The empires were long forgotten, but the terrible Resurrected Men were not. Tom could remember playing at being one when he was a child in the Guild Orphanage, stomping about with his arms held out straight in front of him, shouting, “I-AM-A-STAL-KER! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!” until Miss Plym came and told him to keep the noise down.
But he had never expected to meet one.
As the stolen balloon scudded eastward, on the night-wind he sat shuddering in the swaying basket, twisted sideways so that Hester wouldn’t see the wet stain on his breeches, and said, “I thought they all died hundreds of years ago! I thought they were all destroyed in battles, or went mad and tore themselves apart…”
“Not Shrike,” said Hester.
“And he knew you!”
“Of course he did,” she said. “We’re old friends, Shrike and me.”
She had met him the morning after her parents died, the morning when she woke up on the shores of the Hunting Ground in the whispering rain. She had no idea how she came to be there, and the pain in her head was so bad that she could barely move or think.
Drawn up nearby was the smallest, filthiest town that she had ever seen. People with big wicker baskets on their backs were coming down out of it on ladders and gangplanks and sifting through the flotsam on the tide-line before returning with their baskets full of scrap and driftwood. A few were carrying her father’s rowing boat away, and it wasn’t long before some of them discovered Hester. Two men came and looked down at her. One was a typical scavenger, small and filthy, with bits of an old bug piled in his basket. After he had peered at her for a while he stepped back and said to his companion, “Sorry, Mr Shrike—I thought she might be one for your collection, but she’s flesh and blood all right. …”
He turned and stumped away across the steaming garbage, losing all interest in Hester. He only wanted stuff he could he could sell, and there was no value in a half-dead child. Old bug tyres, now—those were worth something…
The other man stayed where he was, looking down at Hester. It was only when he reached down and touched her face and she felt the cold, hard iron beneath his gloves that she realized he was not really a man at all. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a wire brush being scraped across a blackboard. “YOU CAN’T STAY HERE, CHILD,” he said, and picked her up and slung her over his shoulder and took her aboard the town.
It was called Strole, and it was home to fifty tough, dust-hardened scavengers who robbed Old-Tech sites when they could find them and scrounged salvage from the leavings of larger towns when they could not. Shrike lived with them, but he was no scavenger. When criminals from one of the great Traction Cities escaped into the Out-Country, Shrike would track them and cut off their heads, which he carefully preserved. When he crossed that city’s path again he would take the head to the authorities, and collect his reward.
Why he bothered to rescue her Hester never did discover. It could not have been out of pity, for he had none. The only sign of tenderness she ever saw in him was when he busied himself with his collection. He was fascinated by old automata and mechanical toys, and he would buy any that passing scavengers brought to him. His ramshackle quarters in Strole were full of them: animals, knights in armour, clockwork soldiers with keys in their backs, even a life-size Angel of Death pulled from some elaborate clock. But his favourites were all women or children: beautiful ladies in moth-eaten gowns and pretty girls and boys with porcelain faces. All night long Shrike would patiently dismantle and repair them, exploring the intricate escapements of their hearts as if searching for some clue to the workings of his own.
Sometimes it seemed to Hester that she too was part of his collection. Did she remind him of the wounds that he had suffered on the battlefields of forgotten wars, when he had still been human?
She shared his home for five long years, while her face healed badly into a permanent ruined scowl and her memories came slowly back to her. Some were startl-ingly clear, the waves on the shores of Oak Island, her mum’s voice, the moor-wind with its smells of wet grass and the dung of animals. Others were murky and hard to understand; they flashed into her mind just as she was falling asleep, or caught her unawares while she wandered amongst the silent mechanical figures in Shrike’s house. Blood on the star-charts. A metallic noise. A man’s long, handsome face with sea-grey eyes. They were broken shards of memory, and they had to be carefully collected and pieced together, just like the bits of machinery the scavengers dug up.
It was not until she overheard some men telling stories about the great Thaddeus Valentine that she started to make sense of it all. She found that she recognized that name: it was the name of the man who had killed her mum and dad and turned her into a monster. She knew what she had to do without even having to think about it. She went to Shrike and told him she wanted to go after Valentine.
“YOU MUST NOT,” was all the Stalker said. “YOU’LL BE KILLED.”
“Then come with me!” she had pleaded, but he would not. He had heard about London and about Magnus Crome’s love of technology. He thought that if he went there the Guild of Engineers would overpower him and cut him into pieces to study in their secret laboratories. “YOU MUST NOT GO,” was all that he would say.
So she went anyway, waiting till he was busy with his automata, then slipping out of a window and out of Strole, and setting off across the wintry Out-Country with a stolen knife in her belt, in search of London and revenge.
“I’ve never seen him since that,” she told Tom, shivering in the basket of the stolen balloon. “Strole was down on the shores of the Anglish Sea when I left, but here Shrike is, working for Magnus Crome, and wanting to kill me. It doesn’t make sense!”
“Maybe you hurt his feelings when you ran away?” suggested Tom.
“Shrike doesn’t have feelings,” said Hester. “They cleaned all his memories and feelings away when they made a Stalker of him.”
She sounds as if she envies him, thought Tom. But at least the sound of her voice had helped to calm him, and he had stopped shaking. He sat and listened to the wind sigh through the balloon’s rigging. There was a black stain on the western clouds which he thought must be the smoke from Airhaven. Had the aviators managed to get the fires under control, or had their town been destroyed? And what about Anna Fang? He realized that Shrike had probably murdered her, along with all her friends. That kind, laughing aviatrix was dead, as dead as his own parents. It was as if there was a curse on him that destroyed everybody who was kind to him. If only he had never met Valentine! If only he had stayed safely in the Museum where he belonged!
“She might be all right,” said Hester suddenly, as if she had guessed what he was thinking about. “I think Shrike was just playing with her; he didn’t have his claws out or anything.”
“He’s got claws? ”
“As long as she didn’t annoy him too much he probably wouldn’t waste time killing her.”
“What about Airhaven?”
“I suppose if it’s really badly damaged it’ll put down somewhere for repairs.”
Tom nodded. Then a happy thought occurred to him. “Do you think Miss Fang’11 come after us?”
“I don’t know,” said Hester. “But Shrike will.”
Tom looked over his shoulder again, horrified.
“Still,” she said, “at least we’re heading in the right direction for London.”
He peered gingerly over the edge of the basket. The clouds lay below them like a white eiderdown drawn across the land, hiding anything that might give a clue as to where they were, or where they were going. “How can you tell?” he asked.