Mortal Engines

24 AN AGENT OF THE LEAGUE

The strange light in the north had died away and the long thunderclap had spent itself, echoing and re-echoing from the walls of the old volcano. Mastering their panicked horses, the men of the Black Island came on along the margins of the bog amid a drum-roll of galloping hooves and the torn-silk sound of windblown torches.

Tom raised his hands and shouted, “We’re friends! Not pirates! Travellers! From London!” But the horsemen were in no mood to listen, even the few who understood. They had been hunting survivors from the sunken suburb all day, they had seen what Peavey’s pirates had done in the fishing villages along the western shore, and now they shouted to each other in their own language and galloped closer, raising their bows. A grey-feathered arrow thudded into the ground at Tom’s feet, making him stumble backwards. “We’re friends!” he shouted again.

The leading man drew his sword, but another rider spurred in front of him, shouting something in the Island tongue, then in Anglish. “I want them alive!”

It was Anna Fang. She reined in her horse, swung herself down from the saddle and ran towards Tom and Hester, her coat flapping against the firelight like a red flag. She wore a sword in a long scabbard on her back, and on her breast Tom saw a bronze badge in the shape of a broken wheel—the symbol of the Anti-Traction League.

“Tom! Hester!” She hugged them one by one, smiling her sweetest smile. “I thought you were dead! I sent Lindstrom and Yasmina to look for you, the morning after the fight at Airhaven. They found your balloon wrecked in those horrible marshes, and said you must be dead, dead. I wanted to search for your poor bodies, but the Jenny had been damaged, and I was so busy helping guide the town down to the repair-yard here… But we said prayers for you, and made funeral sacrifices to the gods of the sky. Do you think we could ask them for a refund?”

Tom kept quiet. His chest was hurting so that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. Anyway, the badge on the aviatrix’s coat told him that Peavey’s stories had been true: she was an agent of the League. He wasn’t charmed any more by her kindness and her tinkling laugh.

She shouted something over her shoulder to the waiting riders, and a couple jumped down from their ponies and led them forward, staring in wonder at Shrike’s corpse. “I have to leave you for a while,” she explained. “I’m taking the Jenny north to see what devilry has lit up the sky. The islanders will look after you. Can you ride?”

Tom had never even seen a horse before, let alone sat on one, but he was so dazed with pain and shock that he could not protest as they heaved him up into the saddle of a shaggy little pony and started to lead it 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.”

“The people will not like that,” Vambrace warns. “They have had their victory, now they want the spoils. The scrap metal and spare parts from that conurbation—”

“I have not brought London all this way for scrap metal and spare parts,” Crome interrupts. He stands at the handrail on the roofs rim and stares east. He can already see the white summits of high mountains on the horizon, like a row of pearly teeth. “We must press on. A few more days will bring us within range of the Shield-Wall. I have announced a public holiday, and a reception at the Guildhall to mark the great event. Think of it, Vambrace! A whole new hunting ground!”

“But the League know we are coming now,” warns Vambrace. “They will try to stop us.”

Crome’s eyes are bright and cold, gazing at the future. He says, “Valentine has his orders. He will deal with the League.”

And so London kept moving, dragging itself eastward as the smoke of the dead conurbation towered up into the sky behind, and Katherine walked to the elevator stations through the wet wreckage of last-night’s celebrations. Broken Chinese lanterns blew across the shuddering deckplates, and men in the red livery of the Recycling Department wheeled bins around, gathering up abandoned party-hats and soggy banners whose messages were still dimly to be read: We V Magnus Crome and Long Live London. Dog played chase with a billowing paperchain, but Katherine called him sharply to heel. This was no time for games.

At least in the Museum there were no banners and no paperchains. The Historians’ Guild had never been as quick as the rest of London to welcome new inventions from the Engineers, and they made no exception for MEDUSA. In the dusty shadows of the exhibition galleries there was a decent silence, as befitted the morning after the death of a whole city. The sounds of the streets outside seemed muffled, as if thick, soft curtains of time hung in the dim air between the display cabinets. The quietness helped Katherine to gather her thoughts, and by the time she reached Chudleigh Pomeroy’s office she was quite clear about what she had to say.

She had not yet told Mr Pomeroy what she had learned in the Engineerium, but he had seen how shaken she was when he left her at Clio House the night before. He did not seem surprised to find her and Dog at his door.

“Mr Pomeroy,” she whispered, “I have to talk to you. Is Bevis here? Is he all right?”

“Of course,” he said at once. “Come in!”

Bevis Pod was waiting for her in the little teak-panelled office, dressed in borrowed Historian’s robes, his pale skull looking as fragile as an eggshell in the dim yellow glow of the Museum lamps. She wanted to run to him and hold him and apologize for what she had led him into, but crammed in around him were about a dozen Historians, some perching on the arms of chairs and the corners of Pomeroy’s desk. They all looked up guiltily at Katherine, and she looked back at them with a sudden, horrible fear that Pomeroy had betrayed her.

“Don’t worry,” said Pomeroy kindly. “If Pod’s to be a guest of the Museum I thought my fellow Historians should be introduced to him. None of us are friends of the Lord Mayor. We have agreed that Apprentice Pod can stay as long as necessary.”

The Historians made a space for her next to Bevis. “Are you all right?” she asked him, and was relieved when he managed a nervous smile. “Not bad,” he whispered. “It’s strange here. All this wood everywhere, and old stuff. But the Historians are very kind…”

Katherine looked around the room at them. She knew many of them by sight; Dr Arkengarth, Dr Karuna, Professor Pewtertide, young Miss Potts, Norman Nancarrow from Prints and Paintings and Miss Plym, who was sniffling into her hankie.

“We’ve been talking about the destruction of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth,” said Pomeroy, pressing a hot mug of cocoa into her hands. “This horrible MEDUSA device.”

“Everybody else seems to think it’s wonderful,” said Katherine bitterly. “I could hear them laughing and shouting ‘Good old Crome’ half the night. I know they’re relieved that we didn’t get eaten, but… Well, I don’t think blowing up another city is anything to be happy about.”

“It’s a disaster!” agreed old Dr Arkengarth, wringing his bony hands. “The vibrations from that vile machine played havoc with my ceramics!”

“Oh, bother your ceramics, Arkengarth,” snapped Pomeroy, who could see how upset Katherine was. “What about Panzerstadt-Bayreuth? Burned to a cinder!”

“That’s what comes of the Engineers’ obsession with Old-Tech!” said Professor Pewtertide. “Countless centuries of history to learn from, and all they are interested in is a few ancient machines!”

“And what did the Ancients ever achieve with their devices anyway?” whined Arkengarth. “They just made a horrible mess of their world and then blew themselves up!”

The others nodded dolefully.

“There was a great museum in Panzerstadt-Bayreuth,” said Dr Karuna.

“I believe they had some wonderful paintings,” agreed Nancarrow.

“Unique examples of 30th Century c-c-cabinet-making!” wailed Miss Plym, and collapsed in tears on Arkengarth’s knobbly shoulder.

“You must excuse poor Moira, Katherine,” whispered Pomeroy. “She had terrible news this morning. Crome has ordered that our furniture collection be broken up to feed the furnaces. It’s the fuel shortage, you see, a result of this mad journey east.”

Katherine couldn’t have cared less about furniture or ceramics at that moment, but she felt glad that she was not the only one in London appalled by what the Lord Mayor had unleashed. She took a deep breath, then quickly explained what she and Bevis had heard in the Engineerium; about MEDUSA and the next step in Crome’s great plan; the attack on the Shield-Wall.

“But that’s terrible!” they whispered when she had finished.

“Shan Guo is a great and ancient culture, Anti-Traction League or no Anti-Traction League. Batmunkh Gompa can’t be blown up…!”

“Think of all those temples!”

“Ceramics!”

“Prayer-wheels…”

“Silk paintings…”

“F-f-furniture!”

“Think of the people!” said Katherine angrily. “We must do something!”

“Yes! Yes!” they agreed, and then all looked sheepishly at her. After twenty years of Crome’s rule they had no idea how to stand up to the Guild of Engineers.

“But what can we do?” asked Pomeroy at last.

“Tell people what is happening!” urged Katherine. “You’re Acting Head Historian. Call a meeting of the Council! Make them see how wrong it is!”

Pomeroy shook his head. “They won’t listen, Miss Valentine. You heard the cheering last night.”

“But that was only because Panzerstadt-Bayreuth had been going to eat us! When they leam that Crome plans to turn his weapon on yet another city. …”

“They’ll just cheer all the louder,” sighed Pomeroy.

“He has packed the other Guilds with his allies anyway,” observed Dr Karuna. “All the great old Guildsmen are gone; dead or retired or arrested on his orders. Even our own apprentices are as besotted with Old-Tech as the Engineers, especially since Crome foisted his man Valentine on us as Head Historian… Oh, I mean no offence, Miss Katherine…”

“Father isn’t Crome’s man,” said Katherine angrily. “I’m sure he’s not! If he knew what Crome was planning he would never have helped him. That’s probably why he was packed off on this reconnaissance mission, to get him out of the way. When he gets home and finds out he’ll do something to stop it. You see, it was he who found MEDUSA in the first place. He would be horrified to think of it killing all those people. He will want to make amends, I’m sure he will!”

She spoke so passionately that some of the Historians believed her, even the ones like Dr Karuna who had been passed over for promotion when Crome put Valentine in charge of their Guild. As for Bevis Pod, he watched her with shining eyes, filled with a feeling that he couldn’t even name; something that they had never taught him about in the Learning Labs. It made him shiver all over.

Pomeroy was the first to speak. “I hope you’re right, Miss Valentine,” he said. “Because he is the only man who can hope to challenge the Lord Mayor. We must wait for his return.”

“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 Wall, and he saw that it was a city, a vertical city with hundreds of terraces and balconies and windows all carved into the black rock, tier upon tier of shops and barracks and houses with balloons and brightly coloured kites drifting up and down between them like petals.

“Batmunkh Gompa,” announced Miss Fang. “The City of Eternal Strength. Although the people who call it that have never heard of MEDUSA, of course.”

It was beautiful. Tom, who had always been taught that static settlements were dingy, squalid, backward places, went to the window and stared, and Hester came and pressed her face to the glass beside him, safe behind her veil and almost girlish. “Oh! It’s just like the cliffs on Oak Island where the sea-birds nest!” she cried. “Look! Look!” Down at the base of the Wall a lake shone azure blue, flecked with the sails of pleasure-boats. “Tom, we’ll go swimming, I’ll teach you how…”

The Jenny Haniver landed among some other merchant ships at a mooring-terrace halfway down the Wall, and Miss Fang led Tom and Hester to a waiting balloon that took them up again past parks and tea-shops to the governor’s palace; the ancient monastery from which Batmunkh Gompa took its name, whitewashed and many-windowed, carved out of the steep side of the mountain at the Wall’s end. Other balloons were converging on the landing deck below the palace gardens, their envelopes bright in the mountain sunlight, and in one of the dangling baskets Tom saw Captain Khora waving.

They met on the landing deck, the young airman touching down just ahead of them and running across to embrace Miss Fang and help her friends out of the skittish gondola. He had flown here from Airhaven the morning after Shrike’s attack, and he seemed amazed and happy to see Tom and Hester alive. Turning to the aviatrix he said, “The Governor and his officers are eager for your report, Feng Hua. Terrible rumours have reached us about London…”

It was good to meet a friendly face in this strange new city, and Tom fell into step beside Khora as he led the newcomers up the long stair to the palace entrance. He remembered seeing a trim Achebe 2100 berthed at one of the lower platforms and asked, “Was that your machine we saw at the mooring-place, the one with oxhide outriggers?”

Khora laughed delightedly. “That old air-scow? No, thank the gods! My Mokele Mbembe is a warship, Tom. Every ally of the League supplies a ship to the Northern Air-Fleet, and they are stabled together, up there.” He stopped and pointed, and Tom saw the gleam of bronze doors far up near the summit of the Wall. “The High Eyries.”

“We’ll take you up there one day, Tom,” promised Miss Fang, leading them past the warrior-monks who guarded the door and on into a maze of cool stone corridors. “The League’s great Air Destroyers are one of the wonders of the skies! But first, Governor Khan must hear Hester’s story.”

Governor Ermene Khan was a gentle old man with the long, mournful face of a kindly sheep. He welcomed them all into his private quarters and gave them tea and honey-cakes in a room whose round windows looked down towards the lake of Batmunkh Nor, gleaming among patchwork farmlands, far below. For a thousand years his family had helped to man the Shield-Wall, and he seemed dazed by the news that all his guns and rockets were suddenly useless. “No city can pass Batmunkh Gompa,” he kept saying, as the room filled with officers eager to hear the aviatrix’s advice. “My dear Feng Hua, if London dares to approach us, we will destroy it. As soon as it comes in range—boom!”

“But that is what I’m trying to tell you!” cried Miss Fang impatiently. “London doesn’t need to come within range of your guns. Crome will park his city a hundred miles away and burn your precious Wall to ashes! You have heard Hester’s story. I believe that the machine Valentine stole from her mother was a fragment of an ancient weapon—and what happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth proves that the Guild of Engineers have managed to restore it to working order.”

“Yes, yes,” said an artillery officer, “so you say. But can we really believe that Crome has found a way to reactivate something that has been buried since the Sixty Minutes War? Perhaps Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was just destroyed by a freak accident.”

“Yes!” Governor Khan clutched gratefully at the idea. “A meteorite, or some sort of gas-leak…” He stroked his long beard, reminding Tom of one of the dithery old Historians back at the London Museum. “Perhaps Crome’s city will not even come here… Perhaps he has other prey in mind?”

But his other officers were more ready to believe the Wind-Flower’s report. “He’s coming here, all right,” said one, an aviatrix from Kerala, not much older than Tom. “I took a scout-ship west the day before yesterday, Feng Hua,” she explained, with an adoring look at Miss Fang. “The barbarian city was less than five hundred miles away, and approaching fast. By tomorrow night MEDUSA could be within range.”

“And there have been sightings of a black airship in the mountains,” put in Captain Khora. “The ships sent to intercept it never returned. My guess is that it was Valentine’s 13th Floor Elevator, sent to spy out our cities so that London can devour them.”

Valentine! Tom felt a strange mix of pride and fear at the thought of the Head Historian on the loose here in the very heart of Shan Guo. Beside him, Hester tensed at the mention of the explorer’s name. He looked at her, but she was staring past him, out through the open windows towards the mountains as if she half expected to see the 13th Floor Elevator go flying past.

“No city can pass the Shield-Wall,” said Governor Khan, loyal to his ancestors, but he did not sound convinced any more.

“You must launch the Air-Fleet, Governor,” Miss Fang insisted, leaning forward in her seat. “Bomb London before they can bring MEDUSA into range. It’s the only way to be sure.”

“No!” shouted Tom, springing up so that his chair fell backwards with a clatter. He couldn’t believe what she had said. “You said we were coming here to warn people! You can’t attack London! People will get hurt! Innocent people!” He was thinking of Katherine, imagining League torpedoes crashing into Clio House and the Museum. “You promised!” he said weakly.

“Feng Hua does not make promises to savages,” snapped the Keralan girl, but Miss Fang hushed her. “We will just hit the Gut and tracks, Tom,” she said. “Then the Top Tier, where MEDUSA is housed. We do not seek to harm the innocent, but what else are we to do, if a barbarian city chooses to threaten us?”

“London’s not a barbarian city!” shouted Tom. “It’s you who are the barbarians! Why shouldn’t London eat Batmunkh Gompa if it needs to? If you don’t like the idea, you should have put your cities on wheels long ago, like civilized people!”

A few of the League officers were shouting angrily at him to be quiet, and the Keralan girl had drawn her sword, but Miss Fang calmed them with a few words and turned her patient smile to Tom. “Perhaps you should leave us, Thomas,” she said firmly. “I will come and find you later.”

Tom’s eyes stung with stupid tears. He was sorry for these people, of course he was. He could see that they weren’t savages, and he didn’t really believe any more that they deserved to be eaten, but he couldn’t just sit by and listen to them planning to attack his home.

He turned to Hester in the hope that she would take his side, but she was lost in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing and re-tracing the scars under her red veil. She felt guilty and stupid. Guilty because she had been happy in the air with Tom, and it was wrong to be happy while Valentine was wandering about unpunished. Stupid because, when he gave her the shawl, she had started to hope that Tom really liked her, and thinking of Valentine made her remember that nobody could like her, not in that way, not ever. When she saw him looking at her she just said, “They can kill everybody in London for all I care, so long as they save Valentine for me.”

Tom turned his back on her and stalked out of the high chamber, and as the door rolled shut behind him he heard the Keralan girl hiss, “Barbarian!”

Alone, he mooched down to the terrace where the taxi-balloons waited and sat on a stone bench there, feeling angry and betrayed and thinking of things that he should have said to Miss Fang, if only he had thought of them in time. Below him the rooftops and terraces of Batmunkh Gompa stretched away into the shadows below the white shoulders of the mountains, and he found himself trying to imagine what it must be like to live here and wake up every day of your life to the same view. Didn’t the people of the Shield-Wall long for movement and a change of scene? How did they dream, without the grumbling vibrations of a city’s engines to rock them to sleep? Did they love this place? And suddenly he felt terribly sad that the whole bustling, colourful, ancient city might soon be rubble under London’s tracks.

He wanted to see more. Going over to the nearest balloon-taxi, he made the pilot understand that he was 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 Jenny Haniver.) But this man was different; something about him snagged Tom’s gaze and would not let it go.

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, “Bones of a Blue Whale, Discovered by Mrs P. Shaw, Freelance Archaeologist”.

Pandora Shaw, thought Katherine, recalling the name she had seen in the Museum catalogue. Not Hester. Of course not. But just to get Dr Arkengarth out of lecture-mode she said, “Did you know her? Pandora Shaw?”

“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 called Shaw who wants to kill Father…

She could hardly manage to force the words out, but at last she asked, “Did she have a child?”

“I think she did, I think she did,” the old man mused. “Yes, I remember Mrs Shaw showing me a picture once when she turned up with some ceramics for my department. Lovely pieces. A decorated vase from the Electric Empire Era, best of its kind in the collection…”

“Do you remember its name?”

“Ah, yes, let me see … EE27190, I believe.”

“Not the vase! The baby!”

Katherine’s impatient shout echoed through the gallery and out into the halls beyond, and Dr Arkengarth looked first startled, then offended. “Well, really, Miss Valentine, there’s no need to snap! How should I remember the child’s name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics. But I believe this particular one was called Hattie or Holly or…”

“Hester!” sobbed Katherine, and turned and ran, ran with Dog at her heels, ran and ran without knowing where or why, since there was no way that she could outrun the dreadful truth. She knew how Father had come by the key to MEDUSA, and why he had never spoken of it. At last she knew why poor Hester Shaw had wanted to kill him.

28. A STRANGER IN THE MOUNTAINS OF HEAVEN

Valentine’s hand drew subtle, complicated shapes in the air above the girl’s bowed head, and her face was calm and smiling, little suspecting that she was being blessed by the League’s worst enemy.

Tom watched from behind a shrine to the sky goddess. His eyes had known who the red-robed monk was all along, and now his brain caught up with them in a flurry of understandings. Captain Khora had said that the 13th Floor Elevator had been haunting the mountains. It must have dropped Valentine off in the crags near Batmunkh Gompa, and he had come the rest of the way on foot, creeping into the city like a thief. But why? What secret mission could have brought him here?

Tom didn’t know what to feel. He was frightened, of course, to be so close to the man who had tried to murder him, but at the same time he was thrilled by Valentine’s daring. What courage it must have taken, to sneak into the great stronghold of the League, under the very noses of London’s enemies! It was the sort of adventure that Valentine had written about, in books that Tom had read again and again, huddled under the blankets in the Third-Class Apprentices’ dorm with a torch, long after lights out.

Valentine finished his blessing and moved on. For a few moments Tom lost sight of him among the crowds in the square, but then he spotted the red robe climbing on up the broad central stairway. He followed at a safe distance, past beggars and guards and hot-food vendors, none of whom guessed that the red-robed figure was anything more than one of those crazy holy men. Valentine had his head bowed now and he climbed quickly, so Tom did not feel in any danger as he hurried along, twenty or thirty paces behind. But he still didn’t know what he should do. Hester deserved to know that her parents’ murderer was here. Should he find her? Tell her? But Valentine must be on some important mission for London, maybe gathering information so that the Engineers would know exactly where to aim MEDUSA. If Hester killed him, Tom would have betrayed his whole city. …

He climbed onward, ignoring the pain of his broken ribs. Around him the terraces of Batmunkh Gompa were speckled with lamps and lanterns, and the envelopes of balloon-taxis glowed from within as they rose and fell, like strange sea-creatures swimming around a coral reef. And slowly he realized that he didn’t want Valentine to succeed in whatever he was planning. London was no better than Tunbridge Wheels, and this place was old, and beautiful. He wouldn’t let it be smashed!

“It’s Valentine!” he shouted, charging up the stairs, trying to warn the passers-by of the danger. But they just stared at him without understanding, and when at last he reached the red-robed man and pulled his hood down he found the round, startled face of a pilgrim monk blinking back at him.

He looked around wildly and saw what had happened. Valentine had taken a different stairway out of the central square, leaving Tom following the wrong red robe. He went running down again. Valentine was barely visible, a red speck climbing through lantern-light towards the high places of the city—and the eyrie of the great air-destroyers. “It’s Valentine!” shouted Tom, pointing, but none of the people around him spoke Anglish; some thought he was mad, others thought he meant that MEDUSA was about to strike. A wave of panic spread across the square, and soon he heard warning gongs sounding in the densely-packed terraces of shops and inns below.

His first thought was to find Hester, but he had no idea where to look. Then he ran to a balloon taxi and told the pilot, “Follow that monk!” but the woman smiled and shook her head, not understanding. “Feng Hua!” Tom shouted, remembering Anna Fang’s League name, and the taxi-pilot nodded and smiled, casting off. He tried to calm himself as the balloon rose. He would find Miss Fang. Miss Fang would know what to do. He remembered how she had trusted him with the Jenny during the flight across the mountains, and felt ashamed for turning on her in the council meeting.

He was expecting the taxi to take him to the governor’s palace, but instead it landed near the terrace where the Jenny Haniver was berthed. The pilot pointed towards an inn which clung to the underside of the terrace above like a house martin’s nest. “Feng Hua!” she said helpfully. “Feng Hua!”

For a panic-stricken moment Tom thought that she had carried him to an inn with the same name as Miss Fang; then, on one of the establishment’s many balconies, he caught sight of the aviatrix’s blood-red coat. He thrust all the money he had at the pilot, shouting, “Keep the change!” and left her staring at the unfamiliar faces of Quirke and Crome as he raced away.

Miss Fang was sitting at a balcony table with Captain Khora and the stern young Keralan flier who had been so angry at Tom’s outburst earlier. They were drinking tea and deep in discussion, but they all leaped up as Tom blundered out on to the balcony. “Where’s Hester?” he demanded.

“Down on the mooring platforms, in one of her moods,” said Miss Fang. “Why?”

“Valentine!” he gasped. “He’s here! Dressed as a monk!”

The inn’s musicians stopped playing, and the sound of the alarm-gongs in the lower city came drifting through the open windows.

“Valentine, here?” sneered the Keralan girl. “It’s a lie! The barbarian thinks he can frighten us!”

“Be quiet, Sathya!” Miss Fang reached across and gripped Tom by the arm. “Is he alone?”

As quickly as he could, Tom told her what he had seen. She made a hissing sound through her clenched teeth. “He has come after our Air-Fleet! He means to cripple us!”

“One man cannot destroy an Air-Fleet!” protested Khora, smiling at the notion.

“You’ve never seen Valentine at work!” said the avia-trix. She was already on her feet, excited at the prospect of crossing swords with London’s greatest agent. “Sathya, go and rouse the guard, tell them the High Eyries are in danger.” She turned to Tom. “Thank you for warning us,” she said gently, as if she understood the agonizing decision he had had to make.

“I’ve got to tell Hester!” he protested.

“Certainly not!” she told him. “She will only get herself killed, or kill Valentine, and I want him kept alive for questioning. Stay here until it is all over.” A last ferocious smile and she was gone, down the steps and out of the panicked inn with Khora at her heels. She looked grim and dangerous and very beautiful, and Tom felt himself brushed by the same fierce love which he knew Khora and the Keralan girl and the rest of the League must feel for her.

But then he thought of Hester, and what she would say when she learned that he had seen Valentine and hadn’t even told her. “Great Quirke!” he shouted suddenly. “I’m going to find her!” Sathya just stared at him, not stern any more, just frightened and very young, and as he ran towards the stairs he shouted back at her, “You heard what Miss Fang said! Raise the alarm!”

Out on to dark ladderways again, down to the mooring platform where the Jenny Haniver hung at anchor. “Hester! Hester!” he shouted, and there she was, coming towards him through the glow of the landing-lights, tugging the red shawl up across her face. He told her everything, and she took the news with the cold, silent glare he had expected. Then it was her turn to run, and he was following her up the endless stairs.

The Wall made its own weather. As Tom and Hester neared the top the air grew thin and chill and big fluttering snowflakes brushed their faces like butterfly wings. They could see lantern-light on a broad platform ahead where a gas tanker was lifting away empty from the High Eyries. Then there was an unbelievable gout of flame shooting out of the face of the Wall, and another and another, as if it were dragons, not airships, that were stabled there. Caught in the blast, the tanker’s envelope exploded, white parachutes blossoming around it as it began to fall. Hester stopped for a moment and looked back, flames shining in her eye. “He’s done it! We’re too late! He’s fired their Air-Fleet!”

They ran on. Tom’s ribs hurt him at every breath and the cold air scorched his throat, but he kept as close behind Hester as he could, crunching through snow along a narrow walkway to the platform outside the eyries. The bronze gates stood open and a crowd of men were pouring out, shielding their faces from the heat of the blaze within. Some of them were dragging wounded comrades, and near the main door Tom saw Khora being tended by two of the ground-crew.

The aviator looked up as Tom and Hester ran to him. “Valentine!” he groaned. “He bluffed his way past the sentries, saying he wanted to bless our airships. He was setting his explosives when Anna and I arrived. Oh, Tom, we never imagined that even a barbarian would try something like this! We weren’t prepared! Our whole Air-Fleet… My poor Mokele Mbembe… .” He broke off, coughing blood. Valentine’s sword had pierced his lung.

“What about Miss Fang?” asked Tom.

Khora shook his head. He did not know. Hester was already stalking away into the searing heat of the hangars, ignoring the men who tried to call her back. Tom ran after her.

It was like running into an oven. He had an impression of a huge cavern, with smaller caverns opening off it, the hangars where the League’s warships were housed. Valentine must have gone quickly from one ship to the next, placing phosphorus bombs. Now only their buckling ribs were visible in the white-hot heart of the blaze. “Hester!” shouted Tom, his voice lost in the roar of the flames, and saw her a little way ahead of him, hurrying down a narrow tunnel that led deeper into the Wall. I’m not following her in there! he thought. If she wants to get herself trapped and roasted, that’s her lookout. … But as he turned back towards the safety of the platform, the ammunition in the gondolas of the burning airships caught, and suddenly there were rockets and bullets flying everywhere, bursting against the stone walls and howling through the air around him. The tunnel was closer than the main entrance and he scrambled into it, whispering prayers to all the gods he could think of.

Fresh air was coming from somewhere in front of him, and he realized that the passage must lead right through the Wall to one of the gun-emplacements on the western face. “Hester?” he shouted. Only echoes replied, muddled with the echoing roar of the fires in the hangar. He pressed on. At a fork in the tunnel lay a huddled shape; a young airman cut down by Valentine’s sword. Tom breathed a sigh of relief that it was not Hester or Miss Fang, and then felt guilty, because the poor man was dead.

He studied the branching tunnel. Which way should he go? “Hester?” he shouted nervously. Echoes. A stray bullet from the hangar came whining past and struck sparks off the stonework by his head. Choosing quickly, he ducked down the right-hand passage.

There was another sound now, closer and sharper than the dull roar of the fires, a thin, birdlike sound of metal on metal. Tom hurried down a slippery flight of steps, saw light ahead and ran towards it. He emerged into the cold and the fluttering snow on a broad platform where a rocket-battery gazed out towards the west. Flames flapped and tore in an iron brazier, lighting the ancient battlements, the sprawled bodies of the rocket crew and the wild shimmer of swords as Valentine and Miss Fang battled each other back and forth across the scrabbled snow.

Tom crouched in the shadows at the tunnel’s mouth, clutching his aching ribs and staring. Valentine was fighting magnificently. He had torn off his monk’s robes to reveal a white shirt, black breeches, long black boots, and he parried and thrust and ducked gracefully under the aviatrix’s blows—but Tom could see that he had met his match. Holding her long sword two-handed, Miss Fang drove him back towards the rocket battery and the bodies of the men he had killed, anticipating every blow he made, feinting and swinging, jumping into the air to avoid a low back-stroke, until at last she smashed the sword from his hand. He went down on his knees to reach for it, but her blade was already at his throat and Tom saw a dark rill of blood start down to stain the collar of his shirt.

“Well done!” he said, and smiled the smile that Tom remembered from that night in the Gut, a kind, amused, utterly sincere smile. “Well done, Feng Hua!”

“Quiet!” she snapped. “This isn’t a game…”

Valentine laughed. “On the contrary, my dear Wind-Flower, it’s the greatest game of all, and my team appears to be winning. Haven’t you noticed that your Air-Fleet is on fire? You really should have tightened up your security arrangements. I suppose because the League has had things its own way for a thousand years, you think you can rest on your laurels. But the world is changing…”

He’s playing for time, thought Tom. But he could not see why. Cornered on this high platform, unarmed, with no chance of escape, what did Valentine hope to gain by taunting the aviatrix? He wondered if he should go forward and pick up the fallen sword and stand by Miss Fang until help arrived, but there was something so powerful and dangerous about Valentine, even in defeat, that he dared not show himself. He listened, hoping to catch the sounds of soldiers coming down the tunnel, and wondering what had become of Hester. All he could hear was the distant clamour of gongs and fire-bells from the far side of the Wall, and Valentine’s flirtatious, half-mocking voice.

“You should come and work for London, my dear. After all, this time tomorrow the Shield-Wall will be rubble. You will need a new employer. Your League is finished…”

And light burst down from above; the harsh beam of an airship’s searchlight raking across the snow. The aviatrix reeled blindly backwards, and Valentine leaped up, snatching his sword, pulling her hard against him as he drove it home. For a moment the two of them stumbled together like drunken dancers at the end of a party, close enough to Tom’s hiding place for him to see the bright blade push out through the back of Miss Fang’s neck and hear her desperate, choking whisper: “Hester Shaw will find you. She will find you and—” Then Valentine wrenched his sword free and let her fall, turning away, leaping up on to the battlements as the 13th Floor Elevator came looming down out of the searchlight’s glare.

29. GOING HOME

The black airship had been drifting in silence, riding the wind to this high rendezvous while the defenders of Batmunkh Gompa were busy with fires and explosions. Now her engines burst into life, churning the drifting snowflakes and drowning out Tom’s cry of horror.

Valentine walked out along the barrel of a rocket launcher as nimbly as an athlete on a bar and sprang, spread-eagling himself for an instant on the naked air before his hands found the rope ladder that Pewsey and Gench had lowered for him. Catching it, he swung himself up into the gondola.

Tom ran forward, and was plunged into sudden darkness as the searchlight snapped off. Rockets from higher batteries came sparkling down to burst against the Elevator’s thick hide. One shattered some glass in the gondola, but the black airship was already powering away from the Wall. The backwash from its propellers slammed into Tom’s face as he knelt over Anna Fang, shaking her in the dim hope that she might wake.

“It’s not fair!” he sobbed. “He waited till you were dazzled! You beat him!” The aviatrix said nothing, but stared past him with a look of stupid surprise, her eyes as dull as dry pebbles.

Tom sat down beside her in the reddening snow and tried to think. He supposed he would have to leave Batmunkh Gompa now, get out fast before London came, but the very thought of moving on again made him weary. He was sick of being swept to and fro across the world by other people’s plans. A thin, hot anger started rising in him as he thought about Valentine, flying home to a hero’s welcome. Valentine was the cause of all this! It was Valentine who had ruined his life, and Hester’s, and put an end to so many more. It was Valentine who had given the Guild of Engineers MEDUSA. Hester had been right; he should have let her kill him when she had the chance…

There was a noise at the far end of the platform and he looked up and saw a black mass of arms and legs and coat hurriedly untangling itself, like a big spider fallen from the ceiling. It was Hester, who had taken the wrong turning as she raced after Valentine and come out in an observation bunker high above. Now here she was, having scrambled down thirty feet of snowy wall and dropped the final ten. Her eye rested for a moment on the fallen aviatrix, then she turned and went to the battlements and stared out at the dark and the dancing snow. “It should have been me,” Tom heard her say. “At least I would have made sure I took him with me.”

Tom watched her. He felt tight and sick and trembly from the grief and rage inside him, and knew that this was how Hester must feel, how she had always felt, ever since Valentine killed her parents. It was a terrible feeling, and he could think of only one way to cure it.

He groped under the collar of Anna’s coat and found the key on its thong and wrenched it free. Then he stood up and went to where Hester was and put his arms around her. It was like hugging a statue, she was so stiff and tense, but he needed to hold on to something so he hugged her anyway. Guns were still firing overhead in the vain hope of hitting the 13th Floor Elevator. He put his face close to Hester’s ear and shouted over the noise, “Let’s go home!”

She looked round at that, puzzled and a little annoyed. “Have you gone funny?”

“Don’t you see?” he shouted, laughing at the crazy idea that had just come creeping into his mind. “Someone’s got to make him pay! You were right; I shouldn’t have stopped you before, but I’m glad I did, because the Gut Police would have killed you and then we’d never have met. Now I can help you get to him, and help you get away afterwards. We’ll go back to London! Now! Together!”

“You have gone funny,” said Hester, but she came with him anyway, helping him find a way back through the Shield-Wall while soldiers came running past them, frightened, soot-stained and far too late, crying out in woe when they saw the bodies on the rocket-platform.

The night sky over Batmunkh Gompa was full of smoke and tatters of singed envelope fabric. Fires were still burning in the High Eyries, but already the roads in the valley were clogged with constellations of small lights, the lanterns of refugees, spilling away into the mountains like water bursting from a breached dam. With the death of the Air-Fleet the Shield-Wall was finished, and its people were fleeing as fast as their feet and mules and ox-carts and freight-balloons could take them.

Down at the mooring platform, ships were already lifting into the smoky sky and turning south. The Keralan girl, Sathya, was trying to rally some panic-stricken soldiers, sobbing, “Stay and hold the Wall! The Southern Air-Fleet will reinforce us! They can be here in less than a week!” But everyone knew that Batmunkh Gompa would be gone by then, and London would be pushing south towards the League’s heartlands. “Stay and hold the Wall!” she begged, but the airships kept lifting past her, lifting past her.

The Jenny Haniver still hung at anchor, silent, dark. The key that Tom had taken from Anna Fang’s body fitted snugly into the lock on the forward hatch, and soon he was standing on the flight-deck, staring at the controls. There were far more of them than he remembered.

“Are you sure we can do this?” asked Hester softly.

“Of course,” said Tom. He tried a few switches. The hatch sprang open again, the cabin lights came on, the coffee machine started making a noise like a polite dog clearing its throat and a small inflatable dinghy dropped from the roof and knocked him over.

“Quite sure?” she asked, helping him up.

Tom nodded. “I used to build model airships when I was little, so I understand the principle. And Miss Fang showed me the controls when we were in the mountains. … I just wish she’d labelled everything in Anglish.”

He thought for a moment, then hauled on another lever, and this time the engines throbbed into life. Out on the mooring platform people turned to stare, and some made the sign against evil; they had heard of Feng Hua’s death and wondered if it was her restless ghost aboard the Jenny Haniver. But Sathya saw Tom and Hester standing at the controls and came running towards them.

Frightened that she would stop him taking off, Tom hunted for the lever which moved the engine pods. Bearings grated as they swivelled into take-off position. He laughed, delighted at the way the airship responded to the touch of his hands on the controls, hearing the familiar creak and huff of the gas-valves somewhere overhead and the clang of the mooring-clamps disengaging. People waved their arms and shouted, and Sathya pulled out a gun, but at the last moment Captain Khora came stumbling out on to the platform, supported by one of his crewmen, and gently took it from her. He looked up at Tom, raising a hand to wish him luck, and the surprising pinkness of his palm and fingertips was what stuck in Tom’s mind as the airship swayed uncertainly up into the sky and climbed through the smoke from the High Eyries. He took one last look down at Batmunkh Gompa, then swung her out over the Shield-Wall and turned her nose towards the west. He was going home.

30. A HERO’S WELCOME

The clouds that had shed their snow on Batmunkh Gompa blew west to fall as yet more rain on London, and it was raining still when the 13th Floor Elevator reached home, early the following afternoon. No crowds were waiting to welcome it. The sodden lawns of Circle Park were deserted, except for some workers from the Recycling Department who were cutting down the last of the trees, but the Guild of Engineers had been warned of Valentine’s return, and as the great airship came nosing down into the wet flare of the landing beacons they ran out on to the apron with the rain beating on their bald heads and the lights making splashy reflections on their coats.

Katherine watched from her bedroom window as the ground-crew winched the airship down and the excited Engineers clustered closer. Now hatches were opening in the gondola; now Magnus Crome was going forward, with a servant holding a white rubber umbrella over him, and now, now Father was coming down the gangplank, easy to recognize even at this distance by his height and his confident stride and the way his all-weather cape filled and flapped in the rising breeze.

The sight of him gave Katherine a twisting feeling deep inside, as if her heart really was about to burst with grief and anger. She remembered how much she had been looking forward to being the first to greet him when he stepped back aboard the city. Now she was not sure that she could even bring herself to speak to him.

Through the wet glass she saw him talk to Crome, nodding, laughing. A surge of white coats hid him from her for a moment, and when she saw him again he had pulled himself away from the Lord Mayor and was hurrying across the soggy lawns towards Clio House, probably wondering why she hadn’t been waiting for him at the quay.

She panicked for a moment and wanted to hide, but Dog was with her, and he gave her the strength she needed. She closed the tortoise-shell shutters and waited until she heard Father’s feet on the stairs, Father’s knock at the door.

“Kate?” came his muffled voice. “Kate, are you in there? I want to tell you all my adventures! I am fresh from the snows of Shan Guo, with all sorts of tales to bore you with! Kate? Are you all right?”

She opened the door just a crack. He stood on the landing outside, dripping with rain, his smile fading as he saw her tearful, sleep-starved face.

“Kate, it’s all right! I’m back!”

“I know,” she said. “And it’s not all right. I wish you’d died in the mountains.”

“What?”

“I know all about you,” she told him. “I’ve worked out what you did to Hester Shaw.”

She let him into the room and shut the door, calling sharply to Dog when he ran to greet him. It was dark with the shutters closed, but she saw Father look at the heap of books spilling from the corner table, then at her. There was a freshly-dressed wound on his neck, blood on his shirt. She twined a finger in her tangled hair and tried hard not to start crying again.

Valentine sat down on the unmade bed. All the way from Batmunkh Gompa, Anna Fang’s last promise had been echoing in the corners of his mind: Hester Shaw will find you. To have the same name thrown at him here, by Katherine, was like a knife in the heart.

“Oh, you needn’t worry,” said Katherine bitterly. “No one else knows. I learned the girl’s name, you see. And Dr Arkengarth told me how Pandora Shaw was murdered, and I’d already found out that she died seven years ago, around the time you got back from that expedition and the Lord Mayor was so pleased with you, so I just put it all together and. …”

She shrugged. The trail had been easy to follow once she had all the clues. She picked up a book she had been reading and showed it to him. It was Adventures on a Dead Continent, his own account of his journey to America. She pointed to a face in a group photograph of the expedition; an aviatrix who stood beside him, smiling. “I didn’t realize at first,” she said, “because her name had changed. Did you kill her yourself? Or did you get Pewsey and Gench to do it?”

Valentine hung his head, angry, despairing, ashamed. A part of Katherine had been hoping against hope that she was wrong, that he would deny it and give her proof that he was not the Shaws’ killer, but when she saw his head go down she knew that he could not and it was true.

He said, “You must understand, Kate, I did it for you…”

“For me?”

He looked up at last, but not at her. He stared at the wall near her elbow and said, “I wanted you to have everything. I wanted you to grow up as a lady, not as an Out-Country scavenger like I had been. I had to find something that Crome needed.

“Pandora was an old comrade, from the American trip, just as you say. And yes, she was with me when I found the plans and access codes to MEDUSA. We never imagined it would be possible to reconstruct the thing. Later Pandora and I went our separate ways; she was an Anti-Tractionist and she married some clod-hopping farmer and settled down on a place called Oak Island. I didn’t know she was still thinking about MEDUSA. She must have made another trip to America, alone this time, and found her way into another part of the same old underground complex, a part we’d missed on the first dig. That’s where she found—”

“A computer-brain,” said Katherine impatiently. “The key to MEDUSA.”

“Yes,” murmured Valentine, astonished at how much she knew. “She sent me a letter, telling me she had it. She knew it was worthless without the plans and codes, you see, and those were in London. She thought we could sell it and share the proceeds. And I knew that if I could give Crome a prize like that it would make my fortune, and your future would be secure!”

“And so you killed her for it,” said Katherine.

“She wouldn’t agree to sell it to Crome,” said her father. “She was an Anti-Tractionist, as I said. She wanted the League to have it. I had to kill her, Kate.”

“But what about Hester?” said Katherine numbly. “Why did you have to hurt her?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said miserably. “She must have woken up and heard something. She was a pretty child. She was about your age, and she looked so like you that she might have been your sister. Perhaps she was your sister. Pandora and I were very close at one time.”

“My sister?” gasped Katherine. “Your own daughter!”

“When I looked up from her mother’s body and saw her staring at me! I had to silence her. I struck wildly at her, and I made a mess of it. I thought she was dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to make sure. She escaped, vanished in a boat. I thought she must have drowned, until she tried to stab me that night in the Gut.”

“And Tom…” Katherine said. “He learned her name, and so you had to kill him too, because if he’d mentioned her to the Historians the truth might have come out.”

Valentine looked helplessly at her. “You don’t understand, Kate. If people discovered who she is and what I have done, not even Crome would be able to protect me. I would be finished, and you would be dragged down with me.”

“But Crome knows, doesn’t he?” asked Katherine. “That’s why you’re so loyal. Loyal as a dog, so long as you get paid and get to pretend that foreign daughter of yours is a High London lady.”

Rain, rain on the windows and the whole room quivering as London dragged itself across the sodden earth. Dog lay with his head on his paws, his eyes darting from his mistress to Valentine and back. He had never seen them fight before, and he hated it.

“I used to think you were wonderful,” said Katherine. “I used to think that you were the best, bravest, wisest person in the world. But you’re not. You’re not even very clever, are you? Didn’t you realize what Crome would use the thing for?”

Valentine looked sharply at her. “Of course I did! This is a town eat town world, Kate. It’s a shame Panzerstadt-Bayreuth had to be destroyed, of course, but the Shield-Wall has to be breached if London is to survive. We need a new hunting ground.”

“But people live there!” wailed Katherine.

“Only Anti-Tractionists, Kate, and most of them will probably get away.”

“They’ll stop us. They’ve got airships…”

“No.” In spite of everything, Valentine smiled, proud of himself. “Why do you think Crome sent me east? The League’s Northern Air-Fleet is in ashes. Tonight MEDUSA will blast us a passage through their famous Wall.” He stood up and reached for her, smiling, as if this victory that he was delivering would put right everything he had done. “Crome tells me that firing is scheduled for nine o’clock. There’s to be a reception at the Guildhall beforehand; wine, nibbles and the dawn of a new era. Will you come with me, Kate? I’d like you to…”

Her last hope had been that he had not known Crome’s mad plan. Now even that was gone. “You fool!” she screamed. “Don’t you understand what he’s doing is wrong? You’ve got to stop him! You’ve got to get rid of his horrible machine!”

“But that would leave London defenceless, in the middle of the Hunting Ground,” her father pointed out.

“So? We will have to carry on as we always have, chasing and eating, and if we meet a bigger city and get eaten ourselves… well, even that would be better than being murderers!”

She couldn’t bear to be in that room with him another second. She ran, and he did not try to stop her, or even call her back, just stood there looking pale and stunned. She left the house and ran sobbing through the rainswept park with Dog at her heels, until the whole of High London was between her and Father. I must do something! was all she could think. I must stop MEDUSA…

She hurried towards the elevator station, while the Goggle-screen loops began to blare the good news of Valentine’s return all over London.

31. THE EAVESDROPPER

London gathered speed, racing towards the mountains. Semi-static towns that had hidden for years on these high steppes were startled out of their torpor by its coming and went lumbering away, leaving behind them green patches of farmland and once a whole static suburb. The city paid no heed to any of them. The whole of London knew the Lord Mayor’s plan by now. In spite of the cold, people gathered on the forward observation decks and peered through telescopes towards Shan Guo, eager for their first glimpse of the legendary Wall.

“Soon!” they told each other.

“This very night!”

“A whole new hunting ground!”

Most people at the Museum were used to Katherine and Dog by now, and nobody paid very much attention as she hastened through the lower galleries with the white wolf trotting behind her. A few noticed the frantic look in her eyes and the tears on her face, but before they could ask her what was wrong or proffer a pocket handkerchief she had swept past, heading towards Mr Nancarrow’s office at a near run.

There she found a smell of turpentine and the lingering scent of the art-historian’s pipe tobacco, but no Nancarrow and no Bevis Pod. She ran back out into the hallway, where a fat Third-Class Apprentice was mopping the floors. “Mr Nancarrow’s in the store-rooms, Miss,” he told her sullenly. “He’s got that funny new bloke with him.”

The funny new bloke was helping Mr Nancarrow drag a picture out of the storage racks when Katherine burst in. It was a huge, gilt-framed painting called “Quirke oversees the rebuilding of London”, by Walmart Strange, and when Bevis dropped the end he was holding it made a crash that echoed and re-echoed through the dusty store-room like a small explosion. “I say, Pod!” complained Nancarrow angrily, but then he too saw Katherine’s face and quickly restrained himself. “You look as if you need a nice cup of tea, Miss Valentine,” he muttered, hurrying away into the maze of racks.

“Kate?” Bevis Pod took a few uncertain steps towards her. “What’s happened?” He wasn’t used to comforting people; it was not the sort of thing an Apprentice Engineer was trained for. He held his arms out stiffly to touch her shoulders, and looked shocked when she flung herself against him. “Er …” he said, “there, there…”

“Bevis,” she sniffled, “it’s up to us now. We have to do something. Tonight…”

“Tonight?” He frowned, struggling to keep up with her rapid, half-sobbed explanations. “But do you mean just us alone? I thought your father was going to help us…”

“He’s not my father any more,” said Katherine bitterly, and realized that it was true. She clung to Bevis as tightly as she could, as if he were a raft that could carry her safe across this mire of misery and guilt. “Father’s Crome’s man. That’s why I’ve got to get rid of MEDUSA, do you see? I have to make amends for the things he’s done. . .”

Nancarrow came pottering back with two tin mugs of tea. “Urn! Oh! Ah!” he mumbled, embarrassed at finding his two young friends in one another’s arms. “I mean … yes. Paperwork. Must dash. Back in an hour or two. Carry on, Pod. . .”

As he left, he almost fell over the fat Third-Class Apprentice, who had been mopping the passage just outside the store-room door. “For Quirke’s sake, Melliphant!” they heard him snap. “Can’t you keep out of the way?”

But Herbert Melliphant could not keep out of the way. Ever since his demotion he had been looking for a handhold that would help him claw his way back up to First Class. This Pod person had caught his eye a few days ago; this stranger who seemed so friendly with the old Guildsmen; who went about with the Head Historian’s daughter; who dressed as an Apprentice but who didn’t sleep with the others in the dormitory or join them for lessons. He had heard on the Goggle-screens that the Guild of Engineers were still hunting the people who had infiltrated their secret meeting, and he was starting to suspect that Dr Vambrace might be very interested in Nancarrow’s little helper. As soon as the old man was out of sight he put down his mop and pail and stepped back to the door.

“. . .the Anti-Traction League can’t defend themselves,” Katherine was saying. “That’s what Father has been doing; spying out their cities and blowing up their Air-Fleet. That’s why it’s up to us.”

“What about the Historians?” asked Bevis.

Katherine shrugged. “They’re too scared to help us. But I can do it alone, I know I can. Father’s invited me to the Lord Mayor’s reception. I’m going to go. I’m going find Father and tell him I’ve forgiven him, and we’ll go to Crome’s party like a happy little family; but while the others are all telling Crome how clever he’s been and eating sausages on sticks I’ll slip away and find MEDUSA and smash it. Do you think a hammer would the trick? I know where Dr Arkengarth keeps the keys to the caretaker’s stores. There’s bound to be a hammer in there. Or a crowbar. Would a crowbar be better?”

She laughed, and saw Bevis flinch at the mad, brittle sound. For a moment she feared that he was about to say something like “Calm down,” or “It can’t possibly work:. . .” She touched his face, his blushing ears, and felt the quick pulse beating in his throat and the muscles flexing as he swallowed.

“A bomb,” he said.

“MEDUSA must be huge—it probably fills half of St Pauls. If you really want to smash it you need explosives.” He looked excited and scared. “The cleaning stuff Museum caretakers use has nitrogen in it and if I mix it with some of Dr Nancarrow’s picture-restoring fluids, and make a timer. . .”

“How do you know all this?” asked Katherine, shocked, because even she had not thought as far as bombs.”

“Basic chemistry,” said Bevis with a shrug. “I did a course, in the Learning Labs. . .” “

“Is that all they think about, your lot?” she whispered. “Making bombs and blowing things up?”

“No, no!” he replied. “But science is like that. You can use it to do whatever you want. Kate, if you really want to do this I’ll make you a bomb you can put in a satchel. If you can get to MEDUSA, leave it near the computer brain and set the timer and run away. Half an hour later…”

Outside, Melliphant’s ear flattened itself against the wood of the door like a pale slug.

Faster and faster and faster. It is as if the Lord Mayor’s eagerness has infected the very fabric of his city; the pistons in the engine-rooms beat as eagerly as his heart, the wheels and tracks race like his thoughts, rushing towards the Wall and the next chapter in London’s great story.

All afternoon Valentine has hunted for Katherine through the park, startling his friends from their suppers by suddenly looming up at the French windows, a dripping wraith in blood-stained clothes, demanding, “Is my daughter here? Have you seen her?” Now he strides to and fro across the drawing room at Clio House, his boots dribbling water on to the muddy carpet as he tries to walk the wet cold of the park: out of his bones, the fear out of his mind.

At last he hears footsteps on trie gravel drive, footsteps in the entrance hall, and Pewsey bursts in, looking as wet and miserable as his master. “I tracked her down, Chief! She’s at the Museum. Been spending a lot of time there lately, according to old Creaber on the front desk…”

“Take me there!” shouts Valentine.

“You sure, Chief?” Pewsey studies his own feet rather than look at his master’s feverish, tear-streaked face. “I think it might be better if you let her alone for a bit. She’s safe at the Museum, ain’t srie, and I reckon she needs a chance to think things over. She’ll come back in her own time.”

Valentine slumps down in a chair, and the old aviator moves quietly around the room, lighting the lamps. Outside, the daylight is fading. “I’ve polished your sword, and laid out your best robes in the dressing room,” says Pewsey gently. “It’s the Lord Mayor’s reception, sir, remember? Wouldn’t do to miss it.”

Valentine nods, staring at his hands, his long fingers. “Why did I go along with his schemes, all these years, Pewsey? Why did I give him MEDUSA?”

“I couldn’t rightly say, sir…”

He stands up with a sigh and heads for the dressing room. He wishes he had Kate’s sharpness; to know so easily what’s right, what’s wrong. He wishes he had the courage to stand up to Crome the way she wants him to, but it is too late for that, too late, too late.

And Crome himself looks up from his dinner (a puree of vegetables and meat-substitute, with just the right amounts of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, et cetera), looks up at the shivering Apprentice Historian whom Vambrace has just thrust into his office and says, “So, Apprentice Melliphant, I gather you have something to tell us?”

32. CHUDLEIGH POMEROY PULLS IT OFF

She found that she could cope. Earlier she had wanted to curl up in a corner and die of grief, but now she was all right. It made her remember the way she had felt when her mother died; flattened by the great numb blow of it and faintly surprised at the way life kept going on. And at least this time she had Dog to help her, and Bevis.

“Kate, I need another bolt, like this one but longer…”

She had come to think of Bevis Pod as a sweet, clumsy, rather useless person, someone who needed her to look after him, and she suspected that that was how the Historians all thought of him as well. But that afternoon she had begun to understand that he was really much cleverer than her. She watched him work, hunched under a portable argon globe in a corner of the Transport gallery, carefully measuring out the right amounts of scrubbing powder and picture-cleaning fluid. Now he was building a timing mechanism out of lengths of copper picture wire and parts from the dashboard of a centuries-old bug, fitting it all into the satchel she had found for him.

“A bolt, Kate?”

“Oh, yes…” She ratched quickly through the pile of spare parts on the floor beside him and found what he wanted. Handed it to him. Checked her watch. It was eight o’clock. Soon she would have to go back to Clio House and fit a smile on to her face and say to Father, “I’m sorry I was so silly earlier—welcome home—please can I come with you to the Lord Mayor’s party?”

“There,” said Bevis, holding up the satchel. “It’s done.”

“It doesn’t look like a bomb.”

“That’s the idea, silly! Look.” He opened it up and showed her the package nestling inside, the red button that she had to push to arm it and the timing mechanism. “It won’t make a very big bang,” he admitted, “but if you can get it close enough to the computer-brain. …”

“I’ll find a way,” she promised, taking it from him. “I’m Valentine’s daughter. If anybody can get to MEDUSA, it’s me.” He looked rueful, she thought, and she wondered if he was thinking of all that wonderful old-world computing power, an Engineer’s dream, about to be sacrificed. “I’ve got to do it,” she said.

“I know. I wish I could come with you, though.”

She hugged him, pressing her face against his face, her mouth against his mouth, feeling him shiver as his hands came up nervously to stroke and stroke her hair. Dog gave a soft growl, jealous perhaps, afraid that he was losing Katherine’s love and would soon be abandoned, like the poor old soft toys on the shelves in her bedroom. “Oh Bevis,” she whispered, pulling back, trembling. “What’s to become of us?”

The sound of distant shouting reached them, echoing up the stairwell from the lower floors. It was too faint to make out any words, but they both knew at once that something must be wrong; nobody ever shouted in the Museum.

Dog’s growl grew louder. He went running to the door and they both followed him, pushing their way quietly out on to the darkened landing. A cool breeze touched their faces as they peered over the handrail and down, the long spiral of stairs dwindling into darkness below with the bronze handrails gleaming. More shouts, then the bang and clatter of something dropped. Torch-beams stabbed a lower landing and they heard the shouting voice quite clear: Chudleigh Pomeroy’s, saying, “This is an outrage! An outrage! You are trespassing on the property of the Guild of Historians!”

The Engineer security team came up the stairs in a slapping rush of rubber-soled boots, torchlight sliding over their coats and their shiny, complicated guns. They slowed as they reached the top and saw Dog’s eyes flashing, his ears flattening backwards as he growled and growled and crouched to spring. Guns flicked towards him, and Katherine grabbed him by the collar and shouted, “He won’t hurt you, he’s just frightened. Don’t shoot…”

But they shot him anyway, the guns giving sharp little cracks and the impact of the bullets wrenching Dog away from her and slamming him back against the wall with a yelp; then silence, and the whispering sound of the big body falling. In the dancing torchlight the blood looked black. Katherine gasped for breath. Her arms and legs were shaking with a quick, helpless shudder that she couldn’t stop. She could not have moved if she had wanted to, but just in case a sharp voice barked, “Stay where you are, Miss Valentine.”

“Dog…” she managed to whine.

“Stay where you are. The brute is dead.”

Dr Vambrace came up the stairs through the thin, shifting smoke. “You too, Pod,” he added, seeing the boy make a twitching move towards the body. He stood on the top step and smiled at them. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you, Apprentice. I hope you’re ashamed of yourself. Give me that satchel.”

Bevis held it out and the tall Engineer snatched it from him and opened it. “Just as Melliphant warned us; a bomb.”

Two of his men stepped forward and hauled the prisoners after him as he turned and started down the stairs. “No!” wailed Katherine, struggling to keep hold of Bevis’s hand as they were dragged apart. “No!” Her voice bounced shrilly back at her from the ceiling and went echoing away down the stairwell, and she thought it sounded frail and helpless, like a child having a tantrum, a child caught playing some stupid, naughty trick and protesting at its punishment. She kicked at the shins of the man who held her, but he was a big man, and booted, and didn’t even wince. “Where are you taking us?”

“You are coming with me to Top Tier, Miss Valentine,” said Vambrace. “You will be quite the talking-point of the Lord Mayor’s little party. As for your sweetheart here, he’ll be taken to the Deep Gut.” He grinned at the little noise Bevis made, a helpless gulped-back squeak of fear. “Oh yes, Apprentice Pod, some very interesting experiences await you in the Deep Gut.”

“It wasn’t his fault!” Katherine protested. She could feel things unravelling, her foolish plan running out of control and lashing backwards to entrap her and Bevis and poor Dog. “I made him help me!” she shrieked. “It’s nothing to do with Bevis!” But Vambrace had already turned away, and her captor clamped a chemical-tasting hand across her mouth to stop her noise.

Valentine’s bug pulls up outside the Guildhall, where the bugs of most of the Guild heads are already parked.

Gench gets out and holds the lid open for his master, then fusses over him like a mother sending her child off to school, brushing his hair off his face and straightening the collar of his best black robe, buffing the hilt of his sword.

Valentine looks absently up at the sky. High, feathery cloud, lit by the fast-sinking sun. The wind is still blowing from the east, and it brings a smell of snow that cuts through his thoughts of Katherine for a moment, making him think again of Shan Guo. Hester Shaw will find you, the Wind-Flower had whispered, dying. But how could she have known about Hester? She could not have met the girl, could she? Could she? Is Hester still alive? Has she made her way somehow to Batmunkh Gompa? And is she waiting in those mountains now, ready to climb back aboard London and try again to kill him—or, worse, to harm his daughter?

Pushing Gench’s big hands away, he says, “If you don’t mind missing the party, boys, it might be worth taking the 13th Floor Elevator up for a spin tonight. Just in case those poor brave fools from the League try anything.”

“Right you are, Chief!” The two old airmen have not been looking forward to the Lord Mayor’s reception—all that finger-food and posh chat. Nothing could cheer them up better than the prospect of a good fight. Gench climbs in next to Pewsey and the bug veers away, startling Engineers and Beefeaters out of its path. Valentine straightens his own tie and walks quickly up the steps into the Guildhall.

The Engineers marched their prisoners through the lower galleries of the Museum to the Main Hall. There was nobody about. Katherine had never seen the Museum as empty as this. Where were the Historians? She knew they couldn’t help her, but she wanted to see them, to know that somebody knew what had become of her. She kept listening for the pattering feet of Dog on the floor behind her, and being surprised when she couldn’t hear them, and then remembering. Bevis was marching next to her, but he wouldn’t look at her, just stared straight ahead as if he could already see the chambers of the Deep Gut and the things that would happen to him there.

Then, at the top of the steps that led down to the main entrance, the Engineers halted.

Down in the foyer, their backs to the big glass doors, the Historians were waiting. While Vambrace’s men were busy upstairs they had raided the display cases in the Weapons Warfare gallery, arming themselves with ancient pikes and muskets, rusty swords and tin helmets. Some had strapped breast-plates over their black robes, and others carried shields. They looked like a chorus of brigands in an amateur pantomime.

“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 her dander, CP!” chirped Moira Plym, hurrying up the steps to stand beside him. “Oh, that’ll teach them to fiddle with my furniture, all right! That’ll show them what happens to—” The visor of the helmet she was wearing snapped shut, muffling the rest.

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 for London’s homing beacon, while Hester hunted through the lockers until she found what she needed; a heavy black pistol and a long, thin-bladed knife.

For one night only, London’s great council chamber has been decked out with lights and banners and turned into a party venue. The heads of the greater and lesser Guilds mingle happily among the green leather benches and sit on the speaker’s dais, chattering excitedly about the new hunting ground, glancing at their watches from time to time as the hour for firing MEDUSA draws closer. Apprentice Engineers tack to and fro among the revellers, handing out experimental snacks prepared by Supervisor Nimmo’s department. The snacks are brown and taste rather peculiar, but at least they are cut into perfectly geometrical shapes.

Valentine pushes his way through the crowd until he finds Crome and his aides, a wedge of white rubber surrounded by the tall black shapes of Stalker security guards. He wants to ask the Lord Mayor what became of the agent he sent after Hester Shaw. He wades towards them, elbowing well-upholstered Councillors aside and catching quick snatches of their conversation: “There’s Valentine, look, back from Shan Quo!”

“Blew up the League’s whole Air-Fleet, so I heard!”

“What charming snacks!”

“Valentine!” cries the Lord Mayor when the explorer finally reaches him. “Just the man we’ve been waiting for!”

He sounds almost jolly. Beside him stand the geniuses who have made MEDUSA work again: Dr Chandra, Dr Chubb and Doctor Wismer Splay, along with Dr Twix, who simpers and bobs a curtsy, congratulating Valentine on his trip to Shan Guo. Behind her the black-clad guards stand still as statues, and Valentine nods at them. “I see you’ve been making good use of the old Stalker parts I brought you, Crome…”

“Indeed,” agrees the Lord Mayor with a chilly smile. “A whole new race of Resurrected Men. They will be our servants and our soldiers in the new world that we are about to build. Some are in action even as we speak, down at the Museum.”

“The Museum?”

“Yes.” Crome watches him slyly, gauging his reactions. “Some of your Historians are traitors, Valentine. Armed traitors.”

“You mean there is fighting? But Kate’s there! I must go to her!”

“Impossible,” the Lord Mayor snaps, gripping his arm as he turns to leave. “Tier Two is out of bounds. The Museum is surrounded by Stalkers and Security teams. But don’t worry. They have strict instructions not to harm your daughter. She will be brought up to join us as soon as possible. I particularly want her to watch MEDUSA in action. And I want you here too, Valentine. Stay.”

Valentine stares at him, past the frozen faces of the other party-goers, in the sudden silence.

“Where does your real loyalty lie, I wonder,” muses Crome. “With London, or with your daughter? Stay.”

“Stay.” As if he’s a dog. Valentine’s hand curls for a moment on his sword-hilt but he knows he will not draw it. The truth is that he is afraid, and all his adventures and expeditions have only been attempts to hide himself from this truth: he is a coward.

He stretches a smile across his trembling face, and bows.

“Your obedient servant, Lord Mayor.”

There was a door in the wall near Natural History, a door that Katherine must have passed hundreds of times without even seeing it. Now, as Pomeroy unlocked it and heaved it open, they heard the strange, echoing moan of wind in a long shaft, mingled with the rumble of the city’s engines. He handed Bevis the key and a torch. “Good luck, Mr Pod. Kate, good luck…”

From somewhere behind him came a great dull boom that set the glass rattling in the display cases. “They’re here,” said Pomeroy. “I’m needed at my post…”

“Come with us!” Katherine begged him. “You’ll be safer on Top Tier, among the crowds…”

“This is my Museum, Miss Valentine,” he reminded her, “and this is where I’ll stay. I’d only get in your way up there.”

She hugged him, pressing her face into his robe and savouring its smell of mothballs and pipe-tobacco. “Your poor Museum!”

Pomeroy shrugged. “I don’t think the Engineers would have let us keep hold of our relics much longer. At least this way we’ll go down fighting.”

“And you might win…”

“Oh, yes,” the old Historian gave a rueful chuckle. “We used to thrash them regularly in the inter-guild football cup, you know. Of course, they didn’t have machine-guns and Stalkers to help them…” He lifted her face and looked into her eyes, very serious. “Stop them, Katherine. Stick a spanner in the works.”

“I’ll try,” she promised.

“We’ll meet again soon,” said Pomeroy firmly, hefting his blunderbuss as he turned away. “You’ve got your father’s gift, Kate: people follow you. Look at the way you stirred us up!”

They heard the cannon roar again as he closed the door on them, and then the clatter of small-arms, closer now and tangled with faint screams.

“There!” said Tom.

They were flying high through thin drifts of cloud, and he was looking down at London, far ahead.

“There!”

It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city’s elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger; a storm-front of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling towards the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn’t look like home.

“There. …” he said again.

“I see it,” said Hester, beside him. “Something’s going on on Top Tier. It’s lit up like a fairground. Tom, that’s where Valentine will be! They must be getting ready to use MEDUSA!”

Tom nodded, feeling guilty at the mention of MEDUSA. He knew that if Miss Fang were here she would be coming up with a plan to stop the ancient weapon, but he did not see what he could do about it. It was too big, too terrible, too hard to think about. Better to concentrate on what mattered to him and Hester, and let the rest of the world look after itself.

“He’s down there,” whispered the girl. “I can feel him.”

Tom didn’t want to go too close, in case the Lord Mayor had set men to watch the skies, or sent up a screen of spotter-ships. He tugged on the controls and felt the big, slow movement as the airship responded. She rose, and London faded to a smudge of speeding light beneath the cloud as he steered her southward and began to circle round.

They climbed out of darkness into darkness, Bevis Pod’s torch flittering on stair after identical metal stair. Their big shadows slid up the walls of the shaft. They didn’t speak much, but each listened to the other’s steady breathing, glad of the company. Katherine kept looking back, expecting to see Dog at her heels.

“Five hundred steps,” whispered Bevis, stopping on a narrow landing and shining his torch upward. The stairs spiralled up for ever. “This must be Tier One. Halfway.”

Katherine nodded, too out-of-breath to speak, too on-edge to rest. Above them the Lord Mayor’s reception must be in full swing. She climbed on, her knees growing stiff, each intake of breath a cold hard ache in the back of her throat, the too-heavy satchel banging against her hip.

Through the windows of the airship Hester could see the Out-Country streaming past, only a hundred or so feet below, scarred with the same ruler-straight trenches that she and Tom had stumbled along on the days after they first met. And there was London, red tail-lights in the darkness, dimming as Tom brought the airship up into the thick poison-fog of the city’s exhaust. He was good at this, she realized, and thought what a pity it was that his plan was not going to work.

The radio crackled into life; London Docks and Harbour Board, demanding their identity codes.

Tom looked back at her, scared, but she knew how to handle this. She went to the radio and flipped the “transmit” switch up and down quickly, garbling her message as if the communications system was shot. “London Airship GE47,” she said, remembering the code name that had come crackling over the inn’s loudspeakers in Airhaven all those weeks before. “We’re taking Shrike back to the Engineerium.”

The radio said something, but she snapped it off. Black smog pressed against the windows, and water droplets condensed on the glass and went quivering off this way and that, leaving wriggly trails.

“I’ll circle the city for twenty minutes and then come in and pick you up,” Tom was saying. “That should give you time to find Valentine and…”

“I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom,” she said. “Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me.”

“I’ll circle back…”

“I’ll be dead.”

“I’ll circle back anyway…”

“There’s no point, Tom.”

“I’ll circle back and pick you up.”

She looked at him and saw tears shining in his eyes. He was crying. He was crying for her, because she was going into danger and he would not see her again, and she thought it was strange that he cared about her that much, and very sweet. She said, “Tom, I wish…” and, “Tom, if I…” and other little broken bits of sentences that petered out in silence, because she didn’t even know herself what she was trying to say, only that she wanted him to know that he was the best thing that had happened to her.

A light loomed out of the swirling dark, then another. They were rising past Tier Three, and very close. Tier Two slid by, with people staring up from an observation deck, and then Circle Park with lanterns strung between the trees. Tom fumbled with the controls and the Jenny went powering forward, low over the rooftops of Knightsbridge and up towards the aft edge of Top Tier. He glanced quickly at Hester. She wanted to hug him, kiss him, something, but there was no time now, and she just gasped, “Tom, don’t get yourself killed,” slammed the hatch-controls to “open” and ran to it and jumped as the airship swung in a shuddery arc over the rim of Top Tier.

She hit the deckplate hard and rolled over and over. The Jenny Haniver was pulling away fast, lit by the sparkling trails of rockets from an air-defence battery on the Engineerium. The rockets missed, darkness swallowed the airship, and she was alone, scrambling into the shadows.

“A single airship, Lord Mayor.” It is a nervous-looking Engineer, a shell-like radio clipped to his ear. “It has pulled clear, but we believe it may have landed a boarding party.”

“Anti-Tractionists on Top Tier?” The Lord Mayor nods, as if this is the sort of little problem that crops up every day. “Well, well. Dr Twix, I think this might be a good opportunity to test your new models.”

“Oh, goody!” trills the woman, dropping a plate of canapes in her excitement. “Come along, my chicks! Come along!”

Her Stalkers turn with a single movement and form up behind her, striding through thrilled party-goers to the exits.

“Bring me the boarders alive!” Crome calls after her. “It would be a pity if they missed the big event.”

34. IDEA FOR A FIREWORKS DISPLAY

T om wiped at his eyes with the heel of one hand and concentrated on his flying, steering the Jenny away from London and up. He wasn’t frightened now. It felt good to be doing something at last, and good to be in charge of this huge, wonderful machine. He turned her eastwards, pointing her nose towards the last faint gleam of day on the summit of Zhan Shan. He would circle for twenty minutes. It felt as if half that time had passed already, but when he checked the chronometers he saw that it was less than two minutes since Hester jumped down into London and-

A rushing, brilliant thing slammed into the gondola, and the blast plucked him out of his seat. He clung to a stanchion and saw papers and instrument panels and sputtering lengths of cable and the shrine with its photographs and ribbons and Miss Fang’s half-read book all rushing out through a jagged hole in the fuselage, tumbling into the sky like ungainly birds. The big windows shattered and the air turned sharp and shimmery with flying glass.

He craned his neck, peering up through the empty windows, trying to see if the envelope was burning. There were no flames, but overhead a great dark shape slid past, moonlight slithering along its armoured envelope. It was the 13th Floor Elevator, pulling past the Jenny and performing a lazy victory-roll far over the foothills of Shan Guo before it came sweeping back to finish him.

Magnus Crome watches his guests crowd out into the square, gazing up at the glare and flicker of the battle taking place above the clouds. He checks his wrist-watch. “Dr Chandra, Dr Chubb, Dr Splay; it is time to deploy MEDUSA. Valentine, come with us. I’m sure you are keen to see what we’ve made of your machine.”

“Crome,” says the explorer, blocking his path, “there is something I must say…”

The Lord Mayor raises an eyebrow, intrigued.

Valentine hesitates. He has been planning this speech all evening, knowing that it is what Katherine would want him to say. Now, faced with the Lord Mayor’s arctic eyes, he falters, stammering a moment. “Is it worth it, Crome?” he says at last. “Destroying the Shield-Wall will not destroy the League. There will be other strongholds to defeat, hundreds of fortresses, thousands of lives. Is it really worth so much, your new hunting ground?”

There is a ripple of amazement among the bystanders. Crome says calmly, “You have left it rather late to have doubts, Valentine. You worry too much. Dr Twix can build whole armies of Stalkers, more than enough to crush any resistance from Anti-Tractionist savages.”

He starts to push past, but Valentine is in front of him again. “Think, Lord Mayor. How long will a new hunting ground support us? A thousand years? Two thousand? One day there will be no more prey left anywhere, and London will have to stop moving. Perhaps we should accept it; stop now, before any more innocent people are killed; take what you have learned from MEDUSA and use it for peaceful purposes…”

Crome smiles. “Do you really think I am so shortsighted?” he asks. “The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving.

Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be travelling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!”

Valentine follows him to the door and out across the square towards St Paul’s. Katherine is right, he keeps thinking. He’s as mad as a spoon! Why didn’t I put a stop to his schemes when I had the chance? Above the clouds, the rockets flare and bang, and the light of an exploding airship washes across the upturned faces of the crowd, who murmur, “Oooooooooh!”

And Hester Shaw crouches at the Tier’s edge as the Resurrected Men stalk by, green eyes sweeping the walls and deckplates, steel claws unsheathed and twitching.

The Cat’s Creep ended in a small circular chamber with stencilled numbers on the sweaty walls and a single metal door. Bevis slipped the key into the lock, and Katherine heard it turn. A crack of light appeared around the door’s edge, and she heard voices outside, a long, tremulous, “Ooooh!”

“We’re in an alley off Paternoster Square,” Bevis said. “I wonder why they sound so excited?”

Katherine pulled out her watch and held it in the thin sliver of light from the door. “Ten to nine,” she said. “They’re waiting for MEDUSA.”

He hugged her one last time and whispered quickly, shyly, “I love you!” Then he pushed her past him through the door and stepped out after her, trying to look like her captor, not her friend, and wondering if any other Engineer had ever said what he had just said, or felt the way he felt when he was with Katherine.

Tom scrambled through the debris in the listing wreck of the Jenny’s gondola. The lights were out and blood was streaming into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, blinding him. The pain of his broken ribs washed through him in sick, giddy waves and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he knew he mustn’t. He fumbled for the rocket controls, praying to all the gods he had ever heard of that they had not been blown away. And sure enough, at the flick of the right switch a viewing scope rose out of the main instrument panel, and he wiped his eyes and saw the dim upside-down ghost of the 13th Floor Elevator framed in the cross-hairs, growing bigger every minute.

He heaved as hard as he could on the firing controls, and felt the deck shift under him as the rockets went shrieking out of their nests beneath the gondola. Dazzling light blossomed as they hit their target, but when he blinked the bright after-images away and peered out the black airship was still there, and he realized that he had barely dented the great armoured envelope, and that he was going to die.

But he had bought himself a few more moments, at least, for the Elevator’s starboard rocket projectors were damaged and she was pulling past him and turning to bring her port array to bear. He tried to calm himself. He tried to think of Katherine, so that the memory of her would be what he took down with him to the Sunless Country, but it was a long time since he had dreamed of her, and he couldn’t really remember what she looked like any more. The only face that he could call to mind was Hester’s, and so he thought of her and the things that they had gone through together, and how it had felt to hold her on the Shield-Wall last night, the smell of her hair and the warmth of her stiff, bony body through the ragged coat.

And from some corner of his memory came the echo of the League rockets that had battered at the 13th Floor Elevator as she banked away from Batmunkh Gompa; the thick crump of the explosions and the small, bright, prickling noise of broken glass.

Her envelope was armoured, but the windows could be broken.

He lurched back to the rocket controls and re-targeted them so that the cross-hairs on the little screen were centred not on the Elevator’s looming gasbags, but on her windows. The gauge beside the viewscope told him he had three rockets left, and he fired them all together, the shattered gondola shivering and groaning as they sprang away towards their target.

For a fraction of a second he saw Pewsey and Gench on their flight-deck, staring at him, faces wide with silent terror. Then they vanished into brightness as the rockets tore in through their viewing windows and their gondola filled with fire. A geyser of flame went tearing up the companion-ladders between the gasbags and blew out the top of the envelope. By the time Tom could see again the huge wreck was veering away from him, fire in her ruined gondola and the hatches of her hold, fire flapping from her steering vanes, fire unravelling from shattered engine-pods, fire lapping inside her envelope until it looked like a vast Chinese lantern tumbling down towards the lights of London.

Katherine stepped out of the alley’s mouth into a running crowd, people all around her looking up, some still clutching drinks and nibbles, their eyes and mouths wide open. She looked at St Paul’s. The dome had not yet opened, so it couldn’t be that that they were staring at. And what was this light, this swelling orange glow that outshone the argon-lamps and made the shadows dance?

At that moment the blazing wreckage of an airship came barrelling out of the sky and crashed against the facade of the Engineerium in a storm of fire and glass and out-flung scythes of blackened metal. A whole engine broke free of the wreck and came cartwheeling across the square towards her, red hot and spraying blazing fuel. Bevis pushed her aside and down. She saw him standing over her, his mouth open, shouting something, and saw a blue eye on the blistered engine cowling as it tore him away, a whirl of limbs, a flap of a torn white coat, his scream lost in the bellow of twisting metal as the wreckage smashed against the Top Tier elevator station.

A blue eye on the cowling. She knew it should mean something, but she could not think what.

She stood up slowly, shaking. There were small fires on the deck all round her, and one great fire in the Engineerium that cast Hallowe’en light across the whole tier. She stumbled to where the blazing engine lay, its huge propeller blades jutting out of the deck-plate like megaliths. Raising her hand to shield her face against the belching heat, she looked for Bevis.

He was lying broken in a steep angle of the debris, twisted in such impossible ways that Katherine knew at once there was no point even calling out his name. The flames were rising, making his coat bubble and drip like melting cheese, heat pressing against her face, turning her tears to puffs of steam, driving her backwards over wreckage and bodies and pieces of bodies.

“Miss Katherine?”

A blue eye on the engine cowling. She could still see the outline, the paint peeling under the tongues of the fire. Father’s ship.

“Miss Katherine?”

She turned and found one of the men from the elevator station standing with her, trying to be kind. He took her by the arm and led her gently away, gesturing towards the main part of the wreck, the scorching firestorm in the Engineerium. “He wasn’t in it, Miss.”

She stared at his smile. She didn’t understand. Of course he had been in it! She had seen him there, his dead, gaping face and the flames rising round him. Bevis, whom she had led here, who had loved her. What was there to smile about?

But the man kept smiling. “He wasn’t aboard, Miss. Your dad, I mean. I saw him not five minutes ago, going into St Paul’s with the Lord Mayor.

She felt the sinister weight of the satchel still hanging from her shoulder, and remembered that she had a job to do.

“Come on, Miss,” said the man. “You’ve had a nasty shock. Come and have a sit down and a nice cup of tea…”

“No,” she said. “I have to find my father.”

She left him there and turned away, stumbling across the square, through panicked crowds in smoke-stained robes and party-frocks, through the long, shivering bray of sirens to St Paul’s.

Hester was darting towards the Guildhall when the explosion lifted her off her feet and flung her out of the shadows and into the harsh spill of light from the blazing Engineerium. She rolled over and over on the quaking deckplate, stunned, her pistol skittering away, her veil torn off. There was a moment of silence, then noises came crowding in; screams, sirens. She shuffled through her memories of the moments before the blast, trying to put them in some sort of order. That light above the rooftops, that burning thing sliding down the sky, had been an airship. The Jenny Haniver. “Tom,” she said, whispering his name to the hot pavement, and felt smaller and more alone than ever before.

She pushed herself up on all fours. Nearby, one of the new Stalkers had been caught by the blast and cut in half, and its legs were stamping aimlessly about and bumping into things. The shawl that Tom had given her blew past. She caught it, knotted it around her neck and turned to look for the fallen gun, only to find another squad of Stalkers, quite unharmed, closing in upon her from behind. Their claws were fire-coloured slashes in the darkness, and firelight lit their long, dead faces, and she realized with a hollow stab of disappointment that this was the end of her.

And above the black, silhouetted rooftops of the Guildhall, beyond the smoke and the dancing sparks, the dome of St Paul’s was starting to open.

35. THE CATHEDRAL

The Jenny Haniver’s shattered gondola moaned like a flute as the west wind blew through it, carrying it swiftly away from London. Tom slumped exhausted at the controls, crumbs of broken glass clinging like grit to his face and hands. He tried to ignore the wild spinning of the pressure gauges as hydrogen leaked from the damaged envelope. He tried not to think about Pewsey and Gench, burning inside their burning gondola, but every time he closed his eyes he saw their screaming faces, as if the black zeroes of their open mouths were etched for ever on to his eyeballs.

When he raised his head he saw London, far to the east. Something was happening to the cathedral, and torrents of pink and green fire were gushing from the Engineerium. Slowly he started to understand what had happened. It was his fault! People must be dead down there, not just Pewsey and Gench but lots of people, and if he had not shot down the 13th Floor Elevator they would still be alive. He wished he had never fired those rockets. It would be better to be dead himself than to sit here watching Top Tier burn and know that it was all his fault.

Then he thought, Hester!

He had promised her he would go back. She would be waiting, down there among the fires. He couldn’t let her down. He took a deep breath and leaned on the controls. The engines choked back into life. The Jenny Haniver turned sluggishly into the wind and started inching back towards the city.

Katherine moved like a sleepwalker through Paternoster Square, drawn towards the transformed cathedral. Around her the fires were spreading, but she barely noticed. Her eyes were fixed on the terrible beauty above her; that white cowl unfolding against the night sky, turning towards the east. She no longer felt afraid. She knew Clio was watching over her, keeping her safe so that she could atone for the dreadful things Father had done.

The guards on the cathedral door were too distracted by the fires to pay much attention to a schoolgirl with a satchel. At first they told her to clear off, but when she insisted that her father was inside and flashed her crumpled gold pass at them they simply shrugged and let her through.

She had never been inside St Paul’s before, but she had seen pictures. They hadn’t looked anything like this.

The pillared aisles and the high, vaulted ceilings were still where they had always been, but the Guild of Engineers had sheathed the walls in white metal and hung argon globes in wire cages from the ceilings. Fat electric cables snaked up the nave, feeding power towards something at the heart of the cathedral.

Katherine walked slowly forward, keeping to the shadows under the pillars, out of the way of the scores of Engineers who were scurrying about checking power-linkages and making notes on clipboards. Ahead of her, the dais under the great dome was filled with strange machinery. A mass of girders and hydraulics supported the weight of the huge cobra-hood that towered up into the night, and around its base stood a forest of tall metal coils, all humming and crackling in a slowly rising surge of power. Engineers were hurrying between them, and going up and down the central tower on metal stairways, and many more were clustered around a nearby console like priests at the altar of a machine god, talking in hushed, excited voices. Among them she saw the Lord Mayor, and beside him, looking grim, was Father.

She froze, safe in the shadows. She could see his face quite clearly. He was watching Crome, and frowning, and she knew he would rather be outside helping with the rescue-work and only the Lord Mayor’s orders kept him here. She forgot for a moment that he was a murderer; she wanted to rush over and hug him. But she was in Clio’s hands now, the agent of History, and she had work to do.

She edged closer, until she was standing in the shelter of an old font at the bottom of the dais steps. From there she had a good view of what Crome and the others were doing. Their console was a cat’s cradle of wires and flexes and rubberized ducts, and in the middle of it sat a little sphere no bigger than a football. Katherine could guess what that was. Pandora Shaw had found it in a deep laboratory of lost America and brought it back with her to Oak Island, and Father had stolen it the night he murdered her. The Engineers had cleaned and repaired it as best they could, replacing damaged circuits with primitive machines that they had cobbled together from Stalkers’ brains. Now Dr Splay sat in front of it, his fingers spidering over an ivory keyboard, typing up green, glowing sequences of numbers on a portable Goggle-screen. A second screen showed a murky image of the view ahead of London, cross-hairs centred on the distant Shield-Wall.

“The accumulators are charged,” somebody said.

“There, Valentine!” said Crome, resting a bony hand on her father’s arm. “We are ready to make history.”

“But the fires, Crome…”

“You can play at firemen later,” snapped the Lord Mayor. “We must destroy the Shield-Wall now, in case MEDUSA is damaged by the blaze.”

Splay’s fingers kept clattering on the keyboard, but the other sounds of the cathedral faded away. The Engineers were staring in awe at the coil-forest, where weird, rippling wraiths of light were forming, drifting upwards towards the sky above the open dome with a faint, insectile buzz. Katherine began to suspect that they didn’t really understand this technology that her father had dug up for them; they were almost as awed by it as she.

If she had run forward then, primed her bomb and flung it at the ancient computer, she might have changed everything. But how could she? Father was standing right beside the thing, and even when she told herself that he was not her father any more and tried to weigh his life against the thousands about to die in Batmunkh Gompa, she still could not bring herself to harm him. She had failed. She turned her face to the vaulted roof and asked, What do you want me to do? Why have you brought me here?

But Clio didn’t answer.

Crome stepped towards the keyboard. “Give MEDUSA its target coordinates,” he ordered.

Splay’s fingers rattled over the keys, typing in the latitude and longitude of Batmunkh Gompa.

“Target acquired,” announced a mechanical voice, booming from fluted speakers above Splay’s station.

“Range: 130 miles and closing. Input clearance code Omega.”

Dr Chubb produced a sheaf of thick plastic sheets, the laminated fragments of ancient documents. Faint lists of numerals showed through the plastic, like insects trapped in amber, as he flipped through the sheets until he found the one he wanted and held it up for Splay to read.

But before Splay could begin typing in the code-numbers there was a confused babble of voices down by the main entrance. Dr Twix was there, with some of her Stalkers close behind her. “Hello, everybody!” she chirped, hurrying up the aisle and beckoning for her creations to follow. “Just look what my clever babies have found for you. Lord Mayor! A real live Anti-Tractionist, just as you asked. Though I’m afraid she’s rather ugly…”

“Input clearance code Omega,” repeated MEDUSA. The mechanical voice had not really changed, but to Katherine it sounded slightly impatient.

“Shut up, Twix!” barked Magnus Crome, staring at his instruments, but the others all turned to look as one of the Stalkers lurched up on to the dais and dumped its burden at the Lord Mayor’s feet.

It was Hester Shaw, her hands tied in front of her, helpless and sullen and still wondering why the Stalkers had not killed her straight away. At the sight of her ruined face the men on the dais froze, as if her gaze had turned them all to stone.

Oh, great Clio! whispered Katherine, seeing for the first time what Father’s sword had done. And then she looked from Hester’s face to his, and what she saw there shocked her even more. The expression had drained from his features, leaving a grey mask, less human and more horrible than the girl’s. This was how he must have looked when he killed Pandora Shaw and turned round to find Hester watching him. She knew what would happen next, even before his sword came singing from its sheath.

“No!” she screamed, seeing what he meant to do, but her mouth was dry, her voice a whisper. Suddenly she understood why the goddess had brought her here, and knew what she must do to make amends for Father’s crime. She dropped the useless satchel and ran up the steps. Hester was stumbling backwards, lifting her bound hands to ward off Father’s blow, and Katherine flung herself between them so that suddenly it was she who was in his path, and his sword slid easily through her and she felt the hilt jar hard against her ribs.

The Engineers gasped. Dr Twix gave a frightened little squeak. Even Crome looked alarmed.

“Input clearance code Omega,” snapped MEDUSA, as if nothing at all had happened.

Valentine was saying “No!”, shaking his head as if he couldn’t understand how she came to be here with his sword through her. “Kate, no!” He stepped back, pulling the blade free.

Katherine watched it slither out of her. It looked ridiculous, like a practical joke. There was no pain at all, but bright blood was throbbing out of a hole in her tunic and splashing on the floor. She felt giddy. Hester Shaw clutched at her but Katherine shook her off. “Father, don’t hurt her,” she said, and took two faltering steps forward and fell against Dr Splay’s keyboard. Meaningless green letters spattered the little Goggle-screen as her head hit the keys, and as Father lifted her and laid her gently down she heard the voice of MEDUSA boom, “Incorrect code entered.”

New sequences of numbers spilled across the screens. Something exploded with a sharp crack among the looping webs of cable.

“What’s happening?” whimpered Dr Chubb. “What’s it doing?”

“It has rejected our target coordinates,” gasped Dr Chandra. “But the power is still building…”

Engineers rushed back to their posts, stumbling over Katherine where she lay on the floor, her head on Father’s lap. She ignored them, staring at Hester’s face. It was like looking at her own reflection in a shattered mirror, and she smiled, pleased that she had met her half-sister at last, and wondering if they were going to be friends. She started to hiccup, and with each hiccup blood came up her throat into her mouth. A numb chill was spreading through her body, and she could feel herself beginning to drift away, the sounds of the cathedral growing fainter and fainter. Am I going to die? she thought. I can’t, not yet, I’m not ready!

“Help me!” Valentine bellowed at the Engineers—but they were only interested in MEDUSA. It was the girl who came to his side and lifted Katherine while he ripped a strip from his robe and tried to staunch the bleeding. He looked up into her one grey eye and whispered, “Hester … thank you!”

Hester stared back at him. She had come all this way to kill him, through all these years, and now that he was at her mercy she felt nothing at all. His sword lay on the ground where he had dropped it. No one was watching her. Even with her wrists bound she could have snatched it up and stuck it through his heart. But it didn’t seem to matter now. Dazed, she watched his tears fall, plopping into the astounding lake of blood that was spreading out from his daughter’s body. Confused thoughts chased each other through her head. He loves her! She saved my life! I can’t let her die’.

She reached out and touched him, and said, “She needs a doctor, Valentine.”

He looked at the Engineers, clustering around their machine in a frantic scrum. There would be no help from them. Outside the cathedral doors curtains of golden fire swung across Paternoster Square. He looked up, and saw something red catch the firelight beyond the high windows of the starboard transept.

“It’s the Jenny Haniver!” shouted Hester, scrambling to her feet. “Oh, it’s Tom! And there’s a medical bay aboard…” But she knew the Jenny couldn’t land amidst the flames of Top Tier. “Valentine, can we get on to the roof somehow?”

Valentine picked up his sword and cut the cords on her wrists. Then, flinging it aside, he lifted Katherine and started to carry her between the spitting coils to where the metal stairway zig-zagged up into the dome. Stalkers reached out for Hester as she scurried after him, but Valentine ordered them back. To a startled Beefeater he shouted, “Captain! That airship is not to be fired upon!”

Magnus Crome came running to clutch at his sleeve. “The machine has gone mad!” he wailed. “Quirke alone knows what commands your daughter fed it! We can’t fire it and we can’t stop the energy build-up! Do something, Valentine! You discovered the damned thing! Make it stop!”

Valentine shoved him aside and started up the steps, through the rising veils of light, the crackling static, through air that smelted like burning tin.

“I only wanted to help London!” the old man sobbed. “I only wanted to make London strong!”

36. THE SHADOW OF BONES

Hester took the lead, climbing up through the open top of the dome into smoky firelight and the shadow of the great weapon. Off to her right, the charred skeleton of the 13th Floor Elevator lay draped over the ruins of the Engineerium like a derelict rollercoaster. The fire had spread to the Guildhall, and the Planning Department and the Hall of Records were blazing, hurling out firefly-swarms of sparks and millions of pink and white official forms. St Paul’s was an island in a sea of fire, with the Jenny Haniver swinging above it like a low-budget moon, scorched and listing, veering drunkenly in the updraughts from the burning buildings.

She climbed higher, out on to the cobra-hood of MEDUSA. Valentine came after her; she could hear him whispering to Katherine, his eyes fixed on the struggling airship.

“What idiot is flying that thing?” he shouted, working his way across the cowl to join her.

“It’s Tom!” Hester called back, and stood up, waving both arms and shouting, “Tom! Tom!”

It was the shawl that Tom saw first, the one he had bought for her in Peripatetiapolis. Knotted round her neck now, streaming on the wind, it made a sudden flash of red, and he saw it from the corner of his eye and looked down and saw her there, waving. Then a black wing of smoke came down over her and he wondered if he had only imagined that tiny figure inching out on to the cobra’s hood, because it seemed impossible that anyone could survive in this huge fire that he had caused. He made the Jenny Haniver swoop closer. The smoke lifted, and there she was, flapping her arms, with her long black coat and her long-legged stride and her ugly, wonderful face.

Katherine opened her eyes. The cold inside her was growing, spreading from the place where the sword had gone in. She was still hiccuping, and she thought how stupid it would be to die with hiccups, how undignified. She wished Dog was with her. “Tom! Tom!” somebody kept shouting. She turned her head and saw an airship coming down out of the smoke, closer and closer until the side of the gondola scraped against MEDUSA’s cowl and she felt the down-draught from its battered engine pods. Father was carrying her towards it, and she could see Tom peering out at her through the broken windscreen, Tom who had been there when it all began, whom she had thought was dead. But here he was, alive, looking shocked and soot-stained, with a V-shaped wound on his forehead like the mark of some unknown Guild.

The gondola was much bigger inside than she expected. In fact, it was a lot like Clio House, and Dog and Bevis were both waiting for her there, and her hiccups had stopped, and her wound wasn’t as bad as everyone had thought, it was just a scratch. Sunlight streamed in through the windows as Tom flew them all up and up into a sky of the most perfect crystal blue, and she relaxed gratefully into her father’s arms.

Hester reached the airship first, hauling herself aboard through its shattered flank. But when she looked back, holding out her hand to Valentine, she saw that he had fallen to his knees, and realized Katherine was dead.

She stayed there, still with her hand outstretched, not quite knowing why. There was an electric shimmer in the air above the white metal hood. She shouted, “Valentine! Be quick!”

He lifted his eyes from his daughter’s face just long enough to say, “Hester! Tom! Fly! Save yourselves!”

Behind her Tom was cupping his hands to his ears and shouting, “What did he say? Is that Katherine? What’s happened?”

“Just go!” she yelled, and, clambering past him, started switching all the engines that still worked to full power. When she looked down again Valentine was dwindling away below, a dark shape cradled in his arms, a pale hand trailing. She felt like Katherine’s ghost, rising into the sky. There was a terrible pain inside her and her breath came in sobs and something wet and hot was spilling down her cheek. She wondered if she could have been wounded without noticing it, but when she put her hands to her face her fingers came away wet, and she understood that she was crying, crying for her mum and dad, and Shrike, and Katherine, and even for Valentine as the crackling light around the cathedral grew brighter and Tom steered the Jenny Haniver away into the dark.

Down in the Gut, London’s enormous motors suddenly cut out, without warning and all at once, doused by the strange radiations that were starting to sleet through the city’s fabric. For the first time since it crossed the land-bridge the great Traction City started to slow.

In a hastily barricaded gallery in the London Museum, Chudleigh Pomeroy peered cautiously over the replica of the Blue Whale and saw that the squads of Stalkers advancing on his last redoubt had all stopped in their tracks, pale clouds of sparks coiling about their metal skulls like barbed wire. “Great Quirke!” he said, turning to his surviving handful of Historians. “We’ve won!”

Valentine watches the red airship fly away, lit by the flames of Top Tier and by the spitting forks of light that are beginning to flare around St Paul’s. He can hear hopeless fire-bells jangling somewhere below, and the panic-stricken shouts of fleeing Engineers. A halo of St Elmo’s fire flares around {Catherine’s face and her hair sparks and cracks as he strokes it. He gently moves a stray strand which has blown into her mouth, and holds her close, and waits—and the storm-light breaks over them and they are a knot of fire, a rush of blazing gas, and gone: the shadows of their bones scattering into the brilliant sky.

37. THE BIRD ROADS

London wore a wreath of lightning. It was as if the ray that should have reached out across a hundred miles to sear the stones of Batmunkh Gompa had tangled around the upper tiers instead, sending cataracts of molten metal splashing down the city’s flanks. Explosions surged through the Gut, heaving vast fragments of wreckage end-over-end into the sky like dead leaves in a gale. A few airships rose with them, seeking to escape, but their envelopes ignited and they shrivelled and fell, small bright flakes of fire amid the greater burning.

Only the Jenny Haniver survived, riding on the fringes of the storm, spinning and pitching as the shock waves battered her, streamers of rainbow light spilling from her rigging and rotor-blades. Her engines had all failed together in that first great pulse of energy, and nothing that Tom knew how to do would make them start again. He slumped down in what was left of the pilot’s seat, weeping, watching helplessly as the night wind carried him further and further from his dying city.

“It’s my fault,” was all he could think to say. “It’s all my fault…”

Hester was watching too, staring back at the place where St Paul’s had been as if she could still see the after-images of Katherine and her father lost in the brightness there. “Oh, Tom, no,” she said. “It was an accident. Something went wrong with their machine. It was Valentine’s fault, and Crome’s. It was the Engineers’ fault for getting the thing to work and my mum’s fault for digging it up in the first place. It was the Ancients’ fault for inventing it. It was Pewsey’s and Gench’s fault for trying to kill you, and Katherine’s for saving my life…”

She sat down beside him, wanting to comfort him but afraid to touch him, while her reflections sneered at her from fractured dials and blades of window-glass, more monstrous than ever in the fluttering glare of MEDUSA. Then she thought, Silly, he came back, didn’t he? He came back for you. Trembling, she put her arms around him and pulled him close, nuzzling the top of his head, shyly kissing away the blood from the fresh wound between his eyebrows, hugging him tight until the dying weapon had spent itself and the first grey daylight crept across the plain.

“It’s all right, Tom,” she kept telling him. “It’s all right…”

London was far away, motionless under banners of smoke. Tom found Miss Fang’s old field glasses and focused them on the city. “Someone must have survived,” he said, hoping that saying it would make it true. “I bet Mr Pomeroy and Clytie Potts are down there, organizing rescue parties and handing out cups of tea… …” But through the smoke, the steam, the pall of hanging ash he could see nothing, nothing, nothing, and although he swung the binoculars to and fro, growing increasingly desperate, all they showed him were the bony shapes of blackened girders, and the scorched earth littered with torn-off wheels and blazing lakes of fuel and broken tracks lying tangled on themselves like the cast-off skins of enormous snakes.

“Tom?” Hester had been trying the controls, and had found to her surprise that the rudder-levers still worked. The Jenny Haniver responded to her touch, turning this way and that on the wind. She said gently, “Tom, we could try and reach Batmunkh Gompa. We’ll be welcome there. They’ll probably think you’re a hero.”

But Tom shook his head: behind his eyes the 13th Floor Elevator was still spiralling towards Top Tier and Pewsey and Gench were riding their black, silent screams into the fire. He didn’t know what he was, but he knew he was no hero.

“All right,” said Hester, understanding. It took time to get over things sometimes, she knew that. She would be patient with him. She said, “We’ll head for the Black Island. We can repair the Jenny at the air-caravanserai. And then we’ll take the Bird Roads and go somewhere far away. The Hundred Islands, or the Tannhauser Mountains, or the Southern Ice Waste. I don’t mind where. As long as I can come too.”

She knelt beside him, resting her arms on his knees and her head on her arms, and Tom found that he was smiling in spite of himself at her crooked smile. “You aren’t a hero, and I’m not beautiful, and we probably won’t live happily ever after,” she said. “But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”