A Darkling Plain

happened. At Rogues’ Roost Hester had encountered that horrible Engineer Popjoy, but he had been in the Deep Gut when MEDUSA went off…

He pushed his way up the crowded stair and saw Clytie hurrying away from him between the long-stay docking pans. He could hardly blame her, after the way he’d yelled at her. He must have been too far away for her to recognize him, and she’d mistaken him for some kind of loony, or a rival trader angry that she’d outbid him in the auction rooms. He trotted after her, eager to explain himself, and saw her run quickly up another stairway onto Pan Seven, where a small, streamlined airship was berthed. He paused at the foot of the stairs just long enough to read the details chalked on the board there and learn that the ship was the Archaeopteryx, registered in Airhaven and commanded by Cruwys Morchard. Then, careful not to run, or shout, or do anything else that might alarm a lady air trader, he climbed after her. Of course, with her Guild training, Clytie Potts would have had no trouble finding a place aboard an Old Tech trader. No doubt this Captain Morchard had taken her on as an expert buyer, and that was why she had been at the auction house.

He paused to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, his heart hammering fiercely. The Archaeopteryx towered over him in the twilight. She was camouflaged, her gondola and the undersides of her envelope and engine pods sky blue, the upper parts done in a dazzle pattern of greens and browns and grays. At the foot of her gangplank two crewmen were waiting in a pool of pale electric light. They looked rough and shabby, like Out-Country scavengers. As Clytie approached them, Tom heard one man call out, “You get ’em all right, then?”

“I did,” replied Clytie, nodding to the package she was carrying. The other man came forward to help her with it, then saw Tom coming up behind her. Clytie must have noticed his expression changing, and turned to see why.

“Clytie?” said Tom. “It’s me, Tom Natsworthy. Apprentice Third Class, from the Guild of Historians. From London. I know you probably don’t recognize me. It’s been … what? … nearly twenty years! And you must have thought I was dead…”

At first he felt sure that she had recognized him, and that she was happy to see him, but then her look changed; she took a step backward, away from him, and glanced toward the men by the gangplank. One of them—a tall, gaunt man with a shaven head—put a hand to his sword, and Tom heard him say, “This fellow bothering you, Miss Morchard?”

“It’s all right, Lurpak,” said Clytie, motioning for him to stay where he was. She came a little closer to Tom and said pleasantly, “I’m sorry, sir. I fear you have mistaken me for some other lady. I am Cruwys Morchard, mistress of this ship. I don’t know anyone from London.”

“But you …,” Tom started to say. He studied her face, embarrassed and confused. He was sure she was Clytie Potts. She had put on a little weight, just as he had himself, and her hair, which had been dark, was dusted with silver now, as if cobwebs had settled on it, but her face was the same … except that the space between her eyebrows, where Clytie Potts had rather proudly worn the tattooed blue eye of the Guild of Historians, was blank.

Tom began to doubt himself. It had been twenty years, after all. Perhaps he was wrong. He said, “I’m sorry, but you look so like her…”

“Don’t mention it,” she said with a charming smile. “I have one of those faces. I am always being mistaken for somebody.”

“You look so like her,” said Tom again, half hopefully, as if she might suddenly change her mind and remember that she was Clytie Potts, after all.

She bowed to him and turned away. Her men eyed Tom as they helped her up the gangplank with her package. There was nothing more to say, so he said “Sorry” again and turned away himself, blushing hotly as he made his way off the pan. He started across the harbor toward his own ship’s berth, and had not gone more than twenty paces when he heard the Archaeopteryx’s engines rumbling to life behind him. He watched her rise into the evening sky, gathering speed quickly as she cleared the city’s airspace and flew away toward the east.

Which was curious, because Tom was certain that the signboard beside her pan had said she would be in Peripatetiapolis for two more days…

Chapter 3 The Mysterious Miss Morchard

“I am sure it was her!” Tom said, over supper that night at the Jolly Dirigible. “She was older, of course, and the Guild-mark wasn’t on her brow, which threw me a little, but tattoos can be removed, can’t they?”

Wren said, “Don’t get agitated, Dad…”

“I’m not agitated, only intrigued! If it is Clytie, how come she is still alive? And why did she not admit who she was?”

He did not sleep much that night, and Wren lay awake too, in her little cabin up inside the Jenny’s envelope, listening to him pad along the passageway from the stern cabin and clatter as quietly as he could in the galley, making himself one of those three-in-the-morning cups of tea.

At first she was worried about him. She hadn’t quite believed his version of what the heart doctor had said, and she felt quite certain that he should not be staying awake all night and fretting about mystery aviatrices. But gradually she started to wonder if his encounter with the woman might not have been a good thing after all. Talking about her at supper, he had seemed more alive than Wren had seen him for months; the listlessness that had settled over him when Mum left had vanished, and he had been his old self again, full of questions and theories. Wren couldn’t tell if it was the mystery that appealed to him, or the thought of a connection with his lost home city, or if he simply had the hots for Clytie Potts, but whichever it was, might it not do him good to have something other than Mum to think about?

At breakfast next morning she said, “We should investigate. Find out more about this self-styled Cruwys Morchard.”

“How?” asked her father. “The Archaeopteryx will be a hundred miles away by now.”

“You said she bought something at the auction rooms,” said Wren. “We could start there.”

Mr. Pondicherry who was a large, shiny sort of gentleman, seemed to grow even larger and shinier when he looked up from his account books to see Tom Natsworthy and daughter entering his little den. The Jenny Haniver had sold several valuable pieces through Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms that season. “Mr. Natsworthy!” He chuckled. “Miss Natsworthy! How good to see you!” He stood up to greet them, and pushed back a great deal of silver-embroidered sleeve to reveal a plump brown hand, which Tom shook. “You are both well, I hope? The Gods of the Sky are kind to you? What do you have for me today?”

“Only questions, I’m afraid,” Tom confessed. “I was wondering what you could tell me about a freelance archaeologist called Cruwys Morchard. She made a purchase here yesterday.”

“The lady from the Archaeopteryx?” mused Mr. Pondicherry. “Yes, yes; I know her well, but I’m afraid I cannot share such information.”

“Of course,” said Tom, and, “Sorry, sorry.”

Wren, who had half expected this, took out of her jacket pocket a little bundle of cloth, which she set down upon the blotter on Mr. Pondicherry’s desk. The auctioneer purred like a cat as he unwrapped it. Inside lay a tiny, flattened envelope of silvery metal, inset with minute oblong tiles on which faint numbers still showed.

“An Ancient mobile telephone,” said Wren. “We bought it last month, from a scavenger who didn’t even know what it was. Dad was planning to sell it privately, but I’m sure he’d be happy to go through Pondicherry’s if…”

“Wren!” said her father, startled by her cunning.

Mr. Pondicherry had put his head down close to the relic and screwed a jeweler’s glass into his eye. “Oh, pretty!” he said. “So beautifully preserved! And the trade in trinkets like this is definitely picking up now that peace is breaking out. They say General Naga hasn’t time to fight battles anymore, now that he’s found himself a lovely young wife. Almost as lovely as Cruwys Morchard…” He looked at Tom and winked, one eye made huge by the