at each other.
But although half of London seemed to be standing about in the open space outside Crouch End, none of them so much as looked at Theo or Wren. They were all staring westward. And as Wren joined them, she saw that the sky above the dinosaur spines of the wreckage was glowing red, as if a huge fire were burning just beyond the horizon.
“What is it, Mr. Luperini?” asked Wren, spotting Cat’s father standing nearby. “Is it the war?”
Luperini shook his head; shrugged. Faint, eerie noises blew in on the wind; shriekings and roarings. A ghostly wing of light lit up the western half of the sky, blanching the stars. Wren took Theo’s hand again.
“Reminds me of the night we zapped old Bayreuth,” someone said.
“Wren!” Tom came hurrying over to them. “I was wondering where you’d got to. What do you make of this, Theo?”
Theo shook his head. “How long has it been going on?”
“About a half hour—surely you must have noticed that first flash?”
“Urn …,” said Wren.
Theo frowned at the sky. “If it’s gunfire, it’s not like any I’ve seen before.”
Dr. Abrol came hurrying down the track from the listening post on the edge of the debris field where he spied on the Green Storm’s radio messages and on those of the approaching cities. Londoners gathered around him, calling out to ask what he had heard on the airwaves.
“It’s hard to be sure,” he said nervously, his spectacles flickering with reflections of the sky. “Something keeps interfering with the signals. But it seems … it sounds as if …” (“What? What?” the people around him urged.) He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple making a neat little bob. “Whole cities have been destroyed,” he said, and had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the cries, the curses, the hisses of indrawn breath. “Manchester. All sorts of Traktionstadts and suburbs …”
“Old Tech!” cried Chudleigh Pomeroy, who had come wandering out in his dressing gown to see what all the fuss was about. “It has to be. The Green Storm have some sort of Old Tech weapon…”
“But why wait until now to use it?” wondered Clytie.
“Who knows. Perhaps even they are scared of it. It must be horribly powerful.”
“But where did they find it?” other voices asked. “What on earth is it?”
Lurpak Flint stood behind Clytie, his arms wrapped around her. “Perhaps it is not anything on Earth at all. Remember, the Ancients left weapons in orbit. What if the Green Storm have found a way to wake one?”
“There are distress calls on the Green Storm’s airwaves too,” Dr. Abrol said. “Reports of an explosion at Tienjing. It’s very confused. Sorry.”
“Maybe the Traktionstadts have sent airships to Tienjing to try and blow up the transmitter that controls this weapon,” Pomeroy suggested.
Another pulse of arctic light lit the sky. “Doesn’t look like they hit it,” said Len Peabody. “This is bad, ain’t it? I mean, what’s to stop the Mossies turning their toy on New London as soon as they see us leaving the debris field?”
Pomeroy sighed; shrugged. “Why, nothing,” he said. “It is a problem, as you say. But it is not one we can do anything about. All we can do is pray to Quirke and Clio and all the other gods that the Green Storm will not think us worth wasting a blast of their spiffy new super-weapon on. New London is small, after all. Quirke willing, we may yet slip away. Go north, out of this horrible world the cities and the Storm have made. I fancy seeing the Ice Wastes before I die…”
He raised his voice a little, so that everyone else stopped staring at the sky and turned to listen. “This does not alter our plans. It may even help us, in a dreadful way; it may delay Harrowbarrow’s arrival. So go to your beds, and try and rest. There’s nothing to be gained by watching this fireworks party, and we have hard work ahead of us tomorrow. I, for one, could do with a snooze.”
The clumps of Londoners began to disperse, wandering away in ones and twos to their homes. Tom recognized the look on the faces of those who passed him. He had seen it at Batmunkh Gompa, nineteen years ago. It was the look of people who have just learned that a civilization quite opposed to their own has just become the most powerful on Earth. Despite Pomeroy’s brave words, they were afraid.
Only Wren and Theo, walking with heads together and their arms around each other’s waists, looked calm. They did not believe that some Ancient weapon could come between them; they imagined the feelings they shared were stronger than the Storm and the cities and all the Old Tech in the world. Tom let them go past him and watched them as they walked on ahead, remembering how he had once felt like that, with Hester.
He walked toward Crouch End beside Chudleigh Pomeroy. The old man was moving slowly, as if the Stalker- birds had shaken him more badly than he was admitting, but when Tom offered him an arm to lean on, he waved it away. “I’m not quite incapable yet, Apprentice Natsworthy. Though I must say, things have been getting jolly exciting since you and your daughter arrived. Birds and ’burbs and doomsday weapons … there’s barely a minute’s peace.”
Another pallid flicker of light came from the western sky. It seemed brighter this time, and Tom thought he saw a white blade of light slice across the stars, striking down at the Earth from some immeasurable height. Again, faintly, he heard that roaring, shrieking sound. “Great Quirke!” he whispered.
“They didn’t muck about, those Ancients.”
“Was Lurpak right? Is it really up in orbit somewhere?”
“It’s possible,” said Pomeroy. “There is all sorts of stuff still circling up there. The old records list a few weapons that the Ancients were supposed to have hung in heaven. The Diamond Bat, Jinju 14, the Nine Sisters, ODIN. Most of them must have been destroyed in the Sixty Minute War, or fallen out of the sky in all the millennia since. But I suppose it’s possible that one’s still up there, and Naga’s people have managed to awaken it.”
“ODIN,” said Tom. “I’ve heard that name somewhere…”
“Quirke preserve us! You must have actually been paying attention during one of my lectures, Natsworthy!” chuckled Pomeroy, but he sounded weary, and Tom started walking again, thinking that it could not be good for the old Historian to be hanging about here in the chill air. The white light had gone now, anyway; there was nothing to see but a sinister, reddish glow in the west.
“The name stood for Orbital Defense Initiative,” Pomeroy said as they strolled on together. “It was part of the American Empire’s last, furious arms race with Greater China. I wonder where on earth our Mossie friends dug up the access codes.”
“Quirke Almighty!” Tom said suddenly, with such concern in his voice that Pomeroy stopped again and turned to peer at him.
“Everything all right, Natsworthy?”
“Yes,” said Tom, but he was lying. He had remembered why the name ODIN sounded familiar. That had been the only legible word among the thousands of numbers and symbols scratched on the pages of the Tin Book of Anchorage, the relic that Wren had helped the Lost Boys steal from Vineland. Tom had almost forgotten about the book; he had assumed it was destroyed when Cloud 9 fell. Naga’s people must have taken it with them to Shan Guo, and used it to arouse the dreadful weapon in the sky.
“Please,” he said, “don’t mention any of this to Wren.”
Pomeroy chuckled again and nudged him. “Don’t want to spoil her romance, eh? Don’t blame you, Natsworthy. It’s good to see that our young people are getting on with the serious business of falling in love with each other, despite all these trivial distractions. And I like that Theo Ngoni. They’ll be good for each other.”
“If they live through this,” said Tom. “If any of us do.”
“The forces of History will decide that,” said Pomeroy. “I’ve studied History all my life, and the one thing I’ve learned for certain is that you can’t stand against it. It’s like a river in flood, and we are just swept along in it. The big people, like Naga, or those Traktionstadt fellows, may try to swim against the current for a time, but little people like us, the best we can hope for is to keep our heads above water for as long as we can.”
“And when we go under?” asked Tom. “What then?”
Pomeroy laughed. “Then it’s someone else’s turn. Your daughter and her young man, for instance. A London Historian’s daughter and an Anti-Tractionist. Maybe they’re the future.”
They were drawing close to his comfortable little book-lined hut. As he turned and took Tom’s hand, Tom said suddenly, “Mr. Pomeroy, if anything happened to me, you would look after Wren, wouldn’t you?”
Pomeroy frowned. He seemed about to say something flippant but then realized how serious Tom was, and
