Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  "It's gone off its trolley!" yelled a barrow boy, and shied a half brick, which bounced off the Stalker's armor with a clang.

  The occupant of the chair wound down a tinted window and leaned out, shouting at the Stalker to walk on. Glimpsing her dappled face, Gideon dropped to his knees in the dirty snow. Several of the other onlookers followed suit, if the Stalker came to

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  its senses, the Scriven woman would have it kill anyone who had been disrespectful enough to remain standing in her presence.

  But the Stalker was too far gone for that. A veteran of the nomad empires' long wars, it had finally worn out. " sleepy now ," it bellowed, and reaching up, caught hold of its own head with both steel hands and wrenched it off in a shower of yellowish sparks and a gurgling of thick fluids. The green light in its eyes faded, and, still holding its head, it toppled over like the statue of a fallen tyrant and lay on the cobbles, trailing thin strings of smoke.

  For a moment there was silence. It was so quiet that Gideon could hear the north wind sighing between the icicles that trailed from the eaves above him. For years hostility to the Scriven had been growing, but this situation was new to everyone; a Scriven alone and defenseless in a St Kylie street. The Londoners looked at one another, wondering whether they dared take their revenge.

  Before they could decide, the chair door opened and the Scriven stepped out. She wore a tortoiseshell cat-fur cape with the collar turned up so that all you could see of her was her face. A beautiful face, large-eyed and porcelain pale, the cheeks and forehead darkly dappled with the Scriven markings.

  "Move this out of the road," she commanded, pointing one gloved finger at the Stalker's wreck. "And take me to the Barbican."

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  None of the watching Londoners moved. How they hated her! You could feel it in the air, like a rising mist. That cape she wore cost more than all their houses. The price of those gloves would have fed and clothed their children for a year. And she'd been so sure of herself, with her resurrected heavy to protect her, that she hadn't even brought the Scriven's usual honor guard of thugs and soldiers with her when she ventured through St Kylie.

  Someone threw a stone. It wasn't thrown hard, but it struck the Scriven on the side of her perfect face and she put up a hand to the place where it had hit, and her eyes widened a little, and she seemed at last to understand what danger she was in.

  "You wouldn't dare!" she said, but she didn't sound at all certain about it.

  "No!" said Gideon. (Was it really him speaking? It had to be; he could feel his mouth shaping the words, and see the breath smoldering in front of his face as he spoke them into the cold, still air.) "No! Come along, this isn't reasonable. You have nothing to gain by assaulting this person. Do you think the Scriven won't send their mercenaries down here to take revenge, if you go any further in this foolishness?"

  "Who's he?" asked a woman.

  "No idea," said another.

  "Engineer, by the look of him."

  "Blog off, Scriven lover!" yelled a man in the stiff blue overalls of a plasticsmith, hefting a cobblestone ready to hurl at the

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  Scriven. But he sounded half-hearted, as if even he could see the sense in what Gideon had said. The stone stayed in his hand, unthrown. Gideon walked past him toward the Scriven.

  "Thank you," she said thinly, as he drew near to her. Some of the onlookers gasped and murmured. They had never heard a Scriven thank anyone before. She was trembling slightly. How old was she? She didn't look much more than twenty, but it was hard to tell with her kind. The joke in London was that if you wanted to know how old a Dapplejack was you had to cut them in half and count the rings.

  She reached out and took Gideon by the arm before he could object. "You will lead me to the Barbican, Engineer," she said. She didn't have any idea where she was, he realized. Conveyed around London all her life by chair, she knew nothing of the layout of its streets. Whereas he, who had never been able to afford to travel except on foot, could easily get his bearings by glancing up at the temples and buildings whose spires he could see poking up behind the snowy rooftops.

  A stone flew past him and smashed one of the chair windows. He felt the Scriven woman flinch at the sound of the glass shattering. He flinched, too, but he calmed himself by reciting pi and telling himself that he was doing the only reasonable thing. And, arm in arm with the Scriven, he walked up that street and back onto streets he knew, while behind them her would-be murderers contented themselves by making a bonfire of her abandoned chair and smashing the fallen Stalker up for spare parts.

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  It was starting to snow again, or perhaps it was just the winter wind lifting flurries of powder snow from the roofs and chimney stacks. The small flakes settled like sequins in the tortoiseshell fur of the Scriven's cape as she and Gideon walked past the lighted windows of exclusive restaurants and high-class scent shops and boutiques until they reached the square in front of the Barbican. Despite the masonry which filled its wheel arches and the new spires and turrets which spoiled its timber upperworks, the old fortress clearly showed its origins as a huge vehicle -- a high-prowed ship of the steppes in which the Scriven had been dragged halfway across the world by their armies of slaves.

  Gideon thought his companion might be interested to hear the latest news from the nomad empires, whose technomancers were now fitting engines to their traction fortresses, but just as he was about to mention it she let go his arm and turned to look at him.

  Her eyes were the rich brown of expensive chocolate, with some unguessable emotion in them, and suddenly she laughed, and Gideon saw that she wore a metal brace on her teeth. It glittered in the light from the windows of the shops like a tiny railway track. So she wasn't perfect after all, or at least she must not think that she was perfect, if she had paid some dentist to attach all that careful engineering to her smile.

  That was when he fell in love with her.

  She asked his name before she left him and went up into the Barbican. He told her, but he was too startled by his own feelings

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  to ask hers, or ask her what she had been doing in the back-streets of St Kylie all alone. Not until the next morning, when he read the front-page story in the Alarmist, did he learn that Wavey Godshawk, daughter of Auric Godshawk, had been waylaid in the low city when her malfunctioning Jaeger servant took a wrong turn, and that the Scriven's mercenaries had executed twenty Londoners by way of punishment.

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  ***

  20 at N onesuch house

  That brief confrontation in St Kylie, and the Patchwork king's spiteful response, would change the history of London forever. By the summer of that year few Scriven dared venture far beyond the expensive, well-lit streets that surrounded the Barbican. Those who did were slaughtered by the Skinners' Guilds. Brutish reprisals by Godshawk's Suomi mercenaries seemed to have no effect beyond making the commons hate him even more.

  But Gideon Crumb, safe in the Engineerium, barely noticed any of it. He had never taken an interest in politics and, except for that one morning after he walked Wavey Godshawk home, he avoided newspapers, which everyone knew were unreasonable things, filled with scaremongering and the wildest rumors. He was busy with the study of ancient engines, which he hoped would win him his place as a fully fledged Engineer, and he had no more time for wandering the streets of London.

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  The only trouble was, he could not forget Wavey Godshawk. At night in his bunk while he waited for sleep, when he should have been turning over ideas about torque and fuel efficiency in his mind, he kept being distracted by the image of her face, her smile, her way of speaking. Her voice had been soft but rather deep, he recalled. She had had very small hands. Her hair, or at least those strands of it which had escaped the hood of her cape, was tawny blond....

  He told himself not to be so foolish, and forced himself to consider power-weight ratios until he fell asleep, but Wavey Godshawk waited for him in his dreams
. It was all most distracting, and almost enough to make him wonder if Dr. Stayling didn't have it right when he said that a good Engineer must purge himself of all emotions.

  And then, on a September afternoon, when he was puzzling over books in the library, the sounds of uproar and disorder reached him, coming not from distant quarters of the city, as they had all summer, but from somewhere inside the Engineerium itself.

  He closed the book he was reading and hurried out of the library. In the corridor which led to the Engineerium's main entrance, men in the gaudy jackets of Godshawk's private militia were striding about with muskets among a lot of white-coated, kneeling Engineers. "Kneel!" one bellowed, seeing Gideon standing there staring, and Gideon knelt.

  In through the main doors, as if she were solidifying out of a

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  blaze of sunshine, came Wavey Godshawk. The gown she wore was the most unreasonable thing ever seen in the Engineerium. Its skirts whispered along either wall as she passed. Even Dr. Stayling, who had often declared that it was irrational and unreasonable to kneel before a Scriven, went down on his knees at the sight of her. Gideon, too embarrassed to look at her face, looked at the floor instead. He heard her dress come whispering and sighing and hissing toward him, and then the creak of the huge wicker frame beneath her skirts as she stopped just a few inches away.

  "I am here on behalf of His Excellency the Civic Commander Auric Godshawk," she said, in that well-remembered voice. "He has sent me here to find an Engineer to be his assistant." She paused, and Gideon pictured her looking about at all the kneeling Engineers like a lady shopping for new gloves, until he felt her hand touch the back of his bowed head, light as a butterfly.

  "I think I'd like this one. Have him sent to Nonesuch House this afternoon."

  ***

  There were a lot of men in the Order far better qualified than Gideon Crumb to serve as an assistant to the great Scriven inventor. Later, there would be all sorts of spiteful rumors about him. The unemotional Dr. Whyre grew quite angry that he had not been offered a chance to explore the mysteries of Godshawk's laboratories, and stubbed his toe rather badly when he kicked his workbench in a fit of pique. But Gideon was never aware of that.

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  He must have spent the next few hours gathering his books and belongings, packing clean shirts and underwear, and traveling somehow to 'Bankmentside and out along the causeway. But when he thought back on it in after years, it seemed to him that he had gone straight from kneeling before Wavey Godshawk in the Engineerium to kneeling before her father in the hallway of Nonesuch House, watching Godshawk's slippers and the hems of Godshawk's robes as the tyrant-inventor paced toward him. "Get up."

  Gideon climbed to his feet, still too nervous to look directly at his new employer. He glimpsed peacock-colored robes, a speckled hand gripping the handle of a steel cane, a lot of rings, a crisp white cuff. The voice said, "Why should you kneel to me, Londoner? There are thousands of your kind in this city, and barely two hundred of mine. The time of the Scriven will soon be over."

  Gideon couldn't help but look up at that. Except for a strange, half-mocking smile, Godshawk's face was the same face that Gideon remembered from a thousand wall posters, and from the immense statue which was being built in the west of the city. A long, angular face, leopard speckled, white-bearded, white-maned. The large, watchful eyes of a big and dangerous cat.

  "I've shocked you, eh?" he said. "You've never heard one of the Scrivener's chosen people speak the truth about ourselves that way? Well, I'll go further. There is no Scrivener. There is no real difference between us and any other race of human beings. Our longevity, and these attractive marks of which we are so proud,

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  are just minor genetic quirks. Fate has blessed us with robust constitutions and an interesting skin complaint, and in every other way we are as human as you. We managed to grow powerful for a while, but we have not done much with that power. We played games, like children, imagining that the real business of our kind all lay ahead. Now playtime is nearly over, and we see that there is nothing more to come. That's why I must work fast, if I am to leave the world anything to remember us by. So I need an assistant. My daughter tells me that you did her a service once, and those fools at the Engineerium assure me you are clever."

  "What would you have me do, sir?" asked Dr. Crumb, excited at the thought of working on one of the old Scriven's inventions.

  But by way of answer, Godshawk merely led him to a side room and flung the door open. It was a big room, and it was filled from side to side and floor to ceiling with old-tech. There were big pieces and small, well-preserved ones along with a few that were no more than hunks of rust.

  "I need money, Crumb. I have a project in mind, and it must be funded, so I have decided to sell off my collection. This lot has been acquired over a lifetime, and I've had a long life. I can't remember what's in here myself, so I want you to catalogue it, and assess it as you go. Sort the trash from the treasures. Make notes, if you need anything, ask my daughter. I'll pop in from time to time and see how you're doing."

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  "I'll do my best, sir," said Gideon. But Godshawk had already gone striding on his way.

  ***

  Days went by. Weeks went by. Slowly, Gideon worked his way through the mountains of machinery, studying, describing, puzzling. Had this battered plastic frame been part of a TV set, or only a window? Could this crushed orange rubber ball really have hopped into space, as its name suggested? He made drawings and notes in a circular ledger. He grew bored. He thought often of asking Godshawk to release him from this work, which any half-trained scavenger could have done, and let him return to the Engineerium. But he never did. At the Engineerium he would not be near Wavey Godshawk.

  Wavey worked as her father's assistant. When she was in that role she wore her hair tied back and put on a white coat, tailored to spread over the wide bell of her skirts. Each afternoon she would come in and listen carefully while Gideon explained the more interesting pieces he had found and catalogued. She dropped in with questions and suggestions, always perfectly timed. She set him thinking. She challenged his assumptions. The Order had taught him that women were weak, unreasonable creatures, but Wavey was neither. The Scriven dapplings on her face and neck made chains of little V-shapes, like wild geese flying. He imagined mathematical formulae that might describe the angle of her cheekbones.

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  ***

  21 NOCTURN E IN BLUE

  In the summertime, some of the objects that Gideon had studied were shipped north to the city to be sold at auction in the Tech Exchange, and the rest were cleared into a smaller room, for Nonesuch House was to host a party. As Lord of London, Godshawk was expected to be hospitable. His Suomi mercenaries went to and fro along the causeway, checking for booby traps and clearing stands of trees where Skinner terrorists might lurk. Canopies and marquees flowered on Godshawk's lawns, and famous scent artists like Eldritch Hooter and Odourita arrived to load the scent lanterns with their specially composed perfumes.

  Gideon's work languished as the day of the party drew near. Godshawk seemed to have forgotten all about the remainder of his collection, and even Wavey stopped visiting, spending her afternoons instead trying on dresses with the help of a new slave girl her father had bought for her in the city. Gideon sat in his room, thinking about her, listlessly trying to concentrate on

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  his notes and drawings, distracted by the tuning-up of power shawms and pneumatic sackbuts in the bandstand below his window.

  He wasn't invited to the party, of course. But nor was he forbidden from attending, and when the whole of Nonesuch House was filled with revellers and rowdy as a St Kylie boozer, there was not much else that he could do. He wandered through the crowded rooms, listening to the music and sniffing the rich odors that unfurled from the scent lanterns. Wavey had told him that her people could see scents, and had spoken passionately about the great perfume symphonies of Hooter, Klopsto
ck, and DeFries, which to her were not just smells but shimmering, luminous fields of subtle color. Gideon tried to imagine what that would be like, but he couldn't; the scents just made him sneeze. He swiped a glass from a passing waiter's tray and wandered on, ignored by the Scriven, who shouted small talk at one another over his head.

  "Hooter's in good form! What does he call this scent?"

  "I think it's Nocturne in Blue ."

  "Did you hear about Stefan Destrier? The Skinners got him, laid in wait for him by his own gate."

  "Disgraceful! Godshawk must do something to discipline these monkeys...."

  The Scriven men wore stack-heeled boots and pearl-studded evening coats; the ladies in their vast skirts looked like mythical creatures, half woman, half sofa. Wavey Godshawk glided by,

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  heading to the dance floor, arm in arm with some old Scriven lord. Her face was lifted toward her partner's, and her eyes were smiling, but she kept her mouth closed, and Gideon knew that it was because she felt self-conscious about the brace on her teeth. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  "There goes Odo Bolventor with the Godshawk girl," said a Scriven, leaning over Gideon's shoulder to point out the couple to his friend.

  "I hear Godshawk's been trying to arrange a marriage. He needs an heir."

  "And Bolventor needs her dowry. He calls himself Margrave of Thurrock, but he's as poor as a gnat!"

  They moved on, still gossiping, never realizing that they had just squashed Gideon's dreams. He pushed his way out of the room. He did not want to watch Wavey dancing with her Margrave. He went out into the gardens, glad to be away from the heat and noise of the party and the cloying odors of the scent lanterns. He walked past the ghostly marquees, past the gangs of servants who were busy lighting float lamps and setting them adrift upon the evening air. The sounds of music and chitchat faded as he went downhill toward the still lagoons.