A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  The room lurched suddenly like a land-barge going over rough ground. Midas Flynn’s greyish toothbrush jiggled in a glass mug on the side of the bath. The Red Herring was on the move. Fever heard a bang from Flynn’s office, a startled shout. She thought he had dropped something. But that seemed strange; he must be used to the club’s movements. He had told her himself that it was about to set off, so it should not have caught him by surprise…

  “Great gods!” she heard him say, his voice sounding strange and muffled through the door. And then,

  “Vishniak!”

  A second bang, just like the first. The thud and scuffle of something heavy falling.

  She held her breath, standing there in the half dark, in the blood-red glow from the window. The building quaked and rumbled as it was dragged up the cliffside. On the other side of the door she could hear someone moving about; opening and closing drawers, dropping things. She bent down and peered through the keyhole, which showed her a corner of Flynn’s desk and a swift glimpse of a wet weatherproof cloak as someone walked past.

  It wasn’t Flynn.

  She straightened up quickly and the floor creaked under her heel. The movements outside stopped suddenly and she knew that whoever it was out there had heard. In the next instant there was another gunshot. A hole appeared in the bathroom door and a tile shattered on the wall behind her, dust and splinters pattering to the floor. The bullet must have missed Fever by inches. She froze; made a statue of herself, not even moving her eyes, which stayed fixed on the hole in the door, on the rod of yellow light which poked through it from the room beyond.

  Footsteps came to the door. The hole darkened. She could hear someone breathing, just the other side of the thin wood.

  Slowly, silently, the doorknob began to turn.

  Fever waited until the door started to open, then stepped as noiselessly as she could into the angle behind it, flattening herself against the wall. Light came into the bathroom, and with it a silvery smell of gunpowder. A shadow fell across the chessboard tiles on the floor. Someone in a cloak and a hat. Someone with a pistol in his hand.

  Vishniak, she thought.

  The hand holding the pistol came into view around the edge of the door. A man’s hand, the cuff of a wet sleeve, the pistol itself of northern workmanship, blond wood and steel, the long barrel decorated with a snarling wolf’s head.

  She needed to breathe and she dared not. If the gunman so much as touched the open door it would press against her and he would feel the resistance and know that she was there. If he took just another step into the bathroom…

  The cistern trickled again; a long trill of falling water and then a series of single, musical drips. The sound was a semitone higher than the noise the loose board had made, but to the man with the gun it must have sounded the same. He let out a sigh that was half a snort, turned, and was gone. Fever waited until she heard the outer door close before she let her own breath out. The moving building rumbled on. The toothbrush jiggled.

  When she went back into the main room she could not see Midas Flynn at first. Then she spotted his feet poking out from behind the desk, tangled with the fallen chair. The patterns of hobnails on the soles of his boots glinted in the red light from the window like the eyes of spiders.

  Fever stood in the bathroom doorway and watched the boots. They didn’t move. She listened, and heard the whisper of the rain, the drip of the cistern, her own raggedy breathing.

  14

  BUILDINGS IN MOTION

  aster Flynn?” she said cautiously.

  She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one. She went to the desk and looked over into the narrow gap between the desk and the wall. Midas Flynn was lying there, and the carpet under him glistened wetly in the red light. He was dead. You could tell he was dead because of the expressionless way his eyes watched the ceiling and because of the two big holes in the front of his tunic. There was blood on the wall too, and on the desk, which Fever didn’t notice until she put her hand down in it; it was thick and slightly warm. One of the drawers of the desk was half open and she could see the handle of a gun in there. She pulled it out, wondering if it were loaded, remembering how she’d loaded Kit Solent’s pistols for him in that sedan chair back in London.

  “Midas?” said a voice, the door opening. She looked round. The girl who’d shown her up was coming into the room, a faint frown between her perfect eyebrows. Fever held up a hand to halt her. The girl stared at it; stared at the blood on it, at the pistol in Fever’s other hand, stared at the splashes on the wall, stared at Midas Flynn’s dead legs sticking out from behind the desk.

  “He’s been shot,” said Fever.

  The girl started to scream. It was a shrill, awful sound, like a klaxon, and Fever started to go towards her, wondering how to make her stop, but the girl backed away from her and slammed the door on her way out. “No!” shouted Fever, dropping the pistol and running to the door, but by the time she opened it the corridor outside was empty. She could hear the girl running away from her down the stairs, her fading shrieks mingling with the distant music. In a few moments she would be back, probably bringing Flynn’s hired thugs. They’d hear the girl’s story and they’d come up here and find her and find Flynn dead and there’d be nothing she could tell them that would make them believe she wasn’t the killer. She imagined trying to reason with them, but she knew too well that when people get panicky, reason is the first thing they abandon. They’d probably shoot her before she could get two words out. How had Vishniak come in and out without them seeing him? she wondered. He must have found a way in over the roof…

  That gave her an idea. She went back into the room and closed the door, turning the key in the lock. She crossed the room and got in between the blind and the window to force the casement open. The night air smelled of rain and metal as she scrambled on to the shuddering, rain-slithery wooden window ledge. Above her a flaking cornice jutted out, spattered with the droppings of pigeons and angels. Raindrops fell from it and plunged past her through the red light from the fish-shaped sign and down into the steep ragged strip of cliff garden which separated The Red Herring from the rails of its counterweight. The rails glistened wetly in the light from the club. Fever looked up the slope and saw the counterweight coming down; a big white restaurant, stately as a ship. Beyond it, all along the cliff-side, buildings were going up or coming down, lights gleaming through the rain.

  Back in the room she could hear fists pounding on the door and muffled voices shouting at her to open it. She glanced up the line again. The counterweight restaurant was still a hundred yards away, but it was coming quickly closer. She estimated The Red Herring’s speed to be a brisk walking pace; say four miles per hour. The counterweight must be moving at the same rate, which gave a combined speed of eight miles per hour. They would both reach the track’s halfway point at the same moment, and at that speed they might take twenty seconds to pass each other. That should be time enough…

  The door burst open and the room started filling with men. They carried knives and swords; one held a pistol. Fever peeked in at them through the streaming windows, watching between the slats of the blind. She saw the one called Vigo giving orders to the others. He pointed to the half-open door of the bathroom and two of the others went in to check it. He stooped over Midas Flynn and she saw him shake his head. Then he raised it and looked straight at her through the blind.

  She started to edge along the ledge. The wood was wet, slippery, rotten. A chunk fell off under her weight and dropped, turning over and over in the red light. She dug her nails into the wet boards of the wall to save herself from going with it.

  “There she is!” Vigo was leaning out of the window, pointing her out to another man; the one with the pistol, who stretched it out towards her, holding one hand over the firing mechanism to keep the rain off it.

  “It wasn’t me!” she shouted. “There was someone else! Vishniak, I think…”

  “Don’t give me that!” he shouted ba
ck. “You killed Flynn!”

  He was being as unreasonable as Fever had feared. She looked away from him. The descending restaurant was only a few yards uphill now, but it was veering away from her. In the spill of light from its verandas she saw that the rails curved here to allow the two buildings to pass each other with a few yards to spare.

  Could she jump those few yards?

  There was a flash and a hissy bang and a pistol ball sang past her nose and thudded into the cornice above her, spraying her with scales of old paint and splinters of rotted wood. She looked round. The gunman was already reloading, while one of his mates scrambled warily out on to the ledge with a knife in his hand.

  It was either jump or die.

  The restaurant was passing, filling the air with noise, splashing pale light up the walls of The Red Herring.

  There was only one rational choice.

  Desperate and ungainly, flapping her long limbs as if she were trying to fly, she flung herself across the yawning space between the buildings. Caught a whirling glimpse of the canyon between them, the lighted windows and the falling rain. Then she slammed against roof-tiles and slithered down, grabbing for a handhold, gasping, fetching up in a guttering. A pistol ball shattered a tile a few feet away. She turned her head and saw The Red Herring go grinding past, the Shadow Men watching her furiously from the window of Flynn’s room.

  Just before it parted from its counterweight two of them made the same leap Fever had. She heard them land with thumps and grunts and curses a little further along the roof.

  A second before they landed she had felt as if she’d never move again; a second afterwards she was up and running, knowing that her only hope was to outpace them. The restaurant roof formed a strange landscape; steep hillocks tiled with green copper dragon’s-scales; flat plains of asphalt where the rain had pooled. She splashed through the puddles, hearing shouts and heavy footfalls behind her. Chimney stacks towered up around her. Ventilators with visored cowls like the helms of evil knights exhaled smells of cooking from the kitchens below. Twice she scared up roosting angels, flinching from the applause of their wings as they took off into the rain.

  Then she was at the far side of the restaurant, and a neighbouring building was climbing past it, and she hesitated on a sagging corner of the roof and heard the Shadow Men come blundering across the tiles towards her and threw herself forward just as the first of them reached for her.

  This time the distance was even greater and she almost missed; her hands caught hold of a guttering which tilted and nearly gave way, drenching her in dirty water. Dangling there, she looked back, and there were her two pursuers standing uselessly between the restaurant’s chimneys as it carried them down to Rua Cĩrculo.

  Fever’s hands slipped on the wet lead of the guttering. She screamed, fell, landed with a jarring thump on the pierced metal landing of a fire-escape which switchbacked down the wall below her.

  There she lay, listening to the sounds of music and laughter from inside, letting the building take her with it as it glided up the cliff. By the time it reached its railhead she had managed to stop herself trembling. She pulled herself upright, brushed the dirt from her clothes and went down the metal stairs to mingle with some raucous customers who were spilling out of the building’s exits into one of the labyrinths of little streets near the top of South Stair.

  She turned downhill, feeling immensely tired and wanting nothing more than to be in her neat little bed in her neat little room at the hotel. But after she had gone a few yards she stopped. Vishniak would have left The Red Herring by now, unnoticed amid the confusion. And if Flynn had been right, he would be making for Casas Elevado. He might be there already.

  She shivered, recalling the sound of his breathing, the shadow he’d thrown on the floor of Flynn’s bathroom. Lothar Vishniak. Even his name sounded scary. The locks on Arlo’s gate would not stop a man like that.

  She went a few more steps, thinking that she must go and find Dr Teal. But Dr Teal was on the far side of Mayda; it might take her an hour to reach and rouse him. Maybe Fat Jago Belkin and his beautiful wife could help her … but she didn’t even know where their home was.

  She looked about for someone she could ask for help, but these streets were rough and disreputable; she saw only drunk sailors shambling from bar to bar and irrationally dressed women calling down to them from balconies. In an alleyway a man was being kicked and beaten by a quartet of brawny thugs in straw hats and stripy coats who were singing, “That’s for squealing on Louie, you double-crossing fink,” in a catchy four-part harmony.

  Realizing that no one would help her but herself, she turned back up the hill, running as fast as she could towards Casas Elevado.

  15

  AT THE THURSDAY HOUSE

  asas Elevado was almost deserted in the dark, and what few passers-by there were, were hurrying along with their heads down against the strengthening rain. No one seemed to notice Fever as she ran to Arlo Thursday’s gate. No one even glanced up when the gate swung slackly open at her touch and she cried out.

  She stood there in the shelter of the gateway, with the warm rain hissing on the road behind her and rattling on the wet leaves of the garden in front of her and the gate with its broken lock swinging wider, squeaking on its rusty hinges.

  She was too late. Vishniak had beaten her here, or else he’d come here before he called in on Midas Flynn. She stepped through the gate and went a little way along the path between the trees. The house was right up at the top of the gardens, no lights in its windows. Among the bushes in the garden something rustled, scaring her, but at her answering movement it took sudden flight, white wings between the wet boughs, and she saw that it was just an angel.

  She started to climb without really knowing why. For all she knew, Vishniak was up there, and she did not imagine him to be the type of man who liked being disturbed when he was working. But she had to know if Arlo Thursday was alive or dead. Alive seemed unlikely, given the broken gate and what had befallen Midas Flynn. But dead seemed impossible. All his ideas, all his knowledge, gone… Maybe, if she was quick and careful, she might be able to salvage something; his notes, or one of his models.

  A long flight of concrete steps ran straight up the middle of the garden, between the tracks for the house and the tracks for its counterweight. Fever supposed they had been put there so that the tracks could be maintained, and maybe as a means of escape in case the house stuck halfway down. She went up them, breathless, her thighs aching with each step, looking up all the time at the house. Nothing moved there. No lights showed.

  She reached the top of the stairs and stepped on to the veranda, walking round to the back of the house where she had first met Arlo. The air was full of the smell of crushed herbs: lavender, lemongrass. The models which had hung from the veranda roof were gone, but that might not mean anything; Arlo might have taken them in because of the rain. Fever tried the back door. It was unlocked. She opened it a crack, but dared not go in. She put her face to the kitchen window and peered hard. Things in there looked much as they had that afternoon. She tried to imagine that Arlo Thursday was asleep behind the drawn blinds in one of those other rooms, or ignoring her the way he had before. Not dead on the floor somewhere like Midas Flynn.

  She knew that it was stupidly dangerous to go into the house. What if Vishniak was inside? What if he had seen her light as she climbed the stairs? What if he was waiting for her? She couldn’t prove that he was not. But she had no evidence that he was. She waited for a while and there was no sound from inside the house. “Senhor Thursday?” she called softly at last. “Arlo! It’s Fever Crumb!”

  Echoes of her voice came flatly back at her off the wet cliffs at the top of the garden. That was all the answer she got.

  She opened the door wider and stepped through. Went past the empty kitchen, padding along the hall with her breath held, her eyes adjusting to the dark. Rain rattled at the windows and a guttering somewhere dripped steadily. In the doorway of the
former dining room the sawdust and wood-shavings made pale patterns on the floor. She pushed open the door. The room was empty. The flying machine was gone. Even the battered table was bare, cleared of tools and drawings as well as the Saraband engine. If it were not for the dust and the shavings Fever could have believed the machine had been nothing but a dream.

  She moved on through the house, afraid of what she expected to find. But all she found were empty rooms. Most barely furnished, what furniture there was tiger-striped by the dim rainy light which pierced the blinds. In the bedroom something lay on the floor, but when she fumbled her torch out and switched it on it revealed only a heap of Arlo Thursday’s clothes.

  She swung the torch beam on to the wall behind the bed. A painting hung there in a driftwood frame. It was the sort of painting that proud Maydan shipowners commissioned to mark the launching of a new vessel. Two young men in the clothes of half a century ago, standing on a quayside with an elegant ship behind them. The man on the right was black-haired, and his freckled face was so like Arlo’s that it seemed logical to assume that he was Arlo’s grandfather, the notorious Daniel Thursday. But the other…

  Fever went closer, kicking aside the drift of abandoned clothes without noticing them as she stared at the double portrait. Staring at a confident-looking man with a long jaw, grey eyes set slightly wider apart than the eyes of Homo sapiens, a lion’s mane of dark-gold hair. Over his cheekbones, across his brow were clusters of dark markings, like messages scribbled in an unknown alphabet. The artist had captured something arrogant and playful in his smile.

  She knew that smile, that face, that noble head. She ought to. She’d lived inside a statue of it for fourteen years.