Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

Grumbling and cursing, she wriggled out from under the covers and crept forward, slithering on the ice which had formed on the deck. The chemical toilet behind the flight deck had been smashed to pieces by one of the rocket blasts, but there was a handy hole in the floor where it had been. She crouched over it and did her business as quickly as she could, gasping at the fierce cold.

She wanted to go straight back to Tom, and later she would wish that she had, but something prompted her to go forward on to the silent flight deck instead. It was pretty up there now, with the dim glow of the instrument panels glittering through layers of frost. She knelt in front of the little shrine where the statues of the Sky Goddess and the God of Aviators stood. Most aviators decorated their flight-deck shrines with pictures of their ancestors, but neither Tom nor Hester had any images of their dead parents, so they had tacked up a photograph of Anna Fang which they unearthed from a trunk in the cabin when the Jenny was being repaired. Hester said a little prayer to her, hoping that she would be a friend to them down in the Sunless Country.

It was as she stood up to go back to Tom that she happened to glance out across the ice and saw the cluster of lights. At first she thought that they were just a reflection of that strange fire in the sky which Tom had been so pleased by — but these were steady points, not changing colour, just twinkling a little in the frosty air. She went closer to the shattered window. The cold made her eye water, but after a while she made out a dark bulk around the lights, and a pale drift of fog or steam above them. She was looking at a small ice city, about ten miles to leeward, heading north.

Trying to ignore her strange, ungrateful sense of disappointment, she went to rouse Tom, patting his face until he groaned and stirred and said, “What is it?”

“Some god’s got a soft spot for us,” she said. “We’re saved.”

By the time he reached the flight deck the city was closer, for the fortunate wind was blowing them almost directly towards it. It was a small, two-tiered affair, skating along on broad iron runners. Tom trained the binoculars on it and saw its curved and sloping jaws, closed to form a snow-plough, and the huge, hooked stern-wheel that propelled it across the ice. It was an elegant city, with crescents of tall white houses on its upper tier and some sort of palace complex near the stern, but it had a faintly mournful air, and there were patches of rust, and many lightless windows.

“I don’t understand why we didn’t pick up their beacon,” Hester was saying, fumbling with the controls of the radio set.

“Maybe they don’t have one,” said Tom.

Hester scrolled up and down the wavebands, hunting for the warble of a homing beacon. There was nothing. It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence. But when she hailed it on the open channel a perfectly friendly harbour master answered her in Anglish, and after half an hour the harbour master’s nephew came buzzing up aboard a little green air-tug called the Graculus to take the Jenny Haniver under tow.

They set down at an almost deserted air-harbour near the front of the city’s upper tier. The harbour master and his wife, kind, round, acorn-brown people in parkas and fur bonnets, guided the Jenny into a domed hangar that opened like a flower, and carried Pennyroyal on a stretcher to their home behind the harbour office. There in the warm kitchen, coffee and bacon and hot pastries awaited the newcomers, and as Tom and Hester tucked in, their hosts stood watching, beaming their approval and saying, “Welcome, travellers! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Anchorage!”

It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Freya’s chauffeur always drove her to the Temple of the Ice Gods so that she could pray to them for guidance. The temple was barely ten yards from her palace, on the same raised platform near the stern of the city, so it was not really necessary to go through the business of calling out her chauffeur, climbing into her official bug, driving the short distance and climbing out again, but Freya went through it anyway; it would not have been seemly for the margravine to walk.

Once again she knelt in the dim candle-glow of the refrigerated temple and looked up at the lovely ice-statues of the Lord and Lady and asked them to tell her what she should do, or at least to send a sign to show her that the things she had already done were right. And once again there was no answer: no miraculous light, no voices whispering in her mind, no patterns of frost arranging themselves into messages on the floor, only the steady purr of the engines making the deckplates judder against her knees, the winter twilight pressing at the windows. Her mind kept drifting off, thinking about stupid, annoying things, like the stuff that had gone missing from the palace. It made her angry and a little scared, that someone could come into her chambers, and take her things. She tried asking the Ice Gods who the thief was, but of course they would not tell her that, either.

Finally she prayed for Mama and Papa, wondering what it was like for them down in the Sunless Country. Since their deaths she had begun to realize that she had never really known them, not in the way that other people know their parents. There had always been nannies and handmaidens to look after Freya, and she saw Mama and Papa only at dinner time and on formal occasions. She had called them “Your Radiance” and “Sir”. The closest she had been to them was on certain summer evenings when they had gone for picnics in the margravine’s ice-barge — simple family affairs, just Freya and Mama and Papa and about seventy servants and courtiers. Then the plague came, and she wasn’t even allowed to see them, and then they were dead. Some servants laid them in the barge and set fire to it and sent it out on to the ice. Freya had stood at her window and watched the smoke going up, and it felt as if they had never existed at all.

Outside the temple, her chauffeur was waiting for her, pacing up and down and scratching patterns in the snow with the toe of his boot. “Home, Smew,” she announced, and as he scurried to slide the lid of the bug open she looked towards the bows, thinking how pathetically few lights there were in the upper city these days. She remembered issuing a proclamation about the empty houses, stating than any of the engine-district workers who wished might move out of their dingy little flats down below and take over some of the empty villas up here instead, but very few had done so. Perhaps they liked their dingy flats. Perhaps they needed the comfort of familiar things just as badly as she did.

Down at the air-harbour a splash of red stood out gaudily amid the whites and greys.

“Smew? Whatever is that? Surely a ship has not arrived?”

The chauffeur bowed. “She put in last night, Your Radiance. A trader called the Jenny Haniver. Shot up by air-pirates or something, and in bad need of repairs, according to Harbour Master Aakiuq.”

Freya peered at the ship, hoping to make out more details. It was difficult to see much through the swirls of powder snow which were being blown off the rooftops. How odd to think of strangers walking about aboard Anchorage again after all this time!

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.

“The margravine isn’t normally informed about the arrival of mere merchantmen, Your Radiance.”

“But who is aboard this ship? Are they interesting?”

“Two young aviators, Your Radiance. And an older man, their passenger.”

“Oh,” said Freya, losing interest. For a moment she had been almost excited, and had imagined inviting these newcomers to the palace, but of course it would never do for the Margravine of Anchorage to start hobnobbing with tramp aviators and a man who couldn’t even afford his own airship.