A Darkling Plain (36 page)

"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 brushed 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?"

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.

***

T he 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