Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

“Tom,” she said, “watch out for Hester, won’t you?”

“We’ll watch out for each other, like always,” said Tom, misunderstanding.

Freya gave up, and kissed him. “You’ll find Wren,” she said, “I know it.”

Tom nodded. “I know it too. And I’ll find the Tin Book as well, if I can. If what Uncle told Caul was true, if the Green Storm are making war on cities… I saw what they were like at Rogues’ Roost, Freya. If that book is the key to something dangerous, we mustn’t let them get hold of it…”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s the key to anything,” Freya reminded him. “It would be better to get it back if we can, just to be safe. But Wren is all that really matters. Find her, Tom. And come home safe to Vineland.”

Then Tom went with Hester aboard the Screw Worm, and Freya watched and waved as the Worm submerged; she stood with Caul at the edge of the moon-pool till the last ripples faded. The children were waiting for her aboard the Naglfar, their high, nervous voices spilling from its open hatches.

“Are we going now?”

“Is it far to Anchorage?”

“Will we really have our own rooms and everything there?”

“Is Uncle really dead?”

“I feel sick!”

Freya took Caul’s hand in hers. “Well?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

So they went, and Grimsby stood abandoned at last. After a few days even the dim light from its windows faded, and one by one the air pumps died. Through widening cracks and fissures that there was no one left to repair, the patient sea came creeping in, and the fish made their homes in the halls of the Lost Boys.

Tom would miss the company of Freya, and even Caul, but for Hester it was a relief to be alone with him again. She had never been truly comfortable with anyone but Tom, except for Wren, when Wren was little. She watched lovingly as Tom worked the Screw Worm’s strange controls, frowning with concentration as he tried to remember all that Caul had taught him. That night, when the limpet was running smoothly south by southwest toward Brighton’s cruising grounds and the waters were singing against the hull, she slipped into his bunk and wrapped her long limbs around him and kissed him, remembering how, when they were young and first together in the Jenny Haniver, they used to kiss for hours. But Tom was too worried about Wren to kiss her back, not properly, and she lay for a long time awake while he slept, and thought bitterly, He loves her more than ever he loved me.

First frost reached Vineland long before the Naglfar. The old submarine, with too many people aboard and her poor old engines grumbling all the way, took several weeks to return to the Dead Continent and nose her way up the winding rivers that the Screw Worm had swum down in days. But Caul coaxed her back to Anchorage at last, and she surfaced through a thin covering of ice just off the mooring beach. Freya climbed out, waving, and was almost shot again, this time by Mr. Smew, who believed the Lost Boys were invading.

And in a way they were. Anchorage would never be the same again, now that all these boisterous, ill-mannered, sometimes troubled children had come to live there. Freya set about opening the abandoned upper floors of the Winter Palace, and the old building filled with life and noise as the children moved into their new quarters. Some of them were not quite used to the idea that they were not supposed to steal, and some had nightmares, calling out Uncle’s name and Gargle’s in their dreams, but Freya was convinced that with patience and love they could be helped to forget their time beneath the sea and grow into happy, healthy Vinelanders.

After all, it had worked with Caul, eventually. Freya wouldn’t say what had passed between them on the voyage home, but the former Lost Boy never went back to his shack in the engine district. At the beginning of that October, when the harvests were in and the animals down from the high pastures and the city was preparing for winter, he and the margravine were married.

Freya awoke early on the morning after her wedding: wide-awake at five o’clock, the way she used to be when she was young. She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Caul, and went to the window of her chamber with the floor cold under her bare feet and the tatters of her bridal wreath still hanging in her hair.

When she drew back the curtains, she saw that the ice was thick upon the lake and that a dusting of snow had fallen in the night. She felt glad that her city was back in the domain of the Ice Gods for another six months. The gods of summer, of the lake and the hunt, had all been good to her people, and the gods of the sea and the Goddess of Love had been very kind to her too, but the Ice Gods were the gods she had grown up with, and she trusted them better than the rest. She breathed on the window and drew their snowflake symbol in the mist and whispered. “Keep Tom safe. And Hester too, though she doesn’t deserve it. Lead them to Wren, wherever she may be. And may they all come home again to us, safe and happy and together.”

But if the Ice Gods heard her prayer, they sent no sign. The only answer Freya had was the sound of the wind in the spires of the Winter Palace, and her husband’s voice, gentle and sleepy, calling her back to her bed.

Pennyroyal, my dear?”

“Mmmmm?”

Morning in the Pavilion, and the mayor and mayoress sitting at opposite ends of the long table in the breakfast room, screened from the hot sun by muslin blinds. Behind the mayoress’s chair, her African slave waved an ostrich-feather fan, wafting cool air over her and rustling the pages of the newspaper that her husband was trying to read. “Pennyroyal, I am talking to you.”

Nimrod Pennyroyal sighed and put down the paper. “Yes, Boo-Boo, my treasure?”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself saddled with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke. Fifteen years earlier, when Predator’s Gold was topping the bestseller lists aboard every city of the Hunting Ground, she had seemed like a good idea. Her family were old Brighton aristocracy, but poor. Pennyroyal was a mere adventurer, but rich. The marriage allowed the Heckmondwykes to restore their fortunes, and gave Pennyroyal the social clout he needed to get himself elected mayor. Boo-Boo made an excellent wife for a man of ambition: She was good at small talk and flower arrangements, she planned dinner parties with military precision, and she was expert at opening fetes, galas, and small hospitals.

Yet Pennyroyal had come to regret his marriage. Boo-Boo was such a large, forceful, florid woman that she tired him out just by being in the same room. A keen amateur singer, she had a passion for the operas of the Blue Metal culture, which went on for days with never a trace of a tune, and usually ended with all the characters dead in a heap. When Pennyroyal annoyed her by questioning the cost of her latest frock or flirting too openly with a councillor’s wife over dinner, she would practice her scales until the windows rattled, or crank up her gramophone and treat the household to all six hundred verses of the Harpoon Aria from Diana, Princess of Whales.

“I expect you to listen when I talk to you, Pennyroyal,” she said now, setting down her croissant in an ominous manner.

“Of course, dear. I was just studying the latest war reports in the Palimpsest. Excellent news from the front. Makes one proud to be a Tractionist, eh?”