A Darkling Plain (50 page)

"Will he come after us?"

Hester shrugged uneasily. "He fell a long way, Tom. He saved me, and he fell. He might be damaged. He might be dead, and there's no one to bring him back this time."

"Just us then," said Tom, and he took her in his arms again, and kissed her. She smelled just as she had on the night they first kissed, of ash and smoke and her own sharp sweat. He loved her very badly, and he was glad they were alone again, in danger and the wilds, where nothing that she had done mattered.

Not quite alone, of course. He had forgotten Pennyroyal, who knelt up in the bog and said in an irritable, gag-muffled voice, "Do you
mind?"

Hester pulled away from Tom reluctantly and nodded toward the house. "This must be the place."

"We'd better get on with it, then." Tom took the lightning gun from his shoulder and checked it while Hester tied Pennyroyal's hands and feet again, reknotting the ends of the cords she'd cut earlier.

"You can't leave me here, bound and helpless!" Pennyroyal complained through his gag.

"We can't have you running around free," said Hester. "You'd sell us out to the Stalker for a handful of copper."

"But what if you don't come back?"

"Pray we do," she suggested.

Tom felt unhappy about leaving the old man behind, but he knew she was right. They were already in enough danger, without a Pennyroyal on the loose behind them.

"How are you proposing to get out of this place?" Pennyroyal howled, as they started to leave, but they had no answer to that, so Hester just tied his gag tighter.

It was hard, rocky country, that valley of Erdene Tezh. Hester liked it. She could hear the grass singing, and smell the earth, and it reminded her of Oak Island. She took Tom's hand, and they walked together through the gloomy light, looking over their shoulders from time to time at the burning brazier that had been the
Jenny Haniver.
The ground rose in a steep, grassy slope to a docking pan behind a windbreak of pines. The trees made a steady sighing sound as their needles combed the wind. The same wind boomed against the taut silicone-silk envelope of an air yacht. It was locked and abandoned-looking, but knowing it was there made them feel more hopeful. They moved on, dropping down toward the lake again, toward the causeway.

Hester took the lightning gun from Tom. He was breathing hard, sounding winded. "Stay here with the airship," she said. "Let me go."

He shook his head. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers; his mouth, warm in the cold. They started together across the causeway. Tom was slow, but she was glad

of that, because it meant that she could draw ahead of him, ready to deal with whatever was waiting for them in that house. There was a creaking noise, but when she swung toward it, it was only plates of ice grinding and grating together at the edge of the lake. Farther out, clear water shone gray and still. She looked ahead again, toward the house.

There was someone standing on the causeway.

"Tom!" she yelled, raising the lightning gun. But she didn't pull the trigger. It was not a Stalker that stood there watching her. Just a child. A pinched white face and shabby clothes and a lot of filthy hair. She took another few steps, and recognized him. How had he come here? But it didn't matter. She lowered the gun completely and turned to Tom. "It's Fishcake!"

Running feet behind her. She heard the boy grunt and, turning, saw the knife flash as he slashed it at her throat. She dropped the lightning gun and grabbed his thin wrist, bending the knife away, twisting his arm until he cried out and let it go. She caught it as it fell and stuffed it through her belt, like a stern teacher confiscating a slingshot. She pushed Fishcake away, and he fell down and started to cry.

"Tom," said a whispering voice from above them. "Hester. How nice of you to drop in."

The Stalker. She had been standing in the shadows at the causeway's end where ten worn stone steps led up to a gate. She came carefully down the steps, limping, the gray light shining faintly on her bronze face.

"She's my Stalker!" shouted Fishcake. "I found her after you left me behind. She's been good to me. She's going to help me kill you!"

Hester looked for the lightning gun, but it had fallen down among the rocks at the waterside. She started to scramble down to fetch it, but steel hands caught her, lifting her, dragging her, gripping her face; a metal arm went across her chest, pulling her back hard against an armored breastplate.

"No!" shouted Tom, running for the fallen gun.

"Please don't be disagreeable, Tom," whispered the Stalker, "or I shall break her neck. I could do it very easily. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

Tom stopped running. He could not speak. He felt as if someone had jammed a rusty skewer through his left armpit, deep into his chest. Pain ran down his arm, too, and up his neck, along his jaw. He fell to his knees, gasping.

"Poor Tom," the Stalker said. "Your heart. Poor thing."

Crouched by her feet, Fishcake watched hungrily. "Kill them!" he shouted in his thin, angry voice. "Her first, then him!"

"They were Anna's friends, Fishcake," said the Stalker. "But they left me behind!" sobbed Fishcake. "She murdered 'Mora and Gargle! I swore I'd kill her!"

"They will both die soon enough."

"But I swore it!"

"No," whispered the Stalker.

Fishcake shouted something and groped for the knife in Hester's belt, but the Stalker swiped him aside, so hard that he was thrown right off the causeway, down onto the ice, which starred and moaned beneath him but did not give way. Howling with pain and betrayal, Fishcake crept back to the causeway. Sobbing, slithering over the wet stones, he ran away from the house.

The Stalker Fang let Hester go and stooped over Tom. Her steel hand rested on his chest, and her eyes flared as she sensed the erratic, stumbling beats of his heart. "Poor Tom," she whispered. "Not long now."

"What's wrong with him?" asked Hester.

"He's going to die," said the Stalker.

"He can't! Oh, he can't! Please!"

"It doesn't matter," whispered the Stalker. "Soon everyone is going to die."

She lifted Tom in her arms, and Hester followed her as she carried him up the steps and through her frozen garden, into her tomb of a house.

***

PELL-MELL ALONG STACK Seven Sluice, the thick air full of the snattering of dynamos and clang of running repairs down in the district. Up rusty rungs that rose forever, trembling with vibrations as the engines came online. Wren exhausted, scared, hurting, each lungful of air a stabbing ache in the strained muscles of her chest and back, and the only thing that drove her on the fact that Theo was with her now. He reached out sometimes to touch her, encouraging her, but they could not speak, for it was too loud in these dank ladderways, these iron throats that filled with hot breath and angry bellowings as the wounded suburb struggled back to life.

They were soon lost. They wanted to go forward and down, but the tubular streets twisted around on themselves and looped blindly about, leading them up and aft instead. At

last they emerged onto a catwalk high above some open square at the heart of the engine district, looking down past lighted windows and giant ducts into a space where a hundred fat brass pistons were pumping up and down in sprays of steam, their speed increasing as Theo and Wren leaned over the handrail to watch.

The handrail trembling; the whole suburb lurching forward. "It's moving!" shouted Wren, but Theo couldn't hear her, and there was no need to repeat it for it was quite obvious by then that Harrowbarrow was under way again. No time to repeat it anyway, for just then an engine worker in greasy overalls popped up through a hatchway in the catwalk and stared at them, mouth opening wide as he shouted down to his mates below.

Theo and Wren fled and found a spindly ladder leading up through the sousaphone maze of ducts and tubes that coiled above their heads. Condensation fell on them like warm rain as they dragged themselves up under the curve of the suburb's armor. At the top of the ladder was a hatch; it took both of them to twist the heavy handles and heave it open. Daylight came pouring in, and fresh, cold wind. Wren looked down the ladder and saw flashlights moving on the catwalk below; men gathering to stare at her and point. Then Theo, who was already through the hatch, reached back to pull her up into the open air.

At least I'll die in daylight,
she thought, lying panting on the filthy armored back of Harrowbarrow. A narrow walkway ran along the suburb's spine, without handrails. On either side of it a few hundred feet of battered armor sloped down to the suburb's edges, where the tracks ground by, clogged

with earth and hunks of rust. Beyond them the spires and spikes of ruined London sped past.

Theo slammed the hatch shut behind them and started to drag Wren away from it ; shouting something about Kobold's men following them up, but before they had gone very far, the metal around them suddenly erupted in sparks and little spurts of smoke and dust, and she realized they were being machine-gunned--not very accurately, thank Quirke.

Theo flung himself down, half on top of her, as a plump white shape soared above the wreckage to larboard. Through the spray of rust and soil flung up by Harrowbarrow's tracks Wren saw that it was a rather elderly-looking airship with the markings of the Green Storm, gun turrets swiveling to squirt fire at the racing suburb.

"The Storm are here!" she shouted.

"We're friends!" Theo yelled. Wren held on to him to save him from being thrown off Harrowbarrow's back as he waved his arms and shouted, "Help! Help!" But to the aviators in that ship he was just another flea-size shape creeping about on the suburb they'd been ordered to destroy; they swung their guns toward him again, and Wren heard the bullets swishing overhead as she pulled him down beside her.

A few yards from where they lay a circular hatch cover slid open in the suburb's armor, and a revolving gun emplacement popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It had been built on the turntable of an old fairground carousel from a coastal pleasure town that Harrowbarrow had eaten long ago, and as it spun around and around, cheerful calliope music came from it, along with puffs of gun smoke and streamers of

white steam. The barrels of its four long guns recoiled rhythmically into their armored housing as they fired, lacing the sky above the suburb with cannon shells. The airship that had shot at Wren and Theo burst into flames and was left quickly behind as the suburb went thundering on. Overhead, two other ships veered away, envelopes and tail fins filling with ragged holes.

The coming of Harrowbarrow could be heard in the Womb by that time. As the Londoners struggled aboard their new city with whatever possessions they had managed to save, the scrap-metal clangor of the approaching suburb filled the sky outside and echoed around the central hangar.

A Green Storm runner came to find Naga, who was waiting on the open stretch of deck plate at New London's stern. "Our airships can't hold her, sir. The
Belligerent Peony
has just been downed. Only the
Fury
and the
Protecting Veil
are left."

"Pull them clear," ordered Naga. "Tell the ground troops to get aboard this ... machine." He turned as Lavinia Childermass came running out of the stairwell that led down to her engine districts. "Well, Londoner?"

"We are ready, I think," the old Engineer said.

"Good. The harvester suburb is nearly upon us. I am going aboard my airship. I shall try to hold it off as long as I can, but it is strong. Best pray that your New London is fast."

"It is fast," promised Dr. Childermass as Naga turned away, his stomping armor carrying him toward the boarding ladders up which squads of Green Storm troopers were hurrying. She ran after him, jostled by passing soldiers. "You should stay, General! The birth of a town is a great event!"

Naga turned, and bowed, and hurried on. "Good luck, Engineer!" she heard him shout. She watched him go, thinking how strange it was that he should turn out to be New London's midwife. Then, remembering her position, she went haring back to her own post. The deck plates were trembling as, one by one, her assistants threw the starting levers of the Childermass engines. By the time she reached her command room in the heart of the underdeck, the faint whine of the repellers had risen to a pitch beyond her hearing, and there was an odd, bobbing movement in the floor. New London was airborne.

She reached for the speaking tube that linked her to the lord mayor's navigation room, high in the new town hall. "Hello! Ready?"

"Ready," came Garamond's voice, muffled and peevish. Lavinia Childermass hung the tube in its cradle and looked at the scared, expectant, grimy faces of her crew. Even down here she could hear the crash and rattle as Harrowbarrow shouldered its way toward her through the debris fields. She nodded, and her people sprang to their controls.

Outside the Womb, Naga watched Harrowbarrow's scouts scurry aside as the noise of their suburb's approach grew louder. He fired his pistol at a couple of them, to speed them on their way. The sky above those rust hills west of Crouch End was filling with dust and debris, as if a scrap-metal geyser had erupted there. And suddenly the hills themselves shifted, slithered, bulged and burst apart, and tearing through them came Harrowbarrow's brutal snout.

The Womb lurched and seemed to settle. At its northern end Peabody's men had set off their explosive charges, and with a dreamy slowness the tall, corroded doors at the hangar mouth fell forward, crashing down into the rust and rubble outside.

Harrowbarrow ground its way over the ruins of Crouch End, bright rags of curtains and carpet snagging on its clawed tracks. The cruiser
Protecting Veil
fired a flight of rockets at it and rose out of range before the one remaining swivel gun on Harrowbarrow's back could swing around to target her. The
Fury
swooped toward the Womb, and Naga ran forward and leaped aboard as she hovered for a moment just above the ground. By the time his armor had hauled him through the hatch and onto the flight deck, the ship was high again. An aviatrix came running to him with reports, but Naga waved her away, tense as an expectant father. He went to a gun slit and peered down at the mouth of the Womb.