Bridge of storms, p.1
Bridge of Storms, page 1
For Philippa Milnes-Smith, with love
Title Page
Dedication
1Hawkshead
2Nekroteknik!
3The Men from Museion
4The City Nest
5Too Many Professors
6Stoat Dancing
7Museum Light
8Below Decks
9Pringles for Breakfast
10The Night Attack
11Miss Torpenhow, in the Library, with the Dagger
12King of the Underworld
13Stanislaus and the Stalker
14Worrible the Horrible
15Out of the Frying Pan …
16The Black Glove
17Into the Fire
18Captives
19The Dogs of War
20Bullets and Battering Rams
21Stranger on the Shore
22A Change in the Weather
23Fires Were Started
24Doom in the Doghouse
25The Frozen World
26Course Correction
27The Immortal
28Foothills
29Stanislaus and Vespertine Investigate
30Doubt
31The Lightning Gun
32Betrayed
33Lamplighter
34At the Bridge of Storms
35In the Belly of the Beast
36Rust
37Control
38Harpoons
39Armed and Dangerous
40Duels
41Tug of War
42As if I Were Never Here at All
43This May Not Be the End
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Scholastic Books by Philip Reeve
Preview of Mortal Engines
Copyright
It was not Tamzin’s fault.
All she did was duck. It was instinct — that was all. She barely even saw the beer mug come flying at her, just caught the movement from the corner of her eye. But that was enough to make her Arcade fighter training kick in. So she ducked, and the mug sailed harmlessly above her head. The man standing behind her should have ducked too, but his instincts weren’t as sharp as Tamzin’s. The mug hit him squarely on the nose, breaking both.
That was when it all went sideways. The broken-nosed man bellowed in pain. He lunged for the mug-thrower, but, blinded by anger and spilled beer, grabbed the wrong man. His victim let out an indignant yell that summoned all his shipmates to his aid, and the little tavern was suddenly full of windmilling fists, thrown chairs, squawking barmaids, breaking glass, and furious aviators intent on thumping anyone who came within reach. Tamzin dodged a swung bottle, dived beneath a table, surfaced on the far side, and went to help her friends.
Oddington Doom was the veteran of more brawls and battles than he could remember, and had adopted a fighter’s stance, fists clenched, lashing out with cool, scientific violence at any piece of sky trash who came near. Max Angmering, far less experienced, had snatched up a chair to defend himself from a knife-wielding Uighur aviatrix who had taken a dislike to him for no reason he could understand. Hilly Torpenhow, who had been a history tutor until very recently and thought of herself more as a thinker than a warrior, snatched a heavy wooden tray from a neighboring table and applied it tactically to the Uighur’s head. The aviatrix grunted and toppled backward through the pane of smeared plastic that served as the tavern’s only window, landing hard on the balcony outside and rolling. Max and Tamzin both went after her, stopping her before she could smash through the flimsy-looking balustrade at the balcony’s brim.
They caught her just in time. Below the balcony were the town’s engines and propellers, and below those an awful lot of empty sky.
The Uighur lady did not thank them for saving her. Stumbling to her feet, she cursed them loudly in her own tongue and ran back inside to rejoin the fight. Tamzin and Max stood looking at each other. When they had set off with Hilly and Doom aboard the airship Fire’s Astonishment in search of adventure, this was not quite the sort of thing that either of them had had in mind.
And as they stood there, listening to the din of battle spilling from the tavern, one voice suddenly rose above the rest, shrill and terrified. “Revenant! Revenant! Run for your lives! There’s a Revenant loose!”
* * *
Oddington Doom had warned them that Hawkshead was a rough little place. “A nest of villains,” had been his exact words when they’d first sighted the air town, dangling from its patchwork cloud of gasbags somewhere above the Central Hunting Ground. A bundle of balsa-wood buildings and bamboo gantries, lashed together with rags of old envelope fabric, it had the off-putting look of something built by insects. But the Fire’s Astonishment was running low on fuel, and it seemed more efficient to dock at Hawkshead than to descend to the next city that passed by upon the ground.
It had been Hilly’s idea to visit the tavern once the Astonishment’s tanks were filled. “After all,” she said, “we paid that sky-high mooring fee — we might as well look around a little. I have never been aboard an air town, other than Bad Luftgarten.”
Bad Luftgarten was an elegant spa town. Hawkshead was a less classy sort of place entirely. Half the aviators who docked there were smugglers or sky-pirates, and the other half looked as though they would be happy to help out if the smugglers and pirates were short-handed. Dubious characters lurked in dingy doorways, trying to interest passersby in unsavory things. A parpsichord was hooting and wheezing inside the Hawkshead Tavern, but the music stopped when the crew of the Fire’s Astonishment walked in. The conversations that had been in progress stopped with it. All heads turned to stare at the newcomers, except for those that belonged to folk too drunk to care.
“What a dump!” murmured Max.
“Oh, it does not look too bad,” said Hilly brightly. She glanced around and caught sight of two men sitting nervously at a table near the window: an old man and a young one, dressed in robes of ginger tweed. “There,” she said, “not all the clientele are miscreants or ne’er-do-wells. Those gentlemen look like scholars. Let us go and introduce ourselves.”
It was as they picked their way between the crowded tables that someone called out, “Tamzin Pook!”
Tamzin glanced around. She didn’t know the drunken airshipman who was pointing at her, but a lot of people Tamzin didn’t know knew her. She had grown her hair a bit since leaving Margate, and wore aviator’s clothes, but anyone who had watched one of her fights in the Amusement Arcade would recognize her. This fellow clearly had. He rose unsteadily from his seat and shouted, “You owe me thirty silver cogs, Tamzin Pook! I had a bet on Eve Vespertine to beat that hedgepig machine, and you went and let it kill her.”
Tamzin hesitated, then decided to ignore him. She had carried the guilt of Eve Vespertine’s death with her for a long time, and had left it behind her at last; she was not going to let this hairy oaf remind her of it. She looked away. By chance, her eye fell upon a yellowing page of newsprint serving as a tablecloth. Where Is Mortmain? asked the headline, beside a picture of a smug, bewhiskered face that Tamzin knew too well.
The hairy oaf who had yelled at her did not like being ignored, or perhaps he really did blame Tamzin for the loss of his money. He belched, then hurled his beer mug at her, and Tamzin ducked, and so everything went south until Tamzin and Max found themselves on the balcony outside the torn plastic window, listening to panicked voices take up the shout of “Revenant!”
It occurred to Tamzin that she had ended up in trouble aboard Bad Luftgarten too. She did not have much luck on air towns.
Revenant!” most of the tavern’s denizens were shouting, although a few shouted the Germanic name, “Todt-jaeger!” or the Airsperanto one, “Nekroteknik!” One or two yelled, “Stalker!” which was rather a silly term in Hilly Torpenhow’s opinion.
There was nothing silly about Revenants. Armored, undead soldiers created by the nomad empires, most had been destroyed hundreds of years before, but they still stalked the nightmares of the north. The Revenant animals Tamzin had fought in the Arcade had been flimsy contraptions compared to the Stalkers of old, but even they had been deadly enough. The thing now stomping along the creaking bamboo walkways of Hawkshead was human-shaped, and altogether more terrible. The bruised and battered drinkers pouring out of the tavern collided on the platform outside with a gaggle of townsfolk retreating before the Revenant. Forgetting their differences in the face of this horror, they all stood and gawped at it together.
The Revenant had blue armor with a chromium trim, speckled with brass patches where dents and bullet holes had been repaired. It had lost an arm somewhere, although the remaining one, with its massive steel hand, looked dangerous enough. It wore no helmet, so everyone could see its dead, gray face, and the green light that flickered like a bottled aurora behind its heavy goggles. It wore, for some sinister reason of its own, a rainbow-striped woolen bobble hat.
As the horrified aviators and townsfolk backed away from it, the Revenant suddenly stooped and scooped up something from the shadows behind the bins outside the Silverfish Grill. The something turned out to be a small black cat with white mittens. A few of the more sentimental onlookers cried out in pity, afraid the poor animal was about to meet a dreadful end. But the cat just jumped up happily on to the Revenant’s armored shoulder.
The Revenant seemed to notice for the first time that it had an audience. The green light behind its goggles flared eerily.
Oddington Doom raised his voice. “It’s all right, everyone. She’s with us.”
Tamzin, shoving her way roughly through the throng, ran to where the Revenant stood. “Vespertine,” she scolded, “we told you to stay aboard the ship in case people saw you and …” She gestured at the horrified faces of the crowd. “Well, in case of this.”
“Small Cat escaped,” said the Revenant in her voice like dry-paper rustling. “I came to find him.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters,” said Tamzin. She patted Vespertine’s armored arm. This Revenant, the last and most sophisticated to be built in Margate, had been made from the body of Tamzin’s dead team friend Eve Vespertine. Despite her size and strength, she felt to Tamzin like a little sister.
“Maybe it’s good you showed yourself,” Tamzin admitted. “Those sky trash will think twice before they try starting anything with us again.” She took Vespertine’s massive, metal hand in hers and said loudly for the onlookers to hear, “She’s safe. She’s a friend of ours.”
But there were fewer onlookers by then, and soon there were almost none at all. The crowd was draining away: slinking into nearby shops, or down to the air town’s lower decks, or hurrying back to their airships and starting up their engines. No one believed a Revenant could be safe. No one wanted to tangle with anybody who was friends with one.
Pretty soon, the crew of the Fire’s Astonishment were all alone on the platform, except for the two tweed-clad scholars, who watched them warily from the doorway of the tavern. The older man seemed cautious, but after a few moments his younger companion edged closer and called out, “I say … do you really own this creature?”
“She travels with us,” said Oddington Doom.
“Would you be prepared to sell her?” asked the older man.
“Indeed no!” said Hilly indignantly. “Vespertine is a friend of ours. She is not a mere contraption to be bought and sold.”
“Pity,” the scholar said, shaking his head. “Our city is in desperate need. A thing like this, capable of striking terror into the hearts of ruffians, might save it from a dreadful end.”
“Then maybe we can do business after all,” said Oddington Doom. “A few months ago, we liberated the city of Thorbury from the tyrant Gabriel Strega. Now we ply the Bird Roads as adventurers, looking for fresh challenges to test our courage and our wits. Striking terror into the hearts of ruffians is what we do best. Saving cities from dreadful ends is our specialty.” He swept off his hat, adjusted his eye patch, and made the sort of elegant, theatrical bow that had won him scores of admirers in his younger days, but which now played merry hell with his lumbago.
The younger of the two scholars seemed delighted, but the older one was not convinced. “An old man, a woman not much younger, a youth, and a girl? What use could you four be to us?”
Doom grinned. “Don’t let appearances deceive you, friend. I’ve been in more battles than I can number. Tamzin here is a fighter from the famous Amusement Arcade on Margate, where she battled machines bigger and deadlier than Vespertine here every night of the week, and twice on Saturdays. Max Angmering’s family has ruled Thorbury since it was founded: The blood of warriors and heroes runs in his veins. And as for Hilly Torpenhow, why, she’s brave as a she-wolf when the chips are down, and there’s nothing she couldn’t tell you about history or geography. She’s the brains of our little outfit. So how about you buy us a round of drinks, and let’s talk about this city of yours, and why it needs our help?”
The Hawkshead Tavern had shuttered its doors, but it opened them again when Vespertine tapped on the glass. The landlord did not want to serve a Revenant, but nor did he dare turn a Revenant away. He contented himself with glaring darkly from behind his bar while Vespertine and her friends sat down with the scholars at his largest table. Trembling barmaids served them ginger tea and brought a saucer of cream for Small Cat.
The older of the two scholars was a shortish, brownish, worried-looking man. His head was mostly bald, but — perhaps to compensate — bushy tufts of wire-gray hair sprouted from his large ears. “I am Professor Loomis,” he explained. “My young assistant here is Rowan Bellweather. I am chief navigator for the city of Museion.”
Hilly set down her teacup and said, “Museion? Goodness gracious! I feared it had been eaten years ago!”
“Indeed not, dear lady,” said Loomis. “But it has fallen upon hard times. Hard times indeed …”
Hilly turned to her companions. “Museion is only a small city, but in its own way it is one of the very greatest. It was built by a committee of scholars from London, Paris, and a dozen other places. It does not wander as other cities do in search of prey or trade, but only in the pursuit of learning.”
Loomis nodded proudly. “And we have learned wonderful things,” he said. “For more than two hundred years Museion has roamed the world, seeking knowledge wherever it could be found, excavating Ancient sites, and amassing a vast collection of artifacts and books. Many bright young people came to study with us. Some returned to their own cities to found universities and museums of their own; others stayed with us and became important scholars, writers, and thinkers. But ‘the times they are a-changin’,’ as the Ancient poet said. Not everyone in the Great Hunting Ground has the respect for learning that they once did …”
“Predator suburbs kept chasing us,” explained Rowan Bellweather.
“So Museion sought shelter in an old city nest among the foothills of the Tannhäuser Mountains,” Loomis continued. “There we have remained for the past year and a half.”
“It’s called the Frying Pan,” said Bellweather.
“Now our dean and Senior Fellows have decided —”
“They are our equivalent of a mayor and town council,” explained Bellweather, like a helpful footnote.
“We have decided,” repeated Loomis, glaring at him, “that rather than waiting to be torn to pieces by savage towns, Museion should be devoured with dignity by a civilized city that understands the value of our work. We have made a treaty with London to that effect. London’s Guild of Historians has agreed that when their city eats Museion, they will combine our collections with their own.”
“A most sensible solution,” said Hilly. “My own late father was a member of the Guild of Historians. I am sure Museion’s treasures will make a wonderful addition to the London Museum.”
“Unfortunately,” said Bellweather, “we couldn’t persuade London’s council that it was worth coming all the way to the Frying Pan for a simple ‘meet and eat.’ They want Museion to travel to the Western Hunting Ground and rendezvous with London there.”
“But that is a long journey,” said Loomis. “And as soon as we leave the safety of the Frying Pan, we shall be beset by enemies.”
“There’s this nomad band called the Junkyard Dogs,” said Bellweather excitedly. “They’ve already had two goes at raiding us. As soon as we move out onto open ground, they’ll be down on us like a pack of … well, dogs …”
“Are they a big mob?” asked Doom.
“They lair in an upland valley, out of sight of our lookouts,” said Loomis. “But they have dozens of armored vehicles, and a traction fortress they call the Hundberg. They must have hundreds of warriors.”
“Then you’ll have quite a fight on your hands,” said Doom.
“But we have dealt with nomads before,” said Hilly proudly. “They are nothing but bullies, who just need someone to stand up to them. And as civilized people we have a duty to help Museion in its hour of need. All those archives and collections! What a tragedy it would be if that great store of knowledge were to perish from the world. And what good fortune that we happened to stop in Hawkshead today. I believe the gods themselves must have arranged our meeting, Professor Loomis! Of course we shall come to Museion!”
The journey north and east was a long one, made longer by the fact that the Fire’s Astonishment had to keep to the pace of Professor Loomis’s airship, a tiny research vessel called the Owl of Minerva.
It was smooth, calm-weather flying, but Max felt uneasy. After the battle of Thorbury, he had thought it a splendid idea to set off in search of fresh adventures. Now that new battles lay ahead, he wondered if he was really suited to adventures after all. His memories of the fighting aboard Thorbury were just a blur of terror and confusion. Doom claimed he had the blood of warriors and heroes in his veins, but Max was keen to keep it there. What if, when the time came to fight again, he turned out to be too cowardly?
