Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Grike sensed the boy’s unease, “I will not harm you,” he said. “even if i wanted to, i could not.”

“Why?” asked Theo, remembering how Grike had spared the man he’d caught during the battle. “That’s what Stalkers are for, isn’t it? Harming people?”

Grike’s steel teeth gleamed as he tried to smile, ” not in dr. zero’s opinion.”

“Dr. Zero? She built you?”

“i was built by the nomad empires. i am older than the storm. older than municipal darwinism. the last of the lazarus brigade. but i was rebuilt by oenone zero, and she must have altered me. now if i think of killing once-born, my head fills with pictures of all the once-born i hurt and killed before, and i cannot do it.”

“Dr. Zero’s here!” said Theo eagerly, remembering his promise to protect Oenone. “She’s aboard Cutler’s Gulp! She’s called Lady Naga now. They said she was being sold to that trader Varney… We have to go back! We have to help her!”

Hester, coming out of the cabin with food and the makings of a fire, looked coldly at him. “We don’t have to do anything, boy. We’re not going back. And if you mean Napster Varley, I saw his Humbug lift off from the Gulp as we were pulling away. Anything he bought there he’ll have taken with him.”

Grike hissed like a thoughtful kettle. “WE COULD GO AFTER HIM.”

“Not you as well!” cried Hester angrily. “For all the gods’ sakes, Grike, she’s the vet who neutered you! What do you care if she’s been ’slaved?”

Noises came from inside Grike’s armored skull. Theo wondered if they were the sounds of thoughts whizzing through the Stalker’s brain. “IF I CAN FIND HER, SHE WILL TELL ME WHY SHE HAS DONE THIS TO ME. WE COULD GO NORTH, SELL THE SAND SHIP AND BUY AN AIRSHIP. NAPSTER VARLEY’S VESSEL IS SLOW. ITS WIDMERPOOL-12 AERO-ENGINES ARE INEFFICIENT. WE COULD CATCH IT UP DESPITE HIS HEAD START.”

Hester turned away from him and kicked the gunwales of her sand ship. “I like the desert,” she said angrily. “It’s good. It’s simple. It’s clean. I can make a living here.”

“YOU ARE NO MORE ALIVE THAN ME,” said Grike.

“No?” Hester glared at him. She was good at glaring; she could glare better with that one eye than most people could with two. “Well, isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you always want to make a Stalker of me, so we could wander about dead together?” She appealed to Theo. “Grike wants to make me like him. That’s the only reason he’s stayed with me since Cloud 9 came down. He’s not got the stomach anymore to kill me himself, so he’s been waiting for one of these sand rats to do it for him. Then he’ll take my carcass to his old friends in the Storm and get me Resurrected.”

“Oh!” said Theo, horrified. Resurrection was the worst fate he could imagine, yet Hester spoke of it as if it were nothing.

“I won’t care,” she said. “I’ll be dead. He can do what he wants with what’s left.”

“no,” said Grike. If he could have whispered, he would have whispered it, but all Grike’s words came out the same, loud and sharp and scraping. He wished Oenone Zero had done something about his voice instead of tinkering with his brain. He said, ” when your death comes, i will have you resurrected, as we agreed long ago. but i can wait. i want to see you live again and be happy. you will be neither while you stay in this desert.”

Hester sat down and hid her face in one hand. She was only in her middle thirties, but she looked ten years older, and very tired. Theo felt sorry for her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he didn’t think she’d like that. He glanced at Grike, but the Stalker seemed to have said all that he was going to.

“Mrs. Natsworthy,” said Theo, “it’s not just Dr. Zero who’s in danger. It’s lots of people. The truce depends on her. Who knows what General Naga might do if he doesn’t get her back? He loves her.”

“He’s a fool, then,” muttered Hester. “People shouldn’t love each other. It only leads to trouble.” She looked at Theo. “I don’t care about your truce. I don’t care about General Naga or this wife of his.”

She jumped down onto the sand and started walking away from the ship, gathering dry acacia branches to make a fire. Although she kept her back to Grike and Theo, she knew that they were both watching her. She felt shivery, and cold despite the heat, as if she had a fever coming on, but she knew it wasn’t fever.

At first, when she’d found herself alone with Grike, she had been terrified. She had remembered his ghoulish plans for her, and imagined that he was going to kill her at once. But when she learned that he couldn’t or wouldn’t kill, she had decided that Grike was the person she belonged with. Had it not been Grike who rescued her, all those years ago, after her own father tried to murder her? Grike had looked after her when she was a child, long before she met Tom; now her life with Tom was over, and she was with Grike again. There was a Tightness about it.

Anyway, she was glad of someone to talk to. During these months in the desert she had told him things that she had never told anyone before. She told him about her first meeting with Tom, and how she had fallen in love with him; about the Jenny Haniver, and Wren. And she told him how she had betrayed Anchorage, and murdered Piotr Masgard, about how she had driven her own daughter away.

Grike did not judge her the way a human being would have; he just listened patiently. Hester felt that when she had told him everything, then she would be able to forget her previous life; she would become as blank as the sand and the red-rock hills, and her memories would not be able to hurt her anymore.

And now this boy had dropped into her life like a shower upon the desert, making all sorts of things stir under the parched surface. Hope, for instance. Little dreams. She tried not to let them grow, but couldn’t stop them. Theo was still in touch with Wren and Tom, and one day he might tell them of his meeting with Hester in the sand sea. She liked the idea that he might have something good to say about her. She imagined her husband and daughter, in some far-off harbor, hearing that she had done something good again, just once, to balance all the bad things.

She turned and started lugging her bundle of branches toward the ship. “All right, old Stalker,” she said when she drew near. “All right. All right then. Let’s sell this old tub and find ourselves an airship.”

AMV Jenny Haniver

Murnau Air Harbor

21st May

Dear Theo,

I thought I should write to you, because I am starting on a journey, and it may be dangerous, and I shouldn’t want to die and disappear and leave you thinking that I just hadn’t got in touch because I couldn’t be bothered. A wealthy Murnau gentleman, Wolf Kobold, has hired us to do a little exploring, and we have been in Murnau Harbor for the past week, loading provisions and making plans. Mr. Kobold has left now, gone north to a suburb he runs called Harrowbarrow. (He’s important enough that he can just commandeer Abwehrtruppe airships to give him lifts, which makes you wonder why he needs us, but I think he likes to do things for himself really, and not make use of all the privileges his position brings.) Tomorrow we shall fly out to join him on Harrowbarrow, and our journey will begin. So I am going to leave this letter at the Air Exchange and hope that they will pass it on to the captain of a westbound ship who will pass it on to someone else, and before the year’s out it might, with luck, find its way to Zagwa, and to you.

This is all rather complicated to explain, but I shall try. It seems that some survivors may be living still among the ruins of London. This is news to me, because I didn’t even know that London had any ruins—I thought it had been completely burned up. But apparently there are quite a lot of bits left, scattered about in the Out-Country west of the Green Storm fortress at Batmunkh Gompa. Wolf Kobold went there once, and wants to go back and find out more, and Dad is keen to take him, not just because of all the money he is paying us, but for old times’ sake. And I want to go too. It sounds exciting: just the sort of adventure I used to imagine when I was stuck in Anchorage. I’ve seen old pictures of London, and heard Dad’s stories of it, but imagine actually being there, and walking in the ruins of those streets Dad walked along when he was little! I’m a Londoner’s daughter, which makes me a Londoner too, in a way; at least, it’s part of me, and I want to see it nearly as badly as Dad.