Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“Don’t you get lonely?” Fishcake asked.

“Of course I do. It’s a better life than I deserve, after the things I did when I was young. But if you wanted to stay for a while, there would be room for you. Just until you are ready to move on, or old enough to move down into the villages and make a life for yourself there… Fishcake, you’re only a child.”

They walked together back to the house. The Stalker stood outside like a statue, her face tilted toward the mountains. Hearing them coming, she turned and whispered, “I must go now.”

“No!” said Sathya.

“No!” cried Fishcake, feeling his perfect day slipping away from him. He wondered if his Stalker had changed again, but she was still Anna.

“I have been thinking,” she said patiently. “The Engineer who Resurrected me is still alive, isn’t he?”

“Dr. Popjoy is a great man now,” said Sathya bitterly. “The Storm gave him a villa of his own, the house on the promontory at Batmunkh Gompa.”

“I will go there,” said Anna. “I will ask him to look inside my head and destroy the other part of me. The Stalker Fang must not be allowed to survive. Who knows what she is planning?”

“She wants to talk to somebody called Odin,” Fishcake offered. “That’s why she came here.”

“And who is Odin?” asked his Stalker. “I do not trust her. I will make Popjoy quiet her forever. If he cannot, he must destroy us both.”

“Oh, Anna!” cried Sathya, trying to hug her, but the Stalker drew away.

“I cannot stay here,” she whispered. “If I change again, I might kill you. I must leave now, before my other self returns.”

Sathya started to cry and plead with Anna to change her mind, but Fishcake knew that there was no point arguing. He’d come a long way with his Stalker, and he knew that the Anna part of her was just as stubborn as the other. He felt in his pocket, and his hand closed around the little horse she’d carved for him. “I’m coming too,” he said.

“No, Fishcake,” said both women at once, the dead and the living, in perfect unison.

“You need me,” he insisted. “Even the other you needs me. How far is it to this Batmunkh Gompa? Miles of walking, I expect. You can’t do it all alone, blind…” He was crying, because he did not want to leave the hermitage behind, but he did not want his Stalker to leave him behind either. He held tight to the toy horse and tried hard to look brave. “I’m coming too.”

Evening in no-man’s-land. Harrowbarrow had been moving slowly east all day, waiting motionless beneath the shale whenever an air patrol flew by above, surfacing sometimes when the sky was clear to let a haze of exhaust smoke billow out like fog from vents at its stern.

Traveling underground in a burrowing mole suburb was one of those things that sounded terribly exciting but quickly grew dull when you actually did it, thought Wren. She walked briskly through Harrowbarrow’s smoggy, roasting streets, and the citizens stared at her as she passed, and turned so that they could carry on staring when she had gone by. She was afraid that her haircut and her clothes, which had made her feel so fashionable and grown-up in Murnau, just made her outlandish to these burrowing folk.

She would have felt happier staying safe in the town hall, but Wolf Kobold had invited her down to join him on the bridge. He had invited Dad, too, but Dad was not feeling well, and Wren didn’t want Wolf thinking they did not appreciate his invitation, so here she was, passing the glass brick windows of the Delver’s Arms and taking a left onto Perpendicular Street, a ladderway that dropped into the suburb’s depths.

The bridge was a movable building, spanning Harrow-barrow’s dismantling yards, with big greasy wheels at either end set in rails on the yard walls so that it could trundle forward to the jaws to oversee a catch or aft to watch the workers in the salvage stacks. Chains dangled from it, swaying and clanking with the suburb’s lurching motions, and two men lounged on guard duty at the foot of the ladder that led up into it. One of them stepped out to bar Wren’s way as she reached for the bottom rung, but his mate said, “Easy, she’s His Worship’s girl.”

“I’m not anybody’s girl,” retorted Wren, but the men didn’t hear her. The scraping and grinding of shale against the suburb’s hull was deafening, and something about these hard, leather-faced scavengers made Wren’s voice come out very small and girly. She felt their eyes upon her as she lowered herself down the ladder, and heard one of them shout something to the other that made both of them laugh.

“Wren!” Wolf cried happily, when she emerged through the hatchway in the bridge floor and stood breathless and bewildered, looking about her at all the racks of levers, the banks of dials and switches, the rows of gauges, the speaking tubes sticking down like stalactites out of the low metal ceiling. He sprang from his swivel chair and came to greet her, sidestepping nimbly as Hausdorfer and the other navigators hurried past him with rolled-up maps or orders for the engine rooms.

“I’m glad you could come down! How’s Herr Natsworthy?”

“All right,” Wren replied. “He’s having an after-dinner nap, I hope…” (Dad had not felt well since they’d come aboard the burrowing suburb, and he was looking pale and weak. She had left him with strict instructions to get some sleep, but, knowing him, he was probably in Wolf’s library, studying charts of the land ahead.)

Wolf took her arm. “You worry about him.”

“I think Harrowbarrow is too hot and stuffy for him,” said Wren. She didn’t want to explain about Dad’s heart trouble. Dad put so much effort into trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he was all right, it would have felt like a betrayal to tell Wolf how ill he really was. “He’ll be fine,” she promised, smiling as brightly as she could.

“Good,” said Wolf, as if they had settled something. He guided Wren to a place near his chair where a big brass thing covered in knobs and levers poked down through the ceiling. There were two eyepieces at the bottom of it. Wolf pulled it down until they were at the right level for Wren to look through. “I thought you’d like a look at the view.”

Wren had almost forgotten that there were such things as views. The hours passed so slowly aboard Harrowbarrow that it already seemed like days since she had seen the sky, or the earth. Yet when she looked into the eyepieces of the periscope, she saw them both; the sky deep blue and almost cloudless, a crescent moon hanging bright above the weed-grown walls of the track mark that the suburb was running through.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Close to the Storm’s country,” Wolf replied.

“Then why are there no fortresses? No settlements?”

Wolf chuckled. “The Storm haven’t enough troops left to garrison all the new territories they captured. Out here they just have armored watchtowers every few miles. Air patrols too, sometimes.”

“Then it’ll be easy to get the Jenny across?”

“Easy enough. I have prepared a little diversion that will keep the Storm’s lookouts busy.”

Wren frowned. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a diversion when they’d planned this trip, in Murnau. But before she could ask him what he meant, Hausdorfer approached them, and Wolf turned to speak in German with him. After a few words he grinned, and slapped the older man on the shoulder, and Hausdorfer started bellowing orders down the speaking tubes in a language Wren didn’t even recognize—Slavic? Roma? The suburb shuddered and canted, changing course.

“When we’re moving slow like this, I send scouting parties out ahead of us on foot. Some of them have just come in to report. We’re almost at the Storm’s front line.” Wolf slapped her on the shoulder and grinned; he was having fun. “You should fetch your father. We’ll be going through within the hour.”