“Theo,” said Lady Naga, taking his hands in greeting as he stopped in front of the Nzimu. “You remember Rohini, don’t you? And this is Captain Rasputra, who insists on coming as my bodyguard.”
“She’s a precious cargo,” said Rasputra, a white smile flashing at Theo out of his black spade of beard. “I promised Naga I’d not let her out of my sight.”
“It will be just the four of us,” Lady Naga said.
“When you refuel at Tibesti,” Khora said, “let everyone believe that Lady Naga and the captain are your passengers, and Rohini is your wife.”
“Right,” said Theo, glancing at the beautiful servant girl and feeling glad that his sisters were not here to giggle.
Captain Rasputra said, “The wind is rising.”
Lady Naga turned to Khora. “You have a beautiful country, Air Marshal. I hope to return one day, when peace has come back to the world.”
“I hope that day will be soon,” said Khora, returning her bow. The breeze fluttered their cloaks. As Khora straightened, he said, “Lady Naga, I owe you special thanks for ridding us of the Stalker Fang. I knew Anna Fang in life, and I loved her. The thought of that unholy thing walking about with her face …”
“I know,” said Lady Naga. “I know how it feels. My own brother … But you must not fear for Anna Fang. She is at peace.” She looked past him at Theo, and stretched out her small hand to him again. “Theo. Shall we go aboard?”
Chapter 5
A Boy and His Stalker
Fishcake hurried down a side alley deep in the under-tiers of Cairo. There were a lot of people about, even at this late hour, but that did not worry him. He was only ten years old, and little more than waist high to most of the passersby. They barely noticed him as he wove his way among them, clutching his bag of stolen Old Tech under his robes. From time to time he paused among the knots of men who gathered to argue and haggle in front of stalls heaped high with scraps of machinery. They loved to argue, down here in the Lower Suq, and if Fishcake timed it right and waited till the debate had reached its height, they never saw his skinny white hand dart out to snatch a piece of circuitry or a fragment of dented armor.
When he had what he needed, he stopped at a food stall and stole a sticky pastry, which he ate on the move as he scurried down the long maze of ladderways and stairs and ’tween-tier maintenance catwalks that led down eventually into Cairo’s drains. The city was rumbling across rough country toward the shores of the Middle Sea ; and the fetid spillways of its storm-drain system rang with the squeal and grumble of the vast axles turning. It was mostly shadows down there, except where spokes of red light from furnaces and refineries splayed down through the gratings. The stench, the noise, the fumes would have been too much for most people to bear, but for Fishcake this was home. He felt safe in the city’s noisy belly, where almost no one came.
He checked all the same to make sure he had not been followed before he pried open a grating in the wall of the main drain and threw his heavy bag through the hole, then slithered after it.
It was dark in the little side chamber he dropped into. Dark and dry. A hundred years before, Cairo had gone hunting far to the south, in lands where the rains came hard and frequently. It had needed its network of storm drains then, but since it had returned to the desert, they had been sealed off and forgotten. In the Lower Suq Fishcake sometimes heard men saying that the drains were haunted by djinni and evil ghosts, and it always made him smile, because they were right.
He picked up his bag and started wading through the moraine of greasy food wrappers and empty water bottles on the chamber floor. Near the back of the chamber, where light flickered in fitfully through another grating, something moved.
“Fishcake?” whispered a voice.
“Hello, Anna,” said Fishcake. He was glad it was her. He switched on his lamp, a stolen argon globe fed by power that he leeched from a cable upstairs. His Stalker was propped in a corner. She had unsheathed her claws when she heard him coming, and the long blades were still bared, raised in front of her blind bronze face. Fishcake felt what he always felt when he came home to her: pride, and loathing, and a sort of love. Pride because he had built her himself, cobbling her together from the pieces of her smashed body that he had rescued from the desert. Loathing because she had not turned out as well as he had hoped. Her armor, which must once have been so smooth and silvery, was dull and dented as an old bucket, scabbed with solder and riveted-on patches that he’d made by stamping soup tins flat. And although he had never seen a Stalker in action, he was sure her joints and bearings were not supposed to grate like that each time she moved…
As for the love, well, everybody needs to love someone, and the Stalker was all Fishcake had. She had saved him in the desert, told him what to do, told him how to rebuild her. She was a strange companion, and scary sometimes, but it was better than being alone.
“I found some couplings,” said Fishcake, emptying out his bag in the corner of the chamber where he kept his stolen tools. The chamber rocked and shuddered with the movements of the city. Light spiked through the gratings, shining on the Stalker’s unchanging face, her comforting bronze smile. “I’ll put you together again soon,” Fishcake promised. “Tonight…”
“Thank you, Fishcake. Thank you for taking care of me.”
“That’s all right.”
Fishcake had learned that his Stalker was really two people. One was the Stalker Fang, a stern, merciless being who had ordered the Green Storm about for years and now ordered Fishcake instead. But from time to time she would jerk and quiver and go silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, she would be Anna, who was much gentler, and a bit bewildered.
At first Fishcake had thought that Anna was just the result of a short circuit inside the Stalker’s complicated brain, but over the months he had come to understand that there was more to her than that. Anna remembered all sorts of things that had happened long ago, and she liked to talk about people and places that Fishcake had never heard of. A lot of her stories made no sense; they were just lists of disconnected images and names, like random pieces from a hundred mixed-up jigsaws. Sometimes she just made sobbing noises, or begged Fishcake to kill her, which he did not know how to do, and wouldn’t have done even if he had, in case she turned back into the Stalker Fang while he was doing it and killed him instead. But he liked Anna. He was glad it was Anna tonight.
He found her legs, stacked in a corner beneath some newspapers. He had rebuilt them months ago, and he was quite pleased with them, even though the bottom part of the right one and the right foot were missing and he had had to use an old metal table leg instead. He had never managed to attach them to the rest of his Stalker, because he couldn’t find the right couplings, but tonight in the Suq he had struck lucky at last. It was because of this truce out east; traders were arriving in Cairo from all sorts of places that had been war zones until quite recently, from the territory of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft and the battlefields of the Altai Shan. (There was no shortage of smashed Stalker bits in the Altai Shan.)
Fishcake drank some water and set to work. He said, “We’ll soon be away from here.”
“You have found an airship?” whispered the Stalker. She sounded eager. (One thing that the Stalker Fang and Anna parts of her had in common was that they both kept nagging at Fishcake to finish the repairs and take them away to a place called Shan Guo. The Stalker Fang had something important to do there. Anna just wanted to go home.) “I had an airship of my own once,” she whispered. “The Jenny Haniver. I built her myself, secretly, in Arkangel, stole parts from Stilton’s salvage yards, and flew away…”