Read Mortal Engines me-1: Mortal Engines for Free Online

his head. “The assassin dragged him with her when she jumped. They were both drowned in the mud of the Out-Country, or crushed beneath the tracks.”
    “Oh,” whispered Katherine, and sat down on the edge of a table, not even noticing Dog when he came padding in to rest his great head on her knee.
Poor Tom!
she thought. He had been so sweet, so eager to please. She had really liked him. She had even thought of asking Father about bringing him up to work at Clio House so she and Dog could get to know him better. And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city’s wake.
    “The Lord Mayor isn’t happy,” said Valentine, glancing at the clock. “An assassin loose in the Gut on London’s first day back in the Hunting Ground. He is coming down here in person to discuss it. Will you sit with me while I wait for him? You can have some of my breakfast if you like. There is coffee on the table—rolls -butter. I have no appetite at all.”
    Katherine had no appetite either, but she glanced at the food, and noticed a battered leather pack lying on the far side of the table. It was the pack the girl assassin had dropped in the Gut last night, and its contents were spread out around it like exhibits in a strange museum: a metal water-bottle, a first-aid kit, some string, a few strips of dried meat that looked tougher than the tongues of old boots and a stained and crumpled sheet of paper with a photograph stapled to it. Katherine picked it up. It was an identity form, issued in a town called “Strole”, filthy and faded and coming apart along the creases. Before she could study the writing her eye was drawn to the photograph. She gasped. “Father! Her face!”
    Valentine turned, saw her holding the paper and snatched it from her hand with an angry cry. “No, Kate! That is not for your eyes! It is not for anybody’s eyes…”
    He pulled out his lighter and carefully lit a corner of the form, folding it into the ashtray on his desk as it burned. Then he went back to his pacing, and Katherine sat and watched him. In the ten years since she arrived in London Katherine had come to think of him as her best friend as well as her father. They liked the same things, and laughed at the same jokes, and never kept secrets from each other—but she could see that he was keeping something from her about this girl. She had never seen him so worried by anything. “Who is she, Father?” she asked. “Do you know her from one of your expeditions? She is so young, and so… Whatever happened to her face!”
    There were footsteps, a knock at the door, and Pewsey burst into the room. “Lord Mayor’s on his way, Chief.”
    “Already?” gasped Valentine.
    “ ’Fraid so. Gench just saw him coming across the park in his bug. Said he didn’t look pleased.”
    Valentine didn’t look pleased either. He grabbed his robes from the chair-back where they had been flung and started trying to make himself presentable. Katherine stepped forward to help, but he waved her away, so she kissed him quickly on the cheek and hurried out with Dog trotting behind her. Through the big oval windows of the drawing room she could see a white official bug pulling in through the gates of Clio House. A squad of soldiers ran ahead of it, dressed in the bright red armour of the Beefeaters, the Lord Mayor’s personal bodyguard. They took up positions around the garden like ugly lawn ornaments as Gench and one of the other servants hurried forward to open the bug’s glastic lid. The Lord Mayor stepped out and came striding towards the house.
    Magnus Crome had been ruler of London for nearly twenty years, but he still didn’t
look
like a Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayors in Katherine’s history books were chubby, merry, red-faced men, but Crome was as thin as an old crow, and twice as gloomy. He didn’t even wear the scarlet robes that had been the pride and joy of other mayors, but still