“What is the meaning of this?” barked Dr Vambrace.
Chudleigh Pomeroy stepped forward, holding a blunderbuss with a brass muzzle as broad as a tuba’s. Katherine started to realize that other Historians were watching from the shadows at the edges of the hall, lurking behind display cases, pointing steam-powered rifles through the articulated ribs of dinosaurs.
“Gentlemen,” said Pomeroy nervously, “you are on the property of the Guild of Historians. I suggest that you unhand those young people immediately.”
“Immediately!” agreed Dr Karuna, training her dusty musket on the red wheel between Vambrace’s eyebrows.
The Engineer began to laugh. “You old fools! Do you think you can defy us? Your Guild will be disbanded because of what you’ve done here today. Your silly trifles and trinkets will be fed to the furnaces, and your bodies will be broken on engines of pain in the Deep Gut. We’ll make you history, since history is all you care about! We are the Guild of Engineers! We are the future!”
There is a heartbeat pause, near-silent, just the echo of Vambrace’s voice hanging on the musty air and the faint sounds of men reaching for guns and arthritic fingers tightening on ancient triggers. Then the foyer vanishes into smoke and stabbing darts of fire, and the noise bounces from the high-domed roof and comes slamming down again, a ragged crackle split by the deep boom of Pomeroy’s blunderbuss and the shrieking roar of an old cannon concealed in a niche behind the ticket office, which goes off with a great jet of flame as Dr Nancarrow sets his lighter to the touch-hole. Katherine sees Vambrace and the two men next to him swiped aside, sees Dr Arkengarth falling backwards with his arms windmilling, feels the man who holds her jerk and stumble and the thick slap as a musket-ball goes through his rubber coat.
He falls away from her, and she drops to her knees and wonders where to hide. Nothing remains of Vambrace but his smouldering boots, which would be cartoony and almost funny except that his feet are still inside them. Half his men are down, but the rest are rallying, and they have better weapons than the Historians. They spray the foyer with gunfire, striking sparks from the marble floor and flinging splinters of dinosaur bone high into the air. Display cases come apart in bright cataracts of powdered glass, and the Historians who are cowering behind them go scrambling back to other hiding places, or fall among the fallen exhibits and lie still. Above them, argon-globes smash and gutter until the hall is dark, stuttering like cine-film in the migraine flicker of gun-light, and the Engineers are pushing forward through it towards the doors.
Behind them, forgotten, Bevis Pod reaches for an abandoned gun and swings it up, his long hands feeling their way across the shiny metal for catches and triggers. Katherine watches him. The air around her is thick with wailing shot and whirling chips of marble and moaning battle-frisbees, but she cannot tear her eyes or her mind away from Bevis long enough to think about finding cover. She sees him unfold the gun’s spindly arm-rest and wedge it into the crook of his elbow, and sees the small blue holes it makes in the backs of the Engineers’ coats. They fling up their arms and drop their guns and spin about and fall, and Bevis Pod watches them through the bucking sights with a calm, serious look, not her gentle Bevis any more but someone who can kill quite coldly, as if the Engineer in him really does have no regard for human life, or maybe he has just seen so much death in the Deep Gut that he thinks it is a little thing and does not mind dealing it out.
And when he stops shooting it is very quiet, just the rubbery lisp of the corpses settling and a quick bony rattle that Katherine slowly recognizes as the sound of her own teeth chattering.
From the corners of the hall Historians came creeping. There were more of them than Katherine had feared. In the flicker of battle she had thought she saw all of them shot, but, although some were wounded, the only ones dead were a man called Weymouth, who she had never spoken to, and Dr Arkengarth. The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.
Bevis Pod knelt staring at the gun in his hands, and his hands were shaking, and blue smoke unravelled from the mouth of the gun and drifted up in scrolls and curlicues towards the roof.
Pomeroy came stumping up the stairs. His wig had been blown off and he was nursing a wound on his arm where a splinter of bone had cut him. “Look at that!” he said. “I must be the first person to be harmed by a dinosaur for about seventy million years!” He blinked at Katherine and Bevis, then at the fallen Engineers. None of them were laughing at his little joke. “Well!” he said. “Well, eh? Gosh! We showed them! As soon as I told the others what was going on we all agreed it wouldn’t do. Well, most of us did. The rest are locked in the canteen, along with any apprentices we thought might support Crome’s men. You should have seen us, Kate! ‘We won’t let them take Miss Valentine!’ we all said, and we didn’t. It goes to show, you know. An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!”
“Or
Katherine found the fallen satchel, lying in the muck and blood on the stairs. It seemed to be undamaged, except for some unpleasant stains. “I’ve got to go to Top Tier. Stop MEDUSA. It’s the only way. I’ll go to the elevator station and…”
“No!” Clytie Potts came bounding up the steps from the front entrance. “A couple of Engineers who were stationed outside got away,” she said. “They’ll have raised the alarm. There’ll be a guard on the elevators, and more security men here at any minute. Stalkers too, probably.” She met Pomeroy’s worried gaze and dipped her head as if it was all her fault. “Sorry, CP.”
“That’s all right, Miss Potts.” Pomeroy slapped her kindly on the shoulder, almost knocking her over. “Don’t worry, Katherine. We’ll keep the devils busy here, and you can sneak up to Top Tier by the Cat’s Creep.”
“What’s that?” asked Katherine.
“It’s the sort of thing Historians know about and everybody else has forgotten,” said Pomeroy, beaming. “An old stairway, left over from the first days of London when the elevator system couldn’t always be relied on. It goes up from Tier Three to Top Tier, passing through the Museum on the way. Are you ready to travel?”
She wasn’t, but she nodded.
“I’m going with her,” said Bevis.
“No!”
“It’s all right, Kate. I want to.” He was turning dead Engineers over, looking for a coat without too many holes in. When he found one he began to fumble with the rubber buttons. “If the Engineers see you walking about alone up there they’ll guess what happened,” he explained. “But if I’m with you, they’ll think you’re a prisoner.”
“He’s right, Kate,” said Pomeroy, nodding, as Clytie Potts helped the young Engineer into the coat and wiped away the worst of the blood with the hem of her robe.
He checked his watch. “Eight-thirty. MEDUSA goes off at nine, according to the Goggle-screens. That should give you plenty of time to do whatever you’re planning to do. But we’d better start you on your way, before those Engineers get back with reinforcements.”
33. WINE AND NIBBLES AND THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA
The Jenny Haniver was filled with memories of Anna Fang; the mark of her mouth on a dirty mug, the print of her body on the unmade bunk, a half-read book on the flight deck, marked with a ribbon at page 205. In one of the lockers Hester found a chest full of money; not just bronze coins but silver taels and golden sovereigns, more money than she or Tom had ever seen in their lives.
“She was rich!” she whispered.
Tom turned round in the pilot’s seat and stared at the money. All through their long flight from Shan Guo he had not thought twice about taking the airship; he felt as if they were just borrowing her to finish a job that Miss Fang would have wanted done. Now, watching Hester lift the tinkling handfuls of coin, he felt like a thief.
“Well,” said Hester, snapping the treasure-chest shut, “It’s no use to her where she’s gone. And no use to us, since I expect we’ll soon be joining her there.” She glanced up at him. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
He shook his head, although the truth was that the anger he had felt earlier had drained away during his struggles to master the airship and steer it westwards through the fickle mountain weather. He was starting to feel afraid, and starting to remember Katherine and wonder what would become of her when her father was dead. But he still wanted to make Valentine pay for all the misery he had caused. He started scanning the radio frequencies
