Katherine felt helpless tears prickling her eyes. “Please,” she whispered, “could you just take us home?”
“Of course.”
They sat in awkward silence as the bug drove through the streets of Tier One into the park. The darkness was full of people running and shouting, pointing up towards the cathedral. But there were other runners too: Engineer security men leading squads of Beefeaters. When the bug stopped outside Clio House, Pomeroy climbed out to walk Katherine to the door. She whispered a heartfelt goodbye to Bevis and followed him. “Could you take Apprentice Pod to an elevator station?’ she asked. “He needs to get back to the Gut.”
Pomeroy looked worried. “I don’t know, Miss Valentine,” he sighed. “You’ve seen how het-up the Engineers are. If I know them they’ll have all their factories and dormitory blocks locked down tight by now, and security checks in progress. They may already have worked out that he’s missing, along with two coats and hoods…”
“You mean, he can’t go back?” Katherine felt dizzy at the thought of what she had done to poor Pod. “Not ever?”
Pomeroy nodded.
“Then I’ll keep him with me at Clio House!” Katherine decided.
“He’s not a stray cat, my dear.”
“But when Father gets home he’ll be able to sort everything out, won’t he? Explain to the Lord Mayor that it was nothing to do with Bevis…”
“It’s possible,” agreed Pomeroy. “Your father is very close to the Guild of Engineers. A damned sight too close, some people say. But I don’t think Clio House is the place to keep your friend. I’ll take him down to the Museum. There’s plenty of room for him there, and the Engineers won’t be able to search for him without giving us warning first.”
“Would you really do that?” asked Katherine, afraid that she was dragging yet another innocent person into the trouble she had created. But after all, it would only be for a few days, until Father came home. Then everything would be all right. “Oh, thank you!” she said happily, standing on tiptoe to kiss Pomeroy’s cheek. “Thank you!”
Pomeroy blushed and beamed at her, and started to say something else—but although his mouth moved she could not hear the words. Her head was filled with a strange sound, a whining roar that grew louder and louder until she realized that it wasn’t inside her at all, but pounding down from somewhere overhead.
“Look!” shouted the Historian, pointing upwards.
Her fear had made her forget St Paul’s. Now, looking up at Top Tier, she saw the cobra-hood of MEDUSA start to crackle with violet lightning. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck prickled, and when she reached for Pomeroy’s hand pale sparks jumped between the tips of her fingers and his robes. “Mr Pomeroy!” she shouted. “What’s happening?”
“Great Quirke!” the Historian cried. “What have those fools awoken now?”
Ghostly spheres of light detatched themselves from the glowing machine and drifted down over Circle Park like fire-balloons. Lightning danced around the spires of the Guildhall. The rushing, whining roar grew louder and louder, higher and higher, until even with her hands clapped over her ears Katherine felt she could not bear a moment more of it. Then, quite suddenly, a stream of incandescent energy burst from the cobra’s hood and stretched northwards, a snarling, spitting cat-o’-ninetails lashing out to lick at the upperworks of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth. The night split apart and went rushing away to hide in the corners of the sky. For a second Katherine saw the tiers of the distant conurbation limned in fire, and then it was gone. A pulse of brightness lifted from the earth, blinding white, then red, a pillar of fire rushing up in silence into the sky, and across the flame-lit snow the sound-wave came rolling, a low, long-drawn-out boom as if a great door had slammed shut somewhere in the depths of the earth.
The beam snapped off, plunging Circle Park into sudden darkness, and in the silence she heard Dog howling madly inside the house.
“Great Quirke!” Pomeroy whispered. “All those poor people…!”
“No!” Katherine heard herself say. “Oh, no, no, no!” She started to run across the garden, staring towards the lightning-flecked cloud which wreathed the wreckage of the conurbation. From Circle Park and all the observation platforms came the sound of wordless voices, and she thought at first that they were crying out in horror, the way she wanted to—but no; they were cheering, cheering, cheering.
PART TWO
24
AN AGENT OF THE LEAGUE
The strange light in the north had died away and the long thunderclap had spent itself, echoing and re-echoing from the walls of the old volcano. Mastering their panicked horses, the men of the Black Island came on along the margins of the bog amid a drum-roll of galloping hooves and the torn-silk sound of windblown torches.
Tom raised his hands and shouted, “We’re friends! Not pirates! Travellers! From London!” But the horsemen were in no mood to listen, even the few who understood. They had been hunting survivors from the sunken suburb all day, they had seen what Peavey’s pirates had done in the fishing villages along the western shore, and now they shouted to each other in their own language and galloped closer, raising their bows. A grey-feathered arrow thudded into the ground at Tom’s feet, making him stumble backwards. “We’re friends!” he shouted again.
The leading man drew his sword, but another rider spurred in front of him, shouting something in the Island tongue, then in Anglish. “I want them alive!”
It was Anna Fang. She reined in her horse, swung herself down from the saddle and ran towards Tom and Hester, her coat flapping against the firelight like a red flag. She wore a sword in a long scabbard on her back, and on her breast Tom saw a bronze badge in the shape of a broken wheel—the symbol of the Anti-Traction League.
“Tom! Hester!” She hugged them one by one, smiling her sweetest smile. “I thought you were dead! I sent Lindstrom and Yasmina to look for you, the morning after the fight at Airhaven. They found your balloon wrecked in those horrible marshes, and said you must be dead, dead. I wanted to search for your poor bodies, but the Jenny had been damaged, and I was so busy helping guide the town down to the repair-yard here… But we said prayers for you, and made funeral sacrifices to the gods of the sky. Do you think we could ask them for a refund?”
Tom kept quiet. His chest was hurting so that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. Anyway, the badge on the aviatrix’s coat told him that Peavey’s stories had been true: she was an agent of the League. He wasn’t charmed any more by her kindness and her tinkling laugh.
She shouted something over her shoulder to the waiting riders, and a couple jumped down from their ponies and led them forward, staring in wonder at Shrike’s corpse. “I have to leave you for a while,” she explained. “I’m taking the Jenny north to see what devilry has lit up the sky. The islanders will look after you. Can you ride?”
Tom had never even seen a horse before, let alone sat on one, but he was so dazed with pain and shock that he could not protest as they heaved him up into the saddle of a shaggy little pony and started to lead it downhill. He looked back for Hester and saw her scowling at him, hunched in the saddle of a second pony. Then the knot of riders closed about her, and he lost sight of her in the narrow, crowded streets of the caravanserai, where whole families were standing outside their homes to stare at the northern sky, and dust and litter whirled between the buildings as Airhaven dipped overhead, trying out its rotors one by one.
There was a small stone house where someone found a seat for him, and a man in black robes and a big white turban who examined his bruised chest. “Broken!” he said cheerfully. “I am Ibrahim Nazghul, physician. Four of your ribs are quite smashed up!”