glass. “Very well. Just between ourselves, Ms. Morchard was indeed here yesterday. She bought a job lot of Kliest Coils.”
“What on earth would she want with those?” wondered Tom.
“Who knows?” Mr. Pondicherry beamed and spread his hands wide, as if to say,
“Has she ever mentioned anything about where she comes from?” Wren asked eagerly.
Mr. Pondicherry thought for a moment. “Her ship is registered in Airhaven,” he said.
“Oh, we know that. I mean, do you know where she grew up? Where she was trained? You see, we think she comes from London.”
The auctioneer smiled at her indulgently, and winked again at Tom as he slipped the old telephone into a side drawer of his bureau. “Ah, Mr. N, what romantical notions these young ladies do have! Really, Miss Wren!
Afterward they took coffee on a balcony cafe and looked out eastward across the endless plains of the Great Hunting Ground. It was one of those warm, golden days of spring. A haze of green filled the massive ruts and track marks that passing cities had scored across the land below, and the sky was full of swerving swifts. Away in the east a mining town was gnawing at a line of hills that had somehow been overlooked until now.
“The strange thing is,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where.
He couldn’t explain. Lately he had been thinking more and more about his early years in the London Museum. It made him sad to think that when he died, the memory of the place would die with him. If there really was another Historian alive, someone who had grown up among the same dusty galleries and beeswax-smelling corridors as him, who had snoozed through old Arkengarth’s lectures, and listened to Chudleigh Pomeroy grumbling about the building’s feeble shock absorbers, then the responsibility of remembering it all would be lifted from him; the echoes of those things would linger in other memories, even after he was gone.
“What I don’t understand,” said Wren, “is why she won’t admit it. Surely it would be a selling point, in an Old Tech trader, to say they came from London and were trained by the Historians’ Guild.”
Tom shrugged. “I always kept quiet about it, when your mother and I were trading. London was unpopular in those years. What the Guild of Engineers had done upset the whole balance of the world. Scared a lot of cities, and led to the rise of the Green Storm. I suppose that’s why Clytie took another name. The Pottses are a famous London family; they’ve been producing aldermen and heads of guild since Quirke’s time. Clytie’s grandfather, old Pisistratus Potts, was lord mayor for years and years. If you want to pretend you’re not a Londoner, it wouldn’t be a good idea to go around with a name like Clytie Potts.”
“And what about those things she bought at Pondicherry’s?” Wren wondered.
“Kliest Coils?”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“There’s no reason why you would have,” her father said. “They come from the Electric Empire, which thrived in these parts before the rise of the Blue Metal culture, around 10,000 B.T.”
“What are they for?”
“Nobody knows,” said Tom. “Zanussi Kliest, the London Historian who first studied them, claimed they were meant to focus some sort of electromagnetic energy, but no one has ever worked out a practical use for them. The Electric Empire seems to have been a sort of technological cul-de-sac.”
“These coils aren’t valuable, then?”
“Only as curios. They’re quite pretty.”
“So what’s Clytie Potts going to do with them?” asked Wren.
Tom shrugged again. “She must have a buyer, I suppose. Maybe she knows a collector.”
“We should go after her,” said Wren.
“Where to? I asked at the harbor office last night. The
“She’ll be heading east,” said Wren, with the confidence of someone who had been studying the air trade for a whole season and felt she had its measure. “Everybody is going east now that the truce seems to be holding, and we should too. Even if we don’t find Clytie Potts, there will be good trading, and I’d love to see the central Hunting Ground. We could go to Airhaven. The Registration Bureau there must have some more details about Cruwys so- called Morchard and her ship.”
Tom finished his coffee and said, “I’d been thinking you might want to go south this spring. Your friend Theo is still in Zagwa, isn’t he? I expect we could get permission to land there…”
“Oh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” said Wren casually, and blushed bright red.
“I liked Theo,” Tom went on. “He’s a good lad. Kind and well-mannered. Handsome, too…”
“Daddy!” said Wren sternly, warning him not to tease. Then she relented, sighed, and took his hand. “Look, the reason Theo has such good manners is that he’s really posh. His family are rich, and they live in a city that was part of a great civilization when our ancestors were still wearing animal skins and squabbling over scraps in the ruins of Europe. Why would Theo be interested in me?”
“He’d be a fool if he isn’t,” said her father, “and he didn’t strike me as a fool.”
Wren gave an exasperated sigh. Why couldn’t Dad understand? Theo was in his own city, surrounded by lots of girls far prettier than her. His family might have married him off by now, and even if they hadn’t, he was sure to have forgotten all about Wren. That kiss, which had meant so much to her, had probably meant nothing at all to Theo. So she did not want to make a fool of herself by chasing off to Zagwa, knocking on his door, and expecting them to pick up where they’d left off.
She said, “Let’s go east, Dad. Let’s go and find Clytie Potts.”
Chapter 4
Lady Naga
Theo, who had been adrift for days on slow tides of pain and anesthetic, came to the surface at last in a clean, white room in Zagwa Hospital. Through veils of mosquito netting and smudged memories he could see an open window, and evening sunlight on the mountains. His mother and father and his sisters Miriam and Kaelo were gathered around his bed, and as he gradually recovered his senses, Theo realized that his wounds must have been very grave indeed, for instead of teasing him and telling him how silly he looked lying there all bruised and bandaged, his sisters seemed inclined to cry and kiss him. “Thank God, thank God,” his mother kept saying, and his father, leaning over him, said, “You’re going to be all right, Theo. But it was touch and go for a while.”
“The knife,” said Theo, remembering, touching his stomach, which was wrapped in clean, crisp bandages. “The rockets … They hit the citadel!”
“They exploded quite harmlessly in the gardens,” his father assured him. “Nobody was hurt. Nobody but you. You were badly wounded, Theo, and you lost a lot of blood. When our aviators brought you in, the doctors were ready to give you up for dead. But the ambassador heard of your plight— the Storm’s ambassador, Lady Naga—and she came and worked on you herself. She used to be some sort of surgeon before her marriage. She certainly knows a thing or two about a person’s insides. That is a claim to fame, eh, Theo? You have been healed by General Naga’s wife!”
“So you saved her life, and she saved yours,” said Miriam.
“She will be delighted to hear that you are on the mend!” said Mrs. Ngoni. “She was very impressed by your bravery, and takes a great interest in you.” She pointed proudly to a mass of flowers in a corner of Theo’s hospital room, sent by Lady Naga. “She came to see me herself, to tell me how well the operation had gone.” She beamed, clearly rather taken with the visitor from Shan Guo. “Lady Naga is a very good person, Theo.”
“If she is so good, what is she doing in the Green Storm?” asked Theo.
