Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Dazed, he scrambled up onto a fire step to see what they were running from. Beyond the bramble hedge of wire outside the trench, mountainous shapes were moving. Now and again, as the gusting wind hooked swags of smoke aside, he could see Murnau, only a few miles off, munching its way through the shell-battered city-traps, while a dozen harvester suburbs probed for mines or pitfalls. A nearby fortress was firing rockets toward it, but as Theo watched, the ground began to tremble sluggishly and up from the mud at the fort’s base an enormous blunt steel nose came shoving, lifting to expose giant drills and complicated mouthparts, knocking the fort to pieces and gobbling them down. WELCOME TO HARROWBARROW said a crude white slogan painted on the armored flank. Theo had plenty of time to read it as the weird suburb went grinding past him, crushing bunkers and wrecked gun emplacements beneath its tracks. Signal lamps blinked on Murnau’s upper tier, as if trying to call it to heel, but the suburb ignored them; it settled itself deep into the muddy earth again and went grinding on into Green Storm territory.

Theo jumped down from the step and stumbled on, confused by the smoke and the steep walls of earth that had been thrown across the trench by the explosions. Fresh blasts went off, spattering him with mud and muddy water, but it all happened in hissing, undersea silence, like a dream. He barely understood what was going on. How could the cities have broken through so easily? Where were the indomitable air destroyers and thousand-Tumbler quick-response units that he had been told of in the Green Storm’s propaganda films?

An airship drifted overhead, burning so fiercely that he could not tell which side it had belonged to. By its light he saw the dugout entrance and ran gratefully through it. The command post had already been evacuated, but Theo’s coat still hung on the back of the folding chair where he had left it. He pulled it on, feeling Wren’s letter crinkle in the pocket, her photograph pressing against his heart.

He didn’t hear the scream of the snout-gun shell descending. The first he knew of it was when the hot hands of the explosion lifted him off his feet. Then everything turned into light.

The Stalker Fang pauses at the edge of the docking pan where Popjoy’s air yacht is tethered and turns her bronze face toward the west.

“What?” asks Fishcake. “What is it?” He looks westward too, but he can see nothing; just the mountains. How sick he is of mountains! They stand guard like frost giants all around this high, green valley, and their reflections shimmer in the windswept lake below the docking pan. “Gunfire,” the Stalker whispers.

“You mean the war is on again?” Fishcake strains his grubby Once-Born ears to try and hear what she can hear. “I must work quickly. Come.”

She starts limping toward the causeway, and Fishcake follows her, carrying on his shoulder one of the cases of equipment that she made him bring from Dun Resurrectin’.

Overhead, the dead birds that followed her from Popjoy’s place soar past, keeping watch for movements in the sky or on the steep pass at the valley’s western end.

The causeway is two hundred paces long. At its far end is a rocky island where a house stands, dark and cold as a tomb. It was a monastery once, sacred to the gods and demons of the mountains, whose faces still leer out of niches in the outer walls. Later it was Anna Fang’s home, a place of light and laughter where she relaxed between missions for the Anti-Traction League. She had planned to retire here, and raise horses in the steep green pastures, before Valentine’s sword unraveled all her plans.

In the first years of the Green Storm regime there had been talk of turning Erdene Tezh into a museum, where schoolchildren could come to see relics of the Wind-Flower and tread the same floors that she had trodden. But the Stalker she had become forbade it. She had the house locked, and let it fall into ruin.

The gate whines as the Stalker heaves it open. Fishcake crunches after her through the gateway, where patches of snow lie blue in the shadows. Safe in the loop of the thick stone wall is a garden; dead trees and dead brown grass, a fountain lacy with icicles. Fishcake trots after his Stalker up the frosty path to the house. She does not smash the door down as he has been expecting, but extends one of her finger-glaives, inserts it into the keyhole, and moves it carefully about in there until the lock clicks. As she opens the door, she looks back at Fishcake.

“Home again!” she whispers.

He follows her into the shadows. He can’t be sure anymore if she is Anna or the Stalker Fang. He thinks she may be both, as if Popjoy’s tinkering blended the two personalities somehow. She has not been unkind to Fishcake, and she still shares her memories with him, but she does not play with him anymore; she no longer takes his hand, or tousles his hair, or comes to hold him at night when he wakes from a bad dream. All he has left of that Anna is the carved toy horse, which he clutches tightly when he goes to sleep.

Whoever she is, the Stalker seems happy to be home. “Ah,” she sighs, passing through a reception room where the ceiling has collapsed and bird droppings lie thick on a fine tiled floor. “ Oh!” she says, crossing the atrium and peering into a long chamber whose shattered windows stare out across the mere to the white heights of the Erdene Shan. “She had such parties here! Such happy times…”

The wind hoots through holes in the walls. Beyond the party room lies a bedroom, a canopied bed sinking like a torpedoed ship into a sea of its own moldering covers. At the far side of the bedroom is another locked door. And beyond the door…

The room exhales stale air when she unlocks it. Fishcake, creeping in behind her, guesses that this part of the house has been sealed. It smells a bit like Grimsby. The walls and floor are covered in metal, with rubber mats to walk on. Cobwebs and plastic swathe a curious mountain of machinery: wires and tubes, screens and boxes, valves and dials and colored electrical cords, keyboards torn from typewriting machines.

“Engineers were not the only ones who knew how to build things, back in the good old days,” the Stalker whispers. “Anna was clever with machines, just like you, Fishcake. She even built her own airship out of odds and ends. She was attempting to make a long-range radio transmitter here. It never worked very well, and others since have had much more success. But it’s a start. With what we brought from Popjoy’s workshop, and the radio set from his yacht, I am certain we can boost the signal.”

“Who are you signaling to?” asks Fishcake.

The Stalker lets out her hissy laugh. She takes him by the arm and drags him into the ruined bedroom, points through a hole in the roof, straight up, at the deep blue in the top of the sky.

“Up there. That’s where the receiver is. We are going to send a message into heaven.”

19th June

Seventeen days have passed since Wolf Kobold ran away. Everybody seems to be forgetting him. Even me, most of the time. Even Angie, now that her headache has faded and the lump is going down. Most people think that there’s no way Wolf could cross all those miles of Green Storm territory and get back to Harrowbarrow again. Even if he could, he would never be able to bring Harrowbarrow back east to eat New London, at least not unless war breaks out again. But work on New London is going ahead even faster, just in case.

When I first found out what they are building, I thought they were all a bit mad, to be honest. But when you see how hard everyone works here, and how much they all believe in this crazy new city the Engineers have dreamed up, you realize what it must have been like in Anchorage when Freya Rasmussen decided to take it across the ice to America. That was a mad idea too, and I’m sure there were a lot of people who thought it would never work—my mum was so sure of it that she betrayed the whole place to Arkangel when she couldn’t persuade Dad to leave. But she was wrong, because it did work, didn’t it? And I don’t want to be like Mum, so I’ve decided to believe that New London is going to work too.