Mortal Engines

by Philip Reeve

  A rushing, brilliant thing slammed into the gondola, and the blast plucked him out of his seat. He clung to a stanchion and saw papers and instrument panels and sputtering lengths of cable and the shrine with its photographs and ribbons and Miss Fang’s half-read book all rushing out through a jagged hole in the fuselage, tumbling into the sky like ungainly birds. The big windows shattered and the air turned sharp and shimmery with flying glass.

  He craned his neck, peering up through the empty windows, trying to see if the envelope was burning. There were no flames, but overhead a great dark shape slid past, moonlight slithering along its armoured envelope. It was the 13th Floor Elevator, pulling past the Jenny and performing a lazy victory-roll far over the foothills of Shan Guo before it came sweeping back to finish him.

  Magnus Crome watches his guests crowd out into the square, gazing up at the glare and flicker of the battle taking place above the clouds. He checks his wrist-watch. “Dr Chandra, Dr Chubb, Dr Splay; it is time to deploy MEDUSA. Valentine, come with us. I’m sure you are keen to see what we’ve made of your machine.”

  “Crome,” says the explorer, blocking his path, “there is something I must say…”

  The Lord Mayor raises an eyebrow, intrigued.

  Valentine hesitates. He has been planning this speech all evening, knowing that it is what Katherine would want him to say. Now, faced with the Lord Mayor’s arctic eyes, he falters, stammering a moment. “Is it worth it, Crome?” he says at last. “Destroying the Shield-Wall will not destroy the League. There will be other strongholds to defeat, hundreds of fortresses, thousands of lives. Is it really worth so much, your new hunting ground?”

  There is a ripple of amazement among the bystanders. Crome says calmly, “You have left it rather late to have doubts, Valentine. You worry too much. Dr Twix can build whole armies of Stalkers, more than enough to crush any resistance from Anti-Tractionist savages.”

  He starts to push past, but Valentine is in front of him again. “Think, Lord Mayor. How long will a new hunting ground support us? A thousand years? Two thousand? One day there will be no more prey left anywhere, and London will have to stop moving. Perhaps we should accept it; stop now, before any more innocent people are killed; take what you have learned from MEDUSA and use it for peaceful purposes…”

  Crome smiles. “Do you really think I am so shortsighted?” he asks. “The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving. Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be travelling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!”

  Valentine follows him to the door and out across the square towards St Paul’s. Katherine is right, he keeps thinking. He’s as mad as a spoon! Why didn’t I put a stop to his schemes when I had the chance? Above the clouds, the rockets flare and bang, and the light of an exploding airship washes across the upturned faces of the crowd, who murmur, “Oooooooooh!”

  And Hester Shaw crouches at the Tier’s edge as the Resurrected Men stalk by, green eyes sweeping the walls and deckplates, steel claws unsheathed and twitching.

  The Cat’s Creep ended in a small circular chamber with stencilled numbers on the sweaty walls and a single metal door. Bevis slipped the key into the lock, and Katherine heard it turn. A crack of light appeared around the door’s edge, and she heard voices outside, a long, tremulous, “Ooooh!”

  “We’re in an alley off Paternoster Square,” Bevis said. “I wonder why they sound so excited?”

  Katherine pulled out her watch and held it in the thin sliver of light from the door. “Ten to nine,” she said. “They’re waiting for MEDUSA.”

  He hugged her one last time and whispered quickly, shyly, “I love you!” Then he pushed her past him through the door and stepped out after her, trying to look like her captor, not her friend, and wondering if any other Engineer had ever said what he had just said, or felt the way he felt when he was with Katherine.

  Tom scrambled through the debris in the listing wreck of the Jenny’s gondola. The lights were out and blood was streaming into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, blinding him. The pain of his broken ribs washed through him in sick, giddy waves and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he knew he mustn’t. He fumbled for the rocket controls, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of that they had not been blown away. And sure enough, at the flick of the right switch a viewing scope rose out of the main instrument panel, and he wiped his eyes and saw the dim upside-down ghost of the 13th Floor Elevator framed in the cross-hairs, growing bigger every minute.

  He heaved as hard as he could on the firing controls, and felt the deck shift under him as the rockets went shrieking out of their nests beneath the gondola. Dazzling light blossomed as they hit their target, but when he blinked the bright after-images away and peered out the black airship was still there, and he realized that he had barely dented the great armoured envelope, and that he was going to die.

  But he had bought himself a few more moments, at least, for the Elevator’s starboard rocket projectors were damaged and she was pulling past him and turning to bring her port array to bear. He tried to calm himself. He tried to think of Katherine, so that the memory of her would be what he took down with him to the Sunless Country, but it was a long time since he had dreamed of her, and he couldn’t really remember what she looked like any more. The only face that he could call to mind was Hester’s, and so he thought of her and the things that they had gone through together, and how it had felt to hold her on the Shield-Wall last night, the smell of her hair and the warmth of her stiff, bony body through the ragged coat.

  And from some corner of his memory came the echo of the League rockets that had battered at the 13th Floor Elevator as she banked away from Batmunkh Gompa; the thick crump of the explosions and the small, bright, prickling noise of broken glass.

  Her envelope was armoured, but the windows could be broken.

  He lurched back to the rocket controls and re-targeted them so that the cross-hairs on the little screen were centred not on the Elevator’s looming gasbags, but on her windows. The gauge beside the viewscope told him he had three rockets left, and he fired them all together, the shattered gondola shivering and groaning as they sprang away towards their target.

  For a fraction of a second he saw Pewsey and Gench on their flight-deck, staring at him, faces wide with silent terror. Then they vanished into brightness as the rockets tore in through their viewing windows and their gondola filled with fire. A geyser of flame went tearing up the companion-ladders between the gasbags and blew out the top of the envelope. By the time Tom could see again the huge wreck was veering away from him, fire in her ruined gondola and the hatches of her hold, fire flapping from her steering vanes, fire unravelling from shattered engine-pods, fire lapping inside her envelope until it looked like a vast Chinese lantern tumbling down towards the lights of London.

  Katherine stepped out of the alley’s mouth into a running crowd, people all around her looking up, some still clutching drinks and nibbles, their eyes and mouths wide open. She looked at St Paul’s. The dome had not yet opened, so it couldn’t be that that they were staring at. And what was this light, this swelling orange glow that outshone the argon-lamps and made the shadows dance?

  At that moment the blazing wreckage of an airship came barrelling out of the sky and crashed against the façade of the Engineerium in a storm of fire and glass and out-flung scythes of blackened metal. A whole engine broke free of the wreck and came cartwheeling across the square towards her, red hot and spraying blazing fuel. Bevis pushed her aside and down. She saw him standing over her, his mouth open, shouting something, and saw a blue eye on the bl
istered engine cowling as it tore him away, a whirl of limbs, a flap of a torn white coat, his scream lost in the bellow of twisting metal as the wreckage smashed against the Top Tier elevator station.

  A blue eye on the cowling. She knew it should mean something, but she could not think what.

  She stood up slowly, shaking. There were small fires on the deck all round her, and one great fire in the Engineerium that cast Hallowe’en light across the whole tier. She stumbled to where the blazing engine lay, its huge propeller blades jutting out of the deckplate like megaliths. Raising her hand to shield her face against the belching heat, she looked for Bevis.

  He was lying broken in a steep angle of the debris, twisted in such impossible ways that Katherine knew at once there was no point even calling out his name. The flames were rising, making his coat bubble and drip like melting cheese, heat pressing against her face, turning her tears to puffs of steam, driving her backwards over wreckage and bodies and pieces of bodies.

  “Miss Katherine?”

  A blue eye on the engine cowling. She could still see the outline, the paint peeling under the tongues of the fire. Father’s ship.

  “Miss Katherine?”

  She turned and found one of the men from the elevator station standing with her, trying to be kind. He took her by the arm and led her gently away, gesturing towards the main part of the wreck, the scorching firestorm in the Engineerium. “He wasn’t in it, Miss.”

  She stared at his smile. She didn’t understand. Of course he had been in it! She had seen him there, his dead, gaping face and the flames rising round him. Bevis, whom she had led here, who had loved her. What was there to smile about?

  But the man kept smiling. “He wasn’t aboard, Miss. Your dad, I mean. I saw him not five minutes ago, going into St Paul’s with the Lord Mayor.”

  She felt the sinister weight of the satchel still hanging from her shoulder, and remembered that she had a job to do.

  “Come on, Miss,” said the man. “You’ve had a nasty shock. Come and have a sit down and a nice cup of tea…”

  “No,” she said. “I have to find my father.”

  She left him there and turned away, stumbling across the square, through panicked crowds in smoke-stained robes and party-frocks, through the long, shivering bray of sirens to St Paul’s.

  Hester was darting towards the Guildhall when the explosion lifted her off her feet and flung her out of the shadows and into the harsh spill of light from the blazing Engineerium. She rolled over and over on the quaking deckplate, stunned, her pistol skittering away, her veil torn off. There was a moment of silence, then noises came crowding in; screams, sirens. She shuffled through her memories of the moments before the blast, trying to put them in some sort of order. That light above the rooftops, that burning thing sliding down the sky, had been an airship. The Jenny Haniver. “Tom,” she said, whispering his name to the hot pavement, and felt smaller and more alone than ever before.

  She pushed herself up on all fours. Nearby, one of the new Stalkers had been caught by the blast and cut in half, and its legs were stamping aimlessly about and bumping into things. The shawl that Tom had given her blew past. She caught it, knotted it around her neck and turned to look for the fallen gun, only to find another squad of Stalkers, quite unharmed, closing in upon her from behind. Their claws were fire-coloured slashes in the darkness, and firelight lit their long, dead faces, and she realized with a hollow stab of disappointment that this was the end of her.

  And above the black, silhouetted rooftops of the Guildhall, beyond the smoke and the dancing sparks, the dome of St Paul’s was starting to open.

  35

  THE CATHEDRAL

  The Jenny Haniver’s shattered gondola moaned like a flute as the west wind blew through it, carrying it swiftly away from London.

  Tom slumped exhausted at the controls, crumbs of broken glass clinging like grit to his face and hands. He tried to ignore the wild spinning of the pressure gauges as hydrogen leaked from the damaged envelope. He tried not to think about Pewsey and Gench, burning inside their burning gondola, but every time he closed his eyes he saw their screaming faces, as if the black zeroes of their open mouths were etched for ever on to his eyeballs.

  When he raised his head he saw London, far to the east. Something was happening to the cathedral, and torrents of pink and green fire were gushing from the Engineerium. Slowly he started to understand what had happened. It was his fault! People must be dead down there, not just Pewsey and Gench but lots of people, and if he had not shot down the 13th Floor Elevator they would still be alive. He wished he had never fired those rockets. It would be better to be dead himself than to sit here watching Top Tier burn and know that it was all his fault.

  Then he thought, Hester!

  He had promised her he would go back. She would be waiting, down there among the fires. He couldn’t let her down. He took a deep breath and leaned on the controls. The engines choked back into life. The Jenny Haniver turned sluggishly into the wind and started inching back towards the city.

  Katherine moved like a sleepwalker through Paternoster Square, drawn towards the transformed cathedral. Around her the fires were spreading, but she barely noticed. Her eyes were fixed on the terrible beauty above her; that white cowl unfolding against the night sky, turning towards the east. She no longer felt afraid. She knew Clio was watching over her, keeping her safe so that she could atone for the dreadful things Father had done.

  The guards on the cathedral door were too distracted by the fires to pay much attention to a schoolgirl with a satchel. At first they told her to clear off, but when she insisted that her father was inside and flashed her crumpled gold pass at them they simply shrugged and let her through.

  She had never been inside St Paul’s before, but she had seen pictures. They hadn’t looked anything like this.

  The pillared aisles and the high, vaulted ceilings were still where they had always been, but the Guild of Engineers had sheathed the walls in white metal and hung argon globes in wire cages from the ceilings. Fat electric cables snaked up the nave, feeding power towards something at the heart of the cathedral.

  Katherine walked slowly forward, keeping to the shadows under the pillars, out of the way of the scores of Engineers who were scurrying about checking power-linkages and making notes on clipboards. Ahead of her, the dais under the great dome was filled with strange machinery. A mass of girders and hydraulics supported the weight of the huge cobra-hood that towered up into the night, and around its base stood a forest of tall metal coils, all humming and crackling in a slowly rising surge of power. Engineers were hurrying between them, and going up and down the central tower on metal stairways, and many more were clustered around a nearby console like priests at the altar of a machine god, talking in hushed, excited voices. Among them she saw the Lord Mayor, and beside him, looking grim, was Father.

  She froze, safe in the shadows. She could see his face quite clearly. He was watching Crome, and frowning, and she knew he would rather be outside helping with the rescue-work and only the Lord Mayor’s orders kept him here. She forgot for a moment that he was a murderer; she wanted to rush over and hug him. But she was in Clio’s hands now, the agent of History, and she had work to do.

  She edged closer, until she was standing in the shelter of an old font at the bottom of the dais steps. From there she had a good view of what Crome and the others were doing. Their console was a cat’s cradle of wires and flexes and rubberized ducts, and in the middle of it sat a little sphere no bigger than a football. Katherine could guess what that was. Pandora Shaw had found it in a deep laboratory of lost America and brought it back with her to Oak Island, and Father had stolen it the night he murdered her. The Engineers had cleaned and repaired it as best they could, replacing damaged circuits with primitive machines that they had cobbled together from Stalkers’ brains. Now Dr Splay sat in front of it, his fingers spidering over an ivory keyboard, typing up green, glowing sequences of numbers on a portable G
oggle-screen. A second screen showed a murky image of the view ahead of London, cross-hairs centred on the distant Shield-Wall.

  “The accumulators are charged,” somebody said.

  “There, Valentine!” said Crome, resting a bony hand on her father’s arm. “We are ready to make history.”

  “But the fires, Crome…”

  “You can play at firemen later,” snapped the Lord Mayor. “We must destroy the Shield-Wall now, in case MEDUSA is damaged by the blaze.”

  Splay’s fingers kept clattering on the keyboard, but the other sounds of the cathedral faded away. The Engineers were staring in awe at the coil-forest, where weird, rippling wraiths of light were forming, drifting upwards towards the sky above the open dome with a faint, insectile buzz. Katherine began to suspect that they didn’t really understand this technology that her father had dug up for them; they were almost as awed by it as she.

  If she had run forward then, primed her bomb and flung it at the ancient computer, she might have changed everything. But how could she? Father was standing right beside the thing, and even when she told herself that he was not her father any more and tried to weigh his life against the thousands about to die in Batmunkh Gompa, she still could not bring herself to harm him. She had failed. She turned her face to the vaulted roof and asked, What do you want me to do? Why have you brought me here?

  But Clio didn’t answer.

  Crome stepped towards the keyboard. “Give MEDUSA its target coordinates,” he ordered.