Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

  The Great Carn’s council-chamber was packed with men. Carved dragon heads snarled from the hammer-beams. More of Raven’s Stalkers stood guard around the walls. Cluny’s father was there and she wanted him to hug her, but such was her dignity now that he dared not touch her, or even smile. Tharp pushed her past him, towards the Great Carn and his advisors, towards their spread-out maps and plans of war, taking Cluny with him, leading her into the destiny that she could not escape.

  The monowheels swept southward, leaping ditches like rolled hoops, the heavier campavans clattering behind them. Searchlights swept the ground ahead, fingering the deep, fresh wheel-marks Borglum’s barge had left.

  “Well,” said Borglum, watching through his telescope as the gap between them and the Knuckle Sandwich slowly thinned. “I thought we’d make for London, but scratch that. Those bloggers will be on us in a half hour. Anywhere closer we can aim for, Master Fenster?”

  The Sandwich’s steersman looked doubtful. He drew a finger southward down a chart which he’d pinned to the wheelhouse wall. “There’s fighting going on all over, boss. You seen those gun-lights flashing on the clouds?” He knew a thing or two of battles, Fenster did; he’d driven stompers for the Oster-Rus before an anti-misshape Tsar seized power and took objection to his wide, six-fingered hands. “If I was Quercus,” he said, “I’d aim to make a stand here; where the road crosses this here ridge. We should find soldiers there who’re loyal to London.”

  “How far?”

  “An hour, maybe.”

  “Let’s go then. I’ll tell everyone to look lively. Them as can fight: to the hatchways.”

  Fever thought that she was one of them as could fight. “I can handle a firearm,” she said, recalling the hard thump of Cluny’s arquebus when she gunned that nightwight down, and hoping the Knuckle Sandwich’s gunroom held something a bit less primitive; Bugharin rifles, maybe. But it turned out that the Knuckle Sandwich didn’t have a gunroom. “Blades is all we use,” said Stick, as he and Fever hurried to the armoury. “Who’d pay to watch gunplay? There’s no artistry in guns.”

  He got that straight from Master Borglum, Fever thought, and maybe it was true. By that time shot from the long swivel cannon on the campavans was starting to clatter against the Sandwich’s hull, and it didn’t sound very artistic. She went down into the oven of the under-deck, where the Stalker was running tirelessly on his treadmill and everyone else was helping to shovel wood and sea-coal into the furnaces and trying to keep out of the way of the jets of steam which kept squealing from the boilers’ safety valves. It was backbreaking work, down there in the heat and the furnace-light. Within minutes sweat had plastered Fever’s hair across her eyes and soaked through the armpits of her clothes in dark half-moons, but at least amid the thrashing of the pistons she could not hear the shot pecking at the barge’s stern. If we can just keep going, she thought, trying to estimate the relative speeds of barges, campavans, monowheels, if we can just keep moving, perhaps they’ll give up. . .

  Above decks the mist was thinning. The moon appeared: the Scrivener’s Moon; near full, shining on swift campavans and blazing silver on the rims of monowheels. It glittered on the points of the first grappling hook that the pursuers flung, and Borglum himself saw it and went scrambling along the upperworks to hack it free before the men who’d thrown it could climb out of their campavan and swarm aboard. They opened up on him with a panpipe-gun mounted on the campavan’s roof, but he was too small a target and he scuttled back into the wheelhouse unharmed. On either side now the pursuers were pulling forward, racing along beside his good old barge.

  “Faster!” he yelled at his steersman.

  Master Fenster shook his head. He was amazed that the old ship was still going this fast.

  “Then we must lighten her!” yelled Borglum.

  Fever, lost in a waking dream of heat and work below decks, heard them calling her name, and the names of all those others who weren’t essential to the engines’ running. Then she was upstairs again, and they were tearing the Knuckle Sandwich apart, grabbing everything that was not bolted down, unbolting all the things that were, slinging anything that would burn downstairs to feed the furnaces and lugging the rest to the side hatches, where the waiting defenders helped to hurl it out into the rushing dark. An impertinent monowheel came dashing alongside with a man leaning from its hub-cabin to shoot a musket at them, but Stick hit him in the face with a well-aimed plaster statuette from the Temple of All-Knowing Poskitt at Kjork. The gunman pitched backwards, his pilot lost control and the monowheel veered away and fell on its side among the gorse bushes.

  The rest hung back for a while after that, but as Fever helped the crew shove more of their belongings through the hatch she sometimes heard the crack of musketry, and sensed things whirring past like wasps. When she went into Lady Midnight’s cabin to pull apart the bunk she’d just been napping on she found the outer wall pierced all over, like lacework, all the furniture and hangings shredded, spent carronade balls rolling around like marbles on the deck. She had lost all sense of how much time had passed since the chase began. It seemed like seconds; it seemed like days. Back in the corridor she saw herself reflected in an ornate mirror that somebody passed to her. A soot-blacked face with wide, white, frightened eyes, striped where streams of sweat had washed the smuts away. If Wavey could have seen her she’d have said, “Oh, Fever, what have you done to yourself?” That made her start to laugh as she dragged the mirror towards the hatch, but she stopped quickly, because she had blundered into the middle of a battle.

  One of the campavans had finally drawn close enough to the Sandwich’s starboard quarter for men to leap the gap. They had landed unnoticed, and scrambled quickly along the barge’s side to reach the hatch. One of them had pistolled the Knave of Knives before he could slam it shut, but their other shots had all missed – it was no easy thing to aim a gun with the barge bucketing beneath them like a maddened mammoth – and now that they were through the hatchway there was no time to reload; it was sword against sword, and Borglum’s fighters were well-used to swords. Fever cowered behind the mirror until it was over; till Lady Midnight ran the last man through and kicked his body from the hatchway. Others slammed the hatch shut as she turned away, touching her blood-stained cardigan. “Don’t suppose that will ever wash out,” she said, mock-rueful, trying to raise a laugh. She had not realized yet that the Knave was dead. The others gathered round him where he lay. Fever left her mirror propped against a bulkhead and edged away, leaving them to their grief. She could hear the crash of axes as the crew below broke up the last of the furniture and started on the decking. She wondered if they would have agreed to Borglum’s plan if they had known what it would cost them.

  The next assault came on the other side of the barge, but it was bungled; two men fell beneath the wheels as they jumped across; the rest were beaten off by Quatch before they could make it through the hatchway. The campavans and ’wheels fell back again, grouping astern.

  “Look! They’ve had enough!” crowed Stick, his voice echoing through the empty spaces where cabins used to be. He could not see what the pursuers could. From beneath the Knuckle Sandwich long pennants of fire were licking at the ground. The speeding barge now trailed a train of sparks and oily smoke.

  The first Fever knew of it was when the brakes went on, a sudden juddering that was somehow different from all the juddering that had gone before. “Abandon ship!” hollered Borglum, dropping down through the trapdoor from the smashed wheelhouse. “Fire! Fire!” people were shouting, scrambling up the companionways from the engine room, the flames behind them casting their jerky, misshape shadows up the smoke. Someone was trapped down there, shrieking. In the confusion, some of the ’shapes thought it was another attack and ran this way and that with weapons ready, blocking the corridors. “Abandon ship!” Fever shouted. “Or we’ll be blown as high as Raven. . .”

  But there wasn’t enough fuel left aboard the Sandwich for a real explosion. The barge just burn
ed, wrapping itself in flame as the survivors of the carnival jumped from the hatches and hurried into the firelit scrub. Looking back, Fever glimpsed the Carnival’s Stalker for a moment, still mindlessly working his treadmill as the walls collapsed around him, a runner in a wheel of fire. Sparks danced. Beyond the flames, the monowheels rolled to and fro, their engines moaning, a shot ringing out from time to time.

  “Poor old barge,” said Master Fenster, pulling off his hat.

  “Poor Sandwich,” said Lucy, and her face was bright with tears in the flame-light.

  “Toasted,” said Stick, with his arm around her.

  “We’re done for now,” said Lady Midnight. “They’ll hunt us down one by one. They’ve already got the Knave and Webfinger Joe.”

  “No,” said Borglum. He wasn’t watching the blaze or the monowheels; he’d turned to look southward instead. “The Sandwich brought us far enough. Look.”

  Fever turned. There in the moonlight a mile away a long ridge rose, whale-backed and somehow familiar. It was Dryships Hill, where she had once sat looking at the fires of the far-off Fuel Country. Just as she realized that, the lights of big vehicles appeared over its crest: one, two, three landships, and their guns went off with stabs of flame and puffs of moonlit smoke, and shells began to fall close to the monowheels, scattering them, drowning out the shrill howl of their engines as they fled.

  “Hands up, hands up, all of you,” Borglum was saying. “We haven’t escaped from that lot just to get ourselves splattered by the other side.” He had his short arms up above his head, and Fever copied him, and so did all the others, and they stood there with their backs to the heat of their burning barge as the infantry of London came hurrying down the scarp.

  “Miss Crumb? We had heard that you were. . . I am glad to find it is not true. You came from the north?”

  Fever knew this man; his curly hair and honest, northern face. She remembered Wavey pointing him out to her across the heads of dancers in the Great Under Tier at Quercus’s ball all those months ago. Captain Andringa.

  “Have you seen anything of the traitor’s fortresses?” he asked, turning from her to Stick and Stick to Lady Midnight, but they were all too shocked by the night’s events to answer. He said, “I was sent out by Quercus to find them.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry back to Quercus then,” said Borglum. “’Cos they’re coming to find you. I sorted out Raven for you – don’t thank me, it was my pleasure – but I reckon every scrap o’ armour Arkhangelsk possesses is still hammering across that seabed. You’d better run home to London, and take us with you if you please.”

  Andringa’s men were jogging past him, kneeling among the gorse, shooting after the withdrawing monowheels. He looked sideways, left and right along the slope of the hill, at the black hulks of Three Dry Ships on their reef of outbuildings. Around his landships on the ridge Stalkers were moving, their green eyes shining. “No,” he said. “We won’t be running. We shall hold them here.”

  “Hold them?” said Fever. “There are hundreds! Landships, forts, Stalkers. . .”

  “Hold them?” scoffed Borglum. “What’s to stop them just going round you?”

  “There are marshes east and west of here,” said Andringa. “Unless they want to go far out of their way then they must cross this hill. Besides, the Arkhangelsk are warriors. They always point their vehicles towards the sound of the guns. The flames from your barge will call them like a beacon.”

  Between the charred ribs of the Knuckle Sandwich the fires were dying down. Beyond them, along the black horizon, other lights were showing now, as the vanguard of the northern armada came hull-up. Andringa studied them, nodded. “We will hold them here for as long as we can. We can buy the Lord Mayor some time, at least.”

  “Time? Time for what?” Borglum complained.

  “To get London away,” said Andringa, as if it were obvious. “Your father has been busy, Miss Crumb. The engines are complete. Quercus is moving the city.”

  30

  AT THREE DRY SHIPS

  t wasn’t hard to see why the crew of the Knuckle Sandwich had not noticed Three Dry Ships until they were almost upon it. Not a light showed in the windows of the beached hulks, nor in the low huddle of buildings round about them. The townlet was deserted, its people fled before the coming storm.

  “And that’s what we should do too,” Stick said, as he and Fever and the rest went to shelter inside the largest of the old ships. They looked into the empty cabins that were shops and homes now; all showed signs that their owners had departed in a hurry. A ginger cat mewled at them, looking up jealously from the half-eaten remains of some family’s forgotten supper. “We should run, I reckon,” Stick said. “Leave these London soldier boys to fight their battle.”

  “Stick, how can we?” Lucy said, holding tight to his hand with her pincer. “We’re too tired. We need to rest.”

  “No good runnin’,” Borglum said. “There’s no vehicles nor animals left in this dump.”

  “We could go on foot, and hide in the marshes,” Stick suggested.

  “Very likely we could, Master Stickle,” said the dwarf. “And very likely Arkies on foot will come and hunt us there if they win this fight. Anyway, I’m a trifle short to go wading about in sloughs. No, we’ll wait and see what happens. Maybe Andringa really can hold these northern nanas off. If he don’t, we’ll prevail on him to find a space for us aboard one of his landships when he goes running back to Quercus. Till then, we might as well stop here. At least there’s beds.”

  So they lay themselves down on beds abandoned by the folk of Three Dry Ships and there they slept, or tried to. Their dreams were bad, and several times that night Fever was woken by the sound of cannon fire, far off, but never far enough.

  The third time she woke the sky outside was growing pale. She knew that she could sleep no more without knowing what was happening, so she rose and pulled on her boots (she had slept in all her other clothes) and climbed silent stairways to the old ship’s deck. There, between the chicken-coops and the clothes lines of forgotten washing, Andringa and a dozen other Movement captains stood talking together on the sterncastle, passing a telescope between them. More London landships had arrived in the night and were parked all over the slope of the hill behind the town.

  One of the men saw Fever come up out of the stairway. “What’s she doing here?” she heard him say.

  Captain Andringa told him, “Miss Crumb and her friends have done more already in this war than you,” and beckoned her forward. “Miss Crumb!” he said as she reached him. “I was hoping we might spare a barge to carry you home, but it seems we shall have need of them all today. . .”

  He pointed to the north. There, on the rolling land where the Knuckle Sandwich still smouldered, strange shapes had appeared. Neat-edged plantations of young trees, Fever thought at first, and wondered how she had not noticed them before. Then she started to see movements among them, and men on horses cantering from one to another, and she realized that each of those bristling squares and oblongs was a unit of men: soldiers standing motionless with their pikes and long, north-country muskets pointed at the sky. Between them in the mist waited squadrons of campavans and the big hard shapes of landships, grey as outcrop stone in the dawn. Far behind them she could just make out still larger shapes: the traction castles of the Arkhangelsk Carns, gathered about the Great Carn’s heart-fort. They were being held back ready for the moment when their smaller, faster moving comrades shattered the Londoners’ defensive line. Which one is Cluny on? Fever wondered. What is she doing, now, at this instant?

  “We’ll be hard pressed,” said the man who had complained about Fever when she came on deck.

  “We held them at Hill 60,” said Andringa.

  “Our Stalkers held them,” said another man. “They have Stalkers of their own now, thanks to Raven.”

  “We’ll hold them just the same.”

  Borglum came clambering up the same stair Fever had used. “What, you lot stil
l here?” he asked in mock surprise when he saw Andringa and the other men. He stood on tiptoe to peep over the parapet. The sun was rising above the eastern fog-banks now. The banners of Arkhangelsk showed their bright colours. “Oho!” he said. “How long till the fun starts?”

  “You and your people will be safe here, Master Borglum,” promised Andringa. “You are well behind our lines.”

  “Are we?” said Borglum. “That could change. Lines move, Captain, but these old hulks won’t. If the tide comes in they’ll be overwhelmed, and the tide’s coming all right; a tide of steel.”

  “Then we must dam it, Master Borglum,” said Andringa calmly.

  From one of the northern landships a cannon boomed. Fever saw the puff of smoke drifting away, and heard the shot go whirring overhead.

  “Get your people under cover,” said Andringa to Borglum, and to his comrades, “Gentlemen, we must rejoin our units. . .”

  He had to shout the last few words, for all along the northern line guns were going off, red-gold muzzle-flashes stabbing out of a spreading cloud of smoke. The shells passed above Three Dry Ships with a sound like geese on the wing and burst among the dug-in landships on the slopes of Dryships Hill.

  “They’re softening us up ready for an attack,” said Borglum cheerfully. “It won’t last long. Those northern nanas don’t like shooting matches; they’d sooner get to close quarters.” He shoved Fever ahead of him, back down the stairs, and she was glad to go; the air outside was buzzing with shot. But down at ground level the misshapes were arranging breakfast, sitting out the barrage together as if it was any ordinary storm. With them she felt safer; she even managed to eat a couple of the pancakes which Quatch rustled up, although she had thought she had no appetite at all.