Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  He almost gave up and ran, but the thought of his mother stopped him. With the money Shkin had promised him for the Tin Book he would be able to move Mum into one of the luxury suites on the top floor of her nursing home, with a view of the parks at the city’s stern. He forced himself to stay calm. Pennyroyal wasn’t clever enough to set up a surveillance-crab. And if he had, he would certainly have bragged about it to his dinner guests.

  Plovery took the picture off the wall and set it down carefully against Pennyroyal’s chair. The circular door of the safe confronted him. He reached for the dial and turned it right, then left, then right again. On previous visits to the Pavilion he had often seen Pennyroyal open the safe, and had worked out the combination by listening to the number of clicks the dial made. Two-two-oh-nine-nine-five-seven… Calmly, carefully, he went through the sequence, and the heavy door swung open.

  Inside the safe was a small leather case. Inside the case was the Tin Book of Anchorage. Plovery took it out, holding it reverently, for old things were his love as well as his livelihood. There was something beautiful, he thought, about the way that human handiwork could outlive its makers by so many, many years.

  As he reached up to shut the safe he sensed a movement behind him, and turned, and—

  Wren was halfway to the dormitory when she heard his horrible, quivering scream. She squeaked and froze, then dived behind a nearby statue. The scream ended in a sort of gargling noise. The echoes faded into silence, and then the Pavilion began to fill with the sounds of doors opening and people shouting to each other. Lights came on. Glancing through the window beside her, Wren saw that light was flooding the gardens too; big security lamps flicking on, and guards running about with wobbling hand-held lanterns.

  That’s that, she thought, no chance of escaping now – and then felt ashamed that she was feeling sorry for herself when she should really have been worrying about whoever it was who had let out that dreadful shriek.

  She left her hiding place and ran towards the dormitory. Halfway there she turned a corner and cannoned into Theo Ngoni, coming up a side-passage from the direction of the kitchens. “Oh!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard someone scream…” he said.

  “Me too…”

  “The whole house heard someone scream, my dears.” Mrs Pennyroyal was striding towards them in her billowing nightie, like a ship in full sail. Wren jumped away from Theo, wondering if they would be punished for speaking to each other, but the mayoress just looked kindly at them and said, “It seemed to come from my husband’s part of the house. Let’s see what has happened.”

  Wren and Theo followed obediently in her wake as she swept toward the larboard wing. Wren thought privately that it had been the sort of scream you hurry away from, not towards, but Mrs Pennyroyal seemed determined to get to the source of the disturbance. Perhaps she was hoping that her husband had scalded himself on a hot-water bottle or fallen off his balcony, and didn’t want to waste good gloating time.

  They climbed the winding stairs behind the ballroom and passed the door to a little staircase which led down to the Cloud 9 control room; it was open, with worried-looking crewmen peering out. Lights were burning in the mayor’s office, and as they drew closer Wren heard Pennyroyal’s voice, shrill and wobbly with alarm, saying, “But the intruder may still be at large!” Slaves and militia were crowded round the open door, but they drew aside respectfully as their Lady Mayoress approached.

  Pennyroyal was standing beside his desk, along with two officers of his guard. He looked up as his wife and her retinue entered. “Boo-Boo! Don’t look…”

  Boo-Boo looked, and gasped. Wren looked too, and wished she hadn’t. Theo looked, and seemed quite undisturbed, but then he’d been in battle and had probably seen things like this before.

  Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try and protect himself. It had done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his evening robes into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and Remora.

  “Must have been a knife,” one of the militia officers was saying lamely. “Or maybe a spear…”

  “A spear?” shouted Pennyroyal. “In my Pavilion? On the night before the MoonFest ball?”

  The officers swapped sheepish glances. Like most of Brighton’s soldiers they had signed up mainly for the uniforms – fetching scarlet numbers, with pink facings and a lot of gold tassels. They had never expected to have to face dead bodies and mysterious intruders, and now that they were they both felt a bit queasy.

  “How did he get in?” asked one.

  “There’s no sign of a break-in,” agreed the other.

  “Well, I expect he took the spare key from the vase outside,” said Pennyroyal. “I always keep a spare key there; Plovery knows that. Knew it, rather…”

  The officers studied the body at their feet and nervously fingered the hilts of their ornamental swords.

  “It looks to me as if he was trying to burgle Your Worship’s safe,” decided the first.

  “Yes; what is that thing he’s holding?” said the second.

  “Nothing!” Pennyroyal snatched the Tin Book from the dead man’s hands and thrust it back inside the safe, locking the door behind it. “Nothing of value, and anyway, it isn’t here; you didn’t see it…”

  There was a thunder of fleece-lined boots on the stairs, and Orla Twombley burst into the room with half-a-dozen Flying Ferrets at her back. They carried drawn swords, and the aviatrix used hers to point at Wren. “That’s the girl!”

  “What? I say…” Pennyroyal turned to peer at Wren.

  “She came asking my lads to ready your sky-yacht,” Orla Twombley explained, taking a menacing step towards Wren as if she thought it might be safest to run the girl through where she stood. “Had some cock-and-bull story about the mayoress here wanting the old sack of gas refuelled so she can go shopping in Benghazi…”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” cried Pennyroyal excitedly. “The girl was preparing her getaway! Once a burglar, always a burglar, eh?”

  Oh, gods! thought Wren. She had never imagined that her careful plan could go as wrong as this. What would they do to her? Send her back to Shkin, probably, and demand a refund…

  Everybody was talking excitedly, Pennyroyal raising his voice above the rest. “Plovery must have recruited her to help him rob me, only she murdered him for the loot instead! And no doubt this Mossie devil was in it with her!” he added, pointing at Theo. “Well done, Orla, my angel! Without your quick thinking they’d have made off aboard the Peewit with the … ah … contents of my safe.”

  “Rubbish!” said Boo-Boo, in a voice that made them all fall silent and turn nervously to look at her. She had drawn herself up to her full height, and turned the colour that mayoresses turn when they hear their husbands refer to attractive aviatrices as “my angel” right in front of them. She put her arm around Wren. “What Wren told Miss Twombley was entirely true. I did ask for the Peewit to be refuelled. I was planning to go shopping in Benghazi tomorrow, though I don’t suppose I shall feel up to it now. Anyway, Wren and Theo were with me when poor Plovery cried out; neither of them could possibly have done this dreadful deed.”

  Wren and Theo stared at her, astonished that Boo-Boo would lie to protect them.

  “But if it wasn’t them,” asked Pennyroyal, “who…?”

  “That is not for me to find out,” said Boo-Boo haughtily. “I am returning to my quarters. Please search for your murderer quietly. Come, Wren; come, Theo. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

  She turned and strode out of the room, past the chastened aviators. Wren curtseyed to Pennyroyal and hurried after Theo and her mistress. “Mrs Pennyroyal,” she whispered, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Thank you.”

  Boo-Boo seemed no
t to hear. “What a dreadful business!” she said. “That poor, poor man. My husband was to blame, I am sure.”

  “You think the mayor killed him?” asked Theo. He sounded as if he didn’t believe it, but Wren knew Professor Pennyroyal was quite capable of murdering someone if it suited him. Look at how he had treated Dad! She could see now how he had fooled everyone in Anchorage for so long, for he was certainly a good actor. How shocked he had looked, standing over Plovery’s body…

  “Old-Tech!” sighed Boo-Boo. “It is never anything but trouble. Oh, I do not say that Pennyroyal wielded the fatal blade himself, but I expect he has set up some nasty booby trap to protect his safe. He would stop at nothing to protect that ridiculous Tin Book. What is so special about it anyway? Do you know, child?”

  Wren shook her head. All she knew was that the Tin Book had been the cause of yet another death. She wished she had never taken the horrid thing from Miss Freya’s library.

  Outside the doors of her bedroom Boo-Boo shooed away the guard and turned to Wren and Theo. She studied them both with a sad smile, taking Wren’s hands in hers. “My dear children,” she said, “I am so sorry that your attempt to fly away has failed. I’m sure that is what you were doing, Wren? Having my husband’s yacht fuelled so that you and Theo could fly away together?”

  “I—” said Theo.

  “Theo had nothing to do with it!” Wren protested. “I ran into him in the corridor. We were both coming to see what had happened—”

  Mrs Pennyroyal raised a hand; she would hear none of it. She had done her best to stop this happening, but now that it had she found that it was all rather thrilling and romantic. “You need not hide the truth from me,” she said, and tears came into her eyes. “I hope I am your friend, as well as your mistress. As soon as I saw you together, your tryst interrupted by the death-cry of that unhappy man, I understood everything. How I wish that I had known a burning passion like yours, instead of getting married off to Pennyroyal to please my family…”

  “But—”

  “Ah, but yours is a forbidden love! You remind me of Prince Osmiroid and the beautiful slave-girl Mipsie in Lembit Oriole’s wonderful opera Trodden Weeds. But you must be patient, my dears. What hope of happiness do you have if you escape? Runaway slaves, penniless and far from home, pursued by bounty hunters wherever you turn. No, you must stay here a while, and meet only in secret. Now that I know how much you long to leave, I shall do all that is in my power to persuade Pennyroyal that he must set you free.”

  Wren could feel herself blushing. How could anyone imagine that she was in love with Theo Ngoni, of all people? She glanced at him, and was annoyed to see that he looked embarrassed too, as if the very idea that he might be in love with Wren was ridiculous.

  “Patience, my lovebirds,” the mayoress said, and kissed each of them upon the forehead. She smiled, and opened her bedroom door. “Oh, by the way,” she murmured, “not a word to anyone about poor Mr Plovery. I will not allow this terrible event to upset our MoonFest celebrations…”

  23

  BRIGHT, BRIGHTER, BRIGHTON!

  MoonFest! A buzz of expectation rose from the raft city as the sun came up. Actors and artists who never usually stirred before noon leaped from their beds at gull-squawk and began putting the finishing touches to decorations and carnival floats, while shopkeepers rolled up their shutters and unfurled their blinds with a gleeful air, dreaming of record takings. Brighton was not a religious city; most of its people thought that religion was at best a fairy tale, at worst a con-trick. To them the rising of the first full moon of autumn, which was a solemn, sacred night in other cities, meant only one thing: it was party time!

  Actually, it was almost always party time aboard Brighton. When Wren arrived the Aestival Festival, a six-week celebration of the gods of summer, had been petering out in a slew of firework parties and fancy dress parades. Since then there had been the Large Hat Festival, the Cheese Sculpture Biennale, the Festival of Unattended Plays, Poskitt Week, and Mime-Baiting Day (when Brightonians were allowed to get their own back on the city’s swarms of irritating street performers). But MoonFest still had a special place in the hearts and wallets of Brightonians, and the growing cluster of towns on shore seemed to promise a bumper harvest of visitors. Even the editor of the Palimpsest, who would usually have been delighted to print the rumours he’d been hearing about a mysterious death on Cloud 9 during the night, relegated the story to a small column on page four and filled his front page with Festival news instead.

  BOO-BOO’S BEVY OF BEAUTIES BOOSTS BRIGHTON!

  Lady Mayoress Boo-Boo Pennyroyal predicted yesterday that this year’s MoonFest celebrations will be Brighton’s best ever. Mrs Pennyroyal (39) – pictured left, posing for the Palimpsest’s photographer along with a bevy of her most beautiful handmaidens – will tonight play hostess to the Middle Sea’s richest partygoers when the Pavilion opens its doors and dance-floors for the Mayoral Ball.

  “Everybody who is anybody is on their way to Brighton!” said Mrs Pennyroyal. “What better place to celebrate Moon Festival than in this white city, adrift on an azure sea?”

  Of course, it wasn’t really a white city on an azure sea at all; that was just how it looked from the observation platforms of Cloud 9. Down at deck-level, Brighton was an off-white city, its rooftops streaked with gull droppings, its streets sticky with abandoned snacks, adrift on a slick of its own litter and sewage. But the weather was perfect; a soft onshore breeze to waft the air-taxis across to Benghazi and Kom Ombo and cool their passengers on the journey back; the hot sun baking the metal pavements and releasing complex odours from the puddles of grease and sick which last night’s revellers had left behind. As the day wore on the city settled lower in the water, weighed down by the crowds of visitors who filled the streets and artificial beaches, and splashed and shrieked along the fringes of the Sea Pool. By mid-afternoon all the rubbish bins were overflowing, and the gulls fought each other for scavenged scraps of meat and pastry, swooping low over the heads of the long queues that had formed beneath the Pharos Wheel and outside the entrance to the Brighton Aquarium.

  Tom Natsworthy, waiting in the line of holidaymakers, ducked as another screaming gull dived past. He had been nervous of large birds ever since he fought with the Green Storm’s flying Stalkers at Rogue’s Roost. But these greedy gulls were really the least of his worries. He felt sure that the Aquarium’s uniformed attendants would be able to tell just by looking at him that he had come aboard Brighton only an hour before, climbing out of a manhole that the Screw Worm had bored through the city’s hull. He expected at any moment to be dragged out of the queue and denounced as an intruder and a stowaway.

  The Screw Worm had caught up with Brighton that morning. Tom had approached slowly, frightened of triggering whatever Old-Tech Brighton had used to catch the Lost Boys, but it seemed that the city had turned its sensors off now that its fishing trip was over. Even so, he and Hester had barely dared to breathe as the magnetic clamps engaged and the hull-drill chewed noisily through the resort’s deckplates.

  Tom had wanted to use the crab-cams to search for signs of Wren, but Hester disagreed. “We’re not Lost Boys,” she pointed out. “It’d take all sorts of skills we haven’t got to steer one of those things through Brighton’s plumbing. It could be weeks before we sighted Wren. We’ll go up ourselves. We ought to be able to find some sign of all those limpets they fished aboard.”

  Hester was right. When they emerged from the Worm into a deserted alleyway behind Brighton’s engine district almost the first thing they saw was a poster pasted to an exhaust duct. It showed a limpet surrounded by savage boys, beneath the words Parasite Pirates of the Atlantic! Artefacts and captives taken from the Sub-Aquatic Thieves’ Den of Grimsby, during Brighton’s recent expedition, are on Public Display at the Brighton Aquarium, 11-17 Burchill Square.

  “Captives!” said Tom. “Wren might be there! That’s where we’ve got to go…”

  Hester, a slower reader tha
n her husband, was still halfway through the text. “What’s an Aquiarium?”

  “A place for fish. A sort of zoo, or museum.”

  Hester nodded. “Museums are your department. You go and have a look. I want to go and nose round the air-harbour. I might hear something about Wren there, and I want to see if I can find us a ship; I don’t fancy going all the way home in that stinking old limpet.”

  “We shouldn’t split up,” said Tom.

  “It’s only for a while,” said Hester. “It’ll be quicker.” It was just an excuse, of course. The truth was that all the time she’d spent cooped up with Tom beneath the waves had made her irritable. She wanted to be alone for a while; to breathe, and look around this city, without having to listen to him worrying always about Wren. She kissed him quickly and said, “I’ll meet you in an hour.”

  “Back at the Worm?”

  Hester shook her head. The engine district was getting busy as a new shift clocked on; passers-by might notice them sneaking down their secret manhole. She pointed to another advert, half obscured by the Aquarium poster, for a coffee shop in Old Steine called The Pink Café.

  “There…”

  Luckily, the Aquarium’s attendants were only interested in selling tickets and chatting to each other about their plans for the evening. They were not on the lookout for intruders, and even if they had been, there was nothing to distinguish Tom from the other visitors. He was just a youngish, tousled, slightly balding man, perhaps a scholar from the middle tiers of Kom Ombo, and if his clothes were rather rumpled and old-fashioned and he smelled faintly of mildew and brine, well, there was no rule against that. The girl at the turnstile barely glanced at him as she took his money and waved him through.

  Inside the Aquarium, bored-looking fish drifted in big, dim tanks and there was such a smell of rust and salt water that Tom could almost have imagined he was back in Grimsby. But nobody was looking at the fish, or the sea horses, or the mangy sea lions. Everyone was heading to the central hall, following the brightly coloured signs to the Parasite Pirates exhibit.