Mortal Engines (12 page)

And then they sank down into the clouds and could see nothing but swirling dark billows and sometimes a quick glimpse of the moon scudding dimly above them. The basket creaked and the envelope flapped and the gas-valve hissed like a tetchy snake.

“When we touch down, get out of the basket as quick as you can,” said Hester.

“Yes,” he said, and then, “but … you mean we’re going to leave the balloon?”

“We don’t stand a chance against Shrike in the air,” she explained. “Hopefully on the ground I can outwit him.”

“On the ground?” cried Tom. “Oh, not the Out-Country again!”

The balloon was sinking fast. They saw the black landscape looming up below, dark blots of vegetation and a few thin glimmers of moonlight. Overhead, thick clouds were racing into the east. There was no sign of Shrike’s airship. Tom braced himself. The ground was a hundred feet below, then fifty, then ten. Branches came rattling and scraping along the keel and the basket bucked and plunged, crashing against muddy earth and leaping up into the sky and down again and up.

“Jump!” screamed Hester, the next time it touched down. He jumped, falling through scratchy branches into a soft mattress of mud. The balloon shot upwards again and for a moment he was afraid that Hester had abandoned him to perish on the bare earth. “Hester!” he shouted, so loud it hurt his throat. “Hester!” And then there was a rustling in the scrub away to his left and she was limping towards him. “Oh, thank Quirke!” he whispered.

He expected her to stop and sit down with him to rest a while and thank the gods for dropping them on to soft, wet earth instead of hard stone. Instead, she walked straight past him, limping away towards the north-east.

“Stop!” shouted Tom, still too winded and shivery to even stand. “Wait! Where are you going?”

She looked back at him as if he were mad. “London,” she said.

Tom rolled on to his back and groaned, gathering his strength for another weary trek.

Above him, freed of their weight, the balloon was returning to the sky, a dark tear-drop that was quickly swallowed into the belly of the clouds. A few moments later he heard the purr of engines as Shrike’s airship went hurrying after it. Then there was only the night and the cold wind, and rags of moonlight prowling the broken hills.

K
atherine decided to start at the top. The day after her father left London she sent a message up the pneumatic tube system to the Lord Mayor’s office from the terminal in her father’s room, and half an hour later a reply came back from Crome’s secretary: the Lord Mayor would see Miss Valentine at noon.

Katherine went to her dressing room and put on her most businesslike clothes – her narrow black trousers and her grey coat with the shoulder-fins. She tied back her hair with a clip made from the tail-lights of an ancient car and fetched out a stylish hat with trailing ear-flaps which she had bought six weeks before but hadn’t got round to wearing yet. She put colour on her lips and soft oblongs of rouge high on her cheekbones and painted a little blue triangle between her eyebrows, a mock Guild-mark like the fashionable ladies wore. She found a notebook and a pencil and slipped them both into one of Father’s important-looking black briefcases along with the pass he had given her on her fifteenth birthday, the gold pass which allowed her access to almost every part of London. Then she studied her appearance in the mirror, imagining herself a few weeks from now going to meet the returning expedition. She would be able to tell Father,
“It’s all right now, I understand everything; you needn’t be afraid any more
…”

At a quarter to twelve she walked with Dog to the elevator station in Quirke Circus, enjoying the looks that people gave her as she passed. “
There goes Miss Katherine Valentine,”
she imagined them saying.
“Off to
see the Lord Mayor
…” The elevator staff all knew her face, and they smiled and said, “Good morning, Miss Katherine,” and patted Dog and didn’t bother looking at her pass as she boarded the 11.52 for Top Tier.

The elevator hummed upwards. She walked briskly across Paternoster Square, where Dog stared thoughtfully at the wheeling pigeons and pricked up his ears at the sounds of the repair-work going on inside St Paul’s. Soon she was climbing the steps of the Guildhall and being ushered into a tiny internal elevator, and at one minute to twelve she was shown through the circular bronze door of the Lord Mayor’s private office.

“Ah, Miss Valentine. You are one minute early.” Crome glanced up at her from the far side of his huge desk and went back to the report that he had been reading. Behind his head was a round window with a view of St Paul’s, looking wavery and unreal through the thick glass, like a sunken temple seen through clear water. Sunlight shone dimly on the tarnished bronze panels of the office walls. There were no pictures, no hangings or decorations of any sort, and the floor was bare metal. Katherine shivered, feeling the cold rise up through the soles of her shoes.

The Lord Mayor kept her waiting for fifty-nine silent seconds which seemed to stretch on for ever. She was feeling thoroughly uncomfortable by the time he set down the report. He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.

“You will be glad to hear that I have just received a coded radio signal sent from your father’s expedition shortly before he flew out of range,” he said. “All is well aboard the
13th Floor Elevator.
”

“Good!” said Katherine, knowing that it would be the last she would hear of Father until he was on his way home; even the Engineers had never been able to send radio signals more than a few hundred miles.

“Was there anything else?” asked Crome.

“Yes…” said Katherine, and hesitated, afraid that she was going to sound foolish. Faced with Crome’s cold office and still colder smile she found herself wishing she had not put on so much make-up or worn these stiff, formal clothes. But this was what she had come here for, after all. She blurted out, “I want to know about that girl, and why she tried to kill my father.”

The Lord Mayor’s smile vanished. “Your father has never seen fit to tell me who she is. I have no idea why she is so keen to murder him.”

“Do you think it is something to do with MEDUSA?”

Crome’s gaze grew a few degrees colder. “That matter does not concern you!” he snapped. “What has Valentine told you?”

“Nothing!” said Katherine, getting flustered. “But I can see he’s scared, and I need to know why, because…”

“Listen to me, child,” said Crome, standing up and coming around the desk at her. Thin hands gripped her shoulders. “If Valentine has secrets from you it is for good reason. There are aspects of his work that you could not begin to understand. Remember, he started out with nothing; he was a mere Out-Country scavenger before I took an interest in him. Do you want to see him reduced to that again? Or worse?”

Katherine felt as if he had slapped her. Her face burnt red with anger, but she controlled herself.

“Go home and wait for his return,” ordered Crome. “And leave grown-up matters to those who understand
them. Don’t speak to anyone about the girl, or MEDUSA.”

“
Grown-up matters?
” thought Katherine angrily. “
How old does he think I am?”
But she bowed her head and said meekly, “Yes, Lord Mayor,” and “Come along, Dog.”

“And do not bring that animal to Top Tier again,” called Crome, his voice following her into the outer office, where the secretaries turned to stare at her furious, tearful face.

Riding the elevator back to Quirke Circus, she whispered in her wolf’s ear, “We’ll show him, Dog!”

Instead of going straight home she called in at the Temple of Clio on the edge of Circle Park. There in the scented darkness she calmed herself and tried to work out what to do next.

Ever since Nikolas Quirke had been declared a god, most Londoners had stopped giving much thought to the older gods and goddesses, and so Katherine had the temple to herself. She liked Clio, who had been her mother’s goddess back in Puerto Angeles, and whose statue looked a bit like Mama too, with its kind dark eyes and patient smile. She remembered what Mama had taught her, about how the poor goddess was being blown constantly backwards into the future by the storm of progress, but how she could reach back sometimes and inspire people to change the whole course of history. Looking up now at the statue’s gentle face she said, “What must I do, Clio? How can I help Father if the Lord Mayor won’t tell me anything?”

She hadn’t really expected an answer, and none came, so she said a quick prayer for Father and another for poor Tom Natsworthy, and made her offerings and left.

It wasn’t until she was halfway back to Clio House that the idea struck her, a thought so unexpected that it could have been sent to her by the goddess herself. She remembered how, as she ran towards the waste chutes on the night Tom fell, she had passed someone heading in the other direction; a young Apprentice Engineer, looking so white and shocked that she was
sure
he must have witnessed what happened.

She hurried homeward through the sunlit park. That young Engineer would have the answer! She would go back to the Gut and find him! She would find out what was going on without any help from wicked old Magnus Crome!

T
om and Hester had walked all night, and when the pale, flat sun rose behind drifts of morning fog they kept walking, stopping only now and then to catch their breath. This landscape was quite different from the mud-plains they had crossed a few days ago. Here they had to keep making detours around bogs and pools of brackish water, and although they sometimes stumbled into the deep, weed-choked scars of old town-tracks it was clear that no town had been this way for many years. “See how the scrub has grown up,” said Hester, pointing out ruts filled with brambles and hillsides green with young trees. “Even a little semi-static would have felled those saplings for fuel.”

“Perhaps the earth here is just too soft,” suggested Tom, sinking to his waist for the twentieth time in the thick mud. He was recalling the huge map of the Hunting Ground that hung in the lobby of the London Museum, and the great sweep of marsh-country that stretched all the way from the central mountains to the shores of the Sea of Khazak, mile after mile of reed-beds and thin blue creeks and all of it marked,
Unsuitable for Town or City.
He said, “I think this must be the edge of the Rustwater Marshes. They call it that because the water is supposed to be stained red with the rust of towns that have strayed into it and sunk. Only the most foolhardy mayor would bring his town here.”

“Then Wreyland and Anna Fang brought us much further south than I thought,” whispered Hester to herself. “London must be almost a thousand miles away by now.
It’ll take months to catch it up again, and Shrike will be on my tail the whole way.”

“But you fooled him!” Tom reminded her. “We escaped!”

“He won’t stay fooled for long,” she said. “He’ll soon pick up our tracks again. Why do you think he’s called a Stalker?”

On and on she led him, dragging him over hills and through mires and down valleys where the air was speckly with swarms of whining, stinging flies. They both grew weary and peevish. Once Tom suggested they sit down and rest a while, and Hester snapped back, “Do what you like. What do I care?” After that he trudged on in silence, angry at her. What a horrible, ugly, vicious, self-pitying girl she was! After all they had come through, and the way he had helped her in the Out-Country, she was still ready to abandon him. He wished Shrike had got her and it was Miss Fang or Khora who he had escaped with.
They
would have let him rest his aching feet…

But he was glad enough of Hester when the darkness fell, when thick clots of fog rose out of the marshes like the ghosts of mammoths and every rustle in the undergrowth sounded like a Stalker’s footfall. She found a place for them to spend the night, in the shelter of some stunted trees, and later, when the sudden shriek of a hunting owl brought him leaping out of his uneasy sleep he found her sitting guard beside him like a friendly gargoyle. “It’s all right,” she told him. And after a moment, in one of those sudden flashes of softness that he had
noticed before, she said, “I miss them, Tom. My mum and dad.”

“I know,” he said. “I miss mine too.”

“You’ve got no family at all in London?”

“No.”

“No friends?”

He thought about it. “Not really.”

“Who was that girl?’ she asked, after a little while.

“What? Where?”

“In the Gut that night, with you and Valentine.”

“That was Katherine,” he said. “She’s… Well, she’s Valentine’s daughter.”

Hester nodded. “She’s pretty,” she said.

After that he slept easier, dreaming that Katherine was coming down to rescue them in an airship, carrying them back into the crystal light above the clouds. When he next opened his eyes it was dawn and Hester was shaking him.

“Listen!”

He listened, and heard a sound that was not the sound of woods or water.

“Is it a town?” he asked hopefully.

“No…” Hester tilted her head to one side, tasting the sound. “It’s a Rotwang aëro-engine…”

It grew louder, throbbing down out of the sky. Above the swirling mist a London scout-ship flickered by.

They froze, hoping that the wet black cage of branches overhead would hide them. The growl of the airship faded and then rose again, circling. “Shrike can see us,” whispered Hester, staring up at the blind, white fog. “I can feel him watching us…”

“No, no,” Tom insisted. “If we can’t see the airship, how can he see us? It stands to reason…”