Wren imagined her friends piling up driftwood and broken furniture in the meadow behind the city, and maybe wondering where she was and whether she was safe. How she wished she could be there with them! She couldn’t imagine how she had ever thought their lives dull, or why she had argued so with Mummy. Each night, lying in her bed in the slave quarters, she would hug herself and whisper the songs she used to sing when she was little, and pretend that the creaking of the hawsers that attached Cloud 9 to its gasbags was the murmur of waves against the shores of Vineland.
Wren had almost forgotten Nabisco Shkin, and, to be fair, Nabisco Shkin had almost forgotten her. Sometimes, as he went about his busy round of meetings, he glanced up at Cloud 9 and allowed himself to feel a momentary pleasure at the revenge he would take on the girl who had tricked him, but his plans for a slaving expedition to Vineland were at a very early stage, and he had more pressing business to attend to.
Today, for instance, he had received a very interesting note from a man named Plovery.
Descending to the Pepperpot’s midlevel, he exited through a side door and strode quickly into the maze of the Laines. These narrow streets, lit only by sputtering argon globes and by shafts of sunlight that poked down through vents and skylights in the deck plates overhead, were the haunt of beggars, thieves, and ne’er-do-wells, but Shkin was well enough known to walk them without a bodyguard. Even the most witless of Brighton’s lowlifes had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who dared lay a finger on Nabisco Shkin. People stepped out of his way, and turned to watch him when he had gone past. Roistering aviators were tugged out of his path by their friends. Unwary drug touts and gutter girls started back as if his glance had burned them. Only one miserable dreadlocked beggar, leading a dog on a length of string, dared to whine, “A few spare dolphins, sir? Just to buy some food?”
“Eat the dog,” suggested Shkin, and made a mental note to send a snatch squad to this district once Moon Festival was over. He would be doing his city a favor by sweeping these scum off the streets, and they would all fetch a profit at the autumn markets.
He entered a narrow alleyway behind a fried-fish stall, holding a handkerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of pee and batter. In the windows of a scruffy shop at the alley’s end, mounds of junk and Old Tech glimmered. PLOVERY said the faded sign above them, and the jangle of the bell as Shkin opened the door brought the antiques dealer scurrying from a back room.
“You wished to see me?”
“Why, yes, sir, yes…” Plovery bowed and beamed, and twined his thin white fingers into knots. Annoyed at Pennyroyal’s decision to find a buyer for the Tin Book without his help, the antiques dealer had decided to take what he knew about it to another wealthy man. His note had dropped into Shkin’s in-box just an hour ago, and he was impressed and a little startled to find Shkin standing here in person quite so soon. Nervously, he told the slave dealer all that he had learned.
“Military, eh?” said Shkin, just as Pennyroyal had a few hours earlier. “An ancient weapon?”
“Just a code, sir,” Plovery cautioned. “But perhaps a clever man who understood such things might work backward from the code and reconstruct the machine that it was written for. That could be valuable, sir. And as Pennyroyal told me that he had got the book from you—’I tricked that creep Shkin into handing it over for free’ were his exact words, sir, if you’ll forgive me—well, I thought you might be interested, sir.”
“I have already made arrangements that will repay His Worship for that little episode,” said Shkin, annoyed that this wretch knew how Pennyroyal had outwitted him. He was intrigued by Plovery’s story all the same. “You made a copy of the book, of course?”
“No, sir. Pennyroyal will not let it out of his sight. It is in his safe at the Pavilion. But if I had a buyer, sir, I might be able to get my hands on it. I am a frequent visitor to the Pavilion, sir.”
Shkin twitched an eyebrow. He was interested, but not interested enough yet to lay down the sort of money that he knew Plovery would want. “I deal in slaves, not Old Tech,” he said.
“Of course, sir. But what if it does turn out to be some ancient weapon? It might tip the balance. End the war. And the war has been so good for business, sir, has it not?”
Shkin pondered for a moment, then nodded.
“Very well. The thing is mine by rights anyway. ‘Finders keepers,’ you know. I do not like to think of Pennyroyal profiting from it. I take it you know the combination of his safe?”
Plovery said, “Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven. Twenty-second of September, nine hundred and fifty-seven T. E. It’s His Worship’s birthday.”
Shkin smiled. “Very well, Plovery. Fetch me the Tin Book.”
Chapter 21
The Flight of a Seagull
That afternoon, when luncheon was over and the preparations for dinner not yet begun, Wren wandered through the kitchen garden and out into the grounds behind the Pavilion to watch a wing of the Flying Ferrets take off on patrol. The Ferrets had set up a temporary airfield in a little-used part of the gardens behind the Pavilion. Wren knew most of the strange machines by sight now, and recognized them as they taxied out of their hangars: the Visible Parity Line and the Tumbler Pigeon, the Austerity Biscuit and the J. M. W. Turner Overdrive. The ground crews fitted them into spring-loaded canvas catapults and sent them hurtling over the edge of the deck plate while the aviators gunned their engines and prayed that their wings would find a purchase on the air before they plunged into the dirty sea off Brighton’s stern.
Wren watched from the handrail at the gardens’ brink while Ferret after Ferret pulled out of its dive and went zooming off across the rooftops, doing ill-advised aerobatics and letting off canisters of green and purple smoke. It was a spectacle that she had always enjoyed before, but today it only made her feel more homesick than ever. She would have liked to tell Dad about the Ferrets’ machines.
Behind the aerodrome stood a whale-backed hillock of copper, screened by cypress trees. Wren had noticed it from a distance before, but she had never bothered to take a closer look, assuming that it was just another of the abstract sculptures that littered the lawns of Cloud 9, bought by Pennyroyal to keep his supporters in the Artists’ Quarter happy. Today, having nothing better to do, she wandered toward it. As she drew nearer, she started to realize that it was a building, with huge curved doors at one end and a fan-shaped metal pavement outside. The copper curves of its walls and roof were studded with decorative spines, so it looked like a giant puffer fish surfacing through the grass. A spindly exterior staircase led up one side, and Wren climbed up it and peeked in through a high window.
In the shady interior sat a sky yacht so delicate and sleek that even Wren, who knew nothing about airships, could tell that it was ferociously expensive.
“That’s the Peewit,” said a helpful voice behind her. Cynthia was standing at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Wren,” she added. “I’m going to the household shrine; I simply must make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Beauty; I really want to lose weight before Moon Festival. You should come with me. You could ask her to do something about your spots.”