A Darkling Plain

He had thought that he didn’t want to kiss her, but all of a sudden he realized that he had wanted nothing else, ever since they’d parted. The things she had done that had made him so angry, the lies she’d told him and the men she’d killed, only made him want her more. He had loved Valentine when he was a boy, and now he loved Valentine’s daughter. He kissed her face, her jaw, her damaged, tear-wet mouth. “I don’t hate you,” he said.

From his station high in the envelope, where he had been keeping watch for pursuers, Grike heard the sounds from the flight deck: their rustling movements and the things they whispered to each other. Hester’s constant weakness for the other Once-Born saddened him. Scared him, too, for he could tell from the sick, arrhythmic stutter of Tom’s heart that Tom would not live long. What would Hester do without him? How could she have invested all her hopes in something so fragile? And yet her small voice, audible only to a Stalker’s ears, still drifted up the companionway, murmuring, “I love you I love you I always loved you Tom oh only you and always…”

Embarrassed, Grike tried not to listen to her, concentrating hard upon the other noises around him. And faintly, faintly, beneath the noise of engines and envelope fabric and the wind in the rigging, he sensed a third heartbeat, another pair of lungs filling and emptying, the familiar chattering of frightened teeth.

A few empty crates stood between the air-frame struts. A heap of tarpaulins quivered in a corner. Grike ripped them aside and stared down at the Once-Born huddled underneath.

It was hard for a flat, mechanical voice like his to sound weary, but he managed it.

“SO, PROFESSOR, WE MEET AGAIN.”

“THERE IS A STOWAWAY ON BOARD,” the old Stalker announced, climbing down the companion way with his captive. Tom and Hester sprang apart, straightening their clothes and their ruffled hair, turning their attention reluctantly to Nimrod Pennyroyal as Grike shoved him onto the flight deck.

“Please, please, please, forgive me!” he was begging, pausing to add, “Oh, hello, Natsworthy!”

Tom nodded awkwardly but did not say anything. He knew that there would be no more time for him to be alone with Hester, for the plateau below was narrowing and rising, and the steep buttresses of the Erdene Shan were only a few miles ahead.

“Throw him out the hatch!” said Hester angrily, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt. “Give him to me; I’ll do it myself!” She felt that dropping Pennyroyal thousands of feet onto some nice pointy rocks would help her regain her dignity. But she knew that Tom would not want that, so she restrained herself, and asked, “How in the gods’ names did you slip aboard?”

“I couldn’t just let you leave me in Batmunkh Gompa, could I?” Pennyroyal started babbling. “I mean, for Poskitt’s sake, I wasn’t going to hang around and let Naga chop my head off or something. Authors lose all their appeal to the public if they are only available in kit form. So I sneaked aboard while those Green Storm chappies were fueling her, and hid in the hold. If Mr. Grike hadn’t come poking about, I’d still be there, being no trouble to you at all. Where are we going, anyway? Airhaven? Peripatetiapolis? Somewhere nice and safe, I trust?”

“Nowhere’s safe anymore,” said Tom. “We’re going to Erdene Tezh.”

“Where? And, indeed, why?”

“Because we think the Stalker Fang is there.”

Pennyroyal’s eyes bulged; he writhed in Grike’s grip. “But she’ll kill us all! She’ll have airships, soldiers, Stalkers…”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I think she’s quite alone. How else would she have been able to return without Naga’s intelligence people suspecting anything?” He grunted and clutched his chest, feeling his heart straining in the thin high-altitude air. For a moment he felt an absolute hatred of Pennyroyal. What was the old man doing here? Why was he haunting them? He wondered if he should tell Hester about his failing heart. When she learned that the old wound was going to kill him, she would murder Pennyroyal out of hand…

But he still did not want to tell Hester how ill he was. He wanted to cling for as long as possible to the pretense that he was going to survive, and sleep in her arms tonight, and fly on with her in the morning to fresh adventures in other skies.

“Tie him up in the stern cabin,” he said.

“But Tom, be reasonable!” Pennyroyal wailed.

“Tie him nice and tight. We can’t risk having him on the loose.”

Grike dragged the spluttering explorer away; Hester touched Tom’s face with her fingertips and followed, promising to tie the knots herself and leave Grike to guard him. Alone on the flight deck, Tom steered the Jenny between the snow spires of the Erdene Shan, up and up until the topmost peaks were sliding past the windows like vast, blind ships, snowfields ghostly in that ashen light.

When Hester came back to the flight deck, he said, “We’ll be over the valley in another half hour if Anna’s old charts are right.”

“They should be,” said Hester, hugging him from behind. “Erdene Tezh was her house, wasn’t it?”

Tom nodded, wishing he could kiss her again, but too wary of the spines and spikes of rock he was flying through to even glance at her. “Anna told me once she planned to retire here.”

Hester hugged him tighter. “Tom, when we get there, if it is her, we’re just going to let Grike kill her, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to talk to her, or argue with her, or appeal to her better nature, are you?”

Tom looked sheepish. Hester knew him too well; she had already guessed the half-formed plans he had been turning over in his mind all day. He said, “At Rogues’ Roost that time, she seemed to know me. She let us go.”

“She isn’t Anna,” Hester warned him. “Just remember that.” She kissed the hollow of his neck beneath his ear, where the swift pulse beat. “What I told you that night on Cloud 9, about you being boring, I didn’t mean it. You’re not boring. Or maybe you are, but in a lovely way. You never bored me.”

They crossed a high pass. On the eastern side the ground fell steeply, down, down, down, a valley opening, white and then green, a wriggle of river in its deep cleft, a lake at the far end, and, on an island there, the house of the Wind-Flower. Tom, through the Jenny’s old field glasses, saw a saucer-shaped antenna poking from its roof. Then the sky filled with wings.

Hester had just enough time to push him to the floor before the first wave of Stalker-birds shattered the Jenny’s front windows. Two of them came into the cabin, filling it with their flapping, the idiot flailing of their green-eyed heads. Hester snatched the lightning gun and shot the first before it saw her. The other came shrieking at her, its knife of a beak aimed straight at her eye. She fired the lightning gun at it and it exploded, filling the flight deck with gunge and feathers. She looked down at Tom. “Are you all right?”

“Yes …” He looked scared and white. Hester squirmed upright, hissing with pain as the movement wrenched strained muscles. She peered out the windows. More birds were circling the Jenny, and she could see a couple tearing at the starboard engine pod. She aimed the lightning gun through the side window and shot them both, then tossed it down to Tom and snatched her own gun down from an overhead locker. She started aft along the gondola’s central corridor. Pennyroyal was screeching in the stern cabin, and through the half-open door Hester saw the flap of wings and the gleam of Grike’s armor as he beat the birds back. “HESTER!” the Stalker shouted.

“I’m fine,” she promised. She heard wings and claws inside the little medical bay where Anna Fang had once treated her for a crossbow wound. She kicked the door open and turned her gun on the birds that had torn their way in through the roof there. The gun was a good one—the steam-powered Weltschmerz 60 with the underslung grenade launcher that she’d picked up for a song in El Houl—but it made more of a mess of the medical bay than the birds had, shredding the outer wall till it looked like a doily. Through the holes she could see more birds going for the engine pod, and heard it choke and die, the propeller slowing. “Oh, damn it,” she said, and pumped a grenade through the pod’s cowling, blowing it to pieces along with the birds.

Back out in the corridor she shouted, “Tom? You all right?”

“Of course! Don’t keep asking!”

“Put us down then.”

“Down isn’t a problem,” said Tom, checking the row of gas-pressure gauges on the instrument panel and seeing all the needles whirling toward zero. Unbalanced by the loss of the starboard pod, the gondola was tilting steeply sideways. Scary shapes flapped by outside, but Tom tried to ignore them, saving the lightning gun in case more got in. Gaudy yellowish light licked in through the larboard windows. The envelope was burning.

Hester kicked open the stern-cabin door. Grike was in the process of ripping a Resurrected eagle to pieces.