Predator's gold

30

Freya woke early and lay for a while in the dark, feeling her city shudder beneath her as it went bucketing over scab-ice and pressure ridges. Anchorage was far to the west of Greenland now, heading south over unknown ice and the humped, rocky backs of frozen islands. Several times Mr Scabious had had to hoist up the drive-wheel and let the cats haul the city across solid, snow-covered rock and riven glaciers. Now sea-ice stretched ahead of them again, reaching unbroken towards the horizon. Miss Pye thought it was Hudson’s Bay, the great ice-plain which Professor Pennyroyal claimed would carry them into the heart of the Dead Continent, almost to the borders of his green places. But would it be strong enough to bear Anchorage’s weight?

If only Professor Pennyroyal could tell us for sure, thought Freya, kicking off her covers and padding to the window. But Pennyroyal had come this way on foot, and the desciptions in his book were really surprisingly vague. Miss Pye and Mr Scabious had tried to make him go into more detail, but he had just grown sulky and rude, and after a while he had stopped coming to Steering Committee meetings altogether. In fact, ever since Hester flew off in the Jenny Haniver, the good professor had been acting very oddly indeed.

A breath of cold blew in Freya’s face as she parted the curtains to look out at the ice. Strange, to think that this was the far side of the world! Stranger still to remember that soon they would be in the new hunting ground, and the views from her windows would all be green; grass and bushes and trees. The idea still scared her a little. Would the Ice Gods rule in lands where snow only lay for a few months of each year? Or would Anchorage need new gods?

A wedge of light yellowed the snow outside the Wheelhouse as a door opened and someone slipped out. Freya wiped away the fog her breath had made and put her face close to the glass. There was no mistaking that silhouette; a portly figure in heated robes and an outsize fur turban, creeping guiltily along Rasmussen Prospekt.

Even by Professor Pennyroyal’s recent standards this was strange behaviour. Freya dressed quickly, pulling on the simple, fleece-lined working clothes that were her usual outfit these days, and pocketing a torch. She crept out of the palace without bothering to wake Smew. Pennyroyal was nowhere to be seen, but his deep, wandering footprints gaped in the snow, showing her the way he had gone.

A few months ago Freya would not have dared to venture out of the palace precincts alone, but she had changed a lot during the long journey around the top of Greenland. At first, the shock of losing Tom had almost plunged her back into her old ways; staying in her quarters, seeing nobody, issuing her orders through Scabious or Smew. But she had soon grown bored, cooped up in the Winter Palace. She itched to know what was happening outside. And so she ventured out, and threw herself into the life of her city in ways she never had before. She sat gossiping with off-duty workers who ate their lunches in the heated pavilions on the edge of the upper city, watching the ice go by. She learned from Windolene Pye how to wash herself, and clean her teeth, and she had cut her hair short. She joined the patrols which Scabious sent down on to the skid-supports each morning to check for parasites; she drove cargo-machines in the engine district; she had even gone out on to the ice ahead of Anchorage with a startled and rather embarrassed survey-team. She had thrown away all her family’s traditions with a feeling of relief, like getting rid of old, ill-fitting clothes.

And now she was sneaking through the shadows on the starboard side of Rasmussen Prospekt, spying on her own chief navigator!

Ahead of her the professor’s gaudy turban made a sudden blotch of colour against the dingy, ice-caked buildings as he slipped between the gates of the air-harbour.

Freya ran after him, dashing from one patch of shadow to the next until she threw herself down in the shelter of the customs booth just inside the harbour gates. Wreathed in the mist of her own hot breath she looked around, thinking for a moment that she had lost her quarry among these snowy hangars and docking-pans. No — there he was! The bright blob of his turban bobbed under a streetlamp on the far side of the harbour, then blinked out as he stepped into the shadows at the entrance to Aakiuq’s warehouse.

Freya crossed the harbour, tracing the jittery path of the explorer’s footsteps through the snow. The warehouse door stood open. She paused a moment, peering nervously into the darkness inside and remembering the parasite-boys who had used the dark as a cloak to haunt and plunder her city… But there was no danger now; the torch that she could see moving about in the far reaches of the warehouse did not belong to some malevolent ice-pirate, just to an odd explorer.

She could hear his voice muttering in the dusty silence. Who was he talking to? Himself? Windolene Pye had told her that he’d drained the chief navigator’s wine-cellar and now stole liquor from the empty restaurants in the Ultima Arcade. Maybe he was drunk, and raving. She moved closer, easing her way between mountains of old engine-parts.

“Pennyroyal calling anyone!” said his voice, low but desperate-sounding. “Pennyroyal calling anyone! Come in, please! Please!”

He crouched in a pool of green light cast by the glowing dials of an ancient radio set that he must somehow have managed to get working. Headphones were clamped over his ears, and his hand trembled slightly as it clutched the microphone. “Is there anybody out there? Please! I’ll pay you anything! Just get me off this city of fools!”

“Professor Pennyroyal?” said Freya loudly.

“Warrgh! Clio! Poskitt! Knickers!” yelped the professor. He leapt up, and there was a sliding clatter as the lead of his headphones tugged an avalanche of old wireless components down around his feet. The light from the dials went out, and a few valves burst with little showers of sparks, like disappointing fireworks. Freya pulled out her torch and switched it on. Caught in the dusty beam, Pennyroyal’s face looked pallid and sweaty, fear changing to a simpering smile as he squinted past the light and made out Freya.

“Your Radiance?”

Almost nobody bothered calling her that these days. Even Miss Pye and Smew called her “Freya”. How out of touch the professor had become!

“I’m glad to see you’re keeping busy, Professor,” she said. “Does Mr Aakiuq know you’re snooping about in his warehouse?”

“Snooping, Your Radiance?” Pennyroyal looked shocked. “A Pennyroyal never snoops! No, no, no… I was merely — I didn’t want to trouble Mr Aakiuq…”

Freya’s torch flickered, and she remembered that there probably weren’t that many batteries left aboard Anchorage. She found a switch and turned on one of the argon-lamps which swung from the rusty rafters overhead. Pennyroyal blinked in the sudden brightness. He looked terrible; pasty-skinned, red-eyed, a fuzz of white stubble blurring the neat edges of his beard.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked.

“To anyone. No one.”

“And why do you want them to get you off this city of fools? I thought you were coming with us? I thought you were keen to return to the green valleys of America and the beautiful Zip Code.”

She would not have thought it possible for him to get any paler, but he did. “Ah!” he said. “Um.”

Sometimes, during the past few weeks, a horrible thought had come to Freya. It came at odd moments — when she was in the shower, or lying awake at three in the morning, or eating dinner with Miss Pye and Mr Scabious, and she had never spoken of it to anyone else, although she was sure that they must have thought it too. Usually, when she felt it slithering into her mind, she tried to think about something else, because — well, it was silly, wasn’t it?

Only it wasn’t silly. It was the truth.

“You don’t know the way to America, do you?” she asked, trying to keep the trembly sound out of her voice.

“Um.”

“We’ve come all this way, following your advice and your book, and you don’t know how to find your green valleys again. Or maybe there aren’t even any to find? Have you ever been to America, Professor?”

“How dare you?” Pennyroyal started to say, and then, as if realizing that there was no more mileage in lies, sighed and shook his head. “No. No, I made it all up.” He sank down on an upturned engine-cowling, miserable and defeated. “I never went anywhere, Your Radiance. I just read other people’s books, and looked at pictures, and made it all up. I wrote America the Beautiful whilst lounging by a hotel swimming pool on the top tier of Paris, in the company of a delectable young person named Peaches Zanzibar. Took care to set it all somewhere nice and remote, of course. I never dreamed that anyone would actually want to go there.”

“So why didn’t you just admit it was all a fib?” asked Freya. “When I appointed you chief navigator, why didn’t you tell me it was all lies?”

“And pass up the chance of all that money, and posh apartments, and the chief navigator’s wine cellar? I’m only human, Freya. Besides, if word got back to the Hunting Ground, I’d have been a laughing stock! I just thought I’d leave with Tom and Hester.”

“That’s why you were so upset when Hester took the Jenny Haniver! ”

“Exactly! She cut off my escape route! I had no way off this city, and I couldn’t admit what I’d done, because you’d have killed me.”

“I would not!”

“Well, your people would. So I’ve been using these old radios to try and call for help; hoped there might be a lost air-trader or an exploration vessel within range, someone who could take me off.”

It was remarkable how sorry he could feel for himself, whilst not worrying at all about the city he had led to its doom. Freya shivered with anger. “You — You — You are dismissed, Professor Pennyroyal! You are no longer my chief navigator! You will hand back your ceremonial compasses and the keys to the Wheelhouse immediately!”

It didn’t make her feel any better. She collapsed on a heap of old gaskets that creaked and shifted under her weight. How was she going to break this news to Miss Pye and Mr Scabious and everybody else? That they were stuck on the wrong side of the world, with nothing ahead of them but a dead continent and not enough fuel to ever get home again, and that it was she who had brought them here! She had told everyone this voyage west was what the Ice Gods wanted, when all along it was only what she had wanted. If only she had not been taken in by Pennyroyal and his stupid book!

“What am I going to do?” she asked. “What am I going to do?”

Someone shouted something, out in the streets behind the air-harbour. Pennyroyal looked up. There was a whirring, purring noise coming from somewhere. It was very faint, a muttering that rose and fell, sounding for all the world like -

“Aero-engines!” Pennyroyal leapt up, knocking over more heaps of spares in his haste to reach the door. “Thank Clio! We’re saved!”

Freya ran after him, wiping away tears, tugging up her cold-mask. Outside, the dark had faded to a steely twilight. Pennyroyal was pounding away from her across the harbour, stopping once to turn and point as something slid across the sky beyond the harbour office. Freya squinted into the wind and saw a cluster of lights, a creamy trail of exhaust smoke smeared on the darkness. “Airship!” Pennyroyal yelled, doing a mad little dance in the middle of a snowy docking-pan. “Someone heard my message! We’re saved! Saved!”

Freya ran past him, trying to keep the machine in sight. The Aakiuqs were standing outside the harbour office, looking up. “An airship, right out here?” she heard the harbour master say. “Who can it be?”

“Did the Ice Gods tell you they were coming, Freya dear?” asked Mrs Aakiuq.

A man called Lemuel Quaanik ran up, snowshoes flapping from his big feet. He was one of the surveyors with whom Freya had worked, and so he did not feel too much in awe of her to speak. “Radiance? I seen that ship before. That’s Piotr Masgard’s rig, the Clear Air Turbulence! ”

“The Huntsmen of Arkangel!” gasped Mrs Aakiuq.

“Here?” cried Freya. “It can’t be! Arkangel would never hunt west of Greenland. There’s nothing here for it to eat.”

“There’s us,” said Mr Quaanik.

The Clear Air Turbulence circled Anchorage, then hung off the stern like a lone wolf shadowing its prey. Freya ran to the Wheelhouse and up to the bridge. Windolene Pye was already there, still in her nightgown with her long, greying hair undone. “It’s the Huntsmen, Freya!” she said. “How did they find us? How in all the gods’ names did they know where we were?”

“Pennyroyal,” Freya realized. “Professor Pennyroyal and his stupid broadcasts…”

“They’re signalling,” called Mr Umiak, leaning out of the radio room. “They’re ordering us to cut our engines.”

Freya glanced sternward. In this half-light the ice was pale and faintly luminous. She could see the scumbled track of her city’s stern-wheel stretching away towards the north-east, fading into mist. There was no sign of pursuit, just that black ship, shifting and trembling as it rode the city’s slipstream.

“Shall I answer them, Freya?”

“No! Pretend we haven’t heard.”

That didn’t stop Piotr Masgard for long. The Clear Air Turbulence slid closer until it was hanging abreast of the Wheelhouse, and Freya stared out at it through the glass wall and saw the aviators bent over their controls on the flight deck and a gunner grinning at her from a little armoured blister slung under the engine pods. She saw a hatch open, and Piotr Masgard himself lean out, shouting something through a bull-horn.

Miss Pye opened a ventilator, and the big voice came booming in at them.

“Congratulations, people of Anchorage! Your city has been chosen as prey by great Arkangel! The Scourge of the North is a day’s journey from here, and gaining fast. Shut down your engines and save us a chase, and you will be treated well.”

“They can’t eat us!” said Miss Pye. “Not now! Oh, it really is too bad!”

Freya felt a spreading numbness, as if she’d fallen into icy water. Miss Pye was looking at her, along with everyone else on the bridge, all waiting for the Gods of the Ice to speak through her and tell them what to do. She wondered if she should tell them the truth. It might be better to be eaten by Arkangel than to run on endlessly over this uncharted ice towards a continent that really was dead, after all. Then she thought of all that she had heard about Arkangel, and the way it treated the people it ate, and she thought, No, no, anything is better than that. I don’t care if we fall through the ice, or starve in dead America, they shall not have us!

“Shut down your engines!” bellowed Masgard.

Freya looked east. If Arkangel had cut across the spine of Greenland it might be as close as Masgard claimed, but Anchorage could still outrun it. The predator city would not want to venture far on to this uncharted ice-plain. That was why they had resorted to sending out their huntsmen…

She had no loud-hailer to reply with, so she took a chinograph pencil from the chart table and wrote in big letters on the back of a map, NO! “Miss Pye,” she said, “please tell Mr Scabious, ‘Full Speed Ahead’.”

Miss Pye stepped to the speaking tubes. Freya pressed her message to the glass. She saw Masgard strain to read it, and the way his face changed when he understood. He went back inside his gondola and slammed the hatch shut and the airship veered away.

“What can they do, after all?” said one of the navigators. “They won’t attack us, for they’d risk damaging the very things they want to eat us for.”

“I bet Arkangel is much more than a day away!” declared Miss Pye. “That great lumbering urbivore! They must be desperate, or they wouldn’t have to send out spoilt toffs to play at air-pirates. Well, Freya, you called their bluff all right. We shall outrun them easily!”

And the Clear Air Turbulence dropped down into the sleet of powdered ice behind the city and fired a flight of rockets into the larboard supports of the stern-wheel. Smoke, sparks, flames spewed from Anchorage’s stern; the axle gave way and the wheel fell sideways and slewed across the ice, still attached by a tangle of drive-chains and twisted stanchions at its starboard end, an anchor of wreckage that brought the city skidding and shuddering to a standstill.

“Quickly!” shouted Freya, feeling panic rise in her as the lights of the airship lifted out of the fading cloud of ice astern. “Get us moving again! Lower the cats…”

Miss Pye was at the speaking tubes, listening to the garbled reports from below. “Oh, Freya, we can’t; the wheel is too heavy to drag, it must be cut away, and Soren says that will take hours!”

“But we don’t have hours!” screamed Freya, and then realized that they didn’t even have minutes. She clung to Miss Pye, and together they stared towards the air-harbour. The Clear Air Turbulence landed there just long enough to vomit out a score of dark, armoured figures who went hurrying down the stairways to secure the engine district. Then she was aloft again, hanging in the sky above the Wheelhouse. The glass walls gave way under the boots of more men, swinging down on ropes from her gondola. They crashed on to the bridge in a spray of glittering fragments, a blur of screams, shouts, swords bright in the lamplight, the chart table overturned. Freya had lost Miss Pye. She ran for the lift, but someone was there ahead of her, fur and armour and a grinning face and big, gloved hands reaching out to catch her, and all she could think was, All this way! We’ve come all this way, only to be eaten!