Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Wren pushed past him and went back to the flight deck. Tom was staring out through the big forward windows: nothing out there but mist. Sometimes a buttress of earth and rocks where the wall of the track mark they were flying in had partially collapsed. Each time that happened, Tom would make a quick, calm adjustment to the steering levers, guiding the Jenny expertly around it. Wren envied him for having something to concentrate on. All she could think of were those struggling figures she’d glimpsed through the hangar doors. She felt guilty for having been part of the attack, and more and more afraid. Despite what Wolf said, she was sure the Storm must know that the Jenny Haniver had pierced their line; at any moment rockets or Stalker-birds would come howling out of the mist, and they would be the last thing she would see.

“I’m sorry,” said her father softly, sounding as shocked and miserable as her. “When he said he knew a place where we could cross, I just thought …”

Wren said, “How could he do that? All those people?”

“There’s a war on, Wren,” Tom reminded her. “Wolf’s a soldier.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “I think he enjoys it.”

“Some people are like that,” agreed Tom. He had recognized the light in Wolf’s eyes as the battle raged; Hester had had the same look, that night at the Pepperpot when she’d murdered Shkin’s guards. He said, “Wolf has some strange ideas, but then he’s led a strange life. He’s very young, and he’s never known anything but war. Underneath, I think, he’s a decent young man.”

“Must be pretty deep underneath,” said Wren.

Tom smiled. “I knew a man called Chrysler Peavey once. A pirate mayor, boss of a suburb nearly as fierce as Harrowbarrow, but he wanted more than anything to be a gentleman. Wolf’s the other way round: a gentleman who wants to be a pirate. But there’s another side to him. He’s treated us well, hasn’t he? Now that we’ve got him away from his suburb, we might see that side of him again.”

Wren nodded cautiously, as if wishing she could believe him. Tom wished he believed himself. He had been wrong to accept Wolf’s offer, he was certain of that now. What would become of Wren if anything happened to him on this flight and she was left with only Wolf Kobold to look after her?

But as the Jenny flew on, mile after lonely mile, and no rockets or birds appeared, he began to feel more hopeful, and started to remember the sense of peace that had come to him with his dream of the museum. He did not like what Kobold had done, but at least they were on their way. From somewhere ahead, beyond these midnight plains, he could feel the tug of London’s gravity, drawing the Jenny Haniver and her passengers toward it like a dark star.

After a few hours the fog thinned, and Wren was able to see properly for the first time the landscape that she was flying over—or rather flying in, for Tom was still keeping the airship as low as he dared, hiding her behind the steep fans of dried mud that towered between London’s old track marks. As far as Wren could see, the land around her was not much different from the plains the cities rolled across back on their side of the line. The Green Storm had cleared these eastern steppes of Traction Cities, but they had not yet built settlements of their own. Sometimes, through clefts in the walls of the track mark, the distant lights of forts or farmsteads showed, far off across the churned, weed-tangled land; but if they were keeping watch at all, they were not watching for a single small airship.

London’s wake ran ruler straight toward the east. Each of the city’s tracks had plowed a trench two hundred feet wide and often almost as deep. Tom steered the Jenny along the northernmost one until the ribbon of sky above him started to turn pale. Then he set her down to wait out the hours of daylight.

Later, sitting watch on the silent flight deck while he slept, Wren looked up into the sky and saw dozens of Green Storm airships pass over, very high and heading west. Then the rhythmic wingbeats of a flock of Stalker-birds caught her eye, also flying west. She pointed them out to Wolf Kobold, but he said, “Nothing to worry about. Routine troop movements.”

As angry as she had been at him the night before, Wren felt glad that he was there with them; glad of his soldierly certainty; his confidence. And already, as Harrowbarrow fell behind, he seemed to be softening, just as Tom had promised. His voice and his expression had grown gentler, and when Wren asked him to do something, he obeyed meekly, as if conceding that, aboard the Jenny Haniver, she was the expert.

He was right about the birds, though. None came low or close enough to see the Jenny’s russet envelope amid the red earth of the track mark.

That night they flew on, and the next day passed in the same way, except that there was a deep, clear pool of water close to where Tom set the airship down, and Wren swam in it. The water was numbingly cold, its surface filled with bright reflections that shattered ahead of her. She turned on her back and floated, feeling her swimming dress balloon around her, listening to the silence. Her old life, Vineland and Brighton, seemed impossibly far away.

Stones scampered down the steep wall of the track mark and plopped into the water, spreading rings of overlapping ripples toward her. Wolf was clambering between the trees that jutted from the track wall. He saw Wren and waved. “Just taking a look!” he called.

Wren swam ashore and changed quickly into her clothes, making sure that the Jenny Haniver was between her and Wolf. When she emerged, wet haired and shivery, she could not see him, but when she scrambled up to the top of the track mark, she found him lying on a flat, grassy ledge, peering through a pocket telescope across the Storm’s country.

“What can you see?” she asked.

“Nothing to worry about.”

He handed Wren the telescope and she put it to her eye. Southward, a plain of brown grass rolled away toward distant blue hills. A cluster of the Storm’s silly wind turbines flickered in the sunlight above a small static. Farther east something else was moving; a long, low town, Wren thought at first, then realized that it couldn’t be.

“Supply train, heading west with provisions for their armies,” said Wolf. “They’ve laid railways all the way from the mountains of Shan Guo to the Rustwater. That’s how I got home from London last time: hiding in a freight car. Most of the trains aren’t manned.”

“What, not even a driver?” asked Wren, focusing on the black electric locomotive at the front of the train, a blunt, windowless thing, charging along like a bull.

“The engine is the driver. A Popjoy Mark XII Stalker, controlled by a Resurrected human brain. Some poor dissident or captured soldier whom the Storm have turned into a train engine. They aren’t worth getting sentimental about, Wren. They’re savages, and it is either them or us.”

Wren knew he was referring to the night battle, apologizing, or explaining. She tried to think of a riposte, but nothing came.

“Look, it’s slowing,” said Wolf, taking back the telescope. “Must be a bridge or weak bit of rail there. That would be a useful place to climb aboard, if we ever need to.”

“What do you mean?”

Wolf grinned at her. “If anything goes wrong with your airship, we’ll be walking home. A lift aboard one of those trains will cut weeks off the journey.”

Wren nodded. She knew he was hoping to unsettle her, and refused to let him. “Look,” she said, pointing. “The trees grow close to the rails there. You could hide there while you waited for a train.”