by Philip Reeve
“What do I say, Crumb?”
What did you say, to start a city moving? Dr Crumb looked blank, and for a moment, no one spoke.
“What about, ‘Proceed’?” Dr Crumb suggested.
Quercus nodded, smoothed the front of his tunic, looked around to make sure that everyone was paying attention and said, “Proceed!”
With a single movement, all the waiting Mechanics pulled their levers back.
Up on Charley Shallow’s secret eyrie it felt like an earthquake had begun. The first lurch almost rolled Gwen off the edge. Charley caught her and she clung to him and they stared at each other, shocked to feel the solid steel girders beneath them trembling and throbbing with the vibrations rising from the Engine District. There was noise too – they could hear it drumming away across Tent Town and hammering back at them from the hills. A flicker of movement spread like a ripple through the watching crowds as everyone down there put their hands over their ears, but up where Gwen and Charley were it seemed just distant thunder. No, it was the vibrations that Charley would remember. He had not realized until now – how could he have been so stupid? – he had not realized what a moving city really meant. What power was in it! Like a big animal waking and stirring, getting ready to move. . .
All through the Engine District his fellow apprentices were running to holler their reports to the Engineers who waited in the control chamber. “Full power on all the engines in Group A, sir!”
“Group B running true, sir!”
“Pressure steady. . .”
“Brakes are holding, chief.”
“Ninety per cent on Group D, Dr Crumb!”
“Oh, Wavey,” said Dr Crumb, certain that no one would hear him beneath the din of the engines. She should have been here to see this, he thought. The engines that her father had designed, and that she had perfected – with a little guidance from himself. “Oh, Fever. . .” Then he thought, It does not matter. It does not matter that they are gone. Their work survives. This city; this rational city; this is what matters. He must ignore these foolish emotions, the way he had been taught as a young Engineer. He must make himself as unfeeling as a machine, so that he could better serve this greater machine.
Quercus was signalling to him again. He glanced at his fellow Engineers, making sure that all were satisfied. Then raised a hand. Fifty levers were eased forward.
Slowly, with a dying fall, the song of the Godshawk engines ceased.
High above, Charley felt the complex tremors subside until the city was still again. Rags of smoke flew past him, wind-blown from the exhaust stacks in the west. Over on the eastern rim, above the big doors of the Gut, a crane collapsed. Up from Tent Town, far below, came the sound of cheering, or screaming, or something. Charley didn’t much care what.
“. . .horrible! It’s horrible!” Gwen was saying. “Doc Stayling was right. People won’t stand for this! Who’d want to live aboard this clanking contraption?”
Charley didn’t reply. He was thinking, How could I not have understood? The power of the thing. . . ! If a man could command power like that, he could do anything. . . He could remake the world. . .
He looked at Gwen, and her mouth was moving, but he didn’t know or care what she was yapping about any more. They’d picked the wrong side, him and Gwen. Those others, Stayling and Shamflower, they were the old world, doomed to pass and fail and be replaced. What place had there ever been for Charley Shallow in their London? A blanket on the floor at the Mott and Hoople, that was all. In Quercus’s London it would all be different. There had never been a city like this before, not even back in Ancient days. In a city like this there’d be new rules, and no telling how high a Ditch Street boy might rise. . .
As soon as they came down from aloft, Charley rid himself of Gwen, telling her he needed to show his face among the other ’prentices. Once she was gone he climbed back up to Tier One.
Quercus had returned to his old traction fortress, which, stripped of its wheels and engines, had been built into the fabric of the new city at the tier’s centre. Drinks were being served in there; Movement bigwigs clustered at the door. A guard stopped Charley as he hurried up the ramp. “I’ve got a message for the Lord Mayor,” he said, showing his badge again.
“I’ll give it to him.”
“Dr Crumb said I was to deliver it in person.”
The man looked doubtful, but an officer stepped out of the clump of men in the doorway and said, “You’re Crumb’s boy, aren’t you? I remember you,” and, to the soldier, “Let him pass.”
The guard searched him thoroughly, and let him through. No going back now, thought Charley, as he went along the carven corridors, past hangings and statues and rooms where women talked and giggled. But the thought of going back had not really occurred to him; the moment he felt the song of the city rippling through him he had known what he had to do.
“Message for the Lord Mayor. Message from Dr Crumb. . .”
He had to explain himself half a dozen times before at last he stood face to face with Quercus, a surprisingly small, surprisingly ordinary man who raised one eyebrow, questioning.
“Well, boy? What does Crumb want?”
“Nothing, sir.” No one was watching him; no one was interested in a scrawny apprentice delivering a message from the Engineers. All around him the talk and laughter and chink of wine glasses seemed to fade until it was just him and Quercus, eye to eye.
“I’m Charley Shallow, sir. I’ve got information. There’s treachery brewing in London, sir. In the north too. I was almost part of it; there’s this girl, sir, and she drew me into it. But I’m London through and through, sir, and I won’t be part of it any more. I can give you the traitors’ names, addresses, everything.”
18
FEVER IN THE COMET’S TAIL
n the strange waiting time that had followed the end of their war against the Movement, the Arkhangelsk had gathered on the plains of Heklasrand. To the south and west the woods and marshes stretched away in mist; to the north and east the bony hills of what had once been Norway hunched themselves up in snow, and the sky was stained with the ash of young volcanoes. When the wind was in the north you could smell ice on the air, but here in the brief summer there was grazing for the empire’s herds, and clear water flowing in a hundred rivers, and a place for the beaten-up war-wagons to repair themselves in readiness for the storm that was to come.
“We call it the Kometsvansen,” said Cluny Morvish, walking with her guest, or captive, or whatever she was, up on the roof of the Morvish traction fort. “It means the comet’s tail. The Great Carn’s castle is the comet, you see, and all the other vehicles follow it, like the tail of the comet stretching across the sky.”
Fever leant on the bulwark in the lee of a cannon, glad of the chance to rest. She was well enough now to leave her room and eat with the Morvish in their big communal dining hall on the ground-deck, and to walk around the vehicle’s upperworks with Cluny when the meal was over, but her wounds still ached badly sometimes. Trying to ignore the pain, she looked out across the rolling land, dappled with grazing herds, cluttered with forts, half-timbered barges, landships, and little clusters of campavans and hide-roofed rolling houses. How primitive it all was! Like something from the Black Centuries. And yet she could smell the pleasant smell of woodsmoke, and hear children playing around the nearest barges, and down at the river women were doing laundry, and all around her life was going on. In a strange way it helped her to better understand Quercus and his urge to build a moving city. Because was this sprawl of vehicles, this comet’s tail, not a moving city of a sort? This was how Quercus and his people had lived too, before Wavey Godshawk lured them to London.
“In the north we call this month the Foxglove Moon,” said Cluny, stooping to watch a bee bustle into one of the foxgloves that had seeded itself on the traction fort’s mossy parapet. “After this comes Scrivener’s Moon, the First and Second Frost Moons, Ice Moon, Brass Monkey Moon. . .” She stopped; looked serious. “The Scr
ivener’s Moon will rise a few days from now. When it is full, we shall roll south to London and destroy Quercus’s new city.”
Fever watched Carn Morvish’s landship Fury go rumbling around the fort to test its engines, covered in spines and fluttering banners and barnacle gun-turrets. She said, “I still don’t understand why you are so afraid of London. What harm can it do to you, when you have things like the Fury to defend you?”
“You haven’t seen London,” replied Cluny Morvish. “Not finished, I mean. The size of it, and its horrible jaws. . .”
“London does not have jaws,” said Fever. Cluny kept on mentioning those jaws, as if, of all the details of her dream, that was the one that horrified her most. Fever could only imagine that she’d seen a picture of the serrated hangar doors of the Great Under Tier, and that it had triggered some private phobia. Patiently, she started trying to explain what Dr Crumb had once explained to her; all the good, rational reasons for making London move. “It will be safer, and cleaner, and fairer. Everyone will pay their share to provide good housing, and hospitals for the sick, and schooling for children, and pensions for the old. . .”
But such ideas were shocking to the Arkhangelsk. “Then none of you will be free!” said Cluny, quite appalled. “If you aren’t responsible for yourselves, if you expect your leaders to provide everything, you will be no better than their pets. . .”
She broke off with a little whimper. She was trembling, and as Fever turned to her she swayed, and put a hand on the cannon’s flank for support. Some of her bodyguards, who had been standing at a distance watching her talk with the London girl, came hurrying forward. Cluny waved them away. “I’m all right!” she said to them, and to Fever, “It is the dream again. . .”
“But you’re awake,” Fever pointed out.
“It comes in daylight too now.” Cluny’s eyes were fixed on her, but she was not looking at her; she was studying the immense, hungry face of the new city, visible only in her mind.
“Then it’s not a dream,” said Fever helpfully. “It’s a hallucination.”
Whatever it was, it seemed to be passing. Cluny ran a hand over her face and blinked. “Oh,” she said, and grinned unhappily. “When Tharp first said I was the Vessel of the Ancestors and wasn’t allowed to fight or hunt any more, I felt like it was a stupid punishment. But I couldn’t fight now even if it was allowed. I tried sparring with Marten last week, and the dream kept rising up between us; I could hardly see him.”
Fever felt sorry for her. She was ill, that was what it had to be. People’s ancestors did not send them dreams; there was no way that this young woman could really be seeing the future. She was mad. But why had her madness seized on the image of London? And why, when she described her dream, were so many of the details correct?
“You are quite certain that you’ve never seen London?” she asked.
“Not the new city, no. I was in London when I was a baby – things were different in the empire then, and my father the Carn was in exile; he lived in London for a time. That was back when the Scriven were in charge. There was no talk then of setting it on wheels.”
That felt like a clue, but Fever could not see where it led. “Have you ever had dreams like this before?” she asked. “When you were little, perhaps?”
Cluny shook her head. “There was one that came to me often when I was a little girl, but it was nice, not scary. . .”
“Cluny! Cluny-my-sister!” shouted Marten, scrambling out of a nearby hatch. “The Kubin’s old war-lamp has arrived! Tharp is going to make it work!”
Cluny shook herself. She seemed recovered. She turned to follow her brother, then looked back and said, “Come, Fever. Come and see. . .”
*
On the close-cropped grass beside the fort a crowd had gathered around an enormous old-tech lamp which mammoths had dragged all the way from the slow-rolling fort of Carn Kubin, at the rear of the Kometsvansen. This was the Kubins’ contribution to the war against London, if only it could be made to work. Nintendo Tharp was dancing slowly round it, wearing what looked to Fever like a small stove on his head. He struck odd, one-legged poses like a heron, and called in sing-song voices on the Ancestors and the Repair Spirits.
Here was the reason why the Movement had been able to hold off Arkhangelsk for so long, thought Fever, as Cluny led her to the front of the watching crowd. Quercus’s technomancers were men of science; primitive, to be sure, but always ready to learn from new discoveries. Tharp and the other technomancers of Arkhangelsk had closed their minds, and still treated knowledge as their ancestors had done; a mystery to be passed down in whispers from one ignorant generation to the next. When one of the Movement’s engines failed there would be a spare waiting ready in some storeroom, probably an improved model too. But when an engine failed among the vehicles of the Kometsvansen Tharp and his smiths might take weeks dismantling it and forging copies of the damaged parts; copies that grew cruder with each passing generation of technomancers.
Rattling a staff bedecked with ancient mobile ’phones, Tharp finished his ceremony and marched over to open the carved wooden housing of the lamp. A young Kubin warrior brought him the giant bulb, wrapped in mammoth wool and nestled in a special casket. Tharp examined it carefully before fitting it into place. Fever could tell that he had no idea how the lamp worked or what had gone wrong with it, but everyone else seemed confident in him, and when he stepped back the lamp’s crew ran forward eagerly to wind the mammoth-ivory handle which was supposed to light it.
Nothing happened. A sigh of disappointment ran through the watchers.
“It is beyond even my power to mend this machine,” declared Tharp, shaking his head dramatically and showering drops of scalding water from the spigot of his steaming hat. “It shall be broken up. Its wood will feed our furnaces when we roll on London.”
He walked away towards the waiting bulk of the heart-fortress. Fever, who could never resist the mysteries of machinery, said as he passed her, “What is wrong with it? How is it powered?”
The technomancer started. He was not used to being spoken to like that. He pretended that he had not heard, but Cluny said, “It works by ’lectric, of course. Like most old things.”
“But where does the electricity come from?” asked Fever. “There must be a generator inside. Probably a series of armature coils wound around an iron rotor. The coils are connected to the output terminals with a commutator. If one of the connections has been damaged. . .”
“What is she saying?” called a man from the crowd.
“She should not be here at all!” yelled another. “Spying on our weapons. . .”
“It’s only a lamp!” said Fever. Their anger startled her. She was only trying to help. She waved a hand at their lamp and said, “If it was a gun or a bomb then of course I would not help you, but what harm do you think a lamp can do?”
Some of the Arkhangelsk called out angrily that they had long used war-lamps to dazzle ice-corsairs and nightwights. What did she know of the ways of warriors? She was just a southron! A mossy witch!
But Cluny Morvish said, “Let her try.”
“Pointless,” said Tharp. “The device is dead.”
“Then we have nothing to lose,” said Cluny. “The Ancestors sent Fever to us for a reason. If she wants to help us, let her try.”
The technomancer shot a look of loathing at Fever, but he could not be seen to defy the Ancestors, so he let her step past him to the lamp. It took her a moment to find the inspection panel on its housing – it was covered with carved gods and animals like every other part of the lamp, and the bolts which held it in place were disguised as the heads of griffins – but once she had located it it came free easily enough, and behind it, just as she had expected, sat a big, crude dynamo.
Her accusers fell silent, watching. Tharp, who had never even noticed that inspection panel, came to peer critically over her shoulder as she checked the copper coils. She had seen dynamos like this in London, back in childhood days; peop
le used to bring them to the Engineers for repair. It wasn’t always easy to see where the break was, but . . . there, she had it!
“Do you have a solder?” she asked. “Spare wire?”
“No,” said Tharp.
“They are in the pouch at your belt, Master Tharp,” said Cluny helpfully. “Remember?”
Tharp glowered, and pressed into Fever’s hand a crude soldering device and a roll of copper wire. “Your London ways won’t work on our machinery,” he said in a threatening voice as he watched her work. “Our devices are protected by powerful apps.”
He was trying to put her off, but Fever never felt calmer than when she had machinery to work with. Electricity had no moods or feelings; it would always run down a copper wire, and if the wire was broken then she knew just how to mend it. The thin smoke from the soldering iron tickled her nose. Tharp’s voice was just a noise behind her; she paid it no more heed than the cawing of the crows or the murmurs of the watching crowd.
When she had finished, the lamp-crew tried winding their handle again. This time the bulb lit, shining like a small sun behind its faceted lens.
“Wait till the Londoners get an eyeful of that!” a woman in the crowd yelled. “They’ll run like rabbits!”
Fever gave Tharp back his gear and returned to Cluny, feeling pleased with herself. Cluny looked pleased too, laughing at Tharp’s loss of face. But as Fever reached her, her laughter stopped; she swayed and almost fell. Someone caught her. She looked at Fever in confusion, said, “It is the dream again. . . Worse than ever.”
“Perhaps the magnetic field from that dynamo has affected it. . .” said Fever, thinking aloud.
“Nonsense!” said Tharp, barging past her in a flutter of ridiculous robes. “The lamp works by ’lectric fluxions, not magnets. This girl knows nothing. What are the Ancestors showing you, Cluny Morvish?”
Cluny turned her face to the sound of his voice like a blind girl. Her eyes were full of visions of other times. “London again,” she said. “And Fever’s mother, when she was young and beautiful. And – oh, Fever, it is the other dream, the one I told you of, the nice one from when I was little. The lanterns floating above the pools. . . Ow, my head. . .”
