Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  “Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms Twombley are having a fling,” she explained patiently.

  “Oh!” Cynthia looked scandalized. “Oh, poor Mistress! To think, a man of his age, throwing himself at slinky aviatrixes!”

  “I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than that,” Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl, who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he’d written in his silly books.

  “What?” asked Cynthia, intrigued. “What things?”

  “I’ll tell you another time,” Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would forget.

  To change the subject she said, “Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo’s chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always looks so sad.”

  “Oh, he’s another new arrival, like you,” said Cynthia excitedly. “He’s only been here for a few weeks. His name’s Theo Ngoni, and he used to be a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It’s meant to be ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it’s scary. I mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn’t we! Look at him! Don’t he look vicious?”

  Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it must have been for him, to be defeated and dragged away from his home and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel sorry for herself, too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way to escape from this place.

  For a few days Pennyroyal had taken a special interest in Wren, calling her “my fan from beneath the sea”, and lending her his latest book, a history of the war with the Green Storm. But he quickly forgot her, and she became just another of his wife’s many slaves.

  Her new life was simple. She rose each day at seven, breakfasted, and went with the other girls of Mrs Pennyroyal’s household to Mrs Pennyroyal’s bedchamber, where they woke Mrs Pennyroyal and helped her dress, and spent an hour working on her hairdo, which was elaborate, expensive and several feet tall. In the mornings, when the mayor went down to the Town Hall, his wife liked to take a long, relaxing wallow in the swimming pool. Sometimes in the afternoons, when Pennyroyal came home tipsy from something he called a “working lunch”, Boo-Boo took the cable car down to Brighton and went visiting, or opened things, but she never took any of her pretty young handmaidens with her, just a couple of slave-boys to carry her shopping.

  At eight in the evening, dinner was served; usually a big affair, with many guests, and Wren and the other girls running in and out with roast swan, shark steaks, sea-pie and great wobbling desserts. After that, Mrs Pennyroyal had to be helped to bathe, and dress for bed, before the girls were finally allowed to go to their own beds, in a dormitory on the ground floor.

  It was hard work sometimes, but when she was not busy attending to the mayoress Wren was allowed to do pretty much what she liked, and what she liked, in those first few weeks, was to wander about the Pavilion and its grounds with Cynthia Twite.

  Pennyroyal’s palace was a treasure-trove of wonders, and Wren loved the gardens, with their shaded walks and summerhouses, the elaborate topiary maze, the groves of blue-green cypresses and shrines to antique gods. Sometimes, as Brighton steamed south into warmer waters and golden autumn sunshine, she would stand at the handrail at the gardens’ edge and look down at the white city below her, at the shining sea, at the circling gulls and the airships and the pennants streaming on the wind, and wonder if it hadn’t been worth getting kidnapped and enslaved just to see so much beauty.

  But more and more, as the weeks wore by, she missed her mum and dad. She knew she had to get away from Cloud 9. But how? No airships were allowed to land on the airborne deckplate, so the only way off was by cable car, and the cable car was closely guarded by Brighton’s red-coated militia. And even if she made it down to Brighton, what good would that do her? She wore the brand of the Shkin Corporation, and if she tried to board an outbound ship she would be taken up as a runaway slave and handed straight back to Shkin.

  And all the time she was being carried further and further from her home. Brighton was nosing south down the long coast of the Hunting Ground, while dusty two-tiered traction towns kept pace with it on shore. Everybody was talking about the Moon Festival, Boo-Boo endlessly writing and rewriting the guest-list for the mayor’s ball, the cooks in the Pavilion kitchens working overtime to turn out moon-shaped cakes and silver moon-sweets. The rising of the first full moon of autumn was an event sacred to all the most popular religions. There would be parties and processions aboard Brighton, and all over the world the Moon Festival fires would burn in city and static alike. There would even be one lonely bonfire on the Dead Continent, for at Anchorage-in-Vineland Moon Festival was the biggest social event of the year.

  Wren imagined her friends piling up driftwood and broken furniture in the meadow behind the city, and maybe wondering where she was, and whether she was safe. How she wished she could be there with them! She couldn’t imagine how she had ever thought their lives dull, or why she had argued so with Mummy. Each night, lying in her bed in the slave quarters, she would hug herself and whisper the songs she used to sing when she was little, and pretend that the creaking of the hawsers which attached Cloud 9 to its gasbags was the murmur of waves against the shores of Vineland.

  Wren had almost forgotten Nabisco Shkin, and, to be fair, Nabisco Skin had almost forgotten her. Sometimes as he went about his busy round of meetings he glanced up at Cloud 9 and allowed himself to feel a momentary pleasure at the revenge he would take on the girl who had tricked him, but his plans for a slaving expedition to Vineland were at a very early stage, and he had more pressing business to attend to.

  Today, for instance, he had received a very interesting note from a man named Plovery.

  Descending to the Pepperpot’s mid-level, he exited through a side-door and strode quickly into the maze of the Laines. These narrow streets, lit only by sputtering argon-globes and by shafts of sunlight which poked down through vents and skylights in the deckplates overhead, were the haunt of beggars, thieves and ne’er-do-wells, but Shkin was well enough known to walk them without a bodyguard. Even the most witless of Brighton’s lowlifes had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who dared lay a finger on Nabisco Shkin. People stepped out of his way, and turned to watch him when he had gone past. Roistering aviators were tugged out of his path by their friends. Unwary drug-touts and gutter-girls started back as if his glance had burned them. Only one miserable, dread-locked beggar, leading a dog on a length of string, dared to whine, “A few spare dolphins, sir? Just to buy some food?”

  “Eat the dog,” suggested Shkin, and made a mental note to send a snatch squad to this district once Moon Festival was over. He would be doing his city a favour by sweeping these scum off the streets, and they would all fetch a profit at the autumn markets.

  He entered a narrow alleyway behind a fried fish stall, holding a handkerchief to his nose to ward off the stench of pee and batter. In the windows of a scruffy shop at the alley’s end mounds of junk and Old-Tech glimmered. PLOVERY, said the faded sign above them, and the jangle of the bell as Shkin opened the door brought the antiquary scurrying from a back room.

  “You wished to see me?”

  “Why yes, sir, yes…” Plovery bowed and beamed, and twined his thin, white fingers into knots. Annoyed at Pennyroyal’s decision to find a buyer for the Tin Book without his help, the antiquary had decided to take what he knew about it to another wealthy man. His note had dropped into Shkin’s in-tray just an hour ago, and he was impressed and a little startled to find Shkin standing here in person quite so soon. Nervously, he told the slave-dealer all that he had learned.

  “Military, eh?” said Shkin,
just as Pennyroyal had a few hours earlier. “An ancient weapon?”

  “Just a code, sir,” Plovery cautioned. “But perhaps a clever man who understood such things might work backwards from the code and reconstruct the machine which it was written for. That could be valuable, sir. And as Pennyroyal told me that he had got the book from you – I tricked that creep Shkin into handing it over for free were his exact words, sir, if you’ll forgive me – well, I thought you might be interested, sir.”

  “I have already made arrangements that will repay His Worship for that little episode,” said Shkin, annoyed that this wretch knew how Pennyroyal had outwitted him. He was intrigued by Plovery’s story, all the same. “You made a copy of the book, of course?”

  “No, sir. Pennyroyal will not let it out of his sight. It is in his safe at the Pavilion. But if I had a buyer, sir, I might be able to get my hands on it. I am a frequent visitor to the Pavilion, sir.”

  Shkin twitched an eyebrow. He was interested, but not interested enough yet to lay down the sort of money that he knew Plovery would want. “I deal in slaves, not Old-Tech.”

  “Of course, sir. But what if it does turn out to be some ancient weapon? It might tip the balance. End the war. And the war has been so good for business, sir, has it not?”

  Shkin pondered for a moment. Then nodded.

  “Very well. The thing is mine by rights anyway. ‘Finders Keepers’, you know. I do not like to think of Pennyroyal profiting from it. I take it you know the combination of his safe?”

  Plovery said, “22-09-957. Twenty-second of September, nine-hundred and fifty-seven TE. It’s His Worship’s birthday.”

  Shkin smiled. “Very well, Plovery. Fetch me the Tin Book.”

  21

  THE FLIGHT OF A SEAGULL

  That afternoon, when luncheon was over and the preparations for dinner not yet begun, Wren wandered through the kitchen garden and out into the grounds behind the Pavilion to watch a wing of the Flying Ferrets take off on patrol. The Ferrets had set up a temporary airfield in a little-used part of the gardens behind the Pavilion. Wren knew most of the strange machines by sight now, and recognized them as they taxied out of their hangars; the Visible Panty Line and the Tumbler Pigeon, the Austerity Biscuit and the JMW Turner Overdrive. The ground-crews fitted them into spring-loaded canvas catapults and sent them hurtling over the edge of the deckplate, while the aviators gunned their engines and prayed that their wings would find a purchase on the air before they plunged into the dirty sea off Brighton’s stern.

  Wren watched from the handrail at the gardens’ brink while Ferret after Ferret pulled out of its dive and went zooming off across the rooftops, doing ill-advised aërobatics and letting off canisters of green and purple smoke. It was a spectacle that she had always enjoyed before, but today it only made her feel more homesick than ever. She would have liked to tell Dad about the Ferrets’ machines.

  Behind the aërodrome stood a whale-backed hillock of copper, screened by cypress trees. Wren had noticed it from a distance before, but she had never bothered to take a closer look, assuming that it was just another of the abstract sculptures which littered the lawns of Cloud 9, bought by Pennyroyal to keep his supporters in the Artists’ Quarter happy. Today, having nothing better to do, she wandered towards it. As she drew nearer she started to realize that it was a building, with huge, curved doors at one end and a fan-shaped metal pavement outside. The copper curves of its walls and roof were studded with decorative spines, so that it looked like a giant puffer-fish surfacing through the grass. A spindly exterior staircase led up one side, and Wren climbed up it and peeked in through a high window.

  In the shady interior sat a sky-yacht so delicate and sleek that even Wren, who knew nothing about airships, could tell that it was ferociously expensive.

  “That’s the Peewit,” said a helpful voice behind her. Cynthia was standing at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Wren,” she added. “I’m going to the household shrine; I simply must make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Beauty; I really want to lose weight before Moon Festival. You should come with me. You could ask her to do something about your spots.”

  Wren was more interested in yachts than spots. She turned back to the window. “The Peewit… Is she Pennyroyal’s?”

  “Of course.” Cynthia climbed halfway up the stairs. “She’s called a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow – very fancy. But the mayor hardly ever takes her up any more. He keeps her polished and full of lifting-gas, but the only time she gets used is when Boo-Boo goes shopping aboard another city.”

  “Won’t the mayor be using her in the MoonFest Regatta?” asked Wren.

  “Oh, no; he’s got a vintage airship moored down in Brighton. He’s going to be flying her, with that Orla Twombley as his co-pilot. She’s going to lead a Fly-past of Historic Ships, and there’s to be an Air Battle with real rockets, just like in Prof Pennyroyal’s books. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s had the most amazing adventures on the Bird Roads.”

  Wren looked again at the yacht, thinking of the airship that Pennyroyal had stolen from her parents all those years before. Might it be possible for her to sneak down here at dead of night, slide open the boathouse doors and take off aboard the Peewit? That would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it!

  A faint drum-beat of hope began to throb deep down inside her. It cheered her up no end as Cynthia took her hand and led her towards the slaves’ and servants’ shrine behind the Pavilion kitchens. She barely heard her friend’s bright chatter about make-up and hairstyles. In her imagination she was already piloting the Peewit westward; she was crossing the Dead Hills, the lakes of Vineland were shining blue below her, and her parents were running to greet her as she touched down in the fields of Anchorage.

  The only trouble was, Wren had no idea how to fly a Type IV Serapis Moonshadow. Or anything else for that matter. But she knew someone who did.

  Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas which she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn’t notice. The rest were always disobeying her rule and trying to sneak into one another’s quarters, which pained Boo-Boo. But at least Theo Ngoni never gave her any cause for concern. Theo Ngoni never spoke to anyone.

  Wren, though, was determined to speak to Theo Ngoni, and she found her chance a few days after her discovery of the boathouse. Boo-Boo had gone down to Brighton, and Pennyroyal had collared Wren and Cynthia to act as his towel-holders while he took a dip in the pool. By a lucky chance Theo was on duty at the pool-side too, carrying the mayor’s spare swimming goggles on a silver platter. While Pennyroyal dozed on his drifting lilo Wren sidled up to her fellow slave and whispered, “Hello!”

  The boy looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, but said nothing. Wren wondered what to do next. She had never been this close to Theo before. He was very handsome, and although Wren was tall, Theo was taller still, which made her feel young and silly as she stood there at his side.

  “I’m Wren,” she said.

  He looked away again, out across the gardens and the blue sea, towards a distant haze on the horizon that Wren had been told was Africa. Maybe he was homesick. She said, “Is that where you come from?”

  Theo Ngoni shook his head. “My home was in Zagwa. A static city in the mountains, far to the south.”

  “Oh?” said Wren encouragingly, and, “Is it nice?” but the boy said no more. Determined to keep the conversation going she added,
“I didn’t know the Green Storm had bases in Africa. That book Prof Pennyroyal lent me said that the African statics didn’t approve of the war.”

  “They don’t.” Theo turned his head to look at her, but it was a cold look. “I ran away from my family to travel to Shan Guo and join the Storm’s youth wing. I thought it would be a glorious thing to fight against the barbarian cities, and sweep them from the earth.”

  “Gosh, yes,” agreed Wren. “I’m an Anti-Tractionist myself, you know.”

  Theo stared at her. “I thought you were a Lost Girl. From that place under the sea.”

  “Oh yes, I am,” said Wren quickly, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “But Grimsby didn’t move, it wasn’t a moving city, so that makes me a Mossie through and through. Did you fight in many battles?”

  “Only one,” said Theo, looking away again.

  “You got captured on your first go? Oh, bad luck!” Wren tried to sound sympathetic, but she was fast losing patience with this sullen, gloomy boy. Maybe all that she’d heard about the Storm and its soldiers was true; they were brainwashed fanatics. Still, she was sure he must want to leave Cloud 9 as badly as she did, and she thought it unlikely that he would betray her to the hated Tractionists, so she decided to take a chance and tell him about her plan.

  She glanced round and saw that Pennyroyal was asleep. The other slaves were dozing too, or whispering together on the far side of the pool, while Cynthia, who was closest, was studying her freshly varnished fingernails with a frown of deep concentration. Wren sidled even closer to Theo and whispered, “I know a way we can escape.”

  Theo said nothing, but he stiffened slightly, which Wren thought was a good sign.