Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

“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?

Somewhere among the warehouses on the lower tier, a single pistol-shot rang out.

The trail of footprints had led Tom into familiar streets, lit by the glare of the fires in the harbour above. Beginning to feel uneasy, he rounded a last corner and saw the Jenny Haniver, sitting where he had left her in the shadow of the warehouses. Pennyroyal was fumbling with the hatch.

“Professor!” shouted Tom, walking towards him. “What are you doing?”

Pennyroyal looked up. “Damn!” he muttered, when he realized he’d been found, and then, with something of his old bluster, “What does it look as if I’m doing, Tom? I’m getting off this burg while there’s still time! If you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me. Great Poskitt, you’d hidden this thing well! Took me ages to spot her…”

“But there’s no need to leave now!” said Tom. “We can get the city’s engines started and outrun Arkangel. Anyway, I’m not leaving Hester!”

“You would if you knew what she’d done,” said Pennyroyal darkly. “That girl’s no good, Tom. Completely insane. Unhinged as well as ugly…”

“Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” cried Tom indignantly, reaching out to drag the explorer away from the hatch.

Pennyroyal pulled a pistol from inside his robes and shot him in the chest.

The kick of the bullet threw him backwards into a snowdrift. He tried to struggle up, but he couldn’t. There was a hot, wet hole in his coat. “That’s not fair!” he whispered, and felt blood flood up his throat and fill his mouth, hot and salty. The pain came in like the long, grey breakers at Rogues’ Roost, steady and slow, each wave fading into the next.

There was a crunch of footsteps in the snow. Pennyroyal crouched over him, still holding the gun. He looked almost as surprised as Tom. “Oops!” he said. “Sorry. Only meant to scare you; it just went off. Never handled one of these things before. Took it from one of those chaps your loony girlfriend spiked.”

“Help,” Tom managed to whisper.

Pennyroyal twitched Tom’s coat open and looked at the damage. “Eugh!” he said, and shook his head. He groped in the inner pockets and drew out the Jenny ’s keys.

Tom felt the deckplates under him begin to shudder as the city’s engines came back to life. Saws were howling up at the stern as Scabious’s men cut away the wreckage of the wheel. “Listen!” he whispered, and found that his voice sounded like someone else’s, faint and far away. “Don’t take the Jenny! You needn’t! Mr Scabious will get us moving again. We’ll outrun Arkangel…”

Pennyroyal stood up. “Really, what an incurable romantic you are, Tom. Where do you think you’re going to run to? There are no green bits in America, remember? This city is headed for a cold, slow death on the ice or a quick, hot one in the gut of Arkangel, and either way I don’t intend to be around when it happens!” He tossed the keys up in the air and caught them again, turning away. “Must dash. Sorry again. Cheerio!”

Tom started trying to drag himself through the snow, determined to find Hester, but after a few feet he had forgotten what it was he meant to tell her. He lay in the snow, and after a while the burr of aero-engines reached him, rising and then fading as Pennyroyal lifted the Jenny Haniver out of the maze of warehouses and steered her away into the dark. It didn’t seem to matter much by then. Even dying didn’t seem to matter, although it seemed odd to think that he had outflown Fox Spirits and escaped Stalkers and survived strange adventures under the sea only to end like this.

The snow kept on falling, and it wasn’t cold any more, just soft and snug, heaping its silence over the city, wrapping the whole world in a dream of peace.

Just after sunrise a cheer ran through the engine district as the wreckage of the stern-wheel was finally cut away and the city began to move again, swinging south by south-west. Yet with the wheel gone and just the cats to drag it forward Anchorage could only manage a crippled crawl, making barely ten miles per hour. Already in the breaks between the snow showers Arkangel could be seen looming in the east like a polluted mountain.

Freya stood with Mr Scabious on the stern-gallery. The engine master had a pink sticking-plaster on his forehead where a Huntsman’s bullet had grazed him, but he was the only casualty of the battle to retake the engine district: the Huntsmen had quickly seen that they were outnumbered, and fled on to the ice to await rescue by Arkangel’s survey-suburbs.

“Only one hope for us,” muttered Scabious, as he and Freya watched the low sunlight kindle reflections in the windows of the predator city. “If we run far enough south the ice’ll grow thinner and they may break off the chase.”

“But if the ice is thinner won’t we go through it too?”

Scabious nodded. “There’s always that danger. And if we’re to keep ahead we can’t afford to bother with survey-teams and scout-parties; we’ll have to keep going as fast as we can, and hope for the best. America or bust, eh?”

“Yes,” said Freya. And then, feeling that there was no point in lying any more, “No. Mr Scabious, it was all a lie. Pennyroyal had never been to America. He invented the whole thing. That’s why he shot Tom, and took the Jenny Haniver. ”

“Oh, aye?” said Scabious, turning to look down at her.

Freya waited for something more, but it didn’t come. “Well, is that it?” she asked. “Just ‘oh, aye’? Aren’t you going to tell me what a little fool I’ve been, for believing in Pennyroyal?”

Scabious smiled. “To tell you the truth, Freya, I had my doubts about that fellow from the first. Didn’t ring true somehow.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“Because it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” said the engine master. “I liked your idea of crossing the High Ice. What was this city before we started west? A moving ruin; the only people who hadn’t left were the ones too full up with sorrow to think of anywhere to go. We were more like ghosts than human beings. And now look at us. Look at yourself. The journey’s shaken us up and turned us about and we’re alive again.”