Predator's Gold (14 page)

“Yes, I know; it’s an awful bore. I’m sure they never used to before we came to the High Ice…” She came close again, holding out her hands. “Tom…”

“I must go,” he said. “It’s late. I’m sorry. Thank you.” Hurrying up the stairs to his room, he tried to ignore the warm cinnamon taste of Freya in his mouth and think of Hester. Poor Het! She had sounded so lonely when he spoke to her on the telephone. He should go to her. He would just lie down for a bit and gather his thoughts, and then he would pull on cold-weather gear and head down to the harbour. How soft this bed was! He closed his eyes, and felt the room revolving. Too much wine. It was only the wine that had made him kiss Freya; it was Hester he was in love with. So why could he not stop thinking about Freya? “You idiot!” he said aloud.

Above his head the heat-duct rattled, as if something inside it was agreeing, but Tom didn’t notice, for he had already drifted off to sleep.

Hester was not the only one who had overseen Tom and Freya’s kiss. Caul, sitting alone in the forward cabin of the limpet while Skewer and Gargle went off housebreaking, had been flipping idly through the spy-channels when he was brought up short by the sight of them embracing. “Tom, you fool,” he whispered.

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return. And what could be kinder than going out with Hester Shaw, making that ugly, useless girl feel loved and wanted? To Caul it seemed almost saintly. It was horrible to see Tom kissing Freya like that, betraying Hester, betraying himself, ready to throw everything away.

And maybe, too, he was a little jealous.

He glimpsed a blurred face in the open doorway behind the couple; zoomed in just in time to recognize Hester as she turned and ran. When he pulled back the other two had broken away from each other; they looked uncertainly towards the door, talking in low, embarrassed voices. “It’s late. I must go.”

“Oh, Hester!” He flipped away from the Wunderkammer, checking other channels, searching for her. He didn’t know why it should upset him so, the thought of her in pain, but it did. Perhaps it was partly envy, and the knowledge that if she did something stupid Tom would end up with Freya. Whatever it was, it made his hands shake as he fumbled with the controls.

There was no sign of her on the other palace cameras. He moved a spare into a position on the roof and swung it around, checking the grounds and the surrounding streets. Her blundering feet had jot ed a long, illegible sentence on the white page of Rasmussen Prospekt. Caul leaned closer to his screens, perspiring slightly as he started scuttling cameras into positions at the air-harbour. Where was she?

16

NIGHT FLIGHT

The Aakiuqs were still asleep. Hester crept back to her room and took the money Pennyroyal had given her at Airhaven from its hiding place under her mattress, then went straight to the Jenny’s hangar. Scrabbling away the snow that had drifted against the door, she dragged it open. She lit the working-lamps. The Jenny Haniver’s red bulk loomed over her, ladders propped against half-painted engine pods, raw new panels covering the holes in the gondola like fresh skin over a recent wound. She went aboard and turned the heaters on. Then, leaving everything to warm up, she trudged back out into the snow, heading for the fuel-tanks.

Up in the hangar’s shadowy dome, something scuttled and clanked.

It was not hard to guess what she was planning. Caul thumped the control desk in front of him and groaned, “Hester, no! He was drunk! He didn’t mean it!” He perched on the brink of his chair, feeling like some impotent god who could watch events unfold but was powerless to alter them.

Except that he could. If Tom knew what was happening, Caul was sure he would go straight to the harbour, reason with Hester, apologize, make her understand. Caul had seen couples making up before, and he felt sure this silly rift need not be final –

if only Tom knew.

But the only person who could tell him was Caul.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself angrily, pulling his hands back from the camera controls. “What do a couple of Drys mean to you? Nothing! Not worth risking the Screw Worm for. Not worth disobeying Uncle.”

He reached for the controls again. He couldn’t help it. He had a responsibilty.

He switched to the camera inside Tom’s bedchamber at the palace and made it rattle its legs against the inside of the duct it was hiding in. Tom just lay there, fast asleep with his stupid mouth open and no idea that his life was falling apart.

Leave it, thought Caul. You tried, you couldn’t wake him, it’s over. It doesn’t matter.

He checked on Hester, then sent a camera racing through the heat-ducts of the upper city villa where Skewer and Gargle were working, peering into each room in turn until he found them in the kitchen, slipping silver-plate into their carry-alls.

The cam tapped the inside of the duct; three taps, then a pause, then another three.

Return at once. The blurred figures on the screen leapt up, recognizing the code, clownish in their clumsy haste to stow the last of the loot and get back to the limpet.

Caul hesitated for one moment longer, cursing his soft heart and reminding himself what Uncle would do to him if word of this got out. Then he ran, scrabbling up the ladder, through the hatchway, out into the silent city.

She had been afraid that the fuel-tanks would be frozen, but she had reckoned without the ingenuity of eight hundred years of Anchorage harbour masters, who had found ways of adapting to the arctic cold. The fuel was mixed with anti-freeze, and the pump controls were housed in a heated building next to the main tank. She unhooked the fuel hose and heaved the big nozzle up on to her shoulder, stomping back to the hangar with it uncoiling across the snow behind her. Inside the hangar she attached the nozzle to a valve in the airship’s underside, then returned to the pump-house to switch on. The hose began to shudder slightly as the fuel started gurgling through it. While the tanks were filling she went aboard and started to make ready. The gondola lights weren’t yet working, but she found her way around by the work-lamps outside. As she began flicking switches on the control panels the instruments sprang into life, their illuminated dials filling the flight deck with a firefly glow.

Tom woke up, surprised to find that he had been asleep. There was a thick, silty feeling in his head, and somebody was in the room with him, leaning over his bed, touching his face with cold fingers.

“Freya?” he said.

It was not the margravine. A blue-ish torch flicked on, lighting up the pale face of a total stranger. Tom thought he knew everybody aboard Anchorage by sight, but he did not recognize this white face, this pale fire of white-blond hair. The voice was strange too, with a soft accent that was not the accent of Anchorage. “No time to explain, Tom! You’ve got to come with me. Hester’s at the air-harbour. She’s leaving without you!”

“What?” Tom shook his head, trying to shake the remnants of his dreams away, half-hoping that this was one of them. Who was this boy, and what was he on about? “Why would she do that?”

“Because of you, you idiot!” the boy shouted. He ripped Tom’s bedcovers away and flung his outdoor clothes at him. “How do you think she felt, watching you snog Freya Rasmussen?”

“I didn’t!” said Tom, appalled. “It was just – And Hester couldn’t have – Anyway, how do you know about –?” But the stranger’s urgency was beginning to infect him.

He pulled off his borrowed robe, fumbled his boots and cold-mask on, pulled on his old aviator’s coat and followed the boy out of the room, then out of the palace by a side-entrance he had never even noticed before. The night was wrenchingly cold, the city a dream of winter. Off the western side the mountains of Greenland hunched themselves up out of the ice, looking crisp-edged in the moonlight and close enough to touch. The Aurora flared above the rooftops, and in the silence Tom thought he could hear it crackling and buzzing like a power-line on a frosty morning.

The stranger led him down a stairway on Rasmussen Prospekt, along a maintenance walkway under the belly of the tier, up another stairway to the air-harbour. As they emerged into the open again Tom saw he had been wrong about the noise. The crackling was the sound of ice falling from the Jenny’s hangar as the domed roof opened, and the buzzing was her engine pods swivelling into take-off position.

“Hester!” Tom shouted, pushing himself through the snow. In the open hangar the Jenny’s running lights snapped on, reflections flaring across the drifts. He heard a ladder that had been propped against her side fall with a crash, heard the triple clang as the docking clamps released. It couldn’t really be Hester, could it, moving about behind the darkened flight-deck windows? He scrabbled and swam through an ocean of snow. “Hester! Hester!” he shouted, and still didn’t really believe that she would take off. She couldn’t know about that stupid kiss, could she? She had been upset when he told her he wanted to stay here; she was teaching him a lesson, that was all. He kicked and struggled his way through the drifts, faster now, but when he was still twenty yards from the hangar the Jenny Haniver lifted into the sky and turned south-east, sweeping away very quickly over the rooftops and out across the endless ice.

“Hester!” he shouted, suddenly angry. Why couldn’t she just tell him how she felt, like a normal person, instead of storming off like this? The west wind was rising: carrying the airship swiftly away from him, flinging powder snow into his face as he turned to look for his mysterious companion. The boy was gone. He was alone, except for Mr Aakiuq, who was stumbling towards him and shouting, “Tom? What’s happened?”

“Hester!” said Tom, in a tiny voice, and sat down in the snow. He could feel tears soaking into the fleece inside his cold-mask as the Jenny’s stern-lantern, a tiny flake of warmth in that great cold, dwindled and dwindled, and merged at last with the Aurora.

17

AFTER HESTER

Tom made his way back along the under-tier walkway with a horrible, empty, kicked-in-the-stomach feeling. It was several hours since the Jenny Haniver had taken off. Mr Aakiuq had tried to contact Hester by radio, but there had been no reply. “Perhaps she’s not switched it on,” the harbour master said. “Or perhaps it’s not working: I never had a chance to test all the valves. And there is not nearly enough gas in the envelope – I only filled it to check the cells were sound. Oh, why did the poor child have to take off so suddenly?”

“I don’t know,” Tom had replied, but he did. If only he had understood sooner how much she hated it here. If only he had spared a thought for how she must feel, before he started to fall in love with this city. If only he hadn’t kissed Freya. But his guilt kept twisting round and turning into anger. After all, she hadn’t thought about his feelings. Why shouldn’t he stay here if he wanted to? She was so selfish. Just because she hated city life didn’t mean that he wanted to be a homeless sky-tramp for ever.

Still, he had to find her again. He didn’t know if she would take him back, or if he even wanted her to, but he couldn’t let it end in this horrible, messy, broken way.

The city’s engines were purring into life as he hurried up into the cold of the upper tier. He went towards the Winter Palace, stumbling along in the same flailing track that he had made earlier. He didn’t want to see Freya – his insides curled up like burning paper when he thought about what had passed between them in the Wunderkammer – but only Freya had the power to order the city to turn back and pursue the Jenny Haniver.

He was passing through the long shadow of the Wheelhouse when the door slammed open and a frantic, silk-robed apparition came blundering at him through the snow. “Tim! Tim, is it true?” Pennyroyal’s eyes were wide and bulging; his grip on Tom’s arm sharp as frostbite. “They’re saying that girl of yours has left! Flown off!”

Tom nodded, feeling ashamed.

“But without the Jenny Haniver…”

Tom shrugged. “Maybe I’ll have to come with you to America after all, Professor.” He pushed past the explorer and ran on, leaving Pennyroyal to wander back towards his apartments muttering, “America! Ha ha! Of course! America!” In the Winter Palace, he found Freya waiting for him. She was perched on a chaise longue in the smallest of her receiving-rooms, a chamber no larger than a football pitch and lined with so many mirrors that there seemed to be a thousand Freyas sitting there, and a thousand Toms bursting in wet and dishevelled to drip melted snow on to her marble floor.

“Your Radiance,” he said, “we must turn back.”

“Turn back?” Freya had been expecting all sorts of things, but not this. Flushed with delight at the news of Hester’s leaving, she had imagined herself comforting Tom, reassuring him that it was all for the best, making him understand that he was far better off without his hideous girlfriend and that it was clearly the Ice Gods’ will that he remain here, in Anchorage, with her. She had put on her prettiest gown to help him understand, and she had left the top button undone in a way that revealed a tiny triangle of soft white flesh below the hollow of her throat. It made her feel shiveringly bold and grown-up. She had been expecting all sorts of things, but she had not expected this.

“How can we turn back?” she demanded, half-laughing, in the hope that he was making some sort of joke. “Why should we turn back?”

“But Hester…”

“We can’t catch up with an airship, Tom! And why would we want to? I mean, with Wolverinehampton out there behind us somewhere…” But he wasn’t even looking at her; his eyes were shiny and sliding with tears. She fumbled the top of her gown closed, feeling embarrassed and then quickly cross. “Why should I risk my whole city for the sake of a mad girl in an airship?”