A Darkling Plain

“I think not, Mr. Natsworthy. As far as I’m concerned, you and your daughter are Kobold’s accomplices. You’re staying here.”

“Nonsense, Garamond,” snapped Chudleigh Pomeroy, emerging from his hut in dressing gown and nightcap. “Tom and Wren have as much to lose as any of us. Kobold is probably planning to make off aboard that airship of theirs.”

Wren hugged her father. “You stay here, Daddy,” she said and, snatching a lantern, ran off with Angie and her brother, Saab. Tom watched them go, the bobbing lamps disappearing into the hillocks of scrap, Mr. Garamond yelling orders that were meant to be military but made him sound like a panicky teacher in charge of a school outing. “At the double! Work in pairs! Watch where you’re pointing that lightning gun, Spandex Thrale!”

Fanning out across the rubble, the searchers moved away from Crouch End, combing every path and cranny of the rust hills for traces of Wolf. “He can’t have got far,” Wren heard people whispering. But he could, she thought. He’s a soldier; he’s already made his way back to Harrowbarrow once before, hundreds of miles through Green Storm territory. Hiding from us in a maze the size of London won’t be hard.

At least he had not made it to the airship hangar yet. The Jenny and the Archaeopteryx sat where they had been left, untouched. Garamond loudly detailed Saab and a few others to reinforce the guard on them, and the search parties moved on.

“It’s useless,” said Wren miserably, as she and Angie tramped away from the hangar, along that narrow path she had come in by on the first day. “He could be anywhere. He’s skilled at hiding. His whole suburb hides.”

“Oof!” said Angie.

It seemed a funny sort of reply. Wren turned to look at her friend and found herself, for the second time that night, unexpectedly face-to-face with Wolf Kobold.

“You’ve found me, Wren!” he said brightly. “Now it’s your turn to hide…”

He stooped over Angie, who had crumpled at his feet, knocked down by a blow from behind with some heavy object—there was no shortage of blunt instruments in the debris fields. Wren opened her mouth to scream for help, but before she could force a sound out, Wolf straightened up again, pointing Angie’s crossbow at her.

Wren wasn’t sure if she was supposed to raise her hands or not. She flapped her arms uncertainly, wondering if Angie was alive or dead. “You’ll never get away!” she said. “There are guards in the airship hangar, with lightning guns—”

“I don’t need an airship, Wren,” said Wolf, laughing. “I thought once that the Engineers’ secret might be something I could carry away aboard your Jenny Haniver, but now I’ve seen how wrong I was. I shall have to bring Harrowbarrow east…” Keeping the crossbow pointed at her, he started pulling off Angie’s belt, with its quiver of bolts and canteen of water. “Look, I have all I need for a trek across the Out-Country. I’ll ride on one of the Storm’s convenient Stalker trains. Hausdorfer will have Harrowbarrow waiting for me just across the line.” He grinned at Wren and held out one hand. “Why not come with me?”

“What?”

“You’re wasted in the life you lead, Wren. Trailing about after your dad. How long is he going to keep you trapped here, skivvying for these mudlarks? Come home to Harrowbarrow with me.”

“And watch it eat New London?” asked Wren. “I don’t think so.”

“Then think harder. This new technology the lady Engineer has developed is wasted on the Londoners. Well-meaning fools! They haven’t even put jaws on their new city. I’m going to take it for myself, and use it to make Harrowbarrow the most powerful predator on earth. A flying predator, armed with electric weapons! Think of it!”

Wren did. She didn’t like it.

Wolf laughed again, then blew her a kiss as he turned away. “There’ll always be a place for you in my town hall, Wren,” he said.

Wren bent over Angie. The girl groaned as Wren touched her face, which she hoped was a good sign. “Help!” she screamed, as loudly as she could. “Help! Help! He’s here! Over here!”

They came running: Saab, Garamond, Cat Luperini.

Someone with more medical know-how than Wren bent over Angie and said, “She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine.” But of Wolf there was no sign, and although the others kept hunting him until the sky above the wreck turned gray with morning, he was not sighted again; he had faded away, as if he had been just another of London’s ghosts.

PART TWO

Chapter 24 Manchester

The clang and tremor of docking clamps engaging shook Oenone from her dreams. She struggled to stay asleep, but the dull, hungry ache in her belly kept nagging at her, and she came awake groggily. She had been dreaming of home, the islands of Aleutia; gray stone and gray sky and gray winter sea, she and her brother Eno haring downhill in the sharp cold. The images faded quickly in the stuffy heat of the Humbug’s hold.

It was morning. The new-risen sun was poking in through rents in the Humbug’s envelope. Oenone lay curled on the floor of a wire-mesh pen, surrounded by crates and boxes full of dodgy gadgets and unsold trade goods that Napster Varley must once have hoped would make his fortune. There was no mattress in the pen, and Oenone was so stiff from sleeping on the hard deck that she could barely move. She lay there for a while, wondering what it was about her prison that seemed different this morning. Then she realized. The rattling engines that had been drilling their noise into her ears all the way from Cutler’s Gulp had stopped.

She could hear voices down below her in the gondola. Varley was shouting at his wife, as usual. As usual, the baby was crying. Oenone had never known a baby who cried as much as Napster Junior.

She drank water from the tin jug Varley had left her, peed in her cracked enamel chamber pot, and said her morning prayers. By the time she had finished, all was quiet below. She waited fearfully to see what would happen next.

To her relief it was not Varley who came up through the hatch, but Varley’s wife. Mrs. Varley was not exactly friendly toward the prisoner in the hold, but she was friendlier than her husband. She was a freckled, doughy girl with unruly red hair and frightened eyes, one of which was currently swollen shut and surrounded by yellowish bruises. Varley had bought her somewhere, and she had not made as good a wife as he had hoped. He beat her, and Oenone had often heard her screams and sobs echoing through the airship. She had come to feel a sort of comradeship with this exhausted young woman, as if they were both prisoners together.

“Napster says to give you breakfast,” Mrs. Varley said now, in her quivery little voice, and pushed a bowl of bread through the bars, along with half an apple.

Oenone started to shovel the food into her mouth with both hands. She felt ashamed, but she couldn’t help it; a few weeks of captivity had turned her into a savage, an animal. “Where are we?” she managed to ask between mouthfuls.

“Airhaven,” said Mrs. Varley. She looked about fearfully, as if she were afraid her husband might be lurking among the stacks of crates, ready to leap out and black her other eye for talking to the cargo. She leaned close to the mesh of the cage. “It’s a town that flies!”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“And it’s above something called the Murnau cluster,” Mrs. Varley went on, her excitement getting the better of her fear. “There’s more cities down there than I’ve ever seen in my life. A big fighting one, all hidden in armor, and trade towns too, and Manchester! Napster says Manchester’s one of the biggest cities in the world! He read