A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  “You may imagine my astonishment! London was gone. Had I not seen with my own eyes the baleful flash of its explosion? ‘How did you come by all these Quirkes, my dear?’ I asked, and Ms. Morchard, after a moment’s confusion, confessed that she was an archaeologist, and that she had been hunting for salvage among the ruins of London!”

  A ripple of excitement spread among Pennyroyal’s listeners. People whispered eagerly to one another in New German (a handsome language; the words had corners). Tom leaned forward eagerly in his chair. A young lady in a frock decorated with hundreds of blue eyes said, “But Herr Professor, London’s wreck is haunted!”

  “Indeed,” replied Pennyroyal. “In the months that followed London’s destruction, a dozen different scavenger suburbs went hastening east to devour its twisted and blackened remains. None of them ever returned.”

  “Because the air fleets of the old Anti-Traction League caught them as they neared the debris field and bombed them to bits,” said a clear, faintly mocking voice. The young man whom Wren had noticed earlier had come to the edge of the circle of Pennyroyal’s friends and was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, listening intently. His eyes twinkled. His long mouth widened sideways in something that was almost a sneer.

  “So we are told, sir,” Pennyroyal agreed, glaring at him. “So we are told. But have we not all heard eerier rumors?”

  The Murnauers nodded and muttered. It seemed they all had.

  “Cruwys Morchard was a rational, scientific sort, like our friend here,” Pennyroyal went on. “She paid no heed to talk of ghosts. But she had seen things inside London that had turned her hair gray! No sooner had her party landed among the ruins than a fork of mysterious lightning came crackling out of the debris and destroyed their airship! More lightning followed, leaping upward from the dead metal and striking all around the explorers, as if it were drawn to the warmth of the blazing ship—or perhaps to the warm bodies of Ms. Morchard and her comrades! One of her party was burned to ashes. The others panicked and fled, but the ruins seemed to shift and twist about them, so that they could not find their way out of the debris fields. A dozen of them died during the week it took them to struggle back to the Out-Country. And it was not just the lightning that killed them. There were … other things. Things that made even the valiant Ms. Morchard grow pale as she spoke of them. Things that drove men mad, so that they flung themselves from high places in the wreckage rather than face them.”

  “What sort of things?” asked the young lady with the eyes on her dress, all agog.

  “Ghosts!” whispered Pennyroyal. “I know, Fräulein Hinblick, you will tell me there is no such thing; you will say that nobody returns from the Sunless Country. But Ms. Morchard swore to me that she had met with phantoms in the ruined streets of London. And since Ms. Morchard is the only person who has ever walked those streets and lived to tell the tale, I think we should take her word for it.”

  There was a silence in the room. It seemed to have grown rather cold. Fräulein Hinblick snuggled closer to her companions, and a young man with medal ribbons and a wooden hand said softly, “It is a haunted place. When I flew with the Abwehrtruppe, I saw it from a distance. Ghostly lights flash and glimmer there at night. Even the Green Storm fear it. Over the rest of the old eastern Hunting Ground they have put settlements and forests and farms and windmill fields, but for a hundred miles around the wreck of London there is nothing.”

  Tom leaned forward in his seat. It was time for him to try out the theory that he had been working on over the past few days. He was shaking slightly. He said, “I think Ms. Morchard may have been deceiving you a little. You see, I believe that she comes from London. I knew her when she was Clytie Potts, a member of the Guild of Historians. Somehow she survived MEDUSA. Perhaps she made up her tale of ghosts and lightning to keep people from going to London? To scare off scavengers who might try to loot the wreck? Could it be that other Londoners survived the explosion, and that she uses the Archaeopteryx to fly in and out of the ruins, ferrying supplies to them?”

  The young Murnauers were far too polite to say that they didn’t believe him, but Wren could see by their faces that they did not. Only the shabby young man watched him with interest.

  “Medical supplies and livestock,” Tom said hopefully. “That’s what the clerk at Airhaven told us she carries…”

  Pennyroyal shook his head. “A nice idea, Tom, but a bit unlikely, wouldn’t you say? Even if anyone had survived that terrible disaster, why would they still be living in the ruins, all those hundreds of miles behind the Green Storm’s lines?”

  Wren felt embarrassed for her father. She wished he had tried out his crazy-sounding idea on her before he let everybody else hear it. Poor Dad! He really missed his old city, even after all these years; that was why he had let his imagination run away with him.

  The breakfast party was beginning to break up, the room filling with a low buzz of conversation as Tom spoke eagerly to Pennyroyal, and Fräulein Hinblick explained what had just been said to some of her friends who spoke no Anglish. A few of them looked doubtfully at Tom, and there was some laughter. Wren turned to search for Orla Twombley and instead found the shabby stranger standing close behind her.

  “Your father’s imagination is almost as vivid as Professor Pennyroyal’s,” he said.

  “Daddy is a Londoner himself,” Wren told him. “It’s only natural that he should be interested in what has become of London.”

  The man seemed satisfied. He was better-looking than Wren had thought at first, and younger, too; just a boy really, eighteen or nineteen, with clear, pale skin and a faint stubble showing on his chin and upper lip. But his ice-blue eyes seemed to belong in a much older face. They stared past Wren at her father as he said, “I should like to talk to him. But not here.” He thought for a moment, then reached inside his coat and took out a square, thick, creamy card, which he gave to Wren. Curly writing was embossed on it, an address on the Oberrang, Murnau’s upper tier. “My father is giving a party tomorrow afternoon. You should both come. There we may speak in private.”

  He studied her face for a moment. Wren looked down at the invitation, and when she looked up again, the young man had turned away; she saw the skirts of his coat swirl as he reached the stairs and started down; his hair glinted gold in the lamplight. Then he was gone.

  Wren turned to her father, but Tom was talking to the journalist Spiney, trying not to give too much of the truth away as Spiney quizzed him about how he knew Professor Pennyroyal. Wren went over to Orla Twombley instead. “Who was that man?” she asked. “The one who interrupted the Professor’s story?”

  “Him?” The aviatrix looked around quickly and, seeing that the young man had left, said, “His name is Wolf Kobold. Son of Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, the old soldier they made mayor of Murnau when this war began. Look, there they are together in that print above the fireplace… Wolf’s a brave fighter. Handsome too, don’t you think?”

  Wren did, but she was too shy to admit it. She tried not to blush as the aviatrix steered her across the still-crowded room to show her the picture. There stood the kriegsmarschall, a stern, stiff gentleman whose enormous white mustaches made him look as if a wandering albatross had chosen his upper lip as a perch. Beside him was the young man to whom Wren had just spoken, looking younger still— the picture must have been five or six years old, for it showed Wolf as a rather angelic schoolboy. Wren wondered what had happened to him in the years since to make him so grim.

  “He’ll be kriegsmarschall himself when the old man finally retires or dies,” Orla Twombley was saying. “Until then he has been acting as mayor of one of Murnau’s harvester suburbs. He drops into Moon’s sometimes, when he visits Murnau on family business, but he’s a solitary type. I’ve never talked with him.”

  Wren showed her the invitation she’d been given, and Orla whistled softly. “Wren, my dear, you are going up in the world! I declare, you’ve barely been aboard this city an hour, and already you�
�ve been invited to the kriegsmarschall’s garden party.”

  Chapter 10

  The Black Angel

  Oh, what’s this? Here on the high seas of the desert, where the rippling horizons seem more liquid than land, something solid has appeared. It is just a speck at first; a dark triangle shimmering above the silver mirages that lie across the dunes, but it grows clearer and harder by the moment; a blade, a shark’s fin, a black sail bellying in the desert wind. Listen; you can hear the sand singing under racing tires. Look; you can see the sun’s reflection like diamonds in a line of portholes.

  Imagine a pond skater, but magnify it until it is as big as a yacht. Fix a wheel to each of its long legs, and raise a mast above it. Then set it skimming over sand instead of water. It is a sand ship, the vehicle of choice for desert scavengers and bounty hunters, and as it passes, if we turn to look, we can see what has brought it into this mineral ocean. The region ahead of it is crowded with towns, their smokestacks and upperworks dancing behind the curtains of reflected heat that sway above the dunes.

  This is a rare event, the nearest thing to a trading cluster that you will find in the dried-out, town-eat-town world of the desert deeps. A big, slow suburb that should be preying on fishing hamlets along the far-off coast has blundered into the sand sea by mistake, and been hunted to a standstill by a pack of speedy predators. The hunters have huge wheels, huge jaws, huge engines, and huge appetites to match. They have cornered their prey in a dusty bowl of sand called Bitumen Bay, ringed by mined-out hills. They are tearing it apart, and for a day or so, while they are too busy digesting their catch to eat one another, an uneasy peace prevails. Merchants go from one fierce town to another, and far-wandering airships appear out of nowhere to flog Old Tech and knickknacks. Even the swift, shy scavenger towns come creeping close to try to sell the scraps they’ve found among the sands.

  The black sails of the nameless ship crinkle and flutter like the petals of an opium poppy as its pilot brings it up into the wind, slowing, sweeping around in a long curve that will take it into the school of other sand ships around the cluster.

  The townlet of Cutler’s Gulp had parked itself on the slopes of an enormous dune a half mile from the feeding frenzy and kept its engines idling, ready to take off in a moment should any of the predators show signs of fancying it for dessert. It was a long, low thing, its single deck overshadowed by fat sand wheels. It consisted mainly of engines, and of the bloated ducts and flues and exhaust pipes that served them. The inhabitants made their homes in what little space was left, stretching their awnings between the ducts and building small dwellings of mud and papier-mâché on the few bare patches of deck among the engine housings. Sand ships came and went from garages in its belly, and a jaunty black-and-white-striped air trader called the Humbug came buzzing across the dunes to touch down at the harbor, a blank space near the bows where a couple of the mud buildings had recently collapsed.

  The master of the Humbug was a merchant named Napster Varley. VARLEY SON said the signs on his ship’s engine pods, but little Napster Junior was only three months old, and not yet taking an active part in the running of the business. Varley had hoped that a wife and child might give him the respectability he needed to escape from these tin-pot desert trading towns and set up in one of the big cities. But so far they had brought him nothing but noise, annoyance, and expense, and if he had not needed his wife to help him pilot the Humbug, he would have kicked them both overboard months ago.

  As the sun sank westward and the shadows started to lengthen, Varley found himself ambling aft along the Gulp’s ramshackle walkways with the boss of the place, Grandma Gravy.

  They made an odd pair. Napster Varley was a slight, pasty young man, with flakes of sunburned skin peeling off his snub nose. He was a keen reader of business books, and in one of them (How to Succeed at the Air Trade by Dornier Lard) he had read that a successful businessman must always dress distinctively, that his customers shall remember him. So despite the heat he wore a purple frock coat, a fur stovepipe hat, and a pair of baggy yellow pantaloons with a crimson windowpane check.

  Grandma Gravy, meanwhile, covered herself with so many layers of flapping, rust-colored shawls and robes and skirts and djellabas that she looked as if one of the nomad tents of the deep desert had decided to get up and walk about. But if you peered closely at the space between her massive shoulders and her wide-brimmed hat, you could see, behind the close mesh of her fly-proof veil, a fat, yellowish face and a pair of tiny, calculating eyes that glittered slightly as she studied Mr. Varley.

  “Got somefin to sell,” she told him. “Aye. Found it out in the deeps, few weeks by. Valooble.”

  “Really?” Varley dabbed at his neck with a handkerchief and waved the flies away. “Not Old Tech, is it? The price of Old Tech has dropped something shocking since this truce began…”

  “More valooble’n Old Tech,” muttered Grandma Gravy. “Mossie airship gone down, dinnit? My boys saw the fires in the sky. My town was first at the wreck. Not much left, no. Jus’ a few struts and engine parts and this item, this valooble item.”

  She led him up a metal stairway and in through the door of one of the mud-brick towers that rose like termite hills out of the tangle of ducts at the townlet’s stern. Inside were more stairs, and Grandma panted and rattled as she climbed them. The hems of her robes were bedecked with magic charms: a human jawbone, a monkey’s hand, little greasy-looking leather pouches filled with gods-knew-what. Grandma Gravy had a reputation for witchcraft, and used it to keep her people in line. Even Varley felt a little nervous as he followed her up the winding stairs, and he touched the medal of the God of Commerce that hung around his neck beneath his paisley cravat.

  They came to an upper room, hot, and filled, like the rest of Grandma’s tower, with a brownish haze and a faint smell of burned fat. In the middle of the room someone lay chained by the feet to a ring in the metal floor. A boy, Varley thought, until she raised her head and looked up at him through tangles of filthy hair and he saw that she was a young woman. She was dressed in rags, and there were bruises on her throat, and sores on her bony ankles where the shackles had rubbed.

  “Sorry, Grandma,” said Varley quickly. “I’m not buying no slaves.” (He had no moral objection to the slaving business, but the great Nabisco Shkin, in his book Investing in People, advised would-be slavers to buy only the healthiest stock. Varley could see at a glance that this scrawny little quail was already half dead.)

  “She’s far more valooble than just some slave,” said Grandma Gravy in her rasping, breathless voice. She waddled across the room and grabbed the captive by her hair, twisting her face toward Varley. “What do you think she be?”

  Varley fished a monocle out of his breast pocket and squinted through it at the captive’s dull, almond-shaped eyes. Her skin, under all the dirt and sunburn and exposure sores, had once been ivory colored. He shrugged, growing tired of the game. “I don’t know, Grandma. Some kind of half-breed eastern trash. Shan Guonese? Ainu? Inuit?”

  “Alooshan!” crowed Grandma Gravy. “Bless you, Grandma.”

  “From Aloosha.” Grandma Gravy let the woman’s head drop and came waddling back to where Varley waited. Her breath went hur, hur, hur behind the fly-proof veil. “Know ’oo she is then, young trader? She’s that Mossie general’s wife. She’s the queen of the Green Storm!”

  Varley said nothing, but his posture changed. He took his hands out of his pockets and licked his lips, and his eyeglass flashed. He’d heard a story about Lady Naga’s airship going down in the sand sea. Was this her? It could be. He’d seen a picture of her once in the Airman’s Gazette, and he tried hard to remember it, but she had been in her wedding finery, and anyway, all these easterners looked the same to Napster Varley.

  “Found this on her,” said Grandma Gravy, and produced from inside her tent of robes a signet ring. Gold, with an oak-leaf design. “And look at that cross around her neck: that’s Zagwan workmanship.”

  Varley h
eld a silk handkerchief to his nose and went close to the woman. “Are you Lady Naga?” he asked, very loudly and slowly.

  She stared at him and nodded faintly. “What has become of Theo?” she asked.

  “She’s talking ’bout some Zagwan kid what was traveling with her,” Grandma Gravy explained. “We stuck him in the engine pits. Dead by now, I s’poze. Anyway, merchant, what I’m asking is, what’s to be done with her? I can’t go on keeping her in luxury like this. She’s too weak to sell for a common slave, but she ought to be valooble to someone, aye? The queen of the Mossies…”

  “Oh, indeed,” said Varley thoughtfully.

  “I been thinkin’ we might skin her, see,” suggested Grandma Gravy. “Her hide might fetch a tidy sum, aye? We could turn her into a nice rug, or some scatter cushions.”

  “Oh, Grandma Gravy, no!” cried Varley. “It’s her brain that is the valuable part!”

  “You mean a paperweight or somefin?”

  Varley leaned as near to Grandma as he could bear and tapped one finger on his temple. “What she knows. I could take her to Airhaven and offer her to the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. They might pay well for her.”

  “Then you’ll buy her whole? What’ll you give?”

  “Oh, well, of course, I will have transport costs to factor in, and other overheads, and this unfortunate truce has upset the market, but let me see …”

  “Ow much?”

  “Ten gold dollars,” said the merchant.

  “Twenty.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Course,” said Grandma Gravy thoughtfully, “I could always make little talismans out of her fingies and toes and sell ’em off individual…”

  “Twenty it is,” said Varley hastily, and started counting the coins out into her hand before she could up the price.