"Was there anything else?" asked Crome.
"Yes..." said Katherine, and hesitated, afraid that she was going to sound foolish. Faced with Crome's cold office and still colder smile she found herself wishing she had not put on so much make-up or worn these stiff, formal clothes. But this was what she had come here for, after all. She blurted out, "I want to know about that girl, and why she tried to kill my father."
The Lord Mayor's smile vanished. "Your father has never seen fit to tell me who she is. I have no idea why she is so keen to murder him."
"Do you think it is something to do with MEDUSA?"
Crome's gaze grew a few degrees colder. "That matter does not concern you!" he snapped. "What has Valentine told you?"
"Nothing!" said Katherine, getting flustered. "But I can see he's scared, and I need to know why, because..."
"Listen to me, child," said Crome, standing up and coming around the desk at her. Thin hands gripped her shoulders. "If Valentine has secrets from you it is for good reason. There are aspects of his work that you could not begin to understand. Remember, he started out with nothing; he was a mere Out-Country scavenger before I took an interest in him. Do you want to see him reduced to that again? Or worse?"
Katherine felt as if he had slapped her. Her face burnt red with anger, but she controlled herself.
"Go home and wait for his return," ordered Crome. "And leave grown-up matters to those who understand them. Don't speak to anyone about the girl, or MEDUSA."
"Grown-up matters?"
thought Katherine angrily.
"How old does he think I am?"
But she bowed her head and said meekly, "Yes, Lord Mayor," and "Come along, Dog."
"And do not bring that animal to Top Tier again," called Crome, his voice following her into the outer office, where the secretaries turned to stare at her furious, tearful face.
Riding the elevator back to Quirke Circus, she whispered in her wolfs ear, "We'll show him, Dog!"
* * * * *
Instead of going straight home she called in at the Temple of Clio on the edge of Circle Park. There in the scented darkness she calmed herself and tried to work out what to do next.
Ever since Nikolas Quirke had been declared a god, most Londoners had stopped giving much thought to the older gods and goddesses, and so Katherine had the temple to herself. She liked Clio, who had been her mother's goddess back in Puerto Angeles, and whose statue looked a bit like Mama too, with its kind dark eyes and patient smile. She remembered what Mama had taught her, about how the poor goddess was being blown constantly backwards into the future by the storm of progress, but how she could reach back sometimes and inspire people to change the whole course of history. Looking up now at the statue's gentle face she said, "What must I do, Clio? How can I help Father if the Lord Mayor won't tell me anything?"
She hadn't really expected an answer, and none came, so she said a quick prayer for Father and another for poor Tom Natsworthy, and made her offerings and left.
It wasn't until she was halfway back to Clio House that the idea struck her, a thought so unexpected that it could have been sent to her by the goddess herself. She remembered how, as she ran towards the waste chutes on the night Tom fell, she had passed someone heading in the other direction; a young Apprentice Engineer, looking so white and shocked that she was
sure
he must have witnessed what happened.
She hurried homeward through the sunlit park. That young Engineer would have the answer! She would go back to the Gut and find him! She would find out what was going on without any help from wicked old Magnus Crome!
15
THE RUSTWATER MARSHES
Tom and Hester had walked all night, and when the pale, flat sun rose behind drifts of morning fog they kept walking, stopping only now and then to catch their breath. This landscape was quite different from the mud-plains they had crossed a few days ago. Here they had to keep making detours around bogs and pools of brackish water, and although they sometimes stumbled into the deep, weed-choked scars of old town-tracks it was clear that no town had been this way for many years. "See how the scrub has grown up," said Hester, pointing out ruts filled with brambles and hillsides green with young trees. "Even a little semi-static would have felled those saplings for fuel."
"Perhaps the earth here is just too soft," suggested Tom, sinking to his waist for the twentieth time in the thick mud. He was recalling the huge map of the Hunting Ground that hung in the lobby of the London Museum, and the great sweep of marsh-country that stretched all the way from the central mountains to the shores of the Sea of Khazak, mile after mile of reed-beds and thin blue creeks and all of it marked, Unsuitable for Town or City. He said, "I think this must be the edge of the Rustwater Marshes. They call it that because the water is supposed to be stained red with the rust of towns that have strayed into it and sunk. Only the most foolhardy mayor would bring his town here."
"Then Wreyland and Anna Fang brought us much further south than I thought," whispered Hester to herself. "London must be almost a thousand miles away by now. It'll take months to catch it up again, and Shrike will be on my tail the whole way."
"But you fooled him!" Tom reminded her. "We escaped!"
"He won't stay fooled for long," she said. "He'll soon pick up our tracks again. Why do you think he's called a Stalker?"
* * * * *
On and on she led him, dragging him over hills and through mires and down valleys where the air was speckly with swarms of whining, stinging flies. They both grew weary and peevish. Once Tom suggested they sit down and rest a while, and Hester snapped back, "Do what you like. What do I care?" After that he trudged on in silence, angry at her. What a horrible, ugly, vicious, self-pitying girl she was! After all they had come through, and the way he had helped her in the Out-Country, she was still ready to abandon him. He wished Shrike had got her and it was Miss Fang or Khora who he had escaped with. They would have let him rest his aching feet...
But he was glad enough of Hester when the darkness fell, when thick clots of fog rose out of the marshes like the ghosts of mammoths and every rustle in the undergrowth sounded like a Stalker's footfall. She found a place for them to spend the night, in the shelter of some stunted trees, and later, when the sudden shriek of a hunting owl brought him leaping out of his uneasy sleep he found her sitting guard beside him like a friendly gargoyle. "It's all right," she told him. And after a moment, in one of those sudden flashes of softness that he had noticed before, she said, "I miss them, Tom. My mum and dad."
"I know," he said. "I miss mine too."
"You've got no family at all in London?"
"No."
"No friends?"
He thought about it. "Not really."
"Who was that girl?' she asked, after a little while.
"What? Where?"
"In the Gut that night, with you and Valentine."
"That was Katherine," he said. "She's... Well, she's Valentine's daughter."
Hester nodded. "She's pretty," she said.
After that he slept easier, dreaming that Katherine was coming down to rescue them in an airship, carrying them back into the crystal light above the clouds. When he next opened his eyes it was dawn and Hester was shaking him.
"Listen!"
He listened, and heard a sound that was not the sound of woods or water.
"Is it a town?" he asked hopefully.
"No..." Hester tilted her head to one side, tasting the sound. "It's a Rotwang aero-engine..."
It grew louder, throbbing down out of the sky. Above the swirling mist a London scoutship flickered by.
They froze, hoping that the wet black cage of branches overhead would hide them. The growl of the airship faded and then rose again, circling. "Shrike can see us," whispered Hester, staring up at the blind, white fog. "I can feel him watching us..."
"No, no," Tom insisted. "If we can't see the airship, how can he see us? It stands to reason..."
* * * * *
But high overhead the Resurrected Man tunes his eyes to ultra-red and switches on his heat-sensors and sees two glowing human shapes amid the soft grey static of the trees.
"TAKE ME CLOSER,
" he orders.
"If you can see them so clearly now," the airship's pilot grumbles, "it's a pity you couldn't tell that bloomin' balloon was empty before we went chasing it across half the Hunting Ground."
Shrike says nothing. Why should he explain himself to this whining Once-born? He had seen that the balloon was empty as soon as it popped back up above the clouds, but he had decided to keep it to himself. He was pleased at Hester Shaw's quick thinking, and he decided to let her live a few more hours as a reward, while this slow-witted Engineer-aviator pursued her empty balloon.
He flicks his eyes back to their normal setting. He will hunt Hester the hard way, with scent and sound and ordinary vision. He calls up a memory of her face and sets it turning in his mind as the airship sweeps down through the fog.
* * * * *
"Run!" said Hester. The airship loomed out of the whiteness a few yards away, settling towards the ground with its rotors beating the fog like egg-whisks. She hauled Tom out of their useless hiding place and away across sodden ground, knuckled with tree-roots. White scuts of water spurted at every step, and black slime gurgled into their boots. They ran blindly, until Hester came to such an abrupt stop that Tom crashed into her from behind and they both went sprawling.
They had come in a circle. The airship hung just ahead of them, and a giant shape barred their path. Two beams of pale green light stabbed towards them, filled with dancing water droplets. "HESTER," grated a metal voice.
Hester groped for something she could use as a weapon and came up with a gnarled old length of wood. "Don't come any closer, Shrike!" she warned. "I'll smash those pretty green eyes of yours! I'll bash your brains out!"
"Come on!" squeaked Tom, plucking at her coat and trying to drag her away.
"Where to?" asked Hester, risking a quick glance back at him. She shifted her grip on the makeshift club and stood her ground as Shrike stalked closer.
"YOU HAVE DONE WELL, HESTER, BUT THE HUNT IS ENDED." The Stalker was moving carefully over the wet ground. Each time he set down his metal foot a wreath of steam hissed up. He raised his hands and claw-like blades slid out.
"What made you change your mind about London, Shrike?" shouted Hester angrily. "How do you come to be Crome's odd-job man?"
"
YOU
LED ME TO LONDON, HESTER." Shrike paused, and his dead face widened in a steely smile, "I KNEW YOU WOULD GO THERE. I SOLD MY COLLECTION AND CHARTERED AN AIRSHIP SO THAT I COULD GET THERE BEFORE YOU."
"You sold your clockwork people?" Hester sounded astonished. "Shrike, if you wanted me back that badly, why didn't you just track me down?"
"L DECIDED TO LET YOU CROSS THE HUNTING GROUND ALONE," said Shrike. "IT WAS A TEST."
"Did I pass?"
Shrike ignored her. "WHEN I REACHED LONDON I WAS TAKEN STRAIGHT TO THE ENGINEERIUM, AS I EXPECTED. 1 SPENT EIGHTEEN MONTHS THERE WAITING FOR YOU TO ARRIVE. THE ENGINEERS TOOK ME APART AND PUT ME TOGETHER AGAIN A DOZEN TIMES. BUT IT WAS WORTH IT. I MADE A DEAL WITH MAGNUS CROME. HE HAS PROMISED ME MY HEART'S DESIRE."
"Oh, good," said Hester weakly, wondering what on earth he was talking about.
"BUT FIRST YOU MUST DIE."
"But Shrike, why?"
The reply was drowned out by a thick, warbling hum that made Tom wonder if the Stalker's airship was about to lift off without him. He glanced up at it. It was still holding the same position as before, but the steady chirrup of the propellers had been masked by the new noise, a rumbling, slithering roar that grew louder every second. Even Shrike seemed disturbed: his eyes flickered and he tilted his head to one side, listening. Underfoot, the ground began to tremble.
Out of the fog behind the Stalker burst a wall of mud and water, curling over at the top, capped with white foam. Behind it came a town, a very small, old-fashioned town, racing along on eight fat wheels. Hester scrambled backwards, and Shrike saw the look on her face and turned to see what caused it. Tom dived sideways, grabbing the girl by the scruff of her neck and hurling her to safety. The airship tried to veer away but the wheels of the speeding town caught it and blew it apart and ploughed the blazing debris down into the mud. An instant later they heard the Stalker bellow "HESTER!" as the huge front wheel came crashing down on him.
They clung together, rolling over and over as the town howled past, a flicker of spokes and pistons, firelight on metal, tiny figures staring down from observation decks, the long-drawn-out moan of a klaxon echoing through the fog. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. The air stank of smoke and hot metal.
They sat up. Bits of airship were drifting down, blazing merrily. Where the Stalker had been standing a deep wheel-mark was quickly filling with black, glistening mud. Something which might have been an iron hand jutted from the ooze and a pale cloud of steam rose into the air above it and slowly faded.
"Is it...
dead?"
asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well..."
Tom wondered dimly what Shrike had meant about his "heart's desire". Why would he have sold his precious collection to come after Hester if all he wanted to do was kill her? There was no way of knowing now. "And the poor men on that airship.. ." he whispered.
"They were sent to help him kill us, Natsworthy," said the girl. "Don't waste your pity on them."