by Philip Reeve
“I didn’t say it was,” replied Valentine. “But one day we may have to go to Shan Guo and breach the League’s defences. You know how short prey has become. Cities are starting to starve, and turn on one another.”
Katherine shivered. “But there must be some other solution,” she protested. “Can’t we talk to the Lord Mayors of other cities and work something out?”
He laughed gently. “I’m afraid Municipal Darwinism doesn’t work like that, Kate. It’s a town eat town world. But you mustn’t worry. Crome is a great man, and he will find a way.”
She nodded unhappily. Her father’s eyes had that haunted, hunted look again. He had still not confided in her about the girl assassin, and now she could tell that he was keeping something else from her, something about this expedition and the Lord Mayor’s plans for London. Was it all connected somehow? She could not ask him directly about the things she had overheard in the atrium without admitting that she had spied on him, but just to see what he would say she asked, “Does this have something to do with that awful girl? Was she from Shan Guo?”
“No,” said Valentine quickly, and she saw the colour drain from his face. “She is dead, Kate, and there is no reason to worry about her any more. Come on.” He stood up quickly. “We have a few days more together before I set off; so let’s make the most of them. We’ll sit by the fire and eat buttered toast and talk about old times, and not think about … about that poor disfigured girl.”
As they walked back hand in hand across the park a shadow slid over them; a Goshawk 90 departing from the Engineerium. “You see?” said Katherine. “The Guild of Engineers has airships of its own. I think it’s horrid of Magnus Crome, sending you away from me.”
But her father just shaded his eyes to watch as the white airship circled Top Tier and flew quickly towards the west.
8
THE TRADING CLUSTER
Tom was dreaming of Katherine. She was walking arm in arm with him through the familiar rooms of the Museum, only there were no curators or Guildsmen about, nobody to say, “Polish the floor, Natsworthy,” or “Dust the 43rd Century glassware.” He was showing her around the place as if he owned it, and she was smiling at him as he explained the details of the replica airships and the great cut-away model of London. Through it all a strange, moaning music sounded, and it wasn’t until they reached the Natural History gallery that they realized it was the blue whale, singing to them.
The dream faded, but the weird notes of the whale’s song lingered. He was lying on a quivering wooden deck. Wooden walls rose on either side, with morning sunlight glinting through the gaps between the planks, and overhead a mad confusion of pipes and ducts and tubes crawled over the ceiling. It was Speedwell’s plumbing, and its burblings and grumbles were what he had mistaken for the song of the whale.
He rolled over and looked around the tiny room. Hester was sitting against the far wall. She nodded when she saw that he was awake.
“Where am I?” he groaned.
“I didn’t know anybody really said that,” she said. “I thought that was just in books. ‘Where am I?’ How interesting.”
“No, really,” Tom protested, looking around at the rough walls and the narrow metal door. “Is this still Speedwell? What happened?”
“The food, of course,” she replied.
“You mean Wreyland drugged us? But why?” He got up and made his way to the door across the pitching deck. “Don’t bother,” Hester warned him, “it’s locked.” He tried it anyway. She was right. Next he stumbled over to peer through a crack in the wall. Beyond it he could see a narrow wooden walk-way that flickered like a Goggle-screen picture as the shadow of one of Speedwell’s wheels flashed across it. The Out-Country was rushing past, looking much rockier and steeper than when last he saw it.
“We’ve been heading south by south-east since first light,” explained Hester wearily, before he could ask. “Probably longer, but I was asleep too.”
“Where are they taking us?”
“How should I know?”
Tom sat down in a heap with his back to the shuddering wall. “That’s it then!” he said. “London must be hundreds of miles away! I’ll never get home now!”
Hester said nothing. Her face was white, making the scars stand out even more than usual, and blood had soaked into the planking around her injured leg.
An hour crawled by, and then another. Sometimes people went hurrying along the walk-way outside, their shadows blocking out the skinny shafts of sunlight. The plumbing burbled to itself. At last Tom heard the sound of a padlock being undone. A hatch low down on the door popped open and a face peered in. “Everybody all right?” it asked.
“All right?” shouted Tom. “Of course we’re not all right!” He scrambled towards the door. Wreyland was on hands and knees outside, crouching down so he could see through the hatch (which Tom suspected was really a cat-flap). Behind him were the booted feet of some of his men, standing guard. “What have you done this for?” Tom asked. “We haven’t done you any harm!”
The old mayor looked embarrassed. “That’s true, dear boy, but times are hard, you see, cruel hard these days. No fun, running a traction town. We have to take what we can get. So we took you. We’re going to sell you as slaves, you see. That’s how it is. There’ll be some slaving towns at the cluster, and we’re going to sell you. It has to be done. We need spare parts for our engines, if we’re to keep a step ahead of the bigger towns…”
“Sell us?” Tom had heard of cities that used slaves to work their engine rooms, but it had always seemed like something distant and exotic that would never affect him. “I’ve got to catch London! You can’t sell me!”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll fetch a good price,” Wreyland said, as if it were something Tom should be pleased about. “A handsome, healthy lad like you. We’ll make sure you go to a good owner. I don’t know about your friend, of course: she looks half dead, and she was no oil-painting to start with. But maybe we can sell you off together, ‘buy one, get one free’ sort of thing.” He pushed two bowls through the flap, round metal bowls such as a dog would eat from. One contained water, the other more of the blue-ish algae. “Eat up!” he said cheerfully. “We want you looking nice and well-fed for the auction. We’ll be at the cluster by sundown, and sell you in the morning.”
“But…” Tom protested.
“Yes, I know, and I’m terribly sorry about it, but what can I do?” said Wreyland sadly. “Times are hard, you know.”
The hatch slammed shut. “What about my seedy?” shouted Tom. There was no answer. He heard Wreyland’s voice in the passage outside, talking to the guard, then nothing. He cupped his hands and drank some water, then took the bowl across to Hester. “We’ve got to get away!” he told her.
“How?”
Tom looked around their cell. The door was no use, locked and guarded as it was. He peered up at the plumbing until he had a crick in his neck, but although some of the pipes looked big enough for a person to crawl through he could see no way to get into them, or even to reach them. Anyway, he wouldn’t have fancied crawling through whatever that thick fluid was which he could hear gurgling inside them. He turned his attention to the wall, feeling his way along the planks. At last he found one that felt slightly loose, and gradually, as he worked at it, it started to get looser still.
It was slow, hard, painful work. Tom’s fingers filled with splinters and the sweat ran down his face and he had to stop each time someone passed along the walk-way outside. Hester watched silently, until he started to feel cross with her for not helping. But by evening, as the sky outside turned red and the racing townlet started to slow, he had made a gap just wide enough to get his head through.
He waited until he was sure there was no one about, then leaned out. Speedwell was passing through the shadows of some tall spines of rock, the town-gnawed cores of old mountains. Ahead lay a natural amphitheatre, a shallow bowl between more rock-spires, and it was full of towns. Tom had never seen so m
any trading suburbs and traction villages gathered in one place before. “We’re here!” he told Hester. “It’s the trading cluster!”
Speedwell slowed and slowed, manoeuvring into a space between a ragged little sail-powered village and a larger market town. Tom could hear the people on the new towns hailing Speedwell, asking where it had come from and what it had to trade. “Scrap metal,” he heard Mrs Wreyland bellow back, “and some wood, and a pretty seedy and two fine, fresh, healthy, young slaves!”
“Oh, Quirke!” muttered Tom, working away at enlarging the hole he had made.
“It’ll never be big enough,” said Hester, who always expected the worst and was usually right.
“You could try helping, instead of just sitting there!” Tom snapped back, but he regretted it at once, for he could see that she was very ill. He wondered what would happen if she was too weak to escape. He couldn’t run off into the Out-Country alone and leave her here. But if he stayed, he would end up as a slave on one of these filthy little towns!
He tried not to think about it and concentrated on making the hole bigger, while the sky outside grew dark and the moon rose. He could hear music and laughter drifting across the trading cluster and the sounds of gangways being run out as some of Wreyland’s people went off to enjoy themselves aboard the other towns. He scrabbled and scratched at the hole, prising at the planks, scraping at them with a rusty nail, but it was no use. At last, desperate, he turned to Hester and hissed, “Please! Help!”
The girl stood up unsteadily and walked over to where he crouched. She looked sick, but not quite as bad as he’d feared. Perhaps she had been saving herself, harbouring her last reserves of strength until it was dark enough to escape. She felt around the edges of the hole he had made and nodded. Then, leaning all her weight on Tom’s shoulder, she swung her good foot up hard against the wall. Once, twice she kicked it, the wood around the hole splintering and yielding, and at the third kick a whole section of planking fell out, spilling across the walk-way outside.
“I could have done that!” said Tom, staring at the ragged hole and wondering why he hadn’t thought of it.
“But you didn’t, did you?” said Hester, and tried to smile. It was the first time he had seen her smile; an ugly, crooked thing, but very welcome; it made him feel that she was starting to like him and didn’t just regard him as an annoyance.
“Come on then,” she said, “if you’re coming.”
Hundreds of miles away across the moonlit mud, Shrike spots something. He signals to the Engineer pilots, who nod and grumble as they steer the Goshawk 90 down to land. “What now? How much longer are we going to keep flying back and forth along these track-marks before he’ll admit the kids are dead?” But they grumble quietly: they are terrified of Shrike.
The hatch opens and Shrike stalks out. His green eyes sweep from side to side until he finds what he is looking for. A rag of white fabric from a torn shirt, soggy with rain, half-buried in the mud. “HESTER SHAW WAS HERE,” he tells the Out-Country at large, and begins sniffing for her scent.
9
THE JENNY HANIVER
At first it looked as if their luck might hold. They scrambled quickly across the dimly-lit walk-way and down into the shadows under one of Speedwell’s wheel-arches. They could see the dark bulks of the other towns, with lights burning in their windows and a big bonfire on the top deck of one of them, a mining townlet on the far side of the cluster where a noisy party was in progress.
They crept along the outside edge of Speedwell to a place where a gangplank stretched across to the market town which was parked next door. It was unguarded, but brightly lit, and as they reached the far end and stepped on to the deck of the market town a voice somewhere behind them shouted, “Hey!” and then, louder, “Hey! Hey! Uncle Wreyland! Them slaves is ’scaping!”
They ran, or rather, Tom ran, and dragged Hester along beside him, hearing her whimper in pain at every step. Up a stairway, along a catwalk, past a shrine to Peripatetia, goddess of wandering towns, and they were in a market square lined with big iron cages, in some of which thin, miserable slaves were waiting to be sold off. Tom forced himself to slow down and tried to look inconspicuous, listening all the time for sounds of pursuit. There were none. Maybe the Wreylands had given up the chase, or maybe they weren’t allowed to chase people on to other towns – Tom didn’t know what the rules were in a trading cluster.
“Head for the bows,” said Hester, letting go his arm and pulling the collar of her coat up to hide her face. “If we’re lucky there’ll be an air-harbour at the bows.”
They were lucky. At the front of the town’s top deck was a raised section where half a dozen small airships were tethered, their dark, gas-filled envelopes like sleeping whales. “Are we going to steal one?” Tom whispered.
“Not unless you know how to fly an airship,” said Hester weakly. “There’s an airman’s café over there; we’ll have to try and book passage like normal people.”
The café was just an ancient, rusting airship gondola that had been bolted to the deck. A few metal tables stood in front beneath a stripy awning. Hurricane lamps were burning there and an old aviator slumped snoring in a chair. The only other customer was a sinister-looking Oriental woman in a long, red leather coat who sat in the shadows near the bar. In spite of the dark she wore sunglasses, the tiny lenses black as the wing-cases of beetles. She turned to stare at Tom as he walked up to the counter.
A small man with a huge, drooping moustache was polishing glasses. He glanced up without much interest when Tom said, “I’m looking for a ship.”
“Where to?”
“London,” said Tom. “Me and my friend have to get back to London, and we have to leave tonight.”
“London, is it?” The man’s moustachios twitched like the tails of two squirrels which had been shoved up his nose and were starting to get a bit restless. “Only ships with a licence from the London Merchant’s Guild can dock there. We’ve got nuffink like that here. Stayns ain’t that sort of town.”
“Perhaps I may be of help?” suggested a soft, foreign-sounding voice at Tom’s shoulder. The woman in the red coat had come silently to his side; a lean, handsome woman with badgery slashes of white in her short black hair. Reflections of the hurricane lamps danced in her sunglasses, and when she smiled Tom noticed that her teeth were stained red. “I haven’t a licence for London, but I am going to Airhaven. You could find a ship there that will take you the rest of the way. Have you some money?”
Tom hadn’t thought about that part. He rummaged in his tunic and fished out two tatty banknotes with the face of Quirke on the front and Magnus Crome gazing sternly from the back. He had put them in his pocket the night he fell out of London, hoping to spend them at the catch-party in Kensington Gardens. Here, under the fizzing hurricane lamps of the air-harbour, they looked out of place, like toy money.
The woman seemed to think so too. “Ah,” she said. “Twenty Quirkes. But notes like that can only be spent in London. Not much use to a poor wandering skyfarer like me. Don’t you have any gold? Or Old-Tech?”
Tom shrugged and mumbled something. Out of the corner of his eye he saw some newcomers pushing their way between the tables. “Look, Uncle Wreyland!” he heard one of them shout. “Here they are! We’ve got ’em!”
Tom looked round and saw Wreyland and a couple of his boys closing in, carrying heavy clubs. He grabbed Hester, who was leaning against the counter, barely conscious. One of the Speedwell men moved to cut off their escape, but the woman in the red coat barred his way and Tom heard her say, “These are my passengers. I was just arranging a fee.”
“They’re our slaves!” shouted Wreyland, pushing past her. “Tom Nitsworthy and his friend. Found ’em in the Out-Country, fair and square. Finders keepers…”
Tom hurried Hester across the metal deck, past stairways leading up to the quays where the airships moored. He could hear Wreyland’s men splitting up, shouting to each other as they searched, then a grunt an
d a crash as if one of them had fallen over. Good, he thought, but he knew that the others would soon find him.
He dragged Hester up a short iron stairway to the quays. There were lights in some of the ships that hung at anchor there, and he had a vague idea about forcing his way aboard one of them and making them take him to London. But he had nothing that would serve as a weapon, and before he could look for one there were feet ringing on the ladder behind him and Wreyland’s voice saying, “Please try and be reasonable, Mr Nitsworthy! I don’t want to have to hurt you. Fred!” he added. “I’ve got the rotters cornered. Fred?”
Tom felt the hope drain out of him. There was no escape now. He stood there meekly as Wreyland stepped forward into the light from the portholes of a nearby airship, hefting his club. Hester slumped against a dockside winch and moaned.
“It’s only fair,” said Wreyland, as if he thought she was complaining. “I don’t like this slaving lark any more than you do, but times are hard, and we did catch you, there’s no denying it…”
Suddenly, faster than Tom would have thought possible, Hester moved. She dragged a metal lever out of the winch and swung it at Wreyland. His club went whirling out of his hand and hit the deck with a glockenspiel sound, and the metal bar struck him a glancing blow on the side of his head. “Ow!” he wailed, crumpling to the floor. Hester lurched forward and raised the bar again, but before she could bring it down on the old man’s skull Tom grabbed her arm. “Stop! You’ll kill him!”
“So?” She swung towards him, snaggle teeth bared, looking like a demented monkey. “So?”