A Darkling Plain

soldiers. “You should stay, General! The birth of a town is a great event!”

Naga turned, and bowed, and hurried on. “Good luck, Engineer!” she heard him shout. She watched him go, thinking how strange it was that he should turn out to be New London’s midwife. Then, remembering her position, she went haring back to her own post. The deck plates were trembling as, one by one, her assistants threw the starting levers of the Childermass engines. By the time she reached her command room in the heart of the underdeck, the faint whine of the repellers had risen to a pitch beyond her hearing, and there was an odd, bobbing movement in the floor. New London was airborne.

She reached for the speaking tube that linked her to the lord mayor’s navigation room, high in the new town hall. “Hello! Ready?”

“Ready,” came Garamond’s voice, muffled and peevish. Lavinia Childermass hung the tube in its cradle and looked at the scared, expectant, grimy faces of her crew. Even down here she could hear the crash and rattle as Harrowbarrow shouldered its way toward her through the debris fields. She nodded, and her people sprang to their controls.

Outside the Womb, Naga watched Harrowbarrow’s scouts scurry aside as the noise of their suburb’s approach grew louder. He fired his pistol at a couple of them, to speed them on their way. The sky above those rust hills west of Crouch End was filling with dust and debris, as if a scrap-metal geyser had erupted there. And suddenly the hills themselves shifted, slithered, bulged and burst apart, and tearing through them came Harrowbarrow’s brutal snout.

The Womb lurched and seemed to settle. At its northern end Peabody’s men had set off their explosive charges, and with a dreamy slowness the tall, corroded doors at the hangar mouth fell forward, crashing down into the rust and rubble outside.

Harrowbarrow ground its way over the ruins of Crouch End, bright rags of curtains and carpet snagging on its clawed tracks. The cruiser Protecting Veil fired a flight of rockets at it and rose out of range before the one remaining swivel gun on Harrowbarrow’s back could swing around to target her. The Fury swooped toward the Womb, and Naga ran forward and leaped aboard as she hovered for a moment just above the ground. By the time his armor had hauled him through the hatch and onto the flight deck, the ship was high again. An aviatrix came running to him with reports, but Naga waved her away, tense as an expectant father. He went to a gun slit and peered down at the mouth of the Womb.

“Come on!” he muttered. “Come on!”

Crouching on Harrowbarrow’s spine, Wren and Theo tried to shield each other as the rust hills broke over the suburb like a wave. Giant fists and fangs of metal came clattering and scraping over the armor, some tumbling high into the air, some caroming over the hull so close that Wren felt the wind of them as they whisked past her. Then they were gone, Crouch End was being crushed beneath the tracks, and ahead, on the crest of the next ridge, the Womb lay waiting. “Look!” she shouted. “Theo! Look!”

From the open doorway of the old hangar New London was emerging, the magnetic mirrors on its flanks shining like sovereigns. It hovered outside the Womb for a moment, dipping a little, uncertain of itself. A newborn city, thought Wren, like something from the olden days, and she wished and wished that her father could be here with her to see it.

Righting itself, New London started to move, the heat haze shimmer beneath its hull increasing as it put on speed, hovering away northward across the debris field. And Harrowbarrow swung northward too, the jolt of its snarling engines throwing Wren off her balance as it began powering in pursuit of the new city. She sprawled awkwardly backward, afraid for a moment that she would roll down the slope into the endlessly grinding teeth of the suburb’s tracks, but she managed to find a handhold. As she clawed her way back to Theo, she saw the hatch they had come through heave open again and Wolf Kobold climb out.

He looked pleased to see them, but not in a good way.

Chapter 50 The Stalker’s House

There were some blue squares. Dusty blue, against a background of black. Tom, who had not expected to wake at all, woke slowly, from half-remembered dreams. The squares were sky, showing through holes in a crumbling roof. The clouds had cleared; there was a patch of evening sunlight coming and going on the mildewed wall. He lay on something soft, and there were smells of must and damp around him. His hands and feet felt miles away; his head was too heavy to lift; someone had crammed a big, square slab of stone inside his chest. Faint jabs of pins and needles in his limbs let him know that he was still alive.

“Tom?” A whisper. He moved his head. Hester bent over him. “Tom, my dearest … you blacked out. The Stalker said it was your heart. She said you were dying, but I knew you wouldn’t—”

“The Stalker …” Tom began to understand where he was. The Stalker Fang had scooped him up and taken him inside with her. She had laid him on a bed; an old, worm-eaten, weed-grown bed whose draperies had been nibbled thin by moths, but still a bed; the place you put someone you meant to take care of.

“She let us live,” he said.

Hester nodded. “She’s tied my hands and feet, but not yours. She didn’t bother with yours. If you can reach the knife in my belt…”

She fell silent as the Stalker Fang limped into the room and sat down on the end of the bed, watching Tom with her cold green eyes.

“Anna?” he asked weakly.

“I am not Anna,” whispered the Stalker. “Just a bundle of Anna’s memories. But I’m pleased you’re here, Tom. Anna was very fond of you. You are her very last memory. Lying in the snow, and you looking down and calling her name.”

“I remember,” said Tom faintly. “I thought she was already dead.”

“Nearly,” whispered the Stalker. “Not quite. You’ll understand. Soon you’ll make the same journey.”

“But I’m not ready.”

“Nor was Anna. Perhaps no one ever is.”

Behind her, through the open doorway, Tom could see a room stuffed with machines; lights and screens and bits of equipment too complicated for his tired, shocked brain to fathom. He said, “ODIN …”

“I talk to it from here.”

“Why did you turn it on your own people?”

The Stalker watched him with her head tipped a little to one side. “An overture, before the symphony begins,” she whispered. “By attacking both sides, I made each think the other was to blame; they will be too busy with each other to come looking for me, and that will give me the time I need.”

“To do what?”

“I have been preparing a sequence of commands, a long and complicated sequence. I shall begin transmitting them soon, when ODIN comes clear of the mountains again. They will divert it onto new orbits, give it new targets to strike at.”

“What targets?”

“Volcanoes,” said the Stalker. She reached out gently and stroked Tom’s hair. “Tonight ODIN will strike at forty points along the Tannhauser chain. Then on across the world: the Deccan volcano maze; the Hundred Islands…”

“But why?” asked Hester. “Why volcanoes?”

“I am making the world green again.”

“What,” cried Tom, “by smothering it in smoke and ash, and killing thousands of people?”

“Millions of people. Don’t get excited, Tom; your poor heart might not take it, and I am so looking forward to having someone sensible to talk to.”

“And what about me?” asked Hester, as if she were afraid the Stalker was trying to steal Tom away from her.

“As long as you don’t try to be foolish or destructive, you are safe. I suppose you will starve in a week or so—there is no food left here. But until then I shall enjoy your company. Anna always felt our destinies were linked,