A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  “Now what?” asked Jonathan Hazell.

  Fever hadn’t really thought about it. She quickly considered their situation. It was not good. Dawn was coming. Offshore, Fat Jago’s men would be preparing another attack. “We have to get away from here,” she said. “We’ll take your boat.”

  “They’ll catch us!” the merchant objected. “There’s no way we can outrun that galley!”

  “They won’t be after us,” said Fever. “It’s Arlo they want, and Arlo will be flying back to Mayda.” She turned to Arlo. “You must do what you always planned to. Fly the Goshawk across and land it in Mayda, let everybody see what you’ve created. Then your idea will be free in the world and there’ll be no point in anyone trying to stop it any more.”

  “Fever, I can’t,” said Arlo. He was sitting at the foot of the stairs, propping Dr Teal’s gun against the handrail. “I can’t move my arm. There’s no strength in my hand. I can’t fly the Goshawk like this. I’m sorry. You’ll have to do it.”

  She started to protest, but she knew that he was being rational. His wounded arm in its sleeve of bloody bandage looked stiff and lifeless, like something that did not belong to him.

  “Don’t you dare, Fever!” warned Dr Teal. “Burn the machine. The plans too. That way the Oktopous won’t get hold of it, and I’ll make an exception and let Thursday go.”

  “Really?” asked Fever.

  “He’s lying,” said Arlo. “You can see that he’s lying!”

  How? wondered Fever. But she knew Arlo’s instincts for such things were better than hers so she tore another strip from his ruined shirt and gagged Dr Teal to stop him saying any more. Outside, the eastern sky had turned that shade of pink you see sometimes on the insides of seashells. A brisk west wind blew scraps of cloud along.

  “I’ve never flown before,” she said.

  “Nor had I, before yesterday,” said Arlo. “You’ll soon get the hang of it.”

  27

  FEVER IN THE AIR

  o there she hung in the harness of the Goshawk, wishing that there had been time to make even a short test flight with the new engine. The sky to westward was twilight grey, the sea still, a bright planet hanging just above the horizon. The wind blew in her face. Angels hung on the updraughts above the tower. Their grief over Weasel seemed forgotten now. They were just curious to see whether the machine would fly any better this time.

  Fever tried to imagine herself landing the Goshawk in Mayda, explaining herself to the people who came gathering round to gawp and wonder. It was hard to believe that they would listen. But she could think of nothing else to do.

  Arlo leaned over her, fumbling one-handed with the torus inside its new housing. After a moment Fever felt it start up. It sent vibrations rippling through all the spars and cables; through all her bones; her tensed muscles. Fever threw a switch to complete the circuit and felt the vibrations change as the propeller started turning faster and faster, the Goshawk straining forward. She shouted to Jonathan Hazell, “Now! Now!” and he leaned all his meagre weight against the tail-bar, pushing, running with the machine as it began to move.

  The tower’s edge rushed at her, sped past, and she was in the air. She almost stalled and dropped backwards into the cliff face, but recovered in time, straining at the flap and rudder controls, easing the machine up and away over the dead quays, over the sea.

  She had a dizzying view for a moment of the isles and stacks to northward. Saw a scattering of postage-stamp sails that must be Mayda’s fishing fleet, and a bigger ship lying on the far rim of the sea. All she could hear was the wind sighing over paper and singing through rigging; the creak of wood and cordage. The purr of the torus was too faint to reach her. She flew with no more noise than an angel.

  Then, as she turned the Goshawk’s nose towards the east, Mayda itself came into view, and the red galley, and three small boats lying black as splinters on the bright water halfway between the galley and Arlo’s island.

  They had already seen her. She could see men standing up in them, waving to each other, pointing. When she aimed the Goshawk at them and went swooping down a man panicked and threw himself into the sea. She wished she had brought a stone or something to drop on them, but she had nothing. All she could do was look down at the stupid, shouting, upturned faces as she wheeled above them. One man raised an arquebus and she saw the white spurt of smoke as he fired it at her, but she didn’t think that he could hit her. She went higher just in case, and now the boats were behind her and she was rushing through the sunlit air, her escort of angels stretching out on either wing.

  She had never felt so alive, and she found herself thinking that if she did fall and die it would be worth it just to have felt this soaring freedom…

  But she saw no reason why she should fall. The torus was working just as she had hoped, and the sense of impending danger that had been with her all through the launch was fading steadily as she learned to trust the Goshawk. She banked from side to side, veering through the flock of excitable angels. Glancing back, she saw that the boats had caught up with the galley and that their crews were scrambling up her sides, the galley herself already turning and getting under way.

  It occurred to her that she should give the Oktopous men some hope of catching her. Without encouragement they might give up and go ashore in the hope of finding plans or something in the tower, and find Arlo and Jonathan Hazell too. She took the Goshawk down low again, remembering how mother birds sometimes feigned injury to lure predators away from their chicks. Perhaps Fat Jago’s men would think that the machine was damaged. That would make them pursue it even more eagerly, and stop them wondering about who might be left behind on the island.

  So she glided above the crests of the waves, spattered with water whenever one rippled into foam. On her right the Goshawk’s shadow scudded along, looking like some huge ray keeping pace with her just under the surface. In the north, the big ship she had noticed earlier had drawn nearer, and resolved itself into three ships sailing close together in a tight formation. That worried her faintly. Could it be more Oktopous galleys? Reinforcements, summoned by the captain of the Desolation Row? But surely they would not send three, and they would be coming from the south, from the Middle Sea, not from the north?

  A breathy boom came from behind her. It sounded like an exhausted thunderclap and she could not think what it meant until she banked and circled and saw the galley fire a second shot; a jab of orange flame from the big gun in that swivelling wooden turret on its forecastle. The projectile went whining past, just off the tip of her right-hand wing, and kicked up a splash of spray about a hundred yards beyond her. By the time the sound came across the water to her the galley had already fired again, and she was climbing, climbing, striving to get out of range.

  She had not reckoned with gunfire. Fat Jago had wanted the machine in one piece, hadn’t he? But maybe whoever had succeeded him as commander of the galley wasn’t so bothered about that. Maybe he would be content to smash it from the sky and see what he could learn from the wreckage.

  Mayda still looked a long way off. She pushed hard on the altitude lever and the Goshawk climbed gamely, the torus thrumming, the distant booms of the big gun fading behind her. But there was a new noise now; a rattling, hissing sound that she was certain had not been there when she first took off. She craned her head about, trying to find the cause of it.

  There was a hole in the left-hand wing. She couldn’t think that it had been made by one of the shells from the big gun; it was too small, and they had not come close enough. Perhaps that man who had fired his gun at her when she circled the boats had been a better shot than she’d allowed for. At any rate, the hole was there, and getting steadily bigger as the wind worried at its edges. She felt a listing sensation, as if the right-hand wing was lower than the left. She tried altering her balance in the harness, but it made no difference. The wing was starting to break up.

  She did not feel free or ecstatic any more. Carefully reciting numbers from the
Fibonacci series to try and keep herself calm, she began easing the Goshawk back down, reasoning that if she was doomed to drop into the sea it would be better to do it from six feet than six hundred. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the galley coming after her, perhaps two miles behind. She wished now she’d not tried to be so clever; wished she hadn’t taunted them or tried to be a mother bird. Hoping to get well ahead, she adjusted the torus control to give her more speed.

  It was a bad mistake. As the Goshawk powered forward the stresses on its injured wing increased. A supporting strut snapped with a sound like a pistol shot; a loose cable lashed Fever’s face, the Goshawk flipped over, and suddenly she was not the pilot of a flying machine any longer, just a frightened girl dropping into the sea in a tangle of ripped paper and splintering wood. The horizon cartwheeled over her. She heard the angels screeching. Then the sea slapped her hard and she was underwater; blue and white and a blizzard of bubbles, some of which were caused by all the air in her lungs rushing out and making for the surface.

  She struggled with the buckles of the harness. She couldn’t tell if she was ten fathoms deep or if the wreck was floating on the waves and she just happened to be underneath it. It didn’t matter much anyway, since she could drown just as well in either place. The buckles were too stiff. She strained at them and couldn’t shift them and then at the last moment, as her vision darkened and coloured stars started to swim inside her head, she wrenched herself free of the straps without undoing them, fought against the drowning machine for a terrified moment and burst up gasping into the sunlight.

  The Goshawk was afloat. Crumpled, shattered, barely recognizable as the graceful thing of thirty seconds earlier, it rode the long swell like a clot of flotsam. Which, Fever supposed, as she dragged herself on to the rudder, was all it was now. One wing, held upright by a taut tangle of rigging, poked into the air like a boat’s sail. Like a paper tombstone. Like a signpost, telling the lookouts at the masthead of the Desolation Row where they could find their fallen prey.

  She lay on the rudder and tried to catch her breath. The waves that washed over her washed away pink, and she realized that the stinging pain she could feel on her face was a deep gash, caused by that flailing cable-end. If it weren’t for the goggles, she might have lost an eye. She pulled them off – they’d filled with water anyway – and started trying to think what she should do next. It was hard to concentrate, for loss of blood was making her feel dizzy and stupid. She wondered if she would bleed to death before the galley reached her. But whatever happens, they mustn’t find the torus…

  The thought of that powerful little device in the hands of another man like Fat Jago cut through the fog that was starting to wrap her brain. She made herself grope her way along the wallowing fuselage to the place where the engine housing was attached. The torus was silent now, broken in the wreck or drowned by the sea. But she couldn’t be certain that it was not repairable, so she pulled her knife out of her pocket and set to work, loosening one screw and then the next until the torus came free in her hands. She looked at it, at the battered pale metal which had survived through so many centuries, which her grandfather had held before her. All that power, and all that mystery. I can’t just throw it away, she thought. It needs to be studied. The Order of Engineers should see it…

  But then she looked up and the Desolation Row was much closer than she’d thought, and anyway the Engineers weren’t an Order any more, they were a Guild, and even if she could give them the torus they wouldn’t use it to fly, only for something irrational like making an even bigger, faster mobile city. So she opened her fingers and it slid down the slope of the wing and silently into the sea, where she watched it for a moment going down, fading away from her into the blue depths like her offering to the Mother Below.

  The beating of the galley’s drums came steadily to her across the water, and with it now there was another sound; a steady pounding, a throaty throb. She thought at first that it was the blood whooshing and booming in her ears, but then she looked at the Desolation Row and saw that they had heard it too. Men were running about excitedly on the galley’s decks, and the gun turret was swivelling, and it wasn’t pointed at her any more but at something else, something in the north.

  Sleepily, she sat herself up, bracing herself against the struts of her foundering machine. The swell was steepening, and for a moment, down in the combe between two waves, she could see nothing but sea and sky. Then the next wave heaved the wreckage upwards and her view widened.

  There was a second ship coming towards her. It was the same one which she had glimpsed earlier, and which she had mistaken for three ships sailing side by side. Now that it was closer she could see that it was really one ship with three hulls linked together by thick struts and gantries. A trimaran, she supposed you’d call it. All three hulls were studded with gun emplacements, and as Fever watched one of the guns went off, and a white spurt of water was flung up just ahead of the Desolation Row.

  The sea swung her down again into another trough; nothing to see but blue water. When she came up again she was just in time to watch the galley let off its big gun, the shot falling harmlessly just short of the strange ship. She could see people hurrying along brass-railed walkways on the upper decks of the newcomer, a flag flapping on a tall mast. She squinted at it, and knew it. It showed a wheeled white tower on a black field. The flag of Quercus. The flag of London.

  Fever Crumb, she thought, flopping down on her side, you’re hallucinating. Your mind is making up a rescuer for you. There’s no point looking at it; it isn’t real.

  But the waves kept hoisting her up, like friendly grown-ups lifting a child to see a passing parade. She couldn’t help but watch. She couldn’t help but see the way the Desolation Row started to turn uncertainly as the new ship bore down on it; the way the new ship’s central hull swept forward into a ram longer and sharper and even more vicious than the galley’s. A shell glanced from its ironclad prow. Another made part of its upperworks unravel into smoke and splinters, but it kept moving at the same speed, the thump of its engines drumming across the sea, steam and smoke and sparks pumping out of its tall chimneys. It swept past the wreckage of the Goshawk, and its wake lifted Fever even higher so that she could watch as it sliced the Desolation Row in half.

  The galley’s stern rolled over and sank instantly. The bow section floated for a few seconds, the oars still going up and down as if some of the rowers there hadn’t noticed that they no longer had a ship to pull. Then something exploded down beneath the gun turret, blasting orange flame high into the air, sending shards of splintered wood turning over and over up among the circling angels. A man went with them. Fever watched him waving his arms and legs as he soared up and up, and seemed to hang for a moment in the sunlight, as if gravity had forgotten him before he fell with all the other wreckage, and vanished into the rash of white water where the galley had gone down, and did not surface.

  A black clot of smoke rose and spread above the wreck-site, trailing long cloudy tentacles like a phantom squid. The victorious steamship backed its engines and began to turn towards Fever, and had she been watching still she would have seen that boats were being lowered from davits on its sides. But by then she had seen enough. Her eyes closed. It felt peaceful just to lie there with the salt water prickling as it dried on her skin and the sun making hot patterns behind her eyelids, the colour of Arlo’s kiss. She relaxed her grip on the struts she’d been clinging to. Her own weight slid her gently down the wing, and the waiting sea folded over her like a coverlet.

  She didn’t notice the angels descending. She didn’t feel their beaks and fingers hooking her wet clothes, or hear the flap of their wings as they struggled together to keep her from slipping under the water. But somewhere in her dreams she heard the shouts of the sailors in the approaching boats, who thought that the big birds were trying to eat her. “Get out of it! Gahn! Blog off, you great fevvery cloots!” London voices, she thought. London has come to find me.

&nb
sp; 28

  MOTHERSHIP

  ever, dearest?”

  Her mother was bending over her.

  Her mother?

  She tried closing her eyes and opening them again.

  “Fever,” her mother said, “it’s me.”

  And so it was. Wavey Godshawk, with her ash-white hair wound in an elaborate chignon around her beautiful head, and wearing a costume that had been designed by some expensive dressmaker to look slightly like a sailor’s uniform without concealing any of her natural curves.

  “But where…?”

  Fever sat up, and felt salt prickling where the seawater had dried on her skin. The cabin was luxurious: all wood and bronze, with curtained windows, glass-fronted bookcases, soft chairs, a scent-lantern playing something cool and minty. There were paintings on the panelled walls and one of them was a portrait of Fever’s father, looking awkward in a stiff-collared tunic. Only the beat of big engines trembling through the walls and floor let her know that she was still at sea. She seemed to be always waking up on strange boats these days.

  “What ship is this?” she asked.

  Wavey leaned over her, smoothing a soft hand over her face. “You are aboard the steam-ram Supercollider, my darling, and you are perfectly, perfectly safe.”

  When Wavey Godshawk received word from Dr Teal to say that he had found her missing daughter, she had gone straight to Quercus to ask for a ship that she could take to Mayda, and Quercus had lent her the Supercollider. He had built the great steam-ram to protect the convoys of shipping which helped feed his new city’s hunger for raw materials, but the northern seas were clear of pirates now, and he saw no harm in letting the barbarous southerners see how powerful London’s new masters was. He had lent her to Wavey with his blessing.