She moved behind her pile of machinery, making some adjustment to the cables that trailed up through the ceiling to the antenna on the roof. Tom tugged the knife out of Hester’s belt, and she fumbled it from him and clasped it between her hands, sawing awkwardly at the old ropes the Stalker had used to tie her wrists.
As he crept across the causeway, Pennyroyal tried to keep calm by imagining how he would describe all these adventures to his enthralled readership. Caution urged that I should stay away from that dreadful house, hut the fate of whole cities hung in the balance, and my poor companions were prisoners within. I knew that to run would leave an irredeemable blot on the honor of the Pennyroyals! (And I do need that key, Poskitt-damn-it!) My faithful native companion, Fishcake (can that be his real name?), led me to the end of the fatal causeway and would go no farther. I would not have allowed it anyway, for I could never let one so young risk his life in mortal combat with the Stalker. (Stalkeress? Stalkerine? Gods, I hope it doesn’t come to actual combat! I wish that lad had had the nerve to come instead of me; the beastly little coward…) It was a little unsettling, I confess, but as I went on alone through the gathering darkness, I began to feel curiously nerveless. I have found myself in a lot of dicey situations over the years, and what I’ve learned is that it’s always best to remain cool, collected, and— GREAT POSKITT’S HAIRY ARSE WHAT’S THAT?
Only an owl!
Only an owl…
Shuddering, Pennyroyal took a nip of brandy from his secret hip flask and started hunting along the water’s edge for Tom’s anti-Stalker gun. The boy had said that Hester had dropped it here somewhere. Pennyroyal didn’t mean to go any closer to that damned house without it. Ah! There it was. Still humming. Looked undamaged. A dashed odd-looking weapon, but they don’t call me Dead-eye Pennyroyal for nothing! Setting the stock of the strange gun firmly against my shoulder (is that where it’s supposed to go?), I resumed my catlike progress…
The Stalker Fang was busy with her machinery. From time to time the words and numbers crawling across the Goggle Screen were replaced with a furry, grayish picture. Tom realized that he was seeing what no human being had seen for millennia: the world from space, viewed through the eye of ODIN. Oddly, it was not very impressive.
Could ODIN really destroy humanity? Surely it would break, or run out of power, or something in that crazy stack of old machinery that the Stalker was using to talk to it would go wrong, and that would be the end of her plans. It made him angry that he and Hester had come so far and sacrificed so much to avert such a tatty effort. At least MEDUSA had looked worth dying for; its entrails had filled a cathedral, and its cobra hood had towered over London. This new weapon was just space junk, controlled by a mad old Stalker from a place that looked and smelled like a teenager’s bedroom…
Beside him, Hester gave a little grunt of triumph as the knife severed the rope on her wrists. She stooped to start work on the one that bound her ankles.
The Stalker Fang was talking to ODIN again, tapping at her ivory keys, whispering the codes to herself as she conducted her bargain-basement apocalypse. Sometimes she whispered something to Tom and Hester too: “Just think, my dears—all that pretty lava …” Anna Fang had liked having someone to talk to, and the Stalker she had become had inherited the taste. When Hester whispered, “Now!” and Tom rolled off the bed and stood up, she said, “Where are you going?”
“Come on!” hissed Hester, her arm around him, supporting him, dragging him toward the nearest window. She hadn’t Tom’s education, and she hadn’t really followed the Stalker’s rambling talk. All she cared about was saving Tom. She refused to believe that there was no hope at all.
But Tom knew there was little point in trying to outrun the Stalker Fang, who turned and came toward them as they neared the window. He twisted around to face her. Hester was still trying to drag him to the window, but Tom shook free of her. He had come to Shan Guo to talk, not to fight; if Naga wouldn’t listen to him, perhaps this Stalker might. I am not Anna, she had said, just a bundle of Anna’s memories… But what was anyone but a bundle of memories?
Tom reached out to her. “We can’t stay,” he said. “We have a daughter. She’ll need us.”
The Stalker’s eyes flickered. “A daughter …”
“Her name’s Wren.”
“A daughter …” She clapped her hands together with a clang. “Tom, Hester … How wonderful! When I, when Anna first saw you together, she, I knew you were meant for each other! And now you have a baby girl.”
“She’s not a baby girl anymore,” said Hester. “She’s a great big stroppy young woman.”
“We brought her up,” said Tom, “we kept her safe; we taught her things; she learned to fly the Jenny Haniver… And now you want to kill her along with everybody else.”
The Stalker shrugged—an odd movement for a Stalker; it made her armor grate. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette, Tom. Or is it the other way around? Where is she, this daughter of yours?”
“In London,” said Tom. “In the wreck of London. The people there are building a new city, a floating city…” He wished now that he had paid more attention to Dr. Childermass’s technical explanations. “It doesn’t claw up the ground, it doesn’t eat other cities, it doesn’t even use up much fuel. Why can’t it have a place in your green world? Why can’t Wren?”
The Stalker hissed and turned away, going back to her machines.
Tom stumbled after her, and Hester, who had resigned herself to listening to the two of them chat, went with him.
The Stalker’s fingers were rattling at her keyboards again. The gray image on the central screen changed, from a view of Zhan Shan’s blazing wound to a more distant panorama of the clouded limb of the Earth. Then it began to close in again, the machinery behind the screen wheezing and clicking, the images flicking past like shuffled cards. A charcoal-gray patch expanded to become the wreck of London, then filled the screen. Tom recognized Putney Vale and the Womb as ODIN’s gaze slid eastward, then north.
“Nothing moving …,” whispered the Stalker. “What are those bright patches?” asked Tom. “Those are burning airships.”
“What?” Tom stared as more specks of white fire slid past; then, just off the northern edge of the wreck, a burning sprawl like a hole torn in the screen. What had happened in the debris fields since he’d been gone? What had happened to Wren? His heart clenched into a fist and began to batter at his ribs.
“Ah!” hissed the Stalker. “That must be your floating city…”
She was quicker at reading the grainy pictures than Tom. It took him a moment to understand that he was looking down at New London. It was well outside the debris fields, moving north. And still the machinery whirred and nattered and the image on the screen kept flicking, changing, pulling closer and closer to the new city until he could make out people milling about on its stern. Dozens of people, lining the handrails, staring back toward the debris fields as New London bore them safe away. And he could make out faces now, the faces of his friends: Clytie and her husband, Mr. Garamond laughing for once, looking happy—and there was Wren, disheveled, smeared with what looked like soot, but Wren for sure; he cried out as her face slipped across the screen, and the Stalker swung ODIN’s gaze to focus on her, still zooming in and in.