Philip Reeve: A Darkling Plain

At breakfast next morning she said, “We should investigate. Find out more about this self-styled Cruwys Morchard.”

“How?” asked her father. “The Archaeopteryx will be a hundred miles away by now.”

“You said she bought something at the auction rooms,” said Wren. “We could start there.”

Mr. Pondicherry who was a large, shiny sort of gentleman, seemed to grow even larger and shinier when he looked up from his account books to see Tom Natsworthy and daughter entering his little den. The Jenny Haniver had sold several valuable pieces through Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms that season. “Mr. Natsworthy!” He chuckled. “Miss Natsworthy! How good to see you!” He stood up to greet them, and pushed back a great deal of silver-embroidered sleeve to reveal a plump brown hand, which Tom shook. “You are both well, I hope? The Gods of the Sky are kind to you? What do you have for me today?”

“Only questions, I’m afraid,” Tom confessed. “I was wondering what you could tell me about a freelance archaeologist called Cruwys Morchard. She made a purchase here yesterday.”

“The lady from the Archaeopteryx?” mused Mr. Pondicherry. “Yes, yes; I know her well, but I’m afraid I cannot share such information.”

“Of course,” said Tom, and, “Sorry, sorry.”

Wren, who had half expected this, took out of her jacket pocket a little bundle of cloth, which she set down upon the blotter on Mr. Pondicherry’s desk. The auctioneer purred like a cat as he unwrapped it. Inside lay a tiny, flattened envelope of silvery metal, inset with minute oblong tiles on which faint numbers still showed.

“An Ancient mobile telephone,” said Wren. “We bought it last month, from a scavenger who didn’t even know what it was. Dad was planning to sell it privately, but I’m sure he’d be happy to go through Pondicherry’s if…”

“Wren!” said her father, startled by her cunning.

Mr. Pondicherry had put his head down close to the relic and screwed a jeweler’s glass into his eye. “Oh, pretty!” he said. “So beautifully preserved! And the trade in trinkets like this is definitely picking up now that peace is breaking out. They say General Naga hasn’t time to fight battles anymore, now that he’s found himself a lovely young wife. Almost as lovely as Cruwys Morchard…” He looked at Tom and winked, one eye made huge by the glass. “Very well. Just between ourselves, Ms. Morchard was indeed here yesterday. She bought a job lot of Kliest Coils.”

“What on earth would she want with those?” wondered Tom.

“Who knows?” Mr. Pondicherry beamed and spread his hands wide, as if to say, Once I have my percentage, what do I care what my customers do with the rubbish they buy? “They are of no earthly use. Trade goods, I suppose. That is Ms. Morchard’s profession. An Old Tech trader, and a good one, I believe. Been on the bird roads since she was just a slip of a girl.”

“Has she ever mentioned anything about where she comes from?” Wren asked eagerly.

Mr. Pondicherry thought for a moment. “Her ship is registered in Airhaven,” he said.

“Oh, we know that. I mean, do you know where she grew up? Where she was trained? You see, we think she comes from London.”

The auctioneer smiled at her indulgently, and winked again at Tom as he slipped the old telephone into a side drawer of his bureau. “Ah, Mr. N, what romantical notions these young ladies do have! Really, Miss Wren! Nobody comes from London!”

Afterward they took coffee on a balcony cafe and looked out eastward across the endless plains of the Great Hunting Ground. It was one of those warm, golden days of spring. A haze of green filled the massive ruts and track marks that passing cities had scored across the land below, and the sky was full of swerving swifts. Away in the east a mining town was gnawing at a line of hills that had somehow been overlooked until now.

“The strange thing is,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where. Cruwys Morchard. I suppose it was on the bird roads, in the old days…” He poured Wren more coffee. “You must think me very silly, to let myself be so affected by it. It’s just that the thought of another Historian, still alive after all these years …”

He couldn’t explain. Lately he had been thinking more and more about his early years in the London Museum. It made him sad to think that when he died, the memory of the place would die with him. If there really was another Historian alive, someone who had grown up among the same dusty galleries and beeswax-smelling corridors as him, who had snoozed through old Arkengarth’s lectures, and listened to Chudleigh Pomeroy grumbling about the building’s feeble shock absorbers, then the responsibility of remembering it all would be lifted from him; the echoes of those things would linger in other memories, even after he was gone.

“What I don’t understand,” said Wren, “is why she won’t admit it. Surely it would be a selling point, in an Old Tech trader, to say they came from London and were trained by the Historians’ Guild.”

Tom shrugged. “I always kept quiet about it, when your mother and I were trading. London was unpopular in those years. What the Guild of Engineers had done upset the whole balance of the world. Scared a lot of cities, and led to the rise of the Green Storm. I suppose that’s why Clytie took another name. The Pottses are a famous London family; they’ve been producing aldermen and heads of guild since Quirke’s time. Clytie’s grandfather, old Pisistratus Potts, was lord mayor for years and years. If you want to pretend you’re not a Londoner, it wouldn’t be a good idea to go around with a name like Clytie Potts.”

“And what about those things she bought at Pondicherry’s?” Wren wondered.

“Kliest Coils?”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“There’s no reason why you would have,” her father said. “They come from the Electric Empire, which thrived in these parts before the rise of the Blue Metal culture, around 10,000 B.T.”

“What are they for?”

“Nobody knows,” said Tom. “Zanussi Kliest, the London Historian who first studied them, claimed they were meant to focus some sort of electromagnetic energy, but no one has ever worked out a practical use for them. The Electric Empire seems to have been a sort of technological cul-de-sac.”

“These coils aren’t valuable, then?”

“Only as curios. They’re quite pretty.”

“So what’s Clytie Potts going to do with them?” asked Wren.

Tom shrugged again. “She must have a buyer, I suppose. Maybe she knows a collector.”

“We should go after her,” said Wren.

“Where to? I asked at the harbor office last night. The Archaeopteryx didn’t leave any details of her destination.”

“She’ll be heading east,” said Wren, with the confidence of someone who had been studying the air trade for a whole season and felt she had its measure. “Everybody is going east now that the truce seems to be holding, and we should too. Even if we don’t find Clytie Potts, there will be good trading, and I’d love to see the central Hunting Ground. We could go to Airhaven. The Registration Bureau there must have some more details about Cruwys so-called Morchard and her ship.”

Tom finished his coffee and said, “I’d been thinking you might want to go south this spring. Your friend Theo is still in Zagwa, isn’t he? I expect we could get permission to land there…”

“Oh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” said Wren casually, and blushed bright red.

“I liked Theo,” Tom went on. “He’s a good lad. Kind and well-mannered. Handsome, too…”