“Why?”
Hester shrugged. (Better not mention the journey to America; too hard to explain and too hard to believe.) “Who knows? Perhaps they’ve learned about some Old-Tech site and they’re off to dig it up. I’m sure you’d find a way to prise the details out of their beautiful young margravine…”
Masgard grinned. “Julianna here was a margrave’s daughter, before great Arkangel ate her daddy’s town.”
“Then think what a pretty addition Freya Rasmussen will make to your collection,” said Hester. She seemed to be standing outside herself; she felt nothing, except a faint pride at just how heartless she could be. “And if you want a snack to keep you going on the way, I can give you the coordinates of Wolverinehampton, a predator-suburb with a fat new catch.”
Masgard was hooked. He’d had word of Anchorage and Wolverinehampton from Widgery Blinkoe a few days earlier, but the oily antiquary had not known Wolverinehampton’s present course. As for Anchorage, Masgard was not sure whether to believe a sighting of an ice city so far west. Yet this mangy sky-urchin sounded like she knew her stuff, and with Blinkoe’s report to back it up, her information would be enough to persuade the Council to change course. He let her wait a moment, so that she could appreciate just how despicable she was. Then he opened a compartment in the armrest of his flying chair and pulled out a thick sheet of parchment which he signed with a fountain pen. His slave-girl passed the paper to Hester. There were words printed on it in gothic script, and seals with the names of the gods of Arkangeclass="underline" Eisengrim and the Thatcher.
“A promissory note,” explained Masgard, revving his chair’s engines and lifting away from her. “If your information proves correct you can come and collect your fee when we eat Anchorage. Give the details to my clerk.”
Hester shook her head. “I’m not doing this for predator’s gold.”
“Then what?”
“There’s somebody aboard Anchorage. Tom Natsworthy, the boy you saw me with in Airhaven. When you eat the city, you’ll let me have him. But he’s not to know it’s been arranged. I want him to think I’m rescuing him. Everything else aboard the stinking place is yours, but not Tom. He’s mine. My price.”
Masgard stared down at her for a moment, genuinely surprised. Then he flung back his head and his laughter filled the room with echoes.
Waiting at the station for an elevator that would take her back to the air-harbour, she felt the deckplates shiver as great Arkangel began to move. She patted her pocket, checking again that she had Masgard’s revised promissory note safe. How glad Tom would be when she came to rescue him from the predator city’s gut! How easily she would make him forget his infatuation with the margravine, once they were together again on the Bird Roads!
She had done what she had to, for Tom’s sake, and there was no going back. She would fetch a few bits and pieces from the Jenny Haniver and find a room somewhere to wait out the journey.
It was night again by the time she reached the air-harbour, and snowflakes were fluttering around the landing-lights at the harbour mouth. The noise of raucous laughter and cheap music drifted from taverns behind the docking pans, gusting louder whenever someone opened a door. Dim lamplight made puddles of shadow under the big, moored traders; ships with northern names, the Fram and the Froud and the Smaug. She began to feel nervous as she walked towards the low-rent docking pan where the Jenny waited. This was a dangerous city, and she had lost the habit of being alone.
“Miss Shaw?” The man surprised her, coming up on her blind side. She reached for her knife, then recognized the nice old merchant who had helped her earlier. “I’ll walk you to your ship, Miss Shaw. There are some Snowmad traders aboard; ruffianly types. It’s not safe for a young woman alone. Your vessel’s the Jenny Haniver, isn’t she?”
“That’s right,” said Hester, wondering how he knew her name and that of her ship. She supposed he must have asked around earlier, or looked it up in the new-arrivals ledger at the harbour office.
“You’ve seen Masgard then?” her new friend asked. “I suppose that has something to do with this sudden move to the west? You’ve sold him a town?”
Hester nodded.
“I’m in a similar line of work myself,” the merchant said, and slammed her against a metal stanchion beneath a trader called the Temporary Blip. She gasped, hurt and surprised, trying to gulp in enough air to scream for help. Something stung the side of her neck like a hornet. The merchant stepped away from her, breathing hard. A brass syringe flashed in the light from the distant taverns as he slid it back into his pocket.
Hester tried to put her hand to her neck, but the drug was taking effect quickly and her limbs no longer obeyed her. She tried to call out, but all that emerged was a wordless hoot. She took a step forward and fell, her face a few inches from the man’s boots. “Terribly sorry,” she heard him say, his voice wavery and far away, like Tom’s voice the last time she heard it, seeping out of the telephone in the Aakiuqs’ parlour. “I have five wives to support, you see, and they all have expensive tastes, and nag me something rotten.”
Hester hooted again, dribbling on to the deckplate.
“Don’t worry!” the voice went on. “I’m just taking you and your ship down to Rogues’ Roost. You’re wanted for questioning. That’s all.”
“But Tom — ” Hester managed to moan.
More boots appeared: expensive, fashionable, ladies’ boots, with tassels. New voices babbled overhead. “You’re sure it’s her, Blinkoe?”
“Eugh! She’s so ugly!”
“She can’t be worth anything to anyone!”
“Ten thousand in cash when I get her to the Roost,” said Blinkoe smugly. “I’ll take her there aboard her own ship, and tow the Blip ’s tender to bring me home again. Be back in no time, with bags full of money. Look after the shop while I’m gone, dears.”
“No!” Hester tried to say, because if he took her away she wouldn’t be there to rescue Tom; he would be eaten along with the rest of Anchorage and all her schemes would come to nothing… But although she tried to struggle as they rummaged for her keys she could not move or make a sound or even blink. It took her a long time to lose consciousness, however, and that was the worst of it, for she understood everything that was happening as the merchant and his wives dragged her aboard the Jenny Haniver and began the preparations for take-off.
PART TWO
19
Ice-water woke her: a storm of it, driving her sideways across a cold stone floor and thrusting her against a wall of white tiles. She gasped and screamed and gurgled. Water filled her mouth. Water plastered draggled hair across her face so that she couldn’t see, and when she raked it aside there was not much to see anyway, only a chill white room lit by a single argon-globe, and men in white uniforms aiming hosepipes at her.
“Enough!” shouted a female voice, and the storm ceased, the men turning away to hook the hoses’ dribbling snouts over a metal frame bolted to the wall. Hester choked and cursed and spewed water out on to the floor, where it swirled away into a central drain. Dim flickers of memory came back to her, of Arkangel, and a merchant: of surfacing from sleep in the cold, rattly hold of the Jenny and finding that she was tied up. She had struggled and tried to shout, and the merchant had come, all apologetic, and there had been that hornet-sting on her neck again, and darkness. He had drugged her and kept her drugged, and while she was under he had flown her from Arkangel to whatever this place was…
“Tom!” she moaned.
Booted feet came sloshing towards her. She looked up snarling, expecting the merchant, but this wasn’t him. This was a young woman in white, with a bronze badge on her breast that marked her out as a subaltern in the Anti-Traction League, and an armband embroidered with green lightning.