Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small once-born boy came and stood looking at Shrike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ochre skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.

  “HELLO,” said Shrike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking to him in a language which he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak-trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Shrike’s joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl-pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds’ nests and moss.

  The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult once-born came to stare at Shrike, and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to decipher their language. They’d thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers’ mothers’ time.

  Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Shrike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Shrike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring-towers. Silvery discs, like misty mirrors, swivelled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat-haze.

  They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city’s heart. People crowded round him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine-men out of the old stories?

  Shrike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate each other. The once-born laughed. Of course there weren’t; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad idea!

  “What are you for?” asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Shrike looked down at him. He pondered a while, thinking of something Dr Popjoy had told Anna.

  “I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE,” he said. “What do you remember?”

  “I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM.”

  His listeners looked blank. Someone said, “Who were they?”

  “THEY LIVED LONG AGO. IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY TO ME.”

  The little girl who’d found Shrike looked up at him and said, “Tell us!” Around her, people smiled, and nodded, settling down cross-legged, waiting to see what stories he had brought for them out of the lost past. They liked stories. Shrike felt, for a moment, almost afraid. He didn’t know how to begin.

  He sat down on the chair they brought for him. He took the little girl on his lap. He watched dust-motes dancing in the ancient sunlight that poured like honey through the hall’s long windows. And then he turned his face towards the expectant faces of the once-born, and began.

  “IT WAS A DARK, BLUSTERY DAY IN SPRING,” he said, “AND THE CITY OF LONDON WAS CHASING A SMALL MINING TOWN ACROSS THE DRIED-UP BED OF THE OLD NORTH SEA…”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A Darkling Plain and its three predecessors would have been quite different kettles of fish without the inspiration, advice and encouragement which their author has received from Brian Mitchell, Leon Robinson, Liz Cross, Mike Grant and Gavin Wilson. Gigantic thank yous are also due to my editors, Kirsten Stansfield, Holly Skeet and Katy Moran, and to everyone at Scholastic who has worked so hard to make the Mortal Engines quartet a success. For help with a couple of details in the present volume I am indebted to Alison Janzen, and to my father, Michael Reeve, who seems to know everything. And thanks, finally, to Nick and Kjartan, who let me take their names in vain.

  Philip Reeve

  Dartmoor, 2006

  One of the greatest fantasy worlds ever created. Read them all…

  Aboard London, lowly apprentice Tom Natsworthy longs to be part of the next attack. When he saves his chief from a mad assassin, he is suddenly flung from the speeding city with a mysterious scar-faced girl. They must run for their lives through the wastelands, tracked by an unstoppable cyborg programmed to kill them…

  A lone, frozen city speeds across the northern Ice Wastes. Far above, a tiny, crippled aircraft falls from the sky. Tom and Hester seek refuge from enemy gunships in ghostly Anchorage. But the silent city is full of deadly secrets…

  The mighty engines of Anchorage are dead. Life on the static city is worlds away from the terrors of Tom and Hester’s war-torn past. But their teenage daughter Wren longs for adventure. One rebellious act unleashes a lethal conflict that threatens to destroy them all…

  The greatest predator city of them all lies in ruins. London is dead, but rumours spread that its metal corpse hides incredible secrets. Tom and Hester have been torn apart by war and treachery. And the next generation of adventurers is about to face the final battle as their world explodes around them…

  THE PREQUELS

  Thousands of years from now, a baby is abandoned in the ruins of London. Rescued by some eccentric Engineers, Fever Crumb grows up unaware that she is the keeper of an explosive secret. Are the mysterious powers she possesses the key that will save London from a new and terrible enemy?

  In a faraway corner of a ruined world, a mysterious boy is building a flying machine. Birds help him, and so does a beautiful, brilliant engineer called Fever Crumb. Powerful enemies stalk them – either to possess their fantastic invention, or to destroy the secrets of flight forever.

  In a future land once known as Britain, nomad tribes are preparing to fight a terrifying enemy - the first-ever traction city. In the chaotic weeks before battle begins, Fever Crumb must journey to the wastelands of the North in search of a mysterious black pyramid, whose secrets will change her world forever.

  The Traction Era

  “Many of us who live aboard Traction Cities like to believe that they have lasted for ‘A Thousand Years’ – a belief which our rulers choose to encourage, since a thousand is such a nice, round number and gives an air of such immense age and dignity to these clanking city-states of ours. Similarly, the elders of the Anti-Traction League often boast of the ‘thousand years’ which have passed since Lama Batmunkh first took arms against the forces of Municipal Darwinism. But history is seldom so neat, and the history of the Traction Era is no exception...”

  (Chudleigh Pomeroy, a London Historian, writing in 1000 TE.)

  Historians disagree about exactly when the Traction Era can be said to have begun, but most take the year 1 TE to refer to the (estimated) time when nomads first started motorizing. The centuries-old aftershocks of the Sixty Minute War had still not died away, and the climate alternated unpredictably between brief ice-ages and warmer periods of violent storms. Even the Earth itself seemed restless, shuddering with earthquakes and sprouting new volcanoes. Mass migration became a way of life, and it was the itinerant nations of Europe (at that time known as “Europa”, later called “The Great Hunting Ground”) who first applied the half-understood traction technology of the Ancients to their wagons and mobile homes. The mechanized empires that sprang up during this First Traction Boom included the Scriven, the Arkhangelsk, the Movement, the Republique des Blindes and the Traktionreichs. Their wagon trains and motor-and-bailey castles bore scant resemblance to the towering Traction Cities of later centuries, but quickly came to dominat
e much of Europe, especially in the harsh north. In Asia, as a response to incursions by nomad landships, various wall-building and defence collectives came about under leaders such as Lama Batmunkh, the stirrings of what would eventually become the Anti-Traction League.

  However, as the climate stabilized over the next four centuries, stationary living became a more attractive option again. Many of the once-mobile nations settled down, and Anti-Tractionist and technophobic ideas were resurgent in Europe, especially in backwaters like Mayda; while roving convoys of trade barges were a common sight everywhere, large independent nomad empires were primarily confined to northern Europe, with the temperate southern lands forming a demotorized zone.

  All this changed when the Movement, a particularly technological and aggressive northern empire, conquered London around 477 TE and began transforming it into the first true Traction City. The success of London, and the lesson of “bigger is better” it taught at the Battle of Three Dry Ships, inspired a Second Traction Boom, in which the richer and more powerful static nation-states of Europe attempted to copy them, notable among them Paris, Murnau and the regrouped nomad tribe Arkangel. Traction Cities of those days were highly militarized machines, as much mobile castles as cities, and generally considered cannon their first, last and only argument.

  There then followed a long, chaotic period of hardship and protracted unpleasantness known as the Wheeled War or Forty Years War, as mobile cities, nomad war-bands and static city-states fought ceaselessly over borders. This state of affairs ended only when, in the early sixth century TE, crusades from the Zagwan Empire swept across the Mediterranean in an attempt to invade Europe and crush Tractionism and techno-heresy forever. Forced to cooperate against the greater Zagwan threat, Europe’s Tractionists were eventually victorious.

  The Diet of Ulp, a peace conference held between the cities in 520 TE, set out the tenets of a less martial system of Municipal Darwinism, and marks the beginnings of the Golden Age of Traction. Chesney Hallam, Lord Mayor of London, spread out a map of Europe before his rival mayors and declared, “This is not a battlefield! This is a hunting ground!” He reminded them of the theory of Municipal Darwinism, which had been gaining popularity among Tractionists for several decades. There was no need for cities to fight, he explained, since it was the natural order of things that bigger, faster cities should catch and eat their smaller brethren. The prey might run, but, if it lacked the speed or luck to escape, its citizens should accept their lot, and be glad to let their town be swallowed by a larger, fitter city. In return, the victorious city should not murder or enslave the people it had caught, but should welcome them as valuable new additions to its own population. “Gentlemen,” Hallam concluded, “Turn your swords into ploughshares! Then, bolt them onto the front of your cities and use them to eat each other!”

  From then, the use of artillery and boarding parties was banned by all self-respecting towns and cities, and the energy and treasure which they had once put into their gun batteries was expended instead upon faster engines and bigger jaws. Any scepticism among the older cities was quickly overcome as a Third Traction Boom swept through Europe’s statics, providing large amounts of prey that was a) small and easily devoured, or b) kept falling over on its experimental pogo springs (see Borsanski Novi). Playing By The Rules proved most profitable, and a complex code of chivalry evolved governing the circumstances under which towns might be chased and eaten, and the treatment of captives. Naturally there were always a few towns which refused to abide by these rules, and continued to shoot the wheels off their prey and sell their captives into slavery, but they were rightly despised by all decent Tractionists.

  Timeline

  1 TE: First Traction Boom

  260 TE: The Scriven, an eccentric nomad empire, conquer London.

  267 TE: Breakaway elements of the Ostertraktionreich form a new mobile empire, the Movement.

  463 TE: Fall of the Scriven. Fever Crumb born.

  469 TE: Nikola Quercus becomes Land Admiral of the Movement.

  477 TE: The Movement conquers London.

  477-480 TE: Mobilization of London sparks the Second Traction Boom, as stolen copies of Godshawk Land Engines spread across Western Europe.

  480-520 TE: The Wheeled War. Remnants of the nomad empires, Anti-Tractionist punitive expeditions, and the first generation of Traction Cities all fight each other, resulting in four decades of general violence, misery and horror.

  518-520 TE: The Zagwan Crusade. Zagwa, appalled by the rise of Traction Cities, launches a series of massive, but ultimately unsuccessful, sea-borne assaults on the southern coasts of Europe. The defeat of the Zagwan armies, combined with the crippling cost of the crusades, begins the long decline of the Zagwan Empire, which is left without the means to suppress rebellions in vassal-states like Tibesti or to defend its northern borders against Tractionism.

  520 TE: The Diet of Ulp. The leading Traction Cities, having worked together to defeat the Zagwan Crusade, sign a formal truce. Signatories include the Lord Mayors of London, Motoropolis, Novi Karlovac and Murnau. The Third Traction Boom begins, and lasts for many more years, eventually culminating in Tractionist dominance over most of Europe, northern Africa, and Nuevo Maya.

  600-800 TE (Approx): The Golden Age of Traction; large mobile cities thrive, with plenty of smaller towns and surviving static settlements for all to eat, and an unofficial truce with the Anti-Traction League. Many cities reproduce, building suburbs to carry away their surplus populations and spread their cultures. The air-trade also booms, and great leaps forward in airship technology occur.

  900/926 TE: A mini ice age, best remembered for the dreadful Iron Winter of 919. Grimsby sunk by pack ice in the North Atlantic. Northern towns and cities snowed in, or forced to move south in search of prey. Regarded by many as the beginning of the end for Tractionism: scarcer resources mean that suburbs are no longer being built, while an increase in volcanic activity in the north makes large parts of the Frost Barrens impassable.

  997 TE: The Big Tilt hits London, causing many deaths and seriously damaging the city. Thaddeus Valentine is appointed Head Historian.

  1007 TE: Events of Mortal Engines: London makes its push for the Shield-Wall.

  1009/10 TE: Predator’s Gold. A coup in the Anti-Traction League as the Green Storm take over and begin mobilization.

  1012 TE: The Green Storm begins its first big assault on the Great Hunting Ground. At first the cities are driven helplessly before the onslaught of its air fleets, and many are destroyed. The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft, an alliance of cities, is founded in response. The beginning of the Traction War.

  1014 TE: “The Red Winter” – large battle involving Murnau. The Green Storm land squads of Stalkers on the city’s upper decks.

  1019 TE: Battle of the Bay of Bengal.

  1022-1023 TE: The Rustwater Salient and the Altai front are stalemated, and fronts largely stabilized, though fruitless attacks are launched by both sides through the winter of ‘22.

  1025 TE: Events of Infernal Devices.

  1026 TE: Events of A Darkling Plain.

  GLOSSARY

  Air-caravanserai

  A static, fortified fuelling station and trading post where airships on long hauls could stop for rest and maintenance. The caravanserais tended to be found in mountain ranges or upland areas where they were safe from hungry cities, and where airships did not have to descend too far. (See Airhaven; Black Isle)

  Air-destroyer

  The grandest warships of the Green Storm and the old Anti-Traction League’s battle fleets; vast airships with crews running to the hundreds, armed with great batteries of rockets and anti-city cannon. The Storm’s “Divine Raincloud” combat doctrine favoured stationing air-destroyers at a safe altitude above cities, discharging Tumblers, dumb bombs, assault gliders and fighter airships. Examples: Fury, Mono No Aware (The Sadness of Things), Sword Flourished in Understa
ndable Pique, Hungry Ghost, Requiem Vortex, Autumn Rain from the Heavenly Mountains. (See Tumblers.)

  Air-trade

  Lighter-than-air flight emerged in Europe sometime in the 6th century TE; however, the Anti-Traction League always claimed to have had it for far longer, using yak-skin balloons to reach their hilltop cities. The Air-trade took off greatly in the early years of Traction Cities, when it was widely recognized as a sensible way of a) trading with cities that were not always where you left them and b) not being eaten by them. The increasing use of airships led to the end of the old nomadic merchant convoys whose land barges had criss-crossed Europe since the dawn of Traction: the few merchants whose barges had not been eaten by peckish cities swapped them for dirigibles, or simply lashed them to gasbags and rose above the fray. Air-traders often travelled in large convoys, where their numbers protected them against air-pirates and the other perils of the sky. (See Sky Train.)

  Throughout the Traction Era the air-trade was considered “neutral ground” and was the main route for semi-official trade between cities and the static nations of the ATL. Naturally, in times of tension, both sides used the air-trade as a handy means of inserting spies and saboteurs into the strongholds of the other, and in harsh times some aviators were not above working as freelance spotters for predatory cities. (See Predator’s Gold.)