A Darkling Plain

Theo nodded, angry that he’d not thought of that for himself. A moment later the Shadow swung its engine pods upright and forced itself down into the white billows beneath Airhaven.

“Aaaaaaaaah!” wailed Pennyroyal and Spiney, and then, “Oh!” as the safety net beneath Strut 13 caught them and held them safe. They bounced together, as if they had dropped into a giant’s hammock.

“Great Poskitt!” whimpered Pennyroyal, thrusting the journalist away from him and trying to stand upright. He had forgotten the net’s existence until its thick, yielding mesh broke his fall. “I thought we were done for!” he gasped.

“You’re done for all right, Nimrod!” Sampford Spiney cackled. He had been just as scared as Pennyroyal, but he wasn’t about to show it. “Consorting with the Storm; taking part in a brawl; accessory to the attempted murder of a kriegsmarschall—here, was that bint on the strut really Naga’s wife? That’s what your Manchester friends are saying…” Excited at the thought of all the startling reports that he would soon be filing, the journalist began to bounce happily up and down.

“Do stop doing that, old man,” pleaded Pennyroyal. “You’re making me feel all queasy.”

“Not half as queasy as you’ll be when you see the next edition of The Speculum.” Spiney chuckled, bouncing harder. Odd noises started to come from the net: faint creaks, small twanging sounds.

“Spiney, I really think you should stop! This net looks old, and it’s already taken the weight of a brace of fat Mancunians tonight…”

With a sound like plucked harpstrings the bolts that attached one edge of the net to the underside of Strut 14 started to come free. Spiney stopped bouncing, and let out a strangled yelp.

“Help!” shouted Pennyroyal, as loudly as he could, but although Strut 13 was crammed with people the only one who heard him was Spiney’s photographer, Miss Kropotkin. Her face appeared over the edge of the strut. She stretched down toward the stranded men with one hand, but she could not reach them. Pennyroyal started trying to claw his way up the steep net toward her, but only succeeded in pulling some of the bolts on that side free as well. “Oh, Poskitt!”

“Miss Kropotkin!” Spiney shrieked. “Fetch help! Fetch help at once, or I’ll make sure you end up photographing pet shows and garden parties for the rest of your worthless—”

And with a presence of mind that ensured she would never have to photograph another pet show as long as she lived, Miss Kropotkin raised her camera as the net gave way and took the picture that would appear on page 1 of the next edition of The Speculum beneath the headline “Writers Perish in Airhaven Death Plunge Horror.”

Chapter 28 Storm Birds

As the Shadow Aspect sank into the clouds, Grike strode aft. In the curtained-off cabin at the stern of the gondola Oenone was crouching over Hester, using her fingers to try to stop the blood that was pouring from the gash on Hester’s scalp. She looked up at Grike. “Is there a medicine chest? Just a first-aid kit even?”

Grike stared at Hester’s gray, shocked face. Let her die, he wanted to tell Oenone, then use your skill to Resurrect her. In place of that scarred and ruined face give her a steel mask, more perfect than the Stalker Fang’s. In place of her breakable body build her a body as strong as this one. She would forget her life, but Grike felt certain that her spirit would survive. Over the millennia that they would have together, he would help her to recover it. His immortal child.

“Medicine chest!” shouted Oenone. “Quickly, Mr. Grike!”

Grike turned and found the Shadow’s first-aid kit in the locker above the bunk. As he handed it to Oenone, a blow shook the airship. He went forward onto the flight deck again. Theo was clinging to the controls, staring out of wet windows.

“we are under attack,” Grike said.

“What?” the boy looked around at him, wide eyes white in his dark face.

“we were hit. a projectile …”

Theo turned to the window again. “I can’t see another ship. I can’t see anything. This cloud—”

And then the Shadow Aspect dropped out of the belly of the clouds, and they both saw the flanks of cities rising all around them, the sky between filled with the running lights of dozens of airships. It was raining, and the drops flecked the windows and blurred everything into a kaleidoscope of glowing specks, but Grike could tell by their trajectories that the other ships were not searching for the Shadow Aspect. They were not military ships at all, but freighters and liners, heading west.

“murnau is evacuating its women and children,” he said.

“Preparing for war …,” whispered Theo, and then, remembering his plight, “What about us?”

“word of our departure may not have reached the other cities yet.”

“Well, it can’t be long,” said Theo. It seemed pointless to turn the Shadow eastward, for he did not believe they could escape from the Murnau cluster now, but he turned her anyway, peering out through the rain as she flew through a steep-sided canyon whose walls were the towering sides of Manchester and Traktionbad Braunschweig. He took the Shadow low so that the cities’ tall wheels slid past on either side of the gondola. Other ships poured through the canyon high above, most of them flying west. Ahead, across a few miles of mud crawling with small, fierce-looking suburbs, stood Murnau. The great fighting city had shut its armor. Theo started to steer the Shadow Aspect around its northern flank, still at track level. The rudder controls were sluggish. “I think the steering vanes are damaged,” he said, tugging irritably at the levers.

Remembering the blow that he had felt as the ship dropped away from Airhaven, Grike went aft again. Hester was conscious, groaning as Oenone cleaned her wound. “Tom! Oh, Tom!” Grike caught the sharp whiff of medical alcohol. He climbed the companion ladder, stooping as he stepped out onto the axial catwalk that led along the center of the envelope. At the sternward end was a small hatch, built for Once-Born and almost too small for him to squeeze his Stalker’s bulk through. Outside, the Shadow’s rain-wet tail fins shone silvery in the light from the passing windows of Murnau’s skirt forts. Holding tight to the ratlines, Grike made his way out onto the lateral fin. At the rear of the fin something had wedged among the control cables. Beneath the howl of the engines and the drumming of rain on the steep curve of the envelope above him, Grike picked up another sound, a rhythmic clatter. Was this some new weapon? He let go of the ratlines with one hand and unsheathed his claws.

The shape in the control cables shifted suddenly, reacting to the flick of wet light from the blades. A white, frightened face gaped up at Grike. “Great Poskitt!” it wailed.

Grike realized what had happened. This Once-Born must have fallen from Airhaven as the Shadow Aspect departed. He sheathed his claws and reached out to drag him to safety, but the Once-Born misunderstood; terrified, he let go his tight grip on the cables and began to fall again, shrieking as he tumbled into the sky. Grike lunged forward and grabbed him by the collar of his coat, swinging him around and safely up onto the fin again. The Shadow Aspect tilted, engines caterwauling, as Grike heaved the man over the aileron flaps and started to drag him along the fin toward the open hatch.

The airship’s sudden, uncertain movement drew the attention of lookouts in Murnau’s skirt forts. As Grike and his dripping, barely conscious burden regained the flight deck, the forts’ gun slits started to prickle with light. It looked quite pretty, until the first bullets began tearing into the gondola. Windows shattered; pressure gauges wavered as holes were torn in the gas cells. The engines howled, still driving the ship eastward, past towering jaws, out across rainswept, shell-torn mud. The gunfire stopped. Theo checked the periscope. Astern, three points of light were pulling clear of the immense bulk of the armored city; three bat-black shapes growing against the gray underbelly of the clouds.

High above, Orla Twombley wiped rain from her goggles and pushed her flying machine Combat