A Darkling Plain

Marshes and found its way at last into the Sea of Khazak. The sea had been a battlefield not long before, and there were sunken suburbs and drowned airships lying all over its silty floor. Fishcake burgled their rusting fuel tanks and surfaced in a cleft on the rocky shore of the Black Island to recharge the limpet’s batteries. Then he submerged again and pressed on eastward.

The Spider Baby had passed beyond the edge of Lost Boy charts weeks earlier, but Fishcake’s Stalker seemed to have a map of this country in her mind. Beyond the sea a broad river curved down out of the eastern hills. Fishcake did as she told him, following the river east, past Green Storm airbases and under bridges rumbling with convoys of half-tracks and armored trains. Pontoons had been stretched across the river in case townie raiders tried to sneak inland in boats, but the Spider Baby slid under them, passing like a ghost through the lands of the Storm.

“Why don’t you make yourself known?” asked Fishcake, looking through the periscope at settled statics, farmland, the green lightning-bolt banners flapping confidently from forts and temples. “These are your people, aren’t they? When they see that you’re alive—”

“They betrayed me,” his Stalker hissed. “The Once-Born have failed me. They follow Naga now. I shall make the world green again without them.”

“But you’ll have me, won’t you?” said Fishcake nervously. “I can help you, can’t I?”

His Stalker did not answer him. But later, while he was resting, he woke to find her sitting at his side. She was Anna again, and she touched his hair with her cold hand and whispered, “You are a good boy, Fishcake. I am so glad of you. I should have had a son of my own. I should have liked to watch a child grow, and play. I never see you play, Fishcake. Would you like to play a game?”

Fishcake felt himself turn hot with shame. “I don’t know any games,” he murmured. “They didn’t—at the Burglarium— I mean, I don’t know how to.”

“Poor Fishcake,” the Stalker whispered. “And poor Anna.”

Fishcake huddled himself on her lap, wrapping his arms around her battered metal body and laying his head against her hard chest, listening to the tick and shush of the weird machines inside her. “Mummy,” he said quietly, just to find out what shape the word made in his mouth. He did not remember calling anybody that before. “Mummy.” He was crying, and the Stalker comforted him, stroking his head with her clumsy hands and whispering an old Chinese lullaby that Anna Fang had heard in her own childhood, on the bird roads, long ago.

And Fishcake slept, and did not wake until she turned into the Stalker Fang again and stood up, dumping him onto the floor.

Mile by mile, up rivers, through marshes, clumping on its eight steel feet through empty valleys, the Spider Baby edged its way eastward. One night, when Fishcake went out onto the hull to breathe fresh air, the moonlit mountains of Shan Guo stretched along the horizon ahead of him like a white smile.

The river shallowed, choked with rocks and boulders that spring floods had washed from the overhanging hillsides. The Spider Baby moved only by night, stalking up white rushing rapids in the starlight, hiding at dawn in the dense forests of pine and rhododendron that cloaked the riverbanks. The Stalker Fang grew impatient during these delays; she bared her claws and listened enviously to the convoys of Green Storm airships that passed overhead from time to time. But when she was Anna, she liked the forests. She held Fishcake’s hand and led him down the quiet, resin-scented aisles between the trees, or turned girlish and silly and threw pine-cones at him. “We’re playing!” she whispered excitedly, as he chased after her laughing, throwing pinecones of his own. “Fishcake, this is what playing feels like!”

Fishcake lived for the times when she was Anna. He hated the Stalker Fang, and Anna did too. “She scares me,” she told him once. “The other one. So cold and fierce. When she comes, I can’t even hear myself think…”

But the Stalker Fang was scared of Anna, too. Each time she regained control, her first question was always, “How long was I malfunctioning? What did the Error do? What did it say?” That was her name for the Anna part of her: the Error.

“This unit is damaged,” she declared. “I need repair.”

“I don’t know how,” whined Fishcake. “I don’t know anything about Stalker brains.” If he had, he would have shut down the Fang part of her and made her be Anna all the time. Then they could take the Spider Baby away into the empty mountains somewhere and live there and be happy together, the Lost Boy who wanted a mother and the dead woman who wanted a child. But he knew it was hopeless. If the Fang part of her found out that Fishcake had tried to help the Error, she would kill him.

So he went east and north with her, following her whispery directions, while the river grew steeper and narrower, until one night the Spider Baby surfaced in the plunge pool beneath a tall white waterfall and Fishcake realized that it could carry them no farther. At first he felt relieved. But the Stalker Fang was not disheartened for a moment. “We shall leave the limpet here and walk,” she whispered.

“Walk to where?” asked Fishcake.

“To talk to ODIN.”

“How far is it?”

“It is two hundred and ninety-four miles away.”

“I can’t walk that far!” protested Fishcake.

“Then stay here,” his Stalker said. She left the limpet and started to feel her way up the steep, spray-wet ladder of rocks beside the cataract. Fishcake quickly filled a burgling bag with provisions, ready to go after her. When he scrambled out onto the hull, he found her waiting for him. She was still the Stalker Fang. She had decided that he might be useful to her after all.

“There is a hermitage on Zhan Shan,” she whispered. “We shall break the journey there.”

Zhan Shan was a volcano so huge and high that Fishcake had been piloting the Spider Baby across its lower slopes for days without even noticing. The whole world seemed to form the roots of Zhan Shan, and its head was lost above the clouds. The narrow tracks that wound up and up across the lava fields were lined with shrines. Raggedy silk prayer flags clapped and fluttered and tore away in wisps of silk and cotton, carrying prayers to the realms of the Sky Gods.

“This is a holy mountain,” said Fishcake’s Stalker, turning into Anna again and picking him up, because the path was steep and the air thin and he was close to exhaustion. He wondered why she had come back now. Had it been the sound of those flags flapping that had woken her?

“No one knows how it came to be,” she whispered. “Perhaps it was the Gods who put it here, perhaps the Ancients. Something ripped the land open, and the hot blood of the earth welled out and made Zhan Shan and all the young mountains north of here. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun. The winter lasted for decades. But look how beautiful this land is now!”

“You can’t see it.”

“I remember it. I loved these mountains, when I was alive. It is good to be home.”

After a day and a night, Fishcake saw a light ahead, twinkling at him through the twilight and the silent- falling snow. They passed a field where a few hairy cattle stood with blankets of snow on their backs. Beyond it lay a tiny house with a steep roof and eaves that curled up at the corners like burning paper. It was built from the black volcanic stone of the mountainside, but there were shutters and a pillared porch made of carved wood painted red and gold and blue, which gave it a cheerful look. A dog trotted out to greet the travelers, then slunk off whimpering when it sniffed the Stalker.

“What is this place?” Anna whispered.

“Don’t you know?” asked Fishcake. “You brought us here.”

“I have never been here before. I just followed the road the other me set us on.”

Fishcake looked critically at the little house. “She said there was a hermitage. She said we’d break our journey there. Is this it?”

His Stalker did not know.

The door had two gold eyes to ward off evil. Fishcake thumped with his small fist on the planks between them. He heard a movement behind the door, then silence. He knocked again. Above, on the sheer buttresses of the mountain, the evening mist made ghosts.

The door opened. A person in a red robe of some thick, crude-woven fabric. A woman, Fishcake decided. She had a brown face, hollow and large eyed, and her hair had been shaved down to a shadow on her bony skull. “We need food, please, Missis, and water,” Fishcake began, but the woman was not even looking at him. She stared