A Darkling Plain

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  intelligence wing knew only from rumors. But Naga had come up against plenty of other harvesters in his time: Evercreech and Werewolf, Holt and Quirke-Le-Dieu. They were hard places; rip off their tracks and destroy their engines and they would still keep coming, extending spare wheels and firing up emergency motors. He shielded his eyes against the light and watched his airships burning--four of them now, a good crop of escape balloons drifting downwind, thank gods. He knew he had a fight on his hands.

  He looked behind him to check that the Londoners were doing as he'd ordered, and saw them hurrying up the track to the Womb. Some carried bundles of belongings; others clutched the hands of scared children or helped the old and sick hobble along. Subgeneral Thien was ordering squads of battle-Stalkers into the rust heaps to stop any Harrowbarrovians who tried to circle around and cut them off.

  Naga took a carbine from one of his dead soldiers and threw it to the first Londoner he saw, a wide-eyed girl. "Covering fire," he ordered. For a moment he wondered if he had done the wrong thing and she was going to turn the gun on him, but she ran away to join his own troops, who were crouched among the heaps of scrap metal west of the vegetable gardens, taking potshots at any townies who moved up in the rust hills.

  "What about the Londoners' new city, Excellency?" asked Subgeneral Thien, running over to crouch at his side. "Shall we destroy it?"

  Naga stared at the long wedge of the Womb while bullets whirred past him like wasps. What would it be like to live all these years in a rubble heap, to work so hard, only to see the

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  thing you had built snatched away when it was almost finished?

  Subgeneral Thien was saying, "We can't risk the Engineer technology falling into the hands of these Traktionstadt vermin."

  Naga patted him on the shoulder. "You're right. Find that woman Engineer and tell her to start her engines. The new city must leave at once."

  Thien gaped at him, eyes wide behind his visor. "You're letting it go? But it is a mobile city! We are sworn to destroy all mobile cities--"

  "It's not a city, Subgeneral," said Naga. "It's a very large low-flying airship, and I intend to see that it comes to no harm."

  Thien stared a moment longer and seemed to understand. He nodded and saluted, and Naga saw him grinning as he hurried off, crouched low and zigzagging to avoid the bullets. Beneath his armor Naga felt himself trembling; it was not easy to go against everything he had believed for so many years. But Oenone had taught him that there sometimes came a time when beliefs had to be abandoned, or altered to suit new circumstances. He knew that she would approve of what he was doing.

  He ran across open ground to the vegetable gardens and crouched down beside the young London girl he had given the gun to. "What's your name, child?"

  "Angie, Mister. Angie Peabody."

  He squeezed her shoulder with his mechanical hand, sharing his courage with her the way he had so many times with so many other frightened youngsters in tight corners

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  like this. "Well, Angie, we're going to fall back to the Womb, and keep these devils at bay until your people can get their new city moving."

  "You're 'elping us, Mister? Cor, ta!"

  Her young face and bright, startled smile reminded Naga so strongly of Oenone that as he went running on to pass the same message to his own troops, he had to pull his visor shut so that they wouldn't see his tears. He thanked his gods that the harvester had come, and that he had a battle to fight and people to defend; no politics to confuse him, no super-weapons to worry about, just a chance to die like a warrior, sword in hand, facing the barbarians.

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  48 A Voyage to Erdene Tezh

  ***

  ABOVE THE WHITE KNIVES of the mountains the sky was full of memories. Tom and Hester didn't talk much as the Jenny flew away from Batmunkh Gompa, but they didn't have to: Each knew what the other was thinking of. All the voyages they'd made in this little ship; all the castles of cloud they'd flown her around, the glittering seas they'd seen below, the tiny, toylike cities, the convoys and the trading posts, the ice mountains calving from Antarctic glaciers ... The memories linked them together, drawing them closer, but they were all stained and spoiled by the things Hester had done.

  So they did not talk. They took turns to sleep; to eat; and when they were together on the flight deck, they spoke only about the mountains, the wind, the sinking pressure in number three gas cell. Tom fetched the lightning gun from its hiding place and explained how it worked. They flew over

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  small towns, high, sparse pastureland, and ribbons of road. They saw no other ships. Tom kept the radio switched on, but all they heard were a few confused scrabblings of battle code and garbled distress calls on elusive frequencies, interspersed with pulses of interference, like breakers on a pebble shore. The sunlight faded. The sky was veiled with volcanic ash and city smoke. The Jenny crossed a high plateau. Ahead rose the snow spires of the Erdene Shan.

  A sad, unwelcome thought came into Tom's head: This was the last journey of his life.

  And as if she guessed what he was thinking, Hester took his hand. "Don't worry, Tom. We'll be all right. Hopeless missions are what we do best, remember?"

  He looked at her. She was watching him solemnly, waiting for a smile, some sign of forgiveness or approval. But why should he forgive her? He snatched his hand away. "How could you do it?" he shouted. All the stored-up anger he had been nursing since she'd left came out of him in a rush that sent her reeling back as if he'd hit her. "You sold Anchorage! You betrayed us all to the Huntsmen!"

  "For you!" Hester's face was flushed, her scar dark and angry-looking. Her voice slurred the way it always did when she was upset, making it hard to hear what she said next. "For your sake, that's why I did it, because I was afraid you'd go off with Freya Rasmussen."

  "I should have done! Freya doesn't kill people, and enjoy doing it, and lie about it afterward! How could you lie to me, all those years? And in Brighton too ... abandoning that little Lost Boy--how could you?"

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  Hester raised one hand to shield her face. "I'm Valentine's daughter," she said.

  "What?" Tom thought he'd misheard. "Valentine was my father."

  Tom was still angry. He thought this was another lie. "David Shaw was your father."

  "No." Hester shook her head, her face hidden now by both her hands. "My mum and Valentine were lovers before she married. Valentine was my father. I found out a long time ago, at Rogues' Roost, only I never told you, 'cos I thought if you knew, then you'd hate me. But now you hate me anyway, so you might as well know the truth. Valentine was my dad. His blood's in me, Tom; that's why I can lie and steal and kill people and it doesn't feel wrong to me; I know it's wrong, but I don't feel it. I'm Valentine's daughter. I take after him."

  Her one gray eye peered out at him between her fingers, as if she had turned back into the shy, broken girl he had fallen in love with all those years before. A memory came to him, clear as sunlight, from Wren's thirteenth summer, when she and Hester had just been starting to fight: Hester standing at the bottom of the staircase in their house at Dog Star Court and shouting up at her sulky daughter, "You take after your grandfather!" At the time he'd thought she'd been talking about David Shaw, and he'd thought it surprising, because she'd always said that David Shaw had been a quiet, kind man. But of course she had been thinking of her real father.

  He felt the last of his anger drain away, leaving him shaky and ashamed. What must it have been like for her, keeping such a secret for so long?

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  "And Wren too,"' she snuffled, weeping now. "He's in her too--why else would she steal that Tin Book thing? Why else run out on us? That's why I had to go, Tom. Maybe if she just has you, she'll be all right, maybe the Valentine in her won't come out."

  "It's not Thaddeus Valentine whom Wren takes after," Tom said gently. He went to her and took her hands, pulling them aside and down so that he could see her face. "If yo
u could see her now, Het--she's so brave and beautiful. She's just like Katherine."

  He had thought that he didn't want to kiss her, but all of a sudden he realized that he had wanted nothing else, ever since they'd parted. The things she had done that had made him so angry, the lies she'd told him and the men she'd killed, only made him want her more. He had loved Valentine when he was a boy, and now he loved Valentine's daughter. He kissed her face, her jaw, her damaged, tear-wet mouth. "I don't hate you," he said.

  From his station high in the envelope, where he had been keeping watch for pursuers, Grike heard the sounds from the flight deck: their rustling movements and the things they whispered to each other. Hester's constant weakness for the other Once-Born saddened him. Scared him, too, for he could tell from the sick, arrhythmic stutter of Tom's heart that Tom would not live long. What would Hester do without him? How could she have invested all her hopes in something so fragile? And yet her small voice, audible only to a Stalker's ears, still drifted up the companionway, murmuring, "I love you I love you I always loved you Tom oh only you and always...."

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  Embarrassed, Grike tried not to listen to her, concentrating hard upon the other noises around him. And faintly, faintly, beneath the noise of engines and envelope fabric and the wind in the rigging, he sensed a third heartbeat, another pair of lungs filling and emptying, the familiar chattering of frightened teeth.

  A few empty crates stood between the air-frame struts. A heap of tarpaulins quivered in a corner. Grike ripped them aside and stared down at the Once-Born huddled underneath.

  It was hard for a flat, mechanical voice like his to sound weary, but he managed it.

  "SO, PROFESSOR, WE MEET AGAIN."

  "THERE IS A STOWAWAY ON BOARD," the old Stalker announced, climbing down the companion way with his captive. Tom and Hester sprang apart, straightening their clothes and their ruffled hair, turning their attention reluctantly to Nimrod Pennyroyal as Grike shoved him onto the flight deck.

  "Please, please, please, forgive me!" he was begging, pausing to add, "Oh, hello, Natsworthy!"

  Tom nodded awkwardly but did not say anything. He knew that there would be no more time for him to be alone with Hester, for the plateau below was narrowing and rising, and the steep buttresses of the Erdene Shan were only a few miles ahead.

  "Throw him out the hatch!" said Hester angrily, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt. "Give him to me; I'll do it myself!" She felt that dropping Pennyroyal thousands of feet onto some nice pointy rocks would help her regain her

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  dignity. But she knew that Tom would not want that, so she restrained herself, and asked, "How in the gods' names did you slip aboard?"

  "I couldn't just let you leave me in Batmunkh Gompa, could I?" Pennyroyal started babbling. "I mean, for Poskitt's sake, I wasn't going to hang around and let Naga chop my head off or something. Authors lose all their appeal to the public if they are only available in kit form. So I sneaked aboard while those Green Storm chappies were fueling her, and hid in the hold. If Mr. Grike hadn't come poking about, I'd still be there, being no trouble to you at all. Where are we going, anyway? Airhaven? Peripatetiapolis? Somewhere nice and safe, I trust?"

  "Nowhere's safe anymore," said Tom. "We're going to Erdene Tezh."

  "Where? And, indeed, why?"

  "Because we think the Stalker Fang is there."

  Pennyroyal's eyes bulged; he writhed in Grike's grip. "But she'll kill us all! She'll have airships, soldiers, Stalkers...."

  "I don't think so," said Tom. "I think she's quite alone. How else would she have been able to return without Naga's intelligence people suspecting anything?" He grunted and clutched his chest, feeling his heart straining in the thin high-altitude air. For a moment he felt an absolute hatred of Pennyroyal. What was the old man doing here? Why was he haunting them? He wondered if he should tell Hester about his failing heart. When she learned that the old wound was going to kill him, she would murder Pennyroyal out of hand....

  But he still did not want to tell Hester how ill he was. He

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  wanted to cling for as long as possible to the pretense that he was going to survive, and sleep in her arms tonight, and fly on with her in the morning to fresh adventures in other skies.

  "Tie him up in the stern cabin," he said.

  "But Tom, be reasonable!" Pennyroyal wailed.

  "Tie him nice and tight. We can't risk having him on the loose."

  Grike dragged the spluttering explorer away; Hester touched Tom's face with her fingertips and followed, promising to tie the knots herself and leave Grike to guard him. Alone on the flight deck, Tom steered the Jenny between the snow spires of the Erdene Shan, up and up until the topmost peaks were sliding past the windows like vast, blind ships, snowfields ghostly in that ashen light.

  When Hester came back to the flight deck, he said, "We'll be over the valley in another half hour if Anna's old charts are right."

  "They should be," said Hester, hugging him from behind. "Erdene Tezh was her house, wasn't it?"

  Tom nodded, wishing he could kiss her again, but too wary of the spines and spikes of rock he was flying through to even glance at her. "Anna told me once she planned to retire here."

  Hester hugged him tighter. "Tom, when we get there, if it is her, we're just going to let Grike kill her, aren't we? You're not going to try to talk to her, or argue with her, or appeal to her better nature, are you?"

  Tom looked sheepish. Hester knew him too well; she had already guessed the half-formed plans he had been turning over in his mind all day. He said, "At Rogues' Roost that time,

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  she seemed to know me. She let us go."

  "She isn't Anna,"' Hester warned him. "Just remember that." She kissed the hollow of his neck beneath his ear, where the swift pulse beat. "What I told you that night on Cloud 9, about you being boring, I didn't mean it. You're not boring. Or maybe you are, but in a lovely way. You never bored me."

  They crossed a high pass. On the eastern side the ground fell steeply, down, down, down, a valley opening, white and then green, a wriggle of river in its deep cleft, a lake at the far end, and, on an island there, the house of the Wind-Flower. Tom, through the Jenny's old field glasses, saw a saucer-shaped antenna poking from its roof. Then the sky filled with wings.

  Hester had just enough time to push him to the floor before the first wave of Stalker-birds shattered the Jenny's front windows. Two of them came into the cabin, filling it with their flapping, the idiot flailing of their green-eyed heads. Hester snatched the lightning gun and shot the first before it saw her. The other came shrieking at her, its knife of a beak aimed straight at her eye. She fired the lightning gun at it and it exploded, filling the flight deck with gunge and feathers. She looked down at Tom. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes ..." He looked scared and white. Hester squirmed upright, hissing with pain as the movement wrenched strained muscles. She peered out the windows. More birds were circling the Jenny, and she could see a couple tearing at the starboard engine pod. She aimed the lightning gun through the side window and shot them both, then tossed it down to Tom and snatched her own gun down from an

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  overhead locker. She started aft along the gondola's central corridor. Pennyroyal was screeching in the stern cabin, and through the half-open door Hester saw the flap of wings and the gleam of Grike's armor as he beat the birds back. "HESTER!" the Stalker shouted.

  "I'm fine," she promised. She heard wings and claws inside the little medical bay where Anna Fang had once treated her for a crossbow wound. She kicked the door open and turned her gun on the birds that had torn their way in through the roof there. The gun was a good one--the steam-powered Weltschmerz 60 with the underslung grenade launcher that she'd picked up for a song in El Houl--but it made more of a mess of the medical bay than the birds had, shredding the outer wall till it looked like a doily. Through the holes she could see more birds going for the engine pod, and heard it
choke and die, the propeller slowing. "Oh, damn it," she said, and pumped a grenade through the pod's cowling, blowing it to pieces along with the birds.

  Back out in the corridor she shouted, "Tom? You all right?"

  "Of course! Don't keep asking!"

  "Put us down then."

  "Down isn't a problem," said Tom, checking the row of gas-pressure gauges on the instrument panel and seeing all the needles whirling toward zero. Unbalanced by the loss of the starboard pod, the gondola was tilting steeply sideways. Scary shapes flapped by outside, but Tom tried to ignore them, saving the lightning gun in case more got in. Gaudy yellowish light licked in through the larboard windows. The envelope was burning.

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  Hester kicked open the stern-cabin door. Grike was in the process of ripping a Resurrected eagle to pieces. He looked like a scarecrow, coated with slime and feathers, and he swung his dead face toward her and said, "THIS SHIP IS FINISHED."

  "Not the Jenny," said Hester loyally. "Tom'll get her down all right. Go forward. Keep him safe."

  She stood aside to let him go past her. She'd been hoping the birds would have killed Pennyroyal, but they'd been too busy with Grike. The explorer lay on the floor where she'd left him, bound and gagged, looking up at her with round, pleading eyes. She considered shooting him, then shouldered her gun and pulled her knife out, stooping. Pennyroyal gave a squeal of fright, but she was only cutting the ropes on his feet and his wrists.

  As she stood up again, the remains of the long stern window disintegrated in an ice fall of smashed glass, and the wide black wings of a Resurrected condor filled the cabin. Its claws raked Pennyroyal's head as it came flapping at Hester. She dropped the knife and tried to bring her gun to bear, but there was no time. She heard herself scream; a terrible, thin, little-girl scream, and suddenly Grike was back in the cabin with her, pulling her out of the way of the driving beak, grabbing the bird, its blades striking sparks from his armor as he crushed it to his body.