Infernal Devices (20 page)

Shkin pondered for a moment, then nodded.

"Very well. The thing is mine by rights anyway. 'Finders keepers,' you know. I do not like to think of Pennyroyal profiting from it. I take it you know the combination of his safe?"

Plovery said, "Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven. Twenty-second of September, nine hundred and fifty-seven T. E. It's His Worship's birthday."

Shkin smiled. "Very well, Plovery. Fetch me the Tin Book."

***

THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN LUNCHEON was over and the preparations for dinner not yet begun, Wren wandered through the kitchen garden and out into the grounds behind the Pavilion to watch a wing of the Flying Ferrets take off on patrol. The Ferrets had set up a temporary airfield in a little-used part of the gardens behind the Pavilion. Wren knew most of the strange machines by sight now, and recognized them as they taxied out of their hangars: the
Visible Parity Line
and the
Tumbler Pigeon,
the
Austerity Biscuit
and the
J. M. W. Turner Overdrive.
The ground crews fitted them into spring-loaded canvas catapults and sent them hurtling over the edge of the deck plate while the aviators gunned their engines and prayed that their wings would find a purchase on the air before they plunged into the dirty sea off Brighton's stern.

Wren watched from the handrail at the gardens' brink

while Ferret after Ferret pulled out of its dive and went zooming off across the rooftops, doing ill-advised aerobatics and letting off canisters of green and purple smoke. It was a spectacle that she had always enjoyed before, but today it only made her feel more homesick than ever. She would have liked to tell Dad about the Ferrets' machines.

Behind the aerodrome stood a whale-backed hillock of copper, screened by cypress trees. Wren had noticed it from a distance before, but she had never bothered to take a closer look, assuming that it was just another of the abstract sculptures that littered the lawns of Cloud 9, bought by Pennyroyal to keep his supporters in the Artists' Quarter happy. Today, having nothing better to do, she wandered toward it. As she drew nearer, she started to realize that it was a building, with huge curved doors at one end and a fan-shaped metal pavement outside. The copper curves of its walls and roof were studded with decorative spines, so it looked like a giant puffer fish surfacing through the grass. A spindly exterior staircase led up one side, and Wren climbed up it and peeked in through a high window.

In the shady interior sat a sky yacht so delicate and sleek that even Wren, who knew nothing about airships, could tell that it was ferociously expensive.

"That's the
Peewit,"
said a helpful voice behind her. Cynthia was standing at the foot of the stairs. "I've been looking for you
everywhere,
Wren," she added. "I'm going to the household shrine; I simply
must
make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Beauty; I really want to lose weight before Moon Festival. You should come with me. You could ask her to do something about your spots."

Wren was more interested in yachts than spots. She turned back to the window. "The
Peewit
... Is she Pennyroyal's?"

"Of course." Cynthia climbed halfway up the stairs. "She's called a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow--very fancy. But the mayor hardly ever takes her up anymore. He keeps her polished and full of lifting gas, but the only time she gets used is when Boo-Boo goes shopping aboard another city."

"Won't the mayor be using her in the MoonFest Regatta?" asked Wren.

"Oh ; no; he's got a vintage airship moored down in Brighton. He's going to be flying her, with that Orla Twombley as his copilot. She's going to lead a Flyby of Historic Ships, and there's to be an Air Battle with real rockets, just like in Professor Pennyroyal's books. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but he's had the most amazing adventures on the bird roads."

Wren looked again at the yacht, thinking of the airship that Pennyroyal had stolen from her parents all those years before. Might it be possible for her to sneak down here at dead of night, slide open the boathouse doors, and take off aboard the
Peewit?
That would be poetic justice, wouldn't it!

A faint drumbeat of hope began to throb deep down inside her. It cheered her up no end as Cynthia took her hand and led her toward the slaves' and servants' shrine behind the Pavilion kitchens. She barely heard her friend's bright chatter about makeup and hairstyles. In her imagination she was already piloting the
Peewit
westward: She was crossing the Dead Hills, the lakes of Vineland were shining blue below her, and her parents were running to greet her as she touched

down in the fields of Anchorage.

The only trouble was, Wren had no idea how to fly a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow. Or anything else, for that matter. But she knew someone who did.

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that
never
happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice. The rest were always disobeying her rule and trying to sneak into one another's quarters, which pained Boo-Boo. But at least Theo Ngoni never gave her any cause for concern. Theo Ngoni never spoke to anyone.

Wren, though, was determined to speak to Theo Ngoni, and she found her chance a few days after her discovery of the boathouse. Boo-Boo had gone down to Brighton, and Pennyroyal had collared Wren and Cynthia to act as his towel holders while he took a dip in the pool. By a lucky chance Theo was on duty at the poolside too, carrying the mayor's spare swimming goggles on a silver platter. While Pennyroyal dozed on his drifting air bed, Wren sidled up to her fellow slave and whispered, "Hello!"

The boy looked at her out of the corner of his eye but said nothing. Wren wondered what to do next. She had never been this close to Theo before. He was very handsome, and although Wren was tall, Theo was taller still, which made her feel young and silly as she stood there at his side.

"I'm Wren," she said.

He looked away again, out across the gardens and the blue sea, toward a distant haze on the horizon that Wren had been told was Africa. Maybe he was homesick. She said, "Is that where you come from?"

Theo Ngoni shook his head. "My home was in Zagwa. A static city in the mountains, far to the south."

"Oh?" said Wren encouragingly, and, "Is it nice?" but the boy said no more. Determined to keep the conversation going, she added, "I didn't know the Green Storm had bases in Africa. That book Professor Pennyroyal lent me said that the African statics didn't approve of the war."

"They don't." Theo turned his head to look at her, but it was a cold look. "I ran away from my family to travel to Shan Guo and join the Storm's youth wing. I thought it would be a glorious thing to fight against the barbarian cities and sweep them from the earth."

"Gosh, yes," agreed Wren. "I'm an Anti-Tractionist myself, you know."

Theo stared at her. "I thought you were a Lost Girl. From that place under the sea."

"Oh, yes, I am," said Wren quickly, annoyed at herself for forgetting. "But Grimsby didn't
move,
it wasn't a
moving
city, so that makes me a Mossie through and through. Did you fight in many battles?"

"Only one said Theo, looking away again.

"You got captured on your first go? Oh, bad luck!" Wren tried to sound sympathetic, but she was fast losing patience with this sullen, gloomy boy. Maybe all that she'd heard about the Storm and its soldiers was true: They were brainwashed fanatics. Still, she was sure he must want to leave Cloud 9 as badly as she did, and she thought it unlikely that he would betray her to the hated Tractionists, so she decided to take a chance and tell him about her plan.

She glanced round and saw that Pennyroyal was asleep. The other slaves were dozing too, or whispering together on the far side of the pool, while Cynthia, who was closest, was studying her freshly polished fingernails with a frown of deep concentration. Wren sidled even closer to Theo and whispered, "I know a way we can escape."

Theo said nothing, but he stiffened slightly, which Wren thought was a good sign.

"I know where we can get an airship," she went on. "Cynthia Twite told me you used to be an aviator."

Theo almost smiled at that. "Cynthia Twite is a fool who understands nothing."

"True. But if you can fly an airship--"

"I did not fly airships. I flew Tumblers."

"Tumblers?" asked Wren. "What are they? Are they like airships? I mean, if you know the basics ..." But Theo had clammed up again, narrowing his eyes and staring past her at the horizon. "Oh, come on!" Wren whispered impatiently. "Do you
like
being Pennyroyal's slave? Don't you
want
to escape? I should have thought you'd be itching to get back to the Green Storm...."

"I would never go back to the Storm!" Theo said suddenly, angrily, almost dropping the mayoral goggles as he turned to face her. "It is a lie, their great war, The World Made Green Again. My father was right; it is all lies!"

"Oh," said Wren. "Well, what about your home, then? You must want to go back to Zagwa...."

Theo stared at the horizon again, but it was not the sea and the sky and the distant shore that he was watching. Even here, in the expensive sunlight of Cloud 9, he could see that last, desperate fight above the Rustwater. The light of guns and rockets and burning ships had glittered in all the little winding waterways below him as he fell. A doomed suburb had been bellowing its distress calls across the marshes, and the exultant voices of his comrades had crackled in his headphones, shouting, as they began their own drops, "The World Made Green Again!" and "Death to the Pan-German Traction Wedge!" He had thought that those would be the last sounds he would ever hear. But here he was, months later and half a world away, still alive. The gods of war had spared him so that he could stand beside a swimming pool and be talked at by this stupid, skinny white girl who thought herself so clever.

"I can never go home," he said. "Didn't you hear me? I disobeyed my father. I ran away. I can never go home."

Wren shrugged. "All right, suit yourself," she told him, and stomped away before Pennyroyal woke up and saw them talking to each other. She would show Theo Ngoni! She would steal the mayor's yacht on her own and pilot it back to Vineland herself. It was only a silly airship, after all! How hard could it be?

***

Dusk settled over Brighton. Along the promenades at the edges of its three tiers, strings of colored bulbs were switched on. Lights blinked and swirled on the fairgrounds and the pleasure piers. Powerful lamps were lit atop each cabin of the revolving Pharos Wheel, which was mounted near the city's bow and served as both a joyride for the tourists and a lighthouse to guide night-flying airships to Brighton.

The city was swinging eastward. Soon it would thread itself through the narrow strait that separated Africa from the Great Hunting Ground and swim proudly into the Middle Sea. Brighton's businessmen were hoping for plenty of visitors when they anchored for Moon Festival. Word of the campaign against the Lost Boys would have spread along the bird roads by now, and the captured limpets displayed in the Brighton Aquarium would add a certain educational element to the attractions of the usual MoonFest celebrations. Already sightseers had started arriving from some of the small towns whose lights could be seen on the shore.

Above the coming and going of balloons, the shadows of evening pooled between the cypress groves of Cloud 9, and colored floodlights made the Pavilion blush pink and gold. A few airships circled it, up from Brighton on an evening pleasure trip. The amplified voices of their pilots were faintly audible on Cloud 9, pointing out features of interest, but new security arrangements prohibited them from coming too close. None of the sightseers noticed a small window swing open in one of the Pavilion's domes, or the bird that flew out of it and up through the web of hawsers to join the cloud of gulls hanging ghostly in the city's wake.

Although it was white like a gull and had a gull's soaring flight, this bird was not a gull; not anymore. Its bill had been replaced with a blade, and in the spaces of its skull glowed dim green lights. It rose through the circling flocks and flew away into the deepening twilight.

On and on it flapped, untiring, while days and nights came out of the east to meet it. It crossed the town-torn spine of Italy and skirted the plumes of erupting volcanoes in Asia Minor. At a Green Storm air base in the Ziganastra Mountains, it landed to let the base commander peer at the slip of paper that it carried in a cavity inside its chest. She cursed under her breath when she saw whom the coded message was addressed to, and summoned a sleepy surgeon-mechanic to recharge the gull's power cells.

It went on its way, flying into the haze of smoke above the Rustwater Marshes, where artillery duels were rumbling like autumn storms. A squadron of enormous Traction Cities was crawling eastward, trying to head off a Green Storm counterattack. On their lower tiers, whole buildings had been converted into snout guns. Railways carried huge high-explosive shells out of the cities' innards, and the guns hurled them into the marshy Out-Country ahead, which was said to be crawling with Stalkers and mobile rocket units. Buffeted by passing airships and the fluffy white thistledown of antiaircraft bursts, the gull let the leading city's slipstream carry it eastward for a while, then rose above the battle and flapped on toward the white mountains that stood on the rim of the world.