by Philip Reeve
By the fourth day the plains were dark with vehicles and lines of men and mammoths, all moving south. Tharp’s landship cut south-easterly across the line of their march. It passed columns of Suomi dragging their primitive war-cars on mammoth-drawn sleds. It passed lines of fuel bowsers and supply wagons, then big white landships with carved upperworks; some pushing south with chimneys snorting steam, some broken down with their crews making hasty repairs. Tharp talked with their commanders, who pointed him south. Somewhere in the haze ahead, Raven’s Jotungard and the Great Carn’s heart-fortress were rolling side-by-side, the spearhead of this land-armada.
Tharp made them give him fuel and water, and headed on. “The Vessel of the Ancestors must be aboard the Great Carn’s fort when we reach London,” he told Cluny. “Without you, the Ancestors may not grant us victory in battle. Who knows what offence you have already caused them, taking off into the wilds like that?”
Cluny said, “What is to become of Fever Crumb?”
The technomancer’s flinty eyes gleamed suspiciously. He had never liked that London girl. He could not fathom why Cluny wanted to protect her. He would have killed her already if Cluny had not kept telling him that the Ancestors wanted her alive. He said, “She is Rufus Raven’s concern. The Ancestors cannot object to us handing her over to her rightful lord. Let Raven decide if he will keep her safe or send her to join her mother.”
“You know what he will do!” said Cluny hotly. “You cannot let him have her! I forbid it!”
“You forbid it?” No one had ever spoken to Tharp like that; no one. “You forbid it?” The ways of the Ancestors were strange to him; of all the Arkhangelsk they might have chosen for their vessel, why had they picked this headstrong, infuriating girl?
They stopped to rest the engines for a while, but they were moving again before dawn, while landships and campavans rolled by on every side. “The north has woken!” shouted passing soldiers, cheering Cluny Morvish when Tharp made her stand up on the landship’s prow with the banner and the gaping nightwight heads. “The north is on the move!” Away to the east, high towers of smoke were rising above the dried-out sea, marking places where battles were breaking out around the Movement’s oil wells.
By sundown the engines were labouring again and Tharp called a rest while he prayed to the Repair Spirits. The ground shook as forts and landships rumbled by. A few stopped, recognizing Tharp’s standard; their commanders came aboard, asking shyly if the Vessel of the Ancestors would bless them. They knelt before Cluny while she placed her hand on their heads and Tharp danced round her, chanting apps and words of power.
She thought, It is all nonsense. The Ancestors have never touched my mind. She kept thinking of the silver machines which Fever Crumb had shown her at Skrevanastuut. She kept thinking of the one in her own brain. She said gruffly to each man, “Go with our Ancestors’ blessings.”
Later, when Cluny was asleep, another barge pulled up alongside, and its master came aboard looking for Tharp. He was not seeking a blessing. He was no warrior, just a showman whose circus had been rattling around the north for a few weeks, entertaining the nomads as they mustered for their drive on London. His name was Borglum.
He stood in Tharp’s cramped little cabin and looked up sceptically at the Technomancer. He said, “I’ve been hearing you got a Londonish girl here somewhere.”
“Fever Crumb,” the Technomancer said. “A nasty, sneaking creature; half Scriven.”
“Last of her kind, I heard tell,” said Borglum. “That makes her valuable to a man in my line of business.”
“How valuable?”
“I have a purse of gold I’d give you for her.”
Tharp considered. In his mind’s eye the gold shone yellow as butter. “The girl would come to no harm?” he asked.
“Not unless you count having to perform for her living harm,” said Borglum. “Not unless you count having to dress up in costume and go out in front of hard staring eyes and hear people say, ‘Look at that nasty misshape’ harm.” He’d rightly guessed how Tharp felt about his prisoner, and knew he would be more likely to part with her if he thought she was going to a life of misery and humiliation. “And of course,” he added, “there’s always the chance of accidents in the ring. Most of my misshapes end up spiked on something pointy eventually. But that’s their fault for getting careless; I ain’t exactly harming ’em.”
“Show me the gold,” said Tharp.
When they came to wake Fever they didn’t tell her she’d been sold. She didn’t know what was happening as they dragged her away from Tharp’s landship, through the light of the fires his men had lit to keep passing vehicles from running into it in the dark. She didn’t recognize the Knuckle Sandwich, squatting in pointy silhouette against the glow of burning oil wells on the far horizon. Didn’t even recognize Borglum and Quatch when they came out to take her from the Arkhangelsk. It seemed a million years since she had seen them; in that lost era before Wavey’s death, before Cluny or Skrevanastuut. She had almost forgotten that she’d ever been a traveller with the Carnival of Knives.
And then she was inside, and the hatches were slamming shut, and as the old barge chugged and shuddered into motion they all came round her, Quatch and Borglum and Lucy the lobster-girl, Lady Midnight, Stick, all touching her, patting her, helping her to their warm cabin and saying, “You poor thing!” and “We’re so sorry!”, saying, “Your poor mother,” and, “We thought you were dead. . .”
Borglum had arrived at Hill 60 the day after Fever left, and found the whole camp sizzling with gory stories about what had happened to Wavey Godshawk and her daughter.
“Is it true?” he’d asked, shoving his way into a meeting of Rufus Raven and his captains.
Raven nodded. The others exchanged sly glances. They’d all heard how little Borglum had once been in love with Wavey. Love was comical in a dwarf. They looked forward to seeing what he’d do.
“Where is she?” said Borglum. “Me an’ my people, we’d care to give her burial. . .”
“Ash,” said Raven, with a wave of his hand. “We burned her.”
“Ash?” said Borglum. He found it hard to believe his Duchess was just gone. He’d feared the worst, but he’d expected at least a body. “A pyre, was it? Like burning dead leaves on a bonfire? Oh, that weren’t the Scriven way. She’d not have liked that.”
Raven said, “I could have given her to the Suomi, who’d have carved flutes from her bones and used her skin to make their battle drums. You think she’d have preferred that?”
Borglum shrugged. “Maybe. She always wanted to be musical.”
Raven and his captains chortled. When Borglum pulled out a spotted handkerchief that could have served him as a bed-sheet and used it to wipe away a tear, they laughed still louder. Raven told him that he should stay at Hill 60, where the gathering forces of the north would be glad of entertainment. Borglum agreed. Later, almost idly, he would ask what had become of Wavey’s girl, and be told she too was dead. He would look over the crag where she was said to have fallen, while the crossbowmen boasted, “A proper pincushion we made of her!”
“But a man in my business soon gets to know that you don’t believe someone’s dead till you’ve seen the corpse,” said Borglum, sitting by Fever’s side while the Knuckle Sandwich roared southward through the night. “Enough people saw your poor mum dead that I had to believe them, but not one had seen you, dear, so I reckoned you might be among the living yet. We hung round Hill 60, and we rolled around the north a bit, and we kept our ears to the ground, and we heard bits o’ this, and bits o’ that, and eventually we caught you up, and here you are.”
“Thank you,” said Fever.
“Never thank me,” Borglum said. “You should hate me, rather. But for me and my talk o’ the north, your mum would be breathing still, happy in London with that Crumb of hers. It was me brought her to this end, and don’t I know it? And the only thing I could do to make amends, the small and single thing, was to find you living
and keep you safe. That’s the one thing the Duchess would have wanted.”
“Well, there is that other thing, too,” said Lady Midnight. She was sitting next to Fever with an arm about her shoulders, doing her best to be motherly.
“Oh yeah!” said Borglum. “I was forgettin’ that. Stick, go up and check how we’re doing, will you? We should be coming up on Jotungard soon.”
“Jotungard?” said Fever with a start. She wondered suddenly if she could trust Borglum. “That’s Raven’s fort! Shouldn’t we keep away from it?”
“Don’t worry,” said Borglum. He jumped down from his chair and started rolling up his sleeves. “We’re just going to trundle alongside for a while. Master Raven won’t mind. We’re welcome aboard Jotungard any time. Why, just yesterday we went aboard and gave a special show for Raven and his captains and their ladies. I left something behind, though, so I need to sort it. You’d better help me.”
“She’s tired, Borglum,” said Quatch. “She needs rest.”
“She can rest all she likes when we’re out of this river of steel,” said Borglum, “but first there’s something she needs to be part of. She’ll regret it always if she ain’t. You come with me, Fever dearie. We got something to do that’ll please our poor Duchess, wherever she might be.”
Fever didn’t understand. She was tired and frightened and bruised from all those days in lockers and mammoth baskets, and she could not fathom what he wanted of her.
“It’s the one other thing she would have wanted, see,” said Borglum kindly. “You safe, that would have been first on her list, and don’t you never doubt it. But second, and in quite large letters, underlined, she’d have put Revenge.”
“Even clever men like Raven make mistakes,” he explained, guiding Fever through the Sandwich’s smoky innards. “He sees a little chap like me and he can’t quite bring himself to believe that I’ve got the same sized heart as him, and that I cared for your mother as much as ever he cared about anything. If I stood six foot tall he’d have said to himself, ‘That Borglum, he’s a danger. He was fond of the Duchess and I done her in, so now I can’t never trust him, and I’d best get rid of him, too.’ But ’cos I’m short he thinks I don’t feel things the way full sized fellows do.”
He came to his cabin door and swung it open; held it for Fever to step through. In the middle of the cabin squatted the paper boy machine. The light of a hanging lantern swayed and shimmered over its brass scrollwork and the plastic handles of its levers.
“Trouble is,” said Borglum, flicking switches on its control panel, “my legs are too short to reach the pedals. So I thought you could do that, with those long Scriven shanks of yours, while I handle the murdering.”
Jotungard and the Arkhangelsk heart-fortress were lumbering side by side across the plains, with lookouts stationed to keep watch and make sure neither pulled ahead of the other. This was the deal that Raven and the Great Carn had worked out; they would reach London at the same time, and share equally in the spoils. The great vehicles could move at barely more than walking pace, but around them the strongest and speediest of their landships rolled, and now and then, at prearranged coordinates, a few would break off and race away to assault a settlement or oil well whose garrison was still thought loyal to Quercus.
With all the coming and going in the vanguard, no one noticed the Knuckle Sandwich when it swerved down out of the north-west and came alongside Jotungard. The men in the Sandwich’s wheelhouse matched their course and speed with the huge castle; Stick, on lookout duty, shouted down a ventilator, “We’re in position, boss!” All through the barge the carnival ’shapes crossed their fingers and offered up prayers to fierce and warlike gods. Borglum had told them all his plan and given all the choice to stay safe out of it, and a few had stayed behind in the north, but most had opted to come with him; they mourned the Duchess, and meant to see Raven suffer for what he’d done.
In his cabin, Borglum peered into the machine’s flickery grey screen and waited for a picture to appear. “Yesterday, when we did our command performance for his Raven-ness, we left a little gift aboard his castle. One of your mother’s paper boys slid in behind a tapestry down on the bottom deck. Now, if all this joggling and jolting don’t break the signal up too much, I mean to wake it and send it ’bout its work. I’ll teach Rufus Raven not to turn his back upon the little man.”
Fever sat on the machine’s saddle, pedalling quickly. She felt a dark thrill which she tried to calm, telling herself that Engineers did not approve of revenge.
“Just killing Raven, that would be the obvious thing,” said Borglum. “Sneak the paper boy into his cabin while he’s sleepin’; slit his throat with one almighty paper-cut. But I’m a showman, Fever. I’m an artist. Small of stature, but I think BIG. Kill Raven? That would be lettin’ him off lightly. I’m going to kill him, and his people, and his castle, and his dreams, and any hope he ever had of winning himself a place in history with his treachery and grand alliances. A hundred years from now they’ll worship old Quercus like a god, but mention Raven and they’ll say, ‘Who’s he?’”
He thumped the side of the machine and a picture flickered and steadied on the screen. Just blackness, but when he worked the control levers the blackness slid aside, and a grainy, ghostly, grey-and-white image of a lamplit corridor appeared.
On Jotungard the paper boy slid sideways from behind the tapestry where Borglum had hidden it the day before. It wasn’t a pale white cut-out, like the paper boys that Fever had once fought. The carnival crew had painted it with dark brown paint, and combed a pale grain through it with the tines of a fork before it dried. It looked like wood. In the dingy light of Jotungard’s under deck it could pass for part of the wall until it moved.
It moved now, obeying the orders that came flicking into its electric brain from the machine in Borglum’s cabin. It scuttled along the corridor on the edges of its paper feet, and stopped still and all but invisible against a wall as a pair of the Movement’s red-robed technomancers ambled by.
“Where are you sending it?” asked Fever, peering over Borglum’s head at the image on the screen as he started it on its way again. “Raven’s cabins are on the upper decks, near the heart-chamber. . .”
“Never mind them,” said Borglum.
“It would be wrong to harm anyone but Raven,” Fever said nervously. “They were not responsible for what happened to Wavey.”
“Keep pedallin’,” Borglum growled. “Or go an’ fetch someone else to pedal for me if you’re feeling too high-minded. This is a war that’s starting here. Who do you want to win? Your dad and his friends in London, or these barbarians with their murdering ways and their grubby, stupid prophetess?”
“Cluny Morvish isn’t grubby,” said Fever. “Well. . . She isn’t stupid.”
“Friend of yours now, is she?” Borglum asked.
“She’s. . . Yes.”
“Then the best thing you can do for her is end this war now, before she gets herself killed.”
“What was that?” asked Fever, seeing white words drift across the screen.
It was a sign, bolted to the corridor wall, and Borglum’s paper boy had just stalked past it. It said, Powder Magazine: No Naked Flames Beyond This Point. There was a drawing of an explosion underneath, for the benefit of crewmen who couldn’t read.
A guard stood outside the magazine’s iron-bound door, but it is hard to guard a door when you know there are no enemies within a hundred miles. The guard was thinking about the girl he’d left at Hill 60, and when he finally realized that the paper boy was not just a shifting shadow on the passage wall he did not know what it was, or what to do. He raised his crossbow and put a quarrel through it. It came on with a small hole torn in it, the quarrel quivering in the planking of the wall behind. The scared guard dropped his bow and drew his sword, but Borglum had grown good at running paper boys during the shows he’d put on those past few weeks, and he crumpled it and spun it past the guard’s feet and stood it up and smoothed it
flat again. It slid like bad news through the tiny crack between the door and its frame.
Inside the magazine, in the wan, swaying light of the electric lamps, Raven’s chief gunner and his mates looked up from the gunpowder they were scooping into pannikins, the big brass-bound shells they were easing off their racks.
Ever the showman, Borglum made the paper boy take a little bow as he turned it to face them.
Out in the corridor the guard began to toll a handbell.
Up in the heart-chamber, Raven looked up from the reports he had been reading. His wife put down her knitting.
Fever, legs aching now, kept pedalling. Sometimes, later, she would wonder if she should have stopped.
The paper boy held up its hands. Each finger was painted with a greenish thimble of phosphorous sesquisulfide and potassium chlorate. It reached out both paper arms and dragged its fingers over the rough planking of the walls. The phosphorous blobs flared into flame, fierce and white and shaped like ears of corn, blinding the paper boy’s electric eyes, bleaching the screen in Borglum’s cabin white.
“Get us clear!” yelled Borglum.
“Get us clear!” boomed Quatch, stationed outside his door.
“Get us clear!” shouted Stick, up in the lookout.
The Knuckle Sandwich swerved away from Jotungard’s skirts, plunging across the path of another fortress, speeding into the darkness ahead of the armada. Misshapes crowded to the portholes. Borglum scrambled from his cabin and up a companionway on to the spiny roof. Fever went after him. The forts were falling swiftly astern; signal lanterns flashing as they asked each other who was commanding that scruffy barge that had just broken ranks. Sleet blew past on the wind.