by Philip Reeve
7
NEWS FROM THE NORTH
he main cabin of the Knuckle Sandwich was a cosy place, warmed by a big iron stove, where the carnival’s fighters and musicians sat about drinking from tin mugs and helping themselves to slices of pie. It was all so neat and small and cosy, and so rational in the clever way that so many cupboards and lockers and fold-down seats fitted into the tight space, that Fever could almost have imagined herself back aboard the Lyceum, except that the occupants were so strange, and so many of them wore bandages and sticking-plasters over fresh wounds, and there was such a smell of sweat and liniment mingling with the odours of the pie. Also, weapons hung on the walls instead of plates or pictures, and items of spiked and studded armour dangled from a line above the stove, steaming gently where the blood had been sponged off them. The Stalker stood motionless in a corner, draped with damp laundry.
Even though she had worked out that most of the wounds the fighters had suffered were pretend, Fever was still startled to see just how unharmed they were. That small, dark man, the Knave of Knives – she was sure she’d seen him torn across the face with Lady Midnight’s flail, but there wasn’t a scratch on him anywhere now.
“Look who’s here!” said Borglum loudly, showing his guests in.
Some of the misshapes cheered as Wavey entered, some just smiled, but they all looked happy to see her. These people were a family for each other, and Wavey was a part of it. It seemed that Fever and her father could be part of it too, if they wanted, for the misshapes greeted them both with huge kindness when Borglum explained who they were. But they could not join in the conversations which were flowering around Wavey, the “how have you been”s and “how you’ve changed”s of old friends meeting. They stood uneasily at the edge of the gathering, listening without really understanding while Wavey joked with Borglum’s bowler-hatted bargemaster Ned Fenster about some adventure they’d shared out in the Birkenmark, and admired the claws of the lobster-girl, whose name was Lucy.
“Your mum made me my first pair when I was little,” Lucy said, grinning shyly at Fever. “Borglum and Master Fenster copied her design to make me these.”
At last Dr Crumb found a chance to say, “But Wavey, how do you know these good people?”
“You mean she didn’t tell you?” asked several of the misshapes all together. “You mean she never told you about the Carnival of Knives? Oh, Wavey! Oh, Duchess!” And Lady Midnight, who had swapped her armour for a fluffy pink cardigan, said chidingly, “Is it that you’re ashamed of us, Wavey?”
“Of course not, Agnes, dear,” said Wavey, caught out, and blushing a little.
“Of course she is,” said Borglum. He clambered on to a leather armchair near the stove and pulled out his pipe. “When you become a fine lady, Agnes Ndende, and marry a good gent like Dr Crumb, I don’t expect you’ll tell him about how you used to trundle round the north-country with a rough ’n’ tumble carny crew. But that’s what Wavey did, Doc, for a couple o’ years. And mighty good at it she was, too, and much we miss her. So sit down, sit down, and grab a bit o’ pie, and Borglum will tell you all about it.”
Fever and her father sat. There seemed to be no choice. The misshapes were all sitting down too, apparently looking forward to Borglum’s tale. One of the musicians teased gentle music from a harp with her seven-fingered hands. Wavey said protestingly again, “I am not ashamed of you, of course I’m not,” and took a seat beside her husband.
Borglum lit his pipe and looked at his little audience through its smoke.
“Well, here’s the thing,” he said, “and some of you has heard it before, and some of you maybe hasn’t, having joined our merry band after the Duchess left us. But this here is the story of how she came to join us in the first place, and I don’t blame her a jot for never having told it to the doc and Fever here, for there’s parts of it as must be hurtful to her to think of.
“We was up in the Birkenmark that summer,” he remembered. “It was the year the Scriven were overthrown in London, and news of it had just reached the north. We was setting up the show in the old caravanserai at Ulm when we heard of some travelling Londoners who’d captured a Scriven maid. Skinners, these bozos called theirselves, and they was bragging about how they’d drag this girl home with them to London Town an’ flay the hide off her in Barbican Square. The last of the Scriven, that’s what they said she was.
“Well, we didn’t like that sort of talk. You see, Dr Crumb, we’ve got a sympathy for misshapes and outlandish folk, as you can imagine. And while the Scriven had always been a bit too high-and-mighty for my liking, I found I didn’t much care for the idea of this one losing her skin. It was about all she had left at that point, except for her bones, which poked out through it like sticks in a bag.
“Well, the Carnival of Knives can always use an extra freak, and it seemed to me that if this poor quail was really the last of the Scriven, that made her valuable to a showman like myself. So I made those Skinner boys an offer. Give us the girl and they’d get a purse of silver and free tickets to the show. Mighty generous, I thought. But those boys weren’t interested in money (which is a sure sign of danger in a man). So Quatch and Lady Midnight made them a different sort of offer, namely, give us the girl and they’d get to keep on breathing. Even that they turned down. It’s funny how blokes like them will always think they’re sharper and quicker than poor mis-formed folk like us, and how often they are wrong. When negotiations closed there were a few less Skinners in the world and your mother had become a carny girl.
“And do you know what was the first thing she said, when we brought her aboard the Sandwich and took off the gag those Skinners had put on her? Why, she just looked around, cool as a cucumber, calm as a courgette, and she says, ‘I expect you could use a technomancer.’ Turned out she wasn’t just the Last Living Dapplejack, but a machine-wrangler too, and soon she was rigging up murdering machines to thrill our punters, as fierce as any that ever spilled a fighter’s blood at Pickled Eel Circus. Halved the coal our engines ate, to boot. Even made herself a boiler-plate bikini and took turns in the fighting pit herself sometimes, though we had to paint some extra speckles on her, since the Scrivener had been so parsimonious with her pigmentation.”
He sighed, and a smoke ring wobbled up out of his pipe and hung in the air above his head like a fading halo. “She was our wonder girl,” he said. “Near broke my black old heart when we stopped among the Movement’s forts one time and she chose to up and leave us and become technomancer to Quercus. Not that I blame her for it. She’s a lady, and made for better things than this old carnival.”
He fell silent, watching the flames in the stove. Was that a tear glinting in the crease beneath his eye?
“You said you had news for me, Jasper,” Wavey reminded him, after a little while.
Borglum looked up. “That’s right. I ’spect it’s nothing, but you told me once how old Godshawk went expeditioning up into the edges of the ice, and how he found an old tower there, a pirrie-mid sorta thing, up in Caledon.”
Wavey nodded. “A place the snowmads call Skrevanastuut. That’s right. Godshawk thought it might be important, but he had a terrible time getting there. When he finally reached the pyramid, he found that there was no way in. He came home knowing nothing more about its origins than when he left London. It was long ago. I was just a little girl.”
“Well, I remember you telling me that story,” said Borglum. “And I heard something else just recently that brought it to mind. I was talking to a scavenger named Duergar, who’d been up in them hills last summer, and lingered too long, and got caught by the first snow. Struggling south again he’d lost his way, and fetched up at this pirrie-mid of yours, which most folks in the north know to avoid, because it’s the haunt of ghosts and nightwights and the walking dead. He told me that there’s a way in now. Those earth-storms we’ve had up north these past few years have opened a crack or a fissure or something, and he reckoned that somebody could get inside, if they wanted to. Whi
ch he didn’t, on account of how haunted and unlucky the place is. He was dying when I talked with him, and he blamed his sickness on having spent just one night in the shadow of that pirrie-mid. Though given how much he drank, I ’spect it was booze that killed him, not a curse.”
Wavey said nothing. Dr Crumb looked at her inquiringly and said, “I have heard of these pyramids. There are several of them, far to the north, on the High Ice. It is where Stalker brains are supposed to have come from. I did not know that there were any so far south as Caledon. . .”
“There aren’t,” said Wavey. “All the pyramids that we know of on the ice were looted long ago. This one at Skrevanastuut is different. It is smaller, and Godshawk believed that it might be even older.”
“Perhaps the first Stalker-builders made it and then moved north to construct the others,” reasoned Dr Crumb. “The world may have been warmer then.”
Wavey was looking at the fire. She said, “Godshawk believed that the Skrevanastuut structure might hold . . . oh, all sorts of secrets.”
“If there is really a way in, we shall soon hear all about them,” said Dr Crumb. “Some scavenger or archaeologist will have penetrated its mysteries by now.”
“Not likely,” said Borglum. “The passes have all been closed by winter since old Duergar came by. Even if they weren’t, the place is cursed.”
“My dear sir, there is no such thing as a curse.”
“Maybe not. But the snowmads believe there is, and they’re the only people likely to go a-roaming in those lonely hills. They’ll steer clear of that old pirrie-mid, be it open or shut.”
Wavey laughed her silvery laugh. “Dear Jasper! And you came all this way just to tell me of it.”
“Not just that, Duchess.” Borglum blushed a deep red. “We’re here on business, like I said.”
The barge shook with footsteps. The cabin door opened to let in Quatch and the snowmad boy. Borglum jumped up, saying, “You remember Quatch, Duchess, and here is one of our new recruits, Harrison Stickle. We call him Stick.”
It seemed that Wavey did remember Quatch, for she was already hugging him, snuggling her head against his hairy shoulder, while Dr Crumb looked on and worried about fleas. Fever made a neat, Engineerish bow to Harrison Stickle, who looked away from her and said to Borglum, “We chased that snooper far into the tents, chief, but there we lost him. . .”
*
In the chamber behind the altar Charley had struggled with his captors, uncertain how many they were or what they meant to do with him. In the confusion he imagined that they must be some of Borglum’s people, and bit desperately at the hand which was gagging him.
“Ow! Keep still, kid!” said a gruff voice. “Do you want those northish ’shapes to find us all?”
Charley went still. He heard other people round him keeping still too: their breathing; the sounds their clothes made as they shifted. Outside, the voices of his hunters moved away.
“They’ve gone,” a woman’s voice said.
Someone opened the shade of a dark-lantern and yellow light washed over wall paintings of scenes from the Life of St Kylie. The place was a robing room where the priestesses of the cult changed into their mitres and ceremonial hot-pants on festival days. The woman who had spoken looked like a priestess herself; dark robes, and the saffron mark of the saint on her high white forehead. Two men stood with her; ordinary men, with ordinary faces attached to ordinary bodies, clad in the overalls of workers on the new city. One held a pair of paint pots, so it seemed safe to assume that these were the people who had just finished painting the roundel of the London Underground on the temple wall when Charley blundered in.
He supposed that he should feel afraid of them. Everyone knew that the London Underground were terrorists. But they seemed so much less frightening than the fighters from the Carnival of Knives that it was hard to feel anything but relieved.
“Why were they after you?” the woman asked.
“Saw me nosing round their circus,” said Charley.
“I told you we should let them take him,” said one of the men, the older one, whose cropped white hair glittered like hoar frost in the lantern light. “They’d probably just have given him a good hiding and let him go. Now he’s seen us.”
“We’ll have to kill him,” said the other man, but he didn’t sound very convinced, and neither of his friends took any notice.
The priestess moved closer to Charley, studying the knife they’d taken from him. She was a tall, plain-featured woman with a stale, sweetish smell of incense coming off her clothes each time she moved. She read the legend on the knife’s handle and then looked hard into Charley’s face. “He’s the Skinner’s boy!” she said. She shut the knife and turned to her friends. “Don’t you remember the upsets before the Movement came? He’s Bagman Creech’s boy, I’d swear to it!”
Charley felt grateful to her for remembering. There’d be no question of harming him now that they knew who he was. He smiled his friendliest smile.
The older man turned away in disgust. “Some Skinner’s boy! He works for that Dapplejack slut who Quercus made Chief Engineer.”
“That’s not true!” said Charley. “I mean, it is, but I never asked to work for her. It’s no fault of mine she got set up over the whole Guild. I hate her. That’s what got me in trouble tonight. I was spying on her. Her and her Scriven-loving husband, and that scrawny brat of theirs. . .”
“I thought you said you was at the Carnival of Knives?” the young man growled.
“I was! An’ so was they!”
All three of them looked sharply at him. The white-haired man said, “Wavey Godshawk was there?”
Charley nodded. “She knows that dwarf showman. I heard them talk. He brought news for her from the north. Something about some power.”
Both men looked at the priestess.
“Which power?” she said. “Arkhangelsk?”
“I dunno. I couldn’t hear much. Then I had to scarper.”
Charley didn’t know why, but what he’d said had made his three new friends tense like spooked dogs. They kept glancing at each other, asking questions with their eyes that they didn’t want to voice in Charley’s presence. He felt pleased.
“I can find out,” he said. “I’ll find out what she’s up to, if you want, and come and tell you.”
The older man sniffed. “You know who we are, kid?”
Charley nodded eagerly. “I saw that sign you painted. You’re the Underground, ain’t you?”
The man nodded. “We’re the only ones in London with the guts to stand up to Quercus and stop him stealing our city away.”
“Well, I can help,” said Charley earnestly. “You just have to let me know where I can find you again. . .”
8
PLANS
o, Snow Leopard. You are Chief Engineer, and we have a city to move. We cannot afford to lose you.”
Not many people dared say no to Wavey Godshawk, but Nikola Quercus, Lord Mayor of London, Land-Admiral of the Movement, was one of them. He was a mild-looking man, no taller than Dr Crumb, pale-complexioned, dressed in a simple grey tunic with none of the braid or jewellery that Movement warriors usually favoured. He did not look like a man who had conquered and looted half the cities of the Birkenmark, or fought off the Suomi horde at Hill of Skulls, or won himself an empire that stretched all the way north from the Anglish Sea into the Fuel Country. Yet he had done all of those things, and many more, and now he sat at the Crumbs’ breakfast table in the watery sunlight of a London summer, looking at the map of the north which Wavey had spread out there.
“Where did you say this black pyramid lies?”
“Just here, Lord Mayor. . .” The map had been rolled, and showed a tendency to curl up at the edges. Wavey walked around the table, weighting the corners down with three cups and a jam-pot. She leaned over her lord mayor’s shoulder and pointed to a spot among the busy contour lines of the old Scottish mountains. “The pyramid is not marked. Godshawk knew where it lay;
I remember him pointing it out to me on his charts. Alas, those perished with him in the Skinners’ Riots.”
“That is beyond the edges of the ice.”
“Not quite. Not at present. Not in the summertime.”
Wavey had been thinking all night about Borglum’s news, and she had come down to breakfast determined to set off for Skrevanastuut at once. None of the sensible, rational objections which Fever or Dr Crumb raised could stop her from summoning the Lord Mayor and explaining her scheme to him. Now they sat mutely watching while Quercus raised all the same arguments that they had tried.
“It’s savage country north of London. The brigand-kings of Leeds and Lincoln have no love for Londoners.”
Wavey chuckled. “I am not proposing to go alone. I hoped I could borrow one of your landships, and a few of your soldiers. We’ll take your excellent new roads north over the old sea, and avoid all the savages. We shall meet no brigand-kings when we reach Caledon; no one lives there at all.”
“Only nightwights,” said Quercus darkly.
“Nightwights?” Wavey laughed again. “Bogey men for nomad nursemaids to frighten little children with. Surely you do not still believe in nightwights, my Lord Mayor?”
Quercus said, “If you really think there is valuable old-tech in this pyramid, we could send another Engineer. Steepleton, or Lark.”
“Lord Mayor, did I not explain? This place may have been made by the first Stalker builders. We might find Stalker brains there, which would be useful enough, since we have no spares left, and our Stalkers are wearing out at a frightening rate. Or we may find something better: the secret of making Stalker brains for ourselves; the answer to the mystery of how the Stalkers are powered. You think the new London is mighty now? Imagine how much mightier it would be if you could power it by Molecular Clockwork!”