“Of course, Anna, but you must try to remember. You must be yourself again, before we take you home. Everyone in the League’s lands loved you; when they hear you have returned they will rise up and follow you.”
“Ah, Commander,” muttered Popjoy, backing towards the bridge. “I think we should withdraw now…”
“I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker.
“Commander, I definitely think…”
“Anna, please!”
Instinctively, Hester grabbed Sathya and dragged her backwards. The claws scythed past an inch from her throat. The guard levelled his machine-gun and the Stalker hesitated just long enough for them all to scurry back across the bridge. As they reached the door the man stationed outside pulled a heavy, red-handled lever. Red warning lights came on amid a rising buzz of electricity. “I am not Anna Fang!” Hester heard the Stalker shout, as she bundled out after the others into the antechamber. Glancing back in the instant before the guards slammed and locked the door, she saw it watching her, its claws jerking and glinting.
“Fascinating,” said Popjoy, making notes on his clipboard. “Fascinating. With hindsight, it may have been a tad unwise to install the finger-glaives so early…”
“What’s wrong with her?” Sathya demanded.
“It’s hard to be entirely sure,” admitted Popjoy. “I imagine the new memory-seeking components which I added to the basic Stalker-brain are clashing with its tactical and aggressive instincts.”
“You mean it’s mad?” asked Hester.
“Really, Miss Shaw, ‘mad’ is such an unhelpful term. I would prefer to say that the former Miss Fang is ‘differently sane’.”
“Poor Anna,” whispered Sathya, stroking her throat with the tips of her fingers.
“Don’t worry about Anna,” said Hester. “Anna’s dead. Poor you is what you mean. You’ve got a mad killing machine in there, and your stupid guns aren’t going to keep it penned in for ever. It could climb down off that platform! It could reach the door and-”
“The bridge is electrified, Miss Shaw,” said Popjoy firmly. “The girders under the platform are electrified. The inside of the door is also electrified. Even Stalkers dislike massive electric shocks. As for the guns, I am pretty sure the former Miss Fang does not yet understand her new strength; she is still wary of them. That may well be a sign that she does indeed possess lingering memories of her earlier, human incarnation.”
Sathya glanced at him, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “Yes. Yes, doctor. We must not give up. We will bring Hester here again.”
She turned away smiling, but Hester had seen the panicky look behind Popjoy’s spectacles. He had no idea at all of how to restore the dead aviatrix’s memories. Surely even Sathya must soon realize that this attempt to bring her friend back from the Sunless Country was doomed. And when she did, there would be no more reason for her to keep Hester around.
I’m going to die here, she thought, as guards took her back to her cell and locked her in. Either Sathya or that mad thing will kill me, and I’ll never see Tom again, and I’ll never rescue him, and he’ll die too, in the slave-pits of Arkangel, cursing me.
She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down until she was kneeling, curled into a little miserable knot. She could hear the sea hissing between the rocks of Rogues’ Roost, as cold as the voice of the new Stalker. She could hear small bits of paint and cement falling from the damp-rotted roof of her cell, and faint, scratchy noises in the old heat-duct that reminded her of Anchorage. She thought about Mr Scabious, and Sathya, and about the desperate, hopeless things that people did to try and hold on to the people they loved.
“Oh, Tom! Oh, oh, Tom!” she sobbed, imagining him safe and happy in Anchorage, with no idea that she had set great Arkangel on his tail.
21
A week went by, and then another and another. Anchorage swung west, creeping along the northern edge of Greenland with survey-sleds sent out ahead to sound the ice. No city had come this way before, and Miss Pye did not trust her charts.
Freya felt as if she had wandered into unmapped territory, too. Why was she so unhappy? How had everything gone so wrong, when it had all seemed to be going so right? She could not understand why Tom didn’t want her. Surely, she thought, wiping a hole in the dust on her dressing-room mirror to study her reflection, surely he cannot still be missing Hester? Surely he can’t prefer her to me?
Sometimes, sniffling with self-pity, she concocted elaborate schemes to win him back. Sometimes she grew angry and stomped along the dusty corridors muttering all the things she should have said during their argument. Once or twice she found herself wondering whether she could order him to be beheaded for high treason, but Anchorage’s executioner (a very ancient gentleman whose post had been purely ceremonial) was dead, and Freya doubted that Smew could lift the axe.
Tom had moved out of his suite in the Winter Palace into an abandoned apartment in a big, empty building on Rasmussen Prospekt, not far from the air-harbour. Without the Wunderkammer or the margravine’s library to distract him, he devoted his days to feeling sorry for himself and wondering how to get Hester back, or at least find out where she had gone.
There was no way off Anchorage, that much was certain. He had pestered Mr Aakiuq about fitting out the Graculus for long-range travel, but the Graculus was just a tug; she had never flown more than half a mile from the air-harbour before, and Mr Aakiuq claimed it would be impossible to give her the bigger fuel-tanks she would need if Tom was to take her back east. “Besides,” the harbour master added, “what would you fill them with? I’ve been checking fuel levels in the harbour tanks. There’s almost nothing left. I don’t understand it. The gauges still read full, but the tanks are nearly empty.”
Fuel was not the only thing that had been going missing. Unconvinced by Scabious’s talk of ghosts, Tom had been asking around in the engine district for anyone who might know something of Hester’s mysterious friend. Nobody did, but they all seemed to have their own tales of figures glimpsed in corners of the district where no one should be, and of tools set down at a shift’s end and never seen again. Things vanished from lockers and bolted rooms, and an oil-tank on Heat Exchange Street had run dry, even though the gauges showed it nearly full.
“What’s going on?” asked Tom. “Who would take all these things? Do you think there’s somebody aboard who we don’t know about? Someone who stayed on in secret after the plague, to line their pockets?”
“Bless you, young man,” the engine district workers chuckled. “Who’d stay aboard a city like this, unless they wanted to help Her Radiance take it to America? There’s no way off, no way to sell the things they’ve stolen.”
“Then who — ?”
“Ghosts,” was all they’d say, shaking their heads, fingering the amulets they all wore around their necks. “The High Ice has always been haunted. The ghosts come aboard and play tricks on the living. Everyone knows that.”
Tom was not so sure. There was something spooky about the engine district, and sometimes when he was on his own in the dingy streets he had the strangest feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn’t see what ghosts would want with oil, and tools, and airship fuel, and trinkets from the margravine’s museum.
“He’s on to us,” said Skewer darkly, watching the screens one evening as Tom poked about among some deserted buildings on the edge of the engine district. “He knows.”