“Nothing’s happening,” said Stick.
“Wait,” said Borglum. “Wait.”
The light came first, breaking like sunrise from the base of Jotungard. The light; and then the noise; the thunder rolling across the plain, past the speeding Sandwich and on into the lands beyond. Amid the thunder Jotungard was seen to lift, and slew, and twist, and then it was not a castle at all but a jigsaw of black fragments all parting company with one another, pushing outwards on one red spreading rose of an explosion after another as the powder magazine set off the boilers and the boilers set off the fuel store, and the neighbouring vehicles veered and braked and some ran themselves right under the wheels of the Arkhangelsk heart-fortress in their efforts to avoid the axles and hubs and sponsons and shards of upperwork and armour which were coming down now all around.
And on the Knuckle Sandwich, under the thunder and the engines’ roar, there was an awed and respectful quiet among the watchers. But Borglum stood at the stern rail with his clothes flapping in the breeze and raised a flask of brandy that he’d taken from his pocket; held it up gleaming in the fires of Jotungard.
“You sleep sound now, Wavey dear,” he said.
28
MOVING ON
harley woke to the sound of thunder. When he was a nipper he’d been afraid of storms, and he sat up now in his bed confused and panicky, waiting for the lightning.
But it wasn’t really thunder. ’Course not. It was London’s engines warming up. The vibrations shivered through him; the springs of his bedstead sang; the glass on his bedside table jittered and sloshed, and the pens in their pot on his tiny desk all trilled together like crickets. The whole room was a-shudder, and his neighbours must have woken too, because he could hear no snoring coming through the walls.
It took Charley about three blinks, about three beats of his heart to understand what was happening. Then he was up, groping for his clothes, thinking, This is it! He dressed, laced his shoes, and blundered out of the room, pulling on his new white coat as he went. In the passage outside he met dozens of other Engineers all doing likewise. They went down the stairways of the building in a white tide. “Is it another test?” Charley heard one man ask, and a second answered, “Can’t be; not at this hour. This is real.”
Out they went into the patchy glare of the electric lamps on B:19 Street (which they all called Geargate). “Look!” said someone, pointing to the street’s end and the darkness beyond the tier’s edge there, and they looked, and saw far-off hills thrown suddenly into black silhouette by the pale flashes leaping up the northern sky.
“Lightning?”
“Guns.”
“Far off, though.”
“Not far enough.”
“To your stations!” a senior Guildsman was bellowing. “To your stations! Dr Shallow, Dr Crumb is asking for you. . .”
. . .while out in Tent Town the common folk of London were scrambling from their beds, stumbling in darkness or in lantern light to their tents’ doors, staring at their new city, which lit the earth around its wheels with the glow of furnaces and sent up streamers of steam and smoke against the stars.
“Is it another test?”
“Maybe the Arkhangelsk are coming. . .”
“Quercus is leaving!”
“He can’t be. Not without us. . .”
Nervous-looking squads of coppertops moved from street to street, collecting the last of the workers whose names appeared on Dr Crumb’s list. “Report aboard the new city at once. There’s an emergency. Yes, bring your family. Quickly.” The plumes of smoke that striped the sky were thicker now. The ground seemed to jump to the rhythm of the engines. Milly came to the doorway of her family’s shack and looked out across her city, lit now by the torches of the crowd as well as by the lamps and furnaces of the new London. “They are leaving without us!” said her dad, out in the street. He looked back at her quickly with wide, frightened eyes. Behind her in the shack her baby sister started to wail.
She ran outside to join him. “It will be all right,” she said. “Charley’s got us on that list. He promised. . .”
Her father didn’t seem to be listening. He shook his head, said disbelievingly, “The new city ain’t ready! It can’t move yet!”
Milly could not quite believe it either, despite the rumours she had heard. It was too terrible to believe; she only wished she had not been born into such times as these. She could sense that there would be paintings made about this night one day, and stories told, and great songs sung, for hundreds of years, long after she was dead. She wished she could be one of them future people listening to the stories, instead of herself, stood helpless and afraid here at the start of things.
“It’s all right,” she said again. “They’ll come and fetch us aboard. Charley promised. . .”
Sure enough there were men shouting in the neighbouring street; the white coat of an Engineer and the gleaming cap-badges of coppertops glimpsed between the tents, shouting names: “Maltby: quickly; bring your family. Aaronson; where is the Aaronsons’ tent?”
Milly stuck her head in through the hut door, into the wailing of the baby, the sleepy questions of her brothers. “Get ready!” she shouted. “Pack some stuff! We’re going aboard the new city. . .”
As Charley hurried into the control room Dr Crumb turned towards him, and the reflections of electric lamps slipped across the lenses of his icy little spectacles. “News from the north, Charley. Quercus says that we must leave now; tonight.”
Thank the gods for that, thought Charley, who had not much fancied waiting for the traitor Raven and his savage allies to arrive.
“You’ll stay with me,” Dr Crumb was saying. “I may need a runner to take messages to the outer sectors. . .”
All around him, lesser Engineers were eyeing their gauges as pressure built in London’s engines. A man ran up to report a problem in one of the fuel feeds and Dr Crumb turned to consider it, forgetting Charley. The rising rumble of the engines filled the caverns of Base Tier, and now for the first time Charley felt the city stir, edging forward just an inch as the wheels slithered in London clay.
“Those poor devils outside,” muttered an apprentice.
Charley wondered for a moment who he meant. He’d forgotten his promise to Milly Floater long ago.
Outside again, pushing past her father, hopping guy-ropes, running between the tents to pluck at the sleeve of that Engineer. She’d half hoped it might be Charley himself, but it was an older man, looking down his nose at her as she blurted, “Please, sir, my family and me are on the list. Floater’s the name. You’ll see us there. Dr Shallow put us there himself. . .”
The Aaronsons hurried past, carrying their belongings in sacks and suitcases, chivvied towards the new city’s boarding stairs by scared-looking coppertops. The Engineer glanced down at his list and shook his head. “No Floaters here.” Turning away now. “Dyce? William Dyce?”
“Please!” shouted Milly, grabbing at him again, but a policeman shoved her aside. She fell, and by the time she was on her feet again the Engineer and his bodyguard were hidden from her by a hedge of other people, all demanding to know what was happening, or shouting out reasons why they must be allowed aboard the new city. “Please!” Milly screamed. “We are on the list! Charley promised!”
Now, in the sullen red light that seeped from the Engine District, the lucky ones could be seen climbing the stairways into the new city. Those left behind, the untrained labourers and shopkeepers and keepers of canvas pubs whom Dr Crumb had deemed worthless, all looked on in growing fright. The engine smoke drifting past them stank of betrayal. They had trusted Quercus. They had paid him the taxes he asked of them, and most had believed the promises he gave them in return. Now, in the dark, in the cold, they were learning the most important rule of politics: the government was not their friend.
From Clerkenwell and old St Kylie the first angry shouts arose. Torches were kindled; people surged to the stairways. As the coppertops hurried the last of their charges up into
the city bricks and bottles began to fall on them. Caught in the crowd’s tide, Milly was swept away from her family. She broke free and tried to scurry home along a side-street between rows of empty tents, but a strange barricade blocked her way. She stood and stared at it for half a minute before she realized what it was. Dead horses were heaped up there. There had been a stable in that street, and someone had brought all the horses out and shot them and just left them lying there. Milly put a hand up to her mouth. She’d liked those horses. She used to bring her little brothers and sisters down to pat their noses sometimes and feed them apples. Now their blood was soaking through the soles of her shoes. “Who’d do such things?” she said, and a man running past her paused and shouted, “It was the coppertops, of course. They’re shooting all the horses. Mammoths too. If we had horses we could keep up with their new city, and they don’t want that!”
That was when it finally became real to Milly. She turned back towards the city. The crowds were boiling around the feet of the stairways. Some men were climbing the tracks; others had scrambled up to the towering doors of the Gut and were trying to force them open. Through the din of the engines Milly heard the crack of rifles, and she didn’t think it was just horses they were shooting any more. Then the engines roared louder still, drowning out the shots. The city shivered. Its wheels began to turn. The giant tracks slithered against wet earth, then found a purchase, inching forward over the aprons of rubble that had been packed in front of them.
The voice of the crowds rose in a despairing wail. The guards on the stairways were overwhelmed as people began to swarm up them: men in nightshirts wielding picks and spanners, frightened children, babies held up above their mother’s heads in baskets like tiny boatmen on a violent sea. But the stairways were shivering; twisting; wrenched sideways as the city moved. At their heads, the Lord Mayor’s men swung axes, cutting them free. One fell and then another, crashing down into the shadows between those huge wheels. On the city’s edge a crane collapsed, tugged from its footings. Then another and another; one by one their legs buckled under them and they knelt down like weary giraffes and then pitched forward, a ripple spreading outward through the crowds as people under them fought to escape.
A few people, mostly men, had managed to struggle up on to the city’s skirts and could be seen there battling with the Lord Mayor’s soldiers, but by now most had given up all hope of getting aboard. Pushing away from the city, they left a circle of clear ground around it as it revved its engines and began to turn, spewing smoke and sparks and smuts over the masses now fighting to escape its wheels.
Poor Milly, caught in the midst of them again, found herself jostled and shouted at and elbowed, knocked to her knees and nearly trampled flat. Women were shrieking and men were cursing and tents were blazing into flame, and the last cranes crashed down in ruin as the new city tore free of them. The tracks on the southern side kept rolling forward; those on the north went into reverse. The city turned laboriously, like a gigantic baby shuffling round on its bottom. It was not turning south, as everyone had expected. Slowly, slowly, it turned its back on Tent Town, and the engine’s roar increased. Huge sections of scaffolding up on the unfinished higher tiers collapsed, spilling from its stern in an avalanche of timber as it began to crawl away.
Some people followed it, still hoping that somehow they might fight their way aboard. Some ran the other way. Some, like Milly, just knelt staring at the deep watery wounds where it had stood, and the wheel ruts stretching black across the rubble-fields, ploughing through the lower slopes of Ludgate Hill. She watched the new city pull away, moving faster now, dwindling slowly towards the flickers of white lightning in the far north-east.
“You’re a dirty liar, Charley Shallow!” she shouted at it. But there was so much other shouting going on that no one heard her.
Dr Crumb, feeling a little dizzy from the heat and all the sleepless nights he’d spent preparing for this one, walked out of the control chamber and through the roaring Engine District. Everything seemed to be running smoothly, although he sensed a slight sluggishness in the larboard engines; the outer banks of tracks on that side were moving slower than the rest, and every few minutes the steersmen had to make a slight adjustment to the city’s course. He would have to look into that. But not quite yet.
He kept walking till he reached the city’s after-edge, from where he could look back upon the place that it had left behind. A mass of moving things covered the earth back there, their struggles lit fitfully by burning tents and the pinpoint flames of torches. He could make out no faces, no individuals, and he found that he felt no more pity for them than he would feel for protozoa swarming on a microscope slide. A cool and rational pride awoke in him as he recognized that he had finally achieved what he had set out to long ago. He had left all feeling behind him, along with those useless people and their useless tents. He had at last become a man of reason: a new man for a new age.
29
TOASTED SANDWICH
n spite of everything, in spite of the wild racketing and rocking and the steady fear, Fever fell asleep, dreaming uneasily, waking now and then just long enough to stop herself from being hurled out of her borrowed bunk when the Knuckle Sandwich rattled across some particularly rough bit of terrain. Big as it was, the carnival barge sometimes seemed to become airborne as it sped over the hummocks of the former seabed. The lookouts on the stern had reported no signs of pursuit, but Borglum would take no chances. “We just killed their chief and smashed their strongest fort,” he growled. “That’s liable to annoy.”
She slept deeply. Once she woke and looked out of the porthole by her bunk and saw nothing but the night and the mist and the roadside bushes lit by the flare from Borglum’s furnaces. She dropped her head into the pillow, into the smell of Lady Midnight’s perfume (for the blind fighter had lent Fever her cabin), and slept again, and woke to hear voices bellowing somewhere above her head.
“Lights astern!”
She was awake all at once. She scrambled into the main cabin, where most of the others were crowded at the windows. Quatch turned his kindly, hairy face to her and said, “We ain’t too worried yet, miss. We have the auxiliary engine running. They may not catch us.”
“What if they do?” asked Fever.
Lady Midnight looked at her with those startling white eyes. “If they want to stop us then they’ll have to board us, and once they board, their shooting instruments won’t do them no good.”
“And you have your Stalker. . .” said Fever.
“Not really, miss,” the Knave of Knives put in. “Your mum fixed him so he will not kill, to avoid unfortunate accidents in the ring. . .”
“Besides which,” said Quatch, “he is the auxiliary engine, you see. There is a treadmill down below, and he runs in it.”
“Don’t you fear, Miss Fever,” Lady Midnight said. “We don’t need old Ironsides to defend us. We are the Carnival of Knives.”
Stick, face pressed to the window glass, raised his voice above the rest. “Those lights are getting closer. . .”
Should you ever wish to discombobulate a land-armada, there are few better ways to do it than by blowing up its admiral’s traction castle. In the centuries that followed, historians of the Traction Era would refer to “Borglum’s Gambit” and waste a lot of ink and paper bickering about whether the destruction of Jotungard had been the first real battle of the Northern War, or whether that honour belonged to the fighting that broke out around Three Dry Ships a few hours later. They all agreed on the facts, however. Jotungard had exploded, killing almost everyone on board and damaging many of the vehicles bunched around it, most of which had been Raven’s. In that moment the leadership of the armada passed from Raven and his captains to the Great Carn of Arkhangelsk. Lit by the gaudy, dying-down fires of the wreckage of Jotungard his huge fortress pulled over and gathered its lesser forts about it as the Carns went aboard to hear how the battle-line was being rearranged.
While they debated, Raven’s sur
viving captains wondered what to do. Many turned their forts and landships quietly aside, figuring that with Jotungard gone there was no way this northern rabble could outfight Quercus. Others, who feared Quercus less or had loved Raven better, set about avenging him. Their heavy landships could not catch the unarmoured Knuckle Sandwich, but they sent a squadron of monowheels south, with armed campavans to provide support, and orders to take or destroy the carnival barge.
Cluny Morvish heard the howl of the departing ’wheels as Tharp led her through the firelight and the chaos to present her at the rear hatch of the Great Carn’s fort. There were Stalkers on guard there; gifts from Raven to the Great Carn, for the Arkhangelsk had no Stalkers of their own. They had orders to let no one pass, for everyone was afraid that there might be plots afoot to sabotage this fortress too, but when their mortal officers saw the girl waiting there with Tharp on their doorstep they cuffed the resurrected men aside and welcomed her in, asking meekly for her blessing as they led her up the stairways to the Carn.
All Cluny could see were the red fingers of firelight that poked in through every arrow-slit and gun port. This is a real war, she thought, and I have started it. But she had not chosen to start it; it had all been done by the machine in her head. She had no more control over her life, it seemed, than those Stalkers on sentry-go outside the Great Carn’s door. She wished her friend Fever could have been there to help her think it all through. Or was it just the old man’s memories in her head that had made Fever Crumb seem such pleasant company?
Anyway, Fever was lost now; sold by Tharp to passing showmen. Cluny had screamed at him when he told her. She would have punched his smug old face if some of his men had not held her back. She had threatened to open the spigot on his stupid hat and boil him. She wished she had now, but a vision of London had come and the fight had gone out of her. Fever was lost, and there was nothing for her to do but follow Tharp meekly up the heart-fort’s winding stairs.