Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

“No doctor in Speedwell anyway,” laughed Wreyland. “Not one. And as for food… Well, times are hard. Do you have anything you can trade?”

Tom patted the pockets of his tunic. He had a little money, but he didn’t see what use London money would be to Orme Wreyland. Then he touched something hard. It was the seedy he had found in the Gut. He pulled it out and looked wistfully at it for a moment before he handed it to the old man. He had been planning to make a present of it to Katherine Valentine one day, but now food was more important.

“Pretty! Very pretty!” admitted Orme Wreyland, tilting the disc and admiring the rippling rainbows. “Not a lot of use, but worth a few nights’ shelter and a bit of food. It’s not very good food, mind, but it’s better than nothing…”

He was right: it wasn’t very good, but Tom and Hester ate greedily anyway and then held out their bowls for more.

“It’s made from algae, mostly,” explained Orme Wreyland, as his wife slopped out second helpings of the bluish muck. “We grow it in vats down under the main engine room. Nasty stuff, but it keeps body and soul together when pickings is thin, and between you and me, pickings has never been thinner. That’s why we were so glad to come across this mound of trash we’re scraping through.”

Tom nodded, leaning back in his chair and looking around the Wreylands’ quarters. It was a tiny, cheese-shaped room, and not at all what he would have expected of a mayoral residence—but then Orme Wreyland was not exactly what he would have expected of a mayor. The shabby old man seemed to rule over a town composed mainly of his own family; sons and daughters, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and the husbands and wives that they had met on passing towns.

But Wreyland was not a happy man. “It’s no fun, running a traction town,” he kept saying. “No, no fun at all, not any more. There was a time when a little place like Speedwell could go about its business quite safely, being too small for any other town to bother eating. But not now. Not with prey so scarce. Everyone we see wants to eat us. We even found ourselves running from a city the other day. One of those big Prankish-speaking Villes Mobiles it was. I ask you, what good would a place like Speedwell be to a monster like that? We’d barely take the edge off its appetite. But they chased us anyway.”

“Your town must be very fast,” said Tom.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Wreyland, beaming, and his wife put in, “Hundred miles an hour, top speed. That’s Wreyland’s doing. He’s a wizard with those big engines of his.”

“Could you help us?” asked Tom, leaning forward in his seat. “We need to get to London, as quickly as possible. I’m sure you could catch it up, and there might be more spoil-heaps along the way…”

“Bless you, lad,” said Wreyland, shaking his head. “What London drops isn’t worth going far for, not these days. Everything’s recycled now that prey’s so short. Why, I remember the days when cities’ waste-heaps used to dot the Hunting Ground like mountains. Oh, there was good pickings then! But not any more. Besides,” he added with a shudder, “I wouldn’t take my town too close to London, or any other city. You can’t trust them these days. They’d turn round and snaffle us, like as not. Chomp! No, no.”

Tom nodded, trying not to show his disappointment. He glanced across at Hester, but her head was hanging down and she seemed to be asleep, or unconscious. He hoped it was just the effects of her long walk and her full stomach, but as he started up to check that she was all right Wreyland said, “I tell you what, though, lad; we’ll take you to the cluster!”

“To the what?”

“To the trading-cluster! It’s a gathering of small towns, a couple of days run south-east of here. We were going anyway.”

“There’ll be lots of towns at the cluster,” Mrs Wreyland agreed. “And even if none of them is prepared to take you and your friend to London, you’ll soon find an air-trader who will. Bound to be air-traders at a cluster.”

“I…” said Tom, and stopped. He wasn’t feeling very well. The room seemed to waver, then started to roll like the picture on a badly-tuned Goggle-screen. He looked at Hester and saw that she had slipped off her seat on to the floor. The Wreylands’ household gods grinned at him from their shrine on the wall, and one of them seemed to be saying in Orme Wreyland’s voice, “Sure to be airships there, Tom, always airships at a trading-cluster. …”

“Would you like some more algae, dear?” enquired Mrs Wreyland, as he fell to his knees. From a long, long way away he heard her saying, “It took an awfully long time to take effect, didn’t it, Ormey?”, and Wreyland replying, “We’ll have to put more in next time, my sweet.” Then the swirling patterns on the carpet reached up and twined around him and pulled him down into a sleep that was as soft as cotton wool, and filled with dreams of Katherine.

Above Tier One, above the busy shops of Mayfair and Piccadilly, above Quirke Circus, where the statue of London’s saviour stands proudly on its fluted steel column, Top Tier hangs over the city like an iron crown, supported by vast pillars. It is the smallest, highest and most important of the seven Tiers, and, though only three buildings stand there, they are the three greatest buildings in London. To sternward rise the towers of the Guildhall, where the greater and lesser Guilds all have their offices and meet in council once a month. Opposite it is the building where the real decisions are taken: the black glass claw of the Engineerium. Between them stands St Paul’s, the ancient Christian temple that Quirke re-erected up here when he turned London into a Traction City. It is a sad sight now, covered in scaffolding and shored up with props, for it was never meant to move, and London’s journeys have shaken the old stonework terribly. But soon it will be open to the public again: the Guild of Engineers has promised to restore it, and if you listen closely you can hear the drills and hammers of their men at work inside. Magnus Crome hears them as his bug goes purring through the old cathedral’s shadow to the Engineerium. They make him smile a faint, secret smile.

Inside the Engineerium the sunlight is kept at bay behind black windows. A cold neon glow washes the metal walls, and the air smells of antiseptic, which Crome thinks is a welcome relief from the stench of flowers and new-mown grass that hangs over High London on this warm spring day. A young apprentice leaps to attention as he stalks into the lobby and bows her bald head when he barks, “Take me to Doctor Twix.”

A monorail car is waiting. The apprentice helps the Lord Mayor into it and it takes him sweeping up in a slow spiral through the heart of the Engineerium. He passes floor after floor of offices and conference rooms and laboratories, and glimpses the shapes of strange machines through walls of frosted glass. Everywhere he looks he sees his Engineers at work, tinkering with fragments of Old-Tech, performing experiments on rats and dogs, or guiding groups of shaven-headed children who are up on a day-trip from the Guild’s nurseries in the Deep Gut. He feels safe and satisfied, here in the clean, bright, inner sanctum of his Guild. It makes him remember why he loves London so much, and why he has devoted his whole career to finding ways to keep it moving.

When Crome was a young apprentice, many years ago, he read gloomy forecasts which said that prey was running out and Traction Cities were doomed. He has made it his life’s work to prove them wrong. Clawing his way to the top of his Guild and then on to the Lord Mayor’s throne was just the start. His fierce recycling and anti-waste laws were merely a stop-gap. Now he is almost ready to unveil his real plan.