“It won’t have to,” she replied. “Look.”
He looked where she pointed, and saw a break in the mountain-chain ahead, a broad pass that a city could have crawled along—except that stretching across it, so vast that it seemed at first glance just another spur of the mountains, was the Shield-Wall.
It was like a wall of night, black, black, built from huge blocks of volcanic stone, armoured with the rusting deckplates of cities that had dared to challenge it and been destroyed by the hundreds of rocket batteries on its western face. On its snow-clad summit, four thousand feet above the valley floor, the banner of the broken wheel snapped and raced in the wind and the sunlight gleamed on armoured gun-emplacements and the steel helmets of the League’s soldiers.
“If only it were as strong as it looks,” sighed the avia-trix, bringing the Jenny Haniver down towards it it in a long sweeping curve. A small flying machine, little more than a motorized kite, came soaring to meet them, and she held a brief radio conversation with its pilot. It circled the Jenny once and then whirred ahead, guiding the newcomer over the top of the Shield-Wall. Tom looked down at broad battlements and the faces of soldiers gazing upwards, yellow, brown, black, white, faces from every part of the world where barbarian statics still held out against Municipal Darwinism. Then they were gone; the Jenny was sinking down the sheltered eastern side of the Wall, and he saw that it was a city, a vertical city with hundreds of terraces and balconies and windows all carved into the black rock, tier upon tier of shops and barracks and houses with balloons and brightly coloured kites drifting up and down between them like petals.
“Batmunkh Gompa,” announced Miss Fang. “The City of Eternal Strength. Although the people who call it that have never heard of MEDUSA, of course.”
It was beautiful. Tom, who had always been taught that static settlements were dingy, squalid, backward places, went to the window and stared, and Hester came and pressed her face to the glass beside him, safe behind her veil and almost girlish. “Oh! It’s just like the cliffs on Oak Island where the sea-birds nest!” she cried. “Look! Look!” Down at the base of the Wall a lake shone azure blue, flecked with the sails of pleasure-boats. “Tom, we’ll go swimming, I’ll teach you how…”
The Jenny Haniver landed among some other merchant ships at a mooring-terrace halfway down the Wall, and Miss Fang led Tom and Hester to a waiting balloon that took them up again past parks and tea-shops to the governor’s palace; the ancient monastery from which Batmunkh Gompa took its name, whitewashed and many-windowed, carved out of the steep side of the mountain at the Wall’s end. Other balloons were converging on the landing deck below the palace gardens, their envelopes bright in the mountain sunlight, and in one of the dangling baskets Tom saw Captain Khora waving.
They met on the landing deck, the young airman touching down just ahead of them and running across to embrace Miss Fang and help her friends out of the skittish gondola. He had flown here from Airhaven the morning after Shrike’s attack, and he seemed amazed and happy to see Tom and Hester alive. Turning to the aviatrix he said, “The Governor and his officers are eager for your report, Feng Hua. Terrible rumours have reached us about London…”
It was good to meet a friendly face in this strange new city, and Tom fell into step beside Khora as he led the newcomers up the long stair to the palace entrance. He remembered seeing a trim Achebe 2100 berthed at one of the lower platforms and asked, “Was that your machine we saw at the mooring-place, the one with oxhide outriggers?”
Khora laughed delightedly. “That old air-scow? No, thank the gods! My Mokele Mbembe is a warship, Tom. Every ally of the League supplies a ship to the Northern Air-Fleet, and they are stabled together, up there.” He stopped and pointed, and Tom saw the gleam of bronze doors far up near the summit of the Wall. “The High Eyries.”
“We’ll take you up there one day, Tom,” promised Miss Fang, leading them past the warrior-monks who guarded the door and on into a maze of cool stone corridors. “The League’s great Air Destroyers are one of the wonders of the skies! But first, Governor Khan must hear Hester’s story.”
Governor Ermene Khan was a gentle old man with the long, mournful face of a kindly sheep. He welcomed them all into his private quarters and gave them tea and honey-cakes in a room whose round windows looked down towards the lake of Batmunkh Nor, gleaming among patchwork farmlands, far below. For a thousand years his family had helped to man the Shield-Wall, and he seemed dazed by the news that all his guns and rockets were suddenly useless. “No city can pass Batmunkh Gompa,” he kept saying, as the room filled with officers eager to hear the aviatrix’s advice. “My dear Feng Hua, if London dares to approach us, we will destroy it. As soon as it comes in range—boom!”
“But that is what I’m trying to tell you!” cried Miss Fang impatiently. “London doesn’t need to come within range of your guns. Crome will park his city a hundred miles away and burn your precious Wall to ashes! You have heard Hester’s story. I believe that the machine Valentine stole from her mother was a fragment of an ancient weapon—and what happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth proves that the Guild of Engineers have managed to restore it to working order.”
“Yes, yes,” said an artillery officer, “so you say. But can we really believe that Crome has found a way to reactivate something that has been buried since the Sixty Minutes War? Perhaps Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was just destroyed by a freak accident.”
“Yes!” Governor Khan clutched gratefully at the idea. “A meteorite, or some sort of gas-leak…” He stroked his long beard, reminding Tom of one of the dithery old Historians back at the London Museum. “Perhaps Crome’s city will not even come here… Perhaps he has other prey in mind?”
But his other officers were more ready to believe the Wind-Flower’s report. “He’s coming here, all right,” said one, an aviatrix from Kerala, not much older than Tom. “I took a scout-ship west the day before yesterday, Feng Hua,” she explained, with an adoring look at Miss Fang. “The barbarian city was less than five hundred miles away, and approaching fast. By tomorrow night MEDUSA could be within range.”
“And there have been sightings of a black airship in the mountains,” put in Captain Khora. “The ships sent to intercept it never returned. My guess is that it was Valentine’s 13th Floor Elevator, sent to spy out our cities so that London can devour them.”
Valentine! Tom felt a strange mix of pride and fear at the thought of the Head Historian on the loose here in the very heart of Shan Guo. Beside him, Hester tensed at the mention of the explorer’s name. He looked at her, but she was staring past him, out through the open windows towards the mountains as if she half expected to see the 13th Floor Elevator go flying past.
“No city can pass the Shield-Wall,” said Governor Khan, loyal to his ancestors, but he did not sound convinced any more.
“You must launch the Air-Fleet, Governor,” Miss Fang insisted, leaning forward in her seat. “Bomb London before they can bring MEDUSA into range. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“No!” shouted Tom, springing up so that his chair fell backwards with a clatter. He couldn’t believe what she had said. “You said we were coming here to warn people! You can’t attack London! People will get hurt! Innocent people!” He was thinking of Katherine, imagining League torpedoes crashing into Clio House and the Museum. “You promised!” he said weakly.
“Feng Hua does not make promises to savages,” snapped the Keralan girl, but Miss Fang hushed her. “We will just hit the Gut and tracks, Tom,” she said. “Then the Top Tier, where MEDUSA is housed. We do not seek to harm the innocent, but what else are we to do, if a barbarian city chooses to threaten us?”