by Philip Reeve
A few empty crates stood between the air-frame struts. A heap of tarpaulins quivered in a corner. Shrike ripped them aside, and stared down at the once-born huddled underneath.
It was hard for a flat, mechanical voice like his to sound weary, but he managed it.
“SO, PROFESSOR; WE MEET AGAIN.”
“THERE IS A STOWAWAY ON BOARD,” the old Stalker announced, climbing down the companionway with his captive. Tom and Hester sprang apart, straightening their clothes and their ruffled hair, turning their attention reluctantly to Nimrod Pennyroyal as Shrike shoved him on to the flight-deck.
“Please, please, please, forgive me!” he was begging, pausing to add, “Oh, hello Natsworthy!”
Tom nodded awkwardly, but did not say anything. He knew that there would be no more time for him to be alone with Hester, for the plateau below was narrowing and rising, and the steep buttresses of the Erdene Shan were only a few miles ahead.
“Throw him out the hatch!” said Hester angrily, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt. “Give him to me; I’ll do it myself!” She felt that dropping Pennyroyal thousands of feet on to some nice pointy rocks would help her regain her dignity. But she knew that Tom would not want that, so she restrained herself, and asked, “How in the gods’ names did you slip aboard?”
“I couldn’t just let you leave me in Batmunkh Gompa, could I?” Pennyroyal started babbling. “I mean, for Poskitt’s sake, I wasn’t going to hang around and let Naga chop my head off or something. Authors lose all their appeal to the public if they are only available in kit form. So I sneaked aboard while those Green Storm chappies were fuelling her, and hid in the hold. If Mr Shrike hadn’t come poking about I’d still be there, being no trouble to you at all. Where are we going anyway? Airhaven? Peripatetiapolis? Somewhere nice and safe, I trust?”
“Nowhere’s safe any more,” said Tom. “We’re going to Erdene Tezh.”
“Where? And, indeed, why?”
“Because we think the Stalker Fang is there.” Pennyroyal’s eyes bulged; he writhed in Shrike’s grip. “But she’ll kill us all! She’ll have airships, soldiers, Stalkers…”
“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I think she’s quite alone. How else would she have been able to return without Naga’s intelligence people suspecting anything?” He grunted and clutched his chest, feeling his heart straining in the thin, high-altitude air. For a moment he felt an absolute hatred of Pennyroyal. What was the old man doing here? Why was he haunting them? He wondered if he should tell Hester about his failing heart. When she learned that the old wound was going to kill him she would murder Pennyroyal out of hand…
But he still did not want to tell Hester how ill he was. He wanted to cling for as long as possible to the pretence that he was going to survive, and sleep in her arms tonight, and fly on with her in the morning to fresh adventures in other skies.
“Tie him up in the stern cabin,” he said.
“But Tom, be reasonable!” Pennyroyal wailed.
“Tie him nice and tight. We can’t risk having him on the loose.”
Shrike dragged the spluttering explorer away; Hester touched Tom’s face with her fingertips and followed, promising to tie the knots herself and leave Shrike to guard him. Alone on the flight-deck, Tom steered the Jenny between the snow-spires of the Erdene Shan, up and up until the topmost peaks were sliding past the windows like vast, blind ships, snow-fields ghostly in that ashen light.
When Hester came back to the flight-deck he said, “We’ll be over the valley in another half-hour if Anna’s old charts are right.”
“They should be,” said Hester, hugging him from behind. “Erdene Tezh was her house, wasn’t it?”
Tom nodded, wishing he could kiss her again, but too wary of the spines and spikes of rock he was flying through to even glance at her. “Anna told me once she planned to retire here.”
Hester hugged him tighter. “Tom, when we get there, if it is her, we’re just going to let Shrike kill her, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to talk to her, or argue with her, or appeal to her better nature, are you?”
Tom looked sheepish. Hester knew him too well; she had already guessed the half-formed plans he had been turning over in his mind all day. He said, “At Rogues’ Roost that time, she seemed to know me. She let us go.”
“She isn’t Anna,” Hester warned him. “Just remember that.” She kissed the hollow of his neck beneath his ear, where the swift pulse beat. “What I told you that night on Cloud 9, about you being boring; I didn’t mean it. You’re not boring. Or maybe you are, but in a lovely way. You never bored me.”
They crossed a high pass. On the eastern side the ground fell steeply, down, down, down, a valley opening, white and then green, a wriggle of river in its deep cleft, a lake at the far end, and, on an island there, the house of the Wind-Flower. Tom, through the Jenny’s old field-glasses, saw a saucer-shaped antennae poking from its roof. Then the sky filled with wings.
Hester had just enough time to push him to the floor before the first wave of Stalker-birds shattered the Jenny’s front windows. Two of them came into the cabin, filling it with their flapping, the idiot flailing of their green-eyed heads. Hester snatched the lightning gun and shot the first before it saw her. The other came shrieking at her, its knife of a beak aimed straight at her eye. She fired the lightning gun at it and it exploded, filling the flight-deck with gunge and feathers. She looked down at Tom. “Are you all right?”
“Yes…” He looked scared and white. Hester squirmed upright, hissing with pain as the movement wrenched strained muscles. She peered out of the windows. More birds were circling the Jenny, and she could see a couple tearing at the starboard engine pod. She aimed the lightning gun through the side window and shot them both, then tossed it down to Tom and snatched her own gun down from an overhead locker. She started aft along the gondola’s central corridor. Pennyroyal was screeching in the stern-cabin, and through the half-open door Hester saw the flap of wings and the gleam of Shrike’s armour as he beat the birds back. “HESTER!” the Stalker shouted.
“I’m fine,” she promised. She heard wings and claws inside the little medical bay where Anna Fang had once treated her for a crossbow-wound. Kicked the door open and turned her gun on the birds that had torn their way in through the roof there. The gun was a good one – the steam-powered Weltschmerz 60 with the underslung grenade-launcher that she’d picked up for a song in El Houl – but it made more of a mess of the medical bay than the birds had, shredding the outer wall till it looked like a doily. Through the holes she could see more birds going for the engine pod, and heard it choke and die, the propeller slowing. “Oh, damn it,” she said, and pumped a grenade through the pod’s cowling, blowing it to pieces along with the birds.
Back out in the corridor she shouted, “Tom? You all right?”
“Of course! Don’t keep asking!”
“Put us down then.”
“Down isn’t a problem,” said Tom, checking the row of gas-pressure gauges on the instrument panel and seeing all the needles whirling towards zero. Unbalanced by the loss of the starboard pod, the gondola was tilting steeply sideways. Scary shapes flapped by outside, but Tom tried to ignore them, saving the lightning gun in case more got in. Gaudy, yellowish light licked in through the larboard windows. The envelope was burning.
Hester kicked open the stern-cabin door. Shrike was in the process of ripping a resurrected eagle to pieces. He looked like a scarecrow, coated with slime and feathers, and he swung his dead face towards her and said, “THIS SHIP IS FINISHED.”
“Not the Jenny,” said Hester loyally. “Tom’ll get her down all right. Go forward. Keep him safe.”
She stood aside to let him go past her. She’d been hoping the birds would have killed Pennyroyal, but they’d been too busy with Shrike. The explorer lay on the floor where she’d left him, bound and gagged, looking up at her with round, pleading eyes. She considered shooting him, then shouldered her gun and pulled her knife out, stooping. Pennyroyal gave a
squeal of fright, but she was only cutting the ropes on his feet and his wrists.
As she stood up again the remains of the long stern-window disintegrated in an ice-fall of smashed glass and the wide black wings of a Resurrected condor filled the cabin. Its claws raked Pennyroyal’s head as it came flapping at Hester. She dropped the knife and tried to bring her gun to bear, but there was no time. She heard herself scream; a terrible, thin, little-girl scream, and suddenly Shrike was back in the cabin with her, pulling her out of the way of the driving beak, grabbing the bird, its blades striking sparks from his armour as he crushed it to his body.
The Jenny Haniver lurched as another of her gas-cells exploded; her nose tipped up, her stern down. Hester was flung on top of Pennyroyal, who clung to a bulkhead. She saw Shrike stumble towards the stern, where the mountains glowed in the twilight beyond the smashed window. The bird was strong; half-crushed, it still flapped and clawed. The spasmic beating of its wings overbalanced Shrike. He smashed the bunk and crashed against the stern wall, which started to give way beneath him with a splintering sound.
“Shrike!” screamed Hester, scrambling down the hill of the deck to help him.
“Hester, no!” yelled Pennyroyal through his gag, pulling her back.
The wall collapsed. Shrike turned his face for a second towards Hester. Still clutching the condor, he fell. “Shrike!” she shrieked again, as the gondola tilted back to the horizontal. She kicked herself free of Pennyroyal and scrabbled as close as she dared to that gaping rent where the wall had been. “Shrike!”
No answer. Nothing to see in the smoke and the wind and the rain of burning fragments from her dying ship. Only the echoes of Shrike’s last cry bouncing up at her from the abyss where he had fallen: “HESTER!”
From the wall of the Stalker’s garden, Fishcake watched the burning airship draw a long, bright trail down the sky, deep into the shadows of the valley. The wind was carrying the sound away, or maybe burning airships made no sound; at any rate, it all seemed to be happening in silence. It was very beautiful. The igniting gas-cells were like fountains, showering out golden fragments which twinkled and faded as they fell. Blazing birds tried to flutter away from it, and they fell too, their bright reflections rising towards them in the waters of the lake until they met in a white kiss of steam.
A footfall in the snow behind him made Fishcake look round. The Stalker stood there, watching. “It is the Jenny Haniver,” she whispered calmly. “How sweet of somebody to bring her home…”
The airship settled in marshy ground on the lake’s far shore. As the smoke of its burning spread across the reed-beds Fishcake was almost sure he saw people running away from it. Mr Natsworthy, he thought, and Hester. And he felt suddenly afraid, because he remembered what he had sworn to do to Hester, and was not sure that he had the courage to do it.
His Stalker’s hand rested on his shoulder. “They are no threat to us,” she whispered. “We will not hurt them.”
But Fishcake gripped the knife inside his jacket and thought about the last time he had seen the Jenny Haniver, flying away without him into the skies of Brighton.
Tom splashed through ankle-deep water and dropped into wet grass, hugging the precious lightning gun. Hester was close behind him, flinging down Pennyroyal. Survivors of the Stalker-bird flock clawed and shrieked around the blazing envelope, still trying to worry it to death. Hester lifted her gun and emptied the last of its grenades into the inferno. The explosion lit up the lake, the slopes and cliffs around it, the lonely house on its island. The Jenny’s rockets went up too, with orange flashes. Then there was only the swirling smoke, and the flames dancing in the smashed birdcage that had been their little airship; twenty years of memories burning away to charcoal and sooty metal.
“Tom?” asked Hester.
“Yes,” he said. His chest ached, but not badly. Perhaps being with Hester again had healed his broken heart. He hoped so, because his green pills had been in the Jenny’s stern-cabin.
“Our Jenny Haniver,” she said.
“She was only a thing,” said Tom, wiping at his eyes with a singed cuff, looking around. “We’re all right; that’s all that matters. Where’s Shrike?”
“He’s gone. He fell. Up there somewhere…” She pointed towards the enormous silence of the mountains.
“Will he come after us?”
Hester shrugged uneasily. “He fell a long way, Tom. He saved me, and he fell. He might be damaged. He might be dead, and there’s no one to bring him back this time.”
“Just us then,” said Tom, and he took her in his arms again, and kissed her. She smelled just as she had on the night they first kissed, of ash and smoke and her own sharp sweat. He loved her very badly, and he was glad they were alone again, in danger and the wilds, where nothing that she had done mattered.
Not quite alone, of course. He had forgotten Pennyroyal, who knelt up in the bog and said in an irritable, gag-muffled voice, “Do you mind?”
Hester pulled away from Tom reluctantly and nodded towards the house. “This must be the place.”
“We’d better get on with it, then.” Tom took the lightning gun from his shoulder and checked it while Hester tied Pennyroyal’s hands and feet again, reknotting the ends of the cords she’d cut earlier.
“You can’t leave me here, bound and helpless!” Pennyroyal complained, through his gag.
“We can’t have you running around free,” said Hester. “You’d sell us out to the Stalker for a handful of copper.”
“But what if you don’t come back?”
“Pray we do,” she suggested.
Tom felt unhappy about leaving the old man behind, but he knew she was right. They were already in enough danger, without a Pennyroyal on the loose behind them.
“How are you proposing to get out of this place?” Pennyroyal howled, as they started to leave, but they had no answer to that, so Hester just tied his gag tighter.
It was hard, rocky country, that valley of Erdene Tezh. Hester liked it. She could hear the grass singing, and smell the earth, and it reminded her of Oak Island. She took Tom’s hand and they walked together through the gloomy light, looking over their shoulders from time to time at the burning brazier that had been the Jenny Haniver. The ground rose in a steep, grassy slope to a docking pan behind a windbreak of pines. The trees made a steady sighing sound as their needles combed the wind. The same wind boomed against the taut siliconsilk envelope of an air-yacht. It was locked and abandoned-looking, but knowing it was there made them feel more hopeful. They moved on, dropping down towards the lake again, towards the causeway.
Hester took the lightning gun from Tom. He was breathing hard, sounding winded. “Stay here with the airship,” she said. “Let me go.”
He shook his head. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers; his mouth, warm in the cold. They started together across the causeway. Tom was slow, but she was glad of that, because it meant that she could draw ahead of him, ready to deal with whatever was waiting for them in that house. There was a creaking noise, but when she swung towards it was only plates of ice grinding and grating together at the edge of the lake. Further out, clear water shone grey and still. She looked ahead again, towards the house.
There was someone standing on the causeway.
“Tom!” she yelled, raising the lightning gun. But she didn’t pull the trigger. It was not a Stalker that stood there watching her. Just a child. A pinched white face and shabby clothes and a lot of filthy hair. She took another few steps, and recognized him. How had he come here? But it didn’t matter. She lowered the gun completely and turned to Tom. “It’s Fishcake!”
Running feet behind her. She heard the boy grunt and, turning, saw the knife flash as he slashed it at her throat. She dropped the lightning gun and grabbed his thin wrist, bending the knife away, twisting his arm until he cried out and let it go. She caught it as it fell and stuffed it through her belt, like a stern teacher confiscating a catapult. She pushed Fishcake away and he fell dow
n and started to cry.
“Tom,” said a whispering voice from above them. “Hester. How nice of you to drop in.”
The Stalker. She had been standing in the shadows at the causeway’s end where ten worn stone steps led up to a gate. She came carefully down the steps, limping, the grey light shining faintly on her bronze face.
“She’s my Stalker!” shouted Fishcake. “I found her after you left me behind. She’s been good to me. She’s going to help me kill you!”
Hester looked for the lightning gun, but it had fallen down among the rocks at the waterside. She started to scramble down to fetch it, but steel hands caught her, lifting her, dragging her, gripping her face; a metal arm went across her chest, pulling her back hard against an armoured breastplate.
“No!” shouted Tom, running for the fallen gun.
“Please don’t be disagreeable, Tom,” whispered the Stalker, “or I shall break her neck. I could do it very easily. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
Tom stopped running. He could not speak. He felt as if someone had jammed a rusty skewer through his left armpit, deep into his chest. Pain ran down his arm, too, and up his neck, along his jaw. He fell to his knees, gasping.
“Poor Tom,” the Stalker said. “Your heart. Poor thing.”
Crouched by her feet, Fishcake watched hungrily. “Kill them!” he shouted, in his thin, angry voice. “Her first, then him!”
“They were Anna’s friends, Fishcake,” said the Stalker. “But they left me behind!” sobbed Fishcake. “She murdered ’Mora and Gargle! I swore I’d kill her!”
“They will both die soon enough.”
“But I swore it!”
“No,” whispered the Stalker.
Fishcake shouted something and groped for the knife in Hester’s belt, but the Stalker swiped him aside, so hard that he was thrown right off the causeway, down on to the ice, which starred and moaned beneath him but did not give way. Howling with pain and betrayal, Fishcake crept back to the causeway. Sobbing, slithering over the wet stones, he ran away from the house.