Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines (14 page)

They were with him, the pirates forming a tight protective knot around their mayor as he hurried Tom down the stairs. Hester came limping behind. There were screams below, and frightened faces staring up at them from a third-floor landing already knee-deep in water. “Abandon town!” hollered Peavey. “Women and mayors first!”

They crashed into his private quarters, where his daughter stood clutching her frightened brothers and sisters. Peavey ignored her and waded to a chest in the corner, scowling with concentration as he twirled the combination lock this way and that. The chest sprang open, he dragged out a little orange bundle and then they were on the move again, out on to the balcony where the sea was already spilling through the railings. Tom turned back into the room, meaning to help Cortina and the children, but Peavey had forgotten all about them. He flung the bundle down into the waves and it unfolded with a complicated hiss, flowering into a small, circular life-raft. “Get aboard,” he snapped, taking hold of Tom and thrusting him towards it.

“But…”

“Get aboard!” A boot in the seat of his breeches sent him tumbling over the balcony rail and down on to the yielding rubber floor of the raft. Mungo was next, then the others piled in so fast that the raft wallowed deep and water spilled over the gunwales. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” wailed Cortina Peavey somewhere away to the left, but by the time Tom had scrambled out from under Mr Ames the suburb was already far away, its stern submerged and its bows tilted high into the night sky. He looked for Hester and found her crouching beside him. Peavey’s monkey jabbered with fear, bouncing up and down on his head. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” came the distant cries, and there were white splashes, dozens of splashes as people leaped from palisades and the useless tatters of the air-bags. Hands clutched at the sides of the raft and Mungo and Peavey beat them away. Frantic figures came splashing through the swell towards them, and Janny Maggs stood up and fired her machine-gun, churning up red water all around the raft. The suburb was tilting steeper, steeper; there was a rush of steam as the sea poured into its boilers and then with sudden, shocking speed it slid under. The water boiled and heaved. For a while there were screams, faint cries for help, a brief rattle of gunfire as a drifting fragment of debris changed hands, a longer one as a few lucky pirates battled their way on to a beach.

Then there was silence, and the raft turning slow circles as the current drew it in towards the shore.

At dawn Shrike comes to the edge of the sea. The tide is turning and the deep wheel marks that lead down into the surf are already starting to blur. Eastward, smoke rises from settlements on the shores of the Black Island. The Stalker wrenches his dead face into a smile, feeling very pleased with Hester Shaw and the trail of destruction that she has left behind her.

The thought of Hester is all that dragged him through the marshes. On and on it has drawn him, through mud that sucked at his damaged leg and sloughs whose bitter waters sometimes closed over his head. But at least the tracks the suburb left were easy to follow. He follows them again now, stalking down the beach and into the waves like a swimmer bent on a morning dip. Salt water slaps at the lenses of his eyes and seeps stinging through the gashes in his armour. The sounds of the gulls and the wind fade, replaced by the dim hiss of the underneath of the sea. Air or water, it makes no difference to the Resurrected Men. Fish goggle at him and dart away into forests of kelp. Crabs sidle out of his path, rearing up and waving their pincers at him, as if they are worshipping a crab-god, armoured, invincible. He ploughs on, following the water-scent of oil and axle-grease that will lead him to Tunbridge Wheels.

A few miles from the inlet where they had come ashore, Chrysler Peavey paused at the top of a steep rise and waited for the others to catch up. They came slowly, first Tom and Hester, then Ames with his map, finally Maggs and Mungo, bent under the weight of their guns. Looking back they could see the steep rocky flanks of the island falling to the sea, and a cluster of boats gathered above the wreck of Tunbridge Wheels, where a raft with a crane on it had already been anchored. The islanders were wasting no time in looting the drowned suburb.

“Mossie scum,” growled Peavey.

Tom had barely spoken to the mayor since they first came struggling ashore. Now he was surprised to see tears gleaming in the little man’s eyes. He said, “I’m so sorry about your family, Mr Peavey. 1 tried to reach them, but…”

“Little twerps!” snorted Peavey. “I wasn’t sniffling over
them.
It’s my lovely suburb! Look at it! Damn Mossies…”

Just then, from somewhere to the south, they heard the faint clatter of gunfire.

Peavey’s face brightened. He turned to the others. “Hear that! Some of the lads must have got ashore! They’ll be more’n a match for them Mossies! We’ll link up with ’em! We’ll capture Airhaven yet, keep a few of its people alive to repair it, kill the rest and fly back to the mainland rich. Drop out of the sky on a few fat towns before word gets round that Airhaven’s gone pirate! Catch ourselves a city, maybe!”

He set off again, hauling himself up from boulder to boulder with the monkey riding on his hunched shoulders. The others followed behind. Maggs and Mungo seemed dazed by the loss of Tunbridge Wheels and not convinced by Peavey’s latest plan. They kept exchanging glances and muttering together when their mayor was out of earshot—but they were in strange country, and Tom didn’t think they had the nerve to move against Peavey, not yet. As for Mr Ames, he had never set foot on the bare earth before. “It’s horrible!” he grumbled. “So difficult to walk on… All this grass! There may be wild animals, or snakes… I can quite see why our ancestors decided to stop living on the ground!”

Tom knew exactly how he felt. To north and south of them the steep side of the Black Island stretched away, and above them the slope climbed almost vertically to dark crags which moaned with ghostly voices as the wind blew around them. Some of the higher pinnacles of rock had been sculpted into such wild shapes that from the beach they had looked like fortresses, and Peavey had led his party on a long detour to avoid them before he realized they were only stones.

“It’s lovely,” sighed Hester, limping along at Tom’s side. She was smiling to herself, which he had never seen her do, and whistling a little tune through her teeth.

“What are you so happy about?” he asked.

“We’re going to Airhaven, aren’t we?” she replied in a whisper. “It’s laired up ahead somewhere, and Peavey’s little gang will never take it, not with Mossies and the Airhaven people ranged against them. They’ll be killed, and we’ll find a ship to take us north to London. Anna Fang’s there, remember. She might help us again.”

“Oh, her!” said Tom angrily. “Didn’t you hear what Peavey said? She’s a League spy.”

“I thought so,” admitted Hester. “I mean, all those questions she kept asking us about London, and Valentine.”

“You should have told me!” he protested. “I might have revealed an important secret!”

“Why would I care?” asked Hester. “And since when have Apprentice Historians known any important secrets? Anyway, I thought you realized she was a spy.”

“She didn’t look like one.”

“Well, spies don’t, generally. You can’t expect them to wear a big sandwich board with ‘SPY’ on it, or a special spying hat.” She was in a strange, jokey mood, and Tom wondered if it was because these dismal steeps reminded her of her girlhood on that other island. Suddenly she touched his arm and said, “Poor Tom. You’re learning what Valentine taught me all those years ago; you can’t trust anybody.”

“Huh,” said Tom.

“Oh, I don’t mean
you,”
she added hurriedly. “I think I trust you, almost. And what you did for me back in Tunbridge Wheels—making Peavey let me out of the lock-ups like that… A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. Not for somebody like me.”

Tom looked round at her, and saw more clearly than ever before the kind, shy Hester peeping from behind the grim mask. He smiled at her with such warmth that she blushed (at least, her strange face turned red in patches and her scar went purple) and Peavey looked back at them and hollered, “Come on, you two lovebirds! Stop whispering sweet nothings and
march!”

Afternoon, the cloud clearing eastwards and sunlight dazzling down through the wave-tops, flickering on the upperworks of Tunbridge Wheels. Shrike moves through the suburb’s streets with his head swinging slowly from side to side. Bodies drift in the flooded rooms like cold teabags left too long in the pot. Small fish dart in and out of a pirate’s mouth. A girl’s hair coils on the current. Dark keels of salvage boats move overhead. He waits hidden in the shadows while three naked boys come diving down, flying past him with urgent motions of their arms and legs and leaving trails of silver bubbles. They kick back to the surface carrying guns, bottles, a leather belt.

Hester is not here. Shrike turns away from the sunken suburb, following the shadows of drifting oil-slicks over the silt. Wreckage is strewn along the sea floor, and floating bodies beckon him towards the roots of the Black Island.

It is evening by the time he walks out of the surf, trailing flags of seaweed, water draining from inside his battered armour. He shakes his head to clear his vision and stares about him at a beach of black sand beneath dark cliffs. It takes him most of another hour to find the life-raft, hidden in a tumble of house-sized boulders. He unsheathes his metal claws and tears the bottom out of it, cutting off her escape. Hester is his again now. When she is dead he will carry her gently through the drowned sunlight and the forests of kelp, back through the marshes and the long leagues of the Hunting Ground to Crome. He will take her into London in his arms like a father carrying his sleeping child.

He drops on all fours in the sand and starts sniffing for her scent.

Towards sundown, they finally reached the top of the slope, and found themselves looking down into the centre of the Black Island.

Tom hadn’t realized until now that it was an extinct volcano, but from here it was obvious; the steep, black crags ringed an almost circular bowl of land, green, and patched with fields. Almost directly below the place where the pirates crouched, a small static settlement stood beside a blue lake. There were airship hangars and mooring masts beside the stone buildings, and on the flat ground behind them, dwarfing the whole place, Airhaven perched on a hundred skinny landing legs, looking as helpless as a grounded bird.

“The air-caravanserai!” chuckled Peavey. He pulled out his telescope and put it to his eye. “Look at ’em work! They’re pumping their gasbags back up, desperate to get back into the sky…” He swung the glass quickly across the surrounding hillsides. “No sign of any of our boys. Oh, if only we had a cannon left! But we’ll manage, eh lads? A bunch of airy-fairies is no match for us! Come on, let’s get closer…”

There was a strange edge to the mayor’s voice.
He’s frightened,
Tom realized.
But he can’t admit it, in case Mungo and Maggs and Ames lose faith in him.
He had never thought he would feel sorry for the pirate mayor, but he did. Peavey had been kind to him, in his way, and it hurt to see him reduced to this, scrambling across the wet ground with his people muttering and cursing him behind his back.

They still followed him though, down between the screes into the crater of the old fire-mountain. Once they saw riders silhouetted on a distant crag; a patrol of islanders hunting for survivors from the sunken pirate town. Once an airship flew low overhead, and Peavey hissed at everybody to lie flat and stay still, wrapping his monkey under his robes to muffle its shrill complaints.

The airship circled, but by that time the sun had gone down, and the pilot did not see the figures who cowered in the twilight below him like mice hiding from an owl. He flew back down to land at the caravanserai as a fat moon heaved itself over the eastern crags.

Tom gave a sharp sob of relief and scrambled up. Around him the others were also starting to move, grunting, dislodging small stones which went clattering away down the hillside. He could see people hurrying about with lanterns and torches in the streets of the air-caravanserai, and lamp-lit windows that made him think how wonderful it would be to be warm and safe indoors. Airhaven was bright with electric lights, and the wind brought the distant sounds of shouted orders, music, cheering.

“For Pete’s sake!” hissed Mungo. “We’re too late! It’s leaving!”

“Never,” scoffed Peavey.

But they could all see that Airhaven’s gasbags were almost full. A few minutes later the growl of its engines came rumbling up the slope, rising and falling as the wind gusted. The flying town was straining upwards, its crab-like legs folding back into place underneath it. “No!” shouted Peavey.

Then he was running downhill, scrambling and tumbling down clattering spills of scree towards the flat, boggy land in the crater floor, and as he ran they heard him screaming “Come back! You’re my
catch!
I sank my town for you!”

Mungo and Maggs and Ames set off after him, with Hester and Tom behind. At the foot of the slope the ground grew soft and squashy underfoot and pools of water reflected the moon and the lights of the rising town.

“Come back!” they could hear Peavey shouting, somewhere ahead of them. “Come back!” and then, “Ah! Oh! Help!”

They hurried towards the sound of his voice and the harsh screams of the monkey, and all came to a halt together at the edge of a deep patch of bog. Peavey was already up to his waist in it. The monkey perched on top of his head like a sailor on a foundering ship, grinning with fear. “Give me a hand, boys!” the mayor pleaded. “Help me! We can still get it! It’s only testing its liftin’ engines! It’ll come down again!”

The pirates watched him silently. They knew they had no chance of taking the flying town, and that his shouts had probably warned the islanders of their presence.

“We’ve got to help him!” whispered Tom, starting forward, but Hester held him back.

“Too late,” she said.

Peavey was sinking deeper, the weight of his chain of office pulling him down. He spluttered as the black mud swilled into his mouth. “Come on, lads! Maggs? Mungo? I’m your mayor! I done all this for you!” He searched for Tom with wild, terrified eyes. “Tell ’em, Tommy boy!” he whimpered. “Tell ’em I wanted to make Tunbridge Wheels great! I wanted to be respectable! Tell ’em—”

Mungo’s first shot blew the monkey off the top of Peavey’s head in a cloud of singed fur. The second and third went through his chest. He bowed his head, and the mud gulped him down with soft farting noises.

The pirates turned to look at Tom.

“We prob’ly wouldn’t be ’ere if it weren’t for you,” muttered Mungo.

“If you hadn’t of gone filling the Chiefs head up with all them ideas about manners and cities and stuff,” agreed Maggs.

“Different forks for every course, and no talking with your mouth full!” sneered Ames.

Tom started to back away. To his surprise, Hester stepped quickly between him and the pirates. “It’s not Tom’s fault! “she said.

“An” you’re no use to us, neither,” Mungo growled. “Neither of you is. We’re pirates. We don’t need no lessons in etiquette an’ we don’t need no lame scarface girl to hold us up.” He raised his gun, and Maggs followed suit. Even Mr Ames pulled out a little revolver.

And a voice out of the darkess said, “they’re mine.”