There was a silence in the room. It seemed to have grown rather cold. Fräulein Hinblick snuggled closer to her companions, and a young man with medal ribbons and a wooden hand said softly, “It is a haunted place. When I flew with the Abwehrtruppe, I saw it from a distance. Ghostly lights flash and glimmer there at night. Even the Green Storm fear it. Over the rest of the old eastern Hunting Ground they have put settlements and forests and farms and windmill fields, but for a hundred miles around the wreck of London there is nothing.”
Tom leaned forward in his seat. It was time for him to try out the theory that he had been working on over the past few days. He was shaking slightly. He said, “I think Ms. Morchard may have been deceiving you a little. You see, I believe that she comes from London. I knew her when she was Clytie Potts, a member of the Guild of Historians. Somehow she survived MEDUSA. Perhaps she made up her tale of ghosts and lightning to keep people from going to London? To scare off scavengers who might try to loot the wreck? Could it be that other Londoners survived the explosion, and that she uses the Archaeopteryx to fly in and out of the ruins, ferrying supplies to them?”
The young Murnauers were far too polite to say that they didn’t believe him, but Wren could see by their faces that they did not. Only the shabby young man watched him with interest.
“Medical supplies and livestock,” Tom said hopefully. “That’s what the clerk at Airhaven told us she carries…”
Pennyroyal shook his head. “A nice idea, Tom, but a bit unlikely, wouldn’t you say? Even if anyone had survived that terrible disaster, why would they still be living in the ruins, all those hundreds of miles behind the Green Storm’s lines?”
Wren felt embarrassed for her father. She wished he had tried out his crazy-sounding idea on her before he let everybody else hear it. Poor Dad! He really missed his old city, even after all these years; that was why he had let his imagination run away with him.
The breakfast party was beginning to break up, the room filling with a low buzz of conversation as Tom spoke eagerly to Pennyroyal, and Fräulein Hinblick explained what had just been said to some of her friends who spoke no Anglish. A few of them looked doubtfully at Tom, and there was some laughter. Wren turned to search for Orla Twombley and instead found the shabby stranger standing close behind her.
“Your father’s imagination is almost as vivid as Professor Pennyroyal’s,” he said.
“Daddy is a Londoner himself,” Wren told him. “It’s only natural that he should be interested in what has become of London.”
The man seemed satisfied. He was better-looking than Wren had thought at first, and younger, too; just a boy really, eighteen or nineteen, with clear, pale skin and a faint stubble showing on his chin and upper lip. But his ice-blue eyes seemed to belong in a much older face. They stared past Wren at her father as he said, “I should like to talk to him. But not here.” He thought for a moment, then reached inside his coat and took out a square, thick, creamy card, which he gave to Wren. Curly writing was embossed on it, an address on the Oberrang, Murnau’s upper tier. “My father is giving a party tomorrow afternoon. You should both come. There we may speak in private.”
He studied her face for a moment. Wren looked down at the invitation, and when she looked up again, the young man had turned away; she saw the skirts of his coat swirl as he reached the stairs and started down; his hair glinted gold in the lamplight. Then he was gone.
Wren turned to her father, but Tom was talking to the journalist Spiney, trying not to give too much of the truth away as Spiney quizzed him about how he knew Professor Pennyroyal. Wren went over to Orla Twombley instead. “Who was that man?” she asked. “The one who interrupted the Professor’s story?”
“Him?” The aviatrix looked around quickly and, seeing that the young man had left, said, “His name is Wolf Kobold. Son of Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, the old soldier they made mayor of Murnau when this war began. Look, there they are together in that print above the fireplace… Wolf’s a brave fighter. Handsome too, don’t you think?”
Wren did, but she was too shy to admit it. She tried not to blush as the aviatrix steered her across the still-crowded room to show her the picture. There stood the kriegsmarschall, a stern, stiff gentleman whose enormous white mustaches made him look as if a wandering albatross had chosen his upper lip as a perch. Beside him was the young man to whom Wren had just spoken, looking younger still— the picture must have been five or six years old, for it showed Wolf as a rather angelic schoolboy. Wren wondered what had happened to him in the years since to make him so grim.
“He’ll be kriegsmarschall himself when the old man finally retires or dies,” Orla Twombley was saying. “Until then he has been acting as mayor of one of Murnau’s harvester suburbs. He drops into Moon’s sometimes, when he visits Murnau on family business, but he’s a solitary type. I’ve never talked with him.”
Wren showed her the invitation she’d been given, and Orla whistled softly. “Wren, my dear, you are going up in the world! I declare, you’ve barely been aboard this city an hour, and already you’ve been invited to the kriegsmarschall’s garden party.”
Chapter 10
The Black Angel
Oh, what’s this? Here on the high seas of the desert, where the rippling horizons seem more liquid than land, something solid has appeared. It is just a speck at first; a dark triangle shimmering above the silver mirages that lie across the dunes, but it grows clearer and harder by the moment; a blade, a shark’s fin, a black sail bellying in the desert wind. Listen; you can hear the sand singing under racing tires. Look; you can see the sun’s reflection like diamonds in a line of portholes.
Imagine a pond skater, but magnify it until it is as big as a yacht. Fix a wheel to each of its long legs, and raise a mast above it. Then set it skimming over sand instead of water. It is a sand ship, the vehicle of choice for desert scavengers and bounty hunters, and as it passes, if we turn to look, we can see what has brought it into this mineral ocean. The region ahead of it is crowded with towns, their smokestacks and upperworks dancing behind the curtains of reflected heat that sway above the dunes.
This is a rare event, the nearest thing to a trading cluster that you will find in the dried-out, town-eat-town world of the desert deeps. A big, slow suburb that should be preying on fishing hamlets along the far-off coast has blundered into the sand sea by mistake, and been hunted to a standstill by a pack of speedy predators. The hunters have huge wheels, huge jaws, huge engines, and huge appetites to match. They have cornered their prey in a dusty bowl of sand called Bitumen Bay, ringed by mined-out hills. They are tearing it apart, and for a day or so, while they are too busy digesting their catch to eat one another, an uneasy peace prevails. Merchants go from one fierce town to another, and far-wandering airships appear out of nowhere to flog Old Tech and knickknacks. Even the swift, shy scavenger towns come creeping close to try to sell the scraps they’ve found among the sands.
The black sails of the nameless ship crinkle and flutter like the petals of an opium poppy as its pilot brings it up into the wind, slowing, sweeping around in a long curve that will take it into the school of other sand ships around the cluster.
The townlet of Cutler’s Gulp had parked itself on the slopes of an enormous dune a half mile from the feeding frenzy and kept its engines idling, ready to take off in a moment should any of the predators show signs of fancying it for dessert. It was a long, low thing, its single deck overshadowed by fat sand wheels. It consisted mainly of engines, and of the bloated ducts and flues and exhaust pipes that served them. The inhabitants made their homes in what little space was left, stretching their awnings between the ducts and building small dwellings of mud and papier-mâché on the few bare patches of deck among the engine housings. Sand ships came and went from garages in its belly, and a jaunty black-and-white-striped air trader called the Humbug came buzzing across the dunes to touch down at the harbor, a blank space near the bows where a couple of the mud buildings had recently collapsed.