“You will be glad to hear that I have just received a coded radio signal sent from your father’s expedition shortly before he flew out of range,” he said. “All is well aboard the 13th Floor Elevator.”
“Good!” said Katherine, knowing that it would be the last she would hear of Father until he was on his way home; even the Engineers had never been able to send radio signals more than a few hundred miles.
“Was there anything else?” asked Crome.
“Yes…” said Katherine, and hesitated, afraid that she was going to sound foolish. Faced with Crome’s cold office and still colder smile she found herself wishing she had not put on so much make-up or worn these stiff, formal clothes. But this was what she had come here for, after all. She blurted out, “I want to know about that girl, and why she tried to kill my father.”
The Lord Mayor’s smile vanished. “Your father has never seen fit to tell me who she is. I have no idea why she is so keen to murder him.”
“Do you think it is something to do with MEDUSA?”
Crome’s gaze grew a few degrees colder. “That matter does not concern you!” he snapped. “What has Valentine told you?”
“Nothing!” said Katherine, getting flustered. “But I can see he’s scared, and I need to know why, because…”
“Listen to me, child,” said Crome, standing up and coming around the desk at her. Thin hands gripped her shoulders. “If Valentine has secrets from you it is for good reason. There are aspects of his work that you could not begin to understand. Remember, he started out with nothing; he was a mere Out-Country scavenger before I took an interest in him. Do you want to see him reduced to that again? Or worse?”
Katherine felt as if he had slapped her. Her face burnt red with anger, but she controlled herself.
“Go home and wait for his return,” ordered Crome. “And leave grown-up matters to those who understand them. Don’t speak to anyone about the girl, or MEDUSA.”
“Grown-up matters?” thought Katherine angrily. “How old does he think I am?” But she bowed her head and said meekly, “Yes, Lord Mayor,” and “Come along, Dog.”
“And do not bring that animal to Top Tier again,” called Crome, his voice following her into the outer office, where the secretaries turned to stare at her furious, tearful face.
Riding the elevator back to Quirke Circus, she whispered in her wolfs ear, “We’ll show him, Dog!”
Instead of going straight home she called in at the Temple of Clio on the edge of Circle Park. There in the scented darkness she calmed herself and tried to work out what to do next.
Ever since Nikolas Quirke had been declared a god, most Londoners had stopped giving much thought to the older gods and goddesses, and so Katherine had the temple to herself. She liked Clio, who had been her mother’s goddess back in Puerto Angeles, and whose statue looked a bit like Mama too, with its kind dark eyes and patient smile. She remembered what Mama had taught her, about how the poor goddess was being blown constantly backwards into the future by the storm of progress, but how she could reach back sometimes and inspire people to change the whole course of history. Looking up now at the statue’s gentle face she said, “What must I do, Clio? How can I help Father if the Lord Mayor won’t tell me anything?”
She hadn’t really expected an answer, and none came, so she said a quick prayer for Father and another for poor Tom Natsworthy, and made her offerings and left.
It wasn’t until she was halfway back to Clio House that the idea struck her, a thought so unexpected that it could have been sent to her by the goddess herself. She remembered how, as she ran towards the waste chutes on the night Tom fell, she had passed someone heading in the other direction; a young Apprentice Engineer, looking so white and shocked that she was sure he must have witnessed what happened.
She hurried homeward through the sunlit park. That young Engineer would have the answer! She would go back to the Gut and find him! She would find out what was going on without any help from wicked old Magnus Crome!
15. THE RUSTWATER MARSHES
Tom and Hester had walked all night, and when the pale, flat sun rose behind drifts of morning fog they kept walking, stopping only now and then to catch their breath. This landscape was quite different from the mud-plains they had crossed a few days ago. Here they had to keep making detours around bogs and pools of brackish water, and although they sometimes stumbled into the deep, weed-choked scars of old town-tracks it was clear that no town had been this way for many years. “See how the scrub has grown up,” said Hester, pointing out ruts filled with brambles and hillsides green with young trees. “Even a little semi-static would have felled those saplings for fuel.”
“Perhaps the earth here is just too soft,” suggested Tom, sinking to his waist for the twentieth time in the thick mud. He was recalling the huge map of the Hunting Ground that hung in the lobby of the London Museum, and the great sweep of marsh-country that stretched all the way from the central mountains to the shores of the Sea of Khazak, mile after mile of reed-beds and thin blue creeks and all of it marked, Unsuitable for Town or City. He said, “I think this must be the edge of the Rustwater Marshes. They call it that because the water is supposed to be stained red with the rust of towns that have strayed into it and sunk. Only the most foolhardy mayor would bring his town here.”
“Then Wreyland and Anna Fang brought us much further south than I thought,” whispered Hester to herself. “London must be almost a thousand miles away by now. It’ll take months to catch it up again, and Shrike will be on my tail the whole way.”
“But you fooled him!” Tom reminded her. “We escaped!”
“He won’t stay fooled for long,” she said. “He’ll soon pick up our tracks again. Why do you think he’s called a Stalker?”
On and on she led him, dragging him over hills and through mires and down valleys where the air was speckly with swarms of whining, stinging flies. They both grew weary and peevish. Once Tom suggested they sit down and rest a while, and Hester snapped back, “Do what you like. What do I care?” After that he trudged on in silence, angry at her. What a horrible, ugly, vicious, self-pitying girl she was! After all they had come through, and the way he had helped her in the Out-Country, she was still ready to abandon him. He wished Shrike had got her and it was Miss Fang or Khora who he had escaped with. They would have let him rest his aching feet…
But he was glad enough of Hester when the darkness fell, when thick clots of fog rose out of the marshes like the ghosts of mammoths and every rustle in the undergrowth sounded like a Stalker’s footfall. She found a place for them to spend the night, in the shelter of some stunted trees, and later, when the sudden shriek of a hunting owl brought him leaping out of his uneasy sleep he found her sitting guard beside him like a friendly gargoyle. “It’s all right,” she told him. And after a moment, in one of those sudden flashes of softness that he had noticed before, she said, “I miss them, Tom. My mum and dad.”
“I know,” he said. “I miss mine too.”
“You’ve got no family at all in London?”
“No.”
“No friends?”
He thought about it. “Not really.”
“Who was that girl?’ she asked, after a little while.
“What? Where?”
“In the Gut that night, with you and Valentine.”