Predator's gold hcc-2

by Philip Reeve

  She pushed her way out through the heat-lock. The cold-mask cut off her peripheral vision, so she threw it away and went down the slope on to Rasmussen Prospekt with the snowflakes stroking her face like cold fingers. A long line of fresh footprints reached away from her, already filling with snow. She followed them, measuring the long strides. Ahead, a man was silhouetted against the dying glare from the air-harbour. It was Masgard. She quickened her pace, and as she drew closer she could hear him calling the names of his dead companions. “Garstang? Gustavsson? Sprue?” She could hear the panic rising in his voice. He was just a rich city boy who enjoyed playing pirates and had never expected anyone to stand up to him. He’d come looking for a fight, and now that a fight had found him he didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Masgard!” she called.

  He spun round, breathing hard. Beyond him the Clear Air Turbulence had burned down to a charred metal basket. The docking-pans seemed to jostle each other in the last mad light of the guttering fire.

  Hester lifted her sword.

  “What are you playing at, aviatrix?” Masgard shouted. “You sell me this city, then you try and help them take it back. I don’t understand! What’s your plan?”

  “There isn’t one,” said Hester. “I’m just making it up as I go along.”

  Masgard drew his sword and swished it to and fro, practising flashy fencing moves as he advanced on her. When he was a few feet away Hester lunged forward and jabbed her blade at his shoulder. She didn’t think she’d done much damage, but Masgard dropped his sword and put his hands to the wound and slithered in the snow and fell over. “Please!” he shouted. “Have mercy!” He fumbled under his furs, pulling out a fat purse and sprinkling the snow between them with big, glittering coins. “The boy’s not here, but take this and let me live!”

  Hester walked to where he lay and swung the sword at him with both hands, bringing it down again and again until his screams stopped. Then she flung the sword aside and stood watching while Masgard’s blood soaked pinkly into the snow and the big white flakes began to bury the gold he had thrown at her. Her elbows ached, and she had an odd feeling of disappointment. She had expected more of this night. She wanted something other than this dazed, hollowed-out feeling that she was left with. She had been expecting to die. It seemed wrong that she was still alive, not even hurt. She thought of all those dead Huntsmen. Other people had been killed in the battle too, no doubt, all because of what she’d done. Was she not to be punished at all?

  Somewhere among the warehouses on the lower tier, a single pistol-shot rang out.

  The trail of footprints had led Tom into familiar streets, lit by the glare of the fires in the harbour above. Beginning to feel uneasy, he rounded a last corner and saw the Jenny Haniver, sitting where he had left her in the shadow of the warehouses. Pennyroyal was fumbling with the hatch.

  “Professor!” shouted Tom, walking towards him. “What are you doing?”

  Pennyroyal looked up. “Damn!” he muttered, when he realized he’d been found, and then, with something of his old bluster, “What does it look as if I’m doing, Tom? I’m getting off this burg while there’s still time! If you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me. Great Poskitt, you’d hidden this thing well! Took me ages to spot her…”

  “But there’s no need to leave now!” said Tom. “We can get the city’s engines started and outrun Arkangel. Anyway, I’m not leaving Hester!”

  “You would if you knew what she’d done,” said Pennyroyal darkly. “That girl’s no good, Tom. Completely insane. Unhinged as well as ugly…”

  “Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” cried Tom indignantly, reaching out to drag the explorer away from the hatch.

  Pennyroyal pulled a pistol from inside his robes and shot him in the chest.

  The kick of the bullet threw him backwards into a snowdrift. He tried to struggle up, but he couldn’t. There was a hot, wet hole in his coat. “That’s not fair!” he whispered, and felt blood flood up his throat and fill his mouth, hot and salty. The pain came in like the long, grey breakers at Rogues’ Roost, steady and slow, each wave fading into the next.

  There was a crunch of footsteps in the snow. Pennyroyal crouched over him, still holding the gun. He looked almost as surprised as Tom. “Oops!” he said. “Sorry. Only meant to scare you; it just went off. Never handled one of these things before. Took it from one of those chaps your loony girlfriend spiked.”

  “Help,” Tom managed to whisper.

  Pennyroyal twitched Tom’s coat open and looked at the damage. “Eugh!” he said, and shook his head. He groped in the inner pockets and drew out the Jenny ’s keys.

  Tom felt the deckplates under him begin to shudder as the city’s engines came back to life. Saws were howling up at the stern as Scabious’s men cut away the wreckage of the wheel. “Listen!” he whispered, and found that his voice sounded like someone else’s, faint and far away. “Don’t take the Jenny! You needn’t! Mr Scabious will get us moving again. We’ll outrun Arkangel…”

  Pennyroyal stood up. “Really, what an incurable romantic you are, Tom. Where do you think you’re going to run to? There are no green bits in America, remember? This city is headed for a cold, slow death on the ice or a quick, hot one in the gut of Arkangel, and either way I don’t intend to be around when it happens!” He tossed the keys up in the air and caught them again, turning away. “Must dash. Sorry again. Cheerio!”

  Tom started trying to drag himself through the snow, determined to find Hester, but after a few feet he had forgotten what it was he meant to tell her. He lay in the snow, and after a while the burr of aero-engines reached him, rising and then fading as Pennyroyal lifted the Jenny Haniver out of the maze of warehouses and steered her away into the dark. It didn’t seem to matter much by then. Even dying didn’t seem to matter, although it seemed odd to think that he had outflown Fox Spirits and escaped Stalkers and survived strange adventures under the sea only to end like this.

  The snow kept on falling, and it wasn’t cold any more, just soft and snug, heaping its silence over the city, wrapping the whole world in a dream of peace.

  33

  THIN ICE

  Just after sunrise a cheer ran through the engine district as the wreckage of the stern-wheel was finally cut away and the city began to move again, swinging south by south-west. Yet with the wheel gone and just the cats to drag it forward Anchorage could only manage a crippled crawl, making barely ten miles per hour. Already in the breaks between the snow showers Arkangel could be seen looming in the east like a polluted mountain.

  Freya stood with Mr Scabious on the stern-gallery. The engine master had a pink sticking-plaster on his forehead where a Huntsman’s bullet had grazed him, but he was the only casualty of the battle to retake the engine district: the Huntsmen had quickly seen that they were outnumbered, and fled on to the ice to await rescue by Arkangel’s survey-suburbs.

  “Only one hope for us,” muttered Scabious, as he and Freya watched the low sunlight kindle reflections in the windows of the predator city. “If we run far enough south the ice’ll grow thinner and they may break off the chase.”

  “But if the ice is thinner won’t we go through it too?”

  Scabious nodded. “There’s always that danger. And if we’re to keep ahead we can’t afford to bother with survey-teams and scout-parties; we’ll have to keep going as fast as we can, and hope for the best. America or bust, eh?”

  “Yes,” said Freya. And then, feeling that there was no point in lying any more, “No. Mr Scabious, it was all a lie. Pennyroyal had never been to America. He invented the whole thing. That’s why he shot Tom, and took the Jenny Haniver. ”

  “Oh, aye?” said Scabious, turning to look down at her.

  Freya waited for something more, but it didn’t come. “Well, is that it?” she asked. “Just ‘oh, aye’? Aren’t you going to tell me what a little fool I’ve been, for believing in Pennyroyal?”

  Scabious smiled. “To tell you the tru
th, Freya, I had my doubts about that fellow from the first. Didn’t ring true somehow.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” said the engine master. “I liked your idea of crossing the High Ice. What was this city before we started west? A moving ruin; the only people who hadn’t left were the ones too full up with sorrow to think of anywhere to go. We were more like ghosts than human beings. And now look at us. Look at yourself. The journey’s shaken us up and turned us about and we’re alive again.”

  “Probably not for very long.”

  Scabious shrugged. “Even so. And you never know; perhaps we’ll find a way. If we can only stay out of the jaws of that great monster.”

  They stood in silence, side by side, and studied the pursuing city. It seemed to grow darker and closer as they watched.

  “I must confess,” said Scabious, “I’d never imagined Pennyroyal would go as far as shooting people. How is poor young Tom?”

  He lay on the bed like a marble statue, the fading scars and bruises of his fight with the Stalker-birds standing out starkly on his white face. His hand when Hester held it was cold, and only the faint fluttering pulse told her he was still alive.

  “I’m sorry, Hester.” Windolene Pye spoke in a whisper, as if anything louder might attract the attention of the Goddess of Death to this makeshift sickroom in the Winter Palace. All night and all day the lady navigator had been tending to the wounded, and especially to Tom, who was most badly hurt. She looked old and weary and defeated. “I’ve done all I can, but the bullet is lodged against his heart. I daren’t try to extract it, not with the city lurching about like this.”

  Hester nodded, staring at Tom’s shoulder. She could not bring herself to look at his face, and Miss Pye had pulled a coverlet over the rest of him for modesty’s sake, but the arm and the shoulder nearest to Hester were bare. It was a pale, angular shoulder, slightly freckled, and it seemed to her to be the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She touched it, and stroked his arm, watching the soft down of hair spring back as her fingers passed, feeling the muscles and tendons strong under the skin, the faint tick of a pulse at his blue wrist.

  Tom stirred at her touch, half opening his eyes. “Hester?” he murmured. “He took the Jenny. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Tom, it’s all right, I don’t care about the ship, only you,” said Hester, pulling his hand against her face.

  When they came to find her after the battle and told her that Tom was shot and dying she had thought there must be some mistake. Now she understood that it was not so. This was her punishment for delivering Freya’s city into the jaws of Arkangel. She must sit in this room and watch Tom die. It was far, far worse than her own death could have been.

  “Tom,” she whispered.

  “He’s unconscious again, poor dear,” said one of the women who had been helping Miss Pye. She reached across to brush Tom’s brow with cool water, and someone brought a chair for Hester. “Maybe he’s better off out of it,” she heard another of the nurses whisper.

  Outside the long windows it was already growing dark. The lights of Arkangel sprawled on the horizon.

  The predator city was closer still by the time the sun rose again. When it wasn’t snowing you could make out individual buildings; factories and dismantling-mills mainly, the endless prisons of the city’s slaves, and a great spike-turreted temple to the wolf-god squatting on the topmost tier. As the predator’s shadow groped across the ice towards Anchorage a spotter-ship came buzzing down to see what had befallen Masgard and his Huntsmen, but after hovering for a moment above the burnt wreck of the Clear Air Turbulence it turned tail and sped back to its eyrie. No more came near Anchorage that day. The Direktor of Arkangel was in mourning for his son, and his council saw no sense in wasting yet more ships to secure a prize that would be theirs by sundown anyway. The city flexed its jaws, giving the watchers on Anchorage’s stern an unforgettable glimpse of the vast furnaces and dismantling-engines that awaited them.

  “We should get on the radio and remind them what became of their Huntsmen!” vowed Smew, sitting in on an impromptu meeting of the Steering Committee that afternoon. “We’ll tell them that the same thing will happen to them if they don’t back off.”

  Freya didn’t answer. She was trying to pay attention to the discussion, but her mind kept drifting away to the sickroom. She wondered if Tom was still alive. She would have liked to go and sit with him, but Miss Pye had told her that Hester was always there, and Freya was still afraid of the scarred girl — even more so, after what she had done to the Huntsmen. Why could it not have been Hester who was shot? Why had it happened to Tom?

  “I think that might just make things worse, Smew,” Scabious said, after waiting a decent time for the margravine to give her opinion. “We don’t want to make them any angrier.”

  A deep boom, like cannon-fire, rattled the glass in the windows. Everyone looked up. “They’re shooting at us!” cried Miss Pye, reaching for Scabious’s hand.

  “They wouldn’t do that!” cried Freya. “Not even Arkangel…”

  The windows were blurred with frost. Freya pulled on her furs and hurried out on to the balcony, the others close behind. From there they could see how near the predator was. The hiss of its runners as it raced across the ice seemed to fill the sky, making Freya wonder if this was the first time cities had come to break the silence of this unmapped plain. Then came that great boom again, and she knew that it was not gunfire but the sound everyone who lived aboard an ice city dreaded; the crack of sea-ice breaking.

  “Oh, gods!” muttered Smew.

  “I should be in the Wheelhouse,” said Miss Pye.

  “I should be with my engines,” murmured Scabious. But there was no time, and neither of them moved; there was nothing now that anyone could do but stand and watch.

  “Oh no!” Freya heard herself saying. “Oh no, no, no!”

  Another boom, sharper this time, like thunder. She stared up at the cliff-face of Arkangel, trying to see if the predator city had heard the noises too and applied its ice-brakes. If anything it was still gaining, gambling everything on a last, mad dash. She held tight to the balcony railings and prayed to the Ice Gods. She wasn’t sure that she really believed in them any more, but who else could help her now? “Make us swift, Lord and Lady,” she begged, “but don’t let us go through the ice!”

  The next boom was louder, and this time Freya saw the crack open, a dark grin widening a quarter-mile to starboard. Anchorage lurched and veered away. Freya imagined the helmsman trying desperately to steer a course across a jigsaw of breaking ice. Another lurch, and glassware fell and smashed somewhere inside the palace. The booms and cracks came very close together now, and from all sides.

  Arkangel, sensing that it could not stay on this course much further, put on one final burst of speed. Its jaws swung wide, wide, and the sun glittered on banks of revolving steel teeth. Freya saw workers scurrying down stairways towards the predator’s gut, and fur-clad onlookers gathering on high balconies much like her own to watch the catch. And then, before the jaws could close on Anchorage’s tail, the whole edifice seemed to shiver and slow. A sheet of white spray lifted into the air, like a curtain of glass beads being drawn between the two cities.

  The spray crashed across Anchorage as freezing rain. Arkangel was trying frantically to reverse, but the ice beneath it was fragmenting and its drive-wheels could not gain a purchase. Slowly, like a mountain falling, it tipped forward, and its jaws and the forward parts of its lowest tier bowed down into a widening zigzag of black water. Geysers of steam burst up as the cold sea sluiced through its furnaces, and it let out a great bellow, like some huge, wounded creature cheated of its prey.

  But Anchorage was in trouble too, and no one aboard had time to celebrate the predator’s defeat. The city was tilting steeply to larboard, tracks screaming as they struggled to keep a hold on the ice, gouts of spray thrown up on all si
des. Freya had never felt movements like this, and did not know what they meant, but she could guess. She grabbed Miss Pye’s hand, and Smew’s, and Miss Pye was already clinging on to Mr Scabious, and they crouched there together, waiting for the gurgling black waters to come swirling up the stairways and drown them.

  And waiting. And waiting. Slowly the light faded, but it was just night drawing on. Snow touched their faces.

  “I’d better see if I can make it down to the engine district,” said Scabious slightly bashfully, disentangling himself and hurrying away. After a while Freya felt the engines shut down. The city’s movements seemed to have eased a little, but the floor was still tilted out of true, and there was a still a faint, strange motion in the fabric of the palace.

  Smew and Miss Pye went back inside, out of the cold, but Freya stayed on the balcony. Night and snow veiled the wreck of Arkangel, but she could still see its lights and hear the howl of its engines as it tried to drag itself back on to firmer ice. What had befallen Anchorage she could not tell; there was still this weird wallowing motion, and even without engines the city seemed to be moving steadily away from the trapped predator.

  A burly shape hurried across the palace gardens, and Freya leaned out over the balcony’s brim and shouted, “Mr Aakiuq?”

  He looked up at her, the fur on the hood of his parka making a white O around his dark face. “Freya? Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “What’s happening?”

  Aakiuq cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We’re adrift! We must have reached the edge of the ice, and the bit we were on broke free.”

  Freya stared out into the dark beyond the city’s edge. She could see nothing, but at least the strange rise and fall of the deckplates made sense now. Anchorage was waterborne, balanced precariously on its raft of ice like an overweight sunbather drifting out to sea on a lilo. So much for that thick plain of sea-ice stretching right into the heart of the Dead Continent! “Pennyroyal!” she shouted at the empty sky. “The gods will punish you for bringing us to this!”