“Your birds are under my control now, Dr. Popjoy,” whispered the Stalker. “Stupid creatures, but they have their uses.” She moved toward him, swinging the head in her outstretched hand so that the light from its eyes swept the room. Fishcake glimpsed things running away—Stalkerized insects and animals, a dog with the head of a dead girl. On a plate balanced on the arm of Popjoy’s couch sat a neat wedge of fruitcake, which Fishcake snatched and crammed into his mouth. Eating messily, he pushed open a door in the far wall and looked through into some sort of workshop: cadavers on slabs and shelves heaped high with curious machinery.
“It wasn’t me!” Popjoy was whimpering, assuming that the Stalker Fang had come for revenge. “I didn’t know Grike would attack you! It was all that girl’s doing; that Zero girl! She’s dead now; did you hear? The townies got her, down in Africa. Naga’s quite cut up about it, they say; sticks to his quarters and won’t issue orders. Everyone will be relieved to hear that you’re back! You’ll be on your way to Tienjing, I suppose? To reclaim power? I can help you…”
“Tienjing no longer matters,” whispered the Stalker, holding the head out to stare at him. “The Green Storm no longer matters. The world will not be made green again by air fleets and guns and the squabbling of the Once-Born.”
“Of course not, of course not.” Popjoy edged away until he was pressed against a wall and could edge no farther. His face shone sweatily in the green light. “So what can I do for you, Excellency? What small service can this feeble Once-Born offer … ?”
The Stalker did not answer at once. She moved the severed head, following the flight of a Resurrected bee around a lamp on a side table. Then, in a voice softer even than her usual graveyard whisper, she said, “I remember things.”
“Ah…”
“I remember being Anna Fang.”
“Oh? Interesting.” Fishcake, who was watching from behind the couch, could see that Popjoy really was interested, despite his fear.
“The memories overwhelm me sometimes,” the Stalker confessed. “It has been worse since I reached Shan Guo. Sometimes it is as if I become her.”
“Then the stuff I installed has started to work at last!” cried Popjoy triumphantly. “The damage you suffered must have dislodged something, or perhaps in repairing itself your brain has made some connection that I could not achieve with my crude instruments.”
“How is it possible?” demanded the Stalker. “Are they real memories?”
“Hard to say,” mused Popjoy. “How do you define a real memory? But it’s nothing to be frightened of. I think I can correct it… May I take a look? Inside?” He tapped his own bald head, and grinned, his fear replaced by a nervous excitement. “If you could wait till morning, when my laboratory assistants arrive to help me with my little retirement projects…”
“No.” The Stalker Fang was already moving toward Popjoy’s workshop. “No one must know that I am here. You will do it now. The boy can help you.”
The workshop stank of death and chemicals. Racks on the walls held shiny displays of scalpels and bone saws. Fishcake, who still didn’t trust the old Engineer, helped himself to a long, thin-bladed knife and hid it inside his coat.
The Stalker Fang shoved a cluttered bench aside and knelt down on the floor, in the spill of light from a hanging argon globe. Kneeling, she was still so tall that her bowed head reached halfway up Popjoy’s chest. The Engineer circled her, licking his lips and fidgeting. “You, boy,” he snapped, holding out his hand to Fishcake without ever looking at him. “Pass me that tray…”
The tray was metal, covered with delicate, finely made instruments. It rattled and clattered in Fishcake’s shaking hands as he passed it over. The instruments made a mockery of the crude tools he had used to repair his Stalker. He saw the Engineer wince at the sight of the cheap iron bolts with which he had fixed her death mask in place.
“Who made these repairs? A real botch job…”
“The child has done well,” said the Stalker, and Fishcake felt proud.
Popjoy had surgeon’s fingers, slender and clever. Within half a minute he had the mask off, baring the dead woman’s face beneath. Another half minute and the top of her skullpiece came free and was laid on a table. “Lamp, boy,” he said, and strapped the small flashlight that Fishcake passed him around his head. He peered down into the tangle of machinery and preserved brain tissue inside the Stalker’s skull.
“Sometimes she is just Anna, for days and days,” said Fishcake, hoping that Popjoy would take the hint, destroy the Stalker part of her, and save his Anna. “It was the Anna bit that wanted to come here, so you could help her. I think Anna Fang is trapped inside her somewhere, and sometimes when she remembers who she is, the Stalkerish side shuts down…”
“The ghost in the machine…” Popjoy looked at him and winked. “I’m afraid not, lad. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, you know.” He selected a long, thin probe from the tray and inserted it into a crevice of the Stalker’s brain. The Stalker’s head lifted with a jerk; her dry lips moved; she whispered, “Stilton … I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, but it was the only way—”
“Anna?” said Fishcake eagerly.
Her eyeless, desiccated face turned toward him. “Fishcake?”
“It’s her!” Fishcake told Popjoy, “Keep her! Hold on to her! Don’t let the other one come back!”
Popjoy was busy with his probes and instruments. He didn’t even bother to look at Fishcake. “You have it all wrong, boy,” he said. “These memories aren’t a person. They’re just residue that the Stalker brain has scoured out of the dead brain cells of the host. Eighteen years too late, mind, but better than never…”
Something sparked, down inside the Stalker’s head; the flash lit up the inside of her mouth, which had fallen open.
She jerked again and said, “No tricks, Popjoy.”
“What, you think I’d sabotage my finest work?” cried Popjoy hurt. “I am just making a few minor adjustments.”
“You have found the Error? The memories? Remove them!”
“Great Quirke, certainly not!”
“Remove them!”
“But Excellency, they are what distinguish you from the mindless Stalkers, the battle models… They are what make you the finest Stalker of the age; the pinnacle of Resurrection technology…”
Either Popjoy’s words or the pleading tone that had crept into his voice caught the Stalker’s attention. She nodded cautiously, prepared at least to hear him out.
“Those memories have always been there, submerged beneath the surface,” the Engineer explained. “They give you levels of experience and emotion that no other Stalker of mine can draw on. Recently, thanks to the damage Mr. Grike inflicted, they have become intense, overwhelming your conscious mind. But we should soon be able to strike a healthy balance.”
“What are they?” insisted the Stalker. “Where have they come from? Why do I remember being Anna?”
“I’m really not sure,” admitted Popjoy, groping for a tiny pair of pliers and setting to work. “The fact is, the brain I fitted you with isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. Certainly not one of those clunky modern models we London Engineers built, and not like old Mr. Grike’s, either. It’s much older, and much stranger.
“You see, when your friend Sathya first took me to Rogue’s Roost all those years ago and ordered me to bring Anna Fang back to life, I panicked a bit. I knew it was impossible. So to buy myself some time, I set up an expedition and took a Green Storm airship out into the Ice Wastes, hunting for an Old Tech site that I’d heard rumors of ever since I was an apprentice in dear old London. The Engineers had looked for it but never found it. I had better luck. Right up to the top of the world we went; so far north we started going south again. And there, half buried in the snows of a tiny, frozen island, we found a complex built by some forgotten culture that must have flourished in the days before the Nomad Empires. Inside the central pyramid sat a dozen dead men and women on stone thrones. Some had been crushed by roof falls or encased in ice, but there were a few who, when we entered their chamber, began to whisper to us in languages we couldn’t identify. They were Stalkers, of a sort, although they had no armor or weapons, and they’d clearly not been built to fight.”