Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Caul took little sips of air, but never quite enough to fill his lungs.

  “Oh, it was character-building stuff, Caul. I took up with a gang of Snowmad scavengers who were bringing up salvage from the wreck of Grimsby. Killed ’em one by one. Nicked their submarine. Came down here. Started doing a spot of burgling: snapping up a few unconsidered trifles to replace all the things I’d lost. Snapped up information too, because I’d sworn by then that nobody would ever keep a secret from me again. So in a way, you could say she made me the man I am today, that witch Anna Fang.”

  The name, repeated and repeated, found its way through the swirls of coloured lights that were exploding in Caul’s head. “Fang,” he tried to say.

  “Exactly,” whispered Uncle. “I worked out what was going on at Rogues’ Roost a while back. All those pictures turning up, and the way they were so keen to find the Jenny Haniver. Either they’re setting up an Anna Fang museum, I told myself, or they’ve brought her back.”

  Caul remembered the listening post, and the violent, confusing aftermath of the raid. A few cameras had still been functioning, and as their operators sought desperately for some trace of the burgling party they had caught glimpses of the Stalker Fang, and picked up the sound of its terrible dead voice whispering of war.

  “That’s why I put so much effort into the Rogues’ Roost job,” Uncle said. “Just think of it! Burgling back the very person who’d led to my downfall all those years ago. My career turning back to its start, like a snake eating its tail! Poetic justice! I was going to bring that Stalkerette down here and reprogram her and set her slaving for me again, on and on, never resting, till the sun goes out and the world freezes over!

  “And I’d’ve done it too. If you hadn’t blown them crab-bombs when you did, and made Wrasse take his lads in too soon, it would all have worked out. But you spoiled it, Caul. You went and ruined everything.”

  “Please…” Caul managed to say, gathering enough breath with a great effort and shaping it carefully into a word. “Please…”

  “Please what?” sneered Uncle. “Let you live? Let you die? Not after what you did, Caul, my lad. The boys have got to have someone to blame for what happened to Wrasse, and I’m damned if it’s going to be me. So you’ll hang there till you croak, and then you’ll hang there till the smell gets too bad for even the Lost Boys to stick, and then we’ll flush you out the water-door. Just to remind everybody that Uncle Knows Best.”

  A long sigh, a fumble of fingers against the microphone, then that flicked-balloon sound of the speaker switching off, and even the background hiss of static died. The rope creaked, the room spun, the sea pressed against the walls and windowpanes of Grimsby, looking for ways in. Caul drifted through blackness, woke, drifted again.

  In his high chamber, Uncle watched the dying boy’s face turn on a half-dozen screens, close-up, medium close-up, long shot. He stifled a yawn and turned away. Even all-seeing eyes have to sleep sometimes, although he didn’t like any but the most faithful of his boys to know about it. “Keep a good watch on him, Gargle,” he said to his young assistant, and climbed the stairs to his bedchamber. The bed was almost hidden now by heaps of papers, by folders and files and books and documents in tin containers. Uncle snuggled under the counterpane (gold-embroidered, stolen from the Margrave of Kodz) and went quickly to sleep.

  In his dreams, which were always the same, he was young again; exiled and penniless and brokenhearted.

  When Caul next came round it was still night, and the rope that was strangling him had started to jerk and twist. He fought for breath, making horrible wet rattling sounds, and someone just above him hissed, “Stay still!”

  He opened his good eye and looked up. In the shadows above his head a knife shone, sawing through the thick, tarry strands of the rope.

  “Hey!” he tried to say.

  The last strand broke. He fell through darkness, landed hard on the hull of the Screw Worm and lay there gasping for breath with great helpless whooping sounds. He felt someone cut the cords on his wrists. Hands found his shoulders and rolled him over. Gargle was looking down at him.

  Caul tried to speak, but his body was too busy breathing to bother with words.

  “Pull yourself together,” Gargle said softly. “You’ve got to go.”

  “Go?” croaked Caul. “But Uncle will see!”

  Gargle shook his head. “Uncle’s asleep.”

  “Uncle never sleeps!”

  “That’s what you think. Anyway, all the crab-cams that were watching you have gone wrong. I arranged it.”

  “But when he finds out what you’ve done—”

  “He won’t.” Gargle’s grin flashed white. “I hid the bits of the crabs I busted in Skewer’s bunk. Uncle’ll think Skewer did it.”

  “Skewer hates me! Uncle knows that!”

  “No, he doesn’t. I’ve been telling Uncle how well the two of you got on aboard the Screw Worm. How Skew only took charge because he was worried about you. How he’d do anything for you. Uncle thinks you and Skew are thick as thieves.”

  “Gods!” Caul said hoarsely, surprised at the newbie’s cunning and appalled at the thought of what was going to happen to Skewer.

  “I couldn’t let Uncle kill you,” Gargle said. “You were good to me aboard Anchorage. And that’s where you belong, Caul. Take the Screw Worm and get back to Anchorage.”

  Caul massaged his throat. All his years of training were screaming at him that stealing a limpet was the most terrible sin a Lost Boy could contemplate. On the other hand, it felt good to be alive, and every breath that he drew into his starved lungs made him more determined to stay that way.

  “Why Anchorage?” he said. “You heard Tom and Pennyroyal talking. Anchorage is doomed. And I’d not be welcome there anyway. Not a burglar like me.”

  “They’ll welcome you all right. When they find out how much they need you, they’ll soon forget you ever burgled them. You’ll want this.” Gargle shoved something into his hand; a long tube of thin metal. “No time to talk, Caul,” he said. “You don’t belong here. You never belonged here, really. Now get into that limpet and clear off.”

  “Aren’t you coming too?”

  “Me? Course not. I’m a Lost Boy. I’m going to stay here and make myself useful to Uncle. He’s an old man, Caul. His eyesight and his ears are going. He’s going to need someone he can trust to run his cameras and his archives. Give me a few years and I’ll be his right hand. A few more, and who knows? Maybe I’ll be running Grimsby myself.”

  “That’d be good, Gargle,” said Caul, laughing painfully. “I’d like to see you in charge of Grimsby. Put a stop to all that bullying.”

  “Put a stop to it?” Gargle wore a grin Caul hadn’t seen before, a cold, sharp grin he didn’t like at all. “Not likely! I’m going to be the biggest bully of them all! That’s what kept me going, Caul, all the time Skewer and the others were roughing me up in the Burglarium. Thinking about what I’d do to them when my turn came.”

  Caul stared at him a moment longer, half inclined to believe that this was all just another dream. “Go,” Gargle said again, and opened the Screw Worm’s hatch. Dream or not, there was no arguing with him; there was such a sureness in his voice that Caul felt like a newbie again, being ordered about by some confident, older boy. He almost dropped the thing Gargle had given him, but Gargle caught it and thrust it at him again. “Go, and stay gone, and good luck!”

  Caul took it, and pulled himself weakly to the hatch and then inside and down the ladder, wondering how this battered tube of japanned tin was meant to help him.

  30

  ANCHORAGE

  Freya woke early and lay for a while in the dark, feeling her city shudder beneath her as it went bucketing over scab-ice and pressure ridges. Anchorage was far to the west of Greenland now, heading south over unknown ice and the humped, rocky backs of frozen islands. Several times Mr Scabious had had to hoist up the drive-wheel and let the cats haul the city across solid, snow-covered rock
and riven glaciers. Now sea-ice stretched ahead of them again, reaching unbroken towards the horizon. Miss Pye thought it was Hudson’s Bay, the great ice-plain which Professor Pennyroyal claimed would carry them into the heart of the Dead Continent, almost to the borders of his green places. But would it be strong enough to bear Anchorage’s weight?

  If only Professor Pennyroyal could tell us for sure, thought Freya, kicking off her covers and padding to the window. But Pennyroyal had come this way on foot, and the desciptions in his book were really surprisingly vague. Miss Pye and Mr Scabious had tried to make him go into more detail, but he had just grown sulky and rude, and after a while he had stopped coming to Steering Committee meetings altogether. In fact, ever since Hester flew off in the Jenny Haniver, the good professor had been acting very oddly indeed.

  A breath of cold blew in Freya’s face as she parted the curtains to look out at the ice. Strange, to think that this was the far side of the world! Stranger still to remember that soon they would be in the new hunting ground, and the views from her windows would all be green; grass and bushes and trees. The idea still scared her a little. Would the Ice Gods rule in lands where snow only lay for a few months of each year? Or would Anchorage need new gods?

  A wedge of light yellowed the snow outside the Wheelhouse as a door opened and someone slipped out. Freya wiped away the fog her breath had made and put her face close to the glass. There was no mistaking that silhouette; a portly figure in heated robes and an outsize fur turban, creeping guiltily along Rasmussen Prospekt.

  Even by Professor Pennyroyal’s recent standards this was strange behaviour. Freya dressed quickly, pulling on the simple, fleece-lined working clothes that were her usual outfit these days, and pocketing a torch. She crept out of the palace without bothering to wake Smew. Pennyroyal was nowhere to be seen, but his deep, wandering footprints gaped in the snow, showing her the way he had gone.

  A few months ago Freya would not have dared to venture out of the palace precincts alone, but she had changed a lot during the long journey around the top of Greenland. At first, the shock of losing Tom had almost plunged her back into her old ways; staying in her quarters, seeing nobody, issuing her orders through Scabious or Smew. But she had soon grown bored, cooped up in the Winter Palace. She itched to know what was happening outside. And so she ventured out, and threw herself into the life of her city in ways she never had before. She sat gossiping with off-duty workers who ate their lunches in the heated pavilions on the edge of the upper city, watching the ice go by. She learned from Windolene Pye how to wash herself, and clean her teeth, and she had cut her hair short. She joined the patrols which Scabious sent down on to the skid-supports each morning to check for parasites; she drove cargo-machines in the engine district; she had even gone out on to the ice ahead of Anchorage with a startled and rather embarrassed survey-team. She had thrown away all her family’s traditions with a feeling of relief, like getting rid of old, ill-fitting clothes.

  And now she was sneaking through the shadows on the starboard side of Rasmussen Prospekt, spying on her own chief navigator!

  Ahead of her the professor’s gaudy turban made a sudden blotch of colour against the dingy, ice-caked buildings as he slipped between the gates of the air-harbour.

  Freya ran after him, dashing from one patch of shadow to the next until she threw herself down in the shelter of the customs booth just inside the harbour gates. Wreathed in the mist of her own hot breath she looked around, thinking for a moment that she had lost her quarry among these snowy hangars and docking-pans. No – there he was! The bright blob of his turban bobbed under a streetlamp on the far side of the harbour, then blinked out as he stepped into the shadows at the entrance to Aakiuq’s warehouse.

  Freya crossed the harbour, tracing the jittery path of the explorer’s footsteps through the snow. The warehouse door stood open. She paused a moment, peering nervously into the darkness inside and remembering the parasite-boys who had used the dark as a cloak to haunt and plunder her city… But there was no danger now; the torch that she could see moving about in the far reaches of the warehouse did not belong to some malevolent ice-pirate, just to an odd explorer.

  She could hear his voice muttering in the dusty silence. Who was he talking to? Himself? Windolene Pye had told her that he’d drained the chief navigator’s wine-cellar and now stole liquor from the empty restaurants in the Ultima Arcade. Maybe he was drunk, and raving. She moved closer, easing her way between mountains of old engine-parts.

  “Pennyroyal calling anyone!” said his voice, low but desperate-sounding. “Pennyroyal calling anyone! Come in, please! Please!”

  He crouched in a pool of green light cast by the glowing dials of an ancient radio set that he must somehow have managed to get working. Headphones were clamped over his ears, and his hand trembled slightly as it clutched the microphone. “Is there anybody out there? Please! I’ll pay you anything! Just get me off this city of fools!”

  “Professor Pennyroyal?” said Freya loudly.

  “Warrgh! Clio! Poskitt! Knickers!” yelped the professor. He leapt up, and there was a sliding clatter as the lead of his headphones tugged an avalanche of old wireless components down around his feet. The light from the dials went out, and a few valves burst with little showers of sparks, like disappointing fireworks. Freya pulled out her torch and switched it on. Caught in the dusty beam, Pennyroyal’s face looked pallid and sweaty, fear changing to a simpering smile as he squinted past the light and made out Freya.

  “Your Radiance?”

  Almost nobody bothered calling her that these days. Even Miss Pye and Smew called her “Freya”. How out of touch the professor had become!

  “I’m glad to see you’re keeping busy, Professor,” she said. “Does Mr Aakiuq know you’re snooping about in his warehouse?”

  “Snooping, Your Radiance?” Pennyroyal looked shocked. “A Pennyroyal never snoops! No, no, no… I was merely – I didn’t want to trouble Mr Aakiuq…”

  Freya’s torch flickered, and she remembered that there probably weren’t that many batteries left aboard Anchorage. She found a switch and turned on one of the argon-lamps which swung from the rusty rafters overhead. Pennyroyal blinked in the sudden brightness. He looked terrible; pasty-skinned, red-eyed, a fuzz of white stubble blurring the neat edges of his beard.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

  “To anyone. No one.”

  “And why do you want them to get you off this city of fools? I thought you were coming with us? I thought you were keen to return to the green valleys of America and the beautiful Zip Code.”

  She would not have thought it possible for him to get any paler, but he did. “Ah!” he said. “Um.”

  Sometimes, during the past few weeks, a horrible thought had come to Freya. It came at odd moments – when she was in the shower, or lying awake at three in the morning, or eating dinner with Miss Pye and Mr Scabious, and she had never spoken of it to anyone else, although she was sure that they must have thought it too. Usually, when she felt it slithering into her mind, she tried to think about something else, because – well, it was silly, wasn’t it?

  Only it wasn’t silly. It was the truth.

  “You don’t know the way to America, do you?” she asked, trying to keep the trembly sound out of her voice.

  “Um.”

  “We’ve come all this way, following your advice and your book, and you don’t know how to find your green valleys again. Or maybe there aren’t even any to find? Have you ever been to America, Professor?”

  “How dare you?” Pennyroyal started to say, and then, as if realizing that there was no more mileage in lies, sighed and shook his head. “No. No, I made it all up.” He sank down on an upturned engine-cowling, miserable and defeated. “I never went anywhere, Your Radiance. I just read other people’s books, and looked at pictures, and made it all up. I wrote America the Beautiful whilst lounging by a hotel swimming pool on the top tier of Paris, in the company of a delectable yo
ung person named Peaches Zanzibar. Took care to set it all somewhere nice and remote, of course. I never dreamed that anyone would actually want to go there.”

  “So why didn’t you just admit it was all a fib?” asked Freya. “When I appointed you chief navigator, why didn’t you tell me it was all lies?”

  “And pass up the chance of all that money, and posh apartments, and the chief navigator’s wine cellar? I’m only human, Freya. Besides, if word got back to the Hunting Ground, I’d have been a laughing stock! I just thought I’d leave with Tom and Hester.”

  “That’s why you were so upset when Hester took the Jenny Haniver!”

  “Exactly! She cut off my escape route! I had no way off this city, and I couldn’t admit what I’d done, because you’d have killed me.”

  “I would not!”

  “Well, your people would. So I’ve been using these old radios to try and call for help; hoped there might be a lost air-trader or an exploration vessel within range, someone who could take me off.”

  It was remarkable how sorry he could feel for himself, whilst not worrying at all about the city he had led to its doom. Freya shivered with anger. “You – You – You are dismissed, Professor Pennyroyal! You are no longer my chief navigator! You will hand back your ceremonial compasses and the keys to the Wheelhouse immediately!”