He ran across open ground to the vegetable gardens and crouched down beside the young London girl he had given the gun to. “What’s your name, child?”
“Angie, Mister. Angie Peabody.”
He squeezed her shoulder with his mechanical hand, sharing his courage with her the way he had so many times with so many other frightened youngsters in tight corners like this. “Well, Angie, we’re going to fall back to the Womb, and keep these devils at bay until your people can get their new city moving.”
“You’re ’elping us, Mister? Cor, ta!”
Her young face and bright, startled smile reminded Naga so strongly of Oenone that as he went running on to pass the same message to his own troops, he had to pull his visor shut so that they wouldn’t see his tears. He thanked his gods that the harvester had come, and that he had a battle to fight and people to defend; no politics to confuse him, no super-weapons to worry about, just a chance to die like a warrior, sword in hand, facing the barbarians.
Chapter 48
A Voyage to Erdene Tezh
Above the white knives of the mountains the sky was full of memories. Tom and Hester didn’t talk much as the Jenny flew away from Batmunkh Gompa, but they didn’t have to: Each knew what the other was thinking of. All the voyages they’d made in this little ship; all the castles of cloud they’d flown her around, the glittering seas they’d seen below, the tiny, toylike cities, the convoys and the trading posts, the ice mountains calving from Antarctic glaciers … The memories linked them together, drawing them closer, but they were all stained and spoiled by the things Hester had done.
So they did not talk. They took turns to sleep; to eat; and when they were together on the flight deck, they spoke only about the mountains, the wind, the sinking pressure in number three gas cell. Tom fetched the lightning gun from its hiding place and explained how it worked. They flew over small towns, high, sparse pastureland, and ribbons of road. They saw no other ships. Tom kept the radio switched on, but all they heard were a few confused scrabblings of battle code and garbled distress calls on elusive frequencies, interspersed with pulses of interference, like breakers on a pebble shore. The sunlight faded. The sky was veiled with volcanic ash and city smoke. The Jenny crossed a high plateau. Ahead rose the snow spires of the Erdene Shan.
A sad, unwelcome thought came into Tom’s head: This was the last journey of his life.
And as if she guessed what he was thinking, Hester took his hand. “Don’t worry, Tom. We’ll be all right. Hopeless missions are what we do best, remember?”
He looked at her. She was watching him solemnly, waiting for a smile, some sign of forgiveness or approval. But why should he forgive her? He snatched his hand away. “How could you do it?” he shouted. All the stored-up anger he had been nursing since she’d left came out of him in a rush that sent her reeling back as if he’d hit her. “You sold Anchorage! You betrayed us all to the Huntsmen!”
“For you!” Hester’s face was flushed, her scar dark and angry-looking. Her voice slurred the way it always did when she was upset, making it hard to hear what she said next. “For your sake, that’s why I did it, because I was afraid you’d go off with Freya Rasmussen.”
“I should have done! Freya doesn’t kill people, and enjoy doing it, and lie about it afterward! How could you lie to me, all those years? And in Brighton too … abandoning that little Lost Boy—how could you?”
Hester raised one hand to shield her face. “I’m Valentine’s daughter,” she said.
“What?” Tom thought he’d misheard. “Valentine was my father.”
Tom was still angry. He thought this was another lie. “David Shaw was your father.”
“No.” Hester shook her head, her face hidden now by both her hands. “My mum and Valentine were lovers before she married. Valentine was my father. I found out a long time ago, at Rogues’ Roost, only I never told you, ’cos I thought if you knew, then you’d hate me. But now you hate me anyway, so you might as well know the truth. Valentine was my dad. His blood’s in me, Tom; that’s why I can lie and steal and kill people and it doesn’t feel wrong to me; I know it’s wrong, but I don’t feel it. I’m Valentine’s daughter. I take after him.”
Her one gray eye peered out at him between her fingers, as if she had turned back into the shy, broken girl he had fallen in love with all those years before. A memory came to him, clear as sunlight, from Wren’s thirteenth summer, when she and Hester had just been starting to fight: Hester standing at the bottom of the staircase in their house at Dog Star Court and shouting up at her sulky daughter, “You take after your grandfather!” At the time he’d thought she’d been talking about David Shaw, and he’d thought it surprising, because she’d always said that David Shaw had been a quiet, kind man. But of course she had been thinking of her real father.
He felt the last of his anger drain away, leaving him shaky and ashamed. What must it have been like for her, keeping such a secret for so long?
“And Wren too,” she snuffled, weeping now. “He’s in her too—why else would she steal that Tin Book thing? Why else run out on us? That’s why I had to go, Tom. Maybe if she just has you, she’ll be all right, maybe the Valentine in her won’t come out.”
“It’s not Thaddeus Valentine whom Wren takes after,” Tom said gently. He went to her and took her hands, pulling them aside and down so that he could see her face. “If you could see her now, Het—she’s so brave and beautiful. She’s just like Katherine.”
He had thought that he didn’t want to kiss her, but all of a sudden he realized that he had wanted nothing else, ever since they’d parted. The things she had done that had made him so angry, the lies she’d told him and the men she’d killed, only made him want her more. He had loved Valentine when he was a boy, and now he loved Valentine’s daughter. He kissed her face, her jaw, her damaged, tear-wet mouth. “I don’t hate you,” he said.
From his station high in the envelope, where he had been keeping watch for pursuers, Grike heard the sounds from the flight deck: their rustling movements and the things they whispered to each other. Hester’s constant weakness for the other Once-Born saddened him. Scared him, too, for he could tell from the sick, arrhythmic stutter of Tom’s heart that Tom would not live long. What would Hester do without him? How could she have invested all her hopes in something so fragile? And yet her small voice, audible only to a Stalker’s ears, still drifted up the companionway, murmuring, “I love you I love you I always loved you Tom oh only you and always…”
Embarrassed, Grike tried not to listen to her, concentrating hard upon the other noises around him. And faintly, faintly, beneath the noise of engines and envelope fabric and the wind in the rigging, he sensed a third heartbeat, another pair of lungs filling and emptying, the familiar chattering of frightened teeth.
A few empty crates stood between the air-frame struts. A heap of tarpaulins quivered in a corner. Grike ripped them aside and stared down at the Once-Born huddled underneath.
It was hard for a flat, mechanical voice like his to sound weary, but he managed it.
“SO, PROFESSOR, WE MEET AGAIN.”
“THERE IS A STOWAWAY ON BOARD,” the old Stalker announced, climbing down the companion way with his captive. Tom and Hester sprang apart, straightening their clothes and their ruffled hair, turning their attention reluctantly to Nimrod Pennyroyal as Grike shoved him onto the flight deck.