“Maybe they don’t have one,” said Tom.

Hester scrolled up and down the wavebands, hunting for the warble of a homing beacon. There was nothing. It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence. But when she hailed it on the open channel a perfectly friendly harbour master answered her in Anglish, and after half an hour the harbour master’s nephew came buzzing up aboard a little green air-tug called the Graculus to take the Jenny Haniver under tow.

They set down at an almost deserted air-harbour near the front of the city’s upper tier. The harbour master and his wife, kind, round, acorn-brown people in parkas and fur bonnets, guided the Jenny into a domed hangar that opened like a flower, and carried Pennyroyal on a stretcher to their home behind the harbour office. There in the warm kitchen, coffee and bacon and hot pastries awaited the newcomers, and as Tom and Hester tucked in, their hosts stood watching, beaming their approval and saying, “Welcome, travellers! Welcome, welcome, welcome to Anchorage!”

7

GHOST TOWN

It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Freya’s chauffeur always drove her to the Temple of the Ice Gods so that she could pray to them for guidance. The temple was barely ten yards from her palace, on the same raised platform near the stern of the city, so it was not really necessary to go through the business of calling out her chauffeur, climbing into her official bug, driving the short distance and climbing out again, but Freya went through it anyway; it would not have been seemly for the margravine to walk.

Once again she knelt in the dim candle-glow of the refrigerated temple and looked up at the lovely ice-statues of the Lord and Lady and asked them to tell her what she should do, or at least to send a sign to show her that the things she had already done were right.