Infernal Devices (2 page)

When Wren was younger, these abandoned levels had been her playground, and she still liked to walk here when she was feeling sad or bored, imagining what fun it must have been to live aboard a city that moved. The grown-ups were always talking about the bad old days, and how frightening it had been to live in constant danger of being swallowed up by some larger, faster city, but Wren would have loved to see the towering Traction Cities, or to fly from one to another aboard an airship, as Mum and Dad had done before she was born. Dad kept a photograph on his desk that showed them standing on a docking pan aboard a city called San Juan de Los Motores, in front of their pretty little red airship the
Jenny Haniver,
but they never talked about the adventures they must have had. All she knew was that they had ended up landing on Anchorage, where the villainous Professor Pennyroyal had stolen the ship from them, and after that they had settled down, content to play their roles in the cozy, dozy life of Vineland.

Just my luck,
thought Wren, breathing in the warm, flowery scent of the baled hay. She would have liked to be an air trader's daughter. It sounded a glamorous sort of life, and much more interesting than the one she had, stuck on this lonely island among people whose idea of excitement was a rowboat race or a good apple harvest.

A door closed somewhere in the darkness ahead, making her jump. She'd grown so used to the quiet and her own company that the idea of someone else moving around down here was almost frightening. Then she remembered where she was. Busy with her thoughts, she'd walked all the way to the heart of the district, where Caul, Anchorage's engineer,

lived alone in an old shed between two tier supports. He was the only inhabitant of Anchorage's lower levels, since nobody else would choose to live down here amid the rust and shadows when there were pretty mansions standing empty in the sunlight up above. But Caul was an eccentric. He didn't like sunlight, having been brought up in the undersea thieves' hole of Grimsby, and he didn't like company either. He'd been friendly once with old Mr. Scabious, the city's former engineer, but since the old man had died, he had kept himself to himself down here in the depths.

So why would he be wandering about in the engine district at this hour? Intrigued, Wren crept up a ladder onto one of the overhead walkways, from where she had a good view across the old engine pits to Caul's shack. Caul was standing outside the door. He had an electric lantern, and he had raised it up so that he could study a scrap of paper that he held in his other hand. After a moment, he pocketed the paper and set off toward the city's edge.

Wren scrambled back down the ladder and started following the light. She felt quite excited. When she was younger, working her way steadily through the small stock of children's books in the margravine's library, her favorite stories had been the ones about plucky schoolgirl detectives who were forever foiling smugglers and unmasking Anti Tractionist spy rings. She had always regretted that there were no criminals to detect in Vineland. But hadn't Caul been a burglar once? Maybe he was reverting to his old ways!

Except, of course, that there was no point stealing anything in Anchorage, where everyone took what they liked from the hundreds of abandoned shops and houses. As she

picked her way through the heaps of half-dismantled machinery behind Caul's shack, she tried to think of a more likely explanation for his nighttime wanderings. Maybe he couldn't sleep, like her. Maybe he was worried about something. Wren's friend Tildy had told her that years and years ago, way back when Anchorage first came to Vineland, Caul had been in love with Miss Freya and Miss Freya had been in love with Caul too, but nothing had come of it because Caul had been so strange, even in those days. Maybe he wandered the streets of the engine district every night, yearning for his lost love? Or maybe he was in love with someone else and was going to meet her for a moonlit tryst out on the city's edge?

Pleased by the idea that she would have something really juicy to tell Tildy in the morning, Wren quickened her pace.

But when he reached the city's edge, Caul did not stop, just hurried down a stairway that led onto the bare earth and started up the hill, sweeping the lantern beam ahead of him. Wren waited a moment, then followed, jumping down into the springy heather and creeping after him up the track that led to the humming drystone turbine house of old Mr. Scabious's hydroelectricity plant. Caul did not stop there either, but kept going, climbing between the apple orchards and across the high pasture, into the woods.

At the top of the island, where the pines filled the air with the smell of resin and crags poked up through the thin turf like the spines on a dragon's back, Caul stopped and turned his lantern off and looked around. Fifty feet behind him, Wren crouched among the crisscross shadows. A faint wind stirred her hair, and overhead the trees moved their

small hands against the sky.

Caul looked down at the sleeping city nestled in the curve of the island's southern shore. Then he turned his back on it, raised his lantern, and switched it on and off three times.
He's gone mad,
thought Wren, and then,
No--he's signaling to someone, just like the wicked headmaster in
Milly Crisp and the Twelfth Tier Mystery

And sure enough, down among the empty, rocky bays of the north shore, another light flashed back an answer.

Caul moved on, and Wren began to follow him again, dropping down the steep northern flank of the island, out of sight of the city. Maybe he and Miss Freya had got back together and were too afraid of gossip to let anyone know? It was a romantic thought, and it made Wren smile to herself as she tracked Caul down the last precipitous stretch of sheep track, through a stand of birch trees, and out onto a beach between two headlands.

Miss Freya was not waiting for him. But someone was. A man was standing at the water's edge, watching as Caul went crunching toward him down the shingle. Even from a distance, in the faint light of the Aurora, Wren could tell that he was someone she had never seen before.

At first she could not believe it. There
were
no strangers in Vineland. The only people here were those who had come here aboard Anchorage or been born here since, and Wren knew all of them. But the man on the shore was a stranger to her, and his voice, when he spoke, was a voice she had never heard.

"Caul, my old shipmate! Good to see you again."

"Gargle," said Caul, sounding uneasy, and not taking the

hand that the stranger held out for him to shake.

They said more, but Wren was too busy wondering about the newcomer to listen. Who could he be? How had he come here? What did he want?

When the answer hit her, it was one she didn't like.
Lost Boys.
That's what they'd been called, the gang Caul had been part of, which had burgled Anchorage back in its ice-faring days with their strange, spidery machines. Caul had left them to come with Miss Freya and Mr. Scabious. Or had he? Had he been secretly in contact with the Lost Boys all these years, waiting until the city was settled and prosperous before he called them in to rob it again?

But the stranger on the beach wasn't a boy. He was a grown man, with long, dark hair. He wore high boots, like a pirate in a storybook, and a coat that came down to his knees. He flicked the skirts of the coat back and stuck his thumbs through his belt, and Wren saw a gun in a holster at his side.

She knew that she was out of her depth. She wanted to run home and tell Mum and Dad of the danger. But the two men had wandered closer to her, and if she ran, she would be seen. She wriggled deeper into the low gorse bushes behind the beach, timing each movement to coincide with the rasp of the little waves breaking on the shingle.

The man called Gargle was speaking, sounding as if he were making some kind of joke, but Caul suddenly cut him off. "What have you come here for, Gargle? I thought I'd seen the last of Lost Boys. It was a bit of a shock to find your message under my door. How long have you been creeping around Anchorage?"

"Since yesterday," said Gargle. "We just dropped by to say

hello and see how you were doing, friendly-like."

"Then why not show yourselves? Why not come and talk to me in daylight? Why leave messages and drag me out here in the middle of the night?"

"Honest, Caul, I wanted to. I'd planned to land my limpet on the mooring beach, all open and aboveboard, but I sent a few crab-cams in first, of course, just to be sure. Good thing I did, ain't it? What's happened, Caul? I thought you were going to be a big man in this place! Look at you: oily overalls and raggedy hair and a week's worth of beard. Is the mad tramp look big in Anchorage this season? I thought you were going to marry their margravine, that Freya What's-her-name."

"Rasmussen," said Caul unhappily. He turned away from the other man. "I thought so too. It didn't work out, Gargle. It's complicated. It's not like you think it's going to be when you just watch it through the crab-cameras. I never really fitted in here."

"I should have thought the Drys would welcome you with open arms," said Gargle, sounding shocked. "After you brung them that map and everything."

Caul shrugged. "They were all kind enough. I just don't fit. I don't know how to talk to them, and talking's important to the Drys. When Mr. Scabious was alive, it was all right. We worked together and we didn't need to talk, we had the work instead of words. But now that he's gone ... What about you, anyway? And what about Uncle? How is Uncle?"

"Like you care!"

"I do. I think of him often. Is he--?"

"The old man's still there, Caul," said Gargle.

"Last time I spoke to you, you had plans to get rid of him, take over ..."

"And I have taken over," said Gargle, with a grin that Wren saw as a white blur in the dark. "Uncle's not as sharp as he was. He never really got over that business at Rogues' Roost. So many of his best boys lost, and all his fault. It nearly did him in, that. He relies on me for nearly everything nowadays. The boys look up to me."

"I bet they do," said Caul, and there was some meaning in his words that Wren couldn't understand, as if they were picking up a conversation that they'd started long ago, before she was even born.

"You said you need my help," said Caul.

"Just thought I'd ask," said Gargle. "For old time's sake."

"What's the plan?"

"There's no plan, exactly." Gargle sounded hurt. "Caul, I didn't come here on a burgling mission. I don't want to rob your nice Dry friends. I'm just after one thing, one little thing, a particular small thing that no one will miss. I've looked with the crab-cams, I've sent my best burglar in, but we can't see it. So I thought, 'What we need is a man on the inside.' And here you are. I told my crew, 'We can rely on Caul.'"

"Well, you were wrong," said Caul. His voice was trembly. "I may not fit in here, but I'm not a Lost Boy either. Not anymore. I'm not going to help you rob Freya. I want you gone. I won't tell anyone you were here, but I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open. If I hear a crab-cam nosing about, or see that something's gone missing, I'll let the Drys know all about you. I'll make sure they're waiting for you next time

you come sneaking into Anchorage."

He turned and strode up the beach, crashing through the gorse barely a foot from the place where Wren was hiding. She heard him fall and curse as he started up the hill, and then the sounds of his going growing fainter and fainter as he climbed. "
Caul
!" called Gargle, but not too loud, a sort of whispering cry, with hurt in it, and disappointment.
"Caul!"
Then he gave up and stood still and pensive, running a hand through his hair.

Wren began to move, very carefully and quietly, getting ready for the moment when he would turn his back on her and she could creep away between the trees. But Gargle did not turn. Instead, he raised his head and looked straight at her hiding place and said, "My eyes and ears are sharper than old Caul's, my friend. You can come out now."

19

***

WREN STOOD UP AND turned and started running, all in the same lurching, panicked movement, but before she had taken three steps a second stranger came out of the dark to her left and seized hold of her, swinging her around, dumping her on the ground. "Caul!" she started to shout, but a cold hand went across her mouth. Her captor looked down at her--another pale face, half hidden by black swags of hair-- and the man from the beach came running up. A flashlight came on, a thin blue wash of light that made Wren blink.

"Gently," said the man called Gargle. "Gently now. It's a woman. A young woman. I thought as much." He held the flashlight away so that Wren could see him. She had expected someone Caul's age, but Gargle was younger. He was smiling. "What's your name, young woman?"

"Wr-Wren," Wren managed to stammer out. "Wr-Wren

N-N-N-N-Natsworthy." And when Gargle had managed to filter out all those extra
N's,
his smile grew broader and warmer.

"Natsworthy? Not Tom Natsworthy's child?"

"You know Dad?" asked Wren. In her confusion, she wondered if her father had also been coming down for secret meetings with the Lost Boys in the coves of the north shore, but of course Gargle was talking about the old days, before she was born.

"I remember him well," said Gargle. "He was our guest for a bit aboard the
Screw Worm.
He's a good man. Your mother would be his girl, the scar-faced one? What was she called...? Yes, Hester Shaw. I always thought that spoke well of Tom Natsworthy, that he could love someone like her. Appearances don't matter to him. He looks deeper. That's rare among the Drys."

"What are we going to do with her, Gar?" asked the stranger who had caught Wren, in an odd, soft voice. "Is she fish food?"