A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  As Wren eased the steering levers back and the Jenny rose, and the rounded thing slid by beneath her, Tom saw that the other man was right; it was buckled, corroding, shaggy with weeds, but unmistakably one of London’s wheels. Beyond it the Out-Country mud was strewn with immense, dark shapes; more wheels, lengths of twisted axle, strange melted masses of metal flung out from the exploding city. Cast-off tracks were strewn across it all, like ruined roadways leading toward the mountain of scrap that was just coming into view through the mist ahead.

  Tom held his breath. He remembered the last time he had seen London, blazing and wracked by explosions, on the morning after MEDUSA. Hester had been with him then; they had been cast adrift together in the Jenny, and she had comforted him, and made him turn away from the sight of his dying city. By the time he had looked again, the wind had blown them far from London.

  “Do you want to land?” asked Wren.

  Tom rubbed a hand quickly across his eyes and looked at Wolf. Wolf said, “Not yet. This is just the western edge of the debris fields. Nothing here but wheels and tracks and a few burned-out suburbs that came looking for salvage and got bombed by the Anti-Traction League…”

  “Or blasted by the ghost lights,” joked Wren, and then wished she hadn’t, because the silly ghost stories she had heard in Moon’s did not seem silly at all now. The silent wreckage of London was slipping past on either side of the gondola: empty-windowed husks of broken buildings looming out of the night like a fleet of ghost ships.

  “We’ll head eastward for a bit,” Tom decided.

  The landscape beneath the Jenny Haniver was altering quickly. Soon she reached the main debris field, where the earth was completely hidden by deep, dense heaps of tangled scrap. She passed over a burned-out suburb, wheels and engine array dissolving into the greater ruin of the city it had come to feast on. Trees stirred softly in the clefts between steep-tilted jags of deck plate. Ahead the wreckage heaped upward into spiny hills. Tom sighted a flat place, half-hidden by the overhanging plates of a sloughed-off track, circled back to check it, and set the Jenny down quietly and carefully in the shadows there.

  “Gosh!” whispered Wren in the silence that closed in once Tom had killed the engines.

  Wolf Kobold opened the hatch, letting in cold, moist air and a smell of wet earth. “Nobody about,” he said. “No welcoming committee…”

  Tom could feel his heart pounding. He struggled to calm himself. Furtively swallowing one of his green pills, he found an excuse to stay on the flight deck while Kobold and Wren busied themselves outside, tethering the Jenny securely with landing anchors and draping her engine pods and steering fins with the camouflage netting he had brought from Murnau. She was too big to hide, but with luck passing airships or Stalker-birds would miss her, tucked into that rusty cave of track plates with the netting softening her outlines.

  They gathered the things they needed: their canvas packs; lanterns; the old gun that Tom had never used, taken down from the locker above his pilot’s chair. Outside, the sky above the debris fields was turning gray, stars fading as the dawn approached. They drank tea, and Wolf took a nip of something stronger from his hip flask.

  “Perhaps you should stay here with the ship, Wren,” Tom suggested. “At least until we’ve had a look around…”

  “We should stick together,” said Wolf firmly, and no one disagreed; they were on the ground again now, back in his realm, and they let him go ahead, a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, as they stepped out one by one into the shadows of the lost city.

  It seemed silent at first. An eerie, awful, graveyard silence, broken only by the footfalls of the newcomers. The white gardens of the Moon must be this quiet, thought Tom. But gradually, as they picked their way along the narrow, aimless tracks, he became aware of small sounds. Drips of water pattered down from overhangs; a scrap of curtain flapped in an empty window; flakes of rust shifted and stirred, piled in deep drifts among the hollows of the wreckage.

  “No one about,” muttered Wolf.

  “How does it feel to be home, Dad?” asked Wren.

  “Strange.” Tom stooped to run his fingers over a buckled metal sign that lay among the rust scraps underfoot, tracing the familiar name of a London street; FINCHLEY ROAD, TIER FOUR. “Strange and sad…”

  “Quiet,” warned Wolf, standing a little ahead of the others, watchful, his gun in his hand.

  “If there’s anyone here, they must have heard the Jenny’s engines when we set down,” Tom reminded him. “They know we’ve arrived. I wish they’d show themselves…”

  A bird cried, away in the ruins somewhere. They pressed on eastward, pulling on their goggles to shield their eyes against the peach-colored glare of the rising sun. The debris fields had looked big from the windows of the Jenny Haniver, but from ground level they were simply vast. London was another country; a mountainous island whose central peaks stood several hundred feet high. Parts of the wreck were still recognizably the remains of a city; there were whole streets of empty-eyed buildings, and a row of upside-down shops with the fading, blistered signs still in place above—now below—their doors. But in other sections everything was so twisted, so jumbled up, so distorted that it was hard to say what it had been before MEDUSA. And twice, among the enormous heaps of rust, Tom made out subsidiary wrecks; the carcasses of suburbs. He remembered hearing in Murnau about suburbs that had gone to tear salvage from the wreck soon after it fell, and had never come back because the Anti-Traction League had bombed them. But these suburbs, deep in the ruins, one with its jaws still clamped around some tasty mass of scrap, did not show the scars of any bomb or rocket blasts. It looked to Tom as if the reason they had never gone home was because they had melted.

  At the top of a low rise he stopped and shouted, “Hello!”

  “Ssshh!” hissed Wolf, whirling around.

  “Yes, Dad!” said Wren. “Someone will hear you!”

  “That’s what we want, isn’t it?” asked Tom. “Didn’t we come here to find people, if there are people here at all? And Wolf, you said yourself that they weren’t hostile…” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted again, “Hello!” Echoes ran off and hid themselves among the wreckage. As they faded, there was a shrill, trilling whistle, but it was only another bird.

  The path led through a shadowy canyon between the rust crags and then out into sunlight again. Tier-support pillars, broken gantries, and shards of deck plate lay jumbled together, blackened and fused by unimaginable heat. The travelers scrambled over a tangle of rusting six-inch hawser, like gnats creeping through a bowl of congealed spaghetti. Beyond it a wrenched rind of deck plate arched over the pathway. As they passed beneath it Wren sensed movement above her and looked up, but it was only a bird—a nice, ordinary, non-Stalkerized bird—gliding higher and higher on the thermals that were rising from the sun-warmed wreck. They moved on, passing through the cool shade of the arch and out into sunlight again.

  And behind them a sudden babble of shouts and howls broke out, spinning them around, making Wolf curse and Wren grab for her father’s hand.

  The steep screes of rust flakes beside the path had come alive with raggedy, careering figures, and more were letting themselves down on ropes from hiding places in that twisted arch. Wolf aimed his gun at one of them, but Tom shouted, “No, don’t!” and snatched at his arm so that the shot went wide. Before Wolf could fire again, he was surrounded by grimy young people with homemade weapons, all shouting, “Hands up!” and “Don’t move!” and “Throw down your guns!” Some of them had feathers in their hair, and had drawn stripes of rusty mud across their faces like war paint. One, a girl in a grubby white rubber coat, jumped down close to Wren and pointed a crude crossbow at her.

  Wren had had all sorts of things pointed at her since leaving Anchorage—everything from clunky old Lost Boy gas pistols to shiny new machine guns. It never got boring. She knew of nothing quite so uncomfortable as finding that your life was suddenly in the hands of someone you
had never met, who did not seem to like you very much, and who could snuff you out in an instant by simply squeezing a trigger. She raised her hands and smiled weakly at the crossbow girl, hoping she wasn’t prone to twitchy fingers.

  Tom was trying to explain to his captors that he was a Londoner and a Third Class Apprentice in the Guild of Historians, but they didn’t seem interested. Someone had snatched Wolf’s pistol and was pointing it at him. Wolf looked so angry and ashamed at being captured that Wren felt sorry for him, and wished she could think of something she could say to comfort him. It had not been his fault, and she was glad that her father had stopped him from shooting anybody.

  The man who seemed to be the leader of the ambush came stumping over to peer suspiciously at Wren. He was older than the others, short and squarish, with cropped gray hair and a tattoo just above the bridge of his nose in the shape of a little green compass. Wren sensed that he was afraid of her, which was a bit rich when you considered that he had a dozen heavily armed juvenile delinquents on his side. He was clutching a gun of his own; a strange thing, covered in wires and tubes, with a flat zinc disk where the muzzle ought to be.

  “Well, young woman?” he demanded tetchily. “What is your game? What are you doing in London?”

  Wren tilted her chin at him and tried to look haughty. “We’ve come to see Clytie Potts,” she said.

  “What?” The man looked surprised. “You know Clytie?”

  “This one keeps saying he’s a Londoner, Mr. Garamond,” shouted one of the boys who had captured Tom.

  “Rubbish!” The man looked at Wren again, chewing his lower lip as he considered what to do.

  “Very well, everyone,” he said at last. “Bind the prisoners’ hands. We shall take them to the lord mayor.”

  Chapter 19

  The Holloway Road

  With their hands tied in front of them, surrounded by the fierce-looking young Londoners, the travelers resumed their journey. Their captors did not lead them east, into the heart of the debris field, as they had expected, but turned north instead. The girl guarding Wren pointed with her crossbow toward the central heights and said, “Lots of ’ot zones in there. Round ’ere, too, only not so bad. If you’d kept going, you’d have ended up slap bang in Electric Lane. Nasty.”

  Wren had no idea what she was talking about, and before she could ask, Mr. Garamond shouted angrily, “Be quiet, Angie Peabody! Stop fraternizing with the scavengers!”

  “I ain’t fraternizing with nobody!” cried the girl indignantly.

  “We aren’t scavengers,” said Tom politely. “We are simply—”

  “Be quiet!” insisted Garamond, like a teacher struggling to keep an unruly class in order. He held up his hand for silence. Around his neck on a length of cord hung a curious little machine with many aerials, and he was frowning at a gauge on its top. “Sprite!” he shouted suddenly. “Everybody down!”

  His young followers obeyed him instantly, flinging themselves down in the mud and pulling Tom, Wren, and Wolf down with them. There was a faint buzzing sound that grew quickly louder and higher pitched until it passed beyond the reach of human hearing; then a gigantic arc of lightning crackled across a gap between two spires of melted deck plate.

  “What was that?” gasped Wren, trying to rub the afterimage off her eyes as crossbow girl helped her to her feet.

  “Lingering energy from MEDUSA,” said Tom’s guard cheerfully. “We call ’em ‘sprites.’ That one was pretty pathetic compared with the monsters we used to get. In the old days the whole of London was hot.”

  “Please be quiet, Will Hallsworth,” shouted Mr. Garamond, waving the party onward. Hallsworth glanced at Wren and grimaced like a cheeky schoolboy, making her smile. She decided that she had been captured by far worse people than these young Londoners in her time.

  The path they were following veered away from the deeper ruins, and they passed through no more hot zones. Twice they crossed places that were almost free of wreckage, stretches of open ground where crops were ripening. Among the rubble heaps scrap-metal windmills rose like rusty sunflowers.

  They descended into a broad, V-shaped valley, whose walls were dead buildings and whose muddy floor lay deep in shadow. Looking up, Wren saw that the sky was hidden by the branches of overhanging trees and by a complicated mesh of knotted ropes and hawsers, through which dead branches and scraps of fabric had been threaded, forming a sort of roof. A few shafts of sunlight shone in, falling like spotlights on the airship that lay tethered on the valley floor.

  “The Archaeopteryx!” cried Tom, recognizing the handsome little ship he had last seen pulling away from Airhaven.

  “So this is where they hide her…” Wolf sounded grudgingly impressed. He was starting to forget the indignity of his capture, and was looking about with as much interest and curiosity as the others.

  They passed the silent airship, then a line of battered tanks labeled fuel and lifting gas, and finally a small guard post with tattered deck chairs, and views of old London tacked to the tin walls. The valley ended at a sheer cliff of metal, and Garamond ordered his party into a tunnel that seemed to lead under it.

  The roundness of the tunnel, and its ribbed walls and roof, puzzled Tom, until the Londoners lit lanterns and he realized that it was one of the old air ducts that lay looped like lifeless snakes throughout the wreck. Rails had been laid along the bottom of the duct, and a couple of wooden carts stood ready at the buffers. Above them, on the curving wall, an old enamel sign gleamed in the lantern light. It was the name plate from a London elevator station; a broad red ring in the middle of a white square, crossed by a vertical blue bar. In white letters on the blue were the words holloway road.

  “This is how we get ’eavy cargoes out of the Archy and into London,” whispered Wren’s guard, Angie. “The Mossies’ spy birds can’t see us if we keep inside this old duct. We call it ‘taking the tube.’ ”

  “The Hollow-Way Road,” said Wren, reading the sign again. “Oh, very funny…”

  “Well, yer gotter ’ave a laugh, ain’t yer?”

  They followed the Holloway Road for what felt like a mile or more, sometimes by lantern light, sometimes through patches of sunshine that spilled in through rents in the skin of the old duct. The way twisted and turned, and the floor sloped steeply sometimes where the duct dipped down into a hollow of the earth or lay draped across another section of wreckage. Underfoot the dust between the rails was stamped with the prints of passing boots.

  At the end of the duct they passed more makeshift cargo carts and another set of buffers, and emerged into daylight again to find a pathway of metal duckboards leading between two steep hills of scrap. Beyond the hills stretched an open space that had been cleared of wreckage. Kitchen gardens had been laid out in raised beds full of peaty soil, and people broke off from picking cabbages and digging potatoes to stand staring as the prisoners were led by.

  Tom stared back. There were not just people inside London; there were lots of people. He looked at their faces, but there was no one he recognized. It didn’t matter; they were Londoners, that was what was important. Many of them bore the marks of old injuries; he saw missing limbs and fingers, a man with a burned face, a blinded woman being guided along by her children, who were telling her excitedly about Tom, Wren, and Wolf. Scars everywhere. Hester would have felt at home here, he thought, and he wished that the wind had blown the Jenny Haniver the other way on that morning after MEDUSA, and carried him and Hester into London instead of away from it. How different things might have been if they had lived in the debris fields…

  At the far side of the garden area a massive section of deck plate lay propped upon the ruins, forming a low-ceilinged cave. Garamond led his party in through the long, letterbox-shaped opening. The iron roof was so low that everyone had to stoop, but in the shadows dozens of small huts and houses had been erected, built from scraps of metal and wood. Crowds were waiting there, alerted by the children who were running excitedly ahead of the procession.
“Where’s Miss Potts?” shouted Garamond over all the noise, and a bald-headed gentleman in a grubby white rubber coat (An Engineer!, thought Tom uneasily) replied, “She’s at the town hall, Garamond.”

  The procession went marching on, deeper and deeper into the metal-roofed cavern until the deck plate overhead was so low, they had to bend almost double to save themselves from cracking their heads on the old bolts and fittings that poked down from it. “This is why it’s called Crouch End,” said Wren’s friendly guard. “It ain’t a very convenient place to live, but in the old days, with sprites and Mossies and Quirke-knows-what-else to hide away from, a roof over our ’eads was very welcome…”

  “Angie Peabody,” barked Mr. Garamond, “I thought I told you to shut your cakeholel”

  Wedged in under the lowest corner of the deck plate was a building fashioned out of an old Gut Supervisor’s office and bits of many other things, all nailed and bolted together in a workmanlike way and painted a cheerful shade of red. london emergency committee someone had written above the door, in careful capitals. Garamond left his charges outside while he went in and had a muffled conversation with someone. Then he came out again and pushed the door wide open. “Step along now, prisoners,” he said. “And show a bit of respect. You are entering the presence of the lord mayor of London!”

  The floor inside the building had been dug out so that there was no need to stoop. Tom went first, with Will Hallsworth at his side, warning him to watch out for the steps. He tripped down them anyway, and landed in a big, slope-ceilinged room where a map of the debris fields covered one wall, marked all over with tickets and flags and mysterious red pins. Around a battered old tin table in the center of the room a dozen people were gathered, looking as if they had been in the middle of a meeting when they were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Garamond and his prisoners. One of them was Clytie Potts. She stood up when she recognized Tom. “Oh, Quirke!” she said.