Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Sathya shoved Hester forward until she was standing only a few inches from the new Stalker. “Look, dear!” she said brightly. “Look! This is Hester Shaw! Valentine’s daughter! You remember how you found her in the Out-Country and brought her to Batmunkh Gompa? She was there when you died!”

  The Stalker leaned close. In the shadows behind its bronze mask a dead black tongue licked withered lips. Its voice was a dry whisper, a night-wind blowing through valleys of stone. “I do not know this girl.”

  “You do, Anna!” urged Sathya, with awful patience. “You must! Try and remember!”

  The Stalker glanced up, scanning the hundreds of portraits on the walls and floor and ceiling of its spherical prison. Anna Fang’s parents were there, and Stilton Kael, who had been Anna’s master when she was a slave in the salvage-yards of Arkangel. Valentine was there, and Captain Khora, and Pandora Rae, but there was no picture of Hester’s disfigured face. It focused its mechanical eyes on her again, and its long claws twitched. “I do not know this girl. I am not Anna Fang. You are wasting my time, little once-born. I wish to leave this place.”

  “Of course, Anna, but you must try to remember. You must be yourself again, before we take you home. Everyone in the League’s lands loved you; when they hear you have returned they will rise up and follow you.”

  “Ah, Commander,” muttered Popjoy, backing towards the bridge. “I think we should withdraw now…”

  “I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker.

  “Commander, I definitely think…”

  “Anna, please!”

  Instinctively, Hester grabbed Sathya and dragged her backwards. The claws scythed past an inch from her throat. The guard levelled his machine-gun and the Stalker hesitated just long enough for them all to scurry back across the bridge. As they reached the door the man stationed outside pulled a heavy, red-handled lever. Red warning lights came on amid a rising buzz of electricity. “I am not Anna Fang!” Hester heard the Stalker shout, as she bundled out after the others into the antechamber. Glancing back in the instant before the guards slammed and locked the door, she saw it watching her, its claws jerking and glinting.

  “Fascinating,” said Popjoy, making notes on his clipboard. “Fascinating. With hindsight, it may have been a tad unwise to install the finger-glaives so early…”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sathya demanded.

  “It’s hard to be entirely sure,” admitted Popjoy. “I imagine the new memory-seeking components which I added to the basic Stalker-brain are clashing with its tactical and aggressive instincts.”

  “You mean it’s mad?” asked Hester.

  “Really, Miss Shaw, ‘mad’ is such an unhelpful term. I would prefer to say that the former Miss Fang is ‘differently sane’.”

  “Poor Anna,” whispered Sathya, stroking her throat with the tips of her fingers.

  “Don’t worry about Anna,” said Hester. “Anna’s dead. Poor you is what you mean. You’ve got a mad killing machine in there, and your stupid guns aren’t going to keep it penned in for ever. It could climb down off that platform! It could reach the door and—”

  “The bridge is electrified, Miss Shaw,” said Popjoy firmly. “The girders under the platform are electrified. The inside of the door is also electrified. Even Stalkers dislike massive electric shocks. As for the guns, I am pretty sure the former Miss Fang does not yet understand her new strength; she is still wary of them. That may well be a sign that she does indeed possess lingering memories of her earlier, human incarnation.”

  Sathya glanced at him, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “Yes. Yes, doctor. We must not give up. We will bring Hester here again.”

  She turned away smiling, but Hester had seen the panicky look behind Popjoy’s spectacles. He had no idea at all of how to restore the dead aviatrix’s memories. Surely even Sathya must soon realize that this attempt to bring her friend back from the Sunless Country was doomed. And when she did, there would be no more reason for her to keep Hester around.

  I’m going to die here, she thought, as guards took her back to her cell and locked her in. Either Sathya or that mad thing will kill me, and I’ll never see Tom again, and I’ll never rescue him, and he’ll die too, in the slave-pits of Arkangel, cursing me.

  She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down until she was kneeling, curled into a little miserable knot. She could hear the sea hissing between the rocks of Rogues’ Roost, as cold as the voice of the new Stalker. She could hear small bits of paint and cement falling from the damp-rotted roof of her cell, and faint, scratchy noises in the old heat-duct that reminded her of Anchorage. She thought about Mr Scabious, and Sathya, and about the desperate, hopeless things that people did to try and hold on to the people they loved.

  “Oh, Tom! Oh, oh, Tom!” she sobbed, imagining him safe and happy in Anchorage, with no idea that she had set great Arkangel on his tail.

  21

  LIES AND SPIDERS

  A week went by, and then another and another. Anchorage swung west, creeping along the northern edge of Greenland with survey-sleds sent out ahead to sound the ice. No city had come this way before, and Miss Pye did not trust her charts.

  Freya felt as if she had wandered into unmapped territory, too. Why was she so unhappy? How had everything gone so wrong, when it had all seemed to be going so right? She could not understand why Tom didn’t want her. Surely, she thought, wiping a hole in the dust on her dressing-room mirror to study her reflection, surely he cannot still be missing Hester? Surely he can’t prefer her to me?

  Sometimes, sniffling with self-pity, she concocted elaborate schemes to win him back. Sometimes she grew angry and stomped along the dusty corridors muttering all the things she should have said during their argument. Once or twice she found herself wondering whether she could order him to be beheaded for high treason, but Anchorage’s executioner (a very ancient gentleman whose post had been purely ceremonial) was dead, and Freya doubted that Smew could lift the axe.

  Tom had moved out of his suite in the Winter Palace into an abandoned apartment in a big, empty building on Rasmussen Prospekt, not far from the air-harbour. Without the Wunderkammer or the margravine’s library to distract him, he devoted his days to feeling sorry for himself and wondering how to get Hester back, or at least find out where she had gone.

  There was no way off Anchorage, that much was certain. He had pestered Mr Aakiuq about fitting out the Graculus for long-range travel, but the Graculus was just a tug; she had never flown more than half a mile from the air-harbour before, and Mr Aakiuq claimed it would be impossible to give her the bigger fuel-tanks she would need if Tom was to take her back east. “Besides,” the harbour master added, “what would you fill them with? I’ve been checking fuel levels in the harbour tanks. There’s almost nothing left. I don’t understand it. The gauges still read full, but the tanks are nearly empty.”

  Fuel was not the only thing that had been going missing. Unconvinced by Scabious’s talk of ghosts, Tom had been asking around in the engine district for anyone who might know something of Hester’s mysterious friend. Nobody did, but they all seemed to have their own tales of figures glimpsed in corners of the district where no one should be, and of tools set down at a shift’s end and never seen again. Things vanished from lockers and bolted rooms, and an oil-tank on Heat Exchange Street had run dry, even though the gauges showed it nearly full.

  “What’s going on?” asked Tom. “Who would take all these things? Do you think there’s somebody aboard who we don’t know about? Someone who stayed on in secret after the plague, to line their pockets?”

  “Bless you, young man,” the engine district workers chuckled. “Who’d stay aboard a city like this, unless they wanted to help Her Radiance take it to America? There’s no way off, no way to sell the things they’ve stolen.”

  “Then who –?”

  “Ghosts,” was all they’d say, shaking their heads, fingering the amulets they all wore around their necks. “The High Ice has always been
haunted. The ghosts come aboard and play tricks on the living. Everyone knows that.”

  Tom was not so sure. There was something spooky about the engine district, and sometimes when he was on his own in the dingy streets he had the strangest feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn’t see what ghosts would want with oil, and tools, and airship fuel, and trinkets from the margravine’s museum.

  “He’s on to us,” said Skewer darkly, watching the screens one evening as Tom poked about among some deserted buildings on the edge of the engine district. “He knows.”

  “He doesn’t know,” said Caul wearily. “He suspects, that’s all. And he doesn’t even know what he suspects, he’s just got an idea that something’s going on.”

  Skewer looked at him in surprise, then laughed. “You know what he thinks pretty well, don’t you?”

  “I’m just saying you haven’t got to worry about him, that’s all,” muttered Caul.

  “And I’m just saying we have, and maybe we ought to do him in. Make it look like an accident. How’d you like that?”

  Caul said nothing, refusing to rise to the bait. It was true that the burglars had had to be a lot more careful since Tom started his investigations, and it was delaying them. Skewer was keen to prove that he’d been right to take command, and determined that when he took the Screw Worm home to Uncle she’d be bulging with loot, but although he and Caul went upstairs nearly every night they dared not steal anything too obvious for fear of arousing Tom’s suspicions further. They’d had to remove their lamprey-hoses from the fuel-tanks at the air-harbour, too, and that would become a problem soon, since the message-fish and most of the Screw Worm’s systems ran on stolen aviation fuel.

  The Lost Boy part of Caul knew Skewer was right. A knife between Tom’s ribs on a lonely street, the body heaved off the stern-gallery, and normal burglary could be resumed. But the other part of him, the kinder part, couldn’t bear that idea. He wished Skewer would just give up and go back to Grimsby, leaving him here alone to watch Tom and Freya and the others. Sometimes he even wondered about giving himself up; throwing himself on the mercy of the people of Anchorage. Except that, for as long as he could remember, he had been told that the Drys had no mercy. His trainers in the Burglarium, his comrades, Uncle’s voice whispering out of the speakers in the Grimsby canteen, all agreed that however civilized the Drys might seem, however comfortable their cities, however pretty the girls, they would do horrible things to a Lost Boy if they caught him.

  Caul wasn’t sure any more that that was true, but he hadn’t the courage to go up and find out. How could he? Hello, I’m Caul. I’ve been burgling you…

  The telegraph machine at the rear of the cabin began to chatter excitedly, breaking in on Caul’s thoughts. He and Skewer both started at the sudden noise, and Gargle, who had grown jumpier than ever under Skewer’s harsh leadership, squealed with fright. The little machine jerked its brass limbs up and down like a mechanical cricket, and a long ribbon of punched white paper began to spew out of a slot in its glastic dome. Somewhere far beneath Anchorage a message-fish from Grimsby was swimming, beaming a signal up through the ice.

  The three boys looked at each other. This was rare. Neither Caul nor Skewer had ever been aboard a limpet which had received a message from Uncle. In his surprise, Skewer forgot his new role for a moment and looked worriedly at Caul.

  “What do you think it is? You think something’s gone wrong at home?”

  “You’re the captain now, Skew,” Caul replied. “Better check.”

  Skewer crossed the cabin, shoved Gargle aside and grabbed the curling ribbon of tape, his eyes narrowing as he studied the patterns of holes. His smile faded.

  “What is it, Skew?” asked Gargle eagerly. “Is it from Uncle?”

  Skewer nodded, looked up, then back at the tape, as if he could not quite believe what he had read there. “Of course it’s from Uncle, you gowk. He says he’s read our reports. We’re to return to Grimsby at once. And he says we’re to bring Tom Natsworthy with us.”

  “Professor Pennyroyal!”

  The great explorer had become a rare sight in Anchorage these past few weeks, keeping to his quarters and not even showing up for meetings of the Steering Committee. “I have a cold!” he had explained, in a muffled voice, when Freya sent Smew to knock upon his door. But as Tom emerged from the engine district stairway on to Rasmussen Prospekt that night he saw Pennyroyal’s familiar, turbanned figure stumbling through the snow ahead of him.

  “Professor Pennyroyal!” he shouted again, breaking into a run, and caught up with him near the foot of the Wheelhouse.

  “Ah, Tim!” said Pennyroyal, with a pallid smile. His voice was slurred, and his arms were full of bottles of cheap red wine which he had just borrowed from an abandoned restaurant called Nosh o’ the North. “So glad to see you again. No luck with that airship I suppose?”

  “Airship?”

  “A little bird told me you were asking Aakiuq about his air-tug. The Crapulous or whatever he calls it. About using it to escape these boreal realms and flit back to civilization.”

  “That was weeks ago, Professor.”

  “Oh?”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Ah. Pity.”

  They stood in awkward silence, Pennyroyal swaying slightly.

  “I’ve been looking for you for ages,” Tom said at last. “There’s something I wanted to ask you. As an explorer and historian.”

  “Ah!” said Pennyroyal wisely. “Ah. You’d better come up.”

  The Honorary Chief Navigator’s official residence had gone to seed since Tom last saw it. Piles of papers and dirty crockery had sprouted like fungus from every flat surface, expensive clothes lay crumpled on the floor and ranks of empty bottles ringed the sofa, flotsam washed up on a spring-tide of pilfered wine.

  “Welcome, welcome,” said Pennyroyal vaguely, waving Tom towards a chair and rummaging in the debris on his desk for a corkscrew. “Now, what can I help you with?”

  Tom shook his head. It sounded silly, now he came to say it aloud. “It’s only,” he said, “well, during your travels, have you ever come across stories of intruders aboard ice cities?”

  Pennyroyal almost dropped the bottle he was holding. “Intruders? No! Why? You don’t mean there’s someone aboard…”

  “No. I’m not sure. Maybe. Someone’s been stealing stuff, and I don’t see why it would be one of Freya’s people – they can have anything they want; they’ve no reason to steal.”

  Pennyroyal opened the wine and took a long drink straight from the bottle. It seemed to steady his nerves. “Maybe we’ve picked up a parasite,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you read Ziggurat Cities of the Serpent-God, my breathtaking account of a journey through Nuevo-Maya?” asked Pennyroyal. “There’s a whole chapter on parasite towns: Las Ciudades Vampiras.”

  “I’ve never heard of a parasite town,” said Tom doubtfully. “Do you mean some sort of scavenger?”

  “Oh no!” Pennyroyal took a seat close to him, breathing hot gusts of wine-fumes into his face. “There’s more than one way to prey on a city. These vampire towns conceal themselves in the litter of the Out-Country until one passes over them. Then they spring up and attach themselves to its underside with gigantic suction-cups. The poor city goes trundling on with no idea what’s clinging to its belly, but all the while the parasite people are sneaking aboard, draining fuel tanks, stealing equipment, murdering the menfolk one by one, carrying off beautiful young women to sell in the slave-markets of Itzal as sacrifices to the volcano-gods. Eventually the host city comes shuddering to a halt, an empty shell, a husk, its engines stripped out, its people dead or captured, and the fat vampire town crawls off in search of fresh prey.”

  Tom thought about that for a while. “But that’s impossible!” he said at last. “How would a city not know it had an entire town hanging underneath it? How would they not spot all these people running around pinching st
uff? It doesn’t make sense! And … suction cups?”

  Pennyroyal looked shocked. “What are you saying, Tom?”

  “I’m saying that you … you made it up! Just like the stuff in Rubbish? Rubbish! and the old buildings you said you saw in America… Oh, Great Quirke!” Tom felt cold suddenly, even though the apartment was warm and stuffy. “Did you ever even go to America? Or was that all made up, too?”

  “Course I did!” said Pennyroyal angrily.

  “I don’t believe you!” The old Tom, brought up to honour his elders and respect all historians, would never have dared to say such things, even to think them. Three weeks without Hester had changed him more than he realized. Standing, he looked down into Pennyroyal’s puffy, sweating face and knew that he was lying. “It was just a fantasy, wasn’t it?” he said. “Your whole trip to America was a story spun out of aviators’ yarns and the legend of old Snøri Ulvaeusson’s disappearing map, which probably never existed in the first place!”

  “How dare you, sir!” Pennyroyal heaved himself heavily upright, gesturing with his empty wine-bottle. “How dare you, a mere former Apprentice Historian, insult me! I’ll have you know my books have sold over a hundred thousand copies! Been translated into a dozen different languages! I’m very highly thought of, me. ‘Brilliant, Breathtaking and Believable’ – the Shuddersfield Gazette. ‘A rattling good yarn’ – the Panzerstadt Coblenz Advertiser. ‘Pennyroyal’s works are a breath of fresh air in the dull world of practical History’ – the Wantage Weekly Waffle…”

  A breath of fresh air was what Tom needed, but not the sort that Pennyroyal could provide. He pushed past the hectoring historian, and ran down the stairs and out into the street. No wonder Pennyroyal had been so keen to see the Jenny Haniver repaired, and so distraught when Hester flew away. His talk of green places was all a lie! He knew full well that Freya Rasmussen was driving her city to its doom!

  He began running to the Winter Palace, but had not gone far before he changed his mind. Freya was the wrong person to tell about this. She had invested everything in the journey west. If he burst in on her claiming that Pennyroyal had been wrong all along her pride would be dented, and Freya had a lot of pride to dent. Worse, she might think that this was just some ruse on Tom’s part to make her turn the city round so he could go looking for Hester.