A Darkling Plain

the Resurrected on Murnau’s upper tiers. They all wanted to hear how this valiant old gentleman had managed to overcome the most terrible Stalker of them all.

But Pennyroyal, for once, seemed lost for words. His mouth hung open, he set down his fork, and one by one his listeners turned to see the newcomers standing in the doorway.

“Two old friends to see you, Professor!” said Orla Twombley, finding herself a place to sit among the Murnauers.

“Tom!” said Pennyroyal, standing. “And Wren! My dear child!”

He came to greet them with his arms outstretched. Their sudden appearance had surprised him, but he was genuinely happy to see them both. He had always felt guilty about shooting Tom, but by saving Wren from the Lost Boys, helping her fly The Arctic Roll to Kom Ombo, and then magnanimously allowing them to keep the little airship, he hoped that he had made up for that unfortunate incident at Anchorage. Now that Tom’s horrible wife had vanished, Pennyroyal felt glad to count the Natsworthys among his friends.

“My dears!” He beamed, hugging them each in turn. “How happy I am to see you! I was just telling my friends here about our adventures on Cloud 9, which are to be the subject of my forthcoming book. A respectable Murnau publishing house, Werederobe and Spoor, has paid a whopping advance for a modest account of my part in the downfall of the Stalker Fang and the rise of General Naga, that peace-loving gentleman. You will both feature in the tale, of course! After all, Wren, was it not you, my loyal former slave girl, who flew The Arctic Roll up to Cloud 9 to rescue me when all hope seemed gone?”

“Was it?” asked Wren. “That’s not how I remember it…”

“She is modesty itself!” cried Pennyroyal, glancing over his shoulder at his young friends, and to Wren herself, rather more urgently, he muttered, “I had to alter the facts a little, just here and there, to add some color, you know.”

Wren looked at her father, and they both shrugged. She thought how tiring it must be to be Pennyroyal, and build a past for yourself out of so many interlocking lies. He must have to spend such a lot of time tinkering with his stories to make sure they fitted, and surely he must live in fear of the day when the whole shaky edifice collapsed?

But perhaps Pennyroyal felt that the rewards made it all worthwhile. He certainly looked as if he were prospering. He wore an outfit of his own invention that managed to make him look important and military without actually being a uniform: a short, sky-blue dolman-sleeve tunic over a red waistcoat (both covered in frogging and pointless silver buttons), a lilac sash, purple breeches with gold embroidery and a six-inch crimson stripe, and bucket-topped boots with gold tassels. Compared to the Pennyroyal she had known in Brighton, Wren thought he looked quite tasteful and restrained.

He made room for Wren and Tom on his own couch, and invited them to help themselves to some of his breakfast while he introduced his friends. Wren was not used to meeting so many new people so quickly. She managed to grasp that the bespectacled man in civilian robes was Sampford Spiney, Murnau correspondent of a journal called The Speculum, who was writing a profile of Pennyroyal, and the quiet, bespectacled young woman clutching an enormous camera was his photographer, Miss Kropotkin. The rest of the introductions passed in a blur of ranks and names. The only person whom Wren was really interested in—a tall, lean young man who stood on his own by the stove—Pennyroyal seemed not to know, which was a pity. He wasn’t as handsome as some of the other young officers, and his old blue greatcoat was shabby and travel stained, but there was something magnetic about him that kept pulling her eyes back to his wry, watchful face.

Pennyroyal poured coffee for his guests, and there was some polite chat about the truce, the weather, and the handsome advance that Pennyroyal had been paid by his new publishers. Then he asked Tom, “How is the good old Arctic Roll? And what has caused you to bring her here?”

“She is the Jenny Haniver again now,” said Tom, “and we have come looking for someone. A lady.”

“Indeed?” Pennyroyal narrowed his eyes thoughtfully; he considered himself a bit of an expert on the fairer sex. “Anyone I might know?”

“I think so,” said Tom. “Her name is Cruwys Morchard.”

“Cruwys!” cried Pennyroyal. “Yes, by Poskitt, I know her well. Great Gods, but it must be twenty years since I first ran into her.” (The journalist Spiney scribbled in his notebook with a stub of pencil.) “She called on me at Cloud 9 a couple of times,” Pennyroyal went on. “Still flying that Archaeopteryx of hers, and still as big a mystery as ever…”

“Why a mystery, sir?” asked one of the Murnauers.

“Why, because nobody knows where she comes from,” said Pennyroyal. “Shall I tell you what I know of her? It is an extraordinary tale…”

“Oh, please do, Professor,” cried Wren. “And tell us just the truth, with no alteration of the facts or added color…”

“Oh, yes, please!” cried half of Pennyroyal’s audience, and “Bitte!” agreed the rest, when their Anglish-speaking friends had translated for them.

“Very well,” said Pennyroyal, but Wren’s request had made him nervous. “Perhaps I should say it is a fairly extraordinary tale. I believe I have heard stranger in my time. But Cruwys Morchard stays in my mind anyway, because of her extraordinary personal charms, and because of the way I met her.”

“It was in Helsinki, some nineteen years ago,” said Pennyroyal. “The city was hunting for semistats out near the Altai Shan. I was down in the Gut, paying a call on a very charming young salvage supervisor named Nutella Eisberg, when Ms. Morchard came aboard with a couple of companions— rough-looking coves, but touchingly devoted to her. Walked right in off the tundra, they did—the city’s jaws being open at the time so that the maintenance crews could clean its teeth—and asked the foreman of the Gut for sanctuary.

“It caused a bit of a stir, I can assure you! This was the year after London was destroyed. There had already been a few atrocities by Green Storm fanatics, and the cities of the eastern Hunting Ground were getting edgy. I think the Helsinki folk would have kicked Ms. Morchard and her friends straight back into the Out-Country, for fear they might be saboteurs or spies, but luckily I happened to be passing at the time, and I said I’d vouch for her. Her beauty touched me, d’you see? And her youth, of course, for at that time she was not much older than Wren is today.”

Everyone turned to stare at Wren, who blushed.

“I took Ms. Morchard to the city’s upper tier with me,” Pennyroyal continued, “and I even offered to let her come and stay in my own suite at the Uusimaa Hotel, if we could find suitable accommodations for her hairy friends. But she said, ‘I have no need of charity, sir. I have a great deal of money, and I have come to this city to buy an airship. If you wish to help me, perhaps you might introduce me to an honest secondhand airship dealer.’ Well I took her straight to old man Unthank. And do you know, she did have money! Wrapped up in a secret belt and concealed about that charming person were dozens of gold coins, and each of her companions was similarly burdened. I got a look at the stuff while she was bargaining with Unthank, and I recognized it at once; London gold, each piece stamped with the portrait of Quirke, the god of that unlucky city!

“You may imagine my astonishment! London was gone. Had I not seen with my own eyes the baleful flash of its explosion? ‘How did you come by all these Quirkes, my dear?’ I asked, and Ms. Morchard, after a moment’s confusion, confessed that she was an archaeologist, and that she had been hunting for salvage among the ruins of London!”

A ripple of excitement spread among Pennyroyal’s listeners. People whispered eagerly to one another in New German (a handsome language; the words had corners). Tom leaned forward eagerly in his chair. A young lady in a frock decorated with hundreds of blue eyes said, “But Herr Professor, London’s wreck is haunted!”

“Indeed,” replied Pennyroyal. “In the months that followed London’s destruction, a dozen different scavenger suburbs went hastening east to devour its twisted and blackened remains. None of them ever returned.”

“Because the air fleets of the old Anti-Traction League caught them as they neared the debris field and bombed them to bits,” said a clear, faintly mocking voice. The young man whom Wren had noticed earlier had come to the edge of the circle of Pennyroyal’s friends and was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, listening intently. His eyes twinkled. His long mouth widened sideways in something that was almost a sneer.

“So we are told, sir,” Pennyroyal agreed, glaring at him. “So we are told. But have we not all heard eerier rumors?”

The Murnauers nodded and muttered. It seemed they all had.