Mortal Engines

“But…”

“In the meantime, we have agreed to keep Mr Pod safe, here at the Museum. He can sleep up in the old Transport Gallery, and help Dr Nancarrow catalogue the art collection, and if the Engineers come hunting for him we’ll find a hiding place. It isn’t much of a blow against Crome, I know. But please understand, Katherine; we are old, and frightened, and there really is nothing more that we can do.”

26. BATMUNKH GOMPA

The world was changing. That was nothing new, of course; the first thing an Apprentice Historian learned was that the world was always changing, but now it was changing so fast that you could actually see it happening. Looking down from the flight-deck of the Jenny Haniver, Tom saw the wide plains of the eastern Hunting Ground speckled with speeding towns, spurred into flight by whatever it was that had bruised the northern sky, heading away from it as fast as their tracks or wheels could carry them, too preoccupied to try and catch each other.

“MEDUSA,” he heard Miss Fang whisper to herself, staring towards the far off, flame-flecked smoke.

“What is a MEDUSA?” asked Hester. “You know something, don’t you? About what my mum and dad were killed for?”

“I’m afraid not,” the aviatrix replied. “I wish I did. But I heard the name once. Six years ago another League agent managed to get into London, posing as a crewman on a licensed airship. He had heard something that must have intrigued him, but we never learned what it was. The League had only one message from him, just two words: Beware MEDUSA. The Engineers caught him and killed him.”

“How do you know?” asked Tom.

“Because they sent us back his head,” said Miss Fang. “Cash on Delivery.”

That evening she set the Jenny Haniver down on one of the fleeing towns, a respectable four-decker called Peripatetiapolis which was steering south to lair in the mountains beyond the Sea of Khazak. At the air-harbour there they heard more news of what had happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth.

“I saw it!” said an aviator. “I was a hundred miles away, but I still saw it. A tongue of fire, reaching out from London’s Top Tier and bringing death to everything it touched!”

“London’s dug up something from the Sixty Minute War,” a freelance archaeologist told them. “The old American Empire was quite insane towards the end; I’ve heard stories about terrible weapons: quantum energy beams that drew their power from places outside the real universe…”

“Who’ll dare defy them now, when Magnus Crome has the power to burn any city that disobeys him?” asked a panic-stricken Peripatetiapolitan merchant. “ ‘Come here and let us eat you,’ London will tell us, and we will have to go. It’s the end of civilization as we know it! Again!”

But one good thing had come out of it; the people of Peripatetiapolis were suddenly quite glad to accept Tom’s London money. On an impulse he bought a red silk shawl to replace the scarf that Hester had lost on that long-ago night when he chased her through the Gut.

“For me?” she said incredulously when he gave it to her. She couldn’t remember anyone ever giving her a gift before. She had not spoken to him much since they left the Black Island, ashamed of her outburst the night before, but now she said, “Thank you. And I suppose I should thank you for saving my life, too. Though I don’t know why you keep bothering.”

“I knew you didn’t really want to end up as a Stalker,” Tom told her.

“Oh, I did,” she said. “It would make things so much easier. But you did the right thing.” She looked away from him, embarrassed, staring down at the shawl in her hands. “I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” said Tom awkwardly. “I know. It’s OK.” He picked up the shawl and tied it carefully round her neck, but as he had expected she pulled it up at once to hide her mouth and nose. He felt strangely sad: he had grown used to that face, and he would miss her lopsided smiles.

They flew on before dawn, crossing a range of steep hills like crumpled brown paper. All day the land rose up and up, and soon Tom realized that they were leaving the Hunting Ground altogether. By evening the Jenny Haniver was flying over landscapes too rugged for most towns to travel. He saw dense forests of pine and rhododendron, with now and then a little static village squatting in its cove of farmland, and once a white settlement perched on a mountain top with roads reaching out from it like the spokes of a wheel; real roads with carts moving up and down and a bright flutter of prayer-flags at the intersections. He watched until they were out of sight. He had heard about roads in his history lessons, but he had never thought he’d see one.

Next day, Anna Fang handed out balls of reddish paste to her passengers. “Powdered betel-nut,” she explained, “mixed with some dried leaves from Nuevo Maya. They help at these high altitudes. But don’t make a habit of chewing them, or your teeth will turn as red as mine.” The gritty paste made Tom’s mouth tingle, but it cured the faint sense of nausea and light-headedness that had been growing in him as the airship flew higher and higher, and it also helped to numb the pain of his broken ribs.

By now the Jenny’s tiny shadow was flickering over high snow-clad summits, and ahead lay summits still higher, white spires which hung like a mirage above the clouds. Beyond them stretched an even higher range, and then another, higher yet. Tom strained his eyes, peering towards the south in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of old Chomolungma, Everest of the Ancients, but storms were brewing in the high Himalayas and it was wrapped in cloud.

They flew for three days through a black-and-white world of snow and glaciers and the sheer dark rock of young mountains, where Tom or Hester sometimes had to mind the controls while Anna Fang took cat-naps in the seat beside them, afraid to risk leaving her flight-deck. And still they climbed, until at last they were skimming over the lower buttresses of great Zhan Shan, tallest of the earth’s new mountains, whose snow-capped caldera jutted into the endless cold above the sky. After that the peaks were lower, white and lovely, with sometimes a green vale between, where huge herds of animals scattered and wheeled at the sound of the airship’s engines. These were the Mountains of Heaven, and they swept away towards the north and east and sank down in the far distance to steppe and taiga and the glitter of impassable swamps.

“This is Shan Guo of the many horses,” Anna Fang told Tom and Hester. “I had hoped to retire here, when my work for the League was done. Now I suppose it may all be eaten by London; our fortresses blasted by MEDUSA and our settlements devoured, the green hills split open and made to give up their minerals, the horses extinct, just like the rest of the world.”

Tom didn’t think it was such a bad idea, because it was only natural that Traction Cities should eventually spread right across the globe. But he couldn’t help liking Miss Fang, even if she was a spy and an Anti-Tractionist, and to comfort her he said, “However powerful MEDUSA is, it will take years for London to gnaw its way through these great big mountains.”

“It won’t have to,” she replied. “Look.”

He looked where she pointed, and saw a break in the mountain-chain ahead, a broad pass that a city could have crawled along—except that stretching across it, so vast that it seemed at first glance just another spur of the mountains, was the Shield-Wall.

It was like a wall of night, black, black, built from huge blocks of volcanic stone, armoured with the rusting deckplates of cities that had dared to challenge it and been destroyed by the hundreds of rocket batteries on its western face. On its snow-clad summit, four thousand feet above the valley floor, the banner of the broken wheel snapped and raced in the wind and the sunlight gleamed on armoured gun-emplacements and the steel helmets of the League’s soldiers.

“If only it were as strong as it looks,” sighed the avia-trix, bringing the Jenny Haniver down towards it it in a long sweeping curve. A small flying machine, little more than a motorized kite, came soaring to meet them, and she held a brief radio conversation with its pilot. It circled the Jenny once and then whirred ahead, guiding the newcomer over the top of the Shield-Wall. Tom looked down at broad battlements and the faces of soldiers gazing upwards, yellow, brown, black, white, faces from every part of the world where barbarian statics still held out against Municipal Darwinism. Then they were gone; the Jenny was sinking down the sheltered eastern side of the