A Darkling Plain

If so, it was more beautiful than any washing line he’d seen before; so bright, so shimmer. He put his hand out to touch it, and his fingers slid straight through it. It was made from warm light.

Theo sat up. There were more of the cords stretched all across the cabin, like a cat’s cradle. Every now and then there would be a thud against the hull and another would appear. They were shafts of sunlight, poking in through the bullet holes that were appearing in the cabin walls.

Dizzy with sleep, Theo rolled off the bunk and landed on the deck. The smooth wood bucked beneath him as the sand ship sped over the rough desert floor. Theo started crawling toward the metal ladder at the rear of the cabin. He could hear shouting above him, and the slam and cough of handguns. As he reached the foot of the ladder, a man came down it headfirst, dead, his turban smoldering where the flash from Hester’s pistol had set it on fire. Theo looked up the ladder through the open hatch. A confusion of struggling shapes blocked out the sun.

He climbed the ladder. Out on the deck in the white, blinding light a scruffy battle was taking place, almost silent apart from the stamp and scuff of feet on the deck boards. A ragged brown dune runner was keeping pace with the sand ship, attached to it by ropes and grappling hooks. Men had jumped across the gap, thinking it would be easy to overpower a one-eyed woman and a Stalker who would not kill, but three of them were already dead, tangled in the rigging or draped across the rail. A fourth was struggling with Grike, who had taken his gun and was holding him away from Hester. A fifth circled Hester, who had thrown her empty pistols aside and was holding a knife, jabbing it at the man each time he lunged at her. He had a sword, much longer and heavier than Hester’s knife, but he had not yet worked up the courage to get close enough to use it.

Theo stood unnoticed in the cabin hatchway. The fight and the desert swirled around him; the heat and light came down on his head like a fall of bright water. On the deck at his feet lay a boarding axe, and the light seemed to pour from its blade. He picked it up and hacked at the rope that stretched from the nearest of the grappling hooks. The rope was old and greasy and parted easily after a few blows. The sand ship lurched, starting to pull away from its attacker. Theo scrambled toward the next hook. “Theo!” he heard Hester shout. He looked up. A man stood in the dune runner’s rigging, grinning at Theo and aiming a blunderbuss. Hornets were buzzing past, and Theo felt one sting his arm. A knife appeared, sticking out of the man’s neck, and he dropped the blunderbuss and fell out of the rigging into the storm of sand between the two ships.

Theo looked at Hester. She had flung her knife at the man with the blunderbuss, and now she was defenseless. Without thinking he swung the flat of his hatchet at the swordsman who was attacking her. The man still hadn’t noticed Theo, and the blow caught him by surprise. He crashed sideways against the rail and over it, away into the swirling dust. Grike dropped the man he had captured down after him, and Theo saw them clamber to their feet in the sand ship’s wake and stagger painfully away, waving at the surviving ships, which were slowing and starting to turn, dismayed by their losses and abandoning the chase. “Good work,” said Hester.

Theo nodded, still dizzy, but proud that he had won her respect.

“You all right?” she asked.

He looked down at his arm, where the hornet had stung. It hadn’t really been a hornet, of course, but the wound was a scratch, not deep. He knelt on the deck and watched Hester pick up the hatchet and cut the remaining ropes. As the dune runner veered away, pilotless, she turned and said, “Stupid! I didn’t rescue you so you could get yourself killed.” But Theo sensed beneath her scorn a sort of rough kindness, and remembered the gentle way she had sat with him in the night, and knew that she was not so unlike Wren after all.

The dust was clearing. The black ship ran on, slowing now, because its sails were full of holes. It began to pass through the shadows of tall towers of rock around whose summits hopeful vultures wheeled. Some of the towers looked like crude, wind-worn statues, and perhaps they were, for all sorts of civilizations had made their mark on the old earth, and some had left some very strange things behind. The towers filled the desert ahead, whittled by the wind into flutes through which the dry breeze moaned. In their crisscross shadows Theo began to feel safe again.

The sand ship slowed, slowed, and came into a shady place where dwarf acacia trees grew. Grike flung out the anchor and furled the sails. He jumped overboard and scaled one of the smaller towers, climbing the fissured rock quickly and easily like a steel lizard. He stood for a while on the summit and then clambered down, calling out that the pursuers had turned tail, and that nothing else was moving in the desert. The sand ship creaked under his weight as he came back aboard. Theo, who had always hated Stalkers, recoiled from him.

Grike sensed the boy’s unease, “I will not harm you,” he said. “even if i wanted to, i could not.”

“Why?” asked Theo, remembering how Grike had spared the man he’d caught during the battle. “That’s what Stalkers are for, isn’t it? Harming people?”

Grike’s steel teeth gleamed as he tried to smile, ” not in dr. zero’s opinion.”

“Dr. Zero? She built you?”

“i was built by the nomad empires. i am older than the storm. older than municipal darwinism. the last of the lazarus brigade. but i was rebuilt by oenone zero, and she must have altered me. now if i think of killing once-born, my head fills with pictures of all the once-born i hurt and killed before, and i cannot do it.”

“Dr. Zero’s here!” said Theo eagerly, remembering his promise to protect Oenone. “She’s aboard Cutler’s Gulp! She’s called Lady Naga now. They said she was being sold to that trader Varney… We have to go back! We have to help her!”

Hester, coming out of the cabin with food and the makings of a fire, looked coldly at him. “We don’t have to do anything, boy. We’re not going back. And if you mean Napster Varley, I saw his Humbug lift off from the Gulp as we were pulling away. Anything he bought there he’ll have taken with him.”

Grike hissed like a thoughtful kettle. “WE COULD GO AFTER HIM.”

“Not you as well!” cried Hester angrily. “For all the gods’ sakes, Grike, she’s the vet who neutered you! What do you care if she’s been ’slaved?”

Noises came from inside Grike’s armored skull. Theo wondered if they were the sounds of thoughts whizzing through the Stalker’s brain. “IF I CAN FIND HER, SHE WILL TELL ME WHY SHE HAS DONE THIS TO ME. WE COULD GO NORTH, SELL THE SAND SHIP AND BUY AN AIRSHIP. NAPSTER VARLEY’S VESSEL IS SLOW. ITS WIDMERPOOL-12 AERO-ENGINES ARE INEFFICIENT. WE COULD CATCH IT UP DESPITE HIS HEAD START.”

Hester turned away from him and kicked the gunwales of her sand ship. “I like the desert,” she said angrily. “It’s good. It’s simple. It’s clean. I can make a living here.”

“YOU ARE NO MORE ALIVE THAN ME,” said Grike.

“No?” Hester glared at him. She was good at glaring; she could glare better with that one eye than most people could with two. “Well, isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you always want to make a Stalker of me, so we could wander about dead together?” She appealed to Theo. “Grike wants to make me like him. That’s the only reason he’s stayed with me since Cloud 9 came down. He’s not got the stomach anymore to kill me himself, so he’s been waiting for one of these sand rats to do it for him. Then he’ll take my carcass to his old friends in the Storm and get me Resurrected.”

“Oh!” said Theo, horrified. Resurrection was the worst fate he could imagine, yet Hester spoke of it as if it were nothing.

“I won’t care,” she said. “I’ll be dead. He can do what he wants with what’s left.”

“no,” said Grike. If he could have whispered, he would have whispered it, but all Grike’s words came out the same, loud and sharp and scraping. He wished Oenone Zero had done something about his voice instead of tinkering with his brain. He said, ” when your death comes, i will have you resurrected, as we agreed long ago. but i can wait. i want to see you live again and be happy. you will be neither while you stay in this desert.”

Hester sat down and hid her face in one hand. She was only in her middle thirties, but she looked ten years older, and very tired. Theo felt sorry for her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he didn’t think she’d like that. He glanced at Grike, but the Stalker seemed to have said all that he was going to.

“Mrs. Natsworthy,” said Theo, “it’s not just Dr. Zero who’s in danger. It’s lots of people. The truce depends on her. Who knows what General Naga might do if he doesn’t get her back? He loves her.”

“He’s a fool, then,” muttered Hester. “People shouldn’t love each other. It only leads to trouble.” She looked at Theo. “I don’t care about your truce. I don’t care about General Naga or this wife of his.”

She jumped down onto the sand and started walking away from the ship, gathering dry acacia branches to make a fire. Although she kept her back to Grike and Theo, she knew that they were both watching her. She felt shivery, and cold despite the heat, as if she had a fever coming on, but she knew it wasn’t fever.

At first, when she’d found herself alone with Grike, she had been terrified. She had remembered his ghoulish