Scrivener's Moon (22 page)

n spite of everything, in spite of the wild racketing and rocking and the steady fear, Fever fell asleep, dreaming uneasily, waking now and then just long enough to stop herself from being hurled out of her borrowed bunk when the
Knuckle Sandwich
rattled across some particularly rough bit of terrain. Big as it was, the carnival barge sometimes seemed to become airborne as it sped over the hummocks of the former seabed. The lookouts on the stern had reported no signs of pursuit, but Borglum would take no chances. “We just killed their chief and smashed their strongest fort,” he growled. “That’s liable to annoy.”

She slept deeply. Once she woke and looked out of the porthole by her bunk and saw nothing but the night and the mist and the roadside bushes lit by the flare from Borglum’s furnaces. She dropped her head into the pillow, into the smell of Lady Midnight’s perfume (for the blind fighter had lent Fever her cabin), and slept again, and woke to hear voices bellowing somewhere above her head.

“Lights astern!”

She was awake all at once. She scrambled into the main cabin, where most of the others were crowded at the windows. Quatch turned his kindly, hairy face to her and said, “We ain’t too worried yet, miss. We have the auxiliary engine running. They may not catch us.”

“What if they do?” asked Fever.

Lady Midnight looked at her with those startling white eyes. “If they want to stop us then they’ll have to board us, and once they board, their shooting instruments won’t do them no good.”

“And you have your Stalker. . .” said Fever.

“Not really, miss,” the Knave of Knives put in. “Your mum fixed him so he will not kill, to avoid unfortunate accidents in the ring. . .”

“Besides which,” said Quatch, “he is the auxiliary engine, you see. There is a treadmill down below, and he runs in it.”

“Don’t you fear, Miss Fever,” Lady Midnight said. “We don’t need old Ironsides to defend us. We are the Carnival of
Knives
.”

Stick, face pressed to the window glass, raised his voice above the rest. “Those lights are getting
closer
. . .”

Should you ever wish to discombobulate a land-armada, there are few better ways to do it than by blowing up its admiral’s traction castle. In the centuries that followed, historians of the Traction Era would refer to “Borglum’s Gambit” and waste a lot of ink and paper bickering about whether the destruction of Jotungard had been the first real battle of the Northern War, or whether that honour belonged to the fighting that broke out around Three Dry Ships a few hours later. They all agreed on the facts, however. Jotungard had exploded, killing almost everyone on board and damaging many of the vehicles bunched around it, most of which had been Raven’s. In that moment the leadership of the armada passed from Raven and his captains to the Great Carn of Arkhangelsk. Lit by the gaudy, dying-down fires of the wreckage of Jotungard his huge fortress pulled over and gathered its lesser forts about it as the Carns went aboard to hear how the battle-line was being rearranged.

While they debated, Raven’s surviving captains wondered what to do. Many turned their forts and landships quietly aside, figuring that with Jotungard gone there was no way this northern rabble could outfight Quercus. Others, who feared Quercus less or had loved Raven better, set about avenging him. Their heavy landships could not catch the unarmoured
Knuckle Sandwich
, but they sent a squadron of monowheels south, with armed campavans to provide support, and orders to take or destroy the carnival barge.

Cluny Morvish heard the howl of the departing ’wheels as Tharp led her through the firelight and the chaos to present her at the rear hatch of the Great Carn’s fort. There were Stalkers on guard there; gifts from Raven to the Great Carn, for the Arkhangelsk had no Stalkers of their own. They had orders to let no one pass, for everyone was afraid that there might be plots afoot to sabotage this fortress too, but when their mortal officers saw the girl waiting there with Tharp on their doorstep they cuffed the resurrected men aside and welcomed her in, asking meekly for her blessing as they led her up the stairways to the Carn.

All Cluny could see were the red fingers of firelight that poked in through every arrow-slit and gun port.
This is a real war
, she thought,
and I have started it
. But she had not
chosen
to start it; it had all been done by the machine in her head. She had no more control over her life, it seemed, than those Stalkers on sentry-go outside the Great Carn’s door. She wished her friend Fever could have been there to help her think it all through. Or was it just the old man’s memories in her head that had made Fever Crumb seem such pleasant company?

Anyway, Fever was lost now; sold by Tharp to passing showmen. Cluny had screamed at him when he told her. She would have punched his smug old face if some of his men had not held her back. She had threatened to open the spigot on his stupid hat and boil him. She wished she had now, but a vision of London had come and the fight had gone out of her. Fever was lost, and there was nothing for her to do but follow Tharp meekly up the heart-fort’s winding stairs.

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. . .”