A Darkling Plain (49 page)

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...."

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

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

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,

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

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.

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.

The
Jenny Haniver
lurched as another of her gas cells exploded; her nose tipped up, her stern down. Hester was flung on top of Pennyroyal, who clung to a bulkhead. She saw Grike stumble toward the stern, where the mountains glowed in the twilight beyond the smashed window. The bird

was strong; half crushed, it still flapped and clawed. The spasmic beating of its wings overbalanced Grike. He smashed the bunk and crashed against the stern wall, which started to give way beneath him with a splintering sound.

"Grike!" screamed Hester, scrambling down the hill of the deck to help him.

"Hester, no!" yelled Pennyroyal through his gag, pulling her back.

The wall collapsed. Grike turned his face for a second toward Hester. Still clutching the condor, he fell. "Grike!" she shrieked again, as the gondola tilted back to the horizontal. She kicked herself free of Pennyroyal and scrabbled as close as she dared to that gaping rent where the wall had been. "Grike!"

No answer. Nothing to see in the smoke and the wind and the rain of burning fragments from her dying ship. Only the echoes of Grike's last cry bouncing up at her from the abyss where he had fallen: "HESTER.!"

From the wall of the Stalker's garden Fishcake watched the burning airship draw a long, bright trail down the sky, deep into the shadows of the valley. The wind was carrying the sound away, or maybe burning airships made no sound; at any rate, it all seemed to be happening in silence. It was very beautiful. The igniting gas cells were like fountains, showering out golden fragments that twinkled and faded as they fell. Blazing birds tried to flutter away from it, and they fell too, their bright reflections rising toward them in the waters of the lake until they met in a white kiss of steam.

A footfall in the snow behind him made Fishcake look

around. The Stalker stood there, watching. "It is the
Jenny Haniver,"
she whispered calmly. "How sweet of somebody to bring her home...."

The airship settled in marshy ground on the lake's far shore. As the smoke of its burning spread across the reed beds, Fishcake was almost sure he saw people running away from it.
Mr. Natsworthy,
he thought,
and Hester.
And he felt suddenly afraid, because he remembered what he had sworn to do to Hester, and was not sure that he had the courage to do it.

His Stalker's hand rested on his shoulder. "They are no threat to us," she whispered. "We will not hurt them."

But Fishcake gripped the knife inside his jacket and thought about the last time he had seen the
Jenny Haniver,
flying away without him into the skies of Brighton.

Tom splashed through ankle-deep water and dropped into wet grass, hugging the precious lightning gun. Hester was close behind him, flinging down Pennyroyal. Survivors of the Stalker-bird flock clawed and shrieked around the blazing envelope, still trying to worry it to death. Hester lifted her gun and emptied the last of its grenades into the inferno. The explosion lit up the lake, the slopes and cliffs around it, the lonely house on its island. The
Jenny's
rockets went up too, with orange flashes. Then there was only the swirling smoke, and the flames dancing in the smashed birdcage that had been their little airship; twenty years of memories burning away to charcoal and sooty metal. "Tom?" asked Hester.

"Yes," he said. His chest ached, but not badly. Perhaps

being with Hester again had healed his broken heart. He hoped so, because his green pills had been in the
Jenny's
stern cabin.

"Our
Jenny Haniver,"
she said.

"She was only a thing," said Tom, wiping at his eyes with a singed cuff, looking around. "We're all right; that's all that matters. Where's Grike?"

"He's gone. He fell. Up there somewhere...." She pointed toward the enormous silence of the mountains.