A Darkling Plain

  "My wife is alive," says Naga. "She is flying home. Are you going to keep up the mute act, or do you have any final words?"

  For a moment she stares at him, hurt, frightened, confused. Then realizing it just won't wash anymore, she laughs. "You old fool! I'm glad she's alive. Now she'll see where her peace has brought us! To the edge of destruction! Not even you will listen to her Tractionist lies now."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You still don't understand?" Rohini laughs again, a little wildly. "She's working for them! She's always been working for them! Why do you think she married you? You're not exactly the answer to a young girl's dream, Naga. Half a man, wrapped up in clanking armor. Not even that, soon. I'm going

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  to kill you, general, and your people will rise up and kill your traitor wife. Then they will be ready to welcome their real leader back, when she reveals herself."

  "What are you--" Naga starts to say. And pauses, because at this point Rohini pulls off her hair, which turns out to be a wig, beneath which two things are concealed: short, blond hair, which clashes oddly with her umber face, and a small gas pistol, with which she shoots him. Naga's breastplate saves him from the bullet, but the impact makes him take a step backward, and he goes crashing and slithering down the stairs.

  "--talking about?" he asks the ceiling, as he lies in the splinters of the wrecked door, dazed.

  Rohini--or whoever she is--appears at the top of the stairs. The gun is still in her hand. This time she aims at his face, not his armor. She is still smiling. She says, "Cynthia Twite, of the Stalker Fang's special intelligence group. A few of us kept the faith, General. We knew she would rise again."

  "You've been poisoning me! The tea! You--"

  "That's right!" says the girl chirpily. "And now I'm going to finish the j--"

  Except she doesn't even finish the sentence, because just at that moment a shaft of light stabs in through the window, so bright that it looks solid, so hot that it sets Cynthia and everything else in the room instantly on fire. A roaring, shrieking noise drowns out her screams. In the shadows of the stairwell Naga feels the heat on his face like the breath from an open furnace. Above him Cynthia Twite is a black branch, burning. There is a sound of crashing masonry. The Jade Pagoda heaves sideways, as if it's having second thoughts

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  about perching here on the mountainside. Naga tries to stand, but his armor won't obey him. Cinders of Cynthia rattle down around him as the light fades. "Help!" he yells into the smoke. "Help!"

  Behind him an ancient stone wall is tugged aside like a curtain. The main part of the Jade Pagoda is gone. He is looking down into the valley where Tienjing has stood, the capital of Anti-Tractionism, for a thousand years. There is nothing there but fire, and the million mournful voices of the wind.

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  39 Firelight

  ***

  WREN BEGAN TO FEEL embarrassed as she and Theo walked down to Crouch End. They had been alone in that nook in the wreckage for much longer than she'd intended. She was pretty sure she had finally got the hang of this kissing business, but she couldn't help but feel that everyone would know what she had been doing. Even when she let go of Theo's hand, there was a sort of electric feeling in the air between them, and they couldn't stop glancing at each other.

  But although half of London seemed to be standing about in the open space outside Crouch End, none of them so much as looked at Theo or Wren. They were all staring westward. And as Wren joined them, she saw that the sky above the dinosaur spines of the wreckage was glowing red, as if a huge fire were burning just beyond the horizon.

  "What is it, Mr. Luperini?" asked Wren, spotting Cat's

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  father standing nearby. "Is it the war?"

  Luperini shook his head; shrugged. Faint, eerie noises blew in on the wind; shriekings and roarings. A ghostly wing of light lit up the western half of the sky, blanching the stars. Wren took Theo's hand again.

  "Reminds me of the night we zapped old Bayreuth," someone said.

  "Wren!" Tom came hurrying over to them. "I was wondering where you'd got to. What do you make of this, Theo?"

  Theo shook his head. "How long has it been going on?"

  "About a half hour--surely you must have noticed that first flash?"

  "Urn ...," said Wren.

  Theo frowned at the sky. "If it's gunfire, it's not like any I've seen before."

  Dr. Abrol came hurrying down the track from the listening post on the edge of the debris field where he spied on the Green Storm's radio messages and on those of the approaching cities. Londoners gathered around him, calling out to ask what he had heard on the airwaves.

  "It's hard to be sure," he said nervously, his spectacles flickering with reflections of the sky. "Something keeps interfering with the signals. But it seems ... it sounds as if ..." ("What? What?" the people around him urged.) He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple making a neat little bob. "Whole cities have been destroyed," he said, and had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the cries, the curses, the hisses of indrawn breath. "Manchester. All sorts of Traktionstadts and suburbs ..."

  "Old Tech!" cried Chudleigh Pomeroy, who had come

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  wandering out in his dressing gown to see what all the fuss was about. "It has to be. The Green Storm have some sort of Old Tech weapon...."

  "But why wait until now to use it?" wondered Clytie.

  "Who knows. Perhaps even they are scared of it. It must be horribly powerful."

  "But where did they find it?" other voices asked. "What on earth is it?"

  Lurpak Flint stood behind Clytie, his arms wrapped around her. "Perhaps it is not anything on Earth at all. Remember, the Ancients left weapons in orbit. What if the Green Storm have found a way to wake one?"

  "There are distress calls on the Green Storm's airwaves too," Dr. Abrol said. "Reports of an explosion at Tienjing. It's very confused. Sorry."

  "Maybe the Traktionstadts have sent airships to Tienjing to try and blow up the transmitter that controls this weapon," Pomeroy suggested.

  Another pulse of arctic light lit the sky. "Doesn't look like they hit it," said Len Peabody. "This is bad, ain't it? I mean, what's to stop the Mossies turning their toy on New London as soon as they see us leaving the debris field?"

  Pomeroy sighed; shrugged. "Why, nothing," he said. "It is a problem, as you say. But it is not one we can do anything about. All we can do is pray to Quirke and Clio and all the other gods that the Green Storm will not think us worth wasting a blast of their spiffy new super-weapon on. New London is small, after all. Quirke willing, we may yet slip away. Go north, out of this horrible world the cities and the Storm have made. I fancy seeing the Ice Wastes before I die...."

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  He raised his voice a little, so that everyone else stopped staring at the sky and turned to listen. "This does not alter our plans. It may even help us, in a dreadful way; it may delay Harrowbarrow's arrival. So go to your beds, and try and rest. There's nothing to be gained by watching this fireworks party, and we have hard work ahead of us tomorrow. I, for one, could do with a snooze."

  The clumps of Londoners began to disperse, wandering away in ones and twos to their homes. Tom recognized the look on the faces of those who passed him. He had seen it at Batmunkh Gompa, nineteen years ago. It was the look of people who have just learned that a civilization quite opposed to their own has just become the most powerful on Earth. Despite Pomeroy's brave words, they were afraid.

  Only Wren and Theo, walking with heads together and their arms around each other's waists, looked calm. They did not believe that some Ancient weapon could come between them; they imagined the feelings they shared were stronger than the Storm and the cities and all the Old Tech in the world. Tom let them go past him and watched them as they walked on ahead, remembering how he had once felt like that, with Hester.

  He walked toward Crouch End beside Chudleigh Pomeroy. The old man was moving slowly, as if the Stalk
er-birds had shaken him more badly than he was admitting, but when Tom offered him an arm to lean on, he waved it away. "I'm not quite incapable yet, Apprentice Natsworthy. Though I must say, things have been getting jolly exciting since you and your daughter arrived. Birds and 'burbs and doomsday weapons ... there's barely a minute's peace."

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  Another pallid flicker of light came from the western sky. It seemed brighter this time, and Tom thought he saw a white blade of light slice across the stars, striking down at the Earth from some immeasurable height. Again, faintly, he heard that roaring, shrieking sound. "Great Quirke!" he whispered.

  "They didn't muck about, those Ancients."

  "Was Lurpak right? Is it really up in orbit somewhere?"

  "It's possible," said Pomeroy. "There is all sorts of stuff still circling up there. The old records list a few weapons that the Ancients were supposed to have hung in heaven. The Diamond Bat, Jinju 14, the Nine Sisters, ODIN. Most of them must have been destroyed in the Sixty Minute War, or fallen out of the sky in all the millennia since. But I suppose it's possible that one's still up there, and Naga's people have managed to awaken it."

  "ODIN," said Tom. "I've heard that name somewhere...."

  "Quirke preserve us! You must have actually been paying attention during one of my lectures, Natsworthy!" chuckled Pomeroy, but he sounded weary, and Tom started walking again, thinking that it could not be good for the old Historian to be hanging about here in the chill air. The white light had gone now, anyway; there was nothing to see but a sinister, reddish glow in the west.

  "The name stood for Orbital Defense Initiative," Pomeroy said as they strolled on together. "It was part of the American Empire's last, furious arms race with Greater China. I wonder where on earth our Mossie friends dug up the access codes."

  "Quirke Almighty!" Tom said suddenly, with such concern

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  in his voice that Pomeroy stopped again and turned to peer at him.

  "Everything all right, Natsworthy?"

  "Yes," said Tom, but he was lying. He had remembered why the name ODIN sounded familiar. That had been the only legible word among the thousands of numbers and symbols scratched on the pages of the Tin Book of Anchorage, the relic that Wren had helped the Lost Boys steal from Vineland. Tom had almost forgotten about the book; he had assumed it was destroyed when Cloud 9 fell. Naga's people must have taken it with them to Shan Guo, and used it to arouse the dreadful weapon in the sky.

  "Please," he said, "don't mention any of this to Wren."

  Pomeroy chuckled again and nudged him. "Don't want to spoil her romance, eh? Don't blame you, Natsworthy. It's good to see that our young people are getting on with the serious business of falling in love with each other, despite all these trivial distractions. And I like that Theo Ngoni. They'll be good for each other."

  "If they live through this," said Tom. "If any of us do."

  "The forces of History will decide that," said Pomeroy. "I've studied History all my life, and the one thing I've learned for certain is that you can't stand against it. It's like a river in flood, and we are just swept along in it. The big people, like Naga, or those Traktionstadt fellows, may try to swim against the current for a time, but little people like us, the best we can hope for is to keep our heads above water for as long as we can."

  "And when we go under?" asked Tom. "What then?"

  Pomeroy laughed. "Then it's someone else's turn. Your

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  daughter and her young man, for instance. A London Historian's daughter and an Anti-Tractionist. Maybe they're the future."

  They were drawing close to his comfortable little book-lined hut. As he turned and took Tom's hand, Tom said suddenly, "Mr. Pomeroy, if anything happened to me, you would look after Wren, wouldn't you?"

  Pomeroy frowned. He seemed about to say something flippant but then realized how serious Tom was, and nodded instead. "Wren has Theo to look after her," he said. "But yes, I'd do my bit, if she needed me. So would Clytie; so would every other Londoner. You needn't worry about her, Tom."

  "Thank you."

  They stood for a moment side by side. Then Pomeroy said, "Well, good night, Apprentice Natsworthy."

  "Good night, Lord Mayor. You're sure ..."

  "Don't fuss," said Pomeroy amiably. "I'm perfectly capable of putting myself to bed. And don't worry too much about the Storm, or Harrowbarrow, or any of the rest of it. London can take it."

  He shambled off, and Tom went slowly home to his own hut, where Theo was to be staying now as well. But as he reached the door, he heard Wren's and Theo's voices inside, where they must be waiting for him to return. They were talking too softly to make out any words, but he knew what they were saying. They were telling each other all the things he and Hester had told each other once; all the things that lovers had always said to one another, imagining that they were the first people ever to say them.

  Not wanting to interrupt, Tom turned away and went out into the open air again. He walked up into the rust hills,

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  going slowly to spare his heart. The western sky looked bruised. I ought to do something, he thought. I have done so little for New London; just brought trouble, really. I should try to do something about this. It's my responsibility in a way; a family matter. But how could I hope to stop ODIN? I don't even know where the Storm control it from....

  And then he thought, I might not be able to stop ODIN, but perhaps I could stop them using it on New London.

  General Naga was a good man--Wren had often spoken about how he had treated her on Cloud 9; how fair and civilized he'd been. Perhaps he was using the weapon only because he was scared, and desperate. Perhaps he was the sort of man who would listen to reason. If he could meet a Londoner, and hear firsthand about New London, surely he would understand that the Storm had no cause to fear it?

  Tom was shaking so much that he had to sit down. Could it be done? He supposed it could. There was fuel enough in the Jenny Haniver's tanks to reach Batmunkh Gompa. And then he remembered Theo telling him how Hester had rescued Lady Naga. Was she in Shan Guo, even now? Might she be able to help persuade General Naga to listen to what Tom had to tell him?

  He walked back to Crouch End. He had been gone far longer than he'd realized; Wren and Theo had fallen asleep waiting for him. Tom went quietly past them to his pack, found paper and a pencil, and wrote a letter for his daughter. He left it beside her and stood looking down at her for a while, listening to her breathe, watching the small, sleeping movements of her fingers, just as he used to when she was a baby. He kissed her forehead, and she smiled in her sleep

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  and snuggled closer to Theo.

  "Night night, little Wren," Tom said. "Sleep tight. Sleep tight."

  Then he went out of the hut and shouldered his pack and left Crouch End, heading for the Holloway Road and the place where the Jenny Haniver was moored.

  On the plains west of London, Wolf Kobold stood on his favorite observation post, up on Harrowbarrow's armored spine. The harvester was stationary, buried in a long hill of loose shale with just a few well-camouflaged gun emplacements and watchtowers protruding. It had traveled only by night since it broke away from the Murnau pack, for although the Green Storm's armies were collapsing, these lands were still enemy territory; Wolf did not want his trip to London interrupted by any foolish battles.

  But tonight, as the suburb prepared to move, a different sort of interruption had occurred.

  Wolf swung his field glasses and counted seven ... nine ... twelve immense bonfires blazing in the west. He was too young to remember MEDUSA, but that was the name that came into his mind. His lookouts--trusted men--had reported a blade of light striking down from the sky and setting off those firestorms. He tilted his head, staring at the stars. They looked innocent enough now.

  A nearby hatch squeaked open. Hausdorfer emerged.

  "Well?"

  "Talked to the radio boys," said Hausdorfer. "They've been trying Manchester,
Winterthur, Koblenz. Nothing. Some kind of distress signal from Dortmund, then they went dead too."

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  Wolf stared at the burning horizon. "What of Murnau?"

  "Can't say. There's interference on every frequency now. But it looks like the Mossies have found themselves a new toy." He waited for an order. None came. "Do you want us to turn back, or what?"

  "Turn back?" The notion was mildly surprising to Wolf. He considered it for a while, then shook his head. "Do you know what survived best after the Sixty Minute War, Hausdorfer? Rats and roaches. It's true. I read it in a history book. Cockroaches and rats. So let the old cities burn. It's Harrowbarrow's time now. A time for cunning, creeping things. Fire up the engines. Steer straight on to London."

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  PART FOUR

  ***

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  40 What Have They Done to the Sky

  HESTER AND HER COMPANIONS had watched from the gun slits of General Xao's new headquarters as the fire from the sky reached down and touched the cities that were closing in on Forward Command, turning them one by one into plumes of blazing fuel and incandescent gas. Grike was with them but saw nothing. The pulses of energy from the mysterious weapon upset the equally mysterious machines inside his head, making his eyes go blank and his armored body shudder helplessly. Lesser Stalkers, who did not have Grike's strength or Oenone Zero on hand to tend to them, fared even worse. At dawn the defenders of Forward Command found their battle-Stalkers scattered in the trenches like fallen lead soldiers. But by then it did not matter, for on the western plains, where cities and suburbs and flocks of airships had been massed, there was now nothing but smoke.