Predator's Gold (8 page)

“Mr Blinkoe?” she asked. “Welcome to the Facility.”

“I thought it was called Rogues’ Roost, my dear?”

“The commander prefers us to call it the Facility.”

“Oh.”

“I’m here to take you to her.”

“Her, eh? I hadn’t realized there were so many ladies in your organization.” The girl’s smile vanished. “The Green Storm believes that both men and women must play their part in the coming war to defeat the Tractionist barbarians, and make the Earth green again.”

“Oh, of course, of course,” said Mr Blinkoe quickly. “I couldn’t agree more…” He didn’t like that sort of talk: war was so terribly bad for business. But the past few years had been bad for the Anti-Traction League: London had rolled almost to the gates of Batmunkh Gompa, and its agents had burned the Northern Air Fleet. That had meant that there were no spare ships to come to the aid of the Spitzbergen Static when Arkangel attacked it last winter, and so the last great Anti-Tractionist city of the north had been swallowed into the predator’s gut. It was only natural that some of the League’s younger officers had grown impatient with the dithering of the High Council, and itchy for revenge. Hopefully it would all come to nothing.

Trailing after the subaltern, he tried to judge the strength of this little base. There were a couple of well-armed Fox Spirits standing ready on docking pans, and a lot of soldiers in white uniforms and bronze crab-shell helmets, all wearing armbands with the lightning-flash symbol of the Green Storm. Heavy security, he thought, his gaze slipping quickly over their steam-powered machine guns. But why? What was going on out here at the back-end of nowhere that warranted all this? A line of troops tramped past, carrying big metal cases stencilled Fragile and Top Secret, tightly locked. A little bald-headed man wearing a transparent plastic coat over his uniform was fussing at the soldiers. “Do go carefully now! Don’t jostle! Those are sensitive instruments!” Sensing Blinkoe’s gaze, he glanced towards him. There was a small tattoo between his eyebrows, in the shape of a red wheel.

“What exactly is it you’re doing here?” Blinkoe asked his escort, following her out of the hangar and along damp tunnels and stairways, climbing up and up through the heart of the rock.

“It’s secret,” she said.

“But surely you can tell me?”

The subaltern shook her head. She was a rude, officious, military sort of girl, Blinkoe decided; not sixth-Mrs-Blinkoe-material at all. He turned his attention to the posters tacked to the passage walls. They showed League airships raining down rockets on mobile towns, beneath angry slogans that exhorted the reader to DESTROY ALL CITIES. Between the posters were stencilled signs pointing the way to cell-blocks, barracks, various gun-platforms, and to a laboratory. That seemed strange, too. The Anti-Traction League had always been sniffy about science; they thought any technology more complicated than an airship or a rocket projector was barbaric, and best ignored. Clearly the Green Storm had different ideas.

Mr Blinkoe began to feel a little afraid.

The commander’s office was in one of the old buildings on the summit of the island.

It had once been Red Loki’s private quarters, and the walls had been decorated with saucy murals which the commander had primly whitewashed over. The whitewash was thin, though, and here and there faint, painted faces were beginning to show through, like the ghosts of dead pirates looking on in disapproval at the Roost’s new tenants. In the far wall, a big circular window looked out at nothing much.

“You’re Blinkoe? Welcome to the Facility.”

The commander was very young. Mr Blinkoe had hoped she’d be pretty, but she turned out to be a stern-looking little minx, all cropped black hair and a hard, peat-coloured face. “You are the agent who sighted the Jenny Haniver at Airhaven?” she asked. Her hands kept clenching and flexing, like fidgety brown spiders. And the way she stared at him with those great dark eyes! Blinkoe wondered if she was slightly mad.

“Yes, Your Honour,” he said nervously.

“And you’re sure it was her? There is no mistake? This is not some story you cooked up to defraud the Green Storm of money?”

“No, no!” said Blinkoe hastily. “Gods, no; it was the Wind Flower’s ship, as clear as day!”

The commander turned away from him and walked to the window, peering out through the salt-frosted glass at the swiftly darkening sky. After a moment she said,

“A wing of Fox Spirits was scrambled from one of our secret bases to intercept the Jenny. None of them returned.”

Widgery Blinkoe was uncertain what to say. “Oh dear,” he ventured.

She turned towards him again, but he couldn’t see her expression, standing as she was against that luminous window. “The two barbarian infiltrators who stole the Jenny Haniver from Batmunkh Gompa may have looked like Out-Country urchins, but they were really highly trained agents in the pay of London. No doubt they used their infernal cunning to outwit and destroy our ships, then fled north into the Ice Wastes.”

“It’s, um, perfectly possible, Commander,” agreed Widgery Blinkoe, thinking how unlikely it sounded.

She came close to him, a short, slight girl, her eyes burning into his. “We have many Fox Spirits. The Green Storm grows stronger every day. A great many League commanders are on our side, and are prepared to send soldiers and ships to strengthen our bases. What we lack is an intelligence network. That is why we need you, Blinkoe. I want you to find me the Jenny Haniver, and the barbarians who fly her.”

“That’s, um, well, that might, yes,” said Blinkoe.

“You will be paid well for your services.”

“How well? I don’t want to seem mercenary, but I do have five wives to support…”

“Ten thousand when you deliver the ship here.”

“Ten thou –!”

“The Green Storm rewards its servants well,” the commander assured him. “But we punish those who betray us, too. If you breathe a word of this, or of what you have seen at the Facility, to anyone, we will find you, and kill you. Quite painfully. Do you understand?”

“Eep!” squeaked Blinkoe, turning his hat around and around in his hands. “Um, may I ask why? I mean, why this ship is so important? I thought she might have sentimental value, as a sort of symbol for the League, but she hardly seems worth—”

“She is worth what I am offering you.” The commander smiled for the first time; a thin, cold, pained little smile, like someone thanking a distant relative for attending a funeral. “The Jenny Haniver and the barbarians who stole her could be vital to our work here,” she said. “That is all you need to know. Find her and bring her to me, Mr Blinkoe.”

10

THE WUNDERKAMMER

All Anchorage’s doctors were dead. The best nurse who could be found for Professor Pennyroyal was Windolene Pye of the Steering Committee, who had once done a first-aid course. Sitting by his bed in a luxurious guest room high in the Winter Palace, she held his wrist between her thin fingers, checking his pulse against her pocket watch.

“I believe he has simply fainted,” she announced. “Perhaps it was exhaustion, or delayed shock after his terrible adventures, poor gentleman.”

“How come we haven’t keeled over then?” Hester wanted to know. “We went through terrible adventures too, and you don’t see us swooning all over the place like maiden aunts.”

Miss Pye, who was a maiden aunt herself, gave Hester a hard stare. “I think you should leave the professor in peace. He requires silence and round-the-clock care.

Shoo, now, all of you…”

Hester, Tom and Smew retreated into the corridor, and Windolene Pye closed the door firmly behind them. Tom said, “I expect he was just overcome. He spent years trying to get somebody to fund a second expedition to America, and to find out so suddenly that the margravine’s taking her whole city there…” Hester laughed. “It’s impossible! She’s mad!”

“Miss Shaw!” gasped Smew. “How can you say such things? The margravine is our ruler, and the Ice Gods’ representative on earth. It was her ancestor, Dolly Rasmussen, who led the survivors of the first Anchorage out of America to safety.

It’s only natural that it should fall to a Rasmussen to lead us home again.”

“I don’t know why you’re defending her,” Hester grumbled. “She treats you like something she found clinging to the sole of her shoe. And I hope you know you aren’t fooling anybody with all these costume changes. We can tell there’s only one of you.”

“I am not trying to fool anybody,” Smew replied, with immense dignity. “The margravine must be at ended by certain servants and officials: chauffeurs, chefs, chamberlains, footmen, et cetera. Unfortunately, they are all dead. So I have had to step into the breach. I do my bit to keep the old traditions going.”

“And what were you before? A chauffeur or a chamberlain?”

“I was the margravine’s dwarf.”

“What did she need a dwarf for?”

“The margravine’s household has always had a dwarf. To amuse the margravine.”

“How?”

Smew shrugged. “By being short, I suppose.”

“Is that amusing?”

“It’s tradition, Miss Shaw. We have been glad of our traditions in Anchorage, since the plague came. Here are your rooms.”

He flung open the doors of two rooms a little further along the corridor from Pennyroyal’s. Each had long windows, a big bed, fat heating ducts. Each was about the size of the Jenny Haniver’s entire gondola.

“They look lovely,” said Tom gratefully. “But we just need the one.”

“Out of the question,” said Smew, bustling into the first room to adjust the controls on the ducts. “It would be unheard of for unmarried young persons of the opposite gender to share a room in the Winter Palace. All manner of canoodling might occur.

Quite out of the question.” A rattling inside one of the ducts distracted him for an instant, then he turned to Hester and Tom with a sly wink. “However, there’s a connecting door between these rooms, and if someone wished to slip through, why, nobody would ever know…”

But somebody knew almost everything that happened in Anchorage. Peering at their screens in the blue dark, the watchers saw a grainy, fish-eye view of Tom and Hester following the dwarf into the second room.

“She’s so ugly!”

“She doesn’t look too happy.”

“Who would, with a face like that?”

“No, it’s not that. She’s jealous. Didn’t you see the way Freya looked at her boyfriend?”

“I’m bored with this lot. Let’s hop.”

The picture changed, jumping to other views: the Aakiuqs in their living room, Scabious in his lonely house, the steady, patient work of the engine district and the agricultural quarter…

“Shouldn’t we send word to the Aakiuqs?” asked Tom, as Smew made his adjustments to the ducts in the second room and prepared to leave. “They might be expecting us back.”

“It’s already been done, sir,” said Smew. “You are guests of the House of Rasmussen now.”

“Mr Scabious won’t be too happy about that,” said Hester. “He didn’t seem to like us one bit.”

“Mr Scabious is a pessimistic man,” said Smew. “It is not his fault. He is a widower, and his only son Axel died in the plague. He has not borne the loss well. But he has no power to stop the margravine offering you her hospitality. You are both very welcome here in the Winter Palace. Just ring for a servant – oh, all right, me – if you need anything. Dinner will be at seven, but if you would please come down a little earlier, the margravine wishes to show you her Wunderkammer.” Her what? thought Hester, but she was sick of looking stupid and ignorant in front of Tom, so she kept quiet. When Smew had gone they opened the connecting door and sat on Tom’s bed, bouncing up and down to test the springs.

“America!” said Tom. “Just think of it! She’s very brave, this Freya Rasmussen. Hardly any cities venture west of Greenland, and none have ever tried to reach the Dead Continent.”

“No, because it’s dead,” said Hester sourly. “I don’t think I’d risk a whole city on one of Pennyroyal’s books.”

“Professor Pennyroyal knows what he’s talking about,” said Tom loyally. “Anyway, he’s not the only one to report green places in America.”

“All those old airman’s legends, you mean?”

“Well, yes. And Snøri Ulvaeusson’s map.”

“The one you told me about? The one that conveniently vanished before anybody could check it out?”

“Are you saying the professor’s lying?” asked Tom.

Hester shook her head. She wasn’t sure what she was saying; only that she found it hard to accept Pennyroyal’s tale of virgin forests and noble savages. But who was she to doubt him? Pennyroyal was a famous explorer who’d written books, and Hester had never even read a book. Tom and Freya believed in him, and they knew much more about these things than her. It was just that she couldn’t equate the timid little man who had quivered and whined each time a rocket came near the Jenny Haniver with the brave explorer who fought off bears and befriended savage Americans.

“I’l go and see Aakiuq tomorrow,” she said. “See if he can speed up work on the Jenny.”

Tom nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I like it here,” he said. “This city, I mean.

It’s sad, but it’s lovely. It reminds me of the nicer bits of London. And it doesn’t go about eating other towns, like London did.”

Hester imagined a gap opening between the two of them, like a crack in ice, very thin at the moment, but likely to widen. She said, “It’s just another Traction City, Tom. Traders or Predators, they’re all the same. Very nice up top, but down below it’l be slaves and dirt and suffering and corruption. The sooner we leave, the better for both of us.”

Smew returned for them at six, and led them down by long, spiralling staircases to a receiving room where Freya Rasmussen was waiting.