Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Airhaven

  Airhaven was a flying town at which airships from all over the world could dock to trade, provision and refuel. It inhabited a curious middle-ground in the long feud between Traction and Anti-Traction, enjoying friendly relations with both the League and the major towns and cities of the Hunting Ground; although very definitely a mobile city, it was not technically a Traction City and caused no damage; its existence was thus not an affront to Anti-Tractionists.

  It began as one of many caravanserais built among the high passes of the Shatterlands to cater to airships making the journey from the Middle Sea to the Hunting Ground. As the air-trade developed, these competing caravanserais moved further and further up the mountainsides (air-traders always preferred to anchor at the highest ones rather than waste gas, fuel and time descending to those at lower levels). This stepping-stone contest of climbing hill-towns went on for many decades, and did not stop when the caravanserais eventually ran out of mountain; they attached gas-balloons and large tethers so that their establishments could actually hang in the sky above their mountaintops, to be hauled down to safety in poor weather. Airhaven was the first to take this process to its logical conclusion by attaching engines and cutting its tethers, becoming, in effect, a gigantic, slow-moving airship.

  A number of other towns followed its lead, including Kipperhawk and Stratosphereham, but by 1000 TE Airhaven was the only one left, the others having variously drifted into volcanic ash-clouds, crashed or found themselves undone by the unfortunate combination of flammable gasbags and drunken Tractionist-versus-Anti-Tractionist gunfights.

  AIRSHIPS OF THE TRACTION ERA

  1. GREEN STORM AIR DESTROYER

  2. TWIN-ENVELOPE “SKY-CAT”

  3. “13TH FLOOR ELEVATOR”

  4. SPICE FREIGHTER

  5. MURASAKI FOX SPIRIT

  6. ANTI-TRACTION LEAGUE CRUISER

  7. “JENNY HANIVER”

  8. “GODDESS” CLASS LINER

  9. SERAPIS MOONSHADOW

  10. SPUDBURY SUNBEAM

  11. EXPERIMENTAL ROCKET-POWERED ZHANG CHEN HAWKMOTH MK V1

  12. HEAVIER-THAN-AIR FIGHTER

  13. ZHANG CHEN HAWKMOTH

  Airsperanto

  Combining elements of German, Chinese, Anglish and a hundred other tongues, Airsperanto is the common language of aviators, who are proud to (literally) rise above all the little petty differences of city against city or Tractionist against Anti-Tractionist.

  Aleutia

  An island chain in the Northern Pacific Ocean. Its eastern end is far too close to the dreaded shores of the Dead Continent for anyone to consider living there, but the westernmost islands have been inhabited at least since the Black Centuries by people who call themselves the Unangan. During the Traction Era these islands became a base for the Anti-Traction League, from where airship patrols could keep watch for amphibious cities approaching the shores of Nippon and Khamchatka. The airbases there were expanded and reinforced by the Green Storm during the Traction war.

  Algae

  At the height of Tractionism there were whole towns devoted to growing, harvesting and selling fresh produce. As prey dwindled, however, they were eaten one by one, and greenstuff became scarce. By the end of the Traction Era, most towns and cities devoted part of their upper tiers to huge greenhouses and polytunnels. Most grew crops of cress and other edible plants on exposed rooftops, and some resorted to sending out scavenging parties to gather edible weeds from the Out-Country. Mushrooms were grown in dark spaces in the cities’ depths, and many experiments were made to farm algae, which experts like those in London’s Guild of Engineers recognized as a valuable source of nutrients. Many cities had large vats and farms devoted to the growth of this green sludge. Its taste was, by most accounts, quite horrid.

  America

  (See Dead Continent, The)

  Ancients

  The name given to all the people who lived before the Sixty Minute War, and in particular to those of the Twenty-First Century, or “Screen Age” (so-called because of the vast number of screen-bearing devices which have been dug up from Ancient sites). Few written records survive from this time, leading some early historians to suggest that the people of the Screen Age, for all their power, had forgotten how to read or write. A popular theory holds that the Ancients somehow stored all their books, letters and other information inside their machines, and that their knowledge was lost with them when their civilization fell.

  Anglish

  A corruption of “American English”: the common language of most of the world.

  Anti-Traction League

  Though politically its roots can be traced to an alliance of upland nobles based around the static city of Tienjing, Shan Guonese legend holds that the League began in spirit when Lama Batmunkh laid the first stone in what was to become the Shield-Wall. While Tractionist historians sniffily point out that specific references to a “League” do not begin until many centuries later, and postmodernist historians contend that the concept of “walls” merely represents the pseudosemiotic discourse derived from the deconstruction of subcultural narratives, Batmunkh’s act was the beginning of a great wall-building tradition among the eastern kingdoms. The Mortar and Harmony Period, as it later came to be known, pooled the resources of the flatland kingdoms that had long sought to keep marauding nomads from their territory, and the monastic mountain orders who wished for better feng shui in the shape of the nations all about them; walls were laid out according to the Eight Trigrams and the principles of overlapping fields of fire. The walls at one point stretched from the Novosibirsk crater-clover to Kandahar, combining powerful symbolism with an obstacle that presented far more trouble than it was worth. While initially just a mutual defence-and-cosmic-harmony arrangement among a loose confederation of eastern states, with the rise of Traction Cities in the fifth and sixth centuries TE the League consolidated into a formal alliance, its member states contributing to a standing military. However, in its early days this military was rarely successful against Tractionism, and with ever-larger cities devouring its walls and flatland castles, the League gradually withdrew to the mountains and turned to rocketry and airships over bagua-based defences. While retaining its capital at Tienjing and spiritual home in Shan Guo, the League gradually came to represent anti-Tractionism everywhere, with the Spitzbergen Static, Tibesti and Zagwa variously counted among its member states or allies.

  (See Lama Batmunkh; Shan Guo; Green Storm)

  Archaeologists

  Long before the dawn of Traction, the marshy site of the old, static London was home to clans of scavengers who made their living by digging up the debris of the Ancient city and sifting though it for useful or attractive bits of old-tech. As they became more prosperous, the most successful of these diggers began to call themselves “archaeologists”, which sounded better than “scavenger” or “salvageman”. The term remained in use throughout the Traction Era, but the distinction between scavengers and archaeologists was always a vague one: scruffy Out-Country oiks who make a living pulling bits of old glass from Ancient rubbish-tips could style themselves “Archaeologists”, while rich and respected men like Thaddeus Valentine whose excavations added mightily to our knowledge of the Ancient world might be dismissed by their rivals as “mere scavengers”.

  Arkangel

  The Hammer of the High Ice; Scourge of the North, Devourer of the Spitzbergen Static; one of the older Traction Cities, founded by the remnants of the Arkhangelsk nomad empire after the Battle of Three Dry Ships. A merciless hunter, it scoffed at the code of Municipal Darwinism and enslaved all the inhabitants of the towns it caught. Captive suburbs were stripped down and used as drones to scout ahead of it as it skated across the High Ice. Within the city’s insulated armour life was equally unforgiving, dominated by a few great corporate families such as the Masgards, the Stanilands and the Kaels.

  Australi
a

  Long regarded as a myth, this great southern continent (also known as Oztralia, ’Stralia and Danundaland) was only rediscovered by air-traders in the 5th Century (although its northern coast had actually been recolonized long before by Anti-Tractionist settlers who had made their way there from the Hundred Islands.) The powerful city-states of the south, including Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, took enthusiastically to the idea of Municipal Darwinism, and were soon racing around the outback devouring their smaller neighbours. Sydney became the most famous of these antipodean Traction Cities, wearing its distinctive pointy opera house at a jaunty angle on its topmost tier, and hanging huge cork fenders from its tier-brims to ward off attacks by the Anti-Tractionist buccaneer airships which laired in the Blue Mountains.

  Bapsnack, Minty (956-1032)

  Daughter of the renowned scavenger Black Jack Bapsnack, who made a fortune from his popular Old-Tech emporium on Peripatetiapolis (“Black Jack Bapsnack’s Old-Tech Knick-Knacks”). Minty scandalized Peripatetiapolitan society by refusing to marry the man her father chose for her and setting out on a series of sight-seeing tours aboard her sky-yacht, accompanied by her staff and pet dogs. She wrote several books about these genteel adventures, including With Poodles to the Pole (Fewmet and Spraint, 979). In later years her name was often linked romantically with that of another well-known author and explorer, Nimrod Pennyroyal.

  Batmunkh, Lama

  A warrior monk who lived in the Tien Shan mountains around 1 TE. On seeing the rise of Tractionism among the nomads of the region he issued his great proclamation, the Pronouncement At Leaping Tiger Gorge, which is commonly translated as, “We’re not having any of that silly traction nonsense here!”, but probably sounded much more impressive in the original Shan Guonese. Like-minded people, driven from the lowlands by the traction nomads, flocked to Batmunkh’s fortified monastery (or “Gompa”), and while much rewriting and destruction of archives by the Green Storm has obscured the historical record, it is not impossible that he presided over the great assembly of upland nobles that gathered at Tienjing to form what would become the Anti-Traction League. As the League grew in power and cohesiveness in the fifth and sixth centuries TE, Lama Batmunkh became increasingly revered as its founder and prophet. Had he not, when viewing the wrecks of Rus landships after the Siege of Churlish Badger Mountain, declared, “These things will lead to trouble, you mark my words”? Again, it probably sounded better in the original. (See Anti-Traction League)

  Batmunkh Gompa

  The “City of Eternal Strength”, standing guard over a broad pass through the Tien Shan Mountains. Here, beneath the windows of the fortified monastery which gives the place its name, Lama Batmunkh first built a wall against the mobilized insanity of Tractionism.

  Over the following centuries the wall became bigger and bigger, and by the time of the Third Traction Boom it was seen as a sort of ultimate target for Traction Cities, the conquest that would give a city legitimacy as Apex Predator. Throughout its history, many great cities vowed to be the first to breach it, only to be destroyed by its rocket batteries and airships. The tallest stationary man-made structure in the world, the wall’s western face is armoured with the deck-plates of defeated assailants. The eastern face is densely built-up, with farmland stretching away eastward along the shores of the lake of Batmunkh Nor. At the wall’s summit stand the High Eyries, the hangars in which the largest airships of the Anti-Traction League’s Northern Fleet were stationed.

  Batmunkh Tsaka

  A static city in Shan Guo, home to the Green Storm’s central Stalker Works during the Traction War. Various daring aviators and mercenary fleets attempted to neutralize the Stalker Works, but tended to end up shot down and Resurrected.

  Battle of the Bay of Bengal

  A large, primarily aerial engagement between Tractionist and Green Storm forces in 1019 TE, which saw the first large-scale use of heavier-than-air craft; several mercenary air forces were involved, including the Junkyard Angels and Richard D’Astardley’s Flying Circus. After the bombing of Perfume Harbour and the loss of three Green Storm air-destroyers, both sides claimed victory. While militarily inconclusive, the heroism of the aviators and generally civilized conduct of the battle helped distract both sides from the grinding attrition developing on the Rustwater Salient and provided a reference point for armchair generals to look back on when grumbling, “War ain’t what it used to be”.

  Benghazi

  An old North African city and Tractionist stalwart, famous for having eaten the last of the Zagwan statics north of their strongholds in the Mountains of the Moon.

  Big Tilt

  In the latter half of the ninth century TE London began to suffer from structural problems, caused by over-expansion in the preceding centuries and a growing shortage of materials. Its journeys across the Shatterlands in 986 and 994 weakened it further, and led to a series of failures which culminated in the “Big Tilt” of 997, when a large portion of Tier Three collapsed onto the tier below. More than five hundred people were killed in the disaster, and the ensuing fires burned out of control for most of the night of April 14th. The Historian Thaddeus Valentine was the hero of the hour, selflessly risking his own life to rescue those trapped in the wreckage, and helping to encourage and co-ordinate the firefighters and salvage teams. In the aftermath of the tragedy it became clear that Purkiss & Watson, the company hired to maintain the tier support pillars in that part of the city, had been saving money by filling rust-holes with a mixture of grease and boot-polish rather than repairing them. The ensuing scandal led to the downfall of Lord Mayor Waverley Egg and the election of Magnus Crome, whose election portrayed him as “The man to get London moving again!”. Nevertheless, the Tilt and the costly repairs which followed it were a severe blow to the city, which spent most of the next decade away from the central Hunting Ground, lurking in the wet hills of its ancestral home, the former island of Britain. (See Valentine, Thaddeus; Crome, Magnus)

  Bird Roads

  The term “Bird Roads” referred originally to the established trade routes along which convoys of airships carried cargo, following the path of favourable high-level winds and winding through the various mountains, volcanoes and known pirate hotspots. Later, it was used to describe the air-trade in general. Many was the young lad who loitered near his city’s air-dock watching the airships come and go, air-train-spotting and dreaming of the day he would “take the Bird Roads.” (See Air-trade)

  Black Centuries

  After the Ancients destroyed themselves in the Sixty Minute War, there were several thousand years in which Nothing Much Happened. These were the Black Centuries. The great civilizations of the Screen Age had been utterly swept away, and humanity was reduced to a few scattered bands of savages, hiding in cellars and caverns to escape the plague-winds and the poisoned rain, and surviving on the canned goods which they managed to dig up from the ruins of their ancestors’ once-mighty cities. It was a savage age, when life was cheap, and most people would happily have sold their own children for a tin of rice pudding. (See Sixty Minute War; Raffia Hat Civilization)

  Black Island or Black Isle

  A volcanic island in the Sea of Khazak. The air-caravanserai there was a popular stop for air-traders.

  Blast-glass

  In parts of the world lie great craters, and within some of them the earth has been fused into glass by the energy of the terrifying weapons which the Ancients flung upon each other during the Sixty Minute War. Blast Glass was highly valued and popular as jewellery and decorative tiles during the Traction Era. Collecting it was said to be dangerous, as many Blast Glass miners succumbed to a wasting disease called the Glass-palsy. In olden times it was said that even the wearing of Blast Glass jewellery could bring on sickness, leading to legends that certain particularly large and elaborate pieces carried a curse.

  Blue Metal Culture

  One of the forgotten civilizations which
existed between the end of the Black Centuries and the beginning of the Traction Era, apparently wiped out by plague. They are known to Historians only by their machines and artefacts, which were made of a bluish alloy. Some credit their technology with frankly unlikely powers.

  Bordeaux-Mobile

  A specialized wine-making city, Bordeaux-Mobile spent its days trundling along the coasts of the Middle Sea letting the southern sun ripen the huge vineyards which it wore like a green wig. Beneath the vineyard decks lay the great treading, fermenting and bottling bays. Very few predators ever attempted to take the town, for fear of incurring the wrath of the wine connoisseurs of the entire Hunting Ground, and those that attempted to give chase often lost their way, as their navigators become intoxicated by the pall of alcohol fumes that followed the city everywhere.

  Boreal Regatta

  A great air-race, held each summer in the far north. The wealthy merchants of Arkangel bet huge amounts on the Regatta, and the sons of the great corporate families often entered their own air-yachts. The Anti-Tractionist aviatrix Anna Fang escaped from slavery aboard Arkangel as a young woman by promising her owner that she could build him an airship fast enough to win the Boreal Regatta: she then used it to flee the city.

  Borsanski-Novi

  Many and curious were the experimental ways devised by wild-eyed inventors during the Third Traction Boom to make their cities move. Tales are told of towns built on hovercraft-skirts, of towns which walked, and of one, Panjandrum, built within in the hub of a single vast wheel. All of them failed to move, or at least failed to move fast enough to escape the jaws of hungry predators. Few were shorter lived than Borsanski-Novi, a tiny Slavic city which thought it would be a good idea to use a set of massive springs in place of wheels. On its maiden voyage in 578 TE this so-called “pogo-city” managed to travel barely two hundred yards before it crashed to the ground and was eaten by Xanne-Sandansky.