Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Varley was waiting for her, looking more feverish and ferrety than ever, a half-eaten supper on the table in front of him. He’d taken off his jacket. His trousers were held up by snakeskin braces. “On your own this time?” he asked Hester. “Got my ten thousand?”

“Five,” said Hester. “That’s all we can get hold of.”

“Then I’ll be selling your Lady Naga to another buyer.”

“Oh, yes, I noticed the enormous queue all up the gangplank when I came aboard,” said Hester. “That was sarcasm,” she added as Varley sprang up to peer through a porthole.

“Face it, you haven’t got any other buyers. You’ll have to do business with me, before someone bigger and tougher hears who you’ve got stashed in your hold and comes to take her off your hands for free.”

Varley glared at her and said nothing. She opened her bag on the kitchen table, and shook out a pile of small, plump money bags. They jingled loudly, as well they might; two were full of Pennyroyal’s savings, and the other eight were stuffed with nuts and washers that she and Theo had bought at the all-night chandlery on the High Street. “Ten bags,” she said, opening one and tipping out a stream of gold. “Two hundred fifty shineys in each. Captain Ngoni will be bringing you the rest when I can assure him your cargo is alive and well.”

Varley eyed the money hungrily, but he wasn’t happy. “That black kid of yours is a captain? The Green Storm must be running short of men as well as money…”

Hester chose another money bag and emptied a second shining drift of coin across the tabletop. (“Look! Pretty!” said Mrs. Varley, bouncing the baby on her knee.)

“Take it or leave it,” said Hester.

Varley still hesitated. “I want to see your face,” he said sullenly.

“Believe me, you really don’t.”

The merchant sniffed, kicked a toy aside, and told his henchman, “Watch her, and don’t go thieving any of my money.” Then he pushed past Hester and vanished up a companion ladder into the Humbug’s envelope. The other man reluctantly pried his eyes away from the heap of gold on the table and watched Hester instead. The baby gurgled. The woman sang him a song that Hester remembered faintly from long ago, but she quickly stopped when Hester looked at her.

“You from Oak Island?” Hester asked.

The woman shook her head. “Red Deer.”

You could see Red Deer Island from the hills above Hester’s childhood home on Oak Island, when the weather was fine. No wonder she recognized the song. She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill this woman and her baby.

“Napster bought me in the wife auction there,” the woman started to explain, and then stopped suddenly again, because she had heard her husband’s footsteps on the ladder, coming back down. She shifted closer to the table to give him room as he dropped into the cabin, dragging his frightened cargo behind him.

Pennyroyal peered into half a dozen of the High Street’s crowded drinking holes before he found what he was looking for. In fact they found him: a gang of rowdy young militia officers up from Manchester on a twenty-four-hour pass, clutching girls and bottles, making their unsteady way from a casino above Strut 1, where they had been betting their pay on Ancient games of chance like Pick-a-Sticks and Buckeroo. Pennyroyal scurried alongside, calling out, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” and “I say,” but they paid him no attention until he shouted, “I am Nimrod Pennyroyal!”

The Mancunians turned to stare at him.

“Shove off!” said one.

“Scrag him!” suggested another.

“Chuck him off the docking ring!” roared a third. “Hoorah!”

“No,” said a fifth man, slightly more sober than the rest. “He is Nimrod Pennyroyal. I recognize him from the papers.”

“Chuck him off the docking ring anyway!”

“Hoorah!”

“He’s that fake explorer bloke, ain’t he?” said one of the girls, peering at Pennyroyal as if he were some mildly interesting animal in a zoo.

“I am not a fake!” Pennyroyal shouted. “I have come to ask your help! There is a high-ranking member of the Green Storm secreted aboard an airship down on the docking ring, and I need the help of some loyal Tractionists to take her into custody!”

“Huh huh huh huh,” went one of the Mancunians, laughing at some private joke. The rest struggled to follow what Pennyroyal was saying. One or two reached for their swords. “A Mossie? Here?”

“Lady Naga herself! I’ve been operating undercover to discover her whereabouts. All that stuff you read in the papers was just a ruse, designed to make the enemy think I was in disgrace. I’ve actually been working for the Murnauer Geheimdienst all along, you know.”

The Mancunians looked blank. None of them had heard the German name for Murnau’s intelligence service before. Pennyroyal cursed their ignorance [but only quietly] and pulled out the old envelope on which he had jotted down the Humbug’s details from the arrivals board in the Floating Exchange. He squinted at his own crabbed writing for a moment, then flourished the envelope like a battle flag. “Come gentlemen!” he cried. “Follow me to Strut 13, and to glory!”

A bruised face, a mat of greasy hair, a thin body shaking and shaking inside a sackcloth dress. Hester was astonished at the flood of pity she felt as she watched Lady Naga come creeping down the Humbug’s companion ladder. She’s not much older than Wren, she thought, and for a moment she wanted to rush forward and hug the poor, frightened creature and comfort her and tell her that she was safe now.

But she wasn’t safe, not yet, and anyway she would not have wanted to be hugged; she seemed as scared of Hester as she was of Varley. When Varley shoved her forward and said, “This nice lady’s come to buy you,” she hung back and let out a whine like a scared animal. Hester, in her black coat and her black veil, looked like the Goddess of Death.

“You’re Lady Naga?” she asked.

“Oenone,” said the young woman, blinking fearfully at her. Her glasses were held together by tape, and one of the lenses was cracked.

“Course she’s Lady bleedin’ Naga,” crowed Varley. “Look at her signet ring, and that Zagwan pendant thing. They’re extra, by the way. Now go and get me the rest of my money.”

Hester nodded and glanced past him, judging the distance between herself and the man with the speargun at the bulkhead door. She turned, back to the wall, one hand moving slowly to the knife inside her coat, and saw out of the corner of her eye the baby reach toward the pile of money bags on Varley’s table.

What happened next happened very slowly, but not slowly enough for her to stop it. The child’s fat hand grabbed the bag; the bag fell; the bag burst. Across the deck at Varley’s feet there went scattering a storm of nuts and washers. Varley, realizing he’d been tricked, let out a yell. Hester snatched her knife and threw it underarm at the man by the door, hitting him in the throat. His speargun went off as he fell, but the spear went high, passing over Hester’s head; she heard it thud into the bulkhead above her. Mrs. Varley was screaming. The baby howled. Something struck Hester a sudden, stunning blow on the top of her head. A flash of purple light went off inside her skull. She cursed and tried to turn, confused, imagining someone had got behind her. Things were falling all around her, punching her shoulders, thumping on the deck. She went down on her knees among them and saw that they were books. The dead man’s speargun had detached one of Varley’s homemade bookshelves from the wall, and it had struck her as it fell. It was a stupid sort of injury, but that didn’t make it any less serious. The spilled books seemed to whirl around her. Dodgy Dealing for Beginners. Investing in People. Make Your Fortune on the Bird Roads—and Survive to Spend It! She felt sure she was going to be sick.