B00DW1DUQA EBOK (15 page)

The following day, Finn was at least allowed to walk again, tethered to the horse by his wrists. This close to Engn there was little or no chance of escaping. The moving engine had been handed over to another master staying at the Halfway House that morning. They trotted along slowly towards Engn, the master apparently in no hurry to reach their destination.

They passed through clusters of ramshackle huts: five, ten, twenty of them grouped around the scorched circle of a fire or the stone lip of a well. Men and women, thin and pinched and dressed in rags, flitted around drawing water, repairing their hovels or just sitting and watching them as they passed by.

‘Who are they?’ asked Finn. ‘What are they doing out here?’

‘These?’ replied the master. ‘They’re nothing. Parasites. They huddle around the walls of Engn, begging for handouts.’

‘But who are they?’

‘Who knows? Perhaps they have someone inside and they’ve come to be as close as possible.’ Master Whelm snorted. ‘It’s pathetic. We should clear them all out, send them home. Cockroaches.’ He shouted his last word so they would be heard by everyone around them. No-one reacted.

‘Some of these houses look like they’ve been here ages,’ said Finn. ‘One or two have the remains of stone walls.’

‘Oh, they didn’t build all this, the wells and the walls. These were the villages of the original builders of Engn, the first builders. Hundreds of years ago. All these scum have just moved in since, taken everything over like a fungus. They squabble over their rotting planks while slowly starving to death.’

An old woman - short, slight, frail - watched them as they trotted by. She held a sloshing pale of water in her hand. Her face was expressionless but she studied Finn intently, as if hoping to see someone she knew. Finn nodded at her. The woman frowned, turned and walked away, as if she’d concluded Finn was of no interest.

By the early afternoon, Finn stood at the base of the great cliff-face walls of Engn. Except the walls weren’t walls; they were a series of constructions and edifices joined together. Stone ramparts and the curving metal sides of vast tanks or furnaces. The sun blazed overhead but he could feel a greater heat from the metal on his back. The ground thrummed, dancing with regular
whumps
. He peered upwards. Fast-moving white clouds scudded through the air from over the city, giving him the clear impression the walls were falling and falling forwards, threatening to crush him. The heat, the walls’ height; the illusion of movement, all contributed to a dizzying feeling of nausea. He longed for cool water. The air smelt of ash and burned oil. Smoke billowing from the chimney above him formed a solid mountainside of black and grey, thick enough to walk up.

All the way across the great plain, part of him had wanted to reach Engn, to see up-close the towers and turning wheels, to understand what they did, what they were. Was the city one great machine or a collection of many? Now that he stood at the walls he found he wanted to step back again, to see the place from a greater distance, to try and take it all in. Up close he was no nearer making sense of it than ever. The black iron pipes running horizontally around the walls above him were vast, surely big enough for him to walk through. But he could no longer see where they led, how they connected. He couldn’t begin to guess their purpose.

In one of the stone sections of the walls, hundreds of small, square windows ran in lines twenty or thirty feet up. Some blazed with light, some were dark, like blind eyes. What went on in all those rooms? Who moved around in there and what did they do? It seemed impossible, staring upwards, to understand it all.

He looked back down at his feet. The road from the Halfway House, paved with red bricks now, had taken them directly up to a vast arched doorway in the walls. It would have been tall enough for a cart stacked high with hay-ricks to pass through. But the doors, wooden and banded with a criss-cross pattern of iron strips, were locked shut. Twenty-four Ironclads stood in front of them, muskets in their arms, unmoving.

Beside the barred door, leaning against the wall, stood a ramshackle wooden hut with a single window in it. Master Whelm awaited his turn to speak to someone in there, Finn’s chain in his hand. Finn could see a bushy grey beard wagging inside the darkness of the hut, a hand writing something in a book as other masters reported in. Next to the hut stood a line of boys, six of them, all watching Finn. They were, he could see now, chained together by their ankles, the chain secured to an iron ring cemented into the wall.

‘Who are they?’ asked Finn.

‘Today’s newcomers. You’ll be joining them soon.’

Red-brick tracks fanned out in all directions from the gates of Engn. Just that morning he’d seen five or six groups of Ironclads converging on the city, two of them with moving engines of their own. A clutch of boys or girls shuffled or rode along with each. How many people were brought here each day? And what happened to them all inside?

The boys by the wall watched Finn with a mixture of suspicion and outright hostility. Their clothes were all odd: unusual cuts and colours. Where were they all from? Two of them whispered to each other, something inaudible but clearly amusing. They laughed together as they looked at him.

The master’s turn at the hut came and he stooped to speak to the old man sitting inside, just a beard and a nose sticking out of the darkness of his hut.

‘Another for you, Master Gatekeeper.’

‘Just the one, Whelm?’

‘Just the one.’

The gatekeeper peered out at Finn. He caught a glimpse of bright, beady eyes, a frown.

‘You needed a moving engine to capture that? Doesn’t look like he could put up much of a fight.’

‘Kept falling off his horse didn’t he?’

There were sniggers from the gaggle of boys. Wherever they were from, they clearly understood what was being said. Master Whelm handed something in to the gatekeeper, a small strip of metal with numbers on it.

‘Fine, fine, I’ll book him in,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘Not going to be one for the Ironclads, though, is he?’

‘No,’ said Master Whelm.

‘Name?’ said the gatekeeper.

Master Whelm elbowed Finn in the side to make him answer.

‘Oh. My name is Finn.’

‘Finn what?’

‘I, I don’t know. Just Finn.’

There were snorts of laughter from the other boys now. Finn heard them whispering to each other.
Doesn’t even know his own name
.

‘You must have a family name too?’

‘No. I’m just Finn.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He’s the blacksmith.’

‘Very well. Finn Smithson it will be.’

‘What will he do inside?’ asked Master Whelm.

The gatekeeper examined the strip of metal, then began turning the pages of his book. ‘Ah, yes, here he is. Interesting, interesting. He has the potential, I see.’

‘The potential for what?’ asked Finn.

‘Of course, it all depends on whether he passes the tests,’ said the gatekeeper, ignoring Finn. ‘And hardly any do, of course. But he’s a possibility.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Finn. ‘What are these
tests
?’

The gatekeeper began to scratch away in his book with a metal pen. Without looking up again, he waved Finn over toward the group of boys. The master pulled Finn away from the hut and set about shackling him to the chain next to all the others.

‘What did he mean?’ asked Finn. ‘About the tests?’

Master Whelm shrugged but didn’t reply. When he’d finished with the ankle-lock he stood back and looked at Finn.

‘Good bye, then, boy. Good luck with … everything.’ He looked like he was going to say something else, but instead he turned and walked to his Ironclads, not looking back.

Finn smiled at the lad beside him: a tall, gangling, black-haired boy in green clothes. He had an intelligent face. But he scowled in response. None of the boys spoke to him. Some eyed him suspiciously, as if he was to blame for them being there, and the rest ignored him.

The sun blazed hotter and hotter. A narrow line of shadow ran along the foot of the walls and the boys huddled there, despite the heat radiating from the metal. Finn sat on the ground and leaned against the wall. His back was soon sticky with sweat. He longed even more for cold water. He longed for a honey sweet, but he had eaten the last of them days ago.

Far across the grass plain, the mountains of his home were a faint, pencil-sketch line on the horizon, no longer solid. Somewhere part-way across, between the mounds of earth, he could just see a group of figures, black sticks shimmering in the haze. Perhaps it was Master Whelm heading back to the mountains, or another group being brought to Engn. He wondered, again, what it was all for. What exactly they had been brought here to
do
. He wondered if Connor had once sat in this same spot, asking himself the same questions.

They stayed at the foot of the wall for several hours. Two more boys joined them in that time, brought in together by a team of six Ironclads. They were both stocky, strong-looking boys, farm labourers maybe, who clearly knew each other well. They talked in low tones to each other as they were led to the wall. They resembled each other a little, Finn thought. Cousins maybe.

Finally, without warning, the great doors began to creak open. Glimpsed through the widening crack, Finn could see they were hauled by thick chains that ran to two floor-standing steam engines inside. Further walls reached up beyond the engines: more sheer walls of stone and metal. Here and there he could see more windows and doorways. Winding around and through everything ran a confusion of pipes and ducts, wires and walkways. Distantly, he could see people up on the walkways, appearing and disappearing in and out of the doorways. He was reminded of ants he’d once found within a broken machine in his father’s workshop. Tiny insects crawling around in a vast machine they could never hope to understand.

A large open square lay between the gate and these inner workings. Finn saw that people stood there, hundreds of them, all in regimented lines a fixed distance apart, none of them moving, like pieces in some vast chess game. He could make no sense of what they were doing. He glanced at the other boys, but each looked just as puzzled as he was. Puzzled or alarmed.

The Ironclads standing in front of the gates moved aside, then, to let someone through. A new master strode out. He was older than Master Whelm. His purple robes were trimmed with gold. Three rings adorned his left index finger where Master Whelm had worn only one. Fifth Wheel.

Finn and the others scrambled to their feet. The new master strode up to them and stopped to inspect them. He was a squat, ugly toad of a man, but his head was that of a pig. He held his mouth open as he gazed at them, as if in dumb bemusement at what he was seeing. But his voice, when he spoke, was hard and clear.

‘My name is Master Owyn,’ the new master said. ‘From now on I am your father and your mother and your sister and your brother. You will do what I say. Do you understand me?’

Without waiting for a reply he turned to the Ironclads standing by the great gates.

‘Unshackle these boys,’ he said. ‘And bring them inside Engn.’

Master Owyn stepped towards the tall, dark-haired boy standing next to Finn. He pinched the fine hair at the boy’s ear between thumb and finger and lifted. The boy’s delicate skin stretched painfully. He cried out and tried to balance on tip-toes to reduce the tugging.

‘I said, do you understand, boy?’

‘Yes, Master. Yes.’

‘Better. From now on do as I say, yes?’

‘Yes, Master.’

Master Owyn released his grip on the boy. They stood in an eight-sided open space, the
Octagon
the master had called it, deep inside Engn. They’d marched for hours from the gates to get there. Finn’s head throbbed from the terrible rush and noise of it all.

He’d have no chance of reaching the gates if he tried to retrace his steps. He could recall only an endless maze of clanging metal walkways, around and between and
through
the machinery. They’d walked beneath shining steel pistons the size of tree-trunks, pumping in and out; over vast tanks of seething, molten metal; through booming, echoing pipes that Finn expected to flood with roaring water at any moment. They’d walked in silence through immense halls of racketing, clapping machines moving at impossible speeds, snapping so fast Finn couldn’t even blink quickly enough at each
clack
. Past vast wheels that drove metal axles revolving at alarming speeds, or else clattering metal chains, the links of which were as big as his whole body. Walking close to the wheels was a dizzying experience; their constant motion made him feel it was the solid ground that lurched and spun. Either that, or the wheels had shaken themselves free of their frames and were cartwheeling forward to crush everything in their path.

They’d ducked underneath, or squeezed between, ducts and pipes of all sizes, from the tiny to the vast, some freezing and some burning to the touch. All of them numbered. Somebody, somewhere, knew them all and where they went. It was incredible. At one point they’d worked their way around a circular construction with countless metal rods protruding from it like an immense crown. Sparks of blue electricity leapt between the rods, zig-zagging their way upwards into the sky. A spider’s web of cables spread out from the tower, hundreds of them leading off in all directions, towards other parts of the machinery. Finn had tried to follow some of the wires with his gaze but there were too many, criss-crossing, splitting, joining. The cables, too, were all tagged with a number. How could anyone understand it all? Some of the cables led to silvery glass orbs, like large incandescent bulbs, that were embedded in the walls or sitting atop iron tripods. The lights didn’t appear to function, however, as none were ever lit.

They’d walked in line through the machinery: around and over and under countless buildings whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. Except they weren’t buildings. They were housings, tanks, cylinders, casings. People lived and worked there, threading their way past spinning wheels, ducking beneath chains and belts, but these weren’t buildings built for people. They were merely components. Parts of the machine. Throughout it all he looked for signs of destruction or damage. For evidence of the wreckers. But there was nothing; the machinery pumped and span and whirred in perfect working order.