“Then why?” asked Fishcake’s Stalker.
“I think they were built to remember,” said Popjoy. He rummaged in a drawer for a set of Stalker’s eyes and started wiring them into his patient’s sockets. “I think that when great leaders of that culture died, their scientist-priests would take the body to the pyramid at the top of the world and stick a machine in their head, and there they’d sit, remembering. They’d remember all the things they’d done in life, and pass on those memories to their successors, and tell the stories of the times they lived in so they’d never be forgotten. Except they were forgotten, of course; their culture vanished from the earth, and the Nomad Empires that came after them picked up a crude version of the same technology and used it to build undead warriors like old Mr. Grike.
“That pyramid was the only relic of the first Stalker builders, and I’m afraid my Green Storm minders dynamited it for fear some other scavenger would stumble on the secret. But in one of the smaller buildings, among a lot of religious paraphernalia and irrelevant old texts, I unearthed an almost complete Stalker brain. I took it back to Rogues’ Roost for study and repairs, connected it to a brain of my own design that controls your motor functions and suchlike, and installed the whole caboodle in the carcass of old Anna Fang.”
The Stalker tilted her head on one side. “So am I Anna Fang?” she asked.
“No, Excellency,” said Popjoy. “You are a machine that can access some of the memories of Anna Fang. And they give you strength.” He replaced her mask and skullpiece, fastening them into place with neat new bolts. “You want to make the world green again; you yearn for it. That’s not because you have been set to obey Green Storm instructions, like some brainless battle-Stalker, but because you can subconsciously remember how much Anna Fang wanted it; you can remember what the townies did to her, and to her family, and how it felt when those things happened. Her memories, those feelings, are what drive you.”
“I remember dying,” said the Stalker, not in the hesitant voice of Anna but in her own harsh hiss. “I remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. The sword in my heart, so cold and sudden, and then that sweet boy kneeling over me, saying my name, and I couldn’t answer him… I remember it all.”
She unplugged her cable from the severed Stalker head and slung it aside. When she reinserted the cable into her own skull, her new eyes filled slowly with green light. “Now it is time for us to go.”
She stood and turned, and Popjoy’s smile faded. “Excellency, you can’t leave now! I need to make further tests and observations! With your help I might be able to make more like you! I’ve spent so many years trying to repeat my success with you, and all I’ve been able to turn out are tin soldiers and silly curiosities.”
“You have an airship?”
“Yes. A yacht, in the hangar behind the house. Why?”
“I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker thoughtfully. “But I am here to do what she would have wanted. I shall take your ship and fly to Erdene Tezh. There I shall speak with ODIN.”
“No!” said Popjoy. “No!”
“You have heard of ODIN, I see.”
“My old Guild … But even they … It was impossible, the codes are lost—”
“The codes are found,” the Stalker said. “They were recorded in the Tin Book of Anchorage. I saw them on Cloud 9. I have carried them safe in my head ever since.”
“It’s madness! I mean, ODIN … Don’t you understand the power of it?”
“Of course. It is the power to make the world green again. Where the Storm has failed, ODIN will succeed.”
Popjoy clenched his plump hands into fists, as if he were about to attack her. “But Excellency, what if it goes wrong? We barely understand these Ancient devices. Remember MEDUSA! ODIN would be incomparably more dangerous than MEDUSA…”
The Stalker’s claws slid from her finger ends. “Your opinion is irrelevant, Doctor. You are no longer needed.”
“But—but you do need me! Your memory problems … with the right trigger, they could flare up again… No!”
The Stalker Fang caught him as he tried to dodge past her to the door. “Thank you for your assistance, Doctor,” she whispered.
Fishcake shut his eyes tight and covered his ears, but he could not quite block out the crunch and spatter of Popjoy’s dying. When he looked again, his Stalker was helping herself to things from the shelves: fragments of circuitry, wires and ducts, the brains of lesser Stalkers. The walls of the workshop had been redecorated with eye-catching slashes of red.
“Find food and water for yourself, boy,” she whispered. “I shall need your help when we reach Erdene Tezh.”
Chapter 22
Wren Natsworthy Investigates
London (!!!)
28th May
I’ve always thought that only smug, self-satisfied people keep diaries, but so much has happened in the past few days that I know I’ll forget half of it if I don’t write it down, so I have cadged this notebook off of Clytie Potts and made a promise to myself to write a journal of my time in London. Maybe if we ever get back to the Hunting Ground, I can turn it into a book, like one of Professor Pennyroyal’s. (Only true!)
It seems hard to believe that it is only two days since we arrived in the debris fields. So much has happened, and I have met so many new people, and found out so much, that it feels as if I have been here a year at least.
I’ll try to start at the beginning. After our meeting with the lord mayor, Mr. Garamond and some of his young warriors took Dad back to where we’d left the Jenny Haniver and made him move her round into the same secret hangar where the Archaeopteryx is kept. They say she will be safer there, and won’t be seen by the Green Storm spy birds that cruise over from time to time. But I think it’s also so they can keep an eye on her; they keep saying we’re not prisoners, but they obviously don’t want us sneaking off. They seem terrified that we’ll tell some other city that they’re here, which seems a bit pathetic—I mean, what do they have that another city would want to cross hundreds of miles of Storm Country to eat?
Later, after an evening meal in the communal canteen, we were all three of us brought to this house, which is to be our home while we’re in London. I say house, but it’s really just a sort of hut; a lot of sheets of old metal bolted and welded together at the base of one of the old brake blocks that support Crouch End’s roof. There are wire grilles over the window holes, but I don’t know if they’ve been put there to keep us from escaping or just because there’s no glass in London. Inside there are three rooms, linked by a lot of winding passages, the floors dug down into the ground so that we can stand upright inside. It’s a little damp, but homey enough, and close enough to the edge of Crouch End that the sun shines in for a half hour or so in the evenings, which is nice. Dad has the biggest room, Wolf is next to him, and I have chosen for myself a little semicircular chamber at the back; one wall is made from an old tin advertising sign (stick-phast paste—accept no imitations), and I have a window that lets in a little sunlight, and the light of the moon at night.