Infernal Devices (26 page)

In the belly of the
Requiem Vortex,
Grike checked on Oenone Zero and found her in her cabin, trying on a steel helmet that made her look even younger and less soldierly than before. Her cowardice perplexed him. He had been sure that she would try to attack the Stalker Fang before the fleet reached its target. Had she given up her plan? Perhaps; he had searched her cabin several times and found no sign of any weapon.

Sirens were hooting. The ship's companionways and passages were full of frightened Once-Borns and impassive battle-Stalkers hurrying to their posts. Grike made his way to the forward gondola and found his mistress there, ignoring the crew, staring out instead at the enormous moon.

"why are we here?" Grike asked.

The Stalker Fang's bronze death mask turned to stare at him. She had still told no one the reason for this expedition,

and Grike suspected that if any of the Once-Borns, even Naga, had asked her so bluntly, she would have torn his throat out with her claws for their impertinence. But she only stared at Grike, and then whispered, "Tell me, Mr. Grike, do you ever remember your former life? Your life as a Once-Born?"

"i do not even remember my life as a stalker," said Grike. (Although a memory flared up as he spoke: a young girl with a bloody face lying on a heap of old cork fishing floats. He squashed it quickly, like a man stamping on a flame.) "I remember nothing before dr. zero awakened me on the black island."

Fang turned away, looking out through the glass again, but he could see the reflection of her face, the odd marsh-gas flaring of her green eyes. "I remembered something once," she said. "Or I almost did. There was a young man I encountered at Rogues' Roost.
Tom.
When I saw him, I felt that I knew him. He was very handsome. Very kind. Anna Fang must have been fond of him. I am not Anna Fang, but when I looked at him I sensed ... oh, all sorts of intriguing feelings."

"we are the dead," said Grike, who was starting to grow uncomfortable. "we do not feel. we do not remember. we were built to kill. what use are memories?"

"Who knows what the first of our kind were built for, back in the Black Centuries?" asked the other Stalker. "My memories are what have brought us here, Mr. Grike. I made inquiries about this
Tom.
I wished to learn more about him, and perhaps to recapture those strange sensations. I found out that he and his companions had a connection with an ice city called Anchorage, so I sent to the Great Library of

Tienjing for books on Anchorage. They had only one: Wormwold's
Historia Anchoragia.
It told me nothing about Tom, but it was there that I first learned of the Tin Book and guessed what it contains.

"what IS the tin book?" asked Grike.

"The Tin Book?" The Stalker looked playfully at him, her head on one side, a finger to her lips. "The Tin Book is what we are here for, Mr. Grike."

Hester too had been waiting for the moon. Perched on a seat on the lower-tier promenade, she had whiled away the time by glancing through her copy of
Predator's Gold,
and what she had found there cheered her. It seemed to her that Pennyroyal had buried the truth beneath so many lies that nobody would ever be able to unearth it.

At moonrise, as the rowdy crowds flooded out of Brighton's underdecks to watch the fireworks, she shoved her way past them, pushing against the tide into the district of dank slave barracks and tenements called Mole's Combe. By the time she reached the foot of Shkin's tower, the streets around her were deserted except for the seagulls, which, startled from their roosts by the racket on the promenades, soared like white phantoms beneath the web of peeling girders overhead.

She had studied the Pepperpot earlier, and decided on a way in. Round on the sternward side, surrounded by bins and fat, snaky ducts, was a small back door made of rusty metal and studded with rivets like the hatch of a submarine. Above the door a spiffy brass security camera kept watch on visitors, but there were no other defenses; the Pepperpot had been

designed to keep people in, not out.

Hester approached cautiously, keeping to the shadows. Her heart beat fast. She imagined the blood rushing through her veins and arteries, filling her with her father's cold strength. She felt that both Wren and Tom were very close, and that soon they would all be together again, and happy. Smiling to herself behind her veil, she pulled the Schadenfreude out from inside her coat and waited until the next fusillade of fireworks, then shot the camera off its mountings.

She had just enough time to stuff the gun away before the door opened and a man came out and stood with his hands on his hips, peering up indignantly at the smoldering wreckage of the camera.

"Happy MoonFest!" called Hester.

The man turned. He looked surprised to see the veiled woman walking toward him, and even more surprised when she shoved a knife between his ribs. He died very quickly, and she heaved his body into the shadows behind the bins and went through the door, closing it softly behind her. She found herself in a corridor. Light and voices came from a small guardroom. She peeked in. There were three more men inside. One was stabbing irritably at the buttons beneath a circular screen that fizzed with static; the others were slumped, bored and uncomfortable, on office chairs, drinks in their hands, wishing they could be with their wives and their children at the celebrations.

Hester shot the one at the screen first, and killed the others as they sprang up, groping for their guns. She stood quiet for a time in the shadows, waiting for someone to

come. No one did. There were so many rockets and firecrackers being let off in the streets outside the Pepperpot tonight that a few extra bangs made no difference. She reloaded the Schadenfreude, noticing with pride that her hands hardly shook at all.

The Shkin Corporation was well organized, and she was glad of it. A framed plan on the guardroom wall showed her the layout of the place. She took a moment to memorize it; then, silent and sure of herself, she moved toward the slave pens. Two men stood watch outside a pair of heavy double doors. One lunged at Hester with some sort of electric cattle-prod thing, but she sidestepped him and stuck her knife in his back, then cut the throat of the other as he reached for the alarm bell. There was a ring of keys on the second one's belt, and it did not take her long to find the one she needed.

The slave pens were filled with soft breathing and the faint stirrings of caged things. As she grew used to the dark, she started to make out the cages ranged around the walls, and the faces staring out at her through the bars.

"Tom?" she called.

All around her, people were shifting and whispering. Some of the prisoners in the cages closest to the door could see the dead guards sprawled outside, and were reporting it to their neighbors.

"Who are you?" called a voice from one of the cages.

"Who are
you?"
she asked.

"Name's Krill."

"A Lost Boy?" Hester walked toward the voice. Soon she was close enough to see his eyes shining in the thin spill of light from the door she'd opened. He was watching the keys

she held, like a hungry dog watching a forkful of food. She jangled the keys softly, by way of encouragement, as she asked, "Is Wren here? Wren Natsworthy?"

"That Dry girl who was on the
Autolycus?"
asked Krill. "Who's asking?"

"The lady with the keys," said Hester.

She saw Krill's fair head bob in the darkness, nodding. "She was in a cage near me for a while, but they took her away."

"Why?"

"Don't know. Fishcake went too, soon after." (He paused to spit, as if he wanted to clean Fishcake's name out of his mouth. There were murmurs of anger and disgust from the other cages. Fishcake wasn't popular.) "Shkin's men told us he turned nark; betrayed Grimsby. Walks about in a uniform now like he's playing at soldiers. What happened to the girl I don't know. Sold, I expect."

"What about her father, Tom? He was taken today."

"Never heard of him. There's no Drys in here, lady. Just Lost Boys."

"Could he be in the holding cells on the middle tier?"

"Could be." Krill shifted thoughtfully. Around him, in the other pens, all the other captives were shifting too, listening, wary as animals. The ones who were close enough to see Hester never took their eyes off the keys. "There'll be more guards up there, though. You'll need something to distract them."

"Did you have anything particular in mind?" asked Hester. Krill grinned, and behind her veil Hester grinned too, because this was exactly what she had planned. She dropped

the keys into Krill's cage. "Play nicely" she said. As she ran toward the stairs, she could hear him scrabbling through the bunch of keys, trying each one in the lock on the door of his pen, and the voices of the Lost Boys, like rising surf, urging him on.

***

MAYOR PENNYROYAL HAD HAD the pavilion ballroom specially redecorated for the festival. The front wall had been replaced with a long row of French windows that opened onto the sundeck outside and let in the light of the sacred moon. Around the dance floor, swags and cascades of silvery fabric hung from every pillar and cornice, reflecting the Milky Way of tiny bulbs that swirled across the ink-blue ceiling. Spotlights illuminated a podium, where a small orchestra played. The walls were covered with priceless works of art: antique masterpieces by Strange and Nias hanging next to the latest snot paintings by Hoover Daley, master of the Expressionist Sneeze.

In a hive of hexagonal chambers opening off behind the main room were all manner of amusing diversions for the guests. In one was a replica of a "bouncy castle," a strange

inflatable fortification that Pennyroyal claimed had been a key feature of Ancient warfare, but that could also be used as a trampoline. In another a projector rattled, showing copies of copies of some of the fragments of film that had survived from before the Sixty Minute War. Armored knights rode through a burning wood, their shadows stretching up through the smoke; flying machines lifted into a tropical dawn; a little tramp walked down a dusty road; groundcars chased each other like tiny cities; a man dangled from a broken clock high above some enormous static settlement; and in soft, beautiful close-ups rose the dreaming faces of the screen goddesses.

Wren, running in from the garden on her mission for Shkin, barely noticed any of it. But as she darted past the film room toward the spiral staircase that would take her up to Pennyroyal's office, she almost collided with Theo, who was coming in the other direction, clutching his ostrich-feather fan. He wore baggy silver trousers and a pair of silver angel's wings.

"Hello," said Wren. "What's the wing thing about?"

Theo shrugged, and his wings flapped. "All the boys are dressed like this. Boo-Boo's idea. Horrible, isn't it?"

"Vile," agreed Wren, though secretly she thought he looked rather fetching.

"Look," he said, "this idea that Boo-Boo's got about us--"

"It's all right," said Wren. "I don't fancy you either."

"Good."

"Good." She was glad he was there, though, and she didn't want to part from him. She thought how much easier it would be to burgle Pennyroyal's safe if she had an accomplice.

Especially an accomplice like Theo, who had been in battles and was probably ten times braver than herself.

"Look," she said, "I've got to do something...."

"Another escape attempt?"

"No. I've got to take something from Pennyroyal's safe."

"What? After what happened to that antique dealer?" Theo stared at her, waiting for her to admit that it was all a joke. When she didn't, he said, "It's that book thing, isn't it? That metal book?"

"The Tin Book of Anchorage," Wren said. "Shkin sent Plovery for it, and now that Plovery's dead, he's sending me."

"Why?" asked Theo. "What's so important about it?"

Wren shrugged. "All I know is that everybody seems to want it.... I think it might have something to do with submarines, but ..." She paused uneasily. Maybe she shouldn't be telling Theo this. He was Green Storm, after all, or had been once. But she was glad she had. She touched his arm. "He's got my dad at the Pepperpot, and if I don't do what he asks, he ... I don't know what he'll do. Will you help me?"

She did know, of course; she just didn't want to say it. She felt glad that she had Theo to confide in.

"Your dad?' he asked. "I didn't know Lost Girls had fathers...."

"I'm not really a Lost Girl," said Wren. "Just mislaid. I told Pennyroyal I came from Grimsby because ... Oh, Theo, it's too complicated to explain. I just have to save Dad!"

She could tell that he understood. He looked scared and serious. "But if the safe's booby-trapped ..." he said.

"That's why I want you to keep a lookout. Please, Theo. I don't want to go in there alone."

"I'm supposed to be on duty in the ballroom. Boo-Boo's orders."

"Boo-Boo's having a wonderful time. She won't notice if we sneak off for five minutes."

Theo thought about it, then nodded. "All right. All right."

Gripping his fan like a battle-axe, he followed Wren up some stairs and through a door at the top into an antique-lined corridor. The noise of the party faded as the door swung softly shut behind them, then dipped again as the corridor turned sharply to the left. Creeping past the door to the control-room stairs, they heard the faint voices of the crewmen chatting at their stations down below, but there were no other sounds. Everyone else was busy in the ballroom or the kitchens, and this part of the Pavilion was deserted.

They reached the end of the corridor and stopped, staring at Pennyroyal's office door.

"What if he changed the combination of his safe after last night?" whispered Theo. "What if he's changed the locks on the door?"