by Philip Reeve
Fever glanced at the names on the Stalkers’ face-shields as she passed them. Neither of them was Shrike. She was glad. She hoped that particular Stalker had been destroyed on the battlefields last year, before the fighting stopped.
Their escort pounded on the main hatch and it heaved open with a squawk of hinges. Just before she followed Wavey inside, Fever looked up and saw, high above her in the evening sky, the scarlet banner of the Marshal in the North rippling from the castle’s topmost turret like a ribbon of blood.
Inside there was gloom, and oil-flames burning in cressets. Warriors welcomed the newcomers and guided them up the long companionways of the castle’s central drum to the heart-chamber. There they found tapestries on the walls; flames roaring in a big stove; the timbers curving overhead like the ribs of a wooden whale. There they found the Marshal waiting.
Other Movement lords whom Fever had met dressed in all sorts of finery; in feathered hats and fancy uniforms they had designed for themselves. Not Raven. He was even plainer in his clothes than Quercus: an old black tunic, scuffed boots and shiny breeches, his short hair finger-combed, a holstered pistol hanging from his broad belt where normal nomad lords would wear a sword. Scars snaked like snail-trails over the worn crag of his face, mementoes of countless fights against the Arkhangelsk, the Suomi, and the Rus.
“Snow Leopard!” he said, when Wavey was shown into his presence. “Welcome to the Raven’s Nest. . .” He had a rough way of speaking. He’d started out as a common mechanic, and he still loved to tinker with his castle’s engines in his spare time. The grooves of his big hands were engrained with oil.
Wavey ignored his smile, lifting her chin in that way she had, Scrivenish, unable to conceal her contempt for normal men and for this man in particular. “What is the meaning of these insults, Marshal? I was stopped upon the road, my friends insulted, my daughter and myself dragged here like captives. . .”
“You are not captives, Snow Lepoard,” said the Marshal. “You are my honoured guests.” His eyes found Fever and narrowed, watching her as intently as he might watch a wing of enemy armour advance across a battlefield. “Your daughter too. I heard a rumour that the Snow Leopard had a cub. She was brought up in London?”
“I am not here to chat about Fever’s upbringing,” snapped Wavey. “I am bound for the hills of Caledon on private business. Your louts have dragged me leagues out of my way. I insist that you let me continue my journey.”
“Impossible,” said Raven. He glanced at his servants, waiting in the corners of the cabin, and clapped his hands. “Wine! Food! Snow Leopard, please, be seated. You too, leopard-cub.”
That meant Fever. She sat down carefully on a padded settle, wondering what was happening. Something had changed in her mother’s face. The Scriven arrogance had drained away, to be replaced by . . . well, if it was not fear, it was something akin to it.
“It seems to me,” said Wavey softly, “that there has been a misunderstanding. I came to the north honestly enough, on a private matter. If I have intruded. . . Raven, if you are doing something here that you do not want Quercus to know about, then forgive me. That is no concern of mine.”
“What do you mean?” asked Raven.
Wavey looked demurely at the deck. “There are an awful lot of mammoths outside. Far more than I recall the Movement ever using in the past.”
“I have made alliances with some other groups.”
The servants, who had scattered through various curtained doorways when Raven clapped his hands, came back quietly, bringing cups of warm spiced wine and plates of pastries. Fever took a cup, although she did not normally drink wine. She liked the spiced smell of it, the warmth of the cup in her hands. Sipping it, she watched the Marshal watch them, and saw the troubled look on his face. The little pastry he picked up looked too small in his big fingers. His duties as a host seemed to make him nervous. She wondered where his wife was. If Wavey was really his guest, why had he not called Mistress Raven to welcome her?
“But what is the purpose of these alliances?” wondered Wavey, in a voice that seemed to say, I am just a poor silly woman, I know nothing of warfare and the ways of men. “I thought the Arkhangelsk were defeated?”
“That fight is finished,” agreed Raven. He drank his wine quickly, set the cup down on a tray that a servant held out for him, and looked hard at Wavey. “What do you think of it, I wonder? What do you really think of this city that Quercus is building?”
Wavey started to chuckle; a soft bubbling sound, low and irresistible. “So that is it! You are making a grab for power! You are gathering an army of your own here, and you mean to set yourself up as Land Admiral over the Movement in Quercus’s place. . .”
“That’s not how it is. . .”
“And you think that by capturing me. . .”
“You don’t understand!”
“Really, Marshal! I’m surprised at you! You were always the most trusted of Quercus’s people. So plain and unimaginative. . .”
“It is not power that I want,” said Raven. “It is just. . . It’s this new city. It’s wrong. It is the beginning of something terrible. I can’t explain it. . .” He stood up again. His boots squeaked as he started to pace to and fro in front of Wavey’s seat. “We are the Movement. We should travel as we have always travelled, free and fast. Going where we will in our campavans and track-houses. Not crammed aboard one single giant machine. The new city will alter everything. It will drain our nomad spirit. It will weaken us. The idea is not even human, is it? It is some crazy Scriven notion that you sowed in Quercus’s mind, Snow Leopard. . .”
Wavey laughed, and Raven stopped, looking angry. He was not used to being laughed at. She said, “Where are you getting this stuff? ‘Drain our nomad spirit’? That’s not you talking! Who has been filling your head with such trash, Raven?”
“There is a new prophet in the north,” he replied. “A lass named Morvish. She has seen it all. Her ancestors have shown her what it will lead to, this new city. She is in the camp now, as it happens, with some of her own people; she has been far abroad, carrying her message to the Suomi and the Samoyed, and she is resting here on her way back to her own people. I shall call for her if you like. . .”
“A prophet?” Wavey giggled. “Oh, Raven, really! There is always some new hedge-prophet springing up in the north. Why would I want to listen to such a person?”
“Because she’ll explain it better than I can,” Raven said. “I’m a simple man, Snow Leopard, I can’t twist words around the way you smart folk do. Maybe if you talk to Cluny Morvish she’ll make you see that this isn’t treachery I’m planning. I’m trying to save the Movement, not take it for my own. . .”
He stumbled over his words, and blushed. Fever, who blushed so easily herself, felt sorry for him, but Wavey just laughed even more. “Even you can hear you’re talking nonsense, Rufus. You have gone bright red! Pretty is she, this Morvish slut? She certainly seems to have turned your head. . .”
Raven glared at her, started to say something, then turned to the men who stood by the door. “Take her. Take both of them.”
The men had been prepared for this. Before Fever understood what was happening one of them had seized her, wrenching one arm behind her back, and was shoving her ahead of him to the door, through which his friend was already pushing Wavey. “This is intolerable!” Wavey shouted. “When Quercus hears of how you’re treating us. . .”
“Quercus will have better things to fret about than you, madam,” Raven shouted behind them, as his men started to drive them down the long, dark throat of a stairwell to the lower decks. “The whole of the north is roused against him! Together we shall sweep him and his new city away!”
14
A SWORD AT SUNSET
he door of the heart-chamber slammed behind them. Their footsteps echoed on the stairs, the two men pushing them hastily down to a silent gun-deck, across it to another stairway, down again. Fever tried to be calm and rational, but she was shaking with fright.
The last time she had been manhandled like this she had ended up tied to the rails of Arlo’s house. . .
Below her, she heard Wavey ask, “Where are you taking us? If I am to be Raven’s hostage I would give a great deal for comfortable quarters. . .”
Her captor let out a snorting laugh. “Hostage? Marshal Raven doesn’t need hostages.”
Wavey started to laugh with him as if he had made a joke that tickled her, and while she laughed she suddenly wrenched herself away from him and twisted and made a hard movement with her hand across his neck, and he flopped back against the stairwell wall with a gurgling shout, his hands to his throat and blood spewing and squirting through the gaps between his fingers. Wavey snatched the pistol from his belt and spun to point it at Fever’s captor, who had let go of Fever and was cursing steadily as he groped for his own gun. Fever felt the pistol-ball flick past her face; the crash of the pistol came an instant later. The cursing stopped suddenly, and the man collapsed and started to slither down the stairs, almost knocking her over. Wavey came up to meet him, stopping him with one foot. The pistol was still in her hand, and in the other Fever saw a little red spike shining, the sharpened hairpin which she’d used to slash the first man’s throat. She must have slipped it into her hair before she came aboard Jotungard, for fear that she was stepping into danger. Or perhaps, after the life she’d led, she was careful to have some small, deadly thing like that about her always.
She dropped the pin and tugged the sword out of the scabbard that trailed from the belt of the man she’d shot. It flashed in the dim stairwell light, and her eyes flashed too, glancing up at Fever. “They were going to kill us,” she said. “Taking us outside to be shot like dogs. I expect the only reason they didn’t do for us upstairs was that Mistress Raven would complain about the mess on her carpets. Raven is terribly hen-pecked. Come on.”
“Where?”
“Outside, quickly, before these charmers’ friends come looking for them.” She dragged Fever after her down the stairs, past the man whose throat she’d cut, down through shadows to a bay on the castle’s bottom level where red evening sunlight came in through the eye-slit in an armoured door. “Open it,” she commanded, and with shaking fingers Fever undid the bolts and pushed it open. Outside a steep wooden gangway led down between two of the castle’s wheels on to the hilltop. At its foot a Stalker stood, its back to the castle, sunset bloodying the huge scrap-metal blade it held. Fever quailed backwards into the shadows of the doorway, but Wavey shoved her forward. They went down the gangway and past the Stalker and he stood unmoving.
“Stupid creatures really,” Wavey said. “He’s been ordered to stop strangers coming in, not out. Now, where are we?”
They were on the narrow margin of land between the castle and the hill’s brink. Heather grew there, and a few sparse pines which had survived the battles of the year before and had not been chopped down for firewood because Raven’s wife felt they improved the view. Behind them in the castle they could hear the shouting of angry men. Someone had found Wavey’s handiwork.
“We must get off this hill and find Borglum,” said Wavey. “He’ll help us.” She set off quickly uphill through the blowing grass, the long, slanting rays of the low sun. The ground sloped steeply, pocked with old shell-holes; pines stuck their roots across the path. Fever saw that her mother was limping again. Behind, the shouts grew louder. She looked back. The castle was leaking armed men. A bullet smacked splinters from a pine-trunk. Wavey turned and raised the pistol, urging Fever on past her as she fired. Two shots; three; a howl from one of their pursuers. Fever scrambled up between the trees and suddenly the ground in front of her dropped away and she was looking down the long scarp of Hill 60 to the scarred old battlefields and tangled woods at its foot. The drop looked almost sheer at first, but then she started to see outcroppings, tussocks, small bushes growing out horizontally from the steeps; handholds which someone in desperate straits might use to clamber down. She thought she could make it, but could Wavey?
Behind her now the clash and ring of blades. Her mother had started up the slope to join her and men from the castle had caught her halfway. Luckily most were only crewmen from Jotungard’s lowest deck and did not seem to carry guns. Wavey faced them in the space between three trees. Even with her old wound slowing her she was quicker than any of the men. She drove her sword through one, hacked down another as he aimed a crossbow at her. There was a pause then and she glanced back at Fever, and her face was beautiful and pale and proud.
“Wavey, we can climb down!” Fever shouted.
“Not me,” said Wavey. “Too old. Too slow. Find Borglum. He’ll help you. Tell him if he won’t I’ll haunt him. . .”
Another enemy was coming at her now, striding uphill through the slanting light with his vast sword raised. The Stalker they had run past earlier had finally understood that they were its enemies.
Wavey looked back once more at Fever. “Run!” she commanded.
But Fever couldn’t; she could only crouch there, staring, while Wavey cast her sword aside and raised the pistol again. There was one last shot in it, and she waited until the Stalker was almost upon her and then fired it in his face. The ricochet shrieked, rebounding from his face-plate in a spurt of sparks. She turned to run but the Stalker was already swinging his sword, and he cut her in half and kicked aside the tumbling pieces of her and came on, all splashed and steaming with her blood.
“Mother!” shouted Fever. “Mummy. . .?”
She had never called Wavey either of those things, and now it was too late, because there was no way in the world that Wavey could be anything but dead. Yet still she crouched there; still she stared, and still she could not run.
The Stalker stopped in front of her. She heard machinery inside him whirr as he raised that sword again. She looked up. The red blade hung over her, but did not fall. There was a notch in its edge where it had severed Wavey’s spine. She moved her eyes from the sword to the Stalker’s face; to its witch-light eyes. Wavey’s shot had set its visor smouldering. The blistered paint was flaking off in little burning curls. She could not read the name which had once been written on its brow.
“Shrike?” she said.
She could not be sure. It might have been any Stalker standing there, but she felt certain it was Shrike, and for some reason of his own he did not kill her but just waited like a red statue, until the men who had been hanging back to watch grew restless and started yelling for him to strike. In Fever’s numb brain echoed Wavey’s voice, nagging her to run.
She ran, fighting down the feeling that it was wrong to leave her mother there alone, knowing that she would feel the guilt of it always. She ran, and the men behind her bayed. She ran, and crossbow bolts flew past her, filling the air with their quick, feathery hiss, and as she reached the brink of the hill one punched her so hard in the back that its fierce little beak stuck out through her chest.
Knocked forward by the force of the blow, she felt the grassy overhang at the hill’s edge give way beneath her. Then she was rolling over and over in a rising rattle of stones, reaching for a bush and feeling that come loose too, growing aware, as she went tumbling down the scree, of a chill and fearsome pain.
She hit an outcropping of rock that stopped her slide, while stones she’d dislodged went scattering and rattling on past her and down into the trees at the hill’s foot. Fearfully she put a hand up to her chest, and felt the hard cold point of the bolt jutting out there. “No! No! No!” she mewed, shuddering there on the scree, the pain and the panic rising, rising. Each breath burned. She could taste blood in her mouth. Behind and above her men came shouting along the brow of the hill and fingers of light from ’lectric lanterns went groping through the dusk.
The scree was still settling, a few last stones bounding past her and setting off little secondary slides. Before it all fell silent she made herself move, kicking away from her holdfast and slithering on down, gritting her teeth against the astonishing pain. She was barely conscious
when she reached the tumble of bigger boulders at the foot of the cliff. She just wanted to lie there. She just wanted to cry.
Ahead of her the ground sloped down to the banks of a river. The river clattered, running shallow over stones, and on the far bank stands of birches showed like white railings in the dusk, with the darkness of pines beyond them. Fever knew that she had to cross the river and get in among those trees, but she couldn’t make herself move. She was cold and she wanted her mother. Breathing hurt and made awful bubbling noises. Blood was running down inside her clothes. Her throat filled and she choked. Memories, her own and Godshawk’s, flared in her fading mind. She saw her mother as a little girl, a young woman. She saw the pieces of her flung aside. “Wavey, Wavey, Wavey,” she sobbed, crawling forward, bent double round the pain. And as she slid down into nothingness she saw very clearly for a moment the strange pyramid at Skrevanastuut, black against a rippling sky.
Far above her, men went searching along the hilltop, shining their lanterns down across the scree.
PART TWO
15
NOMADS’ LAND
n the pink light of the next day’s dawn Cluny Morvish stood beside Raven in the shadow of his traction castle and watched them pile the last faggots up around the pyre they’d built for Wavey Godshawk. A priest waited with a burning brand, and a boy was on hand to scare away the crows, which were already showing an interest in the remains.
“She should not have died,” Cluny said.
She had not heard that Raven had captured the Movement’s chief technomancer until she heard that she’d been killed. She wished that she had had a chance to talk to her. The dead woman’s face seemed hauntingly familiar, although Cluny knew that she could never have seen her before. “She would have made a useful hostage. . .”