Un Lun Dun (14 page)

27

A Wall of Cloth and Steel

So fast he was a blur, Brokkenbroll leapt in front of Deeba. In each of his hands was an open unbrella.

The Unbrellissimo twirled as if he were dancing. He spun the bent unbrellas in his hands, holding them like shields. Impossibly, with a
pud-pud-pud,
the smoggler’s missiles bounced off the canvas.

Brokkenbroll swung the unbrellas so quickly they looked like a shimmering wall of colored cloth and thin metal fingers. He shouted an order. The other unbrellas flapped up, opened, and spun and joined in blocking the Smog’s attack. Some were torn, some bent, some inverted into bowl-shapes. But each made itself a shield.

The onslaught slowed as the smoggler depleted. As its bullets ricocheted away, they dissolved in puffs of smoke, and drifted back towards the Smog. But the unbrellas didn’t give it a chance to regroup. With frantic opening and closing, they made a wind.

The smoggler sent out smog tendrils, groping, trying to hold on to the bridge. But the unbrellas were remorseless against the nasty little miasma. They blew it in clots off the bridge and into the wind.

It was too small to hold firm. It grew paler, and see-through, and then was just a stain in the air, and then was gone.

Deeba and the Propheseers stood in the thick light of the setting UnSun and watched the unbrellas drop, one by one, as if exhausted, beside Zanna.

“Those were bullets,” Lectern said. “And darts. Your unbrellas are
canvas.
”

“So,” said Mortar to the Unbrellissimo. “How in the name of bleeding bricks did you do that?”

“I wasn’t sure when to tell you,” Brokkenbroll said. “I hadn’t yet done a final test. But events, as you see, forced my hand. At least now we know everything works. Instead of trying to explain, it would be easier if I could show you.

“You can get from the Pons Absconditus to anywhere, can’t you?”

“Of course,” said Mortar. “So long as it’s somewhere. That’s what bridges are for—getting to somewhere. Where do you want to go?”

“Please come with me,” Brokkenbroll said. “And…” He looked thoughtful, and was silent for several seconds. “Yes. You too, young Miss Resham. I think you deserve an explanation. A little while back, I found something. Where to? Set course. We’re going to Ben Hue Unstible’s workshop.”

“What?” said Mortar.

“I’m not leaving Zanna,” Deeba said. “Look at her.”

Zanna lay on a sofa, tended by Propheseers. Her eyes were closed. She was sweating, and pale, and with every breath her lungs made an ugly sound.

“I didn’t know,” the book whispered.

“You can’t help her,” Brokkenbroll said. “Not
here.
Not yet. But come with me, and I’ll show you how you may be able to.”

“She won’t be safe,” Deeba said.

“She will,” said Lectern. “We can keep the bridge moving.”

“The main mass of the Smog doesn’t know what’s happened,” Brokkenbroll said. “Eventually, a few wisps of this battle may reach it, but there’s time.”

“I just want to go home,” said Deeba, “and take Zanna with me.”

“Of course,” said Brokkenbroll. “That’s what I’d like to facilitate. Believe me.”

Mortar, Lectern and the book, Deeba and Curdle, the Unbrellissimo, and his obedient unbrellas walked down the curve of the bridge.

“Even when the Smog does find out what happened,” Brokkenbroll said, “I think the course of events might put some fear into it.

“It knows that we’re approaching a big fight,” he said. “It’s been preparing for years. Now it’s started. That’s why it attacked the Shwazzy,” he said to Deeba gently. “It was scared of her. It wanted her out of the way before the war. It’s going to attack UnLondon soon.

“But now we’ve given it something to think about. I’ll explain everything.”

They were near the end of the bridge. Mortar and Lectern focused thoughtfully on the streets ahead.

“Let’s go…” Mortar said, and stepped off the end.

“Don’t worry,” Lectern said to Deeba, and tried to give her a reassuring smile. “I know you want to take care of your friend. We’ll make sure everything’s okay.” She beckoned, and followed Mortar, Deeba only a few steps behind.

She took several steps before realizing that the buildings beside her didn’t look much like they had a few seconds before. They were unfamiliar charcoal-colored edifices in the light of the early-evening loon.

There was no bridge behind her.

She walked past some of UnLondon’s odd buildings. A house like a fruit with windows, one in the shape of the letter
S
and another like a
Y,
a house in a giant hollowed-out ball of string. It made the building that Brokkenbroll took them towards stand out all the more.

“I remember this place,” Mortar said. “Used to get supplies round the back, by canal…”

It was a perfectly ordinary-looking brick factory. It was several floors high, with a tall chimney-cum-clocktower rising from its heart.

28

The Laboratory

The Unbrellissimo led them through the building in absolute darkness.

They stumbled through corridors and rooms and up flights of stairs, following his voice.

“What if there are traps?” Lectern said.

“Shut up,” the book said urgently. “I want to hear this. I need to know what’s going on.”

“It’s been obvious for a while that the Smog’s been preparing something,” Brokkenbroll said. “The Smog’s always hidden, set the odd fire, rushed out and drunk it, disappeared again. Lurking in deserted buildings or under the ground. But things have been changing.

“People have been wondering for months now if the Shwazzy’s due. I think that’s what’s got the Smog so nervous. It must think it’s quest season.

“It was obvious that Unstible was worried, though. I don’t think…” Brokkenbroll looked momentarily at the book, then away, seemingly embarrassed. “I’m not sure he ever quite believed the prophecies were true.” (“Might have been sensible,” the book said morosely.) “When I heard he’d gone, it made me think. Perhaps he was right. Just in case the Shwazzy didn’t come…I thought Unstible was onto something. UnLondon needs a backup plan.”

They kept on through the building’s windowless, unlit innards. Deeba heard Curdle sniff its way.

“Something occurred to me,” the Unbrellissimo said. “The bullets that the Smog fires: they’re rain. An aggressive kind of rain, but rain all the same. The Smog’s a cloud. And clouds have one natural enemy. The unbrella.”

“Hang on,” Deeba said. “Your umbrellas are broken.”

There was an awkward silence.

“
Your um
brellas are sticks,” Brokkenbroll said coldly. “My
un
brellas are
awake.
And still protectors. So I decided to train them, with a little finessing, to protect UnLondoners.

“I needed an army. It wouldn’t be enough to rely on the discards that usually dribble through. So I’ve been recruiting. All the way from here.

“Then I heard something had happened. I listen to the gossip of clouds, which come and go between this sky and yours, and they said the Smog was cackling, that it had defeated its enemy. I wondered if something had happened to the Shwazzy. So I called a watcher to check. Hoped the information was wrong. That’s what you saw, young lady.”

“Zanna didn’t get hit,” said Deeba. “It was another girl.”

“Ah…” said Brokkenbroll. “Blond? Tall? That explains the confusion. I was under the impression that the Shwazzy had been incapacitated. Which, sadly, has now turned out to be true. So it’s just as well I’ve been preparing, after all.”

There was a faint light in the hallway. Brokkenbroll stood by the outline of a door.

“But how?” said Deeba. “Umbrellas can’t stop bullets.”

“Please,” hissed Mortar. “You’re being rather brusque.”

“Leave her alone, Mortar,” Lectern muttered. “What our visitor is trying to say, Unbrellissimo, is that, uh…”

“She’s absolutely right,” Brokkenbroll said. “Neither
um
brellas nor
un
brellas can stop bullets. Not untreated, they can’t. But as I say—the Smog’s bullets are just rain, and my subjects keep the rain off. I knew there must be ways of reinforcing them.”

“So they’re like bulletproof vests?” said Deeba.

“Almost. The problem is that the Smog can change its chemicals, can fire missiles in many different compounds. The only way to make unbrellas effective against anything it might produce was to know everything about the Smog.”

“So that’s why we’re here,” Deeba said. “You got into Unstible’s workshop and read his books, innit? He knew more’n anyone else, and you’ve been learning.”

“Smart girl,” murmured Lectern.

Brokkenbroll laughed.

“You flatter me,” he said. “I couldn’t make head or tail of those texts. Believe me, I’ve tried. No, I knew I’d need help from an expert.”

He opened the door. The illuminations in the room beyond made them blink.

It was an enormous workshop. The ceiling soared. There were shelves crammed with books and dusty machines, and flasks and scrolls and pens and junk. There were piles of plastic, and bits of coal. By a huge fireplace was a freight elevator.

The chamber was filled with boiling kettles and glass and rubber tubes, boilers and conveyor belts. In the center was a bubbling brass vat.

There were no windows in the room. The light came from an enormous number of placid-looking insects the size of Deeba’s fist, which sat on shelves and stools and crawled sluggishly up the walls. Their abdomens were lightbulbs, screwed into their thoraxes. Their slow motion made the shadows crawl.

The room was a hubbub. Thronging every surface were broken umbrellas. They trotted in spidery motion through turning cylinders, in front of sprays of liquid. They hauled up a ridge to the edge of the vat, and one by one jumped in.

They darted in the liquid like penguins underwater, and emerged again, shivering, leapt out and slotted themselves into an enormous rack. Rows and rows of unbrellas dripped and dried.

Mortar and Lectern gasped.

Standing by the ash-filled fireplace was a man in a filthy white coat. He looked pale in the glow of the shifting insect bulbs. He was short and fat, with bloodshot eyes and an enormous bald head.

He looked tired, but he smiled at Deeba and the Propheseers.

“No!” Mortar said at last. “Is that you?”

“Hello old friend,” the strange little figure said.

“Ben?” said Mortar. “Benjamin Unstible?”

29

Hope Hiding with a Cauldron

After his delight, Mortar was angry.

“How long have you been here?” he demanded. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! We thought you were dead…”

“I know, I know,” Unstible said. “I’m sorry. There were reasons.”

He wheezed when he spoke. He shook Deeba’s hand, and his flesh felt taut under her fingers. He looked terrible, though he moved energetically and spoke quickly.

“What reasons? What could possibly justify—”

“The Smog’s still looking for me.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll tell you all the details,” Unstible said. “I promise. The short version is this. While I was in London,
I found the Armets.
”

“What?”
said Mortar. “How? No one knows for sure that they even still exist.”

“Huh? Oh, yes. Well, you know, they may be a secret society, but nothing can hide from someone determined. So I found them. There’s a few of them left. Hiding. And they taught me their spells.”

“Did they show you the Klinneract?” said Lectern reverentially.

“Unfortunately, ah, that is long gone. Magic weapons don’t last. It did its job and now it’s broke. But they did teach me about the Smog. I know everything. I know what it’s made of, and more importantly, I know what can stop it. That’s what I went for, and I found it.

“But the Smog must have realized what I was doing. Because I found out it was
following
me.

“If I wasn’t studying it so close I might not have realized it had crept through, but I had some…feelers out. I had to hide. Go to ground. No one from here knew where I was, for sure. Or even if I was alive. But the Smog was looking for me. Once, it came very close to finding me. I was able to get away and slip back here, but I hadn’t yet made preparations. I knew that as long as the Smog thought I was lost or gone it would leave me alone. So I
had
to stay hidden. I couldn’t come out, because I hadn’t got things ready.”

“We made a plan together,” the Unbrellissimo said.

“Exactly. Brokkenbroll’s servants found me. When he asked me how to make his unbrellas into
shields,
I realized the concrete applications of what I’d learnt.”

“It could stop the Smog,” Brokkenbroll said.

“Exactly.” Unstible waved at the strange machinery and the vat full of fervently swimming unbrellas. “It’s a slightly more supernaturally interesting version of vulcanization. A cocktail of chemicals, technique, and magic that can fend off anything the Smog throws at us. Anything it can do.”

“And we’re almost ready,” Brokkenbroll said, his voice tense with excitement. “I’ve been amassing troops. Unstible’s been getting them ready. In a few days I’ll start issuing treated unbrellas to everyone in UnLondon. It’ll take awhile, but everyone’ll get one. I’ll keep pulling them in from London. Until everyone in the abcity’s protected.”

“But we can’t all move those things like you do, Unbrellissimo,” Lectern said.

“You don’t have to. That’s the beauty.
They obey my orders.
I’ll tell them to protect whomever carries them. With Unstible’s liquid and my soldiers, we can protect everyone in UnLondon. If the Smog tries to rain its bullets at us…just pull out your unbrella, and you’re safe.”

“That’s…brilliant,” said Mortar.

“It’s a plan,” said Lectern. “A real plan.”

“So UnLondon don’t need the Shwazzy after all?” Deeba said. “With your umbrellas or unbrellas or whatever they are? The Smog doesn’t seem to know that. It’s still in her lungs. What’s it
doing
to her? What if she’s really sick? If something happens to her, I don’t care how scary the Smog is, I’ll find it.”

There were a few moments’ silence.

“I think you might at that,” said Brokkenbroll thoughtfully. “It says a lot about you that you came with your friend. You must have been very afraid. It says you’re something to be reckoned with. I wonder what we can do…” He narrowed his eyes and seemed to be evaluating her. “Give me a second,” he said, and beckoned Unstible over.

The two men muttered together. “…we could…” Deeba heard. Lectern shuffled a little closer to her, as if protectively. The two men seemed to be disagreeing. “…absolutely not…” she heard, and “…might work…” and “…worth a try…” and “…not unless we have to…” They bowed their heads together and muttered.

“Alright then,” Unstible said suddenly, and shrugged.

“I’ve had an idea,” Brokkenbroll said. “I think I might be able to get the Smog out of your friend.”

“The trick,” he said, “is to get the Smog so rattled it has to gather every bit of itself to fight. And it’s not used to facing someone with the weapons to keep it at bay.” He pointed to his unbrellas.

“Really?” Mortar said. “You honestly think you can scare the Smog? If you can do that…well.” His expression left little doubt that if the Unbrellissimo could achieve that, he’d win Mortar’s respect and loyalty.

“And how can you help the Shwazzy?” said Lectern.

“I’ll attract its attention,” Unbrellissimo said. “Somewhere away from here, some waste ground where no one can get hurt. Light a couple of old tires, go Smog-fishing.”

“You’re going to call it
deliberately
?” Mortar said.

“I can’t believe this,” said the book miserably. “For centuries I’ve known what was supposed to happen. Ins and outs. And with that whack on the back of the Shwazzy’s head…that was all gone. Turns out I don’t know
anything.
But for the record, it sounds to me like you’re an impressive general. Maybe your plan will even work. Even without the Shwazzy, maybe UnLondon
does
have a chance.”

“Propheseers, Propheseers, please,” Brokkenbroll said. “We’re not just talking about the abcity. We’re also talking about a
young girl,
lying back on that bridge, struggling to breathe. Now, if I can make this work,” he said to Deeba, “then you can rest. Your friend will be safe. The prophecies…well, they’ll still be wrong, but that won’t matter, because UnLondon’ll have a new way to protect itself.” He twirled an unbrella. “So there’ll be no need for the Shwazzy to come running back, and no need for you to worry about her.”

“What can I do?” Deeba said. “I want to help. She’s my friend.”

“It’ll be dangerous. I really can’t…” He stopped and thought. “Perhaps there is one thing.”

“Tell me!”

“It’ll mean you going home. I need time to prepare, and we have to get her as far away from the Smog as possible, as fast as possible. So it’s something you can only do from London.”

Deeba almost sobbed with laughter.

“I
want
to go home!” she said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do since we got here.”

“Alright then,” said the Unbrellissimo. “Let me tell you what to do.”