Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“Surrender? But the new weapon …”

“Yes, yes!” shouted Naga. “The new weapon! You have destroyed Tienjing, you have destroyed Batmunkh Tsaka; you almost destroyed me!”

Tom felt as if a chart that had been guiding him through treacherous territory had suddenly turned out to be upside down all along. A bad-dream feeling. If Naga did not control the ODIN weapon, who did? The cities? But those fires in the west last night … Had the Storm not seen those cities burn? Had the news not reached them?

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. This was all beyond him. But he could still do what he had come here for. “I’m nothing to do with the Traktionstadts,” he said. “I come from London.”

“London?”

“I came to ask you … to beg you … The survivors there—I know you know of them—they are building something; have been building something for many years… They are making a new city; a city that hovers, and will not harm the Earth, and has no wish to eat any static city of yours. I’m here to tell you that they—we—mean you no harm; we have no quarrel with the Storm. If you could call off your birds, and let us go in peace when we leave the debris fields …”

Naga was frowning. “A hovering city?”

“It’s called Magnetic Levitation,” said Tom. “It sort of floats.” He waved his hands about, trying to demonstrate, and then remembered something Lavinia Childermass had said. “It’s not really a city at all, more a very large, low-flying airship. My daughter is there…”

Naga turned to one of the officers behind him and barked out something in Shan Guonese. Tom didn’t know many of the words, but he recognized the tone. The general was asking, “Is this fellow mad? Why are you wasting my time with him?” A moment later, without another look at Tom, he stalked out of the cell, his guards behind him.

“Please,” Tom shouted, “your wife will vouch for me! Is she here? Are her companions here?” (It had suddenly occurred to him that if Tienjing had been destroyed, Hester might have been destroyed with it.) He said, “Please, I am a friend of Theo Ngoni and Hester…”

“My wife?” Naga turned, glaring at him. “She is on her way home. I will certainly tell her all about you when she arrives.” But he made it sound like a threat, not a promise.

The door slammed shut. Tom was left alone again.

Outside, Naga stopped for a moment to think. His men clustered together, glancing fearfully toward the misty heights of Batmunkh Gompa. He knew what they feared. It seemed inconceivable that after destroying Tienjing, the barbarians had not turned their devil weapon on the Shield-Wall and opened a path for themselves into the mountain kingdoms. And yet, when the few airships he had managed to salvage from the disaster at Tienjing flew here at dawn, they found the place untouched, although the populace and half the garrison had already fled into the hills. What were the townies waiting for? (Naga had already discounted the reports that said that Traction Cities had been destroyed last night too. They must be mistakes, or lies put out by the enemy to add to the Storm’s confusion.)

And what did the appearance of this madman Natsworthy mean, aboard the Flower’s old ship?

“London,” he muttered. “Poor Dzhu told me something about London.”

One of his officers, a captain from the Batmunkh Gompa garrison, saluted smartly and said, “There has been increased activity among the squatters there, Excellency. We have been watching them with spy birds.”

“You have records?”

“There is a file in the Intelligence office on Thousand Stair Avenue.”

“Hurry there, and fetch it.”

The captain saluted and ran off, gray faced with fear and clearly expecting the fire from the sky to fall on Batmunkh Gompa at any instant. Naga watched him go. He thought wistfully for a moment of Oenone and then crushed the thought and muttered, “London…”

He remembered the night after the Wind-Flower died: how he had stood on the top of the Shield-Wall while the smoke of the burned Northern Air Fleet drifted up from the hangars below him, and faint and far away the lights of London glittered. It seemed to General Naga that all the troubles of the world began with London.

That afternoon, as the fog thinned and dirty sunlight broke over the debris fields, the people of London buried their lord mayor. Bareheaded, and with black mourning bands tied around their sleeves, eight members of the Emergency Committee carried the shrouded body of the old Historian along a winding, little-used path between the rust hills, while the rest of London followed, and Timex Grout beat out a solemn, steady rhythm on a drum made from an old oil can. Boom, boom, boom, the echoes rolled away, across the wreckage, out across the plains beyond, up into the mottled sky where a few Stalker-birds still circled, very high, watched all the time by lookouts with charged lightning guns.

In Putney Vale, a mossy space between the masses of debris, where trees grew thickly and shaded the graves of all the other Londoners who had died since MEDUSA night, they laid him to rest, and piled the earth over him, and marked the place with a metal marker, carved with the symbol of his Guild, the eye that gazes backward into time. Lavinia Childermass offered up a prayer to Quirke, asking London’s creator to welcome the old man when his soul reached the Sunless Country. (She did not believe in gods or afterlives, being an Engineer, but she had been Pomeroy’s friend as well as his deputy, and she understood the need for this ritual.) Then Clytie Potts stepped forward and sang in a thin, uncertain voice a paean to the goddess Clio.

“He should have been here to steer New London out of the debris fields,” said Len Peabody, angry at the unfairness of it all.

“Now,” said Mr. Garamond, “it’s time we elected a new lord mayor.”

“Lavinia will be the new mayor,” said Clytie Potts. “That’s what Mr. Pomeroy wanted.”

“Mr. Pomeroy is dead,” said Garamond. “The Committee must decide. And then we must discuss what’s to be done with the prisoners.”

Wren had not been allowed to attend the funeral. Other Londoners had pleaded her case, but Garamond, his nose swollen to twice its usual size and the color of an aubergine, stood firm; she and Theo were dangerous agents of the Green Storm, and he insisted that they should be locked up. And so they were put in two old cages, salvaged from the wreck many years ago, which had once held animals in the zoological gardens in Circle Park, and were now kept in a dank corner of Crouch End to confine intruders, murderers, and lunatics who Garamond imagined might threaten the security of London. They had never been used before, and he looked very pleased with himself as his apologetic warriors shoved Wren and Theo inside, padlocking the barred gates behind them.

There, in the shadows, on the mattress that was her only furniture, Wren said her own prayers for Chudleigh Pomeroy as the muffled boom, boom, doom of the funeral drum came echoing across the debris like a heartbeat.

“What now?” asked Theo from his cage. Dark as it was in this part of the End, Wren could see him looking out at her through the bars. If they both reached out, they could touch just their fingertips. “What will happen to us now?”

Wren didn’t know. It was hurtful to be accused and imprisoned like this, but she found it hard to be scared of silly old Garamond and all her London friends. Sooner or later it would all be sorted out, she felt sure. She barely had the strength to think about it, though; she was too busy mourning Mr. Pomeroy and worrying about her father.