Perhaps some jewellery would make it look better. But when she went to her jewellery room she found most of the good pieces gone. Things were always vanishing these days. Freya could not imagine where they went to. Anyway, she didn’t really need a tiara on her sticky, soap-washed hair, or a necklet of amber and gold around her grubby throat. Mama would not approve of her being seen without jewellery, of course, but Mama was dead too.

In the empty, silent corridors of her palace the dust lay thick as powder snow. She rang for a footman and stood staring out of a window while she waited for him to arrive. 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.

Her footman arrived, patting his powdered wig straight.

“Good morning, Smew,” she said.

“Good morning, Your Radiance.”

For a moment she was seized by an urge to ask Smew into her quarters and tell him to do something about all the dust, the fallen clothes, the lost jewellery; to make him show her how the shower worked. But he was a man, and it would be an unthinkable break with tradition for a man to enter the margravine’s private quarters. Instead she said what she said every morning: “You may escort me to the breakfast room, Smew.”

Riding with him in the lift to the lower floor, she imagined her city scuttling across the ice cap like a tiny black beetle creeping over a huge white plate. The question was, where was it going? That was what Smew wanted to know; you could see it in his face, in the way his gaze kept flicking inquisitively at her. The Steering Committee would want to know, too. Running this way and that from hungry predators was one thing, but the time had come for Freya to decide what her city’s future was to be.