Fever Crumb (22 page)

Slowly, like a big, bad-tempered animal settling back to sleep, the brief disturbances wound down. It had been a little riot by London standards, with barely a hundred people killed, and only a half dozen buildings burning, somewhere down Cripplegate, but in its aftermath a carnival feeling filled the city. Happy looters gathered in the big square in front of the Barbican, clad in other people's hats and stolen ball gowns and tattered curtains ripped from the mansions of former councillors. The rain had stopped. In the smoky, slanting sunlight of late afternoon they waited for their new Lord Mayor to make his first proclamation.

Ted Swiney swaggered out onto the mayoral balcony, high above the throng. He'd buttoned his shirt up, and tied his mean little bow tie tight around his neck, which made his face redder than ever. "Swiney!" hollered the crowd.

Ted looked down at their upturned faces, smeared all across the square below him like the pattern on a carpet. A dim, rare doubt swam into his mind. How
did
you run a place like London? He had already sent the former councillors off to douse the fires, so he couldn't ask them. But then his usual confidence returned. He might not know how to run a city, but he knew how to run a pub all right. How different could it be?

He turned and said something to Mutt and Brickie, then looked at the crowd again and raised his fists for quiet. "Right," he bellowed. "First off, this gaff's under new management. You --" (and here he turned to poor, wet Gilpin Wheen, whom Brickie had just hauled out onto the balcony) "-- you're barred! Get out of my town, and don't come back!"

He waited till Wheen had scurried off and the mob's delight had quieted down a bit. "Right," he said, straightening his tie.

Dealing with the old man had given him time to think about his own policies. What would his administration stand for? "Here's some new rules for you," he said. "From now on, no toffs, no misshapes, no foreigners, no spitting. Karaoke every Tuesday night, here at the Barbican. And live sports! Let's get Pickled Eel Circus rebuilt and have some proper fights again!"

A fond memory wafted back to him of the days when he had been the hero of Pickled Eel, using his fists and his wits to bludgeon flat all comers. He ought to get a mural done of himself, he thought, forty feet high in his fighting togs, all up the side of the Barbican. But he wouldn't announce that yet. What he needed was something that would please the crowd.

"And first off," he hollered, "since we've all had a busy day, I 'spect we could all use a
beer."

Throughout his speech the crowd had heard a rumbling, low and hollow, growing louder. Now, down Cattermole Street and around the prow of the Barbican there came trundling an enormous barrel, rolled up the cobbled hill from Swiney's brewery in St Kylie by Mutt Gnarly and a regiment of eager, boozy helpers. The crowd parted to let them maneuver the huge keg to a spot below Ted's balcony, where they heaved and strained and manhandled it, and finally managed to lift it up on two timber trestles. More men appeared, pulling a dray heaped high with mugs and tankards. Mutt used a lump hammer to drive a tap into the barrel, and drew off a pint of foaming amber beer, which he raised toward Ted while the rest of the crowd cheered.

"Brimstone Best!" yelled Swiney, above the din. "A barrel of my finest, big enough for all. Usually I stick a rusty horseshoe in each keg to give it a bit of bite, but this one's so big I had to use an anvil! So get stuck in. The first pint's free and after that it's half price till dawn. It's happy hour!"

And so it was. It was the happiest hour of Ted Swiney's entire reign. He leaned on the balcony and watched his followers get drunk, and the same half-contented, half-contemptuous look came over his face that he wore when he was standing behind his own bar. "Stupid cloots," he muttered to himself. "Booze and circuses, that'll keep 'em quiet." This mayoring lark was going to be a doddle.

But then, above the gusts of raucous singing that wafted from the square, he heard a new sound, softer and yet more menacing than the shouts of the drunken 'prentices fighting and spewing in the streets below.

A rumble and a roar it was, like beer kegs trundling into some vast cellar far away. Ted had never heard that sound before, but he knew it meant trouble. "What's that?" he asked Brickie Chapstick, but Brickie, too full of Brimstone Best, just said, "You're my best mate, you are," and fell over on the carpet.

Ted went and found a window and looked out of it. Northward, where the dim line of the Moatway stretched across the hazy heath, big lazy clouds of smoke were starting to sprawl across the land, and pulses of light kept flapping and flickering inside them, red and gold and white.

Even the revellers in the square had noticed it by then. "Shurrup," they told one another. "No, wha'sh'at, shurrup,
listen
..."

The sound came only dimly to them even then. Crackling volleys of musketry, the whoop of unlikely old-energy weapons, and the deep, steady, kettledrum boom of nomad cannon.

***

The mono was an inefficient, fuel-hungry mode of transport, but it was fast. Fever looked out of the windows as it went rolling past the wrecked balloon and curved toward the breach that the Movement had made in the Moatway. As it climbed the steep bank she saw Stalkers at work there, pulling down the shattered palisades and heaping up the bodies of dead London soldiers. One of the Movement's armored land barges was perched amid the ruins of a fort on the crest of the embankment, and she pressed her face close to the glass as the mono rolled past it, trying to peer between its armor plates to see which sort of engine it used, and whether it had wheels or tracks. Hatches on its hull were open and men in steel helmets and shining chain-mail vests were sitting on its upperworks.

Before she could make out much more, the mono was careering down the steep northern face of the Moatway, crossing the nettle-filled dike in front of it by means of a makeshift timber bridge. She could see other, smaller vehicles on the land ahead, and behind them something so high, and dirty, and pale that she thought it might be the snout of a glacier. Could the ice really have come so far south?

And then she looked again at the thing, and slowly it rearranged itself in her mind until she understood what it was.

It was a traction fortress, the great capital vehicle of the Movement, armored in timber and metal, painted in dirty, whitish dazzle-patterns which must have served as camouflage while it was lumbering across the Ice Wastes. Watchtowers and gun emplacements encrusted its hull, their hard edges softened by swags of camouflage netting. Huge, studded, barrel-shaped wheels showed dimly through the mist that hung about its skirts, the mist which was not mist at all but vapor from its hundreds of chimneys and exhaust stacks.

"It must be a hundred feet tall!" breathed Fever, peering up at its high prow, where a carved wooden dragon's head reared up, irrational, brutal, and stained red by the evening sun.

The Stalkers, of course, did not reply.

In the fortress's flank an armored gate stood open, and the mono rolled through it, up a ramp and into a hangar where a dozen others like it stood waiting or were being refueled by crews of mechanics. Many of the machines had names, like
Rolling
Thunder
or
The Wheel Thing
, but before Fever had time to take in any more details Lammergeier and Corvus were ordering her out of their mono. They marshalled her through a bulkhead door and up a spiral staircase, through more doors, along a passageway. The wooden walls, and the low wooden ceilings, were all carved with serpentine patterns and the stylized forms of the gods and heroes of the old north. Fever and the Stalkers crossed a chamber where a huge cannon and its crew stood ready at an open gun port, and passed into another, more richly decorated, where evening light came through a score of slit-shaped windows to stripe the hanging tapestries and polished deck.

A man who had been sitting in a big chair there rose as she entered. There were others in the room with him -- armored warriors with swords and guns hanging from their thick belts, women in fur-trimmed robes -- but Fever knew at once that the man in the chair was the important one, and she paid no attention to the rest.

" the balloon has been secured ," said the Stalker Lammergeier. "one of its occupants is dead, but this girl continues to function."

The man walked all round Fever with his hands folded behind his back, looking at her as if she were an exhibit.

"I am the Land Admiral Nikola Quercus," he said. He had the faintest trace of an accent. His eyes were narrow, slanted, and stone gray. He wore a shabby, tall-collared tunic, breeches, and boots. He didn't look like a warrior. He looked like a scholar. A mild young man, not big or tall, with fair hair cropped short and brushed forward around his high forehead.

"I am glad to see you safe, Miss Crumb," he said.

Fever could not hide the surprise she felt, that he should know her name. Quercus laughed softly. "Don't worry, I'm not a sorcerer. My agents have been in touch with Dr. Stayling, and keep me informed by means of technomancy. It was a bold move of the Engineer's, putting you aboard that flying machine. Luckily he was able to warn us that you were coming. I am sorry about your companion, Master Salent."

"Solent," said Fever. "He died saving me. He was very brave."

Quercus nodded. "His soul is in the High Halls, then."

Fever thought she should tell him that there were no such things as souls, then decided that she had better not.

"He will be treated with honor," Quercus promised.

"He's
dead."

"Nevertheless, we have certain rites and rituals with which we honor the bodies of the courageous dead, here in the Movement."

Fever bit her lip and supposed she should feel grateful. Funeral rites were silly religious nonsense, and it seemed pitiable that a man like Quercus should believe in gods and souls and rituals. But Kit Solent had not been an Engineer. She remembered the candles under Katie's portrait in his drawing room, and thought that perhaps it would have comforted him to know that the Movement would treat his remains with ceremony.

Quercus nodded, dismissing the matter. He held out his arm to Fever. "Come. I must take you to meet the Snow Leopard."

"Who?"

"My chief technomancer. We call her the Snow Leopard. You know her perhaps by a different name, as Wavey Godshawk."

"My mother?" said Fever, suddenly hesitant, afraid. "But that's ..."

She stopped herself. She had been about to say, "That's impossible." But it was not impossible. When Dr. Crumb told her his story she had recognized that there must be a chance Wavey had survived. She had accepted that she might have a mother, somewhere in the world. She just had not expected to have the question resolved so soon. It was one thing to have a theoretical mother, quite another to be asked to meet her.

Quercus's smile grew broader as he watched the expressions flit across her face. "Come. She waits for you."

***

How long had it been traveling, that fortress of the Movement? Even the Movement had forgotten. Back when they were first driven from their homeland by ice and enemies, it had been the ox-drawn wagon of their chieftain. It had grown as they moved on, acquiring first steam and then petrol engines from the cities that they conquered, putting on turrets and funnels, gun decks and cabins, spires and jaws and sally ports. It was too big now to be powered only by its primitive engines, and its under-decks were filled with massive treadmills, worked by regiments of slaves.

But still the Movement recalled how, long ago, they had lived in Arctic oak forests during some brief, lost era of warmth, and worshipped the gods and spirits of the trees. They had brought one tree with them on their journeyings -- age-old, long dead -- to remind them of their origins. It stood in a chamber of its own, near the castle's stern, a place which seemed quiet even when the engines were pounding and the big guns boomed. Centuries had passed since it last bore leaves or acorns, but the stumps of its branches were decorated with thousands of little scraps of colored rag, the funeral ribbons of everyone who had died during the Movement's wanderings.

Beneath the oak that evening sat a woman. She wore one of the simple gowns that Movement women favored, a gray gown that left her throat bare and displayed a curious sepia birthmark beneath her ear and another in the hollow above her collarbone, like a puddle of spilled ink. Nervously her long hands rose to tuck her hair behind her ears. Then she changed her mind and untucked it again. Her hair was gray-white, the color of wood ash. There were faint crows' feet at the corners of her eyes. In every other way she looked just as she had on the day that Gideon Crumb rescued her from the crowd in St Kylie. Years lay lightly on the Scriven.

One of the big oak doors at the chamber's end opened. The girl came in, and Nikola Quercus came in behind her and softly shut the door again.

"Fever Crumb," he said.

Fever and her mother looked at each other.

"Fever," said Wavey Godshawk, after a little while.

She had thought of Fever often during the years since she fled London, but she had always pictured her as a little girl, like the little girl she had once been herself. She had not prepared herself to meet this spindly teenager with her shaven head and her strange, familiar face.

"My child," she said, after a little longer.

"You have grown up!" she said, wondering.

"What
have
you done to your
hair
?" she asked.

***

My
mother,
thought Fever numbly. She went toward her, but did not take the slender hands that Wavey Godshawk stretched out to her. My
mother.
She could smell her perfume, a subtle, blue-gray scent that matched her dress. And what a strange face she had! It wasn't just those few small speckles. The cheekbones were too high, the eyes too large, the jaw too long, the wide mouth filled with far too many teeth (though very straight, thanks to the brace she'd worn when Dr. Crumb had met her). It was easy to see why people had believed that the Scriven were a new species. It was easy to see why the Scriven had believed it themselves.
She
isn't human,
Fever kept thinking.
And she is my mother....