A Darkling Plain

Tom.

“Rubbish!” The man looked at Wren again, chewing his lower lip as he considered what to do.

“Very well, everyone,” he said at last. “Bind the prisoners’ hands. We shall take them to the lord mayor.”

Chapter 19 The Holloway Road

With their hands tied in front of them, surrounded by the fierce-looking young Londoners, the travelers resumed their journey. Their captors did not lead them east, into the heart of the debris field, as they had expected, but turned north instead. The girl guarding Wren pointed with her crossbow toward the central heights and said, “Lots of ’ot zones in there. Round ’ere, too, only not so bad. If you’d kept going, you’d have ended up slap bang in Electric Lane. Nasty.”

Wren had no idea what she was talking about, and before she could ask, Mr. Garamond shouted angrily, “Be quiet, Angie Peabody! Stop fraternizing with the scavengers!”

“I ain’t fraternizing with nobody!” cried the girl indignantly.

“We aren’t scavengers,” said Tom politely. “We are simply—”

“Be quiet!” insisted Garamond, like a teacher struggling to keep an unruly class in order. He held up his hand for silence. Around his neck on a length of cord hung a curious little machine with many aerials, and he was frowning at a gauge on its top. “Sprite!” he shouted suddenly. “Everybody down!”

His young followers obeyed him instantly, flinging themselves down in the mud and pulling Tom, Wren, and Wolf down with them. There was a faint buzzing sound that grew quickly louder and higher pitched until it passed beyond the reach of human hearing; then a gigantic arc of lightning crackled across a gap between two spires of melted deck plate.

“What was that?” gasped Wren, trying to rub the afterimage off her eyes as crossbow girl helped her to her feet.

“Lingering energy from MEDUSA,” said Tom’s guard cheerfully. “We call ’em ‘sprites.’ That one was pretty pathetic compared with the monsters we used to get. In the old days the whole of London was hot.”

“Please be quiet, Will Hallsworth,” shouted Mr. Garamond, waving the party onward. Hallsworth glanced at Wren and grimaced like a cheeky schoolboy, making her smile. She decided that she had been captured by far worse people than these young Londoners in her time.

The path they were following veered away from the deeper ruins, and they passed through no more hot zones. Twice they crossed places that were almost free of wreckage, stretches of open ground where crops were ripening. Among the rubble heaps scrap-metal windmills rose like rusty sunflowers.

They descended into a broad, V-shaped valley, whose walls were dead buildings and whose muddy floor lay deep in shadow. Looking up, Wren saw that the sky was hidden by the branches of overhanging trees and by a complicated mesh of knotted ropes and hawsers, through which dead branches and scraps of fabric had been threaded, forming a sort of roof. A few shafts of sunlight shone in, falling like spotlights on the airship that lay tethered on the valley floor.

“The Archaeopteryx!” cried Tom, recognizing the handsome little ship he had last seen pulling away from Airhaven.

“So this is where they hide her…” Wolf sounded grudgingly impressed. He was starting to forget the indignity of his capture, and was looking about with as much interest and curiosity as the others.

They passed the silent airship, then a line of battered tanks labeled fuel and lifting gas, and finally a small guard post with tattered deck chairs, and views of old London tacked to the tin walls. The valley ended at a sheer cliff of metal, and Garamond ordered his party into a tunnel that seemed to lead under it.

The roundness of the tunnel, and its ribbed walls and roof, puzzled Tom, until the Londoners lit lanterns and he realized that it was one of the old air ducts that lay looped like lifeless snakes throughout the wreck. Rails had been laid along the bottom of the duct, and a couple of wooden carts stood ready at the buffers. Above them, on the curving wall, an old enamel sign gleamed in the lantern light. It was the name plate from a London elevator station; a broad red ring in the middle of a white square, crossed by a vertical blue bar. In white letters on the blue were the words holloway road.

“This is how we get ’eavy cargoes out of the Archy and into London,” whispered Wren’s guard, Angie. “The Mossies’ spy birds can’t see us if we keep inside this old duct. We call it ‘taking the tube.’ ”

“The Hollow-Way Road,” said Wren, reading the sign again. “Oh, very funny…”

“Well, yer gotter ’ave a laugh, ain’t yer?”

They followed the Holloway Road for what felt like a mile or more, sometimes by lantern light, sometimes through patches of sunshine that spilled in through rents in the skin of the old duct. The way twisted and turned, and the floor sloped steeply sometimes where the duct dipped down into a hollow of the earth or lay draped across another section of wreckage. Underfoot the dust between the rails was stamped with the prints of passing boots.

At the end of the duct they passed more makeshift cargo carts and another set of buffers, and emerged into daylight again to find a pathway of metal duckboards leading between two steep hills of scrap. Beyond the hills stretched an open space that had been cleared of wreckage. Kitchen gardens had been laid out in raised beds full of peaty soil, and people broke off from picking cabbages and digging potatoes to stand staring as the prisoners were led by.

Tom stared back. There were not just people inside London; there were lots of people. He looked at their faces, but there was no one he recognized. It didn’t matter; they were Londoners, that was what was important. Many of them bore the marks of old injuries; he saw missing limbs and fingers, a man with a burned face, a blinded woman being guided along by her children, who were telling her excitedly about Tom, Wren, and Wolf. Scars everywhere. Hester would have felt at home here, he thought, and he wished that the wind had blown the Jenny Haniver the other way on that morning after MEDUSA, and carried him and Hester into London instead of away from it. How different things might have been if they had lived in the debris fields…

At the far side of the garden area a massive section of deck plate lay propped upon the ruins, forming a low-ceilinged cave. Garamond led his party in through the long, letterbox-shaped opening. The iron roof was so low that everyone had to stoop, but in the shadows dozens of small huts and houses had been erected, built from scraps of metal and wood. Crowds were waiting there, alerted by the children who were running excitedly ahead of the procession. “Where’s Miss Potts?” shouted Garamond over all the noise, and a bald-headed gentleman in a grubby white rubber coat (An Engineer!, thought Tom uneasily) replied, “She’s at the town hall, Garamond.”

The procession went marching on, deeper and deeper into the metal-roofed cavern until the deck plate overhead was so low, they had to bend almost double to save themselves from cracking their heads on the old bolts and fittings that poked down from it. “This is why it’s called Crouch End,” said Wren’s friendly guard. “It ain’t a very convenient place to live, but in the old days, with sprites and Mossies and Quirke-knows-what-else to hide away from, a roof over our ’eads was very welcome…”

“Angie Peabody,” barked Mr. Garamond, “I thought I told you to shut your cakeholel”

Wedged in under the lowest corner of the deck plate was a building fashioned out of an old Gut Supervisor’s office and bits of many other things, all nailed and bolted together in a workmanlike way and painted a cheerful shade of red. london emergency committee someone had written above the door, in careful capitals. Garamond left his charges outside while he went in and had a muffled conversation with someone. Then he came out again and pushed the door wide open. “Step along now, prisoners,” he said. “And show a bit of respect. You are entering the presence of the lord mayor of London!”

The floor inside the building had been dug out so that there was no need to stoop. Tom went first, with Will Hallsworth at his side, warning him to watch out for the steps. He tripped down them anyway, and landed in a big,