by Philip Reeve
“All right, what’s a Wunderkammer?” asked Hester, tired of being ignored by this spoilt teenager.
“It’s my private museum,” said Freya. “My Cabinet of Wonders.” She sneezed, and waited a moment for a handmaiden to come and wipe her nose, then remembered they were all dead and wiped it on her cuff. “I love history, Tom. All those old things people dig up. Just ordinary things that were once used by ordinary people, but made special by time.” Tom nodded eagerly, and she laughed, sensing that she’d met a kindred spirit. “When I was little, I didn’t want to be margravine at all. I wanted to be a historian like you and Professor Pennyroyal. So I started my own museum. Come and see.”
Smew led the way, and the margravine kept up her flow of bright chatter as they passed through more corridors, across a vast ballroom where chandeliers lay mothballed under dust-sheets, out into a glass-walled cloister. Lights shone in the dark outside, illuminating whirling snow, an iced-up fountain. Hester stuck her hands into her pockets and made them into fists, stalking along behind Tom. So she’s not just pretty, she thought, she’s read all the same books as he has, and she knows all about history, and she still expects the gods to play fair. She’s like Tom’s mirror image. How am I supposed to compete with that?
The journey ended in a circular lobby, at a door guarded by two Stalkers. As he recognized their angular shapes Tom flinched backwards and almost cried out in terror, for one of those ancient, armoured fighting machines had once chased him and Hester halfway across the Hunting Ground. Then Smew lit an argon globe and he saw that these Stalkers were only relics; rusted metal exoskeletons hacked out of the ice and stood here at the entrance to Freya Rasmussen’s Wunderkammer by way of decoration. He glanced at Hester to see if she shared his fear, but she was looking away, and before he could attract her attention Smew had unlocked the door and the margravine was leading them all through it into her museum.
Tom followed her into the dust and dimness with a strange sensation of coming home. True, the single big room looked more like a junk shop than the careful displays he had been used to back in London, but it was a cave of treasures all the same. The Ice Wastes had seen the rise and fall of at least two civilizations since the Sixty Minute War and Freya owned important relics of each. There was also a model of Anchorage as it might have looked back in its static days, a shelf of vases from the Blue Metal Culture, and some photographs of Ice Circles, a mysterious phenomenon encountered sometimes on the High Ice.
Wandering like a sleepwalker among the exhibits, Tom didn’t notice how reluctant Hester was to follow. “Look!” he called, glancing back delightedly over his shoulder. “Hester! Look!”
Hester looked, and saw things she hadn’t the education to understand, and her own grisly face reflected in the glass fronts of display cases. She saw Tom drifting away from her, exclaiming over some beaten-up old stone statue, and he looked so right that she thought her heart was going to break.
One of Freya’s favourite treasures hung in a case near the back of the room. It was an almost perfect sheet of the thin, silvery metal that turned up in American Empire landfill-sites all over the world, and which the Ancients had called “Tinfoil”. She stood beside Tom and gazed in at it, enjoying the sight of their faces reflected side-by-side in its ripply surface. “They had so much stuff, those Ancients.”
“It’s amazing,” agreed Tom, whispering, because the thing in the case was so old and precious that it felt sacred; fingered by the Goddess of History. “To think that there were ever people so rich that they could throw away things like this! Even the poorest of them lived like Lord Mayors.”
They moved on to the next display: a collection of those strange metal rings so often found in Ancient rubbish tips, some still with a teardrop-shaped pendant attached bearing the word PULL.
“Professor Pennyroyal doesn’t accept that these things were thrown away,” said Freya. “He says that the sites which modern archaeologists call rubbish tips were really religious centres, where the Ancients sacrificed precious objects to their Consumer Gods. Haven’t you read his book about it? It’s called Rubbish? Rubbish! I’ll lend you a copy…”
“Thank you,” said Tom.
“Thank you, Your Radiance, ” Freya corrected, but she smiled so sweetly it was hard to feel offended.
“Of course,” she went on, running her fingers through the dust on a vitrine, “what this place really needs is a curator. There used to be one, but he died in the plague, or left; I forget which. Now everything’s getting dusty, and stuff’s been stolen; some nice old jewellery, and a couple of machines — though I can’t imagine who would want them, or how they got in here. But it will be important to remember the past, once we reach America.” She looked at him again, smiling. “You could stay, Tom. I’d like to think I had a proper London Historian running my little museum. You could expand it, open it to the public. We’ll call it the Rasmussen Institute…”
Tom breathed the museum air more deeply, inhaling the fusty scents of dust and floor-polish and moth-eaten stuffed animals. When he was an Apprentice Historian he had longed to escape and have adventures, but now that his whole life was an adventure the idea of working in a museum again seemed strangely tempting. Then he looked past Freya and saw Hester watching him, a thin, lonely figure half-hidden in the shadows near the door, one hand holding her old red scarf across her face. For the first time he felt annoyed by her. If only she were prettier, and more sociable!
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Hester wouldn’t want to stay here. She’s happiest in the sky.”
Freya glared at the other girl. She wasn’t used to having people turn her down when she offered them positions. She had been starting to like this handsome young historian. She had even been starting to wonder if the Ice Gods had sent him to her to make up for the fact that there were no suitable boys left aboard Anchorage. But why, oh why, had they decided to send Hester Shaw along with him? The girl wasn’t just ugly, she was downright horrible, and she stood between Freya and this nice young man like a demon guarding an enchanted prince.
“Oh well,” she said, as if his refusal had not disappointed her at all. “I gather it will take Aakiuq a few weeks to repair your ship. So you will have plenty of time to think it over.” And plenty of time, she added silently, to dump that horrid girlfriend.
11
RESTLESS SPIRITS
Tom slept well that night, and dreamed of museums. Hester, lying next to him, barely slept at all. The bed was so big that she might as well have stayed in the other room. The way she liked sleeping was cuddled against Tom on the Jenny Haniver ’s narrow bunk, her face in his hair, her knees against the backs of his knees, their two bodies fitting together like bits of a jigsaw. On this big, soft mattress he rolled sleepily away from her and left her all alone in a sweaty tangle of sheets. And the room was too hot; the dry air hurt her sinuses, and metallic rattlings came from the ducts on the ceiling, a faint, horrid noise, like rats in the walls.
At last she pulled on her coat and boots and went out of the palace into the searing cold of the three-in-the-morning streets. A twining staircase led down through a heat-seal into Anchorage’s engine district, a region of steady, pounding noise where bulbous boilers and fuel-holds clustered in the dark between the tier-supports like fungi. She headed sternwards, thinking, Now we’ll see how the little Snow Queen treats her workers. She looked forward to shocking Tom out of his liking for this place. She would spoil his breakfast with her report of conditions on the lower tier.
She crossed an iron footbridge where huge cog-wheels creaked and whirred on either side of her, like the innards of some colossal clock. She followed an enormous, segmented duct down into a sunken sub-level where pistons rose and fell, powered by a set of kludged-together Old-Tech engines of a type she’d never seen before; armoured spheres which hummed and warbled, shooting out shafts of violet light. Men and women strode purposefully about, carrying tool-boxes or driving big, multi-armed labouring machines, but there were no
ne of the shackled slave-gangs or swaggering overseers Hester had expected. Freya Rasmussen’s insipid face gazed down from posters on the tier supports, and the workers bobbed their heads respectfully as they passed beneath it.
Maybe Tom was right, thought Hester, prowling unseen along the edges of the engine-well. Maybe Anchorage really was as civilized and peaceful as it seemed. Maybe he could be happy here. The city might even survive its journey to America, and he could stay aboard as Freya Rasmussen’s museum-keeper and teach the savage tribes about the world their distant ancestors had made. He could keep the Jenny on as his private sky-yacht, and go prospecting for Old-Tech in the haunted deserts on his days off…
He’s not going to need you, though, is he? asked a bitter little voice inside her. And what are you going to do without him?
She tried to imagine a life for herself without Tom, but she couldn’t. She had always known that it wouldn’t last for ever, but now that the end was in sight she wanted to shout, Not yet! I want more! Just another year of being happy. Or maybe two…
She wiped away the tears that kept fogging her eye and hurried aft, sensing cold and open air somewhere beyond the city’s vast heat-recycling plant. The beat of the strange engines faded behind her, replaced by a steady, skirling hiss which grew louder as she neared the stern. After a few more minutes she emerged on to a covered walkway which ran the whole width of the city. There was a protective screen made out of panels of steel grille, and beyond it the Northern Lights glimmered in the ceaselessly rolling bulk of Anchorage’s great stern-wheel.
Hester crossed the walkway and pushed her face against the cold grille and looked through. The wheel had been burnished mirror-bright, and in the cascade of reflections she could see the metal spurs which studded it falling endlessly past her and past her to dig into the ice and shove Anchorage on its way. A fine, cold rain of meltwater flew from it, and fragments of up-flung ice dinned and rattled at the screen. Some of the chunks were very large. A few feet from where Hester stood, a section of grille had been beaten loose and swung inward each time an ice-block struck it, opening a gap through which sleet and smaller pieces of ice splattered on to the walkway.
How easy it would be to slip through that gap! There would be a moment of falling, and then the wheel would roll over her, leaving only a red smear on the ice, quickly forgotten. Wouldn’t that be better than watching Tom drift away from her? Wouldn’t it be better to be dead than alone again?
She reached out for the flapping edge of the grille, but suddenly a hand grabbed her arm, and a voice was shouting in her ear, “Axel?”
Hester swung round, reaching for her knife. Soren Scabious stood behind her. His eyes, as she turned, seemed to be shining with hope and unshed tears; then he recognized her and his face settled back into its habitual look of deep unhappiness. “Miss Shaw,” he growled. “In the dark, I thought you were — ”
Hester backed away from him, hiding her face. She wondered how long he had been watching her. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “What do you want?”
Scabious, embarrassed, took refuge in anger. “I could ask you the same thing, aviatrix! Come to spy on my engine district, have you? I trust you had a good look.”
“I’m not interested in your engines,” Hester said.
“No?” Scabious reached out again, gripping her by the wrist. “I find that hard to believe. The Scabious Spheres have been perfected by my family over twenty generations. One of the most efficient engine systems in the world. I’m sure you’ll want to go and tell Arkangel or Ragnaroll all about the riches they’ll find if they devour us.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Hester spat. “I wouldn’t take predator’s gold!” A thought struck her suddenly, hard and cold like one of the ice-splinters drumming at the grille behind her. “Anyway, who’s Axel? Wasn’t he your son? The one Smew talked about? The dead one? Did you think I was his ghost or something?”
Scabious let go of her arm. His anger faded quickly, like a fire damped down. His eyes darted towards the drive-wheel, up towards the lights in the sky; looking anywhere but at Hester. “His spirit walks,” he muttered.
Hester let out a short, ugly laugh, then stopped. The old man was perfectly serious. He glanced quickly at her and away. His face, lit by that fluttering, uncertain light was suddenly gentle. “The Snowmads believe that the souls of the dead inhabit the Aurora, Miss Shaw. They say that on nights when it is at its brightest they come down to walk upon the High Ice.”
Hester said nothing, just hunched her shoulders, uneasy in the presence of his madness and sorrow. She said awkwardly, “Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, Mr Scabious.”
“But they do, Miss Shaw.” Scabious nodded earnestly. “Since our journey to America began there have been sightings. Movements. Things go missing from locked rooms. People hear footsteps and voices in parts of the district that have been closed up and abandoned since the plague. That’s why I come down here, whenever my work allows, and the Aurora is bright. I’ve glimpsed him twice now; a fair-haired lad, looking out at me from shadows, vanishing as soon as I see him. There are no fair-haired boys left alive in this city. It is Axel, I know it is.”
He stared a moment longer at the luminous sky, then turned and walked away. Hester watched him until his tall silhouette disappeared around the corner at the far end of the gallery. Watched, and wondered. Did Scabious really believe that this city could reach America? Did he even care? Or had he simply gone along with the margravine’s potty plans because he hoped to find his son’s ghost waiting for him on the High Ice?
She shivered. She had not realized until now how cold it was here on the city’s stern. Although Scabious was gone she still had the feeling of being watched. The hair at the nape of her neck began to prickle. She glanced behind her, and there in the mouth of an access passageway she saw — or thought she saw — the pale smudge of a face fade quickly into the dark, leaving only the after-image of a white-blond head.
No one returns from the Sunless Country; Hester knew that, but it did not stop every ghost story she’d ever heard from waking and stirring in her brain. She turned away and ran, ran as fast as she could through the suddenly threatening shadows back to busier streets.
Behind her, amongst the tangle of pipes and ducts that overhung the stern-gallery, something metallic scuttled and clattered and fell still.
12
UNINVITED GUESTS
Mr Scabious was both right and wrong about the ghosts. His city was haunted all right, but not by the spirits of the dead.
The haunting had begun almost a month before, and not in Anchorage but in Grimsby, a very strange and secret city indeed. It had begun with a small sound; a hollow click, like a fingernail flicked once against the taut skin of a toy balloon. Then a sigh of static, the crackle of a microphone being picked up, and the ear on Caul’s ceiling started talking to him.
“Up, boy. Wake. This is Uncle calling. Got a job for you, Caul, boy. Yes.”
Caul, surfacing through a flotsam of dreams, realized with a sudden shock that this was real. He rolled off his bunk and stood up groggily. His room was little bigger than a cupboard, and apart from the shelf-wide bunk and some spectacular damp-stains the only thing in it was the tangle of wires in the centre of the ceiling where a camera and a microphone huddled. The Eyes and Ears of Uncle, the boys called these fixtures. Nothing about the Mouth of Uncle. And yet it was talking to him, all the same.
“You awake, boy?”
“Yes, Uncle!” said Caul, trying not to let the words sound slurred. He had been working hard in the Burglarium yesterday, trying to catch out a gaggle of younger boys as they crept through the maze of corridors and stairways which Uncle had designed to train them in the arts of subtle, unseen thieving. He’d gone to bed dead tired, and must have slept for hours, but he felt as if it was only a few minutes since the lights went out. He jerked his head, trying to shake the thickness of sleep out of his thoughts. “I’m awake, Uncle!”
“Good.�
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The camera stretched down towards Caul; a long, gleaming snake made up of metal segments, mesmerizing him with its one unblinking eye. He knew that in Uncle’s quarters, high in the old Town Hall, his face was coming into focus on a surveillance screen. On an impulse he grabbed the coverlet off his bed and used it to hide his bare body. “What do you want of me, Uncle?” he asked.
“I’ve got a city for you,” the voice replied. “Anchorage. A sweet little ice city, down on its luck, heading north. You’ll take the limpet Screw Worm and burgle it.”
Caul tried to think of something sensible to say, standing there dressed in a duvet in the unwavering gaze of the camera.
“Well, boy,” Uncle snapped. “Don’t you want the job? Don’t you feel you’re ready to command a limpet?”
“Oh, of course! Yes! Yes!” cried Caul eagerly. “It’s just — I thought the Screw Worm was Wrasse’s ship. Shouldn’t he be going, or one of the older boys?”
“Don’t question my orders, boy. Uncle Knows Best. It happens I’m sending Wrasse away south on another job, and that leaves us short-handed. Ordinarily I wouldn’t put a youngster in charge of a burgling trip, but I think you’re ready, and Anchorage is too pretty a prize to miss.”
“Yes, Uncle.” Caul had heard talk about this mysterious job down south, which more and more of the older boys and better limpets were being transferred to. The rumour was that Uncle was planning the most daring robbery of his long career, but nobody knew what it was. Not that it mattered to Caul. Not if Wrasse’s absence meant that he got to command his own limpet!