Predator's Gold Page 25

  Tom stirred at her touch, half opening his eyes. “Hester?” he murmured. “He took the Jenny. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Tom, it’s all right, I don’t care about the ship, only you,” said Hester, pulling his hand against her face.

  When they came to find her after the battle and told her that Tom was shot and dying she had thought there must be some mistake. Now she understood that it was not so. This was her punishment for delivering Freya’s city into the jaws of Arkangel. She must sit in this room and watch Tom die. It was far, far worse than her own death could have been.

  “Tom,” she whispered.

  “He’s unconscious again, poor dear,” said one of the women who had been helping Miss Pye. She reached across to brush Tom’s brow with cool water, and someone brought a chair for Hester. “Maybe he’s better off out of it,” she heard another of the nurses whisper.

  Outside the long windows it was already growing dark. The lights of Arkangel sprawled on the horizon.

  The predator city was closer still by the time the sun rose again. When it wasn’t snowing you could make out individual buildings; factories and dismantling-mills mainly, the endless prisons of the city’s slaves, and a great spike-turreted temple to the wolf-god squatting on the topmost tier. As the predator’s shadow groped across the ice towards Anchorage a spotter-ship came buzzing down to see what had befallen Masgard and his Huntsmen, but after hovering for a moment above the burnt wreck of the Clear Air Turbulence it turned tail and sped back to its eyrie. No more came near Anchorage that day. The Direktor of Arkangel was in mourning for his son, and his council saw no sense in wasting yet more ships to secure a prize that would be theirs by sundown anyway. The city flexed its jaws, giving the watchers on Anchorage’s stern an unforgettable glimpse of the vast furnaces and dismantling-engines that awaited them.

  “We should get on the radio and remind them what became of their Huntsmen!” vowed Smew, sitting in on an impromptu meeting of the Steering Committee that afternoon. “We’ll tell them that the same thing will happen to them if they don’t back off.”

  Freya didn’t answer. She was trying to pay attention to the discussion, but her mind kept drifting away to the sickroom. She wondered if Tom was still alive. She would have liked to go and sit with him, but Miss Pye had told her that Hester was always there, and Freya was still afraid of the scarred girl – even more so, after what she had done to the Huntsmen. Why could it not have been Hester who was shot? Why had it happened to Tom?

  “I think that might just make things worse, Smew,” Scabious said, after waiting a decent time for the margravine to give her opinion. “We don’t want to make them any angrier.”

  A deep boom, like cannon-fire, rattled the glass in the windows. Everyone looked up. “They’re shooting at us!” cried Miss Pye, reaching for Scabious’s hand.

  “They wouldn’t do that!” cried Freya. “Not even Arkangel…”

  The windows were blurred with frost. Freya pulled on her furs and hurried out on to the balcony, the others close behind. From there they could see how near the predator was. The hiss of its runners as it raced across the ice seemed to fill the sky, making Freya wonder if this was the first time cities had come to break the silence of this unmapped plain. Then came that great boom again, and she knew that it was not gunfire but the sound everyone who lived aboard an ice city dreaded; the crack of sea-ice breaking.

  “Oh, gods!” muttered Smew.

  “I should be in the Wheelhouse,” said Miss Pye.

  “I should be with my engines,” murmured Scabious. But there was no time, and neither of them moved; there was nothing now that anyone could do but stand and watch.

  “Oh no!” Freya heard herself saying. “Oh no, no, no!”

  Another boom, sharper this time, like thunder. She stared up at the cliff-face of Arkangel, trying to see if the predator city had heard the noises too and applied its ice-brakes. If anything it was still gaining, gambling everything on a last, mad dash. She held tight to the balcony railings and prayed to the Ice Gods. She wasn’t sure that she really believed in them any more, but who else could help her now? “Make us swift, Lord and Lady,” she begged, “but don’t let us go through the ice!”

  The next boom was louder, and this time Freya saw the crack open, a dark grin widening a quarter-mile to starboard. Anchorage lurched and veered away. Freya imagined the helmsman trying desperately to steer a course across a jigsaw of breaking ice. Another lurch, and glassware fell and smashed somewhere inside the palace. The booms and cracks came very close together now, and from all sides.

  Arkangel, sensing that it could not stay on this course much further, put on one final burst of speed. Its jaws swung wide, wide, and the sun glittered on banks of revolving steel teeth. Freya saw workers scurrying down stairways towards the predator’s gut, and fur-clad onlookers gathering on high balconies much like her own to watch the catch. And then, before the jaws could close on Anchorage’s tail, the whole edifice seemed to shiver and slow. A sheet of white spray lifted into the air, like a curtain of glass beads being drawn between the two cities.

  The spray crashed across Anchorage as freezing rain. Arkangel was trying frantically to reverse, but the ice beneath it was fragmenting and its drive-wheels could not gain a purchase. Slowly, like a mountain falling, it tipped forward, and its jaws and the forward parts of its lowest tier bowed down into a widening zigzag of black water. Geysers of steam burst up as the cold sea sluiced through its furnaces, and it let out a great bellow, like some huge, wounded creature cheated of its prey.

  But Anchorage was in trouble too, and no one aboard had time to celebrate the predator’s defeat. The city was tilting steeply to larboard, tracks screaming as they struggled to keep a hold on the ice, gouts of spray thrown up on all sides. Freya had never felt movements like this, and did not know what they meant, but she could guess. She grabbed Miss Pye’s hand, and Smew’s, and Miss Pye was already clinging on to Mr Scabious, and they crouched there together, waiting for the gurgling black waters to come swirling up the stairways and drown them.

  And waiting. And waiting. Slowly the light faded, but it was just night drawing on. Snow touched their faces.

  “I’d better see if I can make it down to the engine district,” said Scabious slightly bashfully, disentangling himself and hurrying away. After a while Freya felt the engines shut down. The city’s movements seemed to have eased a little, but the floor was still tilted out of true, and there was a still a faint, strange motion in the fabric of the palace.

  Smew and Miss Pye went back inside, out of the cold, but Freya stayed on the balcony. Night and snow veiled the wreck of Arkangel, but she could still see its lights and hear the howl of its engines as it tried to drag itself back on to firmer ice. What had befallen Anchorage she could not tell; there was still this weird wallowing motion, and even without engines the city seemed to be moving steadily away from the trapped predator.

  A burly shape hurried across the palace gardens, and Freya leaned out over the balcony’s brim and shouted, “Mr Aakiuq?”

  He looked up at her, the fur on the hood of his parka making a white O around his dark face. “Freya? Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “What’s happening?”

  Aakiuq cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We’re adrift! We must have reached the edge of the ice, and the bit we were on broke free.”

  Freya stared out into the dark beyond the city’s edge. She could see nothing, but at least the strange rise and fall of the deckplates made sense now. Anchorage was waterborne, balanced precariously on its raft of ice like an overweight sunbather drifting out to sea on a lilo. So much for that thick plain of sea-ice stretching right into the heart of the Dead Continent! “Pennyroyal!” she shouted at the empty sky. “The gods will punish you for bringing us to this!”

  But the gods did not punish Professor Pennyroyal. He had used some of his stolen gold to buy fuel from a tanker pulling clear of Arkangel, and he was already
far away, steering east by the broad scar the predator city had cut across the ice-fields. He was not a very good aviator, but he was lucky, and the weather was not too rough with him. He met with a small ice city east of Greenland, had the Jenny Haniver repainted and renamed, and hired a pretty aviatrix named Kewpie Quinterval to fly her south. Within a few weeks he was back in Brighton, regaling his friends with tales of his adventure in the frozen north.

  By then, even the Direktor of Arkangel had been forced to admit that his city could not be saved. Already many of the rich had fled, pouring away to eastward in a stream of air-yachts and charter-ships (the five widows Blinkoe made enough money selling berths aboard the Temporary Blip to buy themselves a charming villa on the upper tiers of Jaegerstadt Ulm). The slaves who had seized control of the under-decks in all the chaos were leaving too, flying out on stolen freighters or taking to the ice in hijacked survey-sleds and drone-suburbs. At last a general order to evacuate was given, and by midwinter the city stood empty, a great dark carcass that slowly whitened and lost its shape beneath a thickening mantle of snow.

  In the deep of that winter a few hardy Snowmad salvage-towns visited the wreck, draining its fuel tanks and landing boarding parties to harvest the valuables its fleeing citizens had left behind. Spring brought still more, and flights of scavenger-airships like carrion birds, but by then the ice beneath the wreck was growing weaker. In high summer, lit by the weird twilight of the midnight sun, the predator city stirred again, shivering amid a great cannonade of splintering ice, and set out on its final journey, down through the shifting levels of the sea to the cold, strange world below.

  That summer there was news from Shan Guo of a coup inside the Anti-Traction League; the High Council overthrown and replaced by a party called the Green Storm, whose forces were led by a bronze-masked Stalker. No one in the Hunting Ground paid much attention. What did it matter to them if a few Anti-Tractionists were squabbling among themselves? Aboard Paris and Manchester and Prague, Traktiongrad and Gorky and Peripatetiapolis, life went on as normal. Everybody was talking about the fall of Arkangel, and simply everybody was reading Nimrod B. Pennyroyal’s astonishing new book.

  34

  THE LAND OF MISTS

  But Anchorage had not drowned. Borne away from Arkangel by strong currents, it floated into thick fog, the ragged raft of ice it perched on grinding sometimes against other drifting floes.

  When daylight came again most of the city gathered at the railings on the bow of the upper tier. With the engines turned off there was little work for anyone to do, and little to talk about, for the future looked so bleak and brief that no one cared to mention it. They stood in silence, listening to the slap of waves against the ice and peering through gaps in the shifting fog for glimpses of this strange new sight, the sea.

  “Do you think this might be just a big polynya, or a narrow stretch of open water?” asked Freya hopefully, walking out on to the forward observation deck with her Steering Committee. She hadn’t been sure what a margravine should wear for Going to a Watery Grave, so she had put on the old embroidered anorak and sealskin boots she used to wear for trips aboard her mother’s ice-barge, and a matching hat with pom-poms. She regretted it now, because the pom-poms kept bouncing in an inappropriately cheery way, making her feel she had to be optimistic. “Maybe we will drift across it and find good safe ice to run upon again?”

  Windolene Pye, pale and tired from tending the wounded, shook her head. “I would guess these waters don’t freeze until the deeps of winter. I think we will drift on until we ground on some desolate shore, or the ice-floe breaks up and we sink. Poor Tom! Poor Hester! Coming all this way back to save us, and all for nothing!”

  Mr Scabious put his arm around her, and she leaned gratefully against him. Freya looked away, embarrassed. She wondered if she should tell them that it had been Hester who brought Arkangel down on them in the first place, but it didn’t seem fair somehow, not with the poor girl still sitting vigil at Tom’s deathbed. Anyway, Anchorage needed a good heroine at the moment. Better by far to let the blame for the Huntsmen rest with that fraud Pennyroyal. He was to blame for everything else, after all.

  She was still trying to think of something to say when a sleek black back broke the surface, just off the forward edge of the ice-floe.

  It came up like a whale through a wash of white waters, venting air in a hissing plume, and everyone thought a whale was what it was until they began to make out patterns of rivets on the metal hull; hatchways and windows and stencilled lettering.

  “It’s those parasite devils!” shouted Smew, running past with his wolf-rifle. “Come back for more loot!”

  The wallowing machine extended its spider-legs to grip the edges of the ice-floe, hauling itself up out of the water. Sleds were already speeding to meet it, packed with armed men from the engine district. Smew raised his rifle, taking careful aim as the hatch popped open.

  Freya reached out and pushed the gun aside. “No, Smew. There’s only one.”

  Surely it could not be a threat, this lone vessel surfacing so openly? She peered down at the stiff, skinny figure who came creeping up through the parasite’s hatchway, only to be grabbed and pinioned by some of Scabious’s men. She could hear raised voices, but not what they were saying. With Smew, Scabious and Miss Pye at her side she hurried to the head of the stairs that led down on to the city’s skirts, waiting nervously as the captive was led up to meet her. The closer he came, the more grotesque he looked, his misshapen face coloured purple and yellow and green. She knew the parasite-riders were thieves, but she hadn’t thought they were monsters!

  And then he was standing in front of her, and he wasn’t a monster, just a boy of her own age to whom horrible things had been done. Some of his teeth were missing, and a terrible red weal scarred his throat, but his eyes, blinking out at her from a mask of scabs and fading bruises, were black and bright and rather lovely.

  She pulled herself together and tried to sound like a margravine. “Welcome to Anchorage, stranger. What brings you here?”

  Caul opened and closed his mouth, but couldn’t think of what to say. He was out of his depth. All the way from Grimsby he’d been planning for this moment, but he had spent so much of his life trying not to be seen by Drys that it felt unnatural to be standing here in the open with so many of them. Freya shocked him a little, too. It wasn’t just the boyish haircut; she seemed bigger and taller than he remembered, and her face was rosy; she was not at all the pale, dreamy girl he had grown used to from the screens. Behind her stood Scabious, and Smew, and Windolene Pye and half the city, all glaring at him. He began to wonder if it might not have been easier to die in Grimsby after all.

  “Speak, boy!” ordered the dwarf who stood at Freya’s side, jabbing Caul’s belly with his rifle. “Her Radiance asked you a question!”

  “He was carrying this, Freya,” said one of Caul’s captors, holding up a battered tin tube. The people crowding behind Freya drew back with nervous little gasps, but Freya recognized the thing as an old-fashioned document container. She took it from the man, unscrewed the lid and pulled out a roll of papers. Looked at Caul again, smiling.

  “What are these?”

  The breeze, which had been rising unnoticed since the Screw Worm surfaced, tugged at the papers, fluttering their crisp, age-browned edges and threatening to pull them from Freya’s hands. Caul reached out and grabbed them. “Careful! You need those!”

  “Why?” asked Freya, staring down. There were red marks on the boy’s wrists where cords had cut into the flesh, and red marks on the papers too; words written old-fashioned in rust-coloured ink, latitudes and longitudes; the thin, wriggling line of a coast. A rubber-stamped notice warned, Not To Be Removed From The Reykjavik Library.

  “It’s Snøri Ulvaeusson’s map,” said Caul. “Uncle must have stolen it from Reykjavik years ago, and it’s been sitting in his map room ever since. There are notes, too. It tells you how to get to America.”

  Freya smiled a
t his kindness, and shook her head. “But there’s no point. America’s dead.”

  In his urgency to make her understand, Caul gripped her hand. “No! I read it all on the way here. Snøri wasn’t a fraud. He really found green places. Not great forests like Professor Pennyroyal imagined. No bears. No people. But places where there are grass and trees and…” He’d never seen grass, let alone a tree; his imagination kept letting him down. “I don’t know. There’ll be animals and birds, fish in the water. You might have to go static, but you could live there.”

  “But we’ll never be able to reach it,” Freya said. “Even if it’s real, we’ll never get there. We’re adrift.”

  “No…” said Mr Scabious, who had been peering over her shoulder at the map. “No, Freya, we can do it! If we can just stabilize this floe we’re sitting on, and rig up some propellers…”

  “It isn’t far,” said Miss Pye, reaching over Freya’s other shoulder and resting her finger on the map, where the head of one long winding inlet was labelled Vineland. A spattering of islands showed there, so small that they might have been just ink-blots, except that old Snøri Ulvaeusson had marked each one with a childish drawing of a tree. “Perhaps seven hundred miles. Nothing at all, compared with the distance we’ve travelled!”

  “But what are we thinking of?” Scabious turned to Caul, and Caul took a few shuffling steps backwards, remembering how he’d driven this poor old man half mad with his ghostly appearances in the engine district. Scabious seemed to be remembering it too, for his gaze turned cold and far away, and for a long moment the only sounds were the faint, nervous stirrings of the crowd and the rustle of the breeze-blown papers in Freya’s hands. “Do you have a name, boy?” he asked.