Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

Hester scowled.

“Oh, money is no object,” promised Pennyroyal, pulling out a plump purse and jangling it. “Let’s say, five sovereigns now and five more when we dock at Brighton? It’s not as sweet a deal as Piotr Masgard would offer you for betraying some poor city, but it’s pretty good, and you will be doing a great service to literature.”

Hester stared at a coil of hawser on the quay. She knew she had lost. This too-friendly stranger knew just how to appeal to Tom, and even she had to admit that ten sovereigns would come in handy. She made one last effort to fend off the inevitable, booting Pennyroyal’s pack and asking, “What’s in your baggage? We don’t carry Old-Tech. Seen a bit too much of what it can do.”

“Heavens,” cried Pennyroyal, “I couldn’t agree more! I may be Alternative, but I’m not an idiot. I, too, have seen what happens to people who spend their lives digging up old machines. They end up poisoned by weird radiation or blown up by malfunctioning widgets. No, all I carry is a change of undies and a few thousand pages of notes and drawings for my new book, Fire Mountains — Natural Phenomenon or Ancient Blunder? ”

Hester kicked the pack again. It fell slowly over on to its side, but it didn’t let out any metallic noises to suggest that Pennyroyal was lying. She looked down at her feet, then down again, through the perforated deckplates of Airhaven to the earth, where a town was creeping slowly westward, dragging its long shadow behind it. Oh well, she thought. The Middle Sea would be warm and blue, a far cry from these dismal Barrens, and it should only take a week to get there. Surely she could bear to share Tom with Professor Pennyroyal for a week? She would have him to herself for the rest of their lives.

“All right,” she said, and snatched the explorer’s purse, counting out five gold sovereigns before he had time to change his mind. Beside her, Tom was saying, “We can make up a bed for you in the forward hold, Professor, and you can use the medical bay as a study if you wish. I was planning to stay here tonight and pull out at dawn.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Tom,” said Pennyroyal, flashing that odd, nervous glance towards the docking ring again, “I’d rather be off straight away. Mustn’t keep my muse waiting…”

Hester shrugged, and up-ended the purse again. “We’ll leave as soon as the harbour master gives us clearance,” she said. “There’ll be a two sovereign surcharge.”

The sun went down, a red ember sinking into the haze of the western Tannhausers. Balloons were still rising from the trading cluster below, airships and dirigibles still coming south across the basalt uplands from great Arkangel. One of them belonged to an amiable old gentleman called Widgery Blinkoe, an Old-Tech antiques dealer who made ends meet by renting out rooms above his shop in Arkangel’s harbour district, and by acting as an informant to anyone who would pay him.

Leaving his wives to moor the ship, Mr Blinkoe hurried straight to the harbour master’s office and demanded, “Have you seen this man?”

The harbour master looked at the photograph which Mr Blinkoe pushed across his desk and said, “Why, that’s Prof Pennyroyal, the historical gentleman.”

“Gentleman my hat!” cried Blinkoe angrily. “He has lodged at my home these past six weeks, and he ran off as soon as Airhaven came in sight, without paying me a penny of what he owes! Where is he? Where can I find him, the creature?”

“Too late, mate,” grinned the harbour master, who took a certain pleasure in delivering bad news. “He came in on one of the first balloons from Arkangel, asking after south-bound ships. I put him in touch with those youngsters who fly the Jenny Haniver. She pulled out not ten minutes past, bound for the Middle Sea.”

Blinkoe groaned, rubbing a hand wearily over his large, pale face. He could ill afford to lose the twenty sovereigns Pennyroyal had promised. Oh why, why, why had he not made the scoundrel pay in advance? He had been so flattered when Pennyroyal presented him with a signed copy of America the Beautiful (“To my good friend Widgery, with Kindest Regards”) and so excited by the promise of a mention in the great man’s next work, that he hadn’t even smelled a rat when Pennyroyal started charging wine-merchants’ bills to his account. Hadn’t even objected when he began flirting so openly with the younger Mrs Blinkoes! Bother and blast all writers!

And then something that the harbour master had said cut through the fog of self-pity and the incipient headache which had been clouding Blinkoe’s thoughts. A name. A familiar name. A valuable name!

“Did you say the Jenny Haniver?”

“I did, sir.”

“But that’s impossible! She was lost when the gods destroyed London!”

The harbour master shook his head. “Not so, sir; not a bit of it. Been in foreign skies these past two years; trading aboard them Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities, I heard.”

Mr Blinkoe thanked him and ran out on to the quay. He was a portly man, and did not often run, but this seemed worth running for. He shoved aside some children who were taking turns to peer through a telescope mounted on the handrail and used it to scan the sky. A little west of south, late sunlight flashed on an airship’s stern windows; a small, red airship with a clinker-built gondola and twin Jeunet-Carot engine pods.

Mr Blinkoe hurried back to his own ship, the Temporary Blip, and his long-suffering wives. “Quick!” he shouted, as he burst into the gondola. “Switch on the radio set!”

“So Pennyroyal’s slipped through his fingers again,” said one wife.

“Surprise, surprise,” said another.

“This is exactly what happened at Arkangel,” said a third.

“Silence, wives!” Blinkoe shouted. “This is important!”

His fourth wife made a sour face. “Pennyroyal’s hardly worth the bother.”

“Poor, dear Professor Pennyroyal,” the fifth said weepily.

“Forget Pennyroyal,” bawled her husband, pulling off his hat and slipping on the radio headphones, tuning the transmitter to a secret wavelength, gesturing impatiently for wife number five to stop snivelling and turn the starting-handle. “I know people who will pay me well for what I’ve just learned! The trader Pennyroyal just left on was Anna Fang’s old ship!”

Tom had not realized until now how much he missed the company of other historians. Hester was always happy to hear the odd facts and stories that he recalled from his Apprentice days, but she could offer little in return. She had lived by her wits since she was just a child, and although she knew how to jump aboard a speeding town, how to catch and skin a cat and how to kick a would-be robber exactly where it hurt most, she had never bothered learning much about the history of her world.

Now, here was Professor Pennyroyal, his amiable personality filling the Jenny ’s flight deck. He had a theory or an anecdote about everything, and listening to him made Tom feel almost nostalgic for the old days in the London Museum when he had lived surrounded by books and facts and relics and scholarly debate.

“Now take these mountains,” Pennyroyal was saying, gesturing out of the starboard window. They were following a long spur of the Tannhausers southward, and the glow of lava in an active caldera flickered over the explorer’s face. “These are to be the subject of my new book. Where did they come from? They weren’t here in Ancient times, we know that from the maps which have survived. So how did they spring up so quickly? What caused them? It’s just the same in far Shan Guo. Zhan Shan is the highest mountain on earth, and yet it’s not mentioned at all in the Ancient records. Are these new mountains just the result of natural vulcanism, as we’ve always been told? Or are we looking at the results of Ancient technology gone atrociously wrong? An experimental power-source, perhaps, or a terrible weapon! A volcano-maker! Think what a find that would be, Tom!”