A gaggle of officers waited on the docking pan, fussing around a dark-skinned servant girl whom Naga vaguely recognized. He could tell from twenty yards away that they had bad news.
"Excellency, word has come from Africa...."
"This is your wife's servant, Excellency, the mute girl, Rohini...."
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"She arrived on foot at the Tibesti Static, out of the desert, all alone."
"Your wife, Excellency--her ship was jumped by townie warships a day out from Zagwa. The Zagwans must have betrayed her, Excellency. Lady Naga is dead."
Later, in one of the citadel's council rooms, she told him everything; how three townie airships had ambushed the Nzimu, how her crew had fought to defend his wife, and how they had been overwhelmed. She wrote it all laboriously out on papers that an aide read aloud.
When she was a little girl, Cynthia Twite had dreamed of being an actress. Her parents had both been actors; arty, Anti-Tractionist types from the Traction City of Edinburgh who had fled their home for what they imagined would be an idyllic life in a static in Shan Guo. They had always encouraged their daughter to dress up and perform, fondly believing that she might be a star one day. And how right they had been!
Good, tolerant people that they were, they had been taken aback by the sudden rise of the Green Storm. "Not all city people are barbarians," they kept telling Cynthia, rather plaintively, as ferocious Green Storm slogans crackled out of the loudspeakers that the new regime had erected all around their settlement. But Cynthia thought it all very exciting; she enjoyed the flags and uniforms, and the warlike songs she got to sing at school, and she loved the Stalker Fang, so strong and shiny. She soon grew tired of hearing her mum and dad moaning, and reported them to the Storm as Tractionist elements.
After they were taken away, she went to live in a government-run orphanage at Tienjing. From there she was
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recruited into the intelligence wing, and then into the Stalker Fang's private spy network. That was when Cynthia discovered that she had inherited her parents' love of theater. Putting on disguises, adopting other names and voices and mannerisms, these were the things she most enjoyed, and she knew that she did them very well. Her only regret was that she could never claim the applause that she deserved. But it was tribute enough to watch the tears trickle down Naga's face while he listened to all the dreadful things the townies had done to his wife.
Naga had probably never wept in public before. His aides and officers looked quite appalled. Even General Dzhu, who had hatched the plan to kill Lady Naga and helped Cynthia to infiltrate her household, looked uneasy when he heard his old friend sniffling and saw the tears drip off his chin. In the end, he cut short Cynthia's performance. He had arranged Lady Naga's death because he wanted to shock Naga out of his silly notions of peace with the cities, not to destroy him.
"Enough!" he said, holding up his hand to stop the man who was reading out Cynthia's words. "Naga, you should not listen to any more of this. Two things are clear. We cannot trust the Zagwans. And the truce with the Tractionist barbarians must end. My division is ready to attack tomorrow, if you command it."
"And mine," said several other officers, all at once.
"Destroy All Cities!" shouted another, seizing on a Green Storm slogan from simpler times before the truce began.
"No," said Naga angrily.
There was a mutter of surprise from everyone in the chamber. Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing a
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deaf mute and stop herself from crying out.
"No!" the poor fool said again, thumping the tabletop with his mechanical hand. "Oenone would not have wanted to see the world go tumbling back into war on her account."
"But Naga,"' insisted General Dzhu, "she must be avenged."
"My wife did not believe in vengeance," said Naga, trembling. "She believed in forgiveness. If she were here, she would say that the actions of a few townies in the sand sea do not mean that none of them can be trusted. We must continue to work for peace, for her sake." He looked straight at Cynthia, who modestly averted her gaze. "What of this girl? What reward can we offer her? She has been brave, and loyal."
Annoying, having to wait while someone wrote down his question on a piece of paper before she could scribble her answer. She allowed herself a little smile as she wrote it, and it pleased her to think that everyone else in the room thought she was smiling because she was such a good, loyal girl.
I ask only that I be allowed to serve General Naga just as I served his beloved wife.
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15 The Invisible Suburb
***
DAWN FOUND THE Jenny haniver above the scarred brown moors of no-man's-land. The cheerful cluster of cities that surrounded Murnau had sunk below the southwestern horizon sometime in the small hours, and the only city in sight now was a far-off armored hulk called Panzerstadt Winterthur, grumbling north on sentry duty. The Traktionstadts-gesellschaft and the Storm each kept watch on this region out of habit, for they had been outflanked before, but neither seriously imagined the other launching an attack across this marshy, pockmarked landscape, which grew only uglier and less inviting as the light increased. There was nothing down there beneath the mist except the immense track marks of towns.
Some of the older marks were a hundred yards across, steep-walled canyons running straight into the east, their
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bottoms filled with loose shale and chains of boggy ponds. Looking down at them, Tom thought he recognized the tracks of London, which he and Hester had followed long ago. Soon he would follow them again. This time, Quirke willing, they would lead him home.
"Well, I can't see a suburb anywhere," said Wren, wrapping her wet hair in a towel as she came through from the galley, where she had been washing in the sink. The lemony scent of her shampoo filled the flight deck as she went to each window in turn, looking down at the slabs and slopes of mud all shining in the gray dawn. "Nothing!"
"We must be patient," said Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy. It did not seem like Wolf Kobold to be late.... He circled again. The Jenny felt light and playful, as if pleased to be back in the sky. Her holds were empty, on Wolf's instructions; presumably he envisaged himself flying home from the wreck of London with a shipload of loot. But where was he?
The radio gave a sudden crackle and began to squeal. It had been tuned in advance to a frequency that Wolf had provided, so it seemed safe to assume that the shrill, ear-splitting noise coming out of the speakers was the call sign of Harrowbarrow's homing beacon.
Tom scrambled over to turn down the volume, while Wren ran back to the windows. The land below them was as featureless as ever. "I can't see any suburbs," said Wren. "It must still be over the horizon."
"Can't be," said Tom, wincing as the signal increased again. "It sounds as if we're right on top of it."
It was Wren who spotted the movements in a broad track
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mark about a mile to the east. The pools of water there were emptying away, and the trees and bushes that had grown around them were starting to move, turning and twisting and falling one against another. The floor of the track mark heaved upward into a high dome of earth, which split and slithered and fell away to reveal a bank of immense, spiraling drill bits and then a scarred, armored carapace. A gray fist of exhaust smoke punched into the sky. "Great Quirke!" murmured Tom.
In the Wunderkammer at Anchorage-in-Vineland there had been the shell of something called a horseshoe crab. Later, when she was trying to explain what Harrowbarrow looked like, Wren would often compare it to that crab. The suburb was small--barely a hundred feet across, and about three times that in length. It was entirely covered by its armored shell. The front end was a broad, blunt shield, into which the drill bits were being retracted now that it was on the surface. (The shield also covered Harrowbarrow's ugly mouthparts, and could be raised when it wanted to tear chunks off the small towns it hunted, or gobble up a Green Storm fo
rt.! Behind the shield, Harrowbarrow tapered to a narrow stern, protected by overlapping plates of armor. Several of the plates were sliding aside, and Wren glimpsed heavy tracks and wheels beneath them, and a metal landing apron that slid out slowly on hydraulic rams, flickering with landing lights.
"Is that where we're meant to put down?" asked Wren.
Tom said that he supposed it must be. "Kobold said his place was specialized," he said wonderingly, "but I had no idea...."
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He didn't like the look of this place, but he told himself that it was just the first step on the way to London, and guided the Jenny carefully down onto the landing platform.
Wolf Kobold was waiting, ready to answer all their questions. It was nearly a week since Wren had seen him, and she had forgotten just how striking he was. The gray dawn and the landing lights and the wind flapping his coattails about made him look more handsome and piratical than ever. But Wren had always had a soft spot for pirates, and at least Wolf's smile was friendly and welcoming.
Not so his town. All she could see beneath the folded-back armor were blocks of drab gray flats, punched with tiny windows. The people looked gray and drab too as they hurried forward to take the travelers' bags; stocky scowling scavengers in capes and overalls, with goggles or beetlish dust masks shielding their eyes from the gathering daylight.
"No, Harrowbarrow does not exactly burrow," Wolf was saying, in answer to something Tom had asked him. "We cannot bore through bedrock or anything like that--it would be far too slow a way to get about! But there are great many nice deep track marks crisscrossing our world, and their bottoms are mostly filled with loose shale and silt and tumbledown; more than enough of it to hide this little place."
They watched while his men secured the Jenny Haniver to the mooring apron, and then followed him through an alley between the metal buildings and forward along Harrowbarrow's central street. Stairways rose from it to the second storys of the buildings, poky tenements squashed in under the armored roof. Others led down through the deck
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plate to engine rooms, whose heat came up through the pavement and the soles of the travelers' boots. An alcove between the snaking air ducts held an eight-armed image of Thatcher, all-devouring goddess of unfettered Municipal Darwinism.
"Is this your first visit to a harvester?" Wolf asked, watching his guests' faces as they walked along beside him. "We make no pretense at gentility here, as the larger cities do. It's a good, sound place, though. It was a scavenger once, till it got captured by a hunting city up in the Frost Barrens. They thought it might be useful for the war effort, so they delivered it to Murnau whole, and my father gave it to me to knock into shape. I've recruited people from other harvester suburbs to help me. Rough types, but loyal."
The whole place smelled like a stove: smoke and hot metal. Wren thought that if she had to live underground, she would take every chance to go outside and breathe fresh air, but the Harrowbarrovians did not seem inclined even to venture out onto the landing apron; they stayed in the shadowed parts of their suburb, and those whose business took them into the daylight hid their eyes behind sunglasses and goggles and wrapped themselves up against the cold in pea jackets and gray felt mufflers.
"Not many women aboard," said Wolf, with a sideways look at Wren. (She couldn't tell if he was apologizing to her for the lack of female company or hinting at how pleasant it was to have a visit from a pretty aviatrix. Both, maybe.) "No families live here. It's a hard life aboard Harrowbarrow. You mustn't mind my lads if they stare."
And stare they did, their mouths hanging open in their
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stubbly faces, as their young mayor led his visitors up a rackety moving staircase into the town hall, a crescent-shaped building that stood on stilts, overlooking the dismantling yards inside the suburb's jaws. It was ugly, and rather small, but Wolf had furnished it well. There were hangings and tapestries to hide the metal walls, and well-chosen works of art, and when his servants closed the shutters to hide the views of machinery outside, it had a homey feel.
Wolf took them to a long, narrow dining room, the ceiling painted blue with little white clouds as a reminder of the sky outside. "You have not breakfasted, I trust?" he asked, not waiting for an answer as he ushered them to seats around the dining table, making sure that Tom took the place of honor at the head. Another man entered: elderly, short, and sallow, with pocked skin and complicated spectacles. Wolf greeted him warmly and held out a chair for him, too. "This is Udo Hausdorfer, my chief navigator," he explained. "When I am away, it is he who keeps things running smoothly. One of the best men I know."
Hausdorfer nodded, blinking at each of the guests in turn. If he was one of the best men Wolf knew, Wren would not have liked to meet the rest, for Hausdorfer looked like a villain to her. But she could see that Wolf liked him; more than liked him--if she had not known better, she would have taken them for father and son. She could not help thinking how much more at ease Wolf was with this shifty-looking old scavenger than he had seemed with his real father.
Serving women with eyes like bruises moved silently about carrying plates and dishes and pots of coffee. Kobold smiled at his guests and raised his cup.
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"My friends! How pleasant to have new faces at my table! I am happy to say that we have real, fresh coffee, taken from a scavenger town we ate last Tuesday. The fruits of the hunt!"
"You are still hunting?" asked Tom. "I thought the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft had sworn not to eat other towns until the war was won."
Wolf laughed. "A silly, sentimental notion."
"I thought it rather noble," said Tom.
Wolf looked thoughtfully at him as he slurped his coffee. Then, setting down his cup with a clatter, he said, "It may be noble, Herr Natsworthy, but it is not Municipal Darwinism."
"What do you mean?" asked Tom.
"I mean that I have lived aboard Murnau, and I have seen at first hand the way our great Traction Cities have tied themselves up in petty rules and taboos." He speared a kipper with his fork and used it to point at Tom. "The big cities are finished! Even if they win this war, do you think the Traktionstadts will ever hunt again as real cities should? Of course not! They will cry, 'Oh, we must not hunt Bremen; Bremen gave us covering fire when we bogged down on the Pripet salient,' or 'It would be wrong to chase little Wagenhafn, after all that Wagenhafn did for us in the war.' That is why they cannot defeat the Mossies, you see. They insist on helping each other, and as soon as you start helping others, or relying on others to help you, you give away your own freedom. They have forgotten the simple, beautiful act that should lie at the heart of our civilization: a great city chasing and eating a lesser one. That is Municipal Darwinism. A perfect expression of the true nature of the world: that the fittest survive."
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"And yet you're part of their alliance," argued Tom. "You fight in their war."
"For the moment, because it suits us. The Storm must be smashed. But I never let my people forget that we are free. We hunt alone, and we eat whatever we can cram into our jaws."
Tom looked unhappy. Wren hoped he was not about to say something that would offend Wolf. "You make Harrowbarrow sound no better than a pirate suburb," he mumbled at last.
Wolf was not offended. He laughed. "Thank you, Herr Natsworthy! I have always suspected that piracy is the purest form of Municipal Darwinism!"
"But you're only temporary mayor of this place, aren't you?" asked Wren. "I mean, you're heir to Murnau...."
Wolf shrugged and ate his kipper. "I shall never take over my father's job. Not if he begged me. Why rule a lumbering mountain full of merchants and old women when I could be out here, hunting, free? Places like this are the future now. When the Mossies and the big cities finish tearing one another to pieces in this endless war, Harrowbarrow and others like it will inherit the earth."
"Gosh, well, I hadn't thought of it like that," Wren stammered. She was sure he was wrong, but he was so cert
ain of himself that she could not think of a counterargument.
Wolf laughed again. "I'm so sorry. I should not talk politics at breakfast time! And I have not even filled you in on the details of our journey. We shall set off soon, heading due east across no-man's-land. If all goes well, we should reach the Storm's outer defensive line sometime after midnight. I
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have found just the place for the Jenny Haniver to cross unnoticed. Until we reach it, you must make yourselves at home. You are my guests."
He bowed, and his eyes were fixed on Wren. Tom wondered if there was still time to pull out of this expedition; or at least to find some excuse to take Wren back to Murnau, away from this attractive, dangerous young man. But he so wanted her to see London....
And anyway, it was too late. Through the thin walls came the scrape and boom of the suburb's armor sliding shut, and the dull bellow of its engines starting up again. Harrowbarrow crawled on its way along the bottom of its chosen track mark, gathering speed, shoving its bank of drills into the earth, working itself deeper until it was just an unlikely, moving mound, like a rat under a rug, grinding eastward toward the rising sun.
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