A Darkling Plain

He looked like a scarecrow, coated with slime and feathers, and he swung his dead face toward her and said, “THIS SHIP IS FINISHED.”

“Not the Jenny,” said Hester loyally. “Tom’ll get her down all right. Go forward. Keep him safe.”

She stood aside to let him go past her. She’d been hoping the birds would have killed Pennyroyal, but they’d been too busy with Grike. The explorer lay on the floor where she’d left him, bound and gagged, looking up at her with round, pleading eyes. She considered shooting him, then shouldered her gun and pulled her knife out, stooping. Pennyroyal gave a squeal of fright, but she was only cutting the ropes on his feet and his wrists.

As she stood up again, the remains of the long stern window disintegrated in an ice fall of smashed glass, and the wide black wings of a Resurrected condor filled the cabin. Its claws raked Pennyroyal’s head as it came flapping at Hester. She dropped the knife and tried to bring her gun to bear, but there was no time. She heard herself scream; a terrible, thin, little-girl scream, and suddenly Grike was back in the cabin with her, pulling her out of the way of the driving beak, grabbing the bird, its blades striking sparks from his armor as he crushed it to his body.

The Jenny Haniver lurched as another of her gas cells exploded; her nose tipped up, her stern down. Hester was flung on top of Pennyroyal, who clung to a bulkhead. She saw Grike stumble toward the stern, where the mountains glowed in the twilight beyond the smashed window. The bird was strong; half crushed, it still flapped and clawed. The spasmic beating of its wings overbalanced Grike. He smashed the bunk and crashed against the stern wall, which started to give way beneath him with a splintering sound.

“Grike!” screamed Hester, scrambling down the hill of the deck to help him.

“Hester, no!” yelled Pennyroyal through his gag, pulling her back.

The wall collapsed. Grike turned his face for a second toward Hester. Still clutching the condor, he fell. “Grike!” she shrieked again, as the gondola tilted back to the horizontal. She kicked herself free of Pennyroyal and scrabbled as close as she dared to that gaping rent where the wall had been. “Grike!”

No answer. Nothing to see in the smoke and the wind and the rain of burning fragments from her dying ship. Only the echoes of Grike’s last cry bouncing up at her from the abyss where he had fallen: “HESTER.!”

From the wall of the Stalker’s garden Fishcake watched the burning airship draw a long, bright trail down the sky, deep into the shadows of the valley. The wind was carrying the sound away, or maybe burning airships made no sound; at any rate, it all seemed to be happening in silence. It was very beautiful. The igniting gas cells were like fountains, showering out golden fragments that twinkled and faded as they fell. Blazing birds tried to flutter away from it, and they fell too, their bright reflections rising toward them in the waters of the lake until they met in a white kiss of steam.

A footfall in the snow behind him made Fishcake look around. The Stalker stood there, watching. “It is the Jenny Haniver,” she whispered calmly. “How sweet of somebody to bring her home…”

The airship settled in marshy ground on the lake’s far shore. As the smoke of its burning spread across the reed beds, Fishcake was almost sure he saw people running away from it. Mr. Natsworthy, he thought, and Hester. And he felt suddenly afraid, because he remembered what he had sworn to do to Hester, and was not sure that he had the courage to do it.

His Stalker’s hand rested on his shoulder. “They are no threat to us,” she whispered. “We will not hurt them.”

But Fishcake gripped the knife inside his jacket and thought about the last time he had seen the Jenny Haniver, flying away without him into the skies of Brighton.

Tom splashed through ankle-deep water and dropped into wet grass, hugging the precious lightning gun. Hester was close behind him, flinging down Pennyroyal. Survivors of the Stalker-bird flock clawed and shrieked around the blazing envelope, still trying to worry it to death. Hester lifted her gun and emptied the last of its grenades into the inferno. The explosion lit up the lake, the slopes and cliffs around it, the lonely house on its island. The Jenny’s rockets went up too, with orange flashes. Then there was only the swirling smoke, and the flames dancing in the smashed birdcage that had been their little airship; twenty years of memories burning away to charcoal and sooty metal. “Tom?” asked Hester.

“Yes,” he said. His chest ached, but not badly. Perhaps being with Hester again had healed his broken heart. He hoped so, because his green pills had been in the Jenny’s stern cabin.

“Our Jenny Haniver,” she said.

“She was only a thing,” said Tom, wiping at his eyes with a singed cuff, looking around. “We’re all right; that’s all that matters. Where’s Grike?”

“He’s gone. He fell. Up there somewhere…” She pointed toward the enormous silence of the mountains.

“Will he come after us?”

Hester shrugged uneasily. “He fell a long way, Tom. He saved me, and he fell. He might be damaged. He might be dead, and there’s no one to bring him back this time.”

“Just us then,” said Tom, and he took her in his arms again, and kissed her. She smelled just as she had on the night they first kissed, of ash and smoke and her own sharp sweat. He loved her very badly, and he was glad they were alone again, in danger and the wilds, where nothing that she had done mattered.

Not quite alone, of course. He had forgotten Pennyroyal, who knelt up in the bog and said in an irritable, gag-muffled voice, “Do you mind?”

Hester pulled away from Tom reluctantly and nodded toward the house. “This must be the place.”

“We’d better get on with it, then.” Tom took the lightning gun from his shoulder and checked it while Hester tied Pennyroyal’s hands and feet again, reknotting the ends of the cords she’d cut earlier.

“You can’t leave me here, bound and helpless!” Pennyroyal complained through his gag.

“We can’t have you running around free,” said Hester. “You’d sell us out to the Stalker for a handful of copper.”

“But what if you don’t come back?”

“Pray we do,” she suggested.

Tom felt unhappy about leaving the old man behind, but he knew she was right. They were already in enough danger, without a Pennyroyal on the loose behind them.

“How are you proposing to get out of this place?” Pennyroyal howled, as they started to leave, but they had no answer to that, so Hester just tied his gag tighter.

It was hard, rocky country, that valley of Erdene Tezh. Hester liked it. She could hear the grass singing, and smell the earth, and it reminded her of Oak Island. She took Tom’s hand, and they walked together through the gloomy light, looking over their shoulders from time to time at the burning brazier that had been the Jenny Haniver. The ground rose in a steep, grassy slope to a docking pan behind a windbreak of pines. The trees made a steady sighing sound as their needles combed the wind. The same wind boomed against the taut silicone-silk envelope of an air yacht. It was locked and abandoned-looking, but knowing it was there made them feel more hopeful. They moved on, dropping down toward the lake again, toward the causeway.

Hester took the lightning gun from Tom. He was breathing hard, sounding winded. “Stay here with the airship,” she said. “Let me go.”

He shook his head. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers; his mouth, warm in the cold. They started together across the causeway. Tom was slow, but she was glad of that, because it meant that she could draw ahead of him, ready to deal with whatever was waiting for them in that house. There was a creaking noise, but when she swung toward it, it was only plates of ice grinding and grating together at the edge of the lake. Farther out, clear water shone gray and still. She looked ahead again, toward the house.

There was someone standing on the causeway.

“Tom!” she yelled, raising the lightning gun. But she didn’t pull the trigger. It was not a Stalker that stood there watching her. Just a child. A pinched white face and shabby clothes and a lot of filthy hair. She took another few steps, and recognized him. How had he come here? But it didn’t matter. She lowered the gun completely and turned to Tom. “It’s Fishcake!”

Running feet behind her. She heard the boy grunt and, turning, saw the knife flash as he slashed it at her throat. She dropped the lightning gun and grabbed his thin wrist, bending the knife away, twisting his arm until he