Mortal Engines (16 page)

"I'm Bevis," he said, smiling nervously as Katherine sat down opposite him. "Bevis Pod."

"I remember."

"I'm glad you came, Miss. I've been wanting to talk to you ever since you come down to Section 60, but I didn't want the Guild to know I'd been in touch with you. They don't like us talking to outsiders. But I've got the day off 'cos they're preparing for a big meeting, so I came up here. You don't see many Engineers eating in here."

"I'm not surprised," said Katherine to herself, looking at the menu. There was a big colour picture of something called a "Happy Meal", a wedge of impossibly pink meat sandwiched between two rounds of algae-bread. She ordered mint tea. It came in a glastic tumbler and tasted of chemicals. "Are all Tier Five restaurants like this?"

"Oh no," said Bevis Pod. "This one's much nicer than the rest." He could not stop staring at her hair. He had spent his whole life in the Engineer warrens of the Gut and he had never seen anyone before with hair like hers, so long and shining and full of life. The Engineers said hair was unnecessary; a vestige of the ground-dwelling past, but when he saw Katherine's, it made him wonder...

"You said you needed my help..." Katherine prompted.

"Yes," said Bevis. He glanced over his shoulder as if to check that nobody was watching them. "It's about what you asked. I couldn't tell you down at the Turd Tanks. Not with Nimmo watching. I was in enough trouble already, for trying to help that poor man..."

His dark eyes were full of tears again, and Katherine thought it strange that an Engineer could cry so easily.

"Bevis, it's not your fault," she said. "Now what about the girl? Did you see her?"

Bevis nodded, thinking back to the night London ate Salthook. "I saw her run past, with that Apprentice Historian chasing after her. He shouted for help, so I ran after him. I saw the girl turn when she got to the waste-chutes. There was something wrong with her face..."

Katherine nodded. "Go on."

"I heard her shouting at him. I couldn't catch it all, over the engines and the noise of the Dismantling Yards. But she said something about your father, Miss. And then she pointed at herself and said, 'something something something Hester Shaw'. And then she jumped."

"And dragged poor Tom with her."

"No, Miss. He was left there, looking a bit stupid. Then the smoke came down and I couldn't see nothing, and next thing I knew there were policemen everywhere, so I made myself scarce. I wasn't supposed to leave my post, you see, so I couldn't tell anyone what I'd seen."

"But you're telling me," said Katherine.

"Yes, Miss." The apprentice blushed.

"Hester Shaw?" Katherine turned the name over in her mind, but it meant nothing to her. Nor did she understand his description of events, which didn't seem to tally with Father's. Bevis must have made a mistake, she decided.

He glanced around nervously again, then lowered his voice to a whisper. "Did you mean what you said, Miss, about your dad? Could he really do something to help the prisoners?"

"He will when I tell him what's happening," vowed Katherine. "I'm sure he doesn't know. But there's no need to call me Miss; I'm Katherine. Kate."

"Right," said Bevis solemnly. "Kate." He smiled again, but he still looked troubled. "I'm loyal to the Guild," he explained. "I never wanted to be anything but an Engineer. But I never expected to get assigned to the experimental prison. Keeping people in cages and making them work in the Gut, and wade about in those turd-tanks - that's not Engineering. That's just wicked. I do what I can to help them, but I can't do much, and the supervisors just want to work them to death and then send them up to K Division in plastic bags, so even when they're dead they won't get no rest."

"What is this K Division?" asked Katherine, remembering how Nimmo had hushed the other apprentice when she mentioned it. "Is it part of the prison?"

"Oh no. It's up top. In the Engineerium. It's some sort of experimental department, run by Dr Twix."

"What does she use dead bodies for?" asked Katherine nervously, not at all sure that she wanted to know.

Bevis Pod went a little paler. "It's just a rumour, Miss, but some people in the Guild say she's building Stalkers. Resurrected Men."

"Great Clio!" Katherine thought of what she had been taught about the Stalkers. She knew that her father had dug up some rusty skeletons for the Engineers to study, but he had told her they were only interested in the electrical brains. Could they really be trying to make new ones?

"Why?" she asked. "I mean, they were soldiers, weren't they? Sort of human tanks, built for some old war..."

"Perfect workers, Miss," said Bevis, wide-eyed. "They don't need feeding or clothing or housing, and when there's no work to be done you can just switch 'em off and stack 'em in a warehouse, so they're much easier to store. The Guild says that in the future everybody who dies on the lower tiers will be resurrected, and we won't need living people at all, except as supervisors."

"But that's horrible!" protested Katherine. "London would be a city of the dead!"

Bevis Pod shrugged. "Down in the Deep Gut it feels like that already. I'm just telling you what I've heard. Crome wants Stalkers built, and that's what Dr Twix does with the bodies from our section."

"I'm sure if people knew about this awful plan..." Katherine started to say. Then an idea occurred to her. "Does it have a code-name? Do they call it MEDUSA?"

"Blimey! How do you know about MEDUSA?" Bevis's face had turned paler than ever. "Nobody's supposed to know about that!"

"Why?" asked Katherine. "What is it? If it's not to do with these new Stalkers..."

"It's a big Guild secret," whispered Bevis. "Apprentices aren't supposed to even know the name. But you hear the Supervisors talking about it. Whenever something goes wrong, or the city is in trouble, they talk about how everything will be all right once we awaken MEDUSA. Like this week, with this conurbation chasing us. Everybody's running around in a panic thinking it's the end of London, but the top Guildsmen just tell each other, 'MEDUSA will sort things out.' That's why they're having this big meeting at the Engineerium tonight. Magnus Crome is making an announcement about it."

Katherine shivered, thinking about the Engineerium and the mysterious things that went on behind its black windows. That was where she would find the clue to her father's troubles. MEDUSA. It all had something to do with MEDUSA.

She leaned closer to the boy and whispered, "Bevis, listen; are you going to this meeting? Can you tell me what Crome says?"

"Oh no, Miss ... I mean Kate. No! It's strictly Guildsmen only. No apprentices..."

"Couldn't you pose as a Guildsman or something?" Katherine urged him. "I have a feeling that there is something bad going on, and I think this MEDUSA thing is at the bottom of it."

"I'm sorry, Miss," said Bevis, shaking his head. "I wouldn't dare. I don't want to get killed and carted off to Top Tier and turned into a Stalker."

"Then help
me
go!" said Katherine eagerly. She reached across the table to take his hand, and he flinched at her touch and pulled back, staring at his fingers in amazement, as if it had never occurred to him that anybody would want to touch them. Katherine persisted, gently taking both his trembling hands in hers and looking deep into his eyes.

"I have to find out what Crome is really up to," she explained, "for Father's sake. Please, Bevis. I have to get inside the Engineerium!"

A few hours later, as the evening mists came curling from the Rustwater Marshes, Tunbridge Wheels rolled down to the edge of the sea. It paused there a while, gazing out towards a cluster of islands that rose dark and rugged from the silver water. Birds were streaming in off the sea in long skeins and as the suburb cut its engines the beat of their wings came echoing over the mudflats. Small waves beat steadily against the shore and a wind from the east blew hissing through the thin, grey marram grass. There was no other sound, no other movement, no light or smoke-trail of a wandering town anywhere on the marshes or the sea.

"Natswurvy!" shouted Chrysler Peavey, standing with a telescope to his eye at the window of his observation bridge, high in the Town Hall. "Where is the lad? Pass the word for Natswurvy!" When a couple of his pirates ushered Tom and Hester in he turned with a broad grin and held out the telescope, saying, "Take a look, Tommy boy! I told you I'd get you here, didn't I? I told you I'd get you through these marshes safe? Now, have a look at where we're going!"

Tom took the telescope and put it to his eye, blinking at the trembling, blurred circle of view until it came clear. There were dozens of little islands speckling the sea ahead, and a larger one which loomed in the east like the back of an enormous prehistoric monster breaking the water.

He lowered the telescope and shuddered. "But there's nothing there..." he said.

* * * * *

It had taken more than a week for Tunbridge Wheels to pick its slow way through the quagmire, and although Chrysler Peavey had taken quite a shine to Tom he had still not explained what he hoped to find on the far side. His men had not been told either, but they were happy enough snapping up the tiny townships which had taken shelter in the mazes of the Rustwater, semi-static places with moss-covered wheels and delicate, beautiful carvings on their wooden upperworks. They were so small that they were barely worth eating, but Tunbridge Wheels ate them anyway, and murdered or enslaved their people and fed the lovely carvings to its furnaces.

It was a horrible, confusing time for Tom. He had been brought up to believe that Municipal Darwinism was a noble, beautiful system, but he could see nothing noble or beautiful about Tunbridge Wheels.

He was still an honoured guest in the Town Hall, and so was Hester, although Peavey clearly didn't understand his attachment to the scarred, sullen, silent girl. "Why don'cha ask my Cortina out?" he wheedled one night, sitting next to Tom in the old council chamber that was now his dining hall. "Or why not one of them girls we took off the last catch? Lovely lookers they was, an' not a word of Anglish, so they can't give you any lip..."

"Hester isn't my girlfriend!" Tom started to say, but he didn't want to have to go out with the mayor's daughter and he knew Peavey would never understand the truth; that he was in love with the image of Katherine Valentine, whose face had hung in his mind like a lantern through all the miles of his adventures. So he said, "Hester and I have been through a lot together, Mr Peavey. I promised I'd help her catch up with London."

"But that was before," the mayor reasoned. "You're a Tunbridge-Wheelsian now. You're going to stay here with me, like the son I never had, and I'm just thinking that maybe the lads would accept you a bit more easily if you had a better-looking girl; you know, more lady-like."

Tom looked across the clutter of tables and saw the other pirates glaring at him, fingering their knives. He knew that they would never accept him. They hated him for being a soft city-dweller, and for being Peavey's favourite, and he couldn't really blame them.

Later, in the little room he shared with Hester, he said, "We have to get off this town. The pirates don't like us, and they're starting to get tired of Peavey going on at them about manners and stuff. I don't even like to think about what will happen to us if they mutiny."

"Let's wait and see," muttered the girl, curled up in a far corner. "Peavey's tough, and he'll be able to keep his lads in line as long as he finds them this big catch he's been promising. But Quirke alone knows what it is."

"We'll find out tomorrow," said Tom, drifting into an uneasy sleep. "This time tomorrow these horrible bogs will be behind us..."

* * * * *

This time tomorrow, and the horrible bogs were behind them. As Peavey's navigator spread out his maps in the observation bridge a strange hissing sound echoed up the stairwells of the Town Hall. Tom glanced up at the faces of Peavey's henchmen as they clustered around the chart-table, but apart from Hester no one seemed to have heard it. She looked nervously at him and shrugged.

The navigator was a thin, bespectacled man named Mr Ames. He had been the suburb's schoolteacher until Peavey took over. Now he was settling happily into his new life as a pirate: it was a lot more fun, and the hours were better, and Peavey's ruffians were better behaved than most of his old pupils. Smoothing his maps with his long, thin hands he said, "It used to be the hunting ground for hundreds of little aquatic towns, but they all ate each other, and now Anti-Tractionist squatters have started coming down out of the mountains and setting up home on islands like this one..."

Tom craned closer. The great inland Sea of Khazak was speckled with dozens of islands, but the one Ames was pointing to was the biggest, a tattered diamond shape some twenty miles long. He couldn't imagine what was so interesting about it, and most of the other pirates looked baffled too, but Peavey was chuckling and rubbing his hands together in glee.

"The Black Island," he said. "Not much to look at, is it? But it's goin' ter make us rich, boys, rich. After tonight, ol' Tunbridge Wheels'11 be able to set up as a proper city."

"How?" demanded Mungo, the pirate who trusted Chrysler Peavey least, and most resented Tom. "There's nothing there, Peavey. Just a few old trees and some worthless Mossies."

"What are 'Mossies'?" Tom whispered to Hester.

"He means people who live in static settlements," she hissed back. "You know, like in that old saying, 'A rolling town gathers no moss...'"

"The fact is, ladies and gentlemen," announced Peavey, "that there
is
something on the Black Island. A few days ago - just before you come aboard, Tom - we shot down an airship that was footling about over the marshes. Its crew told me something very interesting before we killed 'em. It seems there's been a big battle up in Airhaven; fires, engine-damage, gas-spills, the whole place knocked about so bad they couldn't stay up in the sky but had to come down for repairs. And where d'you fink they've landed?"