by Philip Reeve
“He should have been here to steer New London out of the debris fields,” said Len Peabody, angry at the unfairness of it all.
“Now,” said Mr Garamond. “It’s time we elected a new Lord Mayor.”
“Lavinia will be the new Mayor,” said Clytie Potts. “That’s what Mr Pomeroy wanted.”
“Mr Pomeroy is dead,” said Garamond. “The Committee must decide. And then we must discuss what’s to be done with the prisoners.”
Wren had not been allowed to attend the funeral. Other Londoners had pleaded her case, but Garamond, his nose swollen to twice its usual size and the colour of an aubergine, stood firm; she and Theo were dangerous agents of the Green Storm, and he insisted that they should be locked up. And so they were put in two old cages, salvaged from the wreck many years ago, which had once held animals in the zoological gardens in Circle Park, and were now kept in a dank corner of Crouch End to confine intruders, murderers and lunatics whom Garamond imagined might threaten the security of London. They had never been used before, and he looked very pleased with himself as his apologetic warriors shoved Wren and Theo inside, padlocking the barred gates behind them.
There, in the shadows, on the mattress which was her only furniture, Wren said her own prayers for Chudleigh Pomeroy as the muffled boom, boom, doom of the funeral drum came echoing across the debris like a heartbeat.
“What now?” asked Theo, from his cage. Dark as it was in this part of the End, Wren could see him looking out at her through the bars. If they both reached out they could touch; just their fingertips. “What will happen to us now?”
Wren didn’t know. It was hurtful to be accused and imprisoned like this, but she found it hard to be scared of silly old Garamond and all her London friends. Sooner or later it would all be sorted out, she felt sure. She barely had the strength to think about it though; she was too busy mourning Mr Pomeroy and worrying about her father.
They slept a little; talked a little; Wren made patterns with the straw on the floor of her cage. The day crept by. At evening time, when the dinner-gong was summoning everyone to the communal canteen, Angie Peabody arrived with food and fresh water for them. She poked the tin bowls in through the bars of the cage, and would not meet Wren’s eye.
“Angie?” Wren asked. “You don’t believe what Garamond says about us, do you? You know I’m not any sort of spy.”
“Don’t know what to believe any more,” the girl replied gruffly. “There’s been nothing but trouble ever since you got here, I know that. Them birds coming yesterday, and your friend turning up… Saab got hurt badly, Wren; we don’t even know if he’ll see again, and he’ll always have the scars, and you don’t care a bit; you just went off yesterday evening with your boyfriend or whatever he is… It don’t look good, does it?”
Wren felt dazed with shame. It was true she hadn’t spared much thought for Saab or the others hurt in the attack; she’d been too taken up with thoughts of Theo. “That was wrong of me,” she admitted. “But it hardly makes me a Green Storm spy. Angie, a week ago Garamond was saying we were in league with Harrowbarrow; it was me and my dad who brought Wolf Kobold here? Remember?”
“How do we even know Kobold was what he said he was?” Angie retorted. “You say he went off to find this Harrowbarrow place. He might be Green Storm too, and safe in Batmunkh Gompa or somewhere now.”
That made Wren think of her father. She reached out through the bars, trying to touch Angie, who backed quickly away. “Angie, you’ve got to get me out of here! I have to find a way of going after Dad…”
Angie took another step backwards, disappearing into the shadows. “Mr Garamond said we ain’t to talk to you,” she said.
Wren threw herself down on her mattress, which rewarded her by bursting and poking her in the side with a sharp, rusty spring. “I’m sorry, Theo,” she said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. If I hadn’t written you that letter you’d have stayed with your own people. You’d never have come here.”
“And if you hadn’t talked to me that afternoon by Pennyroyal’s swimming pool on Cloud 9 I’d have been killed or captured when the Storm attacked, and you wouldn’t have to worry about me at all.”
Wren reached out of her cage and touched his fingers. She traced the hard, warm curves of his nails, the little rough bits of skin beside them, the whorls of his fingertips like contour-lines on a tiny, Braille map.
Late that night they were awoken by the last person Wren had expected to come visiting them. “Wren?” a voice asked, and she opened her eyes to see Lavinia Childermass hunkered down outside the gate of her cage. The Engineer had an electric lantern with a blue glass shade. In its dim light her bald head shone like an alien moon. Wren scrambled up, spearing herself on the mattress-spring again, and heard Theo moving in the neighbouring cage.
“Wren, my dear, are you awake?”
“Sort of. What’s happening? Is it Dad?”
“He has not returned, child.”
“Then…”
“We have a new Lord Mayor,” said the Engineer. “The Committee elected him this evening.”
“But I thought you were Mr Pomeroy’s deputy? I thought…”
“The Committee decided that it would be unwise to have an Engineer as mayor,” Dr Childermass said calmly. “They still remember Crome’s regime. And with the war drawing closer they thought it wiser to elect someone with a security background…”
“You can’t mean—”
“Mr Garamond is Lord Mayor of London now, Wren. He played on the fears of the committee to make them support him. I am sorry to say that he has turned a lot of people against you. I think most of London believes that you and Theo and your father had something to do with those birds and the death of poor Chudleigh.”
“But…”
“Shhh! I think they will forgive you, Wren; you are a Londoner’s daughter, after all. But Garamond is going to propose that Theo be killed, and from the talk at the canteen this evening I think a majority of the Committee will side with him. He argues that we cannot allow an Anti-Tractionist to live here, learning our secrets.”
“He’s mad!”
“Perhaps he is, a little. Paranoid, certainly. Poor Garamond; he was no older than you on MEDUSA night. He survived because he was in one of the deep Gut prisons, where Magnus Crome had sent him for being an Anti-Tractionist sympathizer. The day after the disaster he led a band of survivors east, imagining that the Anti-Tractionists he had always admired would help them. But the soldiers they met upon the plains just gunned them down; poor Garamond only escaped by playing dead, hidden under the bodies of his friends.”
“You can see why he wouldn’t trust Anti-Tractionists,” said Theo.
“But it doesn’t give him an excuse to start killing people!” Wren complained. “And it certainly doesn’t give everyone else an excuse to let him!”
“I agree,” said the old Engineer. “But they are scared; the birds, the war, the new weapon. Even the prospect of leaving the debris fields is enough to unsettle them after so many years. And when people are scared, it can bring out the worst in them. That is why I am going to let you go. I am sure that Theo will be able to find you shelter at one of the Storm’s settlements. I don’t imagine the war will last much longer now that the Storm have this orbital terror-weapon, so you will be in far less danger there than with us.”
She reached inside her rubber coat and brought out some sort of Old-Tech device; the type of thing Engineers presumably kept in their pockets all the time. It looked like a can-opener and buzzed like a horsefly, and made the padlock on Wren’s cage clack open. “I brought your pack with me, Wren,” Dr Childermass said, as she moved across to Theo’s cage, and Wren, still not quite believing that they were going, fitted her arms through the shoulder-straps and heaved it on.
“I should carry that,” said Theo, scrambling out of his cage.
“I can manage. We’ll take turns.”
Lavinia Childermass led the
m to a small back way out of Crouch End; a hole in the roof-plate at its lowest point where it sloped down to touch the ground. Scrambled out with them and stood watching them as they set off together into the wreckage, moving closer as they went away from her, as if they thought an old Engineer would not approve of people holding hands and wanted to be safely hidden in the shadows before they finally touched.
Lavinia smiled. She had had a child of her own, once, but in those days the Guild of Engineers had taken all infants straight to the communal nurseries, and she had never known her little Bevis. Dead long ago, she thought, and the sudden sadness made her remember the funeral drum, and Chudleigh Pomeroy lying cold under the earth in Putney Vale. If she had not been a logical, disciplined Engineer she would have found the world too sad a place to live in.
She watched Wren and Theo until the shadows and the wreckage swallowed them. Well, she thought, that is one less thing to worry about. And she went quickly through Crouch End and up the Womb road, returning to her work aboard New London.
43
HOMECOMING
The Fury reached Batmunkh Gompa shortly after sundown, crossing the Shield-Wall by the light of a smudged and bloodstained moon. She had been heading for Tienjing when the master of a passing freighter advised her captain to reroute. “Tienjing is burning! The barbarians have a new weapon! A lance of fire that strikes from the sky! Batmunkh Tsaka is gone, too! Naga has fled to Batmunkh Gompa, but not even Batmunkh Gompa can stand against the fire from heaven! Save yourselves!”
“What’s happening?” grumbled Hester, tired and crotchety after the long flight, one hand pressed to her aching head. “Surely the cities can’t have a super-weapon too?”
“Typical!” said Pennyroyal. “You wait years for an all-powerful orbital heat-ray thingy, and then two come along at once…”
“PERHAPS THE STORM DO NOT CONTROL THE NEW WEAPON,” said Shrike.
“But it blew up cities! We watched it! Who else would want to do that?”
“A THIRD FORCE,” suggested Shrike. “SOMEONE WHO HATES THE CITIES AND THE STORM AND WANTS TO SOW CONFUSION.”
“Like who?” asked Hester.
“THE STALKER FANG.”
“But she’s dead!” said Pennyroyal. “Isn’t she?”
“PERHAPS THE RUMOURS WE HEARD FROM THE ONCE-BORN AT FORWARD COMMAND ARE CORRECT,” said Shrike. “I WAS RE-RESURRECTED. WHAT IF SOMEONE HAS RE-RESURRECTED HER?”
“And you think she is behind these calamities?” asked Oenone. She sounded afraid, but faintly hopeful too, as if it would be a relief to learn that her husband was not responsible.
Shrike said, “WHEN THE NEW WEAPON STRUCK, I REMEMBERED SOMETHING WHICH THE STALKER FANG SAID BEFORE I DISABLED HER. SHE SPOKE OF A THING CALLED ODIN. ‘THE GREATEST OF THE WEAPONS WHICH THE ANCIENTS HUNG IN HEAVEN.’ I BELIEVE SHE HAS AWOKEN IT JUST AS SHE PLANNED. SHE STRUCK AT TIENJING BECAUSE NAGA WOULD BE THERE, AND AT BATMUNKH TSAKA IN THE HOPE OF KILLING YOU, OENONE ZERO.”
“But she’s dead,” insisted Pennyroyal.
“He’s got a point, for once,” Hester agreed. “You pulled her head off, Shrike. Threw the rest of her off Cloud 9. That should have done the trick.”
But Oenone looked troubled. She had looked troubled all the way from Forward Command, and now she said, “Maybe not. She was a very advanced model. Dr Popjoy had put in experimental systems that even I may not have understood. It’s possible that if someone had gathered the body parts they might have been able to…”
Her voice faded away. She shrugged unhappily.
“Oh, fantastic,” said Hester.
“I might be wrong…” Oenone went to the window, looking south into the haze of dirty smoke from Tienjing. “I hope I’m wrong. We must ask Dr Popjoy. As soon as we dock at Batmunkh Gompa I’ll send for him. Popjoy will know.”
The city behind the Shield-Wall lay in silence, only a few dozen lamps burning in its dark streets. More lights shone on the valley floor; a river of lanterns pouring eastward, reflecting in the waters of Batmunkh Nor. The population was fleeing, just as they had fled the threat of MEDUSA the last time Hester was there. She thought what an odd place it must be to live if you had to keep packing all your belongings into carts and running away, and then reminded herself that MEDUSA had been nearly twenty years ago, and that a whole generation had grown up since she and Tom left this city in the Jenny Haniver.
“Gods,” she said grumpily, rubbing her head again. “I’m getting too old for this…”
Fox Spirits guided the Fury to a temporary airfield below an old nunnery on a crag. The ancient building was surrounded by what looked at first like giant lichen; a shapeless mass of grey and brown and white. It was people. Refugees from the city, and survivors of Tienjing brought in aboard the ragtag fleet of freighters and military transports that was moored along the edges of the field. They huddled together against the cold, wrapped in furs and blankets, sheltering under awnings and tents. As Hester, still limping slightly, led her companions past them they started to stand up and shuffle aside, forming an avenue of staring faces. A whispering, like the wind in trees, ran through the crowd, as people pointed out the Lady Naga and her Stalker to their neighbours and their children.
Maybe they were saying that she was to blame for their disaster; that if she had not destroyed the Stalker Fang it would be the townies suffering instead. Maybe they had heard she was dead. Maybe, seeing Shrike and Hester walking beside her they thought she was a phantom come here from the Halls of Shadow with two demons to guard her.
Oenone barely noticed the stir that she was causing. She kept thinking of the Stalker Fang. I must speak to Popjoy, she thought, and looked east towards the lake-shore, where the old Stalker-builder had his retirement villa – but the evening mist lay thick above the lake, and she was not even certain that Popjoy’s place could be seen from here.
At the door of the nunnery a tired-looking sub-officer greeted them. “Lady Naga! You are safe! Gods be thanked!”
Safe, thought Oenone. Yes; even if Fang had returned, Naga would sort everything out. She was safe at last. She returned the boy’s salute, remembering him from her husband’s staff at Tienjing; a friendly boy with a flop of black hair always falling across his eyes. She was glad he had survived. She said, “My husband is here?”
“The general will be overjoyed! I shall take you to him!”
Oenone followed him through the tall, carved doorway. Hester, Shrike and Pennyroyal went with her, not knowing what else to do.
“I shall need to see the scientist Popjoy,” Oenone told their guide. “Can you find him for me?”
The sub-officer seemed nervous. “He is dead, Lady Naga. Murdered at his house by the lake, about three weeks ago. We think one of his Stalkers went wrong and…” He shrugged. “I heard what had been done to him. No human being could have had such strength…”
Oenone looked at Hester. Shrike said, “DID YOU FIND THE STALKER THAT KILLED HIM?”
The boy looked startled at being spoken to by a Stalker, but he recovered, and said, “No. But Popjoy’s sky-yacht was stolen. Perhaps if the killer was an experimental model it might have had the wit to escape. Apparently Popjoy’s house was full of … horrible things.”
He addressed his words to Oenone, but he was looking past her at her companions, as if wondering for the first time who they were and whether he had been right to admit them to Naga’s emergency headquarters.
“These are my friends,” said Oenone hastily, and introduced them: “Mr Shrike; Professor Pennyroyal; Mrs Natsworthy.”
The boy frowned. “Natsworthy?”
He took Oenone aside and they spoke for a moment in Shan Guonese. Hester heard the name Natsworthy mentioned several more times. She reached for the big gun on her shoulder and eased the safety catch off; asked Shrike, “What are they saying?”
Before the Stalker could translate, Oenone came back to join them, smiling. “Hester,” she said, “your husband is here.”
She might as well have car
ried on talking in her own funny language, Hester thought, for what she said made no sense at all.
“Tom Natsworthy,” said Oenone. She took Hester’s hands in hers and smiled into her face. “He arrived this morning, aboard Anna Fang’s old ship…”
“No,” said Hester, not believing it; not wanting to.
“He is being held in a cell down by the docking pans at the foot of this crag. But don’t worry; I shall tell Naga to free him at once. You should go to him, Hester.”
“Me? No.”
“Go to him.” Oenone pulled off the ring she wore and pressed it into Hester’s hand, folding Hester’s fingers over it. “Take this; tell the guards I sent you. Mr Shrike can translate for you. They will let you talk to him. Tell him that orders will soon be coming from my husband to let him go.”
“But he won’t want to see me. Send someone else.”
“You are still his wife.”
“You don’t know about the things I’ve done.”
Oenone stood on tiptoes and kissed her. “Nothing that can’t be forgiven. Now go, while I talk to Naga.”
Hester turned and went, Shrike at her side, everyone in the passage turning to stare, wondering who she could be.
Pennyroyal lingered. “So Tom’s here, eh?” he said. “These Natsworthys do pop up in the most unlikely spots. But I’ll stay with you if I may, Empress. There’s the small matter of the reward you mentioned…”