Scrivener's Moon (11 page)

“Quercus will have better things to fret about than you, madam,” Raven shouted behind them, as his men started to drive them down the long, dark throat of a stairwell to the lower decks. “The whole of the north is roused against him! Together we shall sweep him and his new city away!”

he door of the heart-chamber slammed behind them. Their footsteps echoed on the stairs, the two men pushing them hastily down to a silent gun-deck, across it to another stairway, down again. Fever tried to be calm and rational, but she was shaking with fright. The last time she had been manhandled like this she had ended up tied to the rails of Arlo’s house. . .

Below her, she heard Wavey ask, “Where are you taking us? If I am to be Raven’s hostage I would give a great deal for comfortable quarters. . .”

Her captor let out a snorting laugh. “Hostage? Marshal Raven doesn’t need hostages.”

Wavey started to laugh with him as if he had made a joke that tickled her, and while she laughed she suddenly wrenched herself away from him and twisted and made a hard movement with her hand across his neck, and he flopped back against the stairwell wall with a gurgling shout, his hands to his throat and blood spewing and squirting through the gaps between his fingers. Wavey snatched the pistol from his belt and spun to point it at Fever’s captor, who had let go of Fever and was cursing steadily as he groped for his own gun. Fever felt the pistol-ball flick past her face; the crash of the pistol came an instant later. The cursing stopped suddenly, and the man collapsed and started to slither down the stairs, almost knocking her over. Wavey came up to meet him, stopping him with one foot. The pistol was still in her hand, and in the other Fever saw a little red spike shining, the sharpened hairpin which she’d used to slash the first man’s throat. She must have slipped it into her hair before she came aboard Jotungard, for fear that she was stepping into danger. Or perhaps, after the life she’d led, she was careful to have some small, deadly thing like that about her always.

She dropped the pin and tugged the sword out of the scabbard that trailed from the belt of the man she’d shot. It flashed in the dim stairwell light, and her eyes flashed too, glancing up at Fever. “They were going to kill us,” she said. “Taking us outside to be shot like dogs. I expect the only reason they didn’t do for us upstairs was that Mistress Raven would complain about the mess on her carpets. Raven is terribly hen-pecked. Come on.”

“Where?”

“Outside, quickly, before these charmers’ friends come looking for them.” She dragged Fever after her down the stairs, past the man whose throat she’d cut, down through shadows to a bay on the castle’s bottom level where red evening sunlight came in through the eye-slit in an armoured door. “Open it,” she commanded, and with shaking fingers Fever undid the bolts and pushed it open. Outside a steep wooden gangway led down between two of the castle’s wheels on to the hilltop. At its foot a Stalker stood, its back to the castle, sunset bloodying the huge scrap-metal blade it held. Fever quailed backwards into the shadows of the doorway, but Wavey shoved her forward. They went down the gangway and past the Stalker and he stood unmoving.

“Stupid creatures really,” Wavey said. “He’s been ordered to stop strangers coming in, not out. Now, where are we?”

They were on the narrow margin of land between the castle and the hill’s brink. Heather grew there, and a few sparse pines which had survived the battles of the year before and had not been chopped down for firewood because Raven’s wife felt they improved the view. Behind them in the castle they could hear the shouting of angry men. Someone had found Wavey’s handiwork.

“We must get off this hill and find Borglum,” said Wavey. “He’ll help us.” She set off quickly uphill through the blowing grass, the long, slanting rays of the low sun. The ground sloped steeply, pocked with old shell-holes; pines stuck their roots across the path. Fever saw that her mother was limping again. Behind, the shouts grew louder. She looked back. The castle was leaking armed men. A bullet smacked splinters from a pine-trunk. Wavey turned and raised the pistol, urging Fever on past her as she fired. Two shots; three; a howl from one of their pursuers. Fever scrambled up between the trees and suddenly the ground in front of her dropped away and she was looking down the long scarp of Hill 60 to the scarred old battlefields and tangled woods at its foot. The drop looked almost sheer at first, but then she started to see outcroppings, tussocks, small bushes growing out horizontally from the steeps; handholds which someone in desperate straits might use to clamber down. She thought she could make it, but could Wavey?

Behind her now the clash and ring of blades. Her mother had started up the slope to join her and men from the castle had caught her halfway. Luckily most were only crewmen from Jotungard’s lowest deck and did not seem to carry guns. Wavey faced them in the space between three trees. Even with her old wound slowing her she was quicker than any of the men. She drove her sword through one, hacked down another as he aimed a crossbow at her. There was a pause then and she glanced back at Fever, and her face was beautiful and pale and proud.

“Wavey, we can climb down!” Fever shouted.

“Not me,” said Wavey. “Too old. Too slow. Find Borglum. He’ll help you. Tell him if he won’t I’ll haunt him. . .”

Another enemy was coming at her now, striding uphill through the slanting light with his vast sword raised. The Stalker they had run past earlier had finally understood that they were its enemies.

Wavey looked back once more at Fever. “Run!” she commanded.

But Fever couldn’t; she could only crouch there, staring, while Wavey cast her sword aside and raised the pistol again. There was one last shot in it, and she waited until the Stalker was almost upon her and then fired it in his face. The ricochet shrieked, rebounding from his face-plate in a spurt of sparks. She turned to run but the Stalker was already swinging his sword, and he cut her in half and kicked aside the tumbling pieces of her and came on, all splashed and steaming with her blood.

“Mother!” shouted Fever. “Mummy. . .?”

She had never called Wavey either of those things, and now it was too late, because there was no way in the world that Wavey could be anything but dead. Yet still she crouched there; still she stared, and still she could not run.

The Stalker stopped in front of her. She heard machinery inside him whirr as he raised that sword again. She looked up. The red blade hung over her, but did not fall. There was a notch in its edge where it had severed Wavey’s spine. She moved her eyes from the sword to the Stalker’s face; to its witch-light eyes. Wavey’s shot had set its visor smouldering. The blistered paint was flaking off in little burning curls. She could not read the name which had once been written on its brow.

“Shrike?” she said.

She could not be sure. It might have been any Stalker standing there, but she felt certain it was Shrike, and for some reason of his own he did not kill her but just waited like a red statue, until the men who had been hanging back to watch grew restless and started yelling for him to strike. In Fever’s numb brain echoed Wavey’s voice, nagging her to run.

She ran, fighting down the feeling that it was wrong to leave her mother there alone, knowing that she would feel the guilt of it always. She ran, and the men behind her bayed. She ran, and crossbow bolts flew past her, filling the air with their quick, feathery hiss, and as she reached the brink of the hill one punched her so hard in the back that its fierce little beak stuck out through her chest.

Knocked forward by the force of the blow, she felt the grassy overhang at the hill’s edge give way beneath her. Then she was rolling over and over in a rising rattle of stones, reaching for a bush and feeling that come loose too, growing aware, as she went tumbling down the scree, of a chill and fearsome pain.

She hit an outcropping of rock that stopped her slide, while stones she’d dislodged went scattering and rattling on past her and down into the trees at the hill’s foot. Fearfully she put a hand up to her chest, and felt the hard cold point of the bolt jutting out there. “No! No! No!” she mewed, shuddering there on the scree, the pain and the panic rising, rising. Each breath burned. She could taste blood in her mouth. Behind and above her men came shouting along the brow of the hill and fingers of light from ’lectric lanterns went groping through the dusk.

The scree was still settling, a few last stones bounding past her and setting off little secondary slides. Before it all fell silent she made herself move, kicking away from her holdfast and slithering on down, gritting her teeth against the astonishing pain. She was barely conscious when she reached the tumble of bigger boulders at the foot of the cliff. She just wanted to lie there. She just wanted to cry.

Ahead of her the ground sloped down to the banks of a river. The river clattered, running shallow over stones, and on the far bank stands of birches showed like white railings in the dusk, with the darkness of pines beyond them. Fever knew that she had to cross the river and get in among those trees, but she couldn’t make herself move. She was cold and she wanted her mother. Breathing hurt and made awful bubbling noises. Blood was running down inside her clothes. Her throat filled and she choked. Memories, her own and Godshawk’s, flared in her fading mind. She saw her mother as a little girl, a young woman. She saw the pieces of her flung aside. “Wavey, Wavey, Wavey,” she sobbed, crawling forward, bent double round the pain. And as she slid down into nothingness she saw very clearly for a moment the strange pyramid at Skrevanastuut, black against a rippling sky.

Far above her, men went searching along the hilltop, shining their lanterns down across the scree.

n the pink light of the next day’s dawn Cluny Morvish stood beside Raven in the shadow of his traction castle and watched them pile the last faggots up around the pyre they’d built for Wavey Godshawk. A priest waited with a burning brand, and a boy was on hand to scare away the crows, which were already showing an interest in the remains.

“She should not have died,” Cluny said.

She had not heard that Raven had captured the Movement’s chief technomancer until she heard that she’d been killed. She wished that she had had a chance to talk to her. The dead woman’s face seemed hauntingly familiar, although Cluny knew that she could never have seen her before. “She would have made a useful hostage. . .”

“Not that one.” Raven looked grim. He was tired of talking about the rights and wrongs of killing the Snow Leopard. It was not as if talk could bring her back to life. “Not that Scriven witch. She’d have found some way to stab us in the back if we’d let her live. As it was, she killed five of my men. Anyway, I thought you Arkhangelsk didn’t mind a bit of killing. I hope you don’t, for there’ll be a fair few more must die before we reach London.”

Cluny looked at him. “What of the girl?”

“Shot by one of my crossbowmen as she tried to escape. She went over the crag there. We’ve not yet found the body.”

“It is a bad start,” said Cluny. “When the Ancestors sent me the dream they did not mean us to start killing women and innocent girls.”

“Well, like it or not, it’s done,” said Raven. “And sooner or later Quercus will learn of it. I’ll send word it was an accident; reckon he might swallow that for a while. But sooner or later the truth’ll reach him, and by the time it does we’d best be ready to move.”

“I shall ride back to my people and tell them to make ready,” Cluny promised. “I had hoped to go south and see this London for myself, but. . .”

“No time for that,” said Raven.

“No, indeed.”

Wavey’s pyre was ready. The priest stepped forward and thrust his torch into the faggots at the base with no more ceremony than a gardener burning rubbish on a bonfire. The flames rushed up crackling, and men who had been standing nearby stepped backwards, shielding their faces from the fierce heat.

“The last of the Scriven,” said Rufus Raven. “The world’s well rid of them, don’t you think?”

Cluny Morvish watched for a moment longer, then turned without a word and went away.

Strange lass
, Raven thought. Six months before, when he had first had word of a prophet among the Arkhangelsk, he had thought she would be just another mad messiah of the sort the northlands seemed to breed. But when the fighting stopped and the young woman came across the silent battlefields to tell him her terrible vision of London, well, it had shaken him. Cluny Morvish was no crazy priest but a proper north-country warrior girl, a hunting girl; a shield-maiden from a good fighting clan. Her dream seemed to confirm all Raven’s private fears about the new city. It had been so compelling that it had made him start to think the unthinkable: an alliance with the Arkhangelsk, against Quercus.

The wind changed, blowing pyre-smoke and the stench of Wavey’s burning hair into his face. He turned, covering his nose, and stomped back aboard his castle.

Cluny Morvish had not travelled to Hill 60 in a fortress or a land-barge but on mammoth-back, as befitted a prophet. Just Cluny herself and her younger half-brother Marten, a half-dozen Morvish warriors and the old technomancer Tharp, who was there to interpret Cluny’s vision and make sure she did not engage in any hunting or fighting or flirting, which would not have been fitting for the Vessel of the Ancestors.

“They could not find the girl they shot,” Cluny told them, as they set about striking the tents and loading the mammoths.

“Maybe they did not really shoot her, then,” said one of her warriors.

“They have no skill at tracking, these Movement men,” said Tharp. He leant on his staff and spat into the grass. “It’s because they travel only aboard these engines and great carts and wanigans. They have no reindeer, no mammoth. They’re losing their sense of the earth beneath them. A child of Arkhangelsk could track better.”

“If you want me to, Cluny-my-sister,” said Marten, “I’ll soon pick up this girl’s trail.”

“I want you to,” said Cluny, calling to her mammoth to make it kneel for her, and climbing easily up to sit astride its neck.

“Why?” the technomancer asked suspiciously. He did not like to hear her giving orders. That was
his
job. It galled him that Cluny had a better connection to the Ancestors than he did, and he did not like the way the men had started looking to her for their orders before they looked to him. “Why should we want to find this southron girl?” he demanded.

“Because if she is alive, she will need healing, and if she is dead, she will need burial,” said Cluny Morvish.

Only eight mammoths and nine people, but it still took hours to get them on the road, by the time the beasts were loaded and the tents were struck. They left Hill 60 in the height of the morning with the last thin smoke of Wavey’s pyre going up into the sky behind them. Soon they were among the old war zones to the north-east, where the earth was full of the bones of men and Stalkers and many of the trees were blackened by the discharges of strange old weapons. Marten ran ahead on foot. He was twelve winters old, tireless, and a good tracker. The trail that Raven’s men had missed was as clear as a story to him, written in pressed grasses and broken twigs, in drops of blood like red dew on leaves of hart’s tongue fern. He found the girl lying close to their path, and called the others.

“She’s funny-looking,” he said. “Like an elf, or a nightwight.”

“Her mother was Scriven,” said Cluny.

“That’s just as bad.”

The girl was more than halfway dead, and all the Morvishmen agreed it would be kindest to finish her. Especially when she started telling them that she was Auric Godshawk. “We should kill her and bury her and be on our way,” said Marten. But Cluny insisted that they take her with them.

“Why?” Tharp asked sharply. “Did you have another dream? Do the Ancestors think she is important?”

“Yes,” said Cluny, because she knew he would not argue with the Ancestors.

“Godshawk was the name of the old Scriven king in London,” said one of the warriors, an older man named Munt. “He was lord there in the lean years, when me and your father the Carn were sell-swords in the south.”

“Godshawk was her mother’s name too,” said Cluny. “Auric Godshawk must be one of her Ancestors. Perhaps he is speaking to us through her from the World Without Time.”

The men looked even more warily at Fever after that, but they rigged a travois and hitched it to one of the mammoths and dragged her with them, north and east and north again by marsh tracks and the ancient mammoth-ways. By night she stayed in the technomancer’s tent while Tharp worked the medicine-magic on her and Cluny helped to nurse her. To the surprise of them all she began to get better. By the time they reached the
Kometsvansen
her wounds looked months old and her fever was fading, but she still clung unwaveringly to the belief that she was Auric Godshawk.

Tharp said that she was mad. He said that seeing her mother killed and being half-killed herself had broken her mind. He suggested slyly that, having Scriven blood, she would make a powerful sacrifice when the time came to bless the fortresses before they rolled to war. But Cluny had the men carry the girl aboard her father’s traction fort. The technomancer grumbled, of course. “I have worked the medicine-magic on her again and again, and yet she is not cured. I am the wisest technomancer of Arkhangelsk, and if I cannot cure her, no one can!”

“Let her cure herself, then,” Cluny said, and she sent him away. She had found that she liked caring for Fever Crumb. It helped her to forget her own fears, having someone even worse off to look after. She made the servants bring a bright tin mirror and hang it carefully on the wall near the sick girl’s bed, angled so that she’d be sure to see it when she woke.

In the middle of that night, in the middle of another dream of London, she was woken by a terrible cry. It was coming from the sick girl’s chamber.

“No! I am Auric Godshawk! I am
Godshawk
!”

When Fever woke next morning, she was herself again. She lay under the heaped furs, trying not to think about what had happened and how she had come there. Godshawk had had his own adventures in the north. When she blacked out at the foot of Hill 60 his memories must have flooded her unconscious mind and driven her onwards like a sleepwalker until the Arkhangelsk found her. She remembered it, some of it, but it didn’t seem to mean anything. All she could think of was Wavey’s awful death, and the things about Wavey that she would now never know, and the things that Wavey would never be able to tell her.

And I just ran
, thought Fever.
I just ran and left her
.

It had been the rational thing to do. She knew that. But that did not make it feel
right
.

Someone heard her weeping. Someone came and touched her face and looked down at her, and she recognized the girl she’d seen on mammoth-back at Raven’s camp. She’d not realized then how tall she was; how big-boned, beautiful and strong.
A daughter of the frost giants
, Borglum would have billed her, if she’d joined his Carnival of Knives.
My mammoth-girl
, the ghost of Godshawk whispered wistfully, somewhere in the deeps of Fever’s mind.

The mammoth-girl knelt beside the bed and said gently, “Auric?”

“My name is Fever Crumb,” said Fever.

“Good.”

“Auric was someone who I. . . He’s gone now.”

“Pity,” said the girl, accepting this quite easily, with a smile. “He seemed interesting.”

Fever blushed, remembering how enticing Godshawk had found those smiles.
Kiss me
, she’d said, when she thought she was him.
You’d not deny a last kiss to a dying man
. And the girl had said, “You’re not a dying
man
. . .” Fever blushed at the memory of it. Of course, now that she was herself again she was repelled by the girl’s musky odour and old-tech trinkets and that wild cloud of rust-coloured hair. But her smile was kind, and her lilting northern voice was lovely; she didn’t just roll her Rs, she
bowled
them, pausing mid-word to take a little run-up:
in-terrrrresting
. Some lingering Godshawkish instinct still made Fever want to kiss her.

She sat up, holding the covers round her and telling herself sternly to be rational. She realized now that she was in one of the cabins of a traction fortress; she could feel the faint vibration of its engines. There were rugs on the deck, hangings on the walls. Bits of rusty old-tech dangled as charms or ornaments from the thick oaken beams of the ceiling. There was that mirror where she’d met herself last night. Some of her things lay on a table near the bed: her penknife, her slide rule and her torch. She remembered faintly her arrival here. Before that; the awful journey on that juddering travois; looking up at the branches as she passed through belts of forest. Before that. . .

“My mother is dead,” she said.

The mammoth-girl nodded, and reached out, and moved a strand of hair from Fever’s forehead. Usually Fever hated it when people touched her, but at that moment and with that girl she did not mind. “My mother died when I was small,” the girl said. “I don’t remember how it felt. But my brother fell at Hill 60 and that felt horrible, and it still does. I’m sorry for you.”

“What is this place?” Fever asked.

“You’re in the traction fort of the Morvish,” said the girl. (
The t-rrraction forrrt of the Mo-rrrvish
. . . It was like music.) “I’m Cluny.”

“Raven spoke of you. You’re a prophet. . .”

“I’m not,” said Cluny. She frowned; a shadow came into her hazel eyes. “I don’t
think
I am. . . The Ancestors sent me a dream, and now we have made peace with the Movement and we are making ready to roll on London.”

“With Raven’s help,” said Fever.

Cluny Morvish nodded. “We have not told him that you are here. Nor will we. The Arkhangelsk do not kill women and girls.”

“I must get to London!” said Fever. “I have to tell Dr Crumb. . .” She started to get out of bed, and was halfway before she remembered how weak she was.

“You are not well enough to travel,” said Cluny Morvish, easing her back. “Even if you were, it would not be allowed. You must wait. Soon we will all be in London. We will crush the new city under our tracks, destroy its warriors, and make prisoners of its women.” It sounded quite a gentle business, spoken in that thrilling voice:
c-rrrush, dest-rrroy, make p-rrriss-onairrss
. . .

“Am I a prrris . . . a prisoner?” Fever asked.

“No,” said Cluny Morvish. “You are my guest.”

“A guest who cannot leave.”

Cluny smiled mischievously. “A prisoner-y kind of guest.”

Fever needed to tell Dr Crumb about what had happened to Wavey. She hated to think of him going about his work in London not knowing what had befallen his wife and daughter. But
what we can’t change, we must accept
. That was what Dr Crumb had always taught her. She was at the mercy of this Cluny Morvish, and at least Cluny Morvish seemed more merciful than Raven’s crossbowmen. She tied a little charm around Fever’s neck: a bird’s skull and some blue glass beads wired to an old shard of circuit-board. “I had Tharp make this for you. It will protect you from bad spirits while you heal.”