A Darkling Plain (14 page)

After a while, Kriegsmarschall von Kobold said, "Manchester is coming east. I had a communique from the mayor, Mr. Browne...."

"Ah! Our paymaster."

"It is true that Manchester has helped to finance our struggle.... He plans to hold a conference aboard his city as soon as it reaches the line. The mayors of all the Traktionstadts are to meet and decide how to proceed. I plan to make the case for a lasting peace with the Storm. I would

like you to be there, Wolfram. There at my side, so that everyone can see you are my heir...."

"I shall be going home to Harrowbarrow tomorrow or the day after," said his son. "I have business to attend to."

"With your sky-tramp aviator friends?"

Wolf shrugged.

The kriegsmarschall turned away, hesitated, then shook his head and marched briskly down the steps and across the bridge. He had fought countless battles against the Storm, met Stalkers in hand-to-hand combat on the steps of his own home in the red winter of '14, but his own son always defeated him.

Wolf stood alone and watched him go. After a while he had the uncomfortable feeling that
he
was being watched too. He turned, and there was the statue of the goddess gazing at him with her calm, blind eyes. Despite what he had told his father, Wolf could remember how, as a little boy, he had liked to sit in the statue's lap and look up at her while his father told him stories of Murnau's glorious past. He drew his saber and hacked through the slender neck with three furious blows, sparks flaring as the blade sliced stone. Then he kicked the severed head down the stairs into the empty lake and strode quickly away through the gardens to start preparing for his journey.

*** it seemed to Theo to be raining. He could not feel the rain, for he was indoors, in bed. He could not see the rain, for it was dark. But he could hear it, the gentle hiss of steady falling rain, and even the sound was refreshing after those parched days on Cutler's Gulp. It rushed and sighed and soothed and shushed, and wove together his disjointed dreams.

And sometimes, briefly, he came fully awake, and knew that the hissing rain sound was just the noise of the sand singing beneath the wheels of the black sand ship.

"Don't be afraid," someone told him.

"Wren?" he asked.

"Was she with you when you were taken by Grandma Gravy's boys? Were Wren and Tom with you?"

"No, no," said Theo, shaking his head. "They're far away.

They're in the north, on the bird roads. Wren sent me a card at Christmas.... I hoped I might find her when we reached the north...." Remembering the wreck of the
Nzimu,
he struggled to rise. "Lady Naga.... What about Lady Naga?"

A hand touched his face, gentle and shy. A mouth brushed his forehead. "Don't be afraid, Theo. Sleep."

He slept, and woke again, and saw that the woman who sat beside him was Wren's mother. Above her head an argon globe in a squeaky gimbal swung to and fro, sloshing black washes of shadow up the cabin walls. When the shadows hid Hester's face, Theo could imagine that it was Wren sitting there beside his bunk, but when she saw that he was watching her, she said harshly, "Awake, are you? You'd better pull yourself together. There's no room for slackers on my sand ship." It was as if she hoped that he would not remember the gentle things she had said to him earlier.

Theo tried to speak, but his mouth was drier than Bitumen Bay. Hester reached out roughly and raised his head and pushed a tin cup against his lips. "Don't drink too much," she said. "I can't spare it. I was only in Cutler's Gulp for food and water, and thanks to you I had to leave before I found either. That lout I shot was Grandma Gravy's golden boy. She's not best pleased."

The sand went on singing against the hull of the speeding ship. Theo slept again. Hester stood up and climbed the ladder to the open cockpit, where Grike stood at the tiller, his green eyes glowing. The ship was west of the sand sea, running across plains of roasted shale. Away in the east a band of pale light showed on the horizon. The wind thrummed in the rigging. "He keeps going on about someone

called Lady Naga," Hester said. "I think she must have been with him when the scavs found him. Ever heard of Lady Naga?"

Grike said, "there are ships behind us."

"What? Damn!"

Hester had expected the old witch at Cutler's Gulp to send someone after her. Grandma's reputation for black magic meant that her men were likely to be more scared of Grandma than they were of Hester or her tame Stalker. She squinted at the horizon until she could see them too, the thin, sharp shapes of their sails, like the teeth of fish. She had expected one or two, feared three, but Grandma had sent six, ranging in size from a tiny cutter to a big, twin-hulled dune runner. "I suppose we ought to be flattered," she said.

The sun rose out of the ragged hills astern, and the lookouts on the masts of the pursuing ships saw the black sail ahead. A flare rose from the dune runner, signaling "chase to leeward." A few minutes later there was a puff of smoke aboard one of the smaller ships, and Grike and Hester saw a dune a few hundred yards astern explode in flames and flung sand.

"they will soon be in range," Grike said impassively. "if they hit our tires while we are traveling at this speed, the vehicle will be destroyed."

"Damn," said Hester again. She went below to the gun locker and took out something she had stolen from a bandit she'd killed way out in the Djebel Haqir. It was an automatic jezail, taller than her, with pretty silver chasing on its walnut stock. If the bandit had been sober, he might still have been alive; it was a good gun, with a range of several miles. Hester

loaded big brass shells into the chambers and filled her pockets with more. She checked that Theo was still sleeping. He was, curled up like a child, gentle and vulnerable. Hester made herself turn away. If she wasn't careful, she would start to care about him, and she knew too well that when you cared about people, you opened yourself up to all kinds of pain.

She climbed out into the light, which was hard and white. The scouring wind was full of sand, and the ships were closer. The one that had fired first was smallest and fastest; it was coming up quickly on the starboard quarter, and Hester could see the men on its hull taking aim at her with some kind of swivel-mounted cannon. It puffed out white smoke, and she felt the shot whisk past her, exploding among a stack of biscuit-colored rocks a hundred yards to larboard.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve and steadied her gun against the cockpit rail. "Be easier if you could do this," she told Grike, pushing her sand goggles up her forehead and squinting through the jezail's telescopic top sight. "I can hardly see them...."

"i cannot," said Grike. "I have told you many times. something dr. zero did to me; some barrier in my mind ..."

"I wish I had your Dr. Zero here right now," grunted Hester, trying to focus on the little knot of men busy with their sponges and ramrods around the swivel gun. "I'd put a barrier in
her
mind." She squeezed the jezail's trigger and cursed as the stock slammed against her shoulder. The empty cartridge casing went tumbling astern. Where the bullet had gone Hester could not say, but she had not hit her target. She

was no sharpshooter. Her talent wasn't shooting, only killing.

Luckily the men on the other ship were no better than her; shot after shot went past her as she worked her way steadily through a pocketful of ammunition. She was about to start on the second pocket when the other ship suddenly veered off course.

"Did I do that?" she asked.

The enemy ship was out of control. Maybe one of Hester's stray shots had severed a cable or pierced a tire. It curved across the line of ships, and a three-wheeler close behind it swerved wildly and collided with a little armed yacht. Tangled together, both ships overturned and started to cartwheel impressively across the sand, shedding spars, wheels, sails, and scraps of broken mast. The leading ship had overturned too, throwing up a billowing scarf of sand that hid the remaining three for a while, but they emerged again, vague at first, then sharp and clear and gaining fast. Bullets from a steam-powered machine gun mounted on the big dune runner started thumping against the woodwork close to where Hester crouched. She said something filthy and lay down out of sight.

"THEY ARE TRYING TO CAPTURE THIS SHIP, NOT DESTROY IT," Grike guessed. "NOW THAT THEY HAVE LOST THREE OTHERS, GRANDMA GRAVY WILL NOT WANT THEM TO RETURN WITHOUT A PRIZE."

"Well, that's comforting," said Hester, looking up at him from ankle height as the bullets hanged off his armor. "What are you going to do when they board us?"

"IT WILL NOT COME TO THAT."

"What if it does?"

"THEN I SHALL DEFEND YOU IN ANY WAY I CAN,"' said the Stalker patiently, "I WILL SNATCH AWAY THEIR WEAPONS. I WILL RESTRAIN THEM. I WILL STAND BETWEEN THEIR BLADES AND YOUR BODY. BUT I WILL NOT KILL THEM."

"And if they kill me?"

"THEN I WILL KEEP THE PROMISE I MADE YOU ON THE BLACK ISLAND."

Hester squeezed off a couple more shots at the dune runner. Overhead, the sails were starting to fill with holes, but the silicone silk was tough and did not split. "Why did she do this to you?" Hester shouted. "I mean, tricking you into smashing that Anna Fang thing, fine, but why couldn't you just go back to normal once the job was done?"

"I AM SURE THAT DR. ZERO HAD HER REASONS FOR LEAVING ME WITH A CONSCIENCE."

"Well, I miss the old Grike."

"AND I MISS THE OLD HESTER."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

But she never found out, because at that moment the dune runner pulled alongside, and grappling hooks came hurtling across the narrowing gap between the two ships, and it was time to drop her jezail and pull out her pistols and fight.

The hammer blows of bullets against the hull got into Theo's dreams, so perplexing and out of place in the quiet green spaces he was drifting through that he had to wake up to find out what they meant. He lay on the bunk for a moment, wondering where on earth he was and why it was jolting about so. The portholes on the wall above him were shuttered, so it

was shady in the cabin, but just above his head someone had stretched a golden cord right across from one wall to the other. Theo wondered why anyone should do such a thing. Was it a washing line? If so, it was more beautiful than any washing line he'd seen before; so bright, so shimmer. He put his hand out to touch it, and his fingers slid straight through it. It was made from warm light.

Theo sat up. There were more of the cords stretched all across the cabin, like a cat's cradle. Every now and then there would be a thud against the hull and another would appear. They were shafts of sunlight, poking in through the bullet holes that were appearing in the cabin walls.

Dizzy with sleep, Theo rolled off the bunk and landed on the deck. The smooth wood bucked beneath him as the sand ship sped over the rough desert floor. Theo started crawling toward the metal ladder at the rear of the cabin. He could hear shouting above him, and the slam and cough of handguns. As he reached the foot of the ladder, a man came down it headfirst, dead, his turban smoldering where the flash from Hester's pistol had set it on fire. Theo looked up the ladder through the open hatch. A confusion of struggling shapes blocked out the sun.

He climbed the ladder. Out on the deck in the white, blinding light a scruffy battle was taking place, almost silent apart from the stamp and scuff of feet on the deck boards. A ragged brown dune runner was keeping pace with the sand ship, attached to it by ropes and grappling hooks. Men had jumped across the gap, thinking it would be easy to overpower a one-eyed woman and a Stalker who would not kill, but three of them were already dead, tangled in the rigging

or draped across the rail. A fourth was struggling with Grike, who had taken his gun and was holding him away from Hester. A fifth circled Hester, who had thrown her empty pistols aside and was holding a knife, jabbing it at the man each time he lunged at her. He had a sword, much longer and heavier than Hester's knife, but he had not yet worked up the courage to get close enough to use it.

Theo stood unnoticed in the cabin hatchway. The fight and the desert swirled around him; the heat and light came down on his head like a fall of bright water. On the deck at his feet lay a boarding axe, and the light seemed to pour from its blade. He picked it up and hacked at the rope that stretched from the nearest of the grappling hooks. The rope was old and greasy and parted easily after a few blows. The sand ship lurched, starting to pull away from its attacker. Theo scrambled toward the next hook. "Theo!" he heard Hester shout. He looked up. A man stood in the dune runner's rigging, grinning at Theo and aiming a blunderbuss. Hornets were buzzing past, and Theo felt one sting his arm. A knife appeared, sticking out of the man's neck, and he dropped the blunderbuss and fell out of the rigging into the storm of sand between the two ships.

Theo looked at Hester. She had flung her knife at the man with the blunderbuss, and now she was defenseless. Without thinking he swung the flat of his hatchet at the swordsman who was attacking her. The man still hadn't noticed Theo, and the blow caught him by surprise. He crashed sideways against the rail and over it, away into the swirling dust. Grike dropped the man he had captured down after him, and Theo saw them clamber to their feet in the

sand ship's wake and stagger painfully away, waving at the surviving ships, which were slowing and starting to turn, dismayed by their losses and abandoning the chase. "Good work," said Hester.

Theo nodded, still dizzy, but proud that he had won her respect.

"You all right?" she asked.

He looked down at his arm, where the hornet had stung. It hadn't really been a hornet, of course, but the wound was a scratch, not deep. He knelt on the deck and watched Hester pick up the hatchet and cut the remaining ropes. As the dune runner veered away, pilotless, she turned and said, "Stupid! I didn't rescue you so you could get yourself killed." But Theo sensed beneath her scorn a sort of rough kindness, and remembered the gentle way she had sat with him in the night, and knew that she was not so unlike Wren after all.