Fever Crumb Part 15

"It's a good thing we put Ted in instead of old Gilpin Wheen. Gilpin Wheen wouldn't have lasted ten seconds against this geezer."

"Gilpin Wheen wouldn't have asked him for a fight in the first place, you great soft blogger."

And the shouts going on all the time, booming off the walls all round the square, while pigeons scattered into the sky, and the two men grappled and went rolling in each other's arms down the Barbican steps.

Inside the Barbican, everyone had forgotten Dr. Crumb. He came out onto a high balcony and peered down into the square with the sort of concentration he usually reserved for petri dishes and bits of alum paper.

Below him, Ted had gained the upper hand. But it was only for a moment. Quercus was as slippery as an elver, and the brisk blows he kept landing on Ted's ears and jaw were making the pub keeper slow and stupid. There was blood on both men's faces now, blood spotting the steps and the cobbles of the square, and Ted had spat out a couple of teeth that he could ill afford to lose. But he kept fighting. He was glad, in a way, that the northerner hadn't proved as fragile as he'd expected. This way all London could see the fight was fair, and when he won it they'd rise up and turf these nomads out and carry him shoulder high, the way the crowds at Pickled Eel used to when he laid out one of the Pa tension's champions.

But he knew that he was flagging. It was time to end this punch-up. Grabbing Quercus by his upper body, Swiney started maneuvering him toward the trestles that supported that giant barrel of Brimstone Best. A few men had climbed up onto the trestles as the fight began, and anyone who wasn't in the know would have thought they were just up there for a better view. But one of them was Mutt Gnarly and another was Brickie Chapstick, and Ted had given secret orders to them both.

Chapter 35 Mementoes.

Fever was walking through memories, following her mother and the Stalker Grike along the tunnel, with Corvus and Lammergeier marching behind her. It was so like the first time she'd walked there, with Kit Solent. And so like other times, when G.o.dshawk had come this way, hurrying off to spend a few quiet hours in his workroom between meetings at the Barbican. The old man's memories were pouring into her mind, and the farther she went along that winding way the more frequently she caught herself believing that she was G.o.dshawk, and that the woman who strode ahead of her was her daughter.

She remembered standing outside Nonesuch House, looking north to London. But instead of the real city she saw the future London that G.o.dshawk had imagined. The Barbican was repaired. It had wheels and tracks again, as it had when it first brought the Scriven south, but it was ten times larger than it had been then. Even Fever's own memories of the Movement's traction fortress couldn't compete with it. In G.o.dshawk's vision the whole of London had been stripped and cannibalized to build three tall tiers of houses, parks, and manufactories on its back, and the thunder from its giant engines drummed across the Brick Marsh, startling up wildfowl from the reed beds as the whole structure began dragging itself laboriously across the earth on banks of huge wheels....

"A moving city!" she said, stopping short. "I -- I mean he -- he meant to move London.... The thing in the vault, it's an engine, isn't it?" She remembered the designs she had seen in the notebook at Kit Solent's place. She remembered drawing them now. Just doodles, they had been; the first inklings of an idea. "An external combustion engine, based on an Ancient device called a Stirling engine, but far more efficient ..."

Wavey had stopped walking, too. She stood with her lantern raised, her face turned back to look at Fever. "G.o.dshawk believed that with a few dozen such engines he could move London. He had time to build only one before the Skinners murdered him."

Fever shook her head, clearing away the memories. "But why would anyone want a moving city?"

Wavey laughed. "Perhaps it takes a nomad to see the beauty of it. G.o.dshawk only envisaged moving London once. He meant it to carry the Scriven to the sh.o.r.es of the Middle Sea where they would settle down again, far from angry Londoners and the spreading ice. Quercus has other plans. He means to make London the first true nomad city. He means it to keep on traveling the world, taking whatever it needs from other cities that haven't the means to get out of his path."

"That's not what I intended!" said Fever, G.o.dshawkishly. And then, more like herself, 'That's irrational! It's deranged!"

Her mother made a pretty, dismissive movement with one long white hand in the lantern light. "I suppose it's a nomad thing. Who cares? By telling Quercus about G.o.dshawk's plans and G.o.dshawk's engines I made him the instrument of my revenge. Thanks to him, London will be humbled; its streets will be torn down to provide raw materials, its people will be forced to toil at building G.o.dshawk's dream. A thousand years from now the Scriven will be forgotten, but the world will still remember Auric G.o.dshawk, the man who set a city moving!"

It seemed to Fever much more likely that it would be Quercus who got the credit, should the unlikely scheme succeed. But she did not say so, and Wavey, after smiling fiercely at her for a moment, turned and walked on. Fever and the Stalkers went with her. And perhaps because she now knew each twist and dip of the way so well, or perhaps because she was so taken up with G.o.dshawk's salvaged memories that she was not aware of much else, it seemed to Fever only a little time before the pa.s.sage widened into the antechamber where the vault door waited.

The Stalkers' green eyes swept the walls of the antechamber, and their beam came to rest on the other door, the door with the ivory handle, which led to the upper world.

It was open. And when Wavey went and opened it still wider and looked up the long throat of the stairway there was a dim hint of daylight high above which told them that the outer door was open, too. Fever supposed that she and Kit had forgotten to shut them when they came back inside after Creech was shot. That had been less than twenty-four hours ago, but so much had happened since then that the memory felt more ancient than one of G.o.dshawk's.

Wavey returned to the vault door. She lifted her lantern again. Fever looked at the lock. For a moment she was afraid that all her misfortunes would have driven the number that opened it out of her head, but she just had to stop thinking for a second and it was there. She closed her eyes and carefully pressed each key in turn, watching Auric G.o.dshawk's old speckled fingers type out the sequence. 2519364085.

The lock ticked. The door gave a little s.h.i.+ver, like something waking itself from sleep. Fever heard her mother make a soft sound, deep in her throat, almost a purr. Then the door slid swiftly up into the roof. Behind it was another, but that was already sliding to the right, and behind that was a third that went left.

And behind that, darkness, and faint s.h.i.+fting shards of lantern light bouncing back from dusty metal surfaces.

Wavey took out a pencil and a note tablet and carefully wrote down the code while her Stalkers dragged Kit's heavy toolbox halfway across the doorsill and left it there to stop the door from closing behind them. Wavey had loved her father, but she did not trust him, and Fever, knowing how the old man's mind had worked, knew that it would have been just like him to install some trap or trick that would slam the doors behind them and leave them both entombed.

They picked up their lanterns and stepped across the threshold, cautious and curious as a pair of cats.

Roaring with the rage of the fight, Ted slammed his fists and knees against Quercus's thinner, fitter body, driving him backward. Quercus fought back, landing a blow on Ted's right ear that jarred his skull and sent pain spiking through his head. He grabbed Quercus's hand, his shoulder, brought his head down like a hammer on the younger man's face. Quercus started to fall, but Ted grabbed him by his belt and hair and flung him bodily down in the shadow of the mighty keg.

"Swiney!" roared the crowd, the voice of London drowning out the shouts of the nomads.

Ted looked at him lying there, between the trestles that held the fat barrel up. The cobbles all round it were puddled with the beer that last night's revellers had spilled. The fumes alone were probably enough to set Quercus's head reeling. He would go to meet his G.o.ds stinking like a barroom rug.

Ted lifted his swollen, bloodied head and nodded at Mutt and Brickie, up on the trestles. And Mutt and Brickie, just as he'd told them to, kicked hard against the chocks they'd driven in between the trestle and the keg while everyone was watching the fight, and jumped clear.

Except, like the stupid, drunken cloots they were, they didn't do it quite at the same time, the way Ted had told them. Instead of coming down square and mas.h.i.+ng Quercus like a c.o.c.kroach, one end of the barrel smashed down before the other, missing him by inches. The nomad squirmed swiftly backward, shouting something furious and foreign at Ted.

That was Ted's last sight of him. A half second later the other end of the barrel came down, hiding him from sight. Beer spurted between the staves, but the hoops held it in shape, and the slight camber of the square set it rolling, and its own huge weight kept it coming, straight toward Ted.

"Oh, Cheesers Crice ," he said, not scared, just furious at the never-ending uselessness of Mutt and Brickie. He eyed the barrel sullenly as it rumbled toward him, taller than three men, beer slos.h.i.+ng about inside and the old anvil he'd added for flavoring going dunk, dunk, dunk in there somewhere like the clapper of a wooden bell. Ted waited till it was close before he stepped sideways out of its path with that surprising, prizefighter's grace that he'd used in the old days to dodge charging Stalkers and mounted gladiators.

Only in the ring at Pickled Eel Circus there had always been sawdust to stand on, not smooth cobbles slippery with spilled beer. His heel came down in a puddle of Brimstone Best, and slid from under him. He fell heavily, and before he could rise, the barrel with its heavy planks and thick iron hoops was upon him.

It looked, as it came down on him, rather like a huge wheel.

There was a thick crunch, and a sudden silence in the square. The barrel rolled on, drawing a long red stripe across the pavement until it came to a gentle stop against the water trough. Men were running forward to help Quercus to his feet. Mutt and Brickie and a few other London lads hurried to where Ted lay, but they'd have needed spatulas to get him off the cobbles. The barrel had ironed him as flat as a paper boy.

The silence lasted just a heartbeat more. Then everyone was shouting again. " Quercus! Quercus !" they chanted, as the battered nomad hobbled up the steps, turning at the top to raise both fists in victory. And it wasn't just the men he'd brought with him who were cheering him. Because, say what you will about Londoners, they enjoyed a good, fair fight, and they had always loved a winner.

Chapter 36 The Stalker's Question.

A low, unwindowed room, ribbed with stone b.u.t.tresses. Bra.s.s lamps shaped like lilies hanging from the roof, if you ignored the dust, the vault had the look of a place only lately abandoned. Piles of papers lay waiting to be filed on shelves. A cup stood on a desk, and when Fever peered into it she saw the brown, crystallized dregs of G.o.dshawk's morning coffee.

Tall figures stood in a rank along the farthest wall, and seemed to move when she lifted her lantern to look at them. Corvus, Lammergeier, and Grike all bared their claws while Wavey instantly darted a hand into her bag and brought it out clutching that clumsy gun, the magneto pistol from the Resurrectory. But it was only shadows that had moved; thick, solid-seeming shadows that swung through the dusty air as the lanterns s.h.i.+fted. The Stalkers that stood against the wall were old and lightless-eyed and they wore veils and trains of dusty cobwebs like a row of jilted brides. A few were without their heads. Dimly, from the back of Fever's memory, their names came wafting. Salvage. Rusty. Clockwork Joe .

"There's another chamber," she said. "And then another beyond that ..."

They moved toward the dead Stalkers. There was a narrow door in the wall behind them. They wove a path to it between the spiky, silent figures, and Wavey kept her strange gun ready.

Corvus shoved open the door and pushed through it into a second chamber, identical in size and shape to the first. Fever, Wavey, and the other Stalkers went after him. These rooms were hexagonal, fitted together like the cells of a honeycomb. In this one were shelves of strange old medical devices, and a slab just like the one on which Kit Solent had been remade as Grike. Fever remembered being G.o.dshawk, standing at that slab to fumble in the brains of the living and the dead. She remembered the sharp, off-white smell of the chemicals, the deep copper tang of blood. She did not remember the little cot that her torch revealed-in the shadows behind it. Here, in this room, she, too, had been remade.

She let her light go wandering over the rows of vials and syringes, the ranked bottles with their dusty, unreadable labels, the cobwebbed trays of catlins and retractors. How hard and patiently the old man must have worked down here to save his tiny granddaughter! And for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps he had not simply done it out of a desire to fill her head with his own thoughts and memories. Perhaps G.o.dshawk's consciousness was not inside her after all. Maybe he had failed to transfer more than a few fragments of himself into those old Stalker brains he'd brought back from the north. And maybe he had known he'd failed. When he put that machine in baby Fever's brain it might not have been an attempt to preserve his own personality. It might have been just a last, desperate effort to save his daughter's child. An old man, alone with a dying baby, grabbing up an abandoned experiment and thinking, let's see if this does any good....

Perhaps he realized, there at the end, that immortality wasn't won by designing engines, or building sky-high statues, or stuffing your thoughts into other heads, but just by keeping your children and their children safe, so that they could carry something of you on into the future. Not your opinions, or your silly memories of pools and parties and kissing people in parks, but the deeper memories, written in your genes; the shape of a nose, the curve of an eyebrow, the little habits and mannerisms which endure through families, through history.

Perhaps he hadn't even known, when he placed that device in baby Fever's brain, that it contained anything of himself at all. And Fever, standing in his workroom now, felt for the first time a sort of affection for him, and a sort of grat.i.tude.

She looked up. Grike stood nearby, the green light from his eyes flickering as he studied the slab where G.o.dshawk had tinkered with his Stalkers. Was he remembering his own creation, in Wavey's Resurrectory? Or was some deeper feeling stirring in him? Fever watched uneasily as his bared claws flinched. Told herself not to be silly. He's not Kit Solent. He's just a machine now....

Wavey, meanwhile, had crossed the room along with Corvus and Lammergeier and thrown open another door. "Fever!" she said excitedly. "Come and look! Wait till Quercus sees this?'

But as Fever started to move toward the doorway, the Stalker Grike barred her way.

" what am i ?" he asked.

She hadn't heard him speak before. He had the same flat, awful voice as the other Stalkers, nothing at all like Kit Solent's. The bladed hand he raised in front of her was trembling. " who am i? what has been done to me?"

"I don't ... I don't ... said Fever, not knowing what to say.

But before she could say anything, Grike's fellow Stalkers had reacted. She saw their heads whip round at the sound of his voice, visors down and green light flaring through the eye-slits. In the Lazarus Brigade it sometimes happened that a battle-damaged Stalker would go mad, las.h.i.+ng out at his comrades, even claiming to remember his mortal life. They knew what had to be done. They turned toward Grike, and the crash of armor against armor echoed from the low roof. Fever threw herself sideways as Grike stepped back out of the way of Corvus's blades. Whatever had gone wrong inside his Stalker's brain, it had not slowed or weakened him. He recovered in an instant, slammed Corvus's second blow aside, and drove his own blades through the other Stalker's armor, deep into the organs and machinery beneath. There were sparks and a glittering spray of fluids. Corvus gave a grating roar, and Grike drew back and struck again. Corvus fell sideways, spewing smoke and a smell of burned wiring, the green glow of his eyes going out. Lammergeier circled warily just beyond the reach of Grike's talons. In the doorway of the inner chamber Wavey G.o.dshawk appeared, the magneto pistol in her hands.

"Something's gone wrong with him!" Fever screamed. "Stop him!"

Her mother raised the pistol, pointing it at Grike's head. Grike lunged forward, seizing Lammergeier by his armored wrists. The vault was too small a s.p.a.ce for such large creatures to fight in. An upended shelf spilled laboratory gla.s.sware; a cabinet was kicked into splinters. Grike twisted Lammergeier sideways, s.h.i.+elding himself with the other Stalker's body as Wavey pulled the pistol's trigger. The pistol made a thin whining sound, almost lost in the clash and scuffle of the struggling Stalkers. Lammergeier, caught by its blast, went rigid, juddering. Grike levered his head off, shoved the body aside and strode toward the door, where Wavey stood fumbling with the magneto pistol.

"Wavey!" screamed Fever.

She saw Wavey look up, and watched her realize that she had no time to recharge the pistol. Her face was a ghastly green in the light from the Stalker's eyes. He smashed her aside, looked through the doorway into the far room, then turned back. The beams of his eyes swept past Fever, but he was not interested in her. He looked again at G.o.dshawk's cobwebby equipment, then turned and went striding from the chamber. Fever heard him go cras.h.i.+ng through the first room, blundering out into the antechamber. Heard his heavy footfalls go stamping up the stairs and into silence.

For a moment she felt too frightened to move, but she shut her eyes tight and repeated the Laws of Motion until she felt stronger. Then she picked up her lantern and stepped over the wreckage of Lammergeier and Corvus to the inner door.

She had prepared herself to see her mother dead, like Kit Solent on the heath. But Wavey was still moving, sprawled on the stone floor of the inner room. Above her, forgotten, G.o.dshawk's giant city-s.h.i.+fting engine stood like a huge totem, reflecting gleams of lamplight from a hundred dusty fins and ducts.

Fever knelt down by her mother, and a sudden G.o.dshawk-memory showed her Wavey as a little girl, fallen over on the drive and crying, " Ow, ow, ow !"

"Ow ," said Wavey, s.h.i.+fting, trying to find comfort on the hard, dusty floor. She found none. The Stalker's blades had not ripped her, but his armored fist had struck her like a hammer and flung her hard against the engine. Bones had shattered. Tears of pain shone on her face, and the sight of them filled Fever with panic. What should she do? What should she do?

"Go back to London, quickly!" her mother said, reaching up and touching her, stroking her face with a shaking hand. "There is something wrong with that Stalker; the brain I put into him must have some fault. I should not have brought him here...."

"It is irrational to build machines whose principles you do not understand and whose actions you cannot predict," said Fever, her Engineer's att.i.tudes spilling out in spite of herself. "This mobile city you propose will be the same. Where will it lead?"

Wavey wasn't listening. "Go, Fever.'" she said. "What if the Stalker returns?"

Fever looked sideways and saw the magneto pistol lying on the floor. A small green light shone like a sequin on its handle to let her know that it was charged. She picked it up and it felt odd and heavy in her hand.

"Leave me that," begged Wavey. "Go!"

"I'm going to go and find Master Solent," said Fever. "It would be unwise to leave him alone up there."

"Why can't you do as you're told? He could kill you!" Wavey struggled to raise herself, but the pain was too much and she fell back, half fainting. "Great Scrivener!"

Fever stood up, backing away from her. "Someone else will come soon. Quercus will come, won't he, when his fight is won?"

It felt wrong to leave her mother there, weeping with pain and unable to move. But feelings mean nothing, Fever reminded herself. She gripped the magneto pistol and went quickly out of the vault and up the stairs that led to the old garden.

Chapter 37 The Magneto Gun.

Ruan had promised that it was going to be fun, but Ruan .was silly because it wasn't fun at all. They had come all through that horrid tunnel, scared of ghosties and Dapplejacks all the way, and the walk had made their legs ache very badly and at the end of it there was just a horrid room with boxes in it, and they couldn't sleep there because it smelled funny and they were scared the ghosties might come for them out of the tunnel. So Ruan had found this door and they'd sneaked up the steps and reached another door and gone out through it into open air and there'd been trees and the moon. And Ruan had said, "Now it will be fun! We'll sleep under the stars, like children in a story!" But it still wasn't fun, because he'd made her climb all up a horrible steep hill and her shoes had got wet and she'd dropped Noodle Poodle and they'd had to find him in the dark and at the hill's top there was a horrid ruin just full of ghosties so they didn't go in there but went round it instead and found a sort of summer house with moss and ivy instead of a roof and they went in there and Ruan covered them over with leaves the way the Helpful Birds did to the children in the storybook, only it didn't work because the wind blew through all the holes in the summer house and the leaves that were dry blew away and rustled like ghosties in the corner and the leaves that were wet were cold and clammy. So she'd cried and said she wanted to go home, and Ruan had cried, too, and they'd been afraid to put the candle out, and he'd read them a story out of the red storybook, and somehow they had fallen asleep.

Now Fern was awake, all cold and stiff. It was horrible sleeping outside. She wanted Daddy, and she wanted to go home. Ruan was still sleeping, with his hair flopped over his face. "Wake up, Ruan," she said, but he just grunted at her and stayed sleeping. She rummaged in the bedspread bundle and found a bit of cake for breakfast and went outside with it, breaking off crumbs to give to Noodle Poodle.

It was just starting to get light, and it was very quiet because even the birds were still asleep. There was mist all round the hill and the hill stuck out of the top of it in sunlight and little jewels of water were s.h.i.+ning on the gra.s.s. And up the hill, out of the mist, came a man made all out of metal, with knives for fingernails.

Fern looked at him. He looked at Fern. Fern smiled at him. "It's Daddy!" she shouted, and ran toward him as fast as her fat little legs would carry her.

There were footprints all the way up the stairs. The new Stalker's huge, blank prints, and Fever's scuffly boot-marks from the day before, and here and there a tiny print, like the print of a child's shoe. Fever, running toward daylight and the open air, was so confused by G.o.dshawk's crowding memories that she imagined those footprints might be Wavey's, and Wavey still a little girl.

The door at the top of the stairs still stood wide open where the Stalker Grike had shouldered his way out. Outside, mist hung thick and white above the dripping bushes. Fever started climbing and stopped on the first terrace, near one of the pools. The mist pressed close all round her, as if she were something precious, wrapped in cotton wool. The pool in front of her was green with weed, but at the same time, superimposed upon it, she could see it as it had looked twenty years before. She went down on her hands and knees on the mossy concrete at the edge of it and looked down, and she saw a) a surface of small green leaves, packed so tight that the water was hidden, and b) a clear pool, six feet deep, with speckled carp drifting lazily beneath the lily pads.

She pinched herself, trying to dim the insistent memories. She was not G.o.dshawk. And nor was she the daughter Wavey wanted her to be, or the Engineer Dr. Crumb had wanted to turn her into. She was sick of being the vessel for other people's hopes....

The weight of the strange gun in her hand made her think of Kit Solent and the thing he had become, if she could just find him, and use the gun on him, at least she would have achieved something for herself. But how was she to find him in this fog, with G.o.dshawk's memories flitting between the trees like phantoms?

She was about to shout his name when she heard another voice, a child's voice, high above her in the mist. "Daddy!"

She knew then who it was that had come through the tunnel ahead of her and opened the door. She knew who had made those small footprints on the stairs. She knew that Fern and Ruan had come to Nonesuch Hill, and that the new Stalker had found them there.

But at the same moment, and before she could react to that new knowledge, she heard someone come out of the doorway below her and start running uphill toward her.

"Quick," she said urgently, turning, imagining that it was Quercus or some of his men, freshly arrived through the tunnel.

But it was Charley Shallow.