“From the stars, of course,” said Hester. “Mum showed me. She was an aviator, too, remember? She’d been all over the place. She even went to America once. You have to use the stars to find your way in places like that where they don’t have charts or landmarks. Look, that’s the Pole Star, and that constellation is what the Ancients used to call the Great Bear, but most people nowadays call it the City. And if we keep that one to starboard we’ll know we’re heading north-east…”
“There are so many!” he said, trying to follow her pointing finger. Here above the clouds, without veils of city-smoke and Out-Country dust to hide it, the night sky sparkled with a million cold points of light. “I never knew there were so many stars before!”
“They’re all suns, burning away far out in space, thousands and thousands of miles away,” said Hester, and Tom had the feeling that she felt proud to show him how much she knew. “Except for the ones that aren’t really stars at all. Some of the really bright ones are mechanical moons that the Ancients put up into orbit thousands of years ago, still circling and circling the poor old Earth.”
Tom stared up at the glittering dark. “And what’s that one?” he asked, pointing to a bright star low in the west.
Hester looked at it, and her smile faded away. He saw her hands clench into fists. “That one?” she said. “That’s an airship, and it’s coming after us.”
“Perhaps Miss Fang has come to rescue us?” said Tom hopefully.
But the distant airship was gaining quickly, and in another few minutes they could see that it was a small, London-built scoutship, a Spudbury Sunbeam or a Goshawk 90. They could almost feel Shrike’s green eyes watching them across the deserts of the sky.
Hester started fumbling with the rusty wheels and levers that controlled the gas-pressure in the balloon. After a few seconds she found the one she wanted and a fierce hiss came from somewhere overhead.
“What are you doing?” squeaked Tom. “You’ll let the gas out! We’ll crash!”
“I’m hiding us from Shrike,” said the girl, and opened the valve still further. Looking up, Tom saw the gasbag start to sag. He glanced back at the pursuing airship. It was gaining, but it was still a few miles away. Hopefully from that distance it would look as if some accident had struck the balloon. Hopefully Shrike would not guess Hester’s plan. Hopefully his little ship was not armed with rocket-projectors…
And then they sank down into the clouds and could see nothing but swirling dark billows and sometimes a quick glimpse of the moon scudding dimly above them. The basket creaked and the envelope flapped and the gas-valve hissed like a tetchy snake.
“When we touch down, get out of the basket as quick as you can,” said Hester.
“Yes,” he said, and then, “but… you mean we’re going to leave the balloon?”
“We don’t stand a chance against Shrike in the air,” she explained. “Hopefully on the ground I can outwit him.”
“On the ground?” cried Tom. “Oh, not the Out-Country again!”
The balloon was sinking fast. They saw the black landscape looming up below, dark blots of vegetation and a few thin glimmers of moonlight. Overhead, thick clouds were racing into the east. There was no sign of Shrike’s airship. Tom braced himself. The ground was a hundred feet below, then fifty, then ten. Branches came rattling and scraping along the keel and the basket bucked and plunged, crashing against muddy earth and leaping up into the sky and down again and up.
“Jump!” screamed Hester, the next time it touched down. He jumped, falling through scratchy branches into a soft mattress of mud. The balloon shot upwards again and for a moment he was afraid that Hester had abandoned him to perish on the bare earth. “Hester!” he shouted, so loud it hurt his throat. “Hester!” And then there was a rustling in the scrub away to his left and she was limping towards him. “Oh, thank Quirke!” he whispered.
He expected her to stop and sit down with him to rest a while and thank the gods for dropping them on to soft, wet earth instead of hard stone. Instead, she walked straight past him, limping away towards the north-east.
“Stop!” shouted Tom, still too winded and shivery to even stand. “Wait! Where are you going?”
She looked back at him as if he were mad. “London,” she said.
Tom rolled on to his back and groaned, gathering his strength for another weary trek.
Above him, freed of their weight, the balloon was returning to the sky, a dark tear-drop that was quickly swallowed into the belly of the clouds. A few moments later he heard the purr of engines as Shrike’s airship went hurrying after it. Then there was only the night and the cold wind, and rags of moonlight prowling the broken hills.
14. THE GUILDHALL
Katherine decided to start at the top. The day after her father left London she sent a message up the pneumatic tube system to the Lord Mayor’s office from the terminal in her father’s room, and half an hour later a reply came back from Crome’s secretary: the Lord Mayor would see Miss Valentine at noon.
Katherine went to her dressing room and put on her most businesslike clothes—her narrow black trousers and her grey coat with the shoulder-fins. She tied back her hair with a clip made from the tail-lights of an ancient car and fetched out a stylish hat with trailing ear-flaps which she had bought six weeks before but hadn’t got round to wearing yet. She put colour on her lips and soft oblongs of rouge high on her cheekbones and painted a little blue triangle between her eyebrows, a mock Guild-mark like the fashionable ladies wore. She found a notebook and a pencil and slipped them both into one of Father’s important-looking black briefcases along with the pass he had given her on her fifteenth birthday, the gold pass which allowed her access to almost every part of London. Then she studied her appearance in the mirror, imagining herself a few weeks from now going to meet the returning expedition. She would be able to tell Father, “It’s all right now, I understand everything; you needn’t be afraid any more…”
At a quarter to twelve she walked with Dog to the elevator station in Quirke Circus, enjoying the looks that people gave her as she passed. “There goes Miss Katherine Valentine,” she imagined them saying. “Off to see the Lord Mayor…” The elevator staff all knew her face, and they smiled and said, “Good morning, Miss Katherine,” and patted Dog and didn’t bother looking at her pass as she boarded the 11.52 for Top Tier.
The elevator hummed upwards. She walked briskly across Paternoster Square, where Dog stared thoughtfully at the wheeling pigeons and pricked up his ears at the sounds of the repair-work going on inside St Paul’s. Soon she was climbing the steps of the Guildhall and being ushered into a tiny internal elevator, and at one minute to twelve she was shown through the circular bronze door of the Lord Mayor’s private office.
“Ah, Miss Valentine. You are one minute early.” Crome glanced up at her from the far side of his huge desk and went back to the report that he had been reading. Behind his head was a round window with a view of St Paul’s, looking wavery and unreal through the thick glass, like a sunken temple seen through clear water. Sunlight shone dimly on the tarnished bronze panels of the office walls. There were no pictures, no hangings or decorations of any sort, and the floor was bare metal. Katherine shivered, feeling the cold rise up through the soles of her shoes.
The Lord Mayor kept her waiting for fifty-nine silent seconds which seemed to stretch on for ever. She was feeling thoroughly uncomfortable by the time he set down the report. He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.