Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  The little boy, Gargle, looked as if he might be convinced, glancing fearfully from Tom to the approaching sleds. But Skewer just said, “Quiet,” and Caul’s pale hands kept dancing across the consoles. The Screw Worm lurched into motion again, settling its fat body lower until the hull was resting on the ice. Whirling saw-blades slid out of its belly, and jets of heated water sprayed against the ice, sending up fierce clouds of steam. With clumsy movements of its legs the Screw Worm turned, turned, cutting an escape-hole for itself. When the circle was complete the blades folded back into the hull and the machine pushed itself down, shoving the plug of ice aside and forcing its body through into the water below.

  A hundred yards away Scabious saw what was happening. Steering the sled with his knees he took his hands off the controls and raised his rifle, but the bullet banged off the armoured hull and went whining away across the ice like a lost bee. The parasite’s bulbous eyeball windows sank out of sight. Wavelets lapped across its back, sloshing over magnetic grapples and crab-camera ports. Its long legs folded themselves one by one into the hole, and it was gone.

  Scabious brought his sled to a stop and hurled his rifle away. His prey had escaped him, taking Tom and the parasite-boys with it, and he could imagine neither where it was bound, nor any way that he could follow. Poor Tom, he thought, for in spite of his gruffness he had liked that young aviator. Poor Tom. And poor Axel, who was dead, dead, dead, his ghost not walking Anchorage’s byways after all. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, Mr Scabious.

  He was glad of his cold-mask. It stopped his men from seeing the tears that were coursing down his face as they parked their own sleds close to his and ran to peer into the hole the escaping parasite had cut.

  Not that there was anything there to see. Only a broad circle of open water, and the waves slapping and clopping at its edges with a sound like sarcastic applause.

  Freya had been woken by the lurching of the city, by the noise of bottles of shampoo and jars of bath-salts crashing down from the bathroom shelves where she had abandoned them. She rang and rang for Smew, but he did not come, and in the end she had to venture out of the Winter Palace alone, perhaps the first margravine to do such a thing since Dolly Rasmussen’s time.

  At the Wheelhouse everybody was shouting about ghost-crabs and parasite-boys. Not until it was all over did Freya understand that Tom was gone.

  She couldn’t let Windolene Pye and her staff see that she was crying. She hurried off the bridge and down the stairs. Mr Scabious was on his way up, dripping snow and meltwater as he tugged off his gauntlets and cold-mask. He looked flushed, and more alive than she had seen him since the plague, as if the discovery of the parasite had freed something in him. He almost smiled at her.

  “An amazing machine, Your Radiance! Drilled straight through the ice-sheet. You have to hand it to the devils! I’ve heard legends of parasites on the High Ice, but I confess, I always thought them just old icewives’ tales. I wish I’d been more open-minded.”

  “They took Tom,” said Freya in a small voice.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. He was a brave lad. Tried to warn me of them, and they caught him and dragged him inside their machine.”

  “What will they do with him?” she whispered.

  The engine master looked at her, then shook his head, and pulled off his hat as a mark of respect. He wasn’t sure what the crew of a vampire-parasite-spider-ice-machine might want with the young aviator, but he couldn’t imagine it was anything nice.

  “Can’t we do something?” Freya asked plaintively. “Can’t we dig, or drill, or something? What if this parasite thing resurfaces? We must wait here and watch…”

  Scabious shook his head. “It’s long gone, Your Radiance. We can’t hang about here.”

  Freya gasped as if he’d slapped her. She wasn’t used to having her orders questioned. She said, “But Tom’s our friend! I won’t just abandon him!”

  “He is just one boy, Your Radiance. You have a whole city to think of. For all we know, Wolverinehampton is still on our trail. We must move on immediately.”

  Freya shook her head, but she knew her engine master was right. She had not turned back for Hester when Tom had begged her to, and she could not turn back now for Tom, no matter how much she wanted to. But if only she had been nicer to him, these past weeks! If only her last words to him hadn’t been so snappish and cold!

  “Come, Margravine,” said Scabious gently, and held out his hand. Freya stared at it for a moment, surprised, then reached out and took it, and they climbed the stairs together. It was quiet on the bridge. People turned to look at Freya as she entered, and there was something in the silence that told her they had all been talking about her until a moment before.

  She sniffed, and wiped her eyes on her cuff, and said, “Please get us under way, Miss Pye.”

  “What course, Your Radiance?” asked Miss Pye gently.

  “West,” said Freya. “America.”

  “Oh, Clio!” sniffled Pennyroyal, huddled almost unnoticed in a corner. “Oh, Poskitt!”

  The engines were starting up; Freya could feel the vibrations thrumming through the girders of the Wheelhouse. She pushed past Scabious and went to the back of the bridge, looking out over her city’s stern as it began to move, leaving behind it nothing but a scrawl of sled-tracks and a perfectly circular hole already skimming over with fresh ice.

  23

  HIDDEN DEPTHS

  Days passed, though it was hard to say how many. The dim blue light aboard the Screw Worm made it feel as though time had stopped at quarter to four on a wet November afternoon.

  Tom slept in a corner of the hold on a pile of quilts and tapestries looted from the villas of Anchorage. Sometimes he dreamed that he was walking hand-in-hand with someone down the dusty corridors of the Winter Palace, and woke not knowing if it had been Hester or Freya. Was it really possible that he would never see either of them again?

  He imagined himself escaping, reaching the surface and going in search of Hester, but the Screw Worm was swimming through the luminous canyons beneath the ice, and there was no escape. He imagined fighting his way into the control cabin and sending signals to Anchorage, warning Freya of Pennyroyal’s lies, but even if he worked out which of those rusty machines was the radio, the boys who had kidnapped him would never let him near it.

  They were all very wary of him. Skewer was distant and hostile, and when Tom was about he scowled and swaggered a lot and talked very little. He reminded Tom of Melliphant, the bully who had menaced him during his apprenticeship. As for Gargle, who could not be more than ten or eleven years old, he just stared at Tom with wide round eyes when he thought Tom wasn’t looking. Only Caul was prepared to talk; odd, half-friendly Caul, and even he seemed cautious, and was unwilling to answer Tom’s questions.

  “You’ll understand when we get there,” was all he would say.

  “Where?”

  “Home. Our base. Where Uncle lives.”

  “But who is your uncle?”

  “He’s not my uncle; just Uncle. He’s the leader of the Lost Boys. Nobody knows his real name, or where he came from. I heard a story that he’d been a great man once, aboard Breidhavik or Arkangel or one of those cities, and he got thrown out for some reason, and that’s when he turned to thieving. He’s a genius. He invented the limpets and the crab-cams, and found us, and built the Burglarium to train us in.”

  “Found you? Where?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Caul. “All over the place. On different cities. The limpets steal children to train up as Lost Boys, just like they steal everything else Uncle needs. I was so little when I was taken that I don’t remember anything before. None of us do.”

  “But that’s horrible!”

  “No it’s not!” Caul laughed. He always ended up laughing. It was funny and frustrating, trying to explain the life he had always taken for granted to an outsider. How could he make Tom see that being taken to the Burglarium had been an honour, and that he would much
rather be a Lost Boy than a boring Dry? “You’ll understand when we get there,” he promised. And then (because it made him uneasy, the thought of going home to explain himself to Uncle) he would change the subject and ask, “What’s Freya really like?” or “Do you think it’s true that Pennyroyal doesn’t know the way to America?”

  “He knows the way,” said Tom bleakly. “Anybody with half a brain can work out a route to America from the old charts. The trouble is, I think he lied about what’s at the end of it. I don’t think the green places exist, except in Professor Pennyroyal’s imagination.” He hung his head, wishing he had managed to warn Freya of his fears before the Lost Boys took him. By now Anchorage would be so far on its way that it wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back.

  “You never know,” said Caul, reaching out to touch Tom’s arm and then snatching his hand away quickly, as if the touch of a Dry burned. “He turned out to be right about the parasites, sort of.”

  There came a day (or maybe a night) when Tom was roused from his troubled dreams by Caul shouting, “Tom! We’re home!” He scrambled out of his nest of stolen textiles and hurried to look, but when he reached the control cabin he found that the Screw Worm was still deep under water. A repetitive, echoey ping came from one of the machines. Skewer, busy with his instruments, glanced up just long enough to say, “It’s Uncle’s beacon!”

  There was a yawing, twisting sensation as the limpet adjusted its course. The darkness outside the windows was fading, turning to a twilight blue, and Tom realized that he was no longer beneath the ice-sheet but out in open sea, and that sunlight was dazzling through a choppy surface several hundred feet above his head. The bottoms of gigantic icebergs slid past, like upside-down mountains. Then in the dimness ahead other shapes began to form; weed-furred gantries and girders; the barnacle-encrusted blade of a gigantic propeller; a tilted, silted plane where rows of rusty blocks shoved up out of the mud and litter. Like an airship flying above a landscape of mesas and canyons the Screw Worm was cruising over the streets of an enormous sunken raft-city.

  “Welcome to Grimsby,” said Skewer, steering towards the upper tier.

  Tom had heard of Grimsby. Everybody had heard of Grimsby. Biggest and fiercest of the North Atlantic predator-rafts, it had been sunk by pack ice during the Iron Winter of ninety years ago. Awed, Tom gazed out through the limpet’s windows at the passing view; the swirls of fish glittering between the dead houses, the temples and great office buildings festooned with weed. And then, amid the greys and blues and blacks, something showed warm and golden. Gargle gave a cheer, and Skewer grinned, easing the Worm’s steering-levers forward and lifting it up over the brink of the city’s topmost tier.

  Tom gasped. Ahead, lights shone in the windows of the Town Hall, and people were moving about inside, making this drowned building look warm and homely, like a house well-lit on a winter night.

  “What is it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, how –?”

  “It’s our home,” said Caul. He had been quiet until now, worrying about what sort of welcome awaited him, but he felt proud that Grimsby had impressed Tom, who had seen so many strange cities.

  “Uncle built it!” said Gargle.

  The Screw Worm slid into the water-filled lower storey of the town hall, then wound its way along tubular tunnels where it had to keep waiting for automatic doors to open ahead of it and close behind. This system of water-doors and airlocks served to keep the rest of the building dry, but Tom did not understand that, and it came as a surprise and a huge relief when the limpet broke the surface and came to rest in a pool beneath a high, domed roof.

  The noise of the engines ceased, but from outside came clangs and thuds as docking-arms engaged, hoisting the Screw Worm clear of the water. A hatch in the cabin roof sprang open with a sigh. Caul fetched a ladder and hooked it to the opening. “You go first,” he told Tom, and Tom climbed out on to the limpet’s broad back and stood there breathing cold, ammonia-smelling air and looking around.

  The limpet had surfaced through a circular hole in the floor of a huge, echoing room which might once have been Grimsby’s main council-chamber (on the ceiling the spirit of Municipal Darwinism – a rather beefy young woman with wings – pointed the city fathers towards a prosperous future). Dozens of similar entrances dotted the broad floor, each overhung by a complicated docking-crane. From several of them hung limpets, and Tom was startled to see how ramshackle the vessels looked; as if cobbled together from bits of anything that came to hand. Some were obviously undergoing repairs, but the people who had been working on them (all young men or boys, few much older than Caul or Skewer) had left their posts and were converging on the Screw Worm. They were all staring at Tom.

  Tom stared back, feeling glad of Caul, who had climbed up to stand beside him. Even on the roughest of the cities the Jenny Haniver had visited he had seldom seen a bunch as hostile-looking as this. Lads his own age, wiry, hard-looking young men, little boys smaller than Gargle, all glared at him with something that was half hate, half fear. They were shaggy-headed, and the few who were old enough to shave hadn’t bothered. Their clothes were a mismatched assortment of too big and too small: bits of uniforms, ladies’ shawls and bonnets, diving suits and aviators’ helmets, tea-cosies and colanders pressed into service as hats. They looked as if they’d been showered with debris by an exploding jumble sale.

  A crackle came from overhead, then a high warbling shriek of feedback. All faces turned upwards. Fluted speakers bolted to the docking cranes belched static, and a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Bring the Dry to my quarters, my boys,” it said. “I will speak with him right away.”

  24

  UNCLE

  Grimsby was not quite what Tom would have expected of a master-criminal’s underwater lair. It was too chilly, and smelled too much of mould and boiled cabbage. The reclaimed building which had looked so magical from outside was poky and cluttered, packed like a junk shop with the spoils from years of burglary. Swags of stolen tapestry decked the corridors, the rich designs embroidered over with new patterns of mildew. On shelves, in cubbyholes, half-glimpsed through the open doors of the rooms and workshops that he passed, Tom saw heaps of clothes; mouldering moraines of books and documents, ornaments and jewellery, weapons and tools; snooty-looking mannequins from high-class shops; goggle-screens and fly-wheels; batteries and bulbs; big, greasy machine-parts torn from the bellies of towns.

  And everywhere there were the crab-cameras. The ceilings crawled with the little machines; dark corners glittered with their stilting legs. With no need to hide, they crouched on stacks of crockery or crept down the fronts of bookcases, scuttled over the wall-hangings and swung from the heavy, dangerous-looking electrical cables which festooned the walls. Their cyclops eyes glinted and whirred, tracking Tom as Caul and Skewer led him up the long flights of stairs towards Uncle’s quarters. To live in Grimsby was to live forever in the gaze of Uncle.

  And Uncle was expecting them, of course. He stood up from his chair as they entered his chamber, coming to meet them through the light of a thousand surveillance-screens. He was a little man; both short and thin, pallid from living so long out of the sun’s sight. Half-moon spectacles perched on his narrow nose. He wore fingerless mittens, a five-cornered hat, a braided tunic that might have belonged once to a general or an elevator attendant, a silk dressing gown whose hem drew patterns on the dusty floor, nankeen trousers and bunny-slippers. Strands of sparse white hair trailed over his shoulders. Books which his boys had snatched for him at random from the shelves of a dozen libraries poked from his pockets. Crumbs clung to the grey stubble on his chin.

  “Caul, my dear boy!” he murmured. “Thank you for obeying your poor old Uncle so prompt, and bringing the Dry home so handy. He ain’t been damaged, I take it? No harm done?”

  Caul, remembering how he had behaved in Anchorage, and the reports Skewer would have sent home about him, was too scared to answer. Skewer said gruffly, “Alive and well, Uncle, just like you
r orders.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” Uncle purred. “And Skewer. Little Skewer. You’ve been busy too, I gather.”

  Skewer nodded, but before he could speak, Uncle lashed out at him, striking so hard that Skewer stumbled backwards and fell over with a childish wail of pain and surprise. Uncle kicked him a few times for good measure. Beneath their cheerful bunny faces his slippers had steel toe-caps. “Who do you think you are,” he shouted, “setting up as captain without my say-so? You know what happens to boys who disobey me, don’t you? You remember what I did to young Sonar off the Remora when he pulled a trick like yours?”

  “Yes, Uncle,” snivelled Skewer. “But it wasn’t my fault, Uncle. Caul talked to a Dry! I thought the rules—”

  “So Caul bent the rules a little,” said Uncle kindly, and kicked Skewer again. “I’m a reasonable man. I don’t mind if my boys use their initiative. I mean, it wasn’t just any old Dry young Caul revealed himself to, was it now? It was our friend Tom.”

  He had been circling closer to Tom all the while, and now he reached out a clammy hand and gripped Tom’s chin, twisting his face up into the light.

  “I won’t help you,” said Tom. “If you’re planning to attack Anchorage or something, I won’t help you.”

  Uncle’s laugh was a thin little sound. “Attack Anchorage? That’s no plan of mine, Tom. My boys are burglars, not warriors. Burglars and observers. They watch. Listen. Send me reports about what’s going on aboard the cities, what’s being said. Yes. That’s how I keep my boys in plunder and prey. That’s why I’ve never been found out. I get lots of reports and I put them together, compare and contrast, note things down, add two and two. I look out for names that crop up in odd places. Like Hester Shaw. Like Thomas Natsworthy.”