Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Pirate Suburb

  Anti-Tractionists often scoffed at this term, pointing out that all traction cities were basically pirates. The inhabitants of cities, stung by such jibes, would reply that on the contrary, they scrupulously followed the code of Municipal Darwinism. When they spoke of “pirate suburbs” they were referring to places which didn’t; usually small, speedy townlets which used weapons and tricks to catch luckless prey towns, whose inhabitants they generally murdered or enslaved.

  Poskitt

  A trickster-god who was worshipped in many parts of the Hunting Ground, although his great, maze-like temple at Kjork was one of the first things to be eaten by London after it went mobile.

  Predator’s Gold

  A slang term for the bounty sometimes paid by traction cities to aviators, in return for information about the movements and whereabouts of smaller towns. Decent aviators, of course, would have nothing to do with this unsavoury business, but it grew increasingly common during the final centuries of the Traction Era, leading to the air-trade being regarded with distrust, and many cities refusing landing rights to any airship not licensed by their own merchants’ guild.

  Puerto Angeles

  The “Port of Angels” was lovely raft-city, the topmost tier of which consisted of a garden-temple devoted to Clio, the Goddess of History. When war broke out between the cities and the Green Storm, Puerto Angeles declared neutrality, but took heavy damage at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal when the Storm’s airships mistook it for Perfume Harbour. It was finally sunk by Green Storm hydrofoils in the Sulu Sea a few months later.

  Quirke, Nikolas (441-512)

  Originally called Nikola Quercus, his name was steadily Londonized in the centuries following his conquest of London and conversion of the city into a vehicle.

  Quirke was originally a minor warlord in the nomad empire called the Movement, but became its leader in 468 or 469 by defeating several rivals. Thanks to his friendship with a fugitive Scriven technomancer he learned of the gigantic engines which had been designed by London’s deposed ruler, Auric Godshawk, and brought his forces south in 477 to seize the city, and Godshawk’s prototype. The vast project of rebuilding and motorizing London started shortly afterwards, and was completed with astonishing speed, although the cost of doing so led to civil war within the Movement and most historians believe that London was far from ready when fresh invasions from the north forced it to begin moving. It was not until long after Quirke’s death that it would it be completed.

  Quirke was revered during the Golden Age as the founder of Municipal Darwinism, and in London many streets and public spaces bore his name. In 677, the Guild of Engineers pushed a motion through council declaring Quirke a deity, and he quickly became London’s chief god, eclipsing the original gods of the city such as Poskitt, St Kylie, and the Thin White Duke. By 726 Quirke worship was so popular that the midwinter festival had been renamed “Quirkemas”. Banknotes issued by the Bank of London bore his portrait and were known as “Quirkes”.

  Raffia Hat Civilization

  One of the many cultures which lived and died in the Black Centuries after the Sixty Minute War. Terrible earth-storms had caused the North Sea to drain away and the Raffia Hat Civilization grew up in the marshlands which it left behind.

  We know of them only by their crude carvings, which show them wearing giant raffia hats, presumably to protect them against the still-toxic rains of that drab era. The Historians’ Guild believes that as time passed the hats grew larger and larger, until some were big enough to cover entire villages. However, this quest for ever larger hats resulted in the destruction of the great reed-beds from which the sacred raffia was sourced, and once the existing hats had unravelled there was nothing left to protect the hat-makers from the rains or bind them together as a civilization; they all drifted away or died of head colds or acute embarrassment at their uncovered scalps.

  Raft Cities

  The first raft “cities” were built by the inhabitants of fishing villages and harbour towns on the western coast of the Hunting Ground. To escape from the rampaging likes of London and Paris during the Second Traction Boom, they shifted their homes and belongings aboard boats, barges and large, hastily assembled rafts and simply took to the sea. As the years went by and the Traction craze showed no sign of fading these floating communities enlarged and improved their rafts, added engines and extra tiers, and began to make the most of their new life. Some became predators, attacking and annexing smaller, weaker rafts, and several of them played a part in the defeat of the Zagwan Crusades. Development of sea-going cities always lagged behind that of the great land cities, but during the Golden Age many great raft cities appeared, including Marseilles, Perfume Harbour, Puerto Angeles and the pleasure-city of Brighton.

  Rasmussen, Dolly

  The legends of the ice city of Anchorage told of its founder, a schoolgirl named Dolly Rasmussen who is said to have lived in the original Anchorage of that name, an Ancient static settlement in North America. Haunted by premonitions of a great disaster, she persuaded some of her townspeople to leave the city and camp in the hills outside, from where they watched their home vaporized as the Sixty Minute War broke out. A long and frankly boring song-cycle tells of their wanderings in the years which followed, until they finally built a new city on an island in the north Pacific. They packed their bags again during the Third Traction Boom, transforming Anchorage into one of the swiftest and most beautiful of all the ice cities. Unusually it was ruled throughout its history by women, the Rasmussen Margravines, all of whom claimed descent from Dolly Rasmussen.

  Reykjavik

  An Icelandic-speaking predator raft. It was the birthplace of the notorious air-pirate Red Loki, who later burned down part of it with rockets from his airship, the Anger Management Issues. (He is quoted as saying, “Stupid little town. Stupid little painted wooden houses. If you’d been born here, you’d burn it down too!”) It was perhaps at this time that the map of “Vineland” drawn by the explorer Snøri Ulvaesson went missing from Reykjavik’s library. The city never really recovered from Red Loki’s raid, and in 998 TE it was caught making repairs while on shore and devoured by the predator suburbs of Snørk and Wolverinehampton.

  Rocket projector

  Lighter, cheaper and simpler than cannon, and lacking dangerous muzzle flashes, rockets were the primary tool of airship combat for as long as anyone can remember. While rocket projectors took many forms, they had two essential components: a solid-fuel rocket with a very short ignition fuse, and a booster device (be it a compressed-air charge, a steam catapult, a spigot mortar or just a big spring) for pushing the rocket far enough away from the airship that the back-blast cannot set said airship on fire. Like airships themselves, they are simple enough that even diehard techno-sceptics among the old Anti-Traction League would accept them, yet effective enough to have armed their Air-Fleets for centuries.

  Rogues’ Roost

  This bleak north Atlantic island – little more than a rock covered in bird droppings, jutting from an icy sea – housed an airbase built by the pirate Red Loki, whose blood-red airships terrorized the smaller towns of the north, and even raided Arkangel and the Spitzbergen Static. Sometime around 1008 TE the Green Storm attacked Rogues’ Roost, defeated Loki and his pirate crew and used the base to prepare for their takeover of the Anti-Traction League.

  Rustwater Marshes

  This great swath of rust-red marsh, lying to the west of the Sea of Khazak, was mostly avoided by larger cities, but home to predatory ecosystems of tiny amphibious towns and suburbs. Overrun by the Green Storm in 1012, it changed hands several times during the Traction War, becoming a huge, muddy graveyard of cities and wrecked war machines.

  San Juan de los Motores

  Sister city to St Jean les Quatre-Milles Cheveaux, and, indeed, once part of it. Disagreements between the original city’s many chefs over whether steak should be serve
d medium or rare caused a brief civil war, at the end of which the rival factions literally split the city in two. It maintained a bitter rivalry with its estranged sister city, but was known for the finest tapas in the Hunting Ground. See St Jean les Quatre-Mille Cheveaux

  Scavenger Towns

  Small towns, frequently semi-static, sometimes not much bigger than the land-barges of old, which scoured the out-country for the leavings of larger towns, or for old tech sites which their inhabitants could excavate. Often lawless and violent places.

  Scriven

  One of the smaller nomad empires, the Scriven conquered London around 260 TE and ruled there for the following two centuries, before finally being overthrown by a rebellion. They claimed to be a separate species from the rest of humanity, and a few surviving paintings show them as having speckled skins, though whether this was the result of natural pigmentation, or was achieved by make-up or tattoos, we cannot know. It is possible that they were a mutant strain, created by the radiations of the Sixty Minute War. The scientist Fever Crumb (462-??) claimed that they were related to the “Nightwights”, sub-human cave-dwellers who were once thought to haunt the wastes and marches of the north, and that both races had a connection to the mysterious Arctic pyramid-builders.

  Semi-static

  A catchall term for Traction Cities that chose to remain in one place for sustained periods. Some were “reluctant Tractionists” who farmed or quarried the land around their city but still retained engines and wheels so they could escape when bigger cities appeared on the horizon; others were toll-seekers taking control of some trade route or choke point. A few had simply run out of fuel or had a breakdown and were making the most of it while they sat offering prayers to Peripatetia.

  Sea of Khazak

  A huge inland sea in the central Hunting Ground, home to both static fishing communities and to small amphibious towns which emerged from their lairs on the marshy western shore to snap up passing boats.

  Shan Guo

  One of the Mountain Kingdoms, controlling the Tien Shan range and some of the rolling hill-country to the east. “Shan Guo of the Many Horses” to Anti-Tractionist poets.

  Shatterlands

  A common name for the Alps, the ragged and dangerous mountain chain which stretched across the southern Hunting Ground. Despite their forbidding appearance and awful reputation there were passes through them, and these were so widened in the course of the Traction Era that in 985 London itself was able to haul itself through them and devour many of the small cities of the Italian peninsular.

  Shield Wall

  See Batmunkh Gompa

  Shrike (AKA Grike, Shryke etc.) 477-10??

  The most notorious and longest-surviving of all the Stalkers. Originally constructed – presumably from the corpse of some unknown soldier – as part of the Movement’s Lazarus Brigade, he went rogue following the Battle of Three Dry Ships. Unlike most rogue Stalkers he did not destroy himself or cease to function but survived, carving a bloody trail through the history of the following five centuries. It is possible that the Resurrection technology used to quicken him was of a superior type, taken from one of the strange high-Arctic pyramids of the original Stalker builders. It has also been rumoured that the surgeon-mechanic who constructed him was the legendary Wavey Godshawk, who may have had reasons of her own for making him different from other Stalkers. At any rate, he was fierce, inscrutable and ruthless.

  Shrike acted as a mercenary for many different factions during the Second Traction Boom and the final years of the nomad empires. Later he became state executioner aboard the Traction City of Paris, then an assassin for Aleksei Grishna, the notorious “Bloody Burgomeister” of Kutsoi. When Grishna ordered him to murder the young family of a political rival, however, Shrike killed Grishna himself and escaped into the Out-Country, where he became an effective and much-feared bounty hunter. This is not the only occasion on which the old Stalker is supposed to have spared or saved the lives of children; around the dawn of the tenth century he somehow acquired a foster-daughter, a filthy and disfigured waif who lived with him aboard the scavenger village of Strole and accompanied him on his hunting trips, becoming known to Out-Country criminals as “Death’s Little Helper”. When she disappeared he went in search of her, and seems to drop out of history at that point. Some Stalkerologists claim he entered the service of Magnus Crome, Lord Mayor of London; some that he was finally killed on the Black Island; some that he went on to fight for the Green Storm.

  Sixty Minute War

  A brief but terrible conflict between several of the empires of the Ancient world, during which civilization and human life itself were almost wiped from the Earth. The destruction was so total that the generations growing up in the “Black Centuries” which followed were unable to believe that it had been caused by human actions, and referred to it only as “The Downsizing”, believing that the gods had punished the Ancients for their arrogance and cleverness. The true nature of the catastrophe and the term “Sixty Minute War” were first suggested by the scholar and Engineer Fever Crumb, writing in the 480s. So few documents survive from before the War that it is impossible to know exactly who the combatants were, although historians believe that the “American Empire”, “Greater China”, and the so-called “Barefoot States” all played a part.

  Sky Train

  As an alternative to convoys, which could easily be scattered by bad weather and could only move at the speed of the slowest participant, some air-traders took to using sky trains, in which as many as sixteen large airships were coupled together in a long line, usually protected by a couple of small fighting ships.

  Sky trains offered significant savings for wealthy merchants, since not all the ships in a train needed crews or engines, but unlike the convoys they could not scatter and regroup when danger threatened, and after a few expensive losses they fell out of fashion.

  Slavery

  Slavery was a sad fact of life in the Traction Era. London itself was rebuilt as a traction city largely by slaves, whom Quirke purchased from the slave-pens of the notorious Oktopous Cartel (many great London families can trace their ancestry back to these indentured labourers). Of course, Quirke freed his slaves, and London prided itself on never enslaving the inhabitants of the towns it captured (although it could be argued that the grim workhouses and base-tier barracks they ended up were little better than slave-holds). Other cities, such as Arkangel, had no such scruples. The Anti-Traction League was never above enslaving the prisoners it took in battles with Tractionists, and with the rise of the Green Storm this policy continued. Along with Old-Tech, slaves were one of the main trade commodities of the later Traction era. Successful slave-trading companies included the Shkin Corporation, Thrall-U-Like, and EasySlave.

  Slow Bombs

  Asteroids boosted onto Earth-impact trajectories during the Sixty Minute War, these massive weapons began to arrive over the decades following the conflict, like latecomers to a particularly rowdy party. They gouged great craters in the planet’s already battered crust, and the ash and debris they threw up contributed to the long period of global cooling known as The Black Centuries. Several Slow Bombs are said to have struck North America and one, perhaps a near-miss, obliterated the Isthmus of Panama, creating the Crater Sea. (See Dead Continent, The)

  Sooty Pete

  Originally the god of blacksmiths, the coming of the Traction Era saw Sooty Pete adopted as the patron deity of technomancers and mechanics. Statues of this ugly, hunchbacked god were to be found in the guts and engine-districts of almost every mobile town and city. “For Pete’s sake!” was a common exclamation among enginemen and stokers.

  Spitzbergen Static

  The Anti-Traction League’s great northern stronghold, and a centre of the fur trade. It repelled various hungry predators as well as the pirate airships of Red Loki, but after the burning of the Northern Air-Fleet at Batmunkh Gompa in 1007 many
of the ships which had defended it were called away to duties elsewhere in the League’s territories, and in the winter of 1008 the city of Arkangel, sensing its weakness, swept down across the ice to devour it. Its loss caused great discontent in the ATL and contributed to the rise of the Green Storm.

  Spofforth, Chung-Mai (880-942)

  An explorer from a long line of aviators. She wrote many books about her travels, including A Season with the Snowmads, Off the Beaten Track in Nuevo Maya and In Search of the Stalkers.

  Spring Cultures

  Although much of the world fell into obscure and illiterate barbarism in the Black Centuries, learning and civilization in Africa survived sufficiently to leave many written records, of great interest to the modern historian. Although the continent was far from unscathed, it was far less comprehensively devastated by the weapons of the Sixty Minute War, and it was here that the first flowers of civilization began to bloom afresh. The so-called “Spring Cultures” of the Tibesti Caliphate, Ogbomosho and Nuwe Pretoria eventually grew into great trading cultures whose merchants and missionaries helped to restore civilization to the rest of the world. Foremost among them was the Zagwan Empire, which rose to prominence several centuries before the dawn of Tractionism, armed with religious fervour and a resource base relatively unspoiled by the Sixty Minute War. Their faith, a fundamentalist offshoot of Christianity, held that the War had been sent by God to punish unbelievers and heretechs, and that it was the holy task of Zagwa to finish His work. Despite lacking any weapons or machines not mentioned in the Bible, Zagwa’s large land armies were able to conquer most of the states and empires of Africa, burning all Old-Tech and complex machinery they discovered (along with its owners) on enormous pyres under the orders of their Great Synod. However, when in the sixth century TE the Zagwans attempted to carry their crusade into Europe, which was already embroiled in the Wheeled War, their armies were annihilated by the fleets of armoured landships and battle-hardened Traction Cities. Refusing to accept failure, but ideologically unwilling to use guns or engines themselves, the Zagwans committed most of the material and human resources of their Empire to what proved an unwinnable crusade. By 540 TE, suffering an economic depression after the loss of a generation of young men and wracked by famine after the Synod declared the gearing of windmills to be heresy, Zagwa was a spent force, and the ancient Spring Cultures entered a long, but irreversible, autumn.