“What about your wife? She’s probably a prisoner by now…”
“Yes, poor Boo-Boo…” Pennyroyal pushed open a door and led them out into the gardens at the rear of the Pavilion. “I shall miss her, of course—terrible loss—but time is a great healer. Anyway, I can’t risk my neck trying to rescue her. I owe it to the reading public to save myself, so that the world can hear my account of the Battle of Brighton and my heroic stand against the Storm…”
They hurried through the gardens, Pennyroyal in the lead, Wren and Theo taking turns with the suitcase. The Storm’s troops had not reached this part of Cloud 9 yet; nothing moved among the cypress groves and pergola-covered walks. Smoke drifted from the wreckage of the Flying Ferrets’ aerodrome, but the Green Storm must have thought Pennyroyal’s boathouse an unworthy target, for it still stood unharmed among the trees, bulbous and comical, specks of firelight glinting on its daft copper spines.
“I can hear engines,” said Theo as they made their way through the trees onto the landing apron in front of the boathouse. “Someone’s opened the doors…”
“Great Poskitt Almighty!” shouted Pennyroyal.
The Peewit sat poised in the open doorway, her engines purring as they warmed up for takeoff. The lights were on in her gondola, and Wren could see Nabisco Shkin at the controls. He must have given up waiting for her to bring him the Tin Book and decided to cut his losses and save his own skin. She hung back, scared of him, but Pennyroyal put on a last spurt of speed, charging toward the yacht. “Shkin! It’s me! Your old friend Pennyroyal!”
Shkin swung himself out through the hatch in the side of the Peewit’s sleek gondola and shot Pennyroyal twice with a pistol he pulled from inside his robes. Wren saw an exclamation mark of blood fly upward into the glare of the yacht’s lights. Pennyroyal did an ungainly somersault and crashed against a heap of hawsers and was still.
“Oh, gods,” whispered Wren. Pennyroyal was so much a part of her life from all the stories she had heard in Anchorage that she had imagined he was indestructible.
Shkin stepped down from the gondola and strode toward them with his gun held ready. “Do you have my book?” he asked.
“No,” said Theo before Wren could answer. “The Storm took it.”
“Then what’s in the suitcase?” asked Shkin, and Theo opened it so that he could see. The slaver smiled his cold gray smile. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” he said. “Close the case and hand it to me.”
Theo did as he was told. Shkin’s chilly eyes slid toward Wren again.
“Now what?” she asked. “You’ll shoot us, I suppose?”
“Good gods, no!” Shkin looked genuinely shocked. “I am not a murderer, child. I am a businessman. What profit would I make by killing you? It’s true you managed to annoy me, but it sounds as if our friends from the Green Storm will soon be arriving to teach you some manners.”
Wren listened, and heard harsh foreign voices drifting across the garden. Lights were moving among the trees behind the boathouse. She wanted to ask Shkin about her father, but he had already heaved Pennyroyal’s case aboard the Peewit and was climbing in after it. The engines roared.
“No!” screamed Wren. She couldn’t believe that the gods were really going to let that villain Shkin fly away unscathed. But the Peewit’s docking clamps released, and she rose from the boathouse floor, engine pods swinging neatly into takeoff position. “It’s not fair!” howled Wren, and then, “The book! We’ve got the book! Theo lied! Take us with you and I’ll give you the book!”
Shkin heard her voice, but not her words. He glanced down at her and smiled his faint smile, then turned his attention to the controls again. The yacht sped across its landing apron, passed between two clumps of trees that bowed aside to let it through, and rose gracefully into the sky.
“It’s not fair!” Wren said again. She was sick of Shkin, and sick of being afraid. She understood why Mum and Dad had never wanted to talk about the adventures they had had. If she survived, she would never even want to think about this awful night.
“Why did you lie about the book?” she asked Theo. “He might have taken us with him if we’d given him the book.”
“He wouldn’t,” said Theo. “Anyway, if everybody wants it so badly, it must be something dangerous. We can’t let a man like Shkin get his hands on it.”
Wren sniffed. “Nobody should have it,” she said. She walked to where Pennyroyal lay and gingerly fetched the Tin Book out from inside the mayor’s torn robes. One of Shkin’s bullets had made a deep dent in the cover, but it looked otherwise unharmed. The touch of it disgusted her. All the trouble it had caused! All the deaths! “I’m going to throw it into the sea’ she said, and ran with it across the smoldering, cratered airstrip toward the edge of the gardens.
But it was not the sea that she saw when she looked down over the handrail. Cloud 9 had drifted farther and faster than she had thought. The white wriggle of surf that marked the coast lay several miles away toward the north, with the lights and fires of the other cities strung out along it like pearls on a necklace. Below her, the hills of Africa lay stark beneath the moon.
And as she stood there staring at them, clutching the Tin Book in both hands, she heard running feet behind her, and turned to meet the torches and the upraised guns of a squad of soldiers. There were Stalkers too, one of whom seized hold of Theo, and a man who seemed almost a Stalker himself, a hawk-faced man in mechanized armor with a sword in his iron hand, who stepped in front of the others and said, “Don’t move! You are prisoners of the Green Storm!”
As the Peewit slid out through Cloud 9’s rigging into open sky, Nabisco Shkin permitted himself a thin smile of satisfaction. Most of the Green Storm’s ships were miles away, still engaged above Benghazi and Kom Ombo, and the troops they had landed in Pennyroyal’s garden had better things to worry about than the odd absconding slave trader.
He settled into the yacht’s comfortable seats and patted the case that lay on the deck beside him. Far ahead, the lights of the smaller cities twinkled in the desert night. He would set down on one of those until he was sure the Storm had finished with Brighton; then he would go and see what damage had been done to his business there. The Pepperpot would have been battered, no doubt. Servants and merchandise killed, probably. No matter—they were all insured. He hoped the boy Fishcake was still alive. But even without him, it should be possible to find Anchorage-in-Vineland and fill the holds of a slave ship or two…
He was still dreaming of Vineland when the raptors found him. They were part of a patrol flock set to guard the skies around Cloud 9. Shkin thought they were just a cloud as they came sweeping down on him, dimming the moonlight. Then he saw the flap and flutter of their wings, and an instant later the birds started slamming into the Peewit’s glastic windows, tearing at her pod cowlings, slashing her delicate envelope with talons and beaks. Torn-off steering vanes whirled away on the wind. The propellers sliced dozens of birds to scrap, but dozens more kept taking their places until the Peewit’s engines choked on feathers and slime. Shkin reached for the radio set, opening all channels and shouting, “Call off your attack! I am a legitimate businessman! I am strictly neutral!” But the Green Storm warships that picked up his signal did not know where it was coming from, and the birds themselves did not understand. They tore and rent and clutched and worried, stripping the envelope fabric from its metal skeleton until Nabisco Shkin, looking up through the bare ribs, saw nothing but a kaleidoscope-churning of bird shapes circling black and splay-winged against the sacred moon. And as the wreck began to fall, they ripped the roof off the gondola and got inside with him.