Long ago, the town of Airhaven had decided to escape the hungry cities by taking to the sky. It was a trading post and meeting place for aviators now, drifting above the Hunting Ground all summer, then flying south to winter in warmer skies. Tom remembered how it had once anchored over London for a whole week; how the sight-seeing balloons had gone up and down from Kensington Gardens and Circle Park, and how jealous he had been of people like Melliphant who were rich enough to take a trip in one and come back full of stories about the floating town. Now he was going there himself, and not just as a sightseer, either! What a story he would be able to tell the other apprentices when he got home!
Slowly the airship rose towards the town, and as the sun dipped behind the cloud-banks in the west Miss Fang cut her engines and let her drift in towards a docking strut, while harbour officers in sky-blue livery waved multi-coloured flags to guide her safely to her berth. Behind them the dock was crowded with sightseers and aviators, and even a little gaggle of airship-spotters who dutifully jotted down the Jenny Haniver’s number in their notebooks as the mooring clamps engaged.
A few moments later Tom was stepping out into the twilight and the chill, thin air, gazing at the airships coming and going; elegant high-liners and rusty scows, trim little air-cutters with see-through envelopes and tiger-striped spice-freighters from the Hundred Islands. “Look!” he said, pointing up at the rooftops. “There’s the Floating Exchange, and that church is St Michael’s-in-the-Sky, there’s a picture of it in the London Museum!” But Miss Fang had seen it many, many times before, and Hester just scowled at the crowds on the quayside and hid her face.
The aviatrix locked the Jenny’s hatches with a key that hung on a thong around her neck, but when a barefoot boy ran up and tugged at her coat saying, “Watch yer airship for yer, Missus?” she laughed and dropped three square bronze coins into his palm. “I won’t let nobody sneak aboard!” he promised, taking up his post beside the gangplank. Uniformed dockhands appeared, grinning at Miss Fang but staring suspiciously at her new groundling friends. They checked that the newcomers had no metal toecaps on their boots or lighted cigarettes about their persons, then led them back to the harbouroffice where huge, crudely-lettered notices insisted NO SMOKING, TURN OFF ALL ELECTRICS and MAKE NO SPARKS. Sparks were the terror of the air-trade, because of the danger that they might ignite the gas in the airships’ envelopes. In Airhaven even over-vigorous hair-brushing was a serious crime, and all new arrivals had to sign strict safety agreements and convince the harbourmaster that they were not likely to burst into flames.
At last they were allowed up a metal stairway to the High Street. Airhaven’s single thoroughfare was a hoop of lightweight alloy deckplates lined with shops and stalls, chandleries, cafés and airshipmen’s hotels. Tom turned around and around, trying to take everything in and make sure he would remember it for ever. He saw turbines whirling on every rooftop, and mechanics crawling like spiders over the huge engine pods. The air was thick with the exotic smells of foreign food, and everywhere he looked there were aviators, striding along with the careless confidence of people who had lived their whole life in the sky, their long coats fluttering behind them like leathery wings.
Miss Fang pointed along the curve of the High Street to a building with a sign in the shape of an airship. “That’s the Gasbag and Gondola,” she told her companions. “I’ll buy you dinner, and then we’ll find a friendly captain to take you back to London.”
They strode towards it, the aviatrix in the lead, Hester hiding from the world behind her upraised hand, Tom still looking about in wonder and thinking it a pity that his adventures would soon be over. He didn’t notice a Goshawk 90 circling among a shoal of larger vessels, waiting for a berth. Even if he had, he would not have been able to read its registration numbers at this distance, or see that the insignia on its envelope was the red wheel of the Guild of Engineers.
12
THE GASBAG AND GONDOLA
The inn was big and dark and busy. The walls were decorated with airships in bottles and the propellers of famous old sky-clippers with their names carefully painted on the blades, Nadhezna and Aerymouse and Invisible Worm. Aviators clustered round the metal tables, talking of cargoes and the price of gas. There were Jains and Tibetans and Xhosa, Inuit and Air-Tuareg and fur-clad giants from the Ice Wastes. An Uighur girl played “Slipstream Serenade” on her forty-string guitar, and now and then a loudspeaker would announce, “Arrival on strut three; the Idiot Wind fresh from the Nuevo-Mayan Palatinates with a cargo of chocolate and vanilla,” or, “Now boarding at strut seven; My Shirona outbound for Arkangel…”
Anna Fang stopped at a little shrine just inside the door and said her thanks to the gods of the sky for a safe journey. The God of Aviators was a friendly-looking fellow – the fat red statue on the shrine reminded Tom of Chudleigh Pomeroy – but his wife, the Lady of the High Heavens, was cruel and tricky; if offended she might brew up hurricanes or burst a gas-cell. Anna made her an offering of rice-cakes and lucky money, and Tom and Hester nodded their thank-yous just in case.
When they looked up the aviatrix was already hurrying away from them towards a group of aviators at a corner table. “Khora!” she shouted, and by the time they caught up with her she was being whirled round and round in the arms of a handsome young African and talking quickly in Airsperanto. Tom was almost sure he heard her mention “MEDUSA” as she glanced back at him and Hester, but by the time they drew near the talk had switched into Anglish and the African was saying, “We rode high-level winds all the way from Zagwa!” and shaking red Sahara sand out of his flying helmet to prove it.
He was Captain Khora of the gunship Mokele Mbembe and he came from a static enclave in the Mountains of the Moon, an ally of the Anti-Traction League. Now he was bound for Shan Guo, to begin a tour of duty in the League’s great fortress at Batmunkh Gompa. Tom was shocked at first to be sharing a table with a soldier of the League, but Khora seemed a good man, as kind and welcoming as Miss Fang herself. While she ordered food he introduced his friends: the tall gloomy one was Nils Lindstrom of the Garden Aëroplane Trap, and the beautiful Arab lady with the laugh was Yasmina Rashid of the Palmyrene privateer Zainab. Soon the aviators were all laughing together, reminding each other of battles above the Hundred Islands and drunken parties in the airmen’s quarter on Panzerstadt-Linz, and between stories Anna Fang pushed dishes across the table to her guests. “More battered dormouse, Tom? Hester, try some of this delicious devilled bat!”
While Tom poked the strange foreign food around his plate with the pair of wooden sticks he had been given instead of a knife and fork, Khora leaned close and said softly, “So are you and your girlfriend crewing aboard the Jenny now?”
“No, no!” Tom assured him quickly. “I mean, no, she’s not my girlfriend, and no, we are just passengers…” He fumbled with some mashed locust and asked, “Do you know Miss Fang well?”
“Oh yes!” laughed Khora. “The whole air-trade knows Anna. And the whole of the League too, of course. In Shan Guo they call her ‘Feng Hua’, the Wind-Flower.”
Tom wondered why Miss Fang would have a special name in Shan Guo, but before he could ask, Khora went on, “Do you know, she built the Jenny Haniver herself? When she was just a girl she and her parents had the bad luck to be aboard a town that was eaten by Arkangel. They were put to work as slaves in the airship-yards there, and over the years she managed to sneak an engine here, a steering vane there, until she built herself the Jenny and escaped.”
Tom was impressed. “She didn’t say,” he murmured, looking at the aviatrix in a new light.
“She doesn’t talk about it,” said Khora. “You see, her parents did not live to escape with her; she watched them die in the slave-pits.”
Tom felt a rush of sympathy for poor Miss Fang, his fellow orphan. Was that why she smiled all the time, to hide her sorrow? And was that why she had rescued Hester and himself, to save them from her parents’ fate? He smiled at her as kindly as he could,
and she caught his eye and smiled back and passed him a plate of crooked black legs. “Here, Tom, try a sautéed tarantula…”
“Arrival on strut fourteen!” blared the loudspeaker overhead. “London airship GE47 carrying passengers only.”
Tom jumped up and his chair fell backwards with a crash. He could remember the little fast-moving scout ships that the Engineers used to survey London’s tracks and superstructure, and he remembered how they didn’t have names, just registration codes, and how all the codes started with GE. “They’ve sent someone after us!” he gasped.
Miss Fang was rising to her feet as well. “It might just be coincidence,” she said. “There must be lots of airships from London… And even if Valentine has sent someone after you, you are among friends. We are more than a match for your horrible Beefburgers.”
“Beefeaters,” Tom corrected her automatically, although he knew that she had made the mistake deliberately, just to break the tension. He saw Hester smile and felt glad that she was there, and fiercely determined to protect her.
Then all the lights went out.
There were shouts, boos, a crash of falling crockery from the kitchens. The windows were dim twilight-coloured shapes cut out of the dark. “The electrics are off all over Airhaven!” said Lindstrom’s gloomy voice. “The power-plant must have failed!”
“No,” said Hester quickly. “I know this trick. It’s meant to create chaos and stop us leaving. Someone’s here, coming for us…” There was an edge of panic in her voice that Tom hadn’t heard before, not even in the chase at Stayns. Suddenly he felt very frightened.
From the far end of the room, where crowds of people were spilling out on to the moonlit High Street, a sudden scream arose. Then came another, and a long crash of breaking glass, shrieks, curses, the clatter of chairs and tables falling. Two green lamps bobbed above the crowd like corpse-lanterns.
“That’s no Beefeater!” said Hester.
Tom couldn’t tell if she was frightened, or relieved.
“HESTER SHAW!” screeched a voice like a saw cutting metal. Over by the doorway a sudden cloud of vapour bloomed, and out of it stepped a Stalker.
It was seven feet tall, and beneath its coat shone metal armour. The flesh of its long face was pale, glistening with a slug-like film of mucus, and here and there a blue-white jag of bone showed through the skin. Its mouth was a slot full of metal teeth. Its nose and the top of its head were covered by a long metal skull-piece with tubes and flexes trailing down like dreadlocks, their ends plugged into ports on its chest. Its round glass eyes gave it a startled look, as if it had never got over the horrible surprise of what had happened to it.
Because that was the worst thing about the Stalkers: they had been human once, and somewhere beneath that iron cowl a human brain was trapped.
“It’s impossible!” Tom whimpered. “There aren’t any Stalkers! They were all destroyed centuries ago!” But the Stalker stood there still, horribly real. Tom tried to back away, but he couldn’t move. Something was trickling down his legs, as hot as spilled tea, and he realized that he had wet himself.
The Stalker came forward slowly, shoving aside the empty chairs and tables. Fallen glasses burst under its feet. From the shadows behind an aviator swung at it with a sword, but the blade rebounded from its armour and it smashed the man aside with a sweeping blow of one huge fist, not even bothering to glance back.
“HESTER SHAW,” it said. “THOMAS NATSWORTHY.”
It knows my name! he thought.
“I…” began Miss Fang, but even she seemed lost for words. She pulled Tom backwards while Khora and the others drew their swords and stepped between the creature and its prey. But Hester pushed past them. “It’s all right,” she said in a strange, thin voice. “I know him. Let me talk to him.”
The Stalker swung its dead-white face from Tom to Hester, lenses whirring inside mechanical eyes. “HESTER SHAW,” it said, caressing her name with its gas-leak hiss of a voice.
“Hello, Shrike,” said Hester.
The great head tilted to stare down at her. A metal hand rose, hesitated, then touched her face, leaving streaks of oil.
“I’m sorry I never got the chance to say goodbye…”
“I WORK FOR THE LORD MAYOR OF LONDON NOW,” said Shrike. “HE HAS SENT ME TO KILL YOU.”
Tom whimpered again. Hester gave a brittle little laugh. “But… you won’t do it, will you, Shrike? You wouldn’t kill me?”
“YES,” said Shrike flatly, still staring down at her.
“No, Shrike!” whispered Hester, and Miss Fang seized her chance. She drew a little fan-shaped sliver of metal from a pocket in the sleeve of her coat and sent it whirling towards the Stalker’s throat. It made an eerie moaning sound as it flew, unfolding into a shimmering, razor-edged disc. “A Nuevo-Mayan Battle Frisbee!” gasped Tom, who had seen such weapons safe in glass cases in the Weapons & Warfare section at the Museum. He knew that they could sever a man’s neck at sixty paces, and he tensed, waiting for the Stalker’s skull to drop from its shoulders – but the frisbee just hit Shrike’s armoured throat with a clang and lodged there, quivering.
The slit of a mouth lengthened into a long smile and the Stalker darted forward, quick as a lizard. Miss Fang sidestepped, jumped past it and swung a high kick, but it was far too fast for her. “Run!” she shouted at Hester and Tom. “Get back to the Jenny! I’ll follow!”
What else could they do? They ran. The thing snatched at them as they ducked past, but Khora was there to grab its arm and Nils Lindstrom swung his sword at its face. The Stalker flung Khora off and raised its hand; there were sparks and a shriek of metal on metal, and Lindstrom dropped the broken sword and howled and clutched his arm. It threw him aside and lifted Anna off her feet as she came at it again, swinging her hard against Khora and Yasmina when they rushed to her aid.
“Miss Fang!” shouted Tom. For a moment he thought of going back, but he knew enough about Stalkers to know that there was nothing he could do. He ran after Hester, over a heap of bodies in the doorway and out into shadows and twilight and the frightened, milling crowds. A siren was keening mournfully. There was acrid smoke on the breeze and over by the power-plant he thought he saw the flicker of the thing all aviators feared the most: fire!
“I don’t understand,” gasped Hester, talking to herself, not Tom. “He wouldn’t kill me, he wouldn’t!” But she kept running, and together they dashed out on to Strut Seven where the Jenny Haniver was waiting for them.
But Shrike had already made certain that the little airship would not be going anywhere that night. The envelope had been slashed, the cowling of the starboard engine pod had been wrenched open like an old tin can and a spaghetti of torn wiring spilled out on to the quay. Among it lay the broken body of the boy Miss Fang had paid to guard her ship.
Tom stood staring at the wreckage. Behind him, faintly, growing closer, footsteps trod the metal deck: pung, pung, pung, pung.
He looked round for Hester, and found her gone; limping away along the docking ring – running downhill, he realized, for the damaged air-town was developing a worrying tilt. He shouted her name and sprinted after her, following her out on to a neighbouring strut. A tatty-looking balloon had just arrived there, spilling out a family of startled sightseers who weren’t sure if the darkness and the shouting meant an emergency or some sort of carnival. Hester shouldered her way through them and grabbed the balloonist by his goggles, heaving him out of his basket. It sagged away from the quay as she leaped in. “Stop! Thieves! Hijackers! Help!” the balloonist was shouting, but all Tom could hear was that faint, appalling pung-pung-pung approaching fast along the High Street.
“Tom! Come on!”
He summoned all his courage and leaped after Hester. She was fumbling at the mooring ropes as he landed in the bottom of the basket. “Throw everything overboard,” she shouted at him.
He did as he was told and the balloon lurched upwards, level with the first-floor windows, with the rooftops, with the sp
ire of St Michael’s. Soon Airhaven was a doughnut of darkness falling away behind them and below, and Shrike was just a speck, his green eyes glowing as he stalked out along the strut to watch them go.
13
THE RESURRECTED MAN
In the dark ages before the dawn of the Traction Era, nomad empires had battled each other across the volcano-maze of Europe. It was they who had built the Stalkers, dragging dead warriors off the battlefields and bringing them back to a sort of life by wiring weird Old-Tech machines into their nervous systems.
The empires were long forgotten, but the terrible Resurrected Men were not. Tom could remember playing at being one when he was a child in the Guild Orphanage, stomping about with his arms held out straight in front of him, shouting, “I-AM-A-STAL-KER! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!” until Miss Plym came and told him to keep the noise down.
But he had never expected to meet one.
As the stolen balloon scudded eastward, on the night-wind he sat shuddering in the swaying basket, twisted sideways so that Hester wouldn’t see the wet stain on his breeches, and said, “I thought they all died hundreds of years ago! I thought they were all destroyed in battles, or went mad and tore themselves apart…”
“Not Shrike,” said Hester.
“And he knew you!”
“Of course he did,” she said. “We’re old friends, Shrike and me.”
She had met him the morning after her parents died, the morning when she woke up on the shores of the Hunting Ground in the whispering rain. She had no idea how she came to be there, and the pain in her head was so bad that she could barely move or think.
Drawn up nearby was the smallest, filthiest town that she had ever seen. People with big wicker baskets on their backs were coming down out of it on ladders and gangplanks and sifting through the flotsam on the tide-line before returning with their baskets full of scrap and driftwood. A few were carrying her father’s rowing boat away, and it wasn’t long before some of them discovered Hester. Two men came and looked down at her. One was a typical scavenger, small and filthy, with bits of an old bug piled in his basket. After he had peered at her for a while he stepped back and said to his companion, “Sorry, Mr Shrike – I thought she might be one for your collection, but she’s flesh and blood all right…”