by Philip Reeve
“So?” She swung towards him, snaggle teeth bared, looking like a demented monkey. “So?”
“He’s right, my dear,” said a gentle voice. “There is no need to finish him.”
Out of the shadows stepped the woman from the bar, her red coat swirling around her ankles as she walked towards them. “I think we should get aboard my ship before the rest of his people come looking for you.”
“You said we didn’t have enough money,” Tom reminded her.
“You don’t, Mr Nitsworthy,” said the aviatrix. “But I can hardly stand by and watch you taken away to be sold as slaves, can I? I was a slave myself once, and I wouldn’t recommend it.” She had taken off her glasses. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped, and fine webs of laughter lines crinkled at their corners when she smiled. “Besides,” she added, “you intrigue me. Why is a Londoner wandering about in the Hunting Ground, getting into trouble?” She held out her hand to Tom, a long, brown hand with the thin machinery of bones and tendons clearly visible, sliding under papery skin.
“How do we know you won’t betray us like Wreyland did?” he demanded.
“You don’t, of course!” she laughed. “You will just have to trust me.”
After Valentine and the Wreylands, Tom didn’t think he would ever be able to trust anybody again, but this strange foreigner was the only hope he had. “All right,” he said. “But Wreyland got my name wrong, it’s Natsworthy.”
“And mine is Fang,” said the woman. “Miss Anna Fang.” She still had her hand outstretched as if he was a scared animal she wanted to tame, and she was still smiling her alarming red smile. “My ship is on air-quay six.”
So they went with her, and somewhere in the oily shadows under the quays they stepped over Wreyland’s companions, who lay slumped against a stanchion with their heads lolling drunkenly. “Are they…?” whispered Tom.
“Out cold,” said Miss Fang. “I’m afraid I just don’t know my own strength.”
Tom wanted to stop and check that the men were all right, but she led him quickly past and up a ladder to Quay Six. The ship that hung at anchor there was not the elegant sky-clipper Tom had been expecting. In fact, it was little more than a shabby scarlet gasbag and a cluster of rusty engine pods bolted to a wooden gondola.
“It’s made of junk!” he gasped.
“Junk?” laughed Miss Fang. “Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aëro-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon… It’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards…”
She led them up the gangplank into the cramped, spice-smelling gondola. It was just a narrow wooden tube with a flight-deck at the front and Miss Fang’s quarters at the stern, a jumble of other little cabins in between. Tom had to keep ducking to avoid braining himself on overhead lockers and dangerous-looking bundles of cables that hung from instrument panels on the roof, but the aviatrix flitted around, mumbling in some strange foreign tongue as she set switches, pulled levers and lit dim green electrics which filled the cabin with an aquarium glow. She laughed when she saw Tom’s worried look. “That is Airsperanto, the common language of the sky. It’s a lonely life on the bird-roads, and I have a habit of talking to myself…”
She pulled on a final lever and the creak and sigh of gas-valves echoed through the gondola. There was a clang as the magnetic docking clamps released, and the radio crackled into life and snapped, “Jenny Haniver, this is the Stayns Harbour Board. You are not cleared for departure!”
But the Jenny Haniver was departing anyway. Tom felt his stomach turn over as she lifted into the midnight sky. He scrambled to a porthole, and saw the market town falling away below. Then Speedwell came into view, and soon the whole cluster was spread out below him like a display of model towns in the Museum.
“Jenny Haniver,” insisted the loud speaker, “return to your berth at once! We have a request from the Speedwell town council that you give up your passengers, or they will be forced to—”
“Boring!” trilled Miss Fang, flicking the radio off. A home-made rocket battery on the roof of Speedwell town hall spat a fizzing flock of missiles after them. Three hissed harmlessly past, a fourth exploded off the starboard quarter, making the gondola swing like a pendulum, and the fifth came even closer. (Anna Fang raised an eyebrow at that one, while Tom and Hester ducked for cover like frightened rabbits.) Then they were out of range; the Jenny Haniver was climbing into the cold clear spaces of the night, and the trading cluster was just a distant smear of light beneath the clouds.
10
THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATOR
It rained that night on London, but by first light the sky was as clear and pale as still water, and the smoke from the city’s engines rose straight up into the windless air. Wet decks shone silver in the sunrise and all the banners of Tier One hung limp and still against their flagpoles. It was a fine spring morning, the morning that Valentine had been hoping for, and Katherine had been dreading. It was perfect flying weather.
Although it was so early, crowds had gathered all along the edge of Tier One to watch the 13th Floor Elevator lift off. As Gench drove Katherine and her father over to the air-quay she saw that Circle Park was crowded too; it looked as if the whole of High London had come to cheer Valentine on his way. None of them knew where he was going, of course, but as London sped eastward the city’s rumour-mills had been grinding night and day: everyone was sure that Valentine’s expedition was connected with some huge prize that the Lord Mayor hoped to catch out in the central Hunting Ground.
Temporary stands had been erected for the Council and Guilds and, when she and Dog had wished Father goodbye in the bustling shadows of the hangar, Katherine went to take her place with the Historians, squeezed between Chudleigh Pomeroy and Dr Arkengarth. All around her stood the great and good of London: the sober black robes of Father’s Guild and the purple of the Guild of Merchants, sombre Navigators in their neat green tunics and a row of Engineers robed and hooded in white rubber, looking like novelty erasers. Even Magnus Crome had risen to the occasion, and the Lord Mayor’s ancient chain of office hung gleaming around his thin neck.
Katherine wished they had all just stayed at home. It was difficult saying goodbye to someone when you were part of a great cheering mob all waving flags and blowing kisses. She stroked Dog’s knobbly head and told him, “Look, there’s Father, going up the gangplank now. They’ll start the engines in a moment.”
“I just hope nothing goes wrong,” muttered Dr Arkengarth. “One hears stories about these air-ships suddenly going off bang for no reason.”
“Perhaps we should stand a little further back?” suggested Miss Plym, the Museum’s twittery curator of furniture.
“Nonsense,” Katherine told them crossly. “Nothing is going to go wrong.”
“Yes, do shut up, Arkengarth, you silly old coot,” agreed Chudleigh Pomeroy, surprising her. “Never fear, Miss Valentine. Your father has the finest airship and the best pilots in the world: nothing can go wrong.”
Katherine smiled gratefully at him, but she kept her fingers crossed just the same, and Dog caught something of her mood and started to whimper softly.
From inside the hangar came the sound of hatches slamming shut and the rattle of boarding-ladders being dragged clear. An expectant hush fell over the stands. Along the tier’s edge High London held its breath. Then, as the band struck up “Rule Londinium”, Valentine’s ground-crew began dragging the 13th Floor Elevator out into the sunlight, a sleek, black dart whose armoured envelope shone like silk. On the open platform at the stern of the control gondola Valentine stood waving. He saluted the ground-crew and the flag-decked stands and then smiled straight at Katherine, picking her face out of all the others without a moment’s hesitation.
She waved back frantically, and the crowd cheered themselves hoarse as the 13th Floor Elevator’s engine-pods swivelled into take-off positi
on. The ground crew cast off the mooring-hawsers, the propellers began to turn and blizzards of confetti eddied in the down-drafts as the huge machine lifted into the air. Some Apprentice Historians spread out a banner reading Happy Valentine’s Day! and the cheers went on and on, as if the crowds thought it was their love alone which was keeping the explorer airborne. “Val-en-tine! Val-en-tine!”
But Valentine took no notice of the noise or the flags. He stood watching Katherine, one hand raised in farewell, until the airship was so high and far away that she could not make him out any more.
At last, when the Elevator was just a speck in the eastern sky and the stands were emptying, she wiped away her tears, took Dog’s lead and turned to go home. She was already missing her father, but she had a plan now. While he was away she would make her own enquiries and find out who that mysterious girl had been, and why she scared him so.
11
AIRHAVEN
Once he had washed and slept and had something to eat, Tom began to decide that adventuring might not be so bad after all. By sunrise he was already starting to forget the misery of his trek across the mud and imprisonment in Speedwell. The view from the Jenny Haniver’s big forward windows as the airship flew between golden mountains of dawn-lit cloud was enough to make even the pain of Valentine’s betrayal fade a little. At breakfast-time, drinking hot chocolate with Miss Fang on the flight deck, he found that he was enjoying himself.
As soon as the Jenny Haniver was safely out of the range of Speedwell’s rockets the aviatrix had become all smiles and kindness. She locked her airship on course and set about finding Tom a warm fleece-lined coat and making up a bed for him in the hold, a space high up inside the airship’s envelope, heaped with a cargo of sealskins from Spitzbergen. Then she led Hester into the medical bay and went to work on her injured leg. When Tom looked in on her after breakfast that morning the girl was sleeping soundly under a white blanket. “I gave her something for the pain,” explained Miss Fang. “She will sleep for hours, but you need have no fear for her.”
Tom stared at Hester’s sleeping face. Somehow he had expected her to look better now that she had been washed and fed and had her leg fixed, but of course she was as hideous as ever.
“He has made a mess of her, your wicked Mr Valentine,” the aviatrix said, leading him back to the flight deck, where she took the controls off their automatic setting.
“How do you know about Valentine?” asked Tom.
“Oh, everyone has heard about Thaddeus Valentine,” she laughed. “I know that he is London’s greatest historian, and I also know that that is just a cover for his real work: as Crome’s secret agent.”
“That’s not true!” Tom started to say, still instinctively defending his ex-hero. But there had always been rumours that Valentine’s expeditions involved something darker than mere archaeology, and now that he had seen the great man’s ruthless handiwork, he believed them. He blushed, ashamed for Valentine, and ashamed of himself for having loved him.
Miss Fang watched him with a faint, sympathetic smile. “Hester told me a great deal more last night, while I was tending to her wound,” she said gently. “You are both very lucky to be alive.”
“I know,” agreed Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy that Hester had shared their story with this stranger.
He sat down in the co-pilot’s seat and studied the controls; a baffling array of knobs and switches and levers labelled in mixtures of Airsperanto, Anglish and Chinese. Above them a little lacquered shrine had been fixed to the bulkhead, decorated with red ribbons and pictures of Miss Fang’s ancestors. That smiling Manchu air-merchant must be her father, he supposed. And had that red-haired lady from the Ice Wastes been her mum?
“So tell me, Tom,” asked Miss Fang, setting the ship on a new course, “where is London going?”
The question was unexpected. “I don’t know!” Tom said.
“Oh, surely you must know something!” she laughed. “Your city has left its hidey-hole in the west, come back across the land-bridge, and now it is whizzing off into the central Hunting Ground ‘like a bat out of Hull’, as the saying goes. You must have heard at least a rumour. No?”
Her long eyes slid towards Tom, who licked his lips nervously, wondering what to say. He had never paid any attention to the stupid tales the other apprentices swapped about where London was heading; he really had no idea. And even if he had, he knew it would be wrong to go revealing his city’s plans to mysterious Oriental aviatrices. What if Miss Fang flew off and told some larger city where to lie in wait for London, in exchange for a finder’s fee? And yet, if he didn’t tell her something, she might kick him off her airship – perhaps without even bothering to land it first!
“Prey!” he blurted out. “The Guild of Navigators say there is lots and lots of prey in the central Hunting Ground.”
The red smile grew even broader. “Really?”
“I heard it from the Head Navigator himself,” said Tom, growing bolder.
Miss Fang nodded, beaming. Then she hauled on a long brass lever. Gas-valves grumbled up inside the envelope and Tom’s ears popped as the Jenny Haniver started to descend, plunging into a thick, white layer of cloud. “Let me show you the central Hunting Ground,” she chuckled, checking the charts that were fastened to the bulkhead beside her shrine.
Down, and down, and then the cloud thinned and parted and Tom saw the vast Out-Country spread below him like a crumpled sheet of grey-brown paper, slashed with long, blue shapes that were the flooded track-marks of countless towns. For the first time since the airship lifted away from Stayns he felt afraid, but Miss Fang murmured, “Nothing to fear, Tom.”
He calmed himself and gazed out at the amazing view. Far to the north he could see the cold glitter of the Ice Wastes and the dark cones of the Tannhäuser fire-mountains. He looked for London, and eventually thought he saw it, a tiny, grey speck that raised a cloud of dust behind it as it trundled along, much further off than he had hoped. There were other towns and cities too, dotted here and there across the plain, or lurking in the shadows of half-eaten mountain ranges, but not nearly as many as he had expected. To the south-east there were none at all, just a dingy layer of mist above a tract of marshland, and beyond that the silvery shimmer of water.
“That is the great inland Sea of Khazak,” said the aviatrix, when he pointed to it. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old land-shanty,” and in a lilting, high-pitched voice she sang, “Beware, beware of the Sea of Khazak, for the town that goes near it will never come back…”
But Tom wasn’t listening. He had noticed something much more terrible than any inland sea.
Directly below, with the tiny shadow of the Jenny Haniver flickering across its skeletal girders, lay a dead city. It stood on ground scarred by the tracks of hundreds of smaller towns, tilting over at a strange angle, and as the Jenny Haniver swept down for a closer look Tom realized that its tracks and gut were gone, and that its deckplates were being stripped out by a swarm of small towns which seethed in the shadows of its lower levels, tearing off huge rusting sections in their jaws and landing salvage parties whose blow-torches glittered and sparked in the shadows between the tiers like fairy lights on a Quirkemas tree.
There was a puff of smoke from one of the towns and a rocket came winding up towards the airship and exploded a few hundred feet below. Miss Fang’s hands moved swiftly over the controls and Tom felt the ship lift again. “Half the scavengers of the Hunting Ground are working on the wreck of Motoropolis,” she said, “and they are a jealous lot. Shoot at anybody who comes near, and when nobody does, they shoot at each other.”
“But how did it get like that?” asked Tom, staring back at the huge skeleton as the Jenny Haniver carried him up and away.
“It starved,” said the aviatrix. “It ran out of fuel, and as it stood motionless there a pack of smaller towns came and started tearing it apart. The feeding frenzy has been going on for months, and I expect another city will come along soon and finish o
ff the job. You see, Tom, there isn’t enough prey to go round in the central Hunting Ground – so it can’t be that which has brought London out of hiding.”
Tom twisted round to watch as the dead city fell behind. A pack of tiny predator-suburbs were harrying the scavenger towns on the north-western side, singling out the weakest and slowest and charging after it, but before they caught it the Jenny Haniver rose up again into the pure, clean world above the clouds, and the carcass of Motoropolis was hidden from view.
When Miss Fang looked at him again she was still smiling, but there was an odd gleam in her eyes. “So if it isn’t prey that Magnus Crome is after,” she said, “what can it be?”
Tom shook his head. “I’m only an Apprentice Historian,” he confessed. “Third Class. I don’t really know the Head Navigator.”
“Hester mentioned something,” the aviatrix went on. “The thing Mr Valentine took from her poor parents. MEDUSA. A strange name. Have you heard of it? Do you know what it means?”
Tom shook his head and she watched him closely, watched his eyes until he felt as if she were looking right into his soul. Then she laughed. “Well, no matter. I must get you to Airhaven, and we’ll find a ship to take you home.”
Airhaven! It was one of the most famous towns of the whole Traction Era, and when the warble of its homing-beacon came over the radio that evening Tom went racing forward to the flight deck. He met Hester in the companion-way outside the sick-bay, tousled and sleepy and limping. Anna Fang had done her best with the wounded leg, but she hadn’t improved the girl’s manners; she hid her face when she saw Tom and only glared and grunted when he asked her how she felt.
On the flight deck the aviatrix turned to greet them with a radiant smile. “Look, my dears!” she said, pointing ahead through the big windows. “Airhaven!”
They went and stood behind her seat and looked, and far away across the sea of clouds they saw the westering sun glint on a single tier of light-weight alloy and a nimbus of brightly coloured gas-bags.
