Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  At the top of the stairs was a pair of bullet-pecked bronze doors. “Resurrection Corps,” said Popjoy, as the sentries slammed to attention. “Delivery for Her Excellency.”

  The doors swung wide. The room beyond was big and dark. Shrike’s new eyes switched automatically to nightvision and he saw that the far wall had been reinforced with armour plate. One long slot of a window, like the slit in a visor, remained open, glassless, gazing towards the west. The figure who stood at it was not entirely human.

  “Your Excellency…” Popjoy said.

  “Wait.” A voice from the darkness; a commanding whisper.

  Popjoy waited. In the silence, Shrike detected the faint sound of Doctor Zero’s teeth chattering and the nervous drumming of her heart.

  Suddenly, a huge pulse of light rose from the western marshes, filling the room with an orange glow that fluttered and stabbed as the first great burst of fire separated into the muzzle-flash of countless individual guns and the drifting white pin-points of phosphorus flares. Forward Command shifted slightly, dead metal creaking under Shrike’s feet. After a few more seconds the sound reached him, a far-off rumbling and banging, like somebody moving furniture about in a distant room.

  Bathed in the light of her war, the Stalker Fang turned from the viewing-slit to greet her visitors. She wore long, grey robes, and her face was a woman’s death-mask cast in bronze. She said, “Our artillery has just launched a bombardment on the forward cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. I shall be flying out shortly to lead the ground attack.”

  “Another glorious victory, I’m sure, Fang,” said Popjoy’s voice from somewhere near Shrike’s ankles, and Shrike noticed that both Popjoy and Dr Zero had fallen to their knees, pressing their faces to the smooth wood of the floor.

  “But not a final victory.” The Stalker’s voice was a winter wind rustling among frozen reeds. “We need more powerful weapons, Popjoy.”

  “And you shall have them, Your Excellency,” Popjoy promised. “I’m always on the lookout for odd bits of Old-Tech that might serve. In the meantime, we’ve brought you a small token of the Stalker Corps’s esteem.”

  The Stalker Fang’s almond-shaped eyes flared green as they focused on Shrike. “You are the Stalker Shrike,” she said, gliding closer. “I have seen images of you. I was told that you had ceased to function.”

  “He is fully repaired, Excellency,” said Popjoy

  The Stalker stopped a few paces from Shrike, studying him. “What is the meaning of this, Popjoy?” she asked.

  “A birthday present, Excellency!” Popjoy raised himself, grunting with the effort. “A little surprise that Doctor Zero here dreamed up. I’m sure you remember Oenone Zero; daughter of old Hiraku Zero, the airship ace. She’s a prodigy; already the finest surgeon-mechanic in the corps. (Apart from yours truly, of course.) Well, Oenone had the notion of digging old Shrikey up and repairing him to mark the anniversary of your glorious Resurrection!”

  The Stalker Fang stared at Shrike, saying nothing. Dr Zero was shaking so badly that Shrike could feel the vibrations through the floor.

  “Don’t tell me you’d forgotten?” chirped Popjoy. “It’s seventeen years to the day since I restored you to life in the facility at Rogue’s Roost! You’re sweet seventeen, Fang. Many happy returns!”

  The Stalker Fang watched Shrike with her impassive green eyes. “What am I to do with him?”

  Dr Zero looked up for the first time. “I thought – thought – you could k-keep him by you, Excellency,” she said. “He will serve you well. While you work to cleanse the world of the cancer of mobile cities, Mr Shrike will keep w-w-watch over you.”

  “Th-th-there,” said Popjoy, mocking her frightened stammer. “He’ll keep w-w-watch. A bodyguard as strong as yourself, and with the same heightened senses…”

  “I doubt he is as strong as me,” said the new Stalker.

  “Of course not!” Popjoy said hastily. “Her Excellency doesn’t need bodyguards, Treacle! What are you wittering about?” He simpered towards the waiting Stalker. “I just thought he might amuse you, Fang.”

  The Stalker Fang tilted her head on one side, still considering Shrike. “Very well. The unit is impressive. Appoint him to my staff.”

  A tall door opened at the far end of the gallery. A uniformed aide bowed low and announced, “Excellency, your ship is ready to depart for the front.”

  Without another word to Popjoy the Stalker turned, and walked away.

  “Excellent!” said Popjoy, when she had gone. He rose and switched on an argon lamp, then patted Dr Zero’s bottom as she stood up, making her blush. “Good work, Treacle. The Fire Flower was pleased. People say you can’t tell what she’s thinking, but I put her together, remember; I’ve a pretty good idea what goes on behind that mask.” Dabbing sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief he glanced at Shrike. “So what does the Shrikester think of our glorious leader?”

  “SHE IS STRONG,” said Shrike.

  Popjoy nodded. “She’s that all right. My greatest work. There’s some amazing machinery inside her. Bits of a Stalker-brain even older than yours. Old-Tech stuff so weird that even I can’t be sure how it works. I never managed to build another like her. But maybe one’s enough, eh, Shrikey?”

  Shrike turned back to the window, and the distant battle. Sheets of light sprang into the sky, as if coming from some deep fissure in the earth. The night was full of airships. He thought that it would be good to serve this Stalker Fang; good to obey someone as strong as himself and not take orders from soft, squashable once-born. He would be loyal to her, and perhaps, in time, that loyalty might fill up the empty spaces in his mind, and rid him of the nagging sense that he had lost something precious.

  That face, that scarred face.

  It fluttered in his brain like a moth, and was gone.

  7

  SHE’S LEAVING HOME

  Night, and a fingernail moon lifting from the mist above the Dead Hills. Wren lay fully dressed on her bed in the house in Dogstar Court, listening to her parents’ muffled voices drifting through the wall from their bedroom. It did not take long for them to fade into silence. Asleep. She waited, just to be sure. The dullness of their lives made her want to shriek sometimes. Asleep, at this hour, on such a lovely, moony night! But it suited her plans. She put on her boots and went softly out of her room and down the stairs, with the Tin Book of Anchorage heavy in the bag on her shoulder.

  It had been so easy to steal that it hadn’t felt like stealing at all. It wasn’t stealing, Wren kept assuring herself: Miss Freya didn’t need the Tin Book, and no one else in Anchorage would care that it had gone. It wasn’t stealing at all.

  But even so, as she propped the note she had spent all evening writing against the bread bin and crept out into the star-silvered streets, she could not help feeling sad that her life in Vineland was ending like this.

  When she left Gargle she had run straight back down the hill to the Winter Palace. Miss Freya had still been in the garden, chattering away to Mrs Scabious about the play the younger children would be performing at Moon Festival. Wren went to the library and took down the old wooden casket which Miss Freya had showed her earlier. She took out the Tin Book and locked the box again, setting it safely back in its place on the shelf. Through the open window she could hear Miss Freya saying, “Please, Windolene, just call me Freya; we’ve known each other long enough…”

  Wren slipped out of the library, out of the palace, and hurried home with the Tin Book nestled safely inside her jacket, trying not to feel like a thief.

  The moon was a windblown feather, caught on the spires of the Winter Palace. A lamp burned in Freya Rasmussen’s window, and as Wren hurried past, she thought, Goodbye, Miss Freya, and felt as if she would cry.

  At home it had been worse. All evening she had been close to tears at the thought of leaving Dad, and she had even started to think she would miss Mum. But it was only for a while. She would come back one day, a princess of the Lost Boys, and ev
erything would be all right. She had given Dad a special hug before she went to bed, which had surprised him. He probably thought she was just upset about her latest fight with Mum.

  She went down into the engine district and walked quickly towards the city’s edge. She had just left the shadow of the upper tier and was walking along a broad street between two derelict warehouses when Caul stepped into her path.

  Wren hugged her bag against herself and tried to dodge past him, but he moved to block her way again. His eyes gleamed faintly in the cage of his hair.

  “What do you want?” asked Wren, trying to sound cross instead of just scared.

  “You mustn’t go,” said Caul.

  “Why not? I can go if I want. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Gargle. I watched last night. I looked back when I reached the hilltop, and I saw you come out of that limpet. Did he ask you to help him? Did you agree?”

  Wren didn’t answer.

  “Wren, you can’t trust Gargle,” Caul told her. “He was just a boy when I worked with him, but he was cunning even then. He knows how to use people. How to hide what he really wants. Whatever he’s asked you to do for him, don’t.”

  “And how are you going to stop me?” asked Wren.

  “I’ll tell Tom and Hester.”

  “Why not tell Miss Freya too, while you’re about it?” Wren teased. “I’m sure she’d love to know. But you won’t do it, will you? If you were going to tell Mum and Dad you’d have done it as soon as you saw me come off the Autolycus. You wouldn’t betray your own people.”

  “You have no idea –” Caul started to say, but while he was still busy hunting for the right words she darted past him and away, her running footsteps ringing down the metal stairs at the end of the street and then falling quiet as she jumped off the last stair and on to the earth. The bag banged against her side, and her heart was thumping. She looked back to see if Caul was chasing her, but he was just standing where she had left him, not moving. She waved, then turned away and started running up the hill.

  Hester had fallen asleep quickly that night, but something disturbed Tom just as he was drifting off. Only later would he realize that it had been the sound of the street door closing.

  He lay in the dark and listened to his heart beat. Sometimes it seemed to him to falter, and sometimes there was a pain, or not quite a pain, but a sense that something was wrong inside him, where Pennyroyal’s bullet had torn into his body all those years ago. Exercise always made it worse. He should not have cut those logs this morning. But the logs had needed cutting, and if he had not cut them he would have had to explain to Hester about the pains around his heart, and she would worry, and make him go and consult Windolene Scabious, who was Anchorage’s doctor, and Windolene would want to examine him, and he was afraid of what she might discover. It was better not to think about it. Better just to thank the gods for these good years he’d had with Hester, and with Wren, and worry about the future when it happened.

  But his future was already running towards him, down Rasmussen Prospekt, through Boreal Arcade, up Dog Star Court; it was through the front gate and sprinting up the steps; it was pounding hard at his front door.

  “Great Quirke!” said Tom, startled, sitting up. Beside him, Hester groaned and rolled over, surfacing slowly. Tom threw the covers off and ran downstairs in his nightshirt. Through the glass panels of the front door a blurred figure loomed like a ghost, fists hammering the woodwork. A voice called Tom’s name.

  “Caul?” he said. “It’s open.”

  This was not the first time Caul had woken Tom with bad news. Once before, when Anchorage was ice-borne and Hester had taken off alone aboard the Jenny, he had appeared out of the night to warn Tom what was happening. He had just been a boy then. Now, with his long hair and his beard and his wide, wild eyes he looked like some maniac prophet. He burst into the hall, knocking over the hat-stand and sweeping Tom’s collection of Ancient mobile telephone casings to the floor.

  “Caul, calm down!” said Tom. “What’s the matter?”

  “Wren,” said the former Lost Boy. “It’s Wren…”

  “Wren’s in her room,” said Tom, but he felt suddenly uneasy, recalling the strange way Wren had hugged him when she said goodnight, and that scratch on her cheek which she said she’d done walking into a thorn-bush. He’d sensed that something was wrong. “Wren?” he called up the stairs.

  “She’s gone!” shouted Caul.

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  Hester was halfway down the stairs, pulling on her shirt. She ran back up, and Tom heard her kick the door of Wren’s bedroom open. “Gods and goddesses!” she shouted, and reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Tom, he’s right. She’s taken her bag and her coat…”

  Tom said, “I expect she’s out with Tildy Smew on some midnight jaunt. This is Vineland. What harm can come to her?”

  “Lost Boys,” said Caul. He was pacing to and fro, his hands deep in the pockets of his filthy old coat. The wild animal smell of him filled the hall. “You remember Gargle? He left a note. Wanted me to help him. Stealing something. Don’t know what. Wren must have followed me and got caught. He’s using her. She’s gone to him.”

  Hester went through into the kitchen and came back with a square of paper. “Tom, look…”

  It was a note from their daughter.

  Dearest Daddy and Mummy, she had written,

  I have decided to leave Vineland. Some Lost Boys are here. Don’t worry, they mean no harm. They are going to take me with them. I shall see the Raft Cities and the Hunting Ground and the whole wide world, and have adventures, like you did. I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye but you would only try to stop me going. I will take good care of myself and come home soon with all sorts of tales to tell you.

  love Wren xxxxx

  Hester dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the hall rug. Beneath it, set into the floor, was the safe where the merchant whose house this had been once stored his valuables. All it held now were a few cardboard boxes of ammunition, and a gun. Hester pulled the gun out, unwrapping it from its oilcloth bindings.

  “Where are they, Caul?” she asked.

  “Het –” said Tom.

  “I should have told you sooner,” Caul muttered, “but it’s Gargle. Gargle. He saved my life once…”

  “Where?”

  “A cove on North Shore. Where the trees come down nearly to the water. Please, I don’t want anyone hurt.”

  “Should have thought of that before,” said Hester, checking the gun’s action. Most of the guns she had taken from the Huntsmen of Arkangel she had thrown off the city’s stern while it was still at sea, but this one she had kept, just in case. It wasn’t as pretty as the others; no snarling wolf’s-head on the butt or silver chasing on the barrel. It was just a heavy, black .38 Schadenfreude; an ugly, reliable tool for killing people. She slipped bullets into its six chambers and snapped it shut, then stuffed it through her belt and pushed past Tom to the door, snatching her coat from the rack. “Wake the others,” she told him, and went out into the night.

  From the top of the island Wren could see the Autolycus squatting like a beached crab in the cove where she had first seen Gargle. The blue light from the limpet’s open hatch gleamed on the water. She started down the sheep-track towards it, slithering on loose earth, tripping on roots, the breath cold at the back of her throat as she ran through the trees and the gorse towards the spider-crab silhouette.

  Gargle was standing in the shallows, at the foot of the ramp that led up through the open hatch. Remora was with him, and as Wren drew near she saw Fishcake come down the ramp to join them. “Ready to go?” she heard Gargle ask.

  “Touch of a button,” the boy replied.

  The limpet’s engines were idling, a thin plume of exhaust smoke rising from sealable vents on its back. A crab-cam glinted as it scurried up one of the legs and home to its port on the hull. Other cameras were creeping quickly down the beach, looking so spid
er-like that Wren almost wanted to run away, but she told herself that if she was to travel with the Lost Boys she would have to get used to them, so she made herself walk calmly between them down the shingle.

  “It’s me,” she called softly, as Gargle spun towards the sound of her footsteps. “I’ve got the Tin Book.”

  Anchorage-in-Vineland was waking up, indignant and alarmed. As Hester climbed the path to the woods she could hear doors slamming in the city behind her, and people shouting as they prepared to go and do their bit against the Lost Boys. Some of the younger men almost caught up with her as she drew near to the top of the island, but she left them behind on the descent; they stuck to the zigzag path while she just went straight down, crashing through the brush and surfing down screes in a rattle of bouncing stones. She felt excited, and happy that Wren needed her at last. Her father couldn’t save her from the Lost Boys. Nobody else in Vineland could. Only Hester had the strength to deal with them, and when she had killed them all Wren would come to her senses and realize what danger she had been in and be grateful, and she and Hester would be friends again.

  Hester slithered into a briar-patch at the hill’s foot and looked back. There was no sign of the others. She pulled the gun out of her belt and started towards the cove.

  “Here,” said Wren, sliding the heavy bag off her shoulder and holding it out to Gargle. “It’s in there. My stuff, too.”

  Remora said, “Better tell her, Gar. It’s time to go.”

  Gargle had pulled the Tin Book out and was leafing through it, ignoring both of them.

  “I’m coming with you, remember?” said Wren, starting to grow uneasy, because this wasn’t the welcome she’d expected. “I’m coming with you. That was the deal.”