“Tom…” she said.
“Look out!” shouted Tom. “Miss Pye! What’s that?”
Beyond the dim outlines of Anchorage’s roofs a row of lights blazed suddenly through the darkness, then gigantic claw-toothed wheels and the bright windows of buildings, all rushing past at right-angles to Anchorage’s new course. It was the stern of Wolverinehampton. The heavy wheels spun into reverse as its lookouts sighted Anchorage, but the suburb’s massive jaws made it slow to turn, and already the storm was clamping down again, thick, furious snow hiding the predator from its prey.
“Thank Quirke!” Tom whispered, and laughed with relief. Freya squeezed his fingers, and he found that in the shock of seeing the predator they had reached for each other, and her warm, plump hand was nestled in his. He let go quickly, embarrassed. He had not thought of Hester since the chase began.
Miss Pye ordered course-change after course-change, steering the city deep into the labyrinths of the blizzard. An hour passed, and then another, and slowly a feeling of reprieve seeped into the Wheelhouse. Wolverinehampton would not waste more fuel trying to follow them through the night, and by the time dawn came the storm would have erased their tracks. Miss Pye hugged her colleagues, then the helmsman, then Tom. “We’ve done it!” she said. “We’ve escaped!” Freya was beaming. Professor Pennyroyal, sensing that the danger had passed, had fallen asleep in a corner.
Tom returned the navigator’s hug and laughed, happy to be alive and very, very happy to be aboard this city, among these good and friendly people. He would talk to Hester as soon as the storm was over, and make her see that there was no need for them to go flying off as soon as the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage’s engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home.
In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton’s air-quay Widgery Blinkoe’s five wives turned five unbecoming shades of green. “Ooooh!” they groaned, clutching their delicate stomachs as the suburb tilted and veered, angrily scouring the blizzard for its vanished prey.
“I’ve never been aboard such a horrid little town!”
“Does this hotel have no shock absorbers at all?”
“What were you thinking of, husband, setting us down here?”
“You should have known you’d find no trace of the Jenny Haniver aboard a mere suburb!”
“I wish I’d flown away with dear Professor Pennyroyal. He was madly in love with me, you know.”
“I wish I’d listened to my mother!”
“I wish we were back in Arkangel!”
Widgery Blinkoe carefully stoppered his ears against their complaints with small balls of wax, but he, too, was sick and scared and missing his home comforts. Bother and blast the Green Storm, for sending him on this wild goose chase! For weeks now he’d been trailing across the Ice Wastes like some Snowmad sky-tramp, setting down on every town he saw to ask for news of the Jenny Haniver. People he had questioned in Novaya Nizhni said they had seen her fly off northwards after wrecking the Green Storm’s fighters, but there had not been a sighting since. It was as if the wretched airship had simply vanished!
Dimly, he wondered about the city Wolverinehampton had just tried to snaffle; Anchorage. If he took off when the storm ended he could probably spot the place and catch up with it… But what was the point? He was sure those two young aviators could not have brought their old ship this far west. Besides, he was beginning to think that he would rather face the assassins of the Green Storm than tell his wives they had to land at yet another dingy little harbour.
It was definitely time for a change of plan.
He took out his earplugs, just in time to hear wife number three say plaintively, “…and now they’ve lost their catch, the ruffians who run this town will grow angry and wild! We shall be murdered, and it will all be Blinkoe’s fault!”
“Nonsense, wives!” boomed Blinkoe, standing up to show them that he was the head of the household and that a breakneck chase through a blizzard aboard a savage suburb couldn’t upset him. “Nobody is going to be murdered! As soon as this storm ends we shall fetch the Temporary Blip out of her hangar and fly home to Arkangel. I shall sell details of a few of the towns we’ve touched at to the Huntsmen, so our trip won’t leave us out of pocket, and as for the Green Storm… Well, all manner of aviators pass through the Arkangel airexchange. I shall question them all. One of them must know something about the Jenny Haniver. ”
15
Still the storm blew, the shrill voice of the wind rising higher and higher. In the upper city several empty buildings were blown down, and many more lost roofs and windows. Two of Mr Scabious’s workers, venturing out on to the bows to lash down a loose deckplate, were lifted clear off the city with it and vanished into the darkness off the leeward side, clinging to their trailing cables like the owners of an unwieldy kite.
Hester had been at work with Mr Aakiuq in the Jenny ’s hangar when his nephew came bursting in with news of the chase. Her first instinct had been to run to the Winter Palace to be with Tom, but when she stepped outside the wind hit her like a well-aimed mattress, flattening her against the side of the hangar. A glance at the snow driving across the empty docking pans told her that she could go no further than the harbour master’s house. She sat out the storm in his kitchen, while the Aakiuqs fed her algae stew and told her about other storms, far worse than this, which dear old Anchorage had come through quite unscathed.
Hester felt grateful to them for trying to reassure her, but she was not a child, and she could tell that behind their smiles they were just as scared as her. It wasn’t just this unnatural, unexpected pressing on into the teeth of the storm; it was the thought of that predator, waiting to swallow them all. Not now! thought Hester, gnawing the sides of her thumbs till the blood came. We can’t be eaten now. Just another week, another few days…
For the Jenny Haniver was almost air-worthy again: her rudders and engine-pods repaired, her envelope patched, her gas-cells filled; she awaited only a new coat of paint and a few small repairs to the gondola electrics. It would be a horrible irony if she were to be eaten before she could take off.
At last the telephone clattered. Mrs Aakiuq ran to answer it and came back beaming. “That was Mrs Umiak! She’s heard from the Wheelhouse, and they say we’ve escaped Wolverinehampton. We shall run on just a little longer and then anchor and let the tempest blow over. Apparently it was dear Professor Pennyroyal who advised Her Radiance to keep going despite the storm. That good gentleman! We must all give thanks to the Ice Gods, who sent him here. And Hester, dear, I am to tell you that your young man is safe. He has returned to the Winter Palace.”
A little later Tom himself called to say much the same things. His voice sounded tinny and unnatural as it came filtering through the tangled yards of wiring all the way from the palace. He might as well have been speaking from some other dimension. He and Hester exchanged little flat bits of news. “I wish I was with you,” she said, putting her face very near the mouthpiece and speaking low, for fear Mrs Aakiuq might overhear.
“What? Pardon? No, we’d best stay put. Freya told me people sometimes freeze to death in the streets in storms like this. When Smew drove us back here from the Wheelhouse the bug almost blew away!”
“Freya now, is it?”
“What?”
“The Jenny ’s nearly ready. We can leave by the end of the week.”
“Oh! Good!” She could hear the hesitation in his voice, and behind him other voices talking happily, as if there were a lot of people at the palace, all celebrating. “But maybe we can stay a bit longer,” he said hopefully. “I’d like to stay aboard until we get to America, and then, well, we’ll see…”