A Darkling Plain me-4

by Philip Reeve

  Tom swallowed and said nervously, “I can fly you to Erdene Tezh.”

  “It’s not our business, Tom,” Hester warned him.

  “It is,” Tom told her. “Because if you’re right, we’re the only people who really know who’s responsible for all this. What sort of world will be left for Wren if we let it keep happening? We have to do something.” He was about to explain the connection between ODIN and the Tin Book, but that would only make Hester think it was Wren’s fault, which wasn’t what he meant at all. “I have to do something,” he said weakly.

  “All right,” said Hester. He was as lovely and infuriating as ever. She’d never been able to resist his stupid bravery. “All right. Let’s go to this Erdene Thingy place. It’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do. Only when we get there, you’re not going to do anything heroic; you’re not going to risk your life, or try and talk to the Stalker Fang. You’re going to stay safe in the airship and let Grike go and kill her. And this time he’d better do it properly.”

  Chapter 45

  Harvest

  Wren, awakening, wondered for a moment where she was, remembered what had happened, felt afraid, and then decided that she did not care, because Theo was there with her, breathing softly, his face pressed into the curve of her neck, the heavy, comforting weight of his arm thrown across her.

  They had gone west when they’d left Crouch End, because all the roads and paths Wren knew through the wreckage led west. They had walked for hours, listening out all the time for sounds of pursuit. They had seen the pulse of fire plunge into the mountains and stood in silence, hand in hand, watching the red glow gather in the sky behind Zhan Shan, throwing the summit of the giant volcano into silhouette. At last they had settled down to rest on the very westernmost edge of the debris field, where it petered out into a rash of smaller fields, scattered chunks of track and deck plate, towering wheels. They had taken shelter inside one of the wheels, in a cylindrical cave about twelve feet high where a crank must once have been attached. (Or a connecting rod, or a gubbins of some other kind; neither of them knew enough about the wheels of cities to say for certain.) It was, at least, dry, and not too cold, and they had cuddled together there with Wren’s pack as a pillow and fallen quickly asleep.

  Now a halfhearted daylight filled the circle of the cave mouth. Wren woke Theo as gently as she could, and scrambled around him to the entrance. Peeking out, she saw the deserted margins of the wreck stretching away in hazy sunlight. She craned out farther. It was too misty to make out Zhan Shan, but she could see the tower of smoke that stood above it, wet-slate gray, and as tall as the sky. The ground seemed to shake faintly, and she thought she heard a distant rumbling.

  “Well, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “Why would the Storm turn the weapon on their own land?”

  “It must be another civil war,” said Theo. He poured some water for them from the canteen Lavinia Childermass had given them. “Naga’s probably zapping his rivals.”

  “Charming,” said Wren. “And these are the people whose mercy we’re going to be throwing ourselves on?”

  “Either that or go back to Mr. Garamond.”

  “Fair point. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Gravel,” said Theo, opening a box that Lavinia Childermass had put inside Wren’s pack. “I think it started out as some kind of flapjack. It’s probably very nutritious…”

  “Shhhh!”

  The rumbling sound was growing louder. The ground was definitely shaking, vibrations flaking small scales of rust off the old wheel.

  “The volcano?” said Wren.

  Theo shook his head.

  They scrambled down out of their shelter and stood on the wheel’s rim, staring westward. The rumblings came and went, gusting on the wind. A ridge bulged and shivered, its profile altering as they watched. A gleam of metal showed beneath the scrub, and a fist of exhaust smoke rose triumphantly into the air.

  “Oh, Quirke!” said Wren.

  “Harrowbarrow,” whispered Theo.

  Wren nodded. She had almost forgotten the existence of Wolf Kobold. Her first thought was Thank Quirke we got out of the debris field before he arrived, but it was drowned out immediately by another thought coming close behind it: What about the others?

  “We’ve got to warn them!” she said.

  “Why?” asked Theo. “They’ll know soon enough. If it moves as fast as it did when I saw it tear through the line, they’ll hear the engines in London before long.”

  “But they might not,” said Wren. “The lookouts are young; they’ve never heard town engines; they’ll think it’s the volcano, like we did…” She tried to tell herself that it served the Londoners right for accusing people and locking them in cages, but all she could think of were her friends: Angie and Saab, Clytie, Dr. Childermass. Even Mr. Garamond didn’t deserve to be eaten by Harrowbarrow. The waste of it appalled her; those years of thought and effort and hard work—

  “We’ve got to delay it,” she said. “I’ll go aboard and divert them somehow. Even if it only buys an extra half hour, it might help. Don’t you see? New London has to move today; now, ready or not! Once it’s out of the fields, it should be able to outrun Harrowbarrow.”

  “Oh, not on your own,” said Theo.

  “Yes, because I can’t take you, because you’re the mossiest Mossie in the whole world and a terrible liar and Wolf Kobold doesn’t believe people like you even deserve to be alive. So you’re going to go and be safe somewhere.”

  “Wren,” he protested.

  She hugged him, tight, tight. It would be so easy to just keep out of Harrowbarrow’s way and pretend that none of this had anything to do with her, but it had; what would her father think of her if he knew she’d had a chance to save his city and she’d fluffed it? What would she think of herself? She kissed Theo. “Go,” she said. “Harrowbarrow sends scouts out ahead sometimes, on foot. If they catch you, they won’t ask questions. Please go.”

  “How will I find you again?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wren, pulling away from him. Harrowbarrow’s engines snarled. “I’ll think of something,” she promised. She couldn’t quite bring herself to let go of his hands. “Look, the gods went to all this trouble to bring us together; you don’t think they’d let a silly little enormously dangerous armored suburb come between us, do you?” She checked herself, because she was starting to babble. It had been the same on that air quay at Kom Ombo. She seemed to be able to say anything except the thing she wanted to say.

  In the end, Theo said it instead. “I love you.”

  “Gosh, really? Me too! You, I mean. I, I love you.” She started to move back toward him, then pulled herself away. There, she thought, I’ve told him; now I’ll have one less regret when I get down to the Sunless Country. She turned and started to stumble away through the brambles and the gobbets of rusting wreckage, northward into Harrowbarrow’s path. “Hide!” she shouted at him, seeing him standing there watching helplessly from the shadow of the abandoned wheel. “Go and hide!” She pressed on, half afraid and half hoping that he would insist on coming with her.

  When she looked back again, she could no longer see him.

  Theo ran a little way into the thickets of alder that filled the scooped-out hollow of an old track mark nearby. There he stopped. He wanted to be with Wren, but he knew that if the Harrowbarrovians were as bad as she’d described, he would only be going to his death, and bringing more danger down on her by making Kobold wonder why she was with an Anti-Tractionist.

  Yet he could not just hide.

  He turned east and started loping toward the debris field. The Londoners were not bad people. They deserved all the warning he could give them. He would run to the hangar at the west end of Holloway Road and tell the lads on guard there what was coming for them.

  Wren waded through the waist-high weeds. The day was dimming as the pall of smoke from the distant volcano spread across the sky. End-of-the-world weather. Harrowbarrow’s engines had fallen
silent. She wondered if Wolf Kobold was on his bridge, watching the land ahead through his periscope. She pulled off her jacket and turned it inside out. The red silk lining was tatty and faded after all her adventures, but it was still the brightest thing about. She climbed up on a nameless chunk of wreckage and started to wave the jacket above her head, shouting, “Wolf! Wolf! It’s me! It’s Wren!”

  After a few minutes she jumped down and started plodding on again. She could feel the ground stirring underfoot as the harvester suburb drew nearer. From time to time she waved the jacket and shouted, but she couldn’t even see Harrowbarrow anymore; it had squirreled down into a deep trench. Wren glanced at the sky. No Stalker-birds. Honestly, she thought, where were the Green Storm and their city-zapping super-weapon when you needed them? It was sheer incompetence, letting Harrowbarrow drive so far behind their lines.

  A hummock of grayish earth ahead of her suddenly proved that it wasn’t a hummock after all, by standing up and pointing a gun at her and shouting “Stop!” Wren screamed and dropped her jacket. All around her, more gray-clad men were appearing from the undergrowth. She didn’t recognize their faces, but she knew by their getups and their tinted goggles that they were one of Harrowbarrow’s scouting parties. She raised her hands and tried not to let her voice wobble as she said, “I’m Wren Natsworthy. I’m a friend of your mayor.”

  One of the men searched her for weapons, more thoroughly than Wren felt was really necessary (surely they must know that you couldn’t hide anything very dangerous inside your bra?). Their leader said, “You come,” and they were off, running quickly through the rough, stumbly country, squeezing through crannies in the walls of track marks and wading across their flooded floors. The men moved fast and easily, and shoved Wren when she showed any sign of flagging. She was exhausted by the time the armored flank of Harrowbarrow came in sight, half submerged in mud and torn-up bushes.

  A hatchway opened. The scouts led Wren inside and slammed the hatch cover shut behind her. Then Harrowbarrow went grinding on its way toward the debris fields.

  It felt very strange to be back in the streets of the burrowing suburb after all that had happened; very strange indeed to stand in Wolf Kobold’s town hall, on soft carpets, among velvet curtains and fine paintings and the gentle glow of argon uplighters. Wren stared at herself in a mirror and barely recognized the disheveled, weather-beaten young Londoner who looked out at her. “Wren!”

  They must have called him up from the bridge. He wore boots and breeches and a collarless shirt with big fans of sweat spreading down from the armpits. He looked thinner than she remembered, and she wondered if it had been very hard for him, that journey alone across the Out-Country. Just for an instant she felt pleased and relieved to see him, and she seized on the feeling and used it to make a smile, a shy, warm smile. “Herr Kobold …”

  “Why so formal, Wren?” He came to her and took both her hands in his. “I’m so happy you came to meet us. What brings you here? You are alone? Where is your father?”

  “He is still in London,” she lied.

  “Do the Londoners know of our arrival?”

  “Not yet,” Wren told him.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come…” She let her smile fade, looked as if she were about to cry, to faint. Kobold helped her to a chair. “Oh, Wolf,” she said, “Dad’s a prisoner! After you left, the Londoners thought we must have been in league with you. They locked us in horrible cages, old animal cages from the zoo. Dad’s not well, but they won’t let him out. So I escaped, and I’ve been living in the debris at the edge of the field, waiting and waiting, and I thought you’d never come!”

  Kobold’s arms went around her, pulling her face against his chest. Wren managed to squeeze out a few tears, and then found that if she thought hard about Theo and Dad, it made her cry for real. She said shakily, “Harrowbarrow is my only hope. You’ll keep Daddy safe, won’t you, when you eat New London?”

  “Of course, of course,” said Kobold, stroking her hair. “By this evening we will be at Crouch End; the Londoners and all they have will be our prize; your father will be safe.”

  Wren pulled away from him, looking horrified. “This evening? But you’ll be too late! They are to leave this afternoon! The launch date has been brought forward because of all the fighting… Oh, you must go faster!”

  Wolf shook his head. “Impossible. It will take us that long to skirt the debris fields.”

  “Show me,” said Wren, wiping her face with the back of her grubby hand.

  She followed him along the fuggy walkways and across the dismantling yards, where gangs of men were preparing heavy cutting and rending engines. They climbed the ladder to the bridge and found Hausdorfer at the helm, his peculiar spectacles flashing as he nodded a greeting to Wren. He started to say something in German to Kobold, but the young mayor waved him away and led Wren across to the chart table, where a map of the debris fields had been spread out. Wolf must have drawn it from memory after returning to Harrowbarrow; Wren instantly saw several errors, as well as big blank spaces in the heart of the field, where Wolf had never been.

  He pointed at the map with a pair of dividers, tracing a line that wriggled around the northern edge of the main field and then struck in toward Crouch End. “That’s my plan.”

  “Why not go straight across the middle?” asked Wren.

  “I don’t know what lies there. The wreckage might be impassable. And there are those electrical discharges the Londoners tell stories of—”

  “Fairy stories,” said Wren dismissively. “It’s just as you suspected. The sprites are a tale they told us to keep us from nosing about. That one we saw the first day was faked by one of Garamond’s boys hiding in the debris with a lightning gun.” She smiled at him. “Look. If you want to be sure of reaching Crouch End before they get their new city moving, go this way. There’s a sort of valley stretching through the wreckage that will take you almost all the way there. There are no lookouts in that part, either, so you’ll stay undetected longer.”

  She picked up a pencil that hung on a piece of frayed string from the corner of the table, and drew a line on the chart for Harrowbarrow to follow; west to east through the debris field; straight along Electric Lane.

  The lads on watch beside the Archaeopteryx had heard the muffled engines in the west by the time Theo arrived. They were standing on a high promontory of wreckage outside the hangar, squinting into the murk. As he scrambled toward them, he heard one say, “I can’t see anything. It’s the volcano,” and the other reply, “Or maybe it’s an airship engine. Maybe there’s an airship circling above all this smog—”

  “It’s not an airship!” Theo shouted, and ducked as they turned toward him, afraid that they would fire their crossbows at him. But they only stared. The same boys he’d talked to yesterday. He tried to remember their names; Will Hallsworth and Jake Henson.

  “Will,” he said, walking toward them with his hands outstretched to show he was not armed. “Jake, there’s a suburb coming. Harrowbarrow. You’ve got to warn the others. Your new city has to move out now.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Jake warned his companion. “He’s a Mossie! Mr. Garamond said—”

  “Mr. Garamond is wrong,” Theo insisted. “If I were a Mossie, what would I be doing coming to warn you about Harrowbarrow?”

  “Maybe there is no Harrowbarrow,” said Will, thinking hard. “Maybe it’s a Mossie trick.”

  A snarl of engines drowned out his voice, coming from somewhere to the southwest. A crash and clang of falling debris too. The Londoners stared. Smoke and clouds of dust and rust flakes drifted across the southern sky.

  “It’s surfacing!” shouted Theo. “It’s reached the edge of the wreck! Come on!”

  “What about the Archy?” asked Jake. “We can’t just leave her here!”

  “We’ll have to fetch Lurpak or Clytie…”

  “There’s no time!” shouted Theo,
as the rusty deck plate beneath them shook and shifted, dislodged by the vibrations from the hungry suburb that was shouldering its way through the wreck a mile to the south.

  “Well, we can’t fly her!” wailed Will.

  “I can.”

  “Yes, home to your stinking Mossie friends; we’re not falling for that one!”

  “Will,” shouted Theo, “I’m not with the Green Storm! Trust me!” He scrambled into the hangar, staring at the Archaeopteryx. “Is she fueled?”

  “I think so. Lurpak Flint was down here yesterday working on her.”

  Theo rattled the gondola door. It was locked, and when he asked for the keys, Will and Jake looked blank. He picked up a hunk of metal and smashed the door in, then grabbed a knife from Will’s belt and started to hack at the ropes that anchored the airship. “Her controls will probably be locked,” he shouted as he worked. “But that doesn’t matter. The wind’s with us; even if I can’t get the engines on, it’ll still be quicker than running to Crouch End.”

  Will and Jake started to object, then gave up and joined him. The airship shivered as the ropes fell away. Theo noticed two rockets resting in racks beneath the forward engine pods. If he could get to Crouch End and persuade the Archaeopteryx’s crew to return with him, there was a chance they could slow or stop Harrowbarrow; he’d heard stories of how a well-aimed rocket, shot down an exhaust stack or into a track support, could bring a whole city to a halt. Then New London would have time to escape, and perhaps Theo could find his way aboard the crippled harvester and reach Wren.

  The three boys scrambled into the gondola as the un-tethered airship began to rise. On the flight deck, Theo found that he could work the elevator and rudder wheels, although he had no way to turn on the engines. Sunlight poked in through the gondola windows as the Archaeopteryx rose out of the top of the hangar, trailing camouflage netting and uprooted trees. The brisk wind boomed against the envelope, already pushing her westward, and Theo spun the rudder wheel so that her nose began to swing toward Crouch End.