A Darkling Plain

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  In the end, Theo said it instead. "I love you."

  "Gosh, really? Me too! You, I mean. I, I love you." She started to move back toward him, then pulled herself away. There, she thought, I've told him; now I'll have one less regret when I get down to the Sunless Country. She turned and started to stumble away through the brambles and the gobbets of rusting wreckage, northward into Harrowbarrow's path. "Hide!" she shouted at him, seeing him standing there watching helplessly from the shadow of the abandoned wheel. "Go and hide!" She pressed on, half afraid and half hoping that he would insist on coming with her.

  When she looked back again, she could no longer see him.

  Theo ran a little way into the thickets of alder that filled the scooped-out hollow of an old track mark nearby. There he stopped. He wanted to be with Wren, but he knew that if the Harrowbarrovians were as bad as she'd described, he would only be going to his death, and bringing more danger down on her by making Kobold wonder why she was with an Anti-Tractionist.

  Yet he could not just hide.

  He turned east and started loping toward the debris field. The Londoners were not bad people. They deserved all the warning he could give them. He would run to the hangar at the west end of Holloway Road and tell the lads on guard there what was coming for them.

  Wren waded through the waist-high weeds. The day was dimming as the pall of smoke from the distant volcano spread

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  across the sky. End-of-the-world weather. Harrowbarrow's engines had fallen silent. She wondered if Wolf Kobold was on his bridge, watching the land ahead through his periscope. She pulled off her jacket and turned it inside out. The red silk lining was tatty and faded after all her adventures, but it was still the brightest thing about. She climbed up on a nameless chunk of wreckage and started to wave the jacket above her head, shouting, "Wolf! Wolf! It's me! It's Wren!"

  After a few minutes she jumped down and started plodding on again. She could feel the ground stirring underfoot as the harvester suburb drew nearer. From time to time she waved the jacket and shouted, but she couldn't even see Harrowbarrow anymore; it had squirreled down into a deep trench. Wren glanced at the sky. No Stalker-birds. Honestly, she thought, where were the Green Storm and their city-zapping super-weapon when you needed them? It was sheer incompetence, letting Harrowbarrow drive so far behind their lines.

  A hummock of grayish earth ahead of her suddenly proved that it wasn't a hummock after all, by standing up and pointing a gun at her and shouting "Stop!" Wren screamed and dropped her jacket. All around her, more gray-clad men were appearing from the undergrowth. She didn't recognize their faces, but she knew by their getups and their tinted goggles that they were one of Harrowbarrow's scouting parties. She raised her hands and tried not to let her voice wobble as she said, "I'm Wren Natsworthy. I'm a friend of your mayor."

  One of the men searched her for weapons, more thoroughly than Wren felt was really necessary (surely they must

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  know that you couldn't hide anything very dangerous inside your bra?). Their leader said, "You come," and they were off, running quickly through the rough, stumbly country, squeezing through crannies in the walls of track marks and wading across their flooded floors. The men moved fast and easily, and shoved Wren when she showed any sign of flagging. She was exhausted by the time the armored flank of Harrowbarrow came in sight, half submerged in mud and torn-up bushes.

  A hatchway opened. The scouts led Wren inside and slammed the hatch cover shut behind her. Then Harrowbarrow went grinding on its way toward the debris fields.

  It felt very strange to be back in the streets of the burrowing suburb after all that had happened; very strange indeed to stand in Wolf Kobold's town hall, on soft carpets, among velvet curtains and fine paintings and the gentle glow of argon uplighters. Wren stared at herself in a mirror and barely recognized the disheveled, weather-beaten young Londoner who looked out at her. "Wren!"

  They must have called him up from the bridge. He wore boots and breeches and a collarless shirt with big fans of sweat spreading down from the armpits. He looked thinner than she remembered, and she wondered if it had been very hard for him, that journey alone across the Out-Country. Just for an instant she felt pleased and relieved to see him, and she seized on the feeling and used it to make a smile, a shy, warm smile. "Herr Kobold ..."

  "Why so formal, Wren?" He came to her and took both

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  her hands in his. "I'm so happy you came to meet us. What brings you here? You are alone? Where is your father?"

  "He is still in London," she lied.

  "Do the Londoners know of our arrival?"

  "Not yet," Wren told him.

  "Then what are you doing here?"

  "I've been waiting for you. I knew you'd come...." She let her smile fade, looked as if she were about to cry, to faint. Kobold helped her to a chair. "Oh, Wolf," she said, "Dad's a prisoner! After you left, the Londoners thought we must have been in league with you. They locked us in horrible cages, old animal cages from the zoo. Dad's not well, but they won't let him out. So I escaped, and I've been living in the debris at the edge of the field, waiting and waiting, and I thought you'd never come!"

  Kobold's arms went around her, pulling her face against his chest. Wren managed to squeeze out a few tears, and then found that if she thought hard about Theo and Dad, it made her cry for real. She said shakily, "Harrowbarrow is my only hope. You'll keep Daddy safe, won't you, when you eat New London?"

  "Of course, of course," said Kobold, stroking her hair. "By this evening we will be at Crouch End; the Londoners and all they have will be our prize; your father will be safe."

  Wren pulled away from him, looking horrified. "This evening? But you'll be too late! They are to leave this afternoon! The launch date has been brought forward because of all the fighting.... Oh, you must go faster!"

  Wolf shook his head. "Impossible. It will take us that long to skirt the debris fields."

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  "Show me," said Wren, wiping her face with the back of her grubby hand.

  She followed him along the fuggy walkways and across the dismantling yards, where gangs of men were preparing heavy cutting and rending engines. They climbed the ladder to the bridge and found Hausdorfer at the helm, his peculiar spectacles flashing as he nodded a greeting to Wren. He started to say something in German to Kobold, but the young mayor waved him away and led Wren across to the chart table, where a map of the debris fields had been spread out. Wolf must have drawn it from memory after returning to Harrowbarrow; Wren instantly saw several errors, as well as big blank spaces in the heart of the field, where Wolf had never been.

  He pointed at the map with a pair of dividers, tracing a line that wriggled around the northern edge of the main field and then struck in toward Crouch End. "That's my plan."

  "Why not go straight across the middle?" asked Wren.

  "I don't know what lies there. The wreckage might be impassable. And there are those electrical discharges the Londoners tell stories of--"

  "Fairy stories," said Wren dismissively. "It's just as you suspected. The sprites are a tale they told us to keep us from nosing about. That one we saw the first day was faked by one of Garamond's boys hiding in the debris with a lightning gun." She smiled at him. "Look. If you want to be sure of reaching Crouch End before they get their new city moving, go this way. There's a sort of valley stretching through the wreckage that will take you almost all the way there. There are no lookouts in that part, either, so you'll stay undetected longer."

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  She picked up a pencil that hung on a piece of frayed string from the corner of the table, and drew a line on the chart for Harrowbarrow to follow; west to east through the debris field; straight along Electric Lane.

  The lads on watch beside the Archaeopteryx had heard the muffled engines in the west by the time Theo arrived. They were standing on a high promontory of wreckage outside the hangar, squinting into the murk. As he s
crambled toward them, he heard one say, "I can't see anything. It's the volcano," and the other reply, "Or maybe it's an airship engine. Maybe there's an airship circling above all this smog--"

  "It's not an airship!" Theo shouted, and ducked as they turned toward him, afraid that they would fire their crossbows at him. But they only stared. The same boys he'd talked to yesterday. He tried to remember their names; Will Hallsworth and Jake Henson.

  "Will," he said, walking toward them with his hands outstretched to show he was not armed. "Jake, there's a suburb coming. Harrowbarrow. You've got to warn the others. Your new city has to move out now."

  "Don't listen to him," Jake warned his companion. "He's a Mossie! Mr. Garamond said--"

  "Mr. Garamond is wrong," Theo insisted. "If I were a Mossie, what would I be doing coming to warn you about Harrowbarrow?"

  "Maybe there is no Harrowbarrow," said Will, thinking hard. "Maybe it's a Mossie trick."

  A snarl of engines drowned out his voice, coming from somewhere to the southwest. A crash and clang of falling

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  debris too. The Londoners stared. Smoke and clouds of dust and rust flakes drifted across the southern sky.

  "It's surfacing!" shouted Theo. "It's reached the edge of the wreck! Come on!"

  "What about the Archy?" asked Jake. "We can't just leave her here!"

  "We'll have to fetch Lurpak or Clytie...."

  "There's no time!" shouted Theo, as the rusty deck plate beneath them shook and shifted, dislodged by the vibrations from the hungry suburb that was shouldering its way through the wreck a mile to the south.

  "Well, we can't fly her!" wailed Will.

  "I can."

  "Yes, home to your stinking Mossie friends; we're not falling for that one!"

  "Will," shouted Theo, "I'm not with the Green Storm! Trust me!" He scrambled into the hangar, staring at the Archaeopteryx. "Is she fueled?"

  "I think so. Lurpak Flint was down here yesterday working on her."

  Theo rattled the gondola door. It was locked, and when he asked for the keys, Will and Jake looked blank. He picked up a hunk of metal and smashed the door in, then grabbed a knife from Will's belt and started to hack at the ropes that anchored the airship. "Her controls will probably be locked," he shouted as he worked. "But that doesn't matter. The wind's with us; even if I can't get the engines on, it'll still be quicker than running to Crouch End."

  Will and Jake started to object, then gave up and joined

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  him. The airship shivered as the ropes fell away. Theo noticed two rockets resting in racks beneath the forward engine pods. If he could get to Crouch End and persuade the Archaeopteryx 's crew to return with him, there was a chance they could slow or stop Harrowbarrow; he'd heard stories of how a well-aimed rocket, shot down an exhaust stack or into a track support, could bring a whole city to a halt. Then New London would have time to escape, and perhaps Theo could find his way aboard the crippled harvester and reach Wren.

  The three boys scrambled into the gondola as the un-tethered airship began to rise. On the flight deck, Theo found that he could work the elevator and rudder wheels, although he had no way to turn on the engines. Sunlight poked in through the gondola windows as the Archaeopteryx rose out of the top of the hangar, trailing camouflage netting and uprooted trees. The brisk wind boomed against the envelope, already pushing her westward, and Theo spun the rudder wheel so that her nose began to swing toward Crouch End.

  The first rocket punched through the prow of the envelope and tore the whole length of the ship, exploding in the central gas cell and sending a spume of fire out through her stern. Theo heard Jake and Will scream as the gondola lurched sideways. Struggling with the useless controls; he saw another ship go sliding past behind the sheets of smoke billowing from the Archaeopteryx 's envelope: a small armed freighter in the white livery and green lightning-bolt insignia of the Storm. Machine guns opened up from a nest on her tail fins as she sped by, and bullets came slamming into the Archaeopteryx 's listing gondola, and into Will, smashing him

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  backward through a shattering window. "Will!" screamed Jake, as Theo dragged him to the deck.

  Peering through the smoke, he had a brief, dizzy view of the debris field. Above it, low and menacing, a school of white ships circled. The Green Storm had arrived.

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  46 The Shortcut

  ***

  The warships circled low over Crouch End, low enough for everyone to see the rockets glinting in their racks and the Divine Wind machine cannon twitching in the swiveling turrets. A few of the braver Londoners ran for crossbows and lightning guns, but Mr. Garamond shouted at them not to be so daft. He hated the Storm, but he knew that trying to fight them would be madness.

  Someone tied a white bedsheet to an old broomhandle, and Len Peabody waved it frantically as the leading ship came down. She was the Fury, the only real warship in the fleet, but none of the Londoners noticed how tatty the other ships looked; they were too busy staring at the soldiers and battle-Stalkers who spilled from the Fury's hatches as she descended.

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  General Naga was the first to jump down, relying on his armor to absorb the shock of landing. Straightening up, sword in hand, he breathed in the rusty, earthy air of the debris field and heard his troops disembarking behind him. He glanced to his right. Two of his ships had landed on top of the big wedge of wreckage there, and others were circling it. A party of his men was herding more Londoners down the track that led from it.

  "The site is secure, Excellency," announced his second-in-command, Subgeneral Thien, running to his side and dropping on one knee to salute.

  "Resistance?"

  "One of our armed freighters shot down a ship that rose from the western edge of the ruins. And the gunship Avenge the Wind-Flower was struck by some sort of electrical discharge and destroyed with all hands. She reported movements in the western part of the wreck before she was hit. I've sent the Hungry Ghost to investigate."

  Naga strode toward the waiting Londoners. His feet sank into the deep drifts of rust flakes with crunching sounds, each footstep unpleasantly like the noise Oenone's nose had made when his fist struck it. He tried again to stop thinking of her. She was a traitor, he told himself sternly. Half the men in this fleet would have mutinied if he had not dealt firmly with her. He had to be strong if he was to save the good Earth from these barbarians and their new weapon.

  But the barbarians were something of a disappointment. Ragged, unkempt, unarmed except for a few homemade guns and bows, which they had dropped when they saw

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  Naga's force landing. They had vegetable gardens, for the gods' sake, just like real people! Their leader was a frightened little man with a scrap-metal chain of office around his neck. "Chesney Garamond," he said, in Anglish. "Lord mayor of London. I'm here to negotiate on behalf of my people."

  "Where is the transmitter?" barked Naga.

  "The what?" Garamond gaped fearfully at him.

  Naga raised his sword, but the man's bruised face and swollen nose reminded him suddenly of Oenone, and he lowered it again. His armor grated and hummed as it tried to compensate for the quick shivering of his sword arm. "Where are you hiding it?" he demanded. "We know the ground station is in London. Why else have you lurked here all these years? Why else did you destroy one of our ships just now with your electric gun?"

  "That weren't us," said another man earnestly. "That was just power discharging from the dead metal. Your skyboys got too close to Electric Lane. I'm sorry."

  "And the movements the crew reported in the wreckage over there?"

  "There's nothing there except our youngsters on lookout," said Garamond. "Please don't hurt them; they're just kids--"

  Naga swung to address his waiting troops. "This savage knows nothing! Find me Engineers!"

  "Coming, sir!" A subofficer ran up at the head of a squad of Stalkers, each carrying a struggling, bald-headed prisoner. An old woman was dumpe
d on the ground at Naga's feet. He waved his men back and watched her scramble up.

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  "Where is the transmitter?"

  The Engineer looked curiously at him. Naga had the uneasy feeling that she could sense the swirl of guilt and fear behind the stern face he wore. She said, "There is no transmitter here, sir."

  "Then how do you talk to your orbital weapon?"

  The way her eyes widened made Naga wonder, just for a moment, if he had been wrong. The Londoners started to murmur together, until his men cuffed and threatened them into silence.

  The Engineer said, "They are surprised, General, because they all believed it was you who controlled this new weapon. Certainly we do not. We have no quarrel with anybody; we are simply building a new city for ourselves."

  "Ah, yes, your floating city! I did not believe that story when your agent came babbling of it at Batmunkh Gompa, and I do not believe it now. Shut those barbarians up!" he bellowed, rounding on his men. The barbarians stared fearfully at him. A little boy started to cry, and was quickly hushed by his mother. Naga felt ashamed.

  When he turned back to the lady Engineer, she was holding out a thin, lilac-veined hand to him. "Come and see for yourself...."

  The attack ship Hungry Ghost hovered over the smoldering wreck of the Archaeopteryx and made certain there were no survivors, then veered away toward the southwest to investigate the movements that the crew of Avenge the Wind-Flower had reported before that lasso of electricity had