Infernal Devices (The Hungry City

Chronicles, Book 3)
Philip Reeve
For Sarah, as always
For my editors, Kirsten Stansfield and Holly Skeet, with thanks,
And for Sam Reeve, Tom Skeet, and
Edward Stansfield, one day.

CONTENTS
PART ONE
1. The Sleeper Wakes 3
2. At Anchorage-in-Vineland 8
3. The Limpet Autolycus 20
4. The Legend of the Tin Book 30
5. News from the Sea 45
6 We Are Making a New World 50
7. She's Leaving Home 59
8. Kidnapped 72
9. The Message 79
10. The Parent Trap 88
11. Four Against Grimsby 96
12. Business in Great Waters 101
13. Dr. Zero 112
14. Sold! 121
15. Children of the Deep 138
16. Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes 145
17. The Chapel 153
18. The Naglfar 160
19. The Wedding Wreath 177
PART TWO

20. A Life on the Ocean Wave 183

21. The Flight of a Seagull 196
22. Murder on Cloud 9 206
23. Bright, Brighter, Brighton! 222
24. The Requiem Vortex 235
25. The Pepperpot 239
26. Waiting for the Moon 246
27. The Unsafe Safe 260
28. The Air Attack 274
29. The Unexploded Boy 289
30. Captives of the Storm 304
31. The Moment of the Rose 309
32. The Flight of The Arctic Roll 318
33. Departures 327
34. Finders Keepers 335
35. Marooned in the Sky 340
36. Strange Meetings 349
PART ONE
1 The Sleeper Wakes
***
A t first there was nothing. Then came a spark, a sizzling sound that
stirred frayed webs of dream and memory. And then--with a crackle, a roar-
-a blue-white rush of electricity was surging through him, bursting into the
dry passages of his brain like the tide pouring back into a sea cave. His
body jerked so taut that for a moment he was balanced only on his heels and
the back of his armored skull. He screamed, and awoke to a sleet of static,
and a falling feeling.
He remembered dying. He remembered a girl's scarred face gazing down
at him as he lay in wet grass. She was someone important, someone he
cared about more than any Stalker should care about anything, and there
had been something he had wanted to tell her, but he couldn't. Now there
was only the afterimage of her ruined face. What was her name? His mouth
remembered.
"H ..."
"It's alive!" said a voice.
"HES ..."
"Again, please. Quickly."
"Charging ..."
"HESTER ..."
"Stand clear!"
And then another lash of electricity scoured away even those last strands
of memory and he knew only that he was the Stalker Grike. One of his eyes
started to work again. He saw vague shapes moving through an ice storm of
interference, and watched while they slowly congealed into human figures,
lit by flashlights against a sky full of scurrying moonlit clouds. It was
raining steadily. Once-Borns, wearing goggles and uniforms and plastic
capes, were gathering around his open grave. Some carried quartz-iodine
lanterns; others tended machines with rows of glowing valves and gleaming
dials. Cables from the machines trailed down into his body. He sensed that
his steel skullpiece had been removed and that the top of his head was open,
exposing the Stalker brain nested inside.
"Mr. Grike? Can you hear me?"
A very young woman was looking down at him. He had a faint,
tantalizing memory of a girl, and wondered if this might be her. But no:
there had been something broken about the face in his dreams, and this face
was perfect: an Eastern face with high cheekbones and pale skin, the black
eyes framed by heavy black spectacles. Her short hair had been dyed green.
Beneath her transparent cape she wore a black uniform with winged skulls
embroidered in silver
thread on the high black collar.
She set a hand on the corroded metal of his chest and said, "Don't be
afraid, Mr. Grike. I know this must be confusing for you. You've been dead
for more than eighteen years."
"DEAD," he said.
The young woman smiled. Her teeth were white and crooked, slightly too
big for her small mouth. "Maybe 'dormant' is a better word. Old Stalkers
never really die, Mr. Grike...."
There was a rumbling sound, too rhythmic to be thunder. Pulses of
orange light flickered on the clouds, throwing the crags that towered above
Grike's resting-place into silhouette. Some of the soldiers looked up
nervously. One said, "Snout guns. They have broken through the marsh
forts. Their amphibious suburbs will be here within the hour."
The woman glanced over her shoulder and said, "Thank you, Captain,"
then turned her attention to Grike again, her hands working quickly inside
his skull. "You were badly damaged and you shut down, but we are going to
repair you. I am Dr. Oenone Zero of the Resurrection Corps."
"I DON'T REMEMBER ANYTHING," Grike told her.
 "Your memory was damaged," she replied. "I cannot restore it. I'm sorry."
Anger and a sort of panic rose in him. He felt that this woman had stolen
something from him, although he no longer knew what it had been. He tried
to bare his claws, but he could not move. He might as well have been just
an eye, lying there on the wet earth.
"Don't worry," Dr. Zero said. "Your past is not important.
You will be working for the Green Storm now. You will soon have new
memories."
In the sky behind her smiling face, something began to explode in silent
smears of red and yellow light. One of the soldiers shouted, "They're
coming! General Naga's division is counterattacking with Tumblers, but
that won't hold them for long...."
Dr. Zero nodded and scrambled up out of the grave, brushing mud from
her hands. "We must move Mr. Grike out of here at once." She looked down
at Grike again, smiled. "Don't worry, Mr. Grike. An airship is waiting for
us. We are taking you to the central Stalker Works at Batmunkh Tsaka. We
shall soon have you up and about again...."
She stepped aside to let two bulky figures through. They were Stalkers,
their armor stenciled with a green lightning-bolt symbol that Grike didn't
recognize. They had blank steel faces like the blades of shovels, featureless
except for narrow eye slits, which shone green as they heaved Grike out of
the earth and laid him on a stretcher. The men with the machines hurried
alongside as the silent Stalkers carried him down a track toward a fortified
air caravanserai where ship after ship was lifting into the wet sky. Dr. Zero
ran ahead, shouting, "Quickly! Quickly! Be careful! He's an antique."
The path grew steeper, and Grike understood the reason for her haste and
her men's uneasiness. Through gaps in the crags he glimpsed a great body
of water glittering under the steady flashes of gunfire. Upon the water, and
far off across it on the flat, dark land, giant shapes were moving. By the
light of the blazing airships that speckled the sky above them and the pale,
slow-falling glare of parachute flares, he could see
 their armored tracks, their vast jaws, and tier upon tier of ironclad forts
and gun emplacements.
Traction Cities. An army of them, grinding their way across the marshes.
The sight of them stirred faint memories in Grike. He remembered cities
like that. At least he remembered the idea of them. Whether he had ever
been aboard one, and what he had done there, he did not recall.
As his rescuers hurried him toward the waiting airship, he saw for just an
instant a girl's broken face look up trustingly at him, awaiting something he
had promised her.
But who she was, and what her face was doing in his mind, he no longer
knew.
2 At Anchorage in-Vineland
***
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, AND half a world away, Wren
Natsworthy lay in bed and watched a sliver of moonlight move slowly
across the ceiling of her room. It was past midnight, and she could hear
nothing but the sounds of her own body and the soft, occasional creaks as
the old house settled. She doubted that there was anywhere in the world as
quiet as the place she lived in--Anchorage-in-Vineland, a derelict ice city
dug into the rocky southern shore of an unknown island, on a lost lake, in a
forgotten corner of the Dead Continent.
But quiet as it was, she could not sleep. She turned on her side and tried
to get comfortable, the hot sheets tangling round her. She had had another
row with Mum at supper-time. It had been one of those rows that started
with a tiny seed of disagreement (about Wren wanting to go out with
Tildy Smew and the Sastrugi boys instead of washing up) and grew
quickly into a terrible battle, with tears and accusations, and age-old
grudges being dredged up and lobbed about the house like hand grenades,
while poor Dad stood on the sidelines, saying helplessly, "Wren, calm
down," and "Hester, please!"
Wren had lost in the end, of course. She had done the washing up, and
stomped up to bed as loudly as she could. Ever since, her brain had been
hard at work, coming up with hurtful comments that she wished she had
made earlier. Mum didn't have any idea what it was like being fifteen. Mum
was so ugly that she probably never had any friends when she was a girl,
and certainly not friends like Nate Sastrugi, whom all the girls in
Anchorage fancied, and who had told Tildy that he really liked Wren.
Probably no boy had ever liked Mum, except for Dad, of course--and what
Dad saw in her was one of The Great Unsolved Mysteries of Vineland, in
Wren's opinion.
She rolled over again and tried to stop thinking about it, then gave up and
scrambled out of bed. Maybe a walk would clear her head. And if her
parents woke and found her gone, and worried that she had drowned herself
or run away, well, that would teach Mum not to treat her like a child,
wouldn't it? She pulled on her clothes, her socks and boots, and crept
downstairs through the breathing silence of the house.
Mum and Dad had chosen this house for themselves sixteen years before,
when Anchorage had only just crawled ashore and Wren was nothing but a
little curl of flesh adrift in Mum's womb. It was family history, a bedtime
story Wren remembered from when she was small. Freya Rasmussen had
told Mum and Dad that they might take their pick of the empty houses in
the upper city They had chosen this one, a merchant's villa on a street called
Dog Star Court, overlooking the air harbor. A good house, snug and well
built, with tiled floors and fat ceramic heating ducts, walls paneled in wood
and bronze. Over the years, Mum and Dad had filled it with furniture they
found among the other empty houses round about, and decorated it with
pictures and hangings, with driftwood dragged up from the shore, and with
some of the antiques Dad unearthed on his expeditions into the Dead Hills.
Wren padded across the hall to take down her coat from the rack by the
front door, and did not spare a glance or a thought for the prints on the walls
or the precious bits of ancient food processors and telephones in the glass-
fronted display case. She had grown up with all this stuff, and it bored her.
This past year, the whole house had begun to feel too small, as if she had
outgrown it. The familiar smells of dust and wood polish and Dad's books
were comforting, but somehow stifling too. She was fifteen years old, and
her life pinched her like an ill-fitting shoe.
She closed the door behind her as quietly as she could and hurried along
Dog Star Court. Mist hung like smoke over the Dead Hills, and Wren's
breath came out as mist too. It was only early September, but she could
already smell winter in the night air.
The moon was low but the stars were bright, and overhead the Aurora
was shimmering. At the heart of the city, the rusty spires of the Winter
Palace towered black against the glowing sky, shaggy with ivy. The Winter
Palace had been
 home to Anchorage's rulers once, but the only person who lived there
now was Miss Freya, who had been the city's last margravine and was now
its schoolteacher. On every winter weekday since her fifth birthday, Wren
had gone to the schoolroom on the ground floor of the palace to listen to
Miss Freya explaining about geography and logarithms and Municipal
Darwinism and a lot of other things that would probably never be any use to
her at all. It had bored her at the time, but now that she was fifteen and too
old for school, she missed it horribly. She would never sit in the dear old
schoolroom again, unless she did as Miss Freya had asked and went back to
help teach the younger children.
Miss Freya had made that offer weeks ago, and she would need an
answer soon, for once the harvests were in, the children of Anchorage
would be going back to their lessons. But Wren didn't know if she wanted
to be Miss Freya's assistant or not. She didn't even want to think about it.
Not tonight.
At the end of Dog Star Court, a stairway led down through the deck
plates into the engine district. As Wren went clanging down the stairs, a
summery smell came up at her, and she heard flakes of rust dislodged by
her boots falling amid the heaped hay below. Once this part of the city
would have been full of life and noise, as Anchorage's engines sent it
skating over the ice at the top of the world in search of trade. But the city's
travels had ended before Wren was born, and the engine district had been
turned into a storeroom for hay and root vegetables, and winter quarters for
the cattle. Faint shafts of moonlight, slanting through skylights and holes in
the deck plates overhead, showed her the bales stacked up between the
empty fuel tanks.
When Wren was younger, these abandoned levels had been her
playground, and she still liked to walk here when she was feeling sad or
bored, imagining what fun it must have been to live aboard a city that
moved. The grown-ups were always talking about the bad old days, and
how frightening it had been to live in constant danger of being swallowed
up by some larger, faster city, but Wren would have loved to see the
towering Traction Cities, or to fly from one to another aboard an airship, as
Mum and Dad had done before she was born. Dad kept a photograph on his
desk that showed them standing on a docking pan aboard a city called San
Juan de Los Motores, in front of their pretty little red airship the Jenny
Haniver, but they never talked about the adventures they must have had. All
she knew was that they had ended up landing on Anchorage, where the
villainous Professor Pennyroyal had stolen the ship from them, and after
that they had settled down, content to play their roles in the cozy, dozy life
of Vineland.
Just my luck, thought Wren, breathing in the warm, flowery scent of the
baled hay. She would have liked to be an air trader's daughter. It sounded a
glamorous sort of life, and much more interesting than the one she had,
stuck on this lonely island among people whose idea of excitement was a
rowboat race or a good apple harvest.
A door closed somewhere in the darkness ahead, making her jump. She'd
grown so used to the quiet and her own company that the idea of someone
else moving around down here was almost frightening. Then she
remembered where she was. Busy with her thoughts, she'd walked all the
way to the heart of the district, where Caul, Anchorage's engineer,
lived alone in an old shed between two tier supports. He was the only
inhabitant of Anchorage's lower levels, since nobody else would choose to
live down here amid the rust and shadows when there were pretty mansions
standing empty in the sunlight up above. But Caul was an eccentric. He
didn't like sunlight, having been brought up in the undersea thieves' hole of
Grimsby, and he didn't like company either. He'd been friendly once with
old Mr. Scabious, the city's former engineer, but since the old man had died,
he had kept himself to himself down here in the depths.
So why would he be wandering about in the engine district at this hour?
Intrigued, Wren crept up a ladder onto one of the overhead walkways, from
where she had a good view across the old engine pits to Caul's shack. Caul
was standing outside the door. He had an electric lantern, and he had raised
it up so that he could study a scrap of paper that he held in his other hand.
After a moment, he pocketed the paper and set off toward the city's edge.
Wren scrambled back down the ladder and started following the light.
She felt quite excited. When she was younger, working her way steadily
through the small stock of children's books in the margravine's library, her
favorite stories had been the ones about plucky schoolgirl detectives who
were forever foiling smugglers and unmasking Anti Tractionist spy rings.
She had always regretted that there were no criminals to detect in Vineland.
But hadn't Caul been a burglar once? Maybe he was reverting to his old
ways!
Except, of course, that there was no point stealing anything in
Anchorage, where everyone took what they liked from the hundreds of
abandoned shops and houses. As she
picked her way through the heaps of half-dismantled machinery behind
Caul's shack, she tried to think of a more likely explanation for his
nighttime wanderings. Maybe he couldn't sleep, like her. Maybe he was
worried about something. Wren's friend Tildy had told her that years and
years ago, way back when Anchorage first came to Vineland, Caul had been
in love with Miss Freya and Miss Freya had been in love with Caul too, but
nothing had come of it because Caul had been so strange, even in those
days. Maybe he wandered the streets of the engine district every night,
yearning for his lost love? Or maybe he was in love with someone else and
was going to meet her for a moonlit tryst out on the city's edge?
Pleased by the idea that she would have something really juicy to tell
Tildy in the morning, Wren quickened her pace.
But when he reached the city's edge, Caul did not stop, just hurried down
a stairway that led onto the bare earth and started up the hill, sweeping the
lantern beam ahead of him. Wren waited a moment, then followed, jumping
down into the springy heather and creeping after him up the track that led to
the humming drystone turbine house of old Mr. Scabious's hydroelectricity
plant. Caul did not stop there either, but kept going, climbing between the
apple orchards and across the high pasture, into the woods.
At the top of the island, where the pines filled the air with the smell of
resin and crags poked up through the thin turf like the spines on a dragon's
back, Caul stopped and turned his lantern off and looked around. Fifty feet
behind him, Wren crouched among the crisscross shadows. A faint wind
stirred her hair, and overhead the trees moved their
small hands against the sky.
 Caul looked down at the sleeping city nestled in the curve of the island's
southern shore. Then he turned his back on it, raised his lantern, and
switched it on and off three times. He's gone mad, thought Wren, and then,
No--he's signaling to someone, just like the wicked headmaster in Milly
Crisp and the Twelfth Tier Mystery
And sure enough, down among the empty, rocky bays of the north shore,
another light flashed back an answer.
Caul moved on, and Wren began to follow him again, dropping down the
steep northern flank of the island, out of sight of the city. Maybe he and
Miss Freya had got back together and were too afraid of gossip to let
anyone know? It was a romantic thought, and it made Wren smile to herself
as she tracked Caul down the last precipitous stretch of sheep track, through
a stand of birch trees, and out onto a beach between two headlands.
Miss Freya was not waiting for him. But someone was. A man was
standing at the water's edge, watching as Caul went crunching toward him
down the shingle. Even from a distance, in the faint light of the Aurora,
Wren could tell that he was someone she had never seen before.
At first she could not believe it. There were no strangers in Vineland. The
only people here were those who had come here aboard Anchorage or been
born here since, and Wren knew all of them. But the man on the shore was a
stranger to her, and his voice, when he spoke, was a voice she had never
heard.
"Caul, my old shipmate! Good to see you again."
"Gargle," said Caul, sounding uneasy, and not taking the
hand that the stranger held out for him to shake.
They said more, but Wren was too busy wondering about the newcomer
to listen. Who could he be? How had he come here? What did he want?
When the answer hit her, it was one she didn't like. Lost Boys. That's
what they'd been called, the gang Caul had been part of, which had burgled
Anchorage back in its ice-faring days with their strange, spidery machines.
Caul had left them to come with Miss Freya and Mr. Scabious. Or had he?
Had he been secretly in contact with the Lost Boys all these years, waiting
until the city was settled and prosperous before he called them in to rob it
again?
But the stranger on the beach wasn't a boy. He was a grown man, with
long, dark hair. He wore high boots, like a pirate in a storybook, and a coat
that came down to his knees. He flicked the skirts of the coat back and
stuck his thumbs through his belt, and Wren saw a gun in a holster at his
side.
She knew that she was out of her depth. She wanted to run home and tell
Mum and Dad of the danger. But the two men had wandered closer to her,
and if she ran, she would be seen. She wriggled deeper into the low gorse
bushes behind the beach, timing each movement to coincide with the rasp
of the little waves breaking on the shingle.
The man called Gargle was speaking, sounding as if he were making
some kind of joke, but Caul suddenly cut him off. "What have you come
here for, Gargle? I thought I'd seen the last of Lost Boys. It was a bit of a
shock to find your message under my door. How long have you been
creeping around Anchorage?"
"Since yesterday," said Gargle. "We just dropped by to say
hello and see how you were doing, friendly-like."
"Then why not show yourselves? Why not come and talk to me in
daylight? Why leave messages and drag me out here in the middle of the
night?"
"Honest, Caul, I wanted to. I'd planned to land my limpet on the mooring
beach, all open and aboveboard, but I sent a few crab-cams in first, of
course, just to be sure. Good thing I did, ain't it? What's happened, Caul? I
thought you were going to be a big man in this place! Look at you: oily
overalls and raggedy hair and a week's worth of beard. Is the mad tramp
look big in Anchorage this season? I thought you were going to marry their
margravine, that Freya What's-her-name."
"Rasmussen," said Caul unhappily. He turned away from the other man.
"I thought so too. It didn't work out, Gargle. It's complicated. It's not like
you think it's going to be when you just watch it through the crab-cameras. I
never really fitted in here."
"I should have thought the Drys would welcome you with open arms,"
said Gargle, sounding shocked. "After you brung them that map and
everything."
Caul shrugged. "They were all kind enough. I just don't fit. I don't know
how to talk to them, and talking's important to the Drys. When Mr.
Scabious was alive, it was all right. We worked together and we didn't need
to talk, we had the work instead of words. But now that he's gone ... What
about you, anyway? And what about Uncle? How is Uncle?"
"Like you care!"
"I do. I think of him often. Is he--?"
"The old man's still there, Caul," said Gargle.
"Last time I spoke to you, you had plans to get rid of him, take over ..."
"And I have taken over," said Gargle, with a grin that Wren saw as a
white blur in the dark. "Uncle's not as sharp as he was. He never really got
over that business at Rogues' Roost. So many of his best boys lost, and all
his fault. It nearly did him in, that. He relies on me for nearly everything
nowadays. The boys look up to me."
"I bet they do," said Caul, and there was some meaning in his words that
Wren couldn't understand, as if they were picking up a conversation that
they'd started long ago, before she was even born.
"You said you need my help," said Caul.
"Just thought I'd ask," said Gargle. "For old time's sake."
"What's the plan?"
"There's no plan, exactly." Gargle sounded hurt. "Caul, I didn't come here
on a burgling mission. I don't want to rob your nice Dry friends. I'm just
after one thing, one little thing, a particular small thing that no one will
miss. I've looked with the crab-cams, I've sent my best burglar in, but we
can't see it. So I thought, 'What we need is a man on the inside.' And here
you are. I told my crew, 'We can rely on Caul.'"
"Well, you were wrong," said Caul. His voice was trembly. "I may not fit
in here, but I'm not a Lost Boy either. Not anymore. I'm not going to help
you rob Freya. I want you gone. I won't tell anyone you were here, but I'll
be keeping my eyes and ears open. If I hear a crab-cam nosing about, or see
that something's gone missing, I'll let the Drys know all about you. I'll make
sure they're waiting for you next time
you come sneaking into Anchorage."
He turned and strode up the beach, crashing through the gorse barely a
foot from the place where Wren was hiding. She heard him fall and curse as
he started up the hill, and then the sounds of his going growing fainter and
fainter as he climbed. " Caul !" called Gargle, but not too loud, a sort of
whispering cry, with hurt in it, and disappointment. "Caul!" Then he gave
up and stood still and pensive, running a hand through his hair.
Wren began to move, very carefully and quietly, getting ready for the
moment when he would turn his back on her and she could creep away
between the trees. But Gargle did not turn. Instead, he raised his head and
looked straight at her hiding place and said, "My eyes and ears are sharper
than old Caul's, my friend. You can come out now."
19

3 The Limpet Autolycus

***
WREN STOOD UP AND turned and started running, all in the same
lurching, panicked movement, but before she had taken three steps a second
stranger came out of the dark to her left and seized hold of her, swinging
her around, dumping her on the ground. "Caul!" she started to shout, but a
cold hand went across her mouth. Her captor looked down at her--another
pale face, half hidden by black swags of hair-- and the man from the beach
came running up. A flashlight came on, a thin blue wash of light that made
Wren blink.
 "Gently," said the man called Gargle. "Gently now. It's a woman. A
young woman. I thought as much." He held the flashlight away so that
Wren could see him. She had expected someone Caul's age, but Gargle was
younger. He was smiling. "What's your name, young woman?"
"Wr-Wren," Wren managed to stammer out. "Wr-Wren
N-N-N-N-Natsworthy." And when Gargle had managed to filter out all
those extra N's, his smile grew broader and warmer.
"Natsworthy? Not Tom Natsworthy's child?"
"You know Dad?" asked Wren. In her confusion, she wondered if her
father had also been coming down for secret meetings with the Lost Boys in
the coves of the north shore, but of course Gargle was talking about the old
days, before she was born.
"I remember him well," said Gargle. "He was our guest for a bit aboard
the Screw Worm. He's a good man. Your mother would be his girl, the scar-
faced one? What was she called...? Yes, Hester Shaw. I always thought that
spoke well of Tom Natsworthy, that he could love someone like her.
Appearances don't matter to him. He looks deeper. That's rare among the
Drys."
"What are we going to do with her, Gar?" asked the stranger who had
caught Wren, in an odd, soft voice. "Is she fish food?"
"Let's bring her aboard," said Gargle. "I'd like to get to know Tom
Natsworthy's daughter."
Wren, who had been calming down, grew panicky again. "I have to go
home!" she squeaked, trying to edge away, but Gargle slipped his arm
through hers.
"Just come aboard a moment," he said, smiling pleasantly. "I'd like to
talk. Explain why I'm lurking in your lake like a thief. Well, I am a thief, of
course, but I think you should hear my side of the story before you make
your decision."
"What decision?" asked Wren.
 "The decision about whether or not you tell your parents
and your friends what you've seen here tonight."
Wren thought she trusted him, but she wasn't sure. She had never had to
think about trusting people before. Confused by Gargle's smile, she looked
past him down the beach. The water between the headlands was shining
blue. She thought at first that it was just the afterimage of the flashlight on
her eyes, but then the blue grew brighter, and brighter still, and she saw that
it was a light shining up through the water from below. Something huge
broke the surface about thirty feet offshore.
Behind Caul's shack in the engine district, the limpet that had brought
him to Anchorage lay rusting. It was called the Screw Worm, and Wren and
her friends had often played hide-and-seek between its crook-kneed legs
when they were children. She had always thought it a comical sort of thing,
with its big flat feet and its windows at the front like boggly eyes. She had
never imagined how smoothly a limpet would move, how sleek its curved
hull would look, moonlight sliding off it with the water as it waded to the
beach.
This limpet was smaller than the Screw Worm, and its body was flatter,
more like a tick's than a spider's. Wren thought it was painted with jagged
camouflage patterns, but it was hard to be sure in the moonlight. Through
the bulging windows she could see a small boy working the controls, his
face distorted by the water draining down the glass. He brought the machine
to a stop at the water's edge, and a ramp came down out of its belly with a
shush of hydraulics and grated against the shingle there.
"The limpet Autolycus," said Gargle, gesturing for Wren
to go aboard. "Pride of the Lost Boy fleet. Come aboard, please. Please. I
promise we won't submerge until we've put you ashore."
"What if more Drys come?" asked the other Lost Boy, who wasn't a boy,
Wren noticed, but a girl, pretty and sullen-looking. "What if Caul raises the
alarm?"
"Caul gave us his promise," said Gargle. "That's good enough for me."
 The girl glared at Wren, not convinced. The short black jerkin that she
wore hung open, and there was a gun stuffed through her belt. don't have a
choice, thought Wren. I'll have to trust Gargle. And once she had decided
that, it was an easy thing to walk up the ramp into the cold blue belly of the
limpet. After all, if Gargle had wanted to murder her, he could have done it
just as easily on the beach.
She was taken aft into what she guessed was Gargle's private cabin,
where hangings hid the dull steel walls and there were books and trinkets
laid about. A joss stick smoldered, masking the mildew-and-metal smell of
the limpet with another smell that made Wren think of sophisticated people
and far-off places. She sat down in a chair while Gargle settled himself on
the bunk. The girl waited at the bulkhead door, still glaring. The little boy
Wren had seen through the window stood behind her, watching Wren with
wide, astonished eyes until Gargle said, "Back to your post, Fishcake."
"But ..."
"Now!"
The boy scampered off. Gargle gave Wren a wry smile. "I'm sorry about
that. Fishcake's a newbie, ten years old and
fresh from the Burglarium. He's never seen a Dry before, except on the
crab-cam screens. And you such a pretty one too."
Wren blushed and looked down at the floor, where her boots were
leaking muddy water over Gargle's rich Stamboul rugs. The Burglarium
was where the Lost Boys were trained, she remembered. They were
kidnapped from the underdecks of raft towns when they were too young to
even know it, taken down to the sunken city of Grimsby, and trained in all
the arts of thieving. And crab-cams were the robot cameras they used to spy
on their victims. Miss Freya had made her pupils do a whole project on the
Lost Boys. At the time, Wren had thought it a pointless thing to have to
learn about.
Gargle turned to the girl at the door. "Remora, our guest looks chilly.
Fetch her some hot chocolate, won't you?"
 "I didn't know there were any Lost Girls," said Wren when the girl had
gone.
"A lot's changed in Grimsby since Caul was last there," Gargle replied.
"Just between the two of us, Wren, I pretty much run the old place now. I
managed to get rid of a lot of the rough, bullying boys who surrounded
Uncle, and I sort of persuaded him to start bringing girls down as well as
boys. It was doing us no good living without girls. They're a civilizing
influence."
Wren looked toward the door. She could see the girl called Remora
clattering pans about in some sort of kitchen. She didn't look to Wren like a
civilizing influence. "So is she your wife?" she asked, and then, not wanting
to seem too prim, "Or your girlfriend or something?"
In the kitchen, Remora looked up sharply. Gargle said,
24
"Mora? No! The fact is, some of the girls have turned out to be better
thieves than the boys. Remora's one of the best burglars we've got. Just as
young Fishcake is the best mechanic, for all his tender years. I wanted only
the best with me on this mission, see, Wren. There's something in
Anchorage that I need very badly. I saw it all those years ago, when I was
here with Caul aboard the Screw Worm, but I didn't steal it then because I
didn't think it was of any use."
"What is it?" asked Wren.
Gargle did not answer her at once but waited, studying her face, as if he
wanted to be quite sure that she could be trusted with what he was about to
tell her. Wren liked that. He was not treating her like a child, the way most
people still did. "A young woman," he'd called her, and that was how he
was speaking to her.
"I hate this," he said at last, leaning toward her, looking intently into her
eyes. "You have to believe me. I hate coming in secret like this. I would
rather be open, steer the Autolycus into your harbor and say, 'Here we are,
your friends from Grimsby, come to ask your help.' If Caul had prospered
here, the way I hoped he would, that might have been possible. But as it is,
who'd trust us? We're Lost Boys. Burglars. They'd never believe that all we
want from you is one book, one single book from your margravine's
library."
Remora came back into the cabin and handed Wren a tin mug, full of hot,
delicious chocolate. "Thank you," said Wren, glad of the distraction,
because she didn't want Gargle to see how shocked she was by what he had
just said. Miss Freya's library was one of Wren's favorite places; a treasure
cave filled with thousands and thousands of wonderful old books.
It had been on the upper floors of the Winter Palace once, but nobody
lived on those floors now and Miss Freya had said it was a waste heating
them just for the books' sake, so the library had been moved downstairs....
"That's why you can't find what you want!" she said suddenly. "The
books have all been rearranged since you were last here!"
Gargle nodded, smiling at her admiringly. "Quite right," he said. "It could
take our crab-cams weeks to find the right one, and we don't have weeks to
waste. So I was wondering, Miss Natsworthy, if you'd help us."
Wren had just taken a slurp of chocolate. Anchorage's supplies of
chocolate had run out years ago, and she had forgotten how good it tasted,
but when Gargle asked for her help she almost choked on it. "Me?" she
spluttered. "I'm not a burglar...."
"I wouldn't ask you to become one," said Gargle. "But your father's a
clever man. Friendly with the margravine, from what I remember. I bet you
could find out from him where the book we want might be. Just find it and
tell me, and I'll send Remora in to do the rest. It's called the Tin Book."
Wren had been about to refuse, but the fact that she had never heard of
the book he named made her hesitate. She'd been expecting him to ask
about one of Anchorage's treasures: the great illuminated Acts of the Ice
Gods, or Wormwold's Historia Anchoragia. She said, "Who on earth would
want a whole book about tin?"
Gargle laughed, as if she'd made a joke that he liked. "It's
not about tin," he said. "That's what it's made of. Sheets of metal."
 Wren shook her head. She'd never seen anything like that. "Why do you
want it?" she asked.
"Because we're burglars, and I've learned that it's valuable," said Gargle.
"It must be! To come all this way ..."
"There are people who collect such things: old books and things. We can
trade it for stuff we need." Gargle hesitated, still watching her, and then said
earnestly, "Please, Wren, just ask your father. Always nosing about in
museums and libraries, he was, when I knew him. He might know where
the Tin Book is."
Wren thought about it as she drank the rest of the chocolate. If he had
been asking her for the illuminated Acts, or for some treasured classic, she
would have said no at once. But a book made of metal, one that she'd never
even heard of ... it couldn't be very important, could it? It would probably
never be missed. And Gargle seemed to want it very badly.
"I'll ask," she said doubtfully.
"Thank you!" Gargle took her hands in his. His hands were warm, and
his eyes were rather lovely. Wren thought how nice it would be to tell Tildy
that she'd spent the small hours of the night drinking cocoa in the cabin of a
dashing underwater pirate, and then remembered that she would never be
able to tell Tildy or anybody else about Gargle and the Autolycus. That
made it even nicer somehow. She had never had a proper secret before.
"I'll meet you up in the trees on the hilltop around six
tomorrow," Gargle said. "Is that all right? You can get away?"
"That's suppertime. I'd be missed. My mum ..."
"Noon, then. Noon, or just after."
"All right..."
"And for now--would you like Remora to walk you home?"
"I'll find my way," said Wren. "I often walk about in the dark."
 "We'll make a Lost Girl of you yet," said Gargle, and laughed to show her
he was only joking. He stood up, and she stood up too, and they moved
through the limpet's passageways toward the exit ramp, the newbie
Fishcake peeking out at them from the control cabin. Outside, the night was
cold and the moon shone and the water was lapping against the shore as if
nothing had happened. Wren waved and said good-bye and waved again,
and then walked quickly up the beach and through the trees.
Gargle watched until she was out of sight. The girl Remora came and
stood beside him, and slipped her hand into his. "You trust her?" she asked.
"Don't know. Maybe. It's worth a try. We haven't time to hang about here
searching for the thing ourselves, and we can't do much with the crab-cams
in this dump. These Drys remember us. They'll soon put two and two
together if they start hearing the patter of tiny magnetic feet inside their air
ducts. But don't worry--I'll tell Fishcake to set a couple on watch around
Wren's house, so we'll know if she squeals to her people about us."
"And what if she does?"
"Then we'll kill them all," said Gargle. "And I'll let you do
Wren yourself, with your pretty little knife." And he kissed her, and they
turned and went back aboard.
But Wren, knowing none of this, walked home with a giddy tumble of
thoughts inside her head, half guilt, half pleasure, feeling as if she'd grown
up more in the past few hours than in all the fifteen years that had gone
before.

4 The Legend of the Tin Book

***
THE NEXT DAY DAWNED fair, the sky above the lake harebell blue,
the water clear as glass, each of the islands of Vineland sitting neat and still
upon its own reflection. Wren, exhausted by her adventures in the night,
slept late, but outside her window, Anchorage was waking up. Woodsmoke
rose from the chimneys of the city's thirty inhabited houses, and fishermen
called out good morning to each other as they made their way down the
stairways to the mooring beach.
On the north side of the lake rose a brindled mountain, far higher than the
Dead Hills to the south. Its lower slopes were green with scrub and stands
of pine and steep meadows where wildflowers grew, and in one of these
meadows a group of deer was grazing. There were many deer in the woods
on the green shore, and a few had even swum across to set up home upon
the wilder islands. People had spent a
lot of time debating how they had come here: whether they had survived
since the fall of the old American Empire, or come down from the frozen
country to the north, or made their way here from some larger pocket of
green much farther west. But all Hester Natsworthy cared about, as she
drew back her bowstring in the shelter of the trees downwind, was how
much meat was on them.
The bow made a quick, soft sound. The deer leaped into the air and came
down running, bounding uphill into the shelter of the scrub--all except the
largest doe, who fell dead with Hester's arrow in her heart and her thin legs
kicking and kicking. Hester walked up the hill and pulled the arrow free,
cleaning the point on a handful of dry grass before she replaced it in the
quiver on her back. The blood was very bright in the sunlight. She dipped
her finger in the wound and smeared some on her forehead, muttering her
prayer to the Goddess of the Hunt so that the doe's ghost would not come
bothering her. Then she heaved the carcass onto her shoulder and started
back down the hill to her boat.
Her fellow Vinelanders seldom hunted deer. They said it was because the
fish and birds of the lake were meat enough, but Hester suspected it was
because the deer's pretty fur coats and big, dark eyes touched their soft
hearts and spoiled their aim. Hester's heart was not soft, and hunting was
what she was best at. She enjoyed the stillness and solitude that she found
in the morning woods, and sometimes she enjoyed being away from Wren.
Wistfully, Hester remembered the little laughing girl that Wren had once
been, playing splish-splash on the lakeshore or snuggling on Hester's lap
while Hester sang to her. As
 Wren had looked lovingly up at her and run her chubby fingers over the
old scar that split Hester's face in half, Hester had thought that here at last
was someone who could love her for what she was, and not care what she
looked like. Because although Tom always said he didn't care, Hester had
never shaken off the faint fear that he must, deep down, want someone
prettier than her.
But Wren had grown up, and there had come a day, when she was eight
or nine, when she started to see Hester the same way everyone else did. She
didn't have to say anything; Hester knew that pitying, embarrassed look
well enough, and she could sense Wren's awkwardness when they were out
together and met her friends. Her daughter was ashamed of her.
"It's just a phase," said Tom, when she complained of it to him. Tom
adored Wren, and it seemed to Hester that he always took Wren's side.
"She'll soon be over it. You know what children are like."
But Hester didn't know what children are like. Her own childhood had
ended when she was very young, when her mother and the man she thought
was her father had both been murdered by her real father, Thaddeus
Valentine. She had no idea what it was like to be a normal girl. As Wren
grew and became more willful, and her grandfather's long, curved nose
stuck out of her face like a knife pushed through a portrait, Hester found it
harder and harder to be patient with her. Once or twice, guiltily, she had
caught herself wishing that Wren had never been born and that it was just
her and Tom again, the way it had been in the old days, on the bird roads.
***
When Wren awoke at last, the sun was high. Through her open window
came the calls of the fishermen down at the mooring beach, the laughter of
children, the steady thud of an axe as Dad chopped wood in the yard
outside. There was still a faint taste of chocolate in her mouth. She lay for a
moment, enjoying the thought that none of the people she could hear,
nobody else in all of Vineland, knew the things she knew. Then she
scrambled out of bed and ran to the bathroom to wash. Her reflection
peered out at her from the speckled mirror above the sink: a long, narrow,
clever face. She hated her beaky nose and the scattering of spots around her
too-small mouth, but she liked her eyes: large, wide-set eyes, the irises deep
gray. "Mariner's eyes," Dad had called them once, and even though Wren
wasn't sure exactly what that meant, she liked the sound of it. She tied back
her coppery hair and remembered Gargle calling her pretty. She'd never
thought herself pretty before, but she saw now that he was right.
Running downstairs, she found the kitchen empty, Mum's shirts hanging
white on the line outside the window. Mum was oddly vain about her
clothes. She dressed like a man, in outfits she had taken from the abandoned
shops on the Boreal Arcade, and she was fussy about keeping things
washed and ironed and safe from moths, as if wearing good clothes would
make people forget her horrible scarred ruin of a face. It was just another
example of how sad she was, thought Wren, pouring herself a glass of milk
from the jug in the cold store, smearing honey on one of yesterday's
oatcakes. It was all very well, but it made life difficult for Wren,
having a mum who looked so weird. Tildy's dad, old Mr. Smew, was only
about three feet tall, but he was an Anchorage man through and through, so
nobody really noticed his height anymore. Mum was different. She was
unfriendly, so nobody ever forgot that she was hideous, and an outsider, and
that sometimes made Wren feel like an outsider too.
Maybe that was why she felt so drawn to the Lost Boys. Maybe Gargle
had seen the outsider in her, and that was what had made him confide in her.
She went out into the yard, eating the oatcake, careful not to get honey on
Mum's shirts. Dad was setting small logs one by one on the chopping block
and cutting them in half with the wood axe. He had his old straw hat on,
because his brown hair didn't quite cover the top of his head anymore and
his bald patch sometimes caught the sun. He stopped work when he saw
Wren, putting one hand to his chest. Wren thought he looked as if he was
glad of an excuse for a rest and wondered if his old wound was hurting him
again, but all he said was, "So you're up at last?"
"No, I'm just sleepwalking," she said, kicking a few sticks of wood out of
her way and sitting down beside him. She kissed his cheek and rested her
head on his shoulder. Bees buzzed around the hives at the end of the yard,
and Wren sat and listened to them and wondered how to broach the subject
of the Tin Book of Anchorage. Then she decided to ask him something else
instead.
 "Dad," she said, "you remember the Lost Boys?"
Dad looked uneasy, as he always did when she asked him
about the old days. He fiddled with the bracelet on his wrist, the broad
red-gold wedding bracelet on which his initials were entwined with Mum's.
"Lost Boys," he said. "Yes, I'm not likely to forget them...."
"I was wondering about them," she said. "Were they very wicked?"
"Well, you know Caul," said Dad. "He's not wicked, is he?"
"He's a bit weird."
"Well, maybe, but he's a good man. If you were in trouble, you could turn
to Caul. It's thanks to him we found this place, you know. If he hadn't
escaped from Grimsby and brought us Snori Ulvaeusson's map ..."
"Oh, I know that story," said Wren. "Anyway, it's not Caul I was
wondering about. I was thinking of the others, back in Grimsby. They were
pretty bad, weren't they?"
Tom shook his head. "Their leader, Uncle, was a nasty bit of work. He
made them do bad things. But I think the Lost Boys themselves were a mix
of good and bad, just like you'd find anywhere. There was a little chap
called Gargle, I remember. He's the one who saved Caul when Uncle tried
to kill him, and gave Caul the map to bring to us."
"So he was as brave as Caul?"
"In a way, yes."
"And you met him? How old was he?"
"Oh, only a youngster, as I say," said her father, thinking back to his
brief, frightening time with the Lost Boys. "Nine or ten. Maybe younger."
Wren felt pleased. If Gargle had been nine when Dad
met him, he couldn't be more than twenty-five now, which wasn't so very
much older than herself. And he was a good person who had helped save
Anchorage.
"Why this sudden interest?" her father asked.
"Oh, no reason," said Wren casually. It felt strange, lying to Dad. He was
the person she loved the most in the whole world. He had always treated
Wren like a friend, not a child, and she had always told him everything
before. She suddenly wanted very much to tell him what had happened on
the north shore and ask him what to do. But she couldn't, could she? It
would not be fair to Gargle.
Dad was still looking at her in a puzzled way, so she said, "I just got
thinking about them, that's all."
"Because they're Lost?" asked Dad. "Or because they're Boys?"
"Guess," said Wren. She finished her oatcake and planted a sticky kiss on
his cheek. "I'm going to see Tildy. 'Bye' "
She went out through the gate at the side of the yard and off down Dog
Star Court with the sunlight shining on her hair, and Tom stood watching
her until she turned the corner, feeling proud of his tall, beautiful daughter
and still amazed, even after all these years, that he and Hester had made this
new person.
In the shadows beneath the woodpile, a wireless crab-cam trained its lens
on him. In an underwater cave on one of the smaller islets, his image
fluttered on a round blue screen.
"She nearly gave us away' " said the boy called Fishcake. "He'll guess!"
Gargle patted his shoulder. "Don't worry. Natsworthy's as dim as the
others. He doesn't suspect a thing."
***
Wren walked briskly toward the Smew house but did not turn in through
the gate. She knew full well that Tildy and her family would all be up in
their orchard this morning, picking apples. She had even promised to go
and help. How could she have imagined that she would find something so
much more important to do?
She cut through the Boreal Arcade, glancing at her reflection in the dusty
windows of the old shops, then ran along Rasmussen Prospekt and up the
ramp that led to the Winter Palace. The big front doors were always open in
summer. Wren ran in and shouted, "Miss Freya?" but the only answers were
the echoes of her own voice bouncing back at her from the high ceilings.
She went back outside and followed the graveled path around the foot of the
palace, and there was Miss Freya in her garden, picking beans and putting
them in a basket.
"Wren!" she said happily.
"Hello, Miss Freya!"
"Oh, just Freya, please," said Miss Freya, stooping to set her basket
down. It seemed to be the main purpose of Miss Freya's life to persuade
everybody to call her simply "Freya," but she had never had much success
with it. The older people all remembered that she was the last of the House
of Rasmussen and still liked to call her "Margravine" or "Your Radiance" or
"Light of the Ice Fields." The younger ones knew her as their teacher, so to
them she was always "Miss Freya."
"After all," she said, smiling at Wren as she dabbed the perspiration from
her round face with a handkerchief, "you're not a schoolgirl anymore. We
might soon be colleagues. Have
you thought any more about coming to help me with the little ones once
apple harvest's over?"
Wren tried to look as if she liked the idea without actually promising
she'd do it. She was afraid that if she agreed to come and help run the
school, she might end up like Miss Freya, large and kindly and unmarried.
Changing the subject as swiftly as she could, she asked, "Can I have a look
in the library?"
"Of course!" said Miss Freya, as Wren had known she would. "You don't
need to ask! Was there a particular book ...?"
 "Just something Daddy mentioned once. The Tin Book."
Wren blushed as she said it, for she wasn't used to telling lies, but Miss
Freya didn't notice. "That old thing?" she said. "Oh, it's hardly a book,
Wren. More of a curio. Another of the House of Rasmussen's many hand-
me-downs."
They went together to the library. It was small wonder, Wren thought,
that the Lost Boys needed her help. This huge room was crammed with
books from floor to ceiling, arranged according to some private system of
Miss Freya's. Tatty old paperbacks by Chung-Mai Spofforth and Rifka
Boogie sat side by side with the wooden caskets containing precious old
scrolls and grimoires. The caskets had the names of the books they held
written on the backs in small gold letters, but many were too worn or faded
to read, and Lost Boys probably weren't very good readers anyway. How
would a poor burglar know where to start?
Miss Freya used a set of steps to reach one of the upper shelves. She was
really much too plump to go clambering about on spindly ladders, and
Wren felt guilty and afraid that
she might fall, but Miss Freya knew exactly what she was looking for,
and she was soon down again, flushed from her exertions and holding a
casket with the arms of the House of Rasmussen inlaid in narwhal ivory.
"Have a look," she said, unlocking it with a key that she took from a
hook on a nearby wall.
Inside, on a lining of silicone silk, lay the thing that Gargle had
described. It was a book about eight inches high by six across, made from
twenty sheets of tin bound with a rusty twirl of wire. The sheets were thick
and dull and patched with rust, folded over at the edges to stop readers from
cutting their fingers on the jagged metal. On the topmost sheet someone had
scratched a circle with a crudely drawn eagle inside it; there was lettering
around the edge of the circle and more below, but all too worn for Wren to
make out any words. The other sheets had aged better, and the long rows of
letters, numbers, and symbols that had been laboriously scratched into their
surfaces were still faintly legible. What they meant Wren could not say. The
faded paper label on the back cover, stamped with the arms of Anchorage
and the words Ex Libris Rasmussen, was the only thing that made any sense
at all.
"It's not very impressive, is it?" asked Miss Freya. "It's supposed to be
very old, though. There's a legend about it, which the historian Wormwold
quotes in his Historia Anchoragia. Long ago, in the terrible aftermath of the
Sixty Minute War, the people of Anchorage were refugees, sailing a fleet of
leaky boats across the northern seas in search of an island where they could
rebuild their city. Along the way they encountered a wrecked submarine.
The plagues and
radiation storms had killed off all her crew except for one man, who was
dying. He gave a document to my ancestor Dolly Rasmussen and told her to
preserve it at all costs. So she kept it, and it was handed down from mother
to daughter through the House of Rasmussen, until the paper crumbled.
Then a copy was made, but because paper was scarce in those years, it was
written on old food tins hammered flat. Of course, the people who did the
copying probably had no more idea what it all meant than you or I. The
mere fact that it came from the lost world before the war was enough to
make it sacred."
Wren turned the metal pages, and the wire that bound them scratched and
squeaked. She tried to imagine the long-ago scribe who had so
painstakingly engraved these symbols, working by the light of a seal-fat
lamp in the dark of that centuries-long winter, copying out each wavering
column in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the world the war
had destroyed. "What was it for?" she wondered. "Why did the submarine
man think it was so important?"
"Nobody knows, Wren. Maybe he died before he could say, or maybe it's
just been forgotten. The Tin Book is just another of the many mysteries the
Ancients left us. All we know is that the name of an old god crops up
several times among all those numbers: Odin. So maybe it was a religious
text. Oh, and the picture on the front is the presidential seal of the American
Empire."
Wren looked critically at the eagle. "It looks more like some sort of bird
to me."
 Miss Freya laughed. She looked beautiful, standing there
in the wash of sunlight from the library windows, as big and golden as
the Earth Goddess herself, and Wren loved her, and felt ashamed for
planning to rob her. She asked a few more questions about the Tin Book,
but she wasn't really interested in the answers. She gave the thing back as
soon as she could and left Miss Freya to her gardening, promising to come
back soon and talk about becoming a teacher.
The day was passing quickly, the shadow of the Winter Palace sweeping
across the city's rusty deck plates as the sun climbed the sky. Soon it would
be time for Wren to keep her rendezvous with Gargle. She was starting to
feel more and more nervous about it. However dashing and brave and
handsome he was, however much she liked the idea of helping the Lost
Boys, she could not steal from people she had known all her life. Sooner or
later the Tin Book was sure to be missed, and when it was, Miss Freya
would remember the interest Wren had shown in it and know who was
responsible.
And what was the Tin Book, anyway? What made Gargle want it so?
Wren was not stupid. She knew that documents from the Ancient Era
sometimes held clues to things that were very dangerous indeed: Dad had
told her once that London, the city he grew up in, had been blown entirely
to pieces by a machine called MEDUSA. What if the Tin Book contained
instructions for building something like that and Gargle had found a way of
reading it?
She wandered to the south side of Anchorage and down
the well-worn fishermen's stairs to the mooring beach, where she sat in
the shade of an old, rusted-up caterpillar unit and tried to work out what to
do. Her huge secret, which had seemed so exciting, was beginning to feel
like a bit of a burden. She wished there was someone she could share it
with. But who? Certainly not Mum or Dad or Miss Freya; they would be
horrified at the thought of Lost Boys in Vineland. Tildy would probably
panic too. She imagined telling Nate Sastrugi and asking him to help her,
but somehow, now that she knew Gargle, Nate Sastrugi seemed not nearly
so handsome: just a boy, rather dull and slow, who didn't know much about
anything except fishing.
 She didn't notice the rowboat nosing in toward the beach until her mother
got out of it and shouted, "Wren? What are you doing? Come and help me
with this."
"This" was a poor little deer, stone dead with a hole in its chest, and Mum
was dragging it out of the boat and getting ready to take it up to Dog Star
Court, where she would butcher it and salt the meat for winter. Wren stood
up and went toward her, then noticed how high the sun was. "I can't!" she
said.
"What?"
"I've got to meet someone."
Hester put the deer down and stared at her. "Who? That Sastrugi boy, I
suppose?"
Wren had been trying not to start another argument, but the tone of
Mum's voice was enough to make her temper flare. "Well, why not?" she
asked. "Why shouldn't I? I don't have to be as miserable as you all the time.
I'm not a child
anymore. Just because no boys ever liked you when you were my age--"
"When I was your age' Mum said, low and dangerous, "I saw things you
wouldn't believe. I know what people are capable of. That's why we've
always tried to protect you and keep you close and safe, your dad and me."
"Oh, I'm safe, all right," said Wren bitterly. "What do you think is going
to happen to me in Vineland? Nothing ever happens to anybody here. You're
always hinting about what a terrible time you had and saying how lucky I
am compared with you, but I bet your old life was more exciting than this! I
bet Dad thinks so! I've seen the way he looks at that picture of your old
ship. He loved being out in the world, flying about, and I bet he would still
be if he hadn't got himself stuck here with you."
Mum hit her. It was a hard, sudden slap, with the flat of Mum's open
hand, and as Wren jerked her head backward, away from the blow, Mum's
wedding bracelet grazed her cheek. Wren had not been slapped since she
was small. She felt her face burning, and when she touched it, little bright
specks of blood came away on her fingers from where the bracelet had
caught her. She tried to speak, but she could only gasp.
"There," said Mum gruffly. She seemed almost as shocked as Wren. She
reached out to touch Wren's face, gently this time, but Wren whirled away
from her and ran along the beach and into the cool shadows under
Anchorage, running beneath the old city and out into the pastures behind,
with her mother's voice somewhere behind her shouting
furiously, "Wren! Come back! Get back here!" She kept to the woods so
the pickers in the orchards wouldn't see her, and ran and ran, barely
thinking about where she was running to, until she arrived tearful and out of
breath among the crags at the top of the island, and there was Gargle,
waiting for her.
5 news from the Sea
***
HE WAS ALL KINDNESS and concern, sitting her down on a mossy
stone, taking off his neckerchief to wipe her face, holding her hand until she
was calm enough to speak. "What is it, Wren? What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Nothing really. My mum. That's all. I hate her."
"Now, I'm certain that isn't true." Gargle knelt down beside her. She
didn't think that he had looked anywhere but at her face since she'd found
him, and his eyes, behind the smoked blue glasses that he wore, were a
friend's eyes, kind and worried. "You're lucky to have a mum," he said. "We
Lost Boys, we're just kidnapped when we're little. We none of us know who
our mums or our dads are, though we dream about them sometimes, and
think how sweet it would be if we could meet them. If your mum's hard on
you, I think it's just a sign that she's worried about you."
"You don't know her' said Wren, and held her breath to stop hiccuping.
When she had finished, she said, "I saw the book."
"The Tin Book?" Gargle sounded surprised, as if he'd been so worried
about Wren that he'd forgotten the thing that had brought him to Vineland in
'
the first place. "Thank you ." he said. "You've done in a morning what
might have taken a limpet crew a week or more. Where is it?"
"I don't know," said Wren. "I mean, I don't know if I should tell you. Not
unless you tell me what it is. Miss Freya told me all about its history, but ...
why would anybody want it? What's it for?"
Gargle stood up and walked away from her, staring out between the
pines. Wren thought he looked angry and was afraid that she'd offended
him, but when he turned to her again, he just seemed sad.
"We're in trouble, Wren," he said. "You've heard of Professor
Pennyroyal?"
 "Of course," said Wren. "He shot my dad. He nearly led Anchorage to
ruin. He stole Mum and Dad's airship and flew off in her...."
"Well, he wrote a book about it," Gargle said. "It's called Predator's
Gold, and in it he talks about what he calls 'parasite-pirates' who come up
from under the ice to burgle cities. It's mostly rubbish, but it sold like
hotcakes among the cities we used to live off of: the North Atlantic raft
towns and the ice runners. They all started installing Old Tech burglar
alarms and checking their undersides for parasites once a day, which makes
it kind of hard to attach a limpet to them."
Wren thought about Professor Pennyroyal. All her life
she'd been hearing stories of that wicked man. She'd seen the long, L-
shaped scar on Dad's chest where Mrs. Scabious had opened him up to fetch
the bullet out. And now it turned out that the Lost Boys were Pennyroyal's
victims too!
"But I still don't see why you need the Tin Book," she said.
"We've had to send our limpets farther and farther south," Gargle
explained. "Right down into the Middle Sea and the Southern Ocean, where
the raft cities don't bother to keep watch for us. At least they never used to.
This past summer, we've started losing limpets. Three went south and never
returned. No word, no distress signal, nothing. I think maybe one of those
cities has got hold of some kind of device that lets them see us coming, and
they've been sinking our limpets, or capturing them. And if some of our
people are captured, and tortured, and talk ..."
"They might come looking for Grimsby?"
"Exactly." Gargle looked thoughtfully at her, as if he was glad he had
chosen to tell all this to such an intelligent, perceptive girl. He took her
hands again. "We need something that will get us ahead of the Drys again,
Wren. That's why I need the Tin Book."
"But it's just a load of old numbers," said Wren. "It came off some old
American submarine ..."
 "Exactly," said Gargle. "Those Ancients had subs way ahead of anything
we've got. Ships the size of cities that could cruise right around the world
without once having to come up for air. If we had that kind of technology,
we'd never have to fear the Drys again. We could set the whole of Grimsby
moving and they'd never find us."
"So you think the Tin Book is a plan for a submarine?"
"Maybe not exactly. But there might be enough clues in there to help us
learn how they worked. Please, Wren. Tell us where it is."
Wren shook her head. "Miss Freya and the rest aren't as scary as you
think," she promised him. "Come down to the city with me. Introduce
yourself. I asked my dad about you. He says you helped save Vineland. And
you've been hurt by Pennyroyal, just like us. I expect Miss Freya will be
happy to give you the Tin Book as a gift."
Gargle sighed. "I'd like that, Wren. I'd love it. But it would all take time.
There'd be so much explaining to do, so much mistrust to overcome. And
all the time we stay here, more limpets might be disappearing, and
whoever's taking them may already be zeroing in on Grimsby. I'm sorry,
Wren. We have to do it the Lost Boy way. Tell me where the book is, and
we'll take it tonight and be off. And maybe, when we have it and Grimsby's
safe again, maybe then I'll return and introduce myself, and there'll be peace
and friendship between our two cities."
Wren pulled free of him and hurried away between the trees, almost
running, to a place where she could look down upon the rooftops of
Anchorage. He didn't mean what he had said about coming back, she was
sure of that. He had just said it to make her feel better. Once he left this
place, he would never return. Why should he, when he had a whole world to
roam in? A world of cities that floated and flew and rolled beneath skies
filled with airships. That's what Gargle would be going back to, while she,
all she had to look forward to was being Miss Freya's assistant and growing
old and bored
in Anchorage and one day--if Mum would let her--becoming Mrs. Nate
Sastrugi and having a lot of bored little children of her own.
 "Wren," he said behind her.
"No," she said. She turned to face him, trying not to let her voice shake
too much. "No, I won't tell you where to find the book. I'll take it myself,
and bring it to you tonight. And then I'll come with you." She laughed and
made a big gesture with both arms, trying to take in Anchorage, the lake,
the hills beyond, the whole Dead Continent. "I hate this place. It's too small
for me. I want to go with you when you leave. I want to see Grimsby, and
the Hunting Ground and the Traction Cities and the bird roads. That's my
price. I'll bring you the Tin Book if you'll take me with you when you
leave."

6 We Are Making a new world

***
late into the night, long after the Stalker Works were quiet and empty, her
busy fingers tinkering inside Grike's chest cavity or in his open brain. And
as she worked, she talked to him, filling the old Stalker in on things he'd
missed during his years in the grave. She told him of how the hard-line
faction called the Green Storm had seized power in the Anti-Tractionist
nations of Old Asia and the North, and of their long war against the
Traction Cities. She told him of their immortal leader, the Stalker Fang.
"A STALKER?" he asked, surprised. He was growing used to the Green
Storm's Stalkers: mindless, faceless things who couldn't even recharge
themselves but had to have their batteries laboriously extracted and
replaced after a few days of action. They were the sort of creatures who
gave the living
dead such a bad name. He could not imagine one of them leading armies.
"Oh, the Stalker Fang is nothing like the rest," Dr. Zero assured him.
"She is beautiful, and brilliant. She has an Old Tech brain, like yours, and
all sorts of special adaptations. And she was built using the body of a
famous League agent, Anna Fang. The Storm like people to think that Anna
Fang has come back from the dead to lead our glorious war against the
barbarians."
 The thought of war stirred instincts deep in Grike's Stalker brain. He
flexed his hands, but the blades that he knew should be housed inside them
did not spring out.
Dr. Zero said, "I have removed your finger-glaives."
"HOW AM I TO FIGHT IF I AM UNARMED?" he asked.
"Mr. Grike," Dr. Zero told him, "if we just wanted another lumbering
battle-Stalker, I could have built one myself. There is no shortage of dead
bodies to Resurrect. But you are an antique, more complex than anything
we can build. You're not just a thing, you're a person." She touched his
harmless hands. "It made a nice change, to work on a Stalker who was not
just another soldier."
An airship named The Sadness of Things arrived to carry Grike to a place
they called Forward Command. He stood at Dr. Zero's side in the
observation gondola as they flew west over high snow-clad mountains, then
the plains of the Eastern Hunting Ground, which were Green Storm
territory now, with here and there the wreck of a destroyed Traction City
rusting in the grass.
"This land was all captured in the first weeks of the war,
nearly fourteen years ago'' said Dr. Zero, still keen to educate her patient.
"At first the barbarians were taken completely by surprise when our air
fleets came sweeping down on them out of the mountains. We drove west,
herding terrified cities ahead of us, smashing any that dared turn and fight.
But slowly the cities started to group together and defend themselves. A
union of German-speaking industrials called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft
stopped our advance westward and pushed us back to the Rustwater
Marshes, and a rabble of Slavic Traction Towns attacked our settlements in
Khamchatka and the Altai Shan.
"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.
That face, that scarred face.
It fluttered in his brain like a moth, and was gone.
7 She's Leaving Home
***
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.
He lay in the dark and listened to his heart beat. Sometimes it seemed to
him to falter, and sometimes there was a pain, or not quite a pain but a sense
that something was wrong inside him, where Pennyroyal's bullet had torn
into his body all those years ago. Exercise always made it worse. He should
not have cut those logs this morning. But the logs had needed cutting, and if
he had not cut them, he would have had to explain to Hester about the pains
around his heart, and she would worry and make him go and consult
Windolene Scabious, who was Anchorage's doctor, and Windolene would
want to examine him, and he was afraid of what she might discover. It was
better not to think about it. Better just to thank the gods for these good years
he'd had with Hester and with Wren, and worry about the future when it
happened.
But his future was already running toward him, down
 Rasmussen Prospekt, through the Boreal Arcade, up Dog Star Court; it
was through the front gate and sprinting up the steps; it was pounding hard
at his front door.
"Great Quirke!" said Tom, startled, sitting up. Beside him, Hester
groaned and rolled over, surfacing slowly. Tom threw the covers off and ran
downstairs in his nightshirt. Through the glass panels of the front door a
blurred figure loomed like a ghost, fists hammering the woodwork. A voice
called Tom's name.
"Caul?" he said. "It's open."
This was not the first time Caul had awoken Tom with bad news. Once
before, when Anchorage was iceborne and Hester had taken off alone
aboard the Jenny, he had appeared out of the night to warn Tom what was
happening. He had been just a boy then. Now, with his long hair and his
beard and his wide, wild eyes, he looked like some maniac prophet. He
burst into the hall, knocking over the hatstand and sweeping Tom's
collection of Ancient mobile telephone casings to the floor.
"Caul, calm down!" said Tom. "What's the matter?"
"Wren," said the former Lost Boy. "It's Wren ..."
"Wren's in her room," said Tom, but he felt suddenly uneasy, recalling the
strange way Wren had hugged him when she said good night, and that
scratch on her cheek which she'd said she got walking into a thornbush.
He'd sensed that something was wrong. "Wren?" he called up the stairs.
"She's gone!" shouted Caul. "Gone? Gone where?"
Hester was halfway down the stairs, pulling on her shirt.
She ran back up ; and Tom heard her kick the door of Wren's bedroom
open. "Gods and goddesses!" she shouted, and reappeared at the top of the
stairs. "Tom, he's right. She's taken her bag and her coat...."
Tom said, "I expect she's out with Tildy Smew on some midnight jaunt.
This is Vineland. What harm can come to her?"
 "Lost Boys," said Caul. He was pacing to and fro, his hands deep in the
pockets of his filthy old coat. The wild-animal smell of him filled the hall.
"You remember Gargle? He left a note. Wanted me to help him. Stealing
something. Don't know what. Wren must have followed me and got caught.
He's using her. She's gone to him."
Hester went into the kitchen and came back with a square of paper.
"Tom, look ..."
It was a note from their daughter.
"Dearest Daddy and Mummy," she had written,
I have decided to leave Vineland. Some
Lost Boys are here. Don't worry, they mean
no harm. They are going to take me with them. I shall see the Raft Cities
and the
Hunting Ground and the whole wide world, and have adventures, like
you did. I'm sorry I
couldn't say goodbye but you would only try to stop me going. I will take
good care of myself and come home soon with all sorts of tales to tell you.
love Wren xxxxx
Hester dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the hall rug. Beneath it, set
into the floor, was the safe where the merchant whose house this had been
once stored his valuables. All it held now were a few cardboard boxes of
ammunition and a gun. Hester pulled the gun out, unwrapping it from its
oilcloth bindings.
"Where are they, Caul?" she asked.
"Het--" said Tom.
"I should have told you sooner," Caul muttered, "but it's Gargle. Gargle.
He saved my life once...."
 "Where?"
"A cove on the north shore. Where the trees come down nearly to the
water. Please, I don't want anyone hurt."
"Should have thought of that before," said Hester, checking the gun's
action. Most of the guns she had taken from the Huntsmen of Arkangel she
had thrown off the city's stern while it was still at sea, but this one she had
kept, just in case. It wasn't as pretty as the others; no snarling wolf's head on
the butt or silver chasing on the barrel. It was just a heavy, black .38
Schadenfreude, an ugly, reliable tool for killing people. She slipped bullets
into its six chambers and snapped it shut, then stuffed it through her belt
and pushed past Tom to the door, snatching her coat from the rack. "Wake
the others," she told him, and went out into the night.
From the top of the island Wren could see the Autolycus squatting like a
beached crab in the cove where she had first seen Gargle. The blue light
from the limpet's open hatch gleamed on the water. She started down the
sheep track toward it, slithering on loose earth, tripping on roots, the
breath cold at the back of her throat as she ran through the trees and the
gorse toward the spider-crab silhouette.
Gargle was standing in the shallows, at the foot of the ramp that led up
through the open hatch. Remora was with him, and as Wren drew near, she
saw Fishcake come down the ramp to join them. "Ready to go?" she heard
Gargle ask.
"Touch of a button," the boy replied.
The limpet's engines were idling, a thin plume of exhaust smoke rising
from sealable vents on its back. A crab-cam glinted as it scurried up one of
the legs and home to its port on the hull. Other cameras were creeping
quickly down the beach, looking so spiderlike that Wren almost wanted to
run away, but she told herself that if she was to travel with the Lost Boys,
she would have to get used to them, so she made herself walk calmly
between them down the shingle.
"It's me," she called softly as Gargle spun toward the sound of her
footsteps. "I've got the Tin Book."
 Anchorage-in-Vineland was waking up, indignant and alarmed. As
Hester climbed the path to the woods, she could hear doors slamming in the
city behind her, and people shouting as they prepared to go and do their bit
against the Lost Boys. Some of the younger men almost caught up with her
as she drew near the top of the island, but she left them behind on the
descent; they stuck to the zigzag path while she just went straight down,
crashing through the brush and surfing down screes in a rattle of bouncing
stones. She felt excited, and happy that Wren needed her at last. Her father
couldn't save her from the Lost Boys. Nobody else in Vineland could. Only
Hester had the strength to deal with
them, and when she had killed them all, Wren would come to her senses
and realize what danger she had been in and be grateful, and she and Hester
would be friends again.
Hester slithered into a briar patch at the hill's foot and looked back. There
was no sign of the others. She pulled the gun out of her belt and started
toward the cove.
"Here," said Wren, sliding the heavy bag off her shoulder and holding it
out to Gargle. "It's in there. My stuff too."
Remora said, "Better tell her, Gar. It's time to go."
Gargle had pulled the Tin Book out and was leafing through it, ignoring
both of them.
"I'm coming with you, remember?" said Wren, starting to grow uneasy
because this wasn't the welcome she'd expected. "I'm coming with you.
That was the deal."
She could hear a childish, whining note creeping into her voice, and
knew that she wasn't coming across as brave and grown-up and
adventurous, which was how she wanted Gargle to see her. It suddenly
occurred to her that she was nothing to him, nothing but a way to get hold
of the Tin Book.
"That's it," said Gargle to himself. He threw Wren's bag back at her, then
handed the Tin Book to Fishcake, who stuffed it into a leather satchel that
hung at his side.
 "I'm coming with you," Wren reminded Gargle. "I am coming with you,
aren't I?"
Gargle moved closer to her. There was a mocking tone in his voice when
he spoke. "Thing is, Wren, I've been having a think about that, and we
haven't got the space after all."
Wren blinked quickly, trying to stop the tears from
coming. Flinging her bag down on the shingle, she shouted, "You
promised you'd take me with you!" She could see Remora watching her,
whispering something to little Fishcake that made him smirk too. How
stupid they must think her!
"I want to see things!" she shouted. "I want to do things! I don't want to
stay here and marry Nate Sastrugi and be a schoolteacher and get old and
die!"
Gargle seemed to be angered by all the noise she was making. "Wren," he
hissed, and instantly, like a furious echo, another voice out of the darkness
shouted, "Wren!"
"Mum!" gasped Wren.
"Damn!" muttered Remora.
Gargle didn't say anything at all, just dragged the gas pistol from his belt
and fired toward the beach. In the blue flash of the gun, Wren saw her
mother striding across the shingle, barely flinching as the shot whipped past
her. She held her own gun out stiffly in front of her. Whack, it went, whack,
whack, whack: dull, flat sounds like books being snapped shut. The first
bullet rebounded from the Autolycus with a clang; the next two hissed away
over the lake; the fourth hit Gargle between the eyes. Something thick and
wet spattered Wren's face and clothes.
"Gargle!" shrieked Fishcake.
Gargle went down on his knees, then flopped forward with his bottom in
the air and his face in the chuckling waves.
 Fishcake scrambled through the shallows toward him, getting in
Remora's way as she pulled out her own gun. "Fishcake, get aboard!" she
screamed. "Get back to Grimsby!"
Hester put two bullets through her, kicking her backward and down into
the lake.
"Gargle!" Fishcake was wailing.
Hester was reloading her gun, empty shells jinking on the shingle around
her feet. She shouted, "Wren, come here!" Shaking with fright, Wren
stumbled gladly toward her, but suddenly Fishcake's arm was around her
waist, tugging her back. The snout of Gargle's pistol ground against her
chin.
"Drop the gun!" Fishcake shouted. "Or I'll ... I'll kill her, I'll kill her!"
"Mummy!" squeaked Wren. She couldn't breathe properly. She knew
suddenly that she had had all the adventures she would ever want. She
longed to be safe at home. "Mummy! Help!"
Hester edged forward. Her gun was raised, but she dared not pull the
trigger, they all knew that; there was too much danger of hitting Wren.
"Let her go!" she ordered.
"What, so you can shoot me?" sobbed Fishcake. Twisting Wren about so
that her body was always between him and her mother, he started to drag
her with him up the boarding ramp. The gun was still pressed under her
chin, pushing her head up. She could feel him shaking, and although she
could easily have overpowered him, she dared not try, in case the gun went
off. He pulled her through the hatch into the limpet, and slammed his elbow
against the button that raised the ramp. A ricochet howled off across the
lake as Hester shot at the hydraulics and missed. "Mummy!" shouted Wren
again, and had a brief glimpse of her mother shouting something back as
the hatch closed. Then Fishcake shoved her
through a doorway into the complicated electrical clutter of the control
cabin. She felt the limpet shiver as he began working the controls with one
hand, the other still pointing the gun at her head. "Please," she said. The
cabin lurched. Wren saw lights on the hillside behind the beach. "Help!" she
shouted. Waves were slapping at the cabin windows, and she glimpsed the
moon for a moment, shivery and unreal through the rising water. Then it
was gone, and the note of the engines changed, and she thought, We've
submerged-- never get home now! and her stomach turned over and she
fainted.
Hester ran down the beach, firing her gun at the limpet until its black hull
was lost in a boiling of white water. Then there was nothing to do but shout
Wren's name over and over, hoarse, useless, her lonely voice the only sound
remaining as the lap and wash of the Autolycus's wake faded into silence.
No, not quite silence. Slowly Hester became aware of other sounds: dogs
barking, shouts. Lanterns and flashlights bobbed on the hillside. Mr. Smew
came charging through the gorse, waving an antique wolf rifle twice as tall
as him and shouting, "Where are they, the subaquatic fiends? Let me at
them!"
More people followed him. Hester went to meet them, shrugging aside
the hands that reached for her, the questions. "Are you all right, Mrs.
Natsworthy?"
"We heard shooting!"
"Was it the Lost Boys?"
The bodies in the shallows stirred gently as the waves broke round them,
dragging long smears of red away into
the lake. Caul knelt beside one of them and said in a soft, puzzled voice,
"Gargle." The air stank of gun smoke and exhaust fumes.
Tom ran up, looking stupidly about and seeing only his daughter's going-
away bag lying forlorn upon the shingle. "Where's Wren?" he asked.
"Hester, what happened?"
Hester turned away and would not answer. It was Freya Rasmussen, in
the end, who came to him and took his hands in hers and said, "Oh, Tom,
they've gone, and I think Wren is with them; I think they've taken Wren."
8 Kidnapped
***
daddy, Mummy's face is all funny."
"I know."
"But why is it all funny?"
"Because a bad man cut her when she was just a little girl."
"Did it hurt?"
"I think so. I think it hurt a lot, and for a long time. But it's all right now."
"Will the bad man come back?"
"No, Wren, he's dead. He's been dead a long time. There are* no bad men
in Anchorage-in-Vineland. That's why we live here. We're safe here; nobody
knows about us, and nobody will try to hurt us, and no hungry cities will
come to gobble us up. It's just us, quite safe: Mummy, and Daddy, and
Wren."
The voices of her childhood whispered in Wren's
memory as she slowly returned to her senses. She was lying on the floor
of a tiny cabin that held a metal washbasin and a metal toilet. The toilet
smelled of chemicals. A dim blue bulb glowed in a cage on the roof. The
walls vibrated slightly. She could hear the threshing, churning sound of the
Autolycus motors, and another sound, a creaking and whispering, which she
guessed was water pressing against the hull.
Well, bad men have come to Anchorage-in-Vineland now, she thought,
and they've escaped with what they wanted, and I've helped them. Only
question left is, What are they going to do with me?
Dad had been taken by the Lost Boys once, yet he'd survived all right,
and returned to Anchorage to marry Mum. So that must mean that there was
hope for Wren, mustn't it? But thinking of Dad made her think of Mum, and
that made her remember what Mum had done, and the memory filled her
with a sick horror. Inside her head, like an echo that would not fade, she
could hear the crack and spatter of the bullet hitting Gargle.
She was not sure how long she lay there, shivering, whimpering, too
shocked and miserable to move. At last the hard floor grew so
uncomfortable that she forced herself to stand up. Get a grip, Wren, she told
herself crossly.
The stuff on her clothes had dried brown and crusty, like spilled goulash.
She ran some water into the metal handbasin and tried to sponge it off, then
washed her face and hair as well as she could.
After a long time, a key grated in the lock and the door opened. Fishcake
came and looked in at her. The gun was still
in his hand. His face looked hard and white in the blue light, as if he'd
been carved out of ivory. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Shut up," said Fishcake. His voice sounded hard too. "I ought to kill
you."
"Me?" Wren wriggled, trying to burrow into the deck. "But I haven't done
anything! I got you the Tin Book like Gargle asked ..."
"And your witch of a mother killed him!" Fishcake shouted. The gun in
his hand wobbled as big sobs shook his body. Wren wondered if he was
going to shoot her, but he didn't. She felt scared of him and angry at him
and somehow responsible for him, all at the same time.
"I'm very sorry," she said. "About Remora too."
Fishcake sniffed loudly. "Mora was Gargle's girl," he said. "Everybody
said he was in love with her. He was never really going to take you with
him. I heard him and Mora talking about you, saying how stupid you
were...." He started to cry again. "What are the Lost Boys going to do
without Gargle?" he asked. "It's all right for him; him and Mora are down in
the Sunless Country together. What about the rest of us? What about me?"
 He looked at Wren again. In this underworld light his eyes looked black:
two holes opening onto empty space. "I ought to kill you, just so your Mum
would know how it feels to have someone you love took away. But that
would make me as bad as her, wouldn't it?"
He stepped back, the door slammed shut, and the key grated in the lock.
***
"I'm going after her," said Tom.
Everyone politely ignored him. They thought that going after Wren
would be impossible, but they were all too kind to say so. They thought that
the shock of what had happened was making him talk wildly. And he had
been shocked, quite numb with it when they first told him she was gone. He
had run up and down the beach, shouting her name at the waves as if the
Lost Boys who had taken her might hear him and relent, until his heart had
twisted and kicked so painfully inside him that he thought he was going to
die right then and there upon the shingle, without ever seeing Wren again.
But he hadn't died. Kind hands had led him to a boat and rowed him back
to Anchorage, where now he sat with Hester and Freya and a dozen other
Vinelanders in one of the smaller rooms of the Winter Palace.
"It's my fault, you see," he explained. "She was asking about the Lost
Boys only this morning. I should have guessed something was going on."
"No fault of yours, Tom," said Smew, glaring at Hester, who sat silent
and scowling beside her husband. "If certain people hadn't gone racing off
ahead of the rest of us and started shooting ..."
Several other Vinelanders muttered in agreement. They had always
respected Hester for saving them from the Huntsmen of Arkangel, but they
had never liked her. They all remembered the way she had killed Piotr
Masgard, killed him when there had been no more need for killing, and
hacked and hacked at his body long after he was dead. Small wonder that
the gods would send bad luck to a woman who could do such things. It was
just a shame they'd waited sixteen years to
 send it, and that it had fallen on her nice husband and her lovely daughter
too.
Hester knew what they were thinking. "I was only defending myself," she
said. "I was defending all of us. I promised Freya once I'd look after this
dump and guard it from harm, and that's what I was doing. You want
somebody to blame, blame him."
She pointed at Caul, who sat awkwardly in a far corner. But nobody
seemed to think badly of what Caul had done. His former friends had come
asking for his help, and he had refused. You couldn't expect him to betray
them. They were his people.
"What were the Lost Boys here for, anyway?" asked Mr. Aakiuq.
"Lost Girls too," said Smew, still glowering at Hester. "One of those kids
she shot was just a girl."
"But what brought them back to Anchorage after all these years?"
Everyone turned to look at Caul. He shrugged. "Don't know. Didn't ask.
Thought the less I knew, the better."
"Oh, gods and goddesses!" said Freya suddenly, and went running from
the room. When she returned, she was carrying the empty casket that had
once held the Tin Book of Anchorage. "Wren came asking about it," she
said. "This was what the Lost Boys came here for."
"Why?" asked Tom. "It's not worth anything, is it?"
Freya shrugged. "I didn't think so. But here it is, gone. They must have
asked Wren to get it for them and ..."
"The stupid little--" Hester started to say.
"Be quiet, Het!" snapped Tom. He was thinking of Wren
as a child, and of how, when she was frightened by thunder or a bad
dream, he would hold her tight till she was calm again. He could not bear
the thought of her trapped aboard that limpet, alone and afraid, with nobody
to make it better. "I'm going after her," he said again.
 "Then I'm coming too," Hester agreed, taking his hand. They had been
parted once before, when Hester was a prisoner at Rogues' Roost, and they
had vowed then that they would never be apart again. She said, "We'll go
together."
"But how?" asked Freya.
"I'll help."
Caul had risen to his feet. He circled the room with his back to the wall,
lamplight gleaming in his eyes. "It's my fault," he said. "I thought maybe if
I didn't help them, they'd leave us alone. I didn't think they'd turn to Wren.
I'd forgotten how clever Gargle can ... could be." He put a hand to his
throat, to the shiny red scars that the ropes had left where Uncle had tried to
hang him. He said, "I remember Wren being born. I played with her when
she was little. I'll help. The Screw Worm 'll take you all the way to Grimsby
if need be."
"That old limpet of yours?" Hester sounded angry, as if she thought Caul
was mocking them.
"I thought the Screw Worm broke down years ago," said Tom. "That
summer that you and Mr. Scabious dug out the harbor-mouth...."
"I've repaired her," said Caul. "What do you think I've been doing with
my time, down in the district? Picking fluff out of my belly button? I've
been repairing the Worm. All right, repairing the Worm and picking fluff out
of my belly button. She's not perfect, but she's seaworthy. No fuel, of
course...."
"I reckon there might be a drop left in the old air harbor tanks," said Mr.
Aakiuq. "And we can recharge her accumulators from the hydro plant."
"Then she could be ready in a few days," Caul said. "Maybe a week."
"Wren will be miles away by then!" Hester said.
"It doesn't matter," said Tom firmly. Usually it was Hester who was the
firm one and Tom who did as she said, but he was utterly certain about this.
He had to get Wren back. If Wren were lost, what would be the point of
going on living? He took Hester's hand, sure that she felt the same. "We'll
find her," he promised. "We've faced worse things than Lost Boys in our
time. Even if we have to go all the way to Grimsby, we'll find her."
9 The message
***
winding river systems of the Dead Continent. Fishcake knew his way
back to the sea, for he had helped Gargle map these channels on the journey
from Grimsby. It was simple enough to retrace the route that had brought
the Autolycus through the Dead Hills to Vineland, except that all the way,
Fishcake kept thinking, The last time we passed through this lake, Gargle
was here, or, Last time we crossed this sandbar, Mora made that joke....
He had to do something. But what could he do? He had loved Gar, and he
loved Gar still, but Gar was gone, and crying would not bring him back.
What could he do? He had to do something....
Always before, there had been someone to tell him what to do. He had
never acted on his own or made his own plans,
except for that one panic-driven moment back in Vineland when he'd
grabbed that gun and pointed it at Wren to stop her mum from shooting
him, and even that had not worked out as he had meant it to, for he had
ended up with Wren as a captive, and he didn't know what he should do
with her either.
On the third night after the fight at Vineland, he cut the limpet's engines
and climbed out onto the roof. The Dead Hills of America rose stark against
the shining sky. Certain that Lady Death and all the gods of war and
vengeance watched over this land, Fishcake raised his voice so that they
would all hear him. "I'll avenge you, Gargle! I'll avenge you, Mora! I'll find
Hester Natsworthy again one day, and when I do, I promise you I'll kill
her."
The next day the limpet reached the coast, crept across a stretch of dismal
saltings, and slid gratefully into the gray sea. Safe in the deep, Fishcake set
a course for home, then went aft to see his prisoner. Wren was curled up on
the floor of the toilet cubicle. Staring at her fragile, sleeping face, Fishcake
wished he had not had to capture her, for she was pretty, and none of this
had been her fault. But it was too late now to let her go.
He prodded her with his foot. "We're at sea now," he told her as she
woke. "You don't have to stay in there anymore. There's fifty fathoms of
cold water above us, so don't even think about trying to escape."
"At sea?" Wren knew that the open sea was a long way from Anchorage-
in-Vineland. She bit her lip to stop herself from crying.
"I'm going to take you to Grimsby," said Fishcake. "Uncle or one of the
older boys will know what to do with you. You can clean yourself up if you
want. You can take some of Remora's old clothes from her locker."
"Thank you," whispered Wren.
"I'm not doing it for your sake," Fishcake said sharply, to show her he
wasn't soft. "It's the stink, see? I can't be breathing your reek all the way to
Grimsby."
Wren went aft. For four days she had seen nothing but the inside of the
toilet cubicle, and after that, even the narrow passageways of the Autolycus
seemed roomy. Remora's locker was decorated with pictures snipped out of
stolen magazines: hairstyles and clothes. There were photographs of
Remora and Gargle laughing, their arms around each other. There was a bag
of makeup, and a teddy bear, and a book on interpreting your dreams. Wren
took some clothes and changed, then went and stared at her reflection in the
mirror above the sink, which wasn't really a mirror but just a sheet of
polished metal bolted to the wall. Already she looked older and thinner,
swamped by Remora's shapeless dark clothes. Wren the Lost Girl. When
she had stuffed her own filthy clothes into one of the bags the limpet crews
used for loot and tied it shut, there was nothing of Vineland left about her
but her boots.
She sat in the hold, listening to Fishcake clattering about on the bridge.
Her stomach rumbled, but the Lost Boy had offered her no food, and she
was afraid to ask for any. It was a bit embarrassing, being held prisoner by
someone so much younger than her, but Fishcake's feelings were balanced
on such a knife-edge that Wren was still afraid he might kill her
 if she annoyed him. Better stay quiet. She drank foul-tasting water from
the sink faucet and thought about escape. Daring plans formed in her mind,
only to burst like bubbles after a few seconds. Even if she somehow
overpowered her little captor, she would never be able to steer the limpet
back to Vineland. She was stuck here, and it was all her own fault. She had
been incredibly, dangerously stupid, she could see that now, and it made her
ashamed because she had always thought herself clever. Hadn't Miss Freya
always said that Wren had more brains than any of the other young people
in Vineland?
"Well, Wren," she said, hugging herself for comfort, "if you're going to
stay alive and find your way back to Mum and Dad, you'll have to start
using them."
The Autolycus was a hundred miles from shore when the signal came in.
Fishcake thought at first that it must be a message from another limpet,
although he didn't know that any others were operating on this side of the
ocean. Then he noticed something strange: The signal was being broadcast
simultaneously on the limpet-to-limpet frequency and on the wavelength
that the limpets used to receive pictures from their wireless crab-cams.
He flicked some switches, and the bank of circular screens above his
station slowly flooded with light.
Huddled on the floor of the hold, Wren heard voices. She crept to the
door of the control cabin and peeked through. Fishcake was staring up at
the screens. All six showed the same strange image: a city, seen from
above, cruising on a calm sea. It was hard to tell on this grainy, ghosting
picture
what size of city it was, but it looked pleasant, with many ornate white
cupolas and domes, and lots of long pennants streaming in the wind.
"What's that?" asked Wren.
Fishcake glanced round, but if he was surprised to find her standing
there, he didn't show it. He turned his face to the screens again. "I don't
know," he said. "I've never seen anything like this before. It keeps
repeating. Watch."
 The picture changed. A kindly-looking man and woman sat side by side
upon a sofa. They seemed to be looking straight at Wren and Fishcake, and
although they were strangers, and dressed in the robes and turbans of rich
townspeople, something in their sad and gentle smiles made Wren think of
her own mum and dad and how they must be missing her.
"Greetings, children of the deep!" said the man. "We are speaking to you
on behalf of WOPCART, the World Organization for Parents of Children
Abducted from Raft Towns. For half a century, boys--and lately girls too--
have been vanishing from cities that cross the Atlantic and the Ice Wastes.
Only in recent years, thanks to the explorer Nimrod Pennyroyal, have we
become aware of the parasite-pirates who secretly burgle and infest such
cities, and who steal children away to train as thieves and burglars like
themselves."
"Pennyroyal again!" said Wren crossly.
"Shush!" said Fishcake. "Listen!"
The woman was speaking now, still smiling, but weeping too, as she
leaned toward the viewers. "Now the good people of the raft resort of
Brighton have brought us north into your home waters. If you tune your
radio equipment to 680 kilocycles, you will pick up the signal of Brighton's
homing
beacon. We know that you probably have no memories of the mummies
and daddies from whom you were stolen when you were so very little, and
who have been missing you so very much. But if you come to us, come in
your submarines to meet us here in Brighton, we are sure that many of you
will recognize your own families, and they you. We do not want to harm
you, or take you from your new friends or your exciting new life beneath
the waves. We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again...."
Here the woman's voice grew high and wobbly; she hid her face in her
handkerchief while her husband patted her arm and took over.
"WOPCART has many members," he explained, and the picture changed
again to show a crowd of people gathered on one of the city's observation
platforms. "Every one of us has lost a child, and longs to see him again and
learn what has happened to him. Or, indeed, her. Oh, children of the deep, if
you can hear this message, we beg you, come to us!"
The image lingered for a moment while sad music swelled and the
members of WOPCART all smiled and waved at the camera and the sea
breeze plucked at their coats and robes and hats. Then it was replaced by a
printed sign that read
WOPCART -- SUMMER EXPEDITION
(IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE MAYOR AND COUNCIL OF
BRIGHTON)
The music faded, there was a moment of blackness, and the transmission
began again. "Greetings, children of the deep! ..."
"See?" asked Fishcake, turning to Wren. He had forgotten that she was
his hostage, so eager was he to share the
astonishing message with somebody. His eyes were shining-- his whole
face was radiant--and Wren realized for the first time how young he really
was: just a small boy, far from home and longing for love and comfort.
"What do you think I should do?" he asked. "I checked for Brighton's
homing beacon. They're close. About fifty, sixty miles southwest of us. I
never heard of a city coming that near to the Dead Continent...."
Wren could feel the sense of yearning building in the cramped cabin as
Fishcake imagined that city full of mums and dads floating fifty miles away.
What if she could persuade him to rendezvous with Brighton? She was sure
that she would be far better off there than down in Grimsby. So would
Fishcake, probably, so she need not feel guilty about it.
She went into the cabin and sat down in the swivel chair beside his.
"Maybe they've come here because they're searching for Lost Boys," she
said. "They could have been zigzagging their way north for weeks,
transmitting that message over and over. Gargle told me that limpets had
gone missing. He thought something bad had happened to them, but what if
they just heard that message and went to find their families ... ?"
 "Why haven't they contacted Grimsby, then?" asked Fishcake.
"Maybe they're having too much fun," suggested Wren. "Maybe they
were scared that Gargle would punish them for going to Brighton without
his orders."
Fishcake gazed up at the screens. "Those people look so rich. The Lost
Boys take only kids nobody's going to miss:
orphans and urchins from the underdecks who nobody wants...."
"That's what Gargle and Uncle told you," said Wren. "What if it isn't
true? What if they take children from rich families sometimes too? Anyway,
probably even an orphan would be missed by somebody. Probably even an
urchin's mummy and daddy would want to find him if he got himself stolen
away...."
Two big tears ran down Fishcake's face, pearly in the light from the
screens.
"I'll send a message-fish to Grimsby and ask Uncle what to do," he
decided.
"But Fishcake," said Wren, "he might tell you not to go!"
"Uncle Knows Best," said Fishcake, but he didn't sound very certain.
"Anyway, by the time you get a reply, Brighton might have sailed away.
Autumn's coming. Storms and high seas. Miss Freya always taught us that
raft cities head for sheltered waters in the autumn. So this might be your
only chance...."
"But it's one of the rules. What they teach us in the Burglarium. Never
show yourself. Never give the Drys a chance to find out about the Lost
Boys--that's what Gargle says...."
"These Drys seem to know all about you already," Wren reminded him.
Fishcake shook his head and smudged the tears away with the heel of his
hand. His Burglarium training was fighting against the rising hope that his
own mother and father might have been among that crowd of smiling faces
on the screens. He did not remember them, but he felt sure that if
he met his parents in the flesh, he would know them at once.
"All right," he said. "We'll go closer. We'll have a good look at this
Brighton place, get crab-cams aboard if we can. Check these WOPCART
people are on the level...." He looked at Wren and pitied her; after all, she
had no hope of finding her parents aboard the waiting city.
"You must be starved," he said.
"Pretty hungry," admitted Wren.
Fishcake smiled shyly at her. "Me too. Mora used to do all the cooking.
Do you know how to cook?"
10 The Parent Trap
***
USUALLY AT THIS TIME of year the raft resort of Brighton would
have been cruising the Middle Sea, anchoring now and then so that visitors
from the mobile towns and cities that prowled the shores could come out by
balloon and motor launch to explore its amusement arcades and aquarium,
its beaches and boutiques. But business had been poor these past few
seasons, and so the Council had agreed to venture into the North Atlantic in
search of parasite-pirates.
Now they were beginning to regret it. There had been much excitement
when the first three limpets had made contact, east of the Azores. Crowds
of visitors had come swarming out by airship from the cities of the Hunting
Ground to see the strange new arrivals. But that had been weeks ago. There
had been no sign of Lost Boys since, and the long banners that were
stretched along the city's bows,
declaring WOPCART summer expedition and Brighton welcomes
parasite-pirates, were starting to look tattered, and a little bit sad.
Fishcake brought the Autolycus up to periscope depth about a mile from
Brighton. A night had passed since he'd first picked up the transmission
from WOPCART. The morning sky was the color of the inside of a cowrie
shell, and big gray waves heaved up and down. When Wren took a turn at
the periscope, she could not see Brighton at all, just the waves, which now
and then allowed her a glimpse of a big island away to windward, ringed by
dirty white cliffs, with clouds hugging its summit.
And then she realized that it was not an island at all: What she had taken
for cliffs were rows of white buildings, and the clouds were steam and
exhaust fumes rising from a dense thicket of smokestacks. It was a city, a
three-tiered raft city with two outrigger districts linked to its central hull by
spidery gantries and a bank of huge paddle wheels beating the sea to foam
astern. "Oh!" cried Wren, amazed. She'd seen pictures of cities in books, but
she had never grasped how big they really were: far bigger than Anchorage-
in-Vineland. Airships moved to and fro above a jagged skyline of spires and
domes and rooftops, and a circular deck plate held up by immense gasbags
hung a few hundred feet above the upper tier, anchored to it by thick
hawsers. Wren could see green trees on the edge of the deck plate, and a
building with unlikely onion domes.
"What's that?" she gasped.
"That's called Cloud 9," said Fishcake, who had managed
to get a picture of the city from a crab-cam that he had sent up to perch
upon the periscope. He had fetched out the Autolycus's tattered old copy of
Cade's Almanac of Traction Towns (Maritime Edition), and was comparing
Ms. Cade's diagram of Brighton with the image on the screen. "It's a sort of
airborne park. The big building in the middle is where the mayor of
Brighton lives."
"Gosh" breathed Wren. "I mean-- Gosh!"
"No jaws," said Fishcake, checking the screens to make sure Brighton
had not added anything nasty since Cade's Almanac went to press. There
were a few air defense cannon mounted on revolving platforms on the
promenades, but no more weapons than any town carried in these troubled
times. "It's just a pleasure resort."
He lowered the periscope. As he switched off the crab-cam signal, the
screens filled again with the transmission from Brighton, clearer and
stronger now that the limpet was so close. "We only want a chance to see
our dear lost boys again," the woman from WOPCART was saying.
Fishcake felt a silly, happy hopefulness rising up inside him. What if she
was his mummy? Mums and dads are a chain that binds, a pain, a strain;
they stop boys being boys. That's what he'd been taught to chant down in the
Burglarium. Now that he was faced with the prospect of meeting his own
mum and dad, he found that he'd never really believed it. He'd been missing
his parents his whole life long, and he'd not even known it until he heard the
message from WOPCART.
He took the Autolycus deeper, nearer, down into the shadows beneath
Brighton's hull. Trailing cables and a huge, complicated steering array
loomed out of the murk; green
forests of weed swirled through the cone of light from the limpet's nose
lamp. Near the city's bow, a metallic sphere dangled on cables; Fishcake
guessed it was the machine that WOPCART used to transmit its message
through the sea.
A metallic ping rang through the cabin. Wren thought that something
must have fallen over in the hold, but the sound came again and then again,
chiming out a rhythm, as if someone were carefully tapping the outside of
the hull with a hammer.
"Oh, gods'" said Fishcake suddenly.
"What?" asked Wren. "What is that noise?"
Fishcake was frantically working the limpet's controls, steering for
brighter water beyond the edge of the city. "Gargle told us he ran into
something like this once, under a big predator raft. It's a type of Old Tech
listening device.... The mummies and daddies know we're here now!" He
wasn't sure if he was scared or happy.
With a grinding clang the limpet lurched awkwardly sideways, throwing
Wren off her feet. At first she thought it was because of something Fishcake
had done. "You might have warned me," she complained, rubbing the elbow
she'd banged on a bulkhead. Then she saw that the boy looked just as
startled as her.
"What's happening?" she whispered.
"I don't know, I don't know]"
No mistaking the next sensation. The Autolycus was rising quickly
upward. Water foamed white as it broke the surface, and sunlight burst into
the cabin, blindingly bright after so many days in the dark. When Wren
could see again, the limpet was hanging high above the waves and being
swung
sideways over a broad metal deck that jutted out from Brighton's bow.
People were running across the deck--not the smiley, well-dressed mums
and dads she'd seen on the screens, but rough-looking, tough-looking men
in rubberized overalls. Wren felt a jolt of fear at the sight of them. Then,
looking past them, she relaxed, for overlooking the deck was a pleasant
promenade, and the people lining the railings there looked much more like
Parents of Children Abducted from Raft Towns: beaming, happy, pointing
down excitedly at the limpet as it was dumped on the deck.
Fishcake was already halfway up the ladder that led to the hatch on the
roof. As he popped it open, the sound of cheering burst into the limpet and a
big amplified voice began shouting something, the words confused and
echoey.
Wren followed him up the ladder. Out on the hull, Fishcake was crouched
against the periscope mounting, looking nervously around, confused by the
sunlight and the thundering cheers. The magnetic grapple that had dragged
the limpet from the sea had been released and dangled dripping overhead,
attached to the jib of a crane. The people on the promenade were shouting
and cheering and waving their arms in the air. Wren touched Fishcake's
shoulder to reassure him. The rubber-suited men had formed a loose ring
around the limpet and were closing in cautiously. Wren supposed they must
be longshoremen or fishermen hired to pull limpets aboard. She smiled at
them, but they did not smile back. Straining her ears, she began to make out
what the booming voice was saying.
"... and for those of you who have just joined us," it bellowed through
squalls of feedback, "Brighton has captured a
fourth pirate submarine! There are the crew, creeping out onto the hull--
as desperate-looking a pair of young cutthroats as you could hope to meet!
But don't worry, ladies and gentlemen; the world will soon be rid of these
parasites forever!"
"It's a trap!" said Wren. Fishcake, who hadn't understood what the
announcer was saying, turned a shocked white face toward her. "It's not
real!" she cried, standing up, shouting. "Fishcake! It's a--"
And two men came up the limpet's side, unfurling something between
them that turned out to be a net. They dropped it over Fishcake, who kicked
and struggled and shouted and reached for Wren's hand. "Does this mean
they aren't our mummies and daddies?" he asked her, his voice going
squeaky and ready to cry. "You lied! You lied to me!"
Then strong hands grabbed him from behind and tore him away from
Wren, and more hands grabbed her, rough hands in rubber gauntlets that
stank of fish and oil. A net went over her, and though she wriggled and
lashed out with fists and feet, she could not stop her captor from throwing
her over his shoulder, carrying her down the limpet's flank, and dumping
her heavily on the deck. She heard Fishcake's sobs turn suddenly to a sharp
squeal, and a moment later she understood why. A man grabbed her arm
and burned the back of her hand with a hot iron stamp, branding her with a
sort of logo:
SHKIN
"Mummy! Mummy!" Fishcake was howling as they dragged him away,
still not wanting to believe that WOPCART and all the smiley parents had
been nothing but bait.
"Leave him alone!" screamed Wren, weeping with the pain of her seared
hand. "He's only ten! How can you be so beastly? He thought you were his
parents!"
"That's the idea, boy." A big, burly man in a waterproof cape stooped
over her, belching out a hot fug of whiskey fumes as he peered into her
face. "Hang on," Wren heard him say. "Look, Miss Weems--this one's a
girl."
A brittle, beautiful woman in black shoved him aside. She had a brand on
her hand just like Wren's, but hers was old and had faded to a raised scar
not much darker than the surrounding skin. "Interesting," she said, looking
at Wren. "We've heard rumors of female parasites, but she's the first we've
seen."
"I'm not a Lost Girl!" Wren shouted through the tight wet mesh of the
net. "I was a prisoner aboard the Autolycus, Fishcake took me from my
home...."
The woman sneered at her. "I don't care who you are, girl. We are slave
dealers You are just merchandise, as far as we're concerned."
 "But I'm-- You can't make me a slave!"
"Au contraire, child, our contract with Mayor Pennyroyal is perfectly
clear: Anyone we dredge up in one of those parasite machines becomes the
property of the Shkin Corporation."
"Mayor Pennyroyal?" cried Wren. "You don't mean ... Not Nimrod
Pennyroyal?"
The woman seemed surprised that a Lost Girl should recognize that
name. "Yes. Nimrod Pennyroyal has been mayor of Brighton these past
twelve years or more."
"But he can't be! Who'd want Pennyroyal for mayor?
He's a fraud! A traitor! An airship thief!"
Miss Weems made some notes upon a clipboard. "Take her to the slave
pens," she told one of her men. "Inform Mr. Shkin of the catch. I believe it's
a good sign. We may be drawing close to the pirate nest."
11 Four Against Crimbsy
***
ON THE MORNING OF their departure, when the Screw Worm was
ready at last and Hester and Tom were waiting for Caul to run a few final
tests on the engines, Freya Rasmussen came down to the mooring beach
and announced that she was coming too. Nothing that Tom or Hester could
say seemed to change her mind.
"It'll be dangerous."
"Well, you're both going."
"You're needed here."
"Oh, Anchorage-in-Vineland runs itself perfectly well without me.
Anyway, I told Mrs. Aakiuq that she can be Acting Margravine while I'm
away, and you don't want to disappoint her, do you? She's made herself a
special hat and everything...." Beaming, Freya clambered up the Screw
Worm's boarding ladder and dumped her bulky going-away bag through
the hatch.
"Don't you understand, Snow Queen?" Hester said. "We're not off to
Grimsby to pay a social call. We're going to get Wren back, and if I have to
kill every Lost Boy who stands in my way ..."
"You'll only make things worse," said Freya tartly. "There's been too
much killing already. That's why you need me along. I can talk to Uncle and
make him see reason."
Hester let out an exasperated howl and looked to Caul, sure that he would
not want Freya along for the ride, but Caul was saying nothing, staring
away across the shining water.
So it was settled, and the voyage began like a picnic trip, with Tom and
Freya waving from the Screw Worm's open hatchways as the limpet nosed
out into the lake and all of Anchorage-in-Vineland lined the beach to cheer
them on their way.
As the city passed out of sight behind the headland and the Screw Worm
folded in its legs and prepared to submerge, Freya went down into the
cabin, where Caul was hunched over the rusty controls. But Tom stayed out
on the hull until the last moment, watching the passing shoreline, the green
slopes reflecting in the rippled water. Birds were calling in the reed beds,
their songs echoing the car alarms and mobile-phone trills that their distant
ancestors must have heard: sound-fossils of a vanished world. They made
Tom think of the Ancient settlements he had begun to excavate in the Dead
Hills and the relics of forgotten lives he had unearthed there. Would he ever
return with Wren to finish his work?
"We'll come back," promised Tom as he climbed inside to join Hester.
But Hester said nothing. She did not think that she would ever see
Anchorage-in-Vineland again.
In the cramped control cabin of the Screw Worm there was no way for
Caul to avoid talking to Freya Rasmussen. He wondered if that was half the
reason for her deciding to come. As the waters closed over the nose
windows, she sat down beside him and spread Snori Ulvaeusson's ancient
map upon the pilot's console and said, "So do you remember the way back
to Grimsby?" He nodded.
"I was sure you would," she said. "I'm surprised you haven't made the
trip before."
"To Grimsby?" He turned to look at her, but the kind, careful way she
was watching him made him uneasy, so he stared at the controls instead.
"Why would I want to go back to Grimsby? Have you forgotten what
happened the last time I was there? If Gargle hadn't cut me down ..."
"But you still want to go back," said Freya gently. "Why else did you
repair the Worm?"
Caul squinted into the silty darkness ahead of the limpet, pretending to be
keeping a lookout for sunken rocks. "I thought about it," he admitted.
"That's the trouble. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Even in the first weeks
at Vineland, when there was so much to do and everybody was so kind and
welcoming and you--"
He glanced sideways at her and away. She was still watching him. Why
was she always so kind to him? Sixteen years ago she had offered him her
love, and he'd turned her down
for reasons he still couldn't quite understand. He wouldn't have blamed
her if she'd banished him back to the sea.
"That's why I live down in the underdeck," he admitted. "Because it's the
bit of Anchorage that's the most like Grimsby. And every night, when I'm
dreaming, I hear Uncle's voice. 'Come back to Grimsby, Caul,' it says." He
looked at Freya nervously. He'd never told anyone this, and he was afraid
she might think he was mad. He thought it himself, sometimes. "Uncle
whispers to me, the way he used to whisper out of the speakers on the
Burglarium ceiling when I was small. Even the waves on the beach talk
with his voice. 'Grimsby's your home, Caul, my boy. You don't belong with
the Drys. Come home to Grimsby.'"
Freya reached out to touch him, then thought better of it. She said, "But
when Gargle showed up, asking for you to help him, you turned him down.
You could have given him the Tin Book and gone back with him on the
Autolycus."
"I wanted to," said Caul. "You don't know how much I wanted to."
"But you didn't. You chose Anchorage over Grimsby."
"Only 'cos I was afraid," said Caul. "Only 'cos I was afraid that when I
got there, I'd find I don't fit in any better with the Lost Boys than I do with
you Drys. Maybe I'm not either anymore. Maybe I'm nothing at all."
Freya did touch him then. She laid her hand on his shoulder and felt him
flinch away from her, quick and shy, like a frightened animal. Sometimes
she thought that Caul was as much of a mystery to her now as he had been
all those years ago when he'd first come to her out of the sea. He would
have been so much happier if he had just let her love him.
 And so would she. It hadn't exactly ruined her life, for so many other
good things had happened to her, but sometimes she did feel sad that she
had no husband and no children of her own. It seemed to her that there were
some people-Caul was one, and Hester Natsworthy another--who just didn't
have the knack of being happy.
Or was there more to it than that? She thought of the waves on the beach
whispering to Caul with Uncle's voice, and felt spooked and uneasy. If
Uncle could speak to him in Vineland, what would it be like for him when
they reached Grimsby? And if things went badly there, and it came to a
fight, would Caul be on her side, or on Uncle's?
12 Business in Great Waters
***
THAT'S RIGHT YOUR WORSHIP! Hold it Smile!" tray of flash powder
exploded with a soft chuff, and a ball of smoke rose into the sunlit air of
Cloud 9 like a party balloon. Nimrod Pennyroyal, explorer, author, and
mayor, was having his photograph taken for the Brighton Morninig
Palimpsest again, posing this time with Digby Slingback and Sardona
Flysch, the actor and actress who played the grieving spokespeople of
WOPCART in the messages Brighton was beaming into the Atlantic.
"So, Your Worship," the Palimpsest's reporter asked while the
photographer loaded a fresh plate into his camera, "can you remind our
readers what gave you the idea of this expedition against the parasite-
pirates?"
"I considered it my duty," said Pennyroyal, beaming and adjusting his
chain of office, which twinkled prettily in the
sun. "After all, it was I who first alerted the world to the existence of
these maritime miscreants; you can read of my encounters with them in my
interpolitan bestseller Predator's Gold (Just twenty-five Brightonian
dolphins at all good bookshops). In recent years we have had more and
more reports of their raids and burglaries and have started to deduce how
their organization operates. I considered it my duty to take our city north
and capture as many of them as I could."
"Of course, Your Worship, some of your critics have suggested that it is
all a publicity stunt designed to attract more visitors to Brighton and sell
more copies of your books...."
Pennyroyal made scoffing noises. "My books sell well enough without
publicity stunts. And if news of our quest to rid the oceans of these parasites
brings more tourists to Brighton, what is wrong with that? Brighton is a
tourist city, and it's the mayor's job to help boost it. And may I remind you
that our little fishing expedition is not costing Brighton's ratepayers a
penny. Thanks to the partnership deal I worked out, all the underwater
sensing equipment and limpet traps are paid for by one of our most eminent
businessmen, Mr. Nabisco Shkin. This fake organization for pirates' parents
was all Shkin's idea. I know some people think it's rather cruel, but you
must admit it's worked like a charm. Shkin understands the psychology of
these parentless louts perfectly, you see. He was an orphan himself, you
know, an urchin from the underdeck who pulled himself up by his
bootstraps, so he knew just how to appeal to them."
"And does Your Worship think we shall catch more pirates soon?"
"Wait and see!" chuckled Pennyroyal, presenting his best
profile to the camera as the photographer lined up another shot. "The
boys we took from the first three limpets were hard nuts who refused to
divulge the location of their base. This latest catch includes a younger boy
and a girl too: much easier to crack. I believe the next few days will bring
big results!"
In fact, what the next few days brought was a change in the weather. A
storm sweeping off the Dead Continent chopped the ocean into steep white
waves and threw Brighton up and down so violently that even the residents
felt queasy, and a lot of the visitors who had flown in from the Hunting
Ground to watch Pennyroyal's people fishing for pirates took to their
airships and sky yachts and went hurrying home. The Brightonians (those
who were not feeling too ill to walk about) glared up through the blustering
rain at the underbelly of Cloud 9 hanging in the wet sky and wondered why
they had agreed to let Pennyroyal bring them out onto this wild, unfriendly
ocean.
Down below the pitching decks, on Brighton's lowest level, Wren lay on
the floor of her narrow cage in the Shkin Corporation's holding pens and
wished she were dead. Above her head, an argon lamp swung to and fro,
splashing light across the metal walls and the rows of cages that sat waiting
for more Lost Boys to be lured aboard. Fishcake lay in one; the others held
the crews of the limpets that had been captured earlier. The burn on Wren's
hand hurt terribly. She supposed she would bear that raised weal for the rest
of her life--although that might not be very long.
 "Are we sinking?" she asked when the Shkin Corporation's guard came
round and aimed his flashlight at her to
check that she was still alive.
The guard chuckled. "Feels like it, don't it? But Brighton's ridden out
worse than this. Don't worry; we'll soon be hoovering up the rest of your
chums."
"They're not my chums," said Wren bitterly. "I'm not a Lost Boy...."
"Change the record, love," the man said wearily. "I heard you telling
Monica Weems that same story down on Fishmarket Hard when we first
dredged you up. The answer's still the same. Don't matter who you are.
You're merchandise now. You'll fetch a good price in Nuevo-Maya."
Memories of old geography lessons stirred in Wren's brain: the big globe
in the schoolroom at the Winter Palace and Miss Freya saying, "Here is
Nuevo-Maya, which used to be called South America before the isthmus
that linked it to North America was severed by Slow Bombs in the Sixty
Minute War."
Nuevo-Maya was thousands of miles away! If they took her there, how
could she ever find her way home?
The guard leaned on her cage and leered at her through the bars. "You
don't think Mr. Shkin'd try and sell a bunch of lairy pirates off as house
slaves and nursemaids, do you? You'll end up as fighters aboard one of
them big Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities. Lovely shows they have in them
arenas. Gangs of slaves pitched against each other, or fighting souped-up
dismantling machines and captured Green Storm Stalkers. Blood and guts
all over the shop. But it's all done in honor of their funny Nuevo-Mayan
gods, so it's quite spiritual, really."
Spiritual or not, Wren didn't think she fancied it. She had to find a way
out of this horrible mess. But her brain, about which Miss Freya had said
such nice things, was too addled by the pitching of the city to think of
anything.
 "I hope we do sink!" she shouted weakly after the guard as he went on
his way. "That'd serve you right! I hope we sink before you trap any more
poor Lost Boys!"
But next day the storm slackened and the waves subsided, and that
evening the crews of three more limpets were dragged, sheepish and
weeping, into the slave pens. There were four more limpets that night, and
another three the following day; one of them sensed a trap and fled before
the magnetic grapples caught it, but Brighton gave chase and dropped depth
charges until a white plume of water burst from the ocean to drench the
cheering spectators on the starboard observation decks and bits of limpet
and Lost Boy came bobbing to the surface.
"Word must have reached Grimsby by now," said Krill, one of the boys
who'd been taken earlier, watching white-faced from his cage as the pens
around him filled with captives. "Old Uncle will do something. He'll rescue
us."
"Word has reached Grimsby," said the new arrivals.
"That's where we came from...."
"We picked up that message a couple of days ago."
"Uncle said it was a trap and we shouldn't listen, but we sneaked out
anyway."
"We thought our mums and dads would be here...."
Krill hung his head and started to cry. He had led raiding parties against
static cities in the Western Archipelago,
slaughtering any Dry who stood against him, but here in the Shkin
Corporation's warehouse he was just another lost teenager.
Wren reached through the bars and tugged at Fishcake's sleeve. He had
not spoken to Wren since they were brought in, and she guessed he blamed
her for what had happened to him. Maybe he was right. If only she hadn't
been so keen to persuade him to come to Brighton!
 "Fishcake," she asked gently, "how many Lost Boys are there? All
together, I mean."
Fishcake would not look at her, but after a moment he muttered, "About
sixty, I s'pose. That's not counting Uncle and the newbies too young to ride
limpets."
"But there are at least forty of you here!" Wren said. "Grimsby must be
nearly empty...."
The warehouse door rattled open, letting in another bunch of people.
More prisoners, Wren thought, and didn't even bother to look at them; it
was too depressing. But the sound of tramping feet stopped beside her cage,
and she glanced up to see that the newcomers were not Lost Boys, just two
Shkin Corporation guards and the odious Miss Weems.
"Fetch her out," Miss Weems commanded. Wren was alarmed. Had Miss
Weems finally accepted that she was not a Lost Girl? Perhaps the Shkin
Corporation had realized that she would never cut the mustard in those
Nuevo-Mayan arenas and were planning to throw her overboard rather than
waste any more food and water keeping her alive?
"The master wishes to see you," said Miss Weems. The captive Lost
Boys watched from their cages as Wren was led away.
A door behind the slave pens opened onto a room no bigger than a
cupboard. The guards shoved Wren inside, then crowded in behind her. It
was only when Miss Weems pulled a lever on the wall and Wren felt the
floor jerk under her that she realized this was an elevator. The elevators of
Anchorage had all been out of order for years, but this one was working
perfectly: It rose so fast that Wren felt as if her stomach had been left
behind.
Having been dragged to the slave pens in a net, Wren did not really
understand the layout of the Shkin Corporation building. It was a tower
whose lower stories, down in Brighton's depths, held the captive slaves. The
middle floors, on the city's second tier, housed a few special cells for luxury
goods and the offices of administrators. The higher levels, which poked up
through the resort's top tier in a fashionable district called Queen's Park,
were the offices of the Corporation's founder, Mr. Nabisco Shkin. This
topmost part was as white and beautiful as any iceberg, and gave no hint of
the dangerous nine tenths that lurked below. Local people called the tower
the Pepperpot.
The elevator stopped on the top floor, and Wren stepped out into a large,
circular room. It was beautifully furnished, with plush black draperies,
black carpets, and black pictures in golden frames hanging on the black
walls. But what made Wren catch her breath was the view from the
windows. She was looking out over the rooftops of Brighton: The sun was
shining, bright flags were flying, sky yachts and air pedalos were rising
from the harbor, and legions of gulls were wheeling and soaring around the
chimney pots and far out over the sparkling sea. Spray from the paddle
wheels blew across the
city on a gentle breeze, and the sunlight shining through it filled the
streets with drifting rainbows.
For a moment Wren almost forgot her misery, her hunger, the pain of her
branded hand. Joy bubbled up in her. She was on a raft city, on one of the
wonderful cities she had always dreamed about, and it was even more
beautiful than she could have hoped.
"The girl, Mr. Shkin," announced Miss Weems with an ingratiating whine
in her voice that Wren had not heard before. One of the guards turned Wren
around to face a man who sat quietly watching her from a black swivel
chair.
Nabisco Shkin sat very still, one leg crossed over the other, one patent
leather shoe blinking with reflected light as his foot tapped ever so slightly
up and down, his only movement. A dove-gray suit; gray gloves; gray hair;
gray eyes; gray face; gray voice. He said, "I am delighted to meet you, my
dear," but he didn't sound delighted. Didn't look it either. Didn't look as if
he'd know what delight was. He said, "Monica tells me that you claim to
come from Anchorage."
"I do!" cried Wren, grateful that someone was prepared to listen to her at
last. "My name is Wren Natsworthy, and I was kidnapped--"
 "Nobody comes from Anchorage." Shkin stood up and circled her. His
eyes were on her all the time. "Anchorage sank years ago, west of
Greenland."
"No, it didn't!" blurted Wren. "It--"
Shkin raised one finger and turned to his desk. Turned back with
something in his hands. It was the book that Wren had stolen from Miss
Freya. She had forgotten all about it until now.
"What is this?" he asked.
"That's the Tin Book," she said. "Just an old curio from the Black
Centuries. It's why the Autolycus came to Anchorage. I think it's got
something to do with submarines. I helped the Lost Boys steal it, but it all
went wrong and Fishcake ended up taking me hostage, and if you could
take me back there, sir, I'm sure my mum and dad and Miss Freya would
reward you...."
"Anchorage again." Shkin put the book down and studied her. "Why do
you persist in this ridiculous story? Anchorage is home to no one but fish.
Everyone in Brighton knows that. Our beloved Mayor Pennyroyal made
rather a lot of money with his book about its final days. Predator's Gold
ends with Anchorage sinking to what our ever-original mayor describes as
'a watery grave.'"
"Well, Pennyroyal's a liar!" Wren said angrily, thinking how unfair it was
that Pennyroyal should have survived at all, let alone grown rich from his
fibs. "He's a coward and a liar, and he shot my dad and stole Mum and
Dad's airship so he could run away from Anchorage when he thought
Arkangel was going to eat it. He can't possibly know what happened after
that. Whatever he wrote, he must have made it up."
Nabisco Shkin raised one gray eyebrow about an eighth of an inch, which
was his way of showing surprise. At the same instant, Wren had an idea.
She was the only person in the whole of the outside world who knew the
truth about Anchorage. Surely that must make her valuable? Far too
valuable to be auctioned off with the rest of the Lost Boys as an arena
slave!
 She felt as if a tiny door had opened very far away from
her, on the other side of an enormous, darkened room; she could see a
way out.
She said, "Anchorage found its way to a green bit on the Dead Continent.
It has thrived there, and I'm proof of it. Don't you think Pennyroyal would
like to know that?"
Nabisco Shkin had been about to silence her again, but when she said
that, he hesitated, and his eyebrow shot up a full quarter inch. He settled
into his chair again, his eyes still fixed on Wren. "Explain," he said.
"Well, he'll want to know about Anchorage, won't he?" Wren stammered.
"I mean, if he's made all that money telling people about us, think how
interested he'll be to learn what really happened. He could write a sequel!
He could have an expedition to take me home, and write a book about it!"
And even if he couldn't, she thought, at least life as a slave in this floaty
palace thing would be better than the arenas of Nuevo-Maya. She said
eagerly, "He'll be dying to talk to me."
Shkin nodded slowly. A smile flickered for a moment around his thin
mouth, then gave up the effort. He had been irritated by the crack that
Pennyroyal had made about the underdeck in his interview in the
Palimpsest, reminding everyone of Shkin's beginnings as a child thief in the
dank alleys of Mole's Combe. Maybe this girl was a gift from his gods, a
way to get back his own from Brighton's absurd mayor.
"If your story is true," he said, "you might indeed be of interest to Mayor
Pennyroyal. But how can you prove it?"
Wren pointed to the Tin Book, which lay on his desk. "That's the proof.
It's a famous artifact from the margravine's library...."
"I do not recall Pennyroyal mentioning it in his tediously detailed
account of Anchorage's treasures," said Shkin. "What if he does not
recognize it? That leaves only your word, and who would believe the word
of a slave and a Lost Girl?"
 "He can ask me stuff," said Wren desperately. "He can ask me things
about my mum and dad and Mr. Scabious and Miss Freya, stuff that's not in
his book, stuff that only somebody who'd lived in Anchorage could know
about."
"Interesting." Shkin gave another of his slow-motion nods. "Monica," he
said, "this girl is to be transferred to the Second Tier. Make sure she is
treated as a luxury item from now on."
"Don't forget Fishcake," said Wren. "He's been to Anchorage too."
"Indeed," said Shkin, and with a glance at Miss Weems, he added,
"arrange for that boy to be brought to the questioning room. It's time I had a
word with him."
13 Dr Zero
***
AS THE AIRSHIP THAT had carried her from Batmunkh Tsaka swung
into the shoals of other ships above Tienjing, Oenone Zero looked down
from the gondola windows, delighted by the gaily painted houses balanced
on their impossible ledges, the gardens like window boxes, the sunlight
silvering high-level canals, and the bright robes of the citizens thronging on
the spidery bridges and the steep, ladderlike streets. This city, high in the
central mountains of Shan Guo, had been the birthplace of Anti-
Tractionism. Here Lama Batmunkh had founded the Anti-Traction League,
and here the League had had its capital for a thousand years.
But the League was gone now, the old High Council overthrown, and the
signs of the Green Storm's war were everywhere. As the airship descended
toward the military docking pans at the Jade Pagoda, Oenone found it
harder and
harder to ignore the hideous concrete rocket emplacements that
disfigured Tienjing's parks and the armies of ugly windmills flailing and
rattling on the mountainsides, generating clean energy for the war effort.
For fourteen years no one had been allowed to do anything that was not part
of the war effort, and the civilian quarters of the city showed signs of long
neglect. Wherever Oenone looked, buildings were falling into disrepair and
the shadows of patrolling dreadnoughts slithered across decaying roofs.
The Jade Pagoda was not made of jade, nor was it a pagoda. The name
was just a relic that Tienjing's founders had brought with them when they
had first fled into these mountains; it had probably belonged once to some
pleasant summer palace in the lowlands, long since devoured by hungry
cities. It didn't suit the grim stone fortress that loomed over Oenone as she
disembarked on the snow-scoured pan. On spikes above the outer gates, the
heads of antiwar protesters and people who failed to recycle their household
waste were turning dry and papery as wasps' nests in the mountain air. Huge
slogans had been painted on the walls: THE WORLD MADE GREEN
AGAIN! and ONE LAST PUSH WILL SMASH THE PAN-GERMAN
TRACTION WEDGE!
Soldiers of the Stalker Fang's elite air legion manned the inner gate, and
stepped out to bar the way as Oenone heaved her pack onto her shoulder
and started up the steps from the docking pan.
"Papers, young man," barked the subofficer in charge. It was a mistake
that Oenone was used to. In the Storm's lands, all surplus food was
earmarked for the fighters at the front, and the yearly famines of her
childhood had left her as slight
and flat-chested as a boy of fourteen. She waited patiently while the
subofficer checked her pass, and saw his face change when he realized who
she was. "Let her through! Let her through!" he shouted, lashing at his men
with the flat of his sword, punishing them in the hope that Dr. Zero would
not punish him. "Let her through at once! This is Dr. Zero, the leader's new
surgeon-mechanic!"
Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and
she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had
been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues' Roost, was just a face in a
photograph on the family shrine.
Oenone grew up shy and clever on an air base in remote Aleutia, where
her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs
like "The East Is Green" and "We Thank the Stalker Fang for Our Happy
Childhoods." At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother,
Eno, told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken
Stalkers shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind
the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them
better, not understanding then that they were dead already and would best
be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armor, the
braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base
commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-
mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations
for her mother and herself that way until she was sixteen, when the Green
Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility,
 then to a front-line Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.
In that underground world of trenches and dugouts she toiled through the
long, murderous winter of '22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen
mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where
Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them
marching back into the line.
She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity.
She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way
they weren't people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down
and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the
Resurrection room that Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked
and teased one another as they worked, but because Oenone was so young,
they called her "little sister" and took care of her. They were impressed by
how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved
problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her,
using words like "genius."
Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was
playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that
winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch
of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green
Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that
nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults
hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers
down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter
screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units
crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides
through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in
the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and
slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would
turn on it and tear it apart.
At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming
snout-gun rounds and the whistle of snipers' bullets slicing the cold air
above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months,
and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in
the Resurrection room: You learned to stop feeling things. She didn't even
feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother's air base had
been eaten by amphibious suburbs.
And then, during the spring offensive of '23, she recognized one of the
bodies that the salvage teams dumped in front of her. There was a pattern of
moles on his chest that she knew as well as the constellations he had taught
her when she was little. Even before she peeled aside the bloody rag that
someone had draped over his face, she knew that he was her brother, Eno.
Because their letters to each other had been censored, she hadn't even
known that he was in her sector.
She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets.
She did not want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her
if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps taking
the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced
them as Crypto-Tractionists, and they were shot
and Resurrected with their friends. Oenone did not want to be shot. At
the sight of Eno, all her feelings had returned, and her fear of death came
back so suddenly and so powerfully that she could barely breathe. She did
not ever want to be like Eno, cold and helpless on a slab.
"Surgeon-Mechanic?" asked one of her assistants. "Are you unwell?"
Oenone wanted to be sick. She waved him away and tried to control
herself. It was wrong to even think of not Resurrecting Eno. She told herself
that she should be happy for her brother, because thanks to her, his body
would be able to go on fighting the barbarians even after death. But she was
not happy.
Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, "Scalpel. Bone saw. Rib
spreaders," and set to work. She opened Eno's body and took out his
internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery housings, and
preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel
hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She
took off his skin and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibers of
his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach
stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled
wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and
to the other machines she had installed.
"This isn't really you," she told him, whispering to him constantly as she
worked. "You are in the Sunless Country, and this is just a thing you've left
behind that we can use, like recycling a bottle or a crate. Doesn't the Green
Storm tell us to recycle everything for the sake of the Good Earth?"
When she had finished, she handed him over to a junior surgeon-
mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives. Then she went
outside and smoked a cigarette, and watched airships on fire above no-
man's-land.
It was after that that the dead started talking to her. It seemed strange that
they should be so chatty when her own brother had said nothing at all, but
when she looked into their faces, which she always made a point of doing
after Eno, she could hear them whispering in her mind.
They all asked her same thing: Who will end this? Who will put an end to
this endless war?
"I'll do it," Oenone Zero promised, her small voice drowning in the
thunder of the guns. "At least I'll try."
"Treacle!" cried Popjoy cheerfully, when she finally arrived at his offices,
high in the pagoda. He was packing. In the big trunk that sat open on his
desk, Oenone could see books, files, papers, a framed portrait of the Stalker
Fang, and an enamel mug with the logo of the Resurrection Corps and the
slogan YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A MAD SCIENTIST TO WORK
HERE--BUT IT HELPS! Popjoy was standing on a chair to unhook a
picture of the Rogues' Roost air base, which he dusted with his cuff before
stowing in the trunk. Then he blew Dr. Zero a kiss.
"Congratulations! I've just been to see Fang, and it's official! She's so
impressed with your work on old Grikey that she's decided to let me retire
at last! I'm off to my weekend place at Batmunkh Gompa for a well-earned
rest. A spot of fishing; tinkering with a few pet projects; I might even write
my memoirs. And you, Treacle--you're to be my replacement."
 How strange, thought Oenone. This was what she had been working for
ever since her epiphany in the trenches: to be the Stalker Fang's personal
surgeon-mechanic. For this she had overcome her natural shyness and
fought for a transfer to the central Stalker Works. For this she had put up
with Dr. Popjoy's unpleasant sense of humor and wandering hands. For this
she had spent years tracking down the grave of the notorious Stalker Grike,
and months repairing him, proving to everyone that she was at least
Popjoy's equal. Yet now that the moment had arrived, she could not even
find a smile. Her knees felt weak. She gripped the doorframe to stop herself
from falling.
"Cheer up, Treacle!" Popjoy leered. "It's good news! Power! Money! And
all you have to do in return is check Her Excellency's oil levels from time to
time, buff up her bodywork, keep a weather eye open for rust. She's
basically indestructible, so you shouldn't have too many problems. If you
have any worries, send word to me. Otherwise ..."
Otherwise I'm on my own, thought Oenone Zero, climbing the stairs to
the highest level of the pagoda, the Stalker Fang's own quarters. It was all
wrong, of course; if there were justice in the world, a man like Popjoy, who
had unleashed so much suffering and evil, would suffer himself. Instead, he
was going to end his days in luxury, doing a spot of fishing, tinkering with a
few pet projects. But at least by retiring he would allow Oenone Zero a
chance to fulfill her promise to the dead.
Sentries clattered to attention as she passed. Flunkies bowed low before
her and swung open the doors that led into the Stalker Fang's conference
chamber. Clerks and staff
officers looked up from a big map of the Rustwater and did not bother to
return Oenone's low bow. Fang looked up too, her green eyes flaring. She
had returned from the front line only a few hours before, and her armor was
crusted with dried mud and the blood of townie soldiers. "My new surgeon-
mechanic," she whispered.
"At your service, Excellency," murmured Oenone Zero, and dropped to
her knees before the Stalker. When she found the courage to lift her head,
everyone had gone back to their war maps, and the only eyes that lingered
on her were those of Mr. Grike.
 So everything was in place. She was on the inside, a member of the
central staff. Soon she would put in motion the plan she'd thought of in her
louse-infested bunk on the Altai front. She would assassinate the Stalker
Fang.
14 SOLD
***
Later, Wren would sometimes tell people that she knew what it was like
to be a slave, but she didn't, not really. The old trade was thriving in those
years. Prisoners taken by both sides in the long war were sold wholesale to
men like Shkin, who packed them into leaky, underheated airfreighters and
shipped them off along the bird roads to work on giant industrial platforms
or the endless entrenchments and city-traps of the Storm. Slavery for them
meant grinding labor, the ripping apart of families, random cruelty, and an
early death. The worst Wren had to put up with was Nimrod Pennyroyal's
writing.
They had moved her, after that first interview with Shkin, into a
comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Pepperpot. She had a soft bed, a
basin to wash in, three meals a day, and a new linen dress that rather suited
her. And she
had a copy of Predator's Gold, delivered by Miss Weems "with Mr.
Shkin's compliments."
For a few hours each day, a reflector outside the barred window caught a
beam of sunshine falling through a skylight in the deck plates above and
filled Wren's cell with light. As she curled up on her bunk and opened the
lurid covers of Pennyroyal's book, she could almost imagine herself back in
her own bedroom in Dog Star Court, where she had often sat beside the
window, reading. But she had never read anything like Predator's Gold.
How strange it was to find the places and people and stories she had known
all her life so changed and twisted!
She had been afraid that reading about Mum and Dad would make her
homesickness worse, but she need not have worried. Dad did not feature at
all in Pennyroyal's book. As for Hester Shaw, "a titian-haired Amazon of
the air whose divine face was marred only by a livid scar where some
brigand had drawn his stiletto across the damask flesh of her cheek," she
was barely recognizable as Mum.
 And one night, as Wren lay sleepless, thinking indignantly about all that
she had read, it struck her that she had made another terrible mistake. She'd
thought herself so clever for persuading Shkin to take her to the mayor, but
she'd been assuming that Predator's Gold would be mostly true. She had
not imagined just how much Pennyroyal had lied about his time in
Anchorage. By telling the real story, Wren could destroy his reputation and
his career. Pennyroyal might well want to buy her, but not so that he could
write books about her. He would want to silence her, quickly and
permanently.
Alone in her cell, Wren hid her face in the pillow and
whined with fear. What had she done? And how could she undo it? She
jumped from her bunk and started toward the door, meaning to shout for a
guard. She would tell Shkin that she had lied about Anchorage; she was just
a Lost Girl after all, and of no interest to Professor Pennyroyal. But then she
would be back where she had started, or worse--Shkin would say she had
been wasting his time. She imagined that a man like Shkin would have
unpleasant ways of getting even with people who wasted his time.
"Think, Wren, think!" she whispered.
And all the while, beneath her feet, Brighton's powerful Mitchell &
Nixon engines boomed and pounded, pushing the city steadily northward.
After his interview with Wren, Shkin had questioned Fishcake. The
newbie had proved highly cooperative. He was tired out and terrified, and
eager for some new master who would look after him and tell him what to
do. After a few kind-sounding words from Nabisco Shkin, he confirmed
Wren's story about Anchorage. After a few more, he told the slave dealer
where Grimsby lay.
Shkin's people relayed the information to the mayor and the Council.
Brighton adjusted its course, and soon the Old Tech instruments on the
bridge detected the spires of a sunken city in the depths below. Brighton
circled for a while, broadcasting its treacherous message, and succeeded in
winkling out a last few limpets. When no more appeared, Pennyroyal
decided that the expedition was at an end.
 The original plan had been to send men down in captured limpets to
explore the pirate lair. But the voyage north
had taken longer than expected; it was late in the season, more storms
were forecast, and the people of Brighton, who had the attention span of
midges, were growing bored. Depth charges were dropped, resulting in a
few spectacular underwater explosions and a lot of floating debris, which
the city's shopkeepers scooped up in nets and put on sale as souvenirs of
Grimsby. Pennyroyal made a speech declaring that the North Atlantic was
now safe for decent raft cities again, and Brighton turned south, setting a
course back to the warmer waters of the Middle Sea, where it had promised
to rendezvous with a cluster of Traction Cities to celebrate Moon Festival.
The following afternoon, Wren's door was unlocked and a lot of black-
clad guards came packing into her cell, followed by Nabisco Shkin himself.
"Well, my dear," he said, glancing at the copy of Predator's Gold that lay
on her bunk. "Were you gripped by our mayor's adventures? Did you notice
any errors in his account?"
Wren barely knew where to start. "It's all rubbish!" she said indignantly.
"The people of Anchorage didn't force Pennyroyal to guide them across the
High Ice; they made him their Chief Navigator, which was a great honor,
and he made a proper hash of it. And it wasn't him who fought off the
Huntsmen, it was my mum, and she didn't get killed by Masgard, like she
does in the book; she's still alive. And she'd never have sold Anchorage's
course to Arkangel. And when she's dying and says to Pennyroyal, 'Take
my airship, save yourself,' that's just poo; Pennyroyal stole the ship, and
shot Dad so he could take off in her--he doesn't mention Dad, of
course, and as for that thing that Miss Freya does on page eighty-one ..."
She stopped, remembering her predicament. Shkin was watching her, as
careful and calculating as ever. Maybe giving her the book had just been a
way of testing her, seeing if she would stick to her story about Anchorage in
the face of all Pennyroyal's lies.
"Interesting," Shkin said, and snapped his fingers at one of the guards,
who stepped smartly forward to clamp a pair of pretty silver manacles on
Wren's wrists. "I always suspected that His Worship's tales of adventure
were somewhat embroidered. I think it is time we took you up to meet
him."
Wren was led down the stairways of the Pepperpot to a garage, where a
sleek black bug stood waiting. "What about Fishcake?" she asked as Shkin's
men pushed her inside. "What have you done with poor little Fishcake?"
"He will be remaining at the Pepperpot." Shkin settled himself beside her
on the bug's backseat and checked his pocket watch. "Cloud 9," he told the
driver, and the bug set off, out into the dingy streets of the Laines, a district
of antique shops and cheap hotels that filled most of Brighton's middle tier.
In other circumstances Wren would have been fascinated by the passing
shop fronts packed with junk and Old Tech, the strangely dressed people,
the tier supports plastered with the handbills of hopeless fringe theater
companies. Now, however, she was too busy wondering how she was going
to keep herself alive. It would all be a matter of timing, she decided. If she
were clever enough and kept her nerve, she
might still be able to get herself out of Shkin's hands without Pennyroyal
ever realizing who she really was....
The bug climbed a long ramp to the upper tier. Clearing tourists out of
the way with blasts of its hooter, it sped along Ocean Boulevard, the oval
promenade that ringed Brighton's upper city. It passed hotels and
restaurants, palm trees and crazy-golf courses, fairgrounds, floral clocks,
and bingo parlors. It crossed a bridge that spanned the shallow end of the
Sea Pool, a lake of cleaned and filtered seawater fringed by artifical
beaches. At last it arrived in the Old Steine, the circular plaza where the
thick steel hawsers that tied Cloud 9 to Brighton were attached.
The floating deck plate hovered about two hundred feet above Wren's
head. Looking up, she could see a glass-walled control room jutting from its
underbelly like an elaborate upside-down greenhouse. Men were moving
about inside, operating banks of brass levers that adjusted Cloud 9's trim
and altitude. Small engine pods were mounted all around the deck plate's
edge, and Wren presumed that in rough weather they would be used to keep
Cloud 9 on station above the city. On this windless afternoon only a few
were switched on, acting as fans to blow Brighton's exhaust smoke away
from the mayor's palace.
In the middle of the Old Steine, where the Cloud 9 tow-lines were bolted
to huge, rusty stanchions, a yellow cable car waited to take visitors up to the
Pavilion. As Shkin's bug squeaked to a stop beside it, red-coated soldiers
came hurrying to study the papers of Shkin and his men and run Old Tech
metal detectors over their clothes.
"There was a time when just about anyone was allowed
to go up and wander in the Pavilion gardens," said Shkin. "That's all
changed since the war started. There's no fighting in our part of the world,
of course--the African Anti-Tractionists have no stomach for the Green
Storm's crusade--but Pennyroyal is still terrified that saboteurs or terrorists
might take a potshot at him."
That was the first Wren had heard about the war between the cities and
the Storm. It explained why there were all those big, ugly gun batteries on
the city's esplanades, and why security was so tight.
"Purpose of your visit to Cloud 9, Mr. Shkin?" asked the commander.
"I have an interesting piece of merchandise to show to the mayor."
"I'm not sure His Worship is buying slaves at the moment, sir."
"Oh, he will not want to miss the chance of adding this one to his staff. I
suggest you let us up without further delay, unless you wish to spend the
rest of your career down on Tier Three, picking pubes out of the Sea Pool
filters...."
There were no more objections. Shkin and his party were ushered quickly
aboard, the cable car shuddered, and Wren, looking from its big windows,
saw Brighton fall away below her. "Oh, look!" she murmured, entranced,
but Shkin and his men had seen it all before.
Suddenly the howl of supercharged engine pods filled the cable car and
swift shadows came flickering across its windows. Beyond the web of
Cloud 9's hawsers, a flock of fierce, spiky shapes cut through the afternoon
sky. Wren shrieked, imagining that there had been an explosion up on
Cloud 9
and that this was the debris raining down, but the shapes veered in
formation and hurtled away across Brighton's rooftops, their shadows
speeding across the busy streets.
"But they've got no envelopes!" Wren cried. "No gasbags! How do they
stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!"
Some of Shkin's men laughed. The slave trader himself looked faintly
pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. "Not impossible,"
he said. "The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years
ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm's air fleets. There
is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological
advances...." He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping
back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines. "This lot are called the
Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air force, hired by our esteemed mayor to
protect his palace...."
Wren turned to the window again as the machines sped by. They were
fragile-looking contraptions, all string and balsa wood and varnished paper,
their cockpits stripped down to a bucket seat and a nest of control sticks.
Some had two batlike wings, others three or four or ten; some flapped along
beneath black, creaking things like broken umbrellas. On their massive
engine pods were painted hawks and sharks and naked ladies and raffish,
devil-may-care names: Damn You, Gravity! and Bad Hair Day; Contents
''
Under Pressure and Delayed Gratification NOW . A begoggled aviatrix
waved at Wren from the cockpit of something called the Combat Wombat.
Wren waved back, but the squadron was already pulling away, dwindling to
a cluster of specks far off above the sea.
Wren was trembling as the cable car carried her up through the belly of
Cloud 9 to its terminus in the Pavilion gardens. She had always believed
that Dad and Miss Freya knew everything there was to know about the
world outside Anchorage-in-Vineland, but clearly it had changed a lot in the
sixteen years since they had crossed the ice. They had known nothing about
this terrible war, which was almost as old as she was, and she doubted they
could even imagine the bizarre flying machines she had just seen. It made
her feel even farther away from them.
The pang of homesickness faded as her minders led her out of the upper
cable-car terminus and along graveled paths toward the hub of Cloud 9,
where the sugar-pink minarets and meringue domes of Pennyroyal's palace
rose from gardens filled with palm trees and cypresses, follies and
fountains. Flocks of gaudy parakeets wheeled overhead, and above them
Cloud 9's transparent gasbags shone in the sunlight like enormous bubbles.
"Your business?" asked a house slave, stepping out to bar Shkin's way.
"Nabisco Shkin," the slave dealer replied, and that was enough; the man
bowed and stammered something and waved the visitors on, up an elegant
white staircase to a broad sundeck. At the heart of the sundeck was a pool.
In the middle of the pool, adrift on his air bed in a gold lame swimming
costume, a cocktail in one hand, a book in the other, his round face tilted to
the sun, lounged Nimrod Pennyroyal.
Wren had worked out that Pennyroyal must be at least sixty-five, so she
was expecting someone quite frail. But Pennyroyal had aged well. He had
lost some weight and most
of his hair, but otherwise he looked not much different from the
photographs Wren had seen of him, taken during his brief, unhappy stint as
Anchorage's Honorary Chief Navigator. A bevy of attractive slave girls trod
water around his floating bed, clutching fresh drinks, a bookmark, trays of
cakes and sweets, and other items such as a busy mayor might need. A boy
of Wren's age, long and black as an evening shadow, stood on the poolside,
waving an ostrich-feather fan.
"I see that Green Storm prisoner I sold you has settled in well," said
Shkin.
'Ah? Oh!" Pennyroyal opened his eyes and sat up. "Ah! Afternoon,
Shkin." He twisted round on his air bed to peer at the youth. "Yes, Mrs.
Pennyroyal is delighted with him. Makes a very handy fan bearer. Lovely
wafting action. And he goes so well with the dining room wallpaper." He
looked at Shkin again, and Wren had the impression that he wasn't
particularly pleased to see the slave trader. "Anyway, Nabisco, old chap, to
what do I owe the um, ah ..."
Shkin bowed faintly. "This girl was taken from one of the limpets we
fished up last week. I thought you might wish to purchase her for the
Pavilion." He gestured toward Wren, and his assistants moved her closer to
the poolside so that the mayor might have a better view of her.
Pennyroyal peered at her. "Lost Girl, eh? She scrubs up well, I must say.
But I thought we agreed we don't want any of her crowd hanging about in
Brighton. Weren't you planning to sell them all to Nuevo-Maya?"
"Afraid one of them might know a few awkward facts about your past,
Pennyroyal?" said Shkin.
"Eh? What are you suggesting?"
"This girl," Shkin announced, "has lately arrived from the Dead
Continent. From a city long thought lost, but actually thriving in that
blasted land. A city of which I believe Your Worship has fond memories."
Reaching behind him, Shkin took something from one of his lackeys and
lobbed it across the pool so that it landed on Pennyroyal's air bed. The Tin
Book. Pennyroyal picked it up and studied the cover with a puzzled frown,
then turned it over and looked at the paper label on the back.
"Great Gods]" he gasped, spilling his drink into the pool. "Anchorage!"
"This girl," Shkin said, "is none other than the daughter of your old
traveling companion Hester Shaw."
"Oh, cripes!" yelped Pennyroyal, and with a sudden, spasmodic lurch
capsized his air bed.
"I was concerned to discover that there are certain discrepancies between
the story she tells and the version of events in Your Worship's interpolitan
bestseller Predator's Gold" explained Nabisco Shkin, looking not the least
bit concerned as he stood there on the poolside, leaning on his black steel
cane, watching Pennyroyal splash and flounder. "So I decided it might be
best if I gave Your Worship the opportunity to purchase her before her
account can become publicly known and ... confuse Your Worship's many
readers. Naturally she is priced at a premium. Shall we say a thousand gold
pieces?"
"Never!" spluttered Pennyroyal, standing up in the shallow end with all
the dignity an elderly gentleman in a gold lame swimming costume can
muster. "You're nothing but a gangster, Shkin! I will not be intimidated by
your puerile
attempt to ah, er ... It's not true, is it? It can't be true! Hester Shaw had no
daughter--and anyway, ah, Anchorage sank, didn't it; went down with all
hands...."
"Ask her," said Shkin brightly, pointing the tip of his cane at Wren. "Ask
Miss Natsworthy here."
Pennyroyal gawked at Wren, his eyes so full of fear that for a moment
Wren felt almost sorry for him. "Well, girl?" he asked. "What do you say?
Do you really claim to be from Anchorage?"
Wren took a deep breath and clenched her fists. Now that she was facing
this legendary traitor and villain, she felt less certain than ever that her plan
would work.
"No," she said.
Shkin turned to stare at her.
"Of course it's not true," said Wren, managing a tight little laugh.
"Anchorage went down in Arctic waters years and years ago. Everyone who
has read your magnificent book knows that, Professor Pennyroyal. I'm just a
poor Lost Girl from Grimsby."
Wren had turned her story this way and that in her mind on the way from
the Pepperpot, and could not see how it could be disproved. Of course, if
anyone asked the other Lost Boys, they would all say that Wren was not
one of their tribe, and Fishcake knew who she really was--but why would
Pennyroyal believe their word over Wren's? She could say that Shkin had
bribed them to back him up.
 "I've never been to Anchorage," she said firmly.
Shkin's nostrils flared. "Very well then; the book, the Tin Book, stamped
with the seal of Anchorage's rulers--how do you explain that?"
Wren had already worked out an answer to that. "I brought it with me
from Grimsby," she said. "It is a present for Your Worship. The Lost Boys
stole it years and years ago, like we've stolen all sorts of things from all
sorts of cities. Anchorage is a wreck, sunk at the bottom of the sea. Nobody
lives there."
"But she told me herself she was Hester Shaw's daughter!" said Shkin.
"Why would she lie?"
"Because of your wonderful books, Your Worship," explained Wren, and
gazed at the mayor as adoringly as she could. "I have read them all.
Whenever my limpet attached itself to a new city, I would always burgle the
bookshops first in the hope that there would be a new Nimrod Pennyroyal. I
told Mr. Shkin I was from Anchorage just so that he would bring me to
meet you."
Pennyroyal looked hopeful. He so wanted to believe her. "But your
name," he said. "Natsworthy ..."
"Oh, it's not my real name," Wren said brightly. "I looked up Hester
Shaw in Uncle's records, and it said she used to travel with someone called
that."
"Oh, really?" Pennyroyal tried to hide his relief. "Never heard of him."
Wren smiled, pleased at how easy it was to lie and how good she was
turning out to be at it. Her story didn't make a lot of sense, but when you tell
someone something that they want to hear, they tend to believe you;
WOPCART had taught her that.
She said, "I was planning to keep up the pretense, Professor, in the hope
that you would take me into your household. Even if I were only the
lowliest of your slaves, at
 least I would be close to the author of Predator's Gold and ... and all
those other books." She lowered her eyes demurely. "But as soon as I saw
you, sir, I realized that you would never be taken in by my lies, and so I
resolved to tell you the truth."
"Very commendable," said Pennyroyal. "Quite right, too. I saw through it
in an instant, you know. Although oddly enough, you do bear a slight
resemblance to poor Hester. That's why I was startled when you first
appeared. That young woman was very, very dear to me, and it is the
deepest regret of my life that I didn't manage to save her."
Ooh, you rotten liar! thought Wren, but all she said was, "I expect I must
go now, sir. I expect Mr. Shkin will wish to make what profit of me he can.
But I go happily, for at least I have spoken with the finest author of the
age."
"Absolutely not!" Pennyroyal heaved himself out of the pool and stood
dripping, waving away the girls who came hurrying round him with towels,
clothes, and a portable changing tent. "I will not hear of it, Shkin! This
delightful, intelligent young person has shown pluck, initiative, and sound
literary judgment. I forbid you to sell her off as a common slave."
"I have my overhead to consider, Your Worship." Shkin was angry now,
white with it, and struggling to keep himself under control.
"I'll buy her myself, then," said Pennyroyal. He wasn't a sentimental man,
but he didn't like to think of this discerning girl being punished for her love
of his books--besides, house slaves were tax deductible. "My wife can
always use a few extra handmaidens about the place," he explained,
"especially now, with the preparations for the Moon Festival ball
to attend to. Tell you what--I'll give you twenty dolphins for her. That's
more than fair."
"Twenty?" sneered Shkin, as if such a sum were too small to even
contemplate.
"Sold!" said Pennyroyal quickly. "My people will pay you. And next
time, my dear fellow, try not to be so gullible. Honestly, how could anyone
believe that this girl came from America? Quite absurd!"
 Shkin bowed slightly. "As you say, Your Worship. Absurd." He held out
his hand. "The Tin Book, if you please."
Pennyroyal, who had been leafing through the Tin Book, snapped it shut
and clutched it to his chest. "I think not, Shkin. The girl said this was a
present for me."
"It is my property!"
"No, it's not. Your contract with the Council states that any Lost Boys
you fished up were yours. This isn't a Lost Boy, not by any stretch of the
imagination. It's some sort of Ancient code, possibly valuable. It is my duty
as mayor of Brighton to hang on to it for, ah, further study."
Shkin stared for a long moment at the mayor, then at Wren. He
manufactured a smile. "No doubt we shall all meet again," he said
pleasantly, and turned, snapping his fingers for his men to follow him as he
walked briskly away.
Pennyroyal's girls clustered around him, enclosing him within his
changing tent. For a short time Wren was left alone. She grinned, flushed
with her own cleverness. She might still be a slave, but she was a posh
slave, in the house of the mayor himself! She would get good food and fine
clothes, and probably never have to carry anything much heavier than the
odd tray of fairy cakes. And she would meet all kinds of interesting
people. Handsome aviators, for instance, who might be persuaded to fly
her home to Vineland.
Her only regret was that she hadn't managed to bring Fishcake up here
with her. She felt responsible for the boy, and hoped that the slave dealer
wouldn't take out his anger on him. But it would be all right. One way or
another, she would escape, and then maybe she'd find a way of helping
Fishcake too.
Nabisco Shkin was not a man who let his emotions show, and by the time
the cable car set him down again on Brighton's deck plates, he had mastered
his temper. At the Pepperpot he greeted Miss Weems with no more than his
customary coldness and told her, "Bring me the little Lost Boy."
 Soon afterward he was sitting calmly in his office, watching Fishcake
tuck into a second bowl of chocolate ice cream and listening again to his
account of the Autolycus's voyage to Vineland. This boy was telling the
truth, Shkin was sure of it. But there was no point in trying to use him to
discredit the mayor. He was young, and easily influenced: If it came to a
trial, Pennyroyal's lawyers would tear him to shreds. Shkin closed his eyes
thoughtfully and pictured Vineland. "Are you quite certain you can find the
place again, boy?"
"Oh yes, Mr. Shkin," said Fishcake with his mouth full.
Shkin smiled at him over the tips of his steepled fingers. "Good. Very
good," he said. "You know, boy, every now and then I acquire a slave who
proves too useful or too bright to part with; Miss Weems, for example. I
hope that you will be another."
Fishcake nervously returned the smile. "You mean you
ain't going to sell me off to them Nuevo-Mayan devils, sir?"
"No, no, no, no," Shkin assured him, shaking his head. "I want you to
serve me, Fishcake. We'll have you trained up as an apprentice. And next
summer, when the weather improves, I shall outfit an expedition, and you
will lead us to Anchorage-in-Vineland. I imagine those Vinelanders or
Anchorites or whatever they call themselves will fetch a good price at the
slave markets."
Fishcake listened wide-eyed, then grinned. "Yes, Mr. Shkin! Thank you,
Mr. Shkin!"
Shkin leaned back in his chair, his temper quite restored. He would
avenge himself on Pennyroyal by showing the whole world that Anchorage
had survived. As for that treacherous little vixen Wren, let her see how
clever she felt when the Shkin Corporation enslaved all her family and
friends.
15 Children of the Deep
***
THE LIMPET SCREW Worm had been built long before the Lost Boys
started to use wireless crab-cams. Even its radio set had stopped working
long ago. It had no way of receiving the broadcasts from Brighton, and so
Hester, Tom, and Freya never had to find out whether Caul's desire to meet
his parents would have outweighed his loyalty to his friends. Deaf to
WOPCART's invitations, the Screw Worm swam north into the deep, cold
waters of the Greenland Trench. On the same late-summer afternoon that
Wren came face-to-face with Pennyroyal, its passengers finally sighted
Grimsby.
Tom had visited the underwater city once before, but Hester and Freya
knew it only from his descriptions. They jostled for a view as Caul steered
the limpet closer.
Grimsby had been a giant industrial raft once. Now it was a drowned
wreck, resting on the slopes of an undersea
mountain. Weeds and barnacles and rust were all working hard to
camouflage it, blurring the outlines of buildings and paddle wheels until it
was difficult to tell where Grimsby ended and the mountain began.
"Where are the lights?" asked Tom. His strongest memory of the Lost
Boys' lair was the surreal glow of lamplight in the windows of Grimsby's
sunken Town Hall. Now the whole city lay in darkness.
"Something's wrong," said Caul.
Something bumped against the Screw Worm's hull. Shards of splintered
wood and torn plastic revolved in the splay of light from the nose lantern.
The limpet was swimming through a zone of drifting wreckage.
"The whole place is dead--" Hester said, and then stopped short, because
if that was true, then Wren was probably dead as well.
 "Look at the Burglarium!" Caul whispered, shocked. A big building slid
by on the starboard side, a building where he had spent much of his
childhood, now lightless and open to the sea, litter swirling around huge,
jagged rents in its walls. A boy's body turned slow somersaults as the
Worm's wake reached it. Others tumbled in the flooded glastic tunnel that
had once linked the Burglarium to the Town Hall. "Power plant's gone too,"
he added as they passed over a domed building that had been smashed like
an eggshell. His voice sounded tight and strained. "The Town Hall looks all
right. Nobody about, though. I'll see if we can get inside."
It was sixteen years since Caul had fled this place, but he had made the
approach to the limpet pens a thousand times in his dreams since then. He
swung the Screw Worm toward
I40 the water-door at the base of the Town Hall. The door stood open.
Silvery fish were darting in and out.
"Still no one," he said. "It should be closed. There should be sentry subs
to check us out."
"Maybe they're trying to raise us on the radio and we can't hear them,"
Tom suggested hopefully.
"What do we do?" asked Freya.
"We go in, of course," said Hester. She checked the gun in her belt, the
knife in her boot. If there were any Lost Boys left alive in there, she meant
to show them what Valentine's daughter was made of.
The Screw Worm slid into the tunnels. Automatic doors opened ahead and
closed behind. "The emergency power must be on," said Caul. "That's
something...."
"It could be a trap," said Hester. "They might be waiting for us."
But no one was waiting for the Screw Worm. It surfaced in one of the
moon-pools in the floor of the limpet pen, and its passengers scrambled out
into cold, stale air. The darkness was broken only by a few dim red
emergency lights. Air pumps wheezed asthmatically. The big space, which
Tom remembered as being filled with Lost Boys and limpets, was deserted.
Docking cranes stood mournfully above the empty moon-pools like the
skeletons of dinosaurs in an abandoned museum. A fat cargo submarine
wallowed in a dock on the far side of the pens, her hatches open. A half-
dismantled limpet lay in a repair yard, but there was no sign of the
mechanics who should have been working on her.
Tom fetched an electric lantern from the Screw Worm's hold and went
ahead, still trying to hope that he would find
Wren here somewhere, alive and safe and running to hug him. He shone
the lantern into the inky shadows under the cranes. Once or twice he
thought he glimpsed a crab-cam scuttling away from the light. Nothing else
moved.
"Where is everybody?" he whispered.
"Well, here's one of them," said Hester.
The big door at the back of the pens stood half open, and on the threshold
lay a boy of Wren's age, curled up, staring, dead. Hester pushed past Tom
and stepped over the body. In the corridor outside the pens lay a half dozen
more, some killed by sword thrusts, others by metal spears from harpoon
guns.
"Looks like the Lost Boys have been fighting among themselves," she
said. "Nice of them to save us the trouble."
Tom stepped gingerly over the dead boy and looked up. Cold drops of
water pattered on his upturned face. "This place is leaking like a rusty tin
can," he murmured.
"Uncle will know how to fix it," said Caul. The others turned to look at
him, surprised by the confidence in his voice. He felt surprised by it
himself. "Uncle built Grimsby," he reminded them. "He made the first few
rooms airtight and built the first limpet all on his own, without anyone to
help him." He nodded, fingering his neck. The old rope burns were still
there, hard under his fingertips, reminders of how much he had feared and
hated Uncle at the end. But before that, for a long time, he had loved him.
Now that he was here again, and the Burglarium was a ruin and the Lost
Boys gone, he found that the fear and the hate had gone as well and that
only love was left. He remembered how safe he used to feel, curled up in
his bunk while Uncle's voice whispered from
the ceiling speakers through the long night shift. The world had been
simple then, and he had been happy.
"Uncle Knows Best," he murmured.
A sudden movement in the shadows farther down the corridor made
Hester swing her gun up. Freya grabbed her arm before she could shoot,
and Tom yelled "Het, no!" The echoes of his voice went booming away, up
staircases and down side passages, and the face that had been pinned for an
instant in his lantern beam vanished as its owner darted backward into the
shadows.
"It's all right," said Freya, moving past Hester, her hands held out in front
of her. "We won't hurt you."
The darkness was suddenly full of soft footfalls, rustlings. Eyes glinted in
the lantern light. Out from their hiding places the children of Grimsby came
creeping, smudged white faces pale as petals. They were newbies, too
young to take their places yet among the Lost Boys. A few were as old as
nine or ten; most were much younger. They stared at their visitors with
wide, scared eyes. One girl, older and bolder than the rest, came close to
Freya and said, "Are you our mummies and daddies?"
Freya knelt down so that her face was level with the children's. "No," she
said. "No, I'm sorry, we're not."
"But our mummies and daddies are coming, aren't they?" whispered
another child.
"There was a message...."
"They said they were near," said a little boy, tugging at Caul's hand and
looking up earnestly into his face. "They said we should go to them, and a
lot of the big boys wanted to, even though Uncle said not to...."
"And when the other boys tried stopping them, they fought them and
killed them dead!"
 "And then they went anyway. They took all the limpets."
"We wanted to go with them, but they said there wasn't room and we
were only newbies...."
"And there were explosions!" said a girl.
"No, that was later, silly," said another. "That was the depth charges."
"Bang!" shouted the smallest boy, waving his arms about to demonstrate.
"Bang!"
"And all the lights went out, and I think some water got in...."
All the children were talking at once, crowding into the light from Tom's
lantern. Hester held her hand out to one of them, but he backed away and
went to snuggle against Freya instead.
"Is Wren here?" Hester asked. "We're looking for our daughter, Wren."
"She's lost," Tom explained. "She was aboard the Autolycus."
Small faces turned toward him, blank as unwritten pages. The older girl
said, "Autolycus ain't come back. None of the limpets that went out these
last three weeks has come back."
"Then where's Wren?" shouted Tom. He had been terrified that he would
find Wren dead. The prospect of not finding her at all was almost as bad. He
stared from one bewildered little face to another. "What in Quirke's name
has been happening?"
The children backed away from him, frightened.
"Where's Uncle?" asked Caul. Freya smiled at him to let
the children see that he was a friend and they should answer his question.
"Maybe he left too," said Hester.
Caul shook his head. "Don't be stupid. Uncle wouldn't leave Grimsby."
"I think he's upstairs," said one of the boys.
 "He's very old," said another doubtfully.
"He doesn't ever leave his chamber now," agreed a third.
Caul nodded. "Good. We'll talk to him. He'll be able to tell us what's
happened, and he'll tell us where to find Wren." He could feel the others
staring at him. He turned to them and smiled. "It'll be all right. You'll see.
Uncle Knows Best."

16 Those Are Pearls That Were His

Eyes
***
THEY MADE A STRANGE procession, climbing the cluttered stairways
of Grimsby, where salt water dripped from hairline fractures in the high
roof and ran in rivulets from step to step. More bodies lay on the landings,
forming dams that the dirty water pooled behind. Overhead, crab-cameras
clung to ducts and banisters. Now and then, one turned to follow the
newcomers with its Cyclops eye.
Hester went ahead. Behind her, Tom, Caul, and Freya were surrounded
by children, small hands clutching theirs and reaching out to touch their
clothes as if to reassure themselves that these visitors from the world above
were real. They were especially drawn to Freya. In shocked, whispery
voices, they told her all sorts of secrets. "Whitebait picks his nose."
I do not!
"My name's Esbjorn, but the big boys at the Burglarium said I had to be
called Tuna, only I think Tuna's a stupid name, so can I change back now
that all the big boys have got killed dead and run away?"
"He sticks his finger right up there. And he eats the boogers."
"I don't!"
"Children," asked Freya, "who was it who blew up the Burglarium? How
long ago did it happen?"
 But the children couldn't answer that: A few days, said some, a week,
reckoned others. Their chatter faded as they neared the upper floors. They
looked into an enormous chamber, new since Tom and Caul were last in
Grimsby, made by knocking a dozen of the old rooms together. It was
stuffed with fine furnishings: plunder from burgled town halls and looted
statics. Huge mirrors hung on the walls, and swags of silk and velvet
curtained the colossal bed. Clothes and cushions were strewn across the
floor, and mobiles made from beach stones and antique seedies hung from
the ducts on the ceiling.
"This was Gargle's quarters," explained the children. "Gargle ran things
from here."
"Remora made the mobiles," said a little girl. "She's pretty and clever,
and she's Gargle's favorite."
"I wish Gargle would come back," a boy said. "Gargle would know what
to do."
"Gargle's dead," said Hester.
After that, the only sounds were the pad of their feet on the wet carpets
and a faint voice somewhere ahead, tinny and fizzing, as if it were coming
through loudspeakers. It said, "We
only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again...."
Up a final stairway to the chamber of screens, where Grimsby's founder
kept watch over his underwater kingdom. The last time Tom had been here,
it had been guarded; this time the guards were gone and the door was not
even locked. Hester kicked it open and went through it with her gun out.
The others crowded in behind. The chamber was large and high-
ceilinged, lit blue by the ghostly glow of the screens that covered the walls.
They were of every shape and size, from giant public Goggle Screens to
tiny displays ripped from Old Tech hospital equipment, all linked together
by a jungle of wires and ducts. Up above, in the dark dome of the roof,
hung a portable surveillance station: a midget cargo balloon dangling a
globe of screens and speakers. And every screen was showing the same
picture: a crowd of people on the windswept observation platform of a raft
city. "Children of the deep," the voice from the speakers pleaded, "if you
can hear this message, we beg you, come to us!"
"Why did they fall for it? Why did they go? Did they prefer a bunch of
old Drys to me?"
In the middle of the chamber an old man stood with his back to the door,
shouting at the recording on the screens. In his hand was a remote-control
device; he raised it and pressed a switch that made all the screens go blank
and silent, then turned to face Hester and the others.
"Who are you?" he demanded petulantly. "Where's Gargle?"
"Gargle's not coming back," said Tom as gently as he could. He had bad
memories of Uncle, but that did not stop him feeling sorry for the stooped
old man who was shuffling
I48 toward him in a pair of threadbare bunny slippers. The tortoiselike
head, poking out from layer upon layer of moldy clothes, blinked
shortsightedly at him. Uncle's eyes were clouded with age, and Tom noticed
that many of the screens that surrounded him had big magnifying lenses
bolted in front of them to make their pictures clearer. He suspected that
Uncle was almost blind. No wonder he had come to depend on Gargle.
"Gargle has passed on," he said.
"What, you mean ... ?" Uncle came closer, peering at him. "Dead?
Gargle? Little Gargle what gave himself such airs and graces?" His face
showed grief, then relief, then anger. "I told him! I warned him not to go
looking for that rotten book. He wasn't cut out for burgling, Gargle wasn't.
More of a planner. He had brains, Gargle did."
"We know," said Hester. "We saw them."
Uncle recoiled from the sound of her voice. "A woman? There's no
females allowed in Grimsby. I've always been very strict about that. Gargle
always backed me up on that. No girls allowed. Bad luck, that's all they
bring. Can't trust them."
"But Uncle ..." said Freya gently.
 "Eugh, there's another one! The whole place is crawling with females!"
"Uncle?" asked Caul.
The old man twitched around, frowning, as if the sound of Caul's voice
had tripped a rusty switch inside his head. "Caul, my boy!" he said, and
then, with a snarl, "This your doing, is it? You got something to do with
this? Tell the Drys how to find us, did you? You alone, or are there more?"
He limped away, stabbing at his remote control until the
jumbled screens were filled with views of Grimsby, thrusting his
parchment face close to the glass to stare at the empty corridors and
chambers, the empty limpet pen, the flooded, ruined halls of the
Burglarium.
"It's just the four of us, Uncle," said Caul. "We barely know what's
happened here. It has nothing to do with us."
"No?" Uncle stared at him, then let out a high-pitched cackle. "Gods,
then you've picked a fine time to drop in for a visit!"
"We've come for Tom and Hester's daughter," Caul said patiently. "Her
name's Wren. She was taken from Vineland by the newbie who was with
Gargle aboard the Autolycus."
"Fishcake? Fishcake, that was his name...." Uncle hung his head. When
he spoke, he sounded close to tears. "The Autolycus is missing. They're all
missing, Caul, my boy. The fools got that message about their mums and
dads and they went haring straight off to Brighton."
"To Brighton?" Tom had heard of Brighton. A resort town, a bit
bohemian, but not a bad sort of place. If Wren was there, she might be all
right.
"Why would Brighton want them?" asked Hester suspiciously.
Uncle shrugged and spread his hands and made various other twitchy
gestures to show that he had no idea. "I told my boys it was a trap. I told
them. But they wouldn't hear it. Maybe if Gargle had been here. They listen
to Gargle. Don't listen to their poor old Uncle anymore, what's slaved and
worried for them all these years...." Tears of self-pity went creeping down
his crumpled old face, and he blew his nose on his sleeve. His gaze slid
listlessly over Tom and Hester,
then settled on Freya again. "Gods, Caul, is that great fat whale the girl
you ran off to Anchorage for? She's let herself go! Come to think of it, you
don't look too good yourself. I like my boys to be well turned out, and you
... Well, you're shabby, that's the truth of it. Gargle told me you'd gone to
make something of yourself among the Drys."
Caul felt as if he were a newbie again, being told off for forgetting part of
his burgling kit. "Sorry, Uncle," he said.
Freya moved to his side and took his hand in hers. "Caul has made
something of himself," she said. "We couldn't have built Anchorage-in-
Vineland without his help. I'd like to tell you all about it, but first I think we
all have to leave this place."
"Leave?" Uncle stared at her as if he'd never heard the word before. "I
can't leave! What makes you think I'd want to leave?"
"Sir, this place is finished. You can't keep the children here...."
Uncle laughed. "Those lads aren't going anywhere," he said. "They're the
future of Grimsby."
The children edged in closer to Freya. She let go of Caul's hand to stroke
their heads. Everyone could hear the faint groan of stressed metal from the
lower floors, the distant splatter of water spilling in.
"But Mr. Kael," said Freya. She had remembered something Caul had
told her once. Before Uncle became Uncle, he had been Stilton Kael, a rich
young man from Arkangel. Freya hoped that by using his real name, she
might be able to get through to him, but it only made him hiss and glare.
She pressed on anyway. "Mr. Kael, this place is leaking. It's half
flooded, and the air smells stale. I don't know much about secret
underwater lairs, but I'd say Grimsby's future is going to be pretty short."
 Hester snapped off the safety on her Schadenfreude and aimed it in
Uncle's general direction. "If you don't want to come," she said, "you don't
have to."
Uncle peered at her, then up at his hovering globe of screens, where there
was an image of her face far clearer than the one his poor old eyes could
provide him with. "You don't understand," he said. "I'm not leaving, and nor
are you. We're going to rebuild. Make the place watertight again. Stronger
than ever. Make more limpets, better ones. We are none of us leaving. Tell
them, Caul."
Caul flinched and wondered what to do. He didn't want to betray his
friends, but he didn't want to let Uncle down either. The sound of the old
man's voice made him shiver with love and pity.
He looked at Freya. "Sorry," he mumbled. Then, with a sudden, quick
movement, he jerked Hester's gun out of her hand and pointed it at her, then
at Tom.
"Caul!" Tom shouted.
Uncle cackled some more. "Good work, boy! I knew you'd come right in
the end! I'm quite glad I didn't finish hanging you now. What a shame those
others scarpered off before they had a chance to meet you, Caul. You'd be
an object lesson. Return of the Prodigal. All these years gone and you're
still loyal to your poor old Uncle." He pulled a key from one of his pockets
and held it out toward Caul. "Now get rid of this lot. Lock 'em in Gargle's
quarters while we have a proper talk."
Caul kept pointing the gun at Tom, because he knew that Hester was the
only one reckless enough to try and overpower him and that Hester cared
more about Tom's safety than her own. He fished the knife out of Hester's
boot, then took the key from Uncle and started shooing everyone else
backward, toward the open door.
"But Caul--" Freya said.
"Forget it," Hester told her. "I knew we were wrong to trust him. I expect
this is the only reason he agreed to bring us here--so he could see his
precious Uncle again."
 "You won't be hurt," Caul promised. "We'll sort this out. It'll be all right."
He didn't know what he was going to do, only that he was glad to be a Lost
Boy again. "Uncle Knows Best," he said as he forced his prisoners down
the stairs and into Gargle's quarters, locking the doors behind them. "It'll be
all right. Uncle always Knows Best."
17 The Chapel
***
NIGHT FALL IN TIENJING. ABOVE the city, the mountains hung huge
and pale, a pennant of powder snow flying from each cold summit. Above
the mountains, colder yet, the stars were coming out, and the things that
were not stars, the dead satellites and orbital platforms of the Ancients,
danced their old, slow dance in heaven.
The Stalker Grike patrolled the silent corridors of the Jade Pagoda, his
night-vision eyes probing the shadows, his ears detecting conversations in a
distant room, a gust of laughter from the guardhouse, the woodworm busy
in the paneled walls. He roamed through galleries decorated with ancient
carvings of monsters and mountain demons, none of them as scary as
himself. Relishing the grace and power of his retuned body, he checked
with all his many senses for the faint chemical signature of hidden
explosives, or the body-glow of a
lurking assassin. He hoped that soon some foolish Once-Born would try
to attack his mistress. He was looking forward to killing again.
A cold breath touched him: a faint change in air pressure that told him of
an outside door being opened and closed four floors below. He moved
quickly to a window and looked down. A forked blob of body heat was
moving through the shadows of the courtyard toward the checkpoint at the
gate. Grike measured its height and stride against the data he had gathered
during his time as bodyguard, and recognized Dr. Zero.
Where was she going on such a cold night, with curfew due in less than
an hour? Grike pondered the motives of the Once-Born. Perhaps Dr. Zero
had a lover in the lower city. But Dr. Zero had never seemed interested in
love, and anyway, this was not the first time that Grike had caught her
acting strangely. He had noticed the way her heartbeat raced when she was
near the Stalker Fang, and smelled the sharp scent that came from her
sometimes when Fang glanced her way. He was surprised that his mistress
had not noticed these things herself--but then, Fang did not share his
interest in the Once-Borns and their ways. Perhaps she did not realize, or
did not care, that her surgeon-mechanic was afraid of her.
Grike's eyes, on maximum magnification, watched Dr. Zero show her
pass at the checkpoint and followed her until she was lost to him among the
barracks and banners of Tienjing. Why was she so frightened? What scared
her so? What was she doing? What was she planning to do?
Grike owed her everything, but he still knew that it was his duty to find
out.
***
Down through the steep, stepped streets Oenone Zero went hurrying in
her silicone-silk cloak, hood up, head down. The sky above the city was full
of the running lights of carriers and air destroyers taking off from the
military air harbor, carrying yet more young men and women away to the
west, where their deaths were waiting for them on the Rustwater salient.
Guilt welled up inside Oenone, but she was used to it. Every morning she
tended the Stalker Fang's joints and bodywork, and placed her instruments
against the Stalker Fang's steel breast to check on the strange Old Tech
power source that nestled where Anna Fang's heart had once been. Every
morning she told herself, I should do it now, today.
She would not be the first to try. All sorts of fanatical peaceniks and die-
hard supporters of the old League had attempted to destroy the Stalker
Fang, only to have their knives snap on her armor or watch her walk
unscathed from the ruins of bombed rooms and the wrecks of airships. But
Oenone Zero was a scientist, and she had used her scientist's skills to devise
a weapon that could destroy even the Stalker Fang.
The trouble was, she hadn't the courage to use it. What if it didn't work?
What if it did work? Oenone was sure that without the Stalker to lead it, the
Green Storm regime would fall apart--but she doubted it would fall apart so
quickly that the Stalker's supporters would not find time to kill her, and she
had heard rumors about the things they did to traitors.
Lost in her thoughts, she did not notice that she was
 being followed as she crossed Double Rainbow Bridge and turned onto
the Street of Ten Thousand Deities.
Over the centuries, Anti-Tractionists from all over Europe and Asia had
fled into these mountains, and they had brought their own gods with them.
Packed side by side, the temples seemed to jostle one another in the dying
light. Oenone pushed her way past two wedding processions, a funeral, past
shrines decked with lucky money and clattering firecrackers. She passed the
Temple of the Sky Gods, and the Golden Pagoda of the Gods of the
Mountains. She passed the Poskittarium, and the grove of the Apple
Goddess. She passed the silent house of Lady Death. At the end of the
street, sandwiched between the temples of more popular religions, stood a
tiny Christian chapel.
She checked to make sure that no one was watching her before she
stepped inside, but she did not think to look up at the rooftops.
Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept
drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore,
except in Africa and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew
of Christians was that they worshipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on
earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to
things? It was small wonder that this place had fallen into disuse, its roof
gone, weeds growing through the rotting pews. But on nights like this,
when she felt that she must get out of the Jade Pagoda or go mad, this was
where Oenone came to calm herself.
Snowflakes sifted down on her through a sagging sieve of rafters, settling
on her green hair when she threw back her
hood. Running her hands over the walls, she read with her fingertips the
texts carved in the old stone. Most were illegible, but there was one that she
had grown fond of. It was an old fragment from before the Sixty Minute
War, and Oenone was not sure what it meant, but there was something
consoling about it.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
 We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree
Are of equal duration.
Oenone knelt before the bare stone altar and bowed her head. She didn't
believe in him, this ancient god, but she had to talk to someone.
"Help me," she whispered. "If you are there at all, give me strength. Give
me courage. I'm so close to her. I could use the weapon now, if only I were
brave enough. And it wouldn't be murder, would it, to kill someone who is
already dead? I would only be smashing a machine, a dangerous,
destructive machine...."
She spoke softly, barely moving her lips. No human ear could hear her.
But her prayer was heard, just the same. Crouched like a gargoyle on the
chapel's ruined steeple, the Stalker Grike listened carefully to every word.
"Have I the right to do it? It all seemed so clear before, but now I have
seen her; how clever she is, and how
strong.... Maybe it would be murder. Or am I just making excuses for
myself? Am I just looking for a reason not to do it so that I can live? Send
me a sign, God, if you're up there; show me what I should do...."
She waited, and Grike waited with her, but no sign came. The noisy,
popular gods of the neighboring temples seemed to dish out comfort and
counsel like advice columnists, but the god of this place was less scrutable;
maybe he was asleep, or dead. Maybe he was busy with some better world
off at the far end of the universe. Oenone Zero shook her head at her own
foolishness and stood up, making ready to leave.
Grike climbed quickly down the chapel wall and waited in an alcove by
the entrance, where perhaps a statue of the Christians' nailed-up god had
once hung. His suspicions had been right. Dr. Zero was a traitor, and
although he had grown fond of her in his Stalkerish way, he knew that he
must eliminate her before she could harm his mistress. His circuitry
hummed and tingled at the prospect of a kill. She had taken his claws from
him, but he was still strong, and merciless. One blow from his fist would
end her easily.
A footstep on the threshold. The young woman stepped out of the chapel,
pulling up her hood against the cold wind. She did not see Grike. She went
past him and walked quickly away along the Street of Ten Thousand
Deities, hurrying back to her quarters in the pagoda before the curfew bells
were rung.
Grike lowered his fist, feeling startled and slightly foolish. What had
happened to him? He was a Stalker, a killing machine, and yet, when his
quarry's eggshell skull had been in reach, he could not strike.
I must warn the Green Storm's secret police, he thought, jumping down
from the alcove and following Oenone out into the crowds on the street. He
would let the Once-Borns deal with her themselves, down in their white-
tiled torture rooms beneath the Jade Pagoda. But after a few strides he
halted. He simply didn't have it in him to betray Oenone Zero.
She has done this to me, he thought, remembering all those lonely night
shifts in the Stalker Works. Somehow, the young surgeon-mechanic had
built a barrier in his mind that made it impossible for him to harm her, or
tell anyone what she was planning. He had been part of her plans all along.
She had given the Stalker Fang a bodyguard who was not capable of
guarding her.
He should have hated Dr. Zero for using him like that, but he did not
have it in him to hate her either.
He barged through a festival procession outside the shrine of Jomo and
climbed homeward through the darkness and the snow. He was not the
puppet of Oenone Zero. He could not harm her, but he would keep her from
harming his mistress. Somehow he would learn the nature of her plan, and
put a stop to it.

18 The naglfar
***
 AS SOON AS HE had locked his friends and the children inside Gargle's
quarters, Caul sprinted back up the stairs to the chamber of screens. He was
shuddering slightly, and half inclined to go back down and unlock the doors
again. He kept telling himself that he hadn't chosen Uncle over Freya and
the others; he would find a way to stay true to both of them.
"First thing we must do," said Uncle when Caul rejoined him, "is to get
rid of those women. Bad luck, they'll be. You'll see." He had filled his
screens with images of the captives in the room below: big, grainy close-
ups of Hester and Freya. He said, "They look very pretty, I'm sure, and no
doubt you think they're very sweet, but they'll twist round and betray you,
like my Anna did me all those years ago. That's why I've always made it the
rule that there ain't no girls in Grimsby."
Caul put down Hester's gun. He felt stupid, standing there holding it.
"But what about the girl who was aboard the Autolycus with Gargle?"
"Young Remora?" Uncle snatched the gun and stuffed it away inside his
filthy clothes. "I know what you mean. Odd-looking lad. High-pitched
voice. Long hair. Too much makeup. I had my doubts when Gargle first
introduced me, but Gargle assured me he was a boy. A fine burglar. Poor
Remora. I suppose he's dead too?"
"Uncle, there are girls among those poor children we found downstairs.
Lots of them are girls."
"Girls? You're sure?" Uncle started thumbing his remote control, hunting
for close-ups of the children. Caul saw his friends on the screens look up
nervously as crab-cams spidered around on the ceiling above them, jangling
Remora's mobiles. Uncle saw only grayish, face-shaped blurs. "Maybe
Gargle's kidnapping squads have grabbed a few girls by mistake," he
muttered grudgingly. "We'll have to get rid of them, too, if we're to make a
new start. And we will make a new start, Caul, my boy. We'll rebuild
Grimsby, stronger and better than it ever was before, and you'll be my right
hand. You can move into Gargle's pad and look after things for me like
Gargle used to do."
One of the banks of screens behind him suddenly died, leaving the room
even more dimly lit than before. There was a smell of burned wiring, and
when Caul went to investigate, he saw that water was flooding down the
surfaces of the screens and pooling on the floor below. He touched some to
his lips and tasted brine. Uncle Knows Best, he told himself, and he wanted
to believe it because it would have been good
l62 to go back to the old days, when he had been so certain about
everything. Everybody had to believe in something better and greater than
themselves. Tom and Freya had their gods, and Hester had Tom, and Caul
had Uncle. He would not let Uncle down again, even though he was old,
and blind, and confused; even though there was probably nothing that could
save Grimsby from the sea.
But he would not let his friends drown with him.
"You look tired, Uncle," he said gently. It was true. How long had the old
man been alone in this room, staring at the treacherous message from
Brighton on his walls of screens? Caul touched his hand. "You should get
some rest, now that I'm here to keep an eye on things."
Uncle's head jerked round to stare at him, his eyes glittering with
something of their old cunning. "You trying to trick me, Caul? That's what
Gargle did. 'Have a nap, Uncle dear,' he'd say. 'Lie down for forty winks,
Uncle.' And when I woke up, some of my stuff would be missing, or
another boy I'd trusted would be dead, and Gargle would be telling me it
had been an accident...."
"Why did you let him get away with it?" asked Caul.
The old man shrugged. '"Cos I was scared of him. And 'cos I was proud
of him. He was a sharp one, that Gargle, and it was me who made him that
way. He was like a son to me, I s'pose. I like to think that me and Anna
might have had sons, if she hadn't tricked me and flown off in that
homemade airship of hers. I like to think they'd have been as sharp as
Gargle. But I'm glad he's gone, Caul, my boy. I'm glad it's you here now."
Mumbling quietly to himself, Uncle let Caul lead him up
the steep stair to his bedchamber. The midget engine pods of the old
cargo balloon whined and clattered as the ball of screens went with them,
hanging a few feet above their heads so that Uncle could keep staring up at
it, his half-blind eyes flicking nervously from one screen to another. The
entrance to his bedroom had been made higher and wider to let the balloon
squeeze through. "Gotta keep watching them, Caul," he muttered. "Never
know what they'll get up to unwatched. Gotta watch everybody.
Everywhere. Always."
The room had been richly furnished once, for the Lost Boys had brought
all the finest things they stole here as tribute to Uncle. But over the years,
piece by piece, Gargle must have found excuses to move all the treasures
downstairs to his own quarters. All that remained was a bed with a
threadbare quilt, some piles of moldy books, and an upturned crate that
served as a bedside table; it held an old argon lamp and a faded photograph
of a beautiful young woman in the uniform of an Arkangel slave worker.
"I keep that to remind me," said Uncle, when he saw Caul looking at the
picture, and quickly turned it facedown. "My Anna Fang. Pretty, weren't
she? They've gone and made a Stalker of her now, and put her in charge of
the Green Storm, and she rules over half the world, with airships and armies
at her command. I've followed her career. Got a book of cuttings,
somewhere. Gargle thought he could do a deal with her, but I knew it
wouldn't work. Knew it would only lead to trouble...."
"What sort of deal?" asked Caul. He had heard Uncle talk about his lost
love once before, but he had never heard of the Lost Boys trying to do a
deal with the world outside. "Is that
why Gargle came to Anchorage? Why he wanted the Tin Book?"
Uncle sat down on the bed, and his moon of surveillance screens dipped
until it was hanging just above his head. "Gargle said there was trouble
coming. As soon as those first three limpets went missing, he said, 'There's
trouble coming.' He was right, too, wasn't he? Only he didn't know how
soon. He thought if he got hold of that Tin Book, he could give it to the
Green Storm and ask for their protection in exchange, get them to smash
whatever city came hunting for us."
"But why would they want the Tin Book?" asked Caul.
 "Who knows?" replied Uncle with a shrug. "A couple of summers back,
they sent an expedition to try and find the wreck of Anchorage. They didn't,
of course. But Gargle got a crab-cam aboard their ship, and he found out
what it was they was hoping to dredge up."
"The Tin Book?"
Uncle nodded. "They weren't ordinary Green Storm, neither. They were
special agents, who reported straight to her. So Gargle thought, if she's
ready to send ships halfway round the world in the middle of a war looking
for this thing, she must want it pretty bad. And he remembered seeing
something like it when he was burgling Anchorage that time, only he didn't
think nothing of it then." He shook his head. "I told him it wouldn't work. I
told him to stay put. But he was like that, young Gargle; once he got an idea
in his head, there weren't no stopping him, and off he went, and now he's
dead, and that wicked city's stolen all my boys away."
"But what was it?" asked Caul. "The Tin Book, I mean? What makes it so
valuable?"
Uncle, who had been sniffling miserably, blew his nose on a polka-dot
handkerchief and peered at Caul. "Don't know," he said. "We never did find
out. Gargle put about the story that it was the plans to some great big
Ancient submarine that would save us all, but I think he made that up. What
would my poor Anna want with a submarine? No. I reckon it's a weapon.
Something big."
He stuffed the handkerchief away and yawned. "Now, my boy. Enough
about the past. We should think of the future. We should make plans. Time
to start rebuilding. We'll need to nick some stuff. Lucky you brought the
Screw Worm home with you--that'll come in proper handy, that will. And
I've still got the old Naglfar. Remember the good old Naglfar?"
"Saw her in the pens when we arrived," said Caul. He could see that
Uncle was growing sleepy. He helped him lie down, and pulled the tattered
quilt over him, tucking it under his chin. "You have a little sleep," he said.
"You have a sleep, and when you wake, it'll be time to start."
 Uncle smiled up at him and closed his eyes. The ball of screens hung just
above his pillow, and' in the cathode-ray glow of the crab-cam pictures, his
old face looked luminous, a paper mask lit from within by the flickering
light of his dreams.
In the chamber below, some of the children had gone to sleep too. The
rest sat quietly, watching with large, trusting eyes while Tom told them a
story that he used to tell Wren when she was little and woke up scared in
the night. They did not seem frightened by the groans and shudders of the
dying city, or the dribbles of water creeping down the walls.
l66
It had been scary when they were all alone, but now that these kind
grown-ups had arrived, they felt sure that everything would be all right.
Hester prowled the edges of the room, looking for weapons or ways to
pick the heavy locks on the doors, and growing more and more angry as she
found none of either.
"What will you do if you do find a way out?" Freya asked her softly. "Sit
down. You'll scare the children."
Hester scowled at her. "What will I do? Get down to the limpet pens, of
course, and away aboard the Screw Worm."
"But we can't all fit aboard the Screw Worm. Even if we managed to
squeeze all the children into the hold, there wouldn't be air or fuel enough to
get us back to Anchorage."
"Who said we were taking the children?" asked Hester. "I came to rescue
Wren, not those little savages. Wren's not here, so we'll take the Worm to
Brighton and try looking there."
"But the children--" cried Freya, and quickly stopped, in case they heard
her and guessed what Hester was planning. "Hester, how could you even
think such a thing! You have a child of your own!"
"That's right," said Hester. "And if you had, then you'd know how much
trouble they bring. And these aren't even ordinary children. It's all very
well, you coming over all nurturing, but these are Lost Boys. You can't take
them back to Anchorage. What will you do with them there?
"Love them, of course," replied Freya simply.
"Oh, like you did Caul? That really worked, didn't it? They'll rob you
blind, and then probably murder you. You've lost your edge, Snow Queen.
You asked me once to help you protect Anchorage. Well, I'll protect it by
making sure you
don't take a gang of burglar babies home with you as souvenirs of
Grimsby."
Freya took a step backward, as though she didn't like to be so close to
Hester. "I don't think Anchorage needs your sort of protection anymore,"
she said. "I was glad of you once. I hoped all those years of peace would
bring you peace as well. But you've not changed."
Hester was about to reply when the door behind her opened and Caul
came in. She turned on him instead. "Come to gloat over your prisoners?"
Caul would not meet her eye. "You're not prisoners," he said. "I just
didn't want anybody to get hurt. And I didn't want you to make Uncle leave.
He's an old man. He'd die if he leaves Grimsby."
"He'll die if he stays," said Hester. "Unless he's a really good swimmer."
Caul ignored her and spoke to Freya and Tom. "He's asleep now. He'll
sleep for hours, with luck. That gives you time to get away."
"And what about you?" asked Freya.
Caul shook his head. "I have to stay. I'm all he's got."
"Well, you're more than he deserves," said Tom indignantly. "You do
know he'll never really be able to rebuild this place, don't you?"
"You don't understand," said Caul. "Seeing him like this, so old and mad
and miserable ... Of course Grimsby's finished. But Uncle doesn't realize
that. I'm the last of his boys, Tom. I've got to stay with him till the end."
 Freya was about to try to reason with him, but Hester butted in. "Fine by
me. Now, how do you suggest we leave?"
l68
Caul grinned at her, glad of a practical question at last. "The Naglfar.
She's the cargo submarine we saw in the pens when we first got here. She's
old, but she's trusty. She'll take you back to Anchorage all right."
"Then you'll have to come too!" said Freya, relieved. "I can't drive a
submarine on my own, or pilot it, or whatever you're supposed to do to
them."
"Tom and Hester will help you."
"Tom and Hester are taking the Screw Worm and going after Brighton,"
said Hester.
"No," Caul told her. "You've got to go with Freya. I have to stay with
Uncle. I'll help you fuel and provision the Naglfar. You can take her back to
Anchorage and then, once Freya and the children are safe, you can carry on
to Brighton and find Wren.
"
And so, for one last time, the limpet pens of Grimsby were filled with the
sounds of a submarine being made ready for sea. The Naglfar was a rusty,
ramshackle old tub, but Caul said that she would swim, and there was room
enough in her spacious hold for all the children. He did not tell them what
else he knew about her: that she was the submarine that Uncle had stolen
years before from Snowmad scavengers and used to begin his underwater
empire. Nor did he mention where her name came from--in the legends of
the Old North, the Naglfar was a ship built from dead men's fingernails in
which the dark gods would sail to battle at the world's end. He didn't want
to give the children nightmares.
So Tom and Caul concentrated on testing the old sub's engines while
Hester filled her tanks with fuel and Freya
 made some of the older children show her Grimsby's food stores, where
they collected armfuls of provisions to keep them going on the journey back
to Vineland.
Everything had to be done quickly. Metallic moans and grumbles kept
rolling down the passageways of the building, as hull plates that had been
damaged by Brighton's depth charges slowly shifted and gave way under
the pressure of the sea and the bulkhead doors slammed shut to seal off the
flooded sections. No one had forgotten that Uncle was still up there in his
chambers with his mad dreams. But Uncle seemed to be sleeping soundly
for the moment; at least when Tom opened the Naglfar' 's hatches and
looked up at the shadowy roof, he could not see any crab-cams on the
move.
He leaned against the open hatch cover for a moment, glad of the cold,
for it was growing hot and stuffy in the Naglfar's engine room. He had been
overdoing it down there and worrying too much about Wren, and his old
wound was hurting him again, sharp, jabbing shards of pain, as if his heart
were full of broken glass. He wondered again if he was going to die. He
didn't think he was afraid of dying, but he was afraid of dying before he
found Wren.
He decided to worry about Caul instead of himself. He climbed out of the
submarine and found Hester coming across the dock.
"What are we going to do about Caul?" Tom asked softly, drawing her
aside. "He's still set on staying here. Has he forgotten that Uncle tried to
have him killed?"
Hester shook her head. "He's not forgotten," she said. "I don't think he
wants to stay, exactly. It's just that he loves Uncle."
"But Uncle nearly killed him]"
"That doesn't make a difference," said Hester. "Uncle is the nearest thing
Caul's got to a mother or a father. Everybody loves their parents. They may
not always realize that they love them, they may hate them at the same
time, but there's always a little bit of love mixed in with the hate, which
makes it really ... complicated."
 She stopped, unable to explain herself, thinking of her own complicated
feelings for her dead father and her missing child. She wished Wren loved
her as much as Caul loved Uncle.
"Freya told me Caul has dreams about this place every night," said Tom.
"He dreams about Uncle's voice, whispering to him the way it used to when
he was a child. Why would Uncle keep talking to them all, over the
speakers, even while they were asleep?"
"Maybe he was sort of brainwashing them," said Hester.
"That's what I think," Tom agreed. "Putting a kind of hook in their minds
that would always pull them back to Grimsby, no matter how far they tried
to run or how much they wanted to get away."
"We'll overpower Caul," said Hester. "Knock him on the head and drag
him away. He'll come to his senses once we're at sea."
"Maybe," said Tom. "Maybe, once this place is gone and Uncle's dead,
he'll be able to forget it."
From the conning tower of the Naglfar came a piercing, childish scream.
"The cams]" shouted a boy called Eel, whom Freya had told to keep watch
because he was too small to do anything else. "The cams are moving]"
Tom and Hester looked up. Above them, crab-cams were
scuttling along the rusty jibs of the docking cranes, clambering over each
other as they trained their lenses on the pool where the Naglfar wallowed.
"The old man's awake," said Caul, scrambling out of the submarine's
forward hatch and climbing down onto the dock with Freya close behind.
"So what?" asked Hester. "He can't stop us leaving now."
"Who said anyone is leaving?" asked Uncle's scratchy voice. "Nobody's
leaving."
He came limping toward them between the empty moon-pools, Hester's
gun looking huge in his papery, quivering hand. Above his head the old
balloon hung like a moldy thought-bubble, and the globe of screens beneath
it flickered with pictures from the crab-cams. He heaved the gun up and
pulled the trigger, sending a bullet clanging into the metal of the Naglfar's
conning tower. The sound echoed away between the shadowy docking
cranes, and as if in answer a stressed bulkhead somewhere on the upper
levels let out a long groan, like some huge creature dying slowly and
painfully of indigestion.
Uncle ignored it. "Uncle Knows Best!" he shouted shrilly. "Stay here and
help me rebuild Grimsby, and you will be well rewarded. Try to leave, and
you'll be flushed out the water-door to feed the little fishies."
The children twittered. Hester stepped protectively in front of Tom. Caul
ran toward the old man. "Uncle," he said, "I think Grimsby is damaged
worse than we reckoned."
"Well?" asked Uncle, looking up at a close-up of Caul on one of his
screens. "So? It was worse off than this when I first came down here."
"Mr. Kael' Freya called softly. "Stilton?"
She walked across the dock while crab-cameras on the cranes above her
frantically zoomed in on her face and hands. Caul tried to stop her, but she
shrugged him aside and held out her hand to Uncle. "Caul's right," she said.
"Grimsby is coming to an end. It was a bold idea, and I'm glad that I have
seen it for myself, but it is time to leave. You can come with us, back to
Anchorage. Wouldn't you like to breathe fresh air again, and see the sun?"
"The sun?" asked Uncle, and his eyes suddenly swam with tears. It was a
long time since anyone had been kind to him. It was a long time since
anyone had called him Stilton. Freya reached out to him, and he stared up at
his hovering ball of screens, at her gentle white hands hanging huge above
him, like wings.
"Leave Grimsby?" he said, but in a wondering way, softly. The crab-cams
zoomed until every screen showed Freya, or a part of Freya: her face, her
eyes, her mouth, the soft curve of her cheek, her hands, all larger than life,
like parts of a self-assembly kit from which a goddess might be constructed.
Uncle wanted to hold those kind hands and go away with her, and see the
sun again before he died. He took a half step toward her and then
remembered Anna Fang, and how she had betrayed him.
"No!" he shouted. "No! I won't! It's all a trick!"
He pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, and the huge noise
slammed through the pens and made all the children squeal and cover their
ears. The bullet went through Freya's smiling face, and her face broke, and
there was blackness behind it, and sparks, and as the glass rained down on
him, Uncle dimly realized that he had shot not Freya but only her image
on the largest of his screens. He looked for the real Freya, but Caul pulled
her aside and shielded her, and Uncle didn't want to shoot Caul.
From somewhere above him came a long, distracting sigh. The heavy
gun drooped in his hands. He looked up. Everyone looked up, even the
scared children. The sigh grew louder, and Uncle saw that his shot had
opened a hole in the balloon that held his moon of screens aloft. As he
watched, it widened swiftly into a long gash like a yawning mouth.
"Uncle!" shouted Caul.
"Caul!" screamed Freya, pulling him back, holding him tight.
"Anna ..." whispered Uncle.
And the ball of screens came down on him like a boot on a spider. The
screens burst, sparks swarming blue and white, shattered glass sleeting
across the deck. The collapsing balloon settled over the wreckage like a
shroud, and as the smoke from the smashed machines reached the roof, a
sprinkler system kicked in, filling the limpet pens with cold salt rain.
Tom ran up, and Hester took Freya by her shaking shoulders. "Are you
all right?" she asked.
"I think so," Freya said, nodding, soaked to the skin and sneezing at the
smoke. "Is Uncle--?"
Caul skirted the heap of sparking, smoldering screens. Only Uncle's feet,
in their grimy bunny slippers, poked out from beneath the debris. They
twitched a few times and were still.
"Caul?" asked Freya.
"I'm all right," said Caul. And he was, even though for some reason he
could not stop crying. He pulled a swag of balloon fabric over the bunny
slippers and turned to face the others. "Come on," he said. "Let's get the
Naglfar swimming before this place finally falls apart. The Worm too. Tom
and Hester will need the Worm if they're going after Wren."
The work went faster after that. Grimsby was creaking and keening
constantly, and sometimes an ominous shudder rippled the water in the
moon-pools, as if the unlikely old place somehow knew that its maker was
gone, and was dying with him.
The last of the fuel was loaded, and fresh batteries and kegs of water
were rolled aboard the Screw Worm and the Naglfar. Hester prowled the
seeping treasure hoards of Grimsby, gathering up handfuls of gold coins, for
she suspected money might come in useful aboard Brighton. And when
nobody was looking, she burrowed into the heap of ruined screens until she
found her gun, still clutched in Uncle's dead hand. She was certain she
would find a use for that.
On the quayside, Tom hugged Freya. "Good luck," he told her.
"Good luck to you," said Freya, holding his face and smiling at him. She
hesitated, blushing. She had been meaning to warn Tom, if she could, about
his wife. She still didn't think he understood how ruthless Hester could be.
She knew that Hester loved him, but she didn't think that Hester cared at all
about anybody else, and she was afraid that one day her ruthlessness would
bring trouble down on them both.
"Tom," she said, "watch out for Hester, won't you?"
"We'll watch out for each other, like always," said Tom,
misunderstanding.
Freya gave up, and kissed him. "You'll find Wren," she said, "I know it."
 Tom nodded. "I know it too. And I'll find the Tin Book as well, if I can. If
what Uncle told Caul was true, if the Green Storm are making war on cities
... I saw what they were like at Rogues' Roost, Freya. If that book is the key
to something dangerous, we mustn't let them get hold of it...."
"We don't know for sure that it's the key to anything," Freya reminded
him. "It would be better to get it back if we can, just to be safe. But Wren is
all that really matters. Find her, Tom. And come home safe to Vineland."
Then Tom went with Hester aboard the Screw Worm, and Freya watched
and waved as the Worm submerged; she stood with Caul at the edge of the
moon-pool till the last ripples faded. The children were waiting for her
aboard the Naglfar, their high, nervous voices spilling from its open
hatches.
"Are we going now?"
"Is it far to Anchorage?"
"Will we really have our own rooms and everything there?"
"Is Uncle really dead?"
"I feel sick!"
Freya took Caul's hand in hers. "Well?" she asked.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go home."
So they went, and Grimsby stood abandoned at last. After a few days
even the dim light from its windows faded, and one by one the air pumps
died. Through widening cracks
and fissures that there was no one left to repair, the patient sea came
creeping in, and the fish made their homes in the halls of the Lost Boys.
Tom would miss the company of Freya, and even Caul, but for Hester it
was a relief to be alone with him again. She had never been truly
comfortable with anyone but Tom, except for Wren, when Wren was little.
She watched lovingly as Tom worked the Screw Worm's strange controls,
frowning with concentration as he tried to remember all that Caul had
taught him. That night, when the limpet was running smoothly south by
southwest toward Brighton's cruising grounds and the waters were singing
against the hull, she slipped into his bunk and wrapped her long limbs
around him and kissed him, remembering how, when they were young and
first together in the Jenny Haniver, they used to kiss for hours. But Tom was
too worried about Wren to kiss her back, not properly, and she lay for a long
time awake while he slept, and thought bitterly, He loves her more than ever
he loved me.
19 The Wedding Wreath
***
FIRST FROST REACHED VINELAND long before the Naglfar. The
old submarine, with too many people aboard and her poor old engines
grumbling all the way, took several weeks to return to the Dead Continent
and nose her way up the winding rivers that the Screw Worm had swum
down in days. But Caul coaxed her back to Anchorage at last, and she
surfaced through a thin covering of ice just off the mooring beach. Freya
climbed out, waving, and was almost shot again, this time by Mr. Smew,
who believed the Lost Boys were invading.
And in a way they were. Anchorage would never be the same again, now
that all these boisterous, ill-mannered, sometimes troubled children had
come to live there. Freya set about opening the abandoned upper floors of
the Winter Palace, and the old building filled with life and noise as the
children moved into their new quarters. Some of them were not quite
used to the idea that they were not supposed to steal, and some had
nightmares, calling out Uncle's name and Gargle's in their dreams, but
Freya was convinced that with patience and love they could be helped to
forget their time beneath the sea and grow into happy, healthy Vinelanders.
After all, it had worked with Caul, eventually. Freya wouldn't say what
had passed between them on the voyage home, but the former Lost Boy
never went back to his shack in the engine district. At the beginning of that
October, when the harvests were in and the animals down from the high
pastures and the city was preparing for winter, he and the margravine were
married.
Freya awoke early on the morning after her wedding: wide-awake at five
o'clock, the way she used to be when she was young. She climbed out of
bed, careful not to wake Caul, and went to the window of her chamber with
the floor cold under her bare feet and the tatters of her bridal wreath still
hanging in her hair.
 When she drew back the curtains, she saw that the ice was thick upon the
lake and that a dusting of snow had fallen in the night. She felt glad that her
city was back in the domain of the Ice Gods for another six months. The
gods of summer, of the lake and the hunt, had all been good to her people,
and the gods of the sea and the Goddess of Love had been very kind to her
too, but the Ice Gods were the gods she had grown up with, and she trusted
them better than the rest. She breathed on the window and drew their
snowflake symbol in the mist and whispered. "Keep Tom safe. And
Hester too, though she doesn't deserve it. Lead them to Wren, wherever
she may be. And may they all come home again to us, safe and happy and
together."
But if the Ice Gods heard her prayer, they sent no sign. The only answer
Freya had was the sound of the wind in the spires of the Winter Palace, and
her husband's voice, gentle and sleepy, calling her back to her bed.
Part TWO
***

20 A Life on the Ocean Wave

***
PENNYROYAL, MY DEAR?"
"Mmmmm?"
Morning in the Pavilion, and the mayor and mayoress sitting at opposite
ends of the long table in the breakfast room, screened from the hot sun by
muslin blinds. Behind the mayoress's chair, her African slave waved an
ostrich-feather fan, wafting cool air over her and rustling the pages of the
newspaper that her husband was trying to read. "Pennyroyal, I am talking to
you."
Nimrod Pennyroyal sighed and put down the paper. "Yes, Boo-Boo, my
treasure?"
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession
of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got
himself saddled with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke. Fifteen years earlier, when
Predator's Gold
was topping the bestseller lists aboard every city of the Hunting Ground,
she had seemed like a good idea. Her family were old Brighton aristocracy,
but poor. Pennyroyal was a mere adventurer, but rich. The marriage allowed
the Heckmondwykes to restore their fortunes, and gave Pennyroyal the
social clout he needed to get himself elected mayor. Boo-Boo made an
excellent wife for a man of ambition: She was good at small talk and flower
arrangements, she planned dinner parties with military precision, and she
was expert at opening fetes, galas, and small hospitals.
Yet Pennyroyal had come to regret his marriage. Boo-Boo was such a
large, forceful, florid woman that she tired him out just by being in the same
room. A keen amateur singer, she had a passion for the operas of the Blue
Metal culture, which went on for days with never a trace of a tune, and
usually ended with all the characters dead in a heap. When Pennyroyal
annoyed her by questioning the cost of her latest frock or flirting too openly
with a councillor's wife over dinner, she would practice her scales until the
windows rattled, or crank up her gramophone and treat the household to all
six hundred verses of the Harpoon Aria from Diana, Princess of Whales.
"I expect you to listen when I talk to you, Pennyroyal," she said now,
setting down her croissant in an ominous manner.
"Of course, dear. I was just studying the latest war reports in the
Palimpsest. Excellent news from the front. Makes one proud to be a
Tractionist, eh?"
"Pennyroyal!"
"Yes, dearest?"
"I have been looking over the arrangements for our Moon Festival ball,"
said Boo-Boo, "and I could not help noticing that you have invited the
Flying Ferrets."
Pennyroyal made a sort of shrugging motion with his entire body.
"I'm not sure we should be entertaining mercenaries, Nimrod."
"I just happened to invite their leader, Orla Twombley," Pennyroyal
protested. "I may have said she could bring a few of her friends if she
wanted. Wouldn't want her to feel left out, you know.... She's a famous
aviatrix. Her flying machine, the Combat Wombat, downed three air
dreadnoughts at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal."
As he spoke, a vision of the female air ace filled Pennyroyal's mind, sleek
and gorgeous in her pink leather flying suit. He had always prided himself
on how popular he was with the ladies. Why, in his younger days he had
enjoyed passionate romances with exotic and beautiful women (Minty
Bapsnack, Peaches Zanzibar, and the Traktiongrad Smolensk Ladies'
Croquet Team all sprang to mind). He'd been rather hoping that the dashing
Orla Twombley might soon be added to that list.
 "Pretty, isn't she?" said Boo-Boo frostily.
Pennyroyal shifted awkwardly in his chair. "Can't say I've ever really
noticed ..." he mumbled. He hated scenes like this. That nasty, suspicious
look in Boo-Boo's eyes was just the sort of thing, he thought, to put a chap
right off his breakfast. Luckily he was saved from any further interrogation
by one of his house slaves, who opened the breakfast-room door and said,
"Mr. Plovery to see you, Your Worship."
l86
"Excellent!" cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his
visitor. "Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!"
Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the
Laines, was the mayor's advisor on Old Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal
to make himself a tidy little nest egg by secretly selling off items from the
Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face that looked as
if somebody had molded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He
seemed startled by Pennyroyal's exuberant greeting--people weren't usually
so glad to see him, but then, people weren't usually being quizzed about
lovely aviatrices by Mrs. Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.
"I have been doing some research into that item Your Worship showed
me," he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly
toward Boo-Boo. "You remember, Your Worship? The item?"
"Oh, there's no need for secrecy, Plovery," Pennyroyal told him. "Boo-
Boo knows all it about it. Don't you, my little upside-down cake? That
metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a
look at it, just to see what he thought...."
Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the
gossip page. "Do excuse me, Mr. Plovery. I find talk about Old Tech so
dull...."
Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction, and turned back
to Pennyroyal. "You still have the item?"
 "It's in the safe in my office," said Pennyroyal. "Why? Reckon it might
be worth something?"
"Po-o-ossibly," said Plovery cautiously.
"The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do
with submarines."
Mr. Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. "Oh no, Your Worship. She
clearly knows nothing about the machine languages of the Ancients."
"A machine language, eh?"
"A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate
with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular
language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain
surviving fragments of American military code."
"American, eh?" said Pennyroyal, and then, "Military? That should be
worth a bob or two. This war's been dragging on for fourteen years. People
are desperate. The R&D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a
fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon."
Plovery's face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage
of a fortune. "Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I
have contacts in the Mobile Free States...."
Pennyroyal shook his head. "No, Plovery, I'll handle this. There's no
point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I'll keep the book in my safe
until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my
contacts. There's an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young
woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn
time, and she always seems to be on the lookout for unusual bits of Old
Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery."
He shooed the disgruntled Old Tech dealer away and sat
down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the
Palimpsest, which his wife was holding up for him to see. There, on the
front page of the gossip section, was a full-length photograph of himself
entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was
looking even more goddesslike than Pennyroyal remembered.
"Well," he blustered, "she's not really what I'd call pretty...."
"Poor Boo-Boo!" said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above
the breakfast room beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal's chat
with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to
every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. "I don't know how she
puts up with it...."
"Puts up with what?" asked Cynthia innocently.
"Didn't you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he's been having a liaison with Orla
Twombley!"
"What's a 'liaison'?" asked Cynthia, frowning. "Is it a sort of cake?"
Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty, and very dim. She had
been a house slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived,
Mrs. Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren's friend and explain the
workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but
she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than
Cynthia had ever known.
"Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms. Twombley are having a fling,"
she explained patiently.
"Oh!" Cynthia looked scandalized. "Oh, poor Mistress! To
think, a man of his age throwing himself at slinky aviatrices!"
"I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than
that," Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not
tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl
who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he'd written in his silly
books.
"What?" asked Cynthia, intrigued. "What things?"
 "I'll tell you another time," Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would
forget.
To change the subject, she said, "Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo's
chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always
looks so sad."
"Oh, he's another new arrival, like you," said Cynthia excitedly. "He's
been here for only a few weeks. His name's Theo Ngoni, and he used to be
a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and
Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It's meant to be
ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it's scary. I
mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn't we! Look at him!
Don't he look vicious?"
Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older
than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it
must have been for him to be defeated and dragged away from his home
and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he
seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel
sorry for herself too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way
to escape from this place.
***
For a few days Pennyroyal had taken a special interest in Wren, calling
her "my fan from beneath the sea" and lending her his latest book, a history
of the war with the Green Storm. But he quickly forgot her, and she became
just another of his wife's many slaves.
Her new life was simple. She rose each day at seven, breakfasted, and
went with the other girls of Mrs. Pennyroyal's household to Mrs.
Pennyroyal's bedchamber, where they woke Mrs. Pennyroyal and helped
her dress and spent an hour working on her hairdo, which was elaborate,
expensive, and several feet tall. In the mornings, when the mayor went
down to the Town Hall, his wife liked to take a long, relaxing wallow in the
swimming pool. Sometimes in the afternoons, when Pennyroyal came home
tipsy from something he called a "working lunch," Boo-Boo took the cable
car down to Brighton and went visiting, or opened things, but she never
took any of her pretty young handmaidens with her, just a couple of slave
boys to carry her shopping.
At eight in the evening, dinner was served, usually a big affair with many
guests, and Wren and the other girls running in and out with roast swan,
shark steaks, sea-pie, and great wobbling desserts. After that, Mrs.
Pennyroyal had to be helped to bathe and dress for bed before the girls were
finally allowed to go to their own beds, in a dormitory on the ground floor.
It was hard work sometimes, but when she was not busy attending to the
mayoress, Wren was allowed to do pretty much what she liked, and what
she liked, in those first few weeks, was to wander about the Pavilion and its
grounds with Cynthia Twite.
Pennyroyal's palace was a treasure trove of wonders, and Wren loved the
gardens, with their shaded walks and summerhouses, the elaborate topiary
maze, the groves of blue-green cypresses and shrines to antique gods.
Sometimes, as Brighton steamed south into warmer waters and golden
autumn sunshine, she would stand at the handrail at the gardens' edge and
look down at the white city below her, at the shining sea, at the circling
gulls and the airships and the pennants streaming in the wind, and wonder if
it hadn't been worth getting kidnapped and enslaved just to see so much
beauty.
But more and more, as the weeks wore by, she missed her mum and dad.
She knew she had to get away from Cloud 9. But how? No airships were
allowed to land on the airborne deck plate, so the only way off was by cable
car, and the cable car was closely guarded by Brighton's red-coated militia.
And even if she made it down to Brighton, what good would that do her?
She wore the brand of the Shkin Corporation, and if she tried to board an
outbound ship, she would be taken up as a runaway slave and handed
straight back to Shkin.
And all the time, she was being carried farther and farther from her
home. Brighton was nosing south down the long coast of the Hunting
Ground while dusty two-tiered Traction Towns kept pace with it onshore.
Everybody was talking about Moon Festival, Boo-Boo endlessly writing
and rewriting the guest list for the mayor's ball, the cooks in the Pavilion
kitchens working overtime to turn out moon-shaped cakes and silver moon-
sweets. The rising of the first full moon of autumn was an event sacred to
all the most popular religions. There would be parties and processions
aboard
Brighton, and all over the world the Moon Festival fires would burn in
city and static alike. There would even be one lonely bonfire on the Dead
Continent, for at Anchorage-in-Vineland, Moon Festival was the biggest
social event of the year.
Wren imagined her friends piling up driftwood and broken furniture in
the meadow behind the city, and maybe wondering where she was and
whether she was safe. How she wished she could be there with them! She
couldn't imagine how she had ever thought their lives dull, or why she had
argued so with Mummy. Each night, lying in her bed in the slave quarters,
she would hug herself and whisper the songs she used to sing when she was
little, and pretend that the creaking of the hawsers that attached Cloud 9 to
its gasbags was the murmur of waves against the shores of Vineland.
Wren had almost forgotten Nabisco Shkin, and, to be fair, Nabisco Shkin
had almost forgotten her. Sometimes, as he went about his busy round of
meetings, he glanced up at Cloud 9 and allowed himself to feel a
momentary pleasure at the revenge he would take on the girl who had
tricked him, but his plans for a slaving expedition to Vineland were at a
very early stage, and he had more pressing business to attend to.
Today, for instance, he had received a very interesting note from a man
named Plovery.
Descending to the Pepperpot's midlevel, he exited through a side door
and strode quickly into the maze of the Laines. These narrow streets, lit
only by sputtering argon globes and by shafts of sunlight that poked down
through vents and skylights in the deck plates overhead, were the
haunt of beggars, thieves, and ne'er-do-wells, but Shkin was well enough
known to walk them without a bodyguard. Even the most witless of
Brighton's lowlifes had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone
who dared lay a finger on Nabisco Shkin. People stepped out of his way,
and turned to watch him when he had gone past. Roistering aviators were
tugged out of his path by their friends. Unwary drug touts and gutter girls
started back as if his glance had burned them. Only one miserable
dreadlocked beggar, leading a dog on a length of string, dared to whine, "A
few spare dolphins, sir? Just to buy some food?"
"Eat the dog," suggested Shkin, and made a mental note to send a snatch
squad to this district once Moon Festival was over. He would be doing his
city a favor by sweeping these scum off the streets, and they would all fetch
a profit at the autumn markets.
He entered a narrow alleyway behind a fried-fish stall, holding a
handkerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of pee and batter. In the
windows of a scruffy shop at the alley's end, mounds of junk and Old Tech
glimmered. PLOVERY said the faded sign above them, and the jangle of
the bell as Shkin opened the door brought the antiques dealer scurrying
from a back room.
"You wished to see me?"
"Why, yes, sir, yes...." Plovery bowed and beamed, and twined his thin
white fingers into knots. Annoyed at Pennyroyal's decision to find a buyer
for the Tin Book without his help, the antiques dealer had decided to take
what he knew about it to another wealthy man. His note had dropped into
Shkin's in-box just an hour ago, and he was impressed
and a little startled to find Shkin standing here in person quite so soon.
Nervously, he told the slave dealer all that he had learned.
"Military, eh?" said Shkin, just as Pennyroyal had a few hours earlier.
"An ancient weapon?"
"Just a code, sir," Plovery cautioned. "But perhaps a clever man who
understood such things might work backward from the code and reconstruct
the machine that it was written for. That could be valuable, sir. And as
Pennyroyal told me that he had got the book from you--'I tricked that creep
Shkin into handing it over for free' were his exact words, sir, if you'll
forgive me--well, I thought you might be interested, sir."
"I have already made arrangements that will repay His Worship for that
little episode," said Shkin, annoyed that this wretch knew how Pennyroyal
had outwitted him. He was intrigued by Plovery's story all the same. "You
made a copy of the book, of course?"
"No, sir. Pennyroyal will not let it out of his sight. It is in his safe at the
Pavilion. But if I had a buyer, sir, I might be able to get my hands on it. I
am a frequent visitor to the Pavilion, sir."
Shkin twitched an eyebrow. He was interested, but not interested enough
yet to lay down the sort of money that he knew Plovery would want. "I deal
in slaves, not Old Tech," he said.
"Of course, sir. But what if it does turn out to be some ancient weapon? It
might tip the balance. End the war. And the war has been so good for
business, sir, has it not?"
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."
21 The Flight of a Seagull
***
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.
The sky grew cold, and the ground rose. The gull flew through zones of
high white silence and over regions where
the Storm's troop movements gave the mountains the busy, scuttling look
of anthills. At last, on a night of snow and starlight a week after it left
Brighton, it landed on a windowsill of the Jade Pagoda and tapped its bill
against the frosty pane.
The window opened. The Stalker Fang took the gull gently in her steel
hands and opened its chest. The message she took out had been written by
someone called Agent 28. Her green eyes flared slightly brighter. She tore
the message into small pieces and sent for General Naga, commander of her
elite air legion.
 "Make ready an assault unit," she told him. "And prepare my ship for
battle. We leave for Brighton with the dawn."
22 Murder on cloud Nine
***
LATE OCTOBER. IN VINELAND, Wren thought, the grass would be
white and stiff with frost until midmorning; fog would blanket the lake, and
perhaps the first snow was already falling. But here on the Middle Sea it
was still as warm as midsummer, and the only clouds in the sky were small
white fluffy ones that looked as if they'd been put there for decoration.
Brighton had cruised slowly along the southern shores of the Hunting
Ground for several weeks. Then, with Moon Festival drawing near, it
headed south to its appointed rendezvous. Boo-Boo went with her
handmaidens to watch from an observation balcony at the edge of Cloud 9
as the land came into view. "Look, girls, look!" she cried happily, indicating
the coastline with a theatrical sweep of her hand. "Africa!"
24
Wren, standing at the mayoress's side with an enormous parasol, tried to
be impressed, but it was quite difficult. All she could see was a line of low
reddish bluffs rising out of a landscape the color of biscuits, with a couple
of big, ragged mountains lost in the haze beyond. Wren knew from things
her father and Miss Freya had told her that Africa had been both the
birthplace of mankind and its haven in the centuries of darkness that
followed the Sixty Minute War, but the civilizations that once thrived upon
those shores had left no traces--or, if they had, they had long since been
snaffled up by hungry scavenger towns.
One of the towns that might have done the snaffling came into view soon
afterward. A small three-tiered place, it was rumbling along on broad,
barrel-shaped sand wheels, trailing a swirl of red dust like a wind-blown
cape. Wren glanced at it without very much interest. It felt strange to
remember how, two weeks before, she had deserted her post in the middle
of Mrs. Pennyroyal's hairstyling routine to run and stare in wonderment at a
little townlet trundling down onto the shore. She'd seen so many towns and
even small cities since then that they seemed quite ordinary now, and
certainly not the fabulous things that she had imagined when she'd lived in
Vineland.
And then she looked again, and felt as silly as she had on that long-ago
day when she'd first seen Brighton through the Autolycus 's periscope and
mistaken it for an island. The things she'd thought were distant mountains
were not distant at all. Nor were they mountains. They were Traction Cities
so large that, when she'd first looked at them, her brain had simply not
understood what her eyes were showing her.
They were lumbering seaward, and through the dust and the drifting
exhaust smoke Wren could see that each had nine tiers bristling with
chimneys and spires.
"The one on the left is Kom Ombo," the mayoress told her girls. "The
other is Benghazi. Mayor Pennyroyal has contracted to meet them here so
that their people may taste the delights of Brighton this Moon Festival.
They have been hunting sand towns in the deep desert, poor things, so you
can imagine how they will relish good food, fine entertainment, and a
refreshing dip in the Sea Pool."
To Wren, the approaching cities looked at first just like the pictures she
remembered from her dog-eared copy of A Child's Guide to Municipal
Darwinism back in Anchorage. Then, as they drew closer, she began to
make out differences. These cities were armored, the exposed buildings on
the edge of each tier screened with steel plates and antirocket netting. And
although the land around their massive tracks was dotted with small,
scurrying towns and suburbs and Traction Villages, these cities were
making no attempt to swallow them.
"Moon Festival is a sacred time," said the mayoress when Wren pointed
this out. "A time when, according to tradition, no city hunts or eats
another."
"Oh," said Wren, feeling disappointed, for it would have been thrilling to
watch a good old-fashioned city chase.
"Of course," Boo-Boo went on, "with the war on and prey so scarce, not
every mayor abides by tradition nowadays, but if any of those cities tries to
eat another, Ms. Twombley and her friends will sort them out. It's high time
that aerofloozy made herself useful."
Right on cue, the Flying Ferrets went tearing through the sky toward the
cities, rolling and tumbling and firing off colored rockets to demonstrate
how they would deal with any predator that threatened to break the Moon
Festival fast. One peeled off, trailing lilac smoke, to write WELCOME TO
BRIGHTON across the sky. As the thunder of their engines rolled away
across the desert, Wren heard the rattle of heavy chains drifting up from
Brighton. The city was dropping anchor.
"I have a feeling that this will be a wonderful MoonFest!" said Mrs.
Pennyroyal brightly as the girls around her oohed and aahed and applauded
the aviators' daring. "Now, come on, all of you; I wish you all to be
photographed in your costumes for the mayor's ball."
She turned back toward the Pavilion, and Wren, with a last glance at the
towering cities, hurried after her. All the other girls were busy talking about
tomorrow night's ball, and about the charming costumes the house slaves
were to wear. Listening to their excited chatter, Wren found herself feeling
almost sorry that she was going to miss the fun. But miss it she must.
Tonight, while the household was asleep, Wren meant to creep down to the
boathouse and steal the Peewit. By the time the sacred moon rose, she
would be a long, long way from Brighton.
The Pavilion echoed and rang to the sound of preparations for the
MoonFest ball. In the ballroom under the central dome, painters and curtain
fitters were hard at work, and musicians were practicing, and electricians
were covering the ceiling with hundreds of tiny lights. Crates of wine and
hampers of food came creaking up from Brighton in the cable car, and
the militia drilled in the Pavilion gardens.
It was all costing Pennyroyal a fortune, which he thought rather unfair.
The people of Brighton surely wanted their mayor to put on a good show
for Moon Festival; it seemed a bit rich that they expected him to pay for it
all out of his own pocket. So he felt not the tiniest pang of guilt about
inviting Walter Plovery to an informal dinner party he was holding that
night. Between dessert and coffee, while the other guests were discussing
their plans for MoonFest and the latest scandals in the Artists' Quarter,
Pennyroyal led the antiques dealer off to take a look at some of the precious
antiques in the Pavilion's collection. Together the two men wandered from
room to room, studying Stalkers' brains and ground car grilles, fragments of
circuit boards that looked like careful embroidery, flattened drink cans, and
suits of ancient armor. They made notes of pieces that Plovery thought
might fetch a tidy sum from some collectors he knew in Benghazi, and that
Pennyroyal reckoned nobody would miss.
Over coffee, Mr. Plovery mentally totted up the commission he stood to
make on all these sales and found that he was going to do very nicely. Full
of Pennyroyal's food and charmed by the wit and sophistication of his
fellow guests, the antiques dealer regretted that he had ever made that deal
with Shkin about the Tin Book. But Mr. Shkin had promised him a very
great deal of money, and Plovery, whose aged mother lived in an expensive
nursing home at Black Rock, needed all the money he could get. When the
evening ended and the other guests made their way noisily back to the cable
car, he doubled back and hid himself in one of the Pavilion's galleries.
***
The night air made Wren shiver inside her silver lame nightgown as she
stepped out through the servants' entrance into the cold of the garden. She
could hear the sea far below, the wind soughing through the rigging, and
someone burbling a drunken song down in the streets of Brighton.
Clutching the bag of food she had stolen from the kitchens, she hurried
across the damp lawn toward the boathouse and the lights of the Flying
Ferrets' aerodrome.
The boathouse doors were never locked, and big as they were, they were
easy to move, rolling aside on well-oiled casters when Wren leaned her
weight against them. The Peewit's sleek envelope gleamed inside the
hangar as Wren crept to the gondola. She found that she had been holding
her breath, which was silly because there was nobody about. Over at the
aerodrome, a gramophone was playing a popular tune. Wren reached for the
gondola door, and that was not locked either. She crept inside and used the
small flashlight she had pinched from the Pavilion's caretaker to study the
dials on the chromium instrument panels, remembering the diagrams in a
book she'd looked at in the Pavilion's library, Practical Aviation for Fun
and Profit.
The gas cells were full, just as Cynthia had told her. The fuel gauge was
still on empty, but Wren had thought of a way to deal with that. She took
her nightgown off and stashed it behind the instrument panel. Underneath,
she was still wearing her day clothes. She said a quick prayer to the gods of
Vineland, then left the airship and walked briskly across the apron in front
of the boathouse and through the woods toward the Ferrets' base.
In an old summerhouse that had been commandeered by the mercenary
air force, Orla Twombley and a few of her aviators were playing cards.
They looked up suspiciously when Wren came tapping at the door.
"Who's that?"
"Looks like one of Boo-Boo's girls."
The aviatrix stood up lazily and opened the door. "Well?"
"I've come with a message from Mrs. Pennyroyal," said Wren. Her voice
caught a little as she said it, but the aviatrix didn't seem to notice. She
looked worried. Maybe she thought Boo-Boo had sent Wren here to tell her
off for flirting with the mayor. Wren started to feel more confident. "Mrs.
Pennyroyal wants the Peewit to be fueled at once," she explained. "She is
going across to Benghazi tomorrow morning. Very early tomorrow
morning, so she can find lots of bargains at the bazaar. She wonders if your
ground crew would oblige?"
Orla Twombley frowned. "Why ours? Is it not the mayor's men who
should be refueling the old gasbag?"
"Yes," said Wren. "His Worship was supposed to ask them this afternoon,
but he forgot, and they've gone off duty now. So if you wouldn't mind
getting your people to do it, Mrs. Pennyroyal would be ever so grateful."
The aviatrix thought for a moment. She did not want to upset the
mayoress. Boo-Boo had powerful relatives who might force Pennyroyal to
dispense with the Flying Ferrets' services and hire some other freelance air
force instead. Orla Twombley knew for a fact that the Junkyard Angels and
Richard D'Astardley's Flying Circus were both angling to take over the
Brighton contract.
She nodded, and turned to her men. "Algy? Ginger? You
heard what the young lady said...."
Grumpy but obedient, the two aviators set down their cards and their
mugs of cocoa and went out with Wren into the night, muttering about what
a waste of good fuel it was and wondering why anyone still bothered with
airships when heavier-than-air was the way of the future. Wren trailed after
them at a distance and watched as they ran fuel lines from the big tanks
behind their airstrip and linked them to nozzles on the Peewit's underside.
"She'll take a good ten minutes," one of the men said, turning to Wren
with a friendly wink. "No need for you to hang about in the cold, kiddo."
Wren thanked him and ran back to the Pavilion. Ten minutes would give
her just enough time to fetch Cynthia.
She had decided right from the start that she would not tell Cynthia about
her scheme. Cynthia was much too giggly and forgetful to keep a secret,
and would probably have blurted out the whole thing to Mrs. Pennyroyal.
But Wren had no intention of leaving her friend behind. While the Peewit
was being fueled, she would slip into the dormitory where the girls slept,
wake Cynthia as quietly as she could, and bring her down to the boathouse.
By the time they got there, the yacht would be ready for takeoff.
Mr. Plovery used a novel lockpick that Shkin's people had taken from the
Lost Boys to open the door of the mayor's private office. The office was in a
tower room, with long windows reaching up toward a shadowy ceiling high
above. The blinds were open and the moon shone brightly in, showing the
antiques dealer Pennyroyal's cluttered desk and the
drawing by Walmart Strange behind which Pennyroyal's private safe was
hidden.
As he crossed the room, Plovery sensed a movement way up above him
in the domed ceiling, and had the oddest feeling that he was being watched.
He went cold with panic. What if Pennyroyal had got hold of one of those
crab-camera things and was using it to guard his safe?
He almost gave up and ran, but the thought of his mother stopped him.
With the money Shkin had promised him for the Tin Book, he would be
able to move Mum into one of the luxury suites on the top floor of her
nursing home, with a view of the parks at the city's stern. He forced himself
to stay calm. Pennyroyal wasn't clever enough to set up a surveillance crab.
And if he had, he would certainly have bragged about it to his dinner
guests.
Plovery took the picture off the wall and set it down carefully against
Pennyroyal's chair. The circular door of the safe confronted him. He
reached for the dial and turned it right, then left, then right again. On
previous visits to the Pavilion he had often seen Pennyroyal open the safe,
and had worked out the combination by listening to the number of clicks the
dial made. Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven ... Calmly, carefully, he went
through the sequence, and the heavy door swung open.
Inside the safe was a small leather case. Inside the case was the Tin Book
of Anchorage. Plovery took it out, holding it reverently, for old things were
his love as well as his livelihood. There was something beautiful, he
thought, about the way that human handiwork could outlive its makers by
so many, many years.
As he reached up to shut the safe, he sensed a movement behind him, and
turned, and--
Wren was halfway to the dormitory when she heard the horrible,
quivering scream. She squeaked and froze, then dived behind a nearby
statue. The scream ended in a sort of gargling noise. The echoes faded into
silence, and then the Pavilion began to fill with the sounds of doors opening
and people shouting to one another. Lights came on. Glancing through the
window beside her, Wren saw that light was flooding the gardens too: big
security lamps flicking on, and guards running about with wobbling
handheld lanterns.
That's that, she thought, no chance of escaping now --and then felt
ashamed that she was feeling sorry for herself when she should really have
been worrying about whoever it was who had let out that dreadful shriek.
She left her hiding place and ran toward the dormitory. Halfway there,
she turned a corner and cannoned into Theo Ngoni, coming up a side
passage from the direction of the kitchens. "Oh!" she cried. "What are you
doing here?"
"I heard someone scream ..." he said.
"Me too...."
"The whole house heard someone scream, my dears." Mrs. Pennyroyal
was striding toward them in her billowing nightie, like a ship in full sail.
Wren jumped away from Theo, wondering if they would be punished for
speaking to each other, but the mayoress just looked kindly at them and
said, "It seemed to come from my husband's part of the house. Let's see
what has happened."
Wren and Theo followed obediently in her wake as she
2l6
swept toward the larboard wing. Wren thought privately that it had been
the sort of scream you hurry away from, not toward, but Mrs. Pennyroyal
seemed determined to get to the source of the disturbance. Perhaps she was
hoping that her husband had scalded himself on a hot-water bottle or fallen
off his balcony and didn't want to waste good gloating time.
They climbed the winding stairs behind the ballroom and passed the door
to a little staircase that led down to the Cloud 9 control room; it was open,
with worried-looking crewmen peering out. Lights were burning in the
mayor's office, and as they drew closer, Wren heard Pennyroyal's voice,
shrill and wobbly with alarm, saying, "The intruder may still be at large!"
Slaves and militia were crowded round the open door, but they drew aside
respectfully as their lady mayoress approached.
Pennyroyal was standing beside his desk, along with two officers of his
guard. He looked up as his wife and her retinue entered. "Boo-Boo! Don't
look...."
 Boo-Boo looked, and gasped. Wren looked too, and wished she hadn't.
Theo looked, and seemed quite undisturbed, but then he'd been in battle and
had probably seen things like this before.
Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching
the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face,
Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try to protect himself. It had
done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his
evening robe into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very
forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and
Remora.
"Must have been a knife," one of the militia officers was saying lamely.
"Or maybe a spear ..."
"A spear?" shouted Pennyroyal. "In my Pavilion? On the night before the
MoonFest ball?"
The officers swapped sheepish glances. Like most of Brighton's soldiers,
they had signed up mainly for the uniforms--fetching scarlet numbers with
pink trimmings and a lot of gold tassels. They had never expected to have to
face dead bodies and mysterious intruders, and now that they were, they
both felt a bit queasy.
"How did he get in?" asked one.
"There's no sign of a break-in," agreed the other.
"Well, I expect he took the spare key from the vase outside," said
Pennyroyal. "I keep a spare key there...."
The officers studied the body at their feet and nervously fingered the hilts
of their ornamental swords.
"It looks to me as if he was trying to burgle Your Worship's safe,"
decided the first.
"Yes; what is that thing he's holding?" said the second.
 "Nothing!" Pennyroyal snatched the Tin Book from the dead man's hands
and thrust it back inside the safe, locking the door behind it. "Nothing of
value, and anyway, it isn't here; you didn't see it...."
There was a thunder of fleece-lined boots on the stairs, and Orla
Twombley burst into the room with half a dozen Flying Ferrets at her back.
They carried drawn swords, and the aviatrix used hers to point at Wren.
"That's the girl!"
"What? I say ..." Pennyroyal turned to peer at Wren.
"She came asking my lads to ready your sky yacht," Orla Twombley
explained, taking a menacing step toward Wren as
if she thought it might be safest to run the girl through where she stood.
"Had some cock-and-bull story about the mayoress here wanting the old
sack of gas refueled so she could go shopping in Benghazi...."
"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Pennyroyal excitedly. "The girl was
preparing her getaway! Once a burglar, always a burglar, eh?"

'
Oh, gods , thought Wren. She had never imagined that her careful plan
could go as wrong as this. What would they do to her? Send her back to
Shkin, probably, and demand a refund....
Everybody was talking excitedly Pennyroyal raising his voice above the
rest. "Plovery must have recruited her to help him rob me, only she
murdered him for the loot instead! And no doubt this Mossie devil was in it
with her!" he added, pointing at Theo. "Well done, Orla, my angel! Without
your quick thinking, they'd have made off aboard the Peewit with the ... ah
... contents of my safe."
"Rubbish!" said Boo-Boo, in a voice that made them all fall silent and
turn nervously to look at her. She had drawn herself up to her full height
and turned the color that mayoresses turn when they hear their husbands
refer to attractive aviatrices as "my angel" right in front of them. She put
her arm around Wren. "What Wren told Miss Twombley was entirely true. I
did ask for the Peewit to be refueled. I was planning to go shopping in
Benghazi tomorrow, though I don't suppose I shall feel up to it now.
Anyway, Wren and Theo were with me when poor Plovery cried out;
neither of them could possibly have done this dreadful deed."
Wren and Theo stared at her, astonished that Boo-Boo would lie to
protect them.
"But if it wasn't them," asked Pennyroyal, "who ... ?"
"That is not for me to find out," said Boo-Boo haughtily. "I am returning
to my quarters. Please search for your murderer quietly. Come, Wren; come,
Theo. We have a busy day tomorrow."
She turned and strode out of the room, past the chastened aviators. Wren
curtsied to Pennyroyal and hurried after Theo and her mistress. "Mrs.
Pennyroyal," she whispered as they reached the bottom of the stairs. "Thank
you."
Boo-Boo seemed not to hear. "What a dreadful business!" she said. "That
poor, poor man. My husband was to blame, I am sure."
"You think the mayor killed him?" asked Theo. He sounded as if he didn't
believe it, but Wren knew Professor Pennyroyal was quite capable of
murdering someone if it suited him. Look at how he had treated Dad! She
could see now how he had fooled everyone in Anchorage for so long, for he
was certainly a good actor. How shocked he had looked, standing over
Plovery's body....
"Old Tech!" sighed Boo-Boo. "It is never anything but trouble. Oh, I do
not say that Pennyroyal wielded the fatal blade himself, but I expect he has
set up some nasty booby trap to protect his safe. He would stop at nothing
to protect that ridiculous Tin Book. What is so special about it, anyway? Do
you know, child?"
Wren shook her head. All she knew was that the Tin Book had been the
cause of yet another death. She wished
she had never taken the horrid thing from Miss Freya's library.
Outside the doors of her bedroom, Boo-Boo shooed away the guard and
turned to Wren and Theo. She studied them both with a sad smile, taking
Wren's hands in hers. "My dear children," she said, "I am so sorry that your
attempt to fly away has failed. I'm sure that is what you were doing, Wren?
Having my husband's yacht fueled so that you and Theo could fly away
together?"
"I--" said Theo.
"Theo had nothing to do with it!" Wren protested. "I ran into him in the
corridor. We were both coming to see what had happened--"
Mrs. Pennyroyal raised a hand; she would hear none of it. She had done
her best to stop this happening, but now that it had, she found that it was all
rather thrilling and romantic. "You need not hide the truth from me," she
said, and tears came into her eyes. "I hope I am your friend as well as your
mistress. As soon as I saw you together, your tryst interrupted by the death
cry of that unhappy man, I understood everything. How I wish that I had
known a burning passion like yours instead of getting married off to
Pennyroyal to please my family...."
"But--"
"Ah, but yours is a forbidden love! You remind me of Prince Osmiroid
and the beautiful slave girl Mipsie in Lembit Oriole's wonderful opera
Trodden Weeds. But you must be patient, my dears. What hope of happiness
do you have if you escape? Runaway slaves, penniless and far from home,
pursued by bounty hunters wherever you turn. No,
you must stay here awhile, and meet only in secret. Now that I know how
much you long to leave, I shall do all that is in my power to persuade
Pennyroyal that he must set you free."
Wren could feel herself blushing. How could anyone imagine that she
was in love with Theo Ngoni, of all people? She glanced at him and was
annoyed to see that he looked embarrassed too, as if the very idea that he
might be in love with Wren were ridiculous.
"Patience, my lovebirds," the mayoress said, and kissed each of them
upon the forehead. She smiled, and opened her bedroom door. "Oh, by the
way," she murmured, "not a word to anyone about poor Mr. Plovery. I will
not allow this terrible event to upset our MoonFest celebrations...."
 23 Bright, Brighter, Brighton
***
M OONFEST ! A buzz OF expectation rose from the raft city as the sun
came up. Actors and artists who usually never stirred before noon leaped
from their beds at gull squawk and began putting the finishing touches on
decorations and carnival floats, while shopkeepers rolled up their shutters
with a gleeful air, dreaming of record takings. Brighton was not a religious
city; most of its people thought that religion was at best a fairy tale, at worst
a con. To them, the rising of the first full moon of autumn, which was a
solemn, sacred night in other cities, meant only one thing: It was party time!
Actually, it was almost always party time aboard Brighton. When Wren
arrived, the Estival Festival, a six-week celebration of the gods of summer,
had been petering out in a slew of firework parties and parades. Since then
there had been the Large Hat Festival, the Cheese Sculpture Biennale,
the Festival of Unattended Plays, Poskitt Week, and Mime-Baiting Day
(when Brightonians were allowed to get back at the city's swarms of
irritating street performers). But MoonFest still had a special place in the
hearts and wallets of Brightonians, and the growing cluster of towns on
shore seemed to promise a bumper harvest of visitors. Even the editor of the
Palimpsest, who would usually have been delighted to print the rumors he'd
been hearing about a mysterious death on Cloud 9 during the night,
relegated the story to a small column on page 4 and filled his front page
with Festival news instead.
Boo-Boo's Bevy of Beauties Boosts Brighton!
Lady Mayoress Boo-Boo Pennyroyal predicted yesterday that this year's
MoonFest celebrations will be Brighton's best ever. Mrs. Pennyroyal (39)--
pictured at left posing for the Palimpsest's photographer along with a bevy
of her most beautiful handmaidens--will tonight play hostess to the Middle
Sea's richest partygoers when the Pavilion opens its doors and dance floors
for the Mayoral Ball.
"Everybody who is anybody is on their way to Brighton!" said Mrs.
Pennyroyal. "What better place to celebrate Moon Festival than in this
white city, adrift on an azure sea?"
Of course, it wasn't really a white city on an azure sea at all; that was just
how it looked from the observation
platforms of Cloud 9. Down at deck level, Brighton was an off-white
city, its rooftops streaked with gull droppings, its streets sticky with
abandoned snacks, adrift on a slick of its own litter and sewage. But the
weather was perfect: a soft onshore breeze to waft the air taxis across to
Benghazi and Kom Ombo and cool their passengers on the journey back;
the hot sun baking the metal pavements and releasing complex odors from
the puddles of grease and vomit that last night's revelers had left behind. As
the day wore on, the city settled lower in the water, weighed down by the
crowds of visitors who filled the streets and artificial beaches, and splashed
and shrieked along the fringes of the Sea Pool. By midafternoon all the
rubbish bins were overflowing, and the gulls fought one another for
scavenged scraps of meat and pastry, swooping low over the heads of the
long queues that had formed beneath the Pharos Wheel and outside the
entrance to the Brighton Aquarium.
Tom Natsworthy, waiting in the line of holidaymakers, ducked as another
screaming gull dived past. He had been afraid of large birds ever since he'd
fought with the Green Storm's flying Stalkers at Rogue's Roost. But these
greedy gulls were really the least of his worries. He felt sure that the
aquarium's uniformed attendants would be able to tell just by looking at him
that he had come aboard Brighton only an hour before, climbing out of a
manhole that the Screw Worm had bored through the city's hull. He
expected at any moment to be dragged out of the queue and denounced as
an intruder and a stowaway.
***
The Screw Worm had caught up with Brighton that morning. Tom had
approached slowly, frightened of triggering whatever Old Tech Brighton
had used to catch the Lost Boys, but it seemed that the city had turned its
sensors off now that its fishing trip was over. Even so, he and Hester had
barely dared to breathe as the magnetic clamps engaged and the hull drill
chewed noisily through the resort's deck plates.
 Tom had wanted to use the crab-cams to search for signs of Wren, but
Hester disagreed. "We're not Lost Boys," she pointed out. "It'd take all sorts
of skills we haven't got to steer one of those things through Brighton's
plumbing. It could be weeks before we sighted Wren. We'll go up ourselves.
We ought to be able to find some sign of all those limpets they fished
aboard."
Hester was right. When they emerged from the Worm into a deserted
alleyway behind Brighton's engine district, almost the first thing they saw
was a poster pasted to an exhaust duct. It showed a limpet surrounded by
savage boys, beneath the words
PARASITE-PIRATES OF THE ATLANTIC!
ARTIFACTS AND CAPTIVES
TAKEN FROM THE SUB-AQUATIC THIEVES' DEN OF GRIMSBY
DURING BRIGHTON'S RECENT EXPEDITION
ARE ON PUBLIC DISPLAY AT THE
BRIGHTON AQUARIUM, 11-17 BURCHILL SQUARE.
"Captives!" said Tom. "Wren might be there! That's where we've got to
go...."
Hester, a slower reader than her husband, was still
halfway through the text. "What's an aquarium?"
"A place for fish. A sort of zoo, or museum."
Hester nodded. "Museums are your department. You go and have a look.
I want to go and nose round the air harbor. I might hear something about
Wren there, and I want to see if I can find us a ship; I don't fancy going all
the way home in that stinking old limpet."
"We shouldn't split up," said Tom.
 "It's only for a while," said Hester. "It'll be quicker." It was just an
excuse, of course. The truth was that all the time she'd spent cooped up with
Tom beneath the waves had made her irritable. She wanted to be alone for a
while, to breathe and look around this city, without having to listen to him
always worrying about Wren. She kissed him quickly and said, "I'll meet
you in an hour."
"Back at the Worm?"
Hester shook her head. The engine district was getting busy as a new
shift clocked on; passersby might notice them sneaking down their secret
manhole. She pointed to another ad, half obscured by the aquarium poster,
for a coffee shop in the Old Steine called the Pink Café.
"There ..."
Luckily, the aquarium's attendants were only interested in selling tickets
and chatting to each other about their plans for the evening. They were not
on the lookout for intruders, and even if they had been, there was nothing to
distinguish Tom from the other visitors. He was just a youngish, tousled,
slightly balding man, perhaps a scholar from the middle tiers of Kom
Ombo, and if his clothes were rather rumpled and old-fashioned and
he smelled faintly of mildew and brine, well, there was no rule against
that. The girl at the turnstile barely glanced at him as she took his money
and waved him through.
Inside the aquarium, bored-looking fish drifted in big, dim tanks, and
there was such a smell of rust and salt water that Tom could almost have
imagined he was back in Grimsby. But nobody was looking at the fish, or
the sea horses, or the mangy sea lions. Everyone was heading to the central
hall, following the brightly colored signs to the parasite-pirate exhibit.
Tom went with them, trying not to look too eager, reminding himself that
Wren would probably not be here. He shuffled along among the other
visitors, peering at a display of crab-cams and then at a limpet called Spider
Baby that stood on a dais in the center of the hall. Whoever had put it there
had given it a dramatic pose; it was rearing back on its four hind legs and
waving its front feet in the air as if it were about to lash out at the visitors.
Families posed in front of it to have their photographs taken, the children
making scared faces, or sticking out their tongues at the looming machine.
Beyond the limpet, in a straw-lined cage, captive Lost Boys squatted and
stared at the passing crowds. Sometimes one would fling himself at the
bars, shouting abuse, and the visitors would scuttle away, frightened and
delighted, while one of the burly attendants poked the savage with an
electric prod. Tom felt sorry for the Lost Boys, and almost relieved that
Wren was not among them.
Nearby, a pretty young woman in aquarium livery was pointing out
details to a group of children. Tom waited until she had finished, then
approached her. "Excuse me," he asked, "could you tell me how many
limpets were taken?"
The pretty young woman was really very pretty. Her smile almost
dazzled Tom. "Nineteen in total, sir," she said, "and three destroyed at sea."
"And was one of them called the Autolycus?"
The smile faded. Flustered, the woman riffled through her exhibition
notes. Nobody had ever asked her about a particular limpet before. "Let me
see ..." she muttered. "I believe ... Oh, yes! The Autolycus was one of the
first limpets we caught, way over in the western seas, far from the parasite
lair." Her smile returned. "She must have been swimming off on a burgling
mission when we snapped her up...."
"And the crew?"
The young woman was still smiling, but her eyes were troubled; she was
starting to wonder if Tom was some kind of weirdo. "You'd have to ask Mr.
Shkin, sir. Mr. Nabisco Shkin. All the captives are property of the Shkin
Corporation."
"And what's the Shkin Corporation?" asked Hester, who had just been
told the same thing by a secondhand balloon salesman at the air harbor.
"Slaves," said the man, spitting a black jet of tobacco juice onto the deck
plate at his feet and winking at her. "All them boys and girls they fished up
are all slaves now, and serves them right, I say."
 A slave, thought Hester as she strode away through the increasingly busy
streets. The shadows of airships and balloon taxis slid over her as they
poured into the air harbor to offload more cackling crowds of tourists. A
slave. Hester shouldered a group of language students off the pavement.
How was she going to break this to Tom? That his beloved little
girl was cooped up in a slave hold somewhere, or enduring who knew
what at the hands of cruel owners ...
To make matters worse, she had learned that her plan of buying an airship
would not work. Prices had rocketed since she'd last been aboard a city, and
the gold that she had taken from Grimsby wouldn't buy so much as a spare
engine pod at the secondhand airship yards.
She spent some of it at a stall behind the harbor instead, buying a pair of
jet-black sunglasses to hide her missing eye and a headdress of silver discs
that more or less concealed the scar on her forehead. She bought a new veil
too, and an ankle-length black coat with many buttons to replace the shabby
thing she'd worn all the way from Anchorage. Walking on, she found her
mood improving. She liked this city. She liked the sunshine and the crowds,
the jangle of slot machines, the tatty facades of the hotels. She liked being
among people who did not know her and could not guess what lay beneath
her veil. She liked the handsome young aviators who smiled at her as she
strode past, their eyes drawn to this mysterious woman with her hidden face
and long, lean body. And--although she didn't quite admit it to herself--she
liked life without Wren. She was almost glad that the girl had got herself
kidnapped.
She stopped to study a street plan and then crossed a footbridge over the
Sea Pool and headed aft to the Old Steine. There was no sign of Tom at the
tables outside the Pink Café. Hester considered having a coffee while she
waited for him, then decided that she couldn't afford one at Brighton prices.
She wandered around the long curve of the Steine instead, looking at the
shop fronts, until she came to one that stopped her short.
It was a shabby building that had once been a theater. A cheery pink sign
above its door proclaimed THE NIMROD PENNYROYAL EXPERIENCE,
and posters announced: RELIVE MAYOR PENNYROYAL'S
ADVENTURES ON FIVE CONTINENTS AND A THOUSAND CITIES]
EDUCATIONAL AND ENTERTAINING! In the window a waxwork of
Pennyroyal, chained to the floor of a cardboard dungeon, raised and
lowered its head, peering quizzically at a crescent-shaped blade that swung
to and fro above it on a pendulum.
Mayor Pennyroyal? Hester had often wondered what had become of the
fake explorer after he shot Tom and stole the Jenny Haniver. She had
assumed that the gods would have punished him by now for all his lies and
tricks; they'd had sixteen years to think of a suitable comeuppance, after all.
Instead, they seemed to have rewarded him. Pennyroyal was alive. And
Pennyroyal knew what she had done. She had told him herself, in the
Aakiuqs' smashed-up kitchen, while she was getting ready to murder
Masgard and his Huntsmen.
She handed a bronze coin to the man at the ticket booth and went inside.
It seemed as though Brighton's other visitors had found better ways of
educating and entertaining themselves, for the Nimrod Pennyroyal
Experience was almost deserted. There was a dusty museum smell, and
another smell, tantalizing and out of place, that was even more familiar.
Hester wandered past unimpressive artifacts in glass cases, past a
reconstruction of an Ancient landfill site that Pennyroyal had once
excavated. Paintings and waxwork dioramas showed Pennyroyal battling a
bear, escaping from air pirates, and
almost being sacrificed by a cult of Old Tech-worshipping female
warriors--all scenes from Pennyroyal's bestselling books, and all total fibs.
Only one of the paintings meant anything to Hester. It showed Pennyroyal,
sword in hand, fighting off a horde of savage Huntsmen, while at his side a
beautiful young woman expired prettily. It was only after she had stared at
the picture for a minute or more that Hester noticed the martyred girl wore
an eye patch and had a fetching little scar on her cheek.
"Gods!" she said aloud. "Is that bimbo supposed to be me?"
Her voice sounded loud in the empty, echoey rooms. As it faded, Hester
heard footsteps, and the man from the kiosk put his head round the door and
asked, "Everything all right, madam?"
 Hester nodded, too angry to speak.
"Magnificent painting, eh?" the curator said. He was a friendly man,
middle-aged, with a few strands of sandy hair combed carefully across his
bald head. He came and stood next to Hester and beamed proudly at the
picture. "It's inspired by the closing chapters of Predator's Gold, in which
His Worship does battle with the Huntsmen of Arkangel."
"Who's the girl?" asked Hester.
"You haven't read Predator's Gold?" asked the man, surprised. "That is
Hester Shaw, the aviatrix who sells Anchorage to the Huntsmen. She
redeems herself, the poor creature, by dying at Pennyroyal's side, cut down
by the chief of the Huntsmen, Piotr Masgard."
Hester turned away quickly, climbing a dusty metal staircase toward the
upper floor of the museum, barely seeing the
displays she passed, her head filled with panicky, racing thoughts.
Everything was ruined! Pennyroyal didn't just know what she'd done, he'd
written a book about it! There were paintings! Even if Pennyroyal had
twisted the facts, the truth was still there, in black and white on the pages of
his book. Hester Shaw had sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen. And when
Tom found out ...
Would he still love her if he knew what she was really like?
She reached the top of the stairs. The familiar smell was stronger up here,
and Hester remembered suddenly what it was: a mixture of aviation fuel
and lifting gas. She looked up.
The whole upper story was a single glass-roofed room, and in its center,
on metal stanchions, sat an airship. It was old and tattered, and the name
painted along its flank was The Arctic Roll, but Hester would have known
that clinker-built gondola and those much-repaired Jeunet-Carot engine
pods anywhere. She had lived in those narrow cabins for two years, and
flown halfway around the world beneath that old red gasbag. It was the
Jenny Haniver.
"Ugly old tub, ain't she?"
 Hester had not realized that the curator had followed her up the stairs, but
here he was, standing just behind her and smiling amiably. "Hester Shaw
bequeathed her to Professor Pennyroyal with her dying breath, and he flew
her home to Brighton through polar storms and swarms of air pirates."
A wooden walkway had been built beside the gondola. Half listening to
the curator, Hester climbed the steps and peered in through the dusty
windows, remembering the ship's real history. There was the stern cabin,
with the narrow bunk where she used to sleep with Tom. There was the
pilot's seat where she had spent so many long watches. There, on the
scuffed planking of the flight-deck floor, Wren had been conceived....
She sniffed the air. "She smells ready to fly...."
"Yes indeed, madam. Aviatrix, are you?"
Hester looked round at him with a start, wondering if he had guessed
who she was, but he was just being friendly. "Yes," she said, and then,
because he looked as if he wanted to know more, "I'm Captain Valentine of
the Freya."
"Ah!" said the curator, satisfied, and nodded to the Jenny again. "She'll
be leading the Flyby of Historic Ships tomorrow, Ms. Valentine."
Hester touched the cool underside of an engine pod and imagined it
roaring into life. She was starting to recover from her shock. After all, Tom
knew that Pennyroyal was a liar. Why would he believe anything the old
fraud said about her? Beneath her veil, she smiled her crooked smile.
"It should be a very fine display," the curator was saying, smiling up at
her. "There's going to be a reenactment of one of Professor Pennyroyal's
most desperate adventures: a battle between The Arctic Roll and a bunch of
old air tugs dressed up as pirate ships. Real rockets and everything ..."
Hester looked around the big room. "How do you get her out?"
"Eh?" said the curator. "Oh, the roof opens. Opens right up, like a
docking hangar. The mayor will just fly her out."
 Hester nodded, and checked the time by her pocket watch. She had
forgotten her meeting with Tom, and she was already twenty minutes late.
She went back downstairs, with the curator hurrying behind her. In the
souvenir shop near
the exit she helped herself to a copy of Predator's Gold and flipped a
couple of coins at him to pay for it.
"If I might make so bold, Ms. Valentine," said the curator, rummaging in
his cashbox for change, "I was wondering whether you might care to
accompany me to the display tomorrow, and perhaps to dinner afterward?"
But when he looked up, the mysterious aviatrix was gone and the exit
door was swinging softly shut.
Hester walked briskly across the Old Steine toward the café, stuffing
Pennyroyal's book into her pocket. The curator's foolish, flattering request
made her feel attractive and mysterious again, and the panic she had felt
earlier had completely vanished. She knew now that everything would be
all right. She would show Tom the book, and they would laugh together at
all Pennyroyal's lies about her. Then she would spring Wren from the slave
pens, and they would reclaim the Jenny Haniver and fly away together.
The tables outside the café were busy, but there was still no Tom. She
turned around, looking for him, annoyed. It was not like Tom to be late, and
she wanted to tell him her plans.
"Hester?" asked one of the slave girls from the café , approaching with a
folded piece of paper in her hand. "You are Hester, ain't you? The
gentleman said you'd be coming. He asked me to give you this."
The paper was a handbill advertising the aquarium. On the back, in his
neat handwriting, Tom had penciled, Dearest Het, I will see you back at the
SW. Wren has been taken as a slave; I am going to a place called the
Pepperpot to see about buying her back.

24 The Requiem Vortex

***
 THE AIR FLEET HAD made good time since leaving Shan Guo. They
had crossed the sequined turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and were
sweeping westward now over the hills of Jabal Hammar. The four
destroyers flew in line astern, and around them the air throbbed and tore
with the roar of engine pods as an escort of fighter airships--Murasaki Fox
Spirits and Zhang Chen Hawkmoths--scoured the sky for townie privateers.
Through a slit in the armored gondola of the Stalker Fang's flagship, the
Requiem Vortex, Oenone Zero peered toward the distant ground. Nothing
moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she
looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of
passing towns. Jagged bite marks pitted the hillsides where mining towns
had scooped out gutfuls of ore-bearing rock.
When she'd first heard that she was to go with her mistress on this
mysterious expedition, Oenone had felt glad. Isolated in the sky aboard the
Stalker's flagship, surely she would find a chance to use her weapon? But
the world she had seen on the way, scarred and ruined by Municipal
Darwinism, made her wonder afresh if she really had the right. She hated
the war, but she hated Traction Cities too. By killing Fang, might she not be
handing victory to them? If the Green Storm collapsed, the whole earth
might soon look like those wrecked rubble heaps below her. She did not
want that on her conscience.
"Still finding reasons not to do what you came here for, Oenone," she
told herself in the disappointed tone her mother had used when Oenone was
a child and shirked her schoolwork. "What a coward you are!"
She looked ahead, into a brownish haze that she knew was made partly
from the exhaust smoke of cities. Beyond it somewhere lay the Middle Sea,
not far off now. Oenone tried to crush her doubts. A battle was coming, and
she knew enough about battles to feel sure that there would be moments of
such chaos and confusion that she would be able to unleash her device upon
the Stalker Fang without anyone understanding what she had done.
She turned from the gun slit and climbed up into the thundering
passageways inside the envelope. As she neared the officers' mess, she
could hear the voices of some of her comrades, and she paused at the open
door, unnoticed, listening.
 "She says we are to target only Brighton!" Lieutenant Zhao, the gunnery
officer, was saying, pitching her voice low
for fear the Stalker Fang might hear. "Why Brighton? I've read the
intelligence reports. Brighton is the least of cities, the merest pleasure raft."
"She has spies of her own," said Navigator Cheung, staring into his
empty cup as though he could divine the Stalker's plans from the tea leaves
there. "She has deep-cover agents who report to nobody but her."
"Yes, but why would she have placed one aboard Brighton?"
"Who knows? There must be something important about the place."
"Such as?" Zhao shook her head. "There are fat predator towns lurking in
these hills below us. Why must I save my rockets for Brighton when I could
be blowing the tracks off predator towns?"
"It is not for us to question her orders, Zhao."
That came from the expedition's second-in-command, General Naga.
Oenone saw the junior officers stiffen and bow their heads at the sound of
his voice. Naga had been with the Green Storm since its foundation. There
was a famous photograph of him, young and handsome, raising their
thunderbolt banner over the wreck of Traktiongrad; Oenone had had a
poster of it on her bedroom wall when she was a girl. But Naga was not
young anymore, and not handsome either: His hair was gray, his long ocher
face seamed and scarred. He was thirty-five, an old man by the standards of
the Green Storm military. He had lost an arm at Xanne-Sandansky and the
use of his legs at the air siege of Omsk, and he could walk and fight only
because the Resurrection Corps had built him a powered metal exoskeleton.
"I don't like this mission," he admitted, the segments of his mechanical
armor scraping as he leaned across the table. "Brighton is no threat to us,
and I hear it's spent the summer hammering those parasite brigands up in
the North Atlantic. I was a cadet at Rogues' Roost when they attacked our
air base there. I lost good friends to those devils, and I'm glad Brighton's
sorted them out. But orders are orders, and orders from the Fire Flower ..."
 He stopped suddenly, sensing Oenone standing in the doorway.
"Surgeon-Mechanic," he said gruffly, turning toward her. His mechanical
hand clamped on his sword hilt; his exoskeleton clanked and hissed,
making a clumsy half bow. Behind him, Oenone saw fear on the faces of
the junior officers as they recognized her. She knew what they were
thinking. How long has she been there? How much did she hear? Will she
tell the Stalker? Even Naga was afraid of her.
"Please, forgive me," she said, bowing formally to the general and again
to the officers at the table. She went into the mess, poured a glass of
jasmine tea that she did not want, and drank it quickly, in silence.
Everyone's eyes lingered on her. They were almost as wary of her as they
were of the Stalker Fang herself, and she felt glad of that, because it proved
that they did not suspect her real motives.
But someone aboard the Requiem Vortex suspected her. As she left the
mess and climbed the companion ladders to her cabin high among the
reinforced gas cells, Grike watched from the shadows, and waited patiently
for her to make her move.
25 The Pepperpot
***
AFTERNOON WAS TURNING INTO evening as Tom walked toward
the Pepperpot through streets filled with carnival. A procession was moving
slowly along Ocean Boulevard, with pretty girls and boys dressed up as
mermaids cavorting on electric floats, giant dancing puppets of the sea
gods, paper lanterns shaped like fish and serpents twirling on long poles,
and drag queens in enormous feathery hats showering down confetti from
low-flying cargo balloons. Through gaps between the white buildings, Tom
kept glimpsing the sea, and once, with a scream of engines, a patrol of those
unlikely flying machines came hurtling low over the rooftops. Tom clapped
his hands over his ears and turned to watch them pass. He would have been
thrilled by them when he was younger, but now they just reminded him of
how dangerous the world was, and how much it had altered while he'd been
away. The more he saw of it, the more he longed to find Wren and return
to the peace of Vineland.
He pushed on through the crowds, heading for the address that the girl at
the aquarium had given him. He knew that Hester would be cross with him
later for going without her, but he had been far too anxious to wait any
longer for her at the Pink Café. Besides, he kept remembering what she had
done to Gargle, and it made him feel uneasy about how she might react
when she learned Wren's fate. He wanted to talk calmly to this Shkin
fellow. He might turn out to be a reasonable man who would give Wren
back to her parents when he learned the truth. If not, Tom would arrange to
buy her back. Either way, there should be no need for violence.
When he saw the Pepperpot, he felt even more optimistic. Most slavers'
dens were dingy places, tucked away on unmentionable tiers of savage
salvage towns, not elegant white towers. Outside the glass front door, a
guard in smart black livery politely stopped him and ran a metal detector
over him before letting him into a reception area as calm and tasteful as a
hotel lobby. There were soft chairs, and hard metallic-green potted plants,
and a plaque on the wall that read THE SHKIN CORPORATION, and
underneath, in smaller letters, AN INVESTOR IN PEOPLE. The only real
clue to what sort of place it was were the angry, muffled shouts and
clanging sounds that came up faintly through the sea-grass carpet.
"I'm sorry about the noise," said a well-dressed woman sitting behind a
black desk. "It is those filthy Lost Boys. They were very meek when we
first brought them aboard, but they are growing more troublesome and
contumelious by the day. Never mind. The autumn auctions begin
tomorrow, so
we shall soon be rid of them."
"Then you have not sold them yet?" cried Tom. "I'm so glad. I'm looking
for my daughter. Wren Natsworthy. She was with the Lost Boys, and I think
you might have taken her by mistake...."
The woman had penciled-on eyebrows as thin as wire, and she raised
them both in surprise. "One moment, please," she said, and leaned across
her desk to whisper into a brass-and-Bakelite intercom that Tom thought
very futuristic. The intercom whispered back, and after a moment the
woman looked up at Tom and smiled and said, "Mr. Shkin will see you in
person. You may go up."
Tom moved toward the spiral staircase that led up through the ceiling, but
the woman pressed a button on her desk, and a narrow door slid open in the
wall. Tom realized that it was a lift. It looked nothing like the huge public
elevators he remembered from his boyhood in London; it was just a posh
cupboard, paneled in mother-of-pearl, but he tried not to look too surprised,
and stepped inside. The door slid shut. He felt his stomach lurch. When the
door opened again, he was in a quiet, luxurious office where a man was
rising to meet him from behind another black steel desk.
"Mr. Shkin?" asked Tom, while behind him the door closed softly and the
lift went purring down.
Nabisco Shkin bowed low and extended a gray-gloved hand. "My dear
Mr. Natsworthy," he said softly. "Miss Weems tells me you are interested in
one of our slaves. The girl named Wren."
 It made Tom angry to hear Wren called a slave so calmly, but he
controlled himself and shook Shkin's hand. He said,
"Wren is my daughter. She was kidnapped by one of the Lost Boys. I've
come to get her back."
"Indeed?" Shkin nodded, watching Tom carefully. "Unfortunately I had
no idea of the girl's history. She has already been sold."
"Sold?" cried Tom. "Where is she? Is she still aboard Brighton?"
"I shall have to check my files. We have processed so many slaves this
month...."
The elevator door opened again, and the room began to fill with men,
armed guards in black livery. Tom, taken by surprise, barely realized what
was happening before one of the men slammed the handle of a truncheon
into his side and two more caught him as he doubled over, breathless and
choking.
Nabisco Shkin moved around the room, pulling down canvas blinds to
hide the long windows. "A lot of pleasure craft in the sky today," he said
conversationally. "Wouldn't want any happy holidaymakers peeking in on
us, would we?" The room grew shadowy. He returned to his desk and spoke
into the intercom. "Monica, send the boy here. Let's find out if this wretch
is really who he claims to be."
Tom's captors twisted his arms painfully behind him and held him tight,
but they need not have bothered, for he was in no state to stand, let alone try
to overpower four strong guards. He felt his heart flutter and thump, pain
twisting through his side. Shkin came closer, pulled up Tom's sleeve with a
look of faint distaste, and removed his wedding bracelet.
"That's my property!" Tom gasped. "Give it back!"
Shkin tossed the bracelet up in the air and caught it again. "You don't
have property anymore' he said. "You are property unless you have papers
to prove that you are a free man. But if you are who you say you are, you
won't." He held the bracelet up and squinted at it. "HS and TN," he read.
"How touching...."
 The lift bell rang again and another of Shkin's black-clad guards stepped
out. This one was just a boy, dressed up like the rest in a black uniform and
a peaked black cap with a silver SHKIN logo on the front.
"Well, Fishcake?" Shkin asked him. "Do you recognize our guest?"
The boy stared at Tom. "That's him, all right, Mr. Shkin," he said. "I saw
him on the screens when we was at Anchorage. That's Wren's dad."
"How do you ... ?" Tom started to ask, and then realized suddenly who
this boy must be. Fishcake. That was the lad Uncle had talked about, the
newbie who had kidnapped Wren! Tom knew he should feel angry with
him, but he didn't. He just felt more angry than ever with Shkin, because he
could see the logo branded on the back of the boy's thin hand. What sort of
a man would do that to a child? What sort of a city would let a man like that
grow rich and prosperous? He said, "Fishcake, please, is Wren all right?
Was she hurt at all? Do you know who bought her?"
Fishcake was about to reply, but Shkin said, "Don't answer him, boy."
One of the guards hit Tom again, knocking the air out of his lungs in a loud,
wordless woof.
"Fishcake has learned obedience," said Shkin. "He knows that if he
disobeys me, I shall put him back in the holding
cells with his friends, and they will rip him to pieces for betraying
Grimsby." He tore open Tom's waistcoat, pulled up his shirt, and traced with
one gray-gloved finger the scars that had been left by Windolene Pye's
amateur surgery. There was something like a smile on his face.
"The mayor of this city is a very irritating man, Mr. Natsworthy," he said.
"I believe that you may be able to help me expose him as a fraud and a liar.
But first your daughter will help me to retrieve something he has stolen
from me. Who knows--if you cooperate, I might let you both go free." As
he turned to his desk, he tossed the bracelet up into the air and caught it
again. Leaning down to the brass mouthpiece of the intercom, he said,
"Miss Weems, arrange a cell on the midlevels for Mr. Natsworthy, and have
a bug ready to take me to the Old Steine at seven thirty. I think I shall be
attending His Worship's ball after all."
 Hester had already looked in through the front door of the pretty little
tower once without seeing any sign of Tom. She had looked for him
everywhere else that she could think of, hoping that he might have gone
back to the Screw Worm before attempting to talk to the slavers, or circled
back to the Pink Café. Now she was back outside the Pepperpot, feeling
angry and faintly scared. She was sure Tom was in there, and that
something bad had happened to him. The blinds had been drawn across the
windows on one of the upper stories, and there was a bunch of black-
overalled guards in the reception area, chatting to the snooty-looking
woman there. Hester wondered if she should barge in and confront them,
but she did not want to walk into the same trap as Tom.
The man outside saw her peering in again and stared, so she walked
quickly past as if she were just a curious tourist and went into a coffee shop
on the far side of the square, where she drank iced coffee through a straw
and thought. This Shkin character must have decided to take Tom prisoner
for some reason. Perhaps he thought Tom was connected with the Lost
Boys. Well, that was not so big a problem. She would go and rescue him,
just as Tom had come to rescue her when she had been a prisoner at Rogues'
Roost.
But how to get inside that tower? The guard at the door was already wary
of her, and with all these carnival crowds about she could not just shoot her
way in. Oh, poor Tom! Why had he come here alone? He should have
known that he couldn't cope on his own with people like this Nabisco
Shkin.
She paid for her iced coffee and asked the waiter, "Is that Shkin's place?
The tower? It looks too small to hold many slaves."
"It's got hidden depths," the waiter replied, glancing happily at the tip she
put down on the table. "The cells and stuff are down below. That's where
they're keeping all those horrible pirates."
Hester thought again of Rogues' Roost, and of how she had led Tom to
safety through the confusion of a Lost Boy raid. Then she left the café,
walking quickly, glancing down once to make sure that the gun in her belt
didn't spoil the cut of her new coat.
26 Waiting for the moon
***
AS THE SUN SANK red and fat into the haze above Africa, the breeze
stiffened. Brighton began to rock gently on the long, white-capped,
shoreward-rolling combers. Undaunted by the heaving pavements, parades
of children trooped round Ocean Boulevard with bright banners and huge
moon-shaped paper lanterns, and a thousand self-styled artists held private
viewings in one another's houses.
"Keeps 'em busy, I suppose," said Nimrod Pennyroyal, gazing down
philosophically at it all from one of Cloud 9's many observation platforms.
"There are so many tenth-rate painters and performers on this city, we need
a good festival every week or two to make them feel their silly lives are
worthwhile." Drifts of bubbles swirled past him, vomited into the evening
sky by an art installation in Queen's Park. The breeze brought carnival
noises gusting up too: guitars
and cacophoniums jangling in the streets of the historic Muesli Belt,
premature fireworks banging and shrieking on the seafronts.
On the blue-green evening lawns of the Pavilion gardens, between the
shadows of the cypress groves, the guests were starting to gather. All the
men wore formal robes, and the women looked wonderful in ball gowns of
moonlight silver and midnight blue. Paper lanterns had been strung along
all the walks and between the pillars of the bandstand, where some
musicians were tuning up. The Flying Ferrets had arrived, looking terribly
dashing in their fleece-lined flying suits and white silk scarves, talking
loudly about "archie" and "bandits" and "crates" being "ditched in the
briny." Orla Twombley, her hair lacquered into backswept wings, hung on
Pennyroyal's arm.
Drinks and snacks were being served before the dancing began, and
Wren was one of the people doing the serving. She felt pretty and
conspicuous in her MoonFest costume-- baggy trousers and a long tunic
made from some floaty, silvery fabric that she could not name--but the
guests seemed not to notice her at all; they were interested only in the tray
she carried. As she wove her way through the gathering crowds, hands
reached out without a thank-you or a by-your-leave to snatch at her cargo of
drinks and canapés.
Wren didn't mind. She was still tired and uneasy after the events of the
night before. All day there had been an odd atmosphere in the Pavilion,
with militiamen coming and going and security being tightened up. The
other slave girls kept coming to ask Wren if she had really seen the body,
and had there been ever so much blood? To make matters worse,
Mrs. Pennyroyal smiled knowingly at Wren every time she saw her, and
kept finding excuses to send her into rooms where Theo Ngoni was, or
Theo into rooms where Wren was, as if she hoped someone would write an
opera about them one day and there would be a part for a soprano of a
certain age as Boo-Boo Pennyroyal, the thoughtful mistress who made their
love possible.
Strangely, all this kindness made Wren like Boo-Boo less: It was one
thing to keep slaves, but quite another to try to arrange their love affairs.
She felt that the mayoress was pairing her and Theo off like a couple of
prize poodles.
So she was glad to be invisible for a while, to look and listen. And
everywhere she looked, she saw someone she recognized from the society
pages of the Palimpsest. There were Brighton's leading painters, Robertson
Gloom and Ariane Arai. There was the gorgeous Davina Twisty, fresh from
her triumph in Hearts Akimbo at the Marlborough Theatre. That man in the
hat must be the sculptor Gormless, whose ridiculous artworks clogged the
city's public spaces like barbed-wire entanglements. And wasn't that the
great P. P. Bellman, author of atheistic pop-up books for the trendy toddler?
Wren wondered how they would all feel if they knew that a man had been
murdered, right here on Cloud 9, less than twenty-four hours ago.
She met Cynthia and asked her softly, "Is there any news?"
"News?" echoed Cynthia, as bright and brainless as sunshine.
"About poor Mr. Plovery? Have they found out who did it yet?"
 "Oh!" Cynthia's golden ringlets jiggled as she shook her
head. "No. And Mrs. Pennyroyal says we ain't to talk about it. But what's
all this I hear about you and Theo?"
"It's nothing. Just Boo-Boo's imagination."
"You're blushing, Wren! I knew you fancied him! I saw you talking to
him that day at the pool, remember?"
Wren left Cynthia giggling and pressed on through the crowd, asking,
"Would you care for a drink, sir? A canapé, madame?" and gathering up
empty glasses and fragments of still emptier conversations.
"Just look what La Twisty is wearing!"
"You simply must meet Gloom, he's 50 amusing!"
"Have you read Bellman's latest? Quite brilliant! Some of the finest
literature of our age is being written for the under-fives...."
Dusk deepened. Davina Twisty was persuading some friends and
admirers to venture with her into Cloud 9's insanely complicated box-hedge
maze. The band played "Golden Echoes" and "The Lunar Lullaby." Soon
the moon would rise, and everyone would watch the fireworks before
retiring to the Pavilion for dancing and more food. Wren, already
exhausted, paused in a quiet part of the gardens near the deck plate's edge.
It felt nice to be alone at last. She looked across the sea at the armored cities
and thought how melancholy they looked, crouching there upon the dunes
like the temples of a vanished race.
A hand crept onto her shoulder like a gray silk spider. Turning, she
looked into the expressionless face of Nabisco Shkin.
"Enjoying the view, my dear?" he asked. "I hope none of His Worship's
other guests has noticed you loafing here. The
Shkin Corporation has a reputation as a purveyor of only the most
hardworking slaves."
 Wren pulled away from him and tried to return to the light and laughter
of the party but Shkin barred her way. What did he want with her? He must
have been stalking her through the busy gardens, waiting for a moment
when he could catch her alone. She felt cold and frightened. Raising her
empty tray, she held it in front of her like a shield, but Shkin only laughed.
She didn't like his laugh. She'd preferred it when he was silent and icy.
"Why would I harm you, child?" he asked. "I just want you to do a job
for me, the simplest and smallest of jobs. Do you know where your new
master keeps his private safe?"
Wren nodded.
"Good girl." Shkin held up a neat square of paper with a number written
on it. "This is the combination. I'd like you to fetch me the Tin Book. I sent
a friend for it yesterday, but I hear he met with an accident."
Wren lowered her tray, thinking of poor Mr. Plovery.
"Don't look so glum!" Shkin told her. "You've stolen it before. Young
Fishcake told me all about it."
"I won't do it!" Wren said. "You can't make me!"
"Your poor father," said Shkin. He twirled the square of paper back into
an inner pocket of his graphite-colored evening robe and shrugged faintly.
"What a pity, after he came all this way to rescue you!"
Wren couldn't imagine what he meant--not until he reached into another
pocket and brought out a bracelet, which he laid on the tray between them.
By the light of lanterns in the nearby trees Wren recognized Dad's wedding
bracelet. She had known it all her life, that loop of red gold with the
letters HS and TN entwined. But what was it doing on Cloud 9?
"It's a trick!" she said. "Fishcake must have described this to you, and
you had a replica made...."
"Don't you think it's more likely that your dear daddy has come to
Brighton to fetch you home?" asked Shkin. "He is a guest of the Shkin
Corporation. If you fail in the task I have set you, he'll die. Rather slowly.
So be a good girl and run up to Pennyroyal's office."
The gardens were falling quiet. Some of the guests were organizing a
search party to look for Davina Twisty, who was lost in the maze. The
others shushed them. Moonrise was only a few moments away. The thought
of Dad so near made Wren start to cry. How had he come here? How had
Shkin found him? And where was Mum? She reached for the bracelet, but
Shkin's conjuror's hands whisked it away and set the square of paper in its
place.
"Do this little thing for me," he soothed, "and you will be reunited. I'll
send you both home to Vineland in one of my own ships."
Wren didn't believe that, but she believed the rest. Dad was in Shkin's
power. If she didn't do as Shkin asked, he'd be killed. And the worst of it
was, it was all her fault: If she hadn't taken that book in the first place, he
would still be safe in Anchorage. So if stealing the book again was the only
way to keep him safe a little longer, that was what she would have to do.
"But why me?" she asked. "You must know all sorts of people better at
breaking into safes than me...."
"You should have more faith in yourself' said Shkin. "You are an
accomplished burglar, from what I've heard. Besides, if you are caught, the
crime cannot be connected to me. You were the one who brought the Tin
Book here; Pennyroyal will believe that you were simply trying to retrieve
it for yourself."
Wren picked up the paper. The darkness was growing deeper as her
fellow slaves moved between the trees, snuffing out the lanterns, but the
white square seemed to shine in her hand with a light of its own.
"All right," she said, her voice shrunk down to a whisper; then, as she put
down the tray, "What is it? I ought to know. What is this Tin Book, and why
does everybody want it?"
"Not your business," said Shkin, looking past her toward the horizon. "I
can make a profit from it. What more reason do I need? Now go; you have
work to do."
 Wren went, running away between the trees as the sacred moon peeked
over the horizon. For a few seconds, perfect silence settled over Brighton,
for according to the old tradition, wishes made at moonrise on this sacred
night were often granted by the Moon Goddess. Pennyroyal's guests were
far too sophisticated to believe such fairy tales, of course, but they bowed
their heads regardless, some with shrugs and smiles to show that they were
just being ironic but were moved in spite of themselves, remembering the
magical MoonFests of their childhood. They wished for love and happiness
and yet more wealth, while down in the city Brighton's artists wished for
fame, and her actors for long runs in successful plays, and on the
underdecks their slaves and indentured laborers wished for their freedom.
And then
the silence was ended by a single firework, then another, then a great
broadside of rockets and bangers and a clamoring of gongs and bells and
kitchen pans loud enough that the goddess herself might hear it as she
strolled among her porcelain gardens.
Even if the Green Storm fleet had not already picked up the signal of
Brighton's wireless beacon, they would have been able to home in on the
fireworks leaping into the sky above the raft resort. Feathering their steering
vanes, the warships swung toward their target, spreading out across the sky
while their crews prepared rocket projectors and machine cannon, Tumbler
bombs and flocks of raptors, and their fighter escorts, went prowling ahead.
In the belly of the Requiem Vortex, Grike checked on Oenone Zero and
found her in her cabin, trying on a steel helmet that made her look even
younger and less soldierly than before. Her cowardice perplexed him. He
had been sure that she would try to attack the Stalker Fang before the fleet
reached its target. Had she given up her plan? Perhaps; he had searched her
cabin several times and found no sign of any weapon.
Sirens were hooting. The ship's companionways and passages were full
of frightened Once-Borns and impassive battle-Stalkers hurrying to their
posts. Grike made his way to the forward gondola and found his mistress
there, ignoring the crew, staring out instead at the enormous moon.
"why are we here?" Grike asked.
 The Stalker Fang's bronze death mask turned to stare at him. She had still
told no one the reason for this expedition,
and Grike suspected that if any of the Once-Borns, even Naga, had asked
her so bluntly, she would have torn his throat out with her claws for their
impertinence. But she only stared at Grike, and then whispered, "Tell me,
Mr. Grike, do you ever remember your former life? Your life as a Once-
Born?"
"i do not even remember my life as a stalker," said Grike. (Although a
memory flared up as he spoke: a young girl with a bloody face lying on a
heap of old cork fishing floats. He squashed it quickly, like a man stamping
on a flame.) "I remember nothing before dr. zero awakened me on the black
island."
Fang turned away, looking out through the glass again, but he could see
the reflection of her face, the odd marsh-gas flaring of her green eyes. "I
remembered something once," she said. "Or I almost did. There was a
young man I encountered at Rogues' Roost. Tom. When I saw him, I felt
that I knew him. He was very handsome. Very kind. Anna Fang must have
been fond of him. I am not Anna Fang, but when I looked at him I sensed ...
oh, all sorts of intriguing feelings."
"we are the dead," said Grike, who was starting to grow uncomfortable.
"we do not feel. we do not remember. we were built to kill. what use are
memories?"
"Who knows what the first of our kind were built for, back in the Black
Centuries?" asked the other Stalker. "My memories are what have brought
us here, Mr. Grike. I made inquiries about this Tom. I wished to learn more
about him, and perhaps to recapture those strange sensations. I found out
that he and his companions had a connection with an ice city called
Anchorage, so I sent to the Great Library of
Tienjing for books on Anchorage. They had only one: Wormwold's
Historia Anchoragia. It told me nothing about Tom, but it was there that I
first learned of the Tin Book and guessed what it contains.
"what IS the tin book?" asked Grike.
 "The Tin Book?" The Stalker looked playfully at him, her head on one
side, a finger to her lips. "The Tin Book is what we are here for, Mr. Grike."
Hester too had been waiting for the moon. Perched on a seat on the
lower-tier promenade, she had whiled away the time by glancing through
her copy of Predator's Gold, and what she had found there cheered her. It
seemed to her that Pennyroyal had buried the truth beneath so many lies
that nobody would ever be able to unearth it.
At moonrise, as the rowdy crowds flooded out of Brighton's underdecks
to watch the fireworks, she shoved her way past them, pushing against the
tide into the district of dank slave barracks and tenements called Mole's
Combe. By the time she reached the foot of Shkin's tower, the streets
around her were deserted except for the seagulls, which, startled from their
roosts by the racket on the promenades, soared like white phantoms beneath
the web of peeling girders overhead.
She had studied the Pepperpot earlier, and decided on a way in. Round on
the sternward side, surrounded by bins and fat, snaky ducts, was a small
back door made of rusty metal and studded with rivets like the hatch of a
submarine. Above the door a spiffy brass security camera kept watch on
visitors, but there were no other defenses; the Pepperpot had been
designed to keep people in, not out.
Hester approached cautiously, keeping to the shadows. Her heart beat
fast. She imagined the blood rushing through her veins and arteries, filling
her with her father's cold strength. She felt that both Wren and Tom were
very close, and that soon they would all be together again, and happy.
Smiling to herself behind her veil, she pulled the Schadenfreude out from
inside her coat and waited until the next fusillade of fireworks, then shot the
camera off its mountings.
She had just enough time to stuff the gun away before the door opened
and a man came out and stood with his hands on his hips, peering up
indignantly at the smoldering wreckage of the camera.
"Happy MoonFest!" called Hester.
 The man turned. He looked surprised to see the veiled woman walking
toward him, and even more surprised when she shoved a knife between his
ribs. He died very quickly, and she heaved his body into the shadows
behind the bins and went through the door, closing it softly behind her. She
found herself in a corridor. Light and voices came from a small guardroom.
She peeked in. There were three more men inside. One was stabbing
irritably at the buttons beneath a circular screen that fizzed with static; the
others were slumped, bored and uncomfortable, on office chairs, drinks in
their hands, wishing they could be with their wives and their children at the
celebrations.
Hester shot the one at the screen first, and killed the others as they sprang
up, groping for their guns. She stood quiet for a time in the shadows,
waiting for someone to
come. No one did. There were so many rockets and firecrackers being let
off in the streets outside the Pepperpot tonight that a few extra bangs made
no difference. She reloaded the Schadenfreude, noticing with pride that her
hands hardly shook at all.
The Shkin Corporation was well organized, and she was glad of it. A
framed plan on the guardroom wall showed her the layout of the place. She
took a moment to memorize it; then, silent and sure of herself, she moved
toward the slave pens. Two men stood watch outside a pair of heavy double
doors. One lunged at Hester with some sort of electric cattle-prod thing, but
she sidestepped him and stuck her knife in his back, then cut the throat of
the other as he reached for the alarm bell. There was a ring of keys on the
second one's belt, and it did not take her long to find the one she needed.
The slave pens were filled with soft breathing and the faint stirrings of
caged things. As she grew used to the dark, she started to make out the
cages ranged around the walls, and the faces staring out at her through the
bars.
"Tom?" she called.
All around her, people were shifting and whispering. Some of the
prisoners in the cages closest to the door could see the dead guards
sprawled outside, and were reporting it to their neighbors.
 "Who are you?" called a voice from one of the cages.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Name's Krill."
"A Lost Boy?" Hester walked toward the voice. Soon she was close
enough to see his eyes shining in the thin spill of light from the door she'd
opened. He was watching the keys
she held, like a hungry dog watching a forkful of food. She jangled the
keys softly, by way of encouragement, as she asked, "Is Wren here? Wren
Natsworthy?"
"That Dry girl who was on the Autolycus?" asked Krill. "Who's asking?"
"The lady with the keys," said Hester.
She saw Krill's fair head bob in the darkness, nodding. "She was in a
cage near me for a while, but they took her away."
"Why?"
"Don't know. Fishcake went too, soon after." (He paused to spit, as if he
wanted to clean Fishcake's name out of his mouth. There were murmurs of
anger and disgust from the other cages. Fishcake wasn't popular.) "Shkin's
men told us he turned nark; betrayed Grimsby. Walks about in a uniform
now like he's playing at soldiers. What happened to the girl I don't know.
Sold, I expect."
"What about her father, Tom? He was taken today."
"Never heard of him. There's no Drys in here, lady. Just Lost Boys."
"Could he be in the holding cells on the middle tier?"
"Could be." Krill shifted thoughtfully. Around him, in the other pens, all
the other captives were shifting too, listening, wary as animals. The ones
who were close enough to see Hester never took their eyes off the keys.
"There'll be more guards up there, though. You'll need something to distract
them."
 "Did you have anything particular in mind?" asked Hester. Krill grinned,
and behind her veil Hester grinned too, because this was exactly what she
had planned. She dropped
the keys into Krill's cage. "Play nicely" she said. As she ran toward the
stairs, she could hear him scrabbling through the bunch of keys, trying each
one in the lock on the door of his pen, and the voices of the Lost Boys, like
rising surf, urging him on.
27 The Unsafe Safe
***
MAYOR PENNYROYAL HAD HAD the pavilion ballroom specially
redecorated for the festival. The front wall had been replaced with a long
row of French windows that opened onto the sundeck outside and let in the
light of the sacred moon. Around the dance floor, swags and cascades of
silvery fabric hung from every pillar and cornice, reflecting the Milky Way
of tiny bulbs that swirled across the ink-blue ceiling. Spotlights illuminated
a podium, where a small orchestra played. The walls were covered with
priceless works of art: antique masterpieces by Strange and Nias hanging
next to the latest snot paintings by Hoover Daley, master of the
Expressionist Sneeze.
In a hive of hexagonal chambers opening off behind the main room were
all manner of amusing diversions for the guests. In one was a replica of a
"bouncy castle," a strange
inflatable fortification that Pennyroyal claimed had been a key feature of
Ancient warfare, but that could also be used as a trampoline. In another a
projector rattled, showing copies of copies of some of the fragments of film
that had survived from before the Sixty Minute War. Armored knights rode
through a burning wood, their shadows stretching up through the smoke;
flying machines lifted into a tropical dawn; a little tramp walked down a
dusty road; groundcars chased each other like tiny cities; a man dangled
from a broken clock high above some enormous static settlement; and in
soft, beautiful close-ups rose the dreaming faces of the screen goddesses.
Wren, running in from the garden on her mission for Shkin, barely
noticed any of it. But as she darted past the film room toward the spiral
staircase that would take her up to Pennyroyal's office, she almost collided
with Theo, who was coming in the other direction, clutching his ostrich-
feather fan. He wore baggy silver trousers and a pair of silver angel's wings.
"Hello," said Wren. "What's the wing thing about?"
 Theo shrugged, and his wings flapped. "All the boys are dressed like this.
Boo-Boo's idea. Horrible, isn't it?"
"Vile," agreed Wren, though secretly she thought he looked rather
fetching.
"Look," he said, "this idea that Boo-Boo's got about us--"
"It's all right," said Wren. "I don't fancy you either."
"Good."
"Good." She was glad he was there, though, and she didn't want to part
from him. She thought how much easier it would be to burgle Pennyroyal's
safe if she had an accomplice.
Especially an accomplice like Theo, who had been in battles and was
probably ten times braver than herself.
"Look," she said, "I've got to do something...."
"Another escape attempt?"
"No. I've got to take something from Pennyroyal's safe."
"What? After what happened to that antique dealer?" Theo stared at her,
waiting for her to admit that it was all a joke. When she didn't, he said, "It's
that book thing, isn't it? That metal book?"
"The Tin Book of Anchorage," Wren said. "Shkin sent Plovery for it, and
now that Plovery's dead, he's sending me."
"Why?" asked Theo. "What's so important about it?"
Wren shrugged. "All I know is that everybody seems to want it.... I think
it might have something to do with submarines, but ..." She paused uneasily.
Maybe she shouldn't be telling Theo this. He was Green Storm, after all, or
had been once. But she was glad she had. She touched his arm. "He's got
my dad at the Pepperpot, and if I don't do what he asks, he ... I don't know
what he'll do. Will you help me?"
 She did know, of course; she just didn't want to say it. She felt glad that
she had Theo to confide in.
"Your dad?' he asked. "I didn't know Lost Girls had fathers...."
"I'm not really a Lost Girl," said Wren. "Just mislaid. I told Pennyroyal I
came from Grimsby because ... Oh, Theo, it's too complicated to explain. I
just have to save Dad!"
She could tell that he understood. He looked scared and serious. "But if
the safe's booby-trapped ..." he said.
"That's why I want you to keep a lookout. Please, Theo. I don't want to
go in there alone."
"I'm supposed to be on duty in the ballroom. Boo-Boo's orders."
"Boo-Boo's having a wonderful time. She won't notice if we sneak off for
five minutes."
Theo thought about it, then nodded. "All right. All right."
Gripping his fan like a battle-axe, he followed Wren up some stairs and
through a door at the top into an antique-lined corridor. The noise of the
party faded as the door swung softly shut behind them, then dipped again as
the corridor turned sharply to the left. Creeping past the door to the control-
room stairs, they heard the faint voices of the crewmen chatting at their
stations down below, but there were no other sounds. Everyone else was
busy in the ballroom or the kitchens, and this part of the Pavilion was
deserted.
They reached the end of the corridor and stopped, staring at Pennyroyal's
office door.
"What if he changed the combination of his safe after last night?"
whispered Theo. "What if he's changed the locks on the door?"
Wren hadn't thought of that. She prayed that Pennyroyal hadn't either.
Her groping fingers quickly found the spare key, still hidden in the vase. At
first it didn't seem to fit the lock, but that was only because her hands were
trembling so badly. After she spent a few moments swearing and fumbling,
the lock snicked and she turned the handle and pushed open the door.
The office looked peaceful and safe. The Walmart Strange drawing was
back in its place on the wall. Wren went to it and took it carefully off its
hook, laying it down on the desk. Theo followed her into the office and
quietly closed the door, then almost knocked a statue off its pedestal with
his fan.
"Couldn't you have left that stupid thing outside?" she hissed.
"What, where someone might see it lying about?"
Wren turned to the safe. "Ready?" she asked.
Theo didn't look ready. "You think there's a booby trap inside the safe?"
he said.
Wren shook her head. "The safe was open last night, remember, and I
didn't see anything booby-trappish in there." All the same, she made sure
that she was standing well to one side as she reached for the dial. "Mr.
Plovery opened the safe and got the book out. That's when something got
him. Now hush." She frowned, remembering the combination. Two-two, oh-
nine, nine-five-seven ...
As the dial clicked and the tumblers inside the lock chunked and grated,
Theo turned slowly around, looking for hidden dangers. There was nowhere
much in this small room that a trap could be concealed. The objects on the
desk looked innocent enough--a blotter, a few pens, a photograph of Boo-
Boo in a heavy black frame. There was a teak filing cabinet against the far
wall, a picture hanging above it, and above that just a lot of architectural
curlicues and the high, shadowy dome of the ceiling and ...
Was it just his eyes playing tricks, or was something moving up there?
"Wren--" he said.
Wren had the safe door open. She reached in and drew out a battered
black case. "Got it."
 "Wren!" Theo shoved her, knocking her sideways. She dropped the case,
and had an impression as she fell of something white whirring past her. A
blade struck the open door
of the safe, hard enough to throw off sparks. Whatever it was scrabbled,
turned, and came flapping at her as she sprawled on the floor. Wren
glimpsed ragged wings, a curved steel beak, a glow of green eyes. Then
Theo's fan batted the thing sideways, slamming it hard against the wall.
Wren heard something break. The flapping thing fell on the floor and kept
on flapping, flailing small clawed feet like bunches of razors. Theo
smacked at it with his fan. Whimpering, Wren groped across the desk,
found the picture of Boo-Boo, and smashed it down hard on the creature's
head.
Theo helped Wren up. "All right?' he asked shakily.
"I think so. You?"
"Yes."
For a while after that, they didn't speak. Theo's arms were still around
Wren, and her face was pressed against his shoulder. It was a nice shoulder,
warm, with a pleasant smell, and she would have liked to stay like that for
longer, but she made herself step away from him, shaking her head hard to
clear away all the distracting thoughts that were trying to roost there.
Feathers floated about in the moonlight.
"What was it?" she asked, nervously prodding the dead bird thing with
her toe.
"A raptor," said Theo. "A Resurrected bird. I thought only the Storm used
them. It must have been set to keep watch on the safe."
"How do you think old Pennyroyal got hold of it?" Wren wondered.
Theo shook his head, puzzled and worried. "Maybe it's not Pennyroyal's."
"That's silly," said Wren. "Who else would want to guard
 his safe?" She picked up the black case and opened it. Inside, the Tin
Book glinted faintly in the firework light from outside. It looked as dull as
ever. It was hard to believe that it had caused so much trouble. She looked
at Theo. "You go," she told him. "I'll tidy this place up and then find Shkin."
Theo was staring at the Tin Book. He said, "I'll help."
"No." Wren felt terribly grateful to him, and didn't want to keep him here
any longer than she had to. If they were discovered and Theo were punished
for helping her, she would never forgive herself. "Go back downstairs," she
said. "I'll follow in a minute or two. I'll find you later."
He started to object again, then seemed to see the sense in what she said.
He nodded, looked thoughtfully at her for a moment, then took up his
battered fan and left while Wren set to work. Gingerly she picked the dead
bird up and stuffed it into one of the drawers of the desk, along with all the
fallen feathers she could find. It had left a stain of oil or blood or something
on the office floor, but there was nothing Wren could do about that. She
pulled the Tin Book out of its case and replaced it with Boo-Boo's broken
picture, which was of a similar weight and size.
A sound came from the corridor, someone shouting something. Wren
went very still, listening. The shouting sounded angry and scared, but Wren
could not make out the words, and after a moment it stopped. "Theo?" said
Wren aloud.
The office gave a sudden shudder, as if giant hands had shaken the
Pavilion by the shoulders. The faint sound from the ballroom diminished as
conversations faltered and the orchestra stopped playing. Wren imagined
the musicians
looking up from their scores in alarm. Then people laughed, and the
music and chatter resumed, climbing quickly back to their former level, as
if someone were turning up the volume on a recording of party sound
effects.
"Just turbulence," she told herself. Or maybe there had been some sort of
problem with the engine pods; now that she thought about it, the shouts she
had heard might well have been echoing up the little stairway from the
control room. Relieved, she went back to work. She put the case back in the
safe and closed it, then hung the Walmart Strange in front of it again.
Lifting the back of her long tunic, she slipped the Tin Book under the
waistband of her trousers. It would be safe there, she thought, but the metal
struck cold against her bare back, and the wire binding kept scratching her.
She stepped out into the corridor and locked the door, replacing the key
in its hiding place. "Theo?" she hissed. There was no answer. Of course not;
he would be back in the ballroom by now, safe.
Then she glimpsed a movement from the corner of her eye. The door to
the control-room staircase was open, swinging on its hinges with each faint
movement of the building. She stood and stared at it, certain that it had been
closed when she'd passed it with Theo a few minutes earlier. Had one of the
men from the control room heard them crashing about in Pennyroyal's
office and come up to investigate?
The noise from the ballroom grew suddenly loud, and then faded again.
Someone had come through the door at the far end of the corridor. Wren
heard footsteps approaching quickly along the polished floor. At the place
where the
corridor bent, a shadow grew on the wall. Panicking, Wren started to
move back toward Pennyroyal's office, but there wasn't time to find the key
again, so she darted through the open control-room door and pulled it shut
behind her.
She found herself in a shadowy little cubicle where iron stairs spiraled
down through the floor. She knew that they went through the floor below as
well, and through the deck plate beneath it, opening eventually into that
little glass bubble that she had seen from the cable car on the day Shkin
brought her to Cloud 9. She pressed her ear to the door and heard the
footsteps go past out in the corridor.
She was about to breathe again when a voice from below her called,
"Who's there?"
The voice sounded frightened, and oddly familiar.
 "Theo?" she said. A dizzy feeling of confusion swept over her. What
would Theo be doing down there, in that control room full of Pennyroyal's
men? Had he been on Pennyroyal's side all along? Had he gone to tell them
about the slave girl who had just burgled their master's safe?
"Wren," the voice called, "something's happened. I don't know what to
do...."
He did sound frightened. Deciding to trust him, Wren hurried down the
tight spiral of stairs, with the Tin Book jabbing her in the small of her back
at every step. She passed another entrance on the ground floor, and then
descended through a shaft of white-painted metal, warty with rivets, that led
down through the deck plate. Theo was looking up at her from the foot of
the stairs, and he stood aside to let her step past him into the control room.
Through its glass walls she could see the whole of Brighton beneath her,
gaudy with
MoonFest illuminations. All around, fireworks were bursting in the clear
air, splashing the instrument panels with pink and amber light. It was
probably the best view on Cloud 9, but it was wasted on the control room's
crew, who were slumped in their seats, dead. One of them still had a knife
sticking out of his neck, an ordinary carving knife from the Pavilion
kitchens with Pennyroyal's crest on the handle.
"Oh, Quirke!" squeaked Wren, wishing she hadn't eaten so many
canapés. As she bent over to puke, a rush of thoughts swirled into her head.
None of them were pleasant. Hadn't Theo been coming from the direction
of the kitchens when she ran into him last night? And now he was standing
in a room full of men who'd been killed with a kitchen knife, and she was
alone with him.
"It's all right," he said, and she squeaked again as he shyly touched her
arm. He didn't understand how scared of him she suddenly was. As she
edged away from him, he said, "I mean, it's not all right. Look." He tugged
at one of the big brass levers on the instrument panel. "Broken. All broken.
And here ..."
On the main control desk was a fat red lever, encased in a glass box and
surrounded with exclamation marks and warnings that it should be used
only in an emergency. Someone had used it anyway, breaking the glass to
get at it.
"What does that do?" asked Wren, but she already knew, because
Brighton looked smaller than it had when she'd entered the control room,
and the bangs of the bursting fireworks were growing fainter and fainter.
"Explosive bolts," said Theo. "They're meant to sever the cables in case
Brighton sinks or something. Didn't you feel that
lurch? Wren, somebody's cut the towropes! We're adrift!"
Wren stared at him, appalled, and in the silence she could clearly hear the
sounds of the party continuing upstairs. She and Theo were probably the
only people on Cloud 9 who knew what had happened.
"Theo," she said, "you can have the book."
"What?"
She pulled it out of her trousers and held it out to him. Her hands were
shaking, making the reflections from the metal cover dance across his
puzzled face. "Wren," he said, "you don't think I could do this? Even if I
could, why would I?"
"Because you're after the book, like everybody else," said Wren. "You're
a Green Storm agent, aren't you? I knew there was something strange about
you! I bet you got yourself captured deliberately so that you could get into
the Pavilion and spy on us all. I bet you left that gull to watch over the safe,
and now you've set Cloud 9 adrift so that you can murder everybody and
make off with the Tin Book! That's why you wouldn't help me steal the
Peewit, wasn't it? So you could escape in her yourself, once you had the
book!"
"Wren!" shouted Theo. "You're not thinking!" He caught her as she tried
to dash past him to the stairs, caught her by both arms and looked earnestly
into her face. "If I wanted that damned Tin Book, why would I have let you
steal it? I would have let the gull kill you back in Pennyroyal's office, and
taken it for myself. For all I know, you could be the Green Storm agent.
You're so keen to get this book, and you were sneaking around when
Plovery was killed too. One minute you're a Lost Girl and the next you're
not.... You
could be the one who did this!"
"I'm not! I didn't!" Wren gasped.
"Well, nor did I." Theo let her go. She edged backward, trembling, still
clutching the Tin Book.
"I was on my way back to the ballroom when I heard someone shout for
help," said Theo. "I opened the door and called down to ask if everything
was all right. There was no answer, but I thought I heard someone moving
about, so I came down. When I got here, they were all dead. I saw that the
cable had been cut, and I was going to go and raise the alarm, but I was
afraid that you were still upstairs and someone would find you." He
shuddered and ran his hand over his face.
"There was someone upstairs," said Wren, remembering the footsteps,
the shadow. "I heard them go past the door. There's nothing else along that
corridor but Pennyroyal's office. They must have been after the same thing
as us. The Tin Book."
Theo stared at her. "That would fit. They came down here first and did
this, but before they could go up the stairs to the office, they heard me
coming down. They couldn't risk killing me too, in case I was a guest who'd
be missed, so they slunk out through the kitchens and then cut back by the
ballroom and up to the office that way.... But why cut us adrift? Why not
just take the book?"
Wren tried to be sick again, but her stomach was empty. "They almost
saw me!" she whimpered. "If I hadn't hidden in time, they'd have killed me
like they did these men...."
Theo reached out for her but wasn't sure if she would
want him to touch her. "So you don't still think I did it?" he asked.
Wren shook her head and went gratefully to him, hiding her face against
his chest. "Theo, I'm sorry...."
 "It's all right," he told her gently. Then he said, "As for last night, I just
couldn't sleep. I went to the shrine to say prayers for my mother and father
and my sisters. It was a year ago, last Moon Festival, that I left Zagwa.
Slipped out of my parents' house while everyone was celebrating, and
stowed away on a freighter, off to Shan Guo to join the Green Storm. All
the preparations yesterday just made me wonder what they were doing now;
whether my parents have forgiven me; whether they miss me...."
"I bet they do," said Wren. She turned away and leaned against the
window, pressing her face to the cool glass. "That's what parents do. They
forgive us and miss us, no matter what we've done. Look at my dad, coming
all this way to find me...."
She looked toward Brighton, longing for her father. Fireworks spurted
into the sky from somewhere in Montpelier, bursting in bright stars of red
and gold. Wren watched them fade as they drifted slantwise down the wind,
and then her eye was caught by another movement. She turned her head.
There was only the sea: a shifting, sliding pattern of moonlight. But what
was that? That long shadow slipping across the wave tops?
Her view was blotted out by something vast and pale. Huge engine pods
slid by, followed by the open gunports of an armored gondola. Wren saw
men wearing goggles and crab-shell helmets standing in gun emplacements
that jutted
out on gantries, and then tall steering vanes, each emblazoned with a
jagged green lightning bolt. "Theo!" she screamed.
Twenty feet from where they stood, an immense air destroyer was
speeding past Cloud 9.
28 The Air Attack
***
In a cell somewhere beneath the Pepperpot's well-appointed reception
area, Tom lay half dazed, feeling his face swell where Shkin's heavies had
hit him, and fearing for Wren. It had been enough at first just to know that
she was alive. He didn't mind too much what happened to him, as long as
Wren was safe. But was Wren safe? Shkin's men had told him she'd been
'
sold to Pennyroyal, of all people . Pennyroyal was not a bad man, but he
was selfish, and thoughtless, and unscrupulous, and he had once shot Tom
in the heart. The old wound hurt Tom again as he lay on the bunk, waiting
for something to happen. His chest ached, and he wasn't sure if the ache
was real or just his body's memory of the bullet.
He had quickly lost track of time in this bland, window-less room, where
a loop of argon tube glowed on the beige
ceiling like a halo. He had no idea whether it was night or day when the
door finally rattled open.
"Brought you something to eat, Mr. Natsworthy," said a small voice.
"And this."
Tom rolled off the bunk and sat up, rubbing his bruised face. The boy
Fishcake stood in the doorway, holding a tray with a bowl and a tin cup. A
few feet of drab beige corridor were visible behind him. Tom thought
vaguely about escape, but his chest hurt too much. He watched as Fishcake
advanced toward him and set the tray down on the floor.
"I swapped shifts with someone so I could come and see you," the boy
confessed. "It was easy. All the others want the night off, 'cos it's Moon
Festival. That's what all the bangs and crashes are about."
Tom listened, and heard faintly the noise of fireworks and gongs from the
streets outside.
 "I'm sorry you got caught, Mr. Natsworthy," Fishcake admitted. "Wren
was very nice to me. So I thought you'd want to see this."
He took a crumpled page of newspaper from the pocket of his uniform
and held it out for Tom to read. The Palimpsest. And there, in the
photograph beneath the headline, kneeling among a group of other girls
around a large woman with enormous hair ...
"That's Wren, ain't it?" said Fishcake. "See? I thought you'd want to
know she's all right. It's a good life, they say, being a house slave up on
Cloud 9. Look: She's got a fancy frock and a new hairdo and everything."
"Cloud 9? Is that where Wren is?" Tom remembered the floaty palace
thing he had seen hovering above the city. He
reached forward, laying a hand on Fishcake's shoulder. "Fishcake, can
you find my wife and get a message to her? Tell her where Wren is?"
"That one with the scar?" asked Fishcake, wriggling away. He looked
scared and disgusted. "She's not here, is she?"
"She's in Brighton, yes. We came together."
Fishcake had gone a curious color. His hands shook. "I ain't going near
her," he said. "She's evil, that one. She killed Gargle and Remora, and she'd
have killed me too if she could. That's why I had to bring Wren with me. I
didn't want to, but she'd have killed me elsewise."
"I'm sure Hester only did what she had to," said Tom, a little uneasily
because he wasn't sure of that at all. "It was tragic, but--"
"She's evil," Fishcake insisted sullenly. "And you're as bad, even though
you think you ain't. Going about with her makes you as bad as she is."
"You still brought me the paper, though," Tom said. "You're a good boy,
Fishcake." He smiled at the Lost Boy, who eyed him suspiciously. Tom felt
sorry for him. He must have been hurt and betrayed by so many people that
he had turned to the first grown-up who showed him any sort of kindness,
even though it was only Nabisco Shkin. Tom wished he could take him
away from this dreadful city to the safety of Vineland, where he would have
the chance of living a normal life, like the children Freya had rescued from
Grimsby.
He said, "Fishcake, can you get me out of here?"
"Don't be soft!" said the boy. "Mr. Shkin would kill me."
"Mr. Shkin would never find you. I'll take you away with
me, if you like. We'll find Wren and Hester, and we'll go away together."
"Away where? Grimsby's gone. I've got a good job here. Where would I
want to go?"
"Anywhere," said Tom. "We could drop you anywhere you liked. Or we
could take you back with us to Anchorage-in-Vineland and you could live
with us there."
"Live with you?" echoed Fishcake. His eyes seemed to Tom to be as
round and bright as the lamp on the ceiling. "What," he said, "like a
family?"
"Only if that's what you wanted," said Tom.
Fishcake swallowed loudly. He didn't fancy going anywhere with Hester.
Hester deserved to die, and one day he meant to make sure that she did, for
he had not forgotten his vow. But he could not help liking Tom. Tom
seemed kind, even kinder than Mr. Shkin. And Wren had been kind too,
even if she hadn't saved him from Brighton's trap. He would like to live
with Tom and Wren.
"All right," he said. He glanced at the doorway, scared that someone
might have overheard. "All right. As long as you promise--"
Out in the corridor, a nasty, harsh electric bell began to ring, making Tom
and Fishcake jump. Doors slammed, and boots pounded on the metal floor.
Fishcake snatched the piece of paper from Tom and scampered out of the
cell, swinging the door shut behind him. Standing up, Tom ran to peer
through the small grille in the top of the door, but he could see nothing. The
bell jarred and jangled. Men's voices shouted at the far end of the corridor,
and more boots clanged. Then, a sudden, startling bang, and another.
Someone screamed. "Fishcake!" shouted Tom. There was another bang,
very close, and then Hester's voice, outside in the corridor, shouting,
"Tom!"
"Here! In here!" he said, and a moment later her veiled face appeared at
the grille.
"I got your note," she said. He ducked away from the door, and her gun
punched holes in the lock. She kicked the door open.
"Where's Fishcake?" asked Tom. "You didn't hurt Fishcake? He was here
just a minute ago! He had a picture! Wren's on Cloud 9!"
Hester pulled her veil down and kissed him quickly. She smelled of
smoke, and her dear, ugly face was flushed. "Shut up and run," she said.
He ran, ignoring the warning stabs of pain in his chest. Outside the door
of his cell, the corridor made a tight turn. Two men lay dead at the corner.
Neither of them was Fishcake. Tom clambered gingerly over the corpses
and followed his wife up some stairs, past some more bodies. Smoke hung
in the air. Shouts and screams came from somewhere below.
"What's happening?" he asked. "What's going on down there?"
Hester looked back at him, grinning. "Someone's let the Lost Boys out.
Careless, eh? We'd better go out the top way."
The lights went out, all at once. Tom crashed into Hester, who steadied
him and said very calmly, "Don't worry."
There was inkish darkness for as long as it took Tom's heart to make five
stuttering beats, then dull red lights came on. "Emergency generator," said
Hester.
Tom trailed after her, through a series of deserted offices where the
blood-red light shone on the brass handles of filing cabinets and the ivory
keys of typewriting machines. He wondered where Hester had found her
new coat and what had happened to the old one. He was still wondering
when they ran into a bunch of Shkin Corporation men hurrying in the
opposite direction. "Get down!" shouted Hester, knocking Tom to the floor.
"Not you!" she added, as the guards dived for cover.
The office filled with smoke and stabs of flame and a terrible noise. Not
all of the men had guns, and the ones who did fired wildly. Bullets slammed
against the walls, smashed the water cooler, and ripped pages from a
calendar on the desk. Tom hid behind a filing cabinet and watched as Hester
shot the men down one by one. He had not been with her when she'd fought
the Huntsmen, and he had always imagined that she must have been angry
and afraid, but there was a terrible calm about her now. When her gun was
empty, she put it down and killed the last man with a typewriter, the
carriage-return bell jingling cheerfully while she smashed in his skull.
When she picked up her gun and started to reload it, she was smiling. Tom
thought she looked more alive than he had ever seen her before.
"All right?" she asked, pulling him to his feet.
He wasn't, but he was shaking too badly to tell her, so he just followed
her again, up more stairs, and found himself back in the neat reception area
where he had spoken to Miss Weems. Her chair was empty now, the sign on
the door turned to CLOSED, the guard gone from his post outside.
Fireworks boomed and crackled above the rooftops, punching
shafts of pink and emerald light through gaps in the blinds. Hester shot
the lock off the door and pushed it open, but as Tom crossed the room, he
heard frightened breathing, then a whimper.
He went down on his knees and peered beneath Miss Weems's desk.
Fishcake's pale, terrified face looked out at him.
"Fishcake, it's all right!" Tom promised as the boy scrabbled back deeper
into the shadows. He waved at Hester to keep her away. "It's only
Fishcake," he told her, looking round.
"Leave him, then," said Hester.
 "We can't," said Tom. "He's alone and frightened, and he's been working
for Shkin. If the other Lost Boys find him, they'll tear him to pieces. Just a
figure of speech," he added unconvincingly as Fishcake moaned with terror.
"That's his fault," said Hester, poised in the doorway, eager to go. "Leave
him."
"But he told me where Wren is."
"Fine," said Hester angrily. "He's told you. So we don't need him. Leave
him."
"No!" said Tom, more sharply than he meant to. Beneath the desk his
hand found Fishcake's, and he hauled the Lost Boy out. "He's coming with
us. I promised."
Hester stared at the boy and the boy stared at Hester, and for a moment
Tom thought she was going to shoot Fishcake where he stood, but a
thunderous howl of defiance and rage came echoing up from the depths of
the Pepperpot, the roar of Lost Boys on the warpath, and she stuffed her gun
away and slipped through the door, holding it open so that Tom could drag
the scared, quaking child with him out of the
building and down the steps into the plaza. Huge, reverberating bangs
were rebounding from the walls of the surrounding buildings, and dazzling
flashes lit up the sky. Fireworks are so much louder than they were when I
was little, Tom thought, and, looking up, saw fierce white airships
swooping over the city at rooftop height, raining down rockets from their
armored gondolas.
"Great gods and goddesses!" shouted Hester. "That's all we need!"
"What is it?" whined Fishcake, clinging tight to Tom. "What's
happening?"
What was happening was that a squadron of Fox Spirits had been
detached from the main body of the Green Storm fleet to silence Brighton's
air defenses. The MoonFest celebrations were disintegrating into panic as
the aviators mistook the firework displays in Queen's Park and Black Rock
for antiaircraft fire and started strafing them. As carnival processions
writhed across Ocean Boulevard like beheaded snakes, the Requiem Vortex
cut through the smoke above them, powering toward Cloud 9. Ahead stood
the armored mountains that were Kom Ombo and Benghazi, smaller towns
and suburbs snuggling around their skirts.
"A whole cluster of them!" shouted General Naga, gleeful as a huntsman
who has just spied the fox. "That big one ate Palmyra Static a few summers
back!" His mechanical armor grated and hissed as it spun him round to face
the Stalker Fang, raising his one arm in a jerky salute. "So this is why you
brought us west, Excellency! I knew it could not be for that moth-eaten raft
resort! Permission to lead the attack ..."
"Silence," whispered the Stalker Fang. The fires of Brighton shimmered
in her bronze face. "The cluster is irrelevant. The other ships will keep
those city's batteries and fighters busy, and ensure that the Brightonians do
not attempt to help their mayor. Our target is the flying palace. Prepare
boarding parties."
Naga had followed the Stalker unquestioningly for sixteen hard years, but
this was almost too much for him. As his subofficers scrambled to relay her
orders and fetch sidearms and battle armor, he stood for a moment, looking
as if he'd been slapped. Then, recalling what became of officers who
disputed the Stalker Fang's commands, he hurried to obey.
Wren and Theo ran to the other side of the control room just in time to
see the sky between Brighton and the shore blossom with gaudy explosions
of flak from Benghazi's air-defense cannon. The crackling, shifting light
slid across the envelopes of four big warships and countless fighters.
"A Green Storm aerial attack unit," Theo said.
"Oh, Quirke!" whispered Wren, thinking of her father. "Do you think
they'll sink Brighton? My dad's down there! Theo, he'll be killed, and it'll all
be my fault!"
"They aren't here for Brighton," said Theo, taking her hand. "They've
come for the book! Whoever it was who set the gull on guard and killed
these men must have called these ships here, and they've cut us adrift so we
can be boarded more easily."
 From somewhere outside came the screech of air-raid alarms, like
fingernails dragging down the blackboard of the sky.
"We've got to get away," said Wren. "How?" asked Theo.
"On the Peewit, of course. I don't suppose anybody had time to drain her
fuel tanks after last night."
Theo shook his head. "Even if we made it to the boathouse, the Storm
would shoot us down before we were out of Cloud 9's airspace."
"But the Peewit's a yacht, not a warship!"
"The Storm don't care about details like that."
"But don't you know codes and passwords and things? Couldn't you radio
them and tell them you're one of their own people?"
"Wren, I'm not one of their people," said Theo. "Not anymore. I failed
them. If they capture me, they'll have me sent to Batmunkh Tsaka and
killed."
Wren wasn't sure what that meant, but she could see that he was scared,
perhaps as scared as she was. The control room shook as something hit the
deck plate overhead, and a rain of sparks and burning wreckage came
tumbling down past the windows. She looked up into Theo's face and tried
to sound brave. "Theo," she said, "my dad's waiting for me in Brighton, and
your mother and father are waiting for you in Zagwa, and they'll all be
really miffed if we just hang about up here and let ourselves get killed.
Come on. We have to try!"
Still holding hands, they ran up the stairs to the ground-floor entrance,
the door the murderer must have left by. It opened into a corridor outside
the kitchens. There was no one about. Above them they could hear screams
and shouts and the rumble of feet as people fled the ballroom. Explosions in
the sky outside splashed skewed diamonds of
sour yellow light on the floor under the kitchen windows, and glinted on
fallen pans and trays of sweetmeats dropped by slaves who had left in a
hurry.
 They ran to the nearest exit and blundered out into the gardens in front of
the Pavilion. Crowds of party guests were hurrying across the lawns like
frightened sheep. There was no way off Cloud 9, but they wanted to get as
far as they could from the Pavilion for fear the Green Storm were about to
bomb it. Anyway, they were wealthy, and used to getting everything they
needed. Even if the cable car was gone, surely there would be a ship there,
or an air taxi, or some plucky Brightonians organizing a rescue with air
pedalos and sky yachts?
Not wanting to be caught up in the stampede, Theo pushed Wren into the
shelter of one of Pennyroyal's abstract statues. They huddled together and
watched moonlit exhaust trails billow in the sky around Cloud 9 like skeins
of spider silk as the Flying Ferrets buzzed and tumbled, hurling themselves
at the Storm's airships. It was as if each ship had a seed of fire inside it and
the Flying Ferrets were patiently probing for it with streams of incendiary
bullets. When they found it, the airship would begin to glow from inside
like a MoonFest lantern; then blinding patterns of light would checker the
envelope; and finally the whole thing would become a dazzling pyre,
casting eerie shadows from the cypress groves as the wind carried it past
Cloud 9.
But the airships were fighting back, and so were the clouds of
Resurrected eagles and condors that flew with them. The birds descended in
flapping black clouds upon the
Ferrets' flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the
unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them, they made
easy targets for the airships' rockets and machine cannon. Wings were
shredded; fuel tanks blew apart; rotor blades came flipping and fluttering
across the Pavilion's lawns like bits of an exploding Venetian blind. The
Bad Hair Day, its wings ripped off, plunged burning into the cable car
station. The Group Captain Mandrake veered sideways into the Wrestling
Cheese, and both machines crashed together through the flank of a Green
Storm destroyer and went down with it, a vast barrel of fire sinking
gracefully toward the sea.
Just off the edge of the gardens, a larger ship circled, waiting for the
fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper
tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armored island from a sea of smoke. A fat
airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling,
twirling things that looked like silver seedpods until they struck a fortress or
a gun emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung
wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the
beat of a huge drum.
"Tumblers," Theo muttered.
"What, those silver things?" asked Wren. "No, those are bombs. You can
tell by the way they go off, bang! You told me you used to fly Tumblers."
Theo nodded.
"You mean those things have pilots? But they'll be blown to bits!"
Another nod.
"Then how come ... ?"
"How come I'm not dead?" Theo shook his head and would not look at
her. "Because I'm a coward," he said. "I'm a coward, that's why.
The Requiem Vortex prowled through the veils of smoke and ash that
hung above the coast. Panic had broken out among the clustered towns and
cities there, who all assumed the Green Storm fleet had come for them.
Some were running for the shelter of the desert; some inflated buoyancy
sacs and splashed into the sea; some took advantage of the confusion to try
to eat their neighbors. Benghazi and Kom Ombo launched clouds of fighter
airships, which were torn apart by the faster, fiercer Fox Spirits and by
flocks of Stalker birds.
A gas cell had exploded somewhere near the Requiem Vortex's stern, and
spidery Mark IV Stalkers were crawling around on the sheer sides of her
envelope, training extinguishers on the blaze. There was damage to the
steering vanes too, and frantic voices echoing from the speaking tubes
claimed that the rear gondola had been destroyed.
The Once-Borns on the bridge were pale and tense; Grike could see their
faces shining with sweat in the hellish light that blazed in through the
windows. Beneath her steel helmet, Oenone Zero was weeping with fear.
The radio crackled out distress calls and damage reports from other ships:
The Sword Flourished in Understandable Pique had been rammed
amidships and was going down in flames; the
Autumn Rain from the Heavenly Mountains was rudderless and drifting
into the flank of Benghazi. Someone aboard a doomed corvette kept
screaming and screaming until the signal suddenly cut out.
The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman,
she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent city.
"Follow that building," she said.
The ships that had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle
other targets, but the raft resort's troubles were not over. Its engine room
was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its
moorings as the attack began and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and
saffron flame, leaking burning fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge
was either dead or at the mayor's party.
In all the confusion, no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside
the Pepperpot, not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards
and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the
sewage farms of the undertier and the stinking filter beds beneath the Sea
Pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them.
Arming themselves with wrenches and pool rakes and meat tenderizers,
they swarmed up the city's stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire
to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had
spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible
life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they
shared their pain, fled for their lives,
spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor
launches.
Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung
above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no
longer attached to the rest of Brighton.
29 The Unexploded Boy
***
wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow
of the big statue, their backs to the plinth that it perched on. A few glasses
of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank
one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It
seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the
Ferrets' machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm's guns. The
rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went
off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his
eyes shut.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" she asked. "These Tumbler things?"
"No."
"You might as well. There's not much else to do."
Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding
on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a soft voice that she could barely hear
over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.
"It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater," he said. "Enemy
suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back
toward the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go
into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to
be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the
Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artifact that mustn't be
allowed to fall into townie hands...."
Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the
carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots
scrambled for their ships.
"The waiting was worst," he said. "Strapped into our ships, hanging there
in the racks in the Tumbler bay with the doors open under us. You could see
the guns going off below. Then the order--'Tumblers away!'--and we went
for it."
They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and
down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The
earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker
brains couldn't zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and
why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory
and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?
"The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg," he told Wren. "I hit
somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I
was heading for an armored fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic
roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of
silage bales. I suppose that's why I wasn't killed, just knocked out for a
minute or two. I suppose that's why the Tumbler didn't blow. They're
supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there's a manual
override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came
to, but I couldn't... I couldn't bring myself to ..."
"Of course not," said Wren softly. "You'd missed your target. You
couldn't blow up workers. Civilians. It would have been murder."
"It would," said Theo. "But that's not what stopped me. I just didn't want
to die."
"Bit late to decide that, wasn't it?"
Theo shrugged. "I just sat there and cried. And after a while, they came
and defused my Tumbler and dragged me out and took me away. I thought
they were going to kill me. I wouldn't have blamed them. But they didn't.
"All my life I'd been hearing stories about the cruelty of the barbarians,
the way they tortured prisoners, and maybe some are like that, but these
ones tended me like I was one of their own sons. They fed me, and
explained how sorry they were that they'd have to sell me as a slave. They
couldn't afford to keep Green Storm prisoners aboard, you see, for fear we'd
band together and revolt. But I wouldn't have revolted. They'd made me
realize how wrong the Storm are. How stupid it all is, this fighting."
 He looked up at Wren. "That's why I gave up on the Storm. And now,
when they catch me and they find out what I am and what I did, they're
going to kill me."
"They won't!" promised Wren. "Because we won't let them catch you!
We'll get away somehow...."
A growl of engines drowned her out. She stood up cautiously and looked
out across the gardens. A huge, battle-scarred white airship was shoving her
way in through Cloud 9's rigging.
"Great gods!" said Theo, looking over Wren's shoulder. "That's the
Requiem Vortex] That's her ship!"
Snub-nosed projectors mounted on the airship's engine pods swiveled
this way and that, effortlessly blasting any Flying Ferret that came within
range. The Visible Parity Line and the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-
Dot Machiney were smashed apart by rockets, showering shreds of balsa
wood and singed canvas over the crowds who cowered on the Pavilion
lawns. An ornithopter called Is That All There Is? fluttered around the
airship like a gnat pestering a dinosaur, but it could not pierce the reinforced
envelope, and after a few seconds a flight of Stalker birds found it and
ripped it into kindling. Damn You, Gravity! plunged toward the airship's
gondola in a desperate attempt to ram it, but more rockets battered it aside,
and it went plowing through the flank of one of Cloud 9's outer gasbags.
The Pavilion shuddered, the screaming guests on the lawn began to scream
still louder, and the whole deck plate tilted steeply as some of the gas that
had been supporting it went spewing into the night.
Orla Twombley and the other surviving Ferrets, realizing that they could
do no more, turned tail and sped away.
Wren shielded her face against the dust and smoke as the Requiem Vortex
swung her engine pods into landing position
and touched down on the lawns of Cloud 9. Party guests who had fled the
Pavilion earlier now came fleeing back past Wren and Theo's hiding place,
or stood their ground and fashioned flags of surrender out of shirtfronts and
napkins. Redcoats hared through the shrubbery flinging down their
weapons and trying to rid themselves of their fancy uniforms. Machine
guns nattered among the ornamental palms. From the open hatches of the
warship's gondolas spilled spiky armored shapes.
"Stalkers!" yelped Wren. She'd never seen a Stalker, had never really
quite believed in Stalkers, but something about the way those armored
figures moved was enough to convince her that they were not human and
that she very much wanted to be far away from them. She started to run,
calling out to Theo to follow her. "Come on! We'll cut back through the
Pavilion to the boathouse!"
The stairways of the Pavilion were deserted now. Wren and Theo
climbed them quickly, stumbling over abandoned party hats and trampled
bodies. On the sundeck where Shkin had sold her to Pennyroyal, Wren
slipped and went crashing down. The Tin Book, jammed in her waistband,
grazed her spine and dug painfully into her bottom. She thought she could
feel blood running down inside her trousers as Theo helped her up. She
wondered if she should try to get rid of the book, or surrender it to the
Storm and beg for mercy. But the Storm had no mercy, did they? She'd seen
pamphlets and posters since she'd been in Brighton, headlines in the
foreign-affairs pages of the Palimpsest about MORE MOSSIE
ATROCITIES and FURTHER BEASTLINESS BY THE GREEN STORM.
If they found that Wren had the Tin Book ...
From the entrance to the ballroom, they looked back across the lawns.
The battle was over, and Stalkers were moving about down there, herding
crowds of captive guests ahead of them. "I wonder if Shkin's down there,"
said Wren.
"And what about Boo-Boo?" said Theo as they pressed on, crossing the
ballroom, where the lights on the walls and ceiling had failed and broken
glass crunched underfoot. "What about Pennyroyal?"
"Oh, he'll be all right." said Wren. "I bet it was him who brought them
here. Shkin said he was looking for a buyer for the Tin Book. That's just the
sort of thing Pennyroyal would do, sell his own city for a profit...."
They passed the film room, where the projector was still rattling away.
By its light Wren glimpsed a movement on the spiral staircase. "Cynthia!"
shouted Theo.
Their fellow slave came running down the stairs, her party costume
flickering softly with the reflected colors of the film loop. What she had
been doing up there Wren could not imagine. Perhaps she had got flustered
and run the wrong way when everybody was fleeing from the ballroom. Or
maybe Mrs. Pennyroyal had sent her back to fetch something; she was
carrying something shiny in one hand.
"Cynthia," said Wren, "don't be frightened. We're leaving. We'll take you
with us. Won't we, Theo?"
"Where is it, Wren?" snapped Cynthia.
"Where's what?" asked Wren.
"The Tin Book, of course." Cynthia's expression was one that Wren didn't
recognize: cold and hard and intelligent, as if her face were under new
management. "I've already checked Pennyroyal's safe," she said. "I know it
was you who
took it. I've known you were up to something ever since you came
aboard. Who are you working for? The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft? The
Africans?"
"I'm not working for anybody" said Wren.
"But you are, Cynthia Twite," said Theo. "You're with the Green Storm,
aren't you? You killed Plovery and the others. It was you who cut Cloud 9
adrift!"
Cynthia laughed. "Ooh, you catch on fast, African!" She made a polite
curtsy. "Agent 28, of the Stalker Fang's private intelligence group. I was
rather good, wasn't I? Poor, silly Cynthia. How you all laughed at me, you
and Boo-Boo and the rest. And all along I have been working for a different
mistress, for one who will Make the World Green Again." She held her arm
out stiffly toward Wren. The shiny thing in her hand was a gun.
Numbly, Wren fetched the Tin Book out from beneath her tunic and held
it up for Cynthia to see. Cynthia snatched it and stepped back. "Thank you,"
she said, with a trace of her old sweetness. "The Stalker Fang will be
delighted."
"She sent you here to find it?" asked Wren, confused. "But how did she
know ... ?"
Cynthia beamed. "Oh, no. She believed it was still in Anchorage. She
sent an expedition to the place where Pennyroyal said Anchorage went
down, but there was nothing there. So I was placed aboard Cloud 9 to spy
on him, in case he knew what had really become of it. I could hardly
believe my luck when I heard that you had brought the Tin Book itself
aboard! I sent a message to the Jade Pagoda at once, and orders came back
telling me to leave it safe in Pennyroyal's office until help arrived. It is
important. It may
be the key to a final victory. My mistress does not want it copied, or sent
by the usual channels. She is coming to fetch it in person. That is her ship
out there on the lawn." She looked down fondly at the Tin Book. "She will
reward me well when I give it to her."
The gunfire from the gardens had ceased. Wren could hear voices out on
the sundeck, shouting orders in a language she didn't recognize. She stepped
toward Cynthia, wary of the gun in the other girl's hand. "Please," she said,
"you've got the Tin Book. Can't you let us go? If the Storm catch Theo ..."
"They will kill him like the coward he is," said Cynthia calmly. "I'd do it
myself, but I'm sure my mistress will want to question you both first and
find out how much you know about the book."

'
"We don't know anything about it ." cried Theo.
"That's your story, African. You may decide to change it once the inquiry
engines get to work on you."
"But Cynthia ..." Wren shook her head, still numb with the shock of
Cynthia's betrayal. "I don't suppose Cynthia's even your real name, is it?"
The other girl looked surprised. "Of course it is. Why shouldn't it be?"
 "Well, it's not very spy-ish," said Wren.
"Oh? What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing, nothing ... just--"
A bulging suitcase, dropped from the gallery above, hit Cynthia on the
head and burst open, scattering gold coins, jewelery and valuable-looking
bits of Old Tech. "Oh--" said the girl, crumpling. Her gun went off and
punched a hole in
the ceiling somewhere above Wren's head. Theo grabbed Wren and
tugged her backward, afraid that there might be more luggage to follow, but
when they looked up, they saw only the round, pale face of Nimrod
Pennyroyal peering down over the banisters.
"Is she out?" he asked nervously.
Wren went to stoop over Cynthia. There was blood in the girl's hair, and
when Wren touched her neck she could feel no pulse, but she didn't know if
she was feeling in the right place. She said, "I think she might be dead."
Pennyroyal hurried down the stairs. "Nonsense--it was only a playful
little tap. Anyway, she's an enemy agent, isn't she? Probably would have
killed the pair of you if it weren't for my quick thinking. I was just upstairs,
gathering a few valuables, and I heard you talking." He chuckled as he
prized the book from Cynthia's fingers. "What a stroke of luck! I thought I'd
lost this. Now come along, help me gather up the rest."
Wren and Theo began to do as he asked. Pennyroyal, perhaps afraid that
they would try to rob him, picked up Cynthia's gun and held it ready while
he stuffed coins and statuettes and ancient artifacts back inside the case and
sat on the lid to force it shut. The shouting outside drew nearer as Green
Storm soldiers, attracted by the sound of the gunshot, converged on the
ballroom. "There!" said Pennyroyal. "Now, ho for the boathouse! I tell you
what, if you help me carry this lot, you can both come with me. But hurry
up!"
"You can't just leave," protested Wren, trailing after him through the
listing corridors while Theo stuggled along with
 the suitcase. "What about your people?"
"Oh, them," said Pennyroyal dismissively.
"What about your wife? She's probably a prisoner by now...."
"Yes, poor Boo-Boo ..." Pennyroyal pushed open a door and led them out
into the gardens at the rear of the Pavilion. "I shall miss her, of course--
terrible loss--but time is a great healer. Anyway, I can't risk my neck trying
to rescue her. I owe it to the reading public to save myself, so that the world
can hear my account of the Battle of Brighton and my heroic stand against
the Storm...."
They hurried through the gardens, Pennyroyal in the lead, Wren and Theo
taking turns with the suitcase. The Storm's troops had not reached this part
of Cloud 9 yet; nothing moved among the cypress groves and pergola-
covered walks. Smoke drifted from the wreckage of the Flying Ferrets'
aerodrome, but the Green Storm must have thought Pennyroyal's boathouse
an unworthy target, for it still stood unharmed among the trees, bulbous and
comical, specks of firelight glinting on its daft copper spines.
"I can hear engines," said Theo as they made their way through the trees
onto the landing apron in front of the boathouse. "Someone's opened the
doors...."
"Great Poskitt Almighty!" shouted Pennyroyal.
The Peewit sat poised in the open doorway, her engines purring as they
warmed up for takeoff. The lights were on in her gondola, and Wren could
see Nabisco Shkin at the controls. He must have given up waiting for her to
bring him the Tin Book and decided to cut his losses and save his own skin.
She hung back, scared of him, but Pennyroyal put on a last
spurt of speed, charging toward the yacht. "Shkin! It's me! Your old
friend Pennyroyal!"
Shkin swung himself out through the hatch in the side of the Peewit's
sleek gondola and shot Pennyroyal twice with a pistol he pulled from inside
his robes. Wren saw an exclamation mark of blood fly upward into the glare
of the yacht's lights. Pennyroyal did an ungainly somersault and crashed
against a heap of hawsers and was still.
"Oh, gods," whispered Wren. Pennyroyal was so much a part of her life
from all the stories she had heard in Anchorage that she had imagined he
was indestructible.
Shkin stepped down from the gondola and strode toward them with his
gun held ready. "Do you have my book?" he asked.
"No," said Theo before Wren could answer. "The Storm took it."
"Then what's in the suitcase?" asked Shkin, and Theo opened it so that he
could see. The slaver smiled his cold gray smile. "Well, that's something,
isn't it?" he said. "Close the case and hand it to me."
Theo did as he was told. Shkin's chilly eyes slid toward Wren again.
"Now what?" she asked. "You'll shoot us, I suppose?"
"Good gods, no!" Shkin looked genuinely shocked. "I am not a murderer,
child. I am a businessman. What profit would I make by killing you? It's
true you managed to annoy me, but it sounds as if our friends from the
Green Storm will soon be arriving to teach you some manners."
Wren listened, and heard harsh foreign voices drifting across the garden.
Lights were moving among the trees
behind the boathouse. She wanted to ask Shkin about her father, but he
had already heaved Pennyroyal's case aboard the Peewit and was climbing
in after it. The engines roared.
"No!" screamed Wren. She couldn't believe that the gods were really
going to let that villain Shkin fly away unscathed. But the Peewit's docking
clamps released, and she rose from the boathouse floor, engine pods
swinging neatly into takeoff position. "It's not fair!" howled Wren, and then,
"The book! We've got the book! Theo lied! Take us with you and I'll give
you the book!"
 Shkin heard her voice, but not her words. He glanced down at her and
smiled his faint smile, then turned his attention to the controls again. The
yacht sped across its landing apron, passed between two clumps of trees
that bowed aside to let it through, and rose gracefully into the sky.
"It's not fair!" Wren said again. She was sick of Shkin, and sick of being
afraid. She understood why Mum and Dad had never wanted to talk about
the adventures they had had. If she survived, she would never even want to
think about this awful night.
"Why did you lie about the book?" she asked Theo. "He might have
taken us with him if we'd given him the book."
"He wouldn't," said Theo. "Anyway, if everybody wants it so badly, it
must be something dangerous. We can't let a man like Shkin get his hands
on it."
Wren sniffed. "Nobody should have it," she said. She walked to where
Pennyroyal lay and gingerly fetched the Tin Book out from inside the
mayor's torn robes. One of Shkin's bullets had made a deep dent in the
cover, but it looked
3O1
otherwise unharmed. The touch of it disgusted her. All the trouble it had
caused! All the deaths! "I'm going to throw it into the sea' she said, and ran
with it across the smoldering, cratered airstrip toward the edge of the
gardens.
But it was not the sea that she saw when she looked down over the
handrail. Cloud 9 had drifted farther and faster than she had thought. The
white wriggle of surf that marked the coast lay several miles away toward
the north, with the lights and fires of the other cities strung out along it like
pearls on a necklace. Below her, the hills of Africa lay stark beneath the
moon.
And as she stood there staring at them, clutching the Tin Book in both
hands, she heard running feet behind her, and turned to meet the torches and
the upraised guns of a squad of soldiers. There were Stalkers too, one of
whom seized hold of Theo, and a man who seemed almost a Stalker
himself, a hawk-faced man in mechanized armor with a sword in his iron
hand, who stepped in front of the others and said, "Don't move! You are
prisoners of the Green Storm!"
As the Peewit slid out through Cloud 9's rigging into open sky, Nabisco
Shkin permitted himself a thin smile of satisfaction. Most of the Green
Storm's ships were miles away, still engaged above Benghazi and Kom
Ombo, and the troops they had landed in Pennyroyal's garden had better
things to worry about than the odd absconding slave trader.
He settled into the yacht's comfortable seats and patted the case that lay
on the deck beside him. Far ahead, the lights of the smaller cities twinkled
in the desert night. He would
set down on one of those until he was sure the Storm had finished with
Brighton; then he would go and see what damage had been done to his
business there. The Pepperpot would have been battered, no doubt. Servants
and merchandise killed, probably. No matter--they were all insured. He
hoped the boy Fishcake was still alive. But even without him, it should be
possible to find Anchorage-in-Vineland and fill the holds of a slave ship or
two....
He was still dreaming of Vineland when the raptors found him. They
were part of a patrol flock set to guard the skies around Cloud 9. Shkin
thought they were just a cloud as they came sweeping down on him,
dimming the moonlight. Then he saw the flap and flutter of their wings, and
an instant later the birds started slamming into the Peewit's glastic
windows, tearing at her pod cowlings, slashing her delicate envelope with
talons and beaks. Torn-off steering vanes whirled away on the wind. The
propellers sliced dozens of birds to scrap, but dozens more kept taking their
places until the Peewit's engines choked on feathers and slime. Shkin
reached for the radio set, opening all channels and shouting, "Call off your
attack! I am a legitimate businessman! I am strictly neutral!" But the Green
Storm warships that picked up his signal did not know where it was coming
from, and the birds themselves did not understand. They tore and rent and
clutched and worried, stripping the envelope fabric from its metal skeleton
until Nabisco Shkin, looking up through the bare ribs, saw nothing but a
kaleidoscope-churning of bird shapes circling black and splay-winged
against the sacred moon. And as the wreck began to fall, they ripped the
303
roof off the gondola and got inside with him.
Nabisco Shkin was not usually a man who let his emotions show, but
there were a great many birds, and it seemed a terribly long way to the
ground. He screamed all the way down.
30 Captives of the Storm
***
THE MAN IN THE mechanical armor was called Naga. Wren heard his
men call him that as they took the Tin Book from her and started marching
her back toward the Pavilion. It was a scary sort of name, and he looked
pretty scary too, stomping along inside that hissing, grating exoskeleton, but
he seemed civilized enough, and told his men off when they prodded Wren
with their guns to make her walk faster. She was surprised, and relieved;
she'd heard stories about the Storm shooting prisoners on sight. She thought
about asking Naga what he meant to do with her, but she wasn't quite brave
enough. She glanced at Theo, hoping he'd explain what the Green Storm
soldiers were saying to each other in their strange language, but Theo was
walking with his head down and would not look at her.
They climbed one of the Pavilion's outside stairways, past
a walled garden where a crowd of captured slaves and party guests had
been penned by a company of Stalkers. Boo-Boo Pennyroyal was there,
trying to keep everybody's spirits up with a rousing song, but it didn't look
to Wren as though it was working.
She assumed at first that she and Theo were being taken to join those
other captives, but the soldiers kept them moving, past Pennyroyal's
swimming pool, which had emptied itself across the tilting deck in a broad
wet stain. Outside the ballroom windows stood a Stalker far more
frightening than the mindless, faceless brutes Wren had seen so far. He was
big and gleaming, and his armored skull piece did not extend down to hide
his face the way those of the others did, but left it partly bare; a dead white
face, with a long gash of a mouth that twitched slightly as his green eyes
lighted on Wren. She looked away quickly, horrified at catching the thing's
attention. Was he going to speak to her? Attack her? But he just returned
Naga's salute and stepped aside, letting the Stalkers and their captives past
him into the ballroom.
 Someone had got the lights working again. Medical orderlies were taking
Cynthia out on a stretcher. Wren heard her groan as they carried her past
and felt glad that her friend was still alive, then remembered that she had
only been a fake friend, and wasn't sure if she should be glad or not.
Up on the podium where the musicians should have been playing, a
group of officers had gathered. Naga marched over to them and saluted
smartly, making his report. The tallest of them turned to stare at the
captives. Her face was a bronze death mask pierced by two glowing
emerald eyes.
"Oh!" cried Theo.
Wren knew at once that this was the Stalker Fang. Who else could it be?
She seemed to exude power; it crackled in the air about her like static
electricity, making the small hairs on the back of Wren's neck stand up on
end. At her side she could feel Theo shaking as if he were in the presence of
a goddess.
Naga said something else, and the Stalker stepped gracefully down from
the podium, her eyes glowing more brightly as he drew the Tin Book from a
hatch in his armor. Snatching it, she studied the symbols scratched into its
cover and gave a long, shivery sigh of satisfaction. Naga pointed at Wren
and Theo and asked something, but the Stalker waved his question away.
Settling herself cross-legged in the rubble, she opened the Tin Book and
began to read.
"What now?" muttered Theo. "I thought she'd want to question us...."
"I think Naga thought so too," said Wren. But it seemed they had been
forgotten by the Stalker Fang. The Green Storm troops were watching her
as if waiting for more orders, but she was engrossed in the Tin Book. Naga
muttered something to one of his companions. Then a woman--young and
pretty, in a black version of the white uniforms the others wore--spoke to
him, bowed, and jumped down from the podium, making her way to where
the two prisoners waited. "You will please come with me," she said in
Anglish.
 Wren felt relieved. This person looked less stern than the rest of the
Green Storm landing party. DR. ZERO said the printed name tag on her
uniform, under a pair of squiggly characters that Wren guessed would say
the same in Shan
Guonese. She looked far too young to be a doctor. Her tilted eyes and
broad cheekbones reminded Wren of Inuit friends at home in Anchorage,
and that cropped green hair suited her elfin face surprisingly. But there was
no kindness in her voice. She took a gun from one of the troopers and
leveled it at the two captives. "Outside, please. Now!"
They did as she said. As she herded them out onto the sundeck, Wren
glanced up and saw the big Stalker watching her again. What had she done
to interest him so? She looked away quickly, but she could still feel that
green gaze following her.
Dr. Zero motioned with her gun for the prisoners to cross the sundeck
and go down the stairs, as if she were taking them to join the others in the
walled garden. But at the stairs' foot, on a half-moon-shaped terrace out of
sight and earshot of the ballroom, she suddenly stopped them and said in
her soft, accented Anglish, "What is that thing the Stalker took from you?"
Wren said, "The Tin Book. The Tin Book of Anchorage ..."
Dr. Zero frowned, as if the name were one she had not heard before.
"Isn't it what you came here for?" asked Theo.
"Apparently. Who knows?" Dr. Zero shrugged and glanced back in the
direction of the ballroom, lowering her voice as if she feared that her
mistress might overhear her. "Her Excellency did not see fit to share with
anyone her reasons for attacking your city. What is this Tin Book? What
makes it so important that she had to come here with warships to get it?"
"Cynthia said that whoever had the Tin Book could win the war," said
Wren.
She was trying to be helpful, but Dr. Zero just stared at her. Was it only
the moonlight that drained her face of color? Her eyes were wide, looking
through Wren toward some terrible vision of things to come. "Ai!" she
breathed. "Of course. Of course] The book must be a clue to some kind of
Old Tech weapon. Maybe something like MEDUSA, powerful enough to
destroy whole cities. And you have given it to the Stalker Fang! You fools!"
"That's not fair!" protested Wren. "It wasn't our fault...."
Dr. Zero let out a little laugh, but there was no trace of humor in it, only
fear. "It's up to me now, isn't it?" she asked. "It's up to me to stop her!"
She turned and started to run back up the stairs toward the ballroom,
flinging her gun aside as she went.
31 The Moment of the Rose
***
GENERAL NAGA, STILL ANGRY at being denied a chance to tackle
Benghazi and the rest of the cluster, had led his shock troops off to scour
the lower levels of the Pavilion, hoping to find some lurking nest of townie
warriors who might put up a decent fight. In the ballroom, a few battle-
Stalkers stood guard while the Stalker Fang sat reading. The metal pages of
the book glowed softly green in the light from her eyes; her steel fingertips,
tracing the ancient scratch marks, made faint clicking sounds.
Grike waited at the window, watching his mistress but not really seeing
her. He focused instead on the face in his mind: the face of the young girl
prisoner whom Oenone Zero had just led away. He was sure, or almost sure,
that he had seen that face before--those sea-gray eyes, that long jaw, that
coppery hair, had all sent sparks of recognition darting
through his mind. And yet, when he tried to match the girl's features to
the other faces in his memory, he found none that fitted.
Running feet on the sundeck. Grike turned, and sensed behind him in the
ballroom the other Stalkers all reacting too, baring their claws in readiness.
But it was only Dr. Zero.
"Mr. Grike!"
She picked her way toward him between the bodies on the sundeck. She
was trying to smile, but the smile had gone wrong somehow and turned into
a kind of grimace. Grike sensed her ragged breathing, the quick drumbeat
of her heart, the sharp, warning odor of her sweat, and knew that something
was about to happen. For whatever reason, Oenone Zero had decided that
this was the moment to unleash her mysterious weapon against the Stalker
Fang.
But where was it? Her hands were empty; her trim black uniform left
nowhere to hide anything powerful enough to harm a Stalker. He switched
his eyes quickly up and down the spectrum, searching in vain for a
concealed gun or the chemical tang of explosives.
"Mr. Grike," said Dr. Zero, stopping at his side and looking up into his
face. "There is something important that I must tell you." Beads of
perspiration were pushing their way out through the pores of her face. Grike
turned his head and scanned the ballroom, wondering if she had brought
something with her from the Requiem Vortex when they had first landed. He
checked the sundeck too, looking for hidden devices behind the statues on
the balustrades. Nothing. Nothing.
A touch on his hand. He looked down. Dr. Zero's fingers
were resting lightly on his armored fist. She was smiling properly now.
Behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, her eyes were filling with tears.
She said, "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of
equal duration."
And Grike understood.
He turned and walked quickly away from her into the ballroom. He didn't
mean to go; he had not told his legs to move, but they moved anyway. He
was Dr. Zero's weapon; that was all he had been all along.
"stop me !" he managed to shout as he neared the Stalker Fang. Two of
the battle-Stalkers leaped forward to bar his path, and with two blows he
disabled them both, knocking their heads off and leaving their blind, stupid
bodies to stumble about, jetting sparks and fluids. But at least he had
warned Fang of what was happening. She turned, and rose to meet him. The
Tin Book shimmered in her long hands.
"What are you doing, Mr. Grike?"
Grike could not explain. He was a prisoner in his own body, with no
power to control its sudden, deliberate movements. His arms raised
themselves, his hands flexed. Out from his finger ends sprang shining
blades, longer and heavier than his old claws. Like a passenger in a
runaway tank, he watched himself charge at the other Stalker.
 The Stalker Fang unsheathed her own claws and swung to meet him.
They crashed together, armor grating, sparks flashing. From behind the
Stalker Fang's bronze death mask came a furious hiss. The Tin Book fell,
snapping its rusty bindings, metal pages bounding across the floor. This is
why I couldn't see the danger, thought Grike, remembering Oenone
Zero's clever fingers busy in his brain through all those lonely night shifts
in the Stalker Works. Why had he never guessed what she was doing to
him? He had looked everywhere for the assassination weapon, but he had
never suspected himself. And all this time the urge to kill his new mistress
had been embedded in his mind, waiting for Oenone Zero to speak the
words that would awaken it....
He could hear her behind him, scrambling through the wreckage of the
ballroom, shouting out as if to encourage him, "The moment of the rose and
the moment of the yew tree ..."
Breaking free, he drove the blades of his right hand through Fang's chest
in a spray of sparks and lubricants. The new claws were good, harder than
Stalker skin. Fang hissed again, her gray robes in tatters, her armor ripped
open and running with thick rivulets of the stuff that served her for blood.
Oenone Zero was behind her, shouting, "You can't harm him! I built him to
kill you, and I gave him the weapons to do it! Reinforced armor! Tungsten-
alloy claws! Strength you can only dream of!"
Irritated, the Stalker Fang lashed backward and caught Dr. Zero a
glancing blow that flung her across the dance floor. Grike broke into a run
and hit the other Stalker hard, the impact driving her away from the fallen
woman, out into the moonlight on the sundeck. More battle-Stalkers
grabbed at him, but he kicked their legs from under them and drove his
claws through the couplings in their necks. Necks seemed to be the weak
point of Popjoy's Stalkers: Their severed heads clattered on the paving like
dropped skillets, green eyes
going dark. Grike smashed the flailing bodies out of his way. One of
them tangled itself in the rags of curtain hanging inside the shattered
windows, and the sparks spraying from its neck set the fabric alight. Flames
spilled up the curtain and spread quickly across the ballroom ceiling, their
light filling Fang's armor as she scrambled away across the sundeck, one leg
trailing, one arm hanging by a tangle of wires, dented and leaking like a
half-squashed bug.
Grike wanted to give up this fight. He wanted to go back into the blazing
ballroom and help Dr. Zero. But his rebel body had other ideas. He strode
toward the Stalker Fang, and when she lunged at him, he was ready for her,
caught her by the head, and drove the blades of his thumbs in through her
eyes so that the green light died and he felt his claws grate against the
machine inside her skull.
She hissed and shrieked and kicked at him, tearing the armor of his torso-
-she had blades on her toes too; he had not foreseen that--and he slammed
her hard against the balustrade at the deck's edge. Stonework splintered,
fragments of pillar and architrave exploding whitely in the moonlight and
Fang tumbling through it. Grike, all his nerves buzzing with the fierce joy
of a fighting Stalker, leaped after her.
And Wren? And Theo? Abandoned by their captors, they stood gawking
at each other on the crescent terrace, not quite daring to believe that they
had been forgotten, and too alarmed by the terrible noises coming from
above them to risk a break for freedom. Now fragments of balustrade came
showering down around them, and the Stalker Fang and her attacker
dropped like spiky comets from the deck above. Huddled against Theo,
Wren watched, wide-eyed. The clash of Stalker against Stalker was
something nobody had seen for centuries, not since the Nomad Empires of
the North sent their undead armies against each other back in the lost years
before the dawn of Traction, when men were men and cities stayed where
you put them.
"But I thought that he was on her side," complained Wren.
"Shhh!" hissed Theo urgently, afraid that her words would reveal their
presence to the Stalkers.
But the Stalkers had other things on their minds. Fang sent Grike reeling
backward with a kick, but lacked the strength to follow through; instead,
she looked about for an escape route, calling out in her whispery voice for
help. She gripped the handrail at the terrace's edge and, as Grike recovered
and struck viciously at her back, heaved herself over and dropped down into
the gardens.
Grike jumped after her. He could hear the shouting of alarmed Once-
Borns behind him and, looking back, saw Naga and his men running to the
broken balcony, staring down. He ran on, following the trail of oil and ichor
that the injured Stalker had left. She seemed at first to be heading toward
the Requiem Vortex, but she was blind now, and perhaps her other senses
were damaged too. Grike followed the sick machine smell of her through
thick shrubbery, through the green corridors of an ornamental maze, down
the steep slope of the park. Against the railings at the brim she turned, at
bay. The trailing arm hung uselessly, and she barely had
strength to raise the other. Her claws slipped and grated like broken
scissors.
Filled with pity, Grike blurted out, " I'm Sorry."
"The Zero woman!" hissed the Stalker Fang. "She is a traitor, and you are
her creature. I should have been wiser than to put my faith in the Once-
Borns...."
With a savage blow, Grike smashed the bronze mask from her face. Her
head lolled backward on damaged neck joints, and moonlight fell across the
face of the dead aviatrix: a gaunt gray face, black lips drawn back from
olive-stone teeth, smashed green lamps where eyes should have been. She
raised her maimed steel hand to hide herself, and the familiar gesture
startled Grike. Where had he seen it before?
She turned suddenly away from him, awkward and broken, her blind eyes
staring up at the stars. "Do you see it?" she asked. "The bright one in the
east? That is ODIN, the last of the great orbital weapons that the Ancients
set in heaven. It has been waiting up there, sleeping, since the Sixty Minute
War. It is powerful. Powerful enough to destroy countless cities. And the
Tin Book of Anchorage holds the code that will awaken it. Help me, Mr.
Grike. Help me to awaken ODIN and Make the World Green Again."
Grike severed her neck with three fierce blows, her long scream dying as
the head came free.
 He pitched her body over the handrail, then picked up the head and the
fallen mask and flung them after it. The mask flashed in the moonlight as it
fell, and Grike's rage and his new strength seemed to drain out of him.
Jagged interference patterns crackled across his mind as the secret instincts
Oenone Zero had installed there shut down.
Memories came flying at him like bats. He raised his hands to ward them
off, but still they came. They were not the calm, sad human memories that
had filled his mind while he lay dying on the Black Island, but just the
memories of every terrible thing he had done since he'd become a Stalker:
the battles and the murders, the Once-Born outlaws butchered for a bounty,
the beggar boy he'd broken once in Airhaven for no better reason than the
simple joy of killing. How had he done such things? How had he not felt
then the guilt and shame that overwhelmed him now?
And then a scarred face rose in his memory like something surfacing
from deep water, so clear that he could almost put a name to it: "h ... hes ..."
"There it is!" shouted voices close behind him: Once-Born soldiers
blundering out of the shrubbery. "Stop it! Stop, Stalker, in the name of the
Green Storm!" Led by Naga in his clanking battle armor, the Once-Born
approached cautiously, leveling huge hand cannon and steam-powered
machine guns.
"Where is she?" Naga demanded. "What have you done with the Stalker
Fang?"
"she is dead," said Grike. He could barely see the soldiers; the scarred
face filled his mind. "the stalker fang is dead. she is twice-dead. i have
destroyed her."
Naga said something more, but Grike did not hear. He had a feeling that
he was flying apart, dissolving into rust, and all that held him together was
that memory, that face. She was the child whom he had saved, the only
good thing that he had ever done. "hes ... hest ..."
Forgetting the soldiers, he started to run. Stalkers came at
him, and he smashed them aside. Bullets danced on his armor, but he
barely noticed. Damage warnings flashed inside his eyes, but he did not see
them. "HESTER!" he howled, and the gardens swallowed him.

32 The Flight of The Arctic Roll

***
ON OCEAN BOULEVARD BENEATH a lid of smoke, streamers and
paper hats lay in drifts on the tilting pavements, the debris of street parties
that had ended suddenly when the air attack began.
Tom, Hester, and Fishcake crept along in the shadows, trying to avoid the
gangs of looters and rebellious slaves who roamed the smashed arcades.
Troupes of flames were dancing on the stage of the open-air theater, and
every few minutes the deck plates shook as one of the gas tanks at the air
harbor exploded, sending wreckage sleeting across the rooftops and
prickling the Sea Pool into a thousand white splashes. The elaborate,
tattered costumes of dead carnival-goers stirred gently in the night air like
the plumage of slaughtered birds.
"They're still rioting on the underdecks," said Tom, listening to the noises
that came echoing up the stairwells. "How
are we going to get back to the Screw Worm?"
Hester laughed. She was still feeling happy and proud at the way she had
been able to free Tom from Shkin's lockups, and even his insistence on
bringing Fishcake with him had not dented her good mood for long. "I
forgot!" she said. "Can you believe it? In all the excitement it went clean
out of my head. Tom, we don't need the Screw Worm anymore. After all, we
can't fly up to Cloud 9 in a limpet, can we?"
"You mean an airship?' asked Tom doubtfully. "How can we hope to get
hold of an airship? They've been pouring out of the air harbor ever since the
battle, and all overloaded, by the sound of them."
Hester stopped walking and stood and beamed at Tom, while Fishcake
cowered behind him. "The Jenny Haniver is here," she said. "In
Pennyroyal's stupid museum. She's been waiting for us, Tom. We'll steal
her. We used to be good at that."
 She explained quickly, and then they hurried on toward the Old Steine.
Shouting and the sound of smashing glass came through the smoke, and
sometimes shots rang out. The bodies of minor council officials and
promising performance artists dangled from the lampposts. Hester walked
with her gun ready, and Fishcake watched her and remembered the promise
he had made to kill her. He wished he had the nerve to do it, but she scared
him too much. And there was something about the way she looked at Tom,
a tenderness, that unsettled him and made him think she might not be
entirely evil, and that it might be lovely to live with the Natsworthys. Shyly,
he took Tom's hand.
"Did you mean it, what you said?" he asked. "About me
coming with you? You'll really take me home with you to Vineland?"
Tom nodded, and tried to smile encouragingly. "We just have to make a
stop at Cloud 9 on the way...."
But when they reached the Old Steine, he saw the severed hawsers
strewn around the cable car station. Cloud 9 had gone.
"Oh, Quirke!" he shouted. "Where is it?"
It had never occurred to him that it would not still be hanging there,
damaged like the rest of Brighton but airborne, and with Wren somewhere
aboard it, waiting to be rescued. Now he saw how foolish he had been. That
flying palace with its cloud of gasbags must have been a sitting duck for the
Storm's air destroyers.
"Wren ..." he whispered. He could not believe that the gods had brought
her so close to him, only to snatch her away.
Hester took his hand and gripped it hard. "Come on, Tom," she said. "If
we can get off this dump, we might still find the stupid place, ditched in the
sea or adrift. It's Pennyroyal who runs it, remember: He won't have put up
much of a fight."
She pointed to the stained white frontage of the Nimrod Pennyroyal
Experience. The front wall had a few nasty cracks in it and was sagging out
over the pavement. The doors had been blown off their hinges too, and as
Hester led Fishcake and Tom inside, she began to feel a terrible fear that she
was too late, that some other desperate refugee would have come here
before her and taken the Jenny away. But when she ran up the stairs, she
found the old airship sitting where she had
left her. The glass roof of the museum had shattered, scattering shards
across the floor and the Jenny's envelope, but she looked completely
undamaged. She had actually been cleaned up a bit since Hester last saw
her, and a large number I had been pasted to her flank, ready for the regatta.
There were even a couple of small rockets in her rocket racks.
Behind her, Tom reached the top of the steps and stopped. "Het," he said.
"Oh, Het--" Tears ran down his face, and he laughed at himself as he wiped
them away. "It's our ship!"
"What a pile of junk!" exclaimed Fishcake, pulling on a coat that he'd
taken from one of the waxworks down below.
"Fishcake, see if you can turn the lights on," Tom said, and climbed up
into the gondola. The old ship smelled like a museum. He ducked under
dangling cords and ran his hands over the control panels, recognizing the
familiar instrument arrays. Lights came on in the room outside, shining in
through the Jenny's freshly squeegeed windows.
"Remember how it works?" asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the
sort of whisper you would use in a temple.
"Oh, yes," Tom whispered back. "You don't ever forget...." He reached
out reverently and pulled a lever. An inflatable dinghy dropped from a
compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over. He shoveled it under the
chart table and tried another lever. This time the Jenny shivered and shifted,
and the museum was filled with the rising thunder of her twin Jeunet-Carot
engines.
Outside, hands clamped over his ears, Fishcake was coughing in the
exhaust smoke and shouting, "How do you get it out?"
"The roof opens!" Hester yelled back, pointing upward.
Fishcake shook his head. "I don't think so...."
 Tom killed the engines. Leaning out of the Jenny's hatch, he looked up at
the ceiling. With the lights switched on, it was easy to see why no one else
had bothered coming in here to steal the Jenny. A huge hawser, one of the
cables that had once linked Brighton to Cloud 9, had crashed down across
the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, smashing the glass above the Jenny
Haniver and buckling the delicate struts and girders of the roof.
"Oh, Quirke Almighty!" cried Tom. He was starting to get the feeling that
his god was playing games with him. If he survived this, he was going to
think seriously about finding himself a different deity.
He ran back to the flight deck, and Hester. "The roof's smashed. We'll
never get her out!"
"Someone's coming!" yelled Fishcake, peering from one of the museum
windows. "A big gang of them. Lost Boys, I bet, come to see what the noise
was about!"
Hester stared through the Jenny's nose windows at the roof. "Reckon we
could shift that debris?"
Tom shook his head. "That hawser is fatter than the two of us put
together. We're trapped in here!"
"Don't worry," Hester said. "We'll think of something." She closed her
eye, concentrating, while Fishcake ran from window to window, hollering
something else about Lost Boys. Then she looked up at Tom and grinned.
"Thought of something," she said.
She started flipping switches on the long, dusty control desks. The Jenny
Haniver lurched, throwing Tom backward.
Amid all the racket of engines starting up and docking clamps releasing,
he didn't realize at first all of what Hester had done. Then, as the shock
wave of the twin explosions bowed the windows, as the Jenny lifted and
surged forward, he saw that she had emptied the rocket projectors into the
damaged front wall, blasting it into the street and leaving a hole large
enough to let the little airship out into the sky.
 "You've forgotten Fishcake!" he yelled over the long screech of an engine
pod grazing the museum wall.
"Oh, dear!" Hester shouted back.
"Go back!"
"We don't need him, Tom. Not Wanted On Voyage."
Tom scrambled back to the open hatch and reached out, shouting
Fishcake's name. The boy was running toward the lifting gondola, hands
outstretched, face white and horrified beneath a clown mask of powdered
plaster. Over the roar of the engines and the dull hiss of the explosion still
echoing in his ears, Tom could not hear the words, but he didn't need to.
"Come back!" Fishcake was shouting as the Jenny Haniver rose through the
smoke and dust and swung across an Old Steine full of the startled upturned
faces of Lost Boys and looters, up into the sky where she belonged. "Don't
leave me! Mr. Natsworthy! Please! Come back! Come back! Come back!"
The Jenny Haniver flew on, weaving unsteadily this way and that
because Tom and Hester were struggling with each other at the controls.
"For Quirke's sake!" Tom shouted. "We've got to turn back! We can't just
leave him behind!"
Hester pulled his hands free of the steering levers and flung him aside.
He crashed against the chart table and fell heavily, shouting out with pain.
"Forget him, Tom!" she screamed. "We can't trust him. And he said the
Jenny was a piece of junk! He's lucky I didn't knife him!"
"But he's a child! You can't just leave him! What will happen to him?"
"Who cares? He's a Lost Boy! Have you forgotten what he did to Wren?"
The Jenny came up suddenly into clear air and moonlight. The smoke lay
like a field of dirty snow fifty feet beneath the gondola, with the fire-
flecked upperworks of Kom Ombo and Benghazi poking out of it a few
miles to larboard. Airships were buzzing about, but none showed an interest
in the Jenny Haniver. Hester scanned the sky ahead and saw, far away
toward the south, the tattered envelopes of Cloud 9. She pointed the Jenny's
nose at it, locked the controls, and knelt beside Tom. He looked up with an
odd expression, and she suddenly realized that he was afraid of her. That
made her laugh. She took his face between her hands and kissed him, and
licked away the salt tears that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but
he turned his head away. She started to feel afraid herself. Had she gone too
far this time?
"I'm sorry," she told him, though she wasn't. "Look, Tom, I'm sorry, I
made a mistake. I panicked. We'll turn back if you like."
Tom pulled away from her and scrambled up. He kept remembering the
strange smile that had flickered on her face as she'd led him from the
Pepperpot. "You enjoy it," he said.
"Don't you? Like when you killed all those people at Shkin's place, you
were enjoying it...."
Hester said, "They were slavers, Tom. They were villains. They were the
ones who sold Wren. They sold our little girl. The world's a better place
without them in it."
"But ..."
She shook her head and gave a cry of frustration. Why could he not
understand? "Look," she said, "we're just little people, aren't we? We
always have been. Little small people, trying to live our lives, but always at
the mercy of men like Uncle and Shkin and Masgard and Pennyroyal and ...
and Valentine. So yes. It feels good to be as strong as them; it feels good to
fight back and even things up a bit."
Tom said nothing. By the light of the instrument panels she could see a
fresh bruise forming on his head where it had struck the chart table. "Poor
Tom," she said, leaning over to kiss it, but he twitched away again, staring
at the fuel gauges.
"The tanks are only half full," he said. "You knew that when we took off.
If we go back, we might never reach Wren. Anyway, those slaves will have
got poor Fishcake by now."
 Hester shrugged awkwardly and wished he'd let her hold him. His
obsession with the Lost Boy angered her. Why did Tom have to be so
concerned about other people all the time? She controlled herself. "Fishcake
will be able to look after himself," she promised.
Tom looked hopefully at her, wanting to believe her. "You think so? He's
so young...."
"He must be twelve if he's a day. I lived alone in the Out-Country when I
wasn't much older than that, and I did all right. And I didn't have his
Burglarium training." She touched
Tom's face. "We'll find Wren," she promised. "Then we'll find fuel, and
go back to Brighton and get Fishcake, when things have calmed down a
bit."
She put her arms around him, and this time he did not pull away,
although he did not exactly hug her back. She kissed him and ran her
fingers through his thinning hair. She hated fighting with him. And she
hated Fishcake for making them argue like this. She hoped the other Lost
Boys were already using his nitty little head for a football.
33 Departures
***
THEO AND WREN HAD not waited for the Storm to recapture them.
They were running away through the gardens when they heard the Stalker
Fang's death cry echoing between the trees.
"What was that?" Wren wondered, stopping, shocked by the awful,
lonely sound.
"I don't know," said Theo. "Something bad, I think."
They ducked into the shrubbery as another Green Storm squad went
running past. The soldiers' helmets blinked with orange light. Peeking
behind her, Wren saw that the Pavilion was starting to burn.
"Theo] It's on fire!"
"I know," he said. He was standing near to her, near enough that, in the
firelight, she could make out the goose pimples on his bare chest and see
that he was shivering
slightly in the chilly air. Suddenly he put his arms around her. "You
should let the Storm take you, Wren. Cloud 9 is going down. You might be
safer as a prisoner. I can't let them take me, but you could. You should go
back."
"What about you?" she asked. "I can't just leave you here."
"I'll be all right," he said, and then said it again, trying to sound more
certain about it: "I will be all right. This place is sinking slowly. It'll come
down in the desert, and I'll try and make my way south; there's a static
settlement in the Tibesti Mountains, south of the sand sea. Maybe I could
make it on foot."
"No," said Wren. She pulled herself away from him, because when he
was holding her, her brain stopped working and she found herself wanting
to agree with everything he said, but she knew deep down that he was
talking rubbish. Even if he survived Cloud 9's fall, setting out across the
desert on foot would be suicide. "I'm staying with you," she said. "We're
going to find a way off, and that's final. Come on. We'll head back to the
aerodrome. Maybe there's a flying machine that's still usable...."
She set off through the smoky gardens, feeling unaccountably hopeful
and rather pleased with herself, but when they reached the aerodrome again,
she saw that it had been destroyed more completely than she'd realized. The
Ferrets' prefab hangars and barracks had been ripped open and scattered,
and of the machines that had been caught on the ground only scorched
shards remained. But among the ruins of the summerhouse where she had
spoken to Orla Twombley the previous night, she found a couple of fleece-
lined leather jackets hanging incongruously from a coat stand
that still stood upright and undamaged amid the rubble. That seemed
some sort of consolation. She threw one to Theo, who pulled it on
gratefully, hanging up his silver wings like an angel banished from heaven.
Snuggling into the other jacket, Wren tried to think of a new plan. "All
right," she said. "Maybe we will end up in the desert. We'll need water, and
food. And a compass would be useful...."
Theo wasn't listening. A rustling in the foliage beyond the ruins had
caught his attention. He gestured for Wren to be quiet.
"Oh, gods!" she whispered. "Not the Storm again?"
But it was only Nimrod Pennyroyal. Shkin's first shot had slammed
against the Tin Book in his robe pocket, breaking several ribs, and the
second had grazed his temple, knocking him out and covering one side of
his face with blood, but he had regained his senses and dragged himself
down to the aerodrome with the same idea as Wren and Theo, of finding
some way off Cloud 9. Looking up plaintively at them from the shrubbery,
he whispered, "Help!"
"Leave him," said Theo as Wren went toward him.
"I can't," said Wren. She wished she could. After all the things he'd done,
Pennyroyal didn't deserve her help, but not helping him would make her as
bad as he was. She knelt down beside him and tore a strip from the bottom
of her tunic to bandage his head.
"Good girl," Pennyroyal whimpered as she worked. "I think my leg's
broken, too, from when I fell.... That devil Shkin! The beast! He shot me!
Shot me and flew off!"
"Well, now you know how poor Tom Natsworthy felt," said Wren. Blood
soaked through her makeshift bandage as soon as it was in place. She
wished she'd paid more attention to Mrs. Scabious's first-aid lessons back in
Vineland.

"That was entirely different," Pennyroyal said. "It was-- Great Poskitt '
How do you know about Tom Natsworthy?"
"Because I'm his daughter," said Wren. "What Shkin told you about me
was true. Tom's my dad. Hester's my mother."
Pennyroyal made gurgly noises, his eyes bulging with terror and pain. He
watched Wren tear another strip of fabric from her clothes, looking as if he
expected her to strangle him with it. "Isn't there anybody on this flaming
deck plate who is who they say they are?" he asked weakly, and went heavy
and limp in Wren's arms.
"Is he dead?" asked Theo, coming up behind her.
Wren shook her head. "It's just a flesh wound, I think. He's fainted. We
have to help him, Theo. He saved us from Cynthia."
"Yes, but only so he could get his hands on the Tin Book again," said
Theo. "Leave him. Maybe the Storm will find him and take him with them
when they leave...."
But behind him, with a roar of aero-engines, Hawkmoths and Fox Spirits
were beginning to rise from behind the trees, casting long shadows on the
smoke as they threaded their way out through Cloud 9's rigging. The Storm
were leaving already.
 Oenone Zero had been dragged out of her dreams by the stink of burning
curtains. There was a pain in her head, and when she tried to breathe, sharp
smoke caught at the back of
her throat and made her choke and gasp and roll over onto her back.
Above her, flames were washing across the ornate ceiling of the ballroom
in rippling waves, like some bright liquid. She pushed herself up, groping
for her glasses, but her glasses were smashed, and the flames were rising all
around her. Among them she saw the scattered pages of the Tin Book
beginning to blacken.
She plunged through a swaying curtain of fire and out onto the terrace. It
was a blur of smoke and firelight and running bodies, and as she reeled
through it, looking for the stairs, General Naga barred her way. She backed
away from him, tripped over a fallen Stalker, and sat down, helpless, in the
path of the armored man.
"Dr. Zero?" he said. "This ... this attack ... it was your doing?"
Oenone knew that he was going to kill her. She was so full of fear that it
came seeping out of her mouth in thin, high-pitched noises. She squeezed
her eyes shut and whispered a prayer to the god of the ruined chapel in
Tienjing, because although she'd never had much time for gods, she thought
that he must know what it meant to be frightened, and to suffer, and to die.
And the fear left her, and she opened her eyes, and beyond the smoke the
moon was flying, full and white, and she thought it the most beautiful thing
she had ever seen.
She smiled at General Naga and said, "Yes. It was me. I installed secret
instructions in the Stalker Grike's brain. I made him destroy her. It had to be
done."
Naga knelt, and his big metal hands gripped her head. He
leaned forward and placed a clumsy kiss between her eyebrows.
"Magnificent!" he said, as he helped her to stand. "Magnificent! Set a
Stalker to kill a Stalker, eh?"
 He led her away from the fire, through staring, flame-lit groups of
shocked troops and aviators, out across the lawn toward the Requiem
Vortex. He took a cloak from someone and wrapped it around her trembling
shoulders. "You can't imagine how long I've waited for this day!" he said.
"Oh, she was a good leader in those first few years, but the war's dragged
on, and she keeps wasting men and ships as if they're counters in a game.
How long I've tried to think of a way.... And you've done it! You've rid us of
her! Your friend Mr. Grike has run off somewhere, by the way. Is he
dangerous?"
Oenone shook her head, imagining what Grike must be going through.
"It's hard to know. I suppressed some of his memories to make room for my
secret programs. Now that he has fulfilled his duties, those memories will
be starting to resurface. He'll be confused ... perhaps insane.... Poor Mr.
Grike."
"He's just a machine, Doctor."
"No, he's more than that. You must tell your men to search for him."
Naga waved a couple of sentries aside and climbed the gangplank of the
Requiem Vortex. Inside the gondola, he guided Oenone to a chair. She felt
terribly tired. Her own face stared back at her from his burnished
breastplate, smeared with blood and ash and looking naked without her
spectacles. Naga patted her shoulder and muttered gruffly, "There, girl,
there," as if he were calming a spooked animal.
He had a soldier's touch, awkward and unused to gentleness. "You're a
very brave young woman."
"I'm not. I was afraid. So afraid ..."
"But that's what bravery is ; my dear. The overcoming of fear. If you're
not afraid, it doesn't count." He fetched a flask out of a hatch in his armor.
"Here, try some brandy; it will help to steady you. Of course, we won't let
anyone know that you were responsible. Officially, at least, we must mourn
the Stalker Fang's passing. We'll blame the townies. It'll fire up our warriors
like nothing since this war began] We'll launch attacks on all fronts, avenge
our leader's fall ..."
 Oenone spluttered at the sharp taste of the brandy and pushed the flask
away. She said, "No] The war must stop...."
Naga laughed, misunderstanding. "The Storm can still win battles
without that iron witch telling us what to do] Don't worry, Dr. Zero. We'll
do better without her. Blast those barbarian cities to a standstill] And when I
take my place as leader, you'll be rewarded--palaces, money, any job you
like ..."
Dazed, Oenone shook her head. Watching this armored man stride about
the cramped, battle-damaged gondola, she saw that she had underestimated
the Green Storm. War had made them, and they would make sure that the
war went on and on.
"No," she said. "That's not why I--"
But General Naga had forgotten her for the moment and was issuing
orders to his subofficers: "Put out a message on all frequencies: The Stalker
Fang has fallen in battle. Need for calm and stability at this tragic time, etc.,
etc. In order to continue our glorious struggle against Tractionist barbarism,
I am
assuming supreme command. And prepare the Requiem Vortex for
departure; I want to be back in Tienjing before one of our comrades tries to
seize power for himself."
"And the prisoners, General?"
Naga hesitated, glanced at Dr. Zero, and said, "I won't start my reign with
a massacre. Bring them aboard. But please tell that Pennyroyal woman to
stop singing."
The Stalker Grike watched from a hiding place among the bushes as the
Storm's boarding parties hurried back aboard the Requiem Vortex. Someone
with a bulhorn was shouting, "Mr. Grike! Mr. Grike! Come aboard! We are
leaving!"
Grike knew that Dr. Zero must have ordered them to find him and felt
grateful to the surgeon-mechanic, but he did not show himself. He had to
stay on Cloud 9. The girl he had seen outside the ballroom was not among
the prisoners who were being shepherded into the air destroyer. If she was
staying, Grike would stay. In some way that he did not yet understand, that
girl was connected with Hester. Perhaps by staying near her, he would find
Hester again.
34 Finders Keepers
***
FISHCAKE LAY IN THE dunes behind the beach. Numb with cold and
betrayal, he watched as Brighton fired up its battered engines and paddled
lopsidedly away, the voices of the victorious Lost Boys drifting raucously
across the water with the smoke.
He had barely escaped with his life. As the Lost Boys stormed the
museum, he had run like a hare from the hunt, out of a back entrance and
away through the burning streets, sobbing hopelessly, "Mr. Natsworthy,
come back, come back ..." until at last he reached the city's stern and flung
himself blindly off an observation platform there, seeking safety in the sea.
The swim to the shore had exhausted him, and he had almost drowned in
the surf. Now, tired and frozen as he was, it was time for him to move
again. For hungry desert towns
were rolling past him through the dunes, and fierce amphibious suburbs
were steaming toward him, drawn by the wrecked airships and flying
machines that littered the sand and washed in and out on the surf. Fishcake,
who had never been near a Traction Town before, could barely believe how
high their wheels towered over him in the smoky air, or how the ground
shook and shifted as they went lumbering by. Choking on exhaust smoke
and upflung sand, he scrambled away from them and ran into the desert.
He really was a Lost Boy now. He had no idea where he was, or where he
was going. He ran on and on, hour after hour, slithering over dunes,
stumbling across dry expanses of gravel and piles of barren rocks. He was
scared of the dark and the deep shadows, which were growing deeper still
as the moon sank toward the western horizon. At last, on the bank of an
empty creek, he collapsed, hugging his damp knees against his chest for
warmth and whining aloud, "What's to become of poor little Fishcake?"
Nobody answered, and that was what scared him most of all. Gargle and
Remora and Wren had let him down, and the fake mummies and daddies
had tricked him; Mr. Shkin had failed him, and Tom Natsworthy had
abandoned him; but he would rather have been with any of them than out
here on his own.
The moon gleamed on something that lay nearby. Fishcake, who had
been trained to hunt for gleaming things, crept closer without thinking.
A face gazed up at him from the sand. He picked it up. It was made of
bronze and had been quite badly dented. There were holes for the eyes. The
lips were slightly parted in a
smile that Fishcake found reassuring. It was beautiful. Fishcake held it to
his own face and peered through the eyeholes at the westering moon. Then
he stuffed the mask inside his coat and moved on, feeling braver, wondering
what other treasures this desert held.
A few dozen yards farther on, his sharp eyes caught a movement down
on the floor of a dry watercourse. Nervous as an animal, he edged closer. A
severed hand was creeping across the gravel. It appeared to be made of
metal. It moved like a broken crab, dragging itself along by its fingers.
Wires and machinery and something that looked like a bone poked out of
the wrist. Fishcake watched it, and then, because it seemed to have a sense
of purpose about it, he began to follow.
Soon he began to pass other, less lively body parts: a torn-off metal leg
bent the wrong way and draped across a boulder, then a gashed and dented
torso. The hand spidered over that for a while, then crept on its way. A few
hundred yards farther on he found the other hand, still attached to most of
an arm, feeling its way toward a slope of gravel and small boulders where
stunted acacia trees grew.
And there he found the head: a skeletal gray face cupped in a metal skull,
surrounded by a tangle of cables and ducts. It looked dead, but as Fishcake
crouched over it, he knew that it had sensed him. The lenses of the glass
eyes were shattered, but the spidery machinery inside twitched and clicked,
still struggling to see. The dead mouth moved. So faintly that Fishcake
could barely hear, the head whispered to him.
"I am damaged."
 "Just a bit," Fishcake agreed. He felt sorry for it, poor old head. He said,
"What's your name?"
"I am Anna" the head whispered. Then it said, "No, no. Anna is dead. I
am the Stalker Fang." It seemed to have two voices, one harsh and
commanding, the other hesitant, astonished. "We were taken by Arkangel,"
said the second voice. "I am seventeen years old. I am a slave of the fourth
type in the shipyards of Stilton Kael, but I am building my own ship and ..."
Then the first voice hissed, "No! That was long ago, in Anna's time, and
Anna is dead. Sathya, my dear? Is that you? I'm so confused...."
"My name's Fishcake," said Fishcake, a bit confused himself.
"I think I am damaged," said the head. "Valentine tricked me--the sword
in my heart--I'm so cold ... 50 cold.... No. Yes. I remember now. I remember.
The Zero woman's machine ... and General Naga stood by and let it
happen.... I was betrayed."
"Me too," said Fishcake. He could see the twisted fittings around the
edges of the skull where the bronze mask had been torn off. He took the
mask out of his coat and fixed it back into place as best he could.
"Please help her," the head whispered, and then, "You will repair me."
"I don't know how."
"She --I will tell you."
Fishcake looked around. Bits of the Stalker's body were edging toward
him through the sand, homing in on the head. The clutching movements of
the fingers made him think of crab-cams he'd repaired for Gargle. "I might
be able to," he
said. "Not here. I'd need tools and stuff. If we could gather up all your
bits and find a city or something ..."
"Do it," commanded the head. "Then I will travel east. To Shan Guo. To
my house at Erdene Tezh. I will have my revenge upon the Once-Born. Yes,
yes ..."
 "I'll come with you," said Fishcake, eager not to be deserted again. "I can
help you. You'll need me."
"I know the secrets of the Tin Book," the head said, whispering to itself.
"The codes are safe inside my memory. I will return to Erdene Tezh and
awaken ODIN."
Fishcake did not know what that meant, but he was glad to have someone
telling him what to do, even if she was only a head. He stood up. A little
way off, a torn gray robe flapped from the branches of a bush. Fishcake
pulled it free and knotted it into a sort of bag. Then, while the Stalker Fang's
head whispered to itself about The World Made Green Again, he began
collecting up the scattered pieces of her body.
35 Marooned in the Sky
***
IT SEEMED VERY QUIET on Cloud 9 once the storm Were gone. The
wind still sang through the drooping rigging, the remaining gasbags jostled
against each other, and the crash of collapsing floors came sometimes from
inside the burning Pavilion, but none of them were human sounds, so they
did not seem to matter.
Theo and Wren carried the unconscious Pennyroyal into the shelter of a
grove of cypress trees between his boathouse and the ornamental maze.
There was a fountain at the heart of the grove, and they laid Pennyroyal
down and did their best to make him comfortable. Then Theo sat down and
rested his head on his arms and went to sleep too. That surprised Wren.
Tired as she was, she knew she was far too scared and anxious to sleep. It
was different for Theo, she supposed. He'd been in battles before; he was
probably used
to this sort of desperate uncertainty.
"Boo-Boo, my dove, I can explain everything!" muttered Pennyroyal,
stirring and half opening his eyes. He saw Wren sitting beside him and
mumbled, "Oh, it's you."
"Go back to sleep," said Wren.
"You don't like me," said Pennyroyal grumpily. "Look, I'm sorry about
your father, I really am. Poor young Tom. I never meant to hurt him. It was
an accident, I swear."
Wren checked his bandages. "It's not just that," she said. "It's that book of
yours. It's so full of lies! About Miss Freya, and Anchorage, and about my
mum cutting a deal with the Huntsmen ..."
"Oh, but that bit's true," said Pennyroyal. "I admit I may have spiced up
the facts a little here and there, purely for reasons of pacing, but it really
was Hester Shaw who brought Arkangel down on us. She told me so
herself. 'I'm the one who sent the Huntsmen here,' she said. 'I wanted Tom
for myself again. He's my predator's gold.' And a few months later, among a
bunch of refugees from Arkangel, I ran into a charming young person called
Julianna. She'd been a slave girl in the household of that lout Piotr Masgard,
and she told me she'd seen the deal done: An aviatrix came to her master
with word of Anchorage's position. A young aviatrix, barely more than a
girl, with her face split in two by a terrible scar ..."
"I don't believe you," said Wren crossly, and left him there and went out
into the gardens. It couldn't be true; Pennyroyal was up to his old tricks
again, twisting the truth about. But why does he insist on sticking to that
part of his story, when he's admitted the rest was fibs? she wondered
uneasily. Well, maybe he believed it. Maybe Mum had told him that,
to scare him. And as for Masgard's slave girl, just because she'd seen
Masgard talking to a scarred aviatrix, that didn't mean it was Mum: The air
trade was a dangerous life; there must be lots of aviatrices with messed-up
faces....
She shook her head to try to drive the disturbing thoughts away. She had
better things to worry about than Pennyroyal's silly stories. Cloud 9 was
wobbling beneath her feet, and the night air was filled with the groan of
stressed rigging. Smoke poured across the tilted lawns, obscuring scattered
bodies and overturned buffet tables. Wren gathered up some fallen canapés
and stood staring at the Pavilion while she ate them. It was hard to believe
the change that had come over the beautiful building. It was stained and
sagging, and the only light that came from its broken windows was the
reddish glow of spreading fires. The great central dome gaped like a burst
puffball. Above it, the gasbags seemed to be holding, but they were smoke
blackened, and some of the fiercer flames jumping up from the roof of the
Pennyroyals' guest wing were getting dangerously close to their
underbellies.
And as she stood there watching it, Wren became aware of someone
standing nearby, watching her. "Theo?" she said, turning.
But it was not Theo.
 Startled, she lost her balance on the steep grass and fell, hiccuping with
fright. The Stalker did not move, except to brace himself against the tilting
of the garden. He was staring at Wren. How could he do anything but stare,
with only those round green lamps for eyes? The firelight gleamed on his
battered armor and his stained claws. His head twitched.
Oil and lubricant dripped from his wounds. "you are not her," he said.
"No," agreed Wren in a shrill little mouse-squeak. She had no idea who
the horrible old machine was talking about, but she wasn't about to argue.
She wriggled on her bottom across the grass, trying to edge away from him.
The Stalker came slowly closer, then stopped again. She thought she
could hear weird mechanisms whirring and chattering inside his armored
skull. "you are like her," he said, " but you are not her."
"No, I know, a lot of people get us mixed up," said Wren, wondering who
he could have mistaken her for. There was no point running, she told
herself, but her body, with its eagerness to go on living, wouldn't listen. She
pushed herself up and fled, slithering on the wet grass, careering down the
sick slope of the gardens.
"come back !" begged Grike. " help me! i have to find her !" He started to
run after her, then stopped. Chasing the girl would only add to her fear, and
he had already been appalled by the terror and loathing of him that he had
seen in that strange, familiar face. He watched her fade into the smoke.
Behind him, the Pavilion's central dome collapsed into the ballroom in a
gush of sparks. Catherine wheels of debris went bowling past him to crash
into fountains and flower beds or bound off the deck plate's edge entirely
and plummet down into the desert.
Grike ignored them and tilted his head inquisitively. Above the noise, his
sensitive ears had picked up the drone of aero-engines.
***
Whooping for breath, her heart hammering, Wren plunged back into the
cypress grove. Pennyroyal was asleep or unconscious again, but Theo
leaped up. "Wren, what is it?"
 "Stalker!" she managed to gasp. "The Green Storm left a Stalker behind.
That big ugly one that fought the other one ...
Pennyroyal groaned and stirred. Theo drew Wren gently away. "Wren, if
this Stalker had wanted to kill us, it would have found us by now, wouldn't
it? It would have chased you, and be here by now."
Wren thought about that. "I think it was damaged," she said.
"There you are then."
"I think it was mad," she went on, remembering the strange way the
Stalker had spoken to her. She giggled nervously. "I suppose if ordinary
Stalkers are meant to go around killing people, maybe a mad one is the best
sort to be stuck on a doomed hovery island thing with. Maybe it just wanted
to have a nice chat about the weather. Or knit me a cardigan."
Theo laughed. "Anyway," he said, "it's going to be all right. At the rate
we're losing gas, we should touch down in the desert in another half hour or
so."
"You say that like it's a good thing."
"It is," said Theo. "Come and see."
She went with him through the trees to the far side of the grove. From
there, only a short, steeply tilted stretch of lawn separated them from the
deck plate's edge. Beyond the handrail they could see the ground, and
Cloud 9's shadow slithering over curved dunes and barren outcroppings of
stone. All around, clusters of lights and ghostly fans of dust marked the
approach of small towns and villages, racing toward the place where they
thought Cloud 9 would fall.
"Scavenger towns!" wailed Wren. "We'll be eaten!"
"Cloud 9 will be eaten," said Theo. "We won't. We'll get off into the
desert before the towns arrive and go aboard them as travelers, not prey.
We'll take some gold or Old Tech or something from the Pavilion to pay our
way. We'll be all right."
 Wren calmed herself. This is what brought Mum and Dad together, she
thought. There's a togetherness that comes from sharing adventures like
this, and it's strong enough to overcome anything: mistrust, ugliness,
anything. Not that Theo was ugly. Far from it. She turned her head to look
at him, and their faces were so close that the tip of her nose brushed his
cheek.
And it was then--just when Wren knew that they were about to kiss, and
half of her really wanted to and the other half was more scared of kissing
than it was of scavenger towns--it was then that the lawn, like the deck of a
boat in a stormy sea, dropped suddenly from beneath her feet, throwing her
against Theo and Theo against a tree.
"Bother!" she said.
Bad things were happening up among Cloud 9's corona of gasbags.
Roasted by the flames leaping from the Pavilion, the central cell had
ruptured, and the gas was blurting out in a rush of blue fire. A few of the
lesser bags still held, but they were not enough to support the weight of
Cloud 9 for long. The deck plate tipped even more steeply, and the water
from fountains and swimming pools poured off the brim in brief white
cataracts. Debris fell too: statues and summerhouses,
potted palms and garden furniture, marquees and musical instruments,
dropping like manna on the dunes below.
The brindled towns of the desert increased their speed, jostling and
squabbling in their haste to be first at the crash site.
The Jenny Haniver flew through smoke and dust into the shadow of
Cloud 9. Seen through her larboard windows, the tilted underside resembled
a vast, ruined wall, pocked with shell craters and burned-out wrecks. Hester
turned the searchlight on it and watched as some twisted maintenance
walkways slid by, then a warning notice in stenciled white letters ten feet
high: NO SMOKING. The cable car swung from severed hawsers, blood-
stained ball gowns and evening robes billowing from the shattered cabin.
"We're too late," said Hester. "There's not going to be anyone alive up
there."
 "Don't say that!" Tom told her. He spoke sharply, still feeling scratchy
and shaky from their argument. He did not want to argue anymore, because
finding Wren was what mattered now, but things had altered between
himself and Hester, and he was not sure they could be put right. The
hardness of her, the calm way she had abandoned Fishcake, made his
insides curl.
Angrily, he tugged at the Jenny's controls, swinging her up over the top
edge of the deck plate and carefully in through the tangle of rigging. He
wished suddenly that Freya were with him instead of Hester. She would not
have left poor Fishcake behind. She would have found some way out of
Shkin's tower without murdering all those poor men. And
she would not have given up hope of finding Wren so easily.
"Remember London?" he said. "Remember the night of MEDUSA, when
I came to fetch you from London? That looked hopeless too, but I found
you, didn't I? And now we're going to find Wren."
Below them, Cloud 9 swung like a censer. Hester aimed the searchlight at
its ruined gardens.
Dragging Pennyroyal between them, Wren and Theo went crabwise
across the steep face of the gardens, looking for a place where they could
shelter when the deck plate touched down.
"Good work!" Pennyroyal told them, briefly coming to. "Splendid effort!
I'll see that you get your freedom for this...." Then he passed out again,
which made him impossibly heavy. They laid him down, and Wren sat next
to him. The ground was five hundred feet below, perhaps less; Wren could
make out individual scrubby bushes struggling to grow among the long
crescents of rock that dotted the desert, and individual windows and
doorways on the upperworks of a town that was bounding along on big,
barrel-shaped wheels in Cloud 9's shadow. The air was filled with the
sounds of overstrained rigging. Beneath the long-drawn-out metallic moans,
another noise was rising. Wren looked up. Through the tangles of hawsers
that swayed across the garden, the beam of a searchlight poked, dazzling
her. Then it swung away, a long finger of light tracing aimless paths across
the lawns, and behind it she saw a small airship.
 "Look!" she shouted.
"Scavengers," groaned Theo. "Or air pirates!"
The people in the town below seemed to have the same idea, for a rocket
came sputtering up to burst in the sky behind the little ship. It veered away,
then came edging back, steering vanes flicking like the fins of an inquisitive
fish. A face showed at the gondola window. The steering vanes flicked
again, the engine pods swiveled, and the ship touched down on a metal
patio, not too close to Wren and Theo, but not so far away that Wren could
not recognize the people who climbed out of the gondola and came
scrambling toward her across the canted lawn.
At first she refused to believe it. It seemed so impossible that Mum and
Dad could be here that she closed her eyes and tried to make the hurtful
hallucination go away. It couldn't be them, it couldn't, no matter what her
silly eyes were telling her; clearly the adventures she had lived through had
all been too much for her, and she had started imagining things.
And then a voice cried, "Wren!" and someone's arms went round her and
held her tight, and it was her father, and he was hugging her, laughing and
saying, "Wren!" over and over, while tears made white channels through the
ash and dust that smeared his face.
36 Strange Meetings
***
"I'M SORRY," SHE SAID. "I'm so sorry, I've been so stupid--" and after
that she couldn't speak; she couldn't think of a single thing more to say.
"It's all right," Dad kept telling her. "It doesn't matter; you're safe, that's
all that matters...."
Then Dad stepped aside, and it was Mummy hugging her, a harder,
tighter hug, pulling Wren's face against a bony shoulder, and Mum's voice
in her ear asking "You're all right? You've not been hurt?"
"I'm fine," sniffled Wren.
Hester stepped back and cupped Wren's face in her two hands, surprised
at how much love she felt. She was crying with happiness, and she almost
never cried. Not wanting Tom and Wren to think she'd gone soft, she looked
away and noticed the tall black boy hanging back behind Wren, watching.
"Mum, Dad," said Wren, turning to pull him closer, "this is Theo Ngoni.
He saved my life."
"We saved each other," said Theo shyly. He was crying too, imagining
how his own mother and father would welcome him if ever he found his
way home to Zagwa.
Hester looked suspiciously at the handsome young aviator, but Tom
shook his hand and said, "We'd better get aboard."
He turned away toward the waiting airship and Theo went with him, but
as Hester started to follow them, Wren said, "No, wait; Pennyroyal ..."
Tom and Theo didn't hear her, but her mother did.
Wren hurried through the trees to the fountain. Pennyroyal, revived by
the sound of aero-engines, was struggling to his feet. He grinned as he saw
Wren, and said weakly, "What did I tell you, eh? Never say die!" Then,
recognizing the figure who loomed behind her, he added, "Oh, Great
Poskitt!"
The last time Hester had seen Pennyroyal, he had been running away into
the snow and dark of Anchorage the night she'd killed the Huntsmen. The
last time she had spoken to him had been shortly before that, in the
ransacked kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Aakiuq's house, when she had told him
how the Huntsmen had come to be there.
Pennyroyal backed weakly away, his face a dead, cheesy white beneath
the crusted drizzles of blood. Hester caught him with two swift strides,
knocked him down, drew her knife as he groveled and pawed at her feet.
"Please!" he whined. "Spare me! I'll give you anything!"
"Shut up," said Hester, baring his throat to her blade,
bending so the blood wouldn't splash her new coat.
Wren hit her from the side, shoving her away. "Mummy, no!" she yelled.
Hester grunted, winded and angry. "You stay out of this...."
But Wren would not stay out of it. She had seen the look in her mother's
eye when she saw Pennyroyal. Not hate, or anger, or a thirst for revenge,
but fear. And why would Mum be frightened of Pennyroyal unless the thing
that Pennyroyal had said about her was true? As Hester started toward him
again, Wren leaped between them, spreading her arms to protect him. "I
know!" she shouted. "I know what you did! So if you want to silence him,
you're too late! If you want to keep it secret now, you'll have to kill me too."
"Kill you?" Hester grabbed Wren by the collar of her jacket and pushed
her hard against a tree. "I wish you'd never been born!" she shouted. She
turned the knife, changing her grip on the worn bone handle. The blade
filled with firelight. Reflections slid across Wren's appalled, defiant face,
and suddenly it seemed to Hester very like the face of her own half sister,
Katherine Valentine, who had died defending her from their father's sword.
"Mummy?" asked Wren, in a tiny, shocked voice.
 Hester lowered the knife.
Tom and Theo came hurrying through the trees, slithering down the steep
lawn. "What's happening?" shouted Theo, who was in the lead. "Wren? Are
you all right?"
"She's trying to kill him!" Wren had sunk to her knees. She was crying so
much that they could hardly make out her words, but she kept repeating
them until they understood.
"She wants to kill Pennyroyal!"
Tom looked down at Pennyroyal, who raised a trembly hand.
"Tom, my dear fellow, let's not be hasty...."
Tom didn't answer for a moment. He was remembering how it had felt to
lie on his back in the snow of Anchorage, sure that he was about to die. He
could still feel the hole in his chest, and taste the blood. He could still hear
the fading throb of the Jenny's engines as Pennyroyal made off with her. For
a moment he felt as fierce as Hester, ready to seize the knife himself and
finish the old scoundrel. But the feeling passed quickly, and he reached for
his wife's hand. "Het, look at him. He's old and helpless and his palace is
going down in flames. Isn't that revenge enough? Let's get him aboard the
Jenny quickly, before this place sinks any lower."
"No!" shouted Hester. "Have you forgotten what happened last time we
let him aboard? Have you forgotten what he did to you? He nearly killed
you! You can't just forgive him!"
"Yes, I can," said Tom firmly. Kneeling beside Pennyroyal, he nodded to
Theo to help lift him. "What's the alternative? Murder him? What would
that achieve? It wouldn't change anything...."
"It would," said Wren, and there was such an odd sound to her voice that
Tom looked up at her. She was crying with big, unladylike sobs, her face
wet with snot and tears. She scrambled away fearfully when her mother
turned toward her, and shouted out, "If she kills him, he won't be able to tell
you how she sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen."
 Hester jerked her head as if the girl had hit her. "Lies!"
she said. She tried to laugh. "Pennyroyal's been filling her up with his
lies!"
"No," said Wren. "No, it's true. All these years everybody's been so
grateful to her for saving us from the Huntsmen, when all along it was her
who brought them down on us in the first place. I wanted it not to be true. I
told myself it couldn't be. But it is."
Tom looked at Hester, waiting for her to deny it.
"I did it for you," she said.
"Then it's true?"
Hester took a step backward, away from him. "Of course it's true! Where
do you think I went to, that night I took the Jenny? I flew straight to
Arkangel and told Masgard where he'd find Anchorage. It was that or lose
you, and I couldn't have--I couldn't have! Oh, Tom, for the gods' sakes, it
was sixteen years ago; it doesn't matter now, does it? Does it? I sorted it out,
didn't I? I killed Masgard and his men. And I only did it for you...."
But it had been a different Tom Natsworthy whom she had loved enough
to betray whole cities for. That Tom had been a brave, handsome,
passionate boy who might have forgiven her; but this older Tom, this timid
Anchorage historian who stood staring at her with his stupid mouth hanging
open in dismay and his stupid daughter sniveling beside him, would never
understand what she had done. Neither of them would. She was nothing like
them. She had been a fool to believe that she could live in their world.
"All these years," she said, flinging her knife away. "All these years in
Vineland," she said, watching it flash as it stuck quivering in Pennyroyal's
lawn. "All these years with you
both ... Gods, I've been so bored!
She was shaking, and it made her remember the night of MEDUSA,
when she'd first dared to kiss Tom. She had shaken uncontrollably then,
back at the beginning of it all, and here she was shaking again as it all came
to an end. She turned and walked quickly away from him across the ruined
gardens. Through a gap in the smoke ahead, she saw something loom
square and low. She thought it was a building, then realized it was some
sort of stupid maze. Well, it would do. She strode fast toward the entrance.
"Hester!" shouted Tom behind her.
"Go!" She glanced back. He was scrambling after her, a frantic silhouette
against the blaze of the Pavilion, Wren hanging back behind him with her
African boy. "Go!" she shouted, turning without stopping, walking
backward for a pace or two, pointing at the Jenny Haniver. "Just get Wren
aboard and go, before Pennyroyal steals the bloody thing again...."
But Tom only shouted again, "Hester!"
"I'm not coming, Tom," she said. She was crying. Smoke blew past her,
and burning scraps of envelope fabric, and the hot wind raised the skirts of
her coat like black wings, and she looked like some terrible angel. "Go back
to Vineland. Be happy. But not with me. I'm staying here."
"Hester, don't be stupid! This place is falling apart!"
"It's just falling," said Hester. "I'll survive. There are towns below: hard
desert towns, scav platforms. My kind of place."
He had almost caught up with her. She could see his face shining with
tears in the light from the blazing buildings. She wanted very badly to go to
him, to kiss him and hold him,
but she knew that she could never touch him again, because what she had
done would always come between them. "I love you," she said, and turned
and ran, plunging into the maze while the deck plates pitched and reared
beneath her, and sounds that were half sobs and half laughter came out of
her mouth without her meaning them to. Behind her, fainter and fainter, she
heard Tom shouting her name. Overhead, Cloud 9's gasbags were igniting
one by one, filling the maze with weird racing shadows. Hester sobbed and
stumbled, the hedges scratching her face as she blundered into them. She
was just beginning to realize that this was a bad place to be, that she would
need better shelter than this when the deck plate came down, when she
reached the heart of the maze. Something crouched there, as if it had been
waiting for her all along.
She came to a stop, skidding on the grass. The waiting shape unfolded
itself and stood up, towering over her. She thought at first that it was made
of fire, but that was just the reflections from the burning gasbags shining in
its dented, burnished armor. Its dead face widened into a smile. Hester knew
that face; she had shoveled earth over it herself, eighteen years ago on the
Black Island, burying the old Stalker deep and piling stones upon his grave.
It seemed she'd been wasting her time, though. She could smell the familiar
smell of him: formaldehyde and hot metal.
"Hester?" called Tom's voice faintly, away in the gardens somewhere and
lost to her now forever.
And Grike reached for her with his dreadful hands and said, "HESTER
SHAW."
***
Another gasbag went up with a roar, a geyser of light escaping into the
sky. Tom found himself airborne for a moment as the deck plate dropped.
He hit the grass hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a statue of Poskitt.
"Hester!" he shouted as he scrambled up, but his voice was cracking with
the effort, and then his heart seemed to crack too. He kneaded his chest, but
there was no relief: He was on his knees; on his face; pain nailed him to the
lawn. He blacked out, and when he woke, someone was with him. "Hester?"
he mumbled.
"Daddy ..." It was Wren, her hands on his back and his shoulders, her
face looking down at him, tearstained and frightened.
"I'm all right," he told her, and it was true, the pain was passing, though
he felt sick and giddy. "It's happened before.... It's nothing."
He tried to stand, but Wren's friend Theo came and picked him up, lifting
him with barely an effort. He must have lost consciousness again as Theo
carried him back across the gardens, because he thought that Hester was
with him, but when he looked round she wasn't, and they were already at
the Jenny's open hatchway, Pennyroyal peering out at them from the flight-
deck windows. It was confusing, especially with the whole garden tilting
and swaying like this, and the only thing he could be sure of was Wren,
who was holding his hand very tightly and trying to smile at him, though
she was crying at the same time. "Wren," he said, "we can't go; we have to
find your mother...."
Wren shook her head, and helped Theo heave him aboard. "We're going
to get you away from this awful place
before it's too late," she said.
The hatch closed, and as Theo went forward to the flight deck to help
Pennyroyal start the engines, Wren knelt over her father, holding him the
way that he had held her when she was a very little girl, when she was sick
or frightened. "There, there," he used to whisper to her, and so she
whispered, "There, there," and stroked his hair, and kissed him, until he was
calm again. And she tried not to think about Mum, and the things that Mum
had done and said, and the trembling light that had shone from the blade of
Mum's knife. She tried to remember that she did not have a mother
anymore.
How she had aged!
Grike had thought he understood the Once-Borns and the things time did
to them, but it was still a shock to see his poor child's lined and weather-
beaten face, her beautiful red hair turning coarse and gray. He reached
toward her, sheathing his claws, and she reacted in the way most Once-
Borns did when the chase was done and there was no escaping him: that
wordless keening, and the sudden hot stink as her bowels emptied. It hurt
him that she was afraid of him. He pulled her close as gently as he could
and said, "I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH."
And Hester, crushed against his dented armor, could only shudder, and
weep, and listen to the saddest sound she'd ever heard: the dwindling roar of
twin Jeunet-Carots as the Jenny Haniver took off without her.
And Cloud 9 touched down at last, first the dangling cable car plowing
into the sand like a drag anchor, then the edge of
 the deck plate catching on a reef of rocks. Catwalks torn from the
underside went striding end over end across the dunes; smashed flying
machines and uprooted trees spilled down into the desert. A hawser
snapped; a sagging gasbag broke free and fell upward, soaring through
smoke and dust. Whole sections of the Pavilion burst, shedding antiques
and objets d'art like shrapnel. Stairways crumpled; sundecks buckled;
swimming pools imploded. Cloud 9 bounced, slicing the top off a gigantic
dune. Candy-colored domes bowled off across the desert, pursued by
greedy townlets. The wreckage crashed down again, belching fire, trailing
cables and collapsing gasbags; crashed and skidded and spun and shuddered
to a stop.
There was a time of silence, broken only by the mineral sigh of a billion
grains of upflung sand sifting gently down. And in that silence, before the
scavenger towns came roaring in to gobble up the wreckage, the Stalker
Grike stood up and lifted Hester in his arms, and walked away with her into
the desert, and the dark.