Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Hester had just enough time to push him to the floor before the first wave of Stalker-birds shattered the Jenny’s front windows. Two of them came into the cabin, filling it with their flapping, the idiot flailing of their green-eyed heads. Hester snatched the lightning gun and shot the first before it saw her. The other came shrieking at her, its knife of a beak aimed straight at her eye. She fired the lightning gun at it and it exploded, filling the flight deck with gunge and feathers. She looked down at Tom. “Are you all right?”

“Yes …” He looked scared and white. Hester squirmed upright, hissing with pain as the movement wrenched strained muscles. She peered out the windows. More birds were circling the Jenny, and she could see a couple tearing at the starboard engine pod. She aimed the lightning gun through the side window and shot them both, then tossed it down to Tom and snatched her own gun down from an overhead locker. She started aft along the gondola’s central corridor. Pennyroyal was screeching in the stern cabin, and through the half-open door Hester saw the flap of wings and the gleam of Grike’s armor as he beat the birds back. “HESTER!” the Stalker shouted.

“I’m fine,” she promised. She heard wings and claws inside the little medical bay where Anna Fang had once treated her for a crossbow wound. She kicked the door open and turned her gun on the birds that had torn their way in through the roof there. The gun was a good one—the steam-powered Weltschmerz 60 with the underslung grenade launcher that she’d picked up for a song in El Houl—but it made more of a mess of the medical bay than the birds had, shredding the outer wall till it looked like a doily. Through the holes she could see more birds going for the engine pod, and heard it choke and die, the propeller slowing. “Oh, damn it,” she said, and pumped a grenade through the pod’s cowling, blowing it to pieces along with the birds.

Back out in the corridor she shouted, “Tom? You all right?”

“Of course! Don’t keep asking!”

“Put us down then.”

“Down isn’t a problem,” said Tom, checking the row of gas-pressure gauges on the instrument panel and seeing all the needles whirling toward zero. Unbalanced by the loss of the starboard pod, the gondola was tilting steeply sideways. Scary shapes flapped by outside, but Tom tried to ignore them, saving the lightning gun in case more got in. Gaudy yellowish light licked in through the larboard windows. The envelope was burning.

Hester kicked open the stern-cabin door. Grike was in the process of ripping a Resurrected eagle to pieces. He looked like a scarecrow, coated with slime and feathers, and he swung his dead face toward her and said, “THIS SHIP IS FINISHED.”

“Not the Jenny,” said Hester loyally. “Tom’ll get her down all right. Go forward. Keep him safe.”

She stood aside to let him go past her. She’d been hoping the birds would have killed Pennyroyal, but they’d been too busy with Grike. The explorer lay on the floor where she’d left him, bound and gagged, looking up at her with round, pleading eyes. She considered shooting him, then shouldered her gun and pulled her knife out, stooping. Pennyroyal gave a squeal of fright, but she was only cutting the ropes on his feet and his wrists.

As she stood up again, the remains of the long stern window disintegrated in an ice fall of smashed glass, and the wide black wings of a Resurrected condor filled the cabin. Its claws raked Pennyroyal’s head as it came flapping at Hester. She dropped the knife and tried to bring her gun to bear, but there was no time. She heard herself scream; a terrible, thin, little-girl scream, and suddenly Grike was back in the cabin with her, pulling her out of the way of the driving beak, grabbing the bird, its blades striking sparks from his armor as he crushed it to his body.

The Jenny Haniver lurched as another of her gas cells exploded; her nose tipped up, her stern down. Hester was flung on top of Pennyroyal, who clung to a bulkhead. She saw Grike stumble toward the stern, where the mountains glowed in the twilight beyond the smashed window. The bird was strong; half crushed, it still flapped and clawed. The spasmic beating of its wings overbalanced Grike. He smashed the bunk and crashed against the stern wall, which started to give way beneath him with a splintering sound.

“Grike!” screamed Hester, scrambling down the hill of the deck to help him.

“Hester, no!” yelled Pennyroyal through his gag, pulling her back.

The wall collapsed. Grike turned his face for a second toward Hester. Still clutching the condor, he fell. “Grike!” she shrieked again, as the gondola tilted back to the horizontal. She kicked herself free of Pennyroyal and scrabbled as close as she dared to that gaping rent where the wall had been. “Grike!”

No answer. Nothing to see in the smoke and the wind and the rain of burning fragments from her dying ship. Only the echoes of Grike’s last cry bouncing up at her from the abyss where he had fallen: “HESTER.!”

From the wall of the Stalker’s garden Fishcake watched the burning airship draw a long, bright trail down the sky, deep into the shadows of the valley. The wind was carrying the sound away, or maybe burning airships made no sound; at any rate, it all seemed to be happening in silence. It was very beautiful. The igniting gas cells were like fountains, showering out golden fragments that twinkled and faded as they fell. Blazing birds tried to flutter away from it, and they fell too, their bright reflections rising toward them in the waters of the lake until they met in a white kiss of steam.

A footfall in the snow behind him made Fishcake look around. The Stalker stood there, watching. “It is the Jenny Haniver,” she whispered calmly. “How sweet of somebody to bring her home…”

The airship settled in marshy ground on the lake’s far shore. As the smoke of its burning spread across the reed beds, Fishcake was almost sure he saw people running away from it. Mr. Natsworthy, he thought, and Hester. And he felt suddenly afraid, because he remembered what he had sworn to do to Hester, and was not sure that he had the courage to do it.

His Stalker’s hand rested on his shoulder. “They are no threat to us,” she whispered. “We will not hurt them.”

But Fishcake gripped the knife inside his jacket and thought about the last time he had seen the Jenny Haniver, flying away without him into the skies of Brighton.

Tom splashed through ankle-deep water and dropped into wet grass, hugging the precious lightning gun. Hester was close behind him, flinging down Pennyroyal. Survivors of the Stalker-bird flock clawed and shrieked around the blazing envelope, still trying to worry it to death. Hester lifted her gun and emptied the last of its grenades into the inferno. The explosion lit up the lake, the slopes and cliffs around it, the lonely house on its island. The Jenny’s rockets went up too, with orange flashes. Then there was only the swirling smoke, and the flames dancing in the smashed birdcage that had been their little airship; twenty years of memories burning away to charcoal and sooty metal. “Tom?” asked Hester.

“Yes,” he said. His chest ached, but not badly. Perhaps being with Hester again had healed his broken heart. He hoped so, because his green pills had been in the Jenny’s stern cabin.

“Our Jenny Haniver,” she said.

“She was only a thing,” said Tom, wiping at his eyes with a singed cuff, looking around. “We’re all right; that’s all that matters. Where’s Grike?”

“He’s gone. He fell. Up there somewhere…” She pointed toward the enormous silence of the mountains.