Tom knew exactly how he felt. To north and south of them the steep side of the Black Island stretched away, and above them the slope climbed almost vertically to dark crags which moaned with ghostly voices as the wind blew around them. Some of the higher pinnacles of rock had been sculpted into such wild shapes that from the beach they had looked like fortresses, and Peavey had led his party on a long detour to avoid them before he realized they were only stones.
“It’s lovely,” sighed Hester, limping along at Tom’s side. She was smiling to herself, which he had never seen her do, and whistling a little tune through her teeth.
“What are you so happy about?” he asked.
“We’re going to Airhaven, aren’t we?” she replied in a whisper. “It’s laired up ahead somewhere, and Peavey’s little gang will never take it, not with Mossies and the Airhaven people ranged against them. They’ll be killed, and we’ll find a ship to take us north to London. Anna Fang’s there, remember. She might help us again.”
“Oh, her!” said Tom angrily. “Didn’t you hear what Peavey said? She’s a League spy.”
“I thought so,” admitted Hester. “I mean, all those questions she kept asking us about London, and Valentine.”
“You should have told me!” he protested. “I might have revealed an important secret!”
“Why would I care?” asked Hester. “And since when have Apprentice Historians known any important secrets? Anyway, I thought you realized she was a spy.”
“She didn’t look like one.”
“Well, spies don’t, generally. You can’t expect them to wear a big sandwich board with ‘SPY’ on it, or a special spying hat.” She was in a strange, jokey mood, and Tom wondered if it was because these dismal steeps reminded her of her girlhood on that other island. Suddenly she touched his arm and said, “Poor Tom. You’re learning what Valentine taught me all those years ago; you can’t trust anybody.”
“Huh,” said Tom.
“Oh, I don’t mean you,” she added hurriedly. “I think I trust you, almost. And what you did for me back in Tunbridge Wheels—making Peavey let me out of the lock-ups like that… A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. Not for somebody like me.”
Tom looked round at her, and saw more clearly than ever before the kind, shy Hester peeping from behind the grim mask. He smiled at her with such warmth that she blushed (at least, her strange face turned red in patches and her scar went purple) and Peavey looked back at them and hollered, “Come on, you two lovebirds! Stop whispering sweet nothings and march!”
Afternoon, the cloud clearing eastwards and sunlight dazzling down through the wave-tops, flickering on the upperworks of Tunbridge Wheels. Shrike moves through the suburb’s streets with his head swinging slowly from side to side. Bodies drift in the flooded rooms like cold teabags left too long in the pot. Small fish dart in and out of a pirate’s mouth. A girl’s hair coils on the current. Dark keels of salvage boats move overhead. He waits hidden in the shadows while three naked boys come diving down, flying past him with urgent motions of their arms and legs and leaving trails of silver bubbles. They kick back to the surface carrying guns, bottles, a leather belt.
Hester is not here. Shrike turns away from the sunken suburb, following the shadows of drifting oil-slicks over the silt. Wreckage is strewn along the sea floor, and floating bodies beckon him towards the roots of the Black Island.
It is evening by the time he walks out of the surf, trailing flags of seaweed, water draining from inside his battered armour. He shakes his head to clear his vision and stares about him at a beach of black sand beneath dark cliffs. It takes him most of another hour to find the life-raft, hidden in a tumble of house-sized boulders. He unsheathes his metal claws and tears the bottom out of it, cutting off her escape. Hester is his again now. When she is dead he will carry her gently through the drowned sunlight and the forests of kelp, back through the marshes and the long leagues of the Hunting Ground to Crome. He will take her into London in his arms like a father carrying his sleeping child.
He drops on all fours in the sand and starts sniffing for her scent.
Towards sundown, they finally reached the top of the slope, and found themselves looking down into the centre of the Black Island.
Tom hadn’t realized until now that it was an extinct volcano, but from here it was obvious; the steep, black crags ringed an almost circular bowl of land, green, and patched with fields. Almost directly below the place where the pirates crouched, a small static settlement stood beside a blue lake. There were airship hangars and mooring masts beside the stone buildings, and on the flat ground behind them, dwarfing the whole place, Airhaven perched on a hundred skinny landing legs, looking as helpless as a grounded bird.
“The air-caravanserai!” chuckled Peavey. He pulled out his telescope and put it to his eye. “Look at ’em work! They’re pumping their gasbags back up, desperate to get back into the sky…” He swung the glass quickly across the surrounding hillsides. “No sign of any of our boys. Oh, if only we had a cannon left! But we’ll manage, eh lads? A bunch of airy-fairies is no match for us! Come on, let’s get closer…”
There was a strange edge to the mayor’s voice. He’s frightened, Tom realized. But he can’t admit it, in case Mungo and Maggs and Ames lose faith in him. He had never thought he would feel sorry for the pirate mayor, but he did. Peavey had been kind to him, in his way, and it hurt to see him reduced to this, scrambling across the wet ground with his people muttering and cursing him behind his back.
They still followed him though, down between the screes into the crater of the old fire-mountain. Once they saw riders silhouetted on a distant crag; a patrol of islanders hunting for survivors from the sunken pirate town. Once an airship flew low overhead, and Peavey hissed at everybody to lie flat and stay still, wrapping his monkey under his robes to muffle its shrill complaints.
The airship circled, but by that time the sun had gone down, and the pilot did not see the figures who cowered in the twilight below him like mice hiding from an owl. He flew back down to land at the caravanserai as a fat moon heaved itself over the eastern crags.
Tom gave a sharp sob of relief and scrambled up. Around him the others were also starting to move, grunting, dislodging small stones which went clattering away down the hillside. He could see people hurrying about with lanterns and torches in the streets of the air-caravanserai, and lamp-lit windows that made him think how wonderful it would be to be warm and safe indoors. Airhaven was bright with electric lights, and the wind brought the distant sounds of shouted orders, music, cheering.
“For Pete’s sake!” hissed Mungo. “We’re too late! It’s leaving!”
“Never,” scoffed Peavey.
But they could all see that Airhaven’s gasbags were almost full. A few minutes later the growl of its engines came rumbling up the slope, rising and falling as the wind gusted. The flying town was straining upwards, its crab-like legs folding back into place underneath it. “No!” shouted Peavey.
Then he was running downhill, scrambling and tumbling down clattering spills of scree towards the flat, boggy land in the crater floor, and as he ran they heard him screaming “Come back! You’re my catch! I sank my town for you!”
Mungo and Maggs and Ames set off after him, with Hester and Tom behind. At the foot of the slope the ground grew soft and squashy underfoot and pools of water reflected the moon and the lights of the rising town.