by Philip Reeve
Several things happened all at once. Tom turned to run and a net of thin metal mesh, flung from some gantry overhead, dropped over him and brought him crashing down. At the same instant as he heard Caul shout, “Skew! No!” another voice yelled, “Axel?” and he looked up to see Scabious standing at the far end of the gallery, transfixed by the sight of the frail-looking fair-haired boy whom he took to be his son’s ghost. Then, in the shadows overhead, a gun went off with a cough and a sudden stab of blue flame, some kind of gas-pistol, ricochet yowling like a hurt dog. Scabious cursed and flung himself sideways into cover as a second boy leapt down on to the stern-gallery, bigger than Caul and with long dark hair whipping about his face. Together, he and Caul lifted Tom, who was still struggling to free himself from the net. They began to run, jostling their captive into the mouth of an underlit access alley.
It was very dark, and the floors throbbed and jarred with a steady rhythm. Thick ducts sprouted from the deckplates and rose into the shadows overhead like trees in a metal forest. Somewhere behind there was a dim glow of moonlight and the angry, hurt voice of Mr Scabious shouting, “You young — ! Come back here! Stop!”
“Mr Scabious!” Tom shouted, pushing his face into the cold cross-hatch of the net. “They’re parasites! Thieves! They’re-”
His captors dropped him unceremoniously on the deck. He rolled over and saw them crouching in a gap between two ducts. Caul’s long hands had gripped a section of the deckplate and he was lifting it; opening it; a camouflaged manhole.
“Stop!” shouted Scabious, close now, shadow flashing between the ducts astern. Caul’s friend swung his gas-pistol up and squeezed off another round, holing a duct which began to gush a great white geyser of steam.
“Tom!” yelled Scabious. “I’ll fetch help!”
“Mr Scabious!” Tom cried, but Scabious was gone; Tom could hear his voice shouting for aid in some neighbouring tubeway. The lid of the manhole was open, blue light shafting up through steam. Caul and the other stranger picked him up and swung him towards it. He had a glimpse of a short companionway leading down into a dim, blue-lit chamber, and then he was falling, like a sack of coal dropped into a cellar, landing hard on a hard floor. His captors came clattering down the ladder, and the hatch above him slammed shut.
22
THE SCREW WORM
A round-roofed hold, stuffed with plunder like a well-filled belly. Blue bulbs in wire cages. A smell of damp and mildew and unwashed boys.
Tom struggled to sit up. In the fall down the companionway one of his hands had come free of the net, but just as he realized this, and before he could free himself entirely, Caul grabbed his arms from behind and Caul’s friend, the boy called Skewer, squatted in front of him. Skewer had holstered his gas-pistol, but there was a knife in his hand; a short blade of pale metal with a serrated edge. It flashed blue in the blue light as he pressed it against Tom’s throat.
“No, please!” squeaked Tom. He didn’t really think the strangers had gone to all the trouble of kidnapping him just to murder him, but the blade was cold, and the look in Skewer’s pewter-coloured eyes was wild.
“Don’t, Skewer,” said Caul.
“Just so he knows,” Skewer explained, drawing the knife away slowly. “Just so he’s clear what’ll happen if he tries anything fancy.”
“He’s right, Tom,” said Caul, helping Tom to stand. “You can’t escape, so you’d better not try. You won’t be very comfy if we have to lock you in a cargo container…” He pulled a cord from his pockets and bound Tom’s wrists together. “This is just till we’re away from Anchorage. We’ll untie you after, if you behave.”
“Away from Anchorage?” asked Tom, watching Caul’s fingers tie the complex knots. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” said Caul. “Uncle wants to see you.”
“Whose uncle?”
A circular door in the bulkhead behind Caul whirled open suddenly, like the iris of a camera. There were banks of dodgy-looking equipment cluttering the room beyond, and a third boy, startlingly young, who shouted, “Skewer, we’ve got to GO!”
Caul grinned quickly at Tom, said, “Welcome aboard the Screw Worm! ” and ran through into the new room. Tom followed, shunted forward by Skewer’s firm hand. This strange, blue-lit kennel was not some undercroft of Anchorage as he’d thought at first, but it clearly wasn’t one of Professor Pennyroyal’s parasite towns either. It was a vehicle, and this was its control-room; a crescent-shaped cabin with banks of dials and levers all around and bulbous windows looking out into a rushing darkness. On six oval screens above the controls grainy blue views of Anchorage flickered: the Scabious Spheres, the stern-gallery, Rasmussen Prospekt, a corridor in the Winter Palace. On the fifth screen Freya Rasmussen was sleeping peacefully. On the sixth, Scabious led a gang of engine-workers towards the secret manhole.
“They’re on to us!” said the youngest of the burglars, sounding very scared.
“All right, Gargle. Time to go.” Caul reached for a bank of levers. They had a home-made look, like everything else aboard this craft, and they grated and creaked as he pulled them, but they seemed to work. One by one the pictures on the screen folded up and dwindled to white dots. The cabin filled with a metallic hiss as the camera-cables which had infested Anchorage’s air-ducts and plumbing like the tendrils of an invasive weed were reeled quickly in. Tom imagined people all over the city looking up in surprise at the sudden rush and rattle in their heating-ducts. In the cabin, the noise of the reels rose to a deafening shriek and then ended in a series of dull clangs as the crabs were jerked home into ports on the hull above his head and armoured lids closed over them. As the echoes of the last one faded he heard another, fainter clanging; Scabious and his engine district workers hacking at the camouflaged hatch with picks and hammers.
Caul and Skewer stood side by side at the controls, their hands moving quickly and confidently over the crowded panels. Tom, who had always taken great care of the Jenny Haniver ’s instruments, was shocked by the state of these: rusty, scuffed and dirty, levers grating in their slots, dials cracked, sparks flashing blue each time a switch was tripped. But the cabin began to shake and hum and the needles in the crazed gauges flickered and Tom saw that this stuff worked. This machine, whatever it was, might be about to snatch him away from Anchorage before Scabious and the others could do anything to save him.
“Going down!” whooped Skewer.
There was a new sound, not unlike the one made by the Jenny Haniver ’s mooring clamps when they disengaged from a docking pan. Then an awful sensation of falling, as the Screw Worm dropped free from its hiding place on Anchorage’s underbelly. Tom’s stomach turned over. He grabbed a handle on the bulkhead behind him for support. Was this an airship? But it was not flying, just falling, and now came a great juddering shock as it landed on the ice beneath the city. The huge shapes of gantries and skid-supports rushed past beyond the windows, half hidden by a spray of greyish slush, and then suddenly the city was gone and he was looking out across open, moonlit snowfields.
Gargle checked his instruments. “Thin ice bearing east-by-north-east-a-half-east, about six miles,” he squeaked.
Tom still had little idea of the size or shape of the Screw Worm, but watchers on the upper tier saw it clear in the moonlight now as it shot out from beneath the city, narrowly avoiding the drive-wheel. It was a house-high metal spider, its fat hull supported by eight hydraulic legs, each ending in a broad, clawed disc of a foot. Black smoke spurted from exhaust-ports on its flanks as it ran eastward, back along the track made by Anchorage’s runners.
“A parasite!” growled Scabious, dashing out on to a maintenance platform above the drive-wheel to watch it go. Anger bubbled up inside him, forcing apart the locks and bolts with which he had fastened down his feelings since his son died. Some filthy parasite clinging to his city like a tick! Some thieving parasite-boy tricking him into believing that his Axel had returned!
“We’ll stop them!” he shouted to his peopl
e. “We’ll teach them to steal from Anchorage! Tell the Wheelhouse ready about! Umiak, Kinvig, Kneaves, with me!”
Anchorage dug in its starboard ice-rudders and came about. For a while nobody aboard could see anything for the glittering curtains of snow the runners had flung into the air. Then the parasite appeared again, a mile ahead, veering north-east. The city put on speed to give chase, while Scabious’s people heaved the jaws open and gnashed them to clear the ice that had formed on the banks of steel teeth. Searchlights fumbled across the snow, stretching the parasite’s crooked running shadow ahead of it. Closer, closer, until the jaws were snapping so near to the thing’s stern that a puff of smoke from its exhausts was trapped inside. “Once more!” bellowed Scabious, standing on the floor of his city’s small gut. “This time he’s ours!”
But Windolene Pye peered at her charts and saw that the city was speeding towards a place the survey teams had marked with red crosses: a place where open water had skimmed over with ice that would not bear a city’s weight. She swung the engine district telegraph to ALL STOP and Anchorage backed its engines, dug in all its anchors and came shivering to a halt with a shock that scattered black flocks of tiles from the rooftops and brought down an empty terrace of rust-sick buildings on the upper tier.
The parasite machine ran on, stilting its way out on to the treacherous ice. Scabious stared out through the open jaws and watched it slow and halt there. “Ha! We’ve driven him on to the thin stuff! He’ll dare go no further! He’s ours now!” He ran through the gut to the garage where the survey-teams kept their sleds, snatching a wolf-rifle from one of his men as he went. Someone dragged a sled out for him and fired the engines up, and he leapt aboard it and went rushing down the exit chute, a steel door sliding open ahead of him. Out on the ice he swung around the city’s jaws and sped towards the cornered spider-thing, a dozen of his men on other sleds whooping and shouting behind him.
Tom squinted through the limpet’s windows, trying to shield his eyes against the glare of Anchorage’s searchlights. He could already hear the faint shouts of his rescuers, the crack of wolf-rifles fired into the air, the throaty stutter of sled engines hammering towards him across the ice.
“If you just let me go, I’ll put in a good word for you,” he promised his captors. “Scabious isn’t a bad sort. He’ll treat you well if you just hand back the things you’ve stolen from his engine district. And I know Freya won’t want you punished.”
The little boy, Gargle, looked as if he might be convinced, glancing fearfully from Tom to the approaching sleds. But Skewer just said, “Quiet,” and Caul’s pale hands kept dancing across the consoles. The Screw Worm lurched into motion again, settling its fat body lower until the hull was resting on the ice. Whirling saw-blades slid out of its belly, and jets of heated water sprayed against the ice, sending up fierce clouds of steam. With clumsy movements of its legs the Screw Worm turned, turned, cutting an escape-hole for itself. When the circle was complete the blades folded back into the hull and the machine pushed itself down, shoving the plug of ice aside and forcing its body through into the water below.
A hundred yards away Scabious saw what was happening. Steering the sled with his knees he took his hands off the controls and raised his rifle, but the bullet banged off the armoured hull and went whining away across the ice like a lost bee. The parasite’s bulbous eyeball windows sank out of sight. Wavelets lapped across its back, sloshing over magnetic grapples and crab-camera ports. Its long legs folded themselves one by one into the hole, and it was gone.
Scabious brought his sled to a stop and hurled his rifle away. His prey had escaped him, taking Tom and the parasite-boys with it, and he could imagine neither where it was bound, nor any way that he could follow. Poor Tom, he thought, for in spite of his gruffness he had liked that young aviator. Poor Tom. And poor Axel, who was dead, dead, dead, his ghost not walking Anchorage’s byways after all. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, Mr Scabious.
He was glad of his cold-mask. It stopped his men from seeing the tears that were coursing down his face as they parked their own sleds close to his and ran to peer into the hole the escaping parasite had cut.
Not that there was anything there to see. Only a broad circle of open water, and the waves slapping and clopping at its edges with a sound like sarcastic applause.
Freya had been woken by the lurching of the city, by the noise of bottles of shampoo and jars of bath-salts crashing down from the bathroom shelves where she had abandoned them. She rang and rang for Smew, but he did not come, and in the end she had to venture out of the Winter Palace alone, perhaps the first margravine to do such a thing since Dolly Rasmussen’s time.
At the Wheelhouse everybody was shouting about ghost-crabs and parasite-boys. Not until it was all over did Freya understand that Tom was gone.
She couldn’t let Windolene Pye and her staff see that she was crying. She hurried off the bridge and down the stairs. Mr Scabious was on his way up, dripping snow and meltwater as he tugged off his gauntlets and cold-mask. He looked flushed, and more alive than she had seen him since the plague, as if the discovery of the parasite had freed something in him. He almost smiled at her.
“An amazing machine, Your Radiance! Drilled straight through the ice-sheet. You have to hand it to the devils! I’ve heard legends of parasites on the High Ice, but I confess, I always thought them just old icewives’ tales. I wish I’d been more open-minded.”
“They took Tom,” said Freya in a small voice.
“Yes. I’m sorry. He was a brave lad. Tried to warn me of them, and they caught him and dragged him inside their machine.”
“What will they do with him?” she whispered.
The engine master looked at her, then shook his head, and pulled off his hat as a mark of respect. He wasn’t sure what the crew of a vampire-parasite-spider-ice-machine might want with the young aviator, but he couldn’t imagine it was anything nice.
“Can’t we do something?” Freya asked plaintively. “Can’t we dig, or drill, or something? What if this parasite thing resurfaces? We must wait here and watch…”
Scabious shook his head. “It’s long gone, Your Radiance. We can’t hang about here.”
Freya gasped as if he’d slapped her. She wasn’t used to having her orders questioned. She said, “But Tom’s our friend! I won’t just abandon him!”
“He is just one boy, Your Radiance. You have a whole city to think of. For all we know, Wolverinehampton is still on our trail. We must move on immediately.”
Freya shook her head, but she knew her engine master was right. She had not turned back for Hester when Tom had begged her to, and she could not turn back now for Tom, no matter how much she wanted to. But if only she had been nicer to him, these past weeks! If only her last words to him hadn’t been so snappish and cold!
“Come, Margravine,” said Scabious gently, and held out his hand. Freya stared at it for a moment, surprised, then reached out and took it, and they climbed the stairs together. It was quiet on the bridge. People turned to look at Freya as she entered, and there was something in the silence that told her they had all been talking about her until a moment before.
She sniffed, and wiped her eyes on her cuff, and said, “Please get us under way, Miss Pye.”
“What course, Your Radiance?” asked Miss Pye gently.
“West,” said Freya. “America.”
“Oh, Clio!” sniffled Pennyroyal, huddled almost unnoticed in a corner. “Oh, Poskitt!”
The engines were starting up; Freya could feel the vibrations thrumming through the girders of the Wheelhouse. She pushed past Scabious and went to the back of the bridge, looking out over her city’s stern as it began to move, leaving behind it nothing but a scrawl of sled-tracks and a perfectly circular hole already skimming over with fresh ice.
23
HIDDEN DEPTHS
Days passed, though it was hard to say how many. The dim blue light aboard the Screw Worm made it feel as though time had stopped
at quarter to four on a wet November afternoon.
Tom slept in a corner of the hold on a pile of quilts and tapestries looted from the villas of Anchorage. Sometimes he dreamed that he was walking hand-in-hand with someone down the dusty corridors of the Winter Palace, and woke not knowing if it had been Hester or Freya. Was it really possible that he would never see either of them again?
He imagined himself escaping, reaching the surface and going in search of Hester, but the Screw Worm was swimming through the luminous canyons beneath the ice, and there was no escape. He imagined fighting his way into the control cabin and sending signals to Anchorage, warning Freya of Pennyroyal’s lies, but even if he worked out which of those rusty machines was the radio, the boys who had kidnapped him would never let him near it.
They were all very wary of him. Skewer was distant and hostile, and when Tom was about he scowled and swaggered a lot and talked very little. He reminded Tom of Melliphant, the bully who had menaced him during his apprenticeship. As for Gargle, who could not be more than ten or eleven years old, he just stared at Tom with wide round eyes when he thought Tom wasn’t looking. Only Caul was prepared to talk; odd, half-friendly Caul, and even he seemed cautious, and was unwilling to answer Tom’s questions.
“You’ll understand when we get there,” was all he would say.
“Where?”
“Home. Our base. Where Uncle lives.”
“But who is your uncle?”
“He’s not my uncle; just Uncle. He’s the leader of the Lost Boys. Nobody knows his real name, or where he came from. I heard a story that he’d been a great man once, aboard Breidhavik or Arkangel or one of those cities, and he got thrown out for some reason, and that’s when he turned to thieving. He’s a genius. He invented the limpets and the crab-cams, and found us, and built the Burglarium to train us in.”
