A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Oenone shrugged. “He sees. He understands. He knows how you’re feeling. He knows how Theo felt. He knows how it feels to die. And when we die, we go to him.”

  “To the Sunless Country, you mean? Like ghosts?”

  Oenone shook her head patiently. “Like children. Do you remember what it was like to be a tiny child? When everything was possible and everything was given to you, and you knew that you were safe and loved, and the days went on forever? When we die, it will be like that again. That’s how it is for Theo now, in heaven.”

  “How do you know? Did one of those corpses you Resurrected tell you this?”

  “I just know.”

  They sat side by side, and Oenone put her arm around Hester, and Hester let her. Something about this earnest, humorless young eastern woman touched her, despite her best efforts. It was her goodness, and her silly, indomitable hope. She reminded Hester of Tom. They sat on the bed waiting for Mr. Grike, thinking about Theo in heaven. Outside the window the day faded to a steel-gray dusk. The lights of advancing cities twinkled all along the western horizon.

  Theo was not in heaven. He was trudging on foot across an immense, wind-whipped steppe somewhere northeast of Forward Command. He had been walking for so long that his boots were starting to disintegrate, and he had tied them together with strips of cloth, which kept coming undone, trailing in the mud.

  He was not alone. Around him, the remnants of the Green Storm’s forward divisions were spilling eastward, spurred on by tales of hungry harvester suburbs and mercenary aviators raiding deep into Storm territory behind them.

  When he clawed his way out of the ruins of General Xao’s dugout on the first day of the war, Theo’s first thought had been to get home somehow to Zagwa. But cities had been pushing through all along the line. Running from them, he had fallen in with this mass of defeated, fleeing soldiers and been swept along in the only direction that seemed safe: east. He had found a place on a half-track, but after a few days townie airships had bombed the bridges on the road ahead and he had been forced to get off and hobble along with the stragglers, the walking wounded, the ones deafened or driven mad by what they had seen on the line.

  Theo felt half mad himself sometimes. Often in the night he woke shaking, dreaming of his time under the cities’ guns.

  Mostly, though, he just felt miserable. The landscape didn’t help. It had been Storm territory for more than a decade, but the Storm had never known quite what to do with it. One faction had tried to nurture the natural growth of weeds and scrub that filled the old track marks, and then another had attempted to bulldoze the track marks flat and plant wheat. The result was an undulating, thinly wooded country that turned quickly into a quagmire under the boots of the routed army. From time to time they passed wind farms or small static settlements, but the buildings were all empty, the settlers fled, the fields and houses stripped by soldiers at the front of the column.

  Theo wondered about Hester and Oenone and Professor Pennyroyal, and whether they had managed to escape. At first he hoped that they might come looking for him, but as the scale of the Storm’s defeat became clear, he stopped hoping. How would they know where to look? If even half the rumors he heard were true, whole armies had been smashed, and the eastern Hunting Ground must be filled with straggling columns of refugees like the one he’d joined, all trying to reach safety before the hungry cities caught them.

  He reached the crest of a long slope and saw, away to the north, a jagged smear upon the plain. Some of his companions (he couldn’t call them friends; they’d been too stunned and weary even to ask one another’s names) had stopped to look at it, pointing and talking.

  “What is it?” asked Theo.

  “London,” said a Shan Guonese subofficer. “A powerful barbarian city that the gods destroyed when it tried to breach the walls of Batmunkh Gompa.”

  “The gods were with us then,” said another. “Now they have turned their backs on us. They are punishing Naga and his whore for overthrowing our Stalker Fang.”

  A signals officer, his eyes swathed in bandages, said, “I am glad I cannot see London. It is a bad-luck place. Even looking at it brings misfortune.”

  “You think our luck can get any worse?” sneered the first subofficer.

  A shout of “Airship!” went up from farther down the column, and everyone fell flat, some crawling under bushes, some trying to scrape holes for themselves in the wet earth. But the ship that came rumbling overhead was just a Zhang Chen Hawkmoth with the green lightning bolt of the Storm on its tail fins. It settled on the plain a few miles ahead.

  The troops around Theo went quiet. This was the first Storm ship they had seen for many days, and they were wondering what it meant. But Theo was more interested in London. He stared through the mist at its spiny, unwelcoming skyline, trying and failing to imagine it as a moving city. Was Wren really in there somewhere? He dug in his pocket and took out the photograph, studying her face as he had studied it many times on this march east, remembering their long-ago kiss. Love, she had written at the bottom of her letter, but did she mean it, or was it was just one of those loves you end letters with, carelessly, not trying to suggest longing or desire?

  Still, it gave Theo hope to think that Wren might be so close. London’s ghosts didn’t scare him—well, not much. He’d survived the Rustwater and the Line and Cutler’s Gulp, and he could not imagine any ghosts more terrifying than that. Like his Shan Guonese comrade, he didn’t believe his luck could get any worse.

  An officer in a motorized mud sledge came roaring along the line, stopping at each cluster of soldiers to bellow through a bullhorn. “Fresh orders! We are moving southwest! General Xao is making a stand at Forward Command.”

  Theo heard the soldiers around him muttering doubtfully. They did not believe the enclave at Forward Command could hold out for long. They wanted to push on to the safety of the mountains. Maybe in Batmunkh Gompa, which had stood for so long against the cities, there might be hope…

  “Move!” the officer was shouting, as his sledge went slapping and growling on along the column. “Take heart! We are to join with General Xao and smash the barbarians! Food and supplies are waiting on the road to Forward Command!”

  Even he didn’t sound as if he believed it, but everyone knew the penalty for disobeying an order from the Storm. Wearily the soldiers grabbed packs and guns, some grumbling, some cursing, others excited and vowing this time to stop the barbarians forever.

  Not Theo. He was glad to hear that General Xao was still alive, but this was not his war; beneath his stolen greatcoat he was not even in the Storm’s uniform. He stowed Wren’s picture safely in his pocket and slid away from the others, creeping unnoticed down into a flooded track mark as they started to move off.

  It was almost nightfall by the time he judged it safe to show himself again. He waded across the floor of the track mark and scrambled up the far wall onto flat ground. Nothing was left of the army he had traveled east with except for a few abandoned packs, a dead horse, some litter blowing about in the wind. The guns in the west were booming again as he started to pick his way across the plain toward the distant outline of the destroyed city.

  Look for me in London.

  Chapter 35

  Uplink

  The house at Erdene Tezh hums with the power of the old machines. Driven by a hydroelectric generator in the basement, lights gleam, needles quiver, and components stripped from antique Stalker brains tick and chitter to themselves. The room is webbed with cables. In the middle of this nest of machinery the Stalker Fang stands, tapping at ivory keyboards. Bright little fireflies dance for her behind the glass of an old Goggle Screen. She whispers to herself: strings of numbers, letters, cryptic code words culled from her memories of the Tin Book; the forgotten language of ODIN.

  None of it means anything to Fishcake. When his Stalker does not want him to fix or carry something, he wanders the dead rooms or goes out into the garden and looks at the fish frozen in the ice on the pond
, or simply sleeps, clutching his beloved wooden horse. He is sleeping a lot now, as his mind and body withdraw from the hunger and the cold. He has not had much to eat, for although he brought a bag of food with him from Batmunkh Gompa, it is running low. His stomach aches with hunger. He has mentioned the problem to his Stalker, but she ignores him. Now that her transmitter is finished, she is no longer interested in Fishcake.

  Sometimes he dreams of escaping from this place. He casts hopeful glances at the keys to Popjoy’s air yacht, which, for reasons of her own, she has hung around her neck on a cord. He does not dare to snatch them, though; he knows he wouldn’t get more than three paces before she cut him down.

  Tonight, because the rest of the old building is so cold, Fishcake has made his way to her room again, hoping to curl up in the faint warmth of her machines. She is still at work, still typing her chains of numbers. The clatter of her steel fingers on the keys sounds like Lady Death playing dice with dead men’s bones down in the Sunless Country. Hydraulics grizzle up above the ceiling somewhere, sending down a snow of crumbled plaster. Outside, where the real snow whirls around the roof and the Stalker-birds keep watch for snooping airships, a saucer-shaped aerial turns and tips to focus on a point high in the northwestern sky.

  Far, far above, something large and old and cold rides the long dark, frosted with space dust, pocked by micrometeors. Solar panels give off a tired gleam, like dusty windows. Inside the armored hull a receiver listens patiently to the same wash of static that it has been hearing for millennia. But now something is changing: Inside the static, like flotsam washing ashore in the surf, comes a familiar message. The ancient computer brain detects it and responds. Many of its systems have been damaged over the long years, but it has others, fail-safes and backups. Power cells hum; glowing ribbons of light begin to weave through the coils of the weapon chamber; ice crystals tumble away in a bright, widening cloud as heavy shields slide open.

  ODIN gazes down into the blue pool of the Earth and waits to be told what it must do.

  Chapter 36

  Intruders

  22nd June (I think …)

  I’m writing this in a very dismal spot on the western edge of the ruins of London, listening to the guns in the west. How far does the sound of gunfire travel? No one here is sure. But it’s pretty clear that the war is on again, and the Green Storm are losing. Already a few refugees have wandered through the edges of the debris fields—they’ve moved on of their own accord, or with a bit of prompting from Londoners hiding in the debris and making spooky noises, but what if more come?

  And what if suburbs and cities come behind them? And what if Wolf Kobold is already on his way here aboard Harrowbarrow?

  I’ll say this for the Londoners: They don’t give up easily. It’s been decided that New London simply has to be ready to leave by the end of this week, and although Lavinia Childermass and her Engineers look doubtful, they know there is no alternative.

  While the Engineers get busy in the Womb, everyone else is starting to crate up the things that will be needed aboard the new city, and extra patrols have been sent out to keep watch on the western edges of the field for signs of approaching trouble. That’s what leads to me being out here in the wet, instead of tucked up snug in my bed at Crouch End. We’ve made a camp among the rust heaps, and we’ll sleep under the stars tonight (or at least under a sort of rusty overhang, which we are glad of since it will keep the drizzle off). Cat Luperini, who’s in charge of our little band, says we should take turns doing guard duty. She’s having first go, and I’m due to take over at—

  Wren dropped her pencil and closed the book. Through the steady patter of the rain she had clearly heard the sound of a bird calling, the signal that the patrols used to communicate with one another across the wreckage. She went to tell Cat about it, but the other girl had already heard. “It’s Hodge’s lot,” she said. “They need us…”

  The other members of the patrol—Angie Peabody and a small, shy boy named Timex Grout—were waking up, wriggling out from under their blankets and reaching for lanterns and crossbows. Wren’s heart beat quickly; it seemed to be wedged somewhere in the region of her tonsils. This could be it, she thought. What if Ron Hodge’s patrol on the southwestern edge had seen the lights of Harrowbarrow? What if advance parties from Harrowbarrow were already sneaking through the debris fields, ready to kill anyone they met? She fumbled a bolt out of the quiver on her belt and fitted it into her crossbow.

  The birdcall came again. Cat called back, and the patrol set off quickly through the drizzle. The moon shone halfheartedly behind the clouds. Wren was glad of its light, but she was still terrified that she would lose the others and be left wandering in this insane rustscape all alone. Stories that she had scoffed at in Crouch End seemed very real out here in the night shadows. She started remembering all the scary scraps of London folklore she had picked up from her father: the dark supernatural shapes that haunted the nightmares of the old city; the ghosts of Boudicca and Spring-Heeled Jack; the awful salvage-stealing Wombles.

  She almost screamed when a silhouette rose up in the path ahead, but it was just Ron Hodge, the rest of his patrol behind him.

  “What’s going on?” asked Cat.

  “Intruder,” said Ron shakily. “We got a glimpse of him, then lost him. He’s around here somewhere.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Cat took charge, ordering everybody to fan out and search. They called to each other as they crept through the spires and angles of the wreck, and they used words now as well as bird sounds; sometimes just the sound of voices emerging from the dead scrap piles was enough to make intruders turn tail and run.

  There was no sign of anyone.

  “What’s that?” yelped Timex. Wren ran to him, scrambling through drifts of rust flakes as crunchy as breakfast cereal. “There!” he hissed as she reached him, and she saw it too, just for an instant, a movement between two nearby blocks of wreckage. She tried to call out for Cat and the others, but her mouth was too dry. She fumbled for the safety catch of her crossbow, telling herself that if the stranger was one of Wolf’s men from Harrowbarrow, she would have to kill him before he killed her.

  “Who’s there?” shouted a voice. A familiar accent; Theo’s accent. It made Wren feel shivery with relief. This wasn’t an attacker; just some lost African airman, another deserter from the retreating Green Storm armies that the lookouts had sighted passing by. Cat had said that half a dozen had stumbled into the fringes of the debris field over the past few days, and it had been easy enough to frighten them away. Wren wondered what would be the best way to convince this one that the wreck was full of restless spirits. Should she leap out waving her arms and going “Woooooo”?

  Just then, a lot of things happened at once. The stranger, who was closer than he had sounded, appeared suddenly around the corner of an old engine block. Cat and Angie, coming over the crest of the wreckage behind him, unveiled their lanterns, the dazzling ghost lights that had driven off so many previous interlopers. The stranger, alarmed, ran straight toward Wren and Timex, and Timex barged backward, crashing into Wren, whose crossbow went off accidentally with a startling twang and a kick that nearly broke her arm. The stranger fell in the splay of light from the lanterns, and Wren, catching sight of his face, saw that he did not just sound like Theo, he was Theo.

  “Ow!” he said weakly.

  There was a sound of slithering rust flakes as the other Londoners came running. Wren stood shaking her head, rubbing her wrenched arm, waiting to wake up. This was a dream, and a pretty poor one. Theo could not be here. Theo was in Zagwa. That was not Theo, lying there dying on the metal in front of her.

  But when she edged closer, and Cat held up her lantern, there was no mistaking his good, handsome, dark-brown face.

  “Theo?” she said. “I didn’t mean to— Oh, Quirke!” She started to claw at his soggy coat, looking for the crossbow bolt.

  Ron Hodge arrived, keen to ass
ert himself now that the intruder had turned out harmless. “Leave him, Wren,” he ordered.

  “Oh, go away!” yelled Wren. “He’s a friend! And I think I’ve shot him…”

  But there was no hole in Theo’s coat; no blood, no jutting bolt. Her shot had gone wide. “I just slipped,” Theo said weakly, looking at Wren as if he did not believe it could really be her. He half sat up and stared warily at the young Londoners crowding around him. Wren couldn’t take her eyes off him. How thin and pained and tired he looked, and how glad she was to see him!

  Theo tried out a smile. “I got your letter,” he said.

  They made their way back to their camp, where Angie lit a small fire and heated up some soup for Theo, who was shivering with cold and exhaustion. Wren sat by him as he drank it. It felt strange to be with him again. She had been imagining him safe in sunny Zagwa. How did he come to be caught up in the Green Storm’s defeats? She had asked, but he’d just said, “It’s complicated,” and she hadn’t liked to press him.

  She wondered if he still remembered kissing her at Kom Ombo Air Harbor, and supposed that he must; he had come all the way to London to find her, after all.

  “We shouldn’t be mollycoddling him,” said Ron Hodge grumpily, pacing about at the edge of the firelight. “He’s Green Storm.”

  “He’s not!” cried Wren.

  “He’s in a Green Storm uniform.”

  “Only the coat,” said Theo, lifting it open to show his flyer’s clothes beneath. “I stole it from a dead man on the way east. I’m not Green Storm. I don’t know what I am.”

  “He’s a Zagwan,” said one of Ron’s group. “Zagwans are Anti-Tractionists. We can’t let an Anti-Tractionist into London. Wren and her dad have already brought one spy among us; now she’s asking us to take in a Mossie…”

  “So what do you think we should do with him?” asked Cat Luperini. “Kill him?”