A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Anyway, Dad’s been very keen to do his bit. At first he seemed intent on trying to help the Engineers, but the Childermass machines are so different from any technology he’s seen before that I think he just got in the way. So he started helping the men lug bits of salvage up to the hangar, but I had a quiet word with Dr. Childermass and explained about his heart trouble, and she had a q. word with Chudleigh Pomeroy, who took Dad aside and said what New London really needs is a museum, so that even if it roams to the far side of the world, the people who live aboard it will never forget the old London and what became of it. And since none of us have the time, Tom,” he said, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind putting together a collection?” So Dad has been appointed Head Historian and spends his days scouring the rust heaps for artifacts that will say something to future generations about his London—everything from old drain covers and tier-support ties to a little statue of the goddess Clio from somebody’s household shrine.

  Meanwhile, I’ve been out patrolling with the other young Londoners. Mr. Garamond was v. opposed to it at first, but Mr. Pomeroy told him not to be such a bloody fool, and Angie and her friends are all very friendly, and most impressed when I told them I’d been in an actual battle and seen Stalkers and Tumblers and stuff. (I didn’t tell them how completely terrified I was, as it might be bad for morale.) Anyway, I’ve been right across the main debris field several times. It’s very spooky, esp. at night, but Angie and Cat and the rest are good company, and I’ve been given a crossbow to use if we’re attacked—I’m not sure I could actually shoot anyone, but it makes me feel a bit braver.

  What I’d really like is one of the lightning guns the Engineers built to deal with Stalkers, but there aren’t very many of those, and only Mr. G’s most trusted fighters get to use them—Saab and Cat and people. The Green Storm’s Stalker-birds have been getting very nosy these past few weeks, and the danger bell at Crouch End is forever ringing, telling everyone to get under cover because some flea-bitten old dead buzzard is circling overhead, having a good look at us. Mostly we’ve just taken to ignoring them, but when one gets too close to the Womb, the boys on duty in the crow’s nests there shoot it down with their lightning guns; there are half a dozen hanging outside Crouch End now, all singed and charcoaly.

  There is one other way of getting rid of them; it’s much more dangerous, and Angie and her friends treat it as a sort of sport. Last week, when we were out patrolling, a Stalker-bird came flying over us. We’re supposed to hide when that happens, but Angie said, “Let’s have a spot of mollyhawking! ” and jumped right out into the open, so I followed her. We went along one of the paths that wind between the wreckage heaps, and the bird came after us. I was worried it was going to attack, but Angie said they never do; they’re just spies, and she meant to serve it right for snooping.

  We went on, walking quite fast, and soon I began to realize that we were heading toward the middle of the debris field, the bit they call Electric Lane. Till then I’d tended to agree with Wolf about the sprites—that they were just a fairy tale. But up there in the middle of London, where everything looks kind of scorched and melted, I suddenly wasn’t so sure. I asked Angie if it was safe, and she said “safe-ish,” which wasn’t very reassuring, but I didn’t want her to think I was a coward, so I kept going.

  After a bit we came over a rise, and there in front of us was a sort of valley stretching right across the middle of the debris field. It looked quite peaceful, with ponds and trees on its floor, but the wreckage on either side was all charred and twisty-looking. Angie says that it’s the place where the core of MEDUSA fell, having melted its way right down through the seven tiers of London, and that’s why MEDUSA’s residue is strongest there. I don’t know if it’s true. Anyway, I only got a quick glimpse before Angie shoved me into a hollow of the wreckage all overhung with ivy. “Hide!” she said. The stupid old Stalker-bird didn’t see us, and went soaring out over the valley. It hadn’t gone fifty feet before a great snaggly fork of electricity came crackling out of the wreckage and roasted it; there was nothing left but a puff of smoke and some singed feathers that blew away on the wind!

  I got a bit shuddery afterward, thinking what would have happened to the Jenny if we’d flown into Electric Lane that first day.

  * * *

  PS. Saab Peabody asked me out. I said I’d have to think about it and he said he supposed I had a boyfriend on the bird roads somewhere and I said I supposed I did. Silly, or what?

  And now, because it’s late, and tomorrow is a big day—the first test of the new city—I am going to go to bed.

  Chapter 33

  The Test

  The morning of the test dawned dull and cloudy, threatening rain. The wind came from the west in indignant squalls, scattering a confetti storm of petals from the blossom trees that had taken root amid the debris of London.

  Not wanting to impose himself on Wren, who was going up to the Womb with her new friends, Tom made the trek from Crouch End alone. He scanned the mounds of wreckage beside the track as he walked, for he had fallen into a habit of looking everywhere for fragments that might fit into the New London museum, and give the children who would one day be born upon the new city some notion of what old London had been like. When you knew where to look, the rusting ruin heaps were full of relics; street signs and door handles, hinges and tea urns. He spotted a pewter spoon with the crest of the Historians’ Guild on its handle and slipped it into his pocket. He had eaten with spoons like that every day of his childhood; it was like a shard of memory made solid, and he liked to think of those future Londoners looking at it and imagining his life.

  Of course, they would never know the details: how he’d felt and what his dreams had been; his adventures on the bird roads, in the Ice Wastes and America. You couldn’t expect a pewter spoon to convey that sort of detail.

  Lately, watching Wren writing in her journal of an evening, Tom had wondered if he shouldn’t try to write down some of the things that had happened to him, before it was too late. But he was no Thaddeus Valentine. He wasn’t even a Nimrod Pennyroyal. Writing did not come easily to him. Anyway, it would have meant writing about Hester, and he didn’t think he could do that. He’d not even spoken his wife’s name since he came to London. If his new friends ever wondered who Wren’s mother was, they kept it to themselves; perhaps they assumed that she was dead, and that Tom would find it painful to speak of her—which was not so far from the truth. How could he write about Hester for future generations when he did not understand himself why she had done the things she had, or what had made him love her?

  Drawing close to the Womb, he caught up with a crowd of his fellow Londoners, all heading in the same direction. Clytie Potts was among them, and she greeted him warmly, glad of his company; her husband was aboard New London with the Engineers. “Dr. Childermass is afraid her Magnetic Levitation system might work too well,” she explained. “She wants an aviator on hand to steer New London down again if it goes too high.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a joke, Tom.”

  “Oh.” Tom laughed with her, although he didn’t find it funny. “I’m sorry. So much has changed since we were young … so many new inventions … I don’t really know what New London is capable of.” He thought of the Mag-Lev prototypes that Dr. Childermass had shown him: platforms the size of dinner tables that maneuvered around the Womb as if by magic, hanging several feet above the ground. If the new city survived, the Engineers were planning to apply the same technology to actual tables next; floating chairs and beds as well, and hovering Mag-Lev toys, which they would trade as curios to other small cities. Tom had even heard talk of Mag-Lev vehicles, which made him feel oddly sad, because if they worked, they would surely bring an end to the age of airships, and his dear old Jenny Haniver would be obsolete.

  The thought made his heart ache—or maybe that was the result of the climb from Crouch End. He swallowed one of his green pills and went with Clytie through the entrance to the Womb.
/>   Inside the shadowy hangar New London waited, squatting heavily on its oily stanchions and looking less likely to take to the air than any object Tom had ever seen. Small figures were running about on its hull, gesticulating at one another. The Engineers seemed to be having trouble with one of their Magnetic Repellers. Tom scanned the crowd of onlookers for Wren and saw her standing near the front with Angie and Saab and a few other young people whose names he could never remember. He felt proud of her, and glad that she was settling in here and making friends. Seeing her from a distance, he was reminded of Katherine Valentine; she had something of Katherine’s grace and liveliness, the same quick, dazzling smile. It had never struck him before, but then he had not given much thought to Katherine before he’d returned to London. Now that he had noticed it, the strange likeness was inescapable.

  Wren seemed to sense him staring at her; she turned and saw him, standing on tiptoe to wave at him over the sea of heads. Tom waved back and hoped it was not bad luck to compare her to poor, ill-fated Katherine.

  A handbell started to ring. “This is it,” said Clytie. Engineers bustled through the crowd, warning people to stay back near the hangar walls. Everyone fell quiet, looking up expectantly. In the silence they heard Dr. Childermass, who was aboard the new city, call out, “Ready everybody? Now!”

  There was a humming sound that rose quickly until it was too high to hear. Nothing else happened. One of the stanchions near the new city’s stern gave a long groan, as if it shared everyone’s disappointment. Then the other stanchions began to creak and squeak as well, and Tom realized that it was because they were relaxing; New London, whose dead weight they had supported all these years, was no longer pressing down on them. Scraps of rust came whispering down like November leaves. A forgotten paintbrush fell from a gantry and clattered on the Womb floor. The Magnetic Repellers swiveled slightly as Engineers in the city’s control rooms realigned them, but they still looked like big, misty mirrors; no crackling lightning, no mystical glow, just a faint flicker in the air around them, like a heat haze.

  Slowly, slowly, like some ungainly insect taking flight, New London rose from its scrap-metal cradle and turned a little, first to one side, then the other. It edged forward, and again Tom sensed that faint hum. “It works!” people started to whisper, glancing at one another’s faces, making sure that they were not imagining this.

  This was how it must have felt when the first airship flew, thought Tom, or when the divine Quirke first switched on London’s land engines. Lavinia Childermass’s machines were going to change the world in ways he could not imagine. Perhaps by the time Wren’s grandchildren were born, all cities would hover. Perhaps there would be no need for cities at all…

  There was a sharp crack. Smoke squirted from some of the vents in New London’s keel. The heat-haze ripple around the repellers vanished, and the hovering city dropped gracelessly back onto its stanchions with a bellow of straining metal. The spectators groaned in disappointment, pressing themselves against the walls of the Womb as the stanchions swayed and workers ran forward to steady them.

  “It don’t work!” complained a woman standing close to Tom.

  “It’s a dud!” said another.

  Lavinia Childermass appeared among the unfinished buildings at the edge of New London’s upper hull. The Womb’s acoustics and her own nervousness made her speech almost impossible to hear, but as Tom pushed his way to the exit, he caught a few fragments of what she was saying: “A small problem with the Kliest Coils … mustn’t give up … much work still to do … fine tuning … adjustments … wait a few more weeks …”

  But do we have a few more weeks? Tom wondered. For as he stepped outside, he heard the drone of Green Storm airships heading west, and another sound, which he thought at first was thunder and then realized was the rumble of immense guns, somewhere beyond the western horizon.

  Chapter 34

  Displaced Persons

  “I see you’re feeling better.”

  “This is better?”

  “Well, conscious. That’s an improvement.”

  Hester rubbed her eye and tried to bring the ceiling into focus. She felt as thin as water, as if her whole body were just a damp stain drying slowly on this hard horsehair bed. A ghost leaned over her and solidified into someone she ought to know. She began to remember Airhaven; the girl she’d sprung from Varley’s freighter, Lady Naga. She remembered the blow on her head, the fight on Strut 13.

  “You’ve been very ill.” Oenone talked like a doctor, and had changed her sackcloth dress for some kind of white military tunic, but she still looked like a schoolboy. Hester stared at her taped-together spectacles and crooked teeth. “You’ll be all right now; the wound is healing well.”

  Hester remembered airships; the Shadow Aspect and then that big Green Storm job. Taking off into thunder. People yelling at each other; her yelling; Grike holding her. Grike must be disappointed that she’d survived. She raised her head from the pillow to look for him, but he was not there. She was alone with Oenone in a square ivory-colored room. Metal shutters had been folded open to let afternoon light in through a big window. On a chair in the corner her clothes were piled up, neatly folded, her pack and boots beside them on the floor. A couple of her larger guns were propped against the wall, solid and somehow reassuring in this unfamiliar space.

  “What is this place?”

  “We’re at Forward Command,” Oenone said. “It’s an old Traction City that the Storm took years ago.”

  “Not in Shan Guo, then?”

  “Not yet. The Fury was badly damaged when we left the line. The cities broke through faster than anyone expected, and their flying machines were everywhere. We limped this far, and we’ve been stuck here ever since. General Xao is here too. She’s trying to organize a second line of defense, and she’s promised to send us on our way as soon as the Fury can be repaired. But at the moment her mechanics are too busy keeping fighting ships airworthy to work on the Fury. There’s heavy fighting going on north and south of here. This place is just an island in an ocean of hungry cities…”

  Hester half listened, trying to order her vague memories of her illness and the journey east. She knew now how Theo had felt after she’d rescued him from Cutler’s Gulp. She wished she’d shown him more sympathy.

  “What about the others?” she said.

  “Mr. Grike is here, quite undamaged. He sat with you all the time you were ill, but today General Xao has persuaded him to go out to the front-line trenches to help build the defenses. Manchester and a dozen other cities are closing in on us from the west, so she needs all the help she can get. I’ve sent word to him that you were stirring; he’s bound to be here soon. He’ll be delighted that you’ve pulled through.”

  “I doubt it,” said Hester. “What about Theo?”

  Oenone hesitated. “Professor Pennyroyal is here too. He’s been flirting shamelessly with General Xao—”

  “Theo? What about Theo?”

  Oenone looked down, hiding behind her annoying black bangs.

  “Gods and goddesses!” Hester heaved herself sideways off the bed. She tried to stand, but her head swirled. Something tugged at her arm, and she looked down and saw a transparent plastic tube emerging from the flesh beneath her elbow, attached to an upturned bottle on a stand beside her bed. She cried out in horror and disgust.

  “It’s all right,” Oenone promised, stopping her as she reached to tug the tube out. “It’s an Ancient technique; a way of getting fluids into you. You’ve been unconscious for days; we had to—”

  Shaking, Hester sat on the bed’s edge, staring out of the window. Her sickroom seemed to be on the topmost tier of the disabled city; outside, rooftops and chimneys dropped steeply to a gray-green plain where clumps of soldiers were moving about, half-tracks dragging big guns into position. “She came for him, didn’t she? Lady Death…”

  Behind her, Oenone said, “He went back into the trenches for some reason…” She came around the bed. Her hand brus
hed Hester’s bony shoulder. “By the time we knew he had gone, it was too late. He must have run straight into the cities’ bombardment.”

  Hester reached out and grabbed the cord around Oenone’s neck on which her cheap Zagwan crucifix dangled. She pulled it tight, dragging the younger woman’s shocked face down to hers. “You should have gone after him! You should have saved him! He saved you!”

  But it was herself she blamed. She should never have let Theo begin his harebrained rescue mission. Now he was dead. She let go of Oenone and covered her own face, frightened by the tears that were spilling out of her, the horrible moaning noise she couldn’t stop. She had promised herself she would never care about anyone again, and she should have stuck to it, but no, her stupid heart had opened up for Theo, and now he was dead, and she was paying the price for having loved him. She shouted at Oenone, “You should have prayed to that old god of yours! To keep him safe! To bring him back!”

  Down on the plain below the city General Xao’s troops were digging frantic foxholes and city-traps. The blades of their spades and picks glinted rhythmically like a school of bright fish turning. Up through the sickroom floor came the sounds of marching feet and bellowed orders from the lower tiers, where tired subofficers were trying to forge new fighting units out of the drabbles of survivors who kept stumbling in from defeats in the west and north. Oenone and Hester sat side by side on the bed. After a while Oenone said, “If God could do things like that, the world wouldn’t look the way it does. He can’t reach down and change things. He can’t stop any of us doing what we choose to do.”

  “What use is he then?”