Infernal Devices (6 page)

"There has been stalemate ever since. Sometimes we push west and destroy a few more cities; sometimes they push east and devour a few of our forts or farms."

The landscape below was changing, pitted and scarred by recent fighting. Enormous shell craters shone like mirrors stitched into a blanket of mud. From this height, the vast track marks of the enemy's fighting suburbs and the complicated entrenchments and fortifications of the Storm looked almost identical.

"They say we are making the world green again," sighed Dr. Zero, "but all we are doing is turning it into mud...."

Forward Command turned out to be a captured city, a small four-tiered place standing motionless on the slopes of a hill at the northern end of the Rustwater Marshes. Its tracks lay curled on the mud around it. The wheels and lower tiers were scorched and ruined, but on the upper levels lights showed dimly in the deepening twilight. Warships came and

went from makeshift air harbors, and flocks of birds wheeled above the wrecked rooftops. Grike was surprised at the intelligent way the flocks veered to avoid the airships, until
The Sadness of Things
passed close to one and he saw that they were not living birds but Stalkers, their eyes glowing with the same eerie green light as his, their beaks and talons replaced with blades. Below, on roadways bulldozed through the mud, more Stalkers marched, some man-shaped, others bulky, crablike, multilegged.

"THE GREEN STORM HAS MANY STALKERS," he said.

"The Green Storm has need of many, with so many battles to fight," replied Dr. Zero.

The Sadness of Things
settled on a landing field under the walls of the city's town hall. A man was waiting for them there, a small bald-headed old man in fur-lined robes, flinching at the sporadic rumbles of gunfire rolling from the marshes to the west. He grinned when he saw Grike come down the
Sadness's
gangplank. "Grikey! Good to see you up and stalking again! Remember me? I was one of old Twixie's assistants. Helped examine you, back in poor old London."

Grike's brain, which used to hold images often thousand Once-Born faces, now remembered only Dr. Zero and a few technicians from the Stalker Works. He studied the old man's yellowing teeth, the tattoo of a red wheel sunk in the wrinkles between his bushy eyebrows, then turned to Dr. Zero like a child looking to its mother for reassurance.

"This is Dr. Popjoy," she told him softly. "Founder of the Resurrection Corps, and our leader's personal surgeon-mechanic." Then, to the old man, she said, "I am afraid that

Mr. Grike has few memories of his former career, Dr. Popjoy. That section of his brain was severely damaged; I was unable to unlock it."

"Pity," said Popjoy absentmindedly. "Might have been nice to have a chin-wag about the old times. Still, maybe it's for the best." He walked all round the Stalker twice, reaching out to pat Grike's shiny new bodywork and tweak the electric cords that trailed from his steel skull. "Excellent'" he chuckled. "A right proper job, Treacle! Couldn't have done it better myself!"

"I seek only to please the Stalker Fang," said Dr. Zero meekly.

"As do we all, Treacle. Come on now, we'd best go up; she's expecting us."

Hurricane lanterns burned in the long corridors of the building. Uniformed Once-Borns hurried about, shouting commands, waving sheets of paper, talking loudly into field telephones. Many of them had dyed their hair green as a symbol of their loyalty to the Storm. They spoke in clipped battle codes that Grike found he could understand perfectly; Dr. Zero's doing, no doubt. As he followed her and Popjoy up the broad stairways, he wondered what other adjustments she had made.

At the top of the stairs was a pair of bullet-pecked bronze doors. "Resurrection Corps," said Popjoy as the sentries slammed to attention. "Delivery for Her Excellency."

The doors swung wide. The room beyond was big and dark. Grike's new eyes switched automatically to night

vision, and he saw that the far wall had been reinforced with armor plate. One long slot of a window, like the slit in a visor, remained open, glassless, gazing toward the west. The figure who stood at it was not entirely human. "Your Excellency ..." Popjoy said.

"Wait." A voice from the darkness, a commanding whisper.

Popjoy waited. In the silence, Grike detected the faint sound of Dr. Zero's teeth chattering and the nervous drumming of her heart.

Suddenly a huge pulse of light arose from the western marshes, filling the room with an orange glow that fluttered and stabbed as the first great burst of fire separated into the muzzle flash of countless individual guns and the drifting white pinpoints of phosphorus flares. Forward Command shifted slightly, dead metal creaking under Grike's feet. After a few more seconds the sound reached him, a far-off rumbling and banging, like somebody moving furniture about in a distant room.

Bathed in the light of her war, the Stalker Fang turned from the viewing slit to greet her visitors. She wore long gray robes, and her face was a woman's death mask cast in bronze. She said, "Our artillery has just launched a bombardment on the forward cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. I shall be flying out shortly to lead the ground attack."

"Another glorious victory, I'm sure, Fang," said Popjoy's voice from somewhere near Grike's ankles, and Grike noticed that both Popjoy and Dr. Zero had fallen to their knees, pressing their faces to the smooth wood of the floor.

"But not a final victory." The Stalker's voice was a winter wind rustling among frozen reeds. "We need more-powerful weapons, Popjoy."

"And you shall have them, Your Excellency," Popjoy promised. "I'm always on the lookout for odd bits of Old Tech that might serve. In the meantime, we've brought you a small token of the Stalker Corps's esteem."

The Stalker Fang's almond-shaped eyes flared green as they focused on Grike. "You are the Stalker Grike," she said, gliding closer. "I have seen images of you. I was told that you had ceased to function."

"He is fully repaired, Excellency," said Popjoy.

The Stalker stopped a few paces from Grike, studying him. "What is the meaning of this, Popjoy?" she asked.

"A birthday present, Excellency!" Popjoy raised himself, grunting with the effort. "A little surprise that Dr. Zero here dreamed up. I'm sure you remember Oenone Zero, daughter of old Hiraku Zero, the airship ace. She's a prodigy, already the finest surgeon-mechanic in the Corps. (Apart from yours truly, of course.) Well, Oenone had the notion of digging old Grikey up and repairing him to mark the anniversary of your glorious Resurrection!"

The Stalker Fang stared at Grike, saying nothing. Dr. Zero was shaking so badly that Grike could feel the vibrations through the floor.

"Don't tell me you'd forgotten?" chirped Popjoy. "It's seventeen years to the day since I restored you to life in the facility at Rogues' Roost! You're sweet seventeen, Fang. Many happy returns!"

The Stalker Fang watched Grike with her impassive

green eyes. "What am I to do with him?"

Dr. Zero looked up for the first time. "I thought-- thought--you could k-keep him by you, Excellency," she said. "He will serve you well. While you work to cleanse the world of the cancer of mobile cities, Mr. Grike will keep w-w-watch over you."

"Th-th-there," said Popjoy, mocking her frightened stammer. "He'll keep w-w-watch. A bodyguard as strong as yourself, and with the same heightened senses ..."

"I doubt he is as strong as me," said the Stalker Fang.

"Of course not!" Popjoy said hastily. "Her Excellency doesn't need bodyguards, Treacle! What are you wittering about?" He simpered toward the waiting Stalker. "I just thought he might amuse you, Fang."

The Stalker Fang tilted her head on one side, still considering Grike. "Very well. The unit is impressive. Appoint him to my staff."

A tall door opened at the far end of the gallery. A uniformed aide bowed low and announced, "Excellency, your ship is ready to depart for the front."

Without another word to Popjoy, the Stalker turned and walked away.

"Excellent!" said Popjoy when she had gone. He rose and switched on an argon lamp, then patted Dr. Zero's bottom as she stood up, making her blush. "Good work, Treacle. The Fire Flower was pleased. People say you can't tell what she's thinking, but I put her together, remember; I've a pretty good idea what goes on behind that mask." Dabbing sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief, he glanced at Grike. "So what does the Grikester think of our glorious leader?"

"SHE IS STRONG' said Grike.

Popjoy nodded. "She's that, all right. My greatest work. There's some amazing machinery inside her. Bits of a Stalker brain even older than yours. Old Tech stuff so weird that even
I
can't be sure how it works. I never managed to build another like her. But maybe one's enough, eh, Grikey?"

Grike turned back to the window and the distant battle. Sheets of light sprang into the sky as if coming from some deep fissure in the earth. The night was full of airships. He thought that it would be good to serve this Stalker Fang; good to obey someone as strong as himself and not take orders from soft, squashable Once-Borns. He would be loyal to her, and perhaps, in time, that loyalty might fill up the empty spaces in his mind and rid him of the nagging sense that he had lost something precious.

It fluttered in his brain like a moth, and was gone.

***

NIGHT, AND A FINGERNAIL moon lifting from the mist above the Dead Hills. Wren lay fully dressed on her bed in the house in Dog Star Court, listening to her parents' muffled voices drifting through the wall from their bedroom. It did not take long for them to fade into silence.
Asleep.
She waited, just to be sure. The dullness of their lives made her want to shriek sometimes. Asleep at this hour, on such a lovely, moony night! But it suited her plans. She put on her boots and went softly out of her room and down the stairs, with the Tin Book of Anchorage heavy in the bag on her shoulder.

It had been so easy to steal that it hadn't felt like stealing at all. It
wasn't
stealing, Wren kept assuring herself: Miss Freya didn't need the Tin Book, and no one else in Anchorage would care that it had gone. It wasn't stealing at all.

But even so, as she propped the note she had spent all evening writing against the bread bin and crept out into the star-silvered streets, she could not help feeling sad that her life in Vineland was ending like this.

When she'd left Gargle, she had run straight back down the hill to the Winter Palace. Miss Freya had still been in the garden, chattering away to Mrs. Scabious about the play the younger children would be performing at Moon Festival. Wren went to the library and took down the old wooden casket that Miss Freya had shown her earlier. She took out the Tin Book and locked the box again, setting it safely back in its place on the shelf. Through the open window she could hear Miss Freya saying, "Please, Windolene, just call me Freya; we've known each other long enough ..."

Wren slipped out of the library and out of the palace, and hurried home with the Tin Book nestled safely inside her jacket, trying not to feel like a thief.

The moon was a windblown feather, caught on the spires of the Winter Palace. A lamp burned in Freya Rasmussen's window, and as Wren hurried past, she thought,
Good-bye, Miss Freya,
and felt as if she would cry.

At home it had been worse. All evening she had been close to tears at the thought of leaving Dad, and she had even started to think she would miss Mum. But it was only for a while. She would come back one day, a princess of the Lost Boys, and everything would be all right. She had given Dad a special hug before she went to bed, which had surprised him.

He probably thought she was just upset about her latest fight with Mum.

She went down into the engine district and walked quickly toward the city's edge. She had just left the shadow of the upper tier and was walking along a broad street between two derelict warehouses when Caul stepped into her path.

Wren hugged her bag against herself and tried to dodge past him, but he moved to block her way again. His eyes gleamed faintly in the cage of his hair.

"What do you want?" asked Wren, trying to sound cross instead of just scared.

"You mustn't go," said Caul.

"Why not? I can go if I want. Anyway, I don't know what you're talking about."

"Gargle. I watched last night. I looked back when I reached the hilltop, and I saw you come out of that limpet. Did he ask you to help him? Did you agree?"

Wren didn't answer.

"Wren, you can't trust Gargle," Caul told her. "He was just a boy when I worked with him, but he was cunning even then. He knows how to use people. How to hide what he really wants. Whatever he's asked you to do for him, don't."

"And how are you going to stop me?" asked Wren.

"I'll tell Tom and Hester."

"Why not tell Miss Freya too, while you're about it?" Wren teased. "I'm sure she'd love to know. But you won't do it, will you? If you were going to tell Mum and Dad, you'd have done it as soon as you saw me come off the
Autolycus.

You wouldn't betray your own people."

"You have
no idea
--" Caul started to say, but while he was still busy hunting for the right words, she darted past him and away, her running footsteps ringing down the metal stairs at the end of the street and then falling quiet as she jumped off the last stair and onto the earth. The bag banged against her side, and her heart was thumping. She looked back to see if Caul was chasing her, but he was just standing where she had left him, not moving. She waved, then turned away and started running up the hill.

Hester had fallen asleep quickly that night, but something disturbed Tom just as he was drifting off. Only later would he realize that it had been the sound of the street door closing.