Philip Reeve: Infernal Devices

“So you think the Tin Book is a plan for a submarine?”

“Maybe not exactly. But there might be enough clues in there to help us learn how they worked. Please, Wren. Tell us where it is.”

Wren shook her head. “Miss Freya and the rest aren’t as scary as you think,” she promised him. “Come down to the city with me. Introduce yourself. I asked my dad about you. He says you helped save Vineland. And you’ve been hurt by Pennyroyal, just like us. I expect Miss Freya will be happy to give you the Tin Book as a gift.”

Gargle sighed. “I’d like that, Wren. I’d love it. But it would all take time. There’d be so much explaining to do, so much mistrust to overcome. And all the time we stay here, more limpets might be disappearing, and whoever’s taking them may already be zeroing in on Grimsby. I’m sorry, Wren. We have to do it the Lost Boy way. Tell me where the book is, and we’ll take it tonight and be off. And maybe, when we have it and Grimsby’s safe again, maybe then I’ll return and introduce myself, and there’ll be peace and friendship between our two cities.”

Wren pulled free of him and hurried away between the trees, almost running, to a place where she could look down upon the rooftops of Anchorage. He didn’t mean what he had said about coming back, she was sure of that. He had just said it to make her feel better. Once he left this place, he would never return. Why should he, when he had a whole world to roam in? A world of cities that floated and flew and rolled beneath skies filled with airships. That’s what Gargle would be going back to, while she, all she had to look forward to was being Miss Freya’s assistant and growing old and bored in Anchorage and one day—if Mum would let her—becoming Mrs. Nate Sastrugi and having a lot of bored little children of her own.

“Wren,” he said behind her.

“No,” she said. She turned to face him, trying not to let her voice shake too much. “No, I won’t tell you where to find the book. I’ll take it myself, and bring it to you tonight. And then I’ll come with you.” She laughed and made a big gesture with both arms, trying to take in Anchorage, the lake, the hills beyond, the whole Dead Continent. “I hate this place. It’s too small for me. I want to go with you when you leave. I want to see Grimsby, and the Hunting Ground and the Traction Cities and the bird roads. That’s my price. I’ll bring you the Tin Book if you’ll take me with you when you leave.”

Late into the night, long after the Stalker Works were quiet and empty, her busy fingers tinkering inside Grike’s chest cavity or in his open brain. And as she worked, she talked to him, filling the old Stalker in on things he’d missed during his years in the grave. She told him of how the hard-line faction called the Green Storm had seized power in the Anti-Tractionist nations of Old Asia and the North, and of their long war against the Traction Cities. She told him of their immortal leader, the Stalker Fang.

“A STALKER?” he asked, surprised. He was growing used to the Green Storm’s Stalkers: mindless, faceless things who couldn’t even recharge themselves but had to have their batteries laboriously extracted and replaced after a few days of action. They were the sort of creatures who gave the living dead such a bad name. He could not imagine one of them leading armies.

“Oh, the Stalker Fang is nothing like the rest,” Dr. Zero assured him. “She is beautiful, and brilliant. She has an Old Tech brain, like yours, and all sorts of special adaptations. And she was built using the body of a famous League agent, Anna Fang. The Storm like people to think that Anna Fang has come back from the dead to lead our glorious war against the barbarians.”

The thought of war stirred instincts deep in Grike’s Stalker brain. He flexed his hands, but the blades that he knew should be housed inside them did not spring out.

Dr. Zero said, “I have removed your finger-glaives.”

“HOW AM I TO FIGHT IF I AM UNARMED?” he asked.

“Mr. Grike,” Dr. Zero told him, “if we just wanted another lumbering battle-Stalker, I could have built one myself. There is no shortage of dead bodies to Resurrect. But you are an antique, more complex than anything we can build. You’re not just a thing, you’re a person.” She touched his harmless hands. “It made a nice change, to work on a Stalker who was not just another soldier.”

An airship named The Sadness of Things arrived to carry Grike to a place they called Forward Command. He stood at Dr. Zero’s side in the observation gondola as they flew west over high snow-clad mountains, then the plains of the Eastern Hunting Ground, which were Green Storm territory now, with here and there the wreck of a destroyed Traction City rusting in the grass.

“This land was all captured in the first weeks of the war, nearly fourteen years ago’’ said Dr. Zero, still keen to educate her patient. “At first the barbarians were taken completely by surprise when our air fleets came sweeping down on them out of the mountains. We drove west, herding terrified cities ahead of us, smashing any that dared turn and fight. But slowly the cities started to group together and defend themselves. A union of German-speaking industrials called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft stopped our advance westward and pushed us back to the Rustwater Marshes, and a rabble of Slavic Traction Towns attacked our settlements in Khamchatka and the Altai Shan.

“There has been stalemate ever since. Sometimes we push west and destroy a few more cities; sometimes they push east and devour a few of our forts or farms.”

The landscape below was changing, pitted and scarred by recent fighting. Enormous shell craters shone like mirrors stitched into a blanket of mud. From this height, the vast track marks of the enemy’s fighting suburbs and the complicated entrenchments and fortifications of the Storm looked almost identical.

“They say we are making the world green again,” sighed Dr. Zero, “but all we are doing is turning it into mud…”

Forward Command turned out to be a captured city, a small four-tiered place standing motionless on the slopes of a hill at the northern end of the Rustwater Marshes. Its tracks lay curled on the mud around it. The wheels and lower tiers were scorched and ruined, but on the upper levels lights showed dimly in the deepening twilight. Warships came and went from makeshift air harbors, and flocks of birds wheeled above the wrecked rooftops. Grike was surprised at the intelligent way the flocks veered to avoid the airships, until The Sadness of Things passed close to one and he saw that they were not living birds but Stalkers, their eyes glowing with the same eerie green light as his, their beaks and talons replaced with blades. Below, on roadways bulldozed through the mud, more Stalkers marched, some man-shaped, others bulky, crablike, multilegged.

“THE GREEN STORM HAS MANY STALKERS,” he said.

“The Green Storm has need of many, with so many battles to fight,” replied Dr. Zero.

The Sadness of Things settled on a landing field under the walls of the city’s town hall. A man was waiting for them there, a small bald-headed old man in fur-lined robes, flinching at the sporadic rumbles of gunfire rolling from the marshes to the west. He grinned when he saw Grike come down the Sadness’s gangplank. “Grikey! Good to see you up and stalking again! Remember me? I was one of old Twixie’s assistants. Helped examine you, back in poor old London.”

Grike’s brain, which used to hold images often thousand Once-Born faces, now remembered only Dr. Zero and a few technicians from the Stalker Works. He studied the old man’s yellowing teeth, the tattoo of a red wheel sunk in the wrinkles between his bushy eyebrows, then turned to Dr. Zero like a child looking to its mother for reassurance.