Fever Crumb (3 page)

Fever fished in her pocket for the directions that Dr. Stayling had given her, while keeping tight hold of the handle of her suitcase with the other. Dr. Crumb had warned her of the sneak thieves and dip-pockets who haunted London's busier streets. She peered at Dr. Stayling's sketch map, but she could not relate the neat lines he had drawn to the complex, busy, jagged streets in which she found herself. She looked about for a street name or a signpost, but there was none. The river of people swept her on. The low sun was lighting the upper parts of the buildings and a window flashed as a maid leaned out to empty a chamber pot. Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession -- celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, "
Hari, Hari! Hari
Potter!

Disgusted, Fever veered away. But all around her now were the signs of unreason, temples to Poskitt and Mad Isa and dozens more of London's shabby gods, with the ramshackle copper-domed towers of the astrologers poking up over their roofs. Shops and stalls sold scents and prayer flags and dream catchers and impractical hats and cheap storybooks with lurid covers. Barrow boys swore and squabbled. Women passed by with painted faces, wearing skirts so wide that small wheels had been attached to the hems to stop them from dragging in the street-muck, while little gas balloons held up the points of their flamboyant, lacy collars.

It was small wonder, Fever thought, that the Order of Engineers had long ago decided to cloister themselves away from such a world, with all its disorder and distractions. Round a corner she went, and down steep, cobbled streets that kept turning into stairways. Down? No, that must be wrong! She looked at the map again. She should be going uphill.

She was growing confused and panicky, but she was still rational enough to see the truth. She had been alone in the city for barely five minutes, and already she was lost.

***

Trying to think in the calm and scientific way that Dr. Crumb had taught her, Fever turned her back on the sun and started following a nearby viaduct, hoping that it would lead her back to the Terminus. But the viaduct was not easy to follow. Scruffy buildings leaned against its supports, archaeological digs opened in the middle of streets, and in detouring round them she soon lost sight of the tramline altogether.

(She did not notice the black sedan chair that cut through the crowds a hundred feet behind her, dogging her path like a large, square shark.)

She took wrong turn after wrong turn, and ended up on a street with high, abandoned-looking warehouses on either side. In front of the buildings small-time scavengers and archaeologists had set out their wares on trestles under canvas awnings, or spread them on blankets on the cobbled ground. Fever tasted a sudden tang of homesickness as she looked down into a hamper filled with old mobile phone carapaces just like the ones she had so often cleaned and polished for Dr. Crumb. On other stalls she glimpsed intriguing knots of old wiring and circuitry, and once a whole engine, but most of the traders were simply selling junk -- shapeless old clots of crushed plastic and rust whose purpose not even an Engineer could hope to guess.

"'Allo, ducks!" called a toothless old woman, seeing Fever glance at the rust-stained stones that were spread on her blanket. "Treat yourself to a bargain, dearie!" She snatched at Fever's sleeve and Fever looked round into her mad old face. The woman's eyes widened. Her grin turned into something different. "What are you?" she asked. She started to back away, pointing with one arm at Fever's face while she used the other to elbow a path for herself through the crowd. "Her eyes!" she squealed. "Her eyes! She's one of them!"

"Please, do stop it," said Fever, but her voice was small, no more than a whisper really, while the old woman's had risen to a wheezy shriek.

"Scriven! She be Scriven!"

Heads were turning. People were noticing Fever, and they weren't the sort of people she wanted to be noticed by. Burly barrow boys, rag-robed scavengers, crop-headed London roughs with tattooed necks. With startling speed a ring of gawpers congealed around her, attracted by the scent of coming violence. Someone knocked Fever's hat off, and as she stooped to pick it up she heard them muttering, "Look at her! She's got no hair!
No hair!
"

"I am an Engineer," said Fever, straightening up. "I shave my head. Hair is unnecessary, and provides a home to lice and fleas. It is a vestige of our animal past...."

But none of the people round her looked as though they'd know what "vestige" meant, or believe that mankind was descended from the animals. They weren't listening anyway.

"She's tall enough, but she ain't got no speckles," said one man, peering into Fever's face. "She ain't no Scriven."

"But look at them eyes!" another urged. "She's some sort of misshape all right. 'Ow could she be human yet 'ave eyes that don't match?"

"Of course I am human!" said Fever weakly, but the men were all suspicious now, and that word "misshape" had been enough to rouse a wary hatred from deep in their folk memory. Mutations were rare, and not many had been as long lasting or as dangerous as the Scriven, but most Londoners still believed in stamping out misshapes wherever you found them, just in case.

Fever looked around, hoping to find someone in the crowd she might appeal to. There was no one. Some were jeering and laughing at her, while others looked ready to murder her. "Your behavior is irrational," she told them, hoping to calm them, but she could not seem to make them understand. They clumped closer, leering, one man reaching out to prod her. Behind their faces, like something in a dream, a black sedan chair slid toward her, swinging side-on. As the crowd sensed it and turned their heads to look, Fever saw her chance and fled. She found a side alley and darted down it, her cardboard suitcase banging its corners against her legs, shouts breaking out behind her, a rotten cabbage bursting against the damp brickwork of the alley wall.

For a moment there was panic, and wet cobbles, and the slap of her running feet. Then she rounded a corner into another alley and there was the black chair again, blocking the way ahead.

"Miss Crumb!"

A man was leaning from the chair's open door, calling out to her as she turned to run back the way she'd come. He opened the chair's door and reached out a hand to Fever.

"Come on, Miss Crumb," he said. "The Stragglemarket's no place to hang about. Not for a stranger." He smiled, and his smile made her feel safer. "I'm Kit Solent," he said. "Stayling told me you weren't used to being out alone, so I decided to come and meet you at the station. I called, but you must not have heard me. Not your fault, of course. Once you get caught in the crowd, you end up going where it takes you...."

Another crowd, the angry Stragglemarket mob, was approaching fast along the same alley Fever had just run down. She could hear their voices, harsh as animals'.

"Come on, hop in," said Kit Solent.

Fever decided that the rational thing would be to do as he asked. She passed up her case to him and clambered inside, feeling the chair dip beneath her as the bearers adjusted to her weight. Then Kit Solent tugged shut the door and rapped once with his knuckles on the wall behind his head. The chair set off at a brisk walking pace, back up the alley Fever had just run down, herding her pursuers ahead of it. Solent gestured to Fever to keep her head down and leaned from the window, calling out, "She's not come this way."

Crouching between the two bench seats, Fever's eyes grew used to the shadows of the chair. She saw that two children were sitting beside Solent, a boy of about eight years and a little girl, much younger. They sat close together and watched Fever solemnly, like a pair of owls. The girl was clutching some sort of pretend animal, a blue dog made from fluff and wool.

"There!" said Kit Solent, helping her up, and grinning at her as she settled herself on the seat opposite him. The Stragglemarket was behind them; the chair was climbing through quieter streets, up the side of Ludgate Hill. "Miss Crumb, I do believe you are the most exciting employee we've ever had. We have had a sedan-chair chase and a near riot, and it's not yet time for elevenses. You must have a perfect genius for getting into trouble!"

Fever blushed. "It was no fault of mine," she said, peeking through the tiny window behind his head to make sure they were not being followed. 'Those people were most irrational!"

"They were
scared,
Miss Crumb," Kit Solent replied. "Don't you know your history? The Scriven used to run this city, and they were cruel and wicked and not altogether human. Anybody who looks a bit different tends to remind people of them."

He smiled at Fever. He was older than Dr. Crumb but not nearly as old as Dr. Stayling; a large, handsome man, slightly overweight, with an intelligent face, blue eyes, long, chestnut-colored hair tied back with a silver clasp, scruffy clothes, an ink stain on his shirt cuff. Fever remembered him now; he had visited the Head several times, and she had looked down from the window of Dr. Crumb's chambers and watched Dr. Stayling greeting him when he stepped off the wind tram.

The little girl tugged at Solent's sleeve and he leaned down to listen to what she whispered. "That's right, Fern. She's got no hair."

The girl went back to staring at Fever, her small chin pressed against the head of the toy animal. Kit Solent said, 'This is my daughter, Fern, and my son, Ruan."

"Good morning, Miss Crumb," said the boy.

Fever nodded warily. The only child she had ever known was her own younger self. All she remembered about childhood was longing to grow up so that she would understand things as well as Dr. Crumb and be a child no longer. She had no idea what she should say to these two, who were staring at her so expectantly. She felt her ears turning pink. It occurred to her that there was a purpose to hair -- it hid your ears so that nobody could see them flush when you were embarrassed.

"Your Order has kept you something of a secret, Fever," said Kit Solent chattily. "A girl Engineer? I had no idea that there were such animals until Dr. Stayling mentioned you. He tells me you're the best of their apprentices. I decided at once that you were the girl to help me with my project. So much nicer for the children to have a young person about the house, instead of some stern old man."

Fever's ears felt hotter and hotter. One of the Order's best apprentices? Dr. Stayling would hardly have called her that if he had seen the unreasonable panic she had gotten herself into simply trying to find her way to Solent's house. To avoid having to look at Kit Solent she stared out of the window instead, and saw that the chair was turning onto a shabby street that curved along the southeastern flank of Ludgate Hill. The tall houses, which had been the homes of the Scriven and their wealthy human collaborators, still showed signs of damage from the Skinners' Riots. Many were burned-out shells. Even those that were still standing had boarded windows, and the summer weeds waved head-high in their gardens. Fever knew that London's population had dwindled in the years since the Riots, as people moved south to warmer, safer, richer cities, but she had not realized that whole streets of houses lay abandoned so close to the Barbican.

Or perhaps not quite abandoned. Outside one of those gaunt, derelict villas the chair slowed, then turned in through the rusted-open gates to stop on a stretch of weedy gravel outside the front door.

"Here we are!" said Solent brightly, and stepped out of the chair as the chairmen set it down, lifting Fern out after him and leaving Fever and Ruan to make their own way out while he rummaged in his purse for coins to pay the panting bearers.

Fever stood on the gravel and looked up at the place where she was expected to live. It was a tall building, standing alone in what must have been gardens back in Scriven times, but was now a wasteland of brambles and overgrown topiary. Tall clumps of nettles swayed in the breeze, releasing their clouds of pollen like faint breaths of smoke. Most of the lower windows were boarded up, but some on the upper floors still had glass, dusty, dirty glass behind which swags of colored material had been pinned up as curtains. High above she saw a battered roof and some listing chimney pots.

Solent caught her by the arm and propelled her up the front steps. "Welcome, Miss Crumb," he said, bending to unlock the heavy door. "Welcome to Number 17 Ludgate Hill Gardens, my humble home...."

***

Of all the pubs in many-taverned London, the Mott and Hoople on Ditch Street was the dimmest, the dingiest, the darkest, and the most dangerous. There had been a tavern on that spot for centuries, and the centuries seemed hardly to have changed it; it still held the same stale smell, still wore the same bulls-eyes of bottle-bottom glass in its stingy little windows, still had the same sick-and-sawdust covered floors, and the same old jar of ancient gherkins standing by the beer pumps on the bar. And behind the bar, the Mott's landlord, Ted Swiney, who grinned, and joked, and acted the jolly host, and stayed sober always, watching with mean, cunning, little piggish eyes while the customers squandered their last few farthings on his booze.

That morning the talk in the Mott and Hoople was all about the news from the north. London's two newspapers, the
Standard
and the
Alarmist
, which could usually agree about nothing at all, both claimed that a nomad outfit called the Movement was pushing south. The
Standard
said they were refugees, dislodged from their own holdings up north by the deepening ice, while the Alarmist reckoned they were invaders, bent on taking London for themselves. Both papers wanted to know why the Trained Bands, London's part-time militia, had not been sent north to reinforce the guards and lookouts who manned the Orbital Moatway.