A Darkling Plain

on the morning after MEDUSA. Hester had been with him then; they had been cast adrift together in the Jenny, and she had comforted him, and made him turn away from the sight of his dying city. By the time he had looked again, the wind had blown them far from London.

“Do you want to land?” asked Wren.

Tom rubbed a hand quickly across his eyes and looked at Wolf. Wolf said, “Not yet. This is just the western edge of the debris fields. Nothing here but wheels and tracks and a few burned-out suburbs that came looking for salvage and got bombed by the Anti-Traction League…”

“Or blasted by the ghost lights,” joked Wren, and then wished she hadn’t, because the silly ghost stories she had heard in Moon’s did not seem silly at all now. The silent wreckage of London was slipping past on either side of the gondola: empty-windowed husks of broken buildings looming out of the night like a fleet of ghost ships.

“We’ll head eastward for a bit,” Tom decided.

The landscape beneath the Jenny Haniver was altering quickly. Soon she reached the main debris field, where the earth was completely hidden by deep, dense heaps of tangled scrap. She passed over a burned-out suburb, wheels and engine array dissolving into the greater ruin of the city it had come to feast on. Trees stirred softly in the clefts between steep-tilted jags of deck plate. Ahead the wreckage heaped upward into spiny hills. Tom sighted a flat place, half-hidden by the overhanging plates of a sloughed-off track, circled back to check it, and set the Jenny down quietly and carefully in the shadows there.

“Gosh!” whispered Wren in the silence that closed in once Tom had killed the engines.

Wolf Kobold opened the hatch, letting in cold, moist air and a smell of wet earth. “Nobody about,” he said. “No welcoming committee…”

Tom could feel his heart pounding. He struggled to calm himself. Furtively swallowing one of his green pills, he found an excuse to stay on the flight deck while Kobold and Wren busied themselves outside, tethering the Jenny securely with landing anchors and draping her engine pods and steering fins with the camouflage netting he had brought from Murnau. She was too big to hide, but with luck passing airships or Stalker-birds would miss her, tucked into that rusty cave of track plates with the netting softening her outlines.

They gathered the things they needed: their canvas packs; lanterns; the old gun that Tom had never used, taken down from the locker above his pilot’s chair. Outside, the sky above the debris fields was turning gray, stars fading as the dawn approached. They drank tea, and Wolf took a nip of something stronger from his hip flask.

“Perhaps you should stay here with the ship, Wren,” Tom suggested. “At least until we’ve had a look around…”

“We should stick together,” said Wolf firmly, and no one disagreed; they were on the ground again now, back in his realm, and they let him go ahead, a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, as they stepped out one by one into the shadows of the lost city.

It seemed silent at first. An eerie, awful, graveyard silence, broken only by the footfalls of the newcomers. The white gardens of the Moon must be this quiet, thought Tom. But gradually, as they picked their way along the narrow, aimless tracks, he became aware of small sounds. Drips of water pattered down from overhangs; a scrap of curtain flapped in an empty window; flakes of rust shifted and stirred, piled in deep drifts among the hollows of the wreckage.

“No one about,” muttered Wolf.

“How does it feel to be home, Dad?” asked Wren.

“Strange.” Tom stooped to run his fingers over a buckled metal sign that lay among the rust scraps underfoot, tracing the familiar name of a London street; FINCHLEY ROAD, TIER FOUR. “Strange and sad…”

“Quiet,” warned Wolf, standing a little ahead of the others, watchful, his gun in his hand.

“If there’s anyone here, they must have heard the Jenny’s engines when we set down,” Tom reminded him. “They know we’ve arrived. I wish they’d show themselves…”

A bird cried, away in the ruins somewhere. They pressed on eastward, pulling on their goggles to shield their eyes against the peach-colored glare of the rising sun. The debris fields had looked big from the windows of the Jenny Haniver, but from ground level they were simply vast. London was another country; a mountainous island whose central peaks stood several hundred feet high. Parts of the wreck were still recognizably the remains of a city; there were whole streets of empty-eyed buildings, and a row of upside-down shops with the fading, blistered signs still in place above—now below—their doors. But in other sections everything was so twisted, so jumbled up, so distorted that it was hard to say what it had been before MEDUSA. And twice, among the enormous heaps of rust, Tom made out subsidiary wrecks; the carcasses of suburbs. He remembered hearing in Murnau about suburbs that had gone to tear salvage from the wreck soon after it fell, and had never come back because the Anti-Traction League had bombed them. But these suburbs, deep in the ruins, one with its jaws still clamped around some tasty mass of scrap, did not show the scars of any bomb or rocket blasts. It looked to Tom as if the reason they had never gone home was because they had melted.

At the top of a low rise he stopped and shouted, “Hello!”

“Ssshh!” hissed Wolf, whirling around.

“Yes, Dad!” said Wren. “Someone will hear you!”

“That’s what we want, isn’t it?” asked Tom. “Didn’t we come here to find people, if there are people here at all? And Wolf, you said yourself that they weren’t hostile…” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted again, “Hello!” Echoes ran off and hid themselves among the wreckage. As they faded, there was a shrill, trilling whistle, but it was only another bird.

The path led through a shadowy canyon between the rust crags and then out into sunlight again. Tier- support pillars, broken gantries, and shards of deck plate lay jumbled together, blackened and fused by unimaginable heat. The travelers scrambled over a tangle of rusting six-inch hawser, like gnats creeping through a bowl of congealed spaghetti. Beyond it a wrenched rind of deck plate arched over the pathway. As they passed beneath it Wren sensed movement above her and looked up, but it was only a bird—a nice, ordinary, non- Stalkerized bird—gliding higher and higher on the thermals that were rising from the sun-warmed wreck. They moved on, passing through the cool shade of the arch and out into sunlight again.

And behind them a sudden babble of shouts and howls broke out, spinning them around, making Wolf curse and Wren grab for her father’s hand.

The steep screes of rust flakes beside the path had come alive with raggedy, careering figures, and more were letting themselves down on ropes from hiding places in that twisted arch. Wolf aimed his gun at one of them, but Tom shouted, “No, don’t!” and snatched at his arm so that the shot went wide. Before Wolf could fire again, he was surrounded by grimy young people with homemade weapons, all shouting, “Hands up!” and “Don’t move!” and “Throw down your guns!” Some of them had feathers in their hair, and had drawn stripes of rusty mud across their faces like war paint. One, a girl in a grubby white rubber coat, jumped down close to Wren and pointed a crude crossbow at her.

Wren had had all sorts of things pointed at her since leaving Anchorage—everything from clunky old Lost Boy gas pistols to shiny new machine guns. It never got boring. She knew of nothing quite so uncomfortable as finding that your life was suddenly in the hands of someone you had never met, who did not seem to like you very much, and who could snuff you out in an instant by simply squeezing a trigger. She raised her hands and smiled weakly at the crossbow girl, hoping she wasn’t prone to twitchy fingers.

Tom was trying to explain to his captors that he was a Londoner and a Third Class Apprentice in the Guild of Historians, but they didn’t seem interested. Someone had snatched Wolf’s pistol and was pointing it at him. Wolf looked so angry and ashamed at being captured that Wren felt sorry for him, and wished she could think of something she could say to comfort him. It had not been his fault, and she was glad that her father had stopped him from shooting anybody.

The man who seemed to be the leader of the ambush came stumping over to peer suspiciously at Wren. He was older than the others, short and squarish, with cropped gray hair and a tattoo just above the bridge of his nose in the shape of a little green compass. Wren sensed that he was afraid of her, which was a bit rich when you considered that he had a dozen heavily armed juvenile delinquents on his side. He was clutching a gun of his own; a strange thing, covered in wires and tubes, with a flat zinc disk where the muzzle ought to be.

“Well, young woman?” he demanded tetchily. “What is your game? What are you doing in London?”

Wren tilted her chin at him and tried to look haughty. “We’ve come to see Clytie Potts,” she said.

“What?” The man looked surprised. “You know Clytie?”

“This one keeps saying he’s a Londoner, Mr. Garamond,” shouted one of the boys who had captured