Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

Skewer was still grinning. “You’re slipping, Caul! Letting people see you. Lucky for you the old man’s mad. A ghost, eh! Wait till we get home and tell the others! Caul the ghoul! Whooooo!”

“It’s not funny, Skew,” said Caul. What Mr Scabious said had made him feel edgy and strange. He was not sure why. He checked his reflection in the cabin window. There wasn’t much resemblance to the portraits of Axel he’d seen when he was casing Scabious’s office. The Scabious boy had been much older, tall and handsome and blue-eyed. Caul had a burglar’s build, skinny as a skeleton key, and his eyes were black. But they both had the same untidy, white-blond hair. An old man whose heart was broken, glimpsing a fair head through darkness or mist, might jump to conclusions, mightn’t he?

He realized with a start that Skewer was talking to him, and had been talking to him for some time. “…and you know what Uncle says. The First Rule of Burgling — Don’t Get Caught.”

“I’m not going to get caught, Skew. I’m careful.”

“Well, how come you’ve been seen, then?”

“Everybody gets unlucky sometimes. Big Spadger off the Burglar Bill had to knife a Dry who spotted him in the underdecks of Arkangel last season.”

“That’s different. You spend too much time watching the Drys. It’s all right if it’s just on screen, but you hang around up there watching them for real.”

“He does,” agreed Gargle, eager to please. “I’ve seen him.”

“Shut up,” said Skewer, absent-mindedly kicking the smaller boy.

“They’re interesting,” said Caul.

“They’re Drys!” said Skewer impatiently. “You know what Uncle says about Drys. They’re like cattle. Their brains don’t move as fast as ours. That’s why it’s right for us to take their stuff.”

“I know!” said Caul. Like Skewer, he’d had all this drummed into him when he was just a newbie, back in the Burglarium. “We’re the Lost Boys. We’re the best burglars in the world. Everything that ain’t nailed down is ours.” But he knew Skewer was right. Sometimes he felt as if he wasn’t meant to be a Lost Boy at all. He liked watching people better than burgling them.

He swung himself out of his seat and snatched his latest report from a shelf above the camera controls; thirteen pages of Freya Rasmussen’s best official notepaper covered in his big, grubby handwriting. He waved them in Skewer’s face as he headed aft. “I’m sending this back to base. Uncle gets angry if he doesn’t get an update once a week.”

“That’s nothing to how angry he’ll be if you go and get us caught,” Skewer muttered.

The Screw Worm ’s fish bay was beneath the boys’ sleeping cabin, and had taken on the same smell of stale sweat and unwashed socks. There were racks for ten message-fish, but three were already empty. Caul felt a pang of regret as he started prepping Number 4 for launch. In just six more weeks the last fish would be gone. Then it would be time for the Screw Worm to decouple from Anchorage and head for home. He would miss Freya and her people. But that was stupid, wasn’t it? They were only stupid Drys. Only pictures on a stupid screen.

The message-fish looked like a sleek silver torpedo, and if it had been standing upright it would have been taller than Caul. As always, a slight sense of awe overcame him as he checked the fish’s fuel tank and placed his rolled-up report in the watertight compartment near its nose. All over the north, limpet captains just like him were sending fish home to Uncle, so that Uncle would know everything that was going on everywhere and be able to plan ever more daring burglaries. It made Caul feel even more guilty about his liking for the Drys. He was so lucky to be a Lost Boy. He was so lucky to be working for Uncle. Uncle Knew Best.

A few minutes later the message-fish slid from the Screw Worm ’s belly and dropped unnoticed out of the complex shadows on Anchorage’s underside, down on to the ice. As the city swept on into the north, the fish began drilling its way down through the snow, down through the ice, patiently down and down and down until it broke through at last into the black waters beneath the ice cap. Its Old-Tech computer-brain ticked and grumbled. It wasn’t bright, but it knew its way home. It extended stubby fins and a small propeller and went purring quickly away towards the south.

Hester did not tell Tom about her strange encounter. She did not want him to think her silly, babbling about ghosts. The shape she had seen watching her from the shadows had been a trick of her imagination, and as for Mr Scabious, he was mad. The whole town was mad, if they believed Freya and Pennyroyal and their promises of a new green hunting ground beyond the ice, and Tom was mad with them. There was no point in arguing, or in trying to make him see sense. Better just to concentrate on getting him safely away.

Days and then weeks went by, with Anchorage running north across broad plains of sea-ice as it skirted the mountainous shield of Greenland. Hester began to spend most of her time at the air-harbour, watching Mr Aakiuq work on the Jenny Haniver. There was not much she could do to help him, for she was no mechanic, but she could pass him tools and fetch things from his workshop and pour him cups of scalding purple-dark cocoa from his old thermos flask, and she felt that just by being there she might help to hasten the day when the Jenny would be ready to take her away from this haunted city.

Sometimes Tom joined her in the hangar, but mostly he stayed away. “Mr Aakiuq doesn’t want both of us hanging about,” he told Hester. “We’d just get in his way.” But they both knew the real reason: he was enjoying his new life in Anchorage too much. He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d missed living aboard a moving city. It was the engines, he told himself; that faint, comfortable vibration that made the buildings feel alive; that sense that you were going somewhere, and would wake up each morning to a new view from your bedroom window — even if it was just another view of darkness and of ice.

And perhaps, although he didn’t like to admit it to himself, it had something to do with Freya. He often met her in the Wunderkammer or the palace library, and although the meetings were rather formal, with Smew or Miss Pye always waiting in the background, Tom felt that he was coming to know the margravine. She intrigued him. She was so unlike Hester, and so like the girls he used to daydream about as a lonely apprentice back in London; pretty and sophisticated. It was true that she was a bit of a snob, and obsessed with ritual and etiquette, but that seemed understandable when you remembered how she had been brought up, and what she’d lived through. He liked her more and more.

Professor Pennyroyal had made a full recovery, and had moved into the chief navigator’s official residence, in a tall, blade-shaped tower called the Wheelhouse which stood in the precincts of the Winter Palace, near the temple. Its top floor housed the city’s control bridge, but below was a luxurious apartment, into which Pennyroyal settled with an air of satisfaction. He had always thought himself a rather grand person, and it was pleasant to be aboard a city where everybody else thought so too.

Of course, he had no idea how to actually steer an ice city, so the practical day-to-day work of guiding Anchorage was still done by Windolene Pye. She and Pennyroyal spent an hour together each morning, poring over the city’s few, vague charts of the western ice. The rest of the time he relaxed in his sauna, or put his feet up in his drawing room, or went scavenging in the abandoned boutiques of Rasmussen Prospekt and the Ultima Arcade, picking out expensive clothes to suit his new position.