A Darkling Plain (2 page)

Theo had lost his only means of escape, but before he could worry about it, a hatch popped open beside him, and a leather-helmeted head poked out and stared at him through tinted flying goggles. So someone had heard him after all. He threw himself forward, and he and the aviator

tumbled together through the hatch and down a short companionway, landing heavily on a metal walkway between two of the airship's gas cells. Theo scrambled up, but the aviator lay unmoving, stunned. She was a woman; Thai or Laotian by the look of her. Theo had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadts. Yet here she was, in one of their ships and one of their uniforms, flying toward Zagwa with full racks of rockets.

It was a mystery, but Theo hadn't time to ponder it. He gagged the aviatrix with her own scarf, then took her knife from her belt and cut a length of rope from the netting around the gas cells, which he used to bind her hands to the walkway handrail. She woke while he was tying the last knots and started to struggle, glaring out angrily at him through her cracked goggles.

He left her writhing there and hurried along the catwalk to another ladder, climbing down between the shadows of the gas cells. Engine noise boomed around him, quickly drowning out the muffled curses from above. As he dropped into the gondola, the light from the windows dazzled him. He blinked and saw the pilot standing at the controls, his back to Theo.

"What was it?" the man asked in Airsperanto. (Airsperanto? It was the common language of the sky, but Theo had thought the Traktionstadts used German....)

"A bird?" asked the man, doing something to his controls, and turned. He was another easterner. Theo pushed him against a bulkhead and showed him the knife.

Outside, the city was coming into view beyond a spur of the mountains. The crew of the leading Super-Gnat, with no

idea of what was happening aboard her sister ship, angled her vanes and started to swing toward the citadel.

Forcing the pilot down into his seat, Theo groped for the controls of the radio set. It was identical to the radio he'd had in the cabin of his Tumbler bomb during his time with the Storm. He shouted into the microphone, "Zagwa! Zagwa! You're under attack! Two airships! I'm in the one behind!" he added hastily, as puffballs of anti-aircraft fire began to burst in the sky all around him, and shrapnel rattled against the armored gondola and crazed the window glass.

The pilot chose that moment to try and fight, lurching out of his chair and butting Theo bullishly in the ribs. Theo dropped the microphone, and the pilot grabbed his knife hand. They struggled for control of the knife, until suddenly there was blood everywhere, and Theo looked and saw that it was his own. The pilot stabbed him again, and he shouted out in anger and fear and pain, trying to twist the blade away. Staring at his opponent's furious, clenched face, he did not even notice the leading airship vanish in a sheet of saffron flame. The shock wave came as a surprise, shattering all the windows of the gondola at once, and then the debris was slamming and jarring against the envelope. A torn-off propeller blade sheared through the gondola like a scythe. The pilot went whirling out through the immense gash where the side wall had been, leaving Theo with an afterimage of his wide, disbelieving eyes.

Theo stumbled to the radio set and snatched up the dangling microphone. He didn't know if it still worked, but he shouted into it anyway, until exhaustion and terror and loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he heard, as he slipped

down onto the deck, were voices telling him that help was on its way. Twin plumes of smoke were rising from the citadel. Above them, blue as damselflies, the airships of the Zagwan Flying Corps were climbing into the golden sky.

***

24th April 1026 T.E
.

I thought that once he was well enough, he would want to take me straight home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but he hasn't suggested it. So we have been traveling the bird roads ever since, seeing a little of the world and doing a little trading--antiques and Old Tech mostly, but harmless stuff, not like that awful Tin Book! We've done quite well--well enough to get the ship afresh coat of paint and have her engines overhauled. We've changed her name back to
Jenny Haniver,
which is what she was called before Prof Pennyroyal stole her from Mum and Dad all those years ago. We wondered at first if it would be dangerous, but I don't think anyone remembers anymore that that was the name of the Stalker Fang's old ship, and if they do, they don't much care.

I am getting quite used to life as an air trader. You would think me ever so much changed if you could see me. I've had my hair cut in the latest style, sort of lopsided, so that it comes down below my chin on one side but only to ear level on the other. I don't want to sound vain, but it looks
extremely
sophisticated, even if it does make me feel sometimes as if I'm standing on a slope. Also I have new boots, tall ones, and a leather coat--not one of those long ones that Daddy and the other old-style aviators wear, but a tunic, with a red silk lining and pointy bits at the bottom called tappets or lappets or something. And at this moment I am sitting in a cafe behind the air harbor here in Peripatetiapolis, feeling every inch the aviatrix, and just enjoying being aboard a city. I could never really imagine what real cities were like, growing up in sleepy old Anchorage as I did, but now that I spend half my time aboard them, I find I love them--all the people, and the bustle, and the way the engines make the pavements throb as if the whole of Peripatetiapolis is a great, living animal. I am waiting for Dad, who has gone up to the higher tiers to see if the Peripatetiapolitan doctors can find some better pills than the ones the Kom Ombo lot prescribed. (He didn't want to go, of course, but I talked him into it in the end!) And sitting here, I got thinking about you, the way I do quite often, and I thought...

It wouldn't do, Wren decided. She scrumpled the page and lobbed it into a nearby bin. She was getting to be quite a good shot. This must be the twentieth letter she'd written to Theo, and so far she'd not mailed any of them. She had sent a card at Christmas, because although Theo wasn't very religious, he lived in a Christian city and probably celebrated all their strange old festivals, but all she had written was
"Happy Xmas"
and a few lines of news about herself and Dad.

The trouble was, Theo had probably forgotten her by now. And even if he did remember her, he was hardly likely to be interested in her clothes, or her haircut, or the rest of it. And that bit about how much she liked city life would probably shock him, for he was an Anti-Tractionist through and through and could be rather prim....

But she could not forget him. How brave he had been on Cloud 9. And that good-bye kiss, on the Kom Ombo air quay, amid all those oily ropes and heaped-up sky train couplings and shouting stevedores and roaring engines. Wren had never kissed anyone before. She hadn't known quite how you went about it; she wasn't sure where her nose was meant to go; when their teeth banged together, she was afraid that she was doing it all wrong. Theo had laughed, and said it was a funny business, this kissing, and she said she thought she might get the hang of it with a little more practice, but by then the captain of his airship was hollering, "All aboard that's coming aboard!" and starting to disengage his docking clamps, and there had been no time....

And that had been six months ago. Theo had written once--a letter that reached Wren in January at a shabby air

caravanserai in the Tannhäusers--to tell her that he had made it home safely and been welcomed by his family "like the prodigal son" (whatever that meant). But Wren had never managed to compose a reply.

"Bother!" she said, and ordered another coffee.

Tom Natsworthy, Wren's father, had faced death many times, and been in all sorts of frightening situations, but he had never felt any fear quite so cold as this.

He was lying, quite naked, on a chilly metal table in the consulting room of a heart specialist on Peripatetiapolis's second tier. Above him a machine with a long and many-jointed hydraulic neck twisted its metal head from side to side, examining him with a quizzical air. Tom was pretty sure that those green, glowing lenses at its business end were taken from a Stalker. He supposed that Stalker parts were easy to come by these days, and that he should be glad that all the years of war had at least spawned a few good things: new medical techniques, and diagnostic machines like this. But when the blunt steel head dipped close to his torso, and he heard the machinery grating and whirring inside those shining eyes, all he could think of was the old Stalker Grike, who had chased him and Hester across the Out-Country in the year London died.

When it was all over, and Dr. Chernowyth switched off his machine and came out of his little lead-walled booth, he could tell Tom nothing that Tom had not already guessed. There was a weakness in his heart. It had been caused by the bullet that Pennyroyal had shot him with, all those years ago

in Anchorage. It was growing worse, and one day it would kill him. He had a year or two left, maybe five, no more.

The doctor pursed his lips and shook his head and told him to take things easy, but Tom just laughed. How could you take things easy in the air trade? The only way he could take things easy would be if he went home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but after what he had learned about Hester, he could never go back. He had nothing to be ashamed of--
he
had not betrayed the ice city to Arkangel's Huntsmen, or murdered anyone among its snowy streets--but he felt ashamed for his wife's sake, and foolish for having lived so long with her, never suspecting the lies she had told him.

Anyway, Wren would never forgive him if he took her home now. She had the same longing for adventure that Tom himself had had at her age. She was enjoying life on the bird roads, and she had the makings of a fine aviatrix. He would stay with her, flying and trading, teaching her the ways of the sky and doing his best to keep her out of trouble, and when Lady Death came to take him to the Sunless Country, he would leave Wren the
Jenny Haniver
and she would be able to choose whichever life she wanted for herself: the peace of Vineland or the freedom of the skies. The news from the east sounded hopeful. If this truce held, there would soon be all sorts of opportunities for trade.

When he left Dr. Chernowyth's office, Tom felt better at once. Out here, beneath the evening sky, it seemed impossible that he was going to die. The city rocked gently as it rumbled northward up the rocky western shoreline of the Great Hunting Ground. Out upon the silver, sunset-shining sea a fishing town was keeping pace with it beneath a cloud of gulls.

Tom watched for a while from an observation platform, then rode an elevator back to base tier and strolled through the busy market behind the air harbor, remembering his first visit to this city, with Hester and Anna Fang, twenty years before. He had bought Hester a red scarf at one of these stalls, to save her having to keep hiding her scarred face with her hand....

But he did not want to think about Hester. When he started thinking about her, he always ended up remembering the way they had parted, and what she had done made him so angry that his heart would pound and twist inside him. He could not afford to think of Hester anymore.

He began to walk toward the harbor, rehearsing in his mind the things he would tell Wren about his visit to the doctor. ("Nothing to worry about. Not even worth operating....") Passing Pondicherry's Old Tech Auction Rooms, he stopped to let a crowd of traders spill out and thought he recognized one of them, a woman of about his own age, rather pretty. It looked as if she had been successful at the auction, for she was carrying a big, heavy package. She didn't see Tom, and he walked on trying to remember her name and where he had met her. Katie, wasn't it? No, Clytie, that was it. Clytie Potts.