by Philip Reeve
The light slowly increased. The outline of the far-off pyramid became sharper. Suddenly a chorus of shrieks broke out on the far side of the cavern. Cluny jerked with shock, and Fever actually cried out, terrified that the nightwights had seen them, but her voice was drowned in the noise from below. Strange tides were stirring that sea of filthy bodies. Another group of feathered priests was shoving its way towards the window, carrying a mysterious shape which turned out, as it passed beneath the place where Fever and Cluny crouched, to be Marten Morvish. The boy’s eyes stared out through his matted hair so fixed and unseeing that Fever was sure that he was dead. Then he blinked, and she understood that he had just sunk down into some hiding place very deep within himself where the nightwights could not reach him.
She felt Cluny tensing beside her. The light was growing steadily brighter, and she did not think the ’wights could bear it for much longer. Their ceremony was about to reach its climax. They clustered round poor Marten, reaching out grimy hands, wheedling and roaring, but the priests who carried him beat them back with clubs of mammoth bone. They dragged and fumbled him up on to the long rock sill beneath the window, where a figure dressed in a rattling vest of human vertebrae brandished a big, dull-edged knife, and then began to sharpen it, with awful scrapes and grating sounds, against the rock face beside him.
“Now!” whispered Cluny.
“But—” Fever started to say. She did not finish, for Cluny let off the arquebus with a sound like a slap round the eardrums and a spurt of sparks as fierce and ginger as a vixen.
They never knew if the shot hit anyone. It probably went into the ceiling. But the gun’s bark and its belch of light were enough to stun the nightwights, and while they were still reeling Cluny jumped down from the ledge, calling for Fever to follow, and started to run towards the window and the priests and Marten. She swung the arquebus like a club, clearing a path for herself through the panic she had made, until a nightwight wrenched it from her, and another caught her by the hair, but Fever was close behind her and she shone the torch into his eyes and then into the faces of those behind him and they fell back dazzled and screeling, shocked that anyone could command such brightness. Fever laughed, and found her fear was gone, obliterated by a kind of wild elation that she had not felt since she launched herself from the cliffs in Arlo’s air machine.
They came to Marten, who had already kicked his way free of the ’wights who held him and stood there looking dazed but ready, waiting for Cluny to tell him what they would do next. The nightwights were starting to recover from their surprise. Now that the dreadful torch was no longer shining in their eyes they could see that this was not an army attacking them, just two young women. The bone-clad priests urged them forward with hooting cries. While Cluny ran to her brother’s side, Fever turned to face them, pointing the torch.
The nightwights stopped, but it was not the light that stopped them; the battery was failing, and the torch beam was no brighter now than the gathering daylight that flooded through the window behind her. They were staring at Fever. There was a look in their faces that she could not read, and something else; a sort of echo of a face she knew. Her own, or maybe Wavey’s. Those wide cheekbones like spread wings; those too-big eyes set too far apart. The nightwights saw it too, that whisper of resemblance. It made them hesitate and wonder.
“Fever!” shouted Cluny, standing on the window’s brink, hand-in-hand with Marten. Fever left the nightwights to their gawping and went to join her, wondering why she did not just run outside into the light. When she reached her, she understood. Instead of the gentle slopes she had imagined, the window opened on to a sheer drop; fifty or sixty feet into the dark waters of a river.
“Jump!” said Cluny.
“No,” said Fever. “We don’t know how deep that water is. . .”
“Who cares?” shouted Marten.
“Wait!” said Fever. “If our average weight is around eight stone, and we accelerate at . . . well, if U = mgh where U is our potential gravitational energy and m is our altitude, we should hit the water at a velocity of, er, so the depth of the water will need to be at least . . .”
“Fever, sometimes you just have to jump!” screamed Cluny, shoving her forward, and there was a long moment of nothing but her panicked heartbeat and the whoosh of the air rushing past her ears at approximately thirty-two feet per second and a scream that might have been Cluny or Marten or some angry nightwight far above, complaining at being cheated of its breakfast.
Then the water took them, dissipating some of that gravitational energy in a rackety splash and a burst of white spray, and they went down deep beneath it, but not quite deep enough to do more than bump their feet against the smooth black rocks which slept beneath the surface. As they rose the current took hold of them, and the river carried them swiftly around a spur of the hills and the nightwight lair was lost behind them. We did it, we did it, thought Fever, elated, joyful, and then, as the water closed over her head again, Now, I suppose we shall drown. . .
23
THE PLACE OF THE DEAD
or she had never learned to swim; not properly. When she lived with the Persimmons she had had the chance, for the theatre had stopped often at seaside towns and next to lakes and rivers, but it would have meant taking off her white coat and putting on a flimsy, floaty bathing dress, which she thought irrational. On Thursday Island she had done her best to teach herself, but she had never gone far out of her depth, and the best she had achieved was a few dozen strokes of frantic doggy-paddle in the sheltered waters of the bay where Arlo’s family home once stood. In the fierce, cold current of that northern river she felt as helpless as a twig.
But Cluny could swim like a bear, and after the river had carried them a good way from the lair of the nightwights she dragged Fever through frail, splintering panes of ice to the shore, a beach of grey shingle under tall cliffs. Marten had already scrambled out. While Fever lay shuddering there he and Cluny went furiously to and fro collecting the dead branches which spring floods had abandoned in nooks of the rocks behind the beach, and ripping up tufts of pale dead grass for kindling. “Don’t go to sleep!” Cluny kept shouting at Fever, who was curled around her cold self on the shingle and feeling inclined to slide away into a dream of warmer beaches.
Luckily Cluny carried her tinderbox in a plastic purse which had kept it dry. Shaking with the cold, she took it out, and dropped it, and picked it up again (her hands felt more like paws) and at last by concentrating very hard she managed to strike a few sparks and shed them into the nest of grass which Marten made. As the fire caught and grew they pulled their wet clothes off, and then Cluny undressed Fever like a doll and dragged her closer to the flames, saying all the time, “Stay awake, stay awake. . .”
Marten hung their sodden clothes on a dead tree which he dragged close to the fire, and Cluny knelt there in their wet-dog smell, trying to rub some warmth back into Fever’s limbs and thanking the Ancestors that there was no wind to chill them. The wet clothes steamed, the fire grew scorching hot, the risen sun peeked down at their little beach. They huddled in their nakedness around the fire like three cave-people in the morning of the world, and slowly they started to remember what it had felt like to be warm.
“You were brave, Cluny-my-sister,” Marten kept saying. “I was foolish to let myself be taken. I made you go into danger for my sake.”
“Pooh, it was hardly danger, they were only nightwights,” said Cluny, with a laugh. Grey with the cold, blue-mouthed, bedraggled, she still looked beautiful. She caught Fever watching her and said, “Besides, I was not alone; I had Fever with me; I could not have done it without Fever-my-sister.”
Fever blushed with pride, but Marten only grunted. Fever was no sister of his, and he knew that she would have abandoned him if Cluny had not been there.
“I was so afraid,” said Cluny. “I thought they’d eaten you.”
“I thought they were going to,” said Marten. “They stuck me in a nasty little hole deep under
ground. Their pantry, I suppose. All bones and stink it was, and darkness, and I could hear their voices as they came gathering from all their caves and hidey-holes, and when they came to fetch me I was sure. . .”
He stopped and watched the river. He was a warrior of the Arkhangelsk: it would be shameful to admit how terrified and helpless he had been.
“It is over,” said Fever, who was trying to put away her own memories of the nightwight lair and that strange resemblance she had seen in their savage faces. “It is unhelpful to keep thinking about it.”
Marten glanced at her and nodded, grateful for that, at least.
They kept adding fuel to the fire until it had eaten up all the wood that was on the beach and their hot, damp clothes were dry enough to be put on again. The morning wore on. Shadows began to fill the bottom of the gorge. The beach, which had never really been a warm place to start with, grew colder and colder.
“What will become of Lump and Carpet?” asked Fever.
“They’ll be all right,” said Cluny. “There’s nothing in these hills that could harm a mammoth. Maybe they’ll make their way back to the Kometsvansen.”
“Maybe they’re still around here,” said Marten. “We could shout and see if they come.”
“The nightwights might come first,” Cluny said.
“The nightwights might come anyway, once it gets dark,” said Fever. “We should get out of here.” She had been studying the cliff behind them, and she thought that she had found a way up. Perhaps if they climbed to the top of the gorge, she thought, they would be able to see where they were, and how far they had come from last night’s campsite.
They climbed, and looking back across the gorge saw half a dozen different fins of rock which might have been the summit of the hill they’d camped upon. There was no sign of mammoths, not even after Cluny had made herself hoarse giving the special hooting cry she used to summon Carpet. Small flakes of snow blew past them on the breeze like sky-gods’ dandruff. Fever, who believed in looking at the world straight on, did so, and could not help noticing that they were lost, with no food, no weapons, no transport; nothing, in fact, except the damp clothes they stood in. The day was waning, and sundown would bring the nightwights out again, hungry for revenge (although just plain hungry would be bad enough).
“We need to find shelter,” she said.
“Shelter?” said Marten. “Here? What sort of shelter?”
But Fever had already thought of that. They climbed to the top of the next ridge and there it was, just two more valleys away, black against the whiteness of the hills beyond: Skrevanastuut.
It had been a big place once. Long before they came to the tower itself they began to pass the walls of outlying buildings; not real walls any more, of course, just hummocks in the earth, banks and knolls that looked too regular to be natural. “There was a whole town here once,” said Fever. “In Ancient times, before the Downsizing. . .”
“Tharp says the Downsizing was a thousand years ago,” Cluny objected.
“Oh, much, much longer than that! Nobody knows how long. All records were lost. Our modern calendars are just a guess.”
“The pyramid could not have been here all that time,” said Cluny.
Fever knew that she should agree; it seemed unreasonable that any building could have survived through so many ages of the earth. And yet the pyramid, rising now upon the slopes ahead of them, black and angular as an obsidian blade pushed up through the ground, did not look like anything the people of her time could make, nor the people of any other time she’d heard of since the Downsizing.
They went uphill past a low wall that seemed made of the same black substance as the tower itself, and the evening sun raking across the wall’s surface picked out Ancient letters, some of which were still readable:
SCRIV N R S TUT
“Skrevanastuut,” said Fever.
“At least we have got the right mysterious pyramid then,” said Cluny.
Fever said nothing. Those first few letters looked too familiar for her comfort. The Scrivener was the name of her mother’s god; the god from whom all Scriven took their name; the dark god who wrote in secret script upon their skins to show that they were superior to common humans.
Splinters of Godshawk’s memories shifted in her mind. He’d stood here once. She wished she could call on him and make him explain what he knew of this place and what he had hoped to find here, but the memories darted out of reach. Skrevanastuut; Scrivener’s-tuut. . . Perhaps this place was just some old temple to the Scrivener, and that was the only reason why Godshawk had thought it so important.
But even a temple might give them shelter. Tired and hungry though she was, Fever hurried over the last few hundred yards to the pyramid. It was smaller than it had looked from a distance, and it did not quite come to a point but was flat at the top. When she placed her hands against its side she still could not tell what it was made of. Not stone. Not glass. Porcelain would be the closest thing to it, she thought. How could a tower of porcelain have lasted so long?
The sun was dipping. The hills behind her were all in shadow now, the snow in the high corries turning to the colour of bluebells. From among them suddenly a cry went up, colder than wolf-song, harsh and shrill. She looked at Cluny. Cluny looked back at her. Marten reached for his sister’s hand. None of them needed to ask what the sound had been. It was the call of nightwights on the hunting-path.
“If we can find a way in we might be safe,” said Fever. “I think this place is sacred to the nightwights. They may not dare to go in after us.”
“They might be angry if we trespass,” said Marten, who was keeping well back from the tower, alarmed by its strangeness and its sense of age.
“They’re going to eat us anyway,” Cluny reasoned, “so it doesn’t much matter whether we make them angry or not. I hope we do; perhaps we’ll give them indigestion.”
They walked around the tower, and Fever discovered something that had not been obvious from her visions of it: it had only three sides. “Who would build a three-sided pyramid?” she wondered aloud. “Four would be more usual.”
“Perhaps they ran out of money,” said Cluny.
At the eastern corner, on the edge which faced the sunset, they found the opening that Borglum had been told of. A narrow crack in the blackness of the tower, turned down at either end like a glum mouth. Where one end of the crack met the ground there had been a cave-in, an opening the size of a manhole, across which someone, perhaps Borglum’s friend Duergar, had dragged a large, flat stone.
“We can’t go in there,” said Marten, as Fever heaved the stone aside.
“We have to.”
“If the nightwights come here they will follow us in. Cluny-my-sister, you’re not going in there, are you?”
Cluny shook her head. “I’d rather die in the open.”
“Freeze in the open, more like,” said Fever. She knew that what scared Marten was the darkness; after what had happened last night, Marten might always be scared of the darkness now. She pulled out her torch and tried it, but the river-water had got inside it and it was dead. She looked into the hole. It seemed to open into a small passage, with floors and walls of the black porcelain stuff. Perhaps it had been a duct or crawl-way leading into the tower from one of those other buildings?
She swung herself over the hole’s edge and lowered herself in until her feet touched the floor and only her head and shoulders poked out into the sunset. “Be careful!” said Marten behind her. He sounded very fearful; very young. “There could be nightwights inside. . .”
Fever crouched and peered into the gloom under the pyramid. She sniffed. “I don’t think so. . .” The air in the passage had a curious, silvery smell, and it seemed slightly warm. She edged forward, rubble from the burst roof crunching underfoot. In the faint light coming from behind her she could see wires running along the walls; in places they had corroded away, leaving smudges of rust and verdigris. She pressed on until the light was gone and she gu
essed she was directly beneath the centre of the building. There the passage ended in a blind wall. She felt her way over it, wondering if this was another secret door like that one she had opened once to let her mother into Godshawk’s old laboratory. It was only when her fingers had explored every inch of it that she admitted it was just a wall. She looked up.
“Fever-my-sister?” came Cluny’s anxious voice, from outside.
“I’m all right,” she called.
Was that light above her? Impossible; there could be no light inside that windowless pyramid. Unless there had been openings which she had not seen, up in the flat roof, perhaps. . . There was definitely a faint, greenish glow. She stood up slowly. There was no passage roof above her, just a square opening.
She felt around some more, and found metal rungs sticking out of the wall beside her.
Almost as frightened now as Cluny, she climbed up them, into the pyramid.
She emerged into a dark space, echoey, with a feeling of height to it. Grit beneath her hands on the smooth floor as she pushed herself upright. No windows, but light from somewhere caught a green jewel on the wall and made it glow like a little eye.
She went towards it, aware of dim shapes in the shadows round her. The jewel was not a jewel. It was a tiny lamp, set into a panel on the wall; the sort of panel she had often seen, rusty and ruined, dug out of some pit in London and presented to the Engineers for study. And as she stared at the panel, wondering if it could be true, and where it drew its power from, she saw her own shadow appear on the wall and realized that other lamps were coming on behind her, as if Skrevanastuut knew that she was there, and was giving her the light to see it by.
She turned. She was shaking. It all felt too much like magic, and she thought, It is a good thing that I am rational, and know that there is no such thing. Magic was the name unthinking people gave to phenomena they could not explain. A rational person looked closely at such things, and found an explanation. There must be a computer-brain here. It has sensed me, and turned on the lights . . . but the idea that a computer-brain might still exist seemed almost as spooky as magic. Anyway, where did the power come from? Thermal energy from deep beneath the earth? Something in that strange black substance that the place was made of? She imagined mechanimalculae by countless millions busy in the walls themselves, drinking sunlight. The sunlight falling on those black walls all day. Little mills and engines turning, all too small to see. That phrase Wavey used to use: “Molecular Clockwork”. . . Oh, Wavey, if you were only here; together we might be able to understand. . .
