Mothstorm

by Philip Reeve

  At last we reached a central bladder, which seemed to serve the merfolk as a type of marketplace, judging by the heaps of shells and baskets of fat Georgian lug-worms which lay about, though this was early morning and there were few merchants or shoppers present yet. In the centre of that great sphere a root-like structure hung down almost to the floor, and at its foot we parted from Mr Zennor with many kind farewells on either side, expressed through the medium of mime.

  Then, feeling rather like that chap in the fairy tale climbing up his beanstalk, I followed Charity up the root and pushed my way out after her through a sort of rubbery trapdoor on to the upper surface of the floating island, emerging in the shadow of the largest cabbage I had yet seen.14

  For a short time we lingered there beneath the shadows of the great plant’s rubbery leaves, listening intently for any sound which might suggest the presence of moth-men out in the swirling mist. We heard nothing but the wap and waft of the gas-sea beneath the fibrous mat of roots we sat upon, and so, quietly and ever watchful, we set forth. Charity knew where we were going, and despite the mist she threaded her way with great confidence through that maze of towering vegetables, until I saw ahead of us a grey shape which turned out to be the good ship New Jerusalem.

  My admiration for Charity’s father increased no end, for I could tell at once that he must have had courage and an enormous faith if he had been ready to set out across uncharted aether seas in such a grotty old tub. She looked very like one of the little puttering pleasure ships which carry day trippers from Margate up on excursions into near-Earth orbit, except that she had been fitted with some spare water-tanks and cargo containers, all bearing the words, LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY.

  She lay keeled over on her beam ends, which I think was a result of the moth-men’s cowardly attack on her. Half crushed beneath her I could see the remains of a makeshift chapel which Rev. Cruet must have built against her side like a lean-to when she was resting upright. Chairs lay smashed and scattered on the rooty ground, and some kind of Georgian snail was creeping across the mouldings on the front of a patent portable pulpit.15 Bright prints of Bible scenes blew about among the cabbages. Nothing else moved in that dreary place except for Charity and myself, who approached the wreckage carefully, half expecting lurking moth-men to leap out upon us, wielding their blowpipes.

  You may have noticed by now that Charity is not the sort of girl who’s forever reminding a fellow to brush his hair or fretting about getting smuts upon her bonnet. Not, to be blunt, a Myrtle-ish sort of girl. Quite the contrary; she has as much pluck as any chap. She scrambled up through a shot-hole into that poor old ship’s interior as nimbly as you please, and then reached back to help me climb after her.

  There were no moth-men waiting in there, thank Heavens, though everything was awfully torn and tumbled where they had gone rampaging about. The wallpaper and furniture were sadly scorched and shattered, presumably by the same sort of fireballs which had been flung at the Actaeon.

  Yet when we reached the flare locker and undid the catch, we found that its contents had not been disturbed. There were three flares and they looked just like outsize firework rockets, although a note from the Lord Chief Alchemist printed on their labels assured us that they were infinitely more powerful. Light the blue touch-paper and stand extremely well back and one of these beauties would soar a hundred miles into the aether and burst with the brilliance of a small sun.

  ‘Well, they should do the trick!’ I said, reading the instructions.

  ‘Let’s not linger here, then,’ said Charity. ‘I’d lay a hundred to one that there are moth-men about still, and the sooner we are safe under the cabbage-mat again the happier I shall be.’

  Personally I should have liked to stay awhile and explore the wreck. I don’t know about you, but I always find there is something about a wrecked ship that seems to demand exploring. But Charity was growing nervous, and I thought that perhaps it caused her pain to see her home laid waste in that untidy fashion and that it might bring back melancholy thoughts of her lost father. So she took one flare and I took the other two and we found our way back to the hole we’d climbed in by and jumped down on to the cabbage roots.

  But no sooner had we reached the ground than Charity turned to me with a look of great alarm, signalling that I should be silent.16 I understood at once, for I too had heard something. Out there in the endless fog, hissing voices were calling to one another, and they were drawing closer!

  It was easy to guess what had occurred. Despite our caution we must have made some sound which had alerted a passing moth-man patrol, and they were coming to investigate!

  We hurried round the New Jerusalem’s bows – but there were voices on that side of the ship too! We were surrounded, and it would not be long before our enemies were upon us!

  ‘We must run for it!’ I whispered urgently.

  ‘We cannot!’ Charity whispered back. ‘The moth-men will outrun us easily, and their darts will strike us down!’

  ‘Then at least let me fire off a flare before they take us,’ I pleaded, rummaging in my pocket for a packet of lucifers, ‘so that people may know we were here … ’ And then, of a sudden, I had one of those Brilliant Ideas which come to me from time to time and have so often saved my bacon in sticky moments like this one.

  There was no time to explain, so I took Charity by the hand and led her back around the ship to where the remnants of her father’s chapel lay scattered. The snakey voices we had heard were closer, but we could not yet see their owners. Quickly, I propelled Charity up the steps of her father’s portable pulpit and set to work. Like all good pulpits, this one came with a variety of Gothick arches and clustering vines and leaves. Pulling some string from another of my pockets, I quickly lashed my two flares to these handy decorations, one on each side of the pulpit, and struck a lucifer to light the touch-papers. The paper was reluctant to light at first, after its long exposure to the Georgian damp, and when I peeked around the pulpit and saw the grey forms of armoured moth-men appearing through the mist a few yards away, I thought for a moment that we were done for. But first one paper and then the next burst into sputtering sparks, and I hared up the pulpit steps to join Charity, who was still clutching her own flare.

  ‘Cling on tight!’ I warned her.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What have you done?’

  The moth-men must have heard us. There was a hissy cry, and one of their darts dinged off the pulpit rail close to my hand. It didn’t matter; a second later the first flare fired, and the pulpit began to whirl dizzyingly about on the spot. A half-second after that the other flare lit, and the force of both combined was enough to lift us off the ground and send us soaring through the mist, startled moth-men diving from our path. Charity screamed, clinging to the rail. I clambered upright and gripped the sides of the lectern. It was shaped in the form of an eagle, and it wore a cheerful expression, as if it were pleased to have taken flight at last.

  For we were airborne, propelled by those clever flares! If I had lashed them on vertically, I daresay we might have shot all the way up into space, but as it was we flew horizontally, low over the undulating root mass of the floating island. Cabbages flicked past on either side of us. Once one loomed ahead, but almost before I could begin to feel alarm we had smashed through it and were racing on amid a storm of juice and sauerkraut. Looking back, I saw the stricken vegetable collapse, with a pulpit-shaped hole drilled clean through it …

  And I saw something else too. Up in the foggy air a great shape was moving, tearing the vapours with beats of its enormous wings. One of the giant moths was pursuing us, and on its back crouched armoured moth-men, readying things that looked like bagpipes – yet I was sure they were not going to all that trouble simply to give us a rousing tune. Sure enough, an instant later, darts began to rain about us, clanging and sparking from the flying pulpit’s ironwork.

  I rummaged in a locker under the lectern and found several prayer books and a copy of Mr Wesley’s Hymns, Ea
rthly and Otherwise. These I hurled at our pursuers and I believe I hit one, for I saw him plummet from the moth’s back. But the moth came on, and I had no more projectiles.

  ‘A light!’ cried Charity, and I looked round at her and saw that she was holding the remaining flare ready, aiming it at the moth.

  I was loath to waste our last flare in this way, and yet I could see no other hope of escape. I remembered my victory over the dread sky-squid in the Jovian wind-race the previous spring, and the way my sister had exploded a prehistoric Martian starfish a few months before. There is something decidedly invigorating about blowing up gigantic alien monsters and it seemed unsporting not to let Charity have a go. So I fumbled a match out and lit the touch-paper of her flare, which she had wedged into a gap between the pulpit and the rail at such an angle that it pointed towards the pursuing insect. The touch-paper smouldered, sparkled, and with a swoosh of alchemical flame which singed our clothes and took our eyebrows off, the flare went soaring skyward.

  But the pulpit chose that moment to buck, almost throwing us off, and the flare missed the moth entirely and shot up into the clouds, where its light was quickly lost.

  A dart snagged in the sleeve of my Norfolk jacket, but happily did not penetrate far enough to pierce my skin. Thank Heavens for good, thick tweed!

  ‘Art!’ cried Charity, above the rushing of the air past the pulpit. ‘The other flares! Will they not soon explode?’

  I had to concede that her point was a good one. The flares which powered our flight were meant to soar quickly for a hundred miles, but we must already have covered a large part of that distance, and soon they would detonate. I felt that it would be unwise to be aboard the pulpit when they did so.

  I seized hold of Charity’s hand again and together we scrambled to the top of the pulpit stairs – and jumped. We had long since left the floating island behind; only the swirling surface of the gas-sea lay below. We plunged into it and sank deep, while darts whizzed through the waters all around us, leaving trails of bubbles. Even before we regained the surface a dazzling light broke overhead, telling us that the flares attached to the pulpit had gone off.

  We rose, spluttering, into that brightness, treading water in the gassy sea while the brilliance slowly faded. Of the moth there was no sign, and, remembering the habits of earthly moths, I hoped that it might have been drawn to that flame and burned up. But after a minute or so, when the flares had fallen into the sea and their light had gone out, we heard the sweep of great wings and knew that it was still up there, flying to and fro in search of us. And then, from another quarter of the sky, more wing beats sounded …

  ‘There are two of the brutes!’ I gasped.

  ‘Oh Art,’ said Charity. ‘I think we must resign ourselves to captivity. If we do not let the moth-men take us, we shall surely drown. At least there is a chance that they will cast us into the same prison where they are keeping our parents.’

  I saw the sense in what she said, although it pained me to admit it, since no true Briton enjoys the prospect of surrender to a foreign foe. It seemed that I was to have no choice in the matter anyway; already the moth was drawing nearer, and after another half-minute its horrid form became apparent, descending through the vaporous billows a few hundred yards to my left.

  And then, a few hundred yards to my right, the second moth appeared – and, vague and ghostly though it was through all that fog, I sensed that there was something odd about it. I think the riders of the first moth sensed it, too – I heard them hissing to each other, and no darts came whirling down to knock out Charity or myself.

  The second moth’s wings beat more steadily and mechanically than the first, and sounded heavier, squeaking and clunking as they heaved up and down. Instead of fur, its great, rounded body was covered in oaken planks and sheets of copper, held in place by big square-headed nails. It was an aether-ship! And what was that line of square ports which opened so suddenly along its flank?

  ‘Duck!’ I told Charity.

  ‘Ooh, where?’ she asked, for she was a keen ornithologist, and she looked about eagerly for this specimen of Georgian bird life. As she was looking there came a resounding crash, and the mist on our right flared red and gold with cannon fire. Grape- and chain-shot went howling above our heads, and the giant moth crumpled like a circus tent with all its strings cut and collapsed into the gas-sea, throwing up waves which almost overwhelmed Charity and me. But by then the ship which had rescued us was edging nearer, and ropes were hanging down from her open hatches.

  I am sure you have already guessed what ship she was. I know I had. ‘Sophronia ahoy!’ I shouted, cupping my hands around my mouth as I washed up and down in the waves. ‘Sophronia! Sophronia!’ And she came lower, until she was riding like an ordinary ship upon the billows of the sea, and her main hatch opened and there stood Jack Havock, a piratical silhouette against the yellow light from the cabin!

  Chapter Ten

  Of Cocoa and a Captive.

  ‘Art?’ cried Jack. ‘Can that be you?’

  ‘It can and is,’ said I, striking out for the Sophronia, and looking back to make sure that Charity was following.

  ‘And is that Myrtle with you?’ asked Jack, squinting at her through the fog as he reached down to help us aboard.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘this is Miss Charity Cruet, whose father was a missionary here before those moth-riding ruffians made off with him. They have captured Myrtle too, I believe, as well as Father, Mother, Doctor Blears, the Burtons and the whole ship’s company of HMS Actaeon. Oh Heavens, Jack, but I am glad to see you!’

  I sat dripping beside him in the open hatchway while Nipper and the Tentacle Twins hauled Charity aboard. If Charity was alarmed at meeting a giant land-crab and two man-sized anemones, she did not let it show, being made (as I believe I’ve mentioned) out of Sterner Stuff than certain girls I know.

  ‘But how on earth did you manage it?’ I asked, as my mind ran on and I contemplated the sheer unlikeliness of Jack’s appearance there. ‘How did you come to Georgium Sidus so swiftly?’

  ‘Oh, that was ssssimple,’ laughed Ssilissa, joining the other Sophronias who were clustering about us. But we almost had to do without her explanation, for at the sound of her hissing voice Charity Cruet looked up, gave a cry of horror and, snatching Jack’s sword from his belt, swung it at Ssilissa with all her might!

  Luckily, all Charity’s might was no match for Mr Munkulus, who caught her wrists in two of his powerful hands and used a third to wrench the cutlass from her grasp. ‘Steady, young miss,’ he rumbled.

  ‘But she is one of them!’ cried Charity, much alarmed. ‘Art, we’re betrayed! These people are in league with the moth-riders!’

  ‘No, no,’ I assured her. ‘They are my friends. This is Ssilissa, the Sophronia’s alchemist, and as brave and true a blue lizard as one could ask to meet … ’

  ‘But hold hard,’ said Jack. ‘Are you telling us that those moth-jockeys look like Ssil?’

  ‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘I never saw one yet without his armour.’

  ‘Well, I have,’ said Charity, still glaring most suspiciously at Ssil. ‘And they are the very image of your friend here!’

  Ssil pushed past us and stood in the hatchway, gazing out into the fog. ‘Then there are more like me on this world … More like me, and we have drowned them!’

  I feared she was right, for only a few fragments of the smashed moth remained, mere flotsam on the bosom of the gas-sea, amid a greasy slick of silver dust. No doubt those riders in their spiny armour had sunk like stones, and good riddance – but I could not help feeling sorry for Ssil, who had sought so long after her own kind.

  ‘There are plenty more,’ I said consolingly. ‘They are on this world, but not of it. We don’t know where they come from, but there were hundreds of them up in orbit when the Actaeon arrived. Did you not encounter them yourselves?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘We saw the wreck of the Actaeon adrift among those lumpish moons,’ he said. ‘
But no sign of life.’

  ‘How did you come here, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘’Twas your mother’s doing, Art,’ he replied. ‘She left a note at Larklight, telling us where you had gone. And presents too: a Christmas cake for Grindle, a chart for me and a keg of some rare element for Ssil that made Sophronia fly faster than I believed a ship could fly. She was almost wrenched apart.’

  ‘Mother did the same for HMS Actaeon,’ I said sadly. ‘But we had no sooner reached the planet than a squadron of those monstrous moths attacked us, and battered her most dreadfully.’

  Jack nodded sombrely, as if he were seeing again the wreck that hung in orbit. ‘She’s a rare old mess, all right. When we saw her we feared – well, we feared the worst. Yet when we boarded her we found her empty. A ghost ship, coated with silvery dust … ’

  ‘The dust of moth wings!’ I explained.

  Jack nodded. ‘A dozen dead moths tumbled about her in the aether, and we saw fragments which told of the fall of many others. We thought they were mere monsters of space; we had no idea that they had had riders and that there was intelligence behind the attack upon your ship. But we saw that the lifeboat holds were empty, and then, when your flare came up through the clouds –’

  ‘Charity’s flare!’ I cried. ‘She fired it at the moth, but it missed.’