by Philip Reeve
“Yes, but only so he could get his hands on the Tin Book again,” said Theo. “Leave him. Maybe the Storm will find him, and take him with them when they leave…”
But behind him, with a roar of aëro-engines, Hawkmoths and Fox Spirits were beginning to rise from behind the trees, casting long shadows on the smoke as they threaded their way out through Cloud 9’s rigging. The Storm were leaving already.
Oenone Zero had been dragged out of her dreams by the stink of burning curtains. There was a pain in her head, and when she tried to breathe sharp smoke caught at the back of her throat and made her choke and gasp and roll over on to her back.
Above her, flames were washing across the ornate ceiling of the ballroom in rippling waves, like some bright liquid. She pushed herself up, groping for her glasses, but her glasses were smashed, and the flames were rising all around her. Among them she saw the scattered pages of the Tin Book beginning to blacken.
She plunged through a swaying curtain of fire and out on to the terrace. It was a blur of smoke and firelight and running bodies, and as she reeled through it, looking for the stairs, General Naga barred her way. She backed away from him, tripped over a fallen Stalker and sat down, helpless, in the path of the armoured man.
“Dr Zero?” he said. “This… This attack… It was your doing?”
Oenone knew that he was going to kill her. She was so full of fear that it came seeping out of her mouth in thin, high-pitched noises. She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a prayer to the god of the ruined chapel in Tienjing, because although she’d never had much time for gods she thought that He must know what it meant to be frightened, and to suffer, and to die. And the fear left her, and she opened her eyes, and beyond the smoke the moon was flying, full and white, and she thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She smiled at General Naga and said, “Yes. It was me. I installed secret instructions in the Stalker Shrike’s brain. I made him destroy her. It had to be done.”
Naga knelt, and his big metal hands gripped her head. He leaned forward and placed a clumsy kiss between her eyebrows. “Magnificent!” he said, as he helped her to stand. “Magnificent! Set a Stalker to kill a Stalker, eh?”
He led her away from the fire, through staring, flamelit groups of shocked troops and aviators, out across the lawn towards the Requiem Vortex. He took a cloak from someone and wrapped it around her trembling shoulders. “You can’t imagine how long I’ve waited for this day!” he said. “Oh, she was a good leader in those first few years, but the war’s dragged on, and she keeps wasting men and ships as if they’re counters in a game. How long I’ve tried to think of a way… And you’ve done it! You’ve rid us of her! Your friend Mr Shrike has run off somewhere, by the way. Is he dangerous?”
Oenone shook her head, imagining what Shrike must be going through. “It’s hard to know. I suppressed some of his memories to make room for my secret programs. Now that he has fulfilled his duties, those memories will be starting to resurface. He’ll be confused… Perhaps insane… Poor Mr Shrike.”
“He’s just a machine, Doctor.”
“No, he’s more than that. You must tell your men to search for him.”
Naga waved a couple of sentries aside and climbed the gangplank of the Requiem Vortex. Inside the gondola he guided Oenone to a chair. She felt terribly tired. Her own face stared back at her from his burnished breastplate, smeared with blood and ash and looking naked without her spectacles. Naga patted her shoulder and muttered gruffly, “There, girl, there,” as if he were calming a spooked animal. He had a soldier’s touch, awkward and unused to gentleness. “You’re a very brave young woman.”
“I’m not. I was afraid. So afraid…”
“But that’s what bravery is, my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you’re not afraid, it doesn’t count.” He fetched a flask out of a hatch in his armour. “Here, try some brandy; it will help to steady you. Of course, we won’t let anyone know that you were responsible. Officially, at least, we must mourn the Stalker Fang’s passing. We’ll blame the townies. It’ll fire up our warriors like nothing since this war began! We’ll launch attacks on all fronts; avenge our leader’s fall…”
Oenone spluttered at the sharp taste of the brandy and pushed the flask away. She said, “No! The war must stop…”
Naga laughed, misunderstanding. “The Storm can still win battles without that iron witch telling us what to do! Don’t worry, Dr Zero. We’ll do better without her. Blast those barbarian cities to a standstill! And when I take my place as leader you’ll be rewarded – palaces, money, any job you like…”
Dazed, Oenone shook her head. Watching this armoured man stride about the cramped, battle-damaged gondola, she saw that she had underestimated the Green Storm. War had made them, and they would make sure that the war went on and on.
“No,” she said. “That’s not why I –”
But General Naga had forgotten her for the moment and was issuing orders to his sub-officers. “Put out a message on all frequencies; the Stalker Fang has fallen in battle. Need for calm and stability at this tragic time, etc etc. In order to continue our glorious struggle against Tractionist barbarism I am assuming supreme command. And prepare the Requiem Vortex for departure; I want to be back in Tienjing before one of our comrades tries to seize power for themselves.”
“And the prisoners, General?”
Naga hesitated, glanced at Dr Zero and said, “I won’t start my reign with a massacre. Bring them aboard. But please tell that Pennyroyal woman to stop singing.”
The Stalker Shrike watched from a hiding place among the bushes as the Storm’s boarding parties hurried back aboard the Requiem Vortex. Someone with a loud-hailer was shouting, “Mr Shrike! Mr Shrike! Come aboard! We are leaving!”
Shrike knew that Dr Zero must have ordered them to find him, and felt grateful to the surgeon-mechanic, but he did not show himself. He had to stay on Cloud 9. The girl he had seen outside the ballroom was not among the prisoners who were being shepherded into the air-destroyer. If she was staying, Shrike would stay. In some way that he did not yet understand that girl was connected with Hester. Perhaps by staying near her he would find Hester again.
34
FINDERS KEEPERS
Fishcake lay in the dunes behind the beach. Numb with cold and betrayal, he watched as Brighton fired up its battered engines and paddled lopsidedly away, the voices of the victorious Lost Boys drifting raucously across the water with the smoke.
He had barely escaped with his life. As the Lost Boys stormed the museum he had run like a hare from the hunt, out of a back entrance and away through the burning streets, sobbing hopelessly, “Mr Natsworthy, come back, come back…” until at last he reached the city’s stern, and flung himself blindly off an observation platform there, seeking safety in the sea.
The swim to the shore had exhausted him, and he had almost drowned in the surf. Now, tired and frozen as he was, it was time for him to move again. For hungry desert towns were rolling past him through the dunes, and fierce amphibious suburbs were steaming towards him, drawn by the wrecked airships and flying machines that littered the sand and washed in and out on the surf. Fishcake, who had never been near a traction town before, could barely believe how high their wheels towered over him in the smoky air, or how the ground shook and shifted as they went lumbering by. Choking on exhaust smoke and up-flung sand, he scrambled away from them and ran into the desert.
He really was a Lost Boy now. He had no idea where he was, nor where he was going. He ran on and on, hour after hour, slithering over dunes, stumbling across dry expanses of gravel and piles of barren rocks. He was scared of the dark and the deep shadows, which were growing deeper still as the moon sank towards the western horizon. At last, on the bank of an empty creek, he collapsed, hugging his damp knees against his chest for warmth and whining aloud, “What’s to become of poor little Fishcake?”
Nobody answered, and that was what scared him most of all. Gargle and Remora and Wr
en had let him down, and the fake Mummies and Daddies had tricked him; Mr Shkin had failed him, and Tom Natsworthy had abandoned him, but he would have rather been with any of them than out here on his own.
The moon gleamed on something that lay nearby. Fishcake, who had been trained to hunt for gleaming things, crept closer without thinking.
A face gazed up at him from the sand. He picked it up. It was made of bronze, and had been quite badly dented. There were holes for the eyes. The lips were slightly parted in a smile that Fishcake found reassuring. It was beautiful. Fishcake held it to his own face and peered through the eyeholes at the westering moon. Then he stuffed the mask inside his coat and moved on, feeling braver, wondering what other treasures this desert held.
A few dozen yards further on his sharp eyes caught a movement down on the floor of a dry water-course. Nervous as an animal, he edged closer. A severed hand was creeping across the gravel. It appeared to be made of metal. It moved like a broken crab, dragging itself along by its fingers. Flexes and machinery and something that looked like a bone poked out of the wrist. Fishcake watched it, and then, because it seemed to have a sense of purpose about it, he began to follow.
Soon he began to pass other, less lively body-parts; a torn-off metal leg bent the wrong way and draped across a boulder, then a gashed and dented torso. The hand spidered over that for a while, then crept on its way. A few hundred yards further on he found the other hand, still attached to most of an arm, feeling its way towards a slope of gravel and small boulders where stunted acacia trees grew.
And there he found the head; a skeletal grey face cupped in a metal skull, surrounded by a tangle of cables and flexes and ducts. It looked dead, but as Fishcake crouched over it he knew that it had sensed him. The lenses of the glass eyes were shattered but the spidery machinery inside twitched and clicked, still struggling to see. The dead mouth moved. So faintly that Fishcake could barely hear, the head whispered to him.
“I am damaged.”
“Just a bit,” Fishcake agreed. He felt sorry for it, poor old head. He said, “What’s your name?”
“I am Anna,” the head whispered. Then it said, “No, no. Anna is dead. I am the Stalker Fang.” It seemed to have two voices; one harsh and commanding, the other hesitant, astonished. “We were taken by Arkangel,” said the second voice. “I am seventeen years old. I am a slave of the 4th type, in the shipyards of Stilton Kael, but I am building my own ship and…” Then the first voice hissed, “No! That was long ago, in Anna’s time, and Anna is dead. Sathya, my dear? Is that you? I’m so confused…”
“My name’s Fishcake,” said Fishcake, a bit confused himself.
“I think I am damaged,” said the head. “Valentine tricked me – the sword in my heart – I’m so cold… So cold… No. Yes. I remember now. I remember. The Zero woman’s machine… And General Naga stood by and let it happen… I was betrayed.”
“Me too,” said Fishcake. He could see the twisted fittings around the edges of the skull where the bronze mask had been torn off. He took the mask out of his coat and fixed it back into place as best he could.
“Please help her,” the head whispered, and then, “You will repair me.”
“I don’t know how.”
“She – I will tell you.”
Fishcake looked around. Bits of the Stalker’s body were edging towards him through the sand, homing in on the head. The clutching movements of the fingers made him think of crab-cams he’d repaired for Gargle. “I might be able to,” he said. “Not here. I’d need tools and stuff. If we could gather up all your bits and find a city or something…”
“Do it,” commanded the head. “Then I will travel east. To Shan Guo. To my house at Erdene Tezh. I will have my revenge upon the once-born. Yes, yes…”
“I’ll come with you,” said Fishcake, eager not to be deserted again. “I can help you. You’ll need me.”
“I know the secrets of the Tin Book,” the head said, whispering to itself. “The codes are safe inside my memory. I will return to Erdene Tezh, and awaken ODIN.”
Fishcake did not know what that meant, but he was glad to have someone telling him what to do, even if she was only a head. He stood up. A little way off a torn grey robe flapped from the branches of a bush. Fishcake pulled it free and knotted it into a sort of bag. Then, while the Stalker Fang’s head whispered to itself about the world made green again, he began collecting up the scattered pieces of her body.
35
MAROONED IN THE SKY
It seemed very quiet on Cloud 9 once the Storm were gone. The wind still sang through the drooping rigging, the remaining gasbags jostled against each other, and the crash of collapsing floors came sometimes from inside the burning Pavilion, but none of them were human sounds, so they did not seem to matter.
Theo and Wren carried the unconscious Pennyroyal into the shelter of a grove of cypress trees between his boathouse and the ornamental maze. There was a fountain at the heart of the grove, and they laid Pennyroyal down and did their best to make him comfortable. Then Theo sat down and rested his head on his arms and went to sleep too. That surprised Wren. Tired as she was, she knew she was far too scared and anxious to sleep. It was different for Theo, she supposed. He’d been in battles before; he was probably used to this sort of desperate uncertainty.
“Boo-Boo, my dove, I can explain everything!” muttered Pennyroyal, stirring and half opening his eyes. He saw Wren sitting beside him and mumbled, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Go back to sleep,” said Wren.
“You don’t like me,” said Pennyroyal grumpily. “Look, I’m sorry about your father, I really am. Poor young Tom. I never meant to hurt him. It was an accident, I swear.”
Wren checked his bandages. “It’s not just that,” she said. “It’s that book of yours. It’s so full of lies! About Miss Freya, and Anchorage, and about my mum cutting a deal with the Huntsmen…”
“Oh, but that bit’s true,” said Pennyroyal. “I admit I may have spiced up the facts a little here and there, purely for reasons of pacing, but it really was Hester Shaw who brought Arkangel down on us. She told me so herself. ‘I’m the one who sent the Huntsmen here,’ she said. ‘I wanted Tom for myself again. He’s my predator’s gold.’ And, a few months later, among a bunch of refugees from Arkangel, I ran into a charming young person called Julianna. She’d been a slave-girl in the household of that lout Piotr Masgard, and she told me she’d seen the deal done; an aviatrix came to her master with word of Anchorage’s position. A young aviatrix, barely more than a girl, with her face split in two by a terrible scar…”
“I don’t believe you,” said Wren crossly, and left him there and went out into the gardens. It couldn’t be true; Pennyroyal was up to his old tricks again, twisting the truth about. But why does he insist on sticking to that part of his story, when he’s admitted the rest was fibs? she wondered uneasily. Well, maybe he believed it. Maybe Mum had told him that, to scare him. And as for Masgard’s slave-girl, just because she’d seen Masgard talking to a scarred aviatrix, that didn’t mean it was Mum; the air-trade was a dangerous life; there must be lots of aviatrices with messed-up faces…
She shook her head to try and drive the disturbing thoughts away. She had better things to worry about than Pennyroyal’s silly stories. Cloud 9 was wobbling beneath her feet, and the night air was filled with the groan of stressed rigging. Smoke poured across the tilted lawns, obscuring scattered bodies and overturned buffet tables. Wren gathered up some fallen canapés and stood staring at the Pavilion while she ate them. It was hard to believe the change that had come over the beautiful building. It was stained and sagging, and the only light that came from its broken windows was the reddish glow of spreading fires. The grand central dome gaped like a burst puff-ball. Above it, the gasbags seemed to be holding, but they were smoke-blackened, and some of the fiercer flames jumping up from the roof of the Pennyroyals’ guest wing were getting dangerously close to their underbelly.
And as she stood t
here watching it, Wren became aware of someone standing nearby, watching her. “Theo?” she said, turning.
But it was not Theo.
Startled, she lost her balance on the steep grass and fell, hiccuping with fright. The Stalker did not move, except to brace himself against the tilting of the garden. He was staring at Wren. How could he do anything but stare, with only those round green lamps instead of eyes? The firelight gleamed on his battered armour and his stained claws. His head twitched. Oil and lubricant dripped from his wounds.
“YOU ARE NOT HER,” he said.
“No,” agreed Wren, in a shrill little mouse-squeak. She had no idea who the horrible old machine was talking about, but she wasn’t about to argue. She wriggled on her bottom across the grass, trying to edge away from him.
The Stalker came slowly closer, then stopped again. She thought she could hear weird mechanisms whirring and chattering inside his armoured skull. “YOU ARE LIKE HER,” he said, “BUT YOU ARE NOT HER.”
“No, I know, a lot of people get us mixed up,” said Wren, wondering who he could have mistaken her for. There was no point running, she told herself, but her body, with its eagerness to go on living, wouldn’t listen. She pushed herself up and fled, slithering on the wet grass, careering down the sick slope of the gardens.
“COME BACK!” begged Shrike. “HELP ME! I HAVE TO FIND HER!” He started to run after her, then stopped. Chasing the girl would only add to her fear, and he had already been appalled by the terror and loathing of him that he had seen in that strange, familiar face. He watched her fade into the smoke. Behind him, the Pavilion’s central dome collapsed into the ballroom in a gush of sparks. Catherine wheels of debris went bowling past him to crash into fountains and flower-beds or bound off the deckplate’s edge entirely and plummet down into the desert.
Shrike ignored them, and tilted his head inquisitively. Above the noise his sensitive ears had picked up the drone of aëro-engines.