by Philip Reeve
Gusts of wind came at them across the sea like skimmed stones. Fever watched Cluny tie back her hair to stop it blowing in her face; the glory of her long neck bare in the sunlight. I should just kiss her, she thought, then she would know. But would she? Would she understand? Cluny liked boys; the manly young men of Arkhangelsk. She was a nomad, with a nomad’s old-fashioned notions. She probably didn’t even imagine that a girl could feel about her the way that Fever felt. To be rejected would be horrible.
So Fever held tight to her secret and was simply grateful for Cluny’s smiles, while the jokes and laughter of the Morvish flew past her like swifts on the wind.
At last the beach curved north and the wilderness of old Scotland came down to meet it in black cliffs. The air grew cold. Summer was already ending. There was frost in shady places, and inland the white hills slumbered under their icing like disastrous cakes. A broad meltwater river coiled out of the uplands, flowing clear and shallow over beds of golden gravel. Marten and Cluny used it like a road, the two mammoths wading patiently through the water, mile after mile. They camped that night in the lee of some rocks on the bank. In the darkness, above the noise of the river, Fever heard the creaking of glaciers in the valleys further north.
“We could probably walk to the North Pole from here,” she said.
“Let’s not,” said Cluny sleepily. “Skrevanastuut is far enough for me. Anyway, we don’t have time. Look.”
Above the snowy shoulders of the hills across the river the young Scrivener’s Moon was climbing the sky. In another ten days it would be full, and the war on London would begin.
When they moved on next day the river grew steeper, spilling down out of the high country in a long chain of rapids and stony falls which the mammoths could not climb. They kept to the bank, and the going there was easier than it had been on the day before, because they had left the woods behind and the only trees they saw were lonely pines which stood in ones and twos among the crags. This was old country; old rock. Once or twice they passed overgrown forms which might have been ruins; a cleft in a hillside too straight to be natural.
“What do you think it was?” asked Cluny. “The Downsizing, I mean; the thing that did the Ancients in. They were so powerful, and now this is all that’s left. If you don’t believe in gods or spirits or magic, what do you think it was that wrecked the world?”
“There are many theories,” said Fever. “A natural upheaval, probably. An earthstorm or volcano-swarm far worse than those that trouble us these days. Some people believe it was a war, but that seems hardly likely.” She was thinking of the crater of Mayda and other craters she had seen; craters so big you could sometimes barely see across them. “The Ancients were wise. They would not have done that to the world.”
That afternoon they heard wolves howling, which made the mammoths nervous, and Fever too, but Cluny said they were nothing to be scared of. “They will not attack us, not when we have Lump and Carpet with us, and not at this time of the year. The wolves of the west aren’t true wolves anyway; they mingled so much with dog-kind back in the Downsizing that they are half dog. We take and tame the young ones sometimes, and they are our friends.”
Fever recalled the brindled creatures she had seen prowling around the Kometsvansen. They had not looked friendly to her. But Cluny knew far more about this place than she did, and if Cluny was not afraid then it would be irrational for her to be.
“Nightwights,” called Marten, who’d steered Lump close alongside Carpet and had been listening to what his sister said. “It’s nightwights we should be worrying about, in these parts.”
“Don’t worry about nightwights, Marten,” said Cluny.
“But everybody knows they live in old caves and tunnels and things, up here near the ice! ‘Nightwights in the dark beneath the fells.’ They capture travellers and drag them underground and sacrifice them to their weird old gods and eat them!”
Cluny said, “Marten-my-brother, nobody has seen a nightwight for years.”
“The Guild of Engineers does not accept the existence of nightwights,” said Fever. “It is possible that there was once some kind of nocturnal mutant strain that has given rise to legends, but there is no evidence that they survive. Proof would have reached London, if they did.”
“Guild of Engineers doesn’t know much then,” said Marten, giving her a pitying look. “It’s a big place, the north. There are all sorts of things up here, I think.”
“Master Tharp says he treated a man for a nightwight bite once,” said Cluny.
“It was probably a wolf that bit him,” said Fever.
Up in the cold hills somewhere a wolf howled, and others echoed it, and her words did not sound quite so comforting as she had hoped.
Near nightfall they came to a sheltered place beside a spine of rocks on a hilltop where stunted thorn bushes grew up between the boulders and there was wood enough to light a fire. Cluny had shot a hare along the way, and while it cooked Marten led Fever up on to the summit of the rock-spine and pointed north. There, after much peering, she made out the tower of Skrevanastuut, tiny and dark above the blue folds of the hills like a flint arrowhead balanced on the horizon.
“There it is,” said the boy, sounding sullen that Fever had dragged them here yet proud that they had made it. “It’s still further than it looks, with all those ridges to cross, but if we start early we’ll be there by this time tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Marten,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Did it for her, not you,” said Marten, looking away across the valleys where the mist was rising.
Fever took first watch that night, sitting by the fire with a rug wrapped round her and Cluny’s arquebus across her knees, trying to ignore the way Cluny moaned and stirred as Godshawk’s memories seeped through her dreams. Marten curled up and went to sleep as easily as a dog. Fever sat listening hard for movements out there beyond the reach of the firelight. There were plenty, but none seemed threatening, and when the Scrivener’s Moon had sunk behind the hills she gently woke Cluny and snuggled down under all the furs and blankets she could find.
She lay waiting for sleep, watching Cluny cut a new length of match-cord for the arquebus, light it at the fire’s edge and clamp it in the gun’s dog-head. Sleepily she imagined settling in this lonely, lovely land. Building a little cabin, with a garden round it, and a turbine in one of those fast-flowing streams to generate power. Cluny would live there with her. She would teach Fever to hunt. Her nightmares of London would fade in the high silence of the hills, and Fever would build a flying machine better than the one that she and Arlo had made, and launch it from the snow-flecked crags. One day she would take Cluny’s face between her hands and kiss her. . .
Only she wouldn’t. She knew that she wouldn’t ever be able to tell Cluny how she felt. This love would have to be her secret. Well, she thought, perhaps it was enough just to be near her. There must be lots of people in the world who loved someone without ever being loved back; the way that Borglum had loved Wavey.
It was a wistful feeling, but a sweet one. It warmed her while she fell asleep. It gave her pleasant dreams, which ended suddenly as she woke to a dying fire and a terrible screech.
She sprang up, not even knowing where she was at first. The mammoths were bellowing way down among the scrub in the valley; the fire threw smoke in her face; the night seemed full of dark and furtive movements. “Cluny!” she screamed. “Cluny! Marten!”
A hand touched her shoulder and she turned, feeling relieved until she saw whose hand it was. It was not one of the Morvish who stood behind her but a bony, ragged figure, pale eyes gleaming at her through a fall of lank hair. She stumbled backwards, shouting, “Cluny!” In the shadows beyond the fire a red ember glinted like a ruby; it was the lit end of the slow-match, still clamped in the dog-head of the abandoned arquebus. Fever crouched and picked the weapon up, turned, screamed at the black shape which leapt at her across the fire, pulled the trigger, and saw by the
flash of white light which exploded from the muzzle a wide, filthy, scarcely human face, shrieking in rage and surprise as the ball smashed into him and dropped him in the embers.
That was the first time that she thought, Nightwights. . .
So much for the Guild of Engineers, then. If she ever got back alive to London she would have to set them straight on the anthropology of the north.
Another nightwight came at her out of the dark, snatching the gun, dragging her sideways with it until she overbalanced and let go of it and fell, hitting her head hard on the frosted ground. The nightwight stood over her with a grin full of dirty teeth. Then it rolled up its bulging eyes till they looked like two hard-boiled eggs and flopped down lifeless beside her.
Cluny wrenched her hunting knife out of its back and said, “Where’s Marten?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t. . .” said Fever, between gulps of the chilly air. The horrible stink of burnt nightwight was in her nostrils, and her Scriven senses coloured it the nastiest grey she’d ever smelled.
Cluny left her to shiver there and strode off across the hillside shouting, “Marten! Marten-my-brother!” The only answer was the panicked trumpeting of Lump and Carpet, sounding very far away. She came back and flung her knife into the ground a foot from where Fever crouched. She dropped on her knees, as floppy as the nightwight she’d just killed, and her face in the last of the firelight shone with tears.
“He’s gone,” she said. “It’s your grandfather’s fault. That machine of his. I was meant to keep guard, but London got into my head again, and that’s when the nightwights jumped me from behind. I hadn’t even the wits to use the gun. Oh, Marten-my-brother. . .”
Fever wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but she hung back. She was too much of an Engineer; Cluny’s grief was too raw and unsettling. She had to do something, though, so she pulled out the pocket torch which she had carried all the way from London. She flicked it on and started to trail its pale, moon-coloured beam across the slopes around them, walking first one way, then the other.
Cluny pushed the tears from her face with one hand, leaving it smeared with soot and grease. After watching for a moment she stood up and came and took the light from Fever. “Let me. You’re only messing up the tracks. . .” She stooped low and shone the beam on broken grasses, turned-over stones. “I don’t see any blood,” she said. “I think they’ve taken him alive, down into their nest. . .”
“Oh no,” said Fever.
“No, it’s good,” said Cluny, glancing up at her. Her despair had passed; she looked like a huntress now. “It means he might still be alive, and we can rescue him.”
“How?” said Fever. “Cluny, you must try to be rational. We don’t know where their nest is, or how many they are. . .”
Cluny ignored her and went downhill, sweeping the light over the ground ahead. “They’re supposed to live in old mine workings,” she said. “Or natural caverns. Or just holes in the ground if they can find nothing better.”
Fever watched her, feeling helpless. Reason told her that Marten was probably dead already, sacrificed to some weird old nightwight god inside the hill. The rational thing to do would be to leave; go in search of the mammoths and put as much space between themselves and this place as they could. But she knew she could not make Cluny see that, and slowly, as she watched her scout to and fro among the rocks, she started to realize that Cluny was right; not rational, but right. If there was any hope of saving Marten, they had to try.
22
THE DARK BENEATH THE FELLS
luny was thorough in her tracking. Clues that Fever would have missed even in daylight were plain to her; she knelt to shine the torch at the print of a narrow, shoeless foot; at fresh scratches on a lichened rock. It was really quite scientific, the way she gathered and weighed her evidence.
The summer night was short that far north. A grey light was seeping into the sky by the time they found the low, arched entrance to an old mine working. There were tracks going into it and coming out. Bones were scattered among the rocks on the slope below, but they were old, and not the bones of people.
“They have left no one on guard,” said Fever.
“That’s because they know no one’s stupid enough to go into a nightwight’s nest,” said Cluny.
She stepped cautiously into the tunnel. The blackness was so complete that she might as well have stuck her head in a bag. She turned on the torch and saw that the tunnel sloped gently downwards as it reached into the hill, a ribbon of water trickling along the middle of the stony floor. Something lay there, and for a moment Cluny thought it was a body, awfully ripped and dismembered and somehow flattened. . . When she reached it, it was only her brother’s coat.
She went back to the entrance. Night was draining quickly from the sky. “This is the place,” she said.
Fever had been afraid it might be. Her deepest, most irrational instincts screamed at her not to go into that darkness, and for once the rational part of her agreed with them. But she could not let Cluny go alone, or let Cluny think she was a coward. To reassure herself, she said, “They are savages, and probably there are just a few of them. A family group. Three or four; maybe a dozen. They live in the dark and shun the day, which tells us they do not like light. Well, we have light. You have the arquebus. It is possible we may survive.”
“You’re such a comfort,” Cluny said. She passed Fever the torch and unslung the arquebus from her shoulder. The blue smell of the slow-match tickled Fever’s nostrils. The imminence of danger made her see everything with great intensity; the rocks on the hillside, the tussocks and wind-writhen thorn trees, all seemed haloed with a silver light, and Cluny looked more beautiful than ever: tall, grim, her heavy hair pulled back. I would follow her anywhere, Fever realized.
Just before they stepped together into the tunnel mouth Cluny looked back at her quickly and smiled. “Ancestors keep watch over us both, Fever-Crumb-my-sister.”
Fever did not believe in ancestors, not the sort who kept watch over you, but she found herself thinking of her father as they went along the tunnel. “What is your plan, Fever?” Dr Crumb would have asked her if he’d been there. And she would have had to say, “Get in, find Marten, get out again.” Which she knew was not the sort of plan Dr Crumb would approve of. He would be expecting something with diagrams.
They walked for what seemed a long time, stopping every now and then so that Fever could switch on her torch and check the way ahead for turns or pitfalls. Once the pale cone of light revealed a broken-up skeleton stuffed into a cleft in the wall; bones like gnawed sticks and a grinning skull. But the bones were old, and not quite human. Those wide-spaced eye sockets and the too-many teeth reminded Fever of Scriven skulls which she had seen in London, but more likely it was the remains of a nightwight. Perhaps this was how they buried their dead.
The stale air in the passage stirred, bringing an unpleasant smell to her, and a faint noise, like the far-off muttering of many voices. They moved on slowly, Cluny with the gun up to her shoulder, Fever switching the torch on at briefer and briefer intervals, lightning-blinks just long enough to reassure them that they were not about to step into an abyss. The sound ahead grew louder. It was definitely the sound of voices, mingled with shuffling movement. The passage twisted, plunging downhill more steeply. Now, even between torch-glimpses, Fever could still make out the rocky roof, illuminated by the faintest, pale grey light.
“Daylight,” said Cluny, in the softest whisper. “We must’ve come clean through the hill. . .”
They turned a corner, and looked out over a broad gallery, hollowed by miners in some lost time, with a rugged pillar left in the centre of it to hold up the roof. It was full of nightwights.
“A dozen?” hissed Cluny accusingly. “There must be fifty of them!” Then she went quiet, for fear the nightwights would hear her. But they didn’t. The cavern was too full of the scratch and hiss of their own voices. She hunkered down, pulling Fever with her, and there the
y waited for what seemed an age, afraid to move again in case their movements drew the nightwight’s dark-adapted eyes, wondering what to do next, suspecting that they could do nothing. There are too many of them, Fever thought. Too many. . .
The ledge where they crouched was raised six or seven feet above the level of the cavern floor. Opposite it, perhaps fifty feet away, there was an opening like a long window in the rocky wall. The ghost-light of the pre-dawn sky seeped in there, filling the cavern with a grainy dusk. Even that was too much for the nightwights, who were shielding their eyes with their hands as if they feared the dingy light would blind them. Some were carrying horrid totems made of bone and hair; some wore headdresses of buzzards’ wings. All were gesturing at the window, lowing and grunting and mumbling. Religion, Fever thought disgustedly. They have forgotten all the things that made them human, but they still cling to religion. They are making ready to worship the sun when it rises. . . Yet the window faced north, not east. She could see the distant red embers of volcanoes out there on the far horizon, and closer, in the centre of the view, sharp and black against the mists that lifted from the valleys, the pyramid at Skrevanastuut.
It is not the sun that they worship, she thought. It is the pyramid!
“Where’s Marten?” Cluny whispered.
“I don’t know,” breathed Fever. A certain sense of expectation in the cavern made her think that the ’wights were awaiting something, and that it might have something to do with the catch their hunters had made up on the hill. Despite the tales, the nightwights probably had few opportunities to capture human beings. Prisoners were rare, and rituals would surround their slaughter. . .
Cluny was whispering again, but too softly to hear, and after a moment Fever realized she was praying. She prayed too: Please let him be alive. Please let him be all right. But she knew that nobody was listening.