A Darkling Plain (26 page)

"I'll help!" he said. "I mean, if you can use me. I can't stay here, eating your food, getting in your way, doing nothing, while you all do so much. I'm a Londoner. I want to see London move again as much as any of you. I'm no Engineer, but I kept the
Jenny Haniver
ticking over all right, and at Anchorage I helped Mr. Scabious build the hydroelectric system. I'll stay, and help ... that is, if Wren doesn't mind...."

"Of course I don't," said Wren, and Tom could see that she was just as impressed as him by New London. "And I expect Mr. Kobold will want to help too," she said, turning to draw their companion into the conversation.

But Wolf Kobold was gone. While everyone had been listening and looking down at New London, he had slipped silently away.

Garamond turned white and started shouting things about securing the perimeter and organizing searches. Dr. Childermass stared hard at him. "See?" she said. "Slack."

News of Wolf's escape went ahead of Tom and Wren. By the time they reached Crouch End, they found search parties

being organized, armed with crowbars, crossbows, and even lightning guns. "We'll catch 'im!" Angie Peabody vowed, buckling on a quiverful of crossbow bolts. "He ain't going to sell New London out to no dirty pirate suburb."

"Oh, be careful," Wren warned. "He's dangerous!"

"There are dozens of us and only one of your friend, Miss Natsworthy," snapped Mr. Garamond. "And we know these debris fields a lot better than him. It's Kobold who's in danger, not us. Come along, everyone! Move out!"

"We'll come with you," said Tom.

"I think not, Mr. Natsworthy. As far as I'm concerned, you and your daughter are Kobold's accomplices. You're staying here."

"Nonsense, Garamond," snapped Chudleigh Pomeroy, emerging from his hut in dressing gown and nightcap. "Tom and Wren have as much to lose as any of us. Kobold is probably planning to make off aboard that airship of theirs."

Wren hugged her father. "You stay here, Daddy," she said and, snatching a lantern, ran off with Angie and her brother, Saab. Tom watched them go, the bobbing lamps disappearing into the hillocks of scrap, Mr. Garamond yelling orders that were meant to be military but made him sound like a panicky teacher in charge of a school outing. "At the double! Work in pairs! Watch where you're pointing that lightning gun, Spandex Thrale!"

Fanning out across the rubble, the searchers moved away from Crouch End, combing every path and cranny of the rust hills for traces of Wolf. "He can't have got far," Wren heard people whispering.
But he could,
she thought.
He's a soldier; he's already made his way back to Harrowbarrow once before,

At least he had not made it to the airship hangar yet. The
Jenny
and the
Archaeopteryx
sat where they had been left, untouched. Garamond loudly detailed Saab and a few others to reinforce the guard on them, and the search parties moved on.

"It's useless," said Wren miserably, as she and Angie tramped away from the hangar, along that narrow path she had come in by on the first day. "He could be anywhere. He's skilled at hiding. His whole
suburb
hides."

"Oof!" said Angie.

It seemed a funny sort of reply. Wren turned to look at her friend and found herself, for the second time that night, unexpectedly face-to-face with Wolf Kobold.

"You've found me, Wren!" he said brightly. "Now it's your turn to hide...."

He stooped over Angie, who had crumpled at his feet, knocked down by a blow from behind with some heavy object--there was no shortage of blunt instruments in the debris fields. Wren opened her mouth to scream for help, but before she could force a sound out, Wolf straightened up again, pointing Angie's crossbow at her.

Wren wasn't sure if she was supposed to raise her hands or not. She flapped her arms uncertainly, wondering if Angie was alive or dead. "You'll never get away!" she said. "There are guards in the airship hangar, with lightning guns--"

"I don't need an airship, Wren," said Wolf, laughing. "I thought once that the Engineers' secret might be something I could carry away aboard your
Jenny Haniver,
but now I've

seen how wrong I was. I shall have to bring Harrowbarrow east...." Keeping the crossbow pointed at her, he started pulling off Angie's belt, with its quiver of bolts and canteen of water. "Look, I have all I need for a trek across the Out-Country. I'll ride on one of the Storm's convenient Stalker trains. Hausdorfer will have Harrowbarrow waiting for me just across the line." He grinned at Wren and held out one hand. "Why not come with me?"

"What?"

"You're wasted in the life you lead, Wren. Trailing about after your dad. How long is he going to keep you trapped here, skivvying for these mudlarks? Come home to Harrowbarrow with me."

"And watch it eat New London?" asked Wren. "I don't think so."

"Then think harder. This new technology the lady Engineer has developed is wasted on the Londoners. Well-meaning fools! They haven't even put jaws on their new city. I'm going to take it for myself, and use it to make Harrowbarrow the most powerful predator on earth. A
flying
predator, armed with electric weapons! Think of it!"

Wren did. She didn't like it.

Wolf laughed again, then blew her a kiss as he turned away. "There'll always be a place for you in my town hall, Wren," he said.

Wren bent over Angie. The girl groaned as Wren touched her face, which she hoped was a good sign. "Help!" she screamed, as loudly as she could. "Help! Help! He's here! Over here!"

They came running: Saab, Garamond, Cat Luperini.

Someone with more medical know-how than Wren bent over Angie and said, "She'll be fine, she'll be fine." But of Wolf there was no sign, and although the others kept hunting him until the sky above the wreck turned gray with morning, he was not sighted again; he had faded away, as if he had been just another of London's ghosts.

***

***

THE CLANG AND TREMOR of docking clamps engaging shook Oenone from her dreams. She struggled to stay asleep, but the dull, hungry ache in her belly kept nagging at her, and she came awake groggily. She had been dreaming of home, the islands of Aleutia; gray stone and gray sky and gray winter sea, she and her brother Eno haring downhill in the sharp cold. The images faded quickly in the stuffy heat of the
Humbug's
hold.

It was morning. The new-risen sun was poking in through rents in the
Humbug's
envelope. Oenone lay curled on the floor of a wire-mesh pen, surrounded by crates and boxes full of dodgy gadgets and unsold trade goods that Napster Varley must once have hoped would make his fortune. There was no mattress in the pen, and Oenone was so stiff from sleeping on the hard deck that she could barely move. She lay there

for a while, wondering what it was about her prison that seemed different this morning. Then she realized. The rattling engines that had been drilling their noise into her ears all the way from Cutler's Gulp had stopped.

She could hear voices down below her in the gondola. Varley was shouting at his wife, as usual. As usual, the baby was crying. Oenone had never known a baby who cried as much as Napster Junior.

She drank water from the tin jug Varley had left her, peed in her cracked enamel chamber pot, and said her morning prayers. By the time she had finished, all was quiet below. She waited fearfully to see what would happen next.

To her relief it was not Varley who came up through the hatch, but Varley's wife. Mrs. Varley was not exactly friendly toward the prisoner in the hold, but she was friendlier than her husband. She was a freckled, doughy girl with unruly red hair and frightened eyes, one of which was currently swollen shut and surrounded by yellowish bruises. Varley had bought her somewhere, and she had not made as good a wife as he had hoped. He beat her, and Oenone had often heard her screams and sobs echoing through the airship. She had come to feel a sort of comradeship with this exhausted young woman, as if they were both prisoners together.

"Napster says to give you breakfast," Mrs. Varley said now, in her quivery little voice, and pushed a bowl of bread through the bars, along with half an apple.

Oenone started to shovel the food into her mouth with both hands. She felt ashamed, but she couldn't help it; a few weeks of captivity had turned her into a savage, an animal. "Where are we?" she managed to ask between mouthfuls.

"Airhaven," said Mrs. Varley. She looked about fearfully, as if she were afraid her husband might be lurking among the stacks of crates, ready to leap out and black her other eye for talking to the cargo. She leaned close to the mesh of the cage. "It's a town that flies!"

"I've heard of it."

"And it's above something called the Murnau cluster," Mrs. Varley went on, her excitement getting the better of her fear. "There's more cities down there than I've ever seen in my life. A big fighting one, all hidden in armor, and trade towns too, and Manchester! Napster says Manchester's one of the biggest cities in the world! He read about it in one of his books. He reads a lot of books, does Napster. He's trying to improve himself. Anyway, it's lucky we got here today, because there's a big meeting of mayors and bigwigs there and Napster's gone down there to ... to see if one of them will buy you off him, Miss."

Oenone thought she was used to being helpless and afraid by now, but when she heard that, she was almost sick with fright. She had spent most of her life hearing about the cruelty of the men who ruled the Traction Cities. She forced her hands out through the mesh and snatched at Mrs. Varley's skirts as the girl turned away. "Please," she said desperately. "Please, can't you let me out of here? Just let me ashore. I don't want to die on a city...."

"Sorry," said the girl (and she really was). "I can't. Napster'd kill me if I let you go. You know the temper he's got on him. He'd throw my baby overboard. He's often said he would."

The baby, as if he had overheard, woke up in his crib

down in the gondola and began to bawl. Mrs. Varley tugged her skirts out of Oenone's grasp and hurried away. "Sorry, Miss,"' she said, as she started down the ladder. "I have to go now...."

Manchester, which had been rumbling eastward all spring, detouring now and then to eat some smaller town, had finally reached the Murnau cluster the previous afternoon. Bigger and brasher than the fighting city, it squatted like a smug mountain a few miles behind the front line. Its jaws hung half open--officially so that its maintenance crews could clean its banks of rotating teeth, but it gave the impression that it had half a mind to gobble up a few of the small trading towns that thronged around Murnau's skirts.

One by one the towns gathered in their citizens and started to crawl away, for they all knew that Manchester's arrival meant trouble, even if it didn't eat them. Adlai Browne was a well-known opponent of the truce, and most of the cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft were in debt to him. He had poured a lot of money into their war with the Storm, and now he wanted to see something in return. His couriers, flying ahead of the city, had summoned their leaders to a council of war in Manchester Town Hall.

By nine o'clock that morning airships and cloud yachts were converging on Manchester's top tier from every city and suburb on the line. Watched from a safe distance by polite crowds of onlookers, the mayors and kriegsmarschalls made their way into the town hall, where they took their places on the padded seats of the council chamber and waited for the lord mayor of Manchester to mount the steps

to the speaker's pulpit. High above them, in the dome of the ceiling, painted clouds parted to let beams of painted sunlight through, and a burly young woman who was supposed to be the Spirit of Municipal Darwinism flourished a sword, putting to flight the dragons of Poverty and Anti-Tractionism. Even
her
eyes seemed fixed upon the podium beneath her, as if she too were eager to hear what Adlai Browne would say.

Browne leaned with both hands on the carved pulpit rail and surveyed his audience. He was a squat, florid man, whose immense wealth had made him permanently dissatisfied with everything around him. He looked like an angry toad.

"Gentlemen," he said loudly. ("And ladies," he added, remembering that there were several mayoresses among his audience, as well as Orla Twombley, leader of his own mercenary air force.) "Before we begin this historic conference of ours, I just want to say how very proud I am to be able to bring my city here, and to tell you how much your long years of sacrifice and struggle are appreciated back west, by the ordinary folk of more peaceful cities."

There was polite applause. Kriegsmarschall von Kobold leaned over to his neighbor and muttered, "It is our money they appreciate. We've paid a fortune down the years for all the guns and munitions they have sent us. No wonder Browne is scared at the thought of peace."

"Now I'm a plain-speaking fellow," Browne went on, "so I won't mince my words. I haven't just come here to pat you on the back. I'm here to stiffen you up a bit; to give you a bit of a boot up the proverbial. To remind you, in fact ..." He paused, letting the young man who was translating his words

into New German catch up with him. "To remind you,"' he went on, "that Victory is at hand! I know how much you have all welcomed this truce, this chance to open your cities to the sky again and enjoy a few months' peace. But we who dwell a little farther from the battle lines, and fight the Green Storm in our own ways, are maybe able to see a few things that you can't. And what we see right now is an opportunity to scour the Earth clean forever of the menace of Anti-Tractionism. And it is an opportunity that we must seize!"

There was another spattering of applause. Mayor Browne looked as if he had expected more but acknowledged it anyway, turning to check who his supporters were--von Neumann of Winterthur, Dekker-Stahl from the Dortmund Conurbation, and a few dozen battle-hardened mayors from harvester suburbs. He signaled for quiet before the applause had a chance to peter out of its own accord. "Some of you think I speak too boldly," he admitted. "But Manchester has agents in the lands of the Green Storm, and for weeks now all of them have been telling us the same thing: General Naga is a spent force. That little Aleutian dolly bird he fell for is dead, and the old fool has lost the will to live, or fight, or do anything but sit alone in his palace and rail at the gods for taking her off him. And without Naga the Storm is leaderless. Gentlemen, this--oh, and ladies--this is the moment to attack!"