by Philip Reeve
“Yes, Uncle,” said Caul. “You Know Best.”
“Damn right I do. You’ll go aboard the Screw Worm as soon as day-shift begins. Bring me home some pretty things, Caul. And stories. Lots and lots of stories.”
“Yes, Uncle!”
“And Caul –”
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Don’t get caught.”
And here was Caul, a month later and hundreds of miles from Grimsby, crouching breathless in the shadows while he waited for the beat of Hester’s running feet to fade away. What had come over him since he arrived here, to make him keep taking these risks? A good burglar never let himself be seen, but Caul was almost sure that young aviatrix had spotted him, and as for Scabious… He shivered, imagining what would happen if Uncle heard of this.
When he was sure he was alone he slipped out of his hiding place and went quickly and almost soundlessly down by a secret way into the Screw Worm, which hung hidden in the oily shadows of Anchorage’s underbelly, not far from the drive-wheel. It was a rusty, ramshackle old limpet, but Caul was proud of it, and proud of the way its hold was already filling with the things he and his crew had pilfered from the abandoned workshops and villas of the city above. He dumped his latest bag of plunder with the rest and slid between the stacked bales and bundles into the forward compartment. There, amid the soft buzz of machinery and the steady blue flutter of the screens, the rest of the Screw Worm’s three-boy crew were waiting for him. They had seen everything, of course. While Caul had been following Hester quietly through the engine district, they had been tracking her with their secret cameras, and they were still chuckling over her conversation with the engine master.
“Wooooh! Ghostie!” said Skewer, grinning.
“Caul, Caul,” chirped Gargle. “Old Scabious thinks you’re a ghost! His dead son come back to say hello!”
“I know,” said Caul, “I heard.” He shoved past Skewer and settled himself into one of the creaky leather seats, suddenly annoyed at how cluttered and stuffy the Screw Worm felt after the clean chill of the city above. He glanced at his companions, who were still watching him with foolish grins, expecting him to join in their mockery of old Scabious. They, too, seemed smaller and less vital, compared with the people he had just been watching.
Skewer was the same age as Caul, but bigger and stronger and more sure of himself. Sometimes it seemed strange to Caul that Uncle had not put Skewer in charge of this trip, and sometimes there was an edge to Skewer’s jokes that made him suspect Skewer thought the same thing. Gargle, ten years old and permanently wide-eyed with the rush of his first burgling mission, seemed unaware of the tension between them. He had turned out as clumsy and useless as Caul had feared; inept at burglary, freezing with terror whenever a Dry came near him, he came back from most of his expeditions into the city with his hands shaking and his trousers sodden. Skewer, who was always quick to make the most of another’s weakness, would have bullied and mocked him mercilessly, but Caul held him back. He still remembered his own first job, stuck with a couple of unfriendly older boys in a limpet under Zeestadt Gdansk. All burglars had to start somewhere.
Skewer was still grinning. “You’re slipping, Caul! Letting people see you. Lucky for you the old man’s mad. A ghost, eh! Wait till we get home and tell the others! Caul the ghoul! Whooooo!”
“It’s not funny, Skew,” said Caul. What Mr Scabious said had made him feel edgy and strange. He was not sure why. He checked his reflection in the cabin window. There wasn’t much resemblance to the portraits of Axel he’d seen when he was casing Scabious’s office. The Scabious boy had been much older, tall and handsome and blue-eyed. Caul had a burglar’s build, skinny as a skeleton key, and his eyes were black. But they both had the same untidy, white-blond hair. An old man whose heart was broken, glimpsing a fair head through darkness or mist, might jump to conclusions, mightn’t he?
He realized with a start that Skewer was talking to him, and had been talking to him for some time. “…and you know what Uncle says. The First Rule of Burgling – Don’t Get Caught.”
“I’m not going to get caught, Skew. I’m careful.”
“Well, how come you’ve been seen, then?”
“Everybody gets unlucky sometimes. Big Spadger off the Burglar Bill had to knife a Dry who spotted him in the underdecks of Arkangel last season.”
“That’s different. You spend too much time watching the Drys. It’s all right if it’s just on screen, but you hang around up there watching them for real.”
“He does,” agreed Gargle, eager to please. “I’ve seen him.”
“Shut up,” said Skewer, absent-mindedly kicking the smaller boy.
“They’re interesting,” said Caul.
“They’re Drys!” said Skewer impatiently. “You know what Uncle says about Drys. They’re like cattle. Their brains don’t move as fast as ours. That’s why it’s right for us to take their stuff.”
“I know!” said Caul. Like Skewer, he’d had all this drummed into him when he was just a newbie, back in the Burglarium. “We’re the Lost Boys. We’re the best burglars in the world. Everything that ain’t nailed down is ours.” But he knew Skewer was right. Sometimes he felt as if he wasn’t meant to be a Lost Boy at all. He liked watching people better than burgling them.
He swung himself out of his seat and snatched his latest report from a shelf above the camera controls; thirteen pages of Freya Rasmussen’s best official notepaper covered in his big, grubby handwriting. He waved them in Skewer’s face as he headed aft. “I’m sending this back to base. Uncle gets angry if he doesn’t get an update once a week.”
“That’s nothing to how angry he’ll be if you go and get us caught,” Skewer muttered.
The Screw Worm’s fish bay was beneath the boys’ sleeping cabin, and had taken on the same smell of stale sweat and unwashed socks. There were racks for ten message-fish, but three were already empty. Caul felt a pang of regret as he started prepping Number 4 for launch. In just six more weeks the last fish would be gone. Then it would be time for the Screw Worm to decouple from Anchorage and head for home. He would miss Freya and her people. But that was stupid, wasn’t it? They were only stupid Drys. Only pictures on a stupid screen.
The message-fish looked like a sleek silver torpedo, and if it had been standing upright it would have been taller than Caul. As always, a slight sense of awe overcame him as he checked the fish’s fuel tank and placed his rolled-up report in the watertight compartment near its nose. All over the north, limpet captains just like him were sending fish home to Uncle, so that Uncle would know everything that was going on everywhere and be able to plan ever more daring burglaries. It made Caul feel even more guilty about his liking for the Drys. He was so lucky to be a Lost Boy. He was so lucky to be working for Uncle. Uncle Knew Best.
A few minutes later the message-fish slid from the Screw Worm’s belly and dropped unnoticed out of the complex shadows on Anchorage’s underside, down on to the ice. As the city swept on into the north, the fish began drilling its way down through the snow, down through the ice, patiently down and down and down until it broke through at last into the black waters beneath the ice cap. Its Old-Tech computer-brain ticked and grumbled. It wasn’t bright, but it knew its way home. It extended stubby fins and a small propeller and went purring quickly away towards the south.
13
THE WHEELHOUSE
Hester did not tell Tom about her strange encounter. She did not want him to think her silly, babbling about ghosts. The shape she had seen watching her from the shadows had been a trick of her imagination, and as for Mr Scabious, he was mad. The whole town was mad, if they believed Freya and Pennyroyal and their promises of a new green hunting ground beyond the ice, and Tom was mad with them. There was no point in arguing, or in trying to make him see sense. Better just to concentrate on getting him safely away.
Days and then weeks went by, with Anchorage running north across broad plains of sea-ice as it skirted the mountainous shield of Greenla
nd. Hester began to spend most of her time at the air-harbour, watching Mr Aakiuq work on the Jenny Haniver. There was not much she could do to help him, for she was no mechanic, but she could pass him tools and fetch things from his workshop and pour him cups of scalding purple-dark cocoa from his old thermos flask, and she felt that just by being there she might help to hasten the day when the Jenny would be ready to take her away from this haunted city.
Sometimes Tom joined her in the hangar, but mostly he stayed away. “Mr Aakiuq doesn’t want both of us hanging about,” he told Hester. “We’d just get in his way.” But they both knew the real reason: he was enjoying his new life in Anchorage too much. He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d missed living aboard a moving city. It was the engines, he told himself; that faint, comfortable vibration that made the buildings feel alive; that sense that you were going somewhere, and would wake up each morning to a new view from your bedroom window – even if it was just another view of darkness and of ice.
And perhaps, although he didn’t like to admit it to himself, it had something to do with Freya. He often met her in the Wunderkammer or the palace library, and although the meetings were rather formal, with Smew or Miss Pye always waiting in the background, Tom felt that he was coming to know the margravine. She intrigued him. She was so unlike Hester, and so like the girls he used to daydream about as a lonely apprentice back in London; pretty and sophisticated. It was true that she was a bit of a snob, and obsessed with ritual and etiquette, but that seemed understandable when you remembered how she had been brought up, and what she’d lived through. He liked her more and more.
Professor Pennyroyal had made a full recovery, and had moved into the chief navigator’s official residence, in a tall, blade-shaped tower called the Wheelhouse which stood in the precincts of the Winter Palace, near the temple. Its top floor housed the city’s control bridge, but below was a luxurious apartment, into which Pennyroyal settled with an air of satisfaction. He had always thought himself a rather grand person, and it was pleasant to be aboard a city where everybody else thought so too.
Of course, he had no idea how to actually steer an ice city, so the practical day-to-day work of guiding Anchorage was still done by Windolene Pye. She and Pennyroyal spent an hour together each morning, poring over the city’s few, vague charts of the western ice. The rest of the time he relaxed in his sauna, or put his feet up in his drawing room, or went scavenging in the abandoned boutiques of Rasmussen Prospekt and the Ultima Arcade, picking out expensive clothes to suit his new position.
“We certainly fell on our feet when we landed on Anchorage, Tom, dear boy!” he said when Tom came visiting one night-dark arctic afternoon. He waved a bejewelled hand around his huge sitting room, with its ornate carpets and framed paintings, its fires aglow in bronze tripods, its big windows with their views across the rooftops to the passing ice. Outside, a fierce wind was rising, driving snow across the city, but in the chief navigator’s quarters all was warmth and peace.
“How is that airship of yours coming along, by the way?” Pennyroyal asked.
“Oh, slowly,” said Tom. In truth, he had not been near the air-harbour for several days and did not know how the work on the Jenny Haniver was progressing. He didn’t like to think about it too much, for when the repairs were complete, Hester would want to leave, dragging him away from this lovely city and from Freya. Still, he thought, it’s kind of the prof to show an interest.
“And what about the journey to America?” he asked. “Is everything going well, Professor?”
“Absolutely!” cried Pennyroyal, settling himself on a sofa and rearranging his quilted silicone-silk robes. He poured himself another beaker of wine and offered one to Tom. “There are some excellent vintages in the chief navigator’s cellar, and it seems a waste not to get through as much as we can before … well…”
“You should keep the best to toast your arrival in America,” Tom said, sitting down on a small chair near the great man’s feet. “Have you decided on a course yet?”
“Well, yes and no,” Pennyroyal said airily, gesturing with his beaker and slopping wine over the fur throws on his sofa. “Yes and no, Tom. Once we get west of Greenland it’ll be plain skating all the way. Windolene and Scabious had planned something very complicated, wiggling between a lot of islands that might not even be there any more, then running down the west coast of America. Luckily, I was able to show them a much easier route.” He indicated a map on the wall. “We’ll nip across Baffin Island into Hudson’s Bay. It’s good, thick, solid sea-ice and it stretches right into the heart of the North American continent. That’s the way I came on my journey home. We’ll whizz across that, hoist up the stern-wheel and simply roll on our caterpillar tracks into the green country. It’ll be a doddle.”
“I wish I was coming with you,” sighed Tom.
“No, no, dear boy!” the explorer said sharply. “Your place is on the Bird Roads. As soon as that ship of yours is better you and your, ah, lovely companion must return to the sky. By the way, I hear Her Heftiness the margravine has lent you a few of my books?”
Tom blushed at the mention of Freya.
“So what do you make of them, eh?” Pennyroyal went on, pouring himself more wine. “Good stuff?”
Tom wasn’t quite sure what to say. Pennyroyal’s books were certainly exciting. The trouble was, some of the Alternative Historian’s history was a little too alternative for Tom’s London-trained mind. In America the Beautiful he reported seeing the girders of ancient skyscrapers jutting from the dust of the Dead Continent – but no other explorer had described such sights, which would surely have been eaten away by wind and rust aeons ago. Had Pennyroyal been hallucinating when he saw them? And then, in Rubbish? Rubbish! Pennyroyal claimed that the tiny toy trains and ground-cars sometimes found at Ancient sites weren’t toys at all. “Undoubtedly,” he wrote, “these machines were piloted by minute human beings, genetically engineered by the Ancients for unknown reasons of their own.”
Tom didn’t doubt that Pennyroyal was a great explorer. It was just that when he sat down at a typewriting machine his imagination seemed to run away with him.
“Well, Tom?” asked Pennyroyal. “Don’t be shy. A good writer never objects to constrictive crusticism. I mean, consumptive cretinism…”
“Oh, Professor Pennyroyal!” cried the voice of Windolene Pye, blaring from a brass speaking tube on the wall. “Come quickly! The lookouts are reporting something on the ice ahead!”
Tom felt himself grow cold, imagining a predator city lurking out there on the ice, but Pennyroyal just shrugged. “What does the silly old moo expect me to do about it?” he asked.
“Well, you are chief navigator now, Professor,” Tom reminded him. “Perhaps you’re supposed to be on the bridge at a time like this.”
“Honorararary Chief Nagivator, Tim,” said Pennyroyal, and Tom realized that he was drunk.
Patiently he helped the tipsy explorer to his feet and led him to a small private elevator, which whisked them up to the top floor of the Wheelhouse. They stepped out into a glass-walled room where Miss Pye stood nervously beside the engine district telegraph while her small staff spread charts out on the navigation table. A burly helmsman waited at the city’s huge steering wheel for instructions.
Pennyroyal collapsed on the first chair they passed, but Tom hurried to the glass wall and waited for the wiper-blade to sweep across so that he could catch a glimpse of the view ahead. Thick flurries of snow were driving across the city, hiding all but the nearest buildings. “I can’t see –” he began to say. And then a momentary break in the storm showed him a glitter of lights away to the north.
In the emptiness ahead of Anchorage, a hunter-killer suburb had appeared.
14
THE SUBURB
Freya was trying to sort out a guest list for dinner. It was a difficult business, for by long tradition only citizens of the highest rank could dine with the margravine, and these days that meant just Mr Scabious
, who was nobody’s idea of good company. The arrival of Professor Pennyroyal had cheered things up no end, of course – it was quite acceptable for the city’s chief navigator to sit at table with her – but even the professor’s fascinating stories were beginning to wear a little thin, and he had a tendency to drink too much.
What she really wanted (although she tried not to admit it to herself as she sat there at her desk in the study) was to invite Tom. Just Tom, alone, so that he could gaze at her in the candlelight and tell her how beautiful she was; she was sure he wanted to. The trouble was, he was only a common aviator. And even if she broke with all tradition and asked him, he would bring his nasty girlfriend, and that wasn’t the sort of evening she wanted at all.
She slumped back in her chair with a sigh. Portraits of earlier margravines gazed down kindly at her from the study walls, and she wondered what they would have done in a situation like this. But of course, there had never been a situation like this before. For them the ancient traditions of the city had always worked, providing a simple, infallible guide to what could and could not be done – their lives had ticked along like clockwork. Just my luck to be left in charge when the spring breaks, thought Freya gloomily. Just my luck to be left with a load of rules and traditions that don’t quite fit any more.
But she knew that if she took off the armour of tradition she would have to face all sorts of new problems. The people who had stayed aboard her city after the plague had done so only because they revered the margravine. If Freya stopped behaving like a margravine, would they still be prepared to go along with her plans?
She went back to her guest list, and had just finished doodling a small dog in the bottom left corner when Smew burst in, then burst out again and gave the traditional triple knock.