A Darkling Plain

westward, herding terrified Traction Cities ahead of them and destroying any that did not flee fast enough. Then Arminius Krause, the burgermeister of Traktionstadt Weimar, had sent envoys to eleven other German-speaking cities and proposed that they join together and turn to face the Storm before every mobile town and city was driven off the western edge of the Hunting Ground into the sea.

And so the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was born. The twelve great cities, swiftly joined by others, swore that they would eat no mobile town until the Green Storm was destroyed. They would survive instead by devouring Mossie ships and forts and static settlements until they had made the world safe again for Municipal Darwinism, which every civilized person knew was the most natural, sensible, and fair way of life ever devised.

They turned, they fought, and they forced the startled Green Storm to a stalemate. Now a broad ribbon of no-man’s-land wriggled across the Hunting Ground from the southern fringes of the Rustwater Marshes to the edges of the Ice Wastes, marking the boundary between two worlds. To the east of it the Green Storm were struggling to plant new static settlements and reclaim for their farmers land that had been plowed up and polluted by centuries of Municipal Darwinism. To the west, life went on almost as before, with cities hunting towns and towns hunting villages; the only difference was that most mayors sent a portion of their catch to feed the Traktionstadts.

Over the years there had been all manner of battles as each side tried to break the line. Stretches of churned mud and empty marsh changed hands again and again, at the cost of thousands of lives, but always, when the months-long thunder of thrust and counterthrust had faded, the line remained much as it had been before, a river of dead ground winding across a continent.

Now that the truce seemed to be holding, some of the braver merchant cities and industrial platforms from the west had come to see the line for themselves, and trading clusters had formed around each concentration of Traktionstadts. The Jenny Haniver was flying into one of them. Tom took her low, beneath the gray lid of the cities’ smoke, and Wren peered down at the upperworks of cities and merchant towns, and then down again to the earth, where smaller towns were scuttling along the narrow ridges of land between deep trenches made by larger cities’ tracks. She saw tiny scavenger-villes down there, and speedy fighting suburbs that Tom said were called harvesters. The sky was filled with other airships, balloon taxis, and lumbering sky trains. Once a squadron of ungainly flying machines roared rudely across the Jenny’s bows. “Air hogs!” said Tom, and grumbled about old-fangled inventions and pilots who had no respect for the ways of the bird roads, but Wren was thrilled; the flapping, tumbling machines reminded her of the Flying Ferrets, those brave aviators whom she had seen in action over Cloud 9.

A fighting city called Murnau slipped by outside the windows, a colossal armored wedge, wormholed with gun slits and sally ports. Its tiers were long triangles, narrowing to a sharp prow where a ram jutted out beneath the city’s jaws. It was breathtakingly big and powerful looking, but the sky was brightening quickly now, and Wren could see five or six similar cities in the distance, stretching off in a long line down the western edge of the Rustwater Marshes. Some looked even bigger than Murnau.

The Jenny’s destination was much more peaceful. Hanging in the sky a few miles from Murnau was a small doughnut of deck plate, crammed with lightweight buildings and fringed with mooring struts, supported by a bright cloud of gasbags like a helpful thunderhead. Wren had been aboard that doughnut often during her brief time on the bird roads, in cold northern skies and sticky southern ones. Finding it here above this clutter of armored cities made her feel a little as if she were coming home.

Airhaven!

The long-faced clerk at the harbor office looked thoughtful when Tom asked him about the Archaeopteryx, and shuffled off to rummage in his filing drawers, returning after a few minutes with a musty ledger that he said held details of every ship registered in the flying free port. “Cruwys Morchard, mistress and commander,” he said, and peered through his pince-nez at a cloudy photograph of the aviatrix, paper clipped to the page that held the Archaeopteryx’ s details. “Ah, yes, I remember! A handsome woman. Buys up Old Tech.”

“What sort of Old Tech?” asked Tom.

“Magnetical curiosities mostly, to judge by her customs records. Harmless old gadgets and gewgaws from the Electric Empire. Though she also shops for medical supplies, and a little livestock. Just a lass, she was, when she registered with us. Eighteen years ago!”

“The year after London was destroyed,” said Tom. He unclipped the picture and turned it around. It had been taken long ago, when its subject was still a young woman, her curly hair a cloud of darkness. “It is Clytie Potts!” he murmured.

“Eh, sir?” The clerk was a little deaf. He cupped one hand to his ear while the other snatched back the photograph. “What’s that?”

“I think her real name is Potts,” said Tom.

The clerk shrugged. “Whatever it is, sir, the Sky Gods must like her. There’s not many last eighteen years in the air trade.” And to prove his point, he turned the ledger around and showed Tom and Wren the index pages, where, amid a long list of airships, there were many names crossed through in red, with neat little notes beside them saying things like “missing,” “crashed,” or “exploded at her moorings.”

The clerk thought that Ms. Morchard had bought her ship in the Traction City of Helsinki, and when Tom slipped a golden sovereign under the cover of the ledger, he suddenly recalled that she had purchased her at Unthank’s airship yard there. But where she had come from before that, where she had found the money for an airship, and what precisely her business was, he did not know; and, alas, old Mr. Unthank and all his records had been destroyed ten years ago when one of his apprentices lit a cigar inside the envelope of an unexpectedly leaky Cosgrove Cloudberry. (“You can still see the scorch marks along the edges of Helsinki air harbor,” the clerk said helpfully, as if he hoped it might earn him another sovereign, but it didn’t.)

Outside his little office, the High Street was starting to come to life, and stallholders were rolling up their shutters and laying out trays of vegetables and fruit, flowers, cheeses, and bolts of cloth. Watching them, Tom recalled following Anna Fang past these same stalls on a honey-colored evening twenty years before. It had been his first visit to Airhaven. He remembered how Hester had slunk along beside him, hiding herself from the gaze of passersby behind her upraised hand…

“Oh, Gods!” said Wren, stepping out of the harbor office behind him and pointing to someone on a nearby quay. “Look who it is!”

For an instant, confused by his memories, Tom thought that it might be Hester come to find them. He felt strangely disappointed when he saw a shapely aviatrix in a pink leather flying suit.

Wren was jumping excitedly up and down and calling, “Ms. Twombley! Ms. Twombley!”

The aviatrix, who had been deep in conversation with some of her comrades, looked around in surprise, then strode gracefully across the quay to find out who was hailing her with such enthusiasm. “It’s Orla Twombley,” Wren told her father. “She used to work for Brighton.” And as the aviatrix drew nearer, her puzzled frown changed into a smile of recognition. She and Wren had not known each other well, but each was glad to find that the other had come safely out of the battle on Cloud 9.

“It’s Wren, isn’t it?” Ms. Twombley asked, and took Wren’s hands in hers. “The little slave girl from the Pavilion? I had imagined you dead, or captured by the Storm. How good to see you safe and well! And this fine gentleman is your husband, I suppose?”

“Father,” said Tom, going bright red. “I’m Wren’s father.”

“And wasn’t I always thinking Wren was one of those Lost Girls!” cried Ms. Twombley, astonished. “A poor motherless orphan from away out in the western sea somewhere …”

“Motherless, but not fatherless,” said Wren. “It’s a long story. But I am glad to see you so well, Ms. Twombley. I thought you’d been shot down…”

“That was a bad night, to be sure,” the aviatrix admitted, and shook her head at the memory of the dogfights that had raged around Cloud 9. “But it’d take a lot more than a few Stalker birds and poxy old Fox Spirits to bring down my Combat Wombat. I re-formed the Flying Ferrets. We work for Adlai Browne, lord mayor of Manchester. He’s bringing his city up to the line, and he sent us ahead as his advance guard.”

Wren nodded. They had passed Manchester a week before, a huge, grimy city lumbering southeastward, bristling with cranes that had been busy fitting shiny new plates of antirocket armor over its upper tiers.

“But what has brought you here?” asked Orla Twombley. She looked expectantly at Tom, but Tom said