by Philip Reeve
“He is ill?” asked Oenone, alarmed.
General Xao looked glum. “There have been no clear orders from Tienjing for weeks. We have warned your honoured husband about the build-up on the other side of the line, and the harvester-suburb that raided Track-mark 16 last month. We have told him that we cannot hold these positions if the cities attack; he does not seem to care. It is as if, when he heard word of your death, he gave up all hope.”
Oenone looked for a moment as if she would cry. She said hoarsely, “Can’t we contact him more quickly? I could talk to him by long-range radio…”
Xao shook her head. “I dare not risk it, Lady Naga. The barbarians could intercept your message, and try again to kill you.”
“It was not the barbarians who tried to kill me the first time,” said Oenone. “It was barbarians who saved me, with Theo’s help.”
“Indeed,” nodded the general, smiling at Theo, and then at Pennyroyal. “We have heard of Professor Pennyroyal’s bravery.”
“Professor Pennyroyal’s bravery?” Theo almost choked on the roll he was munching. He wondered if the general was slightly drunk. First her defeatist talk about not being able to hold the line and now this! “What have you heard?” he asked.
“We have listening-posts deep in no-man’s-land which eavesdrop on the townies’ radio transmissions,” explained the general. She reached for some papers on her desk. “This is a news-bulletin which went out on Murnau’s public screens a few hours ago.” She skimmed the transcript’s first two paragraphs, then cleared her throat and read, “‘The raiders were helped by an agent within Airhaven; the notorious author, charlatan and former Mayor of Brighton, Nimrod B. Pennyroyal. As the Green Storm spy-ship left, several eyewitnesses saw the traitor Pennyroyal running after it, shouting, “What about my money?”
“A traitor? Me?” Pennyroyal looked outraged.
“Only to the Tractionist barbarians,” said General Xao. “To our people you will be a hero.”
“But – gosh! Will I?”
“To think that the mayor of a barbaric raft-town could come to see the error of his ways so clearly that he would risk his own life to free a Green Storm prisoner,” the general went on. “Your statue will stand in the Hall of Matchless Immortals in Tienjing. Naga will reward you richly. He…”
A junior officer entered, bowing nervously and murmuring something in Shan Guonese. The general frowned, standing up. “Forgive me; I am needed outside.”
“What is happening?” asked Oenone.
“Our sound-mirrors are detecting engine noise from the cities… We have been expecting an attack, but not so soon. Great Gods, I’ve still not had the reinforcements I asked for last month!” A bell began to ring on the bank of field-telephones in the next room; then another and another. General Xao snapped an order at her underling and said to Oenone, “Excellency, you must take ship at once. I will not risk…”
An enormous roll of thunder drowned out the remainder of her words. The floor shook, and dust sifted down between the planks of the low roof. Pennyroyal started to call on his peculiar gods again. Theo looked at the table where he had set down his teacup, and the cup was dancing, dancing to the boom, boom, boom of the thunder. A soldier came scrambling into the bunker, and although he was shouting his report in Shan Guonese Theo and his companions knew what it meant, even before General Xao turned to them and said, “It is beginning! All their cities are on the move! Dozens of cities! Hundreds of suburbs!”
They stood up, indignant at being plunged into another adventure before they’d had a chance to recover from the last. “What about Hester and Mr Shrike?”
“I will have your friends meet you at the airfield,” shouted General Xao. “Now go quickly, and gods preserve us all…”
They followed a sub-officer out of the headquarters and through trenches where hundreds of soldiers were hurrying to their positions. The thunder from the west was shockingly loud. The sky above the front-line trenches pulsed with light. Pennyroyal looked terrified. Theo, wincing at the noise of the blasts, kept reminding himself that most of it was probably the Green Storm’s artillery firing at the cities; any attack would soon be beaten off.
Only Oenone had been in the front line before. She recognized the complex shudderings of the earth in the same way a city-person would understand what each movement in their deckplates meant. She knew that somewhere, not far away, fighting suburbs were advancing at high speed behind a rolling barrage of snout-gun shells. She prayed as she ran, wondering if even God would be able to hear her above all the din.
They zigzagged through a communications trench and there ahead of them was the airfield. A corvette was waiting on a central pan while pods of Fox Spirits went snarling into the primrose sky from hangars dug into the hillsides behind her. She was called the Fury, and her engines were already in take-off position, the propellers a blaze of silver. As they crossed the muddy docking pan a half-track marked with the caduceus symbol of the medical corps came speeding up, slewing to a halt near the foot of the Fury’s gangplank. Shrike swung down out of its belly, and reached back to help the bearers bring Hester’s stretcher out.
The sub-officer started urging Oenone towards the ship, and Pennyroyal, needing no encouragement, trotted alongside. Theo was about to follow them when he remembered Wren’s letter, which was still in the pocket of his flying-jacket, on the chair by the stove in Xao’s headquarters.
“I have to go back!” he shouted.
Only Shrike heard him, as he carried Hester up the gangplank. He looked round to see Theo plunge back into the maze of trenches. “THEO NGONI!” he shouted. Sometimes he could barely believe the folly of the once-born.
“Stalker! Get her aboard!” called an aviator from the Fury’s open hatchway.
“WE MUST WAIT,” Shrike insisted. “THE ONCE-BORN THEO NGONI IS NOT WITH US…”
A snout-gun shell burst near the western perimeter of the field, crumpling a rising Fox Spirit and spraying mud and gravel against the Fury’s envelope. Shrike looked towards the trenches, but could see nothing but smoke. Explosions were going off steadily, and he made out another noise beneath and between the slamming of the guns – the deep note of city engines and the high, squealing counterpoint of rolling tracks.
“Come aboard, Stalker, or we take off without you!” yelled the frightened aviator, holding his helmet in place as blast-waves chased each other across the docking pans.
Shrike bellowed, “THEO NGONI!” once more into the storm of sound, then turned reluctantly, carrying Hester up the gangplank and through the hatch. Oenone ran to meet him in the corridor. “Where is Theo? I thought he was with us?”
The Fury jolted and leaped quickly into the air. Shrike carried Hester to the medical bay and laid her on a bunk. “LOOK AFTER THIS ONCE-BORN,” he told the orderlies, and strode across the cabin to a window. Flying machines were swerving through the air outside, bullets from their machine-guns pummelling the Fury’s armour. Below, shell-bursts speckled the ground. All up and down the Green Storm’s line the heavy guns were firing, while steam-trebuchets flung up their long arms and lobbed their bombs into the screens of drifting smoke which curtained no-man’s-land.
“Naga, it has begun!”
General Naga sits slumped in his favourite chair, beside the window of the quarters that he used to share with Oenone. The spiral stairways of the Jade Pagoda rumble like organ pipes as a gale blasts around the old fortress, blowing snow upwards past Naga’s windows.
His old friend General Dzhu waits in the doorway, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, unhappy at delivering such bad news. “We have reports of heavy fighting in a dozen sectors. The Rustwater marsh-forts are under attack, and we’ve lost contact with Xao’s command post…”
“Ah,” says Naga, without looking up.
On the low table beside him stand a teacup and a pot of green tea. The girl Rohini brings it to him every morning at this hour, and plays to him on the shudraga, but today Dzhu sent her packing, in
sisting he must speak to Naga privately. A pity. She is a good girl, and sometimes Naga thinks that her kindness is all that keeps him alive. The music she plays reminds him of his boyhood; hunting duck in the flooded atomic craters of south China, joining the League’s air fleet that summer before London came crawling east. At the training college on Seven Tiger Mountain there was a girl called Sathya whom he had fancied, but she’d been in love with the Wind-Flower.
“Whatever happened to Sathya?” he wonders. “Do you think she’s still at that hermitage we found for her on Zhan Shan?”
“Naga, we’re at war!” his friend shouts. “What are your orders? Do I tell our commanders to stand, or withdraw?”
“Whatever you think necessary, Dzhu.”
Dzhu sighs; turns to go; turns back. “There is another thing; it seems minor, but Batmunkh Gompa are reporting a lot of activity inside the wreck of London…”
Naga flaps his words away. “London? A few poor barbarians, Dzhu; we’ve known about them for years. They’re harmless.”
“Are we sure of that? What if they are a fifth column, waiting to assist the enemy as he advances? I have ordered increased surveillance…”
Naga tries to shrug, but his mechanical armour isn’t made for shrugging. “I’m ill, old friend. I ache all over. I can’t sleep, but I’m never properly awake. My head buzzes like a nest of bees. You should take over command.”
“The people want you, Naga! You smashed the barbarians last spring, and they know you can do it again! They won’t trust me!”
“I miss Zero,” murmurs Naga. “I miss her so much.”
Dzhu stares at him. “I’ll tell Xao to make a stand, if I can reach her.”
As he leaves the chambers, he sees Cynthia Twite waiting outside, watching him from the shadows. He forces her down a narrow stairway and out on to a balcony. Snowflakes flail at them, and the wind blows their hair about. “What’s happening to him?” hisses Dzhu. “I thought once we got rid of the Zero girl he’d come to his senses and lead us to victory, but he just sits there! Is it just grief? Is he dying? Tell me!”
Cynthia smiles. “Green tea,” she says. “A pot every morning, like his poor wife used to make him.”
“You’re poisoning him?”
“Just a little. Not enough to kill him. Just enough to keep him helpless.”
“But we need him!”
“No we don’t, you fool.”
Dzhu is astonished. In the mountain kingdoms women respect men and young people respect their elders, but this girl talks to him as if he’s a child!
“Haven’t you heard the rumours, Dzhu? A Stalker killing Lost Boys aboard Brighton. An abandoned limpet found under a waterfall in Snow Fan Province. The murder of Dr Popjoy. It all adds up. It’s all connected. Are you too blind to see what it means?”
Dzhu just stares at her. The snow’s so thick that her face keeps breaking up like a bad goggle-screen picture.
“She is risen!” Cynthia hisses triumphantly. “Soon she will reveal herself to us, and save us from the barbarians. Until she does, we must make sure that Naga is weak. When he has let the barbarians smash his divisions and devour our western settlements the people will be ready to abandon him and welcome back their true leader!”
“You’re insane!” says General Dzhu, turning to go and warn his friend of her.
One of the long pins which hold Cynthia’s hairstyle in place is tipped with venom. She’s been saving it for just such an emergency. The sharpened tip makes only the tiniest scratch on Dzhu’s neck, but he’s dead before he can even cry out. Grunting with effort and cursing his fat belly, Cynthia heaves the body off the balcony and watches it plummet through the snowflakes to the sharp mountainside hundreds of feet below. She’s always had her doubts about Dzhu, and she has forged his suicide note already. It will be the work of a moment to plant it in his desk.
She thinks of her mistress, the Stalker Fang, out there in the mountains somewhere, waiting. If only she would show herself! Cynthia understands why the Stalker would want to punish the weaklings who flocked to Naga’s banner, but surely she knows that she can still rely upon her faithful private agents. For a moment, as she slips back inside and strolls towards General Dzhu’s quarters, she feels almost angry at her old mistress. It quickly passes. Whatever the Stalker Fang is planning will be dreadful and wonderful, and it is not Cynthia’s place to judge her.
Theo had always had a good sense of direction. He found his way quickly through the maze of trenches and was almost in sight of the dugout when an explosion went off just beyond the wire, kicking fans of earth and smoke high into the dawn sky. He crouched as the mud came spattering down. A sea of smoke filled the trench. Scared, fleeing soldiers blundered through it, throwing down their weapons as they ran, pulling off packs and bandoliers. Their mouths were open as if they were shouting, but Theo couldn’t hear them; he had been deafened by the blast of the shell.
Dazed, he scrambled up on to a fire-step to see what they were running from. Beyond the bramble hedge of wire outside the trench, mountainous shapes were moving. Now and again, as the gusting wind hooked swags of smoke aside, he could see Murnau, only a few miles off, munching its way through the shell-battered city traps, while a dozen harvester-suburbs probed for mines or pitfalls. A nearby fortress was firing rockets towards it, but as Theo watched the ground began to tremble sluggishly and up from the mud at the fort’s base an enormous, blunt, steel nose came shoving, lifting to expose giant drills and complicated mouth-parts, knocking the fort to pieces and gobbling them down. WELCOME TO HARROWBARROW said a crude white slogan painted on the armoured flank. Theo had plenty of time to read it as the weird suburb went grinding past him, crushing bunkers and wrecked gun-emplacements beneath its tracks. Signal lamps blinked on Murnau’s upper tier, as if trying to call it to heel, but the suburb ignored them; it settled itself deep into the muddy earth again and went grinding on into Green Storm territory.
Theo jumped down from the step and stumbled on, confused by the smoke and the steep walls of earth that had been thrown across the trench by the explosions. Fresh blasts went off, spattering him with mud and muddy water, but it all happened in hissing, undersea silence, like a dream. He barely understood what was going on. How could the cities have broken through so easily? Where were the indomitable air-destroyers and thousand-Tumbler quick-response units that he had been told of in the Green Storm’s propaganda films?
An airship drifted overhead, burning so fiercely that he could not tell which side it had belonged to. By its light he saw the dugout entrance, and ran gratefully through it. The command post had already been evacuated, but Theo’s coat still hung on the back of the folding chair where he had left it. He pulled it on, feeling Wren’s letter crinkle in the pocket, her photograph pressing against his heart.
He didn’t hear the scream of the snout-gun shell descending. The first he knew of it was when the hot hands of the explosion lifted him off his feet. Then everything turned into light.
31
THE HOUSE AT ERDENE TEZH
The Stalker Fang pauses at the edge of the docking pan where Popjoy’s air-yacht is tethered and turns her bronze face towards the west.
“What?” asks Fishcake. “What is it?” He looks westward, too, but he can see nothing; just the mountains. How sick he is of mountains! They stand guard like frost-giants all around this high, green valley, and their reflections shimmer in the windswept lake below the docking pan.
“Gunfire,” the Stalker whispers.
“You mean the war is on again?” Fishcake strains his grubby once-born ears to try and hear what she can hear.
“I must work quickly. Come.”
She starts limping towards the causeway, and Fishcake follows her, carrying on his shoulder one of the cases of equipment which she made him bring from Dun Resurrectin’. Overhead, the dead birds which followed her from Popjoy’s place soar past, keeping watch for movements in the sky or on the steep pass at the valley’s western end.
> The causeway is two hundred paces long. At its far end is a rocky island where a house stands, dark and cold as a tomb. It was a monastery once, sacred to the gods and demons of the mountains, whose faces still leer out of niches in the outer walls. Later it was Anna Fang’s home, a place of light and laughter where she relaxed between missions for the Anti-Traction League. She had planned to retire here, and raise horses in the steep green pastures, before Valentine’s sword unravelled all her plans.
In the first years of the Green Storm regime there had been talk of turning Erdene Tezh into a museum, where schoolchildren could come to see relics of the Wind-Flower and tread the same floors which she had trodden. But the Stalker she had become forbade it. She had the house locked, and let it fall into ruin.
The gate whinges as the Stalker heaves it open. Fishcake crunches after her through the gateway where patches of snow lie blue in the shadows. Safe in the loop of the thick stone wall is a garden; dead trees and dead brown grass, a fountain lacy with icicles. Fishcake trots after his Stalker up the frosty path to the house. She does not smash the door down as he has been expecting, but extends one of her finger-glaives, inserts it into the keyhole, and moves it carefully about in there until the lock clicks. As she opens the door she looks back at Fishcake.
“Home again!” she whispers.
He follows her into the shadows. He can’t be sure any more if she is Anna or the Stalker Fang. He thinks she may be both, as if Popjoy’s tinkering blended the two personalities somehow. She has not been unkind to Fishcake, and she still shares her memories with him, but she does not play with him any more; she no longer takes his hand, or tousles his hair, or comes to hold him at night when he wakes from a bad dream. All he has left of that Anna is the carved toy horse, which he clutches tightly when he goes to sleep.