Infernal Devices

but she’d been assuming that Predator’s Gold would be mostly true. She had not imagined just how much Pennyroyal had lied about his time in Anchorage. By telling the real story, Wren could destroy his reputation and his career. Pennyroyal might well want to buy her, but not so that he could write books about her. He would want to silence her, quickly and permanently.

Alone in her cell, Wren hid her face in the pillow and whined with fear. What had she done? And how could she undo it? She jumped from her bunk and started toward the door, meaning to shout for a guard. She would tell Shkin that she had lied about Anchorage; she was just a Lost Girl after all, and of no interest to Professor Pennyroyal. But then she would be back where she had started, or worse—Shkin would say she had been wasting his time. She imagined that a man like Shkin would have unpleasant ways of getting even with people who wasted his time.

“Think, Wren, think!” she whispered.

And all the while, beneath her feet, Brighton’s powerful Mitchell Nixon engines boomed and pounded, pushing the city steadily northward.

After his interview with Wren, Shkin had questioned Fishcake. The newbie had proved highly cooperative. He was tired out and terrified, and eager for some new master who would look after him and tell him what to do. After a few kind-sounding words from Nabisco Shkin, he confirmed Wren’s story about Anchorage. After a few more, he told the slave dealer where Grimsby lay.

Shkin’s people relayed the information to the mayor and the Council. Brighton adjusted its course, and soon the Old Tech instruments on the bridge detected the spires of a sunken city in the depths below. Brighton circled for a while, broadcasting its treacherous message, and succeeded in winkling out a last few limpets. When no more appeared, Pennyroyal decided that the expedition was at an end.

The original plan had been to send men down in captured limpets to explore the pirate lair. But the voyage north had taken longer than expected; it was late in the season, more storms were forecast, and the people of Brighton, who had the attention span of midges, were growing bored. Depth charges were dropped, resulting in a few spectacular underwater explosions and a lot of floating debris, which the city’s shopkeepers scooped up in nets and put on sale as souvenirs of Grimsby. Pennyroyal made a speech declaring that the North Atlantic was now safe for decent raft cities again, and Brighton turned south, setting a course back to the warmer waters of the Middle Sea, where it had promised to rendezvous with a cluster of Traction Cities to celebrate Moon Festival.

The following afternoon, Wren’s door was unlocked and a lot of black-clad guards came packing into her cell, followed by Nabisco Shkin himself.

“Well, my dear,” he said, glancing at the copy of Predator’s Gold that lay on her bunk. “Were you gripped by our mayor’s adventures? Did you notice any errors in his account?”

Wren barely knew where to start. “It’s all rubbish!” she said indignantly. “The people of Anchorage didn’t force Pennyroyal to guide them across the High Ice; they made him their Chief Navigator, which was a great honor, and he made a proper hash of it. And it wasn’t him who fought off the Huntsmen, it was my mum, and she didn’t get killed by Masgard, like she does in the book; she’s still alive. And she’d never have sold Anchorage’s course to Arkangel. And when she’s dying and says to Pennyroyal, ‘Take my airship, save yourself,’ that’s just poo; Pennyroyal stole the ship, and shot Dad so he could take off in her—he doesn’t mention Dad, of course, and as for that thing that Miss Freya does on page eighty-one…”

She stopped, remembering her predicament. Shkin was watching her, as careful and calculating as ever. Maybe giving her the book had just been a way of testing her, seeing if she would stick to her story about Anchorage in the face of all Pennyroyal’s lies.

“Interesting,” Shkin said, and snapped his fingers at one of the guards, who stepped smartly forward to clamp a pair of pretty silver manacles on Wren’s wrists. “I always suspected that His Worship’s tales of adventure were somewhat embroidered. I think it is time we took you up to meet him.”

Wren was led down the stairways of the Pepperpot to a garage, where a sleek black bug stood waiting. “What about Fishcake?” she asked as Shkin’s men pushed her inside. “What have you done with poor little Fishcake?”

“He will be remaining at the Pepperpot.” Shkin settled himself beside her on the bug’s backseat and checked his pocket watch. “Cloud 9,” he told the driver, and the bug set off, out into the dingy streets of the Laines, a district of antique shops and cheap hotels that filled most of Brighton’s middle tier.

In other circumstances Wren would have been fascinated by the passing shop fronts packed with junk and Old Tech, the strangely dressed people, the tier supports plastered with the handbills of hopeless fringe theater companies. Now, however, she was too busy wondering how she was going to keep herself alive. It would all be a matter of timing, she decided. If she were clever enough and kept her nerve, she might still be able to get herself out of Shkin’s hands without Pennyroyal ever realizing who she really was…

The bug climbed a long ramp to the upper tier. Clearing tourists out of the way with blasts of its hooter, it sped along Ocean Boulevard, the oval promenade that ringed Brighton’s upper city. It passed hotels and restaurants, palm trees and crazy-golf courses, fairgrounds, floral clocks, and bingo parlors. It crossed a bridge that spanned the shallow end of the Sea Pool, a lake of cleaned and filtered seawater fringed by artifical beaches. At last it arrived in the Old Steine, the circular plaza where the thick steel hawsers that tied Cloud 9 to Brighton were attached.

The floating deck plate hovered about two hundred feet above Wren’s head. Looking up, she could see a glass-walled control room jutting from its underbelly like an elaborate upside-down greenhouse. Men were moving about inside, operating banks of brass levers that adjusted Cloud 9’s trim and altitude. Small engine pods were mounted all around the deck plate’s edge, and Wren presumed that in rough weather they would be used to keep Cloud 9 on station above the city. On this windless afternoon only a few were switched on, acting as fans to blow Brighton’s exhaust smoke away from the mayor’s palace.

In the middle of the Old Steine, where the Cloud 9 tow-lines were bolted to huge, rusty stanchions, a yellow cable car waited to take visitors up to the Pavilion. As Shkin’s bug squeaked to a stop beside it, red-coated soldiers came hurrying to study the papers of Shkin and his men and run Old Tech metal detectors over their clothes.

“There was a time when just about anyone was allowed to go up and wander in the Pavilion gardens,” said Shkin. “That’s all changed since the war started. There’s no fighting in our part of the world, of course—the African Anti-Tractionists have no stomach for the Green Storm’s crusade—but Pennyroyal is still terrified that saboteurs or terrorists might take a potshot at him.”

That was the first Wren had heard about the war between the cities and the Storm. It explained why there were all those big, ugly gun batteries on the city’s esplanades, and why security was so tight.

“Purpose of your visit to Cloud 9, Mr. Shkin?” asked the commander.

“I have an interesting piece of merchandise to show to the mayor.”

“I’m not sure His Worship is buying slaves at the moment, sir.”

“Oh, he will not want to miss the chance of adding this one to his staff. I suggest you let us up without further delay, unless you wish to spend the rest of your career down on Tier Three, picking pubes out of the Sea Pool filters…”

There were no more objections. Shkin and his party were ushered quickly aboard, the cable car shuddered, and Wren, looking from its big windows, saw Brighton fall away below her. “Oh, look!” she murmured, entranced, but Shkin and his men had seen it all before.

Suddenly the howl of supercharged engine pods filled the cable car and swift shadows came flickering across its windows. Beyond the web of Cloud 9’s hawsers, a flock of fierce, spiky shapes cut through the afternoon sky. Wren shrieked, imagining that there had been an explosion up on Cloud 9 and that this was the debris raining down, but the shapes veered in formation and hurtled away across Brighton’s rooftops, their shadows speeding across the busy streets.

“But they’ve got no envelopes!” Wren cried. “No gasbags! How do they stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!”

Some of Shkin’s men laughed. The slave trader himself looked faintly pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. “Not impossible,” he said. “The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm’s air fleets. There is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological advances…” He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines. “This lot are called the Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air force, hired by our esteemed