Night Flights

by Philip Reeve

  Anna went outside with her, and watched her go nimbly across the stepping stones towards a little wooden prayer room that stood on its own island in the garden lakes. It was that hour when the sky is dark but calm water still holds the light. In the trees behind the palace a nightingale was singing. If I was going to kill her, thought Anna, that is where I would do it; in that prayer room, while she is alone. And she felt glad that there was no need.

  She decided to stay a little longer on Pulau Pinang. She wanted the League to know that she had been thorough. She took tea with local merchants as if she was just an air trader looking for a cargo, and asked each one in passing what they thought of their Sultana. They had no complaints – the taxes were lower than they had been in the late Sultan’s time, and the island was richer, because the visiting raft towns had brought prosperity. The Sultana was a clever woman, a much wiser ruler than her husband had been. Only one man hesitated when Anna asked him about her. He was a spice dealer named Na’a Murad, and his mild, kindly face creased into a frown when she mentioned the Sultana.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It is only gossip, Miss Fang. I should not say…”

  “But sharing gossip is one of life’s great pleasures, Mr Murad.”

  “I should not say,” the man repeated, but then leaned over the teahouse table and in a low voice said, “My sister’s boy is a guard at the palace, and he says our Sultana has a lover. Every night she goes alone to her prayer room…”

  “I saw it, standing among the water gardens.”

  “Well, there is a path from it that leads to a small gate in the outer wall, and from that gate another path descends to a quiet cove where the old Sultan sometimes liked to bathe. And up that path, on several occasions, my sister’s lad says he saw a man arrive.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “He came from the sea. A small boat came into the cove, and a man got out and climbed the path, passed through the gate, and went to meet the Sultana in her prayer room.”

  “Were there no guards on the gate?”

  “There were – my sister’s boy was one of them – but they had orders to let this fellow through.”

  “And what was he like, this man?”

  Na’a Murad leaned closer and his voice grew lower still. “A northerner. His face was white. Not red, like the northerners who come here on their raft towns, but truly white, like the belly of a fish. Like a ghost.”

  Anna laughed. “Perhaps he is a ghost? Perhaps he is the ghost of her husband, the old Sultan…”

  “Oh no, Miss Fang. You see, the first time this man came visiting was a few days before the old Sultan was drowned.”

  There was only one way for raft towns to come and go from Pinang City. They left the harbour, skirted the east coast, and then took the deep-water channel that led between the clustering offshore islands to the open sea. It was in that channel that the old sultan’s ship had gone down. Anna flew the Jenny Haniver to a little village on the coast there, just to take a look, and try to shake the odd feeling that Na’a Murad’s tale had left her with. She walked on long beaches of white sand, and said a prayer at the shrine that the Sultana had built to mark the place where her husband’s body washed ashore. She watched bare brown boys stand poised like herons, up to their waists in the clear water, waiting with their fishing spears. Later she ate some of their catch, cooked on the beach over hot coals.

  Around the headland from the village something like a house stood in the surf, but it was not a house. It was part of the wooden superstructure of a raft town, holed by sea worms and covered with barnacles. The village where the fisherboys and their families lived was partly built from such things; rusted deckplates turned into walls, the huge housing of a paddle wheel doing service as the schoolroom. The wreckage all looked fairly new. “Many towns die in the deep-water channel,” the people told Anna. “Sometimes small parts of them wash up here.”

  Anna ran her fingers down the cut edge of a deckplate. “What tools do you use to slice them up?”

  “We don’t. This is how the sea sends them to us.”

  The offshore islands were the peaks of drowned mountains, thick with trees. In the wide passage between them the sea shone blue and innocent. “Is it storms that sink the towns?” Anna asked. “Are there hidden rocks beneath the water?”

  “Bless you, lady! The sea there is deeper than anywhere else around Pulau Pinang. No shoals. No storms. The sea just takes those towns.”

  “Was there a storm when the Sultan’s ship went down?”

  “No, lady. The sea took him; that is all. The sea was hungry for his ship, so the teeth of the sea devoured it.”

  At dawn the next day Anna took the Jenny Haniver to circle the offshore islands. Clouds of colourful birds rose from the treetops as the airship buzzed by. In some of the narrow passages between the islands, rocks showed just beneath the waves, but in the deep-water channel the sea was bluest blue and only a shoal of silvery flying fish broke the surface, fleeing from some predator in the depths.

  The Jenny flew higher, and Anna looked south across the forested uplands to Pinang City where the little raft town called Dalkey was steaming away from its anchorage. As it hugged the east coast, making for the deep-water passage, she steered the Jenny to meet it, and radioed for permission to dock.

  Dalkey’s mayor was called Diarmid O’Brien, a gangling, sandy man with a shy smile. Sunburned skin was peeling from his big nose and from the bald patch he revealed when he took off his straw hat to welcome Anna to the tiny air dock. “Not many air traders stop by,” he said, as if apologizing for his ramshackle little raft. “We’re just a tinker town, to be fair. Started our wanderings in my grandaddy’s day, way up north somewhere, and just kept going. You know how it is. Always a new thing to see, always a new horizon to peek over…”

  “I know that feeling,” Anna said. “Have you been to Pulau Pinang before?”

  “First time. We passed this way a few years back, but that was in the old Sultan’s time and they weren’t keen on raft towns visiting back then. You?”

  “Can I talk to you privately?” she said.

  “Sure,” said O’Brien. “Make a way for the lady there,” he told the small crowd of townspeople who had gathered to gawp at the tethered airship.

  Anna followed him from the air dock to his town hall. It wasn’t a long way. Nothing was a long way from anything on that tiny, cluttered raft. The town hall was tiny and cluttered too, and a small girl was sitting behind the mayor’s desk. “Now then, Niamh…” said O’Brien, picking her up and plonking her down in a different chair. “Her mother passed away,” he told Anna, “so she comes to work with me.” He found another chair for Anna, dusted it, made her sit, sat down himself, tried out a couple of poses which he seemed to think made him look official and commanding and said solemnly, “Now then, Miss Fang, what can we do for you?”

  “You are bound for the deep-water passage?” asked Anna.

  “To be sure. It’s the only way in or out of Pinang City, for a raft town.”

  “I think it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? It was fine when we came in, Miss Fang. And didn’t the Sultana herself tell me that we should leave this morning? I had a letter from her. The wind will turn against us tomorrow, she says, but today it is as calm as a pond. What makes you think it’s dangerous?”

  Anna started to say something, then noticed the wide eyes of the little girl watching her and stopped. What could she tell these people? There was a shoal of flying fish? All she had was a bad feeling. “I may be wrong,” she said, “but I think you should go carefully, and be prepared to take evasive action.”

  “To evade what?” asked O’Brien. “Pirates?”

  “I think there may be a predator town out here,” Anna said.

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “No, but…”

  O’Brien stood up. He didn’t believe her story, but it wasn’t every day he was visited by a pretty aviatrix and h
e was in no great hurry to see her fly away. “Come with me,” he said. “We’ll ask the lads on the bridge if they’ve spotted anything.”

  The little girl took Anna’s hand as they all climbed the stairs to the top of the town hall. “I’m nearly six,” she said. “I’ve got new shoes.”

  The bridge was a roomful of wheels and levers and chart tables. An old-tech machine with a glowing green screen pinged quietly to itself in a corner. A red-haired woman stood at the town’s huge steering wheel, and two men with telescopes were out on a rusty balcony, scanning the sea ahead. “Nothing, chief,” they said, when O’Brien asked if they’d seen any sign of trouble. Dalkey was turning in to the deep-water passage, the first of the wooded islands sliding by to starboard.

  “Look here, Miss Fang,” said O’Brien, leaning over the old-tech instrument. “The echo-sounder says there’s fifteen fathoms of water under our keel.”

  Anna looked at the passing islands, wondering if a predator town or a pirate fleet could be hidden under the shadow of the trees that grew right down to their shores, but she was certain she would have seen them when she flew over in the Jenny. Between Dalkey and the islands more fish were leaping, big ones, silver in the sun.

  “There’s something here,” she said. “Slow your engines. Turn around.”

  The helmswoman glanced at O’Brien. O’Brien took the brass mouthpiece of a speaking tube off its hook on the wall and blew down it. “Engine room, all engines slow,” he said.

  Anna went out on to the balcony and looked at the sea. It was just as calm as before, but it was no longer such a dark blue. It was growing paler as she watched, and as she tried to work out why she heard the pinging of the echo-sounder on the bridge speed up.

  She turned to look. So did O’Brien, the screen bathing his face in green light as he leaned over it. “That’s not possible!” he said. “Twelve fathoms – ten – the sea floor is coming up at us!”

  The sea was almost white now.

  “Turn back!” ordered Anna. “Get out of here!”

  O’Brien shouted down the speaking tubes again. “Full astern!” The raft town shuddered. A great swirl of roughened water widened around it as it started to reverse, and for a moment Anna thought that the disturbance all came from Dalkey’s propellers. Then she realized that the stretch of sea in front of the town’s bows was bulging, creamy foam streaming away in all directions as something thrust upwards through the surface. One of the lookouts yelled and pointed as a dark spire broke the wave-tops a hundred yards away. Another came up, and another. One rose right beside Dalkey, and Anna saw that it was a tower of dark, barnacled metal, with heavy chains and hawsers swaying from it and people scrambling up it dressed in wet leathery suits and huge brass helmets. Beyond the raft town’s prow the last of the sea was draining from a wide, black metal deck. It seemed roughly circular, with the towers at intervals around its edges, and lower structures spaced here and there between them. Its centre was sliding open to reveal the toothy gleam of well-oiled cutting gear and massive metal grabs. If Dalkey had kept to its course and speed it would have found itself sliding into that mechanical mouth, but its rapid backing had carried its stern out over the edge of the black deck. There was an awful groan of metal grinding over metal, a lurch that scattered shingles off the town hall’s roof, and the raft town slid clear of the predator, crashing down in open water.

  As it fled, the watchers on the town hall bridge had their first clear view of the thing they had escaped from: the immense, oily hull below the catching deck, the towers angling inwards like cranes, swinging huge grabs over the place where Dalkey should have been. The sea came off it in cataracts, almost obscuring the name someone had painted in tall red letters along its barnacled hide: Fastitocalon.

  “What is that thing?” the helmswoman yelled.

  “The teeth of the sea,” said Anna. “A submarine city that preys on passing towns.” She had never heard of such a thing. But why would she? Fastitocalon lived in the deep places of the sea. It only surfaced to eat a ship or the sort of small town that, if it was missed at all, would be thought to have fallen victim to bad weather or poor seamanship. Fastitocalon could have been swimming the oceans of the world for centuries, now eating a raft resort on the Coromandel Coast, now a fishing fleet on the shores of Australia, now finding its way into the deep-water channel off Pulau Pinang, which would be a good hunting ground if only the ruler of the island could be persuaded to let raft towns come there.

  They would have sent a spy into Pinang City first, Anna thought. Someone like herself, who would have talked to people like Na’a Murad and discovered that the Sultana was ambitious, and clever, and weary of her husband. Then they would have sent a message to her. And later a boat had landed in the cove below the palace and the mayor of Fastitocalon or his ambassador had come ashore. A northerner, pale as a ghost from spending all his life under the sea. The Sultana had met him in her prayer room, and he had promised to get rid of her husband for her if she would send a meal Fastitocalon’s way from time to time. And since then he had come calling often, so that he could bring the Sultana her share of the loot from the towns that Fastitocalon had eaten, and she could tell him when the next one would be passing down the deep-water channel.

  “We must get back to the harbour,” O’Brien was saying.

  Anna grabbed the helmswoman’s wrist as she started to turn the wheel. “No. I think the Sultana is in league with the people aboard that thing. She’ll have her soldiers open fire on you. She can’t let you live, not now that you know it’s down there.”

  “But we can’t get past it,” said O’Brien, “and we can’t stay here! Look, it’s submerging; it’ll be after taking another bite at us…”

  “We have to stop it,” said Anna. “We have to fight it.”

  O’Brien looked incredulously at her, then back at the submerging predator. “We’re going to need a bigger town…”

  “Go into the channel between the little islands,” Anna said.

  “There are rocks there!” warned one of the lookouts.

  “They can’t do us any more damage than that monster,” said O’Brien, joining the helmswoman. “If we can get through between those islands we’ll reach the open sea and be away.” Together they heaved the wheel, turning the town’s nose towards the gap between two of the steep islands. The engines surged. Anna stooped over the echo-sounder. It reported the bottom rising, but no faster than it should be. Already, she hoped, the water beneath Dalkey was too shallow for Fastitocalon to sneak underneath it for another attack. Within another two minutes they were in the narrows. Ahead, between the steep shoulders of the two islands, the open sea shone. But ridges of rock lay just beneath the surface, and when the lookouts pointed them out O’Brien ordered the engines to shut down again. Anchors were thrown out, and the town slowed to a stop, the trees brushing its hull on either side.

  “At least we’ll be safe here,” O’Brien said.

  “Question is,” said the helmswoman, “how do we get out again, without being eaten by that underwater thing?”

  Anna went back out on to the balcony, away from the debate. O’Brien’s daughter stood there, peering between the railings at the frightened birds that wheeled above the trees. “Is that town going to eat us?” she asked.

  “No,” said Anna, wondering what Fastitocalon did with the people of the towns and ships it ate. There wasn’t much room on it for new citizens, and who would want to live down there anyway? Maybe it sold them to a big slave market. Maybe it just drowned them.

  She tried to put herself in the mind of the predator’s mayor. What would he be thinking, now that his prey had escaped? What would he be doing? Fastitocalon had to keep its secret; he could not risk Dalkey getting away to spread word of it to other towns. If Dalkey couldn’t be winkled out of its hiding place between the islands, he would send people to take and burn it. And that would be best done at night.

  Anna checked the sun. She estimated that they had about three hours b
efore nightfall. She let her eyes wander over the rooftops of Dalkey, spread out below the town hall’s balcony like a street map. Homes, temples, boathouses, the Jenny on her docking pan, a couple of rusting ships in wet docks. All the way from the north this little town had come. It must have dealt with predators before.

  She went back inside, the little girl trailing behind her. O’Brien and the others were arguing about how much stuff they would have to throw overboard to float the town over the reefs at high tide. She cut across them. “Do you have weapons? Heavy guns? Shells?”

  “Only a half dozen cannon,” said O’Brien. “They fire roundshot or grape. There’s a rack of depth charges we bought when we were cruising off the mouth of the Amazon, in case of piranha-submarines…”

  “Where are they?” said Anna.

  “Locked up in the armoury, but they’ll not pierce the hull of that predator…”

  “Maybe they won’t have to,” Anna said. “Get them ready, and lend me a few men to help me fetch some things from the Jenny Haniver. And open one of your oil tanks. I want it to look as if we’re damaged…”

  In the deep-water channel Fastitocalon waited, hanging a hundred feet below the surface, ready to attack again as soon as its prey came out of that cleft between the islands. In the dim red light of its command chamber its mayor put his face to the eyepiece of a periscope that poked up through the town’s hull to give him a view of the water above. A black cloud hung there. Engine oil, seeping from the prey’s tanks. “We have damaged it,” he told his officers. “When night comes we’ll land boarding parties, take it the old-fashioned way.”

  But before night came, something else emerged from the narrow channel. The black spearhead of a ship’s hull, carefully skirting the oil slick and turning towards the open sea. The mayor smiled. He had seen this before; poor fools abandoning a damaged town, thinking that Fastitocalon would not bother to eat something as small as a ship. But he knew that ship would be carrying all the valuables they could salvage in one snack-sized portion.