Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

The subofficer started urging Oenone toward the ship, and Pennyroyal, needing no encouragement, trotted alongside. Theo was about to follow them when he remembered Wren’s letter, which was still in the pocket of his flying jacket, on the chair by the stove in Xao’s headquarters.

“I have to go back!” he shouted.

Only Grike heard him as he carried Hester up the gangplank. He looked around to see Theo plunge back into the maze of trenches. “THEO NGONI!” he shouted. Sometimes he could barely believe the folly of the Once-Born.

“Stalker! Get her aboard!” called an aviator from the Fury’s open hatchway.

“WE MUST WAIT,” Grike insisted. “THE ONCE-BORN THEO NGONI IS NOT WITH US.”

A snout-gun shell burst near the western perimeter of the field, crumpling a rising Fox Spirit and spraying mud and gravel against the Fury’s envelope. Grike looked toward the trenches but could see nothing but smoke. Explosions were going off steadily, and he made out another noise beneath and between the slamming of the guns—the deep note of city engines and the high, squealing counterpoint of rolling tracks.

“Come aboard, Stalker, or we take off without you!” yelled the frightened aviator, holding his helmet in place as blast waves chased one another across the docking pans.

Grike bellowed, “THEO NGONI!” once more into the storm of sound, then turned reluctantly, carrying Hester up the gangplank and through the hatch. Oenone ran to meet him in the corridor. “Where is Theo? I thought he was with us?”

The Fury jolted and leaped quickly into the air. Grike carried Hester to the medical bay and laid her on a bunk, ” look after this once-born,” he told the orderlies, and strode across the cabin to a window. Flying machines were swerving through the air outside, bullets from their machine guns pummeling the Fury’s armor. Below, shell bursts speckled the ground. All up and down the Green Storm’s line the heavy guns were firing, while steam trebuchets flung up their long arms and lobbed their bombs into the screens of drifting smoke that curtained no-man’s-land.

“Naga, it has begun!”

General Naga sits slumped in his favorite chair, beside the window of the quarters that he used to share with Oenone. The spiral stairways of the Jade Pagoda rumble like organ pipes as a gale blasts around the old fortress, blowing snow upward past Naga’s windows.

His old friend General Dzhu waits in the doorway, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, unhappy at delivering such bad news. “We have reports of heavy fighting in a dozen sectors. The Rustwater Marsh forts are under attack, and we’ve lost contact with Xao’s command post—”

“Ah,” says Naga, without looking up.

On the low table beside him stand a teacup and a pot of green tea. The girl Rohini brings it to him every morning at this hour, and plays to him on the shudraga, but today Dzhu sent her packing, insisting he must speak to Naga privately. A pity. She is a good girl, and sometimes Naga thinks that her kindness is all that keeps him alive. The music she plays reminds him of his boyhood: hunting duck in the flooded atomic craters of south China, joining the League’s air fleet that summer before London came crawling east. At the training college on Seven Tiger Mountain there was a girl called Sathya whom he had fancied, but she’d been in love with the Wind-Flower.

“Whatever happened to Sathya?” he wonders. “Do you think she’s still at that hermitage we found for her on Zhan Shan?”

“Naga, we’re at war!” his friend shouts. “What are your orders? Do I tell our commanders to stand, or withdraw?”

“Whatever you think necessary, Dzhu.”

Dzhu sighs; turns to go; turns back. “There is another thing; it seems minor, but Batmunkh Gompa is reporting a lot of activity inside the wreck of London…”

Naga flaps his words away. “London? A few poor barbarians, Dzhu; we’ve known about them for years. They’re harmless.”

“Are we sure of that? What if they are a fifth column, waiting to assist the enemy as he advances? I have ordered increased surveillance…”

Naga tries to shrug, but his mechanical armor isn’t made for shrugging. “I’m ill, old friend. I ache all over. I can’t sleep, but I’m never properly awake. My head buzzes like a nest of bees. You should take over command.”

“The people want you, Naga! You smashed the barbarians last spring, and they know you can do it again! They won’t trust me!”

“I miss Zero,” murmurs Naga. “I miss her so much.” Dzhu stares at him. “I’ll tell Xao to make a stand, if I can reach her.”

As he leaves the chambers, he sees Cynthia Twite waiting outside, watching him from the shadows. He forces her down a narrow stairway and out onto a balcony. Snowflakes flail at them, and the wind blows their hair about. “What’s happening to him?” hisses Dzhu. “I thought once we got rid of the Zero girl, he’d come to his senses and lead us to victory, but he just sits there! Is it just grief? Is he dying? Tell me!”

Cynthia smiles. “Green tea,” she says. “A pot every morning, like his poor wife used to make him.”

“You’re poisoning him?”

“Just a little. Not enough to kill him. Just enough to keep him helpless.”

“But we need him!”

“No we don’t, you fool.”

Dzhu is astonished. In the mountain kingdoms women respect men and young people respect their elders, but this girl talks to him as if he’s a child!

“Haven’t you heard the rumors, Dzhu? A Stalker killing Lost Boys aboard Brighton. An abandoned limpet found under a waterfall in Snow Fan Province. The murder of Dr. Popjoy. It all adds up. It’s all connected. Are you too blind to see what it means?”

Dzhu just stares at her. The snow’s so thick that her face keeps breaking up like a bad Goggle-Screen picture.

“She is risen!” Cynthia hisses triumphantly. “Soon she will reveal herself to us, and save us from the barbarians. Until she does, we must make sure that Naga is weak. When he has let the barbarians smash his divisions and devour our western settlements, the people will be ready to abandon him and welcome back their true leader!”

“You’re insane!” says General Dzhu, turning to go and warn his friend of her.

One of the long pins that hold Cynthia’s hairstyle in place is tipped with venom. She’s been saving it for just such an emergency. The sharpened tip makes only the tiniest scratch on Dzhu’s neck, but he’s dead before he can even cry out. Grunting with effort and cursing his fat belly, Cynthia heaves the body off the balcony and watches it plummet through the snowflakes to the sharp mountainside hundreds of feet below. She’s always had her doubts about Dzhu, and she has forged his suicide note already. It will be the work of a moment to plant it in his desk.

She thinks of her mistress, the Stalker Fang, out there in the mountains somewhere, waiting. If only she would show herself! Cynthia understands why the Stalker would want to punish the weaklings who flocked to Naga’s banner, but surely she knows that she can still rely upon her faithful private agents. For a moment, as she slips back inside and strolls toward General Dzhu’s quarters, she feels almost angry at her old mistress. It quickly passes. Whatever the Stalker Fang is planning will be dreadful and wonderful, and it is not Cynthia’s place to judge her.

Theo had always had a good sense of direction. He found his way quickly through the maze of trenches and was almost in sight of the dugout when an explosion went off just beyond the wire, kicking fans of earth and smoke high into the dawn sky. He crouched as the mud came spattering down. A sea of smoke filled the trench. Scared, fleeing soldiers blundered through it, throwing down their weapons as they ran, pulling off packs and bandoliers. Their mouths were open as if they were shouting, but Theo couldn’t hear them; he had been deafened by the blast of the shell.