Predator's Gold (27 page)

“Aren’t you coming too?”

“Me? Course not. I’m a Lost Boy. I’m going to stay here and make myself useful to Uncle. He’s an old man, Caul. His eyesight and his ears are going. He’s going to need someone he can trust to run his cameras and his archives. Give me a few years and I’ll be his right hand. A few more, and who knows? Maybe I’ll be running Grimsby myself.”

“That’d be good, Gargle,” said Caul, laughing painfully. “I’d like to see you in charge of Grimsby. Put a stop to all that bullying.”

“Put a stop to it?” Gargle wore a grin Caul hadn’t seen before, a cold, sharp grin he didn’t like at all. “Not likely! I’m going to be the biggest bully of them all! That’s what kept me going, Caul, all the time Skewer and the others were roughing me up in the Burglarium. Thinking about what I’d do to them when my turn came.” Caul stared at him a moment longer, half inclined to believe that this was all just another dream. “Go,” Gargle said again, and opened the Screw Worm’s hatch.

Dream or not, there was no arguing with him; there was such a sureness in his voice that Caul felt like a newbie again, being ordered about by some confident, older boy. He almost dropped the thing Gargle had given him, but Gargle caught it and thrust it at him again. “Go, and stay gone, and good luck!” Caul took it, and pulled himself weakly to the hatch and then inside and down the ladder, wondering how this battered tube of japanned tin was meant to help him.

30

ANCHORAGE

Freya woke early and lay for a while in the dark, feeling her city shudder beneath her as it went bucketing over scab-ice and pressure ridges. Anchorage was far to the west of Greenland now, heading south over unknown ice and the humped, rocky backs of frozen islands. Several times Mr Scabious had had to hoist up the drive-wheel and let the cats haul the city across solid, snow-covered rock and riven glaciers. Now sea-ice stretched ahead of them again, reaching unbroken towards the horizon. Miss Pye thought it was Hudson’s Bay, the great ice-plain which Professor Pennyroyal claimed would carry them into the heart of the Dead Continent, almost to the borders of his green places. But would it be strong enough to bear Anchorage’s weight?

If only Professor Pennyroyal could tell us for sure, thought Freya, kicking off her covers and padding to the window. But Pennyroyal had come this way on foot, and the desciptions in his book were really surprisingly vague. Miss Pye and Mr Scabious had tried to make him go into more detail, but he had just grown sulky and rude, and after a while he had stopped coming to Steering Committee meetings altogether. In fact, ever since Hester flew off in the Jenny Haniver, the good professor had been acting very oddly indeed.

A breath of cold blew in Freya’s face as she parted the curtains to look out at the ice.

Strange, to think that this was the far side of the world! Stranger still to remember that soon they would be in the new hunting ground, and the views from her windows would all be green; grass and bushes and trees. The idea still scared her a little. Would the Ice Gods rule in lands where snow only lay for a few months of each year? Or would Anchorage need new gods?

A wedge of light yellowed the snow outside the Wheelhouse as a door opened and someone slipped out. Freya wiped away the fog her breath had made and put her face close to the glass. There was no mistaking that silhouette; a portly figure in heated robes and an outsize fur turban, creeping guiltily along Rasmussen Prospekt.

Even by Professor Pennyroyal’s recent standards this was strange behaviour. Freya dressed quickly, pulling on the simple, fleece-lined working clothes that were her usual outfit these days, and pocketing a torch. She crept out of the palace without bothering to wake Smew. Pennyroyal was nowhere to be seen, but his deep, wandering footprints gaped in the snow, showing her the way he had gone.

A few months ago Freya would not have dared to venture out of the palace precincts alone, but she had changed a lot during the long journey around the top of Greenland. At first, the shock of losing Tom had almost plunged her back into her old ways; staying in her quarters, seeing nobody, issuing her orders through Scabious or Smew. But she had soon grown bored, cooped up in the Winter Palace.

She itched to know what was happening outside. And so she ventured out, and threw herself into the life of her city in ways she never had before. She sat gossiping with off-duty workers who ate their lunches in the heated pavilions on the edge of the upper city, watching the ice go by. She learned from Windolene Pye how to wash herself, and clean her teeth, and she had cut her hair short. She joined the patrols which Scabious sent down on to the skid-supports each morning to check for parasites; she drove cargo-machines in the engine district; she had even gone out on to the ice ahead of Anchorage with a startled and rather embarrassed survey-team. She had thrown away all her family’s traditions with a feeling of relief, like get ing rid of old, ill-fitting clothes.

And now she was sneaking through the shadows on the starboard side of Rasmussen Prospekt, spying on her own chief navigator!

Ahead of her the professor’s gaudy turban made a sudden blotch of colour against the dingy, ice-caked buildings as he slipped between the gates of the air-harbour.

Freya ran after him, dashing from one patch of shadow to the next until she threw herself down in the shelter of the customs booth just inside the harbour gates.

Wreathed in the mist of her own hot breath she looked around, thinking for a moment that she had lost her quarry among these snowy hangars and docking-pans. No – there he was! The bright blob of his turban bobbed under a streetlamp on the far side of the harbour, then blinked out as he stepped into the shadows at the entrance to Aakiuq’s warehouse.

Freya crossed the harbour, tracing the jittery path of the explorer’s footsteps through the snow. The warehouse door stood open. She paused a moment, peering nervously into the darkness inside and remembering the parasite-boys who had used the dark as a cloak to haunt and plunder her city… But there was no danger now; the torch that she could see moving about in the far reaches of the warehouse did not belong to some malevolent ice-pirate, just to an odd explorer.

She could hear his voice muttering in the dusty silence. Who was he talking to?

Himself? Windolene Pye had told her that he’d drained the chief navigator’s wine-cellar and now stole liquor from the empty restaurants in the Ultima Arcade. Maybe he was drunk, and raving. She moved closer, easing her way between mountains of old engine-parts.

“Pennyroyal calling anyone!” said his voice, low but desperate-sounding.

“Pennyroyal calling anyone! Come in, please! Please!” He crouched in a pool of green light cast by the glowing dials of an ancient radio set that he must somehow have managed to get working. Headphones were clamped over his ears, and his hand trembled slightly as it clutched the microphone. “Is there anybody out there? Please! I’ll pay you anything! Just get me off this city of fools!”

“Professor Pennyroyal?” said Freya loudly.

“Warrgh! Clio! Poskitt! Knickers!” yelped the professor. He leapt up, and there was a sliding clatter as the lead of his headphones tugged an avalanche of old wireless components down around his feet. The light from the dials went out, and a few valves burst with little showers of sparks, like disappointing fireworks. Freya pulled out her torch and switched it on. Caught in the dusty beam, Pennyroyal’s face looked pallid and sweaty, fear changing to a simpering smile as he squinted past the light and made out Freya.

“Your Radiance?”

Almost nobody bothered calling her that these days. Even Miss Pye and Smew called her “Freya”. How out of touch the professor had become!

“I’m glad to see you’re keeping busy, Professor,” she said. “Does Mr Aakiuq know you’re snooping about in his warehouse?”

“Snooping, Your Radiance?” Pennyroyal looked shocked. “A Pennyroyal never snoops! No, no, no… I was merely – I didn’t want to trouble Mr Aakiuq…” Freya’s torch flickered, and she remembered that there probably weren’t that many batteries left aboard Anchorage. She found a switch and turned on one of the argon-lamps which swung from the rusty rafters overhead. Pennyroyal blinked in the sudden brightness. He looked terrible; pasty-skinned, red-eyed, a fuzz of white stubble blurring the neat edges of his beard.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked.

“To anyone. No one.”

“And why do you want them to get you off this city of fools? I thought you were coming with us? I thought you were keen to return to the green valleys of America and the beautiful Zip Code.”

She would not have thought it possible for him to get any paler, but he did. “Ah!” he said. “Um.”

Sometimes, during the past few weeks, a horrible thought had come to Freya. It came at odd moments – when she was in the shower, or lying awake at three in the morning, or eating dinner with Miss Pye and Mr Scabious, and she had never spoken of it to anyone else, although she was sure that they must have thought it too. Usually, when she felt it slithering into her mind, she tried to think about something else, because - well, it was silly, wasn’t it?

Only it wasn’t silly. It was the truth.

“You don’t know the way to America, do you?” she asked, trying to keep the trembly sound out of her voice.

“Um.”

“We’ve come all this way, following your advice and your book, and you don’t know how to find your green valleys again. Or maybe there aren’t even any to find? Have you ever been to America, Professor?”

“How dare you?” Pennyroyal started to say, and then, as if realizing that there was no more mileage in lies, sighed and shook his head. “No. No, I made it all up.” He sank down on an upturned engine-cowling, miserable and defeated. “I never went anywhere, Your Radiance. I just read other people’s books, and looked at pictures, and made it all up. I wrote America the Beautiful whilst lounging by a hotel swimming pool on the top tier of Paris, in the company of a delectable young person named Peaches Zanzibar. Took care to set it all somewhere nice and remote, of course. I never dreamed that anyone would actually want to go there.”

“So why didn’t you just admit it was all a fib?” asked Freya. “When I appointed you chief navigator, why didn’t you tell me it was all lies?”

“And pass up the chance of all that money, and posh apartments, and the chief navigator’s wine cellar? I’m only human, Freya. Besides, if word got back to the Hunting Ground, I’d have been a laughing stock! I just thought I’d leave with Tom and Hester.”

“That’s why you were so upset when Hester took the Jenny Haniver!”

“Exactly! She cut off my escape route! I had no way off this city, and I couldn’t admit what I’d done, because you’d have killed me.”

“I would not!”

“Well, your people would. So I’ve been using these old radios to try and call for help; hoped there might be a lost air-trader or an exploration vessel within range, someone who could take me off.”

It was remarkable how sorry he could feel for himself, whilst not worrying at all about the city he had led to its doom. Freya shivered with anger. “You – You – You are dismissed, Professor Pennyroyal! You are no longer my chief navigator! You will hand back your ceremonial compasses and the keys to the Wheelhouse immediately!”

It didn’t make her feel any better. She collapsed on a heap of old gaskets that creaked and shifted under her weight. How was she going to break this news to Miss Pye and Mr Scabious and everybody else? That they were stuck on the wrong side of the world, with nothing ahead of them but a dead continent and not enough fuel to ever get home again, and that it was she who had brought them here! She had told everyone this voyage west was what the Ice Gods wanted, when all along it was only what she had wanted. If only she had not been taken in by Pennyroyal and his stupid book!

“What am I going to do?” she asked. “What am I going to do?” Someone shouted something, out in the streets behind the air-harbour. Pennyroyal looked up. There was a whirring, purring noise coming from somewhere. It was very faint, a muttering that rose and fell, sounding for all the world like -

“Aëro-engines!” Pennyroyal leapt up, knocking over more heaps of spares in his haste to reach the door. “Thank Clio! We’re saved!” Freya ran after him, wiping away tears, tugging up her cold-mask. Outside, the dark had faded to a steely twilight. Pennyroyal was pounding away from her across the harbour, stopping once to turn and point as something slid across the sky beyond the harbour office. Freya squinted into the wind and saw a cluster of lights, a creamy trail of exhaust smoke smeared on the darkness. “Airship!” Pennyroyal yelled, doing a mad little dance in the middle of a snowy docking-pan. “Someone heard my message! We’re saved! Saved!”

Freya ran past him, trying to keep the machine in sight. The Aakiuqs were standing outside the harbour office, looking up. “An airship, right out here?” she heard the harbour master say. “Who can it be?”

“Did the Ice Gods tell you they were coming, Freya dear?” asked Mrs Aakiuq.

A man called Lemuel Quaanik ran up, snowshoes flapping from his big feet. He was one of the surveyors with whom Freya had worked, and so he did not feel too much in awe of her to speak. “Radiance? I seen that ship before. That’s Piotr Masgard’s rig, the Clear Air Turbulence!”

“The Huntsmen of Arkangel!” gasped Mrs Aakiuq.

“Here?” cried Freya. “It can’t be! Arkangel would never hunt west of Greenland.

There’s nothing here for it to eat.”

“There’s us,” said Mr Quaanik.

The Clear Air Turbulence circled Anchorage, then hung off the stern like a lone wolf shadowing its prey. Freya ran to the Wheelhouse and up to the bridge.