Mortal Engines Read Online Free PDF Page A

learned intelligent speech and was so bold as to engage Electrina in conversation.
    The princess asked it once what that white stuff was which glittered in its maw.
    “That I call teeth,” it said.
    “Oh let me have one!” requested the princess.
    “And what will you give me for it?” it asked.
    “I’ll give you my little golden key, but only for a moment.”
    “What kind of key is it?”
    “My personal key, I use it every evening to wind up my mind. You must have one too.”
    “My key is different from yours,” it answered evasively. “And where do you keep it?”
    “Here, on my breast, beneath this little golden lid.”
    “Hand it over…”
    “And you’ll give me a tooth?”
    “Sure…”
    The princess turned a little golden screw, opened the lid, took out a little golden key and passed it through the bars. The paleface grabbed it greedily and, chuckling with glee, retreated to the center of the cage. The princess implored and pleaded with it to return the key, but all in vain. Afraid to let anyone find out what she had done, Electrina went back to her palace chambers with a heavy heart. She acted foolishly perhaps, but then she was still practically a child. The next day her servants found her senseless in her crystal bed. The King and Queen came running, and the whole court after them. She lay as if asleep, but it was not possible to waken her. The King summoned the court physicians-electricians, his medics, techs and mechanicians, and these, examining the princess, discovered that her lid was open—no little screw, no little key! The alarm was sounded in the castle, pandemonium reigned, everyone rushed here and there looking for the little key, but to no avail. The next day the King, deep in despair, was informed that his paleface wished to speak with him on the matter of the missing key. The King went himself to the park without delay, and the monstrosity told him that it knew where the princess had lost her key, but would reveal this only when the King had given his royal word to restore to it its freedom and, moreover, supply a spacefaring vessel so it could return to its own kind. The King stubbornly refused, he ordered the park searched up and down, but at last agreed to these terms. Thus a spacecraft was readied for flight, and guards escorted the paleface from its cage. The King was waiting by the ship; the Anthropos however promised to tell him where the key lay as soon as it was on board and not before.
    But once on board, it stuck its head out a vent hole and, holding up the bright key in its hand, shouted:
    “Here is the key! I’m taking it with me, King, so that your daughter will never wake again, because I crave revenge, in that you humiliated me, keeping me in an iron cage as a laughingstock!!”
    Flame shot from under the stern of the spacecraft and the vessel rose into the sky while everyone stood dumbfounded. The King sent his fastest steel cloudscorchers and whirlyprops in pursuit, but their crews all came back empty-handed, for the wily paleface had covered its tracks and given its pursuers the slip.
    King Boludar now understood how wrong it had been of him not to heed the wise homologísts, but the damage had been done. The foremost electrical locksmiths worked to fashion a duplicate key, the Great Assembler to the Throne, royal artisans, armorers and artefactotums, Lord High steelwrights and master goldforgers, and cybercounts and dynamargraves—all came to try their skill, but in vain. The King realized he would have to recover the key taken by the paleface, otherwise darkness would forever lie upon the sense and senses of the princess.
    He proclaimed therefore throughout the realm that this, that and the other had taken place, the anthropic paleface Homos absconded with the golden key, and whosoever captured it, or even if only he retrieved the life-giving jewel and woke the princess, would have her hand in marriage and ascend the throne.
    Straightway there appeared in droves