Mortal Engines (25 page)

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 walk-way 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.

T
he black airship had been drifting in silence, riding the wind to this high rendezvous while the defenders of Batmunkh Gompa were busy with fires and explosions. Now her engines burst into life, churning the drifting snowflakes and drowning out Tom’s cry of horror.

Valentine walked out along the barrel of a rocket launcher as nimbly as an athlete on a bar and sprang, spread-eagling himself for an instant on the naked air before his hands found the rope ladder that Pewsey and Gench had lowered for him. Catching it, he swung himself up into the gondola.

Tom ran forward, and was plunged into sudden darkness as the searchlight snapped off. Rockets from higher batteries came sparkling down to burst against the
Elevator
’s thick hide. One shattered some glass in the gondola, but the black airship was already powering away from the Wall. The backwash from its propellers slammed into Tom’s face as he knelt over Anna Fang, shaking her in the dim hope that she might wake.

“It’s not fair!” he sobbed. “He waited till you were dazzled! You beat him!” The aviatrix said nothing, but stared past him with a look of stupid surprise, her eyes as dull as dry pebbles.

Tom sat down beside her in the reddening snow and tried to think. He supposed he would have to leave Batmunkh Gompa now, get out fast before London came, but the very thought of moving on again made him weary. He was sick of being swept to and fro across the world by other people’s plans. A thin, hot anger
started rising in him as he thought about Valentine, flying home to a hero’s welcome. Valentine was the cause of all this! It was Valentine who had ruined his life, and Hester’s, and put an end to so many more. It was Valentine who had given the Guild of Engineers MEDUSA. Hester had been right; he should have let her kill him when she had the chance…

There was a noise at the far end of the platform and he looked up and saw a black mass of arms and legs and coat hurriedly untangling itself, like a big spider fallen from the ceiling. It was Hester, who had taken the wrong turning as she raced after Valentine and come out in an observation bunker high above. Now here she was, having scrambled down thirty feet of snowy wall and dropped the final ten. Her eye rested for a moment on the fallen aviatrix, then she turned and went to the battlements and stared out at the dark and the dancing snow. “It should have been me,” Tom heard her say. “At least I would have made sure I took him with me.”

Tom watched her. He felt tight and sick and trembly from the grief and rage inside him, and knew that this was how Hester must feel, how she had always felt, ever since Valentine killed her parents. It was a terrible feeling, and he could think of only one way to cure it.

He groped under the collar of Anna’s coat and found the key on its thong and wrenched it free. Then he stood up and went to where Hester was and put his arms around her. It was like hugging a statue, she was so stiff and tense, but he needed to hold on to something so he hugged her anyway. Guns were still firing overhead in the vain hope of hitting the
13th Floor Elevator.
He put his face close to Hester’s ear and shouted over the noise, “Let’s go home!”

She looked round at that, puzzled and a little annoyed. “Have you gone funny?”

“Don’t you see?” he shouted, laughing at the crazy idea that had just come creeping into his mind. “Someone’s got to make him pay! You were right; I shouldn’t have stopped you before, but I’m glad I did, because the Gut Police would have killed you and then we’d never have met. Now I can help you get to him, and help you get away afterwards. We’ll go back to London! Now! Together!”

“You
have
gone funny,” said Hester, but she came with him anyway, helping him find a way back through the Shield-Wall while soldiers came running past them, frightened, soot-stained and far too late, crying out in woe when they saw the bodies on the rocket-platform.

The night sky over Batmunkh Gompa was full of smoke and tatters of singed envelope fabric. Fires were still burning in the High Eyries, but already the roads in the valley were clogged with constellations of small lights, the lanterns of refugees, spilling away into the mountains like water bursting from a breached dam. With the death of the Air-Fleet the Shield-Wall was finished, and its people were fleeing as fast as their feet and mules and ox-carts and freight-balloons could take them.

Down at the mooring platform, ships were already lifting into the smoky sky and turning south. The Keralan girl, Sathya, was trying to rally some panic-stricken soldiers, sobbing, “Stay and hold the Wall! The Southern Air-Fleet will reinforce us! They can be here in less than a week!” But everyone knew that Batmunkh Gompa would be gone by then, and London would be pushing south towards the League’s heartlands. “Stay
and hold the Wall!” she begged, but the airships kept lifting past her, lifting past her.

The
Jenny Haniver
still hung at anchor, silent, dark. The key that Tom had taken from Anna Fang’s body fitted snugly into the lock on the forward hatch, and soon he was standing on the flight-deck, staring at the controls. There were far more of them than he remembered.

“Are you sure we can do this?” asked Hester softly.

“Of course,” said Tom. He tried a few switches. The hatch sprang open again, the cabin lights came on, the coffee machine started making a noise like a polite dog clearing its throat and a small inflatable dinghy dropped from the roof and knocked him over.

“Quite sure?” she asked, helping him up.

Tom nodded. “I used to build model airships when I was little, so I understand the principle. And Miss Fang showed me the controls when we were in the mountains… I just wish she’d labelled everything in Anglish.”

He thought for a moment, then hauled on another lever, and this time the engines throbbed into life. Out on the mooring platform people turned to stare, and some made the sign against evil; they had heard of Feng Hua’s death and wondered if it was her restless ghost aboard the
Jenny Haniver.
But Sathya saw Tom and Hester standing at the controls and came running towards them.

Frightened that she would stop him taking off, Tom hunted for the lever which moved the engine pods. Bearings grated as they swivelled into take-off position. He laughed, delighted at the way the airship responded to the touch of his hands on the controls, hearing the familiar creak and huff of the gas-valves somewhere
overhead and the clang of the mooring-clamps disengaging. People waved their arms and shouted, and Sathya pulled out a gun, but at the last moment Captain Khora came stumbling out on to the platform, supported by one of his crewmen, and gently took it from her. He looked up at Tom, raising a hand to wish him luck, and the surprising pinkness of his palm and fingertips was what stuck in Tom’s mind as the airship swayed uncertainly up into the sky and climbed through the smoke from the High Eyries. He took one last look down at Batmunkh Gompa, then swung her out over the Shield-Wall and turned her nose towards the west.

He was going home.

T
he clouds that had shed their snow on Batmunkh Gompa blew west to fall as yet more rain on London, and it was raining still when the
13th Floor Elevator
reached home, early the following afternoon. No crowds were waiting to welcome it. The sodden lawns of Circle Park were deserted, except for some workers from the Recycling Department who were cutting down the last of the trees, but the Guild of Engineers had been warned of Valentine’s return, and as the great airship came nosing down into the wet flare of the landing beacons they ran out on to the apron with the rain beating on their bald heads and the lights making splashy reflections on their coats.

Katherine watched from her bedroom window as the ground-crew winched the airship down and the excited Engineers clustered closer. Now hatches were opening in the gondola; now Magnus Crome was going forward, with a servant holding a white rubber umbrella over him, and now, now Father was coming down the gangplank, easy to recognize even at this distance by his height and his confident stride and the way his all-weather cape filled and flapped in the rising breeze.