Infernal Devices

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.

Chapter 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 eyesgoing 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