Mortal Engines me-1

by Phillip Reeve

  The Jenny Haniver landed among some other merchant ships at a mooring-terrace halfway down the Wall, and Miss Fang led Tom and Hester to a waiting balloon that took them up again past parks and tea-shops to the governor’s palace; the ancient monastery from which Batmunkh Gompa took its name, whitewashed and many-windowed, carved out of the steep side of the mountain at the Wall’s end. Other balloons were converging on the landing deck below the palace gardens, their envelopes bright in the mountain sunlight, and in one of the dangling baskets Tom saw Captain Khora waving.

  They met on the landing deck, the young airman touching down just ahead of them and running across to embrace Miss Fang and help her friends out of the skittish gondola. He had flown here from Airhaven the morning after Shrike’s attack, and he seemed amazed and happy to see Tom and Hester alive. Turning to the aviatrix he said, “The Governor and his officers are eager for your report, Feng Hua. Terrible rumours have reached us about London…”

  It was good to meet a friendly face in this strange new city, and Tom fell into step beside Khora as he led the newcomers up the long stair to the palace entrance. He remembered seeing a trim Achebe 2100 berthed at one of the lower platforms and asked, “Was that your machine we saw at the mooring-place, the one with oxhide outriggers?”

  Khora laughed delightedly. “That old air-scow? No, thank the gods! My Mokele Mbembe is a warship, Tom. Every ally of the League supplies a ship to the Northern Air-Fleet, and they are stabled together, up there.” He stopped and pointed, and Tom saw the gleam of bronze doors far up near the summit of the Wall. “The High Eyries.”

  “We’ll take you up there one day, Tom,” promised Miss Fang, leading them past the warrior-monks who guarded the door and on into a maze of cool stone corridors. “The League’s great Air Destroyers are one of the wonders of the skies! But first, Governor Khan must hear Hester’s story.”

  Governor Ermene Khan was a gentle old man with the long, mournful face of a kindly sheep. He welcomed them all into his private quarters and gave them tea and honey-cakes in a room whose round windows looked down towards the lake of Batmunkh Nor, gleaming among patchwork farmlands, far below. For a thousand years his family had helped to man the Shield-Wall, and he seemed dazed by the news that all his guns and rockets were suddenly useless. “No city can pass Batmunkh Gompa,” he kept saying, as the room filled with officers eager to hear the aviatrix’s advice. “My dear Feng Hua, if London dares to approach us, we will destroy it. As soon as it comes in range—boom!”

  “But that is what I’m trying to tell you!” cried Miss Fang impatiently. “London doesn’t need to come within range of your guns. Crome will park his city a hundred miles away and burn your precious Wall to ashes! You have heard Hester’s story. I believe that the machine Valentine stole from her mother was a fragment of an ancient weapon—and what happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth proves that the Guild of Engineers have managed to restore it to working order.”

  “Yes, yes,” said an artillery officer, “so you say. But can we really believe that Crome has found a way to reactivate something that has been buried since the Sixty Minutes War? Perhaps Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was just destroyed by a freak accident.”

  “Yes!” Governor Khan clutched gratefully at the idea. “A meteorite, or some sort of gas-leak…” He stroked his long beard, reminding Tom of one of the dithery old Historians back at the London Museum. “Perhaps Crome’s city will not even come here… Perhaps he has other prey in mind?”

  But his other officers were more ready to believe the Wind-Flower’s report. “He’s coming here, all right,” said one, an aviatrix from Kerala, not much older than Tom. “I took a scout-ship west the day before yesterday, Feng Hua,” she explained, with an adoring look at Miss Fang. “The barbarian city was less than five hundred miles away, and approaching fast. By tomorrow night MEDUSA could be within range.”

  “And there have been sightings of a black airship in the mountains,” put in Captain Khora. “The ships sent to intercept it never returned. My guess is that it was Valentine’s 13th Floor Elevator, sent to spy out our cities so that London can devour them.”

  Valentine! Tom felt a strange mix of pride and fear at the thought of the Head Historian on the loose here in the very heart of Shan Guo. Beside him, Hester tensed at the mention of the explorer’s name. He looked at her, but she was staring past him, out through the open windows towards the mountains as if she half expected to see the 13th Floor Elevator go flying past.

  “No city can pass the Shield-Wall,” said Governor Khan, loyal to his ancestors, but he did not sound convinced any more.

  “You must launch the Air-Fleet, Governor,” Miss Fang insisted, leaning forward in her seat. “Bomb London before they can bring MEDUSA into range. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “No!” shouted Tom, springing up so that his chair fell backwards with a clatter. He couldn’t believe what she had said. “You said we were coming here to warn people! You can’t attack London! People will get hurt! Innocent people!” He was thinking of Katherine, imagining League torpedoes crashing into Clio House and the Museum. “You promised!” he said weakly.

  “Feng Hua does not make promises to savages,” snapped the Keralan girl, but Miss Fang hushed her. “We will just hit the Gut and tracks, Tom,” she said. “Then the Top Tier, where MEDUSA is housed. We do not seek to harm the innocent, but what else are we to do, if a barbarian city chooses to threaten us?”

  “London’s not a barbarian city!” shouted Tom. “It’s you who are the barbarians! Why shouldn’t London eat Batmunkh Gompa if it needs to? If you don’t like the idea, you should have put your cities on wheels long ago, like civilized people!”

  A few of the League officers were shouting angrily at him to be quiet, and the Keralan girl had drawn her sword, but Miss Fang calmed them with a few words and turned her patient smile to Tom. “Perhaps you should leave us, Thomas,” she said firmly. “I will come and find you later.”

  Tom’s eyes stung with stupid tears. He was sorry for these people, of course he was. He could see that they weren’t savages, and he didn’t really believe any more that they deserved to be eaten, but he couldn’t just sit by and listen to them planning to attack his home.

  He turned to Hester in the hope that she would take his side, but she was lost in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing and re-tracing the scars under her red veil. She felt guilty and stupid. Guilty because she had been happy in the air with Tom, and it was wrong to be happy while Valentine was wandering about unpunished. Stupid because, when he gave her the shawl, she had started to hope that Tom really liked her, and thinking of Valentine made her remember that nobody could like her, not in that way, not ever. When she saw him looking at her she just said, “They can kill everybody in London for all I care, so long as they save Valentine for me.”

  Tom turned his back on her and stalked out of the high chamber, and as the door rolled shut behind him he heard the Keralan girl hiss, “Barbarian!”

  Alone, he mooched down to the terrace where the taxi-balloons waited and sat on a stone bench there, feeling angry and betrayed and thinking of things that he should have said to Miss Fang, if only he had thought of them in time. Below him the rooftops and terraces of Batmunkh Gompa stretched away into the shadows below the white shoulders of the mountains, and he found himself trying to imagine what it must be like to live here and wake up every day of your life to the same view. Didn’t the people of the Shield-Wall long for movement and a change of scene? How did they dream, without the grumbling vibrations of a city’s engines to rock them to sleep? Did they love this place? And suddenly he felt terribly sad that the whole bustling, colourful, ancient city might soon be rubble under London’s tracks.

  He wanted to see more. Going over to the nearest balloon-taxi, he made the pilot understand that he was Miss Fang’s guest and wanted to go down into the city. The man grinned and started weighting his gondola with stones from a pile that stood nearby, and soon Tom found himself travelling d
own past the many levels of the city again until he stepped out on a sort of central square, where dozens of other taxis were coming and going and stairways branched off across the face of the Shield-Wall, going up towards the High Eyries and down to the shops and markets of the lower levels.

  News of MEDUSA was spreading fast through Batmunkh Gompa, and already a lot of the houses and shops were shuttered, their owners fled to cities further south. The lower levels were still packed with people, though, and as the sun dipped behind the Wall Tom wandered the crowded bazaars and steep ladderways. There were fortune-tellers’ booths at the street corners, and shrines to the sky-gods, dusty with the crumbly grey ash of incense sticks. Fierce-looking Uighur acrobats were performing in the central square, and everywhere he looked he saw soldiers and airmen of the League: blond giants from Spitzbergen and blue-black warriors from the Mountains of the Moon, the small dark people of the Andean statics and people the colour of firelight from jungle strongholds in Laos and Annam.

  He tried to forget that some of these young men and women might soon be dropping rockets on London, and started to enjoy the flow of faces and the incomprehensible mish-mash of languages—and sometimes he heard someone say “Tom!” or “Thomasz!” or “Tao-mah!” as they pointed him out to their friends. The story of his battle with Shrike had spread through the mountains from trading-post to trading-post and had been waiting for him here in Batmunkh Gompa. He didn’t mind. It felt like a different Thomas that they were talking about, someone brave and strong who understood what had to be done, and felt no doubts.

  He was just wondering if he should go back to the Governor’s palace and find Hester, when he noticed a tall figure climbing a nearby stairway. The man wore a ragged red robe with the hood pulled down over his face, and carried a staff in one hand and a pack slung over his shoulder. Tom had already seen dozens of these wandering holy men in Batmunkh Gompa; monks in the service of the mountain gods who travelled from city to city through the high passes. (Up at the mooring platform Anna Fang had stooped to kiss the feet of one, and given six bronze coins for him to bless the Jenny Haniver.) But this man was different; something about him snagged Tom’s gaze and would not let it go.

  He started following the red robe. He followed it through the spice market with its thousand astonishing scents, and down the narrow Street of Weavers where hundreds of baskets swung from low poles outside the shops like hanging nests, brushing against the top of his head as he passed underneath. What was it about the way the man moved, and that long brown hand clutching the staff?

  And then, under a lantern in the central square, the monk was stopped by a street-girl asking for a blessing and Tom caught a glimpse of the bearded face inside the hood. He knew that hawk-like nose and those mariner’s eyes; he knew that the amulet hanging between the black brows hid the familiar Guild-mark of a London Historian.

  It was Valentine!

  27. DR ARKENGARTH REMEMBERS

  Katherine spent a lot of time in the Museum in those final days, as London went roaring towards the mountains. Safe in its dingy maze she could not hear the burr of the saws as they felled the last few trees in Circle Park to feed the engines, or the cheers of the noisy crowds who gathered each day in front of the public Goggle-screens where the details of Crome’s great plan were being gradually revealed. She could even forget the Guild of Engineers’ security people, who were everywhere now, not just the usual white-coated thugs, but a strange new breed in black coats and hoods, silent, stiff in their movements, with a faint greenish glow behind their tinted visors: Dr Twix’s Resurrected Men.

  But if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t only the peace and quiet that kept calling her down to the Museum. Bevis was there, his borrowed bedding spread out on the floor of the old Transport gallery, under the dusty hanging shapes of model gliders and flying machines. She needed his company more and more as the city hauled itself eastward. She liked the fact that he was her secret. She liked his soft voice, and the strange laugh that always sounded as if he were trying it on for size, as if he had never had much call for laughter down in the Deep Gut. She liked the way he looked at her, his dark eyes always lingering on her face and especially her hair. “I’ve never really known anybody with hair before,” he told her one day. “In the Guild they use chemicals on us when we’re first apprenticed, so it never grows back.” Katherine thought about his pale, smooth scalp. She liked that too. It sort of suited him. Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected, like an Apprentice Engineer?

  She wished that Father was here, so she could ask him.

  In the afternoons Bevis would pull on a Historian’s robe and hide his bald head under a cap and go down to help Dr Nancarrow, who was busy re-cataloguing the Museum’s huge store of paintings and drawings and taking photographs in case the Lord Mayor decided to feed those to the furnaces as well. Then Katherine would wander the Museum with Dog at her heels, hunting for the things that her father had dug up. Washing machines, pieces of computer, the rusty ribcage of a Stalker, all had labels which read, “Discovered by Mr T. Valentine, Archaeologist”. She could imagine him lifting them gently out of the soil that had guarded them, cleaning them, wrapping them in scrim for transport back to London. He must have done the same thing with the MEDUSA fragment when he discovered it, she thought. She whispered prayers to Clio, sure that the goddess must be present in these time-soaked halls. “London needs him! I need him! Please send him safely home, and soon…”

  But it was Dog, not Clio, who led her into the Natural History section that evening. He had glimpsed a display of stuffed animals from the far end of the corridor and gone prowling down to stare at them, a growl bubbling in the back of his throat. Old Dr Arkengarth, who was passing through the gallery on his way home, backed away nervously, but Kate said, “It’s all right, Doctor! He’s quite safe!” and knelt down at Dog’s side, looking up at the sharks and dolphins that swung above her and the great looming shape of the whale, which had been taken off its hawsers and propped against the far wall before the vibrations could bring it crashing down.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” said Arkengarth, who was always ready to begin a lecture. “A Blue Whale. Hunted to extinction in the first half of the 21 st century. Or possibly the 20th: the records are unclear. We wouldn’t even know what it looked like if Mrs Shaw hadn’t discovered those fossilized bones…”

  Katherine had been thinking about something else, but the name “Shaw” made her look round. The display case Arkengarth was pointing at housed a rack of brownish bones, and propped against a vertebra was a label that said, “Bones of a Blue Whale, Discovered by Mrs P. Shaw, Freelance Archaeologist”.

  Pandora Shaw, thought Katherine, recalling the name she had seen in the Museum catalogue. Not Hester. Of course not. But just to get Dr Arkengarth out of lecture-mode she said, “Did you know her? Pandora Shaw?”

  “Mrs Shaw, yes, yes,” the old man nodded. “A lovely lady. She was an Out-Country archaeologist, a friend of your father’s. Of course, her name was Rae in those days…”

  “Pandora Rae?” Katherine knew that name. “Then she was Father’s assistant on the trip to America! I’ve seen her picture in his book!”

  “That’s right,” said Arkengarth, frowning slightly at the interruption. “An archaeologist, as I said. She specialized in Old Tech, of course, but she brought us other things when she found them—like these whale-bones.

  Later she married this Shaw chappie and went to live on some grotty little island in the western ocean. Poor girl. A tragedy. Terrible. Terrible.”

  “She died, didn’t she?” said Katherine.

  “She was murdered!” Arkengarth waggled his eyebrows dramatically. “Six or seven years ago. We heard it from another archaeologist. Murdered in her own home, and her husband with her. Dreadful b
usiness. I say, my dear, are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

  But Katherine was not all right. In her mind, all the pieces of the puzzle were flying together. Pandora Shaw was murdered, seven years ago, the same time that Father found the machine… Pandora the aviatrix, the archaeologist, the woman who had been with him in America when he found the plans of MEDUSA. And now a girl called Shaw who wants to kill Father…

  She could hardly manage to force the words out, but at last she asked, “Did she have a child?”

  “I think she did, I think she did,” the old man mused. “Yes, I remember Mrs Shaw showing me a picture once when she turned up with some ceramics for my department. Lovely pieces. A decorated vase from the Electric Empire Era, best of its kind in the collection…”

  “Do you remember its name?”

  “Ah, yes, let me see … EE27190, I believe.”

  “Not the vase! The baby!”

  Katherine’s impatient shout echoed through the gallery and out into the halls beyond, and Dr Arkengarth looked first startled, then offended. “Well, really, Miss Valentine, there’s no need to snap! How should I remember the child’s name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics. But I believe this particular one was called Hattie or Holly or…”

  “Hester!” sobbed Katherine, and turned and ran, ran with Dog at her heels, ran and ran without knowing where or why, since there was no way that she could outrun the dreadful truth. She knew how Father had come by the key to MEDUSA, and why he had never spoken of it. At last she knew why poor Hester Shaw had wanted to kill him.

  28. A STRANGER IN THE MOUNTAINS OF HEAVEN

  Valentine’s hand drew subtle, complicated shapes in the air above the girl’s bowed head, and her face was calm and smiling, little suspecting that she was being blessed by the League’s worst enemy.