“How dare you, sir!” Pennyroyal heaved himself heavily upright, gesturing with his empty wine-bottle. “How dare you, a mere former Apprentice Historian, insult me! I’ll have you know my books have sold over a hundred thousand copies! Been translated into a dozen different languages! I’m very highly thought of, me. ‘Brilliant, Breathtaking and Believable’ — the Shuddersfield Gazette. ‘A rattling good yarn’ — the Panzerstadt Coblenz Advertiser. ‘Pennyroyal’s works are a breath of fresh air in the dull world of practical History’ — the Wantage Weekly Waffle…”
A breath of fresh air was what Tom needed, but not the sort that Pennyroyal could provide. He pushed past the hectoring historian, and ran down the stairs and out into the street. No wonder Pennyroyal had been so keen to see the Jenny Haniver repaired, and so distraught when Hester flew away. His talk of green places was all a lie! He knew full well that Freya Rasmussen was driving her city to its doom!
He began running to the Winter Palace, but had not gone far before he changed his mind. Freya was the wrong person to tell about this. She had invested everything in the journey west. If he burst in on her claiming that Pennyroyal had been wrong all along her pride would be dented, and Freya had a lot of pride to dent. Worse, she might think that this was just some ruse on Tom’s part to make her turn the city round so he could go looking for Hester.
“Mr Scabious!” he said aloud. Scabious had never wholly believed in Professor Pennyroyal. Scabious would listen. He turned and ran as fast as he could back to the stairway. As he passed the Wheelhouse Pennyroyal leaned over a balcony to watch, shouting after him, “‘A Startling Talent!’ — The Wheel-Tapper’s Weekly! ”
Down in the hot dark of the engine district everything thrummed and thundered with the beat of the engines as they drove the city on towards disaster. Tom stopped the first men he saw and asked where he could find Scabious. They nodded towards the stern, fingering their amulets. “Gone to look for his son, like every night.”
Tom ran on, into quiet, rusty streets where nothing moved. Or almost nothing. As he passed beneath one of the dangling argon-lamps a faint movement in the mouth of a ventilation-shaft flicked a sliver of reflected light into the corner of his eye. He stopped, breathing hard, his heart thumping, hairs prickling on his wrists and the back of his neck. In his panic over Pennyroyal he had all but forgotten the intruders. Now all his half-formed theories about them flooded his mind again. The ventilator looked empty and innocent enough now, but he was sure there had been something there, something that had darted guiltily back into the shadows just as his eye caught it. And he was sure that it was still in there, watching him.
“Oh, Hester,” he whispered, suddenly very frightened, wishing she were here to help. Hester would have been able to cope with this, but he wasn’t at all sure he could, not alone. Trying to imagine what she would do, he forced himself to walk on, one step after another, not looking towards the ventilator until he was sure he was out of sight of whatever hid there.
“I think he saw us,” said Caul.
“Never!” sneered Skewer.
Caul shrugged unhappily. They had been tracking Tom with their cameras all evening, waiting for him to reach a place that was quiet enough and close enough to the Screw Worm for them to carry out Uncle’s mysterious command. They’d never watched a Dry this closely for this long, and something in Tom’s face as he glanced towards the camera made Caul uneasy. “Come on, Skew,” he said. “It must all build up after a while, mustn’t it? The noises, and the feeling you’re being watched. And he was suspicious even before…”
“They never see!” said Skewer firmly. The strange message from Uncle had made him nervous, and faced with the task of tracking Tom he’d been forced to admit that Gargle was the best cam-operator aboard and hand over the controls to him. He clung to the idea of his superiority over the Drys as if it was the last certain thing in the world. “They might look, but they never see. They’re not as observant as us. There, what did I tell you? He’s walked past. Stupid Dry.”
It wasn’t a rat. All the rats of Anchorage were dead, and anyway, this thing looked mechanical. As he crept back through shadows towards the ventilator Tom could see the light jinking on segmented metal. A bulbous, fist-sized body, supported on too many legs. A single camera-lens eye.
He thought of the mysterious boy who had come for him on the night Hester left, and how he seemed to know everything that went on at the air-harbour and the Winter Palace. How many of these things were there, scuttling and spying in the city’s ducts? And why was this one watching him?
“Where is he, Gargle? Find him…”
“I think he’s gone,” said Gargle, panning to and fro.
“Careful!” warned Caul, resting his hand on the younger boy’s shoulder. “Tom’s still round there somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
“What, psychic as well now, are you?” asked Skewer.
Tom took three deep breaths, then flung himself at the ventilator. The metal thing scrabbled, trying to retreat into the dark shaft. Glad that he was still wearing his heavy outdoor mittens, Tom grabbed its thrashing legs and pulled.
“He’s got us!”
“Reel in! Reel in!”
Eight steel legs. Magnets for feet. An armoured body warted with rivets. That cyclops-lens whirring as it struggled to focus on him. It was so like a gigantic spider that Tom dropped it, and flinched away as it lay there on its back on the deck, writhing its legs helplessly. Then the thin cable that trailed from its rear end went suddenly taut, dragging it backwards against the ventilator with a clang. Tom lunged after it, but he was too slow. The crab-thing was tugged quickly into the shaft and vanished, leaving him listening to the fading clatter as it was hauled away into the city’s depths.
Tom scrambled up, his heart beating quickly. Who would own such a thing? Who would want to spy on the people of Anchorage? He thought of Pennyroyal’s tale of the vampire towns, and suddenly it did not seem quite so unlikely after all. He leaned against the wall to catch his breath and then started to run again. “Mr Scabious!” he shouted, the echoes rolling ahead of him down the tubular streets or vanishing upward into great, dark, dripping, haunted vaults. “Mr Scabious!”
“Lost him again! No, there — camera twelve…” Gargle flipped wildly from camera to camera. Tinnily, through the cabin speakers, Tom’s voice was shouting, “ Mr Scabious! He’s not a ghost! I know where he comes from! ”
“I think he’s heading for the stern gallery.”
“Gotta get him quick!” wailed Skewer, rummaging through lockers for a gun, a net. “He’ll blow our cover! Uncle’ll kill us! I mean really, really kill us! Gods, I hate this! We’re burglars, not kidnappers! What’s Uncle thinking? We’ve never been asked to kidnap Drys before; not full-grown ones…”
“Uncle Knows Best,” Gargle reminded him.
“Oh, shut up!”
“I’ll go,” said Caul. The emergency had made him calm; he knew what had to be done, and he knew how he would do it.
“Not without me,” Skewer shouted. “I don’t trust you up there alone, Dry-lover!”
“All right.” Caul was already halfway to the hatch. “But let me handle him. He knows me, remember?”
“Mr Scabious?”
Tom burst out on to the stern gallery. The moon was up, hanging low in the sky behind the city, and the drive-wheel flung its reflection across the deckplates. The boy stood waiting there in the flash and flicker like a grey ghost.
“How are you doing, Tom?” he asked. He looked nervous and a little shy, but friendly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to meet like this.