Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Oenone hesitated. “Professor Pennyroyal is here too. He’s been flirting shamelessly with General Xao…”

  “Theo? What about Theo?”

  Oenone looked down, hiding behind her annoying black fringe.

  “Gods and Goddesses!” Hester heaved herself sideways, off the bed. She tried to stand, but her head swirled. Something tugged at her arm and she looked down and saw a transparent plastic tube emerging from the flesh beneath her elbow, attached to a upturned bottle on a stand beside her bed. She cried out in horror and disgust.

  “It’s all right,” Oenone promised, stopping her as she reached to tug the tube out. “It’s an Ancient technique; a way of getting fluids into you. You’ve been unconscious for days; we had to…”

  Shaking, Hester sat on the bed’s edge, staring out of the window. Her sickroom seemed to be on the topmost tier of the disabled city; outside, rooftops and chimneys dropped steeply to a grey-green plain where clumps of soldiers were moving about; half-tracks dragging big guns into position. “She came for him, didn’t she? Lady Death…”

  Behind her, Oenone said, “He went back into the trenches, for some reason…” She came around the bed. Her hand brushed Hester’s bony shoulder. “By the time we knew he had gone, it was too late. He must have run straight into the cities’ bombardment…”

  Hester reached out and grabbed the cord around Oenone’s neck on which her cheap Zagwan crucifix dangled. She pulled it tight, dragging the younger woman’s shocked face down to hers. “You should have gone after him! You should have saved him! He saved you!”

  But it was herself she blamed. She should never have let Theo begin his harebrained rescue-mission. Now he was dead. She let go of Oenone and covered her own face, frightened by the tears that were spilling out of her, the horrible moaning noise she couldn’t stop. She had promised herself she would never care about anyone again, and she should have stuck to it, but no, her stupid heart had opened up for Theo, and now he was dead, and she was paying the price for having loved him. She shouted at Oenone, “You should have prayed to that old God of yours! To keep him safe! To bring him back!”

  Down on the plain below the city General Xao’s troops were digging frantic foxholes and city-traps. The blades of their spades and picks glinted rhythmically like a shoal of bright fish turning. Up through the sickroom floor came the sounds of marching feet and bellowed orders from the lower tiers, where tired sub-officers were trying to forge new fighting units out of the drabbles of survivors who kept stumbling in from defeats in the west and north. Oenone and Hester sat side by side on the bed. After a while Oenone said, “If God could do things like that, the world wouldn’t look the way it does. He can’t reach down and change things. He can’t stop any of us doing what we choose to do.”

  “What use is he then?”

  Oenone shrugged. “He sees. He understands. He knows how you’re feeling. He knows how Theo felt. He knows how it feels to die. And when we die, we go to him.”

  “To the Sunless Country, you mean? Like ghosts?”

  Oenone shook her head patiently. “Like children. Do you remember what it was like to be a tiny child? When everything was possible and everything was given to you, and you knew that you were safe and loved, and the days went on for ever? When we die, it will be like that again. That’s how it is for Theo now, in Heaven.”

  “How do you know? Did one of those corpses you resurrected tell you this?”

  “I just know.”

  They sat side by side, and Oenone put her arm around Hester, and Hester let her. Something about this earnest, humourless young woman touched her, despite her best efforts. It was her goodness, and her silly, indomitable hope. She reminded Hester of Tom. They sat on the bed waiting for Mr Shrike, thinking about Theo in Heaven. Outside the window the day faded to a steel-grey dusk. The lights of advancing cities twinkled all along the western horizon.

  Theo was not in Heaven. He was trudging on foot across an immense, wind-whipped steppe somewhere northeast of Forward Command. He had been walking for so long that his boots were starting to disintegrate and he had tied them together with strips of cloth, which kept coming undone, trailing in the mud.

  He was not alone. Around him, the remnants of the Green Storm’s forward divisions were spilling eastward, spurred on by tales of hungry harvester-suburbs and mercenary aviators raiding deep into Storm territory behind them.

  When he clawed his way out of the ruins of General Xao’s dugout on the first day of the war, Theo’s first thought had been to get home somehow to Zagwa. But cities had been pushing through all along the line. Running from them, he had fallen in with this mass of defeated, fleeing soldiers and been swept along in the only direction that seemed safe; east. He had found a place on a half-track, but after a few days townie airships bombed the bridges on the road ahead and he had been forced to get off and hobble along with the stragglers, the walking wounded, the ones deafened or driven mad by what they had seen on the line.

  Theo felt half-mad himself sometimes. Often in the night he woke shaking, dreaming of his time under the cities’ guns.

  Mostly, though, he just felt miserable. The landscape didn’t help. It had been Storm territory for more than a decade, but the Storm had never known quite what to do with it. One faction had tried to nurture the natural growth of weeds and scrub that filled the old track-marks, and then another had attempted to bulldoze the track-marks flat and plant wheat. The result was an undulating, thinly-wooded country which turned quickly into a quagmire under the boots of the routed army. From time to time they passed wind-farms or small static settlements, but the buildings were all empty, the settlers fled, the fields and houses stripped by soldiers at the front of the column.

  Theo wondered about Hester and Oenone and Professor Pennyroyal, and whether they had managed to escape. At first he hoped that they might come looking for him, but as the scale of the Storm’s defeat became clear, he stopped hoping. How would they know where to look? If even half the rumours he heard were true whole armies had been smashed, and the eastern Hunting Ground must be filled with straggling columns of refugees like the one he’d joined, all trying to reach safety before the hungry cities caught them.

  He reached the crest of a long slope and saw, away to the north, a jagged smear upon the plain. Some of his companions (he couldn’t call them friends; they’d been too stunned and weary even to ask each other’s names) had stopped to look at it, pointing and talking.

  “What is it?” asked Theo.

  “London,” said a Shan Guonese sub-officer. “A powerful barbarian city which the gods destroyed when it tried to breach the walls of Batmunkh Gompa.”

  “The gods were with us then,” said another. “Now they have turned their backs on us. They are punishing Naga and his whore for overthrowing our Stalker Fang.”

  A signals officer, his eyes swathed in bandages, said, “I am glad I cannot see London. It is a bad-luck place. Even looking at it brings misfortune.”

  “You think our luck can get any worse?” sneered the sub-officer.

  A shout of “Airship!” went up from further down the column, and everyone fell flat, some crawling under bushes, some trying to scrape holes for themselves in the wet earth. But the ship that came rumbling overhead was just a Zhang-Chen Hawkmoth with the green lightning-bolt of the Storm on its tailfins. It settled on the plain a few miles ahead.

  The troops around Theo went quiet. This was the first Storm ship they had seen for many days, and they were wondering what it meant. But Theo was more interested in London. He stared through the mist at its spiny, unwelcoming skyline, trying and failing to imagine it as a moving city. Was Wren really in there somewhere? He dug in his pocket and took out the photograph, studying her face as he had studied it many times on this march east, remembering their long-ago kiss. Love, she had written at the bottom of her letter, but did she mean it, or was it was just one of those loves you end letters with, carelessly, not trying to suggest longing or desire?

>   Still, it gave Theo hope to think that Wren might be so close. London’s ghosts didn’t scare him; well, not much. He’d survived the Rustwater and the Line and Cutler’s Gulp, and he could not imagine any ghosts more terrifying than that. Like his Shan Guonese comrade, he didn’t believe his luck could get any worse.

  An officer in a motorized mud-sledge came roaring along the line, stopping at each cluster of soldiers to bellow through a loud-hailer. “Fresh orders! We are moving south-west! General Xao is making a stand at Forward Command.”

  Theo heard the soldiers around him muttering doubtfully. They did not believe the enclave at Forward Command could hold out for long. They wanted to push on to the safety of the mountains. Maybe in Batmunkh Gompa, which had stood for so long against the cities, there might be hope…

  “Move!” the officer was shouting, as his sledge went slapping and growling on along the column. “Take heart! We are to join with General Xao and smash the barbarians! Food and supplies are waiting on the road to Forward Command!”

  Even he didn’t sound as if he believed it, but everyone knew the penalty for disobeying an order from the Storm. Wearily, the soldiers grabbed packs and guns, some grumbling, some cursing, others excited and vowing this time to stop the barbarians for ever.

  Not Theo. He was glad to hear that General Xao was still alive, but this was not his war; beneath his stolen greatcoat he was not even in the Storm’s uniform. He stowed Wren’s picture safely in his pocket and slid away from the others, creeping unnoticed down into a flooded track-mark as they started to move off.

  It was almost nightfall by the time he judged it safe to show himself again. He waded across the floor of the track-mark, and scrambled up the far wall on to flat ground. Nothing was left of the army he had travelled east with except for a few abandoned packs, a dead horse, some litter blowing about in the wind. The guns in the west were booming again as he started to pick his way across the plain towards the distant outline of the destroyed city.

  Look for me in London.

  35

  UPLINK

  The house at Erdene Tezh hums with the power of the old machines. Driven by a hydro-electric generator in the basement, lights gleam, needles quiver, and components stripped from antique Stalker-brains tick and chitter to themselves. The room is webbed with cables. In the middle of this nest of machinery the Stalker Fang stands, tapping at ivory keyboards. Bright little fireflies dance for her behind the glass of an old goggle-screen. She whispers to herself; strings of numbers, letters, cryptic code-words culled from her memories of the Tin Book; the forgotten language of ODIN.

  None of it means anything to Fishcake. When his Stalker does not want him to fix or carry something he wanders the dead rooms, or goes out into the garden and looks at the fish frozen in the ice on the pond, or simply sleeps, clutching his beloved wooden horse. He is sleeping a lot now, as his mind and body withdraw from the hunger and the cold. He has not had much to eat, for although he brought a bag of food with him from Batmunkh Gompa it is running low. His stomach aches with hunger. He has mentioned the problem to his Stalker, but she ignores him. Now that her transmitter is finished she is no longer interested in Fishcake.

  Sometimes he dreams of escaping from this place. He casts hopeful glances at the keys to Popjoy’s air-yacht which, for reasons of her own, she has hung around her neck on a cord. He does not dare to snatch them, though; he knows he wouldn’t get more than three paces before she cut him down.

  Tonight, because the rest of the old building is so cold, Fishcake has made his way to her room again, hoping to curl up in the faint warmth of her machines. She is still at work, still typing her chains of numbers. The clatter of her steel fingers on the keys sounds like Lady Death playing dice with dead men’s bones down in the Sunless Country. Hydraulics grizzle up above the ceiling somewhere, sending down a snow of crumbled plaster. Outside, where the real snow whirls around the roof and the Stalker-birds keep watch for snooping airships, a saucer-shaped aerial turns and tips to focus on a point high in the north-western sky.

  Far, far above, something large and old and cold rides the long dark; frosted with space-dust, pocked by micrometeors. Solar panels give off a tired gleam, like dusty windows. Inside the armoured hull a receiver listens patiently to the same wash of static that it has been hearing for millennia. But now something is changing; inside the static, like flotsam washing ashore in the surf, comes a familiar message. The ancient computer brain detects it, and responds. Many of its systems have been damaged over the long years, but it has others; fail-safes and back-ups. Power cells hum; glowing ribbons of light begin to weave through the coils of the weapon-chamber; ice crystals tumble away in a bright, widening cloud as heavy shields slide open.

  ODIN gazes down into the blue pool of the earth, and waits to be told what it must do.

  36

  INTRUDERS

  22nd June (I think…)

  I’m writing this in a very dismal spot on the western edge of the ruins of London, listening to the guns in the west. How far does the sound of gunfire travel? No one here is sure. But it’s pretty clear that the war is on again, and the Green Storm are losing. Already a few refugees have wandered through the edges of the debris fields – they’ve moved on of their own accord, or with a bit of prompting from Londoners hiding in the debris and making spooky noises, but what if more come?

  And what if suburbs and cities come behind them? And what if Wolf Kobold is already on his way here aboard Harrowbarrow?

  I’ll say this for the Londoners; they don’t give up easily. It’s been decided that New London simply has to be ready to leave by the end of this week, and although Lavinia Childermass and her Engineers look doubtful, they know there’s no alternative.

  While the Engineers get busy in the Womb everyone else is starting to crate up the things that will be needed aboard the new city, and extra patrols have been sent out to keep watch on the western edges of the field for signs of approaching trouble. That’s what leads to me being out here in the wet, instead of tucked up snug in my bed at Crouch End. We’ve made a camp among the rust-heaps, and we’ll sleep under the stars tonight (or at least under a sort of rusty overhang, which we are glad of since it will keep the drizzle off). Cat Luperini, who’s in charge of our little band, says we should take turns to do guard duty. She’s having first go, and I’m due to take over at

  Wren dropped her pencil and closed the book. Through the steady patter of the rain she had clearly heard the sound of a bird calling; the signal which the patrols used to communicate with one another across the wreckage. She went to tell Cat about it, but the other girl had already heard. “It’s Hodge’s lot,” she said. “They need us…”

  The other members of the patrol – Angie Peabody and a small, shy boy named Timex Grout – were waking up, wriggling out from under their blankets and reaching for lanterns and crossbows. Wren’s heart beat quickly; it seemed to be wedged somewhere in the region of her tonsils. This could be it, she thought. What if Ron Hodge’s patrol on the south-western edge had seen the lights of Harrowbarrow? What if advance parties from Harrowbarrow were already sneaking through the debris fields, ready to kill anyone they met? She fumbled a bolt out of the quiver on her belt and fitted it into her crossbow.

  The bird-call came again. Cat called back, and the patrol set off quickly through the drizzle. The moon shone half-heartedly behind the clouds. Wren was glad of its light, but she was still terrified that she would lose the others and be left wandering in this insane rust-scape all alone. Stories which she had had scoffed at in Crouch End seemed very real out here in the night-shadows. She started remembering all the scary scraps of London folklore she had picked up from her father, the dark supernatural shapes that haunted the nightmares of the old city; the ghosts of Boudicca and Spring-Heeled Jack; the awful, salvage-stealing Wombles.

  She almost screamed when a silhouette rose up in the path ahead, but it was just Ron Hodge, the rest of his patrol behind him.

  �
�What’s going on?” asked Cat.

  “Intruder,” said Ron shakily. “We got a glimpse of him, then lost him. He’s round here somewhere.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Cat took charge, ordering everybody to fan out and search. They called to each other as they crept through the spires and angles of the wreck, and they used words now as well as bird-sounds; sometimes just the sound of voices emerging from the dead scrap-piles was enough to make intruders turn tail and run.

  There was no sign of anyone.

  “What’s that?” yelped Timex. Wren ran to him, scrambling through drifts of rust-flakes as crunchy as breakfast cereal. “There!” he hissed, as she reached him, and she saw it too, just for an instant, a movement between two nearby blocks of wreckage. She tried to call out for Cat and the others, but her mouth was too dry. She fumbled for the safety-catch of her crossbow, telling herself that if the stranger was one of Wolf’s men from Harrowbarrow she would have to kill him before he killed her.

  “Who’s there?” shouted a voice. A familiar accent; Theo’s accent. It made Wren feel shivery with relief. This wasn’t an attacker; just some lost African airman, another deserter from the retreating Green Storm armies which the lookouts had sighted passing by. Cat had said that half a dozen had stumbled into the fringes of the debris field over the past few days, and it had been easy enough to frighten them away. Wren wondered what would be the best way to convince this one that the wreck was full of restless spirits. Should she leap out waving her arms and going “Woooooo”?

  Just then, a lot of things happened at once. The stranger, who was closer than he had sounded, appeared suddenly around the corner of an old engine-block. Cat and Angie, coming over the crest of the wreckage behind him, unveiled their lanterns, the dazzling ghost-lights which had driven off so many previous interlopers. The stranger, alarmed, ran straight towards Wren and Timex, and Timex barged backwards, crashing into Wren, whose crossbow went off accidentally with a startling twang and a kick that nearly broke her arm. The stranger fell in the splay of light from the lanterns, and Wren, catching sight of his face, saw that he did not just sound like Theo, he was Theo.