“You see?” he shouted. “It was all for nothing, Wren! Another ten minutes and that precious place of yours will be in the ’Barrow’s gut. And you; you and your black boyfriend—I’m going to string your bowels off the yard roof like paper chains, and nail up your carcasses in the slave hold so your London friends can see what comes to those who try to make a fool of me!”
He was close enough by then to swipe at them with his sword. They scrambled backward, away from him. The swiveling gun emplacement behind them let out another stuttering roar as a white airship soared past astern, but Kobold only laughed. “Don’t think the Mossies can save you! They won’t dare come in range of that gun.”
He lunged forward, and the point of his sword struck sparks from the suburb’s armor inches from Theo’s foot. Theo looked at Wren. Near her, where one of the chunky rivets that held Harrowbarrow’s armor in place stood slightly proud of the plating, a shard of wreckage had snagged. Theo threw himself down and pulled it free. It was an old length of half-inch pipe, rusty and sharp at the ends. It was too long and heavy to use for a sword, but Theo had nothing better, so he turned with a cry, swinging it at Kobold. Kobold jumped back, raising his blade to deflect the blow. He looked surprised; even pleased. “That’s the spirit!” he shouted.
Aboard the Fury, Naga said, “We have to silence that swivel gun. There is no other way we can get within range…”
“Sir!” one of his aviators interrupted. “On the suburb’s back—”
Naga swung his telescope along the wood-louse curve of Harrowbarrow’s spine. Twenty yards behind the gun emplacement two figures seemed to be dancing—no, fighting; he saw the flash of sparks as their swords met. “One of our men?”
“Can’t tell, sir. But if we fire on the gun, we may kill whoever it is…”
“That can’t be helped, Commander. Let their gods look after them; we have work to do.”
A flight of rockets sprang from the airship, and Wren ducked as one sizzled past her, close enough for her to glimpse the snarling dragon face painted on its nose cone and the Chinese characters chalked along its flank. It burst on the armor close to the gun turret, but not close enough to do more than rattle shrapnel against it. The other rockets went wide, exploding harmlessly on spikes of wreckage. Harrowbarrow was speeding through a region where long, jagged shards from London’s upper tiers lay heaped on top of one another, forming a lattice through which the westering sun poked its unhealthy crimson beams. Clinging to the armor with both hands, Wren looked up at the sharp spines flicking past. It was like rushing through an enormous, untidy cutlery drawer. If we run ourselves upon one of those, she thought, it will put an end to all our problems…
The blades did not seem to trouble Wolf Kobold. He waved his sword, shouting something to the gun crew, and the gun turned with a swirl of fairground music and filled the air astern with black puffballs, so that the airship yawed hastily and vanished for a while behind the wreckage. Then he renewed his attack on Theo, more earnest and less playful now, as if Wren and her boyfriend were a distraction he wanted to be rid of before the serious business began.
Theo did his best, grunting and shouting out with effort as he swung the rusty pipe to and fro, trying to parry Wolf’s blows, but he was no swordsman, and he found it harder than Wolf to keep his footing on the lurching, lumbering armor. After little more than a minute, during which Theo was driven steadily back toward the housing of the swivel gun, Wolf made a sudden feint, and Theo, lurching sideways to avoid his blade, lost his footing. He fell awkwardly, his head cracking against the armor underfoot. The pipe flew out of his sweaty hands. Wren caught it as it clattered past her. Wolf was already standing over Theo, sword raised to finish him.
She threw herself forward, not knowing what she meant to do, just determined that Wolf should not have it all his own way. She heard somebody scream, and it was her; a hard, ragged scream of terror and rage and panic that seemed to give her the strength she needed as she swung the pipe to fend off Wolf’s descending sword.
More sparks; a shock that jarred her arms in their sockets. For a comical moment Wolf stood amazed, staring at the sword hilt in his hand, the blade broken off halfway along its length. He looked at Wren. He shrugged and threw the broken sword away. He flipped his coat open and pulled a shiny new revolver from its holster.
Despite all the noise, the relentless speed, it seemed to grow very quiet and still on the back of Harrowbarrow in those last moments. Even the swivel gun had stopped firing. When Wren glanced around in the hope of spotting some miraculous escape, she saw the gunners gawping at her out of their little window.
“Good-bye, Wren,” said Wolf.
He hadn’t noticed that persistent white airship swinging into range again above his suburb’s stern. The rockets tore past him as he pulled the trigger, and the shot he fired went wide, flicking through Wren’s hair without touching her. The shock wave from the exploding swivel gun kicked him backward; he struggled to save himself, slipped, fell forward, and the sharp end of the pipe that Wren was still clutching went through him just beneath his breastbone. The impact knocked her down, and the other end of the pipe wedged against a seam in the armor, driving it clean through Wolf’s body.
“Oh!” he shouted, looking down at it.
“I’m sorry,” said Wren.
Wolf raised his head and stared at her. His eyes were very blue and wide, and oddly innocent. He looked as if he were about to cry. When Wren pulled at the pipe, with some idea of tugging it out of him, he lurched sideways, pipe and all, and went tumbling away from her like a broken doll down the long slope of the suburb’s flank until he hit the tracks.
Later she would pray that he had been dead by the time those sliding slabs of machinery caught him. She would tell herself that it had not been his screams she heard as he was snatched and mangled and plowed down into the earth, only the shrieking of stressed metal somewhere, some shard of long-dead London crying out as Harrowbarrow ground over it.
But by then they were on the outer edge of the debris field. A wide plain stretched ahead of them, empty as an ocean—except for the lights of New London, which was a quarter mile ahead and racing northward, crossing open country now, the wreck of its mother city left behind it like a sloughed-off skin.
“Girl!” someone was shouting, and in her shocked state Wren could not work out who it was; not Wolf, for sure; not his gunners, who had vanished with their swiveling turret; not Theo, who was struggling to his feet, his face streaked with blood from where he’d struck his head. She looked up. The Storm’s white ship hung low above her, keeping pace with her by some miracle of stunt flying that only an aviator could properly appreciate. Reaching down to her from a hatch in the gondola was something that she took at first to be a Stalker, until he shouted again, “Girl!” and beckoned irritably for her to take his hand, and she recognized General Naga.
The Fury’s gondola smelled of gun smoke and air fuel. Naga strode around issuing orders to his aviators, glancing at Wren just long enough to say, “You are Londoners? Captured by the harvester?”
Wren just nodded, clinging tight to Theo and finding it hard to believe that they were both still alive. It did not seem like the moment to try and explain that she and General Naga had met before. She could not stop shaking, or thinking about Wolf Kobold. As the Fury veered away from Harrowbarrow and flew toward New London, she let Theo go and went to crouch in a corner, where she was sick till her stomach was empty.
They touched down on New London’s stern, where a crowd of Londoners and Green Storm soldiers were waiting. “Wren!” cried Angie happily, waving, forgetting that Wren had ever been a suspected spy.