Night Flights

by Philip Reeve

  “’Cos the Engineers are always talking about getting the Wombs working again,” said Nutley. “Good thing if they did, too. Trouble with this city is, we don’t make anything any more… Oh, flippin’ ada!”

  Anders’s torch beam was poking down into a square pit in the deck where some other hunk of machinery had once been attached.

  The pit was full of hands.

  Anna Fang went to the door of her cell and looked out through the spyhole at Constable Pym, who was crouching in front of the big wooden filing cabinet. She was not sure what to make of these London policemen. The one who had caught her as she was scrambling back up through the rust hole had been rough and angry and stupid, just as she would have expected, but she had not been prepared for Sergeant Anders’s kindness. She wished now that she had talked to him. She was sorry that she had let him go off into the dark without warning him of what was hiding there.

  “Here we go!” said Pym. He stood up and waved a sheaf of papers at her. He seemed to think that she would understand him if he spoke slowly and clearly. “Every week we get a copy of all the police reports from other stations on Base Tier,” he said. “Corporal Nutley says there’s no point reading them, but there must be some point, mustn’t there, or they wouldn’t send them? I knew it reminded me of something, that thing about the chopped-off hands, and here it is, listen. ‘Friday 10th May. Body identified as Sidney Simmonds, Track-Plate Cleaner 3rd Class, recovered from number fourteen axle housing. Badly mangled; right hand missing.’ That’s from Bermondsey. They put it down as accidental. Thought he’d got caught up in the machinery. And look, here’s another, the week before, way back in Sternstacks: right hand missing. And…”

  Pym set the papers on the desk and leafed swiftly through them. “Disappearances!” he said. “Eight … nine … ten of ’em this fortnight past! Ten men gone overboard, it seems. The Guild of Engineers put out an announcement warning against drunkenness on duty. But did they fall, or was they pushed? And were they missing their right hands when they fell?”

  “When I was a girl,” said Anna, “Arkangel ate a little scavenger town. A nasty little place, but it didn’t even bother to flee when Arkangel came swooping down on it, so it got eaten. There were thirty men aboard. All dead.”

  “Blimey!” whispered Pym, all saucer-eyed. “You can talk Anglish, then?”

  “All the dead men had their right hands missing,” Anna told him. “We found the hands heaped up in an old warehouse near the bows. It looked like a nest of big white spiders.”

  “You’re just trying to frighten me,” said Pym, sounding frightened. “Spreading Panic and Discontent, that’s what you’re trying to do. Anti-Tractionists do that. I went on a course about it.”

  “You should be frightened, policeman,” said Anna. “Your sergeant and the other one aren’t coming back. I know what it is, that thing out there. It will kill them too, and take their hands.”

  “Great Goddess!” Anders started to say, but before he could get the words out he sensed movement in the shadows beyond the pit of hands. He swung his torch towards it and saw dark, oily robes, a hood with more shadows inside it and… Those green lights couldn’t really be two glowing eyes, could they? They must just be goggles, reflecting a green light from somewhere…

  A raised hand sprouted knives; not one, but four. Anders heard himself shouting, “No!” Then the crash of Nutley’s gun deafened him. The robed attacker stumbled but did not fall. Nutley fired again, and the robed shape went backwards and then up, bounding like an ape up the side of the crane, dropping into the darkness beyond.

  “After him!” Anders yelled.

  They went round the crane. Robes flapped under an arch ahead and the policemen followed. Round a corner, through stacks of old crates. “He’s trapped!” shouted Nutley.

  The fugitive was running down a street that both men knew was a dead end. The walls of the shuttered construction hangars towered up on either side. Across the street’s end stretched a wire fence, and beyond the fence was a little unmanned railway that carried solid fuel from the Gut to the old auxiliary Godshawk Engines near Sternstacks. A train was passing, the street lamps beyond flickering between the cars, and the fugitive was silhouetted against the light, slowing as he reached the fence and realized the policemen had him trapped.

  “He’s tall, this fellow…” said Anders.

  The fugitive reached up with one hand and pulled the heavy mesh of the fence apart, tearing a hole big enough for even him to climb through. Anders kept running. The fugitive leaped aboard the last of the trucks as it trundled past. Anders ran right to the fence and stopped there to take careful aim. In all his years as a policeman he had never yet shot anyone, but this felt like a good time to start. He squeezed the trigger and the gun jumped in his hand and he knew he had hit the figure squatting on the last truck because he saw a puff of smoke or dust or something spurt from its robes. But it did not fall. It just turned and looked back at him while the train carried it into a tunnel at the base of a big metal buttress, and again Anders caught that glint of green eyes in the shadows under the ragged hood.

  Nutley came running up and they stood there side by side, winded, bracing themselves against the fence while the city lurched under them, scrambling over some granite reef.

  “It’s not human,” said Anders.

  “Not human?” Nutley started to chuckle. “What, then? A werewolf? A nightwight? Maybe we should be using silver bullets! We missed him, that’s all.”

  “My shot hit. So did at least one of yours.” Anders shook his head, staring at the curve and gleam of the narrow tracks where they plunged into that tunnel, trying to remember where they went. “It was a Stalker,” he said.

  “They’re just in stories, aren’t they, Sarge?’

  “Oh, Stalkers were real enough.” The ghosts of long-ago history lessons stirred in Karl Anders’s memory. There was that rusty head he used to go and look at, in the Hammershoi Museum, when he was a lad. He said, “There was a culture once that knew how to resurrect the dead. Not their minds, just their bodies. Armoured them and sent them to fight in the wars they were always having back in the days before Traction, when rival cities worked out their differences by fighting instead of eating one another. The last of the Stalkers were supposed to have perished at the Battle of Three Dry Ships, but there’s always been rumours of one or two survivors. Old things. Insane and dangerous.”

  “But how’s one come to London?” asked Nutley.

  Anders shrugged. “Up from below, I suppose. London’s been moving slow these past few weeks, creeping up and up these Shatterhorns. A thing like that, if it was lurking in the high places, could have climbed aboard. Unless…” He turned suddenly, looking at Nutley. “It’s no coincidence. This thing appears, and that girl you arrested… There’s a connection.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get back to Airdock Green and ask her.”

  “Sarge!” said Constable Pym excitedly, but Anders had no time to hear his news. He went straight to the cell, leaving Nutley to pour two mugs of tea fortified with a good dash of something stronger from the bottle they kept for emergencies in the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

  Anna stood up as Anders opened the cell door.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t speak Anglish,” he told her. “Everybody speaks Anglish in the air trade. And if you really don’t we can get a translator in. But by the time I can get one here your creature may have killed again.”

  Anna said, “It is not my creature.”

  “It arrived the same time you did. I think maybe Corporal Nutley is right; you are some kind of saboteur and you’ve brought that thing aboard.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” said Pym, from the doorway. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Sarge. It’s been here for days and days. A fortnight maybe. There’ve been deaths and disappearances.”

  Anders looked at him, then back at the girl. Anna decided it was time to tell him
the truth.

  “He’s right,” she said. “I tracked it here. It is very old and it has been wandering the world for a long time. I followed the stories from city to city, settlement to settlement; stories of murders and missing right hands. In most of the places it’s been, people don’t even know what it is; they think it’s a bogeyman, a hungry ghost. Aboard Murnau they called it Struwelpeter; on Manchester it’s the Fingersmith. In these Alpine statics it’s called the Witchfrost. Most places, people just call it the Collector. It takes the right hand of everyone it kills.”

  Some of the anger went out of Anders. He sat down on the cell’s hard bench. “Why?”

  “Maybe it’s planning to open a second-hand shop.”

  “Very funny, Miss Fang. I meant, why did you trail it here?”

  “Because I want it,” said Anna. “You’re right. I am an Anti-Tractionist. I hate all mobile cities. But I’m not so stupid that I think I could blow them up with little fireworks like the one Mr Slim sold me.” She shot a look of scorn at Nutley. “If I had a Stalker to do my bidding, he could tear your city apart with his iron hands. He could kill you all one by one with his steel claws.”

  “But why would he do your bidding?” Anders asked. “Why wouldn’t he just cut your throat for you, and take your pretty hand for a souvenir?”

  The girl shrugged. “I’ve heard about this other Stalker, a bounty killer up in the northlands. Herr Shrike, he’s called, and he kills men and women without pity, for anyone who’ll pay. But sometimes he takes pity on the young. I thought maybe the Collector would be the same. Maybe I’m young enough that he’ll listen to me. Maybe I can make him turn his talents to a good cause, and help me rid the world of these juggernauts of yours.”

  Anders ignored the notion that destroying whole cities full of people was a good cause. “It’s a hell of a risk you’re taking. What if the Collector won’t take pity on you?” He laughed. “Ah, but you’ve already thought that through, haven’t you! That’s why you had the demolition charge with you!”

  Anna tilted her chin at him, sensing mockery. “If I clamp it to his armour and let it off, I bet not even a Stalker could withstand that.”

  Anders shook his head. “Believe me, Miss Fang, if you were close enough to clamp things to its armour, you’d be dead.”

  “Why are we stood here listening to this Mossie minx?” asked Nutley, who had taken Constable Pym’s place in the doorway. “We need to be calling for support. This thing could be halfway to Sternstacks by now, a-murderin’ as it goes. Send word up top, Sarge. Get some of them lads from the Gut who think policing means posing about in fancy body armour. Let them help us deal with this thing.”

  “No,” said Anders. “If we call for help the Guild of Engineers will hear of it.”

  “Good!” said Nutley. “They got death rays and electric guns and all sorts stashed away in their Engineerium, I’ve heard.”

  “Exactly. So you can imagine how they’d love to get their hands on a working Stalker. I want to deal with this thing myself, if I can.”

  He left the cell door open when he went back out into the office.

  “Shall I lock the prisoner up again, Sarge?” asked Pym.

  “No,” said Anders. “We’ll need her with us. You heard what Miss Fang said. It may have a kindness for the young. We need her to lure it close, so I can pin this pretty badge on it.” He held up the demolition charge, now neatly labelled as EVIDENCE in Constable Pym’s boyish handwriting.

  “What, you mean take this Mossie cow off to Sternstacks with us?” Nutley demanded. “You’re going to let her talk to that monster, and maybe turn it against us like she’s wanted to all along? That’s if she doesn’t just run off into the dark first chance she gets!”

  By way of answer to the last point, Anders handcuffed Anna’s wrists together again. “If she runs, Corporal Nutley, you have my permission to shoot her. And if she can say more than ten words to this Collector fellow before I attach the charge to him, my name is not Karl Anders.”

  It was a long way to Sternstacks, down dingy, steeply tilted streets that skirted the central Engine District, leading past the Engineers’ great experimental prison at Piranesi Plaza. “That’s where you’re headed for,” Nutley told Anna Fang with a leer. “All sorts of toys they’ve got in there for loosening Anti-Tractionist tongues. Literally, sometimes.”

  Luckily the streets were almost deserted. The only people they passed were harried engine-minders hurrying from one emergency to another, with no time to wonder where two policemen were going, or why the girl they had with them was handcuffed. They went down Shallow Street, which wasn’t shallow at all that night but canted at an angle that made them shuffle and stagger like comedy drunks. At the street’s end litter sliding downhill from districts near the city’s prow had collected in drifts against an old statue of Charley Shallow himself, one of London’s first and worst lord mayors.

  At Sternstacks they stepped out of the iron shadow of the tiers above into air that was cold and almost fresh. Anna looked up hoping to see stars, but she was out of luck. All around her the huge exhaust stacks of the city rose, taller than any tower she had ever seen, some striped like garter snakes, some so fat that lesser stacks and flues twined round them like ivy round a giant tree. From their tops the smoke and smuts and filthy gas of all the city’s engines spilled in clouds that blotted out the sky.

  “I found a whole parasite town up there in the smog once,” said Nutley. “A little flying place called Kipperhawk. They’d anchored it to London’s stern with hawsers and it was hanging in the smokestream, sieving out minerals and such. Cheeky cloots.”

  “It’s a town-eat-town world,” said Anders.

  They walked past darkened offices and workshops to a low, round opening where the little railway track from Mortlake emerged. A line of trucks was being unloaded there by men in the orange jackets of the fuel corps. Anders went over to the foreman. “Seen anyone come out of Mortlake tonight?”

  “Mortlake?” The man looked at him as if he was crazy. “No. What’s up?” He peered past Anders, trying to ogle Anna through the ripple of hot air from the engines. “Who’s the girl?”

  “Police business,” said Anders.

  “Suit yourself. But if you find my ’prentice on your travels, send him to me, would you? I haven’t seen him since last tea break.”

  “It’s here,” said Anders, going back to where Nutley and the girl were waiting. “An apprentice from that fuel gang has vanished. The Collector has collected himself another hand. Where is he going, Anna?”

  Anna thought about it. She thought about where she would go, if she was the Collector. “To the back, maybe. The edge of the city. He doesn’t like that you saw him. He’s looking for a way off.”

  “There are barriers all along London’s stern.”

  “Barriers don’t stop him.”

  They headed sternwards. Walkways led aft between huge horizontal ducts. The ducts steamed, filling the air with mist. Smuts drifting down from above swirled in the mist like snow gone bad. Sometimes there was actual snow as well. By the time they drew near to the high barriers at the stern, visibility was down to a few yards. When they arrived in front of an iron statue of Sooty Pete, the hunchbacked god of the engine districts, they thought for one terrifying second that they had found the Stalker. And when the strangers appeared, silently and all around them, there was no warning; their rubber-soled shoes made no sound on the deckplates and their long white rubber coats blended perfectly with the drifting steam.

  They were Engineers, with pale, bald scalps and the red cogwheel symbol of their Guild tattooed on their foreheads. There were four of them. Two carried sleek and scientific-looking guns; a third was weighed down by something vaguely gun-like but so huge, and so encrusted with wires, dials, flexes, coils and little copper globes on long prongs that it was hard to be sure.

  “Is there a problem, Sergeant?” snapped the leader, a senior Guildsman, his eyes invisible behind faceted goggles.


  Anders stepped forward, half hoping that in the Sternstacks murk these newcomers wouldn’t notice Anna Fang. But they had noticed her, of course; the eyes of the three gunmen were creeping all over her. Anders chose his reply with care. The Guild of Engineers had started out as London’s mechanics and technicians, but on a mobile city mechanics and technicians were men of great importance. Upsetting them might end a man’s career.

  “We are investigating some murders, sir,” he said. “Three scavengers dead.”

  “Have you reported this, Sergeant?”

  “Not yet, sir. They were Base Tier types; nothing you need concern yourself with, but it must be investigated, sir, all the same.”

  “And the girl?” asked the senior Engineer. His goggles glittered like flies’ eyes as he turned them towards Anna.

  “A witness, sir, assisting us with our enquiries.”

  The goggles swung back to Anders. “These dead scavengers. Had they been mutilated?”

  “Their right hands had been taken off, sir.”

  “Mmm,” said the Engineer. Behind him the man with the big gun-thing shifted position, bracing himself against its weight. The others stood still as statues (which wasn’t very still on London’s shuddering decks). Some of the black smuts that swirled down between the stacks settled on their white coats, speckling them like Dalmatians.

  “You may return to your police station, Sergeant,” the Engineer said. “The Guild of Engineers has this situation under control. Your witness will remain with us.”

  “No, sir,” said Anders.

  Anna looked at him in surprise.

  The Engineer seemed startled, too. He raised one well-pruned eyebrow.

  “She’s in my custody, sir,” said Anders. “For her own protection.”

  “You have questioned her?” asked the Engineer.

  “Oh, we know about the Stalker, sir.”