“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!”
19. THE SEA OF KHAZAK
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.