Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Hester turned back to the window in time to see one of the approaching ships fire a rocket to windward, signalling the Jenny Haniver to heave to and allow herself to be boarded. She wasn’t sure she believed Pennyroyal, but there was something threatening about those ships. She was certain they hadn’t just encountered the Jenny by chance. They’d been sent to find her.

  She touched Tom’s arm. “Go.”

  Tom heaved on the rudder controls, swinging the Jenny about until she was steering north with the gale behind her. He pushed a sequence of brass levers forward and the rumble of the engines rose to a higher pitch. Another lever, and small air-sails unfolded, semi-circles of silicon-silk stretched between the pods and the flanks of the gasbag, adding a little extra thrust to help shove the Jenny through the sky.

  “We’re gaining!” he shouted, peeking into the periscope at the grainy, upside-down image of the view astern. But the Fox Spirits were persistent. They altered course to match the Jenny’s, and coaxed more power out of their own engines. Within an hour they were close enough for Tom and Hester to make out the symbol painted on their flanks – not the broken wheel of the Anti-Traction League, but a jagged green lightning bolt.

  Tom scanned the greyish landscape below, hoping for a town or city where he might seek sanctuary. There were none, except for a couple of slow-moving Lapp farming towns leading their herds of reindeer across the tundra far to the east, and he could not reach them without the Fox Spirits cutting him off. The Tannhäuser Mountains barred the horizon ahead, their canyons and pumice-clouds offering the only hope of shelter.

  “What shall we do?” he asked.

  “Keep going,” said Hester. “Maybe we can lose them in the mountains.”

  “What if they rocket us?” whimpered Pennyroyal. “They’re getting terribly close! What if they start shooting at us?”

  “They want the Jenny in one piece,” Hester told him. “They won’t risk using rockets.”

  “Want the Jenny? Why would anyone want this old wreck?” The tension was making Pennyroyal tetchy. When Hester explained he shouted, “This was Anna Fang’s ship? Great Clio! Almighty Poskitt! But the Green Storm worship Anna Fang! Their movement was founded amid the ashes of the Northern Air Fleet, sworn to avenge the people killed by London’s agents at Batmunkh Gompa! Of course they’d want her ship back! Merciful gods, why didn’t you tell me this ship was stolen? I demand a full refund!”

  Hester shoved him aside and went to the chart table. “Tom?” she said, studying their maps of the Tannhäusers. “There’s a gap in the volcano-chain west of here: the Drachen Pass. Maybe there’ll be a city there we can put down on.”

  They flew on, climbing into thin air above the snowy peaks and once skirting dangerously close to a plume of smoke that belched thickly from the throat of a young volcano. No pass, no city did they see, and after another hour, during which the three Fox Spirits steadily narrowed their lead, a flight of rockets came flashing past the windows and exploded just off the starboard bow.

  “Oh, Quirke!” cried Tom – but Quirke had been London’s god, and if he couldn’t be bothered to save his own city, why would he come to the aid of a battered little airship, lost in the sulphurous updrafts of the Tannhäusers?

  Pennyroyal tried to hide under the chart table. “They are firing rockets!”

  “Oh, thanks, we wondered what those big explodey things were,” said Hester, angry that her prediction had proved wrong.

  “But you said they wouldn’t!”

  “They’re aiming for the engine pods,” said Tom. “If they disable them we’ll be dead in the sky and they’ll grapple alongside and send a boarding party across…”

  “Well, can’t you do something?” demanded Pennyroyal. “Can’t you fight back?”

  “We don’t have any rockets,” said Tom miserably. After that last terrible air battle over London, when he had shot down the 13th Floor Elevator and watched her crew burn inside their burning gondola, he had vowed that the Jenny would be a peaceful ship. Her rocket projectors had been empty ever since. Now he regretted his scruples. Thanks to him, Hester and Professor Pennyroyal would soon be in the hands of the Green Storm.

  Another rocket slammed past. It was time to do something desperate. He called again on Quirke, then swung the Jenny hard over to larboard and took her powering down into the maze of the mountains, flashing through the shadows of wind-carved basalt crags and out again into sunlight.

  And below him, far below him and ahead, he saw another chase in progress. A tiny scavenger town was scurrying southwards through a cleft in the mountains and behind it, jaws agape, rolled a big, rusty, three-tiered Traction City.

  Tom steered the Jenny towards it, glancing from time to time into his periscope, where the three Fox Spirits still hung doggedly on his tail. Pennyroyal gnawed at his fingernails and gibbered the names of obscure gods: “Oh, great Poskitt! Oh, Deeble, preserve us!” Hester turned the radio on again and hailed the fast-approaching city, demanding permission to dock.

  A pause. A rocket struck steam and splinters from a mountainside thirty yards astern. Then a woman’s voice crackled out of the radio, speaking Airsperanto with a heavy Slavic accent. “This is Novaya-Nizhni Harbour Board. Your request is denied.”

  “What?” screamed Pennyroyal.

  “But that’s not—” said Tom.

  “This is an emergency!” Hester told the radio. “We’re being chased!”

  “We know,” the voice came back, regretful but firm. “We want no trouble. Novaya-Nizhni is peaceable city. Keep clear, please, or we fire upon you.”

  A rocket from the lead Fox Spirit came winding in to burst just off the stern. The harsh voices of the Green Storm aviators drowned out the threats from Novaya-Nizhni for a moment, then the woman was back, insisting, “Stay clear, Jenny Haniver, or we will fire!”

  Tom had an idea.

  There was no time to explain to Hester what he was about to do. He didn’t think she would approve anyway, since he had borrowed this manoeuvre from Valentine; from an episode in Adventures of a Practical Historian, one of those books he had thrilled to back in his apprentice days, before he found out what real adventures were like. Spewing gas from her dorsal vents the Jenny dropped into the path of the oncoming city and went powering forward on a collision course. The voice on the radio rose to a sudden scream, and Hester and Pennyroyal screamed too as Tom steered the ship low over the rusty factories on the brim of the middle tier and drove her between two enormous supporting pillars into the shadow of the tier above. Behind him, two of the Fox Spirits pulled up short, but the leader was bolder, and followed him into the heart of the city.

  This was Tom’s first visit to Novaya-Nizhni, and it was rather a fleeting one. From what he could see, the city was laid out in much the same way as poor old London, with broad streets radiating out from the centre of each tier. Along one of these the Jenny Haniver raced at lamp-post height, while shocked faces gaped down at her from upper windows and pedestrians scattered for cover on the pavements. Near the tier’s hub loomed a thicket of support-pillars and elevator shafts, a slalom-course through which the little airship slipped with inches to spare, grazing her envelope and scraping paint from her steering vanes. The pursuing Fox Spirit was not so lucky. Neither Tom nor Hester saw quite what happened, but they heard the rending crash even over the roar of the Jenny’s engines, and the periscope showed them the wreckage crumpling towards the deck, the gondola swinging drunkenly from an overhead tramway.

  Out into sudden, blinding sunlight on the far side of the city. It seemed they had escaped, and even the petrified Pennyroyal cheered in the sudden rush of happiness that united them all. But the Green Storm did not give up so easily. The Jenny swung through the fog of exhaust smoke which hung behind the city, and in the clear air beyond the two remaining Fox Spirits were waiting.

  A rocket slammed into the starboard engines, the blast blowing out the flight-deck windows and flinging Hester to the floor. She scrambled up to find Tom
still crouched over the controls, his hair and clothes frosted with powdered glass. Pennyroyal was slumped against the chart table with blood trickling from a gash on his bald head where one of the Jenny’s brass fire-extinguishers had struck him a glancing blow as it fell. Hester dragged him to a window seat. He was still breathing, but his eyes had rolled up until only two half-moons of white showed under the lids. He looked as if he was studying something very interesting on the inside of his head.

  More rockets struck. A buckled propeller-blade hummed past, whirling down towards the snowfields like a failed boomerang. Tom was still heaving at the controls, but the Jenny Haniver no longer obeyed him – either the rudders were gone, or the cables which operated them had been severed. A fierce gust of wind, howling through a gap in the mountains, swung her towards the Fox Spirits. The nearer of the two made a sudden move to avoid collision, and collided with her sister-ship instead.

  The explosion, barely twenty yards to starboard, filled the Jenny’s flight deck with a lurid glare. When Hester could see again the sky was full of tumbling litter. She could hear the rattle and crash as larger fragments of the Fox Spirits bounded away down the mountainsides into the pass below. She could hear the grumble of Novaya-Nizhni’s engines a few miles astern, the squeak and thunder of its tracks as it hauled itself southwards. She could hear her own heart beating, very loud and very fast, and she realized that the Jenny’s engines had stopped. From the increasingly frantic way that Tom tugged and hammered at the controls, it looked as if there was little hope of starting them again. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered windows, bringing with it flakes of snow and a cold, clean smell of ice.

  She said a quick prayer for the souls of the Green Storm aviators, hoping that their ghosts would hurry down to the Sunless Country and not hang about up here to make more trouble. Then she went stiffly to stand beside Tom. He gave up his useless struggle with the controls and put his arms around her, and they stood there holding each other, staring at the view ahead. The Jenny was drifting over the shoulder of a big volcano. Beyond it there were no more mountains, just an endless blue-white plain stretching to the horizon. They were at the mercy of the wind, and it was carrying them helplessly into the Ice Wastes.

  6

  ABOVE THE ICE

  “It’s no good,” said Tom. “I can’t repair the damage to the engines without setting down, and if we set down here…”

  He didn’t need to say any more. It was three days since the disaster in the Drachen Pass, and below the drifting wreck of the Jenny Haniver lay a landscape hostile as a frozen moon; a cross-hatched waste of thick, ancient ice. Here and there a mountain peak thrust up through the whiteness, but these too were lifeless, white and inhospitable. There was no sign of towns or cities or wandering Snowmad bands, and no answer to the Jenny’s regular distress calls. Although it was still only early afternoon the sun was already going down, a dull red disc that gave no heat.

  Hester wrapped her arms around Tom and felt him shivering inside his thick, fleece-lined aviator’s coat. It was terrifyingly cold here; coldness like a living thing that pressed against your flesh, searching for a way to crawl in through your pores and smother the failing core of warmth inside your body. Hester felt as if it had already crept into her bones; she could feel it gnawing at the furrow Valentine’s sword had left in her skull. But she was still warmer than poor Tom, who had been out on the starboard engine pod for the past hour, trying to chip away the ice that had formed there and make repairs.

  She led him aft and sat him on the bunk in their cabin, heaping blankets and spare coats over him and snuggling in beside him to let him share her own small store of warmth.

  “How’s Professor Pennyroyal?” he asked.

  Hester grunted. It was hard to tell. The explorer had not regained consciousness, and she was beginning to suspect he never would. At the moment he was lying on a bed she had made up for him in the galley, covered with his own bedding-roll and a few blankets which Hester felt she and Tom could ill spare. “Every time I think he’s finally gone and it’s time to chuck him overboard he kind of stirs and mutters and I find I can’t.”

  She dozed off. It was easy and pleasant to sleep. In her dreams a strange light filled the cabin; a fluttering glow that flared and shifted like the light of MEDUSA. Remembering that night, she cuddled closer to Tom, and found his mouth with hers. When she opened her eye the light from her dreams was still there, rippling across his beautiful face.

  “Aurora Borealis,” he whispered.

  Hester sprang up. “Who? Where?”

  “The Northern Lights,” he explained, laughing, pointing to the window. Out in the night a shimmering veil of colour swung above the ice, now green, now red, now gold, now all at once, sometimes fading almost to nothing, sometimes blazing and billowing in dazzling streamers.

  “I’ve always wanted to see them,” said Tom. “Ever since I read about them in that Chung-Mai Spofforth book, A Season with the Snowmads. And here they are. As if they’ve been laid on just for us.”

  “Congratulations,” said Hester, and pressed her face into the soft hollow beneath his jaw so that she could not see the lights. They were beautiful all right, but it was a huge, inhuman beauty, and she could not help thinking that they would soon become her funeral lanterns. Soon the weight of ice accumulating on the Jenny’s envelope and rigging would force her down, and there in the dark and the whispering cold Hester and Tom would sink into a sleep from which there would be no awakening.

  She did not feel particularly frightened. It was nice, dozing there in Tom’s sleepy embrace, feeling the warmth seep out of her. And everybody knew that lovers who died in one another’s arms went down together to the Sunless Country, favourites of the Goddess of Death.

  The only problem was, she needed to pee. The more she tried to ignore it and compose herself and wait calmly for the dark goddess’s touch, the more urgent grew the pressure on her bladder. She didn’t want to die distracted, but she didn’t want to simply go in her breeches either: it wouldn’t be nearly so romantic to go into the afterlife all soggy.

  Grumbling and cursing, she wriggled out from under the covers and crept forward, slithering on the ice which had formed on the deck. The chemical toilet behind the flight deck had been smashed to pieces by one of the rocket blasts, but there was a handy hole in the floor where it had been. She crouched over it and did her business as quickly as she could, gasping at the fierce cold.

  She wanted to go straight back to Tom, and later she would wish that she had, but something prompted her to go forward on to the silent flight deck instead. It was pretty up there now, with the dim glow of the instrument panels glittering through layers of frost. She knelt in front of the little shrine where the statues of the Sky Goddess and the God of Aviators stood. Most aviators decorated their flight-deck shrines with pictures of their ancestors, but neither Tom nor Hester had any images of their dead parents, so they had tacked up a photograph of Anna Fang which they unearthed from a trunk in the cabin when the Jenny was being repaired. Hester said a little prayer to her, hoping that she would be a friend to them down in the Sunless Country.

  It was as she stood up to go back to Tom that she happened to glance out across the ice and saw the cluster of lights. At first she thought that they were just a reflection of that strange fire in the sky which Tom had been so pleased by – but these were steady points, not changing colour, just twinkling a little in the frosty air. She went closer to the shattered window. The cold made her eye water, but after a while she made out a dark bulk around the lights, and a pale drift of fog or steam above them. She was looking at a small ice city, about ten miles to leeward, heading north.

  Trying to ignore her strange, ungrateful sense of disappointment, she went to rouse Tom, patting his face until he groaned and stirred and said, “What is it?”

  “Some god’s got a soft spot for us,” she said. “We’re saved.”

  By the time he reached the flight deck the city was closer,
for the fortunate wind was blowing them almost directly towards it. It was a small, two-tiered affair, skating along on broad iron runners. Tom trained the binoculars on it and saw its curved and sloping jaws, closed to form a snow-plough, and the huge, hooked stern-wheel that propelled it across the ice. It was an elegant city, with crescents of tall white houses on its upper tier and some sort of palace complex near the stern, but it had a faintly mournful air, and there were patches of rust, and many lightless windows.

  “I don’t understand why we didn’t pick up their beacon,” Hester was saying, fumbling with the controls of the radio set.

  “Maybe they don’t have one,” said Tom.

  Hester scrolled up and down the wavebands, hunting for the warble of a homing beacon. There was nothing. It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence. But when she hailed it on the open channel a perfectly friendly harbour master answered her in Anglish, and after half an hour the harbour master’s nephew came buzzing up aboard a little green air-tug called the Graculus to take the Jenny Haniver under tow.

  They set down at an almost deserted air-harbour near the front of the city’s upper tier. The harbour master and his wife, kind, round, acorn-brown people in parkas and fur bonnets, guided the Jenny into a domed hangar that opened like a flower, and carried Pennyroyal on a stretcher to their home behind the harbour office. There in the warm kitchen, coffee and bacon and hot pastries awaited the newcomers, and as Tom and Hester tucked in, their hosts stood watching, beaming their approval and saying, “Welcome, travellers! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Anchorage!”

  7

  GHOST TOWN

  It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Freya’s chauffeur always drove her to the Temple of the Ice Gods so that she could pray to them for guidance. The temple was barely ten yards from her palace, on the same raised platform near the stern of the city, so it was not really necessary to go through the business of calling out her chauffeur, climbing into her official bug, driving the short distance and climbing out again, but Freya went through it anyway; it would not have been seemly for the margravine to walk.