Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

He waited until he was sure there was no one about, then leaned out. Speedwell was passing through the shadows of some tall spines of rock, the town-gnawed cores of old mountains. Ahead lay a natural amphitheatre, a shallow bowl between more rock-spires, and it was full of towns. Tom had never seen so many trading suburbs and traction villages gathered in one place before. “We’re here!” he told Hester. “It’s the trading cluster!”

Speedwell slowed and slowed, manoeuvring into a space between a ragged little sail-powered village and a larger market town. Tom could hear the people on the new towns hailing Speedwell, asking where it had come from and what it had to trade. “Scrap metal,” he heard Mrs Wreyland bellow back, “and some wood, and a pretty seedy and two fine, fresh, healthy, young slaves!”

“Oh, Quirke!” muttered Tom, working away at enlarging the hole he had made.

“It’ll never be big enough,” said Hester, who always expected the worst and was usually right.

“You could try helping, instead of just sitting there!” Tom snapped back, but he regretted it at once, for he could see that she was very ill. He wondered what would happen if she was too weak to escape. He couldn’t run off into the Out-Country alone and leave her here. But if he stayed, he would end up as a slave on one of these filthy little towns!

He tried not to think about it and concentrated on making the hole bigger, while the sky outside grew dark and the moon rose. He could hear music and laughter drifting across the trading cluster and the sounds of gangways being run out as some of Wreyland’s people went off to enjoy themselves aboard the other towns. He scrabbled and scratched at the hole, prising at the planks, scraping at them with a rusty nail, but it was no use. At last, desperate, he turned to Hester and hissed, “Please! Help!”

The girl stood up unsteadily and walked over to where he crouched. She looked sick, but not quite as bad as he’d feared. Perhaps she had been saving herself, harbouring her last reserves of strength until it was dark enough to escape. She felt around the edges of the hole he had made and nodded. Then, leaning all her weight on Tom’s shoulder, she swung her good foot up hard against the wall. Once, twice she kicked it, the wood around the hole splintering and yielding, and at the third kick a whole section of planking fell out, spilling across the walkway outside.

“I could have done that!” said Tom, staring at the ragged hole and wondering why he hadn’t thought of it.

“But you didn’t, did you?” said Hester, and tried to smile. It was the first time he had seen her smile; an ugly, crooked thing, but very welcome; it made him feel that she was starting to like him and didn’t just regard him as an annoyance.

“Come on then,” she said, “if you’re coming.”

Hundreds of miles away across the moonlit mud, Shrike spots something. He signals to the Engineer pilots, who nod and grumble as they steer the Goshawk 90 down to land. “What now? How much longer are we going to keep flying back and forth along these track-marks before he’ll admit the kids are dead?” But they grumble quietly: they are terrified of Shrike.

The hatch opens and Shrike stalks out. His green eyes sweep from side to side until he finds what he is looking for. A rag of white fabric from a torn shirt, soggy with rain, half-buried in the mud. “HESTER SHAW WAS HERE,” he tells the Out-Country at large, and begins sniffing for her scent.

A t first it looked as if their luck might hold. They scrambled quickly across the dimly-lit walkway and down into the shadows under one of Speedwell’s wheel-arches. They could see the dark bulks of the other towns, with lights burning in their windows and a big bonfire on the top deck of one of them, a mining townlet on the far side of the cluster where a noisy party was in progress.

They crept along the outside edge of Speedwell to a place where a gangplank stretched across to the market town which was parked next door. It was unguarded, but brightly lit, and as they reached the far end and stepped on to the deck of the market town a voice somewhere behind them shouted, “Hey!” and then, louder, “Hey! Hey! Uncle Wreyland! Them slaves is “scaping!”

They ran, or rather, Tom ran, and dragged Hester along beside him, hearing her whimper in pain at every step. Up a stairway, along a catwalk, past a shrine to Peripatetia, goddess of wandering towns, and they were in a market square lined with big iron cages, in some of which thin, miserable slaves were waiting to be sold off. Tom forced himself to slow down and tried to look inconspicuous, listening all the time for sounds of pursuit. There were none. Maybe the Wreylands had given up the chase, or maybe they weren’t allowed to chase people on to other towns—Tom didn’t know what the rules were in a trading cluster.

“Head for the bows,” said Hester, letting go his arm and pulling the collar of her coat up to hide her face. “If we’re lucky there’ll be an air-harbour at the bows.”

They were lucky. At the front of the town’s top deck was a raised section where half a dozen small airships were tethered, their dark, gas-filled envelopes like sleeping whales. “Are we going to steal one?” Tom whispered.

“Not unless you know how to fly an airship,” said Hester weakly. “There’s an airman’s cafe over there; we’ll have to try and book passage like normal people.”

The cafe was just an ancient, rusting airship gondola that had been bolted to the deck. A few metal tables stood in front beneath a stripy awning. Hurricane lamps were burning there and an old aviator slumped snoring in a chair. The only other customer was a sinister-looking Oriental woman in a long, red leather coat who sat in the shadows near the bar. In spite of the dark she wore sunglasses, the tiny lenses black as the wing-cases of beetles. She turned to stare at Tom as he walked up to the counter.

A small man with a huge, drooping moustache was polishing glasses. He glanced up without much interest when Tom said, “I’m looking for a ship.”

“Where to?”

“London,” said Tom. “Me and my friend have to get back to London, and we have to leave tonight.”

“London, is it?” The man’s moustachios twitched like the tails of two squirrels which had been shoved up his nose and were starting to get a bit restless. “Only ships with a licence from the London Merchant’s Guild can dock there. We’ve got nuffink like that here. Stayns ain’t that sort of town.”

“Perhaps I may be of help?” suggested a soft, foreign-sounding voice at Tom’s shoulder. The woman in the red coat had come silently to his side; a lean, handsome woman with badgery slashes of white in her short black hair. Reflections of the hurricane lamps danced in her sunglasses, and when she smiled Tom noticed that her teeth were stained red. “I haven’t a licence for London, but I am going to Airhaven. You could find a ship there that will take you the rest of the way. Have you some money?”

Tom hadn’t thought about that part. He rummaged in his tunic and fished out two tatty banknotes with the face of Quirke on the front and Magnus Crome gazing sternly from the back. He had put them in his pocket the night he fell out of London, hoping to spend them at the catch-party in Kensington Gardens. Here, under the fizzing hurricane lamps of the air-harbour, they looked out of place, like toy money.

The woman seemed to think so too. “Ah,” she said. “Twenty Quirkes. But notes like that can only be spent in London. Not much use to a poor wandering skyfarer like me. Don’t you have any gold? Or Old-Tech?”