Predator's gold hcc-2

by Philip Reeve

  Out into sudden, blinding sunlight on the far side of the city. It seemed they had escaped, and even the petrified Pennyroyal cheered in the sudden rush of happiness that united them all. But the Green Storm did not give up so easily. The Jenny swung through the fog of exhaust smoke which hung behind the city, and in the clear air beyond the two remaining Fox Spirits were waiting.

  A rocket slammed into the starboard engines, the blast blowing out the flight-deck windows and flinging Hester to the floor. She scrambled up to find Tom still crouched over the controls, his hair and clothes frosted with powdered glass. Pennyroyal was slumped against the chart table with blood trickling from a gash on his bald head where one of the Jenny ’s brass fire-extinguishers had struck him a glancing blow as it fell. Hester dragged him to a window seat. He was still breathing, but his eyes had rolled up until only two half-moons of white showed under the lids. He looked as if he was studying something very interesting on the inside of his head.

  More rockets struck. A buckled propeller-blade hummed past, whirling down towards the snowfields like a failed boomerang. Tom was still heaving at the controls, but the Jenny Haniver no longer obeyed him — either the rudders were gone, or the cables which operated them had been severed. A fierce gust of wind, howling through a gap in the mountains, swung her towards the Fox Spirits. The nearer of the two made a sudden move to avoid collision, and collided with her sister-ship instead.

  The explosion, barely twenty yards to starboard, filled the Jenny ’s flight deck with a lurid glare. When Hester could see again the sky was full of tumbling litter. She could hear the rattle and crash as larger fragments of the Fox Spirits bounded away down the mountainsides into the pass below. She could hear the grumble of Novaya-Nizhni’s engines a few miles astern, the squeak and thunder of its tracks as it hauled itself southwards. She could hear her own heart beating, very loud and very fast, and she realized that the Jenny ’s engines had stopped. From the increasingly frantic way that Tom tugged and hammered at the controls, it looked as if there was little hope of starting them again. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered windows, bringing with it flakes of snow and a cold, clean smell of ice.

  She said a quick prayer for the souls of the Green Storm aviators, hoping that their ghosts would hurry down to the Sunless Country and not hang about up here to make more trouble. Then she went stiffly to stand beside Tom. He gave up his useless struggle with the controls and put his arms around her, and they stood there holding each other, staring at the view ahead. The Jenny was drifting over the shoulder of a big volcano. Beyond it there were no more mountains, just an endless blue-white plain stretching to the horizon. They were at the mercy of the wind, and it was carrying them helplessly into the Ice Wastes.

  6

  ABOVE THE ICE

  “ It’s no good,” said Tom. “I can’t repair the damage to the engines without setting down, and if we set down here…”

  He didn’t need to say any more. It was three days since the disaster in the Drachen Pass, and below the drifting wreck of the Jenny Haniver lay a landscape hostile as a frozen moon; a cross-hatched waste of thick, ancient ice. Here and there a mountain peak thrust up through the whiteness, but these too were lifeless, white and inhospitable. There was no sign of towns or cities or wandering Snowmad bands, and no answer to the Jenny ’s regular distress calls. Although it was still only early afternoon the sun was already going down, a dull red disc that gave no heat.

  Hester wrapped her arms around Tom and felt him shivering inside his thick, fleece-lined aviator’s coat. It was terrifyingly cold here; coldness like a living thing that pressed against your flesh, searching for a way to crawl in through your pores and smother the failing core of warmth inside your body. Hester felt as if it had already crept into her bones; she could feel it gnawing at the furrow Valentine’s sword had left in her skull. But she was still warmer than poor Tom, who had been out on the starboard engine pod for the past hour, trying to chip away the ice that had formed there and make repairs.

  She led him aft and sat him on the bunk in their cabin, heaping blankets and spare coats over him and snuggling in beside him to let him share her own small store of warmth.

  “How’s Professor Pennyroyal?” he asked.

  Hester grunted. It was hard to tell. The explorer had not regained consciousness, and she was beginning to suspect he never would. At the moment he was lying on a bed she had made up for him in the galley, covered with his own bedding-roll and a few blankets which Hester felt she and Tom could ill spare. “Every time I think he’s finally gone and it’s time to chuck him overboard he kind of stirs and mutters and I find I can’t.”

  She dozed off. It was easy and pleasant to sleep. In her dreams a strange light filled the cabin; a fluttering glow that flared and shifted like the light of MEDUSA. Remembering that night, she cuddled closer to Tom, and found his mouth with hers. When she opened her eye the light from her dreams was still there, rippling across his beautiful face.

  “Aurora Borealis,” he whispered.

  Hester sprang up. “Who? Where?”

  “The Northern Lights,” he explained, laughing, pointing to the window. Out in the night a shimmering veil of colour swung above the ice, now green, now red, now gold, now all at once, sometimes fading almost to nothing, sometimes blazing and billowing in dazzling streamers.

  “I’ve always wanted to see them,” said Tom. “Ever since I read about them in that Chung-Mai Spofforth book, A Season with the Snowmads. And here they are. As if they’ve been laid on just for us.”

  “Congratulations,” said Hester, and pressed her face into the soft hollow beneath his jaw so that she could not see the lights. They were beautiful all right, but it was a huge, inhuman beauty, and she could not help thinking that they would soon become her funeral lanterns. Soon the weight of ice accumulating on the Jenny ’s envelope and rigging would force her down, and there in the dark and the whispering cold Hester and Tom would sink into a sleep from which there would be no awakening.

  She did not feel particularly frightened. It was nice, dozing there in Tom’s sleepy embrace, feeling the warmth seep out of her. And everybody knew that lovers who died in one another’s arms went down together to the Sunless Country, favourites of the Goddess of Death.

  The only problem was, she needed to pee. The more she tried to ignore it and compose herself and wait calmly for the dark goddess’s touch, the more urgent grew the pressure on her bladder. She didn’t want to die distracted, but she didn’t want to simply go in her breeches either: it wouldn’t be nearly so romantic to go into the afterlife all soggy.

  Grumbling and cursing, she wriggled out from under the covers and crept forward, slithering on the ice which had formed on the deck. The chemical toilet behind the flight deck had been smashed to pieces by one of the rocket blasts, but there was a handy hole in the floor where it had been. She crouched over it and did her business as quickly as she could, gasping at the fierce cold.

  She wanted to go straight back to Tom, and later she would wish that she had, but something prompted her to go forward on to the silent flight deck instead. It was pretty up there now, with the dim glow of the instrument panels glittering through layers of frost. She knelt in front of the little shrine where the statues of the Sky Goddess and the God of Aviators stood. Most aviators decorated their flight-deck shrines with pictures of their ancestors, but neither Tom nor Hester had any images of their dead parents, so they had tacked up a photograph of Anna Fang which they unearthed from a trunk in the cabin when the Jenny was being repaired. Hester said a little prayer to her, hoping that she would be a friend to them down in the Sunless Country.

  It was as she stood up to go back to Tom that she happened to glance out across the ice and saw the cluster of lights. At first she thought that they were just a reflection of that strange fire in the sky which Tom had been so pleased by — but these were steady points, not changing colour, just twinkling a little in the frosty air. She went closer to the shat
tered window. The cold made her eye water, but after a while she made out a dark bulk around the lights, and a pale drift of fog or steam above them. She was looking at a small ice city, about ten miles to leeward, heading north.

  Trying to ignore her strange, ungrateful sense of disappointment, she went to rouse Tom, patting his face until he groaned and stirred and said, “What is it?”

  “Some god’s got a soft spot for us,” she said. “We’re saved.”

  By the time he reached the flight deck the city was closer, for the fortunate wind was blowing them almost directly towards it. It was a small, two-tiered affair, skating along on broad iron runners. Tom trained the binoculars on it and saw its curved and sloping jaws, closed to form a snow-plough, and the huge, hooked stern-wheel that propelled it across the ice. It was an elegant city, with crescents of tall white houses on its upper tier and some sort of palace complex near the stern, but it had a faintly mournful air, and there were patches of rust, and many lightless windows.

  “I don’t understand why we didn’t pick up their beacon,” Hester was saying, fumbling with the controls of the radio set.

  “Maybe they don’t have one,” said Tom.

  Hester scrolled up and down the wavebands, hunting for the warble of a homing beacon. There was nothing. It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence. But when she hailed it on the open channel a perfectly friendly harbour master answered her in Anglish, and after half an hour the harbour master’s nephew came buzzing up aboard a little green air-tug called the Graculus to take the Jenny Haniver under tow.

  They set down at an almost deserted air-harbour near the front of the city’s upper tier. The harbour master and his wife, kind, round, acorn-brown people in parkas and fur bonnets, guided the Jenny into a domed hangar that opened like a flower, and carried Pennyroyal on a stretcher to their home behind the harbour office. There in the warm kitchen, coffee and bacon and hot pastries awaited the newcomers, and as Tom and Hester tucked in, their hosts stood watching, beaming their approval and saying, “Welcome, travellers! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Anchorage!”

  7

  GHOST TOWN

  It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Freya’s chauffeur always drove her to the Temple of the Ice Gods so that she could pray to them for guidance. The temple was barely ten yards from her palace, on the same raised platform near the stern of the city, so it was not really necessary to go through the business of calling out her chauffeur, climbing into her official bug, driving the short distance and climbing out again, but Freya went through it anyway; it would not have been seemly for the margravine to walk.

  Once again she knelt in the dim candle-glow of the refrigerated temple and looked up at the lovely ice-statues of the Lord and Lady and asked them to tell her what she should do, or at least to send a sign to show her that the things she had already done were right. And once again there was no answer: no miraculous light, no voices whispering in her mind, no patterns of frost arranging themselves into messages on the floor, only the steady purr of the engines making the deckplates judder against her knees, the winter twilight pressing at the windows. Her mind kept drifting off, thinking about stupid, annoying things, like the stuff that had gone missing from the palace. It made her angry and a little scared, that someone could come into her chambers, and take her things. She tried asking the Ice Gods who the thief was, but of course they would not tell her that, either.

  Finally she prayed for Mama and Papa, wondering what it was like for them down in the Sunless Country. Since their deaths she had begun to realize that she had never really known them, not in the way that other people know their parents. There had always been nannies and handmaidens to look after Freya, and she saw Mama and Papa only at dinner time and on formal occasions. She had called them “Your Radiance” and “Sir”. The closest she had been to them was on certain summer evenings when they had gone for picnics in the margravine’s ice-barge — simple family affairs, just Freya and Mama and Papa and about seventy servants and courtiers. Then the plague came, and she wasn’t even allowed to see them, and then they were dead. Some servants laid them in the barge and set fire to it and sent it out on to the ice. Freya had stood at her window and watched the smoke going up, and it felt as if they had never existed at all.

  Outside the temple, her chauffeur was waiting for her, pacing up and down and scratching patterns in the snow with the toe of his boot. “Home, Smew,” she announced, and as he scurried to slide the lid of the bug open she looked towards the bows, thinking how pathetically few lights there were in the upper city these days. She remembered issuing a proclamation about the empty houses, stating than any of the engine-district workers who wished might move out of their dingy little flats down below and take over some of the empty villas up here instead, but very few had done so. Perhaps they liked their dingy flats. Perhaps they needed the comfort of familiar things just as badly as she did.

  Down at the air-harbour a splash of red stood out gaudily amid the whites and greys.

  “Smew? Whatever is that? Surely a ship has not arrived?”

  The chauffeur bowed. “She put in last night, Your Radiance. A trader called the Jenny Haniver. Shot up by air-pirates or something, and in bad need of repairs, according to Harbour Master Aakiuq.”

  Freya peered at the ship, hoping to make out more details. It was difficult to see much through the swirls of powder snow which were being blown off the rooftops. How odd to think of strangers walking about aboard Anchorage again after all this time!

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.

  “The margravine isn’t normally informed about the arrival of mere merchantmen, Your Radiance.”

  “But who is aboard this ship? Are they interesting?”

  “Two young aviators, Your Radiance. And an older man, their passenger.”

  “Oh,” said Freya, losing interest. For a moment she had been almost excited, and had imagined inviting these newcomers to the palace, but of course it would never do for the Margravine of Anchorage to start hobnobbing with tramp aviators and a man who couldn’t even afford his own airship.

  “Natsworthy and Shaw were the names Mr Aakiuq told me, Your Radiance,” Smew went on, helping her into the bug. “Natsworthy and Shaw and Pennyroyal.”

  “Pennyroyal? Not Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal?”

  “I believe so, Your Radiance, yes.”

  “Then I — Then I — ” Freya turned this way and that, adjusted her bonnet, shook her head. The traditions which had been her guide since everybody died had nothing to say about What To Do In The Event Of A Miracle. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Smew, I must welcome him! Go to the air-harbour! Fetch him to the council chamber — no, to the big audience-room. As soon as you’ve driven me home you must go and — no, go now! I’ll walk home!”

  And she ran back inside the temple to thank the Gods of the Ice for sending her the sign she had been waiting for.

  Even Hester had heard of Anchorage. In spite of its small size it was one of the most famous of the ice cities, for it could trace its name right back to old America. A band of refugees had fled the original Anchorage just before the Sixty Minute War broke out, and had founded a new settlement on a storm-wracked northern island. There they survived through plagues and earthquakes and ice ages until the great Traction boom reached the north. Then every city was forced to start moving or be eaten by those that had, and the people of Anchorage rebuilt their home and set off on their endless journeyings across the ice.

  It was no predator, and the small jaws at its bows were only used for gathering in salvage or gouging up freshwater ice to feed the boilers. Its people made their living by trading along the fringes of the Ice Wastes, where they would link themselves with elegant little boarding-bridges to other peaceful towns and provide a marketplace where scavengers and archaeologists could gather to sell the things they scratched up from the ice.

  So what was it doing here, miles from the trade-routes, he
ading north into the gathering winter? The question had nagged at Hester while she was helping to moor the Jenny Haniver, and it was nagging at her still when she woke from a long, refreshing sleep in the harbour master’s house. In the grainy dusk which passed for daylight here she could see that the crescents of white mansions overlooking the air-harbour were streaked with rust, and that many of the buildings had broken windows that opened on darkness like the eyeholes of skeletons. The harbour itself seemed to be on the verge of vanishing beneath a tide of decay: the bitter wind whipped litter and snow into drifts against the empty hangars, and a scrawny dog lifted its leg against a heap of old sky-train couplings.

  “Such a pity, such a pity,” said Mrs Aakiuq, the harbour master’s wife, as she cooked up a second breakfast for her young visitors. “If you could have seen the dear place in the old days. Such riches, there were, and such comings and goings. Why, when I was a girl we often had airships stacked up twenty deep, waiting for a berth. Sky-yachts and runabouts and racing sloops come up to try their luck in the Boreal Regatta, and gorgeous great liners named after old-world movie-queens, the Audrey Hepburn and the Gong Li. ”

  “So what happened?” asked Tom.