Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex
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St Jean les Quatre-Mille Cheveaux
Very fine restaurants, but SUCH rude waiters. St Jean was ruled by culinary dynasties whose status was determined by the height of their cylindrical white hats. Very picky about its prey, St Jean was known to cross the entire hunting ground to eat a city which had an abundance of a particular ingredient, or whose inhabitants were known to tuck their napkins in properly and tip. (See San Juan de los Motores)
Stalkers
(AKA Jaegers, Resurrected Men, Panzergeisten.) It is disputed as to whether the technology of Stalkers dates to before or after the Sixty Minute War; there is some evidence that “Remembering Machines” based on human brains were being developed before. The nameless culture which constructed pyramids in the Arctic regions during the Black Centuries used the devices known as “Stalker brains” which, when inserted into a human corpse, restored it to a mindless semblance of life. At some point the technology was militarized, and used to construct armoured, undead warriors. These became status-symbols for the warlords of the nomad empires, and were forged by the Movement into a powerful military unit. London’s Guild of Engineers was fascinated by Stalker technology, and funded many expeditions to the Ice Waste in search of it. Machines and weapons based on crude, reverse-engineered Stalker brains were later mass-produced by the Green Storm in many forms, including armoured soldiers, birds, trains, and the abortive “Stalker walrus”.
(See Lazarus Brigade; Shrike)
Strange, Walmart (485-572)
Hailed by many as the greatest artist of the Traction Era, Walmart Strange was a shepherd boy from the Shatterlands who became apprentice to the painter Ruan Solent, accompanying him on his travels around Europe during the Second Traction Boom, and helping him to paint his famous frescoes in London’s Council Chamber, Trade and Technology Standing Guard Over the New London and Barbarism Kneeling in Chains Before the Spirit of Municipal Darwinism. Soon out-stripping his master, Strange went on to have a long and successful career, painting portraits of many of the leading figures of the Third Traction Boom as well as huge historical paintings such as Quirke Oversees the Rebuilding of London, The Battle of Three Dry Ships and The Death of Cluny Morvish.
“QUIRKE OVERSEES THE REBUILDING OF LONDON”
Suburb
This term is sometimes used to refer to any small mobile town, but the true suburbs are those built by the great Traction Cities during the Golden Age.
Sunless Country
The afterlife. This name for it must have arisen during the Black Centuries, for it is used by people all over the world – indeed, it may be a memory of those dreadful years, when the ashes of the Sixty Minute War blocked out the sun and humankind was driven almost to extinction in a landscape of perpetual night. During the Traction Era people living aboard mobile towns and cities often imagined the Sunless Country as a vast Traction City itself, a sort of travelling purgatory trundling through the darkness towards a hoped-for eternal hunting ground; the Fields of Asphodel, where prey would be plentiful. Those in the lands of the Anti-Traction League pictured it as shadowy underworld, from where the ghosts of the dead observed the lives of their descendants, and made rude comments.
Tannhauser Mountains
A range of young volcanoes which roughly mark the border between the Frost Barrens and the Ice Waste. Whether their origins are natural, or whether they were created by one of the unimaginably powerful super-weapons of the Ancients, is still unknown. The passes through them were notoriously dangerous; the hunting grounds of fierce hunter-killer suburbs and lair of air pirates.
Three Dry Ships
A static settlement somewhere in the former North Sea, which was the scene of a battle in 480 TE between the forces of London and an alliance of backward northern empires led by the Arkhangelsk witch-queen Cluny Morvish, who sought to stop the city being mobilized. Seen by some historians as the event that triggered the Second Traction Boom, and ensured the future of Tractionism would take the form of mobile cities rather than nomad empires.
Tienjing
A static city, high in the mountains of Shan Guo, which served as the official capital of the Anti-Traction League, and later of the Green Storm.
Tibesti Static
The ancestral stronghold of the old Tibesti Caliphate, one of the ancient “Spring Cultures”. Long aligned with Zagwa, the static’s fortunes have waned in the last few centuries, its borders constantly eroded by raiders and marauding towns. It now exists as little more than a chain of fortresses in the African mountains south of the Great Sand Sea.
Trading Cluster
A group of traction towns and motorized villages, meeting by chance or at some pre-arranged location, and observing a truce in order to engage in trade.
Traktionstadtsgesellschaft
In the face of the Green Storm’s lightning attacks in 1012, the cities of the Great Hunting Ground had two options: drive for the west as fast as possible, or be destroyed, as swirling fleets of white airships swept across the plains of Europe, concentrating their power on one city at a time before dispersing again.
Twelve German-speaking industrial cities, brought together by the burgermeister of Traktionstadt Weimar, chose a third way: unite. In an alliance hearkening back to the Wheeled War, the cities agreed to pool their resources and to consume no rolling town until the war with the Storm was won. Many cities soon flocked to the alliance, and most that did not sent a portion of their catches east for the war effort. As the war dragged on, the Traktionstadtgesellschaft became the bulwark of the Tractionist military effort in Europe. Its line cities militarized to an extent not seen even in the Wheeled War; decked out in layers of armour and massed batteries of snout-guns and anti-airship cannon, they became vast rolling fortresses. While the alliance’s formation was widely seen as necessary, there were worried whispers – especially among the intellectuals of cities like Paris and Brighton, far from the front and enjoying a Hunting Ground free of their fiercest competitors – that wartime compromises were spelling the end of the Tractionist way of life. Some wondered openly whether the newfound spirit of cooperation would destroy the healthy competition of Municipal Darwinism, and whether, once the war was over, the great Panzerkampfstadts would ever demilitarize again.
Traktionturnieren
A curious sport which emerged among German-speaking Traction towns during the Second Traction Boom. Like knights of old or armoured dinosaurs these small, powerful towns would charge at each other, each aiming to do damage to the other by means of the vast rams or stadtslanzen (“town-lances”) which they carried. Naturally this was unspeakably dangerous, and often one or both towns was completely destroyed, but, as Burgomeister Joachim von Storch of Ritterburg said, “Without risk, there is no sport; without danger, there is no honour.”
In the early days the towns which lost such duels were sometimes looted and dismantled by the victors, but as the code of Traktionturnieren (or “Traction tournaments”) developed the winning town would usually accept a tribute of fuel from its defeated rival or simply be happy to add another victory to the list painted on its armour. Then both towns would go on their way, wearing their duelling scars with pride.
As the Traction Era progressed Traktionturnieren fell out of fashion, and came to be seen as reckless and barbaric, although it remained popular as a theme for paintings, operas and romantic novels. However, when the war with the Green Storm began, the martial traditions of the old jousting towns enabled them to militarize more effectively than many other traction cities, and it was they who founded the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft.
Tumblers
The so-called “Whirling Sycamore Seeds of Death”, Tumblers were short-range “quasi-autonomous munitions” designed to drop from the Green Storm’s air destroyers onto cities below. Their name came from the erratic, spinning flight which, combined with their small size, made them such difficult targets for Tractionist anti-airship batterie
s.
They were steered towards the target city’s tracks or engine districts by fanatical young pilots who had declared themselves ready to die for the sake of “A World made Green again”. If these pilots had second thoughts on their way down it was too late; the tumblers’ nose-cones were packed with explosives which detonated on contact with the city.
Tunbridge Wheels
A notorious pirate suburb that haunted the Rustwater Marshes at the beginning of the eleventh century TE under the leadership of its mayor, Chrysler Peavey. Peavey’s daughter Cortina survived the eventual destruction of the suburb, passed through the slave-pens of the Oktopus Cartel, married into the wealthy Spetsnaz-Cholmondely family and eventually became Lady Mayoress of Peripatetiapolis.
Ulp
Among the first Traction Cities, the small mechanized town of Ulp had won fame among its peers for leading the Automecklenburger tribes to fortune and glory during the Last Crusade in 519 TE, fame sufficient to make its fellow traction cities at least show up out of curiosity when its burghers called the Great Diet in 520 TE, which set out the principles of what was to become modern Municipal Darwinism. Ulp was also the first Traction City to be devoured under the new system, as following the month-long Diet a hungry London immediately set its sights on Ulp as a celebratory meal. After a two-week chase, the city’s engines melted, and the people of Ulp gathered on the decks to welcome the new order, the burghers teary-eyed with pride as London’s jaws closed over them.
Valentine, Thaddeus (963-1007)
A talented Out-Country scavenger, Valentine changed his name from Tadeusz Wallenstein when he began working for London’s Guild of Historians in around 975. An up-and-coming Historian named Chudleigh Pomeroy supported his application to join the Guild, and despite his lowly and outlandish origins he rose rapidly through its ranks. His early life had left him with a much better understanding of archaeology than most of his London-born colleagues, and he began making long and dangerous expeditions in search of old tech relics. His airship, the 13th Floor Elevator, became famous, as did his crew: the reformed air pirates Jasper Pewsey and Silas Gench, and the beautiful aviatrix Pandora Rae, with whom Valentine was rumoured to be in love. During this time he wrote a number of bestselling books about his travels, including Adventures of a Practical Historian and America Deserta – Across the Dead Continent with Gun, Camera and Airship. He also came to the attention of Magnus Crome, London’s Chief Engineer, and it was on Crome’s orders, rather than those of his own Guild, that Valentine made his famous expeditions to America. On one of these journeys he met and fell in love with Nuria Zinadan, the high priestess of Clio on Puerto Angeles: their daughter Katherine would later come to live with Valentine in London. In 998, following his heroic actions in the aftermath of the Big Tilt, and the election of Magnus Crome as Lord Mayor, he was made Head Historian. (Rumours linking him to Pandora Rae’s sad death are just lies put about by envious lesser Historians.)
Wagenhafn
A mobile town of the Second Traction Boom, founded by the old Wagensvolk nomad dynasty, who claim to have maintained a manufacturing empire based around the fortress of Wolfsburg since before the Sixty Minute War. Wagenhafn bugs were the favoured intra-city vehicle and motorized status symbol of the great and good during the tenth century TE.
Western Archipelago
When the western side of the former Island of Britain subsided during the same upheavals which raised the North Sea, a few upland areas were left as islands. The largest are Red Deer Island, Badman (or Bodmaen) Island, and Oak Island, which is the resting-place of a decommissioned traction town called Dunroamin’. Not to be confused with the more mountainous but less pronounceable islands of the Cymric Archipelago further north, or the Irish-speaking island chains to the west.
Zagwa
Once the largest and fiercest of the Spring Cultures, and the supreme power south of the Mediterranean, Zagwa’s dominance was ended by protracted war with Tractionism in the 6th century TE. By the year 1000 all that remained of the once-great empire was a small upland kingdom centred on the city of Zagwa itself, propped up by the air-power of the Anti-Traction League. (See Spring Cultures; Tibesti Static)
Zhan Shan
An unfeasibly vast volcano which thrust its way up among the mountains of Shan Guo at some point in the Black Centuries (the smoke and ashes of its birth doubtless adding somewhat to the general Blackness). As with the Tannhauser Mountains, it is not known whether Zhan Shan was the direct result of an Ancient weapon, or was caused by some natural upheaval. It is possible that its emergence may have been connected with the shock-waves caused by the impact of Slow Bombs. It is popularly believed that Zhan Shan is so tall that its summit reaches up out of the Earth’s atmosphere: this is, of course, silly. However, it is undoubtedly the tallest of the Earth’s mountains. High on its flanks is a complex of caves where the kings and heroes of the Mountain Kingdoms have been laid to rest, their bodies preserved by the sub-zero temperatures and thin, high-altitude air.
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Mortal Engines
First published in the UK in 2001 by Scholastic Children’s Books
Text copyright © Philip Reeve, 2001
Predator’s Gold
First published in the UK in 2003 by Scholastic Children’s Books
Text copyright © Philip Reeve, 2003
Infernal Devices
First published in the UK in 2005 by Scholastic Children’s Books
Text copyright © Philip Reeve, 2005
A Darkling Plain
First published in the UK in 2006 by Scholastic Children’s Books
Text copyright © Philip Reeve, 2006
The Traction Codex: An Historian’s Guide to the Era of Predator Cities
Text copyright © Philip Reeve with Jeremy Levett, 2012
This electronic bundle edition published in 2012 by Marion Lloyd Books
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