Predator's gold

PART THREE
29

“ I want to tell you a little story,” said the voice. “Are you hanging comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

Caul opened his eyes. Rather, he opened one eye, for the other was swollen shut with bruises. What a beating the survivors of poor Wrasse’s crew had given him, as the Screw Worm carried him home in disgrace from Rogues’ Roost! When unconsciousness finally claimed him he had mistaken it for death, and welcomed it, and his last thought was that he was proud he’d helped Tom and Hester get away. Then he woke up back in Grimsby, and the beatings started again, and pretty soon he didn’t feel proud any more. He couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been, throwing his life away to save a pair of Drys.

Uncle reserved a special punishment for boys who really disappointed him. They dragged Caul to the limpet-pens and put a rope around his neck and attached the other end to the Screw Worm ’s docking crane and hoisted him up to slowly strangle. All through the day-shift, while he swung there, gasping for breath, the Lost Boys stood around jeering and shouting and pelting him with scraps of food and litter. And when the night-shift started and everyone returned to their sleeping quarters, the voice began. It was so faint and whispery that Caul thought at first he was imagining it, but it was real enough. It was Uncle’s voice, coming softly from the big speaker near his head.

“Still awake, Caul? Still alive? Young Sonar lasted nearly a week strung up like that. Remember?”

Caul sucked air in through his cut and swollen lips, through the spaces where his front teeth had been. Above him the rope creaked, slowly twisting so that the limpet-pen seemed to spin endlessly round him, the shadowy pools and the silent limpets, the painted figures looking down from the ceiling. He could hear Uncle’s wet, steady breathing coming from the speaker.

“When I was a young man,” Uncle said, “and I was a young man once, as young as you — although, unlike you, I got older — I lived aboard Arkangel. Stilton Kael, that was my name. The Kaels were a good family. Ran stores, hotels, salvage, the track-plate franchise. By the time I was eighteen I was in charge of the family salvage yard. Not that I saw salvage as my destiny, you understand. What I longed for was to be a poet, a writer of great epics, someone whose name would live for ever, like old whatsisname, you know, Thingy — the Greek bloke, blind… Funny how youthful dreams come to nothing. But you’d know all about that, young Caul.”

Caul swung and gasped, hands tied behind him, rope biting into his neck. Sometimes he blacked out, but when he came round the voice was still there, hissing its insistent story into his ears.

“Slaves were what kept the salvage racket running. I was in charge of whole gangs of ’em. Power of life or death, I had. And then one arrived, a girl, who turned my head. Beautiful, she was. A poet notices these things. Hair like a waterfall of India ink. Skin the colour of lamplight. Eyes like the Arctic night; black, but full of lights and mysteries. Get the picture, Caul? Of course, I’m only telling you this because you’ll be fish-food soon. I wouldn’t want my Lost Boys thinking I was ever soft enough to fall in love. Softness and love won’t do in a Lost Boy, Caul.”

Caul thought of Freya Rasmussen, and wondered where she was, and how her journey to America was going. For a moment he saw her so close and clear that he could almost feel her warmth, but Uncle’s voice went whispering on, shattering the dream.

“Anna, this slave’s name was. Anna Fang. It had a certain ring to it, for a poet. I kept her away from the hard, dangerous work, and got her good food, good clothes. I loved her, and she told me she loved me. I planned to free her and marry her, and not care what my family said about it. But it turned out my Anna was playing me for a fool the whole time. While I was mooning over her she was sneaking round my salvage yards, setting aside an old airship envelope here; a couple of engine pods there, getting my workers to fit them to a gondola on the pretext I’d ordered it, selling the presents I gave her to buy fuel and lifting-gas. And one day, while I was still trying to find something that rhymed with Fang and a word to describe the precise colour of her ears, they came to tell me she was gone. Built herself an airship out of all the bits she stole, see. And that was the end of my life in Arkangel. My family disowned me; the Direktor had me arrested for aiding a slave-escape, and I was banished on to the ice with nothing; nothing.”

Caul took little sips of air, but never quite enough to fill his lungs.

“Oh, it was character-building stuff, Caul. I took up with a gang of Snowmad scavengers who were bringing up salvage from the wreck of Grimsby. Killed ’em one by one. Nicked their submarine. Came down here. Started doing a spot of burgling: snapping up a few unconsidered trifles to replace all the things I’d lost. Snapped up information too, because I’d sworn by then that nobody would ever keep a secret from me again. So in a way, you could say she made me the man I am today, that witch Anna Fang.”

The name, repeated and repeated, found its way through the swirls of coloured lights that were exploding in Caul’s head. “Fang,” he tried to say.

“Exactly,” whispered Uncle. “I worked out what was going on at Rogues’ Roost a while back. All those pictures turning up, and the way they were so keen to find the Jenny Haniver. Either they’re setting up an Anna Fang museum, I told myself, or they’ve brought her back.”

Caul remembered the listening post, and the violent, confusing aftermath of the raid. A few cameras had still been functioning, and as their operators sought desperately for some trace of the burgling party they had caught glimpses of the Stalker Fang, and picked up the sound of its terrible dead voice whispering of war.

“That’s why I put so much effort into the Rogues’ Roost job,” Uncle said. “Just think of it! Burgling back the very person who’d led to my downfall all those years ago. My career turning back to its start, like a snake eating its tail! Poetic justice! I was going to bring that Stalkerette down here and reprogram her and set her slaving for me again, on and on, never resting, till the sun goes out and the world freezes over!

“And I’d’ve done it too. If you hadn’t blown them crab-bombs when you did, and made Wrasse take his lads in too soon, it would all have worked out. But you spoiled it, Caul. You went and ruined everything.”

“Please…” Caul managed to say, gathering enough breath with a great effort and shaping it carefully into a word. “Please…”

“Please what?” sneered Uncle. “Let you live? Let you die? Not after what you did, Caul, my lad. The boys have got to have someone to blame for what happened to Wrasse, and I’m damned if it’s going to be me. So you’ll hang there till you croak, and then you’ll hang there till the smell gets too bad for even the Lost Boys to stick, and then we’ll flush you out the water-door. Just to remind everybody that Uncle Knows Best.”

A long sigh, a fumble of fingers against the microphone, then that flicked-balloon sound of the speaker switching off, and even the background hiss of static died. The rope creaked, the room spun, the sea pressed against the walls and windowpanes of Grimsby, looking for ways in. Caul drifted through blackness, woke, drifted again.

In his high chamber, Uncle watched the dying boy’s face turn on a half-dozen screens, close-up, medium close-up, long shot. He stifled a yawn and turned away. Even all-seeing eyes have to sleep sometimes, although he didn’t like any but the most faithful of his boys to know about it. “Keep a good watch on him, Gargle,” he said to his young assistant, and climbed the stairs to his bedchamber. The bed was almost hidden now by heaps of papers, by folders and files and books and documents in tin containers. Uncle snuggled under the counterpane (gold-embroidered, stolen from the Margrave of Kodz) and went quickly to sleep.

In his dreams, which were always the same, he was young again; exiled and penniless and brokenhearted.

When Caul next came round it was still night, and the rope that was strangling him had started to jerk and twist. He fought for breath, making horrible wet rattling sounds, and someone just above him hissed, “Stay still!”

He opened his good eye and looked up. In the shadows above his head a knife shone, sawing through the thick, tarry strands of the rope.

“Hey!” he tried to say.

The last strand broke. He fell through darkness, landed hard on the hull of the Screw Worm and lay there gasping for breath with great helpless whooping sounds. He felt someone cut the cords on his wrists. Hands found his shoulders and rolled him over. Gargle was looking down at him.

Caul tried to speak, but his body was too busy breathing to bother with words.

“Pull yourself together,” Gargle said softly. “You’ve got to go.”

“Go?” croaked Caul. “But Uncle will see!”

Gargle shook his head. “Uncle’s asleep.”

“Uncle never sleeps!”

“That’s what you think. Anyway, all the crab-cams that were watching you have gone wrong. I arranged it.”

“But when he finds out what you’ve done-”

“He won’t.” Gargle’s grin flashed white. “I hid the bits of the crabs I busted in Skewer’s bunk. Uncle’ll think Skewer did it.”

“Skewer hates me! Uncle knows that!”

“No, he doesn’t. I’ve been telling Uncle how well the two of you got on aboard the Screw Worm. How Skew only took charge because he was worried about you. How he’d do anything for you. Uncle thinks you and Skew are thick as thieves.”

“Gods!” Caul said hoarsely, surprised at the newbie’s cunning and appalled at the thought of what was going to happen to Skewer.

“I couldn’t let Uncle kill you,” Gargle said. “You were good to me aboard Anchorage. And that’s where you belong, Caul. Take the Screw Worm and get back to Anchorage.”

Caul massaged his throat. All his years of training were screaming at him that stealing a limpet was the most terrible sin a Lost Boy could contemplate. On the other hand, it felt good to be alive, and every breath that he drew into his starved lungs made him more determined to stay that way.

“Why Anchorage?” he said. “You heard Tom and Pennyroyal talking. Anchorage is doomed. And I’d not be welcome there anyway. Not a burglar like me.”

“They’ll welcome you all right. When they find out how much they need you, they’ll soon forget you ever burgled them. You’ll want this.” Gargle shoved something into his hand; a long tube of thin metal. “No time to talk, Caul,” he said. “You don’t belong here. You never belonged here, really. Now get into that limpet and clear off.”

“Aren’t you coming too?”

“Me? Course not. I’m a Lost Boy. I’m going to stay here and make myself useful to Uncle. He’s an old man, Caul. His eyesight and his ears are going. He’s going to need someone he can trust to run his cameras and his archives. Give me a few years and I’ll be his right hand. A few more, and who knows? Maybe I’ll be running Grimsby myself.”

“That’d be good, Gargle,” said Caul, laughing painfully. “I’d like to see you in charge of Grimsby. Put a stop to all that bullying.”

“Put a stop to it?” Gargle wore a grin Caul hadn’t seen before, a cold, sharp grin he didn’t like at all. “Not likely! I’m going to be the biggest bully of them all! That’s what kept me going, Caul, all the time Skewer and the others were roughing me up in the Burglarium. Thinking about what I’d do to them when my turn came.”

Caul stared at him a moment longer, half inclined to believe that this was all just another dream. “Go,” Gargle said again, and opened the Screw Worm ’s hatch. Dream or not, there was no arguing with him; there was such a sureness in his voice that Caul felt like a newbie again, being ordered about by some confident, older boy. He almost dropped the thing Gargle had given him, but Gargle caught it and thrust it at him again. “Go, and stay gone, and good luck!”

Caul took it, and pulled himself weakly to the hatch and then inside and down the ladder, wondering how this battered tube of japanned tin was meant to help him.