Predator's Gold (16 page)

“Then think what a pretty addition Freya Rasmussen will make to your collection,” said Hester. She seemed to be standing outside herself; she felt nothing, except a faint pride at just how heartless she could be. “And if you want a snack to keep you going on the way, I can give you the coordinates of Wolverinehampton, a predator-suburb with a fat new catch.”

Masgard was hooked. He’d had word of Anchorage and Wolverinehampton from Widgery Blinkoe a few days earlier, but the oily antiquary had not known Wolverinehampton’s present course. As for Anchorage, Masgard was not sure whether to believe a sighting of an ice city so far west. Yet this mangy sky-urchin sounded like she knew her stuff, and with Blinkoe’s report to back it up, her information would be enough to persuade the Council to change course. He let her wait a moment, so that she could appreciate just how despicable she was. Then he opened a compartment in the armrest of his flying chair and pulled out a thick sheet of parchment which he signed with a fountain pen. His slave-girl passed the paper to Hester. There were words printed on it in gothic script, and seals with the names of the gods of Arkangel: Eisengrim and the Thatcher.

“A promissory note,” explained Masgard, revving his chair’s engines and lifting away from her. “If your information proves correct you can come and collect your fee when we eat Anchorage. Give the details to my clerk.” Hester shook her head. “I’m not doing this for predator’s gold.”

“Then what?”

“There’s somebody aboard Anchorage. Tom Natsworthy, the boy you saw me with in Airhaven. When you eat the city, you’ll let me have him. But he’s not to know it’s been arranged. I want him to think I’m rescuing him. Everything else aboard the stinking place is yours, but not Tom. He’s mine. My price.” Masgard stared down at her for a moment, genuinely surprised. Then he flung back his head and his laughter filled the room with echoes.

Waiting at the station for an elevator that would take her back to the air-harbour, she felt the deckplates shiver as great Arkangel began to move. She patted her pocket, checking again that she had Masgard’s revised promissory note safe. How glad Tom would be when she came to rescue him from the predator city’s gut! How easily she would make him forget his infatuation with the margravine, once they were together again on the Bird Roads!

She had done what she had to, for Tom’s sake, and there was no going back. She would fetch a few bits and pieces from the Jenny Haniver and find a room somewhere to wait out the journey.

It was night again by the time she reached the air-harbour, and snowflakes were fluttering around the landing-lights at the harbour mouth. The noise of raucous laughter and cheap music drifted from taverns behind the docking pans, gusting louder whenever someone opened a door. Dim lamplight made puddles of shadow under the big, moored traders; ships with northern names, the Fram and the Froud and the Smaug. She began to feel nervous as she walked towards the low-rent docking pan where the Jenny waited. This was a dangerous city, and she had lost the habit of being alone.

“Miss Shaw?” The man surprised her, coming up on her blind side. She reached for her knife, then recognized the nice old merchant who had helped her earlier. “I’ll walk you to your ship, Miss Shaw. There are some Snowmad traders aboard; ruffianly types. It’s not safe for a young woman alone. Your vessel’s the Jenny Haniver, isn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Hester, wondering how he knew her name and that of her ship.

She supposed he must have asked around earlier, or looked it up in the new-arrivals ledger at the harbour office.

“You’ve seen Masgard then?” her new friend asked. “I suppose that has something to do with this sudden move to the west? You’ve sold him a town?” Hester nodded.

“I’m in a similar line of work myself,” the merchant said, and slammed her against a metal stanchion beneath a trader called the Temporary Blip. She gasped, hurt and surprised, trying to gulp in enough air to scream for help. Something stung the side of her neck like a hornet. The merchant stepped away from her, breathing hard. A brass syringe flashed in the light from the distant taverns as he slid it back into his pocket.

Hester tried to put her hand to her neck, but the drug was taking effect quickly and her limbs no longer obeyed her. She tried to cal out, but all that emerged was a wordless hoot. She took a step forward and fell, her face a few inches from the man’s boots. “Terribly sorry,” she heard him say, his voice wavery and far away, like Tom’s voice the last time she heard it, seeping out of the telephone in the Aakiuqs’

parlour. “I have five wives to support, you see, and they all have expensive tastes, and nag me something rotten.”

Hester hooted again, dribbling on to the deckplate.

“Don’t worry!” the voice went on. “I’m just taking you and your ship down to Rogues’ Roost. You’re wanted for questioning. That’s all.”

“But Tom –” Hester managed to moan.

More boots appeared: expensive, fashionable, ladies’ boots, with tassels. New voices babbled overhead. “You’re sure it’s her, Blinkoe?”

“Eugh! She’s so ugly!”

“She can’t be worth anything to anyone!”

“Ten thousand in cash when I get her to the Roost,” said Blinkoe smugly. “I’ll take her there aboard her own ship, and tow the Blip’s tender to bring me home again.

Be back in no time, with bags full of money. Look after the shop while I’m gone, dears.”

“No!” Hester tried to say, because if he took her away she wouldn’t be there to rescue Tom; he would be eaten along with the rest of Anchorage and all her schemes would come to nothing… But although she tried to struggle as they rummaged for her keys she could not move or make a sound or even blink. It took her a long time to lose consciousness, however, and that was the worst of it, for she understood everything that was happening as the merchant and his wives dragged her aboard the Jenny Haniver and began the preparations for take-off.

PART TWO

19

THE MEMORY CHAMBER

Ice-water woke her: a storm of it, driving her sideways across a cold stone floor and thrusting her against a wall of white tiles. She gasped and screamed and gurgled.

Water filled her mouth. Water plastered draggled hair across her face so that she couldn’t see, and when she raked it aside there was not much to see anyway, only a chill white room lit by a single argon-globe, and men in white uniforms aiming hosepipes at her.

“Enough!” shouted a female voice, and the storm ceased, the men turning away to hook the hoses’ dribbling snouts over a metal frame bolted to the wall. Hester choked and cursed and spewed water out on to the floor, where it swirled away into a central drain. Dim flickers of memory came back to her, of Arkangel, and a merchant: of surfacing from sleep in the cold, rattly hold of the Jenny and finding that she was tied up. She had struggled and tried to shout, and the merchant had come, all apologetic, and there had been that hornet-sting on her neck again, and darkness. He had drugged her and kept her drugged, and while she was under he had flown her from Arkangel to whatever this place was…

“Tom!” she moaned.

Booted feet came sloshing towards her. She looked up snarling, expecting the merchant, but this wasn’t him. This was a young woman in white, with a bronze badge on her breast that marked her out as a subaltern in the Anti-Traction League, and an armband embroidered with green lightning.

“Dress her,” barked the subaltern, and the men dragged Hester upright by her wet hair. They didn’t bother towelling her, just forced her weak limbs into the arms and legs of a shapeless grey overall. Hester could barely stand, let alone resist. They pushed her barefoot out of the shower-room and along a dank corridor, the subaltern leading the way. There were posters on the walls with pictures of airships attacking cities and handsome young men and women in white uniforms gazing at a sunrise beyond a green hill. Other soldiers passed, their boots loud under the low roof. Most were not much older than Hester, but al wore swords at their sides, and lightning-bolt armbands, and the shiny, smug expressions of people who know they are right.

At the end of the passage was a metal door, and behind the door was a cell; a tall, narrow tomb of a room with a single window very high up. Heat-ducts snaked across the crumbling concrete ceiling, but gave out no warmth. Hester shivered, drying slowly in her scratchy overalls. Someone flung a heavy coat at her and she realized that it was her own, and pulled it on gratefully. “Where are the rest?” she asked, and had trouble making them understand, what with her teeth chattering and the after-effects of the merchant’s drugs numbing her already-clumsy mouth.

“The rest of my clothes?”

“Boots,” said the subaltern, taking them from one of her men and throwing them at Hester. “The rest we burned. Don’t worry, barbarian: you won’t need them again.” The door closed; a key turned in the lock; booted feet marched away. Hester could hear the sea somewhere far below, hissing and sighing against a stony shore. She hugged herself against the cold and started to cry. Not for herself, or even for Tom, but for her burned clothes; her waistcoat with Tom’s photograph in the pocket, and the dear red scarf he had bought for her in Peripatetiapolis. Now she had nothing left of him at all.

The darkness beyond the high, small window faded slowly to a washed-out grey.

The door rat led and opened and a man looked in and said, “Up, barbarian: the commander’s waiting.”

The commander was waiting in a big, clean room where the vague forms of dolphins and sea-nymphs showed faintly through the whitewash on the walls and a circular window looked out over a cheese-grater sea. She sat behind her big steel desk, brown fingers drumming out manic little patterns on a manilla folder. She stood up only when Hester’s guards saluted. “You may leave us,” she told them.

“But Commander –” said one.

“I think I can handle one scrawny barbarian.” She waited till they were gone, then came slowly around the desk, staring at Hester the whole way.

Hester had met that fierce, dark stare before, for the commander was none other than the girl Sathya, Anna Fang’s fierce young protegée from Batmunkh Gompa. She did not feel particularly surprised. Ever since she reached Anchorage her life had taken on the strange logic of a dream, and it seemed only right that she should meet a familiar, unfriendly face here at the end of it. Two and a half years had passed since their last meeting, but Sathya seemed to have aged much more than that; her face was gaunt and stern, and in her dark eyes there was an expression that Hester couldn’t read, as if rage and guilt and pride and fear had all got mixed up inside her and turned into something new.

“Welcome to the Facility,” she said coldly.

Hester stared at her. “What is this place? Where is it? I didn’t think your lot had any bases left in the north, not since Spitzbergen got scoffed.” Sathya only smiled. “You don’t know much about my lot, Miss Shaw. The High Council may have withdrawn League forces from the arctic theatre, but some of us do not accept defeat so calmly. The Green Storm maintain several bases in the north.

Since you will not be leaving here alive, I can tell you that this facility is on Rogues’

Roost, an island some two hundred miles from the southern tip of Greenland.”

“Nice,” said Hester. “Come here for the weather, did you?” Sathya slapped her hard, leaving her dazed and gasping. “These were the skies where Anna Fang grew up,” she said. “Her parents traded in these regions, before they were enslaved by Arkangel.”

“Right. Sentimental reasons, then,” muttered Hester. She tensed, expecting another blow, but it did not come. Sathya turned away from her towards the window.

“You destroyed one of our units over the Drachen Pass three weeks ago,” she said.

“Only because they attacked my ship,” Hester replied.

“She is not your ship,” the other girl snapped. “She is… She was Anna’s. You stole her, the night Anna died, you and your barbarian lover, Tom Natsworthy. Where is he, by the way? Don’t tell me he has abandoned you?” Hester shrugged.

“So what were you doing alone aboard Arkangel?”

“Just betraying a few cities to the Huntsmen,” said Hester.

“I can believe that. Treachery is in your blood.”

Hester frowned. Had Sathya dragged her all the way here just to be rude about her parents? “If you mean I take after my mother, well, she was pretty stupid digging up MEDUSA, but I don’t think she actually betrayed anybody.”

“No,” Sathya agreed. “But your father…”

“My dad was a farmer,” cried Hester, feeling suddenly and strangely angry that this girl could stand there and insult the memory of her poor dead dad, who had never done anything but good.

“You are a liar,” said Sathya. “Your father was Thaddeus Valentine.” Outside, snow fell like sifted icing sugar. Hester could see icebergs ploughing through the comfortless grey of the winter sea. In a tiny voice she said, “That isn’t true.”

Sathya pulled a sheet of writing-paper from the folder on her desk. “This is the report that Anna wrote for the League’s High Council, that day she brought you to Batmunkh Gompa. What does she say about you…? Ah, yes: Two young people: one an adorable young Apprentice Historian from London, quite harmless, the other a poor, disfigured girl who I am sure is the lost daughter of Pandora Rae and Thaddeus Valentine.”

Hester said, “My dad was David Shaw, of Oak Island…”

“Your mother had many lovers before she married Shaw,” said Sathya, in a voice crisp with disapproval. “Valentine was one of them. You are his child. Anna would never have written such a thing if she had not been certain.”

“My dad was David Shaw,” snivelled Hester, but she knew it wasn’t true. She had known it in her heart these two years past, ever since her gaze met Valentine’s over the body of his dying daughter Katherine. Some sort of understanding had crackled between them then like electricity, a half-recognition that she had crushed as quick and as hard as she could, because she didn’t want him for a father. She had understood, though, deep down. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to kill him!