by Philip Reeve
Whooping for breath, her heart hammering, Wren plunged back into the cypress grove. Pennyroyal was asleep or unconscious again, but Theo leaped up. “Wren, what is it?”
“Stalker!” she managed to gasp. “The Green Storm left a Stalker behind. That big ugly one that fought the other one…”
Pennyroyal groaned and stirred. Theo drew Wren gently away. “Wren, if this Stalker had wanted to kill us, it would have found us by now, wouldn’t it? It would have chased you, and be here by now.”
Wren thought about that. “I think it was damaged,” she said.
“There you are then.”
“I think it was mad,” she went on, remembering the strange way the Stalker had spoken to her. She giggled nervously. “I suppose if ordinary Stalkers are meant to go around killing people, maybe a mad one is the best sort to be stuck on a doomed hovery island thing with. Maybe it just wanted to have a nice chat about the weather. Or knit me a cardigan.”
Theo laughed. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s going to be all right. At the rate we’re losing gas we should touch down in the desert in another half-hour or so.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“It is,” said Theo. “Come and see.”
She went with him through the trees to the far side of the grove. From there, only a short, steeply tilted stretch of lawn separated them from the deckplate’s edge. Beyond the handrail they could see the ground, and Cloud 9’s shadow slithering over curved dunes and barren outcroppings of stone. All around, clusters of lights and ghostly fans of dust marked the approach of small towns and villages, racing towards the place where they thought Cloud 9 would fall.
“Scavenger towns!” wailed Wren. “We’ll be eaten!”
“Cloud 9 will be eaten,” said Theo. “We won’t. We’ll get off into the desert before the towns arrive, and go aboard them as travellers, not prey. We’ll take some gold or Old-Tech or something from the Pavilion to pay our way. We’ll be all right.”
Wren calmed herself. This is what brought Mum and Dad together, she thought. There’s a togetherness that comes from sharing adventures like this, and it’s strong enough to overcome anything; mistrust, ugliness, anything. Not that Theo was ugly. Far from it. She turned her head to look at him and their faces were so close that the tip of her nose brushed his cheek.
And it was then – just when Wren knew that they were about to kiss, and half of her really wanted to, and the other half was more scared of kissing than it was of scavenger towns – it was then that the lawn, like the deck of a boat in a stormy sea, dropped suddenly from beneath her feet, throwing her against Theo and Theo against a tree.
“Bother!” she said.
Bad things were happening up among Cloud 9’s corona of gasbags. Roasted by the flames leaping from the Pavilion, the central cell had ruptured and the gas was blurting out in a rush of blue fire. A few of the lesser bags still held, but they were not enough to support the weight of Cloud 9 for long. The deckplate tipped even more steeply, and the water from fountains and swimming-pools poured off the brim in brief white cataracts. Debris fell too; statues and summerhouses, potted palms and garden furniture, marquees and musical instruments dropping like manna on the dunes below.
The brindled towns of the desert increased their speed, jostling and squabbling in their haste to be first at the crash-site.
The Jenny Haniver flew through smoke and dust into the shadow of Cloud 9. Through her larboard windows the tilted underside resembled a vast, ruined wall, pocked with shell-craters and burned-out wrecks. Hester turned the searchlight on it and watched as some twisted maintenance walkways slid by, then a warning notice in stencilled white letters ten feet high: NO SMOKING. The cable car swung from severed hawsers, blood-stained ball-gowns and evening-robes billowing from the shattered cabin.
“We’re too late,” said Hester. “There’s not going to be anyone alive up there.”
“Don’t say that!” Tom told her. He spoke sharply, still feeling scratchy and shaky from their argument. He did not want to argue any more, because finding Wren was what mattered now, but things had altered between himself and Hester, and he was not sure they could be put right. The hardness of her, the calm way she had abandoned Fishcake, made his insides curl.
Angrily, he tugged at the Jenny’s controls, swinging her up over the top edge of the deckplate and carefully in through the tangle of rigging. He wished suddenly that Freya was with him instead of Hester. She would not have left poor Fishcake behind. She would have found some way out of Shkin’s tower without murdering all those poor men. And she would not have given up hope of finding Wren so easily.
“Remember London?” he said. “Remember the night of MEDUSA, when I came to fetch you from London? That looked hopeless too, but I found you, didn’t I? And now we’re going to find Wren.”
Below them, Cloud 9 swung like a censer. Hester aimed the searchlight at its ruined gardens.
Dragging Pennyroyal between them, Wren and Theo went crabwise across the steep face of the gardens, looking for a place where they could shelter when the deckplate touched down.
“Good work!” Pennyroyal told them, briefly coming to. “Splendid effort! I’ll see that you get your freedom for this…” Then he passed out again, which made him impossibly heavy. They laid him down, and Wren sat next to him. The ground was five hundred feet below, perhaps less; Wren could make out individual scrubby bushes struggling to grow among the long crescents of rock that dotted the desert, and individual windows and doorways on the upperworks of a town which was bounding along on big, barrel-shaped wheels in Cloud 9’s shadow. The air was filled with the sounds of overstrained rigging. Beneath the long-drawn-out metallic moans another noise was rising. Wren looked up. Through the tangles of hawsers which swayed across the garden the beam of a searchlight poked, dazzling her. Then it swung away, a long finger of light tracing aimless paths across the lawns, and behind it she saw a small airship.
“Look!” she shouted.
“Scavengers,” groaned Theo. “Or air-pirates!”
The people in the town below seemed to have the same idea, for a rocket came sputtering up to burst in the sky behind the little ship. It veered away, then came edging back, steering vanes flicking like the fins of an inquisitive fish. A face showed at the gondola window. The steering vanes flicked again, the engine pods swivelled, and the ship touched down on a metal patio, not too close to Wren and Theo, but not so far away that Wren could not recognize the people who climbed out of the gondola and came scrambling towards her across the canted lawn.
At first she refused to believe it. It seemed so impossible that Mum and Dad could be here that she closed her eyes and tried to make the hurtful hallucination go away. It couldn’t be them, it couldn’t, no matter what her silly eyes were telling her; clearly the adventures she had lived through had all been too much for her, and she had started imagining things.
And then a voice cried, “Wren!” and someone’s arms went round her and held her tight, and it was her father, and he was hugging her, laughing and saying, “Wren!” over and over, while tears made white channels through the ash and dust that smeared his face.
36
STRANGE MEETINGS
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, I’ve been so stupid –” and after that she couldn’t speak; she couldn’t think of a single thing more to say.
“It’s all right,” Dad kept telling her. “It doesn’t matter; you’re safe; that’s all that matters…”
Then Dad stepped aside, and it was Mummy hugging her, a harder, tighter hug, pulling Wren’s face against a bony shoulder, and Mum’s voice in her ear asking “You’re all right? You’ve not been hurt?”
“I’m fine,” sniffled Wren.
Hester stepped back and cupped Wren’s face in her two hands, surprised at how much love she felt. She was crying with happiness, and she almost never cried. Not wanting Tom and Wren to think she’d gone soft she looked away, and noticed the tall black boy
hanging back behind Wren, watching.
“Mum, Dad,” said Wren, turning to pull him closer, “This is Theo Ngoni. He saved my life.”
“We saved each other,” said Theo shyly. He was crying too, imagining how his own mother and father would welcome him if ever he found his way home to Zagwa.
Hester looked suspiciously at the handsome young aviator, but Tom shook his hand, and said, “We’d better get aboard.”
He turned away towards the waiting airship, and Theo went with him, but as Hester started to follow them Wren said, “No, wait; Pennyroyal…”
Tom and Theo didn’t hear her, but her mother did.
Wren hurried through the trees to the fountain. Pennyroyal, revived by the sound of aëro-engines, was struggling to his feet. He grinned as he saw Wren, and said weakly, “What did I tell you, eh? Never say die!” Then, recognizing the figure who loomed behind her he added, “Oh, Great Poskitt!”
The last time Hester had seen Pennyroyal he had been running away into the snow and dark of Anchorage, the night she killed the Huntsmen. The last time she had spoken to him had been shortly before that, in the ransacked kitchen of Mr and Mrs Aakiuq’s house, when she had told him how the Huntsmen came to be there.
Pennyroyal backed weakly away, his face a dead, cheesy white beneath the crusted drizzles of blood. Hester caught him with two swift strides, knocked him down, drew her knife as he grovelled and pawed at her feet.
“Please!” he whined. “Spare me! I’ll give you anything!”
“Shut up,” said Hester, baring his throat to her blade, bending so the blood wouldn’t splash her new coat.
Wren hit her from the side, shoving her away. “Mummy, no!” she yelled.
Hester grunted, winded and angry. “You stay out of this…”
But Wren would not stay out of it. She had seen the look in her mother’s eye when she saw Pennyroyal. Not hate, or anger, or a thirst for revenge, but fear. And why would Mum be frightened of Pennyroyal, unless the thing that Pennyroyal had said about her was true? As Hester started towards him again, Wren leaped between them, spreading her arms to protect him. “I know!” she shouted. “I know what you did! So if you want to silence him, you’re too late! If you want to keep it secret now you’ll have to kill me too.”
“Kill you?” Hester grabbed Wren by the collar of her jacket and pushed her hard against a tree. “I wish you’d never been born!” she shouted. She turned the knife, changing her grip on the worn bone handle. The blade filled with firelight. Reflections slid across Wren’s appalled, defiant face, and suddenly it seemed to Hester very like the face of her own half-sister, Katherine Valentine, who had died defending her from their father’s sword.
“Mummy?’ asked Wren, in a tiny, shocked voice.
Hester lowered the knife.
Tom and Theo came hurrying through the trees, slithering down the steep lawn. “What’s happening?” shouted Theo, who was in the lead. “Wren? Are you all right?”
“She’s trying to kill him!” Wren had sunk to her knees. She was crying so much that they could hardly make out her words, but she kept repeating them until they understood. “She wants to kill Pennyroyal!”
Tom looked down at Pennyroyal, who raised a trembly hand.
“Tom, my dear fellow, let’s not be hasty…”
Tom didn’t answer for a moment. He was remembering how it had felt to lie on his back in the snow of Anchorage, sure that he was about to die. He could still feel the hole in his chest, and taste the blood. He could still hear the fading throb of the Jenny’s engines as Pennyroyal made off with her. For a moment he felt as fierce as Hester, ready to seize the knife himself and finish the old scoundrel. But the feeling passed quickly, and he reached for his wife’s hand. “Het, look at him. He’s old and helpless and his palace is going down in flames. Isn’t that revenge enough? Let’s get him aboard the Jenny quickly, before this place sinks any lower.”
“No!” shouted Hester. “Have you forgotten what happened last time we let him aboard? Have you forgotten what he did to you? He nearly killed you! You can’t just forgive him!”
“Yes I can,” said Tom firmly. Kneeling beside Pennyroyal he nodded to Theo to help lift him. “What’s the alternative? Murder him? What would that achieve? It wouldn’t change anything…”
“It would,” said Wren, and there was such an odd sound to her voice that Tom looked up at her. She was crying with big, unladylike sobs, her face wet with snot and tears. She scrambled away fearfully when her mother turned towards her, and shouted out, “If she kills him, he won’t be able to tell you how she sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen.”
Hester jerked her head as if the girl had hit her. “Lies!” she said. She tried to laugh. “Pennyroyal’s been filling her up with his lies!”
“No,” said Wren. “No, it’s true. All these years everybody’s been so grateful to her for saving us from the Huntsmen, when all along it was her who brought them down on us in the first place. I wanted it not to be true. I told myself it couldn’t be. But it is.”
Tom looked at Hester, waiting for her to deny it.
“I did it for you,” she said.
“Then it’s true?”
Hester took a step backwards, away from him. “Of course it’s true! Where do you think I went to, that night I took the Jenny? I flew straight to Arkangel, and told Masgard where he’d find Anchorage. It was that or lose you, and I couldn’t have – I couldn’t have –! Oh, Tom, for the gods’ sakes, it was sixteen years ago, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Does it? I sorted it out, didn’t I? I killed Masgard and his men. And I only did it for you…”
But it had been a different Tom Natsworthy whom she had loved enough to betray whole cities for. That Tom had been a brave, handsome, passionate boy who might have forgiven her, but this older Tom, this timid Anchorage historian who stood staring at her with his stupid mouth hanging open in dismay and his stupid daughter snivelling beside him, would never understand what she had done. Neither of them would. She was nothing like them. She had been a fool to believe that she could live in their world.
“All these years,” she said, flinging her knife away. “All these years in Vineland,” she said, watching it flash as it stuck quivering in Pennyroyal’s lawn. “All these years with you both… Gods, I’ve been so bored!”
She was shaking, and it made her remember the night of MEDUSA, when she first dared to kiss Tom. She had shaken uncontrollably then, back at the beginning of it all, and here she was shaking again as it all came to an end. She turned and walked quickly away from him across the ruined gardens. Through a gap in the smoke ahead she saw something loom square and low. She thought it was a building, then realized it was some sort of stupid maze. Well, it would do. She strode fast towards the entrance.
“Hester!” shouted Tom, behind her.
“Go!” She glanced back. He was scrambling after her, a frantic silhouette against the blaze of the Pavilion, Wren hanging back behind him with her African boy. “Go!” she shouted, turning without stopping, walking backwards for a pace or two, pointing at the Jenny Haniver. “Just get Wren aboard and go, before Pennyroyal nicks the bloody thing again…”
But Tom only shouted again, “Hester!”
“I’m not coming, Tom,” she said. She was crying. Smoke blew past her, and burning scraps of envelope fabric, and the hot wind raised the skirts of her coat like black wings, and she looked like some terrible angel. “Go back to Vineland. Be happy. But not with me. I’m staying here.”
“Hester, don’t be stupid! This place is falling apart!”
“It’s just falling,” said Hester. “I’ll survive. There are towns below; hard desert towns, scav-platforms. My kind of place.”
He had almost caught her up. She could see his face shining with tears in the light from the blazing buildings. She wanted very badly to go to him, to kiss him and hold him, but she knew that she could never touch him again, because what she had done would always come between them. “I love you,” she sai
d, and turned and ran, plunging into the maze while the deckplates pitched and reared beneath her, and sounds that were half sobs and half laughter came out of her mouth without her meaning them to. Behind her, fainter and fainter, she heard Tom shouting her name. Overhead, Cloud 9’s gasbags were igniting one by one, filling the maze with weird, racing shadows. Hester sobbed and stumbled, the hedges scratching her face as she blundered into them. She was just beginning to realize that this was a bad place to be, that she would need better shelter than this when the deckplate came down, when she reached the heart of the maze. Something crouched there, as if it had been waiting for her all along.
She came to a stop, skidding on the grass. The waiting shape unfolded itself and stood up, towering over her. She thought at first that it was made of fire; but that was just the reflections from the burning gasbags shining in its dented, burnished armour. Its dead face widened into a smile. Hester knew that face; she had shovelled earth over it herself, eighteen years ago on the Black Island, burying the old Stalker deep and piling stones upon his grave. It seemed she’d been wasting her time, though. She could smell the familiar smell of him; formaldehyde and hot metal.
“Hester?” called Tom’s voice, faintly, away in the gardens somewhere and lost to her now for ever.
And Shrike reached for her with his dreadful hands and said, “HESTER SHAW.”
Another gasbag went up with a roar, a geyser of light escaping into the sky. Tom found himself airborne for a moment as the deckplate dropped. He hit the grass hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a statue of Poskitt. “Hester!” he shouted as he scrambled up, but his voice was cracking with the effort, and then his heart seemed to crack too. He kneaded his chest, but there was no relief; he was on his knees; on his face; pain nailed him to the lawn. He blacked out, and when he woke someone was with him. “Hester?” he mumbled.
“Daddy…” It was Wren, her hands on his back and his shoulders, her face looking down at him, tearstained and frightened.