A Web of Air Read online

  Praise

  Philip Reeve has WON the CILIP Carnegie Medal

  Blue Peter Book of the Year

  Nestlé Book Prize – Gold Award

  Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize

  SHORTLISTED for the

  Whitbread Children’s Book of the

  Year WHSmith People’s Choice Awards

  Praise for A WEB OF AIR:

  “A good introduction to one of the most impressive series in children’s literature”

  Daily Telegraph

  “[One] of the most talented and inventive of contemporary writers. [Reeve has] a remarkable ability to combine a strong, engaging and beautifully paced storyline with a passion for argument and ideas: makes much of what passes for young adult fiction seem very thin indeed”

  Robert Dunbar, Irish Times

  “A brilliantly imagined world, told with Reeve’s distinctive verve”

  Top Pick – Children’s Bookseller

  “I love this series, with its unforgettable characters and rich descriptions that make you see everyday objects through completely different eyes. A Web of Air will remind you why Philip Reeve has won so many awards and proves that he has produced a series worthy of sitting alongside Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials in the annals of teen fantasy”

  Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  “Atmospheric, well-tuned and gripping, this is a fine tale for adventure-loving ten-year-olds”

  Philip Womack, Literary Review

  “Philip Reeve’s epic Mortal Engines series has set the imagination of many a child completely wild since it first began. Every one of his Mortal Engines titles stands out as a truly special read. With A Web of Air you will be taken on an emotional journey as well as an enthralling one that’s full of surprises”

  Lovereading4kids.co.uk

  “Another outstanding achievement… This is children’s writing at its most sophisticated and intelligent”

  Lancashire Evening Post

  Praise for the MORTAL ENGINES series:

  “Philip Pullman fans will love Mortal Engines… I didn’t want it to end”

  Daily Telegraph

  “Big, brave, brilliant”

  Guardian

  “A staggering feat of engineering, a brilliant construction that offers new wonders at every turn … Reeve’s prose is sweeping and cinematic, his ideas bold and effortless”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Superbly imagined”

  The Times

  “The idea behind Mortal Engines has other authors crying ‘I wish I’d thought of that!’”

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Witty and thrilling, serious and sensitive, Mortal Engines is one of the most daring and imaginative science fiction adventures ever written for young readers”

  Books for Keeps

  “An absolutely must-read author”

  School Librarian

  “His imagination is electrifying”

  Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “A ground-breaking futurama”

  TES

  “Philip Reeve’s intricate imagination makes J. K. Rowling feel like Enid Blyton”

  Independent

  “I stayed up till three in the morning to finish it. Philip Reeve is a genius”

  Sonia Benster writing in The Bookseller

  “Reeve is a terrific writer”

  The Times

  “Philip Reeve is a hugely talented and versatile author… the emotional journeys of his characters are enthralling, never sentimental and always believable”

  Daily Telegraph

  “There’s a fabulous streak of frivolity running through everything that Reeve writes… Like many of the great writers who can be read happily by both adults and children, Reeve uses the frivolity to hide his own seriousness”

  Guardian

  “Reeve writes with confidence and power. He is not only a master of visceral excitement, but at every turn, surprises, entertains and makes his readers think”

  Books for Keeps

  “Intelligent, funny and wise”

  Literary Review

  “Reeve is a master of young adult fiction”

  Scotsman

  About the Author

  PHILIP REEVE was born in Brighton in 1966. After school he went to art college, then returned to Brighton to work in a small, independent bookshop. Some years later he became an illustrator – providing cartoons for various books, including several of the Horrible Histories series. He has been writing since he was five, but Mortal Engines was his first published book. He lives with his wife and son on Dartmoor.

  www.philip-reeve.com

  www.philipreeve.blogspot.com

  www.mortalengines.co.uk

  By Philip Reeve

  Fever Crumb

  A Web of Air

  Mortal Engines

  Predator’s Gold

  Infernal Devices

  A Darkling Plain

  No Such Thing As Dragons

  Here Lies Arthur

  In the BUSTER BAYLISS series:

  Night of the Living Veg

  The Big Freeze

  Day of the Hamster

  Custardfinger

  Larklight

  Starcross

  Mothstorm

  PHILIP REEVE

  To John Lambert,

  and his Eigenbrain.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise

  A map of MAYDA at the World’s End

  About the Author

  By Philip Reeve

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 THURSDAY’S CHILD

  2 IN MAYDA-AT-THE-WORLD’S-END

  3 STRANGE ANGELS

  4 AN ENGINEER CALLS

  5 THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

  6 THE SHIPWRIGHT’S CURSE

  7 THE MYSTERIES OF FLIGHT

  8 THE SECRET POOL

  9 A LEAVE OF ABSENCE

  10 THE BLESSING OF THE SUMMER TIDES

  11 AËROPLANE

  12 THE FOUNTAIN

  13 THE RED HERRING

  14 BUILDINGS IN MOTION

  15 AT THE THURSDAY HOUSE

  16 MOBILE HOME

  17 THE RAGGED ISLES

  18 THE WATCHTOWER

  19 LITTLE BIRD

  20 WINGS OF THE FUTURE

  21 LOST MAPS OF THE SKY

  22 JONATHAN HAZELL INVESTIGATES

  23 TEST FLIGHT

  24 DROWNED OFFERING

  25 THE LANDING PARTY

  26 NIGHT VISITORS

  27 FEVER IN THE AIR

  28 MOTHERSHIP

  29 WORD FROM THE GREAT DEEP

  30 WESTERING

  Copyright

  1

  THURSDAY’S CHILD

  omething was upsetting the angels. Usually at that hour Arlo found dozens of them fluttering along the beach, scuffling their little bony hands through the mounds of drying seaweed to scare up crabs and sand fleas which they caught and crunched in their toothy beaks. Most mornings, when he came in sight, dozens of them would start calling to him, their scratchy voices rising above the boom of the breaking surf: “A-a-arlo! Snacks? Snacksies?”

  But that morning the beach was silent and deserted. The tide had gone a long way out, and even the sea was quiet. Despite the heat the sky was grey, and had a strange look; as if the clouds had somehow curdled. Glancing up as he climbed his secret path on to the island’s high, rocky spine, Arlo thought that this was what a fish might see if it looked up from inside the sea at the underbelly of the waves. His grandfather had grumbled that a storm was on the way.

  He scrambled up on to the island’s summit, hoping to find cooler air and some angels to talk to. No one had time for him at home that morning. His mother was busy with the new baby, which was gri
zzling at the heat. Father was down at the shipyards, overseeing the work on Senhor Leonidas’s new copper-bottomed schooner. Grandfather was at work in his study. Arlo didn’t really mind. He preferred it up here, on his own. He’d always been a solitary, thoughtful boy.

  Following goat tracks through the gorse and heather, he approached the old, abandoned watchtower, which stood on a crag high above the harbour. From there he could look down into his family’s shipyards. The new schooner lay like a toy in the large pen with other ships, xebecs and barquentines and fine fast sloops, built or half built, in the lesser pens around it. Offshore, the sea was scabbed with islands, but most of them were just barren rocks and angel-rookeries, none as big or pleasant as Thursday Island. Away in the east, dark against the hazy shoreline of the mainland, squatted a conical crater. Smoke hung above it in the hot and strangely windless air, making it look as if it were getting ready to erupt. But it was no volcano. It had been formed in the long-ago by some powerful weapon of the Ancients, and the smoke came from the chimneys of the city that was built on its inner slopes. Mayda-at-the-World’s-End was the finest city in the world, and Arlo’s family were its finest shipwrights, even if they did choose to live outside it, safe and private here upon their island.

  He left the tower and climbed a little higher, intent on the tiny white specks which were the sails of fishing boats scattered around Mayda’s harbour mouth, and suddenly, as he reached the stones at the very top of the island, angels were soaring past him, their wide white wings whizzing and soughing as they tore though the air. A few of them recognized him and he heard them call his name: “A-aa-arlo! A-aa-arlo! W-a-a-a-a-ve!” So he waved, and they swung past him and out across the sea and back again, following curious zigzag flight paths as if they were trying to elude a predator. He glanced up, expecting to see a hawk or sea eagle hanging in the sky’s top, but there was nothing, only those curdled clouds.

  He watched the angels for a while, trying to understand the way they tipped and twitched their wings to steer themselves. He pulled two leaves from a bush, found a forked twig of heather on the ground, and spent a little while constructing an angel of his own. He climbed on a rock and threw it like a dart, and just for a moment its leaf-wings spread to catch the air and he thought it would fly, but it only fell. He lost interest in it before it even hit the ground, and looked away westwards, sensing something.

  Above all the black stacks and wherries where the angels roosted, fretful clouds of them were twisting, turning the sky into a soup of wings. And beyond them, far off across the ocean…

  Something had gone wrong with the horizon.

  Just then his favourite of the angels, the fledgling he called Weasel, landed beside him like a feather football. Arlo groped in his pocket for the crusts of stale bread he always brought with him, expecting Weasel to ask for snacks. But Weasel just made the same noise the others were all making. “Wa-a-ave!”

  “What? What’s that, Weasel?”

  “Wa-ave come!” Weasel had more words in him than the others of his flock. He was learning not to let his bird-voice stretch them out of shape. Grandfather said he was a throwback, almost as clever as the angels of old. He hopped from foot to foot and fluffed out his feathers and waggled his fingers in alarm, trying to make Arlo understand. “Wa-ave come here! Danger! Big-big!”

  “A wave?” said Arlo, and looked again to the west, from where a sudden wind had started blowing.

  The horizon heaved and darkened. It swelled into the sky. Arlo listened. He could hear the hammers at the shipyards, and the maids laughing in the house, and a distant sound that lay beneath it all, so vast and low that he wondered if it had always been there. Perhaps this was the noise the world made, turning round on its axis. But how had he never noticed it before?

  “Wa-a-a-a-ave!” screamed all the angels, and the sky flexed and shuddered and Arlo understood, and then he was up and running. But how can you hope to outrun the horizon?

  After ten paces he looked back and saw it clearly; a blade of grey water sweeping towards him over the face of the sea. It hit the outermost of the islands and there was a brief explosion of spindrift and they were gone and the wave came on, white and broken now, like a range of snow-covered mountains uprooted and running mad.

  “Wa-a-a-ave!” he started to shout, just like the angels, as brainless as an angel in his terror. But who could hear him, above the world-filling voice of the sea?

  He ran and tripped and fell and rolled and scrambled back through the heather, out on to the crag where the watchtower stood. A hundred feet below him the men in the shipyards were setting down their tools, standing, starting to run. From down there he doubted they could see the wave, but they must be able to hear it…

  There was a smack like thunder as it struck the cliffs at the island’s western end. White spray shot high into the sky, and dropped on Arlo as a storm of rain. The weight of it punched him back against the stones of the watchtower wall. It plastered him there; and past him rolled the wave, or part of it, a fat, foam-marbled snake of sea squeezing itself through the straits that separated Thursday Island from its neighbours, lapping at the high crag where he stood.

  And when it was gone, the thunder and the spray and the long, shingle-sucking, white, roaring, hissing rush of it, he peeled himself from the tower’s side already knowing what he was going to see. Or, rather, not see. Because his home, his family, the shipyards and the ships which they had held were all gone, swiped aside by the sea’s paw and dragged down into drowning deeps so bottomless that not a spar or a splinter or a scrap of cloth would ever surface, and he was alone on Thursday Island with the angels.

  2

  IN MAYDA-AT-THE-WORLD’S-END

  n the long, lilac twilight of a midsummer’s evening, Ruan Solent ran between the land-barges which were parked up on the fairground behind the busy harbour. In London, where Ruan came from, these barges were called “Summertown”, and he’d looked forward every year to their arrival. Now he was a part of their convoy, a traveller himself, and he knew that their proper name was Bargetown, and that they kept rolling through every season, not just summer, carrying their shops and entertainments all over Europa; even here, to Mayda-at-the-World’s-End.

  The fairground where they had parked was a weed-speckled empty lot between tall warehouses, swept clear of buildings by the great wave that had struck the World’s End nearly ten years before, the same wave which broke over Thursday Island and destroyed the shipyards there. But Ruan was only ten, and he had arrived in Mayda just that afternoon. He had never heard of Thursday Island. He had heard people talk about the giant wave (the Ondra del Mãe they called it in these parts) but it was an unreal and storybookish thing to him; just another colourful disaster out of history.

  Anyway, Ruan had more immediate disasters to worry about. His land-barge, the travelling theatre called Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum, was supposed to raise its curtain at sundown, and already the sky was freckled with the first pale stars and in the steep streets of the city the lamps were being lit. So Ruan was rushing, weaving, burrowing his way through the crowd of sightseers and shoppers that swirled between the barges. Behind him he could hear his friends Max and Fergus bellowing through their brass trumpets to attract an audience. “Take your places at the Lyceum! Take your places for Niall Strong-Arm or The Conquest of the Moon!” Some of the people Ruan was pushing past looked interested, and started to make their way towards his barge, but Ruan just ran even faster away from it. He knew that without him and his fleet feet and bony elbows, the show could not begin.

  “’Scuse me!” he hollered, as he jabbed and ducked his way past a fat, silky merchant. “Scoozi! Scoozey-mwa!” he shouted, bulldozing onwards. (He was a much-travelled boy, and knew a little of all the languages of Europa.) He was as thin as a pipe-cleaner sculpture and as brown as a hazelnut, with a dandelion-clock of sun-blond hair and a sudden white grin that helped people forgive him when he bumped into them. Maydan fisherfolk in their temple-going best looke
d down and made way for him. Pretty ladies smiled sweet smiles as they stepped aside to let him pass. “’Scuse me!” he kept on shouting. “Scoozey-mwa!”

  All afternoon the barges had been crawling into Mayda, edging their way out along the zigzag causeway which tethered the crater to the mainland, squeezing through a cleft in its wall into the city. The Lyceum had been one of the first to arrive, and while her crew were busy setting out the stage and seating, other barges had parked up all around her; not just the familiar ones which had been travelling with Bargetown all season but a second convoy too, come down from Nowhere and the Caps Del Norte to set up shop here at the World’s End.

  Ruan recognized one of the newcomers; an old blue travelling market called the Rolling Stone. It was such a recent arrival that its engines were still cooling and sea-spray from the causeway crossing dripped like rain off its wheel arches and its underparts, but its merchants had already set out their wares, and a queue of eager shoppers was edging up its gangplank. Ruan scurried up past them to the turnstiles at the top, where one of the men on duty tried to stop him squirming underneath, but the other said, “Oh, let him through, Allan, it’s only that Solent boy from Persimmon’s theatre…”

  He waved a thank you, running out on to the market-deck. It was crammed with stalls and little cluttered shops, already busy with shoppers under its fluttering awnings. A woman blocked Ruan’s way, holding up a bolt of cloth against herself and asking her bored husband his opinion. “You ought to go and see the play, master,” Ruan told him, swerving past. “It starts in a couple o’ minutes.” And right on his cue his words were answered by a distant farting of brass bugles from the far end of Bargetown, announcing that the Lyceum was preparing to raise its curtains.