by Philip Reeve
The children twittered. Hester stepped protectively in front of Tom. Caul ran towards the old man. “Uncle,” he said, “I think Grimsby is damaged worse than we reckoned.”
“Well?” asked Uncle, looking up at a close-up of Caul on one of his screens. “So? It was worse off than this when I first came down here.”
“Mr Kael,” Freya called softly. “Stilton?”
She walked across the dock, while crab-cameras on the cranes above her frantically zoomed in on her face and hands. Caul tried to stop her, but she shrugged him aside and held out her hand to Uncle. “Caul’s right,” she said. “Grimsby is coming to an end. It was a bold idea, and I’m glad that I have seen it for myself, but it is time to leave. You can come with us, back to Anchorage. Wouldn’t you like to breathe fresh air again, and see the sun?”
“The sun?” asked Uncle, and his eyes suddenly swam with tears. It was a long time since anyone had been kind to him. It was a long time since anyone had called him Stilton. Freya reached out to him and he stared up at his hovering ball of screens, at her gentle white hands hanging huge above him, like wings.
“Leave Grimsby?” he said, but in a wondering way, softly. The crab-cams zoomed until every screen showed Freya, or a part of Freya; her face, her eyes, her mouth, the soft curve of her cheek, her hands; all larger than life, like parts of a self-assembly kit from which a goddess might be constructed. Uncle wanted to hold those kind hands, and go away with her, and see the sun again before he died. He took a half-step towards her, and then remembered Anna Fang, and how she had betrayed him.
“No!” he shouted. “No! I won’t! It’s all a trick!”
He pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, and the huge noise slammed through the pens and made all the children squeal and cover their ears. The bullet went through Freya’s smiling face, and her face broke, and there was blackness behind it, and sparks, and as the glass rained down on him Uncle dimly realized that he had not shot Freya but only her image on the largest of his screens. He looked for the real Freya, but Caul pulled her aside and shielded her, and Uncle didn’t want to shoot Caul.
From somewhere above him came a long, distracting sigh. The heavy gun drooped in his hands. He looked up. Everyone looked up, even the scared children. The sigh grew louder, and Uncle saw that his shot had opened a hole in the balloon that held his moon of screens aloft. As he watched, it widened swiftly into a long gash like a yawning mouth.
“Uncle!” shouted Caul.
“Caul!” screamed Freya, pulling him back, holding him tight.
“Anna…” whispered Uncle.
And the ball of screens came down on him like a boot on a spider. The screens burst, sparks swarming blue and white, shattered glass sleeting across the deck. The collapsing balloon settled over the wreckage like a shroud, and as the smoke from the smashed machines reached the roof a sprinkler system kicked in, filling the limpet pens with cold salt rain.
Tom ran up, and Hester, taking Freya by her shaking shoulders, asking, “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” she said, nodding, soaked to the skin and sneezing at the smoke. “Is Uncle –?”
Caul skirted the heap of sparking, smouldering screens. Only Uncle’s feet, in their grimy bunny-slippers, poked out from beneath the debris. They twitched a few times, and were still.
“Caul?” asked Freya.
“I’m all right,” said Caul. And he was, even though, for some reason, he could not stop crying. He pulled a swag of balloon fabric over the bunny-slippers and turned to face the others. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the Naglfar swimming before this place finally falls apart. The Worm too. Tom and Hester will need the Worm if they’re going after Wren.”
The work went faster after that. Grimsby was creaking and keening constantly, and sometimes an ominous shudder rippled the water in the moon-pools, as if the unlikely old place somehow knew that its maker was gone, and was dying with him.
The last of the fuel was loaded, and fresh batteries and kegs of water were rolled aboard the Screw Worm and the Naglfar. Hester prowled the seeping treasure-hoards of Grimsby, gathering up handfuls of gold coins, for she suspected money might come in useful aboard Brighton. And when nobody was looking she burrowed into the heap of ruined screens until she found her gun, still clutched in Uncle’s dead hand. She was certain she would find a use for that.
On the quayside, Tom hugged Freya.
“Good luck,” he told her.
“Good luck you,” said Freya, holding his face and smiling at him. She hesitated, blushing. She had been meaning to warn Tom, if she could, about his wife. She still didn’t think he understood how ruthless Hester could be. She knew that Hester loved him, but she didn’t think that Hester cared at all about anybody else, and she was afraid that one day her ruthlessness would bring trouble down on them both.
“Tom,” she said, “Watch out for Hester, won’t you?”
“We’ll watch out for each other, like always,” said Tom, misunderstanding.
Freya gave up, and kissed him. “You’ll find Wren,” she said, “I know it.”
Tom nodded. “I know it too. And I’ll find the Tin Book as well, if I can. If what Uncle told Caul was true, if the Green Storm are making war on cities… I saw what they were like at Rogues’ Roost, Freya. If that book is the key to something dangerous, we mustn’t let them get hold of it…”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s the key to anything,” Freya reminded him. “It would be better to get it back if we can, just to be safe. But Wren is all that really matters. Find her, Tom. And come home safe to Vineland.”
Then Tom went with Hester aboard the Screw Worm, and Freya watched and waved as the Worm submerged, and stood with Caul at the edge of the moonpool till the last ripples faded. The children were waiting for her aboard the Naglfar; their high, nervous voices spilling from its open hatches.
“Are we going now?”
“Is it far to Anchorage?”
“Will we really have our own rooms and everything there?”
“Is Uncle really dead?”
“I feel sick!”
Freya took Caul’s hand in hers. “Well?” she asked.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
So they went, and Grimsby stood abandoned at last. After a few days even the dim light from its windows faded, and one by one the air-pumps died. Through widening cracks and fissures that there was no one left to repair, the patient sea came creeping in, and the fish made their homes in the halls of the Lost Boys.
Tom would miss the company of Freya, and even Caul, but for Hester it was a relief to be alone with him again. She had never been truly comfortable with anyone but Tom, except for Wren, when Wren was little. She watched lovingly as Tom worked the Screw Worm’s strange controls, frowning with concentration as he tried to remember all that Caul had taught him. That night, when the limpet was running smoothly south-by-southwest towards Brighton’s cruising grounds and the waters were singing against the hull, she slipped into his bunk and wrapped her long limbs around him and kissed him, remembering how, when they were young and first together in the Jenny Haniver they used to kiss for hours. But Tom was too worried about Wren to kiss her back, not properly, and she lay for a long time awake while he slept, and thought bitterly, He loves her more than ever he loved me.
19
THE WEDDING WREATH
First frost reached Vineland long before the Naglfar. The old submarine, with too many people aboard and her poor old engines grumbling all the way, took several weeks to return to the Dead Continent and nose her way up the winding rivers that the Screw Worm had swum down in days. But Caul coaxed her back to Anchorage at last, and she surfaced through a thin covering of ice just off the mooring beach. Freya climbed out waving, and was almost shot again, this time by Mr Smew, who believed the Lost Boys were invading.
And in a way, they were. Anchorage would never be the same again, now that all these boisterous, ill-mannered, sometimes
troubled children had come to live there. Freya set about opening the abandoned upper floors of the Winter Palace, and the old building filled with life and noise as the children moved in to their new quarters. Some of them were not quite used to the idea that they were not supposed to steal, and some had nightmares, calling out Uncle’s name and Gargle’s in their dreams, but Freya was convinced that with patience and love they could be helped to forget their time beneath the sea and grow into happy, healthy Vinelanders.
After all, it had worked with Caul, eventually. Freya wouldn’t say what had passed between them on the voyage home, but the former Lost Boy never went back to his shack in the engine district. At the beginning of that October, when the harvests were in and the animals down from the high pastures and the city was preparing for winter, he and the margravine were married.
Freya awoke early on the morning after her wedding; wide awake at five o’clock, the way she used to be when she was young. She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Caul, and went to the window of her chamber with the floor cold under her bare feet and the tatters of her bridal wreath still hanging in her hair.
When she drew back the curtains she saw that the ice was thick upon the lake, and that a dusting of snow had fallen in the night. She felt glad that her city was back in the domain of the Ice Gods for another six months. The gods of summer, of the lake and the hunt, had all been good to her people, and the gods of the sea and the goddess of love had been very kind to her too, but the Ice Gods were the gods she had grown up with, and she trusted them better than the rest. She breathed on the window and drew their snowflake symbol in the mist and whispered. “Keep Tom safe. And Hester too, though she doesn’t deserve it. Lead them to Wren, wherever she may be. And may they all come home again to us, safe and happy and together.”
But if the Ice Gods heard her prayer, they sent no sign. The only answer Freya had was the sound of the wind in the spires of the Winter Palace, and her husband’s voice, gentle and sleepy, calling her back to her bed.
PART TWO
20
A LIFE ON THE OCEAN WAVE
“Pennyroyal, my dear?”
“Mmmmm?”
Morning in the Pavilion, and the mayor and mayoress sitting at opposite ends of the long table in the breakfast room, screened from the hot sun by muslin blinds. Behind the mayoress’s chair her African slave waved an ostrich-feather fan, wafting cool air over her, and rustling the pages of the newspaper which her husband was trying to read.
“Pennyroyal, I am talking to you.”
Nimrod Pennyroyal sighed, and put down the paper. “Yes, Boo-Boo, my treasure?”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself lumbered with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke. Fifteen years earlier, when Predator’s Gold was topping the best-seller lists aboard every city of the Hunting Ground, she had seemed like a good idea. Her family were old Brighton aristocracy, but poor. Pennyroyal was a mere adventurer, but rich. The marriage allowed the Heckmondwykes to restore their fortunes, and gave Pennyroyal the social clout he needed to get himself elected mayor. Boo-Boo made an excellent wife for a man of ambition; she was good at small-talk and flower arrangements, she planned dinner parties with military precision, and she was expert at opening fêtes, galas and small hospitals.
Yet Pennyroyal had come to regret his marriage. Boo-Boo was such a large, forceful, florid woman that she tired him out just by being in the same room. A keen amateur singer, she had a passion for the operas of the Blue Metal Culture, which went on for days with never a trace of a tune, and usually ended with all the characters dead in a heap. When Pennyroyal annoyed her by questioning the cost of her latest frock or flirting too openly with a councillor’s wife over dinner she would practise her scales until the windows rattled, or crank up her gramophone and treat the household to all six hundred verses of the Harpoon Aria from Diana, Princess of Whales.
“I expect you to listen when I talk to you, Pennyroyal,” she said now, setting down her croissant in an ominous manner.
“Of course, dear. I was just studying the latest warreports in the Palimpsest. Excellent news from the front. Makes one proud to be a Tractionist, eh?”
“Pennyroyal!”
“Yes, dearest?”
“I have been looking over the arrangements for our Moon Festival Ball,” said Boo-Boo, “and I could not help noticing that you have invited the Flying Ferrets.”
Pennyroyal made a sort of shrugging motion with his entire body.
“I’m not sure we should be entertaining mercenaries, Nimrod.”
“I just happened to invite their leader, Orla Twombley,” Pennyroyal protested. “I may have said she could bring a few of her friends if she wanted. Wouldn’t want her to feel left out, you know… She’s a famous aviatrix. Her flying machine, the Combat Wombat, downed three air-dreadnoughts at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal.”
As he spoke, a vision of the female air-ace filled Pennyroyal’s mind, sleek and gorgeous in her pink leather flying suit. He had always prided himself on how popular he was with the ladies. Why, in his younger days he had enjoyed passionate romances with exotic and beautiful women. (Minty Bapsnack, Peaches Zanzibar and the Traktiongrad Smolensk Ladies’ Croquet Team all sprang to mind.) He’d been rather hoping that the dashing Orla Twombley might soon be added to that list.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” said Boo-Boo frostily.
Pennyroyal shifted awkwardly in his chair. “Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed…” he mumbled. He hated scenes like this. That nasty, suspicious look in Boo-Boo’s eyes was just the sort of thing, he thought, to put a chap right off his breakfast. Luckily he was saved from any further interrogation by one of his house-slaves, who opened the breakfast room door and said, “Mr Plovery to see you, Your Worship.”
“Excellent!” cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his visitor. “Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!”
Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the Laines, was the mayor’s advisor on Old-Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal to make himself a tidy little nest-egg by secretly selling off items from the Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face which looked as if somebody had moulded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He seemed startled by Pennyroyal’s exuberant greeting; people weren’t usually so glad to see him – but then, people weren’t usually being quizzed about lovely aviatrices by Mrs Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.
“I have been doing some research into that item Your Worship showed me,” he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly towards Boo-Boo. “You remember, Your Worship? The item?”
“Oh, there’s no need for secrecy, Plovery,” Pennyroyal told him. “Boo-Boo knows all it about it. Don’t you, my little upside-down cake? That metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a look at it, just to see what he thought…”
Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the gossip page. “Do excuse me, Mr Plovery. I find talk about Old-Tech so dull…”
Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction and turned back to Pennyroyal. “You still have the item?”
“It’s in the safe in my office,” said Pennyroyal. “Why? Reckon it might be worth something?”
“Po-o-ossibly,” said Plovery, cautiously.
“The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do with submarines.”
Mr Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. “Oh no, Your Worship. She clearly knows nothing about the machine-languages of the Ancients.”
“A machine language, eh?”
“A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain surviving fragments of American military code.”
“A
merican, eh?” said Pennyroyal, and then, “Military? That should be worth a bob or two. This war’s been dragging on for fourteen years. People are desperate. The R&D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon.”
Plovery’s face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage of a fortune. “Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I have contacts in the Mobile Free States…”
Pennyroyal shook his head. “No, Plovery, I’ll handle this. There’s no point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I’ll pop the book back in my safe until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my contacts. There’s an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn-time, and she always seems to be on the look-out for unusual bits of Old-Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery.”
He shooed the disgruntled Old-Tech dealer away, and sat down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the Palimpsest, which his wife was holding up for him to see. There on the front page of the gossip section was a full-length photograph of himself entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was looking even more goddess-like than Pennyroyal remembered.
“Well,” he blustered, “she’s not really what I’d call pretty…”
“Poor Boo-Boo!” said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above the breakfast room, beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal’s chat with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. “I don’t know how she puts up with it…”
“Puts up with what?” asked Cynthia innocently.
“Didn’t you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he’s been having a liaison with Orla Twombley!”
“What’s a liaison?” asked Cynthia, frowning. “Is it a sort of cake?”
Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty and very dim. She had been a house-slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived Mrs Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren’s friend and explain the workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than Cynthia had ever known.