centre of the Black Island.
Tom hadn’t realized until now that it was an extinct volcano, but from here it was obvious; the steep, black crags ringed an almost circular bowl of land, green, and patched with fields. Almost directly below the place where the pirates crouched, a small static settlement stood beside a blue lake. There were airship hangars and mooring masts beside the stone buildings, and on the flat ground behind them, dwarfing the whole place, Airhaven perched on a hundred skinny landing legs, looking as helpless as a grounded bird.
“The air-caravanserai!” chuckled Peavey. He pulled out his telescope and put it to his eye. “Look at ’em work! They’re pumping their gasbags back up, desperate to get back into the sky…” He swung the glass quickly across the surrounding hillsides. “No sign of any of our boys. Oh, if only we had a cannon left! But we’ll manage, eh lads? A bunch of airy-fairies is no match for us! Come on, let’s get closer…”
There was a strange edge to the mayor’s voice.
They still followed him though, down between the screes into the crater of the old fire-mountain. Once they saw riders silhouetted on a distant crag; a patrol of islanders hunting for survivors from the sunken pirate town. Once an airship flew low overhead, and Peavey hissed at everybody to lie flat and stay still, wrapping his monkey under his robes to muffle its shrill complaints.
The airship circled, but by that time the sun had gone down, and the pilot did not see the figures who cowered in the twilight below him like mice hiding from an owl. He flew back down to land at the caravanserai as a fat moon heaved itself over the eastern crags.
Tom gave a sharp sob of relief and scrambled up. Around him the others were also starting to move, grunting, dislodging small stones which went clattering away down the hillside. He could see people hurrying about with lanterns and torches in the streets of the air-caravanserai, and lamp-lit windows that made him think how wonderful it would be to be warm and safe indoors. Airhaven was bright with electric lights, and the wind brought the distant sounds of shouted orders, music, cheering.
“For Pete’s sake!” hissed Mungo. “We’re too late! It’s leaving!”
“Never,” scoffed Peavey.
But they could all see that Airhaven’s gasbags were almost full. A few minutes later the growl of its engines came rumbling up the slope, rising and falling as the wind gusted. The flying town was straining upwards, its crab- like legs folding back into place underneath it. “No!” shouted Peavey.
Then he was running downhill, scrambling and tumbling down clattering spills of scree towards the flat, boggy land in the crater floor, and as he ran they heard him screaming “Come back! You’re my
Mungo and Maggs and Ames set off after him, with Hester and Tom behind. At the foot of the slope the ground grew soft and squashy underfoot and pools of water reflected the moon and the lights of the rising town.
“Come back!” they could hear Peavey shouting, somewhere ahead of them. “Come back!” and then, “Ah! Oh! Help!”
They hurried towards the sound of his voice and the harsh screams of the monkey, and all came to a halt together at the edge of a deep patch of bog. Peavey was already up to his waist in it. The monkey perched on top of his head like a sailor on a foundering ship, grinning with fear. “Give me a hand, boys!” the mayor pleaded. “Help me! We can still get it! It’s only testing its liftin’ engines! It’ll come down again!”
The pirates watched him silently. They knew they had no chance of taking the flying town, and that his shouts had probably warned the islanders of their presence.
“We’ve got to help him!” whispered Tom, starting forward, but Hester held him back.
“Too late,” she said.
Peavey was sinking deeper, the weight of his chain of office pulling him down. He spluttered as the black mud swilled into his mouth. “Come on, lads! Maggs? Mungo? I’m your mayor! I done all this for you!” He searched for Tom with wild, terrified eyes. “Tell ’em, Tommy boy!” he whimpered. “Tell ’em I wanted to make Tunbridge Wheels great! I wanted to be respectable! Tell ’em—”
Mungo’s first shot blew the monkey off the top of Peavey’s head in a cloud of singed fur. The second and third went through his chest. He bowed his head, and the mud gulped him down with soft farting noises.
The pirates turned to look at Tom.
“We prob’ly wouldn’t be ’ere if it weren’t for you,” muttered Mungo.
“If you hadn’t of gone filling the Chiefs head up with all them ideas about manners and cities and stuff,” agreed Maggs.
“Different forks for every course, and no talking with your mouth full!” sneered Ames.
Tom started to back away. To his surprise, Hester stepped quickly between him and the pirates. “It’s not Tom’s fault! “she said.
“An” you’re no use to us, neither,” Mungo growled. “Neither of you is. We’re pirates. We don’t need no lessons in etiquette an’ we don’t need no lame scarface girl to hold us up.” He raised his gun, and Maggs followed suit. Even Mr Ames pulled out a little revolver.
And a voice out of the darkess said, “they’re mine.”
21. IN THE ENGINEERIUM
London was climbing towards a high plateau where the town-torn earth was dusted with thin layers of snow. A hundred miles behind it rolled Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, not just a threatening blur on the horizon any more but a huge dark mass of tracks and tiers, the gold filigree-work of its ornate top deck clearly visible above the smoke of factories and engines. Londoners crowded on to the aft observation platforms and watched in silence as the gap between the two cities slowly narrowed. That afternoon the Lord Mayor announced that there was no need for panic and that the Guild of Engineers would bring the city safely through this crisis—but there had already been riots and looting on the lower tiers, and squads of Beefeaters had been sent down to keep order in the Gut.
“Old Crome doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” muttered one of the men on duty at the Quirke Circus Elevator Station that evening. “I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but he’s a fool. Bringing poor old London way out east like this, day after day of travelling, week after week, just to get scoffed by some big old conurbation. I wish Valentine was here. He’d know what to do…”
“Quiet, Bert,” hissed his companion, “here comes some more of ’em.”
Both men bowed politely as two Engineers strode up to the turnstiles, a young man and a girl, dressed identically in green glastic goggles and white rubber hoods and coats. The girl flashed a gold pass. When she and her companion had gone up into the waiting elevator Bert turned to his friend and whispered, “It must be important, this do at the Engineerium. They’ve been swarming up out of their nests in the Deep Gut like a load of old white maggots. Imagine having a Guild meeting at a time like this!”
Inside the elevator Katherine sat down next to Bevis Pod, already feeling hot and self-conscious inside the coat that he had lent her. She glanced at him, and then checked her reflection in the window, making sure that the red wheels they had drawn so carefully on each other’s foreheads had not got smudged. She thought they both looked ridiculous in these hoods and goggles, but Bevis had assured her that a lot of Engineers wore them these days, and the other occupant of the elevator, a fat Navigator, didn’t so much as look at them while the car lurched towards Top Tier.
Katherine had spent the whole day restlessly waiting for Bevis to arrive with her disguise. To while away the time she had looked up the name HESTER SHAW in the indices of all her father’s books, but couldn’t find it. A Complete Catalogue of the London Museum contained one brief reference to a Pandora Shaw, but it just said she
