkers all reacting too, baring their claws in readiness. But it was only Dr Zero.
“Mr Shrike!”
She picked her way towards him between the bodies on the sun-deck. She was trying to smile, but the smile had gone wrong somehow, and turned into a kind of grimace. Shrike sensed her ragged breathing, the quick drumbeat of her heart, the sharp, warning odour of her sweat, and knew that something was about to happen. For whatever reason, Oenone Zero had decided that this was the moment to unleash her mysterious we
apon against the Stalker Fang.
But where was it? Her hands were empty; her trim black uniform left nowhere to hide anything powerful enough to harm a Stalker. He switched his eyes quickly up and down the spectrum, searching in vain for a concealed gun or the chemical tang of explosives.
“Mr Shrike,” said Dr Zero, stopping at his side and looking up into his face. “There is something important that I must tell you.” Beads of perspiration were pushing their way out through the pores of her face. Shrike turned his head and scanned the ballroom, wondering if she had brought something with her from the Requiem Vortex when they first landed. He checked the sun-deck too, looking for hidden devices behind the statues on the balustrades. Nothing. Nothing.
A touch on his hand. He looked down. Dr Zero’s fingers were resting lightly on his armoured fist. She was smiling properly now. Behind the thick lenses of her spectacles her eyes were filling with tears.
She said, “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration.”
And Shrike understood.
He turned and walked quickly away from her into the ballroom. He didn’t mean to go; he had not told his legs to move, but they moved anyway. He was Dr Zero’s weapon; that was all he had been all along.
“STOP ME!” he managed to shout as he neared the Stalker Fang. Two of the battle-Stalkers leaped forward to bar his path, and with two blows he disabled them both, knocking their heads off and leaving their blind, stupid bodies to stumble about jetting sparks and fluids. But at least he had warned Fang of what was happening. She turned, and rose to meet him. The Tin Book shimmered in her long hands.
“What are you doing, Mr Shrike?”
Shrike could not explain. He was a prisoner in his own body, with no power to control its sudden, deliberate movements. His arms raised themselves, his hands flexed. Out from his finger-ends sprang shining blades, longer and heavier than his old claws. Like a passenger in a runaway tank, he watched himself charge at the other Stalker.
The Stalker Fang unsheathed her own claws and swung to meet him. They crashed together, armour grating, sparks flashing. From behind the Stalker Fang’s bronze death-mask came a furious hiss. The Tin Book fell, snapping its rusty bindings, metal pages bounding across the floor. This is why I couldn’t see the danger, thought Shrike, remembering Oenone Zero’s clever fingers busy in his brain through all those lonely night-shifts in the Stalker Works. Why had he never guessed what she was doing to him? He had looked everywhere for the assassination weapon, but he had never suspected himself. And all this time the urge to kill his new mistress had been embedded in his mind, waiting for Oenone Zero to speak the words that would awaken it…
He could hear her behind him, scrambling through the wreckage of the ballroom, shouting out as if to encourage him, “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree…”
Breaking free, he drove the blades of his right hand through Fang’s chest in a spray of sparks and lubricants. The new claws were good; harder than Stalker-skin. Fang hissed again, her grey robes in tatters, her armour ripped open and running with thick rivulets of the stuff that served her for blood. Oenone Zero was behind her, shouting, “You can’t harm him! I built him to kill you, and I gave him the weapons to do it! Reinforced armour! Tungsten alloy claws! Strength you can only dream of!”
Irritated, the Stalker Fang lashed backwards and caught Dr Zero a glancing blow which flung her across the dance-floor. Shrike broke into a run and hit the other Stalker hard, the impact driving her away from the fallen woman, out into the moonlight on the sun-deck. More battle-Stalkers grabbed at him, but he kicked their legs from under them and drove his claws through the couplings in their necks. Necks seemed to be the weak point of Popjoy’s Stalkers; their severed heads clattered on the paving like dropped skillets, green eyes going dark. Shrike smashed the flailing bodies out of his way. One of them tangled itself in the rags of curtain hanging inside the shattered windows, and the sparks spraying from its neck set the fabric alight. Flames spilled up the curtain and spread quickly across the ballroom ceiling, their light filling Fang’s armour as she scrambled away across the sun-deck, one leg trailing, one arm hanging by a tangle of flexes, dented and leaking like a half-squashed bug.
Shrike wanted to give up this fight. He wanted to go back into the blazing ballroom and help Dr Zero. But his rebel body had other ideas. He strode towards the Stalker Fang, and when she lunged at him he was ready for her, caught her by the head and drove the blades of his thumbs in through her eyes so that the green light died and he felt his claws grate against the machine inside her skull.
She hissed and shrieked and kicked at him, tearing the armour of his torso – she had blades on her toes, too; he had not forseen that – and he slammed her hard against the balustrade at the deck’s edge. Stonework splintered, fragments of pillar and architrave exploding whitely in the moonlight and Fang tumbling through it. Shrike, all his nerves buzzing with the fierce joy of a fighting Stalker, leaped after her.
And Wren? And Theo? Abandoned by their captors, they stood gawping at each other on the crescent terrace, not quite daring to believe that they had been forgotten, and too alarmed by the terrible noises coming from above them to risk a break for freedom. Now fragments of balustrade came showering down around them, and the Stalker Fang and her attacker dropped like spiky comets from the deck above. Huddled against Theo, Wren watched wide-eyed. The clash of Stalker against Stalker was something nobody had seen for centuries; not since the Nomad Empires of the north sent their undead armies against each other back in the lost years before the dawn of Traction, when men were men and cities stayed where you put them.
“But I thought that he was on her side,” complained Wren.
“Shhh!” hissed Theo urgently, afraid that her words would reveal their presence to the Stalkers.
But the Stalkers had other things on their minds. Fang sent Shrike reeling backwards with a kick, but lacked the strength to follow through; instead, she looked about for an escape route, calling out in her whispery voice for help. She gripped the handrail at the terrace edge, and, as Shrike recovered and struck viciously at her back, heaved herself over and dropped down into the gardens.
Shrike jumped after her. He could hear the shouting of alarmed once-born behind him and, looking back, saw Naga and his men running to the broken balcony, staring down. He ran on, following the trail of oil and ichor that the injured Stalker had left. She seemed at first to be heading towards the Requiem Vortex, but she was blind now, and perhaps her other senses were damaged too. Shrike followed the sick machine smell of her, through thick shrubberies, through the green corridors of an ornamental maze, down the steep slope of the park. Against the railings at the brim she turned at bay. The trailing arm hung uselessly, and she barely had strength to raise the other. Her claws slipped and grated like broken scissors.
Filled with pity, Shrike blurted out, “I’M SORRY.”
“The Zero woman!” hissed the Stalker Fang. “She is a traitor, and you are her creature. I should have been wiser than to put my faith in the once-born…”
With a savage blow Shrike smashed the bronze mask from her face. Her head lolled backwards on damaged neck-joints, and moonlight fell across the face of the dead aviatrix; a gaunt grey face, black lips drawn back from olive-stone teeth, smashed green lamps where eyes should have been. She raised her maimed steel hand to hide herself, and the familiar gesture startled Shrike. Where had he seen it before?
She turned suddenly away from him, awkward and broken, her blind eyes staring up at the stars. “Do you see it?” she asked. “The bright one in the east? That is ODIN; the last of the great orbital weapons which the Ancients set in heaven. It has been waiting up there, sleeping, since the Sixty Minute War. It is powerful. Powerful enough to destroy countless cities. And the Tin Book of Anchorage holds the code that will awaken it. Help me, Mr Shrike. Help me to awaken ODIN and make the world green again.”
Shrike severed her neck with three fier
ce blows, her long scream dying as the head came free.
He pitched her body over the handrail, then picked up the head and the fallen mask and flung them after it. The mask flashed in the moonlight as it fell, and Shrike’s rage and his new strength seemed to drain out of him. Jaggedy interference patterns crackled across his mind as the secret instincts Oenone Zero had installed there shut down. Memories came flying at him like bats. He raised his hands to ward them off, but still they came. They were not the calm, sad, human memories that had filled his mind while he lay dying on the Black Island, but just the memories of every terrible thing he had done since he became a Stalker; the battles and the murders, the once-born outlaws butchered for a bounty, the beggar-boy he’d broken once in Airhaven for no better reason than the simple joy of killing. How had he done such things? How had he not felt then the guilt and shame which overwhelmed him now?
And then a scarred face rose in his memory like something surfacing from deep water, so clear that he could almost put a name to it; “H… HES…”
“There it is!” shouted voices close behind him; once-born soldiers blundering out of the shrubbery. “Stop it! Stop, Stalker, in the name of the Green Storm!” Led by Naga in his clanking battle-armour, the once-born approached cautiously, levelling huge hand-cannon and steam-powered machine-guns.