Predator's Gold Page 5

  Once again she knelt in the dim candle-glow of the refrigerated temple and looked up at the lovely ice-statues of the Lord and Lady and asked them to tell her what she should do, or at least to send a sign to show her that the things she had already done were right. And once again there was no answer: no miraculous light, no voices whispering in her mind, no patterns of frost arranging themselves into messages on the floor, only the steady purr of the engines making the deckplates judder against her knees, the winter twilight pressing at the windows. Her mind kept drifting off, thinking about stupid, annoying things, like the stuff that had gone missing from the palace. It made her angry and a little scared, that someone could come into her chambers, and take her things. She tried asking the Ice Gods who the thief was, but of course they would not tell her that, either.

  Finally she prayed for Mama and Papa, wondering what it was like for them down in the Sunless Country. Since their deaths she had begun to realize that she had never really known them, not in the way that other people know their parents. There had always been nannies and handmaidens to look after Freya, and she saw Mama and Papa only at dinner time and on formal occasions. She had called them “Your Radiance” and “Sir”. The closest she had been to them was on certain summer evenings when they had gone for picnics in the margravine’s ice-barge – simple family affairs, just Freya and Mama and Papa and about seventy servants and courtiers. Then the plague came, and she wasn’t even allowed to see them, and then they were dead. Some servants laid them in the barge and set fire to it and sent it out on to the ice. Freya had stood at her window and watched the smoke going up, and it felt as if they had never existed at all.

  Outside the temple, her chauffeur was waiting for her, pacing up and down and scratching patterns in the snow with the toe of his boot. “Home, Smew,” she announced, and as he scurried to slide the lid of the bug open she looked towards the bows, thinking how pathetically few lights there were in the upper city these days. She remembered issuing a proclamation about the empty houses, stating than any of the engine-district workers who wished might move out of their dingy little flats down below and take over some of the empty villas up here instead, but very few had done so. Perhaps they liked their dingy flats. Perhaps they needed the comfort of familiar things just as badly as she did.

  Down at the air-harbour a splash of red stood out gaudily amid the whites and greys.

  “Smew? Whatever is that? Surely a ship has not arrived?”

  The chauffeur bowed. “She put in last night, Your Radiance. A trader called the Jenny Haniver. Shot up by air-pirates or something, and in bad need of repairs, according to Harbour Master Aakiuq.”

  Freya peered at the ship, hoping to make out more details. It was difficult to see much through the swirls of powder snow which were being blown off the rooftops. How odd to think of strangers walking about aboard Anchorage again after all this time!

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.

  “The margravine isn’t normally informed about the arrival of mere merchantmen, Your Radiance.”

  “But who is aboard this ship? Are they interesting?”

  “Two young aviators, Your Radiance. And an older man, their passenger.”

  “Oh,” said Freya, losing interest. For a moment she had been almost excited, and had imagined inviting these newcomers to the palace, but of course it would never do for the Margravine of Anchorage to start hobnobbing with tramp aviators and a man who couldn’t even afford his own airship.

  “Natsworthy and Shaw were the names Mr Aakiuq told me, Your Radiance,” Smew went on, helping her into the bug. “Natsworthy and Shaw and Pennyroyal.”

  “Pennyroyal? Not Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal?”

  “I believe so, Your Radiance, yes.”

  “Then I – Then I –” Freya turned this way and that, adjusted her bonnet, shook her head. The traditions which had been her guide since everybody died had nothing to say about What To Do In The Event Of A Miracle. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Smew, I must welcome him! Go to the air-harbour! Fetch him to the council chamber – no, to the big audience-room. As soon as you’ve driven me home you must go and – no, go now! I’ll walk home!”

  And she ran back inside the temple to thank the Gods of the Ice for sending her the sign she had been waiting for.

  Even Hester had heard of Anchorage. In spite of its small size it was one of the most famous of the ice cities, for it could trace its name right back to old America. A band of refugees had fled the original Anchorage just before the Sixty Minute War broke out, and had founded a new settlement on a storm-wracked northern island. There they survived through plagues and earthquakes and ice ages until the great Traction boom reached the north. Then every city was forced to start moving or be eaten by those that had, and the people of Anchorage rebuilt their home and set off on their endless journeyings across the ice.

  It was no predator, and the small jaws at its bows were only used for gathering in salvage or gouging up freshwater ice to feed the boilers. Its people made their living by trading along the fringes of the Ice Wastes, where they would link themselves with elegant little boarding-bridges to other peaceful towns and provide a marketplace where scavengers and archaeologists could gather to sell the things they scratched up from the ice.

  So what was it doing here, miles from the trade-routes, heading north into the gathering winter? The question had nagged at Hester while she was helping to moor the Jenny Haniver, and it was nagging at her still when she woke from a long, refreshing sleep in the harbour master’s house. In the grainy dusk which passed for daylight here she could see that the crescents of white mansions overlooking the air-harbour were streaked with rust, and that many of the buildings had broken windows that opened on darkness like the eyeholes of skeletons. The harbour itself seemed to be on the verge of vanishing beneath a tide of decay: the bitter wind whipped litter and snow into drifts against the empty hangars, and a scrawny dog lifted its leg against a heap of old sky-train couplings.

  “Such a pity, such a pity,” said Mrs Aakiuq, the harbour master’s wife, as she cooked up a second breakfast for her young visitors. “If you could have seen the dear place in the old days. Such riches, there were, and such comings and goings. Why, when I was a girl we often had airships stacked up twenty deep, waiting for a berth. Sky-yachts and runabouts and racing sloops come up to try their luck in the Boreal Regatta, and gorgeous great liners named after old-world movie-queens, the Audrey Hepburn and the Gong Li.”

  “So what happened?” asked Tom.

  “Oh, the world changed on us,” said Mrs Aakiuq sadly. “Prey got scarce, and the great predator cities like Arkangel, which wouldn’t have spared us a second glance once, now chase us whenever they can.”

  Her husband nodded, pouring steaming mugs of coffee for his guests. “And then, this year, the plague came. We took aboard some Snowmad scavengers who’d just found bits of an old orbital weapons platform crashed in the ice near the pole, and it turned out to be infected with some kind of horrible engineered virus from the Sixty Minute War. Oh, don’t look so worried; those old battle-viruses do their work fast and then mutate into something harmless. But it spread through the city like wildfire, killing hundreds of people. Even the old margravine and her consort died. And when it was over, and the quarantine was lifted, well, a lot of folk couldn’t see a future any more for Anchorage, so they took what airships there were and went off to find a life in other cities. I doubt there’s more than fifty of us left in the whole place now.”

  “Is that all?” Tom was amazed. “But how can so few people keep a town this size working?”

  “They can’t,” replied Aakiuq. “Not for ever. But old Mr Scabious the engine master has done wonders – a lot of automated systems, clever Old-Tech gadgets and the like – and he’ll keep us moving long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?” asked Hester suspiciously. “Where are you going?”

  The harbour master’s smile vanished. “Can’t tell
you that, Miss Hester. Who’s to say you won’t fly off and sell our course to Arkangel or some other predator? We don’t want to find them lying in wait for us on the High Ice. Now eat up your seal-burgers and we’ll go and see if we can’t roust out some spare parts to fix that poor battered Jenny Haniver of yours.”

  They ate, and then trailed after him across the docks to a huge, whale-backed warehouse. In the dim interior teetering stacks of old engine pods and gondola panels vied for space with spare parts ripped from the flight decks of dismantled airships and curved aluminium envelope-struts like the ribs of giants. Propellors of all sizes hung overhead, swinging gently with the city’s movement.

  “This used to be my cousin’s place,” said Aakiuq, shining an electric lantern over the junk-heaps. “But he went and died in the plague, so I suppose it’s mine now. Never fear; there’s not much goes wrong with an airship that I don’t know how to fix, and there’s precious little else for me to do these days.”

  As they followed him through the rusty dark some small thing clattered and seemed to scrabble, away among the stacked iron shelves of salvage. Hester, wary as ever, jerked her head in its direction, searching the shadows with her single eye. Nothing moved. Small things must always be falling, mustn’t they, in an old lumber room of a place like this? In a building with dodgy shock-absorbers that swayed and shuddered as Anchorage went ploughing across the ice? And yet she could not shake off the sense that she was being watched.

  “Jeunet-Carot engines, wasn’t it?” Mr Aakiuq was asking. He clearly liked Tom – people always liked Tom – and he was making great efforts to help, scurrying to and fro among the mounds of junk and checking notes in a huge, mould-speckled ledger. “I believe I have something that will suit. Your gas-cells are old Thibetan jobs by the look of ’em: those we can’t patch I’ll replace with some nice RJ50s from a Zhang-Chen Hawkmoth. Yes, I believe your Jenny Haniver will be aloft again within three weeks.”

  In blue darkness far below, three pairs of keen eyes watched a small screen, staring at a grainy image of Tom and Hester and the harbour master. Three pairs of ears as white as underground fungi strained to catch the tinny, distorted voices which came whispering down from the world above.

  Back at the harbour master’s house, Mrs Aakiuq kitted Tom and Hester out with overboots and snowshoes, thermal underwear, thick sweaters of oiled wool, mittens, scarves and parkas. There were also cold-masks; fleece-lined leather objects with isinglass eye-pieces and a filter to breathe through. Mrs Aakiuq did not say where all these things had come from, but Hester had noticed the photographs decked with mourning ribbons on the household shrine, and she guessed that she and Tom were dressing in the clothes of the Aakiuqs’ dead children. She hoped those plague-germs really were as dead as the harbour master had promised. She liked the mask, though.

  When they returned to the kitchen they found Pennyroyal sitting by the stove, his feet in a bowl of steaming water and a bandage around his head. He looked pale, but otherwise he was his old self, slurping a mug of Mrs Aakiuq’s moss tea and greeting Tom and Hester cheerfully. “So glad to see you safe! What adventures we shared, eh! Something for my next book there, I suspect…”

  A brass telephone on the wall near the stove emitted a tinny jingle. Mrs Aakiuq hurried to lift the earpiece, listening very carefully to the message being relayed by her friend Mrs Umiak at the exchange. Her face broadened into a shining smile, and by the time she set the phone back on its hook and turned to her guests she could barely speak for excitement.

  “Great news, my dears! The margravine is to grant you an audience! The margravine herself! She is sending her chauffeur to carry you to the Winter Palace! Such an honour! To think, you will go straight from my own humble kitchen to the margravine’s audience chamber!”

  8

  THE WINTER PALACE

  “What’s a margravine?” Hester hissed at Tom, as they stepped outside again into the fierce cold. “It sounds like something you spread on your toast…”

  “I suppose it’s a sort of mayoress,” Tom said.

  “A margravine,” Pennyroyal chipped in, “is the female version of a margrave. A lot of these small northern cities have something similar; a hereditary ruling family, with titles handed down from one generation to the next. Margrave. Portreeve. Graf. The Elector Urbanus of Eisenstadt. The Direktor of Arkangel. They’re very keen on their traditions up here.”

  “Well, I don’t see why they can’t just call her a mayoress and have done with it,” said Hester grumpily.

  A bug was waiting for them at the harbour gates; an electric vehicle of the sort that Tom remembered from London, although he didn’t remember any quite as beautiful as this. It was painted bright red, with a golden letter R surrounded by curlicues on its flank. The single wheel at the back was larger than on a normal bug, and studded to grip snow. On the curving mudguards which arched above the two front wheels big electric lanterns had been mounted, and snowflakes danced crazily in their twin beams.

  The chauffeur saw them coming and slid open the glastic canopy as they drew near. He wore a red uniform with gold braid and epaulettes, and when he drew himself up to his full height and saluted he just about came up to Hester’s waist. A child, she thought at first, and then saw that he was actually much older than her, with a grown man’s head balanced on a stumpy little body. She quickly looked away, realizing that she had been staring at him in exactly the same hurtful, prying, pitiful way that people sometimes stared at her.

  “Name’s Smew,” he said. “Her Radiance has sent me to bring you to the Winter Palace.”

  They climbed into the bug, squeezing on to the back seat on either side of Pennyroyal, who took up a surprising amount of space for a small man. Smew slid shut the lid, and they were off. Tom looked back to wave at the Aakiuqs, who were watching from a window of their house, but the air-harbour had vanished into the snow-flurries and the wintry dark. The bug was driving along a broad thoroughfare, from which covered arcades opened off on either side. Shops and restaurants and grand villas flicked by, all dead, all dark. “This is Rasmussen Prospekt,” Smew announced. “Very elegant street. Runs right through the middle of the upper city from bow to stern.”

  Tom looked out through the bug’s lid. He was impressed by this beautiful, desolate place, yet the emptiness of it made him nervous. Where was it going, rushing into the dead north like this? He shivered inside his warm clothes, remembering his time aboard another town that had been in the wrong place, heading for a mysterious destination: Tunbridge Wheels, whose deranged mayor had driven it to a watery grave in the Sea of Khazak.

  “Here we are,” announced Smew suddenly. “The Winter Palace; home to the House of Rasmussen for eight hundred years.”

  They were nearing the city’s stern, and the bug’s electric motor griped and whinnied as it carried them up a long ramp. At the top stood the palace which Tom had glimpsed from the air the night before; a twirl of white metal with spires and balconies rimed in ice. The upper storeys looked empty and abandoned, but lights showed in some of the windows on the lower floors, and gas-flames danced in bronze tripods outside the circular front door.

  The bug scrunched to a halt on the frosty drive, and Smew held the canopy while his passengers climbed out, then hurried up the palace steps and slid the outer door open, letting them into a small chamber called a heat-lock. He slid the door shut, and after a few seconds, when the cold air that had entered with the visitors had been warmed by heaters in the roof and walls, an inner door opened. They followed Smew into a panelled hallway, the walls hung with tapestries. Giant double doors loomed ahead, clad in priceless Old-Tech alloys. Smew knocked on them, then muttered, “Wait here, please,” and scurried away down a side-passage. The building creaked slightly, swaying with the motion of the city. There was a smell of mildew.

  “I don’t like this,” said Hester, looking up at the thick veils of cobweb which swathed the chandeliers and dangled from the heating ducts. “Why has she asked us here? It coul
d be a trap.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, Miss Shaw,” scoffed Pennyroyal, trying not to look too alarmed by her suggestion. “A trap? Why should the margravine set a trap for us? She’s a very superior sort of person, remember, a type of mayoress.”

  Hester shrugged. “I’ve only come across two mayors before, and neither of them were very superior. They were both stark, staring mad.”

  The doors suddenly jerked and slid sideways, grating slightly on their bearings. Beyond them stood Smew, dressed now in a long blue robe and a six-cornered hat and clutching a staff of office twice his own height. He welcomed the guests solemnly, as if he had never seen them before, and then thumped the staff three times on the metal floor. “Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal and party,” he announced, and stepped aside to let them walk past him into the pillared space beyond.

  A line of argon globes hung from the vaulted roof, each casting a circular glow on the floor beneath it, like stepping stones of light leading towards the far end of the enormous chamber. Someone sat waiting there, slouched in an ornate throne on a raised dais. Hester groped for Tom’s hand, and side by side they followed Pennyroyal through shadow and light, shadow and light, until they stood at the foot of the dais steps, looking up into the face of the margravine.

  For some reason, they had both expected someone old. Everything in this silent, rusting house spoke of age and decay, of ancient customs preserved long after their purpose had been forgotten. Yet the girl gazing haughtily down at them was even younger than they were; certainly not a day over sixteen. A large, pretty girl, dressed in an elaborate ice-blue gown and a white overmantle with a fox-fur collar. Her features had something of the Inuit look of Aakiuq and his wife, but her skin was very fair and her hair was golden. The colour of autumn leaves, Hester thought, hiding her face. The margravine’s beauty made her feel small and worthless and unneeded. She started looking for faults. She’s far too fat. And her neck needs a good wash. And the moths have been at that pretty frock, and all the buttons are done up wrong…