A Darkling Plain (11 page)

Imagine a pond skater, but magnify it until it is as big as a yacht. Fix a wheel to each of its long legs, and raise a mast above it. Then set it skimming over sand instead of water. It is a sand ship, the vehicle of choice for desert scavengers and bounty hunters, and as it passes, if we turn to look, we can see what has brought it into this mineral ocean. The region

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ahead of it is crowded with towns, their smokestacks and upperworks dancing behind the curtains of reflected heat that sway above the dunes.

This is a rare event, the nearest thing to a trading cluster that you will find in the dried-out, town-eat-town world of the desert deeps. A big, slow suburb that should be preying on fishing hamlets along the far-off coast has blundered into the sand sea by mistake, and been hunted to a standstill by a pack of speedy predators. The hunters have huge wheels, huge jaws, huge engines, and huge appetites to match. They have cornered their prey in a dusty bowl of sand called Bitumen Bay, ringed by mined-out hills. They are tearing it apart, and for a day or so, while they are too busy digesting their catch to eat one another, an uneasy peace prevails. Merchants go from one fierce town to another, and far-wandering airships appear out of nowhere to flog Old Tech and knickknacks. Even the swift, shy scavenger towns come creeping close to try to sell the scraps they've found among the sands.

The black sails of the nameless ship crinkle and flutter like the petals of an opium poppy as its pilot brings it up into the wind, slowing, sweeping around in a long curve that will take it into the school of other sand ships around the cluster.

The townlet of Cutler's Gulp had parked itself on the slopes of an enormous dune a half mile from the feeding frenzy and kept its engines idling, ready to take off in a moment should any of the predators show signs of fancying it for dessert. It was a long, low thing, its single deck overshadowed by fat sand wheels. It consisted mainly of engines, and of the

bloated ducts and flues and exhaust pipes that served them. The inhabitants made their homes in what little space was left, stretching their awnings between the ducts and building small dwellings of mud and papier-mâché on the few bare patches of deck among the engine housings. Sand ships came and went from garages in its belly, and a jaunty black-and-white-striped air trader called the
Humbug
came buzzing across the dunes to touch down at the harbor, a blank space near the bows where a couple of the mud buildings had recently collapsed.

The master of the
Humbug
was a merchant named Napster Varley. VARLEY & SON said the signs on his ship's engine pods, but little Napster Junior was only three months old, and not yet taking an active part in the running of the business. Varley had hoped that a wife and child might give him the respectability he needed to escape from these tin-pot desert trading towns and set up in one of the big cities. But so far they had brought him nothing but noise, annoyance, and expense, and if he had not needed his wife to help him pilot the
Humbug,
he would have kicked them both overboard months ago.

As the sun sank westward and the shadows started to lengthen, Varley found himself ambling aft along the Gulp's ramshackle walkways with the boss of the place, Grandma Gravy.

They made an odd pair. Napster Varley was a slight, pasty young man, with flakes of sunburned skin peeling off his snub nose. He was a keen reader of business books, and in one of them
(How to Succeed at the Air Trade
by Dornier Lard) he had read that
a successful businessman must always

dress distinctively, that his customers shall remember him.
So despite the heat he wore a purple frock coat, a fur stovepipe hat, and a pair of baggy yellow pantaloons with a crimson windowpane check.

Grandma Gravy, meanwhile, covered herself with so many layers of flapping, rust-colored shawls and robes and skirts and djellabas that she looked as if one of the nomad tents of the deep desert had decided to get up and walk about. But if you peered closely at the space between her massive shoulders and her wide-brimmed hat, you could see, behind the close mesh of her fly-proof veil, a fat, yellowish face and a pair of tiny, calculating eyes that glittered slightly as she studied Mr. Varley.

"Got somefin to sell," she told him. "Aye. Found it out in the deeps, few weeks by. Valooble."

"Really?" Varley dabbed at his neck with a handkerchief and waved the flies away. "Not Old Tech, is it? The price of Old Tech has dropped something shocking since this truce began...."

"More valooble'n Old Tech," muttered Grandma Gravy. "Mossie airship gone down, dinnit? My boys saw the fires in the sky. My town was first at the wreck. Not much left, no. Jus' a few struts and engine parts and this item, this valooble item."

She led him up a metal stairway and in through the door of one of the mud-brick towers that rose like termite hills out of the tangle of ducts at the townlet's stern. Inside were more stairs, and Grandma panted and rattled as she climbed them. The hems of her robes were bedecked with magic charms: a human jawbone, a monkey's hand, little greasy-looking

leather pouches filled with gods-knew-what. Grandma Gravy had a reputation for witchcraft, and used it to keep her people in line. Even Varley felt a little nervous as he followed her up the winding stairs, and he touched the medal of the God of Commerce that hung around his neck beneath his paisley cravat.

They came to an upper room, hot, and filled, like the rest of Grandma's tower, with a brownish haze and a faint smell of burned fat. In the middle of the room someone lay chained by the feet to a ring in the metal floor. A boy, Varley thought, until she raised her head and looked up at him through tangles of filthy hair and he saw that she was a young woman. She was dressed in rags, and there were bruises on her throat, and sores on her bony ankles where the shackles had rubbed.

"Sorry, Grandma," said Varley quickly. "I'm not buying no slaves." (He had no moral objection to the slaving business, but the great Nabisco Shkin, in his book
Investing in People,
advised would-be slavers to buy only the healthiest stock. Varley could see at a glance that this scrawny little quail was already half dead.)

"She's far more valooble than just some slave," said Grandma Gravy in her rasping, breathless voice. She waddled across the room and grabbed the captive by her hair, twisting her face toward Varley. "What do you think she be?"

Varley fished a monocle out of his breast pocket and squinted through it at the captive's dull, almond-shaped eyes. Her skin, under all the dirt and sunburn and exposure sores, had once been ivory colored. He shrugged, growing tired of the game. "I don't know, Grandma. Some kind of

half-breed eastern trash. Shan Guonese? Ainu? Inuit?"

"Alooshan!" crowed Grandma Gravy. "Bless you, Grandma."

"From Aloosha." Grandma Gravy let the woman's head drop and came waddling back to where Varley waited. Her breath went
hur, hur, hur
behind the fly-proof veil. "Know 'oo she is then, young trader? She's that Mossie general's wife. She's the queen of the Green Storm!"

Varley said nothing, but his posture changed. He took his hands out of his pockets and licked his lips, and his eyeglass flashed. He'd heard a story about Lady Naga's airship going down in the sand sea. Was this her? It could be. He'd seen a picture of her once in the
Airman's Gazette,
and he tried hard to remember it, but she had been in her wedding finery, and anyway, all these easterners looked the same to Napster Varley.

"Found this on her," said Grandma Gravy, and produced from inside her tent of robes a signet ring. Gold, with an oak-leaf design. "And look at that cross around her neck: that's Zagwan workmanship."

Varley held a silk handkerchief to his nose and went close to the woman. "Are you Lady Naga?" he asked, very loudly and slowly.

She stared at him and nodded faintly. "What has become of Theo?" she asked.

"She's talking 'bout some Zagwan kid what was traveling with her," Grandma Gravy explained. "We stuck him in the engine pits. Dead by now, I s'poze. Anyway, merchant, what I'm asking is, what's to be done with her? I can't go on keeping her in luxury like this. She's too weak to sell for a

common slave, but she ought to be valooble to someone, aye? The queen of the Mossies...."

"Oh, indeed," said Varley thoughtfully.

"I been thinkin' we might skin her, see," suggested Grandma Gravy. "Her hide might fetch a tidy sum, aye? We could turn her into a nice rug, or some scatter cushions."

"Oh, Grandma Gravy, no!" cried Varley. "It's her
brain
that is the valuable part!"

"You mean a paperweight or somefin?"

Varley leaned as near to Grandma as he could bear and tapped one finger on his temple. "What she knows. I could take her to Airhaven and offer her to the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. They might pay well for her."

"Then you'll buy her whole? What'll you give?"

"Oh, well, of course, I will have transport costs to factor in, and other overheads, and this unfortunate truce has upset the market, but let me see ..."

'"Ow much?"

"Ten gold dollars," said the merchant.

"Twenty."

"Fifteen."

"Course," said Grandma Gravy thoughtfully, "I could always make little talismans out of her fingies and toes and sell 'em off individual...."

"Twenty it is," said Varley hastily, and started counting the coins out into her hand before she could up the price.

The black sand ship found a berth in one of the garages on the flanks of Cutler's Gulp. Its robed and hooded pilot furled its sails and then jumped down to make the ship fast. He

seemed to be only a servant, or a crewman, for when his work was done, he stood waiting patiently until a woman came down from the ship to join him. Then, together, they climbed the stairs and started along the iron walkways that bridged the townlet's furnace pits, heading for the huddle of cantinas and coffee shops near the stern. Beggars stretched out bowls to them, then saw their faces and thought better of it. Rough desert types with half-formed plans of robbery and violence changed their minds and backed into the shadows under ducts. Even the dogs ran away.

The woman was tall, and very thin, and she carried a long gun on her shoulder. She was dressed all in black: black boots, black breeches, black waistcoat, and a long black duster coat that flew out behind her like black wings when the wind caught it. In a place where everyone went masked or veiled, you might have expected her to wear a black veil too, but she chose to go bareheaded. Her gray hair had been tied back, as if she wanted everyone to see that she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump, and her single eye stared out of the wreckage as gray and chill as a winter sea.

Her name was Hester Shaw, and she killed people.

She had appeared in the desert six months earlier. Her companion, a Stalker named Mr. Grike, had carried her aboard El Houl, one of the towns that was eating the wreck of Cloud 9. She had been ill, and Grike had demanded that the townspeople take care of her. They did not want to argue with a Stalker, so they called a doctor, who examined the

woman and declared that there was nothing wrong with her beyond a few cuts and scrapes and a sort of settled melancholy that he had seen before in the survivors of calamities.

"Has she lost someone who was dear to her, Mr. Grike?" he asked.

"SHE HAS LOST EVERYTHING," the Stalker replied.

So the woman lived for a week or two in one of the sackcloth-curtained cubbyholes that passed for houses on the underdecks, and the Stalker cared for her, and fed her on bread and milk, which he mashed up for her with his metal hands, and the people watched and whispered and tried to imagine what relationship there could be between this dazed, ugly woman and the Resurrected man.

Then, one day, the township's engine master came to visit Grike and said, "Stalker, I want you to kill me someone. The sheikh who rules this town is old and fat. He takes too much of the salvage for himself. Kill him for me, and I'll see you live in comfort on the topmost tiers, with fine food and a featherbed for your um, ah ..."

He was still hunting for a word that might describe Hester when Grike said, "I WILL NOT KILL."

"But you're a Stalker! Of course you kill!"

"I CANNOT. MY MIND HAS BEEN ... TAMPERED WITH."

The engine master scowled and wondered about throwing the useless Stalker off his town, but he didn't see how it could be done. He shook his head, and was about to leave when the scarred woman said quietly, "I'll kill him for you."

"You?"

"I'm Hester Shaw. My father was Thaddeus Valentine, the famous secret agent and assassin," she said. "You want your

sheikh dead? Give me a weapon and tell me where to find him."

"But you're only a woman!" objected the engine master.

So Hester Shaw found herself a fork and a crowbar and climbed the stairs to El Houl's upper tier. She kicked open the doors of the sheikh's house. She killed the sheikh. She killed his guards. She killed his dogs. She moved through the smoky rooms like a plague and left nothing alive behind her. She was more like a Stalker than her Stalker, who would only watch and wait for her.

With the money the engine master gave her, she bought a sand ship and a few guns, and she and her Stalker left El Houl forever, much to the relief of its inhabitants. Since then she had become one of the legends of the deep sands: the woman bounty hunter and her companion, the Stalker who would not kill. Even Theo Ngoni had heard a garbled version of the story, as he toiled away in the engine pits of Cutler's Gulp, but the man who'd told him had spoken partly in Arabic, and had referred to the Stalker as a djinn and to Hester Shaw as the Black Angel. So it came as a complete surprise to him when he glanced up that afternoon to see them striding along the walkway that led above his station, and recognized them both.