Mortal Engines (15 page)

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.

"It was a lucky day for you when Tom came aboard," she told the mayor. "He's an expert on etiquette. He's the politest person I know. He'll tell you anything you want, Peavey."

"But..." said Tom, and winced as she kicked his ankle.

"Lovely-jubbley!" cackled Peavey, spraying them both with half-eaten sandwich. "You stick with old Chrysler, Tommy boy, and you won't go far wrong. As soon as we've scoffed our big catch you can start work. It's waiting for us on the far side of these marshes. We should reach it by the end of the week..."

Tom sipped at his tea. In his mind's eye he saw again the great map of the Hunting Ground; the broad sweep of the Rustwater, and beyond it... "Beyond the marshes?" he said. "But beyond the marshes there's nothing but the SeaofKhazak!"

"Relax, Tommy boy!" chuckled Chrysler Peavey. "Didn't I tell you? Tunbridge Wheels is
specialized*."
Just you wait and see. Wait and
sea,
get it? Wait and
sea,
ha ha ha ha!" And he slapped Tom on the back and swigged his tea, his little finger delicately raised.

A few days later London sighted prey again; a scattering of small Slavic-speaking tractionvilles which had been trying to hide among the crags of some old limestone hills. To and fro the city went, snapping them up, while half of London crowded on to the forward observation platforms to watch and cheer. The dismal plains of the western Hunting Ground were behind them now, and the discontent of yesterday was forgotten. Who cared if people were dying of heat stroke down in the Nether Boroughs? Good old London! Good old Crome! This was the best run of catches for years!

The city chased down and ate the faster towns and then turned back for the slower ones. It was nearly a week before the last of them was caught, a big, once proud place that was limping along with its tracks ripped off after an attack by predator suburbs. On the night it was finally eaten there were catch-parties in all the London parks, and the celebrations grew still more frantic when a cluster of lights was sighted far away to the north. A rumour started to circulate: that the lights belonged to a huge but crippled city; that it was what Valentine had been sent to find, and radio signals from the 13th Floor Elevator would lead London north to its greatest meal ever. Fireworks banged and racketed until two in the morning, and Chudleigh Pomeroy, the acting Head Historian, reduced Herbert Melliphant to Apprentice Third Class after he let off a fire-cracker in the Museum's Main Hall.

But at dawn the happiness and the rumours died away. The lights in the north belonged to a huge city all right, but it was not crippled; it was heading south at top speed, and it had a hungry look. The Guild of Navigators soon identified it as Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, a conurbation formed by the coupling together of four huge Traktionstadts, but nobody else cared very much what it was called; they just wanted to get away from it.

London fired up its engines and raced on into the east until the conurbation sank below the horizon. But next morning, there it was again, upperworks glinting in the sunrise, even closer than before.

* * * * *

Katherine Valentine had not joined in with the parties and the merrymaking, nor did she join in the panic that now gripped her city.

Since her return from the Deep Gut she had kept to her room, washing and washing herself to get rid of the awful slurry-pit stink of Section 60. She hardly ate anything, and she made the servants fling all the clothes she had been wearing that day into the recycling bins. She stopped going to school. How could she face her friends, with all their silly talk of clothes and boys, knowing what she knew? Outside, sunlight dappled the lawns and the flowers were blooming and the trees were all unfurling fresh green leaves, but how could she enjoy the beauty of High London ever again? All she could think of were the thousands of Londoners who were toiling and dying in misery so that a few lucky, wealthy people like herself could live in comfort.

She wrote a letter to the Goggle-screen people about it, and another to the police, but she tore them both up. What was the point of sending them, when everyone knew that Magnus Crome controlled the police and the Goggle-screens? Even the High Priest of Clio had been appointed by Crome. She would have to wait for her father's return before anything could be done about the Deep Gut - providing that London hadn't got itself eaten by the time he came home.

As for her search for the truth about the scarred girl, it had ground to a halt. Apprentice Pod had known nothing - or pretended as much - and she could think of nowhere else to turn.

Then, at breakfast time on the third day of London's flight from Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, a letter came for her. She had no idea who would have written to her, and she turned the envelope over in her hands a couple of times, staring at the Tier Six postmark and feeling oddly afraid.

When she finally tore it open a sliver of paper dropped into her algae-flakes; ordinary London notepaper, recycled so many times that it was as soft and hairy as felt, with a watermark that said "Waste not - want not".

A few weeks earlier Katherine would have been excited, but she was in no mood for mysteries any more. It was probably somebody's idea of a joke, she thought. She was in no mood for jokes, either. How could she be, with London fleeing for its life and the lower tiers full of suffering and misery? She flung the note into the recycling bin and pushed her breakfast away uneaten, then went off to wash again.

But she was curious, in spite of herself. When nine o'clock came she said, "I will not go."

At nine-thirty she told Dog, "It would be pointless, there won't be anybody there."

At ten she muttered, "Pete's Eats - what sort of name is that? They probably made it up."

Half an hour later she was waiting at the Central Shaft terminus for a down elevator.

She got off at Low Holborn and walked to the tier's edge through streets of shabby metal flats. She had put on her oldest clothes and walked fast with her head down and Dog close against her. She didn't feel proud any more when people stared. She imagined them saying,
"That's Katherine Valentine, a stuck-up little
miss from Tier One. They don't know they're bom, those High Londoners."

Belsize Park was almost deserted, the air thick with grainy smog from London's engines. The lawns and flowerbeds had all been given over to agriculture years and years before and the only people she could see were some labourers from Parks & Gardens who were moving along the rows of cabbages, spraying them with something to kill greenfly. Nearby stood a tatty conical building with a sign on its roof that read "Pete's Eats" and, in smaller letters underneath, "Cafe". There were metal tables under awnings on the pavement outside the door, and more tables inside. People sat talking and smoking in the thin flicker of a half-power argon globe. A boy sitting alone at a table near the door stood up and waved. Dog wagged his tail. It took Katherine a moment to recognize Apprentice Pod.