Mothstorm

by Philip Reeve

  Spread across the face of the heavens was a great cloud of silver and gold. It was the same cloud which we had seen on Dr Blears’s photograph back at Larklight, but it was surely far closer now. At first glance it might have seemed enchanting, for it rippled and glittered and shone like fish scales. But although it was still vastly distant and I could not guess what it was made of, some inner voice warned me that this pleasant appearance was false and that the cloud was evil!

  ‘Is that where you are taking us?’ asked Father. He sounded both alarmed and stimulated, for he is a man of science, and despite the blow he had received he was eager, of course, to observe that strange phenomenon at first hand. ‘But why?’

  The moth which was carrying us swerved towards the ship. Its battered iron hull blocked our view, and the cloud was hidden from us. The Snilth leader replaced her helmet as we flew into the darkness between the jaws. ‘Your Shaper has been sssummoned,’ she said. ‘We are taking her to meet God.’

  3

  Naturally, I did not imagine for an instant that GOD really dwelt in that far-away cloud. His ways may be mysterious to us mere mortals, but I feel certain that He would never dream of employing spiny blue termagants. No, this was the Devil’s work, and I had no doubt that the deity we were being dragged away to meet would turn out to be a false god, or else some heathen idol. Presumably, I thought, I shall end up as a sacrifice upon some pagan altar.

  The moth which bore our lifeboat let it down with a tremendous thump upon the iron floor of the fish-ship’s mouth and soared away to nest with others of its horrid kind upon the walls and ceiling. A great crowd of the Snilth came clustering around to drag us out and herd us, along with the men from other boats, down narrow, winding passages and into a sort of gaol somewhere in the ship’s belly, where the Actaeon’s crew were being penned altogether. You will be shocked to hear that our captors made no distinction between officers and deckhands, for it seems that all humans are quite alike in the eyes of the Snilth! A score of the blue-skinned villains patrolled on a balcony above us, carrying objects which looked somewhat like bagpipes and keeping careful watch upon the huddled throng below.

  Into this mass of captive humanity Mother, Father and myself were thrust. Being quite used to the manners of monstrous aliens, I was disgusted but not surprised to see that the Snilth had provided no separate accommodation for their female prisoners and that there was not anywhere to sit down. However, our brave British aethernauts are gallant even in defeat and shuffled aside to make a space for us near one wall, beneath a sort of great, dim window. Alas, it was only a small space, and that throng of men were packed close all about us so that the smell of tobacco, perspiration and patent hair-oil was almost o’erwhelming.

  Not far away from us, among a knot of the Actaeon’s officers, I heard Dr Blears’s shrill, sniping voice raised up in protest. ‘This is intolerable! Intolerable! I am an agent of Her Majesty’s Government, and a Gentleman! Am I to be treated like a common sailor?’

  I agreed with his sentiments, although I thought he might have voiced them more diplomatically. Some of the grimy tattooed fellows about him looked quite indignant at being called common sailors. As for the Snilth on the balcony above, they seemed impervious to his complaint. But one of them raised a set of bagpipes and, pointing a pipe at Dr Blears, squeezed the leathery sack from which it projected. There was a rushing noise and Dr Blears yelped in pain, clutched at his neck and crumpled to the floor!

  Some of the sailors raised a soft cheer, and one fellow so forgot himself as to mutter, ‘That’s shut ’im up!’ Father pushed his way through the crowd which had gathered about Dr Blears and, kneeling beside him, felt for a pulse and pronounced him alive yet insensible, stupefied by an envenomed dart.

  We were wary of the Snilth’s bagpipes after that and no one offered any further token of resistance as more and more captives were packed in with us. In vain we sought among the faces of those men for Art, but there was no sign of him. Nor did we see Sir Richard or Mrs Burton. Father asked around the officers and crew, and came back looking grave.

  ‘No one knows what became of them,’ he announced. ‘Some of the men claim to have seen one of the lifeboats smash against a passing moth and vanish in a cloud of particles. But one fellow reckons that it drove right through the creature and plunged on towards the Georgian cloud-tops.’

  ‘Oh, I saw it happen myself!’ I exclaimed, remembering how cheered I felt when I saw that moth destroyed. ‘Then, if that were Art’s vessel, he may be safe on the planet’s surface!’

  Mother took my hand. ‘We must all sincerely pray that such is the case,’ she said. ‘If Sir Richard and Ulla are with him, I do not believe he can come to very much harm. Yet as to how we might rescue them, I cannot at this moment imagine.’

  By that time the last of the Actaeon’s crew had been brought aboard. The iron doors of our dungeon rolled shut with a dolorous clang, and a strange, deep music began to throb through the floor beneath us. It was like no sound I had heard before, and yet I recognised it as being somehow akin to the song of the great alembic that I had heard aboard the Sophronia and aboard the Liberty during our struggle against the Moobs. It seemed our ship was moving, carrying us away from Georgium Sidus towards who knew what destination.

  Soon afterward, Mother drew our attention to the nearby windowpane or porthole. It was beginning to glow from without with a golden light familiar to anyone who has ever travelled the Golden Roads of Alchemical Space.

  ‘The Benign Effulgence!’ gasped Father. ‘Then these creatures know the secrets of Alchemy.’

  ‘They probably know them better than the Fellows of the Royal College,’ Mother said. ‘Do you not recall Ssilissa’s natural gift for Alchemy? Just imagine how skilled she would be if she had grown up here among her own kind and her talent had been honed and guided.’

  ‘We certainly seem to be progressing with great rapidity,’ I ventured, for I have a natural gift for Alchemy myself, and could sense that we were rushing through space at an immense velocity.

  Mother put her arm about my shoulders to steady me, and said, ‘Chin up, Myrtle. All will be well.’

  But her face was filled with an expression that I had seldom seen on it before, yet knew at once. She was afraid. Old and wise and all-knowing as she was, even she had never travelled where we were travelling now, beyond the influence of our own dear sun and into the pitiless night between the stars!

  4

  I do not know how long that voyage took. Penned as we were in that uncomfortable and evil-smelling place, it seemed like days, but I am prepared to accept that it may only have been hours. I managed to find enough space to sit down, with my back against the wall beneath that golden window, and there I slept awhile. But it was an uneasy sleep, filled with disagreeable dreams and constantly broken by the groans and grumblings of the wounded, who were being tended by the Actaeon’s surgeon in a makeshift sickbay just a little way off.

  When I awoke, it was to find that Mother and Father had been joined by Mr Cumberbatch and some other of the ship’s officers. They were conversing in low voices and the subject of their discourse was, where might the Snilth be taking us?

  ‘Surely, Mr Mumby, you do not think these brutes have flown here from another star?’ asked Mr Cumberbatch. ‘I believe there are several planets beyond Georgium Sidus. They must hail from one of them?’

  ‘We have already travelled far beyond those worlds,’ said Mother. ‘I know them well. One is a water-world, where I am certain no moths could have arisen. The other, which you call Hades, is a small, dark place with a single great moon. Both world and moon are home to forests of greyish lichen and very little else. It is too dark out here at the limits of the Sun’s domain for any higher life to thrive.’

  ‘Why, but beetles live in lichen,’ said Mr McMurdo. ‘And moths are very like beetles, d’ye ken?’

  ‘Oh come, my dear sir,’ protested Father. ‘Moths are nothing at all like beetles!’ (Though personally I cannot s
ee what the difference is, for both moths and beetles have abominable manners and a great superfluity of legs.)

  Mother, however, was not to be sidetracked down these byways of entomology. ‘The Snilth come from another star,’ she said firmly. ‘I sensed as soon as I set eyes on dear Ssilissa that she was not the progeny of any world I know. I feel it strongly now that I look at others of her kind. There is something about them which unsettles me. They are the children of another Shaper.’

  ‘How on earth can you know such things, madam?’ asked Mr Cumberbatch.

  ‘Emily has a profound knowledge of our solar system,’ confided Father. ‘It may interest you to learn that she is four-and-a-half-thousand-million years old.’

  ‘Though I think you’ll agree that I don’t look a day over three thousand million,’ said Mother sweetly.

  ‘And I am not yet quite sixteen,’ I hastened to add (for I should not like anyone to gain the impression that I was millions of years old).

  ‘Then I hope that with the great wisdom which you must have accumulated you will be able to find us a way out of our predicament, madam,’ Mr Cumberbatch said, bowing.

  ‘So do I,’ replied Mother. ‘But I confess that at present I am quite at a loss. And far from being able to help you out of this trouble, I fear it is my fault that you are here in the first place.’

  ‘Nonsense, Emily!’ declared Father. ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘You heard what the Snilth who captured us said, Edward,’ she replied. ‘They were looking for me.’

  Just then we felt the ship begin to slow, and a sudden activity among our Snilth gaolers conveyed to us all the impression that our destination was very near. We turned at once to the window, which was darkening again now as the caul of alchemical particles which had surrounded the vessel began to fade. The glass, or whatever it was made from, was coated with dust, for it seemed the Snilth were not just cruel and warlike but bad housekeepers to boot. However, Mother breathed upon the pane and Father rubbed it with his pocket-handkerchief, and soon, between them, they had cleaned a patch through which we might see quite clearly.

  But, oh, I almost wish that they had not gone to so much trouble! For would it not have been better to live in ignorance than to see what I saw then? The horror of it will live with me for ever, I am quite sure!

  Reader, I implore you, sit down upon a soft chair, take a draft of beef tea or some other invigorating decoction and prepare yourself before you venture to read the next section of my tale, in which I shall describe the dreadful place to which the Snilth had carried us!

  5

  How often, over high tea in the drawing room at Larklight, poor Art has bored our visitors perfectly rigid with his account of the Great Storm on Jupiter. Well, at least if I ever return to sensible skies I shall have an anecdote that will trounce his. For the whirlwind into which the Snilth ship was flying was large enough to swallow up a hundred Thunderheads, and it was made entirely out of moths!

  We were still so far away as yet that they looked no larger than the common moths of Earth. But they were so many that they filled the sky, from top to bottom and side to side: a perfect wall of moths, stretching across the aether ahead of us. And every single moth was flying in the same direction, from left to right, although in places a band of them moved slower or faster than their neighbours, giving the vast swarm a striped appearance. And in one place a sort of gap appeared, and widened, forming the mouth of a tube into which our Snilth ship plunged – a tunnel whose walls and floor and roof were made from the vast rushing bodies of moths, and their flapping wings, and their awful feathery feelers!

  ‘It is like a great hurricane!’ cried my mother above the deafening roar of wing beats from outside. ‘How ingenious! A tempest of moths! A living tornado, whirling from star to star across the aether!’

  ‘But it must be travelling at alchemical speeds,’ declared Father. ‘How can these insects possibly fly so fast?’

  Mother thought a moment, then replied with a frown, ‘These moths are merely passengers. They fly endlessly within a bubble or field of force which must be generated by some object at the heart of the swarm. An object capable of moving at immense velocities, almost like … ’

  And she fell silent, as if she did not dare to speak her suspicion.

  It was dark outside now, for we were deep inside that swirl of insects, where even the starlight was blotted out. The aether was thick and silty with the greasy dust that shook from their wings as they battered and blundered one against another. But slowly, as we tore on through the storm’s heart, it began to grow light again. Dim silvery beams reached through that tumult of heaving wings and furry bodies, as if some great radiance waited for us on the far side.

  ‘What light is that?’ cried Father. ‘Surely we cannot have travelled all the way to another sun?’

  ‘Look!’ shouted one of the sailors. ‘Look there!’

  The close-packed moths outside the windows thinned, and were gone. For a moment I thought we had passed clear through that swarm and out the other side. Then I saw that we were actually in the swarm’s heart, flying out across a gulf of empty space which lay calm in the centre of that vortex of moths, like the eye of a hurricane.

  Far, far away another vast wall of moths whirled from right to left. Closer to us, in the midst of that emptiness, a ball of silver fire blazed like a midget sun, almost too bright to look upon. Around it turned the planets which were home to the Snilth. Tiny, knuckled, bony worlds they were, none as large as Earth’s moon, and dark and dry as the clenched fists of dead pharaohs.

  ‘It is a tiny solar system!’ exclaimed Father.

  ‘But it is not!’ said Mother.

  ‘That sun is not a real sun and those little worlds are not real planets! Look!’

  The Snilth ship slowed and slid through a tight passage between a pair of the little worlds, and we saw that they were made not of rock and water, but of moth-stuff. Moth wings and moth bones and the dry, papery carcasses of long-dead moths had been bundled together with silvery thread and hung in orbit round that gimcrack sun. And over the surfaces of those worlds Snilth farmers crept, harvesting crops of blue-grey mushrooms from fields of moth dust. And out of holes and windows in the walls of the worlds Snilth faces peered to watch us pass, and we peered back and saw in the shadowy galleries within whole families of Snilth, old ones whose spines had fallen out and infants whose tails had not yet grown, and large, blue, speckled eggs from which the baby Snilthlets must hatch. The eggs were tended by smaller, paler, less spiny versions of the Snilth who had captured us. I imagined that they must be slaves or some type of servant class, but Father (who has an eye for such things) said, ‘Those must be the males! Look, my dears! In this strange place the natural order is reversed; the male Snilth keep house and tend to the needs of their children, while their women-folk are the fighters and doers.’

  ‘How deeply improper!’ I cried.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mother, with a smile. ‘It is not so very unlike Larklight.’ (I suppose that was one of her jokes. I shall never understand them.)

  And still our gaol-ship kept moving, gathering speed again and showing no sign of putting in at any of those pocket-planets. We flew over one where Snilth were tending rows of furry white moth-pupae and huge maggots were truffling for food, lifting their horrid faceless heads towards us as we went rushing by. We passed another where dead moths were being rendered down into broth and meat and piles of bone and wing, much as whales are treated on the Earth. In the chasms between the worlds flew other ships like ours, and harnessed moths carrying captured comets and asteroids towards still other planetoids, where smoke belched from the chimney pots of manufactories.

  And then, ahead of us, close to that pocket-sized sun and half hidden in its radiance, we saw another world, still smaller than the rest. So small, indeed, that it was not a world at all, but just a house. A house like Larklight, hanging there in silver sunlight – except, unlike Larklight, it was not built of bricks an
d stone and mortar, but all of moth-bits, and with proportions that obeyed no earthly geometry.

  And then our Snilth guards came shoving roughly through the crowd of prisoners, and the one who had treated us so rudely when she came aboard our lifeboat strode ahead of them, using her tail to knock down any man who did not step out of her path briskly enough. I looked studiously at the floor, hoping not to attract her attention, but it was me whom she had come to find – me, and Father and Mother too.

  ‘You will come with usss,’ she hissed. ‘The Mothmaker is waiting.’

  Chapter Nine

  In Which Your Hero Explores the Wreck of the SS New Jerusalem and Experiments with an Ingenious Yet Alarming System of Powered Flight.

  Well, that’s all jolly interesting and spectacular, I’m sure, but no doubt many of you are wearying of Myrtle’s company by now and are asking yourselves in hushed and trembling voices what has become of Art on Georgium Sidus, and how will he fare in his quest to reach Charity Cruet’s abandoned ship and there secure one of her father’s aetheric distress flares?

  So I shall tell you, and we may return to Myrtle’s account later, if we can find nothing better to occupy us.

  I must have been quite exhausted by all my adventures of the previous day, for I slept as sound as any log, and when I woke I could not think, for a moment, where I was, until I looked out through the wall of Charity’s bubble-home and saw a gigantic three-eyed fish go swimming by.

  Soon after breakfast Charity’s friend and protector, Mr Zennor, arrived, paddling up outside in a sort of underwater boat called a squoracle and letting himself in by slicing open the old wounds in the walls of the vestibule-bubble of Charity’s little nest. He and Charity conversed a long while in the Universal Sign Language, and I detected that she was telling him what we planned to do and that he was cautioning us to stay hidden, lest there were more moth-people abroad. But Charity won him round at last, and we set off, with Mr Zennor accompanying us for the first part of the way. I am pleased to say that we did not swim out through the gas-sea, but went by a much more convenient route through a whole series of neighbouring bladders, whose inhabitants greeted us with clickings and clatterings and cheerful sign-language ‘good mornings’.13