Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Next day, Anna Fang handed out balls of reddish paste to her passengers. “Powdered betel-nut,” she explained, “mixed with some dried leaves from Nuevo Maya. They help at these high altitudes. But don’t make a habit of chewing them, or your teeth will turn as red as mine.” The gritty paste made Tom’s mouth tingle, but it cured the faint sense of nausea and light-headedness that had been growing in him as the airship flew higher and higher, and it also helped to numb the pain of his broken ribs.

  By now the Jenny’s tiny shadow was flickering over high snow-clad summits, and ahead lay summits still higher, white spires which hung like a mirage above the clouds. Beyond them stretched an even higher range, and then another, higher yet. Tom strained his eyes, peering towards the south in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of old Chomolungma, Everest of the Ancients, but storms were brewing in the high Himalayas and it was wrapped in cloud.

  On and on they flew, through a black-and-white world of snow and glaciers and the sheer dark rock of young mountains, where Tom or Hester sometimes had to mind the controls while Anna Fang took cat-naps in the seat beside them, afraid to risk leaving her flight-deck. And still they climbed, until at last they were skimming over the lower buttresses of great Zhan Shan, tallest of the earth’s new mountains, whose snow-capped crown jutted into the endless cold above the sky. After that the peaks were lower, white and lovely, with sometimes a green vale between, where huge herds of animals scattered and wheeled at the sound of the airship’s engines. These were the Mountains of Heaven, and they swept away towards the north and east and sank down in the far distance to steppe and taiga and the glitter of impassable swamps.

  “This is Shan Guo of the many horses,” Anna Fang told Tom and Hester. “I had hoped to retire here, when my work for the League was done. Now I suppose it may all be eaten by London; our fortresses blasted by MEDUSA and our settlements devoured, the green hills split open and made to give up their minerals, the horses extinct, just like the rest of the world.”

  Tom didn’t think it was such a bad idea, because it was only natural that Traction Cities should eventually spread right across the globe. But he couldn’t help liking Miss Fang, even if she was a spy and an Anti-Tractionist, and to comfort her he said, “However powerful MEDUSA is, it will take years for London to gnaw its way through these great big mountains.”

  “It won’t have to,” she replied. “Look.”

  He looked where she pointed, and saw a break in the mountain-chain ahead, a broad pass that a city could have crawled along – except that stretching across it, so vast that it seemed at first glance just another spur of the mountains, was the Shield-Wall.

  It was like a wall of night, black, black, built from huge blocks of volcanic stone, armoured with the rusting deckplates of cities that had dared to challenge it and been destroyed by the hundreds of rocket batteries on its western face. On its snow-clad summit, four thousand feet above the valley floor, the banner of the broken wheel snapped and raced in the wind and the sunlight gleamed on armoured gun-emplacements and the steel helmets of the League’s soldiers.

  “If only it were as strong as it looks,” sighed the aviatrix, bringing the Jenny Haniver down towards it it in a long sweeping curve. A small flying machine, little more than a motorized kite, came soaring to meet them, and she held a brief radio conversation with its pilot. It circled the Jenny once and then whirred ahead, guiding the newcomer over the top of the Shield-Wall. Tom looked down at broad battlements and the faces of soldiers gazing upwards, yellow, brown, black, white, faces from every part of the world where barbarian statics still held out against Municipal Darwinism. Then they were gone; the Jenny was sinking down the sheltered eastern side of the Wall, and he saw that it was a city, a vertical city with hundreds of terraces and balconies and windows all carved into the black rock, tier upon tier of shops and barracks and houses with balloons and brightly coloured kites drifting up and down between them like petals.

  “Batmunkh Gompa,” announced Miss Fang. “The City of Eternal Strength. Although the people who call it that have never heard of MEDUSA, of course.”

  It was beautiful. Tom, who had always been taught that static settlements were dingy, squalid, backward places, went to the window and stared, and Hester came and pressed her face to the glass beside him, safe behind her veil and almost girlish. “Oh! It’s just like the cliffs on Oak Island where the sea-birds nest!” she cried. “Look! Look!” Down at the base of the Wall a lake shone azure blue, flecked with the sails of pleasure-boats. “Tom, we’ll go swimming, I’ll teach you how…”

  The Jenny Haniver landed among some other merchant ships at a mooring-terrace halfway down the Wall, and Miss Fang led Tom and Hester to a waiting balloon that took them up again past parks and tea-shops to the governor’s palace; the ancient monastery from which Batmunkh Gompa took its name, whitewashed and many-windowed, carved out of the steep side of the mountain at the Wall’s end. Other balloons were converging on the landing deck below the palace gardens, their envelopes bright in the mountain sunlight, and in one of the dangling baskets Tom saw Captain Khora waving.

  They met on the landing deck, the young airman touching down just ahead of them and running across to embrace Miss Fang and help her friends out of the skittish gondola. He had flown here from Airhaven the morning after Shrike’s attack, and he seemed amazed and happy to see Tom and Hester alive. Turning to the aviatrix he said, “The Governor and his officers are eager for your report, Feng Hua. Terrible rumours have reached us about London…”

  It was good to meet a friendly face in this strange new city, and Tom fell into step beside Khora as he led the newcomers up the long stair to the palace entrance. He remembered seeing a trim Achebe 2100 berthed at one of the lower platforms and asked, “Was that your machine we saw at the mooring-place, the one with oxhide outriggers?”

  Khora laughed delightedly. “That old air-scow? No, thank the gods! My Mokele Mbembe is a warship, Tom. Every ally of the League supplies a ship to the Northern Air-Fleet, and they are stabled together, up there.” He stopped and pointed, and Tom saw the gleam of bronze doors far up near the summit of the Wall. “The High Eyries.”

  “We’ll take you up there one day, Tom,” promised Miss Fang, leading them past the warrior-monks who guarded the door and on into a maze of cool stone corridors. “The League’s great Air Destroyers are one of the wonders of the skies! But first, Governor Khan must hear Hester’s story.”

  Governor Ermene Khan was a gentle old man with the long, mournful face of a kindly sheep. He welcomed them all into his private quarters and gave them tea and honey-cakes in a room whose round windows looked down towards the lake of Batmunkh Nor, gleaming among patchwork farmlands, far below. For a thousand years his family had helped to man the Shield-Wall, and he seemed dazed by the news that all his guns and rockets were suddenly useless. “No city can pass Batmunkh Gompa,” he kept saying, as the room filled with officers eager to hear the aviatrix’s advice. “My dear Feng Hua, if London dares to approach us, we will destroy it. As soon as it comes in range – boom!”

  “But that is what I’m trying to tell you!” cried Miss Fang impatiently. “London doesn’t need to come within range of your guns. Crome will park his city a hundred miles away and burn your precious Wall to ashes! You have heard Hester’s story. I believe that the machine Valentine stole from her mother was a fragment of an ancient weapon – and what happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth proves that the Guild of Engineers have managed to restore it to working order.”

  “Yes, yes,” said an artillery officer, “so you say. But can we really believe that Crome has found a way to reactivate something that has been buried since the Sixty Minutes War? Perhaps Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was just destroyed by a freak accident.”

  “Yes!” Governor Khan clutched gratefully at the idea. “A meteorite, or some sort of gas-leak…” He stroked his long beard, reminding Tom of one of the dithery old Historians back at the London Museum. “Perhaps Crome’s city will not ev
en come here… Perhaps he has other prey in mind?”

  But his other officers were more ready to believe the Wind-Flower’s report. “He’s coming here, all right,” said one, an aviatrix from Kerala, not much older than Tom. “I took a scout-ship west the day before yesterday, Feng Hua,” she explained, with an adoring look at Miss Fang. “The barbarian city was less than five hundred miles away, and approaching fast. By tomorrow night MEDUSA could be within range.”

  “And there have been sightings of a black airship in the mountains,” put in Captain Khora. “The ships sent to intercept it never returned. My guess is that it was Valentine’s 13th Floor Elevator, sent to spy out our cities so that London can devour them.”

  Valentine! Tom felt a strange mix of pride and fear at the thought of the Head Historian on the loose here in the very heart of Shan Guo. Beside him, Hester tensed at the mention of the explorer’s name. He looked at her, but she was staring past him, out through the open windows towards the mountains as if she half expected to see the 13th Floor Elevator go flying past.

  “No city can pass the Shield-Wall,” said Governor Khan, loyal to his ancestors, but he did not sound convinced any more.

  “You must launch the Air-Fleet, Governor,” Miss Fang insisted, leaning forward in her seat. “Bomb London before they can bring MEDUSA into range. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “No!” shouted Tom, springing up so that his chair fell backwards with a clatter. He couldn’t believe what she had said. “You said we were coming here to warn people! You can’t attack London! People will get hurt! Innocent people!” He was thinking of Katherine, imagining League torpedoes crashing into Clio House and the Museum. “You promised!” he said weakly.

  “Feng Hua does not make promises to savages,” snapped the Keralan girl, but Miss Fang hushed her. “We will just hit the Gut and tracks, Tom,” she said. “Then the Top Tier, where MEDUSA is housed. We do not seek to harm the innocent, but what else are we to do, if a barbarian city chooses to threaten us?”

  “London’s not a barbarian city!” shouted Tom. “It’s you who are the barbarians! Why shouldn’t London eat Batmunkh Gompa if it needs to? If you don’t like the idea, you should have put your cities on wheels long ago, like civilized people!”

  A few of the League officers were shouting angrily at him to be quiet, and the Keralan girl had drawn her sword, but Miss Fang calmed them with a few words and turned her patient smile to Tom. “Perhaps you should leave us, Thomas,” she said firmly. “I will come and find you later.”

  Tom’s eyes stung with stupid tears. He was sorry for these people, of course he was. He could see that they weren’t savages, and he didn’t really believe any more that they deserved to be eaten, but he couldn’t just sit by and listen to them planning to attack his home.

  He turned to Hester in the hope that she would take his side, but she was lost in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing and re-tracing the scars under her red veil. She felt guilty and stupid. Guilty because she had been happy in the air with Tom, and it was wrong to be happy while Valentine was wandering about unpunished. Stupid because, when he gave her the shawl, she had started to hope that Tom really liked her, and thinking of Valentine made her remember that nobody could like her, not in that way, not ever. When she saw him looking at her she just said, “They can kill everybody in London for all I care, so long as they save Valentine for me.”

  Tom turned his back on her and stalked out of the high chamber, and as the door rolled shut behind him he heard the Keralan girl hiss, “Barbarian!”

  Alone, he mooched down to the terrace where the taxi-balloons waited and sat on a stone bench there, feeling angry and betrayed and thinking of things that he should have said to Miss Fang, if only he had thought of them in time. Below him the rooftops and terraces of Batmunkh Gompa stretched away into the shadows below the white shoulders of the mountains, and he found himself trying to imagine what it must be like to live here and wake up every day of your life to the same view. Didn’t the people of the Shield-Wall long for movement and a change of scene? How did they dream, without the grumbling vibrations of a city’s engines to rock them to sleep? Did they love this place? And suddenly he felt terribly sad that the whole bustling, colourful, ancient city might soon be rubble under London’s tracks.

  He wanted to see more. Going over to the nearest balloon-taxi, he made the pilot understand that he was Miss Fang’s guest and wanted to go down into the city. The man grinned and started weighting his gondola with stones from a pile that stood nearby, and soon Tom found himself travelling down past the many levels of the city again until he stepped out on a sort of central square, where dozens of other taxis were coming and going and stairways branched off across the face of the Shield-Wall, going up towards the High Eyries and down to the shops and markets of the lower levels.

  News of MEDUSA was spreading fast through Batmunkh Gompa, and already a lot of the houses and shops were shuttered, their owners fled to cities further south. The lower levels were still packed with people, though, and as the sun dipped behind the Wall Tom wandered the crowded bazaars and steep ladderways. There were fortune-tellers’ booths at the street corners, and shrines to the sky-gods, dusty with the crumbly grey ash of incense sticks. Fierce-looking Uighur acrobats were performing in the central square, and everywhere he looked he saw soldiers and airmen of the League: blond giants from Spitzbergen and blue-black warriors from the Mountains of the Moon, the small dark people of the Andean statics and people the colour of firelight from jungle strongholds in Laos and Annam.

  He tried to forget that some of these young men and women might soon be dropping rockets on London, and started to enjoy the flow of faces and the incomprehensible mish-mash of languages – and sometimes he heard someone say “Tom!” or “Thomasz!” or “Tao-mah!” as they pointed him out to their friends. The story of his battle with Shrike had spread through the mountains from trading-post to trading-post and had been waiting for him here in Batmunkh Gompa. He didn’t mind. It felt like a different Thomas that they were talking about, someone brave and strong who understood what had to be done, and felt no doubts.

  He was just wondering if he should go back to the Governor’s palace and find Hester, when he noticed a tall figure climbing a nearby stairway. The man wore a ragged red robe with the hood pulled down over his face, and carried a staff in one hand and a pack slung over his shoulder. Tom had already seen dozens of these wandering holy men in Batmunkh Gompa; monks in the service of the mountain gods who travelled from city to city through the high passes. (Up at the mooring platform Anna Fang had stooped to kiss the feet of one, and given six bronze coins for him to bless the Jenny Haniver.) But this man was different; something about him snagged Tom’s gaze and would not let it go.

  He started following the red robe. He followed it through the spice market with its thousand astonishing scents, and down the narrow Street of Weavers where hundreds of baskets swung from low poles outside the shops like hanging nests, brushing against the top of his head as he passed underneath. What was it about the way the man moved, and that long brown hand clutching the staff?

  And then, under a lantern in the central square, the monk was stopped by a street-girl asking for a blessing and Tom caught a glimpse of the bearded face inside the hood. He knew that hawk-like nose and those mariner’s eyes; he knew that the amulet hanging between the black brows hid the familiar Guild-mark of a London Historian.

  It was Valentine!

  27

  DR ARKENGARTH REMEMBERS

  Katherine spent a lot of time in the Museum in those final days, as London went roaring towards the mountains. Safe in its dingy maze she could not hear the burr of the saws as they felled the last few trees in Circle Park to feed the engines, or the cheers of the noisy crowds who gathered each day in front of the public Goggle-screens where the details of Crome’s great plan were being gradually revealed. She could even forget the Guild of Engineers’ security people, who were everywhere now, not just
the usual white-coated thugs, but a strange new breed in black coats and hoods, silent, stiff in their movements, with a faint greenish glow behind their tinted visors: Dr Twix’s Resurrected Men.

  But if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t only the peace and quiet that kept calling her down to the Museum. Bevis was there, his borrowed bedding spread out on the floor of the old Transport gallery, under the dusty hanging shapes of model gliders and flying machines. She needed his company more and more as the city hauled itself eastward. She liked the fact that he was her secret. She liked his soft voice, and the strange laugh that always sounded as if he were trying it on for size, as if he had never had much call for laughter down in the Deep Gut. She liked the way he looked at her, his dark eyes always lingering on her face and especially her hair. “I’ve never really known anybody with hair before,” he told her one day. “In the Guild they use chemicals on us when we’re first apprenticed, so it never grows back.”

  Katherine thought about his pale, smooth scalp. She liked that too. It sort of suited him. Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected, like an Apprentice Engineer?

  She wished that Father was here, so she could ask him.

  In the afternoons Bevis would pull on a Historian’s robe and hide his bald head under a cap and go down to help Dr Nancarrow, who was busy re-cataloguing the Museum’s huge store of paintings and drawings and taking photographs in case the Lord Mayor decided to feed those to the furnaces as well. Then Katherine would wander the Museum with Dog at her heels, hunting for the things that her father had dug up. Washing machines, pieces of computer, the rusty ribcage of a Stalker, all had labels which read, “Discovered by Mr T. Valentine, Archaeologist”. She could imagine him lifting them gently out of the soil that had guarded them, cleaning them, wrapping them in scrim for transport back to London. He must have done the same thing with the MEDUSA fragment when he discovered it, she thought. She whispered prayers to Clio, sure that the goddess must be present in these time-soaked halls. “London needs him! I need him! Please send him safely home, and soon…”