A Darkling Plain (5 page)

Lady Naga smiled quietly. "How old are you, Theo?"

"Now? I'm nearly seventeen. Oh, be careful!" he cried, for the dark servant girl, apparently quite fearless and as taken as her mistress with the view, had leaned far out over the crumbly balustrade to look down. "Careful!" Theo shouted. "It's very old! It may give way!"

The girl paid him no attention at all, but the other servant said softly, "Rohini," and reached out to gently pull her back. Her black eyes gazed at Theo, startled and confused.

"Rohini cannot hear you," explained Lady Naga. "She is a deaf-mute, the poor thing. She came to me as a slave; a wedding gift from Naga's oldest friend, General Dzhu. Of course, I do not hold with slavery, so she has her freedom now, but she has chosen to stay with me. She is a good girl."

The girl Rohini bowed to Theo, thanking him for saving her, or apologizing for putting herself in danger. "It's all

Right,"' he said, "it doesn't matter ..." and then remembered that she couldn't hear and tried to mime it, which made both girls laugh. They were as bad as his sisters, Theo thought, but he didn't really mind.

Just then, down a stairway from the upper level of the gardens, came Air Marshal Khora, with Theo's parents. All three looked very solemn. Khora shot Lady Naga a look that seemed to mean something, though Theo could not guess what. The two servant girls stopped laughing at Theo and took themselves quickly away to the other end of the terrace. Some of the house servants appeared with folding tables, chairs, iced red tea, and honey biscuits. Mrs. Ngoni fussed about arranging seats and sending up to the house for a parasol, for she imagined that an ivory-colored person like Lady Naga could very easily catch sunstroke, and did not want it happening in
her
garden.

"Now," said Khora, when all was done, "to business, Theo. I have a job in mind for you. It may be dangerous, it should be interesting, and it might be of supreme importance both to Zagwa and the world. Of course, you must not accept it unless you truly want it; you have already served Zagwa well, and no one will think the worse of you if you turn it down."

"What is it?" asked Theo. He glanced at his parents. His father looked proud, his mother worried. "What do you want me to do?"

Instead of answering directly, Khora stood up and went to the balustrade, looking out across the bright gorge. "Theo," he said, "when you boarded that barbarian airship, did you notice anything unusual about her crew?"

Theo was not sure what he meant. "They were easterners,"

he said at last. "I remember thinking that I had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft."

"Nor have I," said Khora. "Nor has anyone. That aviatrix you captured claims that she and her comrades were mercenaries from the raft city of Perfume Harbor, in the pay of one of the German cities. She has papers that seem to prove that, and we found letters of marque signed by the mayor of Panzerstadt Koblenz in the wreckage of the other airship. We cannot prove that they are forgeries. And yet it doesn't quite ring true. Some of their equipment was surprising, too."

"The radio set on the ship I boarded ...," Theo remembered. "It was a Green Storm model."

Khora returned to his seat, leaned closer to Theo, and spoke quite softly. "I think what you foiled was not an attack on Zagwa by barbarians but an attempt by elements inside the Green Storm to assassinate Lady Naga."

"Why?" Theo started to say, and then remembered what Lady Naga had been telling him. "Because of what she did to the Stalker Fang?"

"Because they hate me," said Lady Naga.

"It is not just that," said Khora. "Lady Naga is too modest to say so, but the recent moves toward peace have largely been due to her influence. General Naga adores her, and does everything she asks."

"I try to guide him," said Lady Naga, blushing.

"But of course there are others in the Storm who cannot bear the idea of making peace with the Traction Cities," Khora went on. "It would serve them very well if Lady Naga were to be killed, and it would serve them even better if she were to be killed by Tractionists. Naga would hardly push for

peace with people he thought had murdered his beloved bride.

"That is why they went to all the trouble of disguising their attack as the work of the Traktionstadts. But now that their plan has failed, who knows what they will try next? She is safe while she is here, but they may attack her ship on its way back to Tienjing. They will be watching for her on the bird roads east of Zagwa, waiting for another chance to strike.

"So we have decided," he said, "to play a little trick on Lady Naga's enemies. The talks are supposed to last another week, but between ourselves the talking is all but done. Lady Naga has convinced us of her husband's good intentions, and we have agreed to help him. A few days from now an unremarkable merchant airship will leave Zagwa air harbor and fly northwest across the sand sea to Tibesti Static, then north again toward the heights of Akheggar. But somewhere over the desert it will change course and make for Shan Guo. Lady Naga will be aboard it, incognito, with one or two of her people to keep her company. No one will expect her to travel by such a route, on such a ship, and by the time her own ship takes off, after the official conclusion of the talks, she will already have been delivered safe to her husband in Tienjing."

"You talk about me as if I were a parcel," complained Lady Naga, embarrassed at being the cause of so much trouble.

"The ship Lady Naga travels on should have an African captain," said Khora. "If our enemies heard that a ship commanded by easterners had left Zagwa, they might smoke our plan, but with a Zagwan in charge, she will appear to be nothing more than a local trader. Of course, it will have to

be someone who has proved his courage and his loyalty, and who can perhaps speak a little Airsperanto."

"Me?" said Theo, catching his drift at last. He looked at Lady Naga, then his parents, and saw that they were all waiting for his answer. His father sat frozen with a honey biscuit halfway to his mouth, and as Theo watched, it slowly came in half and the lower part dropped stickily into Father's lap. "You want me to go?" he said. He felt frightened and excited. To fly north again, to see the world, to be entrusted with such an important mission ... He looked around him at the pleasant house, the steep sunlit gardens, then back to the grave faces of his parents. He had defied them once, running away to join the Green Storm's war. Surely they would not let him leave again?

"Father?" he asked nervously. "Ma?"

"The choice is yours, Theo," said his father, putting one arm around his wife's shoulders. "You've proved more than capable of looking after yourself, and we know you've been restless, cooped up here, longing to return to the sky."

"Like a caged bird," said his mother.

"We will miss you if you go, and fear for you, and pray as we did before for your safe return, but we will not stop you from going, if that is what you want," his father said. "It is a great honor that the air marshal has chosen you."

"You do not have to decide now," said Khora kindly. "The ship does not depart until Tuesday, in the dark of the moon. Think on it tonight, and talk with your mother and father, and let me know your decision in the morning."

But it did not take as long as Khora had expected for

Theo to make his decision. Lady Naga had saved his life, and despite all he had been through in the past year, the urge for adventure was still strong in him. And he could not help wondering whether, on the bird roads of the north, he might meet Wren Natsworthy again.

On Tuesday night, in the dark of the moon, Theo walked at the air marshal's side across Zagwa air harbor, which stood on a low plateau outside the city walls. In a well-lit hangar Lady Naga's cruiser
Plum Blossom Spring
sat in splendor. She was the loveliest airship that Theo had ever seen, but he barely glanced at her; his attention was fixed on the ship that sat waiting for him on an unlit pan at the very edge of the harbor. She was not a remarkable ship--in fact she had been chosen because she was so unremarkable--but Theo could see at once that she was well built. A sturdy little Achebe 1040 with tapered engine pods and long, graceful steering fins. Such ships were used all over Africa as freighters and transports, and this one had clearly had a long life, during which she had grown rather grubby and tattered, but she was Theo's first command, and he was convinced that she was a better ship than even the
Plum Blossom Spring.
Her name was
Nzimu.

Theo had already made his good-byes, and so, it seemed, had Lady Naga, for she was waiting for him at the foot of the
Nzimu's
boarding ladder with just two other people: a young officer who had swapped his Green Storm uniform for the shapeless robes of a trader, and the deaf-mute servant girl Rohini. Khora explained that the other girl, Zhou Li, would

be staying behind in Zagwa to wear her mistress's clothes and stand in for her at next week's official banquet. She was taller than Lady Naga, and Han rather than Aleutian, but they were enough alike that any spies who were watching might be fooled into thinking the ambassador was still in Zagwa.

"Theo," said Lady Naga, taking his hands in greeting as he stopped in front of the
Nzimu.
"You remember Rohini, don't you? And this is Captain Rasputra, who insists on coming as my bodyguard."

"She's a precious cargo," said Rasputra, a white smile flashing at Theo out of his black spade of beard. "I promised Naga I'd not let her out of my sight."

"It will be just the four of us," Lady Naga said.

"When you refuel at Tibesti," Khora said, "let everyone believe that Lady Naga and the captain are your passengers, and Rohini is your wife."

"Right," said Theo, glancing at the beautiful servant girl and feeling glad that his sisters were not here to giggle.

Captain Rasputra said, "The wind is rising."

Lady Naga turned to Khora. "You have a beautiful country, Air Marshal. I hope to return one day, when peace has come back to the world."

"I hope that day will be soon," said Khora, returning her bow. The breeze fluttered their cloaks. As Khora straightened, he said, "Lady Naga, I owe you special thanks for ridding us of the Stalker Fang. I knew Anna Fang in life, and I loved her. The thought of that unholy thing walking about with her face ..."

"I know," said Lady Naga. "I know how it feels. My own brother ... But you must not fear for Anna Fang. She is at peace." She looked past him at Theo, and stretched out her small hand to him again. "Theo. Shall we go aboard?"

***

FISHCAKE HURRIED DOWN a side alley deep in the under-tiers of Cairo. There were a lot of people about, even at this late hour, but that did not worry him. He was only ten years old, and little more than waist high to most of the passersby. They barely noticed him as he wove his way among them, clutching his bag of stolen Old Tech under his robes. From time to time he paused among the knots of men who gathered to argue and haggle in front of stalls heaped high with scraps of machinery. They loved to argue, down here in the Lower Suq, and if Fishcake timed it right and waited till the debate had reached its height, they never saw his skinny white hand dart out to snatch a piece of circuitry or a fragment of dented armor.

When he had what he needed, he stopped at a food stall and stole a sticky pastry, which he ate on the move as he

scurried down the long maze of ladderways and stairs and 'tween-tier maintenance catwalks that led down eventually into Cairo's drains. The city was rumbling across rough country toward the shores of the Middle Sea
;
and the fetid spillways of its storm-drain system rang with the squeal and grumble of the vast axles turning. It was mostly shadows down there, except where spokes of red light from furnaces and refineries splayed down through the gratings. The stench, the noise, the fumes would have been too much for most people to bear, but for Fishcake this was home. He felt safe in the city's noisy belly, where almost no one came.

He checked all the same to make sure he had not been followed before he pried open a grating in the wall of the main drain and threw his heavy bag through the hole, then slithered after it.

It was dark in the little side chamber he dropped into. Dark and dry. A hundred years before, Cairo had gone hunting far to the south, in lands where the rains came hard and frequently. It had needed its network of storm drains then, but since it had returned to the desert, they had been sealed off and forgotten. In the Lower Suq Fishcake sometimes heard men saying that the drains were haunted by djinni and evil ghosts, and it always made him smile, because they were right.

He picked up his bag and started wading through the moraine of greasy food wrappers and empty water bottles on the chamber floor. Near the back of the chamber, where light flickered in fitfully through another grating, something moved.

"Fishcake?" whispered a voice.

"Hello, Anna," said Fishcake. He was glad it was her. He switched on his lamp, a stolen argon globe fed by power that he leeched from a cable upstairs. His Stalker was propped in a corner. She had unsheathed her claws when she heard him coming, and the long blades were still bared, raised in front of her blind bronze face. Fishcake felt what he always felt when he came home to her: pride, and loathing, and a sort of love. Pride because he had built her himself, cobbling her together from the pieces of her smashed body that he had rescued from the desert. Loathing because she had not turned out as well as he had hoped. Her armor, which must once have been so smooth and silvery, was dull and dented as an old bucket, scabbed with solder and riveted-on patches that he'd made by stamping soup tins flat. And although he had never seen a Stalker in action, he was sure her joints and bearings were not supposed to grate like that each time she moved....