Fever Crumb (7 page)

***

To Fever's relief there was no more talk of opening the Godshawk vault that day. She walked with Kit Solent among the mist and ruins on the hilltop, and then went back beneath the hill. Since they had no water with them, she accepted a drink of cold, strong tea from Kit's pocket flask, and perhaps that was what made her feel giddy and slightly overexcited on the long walk back to Ludgate Hill.

Toward evening the sun peeped in under the quilt of cloud that had settled over London in the afternoon. It spilled gold light into the overgrown gardens of Kit Solent's house, and into his drawing room, where he sat with his daughter on his knee and his son at his feet and told a most unlikely story full of giants and heroes and light sabres and gingerbread houses. Fever watched him, and wondered how a rational man could waste so much time talking such nonsense to children. She tried not to listen to the story, and when she found that she was listening anyway and that she was quite eager to hear whether the hero rescued his princess, she made herself say good night and go upstairs to bed.

It was dangerous, this house. She felt that if she let down her guard she would find herself enjoying all its luxuries and irrational little pleasures, and who knew where that would lead? She had often heard Dr. Crumb and the other Engineers talk about Thaniel Wormtimber, who had been a good Engineer himself before he left the Head and let himself be corrupted by the city. She did not want to end up like him, lost in London's maze of unreason.

***

Her bedroom was on the top floor of the house. It had sloping ceilings, and when the wind blew the rafters creaked and the rooftiles rattled. There was a vase of cut flowers on the bedside table, which was irrational, and a potted plant on the windowsill, which was not, because Fever knew that it would absorb some of the carbon dioxide she breathed out and help to replenish the air with oxygen. The bed was very large and soft, quite unlike the hard little cot that she was used to. On the wall above it hung another picture of Kit Solent's dead wife, looking much younger than she did in the picture downstairs, in a frame carved in the shapes of hearts and roses.

Fever carefully took the picture down, since it served no purpose. As she was propping it against the wall over in the room's far corner she noticed the little handwritten label on the back, which read,

That must have been Katie
Solent's
name before Kit married her,
Fever thought, remembering the irrational custom which made women take the name of their husbands. Unthank. She knew it at once. The digger whom Dr. Crumb had gone to visit on the day he found her had been called Unthank. She thought for a moment, wondering if there was some link, then dismissed it as coincidence. For all she knew, Unthank was a common name.

She put on her night things and blew out the candle and lay on the big, soft bed, waiting for sleep. Downstairs she heard the voices of the children as their father tucked them in, and then, after a little more time, the sounds of Kit Solent making his own way to bed. After that there was only silence, the creaking of the old house, the distant noises of the city. But Fever could not sleep. However hard she tried to clear her mind of thoughts, they kept sneaking back in. She had had an eventful day -- perhaps the most eventful day of her life -- and it was hard to keep from thinking of it.

Katie Solent haunted her thoughts, too. That name, Unthank, could not help but recall to her the story that Dr. Crumb used to tell her when she was little. Was it possible that Katie had had a child before she married Kit? One little girl whom she had abandoned in a basket on the marshes, near her father's dig? Was that why Kit had asked Fever into his house? Because he had found out somehow that she was Katie's daughter? And was
he
her father?

She had never wondered before about who her real parents were. Dr. Crumb had told her when she was small that it did not matter, and she believed him. But remembering how cozy little Fern had looked upon her father's lap, she found herself wishing very much that she had grown up with a father like him, and a mother, too.

"Don't be ridiculous," she told herself, sitting up in bed. She must have been lying there awake for hours. Wanting to clear her head, she got up and lit her candle and padded downstairs to find a glass of water. A faint, haunting musk hung in the air, making her wonder if Kit had left the scent lantern alight when he went up to bed, but when she looked into the drawing room the lantern was open and unlit. The portrait of Katie Solent smiled down at her from the wall, and she held up the candle for a while and stood there looking at the picture, and at her own reflection in the glass, trying to make out a resemblance. But there was none, and she could not really believe that she was Mistress Solent's daughter. In her memory, just out of reach, was the face of a quite different woman that matched her own much better. Who did she remind herself of?

Unsettled, she went to the kitchen for her drink and then hurried quietly back upstairs. On the first landing she noticed a door standing open. It had been shut earlier but Kit Solent must have been in there before he turned in. Fever's curiosity overcame her. She pushed the door wider, and stepped through into a library.

It was nothing like as large as the Order's library at Godshawk's Head, and many of the volumes looked worthless -- novels and poems and fantasy quartets, no good for anything but pulping -- yet it was impressive, all the same. Bookcases alternated with windows all the way round the room, and through the windows the moon shone, making silver-gray shapes of light on the floorboards. On a table in the center, a book lay open beside a lit scent lantern, the source of that ghostly smell which still flavored the air.

Fever breathed deeply, intrigued by the musty odor. It was the same scent that Ruan had put on downstairs, or one very like it. And it so nearly reminded Fever of something. She closed her eyes, and the scent seeded her mind with pleasant memories. Dew-wet evening lawns. Lilies in bloom on geometric pools. Fire balloons lofting into a lilac sky...

She shook her head, almost angry at herself. Those were not memories! The image was a fantasy, or a half-remembered dream, neither of which had any place in a well-ordered mind.

Feeling giddy, she leaned on the table, and looked down at the open book. It was a large, old-fashioned volume, with circular pages bound between two discs of leather in the Scriven style. On the open page was a drawing, or perhaps a diagram. Fever couldn't make it out at first. She set down her candle and placed her hands on the table on either side of the book and looked down at the page, and suddenly she was falling into the picture.

What was it? What did it show? She could not be sure. Looping lines of smudged pencil swept across the page, bisecting three big interlocking rings, and inside those rings were smaller rings, and other forms: small crosses, squares, and shapes that reminded her of cogs and pistons. She wished that Dr. Crumb were there with her. Together, she was sure, they would have been able to make sense of it. But even without him she started to understand that some of those pencil marks meant patterns of force, and she could see how some of those shapes might move inside each other, and around each other. And that egg-shaped thing marked
(d)
might act as a kind of regulator on the movement of the other pieces....

It was an engine, she realized, and with that realization came a blazing star of pain, somewhere at the back of her head.

She cried out, and the diagram seemed to jump up at her out of the creamy paper and close around her like a net. In the middle of it a red flower appeared, and she straightened up, looking in horror at the splash of blood that had fallen on the drawing.

Cupping one hand under her streaming nose she pulled out her handkerchief and set one corner of it to the bright little splat of blood. The white fabric soaked up most of it, and Fever dabbed carefully at the rest, but she could not get rid of the brown stain that it had left, like an extra cog wheel, in the heart of the diagram.

She was still trying when she heard footfalls behind her, and turned guiltily to find Kit Solent standing in the doorway, wearing a quilted nightgown, his long hair loose.

"Fever! You poor thing! Whatever's happened?"

"It's a nosebleed," said Fever. "I'm sorry I've never had one before. I got blood on the book...."

Kit Solent strode over to her. He didn't seem to care about the book. He took her handkerchief from her and gave her his own, which seemed as big as a bedsheet, clean and fresh-smelling. "Sit down," he advised, guiding her to a chair. "Tip your head back. Ruan gets these sometimes. It is never as bad as it looks. Yes, the worst is over. I must have left the scent lantern burning when I went to bed. Foolish of me. Perhaps that's what made you feel faint. These old Scriven smells are not to everyone's taste."

The nosebleed seemed to have stopped. She said, "I'm sorry about the book...."

"Oh, don't worry about the book," said Kit, kneeling beside her. "I picked it up for a few quid from a bookstall at Rag Fair, years ago. It's just one of Godshawk's old notebooks. Dozens of them were looted from the Barbican after the riots."

Fever nodded. "Dr. Isbister has some at the Order's library."

"I bought it because it looked interesting. I don't really understand what it's about. Do those old drawings mean anything to you?"

He asked it casually, but Fever sensed a kind of eagerness under the words. Had he left the book out in the hope that she would come in and see it? She lowered her head cautiously, and looked at him, but she could see nothing in his face except kindness and honest concern for her.

Then she noticed something else. Behind him, the rugs of moonlight that had lain on the floor beneath each window were gone. Outside, above the rooftops, the sky was growing pale.

"What is the time?" she asked.

"Almost sunrise," said Kit Solent. 'There's hardly any point going back to bed. Shall I sort out some breakfast?"

"But that can't be...." Fever went to the closest window and looked out. It was true. While she had sat staring at that diagram, the whole night had passed. Behind the Barbican, the sun was coming up.

***

Kit Solent did not take Fever back to Godshawk's secret vault .that day. He had been troubled by her confusion when he stood her before the locked door the day before, and also by the events of the night. He had hoped that the scent lantern and the book would have some effect, but the blood and the girl's obvious distress had upset him. He was a kindly man, and for all her solemn, Engineerish ways Fever seemed a child to him, not so very much different from Fern or Ruan. It felt horrible to see her frightened, and to know that he was to blame. He thought a day of rest was in order before he tried again.

"No school today," he announced over breakfast that morning. "And no work neither. We'll go to Summertown instead!"

"Summertown!" shouted Fern and Ruan happily.

"Summertown?" said Fever, far from certain. She knew what it was, a great triangle of waste ground up in Clerkenwell where, every summer, the wandering land barges stopped to dazzle the citizens of London with sideshows and trade goods. She had often watched the barges rumbling along the Westerway and the Great South Road, and Dr. Crumb had told her much about the engines that powered them, but as for Summertown itself...

"Is it not a rather irrational place?" she asked.

"if fun is irrational," said Kit Solent, through a mouthful of toast, "if color and excitement and good things from far places are irrational, then yes. But I think you'll find it educational, Fever, and I'm sure the children will. Come, you can explain to us how all the engines work."

"Yes, sir," said Fever, lowering her head.

"You're still worried about what happened yesterday," said Kit kindly. "I'm not surprised. But Summertown is not the Straggle-market, and you'll be with us, not on your own. Anyway, everyone will have forgotten you by now."

But Fever was not sure about that. As she left the house an hour later (for it took an extraordinarily long time for Kit Solent and his children to get ready) she noticed two figures standing on the opposite pavement. A ragged boy and an old man in a long black coat and a black bowler hat. They did not do anything, they did not try to accost her; indeed, they drew back shyly into the shadows of an alley as Kit Solent let her out through the gates, and she knew that he had not seen them, but she could sense their eyes on her as she followed him along the street. It made her uneasy, and she did not know why.

***

From the far side of the street, Charley Shallow watched the girl go by. She strode along mannishly at the gentleman's side, with her hat in her hand and her bald head bared for all to see. She looked human enough to him, and pretty, almost. He glanced at Bagman, hoping for some clue as to how he should react.

"I can't see no speckles on her, Master Creech...."

"No, boy."

"So does that mean she's a human being after all?" Charley tried not to sound disappointed. He was half relieved that Bagman wouldn't have to kill the girl, but at the same time he found himself thinking that if Bagman had no prey to hunt he might not need a 'prentice anymore.

"I'm not sure," said Bagman. "There were some Scriven who didn't have many markings. A few had no markings on their faces at all. Blanks, we called 'em. I remember cornering a female like that once, and she held a baby that might have passed for human."

Charley waited for him to say more, but the old man fell silent. He started to realize what a terrible responsibility it was to be a Skinner.

Bagman had turned away, watching as the man and the children and the girl went on up the street, climbing toward Cripple-gate. When they were out of sight he shook his head and gave a few soft, doubtful coughs. "Strangest thing," he said quietly, perhaps to himself. "Always before I could tell at a glance. Even if I couldn't see no markings I could always tell a Scriven by the way they held themselves, the way they moved. But this one ... I ain't sure."