Scrivener's Moon (8 page)

he Guild of Engineers had rescued many odd and interesting books from houses that were being demolished by the salvage gangs; in one of them, Dr Crumb had found a few meandering notes which had enabled him to rediscover the Ancient art of Photography. He had built an experimental camera, and constructed a darkroom in a former closet at Number One Bishopsgate. There, by the light of lanterns with red glass panes, he patiently dipped the plates he had exposed into vats of pungent chemicals. He had made several portraits of Fever in shades of grey and silver, staring at the camera lens with hawkish concentration. He had tried a few of Wavey, too, but Wavey was not good at sitting still. His photographs of her always came out blurred; a shadow-woman with uncertain eyes and other faces peering around the corners of her own, her restless hands transforming into fans of light.

He made one last picture of them both on the day of their departure, setting up his camera outside the Movement landship which would be carrying them north, and hiding beneath a black cloth to open and close the aperture while they posed stiffly in their new cold-weather clothes; their fleece-lined boots and catskin hats, Wavey’s ermine cloak. Then they went aboard the landship, and Dr Crumb followed it as far as the foot of Ludgate Hill, waving to them as they stood on the open upper deck, sometimes calling out last-minute advice: “Shallow breathing is recommended in very cold regions!” or, “The savages of the high north may be pacified by gifts of fat or salt!”

He had been arguing hard against the trip all week, sure that the north was far too dangerous, even after Rufus Raven’s victories. But that morning he had changed his mind. He could see how eager Fever was to go. He had been worried about his sad and beautiful daughter. Perhaps he had been wrong to make her leave her friends on their irrational theatre barge and bring her home. This expedition of Wavey’s would do her good, he thought, and he stood at the end of Bishopsgate watching the landship pull away into the haze, waving and waving until he could see it no more.

Then he went home to develop his photograph, which he would keep by his bedside to help him remember them until they came home again. Fever peering at him all solemn and owlish from between the fur flaps of her hat; Wavey, as usual, a blur.

The new London took much longer than the old to disappear. All morning the landship and Borglum’s barge travelled across the low, dun-coloured hills of Hamster’s Heath, past Slugg’s Pottage and on into the Wintermires, and still when the passengers looked back they could make out the upper levels of the new city rising faint and hazy in the distance. No wonder the people of the roadside villages seemed nervous and oppressed. This had been a country of small independent market towns and farmsteads that had gone on unchanging through generation after generation. Now it was part of the territory of the Movement. The New North Road sliced through farm and town alike, cobbled with the rubble of old London and forever busy with the Movement’s traffic. The strong young men who should have been working the fields had gone south to join the construction teams, leaving their elders to sow and reap the corn that fed London. By night the lights of the new city peered at them over the shoulders of the land. Fever thought that it must be like living under the gaze of a newborn monster.

The landship was called the
Heart of Glass
. It was an unprepossessing vehicle; an armoured barge painted in dirty white dazzle patterns, rolling on big, clawed wheels. Movement landships were faster than most, but it still could not keep pace with Borglum’s speedy
Knuckle Sandwich
, which kept running on ahead and pausing to wait impatiently for it to catch up, like a thoroughbred in the company of a carthorse.

Wavey had helped herself to the captain’s cabin and covered its whitewashed wooden walls with tapestries and fine hangings to make it feel more homely. “After all,” she told Fever, during the first afternoon of the journey, “what is the point in being Chief Engineer if I cannot travel in comfort? I had a hard struggle to get where I am now. When you were a baby I had to flee London like a common criminal, pursued by those mad Skinners, hunted everywhere, till Master Borglum took me in. I lived like an animal, forever frightened, lurking in culverts and reed beds by day, moving on each night, trusting no one. My shoes fell apart, my clothes went to rags, my poor starved ribs looked like a toast rack. Don’t you think I deserve a little luxury now that I am old?”

Fever, who had been standing at the window to look back at London, turned. Wavey was sprawling lazily on a cushioned bench beside the stove, eating Turkish Delight with a little silver fork. Fever had never heard her speak before about the dreadful things she had endured after the Skinners’ Riots. It made her feel suddenly protective. “You’re not old, Wavey,” she said.

“Oh, but I am,” said Wavey. She altered her position on the bench and plumped a cushion, inviting Fever to sit down beside her. It was true, she
was
beginning to look a little gaunt; the skin stretched taut across the fine bones of her face. “We Scriven live far longer than the common human herd,” she said, “and we do not suffer so much from the diseases of old age, but even by Scriven standards I am no longer a young woman. It is starting to show, I fear. These creases around my eyes –
crow’s feet,
people call them; isn’t that horrible? You are so lucky to be young, Fever. You should make the most of your body, my dear, before it starts to let you down. Speaking of which, have you noticed young Harrison Stickle? I’m sure he fancies you. I think he’s rather handsome, in his curious way. . .”

Fever wasn’t listening. She was busy wondering why the Scriven aged differently. What was it about their bodies that had made them less susceptible than other people to the trials of time? She wished that her father were there so that she could discuss it with him.

Turning back to the window, she saw that London had finally sunk behind the hills.

Sometimes the snow lay year-round on those hills, leading Londoners to believe that they could see the snouts of glaciers when they looked north from their city’s borders. But that year was warm, and the ice and snow were gone, leaving the land dotted with meltwater meres. The convoy rattled past them, swinging eastward through heaths and scrub woods and showers of cold grey rain. It crossed Kingsbath marshes and entered Doggerland, a foggy, fenny place, so flat and so full of still, reflecting waters that there seemed to be nothing there except the sky. That country had all been beneath the North Sea until a few centuries ago, and in the mist that met the convoy it looked as if it still was. Borglum said that it must have been cheerier when it had little fishes swimming about it. Still, there was a good road there; a Movement road that ran north-east as straight as a ruler, low hills rising into cloud on its left-hand side, the old seabed stretching out for ever on the right.

Towards sundown a long, low ridge appeared ahead, rising like an island from the marshes, with the road leading over it. This was Dryships Hill, and at its foot on the northern side lay Three Dry Ships, a settlement built around the hulks of some freighters abandoned there when the sea drained away. Their timber hulls had been much built-upon, and sheds and shanties sprawled all around them, for this was an important way-station now on the roads that linked London to the Fuel Country. Filthy children came running and shouting behind the
Heart of Glass
as it pulled in, and for a moment Fever was reminded of other arrivals in other towns, when she had travelled aboard
Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum
. But those journeys had been in southern lands, nothing like the damp plains of Doggerland, and Ambrose Persimmon would never have brought his theatre to a place as grimy and desperate as Three Dry Ships.

There were not enough people there to warrant setting up the arena and staging a proper show, but the carnival fighters sparred with one another in the light of the campfire while Borglum’s cook prepared the evening meal, and the people of the place gathered round to watch.

Fever watched too, for a little while. She had not meant to, for she was alarmed by the carnival people, with their strange looks and costumes and their easy laughter and all the memories they lit in her of her old life in Summertown. At first she stayed in her own small cabin aboard the
Heart of Glass
and tried to read Wintervale’s
History of the Northern Peoples
, because she wanted to learn something about the places that she would soon be seeing. But trying to follow the alliances and fallings-out between those ever-shifting nomad empires was like trying to map smoke, and the clang of weaponry from outside was distracting, so at last she put the book aside and stepped out into the chilly night air, which was filled with the smell of the gorse-root fire and the grunts and war cries of the sparring fighters. The huge, hairy one they called Quatch was crossing blades with the Knave of Knives. Fever watched them, trying not to disapprove, and ate stew from a wooden bowl that someone handed her. She looked across the fire at the lad called Stick and remembered what Wavey had said about him, and he
did
look handsome in the firelight, but he was sitting beside Lucy the lobster-girl and it was it was quite obvious that he was her boy or her sweetheart or whatever the silly expression was, and that made her feel suddenly very lonely.

Quatch gave a great roar, swinging his cleaver in a blow that should have lopped off his opponent’s head, but the Knave ducked under it, tripped him, somersaulted over him as he fell and ended up astride him with his knife at Quatch’s throat. The onlookers clapped and cheered. They knew it was a friendly bout so there was no need for fakery and butcher’s shop blood. The fighters stood up, bowed, and went to find their own bowls of stew.

Next came something special: a new act that Borglum was trying out. Lady Midnight swaggered out on to the fighting-ground. She chose a long blade from the weapons rack and stood there swinging it, splashing glints of firelight over Borglum’s face as he warned the audience to keep quiet, so that the blind woman could hear her foe approaching. Then he left her and hurried into the knot of fighters and crewmen waiting by the barges, grinning at Fever as he came. “This’ll be good!” he said. “This is something special! Oh, but it’s grand to have your mother back. . .”

Fever looked around and saw that her mother was no longer watching the fight. She must have gone back aboard the barge. . . Or aboard
Borglum
’s barge. For a moment she had a horrible feeling that Wavey was going to emerge in the boiler-plate bikini of which the dwarf had spoken so fondly. But what actually came down the ramp of the
Knuckle Sandwich
and stepped out into the firelight was something far, far worse. For a moment nobody could work out what it was. When they did, a murmur of surprise ran through the watchers.

“’Tis a paper dolly. . .”

“A cut-out man. . .”

“But how’s it
moving
then?”

Flat as an outline chalked around a corpse, blank face flickering with firelight and shadow, the paper boy stood and looked around, turning its flat white head from side to side, until it saw Lady Midnight waiting on the far side of the fire.

“Oh!” said Fever, and put a hand up to her face. She was well able to control her emotions usually, but the paper boy was so unexpected, and it reminded her with such awful clarity of the time when she and Dr Crumb and poor Dr Isbister had battled things like that in the library at Godshawk’s Head;
really
battled them, not just in play. For a moment she was afraid that she would faint.

“It is all right,” said a voice beside her, and there was Borglum, looking up at her all kindly and concerned. “You’re wondering how we make him move, the mannikin? ’Tis all done with technomancy, my dear. There is a machine aboard the
Sandwich
which talks somehow to a little wafer of a brain that’s slipped inside the paper of him. Your mother’s operating it now; what he sees, she sees, and she tells him where to move. It’s a marvellous engine.”

“I did not think there were any such things left,” said Fever, who had burned the last of London’s paper boys herself.

“We picked it up from an antiquarian in Hamsterdam who didn’t know how to make it work, and in truth we didn’t know neither, but your mother came aboard today, opened it up, tinkered a while inside with wires and such, and our little papery friend sprang straight to life.”

The paper boy tensed, then started to shuffle forward, mincing along on the edges of his cut-out feet. He moved so silently that Lady Midnight seemed not to have heard him.

“Behind you!” shouted someone in the crowd, forgetting that they were not supposed to speak.

Lady Midnight swung round with her sword ready. The paper boy raised one paper hand, and from his fingertips five tiny claws emerged.

“Poisoned needles!” Borglum shouted importantly. “Envenomed with the ichor of the deadly Zagwan centipede, a vicious reptile from Lady Midnight’s mother country!” He nudged Fever and muttered, “There ain’t no such creature really, so don’t worry; it won’t give our Agnes no more than a scratch. . .”