“Then help
“I have to find out what Crome is really up to,” she explained, “for Father’s sake. Please, Bevis. I have to get inside the Engineerium!”
19. THE SEA OF KHAZAK
A few hours later, as the evening mists came curling from the Rustwater Marshes, Tunbridge Wheels rolled down to the edge of the sea. It paused there a while, gazing out towards a cluster of islands that rose dark and rugged from the silver water. Birds were streaming in off the sea in long skeins and as the suburb cut its engines the beat of their wings came echoing over the mudflats. Small waves beat steadily against the shore and a wind from the east blew hissing through the thin, grey marram grass. There was no other sound, no other movement, no light or smoke-trail of a wandering town anywhere on the marshes or the sea.
“Natswurvy!” shouted Chrysler Peavey, standing with a telescope to his eye at the window of his observation bridge, high in the Town Hall. “Where is the lad? Pass the word for Natswurvy!” When a couple of his pirates ushered Tom and Hester in he turned with a broad grin and held out the telescope, saying, “Take a look, Tommy boy! I told you I’d get you here, didn’t I? I told you I’d get you through these marshes safe? Now, have a look at where we’re going!”
Tom took the telescope and put it to his eye, blinking at the trembling, blurred circle of view until it came clear. There were dozens of little islands speckling the sea ahead, and a larger one which loomed in the east like the back of an enormous prehistoric monster breaking the water.
He lowered the telescope and shuddered. “But there’s nothing there…” he said.
It had taken more than a week for Tunbridge Wheels to pick its slow way through the quagmire, and although Chrysler Peavey had taken quite a shine to Tom he had still not explained what he hoped to find on the far side. His men had not been told either, but they were happy enough snapping up the tiny townships which had taken shelter in the mazes of the Rustwater, semi-static places with moss-covered wheels and delicate, beautiful carvings on their wooden upperworks. They were so small that they were barely worth eating, but Tunbridge Wheels ate them anyway, and murdered or enslaved their people and fed the lovely carvings to its furnaces.
It was a horrible, confusing time for Tom. He had been brought up to believe that Municipal Darwinism was a noble, beautiful system, but he could see nothing noble or beautiful about Tunbridge Wheels.
He was still an honoured guest in the Town Hall, and so was Hester, although Peavey clearly didn’t understand his attachment to the scarred, sullen, silent girl. “Why don’cha ask my Cortina out?” he wheedled one night, sitting next to Tom in the old council chamber that was now his dining hall. “Or why not one of them girls we took off the last catch? Lovely lookers they was, an’ not a word of Anglish, so they can’t give you any lip…”
“Hester isn’t my girlfriend!” Tom started to say, but he didn’t want to have to go out with the mayor’s daughter and he knew Peavey would never understand the truth; that he was in love with the image of Katherine Valentine, whose face had hung in his mind like a lantern through all the miles of his adventures. So he said, “Hester and I have been through a lot together, Mr Peavey. I promised I’d help her catch up with London.”
“But that was before,” the mayor reasoned. “You’re a Tunbridge-Wheelsian now. You’re going to stay here with me, like the son I never had, and I’m just thinking that maybe the lads would accept you a bit more easily if you had a better-looking girl; you know, more lady-like.”
Tom looked across the clutter of tables and saw the other pirates glaring at him, fingering their knives. He knew that they would never accept him. They hated him for being a soft city-dweller, and for being Peavey’s favourite, and he couldn’t really blame them.
Later, in the little room he shared with Hester, he said, “We have to get off this town. The pirates don’t like us, and they’re starting to get tired of Peavey going on at them about manners and stuff. I don’t even like to think about what will happen to us if they mutiny.”
“Let’s wait and see,” muttered the girl, curled up in a far corner. “Peavey’s tough, and he’ll be able to keep his lads in line as long as he finds them this big catch he’s been promising. But Quirke alone knows what it is.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” said Tom, drifting into an uneasy sleep. “This time tomorrow these horrible bogs will be behind us…”
This time tomorrow, and the horrible bogs were behind them. As Peavey’s navigator spread out his maps in the observation bridge a strange hissing sound echoed up the stairwells of the Town Hall. Tom glanced up at the faces of Peavey’s henchmen as they clustered around the chart-table, but apart from Hester no one seemed to have heard it. She looked nervously at him and shrugged.
The navigator was a thin, bespectacled man named Mr Ames. He had been the suburb’s schoolteacher until Peavey took over. Now he was settling happily into his new life as a pirate: it was a lot more fun, and the hours were better, and Peavey’s ruffians were better behaved than most of his old pupils. Smoothing his maps with his long, thin hands he said, “It used to be the hunting ground for hundreds of little aquatic towns, but they all ate each other, and now Anti-Tractionist squatters have started coming down out of the mountains and setting up home on islands like this one…”
Tom craned closer. The great inland Sea of Khazak was speckled with dozens of islands, but the one Ames was pointing to was the biggest, a tattered diamond shape some twenty miles long. He couldn’t imagine what was so interesting about it, and most of the other pirates looked baffled too, but Peavey was chuckling and rubbing his hands together in glee.
“The Black Island,” he said. “Not much to look at, is it? But it’s goin’ ter make us rich, boys, rich. After tonight, ol’ Tunbridge Wheels’11 be able to set up as a proper city.”
“How?” demanded Mungo, the pirate who trusted Chrysler Peavey least, and most resented Tom. “There’s nothing there, Peavey. Just a few old trees and some worthless Mossies.”
“What are ‘Mossies’?” Tom whispered to Hester.
“He means people who live in static settlements,” she hissed back. “You know, like in that old saying, ‘A rolling town gathers no moss…’ ”
“The fact is, ladies and gentlemen,” announced Peavey, “that there
“The Black Island?” suggested Tom, guessing as much from Peavey’s greedy grin.
“That’s my boy, Tommy! There’s an air-caravanserai there, where sky-convoys refuel on their way up from the League’s lands south of the mountains. That’s where Airhaven’s put down. They think they’re safe, with sea all round them and their Mossie friends to help ’em. But they ain’t safe from Tunbridge Wheels!”
A ripple of excitement ran through the assembled pirates. Tom turned to Hester, but she was staring out across the sea towards the distant island. Half of him was appalled by the thought that the lovely flying town was lying crippled there, waiting to be eaten—the other half was busy wondering how on earth Peavey planned to reach it.
“To yer stations, me hearties!” the pirate mayor yelled. “Fire up the engines! Prime the guns! By dawn tomorrow, we’ll all be rich!”
The pirates scrambled to obey his orders, and Tom ran to the window. It was almost dark outside now, with a last ominous glow of sunset bruising the sky above the marshes. But the streets of Tunbridge Wheels were full of
