by Philip Reeve
The Engineer did not so much as twitch a nostril, but the men behind him were not so self-possessed. Anna saw them glance at each other when he said that word.
“I didn’t realize the Engineers knew about it, sir,” Anders said.
“The Guild of Engineers knows everything,” the Engineer snapped. “One of our survey teams encountered the creature three weeks ago, when London first entered these hills. We subdued it and brought it aboard. We have been keeping it under observation in one of the old Wombs.”
“Not keeping it under very good observation, were you?” spluttered Nutley. “It’s killed a dozen men on Base Tier!”
“That was part of the experiment,” said the Engineer calmly. “We wished to see how it behaved in the mobile-urban environment. London is no longer the largest or fastest city in the Great Hunting Ground. If we are to compete with the big Traktionstadts, we need to adjust our hunting strategies. If we could reproduce these Stalkers and insert them into the engine districts of prey cities, they might be useful. However, this Stalker has proved less controllable than we had hoped. We have lost contact with the team we put into Mortlake to study it. It has been decided to shut down the experiment.”
“That contraption will stop it, will it?” asked Nutley, pointing at the big gun-thing.
“We believe so.”
“You let it loose down here on purpose?” Anders said. “But it killed people!”
“They were expendable,” replied the Engineer. “As are you, Sergeant. We really cannot have common policemen prying into the business of the Guild.”
He stepped aside. “Shoot them all,” he said. The men behind him raised their weapons. There were four of them now, not three. The one at the back, half-hidden by the smog, was very tall, and his eyes cast two green rods of light through the murk.
“The Stalker!” shouted Anna.
One Engineer shrieked as the Stalker scythed him down. The second gunman fired one shot before the Stalker killed him: the bullet ricocheted off an engine housing. The man with the giant ungainly gun-thing pulled its triggers and it went off. Scrawling blue lightning wrapped around the robed giant like tinsel round a Quirkemas Tree. It seemed the Engineers had miscalculated, because it did not stop or even slow the Stalker, which cut down the Engineers’ leader and then turned its attention to the one who was shooting him, reaching through the lightning to wrench the big gun and its operator apart.
“Run!” said Anna, and she started to, but Anders and Nutley did not run with her. When she looked back she saw that Anders was on the ground and Nutley was stooping over him, pressing a hand to a wound in his sergeant’s shoulder.
“That ricochet got him!” said Nutley, looking round at her. “Help me!”
Anna hesitated. The Stalker would kill them, she thought, and then she would be free to go back to the Jenny and escape into the sky. But she felt a debt to Anders; he had tried to protect her from the Engineers. Even Nutley felt like a friend now that she had seen the Stalker. She had been stupid to imagine that she could make an alliance with that creature. Human beings had to stick together against things like that.
She scurried back. Anders’s face was grey. Anna did not think the wound was fatal, but the shock and pain had almost made him pass out. Together, she and Nutley dragged him behind the plinth of Sooty Pete’s statue. They crouched there for a moment, united by the fear that the Stalker would come and find them there. When it did not, they cautiously stood up, peering through the clutter of beer bottles and lucky money piled around the statue’s feet.
Silhouetted in the backlit steam, the Stalker looked like a sinister shadow puppet. It was stooping over the dead Engineers, removing each right hand. Its own left hand was a nightmare gauntlet of iron and blades, but its right arm ended at the wrist in a jutting metal prong and a tangle of shredded wires. Carefully it took one of the freshly severed hands and shoved it onto the stump. The fingers jerked like a frog’s legs in a school experiment. Anna imagined electricity flowing into the hand, filling it like a glove. The Stalker raised it in front of its face, into the witch-green glare of those headlamp eyes. It turned the new hand this way and that, considering, then tore it off, flung it aside and reached for another.
“Is that what this is about?” whispered Anna.
How could the Stalker have heard such a faint little whisper, over all the noise of London? But it did. Its huge head swung towards Anna’s hiding place. The beams of its eyes came groping for her through the vapours. It put down the hand it was trying on and came striding towards the shrine.
“It’s coming!” said Nutley.
“Run!” said Anders. “Both of you, get out of here…”
Anna reached down and snatched her bag from him. She stepped out in front of the Stalker before Anders could tell her not to or Nutley could stop her. She held her right hand out in front of her so that the green light of the Stalker’s eyes fringed her fingers.
The Stalker was moving slowly now. Perhaps the Engineers’ lightning had damaged it after all. Its head seemed half skull, half helmet. The skull parts were still thinly papered with old skin. Everything about it was appalling.
Anna waggled her fingers at it. “Is that what you’re looking for?” she asked.
The Stalker stopped in front of her, bracing itself against the rolling of the deck, its bladed hand half raised. Maybe it wasn’t used to being talked to. All these years of hunting and killing and probably nobody had said anything to it more interesting than “Aaaargh!”
“Is that what this is all about?” Anna demanded again. “You lost a hand, so you’re looking for another? Trying and trying and trying to find a replacement. But you never can, can you? They’re always too big or too small or too hairy or the wrong colour. And so you keep on searching…”
The Stalker seemed confused. It twitched its head. Its eyes flickered. “Must… Repair…” it said. Its teeth were metal. Its voice rasped over them like a rusty file.
“Repair?” Anna kept her right hand outstretched. The left was in her bag, fingering the smooth curve of the demolition charge. “How long have you been looking? How many hands have you tried? You need to adapt. People lose hands and arms and legs and all sorts of things, but they learn to live without them. I lost my mother and father when Arkangel ate the town we were aboard. That was worse than losing a hand or two. But I adapted, see?”
The Stalker had lost interest. “Repair,” it said flatly, starting to lumber towards Anna again.
Who remembered, as she drew the charge out of her bag, that she had no idea how long the fuse was set for.
“Here,” she said, holding the charge out.
The Stalker did not seem to know what the charge was. It did not seem to care. It watched Anna’s hand as she reached out with the charge and clamped it to the armour beneath the Stalker’s robes. Anna could guess what it was thinking. Is this the right one at last? After all these years? Is this finally the new hand I need? And she surprised herself with a thought of her own: Poor old thing.
It slashed its blades at her then, and she felt the wind of them against her throat as she sprang back and turned and ran. She glanced behind her just once. The Stalker was lumbering after her, the demolition charge pinned to its robes like a tacky brooch with one red light on it, bright as a ruby.
Then her running shadow was flung on the deckplates in front of her by a sudden, astonishing whiteness behind. Something hit her in the back and there was a lot of tumbling and bumping and the sorts of sensations that people pay good money for in fairgrounds. Time stretched out, or maybe compressed, and when it finally got a grip on itself Anna learned that the demolition charge had not just destroyed the Stalker, it had also blown a big, roughly circular hole in the deckplate. Through this hole gravity and the steep slope of the deck were dragging her. She clawed for a grip at its raggedy edge, but there was nothing to hold on to. She hung there by her slowly slipping fingertips and looked down.
By the light that spilled past her
down the hole she could see bits of the Stalker snagged in the net beneath the city. A hand; a foot; a head with lightless eyes. The body, or whatever was left of it, was gone. Presumably that was what had torn an immense hole in the net, right under Anna’s dangling feet.
Her fingertips slipped another eighth of an inch closer to the hole’s edge. She said a quick prayer to Thursday, but Thursday was a god of flight: she wasn’t sure he could help with plain old falling.
Like an answer, a voice from above said, “Grab hold, Mossie!”
Nutley was looking down at her over the edge of the hole. Just as Anna’s hands lost their grip entirely, he grabbed her by both wrists and heaved her up, like a Snowmad fisherman dragging his catch through an ice hole, up out of the dark onto the hot deck, into the shouts and footsteps of approaching emergency crews.
The doctors said that Anders needed rest once they had patched him up and put his arm in a sling, but he insisted on helping Nutley escort their prisoner back to Airdock Green. “I heard what you said to the Stalker,” he told her, once they were there. “About your mother and father. I can see why you must hate cities.”
Anna shrugged, blowing on the mug of steaming cocoa that Pym had just made for her.
“Hammershoi, the town I lived on, was pretty,” said Anders, “but it wasn’t well-built. Some of the tier supports gave way when London ate it. My wife, Lise, and my daughter, Minna, were caught in the collapse.”
“How can you serve London, if London killed your family?” asked Anna.
“London didn’t set out to kill anyone. It was an accident.”
“Yes, an accident caused by this stupid system!” said Anna fiercely. “This insane, evil system, this Municipal Darwinism that makes city chase city…”
Anders held up a hand to stop her. “It must be good to be so young, and so angry, and so certain that you’re right. Me, I’m not at all sure that it was a good idea to start cities moving all those years ago. But I know there are plenty of good people aboard London, and somebody has to protect them from the bad ones. I hope you remember that, wherever you go in that airship of yours.”
“I thought I was in custody,” said Anna. “I thought I was your prisoner, policeman.”
Anders looked at Nutley. Nutley picked up Anna’s arrest report and carefully tore it in half, and then in half again. He dropped the pieces into the red recycling bin under his desk.
Anders yawned. “Goddess, but I’m tired! What about you, Nutley?”
“Same here, Sarge. Do you know, if a prisoner made a break for freedom right now, I don’t think I could do a single thing about it.”
“And me with this dodgy arm, I doubt I could stop her.”
“But I’m here, Sarge…” said Pym.
“Constable Pym,” said Anders, “I shall need you to type out a full report of last night’s events for the Council of Guilds, taking great care not to mention any mysterious girls or disagreements with Engineers.”
“But, Sarge…”
“In triplicate, Constable.”
Pym looked helplessly at Anna, then sat down at his desk and put a sheet of paper into his typewriter. Anders leaned his chair against the wall and closed his eyes. Nutley opened a biscuit tin and peered intently into its depths. Anna went slowly to the door, opened it and slipped out.
Ten minutes later, as she steered the Jenny Haniver out of the air dock into the clean west wind, she saw that London had reached the top of its climb and was beginning its descent. All the things that had slid to the back of the city on its way up would soon be sliding forward again. Far below, a new day was spreading across the foothills and the plains, lighting up lakes, and rivers, and fat, slow, unsuspecting towns.
Anna circled the city once, watching the Jenny Haniver’s small shadow glide across the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the lawns of Circle Park. Then she flew away, east, into the rising of the sun.
The Jenny Haniver was surfing on the edge of the night as it swept westwards across the Great Hunting Ground. Anna scanned the evening haze ahead for a glimpse of London, but it was still too far west. What she could see were the lights of dozens of small towns on the move; semi-static farming platforms and small trading towns fleeing eastwards as if from an oncoming storm. The Jenny’s radio set picked up the beacons of a few larger ones which had clustered together for trade and protection. Anna altered course, homing in on the cluster. Hopefully someone there would have new information about what London’s lord mayor was planning.
As she descended through the dusk she wondered what had happened to the men she met in London all those years ago, to Anders and Nutley and Pym. Old Anders was likely dead by now, she thought, and she felt sad for him. He had been a good man and a good policeman, and he’d done more than anyone to teach Anna’s younger self that not all city folk were evil.
It had taken her a little longer to work out that not everyone who lived on the good earth and called themself an Anti-Tractionist was good. She had not really learned that lesson until the mission to Pulau Pinang…
Anna had decided not to murder the Sultana after all.
It was a relief. She had been working for many years as an intelligence agent for the Anti-Traction League, carrying messages and spying out information, but she had never seen herself as an assassin. Even when she planted the bomb that sank Marseilles she had made sure to place it in a quiet part of the raft city’s engine district: Marseilles had sunk in shallow water, in calm weather, and had plenty of lifeboats to ferry all its citizens to safety. But when the League ordered her on this mission to the island of Pulau Pinang she had sensed that she was entering new and darker territory, where she might have to do things that her conscience could not so easily excuse.
Pulau Pinang was a large, mountainous island, with white beaches round the edges and the hills green with forests, farms, and plantations of areca nut palms. It had always been friendly to the Anti-Traction League, but its Sultan had died two years previously, when his ship had been lost at sea, and his widow, who now ruled in his place, seemed to have new ideas. Instead of sending out her small navy to scare off any floating towns that tried to approach, the Sultana welcomed them, allowing them to anchor and selling them fuel and fresh water. There were rumours that she planned to turn Pinang City into a raft town and sail off to loot and burn all the other static settlements in the Hundred Islands. The High Council of the Anti-Traction League was alarmed. “We wish you to investigate,” they had told Anna. “If there is any sign that she is motorizing her town, or allying herself with pirate cities, you must remove her, and we shall see that a more sensible ruler is installed.”
“Remove her?” Anna had asked.
“Permanently,” said the Council, and gave her a present: a red-and-gold scarf made from silicon silk, pretty and surprisingly strong, designed for strangling Sultanas.
But even before the Jenny Haniver touched down Anna could see that the stories were untrue. Pinang City was not being turned into a raft; it was a sleepy harbour town just like lots of others in the Hundred Islands, with bright-painted houses lining its steep streets and crowds of children chasing the Jenny’s shadow towards the air harbour. It was true that a mobile town was anchored offshore, but it was not some sinister predator city; it was a shabby little place called Dalkey, not much larger than a big ship. Little boats were clustered around it, selling fresh fruit and vegetables to the townies. A pipeline from the fuel terminal was being dragged out to it along a pontoon. If the Sultana of Pulau Pinang chose to let her people profit from trade with towns like that, Anna could not see very much harm in it.
It was early evening, and the warm air was full of cooking smells and the scent of bougainvillea blossom and the blue smell of the sea. Anna climbed the stairways between the carved fronts of old townhouses towards her meeting with the Sultana. The royal palace floated on its own reflection in the middle of a pretty water garden, tall eaves curving skywards like the wings of seabirds. Guards in lacquered leather armour watched
Anna cross the stepping stones that led to the main entrance. Girls in petal-coloured dresses flitted ahead of her through the shadows in the Sultana’s private quarters. She passed through a decorative cedarwood arch that must have had old-tech hidden beneath its elegant carvings, because it bleeped at her and the girls came apologetically to make her remove all the metal objects from her pockets – some coins, and a blunt penknife. The League knew about that arch, thought Anna. No one would get in to meet the Sultana carrying a knife or a gun. The girls showed no interest in her new red scarf.
The Sultana was a small, birdlike woman, neither young nor old, with an ordinary face but an extraordinary voice, very deep and beautiful. Anna liked her. They sat on the floor, facing each other across a low table while the girls served sweet drinks, and little dishes of delicious food. Anna delivered the bland greetings she had brought from the High Council in Tienjing. The Sultana was not fooled for a moment. “They think I am a traitor,” she said.
“They do not think that, exactly…”
“But they sent you to spy on me.”
Anna said nothing. She could tell that there was no point lying to the Sultana.
“The seas around Pulau Pinang are deep,” said the Sultana, “but they are not that deep. There are many small islands, many hidden shoals, many hazards. The big predator towns do not come here. If little towns come, why should we not trade with them?”
The Anna Fang who had escaped from Arkangel all those years ago could have given her a hundred angry answers to that, but Anna’s life in the sky had softened her; she no longer thought every town a threat, nor everyone who lived aboard a town an enemy. She said, “Then I shall pass on your good wishes to the High Council of the League, and tell them that Pulau Pinang is still their friend.”
The Sultana smiled. “And now I must conclude our little talk, Miss Fang,” she said. “It is sundown, and I must retire to my prayer room for a little while.”
