by Philip Reeve
In London during the Golden Age the Guild of Historians was almost as powerful as the Engineers, indicating the importance of Old-Tech to the city, but also its respect for knowledge and learning – at the urging of the Historians London would sometimes travel for thousands of miles to catch a town with a renowned museum or library. In later years, following the Big Tilt the Engineers re-established their dominance, and by 1007 the seats in the council chamber on Top Tier were distributed as follows: 50% Engineers, 15% Historians, 15% Navigators, 10% Merchants, 10% “Lesser Guilds” (including the Guilds of Physicians, Lawyers, Manufacturers, and Gut Operatives).
Gut
The hangars and harvesting districts on the lower levels of traction cities where resources were processed and captured towns were stripped down. On large cities like London the Gut was heavily automated, with huge dismantling machines to tear the prey apart and conveyor belts to carry the salvaged fuel and material away into other parts of the city. In smaller or more backwards places the Gut might be just a big empty room and some gangs of workers with angle-grinders. It has been suggested that the term “Gut” derives from the huge hangars at the lowest level of London, which were originally known as the G.U.T. or “Great Under Tier”.
Harvester suburb
A new configuration of suburb, built specifically for combat in the war against the Green Storm. Harvesters were low, heavily armoured and designed to break through fortifications and harvest resources behind Storm lines. Some of the fiercest were Werwolf, Evercreech, Harrowbarrow, and Melton Mowbray.
Historians, Guild of (London)
Many cities boasted a Guild of Historians, but London’s was the oldest and the finest. Founded in 525 TE by historians and tech-hunters wishing to emulate the respect and high-standing of the Guild of Engineers. Famous Historians include Fever Crumb, Chesney Hallam (later Lord Mayor) Pisistratus Potts (later Lord Mayor), Waverley Egg, Milton Lambwrack, Hartley Pewtertide, Chudleigh Pomeroy and Thaddeus Valentine.
Homing beacon
Radio beacons mounted aboard most towns and cities to guide airships to them. These devices replaced old-fashioned visual navigation aids on most cities, although Brighton kept its Pharos Wheel (a popular tourist attraction) for nostalgia’s sake. Each city had a distinct tone or radio signature, and experienced aviators learned to recognize Arkangel’s wavering howl or the homely warble of the Airhaven transmitter as they cut through the spluttering static of the Bird Roads.
Hunting Ground
The continent formerly known as Europe, or Europa, although at some periods the “Hunting Ground”, or “Great Hunting Ground” extended all the way across northern Asia to the Pacific. Also, no one is sure whether the term should include the offshore hunting runs of raft cities in the Atlantic and the Middle Sea. Regarded by London’s Guild of Navigators as a vague and unsatisfactory folk term.
Hundred Islands
Also known as the Thousand Islands, although that term is not often used by serious travellers since it sounds too much like a salad dressing. In fact there are over 7,000 islands in this huge archipelago, including Java, Maluku, Halmahera and Palau Pinang. The region was mainly Anti-Tractionist, although piratical Dyak-towns and Chinese-speaking raft cities engaged in frequent raiding and trading voyages among the smaller, more remote islands. (See Palau Pinang)
Ice Waste(s)
Those regions of the world closest to the poles. The term was most often used to refer to the northern Ice Waste, a hunting ground for nomads and mobile cities. Its borders fluctuated many times over the centuries, the edges of the ice-sheet sometimes reaching far south into the Hunting Ground.
The Southern or Antarctic Ice Waste was less well inhabited, but Nuevo-Mayan and Australian merchant venturers built a number of vast, mobile, oil-drilling platforms there.
Jaegerstadts
“Hunting cities” – the German name for predatory towns and cities, dating back to the days of Traktionturnieren when there was a distinction between the Jaegerstadts, who chased after their prey, and the Turnierenstadts, who preferred jousting. Though the term has fallen out of fashion as most German-speaking Traction Cities now identify merely as Traktionstadts, some have kept the old title as part of their name, such as Jaegerstadt Ulm and Jagdstadt Magdeburg.
Jaws
Structures at the front of Traction Cities designed to seize smaller towns, and, in some cases, to drag them into the city’s gut.
Juggernautpur
“The City of Shrines”, Juggernautpur was completely covered in carvings and idols, and fabulously wealthy. One of the four dominant Traction Cities on the Indian subcontinent. For more information see Minty Bapsnack’s Khaja with the Rajah: Travels in search of Cake Among India’s Metropoli (Perpatetiapolis University Press, 982).
Kom Ombo
One of the earliest African cities to go mobile as the Zagwan Empire collapsed, Kom Ombo eventually became a vast, nine-tiered traction city. It prided itself on the splendour of its many mosques. Thaddeus Valentine, who stopped there to refuel on one of his voyages to the Dead Continent, referred to its “thousand minarets”, although some of them were probably just over-decorated exhaust stacks.
Land engines
Engines were the heart of Tractionism. The date of 1 TE is generally held to mark the moment at which European nomads first started motorizing their animal-drawn land-ships and wagons with crude steam engines. Development was slow and patchy afterwards, thanks to the superstitious fear of technology, which was widely held to have brought about the fall of the Ancients. What little development there was was in the hands of technomancers; shaman-mechanics who often had barely any idea what they were doing. Slowly, however, improvements were made, and the study of Ancient relics dug from the permafrost of the northern Frost Barrens enabled larger and more powerful engines to be built. One of the smallest nomad empires, the Movement, was able to hold its larger rivals at bay for several centuries due to its superior engine technology. Its last leader, the great modernizer Nikola Quercus (also known as Nicholas Quirke) was the man who set London moving; however, it is believed that the massive land-engines which powered his mobile city were actually based on designs created by Auric Godshawk, a technomancer-king of the Scriven.
Most city-engines were designed to be omnivorous and operate on a wide variety of fuels, depending on what was available: coal, trees, fuel oil, methane were popular, though attempts to run cities on sewage, grass and seawater proved unsuccessful.
A few popular engine types include:
Godshawk engines (London)
C20 (Salthook)
C50 Super-Stirling (Harrowbarrow)
Mitchell & Nixon engines (Brighton)
Scabious Spheres (Anchorage)
Lazarus Brigade
Many tales are told of this legendary company of Stalkers. Assembled by the technomancers of the Movement, they fought in countless battles until they were finally destroyed at the Battle of Three Dry Ships. Even after that a few survivors continued to haunt the north, including the terrible Stalker known as “Shrike” or “Grike”. (See Shrike)
Limpets
Mobile six-, eight- or ten-legged amphibious submarines. Capable of holding small crews, the limpets were parasites which would cling to undersides of raft cities while their crews crept out to rob and burgle. See Predator’s Gold by Nimrod Pennyroyal (Fewmet and Spraint, 1010).
Lifting-gas or luftgaz
A catch-all term for all the many different sorts of lighter-than-air gas used to keep airships aloft. These included hydrogen, helium, methane, hot ammonia and coal gas. Helium was favoured by aviators from the Anti-Traction League airships as their static homelands had the mining infrastructure in place to find it. As helium airships were generally safer the ATL traditionally built larger ships, including the towering spice freighters of the Hundred Islands, which made immense voyages at high altitudes. Tr
actionists preferred hydrogen, which Traction Cities could easily split from water, having access to plenty of power for electrolysis. However, hydrogen-filled airships had a reputation for what airship manufacturers called “sudden catastrophic venting” and everyone else called “exploding”. This led to a lasting distrust of airships among the traction cities, which usually restricted them to specialized docking areas, as far as possible from the main parts of the city, where fires could be more easily brought under control. It also partly explains why, when war came to the Hunting Ground, the Green Storm invested in fleets of ever-larger air destroyers while the cities sought heavier-than-air solutions.
London
The first and (according to Londoners at least) greatest Traction City; mobilized by Nicholas Quirke and the Movement.
For a somewhat sensationalized but passably accurate account of London’s momentous push east in 1007, see Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.
Marseilles
One of the earliest raft cities, the citizens of Marseilles fought bravely against Zagwan war-galleys during the First Zagwan Crusade, and the Marseilleise have always claimed that it was their actions which delayed the arrival of the Zagwan invasion fleet long enough for resistance to be organized by land-based traction cities. In later years it travelled widely, circumnavigating the globe several times in search of trade and prey. In 986 it devoured several Anti-Tractionist harbours on the northern coast of Australia, and was sunk soon afterwards when an Anti-Tractionist infiltrator planted a bomb in its engine district.
Middle Sea
The Mediterranean; a bustling pond filled with hunting and trading cities.
Mobile Free States
A federation of traction towns and a few larger cities created during the Traction War, which defended a large territory in the eastern Hunting Ground and attacked Anti-Tractionist strongholds in Khamchatka and the Altai Shan; the largest of them was the Traktiongrad conurbation. The Free States liked to compare themselves to the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft, but relations between the two alliances were often uneasy, since the Free States were viewed by those in the west as mere pirate towns which were using the war with the Green Storm as an opportunity to increase their own power and influence.
Moon Festival
Worship of the Moon seems to have been widespread during the Black Centuries, perhaps because of a belief that people living there had survived the Sixty Minute War unscathed and would return to set things right (some historians believe that the Moon Goddess herself is just a distorted folk-memory of the commander of a 21st century Lunar base). By the beginning of the Traction Era the origins of the Festival were long forgotten, but it was still celebrated in city and static alike, usually on or around the night of the first full moon of autumn, when fireworks were set off, bonfires lit, and feasts and parties held.
Municipal Darwinism
A theory devised by Gideon Crumb, London’s first Chief Engineer, but often attributed to Quirke himself. Municipal Darwinists believe that machines, and especially cities, evolve through a process similar to natural selection: the strongest, fastest and best designed towns and cities gradually weeding out the weaker and slower ones. Crumb also predicted the ways in which cities would adapt to exploit different environmental niches; a theory which proved highly influential with the builders of amphibious raft cities and specialized mining and scavenging towns during the Third Traction Boom.
Murnau
One of the earliest German-speaking traction turnierenstadts, Murnau was mobilized around 490 TE by the Ritter Wulfstan von Kobold. It played a part in the defeat of the Zagwan Crusades, and had a long and noble history of jousts with other towns, but as traktionturnieren fell out of fashion it turned to trade and hunting. From the eighth century TE onwards it expanded to become a major traction city. It was a peaceable place, known for wood-carving and string quartets, but with the coming of the Green Storm it remilitarized effectively and appointed a new Lord Mayor, the Kriegsmarshal von Kobold, whose family had long upheld the martial traditions of their ancestors. Under his leadership, Murnau became a bastion of the fight against the Green Storm, and won a string of victories in the winter of 1014.
Nuevo Maya
South America was cut off from the Dead Continent when a Slow Bomb strike during the Sixty Minute War obliterated the isthmus which once joined them. Like people in many other parts of the world, the surviving South Americans blamed the technological advances of the Ancients for the catastrophe which had befallen them, and set about ridding themselves of all the trappings of 21st century civilization. They turned instead to the old ways of the Aztecs and Incas, the Toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs and above all the Mayans, developing a new culture out of half-remembered fragments of all these old ones. By 200 TE the Nuevo-Mayan culture had spread across the whole continent, from the glass shores of the Crater Sea to the snows of Tierra del Fuego, although the region remained politically divided between many rival city states. At first their fearsome gods demanded blood sacrifice, but as centuries passed these cruel customs died out, and the Nuevo-Mayans began to embrace technology once more (the first successful motor-powered airship is said to have been launched in Nuevo Teoticuahan around 480). When traders brought news of the Second Traction Boom across the Atlantic, the Nuevo-Mayan city-states and the motorized gauchos of the great pampas lowlands began to mobilize with surprising speed, and a full-scale Municipal Darwinist food-chain was in operation by 600 TE.
Out-Country
Barren, muddy and squished by passing cities; the sort of place to scare disobedient children and the work-shy labouring classes with (“If you’re naughty/lazy/demand higher wages you’ll be thrown into the out-country AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY”). People who had been living on cities for generations believed the out-country was totally inimical to human life and full of quicksand, sinkholes, and venomous vapours. In fact, scavengers, fugitives and adventurers were able to cross it relatively easily, and whole communities of outcasts lived in the deep track marks left by prowling cities.
Companies such as Pink’s Patent Out-Country Survival Aids took advantage of popular fear of the Out-Country by selling tennis-racquet shoes, gas masks, screw-driven mud-sleds and various unflattering oilskins to intrepid Tractionists.
Old-Tech
Technology left over from older, more advanced societies. The term could refer to anything from the useless but attractive “seedies” and “mobiles” which fashionable ladies wore as jewellery to the enormously complex Ancient computer brains and weapon systems which advanced traction cities sometimes tried to use for their own purposes, often with disastrous results. A staple of trade in the Traction Era.
Palau Pinang
An important static harbour for sea-shipping in the Hundred Islands. In the 980s it thrived under the rule of a tolerant and peace-loving Sultana, Ibu Khadija Suprupta Panggaban, who broke the traditions of her Anti-Tractionist forefathers by encouraging Traction Cities to refuel there. This policy ended abruptly in 992, when she was murdered by an Anti-Tractionist assassin. In later years the Green Storm turned the island into a military base for their airships and hydrofoil swarms.
Pan-German Traction Wedge
See Traktionstadtsgesellschaft
Panzerstadt-Bayreuth
One of the largest and longest surviving conurbations, its eventual destruction during the MEDUSA event left a wreck so vast that half the scavenger suburbs of the Hunting Ground were drawn in to strip it, but so dangerous that few ever returned.
Paris
One of the earliest mobile cities, Paris motorized just in time to escape by being devoured by London, and used engines copied from London’s own. As the air-trade developed it became popular with aviators, who moored their airships to the distinctive iron lattice of its famous mooring tower. During the Golden Age it took part in several city races, beating London on three famous occasions to the Lightfoot Cup. It was al
so home to the Jeunet Carot manufactory, which produced some of the world’s finest aëro engines and later turned to manufacturing heavier-than-air flying machines.
Peripatetia
Originally a savage war-goddess of the nomad empires, Peripatetia was reinvented after the Third Traction Boom as the kindly guardian of mobile cities, watching over their citizens and protecting them against boiler explosions, snapped axles and track failure. She is usually portrayed as a beautiful young woman carrying an oil can and monkey wrench.
Peripatetiapolis
A city in whose pleasant streets and parks the spirit of the Golden Age persisted long into the twilight of Tractionism. Famous for its hanging gardens, artificial waterfalls and busy covered markets, it was a popular stop for air-traders, and was a leader in the fields of engine technology and old-tech medicine. Although originally a hunter, it later learned to survive chiefly by trade, using its jaws only occasionally, to swallow up towns which had grown weary of running from predators and petitioned to be allowed to merge with it.
Perfume Harbour
One of the world’s largest raft cities. Thaddeus Valentine, in his book Further Adventures of a Practical Historian, wrote of it, “To the traveller approaching by air, Perfume Harbour seems a perfect faeryland. The tops of hundreds of pagodas and docking towers rise from a sea of cloud, each brightly painted and elaborately carved, and linked by a thousand delicate, swaying bridges. Down below, however, it is another story; for the cloud is engine-smog, and in its shadow the city’s over-crowded deck plates are a warren of dank alleyways, warehouses and greasy go-downs: here is the notorious Undertown; the foulest den of scum and villainy this side of Peterborough.” Sensible visitors stayed aloft, among the docking-towers and high-level teahouses from where, each autumn, the Austral Air-Rally set off.