He looked up into a round, red, bushy-eyebrowed face under an unconvincing wig; a face that grew even redder when it recognized him.
“Natsworthy!” boomed Chudleigh Pomeroy. “What in Quirke’s name do you think you’re playing at?”
2. VALENTINE
And so Tom found himself being sent off to do Gut-duty while all the other apprentices were busy celebrating the capture of Salthook. After a long, embarrassing lecture in Pomeroy’s office (“Disobedience, Natsworthy. . . Striking a senior Apprentice. . . What would your poor parents have thought?”) he trudged over to Tottenham Court Road station and waited for a down elevator.
When it came, it was crowded. The seats in the upper compartment were packed with arrogant-looking men and women from the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of the four Great Guilds which ran London. They gave Tom the creeps, with their bald heads and those long white rubber coats they wore, so he stayed standing in the lower section, where the stern face of the Lord Mayor stared down at him from posters saying, Movement is Life—Help the Guild of Engineers keep London moving! Down and down went the elevator, stopping at all the familiar stations—Bakerloo, High Holborn, Low Holborn, Bethnal Green—and at every stop another crowd of people surged into the car, squashing him against the back wall until it was almost a relief to reach the bottom and step out into the noise and bustle of the Gut.
The Gut was where London dismantled the towns it caught: a stinking sprawl of yards and factories between the Jaws and the central engine-rooms. Tom loathed it. It was always noisy, and it was staffed by workers from the lower tiers, who were dirty and frightening, and convicts from the Deep Gut Prisons, who were worse. The heat down there always gave him a headache and the sulphurous air made him sneeze and the flicker of the argon globes which lit the walkways hurt his eyes. But the Guild of Historians always made sure some of its staff were on hand when a town was being digested, and tonight he would have to join them and go about reminding the tough old foremen of the Gut that any books and antiques aboard the new catch were the rightful property of his Guild and that history was just as important as bricks and iron and coal.
He fought his way out of the elevator terminus and hurried towards the Guild of Historians’ warehouse, through tubular corridors lined with green ceramic tiles and across metal catwalks high above the fiery gulfs of the Digestion Yards. Far below him he could see Salthook being torn to pieces. It looked tiny now, dwarfed by the vastness of London. Big yellow dismantling machines were crawling around it on tracks and swinging above it on cranes and clambering over it on hydraulic spider-legs. Its wheels and axles had already been taken off, and work was starting on the chassis. Circular saws as big as Ferris wheels bit into the deck-plates, throwing up plumes of sparks. Great blasts of heat came billowing from furnaces and smelters, and before he had gone twenty paces Tom could feel the sweat starting to soak through the armpits of his black uniform tunic.
But when he finally reached the warehouse, things started to look a bit brighter. Salthook had not had a museum or a library, and the small heaps that had been salvaged from the town’s junk-shops were already being packed into crates for their journey up to Tier Two. If he was lucky he might be allowed to finish early and catch the end of the celebrations! He wondered which Guildsman was in charge tonight. If it was old Arkengarth or Dr Weymouth he was doomed—they always made you work your whole shift whether there was anything to do or not. If it was Potty Pewtertide or Miss Plym he might be all right. …
But as he hurried towards the supervisor’s office he began to realize that someone much more important than any of them was on Gut-duty tonight. There was a bug parked outside the office, a sleek black bug with the Guild’s emblem painted on its engine cowling, much too flash for any of the usual staff. Two men in the livery of high-ranking Guild staff stood waiting beside it. They were rough-looking types, in spite of their plush clothes, and Tom knew at once who they were—Pewsey and Gench, the reformed air-pirates who had been the Head Historian’s faithful servants for twenty years and who piloted the 13th Floor Elevator whenever he flew off on an expedition. Valentine is here! Tom thought, and tried not to stare as he hurried past them up the steps.
Thaddeus Valentine was Tom’s hero: a former scavenger who had risen to become London’s most famous archaeologist—and also its Head Historian, much to the envy and disgust of people like Pomeroy. Tom kept a picture of him tacked to the dormitory wall above his bunk, and he had read his books, Adventures of a Practical Historian and America Deserta—Across the Dead Continent with Gun, Camera and Airship, until he knew them by heart. The proudest moment of his life had been when he was twelve and Valentine had come down to present the apprentices’ end-of-year prizes, including the one Tom had won for an essay on identifying fake antiquities. He still remembered every word of the speech the great man had made. “Never forget, Apprentices, that we Historians are the most important Guild in our city. We don’t make as much money as the Merchants, but we create knowledge, which is worth a great deal more. We may not be responsible for steering London, like the Navigators, but where would the Navigators be if we hadn’t preserved the ancient maps and charts? And as for the Guild of Engineers, just remember that every machine they have ever developed is based on some fragment of Old-Tech—ancient high technology that our museum-keepers have preserved or our archaeologists have dug up.”
All Tom had been able to manage by way of reply was a mumbled, “Thank you, sir,” before he scurried back to his seat, so it never occurred to him that Valentine would remember him. But when he opened the door of the supervisor’s office the great man looked up from his desk and grinned.
“It’s Natsworthy, isn’t it? The apprentice who’s so good at spotting fakes? I’ll have to watch my step tonight, or you’ll find me out!”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but it broke through the awkwardness that usually existed between an apprentice and a senior Guildsman, and Tom relaxed enough to stop hovering on the threshold and step right inside, holding out his note from Pomeroy. Valentine jumped to his feet and came striding over to take it. He was a tall, handsome man of nearly forty with a mane of silver-flecked black hair and a trim black beard. His grey, mariner’s eyes twinkled with humour, and on his forehead a third eye—the Guild-mark of the Historian, the blue eye that looks backwards into time—seemed to wink as he raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Fighting, eh? And what did Apprentice Melliphant do to deserve a black eye?”
“He was saying stuff about my mum and dad, sir,” mumbled Tom.
“I see.” The explorer nodded, watching the boy’s face. Instead of telling him off he asked, “Are you the son of David and Rebecca Natsworthy?”
“Yes sir,” admitted Tom. “But I was only six when the Big Tilt happened… I mean, I don’t really remember them.”
Valentine nodded again, and his eyes were sad and kind. “They were good Historians, Thomas. I hope you’ll follow in their footsteps.”
“Oh, yes, sir!” said Tom. “I mean -1 hope so too!” He thought of his poor mum and dad, killed when part of Cheapside collapsed on to the tier below. Nobody had ever spoken like that about them before, and he felt his eyes filling with tears. He felt as if he could tell Valentine anything, anything at all, and he was just on the point of saying how much he missed his parents and how lonely and boring it was being a Third Class Apprentice, when a wolf walked into the office.