But the gods did not punish Professor Pennyroyal. He had used some of his stolen gold to buy fuel from a tanker pulling clear of Arkangel, and he was already far away, steering east by the broad scar the predator city had cut across the ice-fields. He was not a very good aviator, but he was lucky, and the weather was not too rough with him. He met with a small ice city east of Greenland, had the Jenny Haniver repainted and renamed, and hired a pretty aviatrix named Kewpie Quinterval to fly her south. Within a few weeks he was back in Brighton, regaling his friends with tales of his adventure in the frozen north.
By then, even the Direktor of Arkangel had been forced to admit that his city could not be saved. Already many of the rich had fled, pouring away to eastward in a stream of air-yachts and charter-ships (the five widows Blinkoe made enough money selling berths aboard the Temporary Blip to buy themselves a charming villa on the upper tiers of Jaegerstadt Ulm). The slaves who had seized control of the under-decks in all the chaos were leaving too, flying out on stolen freighters or taking to the ice in hijacked survey-sleds and drone-suburbs. At last a general order to evacuate was given, and by midwinter the city stood empty, a great dark carcass that slowly whitened and lost its shape beneath a thickening mantle of snow.
In the deep of that winter a few hardy Snowmad salvage-towns visited the wreck, draining its fuel tanks and landing boarding parties to harvest the valuables its fleeing citizens had left behind. Spring brought still more, and flights of scavenger-airships like carrion birds, but by then the ice beneath the wreck was growing weaker. In high summer, lit by the weird twilight of the midnight sun, the predator city stirred again, shivering amid a great cannonade of splintering ice, and set out on its final journey, down through the shifting levels of the sea to the cold, strange world below.
That summer there was news from Shan Guo of a coup inside the Anti-Traction League; the High Council overthrown and replaced by a party called the Green Storm, whose forces were led by a bronze-masked Stalker. No one in the Hunting Ground paid much attention. What did it matter to them if a few Anti-Tractionists were squabbling among themselves? Aboard Paris and Manchester and Prague, Traktiongrad and Gorky and Peripatetiapolis, life went on as normal. Everybody was talking about the fall of Arkangel, and simply everybody was reading Nimrod B. Pennyroyal’s astonishing new book.
34
But Anchorage had not drowned. Borne away from Arkangel by strong currents, it floated into thick fog, the ragged raft of ice it perched on grinding sometimes against other drifting floes.
When daylight came again most of the city gathered at the railings on the bow of the upper tier. With the engines turned off there was little work for anyone to do, and little to talk about, for the future looked so bleak and brief that no one cared to mention it. They stood in silence, listening to the slap of waves against the ice and peering through gaps in the shifting fog for glimpses of this strange new sight, the sea.
“Do you think this might be just a big polynya, or a narrow stretch of open water?” asked Freya hopefully, walking out on to the forward observation deck with her Steering Committee. She hadn’t been sure what a margravine should wear for Going to a Watery Grave, so she had put on the old embroidered anorak and sealskin boots she used to wear for trips aboard her mother’s ice-barge, and a matching hat with pom-poms. She regretted it now, because the pom-poms kept bouncing in an inappropriately cheery way, making her feel she had to be optimistic. “Maybe we will drift across it and find good safe ice to run upon again?”
Windolene Pye, pale and tired from tending the wounded, shook her head. “I would guess these waters don’t freeze until the deeps of winter. I think we will drift on until we ground on some desolate shore, or the ice-floe breaks up and we sink. Poor Tom! Poor Hester! Coming all this way back to save us, and all for nothing!”
Mr Scabious put his arm around her, and she leaned gratefully against him. Freya looked away, embarrassed. She wondered if she should tell them that it had been Hester who brought Arkangel down on them in the first place, but it didn’t seem fair somehow, not with the poor girl still sitting vigil at Tom’s deathbed. Anyway, Anchorage needed a good heroine at the moment. Better by far to let the blame for the Huntsmen rest with that fraud Pennyroyal. He was to blame for everything else, after all.
She was still trying to think of something to say when a sleek black back broke the surface, just off the forward edge of the ice-floe.
It came up like a whale through a wash of white waters, venting air in a hissing plume, and everyone thought a whale was what it was until they began to make out patterns of rivets on the metal hull; hatchways and windows and stencilled lettering.
“It’s those parasite devils!” shouted Smew, running past with his wolf-rifle. “Come back for more loot!”
The wallowing machine extended its spider-legs to grip the edges of the ice-floe, hauling itself up out of the water. Sleds were already speeding to meet it, packed with armed men from the engine district. Smew raised his rifle, taking careful aim as the hatch popped open.
Freya reached out and pushed the gun aside. “No, Smew. There’s only one.”
Surely it could not be a threat, this lone vessel surfacing so openly? She peered down at the stiff, skinny figure who came creeping up through the parasite’s hatchway, only to be grabbed and pinioned by some of Scabious’s men. She could hear raised voices, but not what they were saying. With Smew, Scabious and Miss Pye at her side she hurried to the head of the stairs that led down on to the city’s skirts, waiting nervously as the captive was led up to meet her. The closer he came, the more grotesque he looked, his misshapen face coloured purple and yellow and green. She knew the parasite-riders were thieves, but she hadn’t thought they were monsters!
And then he was standing in front of her, and he wasn’t a monster, just a boy of her own age to whom horrible things had been done. Some of his teeth were missing, and a terrible red weal scarred his throat, but his eyes, blinking out at her from a mask of scabs and fading bruises, were black and bright and rather lovely.
She pulled herself together and tried to sound like a margravine. “Welcome to Anchorage, stranger. What brings you here?”
Caul opened and closed his mouth, but couldn’t think of what to say. He was out of his depth. All the way from Grimsby he’d been planning for this moment, but he had spent so much of his life trying not to be seen by Drys that it felt unnatural to be standing here in the open with so many of them. Freya shocked him a little, too. It wasn’t just the boyish haircut; she seemed bigger and taller than he remembered, and her face was rosy; she was not at all the pale, dreamy girl he had grown used to from the screens. Behind her stood Scabious, and Smew, and Windolene Pye and half the city, all glaring at him. He began to wonder if it might not have been easier to die in Grimsby after all.
“Speak, boy!” ordered the dwarf who stood at Freya’s side, jabbing Caul’s belly with his rifle. “Her Radiance asked you a question!”
“He was carrying this, Freya,” said one of Caul’s captors, holding up a battered tin tube. The people crowding behind Freya drew back with nervous little gasps, but Freya recognized the thing as an old-fashioned document container. She took it from the man, unscrewed the lid and pulled out a roll of papers. Looked at Caul again, smiling.
“What are these?”
The breeze, which had been rising unnoticed since the Screw Worm surfaced, tugged at the papers, fluttering their crisp, age-browned edges and threatening to pull them from Freya’s hands. Caul reached out and grabbed them. “Careful! You need those!”