Predator's Gold (13 page)

For the Jenny Haniver was almost air-worthy again: her rudders and engine-pods repaired, her envelope patched, her gas-cells filled; she awaited only a new coat of paint and a few small repairs to the gondola electrics. It would be a horrible irony if she were to be eaten before she could take off.

At last the telephone clat ered. Mrs Aakiuq ran to answer it and came back beaming.

“That was Mrs Umiak! She’s heard from the Wheelhouse, and they say we’ve escaped Wolverinehampton. We shall run on just a little longer and then anchor and let the tempest blow over. Apparently it was dear Professor Pennyroyal who advised Her Radiance to keep going despite the storm. That good gentleman! We must all give thanks to the Ice Gods, who sent him here. And Hester, dear, I am to tell you that your young man is safe. He has returned to the Winter Palace.” A little later Tom himself called to say much the same things. His voice sounded tinny and unnatural as it came filtering through the tangled yards of wiring all the way from the palace. He might as well have been speaking from some other dimension. He and Hester exchanged little flat bits of news. “I wish I was with you,” she said, putting her face very near the mouthpiece and speaking low, for fear Mrs Aakiuq might overhear.

“What? Pardon? No, we’d best stay put. Freya told me people sometimes freeze to death in the streets in storms like this. When Smew drove us back here from the Wheelhouse the bug almost blew away!”

“Freya now, is it?”

“What?”

“The Jenny’s nearly ready. We can leave by the end of the week.”

“Oh! Good!” She could hear the hesitation in his voice, and behind him other voices talking happily, as if there were a lot of people at the palace, all celebrating. “But maybe we can stay a bit longer,” he said hopefully. “I’d like to stay aboard until we get to America, and then, well, we’ll see…”

Hester smiled and sniffed and tried to speak but couldn’t for a moment. He sounded so sweet, and so full of love for this place, that it seemed unfair to be angry with him, or to point out that she’d rather go anywhere but the Dead Continent.

“Hester?” he said.

“I love you, Tom.”

“I can’t hear you very well.”

“It’s all right. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you as soon as the storm ends.” But the storm showed no sign of ending. Anchorage slid slowly westward for a few more hours, keen to put as much ice as possible between itself and Wolverinehampton, but more and more cautious. There were not only polynyas and thin ice to be wary of now. The city was nearing the north-eastern fringes of Greenland, where mountains jutted through the ice-sheet to rip the bottoms out of unsuspecting towns. Mr Scabious cut power by half, then half again. Searchlights probed ahead, like long white fingers trying to part the curtains of snow, and survey teams were sent out on motorized sleds to sound the ice. Miss Pye checked and rechecked her charts and prayed for a glimpse of the stars to confirm her position.

At last, with the navigator’s prayers unanswered, Anchorage was forced to halt.

A lightless day limped by. Hester sat by the Aakiuqs’ stove and looked at the photos of their dead children propped on the household shrine and the collection of souvenir plates on the wall, commemorating the births, marriages and jubilees of the House of Rasmussen. All the faces looked like Freya, who must even now be sitting snugly with Tom in the Winter Palace. They were probably drinking mulled wine and talking about history and their favourite books.

Tears filled Hester’s eye. She excused herself before the Aakiuqs started asking what was wrong, and ran upstairs to the box-room where they had made up a bed for her. Why keep on with something that makes me feel this bad? she asked herself. It would be easy to put an end to it. She could go and find Tom when the storm quietened down and say, It’s over, stop here with your Snow Queen if you want, see if I care…

She wouldn’t, though. He was the only good thing she had ever had. It was different for Freya and Tom; they were nice and sweet-natured and good-looking and would have many, many chances to find love. For Hester there would never be anyone else.

“I wish Wolverinehampton had eaten us,” she said to herself, drifting into headachey sleep. At least in the slave-holds Tom would have needed her again.

When she woke it was midnight, and the storm had stopped.

Hester pulled on her mittens, cold-mask and outdoor clothes and went quickly downstairs. Faint snoring came from the Aakiuqs’ bedroom as she crept past the open door. She slid the kitchen heat-lock open and stepped out into the cold. The moon was up, lying on the southern horizon like a lost coin, and by its light Hester could see that all the buildings of the upper tier were covered in a glaze of ice, teased out by the wind into wild, trailing spines and filaments. Icicles dangled from overhead cables and the gantries and cranes of the air-harbour, tapping together in the faint breeze to fill the city with an eerie music; the only sound to break the perfect silence of the snow.

She wanted Tom. She wanted to share this cold beauty with him. Alone with him in these deserted streets, she would be able to tell him how she felt. She ran and ran, scrambling in her borrowed snowshoes over drifts that were sometimes more than shoulder deep even in the lee of the buildings, while the cold burned through her mask and sawed at the back of her throat. Up the stairways from the lower city came sudden gusts of laughter and snatches of music as the engine district celebrated Anchorage’s deliverance. Dizzy with cold, Hester climbed the long ramp to the Winter Palace.

When she had tugged at the bell-pull for about five minutes Smew opened the door.

“I’m sorry,” Hester said, pushing straight through the heat-lock and letting a blast of cold air into the hallway. “I know it’s late. I’ve got to see Tom. I know my way, so you needn’t bother…”

“He’s not in his room,” said Smew grumpily, wrapping his nightgown tighter and fussing with the wheels of the heat-lock. “He’s in the Wunderkammer, with Her Radiance.”

“At this hour?”

Smew nodded sullenly. “Her Radiance does not wish to be disturbed.”

“Well she’s going to get disturbed, whether she wishes it or not,” muttered Hester, shoving him aside and setting off through the corridors of the palace at a run. As she went, she tried to tell herself that it was all perfectly innocent. Tom and the Rasmussen girl had probably just gone to peer at her unrivalled collection of weird old garbage, and lost track of the time. She would find him deep in some conversation about 23rd Century ceramics or the rune-stones of the Raffia Hat Era…

Light spilled from the open doorway of the Wunderkammer, and Hester slowed as she approached it. It would be best to stride straight in with a cheery “hello”, but she wasn’t the cheery sort; she was more the lurking in dark corners sort. She found a dark corner, behind one of the Stalker-skeletons, and lurked. She could hear Tom and Freya talking, but not clearly enough to make out what about. Tom laughed, and her heart seemed to open and shut. There had been a time, after the fall of London, when she had been the only person who could make him laugh.

She slid out of her hiding place and crept into the Wunderkammer. Tom and Freya were over on the far side, half-a-dozen dusty cabinets between them and Hester.

Through the many sheets of thick glass she saw them vaguely, rippling like reflections in a distorting mirror. They were standing very close together, and their voices had grown soft. Hester opened her mouth to speak, longing to make some noise that would distract them from each other, but nothing came out. And as she stood there watching, Freya reached towards Tom and they were suddenly in one another’s arms, and kissing. Still she could make no sound, only stand and stare at Freya’s white fingers moving in Tom’s dark hair, his hands on her shoulders.

She had not felt such a fierce urge to kill somebody since she hunted Valentine. She tensed, ready to snatch one of the old weapons down from the wall and hack and hack at those two, those two, at Tom – at Tom! Appalled, she turned and flung herself blindly out of the museum. There was a heat-lock in the cloister, and she pushed out through it into the frigid night.

She flung herself down into a drift and lay there, helpless, sobbing. More dreadful than the kiss itself was the fierce thing that it had stirred inside her. How could she even have thought of harming Tom? It wasn’t his fault! It was that girl, that girl, she had bewitched him; he had never even looked at another girl until this podgy margravine came along, Hester was sure of it. She imagined killing Freya. But what good would that do? Tom would hate her then, and besides, it wasn’t just Freya, it was this whole city that had won his heart. It was over. He was lost to her. She would lie here in the cold and die, and he would find her frozen body when daylight came, and be sorry…

But she had spent too long surviving to die as easily as that. After a few moments she lifted herself on hands and knees and tried to calm her ragged, painful gasps.

The cold was in her throat, and gnawing at her lips and the tips of her ears, and an idea was coiled in her skull like a red snake.

It was an idea so terrible that for a little while she could not believe it was really she who had thought of it. She rubbed frost from a window and stared at her own dim reflection, wondering. Could it work? Did she dare? But she had no choice but to try; it was her only hope. She tugged up her hood, pulled her cold-mask into place and set off through snow and moonlight to the air-harbour.

It had been a strange day for Tom, trapped in the Winter Palace with the blizzard battering at the windows and Hester lost on the other side of town. A strange day, and a stranger evening. He had been sitting in the library, trying to concentrate on another of Pennyroyal’s books, when Smew appeared in full chamberlain’s garb to tell him that the margravine wanted him to join her for dinner.

From the look on Smew’s face Tom could tell that this invitation was a huge honour.

Formal robes had been found for him, new-laundered and neatly pressed. “They belonged to the old chamberlain,” Smew told him, helping him into them. “They’re about your size, I reckon.”

Tom had never worn robes before, and when he glanced in the mirror he saw someone who looked handsome and sophisticated and nothing at all like him. He felt very nervous, following Smew towards the margravine’s private dining room.

The wind seemed to be shoving at the shutters with less urgency than before, so perhaps the storm was lifting. He would eat as quickly as he could, and then go and find Hester.

But it wasn’t really possible to eat quickly; not a formal dinner like this, with Smew in footman’s gear bringing in dish after dish and then hurrying back to the kitchens to put on his chef’s hat and cook up more, or running to the wine cellars for another bottle of vintage red from the vineyard city of Bordeaux-Mobile. And after a few courses Tom found that he didn’t want to make his excuses and go out into the dying blizzard, for Freya was such good company, and it felt so nice to be alone with her. There was something shiny about her tonight, as if she thought she had done a very daring thing by asking him to eat with her, and she spoke more easily than before about her family and Anchorage’s history, right back to her long-ago ancestress Dolly Rasmussen, a high school girl who had had visions of the Sixty Minute War before it started and had led her little band of followers out of the first Anchorage just before it was vaporized.

Tom watched her talk, and noticed that she had tried to do something really impressive with her hair, and that she was wearing the most glittery and least moth-eaten of her gowns. Had she gone to all that trouble for him? The idea made him feel thrilled and guilty; he looked away from her, and met Smew’s disapproving gaze as he cleared the dessert things and poured coffee.

“Will there be anything else, Your Radiance?”

Freya drank, watching Tom over the rim of her cup. “No thank you, Smew. You can turn in. I thought Tom and I might go down to the Wunderkammer.”

“Certainly, Your Radiance. I shall accompany you.”

Freya looked up sharply at him. “There’s no need, Smew. You can go.” Tom sensed the servant’s unease. He felt a little uneasy himself, but maybe that was just the margravine’s wine going to his head. He said, “Well, perhaps another day…”

“No, Tom,” said Freya, reaching out to touch his hand with her fingertips. “Now.

Tonight. Listen, the storm is over. The Wunderkammer will be beautiful by moonlight…”

The Wunderkammer was beautiful by moonlight, but not as beautiful as Freya. As she led him into the little museum, Tom understood why the people of Anchorage loved and followed her. If only Hester could be more like her! He kept finding himself making excuses for Hester these days, explaining that she was only the way she was because of the awful things that had happened to her, but Freya had been through awful things too, and she wasn’t all bitter and angry.

The moon gazed down through snow-veiled glass, transforming the familiar artefacts with its light. The sheet of foil shone inside its case like a window into another world, and when Freya turned in its dim reflected light to face him, Tom knew that she wanted him to kiss her. It was as if some strange gravity was drawing their faces together, and as their lips touched Freya made a soft little contented noise. She pushed closer to him and his arms went round her without his meaning them to. She had a slightly sweaty, unwashed odour, which seemed strange at first, and then very sweet. Her gown crinkled under his hands, and her mouth tasted of cinnamon.

Then something – a faint noise from the doorway, a breath of cold air from the corridor beyond – made her glance up, and Tom forced himself to push her gently away.

“What was that?” asked Freya, whispering. “I thought I heard someone…” Glad of an excuse to move away from her warmth and her luring smell, Tom backed to the door. “Nobody. Just the heat-ducts, I expect. They’re always rattling and scratching.”