Infernal Devices (3 page)

"Let's bring her aboard," said Gargle. "I'd like to get to know Tom Natsworthy's daughter."

Wren, who had been calming down, grew panicky again. "I have to go home!" she squeaked, trying to edge away, but Gargle slipped his arm through hers.

"Just come aboard a moment," he said, smiling pleasantly. "I'd like to talk. Explain why I'm lurking in your lake like a thief. Well, I
am
a thief, of course, but I think you should hear my side of the story before you make your decision."

"What decision?" asked Wren.

"The decision about whether or not you tell your parents

and your friends what you've seen here tonight."

Wren thought she trusted him, but she wasn't sure. She had never had to think about trusting people before. Confused by Gargle's smile, she looked past him down the beach. The water between the headlands was shining blue. She thought at first that it was just the afterimage of the flashlight on her eyes, but then the blue grew brighter, and brighter still, and she saw that it was a light shining up through the water from below. Something huge broke the surface about thirty feet offshore.

Behind Caul's shack in the engine district, the limpet that had brought him to Anchorage lay rusting. It was called the
Screw Worm,
and Wren and her friends had often played hide-and-seek between its crook-kneed legs when they were children. She had always thought it a comical sort of thing, with its big flat feet and its windows at the front like boggly eyes. She had never imagined how smoothly a limpet would move, how sleek its curved hull would look, moonlight sliding off it with the water as it waded to the beach.

This limpet was smaller than the
Screw Worm,
and its body was flatter, more like a tick's than a spider's. Wren thought it was painted with jagged camouflage patterns, but it was hard to be sure in the moonlight. Through the bulging windows she could see a small boy working the controls, his face distorted by the water draining down the glass. He brought the machine to a stop at the water's edge, and a ramp came down out of its belly with a shush of hydraulics and grated against the shingle there.

"The limpet
Autolycus,"
said Gargle, gesturing for Wren

to go aboard. "Pride of the Lost Boy fleet. Come aboard, please. Please. I promise we won't submerge until we've put you ashore."

"What if more Drys come?" asked the other Lost Boy, who wasn't a boy, Wren noticed, but a girl, pretty and sullen-looking. "What if Caul raises the alarm?"

"Caul gave us his promise," said Gargle. "That's good enough for me."

The girl glared at Wren, not convinced. The short black jerkin that she wore hung open, and there was a gun stuffed through her belt.
don't have a choice,
thought Wren.
I'll have to trust Gargle.
And once she had decided that, it was an easy thing to walk up the ramp into the cold blue belly of the limpet. After all, if Gargle had wanted to murder her, he could have done it just as easily on the beach.

She was taken aft into what she guessed was Gargle's private cabin, where hangings hid the dull steel walls and there were books and trinkets laid about. A joss stick smoldered, masking the mildew-and-metal smell of the limpet with another smell that made Wren think of sophisticated people and far-off places. She sat down in a chair while Gargle settled himself on the bunk. The girl waited at the bulkhead door, still glaring. The little boy Wren had seen through the window stood behind her, watching Wren with wide, astonished eyes until Gargle said, "Back to your post, Fishcake."

"But ..."

"Now!"

The boy scampered off. Gargle gave Wren a wry smile. "I'm sorry about that. Fishcake's a newbie, ten years old and

fresh from the Burglarium. He's never seen a Dry before, except on the crab-cam screens. And you such a pretty one too."

Wren blushed and looked down at the floor, where her boots were leaking muddy water over Gargle's rich Stamboul rugs. The Burglarium was where the Lost Boys were trained, she remembered. They were kidnapped from the underdecks of raft towns when they were too young to even know it, taken down to the sunken city of Grimsby, and trained in all the arts of thieving. And crab-cams were the robot cameras they used to spy on their victims. Miss Freya had made her pupils do a whole project on the Lost Boys. At the time, Wren had thought it a pointless thing to have to learn about.

Gargle turned to the girl at the door. "Remora, our guest looks chilly. Fetch her some hot chocolate, won't you?"

"I didn't know there were any Lost Girls," said Wren when the girl had gone.

"A lot's changed in Grimsby since Caul was last there," Gargle replied. "Just between the two of us, Wren, I pretty much run the old place now. I managed to get rid of a lot of the rough, bullying boys who surrounded Uncle, and I sort of persuaded him to start bringing girls down as well as boys. It was doing us no good living without girls. They're a civilizing influence."

Wren looked toward the door. She could see the girl called Remora clattering pans about in some sort of kitchen. She didn't look to Wren like a civilizing influence. "So is she your wife?" she asked, and then, not wanting to seem too prim, "Or your girlfriend or something?"

In the kitchen, Remora looked up sharply. Gargle said,

24

"Mora? No! The fact is, some of the girls have turned out to be better thieves than the boys. Remora's one of the best burglars we've got. Just as young Fishcake is the best mechanic, for all his tender years. I wanted only the best with me on this mission, see, Wren. There's something in Anchorage that I need very badly. I saw it all those years ago, when I was here with Caul aboard the
Screw Worm,
but I didn't steal it then because I didn't think it was of any use."

"What is it?" asked Wren.

Gargle did not answer her at once but waited, studying her face, as if he wanted to be quite sure that she could be trusted with what he was about to tell her. Wren liked that. He was not treating her like a child, the way most people still did. "A young woman," he'd called her, and that was how he was speaking to her.

"I hate this," he said at last, leaning toward her, looking intently into her eyes. "You have to believe me. I hate coming in secret like this. I would rather be open, steer the
Autolycus
into your harbor and say, 'Here we are, your friends from Grimsby, come to ask your help.' If Caul had prospered here, the way I hoped he would, that might have been possible. But as it is, who'd trust us? We're Lost Boys. Burglars. They'd never believe that all we want from you is one book, one single book from your margravine's library."

Remora came back into the cabin and handed Wren a tin mug, full of hot, delicious chocolate. "Thank you," said Wren, glad of the distraction, because she didn't want Gargle to see how shocked she was by what he had just said. Miss Freya's library was one of Wren's favorite places; a treasure cave filled with thousands and thousands of wonderful old books.

It had been on the upper floors of the Winter Palace once, but nobody lived on those floors now and Miss Freya had said it was a waste heating them just for the books' sake, so the library had been moved downstairs....

"That's why you can't find what you want!" she said suddenly. "The books have all been rearranged since you were last here!"

Gargle nodded, smiling at her admiringly. "Quite right," he said. "It could take our crab-cams weeks to find the right one, and we don't have weeks to waste. So I was wondering, Miss Natsworthy, if you'd help us."

Wren had just taken a slurp of chocolate. Anchorage's supplies of chocolate had run out years ago, and she had forgotten how good it tasted, but when Gargle asked for her help she almost choked on it. "Me?" she spluttered. "I'm not a burglar...."

"I wouldn't ask you to become one," said Gargle. "But your father's a clever man. Friendly with the margravine, from what I remember. I bet you could find out from him where the book we want might be. Just find it and tell me, and I'll send Remora in to do the rest. It's called the Tin Book."

Wren had been about to refuse, but the fact that she had never heard of the book he named made her hesitate. She'd been expecting him to ask about one of Anchorage's treasures: the great illuminated
Acts of the Ice Gods,
or Wormwold's
Historia Anchoragia.
She said, "Who on earth would want a whole book about tin?"

Gargle laughed, as if she'd made a joke that he liked. "It's

not
about
tin," he said. "That's what it's made of. Sheets of metal."

Wren shook her head. She'd never seen anything like that. "Why do you want it?" she asked.

"Because we're burglars, and I've learned that it's valuable," said Gargle.

"It must be! To come all this way ..."

"There are people who collect such things: old books and things. We can trade it for stuff we need." Gargle hesitated, still watching her, and then said earnestly, "Please, Wren, just ask your father. Always nosing about in museums and libraries, he was, when I knew him. He might know where the Tin Book is."

Wren thought about it as she drank the rest of the chocolate. If he had been asking her for the illuminated
Acts,
or for some treasured classic, she would have said no at once. But a book made of metal, one that she'd never even heard of ... it couldn't be very important, could it? It would probably never be missed. And Gargle seemed to want it very badly.

"I'll ask," she said doubtfully.

"Thank you!" Gargle took her hands in his. His hands were warm, and his eyes were rather lovely. Wren thought how nice it would be to tell Tildy that she'd spent the small hours of the night drinking cocoa in the cabin of a dashing underwater pirate, and then remembered that she would never be able to tell Tildy or anybody else about Gargle and the
Autolycus.
That made it even nicer somehow. She had never had a proper secret before.

"I'll meet you up in the trees on the hilltop around six

tomorrow," Gargle said. "Is that all right? You can get away?"

"That's suppertime. I'd be missed. My mum ..."

"Noon, then. Noon, or just after."

"All right..."

"And for now--would you like Remora to walk you home?"

"I'll find my way," said Wren. "I often walk about in the dark."

"We'll make a Lost Girl of you yet," said Gargle, and laughed to show her he was only joking. He stood up, and she stood up too, and they moved through the limpet's passageways toward the exit ramp, the newbie Fishcake peeking out at them from the control cabin. Outside, the night was cold and the moon shone and the water was lapping against the shore as if nothing had happened. Wren waved and said good-bye and waved again, and then walked quickly up the beach and through the trees.

Gargle watched until she was out of sight. The girl Remora came and stood beside him, and slipped her hand into his. "You trust her?" she asked.

"Don't know. Maybe. It's worth a try. We haven't time to hang about here searching for the thing ourselves, and we can't do much with the crab-cams in this dump. These Drys remember us. They'll soon put two and two together if they start hearing the patter of tiny magnetic feet inside their air ducts. But don't worry--I'll tell Fishcake to set a couple on watch around Wren's house, so we'll know if she squeals to her people about us."

"And what if she does?"

"Then we'll kill them all," said Gargle. "And I'll let you do

Wren yourself, with your pretty little knife." And he kissed her, and they turned and went back aboard.

But Wren, knowing none of this, walked home with a giddy tumble of thoughts inside her head, half guilt, half pleasure, feeling as if she'd grown up more in the past few hours than in all the fifteen years that had gone before.

***

THE NEXT DAY DAWNED fair, the sky above the lake harebell blue, the water clear as glass, each of the islands of Vineland sitting neat and still upon its own reflection. Wren, exhausted by her adventures in the night, slept late, but outside her window, Anchorage was waking up. Woodsmoke rose from the chimneys of the city's thirty inhabited houses, and fishermen called out good morning to each other as they made their way down the stairways to the mooring beach.

On the north side of the lake rose a brindled mountain, far higher than the Dead Hills to the south. Its lower slopes were green with scrub and stands of pine and steep meadows where wildflowers grew, and in one of these meadows a group of deer was grazing. There were many deer in the woods on the green shore, and a few had even swum across to set up home upon the wilder islands. People had spent a

lot of time debating how they had come here: whether they had survived since the fall of the old American Empire, or come down from the frozen country to the north, or made their way here from some larger pocket of green much farther west. But all Hester Natsworthy cared about, as she drew back her bowstring in the shelter of the trees downwind, was how much meat was on them.

The bow made a quick, soft sound. The deer leaped into the air and came down running, bounding uphill into the shelter of the scrub--all except the largest doe, who fell dead with Hester's arrow in her heart and her thin legs kicking and kicking. Hester walked up the hill and pulled the arrow free, cleaning the point on a handful of dry grass before she replaced it in the quiver on her back. The blood was very bright in the sunlight. She dipped her finger in the wound and smeared some on her forehead, muttering her prayer to the Goddess of the Hunt so that the doe's ghost would not come bothering her. Then she heaved the carcass onto her shoulder and started back down the hill to her boat.

Her fellow Vinelanders seldom hunted deer. They said it was because the fish and birds of the lake were meat enough, but Hester suspected it was because the deer's pretty fur coats and big, dark eyes touched their soft hearts and spoiled their aim. Hester's heart was not soft, and hunting was what she was best at. She enjoyed the stillness and solitude that she found in the morning woods, and sometimes she enjoyed being away from Wren.