Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  Fever Crumb (The Hungry City Chronicles, Book 5)

  Philip Reeve

  for sarah and sam

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1 The Girl from Godshawk's Head 3

  2 An Offer of Employment 10

  3 The wind Tram 16

  4 Stragglemarket 23

  5 At the Sign of the Mott and Hoople 31

  6 The Archaeologist's House 40

  7 Under London 49

  8 Skinner's Boy 58

  9 The Scent Lantern 66

  10 Summertown 74

  11 Master Wormtimber 84

  12 The Foldable Assassin 89

  13 Morning after the Night Before 95

  14 Skinners in the Brick Marsh 105

  15 Hunting Fever 114

  16 The Long Walk Home 121

  17 Storm Coming 129

  18 Chair vs. Chair 138

  19 Dr. Crumb 147

  20 At Nonesuch House 159

  21 Nocturne in Blue 165

  22 The Fifth Word 174

  VII

  23 Under Siege 183

  24 The Library 193

  25 Heads Will Roll 204

  PART TWO

  26 The Flight North 213

  27 Public Disorder 222

  28 Under New Management 231

  29 The Traction Castle 237

  30 The Snow Leopard 244

  31 Hidden Treasures 251

  32 Technomancy 258

  33 London Falling 267

  34 Mayor vs. Mayor 275

  35 Mementoes 285

  36 The Stalker's Question 292

  37 The Magneto Gun 299

  38 We Are the Dead 305

  39 Crumbs of Comfort 312

  40 The Passing Show 320

  FEVER CRUMB

  ***

  PART ONE

  ***

  3

  1 THE GIRL FROM GODSHAWK'S HEAD

  That morning they were making paper boys. Fever had gone down at dawn to the pressing room to collect fourteen of the big, furled sheets of paper, six feet square, which Dr. Isbister made by pulping and pressing foolish old books that his library did not need. Then she had carried them carefully back up the winding wooden stairways of the Head to the chambers that she shared with Dr. Crumb. There they had set to work.

  Fever was just the right size now to lie on each sheet while Dr. Crumb drew an outline all round her with his pencil. When that was done, she fetched two pairs of paper shears, and they carefully cut out the silhouettes. Soon fourteen of her blank, white selves lay stacked on the workbench. Fever stood at Dr. Crumb's side, watching but not speaking while he spread out one of the cutouts and laid a thin, wire skeleton on top of it. He took care over the hands, with their complicated little mechanisms, and the dim white metal discs, like flimsy coins, which were the paper

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  boy's eyes and brain. These were old-world mechanisms, and if they were damaged they could never be replaced, for no one knew the secrets of their making any more; they had been recycled from one generation of paper boys to the next ever since the Scriven first brought them down out of the unknown north.

  When all the mechanisms were correctly positioned, Fever helped Dr. Crumb to coat the paper figure with paste. Then they took a second cutout and stuck it precisely over the first, so that the two cutouts formed a Fever-shaped paper sandwich with the metal parts hidden inside. Together, they carried it to the bath that stood in a corner of the room and laid it in the solution. At first the paper boy just floated on the surface, like a dead leaf on a pond, but Fever took rubber-tipped tongs and gently pressed it down until the solution flowed over it and it sank. While Dr. Crumb set to work on the next paper boy, Fever got her fingers under the edge of the bath and tilted it gently up and down, up and down, so that the solution shifted but did not spill, and the paper boy slid to and fro under the surface, his head and feet banging alternately against the ends of the bath.

  Fever thought that it would be more rational to call the device a paper girl, since it had been drawn around her, but Dr. Crumb said that it was not alive and had no gender.

  "So why are they called paper boys?"

  "A good point, Fever. The name is foolish, and was clearly not invented by a man of reason."

  When all seven paper boys had been made and soaked, they

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  lifted them out of the bath one by one and held them up so that the excess solution could drain off. Then, carrying the dripping figures on a rack between them, they left the workroom and went up the stairs and out onto the roof.

  "This is a great waste of time," said Dr. Crumb, as they pegged the paper boys out like laundry for the brisk west wind to dry. "Why the New Council does not just ask their Master of Devices to make paper boys for them, I fail to understand. Master Wormtimber was once a member of our Order, and surely he cannot have forgotten everything he learned from us...."

  "Perhaps the New Council knows you make them best, Dr. Crumb," said Fever loyally. "And maybe they want paper boys they can be sure of, if there is really to be a war."

  "There is not going to be a war," said Dr. Crumb.

  "But Dr. Isbister told me that a nomad horde is approaching from the north --"

  "As our Order's librarian, it is one of Dr. Isbister's duties to read the city newspapers, and I'm afraid they fill his mind with rumors and scaremongery. This is not the first time one of the nomad empires has moved south. They will not dare to attack London. Though if they did, I doubt that a few paper boys could do much to stop them."

  The drying paper boys flapped and crockled, a line of white dancers strung between two ventilator cowls. Specks of rust and dust blew against them and stuck to the still-wet paper, so Fever and Dr. Crumb went to and fro patiently picking them off. After

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  a while, as the boys began to dry, Dr. Crumb went back below, leaving Fever to keep an eye on them. She walked to the roof's edge and lay down, enjoying the warmth of the sun. It was July, the height of London's brief summer. Bees droned past her, and the cries of hawkers came up faintly from the deep streets, where she could see people and carts and sedan chairs moving. Jackdaws called and squabbled around the strange, old, blue metal towers in Clerkenwell; wind trams under their clouds of sunlit sail went rattling along their spindly viaducts. And somewhere beneath her, more as a vibration in her breastbone than an actual sound, Fever could hear the voices of old Dr. Collihole and his assistants as they labored in his attic workspace, assembling the vast paper balloon in which he planned one day soon to begin the reconquest of the skies.

  ***

  Fever was the youngest member of the Order of Engineers, and the only female. Engineers did not have wives or children. But one evening fourteen years before, Dr. Crumb had been called out to a dig on the Brick Marsh by an archaeologist named Chigley Unthank who wanted an opinion on some Ancient artifacts which he'd unearthed, and on his way back he had heard crying coming from an old weed-grown pit close to the road. There, among the bramble bushes, he had found a baby in a basket with an old blanket laid over her and a label tied around her wrist, upon which someone had written just four words:

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  Her name is Fever.

  He had told Fever the story often when she was little. (Dr. Crumb did not believe in telling lies, not even white lies, not even to little girls. He had not wanted her to grow up thinking she was his?) She knew how he had stood there in the twilight staring down at the baby in the basket and how finally, not knowing what else to do, he had carried her back with him to Godshawk's Head.

  In earlier years he might have taken her to the civic orphanage, but that was the summer of the Skinners' Riots, and the orphanage had been wrecked and looted, along with much of the rest of the city. In London's rougher bor
oughs, like Limehouse and St Kylie, the skins of murdered Scriven still flapped like speckled flags from poles that the Skinners had set up at street corners. The collection of merchants and lawyers who called themselves the New Council had not yet completely restored order.

  Dr. Crumb made up a little bed for the foundling in a spare drawer of his plan-chest and fed her watered-down milk through a laboratory pipette. Looking into her eyes, he noticed that they were different colors; the left dark brown, the right soft lichen gray. Was that why she had been abandoned? Had her mother been afraid that her neighbors would take that small oddity for a

  8

  sign that the child was a Scriven or some other sort of misshape, and kill her? There was a small wound on the back of her head, a thin cut not quite healed. Dr. Crumb, who had seen for himself the savagery of the Skinners, imagined some crazed Londoner slashing at her with a knife....

  The other Engineers, gathering round him to peer at the tiny refugee, had all agreed with him; the child must not go back to live among those savage, superstitious Londoners. She would stay with the Order, in Godshawk's Head, and Dr. Crumb would act as her guardian. Girls had never been admitted to the Order before, since it was well known that female minds were not capable of rational thought. But if little Fever were to be brought up in the ways of the Order from infancy, was there not a chance that she might make a useful Engineer?

  ***

  So here she lay, fourteen summers later, in the sunshine on the Head's roof. She had grown into an odd-looking girl, and her clothes made her look odder still. Only someone who had spent fourteen years being told that appearances don't matter would dress in clothes like those. Big digger's boots, skinny black trousers, an old gray shirt, a white canvas coat with metal buttons. Then there was her hair, or rather, her lack of hair. The Order was keen to hurry humankind into the future, and they believed that hair was unnecessary. Fever shaved her head every other morning, and had done so for so long that she didn't remember what color her hair would be if she were to let it grow. And

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  below the bald dome of her head she had a curious face, with a short, sudden nose and a wide mouth, thick fair eyebrows, and, oddest of all, those large eyes that didn't match. Yet somehow it all worked. It was one of those rare faces which bypassed pretty and went straight to beautiful.

  Of course, that would never have occurred to Fever. She attached no importance to her looks. But she was beautiful, all the same, as she lay there watching the city and waiting for the paper boys to dry and idly tracing the raised line of that old scar that she could feel but never see -- a slender, silvery thread which curved along the base of her skull.

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  ***

  2 An Offer of Employment

  Godshawk's Head was not a building; it really was a head. Auric Godshawk, the last of London's Scriven overlords, had planned to commemorate his rule with an immense statue of himself, but he had gotten no further than this metal head, seven stories high, which stood near Ox-fart Circus on a patch of waste ground surrounded by the huge, abandoned smelting and rolling sheds where it had been constructed.

  The Scriven had arrived in London two hundred years before. Driven out of their northern homelands by some power shift among the nomad empires, they swept south in search of a city to conquer, and London, rich in trade and archaeology, had drawn them like magpies. After smashing London's army at the Battle of Barnet, they dragged their mobile fortress onto the summit of Ludgate Hill, tore off its wheels, and converted it into the Barbican, the stronghold from which Scriven kings would rule over the city for the next two centuries.

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  They were brilliant, cruel, and party mad, and they were not exactly human beings. In the black time after the Downsizing all sorts of mutations had come whirling down the helter-skelter of the human DNA spiral, and the Scriven claimed to be a new species entirely. Homo superior they liked to call themselves, or sometimes Homo futuris , the idea being that they had come into the world to replace dull old Homo sapiens. They were strange in a lot of ways you couldn't easily put your finger on, and in one way that you could: Their pale skin was blotched and dappled with markings, like leopards' spots. Some Scriven's spots were freckle-colored, others were dark as spilled ink. The Scriven prized dark markings most. They believed that they had each been written on by a god called the Scrivener, who had inscribed the future history of the world upon their skins. Scriven scholars spent whole lifetimes making drawings of other Scriven in the nude, and trying to decipher the Scrivener's sacred ideograms.

  But like most mutant strains, the Scriven hadn't thrived for long. The genetic peculiarities of which they were so proud turned out to be their downfall. All of London's previous conquerors had intermarried with native Londoners and had children who were Londoners themselves, but although some Scriven took human wives and lovers, no children ever came of those unions. Even Scriven marriages were often barren. By the time Godshawk began work on his giant statue there were only a few hundred Scriven left, lording it over a city of sixty thousand. The taxes needed to pay for it, and the slave labor used in its building,

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  helped spark the Skinners' Riots, in which Godshawk and all the other Scriven had been slaughtered.

  The rioters had swirled all through London, burning and smashing anything connected with the Scriven, but they'd not been able to do much damage to that titanic head. When the smoke cleared it was still standing, its stern face dented and daubed with angry slogans.

  There had been a housing shortage after the riots -- the burning down of buildings, it turned out, had been a bad idea in a city made mostly of timber and thatch -- and the unpopular Order of Engineers (who had taken no part in the uprising, and many of whose members had worked for Scriven masters) were thrown out of their big Guildhouse on Ludgate Hill to make room for displaced families. It seemed logical that, rather than waiting for a new Guildhouse to be built while their valuable collections sat moldering in makeshift huts, they should just move into Godshawk's Head. It was hollow, mostly weather-tight, and very big. The builders had left scaffolding inside that formed the basis of floors and walls and stairways. The Engineers glazed Godshawk's eyes, and poked dozens of smaller windows in his cheeks and forehead. They gave him a tar-paper roof like a bad hat. The Head was only intended to be a temporary accommodation, but it became permanent. After all, as the Engineers liked to joke in their dry, unfunny way, it was most appropriate that they should live in a head. Hadn't they always said that they were the brains of the city?

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  ***

  That night, when the paper boys had been taken down and packed in boxes, and sent up to the Barbican, and Fever was washing up after the evening meal in the tiny kitchen which adjoined Dr. Crumb's work space, there came a tapping on the door. She put down the dish she had been wiping and reached for a towel to dry her hands, but Dr. Crumb had already left his workbench and gone to see who their visitor was. Fever could not see the door from where she stood in the kitchen, but she heard it open, and heard the voice of Dr. Stayling.

  Fever wondered what could have brought the Chief Engineer to their quarters at such a late hour. She was almost tempted to eavesdrop on what he and Dr. Crumb were talking about, but she reminded herself to be reasonable. There is no profit in wondering why Dr. Stayling has come here, she thought. It may he nothing to do with you, "Fever Crumb, and if it is, you shall find out about it in good time. So she made herself go on with her chores, carefully wiping and drying each plate, dish, and utensil, and putting them back in their places on the kitchen shelves. A place for everything, and everything in that place was one of the rules that Dr. Crumb had taught her when she was very little.

  She was just emptying the dirty water out of the kitchen window when Dr. Crumb called to her. "Fever. Dr. Stayling would like to speak with you."

  So it did have something to do with her! She put the bowl upside down on the sill to drain, then shut the window. She ran

&n
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  a hand over her head, glad that she had shaved that morning. Then she went through into the workroom.

  Dr. Stayling was a tall, broad-shouldered old man. He shaved his head, like all the Order, but he didn't bother to clip the hairs in his nostrils, which were long and steely gray and quivered when he breathed. Fever, facing him, reminded herself that it would be childish to find that distracting.

  "Fever," said Dr. Crumb, looking worried, "Dr. Stayling has a proposal for you."

  "It is not my proposal, you understand," said Dr. Stayling, with that North Country accent of his which grew stronger when he was excited. "Kit Solent, a minor archaeologist, has asked me to supply an Engineer to live at his house on Ludgate Hill and help him to study artifacts from a new site he has discovered. He has requested you, Fever."

  Fever, like a good Engineer, showed no emotion, but beneath her white coat her heart began to beat very quickly.

  "Fever is very young to be sent out on such a placement," said Dr. Crumb.

  "Nevertheless, Crumb, you're always telling us how rational and capable she is. And it is perfectly usual for young Engineers to be sent out into the world. Only then do we find out if they are truly men of reason, or if they will fall prey to the world's temptations. You did it yourself, Crumb."

  "Yes," said Dr. Crumb, looking suddenly flustered. "Yes, I did, and it was a ... a troubling period. Difficult ..."

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  Dr. Stayling went and stood at the window, gazing out across the great, smoky, unreasonable city. He said, "I always had high hopes for young Solent. As a young man he struck me as having a very rational mind. Made some interesting discoveries. Remember that old underground railway station down by the Marsh Gate? That was one of his finds. Remarkable state of preservation. Then he went and married some digger's daughter, and that was the end of his usefulness. They busied themselves mooning about and having babies for a few years, and then the girl died, and ever since he's just looked after the children while living off his savings, which I should imagine are getting pretty low by now. I'm pleased to hear that he's digging again. It is rational for the Order to encourage him in any way we can."