Predator's gold hcc-2

by Philip Reeve

  But the gods did not punish Professor Pennyroyal. He had used some of his stolen gold to buy fuel from a tanker pulling clear of Arkangel, and he was already far away, steering east by the broad scar the predator city had cut across the ice-fields. He was not a very good aviator, but he was lucky, and the weather was not too rough with him. He met with a small ice city east of Greenland, had the Jenny Haniver repainted and renamed, and hired a pretty aviatrix named Kewpie Quinterval to fly her south. Within a few weeks he was back in Brighton, regaling his friends with tales of his adventure in the frozen north.

  By then, even the Direktor of Arkangel had been forced to admit that his city could not be saved. Already many of the rich had fled, pouring away to eastward in a stream of air-yachts and charter-ships (the five widows Blinkoe made enough money selling berths aboard the Temporary Blip to buy themselves a charming villa on the upper tiers of Jaegerstadt Ulm). The slaves who had seized control of the under-decks in all the chaos were leaving too, flying out on stolen freighters or taking to the ice in hijacked survey-sleds and drone-suburbs. At last a general order to evacuate was given, and by midwinter the city stood empty, a great dark carcass that slowly whitened and lost its shape beneath a thickening mantle of snow.

  In the deep of that winter a few hardy Snowmad salvage-towns visited the wreck, draining its fuel tanks and landing boarding parties to harvest the valuables its fleeing citizens had left behind. Spring brought still more, and flights of scavenger-airships like carrion birds, but by then the ice beneath the wreck was growing weaker. In high summer, lit by the weird twilight of the midnight sun, the predator city stirred again, shivering amid a great cannonade of splintering ice, and set out on its final journey, down through the shifting levels of the sea to the cold, strange world below.

  That summer there was news from Shan Guo of a coup inside the Anti-Traction League; the High Council overthrown and replaced by a party called the Green Storm, whose forces were led by a bronze-masked Stalker. No one in the Hunting Ground paid much attention. What did it matter to them if a few Anti-Tractionists were squabbling among themselves? Aboard Paris and Manchester and Prague, Traktiongrad and Gorky and Peripatetiapolis, life went on as normal. Everybody was talking about the fall of Arkangel, and simply everybody was reading Nimrod B. Pennyroyal’s astonishing new book.

  34

  THE LAND OF MISTS

  But Anchorage had not drowned. Borne away from Arkangel by strong currents, it floated into thick fog, the ragged raft of ice it perched on grinding sometimes against other drifting floes.

  When daylight came again most of the city gathered at the railings on the bow of the upper tier. With the engines turned off there was little work for anyone to do, and little to talk about, for the future looked so bleak and brief that no one cared to mention it. They stood in silence, listening to the slap of waves against the ice and peering through gaps in the shifting fog for glimpses of this strange new sight, the sea.

  “Do you think this might be just a big polynya, or a narrow stretch of open water?” asked Freya hopefully, walking out on to the forward observation deck with her Steering Committee. She hadn’t been sure what a margravine should wear for Going to a Watery Grave, so she had put on the old embroidered anorak and sealskin boots she used to wear for trips aboard her mother’s ice-barge, and a matching hat with pom-poms. She regretted it now, because the pom-poms kept bouncing in an inappropriately cheery way, making her feel she had to be optimistic. “Maybe we will drift across it and find good safe ice to run upon again?”

  Windolene Pye, pale and tired from tending the wounded, shook her head. “I would guess these waters don’t freeze until the deeps of winter. I think we will drift on until we ground on some desolate shore, or the ice-floe breaks up and we sink. Poor Tom! Poor Hester! Coming all this way back to save us, and all for nothing!”

  Mr Scabious put his arm around her, and she leaned gratefully against him. Freya looked away, embarrassed. She wondered if she should tell them that it had been Hester who brought Arkangel down on them in the first place, but it didn’t seem fair somehow, not with the poor girl still sitting vigil at Tom’s deathbed. Anyway, Anchorage needed a good heroine at the moment. Better by far to let the blame for the Huntsmen rest with that fraud Pennyroyal. He was to blame for everything else, after all.

  She was still trying to think of something to say when a sleek black back broke the surface, just off the forward edge of the ice-floe.

  It came up like a whale through a wash of white waters, venting air in a hissing plume, and everyone thought a whale was what it was until they began to make out patterns of rivets on the metal hull; hatchways and windows and stencilled lettering.

  “It’s those parasite devils!” shouted Smew, running past with his wolf-rifle. “Come back for more loot!”

  The wallowing machine extended its spider-legs to grip the edges of the ice-floe, hauling itself up out of the water. Sleds were already speeding to meet it, packed with armed men from the engine district. Smew raised his rifle, taking careful aim as the hatch popped open.

  Freya reached out and pushed the gun aside. “No, Smew. There’s only one.”

  Surely it could not be a threat, this lone vessel surfacing so openly? She peered down at the stiff, skinny figure who came creeping up through the parasite’s hatchway, only to be grabbed and pinioned by some of Scabious’s men. She could hear raised voices, but not what they were saying. With Smew, Scabious and Miss Pye at her side she hurried to the head of the stairs that led down on to the city’s skirts, waiting nervously as the captive was led up to meet her. The closer he came, the more grotesque he looked, his misshapen face coloured purple and yellow and green. She knew the parasite-riders were thieves, but she hadn’t thought they were monsters!

  And then he was standing in front of her, and he wasn’t a monster, just a boy of her own age to whom horrible things had been done. Some of his teeth were missing, and a terrible red weal scarred his throat, but his eyes, blinking out at her from a mask of scabs and fading bruises, were black and bright and rather lovely.

  She pulled herself together and tried to sound like a margravine. “Welcome to Anchorage, stranger. What brings you here?”

  Caul opened and closed his mouth, but couldn’t think of what to say. He was out of his depth. All the way from Grimsby he’d been planning for this moment, but he had spent so much of his life trying not to be seen by Drys that it felt unnatural to be standing here in the open with so many of them. Freya shocked him a little, too. It wasn’t just the boyish haircut; she seemed bigger and taller than he remembered, and her face was rosy; she was not at all the pale, dreamy girl he had grown used to from the screens. Behind her stood Scabious, and Smew, and Windolene Pye and half the city, all glaring at him. He began to wonder if it might not have been easier to die in Grimsby after all.

  “Speak, boy!” ordered the dwarf who stood at Freya’s side, jabbing Caul’s belly with his rifle. “Her Radiance asked you a question!”

  “He was carrying this, Freya,” said one of Caul’s captors, holding up a battered tin tube. The people crowding behind Freya drew back with nervous little gasps, but Freya recognized the thing as an old-fashioned document container. She took it from the man, unscrewed the lid and pulled out a roll of papers. Looked at Caul again, smiling.

  “What are these?”

  The breeze, which had been rising unnoticed since the Screw Worm surfaced, tugged at the papers, fluttering their crisp, age-browned edges and threatening to pull them from Freya’s hands. Caul reached out and grabbed them. “Careful! You need those!”

  “Why?” asked Freya, staring down. There were red marks on the boy’s wrists where cords had cut into the flesh, and red marks on the papers too; words written old-fashioned in rust-coloured ink, latitudes and longitudes; the thin, wriggling line of a coast. A rubber-stamped notice warned, Not To Be Removed From The Reykjavik Library.

  “It’s Snori Ulvaeusson’s map,” said Caul. “Uncle must have stole
n it from Reykjavik years ago, and it’s been sitting in his map room ever since. There are notes, too. It tells you how to get to America.”

  Freya smiled at his kindness, and shook her head. “But there’s no point. America’s dead.”

  In his urgency to make her understand, Caul gripped her hand. “No! I read it all on the way here. Snori wasn’t a fraud. He really found green places. Not great forests like Professor Pennyroyal imagined. No bears. No people. But places where there are grass and trees and…” He’d never seen grass, let alone a tree; his imagination kept letting him down. “I don’t know. There’ll be animals and birds, fish in the water. You might have to go static, but you could live there.”

  “But we’ll never be able to reach it,” Freya said. “Even if it’s real, we’ll never get there. We’re adrift.”

  “No…” said Mr Scabious, who had been peering over her shoulder at the map. “No, Freya, we can do it! If we can just stabilize this floe we’re sitting on, and rig up some propellers…”

  “It isn’t far,” said Miss Pye, reaching over Freya’s other shoulder and resting her finger on the map, where the head of one long winding inlet was labelled Vineland. A spattering of islands showed there, so small that they might have been just ink-blots, except that old Snori Ulvaeusson had marked each one with a childish drawing of a tree. “Perhaps seven hundred miles. Nothing at all, compared with the distance we’ve travelled!”

  “But what are we thinking of?” Scabious turned to Caul, and Caul took a few shuffling steps backwards, remembering how he’d driven this poor old man half mad with his ghostly appearances in the engine district. Scabious seemed to be remembering it too, for his gaze turned cold and far away, and for a long moment the only sounds were the faint, nervous stirrings of the crowd and the rustle of the breeze-blown papers in Freya’s hands. “Do you have a name, boy?” he asked.

  “Caul, sir,” said Caul.

  Scabious stretched out his hand, and smiled. “Well, you look cold, Caul, and hungry. We shouldn’t keep you standing here. We can discuss all this at the palace.”

  Freya remembered her manners. “Of course!” she said, as the crowd around her started to break up, everyone talking excitedly about the map. “You must come to the Winter Palace, Mr Caul. I’ll ask Smew to make hot chocolate. Where is Smew? Oh, never mind, I can do it myself…”

  And so the margravine led the way along Rasmussen Prospekt with Scabious and Miss Pye close behind, Caul walking nervously between them, and others hurrying to swell the strange procession as word spread that the boy from the sea had brought new hope: the Aakiuqs and the Umiaks and Mr Quaanik, and Smew pushing his way to the front, and Freya waving Snori Ulvaeusson’s map in its old tin holder and laughing and joking with them all. It wasn’t very dignified behaviour, and she knew that her Mama and Papa and her mistress of etiquette and her ladies-in-waiting would not have approved, but she didn’t care: their time was gone; Freya was margravine now.

  35

  AN ARK OF ICE

  What a hammering and banging filled Anchorage in the days that followed! What a glow of work-lamps in the long nights, and what showers of sparks as Scabious supervised the cutting of makeshift propeller-blades out of spare deckplates, the building of outriggers from the old cat-cowlings! What a stutter and grumble of engines being tested, cam-shafts and drive-belts repositioned! Caul used the Screw Worm to bore through the ice floe, and the new propellers were lowered carefully down into the water beneath the city, while Scabious experimented with a jury-rigged rudder. None of it worked very well, but it all worked well enough. A week after Caul’s arrival the engines started up in earnest and Freya felt her city stir purposefully beneath her and begin to push itself slowly, slowly through the sea, water chuckling along the edges of its ark of ice.

  And slowly the days grew longer, and the icebergs fewer, and there was warmth in the shafts of sunlight that pierced the fog, for Anchorage was steaming into latitudes where it was still only late autumn.

  Hester took no part in the parties and planning-meetings and sing-songs that occupied the rest of the city in those last weeks of the journey. She didn’t even attend the wedding of Soren Scabious and Windolene Pye. She spent most of her time in the Winter Palace with Tom, and later, when she looked back on those days, it was not the landmarks she remembered — the dead islands and thick jams of drift-ice that Anchorage had to nudge its way past, the lifeless mountains of America hunched on the horizon — but the smaller milestones of Tom’s recovery.

  There had been the day when Miss Pye summoned all her courage and all the knowledge she had been able to find in her medical books and cut Tom open, reaching in with long tweezers among the wet, dark pulsings of his body until — well, Hester had fainted at that point, but when she came to, Miss Pye handed her the pistol-ball, a little dented snub of blue-grey metal that looked as if it could never have harmed anyone.

  Then there had been the day when he first opened his eyes and spoke; feverish, meaningless stuff about London and Pennyroyal and Freya, but better than nothing, and she held his hand and kissed his forehead and eased him back into twitchy, murmurous sleep.

  Now that Tom was no longer expected to die, Freya often came to visit him, and Hester even let her take a turn at sitting with him sometimes, for she was feeling unwell herself by then, as though the motion of the floating city disagreed with her. Things were awkward between the two girls at first, but after a few visits Hester steeled herself and asked, “Are you going to tell them?”

  “Tell who what?”

  “Tell everyone that it was me who sold you to Arkangel?”

  Freya had been wondering about that herself, and she thought for a while before she answered. “What if I did?”

  Hester looked down at the floor, smoothing the pile of the thick carpet with her scuffly old boots. “If you did, I couldn’t stay. I’d go off somewhere, and you’d have Tom.”

  Freya smiled. She would always be fond of Tom, but her crush on him had faded somewhere on the Greenland ice. “I am the Margravine of Anchorage,” she said. “When I marry, it will be for good political reasons, to someone from the lower city, perhaps, or…” (She hesitated, blushing a little at the thought of Caul, so sweet and awkward.) “Anyway,” she went on quickly, “I want you to stay. Anchorage needs someone like you aboard.”

  Hester nodded. She could imagine her father, in some chamber of High London long ago, having just such a conversation as this with Magnus Crome. “So when there’s trouble, like if Uncle and his Lost Boys find your little settlement, or air-pirates attack, or a traitor like Pennyroyal needs quietly killing, you’ll turn to me to do your dirty work?”

  “Well, you do seem rather good at it,” said Freya.

  “And what if I don’t choose to?”

  “Then I’ll tell everyone about Arkangel,” Freya said. “But otherwise, it’ll be our secret.”

  “That’s blackmail,” said Hester.

  “Ooh, is it? Gosh!” Freya looked rather pleased, as if she felt she was finally getting the hang of running a city.

  Hester watched her carefully for a moment, then smiled her crooked smile.

  And at last, very close to journey’s end, there came a night when she was woken from her half-dreams in the chair beside Tom’s bed by a small, familiar voice that said just, “Het?”

  She shook herself and leaned over him, touching his brow, smiling into his pale, worried face. “Tom, you’re better!”

  “I thought I was going to die,” he said.

  “You almost did.”

  “And the Huntsmen?”

  “All gone. And Arkangel stuck in trap-ice somewhere behind us. We’re heading south, right into the heart of old America. Well, it might be old Canada, technically; nobody’s sure where the border used to run.”

  Tom frowned. “Then Professor Pennyroyal wasn’t lying? The Dead Continent is really green again?”

  Hester scratched her head. “I don’t know about that. This old map’s turned up
— it’s complicated. At first I didn’t see why we should believe Snori Ulvaeusson any more than Pennyroyal, but there are definitely patches of green here. Sometimes when the fog lifts you can see twisty little trees and things clinging on for dear life to the sides of the mountains. I suppose that’s what gave rise to all those airman’s tales. But it’s nothing like Pennyroyal promised. It’s no Hunting Ground. Just an island or two. Anchorage will have to become a static settlement.”

  Tom looked frightened, and Hester squeezed his hand and cursed herself for scaring him; she’d forgotten how much townies like him feared life on the bare earth. “I was born on an island, remember? It was nice. We’ll have a good life here.”

  Tom nodded and smiled, gazing at her. She looked good; rather pale, and still nobody’s idea of beautiful, but very striking, in new black clothes she told him she’d taken from a shop in the Boreal Arcade to replace her prison-slops. She had washed her hair, and tied it back with a silvery thing, and for the first time that he remembered she did not try to hide her face while he watched her. He reached up and stroked her cheek. “And are you all right? You look a bit white.”

  Hester laughed. “You’re the only person who ever notices how I look. I mean, apart from the obvious. I’ve just been feeling a bit queasy.” (Better not to tell him yet about what Windolene had found when Hester went to her complaining of sea-sickness. The shock might make him ill again.)

  Tom touched her mouth. “I know it feels awful, those men you had to kill. I still feel guilty about killing Shrike, and Pewsey and Gench. But it wasn’t your fault. You had to do it.”