Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Pennyroyal looked hopeful. He so wanted to believe her. “But your name,” he said. “Natsworthy…”

  “Oh, it’s not my real name,” Wren said brightly. “I looked up Hester Shaw in Uncle’s records, and it said she used to travel with someone called that.”

  “Oh, really?” Pennyroyal tried to hide his relief. “Never heard of him.”

  Wren smiled, pleased at how easy it was to lie, and how good she was turning out to be at it. Her story didn’t make a lot of sense, but when you tell someone something that they want to hear, they tend to believe you; WOPCART had taught her that.

  She said, “I was planning to keep up the pretence, Professor, in the hope that you would take me into your household. Even if I were only the lowliest of your slaves, at least I would be close to the author of Predator’s Gold and… and all those other books.” She lowered her eyes demurely. “But as soon as I saw you, sir, I realized that you would never be taken in by my lies, and so I resolved to tell you the truth.”

  “Very commendable,” said Pennyroyal. “Quite right too. I saw through it in an instant, you know. Although oddly enough you do bear a slight resemblance to poor Hester. That’s why I was startled when you first appeared. That young woman was very, very dear to me, and it is the deepest regret of my life that I didn’t manage to save her.”

  Ooh, you rotten liar! thought Wren, but all she said was, “I expect I must go now, sir. I expect Mr Shkin will wish to make what profit of me he can. But I go happily, for at least I have spoken with the finest author of the age.”

  “Absolutely not!” Pennyroyal heaved himself out of the pool and stood dripping, waving away the girls who came hurrying round him with towels, clothes and a portable changing tent. “I will not hear of it, Shkin! This delightful, intelligent young person has shown pluck, initiative and sound literary judgement. I forbid you to flog her off as a common slave.”

  “I have my overheads to consider, Your Worship.” Shkin was angry now; white with it, and struggling to keep himself under control.

  “I’ll buy her myself then,” said Pennyroyal. He wasn’t a sentimental man, but he didn’t like to think of this discerning girl being punished for her love of his books – besides, house-slaves were tax-deductible. “My wife can always use a few extra handmaidens about the place,” he explained, “especially now, with the preparations for the Moon Festival ball to attend to. Tell you what, I’ll give you twenty Dolphins for her. That’s more than fair.”

  “Twenty?” sneered Shkin, as if such a sum were too small to even contemplate.

  “Sold!” said Pennyroyal quickly. “My people will pay you. And next time, my dear fellow, try not to be so gullible. Honestly, how could anyone believe that this girl came from America? Quite absurd!”

  Shkin bowed slightly. “As you say, Your Worship. Absurd.” He held out his hand. “The Tin Book, if you please.”

  Pennyroyal, who had been leafing through the Tin Book, snapped it shut and clutched it to his chest. “I think not, Shkin. The girl said this was a present for me.”

  “It is my property!”

  “No it’s not. Your contract with the council states that any Lost Boys you fished up were yours. This isn’t a Lost Boy, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s some sort of Ancient code, possibly valuable. It is my duty as mayor of Brighton to hang on to it for, ah, further study.”

  Shkin stared for a long moment at the mayor, then at Wren. He manufactured a smile. “No doubt we shall all meet again,” he said pleasantly, and turned, snapping his fingers for his men to follow him as he walked briskly away.

  Pennyroyal’s girls clustered around him, enclosing him within his changing-tent. For a short time Wren was left alone. She grinned, flushed with her own cleverness. She might still be a slave, but she was a posh slave, in the house of the mayor himself! She would get good food and fine clothes, and probably never have to carry anything much heavier than the odd tray of fairy-cakes. And she would meet all kinds of interesting people. Handsome aviators, for instance, who might be persuaded to fly her home to Vineland.

  Her only regret was that she hadn’t managed to bring Fishcake up here with her. She felt responsible for the boy, and hoped that the slave-dealer wouldn’t take out his anger on him. But it would be all right. One way or another, she would escape, and then maybe she’d find a way of helping Fishcake, too.

  Nabisco Shkin was not a man who let his emotions show, and by the time the cable car set him down again on Brighton’s deckplates he had mastered his temper. At the Pepperpot he greeted Miss Weems with no more than his customary coldness, and told her, “Bring me the little Lost Boy.”

  Soon afterwards he was sitting calmly in his office, watching Fishcake tuck into a second bowl of chocolate ice cream and listening again to his account of the Autolycus’s voyage to Vineland. This boy was telling the truth, Shkin was sure of it. But there was no point in trying to use him to discredit the mayor; he was young, and easily influenced; if it came to a trial, Pennyroyal’s lawyers would tear him to shreds. Shkin closed his eyes thoughtfully, and pictured Vineland. “Are you quite certain you can find the place again, boy?”

  “Oh yes, Mr Shkin,” said Fishcake, with his mouth full.

  Shkin smiled at him over the tips of his steepled fingers. “Good. Very good,” he said. “You know, boy; every now and then I acquire a slave who proves too useful or too bright to part with; Miss Weems for example. I hope that you will be another.”

  Fishcake nervously returned the smile. “You mean you ain’t going to sell me off to them Nuevo-Mayan devils, sir?”

  “No, no, no, no,” Shkin assured him, shaking his head. “I want you to serve me, Fishcake. We’ll have you trained up as an apprentice. And next summer, when the weather improves, I shall outfit an expedition, and you will lead us to Anchorage-in-Vineland. I imagine those Vinelanders or Anchorites or whatever they call themselves will fetch a good price at the slave-markets.”

  Fishcake listened wide-eyed, then grinned. “Yes, Mr Shkin! Thank you, Mr Shkin!”

  Shkin leaned back in his chair, his temper quite restored. He would revenge himself on Pennyroyal by showing the whole world that Anchorage had survived. As for that treacherous little vixen Wren, let her see how clever she felt when the Shkin Corporation enslaved all her family and friends.

  15

  CHILDREN OF THE DEEP

  The limpet Screw Worm had been built long before the Lost Boys started to use wireless crab-cams. Even its radio set had stopped working long ago. It had no way of receiving the broadcasts from Brighton, and so Hester, Tom and Freya never had to find out whether Caul’s desire to meet his parents would have outweighed his loyalty to his friends. Deaf to WOPCART’s invitations, the Screw Worm swam north into the deep, cold waters of the Greenland Trench. On the same late summer afternoon that Wren came face to face with Pennyroyal, its passengers finally sighted Grimsby.

  Tom had visited the underwater city once before, but Hester and Freya knew it only from his descriptions. They jostled for a view as Caul steered the limpet closer.

  Grimsby had been a giant industrial raft once. Now it was a drowned wreck, resting on the slopes of an undersea mountain. Weed and barnacles and rust were all working hard to camouflage it, blurring the outlines of buildings and paddle-wheels until it was difficult to tell where Grimsby ended and the mountain began.

  “Where are the lights?” asked Tom. His strongest memory of the Lost Boys’ lair was the surreal glow of lamplight in the windows of Grimsby’s sunken Town Hall. Now, the whole city lay in darkness.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Caul.

  Something bumped against the Screw Worm’s hull. Shards of splintered wood and torn plastic revolved in the splay of light from the nose-lantern. The limpet was swimming through a zone of drifting wreckage.

  “The whole place is dead –” Hester said, and then stopped short, because if that were true then Wren was probably dead as well.

  “Look at the Burglarium!”
Caul whispered, shocked. A big building slid by on the starboard side, a building where he had spent much of his childhood, now lightless and open to the sea, litter swirling around huge, jagged rents in its walls. A boy’s body turned slow somersaults as the Worm’s wake reached it. Others tumbled in the flooded glastic tunnel which had once linked the Burglarium to the Town Hall. “Power plant’s gone, too,” he added, as they passed over a domed building which had been smashed like an eggshell. His voice sounded tight and strained. “The Town Hall looks all right. Nobody about, though. I’ll see if we can get inside.”

  It was sixteen years since Caul had fled this place, but he had made the approach to the limpet pens a thousand times in his dreams since then. He swung the Screw Worm towards the water-door at the base of the Town Hall. The door stood open. Silvery fish were darting in and out.

  “Still no one,” he said. “It should be closed. There should be sentry-subs to check us out.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to raise us on the radio and we can’t hear them,” Tom suggested hopefully.

  “What do we do?” asked Freya.

  “We go in, of course,” said Hester. She checked the gun in her belt, the knife in her boot. If there were any Lost Boys left alive in there, she meant to show them what Valentine’s daughter was made of.

  The Screw Worm slid into the tunnels. Automatic doors opened ahead and closed behind. “The emergency power must be on,” said Caul. “That’s something…”

  “It could be a trap,” said Hester. “They might be waiting for us.”

  But no one was waiting for the Screw Worm. It surfaced in one of the moon-pools in the floor of the limpet pen and its passengers scrambled out into cold, stale air. The darkness was broken only by a few dim, red emergency lights. Air-pumps wheezed asthmatically. The big space, which Tom remembered as being filled with Lost Boys and limpets, was deserted. Docking cranes stood mournfully above the empty moon-pools, like the skeletons of dinosaurs in an abandoned museum. A fat cargo submarine wallowed in a dock on the far side of the pens, her hatches open. A half-dismantled limpet lay in a repair-yard, but there was no sign of the mechanics who should have been working on her.

  Tom fetched an electric lantern from the Screw Worm’s hold and went ahead, still trying to hope that he would find Wren here somewhere, alive and safe and running to hug him. He shone the lantern into the inky shadows under the cranes. Once or twice he thought he glimpsed a crab-cam scuttling away from the light. Nothing else moved.

  “Where is everybody?” he whispered.

  “Well, here’s one of them,” said Hester.

  The big door at the back of the pens stood half open, and on the threshold lay a boy of Wren’s age, curled up, staring, dead. Hester pushed past Tom and stepped over the body. In the corridor outside the pens lay a half-dozen more, some killed by sword-thrusts, others by metal spears from harpoon-guns.

  “Looks like the Lost Boys have been fighting among themselves,” she said. “Nice of them to save us the trouble.”

  Tom stepped gingerly over the dead boy and looked up. Cold drops of water pattered on his upturned face. “This place is leaking like a rusty tin can,” he murmured.

  “Uncle will know how to fix it,” said Caul. The others turned to look at him, surprised by the confidence in his voice. He felt surprised by it himself. “Uncle built Grimsby,” he reminded them. “He made the first few rooms airtight and built the first limpet all on his own, without anyone to help him.” He nodded, fingering his neck. The old rope-burns were still there, hard under his fingertips, reminders of how much he had feared and hated Uncle at the end. But before that, for a long time, he had loved him. Now that he was here again, and the Burglarium was a ruin and the Lost Boys gone, he found that the fear and the hate had gone as well and that only love was left. He remembered how safe he used to feel, curled up in his bunk while Uncle’s voice whispered from the ceiling-speakers through the long night-shift. The world had been simple then, and he had been happy.

  “Uncle Knows Best,” he murmured.

  A sudden movement in the shadows further down the corridor made Hester swing her gun up. Freya grabbed her arm before she could shoot, and Tom yelled “Het, no!” The echoes of his voice went booming away up staircases and down side-passages, and the face which had been pinned for an instant in his lantern beam vanished as its owner darted backwards into the shadows.

  “It’s all right,” said Freya, moving past Hester, her hands held out in front of her. “We won’t hurt you.”

  The darkness was suddenly full of soft footfalls, rustlings. Eyes glinted in the lantern-light. Out from their hiding places the children of Grimsby came creeping, smudged white faces pale as petals. They were newbies, too young to take their places yet among the Lost Boys. A few were as old as nine or ten; most were much younger. They stared at their visitors with wide, scared eyes. One girl, older and bolder than the rest, came close to Freya and said, “Are you our mummies and daddies?”

  Freya knelt down so that her face was level with the children’s. “No,” she said. “No, I’m sorry, we’re not.”

  “But our mummies and daddies are coming, aren’t they?” whispered another child.

  “There was a message…”

  “They said they were near,” said a little boy, tugging at Caul’s hand and looking up earnestly into his face. “They said we should go to them, and a lot of the big boys wanted to, even though Uncle said not…”

  “And when the other boys tried stopping them they fought them and killed them dead!”

  “And then they went anyway. They took all the limpets.”

  “We wanted to go with them, but they said there wasn’t room and we were only newbies…”

  “And there were explosions!” said a girl.

  “No, that was later, silly,” said another. “That was the depth-charges.”

  “Bang!” shouted the smallest boy, waving his arms about to demonstrate. “Bang!”

  “And all the lights went out, and I think some water got in…”

  All the children were talking at once, crowding into the light from Tom’s lantern. Hester held her hand out to one of them, but he backed away and went to snuggle against Freya instead.

  “Is Wren here?” Hester asked. “We’re looking for our daughter, Wren.”

  “She’s lost,” Tom explained. “She was aboard the Autolycus.”

  Small faces turned towards him, blank as unwritten pages. The older girl said, “Autolycus ain’t come back. None of the limpets that went out these last three weeks has come back.”

  “Then where’s Wren?” shouted Tom. He had been terrified that he would find Wren dead. The prospect of not finding her at all was almost as bad. He stared from one bewildered little face to another. “What in Quirke’s name has been happening?”

  The children backed away from him, frightened.

  “Where’s Uncle?” asked Caul. Freya smiled at him to let the children see that he was a friend and they should answer his question.

  “Maybe he left too,” said Hester.

  Caul shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. Uncle wouldn’t leave Grimsby.”

  “I think he’s upstairs,” said one of the boys.

  “He’s very old,” said another, doubtfully.

  “He doesn’t ever leave his chamber now,” agreed a third.

  Caul nodded. “Good. We’ll talk to him. He’ll be able to tell us what’s happened, and he’ll tell us where to find Wren.” He could feel the others staring at him. He turned to them and smiled. “It’ll be all right. You’ll see. Uncle Knows Best.”

  16

  THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES

  They made a strange procession, climbing the cluttered stairways of Grimsby, where salt water dripped from hair-line fractures in the high roof and ran in rivulets from step to step. More bodies lay on the landings, forming dams which the dirty water pooled behind. Overhead, crab-cameras clung to ducts and bannisters. Now and then one turned to follow the newc
omers with its cyclops eye.

  Hester went ahead. Behind her Tom, Caul and Freya were surrounded by children, small hands clutching theirs and reaching out to touch their clothes as if to reassure themselves that these visitors from the world above were real. They were especially drawn to Freya. In shocked, whispery voices they told her all sorts of secrets.

  “Whitebait picks his nose.”

  “I do not!”

  “My name’s Esbjørn but the big boys at the Burglarium said I had to be called Tuna, only I think Tuna’s a stupid name, so can I change back now all the big boys have got killed dead and run away?”

  “He sticks his finger right up there. And he eats the bogies.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Children,” asked Freya, “who was it who blew up the Burglarium? How long ago did it happen?”

  But the children couldn’t answer that; a few days, said some, a week, reckoned others. Their chatter faded as they neared the upper floors. They looked into an enormous chamber, new since Tom and Caul were last in Grimsby, made by knocking a dozen of the old rooms together. It was stuffed with fine furnishings; plunder from burgled town halls and looted statics. Huge mirrors hung on the walls, and swags of silk and velvet curtained the colossal bed. Clothes and cushions were strewn across the floor, and mobiles made from holed beach-stones and antique seedies hung from the ducts on the ceiling.

  “This was Gargle’s quarters,” explained the children. “Gargle ran things from here.”

  “Remora made the mobiles,” said a little girl. “She’s pretty and clever and she’s Gargle’s favourite.”

  “I wish Gargle would come back,” a boy said. “Gargle would know what to do.”

  “Gargle’s dead,” said Hester.

  After that the only sounds were the pad of their feet on the wet carpets and a faint voice somewhere ahead, tinny and fizzing as if it were coming through loudspeakers. It said, “We only want to be reunited with our dear, lost children…”