Wren wasn’t sure if she was supposed to raise her hands or not. She flapped her arms uncertainly, wondering if Angie was alive or dead. “You’ll never get away!” she said. “There are guards in the airship hangar, with lightning guns—”
“I don’t need an airship, Wren,” said Wolf, laughing. “I thought once that the Engineers’ secret might be something I could carry away aboard your Jenny Haniver, but now I’ve seen how wrong I was. I shall have to bring Harrowbarrow east…” Keeping the crossbow pointed at her, he started pulling off Angie’s belt, with its quiver of bolts and canteen of water. “Look, I have all I need for a trek across the Out-Country. I’ll ride on one of the Storm’s convenient Stalker trains. Hausdorfer will have Harrowbarrow waiting for me just across the line.” He grinned at Wren and held out one hand. “Why not come with me?”
“What?”
“You’re wasted in the life you lead, Wren. Trailing about after your dad. How long is he going to keep you trapped here, skivvying for these mudlarks? Come home to Harrowbarrow with me.”
“And watch it eat New London?” asked Wren. “I don’t think so.”
“Then think harder. This new technology the lady Engineer has developed is wasted on the Londoners. Well-meaning fools! They haven’t even put jaws on their new city. I’m going to take it for myself, and use it to make Harrowbarrow the most powerful predator on earth. A flying predator, armed with electric weapons! Think of it!”
Wren did. She didn’t like it.
Wolf laughed again, then blew her a kiss as he turned away. “There’ll always be a place for you in my town hall, Wren,” he said.
Wren bent over Angie. The girl groaned as Wren touched her face, which she hoped was a good sign. “Help!” she screamed, as loudly as she could. “Help! Help! He’s here! Over here!”
They came running: Saab, Garamond, Cat Luperini.
Someone with more medical know-how than Wren bent over Angie and said, “She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine.” But of Wolf there was no sign, and although the others kept hunting him until the sky above the wreck turned gray with morning, he was not sighted again; he had faded away, as if he had been just another of London’s ghosts.
PART TWO
Chapter 24
Manchester
The clang and tremor of docking clamps engaging shook Oenone from her dreams. She struggled to stay asleep, but the dull, hungry ache in her belly kept nagging at her, and she came awake groggily. She had been dreaming of home, the islands of Aleutia; gray stone and gray sky and gray winter sea, she and her brother Eno haring downhill in the sharp cold. The images faded quickly in the stuffy heat of the Humbug’s hold.
It was morning. The new-risen sun was poking in through rents in the Humbug’s envelope. Oenone lay curled on the floor of a wire-mesh pen, surrounded by crates and boxes full of dodgy gadgets and unsold trade goods that Napster Varley must once have hoped would make his fortune. There was no mattress in the pen, and Oenone was so stiff from sleeping on the hard deck that she could barely move. She lay there for a while, wondering what it was about her prison that seemed different this morning. Then she realized. The rattling engines that had been drilling their noise into her ears all the way from Cutler’s Gulp had stopped.
She could hear voices down below her in the gondola. Varley was shouting at his wife, as usual. As usual, the baby was crying. Oenone had never known a baby who cried as much as Napster Junior.
She drank water from the tin jug Varley had left her, peed in her cracked enamel chamber pot, and said her morning prayers. By the time she had finished, all was quiet below. She waited fearfully to see what would happen next.
To her relief it was not Varley who came up through the hatch, but Varley’s wife. Mrs. Varley was not exactly friendly toward the prisoner in the hold, but she was friendlier than her husband. She was a freckled, doughy girl with unruly red hair and frightened eyes, one of which was currently swollen shut and surrounded by yellowish bruises. Varley had bought her somewhere, and she had not made as good a wife as he had hoped. He beat her, and Oenone had often heard her screams and sobs echoing through the airship. She had come to feel a sort of comradeship with this exhausted young woman, as if they were both prisoners together.
“Napster says to give you breakfast,” Mrs. Varley said now, in her quivery little voice, and pushed a bowl of bread through the bars, along with half an apple.
Oenone started to shovel the food into her mouth with both hands. She felt ashamed, but she couldn’t help it; a few weeks of captivity had turned her into a savage, an animal. “Where are we?” she managed to ask between mouthfuls.
“Airhaven,” said Mrs. Varley. She looked about fearfully, as if she were afraid her husband might be lurking among the stacks of crates, ready to leap out and black her other eye for talking to the cargo. She leaned close to the mesh of the cage. “It’s a town that flies!”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“And it’s above something called the Murnau cluster,” Mrs. Varley went on, her excitement getting the better of her fear. “There’s more cities down there than I’ve ever seen in my life. A big fighting one, all hidden in armor, and trade towns too, and Manchester! Napster says Manchester’s one of the biggest cities in the world! He read about it in one of his books. He reads a lot of books, does Napster. He’s trying to improve himself. Anyway, it’s lucky we got here today, because there’s a big meeting of mayors and bigwigs there and Napster’s gone down there to … to see if one of them will buy you off him, Miss.”
Oenone thought she was used to being helpless and afraid by now, but when she heard that, she was almost sick with fright. She had spent most of her life hearing about the cruelty of the men who ruled the Traction Cities. She forced her hands out through the mesh and snatched at Mrs. Varley’s skirts as the girl turned away. “Please,” she said desperately. “Please, can’t you let me out of here? Just let me ashore. I don’t want to die on a city…”
“Sorry,” said the girl (and she really was). “I can’t. Napster’d kill me if I let you go. You know the temper he’s got on him. He’d throw my baby overboard. He’s often said he would.”
The baby, as if he had overheard, woke up in his crib down in the gondola and began to bawl. Mrs. Varley tugged her skirts out of Oenone’s grasp and hurried away. “Sorry, Miss,” she said, as she started down the ladder. “I have to go now…”
Manchester, which had been rumbling eastward all spring, detouring now and then to eat some smaller town, had finally reached the Murnau cluster the previous afternoon. Bigger and brasher than the fighting city, it squatted like a smug mountain a few miles behind the front line. Its jaws hung half open—officially so that its maintenance crews could clean its banks of rotating teeth, but it gave the impression that it had half a mind to gobble up a few of the small trading towns that thronged around Murnau’s skirts.
One by one the towns gathered in their citizens and started to crawl away, for they all knew that Manchester’s arrival meant trouble, even if it didn’t eat them. Adlai Browne was a well-known opponent of the truce, and most of the cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft were in debt to him. He had poured a lot of money into their war with the Storm, and now he wanted to see something in return. His couriers, flying ahead of the city, had summoned their leaders to a council of war in Manchester Town Hall.
By nine o’clock that morning airships and cloud yachts were converging on Manchester’s top tier from every city and suburb on the line. Watched from a safe distance by polite crowds of onlookers, the mayors and kriegsmarschalls made their way into the town hall, where they took their places on the padded seats of the council chamber and waited for the lord mayor of Manchester to mount the steps to the speaker’s pulpit. High above them, in the dome of the ceiling, painted clouds parted to let beams of painted sunlight through, and a burly young woman who was supposed to be the Spirit of Municipal Darwinism flourished a sword, putting to flight the dragons of Poverty and Anti-Tractionism. Even her eyes seemed fixed upon the podium beneath her, as if she too were eager to hear what Adlai Browne would say.