The night sky over Batmunkh Gompa was full of smoke and tatters of singed envelope fabric. Fires were still burning in the High Eyries, but already the roads in the valley were clogged with constellations of small lights, the lanterns of refugees, spilling away into the mountains like water bursting from a breached dam. With the death of the Air-Fleet the Shield-Wall was finished, and its people were fleeing as fast as their feet and mules and ox-carts and freight-balloons could take them.
Down at the mooring platform, ships were already lifting into the smoky sky and turning south. The Keralan girl, Sathya, was trying to rally some panic-stricken soldiers, sobbing, “Stay and hold the Wall! The Southern Air-Fleet will reinforce us! They can be here in less than a week!” But everyone knew that Batmunkh Gompa would be gone by then, and London would be pushing south towards the League’s heartlands. “Stay and hold the Wall!” she begged, but the airships kept lifting past her, lifting past her.
The Jenny Haniver still hung at anchor, silent, dark. The key that Tom had taken from Anna Fang’s body fitted snugly into the lock on the forward hatch, and soon he was standing on the flight-deck, staring at the controls. There were far more of them than he remembered.
“Are you sure we can do this?” asked Hester softly.
“Of course,” said Tom. He tried a few switches. The hatch sprang open again, the cabin lights came on, the coffee machine started making a noise like a polite dog clearing its throat and a small inflatable dinghy dropped from the roof and knocked him over.
“Quite sure?” she asked, helping him up.
Tom nodded. “I used to build model airships when I was little, so I understand the principle. And Miss Fang showed me the controls when we were in the mountains. … I just wish she’d labelled everything in Anglish.”
He thought for a moment, then hauled on another lever, and this time the engines throbbed into life. Out on the mooring platform people turned to stare, and some made the sign against evil; they had heard of Feng Hua’s death and wondered if it was her restless ghost aboard the Jenny Haniver. But Sathya saw Tom and Hester standing at the controls and came running towards them.
Frightened that she would stop him taking off, Tom hunted for the lever which moved the engine pods. Bearings grated as they swivelled into take-off position. He laughed, delighted at the way the airship responded to the touch of his hands on the controls, hearing the familiar creak and huff of the gas-valves somewhere overhead and the clang of the mooring-clamps disengaging. People waved their arms and shouted, and Sathya pulled out a gun, but at the last moment Captain Khora came stumbling out on to the platform, supported by one of his crewmen, and gently took it from her. He looked up at Tom, raising a hand to wish him luck, and the surprising pinkness of his palm and fingertips was what stuck in Tom’s mind as the airship swayed uncertainly up into the sky and climbed through the smoke from the High Eyries. He took one last look down at Batmunkh Gompa, then swung her out over the Shield-Wall and turned her nose towards the west. He was going home.
30. A HERO’S WELCOME
The clouds that had shed their snow on Batmunkh Gompa blew west to fall as yet more rain on London, and it was raining still when the 13th Floor Elevator reached home, early the following afternoon. No crowds were waiting to welcome it. The sodden lawns of Circle Park were deserted, except for some workers from the Recycling Department who were cutting down the last of the trees, but the Guild of Engineers had been warned of Valentine’s return, and as the great airship came nosing down into the wet flare of the landing beacons they ran out on to the apron with the rain beating on their bald heads and the lights making splashy reflections on their coats.
Katherine watched from her bedroom window as the ground-crew winched the airship down and the excited Engineers clustered closer. Now hatches were opening in the gondola; now Magnus Crome was going forward, with a servant holding a white rubber umbrella over him, and now, now Father was coming down the gangplank, easy to recognize even at this distance by his height and his confident stride and the way his all-weather cape filled and flapped in the rising breeze.
The sight of him gave Katherine a twisting feeling deep inside, as if her heart really was about to burst with grief and anger. She remembered how much she had been looking forward to being the first to greet him when he stepped back aboard the city. Now she was not sure that she could even bring herself to speak to him.
Through the wet glass she saw him talk to Crome, nodding, laughing. A surge of white coats hid him from her for a moment, and when she saw him again he had pulled himself away from the Lord Mayor and was hurrying across the soggy lawns towards Clio House, probably wondering why she hadn’t been waiting for him at the quay.
She panicked for a moment and wanted to hide, but Dog was with her, and he gave her the strength she needed. She closed the tortoise-shell shutters and waited until she heard Father’s feet on the stairs, Father’s knock at the door.
“Kate?” came his muffled voice. “Kate, are you in there? I want to tell you all my adventures! I am fresh from the snows of Shan Guo, with all sorts of tales to bore you with! Kate? Are you all right?”
She opened the door just a crack. He stood on the landing outside, dripping with rain, his smile fading as he saw her tearful, sleep-starved face.
“Kate, it’s all right! I’m back!”
“I know,” she said. “And it’s not all right. I wish you’d died in the mountains.”
“What?”
“I know all about you,” she told him. “I’ve worked out what you did to Hester Shaw.”
She let him into the room and shut the door, calling sharply to Dog when he ran to greet him. It was dark with the shutters closed, but she saw Father look at the heap of books spilling from the corner table, then at her. There was a freshly-dressed wound on his neck, blood on his shirt. She twined a finger in her tangled hair and tried hard not to start crying again.
Valentine sat down on the unmade bed. All the way from Batmunkh Gompa, Anna Fang’s last promise had been echoing in the corners of his mind: Hester Shaw will find you. To have the same name thrown at him here, by Katherine, was like a knife in the heart.
“Oh, you needn’t worry,” said Katherine bitterly. “No one else knows. I learned the girl’s name, you see. And Dr Arkengarth told me how Pandora Shaw was murdered, and I’d already found out that she died seven years ago, around the time you got back from that expedition and the Lord Mayor was so pleased with you, so I just put it all together and. …”
She shrugged. The trail had been easy to follow once she had all the clues. She picked up a book she had been reading and showed it to him. It was Adventures on a Dead Continent, his own account of his journey to America. She pointed to a face in a group photograph of the expedition; an aviatrix who stood beside him, smiling. “I didn’t realize at first,” she said, “because her name had changed. Did you kill her yourself? Or did you get Pewsey and Gench to do it?”
Valentine hung his head, angry, despairing, ashamed. A part of Katherine had been hoping against hope that she was wrong, that he would deny it and give her proof that he was not the Shaws’ killer, but when she saw his head go down she knew that he could not and it was true.
He said, “You must understand, Kate, I did it for you…”
“For me?”
He looked up at last, but not at her. He stared at the wall near her elbow and said, “I wanted you to have everything. I wanted you to grow up as a lady, not as an Out-Country scavenger like I had been. I had to find something that Crome needed.