Fever Crumb Part 7

A ripple of anger moved through the cheap parts of town. By the time Charley hopped off the tram at Celebrity Square people were yelling about it in the streets and smashing the windows of any old-tech shop that had ever done business with the traitor Solent.

Charley went past them, wondering what the fuss was all about. He was halfway down Stragglemarket on his way to Bagman's house when a big hand grabbed him from behind and heaved him hard against a wall. He hung there, pinned, kicking at empty air and staring up once more into the large, red face of Tedward Swiney.

"Crice, you stink of the bog," exclaimed the pub keeper. "I been looking for you all over. Is it true what they're saying? Bagman's croaked?"

Charley couldn't answer. It was all he could do to breathe, with Ted's big fist clumping his coat collar in a tight knot against his windpipe. Ted was wearing his old oilcloth outdoor coat, which stank like a wet dog. The wind flapped it open and in an inside pocket Charley glimpsed the handle of the blunderbuss which usually lived under the counter at the Mott and Hoople in case anyone tried to rob the place or complained about the quality of Ted's beer.

"What about this Patchskin girl?" Ted growled. "Still live an' large, is she? Well?"

Charley managed a nod, and Ted gave another growl and let him drop. He knelt on the cobbles, hacking and gasping.

"You sound worse than the old man did," said Ted. "Where is she then? 'Ow do we find her? Pity to waste all this community spirit you've roused up. I ain't seen the commons look this lively for years. So how do we get hold of her? Out in the marshes, you say?"

"Kit Solent," choked Charley.

"An' who the blog is Kit Solent?"

"He's an archaeologist. He's helping her. He murdered Bagman. Maybe he's a Scriven, too. I didn't see no speckles on him, but then the girl ain't got none neither. This Solent lives up on the hill. I can't remember the street. I can take you there."

Ted Swiney cursed viciously under his breath, which helped him to think. Then he reached down and grabbed Charley by both shoulders, lifting him to his feet. He patted the dust off him with both big hands, trying to look friendly, even fatherly, for the benefit of the gang of onlookers who had gathered to watch. He could sense the anger of the mob building. They needed a leader, but with Bagman gone who could they turn to? Ted meant to make sure that it was him.

Charley stood there uneasily while Ted set his hat straight. Rain was falling heavily now. A chair pa.s.sed, its bearers tramping along like dray horses with their heads down and the rain slicking their hair. Charley watched it going by so that he didn't have to look at Ted Swiney's attempt at a cheery smile. He saw a girl's white face framed in the window s.p.a.ce; the familiar curve of a shaved head. "Ted! Look! It's her! "

Chapter 18 Chair vs Chair.

The chair slowed a little as the rain came on, the bearers growing mistrustful of the greasy cobbles. Rain rattled on the roof and speckled the window gla.s.s as Fever peered out to see where they were. She saw the sign outside a tram stop, celebrity square . She saw more groups of men, sheltering under shop awnings as the downpour increased. She saw a barrel-shaped man lurch forward out of one of the groups. He had his finger pointed straight at Fever, and he was shouting something.

"d.a.m.n that bald pate of yours," said Kit Solent. "You stand out like a beacon." He thrust Fever back against her seat, out of the sight of anyone outside, but the damage had been done, and Fever could hear the roar of angry voices spreading. Her breath came in little shallow gasps, and she was afraid that she was going to be sick. Kit Solent leaned past her. He had his pistol in his hand, and he used the handle to pound on the woodwork behind her head, shouting to the lead bearer, " Faster! Faster! "

The chair started to lurch as the bearers broke into a heavy trot. Fever craned her neck, looking out through the small gla.s.s pane in the back wall. She saw the barrel-shaped man flagging down a pa.s.sing taxi-chair. She saw his mouth move, and knew that he was shouting, "Follow that chair!"

"They're coming after us!" she said.

"They won't catch us...." Kit Solent twisted round to look, and for a moment his head and shoulders obscured Fever's view. "d.a.m.n! That's Swiney!"

"Who's he?"

"Landlord of the Mott on Ditch Street. A real troublemaker. A big man in the bad parts of town ... He turned back to hammer on the wall behind Fever's head again, shouting, "Faster, man! Faster! I'll make it worth your while!"

A moment later the chair was racing up Cransbeigh Notch and crossing Cripplegate. The bearers were fit and fresh and too heavily dosed with lifting drugs to question Kit's order. People who saw them coming just had to dive aside to let the chair go past.

But the chair Ted Swiney had commandeered was fast, too. Fever could see it twenty feet behind, a lean red chair with go-faster stripes and three bearers, one at the front and two behind. The publican's angry face could be seen shouting from a side window. After a few hundred yards he wriggled one hand out, too, clutching something silvery that he pointed toward Fever's chair. Fever couldn't make out what it was until his hand jerked and a flare of orange sparks and white smoke hid him.

Something struck the corner of the chair above her with a startling crack.

"He's shooting at us!" she said stupidly.

"Two can play at that," said Kit Solent, tugging a window open. He leaned his whole body out into the rain, and Fever heard his gun go off and saw the pale puff of smoke whipped sideways on the wind. He must have missed, though, for a moment later Ted Swiney's gun fired again and a hole the size of a two-quid coin appeared in the woodwork of the chair's back.

Kit Solent twisted himself round' and threw his empty pistol into Fever's lap, followed by the ammunition pouch and powder horn. "Reload that!" he shouted, drawing out a second, identical gun. He had been half expecting this sort of trouble, she realized; he had armed himself for a battle while he had been upstairs fetching her things and Mistress Gloomstove's money. She felt hopelessly, helplessly grateful to him for daring to come with her, and she hurried to do as he said, gripping the pistol with trembling fingers, terrified she'd drop it. "A charge of powder, wadding, then the ball, ram it all home with the rod," Kit told her, shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the rain on the roof. Coa.r.s.e-grained powder, black as pepper, sprinkled down her coat. Kit fired his second pistol as she pushed the ball home, and she was still busy with the ramrod when he reached back in, dropping his empty gun on her and groping for the other.

The rain grew suddenly heavier. Gutters gurgled, and the bearers' boots skidded as the chair turned another corner. Ted 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 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 pa.s.sengers you should be shooting...She pushed herself out farther, until her hips wedged in the window s.p.a.ce. 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 sc.r.a.ped 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, 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 looked bigger than her chair; heavier, more ma.s.sive. She thought, Momentum = Ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 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.

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 G.o.dshawk'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 across 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.

Chapter 19 Dr. Crumb.

Along the street and up another, and there in front of them was G.o.dshawk'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 G.o.dshawk's nostril. Fever pounded on the gla.s.s with the flat of her hand and left a smeared red handprint there. A shocked face appeared behind the gla.s.s 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 G.o.ds," said Kit Solent as the doors opened. And if Fever had had G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 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, G.o.dshawk'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 G.o.dshawk?"

"Oh ..." he said, when he heard that. (Another man, less rational, might have said, "Oh, G.o.ds!", "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 G.o.dshawk'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.

Her things had vanished from the little alcove that had been her bed s.p.a.ce, and there was another workbench there instead. Of course, it was only reasonable that Dr. Crumb should make full use of the s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.dshawk 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 his knees in the street mud when the chair of some Scriven n.o.bleman 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 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 att.i.tude 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 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 ..."

"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 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 tortoisesh.e.l.l 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."

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.