Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

  Fever shook her head. A moment before she had been racking her brains for a reckless scheme; now that she had been given one she could only see its flaws. “What if they won’t all go? Anyway, the door will be locked. . .”

  “Not locked,” said Charley. “Bolted. I checked. You leave the guards to me. Once they’re out of the way I’ll undo the bolts and let you and Miss Morvish out. It’s chaos down in the Gut tonight. No one will notice you if you stick to the shadows. You can get her to one of the side exits.”

  Fever looked at him, mumbling her thanks again. There was concern for her in his eyes; in his pleasant smile. He had nothing to gain by helping her, and no reason to lie. She should be glad to have him on her side. So why did Godshawk’s memories, grumbling again in that substrate of her brain, keep reminding her of heels he’d known, and tricksters?

  She ignored them and said meekly, “Thank you. Thank you, Charley Shallow.”

  33

  THE SCRIVENER’S MOON

  he went on alone, leaving Charley to follow. The elevators were all out of order so she went down the Cat’s Creep stairs, down into the bustle and confusion of Base Tier. At the stairs’ foot she stopped, shut her eyes, and tried to calm herself, remembering the way to the Gut. She knew that when she got there she would have to talk her way past Cluny’s guards, and she was not sure how; she was a dreadful actress, a wretched liar. How would she make them believe her? How would she stop her ears turning red?

  She would trust Godshawk’s memories, she decided. They are like a book you can take down whenever you want, Wavey had said, but that wasn’t quite right. They were more like coins on the floor of a dark pool, dimly shining. If she needed to, perhaps she could ignore her own thoughts and reach down into the pool and take out the ones she needed, just as she had that afternoon when her shot brought down the mammoth. She did not know how to spring people from prisons, but Godshawk did. For the first time his memories started to seem like a good thing. They were as much a part of her as the science she’d learned from Dr Crumb or the feelings that Arlo and Cluny had forced her to accept, or the love of danger and excitement she had inherited from Wavey, which made her heart race nervously and deliciously as she started across Base Tier.

  The streets were full of people; huddled sleepers camped among their belongings on the pavements, workers hurrying from one repair job to the next, people moving aimlessly, making their way towards the city’s edge in search of air that did not smell like hot stoves. Fever shouldered her way through them, glancing back from time to time to make sure that Charley Shallow was still following.

  In the Great Under Tier there was chaos, just as he had promised. The huge vault was as packed with people as it had been the last time she was there, on the night of the Lord Mayor’s ball. But the doors were open to the night, and instead of dancers and musicians there were salvage gangs heaving wrecked landships and shards of shattered forts up Dr Steepleton’s loading ramps, breaking them apart with saws and welding gear. Outside, torches flared in the dwindling ruins of the Great Carn’s heart-fort as that too was rendered down, and lines of men, like worker ants, dragged its fragments into London.

  She fought her way past the work-gangs, the heaps of salvage, the shouting foremen; past Hangar 10, Hangar 12, and there ahead of her was 14, the big white number stencilled on its tight-shut doors and a space of calm around it; three soldiers standing guard. She stopped and looked at it and wondered again what to do, until a helpful salvageman noticed her there and said, “They’re keeping that nomad prophet girl locked up in that one, ready for killing in the morning.”

  Fever looked over her shoulder. There was Charley Shallow, watching her from the shadows beside a stack of landship wheels. He nodded encouragingly, and she knew that she should feel glad to have him on her side, but she didn’t; some unreasonable part of her still didn’t trust him. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and strode towards Hangar 14.

  The guards pulled themselves to attention when they saw her coming. “I am here to see the prisoner,” she shouted, above the huge noise of the work going on behind her. “Orders from Dr Crumb.”

  They looked doubtful, but they could all see the badge she wore. The sergeant in charge of them said, “I’ll have to come in with you, Miss . . . I mean, Doctor. . .”

  “I will go alone,” said Fever, with a quick, contemptuous glance, feeling Godshawk’s easy arrogance lifting her chin and stiffening her spine. “She knows secrets. My father told me to speak with her alone.”

  “That’s Dr Crumb’s girl,” said one of the other men.

  “Five minutes, then,” the sergeant said. He did not want trouble with Dr Crumb; everyone knew that it was Dr Crumb who decided who stayed in London and who was left behind. “I’ll have to shut you in there with her, miss. Orders. But don’t worry; she can’t hurt you.”

  He undid the heavy bolts and swung the door open; swung it shut and bolted it again as soon as Fever had stepped through. It was dim in the hangar; a greasy dimness lit by one weak lamp on the high rafters. A big space that felt small after the Great Under Tier. Last time she had looked into one of these hangars it had seemed cramped and crowded, with two landships parked there side by side. Now it was empty; just tall racks and shelves around the walls stacked with tools and spares; the floor sloping gently to a large drain in the centre that let the water out when the landships were hosed down. Cluny sat hunched against the far wall. They had roped her wrists together and tied her feet to a ring-bolt in the floor, but she raised her head as Fever went towards her. Fever smiled reassuringly, but Cluny did not look reassured. She struggled to rise, frightened, making ready to defend herself; making fists of her bound hands. Fever caught them, held them, hushed her. “Cluny, it’s me.”

  “Fever? You’re all right!”

  How she had missed that rolling northern voice! “Yes,” she said, “I’m all-rrrright.”

  “Are you making fun of my accent, London girl?”

  “I wouldn’t d-rrream of it!” said Fever. She knelt down, kissing Cluny’s fingers, looking into her poor, bruised, beloved face; into the vast dark pools of her eyes.

  Only then did she realize that Cluny was blind.

  “It’s gone, Fever,” said Cluny. “Godshawk, or the Ancestors, or whatever it was. I was touched by the fire from a Tesla gun, and the dreams are gone. I can’t see London or the lanterns or any of it any more.”

  “Can you see anything at all?” asked Fever, thinking in panic, How can she get away if she cannot see?

  “Nothing,” said Cluny.

  I will have to go with her, Fever thought, and then realized that that was what she had really meant to do all along. She would not stand watching while Cluny went away from her into the dark, as Arlo had. She would not make the wrong choice again. Of course she would go with her.

  Cluny said, “Is this how it was for you, when the magnetic gun went off?”

  Fever shook her head and then remembered that Cluny couldn’t see her. “No. There was a bright flash, and I passed out for a short time, but after that. . .” She wondered if the device in Cluny’s head had been wired somehow to her optic nerve or the vision centres of her brain. She wondered if the pulse from the Tesla gun had scorched her retinas and without mechanimalculae to help repair her she was taking longer to recover her vision than Fever had. “It will be all right,” she promised. “You’ll see again; you’ll see again; in a day or two, a week. . .”

  Cluny made the wry little smile that Fever loved. “They’re going to kill me in the morning, did they not tell you? Anyway, what is there now to look at, except London, and I’ve seen enough of that. It’s nice to have a chance not to see it, for a change. What are you doing?”

  Fever had found a hacksaw among the tool racks and was busy cutting the cords on her wrists. “You have to leave.”

  “Fever, there are guards outside.”

  “I know,” said Fever. “There is someone who will help us. . .” How long had she b
een in the hangar? A minute? Two? Outside, Charley Shallow would be sending the guards away. In a moment he would undo the bolts and it would be time to go. Don’t trust him, warned the Godshawk part of her.

  She turned, checking the hangar for windows or air vents, but the walls behind the storage racks were blank, just as Charley had said. She had to trust him. There was no other way out, was there?

  From behind the stack of landship wheels Charley had watched Fever go into the hangar. He had watched the guard shut the door behind her. He waited, watching, until three minutes had crawled by. He wanted to give her plenty of time to untie the Morvish girl. He wanted to make certain that she was caught red-handed. He wanted her to be dragged back to her father weeping and disgraced. He could already hear himself saying, “I’m sorry to tell you that Miss Crumb was taken helping her nomad friend escape, sir. . .”

  When he was sure she had had long enough he ran to the hangar, shouting, “Stop her! The Crumb girl! She’s here to help the prisoner escape! She’s got no right! Quickly! She stole my badge!”

  The guards sprang up, alarmed, confused, reaching for their rifles. The sergeant was already at the door, the big bolts rattling back. He swung it wide; guns were levelled; the light from welding gear in the Gut sputtered and flashed into the oily dark.

  The oily, empty dark. The cords that Fever had cut from Cluny’s wrists and ankles lay on the deck like a nest of slow-worms. There was no sign of Cluny or Fever, not even when the men brought lanterns in.

  “Witchcraft!” whispered one of them.

  “Those northerners have powerful technomancy,” said another.

  “Shut up and look for them, you useless cloots!” yelled Charley, striding into the hangar, his eyes going over the bags and crates and toolboxes on the shelves. None was big enough to conceal an Engineer or a nomad prophetess. He turned, baffled, and the drain cover in the middle of the floor shifted with a small metallic grunt under his foot. He looked down. He stooped and tried it. It lifted easily. “Look, sir!” said one of the guards, and there in the shadows under the shelves lay the four bolts which had held it in place and the socket-wrench which Fever Crumb had used to undo them.

  Charley threw the cover aside and stared at the black hole that she had squeezed down. He felt offended that she hadn’t trusted him, and puzzled as to why. What now? Go down there after her? He didn’t fancy that; anyway, those drains were a real maze. But they must all come out somewhere eventually, down beneath the central tracks. . .

  He turned to the shocked and frightened guards. “There’s still time to catch them. Come on!”

  The shaft led down into a larger sewer; a broad iron tube that snaked along London’s underbelly. Through gratings in its roof every few yards water was splattering: water from the ruptured tanks of all those damaged elevators, finding its way out through the new city’s drainage systems. Light came down too; not much, but just enough for Fever to see the way ahead as she waded along, leading Cluny by one hand.

  “You were right about London,” she said. “You were right about all of it. I’m coming with you. We must find your people and the Kometsvansen.”

  Cluny said, “Carn-Morvish-my-father is dead. Marten-my-brother will be Carn now. But how can he protect the people, with all our landships and war-mammoths gone? We shall be at the mercy of small empires, and land pirates, and London. . .”

  “Not if you go west, into the hills,” said Fever. “Get to the country round Skrevanastuut. We saw good land there, didn’t we? Where others will not follow, because they fear the nightwights.”

  “But we fear the nightwights too!” said Cluny.

  “They are just people,” said Fever. “I talked to them, remember? I should like to talk to them again. . .”

  They waded on a little further, through the downpours from a few more drains, and Cluny said, “If I tell him to, I think Carn-Marten-my-brother will lead the Morvish there. And I think he will be needing a technomancer. Will you be our technomancer, Fever Crumb?”

  “I’ll be whatever you want me to,” said Fever.

  The sewer sloped gently towards London’s stern, and every forty or fifty yards there was an opening in the floor down which the water gurgled into the darkness between the city’s tracks.

  “We must jump now,” said Fever, when they reached one. “Just like when we left the nightwight lair.”

  “How far down?” asked Cluny.

  “Sometimes you just have to jump, remember?”

  She guided Cluny to the edge, let her jump, waited a moment, then jumped after her. A long drop. A soft landing, her new white coat drenched in mud. All around her in the dark the huge, tracked wheel-units towered. All around her drips came down, pouring from London’s drains and underbelly like rain out of an iron sky. She helped Cluny up and took her hand again and they made their way towards the city’s edge, slithering through ditches that its tracks had carved, scrambling up the banked earth between them, until at last they emerged from the shadows and a silver light fell on them.

  It was the Scrivener’s Moon, hanging full and fat above the battlefield. It was shockingly bright, and it cast long shadows, and it showed them up clearly to Charley Shallow, who had come out through the hangar doors and was now hurrying through the mud outside the city, keeping watch for them.

  It was just their movement that he saw, for their clothes were the same colour as the mud around them. He glanced at the men who followed him, but they were all looking into the shadows under London; they’d not seen. He darted back and snatched a pistol from the sergeant, pointing into the darkness between the nearest banks of tracks. “In there! I thought I saw something move. . .”

  Because he wanted to confront Fever Crumb alone. Then, whatever happened, there would only be his word for it. It would have been sweet to go and tell Dr Crumb she’d been arrested, but sweeter still to tell him she’d been shot down trying to resist. There would never be any danger then of Crumb forgiving her. Nor any danger to Charley now, since the girl was unarmed and would not be expecting him. He hefted the gun in his hand, remembering how he’d chased her through the Brick Marsh with Bagman. He’d failed that time; let the old Skinner down. Tonight he was going to make up for that.

  He waited until his companions had all gone hurrying into the gloom beneath the city, then turned and ran the other way, straining his eyes in the moonlight for those two fleeing figures.

  They moved away from London, and the going grew easier, here where the earth had not been torn by the city’s weight. Crowds of men were busy down around the open jaws, smashing up wrecks and dragging salvage up the ramps, but here there was only the moonlight and the marsh grass blowing. They turned north, following causeways and winding marshmen’s paths.

  After a mile or so they reached a patch of dryer ground; a low rise topped with thorn trees, where a burned-out northern landship stood with moonbeams poking through the shot-holes in its hull. Fever paused and looked back. There London lay, immense, rumbling, pricked with window-lights, the smoke of its chimneys smeared across the moon. She imagined how it would grow in the years that were to come; gorging itself on the wreckage of the towns and land-fleets it would conquer, eating on the move, putting up new buildings and new levels as it dragged itself across the earth, never stopping now; five tiers, six, seven. It would be difficult; it would be near impossible; there would be crises and disasters, but her poor, foolish father would make it work. She imagined the machines that the Engineers would soon devise to make the catching and dismantling of its prey easier. The doors of the Gut would be widened and strengthened until they were truly jaws, and they would yawn and snatch and crunch year after year, feeding a hunger that would never end. . .

  And she would not be part of it.

  She turned away, ready to move on, but as she reached for Cluny’s hand a voice called out, “Well! Won’t your dad be disappointed when I tell him about all this set-to? He thought you was so rational.”

  Charley Shallow had come up
the side of the rise, hidden by that wrecked landship and all the lacy shadows of the trees. He came towards her like a ghost in his white coat, raising the moon-shiny pistol, pulling back its hammer with a creak and a click. Fever backed away from Cluny, and watched the way the gun’s mouth followed her. She was surprised that he was there, but not particularly surprised that he was pointing a gun at her again. She had never really believed that he had changed. She scanned the moonlit marsh behind him, trying to see if he’d brought others with him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re all alone. I got separated from the others somehow. That’s what I’ll tell your dad, miss, when I get back to London. That’s what I’ll tell them all. How you attacked me; you and your blind barbarian girlfriend. What else could I do but shoot? Not that old Crumb will care too much. He never wanted you back. You weren’t supposed to come back, don’t you see? Quercus half suspected Raven was planning something, so he let you and your mum go north just to see what happened. Why send human beings into danger when you can send a couple of Dapplejacks? You were his canary down a coalmine. You were the finger he held up to test which way the wind was blowing.”

  He’d not really thought of that before, but as he said it he realized that there was probably some truth in it. It hurt Fever, anyway, and he enjoyed hurting her, here in the last seconds of her life. “It was a relief to Dr Crumb when you were gone,” he said. “‘It’s so quiet without them, Charley,’ that’s what he said to me. He doesn’t need you any more. Not now he’s got me. He’ll be glad you’re dead again.”

  “Fever, who is he?” asked Cluny.

  “This is Charley Shallow,” said Fever. “The one I told you about. The one who was going to help us.”

  “He does not sound very helpful. . .”

  “What tipped you off?” asked Charley, still watching Fever. “How did you work out I’d set you up?”