Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  ***

  A storm had blown through the Solent house. At least, that's what it looked like: blasted the front door in and roared right through, overturning furniture and wrenching down curtains, smashing the scent lanterns and spilling perfumes across the floors, filling the wrecked rooms with drifts of clashing scent.

  The Stalker Grike strode through it all quite unmoved, following Corvus and Lammergeier. His visor was up and his bloodless face was the face of Kit Solent, but as his electric eyes slid over portraits of his wife and her father, his children and his former self, he gave no sign of recognizing anything. He has no memories at all, thought Fever. And me, I've far too many .

  There was no sign of Fern or Ruan as they walked toward the hidden basement and the passageway. Fever thought of calling out their names, but stopped herself. She would not want them to meet their father in his new form, not unwarned. Anyway, it seemed unlikely that they would have remained in this place, with its broken windows and torn-off doors. Even though she worked for the Movement, Mistress Gloomstove surely wouldn't have left them alone to face the rioters, would she?

  They stopped before the bookcase. Wavey shone her

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  lantern beam over it, and Fever reached up and pressed the stud to open it. As it slid aside she half thought she heard another sound, behind her. She turned, but saw nothing there. The house was probably full of small meaningless noises as the wind whisked through it.

  She didn't notice Charley Shallow dart behind the doorjamb. But he was there all right, and he had watched the bookcase open, and he had seen how it was done.

  ***

  In Barbican Square Quercus and Swiney circled each other, crouched and wary. Spectators pressed in on all sides. There was a silence that was not quite silence; rather the sound of a thousand people trying not to make a sound. Sometimes a burning torch flapped and roared as the breeze caught it. The short stood on tiptoe to peek over the shoulders of taller Londoners. Movement warriors lowered their guns and stood watching. Mono pilots gazed from the open hatchways of their vehicles. Children were held aloft by their parents -- "It'll be educational, this. When you're grown you'll be able to say, I was there, on Ludgate Hill, the day Swiney did battle for the city against...against... what's this bloke's name again?'"

  "Quercus!" shouted a warrior suddenly, and the others around him took up the chant, cheering on their leader. "Quercus! Quercus!"

  For a moment it was only the invaders' voices that went echoing about the square. Then a Londoner called out, "Swiney!" The

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  rest all looked at him with interest, waiting to see if the Movement or their Stalkers would punish him. When no harm came to him, others started to join in. "Swiney! Come on, Ted! Swiney for London!"

  Quercus lunged forward, feinting to the right, then driving his left fist hard at Swiney's head. But Swiney was ready for him. Caught him by the forearm and slung him past, swung his leg up in a kick that missed, because Quercus was tougher than he looked and recovered faster than Swiney had expected. His bony fist smashed into Ted's face once, twice, blood squirting sudden and red from Ted's nose. Ted staggering backward, shaking his head as if he were shaking off the pain...

  "He's tapped Ted's ketchup," they said in the crowd.

  "He's hard all right."

  "It's a good thing we put Ted in instead of old Gilpin Wheen. Gilpin Wheen wouldn't have lasted ten seconds against this geezer."

  "Gilpin Wheen wouldn't have asked him for a fight in the first place, you great soft blogger."

  And the shouts going on all the time, booming off the walls all round the square, while pigeons scattered into the sky, and the two men grappled and went rolling in each other's arms down the Barbican steps.

  ***

  Inside the Barbican, everyone had forgotten Dr. Crumb. He came out onto a high balcony and peered down into the square with

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  the sort of concentration he usually reserved for petri dishes and bits of alum paper.

  Below him, Ted had gained the upper hand. But it was only for a moment. Quercus was as slippery as an elver, and the brisk blows he kept landing on Ted's ears and jaw were making the pub keeper slow and stupid. There was blood on both men's faces now, blood spotting the steps and the cobbles of the square, and Ted had spat out a couple of teeth that he could ill afford to lose. But he kept fighting. He was glad, in a way, that the northerner hadn't proved as fragile as he'd expected. This way all London could see the fight was fair, and when he won it they'd rise up and turf these nomads out and carry him shoulder high, the way the crowds at Pickled Eel used to when he laid out one of the Pa tension's champions.

  But he knew that he was flagging. It was time to end this punch-up. Grabbing Quercus by his upper body, Swiney started maneuvering him toward the trestles that supported that giant barrel of Brimstone Best. A few men had climbed up onto the trestles as the fight began, and anyone who wasn't in the know would have thought they were just up there for a better view. But one of them was Mutt Gnarly and another was Brickie Chapstick, and Ted had given secret orders to them both.

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  ***

  35 M ementoes

  Fever was walking through memories, following her mother and the Stalker Grike along the tunnel, with Corvus and Lammergeier marching behind her. It was so like the first time she'd walked there, with Kit Solent. And so like other times, when Godshawk had come this way, hurrying off to spend a few quiet hours in his workroom between meetings at the Barbican. The old man's memories were pouring into her mind, and the farther she went along that winding way the more frequently she caught herself believing that she was Godshawk, and that the woman who strode ahead of her was her daughter.

  She remembered standing outside Nonesuch House, looking north to London. But instead of the real city she saw the future London that Godshawk had imagined. The Barbican was repaired. It had wheels and tracks again, as it had when it first brought the Scriven south, but it was ten times larger than it had been then. Even Fever's own memories of the Movement's traction

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  fortress couldn't compete with it. In Godshawk's vision the whole of London had been stripped and cannibalized to build three tall tiers of houses, parks, and manufactories on its back, and the thunder from its giant engines drummed across the Brick Marsh, startling up wildfowl from the reed beds as the whole structure began dragging itself laboriously across the earth on banks of huge wheels....

  "A moving city!" she said, stopping short. "I -- I mean he -- he meant to move London.... The thing in the vault, it's an engine, isn't it?" She remembered the designs she had seen in the notebook at Kit Solent's place. She remembered drawing them now. Just doodles, they had been; the first inklings of an idea. "An external combustion engine, based on an Ancient device called a Stirling engine, but far more efficient ..."

  Wavey had stopped walking, too. She stood with her lantern raised, her face turned back to look at Fever. "Godshawk believed that with a few dozen such engines he could move London. He had time to build only one before the Skinners murdered him."

  Fever shook her head, clearing away the memories. "But why would anyone want a moving city?"

  Wavey laughed. "Perhaps it takes a nomad to see the beauty of it. Godshawk only envisaged moving London once. He meant it to carry the Scriven to the shores of the Middle Sea where they would settle down again, far from angry Londoners and the spreading ice. Quercus has other plans. He means to make London the first true nomad city. He means it to keep on traveling

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  the world, taking whatever it needs from other cities that haven't the means to get out of his path."

  "That's not what I intended!" said Fever, Godshawkishly. And then, more like herself, 'That's irrational! It's deranged!"

  Her mother made a pretty, dismissive movement with one long white hand in the lantern light. "I suppose it's a nomad thing. Who cares? By telling Quercus about Godshawk's plans and Godshawk's engines I made him th
e instrument of my revenge. Thanks to him, London will be humbled; its streets will be torn down to provide raw materials, its people will be forced to toil at building Godshawk's dream. A thousand years from now the Scriven will be forgotten, but the world will still remember Auric Godshawk, the man who set a city moving!"

  It seemed to Fever much more likely that it would be Quercus who got the credit, should the unlikely scheme succeed. But she did not say so, and Wavey, after smiling fiercely at her for a moment, turned and walked on. Fever and the Stalkers went with her. And perhaps because she now knew each twist and dip of the way so well, or perhaps because she was so taken up with Godshawk's salvaged memories that she was not aware of much else, it seemed to Fever only a little time before the passage widened into the antechamber where the vault door waited.

  The Stalkers' green eyes swept the walls of the antechamber, and their beam came to rest on the other door, the door with the ivory handle, which led to the upper world.

  It was open. And when Wavey went and opened it still wider

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  and looked up the long throat of the stairway there was a dim hint of daylight high above which told them that the outer door was open, too. Fever supposed that she and Kit had forgotten to shut them when they came back inside after Creech was shot. That had been less than twenty-four hours ago, but so much had happened since then that the memory felt more ancient than one of Godshawk's.

  Wavey returned to the vault door. She lifted her lantern again. Fever looked at the lock. For a moment she was afraid that all her misfortunes would have driven the number that opened it out of her head, but she just had to stop thinking for a second and it was there. She closed her eyes and carefully pressed each key in turn, watching Auric Godshawk's old speckled fingers type out the sequence. 2519364085.

  The lock ticked. The door gave a little shiver, like something waking itself from sleep. Fever heard her mother make a soft sound, deep in her throat, almost a purr. Then the door slid swiftly up into the roof. Behind it was another, but that was already sliding to the right, and behind that was a third that went left.

  And behind that, darkness, and faint shifting shards of lantern light bouncing back from dusty metal surfaces.

  Wavey took out a pencil and a note tablet and carefully wrote down the code while her Stalkers dragged Kit's heavy toolbox halfway across the doorsill and left it there to stop the door from

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  closing behind them. Wavey had loved her father, but she did not trust him, and Fever, knowing how the old man's mind had worked, knew that it would have been just like him to install some trap or trick that would slam the doors behind them and leave them both entombed.

  They picked up their lanterns and stepped across the threshold, cautious and curious as a pair of cats.

  ***

  Roaring with the rage of the fight, Ted slammed his fists and knees against Quercus's thinner, fitter body, driving him backward. Quercus fought back, landing a blow on Ted's right ear that jarred his skull and sent pain spiking through his head. He grabbed Quercus's hand, his shoulder, brought his head down like a hammer on the younger man's face. Quercus started to fall, but Ted grabbed him by his belt and hair and flung him bodily down in the shadow of the mighty keg.

  "Swiney!" roared the crowd, the voice of London drowning out the shouts of the nomads.

  Ted looked at him lying there, between the trestles that held the fat barrel up. The cobbles all round it were puddled with the beer that last night's revellers had spilled. The fumes alone were probably enough to set Quercus's head reeling. He would go to meet his gods stinking like a barroom rug.

  Ted lifted his swollen, bloodied head and nodded at Mutt and Brickie, up on the trestles. And Mutt and Brickie, just as he'd told

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  them to, kicked hard against the chocks they'd driven in between the trestle and the keg while everyone was watching the fight, and jumped clear.

  Except, like the stupid, drunken cloots they were, they didn't do it quite at the same time, the way Ted had told them. Instead of coming down square and mashing Quercus like a cockroach, one end of the barrel smashed down before the other, missing him by inches. The nomad squirmed swiftly backward, shouting something furious and foreign at Ted.

  That was Ted's last sight of him. A half second later the other end of the barrel came down, hiding him from sight. Beer spurted between the staves, but the hoops held it in shape, and the slight camber of the square set it rolling, and its own huge weight kept it coming, straight toward Ted.

  "Oh, Cheesers Crice ," he said, not scared, just furious at the never-ending uselessness of Mutt and Brickie. He eyed the barrel sullenly as it rumbled toward him, taller than three men, beer sloshing about inside and the old anvil he'd added for flavoring going dunk, dunk, dunk in there somewhere like the clapper of a wooden bell. Ted waited till it was close before he stepped sideways out of its path with that surprising, prizefighter's grace that he'd used in the old days to dodge charging Stalkers and mounted gladiators.

  Only in the ring at Pickled Eel Circus there had always been sawdust to stand on, not smooth cobbles slippery with spilled beer. His heel came down in a puddle of Brimstone Best, and slid

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  from under him. He fell heavily, and before he could rise, the barrel with its heavy planks and thick iron hoops was upon him.

  It looked, as it came down on him, rather like a huge wheel.

  There was a thick crunch, and a sudden silence in the square. The barrel rolled on, drawing a long red stripe across the pavement until it came to a gentle stop against the water trough. Men were running forward to help Quercus to his feet. Mutt and Brickie and a few other London lads hurried to where Ted lay, but they'd have needed spatulas to get him off the cobbles. The barrel had ironed him as flat as a paper boy.

  The silence lasted just a heartbeat more. Then everyone was shouting again. " Quercus! Quercus !" they chanted, as the battered nomad hobbled up the steps, turning at the top to raise both fists in victory. And it wasn't just the men he'd brought with him who were cheering him. Because, say what you will about Londoners, they enjoyed a good, fair fight, and they had always loved a winner.

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  ***

  36 The Stalker's Question

  A low, unwindowed room, ribbed with stone buttresses. Brass lamps shaped like lilies hanging from the roof, if you ignored the dust, the vault had the look of a place only lately abandoned. Piles of papers lay waiting to be filed on shelves. A cup stood on a desk, and when Fever peered into it she saw the brown, crystallized dregs of Godshawk's morning coffee.

  Tall figures stood in a rank along the farthest wall, and seemed to move when she lifted her lantern to look at them. Corvus, Lammergeier, and Grike all bared their claws while Wavey instantly darted a hand into her bag and brought it out clutching that clumsy gun, the magneto pistol from the Resurrectory. But it was only shadows that had moved; thick, solid-seeming shadows that swung through the dusty air as the lanterns shifted. The Stalkers that stood against the wall were old and lightless-eyed and they wore veils and trains of dusty cobwebs like a row of jilted brides. A few were without their heads. Dimly, from the

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  back of Fever's memory, their names came wafting. Salvage. Rusty. Clockwork Joe .

  "There's another chamber," she said. "And then another beyond that ..."

  They moved toward the dead Stalkers. There was a narrow door in the wall behind them. They wove a path to it between the spiky, silent figures, and Wavey kept her strange gun ready.

  Corvus shoved open the door and pushed through it into a second chamber, identical in size and shape to the first. Fever, Wavey, and the other Stalkers went after him. These rooms were hexagonal, fitted together like the cells of a honeycomb. In this one were shelves of strange old medical devices, and a slab just like the one on which Kit Solent had been remade as Grike. Fever remembered being Godshawk, standing at that slab to fumble in the brains of the living and the dead.
She remembered the sharp, off-white smell of the chemicals, the deep copper tang of blood. She did not remember the little cot that her torch revealed-in the shadows behind it. Here, in this room, she, too, had been remade.

  She let her light go wandering over the rows of vials and syringes, the ranked bottles with their dusty, unreadable labels, the cobwebbed trays of catlins and retractors. How hard and patiently the old man must have worked down here to save his tiny granddaughter! And for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps he had not simply done it out of a desire to fill her head with his own thoughts and memories. Perhaps Godshawk's

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  consciousness was not inside her after all. Maybe he had failed to transfer more than a few fragments of himself into those old Stalker brains he'd brought back from the north. And maybe he had known he'd failed. When he put that machine in baby Fever's brain it might not have been an attempt to preserve his own personality. It might have been just a last, desperate effort to save his daughter's child. An old man, alone with a dying baby, grabbing up an abandoned experiment and thinking, let's see if this does any good....

  Perhaps he realized, there at the end, that immortality wasn't won by designing engines, or building sky-high statues, or stuffing your thoughts into other heads, but just by keeping your children and their children safe, so that they could carry something of you on into the future. Not your opinions, or your silly memories of pools and parties and kissing people in parks, but the deeper memories, written in your genes; the shape of a nose, the curve of an eyebrow, the little habits and mannerisms which endure through families, through history.