Nabisco Shkin was not usually a man who let his emotions show, but there were a great many birds, and it seemed a terribly long way to the ground. He screamed all the way down.
Chapter 30
Captives of the Storm
The man in the mechanical armor was called Naga. Wren heard his men call him that as they took the Tin Book from her and started marching her back toward the Pavilion. It was a scary sort of name, and he looked pretty scary too, stomping along inside that hissing, grating exoskeleton, but he seemed civilized enough, and told his men off when they prodded Wren with their guns to make her walk faster. She was surprised, and relieved; she’d heard stories about the Storm shooting prisoners on sight. She thought about asking Naga what he meant to do with her, but she wasn’t quite brave enough. She glanced at Theo, hoping he’d explain what the Green Storm soldiers were saying to each other in their strange language, but Theo was walking with his head down and would not look at her.
They climbed one of the Pavilion’s outside stairways, past a walled garden where a crowd of captured slaves and party guests had been penned by a company of Stalkers. Boo-Boo Pennyroyal was there, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up with a rousing song, but it didn’t look to Wren as though it was working.
She assumed at first that she and Theo were being taken to join those other captives, but the soldiers kept them moving, past Pennyroyal’s swimming pool, which had emptied itself across the tilting deck in a broad wet stain. Outside the ballroom windows stood a Stalker far more frightening than the mindless, faceless brutes Wren had seen so far. He was big and gleaming, and his armored skull piece did not extend down to hide his face the way those of the others did, but left it partly bare; a dead white face, with a long gash of a mouth that twitched slightly as his green eyes lighted on Wren. She looked away quickly, horrified at catching the thing’s attention. Was he going to speak to her? Attack her? But he just returned Naga’s salute and stepped aside, letting the Stalkers and their captives past him into the ballroom.
Someone had got the lights working again. Medical orderlies were taking Cynthia out on a stretcher. Wren heard her groan as they carried her past and felt glad that her friend was still alive, then remembered that she had only been a fake friend, and wasn’t sure if she should be glad or not.
Up on the podium where the musicians should have been playing, a group of officers had gathered. Naga marched over to them and saluted smartly, making his report. The tallest of them turned to stare at the captives. Her face was a bronze death mask pierced by two glowing emerald eyes.
“Oh!” cried Theo.
Wren knew at once that this was the Stalker Fang. Who else could it be? She seemed to exude power; it crackled in the air about her like static electricity, making the small hairs on the back of Wren’s neck stand up on end. At her side she could feel Theo shaking as if he were in the presence of a goddess.
Naga said something else, and the Stalker stepped gracefully down from the podium, her eyes glowing more brightly as he drew the Tin Book from a hatch in his armor. Snatching it, she studied the symbols scratched into its cover and gave a long, shivery sigh of satisfaction. Naga pointed at Wren and Theo and asked something, but the Stalker waved his question away. Settling herself cross-legged in the rubble, she opened the Tin Book and began to read.
“What now?” muttered Theo. “I thought she’d want to question us…”
“I think Naga thought so too,” said Wren. But it seemed they had been forgotten by the Stalker Fang. The Green Storm troops were watching her as if waiting for more orders, but she was engrossed in the Tin Book. Naga muttered something to one of his companions. Then a woman—young and pretty, in a black version of the white uniforms the others wore—spoke to him, bowed, and jumped down from the podium, making her way to where the two prisoners waited. “You will please come with me,” she said in Anglish.
Wren felt relieved. This person looked less stern than the rest of the Green Storm landing party. DR. ZERO said the printed name tag on her uniform, under a pair of squiggly characters that Wren guessed would say the same in Shan Guonese. She looked far too young to be a doctor. Her tilted eyes and broad cheekbones reminded Wren of Inuit friends at home in Anchorage, and that cropped green hair suited her elfin face surprisingly. But there was no kindness in her voice. She took a gun from one of the troopers and leveled it at the two captives. “Outside, please. Now!”
They did as she said. As she herded them out onto the sundeck, Wren glanced up and saw the big Stalker watching her again. What had she done to interest him so? She looked away quickly, but she could still feel that green gaze following her.
Dr. Zero motioned with her gun for the prisoners to cross the sundeck and go down the stairs, as if she were taking them to join the others in the walled garden. But at the stairs’ foot, on a half-moon-shaped terrace out of sight and earshot of the ballroom, she suddenly stopped them and said in her soft, accented Anglish, “What is that thing the Stalker took from you?”
Wren said, “The Tin Book. The Tin Book of Anchorage…”
Dr. Zero frowned, as if the name were one she had not heard before.
“Isn’t it what you came here for?” asked Theo.
“Apparently. Who knows?” Dr. Zero shrugged and glanced back in the direction of the ballroom, lowering her voice as if she feared that her mistress might overhear her. “Her Excellency did not see fit to share with anyone her reasons for attacking your city. What is this Tin Book? What makes it so important that she had to come here with warships to get it?”
“Cynthia said that whoever had the Tin Book could win the war,” said Wren.
She was trying to be helpful, but Dr. Zero just stared at her. Was it only the moonlight that drained her face of color? Her eyes were wide, looking through Wren toward some terrible vision of things to come. “Ai!” she breathed. “Of course. Of course] The book must be a clue to some kind of Old Tech weapon. Maybe something like MEDUSA, powerful enough to destroy whole cities. And you have given it to the Stalker Fang! You fools!”
“That’s not fair!” protested Wren. “It wasn’t our fault…”
Dr. Zero let out a little laugh, but there was no trace of humor in it, only fear. “It’s up to me now, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s up to me to stop her!”
She turned and started to run back up the stairs toward the ballroom, flinging her gun aside as she went.
Chapter 31
The Moment of the Rose
General naga, still angry at being denied a chance to tackle Benghazi and the rest of the cluster, had led his shock troops off to scour the lower levels of the Pavilion, hoping to find some lurking nest of townie warriors who might put up a decent fight. In the ballroom, a few battle-Stalkers stood guard while the Stalker Fang sat reading. The metal pages of the book glowed softly green in the light from her eyes; her steel fingertips, tracing the ancient scratch marks, made faint clicking sounds.
Grike waited at the window, watching his mistress but not really seeing her. He focused instead on the face in his mind: the face of the young girl prisoner whom Oenone Zero had just led away. He was sure, or almost sure, that he had seen that face before—those sea-gray eyes, that long jaw, that coppery hair, had all sent sparks of recognition darting through his mind. And yet, when he tried to match the girl’s features to the other faces in his memory, he found none that fitted.