Predator's gold

33

Just after sunrise a cheer ran through the engine district as the wreckage of the stern-wheel was finally cut away and the city began to move again, swinging south by south-west. Yet with the wheel gone and just the cats to drag it forward Anchorage could only manage a crippled crawl, making barely ten miles per hour. Already in the breaks between the snow showers Arkangel could be seen looming in the east like a polluted mountain.

Freya stood with Mr Scabious on the stern-gallery. The engine master had a pink sticking-plaster on his forehead where a Huntsman’s bullet had grazed him, but he was the only casualty of the battle to retake the engine district: the Huntsmen had quickly seen that they were outnumbered, and fled on to the ice to await rescue by Arkangel’s survey-suburbs.

“Only one hope for us,” muttered Scabious, as he and Freya watched the low sunlight kindle reflections in the windows of the predator city. “If we run far enough south the ice’ll grow thinner and they may break off the chase.”

“But if the ice is thinner won’t we go through it too?”

Scabious nodded. “There’s always that danger. And if we’re to keep ahead we can’t afford to bother with survey-teams and scout-parties; we’ll have to keep going as fast as we can, and hope for the best. America or bust, eh?”

“Yes,” said Freya. And then, feeling that there was no point in lying any more, “No. Mr Scabious, it was all a lie. Pennyroyal had never been to America. He invented the whole thing. That’s why he shot Tom, and took the Jenny Haniver. ”

“Oh, aye?” said Scabious, turning to look down at her.

Freya waited for something more, but it didn’t come. “Well, is that it?” she asked. “Just ‘oh, aye’? Aren’t you going to tell me what a little fool I’ve been, for believing in Pennyroyal?”

Scabious smiled. “To tell you the truth, Freya, I had my doubts about that fellow from the first. Didn’t ring true somehow.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“Because it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” said the engine master. “I liked your idea of crossing the High Ice. What was this city before we started west? A moving ruin; the only people who hadn’t left were the ones too full up with sorrow to think of anywhere to go. We were more like ghosts than human beings. And now look at us. Look at yourself. The journey’s shaken us up and turned us about and we’re alive again.”

“Probably not for very long.”

Scabious shrugged. “Even so. And you never know; perhaps we’ll find a way. If we can only stay out of the jaws of that great monster.”

They stood in silence, side by side, and studied the pursuing city. It seemed to grow darker and closer as they watched.

“I must confess,” said Scabious, “I’d never imagined Pennyroyal would go as far as shooting people. How is poor young Tom?”

He lay on the bed like a marble statue, the fading scars and bruises of his fight with the Stalker-birds standing out starkly on his white face. His hand when Hester held it was cold, and only the faint fluttering pulse told her he was still alive.

“I’m sorry, Hester.” Windolene Pye spoke in a whisper, as if anything louder might attract the attention of the Goddess of Death to this makeshift sickroom in the Winter Palace. All night and all day the lady navigator had been tending to the wounded, and especially to Tom, who was most badly hurt. She looked old and weary and defeated. “I’ve done all I can, but the bullet is lodged against his heart. I daren’t try to extract it, not with the city lurching about like this.”

Hester nodded, staring at Tom’s shoulder. She could not bring herself to look at his face, and Miss Pye had pulled a coverlet over the rest of him for modesty’s sake, but the arm and the shoulder nearest to Hester were bare. It was a pale, angular shoulder, slightly freckled, and it seemed to her to be the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She touched it, and stroked his arm, watching the soft down of hair spring back as her fingers passed, feeling the muscles and tendons strong under the skin, the faint tick of a pulse at his blue wrist.

Tom stirred at her touch, half opening his eyes. “Hester?” he murmured. “He took the Jenny. Sorry.”

“It’s all right, Tom, it’s all right, I don’t care about the ship, only you,” said Hester, pulling his hand against her face.

When they came to find her after the battle and told her that Tom was shot and dying she had thought there must be some mistake. Now she understood that it was not so. This was her punishment for delivering Freya’s city into the jaws of Arkangel. She must sit in this room and watch Tom die. It was far, far worse than her own death could have been.

“Tom,” she whispered.

“He’s unconscious again, poor dear,” said one of the women who had been helping Miss Pye. She reached across to brush Tom’s brow with cool water, and someone brought a chair for Hester. “Maybe he’s better off out of it,” she heard another of the nurses whisper.

Outside the long windows it was already growing dark. The lights of Arkangel sprawled on the horizon.

The predator city was closer still by the time the sun rose again. When it wasn’t snowing you could make out individual buildings; factories and dismantling-mills mainly, the endless prisons of the city’s slaves, and a great spike-turreted temple to the wolf-god squatting on the topmost tier. As the predator’s shadow groped across the ice towards Anchorage a spotter-ship came buzzing down to see what had befallen Masgard and his Huntsmen, but after hovering for a moment above the burnt wreck of the Clear Air Turbulence it turned tail and sped back to its eyrie. No more came near Anchorage that day. The Direktor of Arkangel was in mourning for his son, and his council saw no sense in wasting yet more ships to secure a prize that would be theirs by sundown anyway. The city flexed its jaws, giving the watchers on Anchorage’s stern an unforgettable glimpse of the vast furnaces and dismantling-engines that awaited them.

“We should get on the radio and remind them what became of their Huntsmen!” vowed Smew, sitting in on an impromptu meeting of the Steering Committee that afternoon. “We’ll tell them that the same thing will happen to them if they don’t back off.”

Freya didn’t answer. She was trying to pay attention to the discussion, but her mind kept drifting away to the sickroom. She wondered if Tom was still alive. She would have liked to go and sit with him, but Miss Pye had told her that Hester was always there, and Freya was still afraid of the scarred girl — even more so, after what she had done to the Huntsmen. Why could it not have been Hester who was shot? Why had it happened to Tom?

“I think that might just make things worse, Smew,” Scabious said, after waiting a decent time for the margravine to give her opinion. “We don’t want to make them any angrier.”

A deep boom, like cannon-fire, rattled the glass in the windows. Everyone looked up. “They’re shooting at us!” cried Miss Pye, reaching for Scabious’s hand.

“They wouldn’t do that!” cried Freya. “Not even Arkangel…”

The windows were blurred with frost. Freya pulled on her furs and hurried out on to the balcony, the others close behind. From there they could see how near the predator was. The hiss of its runners as it raced across the ice seemed to fill the sky, making Freya wonder if this was the first time cities had come to break the silence of this unmapped plain. Then came that great boom again, and she knew that it was not gunfire but the sound everyone who lived aboard an ice city dreaded; the crack of sea-ice breaking.

“Oh, gods!” muttered Smew.

“I should be in the Wheelhouse,” said Miss Pye.

“I should be with my engines,” murmured Scabious. But there was no time, and neither of them moved; there was nothing now that anyone could do but stand and watch.

“Oh no!” Freya heard herself saying. “Oh no, no, no!”

Another boom, sharper this time, like thunder. She stared up at the cliff-face of Arkangel, trying to see if the predator city had heard the noises too and applied its ice-brakes. If anything it was still gaining, gambling everything on a last, mad dash. She held tight to the balcony railings and prayed to the Ice Gods. She wasn’t sure that she really believed in them any more, but who else could help her now? “Make us swift, Lord and Lady,” she begged, “but don’t let us go through the ice!”

The next boom was louder, and this time Freya saw the crack open, a dark grin widening a quarter-mile to starboard. Anchorage lurched and veered away. Freya imagined the helmsman trying desperately to steer a course across a jigsaw of breaking ice. Another lurch, and glassware fell and smashed somewhere inside the palace. The booms and cracks came very close together now, and from all sides.

Arkangel, sensing that it could not stay on this course much further, put on one final burst of speed. Its jaws swung wide, wide, and the sun glittered on banks of revolving steel teeth. Freya saw workers scurrying down stairways towards the predator’s gut, and fur-clad onlookers gathering on high balconies much like her own to watch the catch. And then, before the jaws could close on Anchorage’s tail, the whole edifice seemed to shiver and slow. A sheet of white spray lifted into the air, like a curtain of glass beads being drawn between the two cities.

The spray crashed across Anchorage as freezing rain. Arkangel was trying frantically to reverse, but the ice beneath it was fragmenting and its drive-wheels could not gain a purchase. Slowly, like a mountain falling, it tipped forward, and its jaws and the forward parts of its lowest tier bowed down into a widening zigzag of black water. Geysers of steam burst up as the cold sea sluiced through its furnaces, and it let out a great bellow, like some huge, wounded creature cheated of its prey.

But Anchorage was in trouble too, and no one aboard had time to celebrate the predator’s defeat. The city was tilting steeply to larboard, tracks screaming as they struggled to keep a hold on the ice, gouts of spray thrown up on all sides. Freya had never felt movements like this, and did not know what they meant, but she could guess. She grabbed Miss Pye’s hand, and Smew’s, and Miss Pye was already clinging on to Mr Scabious, and they crouched there together, waiting for the gurgling black waters to come swirling up the stairways and drown them.

And waiting. And waiting. Slowly the light faded, but it was just night drawing on. Snow touched their faces.

“I’d better see if I can make it down to the engine district,” said Scabious slightly bashfully, disentangling himself and hurrying away. After a while Freya felt the engines shut down. The city’s movements seemed to have eased a little, but the floor was still tilted out of true, and there was a still a faint, strange motion in the fabric of the palace.

Smew and Miss Pye went back inside, out of the cold, but Freya stayed on the balcony. Night and snow veiled the wreck of Arkangel, but she could still see its lights and hear the howl of its engines as it tried to drag itself back on to firmer ice. What had befallen Anchorage she could not tell; there was still this weird wallowing motion, and even without engines the city seemed to be moving steadily away from the trapped predator.

A burly shape hurried across the palace gardens, and Freya leaned out over the balcony’s brim and shouted, “Mr Aakiuq?”

He looked up at her, the fur on the hood of his parka making a white O around his dark face. “Freya? Are you all right?”

She nodded. “What’s happening?”

Aakiuq cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We’re adrift! We must have reached the edge of the ice, and the bit we were on broke free.”

Freya stared out into the dark beyond the city’s edge. She could see nothing, but at least the strange rise and fall of the deckplates made sense now. Anchorage was waterborne, balanced precariously on its raft of ice like an overweight sunbather drifting out to sea on a lilo. So much for that thick plain of sea-ice stretching right into the heart of the Dead Continent! “Pennyroyal!” she shouted at the empty sky. “The gods will punish you for bringing us to this!”

But the gods did not punish Professor Pennyroyal. He had used some of his stolen gold to buy fuel from a tanker pulling clear of Arkangel, and he was already far away, steering east by the broad scar the predator city had cut across the ice-fields. He was not a very good aviator, but he was lucky, and the weather was not too rough with him. He met with a small ice city east of Greenland, had the Jenny Haniver repainted and renamed, and hired a pretty aviatrix named Kewpie Quinterval to fly her south. Within a few weeks he was back in Brighton, regaling his friends with tales of his adventure in the frozen north.

By then, even the Direktor of Arkangel had been forced to admit that his city could not be saved. Already many of the rich had fled, pouring away to eastward in a stream of air-yachts and charter-ships (the five widows Blinkoe made enough money selling berths aboard the Temporary Blip to buy themselves a charming villa on the upper tiers of Jaegerstadt Ulm). The slaves who had seized control of the under-decks in all the chaos were leaving too, flying out on stolen freighters or taking to the ice in hijacked survey-sleds and drone-suburbs. At last a general order to evacuate was given, and by midwinter the city stood empty, a great dark carcass that slowly whitened and lost its shape beneath a thickening mantle of snow.

In the deep of that winter a few hardy Snowmad salvage-towns visited the wreck, draining its fuel tanks and landing boarding parties to harvest the valuables its fleeing citizens had left behind. Spring brought still more, and flights of scavenger-airships like carrion birds, but by then the ice beneath the wreck was growing weaker. In high summer, lit by the weird twilight of the midnight sun, the predator city stirred again, shivering amid a great cannonade of splintering ice, and set out on its final journey, down through the shifting levels of the sea to the cold, strange world below.

That summer there was news from Shan Guo of a coup inside the Anti-Traction League; the High Council overthrown and replaced by a party called the Green Storm, whose forces were led by a bronze-masked Stalker. No one in the Hunting Ground paid much attention. What did it matter to them if a few Anti-Tractionists were squabbling among themselves? Aboard Paris and Manchester and Prague, Traktiongrad and Gorky and Peripatetiapolis, life went on as normal. Everybody was talking about the fall of Arkangel, and simply everybody was reading Nimrod B. Pennyroyal’s astonishing new book.