Scrivener's Moon (14 page)

“I don’t know,” said Marten, snatching his hand back.

Fever turned away, thinking hard. Was it possible that when Cluny was a child in London, Godshawk had performed the same experiment on her that he had on Fever? Perhaps up here in the wilds, without the sights and smells of London to trigger it, the Stalker implant had never worked. Only now, as word of the new city spread across the north, was it starting to release a few of Godshawk’s memories; and in particular, the memory of the rolling city he had dreamed of building. . .

It was not impossible. The evidence fitted. Fever remembered how frightened she had been when those memories that were not memories began surfacing. At least she had been able to understand a little, when she learned the truth. Poor Cluny, brought up in ignorance, among these savages who did not even know that electricity and magnetism were aspects of the same force! It was small wonder she thought the memories were magic visions. . .

Marten Morvish was looking at her quite fearfully. She said, “Listen, I must explain something. I know what is wrong with your sister!”

Before she could say any more she was pulled away. Two men held her while Tharp rattled his ’phone-staff in her face and shouted, “What magic have you worked on Cluny Morvish?”

“I have done nothing to. . .”

“Lies! You are a powerful technomancer! We all saw how you lit that dead lamp. And now the Vessel of the Ancestors is unwell. . .”

“I am all right now,” said Cluny, from behind him.

“There is something wrong with her,” said Fever, wondering how on earth she could explain it to these ignorant people. “It’s not my doing. It is like an illness. That is why she has been having these hallucinations. . .”

“Visions!” shouted Tharp. “Visions, sent by the Ancestors!”

“No. I think there is a machine embedded in Cluny’s brain. That is where her dreams come from. . .”

“Madness!” said one of the men who held her, sounding truly amazed that she could expect them to believe such stuff.

“There is no machine in my head!” said Cluny Morvish, touching it. “I think I’d know, wouldn’t I? The dreams come from our Ancestors in the World Without Time.”

“Even the one about the lanterns drifting off across the lagoons in the twilight?” Fever said. “All that orange and blue? I liked that one too. And the one about kissing that person in the park, in the snow. . . Have you had that one yet?”

Cluny looked scared, then angry, then scared again.

“We will kill her,” Tharp declared. “Kill her, and offer her blood up to the Ancestors, and ask them to forgive us for ever having let her walk free among us.”

“No!” said Cluny. “It is not their wish that she be killed.”

“Well, we cannot let her walk around free,” said Carn Morvish. He looked as shocked as his daughter by what Fever had said. “We cannot, Cluny-my-daughter.”

Cluny wouldn’t look at Fever. “Keep her under lock and key then,” she said. “Keep her prisoner. But keep her. I don’t understand it yet, but . . . she has a part to play.”

So that was what they did. They took Fever back aboard Carn Morvish’s house, back to the room where she’d been staying since she got there, but this time they locked the door, and set a guard outside, and hammered fast the shutters on the windows. And there in the dark alone they left her, a captive in the comet’s tail.

n London, they were tearing down the temple of St Kylie. They were climbing up on scaffolding and peeling off its copper dome in segments which clanged like cracked bells when they hit the ground below. They were ripping out the panelling, and kicking down the doors, and levering the hasps and hinges and the handles off, and carting statues and reliquaries and altar decorations away for melting down. The poor saint’s followers stood in the Tent Town rain and watched, and some wept, and some raged, but there was nothing that any of them could do. Their own High Priestess, Mistress Shamflower, had been found out as a traitor, and as punishment Quercus had ordered every trace of Kylie-worship to be wiped from the face of London, and the stuff of her temple sent to feed the new city.

Charley Shallow watched too, feeling a jittery sort of satisfaction as the door behind the altar which had once hidden him from Borglum’s misshapes was kicked in and men went through into the hidden chamber behind and started to chuck out the temple’s silver chalices and age-old plastic plates, the priestess’s priceless vestments with their embroidery of copper wire.
I did that
, he told himself. But so much had changed in London, and so much of it was down to him, that it only gave him the ghost of a thrill: he was getting used to the idea of himself as someone who could make a difference to the world.

Within a few hours of his audience with Quercus, London had started to prepare for war. Stacks of timber which had been intended as the deck of Tier Three were being hammered up around the city’s skirts in a crude stockade, thick enough to stop a shot from Raven’s cannons. From their garages in the walls of the Great Under Tier, squadrons of landships went roaring north and east into the Fuel Country. Meanwhile, people of all sorts were flocking to join the defence force, especially the low-class labourers and the slaves whom Quercus had freed. The crackle of gunfire echoed daily across Tent Town as they trained with their new Bugharin rifles. It was a good thing, really, that Dr Stayling and his Underground couldn’t see it, Charley thought. There was no sign of the popular uprising that they had thought would welcome Rufus Raven. Rather, Londoners were rushing to defend their new city.

Walking back from St Kylie’s temple in the rain, he watched a convoy of land-barges rumbling in over the Brick Marsh causeways. They were carrying strange, boxy, tarpaulin-draped cargoes, and as they drew nearer to the new city and people stopped to watch, the word went round that these were naval guns, stripped from the ships of Quercus’s fleet and dragged north to defend London. On the skirts of the new city, cranes were being made ready to lift the weapons into positions on the higher tiers where they would command the northern approaches.

“Those’ll settle Raven’s hash,” shouted a plastic-smith, running past on his way to the training-grounds with his shiny new Bugharin on his shoulder.

Charley certainly hoped so. Then, as he looked up at the cranes, his gaze was caught by another of the new sights of London. From some bare girders at the edge of the base tier the carcasses of his former comrades dangled like overripe fruit, done up in little cages and swinging listlessly in the breeze. They were much squabbled over by crows, and it was hard to tell who was who, though it was still easy enough to spot Gwen Natsworthy, whose dark hair flapped on the breeze like a tattered flag. It had given Charley a funny, empty feeling in his stomach when he first saw her there. He’d told himself angrily that it weren’t no fault of
his
she’d chosen to start playing at revolutions. She only had herself to blame, when you thought about it. They all did.

He no longer lived in the Engineerium with the other apprentices. He had quarters of his own now, next door to Dr Crumb’s in one of the new blocks, Building 18, on Street 1:D (already known to everyone as Engineer’s Row). It was a rational little apartment, hexagonal in shape and designed according to some Engineer’s calculations of exactly how much space one person needed to live in. It had papier mâché walls and a built-in bunk, and this morning it had an official note pinned to the front door ordering Charley to report to the Lord Mayor’s chambers.

He wondered at once if he was in trouble. No; if he were, there’d have been a couple of coppertops waiting for him, not just a note. He told himself as he went inside to put on his best white coat and brush his damp hair flat that this summons was a good thing. It showed that Quercus hadn’t forgotten him. Maybe he was going to be given a bigger apartment, better than this pokey little hutch. He set out for the city’s heart, nodding importantly at the other Engineers and apprentices who called greetings as he passed them. He wished that one of them would ask him where he was going. He would have liked to say, “Quercus wants me. . .” or, “The Lord Mayor needs my advice on something. Big meeting of the council. . .”

When the official busybodies finally showed him into the council chamber he found just two men there: Quercus and Dr Crumb. They were talking, and Charley waited listening by the door until they found time to notice him. Quercus was saying, “. . .so the time it will take to complete the new city is still. . .”

“At least another year,” Dr Crumb replied, his eyes on the papers which were spread out before him on the conference table. “Even if we remove the more irrational and
decorative
aspects of Wavey’s plans, a year is still the minimum period in which we can hope to complete two more tiers. And during that time, the population of London will continue to grow; we may need to build
three
more tiers, and expand the Engine District again, if we are to carry them all.”

Quercus shook his head. “Impossible. We are having enough trouble acquiring materials to complete even this first phase. Raven and his allies will not wait years to make their move. Dr Crumb, what would you say if I told you that it may be necessary to move London in months rather than years? Perhaps even in weeks? Either that, or abandon all this to our enemies.”

Dr Crumb said nothing. The clock on the wall ticked slowly, heavily.

“Master Shallow,” said Quercus, taking advantage of the pause to notice Charley and call him to the table. “I have just appointed Dr Crumb here London’s new Chief Engineer.”

“Congratulations, sir,” said Charley. Dr Crumb looked blankly at him, still thinking about the problem Quercus had set him.

“He will need an assistant,” the Lord Mayor went on. “Dr Crumb tells me that you have been helping him arrange his affairs, but it would be beneath Dr Crumb’s dignity to be assisted by a mere apprentice. So I shall be promoting you to full membership of the Guild of Engineers.”

“But I haven’t passed the exam, sir. . .”

Quercus waved his words aside. “You can sit it when we have time to spare. Congratulations, Dr Shallow.”

Charley bowed, trying not to laugh with pleasure.

“Don’t thank me,” Quercus warned. “It will be hard work; harder than you can probably imagine. We are entering a desperate time. Our enemies are powerful, and they wish to destroy what we have built here. You’ve already done your bit to stop them, but now you must do more. We all must.”

“It may be possible, Lord Mayor,” said Dr Crumb suddenly.

Had he heard anything of what had just been said? Had he even noticed Charley’s promotion? His thin hands fiddled with the papers. He said, “It might be possible to move the city almost immediately if we were to admit that much of the present population is surplus to our requirements. When the building is done we will no longer need all these labourers. Why take them with us, expending fuel and space for no gain? Perhaps we should admit that we can make room aboard this rational new city only for rational people: Engineers, Mechanics; skilled workers who can keep things running. And their families, I suppose. The rest. . .”

“My gods, man!” Quercus said. “You are talking about leaving half the population of London behind!”

Dr Crumb winced at the Lord Mayor’s shoddy mental arithmetic. “Oh, far more than half, Lord Mayor. But they are of no importance.”

Quercus shook his head. “You don’t understand, Crumb. A man in my position, I’m judged by the number of followers I have; the number of people in my
Kometsvansen.
The more followers, the greater the leader; that’s how it’s always been in the north.”

“But you are not in the north any longer,” said Dr Crumb. “You are no longer a nomad; at least, not in the sense that you are used to. You have built a new city, and it must have new rules. Individuals do not matter, you see; that is what we Engineers have always understood, although I’m afraid I forgot it for a time. It is only the survival and improvement of our society that is important. If you wish, I will start drawing up lists of those persons who will be needed aboard the new city.”

“My gods,” said Quercus again, more thoughtfully. “And they call us nomads ruthless.”

“Not ruthless, Lord Mayor,” said Dr Crumb. “Rational.”

“And
if
we reduced our population in this way,” said Quercus, “then, you think, we would be able to move sooner rather than later?”

“Lord Mayor,” said the Engineer, “the engines are almost ready. There is enough space in the present structure to carry everyone we really need.”

Quercus turned his pale grey eyes on Charley. “Needless to say,” he said, “this discussion must remain absolutely secret. If word of what Dr Crumb has just proposed reached Tent Town, we would have riots on our hands.”

“Of course, sir,” said Charley earnestly. “You can rely on me, sir.”

They left the Lord Mayor’s quarters in silence, Charley carrying Dr Crumb’s attache case with its bundled piles of Wavey’s beautiful, fanciful plans. Instead of descending straight to the Engine District, as Charley had expected, they walked to the tier’s edge. “A slight headache,” mumbled Dr Crumb. “A little fresh air would be. . .” At the intersection of streets 1:17 and 1:K the workers had put up more of their cardboard signs; Ball’s Pond Road and Shoe Lane. Dr Crumb pulled them down and walked on, tearing the signs into smaller and smaller pieces until he reached the tier’s edge, where he threw them over the handrail like confetti.

“People are irrational, Charley Shallow,” he said. He clenched his fists. “The world will never be put to rights until we cure them of that. They must be
guided
. They must be
controlled
.”

“It’s
Dr
Shallow, sir,” said Charley. “
Dr
Shallow now, if you don’t mind, sir.”

A ship’s gun rose creaking past them in its cradle of hawsers. Beyond it, through the thinning rain, Charley saw that the temple of St Kylie was all but gone.