Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  “Why are they all so nervous?” Tom asked, turning to Freya, who stood nearby with just as little to do as him. “I mean, the wind’s not that bad, is it? It couldn’t really flip us over?”

  Freya pursed her lips and nodded. She knew her city better than Tom did, and she could feel the uneasy quiver that ran through the deckplates as the gale slid its fingers under the hull and tried to lift it. And it wasn’t only the wind they had to fear. “Most of the High Ice is safe,” she said. “Most of the ice cap is a thousand feet thick, and in some places it goes right down to the ocean floor. But there are patches where it’s thinner. And then there are the polynyas – like lakes of unfrozen water in the midst of all the ice – and the Ice Circles, which are smaller, but could still turn us over if one of the skids plunged in. Polynyas shouldn’t be too hard to avoid, because they’re more or less permanent and they’ll be marked on Miss Pye’s charts. But the circles just appear on the ice at random.”

  Tom remembered the photos in the Wunderkammer. “What causes them?”

  “Nobody knows,” said Freya. “Currents in the ice, maybe, or the vibration from passing cities. You often see them where a city has passed by. They’re very odd. Perfectly round, with smooth edges. The Snowmads say they’re made by ghosts, cutting fishing holes.” She laughed, glad to be talking about the mysteries of the High Ice instead of thinking about the all-too-real predator out there in the storm. “There are all sorts of tales about the High Ice. Like the ghost crabs – giant spider-crab things, as big as icebergs, that people have seen scuttling about in the light of the aurora. I used to have nightmares about them when I was little…”

  She moved closer to Tom, until her arm brushed the sleeve of his tunic. She felt very daring. It had been scary at first, going against the old ways, but now that they were racing through the storm, defying both Wolverinehampton and all the traditions of Anchorage, it felt more than scary. Exhilarating, that was the word. She was glad Tom was here with her. If they survived this, she decided, she would break another tradition and invite him to dine with her, all alone.

  “Tom…” she said.

  “Look out!” shouted Tom. “Miss Pye! What’s that?”

  Beyond the dim outlines of Anchorage’s roofs a row of lights blazed suddenly through the darkness, then gigantic claw-toothed wheels and the bright windows of buildings, all rushing past at right-angles to Anchorage’s new course. It was the stern of Wolverinehampton. The heavy wheels spun into reverse as its lookouts sighted Anchorage, but the suburb’s massive jaws made it slow to turn, and already the storm was clamping down again, thick, furious snow hiding the predator from its prey.

  “Thank Quirke!” Tom whispered, and laughed with relief. Freya squeezed his fingers, and he found that in the shock of seeing the predator they had reached for each other, and her warm, plump hand was nestled in his. He let go quickly, embarrassed. He had not thought of Hester since the chase began.

  Miss Pye ordered course-change after course-change, steering the city deep into the labyrinths of the blizzard. An hour passed, and then another, and slowly a feeling of reprieve seeped into the Wheelhouse. Wolverinehampton would not waste more fuel trying to follow them through the night, and by the time dawn came the storm would have erased their tracks. Miss Pye hugged her colleagues, then the helmsman, then Tom. “We’ve done it!” she said. “We’ve escaped!” Freya was beaming. Professor Pennyroyal, sensing that the danger had passed, had fallen asleep in a corner.

  Tom returned the navigator’s hug and laughed, happy to be alive and very, very happy to be aboard this city, among these good and friendly people. He would talk to Hester as soon as the storm was over, and make her see that there was no need for them to go flying off as soon as the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage’s engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home.

  In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton’s air-quay Widgery Blinkoe’s five wives turned five unbecoming shades of green. “Ooooh!” they groaned, clutching their delicate stomachs as the suburb tilted and veered, angrily scouring the blizzard for its vanished prey.

  “I’ve never been aboard such a horrid little town!”

  “Does this hotel have no shock absorbers at all?”

  “What were you thinking of, husband, setting us down here?”

  “You should have known you’d find no trace of the Jenny Haniver aboard a mere suburb!”

  “I wish I’d flown away with dear Professor Pennyroyal. He was madly in love with me, you know.”

  “I wish I’d listened to my mother!”

  “I wish we were back in Arkangel!”

  Widgery Blinkoe carefully stoppered his ears against their complaints with small balls of wax, but he, too, was sick and scared and missing his home comforts. Bother and blast the Green Storm, for sending him on this wild goose chase! For weeks now he’d been trailing across the Ice Wastes like some Snowmad sky-tramp, setting down on every town he saw to ask for news of the Jenny Haniver. People he had questioned in Novaya Nizhni said they had seen her fly off northwards after wrecking the Green Storm’s fighters, but there had not been a sighting since. It was as if the wretched airship had simply vanished!

  Dimly, he wondered about the city Wolverinehampton had just tried to snaffle; Anchorage. If he took off when the storm ended he could probably spot the place and catch up with it… But what was the point? He was sure those two young aviators could not have brought their old ship this far west. Besides, he was beginning to think that he would rather face the assassins of the Green Storm than tell his wives they had to land at yet another dingy little harbour.

  It was definitely time for a change of plan.

  He took out his earplugs, just in time to hear wife number three say plaintively, “…and now they’ve lost their catch, the ruffians who run this town will grow angry and wild! We shall be murdered, and it will all be Blinkoe’s fault!”

  “Nonsense, wives!” boomed Blinkoe, standing up to show them that he was the head of the household and that a breakneck chase through a blizzard aboard a savage suburb couldn’t upset him. “Nobody is going to be murdered! As soon as this storm ends we shall fetch the Temporary Blip out of her hangar and fly home to Arkangel. I shall sell details of a few of the towns we’ve touched at to the Huntsmen, so our trip won’t leave us out of pocket, and as for the Green Storm… Well, all manner of aviators pass through the Arkangel airexchange. I shall question them all. One of them must know something about the Jenny Haniver.”

  15

  HESTER ALONE

  Still the storm blew, the shrill voice of the wind rising higher and higher. In the upper city several empty buildings were blown down, and many more lost roofs and windows. Two of Mr Scabious’s workers, venturing out on to the bows to lash down a loose deckplate, were lifted clear off the city with it and vanished into the darkness off the leeward side, clinging to their trailing cables like the owners of an unwieldy kite.

  Hester had been at work with Mr Aakiuq in the Jenny’s hangar when his nephew came bursting in with news of the chase. Her first instinct had been to run to the Winter Palace to be with Tom, but when she stepped outside the wind hit her like a well-aimed mattress, flattening her against the side of the hangar. A glance at the snow driving across the empty docking pans told her that she could go no further than the harbour master’s house. She sat out the storm in his kitchen, while the Aakiuqs fed her algae stew and told her about other storms, far worse than this, which dear old Anchorage had come through quite unscathed.

  Hester felt grateful to them for trying to reassure her, but she was not a child, and she could tell that behind their smiles they were just as scared as her. It wasn’t just this unnatural, unexpected pressing on into the teeth of the storm; it was the thought of that predator, waiting to swallow them all. Not now! thought Hester, gnawing the sides of her thumbs till the blood came. We can’t be eaten now. Just another week, another few days…

 
; For the Jenny Haniver was almost air-worthy again: her rudders and engine-pods repaired, her envelope patched, her gas-cells filled; she awaited only a new coat of paint and a few small repairs to the gondola electrics. It would be a horrible irony if she were to be eaten before she could take off.

  At last the telephone clattered. Mrs Aakiuq ran to answer it and came back beaming. “That was Mrs Umiak! She’s heard from the Wheelhouse, and they say we’ve escaped Wolverinehampton. We shall run on just a little longer and then anchor and let the tempest blow over. Apparently it was dear Professor Pennyroyal who advised Her Radiance to keep going despite the storm. That good gentleman! We must all give thanks to the Ice Gods, who sent him here. And Hester, dear, I am to tell you that your young man is safe. He has returned to the Winter Palace.”

  A little later Tom himself called to say much the same things. His voice sounded tinny and unnatural as it came filtering through the tangled yards of wiring all the way from the palace. He might as well have been speaking from some other dimension. He and Hester exchanged little flat bits of news. “I wish I was with you,” she said, putting her face very near the mouthpiece and speaking low, for fear Mrs Aakiuq might overhear.

  “What? Pardon? No, we’d best stay put. Freya told me people sometimes freeze to death in the streets in storms like this. When Smew drove us back here from the Wheelhouse the bug almost blew away!”

  “Freya now, is it?”

  “What?”

  “The Jenny’s nearly ready. We can leave by the end of the week.”

  “Oh! Good!” She could hear the hesitation in his voice, and behind him other voices talking happily, as if there were a lot of people at the palace, all celebrating. “But maybe we can stay a bit longer,” he said hopefully. “I’d like to stay aboard until we get to America, and then, well, we’ll see…”

  Hester smiled and sniffed and tried to speak but couldn’t for a moment. He sounded so sweet, and so full of love for this place, that it seemed unfair to be angry with him, or to point out that she’d rather go anywhere but the Dead Continent.

  “Hester?” he said.

  “I love you, Tom.”

  “I can’t hear you very well.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you as soon as the storm ends.”

  But the storm showed no sign of ending. Anchorage slid slowly westward for a few more hours, keen to put as much ice as possible between itself and Wolverinehampton, but more and more cautious. There were not only polynyas and thin ice to be wary of now. The city was nearing the north-eastern fringes of Greenland, where mountains jutted through the ice-sheet to rip the bottoms out of unsuspecting towns. Mr Scabious cut power by half, then half again. Searchlights probed ahead, like long white fingers trying to part the curtains of snow, and survey teams were sent out on motorized sleds to sound the ice. Miss Pye checked and rechecked her charts and prayed for a glimpse of the stars to confirm her position. At last, with the navigator’s prayers unanswered, Anchorage was forced to halt.

  A lightless day limped by. Hester sat by the Aakiuqs’ stove and looked at the photos of their dead children propped on the household shrine and the collection of souvenir plates on the wall, commemorating the births, marriages and jubilees of the House of Rasmussen. All the faces looked like Freya, who must even now be sitting snugly with Tom in the Winter Palace. They were probably drinking mulled wine and talking about history and their favourite books.

  Tears filled Hester’s eye. She excused herself before the Aakiuqs started asking what was wrong, and ran upstairs to the box-room where they had made up a bed for her. Why keep on with something that makes me feel this bad? she asked herself. It would be easy to put an end to it. She could go and find Tom when the storm quietened down and say, It’s over, stop here with your Snow Queen if you want, see if I care…

  She wouldn’t, though. He was the only good thing she had ever had. It was different for Freya and Tom; they were nice and sweet-natured and good-looking and would have many, many chances to find love. For Hester there would never be anyone else. “I wish Wolverinehampton had eaten us,” she said to herself, drifting into headachey sleep. At least in the slave-holds Tom would have needed her again.

  When she woke it was midnight, and the storm had stopped.

  Hester pulled on her mittens, cold-mask and outdoor clothes and went quickly downstairs. Faint snoring came from the Aakiuqs’ bedroom as she crept past the open door. She slid the kitchen heat-lock open and stepped out into the cold. The moon was up, lying on the southern horizon like a lost coin, and by its light Hester could see that all the buildings of the upper tier were covered in a glaze of ice, teased out by the wind into wild, trailing spines and filaments. Icicles dangled from overhead cables and the gantries and cranes of the air-harbour, tapping together in the faint breeze to fill the city with an eerie music; the only sound to break the perfect silence of the snow.

  She wanted Tom. She wanted to share this cold beauty with him. Alone with him in these deserted streets, she would be able to tell him how she felt. She ran and ran, scrambling in her borrowed snowshoes over drifts that were sometimes more than shoulder deep even in the lee of the buildings, while the cold burned through her mask and sawed at the back of her throat. Up the stairways from the lower city came sudden gusts of laughter and snatches of music as the engine district celebrated Anchorage’s deliverance. Dizzy with cold, Hester climbed the long ramp to the Winter Palace.

  When she had tugged at the bell-pull for about five minutes Smew opened the door. “I’m sorry,” Hester said, pushing straight through the heat-lock and letting a blast of cold air into the hallway. “I know it’s late. I’ve got to see Tom. I know my way, so you needn’t bother…”

  “He’s not in his room,” said Smew grumpily, wrapping his nightgown tighter and fussing with the wheels of the heat-lock. “He’s in the Wunderkammer, with Her Radiance.”

  “At this hour?”

  Smew nodded sullenly. “Her Radiance does not wish to be disturbed.”

  “Well she’s going to get disturbed, whether she wishes it or not,” muttered Hester, shoving him aside and setting off through the corridors of the palace at a run. As she went, she tried to tell herself that it was all perfectly innocent. Tom and the Rasmussen girl had probably just gone to peer at her unrivalled collection of weird old garbage, and lost track of the time. She would find him deep in some conversation about 23rd Century ceramics or the rune-stones of the Raffia Hat Era…

  Light spilled from the open doorway of the Wunderkammer, and Hester slowed as she approached it. It would be best to stride straight in with a cheery “hello”, but she wasn’t the cheery sort; she was more the lurking in dark corners sort. She found a dark corner, behind one of the Stalker-skeletons, and lurked. She could hear Tom and Freya talking, but not clearly enough to make out what about. Tom laughed, and her heart seemed to open and shut. There had been a time, after the fall of London, when she had been the only person who could make him laugh.

  She slid out of her hiding place and crept into the Wunderkammer. Tom and Freya were over on the far side, half-a-dozen dusty cabinets between them and Hester. Through the many sheets of thick glass she saw them vaguely, rippling like reflections in a distorting mirror. They were standing very close together, and their voices had grown soft. Hester opened her mouth to speak, longing to make some noise that would distract them from each other, but nothing came out. And as she stood there watching, Freya reached towards Tom and they were suddenly in one another’s arms, and kissing. Still she could make no sound, only stand and stare at Freya’s white fingers moving in Tom’s dark hair, his hands on her shoulders.

  She had not felt such a fierce urge to kill somebody since she hunted Valentine. She tensed, ready to snatch one of the old weapons down from the wall and hack and hack at those two, those two, at Tom – at Tom! Appalled, she turned and flung herself blindly out of the museum. There was a heat-lock in the cloister, and she pushed out through it into the frigid nig
ht.

  She flung herself down into a drift and lay there, helpless, sobbing. More dreadful than the kiss itself was the fierce thing that it had stirred inside her. How could she even have thought of harming Tom? It wasn’t his fault! It was that girl, that girl, she had bewitched him; he had never even looked at another girl until this podgy margravine came along, Hester was sure of it. She imagined killing Freya. But what good would that do? Tom would hate her then, and besides, it wasn’t just Freya, it was this whole city that had won his heart. It was over. He was lost to her. She would lie here in the cold and die, and he would find her frozen body when daylight came, and be sorry…

  But she had spent too long surviving to die as easily as that. After a few moments she lifted herself on hands and knees and tried to calm her ragged, painful gasps. The cold was in her throat, and gnawing at her lips and the tips of her ears, and an idea was coiled in her skull like a red snake.

  It was an idea so terrible that for a little while she could not believe it was really she who had thought of it. She rubbed frost from a window and stared at her own dim reflection, wondering. Could it work? Did she dare? But she had no choice but to try; it was her only hope. She tugged up her hood, pulled her cold-mask into place and set off through snow and moonlight to the air-harbour.

  It had been a strange day for Tom, trapped in the Winter Palace with the blizzard battering at the windows and Hester lost on the other side of town. A strange day, and a stranger evening. He had been sitting in the library, trying to concentrate on another of Pennyroyal’s books, when Smew appeared in full chamberlain’s garb to tell him that the margravine wanted him to join her for dinner.

  From the look on Smew’s face Tom could tell that this invitation was a huge honour. Formal robes had been found for him, new-laundered and neatly pressed. “They belonged to the old chamberlain,” Smew told him, helping him into them. “They’re about your size, I reckon.”