Mortal Engines (6 page)

Tom shuddered. Every Londoner knew that only savages lived on the bare earth. “I prefer a nice firm deckplate under me,” he said, but Hester didn’t seem to hear him; the words kept spilling out of her twisted mouth as if she had no choice in the matter.

“There was a town there called Dunroamin’. It was mobile once, but the people got sick of running all the time from bigger towns, so they floated it across to Oak Island and took its wheels and engines off and dug it into a hillside. It’s been sitting there a hundred years or more, and you’d never know it used to move at all.”

“But that’s awful!” Tom gasped. “It’s downright Anti-Tractionist!”

“My mum and dad lived down the road a way,” she went on, talking straight over him. “They had a house on the edge of the moor, where the sea comes in. Dad was
a farmer, and Mum was a historian like you – only a lot cleverer than you, of course. She flew off each summer in her airship, digging for Old-Tech, but in the autumn she’d come home. I used to go up to her study in the attic on winter’s nights and eat cheese on toast and she’d tell me about her adventures.

“And then one night, seven years ago, I woke up late and there were voices up in the attic arguing. So I went up the ladder and looked, and Valentine was there. I knew him, because he was Mum’s friend and used to drop in on us when he was passing. Only he wasn’t being very friendly that night. ‘Give me the machine, Pandora,’ he kept saying. ‘Give me MEDUSA.’ He didn’t see me watching him. I was at the top of the ladder, looking into the attic, too scared to go up and too scared to go back. Valentine had his back to me and Mum was stood facing him, holding this machine, and she said, ‘Damn you, Thaddeus, I found it, it’s
mine
!’

“And then Valentine drew his sword and he … and he…”

She paused for breath. She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backwards to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star-charts like the map of a new constellation.

“And then he turned round and saw me watching, and he came at me and I dived back so his sword only cut my face, and I fell back down the ladder. He must have thought he’d killed me. I heard him go to Mum’s desk and start rustling through the papers there, and I got up and ran. Dad was lying on the kitchen floor; he was dead too. Even the dogs were dead.

“I ran out of the house and saw Valentine’s great black
ship moored at the end of the garden with his men waiting. They came after me, but I escaped. I ran down to the boathouse and shoved off in Dad’s skiff. I think I meant to go round to Dunroamin’ and get help – I was only little, and I thought a doctor could help Mum and Dad. But I was so weak with the pain and all the blood… I untied the boat somehow, and the current swept it out, and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the shores of the Hunting Ground.

“I lived in the Out-Country after that. At first I didn’t remember much. It was as if when he cut my head open some of my memories spilled out, and the rest got muddled about. But slowly I started remembering, and one day I remembered Valentine and what he’d done. That’s when I decided to come and find him. Kill him the same way he killed my mum and dad.”

“What was this machine?” asked Tom, in the long silence. “This MEDUSA thing?”

Hester shrugged. (It was too dark to see her by this time, but he
heard
her shrug, the hunch of her shoulders inside her filthy coat.) “Something my mum found. Old-Tech. It didn’t look important. Like a metal football, all bashed and dented. But that’s what he killed her for.”

“Seven years ago,” whispered Tom. “That’s when Mr Valentine got made head of the Guild. They said he’d found something in the Out-Country and Crome was so pleased that he promoted him, straight over the heads of Chudleigh Pomeroy and all the rest. But I never heard what it was he’d found. And I never heard of a MEDUSA before.”

Hester said nothing at all. After a few minutes she began to snore.

Tom sat awake for a long time, turning her story over
and over in his mind. He thought of the daydreams that had kept him going through long, tedious days in the Museum. He had dreamed of being trapped in the Out-Country with a beautiful girl, on the trail of some murderous criminal, but he had never imagined it would be so wet and cold, or that his legs would ache so, or that the murderer would be London’s greatest hero. And as for the beautiful girl…

He looked at the blunt wreck of Hester Shaw’s face in the faint moonlight, scowling even in her sleep. He understood her better now. She hated Valentine, but she hated herself even more, for being so ugly, and for being still alive when her parents were dead. He remembered how he had felt when the Big Tilt happened, and he came home and found his house flattened and Mum and Dad gone. He had thought that it was all his fault somehow. He had felt full of guilt, because he had not been there to die with them.

“I must help her,” he thought. “I won’t let her kill Mr Valentine, but I’ll find a way to get the truth out. If it
is
the truth. Maybe tomorrow London will have slowed down a bit and Hester’s leg will be better. We’ll be back in the city by sundown, and
somebody
will listen to us…”

But next morning they woke to find that the city was even further ahead, and Hester’s leg was worse. She moaned with pain at almost every step now; her face was the colour of old snow and fresh blood was soaking through her bandages and running down into her boot. Tom cursed himself for throwing those rags of shirt
away, and for making Hester lose her pack, and her first-aid kit…

In the middle of the morning, through shifting veils of rain, they saw something ahead of them. A pile of slag and clinker lay spilled across the track-marks, where London had vented it the day before. Drawn up beside it was a strange little town, and as they got closer Hester and Tom could see that people were scrambling up and down the spoil-heap, sifting out collops of melted metal and fragments of unburnt fuel.

The sight gave them hope and they pressed forward faster. By early afternoon they were walking under the shadow of the townlet’s huge wheels, and Tom was staring up in amazement at its single tier. It was smaller than a lot of the houses in London, and it appeared to have been built out of wood by somebody whose idea of good carpentry was to bang a couple of nails in and hope for the best. Behind the shed-like town hall rose the huge, crooked chimneys of an experimental engine array.

“Welcome!” shouted a tall, white-bearded man, picking his way down the clinker-heap, grubby brown robes flapping. “Welcome to Speedwell. I am Orme Wreyland, Mayor. Do you speak Anglish?”

Hester hung back suspiciously, but Tom thought the old man looked friendly enough. He stepped forward and said, “Please, sir, we need some food, and a doctor to look at my friend’s leg…”

“I’m not your friend,” hissed Hester Shaw. “And there’s nothing wrong with my leg.” But she was white and trembling and her face shone with sweat.

“No doctor in Speedwell anyway,” laughed Wreyland. “Not one. And as for food… Well, times are hard. Do you have anything you can trade?”

Tom patted the pockets of his tunic. He had a little money, but he didn’t see what use London money would be to Orme Wreyland. Then he touched something hard. It was the seedy he had found in the Gut. He pulled it out and looked wistfully at it for a moment before he handed it to the old man. He had been planning to make a present of it to Katherine Valentine one day, but now food was more important.

“Pretty! Very pretty!” admitted Orme Wreyland, tilting the disc and admiring the rippling rainbows. “Not a lot of use, but worth a few nights’ shelter and a bit of food. It’s not very good food, mind, but it’s better than nothing…”

He was right: it
wasn’t
very good, but Tom and Hester ate greedily anyway and then held out their bowls for more.

“It’s made from algae, mostly,” explained Orme Wreyland, as his wife slopped out second helpings of the bluish muck. “We grow it in vats down under the main engine room. Nasty stuff, but it keeps body and soul together when pickings is thin, and between you and me, pickings has never been thinner. That’s why we were so glad to come across this mound of trash we’re scraping through.”

Tom nodded, leaning back in his chair and looking around the Wreylands’ quarters. It was a tiny, cheese-shaped room, and not at all what he would have expected of a mayoral residence – but then Orme Wreyland was not exactly what he would have expected of a mayor. The shabby old man seemed to rule over a
town composed mainly of his own family; sons and daughters, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and the husbands and wives that they had met on passing towns.

But Wreyland was not a happy man. “It’s no fun, running a traction town,” he kept saying. “No, no fun at all, not any more. There was a time when a little place like Speedwell could go about its business quite safely, being too small for any other town to bother eating. But not now. Not with prey so scarce. Everyone we see wants to eat us. We even found ourselves running from a city the other day. One of those big Frankish-speaking
Villes Mobiles
it was. I ask you, what good would a place like Speedwell be to a monster like that? We’d barely take the edge off its appetite. But they chased us anyway.”

“Your town must be very fast,” said Tom.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Wreyland, beaming, and his wife put in, “Hundred miles an hour, top speed. That’s Wreyland’s doing. He’s a wizard with those big engines of his.”

“Could you help us?” asked Tom, leaning forward in his seat. “We need to get to London, as quickly as possible. I’m sure you could catch it up, and there might be more spoil-heaps along the way…”

“Bless you, lad,” said Wreyland, shaking his head. “What London drops isn’t worth going far for, not these days. Everything’s recycled now that prey’s so short. Why, I remember the days when cities’ waste-heaps used to dot the Hunting Ground like mountains. Oh, there was good pickings then! But not any more. Besides,” he added with a shudder, “I wouldn’t take my town too close to London, or any other city. You can’t trust them these days. They’d turn round and snaffle us, like as not.
Chomp! No, no.”

Tom nodded, trying not to show his disappointment. He glanced across at Hester, but her head was hanging down and she seemed to be asleep, or unconscious. He hoped it was just the effects of her long walk and her full stomach, but as he started up to check that she was all right Wreyland said, “I tell you what, though, lad; we’ll take you to the cluster!”

“To the what?”

“To the trading-cluster! It’s a gathering of small towns, a couple of days’ run south-east of here. We were going anyway.”

“There’ll be lots of towns at the cluster,” Mrs Wreyland agreed. “And even if none of them is prepared to take you and your friend to London, you’ll soon find an air-trader who will. Bound to be air-traders at a cluster.”

“I…” said Tom, and stopped. He wasn’t feeling very well. The room seemed to waver, then started to roll like the picture on a badly-tuned Goggle-screen. He looked at Hester and saw that she had slipped off her seat on to the floor. The Wreylands’ household gods grinned at him from their shrine on the wall, and one of them seemed to be saying in Orme Wreyland’s voice, “Sure to be airships there, Tom, always airships at a trading-cluster…”

“Would you like some more algae, dear?” enquired Mrs Wreyland, as he fell to his knees. From a long, long way away he heard her saying, “It took an awfully long time to take effect, didn’t it, Ormey?”, and Wreyland replying, “We’ll have to put more in next time, my sweet.” Then the swirling patterns on the carpet reached up and twined around him and pulled him down into a
sleep that was as soft as cotton wool, and filled with dreams of Katherine.

A
bove Tier One, above the busy shops of Mayfair and Piccadilly, above Quirke Circus, where the statue of London’s saviour stands proudly on its fluted steel column, Top Tier hangs over the city like an iron crown, supported by vast pillars. It is the smallest, highest and most important of the seven Tiers, and, though only three buildings stand there, they are the three greatest buildings in London. To sternward rise the towers of the Guildhall, where the greater and lesser Guilds all have their offices and meet in council once a month. Opposite it is the building where the
real
decisions are taken: the black glass claw of the Engineerium. Between them stands St Paul’s, the ancient Christian temple that Quirke re-erected up here when he turned London into a Traction City. It is a sad sight now, covered in scaffolding and shored up with props, for it was never meant to move, and London’s journeys have shaken the old stonework terribly. But soon it will be open to the public again: the Guild of Engineers has promised to restore it, and if you listen closely you can hear the drills and hammers of their men at work inside.

Magnus Crome hears them as his bug goes purring through the old cathedral’s shadow to the Engineerium. They make him smile a faint, secret smile.

Inside the Engineerium the sunlight is kept at bay behind black windows. A cold neon glow washes the metal walls, and the air smells of antiseptic, which Crome thinks is a welcome relief from the stench of flowers and new-mown grass that hangs over High London on this warm spring day. A young apprentice
leaps to attention as he stalks into the lobby and bows her bald head when he barks, “Take me to Doctor Twix.”

A monorail car is waiting. The apprentice helps the Lord Mayor into it and it takes him sweeping up in a slow spiral through the heart of the Engineerium. He passes floor after floor of offices and conference rooms and laboratories, and glimpses the shapes of strange machines through walls of frosted glass. Everywhere he looks he sees his Engineers at work, tinkering with fragments of Old-Tech, performing experiments on rats and dogs, or guiding groups of shaven-headed children who are up on a day-trip from the Guild’s nurseries in the Deep Gut. He feels safe and satisfied, here in the clean, bright, inner sanctum of his Guild. It makes him remember why he loves London so much, and why he has devoted his whole career to finding ways to keep it moving.