Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines (11 page)

Late that night, and deep in the Rustwater Marshes, Tunbridge Wheels finally caught up with its prey. The exhausted townlet had blundered into a sinkhole and the suburb hit it side-on without bothering to slow its thunderous speed. The impact tore the townlet to pieces and splinters came raining down into the suburb’s streets as it turned and sped back to swallow the wreckage. “Meals on wheels!” the pirates howled.

From their cage in the suburb’s gut, Tom and Hester watched in horror as the dismantling-engines went to work, ripping the townlet into heaps of scrap without even bothering to let the survivors off. The few who did come stumbling out were grabbed by the waiting pirates. If they were young and fit they were dragged off to other tiny cages like the one in which Hester and Tom had been imprisoned. If not, they were killed, and their bodies were added to the rubbish heap at the edge of the digestion yard.

“Oh, great Quirke!” Tom whispered. “This is horrible! They’re breaking every rule of Municipal Darwinism…”

“It’s a pirate suburb, Natsworthy,” said Hester. “What did you expect? They strip their prey as quickly as they can and make the captives slaves in their engine-rooms. They don’t waste food and space on people who are too weak to work. It’s not really so different from what your precious London gets up to. At least this lot have the honesty to call themselves pirates.”

The flash of a crimson robe out in the digestion yards caught Tom’s eye. The mayor of the pirate suburb had come down to take a look at his latest catch, and he was strutting along the walkway outside the cells, surrounded by his bodyguards. He was a tiny little man, stooping and hunch-shouldered, a bald head and scrawny neck jutting from the cat-fur collar of his gown. He didn’t look friendly. “He looks more like a moth-eaten vulture than a mayor!” whispered Tom, tugging at Hester’s sleeve and pointing. “What do you think he’ll do with us?”

She shrugged, glancing up at the approaching party. “We’ll be slung into the engine-rooms, I suppose…” Then she stopped short, staring at the mayor as if he was the most amazing thing she had ever seen. Shouldering Tom aside she thrust her face against the bars of the cage and started to shout. “Peavey!” she hollered, straining to make herself heard over the thunder of the gut. “Peavey! Over here!”

“Do you know him?” asked Tom, confused. “Is he a friend? Is he all right?”

“I don’t have friends,” snapped Hester, “and he’s not all right; he’s a ruthless, murdering animal and I’ve seen him kill people for just looking at him in a funny way. So let’s hope the catch has put him in a good mood. Peavey! Over here! It’s me! It’s Hester Shaw!”

The ruthless, murdering animal turned towards their cage and scowled.

“His name’s Chrysler Peavey,” Hester explained hoarsely. “He stopped to trade in Strole a couple of times when I lived there with Shrike. He was mayor of another little scavenger town. The gods alone know how he got himself a flash suburb like this… Now hush; and let me do the talking!”

Tom studied Chrysler Peavey as he came stalking over to peer at the captives, henchmen clustering behind. He wasn’t much to look at. His lumpy scalp reflected the glare of furnaces and the sweat draining off it made pale stripes in the grime on his face. As if to make up for his bald head he had hair almost everywhere else; grubby white bristles pushing out of his chin, thick grey tufts sprouting from his ears and nostrils, and a pair of enormous, bushy, wriggling eyebrows. A tarnished chain of office hung round his neck, and on one shoulder perched a scrawny monkey.

“Who’re they?” he said.

“Couple of hitchhikers, boss—I mean, Your Worship. …” said one of his guards, a woman whose hair had been plaited and lacquered into two long, curving horns.

“Come aboard in the middle of the chase, Your Worship,” added another, the man who had overseen the newcomers’ capture. He showed Peavey the coat he was wearing; the fleece-lined aviator’s coat he had taken from Tom. “I got this off one of ’em…”

Peavey grunted. He seemed about to turn away, but Hester kept grinning her crooked grin at him and saying, “Peavey! It’s me!” until she lit a spark of recognition in his greedy black eyes.

“Bloody Hull!” he growled. “It’s the tin man’s kid!”

“You’re looking good, Peavey,” said Hester, and Tom noticed that she didn’t try to hide her face from the pirates, as if she knew that she mustn’t let them see any sign of weakness.

“Blimey!” said Peavey, looking her up and down. “Blimey! It really is you! The Stalker’s little helper, all growed up and uglier than ever! Where’s old Shrikey then?”

“Dead,” said Hester.

“Dead? What was it, metal fatigue?” He gave a great guffaw and the bodyguards all joined in obediently, until even the monkey on his shoulder started shrieking and rattling its chain. “Metal fatigue! Get it?”

“So how come you’re running Tunbridge Wheels?” asked Hester, while he was still wiping the tears from his eyes and chuckling. “The last I heard of this place it was a respectable suburb. It used to hunt up north, on the edges of the ice.”

Peavey chuckled, leaning against the bars. “Flashy, innit?” he said. “This place ate my old town a couple of years back. Come racing up one day and scoffed it straight down. They was soft, though: they hadn’t reckoned with me and my boys. We busted out of the gut and took over the whole place; set the mayor and the council to work stoking their own boilers, settled ourselves down in their comfy houses and their posh Town Hall. No more scavenging for me! I’m a proper mayor now. His Worship Chrysler Peavey at your service!”

Tom shuddered, imagining the dreadful things that must have happened here when Peavey’s roughs took over—but Hester just nodded as if she was impressed. “Congratulations,” she said. “It’s a good town. Fast, I mean. Well-built. You’re taking a risk, though. If your prey hadn’t stopped when it did, you’d’ve plunged straight into the heart of the Rustwater and sunk like a stone.”

Peavey waved the warning away. “Not Tunbridge Wheels, sweetheart. This suburb’s specialized. Mires and marshes don’t bother us. There’re fat towns hiding in these swamps, and fatter prey still where I’m planning to go next.”

Hester nodded. “So how about letting us out then?” she asked casually. “With all this prey to catch you could probably use a couple of good tough helpers up top.”

“Ha ha!” chortled Peavey. “Nice try, Hettie, but you’re out of luck. Prey’s been short these last couple of years. I need all the loot and grub I can find just to keep the lads happy, and they won’t be happy if I start bringing new faces aboard. ’Specially not faces as ’orrible as yours.” He bellowed with laughter again, looking round at his bodyguards to make sure they were joining in. The monkey ran up on to the top of his head and squatted there, chattering.

“But you need me, Peavey!” Hester told him, forgetting all about Tom in her desperation. “I’m not soft. I’m probably tougher than half of your best lads. I’ll fight for a place up top, if that’s what it takes…”

“Oh, I can use you, all right,” agreed Peavey. “But not up top. It’s in the engine rooms where I need help. Sorry, Hettie!” He turned away, and beckoned to the woman with the horns. “Chain ’em up, Maggs, and take ’em to the slave pits.”

Hester slumped down on the floor of the cage, despairing. Tom touched her shoulder, but she shrugged him irritably away. He looked past her, at Peavey stalking away across his blood-stained yards and the pirates advancing on the cage with guns and manacles. To his surprise, he felt more angry than afraid. After all that they had been through, they were going to become slaves after all! It wasn’t fairl Before he knew what he was doing he was on his feet and pounding at the greasy bars, and, in a strange, thin-sounding voice, he heard himself shouting, “NO!”

Peavey turned round. His eyebrows climbed his craggy forehead like mountaineering caterpillars.

“NO!” shouted Tom again. “You know her, and she asked you for help, and you ought to help her! You’re just a coward, eating up little towns that can’t escape, and murdering people, and sticking people in the slave pit because you’re too scared of your own men to help them!”

Maggs and the other guards all raised their guns and looked at Peavey expectantly, waiting for him to give the order to blow the impertinent prisoner to pieces. But he just stood and stared, and then came walking slowly back towards the cage.

“What did you say?” he asked.

Tom took a step backwards. When he tried to speak again, no words came out.

“You’re from London, ain’t yer?” asked Peavey. “I’d recognize that accent anywhere! And you’re not from the Nether Boroughs, neither. What Tier d’you come from?”

“T-two,” stammered Tom.

“Tier Two?” Peavey looked round at his companions. “You ’ear that? That’s almost High London, that is! This bloke’s a High London gentleman. What did you want to go slinging a gentleman like this in the lock-ups for, Maggs?”

“But you said…” Maggs protested.

“Never mind what I
SAID,”
screamed Peavey. “Get him OUT!”

The horned woman fumbled at the lock until the door slid open, and the other pirates grabbed Tom and dragged him out of the cage. Peavey pushed them aside and started dusting him down with a sort of rough gentleness, muttering, “That’s no way to treat a gentleman! Spanner, give him back his coat!”

“What?” cried the pirate wearing Tom’s coat. “No way!”

Peavey pulled out a gun and shot him dead. “I said, give the gentleman back his COAT!” he shouted at the startled-looking corpse, and the others hurried to pull the coat off and put it back on Tom. Peavey patted at the smouldering bullet hole on the breast. “Sorry about the blood,” he said earnestly. “These blokes, they’ve got no manners. Please allow me to apologize most ’umbly for the misunderstanding, and welcome you aboard my ’umble town. It’s an honour to ’ave a real gentleman aboard at last, sir. I do hope you’ll join me for afternoon tea in the Town Hall…”

Tom gaped at him. He had only just realized that he wasn’t going to be killed. Afternoon tea was the last thing he was expecting. But as the pirate mayor started to lead him away he remembered Hester, still cowering in the cage. “I can’t leave her down here!” he said.

“What, HettieT Peavey looked bewildered.

“We’re travelling together,” explained Tom. “She’s my friend…”

“There’s plenty of other girls in Tunbridge Wheels,” said Peavey. “Much better ones, with noses and everyfink. Why, my own lovely daughter would be very pleased to make your acquaintance…”

“I can’t leave Hester behind,” said Tom, as firmly as he dared, and the mayor simply bowed and gestured to his men to open the cage again.

At first Tom thought that Peavey was interested in the same thing as Miss Fang—information about where London was headed, and what had brought it out into the central Hunting Ground. But although the pirate mayor was full of questions about Tom’s life in the city, he didn’t seem to have much interest in its movements; he was just pleased to have what he called “a High London gent” aboard his town.

He gave Tom and Hester a guided tour of the Town Hall, and introduced them to his “councillors”, a rough-looking gang with names to match; Janny Maggs and Thick Mungo and Stadtsfesser Zeb, Pogo Nadgers and Zip Risky and the Traktiongrad Kid. Then it was time for afternoon tea in his private quarters, a room full of looted treasures high in the Town Hall where his rabble of whining, snot-nosed children kept getting under everybody’s feet. His eldest daughter Cortina brought tea in delicate porcelain cups, and cucumber sandwiches on a blast-glass tray. She was a dim, terrified girl with watery blue eyes, and when her father saw that she hadn’t cut the crusts off the sandwiches he knocked her backwards over the pouffe. “Thomas ’ere is from LONDON!” he shouted, hurling the sandwiches at her. “He expects fings POSH! And you should have done ’em in little TRIANGLES!”

“What can you do?” he said plaintively, turning to Tom. “I’ve tried to brung her up lady-like, but she won’t learn. She’s a good girl though. I look at her sometimes and almost wish I hadn’t shot her mum…” He sniffed and dabbed at his eyes with a huge skull-and-crossbones hanky, and Cortina came trembling back with fresh sandwiches.

“The fing is,” Peavey explained, through a mouthful of bread and cucumber, “the fing is, Tom, I don’t want to be a pirate all me life.”

“Um, no?” said Tom.

“No,” said Peavey. “You see, Tommy boy, I didn’t have the advantages what you’ve got when I was a kid. I didn’t get no education or nuffink, and I’ve always been ugly as sin…”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Tom mumbled politely.

“I had to look out for meself, in the dust-heaps and the ditches. But I always knew one day I’d make it big. I saw London once, see. From a distance, like. Off on its travels somewhere. I fought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, all them tiers, and the white villas up top all shining in the sun. And then I ’card about them rich people what live up there, and I decided that’s how I want to live; all them posh outfits and garden parties and trips to the theatre and that. So I become a scavenger, and then I got a little town of me own, and now I got a bigger one. But what I really want…” (he leaned close to Tom) “what I really want is to be
respectable.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” agreed Tom, glancing at Hester.

“You see, what I’m finking is this,” Peavey went on. “If this hunting trip works out like I hope, Tunbridge Wheels is goin’ ter be rich soon. Really rich. I love this suburb, Tom. I wanna see it grow. I wanna ’ave a proper upper level wiv parks and posh mansions and no oiks allowed, and elevators goin’ up and down. I want Tunbridge Wheels to turn into a city, a proper big city wiv me as Lord Mayor, sumfink I can ’and down to me sprogs. And you Tommy, I want you to tell me how a city ought to be, and teach me manners. Ettyket, like. So I can hob nob wiv’ other Lord Mayors and not ’ave them laugh at me behind my back. And all my lads as well; they live like pigs at the moment. So what do you say? Will you turn us into gentlemen?”

Tom blinked at him, remembering the hard faces of Peavey’s gang and wondering what they would do if he started telling them to open doors for each other and not to chew with their mouths open. He didn’t know what to say, but in the end Hester said it for him.