Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines (18 page)

“Feng Hua does not make promises to savages,” snapped the Keralan girl, but Miss Fang hushed her. “We will just hit the Gut and tracks, Tom,” she said. “Then the Top Tier, where MEDUSA is housed. We do not seek to harm the innocent, but what else are we to do, if a barbarian city chooses to threaten us?”

“London’s not a barbarian city!” shouted Tom. “It’s you who are the barbarians! Why shouldn’t London eat Batmunkh Gompa if it needs to? If you don’t like the idea, you should have put your cities on wheels long ago, like civilized people!”

A few of the League officers were shouting angrily at him to be quiet, and the Keralan girl had drawn her sword, but Miss Fang calmed them with a few words and turned her patient smile to Tom. “Perhaps you should leave us, Thomas,” she said firmly. “I will come and find you later.”

Tom’s eyes stung with stupid tears. He was sorry for these people, of course he was. He could see that they weren’t savages, and he didn’t really believe any more that they deserved to be eaten, but he couldn’t just sit by and listen to them planning to attack his home.

He turned to Hester in the hope that she would take his side, but she was lost in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing and re-tracing the scars under her red veil. She felt guilty and stupid. Guilty because she had been happy in the air with Tom, and it was wrong to be happy while Valentine was wandering about unpunished. Stupid because, when he gave her the shawl, she had started to hope that Tom really liked her, and thinking of Valentine made her remember that
nobody
could like her, not in that way, not ever. When she saw him looking at her she just said, “They can kill everybody in London for all I care, so long as they save Valentine for me.”

Tom turned his back on her and stalked out of the high chamber, and as the door rolled shut behind him he heard the Keralan girl hiss, “Barbarian!”

Alone, he mooched down to the terrace where the taxi-balloons waited and sat on a stone bench there, feeling angry and betrayed and thinking of things that he should have said to Miss Fang, if only he had thought of them in time. Below him the rooftops and terraces of Batmunkh Gompa stretched away into the shadows below the white shoulders of the mountains, and he found himself trying to imagine what it must be like to live here and wake up every day of your life to the same view. Didn’t the people of the Shield-Wall long for movement and a change of scene? How did they dream, without the grumbling vibrations of a city’s engines to rock them to sleep? Did they love this place? And suddenly he felt terribly sad that the whole bustling, colourful, ancient city might soon be rubble under London’s tracks.

He wanted to see more. Going over to the nearest balloon-taxi, he made the pilot understand that he was Miss Fang’s guest and wanted to go down into the city. The man grinned and started weighting his gondola with stones from a pile that stood nearby, and soon Tom found himself travelling down past the many levels of the city again until he stepped out on a sort of central square, where dozens of other taxis were coming and going and stairways branched off across the face of the Shield-Wall, going up towards the High Eyries and down to the shops and markets of the lower levels.

News of MEDUSA was spreading fast through Batmunkh Gompa, and already a lot of the houses and shops were shuttered, their owners fled to cities further south. The lower levels were still packed with people, though, and as the sun dipped behind the Wall Tom wandered the crowded bazaars and steep ladderways. There were fortune-tellers’ booths at the street corners, and shrines to the sky-gods, dusty with the crumbly grey ash of incense sticks. Fierce-looking Uighur acrobats were performing in the central square, and everywhere he looked he saw soldiers and airmen of the League: blond giants from Spitzbergen and blue-black warriors from the Mountains of the Moon, the small dark people of the Andean statics and people the colour of firelight from jungle strongholds in Laos and Annam.

He tried to forget that some of these young men and women might soon be dropping rockets on London, and started to enjoy the flow of faces and the incomprehensible mish-mash of languages—and sometimes he heard someone say “Tom!” or “Thomasz!” or “Tao-mah!” as they pointed him out to their friends. The story of his battle with Shrike had spread through the mountains from trading-post to trading-post and had been waiting for him here in Batmunkh Gompa. He didn’t mind. It felt like a different Thomas that they were talking about, someone brave and strong who understood what had to be done, and felt no doubts.

He was just wondering if he should go back to the Governor’s palace and find Hester, when he noticed a tall figure climbing a nearby stairway. The man wore a ragged red robe with the hood pulled down over his face, and carried a staff in one hand and a pack slung over his shoulder. Tom had already seen dozens of these wandering holy men in Batmunkh Gompa; monks in the service of the mountain gods who travelled from city to city through the high passes. (Up at the mooring platform Anna Fang had stooped to kiss the feet of one, and given six bronze coins for him to bless the
Jenny Haniver.)
But this man was different; something about him snagged Tom’s gaze and would not let it go.

He started following the red robe. He followed it through the spice market with its thousand astonishing scents, and down the narrow Street of Weavers where hundreds of baskets swung from low poles outside the shops like hanging nests, brushing against the top of his head as he passed underneath. What was it about the way the man moved, and that long brown hand clutching the staff?

And then, under a lantern in the central square, the monk was stopped by a street-girl asking for a blessing and Tom caught a glimpse of the bearded face inside the hood. He knew that hawk-like nose and those mariner’s eyes; he knew that the amulet hanging between the black brows hid the familiar Guild-mark of a London Historian.

It was Valentine!

Katherine spent a lot of time in the Museum in those final days, as London went roaring towards the mountains. Safe in its dingy maze she could not hear the burr of the saws as they felled the last few trees in Circle Park to feed the engines, or the cheers of the noisy crowds who gathered each day in front of the public Goggle-screens where the details of Crome’s great plan were being gradually revealed. She could even forget the Guild of Engineers’ security people, who were everywhere now, not just the usual white-coated thugs, but a strange new breed in black coats and hoods, silent, stiff in their movements, with a faint greenish glow behind their tinted visors: Dr Twix’s Resurrected Men.

But if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t only the peace and quiet that kept calling her down to the Museum. Bevis was there, his borrowed bedding spread out on the floor of the old Transport gallery, under the dusty hanging shapes of model gliders and flying machines. She needed his company more and more as the city hauled itself eastward. She liked the fact that he was her secret. She liked his soft voice, and the strange laugh that always sounded as if he were trying it on for size, as if he had never had much call for laughter down in the Deep Gut. She liked the way he looked at her, his dark eyes always lingering on her face and especially her hair. “I’ve never really known anybody with hair before,” he told her one day. “In the Guild they use chemicals on us when we’re first apprenticed, so it never grows back.” Katherine thought about his pale, smooth scalp. She liked that too. It sort of suited him. Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected, like an Apprentice Engineer?

She wished that Father was here, so she could ask him.

In the afternoons Bevis would pull on a Historian’s robe and hide his bald head under a cap and go down to help Dr Nancarrow, who was busy re-cataloguing the Museum’s huge store of paintings and drawings and taking photographs in case the Lord Mayor decided to feed those to the furnaces as well. Then Katherine would wander the Museum with Dog at her heels, hunting for the things that her father had dug up. Washing machines, pieces of computer, the rusty ribcage of a Stalker, all had labels which read, “Discovered by Mr T. Valentine, Archaeologist”. She could imagine him lifting them gently out of the soil that had guarded them, cleaning them, wrapping them in scrim for transport back to London. He must have done the same thing with the MEDUSA fragment when he discovered it, she thought. She whispered prayers to Clio, sure that the goddess must be present in these time-soaked halls. “London needs him! I need him! Please send him safely home, and soon…”

But it was Dog, not Clio, who led her into the Natural History section that evening. He had glimpsed a display of stuffed animals from the far end of the corridor and gone prowling down to stare at them, a growl bubbling in the back of his throat. Old Dr Arkengarth, who was passing through the gallery on his way home, backed away nervously, but Kate said, “It’s all right, Doctor! He’s quite safe!” and knelt down at Dog’s side, looking up at the sharks and dolphins that swung above her and the great looming shape of the whale, which had been taken off its hawsers and propped against the far wall before the vibrations could bring it crashing down.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Arkengarth, who was always ready to begin a lecture. “A Blue Whale. Hunted to extinction in the first half of the 21 st century. Or possibly the 20th: the records are unclear. We wouldn’t even know what it looked like if Mrs Shaw hadn’t discovered those fossilized bones…”

Katherine had been thinking about something else, but the name “Shaw” made her look round. The display case Arkengarth was pointing at housed a rack of brownish bones, and propped against a vertebra was a label that said, “
Bones of a Blue Whale, Discovered by Mrs P. Shaw, Freelance Archaeologist”.

Pandora Shaw,
thought Katherine, recalling the name she had seen in the Museum catalogue.
Not Hester. Of course not.
But just to get Dr Arkengarth out of lecture-mode she said, “Did you know her? Pandora Shaw?”

“Mrs Shaw, yes, yes,” the old man nodded. “A lovely lady. She was an Out-Country archaeologist, a friend of your father’s. Of course, her name was Rae in those days…”

“Pandora Rae?” Katherine knew that name. “Then she was Father’s assistant on the trip to America! I’ve seen her picture in his book!”

“That’s right,” said Arkengarth, frowning slightly at the interruption. “An archaeologist, as I said. She specialized in Old Tech, of course, but she brought us other things when she found them—like these whale-bones.

Later she married this Shaw chappie and went to live on some grotty little island in the western ocean. Poor girl. A tragedy. Terrible. Terrible.”

“She died, didn’t she?” said Katherine.

“She was murdered!” Arkengarth waggled his eyebrows dramatically. “Six or seven years ago. We heard it from another archaeologist. Murdered in her own home, and her husband with her. Dreadful business. I say, my dear, are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

But Katherine was not all right. In her mind, all the pieces of the puzzle were flying together. Pandora Shaw was murdered, seven years ago, the same time that Father found the machine… Pandora the aviatrix, the archaeologist, the woman who had been with him in America when he found the plans of MEDUSA. And now a girl called Shaw who wants to kill Father…

She could hardly manage to force the words out, but at last she asked, “Did she have a child?”

“I think she did, I think she did,” the old man mused. “Yes, I remember Mrs Shaw showing me a picture once when she turned up with some ceramics for my department. Lovely pieces. A decorated vase from the Electric Empire Era, best of its kind in the collection…”

“Do you remember its name?”

“Ah, yes, let me see … EE27190, I believe.”

“Not the vase! The baby!”

Katherine’s impatient shout echoed through the gallery and out into the halls beyond, and Dr Arkengarth looked first startled, then offended. “Well, really, Miss Valentine, there’s no need to snap! How should I remember the child’s name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics. But I believe this particular one was called Hattie or Holly or…”

“Hester!” sobbed Katherine, and turned and ran, ran with Dog at her heels, ran and ran without knowing where or why, since there was no way that she could outrun the dreadful truth. She knew how Father had come by the key to MEDUSA, and why he had never spoken of it. At last she knew why poor Hester Shaw had wanted to kill him.

Valentine’s hand drew subtle, complicated shapes in the air above the girl’s bowed head, and her face was calm and smiling, little suspecting that she was being blessed by the League’s worst enemy.

Tom watched from behind a shrine to the sky goddess. His eyes had known who the red-robed monk was all along, and now his brain caught up with them in a flurry of understandings. Captain Khora had said that the
13th Floor Elevator
had been haunting the mountains. It must have dropped Valentine off in the crags near Batmunkh Gompa, and he had come the rest of the way on foot, creeping into the city like a thief. But why? What secret mission could have brought him here?

Tom didn’t know what to feel. He was frightened, of course, to be so close to the man who had tried to murder him, but at the same time he was thrilled by Valentine’s daring. What courage it must have taken, to sneak into the great stronghold of the League, under the very noses of London’s enemies! It was the sort of adventure that Valentine had written about, in books that Tom had read again and again, huddled under the blankets in the Third-Class Apprentices’ dorm with a torch, long after lights out.

Valentine finished his blessing and moved on. For a few moments Tom lost sight of him among the crowds in the square, but then he spotted the red robe climbing on up the broad central stairway. He followed at a safe distance, past beggars and guards and hot-food vendors, none of whom guessed that the red-robed figure was anything more than one of those crazy holy men. Valentine had his head bowed now and he climbed quickly, so Tom did not feel in any danger as he hurried along, twenty or thirty paces behind. But he still didn’t know what he should do. Hester deserved to know that her parents’ murderer was here. Should he find her? Tell her? But Valentine must be on some important mission for London, maybe gathering information so that the Engineers would know exactly where to aim MEDUSA. If Hester killed him, Tom would have betrayed his whole city. …

He climbed onward, ignoring the pain of his broken ribs. Around him the terraces of Batmunkh Gompa were speckled with lamps and lanterns, and the envelopes of balloon-taxis glowed from within as they rose and fell, like strange sea-creatures swimming around a coral reef. And slowly he realized that he didn’t want Valentine to succeed in whatever he was planning. London was no better than Tunbridge Wheels, and this place was old, and beautiful. He wouldn’t let it be smashed!

“It’s Valentine!” he shouted, charging up the stairs, trying to warn the passers-by of the danger. But they just stared at him without understanding, and when at last he reached the red-robed man and pulled his hood down he found the round, startled face of a pilgrim monk blinking back at him.

He looked around wildly and saw what had happened. Valentine had taken a different stairway out of the central square, leaving Tom following the wrong red robe. He went running down again. Valentine was barely visible, a red speck climbing through lantern-light towards the high places of the city—and the eyrie of the great air-destroyers. “It’s Valentine!” shouted Tom, pointing, but none of the people around him spoke Anglish; some thought he was mad, others thought he meant that MEDUSA was about to strike. A wave of panic spread across the square, and soon he heard warning gongs sounding in the densely-packed terraces of shops and inns below.

His first thought was to find Hester, but he had no idea where to look. Then he ran to a balloon taxi and told the pilot, “Follow that monk!” but the woman smiled and shook her head, not understanding. “Feng Hua!” Tom shouted, remembering Anna Fang’s League name, and the taxi-pilot nodded and smiled, casting off. He tried to calm himself as the balloon rose. He would find Miss Fang. Miss Fang would know what to do. He remembered how she had trusted him with the
Jenny
during the flight across the mountains, and felt ashamed for turning on her in the council meeting.

He was expecting the taxi to take him to the governor’s palace, but instead it landed near the terrace where the
Jenny Haniver
was berthed. The pilot pointed towards an inn which clung to the underside of the terrace above like a house martin’s nest. “Feng Hua!” she said helpfully. “Feng Hua!”

For a panic-stricken moment Tom thought that she had carried him to an inn with the same name as Miss Fang; then, on one of the establishment’s many balconies, he caught sight of the aviatrix’s blood-red coat. He thrust all the money he had at the pilot, shouting, “Keep the change!” and left her staring at the unfamiliar faces of Quirke and Crome as he raced away.

Miss Fang was sitting at a balcony table with Captain Khora and the stern young Keralan flier who had been so angry at Tom’s outburst earlier. They were drinking tea and deep in discussion, but they all leaped up as Tom blundered out on to the balcony. “Where’s Hester?” he demanded.

“Down on the mooring platforms, in one of her moods,” said Miss Fang. “Why?”

“Valentine!” he gasped. “He’s here! Dressed as a monk!”

The inn’s musicians stopped playing, and the sound of the alarm-gongs in the lower city came drifting through the open windows.

“Valentine, here?” sneered the Keralan girl. “It’s a lie! The barbarian thinks he can frighten us!”

“Be quiet, Sathya!” Miss Fang reached across and gripped Tom by the arm. “Is he alone?”

As quickly as he could, Tom told her what he had seen. She made a hissing sound through her clenched teeth. “He has come after our Air-Fleet! He means to cripple us!”

“One man cannot destroy an Air-Fleet!” protested Khora, smiling at the notion.

“You’ve never seen Valentine at work!” said the avia-trix. She was already on her feet, excited at the prospect of crossing swords with London’s greatest agent. “Sathya, go and rouse the guard, tell them the High Eyries are in danger.” She turned to Tom. “Thank you for warning us,” she said gently, as if she understood the agonizing decision he had had to make.

“I’ve got to tell Hester!” he protested.

“Certainly not!” she told him. “She will only get herself killed, or kill Valentine, and I want him kept alive for questioning. Stay here until it is all over.” A last ferocious smile and she was gone, down the steps and out of the panicked inn with Khora at her heels. She looked grim and dangerous and very beautiful, and Tom felt himself brushed by the same fierce love which he knew Khora and the Keralan girl and the rest of the League must feel for her.

But then he thought of Hester, and what she would say when she learned that he had seen Valentine and hadn’t even told her. “Great Quirke!” he shouted suddenly. “I’m going to find her!” Sathya just stared at him, not stern any more, just frightened and very young, and as he ran towards the stairs he shouted back at her, “You heard what Miss Fang said! Raise the alarm!”

Out on to dark ladderways again, down to the mooring platform where the
Jenny Haniver
hung at anchor. “Hester! Hester!” he shouted, and there she was, coming towards him through the glow of the landing-lights, tugging the red shawl up across her face. He told her everything, and she took the news with the cold, silent glare he had expected. Then it was her turn to run, and he was following her up the endless stairs.

The Wall made its own weather. As Tom and Hester neared the top the air grew thin and chill and big fluttering snowflakes brushed their faces like butterfly wings. They could see lantern-light on a broad platform ahead where a gas tanker was lifting away empty from the High Eyries. Then there was an unbelievable gout of flame shooting out of the face of the Wall, and another and another, as if it were dragons, not airships, that were stabled there. Caught in the blast, the tanker’s envelope exploded, white parachutes blossoming around it as it began to fall. Hester stopped for a moment and looked back, flames shining in her eye. “He’s done it! We’re too late! He’s fired their Air-Fleet!”

They ran on. Tom’s ribs hurt him at every breath and the cold air scorched his throat, but he kept as close behind Hester as he could, crunching through snow along a narrow walkway to the platform outside the eyries. The bronze gates stood open and a crowd of men were pouring out, shielding their faces from the heat of the blaze within. Some of them were dragging wounded comrades, and near the main door Tom saw Khora being tended by two of the ground-crew.

The aviator looked up as Tom and Hester ran to him. “Valentine!” he groaned. “He bluffed his way past the sentries, saying he wanted to bless our airships. He was setting his explosives when Anna and I arrived. Oh, Tom, we never imagined that even a barbarian would try something like this! We weren’t prepared! Our whole Air-Fleet… My poor
Mokele Mbembe…
.” He broke off, coughing blood. Valentine’s sword had pierced his lung.

“What about Miss Fang?” asked Tom.

Khora shook his head. He did not know. Hester was already stalking away into the searing heat of the hangars, ignoring the men who tried to call her back. Tom ran after her.

It was like running into an oven. He had an impression of a huge cavern, with smaller caverns opening off it, the hangars where the League’s warships were housed. Valentine must have gone quickly from one ship to the next, placing phosphorus bombs. Now only their buckling ribs were visible in the white-hot heart of the blaze. “Hester!” shouted Tom, his voice lost in the roar of the flames, and saw her a little way ahead of him, hurrying down a narrow tunnel that led deeper into the Wall.
I’m not following her in there!
he thought.
If she wants to get herself trapped and roasted, that’s her lookout. …
But as he turned back towards the safety of the platform, the ammunition in the gondolas of the burning airships caught, and suddenly there were rockets and bullets flying everywhere, bursting against the stone walls and howling through the air around him. The tunnel was closer than the main entrance and he scrambled into it, whispering prayers to all the gods he could think of.

Fresh air was coming from somewhere in front of him, and he realized that the passage must lead right through the Wall to one of the gun-emplacements on the western face. “Hester?” he shouted. Only echoes replied, muddled with the echoing roar of the fires in the hangar. He pressed on. At a fork in the tunnel lay a huddled shape; a young airman cut down by Valentine’s sword. Tom breathed a sigh of relief that it was not Hester or Miss Fang, and then felt guilty, because the poor man was dead.

He studied the branching tunnel. Which way should he go? “Hester?” he shouted nervously. Echoes. A stray bullet from the hangar came whining past and struck sparks off the stonework by his head. Choosing quickly, he ducked down the right-hand passage.

There was another sound now, closer and sharper than the dull roar of the fires, a thin, birdlike sound of metal on metal. Tom hurried down a slippery flight of steps, saw light ahead and ran towards it. He emerged into the cold and the fluttering snow on a broad platform where a rocket-battery gazed out towards the west. Flames flapped and tore in an iron brazier, lighting the ancient battlements, the sprawled bodies of the rocket crew and the wild shimmer of swords as Valentine and Miss Fang battled each other back and forth across the scrabbled snow.

Tom crouched in the shadows at the tunnel’s mouth, clutching his aching ribs and staring. Valentine was fighting magnificently. He had torn off his monk’s robes to reveal a white shirt, black breeches, long black boots, and he parried and thrust and ducked gracefully under the aviatrix’s blows—but Tom could see that he had met his match. Holding her long sword two-handed, Miss Fang drove him back towards the rocket battery and the bodies of the men he had killed, anticipating every blow he made, feinting and swinging, jumping into the air to avoid a low back-stroke, until at last she smashed the sword from his hand. He went down on his knees to reach for it, but her blade was already at his throat and Tom saw a dark rill of blood start down to stain the collar of his shirt.

“Well done!” he said, and smiled the smile that Tom remembered from that night in the Gut, a kind, amused, utterly sincere smile. “Well done, Feng Hua!”

“Quiet!” she snapped. “This isn’t a game…”

Valentine laughed. “On the contrary, my dear Wind-Flower, it’s the greatest game of all, and my team appears to be winning. Haven’t you noticed that your Air-Fleet is on fire? You really should have tightened up your security arrangements. I suppose because the League has had things its own way for a thousand years, you think you can rest on your laurels. But the world is changing…”

He’s playing for time,
thought Tom. But he could not see why. Cornered on this high platform, unarmed, with no chance of escape, what did Valentine hope to gain by taunting the aviatrix? He wondered if he should go forward and pick up the fallen sword and stand by Miss Fang until help arrived, but there was something so powerful and dangerous about Valentine, even in defeat, that he dared not show himself. He listened, hoping to catch the sounds of soldiers coming down the tunnel, and wondering what had become of Hester. All he could hear was the distant clamour of gongs and fire-bells from the far side of the Wall, and Valentine’s flirtatious, half-mocking voice.

“You should come and work for London, my dear. After all, this time tomorrow the Shield-Wall will be rubble. You will need a new employer. Your League is finished…”

And light burst down from above; the harsh beam of an airship’s searchlight raking across the snow. The aviatrix reeled blindly backwards, and Valentine leaped up, snatching his sword, pulling her hard against him as he drove it home. For a moment the two of them stumbled together like drunken dancers at the end of a party, close enough to Tom’s hiding place for him to see the bright blade push out through the back of Miss Fang’s neck and hear her desperate, choking whisper: “Hester Shaw will find you. She will find you and—” Then Valentine wrenched his sword free and let her fall, turning away, leaping up on to the battlements as the 13th Floor Elevator came looming down out of the searchlight’s glare.