Mortal Engines (9 page)

She pulled on a final lever and the creak and sigh of gas-valves echoed through the gondola. There was a clang as the magnetic docking clamps released, and the radio crackled into life and snapped,
“Jenny Haniver,
this is the Stayns Harbour Board. You are not cleared for departure!”

But the
Jenny Haniver
was departing anyway. Tom felt his stomach turn over as she lifted into the midnight sky. He scrambled to a porthole, and saw the market town falling away below. Then Speedwell came into view, and soon the whole cluster was spread out below him like a display of model towns in the Museum.

“Jenny Haniver,”
insisted the loud speaker, “return to your berth at once! We have a request from the Speedwell town council that you give up your passengers, or they will be forced to—”

“Boring!” trilled Miss Fang, flicking the radio off. A home-made rocket battery on the roof of Speedwell town hall spat a fizzing flock of missiles after them. Three hissed harmlessly past, a fourth exploded off the starboard quarter, making the gondola swing like a pendulum, and the fifth came even closer. (Anna Fang raised an eyebrow at that one, while Tom and Hester ducked for cover like frightened rabbits.) Then they were out of range; the
Jenny Haniver
was climbing into the cold clear spaces of the night, and the trading cluster was just a distant smear of light beneath the clouds.

I
t rained that night on London, but by first light the sky was as clear and pale as still water, and the smoke from the city’s engines rose straight up into the windless air. Wet decks shone silver in the sunrise and all the banners of Tier One hung limp and still against their flagpoles. It was a fine spring morning, the morning that Valentine had been hoping for, and Katherine had been dreading. It was perfect flying weather.

Although it was so early, crowds had gathered all along the edge of Tier One to watch the
13th Floor Elevator
lift off. As Gench drove Katherine and her father over to the air-quay she saw that Circle Park was crowded too; it looked as if the whole of High London had come to cheer Valentine on his way. None of them knew where he was going, of course, but as London sped eastward the city’s rumour-mills had been grinding night and day: everyone was sure that Valentine’s expedition was connected with some huge prize that the Lord Mayor hoped to catch out in the central Hunting Ground.

Temporary stands had been erected for the Council and Guilds and, when she and Dog had wished Father goodbye in the bustling shadows of the hangar, Katherine went to take her place with the Historians, squeezed between Chudleigh Pomeroy and Dr Arkengarth. All around her stood the great and good of London: the sober black robes of Father’s Guild and the purple of the Guild of Merchants, sombre Navigators in their neat green tunics and a row of Engineers robed and hooded in white rubber, looking like novelty erasers.
Even Magnus Crome had risen to the occasion, and the Lord Mayor’s ancient chain of office hung gleaming around his thin neck.

Katherine wished they had all just stayed at home. It was difficult saying goodbye to someone when you were part of a great cheering mob all waving flags and blowing kisses. She stroked Dog’s knobbly head and told him, “Look, there’s Father, going up the gangplank now. They’ll start the engines in a moment.”

“I just hope nothing goes wrong,” muttered Dr Arkengarth. “One hears stories about these air-ships suddenly going off bang for no reason.”

“Perhaps we should stand a little further back?” suggested Miss Plym, the Museum’s twittery curator of furniture.

“Nonsense,” Katherine told them crossly. “Nothing is going to go wrong.”

“Yes, do shut up, Arkengarth, you silly old coot,” agreed Chudleigh Pomeroy, surprising her. “Never fear, Miss Valentine. Your father has the finest airship and the best pilots in the world: nothing can go wrong.”

Katherine smiled gratefully at him, but she kept her fingers crossed just the same, and Dog caught something of her mood and started to whimper softly.

From inside the hangar came the sound of hatches slamming shut and the rattle of boarding-ladders being dragged clear. An expectant hush fell over the stands. Along the tier’s edge High London held its breath. Then, as the band struck up “Rule Londinium”, Valentine’s ground-crew began dragging the
13th Floor Elevator
out into the sunlight, a sleek, black dart whose armoured envelope shone like silk. On the open platform at the stern of the control gondola Valentine stood waving. He
saluted the ground-crew and the flag-decked stands and then smiled straight at Katherine, picking her face out of all the others without a moment’s hesitation.

She waved back frantically, and the crowd cheered themselves hoarse as the
13th Floor Elevator
’s engine-pods swivelled into take-off position. The ground crew cast off the mooring-hawsers, the propellers began to turn and blizzards of confetti eddied in the down-drafts as the huge machine lifted into the air. Some Apprentice Historians spread out a banner reading
Happy Valentine’s Day!
and the cheers went on and on, as if the crowds thought it was their love alone which was keeping the explorer airborne. “
Val-en-tine! Val-en-tine!
”

But Valentine took no notice of the noise or the flags. He stood watching Katherine, one hand raised in farewell, until the airship was so high and far away that she could not make him out any more.

At last, when the
Elevator
was just a speck in the eastern sky and the stands were emptying, she wiped away her tears, took Dog’s lead and turned to go home. She was already missing her father, but she had a plan now. While he was away she would make her own enquiries and find out who that mysterious girl had been, and why she scared him so.

O
nce he had washed and slept and had something to eat, Tom began to decide that adventuring might not be so bad after all. By sunrise he was already starting to forget the misery of his trek across the mud and imprisonment in Speedwell. The view from the
Jenny Haniver
’s big forward windows as the airship flew between golden mountains of dawn-lit cloud was enough to make even the pain of Valentine’s betrayal fade a little. At breakfast-time, drinking hot chocolate with Miss Fang on the flight deck, he found that he was enjoying himself.

As soon as the
Jenny Haniver
was safely out of the range of Speedwell’s rockets the aviatrix had become all smiles and kindness. She locked her airship on course and set about finding Tom a warm fleece-lined coat and making up a bed for him in the hold, a space high up inside the airship’s envelope, heaped with a cargo of sealskins from Spitzbergen. Then she led Hester into the medical bay and went to work on her injured leg. When Tom looked in on her after breakfast that morning the girl was sleeping soundly under a white blanket. “I gave her something for the pain,” explained Miss Fang. “She will sleep for hours, but you need have no fear for her.”

Tom stared at Hester’s sleeping face. Somehow he had expected her to look better now that she had been washed and fed and had her leg fixed, but of course she was as hideous as ever.

“He has made a mess of her, your wicked Mr Valentine,” the aviatrix said, leading him back to the flight deck, where she took the controls off their automatic setting.

“How do you know about Valentine?” asked Tom.

“Oh, everyone has heard about Thaddeus Valentine,” she laughed. “I know that he is London’s greatest historian, and I also know that that is just a cover for his
real
work: as Crome’s secret agent.”

“That’s not true!” Tom started to say, still instinctively defending his ex-hero. But there had always been rumours that Valentine’s expeditions involved something darker than mere archaeology, and now that he had seen the great man’s ruthless handiwork, he believed them. He blushed, ashamed for Valentine, and ashamed of himself for having loved him.

Miss Fang watched him with a faint, sympathetic smile. “Hester told me a great deal more last night, while I was tending to her wound,” she said gently. “You are both very lucky to be alive.”

“I know,” agreed Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy that Hester had shared their story with this stranger.

He sat down in the co-pilot’s seat and studied the controls; a baffling array of knobs and switches and levers labelled in mixtures of Airsperanto, Anglish and Chinese. Above them a little lacquered shrine had been fixed to the bulkhead, decorated with red ribbons and pictures of Miss Fang’s ancestors. That smiling Manchu air-merchant must be her father, he supposed. And had that red-haired lady from the Ice Wastes been her mum?

“So tell me, Tom,” asked Miss Fang, setting the ship on a new course, “where
is
London going?”

The question was unexpected. “I don’t know!” Tom said.

“Oh, surely you must know
something
!” she laughed.
“Your city has left its hidey-hole in the west, come back across the land-bridge, and now it is whizzing off into the central Hunting Ground ‘like a bat out of Hull’, as the saying goes. You must have heard at least a rumour. No?”

Her long eyes slid towards Tom, who licked his lips nervously, wondering what to say. He had never paid any attention to the stupid tales the other apprentices swapped about where London was heading; he really had no idea. And even if he had, he knew it would be wrong to go revealing his city’s plans to mysterious Oriental aviatrices. What if Miss Fang flew off and told some larger city where to lie in wait for London, in exchange for a finder’s fee? And yet, if he didn’t tell her
something,
she might kick him off her airship – perhaps without even bothering to land it first!

“Prey!” he blurted out. “The Guild of Navigators say there is lots and lots of prey in the central Hunting Ground.”

The red smile grew even broader. “Really?”

“I heard it from the Head Navigator himself,” said Tom, growing bolder.

Miss Fang nodded, beaming. Then she hauled on a long brass lever. Gas-valves grumbled up inside the envelope and Tom’s ears popped as the
Jenny Haniver
started to descend, plunging into a thick, white layer of cloud. “Let me show you the central Hunting Ground,” she chuckled, checking the charts that were fastened to the bulkhead beside her shrine.

Down, and down, and then the cloud thinned and parted and Tom saw the vast Out-Country spread below him like a crumpled sheet of grey-brown paper, slashed with long, blue shapes that were the flooded track-marks
of countless towns. For the first time since the airship lifted away from Stayns he felt afraid, but Miss Fang murmured, “Nothing to fear, Tom.”

He calmed himself and gazed out at the amazing view. Far to the north he could see the cold glitter of the Ice Wastes and the dark cones of the Tannhäuser fire-mountains. He looked for London, and eventually thought he saw it, a tiny, grey speck that raised a cloud of dust behind it as it trundled along, much further off than he had hoped. There were other towns and cities too, dotted here and there across the plain, or lurking in the shadows of half-eaten mountain ranges, but not nearly as many as he had expected. To the south-east there were none at all, just a dingy layer of mist above a tract of marshland, and beyond that the silvery shimmer of water.

“That is the great inland Sea of Khazak,” said the aviatrix, when he pointed to it. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old land-shanty,” and in a lilting, high-pitched voice she sang, “
Beware, beware of the Sea of Khazak, for the town that goes near it will never come back
…”

But Tom wasn’t listening. He had noticed something much more terrible than any inland sea.

Directly below, with the tiny shadow of the
Jenny Haniver
flickering across its skeletal girders, lay a dead city. It stood on ground scarred by the tracks of hundreds of smaller towns, tilting over at a strange angle, and as the
Jenny Haniver
swept down for a closer look Tom realized that its tracks and gut were gone, and that its deckplates were being stripped out by a swarm of small towns which seethed in the shadows of its lower levels, tearing off huge rusting sections in their jaws and landing salvage parties whose blow-torches glittered and
sparked in the shadows between the tiers like fairy lights on a Quirkemas tree.

There was a puff of smoke from one of the towns and a rocket came winding up towards the airship and exploded a few hundred feet below. Miss Fang’s hands moved swiftly over the controls and Tom felt the ship lift again. “Half the scavengers of the Hunting Ground are working on the wreck of Motoropolis,” she said, “and they are a jealous lot. Shoot at anybody who comes near, and when nobody does, they shoot at each other.”

“But how did it get like that?” asked Tom, staring back at the huge skeleton as the
Jenny Haniver
carried him up and away.

“It starved,” said the aviatrix. “It ran out of fuel, and as it stood motionless there a pack of smaller towns came and started tearing it apart. The feeding frenzy has been going on for months, and I expect another city will come along soon and finish off the job. You see, Tom, there isn’t enough prey to go round in the central Hunting Ground – so it can’t be that which has brought London out of hiding.”

Tom twisted round to watch as the dead city fell behind. A pack of tiny predator-suburbs were harrying the scavenger towns on the north-western side, singling out the weakest and slowest and charging after it, but before they caught it the
Jenny Haniver
rose up again into the pure, clean world above the clouds, and the carcass of Motoropolis was hidden from view.

When Miss Fang looked at him again she was still smiling, but there was an odd gleam in her eyes. “So if it isn’t prey that Magnus Crome is after,” she said, “what can it be?”

Tom shook his head. “I’m only an Apprentice
Historian,” he confessed. “Third Class. I don’t
really
know the Head Navigator.”

“Hester mentioned something,” the aviatrix went on. “The thing Mr Valentine took from her poor parents. MEDUSA. A strange name. Have you heard of it? Do you know what it means?”