by Philip Reeve
Uncle’s device made tiny clicking sounds in the keyhole, and the heat-lock opened. Tom slipped inside, breathing in the familiar smells of the palace. The corridor was deserted; not even a footprint in the thick dust. He hurried through shadows to the Wunderkammer, where the Stalker skeletons scared him all over again, but the lock-pick worked on that door too and he padded into the cobwebby silence between the display cases feeling shaky, but proud of himself.
The square of foil shone with a soft light, reminding him very clearly of Freya, and of the crab-cam that had watched from one of those grilles in the heat-ducts overhead as he kissed her. “Caul?” he said hopefully, peering up into the dark. But there were no burglars aboard Anchorage now, just Huntsmen. He felt suddenly, suffocatingly afraid about what Hester was doing. He hated to think of her out there, in danger, while he waited here. There was a flickery glow in the sky, somewhere near the harbour. What was happening? Should he go and look?
No. Hester had said she would meet him here. She had never let him down before. He tried to distract himself by choosing a weapon from the display on the wall; a heavy, blunt sword with an ornate hilt and scabbard. Once it was in his hand he felt braver. He paced to and fro between the cases of moth-eaten animals and old machines, swinging the sword, waiting for her to come so that they could save Anchorage together.
It was only when the gun-battle began in the ballroom and the shouts and shots and screams came booming along the palace corridors that he realized she had come in through the main entrance anyway, and had started without him.
The gas-pistol was heavier than Freya had expected. She tried to imagine shooting it at someone, but she couldn’t. She wondered if she should explain to Hester how scared she was, but there didn’t seem to be time. Hester was already at the door of the ballroom, beckoning Freya forward with quick jerks of her head. Her hair and her clothes stank of smoke.
Together, they heaved the big door open. Nobody turned to see them enter. Huntsmen and prisoners alike were watching the windows and the great sinuous wings of fire that swayed above the harbour. Freya clutched the gun with sweaty hands, waiting for Hester to shout, “Hands up!” or “Nobody move!” or whatever it was one was supposed to say in situations like this. Instead, Hester just lifted her crossbow and shot the nearest Huntsman in the back.
“Hey, that’s not—” Freya started to say, and then flung herself to the floor, because as the dead man pitched forward the man beside him turned and sprayed a long burst of gunfire at her. She kept forgetting this was all real. She squirmed on the floor and heard the bullets kick chunks out of the doors and skip off the marble beside her. Hester snatched the pistol out of her hand and the Huntsman’s face turned into a splash of red. Smew pulled his gun away from him as he fell, and turned it on a third guard, caught in the swirling panic of the captives. “Rasmussen!” somebody shouted, and suddenly the whole room took up the shout, the ancient war-cry of Anchorage, left over from times when Freya’s ancestors had led battles against air-pirates and the Stalkers of the Nomad Empires. “Rasmussen!” There were shots, a scream, a long, rattling, xylophone trill as a dying Huntsman crashed against one of the mothballed chandeliers. It was all over very quickly. Windolene Pye began organizing people to tend to the wounded, while men helped themselves to the dead Huntsmen’s swords and sidearms.
“Where’s Scabious?” shouted Hester, and somebody pushed him towards her. The engine master looked eager and clutched a captured gun. She said, “Arkangel’s coming. I could see its lights from the air-harbour. You’ll need to get this old place moving pretty sharpish.”
Scabious nodded. “But there’re Huntsmen in the engine district, and the stern-wheel’s shot. We can’t do more than quarter speed on the cats alone, and we can’t even do that until the wreckage of the stern-wheel’s cut away.”
“Get cutting then,” said Hester, discarding her crossbow and drawing her sword.
Scabious thought of a thousand other questions, then shrugged them away and nodded. He started for the stairways with half of Anchorage behind him, those without weapons grabbing chairs and bottles as they passed. Freya, frightened as she was, felt she should go with them and lead the attack like one of those long-ago margravines. She joined the growing rush towards the door, but Hester grabbed her, stopped her. “You stay here. Your people are going to need you alive. Where’s Masgard?”
“I don’t know,” said Freya. “I think he was heading for the main entrance.”
Hester nodded, a quick, small tic of a nod that could have meant anything. “Tom’s in the Museum,” she said.
“Tom’s here?” Freya was having trouble keeping up.
“Please, Your Radiance, keep him safe when all this is over.”
“But…” Freya started to say, but Hester was gone, the bullet-riddled doors swinging shut behind her. Freya wondered if she should follow, but what could she do against Masgard? She turned back into the ballroom, and saw a knot of people still cowering there; the very old and young, the injured, and those who were just too scared to join the fight. Freya knew how they felt. She screwed up her hands into tight fists to stop them shaking and put on her best margravine’s smile. “Don’t be afraid. The Ice Gods are with us.”
Tom, heading for the ballroom, met Scabious and his people pouring towards him, a dark tumble of running limbs, light glinting on metal, pale surf of set faces stark in the lamplight. They filled the corridor like the sea pouring into a foundering ship. Tom was afraid that they would mistake him for a Huntsman, but Scabious saw him and shouted his name, and the tide picked him up and swept him along, the surf breaking into grinning remembered faces: Aakiuq, Probsthain, Smew. People reached out to pat his shoulders, punch his chest. “Tom!” shouted Smew, tugging at his waist. “It’s good to see you back!”
“Hester!” Tom yelled, struggling in the tide as it carried him out of the palace. “Where’s Hester?”
“She saved us, Tom!” Smew shouted, running ahead. “What a nerve! Came into that ballroom and cut down the Huntsmen, merciless as a Stalker! What a girl!”
“But where – Mr Scabious, is she with you?”
His words were lost in the clatter of feet and the shouts of “Rasmussen, Rasmussen!” as the crowd swept past him and away, funnelling down a stairway towards the engine district. He heard shouts and gunshots echoing under the low roof, and wondered if he should go and try to help, but the thought of Hester held him back. Calling her name, he ran through the Boreal Arcade and out into the swirling snow on Rasmussen Prospekt. Two lines of footprints dotted the snow, leading towards the air-harbour. As he hesitated, wondering whether one of the tracks was Hester’s, he saw a face watching him from the doorway of a shop on the far side of the street.
“Professor Pennyroyal?”
Pennyroyal darted sideways, stumbling in the snow, and vanished into a narrow alleyway between two boutiques. Coins sprayed from his fists as he went. He had been filling his pockets with loose change from the shop’s cash-register.
“Professor!” shouted Tom, sheathing his sword and running after him. “It’s only me! Where’s Hester?”
The explorer’s clumsy footprints led to the tier’s edge, where a stairway descended to the lower city. Tom hurried down it, setting his feet in the big, bear-like prints of Pennyroyal’s luxury snowboots. Near the bottom he stopped suddenly, his heart beating fast, startled by a glimpse of black wings, but it was not a Stalker-bird, only the sign outside a tavern called The Spread Eagle. He jogged on, wondering if he would have a fear of birds for ever more.
“Professor Pennyroyal?”
Masgard had not been waiting at the palace entrance, among the bodies of the men she’d killed on her way in. Maybe Scabious’s lot got him, thought Hester. Or maybe he had heard the sounds of fighting and worked out which way the wind was blowing. Maybe he was hurrying back to the harbour in the hope of finding a ship there that could take him home to Arkangel.
She pushed her way out through the heat-lock. The col
d-mask cut off her peripheral vision, so she threw it away and went down the slope on to Rasmussen Prospekt with the snowflakes stroking her face like cold fingers. A long line of fresh footprints reached away from her, already filling with snow. She followed them, measuring the long strides. Ahead, a man was silhouetted against the dying glare from the air-harbour. It was Masgard. She quickened her pace, and as she drew closer she could hear him calling the names of his dead companions. “Garstang? Gustavsson? Sprüe?” She could hear the panic rising in his voice. He was just a rich city boy who enjoyed playing pirates and had never expected anyone to stand up to him. He’d come looking for a fight, and now that a fight had found him he didn’t know what to do with it.
“Masgard!” she called.
He spun round, breathing hard. Beyond him the Clear Air Turbulence had burned down to a charred metal basket. The docking-pans seemed to jostle each other in the last mad light of the guttering fire.
Hester lifted her sword.
“What are you playing at, aviatrix?” Masgard shouted. “You sell me this city, then you try and help them take it back. I don’t understand! What’s your plan?”
“There isn’t one,” said Hester. “I’m just making it up as I go along.”
Masgard drew his sword and swished it to and fro, practising flashy fencing moves as he advanced on her. When he was a few feet away Hester lunged forward and jabbed her blade at his shoulder. She didn’t think she’d done much damage, but Masgard dropped his sword and put his hands to the wound and slithered in the snow and fell over. “Please!” he shouted. “Have mercy!” He fumbled under his furs, pulling out a fat purse and sprinkling the snow between them with big, glittering coins. “The boy’s not here, but take this and let me live!”
Hester walked to where he lay and swung the sword at him with both hands, bringing it down again and again until his screams stopped. Then she flung the sword aside and stood watching while Masgard’s blood soaked pinkly into the snow and the big white flakes began to bury the gold he had thrown at her. Her elbows ached, and she had an odd feeling of disappointment. She had expected more of this night. She wanted something other than this dazed, hollowed-out feeling that she was left with. She had been expecting to die. It seemed wrong that she was still alive, not even hurt. She thought of all those dead Huntsmen. Other people had been killed in the battle too, no doubt, all because of what she’d done. Was she not to be punished at all?
Somewhere among the warehouses on the lower tier, a single pistol-shot rang out.
The trail of footprints had led Tom into familiar streets, lit by the glare of the fires in the harbour above. Beginning to feel uneasy, he rounded a last corner and saw the Jenny Haniver, sitting where he had left her in the shadow of the warehouses. Pennyroyal was fumbling with the hatch.
“Professor!” shouted Tom, walking towards him. “What are you doing?”
Pennyroyal looked up. “Damn!” he muttered, when he realized he’d been found, and then, with something of his old bluster, “What does it look as if I’m doing, Tom? I’m getting off this burg while there’s still time! If you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me. Great Poskitt, you’d hidden this thing well! Took me ages to spot her…”
“But there’s no need to leave now!” said Tom. “We can get the city’s engines started and outrun Arkangel. Anyway, I’m not leaving Hester!”
“You would if you knew what she’d done,” said Pennyroyal darkly. “That girl’s no good, Tom. Completely insane. Unhinged as well as ugly…”
“Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” cried Tom indignantly, reaching out to drag the explorer away from the hatch.
Pennyroyal pulled a pistol from inside his robes and shot him in the chest.
The kick of the bullet threw him backwards into a snowdrift. He tried to struggle up, but he couldn’t. There was a hot, wet hole in his coat. “That’s not fair!” he whispered, and felt blood flood up his throat and fill his mouth, hot and salty. The pain came in like the long, grey breakers at Rogues’ Roost, steady and slow, each wave fading into the next.
There was a crunch of footsteps in the snow. Pennyroyal crouched over him, still holding the gun. He looked almost as surprised as Tom. “Oops!” he said. “Sorry. Only meant to scare you; it just went off. Never handled one of these things before. Took it from one of those chaps your loony girlfriend spiked.”
“Help,” Tom managed to whisper.
Pennyroyal twitched Tom’s coat open and looked at the damage. “Eugh!” he said, and shook his head. He groped in the inner pockets and drew out the Jenny’s keys.
Tom felt the deckplates under him begin to shudder as the city’s engines came back to life. Saws were howling up at the stern as Scabious’s men cut away the wreckage of the wheel. “Listen!” he whispered, and found that his voice sounded like someone else’s, faint and far away. “Don’t take the Jenny! You needn’t! Mr Scabious will get us moving again. We’ll outrun Arkangel…”
Pennyroyal stood up. “Really, what an incurable romantic you are, Tom. Where do you think you’re going to run to? There are no green bits in America, remember? This city is headed for a cold, slow death on the ice or a quick, hot one in the gut of Arkangel, and either way I don’t intend to be around when it happens!” He tossed the keys up in the air and caught them again, turning away. “Must dash. Sorry again. Cheerio!”
Tom started trying to drag himself through the snow, determined to find Hester, but after a few feet he had forgotten what it was he meant to tell her. He lay in the snow, and after a while the burr of aëro-engines reached him, rising and then fading as Pennyroyal lifted the Jenny Haniver out of the maze of warehouses and steered her away into the dark. It didn’t seem to matter much by then. Even dying didn’t seem to matter, although it seemed odd to think that he had outflown Fox Spirits and escaped Stalkers and survived strange adventures under the sea only to end like this.
The snow kept on falling, and it wasn’t cold any more, just soft and snug, heaping its silence over the city, wrapping the whole world in a dream of peace.
33
THIN ICE
Just after sunrise a cheer ran through the engine district as the wreckage of the stern-wheel was finally cut away and the city began to move again, swinging south by south-west. Yet with the wheel gone and just the cats to drag it forward Anchorage could only manage a crippled crawl, making barely ten miles per hour. Already in the breaks between the snow showers Arkangel could be seen looming in the east like a polluted mountain.
Freya stood with Mr Scabious on the stern-gallery. The engine master had a pink sticking-plaster on his forehead where a Huntsman’s bullet had grazed him, but he was the only casualty of the battle to retake the engine district: the Huntsmen had quickly seen that they were outnumbered, and fled on to the ice to await rescue by Arkangel’s survey-suburbs.
“Only one hope for us,” muttered Scabious, as he and Freya watched the low sunlight kindle reflections in the windows of the predator city. “If we run far enough south the ice’ll grow thinner and they may break off the chase.”
“But if the ice is thinner won’t we go through it too?”
Scabious nodded. “There’s always that danger. And if we’re to keep ahead we can’t afford to bother with survey-teams and scout-parties; we’ll have to keep going as fast as we can, and hope for the best. America or bust, eh?”
“Yes,” said Freya. And then, feeling that there was no point in lying any more, “No. Mr Scabious, it was all a lie. Pennyroyal had never been to America. He invented the whole thing. That’s why he shot Tom, and took the Jenny Haniver.”
“Oh, aye?” said Scabious, turning to look down at her.
Freya waited for something more, but it didn’t come. “Well, is that it?” she asked. “Just ‘oh, aye’? Aren’t you going to tell me what a little fool I’ve been, for believing in Pennyroyal?”
Scabious smiled. “To tell you the truth, Freya, I had my doubts about that fellow from the first. Didn’t rin
g true somehow.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“Because it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” said the engine master. “I liked your idea of crossing the High Ice. What was this city before we started west? A moving ruin; the only people who hadn’t left were the ones too full up with sorrow to think of anywhere to go. We were more like ghosts than human beings. And now look at us. Look at yourself. The journey’s shaken us up and turned us about and we’re alive again.”
“Probably not for very long.”
Scabious shrugged. “Even so. And you never know; perhaps we’ll find a way. If we can only stay out of the jaws of that great monster.”
They stood in silence, side by side, and studied the pursuing city. It seemed to grow darker and closer as they watched.
“I must confess,” said Scabious, “I’d never imagined Pennyroyal would go as far as shooting people. How is poor young Tom?”
He lay on the bed like a marble statue, the fading scars and bruises of his fight with the Stalker-birds standing out starkly on his white face. His hand when Hester held it was cold, and only the faint fluttering pulse told her he was still alive.
“I’m sorry, Hester.” Windolene Pye spoke in a whisper, as if anything louder might attract the attention of the Goddess of Death to this makeshift sickroom in the Winter Palace. All night and all day the lady navigator had been tending to the wounded, and especially to Tom, who was most badly hurt. She looked old and weary and defeated. “I’ve done all I can, but the bullet is lodged against his heart. I daren’t try to extract it, not with the city lurching about like this.”
Hester nodded, staring at Tom’s shoulder. She could not bring herself to look at his face, and Miss Pye had pulled a coverlet over the rest of him for modesty’s sake, but the arm and the shoulder nearest to Hester were bare. It was a pale, angular shoulder, slightly freckled, and it seemed to her to be the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She touched it, and stroked his arm, watching the soft down of hair spring back as her fingers passed, feeling the muscles and tendons strong under the skin, the faint tick of a pulse at his blue wrist.