A Darkling Plain

this truce out east; traders were arriving in Cairo from all sorts of places that had been war zones until quite recently, from the territory of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft and the battlefields of the Altai Shan. (There was no shortage of smashed Stalker bits in the Altai Shan.)

Fishcake drank some water and set to work. He said, “We’ll soon be away from here.”

“You have found an airship?” whispered the Stalker. She sounded eager. (One thing that the Stalker Fang and Anna parts of her had in common was that they both kept nagging at Fishcake to finish the repairs and take them away to a place called Shan Guo. The Stalker Fang had something important to do there. Anna just wanted to go home.) “I had an airship of my own once,” she whispered. “The Jenny Haniver. I built her myself, secretly, in Arkangel, stole parts from Stilton’s salvage yards, and flew away…”

“Not an airship,” said Fishcake, who was tired of that story. “How do you expect us to nick an airship? The air yards are three tiers up; it’s too dangerous.”

“But we cannot walk to Shan Guo. It will take too long.”

Fishcake placed a leg in position and busied himself connecting wires and cords. “We won’t have to walk,” he said. “I picked up some news in the Lower Suq today. Guess where Cairo’s heading. Brighton. We’re going to park beside the seaside and trade with Brighton. Boats and things will go across. And I reckon there’s still limpets in Brighton. We could get to Shan Guo easy in a limpet.”

“Eyes,” whispered his Stalker. She turned her face to him, showing him the smashed lenses of her eyes. “I will need to see, if we are to reach Shan Guo. You will find me new eyes.”

Her voice had changed. It was still a whisper, but it was harsher and hissier, and Fishcake knew that he was in the presence of the Stalker Fang. He kept his nerve. “Sorry. No eyes. I can’t find none anywhere. Maybe in Brighton, eh? Maybe I’ll find some Stalkers’ eyes in Brighton?”

But he had a feeling he wouldn’t. In fact, several of the stalls he frequented in the Lower Suq had Stalkers’ eyes for sale, big glass jars full of them, like jawbreakers. Fishcake had decided very early on that he would not be stealing any for his Stalker. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that she was stronger and faster and cleverer than him. But as long as she was blind, she would need to stick with her little Fishcake.

“Maybe in Brighton,” he told her again, and set to work on the other leg.

Chapter 6 Rain-Colored Silk

The Nzimu flew north-northwest all night. By dawn she was cruising in calm air above a seemingly endless desert. Theo, whose nerves had been on edge as he guided his little ship over the mountains north of Zagwa, soon started to feel rather bored. Everything was running smoothly. The ambassador stayed in her cabin, high in the envelope. Her pretty servant came down the companionway in a rustle of rain- colored silk from time to time to stare at the view from the gondola windows. Once or twice that day he turned and found her watching him. Each time, her dark eyes darted quickly away from his, seeming suddenly very interested in the ducting above the main control station, or the flickering altimeter needles.

There was something familiar about her, and it nagged at Theo through the long, dull hours of northing. Was it Wren whom she reminded him of? But she was much prettier than Wren…

Captain Rasputra, meanwhile, turned out to be friendly, competent, polite, and perfectly sure that he could fly Lady Naga home to Tienjing without any help from Theo Ngoni. “Look, my dear fellow,” he said, when he came down to relieve Theo that evening. “Let us sort ourselves out. I’m an aviator with twelve years’ experience in General Naga’s own squadron. You, on the other hand, are what? An amateur. A failed Tumbler pilot. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you are commander of this tub for official purposes only, so that we may maintain the fiction that she is a Zagwan vessel on a trading voyage. For practical purposes, while we are up here in the blue, I think you had better leave things to me, eh?”

Before he turned in that evening, Theo climbed onto the top of the envelope and stood in the wind on the tiny lookout platform there, watching for trouble. He saw none, nothing but a few small desert townlets on the move, dragging their long wakes of dust behind them, too busy with their own concerns to pay attention to a passing airship. The air was empty too, except for a distant sky train heading south, its long chain of envelopes gleaming like an amber necklace in the sun.

Theo sighed, almost wishing that air pirates or assassins would attack, so that he could prove his usefulness to Lady Naga and Captain Rasputra. He imagined himself doing something heroic again (conveniently forgetting how frightened he had been aboard that Super-Gnat) and word of it spreading along the bird roads until it reached Wren. But when he tried to picture her, he found that the only face he could call to mind was that of the servant Rohini.

Alone in her cabin in the stern of the Nzimu’s envelope, Oenone Zero, Lady Naga, knelt and bowed her head and made a steeple of her stained hands and started to say her prayers. She did not expect God to answer her, because she did not believe he worked like that. But she had felt his presence very clearly, ever since that night on Cloud 9 when she had thought she was about to die. He gave her strength, and comfort, and courage. It seemed to Oenone that the least she could offer him in return were her prayers.

And so she gave thanks for her time in Zagwa, for the kindness of the queen and bishop and of Air Marshal Khora. She gave thanks for the bravery of Theo Ngoni, and prayed that he would come to no harm on this furtive voyage. And there she became distracted by a rather unspiritual thought. What a pity it was that her husband could not have been as young and handsome as Theo…

She opened her eyes and looked at the portrait of Naga that she kept beside her bunk; his maimed body strapped into mechanized battle armor, his battered, ocher face screwed into the awkward smile of someone who has had no practice smiling. Whenever she saw it, she wondered what it could be that made such a man love her.

She did not love him. She was just grateful for his protection, and glad that the leadership of the Green Storm had passed into the hands of a decent man. That was why she had been unable to say no when he asked her to be his wife. “Of course,” she’d said, and a feeling of numb astonishment had settled over her, which did not lift until she was dressed in her red bridal gown and standing on tiptoe to kiss her new husband in front of a vast assembly of officers and priests and bridesmaids and a nervous Christian vicar, flown in at considerable expense from some static in the Western Archipelago to give Oenone’s new god’s blessing to the marriage.

A gentle knocking broke in upon her memories. The cabin door opened and Rohini came in, shy and silent as ever. Oenone sat down at her portable dressing table and unpinned her hair so that the girl could brush it. In the lamplight the ends of her hair shone faintly auburn, a reminder that some of her long-ago ancestors had probably been Americans who had fled to the remote Aleutian islands after the Sixty Minute War. Yet another reason for the Green Storm’s hard-liners to despise her …

She tried to forget them and enjoy the gentle touch of Rohini’s hands and the soft, sleepy shushing of the hairbrush. She was glad that the girl had volunteered to come with her on this voyage. Rohini was so much quieter and sweeter than her other servants, who all seemed slightly resentful when Oenone tried to treat them like equals. Rohini was the only one who seemed genuinely fond of her, and appeared to appreciate the kindness that Oenone showed her.

So it came as a horrible surprise when Rohini dropped the brush, looped the rain-colored belt of her robe around Oenone’s throat, and, pulling it tight, hissed in a voice Oenone had never heard, “We know what you did, you miserable city lover! We know how you destroyed our beloved leader, and seduced that fool Naga! Now you will see what the true Storm does to traitors…”

Something had woken Theo, and he could not get back to sleep. It was cold in his cabin; his bunk was uncomfortable; he missed his home very much. He turned on the lamp and looked at his wristwatch, but there were several hours to go before he was supposed to relieve Rasputra at the helm. He groaned and turned the light out and snuggled under his scratchy blankets, trying vainly to sleep again.

But as he lay there, he slowly became convinced that his ship had altered course. The sound of the wind against the envelope had changed in some subtle way. He had learned to pay attention to such details during his time aboard the carriers of the Tumbler Corps, where any unexplained course change might mean that the unit was going into battle. The Nzimu had not been due to alter her heading before she sighted the