Mortal Engines

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 position. 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 Tannhauser 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 avi-atrix, 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 off the job. You see, Tom, there isn’t enough prey to go round in the central Hunting