by Philip Reeve
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 th
e 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?”
“She’s not mad.”
“She acts mad.”
“She’s upset!”
“Well, I’m upset!” shouted Freya. “I thought you cared about me! Doesn’t what happened earlier mean anything? I thought you’d forgotten Hester! She’s nothing! She’s nothing but air-trash and I’m glad she’s dumped you! I want you to be my, my, my boyfriend! I hope you understand just what an honour that is!”
Tom stared at her and could think of nothing to say. He saw her suddenly as Hester must; a plump, spoilt, petulant girl who expected the world to arrange itself to suit her. He knew that she was right to refuse his request, that it would be madness to turn the city round, but somehow her rightness made her seem even more unreasonable. He mumbled something and turned away.
“Where are you going?” demanded Freya shrilly. “Who said you could go? I have not given you permission to leave my presence!”
But Tom did not wait for permission. He ran from the room, the door crashing shut behind him, and left her there alone with all her reflections, which turned their heads this way and that in the trembling mirrors, looking blank-faced at each other as if to ask, What did we do wrong?
He ran through the long corridors of the Winter Palace with no idea where he was going, barely noticing the rooms he passed or the faint scratching and scrabbling noises which came sometimes from the ducts and ventilation shafts. Ever since he fell out of London, Hester had been beside him, looking after him, telling him what to do, loving him in that fierce, shy way of hers. Now he had driven her away. He wouldn’t even have known that she was gone if it hadn’t been for that boy…
For the first time since the Jenny Haniver took off, Tom thought of his strange visitor. Who had he been? Someone from the engine district, judging by the way he’d been dressed (Tom remembered layers and layers of dark clothes, a tunic smeared with oil and grease, black paint crackling off its brass buttons). And how had he known what Hester was about to do? Had she confided in him? Told him things she had not told Tom? He felt an odd jab of jealousy at the thought of Het sharing her secrets with someone else.
But what if the boy knew where she had been going? Tom had to find him; talk to him. He ran out of the palace to the nearest stairway and down to the engine district, hurrying through the thunder and fog of the Scabious Spheres to the engine master’s office.
Skewer and Gargle were waiting for Caul when he came scurrying back from the air-harbour, breathless and jumpy from running. They were ready inside the hatchway with guns and knives in case the Drys were on his tail, and they bundled him through and would not let him speak until they were quite sure no one had followed him.
“What were you thinking of?” asked Skewer angrily. “What did you think you were doing? You know it’s forbidden to leave the limpet unguarded. And as for talking to a Dry! Didn’t you learn nothing in the Burglarium?” He put on a strange, whining voice which Caul guessed was supposed to be an impression of him. “‘Tom! Tom! Quickly, Tom! She’s leaving you!’ You fool!”
Caul sat on the floor of the hold, back to a bale of stolen clothes, failure sluicing over him like meltwater.
“You’ve blown it, Caul,” said Skewer, with a sudden smile. “I mean, you’ve really blown it. I’m taking charge of this ship. Uncle will understand. When he hears what you’ve done, he’ll be sorry he didn’t put me in command right from the start. I’m sending a message-fish away, tonight, to let him know all about it. No more snooping for you, you Dry-lover. No more midnight expeditions. No more mooning over margravines — oh, don’t think I haven’t seen you going gooey-eyed each time her face comes on the screens.”
“But Skewer-” whined Gargle.
“Quiet!” said Skewer, cuffing him hard around the head, turning to kick Caul down as he started up to protect the smaller boy. He looked flushed and pleased with himself. “You can stay quiet too, Caul. From now on, we’ll run this limpet my way.”
Mr Scabious, whose home on the upper tier held too many unhappy memories, spent almost all his spare time in his office, a narrow hut squeezed into a gap between two tier supports at the heart of the engine district. It contained a desk, a filing cabinet, a bunk, a Primus stove, a small hand-basin, a calendar, an enamel mug and not much else. Scabious’s mourning robes hung from a hook on the back of the door, flapping like a black wing when Tom pushed it open. The man himself sat at his desk, a statue of melancholy. The furnace-flicker of the engine district sliced in between the slats of the blinds on the window, striping him with bars of light and shadow. Only his eyes moved, spiking the newcomer with a chilly stare.
“Mr Scabious,” panted Tom, “Hester’s gone! She’s taken the Jenny and gone!”
The engine master nodded, staring at the wall behind Tom’s head as if a film were being projected there which only he could see. “Then she is gone. Why come to me?”
Tom sat down heavily on the bunk. “There was a boy. I’ve not seen him before. A pale sort of fair-haired boy from the engine districts, a bit younger than me. He seemed to know all about Hester.”
Scabious moved for the first time, springing up and coming quickly towards Tom. There was a strange look on his face. “You’ve seen him too?”
Tom flinched, surprised by the engine master’s sudden show of passion. “I thought he might be able to tell me where she was going.”
“There is no one like the boy you describe aboard this city. No one living. ”
“But — it sounded like he’d talked to her. If you could just tell me where to find him…”
“You cannot find Axel. He will find you, when he wishes to. Even I have only seen him from a distance. What did he say to you? Did he mention me? Did he
give you any message for his father?”
“His father? No.”
Scabious barely seemed to listen. He fumbled in a pocket of his overalls and pulled out a small silver book; a little photo frame. Tom knew a lot of people who carried these portable shrines, and as Scabious opened his he sneaked a look at the picture inside. He saw a heavy, thick-set young man, like a younger version of Scabious himself. “Oh,” he said, “that’s not the boy I saw. He was younger, and thin…”
That shook the engine master, but only for a moment. “Don’t be a fool, Tom!” he snapped. “The ghosts of the dead can take on any form they wish. My Axel was as slender as you once. It is only natural that he would appear as he was in those days, young and handsome and filled with hope.”
Tom didn’t believe in ghosts. At least, he didn’t think he did. No one comes back from the Sunless Country. That was what Hester always said, and he muttered it under his breath several times for reassurance as he walked away from Mr Scabious’s office and climbed the suddenly dark and shadowy stairways to the upper tier. The boy could not have been a ghost: Tom had felt him, smelled him, sensed the warmth of his body. He had left footprints as he led the way towards the hangar. The footprints would prove it.
But when he reached the air-harbour, the wind had risen, and powder snow was pouring over the surface of the drifts like smoke. The prints around the hangar were already so faint that it was impossible to say how many feet had made them, and whether the strange boy had been real, or a ghost, or only a fragment of a dream.