Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“What’s happening?” grumbled Hester, tired and crotchety after the long flight, one hand pressed to her aching head. “Surely the cities can’t have a super-weapon too?”

“Typical!” said Pennyroyal. “You wait years for an all-powerful orbital heat-ray thingy and then two come along at once.”

“perhaps the storm do not control the new weapon,” said Grike.

“But it blew up cities! We watched it! Who else would want to do that?”

“a third force,” suggested Grike. “someone who hates the cities and the storm and wants to sow confusion.”

“Like who?” asked Hester. “the stalker fang.”

“But she’s dead!” said Pennyroyal. “Isn’t she?”

“perhaps the rumors we heard from the once-born at forward command are correct,” said Grike. “I was re-resurrected. what if someone has re-resurrected her?”

“And you think she is behind these calamities?” asked Oenone. She sounded afraid, but faintly hopeful too, as if it would be a relief to learn that her husband was not responsible.

Grike said, “when the new weapon struck, i remembered something that the stalker fang said before i disabled her. she spoke of a thing called odin. ‘the greatest of the weapons that the ancients hung in heaven.’ i believe she has awoken it just as she planned. she struck at tienjing because naga would be there, and at batmunkh tsaka in the hope of killing you, oenone zero.”

“But she’s dead,” insisted Pennyroyal.

“He’s got a point, for once,” Hester agreed. “You pulled her head off, Grike. Threw the rest of her off Cloud 9. That should have done the trick.”

But Oenone looked troubled. She had looked troubled all the way from Forward Command, and now she said, “Maybe not. She was a very advanced model. Dr. Popjoy had put in experimental systems that even I may not have understood. It’s possible that if someone gathered the body parts, they might have been able to …”

Her voice faded away. She shrugged unhappily.

“Oh, fantastic,” said Hester.

“I might be wrong.” Oenone went to the window, looking south into the haze of dirty smoke from Tienjing. “I hope I’m wrong. We must ask Dr. Popjoy. As soon as we dock at Batmunkh Gompa, I’ll send for him. Popjoy will know.”

The city behind the Shield-Wall lay in silence, only a few dozen lamps burning in its dark streets. More lights shone on the valley floor, a river of lanterns pouring eastward, reflecting in the waters of Batmunkh Nor. The population was fleeing, just as they had fled the threat of MEDUSA the last time Hester was there. She thought what an odd place it must be to live if you had to keep packing all your belongings into carts and running away, and then reminded herself that MEDUSA had been nearly twenty years ago, and that a whole generation had grown up since she and Tom left this city in the Jenny Haniver.

“Gods,” she said grumpily, rubbing her head again. “I’m getting too old for this…”

Fox Spirits guided the Fury to a temporary airfield below an old nunnery on a crag. The ancient building was surrounded by what looked at first like giant lichen, a shapeless mass of gray and brown and white. It was people. Refugees from the city, and survivors of Tienjing brought in aboard the ragtag fleet of freighters and military transports moored along the edges of the field. They huddled together against the cold, wrapped in furs and blankets, sheltering under awnings and tents. As Hester, still limping slightly, led her companions past them, they started to stand up and shuffle aside, forming an avenue of staring faces. A whispering, like the wind in trees, ran through the crowd, as people pointed out the Lady Naga and her Stalker to their neighbors and their children.

Maybe they were saying that she was to blame for their disaster; that if she had not destroyed the Stalker Fang, it would be the townies suffering instead. Maybe they had heard she was dead. Maybe, seeing Grike and Hester walking beside her, they thought she was a phantom come here from the Halls of Shadow with two demons to guard her.

Oenone barely noticed the stir that she was causing. She kept thinking of the Stalker Fang. I must speak to Popjoy, she thought, and looked east toward the lakeshore, where the old Stalker builder had his retirement villa—but the evening mist lay thick above the lake, and she was not even certain that Popjoy’s place could be seen from here.

At the door of the nunnery a tired-looking subofficer greeted them. “Lady Naga! You are safe! Gods be thanked!”

Safe, thought Oenone. Yes; even if Fang had returned, Naga would sort everything out. She was safe at last. She returned the boy’s salute, remembering him from her husband’s staff at Tienjing: a friendly boy with a flop of black hair always falling across his eyes. She was glad he had survived. She said, “My husband is here?”

“The general will be overjoyed! I shall take you to him!”

Oenone followed him through the tall, carved doorway.

Hester, Grike, and Pennyroyal went with her, not knowing what else to do.

“I shall need to see the scientist Popjoy,” Oenone told their guide. “Can you find him for me?”

The subofficer seemed nervous. “He is dead, Lady Naga. Murdered at his house by the lake, about three weeks ago. We think one of his Stalkers went wrong and …” He shrugged. “I heard what had been done to him. No human being could have had such strength…”

Oenone looked at Hester. Grike said, ” did you find the stalker that killed him?”

The boy looked startled at being spoken to by a Stalker, but he recovered, and said, “No. But Popjoy’s sky yacht was stolen. Perhaps if the killer was an experimental model, it might have had the wit to escape. Apparently Popjoy’s house was full of … horrible things.”

He addressed his words to Oenone, but he was looking past her at her companions, as if wondering for the first time who they were and whether he had been right to admit them to Naga’s emergency headquarters.

“These are my friends,” said Oenone hastily, and introduced them: “Mr. Grike; Professor Pennyroyal; Mrs. Natsworthy.”

The boy frowned. “Natsworthy?”

He took Oenone aside and they spoke for a moment in Shan Guonese. Hester heard the name Natsworthy mentioned several more times. She reached for the big gun on her shoulder and eased the safety catch off, then asked Grike, “What are they saying?”

Before the Stalker could translate, Oenone came back to join them, smiling. “Hester,” she said, “your husband is here.”

She might as well have carried on talking in her own funny language, Hester thought, for what she said made no sense at all.

“Tom Natsworthy,” said Oenone. She took Hester’s hands in hers and smiled into her face. “He arrived this morning, aboard Anna Fang’s old ship…”

“No,” said Hester, not believing it; not wanting to.

“He is being held in a cell down by the docking pans at the foot of this crag. But don’t worry; I shall tell Naga to free him at once. You should go to him, Hester.”

“Me? No.”

“Go to him.” Oenone pulled off the ring she wore and pressed it into Hester’s hand, folding Hester’s fingers over it. “Take this; tell the guards I sent you. Mr. Grike can translate for you. They will let you talk to him. Tell him that orders will soon be coming from my husband to let him go.”

“But he won’t want to see me. Send someone else.”

“You are still his wife.”

“You don’t know about the things I’ve done.”

Oenone stood on tiptoes and kissed her. “Nothing that can’t be forgiven. Now go, while I talk to Naga.”

Hester turned and went, Grike at her side, everyone in the passage turning to stare, wondering who she could be.