A Darkling Plain (54 page)

going to be well. We'll take the bird roads again."

"Look!" said Tom.

Above the mountains a new star had appeared. It was very bright, and it seemed to be growing larger. Tom managed to stand, walking a few paces away from the fountain for a better view.

"Tom, be careful.... What is it?"

He looked back at her, his eyes shining. "It's ODIN! It must have ... blown up! That's what she was doing, before Pennyroyal appeared. She ordered it to destroy itself...."

The new star twinkled like a Quirkemas decoration and then began to fade. At the same instant the roof of the house collapsed with a roar and a rush of sparks, and a spear of pain went through Tom's side, so much worse than before that even as he fell, he knew this was the end of him.

Hester ran to him, her arms around him; he heard her screaming at the top of her lungs, "Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal!"

Pennyroyal reached the docking pan and saw the boy creep out of the pines to meet him. Even here the ground was lit by the glow of the fire on the island; the sky yacht's silvery envelope shone cheerfully with orange reflections. Pennyroyal waved the key as he hurried toward it. "Nothing to fear now, young Fishpaste! I sorted your Stalker out. All it took was a bit of good old-fashioned pluck."

He unlocked the gondola and climbed inside, the boy following. The yacht was a Serapis Sunbeam, rather like the one Pennyroyal had owned in Brighton. He squeezed into the pilot's seat and quickly found the key slot under the main control wheel. Lights began coming on. The fuel and gas

gauges all showed half full, and the engines worked after a couple of attempts. "First I must collect my young friends," Pennyroyal said. After what they had just endured together, he felt Tom and Hester really
were
his friends; his comrades. He was determined that he would save young Tom.

"No," said Fishcake coldly, from just behind him.

"Eh? But it's all right, child; there's no danger now...."

"Go now," said Fishcake, and he reached around from behind the pilot's seat and pressed one of the blades of Pennyroyal's own pocketknife against his throat.

"They left me behind," he said.

In the garden Hester heard the engines rumble and rise, and said, "He's coming, Tom, the airship's coming!"

Tom wasn't listening. All he heard was the word "airship," and as all pain and feeling began to leave him, he saw again the bright ships lifting from Salthook on the afternoon that London ate it, long ago.

The sky yacht rose and hung above the garden. The downdraft from its engine pods whipped Hester's hair about and made the burning house behind her roar like a furnace. She looked up. Fishcake was staring down at her through one of the gondola windows. She recognized the look on his face, solemn and triumphant all at once, and she felt sorry for him, for all the things he must have seen and been through, and all the long miles he had had to come for his revenge. Then he turned from the window and shouted something at Pennyroyal and the yacht rose, curving away toward the mountains, the drone of its engines whispering into silence.

There's no way out this time,
Hester thought. And then she

thought,
There is always a way out.
She pulled Fishcake's long, thin-bladed knife out of her belt again and laid it down in the shadows beside her, where it gleamed with reflections from the fire; a narrow doorway leading out of the world.

She kissed Tom's face, and for a moment he half woke, although he still didn't quite know where he was; memories and real life were all tangled up inside his mind, and he thought that he was lying on the bare earth, on that first day, fresh-fallen out of London. But he didn't care, because Hester was with him, holding him tight, watching him, and he thought how lucky he was to be loved by someone so strong, and brave, and beautiful.

And the last thing he felt was the touch of her mouth as she kissed him good-bye, and the last thing he heard was her gruff, gentle voice saying, "It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we'll be together, and it will all be all right."

***

WHEN THEY CAME FOR Oenone, it was still dark, and the breeze that blew in through the small window of the room where they'd been holding her smelled of ash. Faint Earth tremors shivered the floor. She had been feeling them all night in her sleep. Her dreams had been filled with the crash of falling masonry echoing across the valley from Batmunkh Gompa.

She washed her aching face in cold water and said her prayers, assuming they were taking her to be killed. But when they led her down the stairs, she found Subgeneral Thien waiting for her. He looked weary and slightly dazed, and his uniform was streaked with dirt.

"Naga is dead," he said.

Oenone saw him staring at her broken nose and the bruises that had spread around her eyes. If Naga was dead,

then Thien was the most senior officer in Batmunkh Gompa, she thought. He would try to seize power for himself, and he would not want her around to remind people of the man he was replacing.

"Come with me, please," he said.

She followed him outside, onto a balcony where the cold wind tugged at her clothes. The southern sky was a wall of shadow, lit faintly from behind by the red flaring of the volcano. The voices of the nuns chanted steadily somewhere inside the building, the chant rising in volume for a while each time the ground shook. In the courtyard below the balcony Oenone saw hundreds of faces looking up expectantly; Green Storm soldiers and aviators; refugees from Tienjing.

She felt nervous in front of such an audience, but not afraid of dying. She knew that poor Naga would be waiting for her in heaven, and her mother and father, too, and her brother Eno; all those whom she had loved and lost, who had gone ahead of her.

"What do you make of it?" asked Thien. He was looking upward too, and she realized that it was not at her the people in the courtyard were staring, but at something above her head; above the roofs of the nunnery; above the mountains. Across the few patches of the sky that were still clear, hundreds of shooting stars were streaking, white and green and icy blue.

"What do you make of it?" asked Thien again.

He wanted her scientific opinion, Oenone realized. She licked her lips, which had grown very dry. "I would say that something--some
things
--are falling into the upper atmosphere."

"More weapons?" Thien sounded very scared.

Oenone watched for a moment, thinking. "No. No, I think it's a good thing. I think something big has exploded in orbit, and those stars are some of the fragments, burning up."

"The cities' weapon?" asked Thien. "You think it is destroyed?"

"It was not theirs," Oenone said. She was about to explain her theory about the Stalker Fang, and tell him that Grike must have found the ground station and destroyed it, but it would be better kept a secret; if the cities learned who had turned ODIN on them, it would lead to more fighting. "It was all an accident," she said. "Some old orbital, gone mad. Let's pray it's over."

Thien nodded and reached for his sword. She had told him what he wanted to know, thought Oenone, and now she was no more use to him. She could not help squeezing her bruised eyes shut. She heard the ringing rasp of the long blade sliding from its scabbard. She heard the chink of metal against stone. She opened one eye, then the other. Thien was kneeling in front of her, laying his sword on the pavement at her feet. Down in the courtyard everyone else was kneeling too. Soldiers bowed their heads, saluting her, fist-to-palm.

"What are they doing?" she asked, bewildered. "What are
you
doing?"

"Our armies are smashed," said Thien. "The barbarians' cities are broken. The world is in turmoil. We need someone to lead us down new roads. I'm not the man for that."

He rose and took Oenone by the arm, bringing her gently to the front of the balcony so that all the people waiting below could see their new leader.

The engines of the air yacht failed a few miles from Batmunkh Gompa, and Fishcake abandoned her there and set off walking, leaving Pennyroyal behind. Pennyroyal spent a while trying to restart the yacht, but ash had clogged its air intakes, and it would not work. Reluctantly, finding his way by the light of the meteor showers streaking across the northern sky, he set off on foot through the ash drifts to the nearest Green Storm base. There he attempted to surrender, but the Storm were in such a state of confusion that nobody wanted to be saddled with a townie prisoner. "At least send ships to Erdene Tezh!" he begged. "My friends may still be there! It was the ground station! The Stalker Fang was controlling the weapon from there...."

"No one was controlling the weapon," said the base commander, waving a communique she'd just received from Batmunkh Gompa. "Naga's widow says that one of the Ancients' orbital devices malfunctioned, and it destroyed targets at random."

"But ..."

"You are free to go, Professor."

It was months before Pennyroyal found his way back to Murnau. He used the time well, making use of the long waits at provincial air harbors and caravanserais to write his greatest work,
Ignorant Armies.
It was surprisingly truthful by Pennyroyal's standards. He confessed all his previous lies in Chapter One, and kept as close as he could to the facts when he described what he had seen and done at Erdene Tezh.

But when he finally reached the Hunting Ground, he found himself in a world that was changing quickly. The

predators were growing so savage and the prey so scarce that even the staunchest of Municipal Darwinists were starting to wonder how much longer the system could keep going. People were looking for new ways to live, and Murnau had shocked everyone by settling down on a hilltop west of the Rustwater and going static. Refugees from Zhan Shan were moving there, helping the Murnauers lay out fields and plant crops. Old von Kobold had kept on a few of his harvester suburbs, and an air force, led by Orla Twombley, that whizzed around the margins of his pale tract of farmland and scared off any predator that came too close.

Undaunted, Pennyroyal went in search of his publishers, but Werederobe and Spoor wouldn't touch his new book. After Spiney's expose, said those gentlemen, nobody would believe any more wild yarns from Nimrod Pennyroyal. Least of all them. Anyway, the Mossies were friendly now; had he not heard about the treaty von Kobold had signed with the Widow Naga? And, incidentally, what
had
happened to the advance they'd paid him for his previous book?

Pennyroyal spent ten months in debtors' prison, boring his fellow inmates with endless stories of his wonderful adventures. When some of his old friends from Moon's clubbed together and paid his debts, he slunk away to Peripatetiapolis, where one of his former girlfriends, Minty Bapsnack, still had a soft spot for him. He lived out his final years in her house, and they were not unhappy. But even Minty took his story with a pinch of salt, and she never lent him the money he needed to publish
Ignorant Armies.

***

Fishcake did not see the shooting stars. By the time the wreckage from ODIN began to streak across the sky he was beneath the lid of smoke from Zhan Shan. He bypassed Batmunkh Gompa in the dark and walked on for days, up roads clogged with ash and refugees.

He was the only person traveling toward the volcano, not away. The eastern flank of the mountain had been ripped open, and the people who had lived beneath it were fleeing in ragged columns, with tales of whole towns being buried, whole cities swept away. But the western slopes, though shaken and dusted with ash, had not suffered so badly. When Fishcake came over the ridge above the hermitage, he saw the little house still standing, the cattle in their pasture eating bales of hay brought up from the lowlands, fresh prayer flags flapping on the shrine at the head of the pass. He shuffled toward the door on bare, bloody feet and collapsed on the step, where Sathya found him next morning when she came out to milk the cow. In his frostbitten hand he was still clutching the little horse that his Stalker had made for him.

He would stay there with Sathya for many years, growing into a strong, handsome young man of the mountain kingdoms. He would come to forget a lot of the awful things he had been through, but he never forgot what he had done at Erdene Tezh. That was his secret, and at first it made him feel strong and proud, because he'd carried out his promise to the gods and sent Hester Natsworthy and her husband to the Sunless Country. But later, when he was grown up and married, watching his own children play with Anna's little horse in the dust outside his foster mother's hermitage, he came to

feel less certain about it. Those were the years when the Widow Naga was pushing hard for peace, preaching her policy of forgiveness toward old enemies. Sometimes Fishcake wished he had shown a little more forgiveness himself, and let the Natsworthys aboard that sky yacht after all. But at least (he told himself) he hadn't
killed
Hester and Tom; he'd just taught them a lesson by abandoning them as they'd once abandoned him. They were tough and resourceful, and he was sure they had survived.

25th April 1027
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