A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  “I flew, Fever! I flew!”

  Fever stepped away, because he showed a definite inclination to hug her, the way the Lyceum actors sometimes did after a good performance. She did not want to be hugged by Arlo Thursday. She did not know where it would end.

  His laughter slowly wore itself out. He pulled his goggles off and wiped his eyes. There was a small cut beneath one of them.

  “You were right about the engine,” he said. “We shall need a lighter one.”

  Fever shook her head. “That isn’t possible.”

  “You could make one,” he said. He had flown; he felt all things were possible. “I bet you could make one even better than Edgar’s…”

  “Out of what?” Fever complained. “I haven’t the materials or the tools. I have no idea how to make an engine that would be light enough. And even if I did, what would it run on? Half our ethanol has spilled away. You will just have to make the Goshawk bigger. If it had a broader wingspan perhaps it would be able to lift the engine…”

  “No…” Arlo sat down on the sand, sobered. The angels swooped to and fro above him, dropping echoes of his spent laughter like bombs, Ha ha! Hoo hoo hoo! He traced shapes in the sand for a moment; wings; letters. “No; we haven’t the time; we haven’t the wood; we haven’t the paste or the paper. We must have another engine.”

  “But I have already explained…”

  “You don’t need to build one.” He looked up at her, shading his eyes with one hand, smiling so happily that she wondered if he were still delirious. “We already have one. Right here, on the island.”

  Fever thought for a moment. “The Aranha?”

  “Why not? Your grandfather’s gift to mine. There’s some engine inside it that doesn’t seem to need fuel.”

  “All engines need fuel.”

  “Then maybe it has a limitless supply. If we can get it out and use it to drive the Goshawk’s propeller we’ll have solved the weight problem.”

  “But we need the Aranha! What if Belkin finds us? Or Vishniak?”

  “What if they don’t?” asked Arlo. “They haven’t yet. Why should they now?” He stood up, brushing sand from his clothes, shaking it from his hair. He had been in the sky, and he was not going to let his enemies stop him from returning. “Fever, we’ve almost done it! Powered, controlled flight! We can’t let fear of Belkin and Vishniak stop us now!”

  They spent the rest of the morning dismantling the Goshawk and moving the pieces up above the tideline before the sea returned. In the afternoon they carried it all back, piece by piece, to the tower, reassembling it on the roof while the Aranha hopped on its endless, eerie sentry duty among the overgrown quays below them.

  At about the age when most children were learning nursery rhymes and how to count to ten, Fever had been taught the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Dr Crumb said that everyone should know them; they were the key to understanding so much about the universe. The name made them sound complicated, but they were really quite simple. The first law said that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change its form. The second, that entropy increases in a closed system; which, Dr Crumb explained, meant that hot things, if left to their own devices, cooled down; that heat only moved from hotter places to colder ones, and that machines could never be completely efficient.

  So where did that leave the Stalkers? Reanimated corpses, armoured and mechanized, powered by technology from who-knew-when, they burned no fuel as far as Fever had ever been able to see, and they had been known to keep going for centuries. So either they must be making their own energy somehow (which broke the first law), or they were charged up when they were made and the charge kept them running for ever (which broke the second).

  A technomancer Fever had talked to in Bruges claimed that they drew power from the air by harvesting invisible electric fields, but she suspected he was only guessing. Her mother, chief Stalker-builder to the Movement, had mentioned something called Molecular Clockwork, but she had not been able to explain it, and it sounded like voodoo to Fever.

  It was a mystery, and as she followed Arlo down to the shipyard in the evening sunlight she looked forward to learning more.

  In the alleyways between the ivy-covered ruins Arlo called the machine’s name softly, like someone calling for a strayed cat, and after a few moments it came to them, hopping out through a hole in a wall with the sunset winking on its spines.

  “Careful,” said Fever. “You should have seen what it did to Fat Jago’s thugs and the front of your house.”

  Arlo ignored her. He held out his hand to the Aranha. It hesitated, then seemed to understand, and came closer, swivelling its blunt body from side to side. Fever saw the gun jutting out of its underside, the metal around it darkened and made iridescent by the exhaust from the muzzle. She saw other details which she’d never noticed before, having never been so close to it in daylight: the rims of small inspection hatches set into its flanks and belly; the pistons at the joints of its legs shining sleekly with oil.

  “Come here,” said Arlo, as if it were a pet. It hopped close to him and he deftly popped a hatch open and drew out a glittering ribbon of brass-cased bullets, lifting it into the sunlight as carefully as a Bargetown swami handling a snake. The Aranha just stood there, patiently waiting. He took out a screwdriver and started undoing screws all around the carapace. Fever caught them in her hands as they fell. When there were twelve cupped in her palms she put them down carefully on the ground and she and Arlo between them lifted the whole top of the carapace off.

  A stink of chemistry and must escaped into the air. Fever looked inside the Aranha and saw a mass of wires and ducting wound around and through the featherless carcass of a long-dead bird, all cupped in that metal shell. Mechanical tendrils sprouted from the angel’s skull and from dozens of junction boxes anchored to its spine; a cat’s cradle of wiring more complicated by far than the one she’d created under the Lyceum’s stage. Beneath it all a doughnut-shaped contraption buzzed. Cautiously, she put her hand close to it. It felt as warm as an egg.

  “That’s the power source. Look. It’s wired into everything…”

  “Behold, the Doughnut of Power,” said Arlo.

  “But what is it?” asked Fever. “We should be careful. If we start un-wiring it, it might explode and take us with it. It might make another crater as big as Mayda.”

  But Arlo was already at work, with snips and tweezers, detaching the magic doughnut from the machinery it had powered. He did not care what it was. If it could keep the Aranha on duty through three generations, it should have no difficulty carrying the Goshawk back into the air.

  As he started to lift the doughnut free the Aranha jerked into motion, swift and startling as a spider. It took a step, turned, poked out its gun like a long black tongue. Something inside it went snick-snick-snick like a sewing machine.

  “The power source is no use on its own,” said Fever, wincing with disgust as she snatched a spanner and delved in past the threshing angel in its nest of tubes. “We’ll need the drive mechanism too…” Together they wrenched out the doughnut, along with a fat electric motor. There were sparks, a smell of burned wire, and the Aranha jerked rigid and toppled backwards. Fever jumped out of its way just in time to stop herself going with it as it pitched off the edge of the quay. The splash rang off the ruined walls. The Aranha sank away from her into the greenish water, down into the shadows cast by the wavering weed, the darting silvery fish.

  “Pity,” said Arlo. “I was going to try and salvage the gun too.”

  Cupped in his brown hands, trailing severed cables, the weird power-ring buzzed like a maybug.

  Nothing that Fever knew about power sources could help her understand the object they had taken out of the Aranha. It was high old-tech from the deep past. She didn’t even know a name for the pale metal it was made from. It had no need for fuel and no visible moving parts, and yet it was clearly producing energy, and even wasting a little in the form of that beetly buzzing and a f
aint warmth, until she discovered a square pad on its underside which, when pressed, seemed to shut it off.

  Arlo wanted to call it the doughnut, but Fever thought that sounded undignified and insisted on the torus. Fever thought they should try to prise it open and see what was going on inside, but Arlo shook his head.

  “We’re here to build an aircraft, not to study this contraption. Besides, what if you were right? If we start trying to get inside it, it might explode, or poison us. You hear sometimes of scavengers being poisoned by old machines; their hair falls out, or they puff up like bladders.”

  “If we don’t know how it works,” said Fever, “we’ll never be able to make another.”

  “We won’t need to,” said Arlo. “The important thing for now is to get the Goshawk airborne, so we can show the merchants of Mayda that it really does fly. Once we have some money behind us then we’ll build bigger machines, capable of carrying a real motor.”

  They laid the torus on the floor of the tower, arranging its spaghetti of wires around it like the legs of a jellyfish which they were getting ready to dissect. The wires were sheathed in plastic, with little terminals of the pale metal at their ends. “It’s like a battery,” said Fever, wishing again that she still had some of Godshawk’s memories. “Look, this red wire must be a negative pole and this black one is positive… Or perhaps the other way around. Either way we should be able to form a circuit…”

  Arlo nodded encouragingly, but Fever could tell that he did not understand. She fetched Edgar Saraband’s engine, which they had not bothered to mount again aboard the Goshawk. Opening the heavy cowling, she studied the parts inside. If they were to lose the fuel keg and all those unsightly ducts, she could house the torus there, and use its motor to turn the gears and power the reduction drive. A pity the Aranha had sunk; it would have been a useful mine for the materials she would need. But Arlo’s toolboxes were well stocked, and she was an Engineer. She thought that she could do it.

  She told Arlo to bring spanners and screwdrivers, and set to work dismantling the old engine.

  24

  DROWNED OFFERING

  t the foot of the cliffs in a corner of the Belkin’s beach Thirza kept a sacred tide-pool. She knew that it was silly, but the Mãe Abaixo had been so much a part of her childhood, and it made her feel safe and childlike again to perform the age-old rituals. So she had had a priestess from the temple come to bless the pool, and Fat Jago’s architect had designed a pretty little copper-domed temple with driftwood pillars to shelter it, and each day (if she was not too busy) she came down to make an offering there.

  She was kneeling at the pool’s edge watching the green and purple weeds wave in its depths when Weasel found her that afternoon. He came winging low over the wave tops, and settled beside her, calling her name, full of excitement at having flown with Arlo.

  When Thirza returned to the house she was shaking a little, and her dress was wet. She went to find Fat Jago, who was reading in the garden room. “The fruit is ripe,” she said. “It’s time to shake the tree.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Arlo flew this morning. Poor Weasel told me all about it. He was very excited. There was a lot I didn’t really understand, about Arlo and the Crumb girl and a big crab? But the important part was clear enough. Arlo has finished his machine, and he flew all round the island in it and landed on a beach. Flew like an angel, apparently.”

  Fat Jago set his book aside and levered himself up out of his chair. “Excellent. I’ll cross to Thursday Island tonight. Prepare a letter for the Cartel; we’ll send it as soon as I come home with the machine. What about that bird of yours?”

  “Oh, I have dealt with him,” said Thirza, as carelessly as she could.

  Her husband came closer and saw the state she was in; the small scratches on her hands and the seawater dripping from the hem of her dress. “Poor Thirza!” he said, and held her close.

  She had drowned Weasel in the tide-pool. It had been horrible. She had had to hold him under with both her hands, and it had taken much longer than she had expected for the life to go out of him. Water had splashed everywhere, and his little fingers had clutched and clawed and scrabbled at her hands. It had made her sad, but she had no further use for the angel now, and if she had let him live there was always a danger that he might fly back to the island and let Arlo know what he had told her. Anyway, he would be her gift to the Goddess. The Mãe Abaixo was usually content with wine or coins these days and never asked for human sacrifices any more, but at a time like this, with such important business to be conducted, it could do no harm to offer her a life.

  While she changed out of her wet clothes and Bisa dabbed ointment on her scratches, Fat Jago made his preparations. He sent messengers running into the city to tell the captain and crew of his galley that they would sail on the evening tide. He took off his gold-embroidered house-robes and put on some clothes which Thirza had given him especially for this expedition; a sturdy canvas jacket with dozens of useful pockets, dark blue barragan breeches, gaitered boots. She thought he looked splendid when he emerged from his dressing room. The brass buttons that secured all the pockets glinted and winked in the evening sunlight, bright as new gold coins, and he had changed his diamond scalp-symbol from red to a nice, nautical blue. She fetched the packet of sandwiches that she had made for him and slipped it into one of the pockets.

  “I wish I could come with you,” she said, smoothing a crease out of his collar.

  “It’s no place for you, my sweet,” said Fat Jago. He knew there might be violence and unpleasantness ahead, and he liked to keep Thirza free of such things, in a separate compartment of his life. He kissed her goodbye. “I’ll miss you!”

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  When his sedan chair had departed for the harbourside she went back down the garden to the beach. Angels were flapping and cawing around her little temple, striping its roof with their poo, wailing over the bundle of dirty feathers that washed to and fro in the pool between the driftwood pillars. “Shoo!” shouted Thirza, flapping her arms at them. “Be off with you!”

  They lifted into the sky like wind-blown newspapers, still wailing.

  A half-hour later, Jonathan Hazell stepped out on to the little balcony outside his study. He had dispatched messengers to Nowhere and Meriam that morning, and Dr Teal had been pacing the drawing room ever since, waiting for them to return with news of Fever. Jonathan Hazell had busied himself with all the letters and receipts and bills of lading which he had been neglecting during the past few days while he played detective. It never ceased to astonish him, the way such paperwork heaped up…

  Standing on the balcony, he started to notice that there was some sort of confusion going on among the angels. Alarm calls racketed across the rooftops. The big birds were flying in crazy circles over the harbour and executing wild manoeuvres between Mayda’s chimney stacks. He shivered. The idea that he shared this city with intelligences that were not human had always unsettled him, no matter how dim and amiable the angels were. He could not help but find this strange behaviour ominous. He’d often heard his Maydan friends recall that the angels had been the first to raise the warning when that great wave came; the Ondra Del Mãe, rolling in like a judgement from the western deeps…

  He glanced towards the harbour mouth and the open ocean beyond. There was no sign of a wave. But he saw something in the outer basin that concerned him almost as much. He stared for a moment, then ran inside the house.

  “Dr Teal! Dr Teal!”

  He dragged the Engineer out on to the balcony with him and pointed at the harbour.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Dr Teal. “That red ship?”

  “That is Fat Jago’s galley, the Desolation Row!” said Jonathan Hazell. “She’s been towed into the outer basin. She must be making ready to sail on the next tide!”

  Dr Teal looked again, and this time Jonathan Hazell could see his mind working. For all his bumbling, the Engineer wasn’t stupid.
“He must have had word of Thursday and Fever. He’s taking that ship to find them and bring back Arlo’s machine.”

  “Of course, it may be some other matter,” ventured Jonathan Hazell hopefully. “A man like Fat Jago must have many matters of business to attend to.”

  “Believe me,” said Dr Teal, with sudden, startling earnestness, “none of them will be more important than Thursday’s machine.”

  “Machine?”

  “His boat, ship, whatever it is that he is building. We must get aboard that galley and see where Fat Jago is going to—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no!” said Jonathan Hazell. “Fat Jago’s men will see us – I mean, they will see you—”

  “But how else can we find out where they are bound, and get there first, and ensure … ensure Fever’s safety?”

  “Believe me, Dr Teal, I am as concerned about Miss Crumb as you, but to try and stow away aboard the Desolation Row would be madness.” He blinked a few times, looking from Teal to the distant harbourside, where tuns of water were being rolled into the galley’s holds. “Madness,” he said again, and then, “I have a little boat of my own… It will take a big ship like the Desolation Row several hours to make ready and get out of the harbour. In my boat we could leave at once.”

  “For where? Nowhere? Or Meriam?”

  “Meriam,” said Jonathan Hazell firmly. “It is most likely that Miss Crumb has gone where her friends are. And once we are out of the harbour the wind will be with us running down the coast.”