“Hey, that’s not-” Freya started to say, and then flung herself to the floor, because as the dead man pitched forward the man beside him turned and sprayed a long burst of gunfire at her. She kept forgetting this was all real. She squirmed on the floor and heard the bullets kick chunks out of the doors and skip off the marble beside her. Hester snatched the pistol out of her hand and the Huntsman’s face turned into a splash of red. Smew pulled his gun away from him as he fell, and turned it on a third guard, caught in the swirling panic of the captives. “Rasmussen!” somebody shouted, and suddenly the whole room took up the shout, the ancient war-cry of Anchorage, left over from times when Freya’s ancestors had led battles against air-pirates and the Stalkers of the Nomad Empires. “Rasmussen!” There were shots, a scream, a long, rattling, xylophone trill as a dying Huntsman crashed against one of the mothballed chandeliers. It was all over very quickly. Windolene Pye began organizing people to tend to the wounded, while men helped themselves to the dead Huntsmen’s swords and sidearms.
“Where’s Scabious?” shouted Hester, and somebody pushed him towards her. The engine master looked eager and clutched a captured gun. She said, “Arkangel’s coming. I could see its lights from the air-harbour. You’ll need to get this old place moving pretty sharpish.”
Scabious nodded. “But there’re Huntsmen in the engine district, and the stern-wheel’s shot. We can’t do more than quarter speed on the cats alone, and we can’t even do that until the wreckage of the stern-wheel’s cut away.”
“Get cutting then,” said Hester, discarding her crossbow and drawing her sword.
Scabious thought of a thousand other questions, then shrugged them away and nodded. He started for the stairways with half of Anchorage behind him, those without weapons grabbing chairs and bottles as they passed. Freya, frightened as she was, felt she should go with them and lead the attack like one of those long-ago margravines. She joined the growing rush towards the door, but Hester grabbed her, stopped her. “You stay here. Your people are going to need you alive. Where’s Masgard?”
“I don’t know,” said Freya. “I think he was heading for the main entrance.”
Hester nodded, a quick, small tic of a nod that could have meant anything. “Tom’s in the Museum,” she said.
“Tom’s here?” Freya was having trouble keeping up.
“Please, Your Radiance, keep him safe when all this is over.”
“But…” Freya started to say, but Hester was gone, the bullet-riddled doors swinging shut behind her. Freya wondered if she should follow, but what could she do against Masgard? She turned back into the ballroom, and saw a knot of people still cowering there; the very old and young, the injured, and those who were just too scared to join the fight. Freya knew how they felt. She screwed up her hands into tight fists to stop them shaking and put on her best margravine’s smile. “Don’t be afraid. The Ice Gods are with us.”
Tom, heading for the ballroom, met Scabious and his people pouring towards him, a dark tumble of running limbs, light glinting on metal, pale surf of set faces stark in the lamplight. They filled the corridor like the sea pouring into a foundering ship. Tom was afraid that they would mistake him for a Huntsman, but Scabious saw him and shouted his name, and the tide picked him up and swept him along, the surf breaking into grinning remembered faces: Aakiuq, Probsthain, Smew. People reached out to pat his shoulders, punch his chest. “Tom!” shouted Smew, tugging at his waist. “It’s good to see you back!”
“Hester!” Tom yelled, struggling in the tide as it carried him out of the palace. “Where’s Hester?”
“She saved us, Tom!” Smew shouted, running ahead. “What a nerve! Came into that ballroom and cut down the Huntsmen, merciless as a Stalker! What a girl!”
“But where — Mr Scabious, is she with you?”
His words were lost in the clatter of feet and the shouts of “Rasmussen, Rasmussen!” as the crowd swept past him and away, funnelling down a stairway towards the engine district. He heard shouts and gunshots echoing under the low roof, and wondered if he should go and try to help, but the thought of Hester held him back. Calling her name, he ran through the Boreal Arcade and out into the swirling snow on Rasmussen Prospekt. Two lines of footprints dotted the snow, leading towards the air-harbour. As he hesitated, wondering whether one of the tracks was Hester’s, he saw a face watching him from the doorway of a shop on the far side of the street.
“Professor Pennyroyal?”
Pennyroyal darted sideways, stumbling in the snow, and vanished into a narrow alleyway between two boutiques. Coins sprayed from his fists as he went. He had been filling his pockets with loose change from the shop’s cash-register.
“Professor!” shouted Tom, sheathing his sword and running after him. “It’s only me! Where’s Hester?”
The explorer’s clumsy footprints led to the tier’s edge, where a stairway descended to the lower city. Tom hurried down it, setting his feet in the big, bear-like prints of Pennyroyal’s luxury snowboots. Near the bottom he stopped suddenly, his heart beating fast, startled by a glimpse of black wings, but it was not a Stalker-bird, only the sign outside a tavern called The Spread Eagle. He jogged on, wondering if he would have a fear of birds for ever more.
“Professor Pennyroyal?”
Masgard had not been waiting at the palace entrance, among the bodies of the men she’d killed on her way in. Maybe Scabious’s lot got him, thought Hester. Or maybe he had heard the sounds of fighting and worked out which way the wind was blowing. Maybe he was hurrying back to the harbour in the hope of finding a ship there that could take him home to Arkangel.
She pushed her way out through the heat-lock. The cold-mask cut off her peripheral vision, so she threw it away and went down the slope on to Rasmussen Prospekt with the snowflakes stroking her face like cold fingers. A long line of fresh footprints reached away from her, already filling with snow. She followed them, measuring the long strides. Ahead, a man was silhouetted against the dying glare from the air-harbour. It was Masgard. She quickened her pace, and as she drew closer she could hear him calling the names of his dead companions. “Garstang? Gustavsson? Sprue?” She could hear the panic rising in his voice. He was just a rich city boy who enjoyed playing pirates and had never expected anyone to stand up to him. He’d come looking for a fight, and now that a fight had found him he didn’t know what to do with it.
“Masgard!” she called.
He spun round, breathing hard. Beyond him the Clear Air Turbulence had burned down to a charred metal basket. The docking-pans seemed to jostle each other in the last mad light of the guttering fire.
Hester lifted her sword.
“What are you playing at, aviatrix?” Masgard shouted. “You sell me this city, then you try and help them take it back. I don’t understand! What’s your plan?”
“There isn’t one,” said Hester. “I’m just making it up as I go along.”
Masgard drew his sword and swished it to and fro, practising flashy fencing moves as he advanced on her. When he was a few feet away Hester lunged forward and jabbed her blade at his shoulder. She didn’t think she’d done much damage, but Masgard dropped his sword and put his hands to the wound and slithered in the snow and fell over. “Please!” he shouted. “Have mercy!” He fumbled under his furs, pulling out a fat purse and sprinkling the snow between them with big, glittering coins. “The boy’s not here, but take this and let me live!”
Hester walked to where he lay and swung the sword at him with both hands, bringing it down again and again until his screams stopped. Then she flung the sword aside and stood watching while Masgard’s blood soaked pinkly into the snow and the big white flakes began to bury the gold he had thrown at her. Her elbows ached, and she had an odd feeling of disappointment. She had expected more of this night. She wanted something other than this dazed, hollowed-out feeling that she was left with. She had been expecting to die. It seemed wrong that she was still alive, not even hurt. She thought of all those dead Huntsmen. Other people had been killed in the battle too, no doubt, all because of what she’d done. Was she not to be punished at all?