Garstang?” he shouted. “Who’ve you found?”
“Just an old geezer,” Hester yelled back, hoping that the cold-mask would muffle her voice, the fur cloak disguise her skinny outline.
“Just some old man,” the Huntsman said, turning to speak to someone inside the gondola. Then, louder, “Take him to the palace, Garstang! Shove him in with the others! We don’t want him.”
“Please, Mr Huntsman!” Pennyroyal shouted suddenly. “It’s a trap! She’s-”
Hester swung the crossbow up and squeezed the trigger and the Huntsman went screaming backwards. As his comrades tried to push their way out past his thrashing body Hester grabbed the oil lamp from Pennyroyal and lobbed it in through the hatch. A Huntsman’s cloak caught light, and fire blazed up inside the gondola. Pennyroyal shrieked in terror and fled. Hester turned to follow, but after two steps she found that she was flying, lifted up by a hot wind from behind and dumped into snow that was white no longer but a Halloween dazzle of saffron and red. There was no bang, just a great, soft “woof” as the gas-cells caught. She rolled over in the snow and looked back. Men were scrambling from the burning gondola, slapping at the sparks which burrowed through the fur of their coats and cloaks. There were only two of them. One ran towards Hester, making her fumble for her fallen crossbow, but he didn’t look at her, just clumped past shouting something about saboteurs, and she had plenty of time to slip another bolt into the bow and shoot him in the back. There was no sign of Pennyroyal. She circled the burning airship, and met the last of the Huntsmen in a place where the smoke was thick and dark. Took the sword from his hand while he was dying. Thrust it through her belt. Ran towards Rasmussen Prospekt and the lights of the Winter Palace.
Uncle’s device made tiny clicking sounds in the keyhole, and the heat-lock opened. Tom slipped inside, breathing in the familiar smells of the palace. The corridor was deserted; not even a footprint in the thick dust. He hurried through shadows to the Wunderkammer, where the Stalker skeletons scared him all over again, but the lock-pick worked on that door too and he padded into the cobwebby silence between the display cases feeling shaky, but proud of himself.
The square of foil shone with a soft light, reminding him very clearly of Freya, and of the crab-cam that had watched from one of those grilles in the heat-ducts overhead as he kissed her. “Caul?” he said hopefully, peering up into the dark. But there were no burglars aboard Anchorage now, just Huntsmen. He felt suddenly, suffocatingly afraid about what Hester was doing. He hated to think of her out there, in danger, while he waited here. There was a flickery glow in the sky, somewhere near the harbour. What was happening? Should he go and look?
No. Hester had said she would meet him here. She had never let him down before. He tried to distract himself by choosing a weapon from the display on the wall; a heavy, blunt sword with an ornate hilt and scabbard. Once it was in his hand he felt braver. He paced to and fro between the cases of moth-eaten animals and old machines, swinging the sword, waiting for her to come so that they could save Anchorage together.
It was only when the gun-battle began in the ballroom and the shouts and shots and screams came booming along the palace corridors that he realized she had come in through the main entrance anyway, and had started without him.
The gas-pistol was heavier than Freya had expected. She tried to imagine shooting it at someone, but she couldn’t. She wondered if she should explain to Hester how scared she was, but there didn’t seem to be time. Hester was already at the door of the ballroom, beckoning Freya forward with quick jerks of her head. Her hair and her clothes stank of smoke.
Together, they heaved the big door open. Nobody turned to see them enter. Huntsmen and prisoners alike were watching the windows and the great sinuous wings of fire that swayed above the harbour. Freya clutched the gun with sweaty hands, waiting for Hester to shout, “Hands up!” or “Nobody move!” or whatever it was one was supposed to say in situations like this. Instead, Hester just lifted her crossbow and shot the nearest Huntsman in the back.
“Hey, that’s not-” Freya started to say, and then flung herself to the floor, because as the dead man pitched forward the man beside him turned and sprayed a long burst of gunfire at her. She kept forgetting this was all real. She squirmed on the floor and heard the bullets kick chunks out of the doors and skip off the marble beside her. Hester snatched the pistol out of her hand and the Huntsman’s face turned into a splash of red. Smew pulled his gun away from him as he fell, and turned it on a third guard, caught in the swirling panic of the captives. “Rasmussen!” somebody shouted, and suddenly the whole room took up the shout, the ancient war-cry of Anchorage, left over from times when Freya’s ancestors had led battles against air-pirates and the Stalkers of the Nomad Empires. “Rasmussen!” There were shots, a scream, a long, rattling, xylophone trill as a dying Huntsman crashed against one of the mothballed chandeliers. It was all over very quickly. Windolene Pye began organizing people to tend to the wounded, while men helped themselves to the dead Huntsmen’s swords and sidearms.
“Where’s Scabious?” shouted Hester, and somebody pushed him towards her. The engine master looked eager and clutched a captured gun. She said, “Arkangel’s coming. I could see its lights from the air-harbour. You’ll need to get this old place moving pretty sharpish.”
Scabious nodded. “But there’re Huntsmen in the engine district, and the stern-wheel’s shot. We can’t do more than quarter speed on the cats alone, and we can’t even do that until the wreckage of the stern-wheel’s cut away.”
“Get cutting then,” said Hester, discarding her crossbow and drawing her sword.
Scabious thought of a thousand other questions, then shrugged them away and nodded. He started for the stairways with half of Anchorage behind him, those without weapons grabbing chairs and bottles as they passed. Freya, frightened as she was, felt she should go with them and lead the attack like one of those long-ago margravines. She joined the growing rush towards the door, but Hester grabbed her, stopped her. “You stay here. Your people are going to need you alive. Where’s Masgard?”
“I don’t know,” said Freya. “I think he was heading for the main entrance.”
Hester nodded, a quick, small tic of a nod that could have meant anything. “Tom’s in the Museum,” she said.
“Tom’s here?” Freya was having trouble keeping up.
“Please, Your Radiance, keep him safe when all this is over.”
“But…” Freya started to say, but Hester was gone, the bullet-riddled doors swinging shut behind her. Freya wondered if she should follow, but what could she do against Masgard? She turned back into the ballroom, and saw a knot of people still cowering there; the very old and young, the injured, and those who were just too scared to join the fight. Freya knew how they felt. She screwed up her hands into tight fists to stop them shaking and put on her best margravine’s smile. “Don’t be afraid. The Ice Gods are with us.”
Tom, heading for the ballroom, met Scabious and his people pouring towards him, a dark tumble of running limbs, light glinting on metal, pale surf of set faces stark in the lamplight. They filled the corridor like the sea pouring into a foundering ship. Tom was afraid that they would mistake him for a Huntsman, but Scabious saw him and shouted his name, and the tide picked him up and swept him along, the surf breaking into grinning remembered faces: Aakiuq, Probsthain, Smew. People reached out to pat his shoulders, punch his chest. “Tom!” shouted Smew, tugging at his waist. “It’s good to see you back!”
“Hester!” Tom yelled, struggling in the tide as it carried him out of the palace. “Where’s Hester?”
“She saved us, Tom!” Smew shouted, running ahead. “What a nerve! Came into that ballroom and cut down the Huntsmen, merciless as a Stalker! What a girl!”
“But where — Mr Scabious, is she with you?”
His words were lost in the clatter of feet and the shouts of “Rasmussen, Rasmussen!” as the crowd swept past him and away, funnelling down a stairway towards the engine district. He heard shouts and gunshots echoing under the low roof, and wondered if he should go and try to help, but the thought of Hester held him back. Calling her name, he ran through the Boreal Arcade and out into the swirling snow on Rasmussen Prospekt. Two lines of footprints dotted the snow, leading towards the air-harbour. As he hesitated, wondering whether one of the tracks was Hester’s, he saw a face watching him from the doorway of a shop on the far side of the street.
“Professor Pennyroyal?”
Pennyroyal darted sideways, stumbling in the snow, and vanished into a narrow alleyway between two boutiques. Coins sprayed from his fists as he went. He had been filling his pockets with loose change from the shop’s cash-register.
“Professor!” shouted Tom, sheathing his sword and running after him. “It’s only me! Where’s Hester?”
The explorer’s clumsy footprints led to the tier’s edge, where a stairway descended to the lower city. Tom
