by Philip Reeve
“Oh, the world changed on us,” said Mrs Aakiuq sadly. “Prey got scarce, and the great predator cities like Arkangel, which wouldn’t have spared us a second glance once, now chase us whenever they can.”
Her husband nodded, pouring steaming mugs of coffee for his guests. “And then, this year, the plague came. We took aboard some Snowmad scavengers who’d just found bits of an old orbital weapons platform crashed in the ice near the pole, and it turned out to be infected with some kind of horrible engineered virus from the Sixty Minute War. Oh, don’t look so worried; those old battle-viruses do their work fast and then mutate into something harmless. But it spread through the city like wildfire, killing hundreds of people. Even the old margravine and her consort died. And when it was over, and the quarantine was lifted, well, a lot of folk couldn’t see a future any more for Anchorage, so they took what airships there were and went off to find a life in other cities. I doubt there’s more than fifty of us left in the whole place now.”
“Is that all?” Tom was amazed. “But how can so few people keep a town this size working?”
“They can’t,” replied Aakiuq. “Not for ever. But old Mr Scabious the engine master has done wonders — a lot of automated systems, clever Old-Tech gadgets and the like — and he’ll keep us moving long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” asked Hester suspiciously. “Where are you going?”
The harbour master’s smile vanished. “Can’t tell you that, Miss Hester. Who’s to say you won’t fly off and sell our course to Arkangel or some other predator? We don’t want to find them lying in wait for us on the High Ice. Now eat up your seal-burgers and we’ll go and see if we can’t roust out some spare parts to fix that poor battered Jenny Haniver of yours.”
They ate, and then trailed after him across the docks to a huge, whale-backed warehouse. In the dim interior teetering stacks of old engine pods and gondola panels vied for space with spare parts ripped from the flight decks of dismantled airships and curved aluminium envelope-struts like the ribs of giants. Propellors of all sizes hung overhead, swinging gently with the city’s movement.
“This used to be my cousin’s place,” said Aakiuq, shining an electric lantern over the junk-heaps. “But he went and died in the plague, so I suppose it’s mine now. Never fear; there’s not much goes wrong with an airship that I don’t know how to fix, and there’s precious little else for me to do these days.”
As they followed him through the rusty dark some small thing clattered and seemed to scrabble, away among the stacked iron shelves of salvage. Hester, wary as ever, jerked her head in its direction, searching the shadows with her single eye. Nothing moved. Small things must always be falling, mustn’t they, in an old lumber room of a place like this? In a building with dodgy shock-absorbers that swayed and shuddered as Anchorage went ploughing across the ice? And yet she could not shake off the sense that she was being watched.
“Jeunet-Carot engines, wasn’t it?” Mr Aakiuq was asking. He clearly liked Tom — people always liked Tom — and he was making great efforts to help, scurrying to and fro among the mounds of junk and checking notes in a huge, mould-speckled ledger. “I believe I have something that will suit. Your gas-cells are old Thibetan jobs by the look of ’em: those we can’t patch I’ll replace with some nice RJ50s from a Zhang-Chen Hawkmoth. Yes, I believe your Jenny Haniver will be aloft again within three weeks.”
In blue darkness far below, three pairs of keen eyes watched a small screen, staring at a grainy image of Tom and Hester and the harbour master. Three pairs of ears as white as underground fungi strained to catch the tinny, distorted voices which came whispering down from the world above.
Back at the harbour master’s house, Mrs Aakiuq kitted Tom and Hester out with overboots and snowshoes, thermal underwear, thick sweaters of oiled wool, mittens, scarves and parkas. There were also cold-masks; fleece-lined leather objects with isinglass eye-pieces and a filter to breathe through. Mrs Aakiuq did not say where all these things had come from, but Hester had noticed the photographs decked with mourning ribbons on the household shrine, and she guessed that she and Tom were dressing in the clothes of the Aakiuqs’ dead children. She hoped those plague-germs really were as dead as the harbour master had promised. She liked the mask, though.
When they returned to the kitchen they found Pennyroyal sitting by the stove, his feet in a bowl of steaming water and a bandage around his head. He looked pale, but otherwise he was his old self, slurping a mug of Mrs Aakiuq’s moss tea and greeting Tom and Hester cheerfully. “So glad to see you safe! What adventures we shared, eh! Something for my next book there, I suspect…”
A brass telephone on the wall near the stove emitted a tinny jingle. Mrs Aakiuq hurried to lift the earpiece, listening very carefully to the message being relayed by her friend Mrs Umiak at the exchange. Her face broadened into a shining smile, and by the time she set the phone back on its hook and turned to her guests she could barely speak for excitement.
“Great news, my dears! The margravine is to grant you an audience! The margravine herself! She is sending her chauffeur to carry you to the Winter Palace! Such an honour! To think, you will go straight from my own humble kitchen to the margravine’s audience chamber!”
8
THE WINTER PALACE
“ What’s a margravine?” Hester hissed at Tom, as they stepped outside again into the fierce cold. “It sounds like something you spread on your toast…”
“I suppose it’s a sort of mayoress,” Tom said.
“A margravine,” Pennyroyal chipped in, “is the female version of a margrave. A lot of these small northern cities have something similar; a hereditary ruling family, with titles handed down from one generation to the next. Margrave. Portreeve. Graf. The Elector Urbanus of Eisenstadt. The Direktor of Arkangel. They’re very keen on their traditions up here.”
“Well, I don’t see why they can’t just call her a mayoress and have done with it,” said Hester grumpily.
A bug was waiting for them at the harbour gates; an electric vehicle of the sort that Tom remembered from London, although he didn’t remember any quite as beautiful as this. It was painted bright red, with a golden letter R surrounded by curlicues on its flank. The single wheel at the back was larger than on a normal bug, and studded to grip snow. On the curving mudguards which arched above the two front wheels big electric lanterns had been mounted, and snowflakes danced crazily in their twin beams.
The chauffeur saw them coming and slid open the glastic canopy as they drew near. He wore a red uniform with gold braid and epaulettes, and when he drew himself up to his full height and saluted he just about came up to Hester’s waist. A child, she thought at first, and then saw that he was actually much older than her, with a grown man’s head balanced on a stumpy little body. She quickly looked away, realizing that she had been staring at him in exactly the same hurtful, prying, pitiful way that people sometimes stared at her.
“Name’s Smew,” he said. “Her Radiance has sent me to bring you to the Winter Palace.”
They climbed into the bug, squeezing on to the back seat on either side of Pennyroyal, who took up a surprising amount of space for a small man. Smew slid shut the lid, and they were off. Tom looked back to wave at the Aakiuqs, who were watching from a window of their house, but the air-harbour had vanished into the snow-flurries and the wintry dark. The bug was driving along a broad thoroughfare, from which covered arcades opened off on either side. Shops and restaurants and grand villas flicked by, all dead, all dark. “This is Rasmussen Prospekt,” Smew announced. “Very elegant street. Runs right through the middle of the upper city from bow to stern.”
Tom looked out through the bug’s lid. He was impressed by this beautiful, desolate place, yet the emptiness of it made him nervous. Where was it going, rushing into the dead north like this? He shivered inside his warm clothes, remembering his time aboard another town that had been in the wrong place, heading for a mysterious destination: Tunbridge Wheels, whose d
eranged mayor had driven it to a watery grave in the Sea of Khazak.
“Here we are,” announced Smew suddenly. “The Winter Palace; home to the House of Rasmussen for eight hundred years.”
They were nearing the city’s stern, and the bug’s electric motor griped and whinnied as it carried them up a long ramp. At the top stood the palace which Tom had glimpsed from the air the night before; a twirl of white metal with spires and balconies rimed in ice. The upper storeys looked empty and abandoned, but lights showed in some of the windows on the lower floors, and gas-flames danced in bronze tripods outside the circular front door.
The bug scrunched to a halt on the frosty drive, and Smew held the canopy while his passengers climbed out, then hurried up the palace steps and slid the outer door open, letting them into a small chamber called a heat-lock. He slid the door shut, and after a few seconds, when the cold air that had entered with the visitors had been warmed by heaters in the roof and walls, an inner door opened. They followed Smew into a panelled hallway, the walls hung with tapestries. Giant double doors loomed ahead, clad in priceless Old-Tech alloys. Smew knocked on them, then muttered, “Wait here, please,” and scurried away down a side-passage. The building creaked slightly, swaying with the motion of the city. There was a smell of mildew.
“I don’t like this,” said Hester, looking up at the thick veils of cobweb which swathed the chandeliers and dangled from the heating ducts. “Why has she asked us here? It could be a trap.”
“Stuff and nonsense, Miss Shaw,” scoffed Pennyroyal, trying not to look too alarmed by her suggestion. “A trap? Why should the margravine set a trap for us? She’s a very superior sort of person, remember, a type of mayoress.”
Hester shrugged. “I’ve only come across two mayors before, and neither of them were very superior. They were both stark, staring mad.”
The doors suddenly jerked and slid sideways, grating slightly on their bearings. Beyond them stood Smew, dressed now in a long blue robe and a six-cornered hat and clutching a staff of office twice his own height. He welcomed the guests solemnly, as if he had never seen them before, and then thumped the staff three times on the metal floor. “Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal and party,” he announced, and stepped aside to let them walk past him into the pillared space beyond.
A line of argon globes hung from the vaulted roof, each casting a circular glow on the floor beneath it, like stepping stones of light leading towards the far end of the enormous chamber. Someone sat waiting there, slouched in an ornate throne on a raised dais. Hester groped for Tom’s hand, and side by side they followed Pennyroyal through shadow and light, shadow and light, until they stood at the foot of the dais steps, looking up into the face of the margravine.
For some reason, they had both expected someone old. Everything in this silent, rusting house spoke of age and decay, of ancient customs preserved long after their purpose had been forgotten. Yet the girl gazing haughtily down at them was even younger than they were; certainly not a day over sixteen. A large, pretty girl, dressed in an elaborate ice-blue gown and a white overmantle with a fox-fur collar. Her features had something of the Inuit look of Aakiuq and his wife, but her skin was very fair and her hair was golden. The colour of autumn leaves, Hester thought, hiding her face. The margravine’s beauty made her feel small and worthless and unneeded. She started looking for faults. She’s far too fat. And her neck needs a good wash. And the moths have been at that pretty frock, and all the buttons are done up wrong…
Beside her, Tom was thinking, So young, and in charge of a whole city! No wonder she looks sad!
“Your Worship,” said Pennyroyal, bowing low. “May I say how very grateful I am for the kindness that you and your people have extended to myself and my young companions…”
“You must call me ‘Your Radiance’,” said the girl. “Or, ‘Light of the Ice Fields’.”
There was an awkward silence. Little scraping and clicking noises came from the fat heating ducts which snaked across the ceiling, warming the palace with recycled heat from the engines. The girl peered at her guests. At last she said, “If you’re Nimrod Pennyroyal, how come you’re so much fatter and balder than your picture?”
She picked up a book from a small side-table and held it out to show the back cover. It bore a painting of someone who might have been Pennyroyal’s hunkier younger brother.
“Ah, well, artistic licence, you know,” blustered the explorer. “Fool of a painter — I told him to show me as I am, paunch and high forehead and all, but you know what these artistic types are; they do love to idealize, to show the inner man…”
The margravine smiled. (She looked even prettier smiling. Hester decided that she disliked her quite a lot.) “I just wanted to be sure that it was really you, Professor Pennyroyal,” she said. “I quite understand about the portrait. I was always having to have mine done for plates and stamps and coins and things before the plague came, and they hardly ever got it right…”
She stopped talking suddenly, as if some internal nanny had reminded her that a margravine does not babble in front of her guests like an excited teenager. “You may be seated,” she announced, much more formally, and clapped her hands. A door behind the throne popped open and Smew came scuttling out, dragging a set of small chairs. He had taken on yet another guise: the pillbox hat and high-collared tunic of a footman. For a moment Tom wondered if there really were three identical little men in the margravine’s service, but when he looked more closely it was obvious that this was the same Smew; he was still out of breath from his quick changes, and the chamberlain’s wig poked from his pocket.
“Do hurry up,” said the margravine.
“Sorry, Your Radiance.” Smew set the three chairs down facing the throne, then vanished into the shadows again. A moment later he was back, wheeling a heated trolley on which stood a pot of tea and a tray of almond biscuits. With him came another man, tall, stern and elderly, dressed all in black. He nodded to the newcomers, then took up a position beside the throne as Smew poured tea into tiny Blast Glass cups and handed them to the guests.
“So I take it you know my work, O Light of the Ice Fields?” said Pennyroyal, simpering a little.
The margravine’s mask of courtly etiquette slipped again, the excitable teenager showing through. “Oh yes! I love history and adventures. I used to read about them all the time before… well, before I became margravine. I’ve read all the classics: Valentine, and Spofforth, and Tamarton Foliot. But yours were always my favourites, Professor Pennyroyal. That’s what gave me the idea to…”
“Careful, Margravine,” said the man at her side. His voice was a soft rumble, like a well-tuned engine.
“Well, anyway,” said the margravine, “that’s why it’s so wonderful that the Ice Gods sent you here! It’s a sign, you see. A sign that I made the right decision, and that we’ll find what we are looking for. With you to help us, how can we possibly fail?”
“Mad as a spoon,” whispered Hester to Tom, very quietly.
“I’m rather at a loss, Your Radiance,” admitted Pennyroyal. “I think perhaps my intellects are still a little fuddled after that knock on the head. I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
“It’s quite simple,” said the margravine.
“Margravine,” warned the man at her side again.
“Oh, don’t be such an old gloom-bucket, Mr Scabious!” she retorted. “This is Professor Pennyroyal! We can trust him!”
“I don’t doubt it, Your Radiance,” said Scabious. “It is his young friends I am concerned about. If they get wind of our course there is a danger they may be off to sell us to Arkangel as soon as their ship is repaired. Direktor Masgard would dearly love to get his hands on my engines.”
“We’d never do anything like that!” cried Tom, and would have sprung forward to confront the old man if Hester had not held him back.
“I think I can vouch for my crew, Your Radiance,” said Pennyroyal. “Captain Natsworthy is a historian like myself, trained at the
London Museum.”
The margravine turned to study Tom for the first time, with a look of such admiration that he blushed and stared down at his feet. “Then welcome, Mr Natsworthy,” she said softly. “I hope that you will stay here and help us too.”
“Help you with what?” asked Hester bluntly.
“With our journey to America, of course,” the girl replied. She turned the book that she was holding to display the front cover. It showed a muscly, too-handsome Pennyroyal fighting a bear, egged on by a girl in a fur bikini. It was a first edition of America the Beautiful.
“This one was always my favourite,” the margravine explained. “I expect that’s why the Ice Gods put the idea of America into my head. We’re going to find our way across the ice to the new green wilderness that Professor Pennyroyal discovered. There we’ll swap our skids for wheels, and chop down the trees for fuel, and trade with the savages, and introduce them to the benefits of Municipal Darwinism.”
“But, but, but…” Pennyroyal gripped the hand-rests of his chair as if he were riding a roller coaster. “But I mean to say, the Canadian Ice Sheet — West of Greenland — No city has ever attempted to — ”
“I know, Professor,” the girl agreed. “It will be a long and dangerous journey for us, just as it was for you when you came on foot out of America, up on to the ice. But the gods are with us. They must be. Otherwise they would not have sent you to us. I am going to appoint you Honorary Chief Navigator, and with your help I know we will come safely into our new hunting ground.”
Tom, thrilled by the boldness of the margravine’s vision, turned to Pennyroyal. “What wonderful luck, Professor!” he said happily. “You’ll be able to return to America after all!”
Pennyroyal made a gurgling sound and his eyes bulged. “I… Chief navigator, eh? You are too kind, Light of the Ice Fields, too kind…” His Blast Glass cup dropped from his fingers as he fainted, shattering on the iron floor. Smew tutted, because the set was an old heirloom of the House of Rasmussen, but Freya did not care. “Professor Pennyroyal is still weak from his adventures,” she said. “Put him to bed! Air rooms in the guest quarters for himself and his friends. We must nurse him back to health as soon as possible. And do stop fretting about that silly little cup, Smew. Once the professor has led us to America we shall be able to dig up all the Blast Glass we could possibly desire!”