Miss Fang’s guest and wanted to go down into the city. The man grinned and started weighting his gondola with stones from a pile that stood nearby, and soon Tom found himself travelling down past the many levels of the city again until he stepped out on a sort of central square, where dozens of other taxis were coming and going and stairways branched off across the face of the Shield-Wall, going up towards the High Eyries and down to the shops and markets of the lower levels.
News of MEDUSA was spreading fast through Batmunkh Gompa, and already a lot of the houses and shops were shuttered, their owners fled to cities further south. The lower levels were still packed with people, though, and as the sun dipped behind the Wall Tom wandered the crowded bazaars and steep ladderways. There were fortune-tellers’ booths at the street corners, and shrines to the sky-gods, dusty with the crumbly grey ash of incense sticks. Fierce-looking Uighur acrobats were performing in the central square, and everywhere he looked he saw soldiers and airmen of the League: blond giants from Spitzbergen and blue-black warriors from the Mountains of the Moon, the small dark people of the Andean statics and people the colour of firelight from jungle strongholds in Laos and Annam.
He tried to forget that some of these young men and women might soon be dropping rockets on London, and started to enjoy the flow of faces and the incomprehensible mish-mash of languages—and sometimes he heard someone say “Tom!” or “Thomasz!” or “Tao-mah!” as they pointed him out to their friends. The story of his battle with Shrike had spread through the mountains from trading-post to trading-post and had been waiting for him here in Batmunkh Gompa. He didn’t mind. It felt like a different Thomas that they were talking about, someone brave and strong who understood what had to be done, and felt no doubts.
He was just wondering if he should go back to the Governor’s palace and find Hester, when he noticed a tall figure climbing a nearby stairway. The man wore a ragged red robe with the hood pulled down over his face, and carried a staff in one hand and a pack slung over his shoulder. Tom had already seen dozens of these wandering holy men in Batmunkh Gompa; monks in the service of the mountain gods who travelled from city to city through the high passes. (Up at the mooring platform Anna Fang had stooped to kiss the feet of one, and given six bronze coins for him to bless the
He started following the red robe. He followed it through the spice market with its thousand astonishing scents, and down the narrow Street of Weavers where hundreds of baskets swung from low poles outside the shops like hanging nests, brushing against the top of his head as he passed underneath. What was it about the way the man moved, and that long brown hand clutching the staff?
And then, under a lantern in the central square, the monk was stopped by a street-girl asking for a blessing and Tom caught a glimpse of the bearded face inside the hood. He knew that hawk-like nose and those mariner’s eyes; he knew that the amulet hanging between the black brows hid the familiar Guild-mark of a London Historian.
It was Valentine!
27. DR ARKENGARTH REMEMBERS
Katherine spent a lot of time in the Museum in those final days, as London went roaring towards the mountains. Safe in its dingy maze she could not hear the burr of the saws as they felled the last few trees in Circle Park to feed the engines, or the cheers of the noisy crowds who gathered each day in front of the public Goggle- screens where the details of Crome’s great plan were being gradually revealed. She could even forget the Guild of Engineers’ security people, who were everywhere now, not just the usual white-coated thugs, but a strange new breed in black coats and hoods, silent, stiff in their movements, with a faint greenish glow behind their tinted visors: Dr Twix’s Resurrected Men.
But if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t only the peace and quiet that kept calling her down to the Museum. Bevis was there, his borrowed bedding spread out on the floor of the old Transport gallery, under the dusty hanging shapes of model gliders and flying machines. She needed his company more and more as the city hauled itself eastward. She liked the fact that he was her secret. She liked his soft voice, and the strange laugh that always sounded as if he were trying it on for size, as if he had never had much call for laughter down in the Deep Gut. She liked the way he looked at her, his dark eyes always lingering on her face and especially her hair. “I’ve never really known anybody with hair before,” he told her one day. “In the Guild they use chemicals on us when we’re first apprenticed, so it never grows back.” Katherine thought about his pale, smooth scalp. She liked that too. It sort of suited him. Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected, like an Apprentice Engineer?
She wished that Father was here, so she could ask him.
In the afternoons Bevis would pull on a Historian’s robe and hide his bald head under a cap and go down to help Dr Nancarrow, who was busy re-cataloguing the Museum’s huge store of paintings and drawings and taking photographs in case the Lord Mayor decided to feed those to the furnaces as well. Then Katherine would wander the Museum with Dog at her heels, hunting for the things that her father had dug up. Washing machines, pieces of computer, the rusty ribcage of a Stalker, all had labels which read, “Discovered by Mr T. Valentine, Archaeologist”. She could imagine him lifting them gently out of the soil that had guarded them, cleaning them, wrapping them in scrim for transport back to London. He must have done the same thing with the MEDUSA fragment when he discovered it, she thought. She whispered prayers to Clio, sure that the goddess must be present in these time- soaked halls. “London needs him! I need him! Please send him safely home, and soon…”
But it was Dog, not Clio, who led her into the Natural History section that evening. He had glimpsed a display of stuffed animals from the far end of the corridor and gone prowling down to stare at them, a growl bubbling in the back of his throat. Old Dr Arkengarth, who was passing through the gallery on his way home, backed away nervously, but Kate said, “It’s all right, Doctor! He’s quite safe!” and knelt down at Dog’s side, looking up at the sharks and dolphins that swung above her and the great looming shape of the whale, which had been taken off its hawsers and propped against the far wall before the vibrations could bring it crashing down.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Arkengarth, who was always ready to begin a lecture. “A Blue Whale. Hunted to extinction in the first half of the 21 st century. Or possibly the 20th: the records are unclear. We wouldn’t even know what it looked like if Mrs Shaw hadn’t discovered those fossilized bones…”
Katherine had been thinking about something else, but the name “Shaw” made her look round. The display case Arkengarth was pointing at housed a rack of brownish bones, and propped against a vertebra was a label that said, “
“Mrs Shaw, yes, yes,” the old man nodded. “A lovely lady. She was an Out-Country archaeologist, a friend of your father’s. Of course, her name was Rae in those days…”
“Pandora Rae?” Katherine knew that name. “Then she was Father’s assistant on the trip to America! I’ve seen her picture in his book!”
“That’s right,” said Arkengarth, frowning slightly at the interruption. “An archaeologist, as I said. She specialized in Old Tech, of course, but she brought us other things when she found them—like these whale- bones.
Later she married this Shaw chappie and went to live on some grotty little island in the western ocean. Poor girl. A tragedy. Terrible. Terrible.”
“She died, didn’t she?” said Katherine.
“She was murdered!” Arkengarth waggled his eyebrows dramatically. “Six or seven years ago. We heard it from another archaeologist. Murdered in her own home, and her husband with her. Dreadful business. I say, my dear, are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”
But Katherine was not all right. In her mind, all the pieces of the puzzle were flying together. Pandora Shaw was murdered, seven years ago, the same time that Father found the machine… Pandora the aviatrix, the archaeologist, the woman who had been with him in America when he found the plans of MEDUSA. And now a girl
