Scrivener's Moon (21 page)

“Thank you,” said Fever.

“Never thank me,” Borglum said. “You should hate me, rather. But for me and my talk o’ the north, your mum would be breathing still, happy in London with that Crumb of hers. It was me brought her to this end, and don’t I know it? And the only thing I could do to make amends, the small and single thing, was to find you living and keep you safe. That’s the one thing the Duchess would have wanted.”

“Well, there is that other thing, too,” said Lady Midnight. She was sitting next to Fever with an arm about her shoulders, doing her best to be motherly.

“Oh yeah!” said Borglum. “I was forgettin’ that. Stick, go up and check how we’re doing, will you? We should be coming up on Jotungard soon.”

“Jotungard?” said Fever with a start. She wondered suddenly if she could trust Borglum. “That’s Raven’s fort! Shouldn’t we keep away from it?”

“Don’t worry,” said Borglum. He jumped down from his chair and started rolling up his sleeves. “We’re just going to trundle alongside for a while. Master Raven won’t mind. We’re welcome aboard Jotungard any time. Why, just yesterday we went aboard and gave a special show for Raven and his captains and their ladies. I left something behind, though, so I need to sort it. You’d better help me.”

“She’s tired, Borglum,” said Quatch. “She needs rest.”

“She can rest all she likes when we’re out of this river of steel,” said Borglum, “but first there’s something she needs to be part of. She’ll regret it always if she ain’t. You come with me, Fever dearie. We got something to do that’ll please our poor Duchess, wherever she might be.”

Fever didn’t understand. She was tired and frightened and bruised from all those days in lockers and mammoth baskets, and she could not fathom what he wanted of her.

“It’s the one
other
thing she would have wanted, see,” said Borglum kindly. “You safe, that would have been first on her list, and don’t you never doubt it. But second, and in quite large letters, underlined, she’d have put
Revenge
.”

“Even clever men like Raven make mistakes,” he explained, guiding Fever through the
Sandwich
’s smoky innards. “He sees a little chap like me and he can’t quite bring himself to believe that I’ve got the same sized heart as him, and that I cared for your mother as much as ever he cared about anything. If I stood six foot tall he’d have said to himself, ‘That Borglum, he’s a danger. He was fond of the Duchess and I done her in, so now I can’t never trust him, and I’d best get rid of him, too.’ But ’cos I’m short he thinks I don’t feel things the way full sized fellows do.”

He came to his cabin door and swung it open; held it for Fever to step through. In the middle of the cabin squatted the paper boy machine. The light of a hanging lantern swayed and shimmered over its brass scrollwork and the plastic handles of its levers.

“Trouble is,” said Borglum, flicking switches on its control panel, “my legs are too short to reach the pedals. So I thought you could do that, with those long Scriven shanks of yours, while I handle the murdering.”

Jotungard and the Arkhangelsk heart-fortress were lumbering side by side across the plains, with lookouts stationed to keep watch and make sure neither pulled ahead of the other. This was the deal that Raven and the Great Carn had worked out; they would reach London at the same time, and share equally in the spoils. The great vehicles could move at barely more than walking pace, but around them the strongest and speediest of their landships rolled, and now and then, at prearranged coordinates, a few would break off and race away to assault a settlement or oil well whose garrison was still thought loyal to Quercus.

With all the coming and going in the vanguard, no one noticed the
Knuckle Sandwich
when it swerved down out of the north-west and came alongside Jotungard. The men in the
Sandwich
’s wheelhouse matched their course and speed with the huge castle; Stick, on lookout duty, shouted down a ventilator, “We’re in position, boss!” All through the barge the carnival ’shapes crossed their fingers and offered up prayers to fierce and warlike gods. Borglum had told them all his plan and given all the choice to stay safe out of it, and a few had stayed behind in the north, but most had opted to come with him; they mourned the Duchess, and meant to see Raven suffer for what he’d done.

In his cabin, Borglum peered into the machine’s flickery grey screen and waited for a picture to appear. “Yesterday, when we did our command performance for his Raven-ness, we left a little gift aboard his castle. One of your mother’s paper boys slid in behind a tapestry down on the bottom deck. Now, if all this joggling and jolting don’t break the signal up too much, I mean to wake it and send it ’bout its work. I’ll teach Rufus Raven not to turn his back upon the little man.”

Fever sat on the machine’s saddle, pedalling quickly. She felt a dark thrill which she tried to calm, telling herself that Engineers did not approve of revenge.

“Just killing Raven, that would be the obvious thing,” said Borglum. “Sneak the paper boy into his cabin while he’s sleepin’; slit his throat with one almighty paper-cut. But I’m a showman, Fever. I’m an artist. Small of stature, but I think BIG. Kill Raven? That would be lettin’ him off lightly. I’m going to kill him, and his people, and his castle, and his dreams, and any hope he ever had of winning himself a place in history with his treachery and grand alliances. A hundred years from now they’ll worship old Quercus like a god, but mention Raven and they’ll say, ‘Who’s he?’”

He thumped the side of the machine and a picture flickered and steadied on the screen. Just blackness, but when he worked the control levers the blackness slid aside, and a grainy, ghostly, grey-and-white image of a lamplit corridor appeared.

On Jotungard the paper boy slid sideways from behind the tapestry where Borglum had hidden it the day before. It wasn’t a pale white cut-out, like the paper boys that Fever had once fought. The carnival crew had painted it with dark brown paint, and combed a pale grain through it with the tines of a fork before it dried. It looked like wood. In the dingy light of Jotungard’s under deck it could pass for part of the wall until it moved.

It moved now, obeying the orders that came flicking into its electric brain from the machine in Borglum’s cabin. It scuttled along the corridor on the edges of its paper feet, and stopped still and all but invisible against a wall as a pair of the Movement’s red-robed technomancers ambled by.

“Where are you sending it?” asked Fever, peering over Borglum’s head at the image on the screen as he started it on its way again. “Raven’s cabins are on the upper decks, near the heart-chamber. . .”

“Never mind them,” said Borglum.

“It would be wrong to harm anyone but Raven,” Fever said nervously. “They were not responsible for what happened to Wavey.”

“Keep pedallin’,” Borglum growled. “Or go an’ fetch someone else to pedal for me if you’re feeling too high-minded. This is a
war
that’s starting here. Who do you want to win? Your dad and his friends in London, or these barbarians with their murdering ways and their grubby, stupid prophetess?”

“Cluny Morvish isn’t grubby,” said Fever. “Well. . . She isn’t stupid.”

“Friend of yours now, is she?” Borglum asked.

“She’s. . . Yes.”

“Then the best thing you can do for her is end this war now, before she gets herself killed.”

“What was that?” asked Fever, seeing white words drift across the screen.

It was a sign, bolted to the corridor wall, and Borglum’s paper boy had just stalked past it. It said,
Powder Magazine: No Naked Flames Beyond This Point
. There was a drawing of an explosion underneath, for the benefit of crewmen who couldn’t read.

A guard stood outside the magazine’s iron-bound door, but it is hard to guard a door when you know there are no enemies within a hundred miles. The guard was thinking about the girl he’d left at Hill 60, and when he finally realized that the paper boy was not just a shifting shadow on the passage wall he did not know what it was, or what to do. He raised his crossbow and put a quarrel through it. It came on with a small hole torn in it, the quarrel quivering in the planking of the wall behind. The scared guard dropped his bow and drew his sword, but Borglum had grown good at running paper boys during the shows he’d put on those past few weeks, and he crumpled it and spun it past the guard’s feet and stood it up and smoothed it flat again. It slid like bad news through the tiny crack between the door and its frame.

Inside the magazine, in the wan, swaying light of the electric lamps, Raven’s chief gunner and his mates looked up from the gunpowder they were scooping into pannikins, the big brass-bound shells they were easing off their racks.

Ever the showman, Borglum made the paper boy take a little bow as he turned it to face them.

Out in the corridor the guard began to toll a handbell.

Up in the heart-chamber, Raven looked up from the reports he had been reading. His wife put down her knitting.

Fever, legs aching now, kept pedalling. Sometimes, later, she would wonder if she should have stopped.

The paper boy held up its hands. Each finger was painted with a greenish thimble of phosphorous sesquisulfide and potassium chlorate. It reached out both paper arms and dragged its fingers over the rough planking of the walls. The phosphorous blobs flared into flame, fierce and white and shaped like ears of corn, blinding the paper boy’s electric eyes, bleaching the screen in Borglum’s cabin white.

“Get us clear!” yelled Borglum.

“Get us clear!” boomed Quatch, stationed outside his door.

“Get us clear!” shouted Stick, up in the lookout.

The
Knuckle Sandwich
swerved away from Jotungard’s skirts, plunging across the path of another fortress, speeding into the darkness ahead of the armada. Misshapes crowded to the portholes. Borglum scrambled from his cabin and up a companionway on to the spiny roof. Fever went after him. The forts were falling swiftly astern; signal lanterns flashing as they asked each other who was commanding that scruffy barge that had just broken ranks. Sleet blew past on the wind.

“Nothing’s happening,” said Stick.

“Wait,” said Borglum. “Wait.”

The light came first, breaking like sunrise from the base of Jotungard. The light; and then the noise; the thunder rolling across the plain, past the speeding
Sandwich
and on into the lands beyond. Amid the thunder Jotungard was seen to lift, and slew, and twist, and then it was not a castle at all but a jigsaw of black fragments all parting company with one another, pushing outwards on one red spreading rose of an explosion after another as the powder magazine set off the boilers and the boilers set off the fuel store, and the neighbouring vehicles veered and braked and some ran themselves right under the wheels of the Arkhangelsk heart-fortress in their efforts to avoid the axles and hubs and sponsons and shards of upperwork and armour which were coming down now all around.

And on the
Knuckle Sandwich
, under the thunder and the engines’ roar, there was an awed and respectful quiet among the watchers. But Borglum stood at the stern rail with his clothes flapping in the breeze and raised a flask of brandy that he’d taken from his pocket; held it up gleaming in the fires of Jotungard.

“You sleep sound now, Wavey dear,” he said.

harley woke to the sound of thunder. When he was a nipper he’d been afraid of storms, and he sat up now in his bed confused and panicky, waiting for the lightning.

But it wasn’t really thunder. ’Course not. It was London’s engines warming up. The vibrations shivered through him; the springs of his bedstead sang; the glass on his bedside table jittered and sloshed, and the pens in their pot on his tiny desk all trilled together like crickets. The whole room was a-shudder, and his neighbours must have woken too, because he could hear no snoring coming through the walls.

It took Charley about three blinks, about three beats of his heart to understand what was happening. Then he was up, groping for his clothes, thinking,
This is it!
He dressed, laced his shoes, and blundered out of the room, pulling on his new white coat as he went. In the passage outside he met dozens of other Engineers all doing likewise. They went down the stairways of the building in a white tide. “Is it another test?” Charley heard one man ask, and a second answered, “Can’t be; not at this hour. This is real.”

Out they went into the patchy glare of the electric lamps on B:19 Street (which they all called Geargate). “Look!” said someone, pointing to the street’s end and the darkness beyond the tier’s edge there, and they looked, and saw far-off hills thrown suddenly into black silhouette by the pale flashes leaping up the northern sky.

“Lightning?”

“Guns.”

“Far off, though.”

“Not far enough.”

“To your stations!” a senior Guildsman was bellowing. “To your stations! Dr Shallow, Dr Crumb is asking for you. . .”

. . .while out in Tent Town the common folk of London were scrambling from their beds, stumbling in darkness or in lantern light to their tents’ doors, staring at their new city, which lit the earth around its wheels with the glow of furnaces and sent up streamers of steam and smoke against the stars.

“Is it another test?”

“Maybe the Arkhangelsk are coming. . .”

“Quercus is leaving!”

“He can’t be. Not without us. . .”

Nervous-looking squads of coppertops moved from street to street, collecting the last of the workers whose names appeared on Dr Crumb’s list. “Report aboard the new city at once. There’s an emergency. Yes, bring your family. Quickly.” The plumes of smoke that striped the sky were thicker now. The ground seemed to jump to the rhythm of the engines. Milly came to the doorway of her family’s shack and looked out across her city, lit now by the torches of the crowd as well as by the lamps and furnaces of the new London. “They are leaving without us!” said her dad, out in the street. He looked back at her quickly with wide, frightened eyes. Behind her in the shack her baby sister started to wail.

She ran outside to join him. “It will be all right,” she said. “Charley’s got us on that list. He
promised
. . .”

Her father didn’t seem to be listening. He shook his head, said disbelievingly, “The new city ain’t ready! It can’t move yet!”

Milly could not quite believe it either, despite the rumours she had heard. It was too terrible to believe; she only wished she had not been born into such times as these. She could sense that there would be paintings made about this night one day, and stories told, and great songs sung, for hundreds of years, long after she was dead. She wished she could be one of them future people listening to the stories, instead of herself, stood helpless and afraid here at the start of things.

“It’s all right,” she said again. “They’ll come and fetch us aboard. Charley promised. . .”

Sure enough there were men shouting in the neighbouring street; the white coat of an Engineer and the gleaming cap-badges of coppertops glimpsed between the tents, shouting names: “Maltby: quickly; bring your family. Aaronson; where is the Aaronsons’ tent?”

Milly stuck her head in through the hut door, into the wailing of the baby, the sleepy questions of her brothers. “Get ready!” she shouted. “Pack some stuff! We’re going aboard the new city. . .”

As Charley hurried into the control room Dr Crumb turned towards him, and the reflections of electric lamps slipped across the lenses of his icy little spectacles. “News from the north, Charley. Quercus says that we must leave now; tonight.”

Thank the gods for that
, thought Charley, who had not much fancied waiting for the traitor Raven and his savage allies to arrive.

“You’ll stay with me,” Dr Crumb was saying. “I may need a runner to take messages to the outer sectors. . .”

All around him, lesser Engineers were eyeing their gauges as pressure built in London’s engines. A man ran up to report a problem in one of the fuel feeds and Dr Crumb turned to consider it, forgetting Charley. The rising rumble of the engines filled the caverns of Base Tier, and now for the first time Charley felt the city stir, edging forward just an inch as the wheels slithered in London clay.

“Those poor devils outside,” muttered an apprentice.

Charley wondered for a moment who he meant. He’d forgotten his promise to Milly Floater long ago.

Outside again, pushing past her father, hopping guy-ropes, running between the tents to pluck at the sleeve of that Engineer. She’d half hoped it might be Charley himself, but it was an older man, looking down his nose at her as she blurted, “Please, sir, my family and me are on the list. Floater’s the name. You’ll see us there. Dr Shallow put us there himself. . .”

The Aaronsons hurried past, carrying their belongings in sacks and suitcases, chivvied towards the new city’s boarding stairs by scared-looking coppertops. The Engineer glanced down at his list and shook his head. “No Floaters here.” Turning away now. “Dyce? William Dyce?”

“Please!” shouted Milly, grabbing at him again, but a policeman shoved her aside. She fell, and by the time she was on her feet again the Engineer and his bodyguard were hidden from her by a hedge of other people, all demanding to know what was happening, or shouting out reasons why they must be allowed aboard the new city. “Please!” Milly screamed. “We are on the list! Charley promised!”

Now, in the sullen red light that seeped from the Engine District, the lucky ones could be seen climbing the stairways into the new city. Those left behind, the untrained labourers and shopkeepers and keepers of canvas pubs whom Dr Crumb had deemed worthless, all looked on in growing fright. The engine smoke drifting past them stank of betrayal. They had trusted Quercus. They had paid him the taxes he asked of them, and most had believed the promises he gave them in return. Now, in the dark, in the cold, they were learning the most important rule of politics: the government was not their friend.

From Clerkenwell and old St Kylie the first angry shouts arose. Torches were kindled; people surged to the stairways. As the coppertops hurried the last of their charges up into the city bricks and bottles began to fall on them. Caught in the crowd’s tide, Milly was swept away from her family. She broke free and tried to scurry home along a side-street between rows of empty tents, but a strange barricade blocked her way. She stood and stared at it for half a minute before she realized what it was. Dead horses were heaped up there. There had been a stable in that street, and someone had brought all the horses out and shot them and just left them lying there. Milly put a hand up to her mouth. She’d liked those horses. She used to bring her little brothers and sisters down to pat their noses sometimes and feed them apples. Now their blood was soaking through the soles of her shoes. “Who’d do such things?” she said, and a man running past her paused and shouted, “It was the coppertops, of course. They’re shooting all the horses. Mammoths too. If we had horses we could keep up with their new city, and they don’t want that!”

That was when it finally became real to Milly. She turned back towards the city. The crowds were boiling around the feet of the stairways. Some men were climbing the tracks; others had scrambled up to the towering doors of the Gut and were trying to force them open. Through the din of the engines Milly heard the crack of rifles, and she didn’t think it was just horses they were shooting any more. Then the engines roared louder still, drowning out the shots. The city shivered. Its wheels began to turn. The giant tracks slithered against wet earth, then found a purchase, inching forward over the aprons of rubble that had been packed in front of them.

The voice of the crowds rose in a despairing wail. The guards on the stairways were overwhelmed as people began to swarm up them: men in nightshirts wielding picks and spanners, frightened children, babies held up above their mother’s heads in baskets like tiny boatmen on a violent sea. But the stairways were shivering; twisting; wrenched sideways as the city moved. At their heads, the Lord Mayor’s men swung axes, cutting them free. One fell and then another, crashing down into the shadows between those huge wheels. On the city’s edge a crane collapsed, tugged from its footings. Then another and another; one by one their legs buckled under them and they knelt down like weary giraffes and then pitched forward, a ripple spreading outward through the crowds as people under them fought to escape.

A few people, mostly men, had managed to struggle up on to the city’s skirts and could be seen there battling with the Lord Mayor’s soldiers, but by now most had given up all hope of getting aboard. Pushing away from the city, they left a circle of clear ground around it as it revved its engines and began to turn, spewing smoke and sparks and smuts over the masses now fighting to escape its wheels.

Poor Milly, caught in the midst of them again, found herself jostled and shouted at and elbowed, knocked to her knees and nearly trampled flat. Women were shrieking and men were cursing and tents were blazing into flame, and the last cranes crashed down in ruin as the new city tore free of them. The tracks on the southern side kept rolling forward; those on the north went into reverse. The city turned laboriously, like a gigantic baby shuffling round on its bottom. It was not turning south, as everyone had expected. Slowly, slowly, it turned its back on Tent Town, and the engine’s roar increased. Huge sections of scaffolding up on the unfinished higher tiers collapsed, spilling from its stern in an avalanche of timber as it began to crawl away.

Some people followed it, still hoping that somehow they might fight their way aboard. Some ran the other way. Some, like Milly, just knelt staring at the deep watery wounds where it had stood, and the wheel ruts stretching black across the rubble-fields, ploughing through the lower slopes of Ludgate Hill. She watched the new city pull away, moving faster now, dwindling slowly towards the flickers of white lightning in the far north-east.

“You’re a dirty liar, Charley Shallow!” she shouted at it. But there was so much other shouting going on that no one heard her.

Dr Crumb, feeling a little dizzy from the heat and all the sleepless nights he’d spent preparing for this one, walked out of the control chamber and through the roaring Engine District. Everything seemed to be running smoothly, although he sensed a slight sluggishness in the larboard engines; the outer banks of tracks on that side were moving slower than the rest, and every few minutes the steersmen had to make a slight adjustment to the city’s course. He would have to look into that. But not quite yet.

He kept walking till he reached the city’s after-edge, from where he could look back upon the place that it had left behind. A mass of moving things covered the earth back there, their struggles lit fitfully by burning tents and the pinpoint flames of torches. He could make out no faces, no individuals, and he found that he felt no more pity for them than he would feel for protozoa swarming on a microscope slide. A cool and rational pride awoke in him as he recognized that he had finally
achieved what he had set out to long ago. He had left all feeling behind him, along with those useless people and their useless tents. He had at last become a man of reason: a new man for a new age.