breath, hoping that nothing would delay his departure from the Gulp. Grandma’s boys had slung Lady Naga into his hold a few minutes before, and he was shivery with excitement at the thought of the price she would fetch out on the line. If he lingered too long, Grandma Gravy might think better of selling her. So he didn’t run outside to watch the sand ship go racing off across the desert. He ordered his wife to put the baby down and go fire up the engines, and blacked her eye when she did not go quick enough. “Move it, you dozy mare!” he shouted, over the baby’s wailing. “Let’s leave these sand hoppers to their squabbles. We’ve business to attend to!”
Chapter 11
Wolf Kobold
Tom was uncertain about accepting Wolf Kobold’s invitation; he had been brought up to know his place, and he knew that it wasn’t on the Oberrang, which towered above the rest of Murnau like an ornate crown. It took Wren several hours to persuade him.
“You really need to talk to this Wolf person,” she told him. “He seemed so interested in what you had to say about Clytie Potts. I’m sure he knows something.”
Tom shook his head. “I’m not sure I really believe any of that myself. It was just an idea; I have no proof. Pennyroyal didn’t believe it, and he’s the man who claims that Ancient rubbish bins were really ritual centers and that the Ancients had machines called ‘eye-pods’ where they could store thousands of songs on tiny little gramophone records. If
Wren tried another tack. “Don’t you think it would be good for my education, though? To mix a little in high society? Orla said she has a friend who can lend you formal robes.”
It was hard work, but she won him over in the end. Next afternoon they went aboard Murnau and took an elevator to the Oberrang, Tom looking awkward in his borrowed robes, Wren wearing her usual aviatrix’s gear, because she felt it suited her and she knew that nothing she could buy in the bazaars of Airhaven could compete with the finery the rich ladies would be wearing. Looking around at her fellow passengers as the elevator grumbled upward, she wondered if she had made the right decision; she drew some strange looks from the smart officers in their blue dress uniforms and the ladies in elaborate hats and gowns. She heard several people whisper, “Who is that extraordinary girl?”
It was a relief when the elevator stopped and she took Tom’s arm and walked out of the terminus building with him, into bright sunlight. Like the rest of Murnau the Oberrang was covered by an armored roof, but large sections had been folded open to let in the light and air. The party-goers walked toward the spiky bulk of the town hall along a boulevard called Uber den Linden, with a glass pavement through which you could look down on the trees in a park on the tier below. It must have been beautiful in the old days, before the war, but now the trees were all dead, and the bare, scratchy branches reaching up toward her gave Wren an eerie feeling.
A broad swathe of parkland ringed the Rathaus, Murnau’s gothic town hall. There, upon a sparse, patched, mossy lawn, the kriegsmarschall’s garden party was getting underway. Brightly colored pavilions and marquees had been erected, and lines of colored flags strung among the dead trees and the battle-damaged colonnades, along with Chinese lanterns that would be lit later, when it grew dark. Enormous numbers of people were wandering about, for the kriegsmarschall of Murnau was entertaining the mayors and councillors of all the other cities in the cluster. A band played on a flag-decked podium, and people were dancing complicated, formal dances that looked more like applied mathematics than the old-fashioned northern jigs and reels that Wren had learned in Vineland. She wished she had listened to her father and stayed away from this do. She’d only once attended anything as grand as this; that had been on Cloud 9, and she had been there as a slave, handing around trays of drinks and nibbles.
She was just about ready to flee back to the elevators when Wolf detached himself from a small group of officers standing near the band and came to greet her. He had smartened himself a little, but even in formal uniform and a scarlet sash there was something faintly careless and shabby about him. The sword at his side was heavier and cheaper than the ornate ceremonial weapons the other men wore; it looked as if it had been
Wren was not used to having her hand kissed. She blushed and bobbed a curtsy. Wolf’s thumb brushed the raised weal on the back of her hand: the brand of the Shkin Corporation, whose property she had been in Brighton. She snatched her hand away quickly, ashamed, but Wolf just looked inquisitively at her, as if it did not trouble him at all that she had been a slave.
“You have led an interesting life, Fraulein Natsworthy,” he said, taking her arm, leading her and Tom through the busy garden.
“Not really, Mr. von Kobold. But I suppose I’ve packed in quite a bit in the last six months or so…”
“Please,” he said, “call me Wolf. Or at least Mr. Kobold. ‘Von’ is an old honorary title; my parents use it, but I have no time for such nonsense.” He bent closer to Wren and said, “You need not feel ill at ease among these silly women in their silly frocks. Most of them have been living in safer cities than Murnau since the war began, and have only come back now that the guns are quiet. Look at them! They are like overgrown children. They know nothing of real life at all.”
Wren felt glad of his company, and pleased at the slightly envious way the Murnau women watched as she walked by with him, but it disturbed her a little that he had been able to guess so easily how she was feeling.
“You must forgive me for bringing you here,” Wolf went on, addressing Tom. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk. I had not realized how lavishly my family entertain since this foolish truce began. Come, we will go inside…”
He steered them past the bandstand toward the looming, armored walls of the Rathaus, but halfway there they were headed off by a formidable-looking lady in a gown of gray silk so stiff and pointy that she looked armored, too. “Wolf, dear heart,” she said sweetly, “everyone is asking me who your friends are.”
Wolf bowed neatly and indicated Wren and her father. “Mother, let me present Tom Natsworthy, an aviator, and his daughter, Wren. Tom, Wren, my mother, Anya von Kobold.”
“Delighted,” said his mother, though she seemed rather pained as she looked Tom and Wren up and down, as if it physically hurt her to meet anyone so common. “Wolf has developed such quaint, democratickal notions since my husband gave him command of Harrowbarrow, one simply doesn’t know
“Ignore her,” said Wolf, as his mother moved on to greet a clump of aldermen and their wives. “She knows nothing of life out here on the line. She deserts Murnau whenever the fighting starts, and flies off to a hotel on the upper tiers of Paris. All she knows or cares about are clothes and pastries.”
He spoke loudly enough for his mother to hear, and a lot of the other guests looked around, shocked and disapproving. Tom, embarrassed, asked innocently, “Harrowbarrow? Is that the name of your suburb? I don’t believe I’ve heard of it…”
Wolf stopped glaring at his mother’s broad back and smiled. “It is very small, sir, barely a suburb at all; just a little specialized place that came into Murnau’s possession during the war. But it is my own, you know, and I have hopes for it, high hopes.”
As he ushered them into the Rathaus, Wren wondered what sort of place it might be, this Harrowbarrow. The fighting suburbs she had seen on the journey east had looked horrible: low, vicious, and armored like wood lice. Yet Wolf spoke of his with affection. She supposed it was the same sort of pride you met among aviators, who would never hear a bad word about their own ship, even if she was just some leaky sky tug…
Once they were inside, the sounds of the garden party quickly faded. Wolf took his guests into a large, silent room where slender metal pillars held up the roof, giving Wren the feeling that she had stepped into an iron forest. There were chairs, and they all sat down while Wolf rang the bell for a servant and ordered refreshments. Then he waited a moment, studying Tom and Wren as if he were not quite sure that he had done the right thing in bringing them here.
“London,” he said at last. His face twisted into the same wry grin it had worn the previous day when he was listening to Pennyroyal’s story. “I understand that you were once a Londoner yourself, Herr Natsworthy?”
