Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Ten miles more to the mountains. Tom had flown through these skies before, with Hester, flying from Batmunkh Gompa to London in an attempt to stop another Ancient weapon.

He tried not to think about how that voyage had ended, but he could not keep the memories from welling up. Doubts started to gnaw at him. He had failed then, and he would fail again. His scheme of pleading with Naga, which had seemed so promising to him last night, began to feel more and more like madness. He should not be here! He should have stayed with Wren…

He started to put the Jenny about, but as he did so, he saw three arrowheads of dark shapes waiting for him in the sky astern. He felt his heart clench like a fist. Memories of yesterday’s attack and the birds on the long stair at Rogues’ Roost wheeled around him. He snatched Jake Henson’s lightning gun from the copilot’s seat, trying to ready himself for the attack. The birds would make short work of the Jenny, but at least he would take a few dozen of them with him.

The birds held their position. He started to realize that they were not attacking, just keeping watch on him. Perhaps they had been there ever since he had risen out of the fog banks over London. It was so hard to see anything in this hazy, tar-brown light.

And then, at last, the voice he had been waiting for came rustling out of the radio set: a stern voice, speaking in Shan Guonese. He looked eastward and saw the white envelopes of two Fox Spirits glowing in the gloomy sky. The voice translated its order into Anglish. “Barbarian airship, cut your engines. Prepare to be boarded. We are the Green Storm.”

Tom had just time to stow the lightning gun in a hiding place high in the envelope before they came aboard. They were as unfriendly as the Green Storm soldiers he remembered from Rogues’ Roost, but they were not arrogant anymore; they seemed afraid. “How did you know General Naga is at Batmunkh Gompa?” they demanded angrily, when Tom tried to explain what he was doing here in the air approaches of their city.

“I didn’t. Is he? I thought he’d be in Tienjing. That’s your capital, isn’t it? I thought from Batmunkh Gompa you would be able to take me to Tienjing.”

“Tienjing is gone,” said the leader of the Storm patrol, pacing about nervously on the Jenny’s flight deck.

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

The young officer didn’t answer. Then she said, “Anna Fang’s ship was called the Jenny Haniver. I saw a film about her life in basic training.”

“This is the same ship,” said Tom eagerly. “Anna was a friend of mine. I inherited the Jenny when she was—when she …”

“Quiet!” screamed the officer in Shan Guonese, wheeling around to quell the outburst of whispering that had broken out among her men. They seemed to come from half a dozen different countries, and were busy translating Tom’s words for one another. The officer barked more orders, and two of them came forward to hold Tom and manacle his hands. “You will come with us to Batmunkh Gompa,” she said.

“I just want a chance to talk to General Naga,” said Tom hopefully. “I have something important to tell him.”

“About the new weapon?”

“Well, partly, I suppose…”

More whispering, more orders, none in any language that Tom could understand. Some of the men returned to their own ship and reeled in their spidery boarding bridge. The officer took control of the Jenny Haniver, and Tom peered over her shoulder as they flew on toward Batmunkh Gompa, remembering how he had first come here with Anna and Hester all those years ago. The Wall was as sheer and black as before, and still armored with the deck plates of dead cities, vast disks of metal like the shields of Ancient warriors. But on the summit, where the oak-leaf banners of the League had blown, long lightning-bolt flags hung limply in the reddish sun, and between them an immense statue of Anna Fang stood pointing westward, summoning the people of the mountains to battle against the Traction Cities. As the Jenny descended past her, Tom noticed that she was a lot prettier than the real Anna Fang had been, and that a lot of bird droppings had drizzled down her face.

Then they were over the Wall, and sinking past the vertical city on its eastern side, the pretty laddered streets and swallow’s-nest houses all just as Tom remembered them, except that extra docking pans had been constructed on the lower levels, and hundreds of concrete barracks blocks now covered the valley floor at the western end of the lake. The Jenny flew over them, making for a cluster of buildings outside the city proper, on a crag that jutted out from the northern wall of the pass. Tom saw an old nunnery perched on the flat summit surrounded by what looked like an encampment of tents. The lightning-bolt flags were everywhere, interspersed with giant-size portraits of General Naga. On the pan at the crag’s foot where the Jenny set down, someone had scrawled big Chinese letters in whitewash, and then underneath, in shaky Anglish ones, SHE IS RISEN!

“What does that mean?” asked Tom.

“It means nothing,” snapped his captor. “The lies of anti-Naga troublemakers.” She was a grim young woman, and not in any mood to chat, but she did at least allow Tom to keep his green heart pills when her men hustled him across the pan to one of the squat blockhouses behind it, and then into a tiny lime washed concrete cell.

All the time he was being ordered about, or marched around, all the time someone else was in charge of him, Tom felt quite fearless; what happened next was not up to him, and barely seemed to matter. But as soon as the iron-bound door slammed shut on him and he was left alone, his fears came crowding in. What was he doing here? How was Wren coping, back in London? And what had that Green Storm girl meant when she said Tienjing was gone? Had he misheard her? Had she used the wrong word?

It was very quiet in the cell. Strangely so, for when he had last been in Batmunkh Gompa, one of the things that had hooked in his memory was the sounds: the puttering motors of the balloon taxis, the cries of street vendors, the music from the open-fronted teahouses and bars. He stood on the bunk in the corner of his cell and looked out the small barred window. The city stretched away from him, a scarp of stairs and houses where nothing moved but the flags. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no airships waited in the harbor, only a few scurrying figures could be seen on the steep streets. It was as if the city had been abandoned, and the people who remained had all pitched tents on the crag above. A mystery …

Footsteps, voices, out in the narrow entryway beyond his door. He jumped down, surprised. He had expected to wait hours or days for the Storm to deal with him. But the door opened, armed guards in white uniforms took up positions on either side of it, training their guns on Tom, and with a clank of armor a tall, yellowish man whom he recognized as General Naga came in, stooping as his exoskeleton carried him through the low doorway. Tom was relieved that his request for an audience had been taken seriously but astonished by the speed; panicked, too, for he had not quite finished working out what he was going to say to this fierce-looking soldier.

Naga’s narrow eyes narrowed even more as he looked Tom slowly up and down, taking in his travel-stained clothes and unkempt hair. His armor looked scraped and battered, and servomotors inside it whined and crunched unhealthily when he moved. There was a wound on his face, freshly dressed with lint and bandages.

“You are the barbarians’ envoy?”

Tom was taken aback. What was the man talking about?

“You came in the Wind-Flower’s old ship and claim to bring word of the weapon. But you look like a sky tramp. Not even in uniform. Are the Traktionstadts so certain of victory now that they expect me to surrender to a buffoon?”