“Come back!” they could hear Peavey shouting, somewhere ahead of them. “Come back!” and then, “Ah! Oh! Help!”
They hurried towards the sound of his voice and the harsh screams of the monkey, and all came to a halt together at the edge of a deep patch of bog. Peavey was already up to his waist in it. The monkey perched on top of his head like a sailor on a foundering ship, grinning with fear. “Give me a hand, boys!” the mayor pleaded. “Help me! We can still get it! It’s only testing its liftin’ engines! It’ll come down again!”
The pirates watched him silently. They knew they had no chance of taking the flying town, and that his shouts had probably warned the islanders of their presence.
“We’ve got to help him!” whispered Tom, starting forward, but Hester held him back.
“Too late,” she said.
Peavey was sinking deeper, the weight of his chain of office pulling him down. He spluttered as the black mud swilled into his mouth. “Come on, lads! Maggs? Mungo? I’m your mayor! I done all this for you!” He searched for Tom with wild, terrified eyes. “Tell ’em, Tommy boy!” he whimpered. “Tell ’em I wanted to make Tunbridge Wheels great! I wanted to be respectable! Tell ’em—”
Mungo’s first shot blew the monkey off the top of Peavey’s head in a cloud of singed fur. The second and third went through his chest. He bowed his head, and the mud gulped him down with soft farting noises.
The pirates turned to look at Tom.
“We prob’ly wouldn’t be ’ere if it weren’t for you,” muttered Mungo.
“If you hadn’t of gone filling the Chiefs head up with all them ideas about manners and cities and stuff,” agreed Maggs.
“Different forks for every course, and no talking with your mouth full!” sneered Ames.
Tom started to back away. To his surprise, Hester stepped quickly between him and the pirates. “It’s not Tom’s fault! “she said.
“An” you’re no use to us, neither,” Mungo growled. “Neither of you is. We’re pirates. We don’t need no lessons in etiquette an’ we don’t need no lame scarface girl to hold us up.” He raised his gun, and Maggs followed suit. Even Mr Ames pulled out a little revolver.
And a voice out of the darkess said, “they’re mine.”
21. IN THE ENGINEERIUM
London was climbing towards a high plateau where the town-torn earth was dusted with thin layers of snow. A hundred miles behind it rolled Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, not just a threatening blur on the horizon any more but a huge dark mass of tracks and tiers, the gold filigree-work of its ornate top deck clearly visible above the smoke of factories and engines. Londoners crowded on to the aft observation platforms and watched in silence as the gap between the two cities slowly narrowed. That afternoon the Lord Mayor announced that there was no need for panic and that the Guild of Engineers would bring the city safely through this crisis—but there had already been riots and looting on the lower tiers, and squads of Beefeaters had been sent down to keep order in the Gut.
“Old Crome doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” muttered one of the men on duty at the Quirke Circus Elevator Station that evening. “I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but he’s a fool. Bringing poor old London way out east like this, day after day of travelling, week after week, just to get scoffed by some big old conurbation. I wish Valentine was here. He’d know what to do…”
“Quiet, Bert,” hissed his companion, “here comes some more of ’em.”
Both men bowed politely as two Engineers strode up to the turnstiles, a young man and a girl, dressed identically in green glastic goggles and white rubber hoods and coats. The girl flashed a gold pass. When she and her companion had gone up into the waiting elevator Bert turned to his friend and whispered, “It must be important, this do at the Engineerium. They’ve been swarming up out of their nests in the Deep Gut like a load of old white maggots. Imagine having a Guild meeting at a time like this!”
Inside the elevator Katherine sat down next to Bevis Pod, already feeling hot and self-conscious inside the coat that he had lent her. She glanced at him, and then checked her reflection in the window, making sure that the red wheels they had drawn so carefully on each other’s foreheads had not got smudged. She thought they both looked ridiculous in these hoods and goggles, but Bevis had assured her that a lot of Engineers wore them these days, and the other occupant of the elevator, a fat Navigator, didn’t so much as look at them while the car lurched towards Top Tier.
Katherine had spent the whole day restlessly waiting for Bevis to arrive with her disguise. To while away the time she had looked up the name HESTER SHAW in the indices of all her father’s books, but couldn’t find it. A Complete Catalogue of the London Museum contained one brief reference to a Pandora Shaw, but it just said she was an Out-Country scavenger who had supplied a few minor fossils and pieces of Old-Tech to the Historian’s Guild, and gave the date of her death, seven years ago. After that she tried looking up MEDUSA, only to learn that it was some sort of monster in an old story. She didn’t think Magnus Crome and his Engineers believed in monsters.
Nobody gave a second glance as she and Bevis strode across Top Tier towards the main entrance of the Engineerium. Scores of Engineers were already hurrying up the steps. Katherine joined them, clutching her gold pass and keeping close to the apprentice, terrified that she might lose him in this crowd of identical white coats. This will never work! she kept thinking, but the Guildsman on duty at the door wasn’t bothering to look at passes. She took a last look at the fading sunset behind the dome of St Paul’s, then stepped inside.
It was bigger than she expected, and brighter, lit by hundreds of argon globes that hung in the great open shaft at the centre of the building like planets hanging in space. She looked around for the staircase, but Bevis tugged at her arm and said, “We go up by monorail. Look…”
The Engineers were clambering into little monorail cars. Katherine and Bevis joined the queue, listening to their muttered conversations and the squeaky rustle of their coats rubbing together. Bevis’s eyes were wide and frightened behind his goggles. Katherine had hoped that they would be able to get a monorail car to themselves so that they could talk, but more Engineers were arriving all the time and she ended up sitting on the far side of a packed car from him, wedged tightly in with a group from the Mag-Lev Research Division.
“Where are you from, Guildsperson?” asked the man sitting beside her.
“Um…” Katherine looked frantically at Bevis, but he was too far away to whisper an answer. She blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “K Division.”
“Old Twixie, eh?” said the man. “I hear she’s having amazing results with her new models!”
“Oh, yes, very,” she replied. Then the car moved off with a lurch and her neighbour turned to the window, fascinated by the passing view.
Katherine had expected the monorail to feel like an elevator, but the speed and the spiralling movement made it quite different and for a moment she had to concentrate hard on not being sick. The other Engineers seemed not to notice. “What do you think the Lord Mayor’s speech will be about?” one of them asked.
“It must be MEDUSA,” said another. “I heard they are preparing for a test.”
“Let’s hope it works,” said a woman sitting just in front of Katherine. “It was Valentine who found the machine, after all, and he’s only a Historian, you know. You can’t trust them.”