“Come, Margravine,” said Scabious gently, and held out his hand. Freya stared at it for a moment, surprised, then reached out and took it, and they climbed the stairs together. It was quiet on the bridge. People turned to look at Freya as she entered, and there was something in the silence that told her they had all been talking about her until a moment before.
She sniffed, and wiped her eyes on her cuff, and said, “Please get us under way, Miss Pye.”
“What course, Your Radiance?” asked Miss Pye gently.
“West,” said Freya. “America.”
“Oh, Clio!” sniffled Pennyroyal, huddled almost unnoticed in a corner. “Oh, Poskitt!”
The engines were starting up; Freya could feel the vibrations thrumming through the girders of the Wheelhouse. She pushed past Scabious and went to the back of the bridge, looking out over her city’s stern as it began to move, leaving behind it nothing but a scrawl of sled-tracks and a perfectly circular hole already skimming over with fresh ice.
23
Days passed, though it was hard to say how many. The dim blue light aboard the Screw Worm made it feel as though time had stopped at quarter to four on a wet November afternoon.
Tom slept in a corner of the hold on a pile of quilts and tapestries looted from the villas of Anchorage. Sometimes he dreamed that he was walking hand-in-hand with someone down the dusty corridors of the Winter Palace, and woke not knowing if it had been Hester or Freya. Was it really possible that he would never see either of them again?
He imagined himself escaping, reaching the surface and going in search of Hester, but the Screw Worm was swimming through the luminous canyons beneath the ice, and there was no escape. He imagined fighting his way into the control cabin and sending signals to Anchorage, warning Freya of Pennyroyal’s lies, but even if he worked out which of those rusty machines was the radio, the boys who had kidnapped him would never let him near it.
They were all very wary of him. Skewer was distant and hostile, and when Tom was about he scowled and swaggered a lot and talked very little. He reminded Tom of Melliphant, the bully who had menaced him during his apprenticeship. As for Gargle, who could not be more than ten or eleven years old, he just stared at Tom with wide round eyes when he thought Tom wasn’t looking. Only Caul was prepared to talk; odd, half-friendly Caul, and even he seemed cautious, and was unwilling to answer Tom’s questions.
“You’ll understand when we get there,” was all he would say.
“Where?”
“Home. Our base. Where Uncle lives.”
“But who is your uncle?”
“He’s not my uncle; just Uncle. He’s the leader of the Lost Boys. Nobody knows his real name, or where he came from. I heard a story that he’d been a great man once, aboard Breidhavik or Arkangel or one of those cities, and he got thrown out for some reason, and that’s when he turned to thieving. He’s a genius. He invented the limpets and the crab-cams, and found us, and built the Burglarium to train us in.”
“Found you? Where?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Caul. “All over the place. On different cities. The limpets steal children to train up as Lost Boys, just like they steal everything else Uncle needs. I was so little when I was taken that I don’t remember anything before. None of us do.”
“But that’s horrible!”
“No it’s not!” Caul laughed. He always ended up laughing. It was funny and frustrating, trying to explain the life he had always taken for granted to an outsider. How could he make Tom see that being taken to the Burglarium had been an honour, and that he would much rather be a Lost Boy than a boring Dry? “You’ll understand when we get there,” he promised. And then (because it made him uneasy, the thought of going home to explain himself to Uncle) he would change the subject and ask, “What’s Freya really like?” or “Do you think it’s true that Pennyroyal doesn’t know the way to America?”
“He knows the way,” said Tom bleakly. “Anybody with half a brain can work out a route to America from the old charts. The trouble is, I think he lied about what’s at the end of it. I don’t think the green places exist, except in Professor Pennyroyal’s imagination.” He hung his head, wishing he had managed to warn Freya of his fears before the Lost Boys took him. By now Anchorage would be so far on its way that it wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back.
“You never know,” said Caul, reaching out to touch Tom’s arm and then snatching his hand away quickly, as if the touch of a Dry burned. “He turned out to be right about the parasites, sort of.”
There came a day (or maybe a night) when Tom was roused from his troubled dreams by Caul shouting, “Tom! We’re home!” He scrambled out of his nest of stolen textiles and hurried to look, but when he reached the control cabin he found that the Screw Worm was still deep under water. A repetitive, echoey ping came from one of the machines. Skewer, busy with his instruments, glanced up just long enough to say, “It’s Uncle’s beacon!”
There was a yawing, twisting sensation as the limpet adjusted its course. The darkness outside the windows was fading, turning to a twilight blue, and Tom realized that he was no longer beneath the ice-sheet but out in open sea, and that sunlight was dazzling through a choppy surface several hundred feet above his head. The bottoms of gigantic icebergs slid past, like upside-down mountains. Then in the dimness ahead other shapes began to form; weed-furred gantries and girders; the barnacle-encrusted blade of a gigantic propeller; a tilted, silted plane where rows of rusty blocks shoved up out of the mud and litter. Like an airship flying above a landscape of mesas and canyons the Screw Worm was cruising over the streets of an enormous sunken raft-city.
“Welcome to Grimsby,” said Skewer, steering towards the upper tier.
Tom had heard of Grimsby. Everybody had heard of Grimsby. Biggest and fiercest of the North Atlantic predator-rafts, it had been sunk by pack ice during the Iron Winter of ninety years ago. Awed, Tom gazed out through the limpet’s windows at the passing view; the swirls of fish glittering between the dead houses, the temples and great office buildings festooned with weed. And then, amid the greys and blues and blacks, something showed warm and golden. Gargle gave a cheer, and Skewer grinned, easing the Worm ’s steering-levers forward and lifting it up over the brink of the city’s topmost tier.
Tom gasped. Ahead, lights shone in the windows of the Town Hall, and people were moving about inside, making this drowned building look warm and homely, like a house well-lit on a winter night.
“What is it?” Tom wondered. “I mean, how — ?”
“It’s our home,” said Caul. He had been quiet until now, worrying about what sort of welcome awaited him, but he felt proud that Grimsby had impressed Tom, who had seen so many strange cities.
“Uncle built it!” said Gargle.
The Screw Worm slid into the water-filled lower storey of the town hall, then wound its way along tubular tunnels where it had to keep waiting for automatic doors to open ahead of it and close behind. This system of water-doors and airlocks served to keep the rest of the building dry, but Tom did not understand that, and it came as a surprise and a huge relief when the limpet broke the surface and came to rest in a pool beneath a high, domed roof.
The noise of the engines ceased, but from outside came clangs and thuds as docking-arms engaged, hoisting the Screw Worm clear of the water. A hatch in the cabin roof sprang open with a sigh. Caul fetched a ladder and hooked it to the opening. “You go first,” he told Tom, and Tom climbed out on to the limpet’s broad back and stood there breathing cold, ammonia-smelling air and looking around.
The limpet had surfaced through a circular hole in the floor of a huge, echoing room which might once have been Grimsby’s main council-chamber (on the ceiling the spirit of Municipal Darwinism — a rather beefy young woman with wings — pointed the city fathers towards a prosperous future). Dozens of similar entrances dotted the broad floor, each overhung by a complicated docking-crane. From several of them hung limpets, and Tom was startled to see how ramshackle the vessels looked; as if cobbled together from bits of anything that came to hand. Some were obviously undergoing repairs, but the people who had been working on them (all young men or boys, few much older than Caul or Skewer) had left their posts and were converging on the Screw Worm. They were all staring at Tom.