Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  29

  GOING HOME

  The black airship had been drifting in silence, riding the wind to this high rendezvous while the defenders of Batmunkh Gompa were busy with fires and explosions. Now her engines burst into life, churning the drifting snowflakes and drowning out Tom’s cry of horror.

  Valentine walked out along the barrel of a rocket launcher as nimbly as an athlete on a bar and sprang, spread-eagling himself for an instant on the naked air before his hands found the rope ladder that Pewsey and Gench had lowered for him. Catching it, he swung himself up into the gondola.

  Tom ran forward, and was plunged into sudden darkness as the searchlight snapped off. Rockets from higher batteries came sparkling down to burst against the Elevator’s thick hide. One shattered some glass in the gondola, but the black airship was already powering away from the Wall. The backwash from its propellers slammed into Tom’s face as he knelt over Anna Fang, shaking her in the dim hope that she might wake.

  “It’s not fair!” he sobbed. “He waited till you were dazzled! You beat him!” The aviatrix said nothing, but stared past him with a look of stupid surprise, her eyes as dull as dry pebbles.

  Tom sat down beside her in the reddening snow and tried to think. He supposed he would have to leave Batmunkh Gompa now, get out fast before London came, but the very thought of moving on again made him weary. He was sick of being swept to and fro across the world by other people’s plans. A thin, hot anger started rising in him as he thought about Valentine, flying home to a hero’s welcome. Valentine was the cause of all this! It was Valentine who had ruined his life, and Hester’s, and put an end to so many more. It was Valentine who had given the Guild of Engineers MEDUSA. Hester had been right; he should have let her kill him when she had the chance…

  There was a noise at the far end of the platform and he looked up and saw a black mass of arms and legs and coat hurriedly untangling itself, like a big spider fallen from the ceiling. It was Hester, who had taken the wrong turning as she raced after Valentine and come out in an observation bunker high above. Now here she was, having scrambled down thirty feet of snowy wall and dropped the final ten. Her eye rested for a moment on the fallen aviatrix, then she turned and went to the battlements and stared out at the dark and the dancing snow. “It should have been me,” Tom heard her say. “At least I would have made sure I took him with me.”

  Tom watched her. He felt tight and sick and trembly from the grief and rage inside him, and knew that this was how Hester must feel, how she had always felt, ever since Valentine killed her parents. It was a terrible feeling, and he could think of only one way to cure it.

  He groped under the collar of Anna’s coat and found the key on its thong and wrenched it free. Then he stood up and went to where Hester was and put his arms around her. It was like hugging a statue, she was so stiff and tense, but he needed to hold on to something so he hugged her anyway. Guns were still firing overhead in the vain hope of hitting the 13th Floor Elevator. He put his face close to Hester’s ear and shouted over the noise, “Let’s go home!”

  She looked round at that, puzzled and a little annoyed. “Have you gone funny?”

  “Don’t you see?” he shouted, laughing at the crazy idea that had just come creeping into his mind. “Someone’s got to make him pay! You were right; I shouldn’t have stopped you before, but I’m glad I did, because the Gut Police would have killed you and then we’d never have met. Now I can help you get to him, and help you get away afterwards. We’ll go back to London! Now! Together!”

  “You have gone funny,” said Hester, but she came with him anyway, helping him find a way back through the Shield-Wall while soldiers came running past them, frightened, soot-stained and far too late, crying out in woe when they saw the bodies on the rocket-platform.

  The night sky over Batmunkh Gompa was full of smoke and tatters of singed envelope fabric. Fires were still burning in the High Eyries, but already the roads in the valley were clogged with constellations of small lights, the lanterns of refugees, spilling away into the mountains like water bursting from a breached dam. With the death of the Air-Fleet the Shield-Wall was finished, and its people were fleeing as fast as their feet and mules and ox-carts and freight-balloons could take them.

  Down at the mooring platform, ships were already lifting into the smoky sky and turning south. The Keralan girl, Sathya, was trying to rally some panic-stricken soldiers, sobbing, “Stay and hold the Wall! The Southern Air-Fleet will reinforce us! They can be here in less than a week!” But everyone knew that Batmunkh Gompa would be gone by then, and London would be pushing south towards the League’s heartlands. “Stay and hold the Wall!” she begged, but the airships kept lifting past her, lifting past her.

  The Jenny Haniver still hung at anchor, silent, dark. The key that Tom had taken from Anna Fang’s body fitted snugly into the lock on the forward hatch, and soon he was standing on the flight-deck, staring at the controls. There were far more of them than he remembered.

  “Are you sure we can do this?” asked Hester softly.

  “Of course,” said Tom. He tried a few switches. The hatch sprang open again, the cabin lights came on, the coffee machine started making a noise like a polite dog clearing its throat and a small inflatable dinghy dropped from the roof and knocked him over.

  “Quite sure?” she asked, helping him up.

  Tom nodded. “I used to build model airships when I was little, so I understand the principle. And Miss Fang showed me the controls when we were in the mountains… I just wish she’d labelled everything in Anglish.”

  He thought for a moment, then hauled on another lever, and this time the engines throbbed into life. Out on the mooring platform people turned to stare, and some made the sign against evil; they had heard of Feng Hua’s death and wondered if it was her restless ghost aboard the Jenny Haniver. But Sathya saw Tom and Hester standing at the controls and came running towards them.

  Frightened that she would stop him taking off, Tom hunted for the lever which moved the engine pods. Bearings grated as they swivelled into take-off position. He laughed, delighted at the way the airship responded to the touch of his hands on the controls, hearing the familiar creak and huff of the gas-valves somewhere overhead and the clang of the mooring-clamps disengaging. People waved their arms and shouted, and Sathya pulled out a gun, but at the last moment Captain Khora came stumbling out on to the platform, supported by one of his crewmen, and gently took it from her. He looked up at Tom, raising a hand to wish him luck, and the surprising pinkness of his palm and fingertips was what stuck in Tom’s mind as the airship swayed uncertainly up into the sky and climbed through the smoke from the High Eyries. He took one last look down at Batmunkh Gompa, then swung her out over the Shield-Wall and turned her nose towards the west.

  He was going home.

  30

  A HERO’S WELCOME

  The clouds that had shed their snow on Batmunkh Gompa blew west to fall as yet more rain on London, and it was raining still when the 13th Floor Elevator reached home, early the following afternoon. No crowds were waiting to welcome it. The sodden lawns of Circle Park were deserted, except for some workers from the Recycling Department who were cutting down the last of the trees, but the Guild of Engineers had been warned of Valentine’s return, and as the great airship came nosing down into the wet flare of the landing beacons they ran out on to the apron with the rain beating on their bald heads and the lights making splashy reflections on their coats.

  Katherine watched from her bedroom window as the ground-crew winched the airship down and the excited Engineers clustered closer. Now hatches were opening in the gondola; now Magnus Crome was going forward, with a servant holding a white rubber umbrella over him, and now, now Father was coming down the gangplank, easy to recognize even at this distance by his height and his confident stride and the way his all-weather cape filled and flapped in the rising breeze.

  The sight of him gave Katherine a twisting feeling deep inside, as if h
er heart really was about to burst with grief and anger. She remembered how much she had been looking forward to being the first to greet him when he stepped back aboard the city. Now she was not sure that she could even bring herself to speak to him.

  Through the wet glass she saw him talk to Crome, nodding, laughing. A surge of white coats hid him from her for a moment, and when she saw him again he had pulled himself away from the Lord Mayor and was hurrying across the soggy lawns towards Clio House, probably wondering why she hadn’t been waiting for him at the quay.

  She panicked for a moment and wanted to hide, but Dog was with her, and he gave her the strength she needed. She closed the tortoise-shell shutters and waited until she heard Father’s feet on the stairs, Father’s knock at the door.

  “Kate?” came his muffled voice. “Kate, are you in there? I want to tell you all my adventures! I am fresh from the snows of Shan Guo, with all sorts of tales to bore you with! Kate? Are you all right?”

  She opened the door just a crack. He stood on the landing outside, dripping with rain, his smile fading as he saw her tearful, sleep-starved face.

  “Kate, it’s all right! I’m back!”

  “I know,” she said. “And it’s not all right. I wish you’d died in the mountains.”

  “What?”

  “I know all about you,” she told him. “I’ve worked out what you did to Hester Shaw.”

  She let him into the room and shut the door, calling sharply to Dog when he ran to greet him. It was dark with the shutters closed, but she saw Father look at the heap of books spilling from the corner table, then at her. There was a freshly-dressed wound on his neck, blood on his shirt. She twined a finger in her tangled hair and tried hard not to start crying again.

  Valentine sat down on the unmade bed. All the way from Batmunkh Gompa, Anna Fang’s last promise had been echoing in the corners of his mind: Hester Shaw will find you. To have the same name thrown at him here, by Katherine, was like a knife in the heart.

  “Oh, you needn’t worry,” said Katherine bitterly. “No one else knows. I learned the girl’s name, you see. And Dr Arkengarth told me how Pandora Shaw was murdered, and I’d already found out that she died seven years ago, around the time you got back from that expedition and the Lord Mayor was so pleased with you, so I just put it all together and…”

  She shrugged. The trail had been easy to follow once she had all the clues. She picked up a book she had been reading and showed it to him. It was Adventures on a Dead Continent, his own account of his journey to America. She pointed to a face in a group photograph of the expedition; an aviatrix who stood beside him, smiling. “I didn’t realize at first,” she said, “because her name had changed. Did you kill her yourself? Or did you get Pewsey and Gench to do it?”

  Valentine hung his head, angry, despairing, ashamed. A part of Katherine had been hoping against hope that she was wrong, that he would deny it and give her proof that he was not the Shaws’ killer, but when she saw his head go down she knew that he could not and it was true.

  He said, “You must understand, Kate, I did it for you…”

  “For me?”

  He looked up at last, but not at her. He stared at the wall near her elbow and said, “I wanted you to have everything. I wanted you to grow up as a lady, not as an Out-Country scavenger like I had been. I had to find something that Crome needed.

  “Pandora was an old comrade, from the American trip, just as you say. And yes, she was with me when I found the plans and access codes to MEDUSA. We never imagined it would be possible to reconstruct the thing. Later Pandora and I went our separate ways; she was an Anti-Tractionist and she married some clod-hopping farmer and settled down on a place called Oak Island. I didn’t know she was still thinking about MEDUSA. She must have made another trip to America, alone this time, and found her way into another part of the same old underground complex, a part we’d missed on the first dig. That’s where she found—”

  “A computer-brain,” said Katherine impatiently. “The key to MEDUSA.”

  “Yes,” murmured Valentine, astonished at how much she knew. “She sent me a letter, telling me she had it. She knew it was worthless without the plans and codes, you see, and those were in London. She thought we could sell it and share the proceeds. And I knew that if I could give Crome a prize like that it would make my fortune, and your future would be secure!”

  “And so you killed her for it,” said Katherine.

  “She wouldn’t agree to sell it to Crome,” said her father. “She was an Anti-Tractionist, as I said. She wanted the League to have it. I had to kill her, Kate.”

  “But what about Hester?” said Katherine numbly. “Why did you have to hurt her?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said miserably. “She must have woken up and heard something. She was a pretty child. She was about your age, and she looked so like you that she might have been your sister. Perhaps she was your sister. Pandora and I were very close at one time.”

  “My sister?” gasped Katherine. “Your own daughter!”

  “When I looked up from her mother’s body and saw her staring at me…! I had to silence her. I struck wildly at her, and I made a mess of it. I thought she was dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to make sure. She escaped, vanished in a boat. I thought she must have drowned, until she tried to stab me that night in the Gut.”

  “And Tom…” Katherine said. “He learned her name, and so you had to kill him too, because if he’d mentioned her to the Historians the truth might have come out.”

  Valentine looked helplessly at her. “You don’t understand, Kate. If people discovered who she is and what I have done, not even Crome would be able to protect me. I would be finished, and you would be dragged down with me.”

  “But Crome knows, doesn’t he?” asked Katherine. “That’s why you’re so loyal. Loyal as a dog, so long as you get paid and get to pretend that foreign daughter of yours is a High London lady.”

  Rain, rain on the windows and the whole room quivering as London dragged itself across the sodden earth. Dog lay with his head on his paws, his eyes darting from his mistress to Valentine and back. He had never seen them fight before, and he hated it.

  “I used to think you were wonderful,” said Katherine. “I used to think that you were the best, bravest, wisest person in the world. But you’re not. You’re not even very clever, are you? Didn’t you realize what Crome would use the thing for?”

  Valentine looked sharply at her. “Of course I did! This is a town eat town world, Kate. It’s a shame Panzerstadt-Bayreuth had to be destroyed, of course, but the Shield-Wall has to be breached if London is to survive. We need a new hunting ground.”

  “But people live there!” wailed Katherine.

  “Only Anti-Tractionists, Kate, and most of them will probably get away.”

  “They’ll stop us. They’ve got airships…”

  “No.” In spite of everything, Valentine smiled, proud of himself. “Why do you think Crome sent me east? The League’s Northern Air-Fleet is in ashes. Tonight MEDUSA will blast us a passage through their famous Wall.” He stood up and reached for her, smiling, as if this victory that he was delivering would put right everything he had done. “Crome tells me that firing is scheduled for nine o’clock. There’s to be a reception at the Guildhall beforehand; wine, nibbles and the dawn of a new era. Will you come with me, Kate? I’d like you to…”

  Her last hope had been that he had not known Crome’s mad plan. Now even that was gone. “You fool!” she screamed. “Don’t you understand what he’s doing is wrong? You’ve got to stop him! You’ve got to get rid of his horrible machine!”

  “But that would leave London defenceless, in the middle of the Hunting Ground,” her father pointed out.

  “So? We will have to carry on as we always have, chasing and eating, and if we meet a bigger city and get eaten ourselves … well, even that would be better than being murderers!”

  She couldn’t bear to be in that room with him anothe
r second. She ran, and he did not try to stop her, or even call her back, just stood there looking pale and stunned. She left the house and ran sobbing through the rainswept park with Dog at her heels, until the whole of High London was between her and Father. I must do something! was all she could think. I must stop MEDUSA…

  She hurried towards the elevator station, while the Goggle-screen loops began to blare the good news of Valentine’s return all over London.

  31

  THE EAVESDROPPER

  London gathered speed, racing towards the mountains. Semi-static towns that had hidden for years on these high steppes were startled out of their torpor by its coming and went lumbering away, leaving behind them green patches of farmland and once a whole static suburb. The city paid no heed to any of them. The whole of London knew the Lord Mayor’s plan by now. In spite of the cold, people gathered on the forward observation decks and peered through telescopes towards Shan Guo, eager for their first glimpse of the legendary Wall.

  “Soon!” they told each other.

  “This very night!”

  “A whole new hunting ground!”

  Most people at the Museum were used to Katherine and Dog by now, and nobody paid very much attention as she hastened through the lower galleries with the white wolf trotting behind her. A few noticed the frantic look in her eyes and the tears on her face, but before they could ask her what was wrong or proffer a pocket handkerchief she had swept past, heading towards Mr Nancarrow’s office at a near run.

  There she found a smell of turpentine and the lingering scent of the art-historian’s pipe tobacco, but no Nancarrow and no Bevis Pod. She ran back out into the hallway, where a fat Third-Class Apprentice was mopping the floors. “Mr Nancarrow’s in the store-rooms, Miss,” he told her sullenly. “He’s got that funny new bloke with him.”