A Darkling Plain

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  "What does that mean?" asked Tom.

  "It means nothing," snapped his captor. "The lies of anti-Naga troublemakers." She was a grim young woman, and not in any mood to chat, but she did at least allow Tom to keep his green heart pills when her men hustled him across the pan to one of the squat blockhouses behind it, and then into a tiny lime washed concrete cell.

  All the time he was being ordered about, or marched around, all the time someone else was in charge of him, Tom felt quite fearless; what happened next was not up to him, and barely seemed to matter. But as soon as the iron-bound door slammed shut on him and he was left alone, his fears came crowding in. What was he doing here? How was Wren coping, back in London? And what had that Green Storm girl meant when she said Tienjing was gone? Had he misheard her? Had she used the wrong word?

  It was very quiet in the cell. Strangely so, for when he had last been in Batmunkh Gompa, one of the things that had hooked in his memory was the sounds: the puttering motors of the balloon taxis, the cries of street vendors, the music from the open-fronted teahouses and bars. He stood on the bunk in the corner of his cell and looked out the small barred window. The city stretched away from him, a scarp of stairs and houses where nothing moved but the flags. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no airships waited in the harbor, only a few scurrying figures could be seen on the steep streets. It was as if the city had been abandoned, and the people who remained had all pitched tents on the crag above. A mystery ...

  Footsteps, voices, out in the narrow entryway beyond his

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  door. He jumped down, surprised. He had expected to wait hours or days for the Storm to deal with him. But the door opened, armed guards in white uniforms took up positions on either side of it, training their guns on Tom, and with a clank of armor a tall, yellowish man whom he recognized as General Naga came in, stooping as his exoskeleton carried him through the low doorway. Tom was relieved that his request for an audience had been taken seriously but astonished by the speed; panicked, too, for he had not quite finished working out what he was going to say to this fierce-looking soldier.

  Naga's narrow eyes narrowed even more as he looked Tom slowly up and down, taking in his travel-stained clothes and unkempt hair. His armor looked scraped and battered, and servomotors inside it whined and crunched unhealthily when he moved. There was a wound on his face, freshly dressed with lint and bandages.

  "You are the barbarians' envoy?"

  Tom was taken aback. What was the man talking about?

  "You came in the Wind-Flower's old ship and claim to bring word of the weapon. But you look like a sky tramp. Not even in uniform. Are the Traktionstadts so certain of victory now that they expect me to surrender to a buffoon?"

  "Surrender? But the new weapon ..."

  "Yes, yes!" shouted Naga. "The new weapon! You have destroyed Tienjing, you have destroyed Batmunkh Tsaka; you almost destroyed me!"

  Tom felt as if a chart that had been guiding him through treacherous territory had suddenly turned out to be upside down all along. A bad-dream feeling. If Naga did not control

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  the ODIN weapon, who did? The cities? But those fires in the west last night ... Had the Storm not seen those cities burn? Had the news not reached them?

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. This was all beyond him. But he could still do what he had come here for. "I'm nothing to do with the Traktionstadts," he said. "I come from London."

  "London?"

  "I came to ask you ... to beg you ... The survivors there--I know you know of them--they are building something; have been building something for many years.... They are making a new city; a city that hovers, and will not harm the Earth, and has no wish to eat any static city of yours. I'm here to tell you that they--we--mean you no harm; we have no quarrel with the Storm. If you could call off your birds, and let us go in peace when we leave the debris fields ..."

  Naga was frowning. "A hovering city?"

  "It's called Magnetic Levitation," said Tom. "It sort of floats." He waved his hands about, trying to demonstrate, and then remembered something Lavinia Childermass had said. "It's not really a city at all, more a very large, low-flying airship. My daughter is there...."

  Naga turned to one of the officers behind him and barked out something in Shan Guonese. Tom didn't know many of the words, but he recognized the tone. The general was asking, "Is this fellow mad? Why are you wasting my time with him?" A moment later, without another look at Tom, he stalked out of the cell, his guards behind him.

  "Please," Tom shouted, "your wife will vouch for me! Is she here? Are her companions here?" (It had suddenly

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  occurred to him that if Tienjing had been destroyed, Hester might have been destroyed with it.) He said, "Please, I am a friend of Theo Ngoni and Hester...."

  "My wife?" Naga turned, glaring at him. "She is on her way home. I will certainly tell her all about you when she arrives." But he made it sound like a threat, not a promise.

  The door slammed shut. Tom was left alone again.

  Outside, Naga stopped for a moment to think. His men clustered together, glancing fearfully toward the misty heights of Batmunkh Gompa. He knew what they feared. It seemed inconceivable that after destroying Tienjing, the barbarians had not turned their devil weapon on the Shield-Wall and opened a path for themselves into the mountain kingdoms. And yet, when the few airships he had managed to salvage from the disaster at Tienjing flew here at dawn, they found the place untouched, although the populace and half the garrison had already fled into the hills. What were the townies waiting for? (Naga had already discounted the reports that said that Traction Cities had been destroyed last night too. They must be mistakes, or lies put out by the enemy to add to the Storm's confusion.)

  And what did the appearance of this madman Natsworthy mean, aboard the Flower's old ship?

  "London," he muttered. "Poor Dzhu told me something about London."

  One of his officers, a captain from the Batmunkh Gompa garrison, saluted smartly and said, "There has been increased activity among the squatters there, Excellency. We have been watching them with spy birds."

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  "You have records?"

  "There is a file in the Intelligence office on Thousand Stair Avenue."

  "Hurry there, and fetch it."

  The captain saluted and ran off, gray faced with fear and clearly expecting the fire from the sky to fall on Batmunkh Gompa at any instant. Naga watched him go. He thought wistfully for a moment of Oenone and then crushed the thought and muttered, "London...."

  He remembered the night after the Wind-Flower died: how he had stood on the top of the Shield-Wall while the smoke of the burned Northern Air Fleet drifted up from the hangars below him, and faint and far away the lights of London glittered. It seemed to General Naga that all the troubles of the world began with London.

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  42 The Funeral Drum

  ***

  THAT AFTERNOON, AS THE fog thinned and dirty sunlight broke over the debris fields, the people of London buried their lord mayor. Bareheaded, and with black mourning bands tied around their sleeves, eight members of the Emergency Committee carried the shrouded body of the old Historian along a winding, little-used path between the rust hills, while the rest of London followed, and Timex Grout beat out a solemn, steady rhythm on a drum made from an old oil can. Boom, boom, boom, the echoes rolled away, across the wreckage, out across the plains beyond, up into the mottled sky where a few Stalker-birds still circled, very high, watched all the time by lookouts with charged lightning guns.

  In Putney Vale, a mossy space between the masses of debris, where trees grew thickly and shaded the graves of all

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  the other Londoners who had died since MEDUSA night, they laid him to rest, and piled the earth over him, and marked the place with a metal marker, carved with the symbol of his Guild, the eye that gazes backward into time. Lavinia Childermass offered u
p a prayer to Quirke, asking London's creator to welcome the old man when his soul reached the Sunless Country. (She did not believe in gods or afterlives, being an Engineer, but she had been Pomeroy's friend as well as his deputy, and she understood the need for this ritual.) Then Clytie Potts stepped forward and sang in a thin, uncertain voice a paean to the goddess Clio.

  "He should have been here to steer New London out of the debris fields," said Len Peabody, angry at the unfairness of it all.

  "Now," said Mr. Garamond, "it's time we elected a new lord mayor."

  "Lavinia will be the new mayor," said Clytie Potts. "That's what Mr. Pomeroy wanted."

  "Mr. Pomeroy is dead," said Garamond. "The Committee must decide. And then we must discuss what's to be done with the prisoners."

  Wren had not been allowed to attend the funeral. Other Londoners had pleaded her case, but Garamond, his nose swollen to twice its usual size and the color of an aubergine, stood firm; she and Theo were dangerous agents of the Green Storm, and he insisted that they should be locked up. And so they were put in two old cages, salvaged from the wreck many years ago, which had once held animals in the zoological gardens in Circle Park, and were now kept in a dank

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  corner of Crouch End to confine intruders, murderers, and lunatics who Garamond imagined might threaten the security of London. They had never been used before, and he looked very pleased with himself as his apologetic warriors shoved Wren and Theo inside, padlocking the barred gates behind them.

  There, in the shadows, on the mattress that was her only furniture, Wren said her own prayers for Chudleigh Pomeroy as the muffled boom, boom, doom of the funeral drum came echoing across the debris like a heartbeat.

  "What now?" asked Theo from his cage. Dark as it was in this part of the End, Wren could see him looking out at her through the bars. If they both reached out, they could touch just their fingertips. "What will happen to us now?"

  Wren didn't know. It was hurtful to be accused and imprisoned like this, but she found it hard to be scared of silly old Garamond and all her London friends. Sooner or later it would all be sorted out, she felt sure. She barely had the strength to think about it, though; she was too busy mourning Mr. Pomeroy and worrying about her father.

  They slept a little; talked a little; Wren made patterns with the straw on the floor of her cage. The day crept by. At evening time, when the dinner gong was summoning everyone to the communal canteen, Angie Peabody arrived with food and fresh water for them. She poked the tin bowls in through the bars of the cage and would not meet Wren's eye.

  "Angie?" Wren asked. "You don't believe what Garamond says about us, do you? You know I'm not any sort of spy."

  "Don't know what to believe anymore," the girl replied gruffly. "There's been nothing but trouble ever since you got

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  here, I know that. Them birds coming yesterday, and your friend turning up.... Saab got hurt badly, Wren; we don't even know if he'll see again, and he'll always have the scars, and you don't care a bit; you just went off yesterday evening with your boyfriend or whatever he is.... It don't look good, does it?"

  Wren felt dazed with shame. It was true she hadn't spared much thought for Saab or the others hurt in the attack; she'd been too taken up with thoughts of Theo. "That was wrong of me," she admitted. "But it hardly makes me a Green Storm spy. Angie, a week ago Garamond was saying we were in league with Harrowbarrow; it was me and my dad who brought Wolf Kobold here. Remember?"

  "How do we even know Kobold was what he said he was?" Angie retorted. "You say he went off to find this Harrowbarrow place. He might be Green Storm too, and safe in Batmunkh Gompa or somewhere now."

  That made Wren think of her father. She reached out through the bars, trying to touch Angie, who backed quickly away. "Angie, you've got to get me out of here! I have to find a way of going after Dad."

  Angie took another step backward, disappearing into the shadows. "Mr. Garamond said we ain't to talk to you," she said.

  Wren threw herself down on her mattress, which rewarded her by bursting and poking her in the side with a sharp, rusty spring. "I'm sorry, Theo," she said.

  "It's not your fault."

  "It is. If I hadn't written you that letter, you'd have stayed with your own people. You'd never have come here."

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  "And if you hadn't talked to me that afternoon by Pennyroyal's swimming pool on Cloud 9, I'd have been killed or captured when the Storm attacked, and you wouldn't have to worry about me at all."

  Wren reached out of her cage and touched his fingers. She traced the hard, warm curves of his nails, the little rough bits of skin beside them, the whorls of his fingertips like contour lines on a tiny Braille map.

  Late that night they were awoken by the last person Wren had expected to come visiting them. "Wren?" a voice asked, and she opened her eyes to see Lavinia Childermass hunkered down outside the gate of her cage. The Engineer had an electric lantern with a blue glass shade. In its dim light her bald head shone like an alien moon. Wren scrambled up, spearing herself on the mattress spring again, and heard Theo moving in the neighboring cage.

  "Wren, my dear, are you awake?"

  "Sort of. What's happening? Is it Dad?"

  "He has not returned, child."

  "Then ..."

  "We have a new lord mayor," said the Engineer. "The Committee elected him this evening."

  "But I thought you were Mr. Pomeroy's deputy. I thought--"

  "The Committee decided that it would be unwise to have an Engineer as mayor," Dr. Childermass said calmly. "They still remember Crome's regime. And with the war drawing closer, they thought it wiser to elect someone with a security background...."

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  "You can't mean--"

  "Mr. Garamond is lord mayor of London now, Wren. He played on the fears of the Committee to make them support him. I am sorry to say that he has turned a lot of people against you. I think most of London believes that you and Theo and your father had something to do with those birds and the death of poor Chudleigh."

  "But ..."

  "Shhh! I think they will forgive you, Wren; you are a Londoner's daughter, after all. But Garamond is going to propose that Theo be killed, and from the talk at the canteen this evening, I think a majority of the Committee will side with him. He argues that we cannot allow an Anti-Tractionist to live here, learning our secrets."

  "He's mad!"

  "Perhaps he is, a little. Paranoid, certainly. Poor Garamond; he was no older than you on MEDUSA night. He survived because he was in one of the Deep Gut prisons, where Magnus Crome had sent him for being an Anti-Tractionist sympathizer. The day after the disaster he led a band of survivors east, imagining that the Anti-Tractionists he had always admired would help them. But the soldiers they met upon the plains just gunned them down; poor Garamond only escaped by playing dead, hidden under the bodies of his friends."

  "You can see why he wouldn't trust Anti-Tractionists," said Theo.

  "But it doesn't give him an excuse to start killing people!" Wren complained. "And it certainly doesn't give everyone else an excuse to let him!"

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  "I agree," said the old Engineer. "But they are scared; the birds, the war, the new weapon. Even the prospect of leaving the debris fields is enough to unsettle them after so many years. And when people are scared, it can bring out the worst in them. That is why I am going to let you go. I am sure that Theo will be able to find you shelter at one of the Storm's settlements. I don't imagine the war will last much longer now that the Storm have this orbital terror weapon, so you will be in far less danger there than with us."

  She reached inside her rubber coat and brought out some sort of Old Tech device; the type of thing Engineers presumably kept in their pockets all the time. It looked like a can opener and buzzed like a horsefly, and made the padlock on Wren's cage clack open. "I brought your pack with me, Wren," Dr. Childermass said as she moved across to Theo's cage, and Wren, still not quite believing
that they were going, fitted her arms through the shoulder straps and heaved it on.

  "I should carry that," said Theo, scrambling out of his cage.

  "I can manage. We'll take turns."

  Lavinia Childermass led them to a small back way out of Crouch End; a hole in the roof plate at its lowest point where it sloped down to touch the ground. She scrambled out with them and stood watching as they set off together into the wreckage, moving closer together as they went away from her, as if they thought an old Engineer would not approve of people holding hands and wanted to be safely hidden in the shadows before they finally touched.

  Lavinia smiled. She had had a child of her own, once, but in those days the Guild of Engineers had taken all infants

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  straight to the communal nurseries, and she had never known her little Bevis. Dead long ago, she thought, and the sudden sadness made her remember the funeral drum, and Chudleigh Pomeroy lying cold under the earth in Putney Vale. If she had not been a logical, disciplined Engineer, she would have found the world too sad a place to live in.