A Darkling Plain

in his time: Evercreech and Werewolf, Holt and Quirke-Le-Dieu. They were hard places; rip off their tracks and destroy their engines and they would still keep coming, extending spare wheels and firing up emergency motors. He shielded his eyes against the light and watched his airships burning—four of them now, a good crop of escape balloons drifting downwind, thank gods. He knew he had a fight on his hands.

He looked behind him to check that the Londoners were doing as he’d ordered, and saw them hurrying up the track to the Womb. Some carried bundles of belongings; others clutched the hands of scared children or helped the old and sick hobble along. Subgeneral Thien was ordering squads of battle-Stalkers into the rust heaps to stop any Harrowbarrovians who tried to circle around and cut them off.

Naga took a carbine from one of his dead soldiers and threw it to the first Londoner he saw, a wide-eyed girl. “Covering fire,” he ordered. For a moment he wondered if he had done the wrong thing and she was going to turn the gun on him, but she ran away to join his own troops, who were crouched among the heaps of scrap metal west of the vegetable gardens, taking potshots at any townies who moved up in the rust hills.

“What about the Londoners’ new city, Excellency?” asked Subgeneral Thien, running over to crouch at his side. “Shall we destroy it?”

Naga stared at the long wedge of the Womb while bullets whirred past him like wasps. What would it be like to live all these years in a rubble heap, to work so hard, only to see the thing you had built snatched away when it was almost finished?

Subgeneral Thien was saying, “We can’t risk the Engineer technology falling into the hands of these Traktionstadt vermin.”

Naga patted him on the shoulder. “You’re right. Find that woman Engineer and tell her to start her engines. The new city must leave at once.”

Thien gaped at him, eyes wide behind his visor. “You’re letting it go? But it is a mobile city! We are sworn to destroy all mobile cities—”

“It’s not a city, Subgeneral,” said Naga. “It’s a very large low-flying airship, and I intend to see that it comes to no harm.”

Thien stared a moment longer and seemed to understand. He nodded and saluted, and Naga saw him grinning as he hurried off, crouched low and zigzagging to avoid the bullets. Beneath his armor Naga felt himself trembling; it was not easy to go against everything he had believed for so many years. But Oenone had taught him that there sometimes came a time when beliefs had to be abandoned, or altered to suit new circumstances. He knew that she would approve of what he was doing.

He ran across open ground to the vegetable gardens and crouched down beside the young London girl he had given the gun to. “What’s your name, child?”

“Angie, Mister. Angie Peabody.”

He squeezed her shoulder with his mechanical hand, sharing his courage with her the way he had so many times with so many other frightened youngsters in tight corners like this. “Well, Angie, we’re going to fall back to the Womb, and keep these devils at bay until your people can get their new city moving.”

“You’re ’elping us, Mister? Cor, ta!”

Her young face and bright, startled smile reminded Naga so strongly of Oenone that as he went running on to pass the same message to his own troops, he had to pull his visor shut so that they wouldn’t see his tears. He thanked his gods that the harvester had come, and that he had a battle to fight and people to defend; no politics to confuse him, no super-weapons to worry about, just a chance to die like a warrior, sword in hand, facing the barbarians.

Chapter 48 A Voyage to Erdene Tezh

Above the white knives of the mountains the sky was full of memories. Tom and Hester didn’t talk much as the Jenny flew away from Batmunkh Gompa, but they didn’t have to: Each knew what the other was thinking of. All the voyages they’d made in this little ship; all the castles of cloud they’d flown her around, the glittering seas they’d seen below, the tiny, toylike cities, the convoys and the trading posts, the ice mountains calving from Antarctic glaciers … The memories linked them together, drawing them closer, but they were all stained and spoiled by the things Hester had done.

So they did not talk. They took turns to sleep; to eat; and when they were together on the flight deck, they spoke only about the mountains, the wind, the sinking pressure in number three gas cell. Tom fetched the lightning gun from its hiding place and explained how it worked. They flew over small towns, high, sparse pastureland, and ribbons of road. They saw no other ships. Tom kept the radio switched on, but all they heard were a few confused scrabblings of battle code and garbled distress calls on elusive frequencies, interspersed with pulses of interference, like breakers on a pebble shore. The sunlight faded. The sky was veiled with volcanic ash and city smoke. The Jenny crossed a high plateau. Ahead rose the snow spires of the Erdene Shan.

A sad, unwelcome thought came into Tom’s head: This was the last journey of his life.

And as if she guessed what he was thinking, Hester took his hand. “Don’t worry, Tom. We’ll be all right. Hopeless missions are what we do best, remember?”

He looked at her. She was watching him solemnly, waiting for a smile, some sign of forgiveness or approval. But why should he forgive her? He snatched his hand away. “How could you do it?” he shouted. All the stored-up anger he had been nursing since she’d left came out of him in a rush that sent her reeling back as if he’d hit her. “You sold Anchorage! You betrayed us all to the Huntsmen!”

“For you!” Hester’s face was flushed, her scar dark and angry-looking. Her voice slurred the way it always did when she was upset, making it hard to hear what she said next. “For your sake, that’s why I did it, because I was afraid you’d go off with Freya Rasmussen.”

“I should have done! Freya doesn’t kill people, and enjoy doing it, and lie about it afterward! How could you lie to me, all those years? And in Brighton too … abandoning that little Lost Boy—how could you?”

Hester raised one hand to shield her face. “I’m Valentine’s daughter,” she said.

“What?” Tom thought he’d misheard. “Valentine was my father.”

Tom was still angry. He thought this was another lie. “David Shaw was your father.”

“No.” Hester shook her head, her face hidden now by both her hands. “My mum and Valentine were lovers before she married. Valentine was my father. I found out a long time ago, at Rogues’ Roost, only I never told you, ’cos I thought if you knew, then you’d hate me. But now you hate me anyway, so you might as well know the truth. Valentine was my dad. His blood’s in me, Tom; that’s why I can lie and steal and kill people and it doesn’t feel wrong to me; I know it’s wrong, but I don’t feel it. I’m Valentine’s daughter. I take after him.”

Her one gray eye peered out at him between her fingers, as if she had turned back into the shy, broken girl he had fallen in love with all those years before. A memory came to him, clear as sunlight, from Wren’s thirteenth summer, when she and Hester had just been starting to fight: Hester standing at the bottom of the staircase in their house at Dog Star Court and shouting up at her sulky daughter, “You take after your grandfather!” At the time he’d thought she’d been talking about David Shaw, and he’d thought it surprising, because she’d always said that David Shaw had been a quiet, kind man. But of course she had been thinking of her real father.

He felt the last of his anger drain away, leaving him shaky and ashamed. What must it have been like for her, keeping such a secret for so long?

“And Wren too,” she snuffled, weeping now. “He’s in her too—why else would she steal that Tin Book thing? Why else run out on us? That’s why I had to go, Tom. Maybe if she just has you, she’ll be all right, maybe the Valentine in her won’t come out.”

“It’s not Thaddeus Valentine whom Wren takes after,” Tom said gently. He went to her and took her hands, pulling them aside and down so that he could see her face. “If you could see her now, Het—she’s so brave and beautiful. She’s just like Katherine.”