Un Lun Dun Read online

  Once there was a hard squawking and a noise from the void behind her. Something approached her on wings.

  Without looking, Deeba grabbed a handful of books and flung them over her shoulder, rustling like rudimentary wings. There was a thud and an angry cawing. The avian noises receded. She did not hear the books land.

  Though relieved, Deeba felt vaguely guilty about mistreating them.

  She stopped being aware of time. She was only conscious of an endless succession of titles, and of wind growing stronger and louder, and of darkness around her. Deeba’s fingers closed on leaves. She went through places where ivy had claimed the shelves and tangled roots into the books. She went through places where little animals scuttled out of her way.

  I might be climbing the rest of my life, she thought, almost dreamily. I wonder how far this bookcliff goes. I wonder if I should maybe start moving left. Or right. Or diagonally.

  It was growing slowly lighter. Deeba thought she heard a low noise of talking. With a sudden shock, she realized that there were no more shelves.

  She had reached the top. She reached up and hauled herself…

  38

  Class-Marks All the Way Down

  …over the top of the wall of books, and looked out over UnLondon.

  Deeba clung exhausted. Below and all around her was the abcity. The loon shone down.

  She was so tired and confused that for several moments she could not make much sense of what she saw. She hooked her umbrella carefully over bricks, and swung her leg over. Then she looked around.

  Deeba swayed giddily. The wind pushed her hard.

  She was straddling the rim of an enormous tower. It was a cylinder, at least a hundred feet in diameter, hollow and book-lined. Outside, bricks went down the height of countless floors past small clouds and flocking bats, to UnLondon’s streets. Inside, it was ringed with the bookshelves she had climbed.

  The vertical tunnel of books was dim, but lights floated at irregular intervals in the dark void below. It didn’t seem to end. It wasn’t a tower: it was the tip of a shaft of books that went deep into the earth.

  At some point during her ascent, what had been a flat shelf-cliff must have curled around and joined up behind her back, so gradually she hadn’t detected it. It had become a chimney poking from a vertical universe of bookshelves.

  There was motion below her. There were people on the shelves.

  They clung to the edges of the cases and moved across them in expert scuttles. They wore ropes and hooks and carried picks on which they sometimes hung. Dangling from straps they carried notebooks, pens, magnifying glasses, ink pads, and stamps.

  The men and women took books from the shelves as they went, checked their details, leaning against their ropes, replaced them, pulled out little pads and made notes, sometimes carried the book with them to another place and reshelved it there.

  “Hey!” Deeba heard. A woman was climbing towards her. Several men and women turned in their tethers and looked curiously.

  “Can I help you?” the woman said. “I think there’s been some mistake. How did you get past reception? These shelves aren’t open-access.”

  “Sorry,” said Deeba. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The woman moved like a spider just below her. She looked at Deeba over the top of her glasses.

  “You’re supposed to put in a request at the front desk, and one of us’ll fetch whatever you’re after,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to go back.” She pointed over at UnLondon.

  “That’s where I want to go,” Deeba said, pulling off the glove and putting it in her bag. “But I came from inside.”

  “Wait…really?” the woman said excitedly. “You’re a traveler? You came by storyladder? My goodness. It’s been years since we’ve had an explorer. It’s not an easy journey, after all. Still, you know what they say: ‘All bookshelves lead to the Wordhoard Pit.’ And here you are.

  “I’m Margarita Staples.” She bowed in her harness. “Extreme librarian. Bookaneer.”

  “Where did you come from?” Margarita said. “Lost Angeles? Baghdidn’t?”

  “I’m not from an abcity,” Deeba said. “I climbed in from London.”

  “London?” The woman narrowed her eyes. “A young thing like you? You expect me to believe you climbed all that way? Straight up? Didn’t have any trouble from wordcrows? None of the warrior booktribes of the Middle Shelves?”

  “I dunno. Something had a go at me, but I got away. I climbed out of my library. And I came here.”

  “Oh my…” Margarita Staples stared at her. “You’re telling the truth. Well. Well well.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t go left or right on your way here; you might have ended up almost anywhere. There are some terrible libraries, believe me, that you really don’t want to emerge in. Not, I have to admit, that we’re doing so well ourselves at the moment.” She sighed.

  “Why?” said Deeba. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re in the middle of a war,” Staples said. “Not just the library: the whole of UnLondon.”

  39

  Due Diligence

  From these heights, Deeba could see the UnLondon-I. The flickering of Wraithtown, the dark tiles of the Roofdom. She could see the glimmer of the river bisecting the city, the two enormous iron crocodile heads squatting on either side of it.

  The night sky crawled with moving stars. A flying bus cut across the front of the loon.

  “You see?” Margarita Staples pointed across UnLondon.

  In the midst of the roofscape of mixed-up architecture, of huge tiger paws and apple cores and weirder things that served as houses alongside more conventional structures, was a darkness.

  “Oh my gosh,” Deeba said.

  A clot of black enveloped a group of streets. It was hard to see, a shadow in the shadowy night.

  As Deeba watched, tongues of substance unrolled from it and seemed to lick the buildings, leaving them smut-stained. It sent out cloud-tentacles like a dirty octopus.

  Margarita pointed at another patch of roiling fumes, and another. UnLondon was dotted with clutches of malevolent smoke, where the abcity had fallen to the Smog.

  “My job was never boring,” Staples said. “There’s nuts-and-bolts stuff like getting the tarpaulin over the shaft when it rains, and so on. Cataloging and reshelving. The shelves are in a shocking state. And when you’ve got everything ever written or lost to keep track of, it’s quite a job. And there’s fetching books.

  “I used to really look forward to requests for books way down in the abyss. We’d all rope up, follow our lines down for miles. The order falls apart a way down but you learn to sniff out class-marks. Sometimes we’d be gone for weeks, fetching volumes.” She spoke with a faraway voice.

  “There are risks. Hunters, animals, and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets separated. Twenty years ago, I was in a group looking for a book someone had requested. I remember, it was called ‘Oh All Right Then’: Bartleby Returns. We were led by Ptolemy Yes. He was the man taught me. Best librarian there’s ever been, some say.

  “Anyway, after weeks of searching, we ran out of food and had to turn back. No one likes it when we fail, so none of us were feeling great.

  “We felt that much worse when we realized that we’d lost Ptolemy.

  “Some people say he went off deliberately. That he couldn’t bear not to find the book. That he’s out there still in the Wordhoard Abyss, living off shelf-monkeys, looking. And that he’ll be back one day, book in his hand.”

  Margarita shook herself.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t go on. I’m just saying that I’m not scared of a bit of danger. But I never thought I’d be working in a war zone. And it’s going to get worse. The Smog could attack anytime.

  “We have to keep watch for attacks against the tower. That was never what the job was supposed to be. We’re hoping the winds this high’ll put the smogglers off.”

  “What happened to
the people who lived there?” Deeba said.

  “In the Smog zones? Those that were inhabited, people had to get out. Those that weren’t fast enough…?” Margarita shook her head. “No one can go back now. You can’t breathe there. They say there are things that creep out of the Smog zones at night and set fires, or lie in wait and snatch people. Stink-junkies…the dead returned…and smoglodytes—weird things, born out of the chemicals.”

  “I dunno what’s been going on,” Deeba said. “But I know who’s part of it. Benjamin Unstible.”

  “Oh yes,” Staples said. “You’re quite right.”

  “Really?” said Deeba. They’ve worked out for themselves that they can’t trust him, she thought.

  “Yes,” Margarita Staples went on. “If it weren’t for Dr. Unstible, we’d all be dead.”

  Ah, thought Deeba.

  She was about to interrupt the bookaneer and explain why she thought she was wrong, but something stopped her. There was a fervor in Staples’s voice.

  “I haven’t yet got my unbrella,” she said. “The Unbrellissimo’s distributing them as fast as he can, all of them vulcanized with Unstible’s formula. I was saving up to pay. But Brokkenbroll won’t even accept any money for them. Peter Nevereater…” She pointed across the bookpit at a colleague. “He’s got one, and he was caught in a Smog attack.

  “They’re amazing! He told me. You don’t even have to know how to defend yourself! They’ve been given their orders; they’re all fully trained. Peter didn’t even have to get under cover. The unbrella just danced in his hand and kept all the rain-bullets from touching him.”

  “I’ve seen it happen,” said Deeba.

  “It’s an honor to help him,” Margarita said. “Every day or two we get requests from Unstible, for more and more arcane volumes. Chemistry and sorcery. And chemico-sorcery. And sorcero-chemistry. Some pretty hard expeditions to find them, I can tell you. But worth it, for whatever he’s learning.

  “The Smog’s been spreading badly. But if it weren’t for the unbrellas it would’ve taken over the whole abcity by now. With Unstible’s help, we’re in with a chance.”

  It was obvious how much trust she put in Benjamin Unstible and his formula. Deeba thought quickly.

  Her plan had been to announce to everyone who’d listen that Unstible wasn’t what he seemed, but she realized that might not go down well. At best, Margarita would think she was mad. At worst, she might consider Deeba an enemy of UnLondon.

  Deeba didn’t want to end up in an UnLondon jail, or on the run. And besides, Margarita’s certainty made her question her own conclusions. Wasn’t it possible Deeba had got the wrong idea?

  Maybe I should just go back, she thought, and shuddered to think of climbing all the way down again. She didn’t even know if it would work. But more than that, uncertainty gnawed at her.

  I can’t say anything until I’m totally sure Unstible’s lying, she thought. I might be totally wrong. But if not…UnLondon is in real trouble.

  She cast her eyes over the abcity, wondering what to do. Nearby, the flickering outlines of Wraithtown caught her eye. She remembered something that Obaday Fing had told her about its inhabitants.

  The roofs of Wraithtown weren’t consistent. Their shapes shifted. From this distance they seemed to move like pale cold flames.

  Deeba did not like the direction her own thoughts were going. She tried to work out some other way of finding out the information she needed. Unfortunately, she couldn’t. She sighed. She had just thought herself into a dangerous expedition.

  But I have to be totally certain, she thought. So no one can think I’m mad.

  “Can you tell me how to get down?” she said. “Also…what do you know about Wraithtown, and the ghosts?”

  40

  Ghostwards

  Two iron ladders stretched down the outside of the tower. They were rickety and rusted, but after her epic clamber up the cliff of books, they couldn’t intimidate Deeba.

  She waved thanks and good-bye to Margarita the bookaneer, and began to descend. Beside her was the other ladder, for readers coming up, to avoid the nightmare of bottlenecks.

  After a minute or two, she heard the rattling of a typewriter. Beside the steps jutted a shelf of bricks, only slightly larger than the desk that sat on it. A suited man sat behind the desk, staring at Deeba.

  “I don’t have nothing to check out,” she said.

  “Wait…how did you get up here?” he said. “Did you sneak past?”

  “No I didn’t,” Deeba said indignantly. She continued down. “Ask Margarita,” she shouted up to him. “I come from inside.”

  “Really?” he said. “A visitor!” He leaned over the edge of his little work space and called down: “Welcome to UnLondon!”

  Yes, it’s really welcoming, Deeba thought sarcastically, thinking of the boroughs of bubbling Smog. And now I have to go and beg a favor of a bunch of ghosts.

  But despite herself, Deeba could not pretend that she was not excited to have returned.

  At last she touched down onto the pavements of the abcity. Streets meandered away in various directions, their bricks and mortar interrupted by moil technology and other oddities. Bits and pieces of feral rubbish moved skittishly from shadow to shadow.

  “You don’t scare me this time,” Deeba said.

  The sky was growing lighter, from the random direction in which the UnSun was going to rise. Deeba shouldered her bag and swung her umbrella. She looked up at the enormous pillar of the Wordhoard Pit, towering so high it looked as if it were falling.

  Deeba got her bearings and set off in the direction of Wraithtown, considering what she had learnt about its inhabitants.

  No one knew why certain of the dead came, as ghosts, to live in Wraithtown. The vast majority of those who died in UnLondon and in London went straight on to wherever it was they went. Of the few who did stick around, many stayed elsewhere, typically haunting the site of their death. A few others would roam.

  The majority of the ghost population of the city and abcity, however, did settle in Wraithtown. Sometimes they stayed for years, before fading gradually and moving on, going wherever the dead go.

  Wraithtown was an area of UnLondon but was also a suburb of the land of the dead, so far from the necropolis city center that it was hazily visible in the living world. Those dead who lived there must be those with some reason for sticking close to the living, the UnLondoners figured, and their refusal to explain themselves was suspicious.

  It was very difficult to make sense of Wraithtown, as the dead were extremely uncommunicative. This led to thousands of rumors. Why else would the Wraithtown dead stay around, unless they were jealous of the bodies of the living?

  Deeba was afraid. But it was in Wraithtown that she knew she could find out some vitally important information about Unstible. She tried to work out how she could get safely into its streets, learn what she needed to learn, and leave again without having her body stolen from her. She had a mile or two to decide.

  “What am I going to do?” she said out loud.

  As she walked quickly through the unlit alleys, Deeba had to admit she wasn’t quite so sure as she had been that UnLondon didn’t frighten her anymore. Margarita had warned her that the empty and emptish streets on the way to Wraithtown weren’t safe. Deeba told herself that because it was almost dawn, and because she was impatient, it would make sense to set off straightaway. She wondered if she’d made a mistake.

  She began to hum to herself, to keep her spirits up.

  It can’t be very far, she thought. She still hadn’t worked out what she was going to do when she got to the Ghost Quarter. Deeba shivered in the damp, cold air.

  From somewhere nearby came the smashing of glass.

  She froze.

  There was an awful scream, that might be a dog or a fox or possibly, just possibly even a person. Abruptly, it was cut off.

  Deeba crept close to a nearby building, a moil house made of ancient record players. She listen
ed.

  There were no more cries. There was, though, another noise. A faint wet grinding. And something that was not quite padding, nor quite the noise of hooves. Something in-between.

  Deeba crept forward. In those narrow streets and that close air, she could not tell where the sounds were coming from. They were moving.

  Behind her, she saw a dark shape bobbing for a moment between roofs. Something was approaching, a street away, high over the pavement.

  She edged slowly forward, and peeked around a corner.

  Oh… she thought, her heart lurching. Wrong turn.

  A few meters ahead, a huge animal loomed in the dark. It towered on legs like sinewy trees. From its muscular body jutted an enormous extended neck. It was poking its head into the remnants of a top-floor window.

  Deeba heard the liquid-and-grinding noise again. The creature was chewing on the body of its prey.

  A minuscule noise escaped Deeba’s throat, and instantly the dreadful figure turned its head and looked at her with predator’s eyes. Loonlight shone on the curves of its horns. It pulled back its lips from a mouth full of fangs, which dripped slaver and blood. From deep in that immense neck came a growl.

  I should never have doubted, thought Deeba in terror.

  It’s true. In UnLondon, giraffes aren’t cute.

  41

  Monsters of the Urban Savannah

  Deeba ran.

  From behind her came a snarl and a howl, and the drumming of those huge padded feet on the UnLondon pavement as the giraffe gave chase.

  Deeba zigzagged, taking as many sharp turns as she could. She lurched left and right, breathing hard. She glimpsed the beast, galloping at her with enormous strides, flailing its head and hauling its chewed-on monkey like a gory flag.

  With its banner waving, and emitting hyenalike shrieks through its clenched teeth, it was calling its friends, as Deeba realized when she tore around a corner to see another giraffe facing her. They were hunting as a pack.