A Darkling Plain

Nothing more. The green glow in those headlamp eyes died to a pinprick, and went out.

Pennyroyal was staring at the spent gun in his hands, as if wondering how it came to be there. He dropped it and said, “There’s an air yacht moored down below. The keys are around that thing’s neck.”

It never occurred to Tom to ask him how he knew. He reached out and took the keys. They came away easily, for the cord they were threaded on had almost burned through.

“She is dead this time, isn’t she?” asked Pennyroyal nervously.

Tom nodded. “She’s been dead a long time. Poor Anna.” And then the pain came in his chest again and he couldn’t speak; he doubled over, groaning, while Hester clung to him and tried to soothe him.

“I say!” said Pennyroyal. “Is he all right?”

“His heart…” Hester’s voice was tiny, trembly; she’d not felt as helpless or as scared as this since she was a little girl watching her mother die. “Don’t die, Tom.” She groveled on the floor with him, holding him as tight as she could. “Don’t leave me, I don’t want to lose you again…” She looked up through her tears at Pennyroyal. “What shall we do?”

Pennyroyal looked as scared as she did. Then he said, “Doctor. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”

“No use,” said Tom weakly. The worst of the pain had passed, leaving him white and frightened, shining with sweat in the light of the rising flames. He shook his head and said, “I saw a doctor in Peripatetiapolis, and he said it was hopeless…”

“Oh, oh …,” wept Hester.

“Great Poskitt!” cried Pennyroyal. “If this doctor of yours had been any good, he’d hardly have been working in a little place like Peripatetiapolis, would he? Come on, we’ll find you the best medicos money and fame can buy. I’m not having you die on me, Tom; you and Hester are the only witnesses I have to the fact that I’ve just killed the Stalker Fang! Wait until the world hears about this! I’ll be back at the top of the best-seller lists in a flash!” He held out his hand. “Give me the key. He’ll never make it across the causeway. I’ll bring the sky yacht down in the garden.”

Hester glowered at him.

“Well, all right,” said Pennyroyal, “you go and fetch the yacht, and I’ll stay here with Tom.”

“Please stay, Het,” Tom said weakly.

Hester passed the key to Pennyroyal, who said, “Hold on, Tom. Back in a jiffy. You might want to wait outside,” he added as he hurried away. “This building’s on fire.”

Carefully Hester began to drag Tom after him, along the villa’s moldering halls and out into the cold of the garden. They heard Pennyroyal’s footsteps crunching off along the causeway, then silence, broken only by the rush of the flames inside the house. Firelight lapped across the gardens, gleaming on frosted grass and the ice-hung branches of bare trees. Beside a frozen fountain Hester laid Tom down, pulling off her coat to make a pillow for him. “We’re going to get you to Batmunkh Gompa,” she promised. “Oenone will sort you out. She’s a brilliant surgeon; saved Theo’s life; mine, too, probably. She’ll make you well again.” She held his face between her hands. “You’re not to die,” she said. “I don’t ever want to be parted from you again—I couldn’t bear it. You’re going to be well. We’ll take the bird roads again.”

“Look!” said Tom.

Above the mountains a new star had appeared. It was very bright, and it seemed to be growing larger. Tom managed to stand, walking a few paces away from the fountain for a better view.

“Tom, be careful… What is it?”

He looked back at her, his eyes shining. “It’s ODIN! It must have … blown up! That’s what she was doing, before Pennyroyal appeared. She ordered it to destroy itself…”

The new star twinkled like a Quirkemas decoration and then began to fade. At the same instant the roof of the house collapsed with a roar and a rush of sparks, and a spear of pain went through Tom’s side, so much worse than before that even as he fell, he knew this was the end of him.

Hester ran to him, her arms around him; he heard her screaming at the top of her lungs, “Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal!”

Pennyroyal reached the docking pan and saw the boy creep out of the pines to meet him. Even here the ground was lit by the glow of the fire on the island; the sky yacht’s silvery envelope shone cheerfully with orange reflections. Pennyroyal waved the key as he hurried toward it. “Nothing to fear now, young Fishpaste! I sorted your Stalker out. All it took was a bit of good old-fashioned pluck.”

He unlocked the gondola and climbed inside, the boy following. The yacht was a Serapis Sunbeam, rather like the one Pennyroyal had owned in Brighton. He squeezed into the pilot’s seat and quickly found the key slot under the main control wheel. Lights began coming on. The fuel and gas gauges all showed half full, and the engines worked after a couple of attempts. “First I must collect my young friends,” Pennyroyal said. After what they had just endured together, he felt Tom and Hester really were his friends; his comrades. He was determined that he would save young Tom.

“No,” said Fishcake coldly, from just behind him.

“Eh? But it’s all right, child; there’s no danger now…”

“Go now,” said Fishcake, and he reached around from behind the pilot’s seat and pressed one of the blades of Pennyroyal’s own pocketknife against his throat.

“They left me behind,” he said.

In the garden Hester heard the engines rumble and rise, and said, “He’s coming, Tom, the airship’s coming!”

Tom wasn’t listening. All he heard was the word “airship,” and as all pain and feeling began to leave him, he saw again the bright ships lifting from Salthook on the afternoon that London ate it, long ago.

The sky yacht rose and hung above the garden. The downdraft from its engine pods whipped Hester’s hair about and made the burning house behind her roar like a furnace. She looked up. Fishcake was staring down at her through one of the gondola windows. She recognized the look on his face, solemn and triumphant all at once, and she felt sorry for him, for all the things he must have seen and been through, and all the long miles he had had to come for his revenge. Then he turned from the window and shouted something at Pennyroyal and the yacht rose, curving away toward the mountains, the drone of its engines whispering into silence.

There’s no way out this time, Hester thought. And then she thought, There is always a way out. She pulled Fishcake’s long, thin-bladed knife out of her belt again and laid it down in the shadows beside her, where it gleamed with reflections from the fire; a narrow doorway leading out of the world.

She kissed Tom’s face, and for a moment he half woke, although he still didn’t quite know where he was; memories and real life were all tangled up inside his mind, and he thought that he was lying on the bare earth, on that first day, fresh-fallen out of London. But he didn’t care, because Hester was with him, holding him tight, watching him, and he thought how lucky he was to be loved by someone so strong, and brave, and beautiful.

And the last thing he felt was the touch of her mouth as she kissed him good-bye, and the last thing he heard was her gruff, gentle voice saying, “It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together, and it will all be all right.”

Chapter 53 The Afterglow

When they came for Oenone, it was still dark, and the breeze that blew in through the small window of the room where they’d been holding her smelled of ash. Faint Earth tremors shivered the floor. She had been feeling them all night in her sleep. Her dreams had been filled with the crash of falling masonry echoing across the valley from Batmunkh Gompa.

She washed her aching face in cold water and said her prayers, assuming they were taking her to be killed. But when they led her down the stairs, she found Subgeneral Thien waiting for her. He looked weary and slightly dazed, and his uniform was streaked with dirt.

“Naga is dead,” he said.

Oenone saw him staring at her broken nose and the bruises that had spread around her eyes. If Naga was