by Philip Reeve
They had moved her, after that first interview with Shkin, into a comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Pepperpot. She had a soft bed, a basin to wash in, three meals a day and a new linen dress which rather suited her. And she had a copy of Predator’s Gold, delivered by Miss Weems, “with Mr Shkin’s compliments”.
For a few hours each day a reflector outside the barred window caught a beam of sunshine falling through a skylight in the deckplates above and filled Wren’s cell with light. As she curled up on her bunk and opened the lurid covers of Pennyroyal’s book, she could almost imagine herself back in her own bedroom in Dog Star Court, where she had often sat beside the window reading. But she had never read anything like Predator’s Gold. How strange it was, to find the places and people and stories she had known all her life so changed and twisted!
She had been afraid that reading about Mum and Dad would make her homesickness worse, but she need not have worried. Dad did not feature at all in Pennyroyal’s book. As for Hester Shaw, “a titian-haired Amazon of the air whose divine face was marred only by a livid scar, where some brigand had drawn his stiletto across the damask flesh of her cheek”, she was barely recognizable as Mum.
And one night, as Wren lay sleepless, thinking indignantly about all that she had read, it struck her that she had made another terrible mistake. She’d thought herself so clever for persuading Shkin to take her to the mayor, but she’d been assuming that Predator’s Gold would be mostly true. She had not imagined just how much Pennyroyal had lied about his time in Anchorage. By telling the real story, Wren could destroy his reputation and his career. Pennyroyal might well want to buy her, but not so that he could write books about her. He would want to silence her, quickly and permanently.
Alone in her cell, Wren hid her face in the pillow and whined with fear. What had she done? And how could she undo it? She jumped from her bunk and started towards the door, meaning to shout for a guard. She would tell Shkin that she had lied about Anchorage; she was just a Lost Girl after all, and of no interest to Professor Pennyroyal. But then she would be back where she had started, or worse – Shkin would say she had been wasting his time. She imagined that a man like Shkin would have unpleasant ways of getting even with people who wasted his time.
“Think, Wren, think!” she whispered.
And all the while, beneath her feet, Brighton’s powerful Mitchell & Nixon engines boomed and pounded, pushing the city steadily northwards.
After his interview with Wren, Shkin had questioned Fishcake. The newbie had proved highly cooperative. He was tired out and terrified, and eager for some new master who would look after him and tell him what to do. After a few kind-sounding words from Nabisco Shkin he confirmed Wren’s story about Anchorage. After a few more, he told the slave-dealer where Grimsby lay.
Shkin’s people relayed the information to the Mayor and the Council. Brighton adjusted its course, and soon the Old-Tech instruments on the bridge detected the spires of a sunken city in the depths below. Brighton circled for a while, broadcasting its treacherous message, and succeeded in winkling out a last few limpets. When no more appeared, Pennyroyal decided that the expedition was at an end.
The original plan had been to send men down in captured limpets to explore the pirate lair. But the voyage north had taken longer than expected; it was late in the season, more storms were forecast, and the people of Brighton, who had the attention-span of midges, were growing bored. Depth charges were dropped, resulting in a few spectacular underwater explosions and a lot of floating debris, which the city’s shopkeepers scooped up in nets and put on sale as souvenirs of Grimsby. Pennyroyal made a speech declaring that the North Atlantic was now safe for decent raft-cities again, and Brighton turned south, setting a course back to the warmer waters of the Middle Sea, where it had promised to rendezvous with a cluster of Traction-Cities to celebrate Moon Festival.
The following afternoon, Wren’s door was unlocked and a lot of black-clad guards came packing into her cell, followed by Nabisco Shkin himself.
“Well, my dear,” he said, glancing at the copy of Predator’s Gold which lay on her bunk. “Were you gripped by our mayor’s adventures? Did you notice any errors in his account?”
Wren barely knew where to start. “It’s all rubbish!” she said indignantly. “The people of Anchorage didn’t force Pennyroyal to guide them across the High Ice; they made him Acting Navigator, which was a great honour, and he made a proper hash of it. And it wasn’t him who fought off the Huntsmen, it was my mum, and she didn’t get killed by Masgard, like she does in the book; she’s still alive. And she’d never have sold Anchorage’s course to Arkangel. And when she’s dying and she says to Pennyroyal, ‘Take my airship, save yourself,’ that’s just poo; Pennyroyal stole the ship, and shot Dad so he could take off in her – he doesn’t mention Dad, of course. And as for that thing that Miss Freya does on page 81…”
She stopped, remembering her predicament. Shkin was watching her, as careful and calculating as ever. Maybe giving her the book had just been a way of testing her, seeing if she would stick to her story about Anchorage in the face of all Pennyroyal’s lies.
“Interesting,” Shkin said, and snapped his fingers at one of the guards, who stepped smartly forward to clamp a pair of pretty silver manacles on Wren’s wrists. “I always suspected that His Worship’s tales of adventure were somewhat embroidered. I think it is time we took you up to meet him.”
Down the stairways of the Pepperpot to a garage where a sleek black bug stood waiting. “What about Fishcake?” Wren asked, as Shkin’s men pushed her inside. “What have you done with poor little Fishcake?”
“He will be remaining at the Pepperpot.” Shkin settled himself beside her on the bug’s back seat and checked his pocket watch. “Cloud 9,” he told the driver, and the bug set off, out into the dingy streets of the Laines, a district of antique shops and cheap hotels which filled most of Brighton’s middle tier.
In other circumstances Wren would have been fascinated by the passing shop-fronts packed with junk and Old-Tech, the strangely dressed people, the tier-supports plastered with the handbills of hopeless fringe theatre companies. Now, however, she was too busy wondering how she was going to keep herself alive. It would all be a matter of timing, she decided. If she were clever enough, and kept her nerve, she might still be able to get herself out of Shkin’s hands without Pennyroyal ever realizing who she really was…
The bug climbed a long ramp to the upper tier. Clearing tourists out of the way with blasts of its hooter, it sped along Ocean Boulevard, the oval promenade that ringed Brighton’s upper city. It passed hotels and restaurants, palm trees and crazy-golf courses, fairgrounds, floral clocks and bingo parlours. It crossed a bridge that spanned the shallow end of the Sea Pool, a lake of cleaned and filtered sea-water fringed by artifical beaches. At last it arrived in the Old Steine, the circular plaza where the thick steel hawsers which tied Cloud 9 to Brighton were attached. The floating deckplate hovered about two hundred feet above Wren’s head. Looking up, she could see a glass-walled control room jutting from its underbelly like an elaborate, upside-down greenhouse. Men were moving about inside, operating banks of brass levers which adjusted Cloud 9’s trim and altitude. Small engine pods were mounted all around the deckplate’s edge, and Wren presumed that in rough weather they would be used to keep Cloud 9 on station above the city. On this windless afternoon only a few were switched on, acting as fans to blow Brighton’s exhaust smoke away from the mayor’s palace.
In the middle of Old Steine, where the Cloud 9 tow-lines were bolted to huge, rusty stanchions, a yellow cable car waited to take visitors up to the Pavilion. As Shkin’s bug squeaked to a stop beside it, red-coated soldiers came hurrying to study the papers of Shkin and his men and run Old-Tech metal-detectors over their clothes.
“There was a time when just about anyone was allowed to go up and wander in the Pavilion gardens,” said Shkin. “That’s all changed since the war started. There’s no fighting
in our part of the world, of course – the African Anti-Tractionists have no stomach for the Green Storm’s crusade – but Pennyroyal is still terrified that saboteurs or terrorists might take a potshot at him.”
That was the first Wren heard about the war between the cities and the Storm. It explained why there were all those big, ugly gun batteries on the city’s esplanades, and why security was so tight.
“Purpose of your visit to Cloud 9, Mr Shkin?” asked the commander.
“I have an interesting piece of merchandise to show to the mayor.”
“I’m not sure His Worship is buying slaves at the moment, sir.”
“Oh, he will not want to miss the chance of adding this one to his staff. I suggest you let us up without further delay, unless you wish to spend the rest of your career down on Tier 3, picking pubes out of the Sea Pool filters…”
There were no more objections. Shkin and his party were ushered quickly aboard, the cable car shuddered and Wren, looking from its big windows, saw Brighton fall away below her. “Oh look,” she murmured, entranced, but Shkin and his men had seen it all before.
Suddenly the howl of super-charged engine-pods filled the cable car and swift shadows came flickering across its windows. Beyond the web of Cloud 9’s hawsers a flock of fierce, spiky shapes cut through the afternoon sky. Wren shrieked, imagining that there had been an explosion up on Cloud 9 and that this was the debris raining down, but the shapes veered in formation and hurtled away across Brighton’s rooftops, their shadows speeding across the busy streets.
“But they’ve got no envelopes!” Wren cried. “No gasbags! How do they stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!”
Some of Shkin’s men laughed. The slave-trader himself looked faintly pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. “Not impossible,” he said. “The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm’s air-fleets. There is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological advances…” He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines and the peevish squeal of air-brakes. “This lot are called the Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air-force, hired by our esteemed mayor to protect his palace…”
Wren turned to the window again as the machines sped by. They were fragile-looking contraptions, all string and balsa wood and varnished paper, their cockpits stripped down to a bucket-seat and a nest of control-sticks. Some had two bat-like wings, others three or four or ten; some flapped along beneath black, creaking things like broken umbrellas. On their massive engine-pods were painted hawks and sharks and naked ladies and raffish, devil-may-care names: Damn You, Gravity! and Bad Hair Day; Contents Under Pressure and Delayed Gratification Now! A begoggled aviatrix waved at Wren from the cockpit of something called the Combat Wombat. Wren waved back, but the squadron was already pulling away, dwindling to a cluster of specks far off above the sea.
Wren was trembling as the cable car carried her up through the belly of Cloud 9 to its terminus in the Pavilion gardens. She had always believed that Dad and Miss Freya knew everything there was to know about the world outside of Anchorage-in-Vineland, but clearly it had changed a lot in the sixteen years since they crossed the ice. They had known nothing about this terrible war, which was almost as old as she was, and she doubted they could even imagine the bizarre flying machines she had just seen. It made her feel even further away from them.
The pang of homesickness faded as her minders led her out of the upper cable-car terminus and along gravelled paths towards the hub of Cloud 9, where the sugar-pink minarets and meringue domes of Pennyroyal’s palace rose from gardens filled with palm trees and cypresses, follies and fountains. Flocks of gaudy parakeets wheeled overhead, and above them Cloud 9’s transparent gasbags shone in the sunlight like enormous bubbles.
“Your business?” asked a house-slave, stepping out to bar Shkin’s way.
“Nabisco Shkin,” the slave-dealer replied, and that was enough; the man bowed and stammered something and waved the visitors on, up an elegant white staircase to a broad sun-deck. At the heart of the sun-deck was a pool. In the middle of the pool, adrift on his airbed in a gold lamé swimming costume, a cocktail in one hand, a book in the other, his round face tilted to the sun, lounged Nimrod Pennyroyal.
Wren had worked out that Pennyroyal must be at least sixty-five, so she was expecting someone quite frail. But Pennyroyal had aged well. He had lost some weight, and most of his hair, but otherwise he looked not much different from the photographs Wren had seen of him, taken during his brief, unhappy stint as Anchorage’s chief navigator. A bevy of attractive slave-girls trod water around his floating bed, clutching fresh drinks, a bookmark, trays of cakes and sweets and other items such as a busy mayor might need. A boy of Wren’s age, long and black as an evening shadow, stood on the poolside waving an ostrich-feather fan.
“I see that Green Storm prisoner I sold you has settled in well,” said Shkin.
“Ah? Oh!” Pennyroyal opened his eyes and sat up. “Ah! Afternoon, Shkin.” He twisted round on his airbed to peer at the youth. “Yes, Mrs Pennyroyal is delighted with him. Makes a very handy fan-bearer. Lovely wafting action. And he goes so well with the dining-room wallpaper.” He looked at Shkin again, and Wren had the impression that he wasn’t particularly pleased to see the slave-trader. “Anyway, Nabisco, old chap, to what do I owe the um, ah…”
Shkin bowed faintly. “This girl was taken from one of the limpets we fished up last week. I thought you might wish to purchase her for the Pavilion.” He gestured towards Wren, and his assistants moved her closer to the poolside so that the mayor might have a better view of her.
Pennyroyal peered at her. “Lost Girl, eh? She scrubs up well, I must say. But I thought we agreed we don’t want any of her crowd hanging about in Brighton. Weren’t you planning to sell them all to Nuevo Maya?”
“Afraid one of them might know a few awkward facts about your past, Pennyroyal?” said Shkin.
“Eh? What are you suggesting?”
“This girl,” Shkin announced, “has lately arrived from the Dead Continent. From a city long thought lost, but actually thriving in that blasted land. A city of which I believe Your Worship has fond memories.”
Reaching behind him, Shkin took something from one of his lackeys and lobbed it across the pool so that it landed on Pennyroyal’s airbed. The Tin Book. Pennyroyal picked it up and studied the cover with a puzzled frown, then turned it over and looked at the paper label on the back.
“Great Gods!” he gasped, spilling his drink into the pool. “Anchorage!”
“This girl,” Shkin said, “is none other than the daughter of your old travelling companion Hester Shaw.”
“Oh cripes!” yelped Pennyroyal, and with a sudden, spasmodic lurch capsized his air-bed.
“I was concerned to discover that there are certain discrepancies between the story she tells and the version of events in your worship’s interpolitan bestseller Predator’s Gold,” explained Nabisco Shkin, looking not the least bit concerned as he stood there on the poolside, leaning on his black steel cane, watching Pennyroyal splash and flounder. “So I decided it might be best if I gave your worship the opportunity to purchase her before her account can become publicly known and… confuse Your Worship’s many readers. Naturally, she is priced at a premium. Shall we say, a thousand gold pieces?”
“Never!” spluttered Pennyroyal, standing up in the shallow end with all the dignity an elderly gentleman in a gold lamé swimming costume can muster. “You’re nothing but a gangster, Shkin! I will not be intimidated by your puerile attempt to ah, er… It’s not true is it? It can’t be true! Hester Shaw had no daughter – and anyway, ah, Anchorage sank, didn’t it; went down with all hands…”
“Ask her,” said Shkin brightly, pointing the tip of his cane at Wren. “Ask Miss Natsworthy here.”
Pennyroyal gawped at Wren, his eyes so full of fear that for a moment W
ren felt almost sorry for him. “Well, girl?” he asked. “What do you say? Do you really claim to be from Anchorage?”
Wren took a deep breath and clenched her fists. Now that she was facing this legendary traitor and villain she felt less certain than ever that her plan would work.
“No,” she said.
Shkin turned to stare at her.
“Of course it’s not true,” said Wren, managing a tight little laugh. “Anchorage went down in Arctic waters years and years ago. Everyone who has read your magnificent book knows that, Professor Pennyroyal. I’m just a poor Lost Girl from Grimsby.”
Wren had turned her story this way and that in her mind on the way from the Pepperpot, and could not see how it could be disproved. Of course, if anyone asked the other Lost Boys, they would all say that Wren was not one of their tribe, and Fishcake knew who she really was – but why would Pennyroyal believe their word over Wren’s? She could say that Shkin had bribed them to back him up.
“I’ve never been to Anchorage,” she said firmly.
Shkin’s nostrils flared. “Very well then; the book, the Tin Book, stamped with the seal of Anchorage’s rulers – how do you explain that?”
Wren had already worked out an answer to that. “I brought it with me from Grimsby,” she said. “It is a present for Your Worship. The Lost Boys stole it years and years ago, like we’ve stolen all sorts of things from all sorts of cities. Anchorage is a wreck, sunk at the bottom of the sea. Nobody lives there.”
“But she told me herself she was Hester Shaw’s daughter!” said Shkin. “Why would she lie?”
“Because of your wonderful books, Your Worship,” explained Wren, and gazed at the mayor as adoringly as she could. “I have read them all. Whenever my limpet attached itself to a new city I would always burgle the bookshops first, in the hope that there would be a new Nimrod Pennyroyal. I told Mr Shkin I was from Anchorage just so that he would bring me to meet you.”