Mortal Engines (11 page)

“No, Shrike!” whispered Hester, and Miss Fang seized her chance. She drew a little fan-shaped sliver of metal from a pocket in the sleeve of her coat and sent it whirling towards the Stalker’s throat. It made an eerie moaning sound as it flew, unfolding into a shimmering, razor-edged disc. “A Nuevo-Mayan Battle Frisbee!” gasped Tom, who had seen such weapons safe in glass cases in the Weapons & Warfare section at the Museum. He knew that they could sever a man’s neck at sixty paces, and he tensed, waiting for the Stalker’s skull to drop from its shoulders – but the frisbee just hit Shrike’s armoured throat with a clang and lodged there, quivering.

The slit of a mouth lengthened into a long smile and the Stalker darted forward, quick as a lizard. Miss Fang sidestepped, jumped past it and swung a high kick, but it
was far too fast for her. “Run!” she shouted at Hester and Tom. “Get back to the
Jenny!
I’ll follow!”

What else could they do? They ran. The thing snatched at them as they ducked past, but Khora was there to grab its arm and Nils Lindstrom swung his sword at its face. The Stalker flung Khora off and raised its hand; there were sparks and a shriek of metal on metal, and Lindstrom dropped the broken sword and howled and clutched his arm. It threw him aside and lifted Anna off her feet as she came at it again, swinging her hard against Khora and Yasmina when they rushed to her aid.

“Miss Fang!” shouted Tom. For a moment he thought of going back, but he knew enough about Stalkers to know that there was nothing he could do. He ran after Hester, over a heap of bodies in the doorway and out into shadows and twilight and the frightened, milling crowds. A siren was keening mournfully. There was acrid smoke on the breeze and over by the power-plant he thought he saw the flicker of the thing all aviators feared the most: fire!

“I don’t understand,” gasped Hester, talking to herself, not Tom. “He wouldn’t kill
me,
he
wouldn’t
!” But she kept running, and together they dashed out on to Strut Seven where the
Jenny Haniver
was waiting for them.

But Shrike had already made certain that the little airship would not be going anywhere that night. The envelope had been slashed, the cowling of the starboard engine pod had been wrenched open like an old tin can and a spaghetti of torn wiring spilled out on to the quay. Among it lay the broken body of the boy Miss Fang had paid to guard her ship.

Tom stood staring at the wreckage. Behind him,
faintly, growing closer, footsteps trod the metal deck:
pung, pung, pung, pung.

He looked round for Hester, and found her gone; limping away along the docking ring – running
downhill,
he realized, for the damaged air-town was developing a worrying tilt. He shouted her name and sprinted after her, following her out on to a neighbouring strut. A tatty-looking balloon had just arrived there, spilling out a family of startled sightseers who weren’t sure if the darkness and the shouting meant an emergency or some sort of carnival. Hester shouldered her way through them and grabbed the balloonist by his goggles, heaving him out of his basket. It sagged away from the quay as she leaped in. “Stop! Thieves! Hijackers! Help!” the balloonist was shouting, but all Tom could hear was that faint, appalling
pung-pung-pung
approaching fast along the High Street.

“Tom! Come on!”

He summoned all his courage and leaped after Hester. She was fumbling at the mooring ropes as he landed in the bottom of the basket. “Throw everything overboard,” she shouted at him.

He did as he was told and the balloon lurched upwards, level with the first-floor windows, with the rooftops, with the spire of St Michael’s. Soon Airhaven was a doughnut of darkness falling away behind them and below, and Shrike was just a speck, his green eyes glowing as he stalked out along the strut to watch them go.

I
n the dark ages before the dawn of the Traction Era, nomad empires had battled each other across the volcano-maze of Europe. It was they who had built the Stalkers, dragging dead warriors off the battlefields and bringing them back to a sort of life by wiring weird Old-Tech machines into their nervous systems.

The empires were long forgotten, but the terrible Resurrected Men were not. Tom could remember playing at being one when he was a child in the Guild Orphanage, stomping about with his arms held out straight in front of him, shouting,
“I-AM-A-STAL-KER! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!”
until Miss Plym came and told him to keep the noise down.

But he had never expected to
meet
one.

As the stolen balloon scudded eastward, on the night-wind he sat shuddering in the swaying basket, twisted sideways so that Hester wouldn’t see the wet stain on his breeches, and said, “I thought they all died hundreds of years ago! I thought they were all destroyed in battles, or went mad and tore themselves apart…”

“Not Shrike,” said Hester.

“And he
knew
you!”

“Of course he did,” she said. “We’re old friends, Shrike and me.”

She had met him the morning after her parents died, the morning when she woke up on the shores of the Hunting Ground in the whispering rain. She had no idea
how she came to be there, and the pain in her head was so bad that she could barely move or think.

Drawn up nearby was the smallest, filthiest town that she had ever seen. People with big wicker baskets on their backs were coming down out of it on ladders and gangplanks and sifting through the flotsam on the tide-line before returning with their baskets full of scrap and driftwood. A few were carrying her father’s rowing boat away, and it wasn’t long before some of them discovered Hester. Two men came and looked down at her. One was a typical scavenger, small and filthy, with bits of an old bug piled in his basket. After he had peered at her for a while he stepped back and said to his companion, “Sorry, Mr Shrike – I thought she might be one for your collection, but she’s flesh and blood all right…”

He turned and stumped away across the steaming garbage, losing all interest in Hester. He only wanted stuff he could he could sell, and there was no value in a half-dead child. Old bug tyres, now –
those
were worth something…

The other man stayed where he was, looking down at Hester. It was only when he reached down and touched her face and she felt the cold, hard iron beneath his gloves that she realized he was not really a man at all. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a wire brush being scraped across a blackboard. “
YOU CAN’T STAY HERE, CHILD,
” he said, and picked her up and slung her over his shoulder and took her aboard the town.

It was called Strole, and it was home to fifty tough, dust-hardened scavengers who robbed Old-Tech sites when they could find them and scrounged salvage from the leavings of larger towns when they could not. Shrike lived with them, but he was no scavenger. When
criminals from one of the great Traction Cities escaped into the Out-Country, Shrike would track them and cut off their heads, which he carefully preserved. When he crossed that city’s path again he would take the head to the authorities, and collect his reward.

Why he bothered to rescue her Hester never did discover. It could not have been out of pity, for he had none. The only sign of tenderness she ever saw in him was when he busied himself with his collection. He was fascinated by old automata and mechanical toys, and he would buy any that passing scavengers brought to him. His ramshackle quarters in Strole were full of them: animals, knights in armour, clockwork soldiers with keys in their backs, even a life-size Angel of Death pulled from some elaborate clock. But his favourites were all women or children: beautiful ladies in moth-eaten gowns and pretty girls and boys with porcelain faces. All night long Shrike would patiently dismantle and repair them, exploring the intricate escapements of their hearts as if searching for some clue to the workings of his own.

Sometimes it seemed to Hester that she too was part of his collection. Did she remind him of the wounds that he had suffered on the battlefields of forgotten wars, when he had still been human?

She shared his home for five long years, while her face healed badly into a permanent ruined scowl and her memories came slowly back to her. Some were startlingly clear, the waves on the shores of Oak Island, her mum’s voice, the moor-wind with its smells of wet grass and the dung of animals. Others were murky and hard to understand; they flashed into her mind just as she was falling asleep, or caught her unawares while she wandered amongst the silent mechanical figures in Shrike’s
house.
Blood on the star-charts. A metallic noise. A man’s long, handsome face with sea-grey eyes.
They were broken shards of memory, and they had to be carefully collected and pieced together, just like the bits of machinery the scavengers dug up.

It was not until she overheard some men telling stories about the great Thaddeus Valentine that she started to make sense of it all. She found that she recognized that name: it was the name of the man who had killed her mum and dad and turned her into a monster. She knew what she had to do without even having to think about it. She went to Shrike and told him she wanted to go after Valentine.

“YOU MUST NOT,”
was all the Stalker said.
“YOU’LL BE KILLED.”

“Then come with me!” she had pleaded, but he would not. He had heard about London and about Magnus Crome’s love of technology. He thought that if he went there the Guild of Engineers would overpower him and cut him into pieces to study in their secret laboratories.
“YOU MUST NOT GO,”
was all that he would say.

So she went anyway, waiting till he was busy with his automata, then slipping out of a window and out of Strole, and setting off across the wintry Out-Country with a stolen knife in her belt, in search of London and revenge.

“I’ve never seen him since that,” she told Tom, shivering in the basket of the stolen balloon. “Strole was down on the shores of the Anglish Sea when I left, but here Shrike is, working for Magnus Crome, and wanting to kill me. It doesn’t make sense!”

“Maybe you hurt his feelings when you ran away?” suggested Tom.

“Shrike doesn’t have feelings,” said Hester. “They cleaned all
his
memories and feelings away when they made a Stalker of him.”

She sounds as if she envies him,
thought Tom. But at least the sound of her voice had helped to calm him, and he had stopped shaking. He sat and listened to the wind sigh through the balloon’s rigging. There was a black stain on the western clouds which he thought must be the smoke from Airhaven. Had the aviators managed to get the fires under control, or had their town been destroyed? And what about Anna Fang? He realized that Shrike had probably murdered her, along with all her friends. That kind, laughing aviatrix was dead, as dead as his own parents. It was as if there was a curse on him that destroyed everybody who was kind to him. If only he had never met Valentine! If only he had stayed safely in the Museum where he belonged!

“She might be all right,” said Hester suddenly, as if she had guessed what he was thinking about. “I think Shrike was just playing with her; he didn’t have his claws out or anything.”

“He’s got
claws
?!”

“As long as she didn’t annoy him too much he probably wouldn’t waste time killing her.”

“What about Airhaven?”

“I suppose if it’s really badly damaged it’ll put down somewhere for repairs.”

Tom nodded. Then a happy thought occurred to him. “Do you think Miss Fang’ll come after us?”

“I don’t know,” said Hester. “But Shrike will.”

Tom looked over his shoulder again, horrified.

“Still,” she said, “at least we’re heading in the right direction for London.”

He peered gingerly over the edge of the basket. The clouds lay below them like a white eiderdown drawn across the land, hiding anything that might give a clue as to where they were, or where they were going. “How can you tell?” he asked.

“From the stars, of course,” said Hester. “Mum showed me. She was an aviator, too, remember? She’d been all over the place. She even went to America once. You have to use the stars to find your way in places like that where they don’t have charts or landmarks. Look, that’s the Pole Star, and that constellation is what the Ancients used to call the Great Bear, but most people nowadays call it the City. And if we keep
that
one to starboard we’ll know we’re heading north-east…”

“There are so many!” he said, trying to follow her pointing finger. Here above the clouds, without veils of city-smoke and Out-Country dust to hide it, the night sky sparkled with a million cold points of light. “I never knew there were so many stars before!”

“They’re all suns, burning away far out in space, thousands and thousands of miles away,” said Hester, and Tom had the feeling that she felt proud to show him how much she knew. “Except for the ones that aren’t really stars at all. Some of the really bright ones are mechanical moons that the Ancients put up into orbit thousands of years ago, still circling and circling the poor old Earth.”

Tom stared up at the glittering dark. “And what’s that one?” he asked, pointing to a bright star low in the west.

Hester looked at it, and her smile faded away. He saw her hands clench into fists. “That one?” she said. “That’s an airship, and it’s coming after us.”

“Perhaps Miss Fang has come to rescue us?” said Tom hopefully.

But the distant airship was gaining quickly, and in another few minutes they could see that it was a small, London-built scout-ship, a Spudbury Sunbeam or a Goshawk 90. They could almost feel Shrike’s green eyes watching them across the deserts of the sky.

Hester started fumbling with the rusty wheels and levers that controlled the gas-pressure in the balloon. After a few seconds she found the one she wanted and a fierce hiss came from somewhere overhead.

“What are you doing?” squeaked Tom. “You’ll let the gas out! We’ll crash!”

“I’m hiding us from Shrike,” said the girl, and opened the valve still further. Looking up, Tom saw the gasbag start to sag. He glanced back at the pursuing airship. It was gaining, but it was still a few miles away. Hopefully from that distance it would look as if some accident had struck the balloon. Hopefully Shrike would not guess Hester’s plan. Hopefully his little ship was not armed with rocket-projectors…