Highlights from Predator's Gold by Philip Reeve Last read on December 2, 2023
Highlights from this book
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Outside, dim, arctic twilight shone grey on the frosted rooftops of her city. The floor trembled to the beat of cogs and pistons down in the engine district, but there was very little sense of movement, for this was the High Ice, north of north, and there were no passing landmarks, only a white plain, shining slightly with the reflection of the sky.
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Below them to the south, the east and west, the Frost Barrens stretched away into the haze; cold, stony country where the Ice Gods ruled for eight months of the year, and where patches of snow already lay in the shady bottoms of the criss-cross town-tracks. Northwards rose the black basalt wall of the Tannhauser Mountains, the chain of volcanoes which marked the northernmost limit of the Great Hunting Ground. Several were erupting, their plumes of grey smoke like pillars holding up the sky. Between them, faint behind a veil of ash, Hester and Tom could just make out the world-wide white of the Ice Wastes, and something moving there, vast, dirty and implacable, like a mountain gone rogue.
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The city’s anchors tugged free of the snow-swept ice, and the strange turbines in the hearts of the Scabious Spheres began to whirl again. The fat banks of caterpillar tracks which jutted from Anchorage’s skirts on hydraulic arms jerked into motion amid a spray of vapour and anti-freeze. They were lowered until the studded tracks gripped the ice. Wobbling slightly as the wind hammered at its superstructure, Anchorage swung on to a new course. If the Ice Gods were kind Wolverinehampton would not detect the manoeuvre — but what Wolverinehampton’s own course was, what it was doing out there in the swirling murk, only the Ice Gods knew, for the storm had settled in now, a wild arctic tempest that ripped shutters and roof panels from the abandoned buildings of the upper tier and sent them whirling high into the sky, while Anchorage put out its lights and ran on blindly into the blind dark.
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On the second day out she sighted Wolverinehampton. The suburb had turned south after failing to catch Anchorage, and its luck had turned with it, for it had found prey: a cluster of whaling towns driven off course by the storm. There were three of them, each much larger than Wolverinehampton, but the suburb had sped quickly from one to the next, biting away drive-wheels and skid- supports, and when Hester saw it it was turning back to devour them where they lay crippled. It looked to her as if it would be busy with its feast for several weeks, and she was glad that it would not be ranging west to menace Anchorage again and interfere with her own plans.
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The Core was a perplexing place: a great booming cavern, filled with the thunder of the city’s engines, hazy with smoke and drifting steam, criss-crossed by hundreds of walkways and railways and elevator shafts. The buildings sat crammed together on ledges and stilted platforms, or clung underneath like the nests of house martins. Slaves in iron collars swept the pavements, while others were whipped past in gangs by fur-clad foremen, off to perform unpleasant chores in chilly outer districts. Hester tried not to see them, or the rich ladies leading little boys on leashes, or the man who kicked and kicked and kicked a slave who accidentally brushed against him. It was none of her business. Arkangel was a city where the strong did as they liked.
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“Oh, Gods and Goddesses,” said Hester. “Why couldn’t you let her rest in peace?”
“Because we need her!” yelled Sathya. “The League has lost its way! We need new leaders. Anna was the best of us. She will show us the path to victory!” The Stalker flexed its clever hands, and a slender blade slid from each fingertip, snick, snick, snick.
“This isn’t Anna,” Hester said. “Nobody comes back from the Sunless Country. Your tame Engineer may have managed to get her corpse up and about, but it isn’t her. I knew a Stalker once: they don’t remember who they were in life; they aren’t the same person; that person’s dead, and when you stick one of those Old-Tech machines in their head you make a new person, like a new tenant moving into an empty house...
Sathya shoved Hester forward until she was standing only a few inches from the new Stalker. “Look, dear!” she said brightly. “Look! This is Hester Shaw! Valentine’s daughter! You remember how you found her in the Out-Country and brought her to Batmunkh Gompa? She was there when you died!”
The Stalker leaned close. In the shadows behind its bronze mask a dead black tongue licked withered lips. Its voice was a dry whisper, a night-wind blowing through valleys of stone. “I do not know this girl.”
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“Haven’t you read Ziggurat Cities of the Serpent-God, my breathtaking account of a journey through Nuevo-Maya?” asked Pennyroyal. “There’s a whole chapter on parasite towns: Las Ciudades Vampiras. ”
“I’ve never heard of a parasite town,” said Tom doubtfully. “Do you mean some sort of scavenger?”
“Oh no!” Pennyroyal took a seat close to him, breathing hot gusts of wine fumes into his face. “There’s more than one way to prey on a city. These vampire towns conceal themselves in the litter of the Out-Country until one passes over them. Then they spring up and attach themselves to its underside with gigantic suction-cups. The poor city goes trundling on with no idea what’s clinging to its belly, but all the while the parasite people are sneaking aboard, draining fuel tanks, stealing equipment, murdering the menfolk one by one, carrying off beautiful young women to sell in the slave-markets of Itzal as sacrifices to the volcano-gods. Eventually the host city comes shuddering to a halt, an empty shell, a husk, its engines stripped out, its people dead or captured, and the fat vampire town crawls off in search of fresh prey.”
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The predator city was closer still by the time the sun rose again. When it wasn’t snowing you could make out individual buildings; factories and dismantling-mills mainly, the endless prisons of the city’s slaves, and a great spike-turreted temple to the wolf-god squatting on the topmost tier. As the predator’s shadow groped across the ice towards Anchorage a spotter-ship came buzzing down to see what had befallen Masgard and his Huntsmen, but after hovering for a moment above the burnt wreck of the Clear Air Turbulence it turned tail and sped back to its eyrie. No more came near Anchorage that day. The Direktor of Arkangel was in mourning for his son, and his council saw no sense in wasting yet more ships to secure a prize that would be theirs by sundown anyway. The city flexed its jaws, giving the watchers on Anchorage’s stern an unforgettable glimpse of the vast furnaces and dismantling-engines that awaited them.
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Even the Direktor of Arkangel had been forced to admit that his city could not be saved. Already many of the rich had fled, pouring away to eastward in a stream of air-yachts and charter-ships (the five widows Blinkoe made enough money selling berths aboard the Temporary Blip to buy themselves a charming villa on the upper tiers of Jaegerstadt Ulm). The slaves who had seized control of the under-decks in all the chaos were leaving too, flying out on stolen freighters or taking to the ice in hijacked survey-sleds and drone-suburbs. At last a general order to evacuate was given, and by midwinter the city stood empty, a great dark carcass that slowly whitened and lost its shape beneath a thickening mantle of snow.
In the deep of that winter a few hardy Snowmad salvage-towns visited the wreck, draining its fuel tanks and landing boarding parties to harvest the valuables its fleeing citizens had left behind. Spring brought still more, and flights of scavenger-airships like carrion birds, but by then the ice beneath the wreck was growing weaker. In high summer, lit by the weird twilight of the midnight sun, the predator city stirred again, shivering amid a great cannonade of splintering ice, and set out on its final journey, down through the shifting levels of the sea to the cold, strange world below.