Predator's gold

21

A week went by, and then another and another. Anchorage swung west, creeping along the northern edge of Greenland with survey-sleds sent out ahead to sound the ice. No city had come this way before, and Miss Pye did not trust her charts.

Freya felt as if she had wandered into unmapped territory, too. Why was she so unhappy? How had everything gone so wrong, when it had all seemed to be going so right? She could not understand why Tom didn’t want her. Surely, she thought, wiping a hole in the dust on her dressing-room mirror to study her reflection, surely he cannot still be missing Hester? Surely he can’t prefer her to me?

Sometimes, sniffling with self-pity, she concocted elaborate schemes to win him back. Sometimes she grew angry and stomped along the dusty corridors muttering all the things she should have said during their argument. Once or twice she found herself wondering whether she could order him to be beheaded for high treason, but Anchorage’s executioner (a very ancient gentleman whose post had been purely ceremonial) was dead, and Freya doubted that Smew could lift the axe.

Tom had moved out of his suite in the Winter Palace into an abandoned apartment in a big, empty building on Rasmussen Prospekt, not far from the air-harbour. Without the Wunderkammer or the margravine’s library to distract him, he devoted his days to feeling sorry for himself and wondering how to get Hester back, or at least find out where she had gone.

There was no way off Anchorage, that much was certain. He had pestered Mr Aakiuq about fitting out the Graculus for long-range travel, but the Graculus was just a tug; she had never flown more than half a mile from the air-harbour before, and Mr Aakiuq claimed it would be impossible to give her the bigger fuel-tanks she would need if Tom was to take her back east. “Besides,” the harbour master added, “what would you fill them with? I’ve been checking fuel levels in the harbour tanks. There’s almost nothing left. I don’t understand it. The gauges still read full, but the tanks are nearly empty.”

Fuel was not the only thing that had been going missing. Unconvinced by Scabious’s talk of ghosts, Tom had been asking around in the engine district for anyone who might know something of Hester’s mysterious friend. Nobody did, but they all seemed to have their own tales of figures glimpsed in corners of the district where no one should be, and of tools set down at a shift’s end and never seen again. Things vanished from lockers and bolted rooms, and an oil-tank on Heat Exchange Street had run dry, even though the gauges showed it nearly full.

“What’s going on?” asked Tom. “Who would take all these things? Do you think there’s somebody aboard who we don’t know about? Someone who stayed on in secret after the plague, to line their pockets?”

“Bless you, young man,” the engine district workers chuckled. “Who’d stay aboard a city like this, unless they wanted to help Her Radiance take it to America? There’s no way off, no way to sell the things they’ve stolen.”

“Then who — ?”

“Ghosts,” was all they’d say, shaking their heads, fingering the amulets they all wore around their necks. “The High Ice has always been haunted. The ghosts come aboard and play tricks on the living. Everyone knows that.”

Tom was not so sure. There was something spooky about the engine district, and sometimes when he was on his own in the dingy streets he had the strangest feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn’t see what ghosts would want with oil, and tools, and airship fuel, and trinkets from the margravine’s museum.

“He’s on to us,” said Skewer darkly, watching the screens one evening as Tom poked about among some deserted buildings on the edge of the engine district. “He knows.”

“He doesn’t know, ” said Caul wearily. “He suspects, that’s all. And he doesn’t even know what he suspects, he’s just got an idea that something’s going on.”

Skewer looked at him in surprise, then laughed. “You know what he thinks pretty well, don’t you?”

“I’m just saying you haven’t got to worry about him, that’s all,” muttered Caul.

“And I’m just saying we have, and maybe we ought to do him in. Make it look like an accident. How’d you like that?”

Caul said nothing, refusing to rise to the bait. It was true that the burglars had had to be a lot more careful since Tom started his investigations, and it was delaying them. Skewer was keen to prove that he’d been right to take command, and determined that when he took the Screw Worm home to Uncle she’d be bulging with loot, but although he and Caul went upstairs nearly every night they dared not steal anything too obvious for fear of arousing Tom’s suspicions further. They’d had to remove their lamprey-hoses from the fuel-tanks at the air-harbour, too, and that would become a problem soon, since the message-fish and most of the Screw Worm ’s systems ran on stolen aviation fuel.

The Lost Boy part of Caul knew Skewer was right. A knife between Tom’s ribs on a lonely street, the body heaved off the stern-gallery, and normal burglary could be resumed. But the other part of him, the kinder part, couldn’t bear that idea. He wished Skewer would just give up and go back to Grimsby, leaving him here alone to watch Tom and Freya and the others. Sometimes he even wondered about giving himself up; throwing himself on the mercy of the people of Anchorage. Except that, for as long as he could remember, he had been told that the Drys had no mercy. His trainers in the Burglarium, his comrades, Uncle’s voice whispering out of the speakers in the Grimsby canteen, all agreed that however civilized the Drys might seem, however comfortable their cities, however pretty the girls, they would do horrible things to a Lost Boy if they caught him.

Caul wasn’t sure any more that that was true, but he hadn’t the courage to go up and find out. How could he? Hello, I’m Caul. I’ve been burgling you…

The telegraph machine at the rear of the cabin began to chatter excitedly, breaking in on Caul’s thoughts. He and Skewer both started at the sudden noise, and Gargle, who had grown jumpier than ever under Skewer’s harsh leadership, squealed with fright. The little machine jerked its brass limbs up and down like a mechanical cricket, and a long ribbon of punched white paper began to spew out of a slot in its glastic dome. Somewhere far beneath Anchorage a message-fish from Grimsby was swimming, beaming a signal up through the ice.

The three boys looked at each other. This was rare. Neither Caul nor Skewer had ever been aboard a limpet which had received a message from Uncle. In his surprise, Skewer forgot his new role for a moment and looked worriedly at Caul.

“What do you think it is? You think something’s gone wrong at home?”

“You’re the captain now, Skew,” Caul replied. “Better check.”

Skewer crossed the cabin, shoved Gargle aside and grabbed the curling ribbon of tape, his eyes narrowing as he studied the patterns of holes. His smile faded.

“What is it, Skew?” asked Gargle eagerly. “Is it from Uncle?”

Skewer nodded, looked up, then back at the tape, as if he could not quite believe what he had read there. “Of course it’s from Uncle, you gowk. He says he’s read our reports. We’re to return to Grimsby at once. And he says we’re to bring Tom Natsworthy with us.”

“Professor Pennyroyal!”

The great explorer had become a rare sight in Anchorage these past few weeks, keeping to his quarters and not even showing up for meetings of the Steering Committee. “I have a cold!” he had explained, in a muffled voice, when Freya sent Smew to knock upon his door. But as Tom emerged from the engine district stairway on to Rasmussen Prospekt that night he saw Pennyroyal’s familiar, turbanned figure stumbling through the snow ahead of him.

“Professor Pennyroyal!” he shouted again, breaking into a run, and caught up with him near the foot of the Wheelhouse.

“Ah, Tim!” said Pennyroyal, with a pallid smile. His voice was slurred, and his arms were full of bottles of cheap red wine which he had just borrowed from an abandoned restaurant called Nosh o’ the North. “So glad to see you again. No luck with that airship I suppose?”

“Airship?”

“A little bird told me you were asking Aakiuq about his air-tug. The Crapulous or whatever he calls it. About using it to escape these boreal realms and flit back to civilization.”

“That was weeks ago, Professor.”

“Oh?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“Ah. Pity.”

They stood in awkward silence, Pennyroyal swaying slightly.

“I’ve been looking for you for ages,” Tom said at last. “There’s something I wanted to ask you. As an explorer and historian.”

“Ah!” said Pennyroyal wisely. “Ah. You’d better come up.”

The Honorary Chief Navigator’s official residence had gone to seed since Tom last saw it. Piles of papers and dirty crockery had sprouted like fungus from every flat surface, expensive clothes lay crumpled on the floor and ranks of empty bottles ringed the sofa, flotsam washed up on a spring-tide of pilfered wine.

“Welcome, welcome,” said Pennyroyal vaguely, waving Tom towards a chair and rummaging in the debris on his desk for a corkscrew. “Now, what can I help you with?”

Tom shook his head. It sounded silly, now he came to say it aloud. “It’s only,” he said, “well, during your travels, have you ever come across stories of intruders aboard ice cities?”

Pennyroyal almost dropped the bottle he was holding. “Intruders? No! Why? You don’t mean there’s someone aboard…”

“No. I’m not sure. Maybe. Someone’s been stealing stuff, and I don’t see why it would be one of Freya’s people — they can have anything they want; they’ve no reason to steal.”

Pennyroyal opened the wine and took a long drink straight from the bottle. It seemed to steady his nerves. “Maybe we’ve picked up a parasite,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you read Ziggurat Cities of the Serpent-God, my breathtaking account of a journey through Nuevo-Maya?” asked Pennyroyal. “There’s a whole chapter on parasite towns: Las Ciudades Vampiras. ”

“I’ve never heard of a parasite town,” said Tom doubtfully. “Do you mean some sort of scavenger?”

“Oh no!” Pennyroyal took a seat close to him, breathing hot gusts of wine-fumes into his face. “There’s more than one way to prey on a city. These vampire towns conceal themselves in the litter of the Out-Country until one passes over them. Then they spring up and attach themselves to its underside with gigantic suction-cups. The poor city goes trundling on with no idea what’s clinging to its belly, but all the while the parasite people are sneaking aboard, draining fuel tanks, stealing equipment, murdering the menfolk one by one, carrying off beautiful young women to sell in the slave-markets of Itzal as sacrifices to the volcano-gods. Eventually the host city comes shuddering to a halt, an empty shell, a husk, its engines stripped out, its people dead or captured, and the fat vampire town crawls off in search of fresh prey.”

Tom thought about that for a while. “But that’s impossible!” he said at last. “How would a city not know it had an entire town hanging underneath it? How would they not spot all these people running around pinching stuff? It doesn’t make sense! And… suction cups? ”

Pennyroyal looked shocked. “What are you saying, Tom?”

“I’m saying that you… you made it up! Just like the stuff in Rubbish? Rubbish! and the old buildings you said you saw in America… Oh, Great Quirke!” Tom felt cold suddenly, even though the apartment was warm and stuffy. “Did you ever even go to America? Or was that all made up, too?”

“Course I did!” said Pennyroyal angrily.

“I don’t believe you!” The old Tom, brought up to honour his elders and respect all historians, would never have dared to say such things, even to think them. Three weeks without Hester had changed him more than he realized. Standing, he looked down into Pennyroyal’s puffy, sweating face and knew that he was lying. “It was just a fantasy, wasn’t it?” he said. “Your whole trip to America was a story spun out of aviators’ yarns and the legend of old Snori Ulvaeusson’s disappearing map, which probably never existed in the first place!”

“How dare you, sir!” Pennyroyal heaved himself heavily upright, gesturing with his empty wine-bottle. “How dare you, a mere former Apprentice Historian, insult me! I’ll have you know my books have sold over a hundred thousand copies! Been translated into a dozen different languages! I’m very highly thought of, me. ‘Brilliant, Breathtaking and Believable’ — the Shuddersfield Gazette. ‘A rattling good yarn’ — the Panzerstadt Coblenz Advertiser. ‘Pennyroyal’s works are a breath of fresh air in the dull world of practical History’ — the Wantage Weekly Waffle…”

A breath of fresh air was what Tom needed, but not the sort that Pennyroyal could provide. He pushed past the hectoring historian, and ran down the stairs and out into the street. No wonder Pennyroyal had been so keen to see the Jenny Haniver repaired, and so distraught when Hester flew away. His talk of green places was all a lie! He knew full well that Freya Rasmussen was driving her city to its doom!

He began running to the Winter Palace, but had not gone far before he changed his mind. Freya was the wrong person to tell about this. She had invested everything in the journey west. If he burst in on her claiming that Pennyroyal had been wrong all along her pride would be dented, and Freya had a lot of pride to dent. Worse, she might think that this was just some ruse on Tom’s part to make her turn the city round so he could go looking for Hester.

“Mr Scabious!” he said aloud. Scabious had never wholly believed in Professor Pennyroyal. Scabious would listen. He turned and ran as fast as he could back to the stairway. As he passed the Wheelhouse Pennyroyal leaned over a balcony to watch, shouting after him, “‘A Startling Talent!’ — The Wheel-Tapper’s Weekly! ”

Down in the hot dark of the engine district everything thrummed and thundered with the beat of the engines as they drove the city on towards disaster. Tom stopped the first men he saw and asked where he could find Scabious. They nodded towards the stern, fingering their amulets. “Gone to look for his son, like every night.”

Tom ran on, into quiet, rusty streets where nothing moved. Or almost nothing. As he passed beneath one of the dangling argon-lamps a faint movement in the mouth of a ventilation-shaft flicked a sliver of reflected light into the corner of his eye. He stopped, breathing hard, his heart thumping, hairs prickling on his wrists and the back of his neck. In his panic over Pennyroyal he had all but forgotten the intruders. Now all his half-formed theories about them flooded his mind again. The ventilator looked empty and innocent enough now, but he was sure there had been something there, something that had darted guiltily back into the shadows just as his eye caught it. And he was sure that it was still in there, watching him.

“Oh, Hester,” he whispered, suddenly very frightened, wishing she were here to help. Hester would have been able to cope with this, but he wasn’t at all sure he could, not alone. Trying to imagine what she would do, he forced himself to walk on, one step after another, not looking towards the ventilator until he was sure he was out of sight of whatever hid there.

“I think he saw us,” said Caul.

“Never!” sneered Skewer.

Caul shrugged unhappily. They had been tracking Tom with their cameras all evening, waiting for him to reach a place that was quiet enough and close enough to the Screw Worm for them to carry out Uncle’s mysterious command. They’d never watched a Dry this closely for this long, and something in Tom’s face as he glanced towards the camera made Caul uneasy. “Come on, Skew,” he said. “It must all build up after a while, mustn’t it? The noises, and the feeling you’re being watched. And he was suspicious even before…”

“They never see!” said Skewer firmly. The strange message from Uncle had made him nervous, and faced with the task of tracking Tom he’d been forced to admit that Gargle was the best cam-operator aboard and hand over the controls to him. He clung to the idea of his superiority over the Drys as if it was the last certain thing in the world. “They might look, but they never see. They’re not as observant as us. There, what did I tell you? He’s walked past. Stupid Dry.”

It wasn’t a rat. All the rats of Anchorage were dead, and anyway, this thing looked mechanical. As he crept back through shadows towards the ventilator Tom could see the light jinking on segmented metal. A bulbous, fist-sized body, supported on too many legs. A single camera-lens eye.

He thought of the mysterious boy who had come for him on the night Hester left, and how he seemed to know everything that went on at the air-harbour and the Winter Palace. How many of these things were there, scuttling and spying in the city’s ducts? And why was this one watching him?

“Where is he, Gargle? Find him…”

“I think he’s gone,” said Gargle, panning to and fro.

“Careful!” warned Caul, resting his hand on the younger boy’s shoulder. “Tom’s still round there somewhere, I’m sure of it.”

“What, psychic as well now, are you?” asked Skewer.

Tom took three deep breaths, then flung himself at the ventilator. The metal thing scrabbled, trying to retreat into the dark shaft. Glad that he was still wearing his heavy outdoor mittens, Tom grabbed its thrashing legs and pulled.

“He’s got us!”

“Reel in! Reel in!”

Eight steel legs. Magnets for feet. An armoured body warted with rivets. That cyclops-lens whirring as it struggled to focus on him. It was so like a gigantic spider that Tom dropped it, and flinched away as it lay there on its back on the deck, writhing its legs helplessly. Then the thin cable that trailed from its rear end went suddenly taut, dragging it backwards against the ventilator with a clang. Tom lunged after it, but he was too slow. The crab-thing was tugged quickly into the shaft and vanished, leaving him listening to the fading clatter as it was hauled away into the city’s depths.

Tom scrambled up, his heart beating quickly. Who would own such a thing? Who would want to spy on the people of Anchorage? He thought of Pennyroyal’s tale of the vampire towns, and suddenly it did not seem quite so unlikely after all. He leaned against the wall to catch his breath and then started to run again. “Mr Scabious!” he shouted, the echoes rolling ahead of him down the tubular streets or vanishing upward into great, dark, dripping, haunted vaults. “Mr Scabious!”

“Lost him again! No, there — camera twelve…” Gargle flipped wildly from camera to camera. Tinnily, through the cabin speakers, Tom’s voice was shouting, “ Mr Scabious! He’s not a ghost! I know where he comes from! ”

“I think he’s heading for the stern gallery.”

“Gotta get him quick!” wailed Skewer, rummaging through lockers for a gun, a net. “He’ll blow our cover! Uncle’ll kill us! I mean really, really kill us! Gods, I hate this! We’re burglars, not kidnappers! What’s Uncle thinking? We’ve never been asked to kidnap Drys before; not full-grown ones…”

“Uncle Knows Best,” Gargle reminded him.

“Oh, shut up!”

“I’ll go,” said Caul. The emergency had made him calm; he knew what had to be done, and he knew how he would do it.

“Not without me,” Skewer shouted. “I don’t trust you up there alone, Dry-lover!”

“All right.” Caul was already halfway to the hatch. “But let me handle him. He knows me, remember?”

“Mr Scabious?”

Tom burst out on to the stern gallery. The moon was up, hanging low in the sky behind the city, and the drive-wheel flung its reflection across the deckplates. The boy stood waiting there in the flash and flicker like a grey ghost.

“How are you doing, Tom?” he asked. He looked nervous and a little shy, but friendly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to meet like this.

Tom swallowed his yelp of surprise. “Who are you?” he said, backing away. “Those crab-things — you must have loads of them, creeping all over the city, watching everything. Why? Who are you?”

The boy held out his hand, a pleading gesture, begging Tom to stay. “My name’s Caul.”

Tom’s mouth felt dry. Bits of Pennyroyal’s stupid story clanged inside his head like an alarm bell; they murder the menfolk, the city is left just an empty shell, a husk, everyone dead…

“Don’t worry,” said Caul, grinning suddenly, as if he understood. “We’re only burglars, and now we’re going home. But you have to come with us. Uncle says.”

Several things happened all at once. Tom turned to run and a net of thin metal mesh, flung from some gantry overhead, dropped over him and brought him crashing down. At the same instant as he heard Caul shout, “Skew! No!” another voice yelled, “Axel?” and he looked up to see Scabious standing at the far end of the gallery, transfixed by the sight of the frail-looking fair-haired boy whom he took to be his son’s ghost. Then, in the shadows overhead, a gun went off with a cough and a sudden stab of blue flame, some kind of gas-pistol, ricochet yowling like a hurt dog. Scabious cursed and flung himself sideways into cover as a second boy leapt down on to the stern-gallery, bigger than Caul and with long dark hair whipping about his face. Together, he and Caul lifted Tom, who was still struggling to free himself from the net. They began to run, jostling their captive into the mouth of an underlit access alley.

It was very dark, and the floors throbbed and jarred with a steady rhythm. Thick ducts sprouted from the deckplates and rose into the shadows overhead like trees in a metal forest. Somewhere behind there was a dim glow of moonlight and the angry, hurt voice of Mr Scabious shouting, “You young — ! Come back here! Stop!”

“Mr Scabious!” Tom shouted, pushing his face into the cold cross-hatch of the net. “They’re parasites! Thieves! They’re-”

His captors dropped him unceremoniously on the deck. He rolled over and saw them crouching in a gap between two ducts. Caul’s long hands had gripped a section of the deckplate and he was lifting it; opening it; a camouflaged manhole.

“Stop!” shouted Scabious, close now, shadow flashing between the ducts astern. Caul’s friend swung his gas-pistol up and squeezed off another round, holing a duct which began to gush a great white geyser of steam.

“Tom!” yelled Scabious. “I’ll fetch help!”

“Mr Scabious!” Tom cried, but Scabious was gone; Tom could hear his voice shouting for aid in some neighbouring tubeway. The lid of the manhole was open, blue light shafting up through steam. Caul and the other stranger picked him up and swung him towards it. He had a glimpse of a short companionway leading down into a dim, blue-lit chamber, and then he was falling, like a sack of coal dropped into a cellar, landing hard on a hard floor. His captors came clattering down the ladder, and the hatch above him slammed shut.