by Philip Reeve
She thought of the way the outer door had pricked her and then let her in, the tiny needle no doubt sampling her blood somehow. If she had not been part Scriven, would the door have opened for her? She thought of speckled skins and trademarks, of legends and the birth of gods.
“What am I?” she asked.
Several of the memory-Stalkers answered her at once.
“You are Homo superior. . .”
“You are Humanity 2.0. . .”
“You are female, between sixteen and fifty years of age. . .”
“Your genome and nanotech upgrades remain the intellectual property of the Scrivener group of companies. . .”
“Your DNA is contaminated with a standard Homo sapiens strain. . .”
“Sequences encoding for pigmentation have been damaged. . .”
“Stop!” said Fever. The whispering ceased. The Stalkers watched her. She said, “You bred people here? Is that what it was for, this place?”
One of the Stalkers said, “The survival of Homo sapiens is unlikely. The exchange of nuclear and particle-energy weaponry between the US and Greater China resulted in the loss of all major cities. It is believed that Slow Bombs will begin to arrive over the next ten to twelve years.”
“Stop!” said Fever. “What’s a ‘Slow Bomb’?”
One of the other Stalkers said, “Slow Bombs are a revenge weapon of the Barefoot States. They are small asteroids boosted on to Earth-impact trajectories. It is assumed that a number were triggered remotely during the final minutes of the recent nuclear/particle energy exchange. Estimated time to impact varies from three to six years.”
“No, no, no,” said Fever. “They’ve been and gone; this war you’re talking about, it must have been thousands of years ago. . .”
But the Stalkers did not seem to understand her; they knew of only one time: after the war, before the arrival of the Slow Bombs.
“It has been decided that the improved genome will be rushed into production to create Humanity 2.0, a new sub-species with increased resistance to radiation, fully adapted for survival in conditions of low light and sub-zero temperature ranges. Adjustments to mitochondrial DNA sequences encode for reduced senescence, ensuring a longer reproductive life, aiding spread of the upgraded population. Brain functions are compatible with current mnemonic harvesting technology to aid the exchange and retention of group knowledge. The following genetic sequences are the intellectual property of the Scrivener group of companies. . .”
Then they were off again, all joining in, listing long chains of numbers and letters, whispering at her about haem-oxygenase and transport chains. Fever went and sat on the stairs, looking down into the room of screens.
When Cluny came upstairs a few moments later she said, “I have found out what I am.”
“What?”
“The people who built this place could make people. I don’t know how, but they could. There was a war – only they called it an ‘exchange’ – they must have known it was coming. I suppose that’s why they built this place so strong and far from anywhere. They thought ordinary people were going to die out, so they tried to breed a better sort. I suppose those other buildings outside were nurseries . . . or . . . hatcheries. . .”
“And that’s you?” Cluny climbed the stairs to her and sat down next to her. “You’re one of these better people?”
“They were all speckled to start with,” said Fever. “So they’d know not to mate with the old sort of people, I suppose. But it didn’t work out. Something went wrong. This place was abandoned, and the new people forgot what they were, and moved away into other lands, and they only remembered the Scrivener Institute as a silly god. And the years went by, and the old sort of people didn’t die out after all, and the things that had been done to make the new sort better stopped working, or got changed, and some found that they couldn’t have enough babies, and their speckles started to fade, and they went south and conquered London and got wiped out by the Skinners. And some changed in other ways and started living underground, and they became the nightwights. That’s why the ’wights worship this place. That’s why I look like them.”
“You don’t look like a nightwight!”
“Yes I do. Same bone structure.”
“Mmm, fair enough,” said Cluny, looking at her critically. “I was thinking of their teeth and hats and things.”
“I was made,” said Fever. “I always knew I wasn’t standard human, but . . . Cluny, I’m just an artefact. I’m the last bit of data in an experiment that didn’t work.”
Cluny shrugged. None of it meant anything to her. How could people make other people, except in the usual way? And what was the point of worrying about it anyway? She lifted Fever’s chin, and kissed her gently between the eyebrows.
“You’re Fever Crumb,” she said. “And you’re lovely.”
Fever drew back and felt her ears burning. She wished those Scrivener Institute people had done something about the blush response when they had set about designing their new race. . .
She heard something below her. Marten was standing at the foot of the stairs. His eyes met hers, and she guessed that he understood how she felt about his sister, even if Cluny didn’t. Maybe he had sensed it all along, and that was why he’d never liked her.
“The nightwights have been sniffing round,” he said, switching his gaze very carefully from Fever’s face to Cluny’s. Then he held up the two skinned rabbits that he carried and said, “But look, I got breakfast, if you want it.”
The kitchen that Fever had found earlier had glass-fronted cabinets with knobs and dials, but nothing that any of them could recognize as a stove. So once the rabbits were jointed they carried them up through the room of screens and the room of Stalkers, and levered open a sealed hatchway there that led out on to a flat, triangular roof with a little low wall around it. There they squatted amid the rust-stains of an old communications array and roasted the meat over a fire made out of heather twigs and the unreadable records from the shelves downstairs. They had water fetched in Scrivener Institute mugs from a nearby rill to wash it down, and the meat tasted good; better than any meal that Fever could remember, even though she had to eat it with her fingers in a most un-Engineerish way.
When her belly was full she sat beside Marten on the warm porcelain roof listening while Cluny told a story, and watching the way the sun lit Cluny’s profile and the cloud of her hair. It seemed impossible that anything bad was going to befall them. So the nightwights had reached Skrevanastuut. Well, what of it? They had not come inside; they dared not; perhaps they had already given up and gone back to their lairs. Even if they hadn’t, she and Cluny and Marten would be safe as long as they stayed inside the pyramid. Perhaps Skrevanastuut itself would show her a way that the ’wights could be defeated.
But even as she thought that, the smoke of their little fire was going up like a pencil mark upon the still, blue sky and, from caves and shady corries in the hills around, the nightwight hunters squinted out into the hurtful sunlight, and watched that smoke, and waited for the dark.
25
BESIEGED
or the rest of that day Fever tried and failed to make the pyramid give up its secrets. The Stalkers contented themselves with reciting lists of enzymes and molecules, and in the room below the screens just glowed and fizzed. She went downstairs to search the papers in the lower rooms, thinking that at least paper was a thing she understood, but most of what was written there was illegible, and the rest meant no more to her than the ramblings of the Stalkers. There were printed rows of numbers and what looked like lists of children’s heights and weights; perhaps the vital statistics of the first generation of Scriven. On one sheet someone had scribbled, Pearson has decided to head north. . . The answers to questions which had been forgotten millennia ago.
She took one of the little silver Stalker brains she’d found and showed it to Cluny. It lay in her cupped palms like a tiny silver egg. She pointed out ports, no bigger than the pores of her own
skin, from which thin cilia would emerge when it was inserted in a human being, stretching out along the nerve pathways, twining into the roots of the brain.
“This is what is inside my head?” asked Cluny.
“Inside my head too. And in all those whisperers upstairs.”
“So they’re all the rage. . .” Cluny hadn’t really believed until that moment in the thing Godshawk had hidden in her. Hadn’t believed that something so powerful could be so small. The machines of the Arkhangelsk were all big, and the more powerful they were the bigger they had to be. It seemed impossible that her whole life had been derailed by something not much larger than a teardrop. She looked at it for a moment with her eyes shining, and then flung it on the floor and stamped on it. She ground it under her boot heel. She squashed it like a silverfish and kicked it into a corner.
“I’m sorry,” Fever said. She stood behind Cluny and put her arms around her and nuzzled her face in her thick hair and felt guilty at how much she loved the sunlight-in-beechwoods autumn smell of her. “I’ve brought you here for nothing. I don’t understand any of this.”
“I do,” said Cluny. “I understand that these dreams of mine are just recordings, not visions from the Ancestors. And I’ve learned something here. Something about the old world and its ways. All their science. All their knowledge. . .”
“Cluny-my-sister!” came Marten’s voice, from the room above. A moment later they heard what had alarmed him. They had left the hatch on to the roof open to let in fresh air, and through it now there came a sound Fever had hoped not to hear again. The cry of nightwights on the hunting trail.
In the evening sunlight they stood together on the roof, and as the shadows lengthened across the hillsides they started to see movements there as the hunters crept out of their hiding places. As the sun dipped behind the western hills more and more of the ’wights emerged, until at least thirty of them were visible around the base of the pyramid. They seemed to have overcome their awe of it, and a knot of them gathered at the corner where the opening was, listening as one of their feathered priests harangued them. Fever wondered if he was telling them that they had a duty to clear out the interlopers who had invaded their sacred place. Or maybe he was just saying, “Dinner’s up.”
Either way, things looked bleak. Marten and Cluny had dragged the heaviest pieces of furniture they could move over the entrance below, but if they could drag them there then the nightwights could shove them aside. She thought of that tower on Thursday Island where she and Arlo had managed to hold off the Oktopous Cartel’s foot soldiers; but only for a while, and those men had not been half so savage or so numerous as the nightwights. She decided that she should avoid towers in future.
Now, in the twilight, the bravest of the nightwights were running at the pyramid and trying to race up its sloping walls. They were able to climb no more than a few yards before sliding back, but it was helping to rouse the others to a frenzy. If only there were some way to communicate with them, Fever thought. They were not animals, after all; they were able to plan and organize, as they had quickly proved by surrounding the pyramid on all sides. She felt a queasy guilt about the one she’d shot now that she knew he’d been her distant cousin. . .
Marten took his sister’s hand. Fever wondered what would become of Raven’s alliance if Cluny died. Perhaps he would not be able to hold it together without his prophetess. So London will be safe, she thought, but that was no comfort. She wanted London and Cluny to be safe.
So she left them and ran down the stairs again, thinking, It cannot work, and then, It doesn’t matter; there is nothing to lose. The pyramid was full of dull booms and clangs – the sounds of nightwights who had crept into the entryway and were beating at the Morvish barricade from below with stones and spear-butts. Fever ran through the dim rooms, pocketing likely-looking objects. Savages liked objects, she thought. Even if they killed her, their squabbles over the things she took them might distract them for a while from Marten and Cluny.
She ran back up the stairs to the roof. Cluny turned as she emerged and said, “Fever-my-sister. . .” seeing something wild in her eyes.
Fever did not stop to explain. She went past Cluny and vaulted the low wall at the roof’s edge, careering down the western face of the pyramid as if it was a drop-slide at Summertown fair. The steep slope was as slippery as glass. No wonder the nightwights could not climb it, she thought, trying to slow her hurtling descent with her boot heels, friction scorching the heels of her hands. She saw the nightwights below her, scattering and staring. Then she landed with a thump in the heather at the wall’s foot and they were all around her.
“Fever!” Cluny was shouting, behind her and far above, and it sounded like the cry of a bird, plaintive and distant.
She stood up, the pyramid behind her, the nightwights in a loose half-circle all around. It was hard to tell in that dying light, but she thought some of the nightwights were those same ones who had stood staring at her before she jumped out of their lair the day before. If you shaved and bathed and dressed them, she thought, they would look just like un-speckled Scriven.
“I am like you,” she said, trying not to her let voice shake, trying not to let her nose wrinkle at the stink of them. “I am one of you. You can see it. Look at my face. We are the same, you and I.”
She didn’t know if they could understand, but it seemed important to keep talking. “I wish my mother could have seen you,” she said. “Wavey thought she was the last of her kind, but she wasn’t. You are children of the Scrivener too. . .”
The nightwights gaped at her. The ones who had ventured into the tunnel were spilling out, coming to join their friends. Quickly, Fever reached into her pockets and took out the things she’d found inside the tower. “Gifts,” she said. She held them out to the most elaborately befeathered of the ’wights, who backed away as if the things might bite. She set them down in the heather and they came closer, wary, looking to see what this strange young woman had brought them from inside their holy place. A surgeon’s knife, brighter and sharper than any blade they’d seen. A silver dish. A white mug emblazoned with the words Scrivener Institute.
There was a muttering from the nightwights. Up on the pyramid’s top Cluny and Marten were silent. A breeze ruffled the heather.
The nightwights hung back, but one, a boy not much older than Marten, came forward and gingerly picked up the mug. His eyes met Fever’s. What did he see? Someone nightwight-like yet not a nightwight; someone who had been inside Skrevanastuut, and brought out these offerings, and spoken the name of the Scrivener. Perhaps, around their smoky fires in their burrows beneath the hills, his kind kept alive the memory of the first ones who had come from the pyramid, and he thought that she was one of them returned.
Whatever he saw, whatever he thought, this nightwight no longer seemed to view her as a meal. He grunted something and knelt down in front of her in the heather. Around him, slowly, all the others did the same, while Fever stood there nursing the friction burns on her hands and feeling silly, a messenger from the gods with no message to deliver.
A braying trumpet-call echoed from the hillsides, making her start. The nightwights seemed startled too. The sound came again. One turned and pointed south, shouting something.
Up out of a rocky defile there big shapes were moving. A trunk rose against the twilight and another trumpet-call battered at the walls of the pyramid. Wild mammoths? Fever wondered. But there were things on their backs, and as she strained her eyes to be sure of it a dazzling light appeared, sweeping across the weed-grown walls of Skrevanastuut to pin both her and the frightened nightwights in its beam. They hid their eyes and shrieked. Some fell on their faces and seemed to be trying to burrow into the ground as the mammoths came closer and more lamps were turned on. Gunfire crackled. Shot nightwights spun and fell. Fever dropped in the heather and curled as small as she could. Out from among the mammoths men came striding, blades gleaming, pistols spurting flame.
“It’s Father!” shou
ted Marten, up on top of the pyramid. “He’s brought help! We’re saved!”
Beams from the mammoth-mounted lamps-o’-war raked across the heather, finding and blinding fugitive nightwights for the warriors to shoot down. Their pistols were empty now; they waded into the knots of terrified ’wights with swords and axes, slashing and hewing. A bolt thrower twanged in a mammoth’s howdah. Above the screams of the dying nightwights a man was shouting, “Cluny? Cluny Morvish?”
Then the sounds of battle were gone. The Arkhangelsk warriors called out jokes to one another as they moved among the dead. Someone grabbed Fever by her coat and rolled her over and raised a hatchet above her and then stopped when he saw that she was not a nightwight. He started hauling her sideways towards the tunnel mouth, from which Cluny and Marten were scrambling to meet their rescuers. “Let me go!” Fever protested, but he just hollered at his comrades that she was his, until Cluny saw what was happening and shouted, “She’s not to be harmed! She’s not to be hurt!” and another man pulled Fever’s captor off her, growling, “Do as the girl says!”
Fever rose shivering to her knees. Marten ran past her shouting the names of Lump and Carpet, leaping across the heather to greet the mammoths, who waited patiently behind the larger war-beasts. Men busied themselves lopping off nightwight heads to carry home to the Kometsvansen as trophies. The Scrivener Institute mug lay in the heather with its handle broken off. Close by in a clump of bracken a young nightwight hunter cowered, wounded, and shivering so hard that even the ferns around him shook. For a long moment Fever stared into his huge, scared eyes. Then she looked deliberately away. She did not want to draw attention to him.
A lean figure came uphill through the dusk, the tip of his staff pecking the earth in front of him. It had taken Nintendo Tharp days to winkle the truth of Cluny’s disappearance out of her foolish old father, but when he learned it, he had set out at once. He could not let the Vessel of the Ancestors endanger herself on some fool’s errand to a haunted pyramid. “We were following your trail upriver when we found your mammoths wandering,” he said, watching Cluny with his hard, bright eyes. “We saw your smoke this morning and came as fast as we could.”