That afternoon, as the fog thinned and dirty sunlight broke over the debris fields, the people of London buried their lord mayor. Bareheaded, and with black mourning bands tied around their sleeves, eight members of the Emergency Committee carried the shrouded body of the old Historian along a winding, little-used path between the rust hills, while the rest of London followed, and Timex Grout beat out a solemn, steady rhythm on a drum made from an old oil can.
In Putney Vale, a mossy space between the masses of debris, where trees grew thickly and shaded the graves of all the other Londoners who had died since MEDUSA night, they laid him to rest, and piled the earth over him, and marked the place with a metal marker, carved with the symbol of his Guild, the eye that gazes backward into time. Lavinia Childermass offered up a prayer to Quirke, asking London’s creator to welcome the old man when his soul reached the Sunless Country. (She did not believe in gods or afterlives, being an Engineer, but she had been Pomeroy’s friend as well as his deputy, and she understood the need for this ritual.) Then Clytie Potts stepped forward and sang in a thin, uncertain voice a paean to the goddess Clio.
“He should have been here to steer New London out of the debris fields,” said Len Peabody, angry at the unfairness of it all.
“Now,” said Mr. Garamond, “it’s time we elected a new lord mayor.”
“Lavinia will be the new mayor,” said Clytie Potts. “That’s what Mr. Pomeroy wanted.”
“Mr. Pomeroy is dead,” said Garamond. “The Committee must decide. And then we must discuss what’s to be done with the prisoners.”
Wren had not been allowed to attend the funeral. Other Londoners had pleaded her case, but Garamond, his nose swollen to twice its usual size and the color of an aubergine, stood firm; she and Theo were dangerous agents of the Green Storm, and he insisted that they should be locked up. And so they were put in two old cages, salvaged from the wreck many years ago, which had once held animals in the zoological gardens in Circle Park, and were now kept in a dank corner of Crouch End to confine intruders, murderers, and lunatics who Garamond imagined might threaten the security of London. They had never been used before, and he looked very pleased with himself as his apologetic warriors shoved Wren and Theo inside, padlocking the barred gates behind them.
There, in the shadows, on the mattress that was her only furniture, Wren said her own prayers for Chudleigh Pomeroy as the muffled
“What now?” asked Theo from his cage. Dark as it was in this part of the End, Wren could see him looking out at her through the bars. If they both reached out, they could touch just their fingertips. “What will happen to us now?”
Wren didn’t know. It was hurtful to be accused and imprisoned like this, but she found it hard to be scared of silly old Garamond and all her London friends. Sooner or later it would all be sorted out, she felt sure. She barely had the strength to think about it, though; she was too busy mourning Mr. Pomeroy and worrying about her father.
They slept a little; talked a little; Wren made patterns with the straw on the floor of her cage. The day crept by. At evening time, when the dinner gong was summoning everyone to the communal canteen, Angie Peabody arrived with food and fresh water for them. She poked the tin bowls in through the bars of the cage and would not meet Wren’s eye.
“Angie?” Wren asked. “
“Don’t know what to believe anymore,” the girl replied gruffly. “There’s been nothing but trouble ever since you got here, I know that. Them birds coming yesterday, and your friend turning up… Saab got hurt badly, Wren; we don’t even know if he’ll see again, and he’ll always have the scars, and you don’t care a bit; you just went off yesterday evening with your boyfriend or whatever he is… It don’t look good, does it?”
Wren felt dazed with shame. It was true she hadn’t spared much thought for Saab or the others hurt in the attack; she’d been too taken up with thoughts of Theo. “That was wrong of me,” she admitted. “But it hardly makes me a Green Storm spy. Angie, a week ago Garamond was saying we were in league with Harrowbarrow; it was me and my dad who brought Wolf Kobold here. Remember?”
“How do we even know Kobold was what he said he was?” Angie retorted. “You say he went off to find this Harrowbarrow place.
That made Wren think of her father. She reached out through the bars, trying to touch Angie, who backed quickly away. “Angie, you’ve got to get me out of here! I have to find a way of going after Dad.”
Angie took another step backward, disappearing into the shadows. “Mr. Garamond said we ain’t to talk to you,” she said.
Wren threw herself down on her mattress, which rewarded her by bursting and poking her in the side with a sharp, rusty spring. “I’m sorry, Theo,” she said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. If I hadn’t written you that letter, you’d have stayed with your own people. You’d never have come here.”
“And if you hadn’t talked to me that afternoon by Pennyroyal’s swimming pool on Cloud 9, I’d have been killed or captured when the Storm attacked, and you wouldn’t have to worry about me at all.”
Wren reached out of her cage and touched his fingers. She traced the hard, warm curves of his nails, the little rough bits of skin beside them, the whorls of his fingertips like contour lines on a tiny Braille map.
Late that night they were awoken by the last person Wren had expected to come visiting them. “Wren?” a voice asked, and she opened her eyes to see Lavinia Childermass hunkered down outside the gate of her cage. The Engineer had an electric lantern with a blue glass shade. In its dim light her bald head shone like an alien moon. Wren scrambled up, spearing herself on the mattress spring again, and heard Theo moving in the neighboring cage.
“Wren, my dear, are you awake?”
“Sort of. What’s happening? Is it Dad?”
“He has not returned, child.”
“Then …”
“We have a new lord mayor,” said the Engineer. “The Committee elected him this evening.”
“But I thought you were Mr. Pomeroy’s deputy. I thought—”
“The Committee decided that it would be unwise to have an Engineer as mayor,” Dr. Childermass said calmly. “They still remember Crome’s regime. And with the war drawing closer, they thought it wiser to elect someone with a
“You can’t mean—”
“Mr. Garamond is lord mayor of London now, Wren. He played on the fears of the Committee to make them support him. I am sorry to say that he has turned a lot of people against you. I think most of London believes that you and Theo and your father had something to do with those birds and the death of poor Chudleigh.”
“But …”
“Shhh! I think they will forgive you, Wren; you are a Londoner’s daughter, after all. But Garamond is going to propose that Theo be killed, and from the talk at the canteen this evening, I think a majority of the Committee will side with him. He argues that we cannot allow an Anti-Tractionist to live here, learning our secrets.”
“He’s mad!”
“Perhaps he is, a little. Paranoid, certainly. Poor Garamond; he was no older than you on MEDUSA night. He survived because he was in one of the Deep Gut prisons, where Magnus Crome had sent him for being an Anti- Tractionist sympathizer. The day after the disaster he led a band of survivors east, imagining that the Anti- Tractionists he had always admired would help them. But the soldiers they met upon the plains just gunned them down; poor Garamond only escaped by playing dead, hidden under the bodies of his friends.”
“You can see why he wouldn’t trust Anti-Tractionists,” said Theo.
“But it doesn’t give him an excuse to start killing people!” Wren complained. “And it
