He looked blankly at them, then gasped in surprise as Katherine pulled the stupid hood off and he saw her face and her sweat-draggled hair. “Miss Valentine! What in Quirke’s name is happening? Look what those damned interfering Engineers have done to St Paul’s!”
She looked up. The metal orchid was open to its full extent now, casting a deep shadow on the square below. Only it was not an orchid. It was a cowled, flaring thing like the hood of some enormous cobra, and it was swinging round to point at Panzerstadt-Bayreuth.
“MEDUSA!” she said.
“Who?” asked Chudleigh Pomeroy.
A bug siren wailed. “Oh, please!” she cried, turning to the plump Historian, “They’re after us! If they catch Bevis, I don’t know what will happen to him…”
Bless him—he did not say “Why?” or “What have you done wrong?”, just took Katherine by one arm and Bevis Pod by the other and hurried them towards the Guildhall garage where his bug was waiting. As the chauffeur helped them into it a squad of Beefeaters came clattering past, but they paid no attention to Pomeroy and his companions. He hid Katherine’s coat and hood behind his seat, and made Bevis Pod crouch down on the floor of the bug. Then he squeezed himself in beside Katherine on the back seat and said, “Let me do the talking,” as the bug went purring out into Paternoster Square.
There was a throng of people outside the elevator station, gazing up in amazement at the thing which had sprouted from St Paul’s. Beefeaters stopped the bug while a young Engineer peered in. Pomeroy opened a vent in the glastic lid and asked, “Is there a problem, Guildsman?”
“A break-in at the Engineerium. Anti-Tractionist terrorists. …”
“Well, don’t look at us,” laughed Pomeroy. “I’ve been working in my office at the Guildhall all evening, and Miss Valentine has been kindly helping me to sort out some papers…”
“All the same, sir, I’ll have to search your bug.”
“Oh, really!” cried Pomeroy. “Do we look like terrorists? Haven’t you got better things to do, on the last night of London, with a dirty great conurbation bearing down on us? I shall complain to the Council in the strongest possible terms! It’s outrageous!”
The man looked uncertain, then nodded and stepped aside to let Pomeroy’s chauffeur steer the bug into a waiting freight elevator. As the doors closed behind it Pomeroy let out a sigh of relief. “Those damned Engineers. No offence, Apprentice Pod…”
“None taken,” said Bevis’s muffled voice from somewhere below.
“Thank you!” whispered Katherine. “Oh, thank you for helping us!”
“Don’t mention it,” chuckled Pomeroy. “I’m always happy to do anything that upsets Crome and his lackeys. Thousands of years old, that cathedral, and they go and turn it into a… into whatever they’ve turned it into, without so much as a by-your-leave…” He looked nervously at Katherine and saw that she wasn’t really listening. Gently he asked, “But whatever have you done to stir them up, Miss Valentine? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if you and your friend are in trouble, and if there’s anything an old coot like me can do…”
Katherine felt helpless tears prickling her eyes. “Please,” she whispered, “could you just take us home?”
“Of course.”
They sat in awkward silence as the bug drove through the streets of Tier One into the park. The darkness was full of people running and shouting, pointing up towards the cathedral. But there were other runners too: Engineer security men leading squads of Beefeaters. When the bug stopped outside Clio House, Pomeroy climbed out to walk Katherine to the door. She whispered a heartfelt goodbye to Bevis and followed him. “Could you take Apprentice Pod to an elevator station?’ she asked. “He needs to get back to the Gut.”
Pomeroy looked worried. “I don’t know, Miss Valentine,” he sighed. “You’ve seen how het-up the Engineers are. If I know them they’ll have all their factories and dormitory blocks locked down tight by now, and security checks in progress. They may already have worked out that he’s missing, along with two coats and hoods…”
“You mean, he can’t go back?” Katherine felt dizzy at the thought of what she had done to poor Pod. “Not ever?”
Pomeroy nodded.
“Then I’ll keep him with me at Clio House!” Katherine decided.
“He’s not a stray cat, my dear.”
“But when Father gets home he’ll be able to sort everything out, won’t he? Explain to the Lord Mayor that it was nothing to do with Bevis…”
“It’s possible,” agreed Pomeroy. “Your father is very close to the Guild of Engineers. A damned sight too close, some people say. But I don’t think Clio House is the place to keep your friend. I’ll take him down to the Museum. There’s plenty of room for him there, and the Engineers won’t be able to search for him without giving us warning first.”
“Would you really do that?” asked Katherine, afraid that she was dragging yet another innocent person into the trouble she had created. But after all, it would only be for a few days, until Father came home. Then everything would be all right. “Oh, thank you!” she said happily, standing on tiptoe to kiss Pomeroy’s cheek. “Thank you!”
Pomeroy blushed and beamed at her, and started to say something else—but although his mouth moved she could not hear the words. Her head was filled with a strange sound, a whining roar that grew louder and louder until she realized that it wasn’t inside her at all, but pounding down from somewhere overhead.
“Look!” shouted the Historian, pointing upwards.
Her fear had made her forget St Paul’s. Now, looking up at Top Tier, she saw the cobra-hood of MEDUSA start to crackle with violet lightning. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck prickled, and when she reached for Pomeroy’s hand pale sparks jumped between the tips of her fingers and his robes. “Mr Pomeroy!” she shouted. “What’s happening?”
“Great Quirke!” the Historian cried. “What have those fools awoken now?”
Ghostly spheres of light detatched themselves from the glowing machine and drifted down over Circle Park like fire-balloons. Lightning danced around the spires of the Guildhall. The rushing, whining roar grew louder and louder, higher and higher, until even with her hands clapped over her ears Katherine felt she could not bear a moment more of it. Then, quite suddenly, a stream of incandescent energy burst from the cobra’s hood and stretched northwards, a snarling, spitting cat-o’-ninetails lashing out to lick at the upperworks of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth. The night split apart and went rushing away to hide in the corners of the sky. For a second Katherine saw the tiers of the distant conurbation limned in fire, and then it was gone. A pulse of brightness lifted from the earth, blinding white, then red, a pillar of fire rushing up in silence into the sky, and across the flame-lit snow the sound-wave came rolling, a low, long-drawn-out boom as if a great door had slammed shut somewhere in the depths of the earth.
The beam snapped off, plunging Circle Park into sudden darkness, and in the silence she heard Dog howling madly inside the house.
“Great Quirke!” Pomeroy whispered. “All those poor people…!”
“No!” Katherine heard herself say. “Oh, no, no, no!” She started to run across the garden, staring towards the lightning-flecked cloud which wreathed the wreckage of the conurbation. From Circle Park and all the observation platforms came the sound of wordless voices, and she thought at first that they were crying out in horror, the way she wanted to—but no; they were cheering, cheering, cheering.
PART TWO
24
AN AGENT OF THE LEAGUE
The strange light in the north had died away and the long thunderclap had spent itself, echoing and re-echoing from the walls of the old volcano. Mastering their panicked horses, the men of the Black Island came on along the margins of the bog amid a drum-roll of galloping hooves and the torn-silk sound of windblown torches.
Tom raised his hands and shouted, “We’re friends! Not pirates! Travellers! From London!” But the hors
emen were in no mood to listen, even the few who understood. They had been hunting survivors from the sunken suburb all day, they had seen what Peavey’s pirates had done in the fishing villages along the western shore, and now they shouted to each other in their own language and galloped closer, raising their bows. A grey-feathered arrow thudded into the ground at Tom’s feet, making him stumble backwards. “We’re friends!” he shouted again.
The leading man drew his sword, but another rider spurred in front of him, shouting something in the Island tongue, then in Anglish. “I want them alive!”
It was Anna Fang. She reined in her horse, swung herself down from the saddle and ran towards Tom and Hester, her coat flapping against the firelight like a red flag. She wore a sword in a long scabbard on her back, and on her breast Tom saw a bronze badge in the shape of a broken wheel—the symbol of the Anti-Traction League.
“Tom! Hester!” She hugged them one by one, smiling her sweetest smile. “I thought you were dead! I sent Lindstrom and Yasmina to look for you, the morning after the fight at Airhaven. They found your balloon wrecked in those horrible marshes, and said you must be dead, dead. I wanted to search for your poor bodies, but the Jenny had been damaged, and I was so busy helping guide the town down to the repair-yard here… But we said prayers for you, and made funeral sacrifices to the gods of the sky. Do you think we could ask them for a refund?”
Tom kept quiet. His chest was hurting so that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. Anyway, the badge on the aviatrix’s coat told him that Peavey’s stories had been true: she was an agent of the League. He wasn’t charmed any more by her kindness and her tinkling laugh.
She shouted something over her shoulder to the waiting riders, and a couple jumped down from their ponies and led them forward, staring in wonder at Shrike’s corpse. “I have to leave you for a while,” she explained. “I’m taking the Jenny north to see what devilry has lit up the sky. The islanders will look after you. Can you ride?”
Tom had never even seen a horse before, let alone sat on one, but he was so dazed with pain and shock that he could not protest as they heaved him up into the saddle of a shaggy little pony and started to lead it downhill. He looked back for Hester and saw her scowling at him, hunched in the saddle of a second pony. Then the knot of riders closed about her, and he lost sight of her in the narrow, crowded streets of the caravanserai, where whole families were standing outside their homes to stare at the northern sky, and dust and litter whirled between the buildings as Airhaven dipped overhead, trying out its rotors one by one.
There was a small stone house where someone found a seat for him, and a man in black robes and a big white turban who examined his bruised chest. “Broken!” he said cheerfully. “I am Ibrahim Nazghul, physician. Four of your ribs are quite smashed up!”
Tom nodded, giddy with the pain and shock, but starting to feel lucky that he was still alive, and glad that these people weren’t the Anti-Tractionist savages he had been expecting. Dr Nazghul wound bandages around his chest, and his wife brought a steaming bowl of mutton stew and helped Tom eat, spooning it into his mouth. Lantern-light lapped at the corners of the room, and in the doorway the doctor’s children stood staring at Tom with huge dark eyes.
“You are a hero!” explained the doctor. “They say you fought with an iron djinn who would have killed us all.”
Tom blinked sleepily at him. He had almost forgotten the squalid little battle at the edge of the bog: the details were fading quickly, like a dream. I killed Shrike, he thought. All right, so he was dead already, technically, but he was still a person. He had hopes and plans and dreams, and I put a stop to them all. He didn’t feel like a hero, he felt like a murderer, and the feeling of guilt and shame stayed with him, staining his dreams as his head drooped over the bowl of stew and he slipped away into sleep.
Then he was in another room, in a soft bed, and there was a blustery blue-and-white sky beyond the window and a patch of sunlight coming and going on the lime-washed wall.
“How are you feeling, Stalker-killer?” a voice asked. Miss Fang stood over him, watching him with the gentle smile of an angel in an old picture.
Tom said, “Everything hurts.”
“Well enough to travel? The Jenny Haniver is waiting, and I would like to be away before sundown. You can eat once we’re airborne; I’ve made toad in the hole, with real toad.”
“Where’s Hester?” Tom asked groggily.
“Oh, she’s coming too.”
He sat up, wincing at the sharp pain in his chest and the memory of all that had happened. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.
The aviatrix laughed as if she thought he was joking, then realized he wasn’t and sat down on the bed, looking concerned. “Tom? Have I done something to upset you?”
“You work for the League!” he said angrily. “You’re a spy, no better than Valentine! You only helped us because you hoped we’d tell you things about London!”
Miss Fang’s smile faded entirely. “Tom,” she said gently, “I helped you because I like you. And if you had seen your family slave to death aboard a ruthless city, might you not have decided to help the League in its fight against Municipal Darwinism?”
She reached out to brush the tousled hair away from his forehead, and Tom remembered something he had forgotten, a time when he was little and very ill and his mother had sat with him like this. But the badge of the League was still on Miss Fang’s breast, and the wound of Valentine’s betrayal was still raw: he would not let himself be tricked by smiles and kindness again. “You kill people!” he said, pushing her hand away. “You sank Marseilles…”
“If I had not, it would have attacked the Hundred Islands, killing or enslaving hundreds more people than I drowned with my little bomb.”
“And you strangled the … the Raisin of Somewhere-or-Other!”
“The Sultana of Palau Pinang?” The smile came flickering back. “I didn’t strangle her! What a horrible suggestion! I simply broke her neck. She let amphibious raft-cities refuel at her island, so she had be disposed of.”
Tom didn’t see that it was anything to smile about. He remembered Wreyland’s men slumped in the shadows of the air-quay at Stayns, and Miss Fang telling him they were just unconscious.
“I may be no better than Valentine,” she went on, “but there is a difference between us. Valentine tried to kill you, and I want to keep you alive. So, will you come with me?”
“Where to?” asked Tom suspiciously.
“To Shan Guo,” she replied. “I’m willing to bet that what lit up the sky last night had something to do with the thing Valentine took from Hester’s mother. And I have learned that London is heading straight for the Shield-Wall.”
Tom was amazed. Could the Lord Mayor really have found a way to breach the League’s borders? If so, it was the best news for years! As for going to Shan Guo, that was the heart of the Anti-Traction League, the last place in the world a decent Londoner should go. “I won’t do anything to help you harm London,” he told her. “It’s still my home.”
“Of course,” she replied. “But if the Wall is about to be attacked, don’t you think the people who live behind it deserve a chance to get away? I am going to warn them of their danger, and I want Hester to come with me and tell her side of the story. And Hester will only go if you come too.”
Tom laughed, and found that it hurt. “I don’t think so!” he said. “Hester hates me!”
“Nonsense,” giggled Miss Fang. “She likes you very much. Did she not spend half the night telling me how kind you have been, and how wonderfully brave you were, killing that machine-man?”
“Did she?” Tom blushed, feeling suddenly proud. He didn’t think he would ever get used to Hester Shaw and her see-sawing moods. Nevertheless, she was the closest thing he had to a friend in this huge, confusing world, and he still remembered how she had pleaded with Shrike for his life. Wherever she was going, he had to go too: even into the savage heartland of the League; even
to Shan Guo.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll come.”
25. THE HISTORIANS
It is raining on London, steady rain out of the low, bruised sky, raining hard enough to wash away the snow and churn the mud beneath the city’s tracks into thick yellow slurry, but not to quench the fires of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, which are still blazing like a Titan’s pyre away in the north-west.
Magnus Crome stands on the windswept roof of the Engineerium and watches the rising smoke. An apprentice holds an umbrella over him, and behind her wait six tall, motionless figures dressed in black versions of the Guild’s rubber coats. The terrorists who breached the Engineerium last night have still not been caught, and security is being strengthened: from now on the Lord Mayor will go nowhere without his new bodyguard; the first batch of Dr Twix’s Stalkers.
A Guild spotter-ship swings overhead and touches down. Dr Vambrace, the Engineers’ security chief, steps out and comes hurrying to where the Lord Mayor waits, his rubber coat flapping thickly in the wind.
“Well, Doctor?” Crome asks eagerly. “What did you see? Were you able to land?”
Vambrace shakes his head. “Fires are still burning all over the wreck. But we circled as low as we dared and took photographs. The upper tiers have melted and collapsed on to the lower, and it looks as if all the boilers and fuel-stores exploded at the first touch of our energy beam.”
Crome nods. “Were there any survivors?”
“A few signs of life, between the tiers, but otherwise. . .” The security man’s eyes go wide behind his thick glasses, looking like a pair of jellyfish in an aquarium. His department is always keen to find new and inventive ways to kill people, and he is still excited at the thought of the dry, charred shapes he saw littering the streets and squares of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, many of them still standing upright, flashed into clinker statues by the gaze of MEDUSA.
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