Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  The rain grew suddenly heavier. Gutters gurgled, and the bearers' boots skidded as the chair turned another corner. Ted

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  Swiney's three-man rig was still close behind. Other chairs were joining the chase now, as word got round of who it was that the publican was pursuing. One of them slammed into a fruit and veg stall at the side of the street, scattering apples and cabbages into the path of another, whose bearers stumbled and went down, the thin boardings of their chair splintering as it hit the cobbles.

  ***

  Crouched in Ted's chair, Charley Shallow watched the juddering view, rain-spattered, gun-lit. He flinched each time a panicked pedestrian dived out of the chair's path, ducked whenever Solent's pistol fired from the chair ahead. Once a ball came through the boarding beside his head, making a big, splintery hole that the rain gusted in through. It couldn't be worth all this, could it, he kept thinking. They were all going to end up as dead as Bagman....

  But there was no telling that to Ted. The publican was cursing steadily, happy and fierce in the excitement of the chase, pulling his thick body back inside the chair to reload his old blunderbuss and then cramming himself out into the rain again to shoot, bellowing abuse at the straining bearers: "Faster, you bloggers! Faster, you useless cloots!" The gun going off again, smoke blowing through the chair with a sharp, scorched smell. "Got him.' I got the blogger!"

  ***

  Fever finally managed to get a pistol filled before Kit asked for it, and then realized that she'd only managed it because one of Swiney's shots had hit him. He groaned as she pulled him back

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  inside. He had dropped his pistol and there was a scorched hole in the front of his coat, near the shoulder. He looked dazed and white and disbelieving. She let him sink to the floor, thinking he'd be safer there, and looked down and saw that she was still holding the loaded pistol.

  The chair went pounding along a tight, brick-paved street, past pubs and eel bars and dodgy archaeopharmacies. Fever leaned out and saw that Ted Swiney's chair was still behind, though the others had missed the turning and were bunched up at the street's end, bickering about who should go first. Swiney had ducked back inside his chair to reload.

  What had he and Kit been thinking of, she wondered, shooting at each other? If you wanted to stop a chair it was not at the passengers you should be shooting...She pushed herself out farther, until her hips wedged in the window space. Rain battered at her face. She held on grimly to the pistol and tried to aim at the legs of Ted Swiney's forward bearer. She was about to pull the trigger when her own chair plunged suddenly into the rookeries of Kitesbridge, a tangle of grim little streets barely wide enough for it to fit through. A jutting window ledge smacked the gun from her hand and she threw herself back inside as mossy brickwork scraped against both doors. She had a hopeless afterimage of the lost pistol glinting as it bounced on the cobbles. Maybe Ted's bearers would trip on it....

  But when the street widened enough for her to look out again, the pursuing chairs were close behind, moving in a pack,

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  clattering after hers through the shadow of an archway where fires burned in food-sellers' braziers. Swiney popped out of his window again, gun in hand, struggling for a clear shot. Other chairs swerved to let the chase go past, crashing against one another or into the metal pillars of a wind tram viaduct, which were flicking past on either side.

  The blare of a Klaxon rebounded suddenly from the wet housefronts. Twisting round, Fever saw a huge shape slide across an intersection just ahead. A house-high mass of painted upper-works and dim-lit windows, tall smokestacks striped like gypsies' stockings ... It was a land barge heading out of town along the Westerway. The barge traders must have heard the uproar, and decided to quit London before the rioting spread. Fever's chair shot through the space between two of the barge's many wheels; the rattle of rain on the roof stopped for a dark, breathless moment, then began again as it shot out on the far side. Behind, one of the pursuing chairs, choosing a bad moment to try and overtake Ted Swiney's, was smashed under the barge wheels with a crunch that Fever heard even above the drumbeat of her bearers' boots. The rest stopped, bunching up behind the wreck. The barge went by, but there was another behind it, and then another, following one another like overdressed elephants. We're saved, thought Fever.

  But Ted Swiney's chair dove through a gap between two of the vehicles and kept coming after her. It was probably moving too fast to stop or slow down, Fever reasoned. For all its streamlining, it

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  looked bigger than her chair; heavier, more massive. She thought, Momentum = Mass x Velocity...They can go as fast as us, hut they can't stop or turn as quickly.... It was time for some applied physics. She shouted to her bearers, "Turn left here! Left!"

  Because she knew where she was now. These were the streets around the Head, where she had often walked with Dr. Crumb. The chair swung onto Gritpipe Lane, heading steeply downhill toward a corner where the street made a sharp right angle. Another shot from Ted Swiney's gun tore past her, rattling against a pub sign. Ahead, where the street turned, she could see a scent shop on the corner. She remembered passing it with Dr. Crumb, how he had always complained at the irrationality of it. The chair slowed as its straining bearers wrenched it round that ninety-degree bend, canting steeply to one side, finials screeching along wet brickwork.

  A few feet behind, Ted Swiney's men tried to do the same, but their chair would not obey them; their momentum kept driving them toward the scent shop. Charley Shallow, feeling them lose control, kicked open a door and flung himself clear, and Bagman's bowler saved him as his head glanced off a wall.

  The window of the scent shop came apart in bright icefalls of glass as Ted's chair went through it sideways on. A belch of perfume from a thousand shattered vials and bottles broke across the street. Charley stood up carefully, checking himself to make sure that he was still all there. That bang on the head had wrenched his neck and jarred his teeth; he'd bitten down painfully on the

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  corners of his tongue. The chair bearers scrambled past him and scattered, bruised and bleeding, frightened of what they'd done to Ted.

  Charley went to the smashed window and peered in. The wrecked chair lay on its side in the shop. Ted Swiney was scrambling out through the hole where a door had been. He saw Charley watching, and shook his fist. "I'm going to get that girl," he growled.

  The curious old-tech lamp inside the for hire sign on the chair's roof exploded with a wallop of flame, singeing off both his eyebrows.

  ***

  Fever was two streets away by then. Her chair was slowing, juddering as her winded bearers began to weaken. She crouched on the floor and tried to help Kit Solent, shocked by the amount of blood that had soaked his clothes and the way he howled when she started to lift him. Then, without warning, the whole chair leaned sideways and she was howling, too, shrieking in helpless fright as it crashed down and slid on its side across the cobbles.

  "The children," Kit was saying. "I must get back to the children...."

  Fever reached up and heaved the door open and clambered out. One of the bearers lay in the road, gasping for breath, his legs jerking fitfully as if he was still trying to run. The other, too drugged to notice what had happened, stood patiently between his splintered shafts.

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  Fever reached down into the chair and did her best to help Kit Solent out. "I'm sorry," she kept saying, uselessly, as he cried out at the pain. His anguish made her angry. He was supposed to be helping her, not the other way about.... Curious Londoners had emerged from shops and houses to see the crash. She could feel their eyes on her scalp, and although she could not hear what they were muttering to one another, she could guess.

  "Come on," she told Kit. "It's not far to Godshawk's Head...."

  "I must get back to Ludgate Hill," he said, swaying as he pushed himself away from the wrecked chair. "The children ...

  Fever caught him, drew his arm a
cross her shoulders, and did her best to take his weight. "You can't. Not now. Those other chairs ... She could already hear the weary thud of running feet behind them. "Come on, Master Solent, please," she begged. And slowly, slowly, slowly they went on along the street.

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  ***

  19 Dr. Crumb

  Along the street and up another, and there in front of them was Godshawk's Head, huge and craggy in that leaden light, with the rain making waterfalls down its face and spraying off its chin.

  Kit Solent leaned heavily on Fever as they climbed the wooden stairs to the tram platform and went through the gate in the wire fence, which she locked behind them, and then up more stairs to the door in Godshawk's nostril. Fever pounded on the glass with the flat of her hand and left a smeared red handprint there. A shocked face appeared behind the glass and stared at it, and then at her. It was Dr. Isbister, looking like something in an aquarium. "Go away!" he shouted. But other Engineers were appearing behind him, and soon Dr. Stayling was there, ordering Isbister aside and undoing the heavy bolts.

  'Thank the gods," said Kit Solent as the doors opened. And if

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  Fever had had gods she would have thanked them, too, for there at Dr. Stayling's side was Dr. Crumb.

  She wanted to run to him. She wanted to hug him. She contented herself with saying, "Greetings Dr. Crumb, Dr. Stayling. The commons are rioting, and Master Solent has kindly brought me home. He is hurt...."

  "He needs a doctor," said Dr. Isbister, looking warily at the spreading stain of blood on their visitor's coat.

  "I'm fine," Kit insisted. "What I need is to get back to my children. My gods, what if the rioters work out who I am, and go to my house?' He turned back toward the door, but stumbled, and would have fallen if several Engineers had not reached out to steady him.

  "He must have a doctor," said Dr. Isbister.

  "There are no doctors of that sort here," said Dr. Whyre.

  "We must send to the Guild of Physicians in Clerkenwell," Dr. Stayling said.

  "There is no time!" Fever shouted. "Don't you understand? If the men who did this follow us here...

  The Engineers flinched at her outburst. "Your time outside the Head has left you somewhat unreasonable, Miss Crumb," said Dr. Isbister tartly. But the others seemed to understand her. Sometimes , she thought, it might be allowable to be angry or emotional, in order to make people see the urgency of things. She leaned against the stair rail and watched while the Engineers barred the doors and helped Kit Solent away, saying, "We must at least clean and

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  bandage that wound before you go." Soon she was left alone with Dr. Crumb.

  She hadn't noticed until then how hard her heart was pounding, how raggedly she was breathing, how her body still trembled as the terror of the chase shook its way out of her muscles. She looked at Dr. Crumb and said, "Kit took me to Nonesuch House, Godshawk's old house on the marshes. And I remembered it."

  Dr. Crumb tried to keep looking as calm as ever, but the corner of his mouth twitched, and his fingers twined themselves together. "That is impossible," he said. "You were only a few months old when I found you, you could not possibly remember ..."

  "Remember what ?" asked Fever. She knew that she sounded edgy and emotional, but she could not help it; she was edgy and emotional. She said, "I have some connection with that place, don't I? With Godshawk?"

  "Oh ..." he said, when he heard that. (Another man, less rational, might have said, "Oh, gods!", "Oh, Poskitt!", "Oh, great Lud!") He hid his eyes for a moment with one hand, then looked at Fever. "Come," he said.

  Outside people were moving in small groups onto the stretch of waste ground around Godshawk's Head. More and more of them, gathering in the dim and rainy light like crows.

  Fever followed Dr. Crumb up the stairs. Up and up to Dr. Crumb's quarters. She saw as she went in how it had changed.

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  Her things had vanished from the little alcove that had been her bed space, and there was another workbench there instead. Of course, it was only reasonable that Dr. Crumb should make full use of the space while she was away. So why did the sight of it make her want to cry?

  Dr. Crumb poured boiled water for them both from a jug which he kept beside the stove, the water faintly warm as always, and in her own old mug. She clasped her hands around it and drank. She sat on the new workbench and Dr. Crumb stood facing her. He said, "There are some things which I did not tell you, and some things I told you which were not quite true."

  "About me? About who I am? What I am?"

  "Partly. More about me , and what I am."

  "But I thought you didn't believe in telling lies?" said Fever. "Not even white lies? Not even to little girls?"

  Dr. Crumb looked at the floor, as if he had suddenly become very interested in floors. He took a sip of his boiled water, and began.

  ***

  When Gideon Crumb first came to London the city was still ruled by the Scriven. There was already talk about rebel outfits called the Skinners' Guilds, and a few anti-Scriven graffitoes had been scrawled up on walls in the lower parts of town, but Auric Godshawk still sat on his throne in the Barbican, and Scriven still owned half the city's businesses and all its better property.

  Gideon grew used to having to stop in his tracks and drop to

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  his knees in the street mud when the chair of some Scriven nobleman was carried past, or risk being beaten by the servants who walked behind it. He grew used, too, to the gales of brutal cheering and jeering that gusted from Pickled Eel Circus, where handsome gladiators like Ted Swiney and "Slow" Loris Dimbelow did battle with each other, and with the weird killing machines which the Scriven pieced together with infinite skill and with no purpose beyond their own cruel amusement.

  But at least the Scriven's penchant for machines meant that they needed a steady supply of machine-builders and machine-tenders. That was why they had founded the Order of Engineers. But the Order of Engineers had become more than just machine-builders and machine-tenders. They had started out by trying to understand Ancient devices, and ended up by trying to understand everything. They looked carefully and clearly at the workings of the world. They gathered evidence, and made experiments, and developed brilliant theories that they were always ready to abandon if new evidence proved them wrong. They were more than engineers; they had become scientists, and every year they welcomed twenty young men into the Engineerium and started training them to be scientists, too.

  Gideon was one of them, escaping from a childhood in the outlying borough of Lesser Wintermire, with its plashy farms and midge-bite fens, its sputtering tallow candles, and its vague religious spasms of hope and terror. He did not care who London's rulers were. All his attention was focused on its future, which

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  would be lit by gas and 'lectric and the hard white light of reason.

  During his first three years at the Engineerium he was an apprentice, and lived with other apprentices in a honeycomb of small chambers behind the main building. Their life was simple, but comfortable enough. A few of the senior Engineers, men like Dr. Stayling, shaved their heads and avoided all pleasure, saying that it interfered with the ability to reason, but there were others, like Dr. Wormtimber, who argued that good food, a little drink of an evening, and a comfortable bed helped to relax a man, and made it easier for him to think. That attitude appealed to Gideon Crumb, who did not want to shave off his curly, nut-brown hair, or stop eating the oat biscuits and apple-and-bramble pies that reminded him of the nicer bits of his childhood, (of course, he would not go so far as Wormtimber, who had recently moved out of the Engineerium and married an archaeologist's widow. Gideon had always been shy around girls, and had long since decided that romance and marriage and parenthood were things best left to other, less reasonable men.)

  Then, in his fourth year at the Engineerium, everything changed.

  It was a blue, bitter day, way down in the cheerless deeps of winter,
with thick snow heaped along the street sides and weighing down the roofs, and long months to go until Spring Festival. Gideon, out scouring the dig markets for interesting relics, took a wrong turning down a street he did not recognize, and found

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  himself in the middle of a strange disturbance. An elaborately carved sedan chair had halted in the middle of the street, but although it was so expensive-looking that it could only have belonged to a Scriven, none of the pedestrians around it was kneeling down. When Gideon started to kneel, a man nearby said half angrily, "Don't you bend your knee to her , mate!"

  He hesitated, knees already awkwardly bent, and looked again at the chair. It was not a true sedan chair at all, but a type of rickshaw, with tyred wheels at the back where the rear bearer usually walked. In front of it, between its shafts, stood a Jaeger, or "Stalker," as Londoners called them. The Scriven had brought several hundred of these reanimated warriors with them when they arrived in the city, but over the years most had gone mad and destroyed themselves, or simply stopped working. The one that had been pulling this chair seemed to have malfunctioned in some critical way. It stood rigidly to attention, but its bulky head twitched restlessly about, and from the mouth slot of its face shield poured a stream of meaningless words. " i am i was i what several too long too late lonely lonely ..."