“Mr. Pomeroy threw me in through the whale’s mouth,” said Clytie Potts, looking sadly down at her hands as she spoke, as if the memories still upset her.
“Yes,” agreed Pomeroy, “and then, with extraordinary presence of mind, I jumped in after her. Just in time! I think the whole of Tier Two must have given way at that point. Light blazed in at me through every rent and bullet hole in the whale’s hide, and I felt it start to roll, to slide, to tumble through the air! After that I don’t remember much. Surfing down the sides of disintegrating cities inside fiberglass whales isn’t really my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I passed out fairly promptly.”
“The whale eventually came to rest between two fallen tier supports over on the southern edge of the main debris field,” explained Clytie, taking up the story. “Some workers from the salvage yards found it there, and helped us out. That was when I saw what had happened to the city. It was … oh, I can’t begin to describe it. There was fire everywhere, and dirty smoke boiling into the sky, and explosions going off all the time, so there was always wreckage rattling down, and ash falling softly everywhere, like black snow. And sometimes, out of the middle of the ruins, a huge claw of white light would come crackling, groping its way across the ground as if it were feeling for us…”
“Yes, those were dicey times,” said Pomeroy, nodding solemnly. “The League was about, too, hungry for revenge. We watched some of our fellow survivors venture out of the wreckage to give themselves up to a League patrol, and they were all shot on the spot. So Clytie and me and our salvage-yard friends decided to stay put. After a while we started to make contact with other little groups of survivors, and we banded together and wondered what to do. We thought about sneaking back west along the track marks, but where would that get us? Just into the slave holds of some scavenger town, probably, where we’d be no better off than with the League. So in the end we decided to stay here. London might have come a cropper, but it was still London, eh? Still home…”
His colleagues all nodded and muttered agreement, and Pomeroy gave the wall of the committee room an affectionate pat, which made it wobble alarmingly.
“We moved into Crouch End because it seemed safe from sprites,” explained Clytie, “and we were hidden here from the air patrols that the League kept sending over in those early days. There’s a big section of the Gut lying fairly undamaged about a half mile east of here, and we salvaged a lot of useful stuff from it; even a trunk full of money. So later, when the League patrols thinned out a bit, some of us were able to sneak out and buy the Archaeopteryx and start picking up a few other things we needed.”
“It must have been dangerous,” said Tom, thinking of his own experience of crossing the Green Storm’s lines.
“Impossible, sometimes,” admitted Clytie. “But we usually manage a few trips a year…”
“Collecting Old Tech, I gather,” said Wolf Kobold.
Clytie looked uncertain. Several of the councillors shifted uncomfortably in their salvaged chairs.
“And what about these Engineers?” Wolf Kobold went on, nodding at the bald-headed man and woman. “You seem very friendly with them, considering it was all their fault that London exploded in the first place.”
The lady Engineer said softly, “Not all of our Guild supported Magnus Crome and his insane plans. Those of us who opposed him were banished to lowly jobs in the prisons and factories of the Deep Gut. I suppose that’s what saved us. All Crome’s supporters were with him on Top Tier when MEDUSA failed.”
“We’ve been very glad of our Engineers over the years,” said Angie’s father, the wiry former laborer. “They’ve knocked together all sorts of handy contraptions for us— bicycle-powered electric hot plates, solar collectors, windmills, lifting gear. Electrical guns that can knock out the Green Storm’s mechanized spy birds. Dr. Abrol here”—he pointed to the other Engineer, who grinned modestly—“has built a receiver that allows us to listen in on the Storm’s radio traffic, so we’ll have fair warning if they ever do come looking for us. And Dr. Childermass, our deputy mayor, used to be head of the Mag-Lev Research Division. It’s she—”
“Now, Len,” said the lady Engineer in a warning voice.
“The Green Storm must know that you’re here,” said Wolf. “All these windmills and fields and so forth. They must have seen you.”
“I suppose so,” said Clytie Potts.
“Yet they choose to leave you in peace. Perhaps they think you are Anti-Tractionists, like them?”
“Well, they’d be wrong then,” said Angie’s father, sensing the challenge in Kobold’s question and bristling. “They don’t know our plans, no more than you do…”
“Len,” said Dr. Childermass, and Chudleigh Pomeroy cut in hurriedly to say, “Anyway, now that young Natsworthy and his chums are here, we’d best make them comfortable; decide where they’re to stay and so forth.”
“Oh ; we don’t want to trouble you,” Kobold told him. “We’ll just stop a few days, have a nose about, and then head back to the Jenny Haniver.”
“But you can’t leave so soon!” protested Pomeroy. “You’ve only just got here!”
“What he means is, you can’t leave at all,” said Mr. Garamond, who had been listening impatiently to all this from his perch near the door. “These are important times for London. We can’t risk having you tell somebody we’re here.”
“Come, Garamond,” said Pomeroy, “Mr. Natsworthy is a Londoner like us!”
“That’s as may be, but his daughter isn’t, and as for this other gentleman … As head of the Security Subcommittee I have a duty to point out that we don’t know them, and we can’t trust them.”
“Hear, hear,” said Angie’s father, nodding vigorously. “It’d be a right shame if we hung on here for all these years only for some nosey parker to go and squeal about us to a scavenger just when we’re about ready to—”
“Len!” snapped Dr. Childermass.
“But I’m afraid Garamond’s right,” said Pomeroy apologetically. “I think it would be best if our young people keep a twenty-four-hour guard on the Holloway Road and the airship park. Tom, Wren, Herr Kobold, I hope you will consider yourselves our guests, but I’m afraid that there is absolutely no question of you leaving. Another biscuit, anyone?”
Chapter 21
Paging Dr. Popjoy
Sixty miles beyond dead london, where the young mountains of Shan Guo rose steeply from the plains, stood the fortress city of Batmunkh Gompa. It guarded a pass through which, for centuries, Traction Cities had kept trying to break into the fertile Anti-Tractionist kingdoms of the east. But now that the Green Storm had pushed their frontier westward, it had become a sleepy, faded shadow of itself, like a harbor from which the sea had retreated. A small garrison still manned the Shield-Wall, but the city served mainly as a base where armies and supply convoys paused on their way west to the new battlefields of the line.
In the valley behind it, along the pleasant shores of the lake called Batmunkh Nor, lay stilted fishing lodges and the pretty, steep-roofed villas and weekend homes of senior Green Storm officials. One, prettier than the rest, stood among pine trees on a finger of land pointing out into the lake. The lights in its teardrop windows made long reflections in the water, and the roofs curled at each corner like the toes of a sultan’s slippers in a fairy tale. Anyone bold enough to peek between the bars of its high spiked gates would notice some curious statuary in the gardens and a nameplate beside the paved drive that read: