A Darkling Plain

asked, taking his hand. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“Well, you’re here now,” she told him, leading him in through the familiar portico. The dinosaur skeletons in the main hall all turned their bony heads to look at him, and mooed their greetings. “Now you can get on with the rest of your life,” said Clytie. He looked past her and saw his own reflection in a sheet of ancient tinfoil that hung in one of the cabinets, and he was not old and ill-looking but well again, and young.

“Dad?” asked Clytie, turning into Wren, and he woke reluctantly to the stuffy dark of Harrowbarrow, groping for his green pills.

“Are you all right?” Wren asked him. “We’re nearly at the line. Wolf says to make ready…”

The thought that they would soon be leaving made Tom feel a little better; so did the pleasant memory of his dream. He dressed and followed Wren aft to the hangar near the suburb’s stern, where the Jenny Haniver sat waiting to resume her journey. Wolf met them there. “Get your stuff aboard,” he ordered. “Be ready to move out as soon as I come back.”

“Where are you going?” asked Tom, surprised that they were not to take off at once.

“To the bridge. We are not across the line yet, Herr Natsworthy. I am arranging for a little distraction so that the Mossies don’t spot us crossing.”

He left, hurrying forward along one of Harrowbarrow’s tubular streets. Tom and Wren stowed their bags in the Jenny’s gondola, then waited outside, standing close together in the noisy turmoil of the hangar. The note of the idling engines changed suddenly, rising from a murmur to a scream, and Wren grabbed at Tom for support as the suburb surged forward.

“What’s happening?”

Tom was not sure, but even in the windowless hangar there was an immense feeling of speed. With all its auxiliary engines churning, Harrowbarrow raced along the track mark, throwing up a thick bow wave of soil and vegetation as it rose to the surface. The startled Green Storm soldiers had time to fire off a few salvos of rockets, which burst harmlessly against the suburb’s armor. Then the barriers, the fortresses, and the rocket projectors were slammed aside as Harrowbarrow tore through the front line into Storm territory. Sally ports popped open in her flanks, and squads of fierce scavengers swarmed out with guns and knives and maces to attack the survivors scrambling from their dugouts. With a steep skirl of engines Harrowbarrow swung itself sideways, smashing the walls of the track mark down, toppling a watchtower.

A moment later Wolf ran into the hangar, shouting, “Go! Go!” and yelling orders in Roma and German to the men waiting by the hangar door controls. Heaving on brass handles, they started to haul the doors open. As smells of damp earth and cordite swilled into the hangar, Tom and Wren caught their first glimpse of what was happening outside. In the red glow of countless fires a battle was raging across the steep, mashed sides of the track mark. Harrowbarrow was still turning, so the scene slid past quickly, but there was time to see the flattened barracks blocks, the spiky tangles of barbed wire showing spidery against the flames, and the figures struggling and slithering and scrambling in the mud; the flash of gunfire; the glint of blades, the sliding, tumbling dead.

“Get aboard!” shouted Wolf, shoving Wren up the Jenny’s gangplank. “We must be well on our way before reinforcements arrive.”

“All this, just so we can cross the line?” cried Tom. “You never said—”

“I said I would get you across.” Wolf shrugged. “I did not say how. I thought you realized there would be a little unpleasantness involved.”

“But the truce …,” said Wren.

“The truce will hold; we’ve given them no reason to think we’re part of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft…”

“All those poor people…”

Hurrying her onto the flight deck, Wolf grinned kindly at her, as if her softheartedness amused him. “They’re not people, Wren; only Mossies. They chose to live like animals on the bare earth. Now they will die like animals…”

Harrowbarrow had turned right around now; its bows pointed back the way it had come; its stern, and the open doors of the hangar, pointed east into Storm country. Tom was working frantically at the Jenny’s controls. Wren felt the engines coming to life, but she could not hear them above the louder roar of Harrowbarrow’s own engines and the battle going on outside. A few bullets sparked against the frame of the hangar doors, but most of the Green Storm defenses had been silenced. Wolf slapped Tom hard between the shoulder blades and shouted, “Go! Fly! Now!” Tom glanced at Wren and then, grabbing the control levers, he cut the power to the Jenny’s mooring clamps and took her quickly up and forward, out of the hangar, eastward along the foggy floor of the track mark.

Wren left the flight deck and ran aft to the stern cabin.

Through the long window there she had her last sight of Harrowbarrow, a leviathan wreathed in fog and battle smoke, rearing up to gobble and crush another Green Storm fortress before it sank down into the track mark and drove westward. The Jenny was flying fast, the branches of trees in the floor of the track mark scratching and snatching at the gondola’s keel. Soon even the glow of the fires faded into the fog astern, and there was no sound but the familiar purr of the Jeunet-Carot engines.

“I doubt any Mossies noticed us leave,” said Wolf. How long had he been standing behind her? Wren turned. He was watching her kindly, eager to allay her fears. “If they did, my boys will have killed them by now. Hausdorfer will smash a few more of their defenses and then head back into the badlands before reinforcements come. The Storm will think it was only a greedy scavenger town, hungry for scrap metal and Mossie blood. They won’t come looking for us.”

“You didn’t tell us,” said Wren coldly. “You said it would be easy to cross the line! You didn’t say we’d have to fight a battle.”

“That was easy,” said Wolf. “You can’t even imagine what a real battle’s like, Fraulein Aviatrix.”

Wren pushed past him and went back to the flight deck. Tom was staring out through the big forward windows: nothing out there but mist. Sometimes a buttress of earth and rocks where the wall of the track mark they were flying in had partially collapsed. Each time that happened, Tom would make a quick, calm adjustment to the steering levers, guiding the Jenny expertly around it. Wren envied him for having something to concentrate on. All she could think of were those struggling figures she’d glimpsed through the hangar doors. She felt guilty for having been part of the attack, and more and more afraid. Despite what Wolf said, she was sure the Storm must know that the Jenny Haniver had pierced their line; at any moment rockets or Stalker-birds would come howling out of the mist, and they would be the last thing she would see.

“I’m sorry,” said her father softly, sounding as shocked and miserable as her. “When he said he knew a place where we could cross, I just thought …”

Wren said, “How could he do that? All those people?”

“There’s a war on, Wren,” Tom reminded her. “Wolf’s a soldier.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “I think he enjoys it.”

“Some people are like that,” agreed Tom. He had recognized the light in Wolf’s eyes as the battle raged; Hester had had the same look, that night at the Pepperpot when she’d murdered Shkin’s guards. He said, “Wolf has some strange ideas, but then he’s led a strange life. He’s very young, and he’s never known anything but war. Underneath, I think, he’s a decent young man.”

“Must be pretty deep underneath,” said Wren.

Tom smiled. “I knew a man called Chrysler Peavey once. A pirate mayor, boss of a suburb nearly as fierce as Harrowbarrow, but he wanted more than anything to be a gentleman. Wolf’s the other way round: a gentleman who wants to be a pirate. But there’s another side to him. He’s treated us well, hasn’t he? Now that we’ve got him away from his suburb, we might see that side of him again.”

Wren nodded cautiously, as if wishing she could believe him. Tom wished he believed himself. He had been wrong to accept Wolf’s offer, he was certain of that now. What would become of Wren if anything happened to him on this flight and she was left with only Wolf Kobold to look after her?

But as the Jenny flew on, mile after lonely mile, and no rockets or birds appeared, he began to feel more hopeful, and started to remember the sense of peace that had come to him with his dream of the museum. He did not like what Kobold had done, but at least they were on their way. From somewhere ahead, beyond these midnight plains, he could feel the tug of London’s gravity, drawing the Jenny