Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  It didn’t make her feel any better. She collapsed on a heap of old gaskets that creaked and shifted under her weight. How was she going to break this news to Miss Pye and Mr Scabious and everybody else? That they were stuck on the wrong side of the world, with nothing ahead of them but a dead continent and not enough fuel to ever get home again, and that it was she who had brought them here! She had told everyone this voyage west was what the Ice Gods wanted, when all along it was only what she had wanted. If only she had not been taken in by Pennyroyal and his stupid book!

  “What am I going to do?” she asked. “What am I going to do?”

  Someone shouted something, out in the streets behind the air-harbour. Pennyroyal looked up. There was a whirring, purring noise coming from somewhere. It was very faint, a muttering that rose and fell, sounding for all the world like –

  “Aëro-engines!” Pennyroyal leapt up, knocking over more heaps of spares in his haste to reach the door. “Thank Clio! We’re saved!”

  Freya ran after him, wiping away tears, tugging up her cold-mask. Outside, the dark had faded to a steely twilight. Pennyroyal was pounding away from her across the harbour, stopping once to turn and point as something slid across the sky beyond the harbour office. Freya squinted into the wind and saw a cluster of lights, a creamy trail of exhaust smoke smeared on the darkness. “Airship!” Pennyroyal yelled, doing a mad little dance in the middle of a snowy docking-pan. “Someone heard my message! We’re saved! Saved!”

  Freya ran past him, trying to keep the machine in sight. The Aakiuqs were standing outside the harbour office, looking up. “An airship, right out here?” she heard the harbour master say. “Who can it be?”

  “Did the Ice Gods tell you they were coming, Freya dear?” asked Mrs Aakiuq.

  A man called Lemuel Quaanik ran up, snowshoes flapping from his big feet. He was one of the surveyors with whom Freya had worked, and so he did not feel too much in awe of her to speak. “Radiance? I seen that ship before. That’s Piotr Masgard’s rig, the Clear Air Turbulence!”

  “The Huntsmen of Arkangel!” gasped Mrs Aakiuq.

  “Here?” cried Freya. “It can’t be! Arkangel would never hunt west of Greenland. There’s nothing here for it to eat.”

  “There’s us,” said Mr Quaanik.

  The Clear Air Turbulence circled Anchorage, then hung off the stern like a lone wolf shadowing its prey. Freya ran to the Wheelhouse and up to the bridge. Windolene Pye was already there, still in her nightgown with her long, greying hair undone. “It’s the Huntsmen, Freya!” she said. “How did they find us? How in all the gods’ names did they know where we were?”

  “Pennyroyal,” Freya realized. “Professor Pennyroyal and his stupid broadcasts…”

  “They’re signalling,” called Mr Umiak, leaning out of the radio room. “They’re ordering us to cut our engines.”

  Freya glanced sternward. In this half-light the ice was pale and faintly luminous. She could see the scumbled track of her city’s stern-wheel stretching away towards the north-east, fading into mist. There was no sign of pursuit, just that black ship, shifting and trembling as it rode the city’s slipstream.

  “Shall I answer them, Freya?”

  “No! Pretend we haven’t heard.”

  That didn’t stop Piotr Masgard for long. The Clear Air Turbulence slid closer until it was hanging abreast of the Wheelhouse, and Freya stared out at it through the glass wall and saw the aviators bent over their controls on the flight deck and a gunner grinning at her from a little armoured blister slung under the engine pods. She saw a hatch open, and Piotr Masgard himself lean out, shouting something through a bull-horn.

  Miss Pye opened a ventilator, and the big voice came booming in at them.

  “Congratulations, people of Anchorage! Your city has been chosen as prey by great Arkangel! The Scourge of the North is a day’s journey from here, and gaining fast. Shut down your engines and save us a chase, and you will be treated well.”

  “They can’t eat us!” said Miss Pye. “Not now! Oh, it really is too bad!”

  Freya felt a spreading numbness, as if she’d fallen into icy water. Miss Pye was looking at her, along with everyone else on the bridge, all waiting for the Gods of the Ice to speak through her and tell them what to do. She wondered if she should tell them the truth. It might be better to be eaten by Arkangel than to run on endlessly over this uncharted ice towards a continent that really was dead, after all. Then she thought of all that she had heard about Arkangel, and the way it treated the people it ate, and she thought, No, no, anything is better than that. I don’t care if we fall through the ice, or starve in dead America, they shall not have us!

  “Shut down your engines!” bellowed Masgard.

  Freya looked east. If Arkangel had cut across the spine of Greenland it might be as close as Masgard claimed, but Anchorage could still outrun it. The predator city would not want to venture far on to this uncharted ice-plain. That was why they had resorted to sending out their huntsmen…

  She had no loud-hailer to reply with, so she took a chinograph pencil from the chart table and wrote in big letters on the back of a map, NO! “Miss Pye,” she said, “please tell Mr Scabious, ‘Full Speed Ahead’.”

  Miss Pye stepped to the speaking tubes. Freya pressed her message to the glass. She saw Masgard strain to read it, and the way his face changed when he understood. He went back inside his gondola and slammed the hatch shut and the airship veered away.

  “What can they do, after all?” said one of the navigators. “They won’t attack us, for they’d risk damaging the very things they want to eat us for.”

  “I bet Arkangel is much more than a day away!” declared Miss Pye. “That great lumbering urbivore! They must be desperate, or they wouldn’t have to send out spoilt toffs to play at air-pirates. Well, Freya, you called their bluff all right. We shall outrun them easily!”

  And the Clear Air Turbulence dropped down into the sleet of powdered ice behind the city and fired a flight of rockets into the larboard supports of the stern-wheel. Smoke, sparks, flames spewed from Anchorage’s stern; the axle gave way and the wheel fell sideways and slewed across the ice, still attached by a tangle of drive-chains and twisted stanchions at its starboard end, an anchor of wreckage that brought the city skidding and shuddering to a standstill.

  “Quickly!” shouted Freya, feeling panic rise in her as the lights of the airship lifted out of the fading cloud of ice astern. “Get us moving again! Lower the cats…”

  Miss Pye was at the speaking tubes, listening to the garbled reports from below. “Oh, Freya, we can’t; the wheel is too heavy to drag, it must be cut away, and Søren says that will take hours!”

  “But we don’t have hours!” screamed Freya, and then realized that they didn’t even have minutes. She clung to Miss Pye, and together they stared towards the air-harbour. The Clear Air Turbulence landed there just long enough to vomit out a score of dark, armoured figures who went hurrying down the stairways to secure the engine district. Then she was aloft again, hanging in the sky above the Wheelhouse. The glass walls gave way under the boots of more men, swinging down on ropes from her gondola. They crashed on to the bridge in a spray of glittering fragments, a blur of screams, shouts, swords bright in the lamplight, the chart table overturned. Freya had lost Miss Pye. She ran for the lift, but someone was there ahead of her, fur and armour and a grinning face and big, gloved hands reaching out to catch her, and all she could think was, All this way! We’ve come all this way, only to be eaten!

  31

  THE KNIFE DRAWER

  A few hundred feet below the Jenny Haniver’s gondola, vast rough pans of sea-ice were sliding by, criss-crossed with dykes and jagged, shattered ridges. Tom and Hester, looking down from the flight-deck windows at the never-ending whiteness, felt as if they had been flying for ever over this armoured ocean.

  The day after their escape from Rogues’ Roost they had set down at a tiny Snowmad whaling station, and bought fuel with the last of Pe
nnyroyal’s sovereigns. Since then they had just been flying, north and west in search of Anchorage. They had not slept much, for fear of the fallen aviatrix who stalked their dreams. They stayed on the flight deck, nibbling stale biscuits, drinking coffee, telling each other in awkward little bursts of the things they had each seen since they parted.

  They did not speak of Hester’s flight from Anchorage, or of what caused it. They had not mentioned it since that first night, when they lay all breathless and shivery and tangled together on the hard deck, and Hester in a small voice had said, “There’s something I haven’t explained. After I left you, I did something terrible…”

  “You got upset and flew off,” Tom said, misunderstanding. He was so glad to have her back that he didn’t want to risk an argument, so he tried to make it sound as if it had been a small thing, and easy to forgive.

  Hester shook her head. “I don’t mean –” But she could not explain.

  So they had flown on, day after day over rippled sea-ice and deep-frozen land, until today, when Tom said suddenly, “I didn’t mean what happened, with me and Freya. When we get to Anchorage it won’t be like last time, I promise. We’ll just warn them about Arkangel coming, and then we’ll take off again. Head for the Hundred Islands or somewhere, just the two of us, like it used to be.”

  Hester just shook her head. “It’s too dangerous, Tom. There’s a war coming. Maybe not this year or next, but soon, and bad, and it’s too late to do anything about it. And the League still believe we burned their Northern Air-Fleet, and the Green Storm will blame us for the attack on Rogues’ Roost, and that Stalker won’t always be around to protect us.”

  “Then where can we go that will be safe?”

  “Anchorage,” said Hester. “We’ll find a way to keep Anchorage safe, and lie low there for a few years, and then, maybe…”

  But even if there was some way to save the city, she knew that there was no place aboard it for her. She would leave Tom there safe with Freya, and fly on alone. Anchorage was good and kind and peaceful; no place for Valentine’s daughter.

  That night, as the lights of the Aurora danced above him, Tom looked down through a gap in the clouds and saw a great scar drawn across the ice below, hundreds of deep, parallel grooves stretching eastward into clouded uplands and vanishing west into the empty night.

  “City tracks!” he shouted, hurrying to wake Hester.

  “Arkangel,” said Hester. She felt sick and frightened. The wide wake of the predator city brought back to her just how immense it was. How could she hope to stop something like that?

  They swung the Jenny on to Arkangel’s course. An hour later Tom picked up the harsh scream of the predator’s homing beacon slicing through the static on the radio, and soon they saw its lights twinkling in the mist ahead of them.

  The city was moving at quarter speed, with a screen of survey-vehicles and stripped-down drone-suburbs spread out ahead of it to test the ice. Airships hung about it, mostly traders leaving the air-harbour and turning east, reluctant to let Arkangel carry them so far off the edges of all maps. Tom wanted to talk to them, but Hester warned him off. “You can’t trust the sort of ships that deal with Arkangel,” she said. She was afraid one of the traders might recognize her, and let Tom know what she had done. She said, “Let’s stay well clear of the place and keep moving.”

  They stayed clear and kept moving, and the glow of Arkangel dwindled into the dark behind them as snow began blowing in from the north. But as the signal of its beacon began to fade it was replaced by another, very faint at first but growing louder, coming from somewhere on the ice ahead. They stared into the dark, while the wind boomed against the Jenny’s envelope and snowflakes padded at her windows. Faint and far away a cluster of lights sparkled, and the long, sombre note of the homing beacon curled up out of the static, lonely as the cry of wolves.

  “It’s Anchorage.”

  “It’s not moving!”

  “Something’s wrong…”

  “We’re too late!” cried Tom. “Don’t you remember? Arkangel sends its Huntsmen to capture the towns it wants to eat. That brute we met at Airhaven! He turns them round and steers them into its jaws… We’ll have to turn back. If we land there the Huntsmen will hold us until Arkangel arrives, and the Jenny will be eaten along with the city…”

  “No,” said Hester. “We’ve got to land. We’ve got to do something.” She looked at Tom, longing to tell him why this was so important to her. She knew now that if she was to redeem herself she would have to fight the Huntsmen, and that she would very probably be killed. She wanted to explain to Tom about her deal with Masgard, and have him forgive her. But what if he couldn’t forgive? What if he just pushed her away, horrified? The words crouched in her mouth, but she dared not let them out.

  Tom cut the Jenny’s engines and let the wind carry her silently closer. He was touched by Hester’s sudden, surprising concern for the ice city. He had not quite realized, until he saw it again, how much he’d missed it. His eyes filled with tears, making the lights of the Wheelhouse and the Winter Palace flare into spidery patterns. “Everything’s lit up like a Quirkemas tree…”

  “That’s so Arkangel can see it,” Hester said. “Masgard and his Huntsmen must’ve stopped the engines and switched on all the lights and the homing beacon. They’re probably waiting in Freya’s palace right now for their city to arrive.”

  “And what about Freya?” asked Tom. “What about all the people?”

  Hester had no answer to that.

  The air-harbour looked unusually well-lit and welcoming, but there was no question of landing there. Hester doused the Jenny’s running lights and left the flying to Tom, who had always been so much better at it than her. He took the Jenny so low that the keel of the gondola was almost scraping the ice before he jerked her suddenly upward again, slipping her through a narrow gap between two warehouses on the larboard edge of the lower tier. The clang of the docking-clamps sounded horribly loud on the flight deck, but no one came running to see what had happened, and when they ventured outside they found nothing moving in the silent, snow-deep streets.

  They climbed quickly and quietly to the air-harbour, not speaking, wrapped in their different memories of this city. The Clear Air Turbulence was docked on an open pan near the middle of the harbour, the wolf-mark of Arkangel shining red on her envelope. A fur-clad guard stood watch beside her, and there was light and movement behind the windows of the gondola.

  Tom looked at Hester. “What are we going to do?”

  She shook her head, not yet sure. Tom followed her through the spills of thick shadow behind the fuel-tanks, and they let themselves in at the back door of the harbour master’s house. Here there was darkness, broken only by the glow of the harbour lights seeping in through frosty windows. A tornado seemed to have swept the once tidy parlour and kitchen, smashing the collection of commemorative plates, shattering crockery, dashing the portraits of the Aakiuqs’ children from the household shrine. The antique wolf-rifle which used to hang on the parlour wall was gone, and the stove was cold. Hester crunched over the broken fragments of beaming Rasmussen faces to the dresser, and opened the knife drawer.

  Behind her, a loose stair creaked. Tom, who was closest to the staircase, whirled round in time to see the grey smudge of a face peering down at him between the banisters. It was gone almost at once, as whoever was hiding there went scrambling up towards the first floor. Tom shouted in surprise and quickly clamped a hand over his mouth, remembering the man outside. Hester shoved roughly past him, Mrs Aakiuq’s sharpest kitchen knife a dull gleam in her hand. There was a confused tussle in the tigerish shadows behind the banisters, a voice gasping, “Mercy! Spare me!” and the slithering thuds of a heavy body dragged back down the stairs by the seat of its trousers. Hester stood back, panting, the knife still ready, and Tom looked down at her captive.

  It was Pennyroyal. Filthy and straggle-haired, white bristles thick in the hollows of his face, the explorer seemed to have aged
ten years while they’d been away, as though time had passed faster aboard Anchorage than in the outside world. He whimpered slightly, his bulging eyes darting between their faces. “Tom? Hester? Gods and goddesses, I thought you were more of those damned Huntsmen. But how did you come here? Have you got the Jenny with you? Oh, thank heavens! We must leave at once!”

  “What’s been happening here, Professor?” asked Tom. “Where is everybody?”

  Pennyroyal, still keeping a wary eye on Hester’s knife-hand, dragged himself into a more comfortable position, leaning back against the knewel post. “The Huntsmen of Arkangel, Tom. Aëro-hooligans, led by that scoundrel Masgard. They arrived about ten hours ago, smashed the drive-wheel and took charge of the city.”

  “Anyone dead?” asked Hester.

  Pennyroyal shook his head. “Don’t think so. They wanted to keep everyone in good shape for their beastly slave-holds, so they just rounded them all up and imprisoned them in the Winter Palace while they wait for their city to catch up. A few of Scabious’s brave fellows tried to argue, and got roughed up pretty badly, but otherwise I don’t think anyone’s been hurt.”

  “And you?” Hester leaned forward into the light and let him feel her gorgon stare. “How come you’re not locked up with the others?”

  Pennyroyal flicked a narrow, watery smile at her. “Oh, you know the motto of the Pennyroyals, Miss Shaw: ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Sensible Conceal Themselves Beneath Large Items of Furniture.’ I happened to be at the air-harbour when they landed. With typical quick thinking I nipped in here and hid under the bed. Didn’t emerge until it was all over. I’ve thought of presenting myself to young Masgard, of course, and claiming the finder’s fee, but frankly I don’t think he can be trusted, so I’ve been lying low ever since.”

  “What finder’s fee?” asked Tom.