“Cheer up, Treacle!” Popjoy leered. “It’s good news! Power! Money! And all you have to do in return is check Her Excellency’s oil levels from time to time, buff up her bodywork, keep a weather eye open for rust. She’s basically indestructible, so you shouldn’t have too many problems. If you have any worries, send word to me. Otherwise…”
Otherwise I’m on my own, thought Oenone Zero, climbing the stairs to the highest level of the pagoda, the Stalker Fang’s own quarters. It was all wrong, of course; if there were justice in the world, a man like Popjoy, who had unleashed so much suffering and evil, would suffer himself. Instead, he was going to end his days in luxury, doing a spot of fishing, tinkering with a few pet projects. But at least by retiring he would allow Oenone Zero a chance to fulfill her promise to the dead.
Sentries clattered to attention as she passed. Flunkies bowed low before her and swung open the doors that led into the Stalker Fang’s conference chamber. Clerks and staff officers looked up from a big map of the Rustwater and did not bother to return Oenone’s low bow. Fang looked up too, her green eyes flaring. She had returned from the front line only a few hours before, and her armor was crusted with dried mud and the blood of townie soldiers. “My new surgeon-mechanic,” she whispered.
“At your service, Excellency,” murmured Oenone Zero, and dropped to her knees before the Stalker. When she found the courage to lift her head, everyone had gone back to their war maps, and the only eyes that lingered on her were those of Mr. Grike.
So everything was in place. She was on the inside, a member of the central staff. Soon she would put in motion the plan she’d thought of in her louse-infested bunk on the Altai front. She would assassinate the Stalker Fang.
Chapter 14
Sold
Later, Wren would sometimes tell people that she knew what it was like to be a slave, but she didn’t, not really. The old trade was thriving in those years. Prisoners taken by both sides in the long war were sold wholesale to men like Shkin, who packed them into leaky, underheated airfreighters and shipped them off along the bird roads to work on giant industrial platforms or the endless entrenchments and city-traps of the Storm. Slavery for them meant grinding labor, the ripping apart of families, random cruelty, and an early death. The worst Wren had to put up with was Nimrod Pennyroyal’s writing.
They had moved her, after that first interview with Shkin, into a comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Pepperpot. She had a soft bed, a basin to wash in, three meals a day, and a new linen dress that rather suited her. And she had a copy of Predator’s Gold, delivered by Miss Weems “with Mr. Shkin’s compliments.”
For a few hours each day, a reflector outside the barred window caught a beam of sunshine falling through a skylight in the deck plates above and filled Wren’s cell with light. As she curled up on her bunk and opened the lurid covers of Pennyroyal’s book, she could almost imagine herself back in her own bedroom in Dog Star Court, where she had often sat beside the window, reading. But she had never read anything like Predator’s Gold. How strange it was to find the places and people and stories she had known all her life so changed and twisted!
She had been afraid that reading about Mum and Dad would make her homesickness worse, but she need not have worried. Dad did not feature at all in Pennyroyal’s book. As for Hester Shaw, “a titian-haired Amazon of the air whose divine face was marred only by a livid scar where some brigand had drawn his stiletto across the damask flesh of her cheek,” she was barely recognizable as Mum.
And one night, as Wren lay sleepless, thinking indignantly about all that she had read, it struck her that she had made another terrible mistake. She’d thought herself so clever for persuading Shkin to take her to the mayor, 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…”