Running feet behind her. She heard the boy grunt and, turning, saw the knife flash as he slashed it at her throat. She dropped the lightning gun and grabbed his thin wrist, bending the knife away, twisting his arm until he cried out and let it go. She caught it as it fell and stuffed it through her belt, like a stern teacher confiscating a slingshot. She pushed Fishcake away, and he fell down and started to cry.
“Tom,” said a whispering voice from above them. “Hester. How nice of you to drop in.”
The Stalker. She had been standing in the shadows at the causeway’s end where ten worn stone steps led up to a gate. She came carefully down the steps, limping, the gray light shining faintly on her bronze face.
“She’s my Stalker!” shouted Fishcake. “I found her after you left me behind. She’s been good to me. She’s going to help me kill you!”
Hester looked for the lightning gun, but it had fallen down among the rocks at the waterside. She started to scramble down to fetch it, but steel hands caught her, lifting her, dragging her, gripping her face; a metal arm went across her chest, pulling her back hard against an armored breastplate.
“No!” shouted Tom, running for the fallen gun.
“Please don’t be disagreeable, Tom,” whispered the Stalker, “or I shall break her neck. I could do it very easily. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
Tom stopped running. He could not speak. He felt as if someone had jammed a rusty skewer through his left armpit, deep into his chest. Pain ran down his arm, too, and up his neck, along his jaw. He fell to his knees, gasping.
“Poor Tom,” the Stalker said. “Your heart. Poor thing.”
Crouched by her feet, Fishcake watched hungrily. “Kill them!” he shouted in his thin, angry voice. “Her first, then him!”
“They were Anna’s friends, Fishcake,” said the Stalker. “But they left me behind!” sobbed Fishcake. “She murdered ’Mora and Gargle! I swore I’d kill her!”
“They will both die soon enough.”
“But I swore it!”
“No,” whispered the Stalker.
Fishcake shouted something and groped for the knife in Hester’s belt, but the Stalker swiped him aside, so hard that he was thrown right off the causeway, down onto the ice, which starred and moaned beneath him but did not give way. Howling with pain and betrayal, Fishcake crept back to the causeway. Sobbing, slithering over the wet stones, he ran away from the house.
The Stalker Fang let Hester go and stooped over Tom. Her steel hand rested on his chest, and her eyes flared as she sensed the erratic, stumbling beats of his heart. “Poor Tom,” she whispered. “Not long now.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Hester.
“He’s going to die,” said the Stalker.
“He can’t! Oh, he can’t! Please!”
“It doesn’t matter,” whispered the Stalker. “Soon everyone is going to die.”
She lifted Tom in her arms, and Hester followed her as she carried him up the steps and through her frozen garden, into her tomb of a house.
Chapter 49
Newborn
Pell-mell along stack Seven Sluice, the thick air full of the snattering of dynamos and clang of running repairs down in the district. Up rusty rungs that rose forever, trembling with vibrations as the engines came online. Wren exhausted, scared, hurting, each lungful of air a stabbing ache in the strained muscles of her chest and back, and the only thing that drove her on the fact that Theo was with her now. He reached out sometimes to touch her, encouraging her, but they could not speak, for it was too loud in these dank ladderways, these iron throats that filled with hot breath and angry bellowings as the wounded suburb struggled back to life.
They were soon lost. They wanted to go forward and down, but the tubular streets twisted around on themselves and looped blindly about, leading them up and aft instead. At last they emerged onto a catwalk high above some open square at the heart of the engine district, looking down past lighted windows and giant ducts into a space where a hundred fat brass pistons were pumping up and down in sprays of steam, their speed increasing as Theo and Wren leaned over the handrail to watch.
The handrail trembling; the whole suburb lurching forward. “It’s moving!” shouted Wren, but Theo couldn’t hear her, and there was no need to repeat it for it was quite obvious by then that Harrowbarrow was under way again. No time to repeat it anyway, for just then an engine worker in greasy overalls popped up through a hatchway in the catwalk and stared at them, mouth opening wide as he shouted down to his mates below.
Theo and Wren fled and found a spindly ladder leading up through the sousaphone maze of ducts and tubes that coiled above their heads. Condensation fell on them like warm rain as they dragged themselves up under the curve of the suburb’s armor. At the top of the ladder was a hatch; it took both of them to twist the heavy handles and heave it open. Daylight came pouring in, and fresh, cold wind. Wren looked down the ladder and saw flashlights moving on the catwalk below; men gathering to stare at her and point. Then Theo, who was already through the hatch, reached back to pull her up into the open air.
At least I’ll die in daylight, she thought, lying panting on the filthy armored back of Harrowbarrow. A narrow walkway ran along the suburb’s spine, without handrails. On either side of it a few hundred feet of battered armor sloped down to the suburb’s edges, where the tracks ground by, clogged with earth and hunks of rust. Beyond them the spires and spikes of ruined London sped past.
Theo slammed the hatch shut behind them and started to drag Wren away from it ; shouting something about Kobold’s men following them up, but before they had gone very far, the metal around them suddenly erupted in sparks and little spurts of smoke and dust, and she realized they were being machine-gunned—not very accurately, thank Quirke.
Theo flung himself down, half on top of her, as a plump white shape soared above the wreckage to larboard. Through the spray of rust and soil flung up by Harrowbarrow’s tracks Wren saw that it was a rather elderly-looking airship with the markings of the Green Storm, gun turrets swiveling to squirt fire at the racing suburb.
“The Storm are here!” she shouted.
“We’re friends!” Theo yelled. Wren held on to him to save him from being thrown off Harrowbarrow’s back as he waved his arms and shouted, “Help! Help!” But to the aviators in that ship he was just another flea-size shape creeping about on the suburb they’d been ordered to destroy; they swung their guns toward him again, and Wren heard the bullets swishing overhead as she pulled him down beside her.
A few yards from where they lay a circular hatch cover slid open in the suburb’s armor, and a revolving gun emplacement popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It had been built on the turntable of an old fairground carousel from a coastal pleasure town that Harrowbarrow had eaten long ago, and as it spun around and around, cheerful calliope music came from it, along with puffs of gun smoke and streamers of white steam. The barrels of its four long guns recoiled rhythmically into their armored housing as they fired, lacing the sky above the suburb with cannon shells. The airship that had shot at Wren and Theo burst into flames and was left quickly behind as the suburb went thundering on. Overhead, two other ships veered away, envelopes and tail fins filling with ragged holes.
The coming of Harrowbarrow could be heard in the Womb by that time. As the Londoners struggled aboard their new city with whatever possessions they had managed to save, the scrap-metal clangor of the approaching suburb filled the sky outside and echoed around the central hangar.