She watched Wren and Theo until the shadows and the wreckage swallowed them. Well, she thought, that is one less thing to worry about. And she went quickly through Crouch End and up the Womb road, returning to her work aboard New London.
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43 Homecoming
***
THE. Fury reached Batmunkh Gompa shortly after sundown, crossing the Shield-Wall by the light of a smudged and bloodstained moon. She had been heading for Tienjing when the master of a passing freighter advised her captain to reroute. "Tienjing is burning! The barbarians have a new weapon! A lance of fire that strikes from the sky! Batmunkh Tsaka is gone too! Naga has fled to Batmunkh Gompa, but not even Batmunkh Gompa can stand against the fire from heaven! Save yourselves!"
"What's happening?" grumbled Hester, tired and crotchety after the long flight, one hand pressed to her aching head. "Surely the cities can't have a super-weapon too?"
"Typical!" said Pennyroyal. "You wait years for an all-powerful orbital heat-ray thingy and then two come along at once."
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"perhaps the storm do not control the new weapon," said Grike.
"But it blew up cities! We watched it! Who else would want to do that?"
"a third force ," suggested Grike. " someone who hates the cities and the storm and wants to sow confusion."
"Like who?" asked Hester. "the stalker fang."
"But she's dead!" said Pennyroyal. "Isn't she?"
"perhaps the rumors we heard from the once-born at forward command are correct," said Grike. "I was re-resurrected. what if someone has re-resurrected her?"
"And you think she is behind these calamities?" asked Oenone. She sounded afraid, but faintly hopeful too, as if it would be a relief to learn that her husband was not responsible.
Grike said, "when the new weapon struck, i remembered something that the stalker fang said before i disabled her. she spoke of a thing called odin. 'the greatest of the weapons that the ancients hung in heaven.' i believe she has awoken it just as she planned. she struck at tienjing because naga would be there, and at batmunkh tsaka in the hope of killing you, oenone zero."
"But she's dead," insisted Pennyroyal.
"He's got a point, for once," Hester agreed. "You pulled her head off, Grike. Threw the rest of her off Cloud 9. That should have done the trick."
But Oenone looked troubled. She had looked troubled all the way from Forward Command, and now she said, "Maybe
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not. She was a very advanced model. Dr. Popjoy had put in experimental systems that even I may not have understood. It's possible that if someone gathered the body parts, they might have been able to ..."
Her voice faded away. She shrugged unhappily.
"Oh, fantastic," said Hester.
"I might be wrong." Oenone went to the window, looking south into the haze of dirty smoke from Tienjing. "I hope I'm wrong. We must ask Dr. Popjoy. As soon as we dock at Batmunkh Gompa, I'll send for him. Popjoy will know."
The city behind the Shield-Wall lay in silence, only a few dozen lamps burning in its dark streets. More lights shone on the valley floor, a river of lanterns pouring eastward, reflecting in the waters of Batmunkh Nor. The population was fleeing, just as they had fled the threat of MEDUSA the last time Hester was there. She thought what an odd place it must be to live if you had to keep packing all your belongings into carts and running away, and then reminded herself that MEDUSA had been nearly twenty years ago, and that a whole generation had grown up since she and Tom left this city in the Jenny Haniver.
"Gods," she said grumpily, rubbing her head again. "I'm getting too old for this...."
Fox Spirits guided the Fury to a temporary airfield below an old nunnery on a crag. The ancient building was surrounded by what looked at first like giant lichen, a shapeless mass of gray and brown and white. It was people. Refugees from the city, and survivors of Tienjing brought in aboard the ragtag fleet of freighters and military transports moored
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along the edges of the field. They huddled together against the cold, wrapped in furs and blankets, sheltering under awnings and tents. As Hester, still limping slightly, led her companions past them, they started to stand up and shuffle aside, forming an avenue of staring faces. A whispering, like the wind in trees, ran through the crowd, as people pointed out the Lady Naga and her Stalker to their neighbors and their children.
Maybe they were saying that she was to blame for their disaster; that if she had not destroyed the Stalker Fang, it would be the townies suffering instead. Maybe they had heard she was dead. Maybe, seeing Grike and Hester walking beside her, they thought she was a phantom come here from the Halls of Shadow with two demons to guard her.
Oenone barely noticed the stir that she was causing. She kept thinking of the Stalker Fang. I must speak to Popjoy, she thought, and looked east toward the lakeshore, where the old Stalker builder had his retirement villa--but the evening mist lay thick above the lake, and she was not even certain that Popjoy's place could be seen from here.
At the door of the nunnery a tired-looking subofficer greeted them. "Lady Naga! You are safe! Gods be thanked!"
Safe, thought Oenone. Yes; even if Fang had returned, Naga would sort everything out. She was safe at last. She returned the boy's salute, remembering him from her husband's staff at Tienjing: a friendly boy with a flop of black hair always falling across his eyes. She was glad he had survived. She said, "My husband is here?"
"The general will be overjoyed! I shall take you to him!"
Oenone followed him through the tall, carved doorway.
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Hester, Grike, and Pennyroyal went with her, not knowing what else to do.
"I shall need to see the scientist Popjoy," Oenone told their guide. "Can you find him for me?"
The subofficer seemed nervous. "He is dead, Lady Naga. Murdered at his house by the lake, about three weeks ago. We think one of his Stalkers went wrong and ..." He shrugged. "I heard what had been done to him. No human being could have had such strength...."
Oenone looked at Hester. Grike said, " did you find the stalker that killed him?"
The boy looked startled at being spoken to by a Stalker, but he recovered, and said, "No. But Popjoy's sky yacht was stolen. Perhaps if the killer was an experimental model, it might have had the wit to escape. Apparently Popjoy's house was full of ... horrible things."
He addressed his words to Oenone, but he was looking past her at her companions, as if wondering for the first time who they were and whether he had been right to admit them to Naga's emergency headquarters.
"These are my friends," said Oenone hastily, and introduced them: "Mr. Grike; Professor Pennyroyal; Mrs. Natsworthy."
The boy frowned. "Natsworthy?"
He took Oenone aside and they spoke for a moment in Shan Guonese. Hester heard the name Natsworthy mentioned several more times. She reached for the big gun on her shoulder and eased the safety catch off, then asked Grike, "What are they saying?"
Before the Stalker could translate, Oenone came back to
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join them, smiling. "Hester," she said, "your husband is here."
She might as well have carried on talking in her own funny language, Hester thought, for what she said made no sense at all.
"Tom Natsworthy," said Oenone. She took Hester's hands in hers and smiled into her face. "He arrived this morning, aboard Anna Fang's old ship...."
"No," said Hester, not believing it; not wanting to.
"He is being held in a cell down by the docking pans at the foot of this crag. But don't worry; I shall tell Naga to free him at once. You should go to him, Hester."
"Me? No."
"Go to him." Oenone pulled off the ring she wore and pressed it into Hester's hand, folding Hester's fingers over it. "Take this; tell the guards I sent you. Mr. Grike can translate for you. They will let you talk to him. Tell him that orders will soon be coming from my husband to let him go."
"But he won't want to
see me. Send someone else."
"You are still his wife."
"You don't know about the things I've done."
Oenone stood on tiptoes and kissed her. "Nothing that can't be forgiven. Now go, while I talk to Naga."
Hester turned and went, Grike at her side, everyone in the passage turning to stare, wondering who she could be.
Pennyroyal lingered. "So Tom's here, eh?" he said. "These Natsworthys do pop up in the most unlikely spots. But I'll stay with you if I may, Empress. There's the small matter of the reward you mentioned...."
"Of course, Professor," said Oenone, and let him go with her as she followed the subofficer through the mazelike
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corridors. The god that was worshiped in this place went by a name different from hers, but she still felt calmed by the old incense smells and the centuries of prayers that had sunk into the carved ceilings and lime-washed walls. Nuns in nasturtium-colored robes clustered in doorways, watching. Green Storm officers hurried by, staring at her. Most of them did not look happy to see her, but she did not care. Thank God she had been able to come here! She felt glad that she had been able to reunite Hester with her husband, and looked forward happily now to her own reunion with Naga.
Up three stairs to an ancient door. The subofficer knocked, then held the door open for Oenone to walk through. Pennyroyal went with her. In his gray cloak he looked the part of a high-ranking Green Storm officer, and the guards inside saluted him smartly as he followed Oenone into General Naga's makeshift war room.
Around a big table covered in charts stood several dozen people, the ragged remnant of Naga's government. Some of them looked pleased to see Oenone. Naga, raising his eyes from his charts, just gazed at her. There were bruises and cuts on his face, and dents in his armor, and his good hand was mittened in dirty bandages. But he was alive.
"Thank God!" Oenone said happily. She wanted to hug him. But it would not be seemly for the leader of the Storm to be embraced, in public, in front of his captains and his councillors, so she controlled herself and lowered her eyes from his and bowed low and said, "Your Excellency."
Naga said nothing. Around him wise people who knew how much he had longed for her nudged their moonstruck, staring comrades and started gathering up charts and swords
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and helmets and edging toward the chamber's various doors, but Naga called them back. He still had not spoken to his wife.
"I heard about Tienjing," said Oenone.
"It came from the sky," said her husband, watching her face. "From one of those old devil weapons in high orbit, we think. A finger of light ... of energy ... it destroys all it touches.... I am not the man to ask. When it struck Tienjing, I was flat on my back at the foot of a staircase." He tried to gesture, but the gears in the shoulder of his battered exoskeleton grated and seized. "Damn it!" he muttered.
"Let me," said Oenone, glad of an excuse to touch him. The watchful officers drew aside to let her go to him, but when she reached out to unscrew the bolts that held his shoulder piece in place, his bandaged fist caught her across the side of the head. She fell sideways, hit the table, and crashed to the floor amid a rattle of fallen teacups and compass dividers. Some of Naga's officers cried out, and she heard one say, "General! Please!"
"Naga ...," Oenone said. She could barely believe what was happening. She thought his exoskeleton must have gone wrong and made him lash out without meaning to. But when she looked up at him, she saw that the blow had been deliberate.
"This is all your fault!" he shouted. His mechanical hand swept down and grabbed a handful of her hair. He heaved her upright like a sack. "Look what your peace has led to! You told me to treat the barbarians like human beings, and now they are destroying us!"
Oenone had never imagined this. She did not know how to cope with his anger. "No, no, no, no," she said, "Traction
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Cities have been destroyed too; I saw them burning. You must have heard reports--"
"Lies!"
"Naga, the Stalker Fang is back! She controls this thing!"
A murmuring in the room; cries of alarm, of disbelief.
"Think," begged Oenone. "The reports from Brighton. The limpet found in Snow Fan Province.... She wants us to think the townies have the weapon, so that she can use it against us all! She is insane! We have to find the transmitter she uses to speak with it and--"
"Lies!" said Naga. "I have already discovered where the thing is controlled from. It is the London Engineers again, just like MEDUSA. Those harmless squatters we have ignored for so long started busying themselves like ants a few weeks ago, and now this happens." He snatched a photograph from the piles on the table, an aerial view of London taken by a spy bird. "Look! You can see their bald heads! They infest that wreck like maggots in a corpse! And today a Londoner came here with some wild tale to try and put us off the scent. It is MEDUSA all over again! It all begins and ends with London!"
"Then what about Dr. Popjoy?" babbled Oenone. "Fang must have needed him to repair her, and when he had done it, she killed him...."
"Popjoy was another Engineer! We thought he had come over to our side, but he was working for his old Guild all along! That body they found in his villa was so mangled, it could have been anyone! Your former master faked his death and escaped to London to help his old Engineer friends deploy the weapon."
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"No," whispered Oenone. But his theory made a sort of sense. How could she hope to show him he was wrong?
Naga stared at her, breathing hard. "And you were part of their plan too, weren't you Zero?" he said. His voice had grown softer and colder. "You were their creature all along, you Aleutian sorceress. It was Popjoy who first brought you to the Jade Pagoda. How shy and sweet you seemed! But you destroyed Fang and then distracted me, whispering about peace, about love...." He drew his sword. "And all along you were just buying time for the townies until their new weapon was ready!"
Oenone tried to control her helpless trembling. She stretched out her hands toward her husband. "Please believe me. I would never betray you. All I ever wanted was peace."
Naga struck her again, a stunning blow from his mechanical fist. She went down on her knees, keening, her hands cupped to catch the blood from her nose. He shoved her head down and drew his sword. But the thin stalk of her neck, bared in the lantern light, looked so fragile and ivory pale that he could not bring himself to sever it. She had a scurf of grime along her hairline, dirt behind her small ears, like a child.
Naga slammed his sword down, burying the blade deep in the wood of the chart table. As Oenone dropped sobbing at his feet, he wheeled around and bellowed at his officers, "Take her away! Lock her up! I'll hear no more talk of peace!"
He tried not to watch as they dragged her to the door. A few hard-liners, old opponents of the truce, shouted out, "Kill her!" One drew his own sword, and would have butchered Oenone there and then if his friends had not restrained him.
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"No!" Naga shouted. The heavy door swung shut behind his wife. It was easier to be strong now that he could not see her frightened face. "I will behead the traitor Zero myself, in public, in the main square of Batmunkh Gompa!"
A few of his listeners looked almost as woeful as Oenone had, but most were pleased by his announcement; some even cheered.
"First," Naga told them, "we must gather what ships we can, and fly to London. We shall capture the barbarians' transmitter and turn the new weapon upon their own cities! This war is not lost! Follow me, and we shall make the world green again!"
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44 Pillar of Fire
***
NOTHING THAT CANNOT BE forgiven," Oenone had said, but it seemed to Hester, as she went in the cold wind down those long stairways to the docking pans, that she had done things that no one could forgive. She did not know what she could say to Tom; and did not like to think what he might say to her. But she hated to think of him cooped up in one of those little buildings, whose roofs she cou
ld see below her in the glow from the big lamps around the pans. There was a lot of activity down there: Airships were being fueled and filled, and one of them was the Jenny, a familiar, rusty-red envelope among the white of the Storm's warships.
Everything went blurry, and Hester had to wipe her sleeve across her eye. She was glad Oenone and Pennyroyal weren't there to see her sniveling. Only Grike was with her (she could hear the heavy, comforting tramp of his feet on
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the stairs behind her), and Grike had seen her weep before.
The narrow alleys behind the pans were full of loud confusion; the Storm seemed punch-drunk, and the simple business of preparing ships was leading to squabbles and rows between the remnants of different units who spoke different languages and dialects. Pushing through them, Hester felt a tightness in her chest and throat, a building panic at the thought of seeing Tom.
She stopped a passing aviator to ask the way to the cells, and was pleased at how he started bowing and saluting when she showed him Lady Naga's oak-leaf ring. But as she climbed the stone steps to the building he indicated, she heard running footsteps behind her.
"IT IS THE ONCE-BORN PENNYROYAL," announced Grike.
"What does he want?" grumbled Hester, though secretly she was glad of a reason to delay her reunion with Tom.
Pennyroyal came panting up the steps to her. She knew as soon as she saw him that something had gone badly wrong. "Hester! Grike!" he gasped. "Thank Poskitt! We've got to flee! I mean fly! That villain Naga!"
"What's happened?