A Darkling Plain (7 page)

Theo hoped that if he could keep her talking long enough, some helpful god might slip an idea into his brain.

"The hair and skin were easy," Cynthia was saying. "The eyes were the real trick. I'm wearing little Old Tech things called 'contract lenses.'" She touched a finger to one eye and blinked. When she took her hand away, the eye was its old cornflower blue, gazing incongruously at Theo out of her dark face. "If you were any good," she said, "you'd have tried to hit me then. But I see you're still a coward. I'm rather looking forward to killing you, Theo Ngoni. That's why I was saving you till last."

"Please," gasped Lady Naga, heaving about on the deck like something half drowned. "Don't hurt him."

Cynthia stamped on her. "We're
talking!"

"Cynthia," shouted Theo, "why are you doing this?"

Cynthia took another step closer, fixing him with her odd-colored eyes. "This Aleutian bitch betrayed our leader so that Naga could seize power. Do you really think those of us who loved the Stalker Fang would let her get away with it?"

"But why here?" cried Theo helplessly. "Why now? You're part of her household; you could have killed her in Tienjing.... Killed Naga, too."

Cynthia sighed sharply, exasperated by his innocence. "We don't want Naga
dead,"
she explained. "That would only mean civil war, and more distraction from the real business of killing townies. We just want to make him give up this truce. If you hadn't interfered when I called our ships in at Zagwa, it would be over already. But I'm patient. In a few minutes this old rust bucket will go down in flames. Rohini will be the only survivor, and she'll tell Naga how Zagwa betrayed us to the townies and the townies shot us down. That ought to put the mockers on any alliance between Naga and your lot. As for the townies, well, he's hardly going to sit down and talk peace when he hears what they did to his pretty little wifelet. The guns will begin firing again. Our mistress will reward us when she returns to Tienjing!"

"You mean Fang? But she's dead!"

Cynthia smiled eerily. "She was
always
dead, African. That is why she can never be killed. She is waiting for us to end this treacherous talk of truces and conditions. Then she will return, and lead us to total victory!"

"You're mad!" said Theo.

"Oh, that's rich, coming from somebody who goes around smashing down doors with a dirty great axe," said Cynthia, and with no more warning than that, she swung her foot up and drove him backward with a kick, snatching the heavy fire axe from his hands as he went sprawling through the open doorway and tumbled down the companionway to the level below.

A grated walkway hit him hard in the face, and he lay there for a moment tasting blood in his mouth and listening for the sound of Cynthia coming after him. He heard her footsteps pacing along the walkway overhead, and saw her shadow moving against the flank of the gas cell up there. He dragged himself into a crawlspace. After a moment the footsteps stopped. "Theo?" Cynthia called down. "Don't think I'm going to come looking for you. I was looking forward to killing you, but I really can't be bothered to play hide-and-seek. It won't make any difference anyway. There's a bomb under the central gas cell, set to explode at midnight. So I'm going to take one of your silly Zagwan kites and beetle off now; I've arranged to meet some friends of mine in the desert shortly. Toodle-oo!"

The footsteps started again, and grew quieter as she climbed away from him. Theo guessed she was making for the emergency exit in the flank of the envelope. Just inside it was a locker where half a dozen kites were stored, workaday versions of the one he'd flown in Zagwa. He waited, and heard the hatch open, the sounds inside the envelope changing as the wind rushed in. Quickly he scrambled along a lateral support to a place where a glastic porthole had been

riveted into the skin of the envelope. Out in the starlight, far away, a black bat wing showed for a moment against the silver waves of the desert.

What about the other kites? Knowing Cynthia, she would have destroyed them. But maybe the delay that Theo had caused might have left her no time to deal with them. He glanced at his watch and saw with relief that there were still eight minutes to go before midnight. Ignoring the pain in his chest and side, he started climbing toward the kite locker. Even if he had not known where it was, he would have been able to find it by tracing the source of the cold wind howling in through the open escape hatch. Sure enough, the locker was empty; Cynthia had bundled the spare kites out through the hatch before she took flight herself. But when Theo stuck his head out, he saw one kite caught in the ratlines only a few yards from the hatch, and it was easy for him to reach out and drag it back aboard.

Breathing hard, he started to strap himself into the kite. Then he remembered Lady Naga. The kite was big, and she was small; Theo was sure it would carry both of them. But was she even still alive? He glanced quickly at his watch. The climb to the kite locker had not taken nearly as long as he'd thought. He had to try to save Lady Naga. He had promised.

He left the kite by the locker and flung himself back down the steep companionways to her cabin. She was lying where he had left her, but she started whimpering and trying to drag herself away when she heard him come in, imagining that he was Cynthia.

"It's all right," he told her, kneeling down beside her and rolling her over.

"Rohini," she croaked.

"She's gone," said Theo, trying to help her to her feet. "She was never Rohini anyway. Her name's Cynthia Twite; she was part of the Stalker Fang's private spy ring."

"Twite?" Lady Naga frowned and groaned. Thinking seemed to hurt. "No, she was a white girl, the Stalker's agent on Cloud 9.... Naga took her home aboard the
Requiem Vortex,
but she vanished when we reached Shan Guo.... Oh, Theo, I have to get home. If I don't, she or her friends will tell Naga that the townies killed me, and the peace will fail...."

"Don't try to talk," said Theo, worried that she would injure herself still further by forcing all these words up her poor, bruised throat. "I'll get you home, I promise. But first we have to get off this ship." He checked his wristwatch. "There's a b--" he said, and stopped.

It was still eight minutes to midnight.

The fall down the stairs,
he thought.
My watch is broken....

He had just time to remember his father saying, "I don't know why you youngsters wear these gimcrack bracelet watches. A pocket watch is more distinguished, and far, far more reliable," before the explosion tore his ship apart beneath him.

***

BRIGHTON HAD TAKEN a turn for the worse since Wren and Theo had left. The flying palace of Cloud 9 was gone, and it had taken most of the city's ruling elite with it. Brighton was ruled now by the Lost Boys. Dragged aboard as captives by the Shkin Corporation, they had escaped from their pens on the night of the Green Storm raid and quickly made themselves at home, setting up their own small kingdoms among the smart white streets of Queen's Park and Montpelier and the dank labyrinths of the Laines, gathering private armies of beggars and rebel slaves about them. They fought among themselves, or formed shaky alliances that could be broken over a stolen pair of shoes or a covetous glance at a pretty slave girl. You could never tell what a Lost Boy would do next. They were vicious and sentimental, greedy and generous. A lot of them were mad. By night their followers fought

running battles on the litter-strewn promenades, avenging botched deals and imagined insults.

Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys), and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guesthouses and frolic in the Sea Pool; but there was a certain sort of person--well-off artists from the comfortable middle tiers of cities that the war had never touched, and spoiled young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them-- who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music, and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole's Combe and White Ore with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St. Jean les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves,

or gunrunners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy
anything.
And up at the bows, drenched in the spray that crashed over the gunwales every time the launch shoved its blunt nose through a wave, Fishcake stood staring at the approaching resort and wishing he had stayed safe ashore.

In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead, he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he had encountered any of them, they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk, he realized he'd been wrong; the Lost Boys
were
the Brighton authorities.

The launch swung across Brighton's decaying stern, past dirty paddle wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime, where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveler from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, "Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!"

"Lost Boy submarines!" the boy said. "You can buy pleasure trips aboard them and see the city from beneath. And that's not all they're used for. Lost Boys are still pirates at heart. I've heard stories of little towns that have crossed Brighton's path and never been seen again...."

"Ugh!" said the girl again, but she looked delighted at the

thought of boarding a city where real live pirates lived.

Fishcake did not share her enthusiasm. Returning seemed less and less like a good idea.

The launch entered a channel of calm, filthy water between the central hull and the outrigger district of Kemptown. Abandoned pleasure piers arched overhead, their corroded gantries sending down a rain of rust flakes as Brighton shifted on the swell. The voices of the launch crew echoed across the narrowing gap to dockers waiting on the mooring stair. Smells of oil and brine. A dead cat bobbed in a mat of drifting scum. The launch backed its engines, and the other passengers began to gather their bags and pat their clothes, checking that wallets and money belts were still secure, but Fishcake just turned up his collar and tugged down the peak of his greasy cap and wished that he could stay aboard the launch and let it take him back to Cairo.

His Stalker, who was standing silently beside him, wrapped in the long, hooded robe that he had stolen for her from the Lower Suq, seemed to sense his fear. Her steel fingers closed gently on his arm, and she whispered, "There is nothing to be afraid of. I am with you."

She was Anna today. He took her hand in his and held it tight and felt a little braver. He did not even worry too much when a gust of wind snatched his cap off and sent it whirling up into the sunlight.

Two tiers above, in a fortified hotel on Ocean Boulevard, a Lost Boy named Brittlestar jerked around to stare as the lost cap went whirling past his window. "What was that?" he demanded.

His friends and bodyguards fingered the weapons in their belts and said they didn't know. One of his slaves said she thought it was just a hat.

"Just a hat?" hissed Brittlestar. "Nothing is
just
anything! It
meant
something! Where did it come from? Whose was it?"

The bodyguards, friends, and slaves swapped weary glances. Brittlestar was growing increasingly paranoid, and sometimes at night he woke the whole gang as he thrashed around in his sleep and screamed about Grimsby and somebody called Uncle. The bodyguards and friends were starting to think it might soon be time to pitch him overboard and offer their services to some less sensitive Lost Boy, like Krill or Baitball.

Brittlestar, the hem of his silk dressing gown swooshing behind him over the expensive carpets, went rushing to the room where he kept his screens. All the Lost Boys had screens, and all had crab-cameras that they sent sneaking about Brighton to spy on other Lost Boys. Everyone had grown quite used to the scraping of the machines' metal feet inside the city's ventilation shafts, and the echoey, rattling fights that broke out when two rival cameras met. Sometimes at dawn the pavements beneath air vents were littered with torn-off metal legs and shattered lenses, the debris of desperate battles that had raged through the shafts all night.

"Everything
means something!" Brittlestar assured his followers, as they gathered in the doorway to watch him grapple with the screen controls. "You say it's a hat, I say it's a sign. It could be a message from Uncle!" Brittlestar had been dreaming a great deal about Uncle lately. Uncle