Hester.
“Mr Scabious!” he said aloud. Scabious had never wholly believed in Professor Pennyroyal. Scabious would listen. He turned and ran as fast as he could back to the stairway. As he passed the Wheelhouse Pennyroyal leaned over a balcony to watch, shouting after him, “‘A Startling Talent!’ — The Wheel-Tapper’s Weekly! ”
Down in the hot dark of the engine district everything thrummed and thundered with the beat of the engines as they drove the city on towards disaster. Tom stopped the first men he saw and asked where he could find Scabious. They nodded towards the stern, fingering their amulets. “Gone to look for his son, like every night.”
Tom ran on, into quiet, rusty streets where nothing moved. Or almost nothing. As he passed beneath one of the dangling argon-lamps a faint movement in the mouth of a ventilation-shaft flicked a sliver of reflected light into the corner of his eye. He stopped, breathing hard, his heart thumping, hairs prickling on his wrists and the back of his neck. In his panic over Pennyroyal he had all but forgotten the intruders. Now all his half-formed theories about them flooded his mind again. The ventilator looked empty and innocent enough now, but he was sure there had been something there, something that had darted guiltily back into the shadows just as his eye caught it. And he was sure that it was still in there, watching him.
“Oh, Hester,” he whispered, suddenly very frightened, wishing she were here to help. Hester would have been able to cope with this, but he wasn’t at all sure he could, not alone. Trying to imagine what she would do, he forced himself to walk on, one step after another, not looking towards the ventilator until he was sure he was out of sight of whatever hid there.
“I think he saw us,” said Caul.
“Never!” sneered Skewer.
Caul shrugged unhappily. They had been tracking Tom with their cameras all evening, waiting for him to reach a place that was quiet enough and close enough to the Screw Worm for them to carry out Uncle’s mysterious command. They’d never watched a Dry this closely for this long, and something in Tom’s face as he glanced towards the camera made Caul uneasy. “Come on, Skew,” he said. “It must all build up after a while, mustn’t it? The noises, and the feeling you’re being watched. And he was suspicious even before…”
“They never see!” said Skewer firmly. The strange message from Uncle had made him nervous, and faced with the task of tracking Tom he’d been forced to admit that Gargle was the best cam-operator aboard and hand over the controls to him. He clung to the idea of his superiority over the Drys as if it was the last certain thing in the world. “They might look, but they never see. They’re not as observant as us. There, what did I tell you? He’s walked past. Stupid Dry.”
It wasn’t a rat. All the rats of Anchorage were dead, and anyway, this thing looked mechanical. As he crept back through shadows towards the ventilator Tom could see the light jinking on segmented metal. A bulbous, fist- sized body, supported on too many legs. A single camera-lens eye.
He thought of the mysterious boy who had come for him on the night Hester left, and how he seemed to know everything that went on at the air-harbour and the Winter Palace. How many of these things were there, scuttling and spying in the city’s ducts? And why was this one watching him?
“Where is he, Gargle? Find him…”
“I think he’s gone,” said Gargle, panning to and fro.
“Careful!” warned Caul, resting his hand on the younger boy’s shoulder. “Tom’s still round there somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
“What, psychic as well now, are you?” asked Skewer.
Tom took three deep breaths, then flung himself at the ventilator. The metal thing scrabbled, trying to retreat into the dark shaft. Glad that he was still wearing his heavy outdoor mittens, Tom grabbed its thrashing legs and pulled.
“He’s got us!”
“Reel in! Reel in!”
Eight steel legs. Magnets for feet. An armoured body warted with rivets. That cyclops-lens whirring as it struggled to focus on him. It was so like a gigantic spider that Tom dropped it, and flinched away as it lay there on its back on the deck, writhing its legs helplessly. Then the thin cable that trailed from its rear end went suddenly taut, dragging it backwards against the ventilator with a clang. Tom lunged after it, but he was too slow. The crab- thing was tugged quickly into the shaft and vanished, leaving him listening to the fading clatter as it was hauled away into the city’s depths.
Tom scrambled up, his heart beating quickly. Who would own such a thing? Who would want to spy on the people of Anchorage? He thought of Pennyroyal’s tale of the vampire towns, and suddenly it did not seem quite so unlikely after all. He leaned against the wall to catch his breath and then started to run again. “Mr Scabious!” he shouted, the echoes rolling ahead of him down the tubular streets or vanishing upward into great, dark, dripping, haunted vaults. “Mr Scabious!”
“Lost him again! No, there — camera twelve…” Gargle flipped wildly from camera to camera. Tinnily, through the cabin speakers, Tom’s voice was shouting, “ Mr Scabious! He’s not a ghost! I know where he comes from! ”
“I think he’s heading for the stern gallery.”
“Gotta get him quick!” wailed Skewer, rummaging through lockers for a gun, a net. “He’ll blow our cover! Uncle’ll kill us! I mean really, really kill us! Gods, I hate this! We’re burglars, not kidnappers! What’s Uncle thinking? We’ve never been asked to kidnap Drys before; not full-grown ones…”
“Uncle Knows Best,” Gargle reminded him.
“Oh, shut up!”
“I’ll go,” said Caul. The emergency had made him calm; he knew what had to be done, and he knew how he would do it.
“Not without me,” Skewer shouted. “I don’t trust you up there alone, Dry-lover!”
“All right.” Caul was already halfway to the hatch. “But let me handle him. He knows me, remember?”
“Mr Scabious?”
Tom burst out on to the stern gallery. The moon was up, hanging low in the sky behind the city, and the drive-wheel flung its reflection across the deckplates. The boy stood waiting there in the flash and flicker like a grey ghost.
“How are you doing, Tom?” he asked. He looked nervous and a little shy, but friendly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to meet like this.
Tom swallowed his yelp of surprise. “Who are you?” he said, backing away. “Those crab-things — you must have loads of them, creeping all over the city, watching everything. Why? Who are you?”
The boy held out his hand, a pleading gesture, begging Tom to stay. “My name’s Caul.”
Tom’s mouth felt dry. Bits of Pennyroyal’s stupid story clanged inside his head like an alarm bell; they murder the menfolk, the city is left just an empty shell, a husk, everyone dead…
“Don’t worry,” said Caul, grinning suddenly, as if he understood. “We’re only burglars, and now we’re going home. But you have to come with us. Uncle says.”
Several things happened all at once. Tom turned to run and a net of thin metal mesh, flung from some gantry overhead, dropped over him and brought him crashing down. At the same instant as he heard Caul shout, “Skew! No!” another voice yelled, “Axel?” and he looked up to see Scabious standing at the far end of the gallery, transfixed by the sight of the frail-looking fair-haired boy whom he took to be his son’s ghost. Then, in the shadows overhead, a gun went off with a cough and a sudden stab of blue flame, some kind of gas-pistol, ricochet yowling like a hurt dog. Scabious cursed and flung himself sideways into cover as a second boy leapt down on to the stern-gallery, bigger than Caul and with long dark hair whipping about his face. Together, he and Caul lifted Tom, who was still struggling to free himself from the net. They began to run, jostling their captive into the mouth of an underlit access alley.
It was very dark, and the floors throbbed and jarred with a steady rhythm. Thick ducts sprouted from the deckplates and rose into the shadows overhead like trees in a metal forest. Somewhere behind there was a dim glow of moonlight and the angry, hurt voice of Mr Scabious shouting, “You young — ! Come back here! Stop!”
“Mr Scabious!” Tom shouted, pushing his face into the cold cross-hatch of the net. “They’re parasites! Thieves! They’re-”
His captors dropped him unceremoniously on the deck. He rolled over and saw them crouching in a gap between two ducts. Caul’s long hands had gripped a section of the deckplate and he was lifting it; opening it; a
