A Darkling Plain

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  to keep an unruly class in order. He held up his hand for silence. Around his neck on a length of cord hung a curious little machine with many aerials, and he was frowning at a gauge on its top. "Sprite!" he shouted suddenly. "Everybody down!"

  His young followers obeyed him instantly, flinging themselves down in the mud and pulling Tom, Wren, and Wolf down with them. There was a faint buzzing sound that grew quickly louder and higher pitched until it passed beyond the reach of human hearing; then a gigantic arc of lightning crackled across a gap between two spires of melted deck plate.

  "What was that?" gasped Wren, trying to rub the afterimage off her eyes as crossbow girl helped her to her feet.

  "Lingering energy from MEDUSA," said Tom's guard cheerfully. "We call 'em 'sprites.' That one was pretty pathetic compared with the monsters we used to get. In the old days the whole of London was hot."

  "Please be quiet, Will Hallsworth," shouted Mr. Garamond, waving the party onward. Hallsworth glanced at Wren and grimaced like a cheeky schoolboy, making her smile. She decided that she had been captured by far worse people than these young Londoners in her time.

  The path they were following veered away from the deeper ruins, and they passed through no more hot zones. Twice they crossed places that were almost free of wreckage, stretches of open ground where crops were ripening. Among the rubble heaps scrap-metal windmills rose like rusty sunflowers.

  They descended into a broad, V-shaped valley, whose

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  walls were dead buildings and whose muddy floor lay deep in shadow. Looking up, Wren saw that the sky was hidden by the branches of overhanging trees and by a complicated mesh of knotted ropes and hawsers, through which dead branches and scraps of fabric had been threaded, forming a sort of roof. A few shafts of sunlight shone in, falling like spotlights on the airship that lay tethered on the valley floor.

  "The Archaeopteryx!" cried Tom, recognizing the handsome little ship he had last seen pulling away from Airhaven.

  "So this is where they hide her...."Wolf sounded grudgingly impressed. He was starting to forget the indignity of his capture, and was looking about with as much interest and curiosity as the others.

  They passed the silent airship, then a line of battered tanks labeled fuel and lifting gas, and finally a small guard post with tattered deck chairs, and views of old London tacked to the tin walls. The valley ended at a sheer cliff of metal, and Garamond ordered his party into a tunnel that seemed to lead under it.

  The roundness of the tunnel, and its ribbed walls and roof, puzzled Tom, until the Londoners lit lanterns and he realized that it was one of the old air ducts that lay looped like lifeless snakes throughout the wreck. Rails had been laid along the bottom of the duct, and a couple of wooden carts stood ready at the buffers. Above them, on the curving wall, an old enamel sign gleamed in the lantern light. It was the name plate from a London elevator station; a broad red ring in the middle of a white square, crossed by a vertical blue bar. In white letters on the blue were the words holloway road.

  "This is how we get 'eavy cargoes out of the Archy and

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  into London," whispered Wren's guard, Angie. "The Mossies' spy birds can't see us if we keep inside this old duct. We call it 'taking the tube.'"

  "The Hollow-Way Road," said Wren, reading the sign again. "Oh, very funny...."

  "Well, yer gotter 'ave a laugh, ain't yer?"

  They followed the Holloway Road for what felt like a mile or more, sometimes by lantern light, sometimes through patches of sunshine that spilled in through rents in the skin of the old duct. The way twisted and turned, and the floor sloped steeply sometimes where the duct dipped down into a hollow of the earth or lay draped across another section of wreckage. Underfoot the dust between the rails was stamped with the prints of passing boots.

  At the end of the duct they passed more makeshift cargo carts and another set of buffers, and emerged into daylight again to find a pathway of metal duckboards leading between two steep hills of scrap. Beyond the hills stretched an open space that had been cleared of wreckage. Kitchen gardens had been laid out in raised beds full of peaty soil, and people broke off from picking cabbages and digging potatoes to stand staring as the prisoners were led by.

  Tom stared back. There were not just people inside London; there were lots of people. He looked at their faces, but there was no one he recognized. It didn't matter; they were Londoners, that was what was important. Many of them bore the marks of old injuries; he saw missing limbs and fingers, a man with a burned face, a blinded woman being guided along by her children, who were telling her excitedly about Tom, Wren, and Wolf. Scars everywhere. Hester would have felt

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  at home here, he thought, and he wished that the wind had blown the Jenny Haniver the other way on that morning after MEDUSA, and carried him and Hester into London instead of away from it. How different things might have been if they had lived in the debris fields....

  At the far side of the garden area a massive section of deck plate lay propped upon the ruins, forming a low-ceilinged cave. Garamond led his party in through the long, letterbox-shaped opening. The iron roof was so low that everyone had to stoop, but in the shadows dozens of small huts and houses had been erected, built from scraps of metal and wood. Crowds were waiting there, alerted by the children who were running excitedly ahead of the procession. "Where's Miss Potts?" shouted Garamond over all the noise, and a bald-headed gentleman in a grubby white rubber coat (An Engineer!, thought Tom uneasily) replied, "She's at the town hall, Garamond."

  The procession went marching on, deeper and deeper into the metal-roofed cavern until the deck plate overhead was so low, they had to bend almost double to save themselves from cracking their heads on the old bolts and fittings that poked down from it. "This is why it's called Crouch End," said Wren's friendly guard. "It ain't a very convenient place to live, but in the old days, with sprites and Mossies and Quirke-knows-what-else to hide away from, a roof over our 'eads was very welcome...."

  "Angie Peabody," barked Mr. Garamond, "I thought I told you to shut your cakeholel"

  Wedged in under the lowest corner of the deck plate was a building fashioned out of an old Gut Supervisor's office

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  and bits of many other things, all nailed and bolted together in a workmanlike way and painted a cheerful shade of red. london emergency committee someone had written above the door, in careful capitals. Garamond left his charges outside while he went in and had a muffled conversation with someone. Then he came out again and pushed the door wide open. "Step along now, prisoners," he said. "And show a bit of respect. You are entering the presence of the lord mayor of London!"

  The floor inside the building had been dug out so that there was no need to stoop. Tom went first, with Will Hallsworth at his side, warning him to watch out for the steps. He tripped down them anyway, and landed in a big, slope-ceilinged room where a map of the debris fields covered one wall, marked all over with tickets and flags and mysterious red pins. Around a battered old tin table in the center of the room a dozen people were gathered, looking as if they had been in the middle of a meeting when they were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Garamond and his prisoners. One of them was Clytie Potts. She stood up when she recognized Tom. "Oh, Quirke!" she said.

  Beside her, another of the committee was already rising to greet the new arrivals, and his shabby red robe and chain of office marked him clearly as the lord mayor. Tom felt relieved. For a moment he had feared that he was about to come face-to-face with Magnus Crome, the sinister Engineer who had ruled London in his childhood. But this ancient, portly gentleman with tufts of white hair sprouting like steam around his ears was not Crome. And after the relief came astonishment, for Tom found that he knew that round,

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  red face, and meeting it here was even more of a shock than his first encounter with Clytie Potts. "Chudleigh Pomeroy!" he cried.

  "I-- Great Quirke and
Clio!" the old man said, his white eyebrows leaping in surprise. "By the Sacred Black Flannel of Sooty Pete! If it isn't young Apprentice Thing! Young Whatchamacallit! Young, um...."

  "Natsworthy," said Tom. He had always been a little afraid of the Deputy Head Historian, but meeting him here, realizing that he had survived down all these years and against all these odds, made him weep with happiness. He wiped the tears away and said in a wobbly voice, "Tom Natsworthy, Mr. Pomeroy; Apprentice Third Class. I've come home."

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  20 Children of MEDUSA

  ***

  Chudleigh Pomeroy called for refreshments to be brought from the settlement's communal kitchen, and fussed at his colleagues to clear away their piles of paper and make room at the table for the visitors. Tom, who was starting to recover from his shock, turned to look at the other committee members. Two of them were Engineers--a small, brown-skinned man and a rather severe-looking old lady, as bald as two pebbles, and wearing tattered white rubber coats. The rest were just ordinary Londoners; people of all shapes and sizes and several different colors, including a wiry, leathery little man who waved at Angie, prompting her to wave back and say, '"Ullo, Dad!" He looked to Tom as if he'd been a Gut laborer before MEDUSA went off; certainly not the type of person you would have found in London's council chamber in the old days.

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  At last three seats were cleared for the newcomers. Chudleigh Pomeroy beamed at them as they sat down. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Natsworthy" he said, reaching across the table to shake Wren's hand when Tom introduced her. "And Herr Kobold. We've heard a lot about the bravery of your city and its allies. Miss Potts here keeps us up-to-date with the war news. Welcome to London."

  "Thank you, sir," said Wolf, bowing neatly his hand moving to where his sword hilt would have been if Mr. Garamond had not taken his sword away from him. "This is not my first visit. The last time I was here, I found myself ejected before I could actually meet any of your people...." He smiled slyly at the puzzled faces around him and quickly explained the story of his first visit to the debris fields.

  "Great Quirke!" muttered Garamond. "I remember him now...."

  "You're not the first lost soldier to seek shelter here," said Pomeroy. "The lost and wounded of both sides blunder into the fringes of the wreck sometimes. We couldn't risk any of them going off and blurting out our secrets to the outside world, but we didn't want to murder them or anything, so we came up with the notion of simply scaring them away. A few mysterious moans are usually enough to set the bravest of 'em running, but now and then we come across one who's more inquisitive. When we do, we knock 'em out with chloroform before they can see anything and dump them outside the wreckage. Most of them get the message. You're the first to return."

  "So why didn't you knock us out and carry us into the Out-Country?" asked Wren.

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  "Good question," grumbled one of the committee men, glaring at Garamond.

  "It wasn't practical!" said Garamond huffily. "They came in by airship, not on foot. They seemed like scavengers, not castaways. And Mr. Natsworthy here doesn't look any too healthy. If my lads had chloroformed him, he might never have woken up...."

  Tom started to protest that there was nothing wrong with him; that he would have positively welcomed a good, bracing dose of chloroform. Luckily, before an argument could develop, the food arrived: bread and butter, apple crumble and home-baked biscuits, elderflower wine in old tin water bottles.

  "I see you have learned to live off the bare earth," said Wolf Kobold softly. "Just like the Mossies."

  Clytie Potts smiled brightly at him; she was taken with this handsome young newcomer, and missed the faint edge of disgust in his voice. "Oh, we grow all sorts of things in the patches of soil between the rust heaps. It's very fertile. Some of the survivors were workers in the agricultural districts before MEDUSA, and they have taught us all about growing food. And our scavenging teams find all sorts of things among the ruins: tinned goods, sugar, tea. There are fewer than two hundred people in London now, so we've enough for everyone."

  "We hunt, too," said Angie eagerly. "Rabbits and birds and things make their 'omes in the debris fields...." She stopped as Mr. Garamond turned to glare at her; the other youngsters had been made to wait outside, and Wren suspected that Angie wasn't supposed to be in the committee room at all.

  "And Clytie brought in a few goats and sheep aboard that

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  ship of hers," added the quiet, elderly lady Engineer.

  "But I don't understand," Tom was saying. "I mean, how did you survive at all? How do you come to be here? I thought..."

  "You thought we were all dead," said Pomeroy kindly, "which, by the way, is what I thought about you; that villain Valentine told me you'd fallen down a waste chute in the Gut. I've felt guilty ever since about having sent you down there that night. Wine?"

  He filled a motley collection of tin beakers and enamel mugs, and another of the committee handed one to each of the newcomers while Pomeroy sat beaming at them, gathering his thoughts. Then, while they ate and drank, he told them of the last hours of London; of how the tension between the Guild of Historians and Crome's power-hungry Engineers had ended with open warfare in the halls of the museum, and of how Katherine Valentine and Apprentice Engineer Pod had set off up the secret stairway called the Cat's Creep to try and stop MEDUSA being used.

  "Soon after that," he said, "the Engineers attacked in force, and things grew rather confused. We fought like tigers, of course, but they had Stalkers and things, and they drove us back into the Natural History section. There weren't many of us left by that time; Arkengarth and Pewtertide and Dr. Karuna had all been killed, and Clytie here was hurt pretty badly. I decided to make a last stand behind that old model of the Blue Whale--it had been taken down from the ceiling for some reason, and was lying on the floor, where it made a passable barricade. And as we crouched behind it, waiting for those Resurrected fellows to come and finish us, suddenly,

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  boom! The building started to come apart at the seams...."

  "Mr. Pomeroy threw me in through the whale's mouth," said Clytie Potts, looking sadly down at her hands as she spoke, as if the memories still upset her.

  "Yes," agreed Pomeroy, "and then, with extraordinary presence of mind, I jumped in after her. Just in time! I think the whole of Tier Two must have given way at that point. Light blazed in at me through every rent and bullet hole in the whale's hide, and I felt it start to roll, to slide, to tumble through the air! After that I don't remember much. Surfing down the sides of disintegrating cities inside fiberglass whales isn't really my cup of tea, I'm afraid, and I passed out fairly promptly."

  "The whale eventually came to rest between two fallen tier supports over on the southern edge of the main debris field," explained Clytie, taking up the story. "Some workers from the salvage yards found it there, and helped us out. That was when I saw what had happened to the city. It was ... oh, I can't begin to describe it. There was fire everywhere, and dirty smoke boiling into the sky, and explosions going off all the time, so there was always wreckage rattling down, and ash falling softly everywhere, like black snow. And sometimes, out of the middle of the ruins, a huge claw of white light would come crackling, groping its way across the ground as if it were feeling for us...."

  "Yes, those were dicey times," said Pomeroy, nodding solemnly. "The League was about, too, hungry for revenge. We watched some of our fellow survivors venture out of the wreckage to give themselves up to a League patrol, and they were all shot on the spot. So Clytie and me and our salvage-yard

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  friends decided to stay put. After a while we started to make contact with other little groups of survivors, and we banded together and wondered what to do. We thought about sneaking back west along the track marks, but where would that get us? Just into the slave holds of some scavenger town, probably, where we'd be no better off than with the League. So in the end we decided to stay here. London might h
ave come a cropper, but it was still London, eh? Still home...."

  His colleagues all nodded and muttered agreement, and Pomeroy gave the wall of the committee room an affectionate pat, which made it wobble alarmingly.

  "We moved into Crouch End because it seemed safe from sprites," explained Clytie, "and we were hidden here from the air patrols that the League kept sending over in those early days. There's a big section of the Gut lying fairly undamaged about a half mile east of here, and we salvaged a lot of useful stuff from it; even a trunk full of money. So later, when the League patrols thinned out a bit, some of us were able to sneak out and buy the Archaeopteryx and start picking up a few other things we needed."

  "It must have been dangerous," said Tom, thinking of his own experience of crossing the Green Storm's lines.

  "Impossible, sometimes," admitted Clytie. "But we usually manage a few trips a year...."

  "Collecting Old Tech, I gather," said Wolf Kobold.

  Clytie looked uncertain. Several of the councillors shifted uncomfortably in their salvaged chairs.

  "And what about these Engineers?" Wolf Kobold went on, nodding at the bald-headed man and woman. "You seem very friendly with them, considering it was all their fault that

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  London exploded in the first place."

  The lady Engineer said softly, "Not all of our Guild supported Magnus Crome and his insane plans. Those of us who opposed him were banished to lowly jobs in the prisons and factories of the Deep Gut. I suppose that's what saved us. All Crome's supporters were with him on Top Tier when MEDUSA failed."

  "We've been very glad of our Engineers over the years," said Angie's father, the wiry former laborer. "They've knocked together all sorts of handy contraptions for us-- bicycle-powered electric hot plates, solar collectors, windmills, lifting gear. Electrical guns that can knock out the Green Storm's mechanized spy birds. Dr. Abrol here"--he pointed to the other Engineer, who grinned modestly--"has built a receiver that allows us to listen in on the Storm's radio traffic, so we'll have fair warning if they ever do come looking for us. And Dr. Childermass, our deputy mayor, used to be head of the Mag-Lev Research Division. It's she--"