Mortal Engines

downhill. He looked back for Hester and saw her scowling at him, hunched in the saddle of a second pony. Then the knot of riders closed about her, and he lost sight of her in the narrow, crowded streets of the caravanserai, where whole families were standing outside their homes to stare at the northern sky, and dust and litter whirled between the buildings as Airhaven dipped overhead, trying out its rotors one by one.

There was a small stone house where someone found a seat for him, and a man in black robes and a big white turban who examined his bruised chest. “Broken!” he said cheerfully. “I am Ibrahim Nazghul, physician. Four of your ribs are quite smashed up!”

Tom nodded, giddy with the pain and shock, but starting to feel lucky that he was still alive, and glad that these people weren’t the Anti-Tractionist savages he had been expecting. Dr Nazghul wound bandages around his chest, and his wife brought a steaming bowl of mutton stew and helped Tom eat, spooning it into his mouth. Lantern-light lapped at the corners of the room, and in the doorway the doctor’s children stood staring at Tom with huge dark eyes.

“You are a hero!” explained the doctor. “They say you fought with an iron djinn who would have killed us all.”

Tom blinked sleepily at him. He had almost forgotten the squalid little battle at the edge of the bog: the details were fading quickly, like a dream. I killed Shrike, he thought. All right, so he was dead already, technically, but he was still a person. He had hopes and plans and dreams, and I put a stop to them all. He didn’t feel like a hero, he felt like a murderer, and the feeling of guilt and shame stayed with him, staining his dreams as his head drooped over the bowl of stew and he slipped away into sleep.

Then he was in another room, in a soft bed, and there was a blustery blue-and-white sky beyond the window and a patch of sunlight coming and going on the lime-washed wall.

“How are you feeling, Stalker-killer?” a voice asked. Miss Fang stood over him, watching him with the gentle smile of an angel in an old picture.

Tom said, “Everything hurts.”

“Well enough to travel? The Jenny Haniver is waiting, and I would like to be away before sundown. You can eat once we’re airborne; I’ve made toad in the hole, with real toad.”

“Where’s Hester?” Tom asked groggily.

“Oh, she’s coming too.”

He sat up, wincing at the sharp pain in his chest and the memory of all that had happened. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.

The aviatrix laughed as if she thought he was joking, then realized he wasn’t and sat down on the bed, looking concerned. “Tom? Have I done something to upset you?”

“You work for the League!” he said angrily. “You’re a spy, no better than Valentine! You only helped us because you hoped we’d tell you things about London!”

Miss Fang’s smile faded entirely. “Tom,” she said gently, “I helped you because I like you. And if you had seen your family slave to death aboard a ruthless city, might you not have decided to help the League in its fight against Municipal Darwinism?”

She reached out to brush the tousled hair away from his forehead, and Tom remembered something he had forgotten, a time when he was little and very ill and his mother had sat with him like this. But the badge of the League was still on Miss Fang’s breast, and the wound of Valentine’s betrayal was still raw: he would not let himself be tricked by smiles and kindness again. “You kill people!” he said, pushing her hand away. “You sank Marseilles…”

“If I had not, it would have attacked the Hundred Islands, killing or enslaving hundreds more people than I drowned with my little bomb.”

“And you strangled the … the Raisin of Somewhere-or-Other!”

“The Sultana of Palau Pinang?” The smile came flickering back. “I didn’t strangle her! What a horrible suggestion! I simply broke her neck. She let amphibious raft-cities refuel at her island, so she had be disposed of.”

Tom didn’t see that it was anything to smile about. He remembered Wreyland’s men slumped in the shadows of the air-quay at Stayns, and Miss Fang telling him they were just unconscious.

“I may be no better than Valentine,” she went on, “but there is a difference between us. Valentine tried to kill you, and I want to keep you alive. So, will you come with me?”

“Where to?” asked Tom suspiciously.

“To Shan Guo,” she replied. “I’m willing to bet that what lit up the sky last night had something to do with the thing Valentine took from Hester’s mother. And I have learned that London is heading straight for the Shield- Wall.”

Tom was amazed. Could the Lord Mayor really have found a way to breach the League’s borders? If so, it was the best news for years! As for going to Shan Guo, that was the heart of the Anti-Traction League, the last place in the world a decent Londoner should go. “I won’t do anything to help you harm London,” he told her. “It’s still my home.”

“Of course,” she replied. “But if the Wall is about to be attacked, don’t you think the people who live behind it deserve a chance to get away? I am going to warn them of their danger, and I want Hester to come with me and tell her side of the story. And Hester will only go if you come too.”

Tom laughed, and found that it hurt. “I don’t think so!” he said. “Hester hates me!”

“Nonsense,” giggled Miss Fang. “She likes you very much. Did she not spend half the night telling me how kind you have been, and how wonderfully brave you were, killing that machine-man?”

“Did she?” Tom blushed, feeling suddenly proud. He didn’t think he would ever get used to Hester Shaw and her see-sawing moods. Nevertheless, she was the closest thing he had to a friend in this huge, confusing world, and he still remembered how she had pleaded with Shrike for his life. Wherever she was going, he had to go too: even into the savage heartland of the League; even to Shan Guo.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll come.”

25. THE HISTORIANS

It is raining on London, steady rain out of the low, bruised sky, raining hard enough to wash away the snow and churn the mud beneath the city’s tracks into thick yellow slurry, but not to quench the fires of Panzerstadt- Bayreuth, which are still blazing like a Titan’s pyre away in the north-west.

Magnus Crome stands on the windswept roof of the Engineerium and watches the rising smoke. An apprentice holds an umbrella over him, and behind her wait six tall, motionless figures dressed in black versions of the Guild’s rubber coats. The terrorists who breached the Engineerium last night have still not been caught, and security is being strengthened: from now on the Lord Mayor will go nowhere without his new bodyguard; the first batch of Dr Twix’s Stalkers.

A Guild spotter-ship swings overhead and touches down. Dr Vambrace, the Engineers’ security chief, steps out and comes hurrying to where the Lord Mayor waits, his rubber coat flapping thickly in the wind.

“Well, Doctor?” Crome asks eagerly. “What did you see? Were you able to land?”

Vambrace shakes his head. “Fires are still burning all over the wreck. But we circled as low as we dared and took photographs. The upper tiers have melted and collapsed on to the lower, and it looks as if all the boilers and fuel-stores exploded at the first touch of our energy beam.”

Crome nods. “Were there any survivors?”

“A few signs of life, between the tiers, but otherwise. . .” The security man’s eyes go wide behind his thick glasses, looking like a pair of jellyfish in an aquarium. His department is always keen to find new and inventive ways to kill people, and he is still excited at the thought of the dry, charred shapes he saw littering the streets and squares of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, many of them still standing upright, flashed into clinker statues by the gaze of MEDUSA.

“Do you intend to turn back and devour the wreck, Lord Mayor?” he asks after a moment. “The fires will burn themselves out in a day or two.”

“Absolutely not,” snaps Crome. “We must press on towards the Shield-Wall.”