She fought down her rising lunch and turned to Nimmo. "These poor people! Who are they?"
"Oh, don't worry about
them,"
said the supervisor. "They're convicts. Criminals. They deserve it."
"What did they do?'
"Oh, this and that. Petty theft. Tax-dodging. Criticizing our Lord Mayor. They're very well-treated, considering. Now, let's see if we can find Apprentice Pod..."
While he spoke, Katherine had been watching the nearest tank. One of the men working it had stopped moving and let go of his rake, holding his head as if overcome by dizziness. Now a girl apprentice had also noticed him, and stepping up to the edge of the tank she jabbed at the man with her truncheon. Blue sparks flickered where it touched him, and he thrashed and howled and floundered, finally vanishing under the heaving surface. Other prisoners stared towards the place where he had sunk, too scared to go and help.
"Do something!" gasped Katherine, turning to Nimmo, who seemed not to have noticed.
Another apprentice came running along the edge of the tank, shouting at the prisoners below him to help their comrade. Two or three of them dredged him up, and the new apprentice leaned down into the tank and hauled him out, splattering himself with slurry in the process. He was wearing a little gauze mask, like many of the warders, but Katherine was sure she recognized him, and at her side she heard Nimmo growl,
"Pod!"
They hurried towards him. Apprentice Pod had dragged the half-drowned convict on to the metal walkway between the tanks and was trying to wash the slurry from his face with water from a stand-pipe nearby. The other apprentice, the one who had jabbed the poor man in the first place, looked on with an expression of disgust. "You're wasting water again, Pod!" she said, as Katherine and Nimmo ran up.
"What is going on here, Apprentices?" asked Nimmo crossly.
"This man was slacking," the girl said. "I was just trying to get him to work a bit faster."
"He's feverish!" said Apprentice Pod, looking up plaintively, covered in stinking muck. "It's no wonder he couldn't work."
Katherine knelt beside him and he noticed her for the first time, his eyes widening in surprise. He had succeeded in washing most of the slurry from the man's face, and she reached out and laid her hand on the damp brow. Even by the standards of the Deep Gut it felt hot. "He's really sick," she said, looking up at Nimmo. "He's burning up. He should be in hospital..."
"Hospital?" replied Nimmo. "We have no hospital down here. These are prisoners, Miss Valentine. Criminals. They don't require medical care."
"He'll be another case for K Division soon," observed the girl apprentice.
"Be quiet!" hissed Nimmo.
"What does she mean, K Division?" asked Katherine.
Nimmo wouldn't answer. Apprentice Pod was staring at her, and she thought she saw tears trickling down his face, although it might have been perspiration. She looked down at the convict, who seemed to have slid into a sort of half-sleep. The metal decking looked terribly hard, and on a sudden impulse she pulled off her hat and folded it and slipped it under his head as a pillow. "He shouldn't be here!" she said angrily. "He's far too weak to work in your horrible tanks!"
"It's appalling," agreed Nimmo. "The sort of prisoners we are being sent these days are just too feeble. If the Guild of Merchants made more of an effort to solve the food shortage they might be a bit healthier, or if the Navigators pulled their fingers out and tracked down some decent prey for once.. . But I think you have seen enough, Miss Valentine. Kindly ask Apprentice Pod whatever it is your father wishes to know, and I shall take you back to the elevators."
Katherine looked round at Pod. He had pulled down his mask, and he was unexpectedly handsome, with big dark eyes and a small, perfect mouth. She stared at him for a moment, feeling stupid. Here he was, being brave, trying to help this poor man, and she was bothering him with something that suddenly seemed quite trivial.
"It's Miss Valentine, Miss, isn't it?" he said nervously, as Dog pushed past him to sniff at the sick man's fingers.
Katherine nodded. "I saw you in the Gut that night when we ate Salthook," she said. "Down by the waste-chutes. I think you saw the girl who tried to kill my father. Could you tell me everything you remember?"
The boy stared at her, fascinated by the long dark strands of hair that were falling down across her face now that her hat was off. Then his eyes flicked away to look at Nimmo. "I didn't see anything, Miss," he said. "I mean, I heard shouting and I ran to help, but with all the smoke and stuff... I didn't see anybody."
"Are you sure?" pleaded Katherine. "It could be terribly important."
Apprentice Pod shook his head, and wouldn't meet her eye. "I'm sorry. .."
The man on the deck suddenly stirred and gave a great sigh, and they all looked down at him. It took Katherine a moment to understand that he was dead.
"See?" said the girl apprentice smugly. "Told you he was for K Division."
Nimmo was prodding the body with the toe of his boot. "Take him away, Apprentice."
Katherine was shaking. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. If only she could do something to help these poor people! "I'm going to tell my father all about this when he gets home," she promised. "And when he finds out what's going on in this dreadful place. . ." She wished she had never come here. Beside her she heard Pod say again, "Sorry, Miss Valentine," and wasn't sure if he was sorry because he couldn't help her or sorry for her because she had learned the truth of what life was like under London.
Nimmo was growing edgy. "Miss Valentine, I insist that you leave now. You shouldn't be here. Your father should have sent an official member of his Guild if he had business with this apprentice. What did he hope to learn from the boy anyway?"
"I'm coming," said Katherine, and did the only thing she could for the dead convict: she reached out and gently shut his eyes.
"I'm sorry," whispered Apprentice Pod, as they led her away.
17
THE PIRATE SUBURB
Late that night, and deep in the Rustwater Marshes, Tunbridge Wheels finally caught up with its prey. The exhausted townlet had blundered into a sinkhole and the suburb hit it side-on without bothering to slow its thunderous speed. The impact tore the townlet to pieces and splinters came raining down into the suburb's streets as it turned and sped back to swallow the wreckage. "Meals on wheels!" the pirates howled.
From their cage in the suburb's gut, Tom and Hester watched in horror as the dismantling-engines went to work, ripping the townlet into heaps of scrap without even bothering to let the survivors off. The few who did come stumbling out were grabbed by the waiting pirates. If they were young and fit they were dragged off to other tiny cages like the one in which Hester and Tom had been imprisoned. If not, they were killed, and their bodies were added to the rubbish heap at the edge of the digestion yard.
"Oh, great Quirke!" Tom whispered. "This is horrible! They're breaking every rule of Municipal Darwinism..."
"It's a pirate suburb, Natsworthy," said Hester. "What did you expect? They strip their prey as quickly as they can and make the captives slaves in their engine-rooms. They don't waste food and space on people who are too weak to work. It's not really so different from what your precious London gets up to. At least this lot have the honesty to call themselves pirates."
The flash of a crimson robe out in the digestion yards caught Tom's eye. The mayor of the pirate suburb had come down to take a look at his latest catch, and he was strutting along the walkway outside the cells, surrounded by his bodyguards. He was a tiny little man, stooping and hunch-shouldered, a bald head and scrawny neck jutting from the cat-fur collar of his gown. He didn't look friendly. "He looks more like a moth-eaten vulture than a mayor!" whispered Tom, tugging at Hester's sleeve and pointing. "What do you think he'll do with us?"
She shrugged, glancing up at the approaching party. "We'll be slung into the engine-rooms, I suppose..." Then she stopped short, staring at the mayor as if he was the most amazing thing she had ever seen. Shouldering Tom aside she thrust her face against the bars of the cage and started to shout. "Peavey!" she hollered, straining to make herself heard over the thunder of the gut. "Peavey! Over here!"
"Do you know him?" asked Tom, confused. "Is he a friend? Is he all right?"
"I don't have friends," snapped Hester, "and he's not all right; he's a ruthless, murdering animal and I've seen him kill people for just looking at him in a funny way. So let's hope the catch has put him in a good mood. Peavey! Over here! It's me! It's Hester Shaw!"
The ruthless, murdering animal turned towards their cage and scowled.
"His name's Chrysler Peavey," Hester explained hoarsely. "He stopped to trade in Strole a couple of times when I lived there with Shrike. He was mayor of another little scavenger town. The gods alone know how he got himself a flash suburb like this... Now hush; and let me do the talking!"
Tom studied Chrysler Peavey as he came stalking over to peer at the captives, henchmen clustering behind. He wasn't much to look at. His lumpy scalp reflected the glare of furnaces and the sweat draining off it made pale stripes in the grime on his face. As if to make up for his bald head he had hair almost everywhere else; grubby white bristles pushing out of his chin, thick grey tufts sprouting from his ears and nostrils, and a pair of enormous, bushy, wriggling eyebrows. A tarnished chain of office hung round his neck, and on one shoulder perched a scrawny monkey.
"Who're they?" he said.
"Couple of hitchhikers, boss - I mean, Your Worship. .." said one of his guards, a woman whose hair had been plaited and lacquered into two long, curving horns.
"Come aboard in the middle of the chase, Your Worship," added another, the man who had overseen the newcomers' capture. He showed Peavey the coat he was wearing; the fleece-lined aviator's coat he had taken from Tom. "I got this off one of 'em..."
Peavey grunted. He seemed about to turn away, but Hester kept grinning her crooked grin at him and saying, "Peavey! It's me!" until she lit a spark of recognition in his greedy black eyes.
"Bloody Hull!" he growled. "It's the tin man's kid!"
"You're looking good, Peavey," said Hester, and Tom noticed that she didn't try to hide her face from the pirates, as if she knew that she mustn't let them see any sign of weakness.
"Blimey!" said Peavey, looking her up and down. "Blimey! It really is you! The Stalker's little helper, all growed up and uglier than ever! Where's old Shrikey then?"
"Dead," said Hester.
"Dead? What was it, metal fatigue?" He gave a great guffaw and the bodyguards all joined in obediently, until even the monkey on his shoulder started shrieking and rattling its chain. "Metal fatigue! Get it?"
"So how come you're running Tunbridge Wheels?" asked Hester, while he was still wiping the tears from his eyes and chuckling. "The last I heard of this place it was a respectable suburb. It used to hunt up north, on the edges of the ice."
Peavey chuckled, leaning against the bars. "Flashy, innit?" he said. "This place ate my old town a couple of years back. Come racing up one day and scoffed it straight down. They was soft, though: they hadn't reckoned with me and my boys. We busted out of the gut and took over the whole place; set the mayor and the council to work stoking their own boilers, settled ourselves down in their comfy houses and their posh Town Hall. No more scavenging for me! I'm a proper mayor now. His Worship Chrysler Peavey at your service!"
Tom shuddered, imagining the dreadful things that must have happened here when Peavey's roughs took over - but Hester just nodded as if she was impressed. "Congratulations," she said. "It's a good town. Fast, I mean. Well-built. You're taking a risk, though. If your prey hadn't stopped when it did, you'd've plunged straight into the heart of the Rustwater and sunk like a stone."
Peavey waved the warning away. "Not Tunbridge Wheels, sweetheart. This suburb's specialized. Mires and marshes don't bother us. There're fat towns hiding in these swamps, and fatter prey still where I'm planning to go next."
Hester nodded. "So how about letting us out then?" she asked casually. "With all this prey to catch you could probably use a couple of good tough helpers up top."
"Ha ha!" chortled Peavey. "Nice try, Hettie, but you're out of luck. Prey's been short these last couple of years. I need all the loot and grub I can find just to keep the lads happy, and they won't be happy if I start bringing new faces aboard. 'Specially not faces as 'orrible as yours." He bellowed with laughter again, looking round at his bodyguards to make sure they were joining in. The monkey ran up on to the top of his head and squatted there, chattering.
"But you need me, Peavey!" Hester told him, forgetting all about Tom in her desperation. "I'm not soft. I'm probably tougher than half of your best lads. I'll fight for a place up top, if that's what it takes..."
"Oh, I can use you, all right," agreed Peavey. "But not up top. It's in the engine rooms where I need help. Sorry, Hettie!" He turned away, and beckoned to the woman with the horns. "Chain 'em up, Maggs, and take 'em to the slave pits."
Hester slumped down on the floor of the cage, despairing. Tom touched her shoulder, but she shrugged him irritably away. He looked past her, at Peavey stalking away across his blood-stained yards and the pirates advancing on the cage with guns and manacles. To his surprise, he felt more angry than afraid. After all that they had been through, they were going to become slaves after all! It wasn't fairl Before he knew what he was doing he was on his feet and pounding at the greasy bars, and, in a strange, thin-sounding voice, he heard himself shouting, "NO!"