A Darkling Plain

A flight of rockets sprang from the airship, and Wren ducked as one sizzled past her, close enough for her to glimpse the snarling dragon face painted on its nose cone and the Chinese characters chalked along its flank. It burst on the armor close to the gun turret, but not close enough to do more than rattle shrapnel against it. The other rockets went wide, exploding harmlessly on spikes of wreckage. Harrowbarrow was speeding through a region where long, jagged shards from London’s upper tiers lay heaped on top of one another, forming a lattice through which the westering sun poked its unhealthy crimson beams. Clinging to the armor with both hands, Wren looked up at the sharp spines flicking past. It was like rushing through an enormous, untidy cutlery drawer. If we run ourselves upon one of those, she thought, it will put an end to all our problems…

The blades did not seem to trouble Wolf Kobold. He waved his sword, shouting something to the gun crew, and the gun turned with a swirl of fairground music and filled the air astern with black puffballs, so that the airship yawed hastily and vanished for a while behind the wreckage. Then he renewed his attack on Theo, more earnest and less playful now, as if Wren and her boyfriend were a distraction he wanted to be rid of before the serious business began.

Theo did his best, grunting and shouting out with effort as he swung the rusty pipe to and fro, trying to parry Wolf’s blows, but he was no swordsman, and he found it harder than Wolf to keep his footing on the lurching, lumbering armor. After little more than a minute, during which Theo was driven steadily back toward the housing of the swivel gun, Wolf made a sudden feint, and Theo, lurching sideways to avoid his blade, lost his footing. He fell awkwardly, his head cracking against the armor underfoot. The pipe flew out of his sweaty hands. Wren caught it as it clattered past her. Wolf was already standing over Theo, sword raised to finish him.

She threw herself forward, not knowing what she meant to do, just determined that Wolf should not have it all his own way. She heard somebody scream, and it was her; a hard, ragged scream of terror and rage and panic that seemed to give her the strength she needed as she swung the pipe to fend off Wolf’s descending sword.

More sparks; a shock that jarred her arms in their sockets. For a comical moment Wolf stood amazed, staring at the sword hilt in his hand, the blade broken off halfway along its length. He looked at Wren. He shrugged and threw the broken sword away. He flipped his coat open and pulled a shiny new revolver from its holster.

Despite all the noise, the relentless speed, it seemed to grow very quiet and still on the back of Harrowbarrow in those last moments. Even the swivel gun had stopped firing. When Wren glanced around in the hope of spotting some miraculous escape, she saw the gunners gawping at her out of their little window.

“Good-bye, Wren,” said Wolf.

He hadn’t noticed that persistent white airship swinging into range again above his suburb’s stern. The rockets tore past him as he pulled the trigger, and the shot he fired went wide, flicking through Wren’s hair without touching her. The shock wave from the exploding swivel gun kicked him backward; he struggled to save himself, slipped, fell forward, and the sharp end of the pipe that Wren was still clutching went through him just beneath his breastbone. The impact knocked her down, and the other end of the pipe wedged against a seam in the armor, driving it clean through Wolf’s body.

“Oh!” he shouted, looking down at it.

“I’m sorry,” said Wren.

Wolf raised his head and stared at her. His eyes were very blue and wide, and oddly innocent. He looked as if he were about to cry. When Wren pulled at the pipe, with some idea of tugging it out of him, he lurched sideways, pipe and all, and went tumbling away from her like a broken doll down the long slope of the suburb’s flank until he hit the tracks.

Later she would pray that he had been dead by the time those sliding slabs of machinery caught him. She would tell herself that it had not been his screams she heard as he was snatched and mangled and plowed down into the earth, only the shrieking of stressed metal somewhere, some shard of long-dead London crying out as Harrowbarrow ground over it.

But by then they were on the outer edge of the debris field. A wide plain stretched ahead of them, empty as an ocean—except for the lights of New London, which was a quarter mile ahead and racing northward, crossing open country now, the wreck of its mother city left behind it like a sloughed-off skin.

“Girl!” someone was shouting, and in her shocked state Wren could not work out who it was; not Wolf, for sure; not his gunners, who had vanished with their swiveling turret; not Theo, who was struggling to his feet, his face streaked with blood from where he’d struck his head. She looked up. The Storm’s white ship hung low above her, keeping pace with her by some miracle of stunt flying that only an aviator could properly appreciate. Reaching down to her from a hatch in the gondola was something that she took at first to be a Stalker, until he shouted again, “Girl!” and beckoned irritably for her to take his hand, and she recognized General Naga.

The Fury’s gondola smelled of gun smoke and air fuel. Naga strode around issuing orders to his aviators, glancing at Wren just long enough to say, “You are Londoners? Captured by the harvester?”

Wren just nodded, clinging tight to Theo and finding it hard to believe that they were both still alive. It did not seem like the moment to try and explain that she and General Naga had met before. She could not stop shaking, or thinking about Wolf Kobold. As the Fury veered away from Harrowbarrow and flew toward New London, she let Theo go and went to crouch in a corner, where she was sick till her stomach was empty.

They touched down on New London’s stern, where a crowd of Londoners and Green Storm soldiers were waiting. “Wren!” cried Angie happily, waving, forgetting that Wren had ever been a suspected spy.

“Miss Natsworthy! Mr. Ngoni! Thank Quirke you’re safe!” shouted Mr. Garamond, helping them from the gondola. No thanks to you, Wren felt like saying, but then she realized that he already knew that, and that his clumsy hug was his way of saying sorry, and she hugged him back.

The new city had a curious feel; there were none of the tremors and half-muffled shocks and lurches that you felt aboard a Traction City, just a sense of dreamlike movement, and of speed. But perhaps not quite enough speed, for Harrowbarrow filled the view astern, its mouthparts opening to reveal a hot gleam of furnaces and factories inside.

“You’d have thought they’d stop when Kobold died,” said Theo.

“They don’t know,” Wren replied. “Or maybe they do, and they don’t care. Mr. Hausdorfer and the others can handle a simple chase without their master. Harrowbarrow never cared about Wolf the way Wolf cared about Harrowbarrow.”

She didn’t want to talk about Wolf. The way he had looked at her when he’d realized she’d killed him would stay with her always. She tried to tell herself that it was good she felt so guilty and so soiled by what she’d done. Better that than to be like her mother, and not care. But it did not feel good.

She took Theo’s hand, and together they went to stand among the other Londoners at the stern rail. Behind them, Naga was giving orders to his surviving officers, telling Subgeneral Thien, “You will return to Batmunkh Gompa with the Protecting Veil. My wife believes that the Stalker Fang controls the new terror weapon. Help her find it and destroy it.”

“Yes, Excellency…”

“And New London is to be granted safe passage through our territories.”

“Yes, Excellency…”

“Now I want everybody off the Fury before I take her up.”

“But Excellency, you cannot fly alone!”

“Why not? I flew alone at Xanne-Sandansky and Khamchatka. I flew alone against Panzerstadt Breslau. I should be able to handle a filthy little barbarian harvester like this.”

Thien understood; he bowed and saluted and started shouting orders. Wren, looking round to see what all the excitement was about, saw the Fury’s crew jumping down onto the deck plates, saw Naga heaving himself aboard. She looked away. What was happening astern was far more interesting than anything the Storm could do. She barely noticed when the Fury took off again.

Harrowbarrow was driving toward them through sprays of wet earth. Its armor was holed, there were fires on its upper decks, and one of its tracks was grinding, but Hausdorfer didn’t care. He’d been skeptical about this place his master had brought them so far to eat, but now he’d seen it move, seen it fly, he understood what young Kobold had been on about. “More power!” he screamed into his speaking tubes. “Open the jaws! They are defenseless! They are ours!”