A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  The black sand ship found a berth in one of the garages on the flanks of Cutler’s Gulp. Its robed and hooded pilot furled its sails and then jumped down to make the ship fast. He seemed to be only a servant, or a crewman, for when his work was done, he stood waiting patiently until a woman came down from the ship to join him. Then, together, they climbed the stairs and started along the iron walkways that bridged the townlet’s furnace pits, heading for the huddle of cantinas and coffee shops near the stern. Beggars stretched out bowls to them, then saw their faces and thought better of it. Rough desert types with half-formed plans of robbery and violence changed their minds and backed into the shadows under ducts. Even the dogs ran away.

  The woman was tall, and very thin, and she carried a long gun on her shoulder. She was dressed all in black: black boots, black breeches, black waistcoat, and a long black duster coat that flew out behind her like black wings when the wind caught it. In a place where everyone went masked or veiled, you might have expected her to wear a black veil too, but she chose to go bareheaded. Her gray hair had been tied back, as if she wanted everyone to see that she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump, and her single eye stared out of the wreckage as gray and chill as a winter sea.

  Her name was Hester Shaw, and she killed people.

  She had appeared in the desert six months earlier. Her companion, a Stalker named Mr. Grike, had carried her aboard El Houl, one of the towns that was eating the wreck of Cloud 9. She had been ill, and Grike had demanded that the townspeople take care of her. They did not want to argue with a Stalker, so they called a doctor, who examined the woman and declared that there was nothing wrong with her beyond a few cuts and scrapes and a sort of settled melancholy that he had seen before in the survivors of calamities.

  “Has she lost someone who was dear to her, Mr. Grike?” he asked.

  “SHE HAS LOST EVERYTHING,” the Stalker replied.

  So the woman lived for a week or two in one of the sackcloth-curtained cubbyholes that passed for houses on the underdecks, and the Stalker cared for her, and fed her on bread and milk, which he mashed up for her with his metal hands, and the people watched and whispered and tried to imagine what relationship there could be between this dazed, ugly woman and the Resurrected man.

  Then, one day, the township’s engine master came to visit Grike and said, “Stalker, I want you to kill me someone. The sheikh who rules this town is old and fat. He takes too much of the salvage for himself. Kill him for me, and I’ll see you live in comfort on the topmost tiers, with fine food and a featherbed for your um, ah …”

  He was still hunting for a word that might describe Hester when Grike said, “I WILL NOT KILL.”

  “But you’re a Stalker! Of course you kill!”

  “I CANNOT. MY MIND HAS BEEN … TAMPERED WITH.”

  The engine master scowled and wondered about throwing the useless Stalker off his town, but he didn’t see how it could be done. He shook his head, and was about to leave when the scarred woman said quietly, “I’ll kill him for you.”

  “You?”

  “I’m Hester Shaw. My father was Thaddeus Valentine, the famous secret agent and assassin,” she said. “You want your sheikh dead? Give me a weapon and tell me where to find him.”

  “But you’re only a woman!” objected the engine master.

  So Hester Shaw found herself a fork and a crowbar and climbed the stairs to El Houl’s upper tier. She kicked open the doors of the sheikh’s house. She killed the sheikh. She killed his guards. She killed his dogs. She moved through the smoky rooms like a plague and left nothing alive behind her. She was more like a Stalker than her Stalker, who would only watch and wait for her.

  With the money the engine master gave her, she bought a sand ship and a few guns, and she and her Stalker left El Houl forever, much to the relief of its inhabitants. Since then she had become one of the legends of the deep sands: the woman bounty hunter and her companion, the Stalker who would not kill. Even Theo Ngoni had heard a garbled version of the story, as he toiled away in the engine pits of Cutler’s Gulp, but the man who’d told him had spoken partly in Arabic, and had referred to the Stalker as a djinn and to Hester Shaw as the Black Angel. So it came as a complete surprise to him when he glanced up that afternoon to see them striding along the walkway that led above his station, and recognized them both.

  For a moment Theo could not remember where he had seen either of them before. Cloud 9 seemed such a long time ago. Even the wreck of the Nzimu seemed long ago. He dimly remembered how he had dragged Lady Naga out through a rent in her cabin wall as the airship filled with fire, and how they had clung to a hawser on the steering vanes while the wreckage sank toward the desert, but it all seemed like something that had happened to somebody else; or something he had only read about.

  He had been working hard ever since, on eighteen-hour shifts, whipped and beaten and abused, given little water and less food. He had begun to have bad dreams even when he was wide awake, and at first he thought it was just another dream when he saw Wren’s mother walking above him in the dazzling sunlight. But he shook his head, and pinched the sweat from his eyes, and she was still there, and the terrible Stalker beside her.

  “Mrs. Natsworthy!” he shouted, and let go of the handles of the fuel hopper that he had been pushing toward the furnaces. Grandma’s overseers were on him almost at once, smashing him to the deck with their clubs of woven rope. But Wren’s mother had heard him, he was sure, for he saw her horrible face turn and stare at him in the instant before he fell.

  “leave him,” grated the voice of the Stalker, louder than the clatter of the townlet’s engines, and no more human.

  The overseers backed off. It had fallen very quiet in the engine pit. Theo could hear the men’s quick breathing. He tried to stand, but he was too weak; he fell on his knees on the hot, sandy deck. “Mrs. Natsworthy,” he said again, meeting the eye of the woman on the walkway. He did not really think that she could help him, and he knew that as soon as she turned away, the overseers would beat him to death. He just wanted her to know that he was here. Maybe she would be able to tell Wren one day that this was what had become of him. He said, “We met. Remember? On Cloud 9?”

  “I KNOW YOU,” said the Stalker Grike.

  “I don’t,” said Hester Shaw. Hearing her old name shouted out like that had unsettled her. She stared at the boy in the pit below her, a gaunt black boy like a bundle of burned sticks. His teeth were bared in something that she supposed was meant to be a smile, and blood was running down his face where the townsmen had struck him. “Who is he?” she asked Grike.

  “HE IS THE ONCE-BORN CALLED THEO, WHO WAS WITH YOUR CHILD ON CLOUD 9.”

  “Is he?” Hester had vague recollections of Wren having a boy in tow that last time they’d met. Perhaps they’d even been introduced. Hester wished he had not called out to her. She was trying to forget her past. She had come to Cutler’s Gulp only for fresh water and supplies. She didn’t want to get involved.

  But as she started to turn away, Grike caught her arm. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

  “Why not?”

  “HE WILL DIE.”

  “Everybody dies,” said Hester. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

  “Damn you, Grike. What did that Green Storm witch do to you, to make you so soft?”

  “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”

  “Well, you ain’t taking him!” shouted a voice from the pit. The foreman of the furnaces, Daz Gravy, had come out of his shady lair to see what all the fuss was. Stalkers didn’t frighten Daz; he was Grandma Gravy’s favorite grandson, and around his fat neck hung dozens of charms she’d given him to ward off bullets and the evil eye. All he cared about was keeping Grandma’s engines running smooth. He grabbed Theo by his iron slave collar and heaved him back toward his abandoned hopper. “He’s our
s. We found him, square and fair. Dragged him out of a wrecked Mossie airship. Grandma says we can do what we like with hi—”

  In a single motion Hester swept the gun off her shoulder, flipped up the safety catch, and shot him dead. He fell with a wet thud and a clattering of good-luck charms. Hester shot his companions down so quickly that the shots and the echoes of the shots all ran together, like a drumroll. She ran down the iron stairs and held out her hand to Theo, but he was shaking too badly to stand, and so the Stalker had to heave him up and carry him away from the engine pit like a child. Hester followed with her gun held ready. In the silence that had come after the gunshots, she could hear the shuffling sounds and the mutterings as people stepped quickly out of her way.

  For some reason, as she ran after Grike to the sand ship and Grike unsheathed his claws and severed the mooring ropes, she kept remembering Stayns: how she and Tom had run from slavers’ men there, and Anna Fang had saved them. She fired a warning shot across the garage as she scrambled up her ship’s side, and cursed herself for being maudlin. This wasn’t Stayns, and Theo wasn’t Tom, and anyway, she didn’t want to think about it.

  Napster Varley heard the shots and shouting as he readied his airship for the sky, and he swore under his breath, hoping that nothing would delay his departure from the Gulp. Grandma’s boys had slung Lady Naga into his hold a few minutes before, and he was shivery with excitement at the thought of the price she would fetch out on the line. If he lingered too long, Grandma Gravy might think better of selling her. So he didn’t run outside to watch the sand ship go racing off across the desert. He ordered his wife to put the baby down and go fire up the engines, and blacked her eye when she did not go quick enough. “Move it, you dozy mare!” he shouted, over the baby’s wailing. “Let’s leave these sand hoppers to their squabbles. We’ve business to attend to!”

  Chapter 11

  Wolf Kobold

  Tom was uncertain about accepting Wolf Kobold’s invitation; he had been brought up to know his place, and he knew that it wasn’t on the Oberrang, which towered above the rest of Murnau like an ornate crown. It took Wren several hours to persuade him.

  “You really need to talk to this Wolf person,” she told him. “He seemed so interested in what you had to say about Clytie Potts. I’m sure he knows something.”

  Tom shook his head. “I’m not sure I really believe any of that myself. It was just an idea; I have no proof. Pennyroyal didn’t believe it, and he’s the man who claims that Ancient rubbish bins were really ritual centers and that the Ancients had machines called ‘eye-pods’ where they could store thousands of songs on tiny little gramophone records. If he thinks my London theory is unlikely, maybe it really is just a daydream.”

  Wren tried another tack. “Don’t you think it would be good for my education, though? To mix a little in high society? Orla said she has a friend who can lend you formal robes.”

  It was hard work, but she won him over in the end. Next afternoon they went aboard Murnau and took an elevator to the Oberrang, Tom looking awkward in his borrowed robes, Wren wearing her usual aviatrix’s gear, because she felt it suited her and she knew that nothing she could buy in the bazaars of Airhaven could compete with the finery the rich ladies would be wearing. Looking around at her fellow passengers as the elevator grumbled upward, she wondered if she had made the right decision; she drew some strange looks from the smart officers in their blue dress uniforms and the ladies in elaborate hats and gowns. She heard several people whisper, “Who is that extraordinary girl?”

  It was a relief when the elevator stopped and she took Tom’s arm and walked out of the terminus building with him, into bright sunlight. Like the rest of Murnau the Oberrang was covered by an armored roof, but large sections had been folded open to let in the light and air. The party-goers walked toward the spiky bulk of the town hall along a boulevard called Über den Linden, with a glass pavement through which you could look down on the trees in a park on the tier below. It must have been beautiful in the old days, before the war, but now the trees were all dead, and the bare, scratchy branches reaching up toward her gave Wren an eerie feeling.

  A broad swathe of parkland ringed the Rathaus, Murnau’s gothic town hall. There, upon a sparse, patched, mossy lawn, the kriegsmarschall’s garden party was getting underway. Brightly colored pavilions and marquees had been erected, and lines of colored flags strung among the dead trees and the battle-damaged colonnades, along with Chinese lanterns that would be lit later, when it grew dark. Enormous numbers of people were wandering about, for the kriegsmarschall of Murnau was entertaining the mayors and councillors of all the other cities in the cluster. A band played on a flag-decked podium, and people were dancing complicated, formal dances that looked more like applied mathematics than the old-fashioned northern jigs and reels that Wren had learned in Vineland. She wished she had listened to her father and stayed away from this do. She’d only once attended anything as grand as this; that had been on Cloud 9, and she had been there as a slave, handing around trays of drinks and nibbles.

  She was just about ready to flee back to the elevators when Wolf detached himself from a small group of officers standing near the band and came to greet her. He had smartened himself a little, but even in formal uniform and a scarlet sash there was something faintly careless and shabby about him. The sword at his side was heavier and cheaper than the ornate ceremonial weapons the other men wore; it looked as if it had been used. His grin was full of sharp teeth. “My friends!” he called out, bowing low to Tom, taking Wren’s hand and kissing it. “I am so glad you could come!”

  Wren was not used to having her hand kissed. She blushed and bobbed a curtsy. Wolf’s thumb brushed the raised weal on the back of her hand: the brand of the Shkin Corporation, whose property she had been in Brighton. She snatched her hand away quickly, ashamed, but Wolf just looked inquisitively at her, as if it did not trouble him at all that she had been a slave.

  “You have led an interesting life, Fräulein Natsworthy,” he said, taking her arm, leading her and Tom through the busy garden.

  “Not really, Mr. von Kobold. But I suppose I’ve packed in quite a bit in the last six months or so…”

  “Please,” he said, “call me Wolf. Or at least Mr. Kobold. ‘Von’ is an old honorary title; my parents use it, but I have no time for such nonsense.” He bent closer to Wren and said, “You need not feel ill at ease among these silly women in their silly frocks. Most of them have been living in safer cities than Murnau since the war began, and have only come back now that the guns are quiet. Look at them! They are like overgrown children. They know nothing of real life at all.”

  Wren felt glad of his company, and pleased at the slightly envious way the Murnau women watched as she walked by with him, but it disturbed her a little that he had been able to guess so easily how she was feeling.

  “You must forgive me for bringing you here,” Wolf went on, addressing Tom. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk. I had not realized how lavishly my family entertain since this foolish truce began. Come, we will go inside…”

  He steered them past the bandstand toward the looming, armored walls of the Rathaus, but halfway there they were headed off by a formidable-looking lady in a gown of gray silk so stiff and pointy that she looked armored, too. “Wolf, dear heart,” she said sweetly, “everyone is asking me who your friends are.”

  Wolf bowed neatly and indicated Wren and her father. “Mother, let me present Tom Natsworthy, an aviator, and his daughter, Wren. Tom, Wren, my mother, Anya von Kobold.”

  “Delighted,” said his mother, though she seemed rather pained as she looked Tom and Wren up and down, as if it physically hurt her to meet anyone so common. “Wolf has developed such quaint, democratickal notions since my husband gave him command of Harrowbarrow, one simply doesn’t know whom he is going to bring home next. Aviators. How very interesting…”

  “Ignore her,” said Wolf, as his mother moved on to greet a clump of aldermen and th
eir wives. “She knows nothing of life out here on the line. She deserts Murnau whenever the fighting starts, and flies off to a hotel on the upper tiers of Paris. All she knows or cares about are clothes and pastries.”

  He spoke loudly enough for his mother to hear, and a lot of the other guests looked around, shocked and disapproving. Tom, embarrassed, asked innocently, “Harrowbarrow? Is that the name of your suburb? I don’t believe I’ve heard of it…”

  Wolf stopped glaring at his mother’s broad back and smiled. “It is very small, sir, barely a suburb at all; just a little specialized place that came into Murnau’s possession during the war. But it is my own, you know, and I have hopes for it, high hopes.”

  As he ushered them into the Rathaus, Wren wondered what sort of place it might be, this Harrowbarrow. The fighting suburbs she had seen on the journey east had looked horrible: low, vicious, and armored like wood lice. Yet Wolf spoke of his with affection. She supposed it was the same sort of pride you met among aviators, who would never hear a bad word about their own ship, even if she was just some leaky sky tug…

  Once they were inside, the sounds of the garden party quickly faded. Wolf took his guests into a large, silent room where slender metal pillars held up the roof, giving Wren the feeling that she had stepped into an iron forest. There were chairs, and they all sat down while Wolf rang the bell for a servant and ordered refreshments. Then he waited a moment, studying Tom and Wren as if he were not quite sure that he had done the right thing in bringing them here.

  “London,” he said at last. His face twisted into the same wry grin it had worn the previous day when he was listening to Pennyroyal’s story. “I understand that you were once a Londoner yourself, Herr Natsworthy?”

  Tom nodded, and told him about his training in the Guild of Historians and how he had happened to be out of the city when the MEDUSA device went off.