A Darkling Plain

sun, and between them an immense statue of Anna Fang stood pointing westward, summoning the people of the mountains to battle against the Traction Cities. As the Jenny descended past her, Tom noticed that she was a lot prettier than the real Anna Fang had been, and that a lot of bird droppings had drizzled down her face.

Then they were over the Wall, and sinking past the vertical city on its eastern side, the pretty laddered streets and swallow’s-nest houses all just as Tom remembered them, except that extra docking pans had been constructed on the lower levels, and hundreds of concrete barracks blocks now covered the valley floor at the western end of the lake. The Jenny flew over them, making for a cluster of buildings outside the city proper, on a crag that jutted out from the northern wall of the pass. Tom saw an old nunnery perched on the flat summit surrounded by what looked like an encampment of tents. The lightning-bolt flags were everywhere, interspersed with giant-size portraits of General Naga. On the pan at the crag’s foot where the Jenny set down, someone had scrawled big Chinese letters in whitewash, and then underneath, in shaky Anglish ones, SHE IS RISEN!

“What does that mean?” asked Tom.

“It means nothing,” snapped his captor. “The lies of anti-Naga troublemakers.” She was a grim young woman, and not in any mood to chat, but she did at least allow Tom to keep his green heart pills when her men hustled him across the pan to one of the squat blockhouses behind it, and then into a tiny lime washed concrete cell.

All the time he was being ordered about, or marched around, all the time someone else was in charge of him, Tom felt quite fearless; what happened next was not up to him, and barely seemed to matter. But as soon as the iron-bound door slammed shut on him and he was left alone, his fears came crowding in. What was he doing here? How was Wren coping, back in London? And what had that Green Storm girl meant when she said Tienjing was gone? Had he misheard her? Had she used the wrong word?

It was very quiet in the cell. Strangely so, for when he had last been in Batmunkh Gompa, one of the things that had hooked in his memory was the sounds: the puttering motors of the balloon taxis, the cries of street vendors, the music from the open-fronted teahouses and bars. He stood on the bunk in the corner of his cell and looked out the small barred window. The city stretched away from him, a scarp of stairs and houses where nothing moved but the flags. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no airships waited in the harbor, only a few scurrying figures could be seen on the steep streets. It was as if the city had been abandoned, and the people who remained had all pitched tents on the crag above. A mystery …

Footsteps, voices, out in the narrow entryway beyond his door. He jumped down, surprised. He had expected to wait hours or days for the Storm to deal with him. But the door opened, armed guards in white uniforms took up positions on either side of it, training their guns on Tom, and with a clank of armor a tall, yellowish man whom he recognized as General Naga came in, stooping as his exoskeleton carried him through the low doorway. Tom was relieved that his request for an audience had been taken seriously but astonished by the speed; panicked, too, for he had not quite finished working out what he was going to say to this fierce-looking soldier.

Naga’s narrow eyes narrowed even more as he looked Tom slowly up and down, taking in his travel-stained clothes and unkempt hair. His armor looked scraped and battered, and servomotors inside it whined and crunched unhealthily when he moved. There was a wound on his face, freshly dressed with lint and bandages.

“You are the barbarians’ envoy?”

Tom was taken aback. What was the man talking about?

“You came in the Wind-Flower’s old ship and claim to bring word of the weapon. But you look like a sky tramp. Not even in uniform. Are the Traktionstadts so certain of victory now that they expect me to surrender to a buffoon?”

“Surrender? But the new weapon …”

“Yes, yes!” shouted Naga. “The new weapon! You have destroyed Tienjing, you have destroyed Batmunkh Tsaka; you almost destroyed me!”

Tom felt as if a chart that had been guiding him through treacherous territory had suddenly turned out to be upside down all along. A bad-dream feeling. If Naga did not control the ODIN weapon, who did? The cities? But those fires in the west last night … Had the Storm not seen those cities burn? Had the news not reached them?

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. This was all beyond him. But he could still do what he had come here for. “I’m nothing to do with the Traktionstadts,” he said. “I come from London.”

“London?”

“I came to ask you … to beg you … The survivors there—I know you know of them—they are building something; have been building something for many years… They are making a new city; a city that hovers, and will not harm the Earth, and has no wish to eat any static city of yours. I’m here to tell you that they—we—mean you no harm; we have no quarrel with the Storm. If you could call off your birds, and let us go in peace when we leave the debris fields …”

Naga was frowning. “A hovering city?”

“It’s called Magnetic Levitation,” said Tom. “It sort of floats.” He waved his hands about, trying to demonstrate, and then remembered something Lavinia Childermass had said. “It’s not really a city at all, more a very large, low-flying airship. My daughter is there…”

Naga turned to one of the officers behind him and barked out something in Shan Guonese. Tom didn’t know many of the words, but he recognized the tone. The general was asking, “Is this fellow mad? Why are you wasting my time with him?” A moment later, without another look at Tom, he stalked out of the cell, his guards behind him.

“Please,” Tom shouted, “your wife will vouch for me! Is she here? Are her companions here?” (It had suddenly occurred to him that if Tienjing had been destroyed, Hester might have been destroyed with it.) He said, “Please, I am a friend of Theo Ngoni and Hester…”

“My wife?” Naga turned, glaring at him. “She is on her way home. I will certainly tell her all about you when she arrives.” But he made it sound like a threat, not a promise.

The door slammed shut. Tom was left alone again.

Outside, Naga stopped for a moment to think. His men clustered together, glancing fearfully toward the misty heights of Batmunkh Gompa. He knew what they feared. It seemed inconceivable that after destroying Tienjing, the barbarians had not turned their devil weapon on the Shield-Wall and opened a path for themselves into the mountain kingdoms. And yet, when the few airships he had managed to salvage from the disaster at Tienjing flew here at dawn, they found the place untouched, although the populace and half the garrison had already fled into the hills. What were the townies waiting for? (Naga had already discounted the reports that said that Traction Cities had been destroyed last night too. They must be mistakes, or lies put out by the enemy to add to the Storm’s confusion.)

And what did the appearance of this madman Natsworthy mean, aboard the Flower’s old ship?

“London,” he muttered. “Poor Dzhu told me something about London.”

One of his officers, a captain from the Batmunkh Gompa garrison, saluted smartly and said, “There has been increased activity among the squatters there, Excellency. We have been watching them with spy birds.”

“You have records?”

“There is a file in the Intelligence office on Thousand Stair Avenue.”

“Hurry there, and fetch it.”

The captain saluted and ran off, gray faced with fear and clearly expecting the fire from the sky to fall on Batmunkh Gompa at any instant. Naga watched him go. He thought wistfully for a moment of Oenone and then crushed the thought and muttered, “London…”

He remembered the night after the Wind-Flower died: how he had stood on the top of the Shield-Wall while the smoke of the burned Northern Air Fleet drifted up from the hangars below him, and faint and far away the lights of London glittered. It seemed to General Naga that all the troubles of the world began with London.

Chapter 42 The Funeral Drum