Mortal Engines

by Philip Reeve

  Hester said nothing at all. After a few minutes she began to snore.

  Tom sat awake for a long time, turning her story over and over in his mind. He thought of the daydreams that had kept him going through long, tedious days in the Museum. He had dreamed of being trapped in the Out-Country with a beautiful girl, on the trail of some murderous criminal, but he had never imagined it would be so wet and cold, or that his legs would ache so, or that the murderer would be London’s greatest hero. And as for the beautiful girl…

  He looked at the blunt wreck of Hester Shaw’s face in the faint moonlight, scowling even in her sleep. He understood her better now. She hated Valentine, but she hated herself even more, for being so ugly, and for being still alive when her parents were dead. He remembered how he had felt when the Big Tilt happened, and he came home and found his house flattened and Mum and Dad gone. He had thought that it was all his fault somehow. He had felt full of guilt, because he had not been there to die with them.

  “I must help her,” he thought. “I won’t let her kill Mr Valentine, but I’ll find a way to get the truth out. If it is the truth. Maybe tomorrow London will have slowed down a bit and Hester’s leg will be better. We’ll be back in the city by sundown, and somebody will listen to us…”

  But next morning they woke to find that the city was even further ahead, and Hester’s leg was worse. She moaned with pain at almost every step now; her face was the colour of old snow and fresh blood was soaking through her bandages and running down into her boot. Tom cursed himself for throwing those rags of shirt away, and for making Hester lose her pack, and her first-aid kit…

  In the middle of the morning, through shifting veils of rain, they saw something ahead of them. A pile of slag and clinker lay spilled across the track-marks, where London had vented it the day before. Drawn up beside it was a strange little town, and as they got closer Hester and Tom could see that people were scrambling up and down the spoil-heap, sifting out collops of melted metal and fragments of unburnt fuel.

  The sight gave them hope and they pressed forward faster. By early afternoon they were walking under the shadow of the townlet’s huge wheels, and Tom was staring up in amazement at its single tier. It was smaller than a lot of the houses in London, and it appeared to have been built out of wood by somebody whose idea of good carpentry was to bang a couple of nails in and hope for the best. Behind the shed-like town hall rose the huge, crooked chimneys of an experimental engine array.

  “Welcome!” shouted a tall, white-bearded man, picking his way down the clinker-heap, grubby brown robes flapping. “Welcome to Speedwell. I am Orme Wreyland, Mayor. Do you speak Anglish?”

  Hester hung back suspiciously, but Tom thought the old man looked friendly enough. He stepped forward and said, “Please, sir, we need some food, and a doctor to look at my friend’s leg…”

  “I’m not your friend,” hissed Hester Shaw. “And there’s nothing wrong with my leg.” But she was white and trembling and her face shone with sweat.

  “No doctor in Speedwell anyway,” laughed Wreyland. “Not one. And as for food… Well, times are hard. Do you have anything you can trade?”

  Tom patted the pockets of his tunic. He had a little money, but he didn’t see what use London money would be to Orme Wreyland. Then he touched something hard. It was the seedy he had found in the Gut. He pulled it out and looked wistfully at it for a moment before he handed it to the old man. He had been planning to make a present of it to Katherine Valentine one day, but now food was more important.

  “Pretty! Very pretty!” admitted Orme Wreyland, tilting the disc and admiring the rippling rainbows. “Not a lot of use, but worth a few nights’ shelter and a bit of food. It’s not very good food, mind, but it’s better than nothing…”

  He was right: it wasn’t very good, but Tom and Hester ate greedily anyway and then held out their bowls for more.

  “It’s made from algae, mostly,” explained Orme Wreyland, as his wife slopped out second helpings of the bluish muck. “We grow it in vats down under the main engine room. Nasty stuff, but it keeps body and soul together when pickings is thin, and between you and me, pickings has never been thinner. That’s why we were so glad to come across this mound of trash we’re scraping through.”

  Tom nodded, leaning back in his chair and looking around the Wreylands’ quarters. It was a tiny, cheese-shaped room, and not at all what he would have expected of a mayoral residence – but then Orme Wreyland was not exactly what he would have expected of a mayor. The shabby old man seemed to rule over a town composed mainly of his own family; sons and daughters, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and the husbands and wives that they had met on passing towns.

  But Wreyland was not a happy man. “It’s no fun, running a traction town,” he kept saying. “No, no fun at all, not any more. There was a time when a little place like Speedwell could go about its business quite safely, being too small for any other town to bother eating. But not now. Not with prey so scarce. Everyone we see wants to eat us. We even found ourselves running from a city the other day. One of those big Frankish-speaking Villes Mobiles it was. I ask you, what good would a place like Speedwell be to a monster like that? We’d barely take the edge off its appetite. But they chased us anyway.”

  “Your town must be very fast,” said Tom.

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Wreyland, beaming, and his wife put in, “Hundred miles an hour, top speed. That’s Wreyland’s doing. He’s a wizard with those big engines of his.”

  “Could you help us?” asked Tom, leaning forward in his seat. “We need to get to London, as quickly as possible. I’m sure you could catch it up, and there might be more spoil-heaps along the way…”

  “Bless you, lad,” said Wreyland, shaking his head. “What London drops isn’t worth going far for, not these days. Everything’s recycled now that prey’s so short. Why, I remember the days when cities’ waste-heaps used to dot the Hunting Ground like mountains. Oh, there was good pickings then! But not any more. Besides,” he added with a shudder, “I wouldn’t take my town too close to London, or any other city. You can’t trust them these days. They’d turn round and snaffle us, like as not. Chomp! No, no.”

  Tom nodded, trying not to show his disappointment. He glanced across at Hester, but her head was hanging down and she seemed to be asleep, or unconscious. He hoped it was just the effects of her long walk and her full stomach, but as he started up to check that she was all right Wreyland said, “I tell you what, though, lad; we’ll take you to the cluster!”

  “To the what?”

  “To the trading-cluster! It’s a gathering of small towns, a couple of days’ run south-east of here. We were going anyway.”

  “There’ll be lots of towns at the cluster,” Mrs Wreyland agreed. “And even if none of them is prepared to take you and your friend to London, you’ll soon find an air-trader who will. Bound to be air-traders at a cluster.”

  “I…” said Tom, and stopped. He wasn’t feeling very well. The room seemed to waver, then started to roll like the picture on a badly-tuned Goggle-screen. He looked at Hester and saw that she had slipped off her seat on to the floor. The Wreylands’ household gods grinned at him from their shrine on the wall, and one of them seemed to be saying in Orme Wreyland’s voice, “Sure to be airships there, Tom, always airships at a trading-cluster…”

  “Would you like some more algae, dear?” enquired Mrs Wreyland, as he fell to his knees. From a long, long way away he heard her saying, “It took an awfully long time to take effect, didn’t it, Ormey?”, and Wreyland replying, “We’ll have to put more in next time, my sweet.” Then the swirling patterns on the carpet reached up and twined around him and pulled him down into a sleep that was as soft as cotton wool, and filled with dreams of Katherine.

  7

  HIGH LONDON

  Above Tier One, above the busy shops of Mayfair and Piccadilly, above Quirke Circus, where the statue of London’s saviour stands proudly on its fluted steel column, Top Tier hangs over
the city like an iron crown, supported by vast pillars. It is the smallest, highest and most important of the seven Tiers, and, though only three buildings stand there, they are the three greatest buildings in London. To sternward rise the towers of the Guildhall, where the greater and lesser Guilds all have their offices and meet in council once a month. Opposite it is the building where the real decisions are taken: the black glass claw of the Engineerium. Between them stands St Paul’s, the ancient Christian temple that Quirke re-erected up here when he turned London into a Traction City. It is a sad sight now, covered in scaffolding and shored up with props, for it was never meant to move, and London’s journeys have shaken the old stonework terribly. But soon it will be open to the public again: the Guild of Engineers has promised to restore it, and if you listen closely you can hear the drills and hammers of their men at work inside.

  Magnus Crome hears them as his bug goes purring through the old cathedral’s shadow to the Engineerium. They make him smile a faint, secret smile.

  Inside the Engineerium the sunlight is kept at bay behind black windows. A cold neon glow washes the metal walls, and the air smells of antiseptic, which Crome thinks is a welcome relief from the stench of flowers and new-mown grass that hangs over High London on this warm spring day. A young apprentice leaps to attention as he stalks into the lobby and bows her bald head when he barks, “Take me to Doctor Twix.”

  A monorail car is waiting. The apprentice helps the Lord Mayor into it and it takes him sweeping up in a slow spiral through the heart of the Engineerium. He passes floor after floor of offices and conference rooms and laboratories, and glimpses the shapes of strange machines through walls of frosted glass. Everywhere he looks he sees his Engineers at work, tinkering with fragments of Old-Tech, performing experiments on rats and dogs, or guiding groups of shaven-headed children who are up on a day-trip from the Guild’s nurseries in the Deep Gut. He feels safe and satisfied, here in the clean, bright, inner sanctum of his Guild. It makes him remember why he loves London so much, and why he has devoted his whole career to finding ways to keep it moving.

  When Crome was a young apprentice, many years ago, he read gloomy forecasts which said that prey was running out and Traction Cities were doomed. He has made it his life’s work to prove them wrong. Clawing his way to the top of his Guild and then on to the Lord Mayor’s throne was just the start. His fierce recycling and anti-waste laws were merely a stop-gap. Now he is almost ready to unveil his real plan.

  But first he must be certain that the Shaw girl can make no more trouble.

  The car comes sighing to a halt outside one of the upper laboratories. A squat, white-coated barrel of a woman stands waiting at the entrance, hopping nervously from foot to foot. Evadne Twix is one of the best Engineers in London. She may look like someone’s dotty auntie and decorate her laboratory with pictures of flowers and puppies (a clear breach of Guild rules), but when it comes to her work she is utterly ruthless. “Hello, Lord Mayor,” she simpers, bowing. “How lovely to see you! Have you come to visit my babies?”

  “I want to see Shrike,” he snaps, brushing past, and she dances along in his wake like a leaf in the slipstream of a passing city.

  Through her laboratory they go, past startled, bowing Engineers, past glittering racks of glassware – and past tables where rusting metal skeletons are being painstakingly repaired. Dr Twix’s team has spent years studying the Stalkers, the Resurrected Men whose remains turn up sometimes in the Out-Country – and lately they have had more than just remains to work on.

  “You have completed your researches on Shrike?” asks Crome as he strides along. “You are certain he is of no further use to us?”

  “Oh, I’ve learned everything we can, Lord Mayor,” twitters the doctor. “He’s a fascinating piece of work, but really far more complicated than is good for him; he has almost developed his own personality. And as for his strange fixation with this girl… I shall make sure my new models are much simpler. Do you wish me to have him dismantled?”

  “No.” Crome stops at a small, round door and touches a stud that sends it whirling open. “I intend to keep my promise to Shrike. And I have a job for him.”

  Beyond the door hang shadows and a smell of oil. A tall shape stands motionless against a far wall. As the Lord Mayor steps into the room two round, green eyes snap on like headlights.

  “Mr Shrike!” says Crome, sounding almost cheery. “How are we today? I hope you were not asleep?”

  “I DO NOT SLEEP,” replies a voice from the darkness. It is a horrible voice, sharp as the squeal of rusty cogs. Even Dr Twix, who knows it well, shudders inside her rubber coat. “DO YOU WISH TO EXAMINE ME AGAIN?”

  “No, Shrike,” Crome says. “Do you remember what you warned me of when you first came to me, a year and a half ago? About the Shaw girl?”

  “I TOLD YOU THAT SHE IS ALIVE, AND ON HER WAY TO LONDON.”

  “Well, it seems you were right. She turned up just as you said she would.”

  “WHERE IS SHE? BRING HER TO ME!”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid. She jumped down a waste-chute, back into the Out-Country.”

  There is a slow hiss, like steam escaping. “I MUST GO AFTER HER.”

  Crome smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that. One of my Guild’s Goshawk 90 reconnaissance airships has been made ready for you. The pilots will retrace the city’s tracks until you find where the girl fell. If she and her companion are dead, all well and good. If they are alive, kill them. Bring their bodies to me.”

  “AND THEN?” asks the voice.

  “And then, Shrike,” Crome replies, “I will give you your heart’s desire.”

  It was a strange time for London. The city was still travelling at quite high speed, as if there was a catch in sight, but there was no other town to be seen on the grey, muddy plains of the north-western Hunting Ground, and everybody was wondering what the Lord Mayor could be planning. “We can’t just go driving on like this,” Katherine heard one of her servants mutter. “There are big cities further east, and they’ll scoff us up and spit out the bones!” But Mrs Mallow the housekeeper whispered back, “Don’t you know nothing, Sukey Blinder? Ain’t Mr Valentine himself being sent off on a hexpedition to spy out the land ahead? Him and Magnus Crome have got their eye on some vast great prize, you can be sure of it!”

  Some vast great prize perhaps, but nobody knew what, and when Valentine came home at lunchtime from another meeting with the Guild of Engineers Katherine asked him, “Why do they have to send you off on a reconnaissance flight? That’s a job for a Navigator, not the best archaeologist in the world. It’s not fair!”

  Valentine sighed patiently. “The Lord Mayor trusts me, Kate. And I will soon be back. Three weeks. A month. No more. Now, come down to the hangar with me, and we’ll see what Pewsey and Gench have been doing to that airship of mine.”

  In the long millennia since the Sixty Minute War, airship technology had reached levels that even the Ancients had never dreamed of. Valentine had had the 13th Floor Elevator specially constructed, using some of the money that Crome had paid him for the Old-Tech he found on his trip to America, twenty years before. He said she was the finest airship ever built, and Katherine saw no reason to doubt him. Of course he didn’t keep her down at the Tier Five air-harbour with the common merchantmen, but at a private air-quay a few hundred yards from Clio House.

  Katherine and her father walked towards it through the sunlit park. The hangar and the metal apron in front of it were busy with people and bugs as Pewsey and Gench set about loading the Elevator with provisions for the coming flight. Dog went hurrying ahead to sniff at the stacks of crates and drums: tinned meat, lifting gas, medicines, airship-puncture repair kits, sun lotion, gas-masks, flame-proof suits, guns, rain-capes, cold-weather coats, map-making equipment, portable stoves, spare socks, plastic cups, three inflatable dinghies and a carton labelled “Pink’s Patent Out-Country Mud-Shoes – Nobody Sinks with Pink’s!”

  In the shadows of the hanga
r the great airship waited, her sleek, black, armoured envelope screened by tarpaulins. As usual, Katherine felt a rising thrill at the thought of that huge vessel lifting Father up into the sky – and a sadness too, that he was leaving her; and a fear that he might not return. “Oh, I wish I could go with you!” she said.

  “Not this time, Kate,” her father told her. “One day, perhaps.”

  “Is it because I’m a girl?” she asked. “But that doesn’t matter. I mean, in Ancient times women were allowed to do all the same things men did, and anyway, the air-trade is full of women pilots. You had one yourself, on the American trip, I remember seeing pictures of her…”

  “It’s not that, Kate,” he said, hugging her. “It’s just that it may be dangerous. Anyway, I don’t want you to start turning into an old ragamuffin adventurer like me; I want you to stay here and finish school and become a fine, beautiful High London lady. And most of all I want you to stop Dog from peeing over all my crates of soup…”

  When Dog had been dragged away and scolded they sat down together in the shadow of the hangar and Katherine said, “So will you tell me where you are going, that is so important and dangerous?”

  “I am not supposed to say,” said Valentine, glancing down at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “Oh, come on!” she laughed. “We’re best friends, aren’t we? You know I’d never tell anybody else. And I’m desperate to know where London is going to! Everyone at school keeps asking. We’ve been travelling east at top speed for days and days. We didn’t even stop when we ate Salthook…”

  “Well, Kate,” he admitted, “the fact is, Crome has asked me to take a look into Shan Guo.”

  Shan Guo was the leading nation of the Anti-Traction League, the barbarian alliance which controlled the old Indian sub-continent and what was left of China, protected from hungry cities by a great chain of mountains and swamps that marked the eastern limits of the Hunting Ground. Katherine had studied it in Geography. There was only one pass through those mountains, and it was protected by the dreadful fortress-city of Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall, beneath whose guns a hundred cities had come to grief in the first few centuries of Traction. “But why there?” she asked. “London can’t be going there!”