by Philip Reeve
“you are not to blame, theo ngoni. but she should not have gone alone.” He let out a grating, mechanical noise that Theo supposed was the Stalker equivalent of a Sigh. “i should be helping her to free dr. zero. in other times i would have done it easily. taken out the airhaven power plant, sown confusion, and gone aboard the HUMBUG while the once-born were looking elsewhere… but i could not do that without killing.”
“You wouldn’t get far afterward, either,” Theo pointed out.
Grike didn’t seem to hear him. He stood at a porthole, staring out at the night and the silent, tethered ships, “I AM GOING TO HELP HER.”
“But you can’t! If you’re seen …”
“I WILL BE CAREFUL.”
Before Theo could stop him, Grike opened the hatch and jumped down onto the docking strut. No one was about. He crossed the strut in two long strides and dropped over the edge, his armor rippling with reflections from the harbor lights as if he were made of quicksilver. The underside of the strut was in shadow, hatched with girders. Grike crept along them until he was beneath the docking quays, and waited while a puttering dirigible balloon taxi passed beneath him on its way to the central ring. Then he began to pull himself along Airhaven’s underbelly toward Strut 13.
The dirigible taxi pulled in against one of the docking platforms in the center of Airhaven, and its wicker gondola creaked as Sampford Spiney scrambled out, followed by Miss Kropotkin and her enormous camera. The journalist had been at a dinner on the Oberrang when he received the message from Airhaven, and he had not had time to change out of his formal robes. He swayed slightly as he made his way across the mooring platform to where the clerk from the Empyrean was waiting.
“Well? Are you the one who claims to have seen Pennyroyal?”
“He’s been staying in my hotel, sir.”
“Is he there now?”
“No, sir. He ran out not long after I sent word to you…”
“Ran where?”
“I don’t know, sir. Some people came to talk to him. Then he went running off. I can show you his room, sir…”
“His room? His room? Great Thunderer! I can’t interview a room! Find me Pennyroyal himself, or you’ll not see a cent out of The Speculum.”
The clerk hurried toward the stairs that led up to the High Street, and Spiney went with him, snapping at his photographer to follow. “And make a note, Miss Kropotkin,” he added as they climbed. “I’m pretty sure that was the kriegsmarschall’s sky yacht we passed as we came in. What’s the old man doing in Airhaven? Gambling? Seeing a woman? Could be a story in that…”
The Humbug’s gondola reeked of wet nappies. The living quarters at the stern were full of them, draped on lines strung above the heating ducts. Poorly made bookshelves covered the walls, sagging under the weight of Varley’s self-help books. In one corner a slimy-nosed baby snuffled and started to cry. “Hush, hush, hush,” his mother said, looking up nervously as one of Varley’s heavies pushed Hester in.
Varley was waiting for her, looking more feverish and ferrety than ever, a half-eaten supper on the table in front of him. He’d taken off his jacket. His trousers were held up by snakeskin braces. “On your own this time?” he asked Hester. “Got my ten thousand?”
“Five,” said Hester. “That’s all we can get hold of.”
“Then I’ll be selling your Lady Naga to another buyer.”
“Oh, yes, I noticed the enormous queue all up the gangplank when I came aboard,” said Hester. “That was sarcasm,” she added as Varley sprang up to peer through a porthole.
“Face it, you haven’t got any other buyers. You’ll have to do business with me, before someone bigger and tougher hears who you’ve got stashed in your hold and comes to take her off your hands for free.”
Varley glared at her and said nothing. She opened her bag on the kitchen table, and shook out a pile of small, plump money bags. They jingled loudly, as well they might; two were full of Pennyroyal’s savings, and the other eight were stuffed with nuts and washers that she and Theo had bought at the all-night chandlery on the High Street. “Ten bags,” she said, opening one and tipping out a stream of gold. “Two hundred fifty shineys in each. Captain Ngoni will be bringing you the rest when I can assure him your cargo is alive and well.”
Varley eyed the money hungrily, but he wasn’t happy. “That black kid of yours is a captain? The Green Storm must be running short of men as well as money…”
Hester chose another money bag and emptied a second shining drift of coin across the tabletop. (“Look! Pretty!” said Mrs. Varley, bouncing the baby on her knee.)
“Take it or leave it,” said Hester.
Varley still hesitated. “I want to see your face,” he said sullenly.
“Believe me, you really don’t.”
The merchant sniffed, kicked a toy aside, and told his henchman, “Watch her, and don’t go thieving any of my money.” Then he pushed past Hester and vanished up a companion ladder into the Humbug’s envelope. The other man reluctantly pried his eyes away from the heap of gold on the table and watched Hester instead. The baby gurgled. The woman sang him a song that Hester remembered faintly from long ago, but she quickly stopped when Hester looked at her.
“You from Oak Island?” Hester asked.
The woman shook her head. “Red Deer.”
You could see Red Deer Island from the hills above Hester’s childhood home on Oak Island, when the weather was fine. No wonder she recognized the song. She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill this woman and her baby.
“Napster bought me in the wife auction there,” the woman started to explain, and then stopped suddenly again, because she had heard her husband’s footsteps on the ladder, coming back down. She shifted closer to the table to give him room as he dropped into the cabin, dragging his frightened cargo behind him.
Pennyroyal peered into half a dozen of the High Street’s crowded drinking holes before he found what he was looking for. In fact they found him: a gang of rowdy young militia officers up from Manchester on a twenty-four-hour pass, clutching girls and bottles, making their unsteady way from a casino above Strut 1, where they had been betting their pay on Ancient games of chance like Pick-a-Sticks and Buckeroo. Pennyroyal scurried alongside, calling out, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” and “I say,” but they paid him no attention until he shouted, “I am Nimrod Pennyroyal!”
The Mancunians turned to stare at him.
“Shove off!” said one.
“Scrag him!” suggested another.
“Chuck him off the docking ring!” roared a third. “Hoorah!”
“No,” said a fifth man, slightly more sober than the rest. “He is Nimrod Pennyroyal. I recognize him from the papers.”
“Chuck him off the docking ring anyway!”
“Hoorah!”
“He’s that fake explorer bloke, ain’t he?” said one of the girls, peering at Pennyroyal as if he were some mildly interesting animal in a zoo.
“I am not a fake!” Pennyroyal shouted. “I have come to ask your help! There is a high-ranking member of the Green Storm secreted aboard an airship down on the docking ring, and I need the help of some loyal Tractionists to take her into custody!”
“Huh huh huh huh,” went one of the Mancunians, laughing at some private joke. The rest struggled to follow what Pennyroyal was saying. One or two reached for their swords. “A Mossie? Here?”
“Lady Naga herself! I’ve been operating undercover to discover her whereabouts. All that stuff you read in the papers was just a ruse, designed to make the enemy think I was in disgrace. I’ve actually been working for the Murnauer Geheimdienst all along, you know.”
The Mancunians looked blank. None of them had heard the German name for Murnau’s intelligence service before. Pennyroyal cursed their ignorance [but only quietly] and pulled out the old envelope on which he had jotted down the Humbug’s details from the arrivals board in the Floating Exchange. He squinted at his own crabbed writing for a moment, then flourished the envelo
pe like a battle flag. “Come gentlemen!” he cried. “Follow me to Strut 13, and to glory!”
A bruised face, a mat of greasy hair, a thin body shaking and shaking inside a sackcloth dress. Hester was astonished at the flood of pity she felt as she watched Lady Naga come creeping down the Humbug’s companion ladder. She’s not much older than Wren, she thought, and for a moment she wanted to rush forward and hug the poor, frightened creature and comfort her and tell her that she was safe now.
But she wasn’t safe, not yet, and anyway she would not have wanted to be hugged; she seemed as scared of Hester as she was of Varley. When Varley shoved her forward and said, “This nice lady’s come to buy you,” she hung back and let out a whine like a scared animal. Hester, in her black coat and her black veil, looked like the Goddess of Death.
“You’re Lady Naga?” she asked.
“Oenone,” said the young woman, blinking fearfully at her. Her glasses were held together by tape, and one of the lenses was cracked.
“Course she’s Lady bleedin’ Naga,” crowed Varley. “Look at her signet ring, and that Zagwan pendant thing. They’re extra, by the way. Now go and get me the rest of my money.”
Hester nodded and glanced past him, judging the distance between herself and the man with the speargun at the bulkhead door. She turned, back to the wall, one hand moving slowly to the knife inside her coat, and saw out of the corner of her eye the baby reach toward the pile of money bags on Varley’s table.
What happened next happened very slowly, but not slowly enough for her to stop it. The child’s fat hand grabbed the bag; the bag fell; the bag burst. Across the deck at Varley’s feet there went scattering a storm of nuts and washers. Varley, realizing he’d been tricked, let out a yell. Hester snatched her knife and threw it underarm at the man by the door, hitting him in the throat. His speargun went off as he fell, but the spear went high, passing over Hester’s head; she heard it thud into the bulkhead above her. Mrs. Varley was screaming. The baby howled. Something struck Hester a sudden, stunning blow on the top of her head. A flash of purple light went off inside her skull. She cursed and tried to turn, confused, imagining someone had got behind her. Things were falling all around her, punching her shoulders, thumping on the deck. She went down on her knees among them and saw that they were books. The dead man’s speargun had detached one of Varley’s homemade bookshelves from the wall, and it had struck her as it fell. It was a stupid sort of injury, but that didn’t make it any less serious. The spilled books seemed to whirl around her. Dodgy Dealing for Beginners. Investing in People. Make Your Fortune on the Bird Roads—and Survive to Spend It! She felt sure she was going to be sick.
Varley had an arm around Oenone’s throat. “Come on, lads!” he shouted. “Get her! Get her!” Hester remembered the men outside. Squinting with the pain in her head, she tried to stand up. Footsteps shook the gondola as the heavies from the mooring strut came aboard. Hester reached into her pocket and tugged out her pistol, shooting them one at a time as they came barging through the cabin door. The gas pistol made soft coughing sounds, which she hoped would not be heard out on the High Street. The men fell on top of the body of their friend, and one of them kept struggling, so she shot him again. She could feel blood running down her face. She swung the gun toward Varley but fainted before she could pull the trigger.
The next thing she knew, the merchant was wrenching the gun out of her hand. He had a stupid, mad grin, and his nostrils kept flaring. He pulled down Hester’s veil, and his grin grew even wider, as if her ugliness were some sort of victory for him. He spat in her face. “Well,” he said. He put down the gun (a dangerous thing to use on board your own airship) and pulled a knife out of his belt. “Nobody’s going to miss you.”
He looked surprised when his wife picked up the gun and shot him. It seemed to take him a moment to understand that he’d been killed. His grin faded slowly, and he sank down on his knees beside Hester and bowed his head and stayed there, kneeling, dead.
“Oh, God,” murmured Oenone.
Mrs. Varley lowered the gun. She was shaking. The baby howled and howled. Oenone scrambled across the cabin and helped Hester to her feet.
“You’d better go now,” said Mrs. Varley. She pulled a nappy down from one of the lines and started scooping the gold into it.
Hester touched the searing, throbbing place where the shelf had hit her, and her hand came away wet and red. She felt drunk. She held on to Oenone for support and said, “We came to rescue you. Me and Grike.”
“Mr. Grike? He’s here?”
“Theo too. There’s a ship waiting.” With Oenone’s help she started limping toward the exit hatch, which seemed suddenly to be miles away. “Gods, it hurts,” she grumbled. Somehow they reached the top of the gangplank. Out on the docking strut a man was waiting. He was all alone. He had probably heard that last shot. The wind flapped his long blue greatcoat open, and moonlight shone on the hilt of the heavy saber in his belt.
Hester groaned, nauseous and weary. She had no strength left with which to fight him.
“Lady Naga?” said the stranger. “I’m just in time, I see.”
Oenone cringed against Hester as the stranger walked toward her, putting one booted foot on the gangplank. In the dim light from the Humbug’s hatchway his face looked stern, but not unkind. He held out a hand. “I am Kriegsmarschall von Kobold. You must come with me to Murnau. Quickly, please.”
Hester gripped the gangplank rail and glared at him. “You’ll have to get past me first.”
Von Kobold looked respectfully at her. Her scarred face did not shock him, nor did the blood that matted her hair and dripped from her chin. He gave her a little bow. “Forgive me, young woman, but that does not seem too great a challenge. I take it you are an agent of the Storm, come to free your empress? Even if you were not wounded, you could never get her away from here. A dozen cities stand between you and your own territory, and not all of their leaders are as understanding as I. Come with me to Murnau, and I shall find a way to send you and your mistress home to General Naga.”
A blurt of noise from the docking ring made him look around. Someone was shouting; running figures showed against the lighted windows of an all-night Ker-Plunk parlor. “We have to trust him,” whispered Oenone, and helped Hester down the gangplank. But by the time they reached von Kobold, it was too late; the deck plates were thrumming with the stamp of booted feet. Along the strut toward them came six red-coated men with drawn swords, and behind them, urging them on, the podgy, hopping shape of Nimrod Pennyroyal.
“There they are!” Pennyroyal shouted. “They’re escaping! Stop them!”
“Who are you?” barked Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, in such a military voice that the men stopped short. Up on the High Street passersby began to gather at an observation platform to see what was happening down on Strut 13.
“We, sir, are officers of the Manchester Civic Guard,” said the tallest and most sober of the newcomers. “We have been informed that a dangerous Mossie is concealed aboard this airship…”
“Blimey!” said one of his comrades, pointing. “It’s her! Naga’s wife, just like the old man said!”
“What, in that getup?” asked another.
“It’s her. I seen her picture in the Evening News. Blimey!”
“You’re under arrest!” said the leader, striding toward Oenone.
“Stand back, sir,” snapped von Kobold, and drew his saber. “The lady is my prisoner, and I will not deliver her into the hands of your warmongering mayor.”
“Now, steady on!” called Pennyroyal, who didn’t want a squabble between Murnau and Manchester to ruin his chance of some favorable headlines. But before he could say more, the light of a flashbulb blinded him. A small man in formal robes walked out onto the increasingly crowded strut. There was a girl behind him, fumbling a new flashbulb into place on the top of her camera.
“Mr. Pennyroyal!” the newcomer called out pleasantly. “Sampford Spiney of The Speculum. Been looking for yo
u everywhere. Do you have any message for your many disappointed fans?” His voice was affable and faintly snide; it faded into silence as he saw the Mancunians with their drawn swords, von Kobold with his saber, Oenone supporting Hester, who had crumpled to her knees at the foot of the Humbug’s gangplank. “I say!” he murmured excitedly. “What’s all this?”
But the leader of the Mancunians was tired of talking. He raised his sword and tried to barge past von Kobold, but the kriegsmarschall barred his way. Sparks flew as their swords met, directly contravening Airhaven’s strict fire-prevention laws. Up on the High Street people screamed. The Manchester swordsman screamed too, stumbling away with blood running down his arm. Von Kobold turned to face the others. “Defend yourselves!” he shouted, and most of them started to edge back, frightened of this fierce old soldier who seemed ready to take on five of them at once. Only one held his ground. He was a young man, red cheeked and running to fat. In addition to his uniform sword he had a revolver. He pointed it straight at von Kobold, and fired twice.
Theo, waiting aboard the Shadow Aspect, heard the shots. He ran to the hatch. He tried to tell himself that those bangs had not been gunfire, but he knew that they had, and he knew that they had come from the direction of Strut 13.
An alarm bell began to jangle. Theo jumped down onto the mooring strut and started to run toward the docking ring. A squad of men in the sky-blue uniforms of Airhaven was storming down a stairway from the High Street, crossbows held ready. From a docking pan near the town hall a red fire-fighting dirigible was lifting off, ready to train her hoses on any blaze that broke out.
Theo stood helpless, halfway between the Shadow Aspect and the docking ring. What could he do? How could he help?
A horrified scream reached him, blowing on the wind. Another. More shots. He turned and went hammering back to the Shadow.
As Kriegsmarschall von Kobold fell, the man who’d shot him sprang forward, reaching for Lady Naga. Hester heaved herself up to face him and suddenly, although she had done no more than glare at him, he dropped his gun and shouted, “Yaagh!” Looking down, Hester saw the sharp blades that had been driven up through the deck from beneath. There were five of them, and two had gone through the Mancunian’s boot and through the foot inside it. He screamed again, wrenching himself free, and the blades slid back through the deck, leaving ragged holes. “Get this, Miss Kropotkin!” Spiney was ordering his photographer.