“Aero-engines!” Pennyroyal leapt up, knocking over more heaps of spares in his haste to reach the door. “Thank Clio! We’re saved!”
Freya ran after him, wiping away tears, tugging up her cold-mask. Outside, the dark had faded to a steely twilight. Pennyroyal was pounding away from her across the harbour, stopping once to turn and point as something slid across the sky beyond the harbour office. Freya squinted into the wind and saw a cluster of lights, a creamy trail of exhaust smoke smeared on the darkness. “Airship!” Pennyroyal yelled, doing a mad little dance in the middle of a snowy docking-pan. “Someone heard my message! We’re saved! Saved!”
Freya ran past him, trying to keep the machine in sight. The Aakiuqs were standing outside the harbour office, looking up. “An airship, right out here?” she heard the harbour master say. “Who can it be?”
“Did the Ice Gods tell you they were coming, Freya dear?” asked Mrs Aakiuq.
A man called Lemuel Quaanik ran up, snowshoes flapping from his big feet. He was one of the surveyors with whom Freya had worked, and so he did not feel too much in awe of her to speak. “Radiance? I seen that ship before. That’s Piotr Masgard’s rig, the Clear Air Turbulence! ”
“The Huntsmen of Arkangel!” gasped Mrs Aakiuq.
“Here?” cried Freya. “It can’t be! Arkangel would never hunt west of Greenland. There’s nothing here for it to eat.”
“There’s us,” said Mr Quaanik.
The Clear Air Turbulence circled Anchorage, then hung off the stern like a lone wolf shadowing its prey. Freya ran to the Wheelhouse and up to the bridge. Windolene Pye was already there, still in her nightgown with her long, greying hair undone. “It’s the Huntsmen, Freya!” she said. “How did they find us? How in all the gods’ names did they know where we were?”
“Pennyroyal,” Freya realized. “Professor Pennyroyal and his stupid broadcasts…”
“They’re signalling,” called Mr Umiak, leaning out of the radio room. “They’re ordering us to cut our engines.”
Freya glanced sternward. In this half-light the ice was pale and faintly luminous. She could see the scumbled track of her city’s stern-wheel stretching away towards the north-east, fading into mist. There was no sign of pursuit, just that black ship, shifting and trembling as it rode the city’s slipstream.
“Shall I answer them, Freya?”
“No! Pretend we haven’t heard.”
That didn’t stop Piotr Masgard for long. The Clear Air Turbulence slid closer until it was hanging abreast of the Wheelhouse, and Freya stared out at it through the glass wall and saw the aviators bent over their controls on the flight deck and a gunner grinning at her from a little armoured blister slung under the engine pods. She saw a hatch open, and Piotr Masgard himself lean out, shouting something through a bull-horn.
Miss Pye opened a ventilator, and the big voice came booming in at them.
“Congratulations, people of Anchorage! Your city has been chosen as prey by great Arkangel! The Scourge of the North is a day’s journey from here, and gaining fast. Shut down your engines and save us a chase, and you will be treated well.”
“They can’t eat us!” said Miss Pye. “Not now! Oh, it really is too bad!”
Freya felt a spreading numbness, as if she’d fallen into icy water. Miss Pye was looking at her, along with everyone else on the bridge, all waiting for the Gods of the Ice to speak through her and tell them what to do. She wondered if she should tell them the truth. It might be better to be eaten by Arkangel than to run on endlessly over this uncharted ice towards a continent that really was dead, after all. Then she thought of all that she had heard about Arkangel, and the way it treated the people it ate, and she thought, No, no, anything is better than that. I don’t care if we fall through the ice, or starve in dead America, they shall not have us!
“Shut down your engines!” bellowed Masgard.
Freya looked east. If Arkangel had cut across the spine of Greenland it might be as close as Masgard claimed, but Anchorage could still outrun it. The predator city would not want to venture far on to this uncharted ice-plain. That was why they had resorted to sending out their huntsmen…
She had no loud-hailer to reply with, so she took a chinograph pencil from the chart table and wrote in big letters on the back of a map, NO! “Miss Pye,” she said, “please tell Mr Scabious, ‘Full Speed Ahead’.”
Miss Pye stepped to the speaking tubes. Freya pressed her message to the glass. She saw Masgard strain to read it, and the way his face changed when he understood. He went back inside his gondola and slammed the hatch shut and the airship veered away.
“What can they do, after all?” said one of the navigators. “They won’t attack us, for they’d risk damaging the very things they want to eat us for.”
“I bet Arkangel is much more than a day away!” declared Miss Pye. “That great lumbering urbivore! They must be desperate, or they wouldn’t have to send out spoilt toffs to play at air-pirates. Well, Freya, you called their bluff all right. We shall outrun them easily!”
And the Clear Air Turbulence dropped down into the sleet of powdered ice behind the city and fired a flight of rockets into the larboard supports of the stern-wheel. Smoke, sparks, flames spewed from Anchorage’s stern; the axle gave way and the wheel fell sideways and slewed across the ice, still attached by a tangle of drive-chains and twisted stanchions at its starboard end, an anchor of wreckage that brought the city skidding and shuddering to a standstill.
“Quickly!” shouted Freya, feeling panic rise in her as the lights of the airship lifted out of the fading cloud of ice astern. “Get us moving again! Lower the cats…”
Miss Pye was at the speaking tubes, listening to the garbled reports from below. “Oh, Freya, we can’t; the wheel is too heavy to drag, it must be cut away, and Soren says that will take hours!”
“But we don’t have hours!” screamed Freya, and then realized that they didn’t even have minutes. She clung to Miss Pye, and together they stared towards the air-harbour. The Clear Air Turbulence landed there just long enough to vomit out a score of dark, armoured figures who went hurrying down the stairways to secure the engine district. Then she was aloft again, hanging in the sky above the Wheelhouse. The glass walls gave way under the boots of more men, swinging down on ropes from her gondola. They crashed on to the bridge in a spray of glittering fragments, a blur of screams, shouts, swords bright in the lamplight, the chart table overturned. Freya had lost Miss Pye. She ran for the lift, but someone was there ahead of her, fur and armour and a grinning face and big, gloved hands reaching out to catch her, and all she could think was, All this way! We’ve come all this way, only to be eaten!
31
A few hundred feet below the Jenny Haniver ’s gondola, vast rough pans of sea-ice were sliding by, criss- crossed with dykes and jagged, shattered ridges. Tom and Hester, looking down from the flight-deck windows at the never-ending whiteness, felt as if they had been flying for ever over this armoured ocean.
The day after their escape from Rogues’ Roost they had set down at a tiny Snowmad whaling station, and bought fuel with the last of Pennyroyal’s sovereigns. Since then they had just been flying, north and west in search of Anchorage. They had not slept much, for fear of the fallen aviatrix who stalked their dreams. They stayed on the flight deck, nibbling stale biscuits, drinking coffee, telling each other in awkward little bursts of the things they had each seen since they parted.
They did not speak of Hester’s flight from Anchorage, or of what caused it. They had not mentioned it since that first night, when they lay all breathless and shivery and tangled together on the hard deck, and Hester in a small voice had said, “There’s something I haven’t explained. After I left you, I did something terrible…”
“You got upset and flew off,” Tom said, misunderstanding. He was so glad to have her back that he didn’t want to risk an argument, so he tried to make it sound as if it had been a small thing, and easy to forgive.
Hester shook her head. “I don’t mean — ” But she could not explain.
So they had flown on, day after day over rippled sea-ice and deep-frozen land, until today, when Tom said suddenly, “I didn’t mean what happened, with me and Freya. When we get to Anchorage it won’t be like last time, I
