After they were taken away, she went to live in a government-run orphanage at Tienjing. From there she was recruited into the intelligence wing, and then into the Stalker Fang’s private spy network. That was when Cynthia discovered that she had inherited her parents’ love of theater. Putting on disguises, adopting other names and voices and mannerisms, these were the things she most enjoyed, and she knew that she did them very well. Her only regret was that she could never claim the applause that she deserved. But it was tribute enough to watch the tears trickle down Naga’s face while he listened to all the dreadful things the townies had done to his wife.
Naga had probably never wept in public before. His aides and officers looked quite appalled. Even General Dzhu, who had hatched the plan to kill Lady Naga and helped Cynthia to infiltrate her household, looked uneasy when he heard his old friend sniffling and saw the tears drip off his chin. In the end, he cut short Cynthia’s performance. He had arranged Lady Naga’s death because he wanted to shock Naga out of his silly notions of peace with the cities, not to destroy him.
“Enough!” he said, holding up his hand to stop the man who was reading out Cynthia’s words. “Naga, you should not listen to any more of this. Two things are clear. We cannot trust the Zagwans. And the truce with the Tractionist barbarians must end. My division is ready to attack tomorrow, if you command it.”
“And mine,” said several other officers, all at once.
“Destroy All Cities!” shouted another, seizing on a Green Storm slogan from simpler times before the truce began.
“No,” said Naga angrily.
There was a mutter of surprise from everyone in the chamber. Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing a deaf mute and stop herself from crying out.
“No!” the poor fool said again, thumping the tabletop with his mechanical hand. “Oenone would not have wanted to see the world go tumbling back into war on her account.”
“But Naga,” insisted General Dzhu, “she must be avenged.”
“My wife did not believe in vengeance,” said Naga, trembling. “She believed in forgiveness. If she were here, she would say that the actions of a few townies in the sand sea do not mean that none of them can be trusted. We must continue to work for peace, for her sake.” He looked straight at Cynthia, who modestly averted her gaze. “What of this girl? What reward can we offer her? She has been brave, and loyal.”
Annoying, having to wait while someone wrote down his question on a piece of paper before she could scribble her answer. She allowed herself a little smile as she wrote it, and it pleased her to think that everyone else in the room thought she was smiling because she was such a good, loyal girl.
I ask only that I be allowed to serve General Naga just as I served his beloved wife.
Chapter 15
The Invisible Suburb
Dawn found the Jenny Haniver above the scarred brown moors of no-man’s-land. The cheerful cluster of cities that surrounded Murnau had sunk below the southwestern horizon sometime in the small hours, and the only city in sight now was a far-off armored hulk called Panzerstadt Winterthur, grumbling north on sentry duty. The Traktionstadts-gesellschaft and the Storm each kept watch on this region out of habit, for they had been outflanked before, but neither seriously imagined the other launching an attack across this marshy, pockmarked landscape, which grew only uglier and less inviting as the light increased. There was nothing down there beneath the mist except the immense track marks of towns.
Some of the older marks were a hundred yards across, steep-walled canyons running straight into the east, their bottoms filled with loose shale and chains of boggy ponds. Looking down at them, Tom thought he recognized the tracks of London, which he and Hester had followed long ago. Soon he would follow them again. This time, Quirke willing, they would lead him home.
“Well, I can’t see a suburb anywhere,” said Wren, wrapping her wet hair in a towel as she came through from the galley, where she had been washing in the sink. The lemony scent of her shampoo filled the flight deck as she went to each window in turn, looking down at the slabs and slopes of mud all shining in the gray dawn. “Nothing!”
“We must be patient,” said Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy. It did not seem like Wolf Kobold to be late… He circled again. The Jenny felt light and playful, as if pleased to be back in the sky. Her holds were empty, on Wolf’s instructions; presumably he envisaged himself flying home from the wreck of London with a shipload of loot. But where was he?
The radio gave a sudden crackle and began to squeal. It had been tuned in advance to a frequency that Wolf had provided, so it seemed safe to assume that the shrill, ear-splitting noise coming out of the speakers was the call sign of Harrowbarrow’s homing beacon.
Tom scrambled over to turn down the volume, while Wren ran back to the windows. The land below them was as featureless as ever. “I can’t see any suburbs,” said Wren. “It must still be over the horizon.”
“Can’t be,” said Tom, wincing as the signal increased again. “It sounds as if we’re right on top of it.”
It was Wren who spotted the movements in a broad track mark about a mile to the east. The pools of water there were emptying away, and the trees and bushes that had grown around them were starting to move, turning and twisting and falling one against another. The floor of the track mark heaved upward into a high dome of earth, which split and slithered and fell away to reveal a bank of immense, spiraling drill bits and then a scarred, armored carapace. A gray fist of exhaust smoke punched into the sky. “Great Quirke!” murmured Tom.
In the Wunderkammer at Anchorage-in-Vineland there had been the shell of something called a horseshoe crab. Later, when she was trying to explain what Harrowbarrow looked like, Wren would often compare it to that crab. The suburb was small—barely a hundred feet across, and about three times that in length. It was entirely covered by its armored shell. The front end was a broad, blunt shield, into which the drill bits were being retracted now that it was on the surface. (The shield also covered Harrowbarrow’s ugly mouthparts, and could be raised when it wanted to tear chunks off the small towns it hunted, or gobble up a Green Storm fort.! Behind the shield, Harrowbarrow tapered to a narrow stern, protected by overlapping plates of armor. Several of the plates were sliding aside, and Wren glimpsed heavy tracks and wheels beneath them, and a metal landing apron that slid out slowly on hydraulic rams, flickering with landing lights.
“Is that where we’re meant to put down?” asked Wren.
Tom said that he supposed it must be. “Kobold said his place was specialized,” he said wonderingly, “but I had no idea…”
He didn’t like the look of this place, but he told himself that it was just the first step on the way to London, and guided the Jenny carefully down onto the landing platform.
Wolf Kobold was waiting, ready to answer all their questions. It was nearly a week since Wren had seen him, and she had forgotten just how striking he was. The gray dawn and the landing lights and the wind flapping his coattails about made him look more handsome and piratical than ever. But Wren had always had a soft spot for pirates, and at least Wolf’s smile was friendly and welcoming.
Not so his town. All she could see beneath the folded-back armor were blocks of drab gray flats, punched with tiny windows. The people looked gray and drab too as they hurried forward to take the travelers’ bags; stocky scowling scavengers in capes and overalls, with goggles or beetlish dust masks shielding their eyes from the gathering daylight.