Predator's gold

14

Freya was trying to sort out a guest list for dinner. It was a difficult business, for by long tradition only citizens of the highest rank could dine with the margravine, and these days that meant just Mr Scabious, who was nobody’s idea of good company. The arrival of Professor Pennyroyal had cheered things up no end, of course — it was quite acceptable for the city’s chief navigator to sit at table with her — but even the professor’s fascinating stories were beginning to wear a little thin, and he had a tendency to drink too much.

What she really wanted (although she tried not to admit it to herself as she sat there at her desk in the study) was to invite Tom. Just Tom, alone, so that he could gaze at her in the candlelight and tell her how beautiful she was; she was sure he wanted to. The trouble was, he was only a common aviator. And even if she broke with all tradition and asked him, he would bring his nasty girlfriend, and that wasn’t the sort of evening she wanted at all.

She slumped back in her chair with a sigh. Portraits of earlier margravines gazed down kindly at her from the study walls, and she wondered what they would have done in a situation like this. But of course, there had never been a situation like this before. For them the ancient traditions of the city had always worked, providing a simple, infallible guide to what could and could not be done — their lives had ticked along like clockwork. Just my luck to be left in charge when the spring breaks, thought Freya gloomily. Just my luck to be left with a load of rules and traditions that don’t quite fit any more.

But she knew that if she took off the armour of tradition she would have to face all sorts of new problems. The people who had stayed aboard her city after the plague had done so only because they revered the margravine. If Freya stopped behaving like a margravine, would they still be prepared to go along with her plans?

She went back to her guest list, and had just finished doodling a small dog in the bottom left corner when Smew burst in, then burst out again and gave the traditional triple knock.

“You may enter, Chamberlain.”

He came in again, breathless, his hat back to front. “Sorry, Your Radiance. Bad news from the Wheelhouse, Radiance. Predator, dead ahead.”

By the time she reached the bridge the weather had closed in completely and nothing could be seen outside but the swarming snow.

“Well?” she asked, stepping out of the elevator before Smew could announce her.

Windolene Pye bobbed a frightened little curtsey. “Oh, Light of the Ice Fields! I am almost sure it’s Wolverinehampton! I saw those three metal tower blocks behind its jaws quite clearly, just as the storm struck. It must have been lying in wait up here, hoping to snap up whaling-towns on the Greenland run…”

“What is Wolverinehampton?” asked Freya, wishing she had paid more attention to all her expensive tutors.

“Here, Your Radiance…”

She had not noticed Tom until he spoke. Now, seeing him, she felt a little warm glow inside her. He held out a dog-eared book and said, “I looked it up in Cade’s Almanack of Traction Cities. ”

She took the book from him, smiling, but her smile faded as she opened it at the page he had marked and saw Ms Cade’s diagram and the legend underneath:

WOLVERINEHAMPTON: An Anglish-speaking suburb which migrated north in 768 TE, to become one of the most feared small predators on the High Ice. Its enormous jaws, and its tradition of staffing its engine districts with shamefully ill-treated slaves, make it a town best avoided.

The deck beneath Freya’s feet juddered and shook. She snapped the book shut, imagining Wolverinehampton’s great jaws already closing on her city — but it was only the Scabious Spheres shutting down. Anchorage slowed, and in the eerie quiet she could hear sleet pecking at the glass walls.

“What’s happening?” asked Tom. “Is something wrong with the engines?”

“We’re stopping,” said Windolene Pye. “Because of the storm.”

“But there’s a predator out there!”

“I know, Tom. It’s terrible timing. But we always stop and anchor when a really big storm blows in. It’s too dangerous not to. The wind on the High Ice can gust up to five hundred miles per hour. It’s been known to overturn small cities. Poor old Skraelingshavn was flipped on to its back like a beetle in the winter of ’69.”

“We could lower the cats,” suggested Freya.

“Cats?” cried Pennyroyal. “What cats? I have allergies…”

“Her Radiance is referring to our caterpillar tracks, Professor,” Miss Pye explained. “They would provide extra traction, but it might not be enough, not in this storm.”

The wind howled agreement, and the glass walls bowed inwards, creaking.

“What about this Wolverinetonham place?” asked Pennyroyal, still flopped in his seat. “They’ll be stopping too, will they?”

Everyone looked at Windolene Pye. She shook her head. “I’m sorry to say they won’t, Professor Pennyroyal. They are lower and heavier than we. They should be able to run right through this storm.”

“Yikes!” whimpered Pennyroyal. “Then we’ll be eaten for sure! They must have got a bearing on our position before the weather closed in! They’ll just follow their noses and gollop! ”

Tipsy as he was, the explorer seemed to Tom to be the only person on the bridge talking sense. “We can’t just sit here and wait to get eaten!” he agreed.

Miss Pye glanced at the whirling needles of her windspeed indicators. “Anchorage has never moved in a wind this strong…”

“Then maybe it’s time to start!” Tom shouted. He turned to Freya. “Talk to Scabious! Tell him to turn out the lights, alter course and run on as fast as he can through the storm. It would be better to capsize than get eaten, wouldn’t it?”

“How dare you talk to Her Radiance like that!” cried Smew, but Freya felt touched and pleased that Tom should care so much about her city. Still, there was tradition to consider. She said, “I’m not sure if I can, Tom. No margravine has ever ordered such a thing before.”

“But no margravine has ever set out for America, either,” Tom pointed out.

Behind him, Pennyroyal heaved himself upright. Before Smew or any of the others could stop him he shoved Tom aside and lunged at Freya, grabbing her by her plump shoulders and shaking her until all her jewellery rattled. “Just do as Tim says!” he shouted. “Do as he says, you silly little ninny, before we all end up as slaves in the belly of Wolverteeningham!”

“Oh, Professor Pennyroyal!” shrieked Miss Pye.

“Get your filthy paws off Her Radiance!” shouted Smew, drawing his sword and levelling it at the explorer’s knees.

Freya shook herself free, startled, indignant, furious, wiping Pennyroyal’s spittle from her face. No one had ever talked to her in that way before, and for a moment she thought, This is what happens when I break with custom and appoint a commoner to high office! Then she remembered Wolverinehampton, racing towards her city through the storm, its massive jaws probably open by now, the furnaces of its gut alight. She turned to her navigators and said, “We will do as Tom says! Don’t stand there staring! Alert Mr Scabious! Change course! Full speed ahead!”

The city’s anchors tugged free of the snow-swept ice, and the strange turbines in the hearts of the Scabious Spheres began to whirl again. The fat banks of caterpillar tracks which jutted from Anchorage’s skirts on hydraulic arms jerked into motion amid a spray of vapour and anti-freeze. They were lowered until the studded tracks gripped the ice. Wobbling slightly as the wind hammered at its superstructure, Anchorage swung on to a new course. If the Ice Gods were kind Wolverinehampton would not detect the manoeuvre — but what Wolverinehampton’s own course was, what it was doing out there in the swirling murk, only the Ice Gods knew, for the storm had settled in now, a wild arctic tempest that ripped shutters and roof panels from the abandoned buildings of the upper tier and sent them whirling high into the sky, while Anchorage put out its lights and ran on blindly into the blind dark.

Caul was filling his burglar’s bag with machine parts from an empty workshop in the engine district when the city changed course. The sudden movement almost made him overbalance. He clutched his bag tight against him so the booty inside would not rattle and crept outside and quickly along the maze of now-familiar streets towards the heart of the district and the pit where the Scabious Spheres were housed. Crouching between two empty fuel-hoppers, he heard the workers shouting to each other as they hurried to their stations, and slowly understood what was happening. He hunched himself deeper into the shadows, wondering what to do.

He knew what he should do; Uncle’s rules were very clear. When a host city was in danger of being eaten, any limpet attached to it must decouple and escape at once. It was part of the big rule: Don’t Get Caught. If even one limpet were to be found, and the cities of the north learned how they had been preyed on and robbed these many years, they would start posting guards and taking security measures. The life the Lost Boys led would become impossible.

And yet Caul did not start back towards the Screw Worm. He didn’t want to leave Anchorage; not yet, and not like this. He tried telling himself it was because this city was his patch: there were still good pickings to be had, and no stupid predator-suburb was going to snatch that from him. No way was he going to take his first command home early and defeated, with her holds barely half full!

But that wasn’t the real reason, and he knew it in the depths of his mind even as the surface seethed with anger at the impertinence of Wolverinehampton.

Caul had a secret. It was a secret so deep and dark that he could never begin to tell Skewer or Gargle about it. The terrible truth was, he liked the people he was burgling. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. He cared about Windolene Pye, and sympathized with her secret fear that she was not good enough to steer the city to America. He worried about Mr Scabious, and was moved by the courage of Smew and the Aakiuqs and the men and women who staffed the engine district and the livestock and algae farms. He felt drawn to Tom, because of his kindness and the life he had led in the sky. (It seemed to Caul that if Uncle hadn’t taken him to be a Lost Boy he might have been a lot like Tom himself.)

As for Freya, he had no word to describe the mixture of new feelings she stirred up in him.

The howl of the Scabious Spheres rose in pitch. The city lurched and jittered, heavy objects crashing to the deck and rolling somewhere in the streets behind Caul’s hiding place, but he knew he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t abandon these people, now that he had come to know them so well. He would take his chances and wait out the chase. Skewer and Gargle wouldn’t decouple without him, and even if they could see him hiding here, they couldn’t know what he was thinking. He’d tell them he hadn’t dared try to get back to the Screw Worm through all this chaos. It would be all right. Anchorage would survive. He trusted Miss Pye and Scabious and Freya to see it through.

Tom had often watched town-hunts from the observation decks on London’s second tier, cheering his city on as it raced after small industrials and heavy, lumbering trade-towns, but he had never experienced a chase from the prey’s point of view before, and he was not enjoying it. He wished he had a job to do, like Windolene Pye and her staff, who were busily laying out more charts and weighting the curly corners down with coffee mugs. They had been drinking endless mugs of coffee since the chase began, and kept darting prayerful glances at the statuettes of the Ice Gods on the Wheelhouse shrine.

“Why are they all so nervous?” Tom asked, turning to Freya, who stood nearby with just as little to do as him. “I mean, the wind’s not that bad, is it? It couldn’t really flip us over?”

Freya pursed her lips and nodded. She knew her city better than Tom did, and she could feel the uneasy quiver that ran through the deckplates as the gale slid its fingers under the hull and tried to lift it. And it wasn’t only the wind they had to fear. “Most of the High Ice is safe,” she said. “Most of the ice cap is a thousand feet thick, and in some places it goes right down to the ocean floor. But there are patches where it’s thinner. And then there are the polynyas — like lakes of unfrozen water in the midst of all the ice — and the Ice Circles, which are smaller, but could still turn us over if one of the skids plunged in. Polynyas shouldn’t be too hard to avoid, because they’re more or less permanent and they’ll be marked on Miss Pye’s charts. But the circles just appear on the ice at random.”

Tom remembered the photos in the Wunderkammer. “What causes them?”

“Nobody knows,” said Freya. “Currents in the ice, maybe, or the vibration from passing cities. You often see them where a city has passed by. They’re very odd. Perfectly round, with smooth edges. The Snowmads say they’re made by ghosts, cutting fishing holes.” She laughed, glad to be talking about the mysteries of the High Ice instead of thinking about the all-too-real predator out there in the storm. “There are all sorts of tales about the High Ice. Like the ghost crabs — giant spider-crab things, as big as icebergs, that people have seen scuttling about in the light of the aurora. I used to have nightmares about them when I was little…”

She moved closer to Tom, until her arm brushed the sleeve of his tunic. She felt very daring. It had been scary at first, going against the old ways, but now that they were racing through the storm, defying both Wolverinehampton and all the traditions of Anchorage, it felt more than scary. Exhilarating, that was the word. She was glad Tom was here with her. If they survived this, she decided, she would break another tradition and invite him to dine with her, all alone.

“Tom…” she said.

“Look out!” shouted Tom. “Miss Pye! What’s that?”

Beyond the dim outlines of Anchorage’s roofs a row of lights blazed suddenly through the darkness, then gigantic claw-toothed wheels and the bright windows of buildings, all rushing past at right-angles to Anchorage’s new course. It was the stern of Wolverinehampton. The heavy wheels spun into reverse as its lookouts sighted Anchorage, but the suburb’s massive jaws made it slow to turn, and already the storm was clamping down again, thick, furious snow hiding the predator from its prey.

“Thank Quirke!” Tom whispered, and laughed with relief. Freya squeezed his fingers, and he found that in the shock of seeing the predator they had reached for each other, and her warm, plump hand was nestled in his. He let go quickly, embarrassed. He had not thought of Hester since the chase began.

Miss Pye ordered course-change after course-change, steering the city deep into the labyrinths of the blizzard. An hour passed, and then another, and slowly a feeling of reprieve seeped into the Wheelhouse. Wolverinehampton would not waste more fuel trying to follow them through the night, and by the time dawn came the storm would have erased their tracks. Miss Pye hugged her colleagues, then the helmsman, then Tom. “We’ve done it!” she said. “We’ve escaped!” Freya was beaming. Professor Pennyroyal, sensing that the danger had passed, had fallen asleep in a corner.

Tom returned the navigator’s hug and laughed, happy to be alive and very, very happy to be aboard this city, among these good and friendly people. He would talk to Hester as soon as the storm was over, and make her see that there was no need for them to go flying off as soon as the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage’s engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home.

In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton’s air-quay Widgery Blinkoe’s five wives turned five unbecoming shades of green. “Ooooh!” they groaned, clutching their delicate stomachs as the suburb tilted and veered, angrily scouring the blizzard for its vanished prey.

“I’ve never been aboard such a horrid little town!”

“Does this hotel have no shock absorbers at all?”

“What were you thinking of, husband, setting us down here?”

“You should have known you’d find no trace of the Jenny Haniver aboard a mere suburb!”

“I wish I’d flown away with dear Professor Pennyroyal. He was madly in love with me, you know.”

“I wish I’d listened to my mother!”

“I wish we were back in Arkangel!”

Widgery Blinkoe carefully stoppered his ears against their complaints with small balls of wax, but he, too, was sick and scared and missing his home comforts. Bother and blast the Green Storm, for sending him on this wild goose chase! For weeks now he’d been trailing across the Ice Wastes like some Snowmad sky-tramp, setting down on every town he saw to ask for news of the Jenny Haniver. People he had questioned in Novaya Nizhni said they had seen her fly off northwards after wrecking the Green Storm’s fighters, but there had not been a sighting since. It was as if the wretched airship had simply vanished!

Dimly, he wondered about the city Wolverinehampton had just tried to snaffle; Anchorage. If he took off when the storm ended he could probably spot the place and catch up with it… But what was the point? He was sure those two young aviators could not have brought their old ship this far west. Besides, he was beginning to think that he would rather face the assassins of the Green Storm than tell his wives they had to land at yet another dingy little harbour.

It was definitely time for a change of plan.

He took out his earplugs, just in time to hear wife number three say plaintively, “…and now they’ve lost their catch, the ruffians who run this town will grow angry and wild! We shall be murdered, and it will all be Blinkoe’s fault!”

“Nonsense, wives!” boomed Blinkoe, standing up to show them that he was the head of the household and that a breakneck chase through a blizzard aboard a savage suburb couldn’t upset him. “Nobody is going to be murdered! As soon as this storm ends we shall fetch the Temporary Blip out of her hangar and fly home to Arkangel. I shall sell details of a few of the towns we’ve touched at to the Huntsmen, so our trip won’t leave us out of pocket, and as for the Green Storm… Well, all manner of aviators pass through the Arkangel airexchange. I shall question them all. One of them must know something about the Jenny Haniver. ”