safe from predators and plagues and spy-ships for ever.
“Set course for the Dead Continent,” she said. “We are going home.”
2
Hester Shaw was starting to get used to being happy. After all her muddy, starveling years in the ditches and scavenger-villes of the Great Hunting Ground she had finally found herself a place in the world. She had her own airship, the Jenny Haniver (if she craned her neck she could just see the upper curve of her red envelope, behind that Zanzibar spice-freighter at strut seventeen) and she had Tom; gentle, handsome, clever Tom, whom she loved with her whole heart and who, in spite of everything, seemed to love her too.
For a long time she had felt sure it wouldn’t last. They were so different, and Hester was hardly anyone’s idea of beautiful; a tall, graceless scarecrow of a girl, her coppery hair done up in too-tight plaits, her face split in half by an old sword-blow that had robbed her of one eye and most of her nose and twisted her mouth into a snag- toothed sneer. It won’t last, she had kept telling herself, all the time they were waiting on the Black Island for the shipwrights to repair the poor battered Jenny Haniver. He only stays with me out of pity, she had decided, as they flew down to Africa, then crossed to South America. What can he see in me? she wondered, while they grew rich ferrying supplies to the great oil-drilling cities of Antarctica and then suddenly poor again, jettisoning a cargo to outrun air-pirates over Tierra del Fuego. Flying back across the blue Atlantic with a merchant convoy she whispered to herself, It cannot possibly last.
And yet it had lasted; it had lasted for more than two years now. Sitting in September sunshine on this balcony outside the Crumple Zone, one of the many coffeehouses on Airhaven High Street, Hester found herself beginning to believe that it might last for ever. She squeezed Tom’s hand beneath the table and smiled her crooked smile, and he looked at her with just as much love as when she first kissed him, in the fluttering light of MEDUSA on the night his city died.
Airhaven had flown north this autumn, and now hung a few thousand feet above the Frost Barrens, while small scavenger towns that had been up on the ice during the months of the midnight sun clustered below it to trade. Balloon after balloon rose to moor at the docking struts of the flying free-port, disgorging colourful Old-Tech traders who started shouting their wares the instant their boots touched its lightweight deckplates. The frozen north was a good hunting ground for diggers-up of lost technology, and these gentlemen were selling Stalker parts, Tesla gun accumulators, nameless odds and ends of machinery left over from half a dozen different civilizations, even some pieces of an Ancient flying machine which had lain undisturbed in the High Ice since the Sixty Minute War.
Below them to the south, the east and west, the Frost Barrens stretched away into the haze; cold, stony country where the Ice Gods ruled for eight months of the year, and where patches of snow already lay in the shady bottoms of the criss-cross town-tracks. Northwards rose the black basalt wall of the Tannhauser Mountains, the chain of volcanoes which marked the northernmost limit of the Great Hunting Ground. Several were erupting, their plumes of grey smoke like pillars holding up the sky. Between them, faint behind a veil of ash, Hester and Tom could just make out the world-wide white of the Ice Wastes, and something moving there, vast, dirty and implacable, like a mountain gone rogue.
Hester pulled a telescope from one of the pockets of her coat and put it to her eye, twizzling the focusing ring until the blurry view came suddenly sharp. She was looking at a city: eight tiers of factories and slave-barracks and smut-spewing chimneys, a sky-train riding the slipstream, parasite airships sifting the exhaust plume for waste minerals, and down below, ghostly through veils of snow and powdered rock, the big wheels rolling.
“Arkangel!”
Tom took the telescope from her. “You’re right. It keeps to the northern foothills of the Tannhausers in summer, eating up scavenger towns as they come through the passes. The polar ice cap is much thicker now than it was in olden days, but there are still parts that are too thin to take Arkangel’s weight till summer’s end.”
Hester laughed. “Know-all.”
“I can’t help it,” Tom said. “I was an Apprentice Historian, remember? We had to memorize a list of the World’s Great Traction Cities, and Arkangel was right near the top, so I’m not likely to forget it.”
“Show off,” grumbled Hester. “I wish it had been Zimbra, or Xanne-Sandansky. You wouldn’t look so clever then.”
Tom was peering through the telescope again. “Any day now it’ll lift up its tracks and lower its iron runners and go skating off in search of ice cities and Snowmad scavenger towns to gobble up…”
For the present, however, Arkangel seemed content to trade. It was too vast to haul itself through the narrow passes of the Tannhausers, but airships were lifting from its harbours and flying south through the haze towards Airhaven. The first of them cut an arrogant swathe through the swirl of balloons around the floating town and swooped in to dock at strut six, just below Tom and Hester’s perch; they felt the faint vibration as its docking- clamps gripped the quay. It was a lean, short-range attack ship with a red wolf painted on its sable envelope and its name underneath in gothic script: the Clear Air Turbulence.
Men swaggered out of the armoured gondola, stomping along the quay and up the stairways which led to the High Street. Big, burly men with fur cloaks and fur hats and a chilly glitter of chain-mail under their tunics. One wore a steel helmet from which sprouted two huge, flaring gramophone horns. A flex led from the helmet to a brass microphone, clamped in the fist of another man, whose amplified voice boomed out across Airhaven as he climbed the stairs.
“Greetings, airlings! From Great Arkangel, Hammer of the High Ice, Scourge of the North, Devourer of the Spitzbergen Static, greetings! We have gold to exchange for anything you can tell us about the locations of ice cities! Thirty sovereigns for information leading to a capture!”
He started to push his way between the Crumple Zone’s tables, still booming out his offer, while all about him aviators shook their heads and made sour faces and turned away. Now that prey was in such short supply everywhere several of the big predators had begun to offer finder’s fees, but few did it this openly. Honest air- traders were starting to fear that they might soon be barred altogether from the smaller ice cities, for what mayor would risk giving docking permits to a ship that might fly off next day and sell his course to a greedy great urbivore like Arkangel? Yet there were always others, smugglers and demi-pirates and merchants whose ships were not bringing in the profits they had hoped for, who were ready to accept predator’s gold.
“Come and find me at the Gasbag and Gondola if you have traded this summer aboard Kivitoo or Breidhavik or Anchorage and know where they plan to over-winter!” urged the newcomer. He was a young man, and he looked stupid and rich and well-fed. “Thirty in gold, my friends; enough to keep your ships in fuel and luftgaz for a year…”
“That is Piotr Masgard,” Hester heard a Dinka aviatrix at a neighbouring table tell her friends. “He’s the youngest son of the Direktor of Arkangel. Calls that gang of his the Huntsmen. They don’t just advertise for snoops; I’ve heard they land that ship of theirs on peaceful little cities too fast for Arkangel to catch and force them to stop, or turn round — force them at sword-point to steer straight into Arkangel’s jaws!”
“But that’s not fair!” cried Tom, who had also been listening, and unluckily his words fell loudly into a momentary gap in Masgard’s speech. The Huntsman swung round, and his big, lazy, handsome face grinned down at Tom.
“Not fair, airling? What’s not fair? This is a town-eat-town world, you know.”
Hester tensed. One thing she could never understand about Tom was why he always expected everything to be fair. She supposed it was his upbringing. A few years living by his wits in a scavenger-ville would have knocked it out of him, but he’d grown up with all the rules and customs of the Guild of Historians to keep real life at bay and, despite all he’d seen since, he could still be shocked by people like Masgard.
“I just mean, it’s against all the rules of Municipal Darwinism,” Tom explained, looking up at the big man. He got to his feet, but found that he was still looking up, for the towering Huntsman was at least a foot taller. “Fast cities eat slow ones, and strong cities eat weak ones. That’s the way it’s meant to work, just like in nature. Offering finder’s fees and hijacking prey upsets the balance,” he went on, as though Masgard was just an opponent at the
