Mortal Engines

He pulled out his lighter and carefully lit a corner of the form, folding it into the ashtray on his desk as it burned. Then he went back to his pacing, and Katherine sat and watched him. In the ten years since she arrived in London Katherine had come to think of him as her best friend as well as her father. They liked the same things, and laughed at the same jokes, and never kept secrets from each other—but she could see that he was keeping something from her about this girl. She had never seen him so worried by anything. “Who is she, Father?” she asked. “Do you know her from one of your expeditions? She is so young, and so… Whatever happened to her face!”

There were footsteps, a knock at the door, and Pewsey burst into the room. “Lord Mayor’s on his way, Chief.”

“Already?” gasped Valentine.

“ ’Fraid so. Gench just saw him coming across the park in his bug. Said he didn’t look pleased.”

Valentine didn’t look pleased either. He grabbed his robes from the chair-back where they had been flung and started trying to make himself presentable. Katherine stepped forward to help, but he waved her away, so she kissed him quickly on the cheek and hurried out with Dog trotting behind her. Through the big oval windows of the drawing room she could see a white official bug pulling in through the gates of Clio House. A squad of soldiers ran ahead of it, dressed in the bright red armour of the Beefeaters, the Lord Mayor’s personal bodyguard. They took up positions around the garden like ugly lawn ornaments as Gench and one of the other servants hurried forward to open the bug’s glastic lid. The Lord Mayor stepped out and came striding towards the house.

Magnus Crome had been ruler of London for nearly twenty years, but he still didn’t look like a Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayors in Katherine’s history books were chubby, merry, red-faced men, but Crome was as thin as an old crow, and twice as gloomy. He didn’t even wear the scarlet robes that had been the pride and joy of other mayors, but still dressed in his long white rubber coat and wore the red wheel of the Guild of Engineers upon his brow. Those earlier Lord Mayors had had their Guild-marks removed to show that they were serving the whole of London, but things had changed when Crome seized power—and even if some people said it was unfair for one man to be master of the Engineers and Lord Mayor, they still admitted that Crome made a good job of running the city.

Katherine didn’t like him. She had never liked him, even though he had been so good to her father, and she was not in any mood to meet him this morning. As soon as she heard the front door iris open she hurried back into the corridor and started up it, calling softly for Dog to follow her. She stopped as soon as she was around the first bend, hidden in a shallow alcove, resting the tips of her fingers on the wolfs head to keep him still. She could tell that some terrible trouble had overtaken her father, and she was not going to let him keep the truth from her as if she was still a little girl.

A few seconds later she saw Gench arrive at the door to the atrium, clutching his hat in his hands. “This way, yer worshipful honour,” he mumbled, bowing. “Mind yer step, yer Mayorness.”

Close behind came Crome. He paused for a moment, his head flicking from side to side in an oddly reptilian way, and Katherine felt his gaze sweep the corridor like a wind from the Ice Wastes. She squeezed herself tighter into the alcove and prayed to Quirke and Clio that he would not see her. For a moment she could hear his breathing and the faint squeaks and creakings of his rubber coat. Then Gench led him into the atrium, and the danger was past.

With one hand firmly on Dog’s collar she crept back to the door and listened. She could hear Father’s voice and imagined him standing beside the ornamental fountain while his men showed Crome to a seat. He started to make some polite comment about the weather, but the cold, thin voice of the Lord Mayor interrupted him. “I have been reading your report of last night’s escapade, Valentine. You assured me that the whole family had been dealt with.”

Katherine flinched away from the door as though it had burned her. How dare the old man talk to Father like that! She did not want to hear any more, but curiosity got the better of her and she set her ear against the wood again.

“…a ghost from my past,” Father was saying. “I can’t imagine how she escaped. And Quirke alone knows where she learned to be so agile and cunning. But she is dead now. So is the boy who caught her, poor Natsworthy…”

“You are sure of that?”

“They fell out of the city, Crome.”

“That means nothing. We are travelling over soft ground; they may have survived. You should have sent men down to check. Remember, we don’t know how much the girl knew of her mother’s work. If she were to tell another city that we have MEDUSA, before we are ready to use it…”

“I know, I know,” said Valentine irritably, and Katherine heard a chair creak as he flung himself down in it. “I’ll take the 13th Floor Elevator back and see if I can find the bodies…”

“No,” ordered Crome. “I have other plans for you and your airship. I want you to fly ahead and see what lies between London and its goal.”

“Crome, that is a job for a Planning Committee scout-ship, not the Elevator… .”

“No,” snapped Crome again. “I don’t want too many people to know where we are taking the city. They will find out when the time is ripe. Besides, I have a task in mind that only you can be trusted with.”

“And the girl?” asked Valentine.

“Don’t worry about her,” said the Lord Mayor. “I have an agent who can be relied on to track her down and finish the job you failed to do. Concentrate on preparing your airship, Valentine.”

The meeting was at an end. Katherine heard the Lord Mayor getting ready to leave, and hurried away up the corridor before the door opened, her mind whirling faster than one of the tumble-dryers in the London Museum’s Hall of Ancient Technology.

Back in her room she sat down to wonder about the things she had heard. She had hoped to solve a mystery, but instead it had grown deeper. All she was sure of was that Father had a secret. He had never kept anything from her before. He always told her everything, and asked her opinion, and wanted her advice, but now he was whispering with the Lord Mayor about the girl being “a ghost from his past” and some agent being sent back to look for her and do… what? Could Tom and the assassin really still be alive? And why was the Lord Mayor packing Father off on a reconnaissance flight amid such secrecy? And why didn’t he want to say where London was going? And what, what on earth was MEDUSA?

6. SPEEDWELL

All that day they struggled onwards, trudging along in the scar that London had clawed through the soft earth of the Hunting Ground. The city was never out of their sight, but it grew smaller and smaller, more and more distant, pulling away from them towards the east, and Tom realized that it might soon be lost for ever beyond the horizon. Loneliness wrenched at him. He had never much enjoyed his life as an Apprentice Historian (Third Class), but now his years in the Museum felt like a beautiful, golden dream. He found himself missing fussy old Dr Arkengarth and pompous Chudleigh Pomeroy. He missed his bunk in the draughty dormitory and the long hours of work, and he missed Katherine Valentine, although he had known her for only a few minutes. Sometimes, if he closed his eyes, he could see her face quite clearly, her kind grey eyes and her lovely smile. He was sure that she didn’t know what sort of man her father was…

“Watch where you’re going!” snapped Hester Shaw, and he opened his eyes and realized that he had almost led her over the brink of one of the gaping track-marks. On they went, and on, and Tom started to think that what he missed most about his city was the food. It had never been up to much, the stuff they served in the Guild canteen, but it was better than nothing, and nothing was what he had now. When he asked Hester Shaw what they were supposed to live on out here she just said, “I bet you wish you hadn’t lost my pack for me now, London boy. I had some good dried dog meat in my pack.”

In the early afternoon they came across a few dull, greyish bushes that London’s tracks had not quite buried, and Hester tore some leaves off and mashed them to a pulp between two stones. “They’d be better cooked,” she said, as they ate the horrid vegetable goo. “I had the makings of a fire in my pack.”