Predator's Gold Page 6

  Beside her, Tom was thinking, So young, and in charge of a whole city! No wonder she looks sad!

  “Your Worship,” said Pennyroyal, bowing low. “May I say how very grateful I am for the kindness that you and your people have extended to myself and my young companions…”

  “You must call me ‘Your Radiance’,” said the girl. “Or, ‘Light of the Ice Fields’.”

  There was an awkward silence. Little scraping and clicking noises came from the fat heating ducts which snaked across the ceiling, warming the palace with recycled heat from the engines. The girl peered at her guests. At last she said, “If you’re Nimrod Pennyroyal, how come you’re so much fatter and balder than your picture?”

  She picked up a book from a small side-table and held it out to show the back cover. It bore a painting of someone who might have been Pennyroyal’s hunkier younger brother.

  “Ah, well, artistic licence, you know,” blustered the explorer. “Fool of a painter – I told him to show me as I am, paunch and high forehead and all, but you know what these artistic types are; they do love to idealize, to show the inner man…”

  The margravine smiled. (She looked even prettier smiling. Hester decided that she disliked her quite a lot.) “I just wanted to be sure that it was really you, Professor Pennyroyal,” she said. “I quite understand about the portrait. I was always having to have mine done for plates and stamps and coins and things before the plague came, and they hardly ever got it right…”

  She stopped talking suddenly, as if some internal nanny had reminded her that a margravine does not babble in front of her guests like an excited teenager. “You may be seated,” she announced, much more formally, and clapped her hands. A door behind the throne popped open and Smew came scuttling out, dragging a set of small chairs. He had taken on yet another guise: the pillbox hat and high-collared tunic of a footman. For a moment Tom wondered if there really were three identical little men in the margravine’s service, but when he looked more closely it was obvious that this was the same Smew; he was still out of breath from his quick changes, and the chamberlain’s wig poked from his pocket.

  “Do hurry up,” said the margravine.

  “Sorry, Your Radiance.” Smew set the three chairs down facing the throne, then vanished into the shadows again. A moment later he was back, wheeling a heated trolley on which stood a pot of tea and a tray of almond biscuits. With him came another man, tall, stern and elderly, dressed all in black. He nodded to the newcomers, then took up a position beside the throne as Smew poured tea into tiny Blast Glass cups and handed them to the guests.

  “So I take it you know my work, O Light of the Ice Fields?” said Pennyroyal, simpering a little.

  The margravine’s mask of courtly etiquette slipped again, the excitable teenager showing through. “Oh yes! I love history and adventures. I used to read about them all the time before… well, before I became margravine. I’ve read all the classics: Valentine, and Spofforth, and Tamarton Foliot. But yours were always my favourites, Professor Pennyroyal. That’s what gave me the idea to…”

  “Careful, Margravine,” said the man at her side. His voice was a soft rumble, like a well-tuned engine.

  “Well, anyway,” said the margravine, “that’s why it’s so wonderful that the Ice Gods sent you here! It’s a sign, you see. A sign that I made the right decision, and that we’ll find what we are looking for. With you to help us, how can we possibly fail?”

  “Mad as a spoon,” whispered Hester to Tom, very quietly.

  “I’m rather at a loss, Your Radiance,” admitted Pennyroyal. “I think perhaps my intellects are still a little fuddled after that knock on the head. I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

  “It’s quite simple,” said the margravine.

  “Margravine,” warned the man at her side again.

  “Oh, don’t be such an old gloom-bucket, Mr Scabious!” she retorted. “This is Professor Pennyroyal! We can trust him!”

  “I don’t doubt it, Your Radiance,” said Scabious. “It is his young friends I am concerned about. If they get wind of our course there is a danger they may be off to sell us to Arkangel as soon as their ship is repaired. Direktor Masgard would dearly love to get his hands on my engines.”

  “We’d never do anything like that!” cried Tom, and would have sprung forward to confront the old man if Hester had not held him back.

  “I think I can vouch for my crew, Your Radiance,” said Pennyroyal. “Captain Natsworthy is a historian like myself, trained at the London Museum.”

  The margravine turned to study Tom for the first time, with a look of such admiration that he blushed and stared down at his feet. “Then welcome, Mr Natsworthy,” she said softly. “I hope that you will stay here and help us too.”

  “Help you with what?” asked Hester bluntly.

  “With our journey to America, of course,” the girl replied. She turned the book that she was holding to display the front cover. It showed a muscly, too-handsome Pennyroyal fighting a bear, egged on by a girl in a fur bikini. It was a first edition of America the Beautiful.

  “This one was always my favourite,” the margravine explained. “I expect that’s why the Ice Gods put the idea of America into my head. We’re going to find our way across the ice to the new green wilderness that Professor Pennyroyal discovered. There we’ll swap our skids for wheels, and chop down the trees for fuel, and trade with the savages, and introduce them to the benefits of Municipal Darwinism.”

  “But, but, but…” Pennyroyal gripped the hand-rests of his chair as if he were riding a roller coaster. “But I mean to say, the Canadian Ice Sheet – West of Greenland – No city has ever attempted to –”

  “I know, Professor,” the girl agreed. “It will be a long and dangerous journey for us, just as it was for you when you came on foot out of America, up on to the ice. But the gods are with us. They must be. Otherwise they would not have sent you to us. I am going to appoint you Honorary Chief Navigator, and with your help I know we will come safely into our new hunting ground.”

  Tom, thrilled by the boldness of the margravine’s vision, turned to Pennyroyal. “What wonderful luck, Professor!” he said happily. “You’ll be able to return to America after all!”

  Pennyroyal made a gurgling sound and his eyes bulged. “I… Chief navigator, eh? You are too kind, Light of the Ice Fields, too kind…” His Blast Glass cup dropped from his fingers as he fainted, shattering on the iron floor. Smew tutted, because the set was an old heirloom of the House of Rasmussen, but Freya did not care. “Professor Pennyroyal is still weak from his adventures,” she said. “Put him to bed! Air rooms in the guest quarters for himself and his friends. We must nurse him back to health as soon as possible. And do stop fretting about that silly little cup, Smew. Once the professor has led us to America we shall be able to dig up all the Blast Glass we could possibly desire!”

  9

  WELCOME TO THE FACILITY

  Far to the south, beyond the margins of the ice, an island rose from a cold sea. Black it was, and jagged, streaked with the droppings of gulls and skuas which made their homes upon its ledges. The noise of the birds could be heard from miles away as they clanged and shrieked and squabbled, diving into the surf for fish or wheeling in great flocks about the high summit, sometimes perching on the roofs of the squat buildings which clung there, or on the rusting handrails of the precarious metal walkways which jutted from the sheer cliffs like bracket fungus on a dead tree-stump. For although the place looked uninhabitable, people lived there; airship hangars had been blasted out of the rock, and clusters of spherical fuel-tanks huddled like spiders’ eggs in narrow crevices. This was Rogues’ Roost, where Red Loki and his legendary band of air-pirates had built their eyrie.

  Loki was gone now, and there were still the scars of rocket explosions on some of the buildings to show that he had not gone willingly. A Green Storm assault unit had come down upon this place one calm night, butchered the pirates and taken control of the Roost, esta
blishing a base that no hungry city could come at.

  The sun was setting, the red and purple and smoky orange smeared across the eastern sky making the island look even more sinister than usual as the Temporary Blip came chugging in from windward. Gun emplacements swivelled like armoured heads, tracking the plump old airship. As she edged in towards the main hangar her escort of Fox Spirits flew circles around her, like farm dogs chivvying a reluctant ewe into a fold.

  “What a dump!” complained one of Widgery Blinkoe’s wives, peering out through the gondola windows.

  “You told us reporting that old airship would bring us luck and money,” agreed another. “You said we’d be sunning ourselves on a raft resort, not trailing out here off the edge of the world.”

  “You promised new dresses, and slaves!”

  “Silence, wives!” shouted Blinkoe, trying to concentrate on his steering-levers while ground-crew guided him into the hangar with coloured flags. “Show some respect! This is a Green Storm base! It is an honour to be asked here: a sign that they value my services!” But in truth he was as dismayed as them at being summoned to Rogues’ Roost. After he radioed his sighting of the Jenny Haniver to the Storm’s base in the Tannhäusers he’d expected a thank you and perhaps a nice payment. He had certainly not expected to be jumped by a flight of Fox Spirits as soon as he left Airhaven and dragged all the way out here.

  “Well, really!” grumbled his wives, nudging each other.

  “It’s a pity the Green Storm don’t respect him as much as he respects them!”

  “Value his services, indeed!”

  “Think of the business we’re losing, trailing out here!”

  “My mother warned me not to marry him.”

  “So did mine!”

  “Mine, too!”

  “He knows this is a fool’s errand! See how worried he looks!”

  Mr Blinkoe was still looking worried as he stepped out of the Temporary Blip in the chaotic, echoey hangar, but his expression changed to an indulgent smile when a pretty subaltern came hurrying up to salute him. Widgery Blinkoe had a weakness for pretty young women, which was how he had ended up marrying five of them, and although those five had all turned out to be rather shrill and headstrong and tended to gang up on him, he could not help toying with the thought of asking the subaltern to become number six.

  “Mr Blinkoe?” she asked. “Welcome to the Facility.”

  “I thought it was called Rogues’ Roost, my dear?”

  “The commander prefers us to call it the Facility.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m here to take you to her.”

  “Her, eh? I hadn’t realized there were so many ladies in your organization.”

  The girl’s smile vanished. “The Green Storm believes that both men and women must play their part in the coming war to defeat the Tractionist barbarians, and make the Earth green again.”

  “Oh, of course, of course,” said Mr Blinkoe quickly. “I couldn’t agree more…” He didn’t like that sort of talk: war was so terribly bad for business. But the past few years had been bad for the Anti-Traction League: London had rolled almost to the gates of Batmunkh Gompa, and its agents had burned the Northern Air Fleet. That had meant that there were no spare ships to come to the aid of the Spitzbergen Static when Arkangel attacked it last winter, and so the last great Anti-Tractionist city of the north had been swallowed into the predator’s gut. It was only natural that some of the League’s younger officers had grown impatient with the dithering of the High Council, and itchy for revenge. Hopefully it would all come to nothing.

  Trailing after the subaltern, he tried to judge the strength of this little base. There were a couple of well-armed Fox Spirits standing ready on docking pans, and a lot of soldiers in white uniforms and bronze crab-shell helmets, all wearing armbands with the lightning-flash symbol of the Green Storm. Heavy security, he thought, his gaze slipping quickly over their steam-powered machine guns. But why? What was going on out here at the back-end of nowhere that warranted all this? A line of troops tramped past, carrying big metal cases stencilled Fragile and Top Secret, tightly locked. A little bald-headed man wearing a transparent plastic coat over his uniform was fussing at the soldiers. “Do go carefully now! Don’t jostle! Those are sensitive instruments!” Sensing Blinkoe’s gaze, he glanced towards him. There was a small tattoo between his eyebrows, in the shape of a red wheel.

  “What exactly is it you’re doing here?” Blinkoe asked his escort, following her out of the hangar and along damp tunnels and stairways, climbing up and up through the heart of the rock.

  “It’s secret,” she said.

  “But surely you can tell me?”

  The subaltern shook her head. She was a rude, officious, military sort of girl, Blinkoe decided; not sixth-Mrs-Blinkoe-material at all. He turned his attention to the posters tacked to the passage walls. They showed League airships raining down rockets on mobile towns, beneath angry slogans that exhorted the reader to DESTROY ALL CITIES. Between the posters were stencilled signs pointing the way to cell-blocks, barracks, various gun-platforms, and to a laboratory. That seemed strange, too. The Anti-Traction League had always been sniffy about science; they thought any technology more complicated than an airship or a rocket projector was barbaric, and best ignored. Clearly the Green Storm had different ideas.

  Mr Blinkoe began to feel a little afraid.

  The commander’s office was in one of the old buildings on the summit of the island. It had once been Red Loki’s private quarters, and the walls had been decorated with saucy murals which the commander had primly whitewashed over. The whitewash was thin, though, and here and there faint, painted faces were beginning to show through, like the ghosts of dead pirates looking on in disapproval at the Roost’s new tenants. In the far wall, a big circular window looked out at nothing much.

  “You’re Blinkoe? Welcome to the Facility.”

  The commander was very young. Mr Blinkoe had hoped she’d be pretty, but she turned out to be a stern-looking little minx, all cropped black hair and a hard, peat-coloured face. “You are the agent who sighted the Jenny Haniver at Airhaven?” she asked. Her hands kept clenching and flexing, like fidgety brown spiders. And the way she stared at him with those great dark eyes! Blinkoe wondered if she was slightly mad.

  “Yes, Your Honour,” he said nervously.

  “And you’re sure it was her? There is no mistake? This is not some story you cooked up to defraud the Green Storm of money?”

  “No, no!” said Blinkoe hastily. “Gods, no; it was the Wind Flower’s ship, as clear as day!”

  The commander turned away from him and walked to the window, peering out through the salt-frosted glass at the swiftly darkening sky. After a moment she said, “A wing of Fox Spirits was scrambled from one of our secret bases to intercept the Jenny. None of them returned.”

  Widgery Blinkoe was uncertain what to say. “Oh dear,” he ventured.

  She turned towards him again, but he couldn’t see her expression, standing as she was against that luminous window. “The two barbarian infiltrators who stole the Jenny Haniver from Batmunkh Gompa may have looked like Out-Country urchins, but they were really highly trained agents in the pay of London. No doubt they used their infernal cunning to outwit and destroy our ships, then fled north into the Ice Wastes.”

  “It’s, um, perfectly possible, Commander,” agreed Widgery Blinkoe, thinking how unlikely it sounded.

  She came close to him, a short, slight girl, her eyes burning into his. “We have many Fox Spirits. The Green Storm grows stronger every day. A great many League commanders are on our side, and are prepared to send soldiers and ships to strengthen our bases. What we lack is an intelligence network. That is why we need you, Blinkoe. I want you to find me the Jenny Haniver, and the barbarians who fly her.”

  “That’s, um, well, that might, yes,” said Blinkoe.

  “You will be paid well for your services.”

  “How well? I don’t want to seem me
rcenary, but I do have five wives to support…”

  “Ten thousand when you deliver the ship here.”

  “Ten thou –!”

  “The Green Storm rewards its servants well,” the commander assured him. “But we punish those who betray us, too. If you breathe a word of this, or of what you have seen at the Facility, to anyone, we will find you, and kill you. Quite painfully. Do you understand?”

  “Eep!” squeaked Blinkoe, turning his hat around and around in his hands. “Um, may I ask why? I mean, why this ship is so important? I thought she might have sentimental value, as a sort of symbol for the League, but she hardly seems worth—”

  “She is worth what I am offering you.” The commander smiled for the first time; a thin, cold, pained little smile, like someone thanking a distant relative for attending a funeral. “The Jenny Haniver and the barbarians who stole her could be vital to our work here,” she said. “That is all you need to know. Find her and bring her to me, Mr Blinkoe.”

  10

  THE WUNDERKAMMER

  All Anchorage’s doctors were dead. The best nurse who could be found for Professor Pennyroyal was Windolene Pye of the Steering Committee, who had once done a first-aid course. Sitting by his bed in a luxurious guest room high in the Winter Palace, she held his wrist between her thin fingers, checking his pulse against her pocket watch.

  “I believe he has simply fainted,” she announced. “Perhaps it was exhaustion, or delayed shock after his terrible adventures, poor gentleman.”

  “How come we haven’t keeled over then?” Hester wanted to know. “We went through terrible adventures too, and you don’t see us swooning all over the place like maiden aunts.”